When I still had earthlink dialup, which is pretty nice dialup, it was $19 a month. I had a cheaper ISP before that, they had severe bandwidth problems to the west coast, essentially they were slower than my modem. I also had a second phone line installed, at a monthly of $20. At the time, cell phones were still ludicrously more expensive than landlines, and I needed to be able to do some tech support over the phone while dialed in, so I needed 2 lines. I'd still probably need two lines because my office is in the basement of the house, and I get crap for cell coverage down there.
I pay $49/month for broadband over cable. It'd be $45 if I had cable, but there's a $5 charge for not having cable.
So, let's see...$39/month or $49/month. Free cable install (they are nearly always running a special) and I paid $50 for the second line install (phone company never runs specials). Oh, and the cable is 10 times faster.
It really wasn't much of a decision for me. For $10/month extra (25% more) I get service that is 10 times faster, way more reliable, and is always ready on the other side of my firewall. As far as "I'd never use the speed"....well, try and admin a windows box sometime without broadband. RDP works over dialup, but you spend way more time than you should waiting for characters to pop.
Also, for some reason I always had problems with modems breaking. Given how hard it is to find a non-winmodem for a realistic price, I'm probably saving money on equipment, or breaking even on better equipment (ethernet vs telco). I've only ever busted one cable modem in 4 years, and the cable company replaced it, for free. No drivers to download or nuthin, it's just a "cable-to-ethernet" adapter with no computer connection required to run it.
Actually, that's what I do most of the time. I've got an XP box at my office, I VPN into the office and use Remote Desktop (native Mac OS X version). Sometimes that doesn't work or I'm on a dialup, an I can do most SQL Server stuff faster by hand from a local ISQL than I can sending screen scrapes (even highly optimized ones) back and forth.
To answer your question, here's the short list of what I need VPC for:
1. SQL Server Management Tools: Enterprise Manager, ISQL/W, and so on.
2. Outlook to Exchange 5.5 integration. Yeah, Entourage works great for Exchange 2000, but it still don't work worth talking about against Exchange 5.5.
3. Testing sites on IE 6. It's just wacky enough to need separate testing.
4. Various Windows network admin apps (User Manager, Share Management, Server Manager).
All told, I get into it once or twice every 3 or 4 weeks. It's not like buying a PS2 to play zelda, it's more like buing a Torx screwdriver: I don't use it often, but when I need it, I REALLY need it, right then. Am I in it all the time? Nope. But I use it enough to justify buying it (err...making my employer buy it:) )
Shutdown is native in XP Pro, but it is also installable from the resource kits. It's pretty handy, it lets you remote shutdown machines over the network.
One of your co-workers takes home his laptop, snaps it into his DSL to do some "Work from Home" (aka one-handed surfing) and picks up the virus. Brings the machine to work the next day, and you're instantly infected office-wide.
Patch everything. Firewalls will only provide you protection until tomorrow morning at the latest, when porn-boy brings his laptop in.
How are you going to communicate to do air/sea rescue? Long range, say with a boat out in the middle of the ocean.
With BPL, the noise floor is raised so high NOBODY can use ANY spectrum from 2 to 70 Mhz. That's all of the spectrum that propagates globally. It doesn't matter if the boat's next to the powerlines or not, because the potentially receiving station might be, and even if it's not, BPL is broad bandwidth raising of the noise floor that will propagate globally. Not just next to the powerlines, but everywhere the powerline-caused interference can propagate to.
So, the hams can't use the spectrum, but then NEITHER CAN THE COAST GUARD. Or anybody else for that matter.
Satellite won't work. Either you've got to have a really directional antenna (not very easy on a tossing ship, or with a lost airplane who can't get bearings, or a lost hiker) or a lot of power (not likely on a ship in distress running battery power).
Land rescue's another biggie. It's a piece of cake to throw out a quick antenna for HF, just a couple pieces of long wire work.
The hams are complaining, but I bet the shortwave broadcasters are too, along with the Coasties, the FAA, and everyone else.
You're still doing an excellent job of missing the entire point.
