You have never lived in London I take it? Some super-privileged live in very exclusive post-codes in London. But a lot of the housing in London is fucking awful council estates that I would need to be paid to even consider walking through. Then if they are not council estates they are SW postcodes which for a long time were the expat Aussie, Kiwi and Saffer ghettos.
The truly super-privileged in the UK don't live in London they live on estates in places like the Cotswolds. Often they will maintain a flat for working in London as well though.
As for the security theatre I hope you are wrong. Hopefully they realise that the passengers on a fast train are the almost zero risk aspect of the operation. Unlike aircraft it is relatively easy to get at a train while it is moving. Just damage the tracks, drop a brick from a bridge etc. Getting someone onto a high speed train with a bomb is pointless when stealing a truck and crashing it onto the line inside the trains braking distance is likely to be more horrifying from a terrorist perspective.
Of course. You always need to model the outcomes and model what will get the best return on investment. The other is to model any other externalities as well.
For example bypasses will not impact traffic travelling into and out of a city where the point of origin or destination is that city. Where as people travelling by train will. The flip side is that the trainstations themselves will generate traffic wherever they are located so that needs to be planned for and handled as well.
Other considerations are pollution and noise. The HSR is likely to be noisier where it runs but for a relatively short period of time. Vehicles are individually quieter but in sum much louder, they are also more distributed. So you are trading a more general reduction in noise for greater noise levels at specific points for shorter durations.
As for pollution HSR will generate significantly less pollution per passenger mile but also move the pollution away from the population centre to the power generator.
Finally what is the long term maintenance costs? Road wears and wears fast as far as infrastructure goes. Rail on the other hand has a very long life cycle in comparison. Over what period of time would the capital and maintenance costs of bypasses exceed the capital and maintenance costs of the rail?
All of these things need to be taken into consideration when deciding if something is a viable plan. You can't just say - it cost $20 billion so it needs to be $100 per ticket to break even.
If that is what they build then you have a whole set of other problems.
Go and clone the Japanese Shinkansen though and none of what you say if true. FFS all the shinkansens I have been on in recent years even have standard powerpoints for you to plug your laptop / other charger in.
The reason that rail is subsidised is because the benefits of their operation, to the governments, are not restricted to their fare price. Every passenger is a passenger not taking an alternative mode of transport. Given the level of congestion on the highways this can be the difference between moving traffic and grid lock. If you can get 15% of the traffic on that corridor travelling by train you are potentially looking at saving vastly more money because you don't have to upgrade the highways. This is especially true where the highways are running through heavily developed areas.
If the backup generators hadn't worked then there would have been multiple days for a truck carrying a replacement generator to drive from anywhere in the country to plug it in.
People seem to forget the fucking massive wall of water that smashed its way across the Fukushima plant and everything around it. Wikipedia has a good article on the safety systems of a BWR reactor. I suggest you have a read.
I had a PCA hooked up after having my broken my collar bone and shattered my wrist re-assembled. The method for me to get a shot of morphine was to simply push a button. The system was set that I could only get a certain number of presses per hour.
That said I didn't use the button at all. They had given me oral painkillers and I was fine with those for the 8 hours I had to wait before they let me go home. For the most part I was just seriously bored. My entertainment was my laptop and watching tv shows on it. It would have been trivial for me to connect an Ethernet cable and mess away.
Yes and no. Yes if they make no changes to the iPlayer service. However what is much more likely to happen is that you will need to log in to iPlayer instead of just being able to access it with nothing but the geo-block.
You want access to the iPlayer server? Please type in the receipt code for your TV license please. If you do not have a UK Tv license but live in the EU and would like to access iPlayer please purchase a subscription over here.
It's a clone of MP3Juices. Grooveshark is gone. Not to mention they signed their trademarks over to the RIAA so this will go offline at a domain level in no time.
20 Gallons is a LONG operating time. My generator uses around 1.6l of fuel per hour (3kW). 20 Gallons is 75l so 2 days of non stop usage. Admittedly in an end of the world scenario the panels will produce energy for longer I think you will have other concerns if getting more fuel has become that much of an issue.
