And don't harp on about metropolitan areas or else I'll declare the whole of California to be metropolitan - it's all at least as urban as Hazelwood, Bromley.)
First of all declaring metropolitan areas nonsense is idiotic. Especially when saying that London, one of the largest cities in the world has less than 10.000 inhabitants. There is some sense in taking into consideration how spread out a city is (The L.A. area for example is larger than some countries), but for the most part what's important is the number of people living in the area since that determines the traveller volume.
Marking major cities at 1 million is a very arbitrary decision. Once again what's important is traveller volume.
By your logic there wouldn't be much need for a nation-wide rail network in the UK at all
Er... Except that I wasn't arguing for the need of large cities to make a railway network viable. I was arguing that you needed them to make a (more expensive) high speed railway network viable.
By contrast, the USA has *nine* large cities
The other part of the argument is the distance between cities. High-speed railways have a relatively small range in which they're profitable; too short a distance and they are unable to achieve an average speed above normal trains. Too large a distance and air travel becomes significantly faster.
In the UK you have 5 large cities within 200 km of each other from north to south (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow) Making a north south route viable.
Similarly Boston - New York - Philadelphia - Washington.
L.A. - San Francisco is already borderline. At 550 km with only Fresno as a major city in between it's at the limit of viable use. IT depends on the number of travellers interested in L.A. - Fresno or S.F. - Fresno. After Minneapolis the nearest largish city west is
Boise (1800 km, ~150.000 inhabitants) or Salt Lake City (1600 km, ~170.000 inhabitants). Neither is large or close enough to allow a viable connection.
I do agree though that frequency is also important. From what I understand of the US railways they make two major mistakes on medium distance rail links (IMHO): too low frequency (though this is probably mostly the result of the owners of the track preferring freight) and too many stops.
In regular service it doesn't. It can only manage those kind of speeds when given a nice straight, level track, consist of only one set of cars and isn't carrying any passengers/freight.
This is still quite an achievement though when you figure that the fastest maglev only went 560 km/s. Theoretically the "no ground friction" thing should give a significant edge to maglevs. But then at those speeds air resistance becomes the main factor. Plus TGV is a much more mature technology.
how feasible is a maglev system in the US? yeah, it's a pipe dream, but imagine...
Boston to NYC. LA to San Fran. maybe even a network of the major cities.
A transcontinental connection wouldn't be commercially viable. At those distances airplanes, even with post 9/11 security checks, are simply faster and cheaper.
A Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington D.C. connection or a San Diego-L.A.-San Francisco one should be quite profitable, due to the medium distances and the large volume of travellers.
Europe has a large scale network of high speed trains which means you can travel over longer distance by switching train. But there are simply too few large cities in the US between the seaboards for that to be feasible. For example: what city would be commercially interesting east of Chicago? Or south of Washington D.C.?.
Still, a Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit (possibly extended to Toronto) connection might be feasible. Which would at least bring the possibility of going New York-Chicago or D.C.-Chicago.
As it is now, it's cheaper and sometimes faster to take Greyhound than Amtrack! The US spent so much on railroad tracks and most aren't used anymore. Sure the costs would be expensive, but would it be worth it if some of those tracks were replaced to support maglevs?
It's not necessary (or desirable) to replace tracks with maglev supports. Especially since most of the tracks a) run through/very close to al kind of towns and suburbs and b) are owned by private companies who would undoubtedly see demanding high payments for their use as an easy way to squeeze a profit from a unused asset.
Realistically the best thing would be to nationalise the rail network and upgrade so the big maglev routes get added passengers.
The British feared the US would invade. The report doesn't cite specific sources for this scenario.
Actually it does:
"The British assessment was made after a warning from the then US Defence Secretary James Schlesinger to the British Ambassador in Washington Lord Cromer. [..]
The ambassador quoted Mr Schlesinger as saying that "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."
(I'm Indian) I read about this a couple of weeks back. Apparently the number of downloads was 200. Not surprising: internet availability among home users is ridiculously low in India, 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband. Its increasing, but slowly.
However India's population is huge. 0.4% of households means that something like 400 million people have access, while 0.02% means 20 million broadband users. Probably more than in any country except for Japan and the US.
Nothing travels the oceans without the permission of the United states.
No. While it's true the rest of the world has nowhere near the Carrier capacity of the US, it doesn't need it. The other forces will have easy access to every airport in the world which means any US naval force within a few hundred miles of a (populated) coast is pretty much toast. Never mind the large number of submarines only one of which would have to get trough to sink a carrier after which a carrier group is nice but hardly invincible.
