No, 50% and 90% are not "optimistic at best" if by that you mean "optimistic for EV loving people". 50% efficient petrol engines simply don't exist in road cars - not even close. 50% efficient engine and transmission combinations don't exist anywhere.
Right - I mean, none of those Chinese and Indian people are in actual fact natives of California... California didn't ever have massive emigration from the east...
Who said it wouldn't be from combustion? Even if you assume that this is all from combusting something, power station turbines, wires, substations, chargers and electric motors are still a much much much more efficient way of moving a vehicle than petrol tankers, engines, and mechanical transmissions.
I view benchmarks like I view performance review numbers. You cannot show improvement if you cannot compare to past metrics. So you collect metrics even if they are poor choices. For example, you can measure a software engineer against SLOC. It is not a great measure of productivity (and many people can attest to why), but it is a measure that is readily available by looking at SCM. Having a bad measure is better than having no measure. Over the years, the SLOC measure may get tweaked in terms of how it is calculated to prevent software engineer from gaming the system too much. Perhaps credit will be added for code reviews and penalties for build breaking. Eventually you will have a number that reflects some level of work done by the software engineer, but not necessarily a linearly scalable number that can accurately reflect productivity. But it is still better than no number.
Complete falacy.
No number is almost always better than an uninformative number. SLOC is a great example of this. You actively do not want engineers to be contributing lots of lines of code - that's how you end up with the Facebook app - 17000 classes doing... basically nothing much, and no one who understands how any of it works.
You actively do not want to use that kind of measure, because it bears exactly 0 correlation to an engineer being productive and/or useful.
My general experience is that the older, experienced programmers are exactly those who don't preen and prance and have egos. They just know how to get the job done. Meanwhile, the 20 somethings are all busy trying to prove themselves better than each other.
No it won't. No one really cares about 4k, because it doesn't make any discernable difference at all to most people. At 10 feet from your TV, your eye can't resolve better than 1080p on a 65" TV (but it can on a 70" or above).
You realise that planes have been brought down by bird strikes... Even ones that have been tested with the chicken gun. Remember that plane that ended up in the Hudson? Bird strikes...
No, because a person can not at home create a nuclear weapon or gasoline with no ingredients whatsoever. They can however create encryption software with exactly 0 input from anyone else.
No, no one uses hydro as base load. You use it to fill in moments where demand suddenly surges, because all you need to do to start generating is open a sluice gate. You then pump the water back up hill during low demand periods.
The problem is, that what he proposes, is more of this... He proposes that more of the country should be privatised, because "businesses can do it much more efficiently".
The correct solution here was not to get any business involved at all, because as soon as you do that, they try and make a (huge) profit out of it. The correct solution was instead to get a software engineering intern on the government's payroll to write this app in one day.
Not true - hydro is only really used as giant batteries for sudden ramp up and ramp down of electricity demand. Most of it is wind. Wave and tidal power play a fair role too though.
It should be extended to cover not just signing up for service, but also signing up for advertising. Europe has strong regulation requiring that you *can* opt out of having your data stored, but some companies (cough) AirFrance (cough) have figured out that they can make it so that you're required to send physical post to them to delete your data from their spam database.
No, it's not the free market. The people making the purchase didn't actually get to any involvement in choosing which service they got, and nor did they get perfect information about the choices available.
Thankfully, roundabouts take up the same amount of space as traffic light controlled junctions, and allow you to shrink the inbound/outbound roads due to their greater efficiency.
[quote]except that many of those lights are there to guarantee that cars can actually get out onto roads when otherwise cars would be backed up through the intersection from the next red light....:-)[/quote] That's fine - roundabouts allow for this too. As soon as one person turns right or left, rather than going straight on, it opens up a small gap for someone on a side street to pop out. That in itself then causes a small hole for someone else to get out. It *is* possible to end up with a poor configuration for roundabouts where one entrance gets starved, but at that point you can put lights on the roundabout which alternate red/green in a circle. It's not as efficient as a plain roundabout, but it's much more efficient than a light controlled junction still.
