Gorbachev had just come to power and wanted to make peace overtures to the West. A giant space battle station was not going to help this endeavour so a deliberate "launch failure" would be the simplest and easiest way of getting rid of the darn thing and shutting down the program.
Unlikely. I prefer the conspiracy theory that says that a US battle station destroyed it on its way up. The Soviet Union collapsed when its leadership realized what had happened, and what the implications are. US battle stations have also been disabling European and Japanese probes to Mars lately, so there must be something on Mars that we are not allowed to see. It all makes sense to me.
The Space Shuttles and the ISS are just red herrings.
Hydrogen is not a natural fuel. The BMW H2R is an interesting concept car for fuel cells, but the fuel still needs to be produced and you need another fuel for that.
LPG race cars are not very interesting because people have been converting their race cars to LPG for a long time now in Europe. It is simply a new speed record. My parents owned an LPG Audi when I was a young. It has been around as a fuel since 1860.
I think the massive increase in acceleration will be a big seller.
I think increase in acceleration will be limited by law at some point. We don't see well while accelerating because our brains can't cope with things accelerating towards them. High top speeds are safer.
In the Netherlands 300,000 (out of maybe some 5,000,000) cars use LPG. It is cheaper because it is a by-product of refining oil that is otherwise torched, and environmentally friendly 'G3' systems are taxed considerably less. Break-even point for converting to a G3 system is just 4000 km per year.
Modern multipoint injection systems (DGI, SGI/commonrail) are almost indistinguishable in performance to comparable petrol installations, and the fuel economy, and therefore range, is improving.
Main problem is the density of LPG infrastructure abroad. The range of LPG cars is lower, and LPG cars are a serious disadvantage if you go abroad in countries with few LPG stations. I imagine in Australia that would be less of a problem because the car never leaves the country.
It is also important to point out it is not a personnel carrier. Vehicles in this category operate in small packs, in a reconnaisance, artillery observation, or maybe anti-tank role. It can be carried by a helicopter, and operate independently for days. It protects itself with its speed, manouverability, and low observability.
It's the US answer to small vehicles like the German-Dutch Fennek.
The idea of using a hybrid DE engine for this kind of vehicles is obvious. You don't want to run a diesel engine while you are observing, and observation systems often use lots of energy.
Interestingly, the USA has 1/3rd of the world's total economy, but emits only 1/4th of the world's pollution. It's all in how you look at things...
Interestingly, the USA has only 4% of the world's population.
The economy figure would be relevant if the USA was a net exporter of industrial goods. It is not. The USA has a service economy. It is an importer of steel, of cars, of ships etc.
China and Japan are major exporters. Indirectly, USA consumption is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than these figures indicate.
And, besides, this will force European nations to develop methods and technologies that produce clean power and/or use less fossil fuels. Then, when the oil really starts to run dry they'll have the upper hand, and China, India, and the US will be buying technology from them.
Same thing regularly happens with any European Union safety or environmental guideline x: Some countries will start implementing guideline x years before it becomes legally binding because it will give an economic advantage later. For small countries it is an opportunity to become the leader in a future market for products meeting guideline x. Most offensive thing that can happen is that big states later refuse to implement x (for instance on the ground that they are economically disadvantaged).
That's what happened with the Kyoto protocol. 'Unsigning' it was much more offensive than not signing in the first place.
So your Kroger card doesn't have your name associated with it. Big deal! You're still the one swiping it every time you buy groceries, so they can still track your buying patterns. For Kroger, the net effect is the same as if you had a "non-blank" card.
Why is it that everybody thinks the most evil thing about loyalty cards is that they can match your buying habits with your name? You think they really CARE what your name is?
No, nobody cares. Since you are usually carrying your blank card with you and identifying yourself with it regularly at the supermarket, it is trivial to match you to the purchase history anytime they like it.
Blank cards are not enough. You also have to switch them regularly with other people.
My first thought: now this is really going to help the US solve its trade deficit.
Does anyone know whether it is possible for a European company to sue US competitors in the US because they are violating a US patent held by a third party?
It is only fair if European customers that buy US products on the Internet pay for the license fee due to the creative genius that invented international transactions. If they don't want to, they will just have to buy European products.
