"The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels."
In other words, "Anything we can do right now."
Wonder what the envirowackos will find to bitch about when we _can_ do wind and solar.
Yeah, its great.
There is absolutely no alternative for the jet engine, so if you're an airline, you put up a pile of these things and your carbon trading problem goes away, you raise your prices to pay for the towers, and the public is stuck paying for a likely useless feature when, way too late, someone finally can prove that the CO2 increase is following the rise in temperature instead of causing it.
Its not that tough of a problem.
Feed this CO2 to plants in the presence of sunlight. Instant C and 02. Been going on for millions of years. The plants should even grow faster.
Strapping down the wheels would probably take 2 guys 20 seconds or so to throw a nylon net over the tires and fasten it with a cargo fastener.
A bit longer, I think. The problem, as I see it, is also one of getting the vehicle to the depot(extra driving for many), getting into queue at rush hour, getting started, then at the leaving depot, getting unhooked and all that.
I don't think so. It isn't a difficult operation. 20 seconds. I don't think there'd be much of a queue. Design the station correctly, with multiple waiting railcars, and you should be able to have a high thruput.
but the history of transportation in the USA shows that people absolutely do not want to do that. They want their cars with them.
The trick is to ask WHY they want their cars with thim. In my case I figure it's a 'last mile' problem for most mass transit solutions. They want to get to their destination, or at least within a certain distance of it, within a reasonable period of time. Studies have also shown that people tend to assign more expense with 'stalled' time - They'll value a trip at 50mph with a 10 minute wait in the middle less than a 20mph trip with no wait, even if they ultimately take the same amount of time to make a journey of the same distance.
I can only go with the reasons I want my car with me:
Flexibility. I can put together a trip that stops at the movie, the hardware store, the bookstore, the electronics store. I can go to a restaurant, start and stop where I please. I can drop by the gym and have my exercise clothes in the trunk, and put them back there when I'm done.
Cargo. I like to have stuff along. For work, I want my briefcase and my laptop. Do I want to have to lug them around everywhere I go? No. If I decide to stop at the hardware/book/electronics stores, I don't have to luge them all over the store. I can't even take a backpack or a briefcase into the movie since 9/11, but when I go to DC, I usually plan to catch a 4 - 5 PM movie to allow the traffic to subside before I start back toward Fredericksburg. Of course I don't commute to DC every day, but go there on occasions like training. Add the ability to stop by the gym, then I'm carring the briefcase, laptop, and the gym bag everywhere I go. That sucks. And if I want to put any of it down, such as to go thru a fast food line, I risk it being stolen. In my car, it is locked up with a Subaru security system also protecting it.
Control of the environment. I want to play the radio, and I don't like using earphones. I want to feel the bass notes in some heavy metal tunes. I also eat while moving. You can't do that on DC's Metro, they'll handcuff you and take you to jail - no kidding. They handcuffed and arrested a 12 year old kid eating french fries a couple years ago. I want to control the temperature. A metro train I rode last year started the journey with a car that was probably around 95 degrees, with the train engineer finally figuring this out about 20 minutes into the trip and turning on the air conditioning. I want to be able to make noise, foul the air if I so choose (smoke or other stuff), etc. etc. I want to be able to travel armed if I so choose.
I figure that if you offer people a comfortable, clean, individual car or pod that's faster and cheaper than the alternatives, they'll take it, even if it means leaving their car at home. As long as they can get to where they're going, preferably as close to their destination as they can get with said car. In cases of things like airports and busy malls, easy to do. You can end up quite far away in the parking lot.
You'll never build a train that gets as close as a car to most people's destination.
And, this system is not _just_ a commuter system. It is suburbs to town, or town to town, even NYC to LA. The latter railcar might even have a kitchenette, living room, and large screen HDTV positioned in front of the car. Get out of the car, start the coffee and microwave, settle into
Strapping down the wheels would probably take 2 guys 20 seconds or so to throw a nylon net over the tires and fasten it with a cargo fastener. 100 mph is not a factor, only the acceleration is a factor, and that should be about 0.3 Gs. You're not even going to generate much G's on an emergency stop with steel wheels on steel rails.
