Here in the SF area we have Caltrain, but it runs infrequently and is very slow. Level crossings mean that it's also noisy. I would take it more if it were free (right now it's still cheaper to drive my 19.6 mpg 300 HP fun-car), but I wouldn't take it a lot more. If, however, it ran so often that I didn't need to think about the schedule, and were faster (by eliminating stops, possibly by color-coding trains), that would be a different story.
The buses are ludicrously slow and nobody knows when or where they're stopping or going. Few people take them at all. Nobody in my socio-economic group. They're just too stupid.
BART has a better schedule, but doesn't have a useful connection to Caltrain. It doesn't connect around the south side of the bay.
No system makes easy, direct connections to the major airports like you expect in major metropolitan areas. They all require at least one connection via a janky, slow, annoying shuttle bus. At worst they require several hops between various forms of transit. SFO is especially bad since they charge obnoxious fees for shared ride vans, even to off-site parking, and then make it nearly impossible to walk there from anywhere reasonable. They have no interest in improving access to their airport.
tl;dr: I'd take one form more, but not a lot more. I'd take public transit a lot at any cost that's less than driving so long as it's time-competitive with my alternatives. Right now nothing competes with my bicycle for less-than-fifteen-mile trips.
Around the SF Bay Area it feels like the biggest contribution to range anxiety isn't the range, but the delta between claimed range and real range. Lots of folks here have driven (or own themselves) the Leaf or the 500e. The most common expression of dissatisfaction is that there's a large delta between claimed and realized range. This problem seems to have been largely solved on the petrol side of the house (EPA ratings of MPG have gotten a lot more accurate recently).
It seems like there needs to be a realignment between marketers, regulators, and engineers to get these numbers right. What's being done to make that happen? I think that trusting the range numbers would go a very long way to making people more comfortable with electric vehicles.
Full disclosure: I've worked in the EV world for almost ten years, and I'm not impartial.
Homeplug AV2 offers a 1200mbps symbol rate. Real speed will be lower, of course, but it'll get you closer. Here's a product that should be out soonish: http://www.trendnet.com/press/...
If the root complaint is that housing prices are going up, then San Francisco and its residents are at least as much to blame as the economic success of their region. They consistently vote to nix new housing developments because they feel it will upset the character of a neighborhood, or block the view of an adjacent one. To put it bluntly, it's property owners voting down measures that would dilute their property value and current tenants voting down measures that they feel would change the demographics of their neighborhood.
The city is a popular place for young people to live, and with proximity to strong schools like Berkeley and Stanford, young professionals have money. Without growth in housing units, the free market will push housing prices up so long as demand will support it. This is just like any other real estate market in the country.
Many residents complain that the tech buses are using public bus stops. That's between the city and the tech companies, and they've got a negotiated agreement. Maybe the residents are not happy with how their city represented their interests and what they got in return, but that's between the residents and their government. As of right now, the tech companies' use of public bus stops is legal and agreed-upon. Any protests against that use should be at city hall, not at the bus stops.
As for mass transit, that's a hugely sticky issue in the area as well. Caltrain fares are more than the cost to drive for a given distance and it doesn't connect to the BART system, nor does it wrap around at San Jose / Milpitas. The state can't afford to buy the land or pay the construction crews to connect and harmonize these lines, nor will homeowners allow for significant expansion due to the perceived loss in home value. And then there's the problem of the entire western half of SF, where there is no rail or subway at all.
I'm an electrical engineer. Solidworks and Altium run on Windows. Also, Windows is good at window management; the new super+ shortcuts are great. Sure I can set something similar up on your Linux flavor of choice, but that's missing the point.
Users pay for the bandwidth already. Orange should just charge all content providers to send data across their network and see how many users they can hold on to.
I wish I could fine the government for impeding and delaying all sorts of things that annoy me. DMV line moving too slowly? Bam! Fine those sloth-like paper pushers.
On the left of the results page hit search tools, then click "Verbatim". It does just what you think it does. It searches for exactly your terms with no modifications, substitutions, or customizations.
Words like "the", "and", & "a" are non-informational words and have effectively no search value. I propose we take the list of representatives and companies supporting SOPA and add them to the list of non-informational words. They'll instantly cease to exist online.
I said nothing that all six stalls were big, just that the bathroom was needlessly large. But we digress; size of the bathroom isn't the point. The point is that engineering everything to accommodate everyone is unrealistic. In a world of infinite variety, I can always come up with another edge case that will define another requirement. At some point it makes more sense to move the mobility solution closer to the person requiring the mobility, rather than bending infrastructure to fit around the edge case. If there's a worthwhile market, technology will grow to provide a solution.
You can use the same argument for parking spaces, and it seems we've decided as a society that it's important to penalize one behavior and not the other.
