The Viper pulls about 1.01g, as I recall, and the NSX pulls 0.99g. My beloved 300ZX Twin Turbo pulls over 0.90g.
Here's the thing, though: an electric car could have fantastic skid pad numbers, as you can put all the drivetrain weight right at the wheels, as low as you want, plus you can mount the batteries right on the floorboard. The net effect is that you can put the center of gravity, and hence the instant roll-center of the suspension incredibly low, without getting the "jacking" that you get with internal combustion engines' higher positioning.
The Stirling engine has been tried many, many times in transportation scenarios and none have ever proved reliable or cost-effective. These limitations are almost certainly changing (I can think of one company immediately that is on the right track) but certainly it *has* been tried before and has not been feasible. You are not bringing up an idea that has not been thoroughly hashed out in transporation engineering.
I fail to see how this is relevant. The president does not determine whether or not Americans as a people will conserve electricity power or not. This is just one more example of the blame-game. You want to blame the administration that isn't even in power yet for the current energy crisis? There's a great deal more to encouraging conservation in the US than the guy sitting in the oval office. Conservation has to start in the household and move up the societal ladder from the bottom, and ultimately the government will follow its electorate and the corporations will follow their consumers and shareholders. Politicians don't determine what things are important to people. The people have to decide for themselves and make it a priority to pass those values on to their children.
I didn't vote for Bush, but Cheney was a big factor in our getting through oil crises in the past. The fact is, when we're facing a national energy crisis, who else is better suited to deal with the reality of it than experienced energy-industry insiders?
In casino poker rooms, which are highly equivalent (provide a venue for players to gamble amongst themselves in games of skill), this is a somewhat common and legal practice. The casino doesn't make money on the poker players directly, so they use "shills" that sit at the tables and play with the casino's money for an hourly rate. Ethics sort of go out the window when your gambling, much less when you're playing poker.
This model might actually work for the very same reason that casinos offer poker rooms. Unlike almost every other form of gambling, where the players are trying to beat the house with chance, poker is only played against other players. The casino offers a venue and a format for the players and makes money off the transaction. This is very similar to what this gaming company is offering, it seems. The casinos find this a profitable undertaking as long as they can prevent cheating. If a poker room has a reputation for allowing any form of cheating, then players will not come. The same will be true for this gaming system, although harder to enforce.
In fact, just like poker, there will be born whole demographics of people who play. Notably:
1) Casual players who do not expect to make money
2) "Professional Players" who think they can make it, but are convinced that their losses are just the results of luck, cheating, etc. (Most often this is self-delusion)
3) The very small handful of players who can actually consistently make money and do - the sharks. They have no self-delusions about luck or third-parties. This group is so small it almost doesn't even exist, despite the fact that you could throw a rock in a poker room and hit a person who thinks they are a member or the elite.
The only people who make money are the real sharks and the casino.
Bravo to the dot-com business model, but beware if you think you can make it as a professional game-player.
When you've roofed houses in Houston, Texas for fourteen hours a day in August (105 in the shade and 99% humidity) to make $2.00 an hour, ANY job with a ceiling sounds pretty damn appealing, much less a job with air conditioning or one that allows you to sit down.
It's a funny thing watching this past US election and seeing all of the posturing of the politicians regarding the "issues" - particularly health care - and watching them ignore the "War on Drugs."
What would we give for empirical data regarding health care? Everyone has their theory about what the results would be of sweeping health-care policy change, and yet it is all speculation...
Then look at the drug war, where there is HUGE empirical data from Prohibition on what happens in American when a potentially-abused substance is banned, and not a single politico in the two major parties gives it a thought. (Libertarians may now stand up and wave...) Here we are, 75 years later, facing a redux of the heyday of organized crime, witch hunts and illegal importation and we still think our policy is correct! Sheesh...
Oh, and don't forget how you don't have to worry about trying to make enough money to support you for your entire life during its short, physical peak
Check your facts. The average salary for a major league baseball player in 2000 was almost $1.9M. I don't think there is a real problem with these guys supporting themselves.
I fail to see how it would prevent you from recreating the exact signal that came in from the cable. The television doesn't know in advance when things are going to happen, right? So if the signal still comes in via a wire or an antenna, then why couldn't you just record the "copy-never" signal directly and then play it right back into the TV? (Sound like a VCR?) It is still just RF or 1's and 0's.
The television could work via a timestamp or something, I guess, so it knows from the encoding what time something must be played, and not show it otherwise, but that would depend on the integrity of the television's clock. How hard could it be to jack around with the television's internal date and time?
I guess I understand why they want to do this, but I don't understand what they could do to the signal to prevent it from being copied. Can somebody shed some light on this?