Sure, YOU'd like to get people out of their cars, but the history of transportation in the USA shows that people absolutely do not want to do that. They want their cars with them. You can't change that. If you want to build a popular transportation system, you'll build something that carries automobiles, fast. Everything else using rails doesn't get enough ridership to support itself because people (in the USA) would rather drive. IOW, the customer is always right, so either you build what the customer wants to buy, or go bankrupt.
And, this system is not _just_ a commuter system. It is suburbs to town, or town to town, even NYC to LA. The latter railcar might even have a kitchenette, living room, and large screen HDTV positioned in front of the car. Get out of the car, start the coffee and microwave, settle into the easy chair and tune HBO or slip in a Blue-Ray.
Everything should load quickly. Its simply a matter of driving it into the railcar, close up both ends, and its ready to take to the main rails. You'd probably have to add a step in there to secure the wheels to the floor of the railcar to insure that it doesn't roll around. As for the stuff we already have, it is a train pulled by a locomotive, and so runs on a schedule. PRT's run when the customer wants them to. That's one of the big differences. And, the current rail system can take 2 days of switching just to get cargo thru Chicago - it needs rebuilt anyway. Not sure where you're getting "relatively little amount of traffic." Give a man driving a car a way to travel at 100 mph and guarantee him he won't get a ticket, and I think a very large percentage of people will be driving their cars onto the system to go from the burbs to downtown, or from city to city, at 100 mph.
Current systems that carry cars on trains are long haul because it is difficult to load and unload the cars from the trains. A system where you drive your car on the train is different because it loads and unloads quickly. As for the extra mass of the traincar, that is not much of a factor if you only accelerate once per trip, and recover much of the energy during deceleration via dynamic braking and energy recovery back into the grid. The better point of such rail travel is running nose to tail with other such railcars, with just the lead car breaking the wind, so subsequent cars are going - what? - 100 mph? - on maybe 15 - 30 horsepower. Running the individual railcars carrying automobiles without slowing down between origin and destination would result in a very high energy efficiency of very low friction of steel wheels on steel rails and could be done with electricity, meaning it could be done without burning oil. As for most of the highway system not being crowded, try driving I-70 thru Indiana and Ohio, or I-95 anywhere north of Richmond. Give it a while, and the whole nation will be choked with the truck traffic. Trucks could use the rail system too, so this PRT would provide the needed extra capacity for which we're going to have to build more roads of some kind anyway. Traditional PRT only carries people, which doesn't work for someone with a load of plumber's tools or even a traveling salesman's display cases. But a car-carrying PRT would work for virtually everybody.
Yes, but track building and maintenance is VERY expensive. Now, if you could get independently operating vehicles that are not bound to tracks but can navigate a flat surface (like a roadway) in such a fashion, that may just work.
===================
So's highways, and you couldn't go using the interestate highway system because the thing has too many speed limits and idiot drivers. It'd be a case of build all new rails or build all new roadways. Rails more expensive than roadways? Doesn't make a lotta sense.
Gotcha. What you need is the rail system that you drive your car onto, it is a personal rapid transport that moves you in your car to wherever you want to go. It leaves when you enter the railcar, it doesn't stop until you get where you're going, UNLESS you want to stop and eat, etc. On-board computer navigates the rails like the interstate highway system.
All you need is a rail switch that handles railcars individually (I know how to build that,) allowing them to be extracted from the midst of other railcars that are traveling in a "train", without slowing down that train, that are all self-powered from external power source, think nuclear initially, then solar / wind / geothermal when its ready.
With such a system, you can eat in your car, smoke, play Black Sabbath at 103 db, and all the other stuff you can't do on regular public transport, in addition to traveling on your own schedule. Includes getting the nation off oil, getting the overcrowded highway system under control, the overcrowded air traffic system under control, the traffic death toll down dramatically, etc.
Yes, I knew about the monthly charge. I wasn't looking for the cheapest option, but $600 up front was a bit much.
After the cable company's coercion, by overcharging for the cablecards and refusing to rent them, paying for their company-supplied DVR feels too much like surrender. Not into surrender. Yeah, I'm stubborn... sue me. But someday, the worm will turn, and I'll have better options.