Ovaerl in a (very theoretical) war between the US and the rest everything would depend on goals, willingness to sacrifice and level of teamwork. Keeping the US out of the rest of the world shouldn't be too hard if the other countries are able to work together efficiently. Invading the US would be very difficult but could be possible if the others where prepared to sink enough casualties end money into it.
Of course all of this his highly unlikely, especially since there's also nuclear weapons.
How does the voter know that the line printed and the vote saved are the same one? It would be trivial to make the program print a vote for candidate X and mark it as a vote for candidate Y?
True, but at least it would be possible to hold a paper recount, which would show such a deception.
No. Wrong. All the radioactive substances which come out of the mining/enrichment process were in the ore to begin with; it creates nothing! The fission process transforms some long-lived (cool) isotopes to short-lived (hot) isotopes.
True if you want to be precise create may be the wrong word. The extraction and reprocessing does however release significant amounts of radioactive, poisonous material which would otherwise be buried. The main intermediate processing form, uranium hexafluoride, is a rather nasty substance and some of the chemicals involved are noting to sneeze about either.
If you don't see a difference between a prairie and a wheat field with regard to its ability to support a complete ecosystem, I can't help you. (The number of people who can be supported by the excess productivity of a minimally-changed ecosystem like a prairie is small compared to what agriculture can support; that's why farmers have pushed hunter-gatherers off most of the earth.)
Yes, that may be true. However none of that would generally be considered environmental damage. It may be humans "affecting the earth" but it has little relevance to the discussion that was at hand, so I don't quite see the reason to bring it up.
However, contrasted to almost every other source of power (including solar!), the production of power from uranium requires the disturbance of a very, very small amount of land due to the extremely concentrated nature of the resource. Yes, you may make the groundwater of some part of Nevada unsafe to drink for a long time (assuming e.g. iron filings aren't used to immmobilize the radio-technetium), but compared to the size of the continent it's negligible.
What is a small amount of land? Almost everything is negible compared to the size of a continent. For every 7 pounds of uranium oxide (which is only an in-between state in the production of the final rods) you need a ton of ore. ot to mention that the whole production/enriching process creates fairly large amounts of low to mid level radioactive material.
One measure of how much we affect the earth is how much of its net agricultural productivity is consumed (directly or indirectly) by humans, as opposed to being cycled in natural ecosystems.
That's a rather odd way of looking at enviromental damage. After all humans are part of the eco-system as well.
You could count areas which cannot grow much because they're permanently shaded by solar collectors as being part of that consumption of productivity, so by some measures solar could be a bigger blight on the environment than nuclear. (I'm not saying that measure is the right one, just that it deserves consideration in any open-minded evaluation of the tradeoffs.)
Actually there's this amount of sun-lit space which are already not used to grow anything: roofs. If we were to put a decent amount of solar panels on every roof in the world our electricity problem would be solved (well mostly anyway). Even at our current technological level. there are of course other problems with this (the production of sufficient panels for one, the storage for night time use for another) but surface area really isn't the problem.
You're hardly "at the mercy of nature" with solar and tidal power. The movements of Sun, earth and moon tend to be somewhat predictable. Even windpower is fairly consistent over longer periods of time.
Furthermore I'd hesitate to call nuclear energy 'clean'. It maybe so at the actual power station site, but the production of the fuel rods (digging up and enriching uranium) and the actual power station both require a lot of clean-up.
Finnally being confident that a solution will be found seems a rather dangerous approach to waste material that will remain highly dangerous for hundreds or thousands of years.
The interesting point is that there is no limit to the power that will be centralised in the EU, and an assumption that every few years a new round of treaties will centralise power further. The treaties are full of the phrase "Ever Closer Union", and explicitly prevent seccession. (To the best of my knowledge, the equivalent question in the USA was, um, unclear until 1861-65).
I'm not aware of any existing rule forbidding withdrawal from the EU. The draft constitution even has an explicit mechanism for secession (Article I-59 for those who want to look it up). Not to mention that Greenland left the union when it acquired homerule.
Ask yourself, do you really want to give the government the power to shut down any company that it deams worthy of its wrath?
1) If the company is obviously abusing it's near or total monopoly, definitely
2) They're not talking about shitting down MS, they're talking about stiff fines and (hopefully useful) regulations for MS to follow.
3) It's not simply "the government" since any result will be no doubt be put before the courts.
Moderators: get a clue. All other slashdotters: Think about the economy. If you really want to help it, hurting one of your best and most profitable companies is not the way to do so.
