. ..And those areas are probably a great example of when roundabouts fail. If there's a high bias of traffic on one of the intersecting streets, traffic from the lesser street won't be able to enter the intersection.
Roundabouts have downsides:
a. They aren't appropriate where a large, heavily-travelled street intersects a smaller street. The large intersection will so overwhelm the intersection that traffic from the lesser street can't enter;
b. They take much more space than a conventional intersection;
c. They are much more expensive.
There are a few more reasons that I can list, but the point is that they're not a universal solution. Where they're appropriate, though, I really favour them.
Because of issues with maintenance, wildly different stopping distances for various vehicles, seasonal conditions and liability, the transverse stripes that you recommend are probably a non-starter.
I've seen this suggestion of countdown timers in place of yellow lights, and thought it intriguing. There would be some difficulty in attempting it, though, as current controllers aren't designed to handle this feature. The signal head also needs to be changed, as I don't think the space currently available in signal heads is large enough. (Alaska currently requires that speed limit signs (R2-1) have numbers ~14" high for installation on an expressway. I think that this is about to get slightly larger with new standards due "any day now.") Another issue that designers face already is the perception that we already present drivers with too much information, particularly at intersections.
Increasing the yellow cycle can have a drastic reduction on intersection capacity, particularly at intersections already operating above capacity. A clear safety issue, though, is definitely justification for making such a change, though.
Something that does work, and is used in limited cases, is advance warning flashers. These turn on a sufficient distance and time ahead of the yellow light that the driver is nearly certain to have to stop if the yellow flashers are visible to them. They present a problem with closely spaced intersections, though.
I wasn't adequately explicit about the data, spreadsheets and AutoCAD. In this application, I use a small program to get the handles of between 20 and 5,000 text items. I then may modify the (text) value of the handles a dozen (or more) times as the project progresses. So, I first share data from AutoCAD to Excel, then different data the other direction several times. I don't know how to do that easily otherwise. Can you tell me more about how you did what you did?
Too right. I really like the idea of switching to open/libreoffice, but it simply isn't practical. I have several spreadsheets that I use to get data out of Excel and into AutoCAD. I don't think that I can do this between AutoCAD and Calc.
I also wrote a very large spreadsheet that predicts parking demand based on land-use data that breaks when I use Openoffice. I tried porting it over, but one of the functions I used in Excel wasn't available in Openoffice. I started to write a custom function in Openoffice to replace the lost one, but couldn't finish it, because I still had to work with the first spreadsheet. At the time, I was working ~60 hours/week, and I didn't like the idea of working still longer hours to make this function. I gave up.
That said, I don't think that I represent normal users. If all of the templates were in place, I think most users could switch fairly easily. The problem, as I see it, is that I don't want to have to recreate all of the tools I've made with Excel in another slightly incompatible spreadsheet, never mind the partially automated spreadsheets.
I may give it another shot, though. I just discovered that several spreadsheets that handle external files are broken in the switch from Excel 2003 to 2010. Now, my only choice is to abandon the spreadsheets or port them over to the new slightly incompatible spreadsheet. *sigh* Well, at least my time isn't as much in demand in this job as the last one.
As I'm sure that others will point out, there are several for Android. I use Droid48, when I don't have my calculator handy. It's a poor substitute, though.
Huh! I didn't know there were others who thought as I do about pens. I'm careful to hide how specific I am about pens, as I've assumed that I was one of about three people in the world who cared much. My favorite pen is the Zebra F-701. They don't accumulate much gunk, and leave a consistently thin line, though I'm not sure that it'll meet your exacting needs. (When the Zebra pen does accumulate gunk, I just clean it with a tissue.)
My favorite writing tool is a Staedtler 0.2mm drafting pencil, though I also use a 0.5mm pencil. For marking wood, I use a 0.7mm or 0.9mm pencil, for durability.
Instead of using random bits of paper, look for an engineering pad. I find them at staples. I'm not sure what they do differently with the paper, but it seems to be slightly more durable. I appreciate this as I've been known to erase work to make corrections. (The outfit I work for supplies pads, but I prefer to use my own, as the paper is better.)