Right now, I _need_ the cable for fast internet, so I can't divorce the cable company completely. Plus, there are 4 absolutely massive oak trees that are blocking the southern exposure - not sure if I could see either a Dish or Direct TV satellite without chopping them down first.
Some solution - I wanted to go TIVO a few months ago. The TIVO box requires 2 cablecards, plus it is $300 for the box. The cablecards are only available from my cable company, they will not rent them at all, and they want $150 for each one. $600 for TIVO? Nope, no sale.
Solution: No DVR at all. If I really, really, really want to record something, I'll set up the old VHS, but for now, I just watch whatever is on, and if I miss something, I miss something. This will make a future decision to unhook from cable and either go satellite, or get all my entertainment over the internet more appealing.
You should read some of the warnings for chemicals used to process E4 color slides - will the cops come and gather up your darkroom if you're still into that chemical based picture stuff?
Pretty soon they'll pass a law that says, "Don't do anything unusual."
If you look at all the bonehead things that people are getting arrested for nowadays, they seem to be enforcing such a law before its even been passed.
Well, perhaps you've heard that we may be able to mine our last available Gallium ore in about 10 years? Copper in 100 years? Zinc is on the endangered species list, too, so if you like galvanized anything that doesn't rust, well, you may be out of luck without moon-visiting tech.
We better develop the tech to disassemble the moon for its natural resources, and launch them back to earth (electrically, with a railgun powered by solar, hopefully) and then maybe we can pave the Mojave with Gallium-consuming solar cells and run the country on solar. But without more Gallium... its going to soon come to a screeching halt.
When the government comes to you and asks you to do something to help them, then you help them. That is as it should be, and a concept known as "entrapment" protects you.
No different with the telcoms. Protecting them against these lawsuits is the right thing to do, otherwise all we get is higher prices as they pass on the costs of the lawsuits to us - they have to - we're they're only source of revenue.
As for listening to terrorists, I'm all for it. Some, it seems, would allow our enemies to go ahead and communicate unfettered by things like the FBI, DHS, NSA, etc. while someone chases around looking for a judge to approve an assault.
What we're doing is basically different from what the 4th amendment covers. The 4th amendment covers law enforcement and people's rights. What we're doing is fighting a war, which is being conducted over phone lines and the internet. Apply law enforcement techniques to a war, and you'll lose the war. That's it, plain and simple.
No, it doesn't mean its easy. What it means is that with the floodgates to all the rest of the world's programmers open to come here, the supply of programmers and the willingness of those programmers to work for much less than a "comfortable" wage in the USA means that the wages of programming in the USA will go to less than the "fries with that" crowd. Supply and demand. Increase the supply to near infinity, as tapping the entire rest of the world would do, and the available amount of $$$ for wages will be divided by that many people, resulting in ridiculously low wages.
...to study CS or programming in the USA if you're a US citizen. The big business bunch will eventually get their way to remove the caps on H1B visas, there will be millions enter the country that way, and the extreme competition for jobs will result salaries below the "fries with that" crowd. The "lucky" jobholders will live 10 to a house, share a minibus to work, and send the $$$ all back home overseas.
Study law. Its harder to invade.
I believe that the environmental impact of extracting oil from oil shale on the scale required to keep the world running on oil as it is today would have a devastating environmental impact. Probably not as bad as a nuclear war fought over the remaining conventional oil resources...probably. Yeah, what else is new?
Its too bad that this oil wasn't discovered in Saudi Arabia, where we'd have a chance of eventually using it.
But its in this country, where a phalanx of enviro-obstructionists, NIMBYs, and some other tin-foil-hatters will muster the ability to stop the drilling before it starts, much as they have in off-shore areas, ANWR, etc.
The solution to the USA's energy independence AND all the problems that the aforementioned detractors can conjur up has been addressed in a plan explained in the Jan 2008 of Scientific American, where, by the year 2100, we can run the entire country on solar power exclusively. But we need this oil to get to 2100. Are we going to get it? Probably not.
Naw, its more like being sick of Linux gurus telling me _I'm_ stupid for wanting everything my own way. Well... that's how commerce works. Gotta satisfy the customer.
