It could have a considerable value for a new business that wants to give customers and potential investors the impression of being more established than it is. A lot of people will not see through it.
Our new software as a service has accumulated 10008 likes in one week after opening, and 102 five-star reviews!! Give us your money!!!
He was/is a freelancer, so I think it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of his typing was not code. Emails, specifications, documentation, planning, accounting, correspondence with tax authorities and so on and so fourth. These things don't write themselves.
I didn't mention the hyperloop, but it is envisioned to be superior to HSR and air travel...
I have no idea how many travelers would actually use the projected HSR network in California, but judging from a quick look at the map it looks like the vast majority of the journeys on the network would be between stations within each metro area where the station to station journey times would be short enough to allow daily commutes.
That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."
The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.
Yes, but there is empirical data that suggests that high speed lines operate at close to 100% capacity in the morning and evening peak hours. The theoretical maximum capacity of a double track dedicated passenger train line can be calculated based on 2.5 minute headways and about 1000 passengers per train (assuming fairly dense seating in a 400-meter train). In practice you will want 3 minute headways and a more comfortable 700 passengers per train.
(60/3) * 700 = 14000 passengers/h each way
Maybe they're counting on 600 seats per train in order to better cater to customers of size...
And the bottom line is that it has been tried in Germany and the results are expensive high speed lines with slow 'high speed' trains running on them. The German ICE trains struggle to average 100 mph from station to station, which is frankly pathetic considering how expensive the lines were to build.
Yes, I imagine most of the freight along the coast consists of relatively small and time-critical shipments. Trucks are hard to beat for that sort of freight because of their ability to go from somewhere very near point A to somewhere very near point B.
A hyperloop or even a maglev line may make sense for shipping high value lightweight freight over longer distances where air freight is used currently (because of the low cruising speed of trucks), like LA-Seattle, Beijing-Hong Kong.
Maglev is only slightly faster than TGV or similar high speed rail, and normal trains, eg freight services can't run on maglev tracks, whereas they can run on LGV tracks.
That really depends. Maglev would typically be at least 60-70% faster station to station. The problem is the last 10 miles to and from the downtowns of cities, where HSR can use existing tracks. That is probably the greatest drawback of any new transit technology like maglev or hyperloop.
Lightweight freight like mail and packages is fine on HSR lines, but there are several problems with running heavy freight (which is most freight):
1. Heavy freight trains can't climb inclines steeper than 1% unless you add lots of locomotives, which would make it prohibitively expensive for the freight operator. Powerful passenger trains can climb inclines of up to 4%, which means you can let the line climb hills instead of tunnel through them. Tunneling can be quite expensive.
2. Freight trains travel at about one third the speed of fast passenger trains and overtaking is not trivial for obvious reasons which means you'll need to give the freight train a huge head start before the next passenger train, which means that a freight train on a mostly passenger line will occupy several 'slots' that could otherwise be occupied by passenger trains. That's a tremendously inefficient way to utilize your shiny new super expensive HSR line.
3. Freight trains frequently need to run at night in order to arrive at their destination in the morning when people start work or when food needs to arrive at supermarkets. High speed lines, because of their more stringent tolerances, need to be closed off at night in case unforeseen repairs or adjustments are needed.
Maglev could probably be used to transport lightweight and maybe even heavy freight freight in theory, but it's not going to happen in practice because of the prohibitive cost of building side tracks to factories and freight terminals. You can't easily beat freight trucks when there are roads everywhere.
Land is going to be what kills this project, before it even gets as far as anything technical. How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
Why would you?
There are 200+ national governments out there. Convince one of them that it makes sense partnering with you. Once the first hyperloop system is built other governments will follow, including the state of California sooner or later, assuming the system is vastly better than high speed rail. Governments are pretty thick but most of them won't turn down an obviously awesome offer that's going to create profits for businesses and jobs for citizens.
It does need to be really good to overcome the inertia of government stupidity coupled with big corporate lobbyism. There is already a maglev system called Transrapid that is somewhat better than HSR in almost every way (50% faster, slightly cheaper to operate, etc), but governments prefer to build steel on rails because it brings profit to several existing large corporations and their many lobbyists, as opposed to bringing profit to just the corporation that owns Transrapid and their (fewer) lobbyists.
What was the last new (new as in it has no contemporary substitutes) COMMERCIAL software product (as in you pay real money to a company that employs people at grown-up wages to buy it) written in a real programming language and introduced with the same usefulness and value as say, Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks, Skype or Final Cut Pro?
