Rather than making the sunshade orbit earth, wouldn't it be easier to put the shade at some point between the sun and the Earth? Say at one of the Lagrange points?
It wouldn't have to be a solid shade, either -- just truck a lot of water out there and spray it out through a nozzle, and create a cloud of ice crystals. They'd diffuse the incoming light rather than blocking it completely, and as a "fail safe," perhaps you could put them in a slightly unstable orbit, so that over time they'd stop shadowing the planet. If the system wasn't refreshed every few years, it would stop working. (Or maybe the solar wind would push it out of the Lagrange point and cause it to fail eventually...?)
I'm sure there's probably some better fluid to use than water (maybe something lighter?), I was just using it as an example. Maybe even we could use a material that absorbs at particular wavelengths -- diffusing infrared while letting visible light through?
We're only trying to block light here, it seems like a solid shade would be overkill. Why not make a cloud? They do a good job at blocking light inside the atmosphere.
I really enjoyed how they gave the list price and it's cruising speed. Maybe in the next review, they'll take it out on the track for a spin.
Hey, how about gas mileage? I mean, I was all set to order one, but I don't want to get dirty looks from my greenie neighbors because I'm the guy driving the Death Van that only gets 12 MPG.
I think your post got cut off. Would you please repost?
You can pick up from "Here's how you can get those poor miserable people the drugs they want and need..."
Thanks!
Re:Oh oh, I want to ignore reality too.
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Encrypted Ammunition?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ah, yes; the 'I'll take you out of context and then respond with pithy one-liners' semi-troll. I'm feeling charitable today, so I'll respond.
Whenever you introduce more complexity to a system, there's a risk/benefit tradeoff. Your comparison to ABS brakes is not a particularly apt one, but I'll work with it: basically, most people feel that the modern ABS system produces enough benefit to outweigh the complexity (and thus risk of failure) that it introduces. The point is that I don't think that the additional complexity of these safety systems produces enough benefit to be worth it the increased risk of failure, particularly when the failure mode of a non-firing gun is so severe. (Gun doesn't go off, user may well end up dead.)
Your second response is silly as well. To begin with, guns don't unload themselves over time. A loaded gun will still be loaded tomorrow, provided someone hasn't unloaded it. Thus, it's far easier to accidentally have a gun where the batteries aren't charged, than one that's not loaded. Second, anyone who even has a basic idea of how a firearm works knows that in order for it to fling little lead things out the front, it has to have a supply of little lead things. It's less obvious that it also has to have a battery. Because the cartriges are fundamentally required for operation of the gun, they're difficult to forget. Any safety system would by design be nearly transparent, and thus easy to forget about except when it doesn't work.
Regarding handcuffing suspects: the police have carefully thought-out procedures for how to handcuff people in order to reduce the chance of the suspect being able to attack them. Generally, it's done by two people: if the person is really dangerous, you wouldn't even try to get close to them (or let them get close to you) until another person arrived to cover them. And then the weapon goes into a holster, which is designed to be difficult for another person to remove the gun from. (Actually, such holsters are an example of complexity that's probably worth it in terms of a tradeoff, because it doesn't introduce too much.)
Oh look, you made fun of how I openly admitted that I wasn't going to try to prop my argument up with statistics. Wooo. I see you don't have any in return to discuss exactly how many officers are shot with their own weapons in the absence of mitigating factors, in order to underline exactly how severe this problem is? Your side of the argument is predicated on the assumption that there is a substantial risk to officers of being shot with their own guns, and that this risk warrants introducing a needlessly complex, expensive, and failure-prone safety system. I'm saying I don't think the risk is that great. Burden of proof is on you if you still think so, particularly if you want to make fun of my lack of statistics. Who's not wearing any clothes?
And as for your last point, you decided to deprecate another safety system which probably could have helped your argument, since it's an example of a worthwhile complexity/safety tradeoff. As I mentioned earlier, most police forces (at least those that I've interacted with the members of, admittedly all in the US) have discovered that it's not a great idea to get close to a dangerous suspect with a drawn weapon, and have instituted procedures that minimize the need for this. You don't cuff someone without backup (and when you do, if you're the person doing the cuffing, you holster the weapon as you approach), etc. There are probably exceptional circumstances where these procedures can't be followed, but without evidence of how commonplace they are, it's hardly a convincing justification for such safety systems.
I never said at any point that there aren't places for RFID-enabled guns; I can think of a few, they're just few- and far-between. Places where guns currently can't be taken (secure facilities, prisons) might be included, but in general, I think people substantially overestimate the need or demand for such systems in average civilian or police use.
I'm not sure what the link is to (I'm at work right now), but I'm willing to bet you a shiny quarter that it's to the video of that DEA agent shooting himself in the foot.
If that's the case, then allow me to hold it up as a shining example of idiocy in action. That man... was an idiot.
Allow me to step through the fundamental rules of gun safety: Rule 1: Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Well, seeing as how he shot himself in the foot/leg, I think we can probably state that it wasn't pointed in a safe direction. Even when you're holstering a weapon, it shouldn't be pointing at you if you can avoid it, and in most duty holsters you can. (And if can't avoid it, you'd think that you'd be really fucking careful about the other rules, no?)
Rule 2: Keep your finger off the trigger guard until you're ready to shoot. Well, I think we can almost certainly say he messed up here. I suppose perhaps something got wedged inside the trigger guard and depressed the trigger, but I think it's more likely he just had his finger resting on it. That alone puts him in the running for a Darwin Award, in my book. Since he was in a room full of schoolkids, there obviously wasn't any legitimate reason to shoot anything, thus there's NO REASON for his finger to be anywhere near there. That's just inexcusably stupid.
Rule 3: Always keep the gun unloaded until ready for use. Okay, I'll cut him a little slack here, because theoretically he needs to have that gun, because he's a cop (narc, whatever). But, and this is a big BUT, why did he think it a good idea to do anything with (like pull out / demonstrate / wave around) the loaded gun? Hello? Collect call from common sense, do you accept the charges? No? Didn't think so.
That incident shows a number of problems, not least of which is why we're allowing someone who's that clearly stupid to work in law enforcement.
I'll boil it down to one paragraph here: The key thing that people need to understand, is that guns are not hard. They're really not. It is not that difficult to be safe. It's certainly easier than driving a car safely. It only takes one rule (keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction) to ensure that nobody gets shot accidentally, and another rule (keep your finger away from the trigger) to prevent 99.99% of accidental discharges. (I'd say 100%, but no mechanical mechanism is perfect.) Combined with one more rule (keep the gun unloaded), you can prevent all shooting accidents. The average person is quite capable of this. Lots of people who aren't exactly brain surgeons do it every day. So when you hear about an accidental shooting, keep that in mind: either someone was obscenely careless, or they were horrendously stupid, or both. The same behavior would cause problems behind the wheel of a car, or with any significant power tool -- in fact, you can accidentally kill more people with a car than you can with a handgun.
I happen to think the world would be a better place without Britney Spears albums and polyphonic mobile phone ringtones, but I'm not getting up on my high horse and telling people they can't have them, even though I think the costs (annoyance) greatly outweigh the benefits (???) of polyphonic ringtones.
