Just out of curiousity, how do the Saudis prevent outside researchers from publishing their research? It would seem that if you are outside Saudi, then their censorship wouldn't apply. I could see how they prevent outsiders from conducting research, but from publishing their research? Seems that something must have been edited out because that doesn't make sense.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books.
I don't know who "they" are or if that is a true statement, but it doesn't matter. Price comparisons when discussion text books are meaningless because it isn't a free market. So yes, the iPad may be 1/2 the price, but only because the textbook manufactures inflate the cost of textbooks. There is no reason to believe that once ebooks have replaced textbooks for the majority of classrooms, that the pricing of ebooks will climb just as quickly as textbook pricing has.
Textbook publishers always say it is the high cost of printing the books that is the problem and yet, I can self publish and sell at a profit a 1000 page hardcover book for less than $35 using an online service in quantities of 10. One would think with the economies of scale a real publisher would have that $100+ textbooks have a lot of profit involved. I know the authors don't recieve it, but somebody does.
No, textbook prices are high, because it is a scam and there is no real competition. Once ebooks replace textbooks, those prices will rise, too. Supply and demand only works when there is a free market, which does not exists in education.
What exactly does it mean to "give" students ipads? Last I checked, the students are still charged a fee. It might be less than if they paid for textbooks, but the school is giving them an ipad as much as your insurance company gives you free meds by having you pay a reduced price for generic prescriptions. In short, nothing is free, so nothing is being given, the students are only being charged less for an ipad and ebooks than they would be for paper books.
I know that Lynn University is small (really, really small), but surely, they understand economics there, don't they?
They are fed a laboratory chow that is largely starch and sugar. It's not talking about wild animals.
It doesn't matter what they are fed unless the quantity of the feed has changed. Then the question would be why would every lab in the country have changed the quantity of food at the same time? Most likely it is not the type of food or the quantity that has changed but something else in the environment.
Same cause. They're eating too much. Over abundance of food and they have no concept of obesity or early death. There have been studies that have shown links between abundance of food, Obesity, early death and advanced genetic mutation. In short, in the wild, if you've got lots of food, you get fat and live even if you have a mild mutation. You have a better chance of passing on your mutated genes but as a trade off you die early which extends the abundance of food situation for your offspring.
That's not true. In the wild, if there is excess food, the animals don't get fat. Animals in the wild do not overeat, even with an abundance of food. They do, however, produce lots of babies when there is extra food. Those offspring consume the excess food causing a shortage and only the fittest survive the lack of food to pass on their genetic code. But again, in nature if there is excess food, animals do not over eat. They do, however, over populate.
Personally I'm a bit tired of all of these media invented excuses. If you're overweight in almost all cases with very few exceptions it's YOUR fault.
And the animals that are gaining weight, too? For instance, did we all of a sudden start overfeeding lab rats and lab mice? Did ferral dogs and cats all of a sudden start ignoring nature and quit eating when full? It's one thing for humans, it's another thing for the animals mentioned in the article.
Very simply food manufacturers removed the fat in the 70's and replaced it with huge amounts of sugar. The problem with sugar is the brain doesn't see it as nutrition thus it doesn't suppress your appetite when you eat sugar filled foods.
How would that explain the weight changes in the animals mentioned?
It's not really the stock market, but the shareholders/board of directors. As long as the company you create is privately held, you get to call the shots. Once it is public, the board of directors calls the shots. Your vision may have been "Don't be evil" theirs is "Make me money". The two don't necessarily coexist. They could, but usually don't.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago.
Rubbish! The fastest train (record) in 1910 was 210.2 km/h (131 mph) -- Germany. It's now 574.8 km/h (357 mph) -- France. The trains used for the latter record are modified TGV trains, to remove some of the safety limits.
For a whole journey: "As of 2007, a TGV service held the record for the fastest scheduled rail journey with a start to stop average speed of 279.4 km/h (173.6 mph)"
Also, government regulation and investment is what's led to zero passenger fatalities on trains in Britain in the last five years. Any accident, or "near miss", is investigated without trying to assign blame, but to identify how it can be prevented in the future.
