Do tell me the difference between considering the unprovable to be false and considering it to be null.
You might call that the difference between skepticism and empiricism. Religion violates the principle of parsimony, is untestable, and provides nothing in the way of explanatory power. You're arguing about whether or not science should treat religion as being wrong, or not even wrong.
I presume it works with OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS, and/or iOS.
You have an unsupported leap in logic there: that drivers don't exist because there isn't a stable ABI.
Also, do show me the binary driver that works across two dozen cpu architectures. Or the manufacturer who is willing to release two dozen drivers for a niche platform.
In other words, show that the lack of a stable ABI caused this problem, and then show that it would be a better solution. And don't ignore embedded linux; it's more profitable than the desktop.
P.S. What resources have you contributed towards solving this problem?
As I am sure/. is unaware, the Green Party candidate for the Presidency this year is Jill Stein. Ten years ago she debated Mitt Romney and a Libertarian candidate for the gubernatorial race. This year neither she nor Mr. Johnson of the Libertarian Party have been able to debate Mitt. If this is how the national party representatives are treated, is it surprising that a House candidate is also given short shrift?
A sensible political system might indeed include mandatory airtime or debate privileges. As the parent poster has stated, this would require government action. Are you in favor of such a system? How do you justify telling a private company what to do? Why aren't you demanding this same privilege for your party at the national level -- did I miss that slashdot article?
P.S. : If any libertarians want to take up the gage, I have some general comment on your philosophy here.
It's a lot safer and saner to have a dedicated 120V timer switch for your lights than to wire in a, e.g. 5V DC - 120V AC relay so you can control your lights with a microcontroller.
Also, ph and nutrient testing are generally done by hand unless you have a very large operation. A good pH probe costs $100, and then you have to take the time and effort to hook it up to a microcontroller. Then do that for each hydro system, because in a continuous op you'll have at least two of these -- probably three, for the seedling/clone, vegetative growth, and flowering stages. That won't necessarily get you eC readings too, although it's possible. CO2 is another pain.
Don't get me wrong, one of my next life goals is to set something like that up. Most growers, however, just throw a $10 timer on the lights and forget about it. Geek factor aside, the ROI just doesn't justify a small unified automation system. If you have a warehouse-sized operation, you can probably afford to drop $4-10k on automation electronics. These will probably not be arduino-based.
P.S. Anyone who wants to contribute some electrical expertise, please send me an email.
This is relevant to my interests. I don't work with Drupal, but it does occasionally happen that a man page is not explicit enough. This would probably be a resource-of-last-resort after the man pages, docs, and google, but more information isn't usually harmful.
I do agree with you about the book reviews though -- I'll write one if you will.
Linux runs on over two dozen processor architectures. Things that aren't integrated with the kernel don't have a prayer of working on different systems.
But okay, this isn't a huge issue, just the kernel's ability to talk to hardware. People are writing all sorts of drivers for Solaris, Mac OSX, and BSD, because they have stable ABIs. Heck, I like to write one of each a day -- before breakfast, if possible.
A stable ABI is a tradeoff: guaranteed compatibility for the short term, and guaranteed incompatibility for the long term. Eventually the OS vendor will change their driver interfaces, and unless the affected drivers are in the kernel, someone else is going to have to take some extra effort to fix them and distribute their changes.
Also, I'd like to introduce you to the concept of technical debt: The cost of maintaining bad code -- e.g., keeping around an obsolete API/ABI for compatibility's sake -- tends to accrue over time. In the context of the previous paragraph, Microsoft pushes this technical debt off to device manufacturers, with interest.
Lastly, in addition to the technical reasons, Linus likes the non-stable ABI and the GPL because they both force more code to be contributed back to the kernel. That's your soundbite answer. You're probably not going to make headway on this issue.
I leave the floor open to anyone who has tried and failed to get driver code into the kernel: i.e. those with a legitimate complaint.
Linux works perfectly well on my desktop. Really I thought all those calls for mainstream desktop use were something of a joke: really, when was the last time you noticed anyone seriously advocating it? And what sort of response did that get?
I would be thrilled to not ever see mainstream use. I'm even glad you're not using Linux. There are lots more productive things than getting on random forums and bitching about problems. Why you think that Linux should cater to the drooling masses is pretty mystifying; didn't someone invent iPads for that? I cannot imagine these people contributing anything but support costs.
I'm not going to advocate for or against desktop use. I do have a bias, but I'm not about to inflict it on everyone around me. I fervently wish you would refrain from doing so.
