I note a lot of govt govt govt politician in your post. Wake me when a local newspaper does a shocking expose on their advertisers, like the local real estate criminals, or the used car dealers, or the local food stores.
I don't really need journalists to tell me political party A is full of crooks, because 1) political party B is thrilled to tell me all about how crooked party A is 2) both sides are equally full of crooks 3) I have no input on the matter, its not like I have an option for non-crooked govt, or an option to have a representative govt. Thats just not an option.
Alan D. Mutter writes that with a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it.
Mutter's smart, but he's got it wrong. Mutter's assuming the product is a constant stable commodity but the real story is how its changing. The strategy first has to focus on what you wanna make and distribute (based partially on what ad contracts you can sell). Then, and only then, can you decide what strategy to push product.
For example, my local fishwrap has all but given up on reporting news. Why bother, in this era? Every 2-3 years they fire 50% of the remaining reporters and editors. What they are moving into is bulk daily spam delivery. A big ole wad of catalogs and flyers and coupons every day with special bulk on Sunday delivery.
One of their competitor newspapers has gone from complimentary copy / humor / comics / and some spam to ultra hard core local entertainment news. Every little bar or tavern that has more than 2 stools seems to have an ad or coupon or report in there. Every garage band who has more than 4 fans (the member's moms) has detailed reports on exactly where and when they're playing. Aiming hard for the 22 year old urban drinker. The other "adult" paper has all the refrigerator advertisements and adult diaper advertisements.
Another competitor newspaper here is shipping product hard on the green thing. Basically complimentary copy for scam health products that just barely avoid FDA legal issues (so Tai Chi won't cure your cancer, but it will reshape your bodys malformed chakra flows and realign your pelvis or whatever). So their product is complimentary copy along the lines of you're green; we're green; we're all green; we all read green spam together.
So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to push local entertainment news... doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out "farm it" works best, I have no use for drink specials in a bar 120 miles away, but spam about the bar 2 miles away is vaguely interesting to me, or would be if I was a drinker. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to be a bulk spam delivery service... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you milk it, just like "direct mail marketing" except you have no relationship w/ the post office. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to basically be a printed infomercial for one (or a couple) products with a distinct non-common man slant... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you feed it, so you can afford to give your periodical spam-vertisement away at every health food store in the area, maybe one copy in every recycled hemp shopping bag at every vegan organic health food store...
Oh, you want to publish a traditional newspaper? Oh that strategy is simple, you just go out of business. Kind of like family farming, got a million bucks? Just keep on farming until its all gone. Maybe ask for govt handout?
publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry
What, never? Locally they're milking it. The physical paper version is a spam delivery service with some stereotypical human interest stories that I'm not interested in and some traditional "journalism" that I'm also uninterested in (horoscopes, local event boosterism/complimentary copy, etc), and some AP news items from a couple days ago to fill unsold ad space. They will not stop delivering spam until mailed paper spam stops, maybe even after. The online version I guess delivers spam (I use a ad blocker, I don't even know) but primarily seems to make its money off pageviews of "comments" which are nothing other than paid political sloganeering where paid political operatives sling tired old slogans at each other as a form of spam.
The cash cow is, give us money, and we'll print your spam and deliver it all over our local geographic quasi-monopoly, I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. Their competitors are US postal mail and direct-mail-spam-services using US postal mail to deliver one pitch per envelope/postcard. Also there are aggregator competitors who mail envelopes stuffed full of coupons and spam and flyers in bulk from multiple companies rather than one promo at a time. Finally there are the special interest papers who will never die, the local free entertainment rag full of which band is playing at which bar and which bar has ladies night on which night, and the occasional political axe to grind slant paper.
Here's the formula. Get ad contracts with Best Buy / Verizon ATT whatever / local car dealers / Target / walmart / local stores if any remain in business. Surround with some fishwrap, containing a cute picture of a puppy or some kid, fill empty space with AP news articles from a couple days ago, print a zillion copies, hand deliver the spam and spam-envelope to approximately one third of local homes.
What is the advantage? Why can't they just burn the natrual gas to make the electricity instead of turning a compressor to compress gas to turn a turbine
Latency and cost.
A 1 MW air turbine is cheaper than a 1 MW natgas turbine, but depressingly not much cheaper. Temps are lower so you can use cheaper alloys / spin it faster and you don't have to deal with igniters and gas injection. I'm sure it ends up being about the same cost in the end as just storing natgas in the tank and burning it.
The latency is a big deal. I would imagine there is backlash in the gearing that limits reaction speed to "fraction of a second but probably a lot longer than half a 60 hz cycle". So if a gust front simultaneously hits every windmill in TX the valve can slam shut, or if a miles long alien space ship instantly warps in and shades all the solar panels in TX the air valve can slam open.
