Slashdot Mirror

Still using my second-generation iPod shuffle every day. I had to replace the battery - which is a procedure I hope I never do again - and the Chinese replacement doesn't last as long as when the iPod was brand new.

I was waiting for The Source to discount their remaining units, however seeing they only have three colours remaining I'm thinking they're not discounting them at all. I guess I'm off to buy one from the local store later today.

What's funny about the iPod shuffle generations is that after... let's call it "customer feedback" about the third generation model, Apple reverted to the design of the second generation for their fourth model.

It's too bad that Apple decided to discontinue the iPod Shuffle. Nothing they have can replace it. Certainly not their stupid overpriced watch. If Apple's idea of replacement for their $50 iPod shuffle is a $370 Apple Watch with $160 AirPods they're completely disconnected from reality. That's more than 10 times as expensive.

I hate watches and I hate the feeling of having something attached to my wrist. I also hate in-ear "pods". If someone gave me a free Apple watch and AirPods, I'd sell them right away without even opening the packages.

in a world where you could put eight miles of new subway line in a major city without checking to see what's there first. But after hundreds of years of development, most without the benefit of geographic information systems, you can't be certain what kind of weird shit (or people) down there.

The author seems shocked that it'd take ten years of planning before you could start workers digging. The reality is you need to figure out the impact on water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecom, peoples basements -- and chances are none of that stuff is all on one map; a lot of it is likely not mapped at all, or mapped incorrectly. Ten years before your break ground seems very reasonable to me.

Likewise he's mortified that the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel project had to spend two years on geological and environmental impact studies before breaking ground. That's a twenty-three mile long complex of causeways and tunnels across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important fisheries in the country as well one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two years of study! He calls this a "run-of-the-mill highway". Sure, anything seems easy if you no abso-frickin' nothing about engineering. Bridges and tunnels are the most prestigious projects for a civil engineer to work on because they're ridiculously complex. Just look at all the pieces of the thing. Two years of preliminary geological and environmental study to build the thing sounds outstanding.

This is just Dunning-Kruger run amok. These aren't cases of preliminary studies holding back engineering. Assessing the feasibility and impact of a project is a *major part* of civil engineering. Sure, you could start digging and hope you don't rupture a gas line, breech a high pressure water main, start a plague of rats in Manhattan's Upper East Side (average annual income $180K), damage a fishery that that brings in 290 million dollars per year, or find out the soil you're tunneling through won't support the weight above it. And then you'd be forced to stop and figure out how to fix it. In fact you'd almost inevitably be forced to stop and redesign your project.

A basic principle of engineering project management is that it's waaay cheaper to anticipate a problem than to figure out what to do about it when you're halfway done.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

That does look unusable. I wonder where I go to print. I would have to click on random buttons hoping I eventually get it. In the old one, the functionality is fairly obvious.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

That does look unusable. I wonder where I go to print. I would have to click on random buttons hoping I eventually get it. In the old one, the functionality is fairly obvious.

A Slashdot commenter predicted the demise of gedit almost three years ago. The core of this argument was the following:

Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.

Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.

Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png

It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.

The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!

This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.

Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.

A Slashdot commenter predicted the demise of gedit almost three years ago. The core of this argument was the following:

Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.

Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.

Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png

It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.

The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!

This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.

Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.

Seeing as how the Democrats have controlled the House and Senate almost exclusively for 40 years from 1957, you can't blame the GOP. Citation for the lazy.

That is not an excuse or reason at all. Because the other did not done the right thing doesn't mean you will not do the right thing too.

Seeing as how the Democrats have controlled the House and Senate almost exclusively for 40 years from 1957, you can't blame the GOP. Citation for the lazy.

No, it still uses XNU, which is not Mach or a BSD kernel, but a hybrid of the two (plus IOKit).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_architecture.svg/400px-Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_architecture.svg.png

I also think the front is a styling miss

Yep it looks dated already. Reminds me of an mix between and old 90's Ford Laser and an early 2000's Mazda 3
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
http://carphotos.cardomain.com...

