The speed of mass transit solutions is often irrelevant unless you're talking about ~300 mile trips where High Speed Rail becomes competitive with air travel. A much bigger factor is frequency. If you have to wait 15 minutes at a stop rather than 30 minutes then that shaves a considerable amount of time off your journey without resorting to unsafe velocities. When you see a tram with an aerodynamic front puttering along the street at 20MPH then you know that the aero front was all for show and had more to do with securing funding than actually improving performance. I suspect that the advertised top speed of this 'bus' has more to do with getting publicity and investor attention than anything that's likely to see service. Even on a German autobahn I wouldn't want to be sitting on a bus that goes faster than 70MPH.
That said, journey time alone is not the only factor in mass transit. Comfort and convenience are a big deal. I know I'd rather have a nap or read a book or get some work done than have to focus on driving.
Some of the routing ideas mentioned in the project's website are worth a closer look. Some interesting concepts in there.
Let me say first that I find Scientology repulsive and a particularly greasy form of pyramid scheme. However, compared to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic trinity, they are responsible for much less evil and far fewer deaths. Between those three religions you have tens of millions slaughtered in pointless wars over minor differences in doctrine. You have sexism that runs deep through the dogma of all three. You have churches who have officially sanctioned everything from genocide to sexually abusing children to slavery. This stuff isn't even in the distant past. I can find examples in the last century where each of these religions has committed terrible atrocities.
Scientology is easy to hate because it is so ridiculous, so absurd, and generally unpopular. It's an easier target than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But if you really take a step back and look at the doctrine of those three faiths, they are equally as ridiculous.
Christianity has had something of a 1920-year head start over Scientology. Give these nutjobs enough time and I'm sure they'll rack up plenty of damage.
I don't want to be "that guy" who comes onto/. saying "oh this will never work", and I think that this technology does have the potential to make better use of existing road space.
But...
America's problem is not insufficient road capacity. Its problem is settlement patterns. Single-use-zoning ordinances make it illegal to open a corner store in a residential neighbourhood in many American cities. These kinds of big government regulations force people to drive between their daily needs, and it's by no accident that America with 5% of the world's population consumes 25% of its oil. (I don't need to spell out the economic or national security implications of that.) The car doesn't dominate in the USA because people are choosing it, it dominates because people are forced into it.
If there were more urban cores with mixed-use development to cater for the singletons and people who want a more walkable environment then it would make a huge impact on fuel consumption by eliminating millions of daily car journeys in the first place.
First Obamacare was communist, now it's fascist? Do you people ever look up the meaning of these labels that you throw around? You're like the people who claim that toll roads are "socialist".
Yeah, and maybe the Soviet's five year plan will work. Why complain about it now? I mean, sure they are diverting water that goes to feed the lake you fish from. Surely it won't be utterly destroyed by this plan while simultaneously causing a massive famine that will cause a significant portion of the population to starve to death. Jeez, you naysayers are just a bunch of crazies.
Fine. Let's keep the current system then. Let's keep denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Let's keep feeding millions into the pockets of profit-making insurance companies in the hope that somehow this will one day magically coincide with the public interest. Let's keep filling up emergency rooms with non emergency patients who can't get treatment anywhere else and then complain about why our health care costs so much.
Nice touch on the Soviet famine reference too. Lets you make exaggerated hyperbolic statements without invoking Godwin's law.
I was going to throw in that the Dems are guilty of this too, but that wasn't the point I was making here so I omitted it. Your wish to change the subject is noted.
Congress passed the law with a majority vote. And now it's been proven constitutional. Do you have a suggestion how to make laws more democratically?
I think he wants Fox News opinion polls to be legally binding.
This is what conservatives do. When there's a Republican President but a Democratic Congress they hail the chief who took action against the wishes of Congress.
When there's a Democratic President and a Republican Congress they denounce the "dictator" in the White House running roughshod over the wishes of the democratically elected members of Congress.