This raises the "noise floor". These are not line of sight signals, they are global signals. Putting radio telescopes above the power lines would help absolutely not at all, because the signals are bouncing up, hitting the ionosphere, and coming back down. Unless we place radio telescopes above the ionosphere, they can't be placed high enough. There's no shielding this, and there's no filtering it out. It's like walking into a room full of very very loud, broadbanded static and trying to listen to the person next to you say something. Unless you can read lips, you're hosed.
If it's only 9600 bps, then if they've got power they've got phones. You're not making any sense here. This doesn't solve the last-mile problem any better than residential phone service does in that case.
Bouncing signals off of clouds, by the way, is not very likely. Typically, the signal will be absorbed by water vapor. Usually any kind of non-ionospheric long-range bounce you get is from tropospheric ducting, which requires hot, still air and cold, still air and a very quick transition between the two, usually caused by a regional tropospheric inversion, which happens occasionally in the summer, but I wouldn't ever bet a chance of rescue on it.
So, did you read the part in the comment you're allegedly replying to about the low power not mattering? Low power transmissions on the right frequencies are GLOBAL. Read the entire comment. I addressed this already, you moron. Signals less than 1 watt are readable worldwide. Even signals less than 1 watt raise the noise floor of the bands, making it harder or impossible to dig out weak signals. We're not talking about stupid-ass lame VHF signals that are line-of-sight only. These are GLOBAL signals that bounce off the ionosphere.
Plus, it don't matter if the plane's out in the middle of the ocean when the receiver is generally going to be on land, and probably even hooked up to commercial power. Usually the way these things are done isn't ship-to-ship, it's ship-to-shore-to-ship, because it's easier to put a really big high-gain antenna on the shore, not on a boat. Bear in mind that the antennas are typically 30 to 50 feet across (30 feet for the 14 Mhz band, and they get much bigger from there). Plus if you want directional antennas with gain, you need to have one that's pretty wide and long. Try and fit that onto a small powerboat--not so good.
But that's ok, anything you don't personally use is worthless, because you don't know anything about it.
On a side note, how would one fly a plan anyway? Easiest way to tell a knee-jerk, poorly reasoned and uninformed response is the total lack of proofreading, you illiterate twerp.
Few miles? Uh...no. Typical hurricane communications is over hundreds of miles, at HF frequencies. The short range stuff (around 3.75 Mhz, usually) is typically 60-100 miles. Hurricanes are BIG, dude.
My point, and since you didn't read my entire previous comment, you probably won't read this so it doesn't really matter, is that there are no other bands. The only bands suitable for worldwide communications are the ones that BPL will make nearly unusable. So by taking away the amateur allocations, you're taking away the ones for radio astronomy, the ones that the coast guard and the airlines use, and the ones that missionaries in africa use to talk to home. All of that, gone so you can get cheaper, faster porn ^H^H^H^Hinternet access.
Keep that in mind next time you're flying in from europe on approach to Kennedy airport.
All the communications that planes use all the way across the ocean is shortwave. Aeronautical mobile service. But this is only a few thousand people a day, no big deal, let 'em miss the airport?
Maybe next time your fishing boat is out in the atlantic and you need to call the coast guard. Maritime mobile service. Wow, this might only be a dozen people a year, let 'em drown.
Your "proportion to number of users effected" argument doesn't look so good now does it?
Every time there's an earthquake or a hurricane in the western hemisphere, I get a little email from the FCC via the ARRL telling me I can't use a specific set of frequencies because they're being used for emergency health and welfare traffic. Usually this is the non-urgent stuff, like "yeah, mom, me and the kids got through the earthquake OK". But that's only a few thousand folks a year. Let mom worry.
These are things that happen. Real people who use those frequencies in ways that make their lives better. And you are advocating interfering with all of that so you can get Internet access into your house faster and cheaper. Your "nature of use" argument begins to wear here. Seriously, given the choice between more effective air-sea rescue and cheaper porn, you're choosing the porn. Unfortunately, I think the FCC's on your side. I don't think Congress is though, they've already overruled that dickmaster once.
