I live in the UK, we have a comprehensive train system. It is neither fast, convenient nor inexpensive.
Inter city trains make sense. When they can travel long distances without stopping they are at their fastest and most efficient. Urban trains make no sense, the continual stop/start nature of the journeys ruins the efficiency and average speed, the multi stage journeys required to travel anywhere but along the corridor of travel makes journey times extremely long, 2-3 times as long even accounting for road congestion.
What's needed is a system which combines the benefits of trains with the benefits of cars:
1: *Individual* vehicles. They can be light, the infrastructure can be inexpensive. There is no need to stop at intermediate stations, the average speed can therefore be very high and journey times very short.
2: Run it on a track or guideway. Fully automated *today*, not in 50 years, reduces costs and increases performance. Can be electrified removing local sources of polution and using high efficiency electric motors.
3: Infrastructure is small and light because the vehicles are small and light, the vehicles can be produced in large numbers via mass production methods, reducing costs. The same can be done for the track infrastructure, this means far more land area can be covered than rail at much lower cost which means more ridership which means fewer cars.
4: The vehicles wait for you, they don't run to a schedule, and because the stations can be laid out in a network rather than a corridor there would be no or much less need to change modes of travel. The result is good overall journey times.
Such a system should have a higher performance and lower cost than rail or cars.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquic k. htm
A person takes up 2 square feet of space and say 100kg of mass. A car takes up around 60 square feet of space and 2000kg of mass.
A single train will often carry around 500-800 people. 500 cars would weigh around 1,000,000kg over and above the passengers. That's a lot of extra weight to lug around, a lot of energy to accelerate it and decelerate at each stop. On top of this, the train would have to be around 6000 feet long to accomodate the cars.
The result is that to be practical the trains would have to be much smaller carring a fraction of the numbers of people, this pushes the cost way up because the infrastructure cost and running costs are spread over far fewer customers. It might be practical for very long distance express lines with no or few stops.
And this is an important point. They are group vehicles.
What this means is that they have to stop at every station on the route in the offchance that someone wants to get on or off. This makes it slow, the average speed is only a fraction of their peak or rated speed. Because they are group vehicles they also have to run to a schedule which means that you have to wait for a train. Both features make journey times significantly longer than an individual vehicle would take.
Also, because the rolling stock is carrying a large group, it is heavy and relatively few of them are built which means no mass manufacture. The supporting infrastructure must also be heavy to cope with the size of the vehicle. This makes it expensive.
Ok, you've got me started now. Group vehicles also simply can't go where everyone wants to go, their ridership is only the few percentage of the population who are with in easy reach of a station. If you add more stations to increase the number of people who use it the trains have to spend more time stopped and average speed suffers further making it slower. Because they don't go exactly where you want to go you have to switch modes or lines, each time you switch you incur a journey time penalty waiting on the schedule.
Scheduled vehicles have to run whether there are people to use it or not, this kills the overall efficiency, the vehicles are heavy, accelerating them and decelerating them takes a lot of energy. During rush hour the ridership is such that it's very efficient. As soon as you get outside the rush hour period and the ridership falls so does the efficiency.
So you end up paying a lot for relatively poor performance.
Probably does, but in the UK a police officer makes the judgement of what constitutes due care and attention, then prosecutes you in a court where you can provide a defense. I don't believe artificial intelligence has advanced far enough that an automatic system is capable of making that determination.
The 3 city blocks to McDonalds are the most dangerous roads, interstates are relatively safe. They've had automatic driving kit for interstates for quite a while.
e.g. http://www.cvhas.org/
They use magnets embedded in the lane to determine position. The issues, what happens at the exit if the driver falls asleep? How do you handle unexpected situations like wildlife on the motorway? Who's at fault when an accident does happen, the manufacturer?
The other thing is that it's a relatively expensive and inefficient way to apply IT to transport, a kludge even. All the vehicles (millions of them eventually) would have to be retrofitted with kit, all the motorways would have to be retrofitted for it to be effective, it's an expensive and rather slow proposition.
"Two major causes of death and destruction on the road - gone."