Calling through reception is OLD SCHOOL recruiting. That is how you did it before linkedIn and CV databases made it relatively easy to find out who had a certain skillset.
If a recruiter has been given the task to find someone with a certain skillset they will take a number of steps. First is to advertise, this picks up some of the people who are actively looking for a job, next is to contact their networks and people they know from their database, next is to mine networks like LinkedIn and finally if that fails is to target competitors who use that type of people and try and talk to them.
And why shouldn't they call through reception? That company isn't their client. People are generally always interested in good opportunities. Sometimes you will get people who are rude to you. But most of the time the response is - sounds interesting, here is my mobile give me a call at 6pm to talk.
Then all people working in SEO and App development must be crap, shoddy and useless.
Some programmers are crap. Some programmes are excellent. Some system administrators are crap. Some system administrators are excellent. Some recruiters are crap. Some recruiters are excellent. See the pattern?
That would require them to be totally irrational and for them to act in ways they currently haven't with their advanced conventional weapons. Iran already has the capability to build advanced weaponry that can cause headaches even for US forces. Those are never seen in the hands of Hamas or others.
Despite all the US propaganda Iran has acted rationally throughout this whole process. They see the US as a threat, and the only way to stop that threat is to be nuclear capable. The US has responded with crippling sanctions but despite that Iran has managed to continue to expand its economy and its technological base.
As your example for who to retaliate against in the event of a disguised launch there are a couple of points. The first is that transporting launch capable nukes secretly is almost impossible, and even if you did manage to move it to launch secretly the chances are it would have been caught on satellite footage in advance of its launch and it can be identified later.
The more real risk is a lead lined shipping container arriving in a port somewhere. But it is possible to identify where a nuclear warhead was manufactured from the debris it leaves behind. The US isn't backwards about invading countries with fairly flimsy evidence of involvement. How much evidence would it need to attack Iran if it found Iranian specific markers in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion?
The people in power don't care what Shia or any other doctrine is. Religion is a tool used to control the mob. It always has been.
From where I sit America is bat shit religious as well. And there is nothing that makes me think a Christian based religion is any less violent or intolerant then an Islamic equivalent. But I don't believe that the US will do anything too stupid because the people in power are nothing if not pragmatic. They will lose their benefits and the comforts in their lives if they destroy it all.
Iran is exactly the same. I'm sure the people in power make all the right observations of faith. But when it comes down to it they want their comfy houses and their nice cars and their pretty women. Just like everyone else.
If the US wants to make itself safer, to reduce tensions in the ME and generally make the world a better place to live it should start helping countries rather than hindering them. NOTHING beats education and quality of life to make blowing yourself up and throwing it all away appear totally stupid.
Nukes are a thoroughly shit offensive weapon. If you throw a nuke at anyone you will get stomped out of existence. Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days. Nukes, chemical weapons, biological weapons, they are all weapons that change the status quo too far. If you deploy any of them against an external party it is game over. As a result they are useless for offence.
Defensively though they are brilliant. The make your borders essentially inviolate to other state actors. Yes you can have rebel or guerilla actions (think Pakistan) but you are safe from someone like the US or Russia. And given the US and Russia have a history of invading countries in that region it seems like a fair incentive to want them.
For Iran to start WW3 after obtaining nuclear weapons would require them to have the drive and the motivation to fight against major obstacles to get them combined with a desire to eradicate themselves from existence. Not normally the sort of thing you get in the one person.
At the point of the accident the highway was 3 lanes in each direction, having just come down from 4. I was in the right hand lane (fast lane) travelling at 100 kph. The traffic was heavy but moving at speed.
For those who know the area it was south bound just after the Gateway merge just before the underwood exit.
It's been 2 years and still when I think about that accident I get upset. No one was seriously hurt (my wife has ongoing back issues) but I had my two girls in the car. The youngest was only 6 weeks old at the time. Because I knew he was going to hit us and how big he was, that when I turned around after the crash I expected both my girls to be dead.
