Just kidding, of course. The thing does have a sail, but it might not be obvious to the uninitiated. It's that thing that looks like a vertical airplane wing. As you may be aware, the sail on a modern sailboat functions much like the wing of an airplane. The rigid sail on this landsailer is actually much more efficient than a cloth sail.
What does this engineering-masturbation have to do with transportation? It's not like it's useful for anything other than some weird bragging rights.
From TFA:
The team plans to take the knowledge they gain from these experiences and apply it to the real world, incorporating aspects from the design into the next generation of vehicles and micro turbines.
So there may be something useful achieved. But even if not, it's still a pretty cool thing. Besides, not everything has to be useful.
I took a course on sailing once. The instructor was fond of pointing out that a sailboat is actually sucked forward rather than blown forward. Repeatedly. I think this guy may have had issues beyond a fuzzy understanding of the physics involved but he wasn't totally off the mark either.
All well and good and I absolutely respect and support your basic premises. I do not, however, support your tactics.
If you really want to do more than annoy a few people who are only trying to do their jobs--not to mention a bunch of people who need help with their computers--the correct approach would be to buy some AAPL stock and take your questions to the annual shareholders meeting where you would have access to the people who actually make corporate decisions, maybe even Steve Jobs himself. A big advantage to this approach is that as long as you are not disruptive, they have to allow you in, which is certainly not the case at an Apple Store.
They would be crowding precisely because, as you say, there are only a finite number of slots.
If they use some up some of those slots to ask pointless questions of people they know can't answer them, they're taking an opportunity away from someone with a legitimate tech support question.
As opposed to mature bullshit, like when Jobs tried to defraud the FSF out of gcc, or when Apple tried to defraud the public out of using graphical user interfaces?
My "digital" cable box doesn't even have a hard drive but if the power goes down for any reason, it can take upwards of five minutes to reboot. If memristor RAM could fix that, I'm all for it.
Great idea, and I agree with it completely, but sometimes it's out of your control. The time I laid my BMW down because someone made a left turn in front of me, for instance. Both the bike and I came out of it with only minor damage but if the guy had waited another five seconds before he made his turn the outcome would have been a whole lot different.
A lightweight car can be just as safe as a heavy one under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, hitting a larger vehicle is not one of them. Here in the U.S., with all the behemoth SUVs driven by morons yacking away on their cell phones when they should be paying attention to their driving, chances are good that if you hit something in an L1, it would be a larger vehicle.
It's quite clear that their priorities are very much in tune with reality, the reality of green.
Yeah, you've got a point there. I was thinking, however, more along lines of the ratio between law enforcement effort applied to and public safety achieved.
Cops don't seem interested in investigating theft of any sort. They certainly don't try to track down thieves.
But just get caught with an ounce of pot or a gram of cocaine and see how interested they suddenly become.
While I don't advocate using drugs (and I come to this from my own personal experience doing it), I think the authorities in the U.S. have their priorities way out of whack with reality.
I don't think it's all that unusual for us old farts to be long-time Internet users. I'm well into the demographic and have a similar history to yours when it comes to being online. I had a dial-up Unix shell Internet account in the early Nineties, back before the WWW became popular. Same deal with my wife before we met.
BTW, my father, who's in his eighties, uses the 'net every day.
Recovering graphic designer and typesetter here. The poster is right, you should use an em dash to separate dependent clauses but when it's not possible (in plain ASCII text e-mail messages, for example), it's acceptable to use two hyphens (--) in it's place.
Learned to sail in a HobieCat. They have daggerboards that can be dropped but, in truth, they're not all that good at sailing close to the wind.
They can be tricky to tack, too--you have to make great, wide turns or do what's called wear, when you make a sort of loop at each tack in order to keep the wind astern. If you make the same sort of quick turn you would make in a monohulled boat, you might find yourself dead in the water.
hopefully it will accelerate to a reasonable speed of a million miles a second
Only problem with that being that a million miles a second is roughly five times the speed of light. Last time I heard, it's not possible go that fast.
Sort of. That buy was of a special, non-voting stock set up just for the occasion. So while Microsoft may own some Apple stock, they have no say in the governance of the company.
I'm not absolutely sure of this but I believe that MS already sold that stock in any case. Made a tidy little profit on it, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen drivers doing it but alcohol was usually involved.