Speeding isn't a major cause. 7% at most, in fact 80% of accidents happen within the limit. Far more important factors: Drunk, tired, distracted (eg mobile phone) and plain stupidity.
We could have fully automated vehicles today. Just not on the roads, they are too complex. There are already systems which can do the job:
"All we really need is an IR sensory input for fog driving."
Just stick on an IR camera and cars will be able to drive themselves? Nope, we're decades away from fully automated vehicles. Real roads are far far more complex than the test roads which they have been run on so far.
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~janka/PATH/st er eo_drive.html
If you want fully automated vehicles right now, a segregated guideway is required, AKA Personal Rapid Transit.
The US software company gets software developed cheap in Russia, China, India for a fraction of the US, but still a bloody good wage in their country. Puts a truly massive markup on it and sells it to Americans for a profit.
"Why don't the music publishers price music a little more closely to a country's economy?"
Cos then you could buy the stuff cheap over there and ship it back home saving a bundle.
Course that practice has been made illegal in the UK, the free market is wonderful, no?
Guess what makes it illegal...
Copyright designs and patents act 1988 and the Trade Marks Act 1994. It is illegal to import/distribute into the UK without the opyright or trade mark owner's consent. There's a bunch of additional stuff which makes it even more illegal to import software.
How do they get from Gas Turbine -> DC? I'd bet there's an AC and rectification stage in there.
Anyway. A single big gas turbine on it's own would be 39%, 40% efficient. Small ones less so. Big power plants are closer to 55%, 60% efficient because they are Combined Cycle, they add an extra steam turbine stage to the exhaust of the gas turbine. If they're really clever about it they then capture the waste heat from the steam turbine and pump it to local houses for central heating and hot water giving an overall energy efficiency of up to 90%.
Transmission losses aren't that big, it obviously depends how far you're sending it but for the UK, 2%-3% on average. Rectifiers, 90% efficient, chargers 95%+.
Overall, I reckon the battery is probably several times more efficient than a local small gas turbine. Not only that, I can simply plug it in to a local electrical outlet to recharge, usually for free. You're a bit stuffed if you don't have a replacement fuel cartridge for a fuel cell or turbine.
In terms of performance batteries have improved significantly anyway. They simply aren't heavy anymore and the next generation Li-S cells have a higher energy density than a tank of compressed hydrogen.
Average Joe isn't going to install anything but Internet Explorer unless his "computer expert" friend tells him it's shit. Hell, as you say, he probably doesn't even know what Internet Explorer is.
The advert should be in computer magazines frequented by "power users" and/or windows administrators. Actually, this is also the market that the Linux distributions should be pointing at, there's no point trying to sell or even give Linux to end users, they don't understand what it does.
I actually ran a Runequest campaign which wasn't far off that. The characters were in a dream world which allowed me to get away with almost anything. Great fun.
"There's nothing EASY about it. You'll never see the day when a national run-off system is installed unless it already has a favorable track record on the local and then state levels."
True, though there are proportional systems already in place all over the world which can be used as examples.
"If representation is allocated based upon how many people support you, the Democrats will usually win."
I'm not sure that's true, the popular vote last time was extremely close. Having said that, that is the point of a democratic system.
However, in a proportional representation system, the large parties themselves will fragment into smaller groups, the force holding them together into large compromised groups will disappear. Look at Europe, look at Israel, though they clearly went too far. Smaller parties can more accurately represent the range of views of the people.
I'd expect plenty of resistance from both of the major parties, there's nothing in it for them but a loss of power. It will take the rise of a third party dedicated to proportional representation to push the issue and because of the system as it is I won't be holding my breath.
"And easier still by voting for people you would like to be elected. What a crazy idea! "
No, un a multi party election under a winner take all election system unless you vote for the largest party with broadly similar views, it increases the chance that the largest opposition party will win. It's a well known phenomenon called the spoiler candidate or spoiler party.
The result is tactical voting and the progession to a two party state.
It's a feature of the electoral system. It can't be avoided without fundamental change to a more representative (proportional) voting system.