Actually the same could be said of the US, a lot of our foriegn policies of late have been decidely midieval, notably the "you're with us or you're against us" black and white take on things. Not to say China's not a potential problem, but this is not sound reasoning as to why it's a problem.
The foreign policy of China has actually been much more civilized than the foreign policy of the US over the last years. China's statements in the UN are sometimes even sentimental. They are trying to connect to "old Europe" and improve their image in the world.
China-Taiwan relations are a different story, of course.
A few years ago we were listed for human rights violations in Koraalspecht prison in the Netherlands Antilles, but apparently that isn't a problem anymore since the government renamed the prison.
Maybe my government is filtering the entry for the Netherlands from this list? Please correct me if the Netherlands is on it.
I am not trying to postulate a theory of how they are to be considered, but remarking on the inconsistent way in which we deal with 'insurgents'. In the Netherlands we do count the dead in the resistance as civilians and innocent victims of the Nazis. We count people shot by Dutch policemen during the occupation as victims of the Nazis. At the same time we would feel that they are to be treated as POWs, and not 'terrorists' or whatever, in relation to the Geneva conventions if they are arrested.
In fact, we even count people who were killed by, or unnecessarily starved because of, American choices during the liberation as civilian victims of the Nazis.
More recently, we also counted Kurd 'insurgents' who were fighting with the Iranians against Saddam as civilian victims of Saddam. We counted armed Shiite insurgents in 1991 as civilian victims of Saddam. Some would even count the victims of the UN's embargo as civilian victims of Saddam.
Why do we suddenly have to make all kinds of distinctions when attributing deaths to an American invasion and occupation? Why not just count everyone who is not a soldier employed by the defeated government as a civilian victim? We always do it that way.
If there is no legitimate government but only a foreign occupation, any local organization can claim to be 'legitimate resistance' to that foreign occupation. In WWII statistics these people are generally counted as civilians and fighting them is criminal. It is a grey area. Is the current situation in Iraq a 'civil war' between a recognized Iraq government and insurgents?
Militants from third countries are a completely different story.
Insurgents are considered Civilians according to most international reports.
So what % of those civilians are terrorists and insurgents?
Do you mean to say that insurgents in European countries who were shot by the Nazis are not to be counted as civilians? We do count them as civilians.
Resistance by the population against occupation by a foreign power is legitimate in the standard theory of aggression in international law, regardless of whether it is a 'good' foreign power or an 'evil' one.
www.iraqbodycount.net themselves admit that its number is very much a lower bound on the actual number of deaths, and counting deaths in the media is statistically speaking definitely not a better approach than door-to-door interviews.
Some of the towns the US is bombing/shelling cannot be accessed by journalists or the US army at all for days at least. The 'modern' way of fighting a war by the US makes it even harder to keep an accurate bodycount. The overreliance on artillery and airforce by the US Army in joint military exercises is infamous among NATO allies. First bomb for a few days, and then go to see what was there. The spy planes and satellites are no compensation for not being there to count the dead.
What we do know is that the US is using very heavy munitions, and that bombing towns killed millions in WWII.
The story forgot to mention the other side. According to the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq, 600,000 civilians were executed during Sadaam Hussein's regime.
That's the past, and it took Saddam decades to do that. The question now is whether the US is going to stop before it kills more civilians than Saddam.
Having four planes, the twin towers, a portion of the Pentagon, and a few other sundry buildings fall out of the sky and/or collapse is, and I'm going out on limb here, a rather more disturbing event than what Britain and Spain experienced over a few decades. I'm not saying that to lessen the experience of the other countries, but there's not a lot of historical precedent for how a people should react to terrorism of Sept 11th's magnitude.
It is not a very meaningful event in terms of risk suffered per inhabitant. A comparable event in terms of risk in my country would take 185 lives (because of the smaller population). That happens occasionally in the form of plane crashes, explosions, floodings, WWII bombings, etc.
It is shocking because of its absolute magnitude, but it hasn't made terrorism a huge risk to any individual, New Yorker, American, or Westerner, because the aggression is directed against a very large group of people.
It is shocking to find out you have enemies that will commit suicide to harm you.
It is also shocking because it happened to a country whose experience of being attacked at home is limited to an attack on its navy in a colony.
But you do have to take proportions into account. Everything that happens in the US is big, because its population is big. To get its attention, the enemy will hit it hard.
