I don't want to be in a rush for an early morning business meeting, get the next car out of the vending machine and find the previous renters were a bunch of college students on a party mission the night before...
Nice idea and reducing number of vehicles in cities is definitely a great goal, though I think the team would have to pay close attention to lessons learned by other projects that have tried to set up publicly shared but autonomous individual transportation mechanisms - that's where I think it would be won or lost. Urban bicycle schemes like the Amsterdam white bikes or neighbourhood car pool sharing comes to mind.
The USA may be the dominant 'empire' (or world power if you prefer) now but at some point it's very likely it will decline, maybe 5 years, 50 or 500 years from now. History seems to show that dominant powers tend to come and go.
Don't get too upset, accept that this will happen, and spend some time ensuring that the current minor powers who may influence authority over you in years to come will look upon you fondly when they are in the ascendency. I think that would be a valuable lesson to learn from other countries whose empires have come and gone. Some European countries that were world powers seemed to do a better job than others in this regard...
(Rail travel...) It's slow as well as being inconvenient
Depends on the country.... in Europe the express trains are looking more and more attractive as the barriers to flying increase. Slow? Eurostar (train) London - Paris means getting to check in 20 minutes before the train leaves in central London (Waterloo and soon to be St. Pancras) and nearly 200 mph across to Gard de Nord. Plane means travelling to the outer reaches of the London (45 mins or so) being there an hour before the plane leaves, and flying to Charles De Gaulle 20km outside central Paris and having to find my way in from there. By the time you add in these extra local travel times and waiting at the airport you're looking at very similar travel times. Inconvenient? last time I travelled on plane I had to take my laptop out of my bag and switch it on, take my shoes off, my belt off, not take any liquids through... compared to Eurostar where none of this is required, just the 'old fashioned' putting luggage through the xray machine and walking onto the train with a decent quality hot drink and firing up the laptop.
Across continental Europe the trains travel at higher speeds than cars and deliver you to the centre of the city: many of the stations were built in the 19th century and are really central.
I think trains could be the way forwards: certainly they are a damn sight better than planes (even in the UK where they try their best to mess you around).
USA I think is a different matter, folks there ran down their train system methodically over decades and it will take a long time to turn it round. And as for the poster from the Bahamas, yup, I guess trains will never really be much of a long distance option there:-)
" In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. "
I can't speak for the USA but in many other countries we also don't have such a car-centric model that seems to dominate a lot of Americans thinking. Roads are shared with cyclists, public transport, and pedestrians, and roads have pavements (sidewalks) alongside them which might have a number of users that need protection from the minority of car drivers who are complete idiots.
"Simply speeding" is in itself dangerous when driving a car in these shared environments. You may be the best driver on the road but thank you very much, I don't want you driving at 90mph past primary schools, old people's homes, etc.
In the UK folks are talking about dropping the urban speed limit from 30mph to 20mph because of the numbers of lives it will save. Getting hit at a ton and a half of steel at 30mph far increases the chances of death over 20mph. Plus the lower speed gives drivers more time to take evasive action/hit the brakes etc when somebody walks out into the road without thinking.
In London: length of one typical train carriage: approx 16 metres. Length of one auto - approx 4 metres. Capacity of train carriage: approx 56 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_A62_Stock).... equivalent traffic jam length to transport that many people in cars - 224 metres.
One 4 carriage train with seats occupied is saving you a kilometre of road traffic...
Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI.
Given that it's a boat race on open water, maybe you should spend a *little* time thinking about hardware issues. If your key interest is AI maybe you should stick to simulators and lab based lego robots (or find a marine engineer for your team)?
I think one of the most important aspects of what your man is up to is turning people's lives around. Sounds like he's not only turned his own life around but the project has also created employment and helps provide skills and training for a number of people that were in a bad way and might otherwise have just continued to mess their own and other people's lives up. It's obviously not the only project doing that, plenty of other worthy projects working with ex-prisoners and drug addicts, community gardens, furniture workshops, etc, but as geeks I reckon we've got to applaud somebody's who's refurbishing computers and also helping people as part of the process.
I won't insult you by saying I salute you, it is not nearly enough..
