The masses' idea of "acceptable risk" does not include the, pardon the misuse of the word, fallout from energy shortages as we run out of coal/oil/natural gas. All reactors blowing up in Chernobyl all at once, and the resulting graphite fire burning unabated for a century+ are nothing compared to what will happen when the fossil fuels will run out. If, that is, we're still in a situation where no high-density alternate power is available -- like from nuclear fission or fusion.
The problem with "masses" is that they only include what they immediately recognize as dangerous in their risk analysis. What they ignore is way more dangerous than the widely publicized snafus.
Their design engineers must be breathing in too much sulphuric acid fumes methinks.
Any UPS that costs more than $400 should have full battery monitoring, including temperature, internal resistance and moisture on the bottom of the compartment. The cost of doing that is perhaps $5 in parts. Anything over $1000 can as well have chemical detectors -- you surely can get them for $5 each in quantity.
The fact that APC doesn't routinely do it the right way is why I laugh very hard into the receiver every time I get a sales call from them. They are idiots, and I have no qualms telling it to anyone who listens.
Now the fact that no other "household name" company I know of does it right is a whole another story.
All you need is two cameras with IR filters, and an IR illuminator. Those will have to look more or less in line with the projection system, so that they illuminate along your visual axis, more or less. You then get redeye effect, in IR -- there will be two very bright spots in your images.
Use the stereo pair to triangulate the 3D position of the eyes, and presto. The whole eye tracking thing is pretty overrated. You don't need any fancy image processing to do that if you have an IR light source. You just track a bunch of blobs. If you want to experiment, you can use wiimote in a pinch to do that. Put a bunch of IR leds around wiimote's camera, and look close enough to it. It's really easy. Since wiimotes are cheap, you can put a bunch of those around the dash, to see your eyes even if you turn your head. If GM wanted to buy the individual image sensors with blob detection that were better than those used in Wiimotes, they could probably get someone like Vicon to design a single chip solution for it. All Vicon does, on the data acquisition end, is really collecting IR blobs.
A wiimote with IR illuminators nearby is a real easy marketing research tool. Put a bunch of those on a display case, and you can easily count how many people were looking at stuff, and also where they were looking. You control the selectivity by adjusting the illuminator's beam width. All you need to collect the data is a PC with a bluetooth interface. For illumination, any LED maglite will do, only you have to replace the LED for an IR one. It's about as cheap as it gets.
What you describe are perhaps some implementation inefficiencies. Many ABS systems operate the actuators in a binary fashion, and they are not designed for variable brake pressure, only for pressure/no-pressure. There's nothing preventing a better design, only status quo.
Whatever you're claiming to be sensing so well, a computer can certainly sense better -- with proper sensors, that is. Most cars do not have a 6DOF inertial platform, even though that would be a good starting point for any decently-performing stability/traction augmentation system.
A computer-controlled antilock system, with servo actuators (vs. binary on-off valves) can, and will, in stable enough conditions, control wheel slip down to 1-2% accuracy or so. It will maintain that wheel slip way faster than you or I can. It needs an inertial platform, or at least a longitudinal acceleration sensor, to do that. The wheel speed sensors are not really reliable for estimating the vehicle speed once the wheels start locking up. You need inertial reference for that. The wheel speed sensors are only useful to compare the individual wheel's speed to that of the car, given that you already know car's speed!
You claim that ESC "uses wheel spin speeds to measure not only slippage, but vehicle travel direction" -- sorry but ESC typically uses a lateral accelerometer combined with estimate of vehicle's speed, and with steering column angle.
As for cruise control: those are purposefully designed to be soft. It's rather easy to have cruise control that will keep your speed to better than 1% under all reasonable conditions. It will need input from an inclinometer (inertial reference!). I have had a Volvo 940 wagon with a rather sloppy cruise control that I replaced with a custom controller with inclinometer, and a beefy electrical model servo to replace the original vacuum-controlled actuator. After model identification work was done (I settled on multiple FIR models), I took it for a spin in some rather hilly terrain and you could hardly see the speedometer needle move. On typical "flat" roads, it felt rock solid, and the measured speed would be within a +/- 0.5% band around the setpoint. Oh, and it worked down to 10mph, not to the silly factory 25mph limit.