I propose cameras pointed in to toilet stalls with 24/7 monitoring to ensure that handicapped toilet stalls aren't abused by those able-bodied assholes. We'll also need to amend the building code to increase the total number of available stalls to ensure that the population is appropriately served.
I was on the building planning committee for a new building at Stanford. The bathrooms are comically large because of handicap access requirements. Despite consuming 800 square feet, there are only six total stalls. The same building also has two handicapped parking spots out front, out of four parking spots total.
Given that the population served is, on average, 22 years old and in excellent health, these measures seem inappropriate. Things would be completely different if this were a retirement home.
Most work lights I've seen are only open 180 degrees anyway.
That's a silly argument as the closed portion of the light is a reflector. Light emitted in all directions isn't magically lost.
Precisely. Further, most LED shop lights have a narrow beam angle, about 20-30 degrees. That makes them dramatically less useful than the 180 degree ordinary shop light. I'm not claiming that every household should be illuminated with incandescent lights, but rather that it is the consumer and the market who should negotiate the choices in technology. There's no reason to force a technology choice when the same desired outcome (higher household electrical efficiency) can be had by simply making the resource (electricity) more expensive through simple means (taxes).
My goal is to show by counterexample why this type of legislation is not terribly bright. Trying to promote resource efficiency is most directly and efficiently accomplished by increasing the price of the resource. But our politicians are spineless and won't do anything so pragmatic, including work with one another.
The brightest shop light you linked to is 300 lumens. A 75-watt incandescent bulb produces 1200 lumens.
As for your arguments, (a) is false, (b) is debatable depending on how you define rugged and what failure modes you're considering, for this purpose I'll concede that you're right, and (c) isn't something I care about in most instances.
Notice that nowhere have I complained about the cost of alternatives, merely their performance characteristics. You're right, I can most certainly afford a $30 flashlight, but what I want is a shop light. My criteria for performance are volumetric density, total light output, ruggedness, consequences of failure, and probability of failure. Incandescent bulbs are an excellent fit for the application.
For what it's worth, the LED bulbs work just great in my kitchen.
I bought a ruggedized incandescent bulb for my shop light, but it consumes twice as much power as I wanted and makes my shop light extremely hot. I examined all of the options at the hardware store. Online options are great, but when you're working projects waiting for even overnight shipping is not an option. The good old fashioned 75-watt bulb is perfectly adequate.
The real way to make people save electricity is to tax the thing you want them to consume less of - electricity. I live in California, and per capita, the state uses less electricity than most other places in the country. I can't help but imagine that's partly due to our high utility rates.
My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.
Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.
Round trip New York / Boston on the Acela Express (Amtrak's high-speed rail) is $198. Round trip from San Jose to San Francisco on Caltrain is $17.50. At that rate per mile, SFO to LAX would cost about $190. SFO to LAX by air on Southwest is $59.
My only radio is in my car, and my television isn't plugged in to a cable network or an antenna. As it stands, I think Slashdot would be my best chance for hearing about a real emergency. Maybe I should check it more than once a day...
I am the previous captain of the Stanford team and will be following the team across the outback again this year as a groupie. Racing itself is arguably the least important part of the overall race effort. While it allows you to choose winners and losers, on its own it doesn't contribute much to the overall solar car team experience. The race is only a few days long, but the effort to get there takes years.
To all of you criticizing the value of solar cars: The point of solar racing isn't to prove that solar cars are a viable mode of transportation. It's to be an extreme engineering exercise for students. Through it they learn project management, budget management, marketing, engineering optimization, teamwork, and real-world design skills. It takes an immense amount of thinking and excellent execution to build a car that weighs a few hundred pounds that can cruise down the freeway at 65 mph all day long on the power of a toaster and that doesn't break after bumping through the desert for thousands of miles.
For what it's worth, Tesla Motors was born out of the Stanford solar car team. Their first battery pack was made in our shop years ago as part of JB's retrofit of his old Porsche. Mission Motors owes quite a bit of its heritage to solar car racing as well, with its founders coming from the Stanford and Yale teams.
If any of you are in the SF bay area, I encourage you to come take a look at one of these cars in person. Our latest entry, Xenith, will be back on campus in January and we enjoy hosting visitors. Just send an email through the form on the Stanford Solar Car Project website.
Wolfram Alpha tells us that the direct path round trip by fiber would take 90 milliseconds. I'm rather impressed that it takes less than twice that to do the trip in reality, what with all of the additional routing delays and non-ideal paths that the data must take.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the SF area we have Caltrain, but it runs infrequently and is very slow. Level crossings mean that it's also noisy. I would take it more if it were free (right now it's still cheaper to drive my 19.6 mpg 300 HP fun-car), but I wouldn't take it a lot more. If, however, it ran so often that I didn't need to think about the schedule, and were faster (by eliminating stops, possibly by color-coding trains), that would be a different story.
