He was trying to make the point that at higher speeds the train would be more likely to derail. but he's wrong anyway as the bottom of the train wraps around the track. In order to derail the mag-lev train would have to rip the track apart. Additionally, since the train is wrapped around the track and doesnt just sit on it like conventional trains do, its possible to superelevate the track (track rises on one side as it turns). Superelevation is used to counteract the centrifugal forces as a vehicles makes a tight turn at fast speeds.
Couple of things wrong with this...
For starters, unlike the German Transrapid, the Japanese maglev design consists of a roughly u-shaped track which the train sits inside of. Basically, very difficult for the train to derail, but in this case it is the track that wraps around the train (at least this is how they were doing it five years ago, I suppose the Japanese might have changed their design since then).
As for superelevation, it is not a characteristic unique to maglev designs. Ordinary steel rail, even in the backwards US, is usually superelevated in the turns. The trouble is that with the relatively narrow track gauge, and with the relatively tall rail cars that need to be stable even when the train is standing still on the corner for whatever reason, the amount of superelevation they can use is limited. Just like highways - they could superelevate onramps and turns much more than they do, and make it more comfortable to travel at high speeds, but it is extremely uncomfortable (and unstable for large trucks) if for some reason (traffic, accident, stall, whatever) you need to stop on the turn. Maglev doesn't really have this problem, as the train is wrapped around the track (or vice versa), so a little more superelevation could be used.
On a side note, a year or two ago I heard about a group (I don't remember if it was the Germans, Japanese, or someone else) taking people up in passenger jets and doing some various g-rate (different amounts of banking, etc.) turns to see what the limits of passenger comfort were. They were trying to figure out how tight they could make turns on a maglev track before people found it too uncomfortable to use (the purpose was to see if it would be reasonable to lay elevated maglev track along existing highway right of ways in cities, using extreme superelevation to allow the trains to maintain high speed without reducing passenger comfort).
Now all these subpoenaed people/companies need to get together and plan a really careful counterattack, not just a defense.
Umm, you do realize that a subpoena does not mean those people are being attacked? It merely means that SCO ostensibly thinks they possess information which is relevant to the case, and they are asking that it be turned over. Although the article said nothing at all about exactly what information SCO was after (going by their past performance, I'm guessing it will be overly broad and intended to show a bias in SCO's favour - something like "Give us all information you have that might validate our claims", then when the people can't come up with this they will accuse the linux community of holding back important information), it seems reasonable to me to subpoena the people that ostensibly know the most about the software in question. However, while issuing subpoenas for these people seems reasonable to me, I somehow doubt that the subpoenas themselves will be reasonable.
But then I realized I tend to like most of the Microsoft hardware I've used, so maybe its actually a good thing. Besides, if Nvidia builds the next chipset all by itself, the next Xbox would probably require a 2.5 ton air conditioning unit (Get the new Xbox - Xboxier! Only $299. Note - price does not include installation of concrete pad for heatsink unit).
Okay, let's see, we would need 3472222222222 1.44 meg floppies to store it all. Assuming we are looking at a New Beetle, we've got 18 cubic feet of cargo space (according to their website). Since the volume of a single floppy (assuming they are completely rigid) is.295 ft *.308 ft *.0108 ft =.000981 cubic feet, we can fit 18348 of them in each VW. So, it would take about 189,242,546 VWs to transport all of the data on floppies. That's quite a few. I'd try and figure out how many trips per New Beetle that would be, but I don't seem to be able to find numbers for total sales. And yes, I'm bored.
A while back, I bought a 17" samsung monitor which had 102kHz vertical refresh listed in the online "review" of the reseller, but upon closer examination, I discovered that it was, in fact, only 96kHz, so I informed them of this.
I assume you mean horizontal refresh, as vertical is usually measured in Hz (as in ~60-120 Hz is pretty normal). Or was that 102 Hz and 96 Hz?
But, yeah, the main reason for the similar-but-different model numbers for similar-but-different products is to keep people from being able to compare identical products, and thus, simply wait for the sale. It's perfectly legal, and when you think about it, pretty smart.