Besides which, more to the point there are a lot of people around, I'm sure, who think the world would be a better place without some things that you enjoy in it. I personally know quite a few people who have a rabid dislike of automobiles and would like to have a world without them; I'm sure they'd have no problem coming up with a similar tax scheme that punished anyone who owned a car every time a person died somewhere in one, and paid you back if you traded in your car for a bicycle. If you drive a car and haven't killed anyone lately, that probably seems pretty stupid. And yet, the number of people killed every year in cars far outweighs those killed by guns. It's all a matter of opinion whether you think the 'benefit' of cars outweighs their social and economic 'cost.'
In short, thankfully, the fact that you think society would be better or worse off without guns is basically irrelevant, as are my feelings regarding polyphonic ringtones (apparently). There are a lot of people who disagree with you, and they vote.
Re:Two great tastes that taste great together!
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Encrypted Ammunition?
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· Score: 1
I just want to make one addition:
People who are gun nuts because they believe it is an important safeguard of freedom and have thought about their beliefs will almost always support first amendment rights. They see arming themselves as a way to protect their free speech rights and would not oppose cryptography.
There are lots of people who believe certain things and haven't ever really stepped back and thought about why they think it; the result is that they have philosophies aren't anywhere near internally consistent -- on the contrary, they're glaringly hypocritical.
But in general, most thinking gun owners, I've found, are also supporters of the other low-digit Amendments, because they realize that a place where you can have a gun but get thrown in jail for saying the wrong thing or standing next to the wrong person isn't a very nice place to live at all.
That said, everyone has their issues. People with guns but who have otherwise-uncontroversial political beliefs are necessarily going to be more attuned to attempts to take their guns than restrictions on their speech, since they don't perceive themselves to be at risk there (or rather, the risk to their right to own guns is that much more real). Similarly, it's hard to get people who don't own guns very enthused about the 2nd Amendment. The best way to safeguard a right is to get more people using it and who feel they have something at stake to lose if that right goes away.
I can't remember the company that marketed it, but a few years ago there was a system that was very close to what you're describing. Instead of a firing pin and mechanically-detonating primer, it was electrically ignited. Basically each cartridge had a little "spark plug" where the primer would be, and this was ignited by an electrical signal from the gun. The gun's trigger was merely a switch, placed where the trigger would normally be.
It wasn't designed for "controlled access", but it was electric. It wouldn't be hard to space the contacts around the base of the cartridge in various ways, specific to each gun -- if you really wanted to. However, you could probably do the same thing with a mechanical firing pin, by making the pin an odd shape and then putting a "keyhole"-shaped cover over the primer: wrong shaped pin, it wouldn't fire. (I'm not advocating this, and in reality I think it would be a stupid idea, but I'm just saying it's possible.)
I think that the idea of electric primer ignition has been kicking around since the 50s, and probably earlier, in various forms. It's yet another solution seeking a problem to solve, in my opinion. Mechanically detonated primers are reliable, cheap, and have been brought to near-perfection over nearly two centuries of development. There's just not any compelling reason to go to an electric system. (OK, maybe one: maybe in very high-speed applications, like Gatling guns, there could be a benefit to reducing the lock time of mechanical firing, or its complexity.) The commercial failure of the gun I saw with this system lay in the fact that nobody really wanted a gun that A) had batteries and B) required special ammunition. (Probably more B.)
About the only reason I could think of for electric primers in most guns was to allow non-standard triggering systems -- you could put the trigger in any place on the gun that you wanted, and maybe make a more ergonomic gun -- but people seem generally happy with the layout of guns today, and gun owners are notoriously resistant to change. (As well they should be, perhaps.)
1. Treat every gun as if it is loaded, all the time.* 2. Keep the muzzle of the gun pointed in a safe direction, always. 3. Do not place your finger inside the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot and pointed at the target.
I'm not a big fan of mechanical safeties, so I don't consider their use a 'safety fundamental,' and in some cases I think new shooters are best to leave them alone -- in particular, on many guns you can only engage the safety when it is cocked, which in my opinion should only occur when it's pointed at the target anyway. If the gun is to be set down, then it should be unloaded and opened (in which case the safety usually can't be on). So basically there's no time when the safety would need to be used: either the gun is open and unloaded, or it's pointing at the target, then loaded, then cocked, and then fired. I'll take a gun that's open and empty over one that's closed (status unknown) with its safety on any day.
Maybe if you're teaching people who are going to go hunting (or carrying holstered weapons), where it's necessary to walk around with a loaded gun, the mechanical safety is more important, but I think that emphasizing the importance of not readying the gun to fire until its required is a better lesson.
If those three rules are followed, it should be absolutely impossible to have an accidental shooting. Or in other words, anytime you hear about someone being shot accidentally, it's because somebody didn't follow one of the 3 basic rules (usually more than just one).
* You have to make certain exceptions to this rule for cleaning, obviously, as you also do for Rule No. 2, but my feeling is that those "exceptions" are things that you can leave to tell people when you're actually teaching them how to clean a gun.
While I can't comment on the situation in your country, the truth of the matter is that here in the U.S., most guns that are used in crimes are obtained illegally, and many of them are imported illegally. (Further down in this discussion someone links to the DOJ page where this is discussed in detail.)
There's no reason to think that if it became tougher for law-abiding citizens to get guns, that it would be any harder for criminals to do so. After all, we've more or less admitted that we cannot, as a country, stop thousands of people from literally walking across our borders (both the northern and southern one). Now consider how much easier it is to move a gun than a person -- guns don't need air or water and don't mind being stuck in the false bottom of a crate for a few months (or years). You can't sniff them out like drugs or bombs, and it's not hard to take them apart so that they're hard to pick out on an x-ray. In short, there's not any way (at least not feasibly, without completely changing how we run our borders) to prevent guns from being imported illegally.
Not to mention the fact that guns really don't wear out (at least not quickly, under typical use; machine guns excepted), and even if you could somehow magically stop all illegal importation, it would take centuries to use up the supply of guns already in criminals' hands.
The single effect that disarming legitimate owners would have, or even making it substantially harder for legitimate citizens to obtain guns, would be to raise the ratio of guns owned by criminals to guns owned by law-abiding people. The numbers don't substantiate the legitimate-owners-supplying-crime arguement, at least in this country.
Also, your theory about criminals being more proficient with guns than most civilian gun owners is also false. Criminals, for the most part, don't go down to the range and practice very often: their guns get used when they're committing crimes, and I doubt they want to draw attention to themselves by doing a lot of target practice. It doesn't take much skill to pick up a gun and wave it around, or to shoot someone from a few feet away; certainly it's nothing like the skill that's required for even the most basic target shooting exercises, or hunting (which a fairly large number of rural and suburban gun owners in the United States are involved with). Even if we factor in the gun owners who don't actually shoot regularly, but just have a gun for defense purposes and have perhaps taken it down to the range once or twice, I think you're vastly overestimating the skills of criminals. Trust me -- I've seen the aftermath of some urban shootings, and there's a lot of "spray and pray" involved.
