It depends on the car. I'm not sure what the situation is like now, but a lot of SUVs used to lack a proper roll cage to protect the inhabitants. There are some great videos of SMART cars in collision with SUVs from about 2002 that show the top of the SUVs crumpling completely.
They went from a 2.5L ~ 180hp engine to a 2.0L 150hp engine. So, it's not like they magically found gas mileage out of nowhere.
So? Engine power by itself is irrelevant. If this reduction in power had a corresponding decrease in vehicle mass then the driver won't notice the difference.
Someone else needs to go back to high school. The kinetic energy in a system is mv^2. If the relative speed is 60MPH instead of 30MPH then v is doubled. If there are two cars of equal mass then m is doubled. Kinetic energy is therefore multiplied by a factor of 8. This is then split between the two vehicles, so each must absorb four times as much energy as if either had collided with a purely inelastic immovable wall (not a brick wall, because a brick wall would be damaged slightly and absorb some energy. A crash barrier would intentionally crumple and absorb a lot more).
You don't understand what an external cost is, do you?
'm going to live in the burbs, having my 4 cars, my swimming pool, my 25 acres, practice mixed martial arts, go hunting, and do dangerous stuff, drive my BMW 85 MPH down 55 MPH highways on the way to work where I"ll make 4 times as much as you.
I don't think the grandparent would have any objection to your doing these things (although, given that you're posting AC on Slashdot, the odds of you actually doing any of them are quite low) as long as you don't expect the rest of society to pay for them. If you want to piss in the swimming pool, you get to pay for cleaning the water.
I am anticipating a lot of positive consequences from SOPA. More funding for Internet-based businesses, more income for hosting companies from international customers and more interest from foreign companies in selling their products here.
I should probably mention that I don't live in the USA...
The costs of operating a mass transit system don't vary much with the passenger levels. It costs as much to run a bus service that one person uses as it does to run one that 30 people use. If the bus is not significantly cheaper than driving, however, most people who have the choice will drive rather than take the bus. If you put the prices up, you're more likely to make people use other forms of transport than you are to increase revenue.
Mass transit can't be self-sufficient until it reaches a critical mass of customers and it needs subsidy to get the prices down for long enough that it reaches this point. This is made harder in the USA by the huge amount of hidden subsidy that cars get (e.g. highways built and maintained with funding from the general tax budget, expensive foreign policy designed to keep the fuel prices low, and so on).
For 8-bit processors with 64K memory (or 128K +banked memory), instructions were only between 1 and 3 bytes in size. Compare that to 16-bit processors with 640K memory where instructions are between 2 and 8 bytes in size or 32-bit processors with 2 MBytes where instructions are between 4 and 32 bytes in size. You still get around 32,000 instructions. It's just the sizes that change.
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from. On ARM, instructions are 2-4 bytes in size for ARMv7 (32 bit) and 4 bytes for ARMv8 in 64-bit mode. On x86-64, the smallest instructions are 1 byte and the common ones average about 3-4 bytes. And these instructions do a hell of a lot more than 6502 or Z80 instructions. One instruction on pretty much any a modern CPU can take two vectors of four 32-bit floating point values and do a fused multiply-add (for example). If you could do that in under 100 Z80 instructions, then I'd be very impressed.
The instruction size has nothing to do with the increase in memory usage. The biggest difference is the increase in data size. The images on this page alone are several MBs when uncompressed. Just the text is more than would fit into the memory of any 8-bit system. Try writing a book on an 8-bit system: you'll end up having to save each chapter to disk / tape separately, because it can't store the entire thing in memory even as plain 7-bit ASCII text. And, with the massive increase in data size, we've also seen an increase in the things people do with it. High-level programming languages mean that one line of code can now be hundreds of instructions, rather than just one or two. Code reuse means that writing a million-instruction program may only mean writing a few tens of thousands of instructions of new code.
