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1. To vote, part the voting machine curtains and enter
2. Pull large red handle to the right. Do not touch the large red handle again until you've made all your selections.
3. Push down the lever next to the candidates you want. An "X" will appear. If you made a mistake, move the lever back and select the candidate you want.
4. You may vote for a candidate not listed on the ballot by writing in the candidate's name. Locate the button over the column of numbered slots on the left of the voting machine and:
1. For General Election: Depress the button and, while holding it in, open the slot opposite the office for which you wish to write in a candidate's name.
2. For Primary Elections: Depress the button and, while holding it in, open the slot number indicated on the ballot under the office and party for which you wish to write in a candidate's name.
Write the name of your preferred candidate in the slot. A pencil is provided. Cast your vote for other offices in the usual manner.
5. When you finish making your selection, leave the levers down and pull the large red handle all the way to the left. The write-in slot will close, the levers will return to their original position and your vote is recorded.
6. Part the curtains and exit.

Fair enough, and you do make some good points. However:

Well, what happens when the barrier to entry for producing this product is rather high, and the original company is well established?

I would ask why the barrier to entry is as high as it is. Why does it cost over 300,000$ to get a taxicab liscence in New York City, for instance? The (government-set) number seems fairly arbitrary to me, given how the costs for my car get nowhere near that high.

But, if you were to break down barriers to entry into markets, then you would (I think) start to see serious competition against monopolies. Getting rid of subsidies for established companies would also help, as that's a barrier to entry.

I will concede that it is possible that there is a universe where ABC Co. has a monopoly on widgets, and no business springs up to compete. The thing is, I would wonder at why no competition appears. If ABC Co. keeps raising prices (which, admittedly, monopolies do tend to do), eventually (assuming minimal, if any, barriers to entry) the small business will be able to compete with ABC Co. So why doesn't competition show up?

I suspect the answer is barriers to entry.

The question is: what happens when a company beats its competition? Answer: the consumer loses.

I will admit that I do not follow. If a company beats its competition, then its product would have to be competitive in some form against its competitors; consumers would get the benefit from that.

Mind, there are other factors at work in the market. And you may perhaps be arguing that once competition is beaten, no more innovation occurs. At which point, I would wonder why no competition springs up with the new innovations (which the bigger company may eventually copy).

I suspect the answer is, again, barriers to entry.

You make a fair assertion that a company is a neutral thing that has the goal of making profit; I cannot argue this assertion. And I do agree that it can cause companies to become shortsighted and damaging. I am not trying to condone that activity. Though I would assert that the larger the company is, the more likely that is to occur; small businesses, from my experience, do want a profit, but tend to "play nicer" than larger companies. Bigger companies do indeed like to throw their weight around, and have the advantage of scale when purchasing.

So yes, I see your point about the telco and cable companies' lobbying, and about what they will do. If there is no Net Neutrality, I do agree that they will create a tiered access of some sort. But I'm not entirely convinced that they will slow every website to a crawl, as that would cause consternation in their customers. On the other hand, I think it's a very real concern over censorship.

On the other hand, what if an ISP wants to be built around being "family-friendly", and would automatically censor pornography and other kid-unsafe websites? They could advertise themselves to religious families as "family-friendly". I have a hard time saying that said ISP should not exist because it does not follow a net neutrality position. Though it should be upfront about its censorship.

Government control may lead to totalitarianism, but government regulation keeps us free, and not beholden to monopolistic practice.

What's the difference between government control and government regulation? As I understand how they are implemented, regulations tend to control what a business can and cannot do.

You also commit bifurcation. You assume that there are only two possibilities for a company to have, say, sanitation checking: themself, or the government. However, the ACT is an organization that performs academic testing outside of the government, and outside of the schools that rely on its scores. What if there were companies that perform the safety inspections and so on--companies that specialized in safety inspections? What real difference wo

The police are out there busting their hump...

According the the New York City Police Department's Web site, there are currently 39,110 officers on duty. Using your estimate, there are approximately 391 city cops that are out there busting everyone else's hump.

I'm not sure, however, if even Google has enough computing capacity to figure out NYC's public transit.