The biggest point with "solid" cruise control is that other cars aren't solid at all, so on highway it may be advantageous to have piss-poor PID-based stock cruise control -- it will maintain inter-car distance much better if the car in front of you is on cruise control, too.
There is no something else if you suddenly remove Google's/YouTube's traffic from the pipes. There's no lost opportunity cost, since there'd be a whole lot of underutilized infrastructure all around the world if Google/YouTube traffic had vanished.
It's not a zero-sum game. Without YouTube traffic, the sum decreases quite a bit, yet you still have all that infrastructure there's no use for.
I believe that forgetting something usually means you never really understood it. I don't think that if you really understand something, you'll ever forget it. There are things I do rather rarely yet I don't forget them because I understand them and could re-derive them from first principles.
Usually if I forget something, it means I never quite understood it in the first place.
I think that real understanding implies almost indefinite retention, and lack of retention can be usually be explained by lack of understanding.
It's very easy to forget something if all you know about it is a memorized definition and an equation and two.
If you use statistical terms and concepts daily, you should be able to explain them after being woken up in the middle of your sleep, after several hours of partying with lots of booze. Anything less probably means you're acting things out rather than understanding them.
Feynman often talked about the issue of real understanding. One could summarize his view thusly: if you cannot explain it to a non-specialist of decent intelligence, you probably don't understand it.
In many U.S. banks, wire transfers are processed 100% manually. Even if they have an on-line front for it, there are peons somewhere who retype it all into green screens, or -- worse -- fax the info around. An international wire transfer almost always ends up being faxed once or twice. No kidding. It fucktarded.
You don't need any skin cells. It's fairly easy to sequence artificial, synthetic mRNA or such that would completely drown out anything present at the crime scene, and have any fingerprint you desire.
The problem is that we're not dealing with a real hash function here.
The procedure used to extract genetic markers in one way in the sense that you cannot reproduce your whole genome from those markers.
But it's absolutely trivial to come up with synthetic genetic material that will yield the same "hash".
The use of the word hash here is very misleading. Genetic markers are NOT hashes. They are croppings. Imagine you have a 1000 megabit image, and you cut a few short line segments out of it. That's what a genetic fingerprint is. It's rather easy to come up with another image that will provide the same fingerprint.
That Yale student needs to retake high school math. No story here, move on please. He absolutely clueless as to how many matches there are expected to be in the U.S. population alone, never mind if the geni.., ahem, idiots in Europe picked up on that great idea. The extraditions would be endless. The airlines would need to schedule extra flights.
People watch too much junk TV shows and think whatever they see there is real. Just today on the news I saw some idiot at the grocery store hitting kids at random. The surveillance video was so low resolution and artifact laden to the point where you could hardly tell the "person" was in fact a human -- you couldn't even tell whether he was black or white! Yet the dickheads speaking Queen's very own think putting cameras on the street solves the crime problem.
You ain't gonna see shit by looking at the street with PAL/NTSC cameras. To get anything like a recognizable face when you have a single camera looking down at a length of public street/sidewalk, you need a 4K digital cinema camera. If those were ordered in batches of 1000, we're talking $10k for one camera+optics. Or $100M for one order. Apparently they need tens of thousands of those -- yeah right.
So, if government people in charge can't figure something as comparatively simple as a surveillance camera system requirements, you think there's ANYONE in ANY position of power who has enough clue to even BEGIN to understand the implications of using DNA fingerprinting? Sorry Winnetou, this requires some solid, science-based common sense. People who have it are nowhere near politics (with scant exceptions). And for a good reason.
