As well as Creationism, a belief held by a few North Americans, you would have to include the ideas of the Jains, the Buddhists, the Hindus, Orthodox Judaism, the Manichaeans and presumably the Hollow Earth believers. They are all just as good as North American Creationism and differ in important details.
In that lot, when are you actually going to find time to teach real geology or biology?
The fact that you refer to "missing links in the fossil record" shows you know absolutely nothing about modern biology. I suggest you read the essays of Jay Gould, some recent stuff on how the finches of Galapagos continue to evolve as they are driven by a changing environment, and an account of the history of geology in the nineteenth century, and then you will know enough to know that you don't know anything and will perhaps STFU.
The light knots are secondary, the key point is solutions to the equations in which the electric and magnetic fields form closed loops. Otherwise the submission makes no sense, because the plasma in fusion experiments consists of matter, not photons.
Even so, why do I think this is not actually going to work? Because for the last fifty years, fusion power has been constantly just twenty years in the future, that's why. The authors don't claim a solution to fusion containment, they are talking about possible new ways of trapping photons or creating condensates.
We Brits like to encourage Americans who understand irony, even if most of your countrymen don't.
Incidentally and slightly off topic, the really most popular British children's author, Jacqueline Wilson - who writes the books they actually borrow from libraries as well as have adults buy for them - has not made nearly as much money as Rowling, because between hype and solid virtue hype wins every time. Wilson has been involved in an issue thatmay amuse you. In one of her recent books one child calls another a "twat" -I am afraid that in our backward British society some children do occasionally use naughty words. Anyway, the Walmart subsidiary Asda didn't like it, and they had to produce an Asda edition with the word "twit" substituted. A linguistic historian obligingly commented that the word "twat" is itself a euphemism - it means a small cultivated area and occurs in some English town names as "thwaite". But what Asda wants, it gets.
My psychology supervisor used to keep a whole filing cabinet of hate mail he received after doing a series of radio programmes. He occasionally used to trawl it for offensive phrases to use on some of his less intelligent colleagues, and to reassure himself that his work had in fact had an effect on people.
And yes, some of it was unintentionally very funny. (I think he was planning to donate it eventually to the Abnormal Psychology people.)
You are right. The root cause of the issue is fundamentally monopolistic - the very idea of long lasting copyright, which gives the inventor of music a much longer protected period than the inventor of a vaccine, which is of far more benefit to society. Once musicians and authors were given this special treatment, opportunistic leeches sprang up to milk it - publishers. These people have nothing to contribute but their monopolistic practices, as far as the vast majority of musicians and authors are concerned. In fact, one of their main functions is to restrict what gets published to try and create an artificial scarcity.
Therefore, online distribution replaces their entire core business proposition, so naturally they resist it.
However, the history of every mass technology - transport, the telephone system - is that what began as a monopoly with artificial shortages (stagecoaches, cable) ends up being democratised, and in doing so creates wealth in unexpected ways. The stagecoaches tried to stop the canals and the canals tried to stop the railways, the telephone companies tried to stop the Internet, at least in the UK, and they all failed.
We have 60 million people in a tiny island, and the population density in our emptiest areas is not much different from US exurbs. What's more, a lot of the people in our remote areas are doing something called "farming", which is rather important just at the moment; they are exporters rather than consumers of energy sources. We actually need to encourage more people to go and live there, because at the moment they all want to live in London. We have just had revealed a £3 billion gap in funding for the £7 billion of repairs the London Underground mass transport system needs. Which makes more sense; spending a few billion on encouraging people to live outside the South-East by improving infrastructure, or spending it on trying to keep too many commuters trying to reach central London every morning?
In fact it almost certainly wasn't fibre. BT experimented with a lower cost aluminium cabling system for a while for POTS. This is what they probably meant. The aluminium cables are so low bandwidth they cannot handle ADSL. In fact, one or two large corporations were caught out like this including npower, who found they could not get ADSL to their HQ in Worcester.
I can assure you that if there was cable in your area with FTTK, BT would be the very last people in the world to tell you. A Telewest salesman once told me that Telewest liked to employ people who had actually been sacked by BT rather than being made redundant, because redundant employees still believed one day they might get their jobs back, and so didn't want to sell against BT. The attitude Telewest liked was the guy who, in WW2 fighter style, put a little telephone sticker on his car every time he managed to move a business away from BT.
