Who were the 40 people? Were they all Austrians? Austria still seems to have a bit of a love affair with far-right politicians, even if they do kill themselves while speeding in BMWs, so this could conceivably tell us more about Austrians than people in general. People usually support the far right because they feel insecure, and aggressive looking cars might add to their feeling of security. After all, the French often seem to have a passion for cars that look quirky, while many US cars just look too brutish for Europeans. Perhaps Californians like the Prius because they tend to be more laid back and less insecure (I know, pop psychology is scientific junk...but so is the article.)
The other interesting question is whether manufacturers should be allowed to make aggressive looking cars. They are supposed to be a form of transport, not an external dick waver. Perhaps making them look friendlier would make the roads safer.
There are some new IT people around with a clue, and they know that the leaks need to be exposed before anything will happen about it.
BTW the Civil Service preference for large incompetent foreign IT companies with big entertainment budgets over small efficient local ones is well known. Exposing the uselessness of companies like EDS and Capita has a sub-agenda; let's get our IT back.
Schwartz is at least a "real" CEO - i.e. he is in a company which has real products - not the "products" of the finance industry - he really knows a lot about the company and its products, and he is in a position to make a significant difference to how it performs. There is a huge difference between Schwartz and some near-psychopathic egomaniac parachuting in to a bank to make stupid investors feel confident.
I have no problem with the people who start, build up and long-term maintain real industry getting paid for it. I have a huge problem with people who have done none of these things (especially those who are really no more than gamblers) thinking they are entitled to excessive rewards from the moment they are appointed.
He is said to have bought the entire apartment below theirs in NY, and used it to hold their collection of fur coats. If he hadn't been killed when he was, he might just have lived to be bombed by an animal rights activist.
Personally, I was around in the 60s, and the Beatles were far inferior to Pink Floyd. Mind you, I'm a Southerner, I have to say that.
Sun doesn't, but if you live in the Java world have you looked at Derby recently? We started out using it as an authentication database embedded in an app, and are now making more and more use of it. It supports transactions and hundreds of simultaneous connections, has very flexible configuration, and supports up to about 50Gbytes of storage. The last alone makes it more useful in many applications than the free versions of MS SQL Server. There are many applications currently running on MySQL which (in my opinion) would benefit from migrating to a tightly coupled all-Java solution. The Derby footprint is tiny, database backup and failover is now supported, and you can work with anything from the command line tool to the usual studio type applications. It has taken me 4 years to become a convert, after 8 years of MySQL, but now in the latest release I love it.
I'm waiting to see whether Vectrix manage to get any traction. The Vectrix scooter has quite a lot of low down acceleration, a 62mph top speed, and lots of bodywork which make it look big on the road. To a car driver it just looks as if colliding with it would be a bad idea. (In fact it would, the battery pack is heavy.) It also has big disk brakes and proper motorcycle tyres. I can imagine myself commuting on one quite happily, but not on the overgrown pedal bike in the article. I'm afraid this hydrogen thing, like the Morgan-based thing referenced elsewhere, is vaporware. Battery electric vehicles are already being commercialised after a few false starts, and people are starting to invest in them. Hydrogen is popular with the oil companies because it looks like it keeps their business model alive, but not with anyone else.
Plus, this is a prototype, so I bet that making a bike that tops out at 80-90 mph and is capable of sustained freeway speeds is not a huge stretch.
Er, yes it is, actually. What you have here is a very small, slow bike, much slower than the one I learned on as a teenager, and by the look of it with skinny tires and reduced mudguards to reduce weight and wind/rolling resistance. But the tank is the size of a large bike tank. You are in effect asking for a machine with about 4 times the hydrogen capacity, and this is a very big scale up indeed. How close do you want to be to a large tank full of compressed hydrogen?
The known problems of hydrogen as a fuel are:
Generation
Bulk storage
Distribution
Safe end-user connection and disconnection
On-vehicle storage
General safety
.By contrast, the all-electric Vectrix is already commercialised and really needs no more than a conversion to lithium batteries to be fully practical. At this point, EVs are already way ahead of hydrogen on ALL the problem areas noted.
I went for a job interview in the early 80s at a military systems company. I had been working on real-time hardware/software for control of a system in two and half dimensions. They wanted someone to work on a control system which was vaguely similar, but they were very cagey about exactly what. I had a major disagreement with the interviewer about some questions he asked me. On the way out we passed a room where someone was coming out of the door and I saw briefly on the wall a wooden mock up of something that looked very like a manta ray.