Natgas turbines react a bit slower. Fast, but not as fast as an air valve.
Depends how adiabatic the whole system can be made. Needs to be terribly well insulated to store the heat of compression. Dieseling the lube oil inside the compressor pistons is probably the limiting temp on the hot end.
Water storage loss is very low, evap and leakage. Compressed air heats up and you need that heat to stay in the tank or you lose the energy.
Also your example of 85% in and 90% out seems a bit messed up since.85*.90 is about 76.5% which compares favorably to your pneumatic air storage system.
Non-adiabatic systems like pneumatic control systems used in factories etc are ridiculously inefficient. You end up with a 10 HP compressor output an effective 1/4 HP of "machine". No one is seriously suggesting non-adiabatic systems, like house or car or factory size.
Very true, but if the total number of accidents decreases, is this important?
Hmm. That was my point. It'll make driving during pre-accident conditions more difficult therefore more accidents. During stressful situations you have to add the extra dimension of "who's driving" and "I have yet another thing other than myself to blame if it goes wrong" and "This might be dumb, but if I have no computer, their computer will none the less prevent the accident"
it takes more or less the same amount of energy to accelerate from 3,000 to 3,050 mph (4,828 to 4,908 km/h) as it takes to get from 50 to 100 mph (80 to 161 km/h)
No, kinetic energy goes with the square of velocity. So to accellerate from 3000 to 3050 mph takes as much as to get from 0 to 550 mph. The rest of the article may be interesting, but it's strange they make errors like that.
They obviously thought of momentum. However your analysis is wrong in that it has the danger of the old aether problem because there is no magical motionless reference state.
Think about it... When I drive to work the surface of the earth is rotating about 1000 MPH east under me, so I'm actually driving east at 1075 MPH every morning and driving home by driving 925 MPH east every night. My car should have a measurably faster 0-60 time and measurably better MPG going west than it does going east but it does not...
A rocket for instance always gets a delta-V of 4000 MPH when it burns 1000 pounds of fuel, in this made up example of pitifully poor Isp value. It does not magically "know" its supposed to burn more fuel to get that delta-V in different directions. A rocket in a frictionless levitated airless underground tube is not much different than a rocket in earth orbit. Any given delta-V of 400 MPH will always require a delta-mass of 100 exactly pounds of fuel regardless of direction. The delta-V of a rocket depends solely on Isp (performance) and mass burned, any existing momentum vector doesn't matter.
How long would it take for workers to actually travel to the middle of a tunnel to get said leaks fixed?
Not only do you not need to limit yourself to one (or two) holes, its actually better to drill as many as possible. This is as true in mine and tunnel engineering as it is true in pr0n.
I can't imagine any sort of high speed mag lev line will have any sort of real earth quake tolerance, but maybe I'm wrong
Yes, you're wrong, and if you'd thought for a few seconds, you would have realized it. Japan does just fine with their bullet trains, despite having plenty of earthquakes.
Come on AC, don't be a jerk, explain why. The reason why earthquakes don't matter in civilized country with trains is data travels around the speed of light (well, Vp correction factor, but pretty GD fast) and earthquake waves travel at the speed of sound in rocks (well actually compression waves go a different speed that transverse waves but whatever). The point is the ratio is ridiculous. So you have earthquake sensors everywhere including deep in mines and wells and even in worst case scenarios you can get warning minutes before the quake hits the train (no kidding). Now 4000 MPH is faster than sonic so if you're headed away you ignore it, the wave isn't going to hit until long after you arrive at destination. If headed toward, well you got issues, but 4000-0 is not really all that long. A spacecraft like the shuttle never peaked above 3 G but went 0 to 18000 in what 9 minutes or something? So if you're willing to risk 10G I think you can stop pretty darn quick.
Its the same reasoning why satellites save lives in hurricane areas... yes the satellite is much further away than the hurricane, but even so, the radio waves get to the shore long before the hurricane arrives...
you could probably get maglev down to $500,000 per km
LOL, no you could not. Lets look at a nice unpressurized low speed shallow ultra low tech project, Boston's "big dig". Thats 14.6 billion dollars for 5.6 kilometers for a mere cost of 2.6 billion dollars per kilometer. And you think you're going to build an evacuated hypersonic deep modern high tech ultra high speed train for a fifth of that. Well.... good luck with that. Maybe you mistyped and meant 500 billion dollars per KM, which is not too far out of line for a superconducting particle accelerator? At 4000 KM from NYC to LA (roughly) thats a ridiculous amount of money, enough to buy each human being currently in the USA a midrange bizjet.