Statistically, most U.S. road intersections with stop signs actually are two-way stops rather than four. Typically, every fourth or fifth intersection is a four-way stop to ensure that people who are afraid to pull out into traffic have at least one path that guarantees them the ability to get on the road.:-)
Interesting, I moved to CA about 3 years ago, and I'm not sure I've seen a 2 way stop since coming. If it were like you said, here, it would be entirely sane.
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.
Or, just make it a passively controlled junction - i.e. a roundabout.
Right, we call those "mini roundabouts" in the UK. They work well in cases where there's not really one road that's more major than the other. Typically trucks just drive over them.
As I said - a major/minor junction is the default for an intersection in the UK - they always work too, and rather better than a 4 way stop.
On the plus side, this will allow the US to reverse it's dumb decision to stick pedestrian crossings right at the same places as complex traffic intersections, and stop the ever-present issue of people making right turns, only to discover (sometimes too late) someone crossing the road right in front of them.
In more sane countries, the pedestrian crossings are put a decent distance away from the actual intersection, and barriers erected to stop people crossing in the intersection.
While you're right - roundabouts are much better than light controlled junctions, the thing I don't understand is why the US insists on using 4 way stops for small junctions, rather than just having a major/minor road configuration like in the UK. A 4 way stop results in everyone having to stop all the time, rather than allowing the 90% case (the more major road having cars on it) to work efficiently. In practice, because the more major road flows more smoothly, the minor roads get cars out quickly too.
Not true. What's true is that given an intersection with 2 lane roads coming into it, a roundabout will need more space than a light controlled intersection.
However, a roundabout causes the roads into it and out of it to be used more efficiently, as traffic flows down them constantly, rather than only coming in bursts roughly 1/4 of the time. The result is that said 2 lane light controlled junction gets replaced by one lane roads, and a roundabout that takes up the same space as the junction.
Overall result - a space saving, not a space cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Right... I mean, not only should they better themselves, but they should do it without the resources that anyone else has...
No, 50% and 90% are not "optimistic at best" if by that you mean "optimistic for EV loving people". 50% efficient petrol engines simply don't exist in road cars - not even close. 50% efficient engine and transmission combinations don't exist anywhere.
Right - I mean, none of those Chinese and Indian people are in actual fact natives of California... California didn't ever have massive emigration from the east...
Oh wait... that's not right.
Who said it wouldn't be from combustion? Even if you assume that this is all from combusting something, power station turbines, wires, substations, chargers and electric motors are still a much much much more efficient way of moving a vehicle than petrol tankers, engines, and mechanical transmissions.
I view benchmarks like I view performance review numbers. You cannot show improvement if you cannot compare to past metrics. So you collect metrics even if they are poor choices. For example, you can measure a software engineer against SLOC. It is not a great measure of productivity (and many people can attest to why), but it is a measure that is readily available by looking at SCM. Having a bad measure is better than having no measure. Over the years, the SLOC measure may get tweaked in terms of how it is calculated to prevent software engineer from gaming the system too much. Perhaps credit will be added for code reviews and penalties for build breaking. Eventually you will have a number that reflects some level of work done by the software engineer, but not necessarily a linearly scalable number that can accurately reflect productivity. But it is still better than no number.
Complete falacy.
No number is almost always better than an uninformative number. SLOC is a great example of this. You actively do not want engineers to be contributing lots of lines of code - that's how you end up with the Facebook app - 17000 classes doing... basically nothing much, and no one who understands how any of it works.
You actively do not want to use that kind of measure, because it bears exactly 0 correlation to an engineer being productive and/or useful.
My general experience is that the older, experienced programmers are exactly those who don't preen and prance and have egos. They just know how to get the job done. Meanwhile, the 20 somethings are all busy trying to prove themselves better than each other.
No it won't. No one really cares about 4k, because it doesn't make any discernable difference at all to most people. At 10 feet from your TV, your eye can't resolve better than 1080p on a 65" TV (but it can on a 70" or above).
You realise that planes have been brought down by bird strikes... Even ones that have been tested with the chicken gun. Remember that plane that ended up in the Hudson? Bird strikes...
No, actually, we know to make the building weaker in critical ways.
Strong buildings typically fall down. Flexible ones do not.
Uhhhh... Last I checked they were doing exactly what you suggest - building structures like space stations on a larger scale.