Best transportation system? I've lived in San Francisco and rode BART every day. I've also lived in DC, and I've also lived in New York.. BART and DC Metro are roughly even (though BART's interior is more comfortable). But realistically, come on.. New York has the best transit system in the US by far.

Coverage is the most important thing for a transit system, that and affordability. Let me know how BART's coverage map compares to this. And that's just the subway, not the buses, and not the commuter rails..

New York City puts the rest of the country to shame when it comes to public transit. San Francisco's a nice compared to cities like LA, Phoenix, Denver, etc. But there are definitely some eastern cities that have it beat.

A bunch of points:

1) MTA is not a corporation, it's a government agency

2) Subway maps have always been freely available in paper form, as well as in electronic form directly off of the MTA's site

3) I don't exactly know why they care, except maybe to make sure that no one is selling these for profit or redistributing inaccurate/outdated versions. The articles don't seem to go into detail, except to mention that the MTA is strapped for cash.

I looked at the New York subway map and got wondering, which is your favourite transport map (from any city) in terms of readability and design?

You mean "Michael Hertz Associates, NYC"? (check copyright section in lower left)

They seem to have done a lot of maps for the MTA. No web page for them turned up on a quick google search.

A downloadable map makes a world of sense

I live in NY City, and for the past few weeks there have been cops in many subway stations doing random searches. According to this article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8660152/

This is costing the city $2 million per week.

If you look at this page (New York MTA):
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/mta/ind-perform/per-nyct. htm

You'll see that the subway system sees about 120 million riders per month with 3 customer accidents and injuries per million per month. That's 40 injuries per month from accidents. Sometimes these are things like fatalities caused from someone getting bumped off of an over-crowded subway platform during rush hour onto the tracks...

So the city spends $2 million per week to "fight terrorism on the subway" and $212 million for security cameras on the subway rather than actually making a difference a difference by improving the system. Go to some G-train subway stations in brooklyn. The structural steel girders are rusting out and the stations are in dire need of maintenance.

And how much money has our government spent starting wars in the middle east (first gulf war, troops in Saudi Arabia, current Iraq occupation)... hundreds of billions of dollars

And then people over there get pissed off and want to set off subway bombs, and then we pay for it again by dealing with an army of cops checking our bags on the subway.

If they want to make subway riders safer, spend money on safety and infrastructure -- not cops -- to reduce accidents. If the government wants to eradicate terrorism, stop spending money on killing people in the Middle East. But of course getting rid of terrorism isn't the issue -- the issue is control of the dwindling global reserves of oil and new business opportunities in the middle east for American companies.

And we as taxpayers have to pay for it, and I have to let cops search my bag if I want to ride the subway to work and pay for that too.

Well, since I was sleeping at 8:03am, I can tell you exactly who I walked past at that time ;)

As more memories being fallible? Yeah, I agree with that - to an extent. Not remembering the oncoming car? That's a small detail. Not remembering whether or not a street is one- or two-way? That's a pretty big "small detail" - especially for (presumably) the cop's home territory and likely a location that has been patrolled before or since.

I just performed a little experiment: Three years ago, I worked for 4 months in NYC on a subway project. Over the course of that project, I performed tasks at several locations in Manhattan, which are shown as dots on a schematic map in a technical report. Just looking at dots on the map, I tried to remember whether or not the streets were one or two way. I then used Google maps and project photos of the area to see if I was right.

I scored 100%. And I haven't been to NYC in 3 years.

If a cop couldn't remember that detail, that cop needs to learn how to take notes - or that cop needs a new career.

Well, I might agree about the utility of the smoking ban but
New York City buses are actually pretty clean.
They haven't used plain old diesel in a while.

Off the top of my head, here's a pretty good example, New York City Water System

How about city parks and recreation? Austin Parks

That's just off the top of my head... sure there's always waste in any beaurocracy, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Waste can always be cleaned-up with good management. City Parks usually cannot be created without the ... uh.. well, without a city and I for one really appreciate greenbelts and public spaces.

How about federal parks? Been to one? You should try it sometime. Take the free tours, they're always educational, even if you do feel like a nerd with all the old folks and 5 year olds.