Well, our police-chief who aren't a police, prefer dialogue and socialism over catching criminals, before being the chief of the police he was the leader of the Migration office and the "Insurance" office (not the last resort welfare stuff but the welfare stuff you collect when you're sick or have a kid or to help pay for your apartment and such.) .. they aren't the most trusted and popular of the government ran places and now he's totally managed to screw the police up too.

But he's still on the job. Because Social-democrats.

The previous "looks like the best prime-minister candidate" of the social-democrats Ygeman had complete garbage history too. I don't remember it now but it included not paying for where he lived(?), lots of late payments but other shit too. Don't remember if it was that his educational background was junk or his jobs or whatever, it was basically all junk anyway.

Our current prime-minister is a social-democrat and he's a compulsive liar and his background is the metal union and .. the social-democrats / their youth organisation. The one they had as leader before that was so shitty he had to go, the one before that is both shitty but also have had lots of unpaid parking tickets, bought private stuff on the account she should use for her job but a lot of other shit too. But I'm too lazy to watch a YouTube video of it all and I don't remember it all. But they are all complete garbage. And those are still supposed to be the elite of the social-democrats I guess..

Picture of the police-chief: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_...
Picture of the prime-minister:
http://www.regeringen.se/conte...

You can kinda see how little goes on in them ..

I haven't even taken the worst pictures!
https://cdn.quizme.se/quiz/b1a...
https://y.cdn-expressen.se/ima...
https://z.cdn-expressen.se/ima...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7S4y...
https://w.cdn-expressen.se/ima... :D

Ygeman looks functional:
https://y.cdn-expressen.se/ima...
But clearly looks wasn't everything.
We should had learned that after Fredrik Reinfeldt (former prime-minister, Moderates):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

He didn't looked all that retarded. He aren't either. But he drowned us in Muslims and Africans and sold out public property way too cheap.

Amazon is late. Radiohead was doing this way back in 1997. -PCP

> Currencies are insane volatile though.

/sarcasm You don't say ... (Stages of a Bubble in case anyone was curious)

His claim is wrong. Biodiversity is still extremely high. But hey - that scientific graph I linked doesn't really lend itself to a "doom and gloom/man is evil!" kind of mantra, does it?

It's going to be a large figure but probably not 99.99% - there's been more species around recently than in any previous historical period.

Shall we, perhaps, present them this trophy? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It's not his fault you felt offended by his joke.. I like the sibling commentator here that continues on the joke with nudity for security.

And you seem to project your nazi thoughts onto other people... This could have been interpreted in many different ways... Like jews (or any other religious person) wanting airplanes full of people prostrating.. It could have been interpreted in a sexual way (like the sibling commentator) etc.

So i ask you.. what's up your https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... to react like that because of a joke?

You are confusing 15,000 PSI chamber pressure here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

With 55,000 PSI chamber pressure: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... (farthest left cartridge). These bullets are typically FMJBT and travel 3000 FPS with around 18,000 Joules of energy... or about 20x more energy than the 50 cal GI handgun round which travel around 1000 FPS with ~ 700 Joules of energy

Note: its not the bullet diameter, it is the powder charge and thus chamber pressure behind it that gives it penetrating power...

Indeed. Knee-jerk cynicism about the future on a website billing itself as news for nerds has always struck me as ridiculous.

But what do I know? I'm just distracting my dumb brain with sex and drugs in this brave new world and the rest of my energy is spent trying to scrounge up some soylent green.

The future is always bleak. I guess no one wants to risk being accused of being naive when they suggest the future might be better instead of worse. Diseases have fallen to unthinkable levels, worldwide poverty is steadily going down, the population is showing signs of coming to a manageable steady state, people are living longer as a result of easier lives, violent crime is dropping, democracy is increasing... but no, it's all going to hell in a handbasket because robots gonna take all out jerbs!

What if this had ALWAYS been done? We most likely wouldn't have many of the great things we have now. Would we have a single perfect linux distro? I think that is wishful thinking.

