With conventional busses, every stop to pick up or drop off passengers means more brake wear. Brakes are ablative and a big maintenance expense.
Not to mention they are loud and shriek y as all get out, and contribute to urban noise pollution. Regenerative braking is practically silent by comparison - what you hear mostly is a gentle whine from the motor and power electronics.
If it was just brake wear, noise, and maintenance, then probably few people would care. The real improvement is that you are not turning a refined petroleum product into heat and brake dust, which is what happens every time a bus stops: all of that hard-won kinetic energy is totally lost to the universe.
And no, properly designed vacuum tubes 1) are not particularly prone to accidents (you want to try to make an "accidental" hole in inch-thick steel?), and 2) do not suffer any form of "propagation" from accidents.
And these assertions are based on an analysis of the operational performance of the existing 100,000-km human-scale vacuum tube network? It is very difficult to point to the success (or failure) rate of something that doesn't exist yet.
Presumably only if they're not counting CO2, unless somehow they've changed the laws of physics
Yes, they are discounting the CO2 emissions. When it comes to trucks operating in ports, or local delivery service, the main gripe is that they exhaust all kinds of nasty crap - fine particulates, NOx, CO, etc. - that is seriously detrimental to human health. As a for instance -
have a look at the asthma rates for communities that surround large ports, then compare them to communities several miles away. (Yes, I know CO2 is detrimental, too, but let us please not be overly pedantic for a moment.) Electric and natural gas trucks largely eliminate that problem.
According to this month's National Geographic magazine (subscription link, but you can peruse a paper copy from any number of places), several teams are genuinely close. In order to make the final cut in the successive rounds of elimination, the six remaining teams all had to demonstrate that they had a spot on a rocket flight manifest. Several are ganging together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 flight. One is going with a RocketLab launch. One is sort-of self-certified, in that the team and rocket company are the same entity.
Whether the lunar probes/landers are genuinely flight ready is a different matter. And as we all know, rocket launch schedules are hardly set in stone. So it may be that, rather than have December come and go with a handful of teams just barely missing out, Google decided to extend the deadline in the hopes that several will at least launch by then.
This does not surprise me. It would be like opening the White Pages to a random listing, and seeing if the number is still active and reaches the same person. Things on the Internet are, and always have been, much more fluid.
I'll agree that Universities have a vested interest in the preservation of knowledge, and so should do better. On the other hand, there are plenty of other changes to this or that university that have happened out in meatspace in the prior 25 years or so. Most of the buildings of my alma mater are still where they used to be, but their function (e.g., the departments that live in them) are not all the same. And certainly a lot of those physical spaces have received renovations over the years, resulting in walls that have been added, moved, or eliminated; outlets and network ports that aren't the same.
I'd wager a bunch of the content of that book is still out there, somewhere. And a lot of it is probably still at whatever custodian institution used to have it. Good luck finding it, though.
The model 3 has a three-phase permanent magnet motor instead
Can you provide substantiation for this claim? I was intrigued to read that, but haven't been able to find anything definitive by casual google searching. The best I saw was forum posts with hearsay, conjecture, and rumor - most of it from a year ago. Now that production cars are out, I expect better information is available.
Wow, it appears like we are really getting close to being able to answer the question: are we alone in the Universe?
All of this exoplanet detection increases the likely value of certain parameters in the Drake equation. And it lowers the uncertainty of those same parameters. This increases the overall odds and confidence that the number of communicative civilizations out there is >= 1, I wouldn't say that it actually brings us that much closer to knowing for sure. A number of the later parameters in the equation - those dealing with the development and survival of intelligent, communicative life - are just as broad and uncertain as ever. So, no, I would not say we are getting close to being able to answer the question, just making more informed guesses.
Only an unambiguous signal from such a civilization (thanks, SETI!) would make it certain.
[Tesla] didn't give a shit about battery powered cars btw
I don't know if there's much historical evidence of that one way or another. However, it is worth pointing out that Nikola Tesla invented the AC induction motor - a rather impressive demonstration that AC power distribution could be used for machines. Each Tesla car has an induction motor in it - something that I think Nikola would be both proud and impressed by.
Google may have found itself in trouble for not firing James Damore. He contributes into the peer performance review system there, and he had openly expressed an opinion that women, as a category, aren't on a par with men with respect to coding. That presents a liability to Google from a different direction.
I wholeheartedly agree. Public health workers agree, emphatically. Unfortunately, they are rarely the ones calling the shots on the policy level and, even when they directing policy, are susceptible to public pressure like most everyone else.
