I used TiddlyWiki with the GTD/GSD/MonkeyGTD as a PM on and off for years. As a local organizing tool it has a lot to recommend it. When coupled with an auto back up tool such as dropbox, etc. it can be very helpful. I would also like to see a sister "lab notebook" plug in to make it more useful than a pure GTD system. The problem with GTD for engineers is that by design it tries to be nearly stateless and to forget everything you have done.
Indeed, this drives my greatest complaint against the patent system: the patent documents. They read as arcane legal documents, not engineering documents. Have you ever met an engineer who said, "I've got a problem that I don't have an answer for, I guess I should head to the patent office to find a solution." Never happen because no one "skilled in the art," as the law says [i.e., an engineer], can read the things. The law says that the patent disclosure is supposed to teach how to use the invention, but plainly do ready like any textbook I've ever read. Let's make patent owners hold up their part of the ancient bargain: You get a short term monopoly in exchange for sharing how your invention works.
Dear EFF and other critics of patents, please stop whining about trolls and patents, and sand up to bad patents to make patents useful. Please take some resources and challenge a patent or two as not "teaching one skilled in the art," how to do something. As long as we let lawyers spew some incomprehensible drivel and only later apply some convenient meaning once others make real and economically useful advances then shame on us for enabling them.
There are some opportunities for the the public to step up and get involved in finding prior art, but we need efforts to get the the technical public involved in fighting useless patent disclosures as our existing process is impractical for anybody but a major player to afford.
Three levels of corporate success: 1) Can't afford any clothes, but the cloths you had in college, 2) Can't afford to be seen in the clothes you had in college, 3) can afford to be seen in any cloths you want including the cloths you had in college. Regrettably, far too many of us don't reach 3 until we retire.
Indeed, we did have a great rail system, but it has been perverted by energy companies exporting coal and oil. The coal and oil companies have cut monopolistic deals to buy up all the capacity on many lines. They are able to do this by making big buys. This has forced others who ship periodically to rely on much more expensive trucks. In some cases farmers who have used these lines for over 100 years have not been able to get product to market because trucking cost more than their profit. Also our rail lines are perpetually in decay and we are loosing many miles of feeder lines that service warehouse and factories districts every year causing a reverse Metcalf effect that will eventually kill the utility of our critical rail system.
CharlieG, Really good information about water based transport, but regrettably far too few containers get put onto rail cars. Your comments about the bunker C is frightening for particulate and chemical pollution. However, our ports are becoming a real crunch point. Container ships drop a huge bolus of containers into the heart of our metro areas with insufficient or non-existant rail capacity to handle the load resulting in trucks jamming our roads. Our ports desperately need to build out their rail connects as well as upgrading to handle the ever larger ships. Also our trunk rail line capacity is being bought up in big single buys for bulk cargo (i.e., coal & oil) so even getting space on rail for containers is hard. We desperately need our Port Authorities to invest in rail connections and even long haul rail lines to keep our freeway open. Cough, cough, Ports of Seattle and Tacoma it is time to restore the Old Milwaukie line over Snoqualmie Pass to Spokane to reduce traffic overhead, speed deliveries and assure schedule reliability (how often are deliveries delayed by road/traffic closures?) for cargo. The restored rail line would do more to fix Seattle traffic than all the transit and new freeways being proposed by taking these truck off the roads.
CharlieG, have to disagree with 3.75 gallon round trip to the mall for most americans even with a monster SUV. Add in schlepping the t-shirt around from warehouse to warehouse and then to store and you may be right on total land fule usage. Another side note, products with a tight market window such as smart phones fly and that is a wholly different animal in terms of fuel usage.
A license is something to lose. If you risk losing your ability to make a living you might be less willing to do something wrong. It is also easier to stand up to an employer if you are standing behind a license.
Indeed. And now if you put software designer you can often get HR to pay you more because designers are more important than engineers in "technology" companies. The time for Professional Engineer Licenses (P.E.) in safety critical applications may have come. The preliminary test known as the Fundamental of Engineering (FE) was really designed for structural engineers, but one might argue that if you can understand and pass it you have no business writing software for ABS brakes, emission controls, railroad switch, x-ray therapy equipment, elevator controls or other safety critical applications. Of course it is easy to miss that everyday IT applications can have life/safety impact. Consider an everyday ERP (inventory) system that spits out a BOM (Bill Of Materials) for a power supply to be built with the wrong fuse and causes homes to burn down. Now some Java intern is writing life safety code without a clue for the impacts and rules for parts substitution. Texas seems to have started this process.
