I'm eagerly waiting for this to develope. It's all stuff that has been done by a government agency, but a private company is certainly bound to be more efficient and productive, lowering the costs of lunar travel. This is serious fuel for a new space war, when prices go down, and it ends up becoming something normal for the people. Let the free market do its thing.
It is following the exact path of civil aviation. I have high hopes of it developing in the same way.
Sorry, a bit of daydreaming is good for me... let the SciFi lover in me have a bit of fun.
Yes, it's funny how open source zealots have become something like vegans, and in some places (like linux.com) they have special menus (not so tasty, but good enough). It's like being allergic to mp3.
Yep, and the bad treatment is if you don't happen to have an "interesting name". I'm Spanish. I have a very very common name in spain, think John Smith. Well, I went to the states for the first time this summer, and, after the LONG queue, the police officer tells me that there is someone else with my name the US has "an interest" on. So, two more hours, so they check my passport with Washington. Of course there will be some arsehole doing bad things with the same name as me! I know 6 people with the same name as me, so there must be around 100.000 people around with my name. Why don't they check the effing passport number in the first place, instead of the name???
Sorry, but I hate US borders. I enjoyed the country very much, but the borders were unbearable. 4 or 5 hours to get in and get out is more than enough. Because getting out was almost as fun as getting in.
Yes, it is certainly hard to understand. In Spain we have a levy on media (which can be bypassed by buying from an international store online), but it is LEGAL to download copyrighted music, if it's not used for profit, only for private use. So, I can download every movie and every song on the internet, and I'm rightfully allowed to do it. To compensate, I have to pay a levy on media. Worth it, in my opinion, as this levy only affects CDs and DVDs for the moment, and not HDDs.
This treats all spanish people as pirates, but says pirates are OK.
Well, the Maglev in Munich might happen in the end... when a politician wants their white elephant, it's hard to change that. In any case, as the traffic between the airport and the city is huge, 10 minutes per person can be significant.
But in any case, you are wrong in one thing. The normal train would cost quite a bit more than 1 million. With 1 million you won't built even 200 meters of rail. And even less in a sub-urban area. The cost will probably be more close to 300 million. But in any case, the maglev is much more expensive.
I had a chat with one of the big fishes of Deutsche Bahn, and they were seriously studying it, as a possibly good investment
Funny, the exact opposite happened to me. About a month ago, my sister and I got my mom an 20' iMac, to replace her XP laptop. Now, she couldn't be happier. She enjoys using the computer now, and the only thing she doesn't like is that things look much better on the screen, so she is alway tempted to buy stuff online.
I think this is great news for FOSS people. Up until now, most software vendors have been quite generous on their piracy tolerance. If these companies start pushing it hard, and making people pay, things will start changing.
Many people just download photoshop because that's what they know. If they have to pay for it, there will be a HUGE shift to GIMP. And that's even more true with Microsoft stuff, at least in Spain. I know very few people who have bought a copy of Windows (not counting what came with the computer). But it's easy to pirate, so they go for it. If they faced fines of 1000 euro for it (or had to pay 300 to buy it in the first place), a lot of people would consider linux. Now, both are free (in practice), so price is not a problem when choosing. Factor that in, and things look very different.
So, good news, people will start using what they need, and not the professional (and expensive) tool for home stuff. And that usually means open source.
Yep, if you read TFA, that's what they did.
Enraged, CEO Sterling Ball vowed never to use Microsoft software again, even if "we have to buy 10,000 abacuses." He shifted to open-source software, which lacks such legal entanglements because its underlying code is freely distributed.
Well, sometimes you just feel lucky. It's fine to have a button to share it with google. Everytime I feel lucky, I go to google and press the button, I'm not searching for anything, I'm just feeling lucky.
Luckily, they don't have the "I'm feeling bored to death", otherwise i would spend too much time there.
I just read from the drive's page on the WD online store:
This power savings equates to reducing CO2 emission by up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year - the equivalent of taking a car off the road for 3 days each year Let's see, 13.8 kilograms per drive per year. That's like saving 13.8/2.4 = 5.75 litres of gas every year... not superimpresive, but more than nothing. At least for the owner's pocket. But thinking about the "green" concept, it's certainly minimum. The economic value of 1 ton of CO2 is considered to be about 50$ (tops). Then, with 13.8 kg, you are saving about 0.70$ a year. Not saving the world here, even with lots of these drives.