And in seriousness, while your style of ranting is great for pageviews and you provoke spirited discussion, this sort of stress is not good for one's long-term health.
It's not dogma, you just didn't understand it. You're only considering your own small corner of the computer world. Linux runs on a dozen or so architectures: which one of those do you want binary compatibility with?
Linux has a dominant share of the embedded computing market, as well as the server market, and is the overwhelming choice for high performance computing. The minimum requirements for a Linux system would blow your mind -- and don't include frivolities like an MMU. Making assumptions about kernel memory structures would be asinine.
Vista isn't even in the running for worst or least-compatible Microsoft OS of the last decade: the contenders would be (in no order) Windows CE, Windows Phone 7, and Windows RT. Or perhaps their Singularity project.
There are two distros whose focus is on stability, Debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and/or derivatives such as CentOS). I'd suggest you repeat your test with them, but it's really more manic ranting than a reproducible experiment.
You have this idea that Linux should be Windows, or that the desktop is a market that it needs to be successful in. I won't deride you for having these ideas, but you may be assured that the overwhelming majority of Linux users have no such concepts. Most Linux installations do not have a desktop. However, you can expect the same kernel drivers to work whether you're running on MIPS, Sparc, ARM, or x86-64.
Aside from the philosophical issues with having non-open components on an open source system, you are essentially suggesting that Linux should only be useful on the desktop, and supporting this idea with some bullshit anecdote about stability, and the hope that device manufacturers will say, "Oh golly gee! We didn't want to invest in Linux at all, but now that you have a stable ABI, we'll hire all the developers we need!" It's working out so well for BSD and Solaris, isn't it? And I know that I can use all my XP and Win95-era drivers on Win8. Heck, even OSX will happily use those PPC drivers on my Mountain Lion MBP.
You are not right. You are not even wrong. You are living in a completely different reality.
This question has been answered. Many times. You know this. I know this. I know you know this. You know that I know that you know this...well perhaps not but I'm sure you can ascribe opinions to me regardless.
Let us begin by stating a general need for transportation: in advocating for personal vehicles, you agree with this. It is obvious that we are past the days where transportation was not a necessity: societies are increasingly mobile, and few will advocate a return to the days where a man lived his days without going further than ten miles from home.
Let us further not ignore the distinction between voluntary personal transportation needs and the common necessity of mass transportation: even in the era of the Internet, it is rare for people to meet all their needs without straying from their doorstop. If you cannot meet the basic requirements for life without transportation, then transportation is a basic requirement for life.
It can not be disputed that competitive markets are extremely efficient for certain classes of problems, where inefficient competitors are weeded out by virtue of having lower profit margins. This efficiency is largely driven by the capital requirements to start competing businesses. This leads to what are called "natural monopolies", where the capital requirements required to start a competing service are high enough to preclude any competition. These natural monopolies are the natural purview of government, and include water services, road networks, and many other utilities.
Personal transportation is not a natural monopoly; the capital required to enter that market is about the cost of a rickshaw or wheelbarrow. Mass transportation, however, is a natural monopoly: the capital requirements to meet the needs of a large number of people are large enough to preclude competition. You will rarely see competing bus lines within a city, and never competing railways.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that public transportation is being presented as a solution to all transportation needs, which is as valid as the idea that personal transportation is the only thing anyone needs. There will not ever be a one-size-fits all solution to both problems; the viability of both are highly dependent on scale. Understanding these concepts is fundamental to a rational discourse on the matter; please do not disqualify yourself from the discussion.
It is the right statistic because it is the only one that might support your claim. It is the wrong statistic because it does not represent the total cost of that mode of transportation, and does not give any predictive ability for the system as a whole. To say that this complex problem can be reduced to a single statistic is, as I said, entirely disingenuous.
pessimistic number because there is often more than one person in a car.
The number you're looking for is the marginal cost to add a passenger. It's one of many costs that tend to be far lower with public transportation. It's easy to add one more person to a bus. It's much more expensive to add one more car to the road.
Public transportation works better in high-density urban areas than in most the US.
Also cars work less well in high-density urban areas. Once you saturate your street capacity, it's hard to solve that problem with the methods you used to get to it. Funny thing, 250 million Americans live in urban areas. Wikipedia says 75% of the US shares about 3% of the land area. Most of the population is contained in urban areas that are quite as densely populated as Europe. But you know, public transit worked just fine when I was in rural Costa Rica last year too.