At least with cameras, any politician dickhead can do an experiment: go to the store, fetch a $1k HD camera, see how much of a picture you get. So you'd think it's easy enough not to be fooled by the vendors, right?
Now somehow you can't get a DNA fingerprinter at Costco just yet and run a bunch of tests on a 100M population, just to be sure. Thus such things are absolutely out of reach of common sense of politicians, and most -- like 99.99% of voting public.
You have every reason to be scared, especially since that Yale student just proved my point: his genious idea was picked up by the NYT hook, line and sinker. And some people on/. argue it's somehow good? WHAT THE FUCK happened to you people. It's not all that hard to imagine what's wrong with the idea. Just don't read what the media publish about it, do some goddamned research yourself. Jeez.
I call BS. He has separate investment accounts, where quite likely there are no transactions for extended amounts of time. His net worth is the sum of cash, stocks and other investments. I bet his cash is just a couple % of his total assets. Out of all the cash he has in some savings/money market account, he probably pays himself, his wife and kids an annuity -- not unlike getting a paycheck every month. And those would be "reasonable" amounts, probably in $10k-$50k/month range per person, and would be bill paying and spending money, essentially. He'd be penniless if he did it any other way.
Burning through a couple billion bucks is very easy if you are in spending mode -- just look at any random government out there, say at certain provincial govt in Canada, cough cough. Besides, since he has a lot in stocks, he'd be losing big time if he was just selling those indiscriminately -- selling a billion$ worth of MS stock in one transaction would put a big spike on the ticker, and could trigger a mass selloff by private investors, temporarily tanking the stock. Of course institutional holders would mostly hold on to it, so in a few hours it would be back where it belongs, but no, he can't just go out and buy a jetliner and pay for it with stocks.
And yes, it's rather easy to monitor that kind of money. It's not like he's sitting in front of a stack of $1 banknotes, making sure that the wind doesn't blow any away.
I think that Carl Sagan has pretty much nailed it in his essay, published in Billions and Billions. To summarize: the extremes (all-on pro-life or all-on pro-choice) are just political stances and are thoughtless positions to take; we need to think of what makes us human -- what's the difference between us an say, a chimpanzee which we share more than 99% of the active genes with. He concludes that the breaking point is the emergence thinking -- thus third-semester abortions are out, unless mother is in danger.
Umm, if you want to change immigration laws to allow aliens to work in the U.S.A. without restrictions, talk to your rep/senator about.
It's an issue that's wholly separate from the biometric ID. You can be for alien/immigrant workers and for biometric ID. Those
are not mutually exclusive. Right now such ID would be used to enforce immigration/employment laws. Change the latter, and the ID
still can stay.
BTW, see how far you'll go in chatting with your rep/senator about allowing unrestricted alien labor. LOL.
LOL. You'll only need this card when you apply for the job. You already need an ID for that, so what would be so different this time, besides the ID being trickier to forge?! You're just irrational, that's what it is.
Special kind of birth certificate?! What drugs are you on? There's only one kind of birth certificate in the U.S. It's handled by the county or state vital statistics departments, usually in the health department. We got the birth certificate for my daughter, and her U.S. passport -- it took about 1.5 months total, nothing special about it, and I just can't see how is the middle class being punished here? What's the big deal?
You already are 'branded'. If you don't wish to be 'branded', you have to keep cloning yourself. Other than that, we're all different and unique. How the heck is that supposed to be 'branding' -- I just don't know.
American companies should be building factories and 'other things' here in the U.S. There's more than enough residents to fill those jobs. It's only due to the corporate nutjobs that we've lost national manufacturing. Those people firmly believe in manna from heaven -- namely, that if you somehow make things cheaper abroad, that you'll still have now-jobless customers with money to pay for those cheaper things. This fantasy can only work for so long. While it works, it of course generates nice 'returns' for the shareholders. But the economic buffer has been spent now. The real reason for our economical crisis is our humongous international trade deficit. That's what made banks lend to non creditworthy customers. A mere 30-40 years ago, people had jobs and could save money and afford sane mortgages. As less and less people had any real economic stability to speak of, due to loss of manufacturing jobs, they banks were losing them as creditworthy customers. But banks live on lending profits! As it is, shareholders demand churn and profits, thus banks resorted to fantasy-backed loans -- otherwise their loan portfolios would shrink alarmingly. And here we are.
