Adobe must be solidly messing things up. Even an otherwise clunky compiler like gcc can vectorize simple loops, so for example on x86 blitting in C can easily saturate whatever is the choke point in moving data around -- no more is the CPUs execution speed an issue. Same goes for most other data processing, such as 1D and 2D FIR (as you may need for rescale filtering). Methinks they don't have anyone who has a clue about signal processing. All they have is the artsy enterprisey folks. They know everything about whiz-bang technologies, but can't code for the life of them.
What a bunch of brouhaha. There is nothing unstable about HDD -- hard drives are much simpler systems, mechanically, than a tape drive + tape combination.
Good luck if you're a small business and your tape drive breaks and you urgently need that file from the tape. Good luck if your tape drops into sand and any sand (just one unlucky grain is enough) gets in. OTOH, for a hard drive dropping into sand is perfect.
RAID is not a data recovery system, it's a system that protects you from hard drive failures. It doesn't recover anything, it allows you to sustain a failure and later restore the redundancy.
Suggesting HDDs as a backup is not silly. It makes perfect financial sense, especially if you're a small business (say a dozen PCs and a TB or two on the file server). For the cost of one LTO-5 tape drive you can get 20TB of USB 2 hard drive storage, and you can go and get it at your local 24h grocery store (Walmart, Meijer, what have you).
100MB/s is plenty. Consider the cost of the whole deal: interface card, drive, cleaning tape, aggravation of having to switch tapes/run cleaning job, and so on. Three external USB 2.0 drives beat that speed, and cost a whopping $420 at Walmart, of all places. You can go and buy them in the middle of the night if need be. Just plug them into the motherboard USB connectors, no recent enough system will have any problems keeping them all going full tilt. The drives will likely last 3 years of constant use. Now let's look at the numbers:
Assumptions: - the tape has a lifetime of 300 passes, capacity of 1.5TB and $100 cost - the drive lasts 3 years and costs $2000 (given my experience with LTO, that's optimistic) - the SAS interface card and cable costs $300
- a USB external hard drive has capacity of 1TB and costs $130
Assuming that nothing gets any cheaper over time, you have to amortize the drive and controller cost over the $30/TB difference between tape and HD. You need $7500 worth of tapes to break even.
Now let's look at the lifetimes. If you're easy on tapes and generally lucky, a 10 tape set may outlast the drive. At that time, you may as well toss the tapes since you will want to buy a newer generation drive, and probably won't risk contaminating it with old crud from those tapes even if the drive may access them just fine. With my luck, half of the tapes had errors after one year, and that was on a lower density tape (VS160).
For LTO, I'd think that you'd want the backup will be written, then verified, and then any data that had errors will be written again. So the number of passes available from the tape's life shrinks by half to 150.
150 passes lets you use one tape to store and verify a total of 225 TB of data over its lifetime. How does that stack up to the hard drive? A USB 2 hard drive will transfer 3.9 TB per day, so if you operate it continuously it will outlive the tape after 2 months. Now of course noone uses backup tapes continuously, but that just gives you the idea of scales involved.
Now knowing that tape prices don't really drop much with time, in a year or two the hard drive cost per terabyte will be lower than the cost of a tape, and there's absolutely no reason to buy tapes any longer. With USB or eSata HDs, the interface costs are essentially nil, and most any current server comes with enough connectors to plug in several external drives at once, and the chipset is fast enough to keep them saturated if your source storage allows. You won't really be throwing multiple $2k tape drives at a bandwidth problem, but with USB or eSATA HD, the bandwidth comes essentially for free: as long as you have enough drives, each drive adds to the bandwidth. With tapes, a tape only adds to the storage capacity, but bandwidth costs $2k per 100MB/s!
So no, tapes make absolutely no financial sense unless your storage needs are immense -- as in a financial institution, media production, engineering/data mining, IT service provider... And even then, the hard drive technology is quickly catching up so that the slight win for tape drives is only a win for the next year or two. After that -- no excuse for sticking with tape, no matter what your size.
