Melkart is my „real“ nickname. I took Melquart at first, because I thought – mistakenly – that Melkart was already taken.

As all these costs are passed on to the passenger by ticket prices, trips by mass transit would not only be faster, but cheaper, too, if the number of intermediate stops could be reduced. On the other hand, as will be seen, different routing patterns often cause higher waiting times due to reduced departure frequency, or requires the passenger to change trains more often. Furthermore, different routing patterns may also require changes to the ROW, like passing lanes at stations or additional stopping bays.

In order to improve transit, one needs to look at different routing patterns. The most widespread concept is that every train stops at every stop along its route. This scheme has the above-mentioned disadvantages. Another concept is the skip-stop service pattern, by which trains skip certain alternating low-utilized stops along the route. The pattern is described here in more detail. It slightly reduces the line capacity on ROWs without passing lane by increasing the minimum headway.

Another service pattern is „zonal operation“, which is particularly suitable for operation between center and periphery. In this pattern all stations along the route are grouped into certain zones, depending on their distance from the center. Routes are then designed to serve a certain zone only, by traveling without stop between the center and the first stop within their zone, and then stopping at every station within their zone. Usually stations located at the border between different zones are assigned to both zones at once in order to allow interchange between different routes, thus allowing to travel between zones without having to connect at the center.

Further routing patterns are possible if trains are capable of splitting and joining during revenue operation. This enables trains to travel one section jointly, thus occupying only one timetable path, which is particularly useful where the capacity of the ROW is limited, and saving costs for staff, too, if trains are operated in human-driven mode, then to split at a certain station and from there onwards to serve different stops or even possibly different lines. If train units are capable of opening a passage way to coupled adjoining units, passengers could also change trains en route instead of at a station.

It could be argued that countries would do better to make themselves more attractive as a permanent home. Of course they should do their best, however, there are limits to it which can’t be transgressed. Different locations, different amounts and quality of land, different climate, different population base and a different position within the international community set different countries into different situations, which can’t be changed at will, at least not easily. For example, some countries have dangerous enemies and therefore must spend more on national defence. Other countries must spend more in order to cope with a difficult climate while other countries again abound in natural ressources. By course of history some countries ended up with a less capable and productive population than others. Coming from different points of departure a country can try hard to do its best and still be less attractive as a permanent home than others. Therefore another policy addressing the problem of emigration must be devised.

I suggest to understand society like a family, giving support in times of need, but demanding contribution in better times, too. Therefore people can’t be allowed to emigrate without settling their incurred debt to society first. The state should be understood as a all-encompassing social security system, which raises premiums according to everyone’s individual capability and productivity and which keeps a financial account for every citizen. Onto this account shall be booked all paid premiums, but also all benefits which were received by the citizen, such as:

• Due share of national defence
• Due share of police and court system
• Due share of a transport system
• Child benefit
• School education
• University education
• Welfare
• etc…

Membership in this all-encompassing social security system would be mandatory for every citizen and for every permanent resident in the country. Citizens who emigrated would still remain members of the social security system and would still have to pay premiums according to their individual capability and productivity. For determining their individual capability, taxes and charges of their host country have to be subtracted from and social benefits added to their premium. Thus, every citizen would still be free to emigrate and not be drawn on harder than citizens who did not emigrate, but at the same time, they could not escape their liability by emigrating to a country offering them better conditions.

People who emigrated and handed back their citizenship, would be allowed to resign from the system, but not before they adjusted all imbalances on their account. To demand them to hand back their citizenship is necessary because someone could emigrate to another country in good times and return back home in times of need, thus taking unfair advantage of his home country. A non-citizen can always be denied entry to the country while a citizen can’t.

Rubber on concrete is superior for passenger traffic compared to steel wheels on rails. Rubber-tired wheels are more lightweight and they dont require heavy bogies, either, because they don’t need rigid axles. For railway vehicles, the sine running requires this. Light weight saves energy particularly when vehicles have to stop frequently on their way, as is the case in transit. While it is true that today braking energy can be recovered, it is not possible to recover even near 100% of it.