Patent reform is not strictly the issue. It is the willingness of Wall Street to invest in very high risk research. Parma has given up on real research and as a result we are see almost no new classes of drugs. Most of what we are seeing come on the market are incremental improvements of existing classes of drugs. If you want a radical solution, for a decade invest equal to say half of what we spend on drugs per year and put that into universities and NIH to do the breakthrough research that pharma refuses to perform. Then have NIH manage the trials. After approval let the generic industry sell the stuff without patent restrictions. On a straight out of pocket basis we'd pay less for drugs after an initial investment as new drugs would be at generic cost. The biggest return on investment for society would be the advances in real breakthrough drugs. Big investment up front, but massive long term payback in health and dollars.
If you're in Shenzhen you can take a walk and pick up all the components you need for your prototype project in the morning and assemble them in the afternoon.
The poster is more right on than the off hand language might suggest. Working with Chinese vendors has taught me that they are business people first and engineers second. Just the opposite of most US start-ups. Several times I have been chatting with a Taiwanese/mainland vendors, when I incidentally mention a design/manufacturing/supply problem only to have them say that they have a [brother|cousin|friend|associate] who can sell me a solution. While I've often found that these referrals were off the mark or just a ploy to get a commission they have taught me that in China folks do build and maintain relationships. In the US there is a whole industry of head hunters just to get resumes to HR departments because far too many US engineers fail to build those networks to keep themselves employed. Conversely, there are places where China fails miserable. Theses weak points include design innovation, marketing, prototyping and importing (importing into China - good luck getting parts/tools quickly through customs and into China). A number of times I've seen Chinese contract manufacturers ask US customers to supply partial or full prototype parts for pilot production runs because they lack the infrastructure to work in short runs nearly as fast as a US company can have made in the US. Shenzhen and Taiwan are indeed unique manufacturing clusters much as San Jose is for development and Detroit used to be for automotive. The US need to nurture and regrow our manufacturing base to remake our manufacturing clusters.
Mr. Kimishima is a great choice Nintendo. He is a banker and CFO at heart, but I found him much more personable and approachable than Iwata-san. He goes way back in the Nintendo family including CFO at Pokemon and functionally the chairman of Nintendo of America (NOA). NOA tends to have alternating layers of Japanese and American levels of senior. Mr. Kimishima was definitely Japan's top representative to NOA in the US. As a banker and CFO type he is well placed to help Nintendo evolve into its next incarnation to meet the changing landscape of disappearing handheld business. His old Keiretsu bank employer is a nexus for business and money in Osaka. He knows how to build relationships outside partners and invent to put big N on a sound footing.
This is hardly new. There has always been a tradeoff between long term capital investment and the option for using higher cost (per unit manufactured) hand labor. The equation is not just the cost per hour of a person vs. the lifetime cost of a machine. There is often different tradeoffs in quality and flexibility. Due to rising asian labor rates, increased shipping rates, very high Chinese energy costs, the capital cost of product sitting idle in transit and the general brain damage of working with an off shore vendor, manufacturing is moving back to the US. Jobs will not be moving back at nearly the same rate because labor rates are much higher in the US and far fewer americans are willing to stand for eight hours a day snapping together two pieces of plastic. You can expect to see a huge growth in manufacturing engineering jobs and yes even robotics engineers. You can also expect to see changes in product design: faster revision cycles because the engineers are located in the same building/timezone as the factory, different design that make use increased automation vs hand assembly, different material/manufacturing choices to take advantage of different energy/supply chain options and cheaper spare parts.
Puns aside about consoles insomnia. Wasting $100s of dollars of you power bill every year is not a serious concern for the video game industry. In 2008 the NRDC, the US EPA with their EnergyStarWalmart beat the consoleindustry about the head and neck and the video game industry managed to sandbag any regulation that even a GE or Sylvania could not for lighting. The reason is simple sloth and incompetence. Simply put the problem is not energy used during game play , but the lack of a meaningful sleep mode. This lack of sleep mode is driven by poor APIs to book mark game status and put the console into sleep mode. The other energy driver is the console companies instant on collecting detailed data of how you use your device and uploading it when you are not playing plus forcing add and other "content" down to your console when it should be sleeping.