I agree that owning a firearm carries with it a certain responsibility. However, where I disagree with you is that we should deny that responsibility to an otherwise law-abiding adult by default. In my country, our entire society is predicated on the assumption that everyone is worthy of a host of important responsibilities (including voting, serving in the military, drinking alcohol), if they haven't done anything to prove that they can't handle it. In geek terms, we've created a society that has "allow by default" as its basic policy with regards to its citizens. An adult who has not done anything wrong and is of normal intelligence and sound mind, should not have to prove their worthiness to some authority in order to own a gun. I have no problem denying this responsibility to people who have shown that they can't handle it (similarly, I have no problem denying to people who've demonstrated a propensity for violence many other rights that normal people enjoy, including life itself if the situation warrants it), but there's a key difference between a system that assumes that the average person is capable of making important decisions, including ones regaring gun ownership, and a system which assumes only a select few are capable or should be allowed this and other responsibilities.
I wouldn't presume anything like that about the technology. At best, they introduce a lot of additional complexity to the weapon, and might lower the chance of it being useful when it needs to be (forget to change the battery? Too late now, you're dead!). For the amount that these things cost, owners, both civilian and police/military, would be better off simply learning how to retain their weapon more effectively (or don't let the suspect/attacker get close enough to you to grapple for the gun; if there's a hostile person within an arms-length of you and you haven't shot them or somebody else isn't pointing a gun at them, something's already wrong).
There are already ways that you can nullify a weapon in a scuffle: drop the magazine. If you press the magazine release on most modern semi-autos, even if the mag doesn't fall completely clear, it will prevent the weapon from firing (assuming you haven't disabled the safety). So if someone does get that close, press the magazine release, drop the weapon, and while the other person is trying to figure out what's wrong with it, draw your backup weapon and shoot them.
Not to mention that although I've yet to see the statistics, I think that the number of officers shot by their own weapons is probably pretty low, and the number shot with their own weapons in the absence of a situation that wasn't supposed to have occured anyway (i.e. where there wasn't some huge fuckup already), and where more traditional safety procedures (such as double- or triple-retention holsters) were in use is even lower.
The whole RFID thing smells like a solution looking for a problem. It's being pushed as a panacea, when the real problems don't stem from failures of the weapons anyway.
This is correct. Sadly, it's one of those distinctions which is not pedantic but rather useful and important (e.g., it's entirely possible for a gun to have both a clip and a magazine, which are totally different mechanisms -- thus, word choice is important), but is constantly misused.
General rule: if it has a spring in it and feeds the cartridges into the firing mechanism of the gun, it's a magazine. If it just holds the cartridges in a particular configuration, it's a clip. (You can't really just say 'if it has a spring in it, it's a magazine,' because many clips have springs or are themselves springs.)
Of course, the "confusion" is sometimes a useful way of determining when someone is dangerously inexperienced: anyone who calls a magazine a clip is probably not someone I'm going to let handle one of my guns.
The EU is afraid of pissing off the USA? Where the hell have YOU been the last century or so?
Was that the century where the U.S.' only real competition in terms of dominating the world collapsed under its own weight, and Europe basically scrambled to throw something together to act as a counterpoise to the Americans, to prevent them from running the world to an even greater extent than they do anyway?
There are lots of real banks that exist mostly online (I'm sure they have a B&M location somewhere, but for all intents and purposes they're a website and a phone number and a P.O. box somewhere). The oldest one that I know of is called "NetBank" and seems to have survived the dot-bomb crash okay. There are probably others, although it's arguable whether using an 'online bank' like NetBank really has any advantages over using a regular local bank that has a solid online presence as well as a real-world one (I think the stated advantage is higher interest rates on deposits and lower rates on loans, but I didn't check this).
PayPal/Google/etc. don't want to compete in this field. They don't want to be a bank. They want to transfer money, and in PayPal's case do a lot of bank-like stuff, but unless they're forced to by law, they're never going to be a bank, because to do so would be to subject themselves to a lot of regulation and oversight that they don't want. As long as we allow them to be quasi-bank-like (in PayPal's case, running deposit accounts that are interest-bearing and from which you can withdraw on demand, but calling them 'debit accounts') but not having to conform to the same laws as banks, they're always going to take the easier path. Can't really blame them: most people would make the same decision (if they are anything close to logical) in the same situation, I think.
Just as an aside, I've taken my PayPal business elsewhere. I no longer accept payments through them for stuff I sell on eBay after a number of problems, and I've basically stopped using them to send money as well. The first sign that things were going down the tubes there is when they tried to "upsell" me to a 'Premier' class account that takes 3% of ALL INCOMING TRANSFERS, just because I accepted one incoming credit-card transaction. I wouldn't have had a problem with them taking 3% off of the CC transfers, but to try to take it from everything is just sleazy, and the "silent" way they upgraded me is even worse. And then, when I told them to de-upgrade me, they told me if it ever happened again, they wouldn't downgrade.
I do quite a bit of business on eBay, luckily I sell mostly unique items and can more or less dictate my terms to buyers, and I don't go through them for anything anymore. If people are in a hurry, they can wire me the money via Western Union and pay for it themselves; if they're not, they can send me a personal check and I'm more than happy to just sit on the item until it clears. Since going to that, I've had less problems accepting people's personal checks than I had with PayPal. I'm starting to suspect that the whole e-payments thing is a bit overrated anyway.
Doesn't matter -- MAC addresses can be so easily spoofed that they're really not a good way to prove who was actually sitting at a terminal. I don't think it would take exactly a genius defense lawyer to destroy that argument in court. Any useful logging is going to be at the username/password level, since theoretically that has a 1:1 association with actual human beings.
I have heard mention of this as well, but I'd never seen any details. I tried to dig up some information; here's what I found.
Apple's "About disk optimization with Mac OS X" (basically telling you that you don't need to defrag), says "Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk."... "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files [that data is continually appended to]. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering.""
There's also a reference to a "hot band," a region of the drive where data is written that's used during startup, in order to increase performance and I assume lessen boot times.
There are 2 separate file optimizations going on here.
The first is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location. This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.
The second is the "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle, the "hottest" files (the files that have been read the most times) are moved to a "hotband" on the disk - this is a part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical disk characteristics (currently sized at 5MB per GB). "Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, files are defragmented. Currently, AHFC only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB.
So that seems to be the deal; if anyone else has more information, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Frequency of use doesn't denote importance, but it might denote how quickly you need to be able to recall it. Similarly, importance doesn't imply that quick recall is necessary. If you don't use something frequently, it might be okay to store it somewhere that takes a while to recall from, even if it is "important," as long as you know where it is so that you can get it back.
As an example, financial records for past years might be very important, but you don't need to be able to access them in a tenth of a second. As long as you can get to them if you really want to (sacrificing a few seconds), then it's all right.
The way I see this translating to reality is that you'd keep all your old documents in slow-speed storage, but then keep an index in high-speed storage, so that you could easily search (both by name and by content) and decide when to pull stuff out of your archives.
This is no different than what people have been doing for centuries with paper. Just because the card catalog is located in the center of the library doesn't mean its contents are inherently more valuable than the actual books (which might be in the basement, back shelves, wherever); it just means that the catalog gets accessed much more often.
Actually, in the physical world, people often exchange speed of recall for certainty of recall. You put important documents in a safe-deposit box, rather than your kitchen counter, because even though it'll take you longer to get them out of the box, they're guaranteed to be there when you need them. Likewise, a system which traded off speed for redundancy would probably be appropriate for "important" but infrequently-accessed electronic documents.
