Why would you order this option? No one who is even close to over the legal limit is driving my car. I could see a fleet vehicle having it, but for me this makes no sense as an option for a personal car. (If it were mandatory, that’s a different story.)

I disagree with you that we’re “there,” but I think we’re in general on the same page. If congress were to take another stab at dual labeling, I think they should actually just mandate metric labeling. If a company decides to keep the Imperial units on there, they can.

Oh, I agree entirely. But I think that a more likely path to metric is the one we’re on now. Companies will demand that those they work with use metric more and more, until eventually at one point (20, 50 years?) we’ll already be effectively metric, and then an act of congress will implement all of the “easy” stuff,…

The bigger issue would be with manufacturing. All of the machine tools that exist, many of them running for decades, are english. Same goes for threads and fasteners, raw material sizes, all of the weights and measures we use (like every single gas pump, almost every thermometer, every non-digital scale), and a myriad…

I’m not saying that the cyclists power makes the di2 power consumption not “wasteful,” I'm just saying that that is a totally stupid thing to worry about. If one were interested in offsetting the energy use of their electronic shifting they could take such drastic steps as turning a light bulb off for two minutes a…

The power consumption of this system is completely and utterly negligible when compared to the power a cyclist is outputting.

You would just need a power meter and a drivetrain with Di2 (plus the accompanying interconnects and software). The bike could shift to maintain constant power, just as many stationary trainers do in erg mode.

I’d think that if you’re going to sprint, you should just not be using auto-shifting.

Tour de France winner, 1903.

Good thing you mentioned this, I was about to call you out on your numbers. ;)

That’s a fair distinction, that they are being tested on the road. I would think that when officially allowing testing of autonomous cars on the road, the states would have mandated some form of enhanced accident reporting, but apparently they didn’t. You wouldn’t even have to make it that burdensome- just make it a…

Pray tell, Kate, how many times did the Wright Bros. & company have an accident before selling their first airplane? Has google attempted to sell these vehicles? Of course there will be accidents. Or else they would be ready for shipment!

Why? They’re not trying to sell this yet. Of course accidents are going to happen... or else it would just be ready.

How far off were they? I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually ran an extra quarter mile, and I’d be surprised if you did less than an extra tenth of a mile.

A whole bunch of people have already answered.... but I feel I have one more thing to add. Basically, optical (wrist based) HRM’s don’t work for everyone. They can do better or worse based on your skin pigment and a slew of other factors. If they put one on the watch, and then it “doesn’t work” for some people,…

Hard to imagine indeed, but yes. Some light reading for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_ex…

At least they might ensure that the 4c and its successors stay available in the US?

This is what I think of when I think of death wobble!

But, in general, you don’t include those costs in the cost of each device. So yes, it is an 80% markup. That doesn’t mean that that is all profit, but it’s how you’d describe the markup.

Yes, but you’d have to divide the distance (in light years) by the percentage of light speed (in decimal form). So traveling 10 light years at 10% of the speed of light would take 100 years. Of course, at these speeds, the time to accelerate and decelerate can be significant, so that can change your answer. That is,…