I took a quick look at a google map of Orlando; it doesn't look much different from any American city to me, except that there's a ridiculous number of small lakes and ponds everywhere, and I'm surprised it's not underwater. Is flooding a big problem there? It looks like it was built on top of a swamp!
It was built on a swamp. And there are areas that are depressingly prone to flooding, but it's not nearly as bad as one could imagine, in spite of frequent hurricanes. The problem isn't so much the grid of streets, but how things are distributed.
Anyway, even so, I don't see how the geography there would be a problem for a SkyTran system. You'd just install the rails along the larger roads so that they're not too far apart from each other and most destinations within the city have stations within walking distance. Even if flooding is a problem as I joked, with SkyTran that's not a problem because it's suspended, so while cars are getting stuck during a flood, the SkyTran travelers won't be inconvenienced at all until they have to walk the final 1/4 mile home or whatever. It's a lot harder to build roads in bad geography like that; with SkyTran, you just have to sink some poles in the ground with concrete footings.
I fully agree with your assessment regarding inter-city connections, and maybe for in the city center. However, "Orlando" is a lot bigger than Orlando proper. SkyTran is probably the only hope we have at all, but even then, you'd have to put systems in to serve everything within 30 miles of the city limits; I don't know if there is any downtown housing other than a single particularly nasty slum. Almost everyone who works there commutes. Were I to look at mine, it'd easily take:
20 minutes by car
2 hours by bus
2.5 hours on foot
1 hour by bike.
Moral of this story: Our public transportation sucks, is unreliable and costs a fortune, nothing is near housing, and I still have no idea how the hell you shop for groceries when you're taking a bus. Hub-and-spoke models for our town fail miserably, because it takes an hour to get to the bus station, and an hour to get where you're going - at least twice a day - and they don't run at enough convenient times because the budget's suffering. We made a concerted effort a decade back with the Lynx system when we were flush with cash, but that was only a good start and we never really finished the rollout.
As long as you work gently, you can get the tendons, bones, and their attachments to grow a good bit without any real trouble. It's just not instantaneous, and shifts the burden of "what grows slowest" away from the muscles themselves.
Once we're there, then we can work on gene therapy for the tendons and bones.
A lot of the fixed costs of production must be amortized the same regarding both ebooks and paperbacks.
Marginal costs are far lower for distributers, but I need to buy an expensive electronic reader.
You never have ebooks that are sitting around taking up valuable shelf space so they get put on sale or clearance to get them to move, however, as ebooks don't really compete for finite retail space. If they go on sale, it's as a loss leader, or to get at least a little money out of price-sensitive consumers who have more time than money.
Actually, I support replacing those miserable excretedextruded-plastic chairs with something, anything less unpleasant. More than anything else in my primary and secondary education including getting tripped down the stairs, those chairs made me miserable for twelve years. There are better stackable chair designs now, and a great many of them are also durable enough to tolerate schoolchildren for years. They could also improve them by making them less flat and prone to sliding, or by giving them more back support - those things allow one to slouch incredibly low or sit as if on a stool, but are miserable for more than an hour or so.
This, exactly this. Selling them abroad will bring the batch size up, and push the per-unit price down. That's how they're likely going to reach the $35 cost target.
0.2 gigs: $15. Overage is $15 per each additional 200 meg unit.
2 gigs: $25. Overage is $10 per each additional gigabyte.
4 gigs: $45; includes tethering, allotment shared with smartphone usage. Overage is $10 per each additional gigabyte.
Sprint was offering twice the minutes and unlimited data for the same overall monthly cost as my AT&T bill.
Schlock's plasgun is an antitank weapon, essentially firing a collimated nuclear detonation.
Hollowpoint bullets will continue to work as well in the future against unarmored targets as they do in the present.
As someone who has dodged a handful of paintballs at long range - mostly by dropping for cover - it's not impossible. But it is very, very difficult, and conditions need to be pretty ideal.
In lack of atmosphere, your gun oil will boil off - or Boyle's off, courtesy of Boyle's Law.
A lot of guns - most modern ones, really - can be fired without their lubricant, and the AA-12 was designed for such thick lubricant that the solid carbon fouling is an ideal grease. It'll also turn a good weapon into a disposable one. On the other hand, the air sealed in a shell casing will provide all the oxygen needed for the powder to burn.
And some of these require you to skip them off the ground between you and your target, as they carry enough energy to kill if aimed directly at what you're trying to stop.
The closest thing to phaser stun we have now are Taser shotgun projectiles, which are supposed to be pretty sack-of-potatoes.
Your 5kW pulse laser will cause severe looking, but superficial injuries. Remember, incapacitation requires destroying the nervous system, or disconnecting it from the body - either directly, or indirectly by depriving it of the blood it requires.