Admittedly, this is low power interference, but on those frequencies, it doesn't take much to send signals globally. Seriously, you can send signals with fractions of a watt in the right conditions and get good readable copy on the other side of the world. This interference level would pretty much devastate those frequencies worldwide.
There's a link there for the PDF of the spectrum allocation. Pretty much "DC to Daylight". The piece that BPL is going to destroy covers a lot of Ham allocations. But it also covers things like: Maritime Mobile Aeronautical Mobile Space Research Standard Time Signals Shortwave Broadcast Radio Astronomy Land Mobile Fixed-station
The amateur service is a very small part of the spectrum below 30 Mhz. A lot of it is used for things like trans-oceanic flights, military and civilian mobile services, and the like.
I'm of two minds whether this will pass or not. Michael Powell, the FCC chair, hasn't made a good decision since he got into office, so I'm thinking this will go through because he's got the power companies all giving him blow jobs under the table. On the other hand, the FAA, NTIA, the military, and the shortwave broadcasters may get through to the FCC that they can't allow this, and maybe somebody will get that lamebrain Powell to do something right.
Small helpful point on forklifts. Generally electric ones use the lead acid batteries as ballast for whatever they're picking up in the front. They're cheaper, very easy to recycle, and they aren't really worried about the weight, since they'd need to have a counterbalance for the load anyway.
A Suzuki Hayabusa will do 190 MPH. And it's even narrower.
Let's see. You can only widen a car to make it more stable according to your statement. Of course, you're an idiot.
You can do things like gyroscopically stabilize it. Sounds exotic, that's how motorcycles stay upright, the wheels spin round and round really fast, gyroscopic effect. Faster you go, more stable the bike is. Just like a bicycle. Wait, there's another example.
You can also do things like lower the center of gravity. Now, I wonder, in a vehicle full of LEAD acid batteries what you could find that was REALLY HEAVY to put really low in the vehicle. Hmm.... Maybe....nah.
Don't believe me? Take an empty soda can. Fill the bottom quarter of it with change, or small washers, whatever, just as long as it's metal or fairly dense. Now, try and tip over the can by pressing on the middle of the can. Wow, it slides, just like a car with a low center of gravity would. Of course, a car would have traction, but tire sizes are chosen so that the car won't roll in that situation, but instead will slide.
That's called engineering. Go read a book or something.
Jeez. Why drive any car that can go faster than 55 then.
The first argument is "because nobody will buy it if it's slow".
The real argument goes more like this. Nearly any device performs its best at the middle of its performance envelope. Musical instruments tend to sound best in the middle of their scales. Scales (the kind you weigh things on, pun intended) are most accurate in the middle of their range. Try and use a bathroom scale for postage sometime.
If the car does 130, it's probably at maximum inefficiency. Probably in the middle range (say, 50 to 80) it's most efficient, which is exactly where most highway driving happens.
Most non-economy cars and SUV's will do 130 anyway, especially if they aren't governed by their computers so their tires don't fly apart.
Also...when you have all of your power produced in one place, it's a lot easier to do things like reduce emissions of nitrogen and sulfur compounds efficiently. Think not only "92 million people ar driving mini fossil fuel plants", but "92 million people driving small, inefficient, generally poorly maintained catalytic converters".
I'm all over this idea. If they ship for $20K, and (huge AND here) the maintenance on the batteries isn't insane, I'll probably be buying one. My commute is 25 miles each way, nearly all interstate.
If you really want to have this go in the "big" cities (big in land areas and commuting distance, not necessarily people) then set up tax writeoffs for corporations, office parks, and parking garages that have recharging stations to offset the cost of installation and maintenance (they can charge the people that park there for the electricity). Just drive to work, plug in, and I'm set.
School of MIS is new since I was there (graduated in Dec 1993). As is the school of Education. It's still predominantly an engineering school though, I can't see many teachers wanting to go there unless they happen to live in town. Most of my English and introductory math classes had some local folks taking classes that would fall into the "non-traditional student" category.
It's great that they're expanding.
Oh, and if any young slashdotter is out there looking for a good computer science/math/engineering program, UMR is a great school, and all of the jobs I've had since graduating have recruited from there heavily with really good results.
