I would guess that, in some ways, the point of resigning is to lose the power to post stories. It's time to move on. Damned hard, but sometimes a taco's gotta do what a taco's gotta do.
And I know he knows squat about trains and freight if he thinks there is any more than minimal advantage to moving freight that fast. People, yes, sometimes. Freight, hardly ever.
Ahh yes, that fanciful high speed rail project.... they first predicted it would break even, operationally, with 90M passengers a year. That's 250K passengers a day. If the average train carries 1000 passengers, that's 250 trains. That's ten an hour, six minutes apart. And that all presupposes that those 90M passengers are evenly distributed throughout the day and week and year. It also assumes there's some reason for people to take 3 hours to travel between the two cities instead of the one hour for airlines, and the high speed train won't be high speed if it makes more than a couple of stops, so both modes of travel need taxis, further worsening the time comparison.
They also plan to run it up the SF peninsula, 50 miles of heavily urbanized cities. Tunnel is too expensive. Grade level would require elevating all cross streets. Above ground is the only affordable plan. Can you imagine the racket from a 300 kph train crossing 50 miles of urban area? There are a lot of wealthy people around there -- I doubt they're thrilled with the idea. I am sure getting it into LA is more so.
Then there's the question of where it goes after SF. Sacramento (150 km away)? Across the bridges and thru more urbanized areas?
What a boondoggle. I have no idea how California voters fell for such an obvious sea story, but they sure did. But it looks like it is dead from a funding point of view, finally, and also there have been some realistic cost analyses showing up, finally. Even the project itself admitted they would only get 1/3 of the passengers they claimed, which puts a big hole in their operational break even.
So let's see some financials for this Bering Sea tunnel. I'd like to see realistic construction costs and oeprational costs, and especially revenue. I doubt there's any more realism to this than Greek mythology, but uncovering the truth might be as interesting.
I wondered this myself -- first thought was I hope they are using hydrogen, or at least not venting the helium. Nope, helium, and they vent it.
How retarded! There's so little danger of a hydrogen fire in their case, it can lift so much more or use a smaller envelope, and it is so easy to generate that the cost alone ought to be the deciding factor.
The only fire danger is in the first few hundred meters of liftoff. Presumably they have emergency parachutes which could take over above that.
Krugman is as looney with his continual "spend tax spend tax spend tax" as the tea party is with their "default default default".
Both are nuts. Taxes literally can't be raised to the 25% level required to make Obama's budget balance -- it has averaged 18% since the end of WW II, with a max of 20% -- 25% would stifle the economy so much as to reduce revenues far beyond what the tax increase would raise additionally. Default wouldn't solve any problems, just create more and different ones.
The government is out of money, spending too much, and tax increases just won't hack it. It might be good sense to spend more as a stimulus in bad times, but you have to pay it back in good times, we haven't been doing that, and the piper has his hand out; payment will be made, in the form of spending cuts or inflation, and it would be a lot better to control it via spending cuts than let inflation hide the problem and destroy investments.
No Congress can constrain a future Congress's action by mere laws -- it takes a constitutional amendment. It's probably a fact in any other such system. Each US Congress lasts two years, and they are bound by the rules they establish at the beginning of the session, and no others. Merely passing a law which says future Congresses must reduce spending by a certain amount is a joke.
Furthermore, the so-called cuts are only cuts from a laughable baseline. They are not reductions in spending, they are only projected (and "recommended", ha ha) reductions in spending increases. The promised actual spending cuts for this year are only $22B, barely 1% of the total deficit this year. Even that is probably an illusion; the last promised cuts, $38B, turned out to be programs already expired, with only $380M, 1%, being true spending cuts. At that rate, this $22B will only be $220M, so small no one will even notice. Almost all the so-called $2T in future spending cuts are mere vague promises of future actions by future Congresses, almost certain to be ignored because they have no force of law.
The yearly deficit this year is $1.6T. $2T over 10 years is just 15 months of deficit alone. It is pitiful, pathetic, and a joke without humor.
Yes, we've known about these ideas for decades, if not centuries in some cases.
Clue me in. Which of these ideas have we known about for centuries, that the NoSQLers claim to have (re-)invented?
Otherwise I mostly agree with you. I get the impression, for instance, that memcached was invented by Zberg strictly because he couldn't wrap his ego around SQL and thought he was so smart that he didn't need to waste time understanding it.
Absolutely. It avoids the political correctness of Science, and you read it as a website, not that awful zinio software you have to install on your computer. But things may have changed since I last tried Science.
Oh pulleez. Don't start pretending Apple's the only original thinker in town and everybody else steals from them. Steve Jobs isn't the first person to wear black.
So explain, then, exactly how you know where to draw the line.
Suppose you consider Disney to be evil for having health benefits for domestic partners, and you refuse to do business with them. Suppose you own a company which makes piping.
Do you refuse to sell piping to Disney?
Do you refuse to sell piping to a local hardware store which sells to Disney?
Now being the owner, it's entirely up to you to make these decisions. But what if you work for this piping company?