When there's a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress they denounce the President and the Congress for "running roughshod over the wishes of the American people as expressed in opinion polls" and they conveniently overlook the fact that opinion polls have no place in the constitution, that opinion polls are not a branch of government, and that the President and Congress are democratically elected fair and square.
Oh, and when that other branch, the judicial branch, has anything to say that they don't like, they denounce "activist judges." I'm surprised I haven't heard that old chestnut yet. Maybe it's because Roberts is one of theirs.
I pay for my health insurance. I choose a high deductible plan.My costs are low.
Now, they will probably triple because I'll have to pay for coverage for things I don't use such as OBGYN.
So, thanks for raising my costs with no benefit to me.
How do you know? Did it ever cross your mind that more people in the pool will lower your premiums? Why don't you wait for them to actually triple before griping about it?
Listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is a Goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business! So, if you want truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds...We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the Tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the Tube tells you. You dress like the Tube; You eat like the Tube; You raise your children like the Tube; You even think like the Tube. This is mass madness! You maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I'm speaking to you now. Turn them off!
I was wondering why a Kort Nozzle & Propeller were selected for propulsion. A wave propulstion system would be potentially more reliable for the long haul.
Ducted props are a pretty mature technology at this point.
...an old black and white movie called Mystery Liner, about a futuristic ocean liner that used some yet-to-be-invented technology to let it navigate the ocean autonomously. Always nice to see another sci-fi dream come true.
> In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control > of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
They are independent but only someone with the exact same biases as they have would pretend they are impartial, balanced or even report all of the news. In their case they really need some force to bring some reality to their work, if not the heavy hand of the government perhaps they should be defunded and exposed to the forces of the marketplace. It is insane to force every Brit to pay the television tax to fund a service they may very well not even use or value.
Same problem over here, where most consumers have figured out the legacy media have no real value but, except for PBS/NPR, they are subject to market forces and are thus going to fail if they continue to ignore the discontent of the customers.
I think you're missing the point of public broadcasting. Market forces inevitably lead to a lowering of quality to cater for the lowest common denominator. By 'quality' I mean educational value or informative value. What is popular isn't necessarily good for you. The existence of public broadcasting is a recognition that information and media is more than just another consumer good, it's far more important than that and has a very powerful influence.
In any case the BBC is widely used by just about the entire population of the UK. It has a far greater reach in the UK than PBS/NPR has in the USA. The TV licensing system might be a bit of a pain in the ass but the Brits are used to paying it, it's not that expensive, and for all the criticism that people throw at the BBC there would be riots in the streets if anyone suggested abolishing it in its current form. It's a treasured national institution.
"What it does not do well is original, unbiased research."
The traditional media don't do that either.
1) It may turn up information sponsors don't want known. 2) It may criticise a group who will complain to sponsors 3) It may embarrass the owners 4) It's more work 5) Nobody cares
although that last one is the perception of the marketing department and owners more than the truth. It's true enough for enough people to keep making money, though. The internet does a much better job of unbiased research. In fact, doing ANY research at all is better than traditional media manage today.
What don't you get? How do you think all this material appears on the internet for the "internet" to research it? Only traditional media can get the information direct from the source.
In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
Slashdot Mirror
When you see a tram with an aerodynamic front puttering along the street at 20MPH then you know that the aero front was all for show
Nope. There is a reason for that smooth, sloped nose. Idaho Stops.
Huh? What's that got to do with the price of fish?
The speed of mass transit solutions is often irrelevant unless you're talking about ~300 mile trips where High Speed Rail becomes competitive with air travel. A much bigger factor is frequency. If you have to wait 15 minutes at a stop rather than 30 minutes then that shaves a considerable amount of time off your journey without resorting to unsafe velocities. When you see a tram with an aerodynamic front puttering along the street at 20MPH then you know that the aero front was all for show and had more to do with securing funding than actually improving performance. I suspect that the advertised top speed of this 'bus' has more to do with getting publicity and investor attention than anything that's likely to see service. Even on a German autobahn I wouldn't want to be sitting on a bus that goes faster than 70MPH.
