The UK should never be used as an example when talking about railway networks.
Something has gone badly wrong with the sector itself. No idea what it is - bad privatisation?, legacy technology?, poor economic incentives? corrupted unions?, shoddy companies?, entrenched interests?, political lobby groups? Whatever it is, the result is your just doing it wrong. Compared to those of western europe my experience of UK trains are that they are slower, more expensive to build and run, more frequently late and unable to deal with weather
In england the problem is implementation not the idea itself nor the technology.
I disagree that terrestrial transport is anywhere near its zenith. I sincerely hope for major improvements in my lifetime.
In terms of environmental efficiency rail travel beats air-travel hands down. It *SHOULD* be the better solution. Power just got entrenched in the wrong hands and those hands stopped innovating. It should have been a perfect innovation playground; rail owns the land the tracks traverse and have complete environment control (no independent vehicles, central control, decimeter scale-knowledge of the route, possibility of total sensor coverage, no dropping out of the sky if the engine cuts).
One of the major economic/political stuff ups of the modern era is the failure of the rail-networks in most countries. At the very least we should be thinking of installing robotic cargo trains with automatic packet-addressing carrages. Parallel to this should be high-speed passanger lines like those in France or Spain (300 km/hr on standard lines with the possibility of 500km/hr maglev). Most countries rail networks are worse than they were in the 1950's.
In the far future tunnel-boring technology should be cheap enough that we can consider vaccum evacuated tunnels spanning the country. At this point rail should be able to retake the speed-records. Economically this will only occur of course if maintaining the tunnel-vaccuum uses less energy than orbital hops.
Maybe we shouldn't consider the airline at fault for not changing seat sizes rather than mainstream america (or UK, or Canada, or Australia) for changing ass sizes.
Damn the FAA for stopping us from smoking and enjoying ourselves on flights!
No wait, the smoke-filled planes really sucked.
Are you sure we aren't looking back with false nostalga, perhaps even getting a bit bigger in the intervening years and confusing that with the seats getting less comfortable?
I think the new tv screens that allow you to choose when you watch a movie or play games are a huge improvement.
Now if only we could have a "parents-only" section.
In the next season of "COPS": A young officer arrives on scene to investigate a 395 (alleged horking). Bad-Boys plays during the opening credits.
A grainy view of Doug and Bob can be seen on the dash-cam, staticky audio can just be overheard.
Officer: "Before this horking took place gentlemen would you be so kind to tell me why exactly had you removed all your clothes?" Doug: "mmme.. dkj" Officer: "Sorry Sir, I didn't understand that" Bob: "sdk.. eh!" Officer: "I did understand that Sir! However I will pretend I did not, and remind you that I am an agent of the law and what you propose is illegal in 12 states"......
Yes but modern people have better food storage, eat 3-4 times what is necessary for survival, discard 100s of calories out of habit and have fat-stocks that are much greater than prevoius generations. I mean if we had to eat boiled shoe out of desparation imagine the resources a modern city has tucked away:)
I would also debate the more-fragile transport chains. We in the "west" are so far from starvation we don't even know what it looks like, its just a boogyman our ancestors had to deal with. Did anyone in hurricane Katrina die of starvation?
Except the distribution itself can also change as feedback mechanisms with different time-scales each react to the new equilibrium. No that we will reach a new equilibrium anytime soon if CO2 does turn out to be a major climate-forcer.
This is not a case of a brave few denialists with nothing but their wits being cornered and forced to fight the good fight:
Mineral Extraction Industry + Oil Extraction Industry + Auto/Aero/shipping Industries + Fossil Fuel Energy Sector + Agriculture & Forestry Sectors + The populations general apathy and inertia against change
>>
any feasable Global Warming Industry (I mean where the F*** do these guys make their profits)
The problem with every generation is that they think they are unique.
When talking about human things like "sexual freedoms", "the corruption of those who lead" or the "rudness of youth" your right. But when considering environmental destruction, species loss, population growth or technological change and sheer ability of man then for the last 500 years each generation really has been unique. And in that uniqueness we will stumble, sometimes doing good sometimes bad.