Suppose you are a salesman, and Disney calls up wanting to buy piping, and you know you'd get fired if you turned down the sale.
Do you do the honorable thing and quit?
Do you do the dishonorable thing and turn them down and hope your boss doesn't find out?
Do you turn the sale over to a co-worker who isn't as principled?
Do you take the sale but turn down the commission?
I'm not trying to be tricky or snarky. I'd really like to know how you deal with these matters.
The problem with letting morals interfere with business decisions is knowing where to stop. Now that they've made it plain how little tolerance they have for independent thinking suppliers, the rest are going to be a bit skittish, either in their dealings with Apple, or in their own R&D. Either way, Apple is sending the message that it doesn't want first tier brilliant thinkers, only second tier yes-men.
I have a friend who lets his religious fundamentalism go crazy. I sent some Thomas the Tank Engine chocolate lollipops for Christmas stocking stuffers, and was told that Thomas is a Disney property, Disney supports health insurance for domestic partners, and therefore my stocking stuffers were unwelcome.
So what next? Don't let UPS deliver anything because the driver might be gay, or support human rights? Where does he draw the line? It's one thing (however silly it is) to not buy Disney products himself because they have gay employees, but to chew me out for not following his politics is absurd.
Sure, count all the nuts and bolts which hold it together too. Other than the crap maintenance which downed the Alaska Air flight, how common is control surface failure?
Engines have far more parts subjected to far more stress, so even if you claim it is 1% safer because it has no control surfaces, it is probably 10 times as dangerous because it appears to need 10 times the power to do anything useful.
Also, their claim of few moving parts is ludicrous. About the only moving parts in airplanes, other than the engine, are the propeller (if it's not a jet) and the control surfaces, and landing gear if retractable. This thing has an engine and has controls for the rotating cylinders, so I'm not sure what they are implying -- very few airplanes crash from failing control surfaces.
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I've always attributed it to the architects showing their disdain for the pedestrian and hoping nobody mentions the emperor is naked.
happen to have taught architecture at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley
Yes, UC Berkeley, where the ugliest building on campus is the architecture building, Wurster Hall. They couldn't even get the name right.
Or at least it was when I was there, a zillion years ago.
Anybody else remember that puffed up critic with the florid language? He spent a while here. Not Jon Katz, I don't think. Been too long.
I would guess that, in some ways, the point of resigning is to lose the power to post stories. It's time to move on. Damned hard, but sometimes a taco's gotta do what a taco's gotta do.
Even elevated, at 300 kph? I doubt anything can be quiet at that speed, and the sound will spread from the height.
You left off your sarcasm tag.
And I know he knows squat about trains and freight if he thinks there is any more than minimal advantage to moving freight that fast. People, yes, sometimes. Freight, hardly ever.
Ahh yes, that fanciful high speed rail project .... they first predicted it would break even, operationally, with 90M passengers a year. That's 250K passengers a day. If the average train carries 1000 passengers, that's 250 trains. That's ten an hour, six minutes apart. And that all presupposes that those 90M passengers are evenly distributed throughout the day and week and year. It also assumes there's some reason for people to take 3 hours to travel between the two cities instead of the one hour for airlines, and the high speed train won't be high speed if it makes more than a couple of stops, so both modes of travel need taxis, further worsening the time comparison.
They also plan to run it up the SF peninsula, 50 miles of heavily urbanized cities. Tunnel is too expensive. Grade level would require elevating all cross streets. Above ground is the only affordable plan. Can you imagine the racket from a 300 kph train crossing 50 miles of urban area? There are a lot of wealthy people around there -- I doubt they're thrilled with the idea. I am sure getting it into LA is more so.
Then there's the question of where it goes after SF. Sacramento (150 km away)? Across the bridges and thru more urbanized areas?
What a boondoggle. I have no idea how California voters fell for such an obvious sea story, but they sure did. But it looks like it is dead from a funding point of view, finally, and also there have been some realistic cost analyses showing up, finally. Even the project itself admitted they would only get 1/3 of the passengers they claimed, which puts a big hole in their operational break even.
So let's see some financials for this Bering Sea tunnel. I'd like to see realistic construction costs and oeprational costs, and especially revenue. I doubt there's any more realism to this than Greek mythology, but uncovering the truth might be as interesting.
In Russia, Russia watches Sarah Palin's house.
Heh ... didn't think of that! Space elevator, here we come!
Every tried winding in 30 km of cable? Slower than molasses. People would starve to death.
I wondered this myself -- first thought was I hope they are using hydrogen, or at least not venting the helium. Nope, helium, and they vent it.
How retarded! There's so little danger of a hydrogen fire in their case, it can lift so much more or use a smaller envelope, and it is so easy to generate that the cost alone ought to be the deciding factor.
The only fire danger is in the first few hundred meters of liftoff. Presumably they have emergency parachutes which could take over above that.
Krugman is as looney with his continual "spend tax spend tax spend tax" as the tea party is with their "default default default".
Both are nuts. Taxes literally can't be raised to the 25% level required to make Obama's budget balance -- it has averaged 18% since the end of WW II, with a max of 20% -- 25% would stifle the economy so much as to reduce revenues far beyond what the tax increase would raise additionally. Default wouldn't solve any problems, just create more and different ones.
