Thanks to contributing to the discussion by repeating my point and adding nothing.
You're welcome, although I was mostly commenting on the "As for adjusting the track for each train... are you high?" sentence, since swb was talking about adjustable wheelsets, asking why not make the trucks adjustable? Point taking about gauging my writing before posting. My train of thought must have derailed somewhere...
Trucks, i.e. bogies, not tracks. There are adjustable wheelsets, although it's more common to change the entire bogie. Also, 1435 and 1524 mm tracks can coexist on a four-rail track; this kind of solution exists, for example, between Sweden and Finland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haparanda-Tornio_rail_bridge_Sep2008.jpg
Such trains have existed for decades already in at least Finland and they certainly haven't killed airlines. Even though there are many advantages: You can put all your stuff in the car when leaving home and at your destination you get to use your own, familiar car instead of a rental car that would also cost more.
Here's a link. Also, pictures of car and truck carriers being switched at the station, waiting to be coupled onto a night train.
You can see three types of vehicle carriers; the blue and white double decker with an open upper deck, the red and white fully enclosed double decker, and the flatcar truck carrier, which is also used to haul charter buses. All of these are loaded and unloaded with an end ramp, and can be driven through. They are set out for unloading, and loaded ones are picked up, i.e. the loading has to be complete about an hour before the train arrives. The vehicles are held in place with their own parking brakes plus wheel chocks.
...and no, they haven't killed airlines, but they certaily are booked to capacity. However, there have been talks about closing down some provincial airports because of insufficient customer base (a few thousand passengers per year). It seems that fast rail connections have made the airlines somewhat redundant, and one airline's messing about (charging for flights and then not flying) has not done much to help, either.
My 20-year-old van with one passenger has a lower carbon footprint than someone traveling on high-efficiency highspeed rail. Why?
Your van isn't moving?
Because the energy put into building the van is already spent and done with. Not true for the HSR.
Ah, but how can someone travel on something that hasn't been built? Besides, you can run an electric railroad with close to zero carbon emissions. (e.g. Switzerland; coal was and is an import, but hydroelectric power was and is abundant, hence they went nearly 100% electric pretty early.)
But what drove me to sell the thing on eBay was the glossy screen. Gloss makes it absolutely impossible to do any work with any bright light source over my shoulder. I do a lot of work in a terminal, and a black background is just impossible to read. So I switched them to a light background. That actually wasn't easy because the Terminal in OS X at the time (10.4, I think) made it really hard to switch colors--I had to download some sort of plugin to do something that X11 terminals have been capable of for years. Even with a light background, though, it was hard to do work if there was a lamp behind me and impossible to do work if there was a window behind me.
If your MacBook was the original edition (came with Tiger and CoreDuo CPU), you should have had a choice between glossy and matte displays. Besides, the colors of the Tiger Terminal.app can be configured in the window settings.
A = Acronym LA = Long Acronym TLA = Three Letter Acronym ETLA = Extended Three Letter Acronym METLA = More Extended Three Letter Acronym WMETLA = Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym SWMETLA = Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym TSWMETLA = Totally Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym RTSWMETLA = Really Totally Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym
When Linux reaches the public domain, would people have the right to distribute modifications in binary form only?
Certainly. Let's say the copyright period were 28 years. If somebody wanted to release binary-only modifications to Linux 1.0 (released in 1994) in 2022, they would certainly be free to do so. Or if somebody wanted to create a proprietary, binary-only Linux kernel, they would only have to trail the GPL kernel by 28 years.
The point of doing either of the above would be...?
Sure: In an emergency can I cobble together something to send out a communication that doesn't involve me fabricating a processor?(...)
For any infrastructure, there should be at least the possibility of a contingency plan that could operate using 1940's technology... ideally with a fail-safe involved as well. Anything else is bound to come back to haunt us sooner or later.
If you're interested in communicating with people over long distances with extremely simple technology, I seriously suggest you look into getting a ham license. It's not very difficult, and you can make yourself useful when other communications networks are down. See http://www.arrl.org/ for further information.