All I can say is thank you to the designers of their car seats and capsule. The top of the boot lid had penetrated the rear windscreen and come a long way into the passenger area. Also the pram in the boot had twisted and rammed one of its supports up through the parcel tray. Amazingly despite all the glass and fragments covering them the only injury they received was friction burns to the inside of my eldest's legs from her seat belt and bruised feet where she kicked the back of my seat.
True - the raw number of traffic accidents is a very hard number to measure. The more minor the traffic accident the more likely it is to never be reported.
However the number of fatalities has, as you said, dramatically dropped. From the Australian Bureau of Statistics
Road fatalities and fatality rates - 1926 to 2008
Australian road fatalities for the period 1926 to 2008 are shown in graph 24.22. Road fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles and 100,000 persons for the same period are shown in graph 24.23. Until 1970, each year other than during the Great Depression and World War 2 had seen a steady growth in motor vehicle ownership and a corresponding increase in road deaths. By 1970 the number of vehicles had increased twelve-fold over the number in 1926 and the road toll had increased about four times to reach its highest mark of 3,798 deaths. The number of fatalities per 100,000 people also peaked in 1970 at 30.4. The road toll in 2008 of 1,464 was around 40% of the 1970 figure, while the number of fatalities per 100,000 people (6.9) for 2008 was slightly less than a quarter of that of 1970. Also, while there were eight road fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles in 1970, this rate has decreased to one in 2008.
Except the number of accidents caused by these systems is lower than the accidents prevented. Every decision you make on a day to day basis is a trade off between two outcome. When you are designing a system, particularly like auto braking you are running the trade off between whether the machine knows better or the human knows better. In many/most cases the machine's response will be an improvement on the human's response.
From your example I'm guessing you have never driven a car with automatic brake systems and tried them out. I have and they kick in REALLY REALLY late. To the point where I was convinced it wasn't going to work. If your car kicks in the automatic brakes the odds are you were going to hit whatever it was in front of you. If that means the tractor trailer then hits you, realistically it was going to anyway.
Obviously there will be cases where the automatic systems make the wrong call and an accident occurs that either wouldn't have or would have been more minor without those systems. But I would suggest the data is heavily skewed towards the systems being a net positive than a negative.
We had this happen to us. Driving along the pacific highway south from Brisbane we had to brake hard because of debris on the road causing the cars in front to emergency stop. Because of my following distance I didn't have to ABS level brake. Unfortunately the 18 wheeler truck behind me didn't have enough space on me. He hit me still travelling at close to 70kph. The only reason my family and I are alive today is the fact he was unloaded and we were in a very safe car (E Class Mercedes).
The truck driver has been charged with Driving without due care and attention.
Yes but that doesn't mean they have to build the hardware.
As for your comment about phones I think we are already there. A huge number of people are still using their Samsung S2s and are quite happy. The difference though is life is pretty hard for a phone and you can always tell whose phone is long in the tooth just by the bumps and scrapes. I think this means for most people the 2 year cycle will continue because their phone is battered rather than obsolete.
Except I hate crap keyboards, crap track pads and small screens. It doesn't matter how good a laptop keyboard is it still sucks next to a decent discrete keyboard.
Yes you can plug external everything into a laptop but then it becomes an expensive version of a desktop. The only exceptions to this are where the laptop comes with a decent docking stations - ala Dell Latitudes. In that instance you still get the advantages of mobility with the ability to have a work place setup.
But even if you do run a docking station desktops are WAY cheaper than laptops. It doesn't matter that laptops are getting better because desktops are getting better too.
You say you are wasting money on a laptop, but if you never move around with your pc you are the one wasting the money. Why pay for a form factor you don't want / need and sacrifice the components inside?
Apple doesn't need to build Mac hardware to use or to do the development. It needs OSX. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from selling their hardware manufacturing arm to someone like ACER and then releasing OSX to the market. Potentially releasing it as a free item in order to increase market penetration. In fact there would be an argument to be made for combining iTunes and OSX into the same package and releasing that to the market.
I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You have never lived in London I take it? Some super-privileged live in very exclusive post-codes in London. But a lot of the housing in London is fucking awful council estates that I would need to be paid to even consider walking through. Then if they are not council estates they are SW postcodes which for a long time were the expat Aussie, Kiwi and Saffer ghettos.