One major UK problem is the Government's feeble approach to infrastructure. When the Conservatives complain that privatising it has been too expensive, you know a supposedly Labour government has got it wrong. However, the quoted cost for neighbourhood fibre is less than the cost of just making the railway line between London and Glasgow work, or of staging that ultimate willy-waggling folly the Olympics. Which do you want the UK to be in 20 years - South Korea or Portugal?
Disclaimer: here where we are in the UK we have cable. And HSDPA. And we get much more bandwidth to Marin County or Cupertino, CA than we do to North London, UK, or to the non-cable equipped BT supplied town eight miles away. It isn't just rural areas; the whole BT infrastructure badly needs fixing, and there is no way that the company that until recently said the Internet would be a passing fad is going to do the job properly.
The Cold War is coming back at a very bad time for the US. When politics turn sour because of internal factors, politicians try to create an external enemy.
Alan Fry, physicist and erstwhile manufacturer of control systems. Personally, I suspect all the technical stuff is actually written by Fry Senior...all right, that's unlikely to be true, but in this case the apple has fallen a lot closer to the tree than most people here seem to realise. Esther Dyson doesn't surprise us, why should Stephen Fry?
Anybody who has been following this stuff knows that it is a field in very active development. One problem for all models is that you need more than one actual example to test the model - which is one of the things that makes climate prediction so challenging.
The article linked to also seems to have been written with Creationist bias, because it suggests our solar system is "unique". The authors don't claim that, and if they did it would be junk, not science.
Or maths for the English. I believe studies in the UK have shown that the A level grade in maths - roughly equivalent to the final year of math in high school - is a better predictor of success in tech jobs than a degree. The reason is blindingly obvious with 6/6 hindsight - your level of math when you start any tech course, including first degree, determines how quickly you will pick things up. By the time you are 18, it's probably too late to learn essential math.
I am eternally grateful to the progressive teachers at my school who ensured that we learned binary, octal and the boolean operations at the age of 12. That's partly because knowing those things got me a summer job in a mainframe facility at the age of 15, but also because, having got that summer job, I could start to understand what it was all about. Being able to read octal kick started me far more than a knowledge of BASIC ever did.
That way, you get to JDBC just after you have learnt the object structures that enable you to do the necessary level of ORM to build efficient applications with storage. Now with I/O, you can build simple but real applications.
I'm going to risk being upsetting here and say that, if you have any real experience with SQL, avoid things like Hibernate. They try and force you to do things the way the Hibernate developers think, and this is not good because they just regard the database as a persistence layer, adding a lot of complexity for the sake of things you may never want to use. Leverage your existing skills by trying to do things "directly" in Java, talking to the APIs as simply as possible. Because then you will be able to do things that the grunts cannot do, since you will get the full benefit of both technologies.
If you are a serious programmer and want to solve real business problems, concentrate on what Java does well - glue things together and use well thought out class structures to map onto the things you want to do.
In my admittedly limited experience over only 25 years or so, if you leverage the strengths of Java you can do things you can do in other languages about as fast, with good reliability, good debugging, good code re-usage and rare platform incompatibilities.
Oh, and get used to Derby (formerly Cloudscape), because you can then have your SQL database all bound up in your 100% Java application and still talk to spreadsheets etc. as easily as if you were using Access.
When I was working part-time on normalisation some years ago, there was a lot of discussion over whether Directives and ENs were intended to protect the citizen or make it easier for European corporations to compete. I think most of the time the EU has got it right, balancing capitalism and statism quite well in the Eurozone, and less well in the Anglozone which tends to overvalue the US model. However, while you are right in what you say about the requirements, the fact is that the EU banks accepted the principles of the Directives in a form which would never have happened in the US, and I believe that this is because at the time European banking culture was more fuelled by ideas of social respectability, and less fuelled by simple greed, than much of the UK banking system. As they say, it takes two to tango.
Speaking as someone who has been a local director of a US corporation and then a general manager in a company with a US subsidiary, the biggest issues are simply that US banks are technically backward compared to Europe, and that you have no Data Protection Act.