Last thing: I bought a Fisher Space Pen 18 or so years ago and absolutely hated it. The durn thing seemed to be happy to write, but it also left ink blobs everywhere. Yech!
Thanks for the humour in your correction. The "-" is right below "/" on the Dvorak keyboard, which I type blindly as the office won't buy me a "proper" keyboard. I'm usually a bit better at double-checking my work.
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers, rather than to the regulators who have failed spectacularly for all of the 20th and this portion of the 21st century. We've gone from regional bank failures to national bank bailouts. No improvement there, I think.
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion. Instead, we in the USA rely on the FDA to protect us. It seems that they've been doing OK, but they've definitely been slower than their EU counterparts in approving therapies. Would we be better off without the FDA, or the semi-protected NBME?
. ..And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
As a libertarian, I don't assume that you're acting out of the goodness of your heart. In fact, I assume that you're a selfish bugger until you prove otherwise. Selfish doesn't necessarily equate to asshole, but I don't assume so.
(By the way, I work a government. Too many of the people I work with are real shitheads for me to believe that the government works on the behalf of its citizens. I recall a recent significant reorganization to de-fang a minor long-lived shithead. ..)
Hilarious. I recall, for the brief time I was studying CS, two students employed in one of the CS labs expounding, respectively, on the virtues of FORTH and LISP. Sorry that I don't have a mod point to toss your way right now.
Is that true for most public entities, and this one in particular? The state of Alaska, on highway projects for example, simply publishes bids for any comer. There is no list of qualified bidders, though for design work, you need an appropriate person with an Alaska PE. Here's an advertisement for airport facilities in Northway, AK, if you're interested. (The preceding link probably broke sometime after 15 November, 2012, if you're reading this later.)
huh! That's even less than your source says we spend on the military, which initially surprised me. But, my first question was: Did they account for spending by the states in their estimate? Further, in trying to sort out the source for the data, the site seemed to repeatedly cite itself in an orobouros-like fashion. Do you have another source?
TVs? Clearly, I went to school in the wrong decade. I can remember when my Alma Mater got telephones. (Truth is, they were late to the game, and only installed telephones in response to an instance of rape, where the attacker broke into the dorm room after protracted effort. Thankfully, he also went to jail.)
Because I was too cheap to buy a TV while at college, I lost the habit of nightly TV viewing. Though I own a secondhand set now, I can't recall the last time I turned it on.
I'm surprised at the price disparity. It's not like Alcatel-Lucent is a cut-rate supplier.
My employer recently bid construction of a project I designed, and all of the bids were within 50% of the low bidder. When I was working as a consultant, I recall losing to the low bidder by 100s on a project worth $80,000. Do others see a price spread as wide as this one?
American culture remains largely a culture of cowboys: decency of speech is based on the threat of violence if you spoke offensively. That's why Texans are still very polite.
I'll see your assertion, and raise you one anecdote.
Riding in the cold isn't so bad. I ride in Fairbanks, AK. The major issue I have is the (long, steep) hill a mile from my house. When I go down the thing in the morning, I'm likely to freeze. In the afternoon, I overheat.
An opensource driver was born, and it's an unstable, slow piece of shit. When these FOSS folks realized they weren't technically competent enough to actually create a driver for a modern GPU architecture, they went back to demonizing ATI for not releasing their proprietary driver under a free license.
Not quite what I've heard. AMD didn't just release the spec, they also released a driver. . ..and assigned several developers to keep working on it. My own opinion is that the open driver keeps slowly improving, and has been useable for a bit. (With the caveat that I don't play games very often.)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the correct solution would be to rip most of them out and replace them with roundabouts.
Not really. There are entirely too many intersection where they would operate poorly to consider roundabouts as a blanket solution.
. . .And those areas are probably a great example of when roundabouts fail. If there's a high bias of traffic on one of the intersecting streets, traffic from the lesser street won't be able to enter the intersection.
