"In the UK we vote for local representatives, though, not for a president."
Exactly the same effect is present though. My own constituency the MP was elected with 38% of the vote, 62% of the constituency population *did not* want him as their representative, their votes were discarded. It's hardly surprising then that there is a lot of apathy when the wishes of the majority are being discarded over the wishes of the largest minority.
"It can be said that the sun never sets on the American Empire."
The problem with any empire is that the sun does inevitably set on it. Eventually the resources required to maintain it become too large, the leaders become corrupt, the people want bigger, more extravagant entertainment and then the barbarians invade.
Um, the software isn't there to predict whether or how people will vote, it's there to tell people why when they do vote that their vote was a complete waste of time.
It's the same situation in the US, only a small number of states really matter and a tiny number of people choose the president. The rest of the population basically don't count.
Both the US and UK electoral systems literally discard huge numbers of votes. The US system discards around 49% of votes becuase you really only have 2 parties. The UK system discards around 60% of votes because we have 3 main parties.
Have a look and see how important your vote is on May 5th. The vast majority of those who don't wish to vote for the incumbent might as well burn their polling cards right now.
This is really just an exercise in power, the US will back up these strong suggestions with threats of trade sanctions etc.
The thing that gets me as someone who lives in Britain and recognises the behaviors of the British Empire in the past is that Americans don't recognise that they live in an empire in all but name.
There seems to be a sort of xeno blindness, nothing outwith the US borders exists and therefore cannot be important. The result being these kinds of strong arm tactics used against sovereign nations. Guess why large portions of the world are antithetical.
SRC's been around for a while (AIX 3?). The Solaris widget looks like Sun thought it was a good idea.
I'm not entirely sure I like it but it's there and it pretty much works. It does mean there are different start/stop widgets on different operating systems and as an administrator that pisses me off.
About 3 or 4 years ago. A great investment. It just worked out of the box and apart from upgrading the disks to 250Gb soon after I got it I haven't had to touch it. Much more useful than a video recorder.
It's single best feature though which none of the others seem to have is the auto recording of stuff it thinks I might like. It searches through all the crap on all the channels and does a fairly good job of picking out the gems.
The next best feature, again of which the others only seem to have a limited subset is the "season pass", tell it to record an entire season of a show and it goes and does it.
Is it the cheapest? Well maybe, maybe not, it certainly isn't expensive compared to the competition. But super size you if all you know is McDonalds.
It's just a spreadsheet. But FFS use a real programming environment to produce applications. Hell, even use an MS programming environment. "Developing" an application on Excel is the height of short sightedness, it's positively myopic.
Except the holder of the monopoly. In a monopoly, network effects stifle commercial competition so the only software which can break into a monopoly market is Free software.
With the security nightmare in US airports, lack of investment in infrastructure to cope with the numbers and the resulting chaos and huge delays. People will just get fed up with travelling to the US and will instead travel to countries where there is investment in the airport infrastructure to cope, where security isn't ridiculously invasive.
The problem for the large airports at the moment is the number of landing slots, Heathrow for instance is landing a plane every 20 seconds. The A380 can put up to 840 people down for each landing slot, almost twice as many as a 747, it's also more efficient than a 747. They already have 150 orders for the thing, 250 are needed to break even some time over the next 40 years it can be expected to be in service.
The 777 can only handle 300 passengers, much like an Airbus A330 but with higher costs. Boeing have been sitting on their backsides for a couple of decades now with the assumption that they would be the king of the airways forever. Today, Airbus handed them their arse. Boeing are now playing catchup, and will be for a while.
The A380 has 2 sets of doors. It can be deplaned faster than a 747 if the airports modify their gates to cope and they *will* make that investment one way or another, their customers the airlines will demand it.
"Having said that, I dont understand how mass transit based on individual vehicles would be different from everyone having their own car, as now. Please explain."
It isn't that different, think of them as fully automated taxis, the key difference being that the vehicles are used by many people. Once you get off, you forget about it. Cars *are* in fact a mass transit system though few recognise this. A 2 second gap between vehicles on a motorway lane is 1800 vehicles/hour or about 2000 people/hour with average ridership. That's similar to light rail in performance.