The truly super-privileged in the UK don't live in London they live on estates in places like the Cotswolds. Often they will maintain a flat for working in London as well though.
As for the security theatre I hope you are wrong. Hopefully they realise that the passengers on a fast train are the almost zero risk aspect of the operation. Unlike aircraft it is relatively easy to get at a train while it is moving. Just damage the tracks, drop a brick from a bridge etc. Getting someone onto a high speed train with a bomb is pointless when stealing a truck and crashing it onto the line inside the trains braking distance is likely to be more horrifying from a terrorist perspective.
Of course. You always need to model the outcomes and model what will get the best return on investment. The other is to model any other externalities as well.
For example bypasses will not impact traffic travelling into and out of a city where the point of origin or destination is that city. Where as people travelling by train will. The flip side is that the trainstations themselves will generate traffic wherever they are located so that needs to be planned for and handled as well.
Other considerations are pollution and noise. The HSR is likely to be noisier where it runs but for a relatively short period of time. Vehicles are individually quieter but in sum much louder, they are also more distributed. So you are trading a more general reduction in noise for greater noise levels at specific points for shorter durations.
As for pollution HSR will generate significantly less pollution per passenger mile but also move the pollution away from the population centre to the power generator.
Finally what is the long term maintenance costs? Road wears and wears fast as far as infrastructure goes. Rail on the other hand has a very long life cycle in comparison. Over what period of time would the capital and maintenance costs of bypasses exceed the capital and maintenance costs of the rail?
All of these things need to be taken into consideration when deciding if something is a viable plan. You can't just say - it cost $20 billion so it needs to be $100 per ticket to break even.
If that is what they build then you have a whole set of other problems.
Go and clone the Japanese Shinkansen though and none of what you say if true. FFS all the shinkansens I have been on in recent years even have standard powerpoints for you to plug your laptop / other charger in.
The reason that rail is subsidised is because the benefits of their operation, to the governments, are not restricted to their fare price. Every passenger is a passenger not taking an alternative mode of transport. Given the level of congestion on the highways this can be the difference between moving traffic and grid lock. If you can get 15% of the traffic on that corridor travelling by train you are potentially looking at saving vastly more money because you don't have to upgrade the highways. This is especially true where the highways are running through heavily developed areas.
If the backup generators hadn't worked then there would have been multiple days for a truck carrying a replacement generator to drive from anywhere in the country to plug it in.
People seem to forget the fucking massive wall of water that smashed its way across the Fukushima plant and everything around it. Wikipedia has a good article on the safety systems of a BWR reactor. I suggest you have a read.
In Aus Starbucks openned 85 stores. Lost $144 million dollars and then closed 60 of their stores....
Starbucks basically collapsed in Australia because it couldn't make a decent coffee to save itself (sorry).
I had a PCA hooked up after having my broken my collar bone and shattered my wrist re-assembled. The method for me to get a shot of morphine was to simply push a button. The system was set that I could only get a certain number of presses per hour.
That said I didn't use the button at all. They had given me oral painkillers and I was fine with those for the 8 hours I had to wait before they let me go home. For the most part I was just seriously bored. My entertainment was my laptop and watching tv shows on it. It would have been trivial for me to connect an Ethernet cable and mess away.
Yes and no. Yes if they make no changes to the iPlayer service. However what is much more likely to happen is that you will need to log in to iPlayer instead of just being able to access it with nothing but the geo-block.
You want access to the iPlayer server? Please type in the receipt code for your TV license please. If you do not have a UK Tv license but live in the EU and would like to access iPlayer please purchase a subscription over here.
It's a clone of MP3Juices. Grooveshark is gone. Not to mention they signed their trademarks over to the RIAA so this will go offline at a domain level in no time.
20 Gallons is a LONG operating time. My generator uses around 1.6l of fuel per hour (3kW). 20 Gallons is 75l so 2 days of non stop usage. Admittedly in an end of the world scenario the panels will produce energy for longer I think you will have other concerns if getting more fuel has become that much of an issue.
