Social Security and Medicare must be massively reformed to be means based and not handouts to everyone over 65 (who are far far richer as a group than everyone under 30).
Medicare, maybe. I'm a single payer advocate, so there's no point in arguing that - we won't agree.
Social Security? It doesn't work that way. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit or government spending - it's a seperate, self-supporting insurance system. It's not currently running a deficit and won't for a few years at least. It costs the government $0 - in fact, the surpluses have been poured into the federal budget (which is why people scream that the feds are raiding it).
Anyone who tells you Social Security needs to be cut to reduce the budget is trying to pull one over on you.
Onto making it means based: You seem to have the misconception that Social Security is a type of welfare. It's not. it's federally mandated insurance. The wealthy payed into it - in fact, they payed more into it than poor people. If you pay $20/month for life insurance to Fred's Assurance Co., and some rich guy pays $200/mo for life insurance at the same company, then why would it be right for you to get a larger payout than him?
You must mean, "Where do I put a CD on a stripped down bargain computer/booksize computer/tablet?"
Seriously, optical drives aren't going away any time soon. People still spend ungodly amounts of money on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, and more and more people are watching them on their computers.
Graphics cards generally keep up to date with the version of DirectX available for the time. If you buy a modern video card when the current version of Windows supports DirectX 10, for instance, that's probably what the video card supports. That makes it generally pretty easy to know what your card is capable of.
OpenGL isn't like that. It moves on its own, and the standardization is closer to that of programming languages, where the standards are based on existing extensions (i.e. if NVidia comes up with a cool OpenGL extension, and it's popular, it may become part of the OpenGL standard*). The version numbers and available extensions don't fit neatly into a single integer.
DirectX requires that the driver supports certain features, and the video card Manufacturer can implement some of those in software. That means you can use cheaper cards and do software rendering to support a certain version of DirectX. You can do the same with OpenGL, but since there's no real target to aim for (like DirectX 11, for instance), you get whatever the video card manufacturer decides to include in their driver.
* Granted, this is somewhat true of DirectX as well - Microsoft doesn't just pull the requirements for a new DirectX version out of their asses. The difference is that there's no standards body to work with - cards must do X to be certified compatible.
Try reading the book. The movie cut out all the preachy crap.
Seriously, it keeps going from the action scenes (i.e. everyone getting eaten) to Malcolm, alone on his deathbed, yelling to no one in particular about how it was all bound to go wrong, they're such fools, etc.
I saw the movie before I read the book. People kept saying the book was so much better. I disagree - the movie was (mostly) the same story with the preachy parts removed. I will admit the end of the book was better, what with hunting down the raptor nests and whatnot, but it doesn't make up for the "moral" of the story being crammed in your face the whole time. People say Starship Troopers is better than the movie, too, but I decided to give it a pass.
It's the same reason I don't like a lot of Heinlein's work. His characters go off on rants about how much better the world is with X (X ususally being some far-left concept or free love) and it completely derails the story. The Door into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy are good, but I made the mistake of buying the extra long version of Stranger in a Strange Land... yeah, there's a reason a third of the book got cut before publishing.
Yeah, it's flat for non-desert land. That means some minor hills. If you've ever been to Iowa, imagine that with the hills about 1/3rd as high. That's why most people call it flat. It is more hilly than the Texas panhandle, but geometric planes have more hills than the Texas panhandle.
It's not flat compared to, say, the ocean on a calm day. That's why most Kansans insist it's not flat.
Oh, and the Flint Hills? Yeah, it's a ridge of hills that runs through the state. You'd barely notice them if there weren't signs pointing out that they're there.
It gives your character a name. It's not actually required to play the game. From what I've heard, there's a way to do guest installs and install the game without a username - I'm not sure on that point, actually, since I bought a name.
It isn't technically required to play on servers (the Minecraft server distributed by Mojang has a setting to not check names, so it's up to the server operator), but the server keeps track of your stuff using your name, so if you want to come back to the server with all your stuff, you need one.
Minetest's all right. I prefer Minecraft, but I played Minetest before buying Minecraft just to see if it was the kind of game I'd be interested in.
The design is pretty neat. The game engine is being stripped down to the basics, and everything else is being done in lua. This gives you a lot of control over the game - it's easy to play around with the lua code to change things. I'd never used lua before and was able to do some pretty cool stuff with minor edits.
