There are no freeways between me and anywhere I want to be.
We have bike trails- they are in parks or out in the woods. Beautiful places. However, they won't get you to work.
I understand that the speed limit is not (usually) a requirement and that bikes can't usually be on the sidewalk. My point was that, contrary to your assertion that bicyclists had the best of both worlds, they in fact had the worst of both: Can't ride on safe sidewalks, and become dangerous to drivers and themselves on roads. Keep in mind that in many areas, roads don't have shoulders. That is primarily what bugs me around here- bicyclists choose roads w/ no shoulder which means that they effectively take up the whole lane while they pedal at a leisurely 15 mph. Cyclists on shouldered roads don't bother me at all.
As for the speed limits, come on- if you were on a bike and you were stuck behind a kid on a BigWheels going 5 mph while you were trying to get to work, you'd be annoyed, too.
I should correct my previous post- The metamod prompt actually shows up every time I make leave a comment, regardless of my mod points. Ever since I started metamoderating that is where I got to it- if there ever was another way I never knew about it.
I don't like the new slashcode either, but for different reasons.
Even if only the office people worked from home, it would make a huge dent in traffic- the commute would be quicker for the rest of us, reducing wasted fuel and time.
Even then, if I had paid for other forms of transportation for all the places I've been this year, and for all the things I've had to haul, it'd cost me a lot more than $12,600.
As it is, I own my vehicle; cheap insurance (clear record) of I want to say $500 something a year; do my own minor maintenance; and fill up every few weeks.
720/yr in gas 550/yr insurance 200/yr avg maint 70/yr taxes (tags)
$1540/yr cost of ownership. I'd have to do some major work to make it up to 12 grand. And I can't get where I need for $4.25/day.
When you can keep up with the speed limit, you can have the rights of drivers. When you ride on the sidewalk, you can have the rights of pedestrians. To me, you are a slow, unpredictable nuisance- especially on two-lane roads where I can't swerve to avoid you because there is oncoming traffic. Passing motorists might be mad... But you should see the ones stacked up behind you waiting to pass.
No offense, it's just that when I see a bicycle up ahead I know I can look forward to driving 25 mph max until he or she decides to turn off; that, or I have to swerve into the other lane which at 5 in the afternoon is just not going to happen.
I think that brain energy needs in relation to the rest of the body's energy needs should be considered, and this is related to brain case size.
Humans' gestation, childrearing, nuclear family, tribe-based society, etc. all essentially stem from our huge brains. Our entire society served to support helpless babies- and our babies had to be born so young as to be helpless so that their huge heads didn't kill their mother during childbirth. Even with the early birth, we still require a fontanelle so our head can squish through the pelvis.
When you look at it that way, our large brain case is pretty important in our general development over the last million years or so. As you go back in time and find proto-humans with smaller brain-cases, you can make educated judgments about their social structure, reasoning ability, etc.
None of this serves to place humans on a pedastal above other thinking creatures who have entirely different brain structures and evolutionary pressures.
Imagine two dots on a piece of paper (have them be a few inches apart for our purposes). Fold the paper like a taco so that the two dots are facing each other and are now touching. As you can see, it would not matter what was drawn on the paper in between the dots for this to work. This represents bending two-dimensional space.
Now imagine two stars in space. Bend spacetime like a 4-d taco so that the stars are touching. As you can see, it doesn't matter what's in between them for this to work. This represents bending 3-dimensional space.
The other answers are close, but no cigar. Any physical movement of the stick will propagate through the stick at the speed of sound through the stick.
To the inevitable smartass: No, sound cannot travel through a vacuum. Fortunately for us, a stick is not a vacuum.
You can experimentally verify this yourself if you want to buy a rod of some resilient material at least a few hundred yards long. A railroad track will work.
You don't need to set off an atomic bomb to accelerate particles to the energies found in the explosion. You don't need to set off a hand grenade to make a piece of metal go as fast as the shrapnel from the grenade.
You don't need to simulate the big bang to make a few particles travel as quickly as they would have during the big bang.
Bang! Someone in a lab within 500 miles of you just heated something up to temperatures above the surface of the sun! Ah, but we're all alive.
I was going to say something about the conservation of angular momentum but the entire left side of my brain exploded as it tried to parse the comment's implications.
I wonder how well the infrared works in cold climates where most pedestrians will be wearing 3-4 inches of insulation? I assume the infrared portion serves to distinguish pedestrians from lightposts.
As far as duping goes- how do you dupe doppler effect? There have been many other cases where ultrasound is used for collision avoidance and AFAIK no one has caused trouble by fooling the sensors.