The buses are ludicrously slow and nobody knows when or where they're stopping or going. Few people take them at all. Nobody in my socio-economic group. They're just too stupid.
BART has a better schedule, but doesn't have a useful connection to Caltrain. It doesn't connect around the south side of the bay.
No system makes easy, direct connections to the major airports like you expect in major metropolitan areas. They all require at least one connection via a janky, slow, annoying shuttle bus. At worst they require several hops between various forms of transit. SFO is especially bad since they charge obnoxious fees for shared ride vans, even to off-site parking, and then make it nearly impossible to walk there from anywhere reasonable. They have no interest in improving access to their airport.
tl;dr: I'd take one form more, but not a lot more. I'd take public transit a lot at any cost that's less than driving so long as it's time-competitive with my alternatives. Right now nothing competes with my bicycle for less-than-fifteen-mile trips.
Around the SF Bay Area it feels like the biggest contribution to range anxiety isn't the range, but the delta between claimed range and real range. Lots of folks here have driven (or own themselves) the Leaf or the 500e. The most common expression of dissatisfaction is that there's a large delta between claimed and realized range. This problem seems to have been largely solved on the petrol side of the house (EPA ratings of MPG have gotten a lot more accurate recently).
It seems like there needs to be a realignment between marketers, regulators, and engineers to get these numbers right. What's being done to make that happen? I think that trusting the range numbers would go a very long way to making people more comfortable with electric vehicles.
Full disclosure: I've worked in the EV world for almost ten years, and I'm not impartial.
Homeplug AV2 offers a 1200mbps symbol rate. Real speed will be lower, of course, but it'll get you closer. Here's a product that should be out soonish: http://www.trendnet.com/press/...
Their flyer also asks for people to disengage from capitalism and for babysitters to steal from their employers.
http://i.imgur.com/5ACrabf.png
If the root complaint is that housing prices are going up, then San Francisco and its residents are at least as much to blame as the economic success of their region. They consistently vote to nix new housing developments because they feel it will upset the character of a neighborhood, or block the view of an adjacent one. To put it bluntly, it's property owners voting down measures that would dilute their property value and current tenants voting down measures that they feel would change the demographics of their neighborhood.
The city is a popular place for young people to live, and with proximity to strong schools like Berkeley and Stanford, young professionals have money. Without growth in housing units, the free market will push housing prices up so long as demand will support it. This is just like any other real estate market in the country.
Many residents complain that the tech buses are using public bus stops. That's between the city and the tech companies, and they've got a negotiated agreement. Maybe the residents are not happy with how their city represented their interests and what they got in return, but that's between the residents and their government. As of right now, the tech companies' use of public bus stops is legal and agreed-upon. Any protests against that use should be at city hall, not at the bus stops.
As for mass transit, that's a hugely sticky issue in the area as well. Caltrain fares are more than the cost to drive for a given distance and it doesn't connect to the BART system, nor does it wrap around at San Jose / Milpitas. The state can't afford to buy the land or pay the construction crews to connect and harmonize these lines, nor will homeowners allow for significant expansion due to the perceived loss in home value. And then there's the problem of the entire western half of SF, where there is no rail or subway at all.
I'm an electrical engineer. Solidworks and Altium run on Windows. Also, Windows is good at window management; the new super+ shortcuts are great. Sure I can set something similar up on your Linux flavor of choice, but that's missing the point.
Users pay for the bandwidth already. Orange should just charge all content providers to send data across their network and see how many users they can hold on to.
Micron felt tip. I'm also an engineer and it's what I use to scribble.
I wish I could fine the government for impeding and delaying all sorts of things that annoy me. DMV line moving too slowly? Bam! Fine those sloth-like paper pushers.
I wonder what happens if I glue a metal plate to the pavement above the sensor...
...now delivered with greater efficiency than ever before.
Given how things are going in America, the next time I leave I may just not bother with the return.
On the left of the results page hit search tools, then click "Verbatim". It does just what you think it does. It searches for exactly your terms with no modifications, substitutions, or customizations.
Words like "the", "and", & "a" are non-informational words and have effectively no search value. I propose we take the list of representatives and companies supporting SOPA and add them to the list of non-informational words. They'll instantly cease to exist online.
I said nothing that all six stalls were big, just that the bathroom was needlessly large. But we digress; size of the bathroom isn't the point. The point is that engineering everything to accommodate everyone is unrealistic. In a world of infinite variety, I can always come up with another edge case that will define another requirement. At some point it makes more sense to move the mobility solution closer to the person requiring the mobility, rather than bending infrastructure to fit around the edge case. If there's a worthwhile market, technology will grow to provide a solution.