Anyway a fully automated mass transit system based on individual vehicles can reduce the inter vehicle spacings to less than a second using computer control, 7000+ vehicles per hour is perfectly possible, thats the equivalent of a 3 lane motorway. The stops can be offline meaning you don't have to stop at all until your destination. Once you get off, the vehicle is available for someone else.
You do have to install a separate guideway for the automated vehicles to A) avoid road congestion and B) avoid complex environments, computer control isn't up to handling complex environments like roads yet.
The result is on demand 24/7. Nearly direct from source to destination with *no* stops. None. Not for traffic lights, not for intersections, not for traffic congestion. It gives very high average speeds and very short journey times.
This is at the cost of installing a separate guideway for the vehicles. But then the guideways are there to support small individual vehicles built out of aluminium and glass reinforced plastic, 400kg each. This means they can be a small fraction of the size and cost of tracks for the likes of trams or light rail which have to support 40-80 tonne vehicles. The *large* reduction in cost means that far more can be installed for a given cost. In fact, the ideal system would be a wide network rather than a single route.
You end up with a mass transit system with a capital cost somewhere between a bus and light rail but with far superior coverage, superior performance to any other transit system, (including the car) and far lower running costs.
You're right. Your power plants are stupidly placed. Or rather, they are placed to be as cheap to operate as possible given the extremely low cost of fuel in the US. You have to ship electricity hundreds of miles, which itself incurs relatively large transmission losses. CHP would mean smaller, cheaper, more local power generation. That could be started today. The technology to do it has been in use for 50+ years.
The waste gas/heat from a power plant is *not* "low quality", it comes out of the steam turbines at several hundred degrees C and has to be cooled in a condenser before being vented to the environment at sub boiling temperature. This stage would be replaced with a heat distribution system.
The europeans are already using heat distribution networks (*and* cooling distribution networks for that matter), they ship hot water (80C -> 100C or so, not steam, though that can be supplied to industrial processes). The efficiency of the heat distribution network obviously depends on the pipe surface area/volume and temperature of the water. 12% - 20% loss depending. Hence the overall efficiency of 70% -> 90%.
e.g. http://www.energy.rochester.edu/dk/dea/dh/ lowtemp. htm
Lets take Helsinki Energy as they are about as good as it gets in the field:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/tuotanto/benef it s.html
Heating: http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat /heating.htm l
Cooling. Rather than running AC: http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat/coolin g.htm l
88% overall efficiency in fuel usage. 90% reduction in electricity consumption due to Air Conditioning.
Instead of centralising your power station and then shipping electricity hundreds of miles, put generation near demand. If necessary gassify coal to allow cleaner generation.
In terms of a 100 year old technology, the first commercially run district heating system was in New York: http://www.jamestownbpu.com/heat/history.ph p
BTW, it wasn't invented in New York. New York was the first commercial system. It isn't more common because coal and oil is increadibly cheap in America.
Heat, you anonymous fool. Heat. We throw 60% of the energy away as heat (at a couple of hundred C BTW). Then transmit the 40% left as electricity in order to produce more heat as space heating and water heating.
Go look up the terms "District Heating", "District Cooling", Cogeneration, CHP, "combined heat and power". None of it is new.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
k .htm
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/prtquic
etc.
Would mean that you don't have to drive ever again:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
It's called Personal Rapid Transit.
But this technology makes lynching so much easier! It'd be almost impossible to kill the wrong person by accident.
When it was found that a paedophile had moved into Newport in Wales some of the local people went out and found out who it was.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stm
With a GPS tracking system they could have got the right person with absolute certainty.
"I'm pretty sure that China would be glad to take all of Canada's oil currently going to the U.S."
t /fasttrack/20050415/RENBRIDGE15?section=Energy
Speak of the devil...
http://globeandmail.workopolis.com/servlet/Conten
No i heard, understood and decided that your point was painfully naive.
