If you're talking current infrastructure, freight trains are still WAY more environmentally friendly than trucks.
Remember, you only need four modern 4,000 bhp diesel-electric locomotives to pull 180 loaded 53" trailers, not 180 trucks spewing WAY more exhaust emissions (assuming each truck has about 400 bhp pulling power).
The problem with airplanes is that because so much of the structure is needed for aerodynamic lift, the result is a much lower freight load per pound of structure compared to a freight train. That's why interest in super large lighter-than-air vehicles have never completely waned, since they could carry a lot of load per pound of structure.
The only thing it will do is make Microsoft create a special install version of Windows 7 that will ask you to decide what brand of web browser program you will install and use as your primary default. I see on a new machine with Windows 7 already pre-installed at the factory, if you insist on Internet Explorer 8.0 the final install will go straight through, while if you install Firefox or Opera as the default you will be asked to put back in the Windows 7 install DVD to copy over and install the non-MIcrosoft web browser.
I agree 100%. I wouldn't be surprised that the Obama Administration is looking seriously at putting the Orion spacecraft on top of an uprated Delta IV or Atlas V rocket, saving NASA billions of dollars in development costs. The Ares V will continue in development since the cargo capability of Ares V to low Earth orbit is even bigger than the Saturn V!
But you still have one BIG problem: hemp plants need a supply of fresh water to grow them.
Meanwhile, you can grow oil-laden algae in seawater, and that you could build big farms of tanks to grow oil-laden algae next to any major ocean coastline.
In fact, in the end oil-laden algae will be where we get our biofuels--you can harvest algae many times times per year, and more importantly, you can even use seawater to grow the algae, too.
Even if hemp could be grown legally in the USA, you still have the issue of finding a place to grow it with access to a reasonably cheap fresh water supply.
At least for fuels and potentially plastics, the better solution is large-scale harvesting of oil-laden algae, which doesn't need fresh water as many forms of oil-laden algae can grow in seawater. And unlike even the fast-growing hemp plant, oil-laden algae can be "harvested" many times per year, which means the potential to produce a huge amount of oil from the algae that can be refined to almost any fuel you can think of with modern refining processes.
Indeed, security issues is another reason why "cloud computing" will not be as ubiquitous as some people claim. Besides, with hard drive storage and flash memory storage densities zooming up nowadays, you can easily keep applications and data stored locally and not worry about losing productivity if you have little to no access to the Internet.
The reason is simple: people don't trust computing "over the cloud," because your device will be essentially useless if you are in an area with little to no Internet connectivity. Besides, you can get a netbook computer for under US$400 nowadays, and with improving technology those netbooks will soon store as much as 250 to 320 GB of data on the hard drive in the machine itself, way more than enough to store local data for business documents, spreadsheets, and smaller presentation files.
What you just described was predicted nearly 30 years ago in Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave.
I suggest you pick up that book and read the chapter "De-massifying the Media." In summation, Toffler predicted that as communication technologies improve, the days of a "mass media" will come to an end, where a few companies dominate the dissemination of news. The rise of the public Internet--especially since 1995 when Windows 95 included built-in PPP support for easy connection to the Internet--started a revolution that made it possible for newsgathering and news dissemination from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. When Matt Drudge broke the story on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair in early 1998 outside the purview of the major news organizations, that should have been the MAJOR warning that the "little people" will start encroaching onto the turf of newsgathering that was then dominated by the big, corporate news organizations.
Also, from what I've read about using IE 8.0 on Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 (Build 7100), it's actually quite good because since the core OS code has been tweaked and streamlined for major performance increases, IE 8.0 works quite fast and is reasonably stable. As such, the likelihood of Windows 7 users installing Firefox is not that great unless the upcoming Firefox 3.5 is REALLY good.
Remember, video encoding requires tremendous amounts of CPU power in the encoding process, far more so than audio encoding. That's why when Pixar renders the images for their movies they use thousands of Apple Xserve blade servers running in massively parallel fasion to do rendering at reasonable speeds.