An airbag is not like a beachball- it's not elastic. In fact, it has to be inelastic for it to work. If in-car airbags acted like you described, they would simply cause the driver's head to bounce back into the headrest, causing massive brain injury. The airbag works by decelerating the head more slowly than the steering wheel would. 40 mph to 0 mpg in a few milliseconds versus a much larger fraction of a second is HUGE in terms of physics.
The best way to protect a falling egg is to drop it onto something inelastic yet yielding- a pile of goose down would work well, for example. Airbags work on this principle (as do crumple zones): Slow the deceleration, absorb the energy (as opposed to transferring it like a bouncy ball), person lives (usually).
A pedestrian airbag would work like that- more a pile of leaves than a trampoline. Find a video on youtube or something of the airbags used by stuntmen in movies- they don't bounce, they deflate.
1: Simulate or create strong AI 2: Feed it details of the human subject 3: Tell the human subject that their mind will be transferred into the computer when their body dies (For a fee) 4: Human dies- turn on AI 5: Family interacts with AI who pretends to be the human; AI acts happy 6: Everyone signs up 7: Profit!!!
Which is why only governments own printing presses, cotton gins, soap, penicillin, barbed wire, steam engines, tnt, synthetic plastics and dyes, nuclear power, transistors, microchips, telegraphs, telephones, the Internet, non-gold standard economies, automobiles...
Do I need to go on? With the exception of actual military weapons, I can't think of any paradigm-shifting technology being 'owned' or controlled solely by the government. Can you name any? Yeah, nuclear missiles- go to a civilian rocket agency. Yeah, the NSA- who uses COTS parts for the most part and is powerful simply due to scale; call Google.
Gov'ts use technology in parallel with civilians, perhaps, and maybe they use it to perpetrate their rule, but I really can't think of anything that we as citizens might see and be confused by.
>>That theory starts to break down when the money your government is spending actually belongs to China...
Not at all. If you take out a loan to start a business, you will make money; the bank will make money; and everyone will be happy.
You are forgetting, I think, that finance in this case is not a zero-sum game. For example-
The Fed borrows $100 billion from China to fund road construction, education, and defense. Let's say the Chinese charge 5% interest but the Fed estimates that the improvements in our national infrastructure from this money will produce another $100 billion in growth over ten years. I shouldn't have to tell you that that is a great deal. Any businessman would be a fool to pass it up.
Borrowing money is usually a good thing. Our economy, although there is doom and gloom about a recession, is actually still growing at a pretty healthy rate. As long as we are growing, it pays to borrow money because you can estimate a positive rate of return. If we were actually in a serious recession or a depression, then I'd be surprised if China would even loan to us in the first place.
An old chestnut- "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose *your* job."
You're confusing discretionary spending with compulsory attendance. If you *had* to use the grocery store nearest you no matter what, then yes- you would end up with spoiled food if you happened to be close to the worst store.
Public schools, which are free, will always be limited by geography. It's not like you can admire a fine school in the next county over and send your children there. I'm saying that the absolute baseline for public education should be at least "pretty good". Great private schools should continue being great- but for the rest of us, public education should be equal to or greater than the education we could provide our own kids. We *do* pay for it, after all.
The only problem with competitive schools is that for competition to work, you need to have schools that lose. And that means that the students lose. The entire point of public schools is to allow kids who can't afford to compete for education to get an education that will at least get them through life.
I support private schools, but not at the expense of public schools. We need to always have that support network for everyone in our society.
I don't know... My mom always told me that she could easily imagine seeing me on the cover of People or Time, but that if I wanted to get there I'd better get my shit straight. Otherwise, she said, she'd be content to see me work at a restaurant for the rest of my life as long as I was happy.
It's as complicated as the situation with the UAW and the American auto makers. Oh wait, it isn't very complicated at all.
IMO, you can't have a military union, a police union, an air traffic controllers union, or a teachers union. Teaching should fall under civil service. If you want tenure, if you want $40+K/year, you should send a resume to the universities.
I've thought about teaching, and my reasons had nothing to do with getting rich or sitting on committees. If you're a teacher, and you've been teaching the same class for 20 years and you're sick of it- go somewhere else. Don't demand WS 12 wages or tenure. It's not like your students get proportionately smarter each year.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that almost as if you're proud of not knowing how to fix a machine with 7 moving parts or the machine that you spend hours each day inside...
-b
There are no freeways between me and anywhere I want to be.
We have bike trails- they are in parks or out in the woods. Beautiful places. However, they won't get you to work.
I understand that the speed limit is not (usually) a requirement and that bikes can't usually be on the sidewalk. My point was that, contrary to your assertion that bicyclists had the best of both worlds, they in fact had the worst of both: Can't ride on safe sidewalks, and become dangerous to drivers and themselves on roads. Keep in mind that in many areas, roads don't have shoulders. That is primarily what bugs me around here- bicyclists choose roads w/ no shoulder which means that they effectively take up the whole lane while they pedal at a leisurely 15 mph. Cyclists on shouldered roads don't bother me at all.