I could see a use for something like this. Personally, I've stopped throwing stuff away. With the exception of temporary and cache files, storage is cheap enough that I just don't delete anything on the off chance that I might want it again. Every email, every instant message, every dictated note (I use a little Olympus digital recorder), every digital photo, it's all saved. By the time I fill up my main hard drive with stuff, I can just buy another one that's probably between two and five times the size, dump everything onto it, and keep the old one as a historical backup. (I keep online backups as well, but I won't bore you with it here.)
I don't think I'm that atypical in this regard. GMail brought the idea of saving all your email, forever, to the masses; Flickr gives you an unlimited amount of photo storage; and technologies like Apple's Spotlight make it relatively easy to search through gigabytes of saved information and pull up related items. What we haven't seen yet is a lot of popular interest in redundant backup systems: that'll come later, once people start realizing how much of their lives they're stored away on the crummy OEM drive in their Dell. (Probably after a lot of them fail and we hear some real horror stories.)
It's not hard to imagine a near future where people just get used to not throwing anything away. In that situation, tiering storage -- allocating the fastest media to the most frequently accessed information -- could have big performance gains. And assuming that you have a relatively static amount of frequently-accessed information, and basically only add information to the "infrequenly accessed" category, a tiered system means that you only really have to add storage to the bottom tier. It's a pyramid where the base gets larger and larger, but the upper part remains basically the same size.
So for example, as you save more and more emails (infrequently accessed information), they automatically get saved onto inexpensive, slower drives, which are then mirrored to each other for redundancy. A single, fast drive could hold the system -- maybe solid state storage? -- and more frequently-accessed data. A smart system would know what information needs to be moved up to faster storage to be very useful (uncompressed digital video, for example, wouldn't be much fun to work with off of a slow drive), and what can be left there as it's accessed (MP3s and compressed video could be played directly from slower media).
I think it's an interesting technology with a lot of possible applications, but as with a lot of other things, it'll be the home user who arrives last to the party, because their storage is the least centralized. Unless there's a move away from storage on individual desktop PCs and towards storage on per-home servers, it'll be a while before most people require or see the benefit in such a thing.
In the end, though, what's repsonsible for dominance of the roadways over mass transit is the automobile industry.
I agree with you, but I also wanted to add in that it's a big handout to the trucking industry; the way we currently tax commercial use of the highway system is totally inadequate.
Truckers "pay" for the use of the highway network (theoretically) through the federal tax on diesel fuel. This is stupid: it's insufficent to pay for the network, and also discourages passenger-car use of diesel (because it makes the fuel artificially expensive).
A tax that was actually based on pound-miles travelled (pounds of cargo times distance travelled on the network) would be more fair, and it would create more competition for the transport of cargo over other means. I think you'd see even more containerized freight being moved by rail, with only the "last mile" occuring by truck, and at the same time you wouldn't be penalizing owners of diesel passenger vehicles for their fuel choice, and the result would be higher efficiency in all vehicles. (There's a reason why diesel vehicles are more popular than gas in other countries; it's only because of our tax structure and lingering public opinion that they aren't here.)
Actually the marginal cost of adding an extra stop "along the way" on a rail line is pretty low: there are some stops on commuter railroads in the Northeast that are nothing more than a bus shelter on a concrete pad next to the tracks.
I could imagine a system where there could be a 'possible stop' for a local (non-express) train at every town along its route, and in order to get the train to stop, you called a number at least 20 minutes before the scheduled stop time, and this would send a signal to the train's engineer, telling him to stop the train there. No call, the train doesn't stop. (If you were inside the train and wanted to disembark there, it's easy enough to put an annunciator in the car, or have the conductor note where your ticket has you getting off and letting the engineer know.)
The justification for making a train stop at a particular town is probably less than would be required to have an interstate exit at that same town -- probably less, since an interstate exit costs millions of dollars (those big, banked cloverleafs aren't cheap); a minimalist train station probably wouldn't have to cost more than a few thousand.
Running a rail line out to a particular town (so no longer imagining the case where a main line runs through anyway) is certainly less expensive than running an interstate there. I've seen the cost comparisons per mile, and divided highways are even more expensive than banked, electrified track, and have much higher maintainance costs. Particularly if you have to buy or include the cost/value of the right-of-way in a high-value area.
There are obviously going to be towns out there which don't have an interstate running through them, and would be too small to ever justify having rail service either: I'm not arguing about that. I don't think anyone is realistically saying that you can take the place of all cars by trains; that's just silly. But there are a lot, perhaps even the majority, of cars on the road today which basically do nothing but drive from the suburbs to urban areas and out again, or go from one major urban area to another. The few times that these 'commuter vehicles' stray from well-traveled routes, they could probably be easily replaced by rental units.
There are always situations where a self-propelled vehicle requiring little or no infrastructure is the appropriate choice; but these situations occur seldom, compared to the many occasions when said self-propelled vehicles are nothing but a waste of energy and metal, following each other down the same route, one after another, day after day.
You have a point, but how many times per year do you go camping? Once a month, at the very most, I'd wager. (And that's if you're really into camping as a family.)
Now, how many times a year do you drive into or out of a major city, or go from one city to another? If you're anything like most Americans, I bet you do that a lot more often than you go out into the wilderness.
Nobody is suggesting that trains are a viable or useful alternative to cars in every possible situation. But there are a whole lot of miles driven by people in cars that aren't going anyplace that couldn't be easily served by mass transit instead. From the suburbs to the city (commuter travel), or from one city to another (inter-urban): both of these situations could be easily and efficiently done with mass transit.
The U.S. is a big country, and there will always be a place for individually-powered vehicles, so that people can get to places where it just doesn't make sense to extend mass transit. However, those situations are more the exception than the rule, and there is a very significant percentage of personal-car usage today that wouldn't have to happen if there had been an equivalent investment in mass-transit infrastructure as there has been in highways.
Actually Ike probably never really got to see the wonderful European rail network, because by the time he set foot on the European continent, most of it had been bombed to hell and back by the Allied air forces. It would have been a total and complete mess.
I don't know if they targeted the autobahns specifically when they were looking for things to bomb, but they definitely went after the railroad infrastructure (bridges, freight yards, stations, etc.); it might have been that the reason Ike was so enamored with the autobahn was because it was the only way left to move stuff around at the end of the war, since the rail network was basically gone. The key parts of it that weren't bombed by the Allies in order to hamper the German war effort were in many cases destroyed by the Germans themselves as they retreated, both in the East and West.
Most of the European rail network that you see today -- the well-graded, electrified, high-speed stuff -- was built or rebuilt after the war.
In 1945-1950, the rail network in the United States was almost certain superior to that in Europe: what happened was that in the 1950s, as the European system got better and better, the U.S's (which should have been exemplary) fell into decline and disrepair.
I think what they mean is that there is a total of 46,000 miles of Interstate highway, or "Limited-Access" highway, or something like that, and then there are 55,000 bridges on the entire federal highway system total (including ones not on limited-access roads).