No, because a person can not at home create a nuclear weapon or gasoline with no ingredients whatsoever. They can however create encryption software with exactly 0 input from anyone else.
No, no one uses hydro as base load. You use it to fill in moments where demand suddenly surges, because all you need to do to start generating is open a sluice gate. You then pump the water back up hill during low demand periods.
No, charged by pumping water up hill during low power demand periods. It's *way* more efficient than most other types of battery.
He means precisely instances like that.
The problem is, that what he proposes, is more of this... He proposes that more of the country should be privatised, because "businesses can do it much more efficiently".
The correct solution here was not to get any business involved at all, because as soon as you do that, they try and make a (huge) profit out of it. The correct solution was instead to get a software engineering intern on the government's payroll to write this app in one day.
Not true - hydro is only really used as giant batteries for sudden ramp up and ramp down of electricity demand. Most of it is wind. Wave and tidal power play a fair role too though.
It should be extended to cover not just signing up for service, but also signing up for advertising. Europe has strong regulation requiring that you *can* opt out of having your data stored, but some companies (cough) AirFrance (cough) have figured out that they can make it so that you're required to send physical post to them to delete your data from their spam database.
No, it's not the free market. The people making the purchase didn't actually get to any involvement in choosing which service they got, and nor did they get perfect information about the choices available.
Space permitting, sure,
Thankfully, roundabouts take up the same amount of space as traffic light controlled junctions, and allow you to shrink the inbound/outbound roads due to their greater efficiency.
[quote]except that many of those lights are there to guarantee that cars can actually get out onto roads when otherwise cars would be backed up through the intersection from the next red light.... :-)[/quote]
That's fine - roundabouts allow for this too. As soon as one person turns right or left, rather than going straight on, it opens up a small gap for someone on a side street to pop out. That in itself then causes a small hole for someone else to get out. It *is* possible to end up with a poor configuration for roundabouts where one entrance gets starved, but at that point you can put lights on the roundabout which alternate red/green in a circle. It's not as efficient as a plain roundabout, but it's much more efficient than a light controlled junction still.
Yes and no - mini roundabouts are great and all, but roundabouts do become more efficient when more than 2 cars can fit on them at once.
Statistically, most U.S. road intersections with stop signs actually are two-way stops rather than four. Typically, every fourth or fifth intersection is a four-way stop to ensure that people who are afraid to pull out into traffic have at least one path that guarantees them the ability to get on the road. :-)
Interesting, I moved to CA about 3 years ago, and I'm not sure I've seen a 2 way stop since coming. If it were like you said, here, it would be entirely sane.
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.
Or, just make it a passively controlled junction - i.e. a roundabout.
Right, we call those "mini roundabouts" in the UK. They work well in cases where there's not really one road that's more major than the other. Typically trucks just drive over them.
As I said - a major/minor junction is the default for an intersection in the UK - they always work too, and rather better than a 4 way stop.
On the plus side, this will allow the US to reverse it's dumb decision to stick pedestrian crossings right at the same places as complex traffic intersections, and stop the ever-present issue of people making right turns, only to discover (sometimes too late) someone crossing the road right in front of them.
In more sane countries, the pedestrian crossings are put a decent distance away from the actual intersection, and barriers erected to stop people crossing in the intersection.
While you're right - roundabouts are much better than light controlled junctions, the thing I don't understand is why the US insists on using 4 way stops for small junctions, rather than just having a major/minor road configuration like in the UK. A 4 way stop results in everyone having to stop all the time, rather than allowing the 90% case (the more major road having cars on it) to work efficiently. In practice, because the more major road flows more smoothly, the minor roads get cars out quickly too.
Not true. What's true is that given an intersection with 2 lane roads coming into it, a roundabout will need more space than a light controlled intersection.
However, a roundabout causes the roads into it and out of it to be used more efficiently, as traffic flows down them constantly, rather than only coming in bursts roughly 1/4 of the time. The result is that said 2 lane light controlled junction gets replaced by one lane roads, and a roundabout that takes up the same space as the junction.
Overall result - a space saving, not a space cost.
So then... it would be useless for a GPS ;)