Despite all our current problems and those we try to predict for the future, unless your of blue-blood most people look back at history and are thankful for the state of today. When we worry about the future we meerly wish to maintain or improve on this situation IMHO. Although there will also always be doomsayers.
Jeesh guys, at the very least can one side pick a player who's name doesn't begin with "M".
Mann, McIntyre and McKitrick, plus all the abbreviating! How is a sheeple like me supposed to understand your arguments if we can't tell who is wearing the white hat and who wears the black?
And yet London and its surrounds hardly ever get any snow anymore - witness how unprepared they were for the 5cm they got this year. I don't think river speed can be the only cause.
The climate in England has changed since 1500's, as it did between 1500 and 1000. This is what happens naturally to some extent, the question is what extent. We are currently in a period of warmth for the better, the reasons behind this are debatable (and may have more than one cause).
Conservation "just happens" only if current markets result in a prices that accurately reflect the short and long-term costs of each input (as well as associated health costs and final product disposal).
Current environmentalism (of the non knee-jerk variety) is based around the concern that these conditions are not always being met.
As an example, for historical reasons American car manufacturers generaly produce bigger cars than those of the rest of the world. Despite multiple generations of new models coming onto the market it's obvious price alone hasn't sufficiently been a factor in promoting conservatoin within the US-auto industry. Not sure why.
So I would say life survives on this reaction on grand scale. They just do it efficiently and without generating masses of waste heat.
Someone mentioned geothermal as a source - perhaps you could also argue that thermal-vent communities rely on this?
Agree that grandparent is totally off though. Hydro is another unutilised example, entire countries run on this source yet no lifeform sits in fast-flowing streams with a mini-turbine generating food. Not sure why
Umm, corrupt Italian police break the law, circumventing safety and endangering lives by deliberately increasing fines for profit. Non-corrupt police notice and fix the problem.
- This article may not provide the police bashing people are after here folks.
Large parts of England and Europe used to be malaria ridden, as did parts of america. While personal hygine isn't 100% preventative of disease, at a socital level hygiene is a major factor. Chlorea, leprosy, malaria, the plague, all are included in Western history. Apart from river blindness, sleeping sickness, dengue fever and yellow fever we've known most tropic diseases at home, and we had a few the tropics never knew.
It is not that the "tropics" are more disease prone or harder to build a society in than elsewhere. It is merely that for historical reasons (or luck) the current sucessful branches of modern society have invested more effort in solving "non-tropical" diseases - now the world need to broadern that umbrella.
But they are frequently replaced by minor varients of themselves. We are currently running through the tree-of-life with a chainsaw and destroying entire branches (although not in this case). In terms of species loss humanity obviously has the ability to reach dinasaur-asteroid-killer proportions.
In terms of sheer infornmation loss that should be considered a disaster. On a more selfish level it also irreversivbly closes potential sources of knowledge and utility that we don't yet know the value of. Consider the Australian aborigines who upon arrival drove all the local potentially domesticatable animals to extinction thus leaving them in a technological rut for 60kyr.
In terms of the ibex clones, I'm not sure this is a wise use of resoucres. Resources now need to be spent sampling/storing/cataloging all the species still alive as the rate of extinction is so great.
Does a realistic perspective really make an argument not worth reading?
There have been many places and times since 15th century europe where people have been reduced to a "serflike" state, modern Finns ain't close to it though. The workers of 20th-century european colonial possessions or soviet russia perhaps?
I don't think it needs to drive a full sized boat. This is just an easy propulsion system with no moving parts that would be perfect for small robotic vehicles.
We are only just beginning to really monitor the world, lots of technologies today are coming out that won't improve on existing tech for power but will beat it on efficiency, size or maintance. Future societies will need to monitor every km^2 of ocean to manage fishing resources and borders, all the lakes and rivers will be monitored for pollution and flooding
The earth IS amazingly exceptional, we just don't know how unique it is.
Frozen ice on Mars is great, and may make the Herculian job of colonising it or starting outposts later a bit easier. It still looks like its a sterile rock, raising self-sustaining colonies on antarctica and in the seas will be far easier in the short term (100 years).