Those are all software products that replaced a hardware system and/or manual labor. All of them also aim to create a final product that is easy to represent digitally (pictures, documents, speech, video). There is a limited number of such workflows, so no surprise there.
Why would there not be simply some mechanical/electrical switch that triggers the train to slow down automatically approaching sharp corners?
No reason, other than money saving and/or trying to complete the project on time by cutting corners. It's usually a bit more advanced that a simple switch, but that's besides the point. Any decent railroad has a signalling system that detects overspeed and automatically slows the train down to something like 20 mph before letting the driver speed up to the allowed speed again.
1. Sign up for an account with a major social provider (Facebook, etc) 2. Tie your social account to your cellphone number/SIM 3. Verify that you own the SIM and that the same number has not been used to register other accounts on the same social network. )Possibly verify that the SIM is registered with the government on the same name used to sign up.) 4. Done. From now on you do one-click signup with other services.
By the way it's only a matter of time before governments begin to dictate (at least de facto) that you must be on at least one of the major social networks, so saying that you don't want to is not going to be an issue. I'm sure there will be "anonymous" signup for porn sites too, with some identifier that the government can use to link your anonymous account to you...
Here's nearly every newspaper article about science ever: "Until recently, scientists believed in $obviously_false_idea, but a recent study shows that..."
The idea that cooperation has been selected for by evolution to some extent is obviously correct, because otherwise we wouldn't have social species that can't survive without cooperation. It's also nothing new, it's one of the central themes of The Selfish Gene that everyone who feigns an interest in science pretends to have read.
I haven't read TFA, but I imagine the study was probably about some detail of how cooperation is selected for.
Except the grandparent didn't argue that it was useless, he merely pointed out that it wouldn't work for astronauts.
This has already occurred to the people working on the invention and to anyone who remembers the law of physics that says that forces on an oscillating object are proportional to the square of the frequency, so it is perhaps a bit obvious.
Everyone says that, but a basic fact of the universe says that it is vastly cheaper and easier to deliver unprocessed information than it is to deliver carefully filtered and processed information. In other words: by the time your well researched news is ready to be printed it is no longer news and it will have cost a lot of money to research and write.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in-depth journalism is more or less political, because the filtering and processing of the information is done by people who have political opinions and biases.
I think a good news source needs a mix of minute by minute reporting and investigative journalism to be viable.
Yeah, the cost of the electricity would have been an order of magnitude lower than the cost of the mirror system if we assume that it consumes 10 kW and runs for 10 hours a day 200 days a year. It would also probably have been more reliable and easier to service...
But on the other hand, would the electric light be able to simulate the spectrum of natural light the way that natural light changes during the day? Would the electric light double as a minor tourist attraction the way that the mirror probably will?
We're already draping our cities in ever larger quantities of LED:s during the winter half of the year up in the north, so it's not like it's a question of either-or. I just hope they're able to get the servos to run reliably and without too much maintenance.
There is no reason at all why you couldn't have the tube split up into multiple parallel tubes at the endpoints where the speed would be quite low anyway. You could even have the train land and roll into a station tube on steerable wheels. That would allow you to have many trains going through the system at once. Or you could have air locks and smaller vehicles with short headways which would allow for as many vehicles as you can store at the end points.
You could have a small number of switches along the way with deceleration and speed limits mandatory for all vehicles whether they are going to switch or not.
You could also settle for much lower speeds than in science fiction, which would allow you to have the system be above ground which would make it a lot cheaper. Most high speed rail services only manage 200 km/h average speed between end stations. If you could build something that averages 400 km/h you would blow HSR out of the water and replace air travel at distances up to about 1500-2000 km. If you could build something that averages 600 km/h you could replace most air travel.
Nobody (in their right mind) is proposing a pneumatic tube transport system. The main complication over long distances is that it would require immense amounts of energy because the air that powers the vehicles would have to overcome the friction/resistance of each unit of length of tube along the way.
The idea here is to power it with linear motors. That has never been tried AFAIK. I can't think of any obvious reason why it would be a bad idea, except that it hasn't been tried so you'll have to start from scratch, for instance by building a scaled down prototype.
At this time, it appears the plane's air speed was too low on final approach, and the pilot may have over-corrected by throttling up and then (mistakenly) putting the nose further up as a panic measure; This resulted in a severe tail strike on the sea wall, and the plane would have become aerodynamically unstable immediately after.