I then put two and two together and got five, because I realised that the disagreement arose because the interviewer did not expect the operating temperature range of the hardware to exceed more than about 25 degrees C - which made sense if it was for use in sea water.
In 1980, they had no idea how hard it would be to create a workable battery technology that would store enough power, and use widely available resources. No conspiracy theory is needed.
Enough with the sarcasm already. Perhaps I'm technical because I have actually worked in vehicle R&D and know something about it?
The fact that the CPU and the electronic peripherals will run down to 8V - which is necessary because of battery volt drop on cranking - is irrelevant. It is the lights and the actuators that are affected by reduced battery voltage. In fact, looking at the linked article, the guy admits that he does not run without an alternator after dark, which at least shows some element of self preservation.
In fact under running conditions cars are optimised to run with the standard charging voltage of 13.6V. As a result, the wiring systems are designed to allow a volt drop of up to 10%, because this is cheaper (less copper...). Boats, which spend most of their time running on battery, have their electrical systems designed for a volt drop of no more than 3% - on mine the critical circuits, refrigerator and C/H, are designed for a volt drop of 1%.
The result of removing the alternator in cars can be sub-optimal lighting, ignition and fuel injection when running on battery only. This even applies to Diesels nowadays - because the injection is controlled by the EMC. The general rule has to be, and I cannot recommend this too strongly, the manufacturer designed it that way for a reason, don't fuck with it.
You do realise that to turn over an appreciable percentage of the world's internal combustion engines to electric/supercapacitor will require enormous investment in barium extraction? Titanium is OK, but finding enough barium and building the plant is a huge undertaking. And your comment is backwards: energy density in real-world dielectric capacitors has always been lower than that in electrochemical batteries.
Having worked in the past with lightning simulators, I have a fair amount of experience of different capacitor technologies, and I can assure you that there will be energy loss in these things. That heat will have to be dissipated, and the dissipation means will reduce the available energy density. There are many other problems, including the varying voltage as the cell discharges, which means complex inverters are needed to supply the motor controller. I'm going to hazard a guess and suggest that the timescale to get this to production volume comparable with bread and butter Diesel or gasoline engine production lines is going to be 30-50 years, which is too late to make a difference. For niche markets it may do very well, but no, the IC engine is not being obsoleted by this.
provided they take the long term view. It is no coincidence that the UK Green movement has definitely aristocratic supporters, because an aristocracy tends to think about its grandchildren (to the extent of things like planting trees that will not mature in their own lifetimes, for the sake of future generations.) I like to think that really sophisticated venture capitalists will be planning now for a comfortable retirement in 30-40 years time - and will therefore be worrying about what the world will be like then. Hedge funds are full of people with a short term attitude - anybody who shorts stocks has that - who just assume that they can accumulate so much wealth that they can insulate themselves from everything short of global meltdown. Which has just worked out so well...but real venture capitalists are an engine of progress. Without them no USA (who funded Columbus and the first colonies?), no canals, no trains, no telephone, no modern medicine.
Funnily enough, the really big economic story this week may not be the $1.1 trillion (including fannie and freddy) bailout. It may be Ireland. The Irish economy is, basically, a banana republic - no real assets other than intangibles. Yet Ireland has guaranteed all bank deposits, with a potential liability in excess of 400 billion (400 billion Euros or $600 billion). Ireland does not have that kind of money, and as people are trying to invest more money in it, the risk of default gets ever greater.
So what is their strategy to deal with it? They have created a class of company (unlimited liability) which basically has to file almost no public accounts. A similar wheeze was used in Germany some years back in the KG & Co. in which one member of a partnership was a limited company. The object is to get US and other corporations to make their corporate HQs in Ireland, and so hide their profits in this offshore bank scheme. Look it up.
By getting US corporations to relocate to Ireland they hope to avoid recession in the economy and ensure the bank guarantees will never be called in. But clearly that will reduce the tax income from corporations in the US, and worsen the crisis there.
I am only just joking when I suggest that some of the pork should have been invested in invading Ireland. Saddam may not have had WMDs, but Ireland seems to be trying to develop WMEDs (weapons of mass economic destruction). Perhaps Osama Bin Laden hasn't been caught because he's actually been in a Dublin pub, plotting the downfall of the US.