I was referring to train speed in the US, I should have been more clear. The same with the comments about government regulations, those were directed at the US, too, and not with safety issues, but other regulations.
I am actually a proponent of high speed rail, it is a shame that the US, with supposedly the greatest economy and wealth of any nation can't get it done. It doesn't require any new technology, other smaller countries have already done the research and paved the way, we just refuse to do it.
Yes, wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power exist. However new nuclear plants in the US are pretty much at a stand still, so whether technological or political, there are obstacles preventing increased adoption. Of the others, hydro is the cheapest, but we have pretty much dammed up all of the available waterways that are sizeable enough to be used for energy production without causing some other negative issue. Wind and solar both suffer from the same problem, you can't increase capacity on demand. We have no control over when the wind blows or the sky is clear. To be effective, it needs to be reliable which means it needs to be available when we need it. So wind and solar, while they can supplement the power needs, are unlikely to be major providers anytime soon.
The real issue is not how much fossil fuel the railroads use. It's how much fossil fuel all the cars and trucks on the highways use. Whether railroad or barge or even the proposed hyperloop, they are all magnitudes more efficient than cars and trucks. Solve that problem and you solve 80% of the fossil fuel problem.
The problem is: diesel is either made of petroleum (a very limited resource) or biomass (which has a low Energy Return on Energy Invested ratio, and is also based on a limited resource: arable land). Electricity can be generated locally (nuclear, solar, wind, water, tide, geothermal etc) and fed into a decentralised grid. Nuclear uses a limited resource as well, this is true, however, a switch to thorium fuel would permit a fairly graceful transition out of fossil fuel to a solar based (Because wind and hydro are also solar energy) system.
To be viable, electricity production has to be reliable and scalable on demand. Wind, tides, etc. do not fit that bill. When loads increase, you can't make the wind blow or the tide come in. Those types of energy can supplement the power grid, but they can not sustain it. Nuclear, is fine, except when was the last nuclear plant built in the US, we simply aren't building them anymore, or in any real quantity, so nuclear is a non-starter. Geothermal would work if you actually have a source for it, and possibly solar in the right locations (otherwise it is like wind). With the exception of hydro electric, that leaves the majority of power in the US coming from coal, natural gas and oil fired power plants. All fossil based fuels.
So whether your locomotive gets it's electricity from it's on board diesel engine or overhead wires, it is still using fossil fuel to generate the electricity. Theoretically it should be cheaper to produce that electricity at a large electric plant and the locomotive get it from overhead wires. However, the maintenance of those overhead wires was prohibitively expensive and most electric lines converted to diesel. Even your local utility company doesn't want the maintenance cost of overhead lines and it doesn't need to have pantographs rubbing up against them at high speed adding to the maintenance woes.
Railroads have a bottom line to worry about. If it were more economical for them to run all electric compared to diesel-electric, they would run all electric. They don't however because the total cost of doing so outweighs the savings on diesel fuel.
You're complaining about safety regulations? The big bad government keeps fucking stuff up because it cares too much about people dying, eh? High speed rail in the US can't get up to genuinely high speeds because it's making use of old tracks which can't sustain those speeds. High speed rail in France and Japan manage just fine with their newer tracks, despite all that regulation weighing them down.
The reason why people like rail as a means of high speed transport is because you can move a large number of people relatively quickly and efficiently. If we didn't care about efficiency we could just keep using costly polluting planes to travel everywhere. This is in the hyperloop proposal, in fact - efficiency gains trail off at distances of greater than one thousand miles or so. He suggests sticking with planes to link cities that are further apart.
I said nothing about safety standards. Those aren't the regulations delaying it. It is the big bad government messing it up. The railroad right of ways have been there for 100 years. Cities then built up around them. If the state wants a highway to go through that area, the railroad needs to either relocate or build the overpass for the highway. As for high speeds, most rail in California is already welded rail on concrete ties rated for 150mph or greater. The NE is different, not because of the quality of rail, but the sharpness of curves. That is not an issue on the west coast.