Just have a look at this: Linux Distro Timeline and tell me that none of those things should have happened. Maybe SOME of them shouldn't, but that's a simple determination in hindsight.

Just look at what Knoppix spawned, and what it inspired. Sometimes you have to let the ones passionate about something run with it. Otherwise, it's death-by-committee.

The biggest strength can also be the biggest downfall... so while complaining about all the multitude of distros, which is comically overwhelming, some really great things have come out of that process which I firmly believe wouldn't have happened with a single driving direction.

Sure. But CO2 and extinction patterns DO NOT line up. Here is a view I agree with, yes, from a scientist.... rgbatduke says: June 12, 2014 at 7:21 am OK, here is a moderately interesting screen-scraped figure I cobbled together. I took the figure above showing atmospheric CO_2 and superimposed the curve showing global average temperature as inferred from the O18 proxy here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... Note that there is no attempt to map O18 to actual global temperature, but we can get at least some idea of how the map proceeds by considering the mean temperature in the current glaciation vs temperatures when Antarctica was ice free (suggesting that the temperature range from the peaks to the troughs of O18 is between 10 and 20 C, where on geological time the Earth is as cold as it has ever been since the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation 450 million years ago. Here is the figure, where I literally traced the Phanerozoic curves and popped them on top of the figure above, scaling them so that their time scales corresponded. The grey bars are glacial epochs, the first one to the left is the O-S glaciation. Combined CO_2 ppm and Phanerozoic O18 concentration The figure kinda speaks for itself. It is this blatant disregard for what should be “common knowledge” to anyone publishing in climate science that really annoys me. How can you write a whole paper even weakly asserting that CO_2 variation caused mass extinctions by changing the climate without correlating the CO_2 concentration with the actual changes in the climate inferable from a far better proxy than “mass extinctions are sometimes caused by climate change”? How is it that no referee caught this omission? I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t see the slightest degree of correlation between CO_2 concentration and global average temperature. Indeed, I would assert that this figure is absolutely, positively incompatible with the assertions that a CO_2 of 600 ppm implies any sort of climate change at all compared to the present. The Ordovician-Silurian glaciation occurred with mean CO_2 levels of ballpark 4000 ppm, sustained. Temperatures soared in mid-Permian with atmospheric CO_2 about where it is today, sustained (all of these peaks are tens of millions of years wide or wider — the entire industrial CO_2 increase plus its “catastrophic” projection isn’t even noise on the timescales involved). The oceans evolved sea life with shells with atmospheric CO_2 five to ten times what it is today. CO_2 in the entire era of the dinosaurs was order of 2000 ppm (5x present) and yet another weaker glacial era occurred across this time frame. The only thing one can actually say with any degree of confidence from this replotting is this: CO_2 levels have, on a very coarse grained average basis, steadily decreased over the last 600 million years. At the same time, the Earth has undergone a cycle of heating and cooling that is almost completely flat when averaged in exactly the same way. You don’t need a calculator to eyeball nearly neutral planetary climate over the last 600 million years. Yes, that climate has ice ages and hothouse ages that last tens of millions of years. No, we cannot explain it. But the hypothesis that CO_2 is even a contributing cause fails to explain even the first order gross features of the variation. CO_2 has been falling at the rate of almost 1000 ppm/100 million years for 600 million years (eyeballing a linear regression of the data). Average global temperature hasn’t changed at all, for 600 million years (eyeballing a linear regression of the data). And that, my friends, is something that I never seem to hear climate scientists acknowledge or discuss. Surely if CO_2 is the universal climate hammer, it would explain the primary variability of the data. Instead, if one attempts to cross-correlate the two curves in this plot (via, e.g. Kolmogorov-Smirnov) to see if there is any vagu

I think you might want to read the order. You speak about what you don't know:
(b) Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State,
in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed
to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims
made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided
that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s
country of nationality. Where necessary and appropriate, the Secretaries
of State and Homeland Security shall recommend legislation to the President
that would assist with such prioritization.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Compare the human-generated amount of CO2 being produced to a single volcano eruption.