In fact this is an issue with HP rather than Microsoft. I don't use Vista (because my company doesn't support it internally) but I do not see any obvious reason why printer drivers should be hard to install. I work for a company which consults in printing, and over the last two years I have been growing increasingly concerned about the quality of HP firmware and drivers. I don't know what the problem is, but the Windows drivers are getting really bloated (and sometimes hard to install) and the firmware has a number of inconsistencies. I am suspecting offshoring of firmware development.
The HP Linux printer system is excellent, and this is not intended as HP bashing per se. In fact, not only HP but also Samsung have excellent Linux support. My advice to Vista users is simple: do not buy HP all in ones, especially as you can get cheap to operate color lasers from other manufacturers.
I'm posting this from my boat, by the way. My 3G modem is at the top of the mast, where it works well. At deck level, no signal. Same thing last week at a meeting; I actually had the dongle hooked over a picture on the wall, because at desk level I wasn't getting a good enough signal. Steel framed buildings can be a pain. People can move around to get a good mobile phone signal, and the phone is at a relatively high level, but netbooks do not lend themselves to working so well that way.
Is the "paedophile issue". It has been known for years that these people try to get jobs in children's homes, the police and Government departments to facilitate their crimes. The same thing will happen in the UK: professional fraudsters will try to get sleepers in the relevant areas. As "Government" IT is actually done by subcontractors who are not properly policed, this is relatively easy.
We already have a serious UK fraud problem originating in the Indian subcontinent - Mumbai was for many years the identity theft capital of the East, with fraud companies even keeping copies of real government forms going back many years, and annual ink samples, to facilitate document faking. Add these capabilities to those of our home grown criminals, and any identity card scheme actually becomes an identity theft facilitator, not an obstacle.
(And yes, I write from personal experience - I was involved in a UK case where an Indian physician from Mumbai produced forged documents. It was this experience that got me interested in identity theft and security, because he was using faked faxes, and the judge seemed unable to understand how easy this was to do.)
Are you suggesting that this guy should go to King Alcinoos and ask for ships to cross the Channel instead? Or is this a complicated pun on the literal meaning of Nausicaa, "ship burner"?
I suspect you are actually thinking of Leucothea, who persuades Odysseus to abandon his raft for something.
Without venturing to comment on whether a space elevator is actually possible, the main reason is simple efficiency. Rockets are incredibly inefficient as power sources in any case, but then in addition you have to use almost all the energy produced to lift the fuel some part of the way. Then, having added all that potential energy to your Shuttle or whatever, on the way down you turn it all into heating the air. The result is huge amounts of fuel to get a very small payload into orbit.
A practical space elevator could use vehicles powered by electric motors, which would get about 70-80% efficiency. On the way down, the motors could be used as generators, getting back probably around 30-50% of the original energy supplied. The total energy consumption might only be a percent or so of that needed for a rocket. The design of the cable with electrical conductors on either side reaching all the way up to geostationary orbit is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader.
This story is just an advertisement. The Three service is perfectly adequate. So I imagine is the Vodafone service. I get 3G or at a minimum Edge in most of the places I want to use a computer, and I suggest you just check the coverage maps before choosing a supplier.
People who like these things might consider using it with a Toshiba G450 phone. This phone weighs only 2 ounces, has no camera, no LCD (OLED display) but is quad band and allows you to make phone calls while connected to the Internet.
At last! Someone has invoked Godwin's Law: The first person to invoke the Nazis as a counter-example on the Internet has lost the argument.
How about:
Winston Churchill
Julius Caesar
Mahatma Gandhi
Burke
Lincoln
I'd add Martin Luther King, but I guess from your post that you probably think he was a one sided evil despot too. Believe me, if you think Barack Obama is one-sided, your knowledge of politics and history is zero. By European standards, he is a moderate right-winger.
Seinfeld is an actor who built his reputation on a sitcom in which the other characters were, for the most part, losers. He then appears in an advert intended to remind people of this sitcom, in which the other character is William Gates III.
The symbolism seems sufficiently obvious. But it leaves me with a major set of questions. How did Steve Jobs manage to bribe the ad agency to come up with the idea? How did they manage to get Microsoft to fall for it? Does the Jobs reality distortion field really extend that far?
I guess, since a lot of creative ad people are still Mac fanboys, the first part might have been easy. But the second part must have been the pitch from hell. Perhaps it only worked because the Gates mansion is so vast that Gates has never found the TV room and so never seen the programme.