And yet another reasons why I generally don't buy from electronics stores. Too much crap like this. "Well, it isn't illegal, so our customers should love us!" Screw that. I find what I want on the internet, and if the electronics store doesn't have the EXACT SAME MODEL as I researched on the net, I don't buy from them. Period. Of course, they almost always charge more even if they do have the same model, so there is usually very little reason to buy from electronics stores.
(For examples, read one of their loudspeaker, audio receiver, or sports car reviews. These are generally valuable only for the pictures.)
I heartily agree with this. Consumer Reports reviews ae pretty close to useless in many areas. Yes, they tell you which product they liked better. But they never seem to give you any of the numbers or any information on how they decided which product was better. They will tell you that one receiver performs better than the others, but they don't tell you how they tested it or exactly what the performance edge actually is. In areas of technology, I almost always disagree with them, especially things that I have extensive experience with.
About the only thing that is remotely useful in most CS reviews is the reliability data they have for some things - but they only have this for old products, so it is less usefull when I'm looking at buying something new.
In general, I think that CS has the right idea in insisting on purchasing all of the products they review - this gets rid of a lot of potential problems with cherries and such. However, they never seem to say anything about their testing parameters or methodology, so I feel like I can never really trust what they say (of course, disagreeing with most of the reviews they have on products I am familiar with contributes a lot to this).
Out of curiosity, what kind of car stereo do you have? I was just wondering if you actually have one withy a line in on the front. I had an old Panasonic (I think - it was about the cheapest CD player I could find at the time, only about $150, and it came with a remote - this would be about five years ago, maybe six) cd player in my old car that had an auxillary in on the front of the unit, but I haven't been able to find one since (of any brand). They all seem to stick the line in on the back, which makes it a pain. Anyway, just wondering if you've managed to find one with aux-in on the front, as this is a feature I'm looking for next time I get a new car stereo.
The actual proportion in France is 75% of electric power generation from nuclear. Another 15% is other "clean" power, such as hydro. The remaining 10% is evil dirty "burning stuff" electricity. I live pretty close to about five reactors here, and I feel pretty safe. It's preferable to having a bunch of coal plants dumping crap (including a fair amount of uranium!) into the air.
There isn't really anything wrong with France, per se, it's just all those French people over there that mess it up.
It's mostly due to the cuisine. How can you trust someone who eats snails? They are obviously so incredibly foreign that you could never really have anything in common with them.
Also, their flag presents problems. It has a blue stripe, a red stripe, and a white stripe. The Russian flag has the same colors, all in three stripes. We all know that Russians are evil (actually, only those of us who were born back before the 80's know this, because it is what our government told us back then, though they have been mysteriously silent on the subject lately), and the similarity of flags clearly shows that the French are evil as well.
Those are the two main reasons, I think. Its also partly the fact that back before 9/11/01, there used to be a couple big tall buildings in New York (so I'm told, I've never actually been there). As it turns out, the ideal position to plan and direct an attack on those buildings is from the top of a tall structure in New York harbor. Obviously this was the purpose of the "gift" the French gave to America. Thats right, the Statue of Liberty was clearly planned from the start to aid the French in carrying out terrorist attacks on Americans.
See, our hatred of the French is well justified, as my exhaustive proof fo their evil reveals.
The page linked didn't have a date, but I'm guessing it is a year or two old. Boeing has dropped plans for the sonic cruiser, and is concentrating on building a high-efficiency aircraft instead (airlines showed very little interest in faster aircraft, and far more in cheaper to fly aircraft). If you look at their products page you will notice that they no longer even list the Sonic Cruiser in the product development section (which they used to). Their newest aircraft under development, the 7E7, is expected to enter service in 2008, and it is supposed to be a high-efficiency mid size airliner with a cruise speed of.85 mach.
Admittedly this is only what is listed on their website, but IIRC they used to list the soniccruiser (which was designed for mach.98 or so) and don't anymore, so it appears that they have dropped it.
With tickets starting at around $6000, fast travel to Europe was only affordable by the rich and by those whose employers would pay for it.
$6000 isn't that bad. I just did a quick search on Travelocity, a business class roundtrip ticket New York-London was running a little over $5000. Another $1000 doesn't seem that bad. For a first class ticket, it jumps up to close to $10000. (Oh, and the cheapest economy class was $187)
John Locke said we have the natural right to life, liberty, and property. Back then, everyone knew what life was, but now, it's not so concrete. What if we substituted "information" for "life?"