The article mentions this... the problem is, it sets up a false dichotomy. The options aren't no vacuum trains or ones that go at 4k mph... there is a whole range of speeds that these trains could be effective and efficient, and not all will turn passengers into goo if it crashes.
Sadly in this case, no. You can't financially handle the R+D and building costs to make this thing and plod along at 100 MPH like the Milwaukee to Chicago run does today. Also cannot operate at a mere 500 MPH like a aircraft given the high costs. So you need to run over 500 MPH. The effects on the passengers of a derailment at 550 MPH are not likely to be a lot better than derailment at 4000 MPH. Sort of like how falling 10 stories off a building doesn't turn out ten times better than falling 100 stories.
Because the simple-minded mythology that people create for themselves is just that: feel-good pseudo-engineering that makes no sense whatsoever.
For an AC that was a brilliant post. However a little brief. As a "real engineer" who can do estimation and think thru technical problems the biggest problem is the vacuum tube is a waste of money and time and land. For a much smaller scale example you could reduce the "indicated air speed" as a pilot would call it of the TGV in France merely by installing gigawatts worth of walmart kitchen fans pointing such that the train gets a nice tailwind. However if you run the numbers it turns out you can get the same performance increase with merely megawatts of extra train power. Similarly, you could invest in terawatts of distributed vacuum pumps, but it turns out you can go just as fast merely by using gigawatts of train power...
Generally speaking in engineering making the immense part more expensive to make the little part cheaper doesn't pay off, for sufficient value of immense. For example, it turns out to be way the heck cheaper to make a long distance transmission line HVDC than to upgrade every tower long the route higher dielectric strength and taller and bigger footings etc etc. To a crude first approximation this is why sea transport is cheaper per ton-mile than train transport. Another example in the US outside hyperurbanized areas its cheaper to buy each user a taxi and taxi driver than to build passenger rail. I like trains and I like riding in trains but even I realize they're an economic disaster.
In fact it turns out to be cheaper to build a self-levitating and self propelling vehicle than to build a really long and terribly complicated track. I think I shall call my new invention the aeroplane.
The other problem is economic. Any 4000 MPH solution is terrifyingly expensive, so even zero interest expense makes it horrendously expensive. If you can get it cheaper than merely hiring someone far away, or booting up a PC running skype... For example, even during the Concorde era it didn't make financial sense to ship a salesman between NYC and London on the Concorde, it turns out to be cheaper to simply open a sales office in both cities and hire staff in each. Somehow this tremendously more expensive solution is supposed to work even better under conditions where cheaper solutions miserably failed?
A learning curve? That sounds like a brick wall. The concept of HJKL doesn't translate well at all. Do dvorak VI users remap to HTNS, which has other side effects such as needing to remap them too?
Wrong translation direction, this going from signs to speech so a deaf person doesn't have to carry a txt2speech or a notepad and pen or learn to speak (yes deaf people can learn to speak, like one of my friends did, confuses the hell out of people who assume being able to speak means being able to hear)
Another thing is one of my kids former school teachers worked her way thru school in the opposite direction translating speech to signs. The general impression I got was it was much closer to the fry cook pay level than the $20 claimed above. You can get $20 if you have deep technical knowledge and translate tech docs from english to Chinese, or if you have a security clearance and know Arabic or other ME languages, but...
No need for new infrastructure, just post it as a project euler problem and when you "win" the blog/psuedowiki thing has a link to the torrent file for a collection of his books... I've uh, heard, that such a torrent exists.
Seriously though I've also heard second hand that if you really want to piss off Mr Gibson all you have to do it tell him you love his book iconic genre defining cyberpunk book "snowcrash". At least thats what I've heard. If you don't get the joke, if you ask people the name of a cyberpunk author then family feud style 90% of them will say Gibson but if you ask them their favorite cyberpunk novel a majority will say "snowcrash" which was actually written by Stephenson. I like Gibson's novels too, this is just funny how people assume the awesomest book must have been written by the awesomest author.
There's X active employees around the time of the crime and that crime earns a Y month prison term if a mere citizen did it instead of a corp. There are practical issues with sending individuals to prison, but GOOG could hire/outsource A number of unemployed and/or homeless people to attend prison in their employees place for B months where X*Y = A*B and the monthly "wage" of attending prison as an honorary GOOG employee floats as a free market but never declines below 40 hours a week at minimum wage. "Inmate employees" legally required to get the same benefits as non inmate employees. Its crazy, but not too crazy.
I would imagine, since you're only being paid while you attend prison, security at corporate prison would be pretty light and cheap other than keeping the scum from killing each other. Build next to a hospital because plenty of uninsured will be signing up to be goog employees, build next to a college (and GED high school) since many inmates would like to learn while incarcerated and they've got a guaranteed income, build next to a gym because many inmates are fat, build next to a detox center because many volunteer inmates will be there because of addiction, build next to a mental hospital because many homeless are completely nuts...