I do agree, however, about the efficiency and high speed rail. As for the hyperloop, it is yet to be proven and most experts agree that the costs quoted are vastly understated, not to mention land acquisition. It is unlikely that the state will approve an 800mph missile in a tube above their freeways. While it is unlikely that something will go wrong, if it does, it would be catastrophic. Once you figure in land acquisition costs, the hyperloop quickly approaches the cost of high speed rail and that is before the environmental impact studies and everything else involved.
It is well documented that what has driven up California's high speed rail cost are political manipulations of the route along with land speculation. All of a sudden a worthless piece of property is valuable if it will force the railroad to go miles out of its way to get around it. There is no reason to expect the same thing would not happen with the hyperloop. Or, if it is permissible to have the hyperloop go down the median of the freeway, why not high speed rail?
between hyperloop and high speed rail is a false race. YES we need fast trains to move people. What we need MORE is an electrified rail grid to move our stuff around. Most trains run off diesel. The age of cheap oil has been over for quite a while now. We need to shift our infrastructure away from fossil fuels, sector by sector. Moving ALL mass transport (cargo or live, vacuum tube or rail) to electric is of paramount importance, and it needs to start happening now, this way when oil started getting really expensive and scarce in the coming decades, we will be able to transport food and goods. What I think we should see is someone haul 100 boxcars of food from California's central valley to New York City using ONLY electrical engines, no diesel. That would be a landmark moment in history and a real beacon of hope for a future to technical civilisation.
Unless you have figured out a way to get electricity out of the air, for the forseeable future, we are going to be using fossil fuel, whether it is to power a diesel engine to turn an alternator to run traction motors of a diesel train (that's all the engine does is turn either a generator or alternator to produce electricity) or that electricity comes from power plant, we are still burning some sort of fossil fuel. It will be a long time before solar and wind and other sources can replace fossil fuel plants.
While it may be more economical to generate electricity in a central point and then transmit it where needed, the maintenance of those transmission lines, particularly for thousands of miles of railroad track would more than offset the savings. Basically, railroads already did what you are proposing, 70 years ago, the only difference is that when they switched to electricity, they carry around diesel generators to supply it. That way, they don't have to rely on faulty transmission lines, brown outs, acts of nature, and a slew of other problems that would leave a train dead on the tracks. Yes, diesel fuel is expensive and will only get more expensive, but so with the production cost of all electricity.
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Well, then based on your question, the answer would be Musk's system, since it is all new and never been tried, there is ample opportunity to have cost overruns and blame it on the new technology that is paving the way for the future (whether that is true or not). The cost overruns with the high speed rail in California have nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with land acquisition costs and environmental impact studies causing delays. Musk tries to get around the land costs by proposing using the median down the interstate, one could run high speed rail down the median, too, at a significant cost savings. Musk will still have to deal with environmental impact studies and those costs and delays aren't figured in his optomistically low pricing.
High speed rail is not new it has been around for over 50 years in most ot Europe and Japan and is pretty much perfected. It is what the politicians and regulators are doing that are causing the problems with the project in CA. If you want affordable high speed rail, get the politicians out of it. Put differently, if you scrap high speed rail in favor of the hyperloop, there is no reason to expect that the politicians and regulators won't mess it up, either.
As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route. This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low. The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers. The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
The casinos have been pushing for high speed rail for years. Two obstacles - environmentalists and they want somebody else to pay for it. Other than that, they think its a great idea.
Yes, that's how the Europeans feel about it as well.
Not just the Europeans, but Asia, too. Pretty much the US is the only country that hasn't embraced high speed rail, something that has been available everywhere else for 50 years. Even the passenger trains of the 1920s ran faster than today's trains.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago. Now, if you remove all of the restrictions imposed by the government facing railroad then you level the playing field. In addition, it shouldn't be about getting 1 person there in 3 hours. What is more efficient, moving 1 or a small group of people from point a to point b in x amount of time or moving a large group of people from point a to point b?
The Concorde was very good at moving a small group of people from point a to b at a high speed, but it wasn't economically sustainable. The slower jumbo jets, because they could carry more passengers were actually more efficient. So, if your goal is to get a single person from point a to be as fast as you can, then neither high speed rail nor hyperloop are the way to go. Both would be a collosal waste of resources.