Massive volcanic eruptions like you describe block out sunlight and cause ice ages. Snow is highly reflective which re-radiates the sunlight while plants absorb the CO2. It's a complex but balanced process. Human-generated has none of these feedback mechanism and simply causes more heat from sunlight to be absorbed. Human-generated CO2 makes the planet increasingly hotter.

Also, last time I checked, plants needed CO2 to survive.

I'm not suggesting we remove every last bit of CO2, just remove the amount that we added.

Do you hate plants?

Plants ate my entire family! On that day I swore to avenge their deaths by eat as many plants as I could! ;)

HEVC is out now

VP9 is out now and has broader use than HEVC.

as well as software players like Microsoft and Apple

Microsoft supports VP9 in Edge.

VP9 has virtually zero mindshare outside the Googleplex

Netflix uses VP9. Wikipedia uses VP9. And, of course, even though it's inside the Googleplex it's difficult to ignore that YouTube uses VP9. YouTube no longer offers 4K video to Safari by default due to Safari's lack of VP9 support.

set top boxes, etc. that support VP9

Roku has VP9 support, Chromecast Ultra has VP9 support, Android phones have VP9 support, etc, etc.

AV1, on the other hand, looks very compelling... it actually has broad industry support, from big players like Microsoft, Cisco, Netflix, Google, all the way down to silicon makers like Broadcom, Xilinx, RealTek, ARM, AMD, and NVIDIA.

Right. Just like VP9. When will Apple add VP9 support?

It's disingenuous to complain that Apple isn't going to include AV1 when it isn't - and won't be - ready before High Sierra.

Show me where I complained that AV1 won't be in High Sierra. Quote me. Maybe re-read what I wrote.

In the meantime, let's acknowledge that Apple hasn't joined the Alliance for Open Media. When will Apple join?

> Give it 6 months and you'll see a huge crash and then it will normalize at about 1/3 of its current value. After that look for gradual but steady increase in price.

Exactly. We even have a graph of the bubble.

I guess we're in the mania phase.

--
Oh look, it is Bitcoin Tuesday ... starting back in 2015.

Actually, you've got the wrong end of the stick here when you're talking about "extrapolation". If you look at the instrumental record from the 1940s to the mid 70s, the world actually cooled.

This was because of industrial sulfate aerosol emissions, which increases the Earth's albedo. This effect was understood in the 1950s, which was why scientists expected the Earth to continue cooling. Arrhenius's CO2 driven warming theories had been discredited for over half a century because of two mistaken beliefs: (1) that CO2's IR absorption band was the same as water vapor's, so that it coud not materially affect temperature and (2) atmospheric CO2 was in equilibrium with ocean CO2. Both these beliefs were proven false in the late 50s, so from 1967 until 1980 or so the question was whether CO2 driven warming or sulfate driven cooling would predominate.

Until the mid 70s sulfates prevailed, however two additional developments caused a shift in the scientific consensus. First, much more data was collected about the Earth's atmosphere. Second, the availability of computers allowed us to actually calculate the relative effects of CO2 and sulfates, and they predicted an imminent reversal in the temperature trends of the past three decades.

This is as good as scientific confirmation of a theory gets: a counter-intuitive prediction that proves to be true. This is why by the 90s the overwhelming majority of climate scientists had confidence in at least the broad picture the models were predicting.

"the temperature has increased faster than natural variability" say what? So all of the temperature excursions over the Holocene were natural, until now? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... Any of the positive temperature rises over the Holocene could have easily exceeded todays rate of change of temperature, and 1000 years from now if you looked at ice cores from today you would see the same smoothed curves. You are looking at high resolution, high frequency data and simply tagging it onto old low resolution, low frequency data and assuming you know what it means. You don't, or you would be famous. And the "deniers" don't use 1998 as a cherry pick starting point, they use a regression from the mean techniques starting with TODAYS temps and working BACKWARDS until they see significant data. Please.

And let's not forget that the first version of the ban wasn't a ban on citizens of those countries travelling to the USA: it was a ban on Muslims from those countries travelling to the USA.