So do something. At least write to your political representative and ask them their position and if they'd be prepared to raise it as an issue next time they are in parliament/house of representatives etc.
Bag checks would have prevented the Eschede train disaster?
Train accidents thankfully happen much less than auto accidents as they can involve a much greater loss of life. However I believe number of fatalities per mile (or kilometre) travelled is much less than via automobile, e.g. http://www.etsc.be/oldsite/rep_all6.htm - 97% of all recent EU transport deaths in 2003 were on roads according to an 2003 EU report ("Transport crashes in the EU killed about 39,200 EU citizens in 2001"). I'd expect the USA to be similar.
--"England has no freedom of speech as it is understood in the USA."
..we talk a lot about the differences between the UK and the USA..
You might raise a discussion with your friend about the difference between "England" and "UK" next time you chat as well - Scotland, for example, has a different legal system to England, yet both are part of the UK...
The environmental impact of fossil fuels is not calculable in any sort of useful way, whereas with a specific environmental poison, you can more directly trace them to their health effects.
So by this logic you consider that we should not do any environmental impact analysis of fossil fuel usage at all, while being (properly) analytical of the impact of solar derived energy?
Out of curiousity, what did you do with folk like this before tasers?
I agree that the guy was clearly up for creating a scene and a bit of an idiot, but really interested to understand what other techniques you have in place (apart from electrocution) to deal with typical mouthy students. I mean, every university has got a character like this.
A lot of people would say the mark of a good politican is how they deal with the awkward heckler at a public meeting.
If this guy was a known character in university, why didn't the other guys heckle him to shut up?
"Most students (60.9 percent) believe it improves their learning."
Most students also believe drinking 10 pints of beer and farting loudly is really funny and will improve their chances of getting laid....
What the students believe and what is actually true may be two completely different things. I should imagine most professors will turn round and ask to see proof that the technology really does improve student learning before adopting a different teaching methodology.
(disclaimer: I'm a university researcher working in technology and education)
I read slashdot but I also got a bike pal. Not mutually exlusive. I'm speaking from experience that armour and a lid are good to wear - oily patch on wet cobbles round Edinburgh - not going that fast but still buggered the bike plenty enough and got to crash to the ground and do a nice slide, absorbed by leathers and lid. Glad I was wearing them.
But come on buddy, a little common sense, and remember you're a role model. *You* might have known what you're doing but lots of idiot teenagers would have been watching the footage of you doing this gig and other ones similar to it. They might take home the message that it's ok not to wear helmet and body armour. The fact that something did go wrong showed that you weren't completely in control.
Please, even if you're happy taking those risks, wear a helmet and body protection. You wouldn't use DIY power tools at home without safety gear so why take risks with your superbike? You seem like a nice guy, stick around for a bit longer so you can pick up your Darwin award and don't encourage idiot teenagers (or adults) to think its ok to do burns on stationary bikes without protection. You've just proved that it's not safe...
If the manufacturer actually pays out the $30.00, then that's a bonus
Heck that's shady business practice. You accept this kind of corrupt behaviour in your country? Hmm, your place is more messed up than I thought it was. Personally I'd be hassling my political representative to get the law changed so said companies get hauled over hot coals metaphorically speaking if they don't honour their promises.
Actually, I don't really get the 'rebate' idea really - how does it work legally? Why don't they just get told by the law to sell the 70 dollar hard drive with a 30 dollar rebate for 40 dollars at point of sale? I understand how it works from their point of view - that not everybody will claim their rebate, so they win - but this seems very dodgy business practice. How is it structured? do you buy the drive for 70 dollars and inside the box is a slip you post off and they supposedly post back the rebate? Is this common practice?
"the worst would of been a radiation leak that could of been cleaned up. The military has egg on their face but no-one was put in danger."
That's ok then. I'll pop the USAF a line to let them know if any of their nuclear armed planes are about to crash, to drop them on your property. Heck, if there's no danger it won't matter if the nukes crack open next to where your kids play. Only a radiation leak after all.
"Would have" not "would of" by the way.... I've never understood why coders of all people are slack with their grammar. You guys wouldn't tolerate it in the code you write...
Umm... I don't think this one is about killing Catholics, we're over that..