Steel wheels on steel rails have the advantage of lower rolling friction. However, this is essential only for slow and heavy traffic over long distances. Over short distances, as between the stops of a transit line, the energy lost to rolling friction is outweighted by the kinetic energy of the vehicle, and for fast traffic, by the energy lost to wind resistance. Therefore steel wheels of steel rails are superior only for slow freight traffic over long distances which is heavy and doesn’t stop often on its route. Another, albeit minimal advantage of steel wheels on steel rails is the possibility to use the rails as return conductor for electric power supply by overhead wire or third rail. Rubber-tired vehicles can be powered electrically, too, but they require a double-pole power supply.

Steel wheels on rails exert a contact pressure per unit area orders of magnitudes higher than rubber tires on concrete. This causes higher maintenance costs for railways. The low adhesion of steel on steel makes railway vehicles unable to ascend very steep slopes. Rubber-tired vehicles can easily ascend steep slopes, even with only few of their axles being powered, and they can accelerate and decelerate slightly faster than railway vehicles. Furthermore, while the braking distance in normal operation is determined by the need of maintaining comfort and safety of the passengers, thus limiting acceleration and deceleration to approximately 1.3 m/s^2, the emergency braking distance is much shorter for rubber-tired vehicles. When coupling trains within revenue operation, this allows for the vehicle behind to approach the standing vehicle much swifter without compromising safety as there is always the possibility of braking harder should the approaching vehicle transgress its target speed for a given distance. Furthermore, a shorter emergency braking distance allows for a train following onto an occupied stopping bay to under-run the absolute braking distance for normal operation to the vehicle in front after the latter already departed, thus allowing to cut off another 8 seconds or so from the minimal possible headway through a station without passing lane.

On stations, ideally there should be at least a passing lane beside the stopping lane in order to maximize throughput of the exclusive ROW and in order to allow for trains to skip stops. Of course, the costs of providing a passing lane may be prohibitively expensive for underground sections although it allows for shorter platform areas at low-utilized stations, if these are to be served by short train consists only. At stations where several trains should be able to stop at the same time, stopping bays can be aligned either side by side or, length-wise, one after the other. The self-steering capability of the vehicles and the absence of rails allows vehicles to overtake each other at every location along the route, without requiring switches.

The possibility for coupling and decoupling vehicles within revenue operation allows to customize the capacity of the trains to the demands over different stretches of the route, without falling back to short-turning trips, which has the drawback of both reducing frequency at short-turned sections and causing uneven loads at the common sections of the route. Furthermore it allows for different routings of units within the same train consists, thus serving several areas at the end of a common line at once with a high frequency, as, for instance, at the end of a common ROW, and even for units to decouple from one train, serving exclusively a low-utilized station on a line and eventually coupling at the succeeding train on the same line, even if there is no passing lane at the low-utilized station. Ideally, after coupling vehicles in normal operation, the passage way between them should be automatically opened to allow for passengers to distribute themselves evenly over the whole length of the train. For this, both ends of each vehicle should be equipped with a roller shutter.

Ideally, the dedicated ROW for transit vehicles is equipped with electric power supply overhead wires or rails, thus allowing for vehicles to be powered electrically. For spur lines on ordinary roads, however, an electric power supply would be too expensive, therefore vehicles should be equipped with an energy storage, too, allowing to travel over short distances without electric power supply overhead wires or rails.

Transit systems running on customized ROWs only have the limitation of being unable to serve all areas without them. Since customized ROWs are expensive, such areas are plenty. By vehicles being able to drive on ordinary roads and mixing with normal street traffic, they can exploit the higher travel speed on dedicated ROWs while still serving areas away from them. In order to allow for driving on ordinary roads mixing with normal street traffic without taking away space for a driver cabin from the interior, the vehicles are equipped with comprehensive camera surveillance at both ends to supervise street traffic, thus allowing for drivers driving them with their visual input being communicated to them from the cameras to monitors in front of them at a remote office. Remote-controlled driving with visual input from cameras can’t be deemed to be any less safe than driving a tramway, since, in case of sudden failure of the cameras or of the communication link, the vehicle can still emergency brake, albeit only within its exact virtual track and therefore being incapable of evading obstacles. But neither can a tramway which drives on rails within street traffic and is still deemed reasonably safe.

