Spamming V1aG4 isn't were the money is at. The big money is in identity theft, espionage and pump & dump schemes. These crimes are committed by using botnets that host phishing sites, send out phishing spam, and use scripts to log into bank accounts and broker accounts.
It is an economic problem, yes. It is *not* analogous to prohibition. This stuff *is* criminal and the crimes committed cost tens billions of dollars each year. The solution is *not* to just toss your hands up and say "we give up", the solution is to lock these fuckers up and toss the key. We, as a society, need to clamp down on these fuckers before they do something that really screws with us. And don't kid yourself either, these people are sitting on top of some of the most powerful distributed computers on the planet.
Chicken Bone Spammers, V1agr4 and R0l3x W4tches is old school 1998 thinking. That crap is the little leagues. The big money is in "professional," massive, highly organized, sometimes government funded crime. This is the big leagues and the assholes playing in it need to be stopped.
Well, that is the problem, they don't belong at the airport and they aren't designed to target your market. They are Urban -> Urban. If you take the stations out of the urban area they serve and put them in airports, of course they couldn't compete:-)
and so they need a box to decrypt the signal so you can watch it on your tv
By "so they need a box" you mean "they need a box blessed by the RIAA, the CIA, and The Pope". Thus if your idea of "needs a box" includes only boxes with tamper proof screws and protocols that encrypt the signal all the way to the controller on the TV, you are in luck I guess.
Question. Does your fantasy world include my SageTV, or somebodies MythTV or Windows MCE? Will your fantasy world with leprechauns and gum-drop houses include cheap consumer hardware from Fry's?
Last I checked, if you want your SageTV to capture the high-def channels you pay $100/mo for, you are shit out of luck. Why? I guess we are thieves or something and will torrent it. Never mind the fact that I pay you guys a fortune for cable, you are the second highest bill I pay--right below rent.
While your fancy ass digital tuner gets your channel mappings and schedules for free, I have to rely on SageTV for the schedule (for free). Worse I have to figure out how to map what few ClearQAM signals I get into logical channels. I can't decode the encrypted QAM stuff that I pay $100/mo for because I guess I'm a criminal. Instead I have to thunk the majority of your content to crappy SDTV analog signals using your set top box and then recompress it on the analog tuner of my Hauppauge card.
The future of television is watching whatever show you want whenever you want after it is released.
And this is what scares you guys the most because it means your entire business model is about to be obsolete. The future doesn't need a cable company for content, only bandwidth. Nobody pays $100/mo for just bandwidth. I can go buy my streaming content from Amazon or Netflix. More likely the parent company of places like Discovery or History Channel will figure out they dont need you either and will offer ways to stream their content to my computer as well.
And you know what? The day I can get all my content directly over the internet will be the day you guys get screwed.
PS: You forgot to mention that only your set top box can do video on demand. Not even paying customers who use Tivo can use your OnDemand services. Ooops.
If Apple had the market share of Windows and still had the default be "dont automatically install most updates", they'd be a huge source of botnets. Microsoft instead chose to install most updates by default (which is probably what most people want) and let nerds who know what they are doing turn that feature off.
Personally, I am surprised to learn Apple doesn't install most updates by default. I think for a consumer OS, such a policy is a very insecure one and is asking for trouble. Are you telling me it won't update itself without asking even if there is a zero-day exploit in the wild?
Bike riders and their bicycles should be licensed like vehicles. Bikes should be required to have a license plates as well. Even if they are only charged a token amount to get both a plate and an endorsement, it would make bikers less "anonymous" and provide a way for drivers and pedestrians (who also get mowed down by bikes) to report knuckleheads on two wheels. Bikers can get away with murder right now because they are anonymous. You can't call the cops and give them a plate number.
Obviously it wouldn't be politically well received by bikers, but in the long run it would make everybody happy. Plus if you required a VIN number like you do on a car, it would benefit the bike owner when their bike gets jacked.
The only issue that would need to be ironed out is how to handle "little jimmy" in his bike with training wheels. I'm sure we can figure that out though.
The look of that site always made me nervous and I could never really tell if it was legit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't CastleCops the ones who distribute HijackThis? I think so, because I'd always get nervous about downloading it from that website.
It must be hard to use AdSense on a security site like that because most of the ads would be "you may have blah blah blah". One of the flaws in AdSense, I suppose.