You cannot willy-nilly increase tape density towards that of hard drives without ensuring that the whole environment is sterile as well. The way current LTO drives are designed, it's a joke. Just look at the specced tape lifes: 2-3 months for a tape that's $50? Gimme a break. I don't believe that LTO-5 or LTO-6 will be any better than current drives -- if anything, the durability of the drives and the tapes will go to hell. Can't keep it in dirty air while increasing densities. Tape technology has been essentially a dead end for a good while, and people who promote it are really trying to swim uphill for no good reason at all. Just give it a rest and work on making hard drives even cheaper.
No, I have no interest -- vested or otherwise -- in disliking the technology. Just that it ceased to make any sense early in this decade. Hard drives hardly ever gave me problems, while tape drives were a constant headache. Compared to hard drives, the cost of tape storage is absolutely ridiculous. A hard drive will easily last 3 years, has decent random access, and you can throw several of them at a server if you want to have faster transfers -- along with a dirt cheap USB or eSata interface card.
Instead of a tape library, just grab a couple USB hubs, and hook up your drives and hubs in a nice tree. Can't beat the access speed of that one, and you can buy all of the components in your local Walmart. 10TB of storage, in 1TB "cartridges", for $1600 installed. No special hardware needed on your server. And you can get it at 4AM, too. Beat that one with a tape library.
A frakkin' hard drive? It's not like getting a 2.5" 1TB is an issue, so I just don't see a point of using tape.
I have used a DLT VS160 drive, and the drive lasted 2 years in normal office environment, doing one backup a day. The tapes were bloody expensive, the drives even more so, and the performance was comparatively abysmal. And this was all using vendor supported configurations: Dell PowerEdge 2650/2850 servers, RHEL, tape drives from Dell too.
Before that, I've used DAT, and it worked so-so -- the drive outlasted a box of tapes and got tossed then, and the tapes seemed to last only 2-3 months each.
The tape support in Linux's kernel has been regressing from what was relatively decent performance in mid-90s. By decent I mean that the drive could stay streaming and didn't have to backtrack. The QIC drives and tapes seemed to last forever (a decade for the drive, 3-5 years for the tape, easy).
With the DLT and LTO drives, I have had to learn quickly how to force the scsi controller to do a device reconnect, because the drives would routinely get stuck. Every once in a while, the SCSI driver stack would just barf and get stuck in a way that made all SCSI devices connected to a given controller unresponsive. This seemed pretty ridiculous -- I have had more success with IDE drives!
And my woes were not due to any sort of SCSI connectivity issues -- I have been following the spec, and went as far as making a buffered inline probe to sniff the SCSI bus using a logic analyzer, and any one of the differential lanes could be routed to a buffered BNC output, to inspect the eye patterns on the scope. So that wasn't a problem -- the controller would just go dead at some point, with any number of commands in progress (sometimes zero, sometimes more), without any protocol errors other than what looked like the controller chip going Hi-Z on the output and refusing to do anything more. This problem was limited to tape drives -- drives in the same enclosure would never have a problem, in 1000s of hours of tests... The kernel would throw a backtrace from somewhere in the scsi stack, and eventually it would hard-panic.
I surmised that the SCSI tape technology is pretty much a well marketed pile of dung, and stayed away. No regrets.
The per gigabyte cost of external 2.5" 1TB drives is same as that of high-end tapes, and if a drive breaks you lose access to just one drive, not to your whole tape collection. And the USB 2 interface is way more convenient than the SCSI anachronism.
I'm not a Nascar fan, but some would argue with you on the Nascar point alone. Now can Nascar outweigh all the harm done -- that's left for discussion.
[To those that don't know: Nascar is an unintended consequence of prohibition.]
You've forgot that the implementation effort required is coincidentally better expressed in MPG too!
Suppose you have a car design that does 10 MPG and you want to go to 20 MPG. It'll be quite a bit of engineering work.