( A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!)
Blowing up the government and the MPs won't work, it's actually just a random mad judge who's asking for this. We also have our fair share of unhinged judges. Though to be fair it is true that our judiciary and government and police do seem to be rather keen on data collection sometimes... I heard the radio interview with the judge this morning when he was suggesting all tourists should also be saliva swabbed when they came into the country. The Radio 4 presenter sugggested this might not be possible... (Radio 4: traditional voice of the BBC, conservative with a small c, if they think it's bonkers it probably is...)
Yes, there are thousands of geeks out there who, if the protocol was simply published, would write that software for the pure pleasure of it.
Looking at the number of v0.1 projects that are fossilised and not moving on sourceforge you can understand the astronomers concern that this might not be the most reliable way forwards... open sourcing might draw in a wider crowd (and I agree it would be a good thing to do) but that in itself won't assure you of a reliable piece of code being created.
Quite clearly though as you note some people - even if a minority - would like to leave the UK but are happy to be independently part of the EU. Flipping your question on the head - not seeing why a section of the UK should leave to become an independent state, given that an increasing amount of power and support comes from the EU, I'd ask what is the big motivation for Scotland / Yorkshire/Essex etc to *stay* as part of the UK?
The argument of course that is often raised in Scotland is that there are member states with similar or smaller populations that get on fine within the EU (Republic of Ireland, Estonia, Denmark).
Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again? Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit. I suppose the earlier Russian (Soviet) plans were based on quite a bit of hardware which is tried and tested (apart from the N1 rocket).
I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...
Depends on the kit and the layout - you can get 10 miles no problem with 5.Ghz kit and there are projects reaching over that in Nepal / India with 2.4Ghz kit. Plus depends on what's in the middle - if you're hopping from small community to small community then they might want to pick up some of the costs. Point taken about reduction in bandwidth due to setting up a mesh network but again depends on purpose - is it for email/ web browsing or streaming video/ playing games which need tiny lag?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to be in a rush for an early morning business meeting, get the next car out of the vending machine and find the previous renters were a bunch of college students on a party mission the night before...
Nice idea and reducing number of vehicles in cities is definitely a great goal, though I think the team would have to pay close attention to lessons learned by other projects that have tried to set up publicly shared but autonomous individual transportation mechanisms - that's where I think it would be won or lost. Urban bicycle schemes like the Amsterdam white bikes or neighbourhood car pool sharing comes to mind.
The USA may be the dominant 'empire' (or world power if you prefer) now but at some point it's very likely it will decline, maybe 5 years, 50 or 500 years from now. History seems to show that dominant powers tend to come and go.
Don't get too upset, accept that this will happen, and spend some time ensuring that the current minor powers who may influence authority over you in years to come will look upon you fondly when they are in the ascendency. I think that would be a valuable lesson to learn from other countries whose empires have come and gone. Some European countries that were world powers seemed to do a better job than others in this regard...
(Rail travel...) It's slow as well as being inconvenient
:-)
Depends on the country.... in Europe the express trains are looking more and more attractive as the barriers to flying increase. Slow? Eurostar (train) London - Paris means getting to check in 20 minutes before the train leaves in central London (Waterloo and soon to be St. Pancras) and nearly 200 mph across to Gard de Nord. Plane means travelling to the outer reaches of the London (45 mins or so) being there an hour before the plane leaves, and flying to Charles De Gaulle 20km outside central Paris and having to find my way in from there. By the time you add in these extra local travel times and waiting at the airport you're looking at very similar travel times. Inconvenient? last time I travelled on plane I had to take my laptop out of my bag and switch it on, take my shoes off, my belt off, not take any liquids through... compared to Eurostar where none of this is required, just the 'old fashioned' putting luggage through the xray machine and walking onto the train with a decent quality hot drink and firing up the laptop.
Across continental Europe the trains travel at higher speeds than cars and deliver you to the centre of the city: many of the stations were built in the 19th century and are really central.
I think trains could be the way forwards: certainly they are a damn sight better than planes (even in the UK where they try their best to mess you around).
