In the interest of being completely anal, in Contra only, the code was up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-B-A. Later iterations of the code (Life Force, Gradius, etc) lopped of the final B-A.
The code is not exclusively limited to Konami games, either; it also appears in Sunsoft's Kid Klown for the NES.
I've never heard of this before. I am sure, however, the timing is incorrect.
In 1893, New York Central's engine no. 999 was the first vehicle to exceed 100 mph. It was put into service as part of the "Exposition Flyer," a train that ran from New York to Chicago in 20 hours, and required sustained operation of 80 mph for much of its route.
I'm not familliar with the exact situation in Seattle, but one assumes the city's HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes have a fair amount of unused capacity. Expensive, unused road capacity isn't gonna help anyoneget re-elected, so it's desireable to fill those lanes up a bit. Methods for doing so include:
Institute programs to encourage ridesharing (tax breaks for employers who succesfully increase carpooling, etc)
Alter land-use and zoning laws to make ridesharing more appealing (limiting parking space construction, encouraging development that better allows for the sort of pick-up/drop-off circulation patterns that occur in carpooling).
Convert HOV lanes to HOT (high-occupancy toll) lanes.
I'm sure Seattle is doing the first already, and the second only affects new construction, so it doesn't work within an election cycle (when it works at all). In the short term, the third option works to better use the existing capacity. Seattle's plan allows them to avoid building expensive toll-collecting infrastructure and can easily reduce the number of passes sold if carpooling increases in the future.
So how, much would passes go for? In Joel Garreau's book "Edge City" he observes that people are generally willing to pay up to half of the wage they earn to save time commuting (if you're salaried, divide salary by 2000 hours/year).
So a $10/hr janitor will pay up to $5 to shave an hour off his daily commute. If he saves 6 minutes each way, 20 work days a month, saving 4 hours per month, he'd pay up to $20 a month for the privilege. A $80k/yr engineer would pay up to $80 per month, and the $10 million/yr CEO will pay up to $10,000. Of course, he'd probably just charter a helicopter.
If Seattle offers up 1000 passes per HOV lane, spread out over a 2-hour peak period, this would be enough to make traffic increase notably, but probably not enough to cause gridlock. If a single HOV lane parallels a freeway has three lanes each direction, each serving 2000 vehicles/hr (just below gridlock), figure that the 8% (1000/120000) of people that perceive themselves as deriving the greatest benefit would pay.
Of course, people not used to using the carpool lane may initially be poor at estimating how much time they will save, so initial prices may not accurately reflect these values.
Amtrak also ran TurboTrains for a while, mostly on their Empire Service (New York-Albany-Buffalo), but stopped using them around the same time VIA did. NYSDOT has recently embarked on a plan to restore seven TurboTrains for Amtrak's Empire Service; the first is supposed to enter revenue service in early 2003.
Not exactly. From the Center for Transportation Research's reportTexas Transportation Energy Savings
"...electric vehicles produce 33% of the air pollution costs of an aveage gasoline car if electricity is generated by natural gas and 80% if by coal."
For a comprehensive critical evaluation of Electric Vehicles from a green perspective, try the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's A Critical Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Benefits, which points out other hidden costs of electric vehicles, such as their limited ability to fund roadway costs (they generate no fuel taxes) and their motivation of increased automobile dependence.
In the interest of being completely anal, I should point out that there has been exactly one fatal monorail accident, which occurred in Wuppertal, Germany in 1999. Four deaths resulted when a car fell 25 feet into a river.
That said, a lack of standardization practically rules out public-sector acceptance of monorails, since selecting a particular manufacturer's system requires buying their vehicles and track for the life of the system.
True, the city of Las Vegas is building a monorail, but Vegas is accepted as having transcended the normal notion of a municipality and redefined itself as a theme park.
In the US, conventional rail speeds are regulated by the Federal Railway Administration (FRA). Any FRA certification allowing speeds in excess of 125mph (~200 kph) requires that there be no at-grade crossings in the segment certified. Precautions must also be taken to restrict other accesses to tracks, including fencing around and on any bridges passing over the tracks.
High-speed maglev trains would certainly be subject to similar restrictions.
Pretty much any surface-based transportation method encounters extreme drag above 300mph making this the realistic limit of any train. Maglev trains such as Germany's (nixed) TransRapid are certainly able to approach this mark.
It suppose this system could be made to hit 300 mph over its 2/3 mile track, but that would require an abusive 1.2g acceleration forward for 10 seconds followed by 10 seconds of 1.2g braking in the opposite direction... plus, there's a lurch as the train shifts from accleration to braking, throwing the unrestrained passengers from being crushed against the back wall across the cabin to crush them against the front.
FYI: A car that goes 0-60mph in 5 seconds experiences an average accleration of ~0.5g.
There are plenty of reasons to not like light rail, but it has the notable advantage of standardization. More than a dozen different manufacturers worldwide make light rail trains and trolleys to run on standard 4' 8 1/2" rail.
Each variety of the alternatives (monorails, personal systems such as SkyTran, etc) uses its own particular guideway and particular vehicles which all but elimates them from real consideration by the public sector. Scream all you want about the components being made of off-the-shelf parts, municipalities and DOT's can't consider engineering and manufacturing replacements from scratch (exception: the city of New Orleans recently began to build its own vintage-style streetcars, but these are established standard-gauge designs that use standard electric motors).