It's a combination of factors. Most towns in Europe have reasonable public transport, so urban dwellers typically don't have to own a car. It's possible to live in a big city in the USA without a car, but if you live in a smallish (or even a relatively large) town you probably need one. Add to this, that there's little or no social stigma attached to using public transport on this side of the pond. This means that, for a lot of the population, a car really is a luxury item. It makes life easier, but it's not indispensable.
People who live outside cities benefit from significantly lower property prices (and, therefore, pay less property tax), which helps offset the cost of the car. When I was looking to buy a couple of years ago, prices dropped by 20-30% when you got more than a couple of miles from the middle of town. Rent is similar.
There's also the fact that we don't have crazy zoning in cities, so there are often lots of jobs within walking or short-bus-ride distance of residential areas. A lot of the people I know walk or cycle to work.
Finally, there's the car size. This side of the pond didn't get into the 'must buy bigger car than everyone else' craze, not least because most people who own cars like being able to park them and parking spaces are often too small for a big SUV if the person next to you parked badly. This means that fuel efficiency is much higher, so that $7.50/gallon in Finland and $4/gallon in the USA end up being quite similar costs per mile for most of the population.
How to calculate the price for using a NON-RENEWABLE energy source?
Oil is renewable, it's just not currently economically feasible to do it. There's nothing magic about oil, it's just a mixture of hydrocarbons that's (currently) quite cheap and energy dense. We've been able to make oil for a long time. You could cover a chunk of desert in the middle of the USA or Africa with solar panels (or, better, algae tanks, but that would require piping in a lot of water) and produce enough oil for the industrial world. No one does, because the cost of this oil would be several times more than the cost of pumping it out of the ground.
I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that you're not from the USA. The situation here (in the UK) is similar. And an increasing number of younger people are simply not bothering to own cars because the cost/benefit is just not worth it. In the USA, public transport outside the big cities is often terrible and even where it's quite good there tends to be a social stigma associated with using it. The car is a huge part of the American self identity. From about the 50s, the car a person drives has been linked to their worth as a person. You need to fix their brains before you can fix their economy...
Actually, it depends on the collision. In head-on collisions, it's often safer to be in the small car, because the lower centre of mass means that the big car just goes over the top, flips, and lands on its roof crushing the inhabitants.
Just remember the USA isn't the EU, with everyone packed together in little clumps, you are talking a HUGE area with people spread out all over the place
Check the numbers. The median and modal population densities for the USA are higher than the EU, only the mean is lower. Or, to put it another way, the infrastructure required for 80% of the US population is less than the infrastructure for 80% of the EU population. The vast majority of the US lives in cities with much higher population densities than you'll see in most of the EU.
Check the last story about broadband in the US for some real numbers - I bothered looking them up then, I'm too lazy to do it again. Yes, there are lots of people living in the middle of nowhere with tens of miles to their nearest neighbour in the USA, but they're statistically irrelevant from an infrastructure perspective. 100% coverage is much harder in the USA than the EU, but 80-90% coverage is a lot easier.
Eliminate Euclidean zoning for the most part. In case you're not aware that name comes from Euclid, Ohio where it was pioneered. It's the kind of zoning where "all the houses are here, all the businesses are there". Get rid of it, and you eliminate a lot of trips.
I remember playing SimCity for the first time as a child and seeing this kind of zoning and wondering what kind of insane city would implement such a system, since it would mean that people would spend a huge amount of time travelling and no one would be living near where they worked nor where they shopped. It seemed completely ludicrous and I assumed it was some unreality that they'd inserted to make the game more challenging, since there was no possible way of designing a sane city with those rules. Then, 10 years later, I visited the USA for the first time and saw that you really do lay out your cities like that. No wonder Americans consider their cars to be so important...