We can make all the Beowulf cluster jokes on this forum,:-) but one reason why Beowulf was developed was the ability to synchronize hundreds to thousands of machines in a massively parallel fashion to speed up data processing, essentially creating a supercomputer setup "on the cheap." I remember reading about a biotech company using 1,000 small tower desktops powered by the Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU all synced together with Beowulf to do DNA modeling.
The biggest competition to Star Trek will likely be three movies:
Disney/Pixar's Up!. DreamWorks/Paramount's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Warner Brothers' Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
2009 has been a relatively weak year for summer movies due to the delayed effects of the Writer's Guild of America strike from 2007-2008, which severely cut down on the number of movies in development (remember, both Star Trek and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were delayed from late 2008 releases because otherwise both studios would lack big "tent pole" movies for Summer 2009). I think 2010 will be a bit better because now that the WGA strike is over, we may see more movies in development and production for Summer 2010.
I think one problem with all this analysis is the fact that if you really want public transit to be a viable option, people have to live in cities with where much of the is located in a small area such as New York City, Chicago, Boston, etc.
However, that means you have to live in cities approaching the population density of Manhattan or Hong Kong for public transit to be a true alternative to the automobile. In Hong Kong, most people can commute to work without needing a car, since the population density can support subway (MTR on Hong Kong/Kowloon side), commuter rail (KCR on Kowloon/New Territories side), light rail (New Territories side), trams (Hong Kong side), buses, minibuses and taxis.
Given the American penchant for disliking living in very high-density environments, small wonder why public transit is not viewed positively in the USA outside of a few big cities.
I wrote this earlier on another message thread, but if President Obama wants to end the problem of "offshoring" assets, he needs to seriously consider going to the much simpler, but much more effective, FairTax consumption tax system to replace our entire national income tax system.
It's not a secret that the WORST form of corruption in Washington, DC is those thousands of tax lobbyists trying "tweak" the IRC to support even the most narrow of constituencies. The result: the IRC plus its additional rulings are now over 67,500 pages of regulation, a code so complex that even the Internal Revenue Service personally admits it has difficulty figuring it all out!
I mean, look at what's so very wrong about the IRC:
1. The compliance cost this year for 2008 Federal income taxes is a mind-boggling US$350 BILLION, and the cost is rising each subsequent year. While people like tax lawyers, accountants, Intuit, H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt might make money, isn't this in the end a major waste of resources that can be better used for other purposes?
2. The fact we tax savings and investments means the USA probably has the lowest savings rate in the world among industrialized countries. A higher savings and investment rate is so sorely needed if we are to fix our economy.
3. Tax evasion is a SERIOUS problem. We have a huge problem with people participating in the underground economy (I've read the estimated value of that is around an amazing US$2 trillion). American citizens and businesses who can afford it are using every possible legal (and sometimes illegal!) tax loophole in the IRC to funnel out of the USA a MASSIVE amount of liquidity, now sitting in offshore financial centers (OFCs) located in places like the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Nauru, Panama, and so on to keep these assets out of the hands of the IRS. The amount sent out to OFCs: estimates vary, but shocking--somewhere between US$12 and US$17 TRILLION! And that money does not flow in our financial system, either.
4. Income taxes by definition favors debt financing over cash payments. The result is obviously wrong, as we've seen from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of the past few years.
5. Larger American companies--because of having to make economic decisions based on lowering the tax burden instead of what's best for the business--are moving a lot of their corporate headquarter and production operations out of the USA. And you wonder why the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands have so many "corporate headquarter" offices and why American companies have large production facilities in Mexico, contracted out a lot of production to China, and contracted out a lot of customer service operations to India, causing big problems like closed factories all over the Midwest (the infamous Rust Belt) and a generally rising unemployment rate.
6. Because of the estate tax, Americans are spending a fortune on tax lawyers trying to figure out how to transfer money to the next generation without being hit by that 55% estate tax.