Really, though, I want to see some numbers for your argument. You've gotten the 'calling-your-opponent-an-idiot' tactic out of the way. Show me a study that shows how everyone-has-a-car is more efficient. The rest of the world will certainly want to learn about it.
One is a direct measurement and the other is a rate set by bureaucrats. FYI, the GSA reimbursement is about four cents lower than the BTS's estimate of ownership costs per mile.
As you might notice if you were more thorough in your reading, a naive cost estimate does not include many externalities and ignores economies of scale. You cannot simply assume that transportation costs scale linearly -- it's not as if there were a uniform distribution of persons.
It is entirely disingenuous to cherry-pick a single statistic out of a 129-page report and claim it as a disproof. I'd suggest you do more homework on this issue, but frankly the math is against you. The rest of the world understands this, they just didn't allow their transportation infrastructure to be held hostage by private interests.
The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1][2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4][5]
There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.
I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?
I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).
In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.
Whenever I commute (as infrequently as possible), I cannot help but look and see the tens of thousands of dollars that each individual has chosen to spend on transportation, and imagine what spending a tenth of that money would have done for public transit.
It's a hidden tax which impacts the middle class most severely. It is a spectacular inefficiency, and in my opinion one of the strongest arguments against Libertarianism.
The other strong argument against Libertarianism is reality.
Have you seen the IOCCC code that looks like an airplane? It's a flight sim. Have you seen the DeCSS Gallery? Also, there's lots of code on the Daily WTF that is as creative as it is terrible.
How about CSS? Am I not coding or not designing when I write that?
When you're championing the rights of the individual, the question becomes -- which individual?
There's an old Soviet joke (the difference between Soviet Russia and fascist America is becoming less clear all the time):
A Chukchi returned home from the Communist Party Congress:
"I attended the Congress. They accepted the new program. They said: âEverything for man, everything for the benefit of Man!â(TM) And this Chukchi saw this Man with his own eyes. He was right there, in the Presidium."
Clearly we need people to champion the rights of individuals in order to resist the forces of government. The problem is, you probably shouldn't win that game.
Hacker News has "News for Startups". Many/. articles show up there first. The community has, generally, far fewer commentators and much less humor. Expect to see a lot of stories about new javascript libraries, and blog posts from random idio^H^H^H^H"entrepreneurs". Tag it "RTFPressRease"
People tell me good subreddits exist. I'm not sure I believe it. Tag it "RTFImageCaption"
Linux Weekly News comes with a free neck adjustment to facilitate looking down on things with fewer freedoms. Tag it "RTFLKML"
Ars Technica, and Wired are both brought to you by their corporate overlords. Hard to complain about the reporting, it's sanitized but not awful. There's no community to speak of at either. It gets tagged for you.
Or you could DIY TFA with a custom RSS feed. But unfortunately I don't think what you're looking for exists outside slashdot, even in its supposed decline. You may get better answers, though, by defining what kind of nerd you are.
Pish. Like there weren't always trolls and shills, and idiot moderators.
The moderation system works. Even Hacker News says so. Their main improvement is that there's no "funny" mod. Their main problem is that there's no "funny" mod. Also a relentless fixation on wheel-reinventing startup web technologies*, but that's to be expected.
Browsing the site at high moderation levels gives you an extremely high S/N ratio. Yes, it's sad that $name doesn't post here any more. Lots of great people still do, though. I'll stick around for the community here for as long as it exists.
Also, for the record, every problem I've ever had with the UI was solved by switching to D1. Sorry Soulskill:(
* this phrase brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Don't demonize your opponents. There's probably an order of magnitude more pro-Apple zealots, at least to judge by their sales numbers. He among us who has never been irrationally attached to an issue may throw the first stone.
First, one must take exception to the idea that source code is not creative. As examples, look at any IOCCC entries -- I like the flight simulator in the shape of an airplane. Secondly, you may examine the DeCSS Gallery and judge whether any of that may be considered a creative expression.
What you are perceiving as lack of creative expression, though, is the flaw in your arguments: software is not eligible for patent protection because it consists of mathematical operations.
Software is Math To most students of Computer Science this is as inarguable as evolution in the biological sciences. At the fundamental level, modern computers only function is to carry out binary arithmetic. This ipso facto means that any function computers do is mathematical, but one might make the argument that things which are not inherently mathematical can nevertheless be modeled or represented using mathematics, and that software is something modeled in math rather being defined in it.