USA I think is a different matter, folks there ran down their train system methodically over decades and it will take a long time to turn it round. And as for the poster from the Bahamas, yup, I guess trains will never really be much of a long distance option there
"
In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. "
I can't speak for the USA but in many other countries we also don't have such a car-centric model that seems to dominate a lot of Americans thinking. Roads are shared with cyclists, public transport, and pedestrians, and roads have pavements (sidewalks) alongside them which might have a number of users that need protection from the minority of car drivers who are complete idiots.
"Simply speeding" is in itself dangerous when driving a car in these shared environments. You may be the best driver on the road but thank you very much, I don't want you driving at 90mph past primary schools, old people's homes, etc.
In the UK folks are talking about dropping the urban speed limit from 30mph to 20mph because of the numbers of lives it will save. Getting hit at a ton and a half of steel at 30mph far increases the chances of death over 20mph. Plus the lower speed gives drivers more time to take evasive action/hit the brakes etc when somebody walks out into the road without thinking.
Or invest in decent public transport instead.
.... equivalent traffic jam length to transport that many people in cars - 224 metres.
In London: length of one typical train carriage: approx 16 metres. Length of one auto - approx 4 metres. Capacity of train carriage: approx 56 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_A62_Stock)
One 4 carriage train with seats occupied is saving you a kilometre of road traffic...
Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI.
Given that it's a boat race on open water, maybe you should spend a *little* time thinking about hardware issues. If your key interest is AI maybe you should stick to simulators and lab based lego robots (or find a marine engineer for your team)?
I think one of the most important aspects of what your man is up to is turning people's lives around. Sounds like he's not only turned his own life around but the project has also created employment and helps provide skills and training for a number of people that were in a bad way and might otherwise have just continued to mess their own and other people's lives up. It's obviously not the only project doing that, plenty of other worthy projects working with ex-prisoners and drug addicts, community gardens, furniture workshops, etc, but as geeks I reckon we've got to applaud somebody's who's refurbishing computers and also helping people as part of the process.
I won't insult you by saying I salute you, it is not nearly enough..
So do something. At least write to your political representative and ask them their position and if they'd be prepared to raise it as an issue next time they are in parliament/house of representatives etc.
Bag checks would have prevented the Eschede train disaster?
Train accidents thankfully happen much less than auto accidents as they can involve a much greater loss of life. However I believe number of fatalities per mile (or kilometre) travelled is much less than via automobile, e.g. http://www.etsc.be/oldsite/rep_all6.htm - 97% of all recent EU transport deaths in 2003 were on roads according to an 2003 EU report ("Transport crashes in the EU killed about 39,200 EU citizens in 2001"). I'd expect the USA to be similar.
You might raise a discussion with your friend about the difference between "England" and "UK" next time you chat as well - Scotland, for example, has a different legal system to England, yet both are part of the UK...
The environmental impact of fossil fuels is not calculable in any sort of useful way, whereas with a specific environmental poison, you can more directly trace them to their health effects.
So by this logic you consider that we should not do any environmental impact analysis of fossil fuel usage at all, while being (properly) analytical of the impact of solar derived energy?
Would how the Euro has affected the European marketplace/ community be a precursor?
Out of curiousity, what did you do with folk like this before tasers?
I agree that the guy was clearly up for creating a scene and a bit of an idiot, but really interested to understand what other techniques you have in place (apart from electrocution) to deal with typical mouthy students. I mean, every university has got a character like this.
A lot of people would say the mark of a good politican is how they deal with the awkward heckler at a public meeting.
If this guy was a known character in university, why didn't the other guys heckle him to shut up?
The killer sentence is in the second paragraph
"Most students (60.9 percent) believe it improves their learning."
Most students also believe drinking 10 pints of beer and farting loudly is really funny and will improve their chances of getting laid....
What the students believe and what is actually true may be two completely different things. I should imagine most professors will turn round and ask to see proof that the technology really does improve student learning before adopting a different teaching methodology.
(disclaimer: I'm a university researcher working in technology and education)
I read slashdot but I also got a bike pal. Not mutually exlusive. I'm speaking from experience that armour and a lid are good to wear - oily patch on wet cobbles round Edinburgh - not going that fast but still buggered the bike plenty enough and got to crash to the ground and do a nice slide, absorbed by leathers and lid. Glad I was wearing them.