One could think of a person's conciousness as nothing more than the physical state of their brain - just like how a computer's "runningness" is nothing more than its design and the contents of its storage, memory, and registers. Since we already have intellectual property, let's make the destruction of information a crime. So killing a human is very bad, and turning of an intelligent computer is bad according to the information destroyed.
How do you know that you are destroying information when you kill someone? Maybe by doing so you have simply allowed them to gain different information unavailable to the rest of us, to share with different people already dead? What if heaven exists, and by killing people you are giving them access to even more information than they could get here? How could you test this? Or are you saying that denying the information held in that person's mind to other people currently alive is the crime? In this case, it would be a crime to refuse to talk to someone - you would be depriving them of information. Destruction of information is a crime? What if I burn a book, is that then a crime? Even though there are thousands of other copies? Is it okay if to destroy something if the information is available elsewhere? Can I kill a person if they have gained all their information by reading books, so they contain no unique data? If I do kill them, can you prove that they possessed unique information that I have now destroyed?
It doesn't matter where the machines are. The question is: when will people be ready to accept machines as independent living entities.
To some extent, I think we already have. As a poster above pointed out, back around 1900 the U.S. supreme court (okay, so this only applies to the U.S., but still...) recognized corporations as being protected some of the same ways citizens are. Corporations are essentially machines designed to make money, with interchangeable human parts. Most people would say that Ford Motor Co. is the same entity today as it was when it was founded, despite the fact that none of the same people work there. It is sort of a living entity in that it has grown, changed, developed and presumably learned something during its existence, and I believe most people would say it is independent of the people that are part of it.
Does anyone remember zip disks? Marvellous little things; decent storage capacity, decent access times, not too big size wise... Yet they failed. Badly.
Zip disks definitely did not fail. For a number of years they were extremely popular, because they filled a niche that nothing else really did - they were relatively cheap, offered decent performance (certainly faster than the CD burners out at the time), and pretty easy to use. you could get a 100MB zip drive and 10 disks for like $150 at a time when a CD burner was a couple hundred and media $3-$5 a pop (and it could only be used once). Just because zip drives are no longer popular does not mean they were a failure, it just means that other technology eventually caught up and passed them. At a time when you had to be very careful to get a CD to burn properly (no buffer underrun protection, etc.) you could plug a zip drive into the printer port and just drag and drop files into it. It wasn't until the last to years or so that CD burners really got to the same level of ease of use.
This isn't about protecting trademarks, this is about simply being able to advertise what you sell. Advertising that I sell Serta mattresses doesn't in any way delute the trademark.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple of things wrong with this...
For starters, unlike the German Transrapid, the Japanese maglev design consists of a roughly u-shaped track which the train sits inside of. Basically, very difficult for the train to derail, but in this case it is the track that wraps around the train (at least this is how they were doing it five years ago, I suppose the Japanese might have changed their design since then).
As for superelevation, it is not a characteristic unique to maglev designs. Ordinary steel rail, even in the backwards US, is usually superelevated in the turns. The trouble is that with the relatively narrow track gauge, and with the relatively tall rail cars that need to be stable even when the train is standing still on the corner for whatever reason, the amount of superelevation they can use is limited. Just like highways - they could superelevate onramps and turns much more than they do, and make it more comfortable to travel at high speeds, but it is extremely uncomfortable (and unstable for large trucks) if for some reason (traffic, accident, stall, whatever) you need to stop on the turn. Maglev doesn't really have this problem, as the train is wrapped around the track (or vice versa), so a little more superelevation could be used.
On a side note, a year or two ago I heard about a group (I don't remember if it was the Germans, Japanese, or someone else) taking people up in passenger jets and doing some various g-rate (different amounts of banking, etc.) turns to see what the limits of passenger comfort were. They were trying to figure out how tight they could make turns on a maglev track before people found it too uncomfortable to use (the purpose was to see if it would be reasonable to lay elevated maglev track along existing highway right of ways in cities, using extreme superelevation to allow the trains to maintain high speed without reducing passenger comfort).
I have a pedal-powered generator. I'm my own grid.
Wow, sounds like your company needs a new person to conduct interviews. Where can I apply?