Now, after many years of tightening regulation, your company has a 50 MPG car. It will be an engineering feat of the same magnitude (at least) to go to 60 MPG!
The actual fuel consumption here doesn't matter since you can't be improving it at the same *absolute* scale forever. One would hope that's understood. All serial production contemporary cars are pretty much in the same ballpark, no need to expect some miracles here.
What MPGs show is some overall "greenness" of given car design on a scale that faces reality: it's not any easier to from 100 to 110 MPG than it is to go from 10 to 20 MPG. MPGs just codify the expectation that stems from how nature works.
Yes, you are chasing milliliters, but when all you have is a road car with an ICE to work with, in the end you will be chasing milliliters, and it will be just as hard as chasing liters was just a century prior.
The biggest savings will come from switching to another technology, and even then a linear scale is something I'd have an issue with -- on the same grounds. If all you have is electric cars, I'd much rather use of MPkWh rather than km/kWh -- the former will be a more practical unit.
You're comparing apples to oranges: it's obvious that if you don't have to drag all the fuel in the rocket, the rocket is smaller, and whatever ends up on the orbit is relatively a bigger % of your rocket's initial mass. But you did have to drag the fuel in the plane! Maybe it's cheaper to drag it around in an airplane, but here we are essentially arguing as to what your first stage should be: rocket vs. jet, and all that. You don't really "save" anything, you just shift the expense to a potentially more optimized first stage. Maybe the darn rocket should have had an air-breathing 1st stage in the first place?
Unless, that is, you propose launching from Mt. Everest, where the 1st stage, or should I call it 0th stage, is courtesy of Alpine orogeny and already paid for:)
I see no problem with MPG. MPG are a better indicator of what's going on, since it doesn't lose sensitivity so quickly. One has to understand that as cars get more efficient, they are asymptotically approaching some limit. A linear scale doesn't work, unless you start piling up digits after the decimal.
Let's say that Prius does 4.5l/100km in some driving scenario. I highly doubt that a non-plugin hybrid, of a certain mass, driven in similar scenario, will ever do, say, 1l/100km. I'm too lazy to get real numbers out of my ass, but some things just don't change -- even you you drop rolling friction, assume ideal thermodynamic efficiency (with realistic materials, though, no 5000K cylinder walls, please), get some 50-years-in-the-future drag coefficient, you still won't beat some number. Ever.
Thus the closer you get, the smaller the difference will be in linear terms. MPG, OTOH, will keep going up while still needing no more than 3 digits: 999MPG is 0.24l/100km, and you will simply not get a car that good. A change from 100 to 101MPG is 0.02l/100km, and a change from 200 to 201MPG is 0.006l/100km. IMHO it's more manageable to use MPG since you need three digits for realistic scenarios and that's it. Heck, it's rather rare when you can definitely say "xxx is enough for everyone" and be right -- with MPG, it's just that. Perhaps with some very, very clever computer control (automatic pilot), you may need one more digit of accuracy (MPG with one decimal). You need really repeatable driving for that, and here humans just won't do.
So, by the time you need xxx.x MPG format, we must have pretty much cars that drive themselves, and are linked in (ad-hoc?) networks that optimize traffic flows for energy efficiency. Human drivers are abysmal when road utilization is high: traffic jams are caused by human drivers, not by anything that's somehow inherent in the road or high traffic flow. The control loops in our brains are poor enough to cause problems when the bumper-to-bumper distance gets small and the speed is "high" (think freeway). When traffic is flowing well, humans still are notoriously inefficient drivers, but the good flow gives an impression that things are just fine, when they are in fact far from optimal. Very far.
The only problem is that this is the equivalent of burning up all that oil -- it will use the same amount of oxygen, just that the carbon will be sequestered in the microorganisms. Now, those don't live forever, and will eventually die and break down. The question is: will there be something to eat those and buffer all the carbon? If not, how fast will those microorganisms break down, and how bad will be whatever's left over? Will there be other bacteria to devour that mess; if so -- are we going to get massive CO2 bubbles coming out of the ocean, potentially sinking ships? Just remember that just the fact that something is natural doesn't mean it's any good. Most potent known poisons are all from natural (living) sources. Heck, the damn oil is all from natural sources -- good old plants and sun, gives you green giggles, but see how messy it really is...