Dude. You've obviously never been to Rolla. Standing joke: "There's a tone of women students in Rolla. Both of them."
There's no business school. There's no school for teachers. There's one building that houses psychology, english, speech, and foreign languages. There are like 10 buildings on campus for different engineering and pure-science disciplines. There just aren't a lot of women going into those fields, which is really unfortunate.
But the point is that under HIPAA rules, browsing that information and pulling it up if you don't need to is illegal. RTFA. You'd be violating Mr. Kennedy's rights to have private records.
Similarly, lookng up the names of baseball players, movie actors, or any other celebrities is illegal. No one has the right to anyone else's medical records unless they have a specific need, specifically to provide healthcare or accurate billing.
They're very strict about that, otherwise you end up with hospitals selling that data to insurers and pharmaceutical companies for advertising and whatnot.
The crux of my point is still valid however. The government was out of the day-to-day business of running airlines, and airlines got better, to the point that I'd say they're really good.
The government doesn't need to be involved in the day-to-day decisions, like "which engine is going to go into the rocket". It needs to be involved in results, getting satellites launched, for example, or supplying the ISS, whatever. Pay for services instead of paying for making sure the spacecraft is built in the proper congressional districts, regardless of the efficacy of building them there or the quality of product produced.
I'd much rather see our government do a guarantee for satellite delivery or same day mail service to get a company started than have them run the company.
Your entire comment makes the rather broad assumption that air density is the same at sea level, 10km and 150km. I'm kind of thinking it drops pretty quickly.
It saves quite a bit of fuel because there is significantly less drag at 10km than there is at sea level. 10km would be, what, pretty much 35 thousand feet, but the service ceiling of an unmodified 747 is 45,000 feet (google owns you).
Air density at 45,000 feet is.000460, air density at sea level is.002377, so air density at 45,000 feet is about 1/5 that of sea level (google rocks, chart 1).
So, if the 747 dropped the payload at 45,000 feet, and the payload gained altitude at a good rate, it would require significantly less rocket fuel than taking off from the ground. In addition, the payload could have smaller fuel tanks, which means smaller pipes, less structure and less insulation to fall off and ding a wing.
You've got some great points. But I take issue with your assumption that people are always going to die in space, because it assumes that there's no such thing as progress. Flying across the ocean is hard. Eventually, Charles Lindberg demonstrated the ability to fly across the ocean. But what got the world from point A (the Wright Brothers, 1903) to point B (Lindbergh, 1927) was not the government. It was something similar to the X-Prize, offered by a newspaper man in New York named Orteig.
And what got us from an exhibition of air travel in the Lindberg flight to the actuality of cross-country and worldwide scheduled airline service wasn't government research grants, it was little fledgling companies like Trans-World Airlines, American Airlines and Pan-American Airlines.
What we need here is an effective technology demonstration (a la the X-Prize) followed by a ramp-up of commercial investment. There was a lot of innovation between 1903 and 1927 in how aircraft were designed and built, and that was a 24 year period. In the last 30 or so years since the Apollo landings we've simply seen a degradation of capabilities from reliable space travel back to "our rockets blow up", the situation in the early 1950's. All of which is because there hasn't been the same level of private industry and innovation in the space travel industry that existed in the air travel industry 75 years ago.
Space travel doesn't have to be expensive or dangerous, any more than flying across the Atlantic. It does have to be privatized or it will continue to be both expensive and dangerous.
It's supposed to be standard practice (full disclosure) that whenever an editor publishes a report that references in any way their parent company or any other company that the publication has a financial or other interest in that the interest be included in a statement in the report.
Look at any given report on Microsoft on MSNBC, or, as you pointed out, any given report on CNN that references AOL, Time Warner, or perhaps even HBO.
It's just good ethical journalism. It helps to avoid the appearence of partiality.
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When I still had earthlink dialup, which is pretty nice dialup, it was $19 a month. I had a cheaper ISP before that, they had severe bandwidth problems to the west coast, essentially they were slower than my modem. I also had a second phone line installed, at a monthly of $20. At the time, cell phones were still ludicrously more expensive than landlines, and I needed to be able to do some tech support over the phone while dialed in, so I needed 2 lines. I'd still probably need two lines because my office is in the basement of the house, and I get crap for cell coverage down there.