I can also think of at least one service industry corporation that built their CRM and ERP frontend from the ground up on NT 4.0. Literally tens of thousands of terminals would have to be migrated to something else.

Government should in no way be involved where private enterprise can provide the same service

Please!

Although they are often unfair and inefficient, governments can and do provide some vital services when the private sector is unwilling or unable to do so. During the 30's, millions of people got power and paved roads thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the WPA. Perfect programs? Certainly not, but they filled a need that wasn't being met by private companies.

Most communities are willing to wait for private broadband roll-out, but for those who aren't willing to live on the cabletelco timetable, the threat of municiple broadband was a big stick to spur private companies into action. This law removes that incentive to action.

This would be comparable to the big power companies getting laws passed during the middle of the 20th century outlawing the many rural power co-ops that sprung up to provide service to people who lived too far away from cities to get get electricity otherwise.

If you were relocating a tech company to a small town, would you choose a city that only has relatively slow commercial broadband, or would you choose a city that has a fiber optic network that you, as a local corporate citizen, could have some influence over?

• Assassination Politics by Jim Bell
• The American Holocaust
• Anarchist's Cookbook
• Icky, unpatriotic, morbid beheading videos and such
• Bias to balance U.S. news bias
• Map of the White House
• Location of NYC water resevoirs
• Alex Jones loves progress!
• Economic terrorism #1 - buy nothing day
• Economic terrorism #2 - evil ad-skipping Tivo
• Economic terrorism #3 - running out of oil isn't a conspiracy theory.
• Economic terrorism #4 - the top 10 most fuel efficient cars of 2005 :)
• The widening wealth gap
• Paper trails make it much harder to steal elections
• Hamster dance!

If jackboot thug out there wants to arrest me for "implicitly supporting" the content of any of these links, feel free to abuse the PATRIOT ACT in order to force slashdot.org to reveal the IP address associated with this post, and in turn my ISP will reveal my name and home address associated with the DHCP lease (because I didn't bother to post through an anonymous proxy(s)). tinfoil_hat_mode off.

--

Those percentages are an artifact of the sample - people from New York City who summer in Florida. Do you know what the votes were like in New York City in the 2000 presidential election? 1,633,525 for the Democrats, 375,792 for the Republicans (I'm counting the party votes, not the individual votes - see the official report here, specifically here - because we don't know how the New York Daily News would have categorized votes for "conservative" and "liberal" in their study - it's interesting that those numbers show a much closer split, 25,130 Conservative [Bush] versus 29,386 Liberal [Gore]) out of a total of 2,283,261, for total percentages of 71.5 percent Democrat, 16.5 percent Republican (if you include the Liberal numbers with the Democrat, you get 72.8%, and if you include the Conservative numbers with the Republican, 17.6%). For a sample size of 46,000 out of 2.3 million, those numbers are pretty similar.

Note, too, that it gives the percentages of people that are registered in both states - 46,000

Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.

- but not of people it thinks VOTED in both states - 1,000 at worst:

But the newspaper found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

That 1,000 is not a good sample of the 48,000, because their motivations are different. The difference between those two numbers is the difference beween neglect and deliberate fraud. The 48,000 are simply registered in two states - since registrations usually aren't "closed" - you usually don't call the town you're moving out of and ask them to take you off the voter rolls - they could very well be people who registered to vote in Florida, and voted in Florida, when they got down there, and registered to vote in New York, and voted in New York - in a different election - when they got up there. You can't apply the "neglect" numbers to make an argument about which party is more likely to commit intentional voter fraud.

Since the percentages almost exactly reflect their sample, the study tells us nothing about Democratic versus Republican voter fraud. Indeed, the newspaper study (from an historically conservative newspaper), at least as it is characterized by the Reuters article, looks as though it deliberately limited its sample to New York City in order to come out with a result that would embarrass the Democratic Party. Now you'll probably say "well, they chose New York City because it's a New York paper and that's what their readership would care about." Ahh, but you see, the Reuters article cited the percentages, but didn't contextualize them by citing the overall voter percentages of their sample - a classic tactic of those who want to lie with statistics. So either the Reuters article is representing what the New York Daily News reported, or they left out the context, and thereby distorted what the New York Daily News reported.