In contrast earth is a full ecology with macroscopic life so large it is visible from space. There may be 1 or even 10^6 equivalent biospheres in the galaxy (we don't know) this still means terran planets are unlikely to be common or close together. This is one of the reasons we should be developing science but also conserving the uniqueness that is our biological heritage.
The man-made compounds like LSD have never gone through rounds of selection to increase their effects on insects/arachnids - thus no change in web. In contrast other compounds (caffine for example) are plant poisons specifically evolved to prevent predation by insects. That they give humans a brief jolly is incidental. Incidental but selected for as we tried every plant out there to find the handful with poisons that give us a brief high but won't kill us. Arachnid neuronal systems are closer to insects than ours are hence the insect poisons have more of their original intended effect. Thus the spider responses are completly different to human responses. Always be cautious of animal tests:)
Agree with the sentiment but not the analogy. Each of the cases you mention were true civil-liberty issues.
Overall the law is a good-thing, it should not be broken without care. "Fuck Em" should only be valid in extreme circumstances and music download or trademark bullying aren't even close. Free music exists and is easily obtainable. We should fight the RIAA - but respect the law while doing so. It is too valuable a thing to cheapen over something so trivial.
I can see why Russia could be annoyed with a semi-functional shield. MAD assumes that even if the other side were to strike first and knock out 95% of your missiles, the 5% that remain would still devestate THEIR country. So a semi-funcitonal missile shield couldn't stop a full-launch from russia BUT if America is striking first it *could* stop russia's remaining nuclear capacity.
So if America votes someone who is completly divorced from reality into power, someone who watches a lot of Fox news for example. This sort of president may believe a missile shield works when it does not, and they now think they have an option to start wars with impunity. In this case russia is very worried as MAD is now asymmetric. Under these circumstances they have more of an incentive to launch a full strike first to guarantee beating the shield - thus the shield could also make the US less safe in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK should never be used as an example when talking about railway networks.
Something has gone badly wrong with the sector itself. No idea what it is - bad privatisation?, legacy technology?, poor economic incentives? corrupted unions?, shoddy companies?, entrenched interests?, political lobby groups? Whatever it is, the result is your just doing it wrong. Compared to those of western europe my experience of UK trains are that they are slower, more expensive to build and run, more frequently late and unable to deal with weather
In england the problem is implementation not the idea itself nor the technology.
I disagree that terrestrial transport is anywhere near its zenith. I sincerely hope for major improvements in my lifetime.
In terms of environmental efficiency rail travel beats air-travel hands down. It *SHOULD* be the better solution. Power just got entrenched in the wrong hands and those hands stopped innovating. It should have been a perfect innovation playground; rail owns the land the tracks traverse and have complete environment control (no independent vehicles, central control, decimeter scale-knowledge of the route, possibility of total sensor coverage, no dropping out of the sky if the engine cuts).
One of the major economic/political stuff ups of the modern era is the failure of the rail-networks in most countries. At the very least we should be thinking of installing robotic cargo trains with automatic packet-addressing carrages. Parallel to this should be high-speed passanger lines like those in France or Spain (300 km/hr on standard lines with the possibility of 500km/hr maglev). Most countries rail networks are worse than they were in the 1950's.
In the far future tunnel-boring technology should be cheap enough that we can consider vaccum evacuated tunnels spanning the country. At this point rail should be able to retake the speed-records. Economically this will only occur of course if maintaining the tunnel-vaccuum uses less energy than orbital hops.
Maybe we shouldn't consider the airline at fault for not changing seat sizes rather than mainstream america (or UK, or Canada, or Australia) for changing ass sizes.
Damn the FAA for stopping us from smoking and enjoying ourselves on flights!
No wait, the smoke-filled planes really sucked.
Are you sure we aren't looking back with false nostalga, perhaps even getting a bit bigger in the intervening years and confusing that with the seats getting less comfortable?
I think the new tv screens that allow you to choose when you watch a movie or play games are a huge improvement.
Now if only we could have a "parents-only" section.
Strange example.
In the next season of "COPS": A young officer arrives on scene to investigate a 395 (alleged horking). Bad-Boys plays during the opening credits.
A grainy view of Doug and Bob can be seen on the dash-cam, staticky audio can just be overheard.
