Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments needed to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ.
Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
You'll be waiting for this call forever. The structure even of a single cell is immensely complex.
Indeed. That's why Fred Hoyle (who discovered nucleosynthesis in stars, and coined the term "Big Bang") was correct to point out,
If only ten amino acids of particular kinds are necessary at particular locations in a polypeptide chain for its proper functioning, the required arrangement (starting from an initially different arrangement) cannot be found by mutations, except as an outrageous fluke. Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well-known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle decisively on the theory.
At this time, it is futile for science to vainly pursue a bottom-up approach to artificial life, in hopes of demonstrating how the first living organism could have self-assembled out of the primordial soup.
What the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existence of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
If exceeding your allotted speaking time is a crime, we should have seen arrests take place at just about every debate of presidential candidates.
In making the arrest, the officers also disobeyed Senator Kerry, who said "that's all right, let me answer his question."
What kind of a monster tases a student immediately after the student, who was clearly not a threat, begs "don't tase me!" ?
Regardless of whether this student had a history of practical jokes, this is as clear an example of police-state tactics as I've ever seen. Meyer is charged with disturbing the peace, but I viewed the video, and things were quite peaceful before police forcibly dragged him away from the microphone. When police momentarily released Meyer's arms, he can be seen sticking them straight up in the air (the submissive posture assumed by someone being held at gunpoint).
Here is another article about the "photonic laser thruster," which says
Bae used a photonic laser and a sophisticated photon beam amplification system to demonstrate that photonic energy could generate amplified thrust between two spacecraft by bouncing photons many thousands of times between them.
From this, it sounds like it can't be used to propel a single stand-alone spacecraft, but it can be used to "push apart" a pair of spacecraft. (Spacecraft A is, in effect, the reaction mass for spacecraft B, and vice versa.)
What the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existence of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
That bag contained his private property that he had just purchased... Should he be able to inspect their cash registers after his purchase? After all, they contain money that was his just moments before.
Your analogy sounds really clever at first, but there's one problem with it. While shoplifting is a widespread problem in our society, cashiers surreptitiously taking too much money out of customers' wallets is not. The day it becomes a significant problem is the day I'll fight for your right to audit their cash register.
if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving.
Depends how you define pollution. The PZEV Accord gets 19/29 MPG city/highway. So if we're talking CO2 emissions, the Accord emits much more pollution.
if Californians want to state-subsidize cleaner automobiles, that's fine. But how does letting other people buy the same kind of car in other states hurt their investment?
Are you the guy who coined the phrase, "yes we sell them at a loss, but we make up for it on volume!"
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments needed to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ.
Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
I want a knob on my audio player, right next to the volume control, that allows me to choose any arbitrary amount of compression.
When I'm listening in a perfectly quiet environment, I'll turn the compression competely off, so I can experience the full dynamic range from the tiniest whisper to the most thunderous tempest.
On the other hand, if I'm listening while mowing the lawn, such that I would never have any hope of hearing that tiniest whisper, I'll dial up quite a bit of compression.
This would be the best of both worlds. Make it so, audio industry!
People are no more satisfied now than they were during the rule of Rome.
That is due to higher expectations.
Higher expectations are due to ignorance. If our educational system put things in perspective, people would realize that the average "poor" American in 2007 has a higher standard of living than the aristocracy in 1607 (he or she tends to own an air conditioner, television, and maybe even a car. The most pervasive health problem among "poor" Americans is obesity.)
In the U.S., poverty (in an abosolute sense) has been eliminated, like smallpox. Failure to put things in perspective, historically and geographically, is why said elimination is not celebrated, and why poverty (in a relative sense only) persists.
Question: As you know, in the Netherlands they have very few inhibitions about hemp (and related crops). So, are farmers in that country growing lots of hemp? Why not, if it has so many profitable uses?
You might be right if the purported reason that some authorities encourage illegal immigration -- the need for cheap labor -- were truthful. In fact, these same authorities would still be encouraging illegal immigration even if there were a large surplus of human labor.
For an inkling of the real reason, look at who was upset by the fact that holders of "Z visas" (under the recently proposed legislation) would not be able to vote.
It's particularly satisfying when I begin coasting far from the red light, while the guy in the next lane blows past me, then screeches to a halt at the light.
And then, due to my well-timed approach, I still have 10-15 mph of undissipated kinetic energy at the time the light turns green, and I can blow past him.
this manual concentration on mileage is probably as distracting as talking on a cell phone
No. Most of the battle is paying close attention to the car(s) in front of you, and immediately taking your foot off the gas as soon as you notice any deceleration up ahead. And then you continue to pay close attention, so you can judge whether coasting alone will be enough to avert a collision with the guy ahead of you. (Coasting: good for mileage. Braking a conventional car: terrible for mileage. Braking a hybrid: bad for mileage, but not as bad as braking a conventional car, because regenerative braking recovers some of the energy.)