Note that this took me 6 minutes to work out, using Google and your posting. I'm sure that the New York Daily News author, or the author of the Reuters article, could have done the same thing. I wish I knew whether they did or not.

Those percentages are an artifact of the sample - people from New York City who summer in Florida. Do you know what the votes were like in New York City in the 2000 presidential election? 1,633,525 for the Democrats, 375,792 for the Republicans (I'm counting the party votes, not the individual votes - see the official report here, specifically here - because we don't know how the New York Daily News would have categorized votes for "conservative" and "liberal" in their study - it's interesting that those numbers show a much closer split, 25,130 Conservative [Bush] versus 29,386 Liberal [Gore]) out of a total of 2,283,261, for total percentages of 71.5 percent Democrat, 16.5 percent Republican (if you include the Liberal numbers with the Democrat, you get 72.8%, and if you include the Conservative numbers with the Republican, 17.6%). For a sample size of 46,000 out of 2.3 million, those numbers are pretty similar.

Note, too, that it gives the percentages of people that are registered in both states - 46,000

Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.

- but not of people it thinks VOTED in both states - 1,000 at worst:

But the newspaper found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

That 1,000 is not a good sample of the 48,000, because their motivations are different. The difference between those two numbers is the difference beween neglect and deliberate fraud. The 48,000 are simply registered in two states - since registrations usually aren't "closed" - you usually don't call the town you're moving out of and ask them to take you off the voter rolls - they could very well be people who registered to vote in Florida, and voted in Florida, when they got down there, and registered to vote in New York, and voted in New York - in a different election - when they got up there. You can't apply the "neglect" numbers to make an argument about which party is more likely to commit intentional voter fraud.

Since the percentages almost exactly reflect their sample, the study tells us nothing about Democratic versus Republican voter fraud. Indeed, the newspaper study (from an historically conservative newspaper), at least as it is characterized by the Reuters article, looks as though it deliberately limited its sample to New York City in order to come out with a result that would embarrass the Democratic Party. Now you'll probably say "well, they chose New York City because it's a New York paper and that's what their readership would care about." Ahh, but you see, the Reuters article cited the percentages, but didn't contextualize them by citing the overall voter percentages of their sample - a classic tactic of those who want to lie with statistics. So either the Reuters article is representing what the New York Daily News reported, or they left out the context, and thereby distorted what the New York Daily News reported.

Note that this took me 6 minutes to work out, using Google and your posting. I'm sure that the New York Daily News author, or the author of the Reuters article, could have done the same thing. I wish I knew whether they did or not.

New York isn't crime-ridden. In terms of offenses the city comes 23rd in the largest 25 cities in the US.

Which is probably why New York's finest are usually busy issuing tickets to pregnant women for sitting down, bar owners for allowing dancing, seniors in the park feeding pigeons, or for that most heinous of crimes, sitting on milk crates.

4. NTSC color was adopted due to the need to be backward-compatible with black and white TV sets in the 1950's. The Europeans never considered black and white compatibility with older sets when PAL and SECAM color was developed in the 1960's.

I missed one arbitrary difference: US mains is 60Hz, while most of the rest of the world is 50Hz. This ensured that - even if the whole world had agreed on a single TV specification - it would still be incompatible with the US.

Why is the US 110V 60Hz instead of 220V 50Hz? Because of Thomas Edison and his bizarre attempts to foist a DC system on the country.

The underlying aspect is that in America it is capitalism which determines standards and that capitalism often involves sticking it to your competitors and their customers. Look at the New York City subway map to see what happens when you rely on free-market competition to deliver a solution. See all those lines between the financial district and Brooklyn Heights? Those were the valuable routes, so you now have six parallel lines with virtually no interconnection. Ditto US cellphones in the 1990s.

If you don't have to pay rent or insure/park an automobile (ever get insurance when living in NYC? It's an experience) then NYC isn't all that much more expensive then most other parts of the country. In fact you can probably live cheaper because many items (food) aren't going to cost you nearly as much because you have such a broad selection of places to shop from. FYI: A 30 day metrocard costs $70.

Of course the New York City/Yonkers income tax sucks. Whatta do?