Granted - the IOC has a bad reputation for taking bribes, etc. but I think from NBC's perspective they would need due diligence performed on their donated money. The IOC can get away with taking massive kickbacks, but I don't know if they could get away with blatant misappropriations of funds. Maybe they could - I'm just speculating - but there are a lot more eyes watching that money than there are when the IOC officials go visit Salt Lake city two years away from the next Games.
The simple fact is that the Internet won't come up with the same kind of cash and at the end it will still be less for the athletes. Too many Internet companies out there think that they can make an advertising-based revenue model work to actually charge serious cash like the big television networks can. Maybe someday, but not today.
Internet broadcasting would not sum up to be anywhere near the amount that it would decrease that value to the IOC. And that money is what funds the games.
And again, who care about watching the games? It is not about that. It is about the fact that US and all the rich countries around the world will send athletes regardless of how much money the IOC has, but all the poor countries won't be able to and the games will become that much more adulterated without funding.
The simple fact is that the only way the Olympics gets funded is by these sponsors and by television money paid because the advertising is so lucrative. If you force the television networks to compete with the internet, you are going to create a competitive market that results in less money to support the games. The games are already dominated by the rich and fat countries - allowing Internet broadcasts would make it even worse as the IOC could not afford to help fund athletes from poorer countries.
And "communities" haven't been doing the moving -- people have.
What is a community, if not the people? Why sustain a "community" whose only significant feature is the ground it is sitting on? If people seek to leave a place because there is nothing there for them, why is that bad?
Technology has been doing this for a SIGNIFICANT amount of time - look at the communities 150 years ago that had to move to be near the railroads, and thousands of years ago communities moved to be near rivers and coastlines. The resources themselves are the only thing that has changed.
Re:Now for something completely different!
on
The New Geography
·
· Score: 1
Me thinks it depends a bit on what you're better at...someone else being proud of being a better "frist poster" than me is not necessarily a good thing, is it?
Sure, but what does the article say they're good at?
creativity, education, trade and culture
That doesn't seem like something that is the formula for success only in a digital era, but has always differentiated successful communities from unsuccessful ones.
Now for something completely different!
on
The New Geography
·
· Score: 1
This, says Plotkin, has triggered a vast upheaval, good news for communities that excel at creativity, education, trade and culture, bad news for everybody else.
I'm sure their long-term strategy is to get college students to become main market, probably using a model pretty similar to the "get paid to surf" type places. Who else but college students would let other people use their computer for just a handful of change, while having a nailed-up connection. Hence Windows.
Long term, to achieve the massively-distributed computing scale that I'm sure they want to, they need to address the market that is, for better or worse, dominated by Microsoft. This is even more true as DSL and Cable-modems become more prevalent in the home.
Great idea, force the prison system to put violent criminals back out on the street so we can keep the "dangerous" white-collared criminals behind bars. Only so much prison space, ya know. Ohio just had to let a guy out after three years that was convicted of killing his 3-year-old son in cold blood.
The entire point of corporate entity law is to ensure that the people actually making the decisions are the ones held responsible. This is called the "corporate veil" and basically says that the shareholders cannot be held responsible for acts of the company.
"But," you say, "its the greedy shareholders out there ruining America! Let's hold them responsible!"
Every mutual-fund owning grandma in the US is a shareholder and you are too. The US economy works because the corporate veil minimizes the risk involved in investment. Would you buy Ford stock if you could be sued for the Firestone-related deaths?
The point is: We have seen the enemy and it is us.
Why not depend on the broadcast mediums to do the culling-out of good music? Rather than taking money from advertisers to pay RIAA royalties, why not play free music and consider the advertising revenue the cost to provide this service? The broadcast mediums are how music gets popular currently anyway. The record companies may decide that Britney Spears is going to be the next big thing, but they have to depend on the media to get the message out to all the 12-year-old girls. The infrastructure already exists. We don't need record companies for distribution or promotion...
The question is what do the RIAA companies bring to the table? Historically they provided a means of distribution that was unavailable to the artists themselves. They had the studios, etc. to record and produce music that could be sold around the world - and they got paid (fairly?) for it.
But now, with MP3's, the distribution costs nothing and can be done by those who are creating the music. Why pay the record company when they are not adding value to the process of getting the music from the artist to the audience?
Its always been known that you here the GOOD songs on radio, and you get to hear the other stuff when you buy the CD.
While I agree that the system has not changed, technology has, and it now allows a different distribution medium.
Here are the two cases:
1) I'm only paying for the released "good" songs, in which case I can do whatever I want with the bad ones since the record company has deemed them to have no monetary value.
2) I'm paying equally for all songs and I don't want the non-released "bad" songs, so the record company is sticking me for stuff I don't want and didn't have a chance to preview.