Also, remember that bullets and kinetic energy destroys tissue efficiently, and lasers have to boil water, one of the liquids most resistant to boiling in order to create steam explosions to damage tissue. If you're trying to cut things, you need a big beast of a capacitor bank, in order to instantly and deeply penetrate a target and sustain that effect for some significant fraction of a second.
Gunpowder stores energy in a much denser form than capacitors, and practical firearms can extract up to 25% of the chemical energy in that powder. Lasers have theoretical efficiencies of up to 65-80% at present, but most modern lasers are closer to 20%. The lack of fragile optics, the reliable, storable energy source, and other similar factors mean firearms are king... for now.
Once semiconductor lasers can be mass produced around 20%, diamond optics can be lab-grown, and battery technology catches up, that might change.
The most appropriate battery right now is the lithium-spinel ion technology, 42 kilojoules in a pistol-sized battery is pretty practical, assuming two 18650 cells. A laser rifle could carry a rather larger pack, of rather larger cells.Using prismatic IMR cells, a 1 megajoule battery the size of a conventional rifle magazine should be achievable. At that point, proper death rays should be quite possible, even practical.
Generally, Apple did it first, got locked into contracts requiring some kind of DRM, and the **AA is perfectly happy to leave it that way so that Apple cannot become a natural monopoly by making a product that utterly shames everyone else in the market. It's the **AA's way of maintaining power over Apple, so that they can't dictate terms to the recording companies by dint of selling 90% of all music sold.
Remember when Amazon got a license to sell DRM-free MP3 years before Apple, and they only got permission to sell DRM-free files by giving up the one-size-fits-all pricing model that made the store practical?
That old G1 you lovingly gave up is ten times better than the crap some of us are stuck with. Consider flogging it on eBay, and using the proceeds to buy a similarly used Airport Express.
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I took a quick look at a google map of Orlando; it doesn't look much different from any American city to me, except that there's a ridiculous number of small lakes and ponds everywhere, and I'm surprised it's not underwater. Is flooding a big problem there? It looks like it was built on top of a swamp!
It was built on a swamp. And there are areas that are depressingly prone to flooding, but it's not nearly as bad as one could imagine, in spite of frequent hurricanes. The problem isn't so much the grid of streets, but how things are distributed.
Anyway, even so, I don't see how the geography there would be a problem for a SkyTran system. You'd just install the rails along the larger roads so that they're not too far apart from each other and most destinations within the city have stations within walking distance. Even if flooding is a problem as I joked, with SkyTran that's not a problem because it's suspended, so while cars are getting stuck during a flood, the SkyTran travelers won't be inconvenienced at all until they have to walk the final 1/4 mile home or whatever. It's a lot harder to build roads in bad geography like that; with SkyTran, you just have to sink some poles in the ground with concrete footings.
I fully agree with your assessment regarding inter-city connections, and maybe for in the city center. However, "Orlando" is a lot bigger than Orlando proper. SkyTran is probably the only hope we have at all, but even then, you'd have to put systems in to serve everything within 30 miles of the city limits; I don't know if there is any downtown housing other than a single particularly nasty slum. Almost everyone who works there commutes. Were I to look at mine, it'd easily take:
20 minutes by car
2 hours by bus
2.5 hours on foot
1 hour by bike.
Moral of this story: Our public transportation sucks, is unreliable and costs a fortune, nothing is near housing, and I still have no idea how the hell you shop for groceries when you're taking a bus. Hub-and-spoke models for our town fail miserably, because it takes an hour to get to the bus station, and an hour to get where you're going - at least twice a day - and they don't run at enough convenient times because the budget's suffering. We made a concerted effort a decade back with the Lynx system when we were flush with cash, but that was only a good start and we never really finished the rollout.
It can barely be said that we have main roads at all.
As long as you work gently, you can get the tendons, bones, and their attachments to grow a good bit without any real trouble. It's just not instantaneous, and shifts the burden of "what grows slowest" away from the muscles themselves.
Once we're there, then we can work on gene therapy for the tendons and bones.
That's nice, but you missed my point.
So, for al the reason Google suggests Chromebooks, how do I let my (hypothetical) kid use a Chromebook without giving them access to my email?
Google Apps for Education sounds great, but I've yet to run into a school using it.
You've never seen how Orlando is laid out either, have you?
A lot of the fixed costs of production must be amortized the same regarding both ebooks and paperbacks.
Marginal costs are far lower for distributers, but I need to buy an expensive electronic reader.
You never have ebooks that are sitting around taking up valuable shelf space so they get put on sale or clearance to get them to move, however, as ebooks don't really compete for finite retail space. If they go on sale, it's as a loss leader, or to get at least a little money out of price-sensitive consumers who have more time than money.
Point of this particular design, is that you don't have to enrich its fuel.