Officer: "Before this horking took place gentlemen would you be so kind to tell me why exactly had you removed all your clothes?" .. dkj" ......
Doug: "mmme
Officer: "Sorry Sir, I didn't understand that"
Bob: "sdk.. eh!"
Officer: "I did understand that Sir! However I will pretend I did not, and remind you that I am an agent of the law and what you propose is illegal in 12 states"
How rude you yanks are, us europeans don't have to learn from YOUR mistakes.
We are perfectly capable of making our own mistakes while repeating your technological ideas 10-years later and at twice the cost.
Yes but modern people have better food storage, eat 3-4 times what is necessary for survival, discard 100s of calories out of habit and have fat-stocks that are much greater than prevoius generations. I mean if we had to eat boiled shoe out of desparation imagine the resources a modern city has tucked away :)
I would also debate the more-fragile transport chains. We in the "west" are so far from starvation we don't even know what it looks like, its just a boogyman our ancestors had to deal with. Did anyone in hurricane Katrina die of starvation?
Except the distribution itself can also change as feedback mechanisms with different time-scales each react to the new equilibrium. No that we will reach a new equilibrium anytime soon if CO2 does turn out to be a major climate-forcer.
This is not a case of a brave few denialists with nothing but their wits being cornered and forced to fight the good fight:
Mineral Extraction Industry + Oil Extraction Industry + Auto/Aero/shipping Industries + Fossil Fuel Energy Sector + Agriculture & Forestry Sectors + The populations general apathy and inertia against change
>>
any feasable Global Warming Industry (I mean where the F*** do these guys make their profits)
The problem with every generation is that they think they are unique.
When talking about human things like "sexual freedoms", "the corruption of those who lead" or the "rudness of youth" your right. But when considering environmental destruction, species loss, population growth or technological change and sheer ability of man then for the last 500 years each generation really has been unique. And in that uniqueness we will stumble, sometimes doing good sometimes bad.
Despite all our current problems and those we try to predict for the future, unless your of blue-blood most people look back at history and are thankful for the state of today. When we worry about the future we meerly wish to maintain or improve on this situation IMHO. Although there will also always be doomsayers.
Jeesh guys, at the very least can one side pick a player who's name doesn't begin with "M".
Mann, McIntyre and McKitrick, plus all the abbreviating! How is a sheeple like me supposed to understand your arguments if we can't tell who is wearing the white hat and who wears the black?
And yet London and its surrounds hardly ever get any snow anymore - witness how unprepared they were for the 5cm they got this year. I don't think river speed can be the only cause.
The climate in England has changed since 1500's, as it did between 1500 and 1000. This is what happens naturally to some extent, the question is what extent. We are currently in a period of warmth for the better, the reasons behind this are debatable (and may have more than one cause).
Do you know what the average height in the Netherlands is? Yet Dutch carparks don't look like American ones..
Conservation "just happens" only if current markets result in a prices that accurately reflect the short and long-term costs of each input (as well as associated health costs and final product disposal).
Current environmentalism (of the non knee-jerk variety) is based around the concern that these conditions are not always being met.
As an example, for historical reasons American car manufacturers generaly produce bigger cars than those of the rest of the world. Despite multiple generations of new models coming onto the market it's obvious price alone hasn't sufficiently been a factor in promoting conservatoin within the US-auto industry. Not sure why.
FIRE = conversion of sugars/lipids --> CO2
So I would say life survives on this reaction on grand scale. They just do it efficiently and without generating masses of waste heat.
Someone mentioned geothermal as a source - perhaps you could also argue that thermal-vent communities rely on this?
Agree that grandparent is totally off though. Hydro is another unutilised example, entire countries run on this source yet no lifeform sits in fast-flowing streams with a mini-turbine generating food. Not sure why
Umm, corrupt Italian police break the law, circumventing safety and endangering lives by deliberately increasing fines for profit. Non-corrupt police notice and fix the problem.
- This article may not provide the police bashing people are after here folks.