In the US it has been made very easy to set up a bank -with the result that many people, some with fraudulent intentions, do just that. (At the other end of the scale I know of a small community of professional people that set up its own bank just because they didn't trust the big ones, and it was very successful. I am not suggesting that Americans are less honest than Europeans, that is far from the truth.) In Europe the banking system has deep roots in the Jewish community becaue Jews were discriminated against - they could not own land but were allowed to charge interest - and this tension has created what is, on the whole, a very successful and honest banking system. (In fact in the UK banks were also started by nonconformists like Quakers for much the same reason - Barclays being an example.)
The result is that until the madness of the last ten years our banking system was very trustworthy and we were prepared to believe in direct debit systems - which on the whole work very well. Meanwhile in the US banks were still settling interbank transfers with bits of paper, and this is still an issue today - in Chicago we had to set up an account with a subsidiary of the (British) NatWest just to avoid ludicrous delays and overcharging for simple transactions. This is ultimately because in the UK many bankers knew they were less than honest, and so were not inclined to trust other banks. The present credit crisis is because, after years of unregulated credit and junk assets, banks have discovered once again that they cannot trust one another. Paypal is an example of a system that was set up to deal with what is really a US problem, not a general problem.
The answer to direct debits is to make the system as robust as European systems - which make the person asking for the money extremely liable if they make a mistake. But this is unlikely to happen, because US law favours corporations over individuals. And, given Obama's choice of running mate and his connections, voting either way in November won't have any effect.
This could be one of those "oh shit" moments. Nowadays, when the slightest observational anomaly gets string theorists salivating, perhaps we need to lay in a stock of Bill Ockham's finest razor blades.
The French have done reasonably well with their plants, but even they have problems when the rain decides not to fall and the rivers do not provide enough cooling water. And France has a Western marginal climate...plenty of water on the West and Northern coasts. Much of the US is far inland, rainfall is variable and abstraction for human use is depleting a lot of rivers. Part of the US problem is that the best places for nuclear plants may have high population density, and may also be well suited to wind power - which gets us back to the infrastructure issue.
This is after all Slashdot...and you are possibly the only poster who doesn't understand nuclear reactors.
The whole point of a reactor is that you get enough concentration of suitable radio-isotopes to create a chain reaction - i.e., the rare neutrons from spontaneously fissioning U235 are used to hit other atoms (e.g. of U238) and cause them to fission, producing more neutrons and so on. Thus the "fuel" is used up much more rapidly than occurs in the ground. Of course I am over-simplifying, but it is quite wrong to think you just put a load of uranium in a big tin can and extract the waste heat.
There are reasons for the scarcity, but one is that current breeders reactors produce plutonium, and the countries which developed nuclear explosives are very worried about letting anybody else have plutonium in case they do it too. The problems of nuclear power are political problems, and those are the hard ones.
More specifically, the preferred choice of consultant of the Government (McKinsey) is an authoritarian, secretive and elitist organisation that believes that the only fate for ordinary people is to be monitored, measured and managed. Politicians don't understand this stuff and do what they are told. The real question is how the Government sold out to a completely undemocratic organisation.
I don't hate my country, but I do dislike those aspects of the private school and class system which causes the people in power to be conformist and inward looking, and ready to believe any snake oil salesman in a Boateng suit. People mock Prince Charles, but at least he is prepared to get into trouble by listening to independent experts and then asking questions about the status quo and the desirability of corporatism. The Government appoints independent experts, and then when their conclusions conflict with those of the editors of tabloid newspapers, or McKinsey, they reject them. The inevitable result is pissed off staff and managerial incompetence. As one of my bosses used to say about organisations like McKinsey, when did you last hear of a great world manager? Taylorism takes no account of leadership, which is what gives morale and a sense of direction to organisations. And the only way to bring in things like data security is to bring back a spirit of public service - which means leadership.
Unfortunately the must-have application on it is Windows only and WINE doesn't work, and it is running XP, but it is not slow, there is no continuous disk activity while using it and, in fact, after a week of use it is likely to get rather more use than I expected. It works just fine with a BT mouse, HSDPA dongle, and wireless.
Tom's Hardware suggested the Celeron is faster than the Atom, but really the Atom seems able to do whatever is necessary and any slight slowdown is compensated by the unnoticeable fan noise.
Perhaps this is partly due to Dell exercising a bit more pressure on Microsoft not to drop XP. Which, btw, according to the same hardware site, runs considerably better on both the Atom and the Celeron than on Vista.