While not the usual scientific publications there was until reciently a "non-pantent" filing with the USPTO called Statutory Invention Registration (SIR) that is used by someone wanting to prevent an idea from becoming patentable by making this public disclosure. This effectively put an idea into the public domain. Now days I guess you can file a preliminary patent and then just abandoned it to the public domain. Still cost about $300, but that is less than many open source publications. I assume that most academic departments would still count this as a publication.
Anything that runs node.js and python is not part of the I O things. An IOt device is more likely to have 256 bytes not 256MB and be a PIC or an 8051 not a x86 or A9. If it is an overpriced high end device maybe a M0. 8K bytes is a whole universe on an embedded device. An IOt device is a connected sensor or a actuator, not a computer or a web server.
Please, this is an embedded OS, not computer (or pocket computer masquerading as a phone). There should not "apps" in an embedded OS. The entertainment system must be architected as a whole and the car must be architected as a whole. Given this is a life/safety critical device there must be a hard separation between the nice to have things like the radio and critical systems like the brakes. Especially if you have a system that has open ports, OTA upgrades or even are connected. The executives, engineers and marketers need to face significant criminal liability for such breaches of trust when offering a life/safety device to the public. Even though I am not a PE this type of situation does argue for licensing.
Yes, truckers are cheap because the industry has turned them into the ugliest of sharecroppers where the are paid by the mile, lease the trucks from the company and pay for upkeep on the trucks. Now fuel, that's expensive! And for longshoremen, everything is so automated that the docks are deserted compared to a century ago so the port labor cost per pound is miniscule. Truckers are lucky to get gross $20/hour BEFORE expenses. The biggest expense in shipping is time: capital setting idle, decaying value due to technological obsolescence, missed market windows, etc. Find some smart MBA at a global company, buy them lunch and let them bend your ear on logistics. That is why so many of your favorite electronic toys arrive via cargo plane.
One of the real long term bottlenecks for our ports is the over reliance of trucks to move containers in and out of the ports. Let's face it, everyone want to be next to the ocean so freeways are already clogged (LAX, SD, SFO, SEA). The US ports need to take on building (or greatly expanding) their own rail links to the interior to get around big city traffic. Existing long range freight rail is already maxed out in the west due to extraction industries exporting oil and coal that farmers can't get their grail to the ports for export. There is also the need to restore many of our short line rail in the western cities to get cargo between the ports and logistic centers. Much of these road beds are just setting fallow in "rail banks," waiting for us to restore them to life. What cheaper and more efficient way unclog our freeways of heavy, slow, polluting and damaging trucks.
This is about as practical as building a space plane to take me from my kitchen to my livingroom. Slow and inefficient rubber tired transit for more than 1/2 around the planet is the biggest waste of a slashdot article let alone the massive physical resources. Modern cargo containers ships are faster, travel more direct, are more all weather, cheaper and gentler on the environment than running trucks on iced over roads. Other than a civil engineer's board imaginations, I can only assume that this is the ultimate attempt of the Serbian chamber of commerce to get a global scale pork barrel project in their backyard. For transportation comparison: Mode - Miles/Gallon/ton - [Hydrocarbons, CO, NO lbs/ton mile]..
Ship - 514 miles/gallon - [0.0009, 0.0020, 0.0053]
Rail - 202 miles/gallon - [0.0046, 0.0064, 0.0183]
Truck - 59 miles/gallon - [0.0063, 0.0190, 0.1017]
Keep in mind that the above does not include the materials, cost or environmental damage to build this road to no where. If you really want a wild road trip drive from Cape Town to Cape Chelyuskin.