Perhaps the second number is referring to all the bridges that are on the designated, numbered highways (i.e., the ones commonly called "Highway" or "Route": Rt. 1, Rt. 66, etc.), even when they're not Interstates.
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Rather than making the sunshade orbit earth, wouldn't it be easier to put the shade at some point between the sun and the Earth? Say at one of the Lagrange points?
It wouldn't have to be a solid shade, either -- just truck a lot of water out there and spray it out through a nozzle, and create a cloud of ice crystals. They'd diffuse the incoming light rather than blocking it completely, and as a "fail safe," perhaps you could put them in a slightly unstable orbit, so that over time they'd stop shadowing the planet. If the system wasn't refreshed every few years, it would stop working. (Or maybe the solar wind would push it out of the Lagrange point and cause it to fail eventually...?)
I'm sure there's probably some better fluid to use than water (maybe something lighter?), I was just using it as an example. Maybe even we could use a material that absorbs at particular wavelengths -- diffusing infrared while letting visible light through?
We're only trying to block light here, it seems like a solid shade would be overkill. Why not make a cloud? They do a good job at blocking light inside the atmosphere.
I really enjoyed how they gave the list price and it's cruising speed. Maybe in the next review, they'll take it out on the track for a spin.
Hey, how about gas mileage? I mean, I was all set to order one, but I don't want to get dirty looks from my greenie neighbors because I'm the guy driving the Death Van that only gets 12 MPG.
I think your post got cut off. Would you please repost?
You can pick up from "Here's how you can get those poor miserable people the drugs they want and need..."
Thanks!
Ah, yes; the 'I'll take you out of context and then respond with pithy one-liners' semi-troll. I'm feeling charitable today, so I'll respond.
Whenever you introduce more complexity to a system, there's a risk/benefit tradeoff. Your comparison to ABS brakes is not a particularly apt one, but I'll work with it: basically, most people feel that the modern ABS system produces enough benefit to outweigh the complexity (and thus risk of failure) that it introduces. The point is that I don't think that the additional complexity of these safety systems produces enough benefit to be worth it the increased risk of failure, particularly when the failure mode of a non-firing gun is so severe. (Gun doesn't go off, user may well end up dead.)
Your second response is silly as well. To begin with, guns don't unload themselves over time. A loaded gun will still be loaded tomorrow, provided someone hasn't unloaded it. Thus, it's far easier to accidentally have a gun where the batteries aren't charged, than one that's not loaded. Second, anyone who even has a basic idea of how a firearm works knows that in order for it to fling little lead things out the front, it has to have a supply of little lead things. It's less obvious that it also has to have a battery. Because the cartriges are fundamentally required for operation of the gun, they're difficult to forget. Any safety system would by design be nearly transparent, and thus easy to forget about except when it doesn't work.
Regarding handcuffing suspects: the police have carefully thought-out procedures for how to handcuff people in order to reduce the chance of the suspect being able to attack them. Generally, it's done by two people: if the person is really dangerous, you wouldn't even try to get close to them (or let them get close to you) until another person arrived to cover them. And then the weapon goes into a holster, which is designed to be difficult for another person to remove the gun from. (Actually, such holsters are an example of complexity that's probably worth it in terms of a tradeoff, because it doesn't introduce too much.)
Oh look, you made fun of how I openly admitted that I wasn't going to try to prop my argument up with statistics. Wooo. I see you don't have any in return to discuss exactly how many officers are shot with their own weapons in the absence of mitigating factors, in order to underline exactly how severe this problem is? Your side of the argument is predicated on the assumption that there is a substantial risk to officers of being shot with their own guns, and that this risk warrants introducing a needlessly complex, expensive, and failure-prone safety system. I'm saying I don't think the risk is that great. Burden of proof is on you if you still think so, particularly if you want to make fun of my lack of statistics. Who's not wearing any clothes?
And as for your last point, you decided to deprecate another safety system which probably could have helped your argument, since it's an example of a worthwhile complexity/safety tradeoff. As I mentioned earlier, most police forces (at least those that I've interacted with the members of, admittedly all in the US) have discovered that it's not a great idea to get close to a dangerous suspect with a drawn weapon, and have instituted procedures that minimize the need for this. You don't cuff someone without backup (and when you do, if you're the person doing the cuffing, you holster the weapon as you approach), etc. There are probably exceptional circumstances where these procedures can't be followed, but without evidence of how commonplace they are, it's hardly a convincing justification for such safety systems.
I never said at any point that there aren't places for RFID-enabled guns; I can think of a few, they're just few- and far-between. Places where guns currently can't be taken (secure facilities, prisons) might be included, but in general, I think people substantially overestimate the need or demand for such systems in average civilian or police use.
I'm not sure what the link is to (I'm at work right now), but I'm willing to bet you a shiny quarter that it's to the video of that DEA agent shooting himself in the foot.
... was an idiot.
If that's the case, then allow me to hold it up as a shining example of idiocy in action. That man
Allow me to step through the fundamental rules of gun safety: Rule 1: Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Well, seeing as how he shot himself in the foot/leg, I think we can probably state that it wasn't pointed in a safe direction. Even when you're holstering a weapon, it shouldn't be pointing at you if you can avoid it, and in most duty holsters you can. (And if can't avoid it, you'd think that you'd be really fucking careful about the other rules, no?)
Rule 2: Keep your finger off the trigger guard until you're ready to shoot. Well, I think we can almost certainly say he messed up here. I suppose perhaps something got wedged inside the trigger guard and depressed the trigger, but I think it's more likely he just had his finger resting on it. That alone puts him in the running for a Darwin Award, in my book. Since he was in a room full of schoolkids, there obviously wasn't any legitimate reason to shoot anything, thus there's NO REASON for his finger to be anywhere near there. That's just inexcusably stupid.
Rule 3: Always keep the gun unloaded until ready for use. Okay, I'll cut him a little slack here, because theoretically he needs to have that gun, because he's a cop (narc, whatever). But, and this is a big BUT, why did he think it a good idea to do anything with (like pull out / demonstrate / wave around) the loaded gun? Hello? Collect call from common sense, do you accept the charges? No? Didn't think so.
That incident shows a number of problems, not least of which is why we're allowing someone who's that clearly stupid to work in law enforcement.
I'll boil it down to one paragraph here: The key thing that people need to understand, is that guns are not hard. They're really not. It is not that difficult to be safe. It's certainly easier than driving a car safely. It only takes one rule (keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction) to ensure that nobody gets shot accidentally, and another rule (keep your finger away from the trigger) to prevent 99.99% of accidental discharges. (I'd say 100%, but no mechanical mechanism is perfect.) Combined with one more rule (keep the gun unloaded), you can prevent all shooting accidents. The average person is quite capable of this. Lots of people who aren't exactly brain surgeons do it every day. So when you hear about an accidental shooting, keep that in mind: either someone was obscenely careless, or they were horrendously stupid, or both. The same behavior would cause problems behind the wheel of a car, or with any significant power tool -- in fact, you can accidentally kill more people with a car than you can with a handgun.
That's a pretty poor justification.
I happen to think the world would be a better place without Britney Spears albums and polyphonic mobile phone ringtones, but I'm not getting up on my high horse and telling people they can't have them, even though I think the costs (annoyance) greatly outweigh the benefits (???) of polyphonic ringtones.