How is MS one of the best (US) companies? It's certainly not at the forefornt of innovations or reliability. If you want to help your economy the last thing you want is a lot of MS like companies:
1) MS is ridiculously profitable precisely *because* it abuses it's monopoly (in any free market those profit margins would have been squeezed by a nice little price war agree ago).
2) MS doesn't use all that capital very productively. Apart from employing relatively few people for a company of their revenue size, they tend to use their massive cash reserves to enter new sectors where they stifle innovation by (trying to) destroying the competition with mediocre products at low prices.
I would think that slashdotters of all people would at least see that MS defintely does have competition. Obviusly the whiny slashdotters that want MS to be broken up havn't ever even tried Linux or Macs.
The question whether or not MS has competition is not the issue. The issue is whether MS abuses it's (near) monopoly position to keep competition down (both in the OS and in other markets)
I agree with you for the most part. However there are two problems. One is that while you have a could add some program later, you've already paid for the MS version. If the programs had to be sold separately You'd have a choice (of course 90% of the people would simply get some kind of package but still)
Second, from what I gathered from the US lawsuit, the issue wasn't so much that the consumer didn't have a choice but that MS contracts with COmputer dealers also forbid them from, say putting Netscape on newly bought computers.
With the current problems in the US space program, it may be that the newly fixed Arianne launch system can claim a significant share of the market.
Arianespace already has a significant share of the market (~40-50%) and has had so for years.
Up until recently one of the main reasons it didn't have a bigger share was the requirement that US satellites to be launched with US launchers.
The new Ariane-5 series however is more expensive, and it could take awhile until optimization has it back to the competitiveness level of the 4 (though it was necessary to move to the 5 due to the increasing requirements for payload weight)
It is important to remember that Arianne is also somewhat cheaper than the Shuttle for any given weight of payload - the shuttles main advantage is that its live crew (which is the reason for the higher cost) can perform and regulate scientific tests.
Actually the Arianne series doesn't really compete with the shuttle, it's main (US) competitor is the Atlas series.
The shuttle is massively more expensive to launch for anything but the largest payloads not so much because of it's crew (though it doesn't help), but because it was designed for an altogether different mission.
Meanwhile the Russian rockets are in many ways cheaper than both.
There's a grey line with the TV show download sites, but if the video streams don't cut out the commercials... I don't see why anyone would want to complain about that ("you're viewing our advertising - stop it!" doesn't make much sense).
TV show files never have the commercials left in them. That would be waiting a lot of bandwidth (a ~33% greater size) for something which no one wants to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Er... Except that I wasn't arguing for the need of large cities to make a railway network viable. I was arguing that you needed them to make a (more expensive) high speed railway network viable.
The other part of the argument is the distance between cities. High-speed railways have a relatively small range in which they're profitable; too short a distance and they are unable to achieve an average speed above normal trains. Too large a distance and air travel becomes significantly faster.
In the UK you have 5 large cities within 200 km of each other from north to south (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow) Making a north south route viable.
Similarly Boston - New York - Philadelphia - Washington.
L.A. - San Francisco is already borderline. At 550 km with only Fresno as a major city in between it's at the limit of viable use. IT depends on the number of travellers interested in L.A. - Fresno or S.F. - Fresno. After Minneapolis the nearest largish city west is Boise (1800 km, ~150.000 inhabitants) or Salt Lake City (1600 km, ~170.000 inhabitants). Neither is large or close enough to allow a viable connection.
I do agree though that frequency is also important. From what I understand of the US railways they make two major mistakes on medium distance rail links (IMHO): too low frequency (though this is probably mostly the result of the owners of the track preferring freight) and too many stops.
French TGV does 515 km/h.
In regular service it doesn't. It can only manage those kind of speeds when given a nice straight, level track, consist of only one set of cars and isn't carrying any passengers/freight.
This is still quite an achievement though when you figure that the fastest maglev only went 560 km/s. Theoretically the "no ground friction" thing should give a significant edge to maglevs. But then at those speeds air resistance becomes the main factor. Plus TGV is a much more mature technology.
A transcontinental connection wouldn't be commercially viable. At those distances airplanes, even with post 9/11 security checks, are simply faster and cheaper.
A Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington D.C. connection or a San Diego-L.A.-San Francisco one should be quite profitable, due to the medium distances and the large volume of travellers.
Europe has a large scale network of high speed trains which means you can travel over longer distance by switching train. But there are simply too few large cities in the US between the seaboards for that to be feasible. For example: what city would be commercially interesting east of Chicago? Or south of Washington D.C.?.
Still, a Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit (possibly extended to Toronto) connection might be feasible. Which would at least bring the possibility of going New York-Chicago or D.C.-Chicago.