I pay $49/month for broadband over cable. It'd be $45 if I had cable, but there's a $5 charge for not having cable.
So, let's see...$39/month or $49/month. Free cable install (they are nearly always running a special) and I paid $50 for the second line install (phone company never runs specials). Oh, and the cable is 10 times faster.
It really wasn't much of a decision for me. For $10/month extra (25% more) I get service that is 10 times faster, way more reliable, and is always ready on the other side of my firewall. As far as "I'd never use the speed"....well, try and admin a windows box sometime without broadband. RDP works over dialup, but you spend way more time than you should waiting for characters to pop.
Also, for some reason I always had problems with modems breaking. Given how hard it is to find a non-winmodem for a realistic price, I'm probably saving money on equipment, or breaking even on better equipment (ethernet vs telco). I've only ever busted one cable modem in 4 years, and the cable company replaced it, for free. No drivers to download or nuthin, it's just a "cable-to-ethernet" adapter with no computer connection required to run it.
Actually, that's what I do most of the time. I've got an XP box at my office, I VPN into the office and use Remote Desktop (native Mac OS X version). Sometimes that doesn't work or I'm on a dialup, an I can do most SQL Server stuff faster by hand from a local ISQL than I can sending screen scrapes (even highly optimized ones) back and forth.
Wow. Mozilla ate the post I had written.
:) )
To answer your question, here's the short list of what I need VPC for:
1. SQL Server Management Tools: Enterprise Manager, ISQL/W, and so on.
2. Outlook to Exchange 5.5 integration. Yeah, Entourage works great for Exchange 2000, but it still don't work worth talking about against Exchange 5.5.
3. Testing sites on IE 6. It's just wacky enough to need separate testing.
4. Various Windows network admin apps (User Manager, Share Management, Server Manager).
All told, I get into it once or twice every 3 or 4 weeks. It's not like buying a PS2 to play zelda, it's more like buing a Torx screwdriver: I don't use it often, but when I need it, I REALLY need it, right then. Am I in it all the time? Nope. But I use it enough to justify buying it (err...making my employer buy it
Hope that clears things up.
Because a $300 real pc wouldn't fit into my laptop bag, and would likely weigh more than 6 pounds.
Shutdown is native in XP Pro, but it is also installable from the resource kits. It's pretty handy, it lets you remote shutdown machines over the network.
It's all about the laptops dude.
One of your co-workers takes home his laptop, snaps it into his DSL to do some "Work from Home" (aka one-handed surfing) and picks up the virus. Brings the machine to work the next day, and you're instantly infected office-wide.
Patch everything. Firewalls will only provide you protection until tomorrow morning at the latest, when porn-boy brings his laptop in.
OK, leave hams out of it for a second.
How are you going to communicate to do air/sea rescue? Long range, say with a boat out in the middle of the ocean.
With BPL, the noise floor is raised so high NOBODY can use ANY spectrum from 2 to 70 Mhz. That's all of the spectrum that propagates globally. It doesn't matter if the boat's next to the powerlines or not, because the potentially receiving station might be, and even if it's not, BPL is broad bandwidth raising of the noise floor that will propagate globally. Not just next to the powerlines, but everywhere the powerline-caused interference can propagate to.
So, the hams can't use the spectrum, but then NEITHER CAN THE COAST GUARD. Or anybody else for that matter.
Satellite won't work. Either you've got to have a really directional antenna (not very easy on a tossing ship, or with a lost airplane who can't get bearings, or a lost hiker) or a lot of power (not likely on a ship in distress running battery power).
Land rescue's another biggie. It's a piece of cake to throw out a quick antenna for HF, just a couple pieces of long wire work.
The hams are complaining, but I bet the shortwave broadcasters are too, along with the Coasties, the FAA, and everyone else.
You're still doing an excellent job of missing the entire point.