Given that most orbital rockets linger in the dense, friction-expensive atmosphere rather shortly and *slowly* there is very little benefit to be had by dropping them down from a plane. I suggest a simple calculation: express the orbital energy as a function of mass and height, and see how small the potential energy is compared to kinetic energy. Hypotethically, if you would lift a rocket up to orbital height without giving it orbital velocity, you'd still need pretty much all of the fuel just to reach the orbital velocity.
The only benefit from launching higher up is for sub-orbital flights that do expend a significant amount of their fuel to overcome atmospheric friction and to gain potential energy. That's why SSOne launches up high.
OTOH, LEO requires ~30 times more energy than sub-orbital. GEO/lunar requires ~60 times more. So, whatever you launch to GEO, the energy used to bring it up to 100km high is so small that you can ignore it and your error is within 2%!
Morton-Thiokol, the same people who, through their negligence (can't call it any different), killed one shuttle crew? Yeah, a great name to associate yourself with, Republican from Alabama.
I up you one. There is one place in the developed world I know of where you can in fact get into serious trouble, even with no use of Google Maps, GPS or any other aid of that sort.
You can get stuck in "blocked-in" lanes (due to construction) on I-75 in Detroit. The Bridge-to-Canada lane may several exits blocked off, and you may end up crossing the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and end up on the Canadian side of the border. There is nothing on the U.S. side preventing you from leaving the U.S.
If you don't have your passport with you, you can get into a ton of grief (4+ hours of interrogation) trying to get back into the U.S.
I wonder whether she was actually following Google directions while walking, or did she just make up the story up later? How can one prove whether she was really following those directions while walking? Was her smartphone/whatever taken into chain of evidence at the scene?...
Most everywhere in the U.S., if you can't afford basic medical care, it is "free". A hospital can't refuse admitting an emergency case based on whether the patient's bill will be covered. If her income would warrant it, she could get her medical bill reduced to more-or-less equivalent of a copay under good insurance coverege. This of course is an uphill battle, and you better had some sharp family members to help out, but it could be done. I don't wish that on anyone, of course.
BTW, what about the driver who actually hit her? He is named a defendant in the suit, after all!
But they do know those laws! The mapping data these days contains speed limits for "thoroughfares" in most of the U.S., and I believe their goal is to have speed limits on every paved and/or named road in the U.S. Of course Google may not be dealing with that, the mapping data providers do.
That law is a bunch of crap. I can't see how it can have any value. There's no way to fairly enforce it. You'd need to literally freeze the time, and do some experimental mechanics on the road surface in at-the-moment conditions, to determine whether the situation could be "unsafe". Heck, give me a break as to how to define "unsafe"... LOL. I hate such laws. They are basically carte blanche for issuing tickets.
I think that if you're uninsured and on low income, you won't really go bankrupt -- *if* you actually apply for financial assistance. It's perhaps a little known dirty secret, but if you're in what's now considered entry-level middle class, you can get pretty much every medical bill from a major medical center reduced. I've caught onto that too late while living on grad student salary: I could get every major bill reduced by 60-75%, just like that. Sigh -- hindsight is 20/20.
Maybe MSFT should hack Google Maps and entice female users into having sex with random passerby. Result: Google gets sued into oblivion by everyone who caught STDs and got pregnant.
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Adobe must be solidly messing things up. Even an otherwise clunky compiler like gcc can vectorize simple loops, so for example on x86 blitting in C can easily saturate whatever is the choke point in moving data around -- no more is the CPUs execution speed an issue. Same goes for most other data processing, such as 1D and 2D FIR (as you may need for rescale filtering). Methinks they don't have anyone who has a clue about signal processing. All they have is the artsy enterprisey folks. They know everything about whiz-bang technologies, but can't code for the life of them.