I've yet to see a FM, printed or not, that has workarounds for bugs in a very specific software upgrade. That is what knowledge base articles are for.
This is why nobody has FM's for troubleshooting. Software and hardware are too complex to distill into a few pages of troubleshooting. The best you can hope for is "Is the computer plugged in" and leave the rest to a high quality knowledge base. And what is funny is the "Is the computer plugged in" sometimes turns out to solve the problem!!!
Now, the question is, does apple have a good knowledge base? I dont know, I dont own one:-) Microsoft has the best out there, but even then it is missing a lot of lore that only google can provide. Too bad the FreeBSD guys don't put together a knowledge base... in fact I can't think of any open source software besides Firefox that has a knowledge base.
This wasn't a hardware problem, it was an obscure firmware issue.
Semantics, really. Apple controls both the firmware and the hardware so it makes no difference. Unlike Linux or Windows, Apple knows *exactly* what hardware and firmware its operating systems will be running on. This gives them the luxury to test their updates on every combo in existence. A rational person would assume that Apple does such testing. I guess that assumption isn't proving to be safe, is it?
The installer shouldn't refuse to continue, it should upgrade the firmware! OSX has a luxury no other operating system has--it runs on purpose built hardware under its control. Thus its installer has no excuse to not just update the firmware.
And assert that certain linux distributions are far worse then this. And by "certian" I am refering to Gentoo. Nothing is more exciting then either
a) some jackass removed some library in a way that breaks half your dependencies. Lesson? Always make sure you can restart ssh and then log in before you close your existing ssh session.
b) having your upgrade break because some jackass depreciated some library in a way that forces you to upgrade in a very rigid step-by-step manner. Lesson? Be afraid of updating your system--it will probably break.
Funner still is searching the Gentoo forums for an answer and sifting through the "this was in the archives, jackass", "this is what you get for waiting a week between updates," and "didn't you read the CVS commit on mailing-list XYZ? We discussed this already, so it isn't my fault".
You haven't experienced "update breaks system" until you've experienced the "Gentoo update breaks system". Gentoo is good in theory and there is a lot I like--for example I love the use of color in their toolkit and the command line. I with other distros and unix's would make their utilities use color more. But Gentoo is a bitch to update.
Raise your hand if your country, marred with the same history of racism and slavery as the United State, has evolved to the point where it can vote the son of a Kenyan goat herder to the highest office of the land. Anybody? Anybody?... didn't think so.
I live in Seattle and we tried the monorail. We never built it. Why? Because it turns out that building a monorail with the same capacity as a light rail doesn't cost less.
First, no sane contractor will bid on it--only one company bid on constructing the monorail, and their bid way higher then the estimate.
Second, it isn't "proven" like rail transit--there are few vendors in existence who can service your monorail system. Worse, there is no "standard" for monorail, so every vendor will have their own system that doesn't inter-operate with the other guys.
Third, the biggest cost to any mass transit system isn't the actually construction cost, but the cost to acquire the right of way and mitigation costs. Monorail is only theoretically cheaper in construction, but it doesn't change the right-of-way cost or mitigation costs. Thus you cannot easily tunnel under a river or a bay, you have to go over the river (and you can't cross the bay). Sure somebody would invent a way to tunnel a monorail, but at that point why not just stick with rail?
Forth, Monorail isn't very flexible. Unlike other forms of mass transit, Monorail cannot be tunneled through hills or downtown areas like rail. It doesn't work on the surface like rail. The only way it works is elevated and rail can be elevated as well.
More generally, studies have shown that it is better to route your mass transit through your neighborhoods--ridership goes down when you follow the highway system (the "dense" bits are usually not next to the highway but further "inland"). Maybe for the long haul it makes sense to use the highway for cheap right of way, but the stations need to be located in the neighborhoods. However, I base this on a regional study and your mileage probably varies. The point is that it isn't always a good idea to follow the highway--it might be cheaper to build but if nobody can get to the stations, it is a waste of money.
Monorail is a pipe dream. The only reason it gets promoted is because it sounds theoretically cheaper to construct. In reality, it is just as expensive, if not more expensive than light rail. Worse, it is not nearly as flexible as light rail.
So yeah, as a Seattleite who voted to halt construction on the monorail, and as a Seattleite who has voted yes to every light-rail system on the ballot, I laugh. Been there, done that, all we got were car tabs with a monorail on them.