Take the Iraq body count and divide it against the size of its population (some 25 million). Compare that to the "terrorism" bodycount.
The US isn't "producing more wealth than it consumes". I has a current accounts deficit.
But the real point is that the things we call 'resources' are usually scarce because 1) they are finite (land, metals), 2) regenerate slowly (minerals, oil, tropical hardwood), or 3) it becomes increasingly costly to find or extract it (potable water, minerals, oil, clean air).
It is simply not true to say that we are not competing for the same things because "market economics is not a zero-sum game". We are competing for limited resources, and without them "wealth" is nothing more than the means to acquire labour: the power to make others do what you want them to do.
There is a lot of wealth to be created by more efficient allocation of resources (that is how markets are not zero-sum) and technological progress reducing the dependence on resources or making their extraction more efficient, but the resources needed to support our current lifestyle are finite and insufficient.
Things that never were considered scarce in the past have become scarce: water, land (try starting a new farming colony like the US), rainforest, silence...
I just realized I do know some things missing in the equation. A '75 kW' car, for instance, will on average be maybe 20 to 40kW (depending on traffic), and you are using a set of four lights + some extra loss + on average 50% efficient alternator = let's say 400-600 W. This is much closer.
4-5% extra fuel? Last I knew, headlamps were 55W (input) each. If you've got a car which runs at 2kW, please tell me.
I just checked it. Tests and calculations are done based on 60W headlamps. For modern fuel efficient cars it is 4-5%, for buses and trucks only 0.1%, and for cars in general, excluding heavy traffic, 2-3%. The SWOV (Research Institute for Traffic Safety) calculated 0.9% as the total average reduction in fuel use (=1.33 billion liters of fuel for the EU). The 4-5% number is the one that made the news.
This is based on Dutch cars, typically some 850-1050 kg and 45-75kW. Taxes for cars roughly double per 100 kg, so the average weight is a bit lower than elsewhere. And obviously average fuel efficiency is also related to fuel prices (1.20 euro/l vs. 0.37 euro/l average in the US).
Or if your alternator runs at less than about 60% efficiency, then get it fixed.
60% is the peak efficiency for a 12V alternator in a car as far as I know, when the engine is running idle and is cool. When driving the car, it is substantially lower.
I don't know how these numbers are calculated, but clearly the relation to fuel consumption is more complex than the linear one you are suggesting.
What if the car suddenly coming towards you is speeding?
A daily scenario for me (four times a day): The highway I am on is merging with another highway to its right. The drivers on the left lane of that highway are all speeding and it is very busy. I MUST adjust my speed to merge.
I think that if you drive drunk, or speed, or drive erratically, you should get a ticket regardless of whether or not a cop happens to be present at the time.
I don't know where you are from, but I am legally allowed to speed if, for instance:
- it is required for reasons of safety, - I am obstructing an emergency vehicle, - I am bringing someone who urgently needs medical attention to a hospital.
A chip in my car would never be able to proof I was not speeding for reasons of safety. Speeding cameras outside the car are better.
Really want to reduce road casualties? Enforce lights being on at all times. Doesn't cost anything, dramatically improves safety.
Costs about 4-5% extra fuel. A traffic safety organization recommended this some years ago in the Netherlands. Government (social-democrats in those days) pointed out that we may not be able to comply with the Kyoto protocol CO2 emission quotum if people start doing that.
Knowing how much extra fuel you consume with light on, windows open, airco running etc. is now a requirement for a driving license in the Netherlands. Theoretical exams always include one or more of questions about fuel consumption.
Do you ever drive in France? French cars don't yield. French traffic is one of the passive defense systems that defends France from foreign invasion.
I would expect the American cars to: - yield to every other car, - take turns very slowly, - brake for anything, - have no option to set the traffic jurisdiction it is driving in (instead it will complain that the traffic signs and other traffic are stupid), - stop at the edge of European inner cities and insist that there is no road there, and - be unable to recognize an empty parking spot if it cannot hold at least three cars.
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Gorbachev had just come to power and wanted to make peace overtures to the West. A giant space battle station was not going to help this endeavour so a deliberate "launch failure" would be the simplest and easiest way of getting rid of the darn thing and shutting down the program.