Of course, 5 watts is about nothing, but if there is really no performance reduction, and with a price of only around 10$ more, they migh be marginally better (economically, from the selfish buyer point of view, ignoring the benefits of reducing CO2 emissions)
Yes, feels like not being able to eavesdrop Skype conversations is just an excuse to get spyware on people's computer. I'm OK with the police doing that, IF a judge decides there is some kind of spyware warrant for that particular person on that particular time.
Well, the hub and spoke model works, and there are good reasons to keep it. It makes operation way cheaper, and the CO2 emissions are way lower. If the problem is that the area around the main airport in big cities is unavailable and the airport cannot grow, solving air traffic control problems is not going to get you too far.
It probably makes more sense to build a big airport further from the cities and build good high speed trains to get you inside the city. Hurray for intermodal transport!
Wow, 20 billion is quite a lot of money. I guess they are expecting really high benefits from that. But I think that a better air traffic control can get you no more than a 30% increase in capacity. From TFA:
Doug Church, an official with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, says that while his organization welcomes technological advances, he's concerned that NextGen not be viewed as a panacea. "An airport can still only handle so many flights," he says. "What we need is more concrete on the ground" in the form of new runways and airfields, he says. I think this guy is pretty much spot on. With 20 billion you can build LOTS of runways. I'm sure there is another way of getting rid of the bottleneck of air traffic control capacity. Just hire more people! In Europe we are managing quite well with "traditional" ways...
Copyright is already far too long, as it lets you make more money while being dead. You are dead! You cannot be productive! No reason to pay you anymore! Because, no matter how well I did at my job, once I die I stop getting money.
Copyright is supposed to exist to promote creating stuff, so you can profit of what you created. "As long as you live" should be long enough for anybody.
I certainly will not be creating anything and thinking: "And when I die, my grandson will still be getting money for this!"
Indeed. I think the DRM fight is the first battle that will be won by "internet inhabitants", the "blogosphere", and most of the free-thinking people of the online world. It is happening, and this article is just the sign that we are one step closer. This is a battle in which we are already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, although far away.
Now we have several more battles to fight; F/OSS software over propietary, breaking Microsoft's monopoly, net neutrality, copyright law reform, etc...
Doesn't matter if people want to call it art, it is applied chemistry and physics. The only thing is that there are many variables and humans have really good sensors to appraise the results. So that instead of calculating the Na+ ions, you can just taste it and get a better reading. Instead of using high precission lab instruments, we use the built in tools we have.
In the end, art is just applied science, but with wildly varying parameters, so it takes a very complex measuring instrument to appreciate the results.
That only makes this project even worse. The common parts of Ultra and a train are that you have to invest in new infrastructure for both of them. that means a lot of money. The difference is that Ultra moves only individuals, and not groups. So it's then more like a driverles-taxi-train.
My job, just so you know, is performing cost-benefit analysis of transport projects. Transport projects, or any other project, should have a >5% Economic Internal Rate of Return (EIRR) to be worth of investment (that's an average number for Europe). This means that the benefits must outweight the costs, by a good margin, with the benefits being discounted along time, so we get a break even if the discount rate is 5%. After this cost benefit analysis 101, let's take a look at Ultra.
The good thing with roads is that we already have a good network. With trains we have a not-too-bad network, because train tracks are expensive to build. Let's say that you can build Ultra tracks for 1/10th of the cost of a 2x2 motorway (to say a number). That's about 600.000 Euros/km. Let's say you build a small network, for a city area, of about 100 km (that's a pretty small network). thats then 30 million Euro. Let's say the vehicles are free, and oepration is super cheap.
The main benefit of transport projects is time savings. Supposing a value of 10 Euros/hour for a person, and saying the lifespan of the project is about 30 years (standard in transport projects). You have to save AT LEAST 1 million Euro a year. Thats 100.000 passenger-hours a year. The capacity of the Ultra system is quite low, as you said, it transports induviduals, not groups. So saying that in this small 100 km network you have 20 vehicles, and they have an individual inside most of the daytime, let's say 12 hours a day. Supposing this people are reducing their travel time in half, that's 12x20 = 240 hours a day, 240x365 = 87.600 passenger-hours a year.