The reason that steam power (various anonymous mine engineers), gas engines, oil engines, balloons, electric motors, gliders, early airplanes and even gas plants and thermal nuclear reactors could be pioneered by amateurs is that they all work at small scales. Every one of these technologies can be made to work at a size that will fit on a kitchen table. (even, with the right isotopes, a thermal nuclear reactor)
Now look at a float glass plant, a steel continuous casting and rolling mill, or any likely practical fusion design. They simply do not work at small scales, therefore they cannot be developed by cottage industry.
This myth keeps getting propagated by trademark holders, but it is not correct. You have to protect your trademark to prevent others from using it to sell or represent the same kind of goods and services as their own. But this was obviously not the case here. Nobody with a brain cell thought that the protestors were trying to pass off what they were doing as an alternative "Olympics", or suggest that they were the only IOC-authorised brand of anti-Chinese protest.
Quite honestly, the IOC brand has been so diluted since 1936 by its association with nasty dictatorships, corruption and junk food that the inhabitants of Mt. Olympus should call and ask for their good name back.
..he once undiplomatically referred to the current Chinese leadership as "ghastly old waxworks." And last week in The Guardian, Marina Hyde suggested that the same description should apply to the IOC and that they deserved one another. When a feudal relic aged around 60, and an upper class British journalist think two sets of people are hopelessly past their sell by date, they must indeed be a long way into the bulging and growing mould stage.
So Google is not so much doing the right thing, but making the tough decision whether to go along with old, obnoxious powerful men who will soon be history, or to keep alongside its demographic.
(my first post on an MSI Wind, and worth waiting for. It is so nice to have a proper keyboard, and the screen is better than I expected.)
The job of the injector is to provide a metered supply of fuel, so the nearest answer is probably the plug, not the wire. High current connectors are not trivial to implement - the Vectrix scooter had a recall because of a problem in this area. But, generally speaking, it is the metering system - the controller - that is the major technical challenge of an EV. Because the batteries are available, if expensive, the brushless motors are available (and really solid proven technology), but connecting the two together is hard. The Vectrix has an advanced controller that allows regenerative braking, as do some hybrid cars, and effective regen is a major factor in mileage. The controller needs to be extremely efficient to avoid wasting lots of energy as heat, it needs to be very reliable and durable, and it needs to function correctly under many load conditions. In fact, I would submit that the sheer technical cleverness of modern motor controllers is what makes EVs possible on modern roads. If you had to start one like a tram, moving a huge brass switrch bar across a resistor bank to prevent the motor shorting before it ran up to speed, they would be impossible to commercialise.
Slashdot Mirror
In that lot, when are you actually going to find time to teach real geology or biology?
The fact that you refer to "missing links in the fossil record" shows you know absolutely nothing about modern biology. I suggest you read the essays of Jay Gould, some recent stuff on how the finches of Galapagos continue to evolve as they are driven by a changing environment, and an account of the history of geology in the nineteenth century, and then you will know enough to know that you don't know anything and will perhaps STFU.
Even so, why do I think this is not actually going to work? Because for the last fifty years, fusion power has been constantly just twenty years in the future, that's why. The authors don't claim a solution to fusion containment, they are talking about possible new ways of trapping photons or creating condensates.
Incidentally and slightly off topic, the really most popular British children's author, Jacqueline Wilson - who writes the books they actually borrow from libraries as well as have adults buy for them - has not made nearly as much money as Rowling, because between hype and solid virtue hype wins every time. Wilson has been involved in an issue thatmay amuse you. In one of her recent books one child calls another a "twat" -I am afraid that in our backward British society some children do occasionally use naughty words. Anyway, the Walmart subsidiary Asda didn't like it, and they had to produce an Asda edition with the word "twit" substituted. A linguistic historian obligingly commented that the word "twat" is itself a euphemism - it means a small cultivated area and occurs in some English town names as "thwaite". But what Asda wants, it gets.
And yes, some of it was unintentionally very funny. (I think he was planning to donate it eventually to the Abnormal Psychology people.)
Therefore, online distribution replaces their entire core business proposition, so naturally they resist it.
However, the history of every mass technology - transport, the telephone system - is that what began as a monopoly with artificial shortages (stagecoaches, cable) ends up being democratised, and in doing so creates wealth in unexpected ways. The stagecoaches tried to stop the canals and the canals tried to stop the railways, the telephone companies tried to stop the Internet, at least in the UK, and they all failed.