It's not necessary (or desirable) to replace tracks with maglev supports. Especially since most of the tracks a) run through/very close to al kind of towns and suburbs and b) are owned by private companies who would undoubtedly see demanding high payments for their use as an easy way to squeeze a profit from a unused asset.
Realistically the best thing would be to nationalise the rail network and upgrade so the big maglev routes get added passengers.
However India's population is huge. 0.4% of households means that something like 400 million people have access, while 0.02% means 20 million broadband users. Probably more than in any country except for Japan and the US.
True, but at least it would be possible to hold a paper recount, which would show such a deception.
True if you want to be precise create may be the wrong word. The extraction and reprocessing does however release significant amounts of radioactive, poisonous material which would otherwise be buried. The main intermediate processing form, uranium hexafluoride, is a rather nasty substance and some of the chemicals involved are noting to sneeze about either.
Yes, that may be true. However none of that would generally be considered environmental damage. It may be humans "affecting the earth" but it has little relevance to the discussion that was at hand, so I don't quite see the reason to bring it up.
What is a small amount of land? Almost everything is negible compared to the size of a continent. For every 7 pounds of uranium oxide (which is only an in-between state in the production of the final rods) you need a ton of ore. ot to mention that the whole production/enriching process creates fairly large amounts of low to mid level radioactive material.
That's a rather odd way of looking at enviromental damage. After all humans are part of the eco-system as well.
Actually there's this amount of sun-lit space which are already not used to grow anything: roofs. If we were to put a decent amount of solar panels on every roof in the world our electricity problem would be solved (well mostly anyway). Even at our current technological level. there are of course other problems with this (the production of sufficient panels for one, the storage for night time use for another) but surface area really isn't the problem.
You're hardly "at the mercy of nature" with solar and tidal power. The movements of Sun, earth and moon tend to be somewhat predictable. Even windpower is fairly consistent over longer periods of time.
Furthermore I'd hesitate to call nuclear energy 'clean'. It maybe so at the actual power station site, but the production of the fuel rods (digging up and enriching uranium) and the actual power station both require a lot of clean-up.
Finnally being confident that a solution will be found seems a rather dangerous approach to waste material that will remain highly dangerous for hundreds or thousands of years.
I'm not aware of any existing rule forbidding withdrawal from the EU. The draft constitution even has an explicit mechanism for secession (Article I-59 for those who want to look it up). Not to mention that Greenland left the union when it acquired homerule.
1) If the company is obviously abusing it's near or total monopoly, definitely
2) They're not talking about shitting down MS, they're talking about stiff fines and (hopefully useful) regulations for MS to follow.
3) It's not simply "the government" since any result will be no doubt be put before the courts.
How is MS one of the best (US) companies? It's certainly not at the forefornt of innovations or reliability. If you want to help your economy the last thing you want is a lot of MS like companies:
1) MS is ridiculously profitable precisely *because* it abuses it's monopoly (in any free market those profit margins would have been squeezed by a nice little price war agree ago).
2) MS doesn't use all that capital very productively. Apart from employing relatively few people for a company of their revenue size, they tend to use their massive cash reserves to enter new sectors where they stifle innovation by (trying to) destroying the competition with mediocre products at low prices.
The question whether or not MS has competition is not the issue. The issue is whether MS abuses it's (near) monopoly position to keep competition down (both in the OS and in other markets)
I agree with you for the most part. However there are two problems. One is that while you have a could add some program later, you've already paid for the MS version. If the programs had to be sold separately You'd have a choice (of course 90% of the people would simply get some kind of package but still)
Second, from what I gathered from the US lawsuit, the issue wasn't so much that the consumer didn't have a choice but that MS contracts with COmputer dealers also forbid them from, say putting Netscape on newly bought computers.
Arianespace already has a significant share of the market (~40-50%) and has had so for years.
Up until recently one of the main reasons it didn't have a bigger share was the requirement that US satellites to be launched with US launchers.
The new Ariane-5 series however is more expensive, and it could take awhile until optimization has it back to the competitiveness level of the 4 (though it was necessary to move to the 5 due to the increasing requirements for payload weight)
Actually the Arianne series doesn't really compete with the shuttle, it's main (US) competitor is the Atlas series.
The shuttle is massively more expensive to launch for anything but the largest payloads not so much because of it's crew (though it doesn't help), but because it was designed for an altogether different mission.
Meanwhile the Russian rockets are in many ways cheaper than both.
TV show files never have the commercials left in them. That would be waiting a lot of bandwidth (a ~33% greater size) for something which no one wants to see.