OTOH, if your goal is to move the most number of people from point a to b in a reasonably fixed period of time, then that is a different problem and would probably call for a different solution.
Basically, before throwing money at a problem, you should be sure you have defined the problem you want solved. Otherwise, you might just pay a lot of money for a solution that you don't really need.
If you alter and manipulate genes so humans could live forever, they won't be humans anymore. They would be something else. So, sure go out and destroy the human race and create a new species, but please, don't pretend that we would be talking about humans. Maybe this new species will even be so kind as to have wax figures of homosapiens along side Neanderthals in their museums. Or, maybe they will even keep a few homosapiens around to work in their factories and farms. Who knows, It will be a brave new world.
Everyone wants to live forever, but death is the natural way of selection within the species. If death was "cured" then the species would stagnate. Leadership would not change. Younger generations would continuously be stuck at the bottom of the heap (or, at least, in their place within the heap). Imagine working at the same job forever, never getting promoted or increased in pay. Now that wouldn't be eternal life. It'd be Hell.
Of course you realize that he only wants this "cure" for aging because he is at the top of the heap, in the so called 1% group. You don't think he has an altruistic motive where he would "cure" say all the people in India do you? The only people who promote living forever are those of means who don't believe there is anything after this life. Maybe they are correct, maybe not, but that is besides the point. You don't find many of the world's poor and suffering wishing to live forever.
But aging is a natural process. And most importantly, cells do not and cannot live indefinitely. The telomere on the ends of genes, that protect the genes, lose a little bit of structure every time a cell multiplies, so regardles of gene therepy or whatever, that cell will die. Nothing can prevent that natural process, which is why aging is not a disease, but a natural process.
If you want to spend billions of dollars on research, it might be better served on finding "cures" for the causes why many people have shortened lifes, such as malnutrition, lack of sanitation, poverty and of course violence and war.
So use something like a galaxy note 8, microsoft surface pro or any other tablet with an active pen and a wacom digitizer. Just because the VAST majority of tablets are crappy for notes does not mean that good ones don't exist.
Tablets can be great for notes. You just have to get one of the right ones.
I understand that there are tablets available that are capable of handling handwriting. However, is it reasonable to expect that every family is going to buy another tablet for each of their children to replace their existing one to get that capability, particularly when there is zero research to show that it would be any better then pencil and paper?
But that's exactly what I was talking about: you have to switch off stuff to make it work. Windows works out of the box with all effects (with the Aero blurry glass effect and all) and file indexing turned on, on an Atom machine.
It doesn't on an XP class machine. If you have a computer capable of running Windows Aero, then KDE should work fine on it. But the AC has commented on his (her?) machine was an old XP class machine. That would mean a single core processor with 512KB to 1MB ram. Windows Vista/7/8 might install on such a machine, but it won't run well on it. KDE will install on it and will run well, once you configure it for a low resource machine.
While your point is well taken, I would suggest that a study of the most successful graduates (we'd need to quantify this somehow) should be done, say 10-20 years after graduation. Identify groups who spent more time socializing than studying, and those who were bookworms, then see how they progressed over time. Just saying...I've seen a lot of successful people who weren't the brightest bulbs, and a lot of rocket scientists who didn't get that far ahead financially.
You would have so many variables to factor out that it would be impossible to do such a study. For instance, their socioeconomic background is going to have a lot more to say about their success than whether or not they were socializing versus studying.
It occurs to me that a tablet, with a stylus, and a good indexed note taking application *full screen* would be superior to pen-and-paper.
But that would necessitate *NOT* replying to e-mail and social media.
It might if you could have a stylus that would let you write as small and accurately as a pen or pencil would, but the stylus' that are common today that are about the size of one's finger hardly would facilitate good note taking. You could get more notes on a 3x5 index card with a pen than you can on an iPad with a stylus in real time (I'm not talking about sitting there and carefully writing things out on the iPad, I'm talking about taking notes in a lecture setting). Face it the touch screens on most tablets were not made for handwriting, but for gestures.