We have 60 million people in a tiny island, and the population density in our emptiest areas is not much different from US exurbs. What's more, a lot of the people in our remote areas are doing something called "farming", which is rather important just at the moment; they are exporters rather than consumers of energy sources. We actually need to encourage more people to go and live there, because at the moment they all want to live in London. We have just had revealed a £3 billion gap in funding for the £7 billion of repairs the London Underground mass transport system needs. Which makes more sense; spending a few billion on encouraging people to live outside the South-East by improving infrastructure, or spending it on trying to keep too many commuters trying to reach central London every morning?
I can assure you that if there was cable in your area with FTTK, BT would be the very last people in the world to tell you. A Telewest salesman once told me that Telewest liked to employ people who had actually been sacked by BT rather than being made redundant, because redundant employees still believed one day they might get their jobs back, and so didn't want to sell against BT. The attitude Telewest liked was the guy who, in WW2 fighter style, put a little telephone sticker on his car every time he managed to move a business away from BT.
Disclaimer: here where we are in the UK we have cable. And HSDPA. And we get much more bandwidth to Marin County or Cupertino, CA than we do to North London, UK, or to the non-cable equipped BT supplied town eight miles away. It isn't just rural areas; the whole BT infrastructure badly needs fixing, and there is no way that the company that until recently said the Internet would be a passing fad is going to do the job properly.
The Cold War is coming back at a very bad time for the US.
When politics turn sour because of internal factors, politicians try to create an external enemy.
Alan Fry, physicist and erstwhile manufacturer of control systems. Personally, I suspect all the technical stuff is actually written by Fry Senior...all right, that's unlikely to be true, but in this case the apple has fallen a lot closer to the tree than most people here seem to realise. Esther Dyson doesn't surprise us, why should Stephen Fry?
The article linked to also seems to have been written with Creationist bias, because it suggests our solar system is "unique". The authors don't claim that, and if they did it would be junk, not science.
I am eternally grateful to the progressive teachers at my school who ensured that we learned binary, octal and the boolean operations at the age of 12. That's partly because knowing those things got me a summer job in a mainframe facility at the age of 15, but also because, having got that summer job, I could start to understand what it was all about. Being able to read octal kick started me far more than a knowledge of BASIC ever did.
That way, you get to JDBC just after you have learnt the object structures that enable you to do the necessary level of ORM to build efficient applications with storage. Now with I/O, you can build simple but real applications.
If you are a serious programmer and want to solve real business problems, concentrate on what Java does well - glue things together and use well thought out class structures to map onto the things you want to do.
In my admittedly limited experience over only 25 years or so, if you leverage the strengths of Java you can do things you can do in other languages about as fast, with good reliability, good debugging, good code re-usage and rare platform incompatibilities.
Oh, and get used to Derby (formerly Cloudscape), because you can then have your SQL database all bound up in your 100% Java application and still talk to spreadsheets etc. as easily as if you were using Access.
When I was working part-time on normalisation some years ago, there was a lot of discussion over whether Directives and ENs were intended to protect the citizen or make it easier for European corporations to compete. I think most of the time the EU has got it right, balancing capitalism and statism quite well in the Eurozone, and less well in the Anglozone which tends to overvalue the US model. However, while you are right in what you say about the requirements, the fact is that the EU banks accepted the principles of the Directives in a form which would never have happened in the US, and I believe that this is because at the time European banking culture was more fuelled by ideas of social respectability, and less fuelled by simple greed, than much of the UK banking system. As they say, it takes two to tango.
In the US it has been made very easy to set up a bank -with the result that many people, some with fraudulent intentions, do just that. (At the other end of the scale I know of a small community of professional people that set up its own bank just because they didn't trust the big ones, and it was very successful. I am not suggesting that Americans are less honest than Europeans, that is far from the truth.) In Europe the banking system has deep roots in the Jewish community becaue Jews were discriminated against - they could not own land but were allowed to charge interest - and this tension has created what is, on the whole, a very successful and honest banking system. (In fact in the UK banks were also started by nonconformists like Quakers for much the same reason - Barclays being an example.)