Unlikely. I prefer the conspiracy theory that says that a US battle station destroyed it on its way up. The Soviet Union collapsed when its leadership realized what had happened, and what the implications are. US battle stations have also been disabling European and Japanese probes to Mars lately, so there must be something on Mars that we are not allowed to see. It all makes sense to me.
The Space Shuttles and the ISS are just red herrings.
Hydrogen is not a natural fuel. The BMW H2R is an interesting concept car for fuel cells, but the fuel still needs to be produced and you need another fuel for that.
LPG race cars are not very interesting because people have been converting their race cars to LPG for a long time now in Europe. It is simply a new speed record. My parents owned an LPG Audi when I was a young. It has been around as a fuel since 1860.
I think the massive increase in acceleration will be a big seller.
I think increase in acceleration will be limited by law at some point. We don't see well while accelerating because our brains can't cope with things accelerating towards them. High top speeds are safer.
In the Netherlands 300,000 (out of maybe some 5,000,000) cars use LPG. It is cheaper because it is a by-product of refining oil that is otherwise torched, and environmentally friendly 'G3' systems are taxed considerably less. Break-even point for converting to a G3 system is just 4000 km per year.
Modern multipoint injection systems (DGI, SGI/commonrail) are almost indistinguishable in performance to comparable petrol installations, and the fuel economy, and therefore range, is improving.
Main problem is the density of LPG infrastructure abroad. The range of LPG cars is lower, and LPG cars are a serious disadvantage if you go abroad in countries with few LPG stations. I imagine in Australia that would be less of a problem because the car never leaves the country.
It is also important to point out it is not a personnel carrier. Vehicles in this category operate in small packs, in a reconnaisance, artillery observation, or maybe anti-tank role. It can be carried by a helicopter, and operate independently for days. It protects itself with its speed, manouverability, and low observability.
It's the US answer to small vehicles like the German-Dutch Fennek.
The idea of using a hybrid DE engine for this kind of vehicles is obvious. You don't want to run a diesel engine while you are observing, and observation systems often use lots of energy.
Interestingly, the USA has 1/3rd of the world's total economy, but emits only 1/4th of the world's pollution. It's all in how you look at things...
Interestingly, the USA has only 4% of the world's population.
The economy figure would be relevant if the USA was a net exporter of industrial goods. It is not. The USA has a service economy. It is an importer of steel, of cars, of ships etc.
China and Japan are major exporters. Indirectly, USA consumption is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than these figures indicate.
And, besides, this will force European nations to develop methods and technologies that produce clean power and/or use less fossil fuels. Then, when the oil really starts to run dry they'll have the upper hand, and China, India, and the US will be buying technology from them.
Same thing regularly happens with any European Union safety or environmental guideline x: Some countries will start implementing guideline x years before it becomes legally binding because it will give an economic advantage later. For small countries it is an opportunity to become the leader in a future market for products meeting guideline x. Most offensive thing that can happen is that big states later refuse to implement x (for instance on the ground that they are economically disadvantaged).
That's what happened with the Kyoto protocol. 'Unsigning' it was much more offensive than not signing in the first place.
The 'oldest boat of the world', the Pesse canoe, is from the Netherlands in NW-Europe and carbon-dated 8825 ± 100 BP.
Many however doubt it is a functional boat, and even the date is challenged. I certainly wouldn't cross anymore than a puddle in it.
I never heard of a 'European route' theory in Europe.
So your Kroger card doesn't have your name associated with it. Big deal! You're still the one swiping it every time you buy groceries, so they can still track your buying patterns. For Kroger, the net effect is the same as if you had a "non-blank" card.
Why is it that everybody thinks the most evil thing about loyalty cards is that they can match your buying habits with your name? You think they really CARE what your name is?
No, nobody cares. Since you are usually carrying your blank card with you and identifying yourself with it regularly at the supermarket, it is trivial to match you to the purchase history anytime they like it.
Blank cards are not enough. You also have to switch them regularly with other people.
If the job is so horrible, EA will eventually have trouble filling it and change their practices. Magic of a free market.
There are still hordes of young people without a house, wife, and children who want to be part of this industry for a year, or maybe two.
The tragedy of these practices is that the game industry continues to rely largely on young and very enthousiastic, but inexperienced programmers.
My first thought: now this is really going to help the US solve its trade deficit.
Does anyone know whether it is possible for a European company to sue US competitors in the US because they are violating a US patent held by a third party?