This raises the "noise floor". These are not line of sight signals, they are global signals. Putting radio telescopes above the power lines would help absolutely not at all, because the signals are bouncing up, hitting the ionosphere, and coming back down. Unless we place radio telescopes above the ionosphere, they can't be placed high enough. There's no shielding this, and there's no filtering it out. It's like walking into a room full of very very loud, broadbanded static and trying to listen to the person next to you say something. Unless you can read lips, you're hosed.
If it's only 9600 bps, then if they've got power they've got phones. You're not making any sense here. This doesn't solve the last-mile problem any better than residential phone service does in that case.
Bouncing signals off of clouds, by the way, is not very likely. Typically, the signal will be absorbed by water vapor. Usually any kind of non-ionospheric long-range bounce you get is from tropospheric ducting, which requires hot, still air and cold, still air and a very quick transition between the two, usually caused by a regional tropospheric inversion, which happens occasionally in the summer, but I wouldn't ever bet a chance of rescue on it.
So, did you read the part in the comment you're allegedly replying to about the low power not mattering? Low power transmissions on the right frequencies are GLOBAL. Read the entire comment. I addressed this already, you moron. Signals less than 1 watt are readable worldwide. Even signals less than 1 watt raise the noise floor of the bands, making it harder or impossible to dig out weak signals. We're not talking about stupid-ass lame VHF signals that are line-of-sight only. These are GLOBAL signals that bounce off the ionosphere.
Plus, it don't matter if the plane's out in the middle of the ocean when the receiver is generally going to be on land, and probably even hooked up to commercial power. Usually the way these things are done isn't ship-to-ship, it's ship-to-shore-to-ship, because it's easier to put a really big high-gain antenna on the shore, not on a boat. Bear in mind that the antennas are typically 30 to 50 feet across (30 feet for the 14 Mhz band, and they get much bigger from there). Plus if you want directional antennas with gain, you need to have one that's pretty wide and long. Try and fit that onto a small powerboat--not so good.
But that's ok, anything you don't personally use is worthless, because you don't know anything about it.
On a side note, how would one fly a plan anyway? Easiest way to tell a knee-jerk, poorly reasoned and uninformed response is the total lack of proofreading, you illiterate twerp.
Few miles? Uh...no. Typical hurricane communications is over hundreds of miles, at HF frequencies. The short range stuff (around 3.75 Mhz, usually) is typically 60-100 miles. Hurricanes are BIG, dude.
My point, and since you didn't read my entire previous comment, you probably won't read this so it doesn't really matter, is that there are no other bands. The only bands suitable for worldwide communications are the ones that BPL will make nearly unusable. So by taking away the amateur allocations, you're taking away the ones for radio astronomy, the ones that the coast guard and the airlines use, and the ones that missionaries in africa use to talk to home. All of that, gone so you can get cheaper, faster porn ^H^H^H^Hinternet access.
Keep that in mind next time you're flying in from europe on approach to Kennedy airport.
All the communications that planes use all the way across the ocean is shortwave. Aeronautical mobile service. But this is only a few thousand people a day, no big deal, let 'em miss the airport?
Maybe next time your fishing boat is out in the atlantic and you need to call the coast guard. Maritime mobile service. Wow, this might only be a dozen people a year, let 'em drown.
Your "proportion to number of users effected" argument doesn't look so good now does it?
Every time there's an earthquake or a hurricane in the western hemisphere, I get a little email from the FCC via the ARRL telling me I can't use a specific set of frequencies because they're being used for emergency health and welfare traffic. Usually this is the non-urgent stuff, like "yeah, mom, me and the kids got through the earthquake OK". But that's only a few thousand folks a year. Let mom worry.
These are things that happen. Real people who use those frequencies in ways that make their lives better. And you are advocating interfering with all of that so you can get Internet access into your house faster and cheaper. Your "nature of use" argument begins to wear here. Seriously, given the choice between more effective air-sea rescue and cheaper porn, you're choosing the porn. Unfortunately, I think the FCC's on your side. I don't think Congress is though, they've already overruled that dickmaster once.