...a group of databases may be provided that each define one or more shorthand terms. These definitions may be structured in the database as shorthand terms paired with longhand terms. For example, one database may define the shorthand term "LOL" to mean "laughing out loud." Another database may instead define "LOL" to mean "lots of laughs." A database may also include multiple definitions for a given term. For example, a user's personal database may have two entries for the shorthand term "OMW" including "on my way" and "oh my word"
IOW, they have managed to patent a dictionary? Prior art, anyone?
So what happens when you cross the border from Finland into Norway or Sweden? How much additional does it cost to make a cell phone call?
Or a more relevant to most U.S. geography, what happens when a Belgian cell phone user crosses in the Netherlands or France? When I do the equivalent (New York to New Jersey or Connecticut)here, it has absolutely no effect on my cell phone bill.
If a Finnish TeliaSonera user gets a TeliaSonera Finland base station, charges are minimal, whereas if the base station is in Sweden and belongs to TeliaSonera Sweden, charges are exorbitant. The EU was supposed to mandate a ceiling on roaming fees, making the charges somewhat less exorbitant...
I don't know where you are that a bank account number is sufficient information to withdraw money from a random account.
The United States. And it's technically not, but since banks here are not very vigilant about these things, but with the account number, bank routing number and a check number, it's possible for fraudsters to do so.
Bank routing numbers are public information; anybody can come up with a check number; so the only possible secret is the account number...
But, here at least, if someone has your bank account number they can wreck havoc on your life, everything from identity theft to fraudulently withdrawing money from your account. How do they prevent that?
I don't know where you are that a bank account number is sufficient information to withdraw money from a random account. The only thing you can do with a bank account number is deposit.
OTOH, I do get checks on occasion, for instance, from mail-in rebates, or when my electric utility issued a refund of my initial deposit in the form of a check. I figure there's gotta be something like that still going on in Europe.
Nope. They just asked for your account number and deposit the money.
There's nothing wrong, however, in using CSS for features that are nice if present but not absolutely necessary for displaying the content. Box drop shadows and special fonts are two things that won't prevent you from reading a website if you don't see them. It just won't look the same and that's fine because that's the way the Web works.
Except it's not the way the corporate client works. The corporate client insists that the web site look exactly identical to all users. It takes effort to convince them that it's actually a good thing that the page looks generally OK, although not exactly like the printed brochure, when the alternative is essentially telling customers "You have the wrong opinion. Go away." (opinion being choice of browser for whatever reason).
The theme of the manifestos is how to avoid the 'object-relational impedance mismatch'...
Electrical impendance mismatch between balanced and unbalanced lines is handled by an autotransformer, a balun, short for balanced-unbalanced. What we need, obviously, is an object-relational transformer, an obre, if you will.
(...)But either way, I'd love to see some kind of regenerative braking on a bike, simpy for those moments when I know slowing down would be a good idea, but I don't want to waste that energy I'd built up through the sweat of my brow.
Flywheel?...on second thought, not if you ever want to turn.
All energy to move a bicycle comes from the cyclist's personal effort. The cyclist knows that for every time they touch the brake, they must do hard work to accelerate again; what's more, the hard work previously done will be thrown away, dumped as heat in the brake pads. Therefore momentum must be conserved as long as reasonably possible, and every aid from gravity is gladly accepted. A form of regenerative braking is when the cyclist's route is so designed that acceleration always happens downhill, and deceleration uphill. This uses gravity to the best advantage. Every cyclist curses where there's a long descent that ends up in a stop, only to continue with a long climb. This means all the kinetic energy gained during the descent has to be dumped as heat and generated again by muscular effort. Here's where a regenerative brake would be terribly handy. Even in my flat hometown there's a particular bridge that ends up in an intersection where one usually has to stop or at least slow down.
Incidentally, the same Newtonian physics applies to cars as well, only the driver doesn't notice it unless tracking fuel consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to contributing to the discussion by repeating my point and adding nothing.
You're welcome, although I was mostly commenting on the "As for adjusting the track for each train... are you high?" sentence, since swb was talking about adjustable wheelsets, asking why not make the trucks adjustable? Point taking about gauging my writing before posting. My train of thought must have derailed somewhere...