Large parts of England and Europe used to be malaria ridden, as did parts of america. While personal hygine isn't 100% preventative of disease, at a socital level hygiene is a major factor. Chlorea, leprosy, malaria, the plague, all are included in Western history. Apart from river blindness, sleeping sickness, dengue fever and yellow fever we've known most tropic diseases at home, and we had a few the tropics never knew.
It is not that the "tropics" are more disease prone or harder to build a society in than elsewhere. It is merely that for historical reasons (or luck) the current sucessful branches of modern society have invested more effort in solving "non-tropical" diseases - now the world need to broadern that umbrella.
It's China, do we not have historical coverage of the last 3000+ years?
It's when a damn doesn't let it out slowly that you have a problem ;)
But they are frequently replaced by minor varients of themselves. We are currently running through the tree-of-life with a chainsaw and destroying entire branches (although not in this case). In terms of species loss humanity obviously has the ability to reach dinasaur-asteroid-killer proportions.
In terms of sheer infornmation loss that should be considered a disaster. On a more selfish level it also irreversivbly closes potential sources of knowledge and utility that we don't yet know the value of. Consider the Australian aborigines who upon arrival drove all the local potentially domesticatable animals to extinction thus leaving them in a technological rut for 60kyr.
In terms of the ibex clones, I'm not sure this is a wise use of resoucres. Resources now need to be spent sampling/storing/cataloging all the species still alive as the rate of extinction is so great.
Does a realistic perspective really make an argument not worth reading?
There have been many places and times since 15th century europe where people have been reduced to a "serflike" state, modern Finns ain't close to it though. The workers of 20th-century european colonial possessions or soviet russia perhaps?
I don't think it needs to drive a full sized boat. This is just an easy propulsion system with no moving parts that would be perfect for small robotic vehicles.
We are only just beginning to really monitor the world, lots of technologies today are coming out that won't improve on existing tech for power but will beat it on efficiency, size or maintance. Future societies will need to monitor every km^2 of ocean to manage fishing resources and borders, all the lakes and rivers will be monitored for pollution and flooding
The earth IS amazingly exceptional, we just don't know how unique it is.
Frozen ice on Mars is great, and may make the Herculian job of colonising it or starting outposts later a bit easier. It still looks like its a sterile rock, raising self-sustaining colonies on antarctica and in the seas will be far easier in the short term (100 years).
In contrast earth is a full ecology with macroscopic life so large it is visible from space. There may be 1 or even 10^6 equivalent biospheres in the galaxy (we don't know) this still means terran planets are unlikely to be common or close together. This is one of the reasons we should be developing science but also conserving the uniqueness that is our biological heritage.
These web-photos look cool but are misleading.
The man-made compounds like LSD have never gone through rounds of selection to increase their effects on insects/arachnids - thus no change in web. In contrast other compounds (caffine for example) are plant poisons specifically evolved to prevent predation by insects. That they give humans a brief jolly is incidental. Incidental but selected for as we tried every plant out there to find the handful with poisons that give us a brief high but won't kill us. Arachnid neuronal systems are closer to insects than ours are hence the insect poisons have more of their original intended effect. Thus the spider responses are completly different to human responses. Always be cautious of animal tests :)
Still, the webs make a great T-shirt
Agree with the sentiment but not the analogy. Each of the cases you mention were true civil-liberty issues.
Overall the law is a good-thing, it should not be broken without care. "Fuck Em" should only be valid in extreme circumstances and music download or trademark bullying aren't even close. Free music exists and is easily obtainable. We should fight the RIAA - but respect the law while doing so. It is too valuable a thing to cheapen over something so trivial.
I can see why Russia could be annoyed with a semi-functional shield. MAD assumes that even if the other side were to strike first and knock out 95% of your missiles, the 5% that remain would still devestate THEIR country. So a semi-funcitonal missile shield couldn't stop a full-launch from russia BUT if America is striking first it *could* stop russia's remaining nuclear capacity.
So if America votes someone who is completly divorced from reality into power, someone who watches a lot of Fox news for example. This sort of president may believe a missile shield works when it does not, and they now think they have an option to start wars with impunity. In this case russia is very worried as MAD is now asymmetric. Under these circumstances they have more of an incentive to launch a full strike first to guarantee beating the shield - thus the shield could also make the US less safe in the short term.