It is only fair if European customers that buy US products on the Internet pay for the license fee due to the creative genius that invented international transactions. If they don't want to, they will just have to buy European products.
Actually the same could be said of the US, a lot of our foriegn policies of late have been decidely midieval, notably the "you're with us or you're against us" black and white take on things. Not to say China's not a potential problem, but this is not sound reasoning as to why it's a problem.
The foreign policy of China has actually been much more civilized than the foreign policy of the US over the last years. China's statements in the UN are sometimes even sentimental. They are trying to connect to "old Europe" and improve their image in the world.
China-Taiwan relations are a different story, of course.
Same here. The Netherlands is not listed anymore.
A few years ago we were listed for human rights violations in Koraalspecht prison in the Netherlands Antilles, but apparently that isn't a problem anymore since the government renamed the prison.
Maybe my government is filtering the entry for the Netherlands from this list? Please correct me if the Netherlands is on it.
I am not trying to postulate a theory of how they are to be considered, but remarking on the inconsistent way in which we deal with 'insurgents'. In the Netherlands we do count the dead in the resistance as civilians and innocent victims of the Nazis. We count people shot by Dutch policemen during the occupation as victims of the Nazis. At the same time we would feel that they are to be treated as POWs, and not 'terrorists' or whatever, in relation to the Geneva conventions if they are arrested.
In fact, we even count people who were killed by, or unnecessarily starved because of, American choices during the liberation as civilian victims of the Nazis.
More recently, we also counted Kurd 'insurgents' who were fighting with the Iranians against Saddam as civilian victims of Saddam. We counted armed Shiite insurgents in 1991 as civilian victims of Saddam. Some would even count the victims of the UN's embargo as civilian victims of Saddam.
Why do we suddenly have to make all kinds of distinctions when attributing deaths to an American invasion and occupation? Why not just count everyone who is not a soldier employed by the defeated government as a civilian victim? We always do it that way.
If there is no legitimate government but only a foreign occupation, any local organization can claim to be 'legitimate resistance' to that foreign occupation. In WWII statistics these people are generally counted as civilians and fighting them is criminal. It is a grey area. Is the current situation in Iraq a 'civil war' between a recognized Iraq government and insurgents?
Militants from third countries are a completely different story.
Insurgents are considered Civilians according to most international reports.
So what % of those civilians are terrorists and insurgents?
Do you mean to say that insurgents in European countries who were shot by the Nazis are not to be counted as civilians? We do count them as civilians.
Resistance by the population against occupation by a foreign power is legitimate in the standard theory of aggression in international law, regardless of whether it is a 'good' foreign power or an 'evil' one.
www.iraqbodycount.net themselves admit that its number is very much a lower bound on the actual number of deaths, and counting deaths in the media is statistically speaking definitely not a better approach than door-to-door interviews.
Some of the towns the US is bombing/shelling cannot be accessed by journalists or the US army at all for days at least. The 'modern' way of fighting a war by the US makes it even harder to keep an accurate bodycount. The overreliance on artillery and airforce by the US Army in joint military exercises is infamous among NATO allies. First bomb for a few days, and then go to see what was there. The spy planes and satellites are no compensation for not being there to count the dead.
What we do know is that the US is using very heavy munitions, and that bombing towns killed millions in WWII.
The story forgot to mention the other side. According to the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq, 600,000 civilians were executed during Sadaam Hussein's regime.
That's the past, and it took Saddam decades to do that. The question now is whether the US is going to stop before it kills more civilians than Saddam.
Having four planes, the twin towers, a portion of the Pentagon, and a few other sundry buildings fall out of the sky and/or collapse is, and I'm going out on limb here, a rather more disturbing event than what Britain and Spain experienced over a few decades. I'm not saying that to lessen the experience of the other countries, but there's not a lot of historical precedent for how a people should react to terrorism of Sept 11th's magnitude.
It is not a very meaningful event in terms of risk suffered per inhabitant. A comparable event in terms of risk in my country would take 185 lives (because of the smaller population). That happens occasionally in the form of plane crashes, explosions, floodings, WWII bombings, etc.
It is shocking because of its absolute magnitude, but it hasn't made terrorism a huge risk to any individual, New Yorker, American, or Westerner, because the aggression is directed against a very large group of people.
