Button presses fail (to achieve the desired result) frequently in my cars. There's the state dependent cruise control on/off/enable/disable button which is sufficiently overloaded that pushing it often results in unwanted disabling of the system, or failure to activate it. This feature seems to be related to safety regulations or ratings, because my 1994 car's cruise control avoided the confusion by simply not having an "off" state that served no functional purpose. There's the shift lever (a fancy schmancy button) in my wife's car, which puts the car into a disabled state if operated too soon in the start up process. Launching this car is like starting in a race, if you don't wait for the starting signal, you are penalized! There are the oh so smart window controls in my 2014 electric car that choose between auto up/down and manual based on who knows what, but never, ever want to stop 1 cm from the top where I occasionally like to leave them for ventilation. There were also the Lucas switches in my '69 MG, but I loved them for for all their failings.

There are well designed buttons, and, well, not nice ones. My favorite button was the crown of a Breitling Aerospace, a quartz watch with both digital and analog displays, with a non-complicated appearance. One button scrolled though menus, set the time or timer, silenced the alarm, etc, and you never felt like there was the least bit of wasted motion. The electric window button in an old Bentley was a bit like this, it did the same job as other electric window buttons of the day, but somehow a little bit better.

That said, the idea of trying to find the right spot on a touchscreen while driving is downright scary; Having to announce to my passengers that I need my seat temperature lowered just seems rude. So I don't see a Rivian in my future. Fortunately, the likes of VW and Porsche have reversed themselves on touchscreen controls, reintroducing physical controls on some models, so I still have hope.

I believe that unintended acceleration due to mechanical failure really occurs in rare cases. It happened to me (twice, same cause) in a 1976 VW Rabbit. The engine compartment was full of small plastic vacuum lines and when one of them came loose, the throttle stuck where it was. Of course the brakes and clutch still worked so there was little safety risk.
As for this MG, I understood that brakes were always designed to be able to overpower the motor on cars, even powerful cars, though my sources are from the pre-electric era. Brake failure plus unintended acceleration and additional control failures is very suspicious. It will be interesting to learn the cause.

Well... Sugar, isn't intrinsically unhealthful. Eating too much of it and, especially, replacing healthful whole foods with highly processed sugary food like substances is a problem. So it probably depends on how much of each sweetener you consume and, in the case of sugar, whether it is in a highly processed form.

Not so. We are inherently creatures of inner conflict because our evolutionary success has been shaped by both individual success as well as group success. Individualism is every bit as much an inherent human drive as is sacrificing one's own selfish best interest to that of the tribe. E.O. Wilson's writing on the subject (The Meaning of Human Existence, or The Social Conquest of Earth) are some of my all time favorite science books.

The good news here is that vaccine developers know all this stuff and more. Many (50+?) vaccine candidates are being developed, some of the most promising are not based on antibodies found in survivors blood.

Um. Your calculations are off as well as your assumptions. Far enough off that I'm nopt going to waste my time looking for your errors. The correct answer here is: we don't know yet, but it looks orders of magnitude worse than a typical flu and likely worse than a bad flu.

The facts right now are that, without serious precautions, diagnosed cases increase exponentially, killing many of those who come down with the disease.

Tracking excess deaths in a population demonstrates that reporting has significantly undercounted fatalities associated with COVID-19. Also, reports of widespread SARS-CoV-2 infection have not been peer reviewer (were not a couple of days ago at least) and their accuracy has been questioned.

The bottom line is that this remains a serious pandemic, with health consequences far worse than a typical flu. I agree with you that the published case infections rates appear suspiciously high, but that is not an excuse for minimizing a very serious public health threat.

I tend to agree with you with regards to competition: Electric is going to be a big part of the future transportation and Tesla will find they are not alone in the performance electric market: Porsche is touting their coming E-Performance cars in a big bold announcement at the front of their web site; Jaguar's I-Pace SUV is on offer. And VW is the by far the biggest carmaking enterprise.