As for the speed limits, come on- if you were on a bike and you were stuck behind a kid on a BigWheels going 5 mph while you were trying to get to work, you'd be annoyed, too.
-b
I should correct my previous post- The metamod prompt actually shows up every time I make leave a comment, regardless of my mod points. Ever since I started metamoderating that is where I got to it- if there ever was another way I never knew about it.
I don't like the new slashcode either, but for different reasons.
-b
Even if only the office people worked from home, it would make a huge dent in traffic- the commute would be quicker for the rest of us, reducing wasted fuel and time.
-b
Even then, if I had paid for other forms of transportation for all the places I've been this year, and for all the things I've had to haul, it'd cost me a lot more than $12,600.
As it is, I own my vehicle; cheap insurance (clear record) of I want to say $500 something a year; do my own minor maintenance; and fill up every few weeks.
720/yr in gas
550/yr insurance
200/yr avg maint
70/yr taxes (tags)
$1540/yr cost of ownership. I'd have to do some major work to make it up to 12 grand. And I can't get where I need for $4.25/day.
-b
When you can keep up with the speed limit, you can have the rights of drivers. When you ride on the sidewalk, you can have the rights of pedestrians. To me, you are a slow, unpredictable nuisance- especially on two-lane roads where I can't swerve to avoid you because there is oncoming traffic. Passing motorists might be mad... But you should see the ones stacked up behind you waiting to pass.
No offense, it's just that when I see a bicycle up ahead I know I can look forward to driving 25 mph max until he or she decides to turn off; that, or I have to swerve into the other lane which at 5 in the afternoon is just not going to happen.
-b
I think that brain energy needs in relation to the rest of the body's energy needs should be considered, and this is related to brain case size.
Humans' gestation, childrearing, nuclear family, tribe-based society, etc. all essentially stem from our huge brains. Our entire society served to support helpless babies- and our babies had to be born so young as to be helpless so that their huge heads didn't kill their mother during childbirth. Even with the early birth, we still require a fontanelle so our head can squish through the pelvis.
When you look at it that way, our large brain case is pretty important in our general development over the last million years or so. As you go back in time and find proto-humans with smaller brain-cases, you can make educated judgments about their social structure, reasoning ability, etc.
None of this serves to place humans on a pedastal above other thinking creatures who have entirely different brain structures and evolutionary pressures.
-b
Imagine two dots on a piece of paper (have them be a few inches apart for our purposes). Fold the paper like a taco so that the two dots are facing each other and are now touching. As you can see, it would not matter what was drawn on the paper in between the dots for this to work. This represents bending two-dimensional space.
Now imagine two stars in space. Bend spacetime like a 4-d taco so that the stars are touching. As you can see, it doesn't matter what's in between them for this to work. This represents bending 3-dimensional space.
Aspirin is in the cabinet. :)
-b
The other answers are close, but no cigar. Any physical movement of the stick will propagate through the stick at the speed of sound through the stick.
To the inevitable smartass:
No, sound cannot travel through a vacuum. Fortunately for us, a stick is not a vacuum.
You can experimentally verify this yourself if you want to buy a rod of some resilient material at least a few hundred yards long. A railroad track will work.
-b
You don't need to set off an atomic bomb to accelerate particles to the energies found in the explosion. You don't need to set off a hand grenade to make a piece of metal go as fast as the shrapnel from the grenade.
You don't need to simulate the big bang to make a few particles travel as quickly as they would have during the big bang.
Bang! Someone in a lab within 500 miles of you just heated something up to temperatures above the surface of the sun! Ah, but we're all alive.
-b
I was going to say something about the conservation of angular momentum but the entire left side of my brain exploded as it tried to parse the comment's implications.
(perhaps I was dictating)
-b
Here goes my karma...
If you want to be immune to a zombie attack, drive an SUV. Zombies only go after vehicles that stand a good chance of containing brains.
sigh.
-b
I wonder how well the infrared works in cold climates where most pedestrians will be wearing 3-4 inches of insulation? I assume the infrared portion serves to distinguish pedestrians from lightposts.
As far as duping goes- how do you dupe doppler effect? There have been many other cases where ultrasound is used for collision avoidance and AFAIK no one has caused trouble by fooling the sensors.
-b
>>I am saying this as an armchair crash test fanatic, not an expert in the field so I might be marginally incorrect on some points.
Are armchair collisions a big problem in your part of the world?
-b ;)
I guess that's why we'll never have turn signals on our cars. Oh well, saves me money.