There is a political desire, by some anyway, to drug test welfare recipients. Well, as GOOG employees, voluntary inmates would have to pass a drug screen like any other employee, I suppose. Some employers don't drug screen. Whatever. I donno about prison life, but don't they drug test "inside"?
This also works around the hire and fire issues, where if the Mighty GOOG hired me next week, there seems no point in imprisoning me if I had nothing to do with it.
Has anyone ever tried (cost of imprisonment per year) * (number of officers, or number of employees).
Supposedly it costs $70K per prisoner per year (hmm, I bet it depends where and what security level) so 22.5 million is 321 person-years of prison. That seems a little excessive since you can kill someone and only get a decade or so... I'm not sure the GOOGs action is quite up to the mass murderer level.
It would make a hell of a lot more sense to give corporations probation, and charge them an amount of money which goes directly to the budget of the applicable regulatory agency... so $22.5 M extra dollars devoted to "double secret probation" watching the Mighty GOOG even closer.
If Google had to teach a certain number of man-years in IT lessons in public schools it would be a deterrent to Google and a benefit to education.
OK, your punishment makes sense for the Mighty GOOG, but what if you wanted to punish Microsoft? Having them "teach" kids is just going to screw the kids up even worse. Also "real programmers" don't have degrees, but public schools require not just bachelors but masters legally to teach.
Now what would work, is using existing community service programs. The corp has to provide 200000 paid hours of recyclables sorting, soup kitchen labor, park and roadside cleanup labor, etc. Emphasis on paid hours. Most corps such as mine already demand workers put in completely unpaid "volunteer" hours as part of our jobs, part of our official job evaluations.
... like most corporate fines, the number seems absurdly low. $22.5 million is about 0.06% (not 6%, 0.06%, six hundredths of a percent) of Google's 2011 revenue. This would be equivalent to fining the average person about twenty bucks,...
That's not $20 a person like you say, thats like $1 million per actual real world Safari user.
Seriously it might ship, but does anyone actually use it? Kind of like "notepad.exe" is theoretically the worlds most widely deployed word processor but no one really uses it. I'd like to see some stats on how many people they were tracking with this. The comparison you're looking for is every victim we track theoretically earns us $10 in revenue per year (optimistically) but the fine works out to 100 years of profits at $1000 per track. Hmm I think that might be an unprofitable line of business, lets put the money toward the "save the igoogle" charity fund instead.
I'm old enough to have had that very argument during the original SQL slammer infestation and the replies were along these lines: 1) Who cares, security costs money but insecurity is free, or free PR advertising anyway. 2) Thats just one bug, one time, I'm sure its completely secure now 3) Webservers were not originally built to be secure, but they pitifully bolted some security on and no one blinks at putting them bare on the net, so why worry about putting something originally designed to be secure on the net? 4) False sense of security means behind the firewall we'll get owned 10 times more often than if we stay paranoid and keep it on the public "dmz". The eternal crunchy outside and soft chewy inside argument. Who knows more about making a DB secure, a DBA or a firewall dweeb? So lets place it on the net and trust the DBA. 5) 99.9999% of databases getting powned are due to no input sanitizing and buffer overruns and other epic programming fails by those idiot web guys, so we may as well place the mysql server open on the net anyway since the web guys leave the barn door wide open almost all the time anyway. 6) Our hard coded back door password in the webserver executable closed source app is "password" so I think having the server outside is the least of our concerns. (prioritization)
I know I'm guilty of recycling a generic password on sites I don't care about, but I fear that my family members are even worse. I'd say there's an 80% chance that my family recycles the same password on both social and banking sites
I have one password for each class of security. Ultra critical life savings depends on it has one which is only used on two sites anyway. Then there's/. and sites like it which has another "I can't lose money, but I'd be pissed if someone stole my account" password. Finally "I can't believe these morons force me to create an account for their cruddy site F those idiots the password for moron sites is password123"
I believe that websites that demand account creation when there is no need to create an account, like to order stuff, or view pages, are a social disease that should be stamped out. Aggressively if necessary. Not because one POS automotive parts site demanding I "create an account" just to make a single item purchase one time in my life is inherently evil, but because making a billion people make hundreds of accounts each, many of which will be stolen IS evil. This is no different than the argument where "if I occasionally accidentally dump out a little used motor oil its no big deal, but if the whole planet dumped all their used oil, it would be a freaking disaster"
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I note a lot of govt govt govt politician in your post. Wake me when a local newspaper does a shocking expose on their advertisers, like the local real estate criminals, or the used car dealers, or the local food stores.