Best wishes, I hope you get better soon.
But come on buddy, a little common sense, and remember you're a role model. *You* might have known what you're doing but lots of idiot teenagers would have been watching the footage of you doing this gig and other ones similar to it. They might take home the message that it's ok not to wear helmet and body armour. The fact that something did go wrong showed that you weren't completely in control.
Please, even if you're happy taking those risks, wear a helmet and body protection. You wouldn't use DIY power tools at home without safety gear so why take risks with your superbike? You seem like a nice guy, stick around for a bit longer so you can pick up your Darwin award and don't encourage idiot teenagers (or adults) to think its ok to do burns on stationary bikes without protection. You've just proved that it's not safe...
If the manufacturer actually pays out the $30.00, then that's a bonus
Heck that's shady business practice. You accept this kind of corrupt behaviour in your country? Hmm, your place is more messed up than I thought it was. Personally I'd be hassling my political representative to get the law changed so said companies get hauled over hot coals metaphorically speaking if they don't honour their promises.
Actually, I don't really get the 'rebate' idea really - how does it work legally? Why don't they just get told by the law to sell the 70 dollar hard drive with a 30 dollar rebate for 40 dollars at point of sale? I understand how it works from their point of view - that not everybody will claim their rebate, so they win - but this seems very dodgy business practice. How is it structured? do you buy the drive for 70 dollars and inside the box is a slip you post off and they supposedly post back the rebate? Is this common practice?
cheers
"the worst would of been a radiation leak that could of been cleaned up. The military has egg on their face but no-one was put in danger."
That's ok then. I'll pop the USAF a line to let them know if any of their nuclear armed planes are about to crash, to drop them on your property. Heck, if there's no danger it won't matter if the nukes crack open next to where your kids play. Only a radiation leak after all.
"Would have" not "would of" by the way.... I've never understood why coders of all people are slack with their grammar. You guys wouldn't tolerate it in the code you write...
Umm... I don't think this one is about killing Catholics, we're over that..
( A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!)
Blowing up the government and the MPs won't work, it's actually just a random mad judge who's asking for this. We also have our fair share of unhinged judges. Though to be fair it is true that our judiciary and government and police do seem to be rather keen on data collection sometimes... I heard the radio interview with the judge this morning when he was suggesting all tourists should also be saliva swabbed when they came into the country. The Radio 4 presenter sugggested this might not be possible... (Radio 4: traditional voice of the BBC, conservative with a small c, if they think it's bonkers it probably is...)
Yes, there are thousands of geeks out there who, if the protocol was simply published, would write that software for the pure pleasure of it.
Looking at the number of v0.1 projects that are fossilised and not moving on sourceforge you can understand the astronomers concern that this might not be the most reliable way forwards... open sourcing might draw in a wider crowd (and I agree it would be a good thing to do) but that in itself won't assure you of a reliable piece of code being created.
Yup, because politicians in capitalist countries are never corrupt, right? ;-)
Quite clearly though as you note some people - even if a minority - would like to leave the UK but are happy to be independently part of the EU. Flipping your question on the head - not seeing why a section of the UK should leave to become an independent state, given that an increasing amount of power and support comes from the EU, I'd ask what is the big motivation for Scotland / Yorkshire /Essex etc to *stay* as part of the UK?
The argument of course that is often raised in Scotland is that there are member states with similar or smaller populations that get on fine within the EU (Republic of Ireland, Estonia, Denmark).
Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again? Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit. I suppose the earlier Russian (Soviet) plans were based on quite a bit of hardware which is tried and tested (apart from the N1 rocket).
I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...
A million in any currency, or just US dollars or UK pounds? how about Zimbabwean Dollars or Laos kips?
Depends on the kit and the layout - you can get 10 miles no problem with 5.Ghz kit and there are projects reaching over that in Nepal / India with 2.4Ghz kit. Plus depends on what's in the middle - if you're hopping from small community to small community then they might want to pick up some of the costs. Point taken about reduction in bandwidth due to setting up a mesh network but again depends on purpose - is it for email/ web browsing or streaming video/ playing games which need tiny lag?