In a winner take all system, it is the side which splits it's vote which loses, this means that if you vote for anyone else but the *main* party with similar views you actually increase the chance of the diametrically opposed party winning. If you want someone with your general views to win an election you should vote for the *main* party candidate but volunteer your time to an opposing spoiler party candidate (Nader, Perot etc) who will reduce your opposition's votes.
To solve this problem the electoral system needs to be replaced with a proportional system which allocates representatives in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote, not on a win/lose basis. This guarantees that if you vote for a party it increases the representation, i.e. the number of seats held in congress or the senate.
When voting for an individual post, like president obviously proportionality is impossible, but an electoral systems which allow voters to rank candidates will produce a more preferred result than the existing system and remove the divide and conquer effect of "spoiler" candidates thereby giving *them* a better chance.
There are a number of proportional representation systems with various advantages and disadvantages so I'm not going to discuss them here.
You can find more information here: http://www.fairvote.org/
"Ever think the reason the two parties remain dominant is that the rest of the country agrees with them?"
It's naive to think that the beliefs of 250,000,000 people can be represented by two parties and two sets of policies, at best they are huge compromises.
The two party state is the direct result of a winner take all electoral system. Proportional Representation electoral systems remove these duopolies.
"Someone should bust them up for forming monopolies"
That's called the electoral process, in a true democracy you can do exactly that. Perhaps the question is do you live in a true democracy or a two party state.
Slashdot Mirror
"Design transportation systems so you don't need a car to fucking live your life."
Here you go:
http://kinetic.seattle.wa.us/getonboard.html
They should really be designing *cities* so that you don't need to travel every time you want something.
e.g.
http://www.carfree.com/
I live in the UK, we have a comprehensive train system. It is neither fast, convenient nor inexpensive.
c k. htm
Inter city trains make sense. When they can travel long distances without stopping they are at their fastest and most efficient. Urban trains make no sense, the continual stop/start nature of the journeys ruins the efficiency and average speed, the multi stage journeys required to travel anywhere but along the corridor of travel makes journey times extremely long, 2-3 times as long even accounting for road congestion.
What's needed is a system which combines the benefits of trains with the benefits of cars:
1: *Individual* vehicles. They can be light, the infrastructure can be inexpensive. There is no need to stop at intermediate stations, the average speed can therefore be very high and journey times very short.
2: Run it on a track or guideway. Fully automated *today*, not in 50 years, reduces costs and increases performance. Can be electrified removing local sources of polution and using high efficiency electric motors.
3: Infrastructure is small and light because the vehicles are small and light, the vehicles can be produced in large numbers via mass production methods, reducing costs. The same can be done for the track infrastructure, this means far more land area can be covered than rail at much lower cost which means more ridership which means fewer cars.
4: The vehicles wait for you, they don't run to a schedule, and because the stations can be laid out in a network rather than a corridor there would be no or much less need to change modes of travel. The result is good overall journey times.
Such a system should have a higher performance and lower cost than rail or cars.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtqui
"So why not bring the car along?"
A person takes up 2 square feet of space and say 100kg of mass. A car takes up around 60 square feet of space and 2000kg of mass.
A single train will often carry around 500-800 people. 500 cars would weigh around 1,000,000kg over and above the passengers. That's a lot of extra weight to lug around, a lot of energy to accelerate it and decelerate at each stop. On top of this, the train would have to be around 6000 feet long to accomodate the cars.
The result is that to be practical the trains would have to be much smaller carring a fraction of the numbers of people, this pushes the cost way up because the infrastructure cost and running costs are spread over far fewer customers. It might be practical for very long distance express lines with no or few stops.
And this is an important point. They are group vehicles.
What this means is that they have to stop at every station on the route in the offchance that someone wants to get on or off. This makes it slow, the average speed is only a fraction of their peak or rated speed. Because they are group vehicles they also have to run to a schedule which means that you have to wait for a train. Both features make journey times significantly longer than an individual vehicle would take.
Also, because the rolling stock is carrying a large group, it is heavy and relatively few of them are built which means no mass manufacture. The supporting infrastructure must also be heavy to cope with the size of the vehicle. This makes it expensive.