It wasn't just that. The referendum was not about AV+ (which was the proposed system by the last electoral reform commission and has a lot of advantages), but about pure AV, which has some advantages and some disadvantages. A lot of people voted 'No' meaning 'No, I don't want AV, but I do want a system better than FPTP'. This was exacerbated by the fact that a lot of Labour voters (and campaigners) wanted AV+ so were encouraging people to vote 'No' so that they could get AV+ on the ballot next time (which, of course, didn't happen, because every 'No' vote was interpreted as 'I am completely happy with FPTP and fear change'). If the referendum had been conducted fairly, it would have had options for FPTP, AV, and 'some other electoral system'. Or just FPTP and 'some other system'.
Not really. For example, in the last election I complained about the fact that the Pirate Party didn't, for example, propose that the BBC would be required to open its archives decades of taxpayer-funded shows for free download and require any future taxpayer-funded creative works to be released under a license at least allowing free redistribution within the UK. After the election, it turned out that this was one of their policies. But, even though I'm probably well in their target demographic, I had no idea.
While I agree with a lot of what they say, they are absolutely terrible at communicating their policies with the electorate.
Getting a seat in Westminster is very hard, because every constituency uses a first-past-the-post system. The smaller parties tend to do a lot better in the devolved assemblies and the EU parliament because those all use some form of PR (secondary party lists, multi-candidate constituencies, and so on). Getting a seat in Westminister requires getting 20-30% of the population in a single constituency to agree with you. This is especially hard since you have to compete with a large segment of the population who votes for X because they've always voted for X (in some cases, because their parents voted for X) without really bothering to know what X stands for.
Make your wristwatch your token. How many people go on trips without a watch?
Bad example, because it means that it is going to be in the same place as your mobile device. The chances of someone who steals your mobile device also stealing your watch are quite high. The entire point of this is that the recovery mechanism should be at home, so if the mobile device is stolen the thief can't unlock it and get at your data, but if you forget your authentication credentials you can still unlock it, but in something that you can't easily lose.
Put the token inside the power adapter, in a little compartment. Hell, you can duct tape it to the adapter (or anything else).
Yes, that would work, but you seem to have missed the 'ease of use' part of the idea. All of those require some extra faffing to unlock. With this version, you just drop it back in the dock and it's unlocked.
We know that intelligent life not very common, or if it is then it's very shy. Life began on this planet well over a billion years ago and we're in orbit around a second-generation star. Anyone evolving around a first-generation star would have a few billion years head start, although a shortage of heavy elements would make technology difficult. We are less than a thousand years away from being able to build self-replicating probes that can explore the entire galaxy within a million years. Compared with the time that's elapsed since complex life evolved on this planet and now, a million years is basically nothing, yet that's all that it would take for a species to put a big 'Hi there!' sign in every star system in this galaxy - something that would be easily detectable by any species to evolve on any planet.
MPL was never GPL compatible. MPL2 is now GPLv3 compatible. GPLv3 is GPLv2-incompatible too. Previously, most Mozilla code was triple-licensed LGPL, GPL and MPL. Presumably now they are going to switch to MPL2-only.
The CDDL is also MPL-with-some-fixes, so it will be interesting to see how MPL2 and CDDL compare.
The advantage of being in space in Heinlein's books comes from the fact that it's hard for people to shoot back. If you're on the Earth's surface, almost anywhere, with modern weapons it's as easy for the enemy to strike at you as it is for you to strike at them. If one side is on the moon and the other side is on Earth, then it's asymmetric because it takes a lot more energy to move a rock from the Earth to the Moon than vice versa (compare the first stage of the Saturn V to the LEM).
Having a moon base doesn't give much of an advantage if your leadership is still on the ground, but if you are China and have the inner party in a self-sustaining lunar colony then you're in a very strong position - the only people who the enemy can easily kill are the ones the leadership doesn't really care about. Of course, a self-sustaining lunar colony is still a very long way away...
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It depends on the car. I'm not sure what the situation is like now, but a lot of SUVs used to lack a proper roll cage to protect the inhabitants. There are some great videos of SMART cars in collision with SUVs from about 2002 that show the top of the SUVs crumpling completely.