If that's the case.....yeah it's kinda stupid.

But since that wasn't the case, it is irrelevant. The OP lied. The ban was on immigrants and non-immigrants from those countries, period. It's pretty easy to find a copy of the original order. For example, here it is in its entirety. Section 3(c) is the relevant part. If I could copy it out of the EO under evince I would paste it here. It says nothing about Islam, Muslim, or religion in any way. The ban is based on the country of origin.

I have a Nokia 3310 you insensitive clod. It's something called a "joke".

I just use write-protect tabs to cover the notch on the corner of the disc sleeve.

Grid fins were designed by the Russians for missiles

Here is a photo of the grid fins on the MOAB: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Once again, someone who thinks the rich have vaults full of gold coins they go swimming in.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

If you guys weren't so blindly dense, I could actually feel sorry for you.

A 9-volt battery is a huge power charge.

You mean like this one? That's not actually huge, that's just a large picture.

The size of the battery that can take down a plane when attached to an explosive.

Trump could take down a plane when attached to an explosive. Should we ban Trump? ;)

Pagecounts. Admittedly, traffic was somewhat less in 2008 (that's as far back as that graph goes), but it has more or less plateaued for the past four of five years (while annual revenue more than doubled over the same period).

Much the same traffic? Does it have much the same content?

Every article retains its full history, from its creation to present state. Every edit. That means their database must handle an enormous amount of data, ever-growing, edit after edit. It never changes; it adds.

In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).

WMF also runs Wikinews, which carries news articles in dozens of languages. It runs Wikipedia in many languages all over the world. Every time it adds a new language, there's a new regional user base. If each language Wikipedia grows as above, then you have cubic growth until the rate of new Wikipedia languages slows.

The volume of data managed, the computer power required to manage that data, back-ups, administration costs, all of that is growing. It's growing faster every day.

As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence

As per IRS NPO rules, the organization must show stability in the face of reasonable risks. Revenue streams from donations are not predictable; a sudden recession can slow the revenue stream while not slowing the expenses. As such, Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.

It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990

Out of $83 million, managers get less than $1 million. Product manager ~$100k, software engineer ~$144k. Management? Executive director $344k; General Counsel (lawyer) $258k; Deputy Director $302k; VP of Engineering $282k; Chief Operating Officer $250k. The executive compensations total about $2 million.

They also spent $3 on a post-it note pad, because that's included in spending of course.

whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally

From a legal perspective, IRS NPO rules require retention of a certain risk buffer, as well as limits to the amount of cash holding. You can't have revenues that much larger than your expenses.

That's not why spending increases with revenue, though, is it?

Revenue comes from donations. WMF gets donations from users. Users only donate so much. More users means more donations--also, more load, more costs in running the service. Being driven entirely on donations from people looking right at your site, revenue would be directly tied to how much load is on your site and, thus, the cost to support that load, wouldn't it?

And all of that amazing content is brought to you by unpaid volunteers.

There is little need for money to fuel Wikipedia content production. Ten years ago, when content production was at its peak, the Wikimedia Foundation had 11 employees and a twentieth of the budget it has today. Wikipedia looked and worked much the same then as it does now ...

People, by and large, donate "to Wikipedia" (but in reality to the Wikimedia Foundation) because they believe there is a shortage of funds to keep Wikipedia up and running and, like you, would not like to see it disappear. But the Wikimedia Foundation isn't in financial trouble; it is swimming in cash, and has been less transparent about many things, including executive compensation, than it could be.

In my view the WMF could do more to demonstrate that it is spending these increasing amounts of money on things that actually benefit readers and volunteer contributors in some palpable way (including how much was spent on each of these). Cost/benefit statements, so people can see that their money has been put to good use.