And banks are still with heads in the sand, nothing has changed here. Just dig a bit and see how many foreclosed/bank owned real estate there is. Banks keep it for months or years, largely under wraps. The banks are now actually taking the free market elements out of the real estate market -- the properties are still over-valued, because the supply is somewhat constrained by the banks. If all REO properties suddenly appeared on the market, there would be a further 50% drop in house prices. Of course it would make the housing affordable to many, but those with existing mortgages would be left upside down. Being "upside down" by itself is not a problem as long as you can stay in the same place. The workforce in the U.S. is too mobile to stay in a house for long, so they'd end up screwed even further.
I agree. I liked it very much back in the 80s when I was visiting Switzerland -- they had "combo" smart cards that were used as ATM and rail discount cards. I would, in fact, like it very much if there was a smart card that could be used for everything -- for proving that I'm licensed to drive, for getting money out of the ATM, for identification,... What's the difference between having it on multiple pieces of plastic vs. having it on one? How does it erode my privacy/freedom in any way?
All it does is decrease profits for wallet makers. I smell a wallet maker conspiracy here.
You're right -- you need timed direct fuel injection so that there's no predetonation. What gets compressed in the cylinder is just air, and then -- at the right time -- you add fuel into it. The supercharged injection means that the fuel will flash-vaporize and self-ignite. I presume that the propagating flame front, aided by thermal expansion of the combusted gas, will mix the fuel and air.
I also think that there may be benefits to lubrication, as there is never raw fuel (not even as a vapor) in contact with cylinder walls.
Slashdot Mirror
The masses' idea of "acceptable risk" does not include the, pardon the misuse of the word, fallout from energy shortages as we run out of coal/oil/natural gas. All reactors blowing up in Chernobyl all at once, and the resulting graphite fire burning unabated for a century+ are nothing compared to what will happen when the fossil fuels will run out. If, that is, we're still in a situation where no high-density alternate power is available -- like from nuclear fission or fusion.
The problem with "masses" is that they only include what they immediately recognize as dangerous in their risk analysis. What they ignore is way more dangerous than the widely publicized snafus.
Their design engineers must be breathing in too much sulphuric acid fumes methinks.
Any UPS that costs more than $400 should have full battery monitoring, including temperature, internal resistance and moisture on the bottom of the compartment. The cost of doing that is perhaps $5 in parts. Anything over $1000 can as well have chemical detectors -- you surely can get them for $5 each in quantity.
The fact that APC doesn't routinely do it the right way is why I laugh very hard into the receiver every time I get a sales call from them. They are idiots, and I have no qualms telling it to anyone who listens.
Now the fact that no other "household name" company I know of does it right is a whole another story.
All you need is two cameras with IR filters, and an IR illuminator. Those will have to look more or less in line with the projection system, so that they illuminate along your visual axis, more or less. You then get redeye effect, in IR -- there will be two very bright spots in your images.
Use the stereo pair to triangulate the 3D position of the eyes, and presto. The whole eye tracking thing is pretty overrated. You don't need any fancy image processing to do that if you have an IR light source. You just track a bunch of blobs. If you want to experiment, you can use wiimote in a pinch to do that. Put a bunch of IR leds around wiimote's camera, and look close enough to it. It's really easy. Since wiimotes are cheap, you can put a bunch of those around the dash, to see your eyes even if you turn your head. If GM wanted to buy the individual image sensors with blob detection that were better than those used in Wiimotes, they could probably get someone like Vicon to design a single chip solution for it. All Vicon does, on the data acquisition end, is really collecting IR blobs.