The suburban lifestyle is what will have to change. Gas prices will force it. The days of 3.5 kids and a huge grass lawn in the country are over. It just isn't affordable.
So a mass transit system currently won't work for many peoples current lifestyle, but reality will soon force the lifestyle into something that works for mass transit.
Half the benefit of rail travel is the stations are usually in the heart of the city you are traveling to, not a 30 mile cab ride away. The fact that you can catch a quick cab from your home in City A and take the train to City B and walk to your hotel is what makes it competitive with air travel.
Sure you might take an extra hour *moving* when you take the train, but typically you spend at least an hour on each end of flight. That extra hour doesn't exist in rail travel because you are *already in the city*, unlike an airport.
If you put the station at the airport, you might as well take the plane as you'll still need the hassle of a long expensive cab ride (and the associated traffic) on either end of the trip.
So no, I would vote a huge No on you idea of using airports for rail stations. That would make rail travel pointless!
But your existing suburban grocery stores are far more expensive than urban ones already and usually have worse quality. It costs a lot of money (gas) to ship junk to the sticks.
As gas prices go back up (and they will, gas-tax or not... the weak economy is what is keeping them low), it will be more and more expensive to live away from urban areas. As long as you are willing and able to pay for the added expense, you can have it any way you like.
Dont be surprised if those in the urban areas vote to stop subsidizing your suburban transit infrastructure either (i.e. roads, roads, roads). Believe it or not, your lifestyle is heavily taxpayer subsidized.
Cities who want to promote bike use might start mandating cabs have bike racks on the back of their cars. That way you can just catch a cab on the off day you shop and need to carry bunch of stuff back to your place.
Does my idea exist? I've never seen it so there might be problems with it like interfering with the airport-bound using their trunk for luggage. I think we could engineer something though, I don't recall if the "cop car" they all use has a trailer hitch receiver.
As far as "parking", I guess it depends on the city. In Seattle, there are things like look like hand-rails in front of stores that you can tie your bike to. And by the way never "tie" your bike, always use those U-bold things. The flexible metal wires all can be cut with bolt cutters in about 10 seconds.
I call it red, white and blue color scheme faux patriotism and propaganda designed to get trick you. "Fair and balanced" means "those who disagree are idiots". Combine the two and you get the last eight years. That people willingly watch that crap is astounding.
Now excuse me, I need to eat my freedom fries. Cooked in pure american corn oil and driven home in my 10mpg H2 (fuck Hall Gore and his "Global Warming" myth). Saffola Oil sounds foreign and weird and anybody selling a spice rack with more than 12 spices must have a few duplicates. And "Oregano"??!! What the hell is that!?
But seriously. You cannot seriously say with a straight face the Fox News graphics are anything but tacky. Really? Seriously?
The Morning Zoo Croo tells it like it is! Fox news can't lie, right? I mean, they are the only fair and unbalanced media out there, right?
COugh. Hack. Weeze.
Seriously, does anybody else have a problem with high-school football-team design style they use on their sets. Fox news has the most tacky set of any news outlet. I think there is a reason for it--any sophistication would turn off their viewers (after all, sophistication is a big-city, educated thing...).
Look, an auto company would have been a fool not to tap into the SUV fad--it was quick, easy money. The problem was only a fool would have seen SUV's for anything but a fad. A smart auto company would have pimped SUV's for as long as the fad lasted, but all the while plan for something else once the fad goes away.
The US automakers seemed to have thought SUV's would be a long-term trend and not a short term "cheap gas" fad. They put all their eggs in the SUV basket and forgot about the whole "long term" thing. Now they are Screwed with a capital S.
If gas prices go up and people suddenly want different vehicles, it takes a while to develop and get them into the dealer lots
Maybe this business model doesn't work anymore. Maybe smart auto companies will engineer business processes that don't require 5 years of re-tooling between models.
If we go to war and China decides to stop sending us cars, then what exactly happens to our economy?
Seeing as how they are making said cars on our soil, we just kick them out and re-purpose the plants to make stuff.
In Europe, they tax the shit out of gas - so people drive smaller vehicles. Maybe we should do that here
There are very good arguments for creating a "floor" to gas prices to a) stabilize oil prices and b) encourage domestic companies to create replacements.