Technologies like Napster allow songs to be distributed independently of the album, and with an opportunity to preview it before listening.
Albums are simply a distribution convenience that is quickly becoming antiquated. Ideally, songs should be sold in their own right and bad songs don't get bought.
What it doesn't say is that if a student downloads a song to "sample and see if they like the album" and find that they only like a few songs, and not the whole album, they simply keep the good songs, trash the old songs, and continue to not by the albums.
But if you pay $15 for a CD and expect to get 8 to 12 songs that you like to listen to, but only get 2 good songs, who is getting ripped off?
If 80% of the songs on a CD suck, then why should I have to pay full price?
Napster gives me an alternative to the record companies that want to pawn off bad music on me and make a quick buck after having released a band's one or two big hits on the radio. How many times do you like all the songs on a CD? Without music "piracy" would you ever have a chance to know what you were buying beforehand? At least at the car dealership I can test-drive. What if they said "Sorry, you can only try it out in reverse and third gear - you can't find out how it runs in the rest of the gears until after you buy it."
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Here's the thing, though: an electric car could have fantastic skid pad numbers, as you can put all the drivetrain weight right at the wheels, as low as you want, plus you can mount the batteries right on the floorboard. The net effect is that you can put the center of gravity, and hence the instant roll-center of the suspension incredibly low, without getting the "jacking" that you get with internal combustion engines' higher positioning.
The Stirling engine has been tried many, many times in transportation scenarios and none have ever proved reliable or cost-effective. These limitations are almost certainly changing (I can think of one company immediately that is on the right track) but certainly it *has* been tried before and has not been feasible. You are not bringing up an idea that has not been thoroughly hashed out in transporation engineering.
I didn't vote for Bush, but Cheney was a big factor in our getting through oil crises in the past. The fact is, when we're facing a national energy crisis, who else is better suited to deal with the reality of it than experienced energy-industry insiders?
In casino poker rooms, which are highly equivalent (provide a venue for players to gamble amongst themselves in games of skill), this is a somewhat common and legal practice. The casino doesn't make money on the poker players directly, so they use "shills" that sit at the tables and play with the casino's money for an hourly rate. Ethics sort of go out the window when your gambling, much less when you're playing poker.
In fact, just like poker, there will be born whole demographics of people who play. Notably:
1) Casual players who do not expect to make money
2) "Professional Players" who think they can make it, but are convinced that their losses are just the results of luck, cheating, etc. (Most often this is self-delusion)
3) The very small handful of players who can actually consistently make money and do - the sharks. They have no self-delusions about luck or third-parties. This group is so small it almost doesn't even exist, despite the fact that you could throw a rock in a poker room and hit a person who thinks they are a member or the elite.
The only people who make money are the real sharks and the casino.
Bravo to the dot-com business model, but beware if you think you can make it as a professional game-player.
When you've roofed houses in Houston, Texas for fourteen hours a day in August (105 in the shade and 99% humidity) to make $2.00 an hour, ANY job with a ceiling sounds pretty damn appealing, much less a job with air conditioning or one that allows you to sit down.
sub misinform {
&misinform();
}
&misinform();
print "truth\n";
What would we give for empirical data regarding health care? Everyone has their theory about what the results would be of sweeping health-care policy change, and yet it is all speculation...
Then look at the drug war, where there is HUGE empirical data from Prohibition on what happens in American when a potentially-abused substance is banned, and not a single politico in the two major parties gives it a thought. (Libertarians may now stand up and wave...) Here we are, 75 years later, facing a redux of the heyday of organized crime, witch hunts and illegal importation and we still think our policy is correct! Sheesh...
Check your facts. The average salary for a major league baseball player in 2000 was almost $1.9M. I don't think there is a real problem with these guys supporting themselves.
The television could work via a timestamp or something, I guess, so it knows from the encoding what time something must be played, and not show it otherwise, but that would depend on the integrity of the television's clock. How hard could it be to jack around with the television's internal date and time?
I guess I understand why they want to do this, but I don't understand what they could do to the signal to prevent it from being copied. Can somebody shed some light on this?
Damn good point. I'd toss all the bullshit ceremonies in favor of making it more legit and offering a chance to a few thousand more athletes.
Granted - the IOC has a bad reputation for taking bribes, etc. but I think from NBC's perspective they would need due diligence performed on their donated money. The IOC can get away with taking massive kickbacks, but I don't know if they could get away with blatant misappropriations of funds. Maybe they could - I'm just speculating - but there are a lot more eyes watching that money than there are when the IOC officials go visit Salt Lake city two years away from the next Games.
The simple fact is that the Internet won't come up with the same kind of cash and at the end it will still be less for the athletes. Too many Internet companies out there think that they can make an advertising-based revenue model work to actually charge serious cash like the big television networks can. Maybe someday, but not today.
