This is pretty stupid. Maglev is a dead-end technology. Conventional rail has achieved 360 miles per hour a few months ago on a standard track with a souped-up standard train whereas maglev only goes up to 280 mph.
Nice, but largely a marketing plot. Catenary voltage was increased to 31 kV from the standard 25 kV. The mechanical tension in the wire was increased to 40 kN from the standard 25 kN as you can read here. You won't see that on production trains. The "sweet" spot for conventional trains is at 400km/h. Above that the air drag and wheel-track-resistance is too costly. Maglev is pretty much frictionless. It can hold a sustained speed over 450km.
In addition, german Maglev technology is rather dangerous; an accident 1 year ago on a demonstration line killed 23 people, this accident was caused by inadequate (by design) signalling system. This is particularly concerning because the first role of railroad signalling is to indicate that the track is free from obstructions ahead so the train may proceed.
The maglev didn't collide with another maglev trainset, but with a conventional wheel-based cleansing train (sadly, this was not considered in the safety concept. Now it is.). A Transrapid maglev still can't collide with another Transrapid out of principal of the electrical propellation.
Your criticism of the Transrapid sounds half-informed. This train has rather different problems like high-cost, incompatibility with existing systems and so on. It is however not a dead-end technology.
As much I want to like this project to be finished, I believe in it's success only if I see the first needed tunnel or so built. There are several reasons against it:
City council of Munich is against it and will sue the State of Bavaria
The costs are really high for such a short distance (well, they would be lower, if Germany were like China and they could relocate inhabitants as they fit and avoid tunnels this way
Valid alternatives exists (albeit their planning is not as mature as the Transrapid line
The Transrapid maglev concept was imagined for longer distances, but then you have other problems: poor freight train capabilities, pressure from both conventional rail-based trains and airplanes, complete incompatibility with conventional rail-based trains.
Why I would like it to succeed: nearly vibration-free and noise-reduced transport, high velocity up to 550km (real world, not the fake TGV-joke, where they changed the motor and electrical circuitry) at lower(!) costs, maintenance-friendly concept (the TCO will be lower compared to rail trains).
Well, the idea of a decoupled powertrain where the conventional Diesel engine will only be used to drive electric traction motors is not new. It is already in use in this huge mining loader from Liebherr.
will be those, who already know, that they will die: suicide bombers. Nothing really matters to them anymore besides their mission. Perhaps this is what the BDO are really trained to look out for: exceptionally calm persons?
I think, all these hydrogen and fuel cell engines are still only an excuse for not having enough powerful batteries. This is the holy grail in car manufacturing and only this would allow to build completely different power trains (e.g. motor in the tires) and free up space useful for passengers.
Your post would be pretty much irrelevant in those current days of multi-gigabyte RAM and terrbyte-sized hard disks. However, kernel size still matters for embedded developers. Many projects in the embedded market still use 2.4 (if they use Linux at all), because even with everything stripped down, 2.6 kernels tend to be considerably larger than 2.4 kernels.
10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.
Wow. An actual truth. What went wrong there? This is certainly true for most P2P sites and YouTube. I search most of the time for artists I know already. But it is not true for music recommendation sites like last.fm
At work in the company of course I use Email with outside clients and customers. But internally, I use quite often now IM and Skype now. Works great where faster communication with immediate feedback is needed, but you also want some sort of tracking.
But Email is still much more universally accepted.
Teachers must earn the respect of students. It is not (and never will be) automatic.
You seem to imply that the teacher-student relationship is symmetrical, when it's not. Unless a teacher is a totally incompetent or bullish, students should pay respect to those, who enable them to go through life with a half-decent job.
School is not kindergarten anymore. Do you really think, you do students any good, if you allow them to behave like this? And no, teachers, when they are not complete morons, have a right be treated respectfully and not to be mocked.
Students have to study and learn and to show respect for their teachers. Any disrespectful behavior should be punished. A 40-day suspension however, is way to harsh.
The right question is, why Microsoft is pretty much the only software corporation that is hated and feared by both its competitors and larger parts of its end users alike. No other software corp. happens to be disliked like MS is.
For some science areas (especially physics and mathematics) more introductory entries would be very helpful. Instead they are often high-level and they link heavily to each other, weaving often an undecipherable web for the layman.
Take for example functional spaces like the "Banach Space" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach_space). You are reading and reading and reading about vector spaces, completley normed vector spaces, metrics etc. etc. and you still don't get, whats it all about. This is, because for every keyword mentioned, Wikipedia will link to a different entry.
This is the idea of a hyper-linked encyclopedia, I know. But in this cases, it just doesn't work that well.
In other science areas, the problem is not so prominent, I guess.
First there was machine language. You hand coded all the little ones and zeros manually to get your machine code. Then came assembler which was a great time saver with all its mnemonics, registers and loops.
The next step was a real higher-level language: FORTRAN. Its estimated, that this meant a time saving ratio for programmers of 10:1 against assembler. This rate of improvement was never reached again. All other improvements in programming are only incremental compared to that.
While the cost of retooling the printing machines and the whole printing process will definitely cost money, the overall costs of printing money bills should outweigh that. Blind people have a right for easy recognition of Dollar bills.
The Euro has a recognizable relief in Braille for every bank note (don't know how well this works, if the bill is old or have been washed inadvertently). Furthermore, the Euro notes all differ in size. Should not be too difficult to (re)introduce that.
Must have been 7 or 8 years, since the last time I visited the Netscape homepage. It was my start page for 2 or 3 years, but I lost interest even before the AOL merger, because it was so "portal".