A wiimote with IR illuminators nearby is a real easy marketing research tool. Put a bunch of those on a display case, and you can easily count how many people were looking at stuff, and also where they were looking. You control the selectivity by adjusting the illuminator's beam width. All you need to collect the data is a PC with a bluetooth interface. For illumination, any LED maglite will do, only you have to replace the LED for an IR one. It's about as cheap as it gets.
What you describe are perhaps some implementation inefficiencies. Many ABS systems operate the actuators in a binary fashion, and they are not designed for variable brake pressure, only for pressure/no-pressure. There's nothing preventing a better design, only status quo.
Whatever you're claiming to be sensing so well, a computer can certainly sense better -- with proper sensors, that is. Most cars do not have a 6DOF inertial platform, even though that would be a good starting point for any decently-performing stability/traction augmentation system.
A computer-controlled antilock system, with servo actuators (vs. binary on-off valves) can, and will, in stable enough conditions, control wheel slip down to 1-2% accuracy or so. It will maintain that wheel slip way faster than you or I can. It needs an inertial platform, or at least a longitudinal acceleration sensor, to do that. The wheel speed sensors are not really reliable for estimating the vehicle speed once the wheels start locking up. You need inertial reference for that. The wheel speed sensors are only useful to compare the individual wheel's speed to that of the car, given that you already know car's speed!
You claim that ESC "uses wheel spin speeds to measure not only slippage, but vehicle travel direction" -- sorry but ESC typically uses a lateral accelerometer combined with estimate of vehicle's speed, and with steering column angle.
As for cruise control: those are purposefully designed to be soft. It's rather easy to have cruise control that will keep your speed to better than 1% under all reasonable conditions. It will need input from an inclinometer (inertial reference!). I have had a Volvo 940 wagon with a rather sloppy cruise control that I replaced with a custom controller with inclinometer, and a beefy electrical model servo to replace the original vacuum-controlled actuator. After model identification work was done (I settled on multiple FIR models), I took it for a spin in some rather hilly terrain and you could hardly see the speedometer needle move. On typical "flat" roads, it felt rock solid, and the measured speed would be within a +/- 0.5% band around the setpoint. Oh, and it worked down to 10mph, not to the silly factory 25mph limit.
The biggest point with "solid" cruise control is that other cars aren't solid at all, so on highway it may be advantageous to have piss-poor PID-based stock cruise control -- it will maintain inter-car distance much better if the car in front of you is on cruise control, too.
His/Her car is a Diesel :)
There is no something else if you suddenly remove Google's/YouTube's traffic from the pipes. There's no lost opportunity cost, since there'd be a whole lot of underutilized infrastructure all around the world if Google/YouTube traffic had vanished.
It's not a zero-sum game. Without YouTube traffic, the sum decreases quite a bit, yet you still have all that infrastructure there's no use for.
I believe that forgetting something usually means you never really understood it. I don't think that if you really understand something, you'll ever forget it. There are things I do rather rarely yet I don't forget them because I understand them and could re-derive them from first principles.
Usually if I forget something, it means I never quite understood it in the first place.
I think that real understanding implies almost indefinite retention, and lack of retention can be usually be explained by lack of understanding.
It's very easy to forget something if all you know about it is a memorized definition and an equation and two.
If you use statistical terms and concepts daily, you should be able to explain them after being woken up in the middle of your sleep, after several hours of partying with lots of booze. Anything less probably means you're acting things out rather than understanding them.
Feynman often talked about the issue of real understanding. One could summarize his view thusly: if you cannot explain it to a non-specialist of decent intelligence, you probably don't understand it.
In many U.S. banks, wire transfers are processed 100% manually. Even if they have an on-line front for it, there are peons somewhere who retype it all into green screens, or -- worse -- fax the info around. An international wire transfer almost always ends up being faxed once or twice. No kidding. It fucktarded.
You don't need any skin cells. It's fairly easy to sequence artificial, synthetic mRNA or such that would completely drown out anything present at the crime scene, and have any fingerprint you desire.