I understand you fully. A lot of people who have strong opinions on this issue are not able to understand the other side. I have exactly the same experience as you, but worse. You see, "wanting everything my own way" includes:
1) having websites which I want to look at be written according to accepted web standards, so they will display properly in all standards-compliant browsers
2) to not have to pay money to buy specific programs in order to open documents which people send me in proprietary formats
I guess you can ask 'em to send it in Acrobat...
OpenOffice just as good as Microsoft Office? Well... then why does this statement always get followed by a disclaimer that all those functions the Microsoft has that OpenOffice doesn't,...
"good" is subjective, OpenOffice could very well be perceived as better by many people for other reasons, right? Wasn't that the point you were making, in reverse? For example, OpenOffice can save its documents in a standard, open file format, and it is free (as in beer), which lets people try it out without paying up front, and free (as in speech), which lets people pay for it in other ways than spending cash (more on that later in my post).
So we all have to be programmers? And of course do I want to program all day on project X, and then come home and program on something else to "pay" for it? No, I'd rather take the money I make during the day and pay for something that I walk off with from over the counter, or that arrives in the mail, and not have to fiddle around writing my own word processor features.
There's a website that I (finally) found that claims that getting Call of Duty 4 to run on Linux under WINE is no harder than any other game
For someone who says "I'll never run Linux 'cuz...", you seem somehow conflicted. Why do you waste your time (and the "finally" indicates --- a lot of time) looking for websites about running a game under Linux?
Just looking to see if my next prospective game would work in Linux. Nope, no Punkbuster.
... The stated reason that Qualcomm didn't port it to Linux was that they perceived that Linux users expect their software for free, which is ANOTHER thing I dsagree with. If a person wants something of value to him, he should be willing to pay for it,...
In some ways, I fully agree with you, here, and in others I disagree. I agree that people should be willing to pay for things of value to them. However, I think your definition of "pay for it" is rather narrow. Some of us pay for our free open-source software by, well, writing more free open-source software (or fixing bugs in existing software). The work we do is worth money. Others pay by providing support on forums, or to our immediate surroundings. Or by posting bug reports and enhancement requests. And then there are some of us who actually do click the "donate" button (if it is provided).
Sure, if that's the way you want to operate, be my guest. I don't want to _have_ to operate that wway because the operating system only offers rograms that are set up that way.
Where I disagree with you is that I believe that there are many people who are willing to pay, but do not have the means to do so (in a significant public fashion, at least), and I strongly believe these people should still be able to use free software.
OK, they don't want to get a job and just use free software, fine... I don't really care. I just don't want to _have_ to use it.
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Pragmatically, India migh not be the best place because there's a decent chance of being at ground zero in a thermonuclear war...
They're working on that. Its called the self-driving car.
Basically, that's the Dale Carnagie Course.
"The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels." In other words, "Anything we can do right now." Wonder what the envirowackos will find to bitch about when we _can_ do wind and solar.
And they're just as likely to run onto that Aliens vs. Predators playground there, too.
Yeah, its great. There is absolutely no alternative for the jet engine, so if you're an airline, you put up a pile of these things and your carbon trading problem goes away, you raise your prices to pay for the towers, and the public is stuck paying for a likely useless feature when, way too late, someone finally can prove that the CO2 increase is following the rise in temperature instead of causing it.
Its not that tough of a problem. Feed this CO2 to plants in the presence of sunlight. Instant C and 02. Been going on for millions of years. The plants should even grow faster.
Strapping down the wheels would probably take 2 guys 20 seconds or so to throw a nylon net over the tires and fasten it with a cargo fastener.
A bit longer, I think. The problem, as I see it, is also one of getting the vehicle to the depot(extra driving for many), getting into queue at rush hour, getting started, then at the leaving depot, getting unhooked and all that.
I don't think so. It isn't a difficult operation. 20 seconds. I don't think there'd be much of a queue. Design the station correctly, with multiple waiting railcars, and you should be able to have a high thruput.
but the history of transportation in the USA shows that people absolutely do not want to do that. They want their cars with them.
The trick is to ask WHY they want their cars with thim. In my case I figure it's a 'last mile' problem for most mass transit solutions. They want to get to their destination, or at least within a certain distance of it, within a reasonable period of time. Studies have also shown that people tend to assign more expense with 'stalled' time - They'll value a trip at 50mph with a 10 minute wait in the middle less than a 20mph trip with no wait, even if they ultimately take the same amount of time to make a journey of the same distance.