Trucks, i.e. bogies, not tracks. There are adjustable wheelsets, although it's more common to change the entire bogie. Also, 1435 and 1524 mm tracks can coexist on a four-rail track; this kind of solution exists, for example, between Sweden and Finland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haparanda-Tornio_rail_bridge_Sep2008.jpg
Such trains have existed for decades already in at least Finland and they certainly haven't killed airlines. Even though there are many advantages: You can put all your stuff in the car when leaving home and at your destination you get to use your own, familiar car instead of a rental car that would also cost more.
Here's a link. Also, pictures of car and truck carriers being switched at the station, waiting to be coupled onto a night train.
You can see three types of vehicle carriers; the blue and white double decker with an open upper deck, the red and white fully enclosed double decker, and the flatcar truck carrier, which is also used to haul charter buses. All of these are loaded and unloaded with an end ramp, and can be driven through. They are set out for unloading, and loaded ones are picked up, i.e. the loading has to be complete about an hour before the train arrives. The vehicles are held in place with their own parking brakes plus wheel chocks.
My 20-year-old van with one passenger has a lower carbon footprint than someone traveling on high-efficiency highspeed rail. Why?
Your van isn't moving?
Because the energy put into building the van is already spent and done with. Not true for the HSR.
Ah, but how can someone travel on something that hasn't been built? Besides, you can run an electric railroad with close to zero carbon emissions. (e.g. Switzerland; coal was and is an import, but hydroelectric power was and is abundant, hence they went nearly 100% electric pretty early.)
What we have here is feature creep.
But what drove me to sell the thing on eBay was the glossy screen. Gloss makes it absolutely impossible to do any work with any bright light source over my shoulder. I do a lot of work in a terminal, and a black background is just impossible to read. So I switched them to a light background. That actually wasn't easy because the Terminal in OS X at the time (10.4, I think) made it really hard to switch colors--I had to download some sort of plugin to do something that X11 terminals have been capable of for years. Even with a light background, though, it was hard to do work if there was a lamp behind me and impossible to do work if there was a window behind me.
If your MacBook was the original edition (came with Tiger and CoreDuo CPU), you should have had a choice between glossy and matte displays. Besides, the colors of the Tiger Terminal.app can be configured in the window settings.
Yeah, but "75mT"?
(...)
The "mT" thing is technically deprecated if I understand correctly, but for whatever reason is still quite common in aerospace circles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
At first I read mT as millitesla, which felt somewhat weird as a measure of carrying capacity...
A = Acronym
LA = Long Acronym
TLA = Three Letter Acronym
ETLA = Extended Three Letter Acronym
METLA = More Extended Three Letter Acronym
WMETLA = Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym
SWMETLA = Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym
TSWMETLA = Totally Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym
RTSWMETLA = Really Totally Seriously Way More Extended Three Letter Acronym
When Linux reaches the public domain, would people have the right to distribute modifications in binary form only?
Certainly. Let's say the copyright period were 28 years. If somebody wanted to release binary-only modifications to Linux 1.0 (released in 1994) in 2022, they would certainly be free to do so. Or if somebody wanted to create a proprietary, binary-only Linux kernel, they would only have to trail the GPL kernel by 28 years.
The point of doing either of the above would be...?
Sure: In an emergency can I cobble together something to send out a communication that doesn't involve me fabricating a processor?(...)
For any infrastructure, there should be at least the possibility of a contingency plan that could operate using 1940's technology... ideally with a fail-safe involved as well. Anything else is bound to come back to haunt us sooner or later.
If you're interested in communicating with people over long distances with extremely simple technology, I seriously suggest you look into getting a ham license. It's not very difficult, and you can make yourself useful when other communications networks are down. See http://www.arrl.org/ for further information.
73 de OH8HTH
From the filed doc:
...a group of databases may be provided that each define one or more shorthand terms. These definitions may be structured in the database as shorthand terms paired with longhand terms. For example, one database may define the shorthand term "LOL" to mean "laughing out loud." Another database may instead define "LOL" to mean "lots of laughs." A database may also include multiple definitions for a given term. For example, a user's personal database may have two entries for the shorthand term "OMW" including "on my way" and "oh my word"
IOW, they have managed to patent a dictionary? Prior art, anyone?
Yeah, but nearly 99.9% of terrorists are Muslim.
By that logic we should strip search anyone who breathes, after all 100% of terrorists breathe air.