Roundabouts have downsides:
a. They aren't appropriate where a large, heavily-travelled street intersects a smaller street. The large intersection will so overwhelm the intersection that traffic from the lesser street can't enter;
b. They take much more space than a conventional intersection;
c. They are much more expensive.
There are a few more reasons that I can list, but the point is that they're not a universal solution. Where they're appropriate, though, I really favour them.
Because of issues with maintenance, wildly different stopping distances for various vehicles, seasonal conditions and liability, the transverse stripes that you recommend are probably a non-starter.
I've seen this suggestion of countdown timers in place of yellow lights, and thought it intriguing. There would be some difficulty in attempting it, though, as current controllers aren't designed to handle this feature. The signal head also needs to be changed, as I don't think the space currently available in signal heads is large enough. (Alaska currently requires that speed limit signs (R2-1) have numbers ~14" high for installation on an expressway. I think that this is about to get slightly larger with new standards due "any day now.") Another issue that designers face already is the perception that we already present drivers with too much information, particularly at intersections.
Increasing the yellow cycle can have a drastic reduction on intersection capacity, particularly at intersections already operating above capacity. A clear safety issue, though, is definitely justification for making such a change, though.
Something that does work, and is used in limited cases, is advance warning flashers. These turn on a sufficient distance and time ahead of the yellow light that the driver is nearly certain to have to stop if the yellow flashers are visible to them. They present a problem with closely spaced intersections, though.
I wasn't adequately explicit about the data, spreadsheets and AutoCAD. In this application, I use a small program to get the handles of between 20 and 5,000 text items. I then may modify the (text) value of the handles a dozen (or more) times as the project progresses. So, I first share data from AutoCAD to Excel, then different data the other direction several times. I don't know how to do that easily otherwise. Can you tell me more about how you did what you did?
Too right. I really like the idea of switching to open/libreoffice, but it simply isn't practical. I have several spreadsheets that I use to get data out of Excel and into AutoCAD. I don't think that I can do this between AutoCAD and Calc.
I also wrote a very large spreadsheet that predicts parking demand based on land-use data that breaks when I use Openoffice. I tried porting it over, but one of the functions I used in Excel wasn't available in Openoffice. I started to write a custom function in Openoffice to replace the lost one, but couldn't finish it, because I still had to work with the first spreadsheet. At the time, I was working ~60 hours/week, and I didn't like the idea of working still longer hours to make this function. I gave up.
That said, I don't think that I represent normal users. If all of the templates were in place, I think most users could switch fairly easily. The problem, as I see it, is that I don't want to have to recreate all of the tools I've made with Excel in another slightly incompatible spreadsheet, never mind the partially automated spreadsheets.
I may give it another shot, though. I just discovered that several spreadsheets that handle external files are broken in the switch from Excel 2003 to 2010. Now, my only choice is to abandon the spreadsheets or port them over to the new slightly incompatible spreadsheet. *sigh* Well, at least my time isn't as much in demand in this job as the last one.
As I'm sure that others will point out, there are several for Android. I use Droid48, when I don't have my calculator handy. It's a poor substitute, though.
Huh! I didn't know there were others who thought as I do about pens. I'm careful to hide how specific I am about pens, as I've assumed that I was one of about three people in the world who cared much. My favorite pen is the Zebra F-701. They don't accumulate much gunk, and leave a consistently thin line, though I'm not sure that it'll meet your exacting needs. (When the Zebra pen does accumulate gunk, I just clean it with a tissue.)
My favorite writing tool is a Staedtler 0.2mm drafting pencil, though I also use a 0.5mm pencil. For marking wood, I use a 0.7mm or 0.9mm pencil, for durability.
Instead of using random bits of paper, look for an engineering pad. I find them at staples. I'm not sure what they do differently with the paper, but it seems to be slightly more durable. I appreciate this as I've been known to erase work to make corrections. (The outfit I work for supplies pads, but I prefer to use my own, as the paper is better.)
Last thing: I bought a Fisher Space Pen 18 or so years ago and absolutely hated it. The durn thing seemed to be happy to write, but it also left ink blobs everywhere. Yech!