7. Foreigners are reluctant to invest in the USA because of very fact we have taxes on earning money.
This is why it is WAY past due we seriously look at fixing our taxation system. One radical (but very common sense) proposal, FairTax (House Resolution 25), essentially replaces all of our national income taxes (the Internal Revenue Code) with single 23% national sales tax on final production goods and services (business to business sales, used goods and college tuition are not taxed). To ensure this tax is progressive, every legal resident of the USA (citizens, resident aliens, aliens with work permits and foreign students at higher institutions of learning) will get a monthly payment that covers the cost of the tax up to the Federally-defined poverty level. This is the plan I favor, given these obvious advantages:
1. It breaks the power of tax lobbyists to use the IRC to favor one group and/or p
Why doesn't the Russian government just give official sanction to the Russian-language version of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 and end it at that? It'll save the Russian government a "mountain of kopeks" in development costs and avoid the IT industry ghettoizing issue, too.
I don't think high-end graphics cards will be completely necesary, but we will need graphics cards powerful enough to decode VC-1 or AVC encoded video from a Blu-ray disc and also provide HDCP support, too. Most of the very latest graphics cards with DVI-D outputs fortunately pass these compatibility tests so necessary for desktop computers to play back Blu-ray discs. Indeed, right now the graphics used on the iMac and Mac Pro are likely Blu-ray compatible, so only some software additions are necessary for Apple to add a BD-RE drive to play back Blu-ray movies and master BD-RE discs.
Of course, I'm not sure if Americans want to go back to living in densely packed cities, though. Do you really want to live like it is in Hong Kong with high-rise dwellings everywhere?
You are asking for essentially Soviet-style total control of the US economy. How did THAT work out?
A VASTLY better solution is to reform government, not turn it into centralized control. We need to do the following steps:
1) Seriously look at completely replacing our current income tax system with a consumption tax system like the FairTax proposal, along with repealing the 16th Amendment. Americans will spend way over US$300 BILLION this year complying with the Federal tax code, not to mention the fact the tax code has caused a lot of tax cheating and capital flight out of the country. Small wonder why we're in such an economic pickle--the tax code has hugely contributed to it in the first place.
2) Reign in the excesses of our equities markets. There should be tight controls on hedge funds, minimum margin requirements for trading stock futures and commodities should be at minimum 15-20% (not the 5% now) to discourage "make a fast buck" speculators, revisions to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to reduce that law's unintentional side effects, and reimpose the Glass-Steagall Act provisions to shield banks from the effects of equities markets.
Interestingly, I do agree that the Federal Reserve should be phased out. We need a Third Bank of the United States that operates like the Bank of England with better centralized monetary controls.
There are a LOT of highly customized software used by governments and businesses that run specifically under Windows XP. As such, offering the Windows XP "virtual machine" will allow these organizations to keep their legacy software as they transition to true Windows 7-compatible customized software.
There's also another issue here: movie downloads put a huge strain on the Internet infrastructure and even if you have Verizon FIOS, tie up your connection for a long time given how big a VC-1 or AVC-encoded file is for 1080p high-definition video (about 15 GB for a two-hour movie!).
I'd rather get a Blu-ray disc of a movie, where you're not subject to the problems of downloading and you get ultra-sharp 1080p video consistently.
I'd agree, but your car's engine is definitely not going to meet modern emission standards!
Here in the USA, diesel engines for automobiles have to meet the same emission standards are petrol-fueled automobiles; as such, up until very recently you couldn't sell a diesel-powered car in the USA, especially since the engine couldn't meet th emission standards for particulates and NOx. But now with urea gas injection in the exhaust stream and Ricardo UK's EGR system, the engine can meet US emission standards with no problems.
Up until very recently, it was nearly impossible to get an automotive diesel engine to meet the very strict EPA/CARB emission standards, especially in regards to NOx emissions.
But recent work by Ricardo UK with a special EGR/turbocharger installation showed they could make a turbodiesel engine meet even the ultra-stringent CARB SULEV standard--essentially the same as a hybrid car! That could pave the way for Ford to offer their Duratorq TDCi 1.6-liter engine in the new Fiesta in the US market, which could result in a car getting Prius-like fuel economy without the complication of a hybrid drivetrain.