I don't really need journalists to tell me political party A is full of crooks, because
1) political party B is thrilled to tell me all about how crooked party A is
2) both sides are equally full of crooks
3) I have no input on the matter, its not like I have an option for non-crooked govt, or an option to have a representative govt. Thats just not an option.
Alan D. Mutter writes that with a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it.
Mutter's smart, but he's got it wrong. Mutter's assuming the product is a constant stable commodity but the real story is how its changing. The strategy first has to focus on what you wanna make and distribute (based partially on what ad contracts you can sell). Then, and only then, can you decide what strategy to push product.
For example, my local fishwrap has all but given up on reporting news. Why bother, in this era? Every 2-3 years they fire 50% of the remaining reporters and editors. What they are moving into is bulk daily spam delivery. A big ole wad of catalogs and flyers and coupons every day with special bulk on Sunday delivery.
One of their competitor newspapers has gone from complimentary copy / humor / comics / and some spam to ultra hard core local entertainment news. Every little bar or tavern that has more than 2 stools seems to have an ad or coupon or report in there. Every garage band who has more than 4 fans (the member's moms) has detailed reports on exactly where and when they're playing. Aiming hard for the 22 year old urban drinker. The other "adult" paper has all the refrigerator advertisements and adult diaper advertisements.
Another competitor newspaper here is shipping product hard on the green thing. Basically complimentary copy for scam health products that just barely avoid FDA legal issues (so Tai Chi won't cure your cancer, but it will reshape your bodys malformed chakra flows and realign your pelvis or whatever). So their product is complimentary copy along the lines of you're green; we're green; we're all green; we all read green spam together.
So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to push local entertainment news... doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out "farm it" works best, I have no use for drink specials in a bar 120 miles away, but spam about the bar 2 miles away is vaguely interesting to me, or would be if I was a drinker. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to be a bulk spam delivery service... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you milk it, just like "direct mail marketing" except you have no relationship w/ the post office. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to basically be a printed infomercial for one (or a couple) products with a distinct non-common man slant... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you feed it, so you can afford to give your periodical spam-vertisement away at every health food store in the area, maybe one copy in every recycled hemp shopping bag at every vegan organic health food store...
Oh, you want to publish a traditional newspaper? Oh that strategy is simple, you just go out of business. Kind of like family farming, got a million bucks? Just keep on farming until its all gone. Maybe ask for govt handout?
publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry
What, never? Locally they're milking it. The physical paper version is a spam delivery service with some stereotypical human interest stories that I'm not interested in and some traditional "journalism" that I'm also uninterested in (horoscopes, local event boosterism/complimentary copy, etc), and some AP news items from a couple days ago to fill unsold ad space. They will not stop delivering spam until mailed paper spam stops, maybe even after. The online version I guess delivers spam (I use a ad blocker, I don't even know) but primarily seems to make its money off pageviews of "comments" which are nothing other than paid political sloganeering where paid political operatives sling tired old slogans at each other as a form of spam.
The cash cow is, give us money, and we'll print your spam and deliver it all over our local geographic quasi-monopoly, I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. Their competitors are US postal mail and direct-mail-spam-services using US postal mail to deliver one pitch per envelope/postcard. Also there are aggregator competitors who mail envelopes stuffed full of coupons and spam and flyers in bulk from multiple companies rather than one promo at a time. Finally there are the special interest papers who will never die, the local free entertainment rag full of which band is playing at which bar and which bar has ladies night on which night, and the occasional political axe to grind slant paper.
Here's the formula. Get ad contracts with Best Buy / Verizon ATT whatever / local car dealers / Target / walmart / local stores if any remain in business. Surround with some fishwrap, containing a cute picture of a puppy or some kid, fill empty space with AP news articles from a couple days ago, print a zillion copies, hand deliver the spam and spam-envelope to approximately one third of local homes.
What is the advantage? Why can't they just burn the natrual gas to make the electricity instead of turning a compressor to compress gas to turn a turbine
Latency and cost.
A 1 MW air turbine is cheaper than a 1 MW natgas turbine, but depressingly not much cheaper. Temps are lower so you can use cheaper alloys / spin it faster and you don't have to deal with igniters and gas injection. I'm sure it ends up being about the same cost in the end as just storing natgas in the tank and burning it.
The latency is a big deal. I would imagine there is backlash in the gearing that limits reaction speed to "fraction of a second but probably a lot longer than half a 60 hz cycle". So if a gust front simultaneously hits every windmill in TX the valve can slam shut, or if a miles long alien space ship instantly warps in and shades all the solar panels in TX the air valve can slam open.
Natgas turbines react a bit slower. Fast, but not as fast as an air valve.
I'm thinking if this system accidentally vents, it'll be the biggest fart in history.
Wait till some PHB builds a system like this in coal fire country. Centralia PA.