That's a contrast with Minecraft, where mod developers have to decompile the java code and replace class files (or use an intermediate mod like Modloader to inject their code into them). Minecraft doesn't have a modding API yet, and I would be surprised if once it comes out (with 1.4, hopefully) it wouldn't still be necessary to replace core code for the heavy mods like Redpower. The main advantage Minecraft has is that it's more mature and has a much larger modding community, so you can get some really well-made mods that really enhance the game.
The cool thing about Notch is that he turns a blind eye toward the mod developers, who are essentially distributing modified versions of his class files, which is a clear cut copyright violation. Modders could change to using patches instead, but that would be a huge PITA.
Either way, Minetest can't be sued by this guy; it's for the PC, and this particular patent covers DRM on Android platforms. Minetest doesn't use any DRM at all.
I consider them nutty because he and I disagree on how to fix the problem. He wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I want reform.
For example, the medical testing procedures used by the FDA have the unfortunate result that drugs are more expensive and take longer to come to market. That's a real concern. However, I don't trust the free market to fix this problem; removing the FDA may make drugs cheaper and more available, but it can also result in lower quality or even dangerous drugs on the market.
I'm not an expert on such things, so I won't comment much on the drug side. I do believe that the FDA plays a vital role in food safety. I'm not paranoid about artificial preservatives and whatnot, but I wouldn't trust the chemicals added to food if the FDA wasn't there to set down the rules. Ron Paul can afford to eat the expensive foods that are free of such things in a free market system, but the poor would only be able to afford cheap food where every possible corner was cut.
The FCC has to exist. Someone needs to arbitrate who can use the spectrum. Someone needs to set limits on electromagnetic interference from electronic devices. Someone needs to set technical standards for broadcast or public systems like TV, commercial radio, and other forms of non-private communication (shortwave, citizen's band, etc.) as well as emergency systems. I do believe that the FCC shouldn't be the morality police, especially in non-radio communications (like cable TV). Cutting back the FCC's realm of influence to only technical specifics would fix virtually all of its problems.
I know a lot of people don't trust regulatory bodies, but there's plenty of evidence around that shows their necessity. Look at the quality of alcoholic beverages during the depression, or the large trust abuses in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or even the predatory lending used by banks and credit card companies (I know there's new regulations on credit cards, but I haven't had one since the new rules came out so I don't know their effectiveness). Like any bureaucracy, regulatory bodies need upkeep and pruning to keep them effective; this is what I feel we need, not simply removing them altogether.
That's why I consider those two ideas as nutty. Like I said, there were other things I considered nutty from that interview, but I only remember the impression I was left with. I do like a lot of his ideas, like cutting back on foreign interventions (although I'd stop at dropping out of NATO and the UN), ending the war on drugs, nixing the PATRIOT ACT, etc. We just disagree strongly on the ability of the free market to improve the lives and freedoms of the average citizen.
Biodiesel as sold from normal fueling stations runs fine in diesel engines with no conversion necessary. It generally has a slightly higher cetane rating and you don't have to worry about sulfur content (which is regulated based on the age and use of the engine - I can only use ultra-low sulfur fuel since my truck is a 2011).
There's an issue with parts warrantees if you use anything higher than B5, though. I routinely put B10 in my truck, because that's what Love's sells at a lot of its truck stops - I just don't tell Freightliner about it:) Higher content commercial blends should be fine, although they're harder to find depending on where you are. I've only seen B100 a few times, but I only look at diesel at truck stops which generally don't sell B100 due to the warrantee issue.
Since biodiesel is very close chemically speaking to mineral diesel, everything pretty much works. That's not the case with ethanol, which eats rubber seals and hoses and only has about 2/3 the energy density of gasoline.
Note, this is all about commercial biodiesel. Dumping used cooking oil in your tank is probably not a good idea unless you know what you're doing.
If they're "not a good idea", WTF is up with the railroad industry's near-universal use of series diesel-electrics?
Three reasons: 1) Electric motors have torque at 0 rpm. 2) Diesel engines are cheaper to operate and maintain than steam. 3) Steam locomotives were only good at a certain type of use, which was set at design time. A locomotive was built for a certain speed and pulling power, and that couldn't be changed - freight locomotives couldn't acheive the speeds of passenger locomotives, but could pull much heavier loads, for instance. Diesel-electrics have a much higher range of utility, meaning you don't need to match the locomotive to its load (although you still wouldn't use a yard switcher as an Amtrack engine).