So even being supersuper generous in all my hypothesis, with this, your EIRR is BELOW 0%. It's just not economically viable. Very cool, I agree, but not justifiable. No sane government would invest in this seriously, maybe as a research initiative, but not for real transport.
So yes, this system is crap (economically). Now you don't have to take my word.
I won't charge you for my cost-benefit analysis.
PS: Before you ask about the reduction in CO2 emissions, let me tell you the value of those. 50 Euros/tonne, at most. They are rarely more than a 2 or 3% of the costs of any transport project.
Pretty cool initiative, but let's be realistic. From the site you linked to:
The ULTra system is an innovative form of PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). It is a system of driverless automatic pods travelling at a speed of up to 25 mph on their own guide-way network. On their own guide-way network, which means not road. We already have something like this. It's called "train". This ULTra system cannot even share the tracks with cars, as tramways. It is just a battery-operated-concrete-track-train. SLOW battery-operated-concrete-track-train. Looks cool, but in practice it's stupid.
My job is studying transport projects. This one is crap. Take my word.
They are not saying anything too futuristic about the Universal water. What they say is almost here (with a good margin for improvement). However, what they don't say is that all those expensive cool ways to get water only matter to the first world, and not third world countries. We'll be lucky if they have a couple of drops of bleach to put on their drinking water to prevent waterborne diseases for 2025. That would save 1.8 million lives a year. Without any cool ways to get the water, just some basic water treatment for everybody.
Well, they don't name renewable energy as such, but when they refer to "Distributed energy", they are clearly meaning solar and wind (and others), as one of the things about those energy sources is that it's hard to create a big central that produces most of the energy needed, but it's easy to have bits of electricity generation here and there, saving in line losses.
About in 2025 nobody steering any vehicles anymore, I'm still waiting for my year 2000 flying car, good luck with your self steered 2025 car. Truth is, we are still VERY far from having those type of cars, and will probably never happen. What will happen (and is already happening) is that sensors and electronics will make driving far easier. For example, on the latest models of BMW, you have cruise control that keeps safety distance, on screen radar that let you see position of objects when parking, the steering wheel vibrates if you are on cruise control and go out of your lane, and many more cute things like those.
But for the moment we are quite far from letting the car drive itself, as it's really difficult to control all variables and preview all unexpected things that could go wrong. I'm not saying a human will do them better than a computer, but when the self steered car appears, it'd better be 100% safe, as people don't like to put their lives on a computer's hands.
For me, it has always been surprising that you americans have all these problems with voting machines. Voting is a simple enough proccess, why would anybody need a machine to do it?
I think it's always better to do it the traditional way, you go there with your ballot and put it on a clear box, after somebody has checked that you are who you say you are, and that you are supposed to vote. Painfully simple, completely fool-proof. It takes a bit more people to do it, but it's just as being in a jury.
I see absolutely no downside about doing it the traditional way. Is there any reason to do it with machines in america, or you do it that way just because it's cooler?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm eagerly waiting for this to develope. It's all stuff that has been done by a government agency, but a private company is certainly bound to be more efficient and productive, lowering the costs of lunar travel. This is serious fuel for a new space war, when prices go down, and it ends up becoming something normal for the people. Let the free market do its thing.
It is following the exact path of civil aviation. I have high hopes of it developing in the same way.
Sorry, a bit of daydreaming is good for me... let the SciFi lover in me have a bit of fun.
Yes, it's funny how open source zealots have become something like vegans, and in some places (like linux.com) they have special menus (not so tasty, but good enough). It's like being allergic to mp3.
Yep, and the bad treatment is if you don't happen to have an "interesting name". I'm Spanish. I have a very very common name in spain, think John Smith. Well, I went to the states for the first time this summer, and, after the LONG queue, the police officer tells me that there is someone else with my name the US has "an interest" on. So, two more hours, so they check my passport with Washington. Of course there will be some arsehole doing bad things with the same name as me! I know 6 people with the same name as me, so there must be around 100.000 people around with my name. Why don't they check the effing passport number in the first place, instead of the name???
Sorry, but I hate US borders. I enjoyed the country very much, but the borders were unbearable. 4 or 5 hours to get in and get out is more than enough. Because getting out was almost as fun as getting in.