How about free distribution of nicotine patches and gum?
Don't you have this? In the UK, we have a quit smoking kit available on the NHS, which includes patches and gum, among other things.
I think you're going to have a hard time convincing most people that not banging the grandparent's head into the steering wheel is an advantage...
They went from a 2.5L ~ 180hp engine to a 2.0L 150hp engine. So, it's not like they magically found gas mileage out of nowhere.
So? Engine power by itself is irrelevant. If this reduction in power had a corresponding decrease in vehicle mass then the driver won't notice the difference.
Someone else needs to go back to high school. The kinetic energy in a system is mv^2. If the relative speed is 60MPH instead of 30MPH then v is doubled. If there are two cars of equal mass then m is doubled. Kinetic energy is therefore multiplied by a factor of 8. This is then split between the two vehicles, so each must absorb four times as much energy as if either had collided with a purely inelastic immovable wall (not a brick wall, because a brick wall would be damaged slightly and absorb some energy. A crash barrier would intentionally crumple and absorb a lot more).
'm going to live in the burbs, having my 4 cars, my swimming pool, my 25 acres, practice mixed martial arts, go hunting, and do dangerous stuff, drive my BMW 85 MPH down 55 MPH highways on the way to work where I"ll make 4 times as much as you.
I don't think the grandparent would have any objection to your doing these things (although, given that you're posting AC on Slashdot, the odds of you actually doing any of them are quite low) as long as you don't expect the rest of society to pay for them. If you want to piss in the swimming pool, you get to pay for cleaning the water.
I am anticipating a lot of positive consequences from SOPA. More funding for Internet-based businesses, more income for hosting companies from international customers and more interest from foreign companies in selling their products here.
I should probably mention that I don't live in the USA...
The costs of operating a mass transit system don't vary much with the passenger levels. It costs as much to run a bus service that one person uses as it does to run one that 30 people use. If the bus is not significantly cheaper than driving, however, most people who have the choice will drive rather than take the bus. If you put the prices up, you're more likely to make people use other forms of transport than you are to increase revenue.
Mass transit can't be self-sufficient until it reaches a critical mass of customers and it needs subsidy to get the prices down for long enough that it reaches this point. This is made harder in the USA by the huge amount of hidden subsidy that cars get (e.g. highways built and maintained with funding from the general tax budget, expensive foreign policy designed to keep the fuel prices low, and so on).
For 8-bit processors with 64K memory (or 128K +banked memory), instructions were only between 1 and 3 bytes in size. Compare that to 16-bit processors with 640K memory where instructions are between 2 and 8 bytes in size or 32-bit processors with 2 MBytes where instructions are between 4 and 32 bytes in size. You still get around 32,000 instructions. It's just the sizes that change.
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from. On ARM, instructions are 2-4 bytes in size for ARMv7 (32 bit) and 4 bytes for ARMv8 in 64-bit mode. On x86-64, the smallest instructions are 1 byte and the common ones average about 3-4 bytes. And these instructions do a hell of a lot more than 6502 or Z80 instructions. One instruction on pretty much any a modern CPU can take two vectors of four 32-bit floating point values and do a fused multiply-add (for example). If you could do that in under 100 Z80 instructions, then I'd be very impressed.
The instruction size has nothing to do with the increase in memory usage. The biggest difference is the increase in data size. The images on this page alone are several MBs when uncompressed. Just the text is more than would fit into the memory of any 8-bit system. Try writing a book on an 8-bit system: you'll end up having to save each chapter to disk / tape separately, because it can't store the entire thing in memory even as plain 7-bit ASCII text. And, with the massive increase in data size, we've also seen an increase in the things people do with it. High-level programming languages mean that one line of code can now be hundreds of instructions, rather than just one or two. Code reuse means that writing a million-instruction program may only mean writing a few tens of thousands of instructions of new code.