If everyone did this, accident rates would plummet.
I'm sure it's feasible to build a flexible railcar that can ride standard-gauge tracks, then upon exiting the tunnel westbound, expand its wheelbase to match the wider Russian tracks.
The tunnel would make for some enticing possibilities. Imagine a rail tanker full of Stolichnaya leaving Moscow and arriving in Boston two weeks later, totally free of stevedores' handling fees. Mmmm, vodka...
I've been on a cruise ship that transited the Panama Canal. Did it make economic sense to fly to Costa Rica, get on the ship, cruise around the Caribbean for a few days, disembark at Ft. Lauderdale, and fly home? No, but I don't regret it, it was a great vacation. Being able to marvel at the canal makes it a tourist destination for its own sake.
Similarly, I would love to take a rail trip through this tunnel into Russia, then fly home.
If you want to ship goods to the US or Russia, you are better off just to load up a boat.
You're neglecting that there are costs involved with shipping the stuff by truck or rail to the seaport, transferring the goods from the truck or railcar onto the ship, then when the ship arrives, transferring the goods from the ship back onto truck or railcar. I don't know exactly how large those costs are, but they certainly make the tunnel more viable. Imagine a rail tanker full of Stolichnaya leaving Moscow and arriving in Boston two weeks later, totally free of stevedores' handling fees. Mmmm, vodka...
Yes, I'm aware that the steel industry has big dependency chains. That's why you will not find the word "steel" in my original post. I said "cast iron." You know, the stuff humans were working with during the Iron Age, thousands of years ago. Adjusting the chemistry of the product is a level of sophistication that would come a few generations later.
Here is a PDF describing methane production processes that aren't dependent on an oil industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments needed to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ.
Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
...write genetic code that doesn't result in an abomination, like the Brundlefly.
You'll be waiting for this call forever. The structure even of a single cell is immensely complex.
Indeed. That's why Fred Hoyle (who discovered nucleosynthesis in stars, and coined the term "Big Bang") was correct to point out,
If only ten amino acids of particular kinds are necessary at particular locations in a polypeptide chain for its proper functioning,
the required arrangement (starting from an initially different arrangement) cannot be found by mutations, except as an outrageous
fluke. Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their
survival. This situation is well-known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle decisively on the theory.
At this time, it is futile for science to vainly pursue a bottom-up approach to artificial life, in hopes of demonstrating how the first living organism could have self-assembled out of the primordial soup.
Taiwan is a modern, peaceful democracy. You could think of it as "the anti-China." I think MacBooks and iPods are manufactured there.
What the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existence of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
If exceeding your allotted speaking time is a crime, we should have seen arrests take place at just about every debate of presidential candidates.
In making the arrest, the officers also disobeyed Senator Kerry, who said "that's all right, let me answer his question."
What kind of a monster tases a student immediately after the student, who was clearly not a threat, begs "don't tase me!" ?
Regardless of whether this student had a history of practical jokes, this is as clear an example of police-state tactics as I've ever seen. Meyer is charged with disturbing the peace, but I viewed the video, and things were quite peaceful before police forcibly dragged him away from the microphone. When police momentarily released Meyer's arms, he can be seen sticking them straight up in the air (the submissive posture assumed by someone being held at gunpoint).
Here is another article about the "photonic laser thruster," which says
Bae used a photonic laser and a sophisticated photon beam amplification system to demonstrate that photonic energy could generate amplified thrust between two spacecraft by bouncing photons many thousands of times between them.
From this, it sounds like it can't be used to propel a single stand-alone spacecraft, but it can be used to "push apart" a pair of spacecraft. (Spacecraft A is, in effect, the reaction mass for spacecraft B, and vice versa.)
Am I right about this?
What the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existence of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
That bag contained his private property that he had just purchased... Should he be able to inspect their cash registers after his purchase? After all, they contain money that was his just moments before.
Your analogy sounds really clever at first, but there's one problem with it. While shoplifting is a widespread problem in our society, cashiers surreptitiously taking too much money out of customers' wallets is not. The day it becomes a significant problem is the day I'll fight for your right to audit their cash register.
if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving.
Depends how you define pollution. The PZEV Accord gets 19/29 MPG city/highway. So if we're talking CO2 emissions, the Accord emits much more pollution.
if Californians want to state-subsidize cleaner automobiles, that's fine. But how does letting other people buy the same kind of car in other states hurt their investment?