To whit: the nominee to be the next surgeon general, among other things, instituted a needle exchange program in Indiana as a way of combating a spreading HIV epidemic there. That's public health policy. On the other hand, it ruffled a lot of feathers, including Indiana's then-governor, now Vice President Mike Pence, who is part of federal policy efforts that will have devastating effects on public health. Also: the nomination for the chief public health officer in the United States wasn't made until six months into the new administration!
Nothing there suggests that users still won't get bumped to a cellular network should the wireless one be deemed to be slow / unreliable
That is a feature (or is it a bug?) that is easily disabled. One could argue that it ought to be turned off by default, rather than turned on. I've had it off for years. Considering that turning WiFi on an off is one swipe and tap away in most circumstances, it is trivial for me (or anyone else) to fall back on cellular data when the WiFi is crappy.
I'll ask the audience: is there anyone who feels that WiFi Assist is a useful feature?
When traveling, I often join a local WiFi network for an hour or a day. When I am leaving the area, I don't always remember to go into iOS wifi settings and saying to "forget this network". Once the network is out of range, I don't know of a way to tell iOS to forget about it. I know that this increases my threat envelope somewhat, because iOS will keep looking for that network (or one with the same SSID).
So: does anyone know of a way to get iOS to list all the WiFi networks it has remembered, so that they can be selectively deleted? does someone produce an app for that? OS X has had this ability since...well...forever. Why doesn't iOS have it?
The reason they went to South America to get this data is that the occultation wasn't visible from anywhere else. (here's the ground track and ephemera.) Otherwise, they could have gotten the data from ground-based telescopes in, say, the United States, or one of the big observatories in the Atacama. An occultation is essentially the same as an eclipse, and those are hardly visible from any ol' place.
Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to coincide with the shadow track of this miniscule object at just the right moment. Part of the reason why they set up an array of ground telescopes was they there was enough uncertainty of the size and trajectory of the object they couldn't be sure exactly where on the ground to capture it. Only 5 of 24 telescopes managed to get it. At orbital velocities, your window of opportunity would be even smaller.
I do agree with your larger point, however: I would love to see a grand fleet of space-based observatories.
I think you are on the right track. I have a Garmin triathlon watch. It's the size of, ya know, a watch, and the battery is probably only a few hundred mAh in capacity. But it can track my location for more than 12 hours on a charge, while also communicating via ANT+ to various sensors and BLE to my phone.
Optimized RF circuitry and no-frills computation go a long way.
I know that language is fluid, evolves, words-are-just-metaphores-for-abstract-impressions-in-the-brain, and other PhD-level obfuscations, but...
Making cyber an independent military command will...
For Fuck's Sake: "cyber" is a prefix, it is not a noun all on its own!
I think the first time I heard it used that way was by - no surprise here - then-candidate Donald Trump during a debate. And, as you can hear in that clip, using "cyber" as a noun sounds about as coherent as saying the internet is a series of tubes. Perhaps people have been misusing "cyber" all this time, and I'm only just now noticing. Maybe that moment of idiocy, broadcast to the whole world, just heightened my senses to it, but now I seem to read and hear it all the time. I prefer to think that stupidity is contagious, and Donald Trump is just an index patient.
Agreed. The first sentence is not actually a sentence by the usual rules (such as they are) that govern English. Where is the verb in that sentence? The second sentence is not much better - here the verb is constructed in the passive voice. The third sentence is some sort of dependent clause that has no business trying to stand on its own as a sentence.
If all of this is so dastardly and important, don't make us work so damn hard to figure it out!
Ads don't magically appear by dint of the universe being against us (although, the universe is against us). In order for those ads to appear, some poor developer had to be given the task of adding that feature. Then some other poor fools had to test it and qualify it across multiple hardware platforms. Then it had to get bundled into the software update, and then pushed out to users.
My point is, there were many, many very intentional acts required for this to occur, and almost none of which could conceivably have been an accident or "error". This ass-hattery must be roundly called out and ridiculed. Probably there isn't any legal action indicated, but it might be nice for someone to try.
That's interesting stuff. However - the patent is from 1989, and would have expired nearly a decade ago. There are plenty of nuclear boosters with deep pockets, including Bill Gates, that would love to create nuclear batteries that burned waste products. So why haven't we seen this? Is it just The Man keeping us on oil forever, or is it that the technology just isn't workable?
how many coal miners do you know that have swimming pools and yachts? Especially when most coal country is faaaar from major bodies of water. I know plenty of coal miners that have bankrupt pensions and unfunded medical liabilities, but that's hardly the same thing.