It is shocking to find out you have enemies that will commit suicide to harm you.
It is also shocking because it happened to a country whose experience of being attacked at home is limited to an attack on its navy in a colony.
But you do have to take proportions into account. Everything that happens in the US is big, because its population is big. To get its attention, the enemy will hit it hard.
Take the Iraq body count and divide it against the size of its population (some 25 million). Compare that to the "terrorism" bodycount.
The US isn't "producing more wealth than it consumes". I has a current accounts deficit.
But the real point is that the things we call 'resources' are usually scarce because 1) they are finite (land, metals), 2) regenerate slowly (minerals, oil, tropical hardwood), or 3) it becomes increasingly costly to find or extract it (potable water, minerals, oil, clean air).
It is simply not true to say that we are not competing for the same things because "market economics is not a zero-sum game". We are competing for limited resources, and without them "wealth" is nothing more than the means to acquire labour: the power to make others do what you want them to do.
There is a lot of wealth to be created by more efficient allocation of resources (that is how markets are not zero-sum) and technological progress reducing the dependence on resources or making their extraction more efficient, but the resources needed to support our current lifestyle are finite and insufficient.
Things that never were considered scarce in the past have become scarce: water, land (try starting a new farming colony like the US), rainforest, silence...
I just realized I do know some things missing in the equation. A '75 kW' car, for instance, will on average be maybe 20 to 40kW (depending on traffic), and you are using a set of four lights + some extra loss + on average 50% efficient alternator = let's say 400-600 W. This is much closer.
4-5% extra fuel? Last I knew, headlamps were 55W (input) each. If you've got a car which runs at 2kW, please tell me.
I just checked it. Tests and calculations are done based on 60W headlamps. For modern fuel efficient cars it is 4-5%, for buses and trucks only 0.1%, and for cars in general, excluding heavy traffic, 2-3%. The SWOV (Research Institute for Traffic Safety) calculated 0.9% as the total average reduction in fuel use (=1.33 billion liters of fuel for the EU). The 4-5% number is the one that made the news.
This is based on Dutch cars, typically some 850-1050 kg and 45-75kW. Taxes for cars roughly double per 100 kg, so the average weight is a bit lower than elsewhere. And obviously average fuel efficiency is also related to fuel prices (1.20 euro/l vs. 0.37 euro/l average in the US).
Or if your alternator runs at less than about 60% efficiency, then get it fixed.
60% is the peak efficiency for a 12V alternator in a car as far as I know, when the engine is running idle and is cool. When driving the car, it is substantially lower.
I don't know how these numbers are calculated, but clearly the relation to fuel consumption is more complex than the linear one you are suggesting.
What if the car suddenly coming towards you is speeding?
A daily scenario for me (four times a day): The highway I am on is merging with another highway to its right. The drivers on the left lane of that highway are all speeding and it is very busy. I MUST adjust my speed to merge.
I think that if you drive drunk, or speed, or drive erratically, you should get a ticket regardless of whether or not a cop happens to be present at the time.
I don't know where you are from, but I am legally allowed to speed if, for instance:
- it is required for reasons of safety,
- I am obstructing an emergency vehicle,
- I am bringing someone who urgently needs medical attention to a hospital.
A chip in my car would never be able to proof I was not speeding for reasons of safety. Speeding cameras outside the car are better.
Really want to reduce road casualties? Enforce lights being on at all times. Doesn't cost anything, dramatically improves safety.
Costs about 4-5% extra fuel. A traffic safety organization recommended this some years ago in the Netherlands. Government (social-democrats in those days) pointed out that we may not be able to comply with the Kyoto protocol CO2 emission quotum if people start doing that.
Knowing how much extra fuel you consume with light on, windows open, airco running etc. is now a requirement for a driving license in the Netherlands. Theoretical exams always include one or more of questions about fuel consumption.
Do you ever drive in France? French cars don't yield. French traffic is one of the passive defense systems that defends France from foreign invasion.
I would expect the American cars to:
- yield to every other car,
- take turns very slowly,
- brake for anything,
- have no option to set the traffic jurisdiction it is driving in (instead it will complain that the traffic signs and other traffic are stupid),
- stop at the edge of European inner cities and insist that there is no road there, and
- be unable to recognize an empty parking spot if it cannot hold at least three cars.