Fuel efficiency was only a consideration compared with coal, and wasn't a major concern. Direct drive diesel was tried, and doesn't work well - no torque at 0 rpm means you need a huge clutching mechanism.
(I won't comment on the rest of your post, since you'd really need numbers to argue further. I will, however, point out that there are plenty of diesel engines designed for fixed-rpm use - refrigerated trailer units are a good example.)
I'd make doubly sure of that fact before I tried it.
I doubt you'd get caught (I've had the IRS check my diesel, but I drive a commercial truck) but if you did, the fines for using offroad diesel for on-road use are very high. It's considered tax evasion.
There's a museum in Hutchinson, KS that has a pretty good set of displays, including the Apollo 13 command module. Apparently there's a lot of Russian stuff there too.
I haven't been, but I've heard great stuff about it.
Just down the street, there's a salt mine museum as well, if that's your thing. Oh, and a garage door company run by assholes that I deliver to on occasion:)
I'm not the original poster, but the nutjob ideas I've heard (on an NPR interview with Rep. Paul himself, from his own lips) included disbanding both the FDA and the FCC.
I'd like to see the FCC scaled back to just being concerned with the spectrum and how it's used from a technical standpoint, but I don't want it abolished.
I also don't like sawdust and mouse crap in my food, so I'm not voting for him.
I can't remember the other parts of the interview I disagreed with - it's been a while. I think the main point he and I disagree on (because I do like a lot of what he says) is that he has infinite faith in the free market and I don't.
I used to go through my grandparents' World Books and browse, reading whatever caught my fancy. Same with my dad's old Encyclopedia Americana - I still page though it when I'm at my dad's house running updates on his computer.
Britannica wasn't friendly to a ten year old. The text was dense and it didn't have as many pictures and diagrams. I used it for science reports and stuff, but I never really dived into it like I did the World Books.
On topic, Wikipedia seems more World Bookish to me. The text isn't cramped into columns and is generally large enough that it's easy on the eyes. There are relevant graphics that are informative. Most articles are laid out so they have enough information so the lay person can satisfy their curiosity while providing links and more in depth information for someone with more serious pursuits.
I can't think of a thing I'd change, except maybe add a cookie so that wikipedia.org gives you the language start page of your choice. The main page is kind of useless unless you speak more than one language.
Yes, my point was that the highway systems get paid by us anyway, except the part you pay directly as fuel tax. We are in full agreement on that point - cars are subsidized by the fact that our taxes pay for the roads.
You're talking about exchanging highway maintenance funds for increased use of trains. I'd love to see increased use of trains; I'm a truck driver, and I'd love to see the interstate become more truck-oriented (don't even start on reducing truck freight by using trains - it will never happen, for very good reasons).
The problem is that it wouldn't work. You still need highways to serve rural areas. You still need cars in smaller communities. My town has 22,000 people in it - there's no mass transit and it takes a couple hours to walk from one side of town to the other. It's the largest town in the county.
Walking doesn't work in towns like this. It gets well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and drops below 0 in the winter. We get snow, and while we don't get as much as you do in NYC we do get ice storms that knock out power for a week every few years. We get torrential rain in the spring and, of course, the occasional tornado (although, really, you don't want to drive in a tornado any more than you want to walk in one). The nearest convienience store is four blocks away, and the nearest grocery store is about a mile and a half away. It's about two and a half miles to the Wal-Mart, which is the only place you can buy most dry goods around here. And of course, we have plenty of elderly people who can't walk that far anyway. So, we drive.
If you've already got a car, and are already paying insurance, it's much easier to just drive to where you need to go. If I need to go to the next largest town in the county (roughly half the size, physically and by population), I could take a theoretical train there, but then I'd have the same problem of needing to get to where I'm actually going to. It's the last mile problem.
To serve communities like this, you'd be subsidizing not only a train system (there's not near enough traffic to be self-supporting, even without people driving between towns), but also a bus system to get around the town. You'd still have the highways around here because you can't downgrade them much; they're already mostly two-lane affairs running between towns, and you need them for trucks and rural traffic (a surprising number of people live outside the city limits).