Umm, you do realize that a subpoena does not mean those people are being attacked? It merely means that SCO ostensibly thinks they possess information which is relevant to the case, and they are asking that it be turned over. Although the article said nothing at all about exactly what information SCO was after (going by their past performance, I'm guessing it will be overly broad and intended to show a bias in SCO's favour - something like "Give us all information you have that might validate our claims", then when the people can't come up with this they will accuse the linux community of holding back important information), it seems reasonable to me to subpoena the people that ostensibly know the most about the software in question. However, while issuing subpoenas for these people seems reasonable to me, I somehow doubt that the subpoenas themselves will be reasonable.
All that I ask is that the receiver not be put in Texas.
Nah, more like "Get my lawyerFX on the line!"
You've gotta keep up with the fads.
But then I realized I tend to like most of the Microsoft hardware I've used, so maybe its actually a good thing. Besides, if Nvidia builds the next chipset all by itself, the next Xbox would probably require a 2.5 ton air conditioning unit (Get the new Xbox - Xboxier! Only $299. Note - price does not include installation of concrete pad for heatsink unit).
Don't worry, when Xbox2 comes out your Xbox 1 won't run Xbox 1 titles either, so backwards compatability won't really be an issue.
Okay, let's see, we would need 3472222222222 1.44 meg floppies to store it all. Assuming we are looking at a New Beetle, we've got 18 cubic feet of cargo space (according to their website). Since the volume of a single floppy (assuming they are completely rigid) is .295 ft * .308 ft * .0108 ft = .000981 cubic feet, we can fit 18348 of them in each VW. So, it would take about 189,242,546 VWs to transport all of the data on floppies. That's quite a few. I'd try and figure out how many trips per New Beetle that would be, but I don't seem to be able to find numbers for total sales. And yes, I'm bored.
I assume you mean horizontal refresh, as vertical is usually measured in Hz (as in ~60-120 Hz is pretty normal). Or was that 102 Hz and 96 Hz?
And yet another reasons why I generally don't buy from electronics stores. Too much crap like this. "Well, it isn't illegal, so our customers should love us!" Screw that. I find what I want on the internet, and if the electronics store doesn't have the EXACT SAME MODEL as I researched on the net, I don't buy from them. Period. Of course, they almost always charge more even if they do have the same model, so there is usually very little reason to buy from electronics stores.
I heartily agree with this. Consumer Reports reviews ae pretty close to useless in many areas. Yes, they tell you which product they liked better. But they never seem to give you any of the numbers or any information on how they decided which product was better. They will tell you that one receiver performs better than the others, but they don't tell you how they tested it or exactly what the performance edge actually is. In areas of technology, I almost always disagree with them, especially things that I have extensive experience with.
About the only thing that is remotely useful in most CS reviews is the reliability data they have for some things - but they only have this for old products, so it is less usefull when I'm looking at buying something new.
In general, I think that CS has the right idea in insisting on purchasing all of the products they review - this gets rid of a lot of potential problems with cherries and such. However, they never seem to say anything about their testing parameters or methodology, so I feel like I can never really trust what they say (of course, disagreeing with most of the reviews they have on products I am familiar with contributes a lot to this).
Out of curiosity, what kind of car stereo do you have? I was just wondering if you actually have one withy a line in on the front. I had an old Panasonic (I think - it was about the cheapest CD player I could find at the time, only about $150, and it came with a remote - this would be about five years ago, maybe six) cd player in my old car that had an auxillary in on the front of the unit, but I haven't been able to find one since (of any brand). They all seem to stick the line in on the back, which makes it a pain. Anyway, just wondering if you've managed to find one with aux-in on the front, as this is a feature I'm looking for next time I get a new car stereo.
I think I will file a patent for the "Cold Food" diet. Yum.
According to the CIA the actual numbers are:
Nuclear - 77.1%
Hydro - 14%
Fossil Fuels - 8.2%
Other - 0.7%
Just to be anal about it.
There isn't really anything wrong with France, per se, it's just all those French people over there that mess it up.
It's mostly due to the cuisine. How can you trust someone who eats snails? They are obviously so incredibly foreign that you could never really have anything in common with them.