Ford will start North American sales of the new Fiesta from their upgraded factory outside Mexico City starting in January 2010. If it is a sales hit (and I expect it to fly out of dealers in no time flat), don't be surprised that by 2012 we'll see the Fiesta assembled in a USA assembly line too.
The US version of the Fiesta will sport a neat new feature: the Powershift dual-clutch transmission with six forward speeds, which offer the convenience of an automatic with the fuel economy of a manual. And given Ricardo UK's work on cleaning up diesel engines, we could see the new Fiesta offered with the Duratorq turbodiesel engine, and that could mean the Fiesta gets Prius-like fuel economy!
I think if President Obama wants high-speed public ground transportation, he should forget about conventional steel wheel passenger railroads.
The problem is simple: the distance between city centers--especially west of the Mississippi--is quite large, and even today's 220 mph trains will take a long time to travel between city centers.
That's why Obama should "go for it" and embrace the latest variants of maglev technology, with trains capable of cruising at 310 mph (500 km/h) or higher. Because of the longer distances involved, maglev makes more sense, since with 310 mph transit speeds you can cover most of the important city pairs in the USA in under two hours easily. Also, maglevs have one advantage: no physical contact running, so we avoid the expensive issue of meticulous upkeep for overhead wiring and steel wheels/steel rails necessary for high-speed train operation, not to mention quieter operation because of no noise from the physical contact.
Imagine traveling between Dallas and Houston, Chicago and St. Louis, MO, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, etc. in a hour or less; it would literally change the demographics of the USA.
Mind you, given the relatively short distance by air between London and Paris, the Eurostar trains--now with high-speed running on both sides beyond the Channel Tunnel--makes a huge amount of sense, and in fact more people travel between London and Paris per year by Eurostar than by airplane. It will be very interesting to see what happens to KLM Cityflyer operating out of London City Airport (LCY) after the Thalys line from Paris is extended all the way to the center of the Netherlands.
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If you're talking current infrastructure, freight trains are still WAY more environmentally friendly than trucks.
Remember, you only need four modern 4,000 bhp diesel-electric locomotives to pull 180 loaded 53" trailers, not 180 trucks spewing WAY more exhaust emissions (assuming each truck has about 400 bhp pulling power).
The problem with airplanes is that because so much of the structure is needed for aerodynamic lift, the result is a much lower freight load per pound of structure compared to a freight train. That's why interest in super large lighter-than-air vehicles have never completely waned, since they could carry a lot of load per pound of structure.
The only thing it will do is make Microsoft create a special install version of Windows 7 that will ask you to decide what brand of web browser program you will install and use as your primary default. I see on a new machine with Windows 7 already pre-installed at the factory, if you insist on Internet Explorer 8.0 the final install will go straight through, while if you install Firefox or Opera as the default you will be asked to put back in the Windows 7 install DVD to copy over and install the non-MIcrosoft web browser.
I agree 100%. I wouldn't be surprised that the Obama Administration is looking seriously at putting the Orion spacecraft on top of an uprated Delta IV or Atlas V rocket, saving NASA billions of dollars in development costs. The Ares V will continue in development since the cargo capability of Ares V to low Earth orbit is even bigger than the Saturn V!
But you still have one BIG problem: hemp plants need a supply of fresh water to grow them.
Meanwhile, you can grow oil-laden algae in seawater, and that you could build big farms of tanks to grow oil-laden algae next to any major ocean coastline.
In fact, in the end oil-laden algae will be where we get our biofuels--you can harvest algae many times times per year, and more importantly, you can even use seawater to grow the algae, too.
Even if hemp could be grown legally in the USA, you still have the issue of finding a place to grow it with access to a reasonably cheap fresh water supply.
At least for fuels and potentially plastics, the better solution is large-scale harvesting of oil-laden algae, which doesn't need fresh water as many forms of oil-laden algae can grow in seawater. And unlike even the fast-growing hemp plant, oil-laden algae can be "harvested" many times per year, which means the potential to produce a huge amount of oil from the algae that can be refined to almost any fuel you can think of with modern refining processes.