If they were coming in too slow AFAIK the proper thing to do is to go around, i.e. go full throttle, pull back on the flight controls and climb. My understanding is that going around would normally not be a mistake even if they're slow enough that they knew they would touch down on the runway (on the landing gear) and bounce up again. The idea is that it's usually a lot safer to take off and go around for a second landing attempt than to attempt to complete a landing that seems to be going wrong. As long as your engines are working properly there shouldn't be a problem.
One possibility that comes to mind is that something prevented them from getting the thrust they needed to go around.
True, you can get a lot more open in terms of intellectual content or intellectual property by using FPGA:s.
You are still writing ones and zeros to memories with an FPGA and you are still dependent on a proprietary part, but those ones and zeroes can have a much more radical impact on how the machine works if it is based around an FPGA than if it is based around a hard CPU.
No, I think Stallman's laptop just happened to have a free BIOS. IIRC Stallman does not think that free hardware is nearly as important as free software. This is a an open/free source hardware design meaning that anyone could theoretically grab the design files, do whatever changes they want and then start producing the board.
The integrated circuits are for the most part closed designs of course. If you want to design a completely and utterly open laptop you must first design an open universe...
And to make things worse the planet would be about one order of magnitude above its carrying capacity if it were not for a steady supply of artificial fertilizer, made from natural gas or other fossil fuels. Even if you can live off the land around you now you may be unable to do so after a major nuclear exchange when fertilizer becomes unavailable and agricultural yields drop.
What about hunting then? Well, we are about two orders of magnitude above the Earth's carrying capacity for us as hunter-gatherers. The what little edible wildlife is left today would run out quickly if there were no conservation laws.
That said, even if the population would drop by 99% there would still be 70 million humans on the planet and humans would still be the most numerous mammal species except for the ones that live off of our economy such as rats and other rodents. Even if the population would drop by 99.99% we would still not qualify as a threatened species, not even nearly. In short: there are a lot of humans and killing us all won't be easy by any means.
Slashdot Mirror
It could have a considerable value for a new business that wants to give customers and potential investors the impression of being more established than it is. A lot of people will not see through it.
Our new software as a service has accumulated 10008 likes in one week after opening, and 102 five-star reviews!! Give us your money!!!
He was/is a freelancer, so I think it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of his typing was not code. Emails, specifications, documentation, planning, accounting, correspondence with tax authorities and so on and so fourth. These things don't write themselves.
Projecting much?
You need to work on your reading comprehension. Hint: everything on the internet is not necessarily an argument.
I didn't mention the hyperloop, but it is envisioned to be superior to HSR and air travel...
I have no idea how many travelers would actually use the projected HSR network in California, but judging from a quick look at the map it looks like the vast majority of the journeys on the network would be between stations within each metro area where the station to station journey times would be short enough to allow daily commutes.
That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."
The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.
Yes, but there is empirical data that suggests that high speed lines operate at close to 100% capacity in the morning and evening peak hours. The theoretical maximum capacity of a double track dedicated passenger train line can be calculated based on 2.5 minute headways and about 1000 passengers per train (assuming fairly dense seating in a 400-meter train). In practice you will want 3 minute headways and a more comfortable 700 passengers per train.
(60/3) * 700 = 14000 passengers/h each way
Maybe they're counting on 600 seats per train in order to better cater to customers of size...
And the bottom line is that it has been tried in Germany and the results are expensive high speed lines with slow 'high speed' trains running on them. The German ICE trains struggle to average 100 mph from station to station, which is frankly pathetic considering how expensive the lines were to build.
Yes, I imagine most of the freight along the coast consists of relatively small and time-critical shipments. Trucks are hard to beat for that sort of freight because of their ability to go from somewhere very near point A to somewhere very near point B.
A hyperloop or even a maglev line may make sense for shipping high value lightweight freight over longer distances where air freight is used currently (because of the low cruising speed of trucks), like LA-Seattle, Beijing-Hong Kong.
Maglev is only slightly faster than TGV or similar high speed rail, and normal trains, eg freight services can't run on maglev tracks, whereas they can run on LGV tracks.
That really depends. Maglev would typically be at least 60-70% faster station to station. The problem is the last 10 miles to and from the downtowns of cities, where HSR can use existing tracks. That is probably the greatest drawback of any new transit technology like maglev or hyperloop.
Lightweight freight like mail and packages is fine on HSR lines, but there are several problems with running heavy freight (which is most freight):
1. Heavy freight trains can't climb inclines steeper than 1% unless you add lots of locomotives, which would make it prohibitively expensive for the freight operator. Powerful passenger trains can climb inclines of up to 4%, which means you can let the line climb hills instead of tunnel through them. Tunneling can be quite expensive.