There are many reader- and contributor-facing things the WMF could do, but doesn't, to my knowledge. For example, they could pay to provide volunteers with free access to paywalled sources, to enable them to cite better references, and create more reliable content (present initiatives in this area seem rudimentary). They could provide readers with tools enabling them to gauge the trustworthiness of an article, based on its sourcing, or how much healthy community involvement it has seen (what information there is now is so impenetrable that no casual reader can make sense of it). They could communicate more openly about known problems in Wikipedia projects that readers should be aware of. Example. Things like that.

Many volunteers – content writers – are quite jaded about the WMF, feeling the WMF get free money off the back of their volunteer work and spend it on stuff that doesn't really help. Spending money in ways that produce little benefit has been an acknowledged problem in the past.

It is difficult, because both contributors and readers are an amorphous mass, and the WMF has perhaps tried to listen more of late under the new CEO. But when I see managers with a checkered work history receiving six-figure windfalls, or wanting to spend $32 million of donated funds on building a Google competitor, or the WMF clamming up and being unresponsive to reasonable questions, or putting out misleading fundraising messages as they have in the past, I am not convinced that this does justice to the mission people gave money to support. The money given to the WMF is given to them in trust, and in my opinion they need to do more to earn it. That's what this is about, not whether Wikipedia is useful or not.

First off, thanks for actually reading the document. These discussions are a lot more enjoyable when 90% of responses aren't just "RTFM" ;)

Their earthquake proofing (and safety in the event of an accident, e.g. a truck going into one of the pylons in a road median) is not nearly good enough. The PDF they put out suggests that they will simply put adjustable dampers in the pylons... But such things react relatively slowly and have a limited range of movement.

They actually have calculations of the track response to impulses like earthquakes (figures 15 through 20 illustrate peak deflections, stress, and shear). Dampers responding slowly is exactly the point; they don't move immediately when they face a jolt, but slowly react to it, giving time for the control system to compensate (see hysteric dampers and base isolation dampers). Also note that simply shifting the tube around a couple millimeters one way or the other does not create a meaningful deflection for the vehicles, even at Hyperloop vehicle speeds. Also note that the capsule skis are mounted on a suspension system designed for ~10hz jolts, and that air bearings have a highly nonlinear response to float height changes.

In a hyperloop, tens of millimetres of offset between two sections of the pipe will cause enormous, injury inducing g-forces on the occupants of the vehicle.

This is not true. Let's take the suspension system out of the equation for a minute. Let's say 20 millimeters, sound good? 30 meters per pylon, so at 340m/s that's 89ms. 20mm in 89ms is ~0,22m/s average velocity (in one direction for the first 30m, then reversed for the next 30m). Which means an acceleration of about ~0,45 m/s^2, or 0,046g. An insignificant amount.

I've actually done the calculations before for the complete loss of all support from a tower, how much sag that would impose on a pipe as described, and how much g-forces that would translate to. The short of it: not all that much.

It might be possible to overcome this by making the pipe larger relative to the vehicle, but then the whole thing becomes less efficient.

I think you've misunderstood something. Increasing the pipe diameter makes it more efficient, not less. The skis remain in close proximity to the wall regardless of the size, but you're reducing the ram air effect by having a larger bypass, and thus reducing the compressor load (as well as enabling a longer suspension deflection stroke). The pipe isn't small to make it efficient, it's small to save construction costs.

Compare this to the maglev trains developed in Japan.

It's not really a proper comparison, now is it? Japanese rail tracks aren't damped. If you want to compare to damped systems, damped bridges are your best comparison point.

To be honest, the whole document is a bit... For example, it talks about how a quiet supersonic aircraft would solve all the long distance problems, apparently unaware of the high cost in terms of fuel consumption / pollution and smaller cabins.

It's not the only problem with supersonic travel, but it is the limiting factor for Hyperloop-length journeys (for reasons which are accurately stated in the document): you have to spend so much time flying subsonic to get to altitude that you lose much of the advantage of the high peak cruise speeds. Other issues are addressable. What you refer to in terms of fuel consumption / pollution and cabin size by and large all come down to drag. There is a huge wave drag at transonic speeds, but it drops with increasing speed. Subsonic cruise is fundamentally more efficient than supersonic, but not prohibitively so for supersonic travel. There's lots of other issues that can be added to the list of problems, mind you -

Actually, internet hosting costs them only $2 million a year. See page no. 3 in this document. Total support and revenue, for comparison, stood at $81.9 million last year. So 2.5% of the fundraising income is spent on hosting.