The terrorists will just hold their breath...
which world is this you live on, where getting drunk is not your own fault, and the subsequent events that happen is also not your fault?
Finland.
(Yes, I'm Finnish.)
I'm sure we could come up with a better term than "vishing".
You might vant to throw a coin in the vishing vell.
I think you define "average person" very widely...
Doesn't something that's average, by its nature, have to be defined widely...?
If the "average person" eats at McD, then yes.
So what happens when you cross the border from Finland into Norway or Sweden? How much additional does it cost to make a cell phone call?
Or a more relevant to most U.S. geography, what happens when a Belgian cell phone user crosses in the Netherlands or France? When I do the equivalent (New York to New Jersey or Connecticut)here, it has absolutely no effect on my cell phone bill.
If a Finnish TeliaSonera user gets a TeliaSonera Finland base station, charges are minimal, whereas if the base station is in Sweden and belongs to TeliaSonera Sweden, charges are exorbitant. The EU was supposed to mandate a ceiling on roaming fees, making the charges somewhat less exorbitant...
I don't know where you are that a bank account number is sufficient information to withdraw money from a random account.
The United States. And it's technically not, but since banks here are not very vigilant about these things, but with the account number, bank routing number and a check number, it's possible for fraudsters to do so.
Bank routing numbers are public information; anybody can come up with a check number; so the only possible secret is the account number...
In contrast, see here.
But, here at least, if someone has your bank account number they can wreck havoc on your life, everything from identity theft to fraudulently withdrawing money from your account. How do they prevent that?
I don't know where you are that a bank account number is sufficient information to withdraw money from a random account. The only thing you can do with a bank account number is deposit.
OTOH, I do get checks on occasion, for instance, from mail-in rebates, or when my electric utility issued a refund of my initial deposit in the form of a check. I figure there's gotta be something like that still going on in Europe.
Nope. They just asked for your account number and deposit the money.
In other words, my phone has a 0.6 Hz CPU with 256MB of RAM...
TFTFY.
Did you think you got those fat pipes to download more porn?
Yes.
There's nothing wrong, however, in using CSS for features that are nice if present but not absolutely necessary for displaying the content. Box drop shadows and special fonts are two things that won't prevent you from reading a website if you don't see them. It just won't look the same and that's fine because that's the way the Web works.
Except it's not the way the corporate client works. The corporate client insists that the web site look exactly identical to all users. It takes effort to convince them that it's actually a good thing that the page looks generally OK, although not exactly like the printed brochure, when the alternative is essentially telling customers "You have the wrong opinion. Go away." (opinion being choice of browser for whatever reason).
The bottom is a self-emulating virtual machine.
I thought self-emulating caused bad eyesight and weakness of the spine?
From wikipedia:
The theme of the manifestos is how to avoid the 'object-relational impedance mismatch'...
Electrical impendance mismatch between balanced and unbalanced lines is handled by an autotransformer, a balun, short for balanced-unbalanced. What we need, obviously, is an object-relational transformer, an obre, if you will.
(...)But either way, I'd love to see some kind of regenerative braking on a bike, simpy for those moments when I know slowing down would be a good idea, but I don't want to waste that energy I'd built up through the sweat of my brow.
Flywheel? ...on second thought, not if you ever want to turn.
All energy to move a bicycle comes from the cyclist's personal effort. The cyclist knows that for every time they touch the brake, they must do hard work to accelerate again; what's more, the hard work previously done will be thrown away, dumped as heat in the brake pads. Therefore momentum must be conserved as long as reasonably possible, and every aid from gravity is gladly accepted. A form of regenerative braking is when the cyclist's route is so designed that acceleration always happens downhill, and deceleration uphill. This uses gravity to the best advantage. Every cyclist curses where there's a long descent that ends up in a stop, only to continue with a long climb. This means all the kinetic energy gained during the descent has to be dumped as heat and generated again by muscular effort. Here's where a regenerative brake would be terribly handy. Even in my flat hometown there's a particular bridge that ends up in an intersection where one usually has to stop or at least slow down.
Incidentally, the same Newtonian physics applies to cars as well, only the driver doesn't notice it unless tracking fuel consumption.