In large cities, the story is different, although once you get west of the eastern seaboard the towns tend to be much less dense. I seem to remember Oklahoma City was once the largest city by acreage in the country, although its population has never been high; it's currently about a million and a half people. Congestion? You get a bit between Norman (where the University of Oklahoma is) and Oklahoma City on I-35 around rush hour, but it's nothing compared to Dallas or Baltimore. People don't feel a need for public transit there, and a bus/train setup can't beat a car on convienience. People here actually enjoy driving.
Local train traffic will never take root in most parts of this country. It's just not going to happen. Maybe if we installed a Walt Disney-style peoplemover system, but so far no city in the world has done so.
Trains as an alternative for aircraft, however - there's some potential there.
And it wouldn't be great for cargo. A lot of cargo (many foods, anything in a sealed plastic container, anything with foam or trapped gasses) can't handle vacuum. Most of the bulk cargos (coal, steel, etc. but probablay not flour and definitely not grain or livestock) that freight trains haul would probably be all right, except no one really cares if they get them this afternoon or next week.
If you're going to build a vacuum tunnel and put a maglev train in it, there's no reason not to go insanely fast.
An accident at 600 km/h would be just as bad as one at 6000 km/h, so safety's not a reason. Efficiency isn't a problem if the vacuum is hard enough. Plus, you have to justify the cost of building all this vs. just using airplanes.
If we ever build maglev tracks on the moon, you can be assured they'd take full advantage of the speed available. I doubt it'll ever be cost effective on Earth, though.
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So... it has an optical drive, then. You just choose not to use it.
I only put seatbelts on when I see flashing lights behind me or drive across a scale, but I seriously doubt they're going away any time soon.
Social Security and Medicare must be massively reformed to be means based and not handouts to everyone over 65 (who are far far richer as a group than everyone under 30).
Medicare, maybe. I'm a single payer advocate, so there's no point in arguing that - we won't agree.
Social Security? It doesn't work that way. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit or government spending - it's a seperate, self-supporting insurance system. It's not currently running a deficit and won't for a few years at least. It costs the government $0 - in fact, the surpluses have been poured into the federal budget (which is why people scream that the feds are raiding it).
Anyone who tells you Social Security needs to be cut to reduce the budget is trying to pull one over on you.
Onto making it means based: You seem to have the misconception that Social Security is a type of welfare. It's not. it's federally mandated insurance. The wealthy payed into it - in fact, they payed more into it than poor people. If you pay $20/month for life insurance to Fred's Assurance Co., and some rich guy pays $200/mo for life insurance at the same company, then why would it be right for you to get a larger payout than him?
stuff like this is where the right wing gets the whole 'democrats hate america' thing from
No, they get that from their campaign advisors, right-wing "entertainment" media, and carvings in bathroom stalls.
It's a gaff. Both sides have them.
You must mean, "Where do I put a CD on a stripped down bargain computer/booksize computer/tablet?"
Seriously, optical drives aren't going away any time soon. People still spend ungodly amounts of money on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, and more and more people are watching them on their computers.
Something like SDL?
It runs on Windows. I don't know how much use it gets there, but it's used on Linux all the time.
Graphics cards generally keep up to date with the version of DirectX available for the time. If you buy a modern video card when the current version of Windows supports DirectX 10, for instance, that's probably what the video card supports. That makes it generally pretty easy to know what your card is capable of.
OpenGL isn't like that. It moves on its own, and the standardization is closer to that of programming languages, where the standards are based on existing extensions (i.e. if NVidia comes up with a cool OpenGL extension, and it's popular, it may become part of the OpenGL standard*). The version numbers and available extensions don't fit neatly into a single integer.
DirectX requires that the driver supports certain features, and the video card Manufacturer can implement some of those in software. That means you can use cheaper cards and do software rendering to support a certain version of DirectX. You can do the same with OpenGL, but since there's no real target to aim for (like DirectX 11, for instance), you get whatever the video card manufacturer decides to include in their driver.
* Granted, this is somewhat true of DirectX as well - Microsoft doesn't just pull the requirements for a new DirectX version out of their asses. The difference is that there's no standards body to work with - cards must do X to be certified compatible.
Try reading the book. The movie cut out all the preachy crap.