Does there already exist a possibility to implement this indirectly? Like a pin board web service, which could be linked to at the topic. IRC-Galleria maybe? A bot could automatically send the IPs of all channel visitors to the web service, which could then restrict access to the pin board to these IPs. Unfortunately dragging and dropping objects into certain areas of web pages hasnt caught on yet.

Anyway it’s a shame that Chat and Instant Messenging haven’t yet been fully integrated. With IM it isn’t possible to operate channels, with more than two visitors and these should have a pin board, too.

About this suspension is said on its website, that it consumes as much energy as an air condition. Naturally, lifting the vehicle up and down by linear motors consumes energy, and I presume the energy consumed increases with both the weight of the vehicle and the roughness of the road.

Furthermore, the German Wikipedia-Artikel about linear motors mentions a maximum achieved force of 30 kN. I don’t know if this figure is applicable for this case, but if it was, it might restrict the use of the Bose suspension to axles with a low weight and make it unsuitable for heavy-duty vehicles.

Orkut has a feature called the „crush list“. You enter every person whose profile you have checked and whom you are interested in, in the „crush list“, but this list is kept secret. Only when there is a match between two people having entered each other in their own „crush list“, i.e. both people have a mutual interest in each other, then both people get notified automatically. This way the risk of being rejected and losing face is reduced to a minimum.

I suggest a feature to present all people matching said certain „hard criteria“, like sex, age span, geographical location, type of interest etc., with those people having entered you in their crush list getting presented preferably, but still hidden between people not knowing you, thus not revealing indirectly their interest in you. People who have seen your profile and decided not being interested in you, should be excluded from the selection. The presentation should be executed like a dia show, while giving you the opportunity, after looking at the profile of one person, to express with a mouse click if you are interested in them or not.

Furthermore, you should be given opportunity to enter a price for how much money you would be willing to satisfy the other person’s interest in you, if he or she was interested in you. This would make both the work of prostitutes and the selection process of their customers easier and more convenient, as the prostitute could easily deselect certain customers without rejecting them openly and the customers would not risk getting rejected.

So what is needed to implement this idea in the real world? I propose setting up a new service, where you can enter a profile, like at so many others and where you can also enter the „hard criteria“ for the people you are looking for. Furthermore it stores your „crush status“ about any other person, which can be either „want“ or „not want“. You may also set as an option that other people can inspect your crush status on them on request. The service lets you search for „hard“ matches, with people having a crush on you mixed in preferably. Last, but not least, it sends out notifications about mutual crushes, but lets members decide if and how they want to receive this info, in order to avoid annoying particularly popular people and possibly drive them away.

But how do people from the real world ever come to use this site? By use of a small button to be placed on profiles of people anywhere else to click on if they have a crush on you. This web button could be placed on personal home pages or profiles in web communities like orkut, facebook etc. or anywhere else on the web. The button has written „I have a crush on this person“ on it and one can choose between a „secret“ crush, and an „open“ crush, the latter being revealed on request to all people who want to know if you had a crush on them or not. The button would then send the info to the above-mentioned service. If the clicker hasn’t registered yet, he or she would be invited, too, with the option of not supplying a full profile but merely one single piece of info allowing to identify them, like their email-address. Members without a profile would then never be included in a presentation.

The concept of „crush lists“ has also been implemented by the site „Crush space“, but very poorly. This site seems mostly deserted now. It is easy to understand why: There is no connection to the outer world, no support is being provided for people who want to lure web surfers from anywhere else to this service, with one mouse-click. Furthermore people whom others have had a crush on, get always notified by email, which can be prohibitively annoying to popular members.

These days, sadly, states are less open about selling chunks of their territor, because they take an too absolute view of the property rights of their citizens. Of course, those citizens owning land in that area might be against it being sold, but such an unconditional right need not be guaranteed by the state in the first place. Think of it as being similar to an expropriation of property taking place when building a right of way, e.g. for a highway or an airport. Then people get expropriated for the common good but compensated for their losses.