Glad I could help. Just FYI, GPS has been in use in aviation since the 90s (example). Full glass panel units with integrated GPS (example) have been around for over 10 years. On airliners, GPS integration usually manifests simply as new indications of the flight management system interfaces (+ improved capabilities of the system, note "GPS PRIMARY" on the linked picture and "ESTIMATED" accuracy of +-0.09NM). Generally, airlines don't like to alter their cockpits too much.

County support for Colorado Amendment 64:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
2012 Election results by County for Colorado (I didn't do 2016... Because I'm not really sure that election was a liberal/conservative thing):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Sure some people on "the right" supported it. But they were the minority in their party, and in the end, voted pretty much along standard liberal/conservative elective county lines to reject legalization.

County support for Colorado Amendment 64:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
2012 Election results by County for Colorado (I didn't do 2016... Because I'm not really sure that election was a liberal/conservative thing):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Sure some people on "the right" supported it. But they were the minority in their party, and in the end, voted pretty much along standard liberal/conservative elective county lines to reject legalization.

Sure. Even breathing emits carbon dioxide.

But chances are you emitting carbon dioxide in ways that aren't even useful to you. For example, if you're air conditioning a room heated by a big picture window all day while you are out, that's emitting carbon that's doing you no actual good. Draw the curtains and put the AC on a timer and you'll be just as cool and save money too.

There's lots of things like this where you're actually paying to pollute for no benefit to yourself. Like not keeping your tires inflated. That seems like It's too easy to possibly make any difference, but keep in mind transportation is the single largest use of energy in the economy. People saving themselves wasted money could have a big impact.

As with anything else, the place to start with a problem is the low-hanging fruit: carbon emissions that do us no good, or even cost us money no result. Is that enough to turn the tide? No, but there's no reason not to get started there.

That and I don't want to pay any "world taxes" either, I"m playing plenty enough for the US fed/state/local as it is.

What makes a "tax" a "tax"? An accountant will tell you that the defining characteristic of a tax is that it's an exaction. You don't get to choose to forgo the tax.

Pollution also exacts a non-voluntary cost from people. If you live in Beijing, you have no choice but to pay the costs of breathing a mix of diesel and coal particulates. If the climate of the planet changes, everyone has to pay the price of adaptation (although some people will also make money off that adapation). Chances are you'll be using more Btus of air conditioning, and because everybody else will be doing the same you'll be paying more for each BTU.

If the government tried to tax you that much, you'd be livid. But the fact it's not an elected official who's doing the exacting doesn't change the fact that you're paying for someone else's wasteful habits.

If you don't want to pay pollution exaction you can either forbid people to pollute entirely, or you can tax pollution. The advantage of taxing pollution is that it gives people more freedom in choosing whether the utility of emitting a unit of pollution exceeds the cost. Cap and trade gives you even more freedom in that it involves incentives as well as penalties.

But even under a simple pollution tax, you can still limit your exposure to the tax through conservation. Once the pollution is emitted, you're stuck paying the price.

I'm kinda surprised that nobody has tried building a quantum dot display with more than three primaries yet, at least not that I've heard of. Like if you went hex with six primaries I think you should come very, very close to any point on the response curve. Maybe combine it with a hex grid instead of square pixels with every other triangle being the "new" primaries and the other three the old, something like this. That kind of Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Turquoise-Blue display should kick ass. Now the obvious downside is that you'll only get half the intensity per channel, but then you can balance accuracy for intensity by either giving your intense pure red an extra boost in intensity with the orange channel or keep the red as it is. For blinding white or something like that you can still fire on 6/6 channels instead of 3/3.