Compressed air is probably 75 percent of that.
Depends how adiabatic the whole system can be made. Needs to be terribly well insulated to store the heat of compression. Dieseling the lube oil inside the compressor pistons is probably the limiting temp on the hot end.
Water storage loss is very low, evap and leakage. Compressed air heats up and you need that heat to stay in the tank or you lose the energy.
Also your example of 85% in and 90% out seems a bit messed up since .85*.90 is about 76.5% which compares favorably to your pneumatic air storage system.
Non-adiabatic systems like pneumatic control systems used in factories etc are ridiculously inefficient. You end up with a 10 HP compressor output an effective 1/4 HP of "machine". No one is seriously suggesting non-adiabatic systems, like house or car or factory size.
Very true, but if the total number of accidents decreases, is this important?
Hmm. That was my point. It'll make driving during pre-accident conditions more difficult therefore more accidents. During stressful situations you have to add the extra dimension of "who's driving" and "I have yet another thing other than myself to blame if it goes wrong" and "This might be dumb, but if I have no computer, their computer will none the less prevent the accident"
Which method is better? A computer backup, or a human backup?
Both fail because both exist. Accident reports will be full of "I thought the computer was driving" and so forth.
Also any time there is none the less an accident, "its the computer's fault"
No, kinetic energy goes with the square of velocity. So to accellerate from 3000 to 3050 mph takes as much as to get from 0 to 550 mph. The rest of the article may be interesting, but it's strange they make errors like that.
They obviously thought of momentum. However your analysis is wrong in that it has the danger of the old aether problem because there is no magical motionless reference state.
Think about it... When I drive to work the surface of the earth is rotating about 1000 MPH east under me, so I'm actually driving east at 1075 MPH every morning and driving home by driving 925 MPH east every night. My car should have a measurably faster 0-60 time and measurably better MPG going west than it does going east but it does not...
A rocket for instance always gets a delta-V of 4000 MPH when it burns 1000 pounds of fuel, in this made up example of pitifully poor Isp value. It does not magically "know" its supposed to burn more fuel to get that delta-V in different directions. A rocket in a frictionless levitated airless underground tube is not much different than a rocket in earth orbit. Any given delta-V of 400 MPH will always require a delta-mass of 100 exactly pounds of fuel regardless of direction. The delta-V of a rocket depends solely on Isp (performance) and mass burned, any existing momentum vector doesn't matter.
How long would it take for workers to actually travel to the middle of a tunnel to get said leaks fixed?
Not only do you not need to limit yourself to one (or two) holes, its actually better to drill as many as possible. This is as true in mine and tunnel engineering as it is true in pr0n.
I can't imagine any sort of high speed mag lev line will have any sort of real earth quake tolerance, but maybe I'm wrong
Yes, you're wrong, and if you'd thought for a few seconds, you would have realized it. Japan does just fine with their bullet trains, despite having plenty of earthquakes.
Come on AC, don't be a jerk, explain why. The reason why earthquakes don't matter in civilized country with trains is data travels around the speed of light (well, Vp correction factor, but pretty GD fast) and earthquake waves travel at the speed of sound in rocks (well actually compression waves go a different speed that transverse waves but whatever). The point is the ratio is ridiculous. So you have earthquake sensors everywhere including deep in mines and wells and even in worst case scenarios you can get warning minutes before the quake hits the train (no kidding). Now 4000 MPH is faster than sonic so if you're headed away you ignore it, the wave isn't going to hit until long after you arrive at destination. If headed toward, well you got issues, but 4000-0 is not really all that long. A spacecraft like the shuttle never peaked above 3 G but went 0 to 18000 in what 9 minutes or something? So if you're willing to risk 10G I think you can stop pretty darn quick.
Its the same reasoning why satellites save lives in hurricane areas... yes the satellite is much further away than the hurricane, but even so, the radio waves get to the shore long before the hurricane arrives...
you could probably get maglev down to $500,000 per km
LOL, no you could not. Lets look at a nice unpressurized low speed shallow ultra low tech project, Boston's "big dig". Thats 14.6 billion dollars for 5.6 kilometers for a mere cost of 2.6 billion dollars per kilometer. And you think you're going to build an evacuated hypersonic deep modern high tech ultra high speed train for a fifth of that. Well.... good luck with that. Maybe you mistyped and meant 500 billion dollars per KM, which is not too far out of line for a superconducting particle accelerator? At 4000 KM from NYC to LA (roughly) thats a ridiculous amount of money, enough to buy each human being currently in the USA a midrange bizjet.
The article mentions this... the problem is, it sets up a false dichotomy. The options aren't no vacuum trains or ones that go at 4k mph... there is a whole range of speeds that these trains could be effective and efficient, and not all will turn passengers into goo if it crashes.