Besides which, more to the point there are a lot of people around, I'm sure, who think the world would be a better place without some things that you enjoy in it. I personally know quite a few people who have a rabid dislike of automobiles and would like to have a world without them; I'm sure they'd have no problem coming up with a similar tax scheme that punished anyone who owned a car every time a person died somewhere in one, and paid you back if you traded in your car for a bicycle. If you drive a car and haven't killed anyone lately, that probably seems pretty stupid. And yet, the number of people killed every year in cars far outweighs those killed by guns. It's all a matter of opinion whether you think the 'benefit' of cars outweighs their social and economic 'cost.'
In short, thankfully, the fact that you think society would be better or worse off without guns is basically irrelevant, as are my feelings regarding polyphonic ringtones (apparently). There are a lot of people who disagree with you, and they vote.
I just want to make one addition:
People who are gun nuts because they believe it is an important safeguard of freedom and have thought about their beliefs will almost always support first amendment rights. They see arming themselves as a way to protect their free speech rights and would not oppose cryptography.
There are lots of people who believe certain things and haven't ever really stepped back and thought about why they think it; the result is that they have philosophies aren't anywhere near internally consistent -- on the contrary, they're glaringly hypocritical.
But in general, most thinking gun owners, I've found, are also supporters of the other low-digit Amendments, because they realize that a place where you can have a gun but get thrown in jail for saying the wrong thing or standing next to the wrong person isn't a very nice place to live at all.
That said, everyone has their issues. People with guns but who have otherwise-uncontroversial political beliefs are necessarily going to be more attuned to attempts to take their guns than restrictions on their speech, since they don't perceive themselves to be at risk there (or rather, the risk to their right to own guns is that much more real). Similarly, it's hard to get people who don't own guns very enthused about the 2nd Amendment. The best way to safeguard a right is to get more people using it and who feel they have something at stake to lose if that right goes away.
I can't remember the company that marketed it, but a few years ago there was a system that was very close to what you're describing. Instead of a firing pin and mechanically-detonating primer, it was electrically ignited. Basically each cartridge had a little "spark plug" where the primer would be, and this was ignited by an electrical signal from the gun. The gun's trigger was merely a switch, placed where the trigger would normally be.
It wasn't designed for "controlled access", but it was electric. It wouldn't be hard to space the contacts around the base of the cartridge in various ways, specific to each gun -- if you really wanted to. However, you could probably do the same thing with a mechanical firing pin, by making the pin an odd shape and then putting a "keyhole"-shaped cover over the primer: wrong shaped pin, it wouldn't fire. (I'm not advocating this, and in reality I think it would be a stupid idea, but I'm just saying it's possible.)
I think that the idea of electric primer ignition has been kicking around since the 50s, and probably earlier, in various forms. It's yet another solution seeking a problem to solve, in my opinion. Mechanically detonated primers are reliable, cheap, and have been brought to near-perfection over nearly two centuries of development. There's just not any compelling reason to go to an electric system. (OK, maybe one: maybe in very high-speed applications, like Gatling guns, there could be a benefit to reducing the lock time of mechanical firing, or its complexity.) The commercial failure of the gun I saw with this system lay in the fact that nobody really wanted a gun that A) had batteries and B) required special ammunition. (Probably more B.)
About the only reason I could think of for electric primers in most guns was to allow non-standard triggering systems -- you could put the trigger in any place on the gun that you wanted, and maybe make a more ergonomic gun -- but people seem generally happy with the layout of guns today, and gun owners are notoriously resistant to change. (As well they should be, perhaps.)
I would reorder them slightly:
1. Treat every gun as if it is loaded, all the time.*
2. Keep the muzzle of the gun pointed in a safe direction, always.
3. Do not place your finger inside the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot and pointed at the target.
I'm not a big fan of mechanical safeties, so I don't consider their use a 'safety fundamental,' and in some cases I think new shooters are best to leave them alone -- in particular, on many guns you can only engage the safety when it is cocked, which in my opinion should only occur when it's pointed at the target anyway. If the gun is to be set down, then it should be unloaded and opened (in which case the safety usually can't be on). So basically there's no time when the safety would need to be used: either the gun is open and unloaded, or it's pointing at the target, then loaded, then cocked, and then fired. I'll take a gun that's open and empty over one that's closed (status unknown) with its safety on any day.
Maybe if you're teaching people who are going to go hunting (or carrying holstered weapons), where it's necessary to walk around with a loaded gun, the mechanical safety is more important, but I think that emphasizing the importance of not readying the gun to fire until its required is a better lesson.
If those three rules are followed, it should be absolutely impossible to have an accidental shooting. Or in other words, anytime you hear about someone being shot accidentally, it's because somebody didn't follow one of the 3 basic rules (usually more than just one).
* You have to make certain exceptions to this rule for cleaning, obviously, as you also do for Rule No. 2, but my feeling is that those "exceptions" are things that you can leave to tell people when you're actually teaching them how to clean a gun.
While I can't comment on the situation in your country, the truth of the matter is that here in the U.S., most guns that are used in crimes are obtained illegally, and many of them are imported illegally. (Further down in this discussion someone links to the DOJ page where this is discussed in detail.)
There's no reason to think that if it became tougher for law-abiding citizens to get guns, that it would be any harder for criminals to do so. After all, we've more or less admitted that we cannot, as a country, stop thousands of people from literally walking across our borders (both the northern and southern one). Now consider how much easier it is to move a gun than a person -- guns don't need air or water and don't mind being stuck in the false bottom of a crate for a few months (or years). You can't sniff them out like drugs or bombs, and it's not hard to take them apart so that they're hard to pick out on an x-ray. In short, there's not any way (at least not feasibly, without completely changing how we run our borders) to prevent guns from being imported illegally.
Not to mention the fact that guns really don't wear out (at least not quickly, under typical use; machine guns excepted), and even if you could somehow magically stop all illegal importation, it would take centuries to use up the supply of guns already in criminals' hands.
The single effect that disarming legitimate owners would have, or even making it substantially harder for legitimate citizens to obtain guns, would be to raise the ratio of guns owned by criminals to guns owned by law-abiding people. The numbers don't substantiate the legitimate-owners-supplying-crime arguement, at least in this country.
Also, your theory about criminals being more proficient with guns than most civilian gun owners is also false. Criminals, for the most part, don't go down to the range and practice very often: their guns get used when they're committing crimes, and I doubt they want to draw attention to themselves by doing a lot of target practice. It doesn't take much skill to pick up a gun and wave it around, or to shoot someone from a few feet away; certainly it's nothing like the skill that's required for even the most basic target shooting exercises, or hunting (which a fairly large number of rural and suburban gun owners in the United States are involved with). Even if we factor in the gun owners who don't actually shoot regularly, but just have a gun for defense purposes and have perhaps taken it down to the range once or twice, I think you're vastly overestimating the skills of criminals. Trust me -- I've seen the aftermath of some urban shootings, and there's a lot of "spray and pray" involved.