That said, journey time alone is not the only factor in mass transit. Comfort and convenience are a big deal. I know I'd rather have a nap or read a book or get some work done than have to focus on driving.
Some of the routing ideas mentioned in the project's website are worth a closer look. Some interesting concepts in there.
Any subsequent posts that denounce the cost of the California HSR deserve to be modded off-topic, because that'll degenerate into a total flame war.
If it were a food ...... it'd be corn on the cob.
Let me say first that I find Scientology repulsive and a particularly greasy form of pyramid scheme. However, compared to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic trinity, they are responsible for much less evil and far fewer deaths. Between those three religions you have tens of millions slaughtered in pointless wars over minor differences in doctrine. You have sexism that runs deep through the dogma of all three. You have churches who have officially sanctioned everything from genocide to sexually abusing children to slavery. This stuff isn't even in the distant past. I can find examples in the last century where each of these religions has committed terrible atrocities.
Scientology is easy to hate because it is so ridiculous, so absurd, and generally unpopular. It's an easier target than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But if you really take a step back and look at the doctrine of those three faiths, they are equally as ridiculous.
Christianity has had something of a 1920-year head start over Scientology. Give these nutjobs enough time and I'm sure they'll rack up plenty of damage.
Did spend your youth hiding from Spetsnaz? Do you recall fighting hand-to-hand with Chinese on Sunset Beach? No? Thank nuclear weapons.
I think China has had more pressing concerns than invading Sunset Beach over the last 50 odd years. So no, I won't thank nukes.
Didn't stop Argentina invading the Falklands.
Didn't stop Al Queda hitting America.
Never stopped Hizbollah from firing rockets into Israel.
OK then, so the urban cores should also include office space. Happy now?
Will happen of its own accord once gasoline costs more than $10/gallon a....
In Europe that would be around about now.
I don't want to be "that guy" who comes onto /. saying "oh this will never work", and I think that this technology does have the potential to make better use of existing road space.
But...
America's problem is not insufficient road capacity. Its problem is settlement patterns. Single-use-zoning ordinances make it illegal to open a corner store in a residential neighbourhood in many American cities. These kinds of big government regulations force people to drive between their daily needs, and it's by no accident that America with 5% of the world's population consumes 25% of its oil. (I don't need to spell out the economic or national security implications of that.) The car doesn't dominate in the USA because people are choosing it, it dominates because people are forced into it.
If there were more urban cores with mixed-use development to cater for the singletons and people who want a more walkable environment then it would make a huge impact on fuel consumption by eliminating millions of daily car journeys in the first place.
First Obamacare was communist, now it's fascist? Do you people ever look up the meaning of these labels that you throw around? You're like the people who claim that toll roads are "socialist".
...that the state of South Carolina is the one buying them at a discount. Voter accuracy? Pshaw. What do we care?
You owe me EU 70,000. The machines are being shredded, as explained in TFA.
There are times when I wish I could change my /. username.
Serious question. Why would insurance companies lower premiums?
Competition.
Next question.
There's nothing in the law that says they have to.
Was there any law on the books before Obamacare that said they had to?
Yeah, and maybe the Soviet's five year plan will work. Why complain about it now? I mean, sure they are diverting water that goes to feed the lake you fish from. Surely it won't be utterly destroyed by this plan while simultaneously causing a massive famine that will cause a significant portion of the population to starve to death. Jeez, you naysayers are just a bunch of crazies.
Fine. Let's keep the current system then. Let's keep denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Let's keep feeding millions into the pockets of profit-making insurance companies in the hope that somehow this will one day magically coincide with the public interest. Let's keep filling up emergency rooms with non emergency patients who can't get treatment anywhere else and then complain about why our health care costs so much.
Nice touch on the Soviet famine reference too. Lets you make exaggerated hyperbolic statements without invoking Godwin's law.