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Just out of curiousity, how do the Saudis prevent outside researchers from publishing their research? It would seem that if you are outside Saudi, then their censorship wouldn't apply. I could see how they prevent outsiders from conducting research, but from publishing their research? Seems that something must have been edited out because that doesn't make sense.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books.
I don't know who "they" are or if that is a true statement, but it doesn't matter. Price comparisons when discussion text books are meaningless because it isn't a free market. So yes, the iPad may be 1/2 the price, but only because the textbook manufactures inflate the cost of textbooks. There is no reason to believe that once ebooks have replaced textbooks for the majority of classrooms, that the pricing of ebooks will climb just as quickly as textbook pricing has.
Textbook publishers always say it is the high cost of printing the books that is the problem and yet, I can self publish and sell at a profit a 1000 page hardcover book for less than $35 using an online service in quantities of 10. One would think with the economies of scale a real publisher would have that $100+ textbooks have a lot of profit involved. I know the authors don't recieve it, but somebody does.
No, textbook prices are high, because it is a scam and there is no real competition. Once ebooks replace textbooks, those prices will rise, too. Supply and demand only works when there is a free market, which does not exists in education.
What exactly does it mean to "give" students ipads? Last I checked, the students are still charged a fee. It might be less than if they paid for textbooks, but the school is giving them an ipad as much as your insurance company gives you free meds by having you pay a reduced price for generic prescriptions. In short, nothing is free, so nothing is being given, the students are only being charged less for an ipad and ebooks than they would be for paper books.
I know that Lynn University is small (really, really small), but surely, they understand economics there, don't they?
They are fed a laboratory chow that is largely starch and sugar. It's not talking about wild animals.
It doesn't matter what they are fed unless the quantity of the feed has changed. Then the question would be why would every lab in the country have changed the quantity of food at the same time? Most likely it is not the type of food or the quantity that has changed but something else in the environment.
Same cause. They're eating too much. Over abundance of food and they have no concept of obesity or early death. There have been studies that have shown links between abundance of food, Obesity, early death and advanced genetic mutation. In short, in the wild, if you've got lots of food, you get fat and live even if you have a mild mutation. You have a better chance of passing on your mutated genes but as a trade off you die early which extends the abundance of food situation for your offspring.
That's not true. In the wild, if there is excess food, the animals don't get fat. Animals in the wild do not overeat, even with an abundance of food. They do, however, produce lots of babies when there is extra food. Those offspring consume the excess food causing a shortage and only the fittest survive the lack of food to pass on their genetic code. But again, in nature if there is excess food, animals do not over eat. They do, however, over populate.
Personally I'm a bit tired of all of these media invented excuses. If you're overweight in almost all cases with very few exceptions it's YOUR fault.
And the animals that are gaining weight, too? For instance, did we all of a sudden start overfeeding lab rats and lab mice? Did ferral dogs and cats all of a sudden start ignoring nature and quit eating when full? It's one thing for humans, it's another thing for the animals mentioned in the article.
Very simply food manufacturers removed the fat in the 70's and replaced it with huge amounts of sugar. The problem with sugar is the brain doesn't see it as nutrition thus it doesn't suppress your appetite when you eat sugar filled foods.
How would that explain the weight changes in the animals mentioned?
Concorde was never designed to complete with large jumbos, it was always going to be a premium way to travel.
As will be the hyperloop, if it ever gets built.
The stock market kills companies.
It's not really the stock market, but the shareholders/board of directors. As long as the company you create is privately held, you get to call the shots. Once it is public, the board of directors calls the shots. Your vision may have been "Don't be evil" theirs is "Make me money". The two don't necessarily coexist. They could, but usually don't.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago.
Rubbish! The fastest train (record) in 1910 was 210.2 km/h (131 mph) -- Germany. It's now 574.8 km/h (357 mph) -- France. The trains used for the latter record are modified TGV trains, to remove some of the safety limits.
For a whole journey: "As of 2007, a TGV service held the record for the fastest scheduled rail journey with a start to stop average speed of 279.4 km/h (173.6 mph)"
Also, government regulation and investment is what's led to zero passenger fatalities on trains in Britain in the last five years. Any accident, or "near miss", is investigated without trying to assign blame, but to identify how it can be prevented in the future.