With our Seattle transportation issues we only seem to talk about cars. There is another big side of this that we don't address with all our talk of ST3 and Metro. That is the ever growing truck traffic being driven by the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. The ports need to step up and take responsibility for their impact on the roads. The ports have the bonding authority to do just about whatever they can get wall street to finance. RIght now good can not get into or out of the ports. Our Washington state farmers can not get space on trains to get their wheat to the ports due to all of the space being leased up in bulk by coal trains. I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass is a often closed in winter for delivering trucking cargo that results in billions in delays. There is a fallow railroad bed, known as the old Milwaukee RailRoad that is in public hands. It runs from between the two ports in Renton, near I-90 just east of Issaquah and reaches all the way to south of Spokane. It has a very even 1.7 grade at that could easily be built out to 150 MPH. The planned expansion of eastside light rail will come very near to the Old Milwaukee line at Issaquah. The ports could easily restore the Old Milwaukee line and lease excess capacity to Sound Transit, Metro and Amtrak. Imagine how moving all of this truck traffic off our Seattle and Freeway roads would reduce congestion. Imagine how a two hour train ride to WSU, the Apple Cup and Spokane would unite the state, reduce congestion, carbon pollution. With a one hour trip from the massive cold war runway at Moses lake it would allow the port to push freight out of Seatac to open up more lucrative passenger plane slots. This would put the ports at a competitive advantage if they can guarantee containers will be in Spokane on railcars ready for trucks or further rail transports regardless of weather or traffic. Now imagine the Ports building out a high speed rail line along I-90 that leverages cargo and passenger service. By combining the cost and solutions of cargo and commuter transportation together we can solve both problems at lower cost. Win-WIn-WIn.
I have a 2014 Subaru with a back-up camera that displays on the radio ONLY when you are in reverse. I expected it to be redundant with the internal rear view mirror, but it is not. It is mounted just off center above the license plate. It is under the ledge above the plate and points down. The clear lens cover is about 1 CM so a small smudge of mud or droplet of water can obscure a large areas of the viewing field . I've learned to rub my finger over the lens every time I walk to my car. With a side mirror you can bob your head and work around a little dirt.
Over laid on the back-up image are two dashed "runway" lines with each dash showing one foot. It shows the ground right up to the back of the bumper. It the past if I were backing up to a low object object I have to guess. Now I'm parking within a couple of inches of where I want to be. I've put a small mark on the floor of my garage and I can back in to exactly where I want to be - every time. I'm sure there are useful ways of adding simple "VR" data to replace the parallax benefits of head bobbing and stereo vision.
Slashdot Mirror
I used TiddlyWiki with the GTD/GSD/MonkeyGTD as a PM on and off for years. As a local organizing tool it has a lot to recommend it. When coupled with an auto back up tool such as dropbox, etc. it can be very helpful. I would also like to see a sister "lab notebook" plug in to make it more useful than a pure GTD system. The problem with GTD for engineers is that by design it tries to be nearly stateless and to forget everything you have done.
Or these is the original Hipster PDA
Indeed, this drives my greatest complaint against the patent system: the patent documents. They read as arcane legal documents, not engineering documents. Have you ever met an engineer who said, "I've got a problem that I don't have an answer for, I guess I should head to the patent office to find a solution." Never happen because no one "skilled in the art," as the law says [i.e., an engineer], can read the things. The law says that the patent disclosure is supposed to teach how to use the invention, but plainly do ready like any textbook I've ever read. Let's make patent owners hold up their part of the ancient bargain: You get a short term monopoly in exchange for sharing how your invention works.
Dear EFF and other critics of patents, please stop whining about trolls and patents, and sand up to bad patents to make patents useful. Please take some resources and challenge a patent or two as not "teaching one skilled in the art," how to do something. As long as we let lawyers spew some incomprehensible drivel and only later apply some convenient meaning once others make real and economically useful advances then shame on us for enabling them.
There are some opportunities for the the public to step up and get involved in finding prior art, but we need efforts to get the the technical public involved in fighting useless patent disclosures as our existing process is impractical for anybody but a major player to afford.
Wow, really in the Game? Just like Fantastic Voyage?
Three levels of corporate success: 1) Can't afford any clothes, but the cloths you had in college, 2) Can't afford to be seen in the clothes you had in college, 3) can afford to be seen in any cloths you want including the cloths you had in college. Regrettably, far too many of us don't reach 3 until we retire.