Sadly in this case, no. You can't financially handle the R+D and building costs to make this thing and plod along at 100 MPH like the Milwaukee to Chicago run does today. Also cannot operate at a mere 500 MPH like a aircraft given the high costs. So you need to run over 500 MPH. The effects on the passengers of a derailment at 550 MPH are not likely to be a lot better than derailment at 4000 MPH. Sort of like how falling 10 stories off a building doesn't turn out ten times better than falling 100 stories.
It's the mile-low club.
Technically its the "mile per second club".
Because the simple-minded mythology that people create for themselves is just that: feel-good pseudo-engineering that makes no sense whatsoever.
For an AC that was a brilliant post. However a little brief. As a "real engineer" who can do estimation and think thru technical problems the biggest problem is the vacuum tube is a waste of money and time and land. For a much smaller scale example you could reduce the "indicated air speed" as a pilot would call it of the TGV in France merely by installing gigawatts worth of walmart kitchen fans pointing such that the train gets a nice tailwind. However if you run the numbers it turns out you can get the same performance increase with merely megawatts of extra train power. Similarly, you could invest in terawatts of distributed vacuum pumps, but it turns out you can go just as fast merely by using gigawatts of train power...
Generally speaking in engineering making the immense part more expensive to make the little part cheaper doesn't pay off, for sufficient value of immense. For example, it turns out to be way the heck cheaper to make a long distance transmission line HVDC than to upgrade every tower long the route higher dielectric strength and taller and bigger footings etc etc. To a crude first approximation this is why sea transport is cheaper per ton-mile than train transport. Another example in the US outside hyperurbanized areas its cheaper to buy each user a taxi and taxi driver than to build passenger rail. I like trains and I like riding in trains but even I realize they're an economic disaster.
In fact it turns out to be cheaper to build a self-levitating and self propelling vehicle than to build a really long and terribly complicated track. I think I shall call my new invention the aeroplane.
The other problem is economic. Any 4000 MPH solution is terrifyingly expensive, so even zero interest expense makes it horrendously expensive. If you can get it cheaper than merely hiring someone far away, or booting up a PC running skype... For example, even during the Concorde era it didn't make financial sense to ship a salesman between NYC and London on the Concorde, it turns out to be cheaper to simply open a sales office in both cities and hire staff in each. Somehow this tremendously more expensive solution is supposed to work even better under conditions where cheaper solutions miserably failed?
A learning curve? That sounds like a brick wall. The concept of HJKL doesn't translate well at all. Do dvorak VI users remap to HTNS, which has other side effects such as needing to remap them too?
I read your comment twice, and wasn't able to decrypt it.
Well, get cracking or you're not going to get a torrent collection of all my /. comments
Wrong translation direction, this going from signs to speech so a deaf person doesn't have to carry a txt2speech or a notepad and pen or learn to speak (yes deaf people can learn to speak, like one of my friends did, confuses the hell out of people who assume being able to speak means being able to hear)
Another thing is one of my kids former school teachers worked her way thru school in the opposite direction translating speech to signs. The general impression I got was it was much closer to the fry cook pay level than the $20 claimed above. You can get $20 if you have deep technical knowledge and translate tech docs from english to Chinese, or if you have a security clearance and know Arabic or other ME languages, but...
No need for new infrastructure, just post it as a project euler problem and when you "win" the blog/psuedowiki thing has a link to the torrent file for a collection of his books... I've uh, heard, that such a torrent exists.
Seriously though I've also heard second hand that if you really want to piss off Mr Gibson all you have to do it tell him you love his book iconic genre defining cyberpunk book "snowcrash". At least thats what I've heard. If you don't get the joke, if you ask people the name of a cyberpunk author then family feud style 90% of them will say Gibson but if you ask them their favorite cyberpunk novel a majority will say "snowcrash" which was actually written by Stephenson. I like Gibson's novels too, this is just funny how people assume the awesomest book must have been written by the awesomest author.
How do you imprison a corporation?
There's X active employees around the time of the crime and that crime earns a Y month prison term if a mere citizen did it instead of a corp. There are practical issues with sending individuals to prison, but GOOG could hire/outsource A number of unemployed and/or homeless people to attend prison in their employees place for B months where X*Y = A*B and the monthly "wage" of attending prison as an honorary GOOG employee floats as a free market but never declines below 40 hours a week at minimum wage. "Inmate employees" legally required to get the same benefits as non inmate employees. Its crazy, but not too crazy.