What a bunch of brouhaha. There is nothing unstable about HDD -- hard drives are much simpler systems, mechanically, than a tape drive + tape combination.
Good luck if you're a small business and your tape drive breaks and you urgently need that file from the tape. Good luck if your tape drops into sand and any sand (just one unlucky grain is enough) gets in. OTOH, for a hard drive dropping into sand is perfect.
RAID is not a data recovery system, it's a system that protects you from hard drive failures. It doesn't recover anything, it allows you to sustain a failure and later restore the redundancy.
Suggesting HDDs as a backup is not silly. It makes perfect financial sense, especially if you're a small business (say a dozen PCs and a TB or two on the file server). For the cost of one LTO-5 tape drive you can get 20TB of USB 2 hard drive storage, and you can go and get it at your local 24h grocery store (Walmart, Meijer, what have you).
100MB/s is plenty. Consider the cost of the whole deal: interface card, drive, cleaning tape, aggravation of having to switch tapes/run cleaning job, and so on. Three external USB 2.0 drives beat that speed, and cost a whopping $420 at Walmart, of all places. You can go and buy them in the middle of the night if need be. Just plug them into the motherboard USB connectors, no recent enough system will have any problems keeping them all going full tilt. The drives will likely last 3 years of constant use. Now let's look at the numbers:
Assumptions:
- the tape has a lifetime of 300 passes, capacity of 1.5TB and $100 cost
- the drive lasts 3 years and costs $2000 (given my experience with LTO, that's optimistic)
- the SAS interface card and cable costs $300
- a USB external hard drive has capacity of 1TB and costs $130
Assuming that nothing gets any cheaper over time, you have to amortize the drive and controller cost over the $30/TB difference between tape and HD. You need $7500 worth of tapes to break even.
Now let's look at the lifetimes. If you're easy on tapes and generally lucky, a 10 tape set may outlast the drive. At that time, you may as well toss the tapes since you will want to buy a newer generation drive, and probably won't risk contaminating it with old crud from those tapes even if the drive may access them just fine. With my luck, half of the tapes had errors after one year, and that was on a lower density tape (VS160).
For LTO, I'd think that you'd want the backup will be written, then verified, and then any data that had errors will be written again. So the number of passes available from the tape's life shrinks by half to 150.
150 passes lets you use one tape to store and verify a total of 225 TB of data over its lifetime. How does that stack up to the hard drive? A USB 2 hard drive will transfer 3.9 TB per day, so if you operate it continuously it will outlive the tape after 2 months. Now of course noone uses backup tapes continuously, but that just gives you the idea of scales involved.
Now knowing that tape prices don't really drop much with time, in a year or two the hard drive cost per terabyte will be lower than the cost of a tape, and there's absolutely no reason to buy tapes any longer. With USB or eSata HDs, the interface costs are essentially nil, and most any current server comes with enough connectors to plug in several external drives at once, and the chipset is fast enough to keep them saturated if your source storage allows. You won't really be throwing multiple $2k tape drives at a bandwidth problem, but with USB or eSATA HD, the bandwidth comes essentially for free: as long as you have enough drives, each drive adds to the bandwidth. With tapes, a tape only adds to the storage capacity, but bandwidth costs $2k per 100MB/s!
So no, tapes make absolutely no financial sense unless your storage needs are immense -- as in a financial institution, media production, engineering/data mining, IT service provider... And even then, the hard drive technology is quickly catching up so that the slight win for tape drives is only a win for the next year or two. After that -- no excuse for sticking with tape, no matter what your size.
I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I get 45 MB/s linear read from a comparatively ancient Poweredge 2650 server's built-in RAID controller.