Seriously, it keeps going from the action scenes (i.e. everyone getting eaten) to Malcolm, alone on his deathbed, yelling to no one in particular about how it was all bound to go wrong, they're such fools, etc.
Yeah, tell me about it.
I saw the movie before I read the book. People kept saying the book was so much better. I disagree - the movie was (mostly) the same story with the preachy parts removed. I will admit the end of the book was better, what with hunting down the raptor nests and whatnot, but it doesn't make up for the "moral" of the story being crammed in your face the whole time. People say Starship Troopers is better than the movie, too, but I decided to give it a pass.
It's the same reason I don't like a lot of Heinlein's work. His characters go off on rants about how much better the world is with X (X ususally being some far-left concept or free love) and it completely derails the story. The Door into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy are good, but I made the mistake of buying the extra long version of Stranger in a Strange Land... yeah, there's a reason a third of the book got cut before publishing.
Meh. I'm still boycotting them from the 1-click patent deal. Barnes and Noble got a lot of business from me because of that.
Even if I wasn't, I would have started when they decided it would be OK to delete e-books from people's Kindles with no warning.
Amazon's douchebaggery isn't new - it's the same old crap they've always done.
Depends how you define flat.
Yeah, it's flat for non-desert land. That means some minor hills. If you've ever been to Iowa, imagine that with the hills about 1/3rd as high. That's why most people call it flat. It is more hilly than the Texas panhandle, but geometric planes have more hills than the Texas panhandle.
It's not flat compared to, say, the ocean on a calm day. That's why most Kansans insist it's not flat.
Oh, and the Flint Hills? Yeah, it's a ridge of hills that runs through the state. You'd barely notice them if there weren't signs pointing out that they're there.
It contains itself, as well as Vatacan City, so 2?
It gives your character a name. It's not actually required to play the game. From what I've heard, there's a way to do guest installs and install the game without a username - I'm not sure on that point, actually, since I bought a name.
It isn't technically required to play on servers (the Minecraft server distributed by Mojang has a setting to not check names, so it's up to the server operator), but the server keeps track of your stuff using your name, so if you want to come back to the server with all your stuff, you need one.
Minetest's all right. I prefer Minecraft, but I played Minetest before buying Minecraft just to see if it was the kind of game I'd be interested in.
The design is pretty neat. The game engine is being stripped down to the basics, and everything else is being done in lua. This gives you a lot of control over the game - it's easy to play around with the lua code to change things. I'd never used lua before and was able to do some pretty cool stuff with minor edits.
That's a contrast with Minecraft, where mod developers have to decompile the java code and replace class files (or use an intermediate mod like Modloader to inject their code into them). Minecraft doesn't have a modding API yet, and I would be surprised if once it comes out (with 1.4, hopefully) it wouldn't still be necessary to replace core code for the heavy mods like Redpower. The main advantage Minecraft has is that it's more mature and has a much larger modding community, so you can get some really well-made mods that really enhance the game.
The cool thing about Notch is that he turns a blind eye toward the mod developers, who are essentially distributing modified versions of his class files, which is a clear cut copyright violation. Modders could change to using patches instead, but that would be a huge PITA.
Either way, Minetest can't be sued by this guy; it's for the PC, and this particular patent covers DRM on Android platforms. Minetest doesn't use any DRM at all.
Every american sysadmin I've talked to also calls it "scuzzy". I wasn't even aware some people pronounced it "sexy".
I consider them nutty because he and I disagree on how to fix the problem. He wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I want reform.
For example, the medical testing procedures used by the FDA have the unfortunate result that drugs are more expensive and take longer to come to market. That's a real concern. However, I don't trust the free market to fix this problem; removing the FDA may make drugs cheaper and more available, but it can also result in lower quality or even dangerous drugs on the market.
I'm not an expert on such things, so I won't comment much on the drug side. I do believe that the FDA plays a vital role in food safety. I'm not paranoid about artificial preservatives and whatnot, but I wouldn't trust the chemicals added to food if the FDA wasn't there to set down the rules. Ron Paul can afford to eat the expensive foods that are free of such things in a free market system, but the poor would only be able to afford cheap food where every possible corner was cut.