I was referring to train speed in the US, I should have been more clear. The same with the comments about government regulations, those were directed at the US, too, and not with safety issues, but other regulations.
I am actually a proponent of high speed rail, it is a shame that the US, with supposedly the greatest economy and wealth of any nation can't get it done. It doesn't require any new technology, other smaller countries have already done the research and paved the way, we just refuse to do it.
Yes, wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power exist. However new nuclear plants in the US are pretty much at a stand still, so whether technological or political, there are obstacles preventing increased adoption. Of the others, hydro is the cheapest, but we have pretty much dammed up all of the available waterways that are sizeable enough to be used for energy production without causing some other negative issue. Wind and solar both suffer from the same problem, you can't increase capacity on demand. We have no control over when the wind blows or the sky is clear. To be effective, it needs to be reliable which means it needs to be available when we need it. So wind and solar, while they can supplement the power needs, are unlikely to be major providers anytime soon.
The real issue is not how much fossil fuel the railroads use. It's how much fossil fuel all the cars and trucks on the highways use. Whether railroad or barge or even the proposed hyperloop, they are all magnitudes more efficient than cars and trucks. Solve that problem and you solve 80% of the fossil fuel problem.
The problem is: diesel is either made of petroleum (a very limited resource) or biomass (which has a low Energy Return on Energy Invested ratio, and is also based on a limited resource: arable land). Electricity can be generated locally (nuclear, solar, wind, water, tide, geothermal etc) and fed into a decentralised grid. Nuclear uses a limited resource as well, this is true, however, a switch to thorium fuel would permit a fairly graceful transition out of fossil fuel to a solar based (Because wind and hydro are also solar energy) system.
To be viable, electricity production has to be reliable and scalable on demand. Wind, tides, etc. do not fit that bill. When loads increase, you can't make the wind blow or the tide come in. Those types of energy can supplement the power grid, but they can not sustain it. Nuclear, is fine, except when was the last nuclear plant built in the US, we simply aren't building them anymore, or in any real quantity, so nuclear is a non-starter. Geothermal would work if you actually have a source for it, and possibly solar in the right locations (otherwise it is like wind). With the exception of hydro electric, that leaves the majority of power in the US coming from coal, natural gas and oil fired power plants. All fossil based fuels.
So whether your locomotive gets it's electricity from it's on board diesel engine or overhead wires, it is still using fossil fuel to generate the electricity. Theoretically it should be cheaper to produce that electricity at a large electric plant and the locomotive get it from overhead wires. However, the maintenance of those overhead wires was prohibitively expensive and most electric lines converted to diesel. Even your local utility company doesn't want the maintenance cost of overhead lines and it doesn't need to have pantographs rubbing up against them at high speed adding to the maintenance woes.
Railroads have a bottom line to worry about. If it were more economical for them to run all electric compared to diesel-electric, they would run all electric. They don't however because the total cost of doing so outweighs the savings on diesel fuel.
You're complaining about safety regulations? The big bad government keeps fucking stuff up because it cares too much about people dying, eh? High speed rail in the US can't get up to genuinely high speeds because it's making use of old tracks which can't sustain those speeds. High speed rail in France and Japan manage just fine with their newer tracks, despite all that regulation weighing them down.
The reason why people like rail as a means of high speed transport is because you can move a large number of people relatively quickly and efficiently. If we didn't care about efficiency we could just keep using costly polluting planes to travel everywhere. This is in the hyperloop proposal, in fact - efficiency gains trail off at distances of greater than one thousand miles or so. He suggests sticking with planes to link cities that are further apart.
I said nothing about safety standards. Those aren't the regulations delaying it. It is the big bad government messing it up. The railroad right of ways have been there for 100 years. Cities then built up around them. If the state wants a highway to go through that area, the railroad needs to either relocate or build the overpass for the highway. As for high speeds, most rail in California is already welded rail on concrete ties rated for 150mph or greater. The NE is different, not because of the quality of rail, but the sharpness of curves. That is not an issue on the west coast.