I'm kinda surprised that nobody has tried building a quantum dot display with more than three primaries yet, at least not that I've heard of. Like if you went hex with six primaries I think you should come very, very close to any point on the response curve. Maybe combine it with a hex grid instead of square pixels with every other triangle being the "new" primaries and the other three the old, something like this. That kind of Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Turquoise-Blue display should kick ass. Now the obvious downside is that you'll only get half the intensity per channel, but then you can balance accuracy for intensity by either giving your intense pure red an extra boost in intensity with the orange channel or keep the red as it is. For blinding white or something like that you can still fire on 6/6 channels instead of 3/3.

Firefox was once far larger than Chrome, at one point they had a third of the market.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Than Firefox decided to get on a rapid release calendar. Users and businesses asked them to go back to a standard release cycle. People told Mozilla that the rapid release cycle made maintenance too cumbersome. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! The switch to a rapid release cycle started in May of 2011.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Rapid...

You can actually see the impact this decision had by looking at historical browser trends. The previous slow decline in browser share transitioned into a 1% loss in one month - their quickest loss ever. Within 6 months Chrome overtook Firefox in browser share and never looked back.

The result of the rapid release cycle was a disastrous impact, if you updated it you broke something, if you didn't update other things broke. Packaging, deploying, extensions, patching and testing became a nightmare for the enterprise. Requests for support for the enterprise were blown off by offering extended support release - which completely missed the point. The result was IT departments chose to use browsers that were willing to offer real enterprise support.

The cries of users fell on deaf ears - all that mattered was making developers happy. Chrome didn't win, Firefox committed suicide through hubris.

Check the first link which explains what "marginal case" is in general, and why your previous attempts to appear intelligent have failed so badly.

Wow, everybody knows what marginal case is. Thanks for exposing your vacuity though in the sense of "Hurr durr, looks like you used an analogy that I can nitpick, guess that means I don't have to face up to your actual arguments and can claim victory on a technicality. Hurr durr." That places you somewhere in the bottom 2 or 3 here.

Don't be a moran.

While I get your point, the cathedral was probably chosen because it's actually recognisable.

It's tough incorporating the Kremlin (building behind red wall in this picture) into pretty much anything.

The game Civilization IV had a Wonder called 'The Kremlin' and its image was the same St. Basil, FWIW. So it's a pretty common association, even outside the news media.

For most countries you can google load curves.

In germany peak power is in summer during early morning and late evening.

Heating is done with gas nearly all over Europe. So no, there is no real special winter peak. The total power used at winter at night is higher than the total power at summer at night. But the peaks are not at night. At night we have "base load" ... hence the name.

Summer peaker load curve is dominated by AC
In your country. Not in mine, and not in most parts of europe. Peak times are when people get out of bed and everyone starts electric appliances, some are already in the first shift working, industry and craftman shops are powering up, and then again when most of the work force comes home, around 6:00PM till 9:00PM. Depending on time of the year Germany has a small peak around 12:00.

Here is an example, different colours for different "types of day", blue = working day, red = saturday, green = sunday. But I'm not sure what kind of "profile" that is. https://blog.stromhaltig.de/20...

The form does not look like "whole germany load curve".

This looks more like a "normal" load curve but is either artistic and/or averaged over the whole year, so makes not to much sense either: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Don't look at it as population numbers alone, but as energy used and pollution produced per person. The U.S.A. is a problem.

I agree that the US is an energy pig, but there are two counter points:

There's a hell of alot more counter points than that. Only 7% of our energy usage is residential: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

So per capita isn't even a great measure. We have a huge GDP with alot of industry, which equates to a great deal of energy usage. If you take GDP into account, the US ranks somewhere around Canada in terms of efficiency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions). Both India and China have tremendously poor efficiency ratings at the bottom of the list.

So the US isn't a beacon of efficiency being mid-pack, but not nearly as bad as the usual "5% of the population causing 15% of emissions". It's more like 25% of the world's total industry is causing 15% of emissions: https://www.google.com/search?...

Considering the fact the vast majority of the world's industry is in the US, EU, and China, it is no surprise they're the top 3 carbon emitters: https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6...

You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.

If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.

When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.

I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.