It's a combination of factors. Most towns in Europe have reasonable public transport, so urban dwellers typically don't have to own a car. It's possible to live in a big city in the USA without a car, but if you live in a smallish (or even a relatively large) town you probably need one. Add to this, that there's little or no social stigma attached to using public transport on this side of the pond. This means that, for a lot of the population, a car really is a luxury item. It makes life easier, but it's not indispensable.
People who live outside cities benefit from significantly lower property prices (and, therefore, pay less property tax), which helps offset the cost of the car. When I was looking to buy a couple of years ago, prices dropped by 20-30% when you got more than a couple of miles from the middle of town. Rent is similar.
There's also the fact that we don't have crazy zoning in cities, so there are often lots of jobs within walking or short-bus-ride distance of residential areas. A lot of the people I know walk or cycle to work.
Finally, there's the car size. This side of the pond didn't get into the 'must buy bigger car than everyone else' craze, not least because most people who own cars like being able to park them and parking spaces are often too small for a big SUV if the person next to you parked badly. This means that fuel efficiency is much higher, so that $7.50/gallon in Finland and $4/gallon in the USA end up being quite similar costs per mile for most of the population.
How to calculate the price for using a NON-RENEWABLE energy source?
Oil is renewable, it's just not currently economically feasible to do it. There's nothing magic about oil, it's just a mixture of hydrocarbons that's (currently) quite cheap and energy dense. We've been able to make oil for a long time. You could cover a chunk of desert in the middle of the USA or Africa with solar panels (or, better, algae tanks, but that would require piping in a lot of water) and produce enough oil for the industrial world. No one does, because the cost of this oil would be several times more than the cost of pumping it out of the ground.
If that were true, then the US automotive industry would not have needed bailouts.
I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that you're not from the USA. The situation here (in the UK) is similar. And an increasing number of younger people are simply not bothering to own cars because the cost/benefit is just not worth it. In the USA, public transport outside the big cities is often terrible and even where it's quite good there tends to be a social stigma associated with using it. The car is a huge part of the American self identity. From about the 50s, the car a person drives has been linked to their worth as a person. You need to fix their brains before you can fix their economy...
Actually, it depends on the collision. In head-on collisions, it's often safer to be in the small car, because the lower centre of mass means that the big car just goes over the top, flips, and lands on its roof crushing the inhabitants.
Just remember the USA isn't the EU, with everyone packed together in little clumps, you are talking a HUGE area with people spread out all over the place
Check the numbers. The median and modal population densities for the USA are higher than the EU, only the mean is lower. Or, to put it another way, the infrastructure required for 80% of the US population is less than the infrastructure for 80% of the EU population. The vast majority of the US lives in cities with much higher population densities than you'll see in most of the EU.
Check the last story about broadband in the US for some real numbers - I bothered looking them up then, I'm too lazy to do it again. Yes, there are lots of people living in the middle of nowhere with tens of miles to their nearest neighbour in the USA, but they're statistically irrelevant from an infrastructure perspective. 100% coverage is much harder in the USA than the EU, but 80-90% coverage is a lot easier.
Eliminate Euclidean zoning for the most part. In case you're not aware that name comes from Euclid, Ohio where it was pioneered. It's the kind of zoning where "all the houses are here, all the businesses are there". Get rid of it, and you eliminate a lot of trips.
I remember playing SimCity for the first time as a child and seeing this kind of zoning and wondering what kind of insane city would implement such a system, since it would mean that people would spend a huge amount of time travelling and no one would be living near where they worked nor where they shopped. It seemed completely ludicrous and I assumed it was some unreality that they'd inserted to make the game more challenging, since there was no possible way of designing a sane city with those rules. Then, 10 years later, I visited the USA for the first time and saw that you really do lay out your cities like that. No wonder Americans consider their cars to be so important...