In 2001, 1,261 cases of tuberculosis were reported in New York City, [...]the lowest number of tuberculosis cases ever reported in the city.
New York City's 2001 tuberculosis rate is still 2.8 times the national rate of 5.6 per 100,000, and is the highest case rate of all areas reporting to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/pdf/tb/tb2001.pdf

Africa and HIV can seem like a far away threat to justify such an expense when there's street people that could infect you with TB just a block away from you...

The city council's proposal we're discussing can be found in PDF format here. .

This prejudice has turned American cities into congested, smoggy messes, where thousands of people are unemployed simply because they can't find a job that will cover the cost of buying a car. Perhaps Dean Kamen thought he could get people of their cars if he could provide them with an alternative to public transit. I mean, we're talking about people who own $50,000 SUVs! What's a $5,000 scooter?

Actually, there's only one reason the Segway exists. It's just a variation of Kamen's revolutionary IBot Wheel Chair, which has been stuck in the FDA approval process for years. The IBot certainly has a future (imagine a wheel chair that climbs stairs and allows the user to talk without any neck craning!), but the Segway is probably just an idea looking for an application.

You mean like this?

RFC 2487: SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over TLS.

SMTP [RFC-821] servers and clients normally communicate in the clear over the Internet.... Further, there is often a desire for two SMTP agents to be able to authenticate each others' identities. For example, a secure SMTP server might only allow communications from other SMTP agents it knows, or it might act differently for messages received from an agent it knows than from one it doesn't know.

I'd much rather see PRT [taxi2000.com] everywhere in the future.

They have something similar to that here. Its call the subway.

Until a moment ago I *thought* NYC sanitation workers were well paid. It's a difficult job and a fairly expensive place to live. Not so -- $30-48k.

I've never seen a film about the Verrazano Narrows bridge collapse.. In fact, there isn't even a bridge with that name.

Really?

Oh that's easy. Some whack-jobs dropped a couple of planes on these tall buildings here and not even the trains were running..... And there's still soldiers with machine guns hanging around all the bridges. I'm not rich enough to own a helicopter for getting off this island, but if anyone actually invests enough money for the Land Shark to get built at the price claimed, it might be an option.

However, unless you configure it yourself, Apache on Mac OS X does not know what hostname it is running on so it can't redirect properly, and will send a redirect to the user to a url with the wrong site.

You can fix this either by changing the ServerName directive in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf or by formally changing your machine's hostname using NetInfo (some instructions here).

Hello,

When posting to /. please refrain from following the guidelines set by RCF 821. Since the application slashdot that you are writing uses a different protocol (slash over httpd over tcp/ip over blah_hardware), you are are not required to tag any mail headers.

Thank you.

J.B. Postel (Ghost of..)

We're all going to die! Ahh!

National Security is increasingly used as an EXCUSE to take power. Security by obscurity doesn't work... Israel is a police state and they're no fucking safer. I guess you're not willing to pay the price for being FREE. ass.

--

A trip to the NYC Transit Museum is very enlightening when you start looking at the hardware required to get all that current to the right place (think of what a 2000 amp circuit breaker would look like).

I think it's actually a good move. I was recently out there for 3 months on business and I'm from the bay area. Granted it might be the middle of nowhere but once technology moves in, you know things will start popping up. Look at Austin as an example. When technology moved into Austin, all sorts of new things came up. That and the UT college girls are there too ;). Once people move out there for jobs, things will naturally pop up.

However, the big thing about being out there is NY city itself. Yahoo maps say it's a 3 hour drive in but I'll bet you can drive and take Metro North in 2 and half hours. New York City is definitely worth the drive. San Francisco is a small and boring place compared to NYC. There are definitely more diverse food and more arts. Tons of clubbing in Manhattan, but I'm sure it doesnt interest most of the /. crowd =).

East coast is definitely a lot more beautiful than Silicon Valley, and there are actual seasons! A bonus point goes to Bay Area for good weather though. I think overall, it'll definitely become the next Silicon ________ (Hudson maybe?)

Besides, if people are willing to move out to Texas, I dont think upstate New York is any worse.

No, only 37.5% of the bridges into Manhattan charge a toll. The rest are free. I used to drive to work in Manhattan from Brooklyn every day for no toll at all- and I had four local bridges to choose from.