Before he was a cartoonist, and indeed while he was starting, Adams was an economist.
It's sad that his wealth seems to have isolated and insulated him so that he seems increasingly to be just going through the motions - but he is well placed to report on the views of economists.
Slashdot Mirror
The other interesting question is whether manufacturers should be allowed to make aggressive looking cars. They are supposed to be a form of transport, not an external dick waver. Perhaps making them look friendlier would make the roads safer.
BTW the Civil Service preference for large incompetent foreign IT companies with big entertainment budgets over small efficient local ones is well known. Exposing the uselessness of companies like EDS and Capita has a sub-agenda; let's get our IT back.
I have no problem with the people who start, build up and long-term maintain real industry getting paid for it. I have a huge problem with people who have done none of these things (especially those who are really no more than gamblers) thinking they are entitled to excessive rewards from the moment they are appointed.
Personally, I was around in the 60s, and the Beatles were far inferior to Pink Floyd. Mind you, I'm a Southerner, I have to say that.
Sun doesn't, but if you live in the Java world have you looked at Derby recently? We started out using it as an authentication database embedded in an app, and are now making more and more use of it. It supports transactions and hundreds of simultaneous connections, has very flexible configuration, and supports up to about 50Gbytes of storage. The last alone makes it more useful in many applications than the free versions of MS SQL Server. There are many applications currently running on MySQL which (in my opinion) would benefit from migrating to a tightly coupled all-Java solution. The Derby footprint is tiny, database backup and failover is now supported, and you can work with anything from the command line tool to the usual studio type applications. It has taken me 4 years to become a convert, after 8 years of MySQL, but now in the latest release I love it.
I'm waiting to see whether Vectrix manage to get any traction. The Vectrix scooter has quite a lot of low down acceleration, a 62mph top speed, and lots of bodywork which make it look big on the road. To a car driver it just looks as if colliding with it would be a bad idea. (In fact it would, the battery pack is heavy.) It also has big disk brakes and proper motorcycle tyres. I can imagine myself commuting on one quite happily, but not on the overgrown pedal bike in the article. I'm afraid this hydrogen thing, like the Morgan-based thing referenced elsewhere, is vaporware. Battery electric vehicles are already being commercialised after a few false starts, and people are starting to invest in them. Hydrogen is popular with the oil companies because it looks like it keeps their business model alive, but not with anyone else.
Er, yes it is, actually. What you have here is a very small, slow bike, much slower than the one I learned on as a teenager, and by the look of it with skinny tires and reduced mudguards to reduce weight and wind/rolling resistance. But the tank is the size of a large bike tank. You are in effect asking for a machine with about 4 times the hydrogen capacity, and this is a very big scale up indeed. How close do you want to be to a large tank full of compressed hydrogen?
The known problems of hydrogen as a fuel are:
.By contrast, the all-electric Vectrix is already commercialised and really needs no more than a conversion to lithium batteries to be fully practical. At this point, EVs are already way ahead of hydrogen on ALL the problem areas noted.
I then put two and two together and got five, because I realised that the disagreement arose because the interviewer did not expect the operating temperature range of the hardware to exceed more than about 25 degrees C - which made sense if it was for use in sea water.
In 1980, they had no idea how hard it would be to create a workable battery technology that would store enough power, and use widely available resources. No conspiracy theory is needed.
The fact that the CPU and the electronic peripherals will run down to 8V - which is necessary because of battery volt drop on cranking - is irrelevant. It is the lights and the actuators that are affected by reduced battery voltage. In fact, looking at the linked article, the guy admits that he does not run without an alternator after dark, which at least shows some element of self preservation.
The result of removing the alternator in cars can be sub-optimal lighting, ignition and fuel injection when running on battery only. This even applies to Diesels nowadays - because the injection is controlled by the EMC. The general rule has to be, and I cannot recommend this too strongly, the manufacturer designed it that way for a reason, don't fuck with it.
And 5 to 1 return in 18 months? Er, depends on the size of the stake and the expected life of the company. No simple rule here.