And you can feed it dangerous, long-lived "waste" which will be magically transmuted to fuel, then turned into dangerous, short-lived waste
Actually, I support replacing those miserable excretedextruded-plastic chairs with something, anything less unpleasant. More than anything else in my primary and secondary education including getting tripped down the stairs, those chairs made me miserable for twelve years. There are better stackable chair designs now, and a great many of them are also durable enough to tolerate schoolchildren for years. They could also improve them by making them less flat and prone to sliding, or by giving them more back support - those things allow one to slouch incredibly low or sit as if on a stool, but are miserable for more than an hour or so.
This, exactly this. Selling them abroad will bring the batch size up, and push the per-unit price down. That's how they're likely going to reach the $35 cost target.
Profit margin?
Before that, it was VCRs.
Didn't you get the memo? Cyber-loafing boosts worker productivity.
This may make me a bad person, but reading this made my day.
Just bought a new iPhone plan last week.
0.2 gigs: $15. Overage is $15 per each additional 200 meg unit.
2 gigs: $25. Overage is $10 per each additional gigabyte.
4 gigs: $45; includes tethering, allotment shared with smartphone usage. Overage is $10 per each additional gigabyte.
Sprint was offering twice the minutes and unlimited data for the same overall monthly cost as my AT&T bill.
Schlock's plasgun is an antitank weapon, essentially firing a collimated nuclear detonation. Hollowpoint bullets will continue to work as well in the future against unarmored targets as they do in the present.
As someone who has dodged a handful of paintballs at long range - mostly by dropping for cover - it's not impossible. But it is very, very difficult, and conditions need to be pretty ideal.
In lack of atmosphere, your gun oil will boil off - or Boyle's off, courtesy of Boyle's Law.
A lot of guns - most modern ones, really - can be fired without their lubricant, and the AA-12 was designed for such thick lubricant that the solid carbon fouling is an ideal grease. It'll also turn a good weapon into a disposable one. On the other hand, the air sealed in a shell casing will provide all the oxygen needed for the powder to burn.
And some of these require you to skip them off the ground between you and your target, as they carry enough energy to kill if aimed directly at what you're trying to stop. The closest thing to phaser stun we have now are Taser shotgun projectiles, which are supposed to be pretty sack-of-potatoes.
Your 5kW pulse laser will cause severe looking, but superficial injuries. Remember, incapacitation requires destroying the nervous system, or disconnecting it from the body - either directly, or indirectly by depriving it of the blood it requires. Also, remember that bullets and kinetic energy destroys tissue efficiently, and lasers have to boil water, one of the liquids most resistant to boiling in order to create steam explosions to damage tissue. If you're trying to cut things, you need a big beast of a capacitor bank, in order to instantly and deeply penetrate a target and sustain that effect for some significant fraction of a second. Gunpowder stores energy in a much denser form than capacitors, and practical firearms can extract up to 25% of the chemical energy in that powder. Lasers have theoretical efficiencies of up to 65-80% at present, but most modern lasers are closer to 20%. The lack of fragile optics, the reliable, storable energy source, and other similar factors mean firearms are king... for now. Once semiconductor lasers can be mass produced around 20%, diamond optics can be lab-grown, and battery technology catches up, that might change. The most appropriate battery right now is the lithium-spinel ion technology, 42 kilojoules in a pistol-sized battery is pretty practical, assuming two 18650 cells. A laser rifle could carry a rather larger pack, of rather larger cells. Using prismatic IMR cells, a 1 megajoule battery the size of a conventional rifle magazine should be achievable. At that point, proper death rays should be quite possible, even practical.
Generally, Apple did it first, got locked into contracts requiring some kind of DRM, and the **AA is perfectly happy to leave it that way so that Apple cannot become a natural monopoly by making a product that utterly shames everyone else in the market. It's the **AA's way of maintaining power over Apple, so that they can't dictate terms to the recording companies by dint of selling 90% of all music sold.
Remember when Amazon got a license to sell DRM-free MP3 years before Apple, and they only got permission to sell DRM-free files by giving up the one-size-fits-all pricing model that made the store practical?
That old G1 you lovingly gave up is ten times better than the crap some of us are stuck with. Consider flogging it on eBay, and using the proceeds to buy a similarly used Airport Express.
You're lucky. I've already completely run out of that set of companies that produces hardware that doesn't suck and isn't (at least a little) evil.
Well, frankly, I have no bleeding idea. I've seen a lot of utter shit that claimed to do the job, and I particularly suggest avoiding the Mvix box.
I'm going to give a few criteria, because Ari J wasn't quite clear enough.
1. Streams from PCs
2. Has on-board storage for when my laptop is absent
3. Doesn't suck.
The only 'right' way to respond to this is to buy open platforms. Unfortunately, this is often hard.
This is more often than not impossible in my experience, not having particularly deep pockets.