The result is that until the madness of the last ten years our banking system was very trustworthy and we were prepared to believe in direct debit systems - which on the whole work very well. Meanwhile in the US banks were still settling interbank transfers with bits of paper, and this is still an issue today - in Chicago we had to set up an account with a subsidiary of the (British) NatWest just to avoid ludicrous delays and overcharging for simple transactions. This is ultimately because in the UK many bankers knew they were less than honest, and so were not inclined to trust other banks. The present credit crisis is because, after years of unregulated credit and junk assets, banks have discovered once again that they cannot trust one another. Paypal is an example of a system that was set up to deal with what is really a US problem, not a general problem.
The answer to direct debits is to make the system as robust as European systems - which make the person asking for the money extremely liable if they make a mistake. But this is unlikely to happen, because US law favours corporations over individuals. And, given Obama's choice of running mate and his connections, voting either way in November won't have any effect.
This could be one of those "oh shit" moments. Nowadays, when the slightest observational anomaly gets string theorists salivating, perhaps we need to lay in a stock of Bill Ockham's finest razor blades.
The French have done reasonably well with their plants, but even they have problems when the rain decides not to fall and the rivers do not provide enough cooling water. And France has a Western marginal climate...plenty of water on the West and Northern coasts. Much of the US is far inland, rainfall is variable and abstraction for human use is depleting a lot of rivers. Part of the US problem is that the best places for nuclear plants may have high population density, and may also be well suited to wind power - which gets us back to the infrastructure issue.
The whole point of a reactor is that you get enough concentration of suitable radio-isotopes to create a chain reaction - i.e., the rare neutrons from spontaneously fissioning U235 are used to hit other atoms (e.g. of U238) and cause them to fission, producing more neutrons and so on. Thus the "fuel" is used up much more rapidly than occurs in the ground. Of course I am over-simplifying, but it is quite wrong to think you just put a load of uranium in a big tin can and extract the waste heat.
There are reasons for the scarcity, but one is that current breeders reactors produce plutonium, and the countries which developed nuclear explosives are very worried about letting anybody else have plutonium in case they do it too. The problems of nuclear power are political problems, and those are the hard ones.
I don't hate my country, but I do dislike those aspects of the private school and class system which causes the people in power to be conformist and inward looking, and ready to believe any snake oil salesman in a Boateng suit. People mock Prince Charles, but at least he is prepared to get into trouble by listening to independent experts and then asking questions about the status quo and the desirability of corporatism. The Government appoints independent experts, and then when their conclusions conflict with those of the editors of tabloid newspapers, or McKinsey, they reject them. The inevitable result is pissed off staff and managerial incompetence. As one of my bosses used to say about organisations like McKinsey, when did you last hear of a great world manager? Taylorism takes no account of leadership, which is what gives morale and a sense of direction to organisations. And the only way to bring in things like data security is to bring back a spirit of public service - which means leadership.
Tom's Hardware suggested the Celeron is faster than the Atom, but really the Atom seems able to do whatever is necessary and any slight slowdown is compensated by the unnoticeable fan noise.
Perhaps this is partly due to Dell exercising a bit more pressure on Microsoft not to drop XP. Which, btw, according to the same hardware site, runs considerably better on both the Atom and the Celeron than on Vista.
Now look at a float glass plant, a steel continuous casting and rolling mill, or any likely practical fusion design. They simply do not work at small scales, therefore they cannot be developed by cottage industry.
Quite honestly, the IOC brand has been so diluted since 1936 by its association with nasty dictatorships, corruption and junk food that the inhabitants of Mt. Olympus should call and ask for their good name back.
So Google is not so much doing the right thing, but making the tough decision whether to go along with old, obnoxious powerful men who will soon be history, or to keep alongside its demographic.
The job of the injector is to provide a metered supply of fuel, so the nearest answer is probably the plug, not the wire. High current connectors are not trivial to implement - the Vectrix scooter had a recall because of a problem in this area. But, generally speaking, it is the metering system - the controller - that is the major technical challenge of an EV. Because the batteries are available, if expensive, the brushless motors are available (and really solid proven technology), but connecting the two together is hard. The Vectrix has an advanced controller that allows regenerative braking, as do some hybrid cars, and effective regen is a major factor in mileage. The controller needs to be extremely efficient to avoid wasting lots of energy as heat, it needs to be very reliable and durable, and it needs to function correctly under many load conditions. In fact, I would submit that the sheer technical cleverness of modern motor controllers is what makes EVs possible on modern roads. If you had to start one like a tram, moving a huge brass switrch bar across a resistor bank to prevent the motor shorting before it ran up to speed, they would be impossible to commercialise.