The FCC has to exist. Someone needs to arbitrate who can use the spectrum. Someone needs to set limits on electromagnetic interference from electronic devices. Someone needs to set technical standards for broadcast or public systems like TV, commercial radio, and other forms of non-private communication (shortwave, citizen's band, etc.) as well as emergency systems. I do believe that the FCC shouldn't be the morality police, especially in non-radio communications (like cable TV). Cutting back the FCC's realm of influence to only technical specifics would fix virtually all of its problems.
I know a lot of people don't trust regulatory bodies, but there's plenty of evidence around that shows their necessity. Look at the quality of alcoholic beverages during the depression, or the large trust abuses in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or even the predatory lending used by banks and credit card companies (I know there's new regulations on credit cards, but I haven't had one since the new rules came out so I don't know their effectiveness). Like any bureaucracy, regulatory bodies need upkeep and pruning to keep them effective; this is what I feel we need, not simply removing them altogether.
That's why I consider those two ideas as nutty. Like I said, there were other things I considered nutty from that interview, but I only remember the impression I was left with. I do like a lot of his ideas, like cutting back on foreign interventions (although I'd stop at dropping out of NATO and the UN), ending the war on drugs, nixing the PATRIOT ACT, etc. We just disagree strongly on the ability of the free market to improve the lives and freedoms of the average citizen.
Biodiesel as sold from normal fueling stations runs fine in diesel engines with no conversion necessary. It generally has a slightly higher cetane rating and you don't have to worry about sulfur content (which is regulated based on the age and use of the engine - I can only use ultra-low sulfur fuel since my truck is a 2011).
There's an issue with parts warrantees if you use anything higher than B5, though. I routinely put B10 in my truck, because that's what Love's sells at a lot of its truck stops - I just don't tell Freightliner about it :) Higher content commercial blends should be fine, although they're harder to find depending on where you are. I've only seen B100 a few times, but I only look at diesel at truck stops which generally don't sell B100 due to the warrantee issue.
Since biodiesel is very close chemically speaking to mineral diesel, everything pretty much works. That's not the case with ethanol, which eats rubber seals and hoses and only has about 2/3 the energy density of gasoline.
Note, this is all about commercial biodiesel. Dumping used cooking oil in your tank is probably not a good idea unless you know what you're doing.
If they're "not a good idea", WTF is up with the railroad industry's near-universal use of series diesel-electrics?
Three reasons:
1) Electric motors have torque at 0 rpm.
2) Diesel engines are cheaper to operate and maintain than steam.
3) Steam locomotives were only good at a certain type of use, which was set at design time. A locomotive was built for a certain speed and pulling power, and that couldn't be changed - freight locomotives couldn't acheive the speeds of passenger locomotives, but could pull much heavier loads, for instance. Diesel-electrics have a much higher range of utility, meaning you don't need to match the locomotive to its load (although you still wouldn't use a yard switcher as an Amtrack engine).
Fuel efficiency was only a consideration compared with coal, and wasn't a major concern. Direct drive diesel was tried, and doesn't work well - no torque at 0 rpm means you need a huge clutching mechanism.
(I won't comment on the rest of your post, since you'd really need numbers to argue further. I will, however, point out that there are plenty of diesel engines designed for fixed-rpm use - refrigerated trailer units are a good example.)
I'd make doubly sure of that fact before I tried it.
I doubt you'd get caught (I've had the IRS check my diesel, but I drive a commercial truck) but if you did, the fines for using offroad diesel for on-road use are very high. It's considered tax evasion.
There's a museum in Hutchinson, KS that has a pretty good set of displays, including the Apollo 13 command module. Apparently there's a lot of Russian stuff there too.
I haven't been, but I've heard great stuff about it.
Just down the street, there's a salt mine museum as well, if that's your thing. Oh, and a garage door company run by assholes that I deliver to on occasion :)
Ah, you want emacs then.
I'm not the original poster, but the nutjob ideas I've heard (on an NPR interview with Rep. Paul himself, from his own lips) included disbanding both the FDA and the FCC.
I'd like to see the FCC scaled back to just being concerned with the spectrum and how it's used from a technical standpoint, but I don't want it abolished.
I also don't like sawdust and mouse crap in my food, so I'm not voting for him.
I can't remember the other parts of the interview I disagreed with - it's been a while. I think the main point he and I disagree on (because I do like a lot of what he says) is that he has infinite faith in the free market and I don't.