Alas, the spare time has diminished and the errors creep in. . .
Thanks for the humour in your correction. The "-" is right below "/" on the Dvorak keyboard, which I type blindly as the office won't buy me a "proper" keyboard. I'm usually a bit better at double-checking my work.
(1-(167mm^2-118mm^2))=0.2934, or approximately 29%. They were referring to the area of the die.
Thank you. I think you did a better job of countering PopeRatzo's assumptions than I did below.
sigh
. . .work FOR a government. Too many. . .
Nope. Wrong.
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers, rather than to the regulators who have failed spectacularly for all of the 20th and this portion of the 21st century. We've gone from regional bank failures to national bank bailouts. No improvement there, I think.
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion. Instead, we in the USA rely on the FDA to protect us. It seems that they've been doing OK, but they've definitely been slower than their EU counterparts in approving therapies. Would we be better off without the FDA, or the semi-protected NBME?
. . .And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
As a libertarian, I don't assume that you're acting out of the goodness of your heart. In fact, I assume that you're a selfish bugger until you prove otherwise. Selfish doesn't necessarily equate to asshole, but I don't assume so.
(By the way, I work a government. Too many of the people I work with are real shitheads for me to believe that the government works on the behalf of its citizens. I recall a recent significant reorganization to de-fang a minor long-lived shithead. . .)
Hilarious. I recall, for the brief time I was studying CS, two students employed in one of the CS labs expounding, respectively, on the virtues of FORTH and LISP. Sorry that I don't have a mod point to toss your way right now.
Is that true for most public entities, and this one in particular? The state of Alaska, on highway projects for example, simply publishes bids for any comer. There is no list of qualified bidders, though for design work, you need an appropriate person with an Alaska PE. Here's an advertisement for airport facilities in Northway, AK, if you're interested. (The preceding link probably broke sometime after 15 November, 2012, if you're reading this later.)
huh! That's even less than your source says we spend on the military, which initially surprised me. But, my first question was: Did they account for spending by the states in their estimate? Further, in trying to sort out the source for the data, the site seemed to repeatedly cite itself in an orobouros-like fashion. Do you have another source?
What happened to the link? Why didn't it show up when I previewed the comment? That should have been to http://www.uaf.edu/ .
TVs? Clearly, I went to school in the wrong decade. I can remember when my Alma Mater got telephones. (Truth is, they were late to the game, and only installed telephones in response to an instance of rape, where the attacker broke into the dorm room after protracted effort. Thankfully, he also went to jail.)
Because I was too cheap to buy a TV while at college, I lost the habit of nightly TV viewing. Though I own a secondhand set now, I can't recall the last time I turned it on.
I'm surprised at the price disparity. It's not like Alcatel-Lucent is a cut-rate supplier.
My employer recently bid construction of a project I designed, and all of the bids were within 50% of the low bidder. When I was working as a consultant, I recall losing to the low bidder by 100s on a project worth $80,000. Do others see a price spread as wide as this one?
Perhaps somebody at Cisco misread a spec?
Some of them have been. Yours, on the other hand. . .
American culture remains largely a culture of cowboys: decency of speech is based on the threat of violence if you spoke offensively. That's why Texans are still very polite.
I'll see your assertion, and raise you one anecdote.
Riding in the cold isn't so bad. I ride in Fairbanks, AK. The major issue I have is the (long, steep) hill a mile from my house. When I go down the thing in the morning, I'm likely to freeze. In the afternoon, I overheat.
That was awesome.
An opensource driver was born, and it's an unstable, slow piece of shit. When these FOSS folks realized they weren't technically competent enough to actually create a driver for a modern GPU architecture, they went back to demonizing ATI for not releasing their proprietary driver under a free license.
Not quite what I've heard. AMD didn't just release the spec, they also released a driver. . . .and assigned several developers to keep working on it. My own opinion is that the open driver keeps slowly improving, and has been useable for a bit. (With the caveat that I don't play games very often.)