"In the UK we vote for local representatives, though, not for a president."
Exactly the same effect is present though. My own constituency the MP was elected with 38% of the vote, 62% of the constituency population *did not* want him as their representative, their votes were discarded. It's hardly surprising then that there is a lot of apathy when the wishes of the majority are being discarded over the wishes of the largest minority.
"It can be said that the sun never sets on the American Empire."
The problem with any empire is that the sun does inevitably set on it. Eventually the resources required to maintain it become too large, the leaders become corrupt, the people want bigger, more extravagant entertainment and then the barbarians invade.
Um, the software isn't there to predict whether or how people will vote, it's there to tell people why when they do vote that their vote was a complete waste of time.
It's the same situation in the US, only a small number of states really matter and a tiny number of people choose the president. The rest of the population basically don't count.
Both the US and UK electoral systems literally discard huge numbers of votes. The US system discards around 49% of votes becuase you really only have 2 parties. The UK system discards around 60% of votes because we have 3 main parties.
It's basicaly a free trade area with political pretentions but boy that would fuck with the American politicians heads.
Have a look and see how important your vote is on May 5th. The vast majority of those who don't wish to vote for the incumbent might as well burn their polling cards right now.
http://www.doyoucount.co.uk/
Ehm, Proportional Representation anyone?
Oh, while we're on the subject of representation, does your MP represent you or do they really represent the leader?
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
This is really just an exercise in power, the US will back up these strong suggestions with threats of trade sanctions etc.
The thing that gets me as someone who lives in Britain and recognises the behaviors of the British Empire in the past is that Americans don't recognise that they live in an empire in all but name.
There seems to be a sort of xeno blindness, nothing outwith the US borders exists and therefore cannot be important. The result being these kinds of strong arm tactics used against sovereign nations. Guess why large portions of the world are antithetical.
SRC's been around for a while (AIX 3?). The Solaris widget looks like Sun thought it was a good idea.
I'm not entirely sure I like it but it's there and it pretty much works. It does mean there are different start/stop widgets on different operating systems and as an administrator that pisses me off.
Y'know I would have thought this fact would have made it into at least some religious text books.
About 3 or 4 years ago. A great investment. It just worked out of the box and apart from upgrading the disks to 250Gb soon after I got it I haven't had to touch it. Much more useful than a video recorder.
It's single best feature though which none of the others seem to have is the auto recording of stuff it thinks I might like. It searches through all the crap on all the channels and does a fairly good job of picking out the gems.
The next best feature, again of which the others only seem to have a limited subset is the "season pass", tell it to record an entire season of a show and it goes and does it.
Is it the cheapest? Well maybe, maybe not, it certainly isn't expensive compared to the competition. But super size you if all you know is McDonalds.
Where the entire planet is a large computer where the purpose is to work out the meaning of life.
It's just a spreadsheet. But FFS use a real programming environment to produce applications. Hell, even use an MS programming environment. "Developing" an application on Excel is the height of short sightedness, it's positively myopic.
Except the holder of the monopoly. In a monopoly, network effects stifle commercial competition so the only software which can break into a monopoly market is Free software.
With the security nightmare in US airports, lack of investment in infrastructure to cope with the numbers and the resulting chaos and huge delays. People will just get fed up with travelling to the US and will instead travel to countries where there is investment in the airport infrastructure to cope, where security isn't ridiculously invasive.
That's the beauty of market economics.
The problem for the large airports at the moment is the number of landing slots, Heathrow for instance is landing a plane every 20 seconds. The A380 can put up to 840 people down for each landing slot, almost twice as many as a 747, it's also more efficient than a 747. They already have 150 orders for the thing, 250 are needed to break even some time over the next 40 years it can be expected to be in service.
The 777 can only handle 300 passengers, much like an Airbus A330 but with higher costs. Boeing have been sitting on their backsides for a couple of decades now with the assumption that they would be the king of the airways forever. Today, Airbus handed them their arse. Boeing are now playing catchup, and will be for a while.