We are witnessing the process of Islamization, this time in Europe, which will cause the indigenous population soon to become a minority in the lands which formerly had been theirs. Now I am not against them reconquering their lands by force, but another option would be to found an association, which would collect capital for a potential land purchase or in order to rent or financially support an army. (The latter, for instance, was done by the Albanian population of Kosovo to support the Kosovo Liberation Army.) As long as the capital is not needed for the land purchase, the association would just invest it like an ordinary investment fund. And the leadership of this association would be accountable for it as the association would be a legal corporation seated in a state with a functioning legal system. All this just like the Jews did when they aimed to found their own state of Israel

After the new state got founded, the capital investors would be alloted pieces of  land in the new territory, according to the amount of capital they contributed. This means that immigrants to the new state need not have been investors before, nor does it mean that people would invest only if they want to immigrate themselves. It might also be just an ordinary investment like any other, with the investor hoping to gain a high profit from later selling the land later to somebody else.

For examples, look at the investment funds and association which founded Jamestown and New England, from which the United States emerged.

On what common grounds would people associate with each other nowadays? The important factors are how well people get along with each other in common life and, most importantly, how they want their new state to look like, what legal system they want. It is similar to a political party, with its members sharing a lot of political views and ambitions, however, it need not be limited to it. Not only political views count, but also how well the people are able to abide by the required rules and meet the demands made to its citizens by the planned society.

How the state must carefully control immigration and procreation, I already clarified in an earlier post.

Es heisst, der Sauerstoff in der Luft sei entstanden, als Organismen auftauchten, die Photosynthese betrieben, also mit Hilfe von Licht Kohlendioxid in seine Bestandteile aufspalteten. Der Sauerstoff wurde in die Luft abgegeben, der Kohlenstoffanteil gelangte schliesslich über einen langen Zeitraum in die Erdöl-, Gas-, und Kohlevorkommen unter der Erde.

Diese Vorkommen verbrennt die Menschheit gerade und erhöht dadurch den Kohlendioxidanteil der Luft. Bei der Verbrennung wird Sauerstoff aus der Luft entnommen und in Kohlendioxid umgewandelt. Durch den Einfluß der menschlichen Aktivitäten müsste sich der Sauerstoffanteil der Atmosphäre also verringern.

Nun ist der Sauerstoff aber angeblich erst durch die Photosynthese der Organismen in die Luft gekommen. Die Verbrennung ist nur die Umkehrung des Prozesses der Photosynthese. Durch die Verbrennung sämtlicher durch die Photosynthese entstandener kohlenstoffhaltiger Substanzen auf der Erde – vor allem die Erdöl-, Gas- und Kohlevorkommen – müsste also auch sämtlicher Sauerstoff aus der Luft verschwinden.

Die Menschheit ist gerade dabei, die Erdöl-, Gas- und Kohlevorkommen zu verbrennen. Der Sauerstoffanteil der Luft nimmt aber nicht merklich ab. Warum nicht?

nicht verstanden !!!!

problem scheint derzeit noch zu sein: zu geringe verbreitung von
gps-empfängern in autos und vor allem: zu hohe tarife für ständige
(mobil)funkverbindung

es gibt auch ein system, mit dem die verkehrsnachrichten digital zusammen
mit dem radio übermittelt werden. damit könnte es evtl. gehen, vielleicht
sind es aber auch zuviele daten

vorteile: fahrtziel, fahrpreis kann übermittelt werden sowie weitere
bedingungen (nichtraucher, mehrere personen, gepäck). außerdem kann zu
kleinen umwegen (abfahrt von der autobahn) animiert werden. und
rechtzeitiges anhalten kein problem mehr (manchmal sind fahrzeuge zu schnell
und sehen anhalter zu spät)

Hier ein NOKIA-Forschungspapier, das die Idee genau beschreibt.

A step in the right direction is that carpooling sites like Mitfahrgelegenheit.de have introduced access to their data base by WAP, making it possible to use one’s cellphone to find a lift. However, offers by drivers must still be entered manually.