You cannot willy-nilly increase tape density towards that of hard drives without ensuring that the whole environment is sterile as well. The way current LTO drives are designed, it's a joke. Just look at the specced tape lifes: 2-3 months for a tape that's $50? Gimme a break. I don't believe that LTO-5 or LTO-6 will be any better than current drives -- if anything, the durability of the drives and the tapes will go to hell. Can't keep it in dirty air while increasing densities. Tape technology has been essentially a dead end for a good while, and people who promote it are really trying to swim uphill for no good reason at all. Just give it a rest and work on making hard drives even cheaper.
No, I have no interest -- vested or otherwise -- in disliking the technology. Just that it ceased to make any sense early in this decade. Hard drives hardly ever gave me problems, while tape drives were a constant headache. Compared to hard drives, the cost of tape storage is absolutely ridiculous. A hard drive will easily last 3 years, has decent random access, and you can throw several of them at a server if you want to have faster transfers -- along with a dirt cheap USB or eSata interface card.
Instead of a tape library, just grab a couple USB hubs, and hook up your drives and hubs in a nice tree. Can't beat the access speed of that one, and you can buy all of the components in your local Walmart. 10TB of storage, in 1TB "cartridges", for $1600 installed. No special hardware needed on your server. And you can get it at 4AM, too. Beat that one with a tape library.
A frakkin' hard drive? It's not like getting a 2.5" 1TB is an issue, so I just don't see a point of using tape.
I have used a DLT VS160 drive, and the drive lasted 2 years in normal office environment, doing one backup a day. The tapes were bloody expensive, the drives even more so, and the performance was comparatively abysmal. And this was all using vendor supported configurations: Dell PowerEdge 2650/2850 servers, RHEL, tape drives from Dell too.
Before that, I've used DAT, and it worked so-so -- the drive outlasted a box of tapes and got tossed then, and the tapes seemed to last only 2-3 months each.
The tape support in Linux's kernel has been regressing from what was relatively decent performance in mid-90s. By decent I mean that the drive could stay streaming and didn't have to backtrack. The QIC drives and tapes seemed to last forever (a decade for the drive, 3-5 years for the tape, easy).
With the DLT and LTO drives, I have had to learn quickly how to force the scsi controller to do a device reconnect, because the drives would routinely get stuck. Every once in a while, the SCSI driver stack would just barf and get stuck in a way that made all SCSI devices connected to a given controller unresponsive. This seemed pretty ridiculous -- I have had more success with IDE drives!
And my woes were not due to any sort of SCSI connectivity issues -- I have been following the spec, and went as far as making a buffered inline probe to sniff the SCSI bus using a logic analyzer, and any one of the differential lanes could be routed to a buffered BNC output, to inspect the eye patterns on the scope. So that wasn't a problem -- the controller would just go dead at some point, with any number of commands in progress (sometimes zero, sometimes more), without any protocol errors other than what looked like the controller chip going Hi-Z on the output and refusing to do anything more. This problem was limited to tape drives -- drives in the same enclosure would never have a problem, in 1000s of hours of tests... The kernel would throw a backtrace from somewhere in the scsi stack, and eventually it would hard-panic.
I surmised that the SCSI tape technology is pretty much a well marketed pile of dung, and stayed away. No regrets.
The per gigabyte cost of external 2.5" 1TB drives is same as that of high-end tapes, and if a drive breaks you lose access to just one drive, not to your whole tape collection. And the USB 2 interface is way more convenient than the SCSI anachronism.
I'm not a Nascar fan, but some would argue with you on the Nascar point alone. Now can Nascar outweigh all the harm done -- that's left for discussion.
[To those that don't know: Nascar is an unintended consequence of prohibition.]
You've forgot that the implementation effort required is coincidentally better expressed in MPG too!
Suppose you have a car design that does 10 MPG and you want to go to 20 MPG. It'll be quite a bit of engineering work.
Now, after many years of tightening regulation, your company has a 50 MPG car. It will be an engineering feat of the same magnitude (at least) to go to 60 MPG!
The actual fuel consumption here doesn't matter since you can't be improving it at the same *absolute* scale forever. One would hope that's understood. All serial production contemporary cars are pretty much in the same ballpark, no need to expect some miracles here.