Exhibit one:
New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (toll) Bridges & Tunnels map

Exhibit two:
Transportation Alternatives' 5-borough bridge map

There are lots of ways into Manhattan without paying - you just have to navigate a little.

For those that don't live in NYC there is a map of queens here

FYI: Far rockaways are very near JFK.

In order to manage a problem like this one, one needs to communicate effectively between all the different stakeholders that are interested in the problem. To this end, NYC has a group just for the purpose. They are called The City of New York Emergency Mapping Center. They produced the parent of all these status maps which is located here.

There wasn't a 'big' map before now because the assessments (as noted elsewhere in these postings) take considerable skill & time. It will not be until the surveyers and the structural engineers get together and measure each building against known locations that we'll really know what will become of some of these buildings. The risks to be still standing buildings are by no means over yet. No one knows the damage that has been done below goround -- nor will we for weeks to come. There are many stories about earthquake damaged buildings that looked fine but had failed foundations in the literature -- those kinds of problems will have to be found by non /.ers who have gone to school for a zillion years. Just because you're in a building and it appears to be working 'ok' doesn't mean that it will ultimately not be raised because its foundation is unsafe.

-

Now for the creeper part of this posting. Have a look at New York City Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. It is amazing that the rescue and recovery is going so smoothly when the people charged with the problem are office-less.

And finally to the scum below that said "rescuers took to long". They've hurt post-collapse several hundred rescuers already with many hundred if not thousands more to be hurt. The site is extremely dangerous in terms of both individual hazards like sharp objects and biohazard as well as bigger hazards like debris piles collapsing, fires or even some of the still standing frames collapsing. They are making a trade-off between danger and speed and their families will argue they're already going too fast. To you (the scum) I say go enlist so you can be canon fodder someplace where we won't miss your /. postings.

-- Multics

If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says.

One has only to think of London under the blitz or the San Francisco earthquake to know that great cities can recover from great disasters.

According to seminal urbanologist Jane Jacobs, cities are inherently resilient to catastrophe. More damage is done by misguided urban planning.

The World Trade Center, as its name suggests, serves a national and international market. The demand for the products and services that the companies in the World Trade Tower provided is still there. Compared to the damage caused by hurricanes in Florida, the cost to rebuild is manageable.

If New York could thrive despite a crime rate that killed many more people than the terrorist over the last 10 years, it can survive this single event.

I suspect that the most lasting effect is that architects will reconsider the need for 110 storey buildings.

Lower Manhattan to Stay Closed

September 12, 2001

Lower Manhattan is expected to remain cut off from the rest of the city today, and schools and stock exchanges will be closed.

Subways, streets and bridges leading to Lower Manhattan are expected to remain closed today. The city's three airports will be closed at least until 2 p.m. The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels will be closed to all but non-emergency traffic vehicles, officials said, but New Jersey-bound traffic on the George Washington Bridge's upper level will be allowed. Westbound traffic on Staten Island's three bridges will also be allowed.

The Police Department said that no one above 14th Street would be allowed to go south of there. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged people not to come into Manhattan.

Subway trains will not stop at stations south of Canal Street, a transit spokesman, Bob Slovak, said. PATH service will operate, but officials urged commuters to stay home.

The city's public schools chancellor, Harold O. Levy, ordered schools closed, probably through tomorrow. He summoned principals, assistant principals, guidance counselors, social workers and school psychologists to go to work "to prepare plans to respond to the tragedy."

Four downtown colleges -- Pace University, the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the New School University and New York University -- canceled classes today. <end of article copy>

Here's also a very handy link to subway, bus, bridge and other local transportation info in NYC. It's at the official MTA site, so it's reliable. Basically south of Canal St. is shut down, and all bridges are just for outbound traffic, as of this post. I've found the cops at the bridges to be reasonable if you are on foot and have a compelling/official reason to get on the island.
God bless America.

Finally, after 5 or so years, these helpful sites:

The MTA (MAPS and Sched's for Trains and Subways, etc..
DMV Vanity Plates Real nice, even shows you the plate and how it'll look before you order it..3 years ago, you could look it up to see if it was taken, but couldn't order it over the net...