Yes, it is certainly hard to understand. In Spain we have a levy on media (which can be bypassed by buying from an international store online), but it is LEGAL to download copyrighted music, if it's not used for profit, only for private use. So, I can download every movie and every song on the internet, and I'm rightfully allowed to do it. To compensate, I have to pay a levy on media. Worth it, in my opinion, as this levy only affects CDs and DVDs for the moment, and not HDDs.
This treats all spanish people as pirates, but says pirates are OK.
Well, the Maglev in Munich might happen in the end... when a politician wants their white elephant, it's hard to change that. In any case, as the traffic between the airport and the city is huge, 10 minutes per person can be significant.
But in any case, you are wrong in one thing. The normal train would cost quite a bit more than 1 million. With 1 million you won't built even 200 meters of rail. And even less in a sub-urban area. The cost will probably be more close to 300 million. But in any case, the maglev is much more expensive.
I had a chat with one of the big fishes of Deutsche Bahn, and they were seriously studying it, as a possibly good investment
Funny, the exact opposite happened to me. About a month ago, my sister and I got my mom an 20' iMac, to replace her XP laptop. Now, she couldn't be happier. She enjoys using the computer now, and the only thing she doesn't like is that things look much better on the screen, so she is alway tempted to buy stuff online.
I think this is great news for FOSS people. Up until now, most software vendors have been quite generous on their piracy tolerance. If these companies start pushing it hard, and making people pay, things will start changing.
Many people just download photoshop because that's what they know. If they have to pay for it, there will be a HUGE shift to GIMP. And that's even more true with Microsoft stuff, at least in Spain. I know very few people who have bought a copy of Windows (not counting what came with the computer). But it's easy to pirate, so they go for it. If they faced fines of 1000 euro for it (or had to pay 300 to buy it in the first place), a lot of people would consider linux. Now, both are free (in practice), so price is not a problem when choosing. Factor that in, and things look very different.
So, good news, people will start using what they need, and not the professional (and expensive) tool for home stuff. And that usually means open source.
Well, sometimes you just feel lucky. It's fine to have a button to share it with google. Everytime I feel lucky, I go to google and press the button, I'm not searching for anything, I'm just feeling lucky.
Luckily, they don't have the "I'm feeling bored to death", otherwise i would spend too much time there.
Of course, 5 watts is about nothing, but if there is really no performance reduction, and with a price of only around 10$ more, they migh be marginally better (economically, from the selfish buyer point of view, ignoring the benefits of reducing CO2 emissions)
Just to be extra-safe, I'll be using skype and talking in ROT13.
Yes, feels like not being able to eavesdrop Skype conversations is just an excuse to get spyware on people's computer. I'm OK with the police doing that, IF a judge decides there is some kind of spyware warrant for that particular person on that particular time.
Well, the hub and spoke model works, and there are good reasons to keep it. It makes operation way cheaper, and the CO2 emissions are way lower. If the problem is that the area around the main airport in big cities is unavailable and the airport cannot grow, solving air traffic control problems is not going to get you too far.
It probably makes more sense to build a big airport further from the cities and build good high speed trains to get you inside the city. Hurray for intermodal transport!
Copyright is already far too long, as it lets you make more money while being dead. You are dead! You cannot be productive! No reason to pay you anymore! Because, no matter how well I did at my job, once I die I stop getting money.
Copyright is supposed to exist to promote creating stuff, so you can profit of what you created. "As long as you live" should be long enough for anybody.
I certainly will not be creating anything and thinking: "And when I die, my grandson will still be getting money for this!"
Meta-acronyms, the next step of misunderstandings...
Indeed. I think the DRM fight is the first battle that will be won by "internet inhabitants", the "blogosphere", and most of the free-thinking people of the online world. It is happening, and this article is just the sign that we are one step closer. This is a battle in which we are already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, although far away.
Now we have several more battles to fight; F/OSS software over propietary, breaking Microsoft's monopoly, net neutrality, copyright law reform, etc...
Let's get back to work.
Doesn't matter if people want to call it art, it is applied chemistry and physics. The only thing is that there are many variables and humans have really good sensors to appraise the results. So that instead of calculating the Na+ ions, you can just taste it and get a better reading. Instead of using high precission lab instruments, we use the built in tools we have.