The thread will now include posts about nutcases who still believe in coal, petroleum, propane and propane accessoires and who believe solar and other renewables are a scam.
Fuckin Nazis
Just skip to the end and invoke Godwin's Law? Well played. Saves the rest of us a lot of trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention they are loud and shriek y as all get out, and contribute to urban noise pollution. Regenerative braking is practically silent by comparison - what you hear mostly is a gentle whine from the motor and power electronics.
If it was just brake wear, noise, and maintenance, then probably few people would care. The real improvement is that you are not turning a refined petroleum product into heat and brake dust, which is what happens every time a bus stops: all of that hard-won kinetic energy is totally lost to the universe.
And these assertions are based on an analysis of the operational performance of the existing 100,000-km human-scale vacuum tube network? It is very difficult to point to the success (or failure) rate of something that doesn't exist yet.
Yes, they are discounting the CO2 emissions. When it comes to trucks operating in ports, or local delivery service, the main gripe is that they exhaust all kinds of nasty crap - fine particulates, NOx, CO, etc. - that is seriously detrimental to human health. As a for instance - have a look at the asthma rates for communities that surround large ports, then compare them to communities several miles away. (Yes, I know CO2 is detrimental, too, but let us please not be overly pedantic for a moment.) Electric and natural gas trucks largely eliminate that problem.
According to this month's National Geographic magazine (subscription link, but you can peruse a paper copy from any number of places), several teams are genuinely close. In order to make the final cut in the successive rounds of elimination, the six remaining teams all had to demonstrate that they had a spot on a rocket flight manifest. Several are ganging together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 flight. One is going with a RocketLab launch. One is sort-of self-certified, in that the team and rocket company are the same entity.
Whether the lunar probes/landers are genuinely flight ready is a different matter. And as we all know, rocket launch schedules are hardly set in stone. So it may be that, rather than have December come and go with a handful of teams just barely missing out, Google decided to extend the deadline in the hopes that several will at least launch by then.
I am a mannequin, you insensitive clod!
This does not surprise me. It would be like opening the White Pages to a random listing, and seeing if the number is still active and reaches the same person. Things on the Internet are, and always have been, much more fluid.
I'll agree that Universities have a vested interest in the preservation of knowledge, and so should do better. On the other hand, there are plenty of other changes to this or that university that have happened out in meatspace in the prior 25 years or so. Most of the buildings of my alma mater are still where they used to be, but their function (e.g., the departments that live in them) are not all the same. And certainly a lot of those physical spaces have received renovations over the years, resulting in walls that have been added, moved, or eliminated; outlets and network ports that aren't the same.
I'd wager a bunch of the content of that book is still out there, somewhere. And a lot of it is probably still at whatever custodian institution used to have it. Good luck finding it, though.
Can you provide substantiation for this claim? I was intrigued to read that, but haven't been able to find anything definitive by casual google searching. The best I saw was forum posts with hearsay, conjecture, and rumor - most of it from a year ago. Now that production cars are out, I expect better information is available.
All of this exoplanet detection increases the likely value of certain parameters in the Drake equation. And it lowers the uncertainty of those same parameters. This increases the overall odds and confidence that the number of communicative civilizations out there is >= 1, I wouldn't say that it actually brings us that much closer to knowing for sure. A number of the later parameters in the equation - those dealing with the development and survival of intelligent, communicative life - are just as broad and uncertain as ever. So, no, I would not say we are getting close to being able to answer the question, just making more informed guesses.
Only an unambiguous signal from such a civilization (thanks, SETI!) would make it certain.
Very well. I appear to be wrong on the content of the memo. Withdrawn.
I don't know if there's much historical evidence of that one way or another. However, it is worth pointing out that Nikola Tesla invented the AC induction motor - a rather impressive demonstration that AC power distribution could be used for machines. Each Tesla car has an induction motor in it - something that I think Nikola would be both proud and impressed by.
Since we are talking in the subjunctive tense...
Google may have found itself in trouble for not firing James Damore. He contributes into the peer performance review system there, and he had openly expressed an opinion that women, as a category, aren't on a par with men with respect to coding. That presents a liability to Google from a different direction.
I wholeheartedly agree. Public health workers agree, emphatically. Unfortunately, they are rarely the ones calling the shots on the policy level and, even when they directing policy, are susceptible to public pressure like most everyone else.