The public sector is also understandably risk-averse; new and amibtious technologies are more likely to have unexpected problems in expanding them into larger real-world systems. Not that light-rail projects aren't immune to ballooning budgets (Seattle, I'm looking at you), but more actual working examples mean that estimates of cost and capabilities of light rail systems are generally closer to reality.
Personal Rapid Transports (PRT's), such as SkyTran have particular additional obstacles, most notably the current nonexistence of actual software to control a few hundred vehicles on a few dozen miles of track (let alone to operate a large system). I'll confess I don't have experience designing such software myself, but I'm pretty sure it's really (really) hard.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure luck is a Markov process.
In the interest of being completely anal, in Contra only, the code was up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-B-A. Later iterations of the code (Life Force, Gradius, etc) lopped of the final B-A.
The code is not exclusively limited to Konami games, either; it also appears in Sunsoft's Kid Klown for the NES.
In a stroke of brilliance, the 5th generation project decided to make Prolog its development language of choice. Ah, those wacky Japanese.
I've never heard of this before. I am sure, however, the timing is incorrect.
In 1893, New York Central's engine no. 999 was the first vehicle to exceed 100 mph. It was put into service as part of the "Exposition Flyer," a train that ran from New York to Chicago in 20 hours, and required sustained operation of 80 mph for much of its route.
- Institute programs to encourage ridesharing (tax breaks for employers who succesfully increase carpooling, etc)
- Alter land-use and zoning laws to make ridesharing more appealing (limiting parking space construction, encouraging development that better allows for the sort of pick-up/drop-off circulation patterns that occur in carpooling).
- Convert HOV lanes to HOT (high-occupancy toll) lanes.
I'm sure Seattle is doing the first already, and the second only affects new construction, so it doesn't work within an election cycle (when it works at all). In the short term, the third option works to better use the existing capacity. Seattle's plan allows them to avoid building expensive toll-collecting infrastructure and can easily reduce the number of passes sold if carpooling increases in the future.So how, much would passes go for? In Joel Garreau's book "Edge City" he observes that people are generally willing to pay up to half of the wage they earn to save time commuting (if you're salaried, divide salary by 2000 hours/year).
So a $10/hr janitor will pay up to $5 to shave an hour off his daily commute. If he saves 6 minutes each way, 20 work days a month, saving 4 hours per month, he'd pay up to $20 a month for the privilege. A $80k/yr engineer would pay up to $80 per month, and the $10 million/yr CEO will pay up to $10,000. Of course, he'd probably just charter a helicopter.
If Seattle offers up 1000 passes per HOV lane, spread out over a 2-hour peak period, this would be enough to make traffic increase notably, but probably not enough to cause gridlock. If a single HOV lane parallels a freeway has three lanes each direction, each serving 2000 vehicles/hr (just below gridlock), figure that the 8% (1000/120000) of people that perceive themselves as deriving the greatest benefit would pay.
Of course, people not used to using the carpool lane may initially be poor at estimating how much time they will save, so initial prices may not accurately reflect these values.
Amtrak also ran TurboTrains for a while, mostly on their Empire Service (New York-Albany-Buffalo), but stopped using them around the same time VIA did. NYSDOT has recently embarked on a plan to restore seven TurboTrains for Amtrak's Empire Service; the first is supposed to enter revenue service in early 2003.
"...electric vehicles produce 33% of the air pollution costs of an aveage gasoline car if electricity is generated by natural gas and 80% if by coal."
For a comprehensive critical evaluation of Electric Vehicles from a green perspective, try the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's A Critical Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Benefits , which points out other hidden costs of electric vehicles, such as their limited ability to fund roadway costs (they generate no fuel taxes) and their motivation of increased automobile dependence.
One more:
Harbison & Steele, "C: A Reference Manual."
K&R's more accessible, but most C-freaks I've dealt with seem to prefer this one as their C reference
That said, a lack of standardization practically rules out public-sector acceptance of monorails, since selecting a particular manufacturer's system requires buying their vehicles and track for the life of the system.
True, the city of Las Vegas is building a monorail, but Vegas is accepted as having transcended the normal notion of a municipality and redefined itself as a theme park.
High-speed maglev trains would certainly be subject to similar restrictions.
It suppose this system could be made to hit 300 mph over its 2/3 mile track, but that would require an abusive 1.2g acceleration forward for 10 seconds followed by 10 seconds of 1.2g braking in the opposite direction... plus, there's a lurch as the train shifts from accleration to braking, throwing the unrestrained passengers from being crushed against the back wall across the cabin to crush them against the front.
FYI: A car that goes 0-60mph in 5 seconds experiences an average accleration of ~0.5g.
Each variety of the alternatives (monorails, personal systems such as SkyTran, etc) uses its own particular guideway and particular vehicles which all but elimates them from real consideration by the public sector. Scream all you want about the components being made of off-the-shelf parts, municipalities and DOT's can't consider engineering and manufacturing replacements from scratch (exception: the city of New Orleans recently began to build its own vintage-style streetcars, but these are established standard-gauge designs that use standard electric motors).
The public sector is also understandably risk-averse; new and amibtious technologies are more likely to have unexpected problems in expanding them into larger real-world systems. Not that light-rail projects aren't immune to ballooning budgets (Seattle, I'm looking at you), but more actual working examples mean that estimates of cost and capabilities of light rail systems are generally closer to reality.
Personal Rapid Transports (PRT's), such as SkyTran have particular additional obstacles, most notably the current nonexistence of actual software to control a few hundred vehicles on a few dozen miles of track (let alone to operate a large system). I'll confess I don't have experience designing such software myself, but I'm pretty sure it's really (really) hard.