In the end, art is just applied science, but with wildly varying parameters, so it takes a very complex measuring instrument to appreciate the results.
Let me explain a bit more.
That only makes this project even worse. The common parts of Ultra and a train are that you have to invest in new infrastructure for both of them. that means a lot of money. The difference is that Ultra moves only individuals, and not groups. So it's then more like a driverles-taxi-train.
My job, just so you know, is performing cost-benefit analysis of transport projects. Transport projects, or any other project, should have a >5% Economic Internal Rate of Return (EIRR) to be worth of investment (that's an average number for Europe). This means that the benefits must outweight the costs, by a good margin, with the benefits being discounted along time, so we get a break even if the discount rate is 5%. After this cost benefit analysis 101, let's take a look at Ultra.
The good thing with roads is that we already have a good network. With trains we have a not-too-bad network, because train tracks are expensive to build. Let's say that you can build Ultra tracks for 1/10th of the cost of a 2x2 motorway (to say a number). That's about 600.000 Euros/km. Let's say you build a small network, for a city area, of about 100 km (that's a pretty small network). thats then 30 million Euro. Let's say the vehicles are free, and oepration is super cheap.
The main benefit of transport projects is time savings. Supposing a value of 10 Euros/hour for a person, and saying the lifespan of the project is about 30 years (standard in transport projects). You have to save AT LEAST 1 million Euro a year. Thats 100.000 passenger-hours a year. The capacity of the Ultra system is quite low, as you said, it transports induviduals, not groups. So saying that in this small 100 km network you have 20 vehicles, and they have an individual inside most of the daytime, let's say 12 hours a day. Supposing this people are reducing their travel time in half, that's 12x20 = 240 hours a day, 240x365 = 87.600 passenger-hours a year.
So even being supersuper generous in all my hypothesis, with this, your EIRR is BELOW 0%. It's just not economically viable. Very cool, I agree, but not justifiable. No sane government would invest in this seriously, maybe as a research initiative, but not for real transport.
So yes, this system is crap (economically). Now you don't have to take my word.
I won't charge you for my cost-benefit analysis.
PS: Before you ask about the reduction in CO2 emissions, let me tell you the value of those. 50 Euros/tonne, at most. They are rarely more than a 2 or 3% of the costs of any transport project.
My job is studying transport projects. This one is crap. Take my word.
They are not saying anything too futuristic about the Universal water. What they say is almost here (with a good margin for improvement). However, what they don't say is that all those expensive cool ways to get water only matter to the first world, and not third world countries. We'll be lucky if they have a couple of drops of bleach to put on their drinking water to prevent waterborne diseases for 2025. That would save 1.8 million lives a year. Without any cool ways to get the water, just some basic water treatment for everybody.
Well, they don't name renewable energy as such, but when they refer to "Distributed energy", they are clearly meaning solar and wind (and others), as one of the things about those energy sources is that it's hard to create a big central that produces most of the energy needed, but it's easy to have bits of electricity generation here and there, saving in line losses.
About in 2025 nobody steering any vehicles anymore, I'm still waiting for my year 2000 flying car, good luck with your self steered 2025 car. Truth is, we are still VERY far from having those type of cars, and will probably never happen. What will happen (and is already happening) is that sensors and electronics will make driving far easier. For example, on the latest models of BMW, you have cruise control that keeps safety distance, on screen radar that let you see position of objects when parking, the steering wheel vibrates if you are on cruise control and go out of your lane, and many more cute things like those.
But for the moment we are quite far from letting the car drive itself, as it's really difficult to control all variables and preview all unexpected things that could go wrong. I'm not saying a human will do them better than a computer, but when the self steered car appears, it'd better be 100% safe, as people don't like to put their lives on a computer's hands.
For me, it has always been surprising that you americans have all these problems with voting machines. Voting is a simple enough proccess, why would anybody need a machine to do it?
I think it's always better to do it the traditional way, you go there with your ballot and put it on a clear box, after somebody has checked that you are who you say you are, and that you are supposed to vote. Painfully simple, completely fool-proof. It takes a bit more people to do it, but it's just as being in a jury.
I see absolutely no downside about doing it the traditional way. Is there any reason to do it with machines in america, or you do it that way just because it's cooler?
Personally I'm wishing good luck to this VISTA.