The A380 has 2 sets of doors. It can be deplaned faster than a 747 if the airports modify their gates to cope and they *will* make that investment one way or another, their customers the airlines will demand it.
"Having said that, I dont understand how mass transit based on individual vehicles would be different from everyone having their own car, as now. Please explain."
n etic.seattle.wa.us/getonboard.html
It isn't that different, think of them as fully automated taxis, the key difference being that the vehicles are used by many people. Once you get off, you forget about it. Cars *are* in fact a mass transit system though few recognise this. A 2 second gap between vehicles on a motorway lane is 1800 vehicles/hour or about 2000 people/hour with average ridership. That's similar to light rail in performance.
Anyway a fully automated mass transit system based on individual vehicles can reduce the inter vehicle spacings to less than a second using computer control, 7000+ vehicles per hour is perfectly possible, thats the equivalent of a 3 lane motorway. The stops can be offline meaning you don't have to stop at all until your destination. Once you get off, the vehicle is available for someone else.
You do have to install a separate guideway for the automated vehicles to A) avoid road congestion and B) avoid complex environments, computer control isn't up to handling complex environments like roads yet.
The result is on demand 24/7. Nearly direct from source to destination with *no* stops. None. Not for traffic lights, not for intersections, not for traffic congestion. It gives very high average speeds and very short journey times.
This is at the cost of installing a separate guideway for the vehicles. But then the guideways are there to support small individual vehicles built out of aluminium and glass reinforced plastic, 400kg each. This means they can be a small fraction of the size and cost of tracks for the likes of trams or light rail which have to support 40-80 tonne vehicles. The *large* reduction in cost means that far more can be installed for a given cost. In fact, the ideal system would be a wide network rather than a single route.
You end up with a mass transit system with a capital cost somewhere between a bus and light rail but with far superior coverage, superior performance to any other transit system, (including the car) and far lower running costs.
http://www.personalrapidtransit.com/
http://ki
You're right. Your power plants are stupidly placed. Or rather, they are placed to be as cheap to operate as possible given the extremely low cost of fuel in the US. You have to ship electricity hundreds of miles, which itself incurs relatively large transmission losses. CHP would mean smaller, cheaper, more local power generation. That could be started today. The technology to do it has been in use for 50+ years.
/ lowtemp. htm
The waste gas/heat from a power plant is *not* "low quality", it comes out of the steam turbines at several hundred degrees C and has to be cooled in a condenser before being vented to the environment at sub boiling temperature. This stage would be replaced with a heat distribution system.
The europeans are already using heat distribution networks (*and* cooling distribution networks for that matter), they ship hot water (80C -> 100C or so, not steam, though that can be supplied to industrial processes). The efficiency of the heat distribution network obviously depends on the pipe surface area/volume and temperature of the water. 12% - 20% loss depending. Hence the overall efficiency of 70% -> 90%.
e.g.
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/dk/dea/dh
Lets take Helsinki Energy as they are about as good as it gets in the field:
f it s.html
t /heating.htm l
n g.htm l
h p
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/tuotanto/bene
Heating:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/hea
Cooling. Rather than running AC:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat/cooli
88% overall efficiency in fuel usage. 90% reduction in electricity consumption due to Air Conditioning.
Instead of centralising your power station and then shipping electricity hundreds of miles, put generation near demand. If necessary gassify coal to allow cleaner generation.
In terms of a 100 year old technology, the first commercially run district heating system was in New York:
http://www.jamestownbpu.com/heat/history.p
BTW, it wasn't invented in New York. New York was the first commercial system. It isn't more common because coal and oil is increadibly cheap in America.
The purpose of this rice is to sell more herbicide. That's pretty much it. Better yield? Possibly. Nothing to do with feeding the third world though.
Heat, you anonymous fool. Heat. We throw 60% of the energy away as heat (at a couple of hundred C BTW). Then transmit the 40% left as electricity in order to produce more heat as space heating and water heating.
Go look up the terms "District Heating", "District Cooling", Cogeneration, CHP, "combined heat and power". None of it is new.
It seems that you just burn it directly. Oh well.