I agree that owning a firearm carries with it a certain responsibility. However, where I disagree with you is that we should deny that responsibility to an otherwise law-abiding adult by default. In my country, our entire society is predicated on the assumption that everyone is worthy of a host of important responsibilities (including voting, serving in the military, drinking alcohol), if they haven't done anything to prove that they can't handle it. In geek terms, we've created a society that has "allow by default" as its basic policy with regards to its citizens. An adult who has not done anything wrong and is of normal intelligence and sound mind, should not have to prove their worthiness to some authority in order to own a gun. I have no problem denying this responsibility to people who have shown that they can't handle it (similarly, I have no problem denying to people who've demonstrated a propensity for violence many other rights that normal people enjoy, including life itself if the situation warrants it), but there's a key difference between a system that assumes that the average person is capable of making important decisions, including ones regaring gun ownership, and a system which assumes only a select few are capable or should be allowed this and other responsibilities.
I wouldn't presume anything like that about the technology. At best, they introduce a lot of additional complexity to the weapon, and might lower the chance of it being useful when it needs to be (forget to change the battery? Too late now, you're dead!). For the amount that these things cost, owners, both civilian and police/military, would be better off simply learning how to retain their weapon more effectively (or don't let the suspect/attacker get close enough to you to grapple for the gun; if there's a hostile person within an arms-length of you and you haven't shot them or somebody else isn't pointing a gun at them, something's already wrong).
There are already ways that you can nullify a weapon in a scuffle: drop the magazine. If you press the magazine release on most modern semi-autos, even if the mag doesn't fall completely clear, it will prevent the weapon from firing (assuming you haven't disabled the safety). So if someone does get that close, press the magazine release, drop the weapon, and while the other person is trying to figure out what's wrong with it, draw your backup weapon and shoot them.
Not to mention that although I've yet to see the statistics, I think that the number of officers shot by their own weapons is probably pretty low, and the number shot with their own weapons in the absence of a situation that wasn't supposed to have occured anyway (i.e. where there wasn't some huge fuckup already), and where more traditional safety procedures (such as double- or triple-retention holsters) were in use is even lower.
The whole RFID thing smells like a solution looking for a problem. It's being pushed as a panacea, when the real problems don't stem from failures of the weapons anyway.
That's two words more than many an idiot who played with explosives got, their last word being:
"Oops--"
This is correct. Sadly, it's one of those distinctions which is not pedantic but rather useful and important (e.g., it's entirely possible for a gun to have both a clip and a magazine, which are totally different mechanisms -- thus, word choice is important), but is constantly misused.
General rule: if it has a spring in it and feeds the cartridges into the firing mechanism of the gun, it's a magazine. If it just holds the cartridges in a particular configuration, it's a clip. (You can't really just say 'if it has a spring in it, it's a magazine,' because many clips have springs or are themselves springs.)
Of course, the "confusion" is sometimes a useful way of determining when someone is dangerously inexperienced: anyone who calls a magazine a clip is probably not someone I'm going to let handle one of my guns.
The EU is afraid of pissing off the USA? Where the hell have YOU been the last century or so?
Was that the century where the U.S.' only real competition in terms of dominating the world collapsed under its own weight, and Europe basically scrambled to throw something together to act as a counterpoise to the Americans, to prevent them from running the world to an even greater extent than they do anyway?
Or were you thinking of some other century?
There are lots of real banks that exist mostly online (I'm sure they have a B&M location somewhere, but for all intents and purposes they're a website and a phone number and a P.O. box somewhere). The oldest one that I know of is called "NetBank" and seems to have survived the dot-bomb crash okay. There are probably others, although it's arguable whether using an 'online bank' like NetBank really has any advantages over using a regular local bank that has a solid online presence as well as a real-world one (I think the stated advantage is higher interest rates on deposits and lower rates on loans, but I didn't check this).
PayPal/Google/etc. don't want to compete in this field. They don't want to be a bank. They want to transfer money, and in PayPal's case do a lot of bank-like stuff, but unless they're forced to by law, they're never going to be a bank, because to do so would be to subject themselves to a lot of regulation and oversight that they don't want. As long as we allow them to be quasi-bank-like (in PayPal's case, running deposit accounts that are interest-bearing and from which you can withdraw on demand, but calling them 'debit accounts') but not having to conform to the same laws as banks, they're always going to take the easier path. Can't really blame them: most people would make the same decision (if they are anything close to logical) in the same situation, I think.
Just as an aside, I've taken my PayPal business elsewhere. I no longer accept payments through them for stuff I sell on eBay after a number of problems, and I've basically stopped using them to send money as well. The first sign that things were going down the tubes there is when they tried to "upsell" me to a 'Premier' class account that takes 3% of ALL INCOMING TRANSFERS, just because I accepted one incoming credit-card transaction. I wouldn't have had a problem with them taking 3% off of the CC transfers, but to try to take it from everything is just sleazy, and the "silent" way they upgraded me is even worse. And then, when I told them to de-upgrade me, they told me if it ever happened again, they wouldn't downgrade.
I do quite a bit of business on eBay, luckily I sell mostly unique items and can more or less dictate my terms to buyers, and I don't go through them for anything anymore. If people are in a hurry, they can wire me the money via Western Union and pay for it themselves; if they're not, they can send me a personal check and I'm more than happy to just sit on the item until it clears. Since going to that, I've had less problems accepting people's personal checks than I had with PayPal. I'm starting to suspect that the whole e-payments thing is a bit overrated anyway.
Doesn't matter -- MAC addresses can be so easily spoofed that they're really not a good way to prove who was actually sitting at a terminal. I don't think it would take exactly a genius defense lawyer to destroy that argument in court. Any useful logging is going to be at the username/password level, since theoretically that has a 1:1 association with actual human beings.
Apple's "About disk optimization with Mac OS X" (basically telling you that you don't need to defrag), says "Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk."
There's also a reference to a "hot band," a region of the drive where data is written that's used during startup, in order to increase performance and I assume lessen boot times.
There's also reference to some automatic defragging in this macosxhints article on HFAC:So that seems to be the deal; if anyone else has more information, I'd be interested to hear about it.
There's also a MacSlash article on HFAC and a discussion on Ars that includes a post of the source code.
Frequency of use doesn't denote importance, but it might denote how quickly you need to be able to recall it. Similarly, importance doesn't imply that quick recall is necessary. If you don't use something frequently, it might be okay to store it somewhere that takes a while to recall from, even if it is "important," as long as you know where it is so that you can get it back.
As an example, financial records for past years might be very important, but you don't need to be able to access them in a tenth of a second. As long as you can get to them if you really want to (sacrificing a few seconds), then it's all right.
The way I see this translating to reality is that you'd keep all your old documents in slow-speed storage, but then keep an index in high-speed storage, so that you could easily search (both by name and by content) and decide when to pull stuff out of your archives.
This is no different than what people have been doing for centuries with paper. Just because the card catalog is located in the center of the library doesn't mean its contents are inherently more valuable than the actual books (which might be in the basement, back shelves, wherever); it just means that the catalog gets accessed much more often.
Actually, in the physical world, people often exchange speed of recall for certainty of recall. You put important documents in a safe-deposit box, rather than your kitchen counter, because even though it'll take you longer to get them out of the box, they're guaranteed to be there when you need them. Likewise, a system which traded off speed for redundancy would probably be appropriate for "important" but infrequently-accessed electronic documents.