-b
An airbag is not like a beachball- it's not elastic. In fact, it has to be inelastic for it to work. If in-car airbags acted like you described, they would simply cause the driver's head to bounce back into the headrest, causing massive brain injury. The airbag works by decelerating the head more slowly than the steering wheel would. 40 mph to 0 mpg in a few milliseconds versus a much larger fraction of a second is HUGE in terms of physics.
The best way to protect a falling egg is to drop it onto something inelastic yet yielding- a pile of goose down would work well, for example. Airbags work on this principle (as do crumple zones): Slow the deceleration, absorb the energy (as opposed to transferring it like a bouncy ball), person lives (usually).
A pedestrian airbag would work like that- more a pile of leaves than a trampoline. Find a video on youtube or something of the airbags used by stuntmen in movies- they don't bounce, they deflate.
Hope this helps.
-b
It's still there, as far as I can tell. The only time I see a link to it is when I have mod points, though- it's right at the top of the discussion.
-b
1: Simulate or create strong AI
2: Feed it details of the human subject
3: Tell the human subject that their mind will be transferred into the computer when their body dies (For a fee)
4: Human dies- turn on AI
5: Family interacts with AI who pretends to be the human; AI acts happy
6: Everyone signs up
7: Profit!!!
Oh I should patent that.
-b
Which is why only governments own printing presses, cotton gins, soap, penicillin, barbed wire, steam engines, tnt, synthetic plastics and dyes, nuclear power, transistors, microchips, telegraphs, telephones, the Internet, non-gold standard economies, automobiles...
Do I need to go on? With the exception of actual military weapons, I can't think of any paradigm-shifting technology being 'owned' or controlled solely by the government. Can you name any? Yeah, nuclear missiles- go to a civilian rocket agency. Yeah, the NSA- who uses COTS parts for the most part and is powerful simply due to scale; call Google.
Gov'ts use technology in parallel with civilians, perhaps, and maybe they use it to perpetrate their rule, but I really can't think of anything that we as citizens might see and be confused by.
-b
but this law is just another step down the Orwellian slippery slope our government has been rushing down the last 20 years or so.
I see this slope comes equipped with an extraordinarily slow escalator? ;)
-b
>>That theory starts to break down when the money your government is spending actually belongs to China...
Not at all. If you take out a loan to start a business, you will make money; the bank will make money; and everyone will be happy.
You are forgetting, I think, that finance in this case is not a zero-sum game. For example-
The Fed borrows $100 billion from China to fund road construction, education, and defense. Let's say the Chinese charge 5% interest but the Fed estimates that the improvements in our national infrastructure from this money will produce another $100 billion in growth over ten years. I shouldn't have to tell you that that is a great deal. Any businessman would be a fool to pass it up.
Borrowing money is usually a good thing. Our economy, although there is doom and gloom about a recession, is actually still growing at a pretty healthy rate. As long as we are growing, it pays to borrow money because you can estimate a positive rate of return. If we were actually in a serious recession or a depression, then I'd be surprised if China would even loan to us in the first place.
An old chestnut- "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose *your* job."
-b
You're confusing discretionary spending with compulsory attendance. If you *had* to use the grocery store nearest you no matter what, then yes- you would end up with spoiled food if you happened to be close to the worst store.
Public schools, which are free, will always be limited by geography. It's not like you can admire a fine school in the next county over and send your children there. I'm saying that the absolute baseline for public education should be at least "pretty good". Great private schools should continue being great- but for the rest of us, public education should be equal to or greater than the education we could provide our own kids. We *do* pay for it, after all.
-b
The only problem with competitive schools is that for competition to work, you need to have schools that lose. And that means that the students lose. The entire point of public schools is to allow kids who can't afford to compete for education to get an education that will at least get them through life.
I support private schools, but not at the expense of public schools. We need to always have that support network for everyone in our society.
-b
I don't know... My mom always told me that she could easily imagine seeing me on the cover of People or Time, but that if I wanted to get there I'd better get my shit straight. Otherwise, she said, she'd be content to see me work at a restaurant for the rest of my life as long as I was happy.
Am I the only one who had sane parents?
-b
It's as complicated as the situation with the UAW and the American auto makers. Oh wait, it isn't very complicated at all.
IMO, you can't have a military union, a police union, an air traffic controllers union, or a teachers union. Teaching should fall under civil service. If you want tenure, if you want $40+K/year, you should send a resume to the universities.
I've thought about teaching, and my reasons had nothing to do with getting rich or sitting on committees. If you're a teacher, and you've been teaching the same class for 20 years and you're sick of it- go somewhere else. Don't demand WS 12 wages or tenure. It's not like your students get proportionately smarter each year.
-b