Admittedly, this is low power interference, but on those frequencies, it doesn't take much to send signals globally. Seriously, you can send signals with fractions of a watt in the right conditions and get good readable copy on the other side of the world. This interference level would pretty much devastate those frequencies worldwide.
Check this out..
There's a link there for the PDF of the spectrum allocation. Pretty much "DC to Daylight". The piece that BPL is going to destroy covers a lot of Ham allocations. But it also covers things like:
Maritime Mobile
Aeronautical Mobile
Space Research
Standard Time Signals
Shortwave Broadcast
Radio Astronomy
Land Mobile
Fixed-station
The amateur service is a very small part of the spectrum below 30 Mhz. A lot of it is used for things like trans-oceanic flights, military and civilian mobile services, and the like.
I'm of two minds whether this will pass or not. Michael Powell, the FCC chair, hasn't made a good decision since he got into office, so I'm thinking this will go through because he's got the power companies all giving him blow jobs under the table. On the other hand, the FAA, NTIA, the military, and the shortwave broadcasters may get through to the FCC that they can't allow this, and maybe somebody will get that lamebrain Powell to do something right.
It's august. Besides the daily SCO update, what's going on worth a front page story?
There's not a lot of tech news going on.
If you didn't like this story, how many stories have you submitted today?
Don't know about the PST's....but check out http://www.pocketmac.net
Small helpful point on forklifts. Generally electric ones use the lead acid batteries as ballast for whatever they're picking up in the front. They're cheaper, very easy to recycle, and they aren't really worried about the weight, since they'd need to have a counterbalance for the load anyway.
Hmm...
A Suzuki Hayabusa will do 190 MPH. And it's even narrower.
Let's see. You can only widen a car to make it more stable according to your statement. Of course, you're an idiot.
You can do things like gyroscopically stabilize it. Sounds exotic, that's how motorcycles stay upright, the wheels spin round and round really fast, gyroscopic effect. Faster you go, more stable the bike is. Just like a bicycle. Wait, there's another example.
You can also do things like lower the center of gravity. Now, I wonder, in a vehicle full of LEAD acid batteries what you could find that was REALLY HEAVY to put really low in the vehicle. Hmm.... Maybe....nah.
Don't believe me? Take an empty soda can. Fill the bottom quarter of it with change, or small washers, whatever, just as long as it's metal or fairly dense. Now, try and tip over the can by pressing on the middle of the can. Wow, it slides, just like a car with a low center of gravity would. Of course, a car would have traction, but tire sizes are chosen so that the car won't roll in that situation, but instead will slide.
That's called engineering. Go read a book or something.
Jeez. Why drive any car that can go faster than 55 then.
The first argument is "because nobody will buy it if it's slow".
The real argument goes more like this. Nearly any device performs its best at the middle of its performance envelope. Musical instruments tend to sound best in the middle of their scales. Scales (the kind you weigh things on, pun intended) are most accurate in the middle of their range. Try and use a bathroom scale for postage sometime.
If the car does 130, it's probably at maximum inefficiency. Probably in the middle range (say, 50 to 80) it's most efficient, which is exactly where most highway driving happens.
Most non-economy cars and SUV's will do 130 anyway, especially if they aren't governed by their computers so their tires don't fly apart.
Also...when you have all of your power produced in one place, it's a lot easier to do things like reduce emissions of nitrogen and sulfur compounds efficiently. Think not only "92 million people ar driving mini fossil fuel plants", but "92 million people driving small, inefficient, generally poorly maintained catalytic converters".
I'm all over this idea. If they ship for $20K, and (huge AND here) the maintenance on the batteries isn't insane, I'll probably be buying one. My commute is 25 miles each way, nearly all interstate.
If you really want to have this go in the "big" cities (big in land areas and commuting distance, not necessarily people) then set up tax writeoffs for corporations, office parks, and parking garages that have recharging stations to offset the cost of installation and maintenance (they can charge the people that park there for the electricity). Just drive to work, plug in, and I'm set.
School of MIS is new since I was there (graduated in Dec 1993). As is the school of Education. It's still predominantly an engineering school though, I can't see many teachers wanting to go there unless they happen to live in town. Most of my English and introductory math classes had some local folks taking classes that would fall into the "non-traditional student" category.