I can only go with the reasons I want my car with me:
Flexibility. I can put together a trip that stops at the movie, the hardware store, the bookstore, the electronics store. I can go to a restaurant, start and stop where I please. I can drop by the gym and have my exercise clothes in the trunk, and put them back there when I'm done.
Cargo. I like to have stuff along. For work, I want my briefcase and my laptop. Do I want to have to lug them around everywhere I go? No. If I decide to stop at the hardware/book/electronics stores, I don't have to luge them all over the store. I can't even take a backpack or a briefcase into the movie since 9/11, but when I go to DC, I usually plan to catch a 4 - 5 PM movie to allow the traffic to subside before I start back toward Fredericksburg. Of course I don't commute to DC every day, but go there on occasions like training. Add the ability to stop by the gym, then I'm carring the briefcase, laptop, and the gym bag everywhere I go. That sucks. And if I want to put any of it down, such as to go thru a fast food line, I risk it being stolen. In my car, it is locked up with a Subaru security system also protecting it.
Control of the environment. I want to play the radio, and I don't like using earphones. I want to feel the bass notes in some heavy metal tunes. I also eat while moving. You can't do that on DC's Metro, they'll handcuff you and take you to jail - no kidding. They handcuffed and arrested a 12 year old kid eating french fries a couple years ago. I want to control the temperature. A metro train I rode last year started the journey with a car that was probably around 95 degrees, with the train engineer finally figuring this out about 20 minutes into the trip and turning on the air conditioning. I want to be able to make noise, foul the air if I so choose (smoke or other stuff), etc. etc. I want to be able to travel armed if I so choose.
I figure that if you offer people a comfortable, clean, individual car or pod that's faster and cheaper than the alternatives, they'll take it, even if it means leaving their car at home. As long as they can get to where they're going, preferably as close to their destination as they can get with said car. In cases of things like airports and busy malls, easy to do. You can end up quite far away in the parking lot.
You'll never build a train that gets as close as a car to most people's destination.
And, this system is not _just_ a commuter system. It is suburbs to town, or town to town, even NYC to LA. The latter railcar might even have a kitchenette, living room, and large screen HDTV positioned in front of the car. Get out of the car, start the coffee and microwave, settle into
Strapping down the wheels would probably take 2 guys 20 seconds or so to throw a nylon net over the tires and fasten it with a cargo fastener. 100 mph is not a factor, only the acceleration is a factor, and that should be about 0.3 Gs. You're not even going to generate much G's on an emergency stop with steel wheels on steel rails. Sure, YOU'd like to get people out of their cars, but the history of transportation in the USA shows that people absolutely do not want to do that. They want their cars with them. You can't change that. If you want to build a popular transportation system, you'll build something that carries automobiles, fast. Everything else using rails doesn't get enough ridership to support itself because people (in the USA) would rather drive. IOW, the customer is always right, so either you build what the customer wants to buy, or go bankrupt. And, this system is not _just_ a commuter system. It is suburbs to town, or town to town, even NYC to LA. The latter railcar might even have a kitchenette, living room, and large screen HDTV positioned in front of the car. Get out of the car, start the coffee and microwave, settle into the easy chair and tune HBO or slip in a Blue-Ray.
Everything should load quickly. Its simply a matter of driving it into the railcar, close up both ends, and its ready to take to the main rails. You'd probably have to add a step in there to secure the wheels to the floor of the railcar to insure that it doesn't roll around. As for the stuff we already have, it is a train pulled by a locomotive, and so runs on a schedule. PRT's run when the customer wants them to. That's one of the big differences. And, the current rail system can take 2 days of switching just to get cargo thru Chicago - it needs rebuilt anyway. Not sure where you're getting "relatively little amount of traffic." Give a man driving a car a way to travel at 100 mph and guarantee him he won't get a ticket, and I think a very large percentage of people will be driving their cars onto the system to go from the burbs to downtown, or from city to city, at 100 mph.