SSL certificates are a form of identification just like a passport is. Seems to me the passport guys figured this stuff out. SSL certificates can't be much different in terms of treaties or regulation.
Or at least they should. SSL certs, I think, are one area best served by government.
SSL certificates are the online version of your drivers license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a drivers license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
Not so with SSL certs as they exist to day. Since private industry issues them, there are no standards. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from verisign. What is the difference? You'd have to ask nerds like us for an explanation, it isn't something anybody can grasp. As far as most people are concerned, both make the "key" at the bottom of their browser lock.
Ideally you should be able to walk into your DMV or whatever state or federal agency you register your business with and for a modest fee, get a government issued SSL certificate.
Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.
What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).
How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem.
What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates?
Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries.
And OpenMP isn't "standard" as far as I'm concerned. Plus it makes you think about threading and it only works in low-level languages like C.
I'm talking about this highly useful code (which is written in a bastardized version of C#, Perl and Javascript for your reading pleasure):
List pimpScores = PimpList.ThreadedMap(function(aPimp){
# score how worthy this guy is at pimpin'
if(aPimp.Hoes > 10) {
return String.Format("Damn brother, {0} is a player", aPimp.PimpName);
} else if (aPimp.Hoes 0) {
return String.Format("{0} is a small time player", aPimp.PimpName);
} else {
return String.Format("{0} isn't a player at all!", aPimp.PimpName);
} });
Look how easy it was to turn a transform like Map into something threaded (even though C# doesn't have Map... I forget what LINQ method does the same transform)
OpenMP doesn't offer anything as intuitive as that. It makes you think long and hard about threading in a dull, dry manner. Threading is everywhere in our code if the program language makes it obvious and easy.
And for those who say "what what about all the weird race conditions and stuff". I'm not a computer science major, so I'm jumping off an edge asking this, but what if we actually use some of this new CPU power in our IDEs and our JIT compilers, couldn't our languages watch out for most of the nasty ways we can shoot ourselves in the food? Like if I do a Array.ThreadedEach(function(element){}) and I'm changing some shared data, couldn't the compiler or IDE let me know at compile time or while I'm writing the code? Obviously you'd need a strongly typed language like C# or Java to pull such stunts, you couldn't do it in perl:-)...
The goal is to make this threaded stuff usable. I think we can do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Spamming V1aG4 isn't were the money is at. The big money is in identity theft, espionage and pump & dump schemes. These crimes are committed by using botnets that host phishing sites, send out phishing spam, and use scripts to log into bank accounts and broker accounts.
It is an economic problem, yes. It is *not* analogous to prohibition. This stuff *is* criminal and the crimes committed cost tens billions of dollars each year. The solution is *not* to just toss your hands up and say "we give up", the solution is to lock these fuckers up and toss the key. We, as a society, need to clamp down on these fuckers before they do something that really screws with us. And don't kid yourself either, these people are sitting on top of some of the most powerful distributed computers on the planet.
Chicken Bone Spammers, V1agr4 and R0l3x W4tches is old school 1998 thinking. That crap is the little leagues. The big money is in "professional," massive, highly organized, sometimes government funded crime. This is the big leagues and the assholes playing in it need to be stopped.
Well, that is the problem, they don't belong at the airport and they aren't designed to target your market. They are Urban -> Urban. If you take the stations out of the urban area they serve and put them in airports, of course they couldn't compete :-)
Well, it was still a useful site, so dont feel too bad :-)
By "so they need a box" you mean "they need a box blessed by the RIAA, the CIA, and The Pope". Thus if your idea of "needs a box" includes only boxes with tamper proof screws and protocols that encrypt the signal all the way to the controller on the TV, you are in luck I guess.
Question. Does your fantasy world include my SageTV, or somebodies MythTV or Windows MCE? Will your fantasy world with leprechauns and gum-drop houses include cheap consumer hardware from Fry's?
Last I checked, if you want your SageTV to capture the high-def channels you pay $100/mo for, you are shit out of luck. Why? I guess we are thieves or something and will torrent it. Never mind the fact that I pay you guys a fortune for cable, you are the second highest bill I pay--right below rent.
While your fancy ass digital tuner gets your channel mappings and schedules for free, I have to rely on SageTV for the schedule (for free). Worse I have to figure out how to map what few ClearQAM signals I get into logical channels. I can't decode the encrypted QAM stuff that I pay $100/mo for because I guess I'm a criminal. Instead I have to thunk the majority of your content to crappy SDTV analog signals using your set top box and then recompress it on the analog tuner of my Hauppauge card.