And if he had called you with your dream job?
Calling through reception is OLD SCHOOL recruiting. That is how you did it before linkedIn and CV databases made it relatively easy to find out who had a certain skillset.
If a recruiter has been given the task to find someone with a certain skillset they will take a number of steps. First is to advertise, this picks up some of the people who are actively looking for a job, next is to contact their networks and people they know from their database, next is to mine networks like LinkedIn and finally if that fails is to target competitors who use that type of people and try and talk to them.
And why shouldn't they call through reception? That company isn't their client. People are generally always interested in good opportunities. Sometimes you will get people who are rude to you. But most of the time the response is - sounds interesting, here is my mobile give me a call at 6pm to talk.
Then all people working in SEO and App development must be crap, shoddy and useless.
Some programmers are crap. Some programmes are excellent. Some system administrators are crap. Some system administrators are excellent. Some recruiters are crap. Some recruiters are excellent. See the pattern?
That would require them to be totally irrational and for them to act in ways they currently haven't with their advanced conventional weapons. Iran already has the capability to build advanced weaponry that can cause headaches even for US forces. Those are never seen in the hands of Hamas or others.
Despite all the US propaganda Iran has acted rationally throughout this whole process. They see the US as a threat, and the only way to stop that threat is to be nuclear capable. The US has responded with crippling sanctions but despite that Iran has managed to continue to expand its economy and its technological base.
As your example for who to retaliate against in the event of a disguised launch there are a couple of points. The first is that transporting launch capable nukes secretly is almost impossible, and even if you did manage to move it to launch secretly the chances are it would have been caught on satellite footage in advance of its launch and it can be identified later.
The more real risk is a lead lined shipping container arriving in a port somewhere. But it is possible to identify where a nuclear warhead was manufactured from the debris it leaves behind. The US isn't backwards about invading countries with fairly flimsy evidence of involvement. How much evidence would it need to attack Iran if it found Iranian specific markers in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion?
The people in power don't care what Shia or any other doctrine is. Religion is a tool used to control the mob. It always has been.
From where I sit America is bat shit religious as well. And there is nothing that makes me think a Christian based religion is any less violent or intolerant then an Islamic equivalent. But I don't believe that the US will do anything too stupid because the people in power are nothing if not pragmatic. They will lose their benefits and the comforts in their lives if they destroy it all.
Iran is exactly the same. I'm sure the people in power make all the right observations of faith. But when it comes down to it they want their comfy houses and their nice cars and their pretty women. Just like everyone else.
If the US wants to make itself safer, to reduce tensions in the ME and generally make the world a better place to live it should start helping countries rather than hindering them. NOTHING beats education and quality of life to make blowing yourself up and throwing it all away appear totally stupid.
Rubbish.
Nukes are a thoroughly shit offensive weapon. If you throw a nuke at anyone you will get stomped out of existence. Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days. Nukes, chemical weapons, biological weapons, they are all weapons that change the status quo too far. If you deploy any of them against an external party it is game over. As a result they are useless for offence.
Defensively though they are brilliant. The make your borders essentially inviolate to other state actors. Yes you can have rebel or guerilla actions (think Pakistan) but you are safe from someone like the US or Russia. And given the US and Russia have a history of invading countries in that region it seems like a fair incentive to want them.
For Iran to start WW3 after obtaining nuclear weapons would require them to have the drive and the motivation to fight against major obstacles to get them combined with a desire to eradicate themselves from existence. Not normally the sort of thing you get in the one person.
At the point of the accident the highway was 3 lanes in each direction, having just come down from 4. I was in the right hand lane (fast lane) travelling at 100 kph. The traffic was heavy but moving at speed.
For those who know the area it was south bound just after the Gateway merge just before the underwood exit.
Here is the street view of the spot. https://goo.gl/maps/Z4bOs
It's been 2 years and still when I think about that accident I get upset. No one was seriously hurt (my wife has ongoing back issues) but I had my two girls in the car. The youngest was only 6 weeks old at the time. Because I knew he was going to hit us and how big he was, that when I turned around after the crash I expected both my girls to be dead.