Current systems that carry cars on trains are long haul because it is difficult to load and unload the cars from the trains. A system where you drive your car on the train is different because it loads and unloads quickly. As for the extra mass of the traincar, that is not much of a factor if you only accelerate once per trip, and recover much of the energy during deceleration via dynamic braking and energy recovery back into the grid. The better point of such rail travel is running nose to tail with other such railcars, with just the lead car breaking the wind, so subsequent cars are going - what? - 100 mph? - on maybe 15 - 30 horsepower. Running the individual railcars carrying automobiles without slowing down between origin and destination would result in a very high energy efficiency of very low friction of steel wheels on steel rails and could be done with electricity, meaning it could be done without burning oil. As for most of the highway system not being crowded, try driving I-70 thru Indiana and Ohio, or I-95 anywhere north of Richmond. Give it a while, and the whole nation will be choked with the truck traffic. Trucks could use the rail system too, so this PRT would provide the needed extra capacity for which we're going to have to build more roads of some kind anyway. Traditional PRT only carries people, which doesn't work for someone with a load of plumber's tools or even a traveling salesman's display cases. But a car-carrying PRT would work for virtually everybody.
Yes, but track building and maintenance is VERY expensive. Now, if you could get independently operating vehicles that are not bound to tracks but can navigate a flat surface (like a roadway) in such a fashion, that may just work. =================== So's highways, and you couldn't go using the interestate highway system because the thing has too many speed limits and idiot drivers. It'd be a case of build all new rails or build all new roadways. Rails more expensive than roadways? Doesn't make a lotta sense.
Gotcha. What you need is the rail system that you drive your car onto, it is a personal rapid transport that moves you in your car to wherever you want to go. It leaves when you enter the railcar, it doesn't stop until you get where you're going, UNLESS you want to stop and eat, etc. On-board computer navigates the rails like the interstate highway system. All you need is a rail switch that handles railcars individually (I know how to build that,) allowing them to be extracted from the midst of other railcars that are traveling in a "train", without slowing down that train, that are all self-powered from external power source, think nuclear initially, then solar / wind / geothermal when its ready. With such a system, you can eat in your car, smoke, play Black Sabbath at 103 db, and all the other stuff you can't do on regular public transport, in addition to traveling on your own schedule. Includes getting the nation off oil, getting the overcrowded highway system under control, the overcrowded air traffic system under control, the traffic death toll down dramatically, etc.
1) Unionize or 2) Continue to be abused. Its that simple. BTW, our parents and grandparents were smarter, and formed unions.
Yes, I knew about the monthly charge. I wasn't looking for the cheapest option, but $600 up front was a bit much. After the cable company's coercion, by overcharging for the cablecards and refusing to rent them, paying for their company-supplied DVR feels too much like surrender. Not into surrender. Yeah, I'm stubborn... sue me. But someday, the worm will turn, and I'll have better options. Right now, I _need_ the cable for fast internet, so I can't divorce the cable company completely. Plus, there are 4 absolutely massive oak trees that are blocking the southern exposure - not sure if I could see either a Dish or Direct TV satellite without chopping them down first.
Some solution - I wanted to go TIVO a few months ago. The TIVO box requires 2 cablecards, plus it is $300 for the box. The cablecards are only available from my cable company, they will not rent them at all, and they want $150 for each one. $600 for TIVO? Nope, no sale. Solution: No DVR at all. If I really, really, really want to record something, I'll set up the old VHS, but for now, I just watch whatever is on, and if I miss something, I miss something. This will make a future decision to unhook from cable and either go satellite, or get all my entertainment over the internet more appealing.
You should read some of the warnings for chemicals used to process E4 color slides - will the cops come and gather up your darkroom if you're still into that chemical based picture stuff?
Pretty soon they'll pass a law that says, "Don't do anything unusual." If you look at all the bonehead things that people are getting arrested for nowadays, they seem to be enforcing such a law before its even been passed.
Well, perhaps you've heard that we may be able to mine our last available Gallium ore in about 10 years? Copper in 100 years? Zinc is on the endangered species list, too, so if you like galvanized anything that doesn't rust, well, you may be out of luck without moon-visiting tech. We better develop the tech to disassemble the moon for its natural resources, and launch them back to earth (electrically, with a railgun powered by solar, hopefully) and then maybe we can pave the Mojave with Gallium-consuming solar cells and run the country on solar. But without more Gallium... its going to soon come to a screeching halt.