Indeed, we did have a great rail system, but it has been perverted by energy companies exporting coal and oil. The coal and oil companies have cut monopolistic deals to buy up all the capacity on many lines. They are able to do this by making big buys. This has forced others who ship periodically to rely on much more expensive trucks. In some cases farmers who have used these lines for over 100 years have not been able to get product to market because trucking cost more than their profit. Also our rail lines are perpetually in decay and we are loosing many miles of feeder lines that service warehouse and factories districts every year causing a reverse Metcalf effect that will eventually kill the utility of our critical rail system.
CharlieG, Really good information about water based transport, but regrettably far too few containers get put onto rail cars. Your comments about the bunker C is frightening for particulate and chemical pollution. However, our ports are becoming a real crunch point. Container ships drop a huge bolus of containers into the heart of our metro areas with insufficient or non-existant rail capacity to handle the load resulting in trucks jamming our roads. Our ports desperately need to build out their rail connects as well as upgrading to handle the ever larger ships. Also our trunk rail line capacity is being bought up in big single buys for bulk cargo (i.e., coal & oil) so even getting space on rail for containers is hard. We desperately need our Port Authorities to invest in rail connections and even long haul rail lines to keep our freeway open. Cough, cough, Ports of Seattle and Tacoma it is time to restore the Old Milwaukie line over Snoqualmie Pass to Spokane to reduce traffic overhead, speed deliveries and assure schedule reliability (how often are deliveries delayed by road/traffic closures?) for cargo. The restored rail line would do more to fix Seattle traffic than all the transit and new freeways being proposed by taking these truck off the roads.
CharlieG, have to disagree with 3.75 gallon round trip to the mall for most americans even with a monster SUV. Add in schlepping the t-shirt around from warehouse to warehouse and then to store and you may be right on total land fule usage. Another side note, products with a tight market window such as smart phones fly and that is a wholly different animal in terms of fuel usage.
A license is something to lose. If you risk losing your ability to make a living you might be less willing to do something wrong. It is also easier to stand up to an employer if you are standing behind a license.
Indeed. And now if you put software designer you can often get HR to pay you more because designers are more important than engineers in "technology" companies.
The time for Professional Engineer Licenses (P.E.) in safety critical applications may have come. The preliminary test known as the Fundamental of Engineering (FE) was really designed for structural engineers, but one might argue that if you can understand and pass it you have no business writing software for ABS brakes, emission controls, railroad switch, x-ray therapy equipment, elevator controls or other safety critical applications. Of course it is easy to miss that everyday IT applications can have life/safety impact. Consider an everyday ERP (inventory) system that spits out a BOM (Bill Of Materials) for a power supply to be built with the wrong fuse and causes homes to burn down. Now some Java intern is writing life safety code without a clue for the impacts and rules for parts substitution.
Texas seems to have started this process.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
Patent reform is not strictly the issue. It is the willingness of Wall Street to invest in very high risk research. Parma has given up on real research and as a result we are see almost no new classes of drugs. Most of what we are seeing come on the market are incremental improvements of existing classes of drugs. If you want a radical solution, for a decade invest equal to say half of what we spend on drugs per year and put that into universities and NIH to do the breakthrough research that pharma refuses to perform. Then have NIH manage the trials. After approval let the generic industry sell the stuff without patent restrictions. On a straight out of pocket basis we'd pay less for drugs after an initial investment as new drugs would be at generic cost. The biggest return on investment for society would be the advances in real breakthrough drugs. Big investment up front, but massive long term payback in health and dollars.
The poster is more right on than the off hand language might suggest. Working with Chinese vendors has taught me that they are business people first and engineers second. Just the opposite of most US start-ups. Several times I have been chatting with a Taiwanese/mainland vendors, when I incidentally mention a design/manufacturing/supply problem only to have them say that they have a [brother|cousin|friend|associate] who can sell me a solution. While I've often found that these referrals were off the mark or just a ploy to get a commission they have taught me that in China folks do build and maintain relationships. In the US there is a whole industry of head hunters just to get resumes to HR departments because far too many US engineers fail to build those networks to keep themselves employed. Conversely, there are places where China fails miserable. Theses weak points include design innovation, marketing, prototyping and importing (importing into China - good luck getting parts/tools quickly through customs and into China). A number of times I've seen Chinese contract manufacturers ask US customers to supply partial or full prototype parts for pilot production runs because they lack the infrastructure to work in short runs nearly as fast as a US company can have made in the US. Shenzhen and Taiwan are indeed unique manufacturing clusters much as San Jose is for development and Detroit used to be for automotive. The US need to nurture and regrow our manufacturing base to remake our manufacturing clusters.