Indeed, security issues is another reason why "cloud computing" will not be as ubiquitous as some people claim. Besides, with hard drive storage and flash memory storage densities zooming up nowadays, you can easily keep applications and data stored locally and not worry about losing productivity if you have little to no access to the Internet.
The desktop/laptop is NOT dead.
The reason is simple: people don't trust computing "over the cloud," because your device will be essentially useless if you are in an area with little to no Internet connectivity. Besides, you can get a netbook computer for under US$400 nowadays, and with improving technology those netbooks will soon store as much as 250 to 320 GB of data on the hard drive in the machine itself, way more than enough to store local data for business documents, spreadsheets, and smaller presentation files.
What you just described was predicted nearly 30 years ago in Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave.
I suggest you pick up that book and read the chapter "De-massifying the Media." In summation, Toffler predicted that as communication technologies improve, the days of a "mass media" will come to an end, where a few companies dominate the dissemination of news. The rise of the public Internet--especially since 1995 when Windows 95 included built-in PPP support for easy connection to the Internet--started a revolution that made it possible for newsgathering and news dissemination from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. When Matt Drudge broke the story on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair in early 1998 outside the purview of the major news organizations, that should have been the MAJOR warning that the "little people" will start encroaching onto the turf of newsgathering that was then dominated by the big, corporate news organizations.
Also, from what I've read about using IE 8.0 on Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 (Build 7100), it's actually quite good because since the core OS code has been tweaked and streamlined for major performance increases, IE 8.0 works quite fast and is reasonably stable. As such, the likelihood of Windows 7 users installing Firefox is not that great unless the upcoming Firefox 3.5 is REALLY good.
Remember, video encoding requires tremendous amounts of CPU power in the encoding process, far more so than audio encoding. That's why when Pixar renders the images for their movies they use thousands of Apple Xserve blade servers running in massively parallel fasion to do rendering at reasonable speeds.
We can make all the Beowulf cluster jokes on this forum, :-) but one reason why Beowulf was developed was the ability to synchronize hundreds to thousands of machines in a massively parallel fashion to speed up data processing, essentially creating a supercomputer setup "on the cheap." I remember reading about a biotech company using 1,000 small tower desktops powered by the Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU all synced together with Beowulf to do DNA modeling.
The biggest competition to Star Trek will likely be three movies:
Disney/Pixar's Up!.
DreamWorks/Paramount's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
Warner Brothers' Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
2009 has been a relatively weak year for summer movies due to the delayed effects of the Writer's Guild of America strike from 2007-2008, which severely cut down on the number of movies in development (remember, both Star Trek and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were delayed from late 2008 releases because otherwise both studios would lack big "tent pole" movies for Summer 2009). I think 2010 will be a bit better because now that the WGA strike is over, we may see more movies in development and production for Summer 2010.
I think one problem with all this analysis is the fact that if you really want public transit to be a viable option, people have to live in cities with where much of the is located in a small area such as New York City, Chicago, Boston, etc.
However, that means you have to live in cities approaching the population density of Manhattan or Hong Kong for public transit to be a true alternative to the automobile. In Hong Kong, most people can commute to work without needing a car, since the population density can support subway (MTR on Hong Kong/Kowloon side), commuter rail (KCR on Kowloon/New Territories side), light rail (New Territories side), trams (Hong Kong side), buses, minibuses and taxis.
Given the American penchant for disliking living in very high-density environments, small wonder why public transit is not viewed positively in the USA outside of a few big cities.
I wrote this earlier on another message thread, but if President Obama wants to end the problem of "offshoring" assets, he needs to seriously consider going to the much simpler, but much more effective, FairTax consumption tax system to replace our entire national income tax system.
It's not a secret that the WORST form of corruption in Washington, DC is those thousands of tax lobbyists trying "tweak" the IRC to support even the most narrow of constituencies. The result: the IRC plus its additional rulings are now over 67,500 pages of regulation, a code so complex that even the Internal Revenue Service personally admits it has difficulty figuring it all out!