Having worked in the past with lightning simulators, I have a fair amount of experience of different capacitor technologies, and I can assure you that there will be energy loss in these things. That heat will have to be dissipated, and the dissipation means will reduce the available energy density. There are many other problems, including the varying voltage as the cell discharges, which means complex inverters are needed to supply the motor controller. I'm going to hazard a guess and suggest that the timescale to get this to production volume comparable with bread and butter Diesel or gasoline engine production lines is going to be 30-50 years, which is too late to make a difference. For niche markets it may do very well, but no, the IC engine is not being obsoleted by this.
provided they take the long term view. It is no coincidence that the UK Green movement has definitely aristocratic supporters, because an aristocracy tends to think about its grandchildren (to the extent of things like planting trees that will not mature in their own lifetimes, for the sake of future generations.) I like to think that really sophisticated venture capitalists will be planning now for a comfortable retirement in 30-40 years time - and will therefore be worrying about what the world will be like then. Hedge funds are full of people with a short term attitude - anybody who shorts stocks has that - who just assume that they can accumulate so much wealth that they can insulate themselves from everything short of global meltdown. Which has just worked out so well...but real venture capitalists are an engine of progress. Without them no USA (who funded Columbus and the first colonies?), no canals, no trains, no telephone, no modern medicine.
So what is their strategy to deal with it? They have created a class of company (unlimited liability) which basically has to file almost no public accounts. A similar wheeze was used in Germany some years back in the KG & Co. in which one member of a partnership was a limited company. The object is to get US and other corporations to make their corporate HQs in Ireland, and so hide their profits in this offshore bank scheme. Look it up.
By getting US corporations to relocate to Ireland they hope to avoid recession in the economy and ensure the bank guarantees will never be called in. But clearly that will reduce the tax income from corporations in the US, and worsen the crisis there.
I am only just joking when I suggest that some of the pork should have been invested in invading Ireland. Saddam may not have had WMDs, but Ireland seems to be trying to develop WMEDs (weapons of mass economic destruction). Perhaps Osama Bin Laden hasn't been caught because he's actually been in a Dublin pub, plotting the downfall of the US.
The HP Linux printer system is excellent, and this is not intended as HP bashing per se.
In fact, not only HP but also Samsung have excellent Linux support. My advice to Vista users is simple: do not buy HP all in ones, especially as you can get cheap to operate color lasers from other manufacturers.
I'm posting this from my boat, by the way. My 3G modem is at the top of the mast, where it works well. At deck level, no signal. Same thing last week at a meeting; I actually had the dongle hooked over a picture on the wall, because at desk level I wasn't getting a good enough signal. Steel framed buildings can be a pain. People can move around to get a good mobile phone signal, and the phone is at a relatively high level, but netbooks do not lend themselves to working so well that way.
We already have a serious UK fraud problem originating in the Indian subcontinent - Mumbai was for many years the identity theft capital of the East, with fraud companies even keeping copies of real government forms going back many years, and annual ink samples, to facilitate document faking. Add these capabilities to those of our home grown criminals, and any identity card scheme actually becomes an identity theft facilitator, not an obstacle.
(And yes, I write from personal experience - I was involved in a UK case where an Indian physician from Mumbai produced forged documents. It was this experience that got me interested in identity theft and security, because he was using faked faxes, and the judge seemed unable to understand how easy this was to do.)
I suspect you are actually thinking of Leucothea, who persuades Odysseus to abandon his raft for something.
A practical space elevator could use vehicles powered by electric motors, which would get about 70-80% efficiency. On the way down, the motors could be used as generators, getting back probably around 30-50% of the original energy supplied. The total energy consumption might only be a percent or so of that needed for a rocket. The design of the cable with electrical conductors on either side reaching all the way up to geostationary orbit is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader.
People who like these things might consider using it with a Toshiba G450 phone. This phone weighs only 2 ounces, has no camera, no LCD (OLED display) but is quad band and allows you to make phone calls while connected to the Internet.
How about:
I'd add Martin Luther King, but I guess from your post that you probably think he was a one sided evil despot too. Believe me, if you think Barack Obama is one-sided, your knowledge of politics and history is zero. By European standards, he is a moderate right-winger.
The symbolism seems sufficiently obvious. But it leaves me with a major set of questions. How did Steve Jobs manage to bribe the ad agency to come up with the idea? How did they manage to get Microsoft to fall for it? Does the Jobs reality distortion field really extend that far?
I guess, since a lot of creative ad people are still Mac fanboys, the first part might have been easy. But the second part must have been the pitch from hell. Perhaps it only worked because the Gates mansion is so vast that Gates has never found the TV room and so never seen the programme.
It's sad that his wealth seems to have isolated and insulated him so that he seems increasingly to be just going through the motions - but he is well placed to report on the views of economists.
Already have defensive flotillas around them. Not.