And this is what scares you guys the most because it means your entire business model is about to be obsolete. The future doesn't need a cable company for content, only bandwidth. Nobody pays $100/mo for just bandwidth. I can go buy my streaming content from Amazon or Netflix. More likely the parent company of places like Discovery or History Channel will figure out they dont need you either and will offer ways to stream their content to my computer as well.
And you know what? The day I can get all my content directly over the internet will be the day you guys get screwed.
PS: You forgot to mention that only your set top box can do video on demand. Not even paying customers who use Tivo can use your OnDemand services. Ooops.
If Apple had the market share of Windows and still had the default be "dont automatically install most updates", they'd be a huge source of botnets. Microsoft instead chose to install most updates by default (which is probably what most people want) and let nerds who know what they are doing turn that feature off.
Personally, I am surprised to learn Apple doesn't install most updates by default. I think for a consumer OS, such a policy is a very insecure one and is asking for trouble. Are you telling me it won't update itself without asking even if there is a zero-day exploit in the wild?
Bike riders and their bicycles should be licensed like vehicles. Bikes should be required to have a license plates as well. Even if they are only charged a token amount to get both a plate and an endorsement, it would make bikers less "anonymous" and provide a way for drivers and pedestrians (who also get mowed down by bikes) to report knuckleheads on two wheels. Bikers can get away with murder right now because they are anonymous. You can't call the cops and give them a plate number.
Obviously it wouldn't be politically well received by bikers, but in the long run it would make everybody happy. Plus if you required a VIN number like you do on a car, it would benefit the bike owner when their bike gets jacked.
The only issue that would need to be ironed out is how to handle "little jimmy" in his bike with training wheels. I'm sure we can figure that out though.
The look of that site always made me nervous and I could never really tell if it was legit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't CastleCops the ones who distribute HijackThis? I think so, because I'd always get nervous about downloading it from that website.
It must be hard to use AdSense on a security site like that because most of the ads would be "you may have blah blah blah". One of the flaws in AdSense, I suppose.
I've yet to see a FM, printed or not, that has workarounds for bugs in a very specific software upgrade. That is what knowledge base articles are for.
This is why nobody has FM's for troubleshooting. Software and hardware are too complex to distill into a few pages of troubleshooting. The best you can hope for is "Is the computer plugged in" and leave the rest to a high quality knowledge base. And what is funny is the "Is the computer plugged in" sometimes turns out to solve the problem!!!
Now, the question is, does apple have a good knowledge base? I dont know, I dont own one :-) Microsoft has the best out there, but even then it is missing a lot of lore that only google can provide. Too bad the FreeBSD guys don't put together a knowledge base... in fact I can't think of any open source software besides Firefox that has a knowledge base.
Semantics, really. Apple controls both the firmware and the hardware so it makes no difference. Unlike Linux or Windows, Apple knows *exactly* what hardware and firmware its operating systems will be running on. This gives them the luxury to test their updates on every combo in existence. A rational person would assume that Apple does such testing. I guess that assumption isn't proving to be safe, is it?
The installer shouldn't refuse to continue, it should upgrade the firmware! OSX has a luxury no other operating system has--it runs on purpose built hardware under its control. Thus its installer has no excuse to not just update the firmware.
And assert that certain linux distributions are far worse then this. And by "certian" I am refering to Gentoo. Nothing is more exciting then either
a) some jackass removed some library in a way that breaks half your dependencies. Lesson? Always make sure you can restart ssh and then log in before you close your existing ssh session.
b) having your upgrade break because some jackass depreciated some library in a way that forces you to upgrade in a very rigid step-by-step manner. Lesson? Be afraid of updating your system--it will probably break.
Funner still is searching the Gentoo forums for an answer and sifting through the "this was in the archives, jackass", "this is what you get for waiting a week between updates," and "didn't you read the CVS commit on mailing-list XYZ? We discussed this already, so it isn't my fault".
You haven't experienced "update breaks system" until you've experienced the "Gentoo update breaks system". Gentoo is good in theory and there is a lot I like--for example I love the use of color in their toolkit and the command line. I with other distros and unix's would make their utilities use color more. But Gentoo is a bitch to update.