Also, their flag presents problems. It has a blue stripe, a red stripe, and a white stripe. The Russian flag has the same colors, all in three stripes. We all know that Russians are evil (actually, only those of us who were born back before the 80's know this, because it is what our government told us back then, though they have been mysteriously silent on the subject lately), and the similarity of flags clearly shows that the French are evil as well.
Those are the two main reasons, I think. Its also partly the fact that back before 9/11/01, there used to be a couple big tall buildings in New York (so I'm told, I've never actually been there). As it turns out, the ideal position to plan and direct an attack on those buildings is from the top of a tall structure in New York harbor. Obviously this was the purpose of the "gift" the French gave to America. Thats right, the Statue of Liberty was clearly planned from the start to aid the French in carrying out terrorist attacks on Americans.
See, our hatred of the French is well justified, as my exhaustive proof fo their evil reveals.
Easy. He doesn't pretend to be your friend.
you insensitive clod!!
Wait, was this a poll? I don't remember. Maybe you could direct me to the proper section...
The page linked didn't have a date, but I'm guessing it is a year or two old. Boeing has dropped plans for the sonic cruiser, and is concentrating on building a high-efficiency aircraft instead (airlines showed very little interest in faster aircraft, and far more in cheaper to fly aircraft). If you look at their products page you will notice that they no longer even list the Sonic Cruiser in the product development section (which they used to). Their newest aircraft under development, the 7E7, is expected to enter service in 2008, and it is supposed to be a high-efficiency mid size airliner with a cruise speed of .85 mach.
.98 or so) and don't anymore, so it appears that they have dropped it.
Admittedly this is only what is listed on their website, but IIRC they used to list the soniccruiser (which was designed for mach
Yeah. If I don't get it, no one should get it! Thats a great attitude. We should stop building everything that I don't get to use.
$6000 isn't that bad. I just did a quick search on Travelocity, a business class roundtrip ticket New York-London was running a little over $5000. Another $1000 doesn't seem that bad. For a first class ticket, it jumps up to close to $10000. (Oh, and the cheapest economy class was $187)
One could think of a person's conciousness as nothing more than the physical state of their brain - just like how a computer's "runningness" is nothing more than its design and the contents of its storage, memory, and registers. Since we already have intellectual property, let's make the destruction of information a crime. So killing a human is very bad, and turning of an intelligent computer is bad according to the information destroyed.
How do you know that you are destroying information when you kill someone? Maybe by doing so you have simply allowed them to gain different information unavailable to the rest of us, to share with different people already dead? What if heaven exists, and by killing people you are giving them access to even more information than they could get here? How could you test this? Or are you saying that denying the information held in that person's mind to other people currently alive is the crime? In this case, it would be a crime to refuse to talk to someone - you would be depriving them of information. Destruction of information is a crime? What if I burn a book, is that then a crime? Even though there are thousands of other copies? Is it okay if to destroy something if the information is available elsewhere? Can I kill a person if they have gained all their information by reading books, so they contain no unique data? If I do kill them, can you prove that they possessed unique information that I have now destroyed?
Interesting idea, but I don't think it works out.
To some extent, I think we already have. As a poster above pointed out, back around 1900 the U.S. supreme court (okay, so this only applies to the U.S., but still...) recognized corporations as being protected some of the same ways citizens are. Corporations are essentially machines designed to make money, with interchangeable human parts. Most people would say that Ford Motor Co. is the same entity today as it was when it was founded, despite the fact that none of the same people work there. It is sort of a living entity in that it has grown, changed, developed and presumably learned something during its existence, and I believe most people would say it is independent of the people that are part of it.
Zip disks definitely did not fail. For a number of years they were extremely popular, because they filled a niche that nothing else really did - they were relatively cheap, offered decent performance (certainly faster than the CD burners out at the time), and pretty easy to use. you could get a 100MB zip drive and 10 disks for like $150 at a time when a CD burner was a couple hundred and media $3-$5 a pop (and it could only be used once). Just because zip drives are no longer popular does not mean they were a failure, it just means that other technology eventually caught up and passed them. At a time when you had to be very careful to get a CD to burn properly (no buffer underrun protection, etc.) you could plug a zip drive into the printer port and just drag and drop files into it. It wasn't until the last to years or so that CD burners really got to the same level of ease of use.
Unless you are Walmart or K-mart.