The problem is that we're not dealing with a real hash function here.
The procedure used to extract genetic markers in one way in the sense that you cannot reproduce your whole genome from those markers.
But it's absolutely trivial to come up with synthetic genetic material that will yield the same "hash".
The use of the word hash here is very misleading. Genetic markers are NOT hashes. They are croppings. Imagine you have a 1000 megabit image, and you cut a few short line segments out of it. That's what a genetic fingerprint is. It's rather easy to come up with another image that will provide the same fingerprint.
That Yale student needs to retake high school math. No story here, move on please. He absolutely clueless as to how many matches there are expected to be in the U.S. population alone, never mind if the geni.., ahem, idiots in Europe picked up on that great idea. The extraditions would be endless. The airlines would need to schedule extra flights.
People watch too much junk TV shows and think whatever they see there is real. Just today on the news I saw some idiot at the grocery store hitting kids at random. The surveillance video was so low resolution and artifact laden to the point where you could hardly tell the "person" was in fact a human -- you couldn't even tell whether he was black or white! Yet the dickheads speaking Queen's very own think putting cameras on the street solves the crime problem.
You ain't gonna see shit by looking at the street with PAL/NTSC cameras. To get anything like a recognizable face when you have a single camera looking down at a length of public street/sidewalk, you need a 4K digital cinema camera. If those were ordered in batches of 1000, we're talking $10k for one camera+optics. Or $100M for one order. Apparently they need tens of thousands of those -- yeah right.
So, if government people in charge can't figure something as comparatively simple as a surveillance camera system requirements, you think there's ANYONE in ANY position of power who has enough clue to even BEGIN to understand the implications of using DNA fingerprinting? Sorry Winnetou, this requires some solid, science-based common sense. People who have it are nowhere near politics (with scant exceptions). And for a good reason.
At least with cameras, any politician dickhead can do an experiment: go to the store, fetch a $1k HD camera, see how much of a picture you get. So you'd think it's easy enough not to be fooled by the vendors, right?
Now somehow you can't get a DNA fingerprinter at Costco just yet and run a bunch of tests on a 100M population, just to be sure. Thus such things are absolutely out of reach of common sense of politicians, and most -- like 99.99% of voting public.
You have every reason to be scared, especially since that Yale student just proved my point: his genious idea was picked up by the NYT hook, line and sinker. And some people on /. argue it's somehow good? WHAT THE FUCK happened to you people. It's not all that hard to imagine what's wrong with the idea. Just don't read what the media publish about it, do some goddamned research yourself. Jeez.
I call BS. He has separate investment accounts, where quite likely there are no transactions for extended amounts of time. His net worth is the sum of cash, stocks and other investments. I bet his cash is just a couple % of his total assets. Out of all the cash he has in some savings/money market account, he probably pays himself, his wife and kids an annuity -- not unlike getting a paycheck every month. And those would be "reasonable" amounts, probably in $10k-$50k/month range per person, and would be bill paying and spending money, essentially. He'd be penniless if he did it any other way. Burning through a couple billion bucks is very easy if you are in spending mode -- just look at any random government out there, say at certain provincial govt in Canada, cough cough. Besides, since he has a lot in stocks, he'd be losing big time if he was just selling those indiscriminately -- selling a billion$ worth of MS stock in one transaction would put a big spike on the ticker, and could trigger a mass selloff by private investors, temporarily tanking the stock. Of course institutional holders would mostly hold on to it, so in a few hours it would be back where it belongs, but no, he can't just go out and buy a jetliner and pay for it with stocks. And yes, it's rather easy to monitor that kind of money. It's not like he's sitting in front of a stack of $1 banknotes, making sure that the wind doesn't blow any away.
I think that Carl Sagan has pretty much nailed it in his essay, published in Billions and Billions. To summarize: the extremes (all-on pro-life or all-on pro-choice) are just political stances and are thoughtless positions to take; we need to think of what makes us human -- what's the difference between us an say, a chimpanzee which we share more than 99% of the active genes with. He concludes that the breaking point is the emergence thinking -- thus third-semester abortions are out, unless mother is in danger.