Raise your hand if your country, marred with the same history of racism and slavery as the United State, has evolved to the point where it can vote the son of a Kenyan goat herder to the highest office of the land. Anybody? Anybody? ... didn't think so.
What were you saying again?
I live in Seattle and we tried the monorail. We never built it. Why? Because it turns out that building a monorail with the same capacity as a light rail doesn't cost less.
First, no sane contractor will bid on it--only one company bid on constructing the monorail, and their bid way higher then the estimate.
Second, it isn't "proven" like rail transit--there are few vendors in existence who can service your monorail system. Worse, there is no "standard" for monorail, so every vendor will have their own system that doesn't inter-operate with the other guys.
Third, the biggest cost to any mass transit system isn't the actually construction cost, but the cost to acquire the right of way and mitigation costs. Monorail is only theoretically cheaper in construction, but it doesn't change the right-of-way cost or mitigation costs. Thus you cannot easily tunnel under a river or a bay, you have to go over the river (and you can't cross the bay). Sure somebody would invent a way to tunnel a monorail, but at that point why not just stick with rail?
Forth, Monorail isn't very flexible. Unlike other forms of mass transit, Monorail cannot be tunneled through hills or downtown areas like rail. It doesn't work on the surface like rail. The only way it works is elevated and rail can be elevated as well.
More generally, studies have shown that it is better to route your mass transit through your neighborhoods--ridership goes down when you follow the highway system (the "dense" bits are usually not next to the highway but further "inland"). Maybe for the long haul it makes sense to use the highway for cheap right of way, but the stations need to be located in the neighborhoods. However, I base this on a regional study and your mileage probably varies. The point is that it isn't always a good idea to follow the highway--it might be cheaper to build but if nobody can get to the stations, it is a waste of money.
Monorail is a pipe dream. The only reason it gets promoted is because it sounds theoretically cheaper to construct. In reality, it is just as expensive, if not more expensive than light rail. Worse, it is not nearly as flexible as light rail.
So yeah, as a Seattleite who voted to halt construction on the monorail, and as a Seattleite who has voted yes to every light-rail system on the ballot, I laugh. Been there, done that, all we got were car tabs with a monorail on them.
The suburban lifestyle is what will have to change. Gas prices will force it. The days of 3.5 kids and a huge grass lawn in the country are over. It just isn't affordable.
So a mass transit system currently won't work for many peoples current lifestyle, but reality will soon force the lifestyle into something that works for mass transit.
Half the benefit of rail travel is the stations are usually in the heart of the city you are traveling to, not a 30 mile cab ride away. The fact that you can catch a quick cab from your home in City A and take the train to City B and walk to your hotel is what makes it competitive with air travel.
Sure you might take an extra hour *moving* when you take the train, but typically you spend at least an hour on each end of flight. That extra hour doesn't exist in rail travel because you are *already in the city*, unlike an airport.
If you put the station at the airport, you might as well take the plane as you'll still need the hassle of a long expensive cab ride (and the associated traffic) on either end of the trip.
So no, I would vote a huge No on you idea of using airports for rail stations. That would make rail travel pointless!
But your existing suburban grocery stores are far more expensive than urban ones already and usually have worse quality. It costs a lot of money (gas) to ship junk to the sticks.
As gas prices go back up (and they will, gas-tax or not... the weak economy is what is keeping them low), it will be more and more expensive to live away from urban areas. As long as you are willing and able to pay for the added expense, you can have it any way you like.
Dont be surprised if those in the urban areas vote to stop subsidizing your suburban transit infrastructure either (i.e. roads, roads, roads). Believe it or not, your lifestyle is heavily taxpayer subsidized.
Cities who want to promote bike use might start mandating cabs have bike racks on the back of their cars. That way you can just catch a cab on the off day you shop and need to carry bunch of stuff back to your place.
Does my idea exist? I've never seen it so there might be problems with it like interfering with the airport-bound using their trunk for luggage. I think we could engineer something though, I don't recall if the "cop car" they all use has a trailer hitch receiver.
As far as "parking", I guess it depends on the city. In Seattle, there are things like look like hand-rails in front of stores that you can tie your bike to. And by the way never "tie" your bike, always use those U-bold things. The flexible metal wires all can be cut with bolt cutters in about 10 seconds.