It wasn't just that. The referendum was not about AV+ (which was the proposed system by the last electoral reform commission and has a lot of advantages), but about pure AV, which has some advantages and some disadvantages. A lot of people voted 'No' meaning 'No, I don't want AV, but I do want a system better than FPTP'. This was exacerbated by the fact that a lot of Labour voters (and campaigners) wanted AV+ so were encouraging people to vote 'No' so that they could get AV+ on the ballot next time (which, of course, didn't happen, because every 'No' vote was interpreted as 'I am completely happy with FPTP and fear change'). If the referendum had been conducted fairly, it would have had options for FPTP, AV, and 'some other electoral system'. Or just FPTP and 'some other system'.
Not really. For example, in the last election I complained about the fact that the Pirate Party didn't, for example, propose that the BBC would be required to open its archives decades of taxpayer-funded shows for free download and require any future taxpayer-funded creative works to be released under a license at least allowing free redistribution within the UK. After the election, it turned out that this was one of their policies. But, even though I'm probably well in their target demographic, I had no idea.
While I agree with a lot of what they say, they are absolutely terrible at communicating their policies with the electorate.
Getting a seat in Westminster is very hard, because every constituency uses a first-past-the-post system. The smaller parties tend to do a lot better in the devolved assemblies and the EU parliament because those all use some form of PR (secondary party lists, multi-candidate constituencies, and so on). Getting a seat in Westminister requires getting 20-30% of the population in a single constituency to agree with you. This is especially hard since you have to compete with a large segment of the population who votes for X because they've always voted for X (in some cases, because their parents voted for X) without really bothering to know what X stands for.
Make your wristwatch your token. How many people go on trips without a watch?
Bad example, because it means that it is going to be in the same place as your mobile device. The chances of someone who steals your mobile device also stealing your watch are quite high. The entire point of this is that the recovery mechanism should be at home, so if the mobile device is stolen the thief can't unlock it and get at your data, but if you forget your authentication credentials you can still unlock it, but in something that you can't easily lose.
Put the token inside the power adapter, in a little compartment. Hell, you can duct tape it to the adapter (or anything else).
Yes, that would work, but you seem to have missed the 'ease of use' part of the idea. All of those require some extra faffing to unlock. With this version, you just drop it back in the dock and it's unlocked.
Yes, because public panics historically have been so bad for governments and big corporations...
We know that intelligent life not very common, or if it is then it's very shy. Life began on this planet well over a billion years ago and we're in orbit around a second-generation star. Anyone evolving around a first-generation star would have a few billion years head start, although a shortage of heavy elements would make technology difficult. We are less than a thousand years away from being able to build self-replicating probes that can explore the entire galaxy within a million years. Compared with the time that's elapsed since complex life evolved on this planet and now, a million years is basically nothing, yet that's all that it would take for a species to put a big 'Hi there!' sign in every star system in this galaxy - something that would be easily detectable by any species to evolve on any planet.
It's a smegging garbage pod!
MPL was never GPL compatible. MPL2 is now GPLv3 compatible. GPLv3 is GPLv2-incompatible too. Previously, most Mozilla code was triple-licensed LGPL, GPL and MPL. Presumably now they are going to switch to MPL2-only.
The CDDL is also MPL-with-some-fixes, so it will be interesting to see how MPL2 and CDDL compare.
The advantage of being in space in Heinlein's books comes from the fact that it's hard for people to shoot back. If you're on the Earth's surface, almost anywhere, with modern weapons it's as easy for the enemy to strike at you as it is for you to strike at them. If one side is on the moon and the other side is on Earth, then it's asymmetric because it takes a lot more energy to move a rock from the Earth to the Moon than vice versa (compare the first stage of the Saturn V to the LEM).
Having a moon base doesn't give much of an advantage if your leadership is still on the ground, but if you are China and have the inner party in a self-sustaining lunar colony then you're in a very strong position - the only people who the enemy can easily kill are the ones the leadership doesn't really care about. Of course, a self-sustaining lunar colony is still a very long way away...