I was going to throw in that the Dems are guilty of this too, but that wasn't the point I was making here so I omitted it. Your wish to change the subject is noted.
Congress passed the law with a majority vote. And now it's been proven constitutional. Do you have a suggestion how to make laws more democratically?
I think he wants Fox News opinion polls to be legally binding.
This is what conservatives do. When there's a Republican President but a Democratic Congress they hail the chief who took action against the wishes of Congress.
When there's a Democratic President and a Republican Congress they denounce the "dictator" in the White House running roughshod over the wishes of the democratically elected members of Congress.
When there's a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress they denounce the President and the Congress for "running roughshod over the wishes of the American people as expressed in opinion polls" and they conveniently overlook the fact that opinion polls have no place in the constitution, that opinion polls are not a branch of government, and that the President and Congress are democratically elected fair and square.
Oh, and when that other branch, the judicial branch, has anything to say that they don't like, they denounce "activist judges." I'm surprised I haven't heard that old chestnut yet. Maybe it's because Roberts is one of theirs.
I pay for my health insurance. I choose a high deductible plan.My costs are low.
Now, they will probably triple because I'll have to pay for coverage for things I don't use such as OBGYN.
So, thanks for raising my costs with no benefit to me.
How do you know? Did it ever cross your mind that more people in the pool will lower your premiums? Why don't you wait for them to actually triple before griping about it?
Dude! Just use an IP cloak!
Listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is a Goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business! So, if you want truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds...We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the Tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the Tube tells you. You dress like the Tube; You eat like the Tube; You raise your children like the Tube; You even think like the Tube. This is mass madness! You maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I'm speaking to you now. Turn them off!
I was wondering why a Kort Nozzle & Propeller were selected for propulsion. A wave propulstion system would be potentially more reliable for the long haul.
Ducted props are a pretty mature technology at this point.
...an old black and white movie called Mystery Liner, about a futuristic ocean liner that used some yet-to-be-invented technology to let it navigate the ocean autonomously. Always nice to see another sci-fi dream come true.
> In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control
> of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
They are independent but only someone with the exact same biases as they have would pretend they are impartial, balanced or even report all of the news. In their case they really need some force to bring some reality to their work, if not the heavy hand of the government perhaps they should be defunded and exposed to the forces of the marketplace. It is insane to force every Brit to pay the television tax to fund a service they may very well not even use or value.
Same problem over here, where most consumers have figured out the legacy media have no real value but, except for PBS/NPR, they are subject to market forces and are thus going to fail if they continue to ignore the discontent of the customers.
I think you're missing the point of public broadcasting. Market forces inevitably lead to a lowering of quality to cater for the lowest common denominator. By 'quality' I mean educational value or informative value. What is popular isn't necessarily good for you. The existence of public broadcasting is a recognition that information and media is more than just another consumer good, it's far more important than that and has a very powerful influence.
In any case the BBC is widely used by just about the entire population of the UK. It has a far greater reach in the UK than PBS/NPR has in the USA. The TV licensing system might be a bit of a pain in the ass but the Brits are used to paying it, it's not that expensive, and for all the criticism that people throw at the BBC there would be riots in the streets if anyone suggested abolishing it in its current form. It's a treasured national institution.
"What it does not do well is original, unbiased research."
The traditional media don't do that either.
1) It may turn up information sponsors don't want known.
2) It may criticise a group who will complain to sponsors
3) It may embarrass the owners
4) It's more work
5) Nobody cares
although that last one is the perception of the marketing department and owners more than the truth. It's true enough for enough people to keep making money, though. The internet does a much better job of unbiased research. In fact, doing ANY research at all is better than traditional media manage today.
What don't you get? How do you think all this material appears on the internet for the "internet" to research it? Only traditional media can get the information direct from the source.
In any case the BBC doesn't have any sponsors and they're not under the direct control of the British state, so they have a lot more leeway in maintaining editorial independence.
Could take a while (and more than two probes) to explore it.