I do agree, however, about the efficiency and high speed rail. As for the hyperloop, it is yet to be proven and most experts agree that the costs quoted are vastly understated, not to mention land acquisition. It is unlikely that the state will approve an 800mph missile in a tube above their freeways. While it is unlikely that something will go wrong, if it does, it would be catastrophic. Once you figure in land acquisition costs, the hyperloop quickly approaches the cost of high speed rail and that is before the environmental impact studies and everything else involved.
It is well documented that what has driven up California's high speed rail cost are political manipulations of the route along with land speculation. All of a sudden a worthless piece of property is valuable if it will force the railroad to go miles out of its way to get around it. There is no reason to expect the same thing would not happen with the hyperloop. Or, if it is permissible to have the hyperloop go down the median of the freeway, why not high speed rail?
between hyperloop and high speed rail is a false race. YES we need fast trains to move people. What we need MORE is an electrified rail grid to move our stuff around. Most trains run off diesel. The age of cheap oil has been over for quite a while now. We need to shift our infrastructure away from fossil fuels, sector by sector. Moving ALL mass transport (cargo or live, vacuum tube or rail) to electric is of paramount importance, and it needs to start happening now, this way when oil started getting really expensive and scarce in the coming decades, we will be able to transport food and goods. What I think we should see is someone haul 100 boxcars of food from California's central valley to New York City using ONLY electrical engines, no diesel. That would be a landmark moment in history and a real beacon of hope for a future to technical civilisation.
Unless you have figured out a way to get electricity out of the air, for the forseeable future, we are going to be using fossil fuel, whether it is to power a diesel engine to turn an alternator to run traction motors of a diesel train (that's all the engine does is turn either a generator or alternator to produce electricity) or that electricity comes from power plant, we are still burning some sort of fossil fuel. It will be a long time before solar and wind and other sources can replace fossil fuel plants.
While it may be more economical to generate electricity in a central point and then transmit it where needed, the maintenance of those transmission lines, particularly for thousands of miles of railroad track would more than offset the savings. Basically, railroads already did what you are proposing, 70 years ago, the only difference is that when they switched to electricity, they carry around diesel generators to supply it. That way, they don't have to rely on faulty transmission lines, brown outs, acts of nature, and a slew of other problems that would leave a train dead on the tracks. Yes, diesel fuel is expensive and will only get more expensive, but so with the production cost of all electricity.
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Well, then based on your question, the answer would be Musk's system, since it is all new and never been tried, there is ample opportunity to have cost overruns and blame it on the new technology that is paving the way for the future (whether that is true or not). The cost overruns with the high speed rail in California have nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with land acquisition costs and environmental impact studies causing delays. Musk tries to get around the land costs by proposing using the median down the interstate, one could run high speed rail down the median, too, at a significant cost savings. Musk will still have to deal with environmental impact studies and those costs and delays aren't figured in his optomistically low pricing.
High speed rail is not new it has been around for over 50 years in most ot Europe and Japan and is pretty much perfected. It is what the politicians and regulators are doing that are causing the problems with the project in CA. If you want affordable high speed rail, get the politicians out of it. Put differently, if you scrap high speed rail in favor of the hyperloop, there is no reason to expect that the politicians and regulators won't mess it up, either.
As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route.
This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low.
The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers.
The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
The casinos have been pushing for high speed rail for years. Two obstacles - environmentalists and they want somebody else to pay for it. Other than that, they think its a great idea.
They are both a waste of money.
Yes, that's how the Europeans feel about it as well.
Not just the Europeans, but Asia, too. Pretty much the US is the only country that hasn't embraced high speed rail, something that has been available everywhere else for 50 years. Even the passenger trains of the 1920s ran faster than today's trains.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago. Now, if you remove all of the restrictions imposed by the government facing railroad then you level the playing field. In addition, it shouldn't be about getting 1 person there in 3 hours. What is more efficient, moving 1 or a small group of people from point a to point b in x amount of time or moving a large group of people from point a to point b?
The Concorde was very good at moving a small group of people from point a to b at a high speed, but it wasn't economically sustainable. The slower jumbo jets, because they could carry more passengers were actually more efficient. So, if your goal is to get a single person from point a to be as fast as you can, then neither high speed rail nor hyperloop are the way to go. Both would be a collosal waste of resources.