All I can say is thank you to the designers of their car seats and capsule. The top of the boot lid had penetrated the rear windscreen and come a long way into the passenger area. Also the pram in the boot had twisted and rammed one of its supports up through the parcel tray. Amazingly despite all the glass and fragments covering them the only injury they received was friction burns to the inside of my eldest's legs from her seat belt and bruised feet where she kicked the back of my seat.
True - the raw number of traffic accidents is a very hard number to measure. The more minor the traffic accident the more likely it is to never be reported.
However the number of fatalities has, as you said, dramatically dropped. From the Australian Bureau of Statistics
Road fatalities and fatality rates - 1926 to 2008
Australian road fatalities for the period 1926 to 2008 are shown in graph 24.22. Road fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles and 100,000 persons for the same period are shown in graph 24.23. Until 1970, each year other than during the Great Depression and World War 2 had seen a steady growth in motor vehicle ownership and a corresponding increase in road deaths. By 1970 the number of vehicles had increased twelve-fold over the number in 1926 and the road toll had increased about four times to reach its highest mark of 3,798 deaths. The number of fatalities per 100,000 people also peaked in 1970 at 30.4. The road toll in 2008 of 1,464 was around 40% of the 1970 figure, while the number of fatalities per 100,000 people (6.9) for 2008 was slightly less than a quarter of that of 1970. Also, while there were eight road fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles in 1970, this rate has decreased to one in 2008.
Except the number of accidents caused by these systems is lower than the accidents prevented. Every decision you make on a day to day basis is a trade off between two outcome. When you are designing a system, particularly like auto braking you are running the trade off between whether the machine knows better or the human knows better. In many/most cases the machine's response will be an improvement on the human's response.
From your example I'm guessing you have never driven a car with automatic brake systems and tried them out. I have and they kick in REALLY REALLY late. To the point where I was convinced it wasn't going to work. If your car kicks in the automatic brakes the odds are you were going to hit whatever it was in front of you. If that means the tractor trailer then hits you, realistically it was going to anyway.
Obviously there will be cases where the automatic systems make the wrong call and an accident occurs that either wouldn't have or would have been more minor without those systems. But I would suggest the data is heavily skewed towards the systems being a net positive than a negative.
We had this happen to us. Driving along the pacific highway south from Brisbane we had to brake hard because of debris on the road causing the cars in front to emergency stop. Because of my following distance I didn't have to ABS level brake. Unfortunately the 18 wheeler truck behind me didn't have enough space on me. He hit me still travelling at close to 70kph. The only reason my family and I are alive today is the fact he was unloaded and we were in a very safe car (E Class Mercedes).
The truck driver has been charged with Driving without due care and attention.
Yes but that doesn't mean they have to build the hardware.
As for your comment about phones I think we are already there. A huge number of people are still using their Samsung S2s and are quite happy. The difference though is life is pretty hard for a phone and you can always tell whose phone is long in the tooth just by the bumps and scrapes. I think this means for most people the 2 year cycle will continue because their phone is battered rather than obsolete.
Except I hate crap keyboards, crap track pads and small screens. It doesn't matter how good a laptop keyboard is it still sucks next to a decent discrete keyboard.
Yes you can plug external everything into a laptop but then it becomes an expensive version of a desktop. The only exceptions to this are where the laptop comes with a decent docking stations - ala Dell Latitudes. In that instance you still get the advantages of mobility with the ability to have a work place setup.
But even if you do run a docking station desktops are WAY cheaper than laptops. It doesn't matter that laptops are getting better because desktops are getting better too.
You say you are wasting money on a laptop, but if you never move around with your pc you are the one wasting the money. Why pay for a form factor you don't want / need and sacrifice the components inside?
Apple doesn't need to build Mac hardware to use or to do the development. It needs OSX. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from selling their hardware manufacturing arm to someone like ACER and then releasing OSX to the market. Potentially releasing it as a free item in order to increase market penetration. In fact there would be an argument to be made for combining iTunes and OSX into the same package and releasing that to the market.
I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.