I could see a use for something like this. Personally, I've stopped throwing stuff away. With the exception of temporary and cache files, storage is cheap enough that I just don't delete anything on the off chance that I might want it again. Every email, every instant message, every dictated note (I use a little Olympus digital recorder), every digital photo, it's all saved. By the time I fill up my main hard drive with stuff, I can just buy another one that's probably between two and five times the size, dump everything onto it, and keep the old one as a historical backup. (I keep online backups as well, but I won't bore you with it here.)
I don't think I'm that atypical in this regard. GMail brought the idea of saving all your email, forever, to the masses; Flickr gives you an unlimited amount of photo storage; and technologies like Apple's Spotlight make it relatively easy to search through gigabytes of saved information and pull up related items. What we haven't seen yet is a lot of popular interest in redundant backup systems: that'll come later, once people start realizing how much of their lives they're stored away on the crummy OEM drive in their Dell. (Probably after a lot of them fail and we hear some real horror stories.)
It's not hard to imagine a near future where people just get used to not throwing anything away. In that situation, tiering storage -- allocating the fastest media to the most frequently accessed information -- could have big performance gains. And assuming that you have a relatively static amount of frequently-accessed information, and basically only add information to the "infrequenly accessed" category, a tiered system means that you only really have to add storage to the bottom tier. It's a pyramid where the base gets larger and larger, but the upper part remains basically the same size.
So for example, as you save more and more emails (infrequently accessed information), they automatically get saved onto inexpensive, slower drives, which are then mirrored to each other for redundancy. A single, fast drive could hold the system -- maybe solid state storage? -- and more frequently-accessed data. A smart system would know what information needs to be moved up to faster storage to be very useful (uncompressed digital video, for example, wouldn't be much fun to work with off of a slow drive), and what can be left there as it's accessed (MP3s and compressed video could be played directly from slower media).
I think it's an interesting technology with a lot of possible applications, but as with a lot of other things, it'll be the home user who arrives last to the party, because their storage is the least centralized. Unless there's a move away from storage on individual desktop PCs and towards storage on per-home servers, it'll be a while before most people require or see the benefit in such a thing.
In the end, though, what's repsonsible for dominance of the roadways over mass transit is the automobile industry.
I agree with you, but I also wanted to add in that it's a big handout to the trucking industry; the way we currently tax commercial use of the highway system is totally inadequate.
Truckers "pay" for the use of the highway network (theoretically) through the federal tax on diesel fuel. This is stupid: it's insufficent to pay for the network, and also discourages passenger-car use of diesel (because it makes the fuel artificially expensive).
A tax that was actually based on pound-miles travelled (pounds of cargo times distance travelled on the network) would be more fair, and it would create more competition for the transport of cargo over other means. I think you'd see even more containerized freight being moved by rail, with only the "last mile" occuring by truck, and at the same time you wouldn't be penalizing owners of diesel passenger vehicles for their fuel choice, and the result would be higher efficiency in all vehicles. (There's a reason why diesel vehicles are more popular than gas in other countries; it's only because of our tax structure and lingering public opinion that they aren't here.)
Actually the marginal cost of adding an extra stop "along the way" on a rail line is pretty low: there are some stops on commuter railroads in the Northeast that are nothing more than a bus shelter on a concrete pad next to the tracks.
I could imagine a system where there could be a 'possible stop' for a local (non-express) train at every town along its route, and in order to get the train to stop, you called a number at least 20 minutes before the scheduled stop time, and this would send a signal to the train's engineer, telling him to stop the train there. No call, the train doesn't stop. (If you were inside the train and wanted to disembark there, it's easy enough to put an annunciator in the car, or have the conductor note where your ticket has you getting off and letting the engineer know.)
The justification for making a train stop at a particular town is probably less than would be required to have an interstate exit at that same town -- probably less, since an interstate exit costs millions of dollars (those big, banked cloverleafs aren't cheap); a minimalist train station probably wouldn't have to cost more than a few thousand.
Running a rail line out to a particular town (so no longer imagining the case where a main line runs through anyway) is certainly less expensive than running an interstate there. I've seen the cost comparisons per mile, and divided highways are even more expensive than banked, electrified track, and have much higher maintainance costs. Particularly if you have to buy or include the cost/value of the right-of-way in a high-value area.
There are obviously going to be towns out there which don't have an interstate running through them, and would be too small to ever justify having rail service either: I'm not arguing about that. I don't think anyone is realistically saying that you can take the place of all cars by trains; that's just silly. But there are a lot, perhaps even the majority, of cars on the road today which basically do nothing but drive from the suburbs to urban areas and out again, or go from one major urban area to another. The few times that these 'commuter vehicles' stray from well-traveled routes, they could probably be easily replaced by rental units.
There are always situations where a self-propelled vehicle requiring little or no infrastructure is the appropriate choice; but these situations occur seldom, compared to the many occasions when said self-propelled vehicles are nothing but a waste of energy and metal, following each other down the same route, one after another, day after day.
You have a point, but how many times per year do you go camping? Once a month, at the very most, I'd wager. (And that's if you're really into camping as a family.)
Now, how many times a year do you drive into or out of a major city, or go from one city to another? If you're anything like most Americans, I bet you do that a lot more often than you go out into the wilderness.
Nobody is suggesting that trains are a viable or useful alternative to cars in every possible situation. But there are a whole lot of miles driven by people in cars that aren't going anyplace that couldn't be easily served by mass transit instead. From the suburbs to the city (commuter travel), or from one city to another (inter-urban): both of these situations could be easily and efficiently done with mass transit.
The U.S. is a big country, and there will always be a place for individually-powered vehicles, so that people can get to places where it just doesn't make sense to extend mass transit. However, those situations are more the exception than the rule, and there is a very significant percentage of personal-car usage today that wouldn't have to happen if there had been an equivalent investment in mass-transit infrastructure as there has been in highways.
Actually Ike probably never really got to see the wonderful European rail network, because by the time he set foot on the European continent, most of it had been bombed to hell and back by the Allied air forces. It would have been a total and complete mess.
I don't know if they targeted the autobahns specifically when they were looking for things to bomb, but they definitely went after the railroad infrastructure (bridges, freight yards, stations, etc.); it might have been that the reason Ike was so enamored with the autobahn was because it was the only way left to move stuff around at the end of the war, since the rail network was basically gone. The key parts of it that weren't bombed by the Allies in order to hamper the German war effort were in many cases destroyed by the Germans themselves as they retreated, both in the East and West.
Most of the European rail network that you see today -- the well-graded, electrified, high-speed stuff -- was built or rebuilt after the war.
In 1945-1950, the rail network in the United States was almost certain superior to that in Europe: what happened was that in the 1950s, as the European system got better and better, the U.S's (which should have been exemplary) fell into decline and disrepair.
I think what they mean is that there is a total of 46,000 miles of Interstate highway, or "Limited-Access" highway, or something like that, and then there are 55,000 bridges on the entire federal highway system total (including ones not on limited-access roads).
Perhaps the second number is referring to all the bridges that are on the designated, numbered highways (i.e., the ones commonly called "Highway" or "Route": Rt. 1, Rt. 66, etc.), even when they're not Interstates.
Alternately, the number might just be incorrect.