What MPGs show is some overall "greenness" of given car design on a scale that faces reality: it's not any easier to from 100 to 110 MPG than it is to go from 10 to 20 MPG. MPGs just codify the expectation that stems from how nature works.
Yes, you are chasing milliliters, but when all you have is a road car with an ICE to work with, in the end you will be chasing milliliters, and it will be just as hard as chasing liters was just a century prior.
The biggest savings will come from switching to another technology, and even then a linear scale is something I'd have an issue with -- on the same grounds. If all you have is electric cars, I'd much rather use of MPkWh rather than km/kWh -- the former will be a more practical unit.
You're comparing apples to oranges: it's obvious that if you don't have to drag all the fuel in the rocket, the rocket is smaller, and whatever ends up on the orbit is relatively a bigger % of your rocket's initial mass. But you did have to drag the fuel in the plane! Maybe it's cheaper to drag it around in an airplane, but here we are essentially arguing as to what your first stage should be: rocket vs. jet, and all that. You don't really "save" anything, you just shift the expense to a potentially more optimized first stage. Maybe the darn rocket should have had an air-breathing 1st stage in the first place?
Unless, that is, you propose launching from Mt. Everest, where the 1st stage, or should I call it 0th stage, is courtesy of Alpine orogeny and already paid for :)
I see no problem with MPG. MPG are a better indicator of what's going on, since it doesn't lose sensitivity so quickly. One has to understand that as cars get more efficient, they are asymptotically approaching some limit. A linear scale doesn't work, unless you start piling up digits after the decimal.
Let's say that Prius does 4.5l/100km in some driving scenario. I highly doubt that a non-plugin hybrid, of a certain mass, driven in similar scenario, will ever do, say, 1l/100km. I'm too lazy to get real numbers out of my ass, but some things just don't change -- even you you drop rolling friction, assume ideal thermodynamic efficiency (with realistic materials, though, no 5000K cylinder walls, please), get some 50-years-in-the-future drag coefficient, you still won't beat some number. Ever.
Thus the closer you get, the smaller the difference will be in linear terms. MPG, OTOH, will keep going up while still needing no more than 3 digits: 999MPG is 0.24l/100km, and you will simply not get a car that good. A change from 100 to 101MPG is 0.02l/100km, and a change from 200 to 201MPG is 0.006l/100km. IMHO it's more manageable to use MPG since you need three digits for realistic scenarios and that's it. Heck, it's rather rare when you can definitely say "xxx is enough for everyone" and be right -- with MPG, it's just that. Perhaps with some very, very clever computer control (automatic pilot), you may need one more digit of accuracy (MPG with one decimal). You need really repeatable driving for that, and here humans just won't do.
So, by the time you need xxx.x MPG format, we must have pretty much cars that drive themselves, and are linked in (ad-hoc?) networks that optimize traffic flows for energy efficiency. Human drivers are abysmal when road utilization is high: traffic jams are caused by human drivers, not by anything that's somehow inherent in the road or high traffic flow. The control loops in our brains are poor enough to cause problems when the bumper-to-bumper distance gets small and the speed is "high" (think freeway). When traffic is flowing well, humans still are notoriously inefficient drivers, but the good flow gives an impression that things are just fine, when they are in fact far from optimal. Very far.
The only problem is that this is the equivalent of burning up all that oil -- it will use the same amount of oxygen, just that the carbon will be sequestered in the microorganisms. Now, those don't live forever, and will eventually die and break down. The question is: will there be something to eat those and buffer all the carbon? If not, how fast will those microorganisms break down, and how bad will be whatever's left over? Will there be other bacteria to devour that mess; if so -- are we going to get massive CO2 bubbles coming out of the ocean, potentially sinking ships? Just remember that just the fact that something is natural doesn't mean it's any good. Most potent known poisons are all from natural (living) sources. Heck, the damn oil is all from natural sources -- good old plants and sun, gives you green giggles, but see how messy it really is...