You can use the same argument for parking spaces, and it seems we've decided as a society that it's important to penalize one behavior and not the other.
I propose cameras pointed in to toilet stalls with 24/7 monitoring to ensure that handicapped toilet stalls aren't abused by those able-bodied assholes. We'll also need to amend the building code to increase the total number of available stalls to ensure that the population is appropriately served.
I was on the building planning committee for a new building at Stanford. The bathrooms are comically large because of handicap access requirements. Despite consuming 800 square feet, there are only six total stalls. The same building also has two handicapped parking spots out front, out of four parking spots total.
Given that the population served is, on average, 22 years old and in excellent health, these measures seem inappropriate. Things would be completely different if this were a retirement home.
Most work lights I've seen are only open 180 degrees anyway.
That's a silly argument as the closed portion of the light is a reflector. Light emitted in all directions isn't magically lost.
Precisely. Further, most LED shop lights have a narrow beam angle, about 20-30 degrees. That makes them dramatically less useful than the 180 degree ordinary shop light. I'm not claiming that every household should be illuminated with incandescent lights, but rather that it is the consumer and the market who should negotiate the choices in technology. There's no reason to force a technology choice when the same desired outcome (higher household electrical efficiency) can be had by simply making the resource (electricity) more expensive through simple means (taxes).
My goal is to show by counterexample why this type of legislation is not terribly bright. Trying to promote resource efficiency is most directly and efficiently accomplished by increasing the price of the resource. But our politicians are spineless and won't do anything so pragmatic, including work with one another.
The brightest shop light you linked to is 300 lumens. A 75-watt incandescent bulb produces 1200 lumens.
As for your arguments, (a) is false, (b) is debatable depending on how you define rugged and what failure modes you're considering, for this purpose I'll concede that you're right, and (c) isn't something I care about in most instances.
Notice that nowhere have I complained about the cost of alternatives, merely their performance characteristics. You're right, I can most certainly afford a $30 flashlight, but what I want is a shop light. My criteria for performance are volumetric density, total light output, ruggedness, consequences of failure, and probability of failure. Incandescent bulbs are an excellent fit for the application.
For what it's worth, the LED bulbs work just great in my kitchen.
I bought a ruggedized incandescent bulb for my shop light, but it consumes twice as much power as I wanted and makes my shop light extremely hot. I examined all of the options at the hardware store. Online options are great, but when you're working projects waiting for even overnight shipping is not an option. The good old fashioned 75-watt bulb is perfectly adequate.
The real way to make people save electricity is to tax the thing you want them to consume less of - electricity. I live in California, and per capita, the state uses less electricity than most other places in the country. I can't help but imagine that's partly due to our high utility rates.
My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.
Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.
Round trip New York / Boston on the Acela Express (Amtrak's high-speed rail) is $198. Round trip from San Jose to San Francisco on Caltrain is $17.50. At that rate per mile, SFO to LAX would cost about $190. SFO to LAX by air on Southwest is $59.
My only radio is in my car, and my television isn't plugged in to a cable network or an antenna. As it stands, I think Slashdot would be my best chance for hearing about a real emergency. Maybe I should check it more than once a day...
I am the previous captain of the Stanford team and will be following the team across the outback again this year as a groupie. Racing itself is arguably the least important part of the overall race effort. While it allows you to choose winners and losers, on its own it doesn't contribute much to the overall solar car team experience. The race is only a few days long, but the effort to get there takes years.
To all of you criticizing the value of solar cars: The point of solar racing isn't to prove that solar cars are a viable mode of transportation. It's to be an extreme engineering exercise for students. Through it they learn project management, budget management, marketing, engineering optimization, teamwork, and real-world design skills. It takes an immense amount of thinking and excellent execution to build a car that weighs a few hundred pounds that can cruise down the freeway at 65 mph all day long on the power of a toaster and that doesn't break after bumping through the desert for thousands of miles.
For what it's worth, Tesla Motors was born out of the Stanford solar car team. Their first battery pack was made in our shop years ago as part of JB's retrofit of his old Porsche. Mission Motors owes quite a bit of its heritage to solar car racing as well, with its founders coming from the Stanford and Yale teams.
If any of you are in the SF bay area, I encourage you to come take a look at one of these cars in person. Our latest entry, Xenith, will be back on campus in January and we enjoy hosting visitors. Just send an email through the form on the Stanford Solar Car Project website.
Wolfram Alpha tells us that the direct path round trip by fiber would take 90 milliseconds. I'm rather impressed that it takes less than twice that to do the trip in reality, what with all of the additional routing delays and non-ideal paths that the data must take.