Wow, it's like you read my mind.
I used to go through my grandparents' World Books and browse, reading whatever caught my fancy. Same with my dad's old Encyclopedia Americana - I still page though it when I'm at my dad's house running updates on his computer.
Britannica wasn't friendly to a ten year old. The text was dense and it didn't have as many pictures and diagrams. I used it for science reports and stuff, but I never really dived into it like I did the World Books.
On topic, Wikipedia seems more World Bookish to me. The text isn't cramped into columns and is generally large enough that it's easy on the eyes. There are relevant graphics that are informative. Most articles are laid out so they have enough information so the lay person can satisfy their curiosity while providing links and more in depth information for someone with more serious pursuits.
I can't think of a thing I'd change, except maybe add a cookie so that wikipedia.org gives you the language start page of your choice. The main page is kind of useless unless you speak more than one language.
Yes, my point was that the highway systems get paid by us anyway, except the part you pay directly as fuel tax. We are in full agreement on that point - cars are subsidized by the fact that our taxes pay for the roads.
You're talking about exchanging highway maintenance funds for increased use of trains. I'd love to see increased use of trains; I'm a truck driver, and I'd love to see the interstate become more truck-oriented (don't even start on reducing truck freight by using trains - it will never happen, for very good reasons).
The problem is that it wouldn't work. You still need highways to serve rural areas. You still need cars in smaller communities. My town has 22,000 people in it - there's no mass transit and it takes a couple hours to walk from one side of town to the other. It's the largest town in the county.
Walking doesn't work in towns like this. It gets well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and drops below 0 in the winter. We get snow, and while we don't get as much as you do in NYC we do get ice storms that knock out power for a week every few years. We get torrential rain in the spring and, of course, the occasional tornado (although, really, you don't want to drive in a tornado any more than you want to walk in one). The nearest convienience store is four blocks away, and the nearest grocery store is about a mile and a half away. It's about two and a half miles to the Wal-Mart, which is the only place you can buy most dry goods around here. And of course, we have plenty of elderly people who can't walk that far anyway. So, we drive.
If you've already got a car, and are already paying insurance, it's much easier to just drive to where you need to go. If I need to go to the next largest town in the county (roughly half the size, physically and by population), I could take a theoretical train there, but then I'd have the same problem of needing to get to where I'm actually going to. It's the last mile problem.
To serve communities like this, you'd be subsidizing not only a train system (there's not near enough traffic to be self-supporting, even without people driving between towns), but also a bus system to get around the town. You'd still have the highways around here because you can't downgrade them much; they're already mostly two-lane affairs running between towns, and you need them for trucks and rural traffic (a surprising number of people live outside the city limits).
In large cities, the story is different, although once you get west of the eastern seaboard the towns tend to be much less dense. I seem to remember Oklahoma City was once the largest city by acreage in the country, although its population has never been high; it's currently about a million and a half people. Congestion? You get a bit between Norman (where the University of Oklahoma is) and Oklahoma City on I-35 around rush hour, but it's nothing compared to Dallas or Baltimore. People don't feel a need for public transit there, and a bus/train setup can't beat a car on convienience. People here actually enjoy driving.
Local train traffic will never take root in most parts of this country. It's just not going to happen. Maybe if we installed a Walt Disney-style peoplemover system, but so far no city in the world has done so.
Trains as an alternative for aircraft, however - there's some potential there.
Yeah, the pressurized cabins.
And it wouldn't be great for cargo. A lot of cargo (many foods, anything in a sealed plastic container, anything with foam or trapped gasses) can't handle vacuum. Most of the bulk cargos (coal, steel, etc. but probablay not flour and definitely not grain or livestock) that freight trains haul would probably be all right, except no one really cares if they get them this afternoon or next week.
Why not?
If you're going to build a vacuum tunnel and put a maglev train in it, there's no reason not to go insanely fast.
An accident at 600 km/h would be just as bad as one at 6000 km/h, so safety's not a reason. Efficiency isn't a problem if the vacuum is hard enough. Plus, you have to justify the cost of building all this vs. just using airplanes.
If we ever build maglev tracks on the moon, you can be assured they'd take full advantage of the speed available. I doubt it'll ever be cost effective on Earth, though.