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, lol. Yes, it was a coincidence. Look at the probabilities, it's not that unlikely.
Given that most orbital rockets linger in the dense, friction-expensive atmosphere rather shortly and *slowly* there is very little benefit to be had by dropping them down from a plane. I suggest a simple calculation: express the orbital energy as a function of mass and height, and see how small the potential energy is compared to kinetic energy. Hypotethically, if you would lift a rocket up to orbital height without giving it orbital velocity, you'd still need pretty much all of the fuel just to reach the orbital velocity.
The only benefit from launching higher up is for sub-orbital flights that do expend a significant amount of their fuel to overcome atmospheric friction and to gain potential energy. That's why SSOne launches up high.
OTOH, LEO requires ~30 times more energy than sub-orbital. GEO/lunar requires ~60 times more. So, whatever you launch to GEO, the energy used to bring it up to 100km high is so small that you can ignore it and your error is within 2%!
Morton-Thiokol, the same people who, through their negligence (can't call it any different), killed one shuttle crew? Yeah, a great name to associate yourself with, Republican from Alabama.
I up you one. There is one place in the developed world I know of where you can in fact get into serious trouble, even with no use of Google Maps, GPS or any other aid of that sort.
You can get stuck in "blocked-in" lanes (due to construction) on I-75 in Detroit. The Bridge-to-Canada lane may several exits blocked off, and you may end up crossing the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and end up on the Canadian side of the border. There is nothing on the U.S. side preventing you from leaving the U.S.
If you don't have your passport with you, you can get into a ton of grief (4+ hours of interrogation) trying to get back into the U.S.
I wonder whether she was actually following Google directions while walking, or did she just make up the story up later? How can one prove whether she was really following those directions while walking? Was her smartphone/whatever taken into chain of evidence at the scene?...
I hate to say it, but if you were just driving around yourself, there's nothing stopping you from ending up on the same bus lane.
Most everywhere in the U.S., if you can't afford basic medical care, it is "free". A hospital can't refuse admitting an emergency case based on whether the patient's bill will be covered. If her income would warrant it, she could get her medical bill reduced to more-or-less equivalent of a copay under good insurance coverege. This of course is an uphill battle, and you better had some sharp family members to help out, but it could be done. I don't wish that on anyone, of course.
BTW, what about the driver who actually hit her? He is named a defendant in the suit, after all!
Kinetic impacts as opposed to what, potential impacts?
But they do know those laws! The mapping data these days contains speed limits for "thoroughfares" in most of the U.S., and I believe their goal is to have speed limits on every paved and/or named road in the U.S. Of course Google may not be dealing with that, the mapping data providers do.
That law is a bunch of crap. I can't see how it can have any value. There's no way to fairly enforce it. You'd need to literally freeze the time, and do some experimental mechanics on the road surface in at-the-moment conditions, to determine whether the situation could be "unsafe". Heck, give me a break as to how to define "unsafe"... LOL. I hate such laws. They are basically carte blanche for issuing tickets.
Yeah, only that it would be between her and the car's driver. Google shouldn't even enter the picture.
I think that if you're uninsured and on low income, you won't really go bankrupt -- *if* you actually apply for financial assistance. It's perhaps a little known dirty secret, but if you're in what's now considered entry-level middle class, you can get pretty much every medical bill from a major medical center reduced. I've caught onto that too late while living on grad student salary: I could get every major bill reduced by 60-75%, just like that. Sigh -- hindsight is 20/20.
Maybe MSFT should hack Google Maps and entice female users into having sex with random passerby. Result: Google gets sued into oblivion by everyone who caught STDs and got pregnant.
I don't think Google has any fault here... however she was on a highway as a pedestrian (which is almost always prohibited... for a reason)
AFAIK, Utah has no laws specifically prohibiting pedestrians on any road, unless there is a traffic control device (a sign saying "NO PEDESTRIANS").