Now be careful, plenty of TDWTF stories are about the idiocy established by decree -- managerial, corporate, you name it.
The placental barrier seems to be, evolutionally, a 'gift' from a virus.
Umm, if you want to change immigration laws to allow aliens to work in the U.S.A. without restrictions, talk to your rep/senator about. It's an issue that's wholly separate from the biometric ID. You can be for alien/immigrant workers and for biometric ID. Those are not mutually exclusive. Right now such ID would be used to enforce immigration/employment laws. Change the latter, and the ID still can stay. BTW, see how far you'll go in chatting with your rep/senator about allowing unrestricted alien labor. LOL.
LOL. You'll only need this card when you apply for the job. You already need an ID for that, so what would be so different this time, besides the ID being trickier to forge?! You're just irrational, that's what it is.
Special kind of birth certificate?! What drugs are you on? There's only one kind of birth certificate in the U.S. It's handled by the county or state vital statistics departments, usually in the health department. We got the birth certificate for my daughter, and her U.S. passport -- it took about 1.5 months total, nothing special about it, and I just can't see how is the middle class being punished here? What's the big deal?
You already are 'branded'. If you don't wish to be 'branded', you have to keep cloning yourself. Other than that, we're all different and unique. How the heck is that supposed to be 'branding' -- I just don't know.
American companies should be building factories and 'other things' here in the U.S. There's more than enough residents to fill those jobs. It's only due to the corporate nutjobs that we've lost national manufacturing. Those people firmly believe in manna from heaven -- namely, that if you somehow make things cheaper abroad, that you'll still have now-jobless customers with money to pay for those cheaper things. This fantasy can only work for so long. While it works, it of course generates nice 'returns' for the shareholders. But the economic buffer has been spent now. The real reason for our economical crisis is our humongous international trade deficit. That's what made banks lend to non creditworthy customers. A mere 30-40 years ago, people had jobs and could save money and afford sane mortgages. As less and less people had any real economic stability to speak of, due to loss of manufacturing jobs, they banks were losing them as creditworthy customers. But banks live on lending profits! As it is, shareholders demand churn and profits, thus banks resorted to fantasy-backed loans -- otherwise their loan portfolios would shrink alarmingly. And here we are. And banks are still with heads in the sand, nothing has changed here. Just dig a bit and see how many foreclosed/bank owned real estate there is. Banks keep it for months or years, largely under wraps. The banks are now actually taking the free market elements out of the real estate market -- the properties are still over-valued, because the supply is somewhat constrained by the banks. If all REO properties suddenly appeared on the market, there would be a further 50% drop in house prices. Of course it would make the housing affordable to many, but those with existing mortgages would be left upside down. Being "upside down" by itself is not a problem as long as you can stay in the same place. The workforce in the U.S. is too mobile to stay in a house for long, so they'd end up screwed even further.
I agree. I liked it very much back in the 80s when I was visiting Switzerland -- they had "combo" smart cards that were used as ATM and rail discount cards. I would, in fact, like it very much if there was a smart card that could be used for everything -- for proving that I'm licensed to drive, for getting money out of the ATM, for identification, ... What's the difference between having it on multiple pieces of plastic vs. having it on one? How does it erode my privacy/freedom in any way?
All it does is decrease profits for wallet makers. I smell a wallet maker conspiracy here.
You're right -- you need timed direct fuel injection so that there's no predetonation. What gets compressed in the cylinder is just air, and then -- at the right time -- you add fuel into it. The supercharged injection means that the fuel will flash-vaporize and self-ignite. I presume that the propagating flame front, aided by thermal expansion of the combusted gas, will mix the fuel and air. I also think that there may be benefits to lubrication, as there is never raw fuel (not even as a vapor) in contact with cylinder walls.