OTOH, if your goal is to move the most number of people from point a to b in a reasonably fixed period of time, then that is a different problem and would probably call for a different solution.
Basically, before throwing money at a problem, you should be sure you have defined the problem you want solved. Otherwise, you might just pay a lot of money for a solution that you don't really need.
If you alter and manipulate genes so humans could live forever, they won't be humans anymore. They would be something else. So, sure go out and destroy the human race and create a new species, but please, don't pretend that we would be talking about humans. Maybe this new species will even be so kind as to have wax figures of homosapiens along side Neanderthals in their museums. Or, maybe they will even keep a few homosapiens around to work in their factories and farms. Who knows, It will be a brave new world.
Everyone wants to live forever, but death is the natural way of selection within the species. If death was "cured" then the species would stagnate. Leadership would not change. Younger generations would continuously be stuck at the bottom of the heap (or, at least, in their place within the heap). Imagine working at the same job forever, never getting promoted or increased in pay. Now that wouldn't be eternal life. It'd be Hell.
Of course you realize that he only wants this "cure" for aging because he is at the top of the heap, in the so called 1% group. You don't think he has an altruistic motive where he would "cure" say all the people in India do you? The only people who promote living forever are those of means who don't believe there is anything after this life. Maybe they are correct, maybe not, but that is besides the point. You don't find many of the world's poor and suffering wishing to live forever.
But aging is a natural process. And most importantly, cells do not and cannot live indefinitely. The telomere on the ends of genes, that protect the genes, lose a little bit of structure every time a cell multiplies, so regardles of gene therepy or whatever, that cell will die. Nothing can prevent that natural process, which is why aging is not a disease, but a natural process.
If you want to spend billions of dollars on research, it might be better served on finding "cures" for the causes why many people have shortened lifes, such as malnutrition, lack of sanitation, poverty and of course violence and war.
So use something like a galaxy note 8, microsoft surface pro or any other tablet with an active pen and a wacom digitizer. Just because the VAST majority of tablets are crappy for notes does not mean that good ones don't exist.
Tablets can be great for notes. You just have to get one of the right ones.
I understand that there are tablets available that are capable of handling handwriting. However, is it reasonable to expect that every family is going to buy another tablet for each of their children to replace their existing one to get that capability, particularly when there is zero research to show that it would be any better then pencil and paper?
But that's exactly what I was talking about: you have to switch off stuff to make it work. Windows works out of the box with all effects (with the Aero blurry glass effect and all) and file indexing turned on, on an Atom machine.
It doesn't on an XP class machine. If you have a computer capable of running Windows Aero, then KDE should work fine on it. But the AC has commented on his (her?) machine was an old XP class machine. That would mean a single core processor with 512KB to 1MB ram. Windows Vista/7/8 might install on such a machine, but it won't run well on it. KDE will install on it and will run well, once you configure it for a low resource machine.
While your point is well taken, I would suggest that a study of the most successful graduates (we'd need to quantify this somehow) should be done, say 10-20 years after graduation. Identify groups who spent more time socializing than studying, and those who were bookworms, then see how they progressed over time. Just saying...I've seen a lot of successful people who weren't the brightest bulbs, and a lot of rocket scientists who didn't get that far ahead financially.
You would have so many variables to factor out that it would be impossible to do such a study. For instance, their socioeconomic background is going to have a lot more to say about their success than whether or not they were socializing versus studying.
It occurs to me that a tablet, with a stylus, and a good indexed note taking application *full screen* would be superior to pen-and-paper.
But that would necessitate *NOT* replying to e-mail and social media.
It might if you could have a stylus that would let you write as small and accurately as a pen or pencil would, but the stylus' that are common today that are about the size of one's finger hardly would facilitate good note taking. You could get more notes on a 3x5 index card with a pen than you can on an iPad with a stylus in real time (I'm not talking about sitting there and carefully writing things out on the iPad, I'm talking about taking notes in a lecture setting). Face it the touch screens on most tablets were not made for handwriting, but for gestures.