Mr. Kimishima is a great choice Nintendo. He is a banker and CFO at heart, but I found him much more personable and approachable than Iwata-san. He goes way back in the Nintendo family including CFO at Pokemon and functionally the chairman of Nintendo of America (NOA). NOA tends to have alternating layers of Japanese and American levels of senior. Mr. Kimishima was definitely Japan's top representative to NOA in the US. As a banker and CFO type he is well placed to help Nintendo evolve into its next incarnation to meet the changing landscape of disappearing handheld business. His old Keiretsu bank employer is a nexus for business and money in Osaka. He knows how to build relationships outside partners and invent to put big N on a sound footing.
This is hardly new. There has always been a tradeoff between long term capital investment and the option for using higher cost (per unit manufactured) hand labor. The equation is not just the cost per hour of a person vs. the lifetime cost of a machine. There is often different tradeoffs in quality and flexibility. Due to rising asian labor rates, increased shipping rates, very high Chinese energy costs, the capital cost of product sitting idle in transit and the general brain damage of working with an off shore vendor, manufacturing is moving back to the US. Jobs will not be moving back at nearly the same rate because labor rates are much higher in the US and far fewer americans are willing to stand for eight hours a day snapping together two pieces of plastic. You can expect to see a huge growth in manufacturing engineering jobs and yes even robotics engineers. You can also expect to see changes in product design: faster revision cycles because the engineers are located in the same building/timezone as the factory, different design that make use increased automation vs hand assembly, different material/manufacturing choices to take advantage of different energy/supply chain options and cheaper spare parts.
Puns aside about consoles insomnia. Wasting $100s of dollars of you power bill every year is not a serious concern for the video game industry. In 2008 the NRDC, the US EPA with their EnergyStarWalmart beat the console industry about the head and neck and the video game industry managed to sandbag any regulation that even a GE or Sylvania could not for lighting. The reason is simple sloth and incompetence. Simply put the problem is not energy used during game play , but the lack of a meaningful sleep mode. This lack of sleep mode is driven by poor APIs to book mark game status and put the console into sleep mode. The other energy driver is the console companies instant on collecting detailed data of how you use your device and uploading it when you are not playing plus forcing add and other "content" down to your console when it should be sleeping.
While not the usual scientific publications there was until reciently a "non-pantent" filing with the USPTO called Statutory Invention Registration (SIR) that is used by someone wanting to prevent an idea from becoming patentable by making this public disclosure. This effectively put an idea into the public domain. Now days I guess you can file a preliminary patent and then just abandoned it to the public domain. Still cost about $300, but that is less than many open source publications. I assume that most academic departments would still count this as a publication.
Anything that runs node.js and python is not part of the I O things. An IOt device is more likely to have 256 bytes not 256MB and be a PIC or an 8051 not a x86 or A9. If it is an overpriced high end device maybe a M0. 8K bytes is a whole universe on an embedded device. An IOt device is a connected sensor or a actuator, not a computer or a web server.
Please, this is an embedded OS, not computer (or pocket computer masquerading as a phone). There should not "apps" in an embedded OS. The entertainment system must be architected as a whole and the car must be architected as a whole. Given this is a life/safety critical device there must be a hard separation between the nice to have things like the radio and critical systems like the brakes. Especially if you have a system that has open ports, OTA upgrades or even are connected. The executives, engineers and marketers need to face significant criminal liability for such breaches of trust when offering a life/safety device to the public. Even though I am not a PE this type of situation does argue for licensing.
Yes, truckers are cheap because the industry has turned them into the ugliest of sharecroppers where the are paid by the mile, lease the trucks from the company and pay for upkeep on the trucks. Now fuel, that's expensive! And for longshoremen, everything is so automated that the docks are deserted compared to a century ago so the port labor cost per pound is miniscule. Truckers are lucky to get gross $20/hour BEFORE expenses.