I would imagine, since you're only being paid while you attend prison, security at corporate prison would be pretty light and cheap other than keeping the scum from killing each other. Build next to a hospital because plenty of uninsured will be signing up to be goog employees, build next to a college (and GED high school) since many inmates would like to learn while incarcerated and they've got a guaranteed income, build next to a gym because many inmates are fat, build next to a detox center because many volunteer inmates will be there because of addiction, build next to a mental hospital because many homeless are completely nuts...
There is a political desire, by some anyway, to drug test welfare recipients. Well, as GOOG employees, voluntary inmates would have to pass a drug screen like any other employee, I suppose. Some employers don't drug screen. Whatever. I donno about prison life, but don't they drug test "inside"?
This also works around the hire and fire issues, where if the Mighty GOOG hired me next week, there seems no point in imprisoning me if I had nothing to do with it.
How do you imprison a corporation?
Has anyone ever tried (cost of imprisonment per year) * (number of officers, or number of employees).
Supposedly it costs $70K per prisoner per year (hmm, I bet it depends where and what security level) so 22.5 million is 321 person-years of prison. That seems a little excessive since you can kill someone and only get a decade or so... I'm not sure the GOOGs action is quite up to the mass murderer level.
It would make a hell of a lot more sense to give corporations probation, and charge them an amount of money which goes directly to the budget of the applicable regulatory agency... so $22.5 M extra dollars devoted to "double secret probation" watching the Mighty GOOG even closer.
If Google had to teach a certain number of man-years in IT lessons in public schools it would be a deterrent to Google and a benefit to education.
OK, your punishment makes sense for the Mighty GOOG, but what if you wanted to punish Microsoft? Having them "teach" kids is just going to screw the kids up even worse. Also "real programmers" don't have degrees, but public schools require not just bachelors but masters legally to teach.
Now what would work, is using existing community service programs. The corp has to provide 200000 paid hours of recyclables sorting, soup kitchen labor, park and roadside cleanup labor, etc. Emphasis on paid hours. Most corps such as mine already demand workers put in completely unpaid "volunteer" hours as part of our jobs, part of our official job evaluations.
... like most corporate fines, the number seems absurdly low. $22.5 million is about 0.06% (not 6%, 0.06%, six hundredths of a percent) of Google's 2011 revenue. This would be equivalent to fining the average person about twenty bucks, ...
That's not $20 a person like you say, thats like $1 million per actual real world Safari user.
Seriously it might ship, but does anyone actually use it? Kind of like "notepad.exe" is theoretically the worlds most widely deployed word processor but no one really uses it. I'd like to see some stats on how many people they were tracking with this. The comparison you're looking for is every victim we track theoretically earns us $10 in revenue per year (optimistically) but the fine works out to 100 years of profits at $1000 per track. Hmm I think that might be an unprofitable line of business, lets put the money toward the "save the igoogle" charity fund instead.
I'm old enough to have had that very argument during the original SQL slammer infestation and the replies were along these lines:
1) Who cares, security costs money but insecurity is free, or free PR advertising anyway.
2) Thats just one bug, one time, I'm sure its completely secure now
3) Webservers were not originally built to be secure, but they pitifully bolted some security on and no one blinks at putting them bare on the net, so why worry about putting something originally designed to be secure on the net?
4) False sense of security means behind the firewall we'll get owned 10 times more often than if we stay paranoid and keep it on the public "dmz". The eternal crunchy outside and soft chewy inside argument. Who knows more about making a DB secure, a DBA or a firewall dweeb? So lets place it on the net and trust the DBA.
5) 99.9999% of databases getting powned are due to no input sanitizing and buffer overruns and other epic programming fails by those idiot web guys, so we may as well place the mysql server open on the net anyway since the web guys leave the barn door wide open almost all the time anyway.
6) Our hard coded back door password in the webserver executable closed source app is "password" so I think having the server outside is the least of our concerns. (prioritization)
Anybody ever hear anything else thats relevant?
I know I'm guilty of recycling a generic password on sites I don't care about, but I fear that my family members are even worse. I'd say there's an 80% chance that my family recycles the same password on both social and banking sites
I have one password for each class of security. Ultra critical life savings depends on it has one which is only used on two sites anyway. Then there's /. and sites like it which has another "I can't lose money, but I'd be pissed if someone stole my account" password. Finally "I can't believe these morons force me to create an account for their cruddy site F those idiots the password for moron sites is password123"
I believe that websites that demand account creation when there is no need to create an account, like to order stuff, or view pages, are a social disease that should be stamped out. Aggressively if necessary. Not because one POS automotive parts site demanding I "create an account" just to make a single item purchase one time in my life is inherently evil, but because making a billion people make hundreds of accounts each, many of which will be stolen IS evil. This is no different than the argument where "if I occasionally accidentally dump out a little used motor oil its no big deal, but if the whole planet dumped all their used oil, it would be a freaking disaster"