To whit: the nominee to be the next surgeon general, among other things, instituted a needle exchange program in Indiana as a way of combating a spreading HIV epidemic there. That's public health policy. On the other hand, it ruffled a lot of feathers, including Indiana's then-governor, now Vice President Mike Pence, who is part of federal policy efforts that will have devastating effects on public health. Also: the nomination for the chief public health officer in the United States wasn't made until six months into the new administration!
Ooooh, goodie: a billionaires' pissing contest. And between techies, too. I'll get the popcorn!
That is a feature (or is it a bug?) that is easily disabled. One could argue that it ought to be turned off by default, rather than turned on. I've had it off for years. Considering that turning WiFi on an off is one swipe and tap away in most circumstances, it is trivial for me (or anyone else) to fall back on cellular data when the WiFi is crappy.
I'll ask the audience: is there anyone who feels that WiFi Assist is a useful feature?
When traveling, I often join a local WiFi network for an hour or a day. When I am leaving the area, I don't always remember to go into iOS wifi settings and saying to "forget this network". Once the network is out of range, I don't know of a way to tell iOS to forget about it. I know that this increases my threat envelope somewhat, because iOS will keep looking for that network (or one with the same SSID).
So: does anyone know of a way to get iOS to list all the WiFi networks it has remembered, so that they can be selectively deleted? does someone produce an app for that? OS X has had this ability since...well...forever. Why doesn't iOS have it?
The reason they went to South America to get this data is that the occultation wasn't visible from anywhere else. (here's the ground track and ephemera.) Otherwise, they could have gotten the data from ground-based telescopes in, say, the United States, or one of the big observatories in the Atacama. An occultation is essentially the same as an eclipse, and those are hardly visible from any ol' place.
Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to coincide with the shadow track of this miniscule object at just the right moment. Part of the reason why they set up an array of ground telescopes was they there was enough uncertainty of the size and trajectory of the object they couldn't be sure exactly where on the ground to capture it. Only 5 of 24 telescopes managed to get it. At orbital velocities, your window of opportunity would be even smaller.
I do agree with your larger point, however: I would love to see a grand fleet of space-based observatories.
(The folks at SWRI are the principle investigators for the New Horizons mission.)
I think you are on the right track. I have a Garmin triathlon watch. It's the size of, ya know, a watch, and the battery is probably only a few hundred mAh in capacity. But it can track my location for more than 12 hours on a charge, while also communicating via ANT+ to various sensors and BLE to my phone.
Optimized RF circuitry and no-frills computation go a long way.
For Fuck's Sake: "cyber" is a prefix, it is not a noun all on its own!
I think the first time I heard it used that way was by - no surprise here - then-candidate Donald Trump during a debate. And, as you can hear in that clip, using "cyber" as a noun sounds about as coherent as saying the internet is a series of tubes. Perhaps people have been misusing "cyber" all this time, and I'm only just now noticing. Maybe that moment of idiocy, broadcast to the whole world, just heightened my senses to it, but now I seem to read and hear it all the time. I prefer to think that stupidity is contagious, and Donald Trump is just an index patient.
Agreed. The first sentence is not actually a sentence by the usual rules (such as they are) that govern English. Where is the verb in that sentence? The second sentence is not much better - here the verb is constructed in the passive voice. The third sentence is some sort of dependent clause that has no business trying to stand on its own as a sentence.
If all of this is so dastardly and important, don't make us work so damn hard to figure it out!
Ads don't magically appear by dint of the universe being against us (although, the universe is against us). In order for those ads to appear, some poor developer had to be given the task of adding that feature. Then some other poor fools had to test it and qualify it across multiple hardware platforms. Then it had to get bundled into the software update, and then pushed out to users.
My point is, there were many, many very intentional acts required for this to occur, and almost none of which could conceivably have been an accident or "error". This ass-hattery must be roundly called out and ridiculed. Probably there isn't any legal action indicated, but it might be nice for someone to try.
That's interesting stuff. However - the patent is from 1989, and would have expired nearly a decade ago. There are plenty of nuclear boosters with deep pockets, including Bill Gates, that would love to create nuclear batteries that burned waste products. So why haven't we seen this? Is it just The Man keeping us on oil forever, or is it that the technology just isn't workable?
Hey, I saw that documentary. What a disaster! I don't know how people in LA survive.
how many coal miners do you know that have swimming pools and yachts? Especially when most coal country is faaaar from major bodies of water. I know plenty of coal miners that have bankrupt pensions and unfunded medical liabilities, but that's hardly the same thing.
Just skip to the end and invoke Godwin's Law? Well played. Saves the rest of us a lot of trouble.