I mean, look at what's so very wrong about the IRC:
1. The compliance cost this year for 2008 Federal income taxes is a mind-boggling US$350 BILLION, and the cost is rising each subsequent year. While people like tax lawyers, accountants, Intuit, H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt might make money, isn't this in the end a major waste of resources that can be better used for other purposes?
2. The fact we tax savings and investments means the USA probably has the lowest savings rate in the world among industrialized countries. A higher savings and investment rate is so sorely needed if we are to fix our economy.
3. Tax evasion is a SERIOUS problem. We have a huge problem with people participating in the underground economy (I've read the estimated value of that is around an amazing US$2 trillion). American citizens and businesses who can afford it are using every possible legal (and sometimes illegal!) tax loophole in the IRC to funnel out of the USA a MASSIVE amount of liquidity, now sitting in offshore financial centers (OFCs) located in places like the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Nauru, Panama, and so on to keep these assets out of the hands of the IRS. The amount sent out to OFCs: estimates vary, but shocking--somewhere between US$12 and US$17 TRILLION! And that money does not flow in our financial system, either.
4. Income taxes by definition favors debt financing over cash payments. The result is obviously wrong, as we've seen from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of the past few years.
5. Larger American companies--because of having to make economic decisions based on lowering the tax burden instead of what's best for the business--are moving a lot of their corporate headquarter and production operations out of the USA. And you wonder why the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands have so many "corporate headquarter" offices and why American companies have large production facilities in Mexico, contracted out a lot of production to China, and contracted out a lot of customer service operations to India, causing big problems like closed factories all over the Midwest (the infamous Rust Belt) and a generally rising unemployment rate.
6. Because of the estate tax, Americans are spending a fortune on tax lawyers trying to figure out how to transfer money to the next generation without being hit by that 55% estate tax.
7. Foreigners are reluctant to invest in the USA because of very fact we have taxes on earning money.
This is why it is WAY past due we seriously look at fixing our taxation system. One radical (but very common sense) proposal, FairTax (House Resolution 25), essentially replaces all of our national income taxes (the Internal Revenue Code) with single 23% national sales tax on final production goods and services (business to business sales, used goods and college tuition are not taxed). To ensure this tax is progressive, every legal resident of the USA (citizens, resident aliens, aliens with work permits and foreign students at higher institutions of learning) will get a monthly payment that covers the cost of the tax up to the Federally-defined poverty level. This is the plan I favor, given these obvious advantages:
1. It breaks the power of tax lobbyists to use the IRC to favor one group and/or p
Why doesn't the Russian government just give official sanction to the Russian-language version of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 and end it at that? It'll save the Russian government a "mountain of kopeks" in development costs and avoid the IT industry ghettoizing issue, too.
I don't think high-end graphics cards will be completely necesary, but we will need graphics cards powerful enough to decode VC-1 or AVC encoded video from a Blu-ray disc and also provide HDCP support, too. Most of the very latest graphics cards with DVI-D outputs fortunately pass these compatibility tests so necessary for desktop computers to play back Blu-ray discs. Indeed, right now the graphics used on the iMac and Mac Pro are likely Blu-ray compatible, so only some software additions are necessary for Apple to add a BD-RE drive to play back Blu-ray movies and master BD-RE discs.
Of course, I'm not sure if Americans want to go back to living in densely packed cities, though. Do you really want to live like it is in Hong Kong with high-rise dwellings everywhere?
You are asking for essentially Soviet-style total control of the US economy. How did THAT work out?
A VASTLY better solution is to reform government, not turn it into centralized control. We need to do the following steps:
1) Seriously look at completely replacing our current income tax system with a consumption tax system like the FairTax proposal, along with repealing the 16th Amendment. Americans will spend way over US$300 BILLION this year complying with the Federal tax code, not to mention the fact the tax code has caused a lot of tax cheating and capital flight out of the country. Small wonder why we're in such an economic pickle--the tax code has hugely contributed to it in the first place.