When the government comes to you and asks you to do something to help them, then you help them. That is as it should be, and a concept known as "entrapment" protects you. No different with the telcoms. Protecting them against these lawsuits is the right thing to do, otherwise all we get is higher prices as they pass on the costs of the lawsuits to us - they have to - we're they're only source of revenue. As for listening to terrorists, I'm all for it. Some, it seems, would allow our enemies to go ahead and communicate unfettered by things like the FBI, DHS, NSA, etc. while someone chases around looking for a judge to approve an assault. What we're doing is basically different from what the 4th amendment covers. The 4th amendment covers law enforcement and people's rights. What we're doing is fighting a war, which is being conducted over phone lines and the internet. Apply law enforcement techniques to a war, and you'll lose the war. That's it, plain and simple.
And I hear that the polar bear meat goes well with spotted owl soup and snail darter sushi.
No, it doesn't mean its easy. What it means is that with the floodgates to all the rest of the world's programmers open to come here, the supply of programmers and the willingness of those programmers to work for much less than a "comfortable" wage in the USA means that the wages of programming in the USA will go to less than the "fries with that" crowd. Supply and demand. Increase the supply to near infinity, as tapping the entire rest of the world would do, and the available amount of $$$ for wages will be divided by that many people, resulting in ridiculously low wages.
...to study CS or programming in the USA if you're a US citizen. The big business bunch will eventually get their way to remove the caps on H1B visas, there will be millions enter the country that way, and the extreme competition for jobs will result salaries below the "fries with that" crowd. The "lucky" jobholders will live 10 to a house, share a minibus to work, and send the $$$ all back home overseas. Study law. Its harder to invade.
Naw, its more like being sick of Linux gurus telling me _I'm_ stupid for wanting everything my own way. Well... that's how commerce works. Gotta satisfy the customer.
I understand you fully. A lot of people who have strong opinions on this issue are not able to understand the other side. I have exactly the same experience as you, but worse. You see, "wanting everything my own way" includes:
I guess you can ask 'em to send it in Acrobat...
OpenOffice just as good as Microsoft Office? Well... then why does this statement always get followed by a disclaimer that all those functions the Microsoft has that OpenOffice doesn't, ...
"good" is subjective, OpenOffice could very well be perceived as better by many people for other reasons, right? Wasn't that the point you were making, in reverse? For example, OpenOffice can save its documents in a standard, open file format, and it is free (as in beer), which lets people try it out without paying up front, and free (as in speech), which lets people pay for it in other ways than spending cash (more on that later in my post).
So we all have to be programmers? And of course do I want to program all day on project X, and then come home and program on something else to "pay" for it? No, I'd rather take the money I make during the day and pay for something that I walk off with from over the counter, or that arrives in the mail, and not have to fiddle around writing my own word processor features.
There's a website that I (finally) found that claims that getting Call of Duty 4 to run on Linux under WINE is no harder than any other game
For someone who says "I'll never run Linux 'cuz ...", you seem somehow conflicted. Why do you waste your time (and the "finally" indicates --- a lot of time) looking for websites about running a game under Linux?
Just looking to see if my next prospective game would work in Linux. Nope, no Punkbuster.
In some ways, I fully agree with you, here, and in others I disagree. I agree that people should be willing to pay for things of value to them. However, I think your definition of "pay for it" is rather narrow. Some of us pay for our free open-source software by, well, writing more free open-source software (or fixing bugs in existing software). The work we do is worth money. Others pay by providing support on forums, or to our immediate surroundings. Or by posting bug reports and enhancement requests. And then there are some of us who actually do click the "donate" button (if it is provided).
Sure, if that's the way you want to operate, be my guest. I don't want to _have_ to operate that wway because the operating system only offers rograms that are set up that way.
Where I disagree with you is that I believe that there are many people who are willing to pay, but do not have the means to do so (in a significant public fashion, at least), and I strongly believe these people should still be able to use free software.
OK, they don't want to get a job and just use free software, fine... I don't really care. I just don't want to _have_ to use it.
while those that spend some significant chu