Ok, you've got me started now. Group vehicles also simply can't go where everyone wants to go, their ridership is only the few percentage of the population who are with in easy reach of a station. If you add more stations to increase the number of people who use it the trains have to spend more time stopped and average speed suffers further making it slower. Because they don't go exactly where you want to go you have to switch modes or lines, each time you switch you incur a journey time penalty waiting on the schedule.
Scheduled vehicles have to run whether there are people to use it or not, this kills the overall efficiency, the vehicles are heavy, accelerating them and decelerating them takes a lot of energy. During rush hour the ridership is such that it's very efficient. As soon as you get outside the rush hour period and the ridership falls so does the efficiency.
So you end up paying a lot for relatively poor performance.
Probably does, but in the UK a police officer makes the judgement of what constitutes due care and attention, then prosecutes you in a court where you can provide a defense. I don't believe artificial intelligence has advanced far enough that an automatic system is capable of making that determination.
How many trillions are you willing to spend?
JFK's vision cost America 5% of it's GDP.
Half asleep? Drunk?
How does this kit relate to breaking the law? Swerving to avoid a pedestrian/dog/deer becomes an offence punishable by automatic ticket?
You have to be able to prove that an offence has been committed, innocent until proved guilty.
The 3 city blocks to McDonalds are the most dangerous roads, interstates are relatively safe. They've had automatic driving kit for interstates for quite a while.
e.g.
http://www.cvhas.org/
They use magnets embedded in the lane to determine position. The issues, what happens at the exit if the driver falls asleep? How do you handle unexpected situations like wildlife on the motorway? Who's at fault when an accident does happen, the manufacturer?
The other thing is that it's a relatively expensive and inefficient way to apply IT to transport, a kludge even. All the vehicles (millions of them eventually) would have to be retrofitted with kit, all the motorways would have to be retrofitted for it to be effective, it's an expensive and rather slow proposition.
"Two major causes of death and destruction on the road - gone."
d .co.uk/
Speeding isn't a major cause. 7% at most, in fact 80% of accidents happen within the limit. Far more important factors: Drunk, tired, distracted (eg mobile phone) and plain stupidity.
We could have fully automated vehicles today. Just not on the roads, they are too complex. There are already systems which can do the job:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.atslt
"And yes, I'm talking about equipping cars with devices that can detect such crimes."
Go on then, what devices are these?
"All we really need is an IR sensory input for fog driving."
t er eo_drive.html
Just stick on an IR camera and cars will be able to drive themselves? Nope, we're decades away from fully automated vehicles. Real roads are far far more complex than the test roads which they have been run on so far.
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~janka/PATH/s
If you want fully automated vehicles right now, a segregated guideway is required, AKA Personal Rapid Transit.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/
You have heard of outsourcing?
The US software company gets software developed cheap in Russia, China, India for a fraction of the US, but still a bloody good wage in their country. Puts a truly massive markup on it and sells it to Americans for a profit.
"Why don't the music publishers price music a little more closely to a country's economy?"
Cos then you could buy the stuff cheap over there and ship it back home saving a bundle.
Course that practice has been made illegal in the UK, the free market is wonderful, no?
Guess what makes it illegal...
Copyright designs and patents act 1988 and the Trade Marks Act 1994. It is illegal to import/distribute into the UK without the opyright or trade mark owner's consent. There's a bunch of additional stuff which makes it even more illegal to import software.
Levi vs Tesco and Sony vs Tesco.
"I think you underestimate the average joe!"
I think you don't know many Average Joes. Most of your friends professionals? College graduates?
That's the top 20%, the average within that bunch is within that 20%, say 85%. The average Joe in comparison is 50%.
How do they get from Gas Turbine -> DC? I'd bet there's an AC and rectification stage in there.
Anyway. A single big gas turbine on it's own would be 39%, 40% efficient. Small ones less so. Big power plants are closer to 55%, 60% efficient because they are Combined Cycle, they add an extra steam turbine stage to the exhaust of the gas turbine. If they're really clever about it they then capture the waste heat from the steam turbine and pump it to local houses for central heating and hot water giving an overall energy efficiency of up to 90%.