It's great that they're expanding.
Oh, and if any young slashdotter is out there looking for a good computer science/math/engineering program, UMR is a great school, and all of the jobs I've had since graduating have recruited from there heavily with really good results.
Dude. You've obviously never been to Rolla. Standing joke: "There's a tone of women students in Rolla. Both of them."
There's no business school. There's no school for teachers. There's one building that houses psychology, english, speech, and foreign languages. There are like 10 buildings on campus for different engineering and pure-science disciplines. There just aren't a lot of women going into those fields, which is really unfortunate.
But the point is that under HIPAA rules, browsing that information and pulling it up if you don't need to is illegal. RTFA. You'd be violating Mr. Kennedy's rights to have private records.
Similarly, lookng up the names of baseball players, movie actors, or any other celebrities is illegal. No one has the right to anyone else's medical records unless they have a specific need, specifically to provide healthcare or accurate billing.
They're very strict about that, otherwise you end up with hospitals selling that data to insurers and pharmaceutical companies for advertising and whatnot.
Good point.
The crux of my point is still valid however. The government was out of the day-to-day business of running airlines, and airlines got better, to the point that I'd say they're really good.
The government doesn't need to be involved in the day-to-day decisions, like "which engine is going to go into the rocket". It needs to be involved in results, getting satellites launched, for example, or supplying the ISS, whatever. Pay for services instead of paying for making sure the spacecraft is built in the proper congressional districts, regardless of the efficacy of building them there or the quality of product produced.
I'd much rather see our government do a guarantee for satellite delivery or same day mail service to get a company started than have them run the company.
Your entire comment makes the rather broad assumption that air density is the same at sea level, 10km and 150km. I'm kind of thinking it drops pretty quickly.
.000460, air density at sea level is .002377, so air density at 45,000 feet is about 1/5 that of sea level (google rocks, chart 1).
It saves quite a bit of fuel because there is significantly less drag at 10km than there is at sea level. 10km would be, what, pretty much 35 thousand feet, but the service ceiling of an unmodified 747 is 45,000 feet (google owns you).
Air density at 45,000 feet is
So, if the 747 dropped the payload at 45,000 feet, and the payload gained altitude at a good rate, it would require significantly less rocket fuel than taking off from the ground. In addition, the payload could have smaller fuel tanks, which means smaller pipes, less structure and less insulation to fall off and ding a wing.
You've got some great points. But I take issue with your assumption that people are always going to die in space, because it assumes that there's no such thing as progress. Flying across the ocean is hard. Eventually, Charles Lindberg demonstrated the ability to fly across the ocean. But what got the world from point A (the Wright Brothers, 1903) to point B (Lindbergh, 1927) was not the government. It was something similar to the X-Prize, offered by a newspaper man in New York named Orteig.
And what got us from an exhibition of air travel in the Lindberg flight to the actuality of cross-country and worldwide scheduled airline service wasn't government research grants, it was little fledgling companies like Trans-World Airlines, American Airlines and Pan-American Airlines.
What we need here is an effective technology demonstration (a la the X-Prize) followed by a ramp-up of commercial investment. There was a lot of innovation between 1903 and 1927 in how aircraft were designed and built, and that was a 24 year period. In the last 30 or so years since the Apollo landings we've simply seen a degradation of capabilities from reliable space travel back to "our rockets blow up", the situation in the early 1950's. All of which is because there hasn't been the same level of private industry and innovation in the space travel industry that existed in the air travel industry 75 years ago.
Space travel doesn't have to be expensive or dangerous, any more than flying across the Atlantic. It does have to be privatized or it will continue to be both expensive and dangerous.
It's supposed to be standard practice (full disclosure) that whenever an editor publishes a report that references in any way their parent company or any other company that the publication has a financial or other interest in that the interest be included in a statement in the report.
Look at any given report on Microsoft on MSNBC, or, as you pointed out, any given report on CNN that references AOL, Time Warner, or perhaps even HBO.
It's just good ethical journalism. It helps to avoid the appearence of partiality.