As for Tesla's leader, Elon Musk, I happen to think that promoting electric cars to help us kick the fossil fuel habit is one of the better things a person could offer humanity. So, yeah, there is literally not much that would be better to do.

If you read Slashdot, you should know that smart, technically savvy people oftan have their quirks. It's can be easy to make fun of such people, but they also deserve credit where credit is due.

They don't need HBO Now because they get access to HBO Go through their satellite provider. Same device access, back catalog, movies, etc.

For my part, I don't particularly like the idea of ATT tracking my viewing habits. The satellite signal is strictly one way (and no, I don't connect the receiver or TV to the internet).

Correct. Heat pumps only make sense in environments where a cool [warm] source is available to drain [source] heat to [from]. According to BMW, "The operation of a heat pump in all its operating modes makes sense in a temperature range between -10C and +40C / +14F and +104F." Pretty much all populous areas of the planet are within this range as I write this, though I admit McMurdo Station in Antarctica is colder (-2F) and I may have missed an unusually cold mountain village or two in the southern hemisphere.

Of course, a heat pump is not a replacement for resistive heating and refrigeration elements, it is a system that incorporates those and other component to optimize heating and cooling operations.

The first hybrid electric car was the Lohner-Porsche, which used lead acid batteries, but I assume you are referring to the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, which employed NiMH. Lithium ion batteries offer far better specific energy density and other advantages, but should never, ever be trickle charged.

Does Tesla really have the "most advanced thermal, management"? AFAIK, they do not use a heat pump, which BMW claims can save up to 3 kW of electrical energy in favorable conditions (BMW Technical Training manual for the i3, originally called i01).

Mostly plant diets are associated with longer, healthier lives (e.g. see the Adventist study); they are better for the planet; and, for some, offer ethical benefits. Your claim of no good reason for mostly plants seems faulty,

Contrast this with diets high in red meat: "A 2016 literature review reported that for 100g or more per day of red meat consumed, the risk increased 11% for each of stroke and for breast cancer, 15% for cardiovascular mortality, 17% for colorectal cancer, and 19% for advanced prostate cancer."

We pretty much already know there is no "best form" of diet to counter western lifestyle diseases like metabolic syndrome. Both Mediterranean and traditional Japanese diets are (or at least were) consumed by exceptionally healthy populations. The Adventist Health Study 2 suggests that vegetarians (including vegetarian+fish) have the best health outcomes. We don't see scientifically reliable results when studying low-fat vs low-carb (e.g. on insulin and glucose metabolism) when people eat sensible quantities of mainly whole foods (but, if you find a diet that yields significant health improvements, take advantage of it). The PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological) Study reported that 3-4 servings of fruits and vegetable is enough to maximize lifespan. Current research is investigating the role of the microbiome, which is greatly influenced by the foods (including indigestible fiber) that we eat. I expect this will at least partially explain the negative effects of processed foods on health.

Someone else quoted Michael Pollan's pithy advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants." This pretty much sums up what you need to know. My little bit of added advice is pay attention to how you feel and stick with foods that make you feel well while avoiding those that don't.

The interesting question here is whether dietary assistance can make a measurable improvement in a health care setting. The followup question is whether your medical insurance pay for that prescription broccoli.

I know it is hard to trust anything in a software ecosystem where the likes of RSA Security has been implicated in a security weakening scandal, and one could almost certainly hide data within an Open-PGP message (e.g. adding a private/experimental packet), but I also know that software I use does not do this. I say this because I have done the exercise of analyzing and decrypting Open-PGP messages produced by GnuPG, and I can account for every byte of each packet with the encrypted massages I have analyzed.

But don't trust me: Look up the RFC 4880 and check for yourself. You'll need to do some work because the protocol is klunky, but it is worth doing if you are seriously concerned.

10 time skin depth may be considered generally sufficient, but the fact remains that cell phone signals penetrate aluminum foil. Go and and try it (as I suggested). Your "shielded" phone will ring when you call it.

I could be mistaken about the skin effect being the cause of the leakage, but you remain wrong in claiming that foil blocks these signals.