Transmission losses aren't that big, it obviously depends how far you're sending it but for the UK, 2%-3% on average. Rectifiers, 90% efficient, chargers 95%+.
Overall, I reckon the battery is probably several times more efficient than a local small gas turbine. Not only that, I can simply plug it in to a local electrical outlet to recharge, usually for free. You're a bit stuffed if you don't have a replacement fuel cartridge for a fuel cell or turbine.
In terms of performance batteries have improved significantly anyway. They simply aren't heavy anymore and the next generation Li-S cells have a higher energy density than a tank of compressed hydrogen.
Average Joe isn't going to install anything but Internet Explorer unless his "computer expert" friend tells him it's shit. Hell, as you say, he probably doesn't even know what Internet Explorer is.
The advert should be in computer magazines frequented by "power users" and/or windows administrators. Actually, this is also the market that the Linux distributions should be pointing at, there's no point trying to sell or even give Linux to end users, they don't understand what it does.
I actually ran a Runequest campaign which wasn't far off that. The characters were in a dream world which allowed me to get away with almost anything. Great fun.
But we got Jedi recognised as an official religion by writing it on the census paper.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2757067.stm
Maybe if you score out one of the existing candidates and write Linus on it instead...
"There's nothing EASY about it. You'll never see the day when a national run-off system is installed unless it already has a favorable track record on the local and then state levels."
True, though there are proportional systems already in place all over the world which can be used as examples.
"If representation is allocated based upon how many people support you, the Democrats will usually win."
I'm not sure that's true, the popular vote last time was extremely close. Having said that, that is the point of a democratic system.
However, in a proportional representation system, the large parties themselves will fragment into smaller groups, the force holding them together into large compromised groups will disappear. Look at Europe, look at Israel, though they clearly went too far. Smaller parties can more accurately represent the range of views of the people.
I'd expect plenty of resistance from both of the major parties, there's nothing in it for them but a loss of power. It will take the rise of a third party dedicated to proportional representation to push the issue and because of the system as it is I won't be holding my breath.
"And easier still by voting for people you would like to be elected. What a crazy idea! "
No, un a multi party election under a winner take all election system unless you vote for the largest party with broadly similar views, it increases the chance that the largest opposition party will win. It's a well known phenomenon called the spoiler candidate or spoiler party.
The result is tactical voting and the progession to a two party state.
It's a feature of the electoral system. It can't be avoided without fundamental change to a more representative (proportional) voting system.
In a winner take all system, it is the side which splits it's vote which loses, this means that if you vote for anyone else but the *main* party with similar views you actually increase the chance of the diametrically opposed party winning. If you want someone with your general views to win an election you should vote for the *main* party candidate but volunteer your time to an opposing spoiler party candidate (Nader, Perot etc) who will reduce your opposition's votes.
To solve this problem the electoral system needs to be replaced with a proportional system which allocates representatives in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote, not on a win/lose basis. This guarantees that if you vote for a party it increases the representation, i.e. the number of seats held in congress or the senate.
When voting for an individual post, like president obviously proportionality is impossible, but an electoral systems which allow voters to rank candidates will produce a more preferred result than the existing system and remove the divide and conquer effect of "spoiler" candidates thereby giving *them* a better chance.
There are a number of proportional representation systems with various advantages and disadvantages so I'm not going to discuss them here.
You can find more information here:
http://www.fairvote.org/
"Ever think the reason the two parties remain dominant is that the rest of the country agrees with them?"
It's naive to think that the beliefs of 250,000,000 people can be represented by two parties and two sets of policies, at best they are huge compromises.
The two party state is the direct result of a winner take all electoral system. Proportional Representation electoral systems remove these duopolies.
"Someone should bust them up for forming monopolies"
That's called the electoral process, in a true democracy you can do exactly that. Perhaps the question is do you live in a true democracy or a two party state.
So, how far does one of these snipers rifles fire?