2) Reign in the excesses of our equities markets. There should be tight controls on hedge funds, minimum margin requirements for trading stock futures and commodities should be at minimum 15-20% (not the 5% now) to discourage "make a fast buck" speculators, revisions to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to reduce that law's unintentional side effects, and reimpose the Glass-Steagall Act provisions to shield banks from the effects of equities markets.
Interestingly, I do agree that the Federal Reserve should be phased out. We need a Third Bank of the United States that operates like the Bank of England with better centralized monetary controls.
There are a LOT of highly customized software used by governments and businesses that run specifically under Windows XP. As such, offering the Windows XP "virtual machine" will allow these organizations to keep their legacy software as they transition to true Windows 7-compatible customized software.
There's also another issue here: movie downloads put a huge strain on the Internet infrastructure and even if you have Verizon FIOS, tie up your connection for a long time given how big a VC-1 or AVC-encoded file is for 1080p high-definition video (about 15 GB for a two-hour movie!).
I'd rather get a Blu-ray disc of a movie, where you're not subject to the problems of downloading and you get ultra-sharp 1080p video consistently.
I'd agree, but your car's engine is definitely not going to meet modern emission standards!
Here in the USA, diesel engines for automobiles have to meet the same emission standards are petrol-fueled automobiles; as such, up until very recently you couldn't sell a diesel-powered car in the USA, especially since the engine couldn't meet th emission standards for particulates and NOx. But now with urea gas injection in the exhaust stream and Ricardo UK's EGR system, the engine can meet US emission standards with no problems.
Up until very recently, it was nearly impossible to get an automotive diesel engine to meet the very strict EPA/CARB emission standards, especially in regards to NOx emissions.
But recent work by Ricardo UK with a special EGR/turbocharger installation showed they could make a turbodiesel engine meet even the ultra-stringent CARB SULEV standard--essentially the same as a hybrid car! That could pave the way for Ford to offer their Duratorq TDCi 1.6-liter engine in the new Fiesta in the US market, which could result in a car getting Prius-like fuel economy without the complication of a hybrid drivetrain.
Ford will start North American sales of the new Fiesta from their upgraded factory outside Mexico City starting in January 2010. If it is a sales hit (and I expect it to fly out of dealers in no time flat), don't be surprised that by 2012 we'll see the Fiesta assembled in a USA assembly line too.
The US version of the Fiesta will sport a neat new feature: the Powershift dual-clutch transmission with six forward speeds, which offer the convenience of an automatic with the fuel economy of a manual. And given Ricardo UK's work on cleaning up diesel engines, we could see the new Fiesta offered with the Duratorq turbodiesel engine, and that could mean the Fiesta gets Prius-like fuel economy!
I think if President Obama wants high-speed public ground transportation, he should forget about conventional steel wheel passenger railroads.
The problem is simple: the distance between city centers--especially west of the Mississippi--is quite large, and even today's 220 mph trains will take a long time to travel between city centers.
That's why Obama should "go for it" and embrace the latest variants of maglev technology, with trains capable of cruising at 310 mph (500 km/h) or higher. Because of the longer distances involved, maglev makes more sense, since with 310 mph transit speeds you can cover most of the important city pairs in the USA in under two hours easily. Also, maglevs have one advantage: no physical contact running, so we avoid the expensive issue of meticulous upkeep for overhead wiring and steel wheels/steel rails necessary for high-speed train operation, not to mention quieter operation because of no noise from the physical contact.
Imagine traveling between Dallas and Houston, Chicago and St. Louis, MO, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, etc. in a hour or less; it would literally change the demographics of the USA.
Mind you, given the relatively short distance by air between London and Paris, the Eurostar trains--now with high-speed running on both sides beyond the Channel Tunnel--makes a huge amount of sense, and in fact more people travel between London and Paris per year by Eurostar than by airplane. It will be very interesting to see what happens to KLM Cityflyer operating out of London City Airport (LCY) after the Thalys line from Paris is extended all the way to the center of the Netherlands.