Really stupid ;-)
Just kidding, of course. The thing does have a sail, but it might not be obvious to the uninitiated. It's that thing that looks like a vertical airplane wing. As you may be aware, the sail on a modern sailboat functions much like the wing of an airplane. The rigid sail on this landsailer is actually much more efficient than a cloth sail.
From TFA:
The team plans to take the knowledge they gain from these experiences and apply it to the real world, incorporating aspects from the design into the next generation of vehicles and micro turbines.
So there may be something useful achieved. But even if not, it's still a pretty cool thing. Besides, not everything has to be useful.
I think you need to get out more.
I took a course on sailing once. The instructor was fond of pointing out that a sailboat is actually sucked forward rather than blown forward. Repeatedly. I think this guy may have had issues beyond a fuzzy understanding of the physics involved but he wasn't totally off the mark either.
I'm guessing that's because he's a patent attorney.
Judging by the people I deal with on a daily basis, I think that this battle of the minds could take place on the head of a pin.
What is this "woman" thing of which you speak?
BTW, it's correctly spelled "hippie."
All well and good and I absolutely respect and support your basic premises. I do not, however, support your tactics.
If you really want to do more than annoy a few people who are only trying to do their jobs--not to mention a bunch of people who need help with their computers--the correct approach would be to buy some AAPL stock and take your questions to the annual shareholders meeting where you would have access to the people who actually make corporate decisions, maybe even Steve Jobs himself. A big advantage to this approach is that as long as you are not disruptive, they have to allow you in, which is certainly not the case at an Apple Store.
They would be crowding precisely because, as you say, there are only a finite number of slots.
If they use some up some of those slots to ask pointless questions of people they know can't answer them, they're taking an opportunity away from someone with a legitimate tech support question.
Citations, please.
My "digital" cable box doesn't even have a hard drive but if the power goes down for any reason, it can take upwards of five minutes to reboot. If memristor RAM could fix that, I'm all for it.
You forgot the obligatory now get off my lawn! ;-)
Great idea, and I agree with it completely, but sometimes it's out of your control. The time I laid my BMW down because someone made a left turn in front of me, for instance. Both the bike and I came out of it with only minor damage but if the guy had waited another five seconds before he made his turn the outcome would have been a whole lot different.
by Robert Silverberg. Gripping plot, accessible on several levels, no naughty words that I can recall.
A lightweight car can be just as safe as a heavy one under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, hitting a larger vehicle is not one of them. Here in the U.S., with all the behemoth SUVs driven by morons yacking away on their cell phones when they should be paying attention to their driving, chances are good that if you hit something in an L1, it would be a larger vehicle.
Yeah, you've got a point there. I was thinking, however, more along lines of the ratio between law enforcement effort applied to and public safety achieved.
But just get caught with an ounce of pot or a gram of cocaine and see how interested they suddenly become.
While I don't advocate using drugs (and I come to this from my own personal experience doing it), I think the authorities in the U.S. have their priorities way out of whack with reality.
I don't think it's all that unusual for us old farts to be long-time Internet users. I'm well into the demographic and have a similar history to yours when it comes to being online. I had a dial-up Unix shell Internet account in the early Nineties, back before the WWW became popular. Same deal with my wife before we met.
BTW, my father, who's in his eighties, uses the 'net every day.
You're absolutely right. Mea culpa.
Even when you're not a typesetter, in fact, but I wasn't using it's as a possessive, I was using it as a contraction for it is.
Recovering graphic designer and typesetter here. The poster is right, you should use an em dash to separate dependent clauses but when it's not possible (in plain ASCII text e-mail messages, for example), it's acceptable to use two hyphens (--) in it's place.
Learned to sail in a HobieCat. They have daggerboards that can be dropped but, in truth, they're not all that good at sailing close to the wind.
They can be tricky to tack, too--you have to make great, wide turns or do what's called wear, when you make a sort of loop at each tack in order to keep the wind astern. If you make the same sort of quick turn you would make in a monohulled boat, you might find yourself dead in the water.
Only problem with that being that a million miles a second is roughly five times the speed of light. Last time I heard, it's not possible go that fast.
Sort of. That buy was of a special, non-voting stock set up just for the occasion. So while Microsoft may own some Apple stock, they have no say in the governance of the company.
I'm not absolutely sure of this but I believe that MS already sold that stock in any case. Made a tidy little profit on it, too.