2. Freight trains travel at about one third the speed of fast passenger trains and overtaking is not trivial for obvious reasons which means you'll need to give the freight train a huge head start before the next passenger train, which means that a freight train on a mostly passenger line will occupy several 'slots' that could otherwise be occupied by passenger trains. That's a tremendously inefficient way to utilize your shiny new super expensive HSR line.
3. Freight trains frequently need to run at night in order to arrive at their destination in the morning when people start work or when food needs to arrive at supermarkets. High speed lines, because of their more stringent tolerances, need to be closed off at night in case unforeseen repairs or adjustments are needed.
Maglev could probably be used to transport lightweight and maybe even heavy freight freight in theory, but it's not going to happen in practice because of the prohibitive cost of building side tracks to factories and freight terminals. You can't easily beat freight trucks when there are roads everywhere.
Land is going to be what kills this project, before it even gets as far as anything technical. How do you acquire the land for the route as a private entity, without eminent domain?
Why would you?
There are 200+ national governments out there. Convince one of them that it makes sense partnering with you. Once the first hyperloop system is built other governments will follow, including the state of California sooner or later, assuming the system is vastly better than high speed rail. Governments are pretty thick but most of them won't turn down an obviously awesome offer that's going to create profits for businesses and jobs for citizens.
It does need to be really good to overcome the inertia of government stupidity coupled with big corporate lobbyism. There is already a maglev system called Transrapid that is somewhat better than HSR in almost every way (50% faster, slightly cheaper to operate, etc), but governments prefer to build steel on rails because it brings profit to several existing large corporations and their many lobbyists, as opposed to bringing profit to just the corporation that owns Transrapid and their (fewer) lobbyists.
What was the last new (new as in it has no contemporary substitutes) COMMERCIAL software product (as in you pay real money to a company that employs people at grown-up wages to buy it) written in a real programming language and introduced with the same usefulness and value as say, Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks, Skype or Final Cut Pro?
Those are all software products that replaced a hardware system and/or manual labor. All of them also aim to create a final product that is easy to represent digitally (pictures, documents, speech, video). There is a limited number of such workflows, so no surprise there.
Why would there not be simply some mechanical/electrical switch that triggers the train to slow down automatically approaching sharp corners?
No reason, other than money saving and/or trying to complete the project on time by cutting corners. It's usually a bit more advanced that a simple switch, but that's besides the point. Any decent railroad has a signalling system that detects overspeed and automatically slows the train down to something like 20 mph before letting the driver speed up to the allowed speed again.
Actual solution:
1. Sign up for an account with a major social provider (Facebook, etc)
2. Tie your social account to your cellphone number/SIM
3. Verify that you own the SIM and that the same number has not been used to register other accounts on the same social network. )Possibly verify that the SIM is registered with the government on the same name used to sign up.)
4. Done. From now on you do one-click signup with other services.
By the way it's only a matter of time before governments begin to dictate (at least de facto) that you must be on at least one of the major social networks, so saying that you don't want to is not going to be an issue. I'm sure there will be "anonymous" signup for porn sites too, with some identifier that the government can use to link your anonymous account to you...
Here's nearly every newspaper article about science ever: "Until recently, scientists believed in $obviously_false_idea, but a recent study shows that..."
The idea that cooperation has been selected for by evolution to some extent is obviously correct, because otherwise we wouldn't have social species that can't survive without cooperation. It's also nothing new, it's one of the central themes of The Selfish Gene that everyone who feigns an interest in science pretends to have read.
I haven't read TFA, but I imagine the study was probably about some detail of how cooperation is selected for.
Except the grandparent didn't argue that it was useless, he merely pointed out that it wouldn't work for astronauts.
This has already occurred to the people working on the invention and to anyone who remembers the law of physics that says that forces on an oscillating object are proportional to the square of the frequency, so it is perhaps a bit obvious.
Electric cars were already off the shelf products in the 90's. The 1890's... That was before oil became really cheap.
The 30 year rule is a nice rule of thumb, but it's only a rule of thumb and it is subject to competition by other technologies.
Everyone says that, but a basic fact of the universe says that it is vastly cheaper and easier to deliver unprocessed information than it is to deliver carefully filtered and processed information. In other words: by the time your well researched news is ready to be printed it is no longer news and it will have cost a lot of money to research and write.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in-depth journalism is more or less political, because the filtering and processing of the information is done by people who have political opinions and biases.