Are you the guy who coined the phrase, "yes we sell them at a loss, but we make up for it on volume!"
#50 and #71 on the TOP500 list are composed of Apple Xserve G5s.
Now, Apple claims that the new quad-core Xserve with Xeon processors is five times faster than the Xserve G5.
Seems like building your supercomputer from Xeon Xserves would be a viable strategy for achieving a high rank on the TOP500 list!
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments needed to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ.
Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
The solution is simple.
I want a knob on my audio player, right next to the volume control, that allows me to choose any arbitrary amount of compression.
When I'm listening in a perfectly quiet environment, I'll turn the compression competely off, so I can experience the full dynamic range from the tiniest whisper to the most thunderous tempest.
On the other hand, if I'm listening while mowing the lawn, such that I would never have any hope of hearing that tiniest whisper, I'll dial up quite a bit of compression.
This would be the best of both worlds. Make it so, audio industry!
I would like to run this on a tablet or a PDA, but Apple don't make such devices
Apple doesn't make them, but they're available: ModBook http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ModBook
People are no more satisfied now than they were during the rule of Rome.
That is due to higher expectations.
Higher expectations are due to ignorance. If our educational system put things in perspective, people would realize that the average "poor" American in 2007 has a higher standard of living than the aristocracy in 1607 (he or she tends to own an air conditioner, television, and maybe even a car. The most pervasive health problem among "poor" Americans is obesity.)
In the U.S., poverty (in an abosolute sense) has been eliminated, like smallpox. Failure to put things in perspective, historically and geographically, is why said elimination is not celebrated, and why poverty (in a relative sense only) persists.
Question: As you know, in the Netherlands they have very few inhibitions about hemp (and related crops). So, are farmers in that country growing lots of hemp? Why not, if it has so many profitable uses?
You might be right if the purported reason that some authorities encourage illegal immigration -- the need for cheap labor -- were truthful. In fact, these same authorities would still be encouraging illegal immigration even if there were a large surplus of human labor.
For an inkling of the real reason, look at who was upset by the fact that holders of "Z visas" (under the recently proposed legislation) would not be able to vote.
that all large prisons hold innocent people.
It's particularly satisfying when I begin coasting far from the red light, while the guy in the next lane blows past me, then screeches to a halt at the light.
And then, due to my well-timed approach, I still have 10-15 mph of undissipated kinetic energy at the time the light turns green, and I can blow past him.
this manual concentration on mileage is probably as distracting as talking on a cell phone
No. Most of the battle is paying close attention to the car(s) in front of you, and immediately taking your foot off the gas as soon as you notice any deceleration up ahead. And then you continue to pay close attention, so you can judge whether coasting alone will be enough to avert a collision with the guy ahead of you. (Coasting: good for mileage. Braking a conventional car: terrible for mileage. Braking a hybrid: bad for mileage, but not as bad as braking a conventional car, because regenerative braking recovers some of the energy.)
If everyone did this, accident rates would plummet.
The famous "Traffic Waves" essay:
m l
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.ht
I'm sure it's feasible to build a flexible railcar that can ride standard-gauge tracks, then upon exiting the tunnel westbound, expand its wheelbase to match the wider Russian tracks.
The tunnel would make for some enticing possibilities. Imagine a rail tanker full of Stolichnaya leaving Moscow and arriving in Boston two weeks later, totally free of stevedores' handling fees. Mmmm, vodka...
I've been on a cruise ship that transited the Panama Canal. Did it make economic sense to fly to Costa Rica, get on the ship, cruise around the Caribbean for a few days, disembark at Ft. Lauderdale, and fly home? No, but I don't regret it, it was a great vacation. Being able to marvel at the canal makes it a tourist destination for its own sake.
Similarly, I would love to take a rail trip through this tunnel into Russia, then fly home.
If you want to ship goods to the US or Russia, you are better off just to load up a boat.
You're neglecting that there are costs involved with shipping the stuff by truck or rail to the seaport, transferring the goods from the truck or railcar onto the ship, then when the ship arrives, transferring the goods from the ship back onto truck or railcar. I don't know exactly how large those costs are, but they certainly make the tunnel more viable. Imagine a rail tanker full of Stolichnaya leaving Moscow and arriving in Boston two weeks later, totally free of stevedores' handling fees. Mmmm, vodka...
Yes, I'm aware that the steel industry has big dependency chains. That's why you will not find the word "steel" in my original post. I said "cast iron." You know, the stuff humans were working with during the Iron Age, thousands of years ago. Adjusting the chemistry of the product is a level of sophistication that would come a few generations later.
Here is a PDF describing methane production processes that aren't dependent on an oil industry.