$3,500,000,000 until 2008
That's right "billion" with a "b".
Internet broadcasting would not sum up to be anywhere near the amount that it would decrease that value to the IOC. And that money is what funds the games.
And again, who care about watching the games? It is not about that. It is about the fact that US and all the rich countries around the world will send athletes regardless of how much money the IOC has, but all the poor countries won't be able to and the games will become that much more adulterated without funding.The simple fact is that the only way the Olympics gets funded is by these sponsors and by television money paid because the advertising is so lucrative. If you force the television networks to compete with the internet, you are going to create a competitive market that results in less money to support the games. The games are already dominated by the rich and fat countries - allowing Internet broadcasts would make it even worse as the IOC could not afford to help fund athletes from poorer countries.
And "communities" haven't been doing the moving -- people have.
What is a community, if not the people? Why sustain a "community" whose only significant feature is the ground it is sitting on? If people seek to leave a place because there is nothing there for them, why is that bad?
Technology has been doing this for a SIGNIFICANT amount of time - look at the communities 150 years ago that had to move to be near the railroads, and thousands of years ago communities moved to be near rivers and coastlines. The resources themselves are the only thing that has changed.
Me thinks it depends a bit on what you're better at...someone else being proud of being a better "frist poster" than me is not necessarily a good thing, is it?
Sure, but what does the article say they're good at?
creativity, education, trade and culture
That doesn't seem like something that is the formula for success only in a digital era, but has always differentiated successful communities from unsuccessful ones.
This, says Plotkin, has triggered a vast upheaval, good news for communities that excel at creativity, education, trade and culture, bad news for everybody else.
Hasn't it always been better to, well, be better?
I'm sure their long-term strategy is to get college students to become main market, probably using a model pretty similar to the "get paid to surf" type places. Who else but college students would let other people use their computer for just a handful of change, while having a nailed-up connection. Hence Windows. Long term, to achieve the massively-distributed computing scale that I'm sure they want to, they need to address the market that is, for better or worse, dominated by Microsoft. This is even more true as DSL and Cable-modems become more prevalent in the home.
Great idea, force the prison system to put violent criminals back out on the street so we can keep the "dangerous" white-collared criminals behind bars. Only so much prison space, ya know. Ohio just had to let a guy out after three years that was convicted of killing his 3-year-old son in cold blood.
"But," you say, "its the greedy shareholders out there ruining America! Let's hold them responsible!"
Every mutual-fund owning grandma in the US is a shareholder and you are too. The US economy works because the corporate veil minimizes the risk involved in investment. Would you buy Ford stock if you could be sued for the Firestone-related deaths?
The point is: We have seen the enemy and it is us.
Why not depend on the broadcast mediums to do the culling-out of good music? Rather than taking money from advertisers to pay RIAA royalties, why not play free music and consider the advertising revenue the cost to provide this service? The broadcast mediums are how music gets popular currently anyway. The record companies may decide that Britney Spears is going to be the next big thing, but they have to depend on the media to get the message out to all the 12-year-old girls. The infrastructure already exists. We don't need record companies for distribution or promotion...
The question is what do the RIAA companies bring to the table? Historically they provided a means of distribution that was unavailable to the artists themselves. They had the studios, etc. to record and produce music that could be sold around the world - and they got paid (fairly?) for it. But now, with MP3's, the distribution costs nothing and can be done by those who are creating the music. Why pay the record company when they are not adding value to the process of getting the music from the artist to the audience?
While I agree that the system has not changed, technology has, and it now allows a different distribution medium.
Here are the two cases:
1) I'm only paying for the released "good" songs, in which case I can do whatever I want with the bad ones since the record company has deemed them to have no monetary value.
2) I'm paying equally for all songs and I don't want the non-released "bad" songs, so the record company is sticking me for stuff I don't want and didn't have a chance to preview.
Technologies like Napster allow songs to be distributed independently of the album, and with an opportunity to preview it before listening.
Albums are simply a distribution convenience that is quickly becoming antiquated. Ideally, songs should be sold in their own right and bad songs don't get bought.
But if you pay $15 for a CD and expect to get 8 to 12 songs that you like to listen to, but only get 2 good songs, who is getting ripped off?
If 80% of the songs on a CD suck, then why should I have to pay full price?
Napster gives me an alternative to the record companies that want to pawn off bad music on me and make a quick buck after having released a band's one or two big hits on the radio. How many times do you like all the songs on a CD? Without music "piracy" would you ever have a chance to know what you were buying beforehand? At least at the car dealership I can test-drive. What if they said "Sorry, you can only try it out in reverse and third gear - you can't find out how it runs in the rest of the gears until after you buy it."