So I typically don't look into it. Everybody thinks like me. Incredible as it may seem.
Anybody trying to prove me wrong are just eggheads in pretentious schools trying to get taxpayer grant money.
I call it red, white and blue color scheme faux patriotism and propaganda designed to get trick you. "Fair and balanced" means "those who disagree are idiots". Combine the two and you get the last eight years. That people willingly watch that crap is astounding.
Now excuse me, I need to eat my freedom fries. Cooked in pure american corn oil and driven home in my 10mpg H2 (fuck Hall Gore and his "Global Warming" myth). Saffola Oil sounds foreign and weird and anybody selling a spice rack with more than 12 spices must have a few duplicates. And "Oregano"??!! What the hell is that!?
But seriously. You cannot seriously say with a straight face the Fox News graphics are anything but tacky. Really? Seriously?
The Morning Zoo Croo tells it like it is! Fox news can't lie, right? I mean, they are the only fair and unbalanced media out there, right?
COugh. Hack. Weeze.
Seriously, does anybody else have a problem with high-school football-team design style they use on their sets. Fox news has the most tacky set of any news outlet. I think there is a reason for it--any sophistication would turn off their viewers (after all, sophistication is a big-city, educated thing...).
Look, an auto company would have been a fool not to tap into the SUV fad--it was quick, easy money. The problem was only a fool would have seen SUV's for anything but a fad. A smart auto company would have pimped SUV's for as long as the fad lasted, but all the while plan for something else once the fad goes away.
The US automakers seemed to have thought SUV's would be a long-term trend and not a short term "cheap gas" fad. They put all their eggs in the SUV basket and forgot about the whole "long term" thing. Now they are Screwed with a capital S.
Maybe this business model doesn't work anymore. Maybe smart auto companies will engineer business processes that don't require 5 years of re-tooling between models.
Seeing as how they are making said cars on our soil, we just kick them out and re-purpose the plants to make stuff.
There are very good arguments for creating a "floor" to gas prices to a) stabilize oil prices and b) encourage domestic companies to create replacements.
SSL certificates are a form of identification just like a passport is. Seems to me the passport guys figured this stuff out. SSL certificates can't be much different in terms of treaties or regulation.
Or at least they should. SSL certs, I think, are one area best served by government.
SSL certificates are the online version of your drivers license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a drivers license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
Not so with SSL certs as they exist to day. Since private industry issues them, there are no standards. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from verisign. What is the difference? You'd have to ask nerds like us for an explanation, it isn't something anybody can grasp. As far as most people are concerned, both make the "key" at the bottom of their browser lock.
Ideally you should be able to walk into your DMV or whatever state or federal agency you register your business with and for a modest fee, get a government issued SSL certificate.
Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.
What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).
How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem.
What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates?
Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries.
And OpenMP isn't "standard" as far as I'm concerned. Plus it makes you think about threading and it only works in low-level languages like C.
I'm talking about this highly useful code (which is written in a bastardized version of C#, Perl and Javascript for your reading pleasure):
List pimpScores = PimpList.ThreadedMap(function(aPimp){
# score how worthy this guy is at pimpin'
if(aPimp.Hoes > 10) {
return String.Format("Damn brother, {0} is a player", aPimp.PimpName);
} else if (aPimp.Hoes 0) {
return String.Format("{0} is a small time player", aPimp.PimpName);
} else {
return String.Format("{0} isn't a player at all!", aPimp.PimpName);
}
});
Look how easy it was to turn a transform like Map into something threaded (even though C# doesn't have Map... I forget what LINQ method does the same transform)
OpenMP doesn't offer anything as intuitive as that. It makes you think long and hard about threading in a dull, dry manner. Threading is everywhere in our code if the program language makes it obvious and easy.
And for those who say "what what about all the weird race conditions and stuff". I'm not a computer science major, so I'm jumping off an edge asking this, but what if we actually use some of this new CPU power in our IDEs and our JIT compilers, couldn't our languages watch out for most of the nasty ways we can shoot ourselves in the food? Like if I do a Array.ThreadedEach(function(element){}) and I'm changing some shared data, couldn't the compiler or IDE let me know at compile time or while I'm writing the code? Obviously you'd need a strongly typed language like C# or Java to pull such stunts, you couldn't do it in perl :-)...
The goal is to make this threaded stuff usable. I think we can do it.