I think a good news source needs a mix of minute by minute reporting and investigative journalism to be viable.
Yeah, the cost of the electricity would have been an order of magnitude lower than the cost of the mirror system if we assume that it consumes 10 kW and runs for 10 hours a day 200 days a year. It would also probably have been more reliable and easier to service...
But on the other hand, would the electric light be able to simulate the spectrum of natural light the way that natural light changes during the day? Would the electric light double as a minor tourist attraction the way that the mirror probably will?
We're already draping our cities in ever larger quantities of LED:s during the winter half of the year up in the north, so it's not like it's a question of either-or. I just hope they're able to get the servos to run reliably and without too much maintenance.
There is no reason at all why you couldn't have the tube split up into multiple parallel tubes at the endpoints where the speed would be quite low anyway. You could even have the train land and roll into a station tube on steerable wheels. That would allow you to have many trains going through the system at once. Or you could have air locks and smaller vehicles with short headways which would allow for as many vehicles as you can store at the end points.
You could have a small number of switches along the way with deceleration and speed limits mandatory for all vehicles whether they are going to switch or not.
You could also settle for much lower speeds than in science fiction, which would allow you to have the system be above ground which would make it a lot cheaper. Most high speed rail services only manage 200 km/h average speed between end stations. If you could build something that averages 400 km/h you would blow HSR out of the water and replace air travel at distances up to about 1500-2000 km. If you could build something that averages 600 km/h you could replace most air travel.
Nobody (in their right mind) is proposing a pneumatic tube transport system. The main complication over long distances is that it would require immense amounts of energy because the air that powers the vehicles would have to overcome the friction/resistance of each unit of length of tube along the way.
The idea here is to power it with linear motors. That has never been tried AFAIK. I can't think of any obvious reason why it would be a bad idea, except that it hasn't been tried so you'll have to start from scratch, for instance by building a scaled down prototype.
It's interesting how many successful terrorists are trained as engineers.
Fixed that for you. It is interesting, but it is also unsurprising if you think about it.
At this time, it appears the plane's air speed was too low on final approach, and the pilot may have over-corrected by throttling up and then (mistakenly) putting the nose further up as a panic measure; This resulted in a severe tail strike on the sea wall, and the plane would have become aerodynamically unstable immediately after.
If they were coming in too slow AFAIK the proper thing to do is to go around, i.e. go full throttle, pull back on the flight controls and climb. My understanding is that going around would normally not be a mistake even if they're slow enough that they knew they would touch down on the runway (on the landing gear) and bounce up again. The idea is that it's usually a lot safer to take off and go around for a second landing attempt than to attempt to complete a landing that seems to be going wrong. As long as your engines are working properly there shouldn't be a problem.
One possibility that comes to mind is that something prevented them from getting the thrust they needed to go around.
Mhmm... Hands above the covers!
If the analog performance of this thing can be made halfway decent this guy may have the beginnings of a small business.
True, you can get a lot more open in terms of intellectual content or intellectual property by using FPGA:s.
You are still writing ones and zeros to memories with an FPGA and you are still dependent on a proprietary part, but those ones and zeroes can have a much more radical impact on how the machine works if it is based around an FPGA than if it is based around a hard CPU.
No, I think Stallman's laptop just happened to have a free BIOS. IIRC Stallman does not think that free hardware is nearly as important as free software. This is a an open/free source hardware design meaning that anyone could theoretically grab the design files, do whatever changes they want and then start producing the board.
The integrated circuits are for the most part closed designs of course. If you want to design a completely and utterly open laptop you must first design an open universe...
And to make things worse the planet would be about one order of magnitude above its carrying capacity if it were not for a steady supply of artificial fertilizer, made from natural gas or other fossil fuels. Even if you can live off the land around you now you may be unable to do so after a major nuclear exchange when fertilizer becomes unavailable and agricultural yields drop.
What about hunting then? Well, we are about two orders of magnitude above the Earth's carrying capacity for us as hunter-gatherers. The what little edible wildlife is left today would run out quickly if there were no conservation laws.
That said, even if the population would drop by 99% there would still be 70 million humans on the planet and humans would still be the most numerous mammal species except for the ones that live off of our economy such as rats and other rodents. Even if the population would drop by 99.99% we would still not qualify as a threatened species, not even nearly. In short: there are a lot of humans and killing us all won't be easy by any means.