Slashdot Mirror
Nice, but largely a marketing plot. Catenary voltage was increased to 31 kV from the standard 25 kV. The mechanical tension in the wire was increased to 40 kN from the standard 25 kN as you can read here. You won't see that on production trains. The "sweet" spot for conventional trains is at 400km/h. Above that the air drag and wheel-track-resistance is too costly. Maglev is pretty much frictionless. It can hold a sustained speed over 450km.
In addition, german Maglev technology is rather dangerous; an accident 1 year ago on a demonstration line killed 23 people, this accident was caused by inadequate (by design) signalling system. This is particularly concerning because the first role of railroad signalling is to indicate that the track is free from obstructions ahead so the train may proceed.
The maglev didn't collide with another maglev trainset, but with a conventional wheel-based cleansing train (sadly, this was not considered in the safety concept. Now it is.). A Transrapid maglev still can't collide with another Transrapid out of principal of the electrical propellation.
Your criticism of the Transrapid sounds half-informed. This train has rather different problems like high-cost, incompatibility with existing systems and so on. It is however not a dead-end technology.
As much I want to like this project to be finished, I believe in it's success only if I see the first needed tunnel or so built. There are several reasons against it:
The Transrapid maglev concept was imagined for longer distances, but then you have other problems: poor freight train capabilities, pressure from both conventional rail-based trains and airplanes, complete incompatibility with conventional rail-based trains.
Why I would like it to succeed: nearly vibration-free and noise-reduced transport, high velocity up to 550km (real world, not the fake TGV-joke, where they changed the motor and electrical circuitry) at lower(!) costs, maintenance-friendly concept (the TCO will be lower compared to rail trains).
I'm sure Eric Schmidt sometimes farts in his office at Google. Will this be news soon, too?
Well, the idea of a decoupled powertrain where the conventional Diesel engine will only be used to drive electric traction motors is not new. It is already in use in this huge mining loader from Liebherr.
will be those, who already know, that they will die: suicide bombers. Nothing really matters to them anymore besides their mission. Perhaps this is what the BDO are really trained to look out for: exceptionally calm persons?
I think, all these hydrogen and fuel cell engines are still only an excuse for not having enough powerful batteries. This is the holy grail in car manufacturing and only this would allow to build completely different power trains (e.g. motor in the tires) and free up space useful for passengers.
into this http://a52.g.akamaitech.net/f/52/827/1d/www.space. com/images/070605_mars_pit_02.jpg
...I read '1899'. Seriously though, location based search and geo-encoding must be older than 1996.
Your post would be pretty much irrelevant in those current days of multi-gigabyte RAM and terrbyte-sized hard disks. However, kernel size still matters for embedded developers. Many projects in the embedded market still use 2.4 (if they use Linux at all), because even with everything stripped down, 2.6 kernels tend to be considerably larger than 2.4 kernels.
Gives me the impression as is the mars is actually hollow beneath its surface. Perhaps giant dust eating termites are living on this planet?
Wow. An actual truth. What went wrong there? This is certainly true for most P2P sites and YouTube. I search most of the time for artists I know already. But it is not true for music recommendation sites like last.fm
Not funny, but rather insightful :-/
... it wasn't: Emacs 6 released after 22 year wait.
At work in the company of course I use Email with outside clients and customers. But internally, I use quite often now IM and Skype now. Works great where faster communication with immediate feedback is needed, but you also want some sort of tracking.
But Email is still much more universally accepted.
Teachers must earn the respect of students. It is not (and never will be) automatic.
You seem to imply that the teacher-student relationship is symmetrical, when it's not. Unless a teacher is a totally incompetent or bullish, students should pay respect to those, who enable them to go through life with a half-decent job.
School is not kindergarten anymore. Do you really think, you do students any good, if you allow them to behave like this? And no, teachers, when they are not complete morons, have a right be treated respectfully and not to be mocked.
Students have to study and learn and to show respect for their teachers. Any disrespectful behavior should be punished. A 40-day suspension however, is way to harsh.
This was expected sooner or later from MS and now the real fight between FOSS and MS begins.
The right question is, why Microsoft is pretty much the only software corporation that is hated and feared by both its competitors and larger parts of its end users alike. No other software corp. happens to be disliked like MS is.
For some science areas (especially physics and mathematics) more introductory entries would be very helpful. Instead they are often high-level and they link heavily to each other, weaving often an undecipherable web for the layman.
Take for example functional spaces like the "Banach Space" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach_space). You are reading and reading and reading about vector spaces, completley normed vector spaces, metrics etc. etc. and you still don't get, whats it all about. This is, because for every keyword mentioned, Wikipedia will link to a different entry.
This is the idea of a hyper-linked encyclopedia, I know. But in this cases, it just doesn't work that well. In other science areas, the problem is not so prominent, I guess.
First there was machine language. You hand coded all the little ones and zeros manually to get your machine code. Then came assembler which was a great time saver with all its mnemonics, registers and loops.
The next step was a real higher-level language: FORTRAN. Its estimated, that this meant a time saving ratio for programmers of 10:1 against assembler. This rate of improvement was never reached again. All other improvements in programming are only incremental compared to that.While the cost of retooling the printing machines and the whole printing process will definitely cost money, the overall costs of printing money bills should outweigh that. Blind people have a right for easy recognition of Dollar bills. The Euro has a recognizable relief in Braille for every bank note (don't know how well this works, if the bill is old or have been washed inadvertently). Furthermore, the Euro notes all differ in size. Should not be too difficult to (re)introduce that.
it was just an exploding Sony accu. Other sources say, that it was a just a Windows Vista box, not withstanding the vapor any longer.
Must have been 7 or 8 years, since the last time I visited the Netscape homepage. It was my start page for 2 or 3 years, but I lost interest even before the AOL merger, because it was so "portal".
Well, if I look at some of the comments here...