The biggest expense in shipping is time: capital setting idle, decaying value due to technological obsolescence, missed market windows, etc. Find some smart MBA at a global company, buy them lunch and let them bend your ear on logistics. That is why so many of your favorite electronic toys arrive via cargo plane.
One of the real long term bottlenecks for our ports is the over reliance of trucks to move containers in and out of the ports. Let's face it, everyone want to be next to the ocean so freeways are already clogged (LAX, SD, SFO, SEA). The US ports need to take on building (or greatly expanding) their own rail links to the interior to get around big city traffic. Existing long range freight rail is already maxed out in the west due to extraction industries exporting oil and coal that farmers can't get their grail to the ports for export. There is also the need to restore many of our short line rail in the western cities to get cargo between the ports and logistic centers. Much of these road beds are just setting fallow in "rail banks," waiting for us to restore them to life. What cheaper and more efficient way unclog our freeways of heavy, slow, polluting and damaging trucks.
This is about as practical as building a space plane to take me from my kitchen to my livingroom. Slow and inefficient rubber tired transit for more than 1/2 around the planet is the biggest waste of a slashdot article let alone the massive physical resources. Modern cargo containers ships are faster, travel more direct, are more all weather, cheaper and gentler on the environment than running trucks on iced over roads. Other than a civil engineer's board imaginations, I can only assume that this is the ultimate attempt of the Serbian chamber of commerce to get a global scale pork barrel project in their backyard. For transportation comparison: .
Mode - Miles/Gallon/ton - [Hydrocarbons, CO, NO lbs/ton mile].
Ship - 514 miles/gallon - [0.0009, 0.0020, 0.0053]
Rail - 202 miles/gallon - [0.0046, 0.0064, 0.0183]
Truck - 59 miles/gallon - [0.0063, 0.0190, 0.1017]
Keep in mind that the above does not include the materials, cost or environmental damage to build this road to no where. If you really want a wild road trip drive from Cape Town to Cape Chelyuskin.
With our Seattle transportation issues we only seem to talk about cars. There is another big side of this that we don't address with all our talk of ST3 and Metro. That is the ever growing truck traffic being driven by the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. The ports need to step up and take responsibility for their impact on the roads. The ports have the bonding authority to do just about whatever they can get wall street to finance. RIght now good can not get into or out of the ports. Our Washington state farmers can not get space on trains to get their wheat to the ports due to all of the space being leased up in bulk by coal trains. I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass is a often closed in winter for delivering trucking cargo that results in billions in delays. There is a fallow railroad bed, known as the old Milwaukee RailRoad that is in public hands. It runs from between the two ports in Renton, near I-90 just east of Issaquah and reaches all the way to south of Spokane. It has a very even 1.7 grade at that could easily be built out to 150 MPH. The planned expansion of eastside light rail will come very near to the Old Milwaukee line at Issaquah. The ports could easily restore the Old Milwaukee line and lease excess capacity to Sound Transit, Metro and Amtrak. Imagine how moving all of this truck traffic off our Seattle and Freeway roads would reduce congestion. Imagine how a two hour train ride to WSU, the Apple Cup and Spokane would unite the state, reduce congestion, carbon pollution. With a one hour trip from the massive cold war runway at Moses lake it would allow the port to push freight out of Seatac to open up more lucrative passenger plane slots. This would put the ports at a competitive advantage if they can guarantee containers will be in Spokane on railcars ready for trucks or further rail transports regardless of weather or traffic. Now imagine the Ports building out a high speed rail line along I-90 that leverages cargo and passenger service. By combining the cost and solutions of cargo and commuter transportation together we can solve both problems at lower cost. Win-WIn-WIn.
More specific, perhaps it came from marrs before the Martian atmosphere boiled off.
Over laid on the back-up image are two dashed "runway" lines with each dash showing one foot. It shows the ground right up to the back of the bumper. It the past if I were backing up to a low object object I have to guess. Now I'm parking within a couple of inches of where I want to be. I've put a small mark on the floor of my garage and I can back in to exactly where I want to be - every time. I'm sure there are useful ways of adding simple "VR" data to replace the parallax benefits of head bobbing and stereo vision.
Hey, Bob, is that you who posted this article?