EZ-Pass once was on ny.us, but they changed over to www.e-zpassny.com. They actually have online stuff instead of a link over to a form you have to snail mail...


.kb

Tunnels, though, might be more promising. Using this as part of a hard-rock tunnel boring machine might work. Those things are big enough to incorporate a big laser, and they're operated close to the cutting face. Maybe the New York City Water Tunnel #3 project, underway since the 1970s and scheduled for completion in 2020, could be speeded up.

Second, his line about people having "better places to go" than the subway: every time I ride the subway, I see 1 or 2 people per car who don't have anywhere better to go. I can't blame them. If I were homeless in New York City in February, I'd spend all night in the subway, too. But I don't want my subways to become a permanent roving homeless shelter.

Third, the most important part: Cringely doesn't know the MTA budget. Five minutes of research would have brought up this page:

MTA Information for Investors

The Audited Financial Statements show that Operating Revenues account for $2.19 billion in Calendar Year 1999. Of that $2.19 billion, $2.00 billion is farebox revenue. $0.07 billion is advertising revnue.

Total expenses are $4.57 billion. The farebox revenue is a lot more than "10% to 15%".

You might wonder why the MTA publishes an audited financial statement. They do it because they have investors. They don't have any stockholders, but they sell a lot of bonds to pay for all those tunnels and trains and boats. The bondholders want to know how the MTA is going to pay them back before they front their money. They feel more secure when the MTA points to the farebox rather than getting 100% of their money from some politicians who could fuck with their funding whenever it's politically expedient.

I don't know how it is in other cities, but here in Sodom-on-Hudson, fares pay a lot more than 15% of the operating cost of the subways.

Going to the MTA's web site, you can see budget figures for 1998. The New York City transit division's (that is, NYC subways, buses, paratransit, and the Staten Island railway) operating cost was $3.8 billion. There were just over 5 million paid rides on each weekday, and a subway fare is $1.50.

So let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Assume that on weekends, ridership is 30% of what it is on weekdays. (I admit I have no basis for this assumption, but it seems reasonably conservative.) This works out to fare revenues of $2.2 billion for that year, or almost 60% of the operating cost.

The actual percentage for the subways is probably higher. That 60% includes the subsidized paratransit division, and the Staten Island railway. I have heard (but I don't recall where) that fares actually cover about 85% of the cost of running the subway.

Which is why they charge for it.

There are a set of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two letter country codes from ISO-3166. ( RFC 1591)

Oh yeah, and before anyone mentions it, the very next line from RFC 1591 is "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created.". Just goes to show...

"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"

This is a hot topic because it deals with two of the three most important things in most peoples lives, intelligence, money and ...ya' know..., wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I have had the oportunity to work in government at the MTA, and also in industry at Actiant. Now, I have spent a year RIT. I can honestly say that I have learned a great deal more in school that anywhere else. Is it worth the money? Probably not.

Living in a dorm, drinking beer and joining a frat all while supposedly "growing up" didn't make sense for me.
Hehe, you are aparently misinformed about college life. Please disregard what you see on tv and in movies. As for the stren, cold, set-in-his-ways professor that is put across in the media simply isnt true, they would love for a student to challenge them.

College is great for people who can study and apply what they remember.
I think you just described every healthy human on this planet...

College to me adds biggotry to the soul.
Oooo... Big words from someone living in an evil empire.

In all seriousness, I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country.

The same drug policies have continued for eight years under Clinton's administration -- does that make them ok?

Parts of our collective culture have given up the Golden Rule.

[RMS] simply doesn't see the big picture with regard to social issues.

If you had any sense you wouldn't be taking the E Train, you would be taking the F Train. Oh I forgot, you crossed the river to mutant land and prefer to be irradiated on the path train

If you had any sense you wouldn't be taking the E Train, you would be taking the F Train. Oh I forgot, you crossed the river to mutant land and prefer to be irradiated on the path train

.us already exists. Try www.tac.nyc.ny.us for example. I believe that it's always xx.us where xx is the two-letter state abbreviation.

Also, the UK should really use .gb to be in conformance with ISO 3166.