The government is out of money, spending too much, and tax increases just won't hack it. It might be good sense to spend more as a stimulus in bad times, but you have to pay it back in good times, we haven't been doing that, and the piper has his hand out; payment will be made, in the form of spending cuts or inflation, and it would be a lot better to control it via spending cuts than let inflation hide the problem and destroy investments.
No Congress can constrain a future Congress's action by mere laws -- it takes a constitutional amendment. It's probably a fact in any other such system. Each US Congress lasts two years, and they are bound by the rules they establish at the beginning of the session, and no others. Merely passing a law which says future Congresses must reduce spending by a certain amount is a joke.
Furthermore, the so-called cuts are only cuts from a laughable baseline. They are not reductions in spending, they are only projected (and "recommended", ha ha) reductions in spending increases. The promised actual spending cuts for this year are only $22B, barely 1% of the total deficit this year. Even that is probably an illusion; the last promised cuts, $38B, turned out to be programs already expired, with only $380M, 1%, being true spending cuts. At that rate, this $22B will only be $220M, so small no one will even notice. Almost all the so-called $2T in future spending cuts are mere vague promises of future actions by future Congresses, almost certain to be ignored because they have no force of law.
The yearly deficit this year is $1.6T. $2T over 10 years is just 15 months of deficit alone. It is pitiful, pathetic, and a joke without humor.
Yes, we've known about these ideas for decades, if not centuries in some cases.
Clue me in. Which of these ideas have we known about for centuries, that the NoSQLers claim to have (re-)invented?
Otherwise I mostly agree with you. I get the impression, for instance, that memcached was invented by Zberg strictly because he couldn't wrap his ego around SQL and thought he was so smart that he didn't need to waste time understanding it.
Absolutely. It avoids the political correctness of Science, and you read it as a website, not that awful zinio software you have to install on your computer. But things may have changed since I last tried Science.
Blaaaah to Science. They can't separate their organization's goals (political correctness overkill) from the science reporting. Try nature instead.
Oh pulleez. Don't start pretending Apple's the only original thinker in town and everybody else steals from them. Steve Jobs isn't the first person to wear black.
So explain, then, exactly how you know where to draw the line.
Suppose you consider Disney to be evil for having health benefits for domestic partners, and you refuse to do business with them. Suppose you own a company which makes piping.
Do you refuse to sell piping to Disney?
Do you refuse to sell piping to a local hardware store which sells to Disney?
Now being the owner, it's entirely up to you to make these decisions. But what if you work for this piping company?
Suppose you are a salesman, and Disney calls up wanting to buy piping, and you know you'd get fired if you turned down the sale.
Do you do the honorable thing and quit?
Do you do the dishonorable thing and turn them down and hope your boss doesn't find out?
Do you turn the sale over to a co-worker who isn't as principled?
Do you take the sale but turn down the commission?
I'm not trying to be tricky or snarky. I'd really like to know how you deal with these matters.
The problem with letting morals interfere with business decisions is knowing where to stop. Now that they've made it plain how little tolerance they have for independent thinking suppliers, the rest are going to be a bit skittish, either in their dealings with Apple, or in their own R&D. Either way, Apple is sending the message that it doesn't want first tier brilliant thinkers, only second tier yes-men.
I have a friend who lets his religious fundamentalism go crazy. I sent some Thomas the Tank Engine chocolate lollipops for Christmas stocking stuffers, and was told that Thomas is a Disney property, Disney supports health insurance for domestic partners, and therefore my stocking stuffers were unwelcome.
So what next? Don't let UPS deliver anything because the driver might be gay, or support human rights? Where does he draw the line? It's one thing (however silly it is) to not buy Disney products himself because they have gay employees, but to chew me out for not following his politics is absurd.
This must be their version of operation Fast and Furious, but true to DHS tradition, they got it backward :-)
Sure, count all the nuts and bolts which hold it together too. Other than the crap maintenance which downed the Alaska Air flight, how common is control surface failure?
Engines have far more parts subjected to far more stress, so even if you claim it is 1% safer because it has no control surfaces, it is probably 10 times as dangerous because it appears to need 10 times the power to do anything useful.
You're probably right. Guess I got carried away with all the other vapid comparisons.
Also, their claim of few moving parts is ludicrous. About the only moving parts in airplanes, other than the engine, are the propeller (if it's not a jet) and the control surfaces, and landing gear if retractable. This thing has an engine and has controls for the rotating cylinders, so I'm not sure what they are implying -- very few airplanes crash from failing control surfaces.
For 120 hp it lifts 70kg. Piper cubs have less power and more lift. I think even helicopters do better. Rogallo wings do better.
Shove enough power into anything and you can make it "fly".
They also claim it near silent, but if you need that much power to lift so little weight, the rotors are only silent in comparison to the engine.
As for having "almost no moving parts and being a maintenance dream", it also has special patented bearings because the normal sort wore out too fast.
Color me unimpressed.