You would be very, very wrong. At the point in which Alan Turing laid out the foundations for all of computer science, no such calculating machines existed. Computers were designed as implementations of mathematical concepts. Programming languages grew out of a branch of mathematics called Lambda calculus, and Lisp in particular is fairly trivially convertible to mathematical statements. All concepts in computer science are defined in formal language which is inherently mathematical -- even the concept of a formal language itself. One consequence of this is that it is possible (though extremely difficult all but trivial programs) to construct a formal mathematical proof of any given program's correctness.
This is not to say that there can be no creativity involved in designing algorithms. However, there we may separate the concept from the expression of the concept, and say:
Math is Discovered, not Invented This is admittedly a philosophical stance, but it has historically been the majority position. It is obvious that one may not "invent" the mathematical operations of arithmetic: they are a consequence of your choice of axioms. It is less obvious to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but the separation of true statements from false ones is not "invention".
The contrary position leads to absurdities, e.g. if mathematical laws did not exist before their discovery, then gravity could not have existed before Isaac Newton.
Monopolies on Mathematics are Absurd It is again, intuitively obvious that patenting "1+1 = 2" is as absurd as patenting the process of obtaining patents. No person can have any exclusive right to a mathematical concept: they exist solely in the mind, and by definition are arrived at from pre-existing axioms. You can no more separate a mathematical concept from its derivation than you may an individual from his: it is the ultimate prior art. If you wish to use a part of the mathematical birthright of every man, the fruit of human genius, as means to your private profit, you may feel free. However, enlisting public resources to that end by claiming monopoly right to a concept, is criminal and offensive.
The same mathematical function may have varying representations. To protect a particular expression of an idea, we have something called "copyright".
Empirical Studies Finally, we may view the chaos that has resulted from the legal fiction of software patents: there can be no more useless expenditure than to dispute the ownership of mathematical concepts. A more thorough discussion of the practicalities is out of scope, but you may peruse more scholarly treatments at your leisure.
Did you read the linked articles? Banks do exist that do not charge interest. I'm sorry if that breaks your brain.
It does not even have to be a "something for nothing" transaction; as a banker you could require a fixed 120% repayment. That is not, of course, how the existing interest-free lending institutions work.
Your handwaving about economics won't change math or thermodynamics.
Crowdfunding replaces a bank loan. It is interest-free lending for the Internet era. It is not investment. It has nothing to do with government or IPOs.
It's much easier to believe that the mythology was cribbed from other sources or made up out of whole cloth.
That goes for the rest of the miraculous happenings too. It's almost as if someone wanted to hijack the moral teachings and substitute idol-worship. Even today the latter seems far more popular than the former.
Slashdot Mirror
Do tell me the difference between considering the unprovable to be false and considering it to be null.
You might call that the difference between skepticism and empiricism. Religion violates the principle of parsimony, is untestable, and provides nothing in the way of explanatory power. You're arguing about whether or not science should treat religion as being wrong, or not even wrong.
I presume it works with OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS, and/or iOS.
You have an unsupported leap in logic there: that drivers don't exist because there isn't a stable ABI.
Also, do show me the binary driver that works across two dozen cpu architectures. Or the manufacturer who is willing to release two dozen drivers for a niche platform.
In other words, show that the lack of a stable ABI caused this problem, and then show that it would be a better solution. And don't ignore embedded linux; it's more profitable than the desktop.
P.S. What resources have you contributed towards solving this problem?
Mod parent insightful.
As I am sure /. is unaware, the Green Party candidate for the Presidency this year is Jill Stein. Ten years ago she debated Mitt Romney and a Libertarian candidate for the gubernatorial race. This year neither she nor Mr. Johnson of the Libertarian Party have been able to debate Mitt. If this is how the national party representatives are treated, is it surprising that a House candidate is also given short shrift?
A sensible political system might indeed include mandatory airtime or debate privileges. As the parent poster has stated, this would require government action. Are you in favor of such a system? How do you justify telling a private company what to do? Why aren't you demanding this same privilege for your party at the national level -- did I miss that slashdot article?
P.S. : If any libertarians want to take up the gage, I have some general comment on your philosophy here.
It's a lot safer and saner to have a dedicated 120V timer switch for your lights than to wire in a, e.g. 5V DC - 120V AC relay so you can control your lights with a microcontroller.
Also, ph and nutrient testing are generally done by hand unless you have a very large operation. A good pH probe costs $100, and then you have to take the time and effort to hook it up to a microcontroller. Then do that for each hydro system, because in a continuous op you'll have at least two of these -- probably three, for the seedling/clone, vegetative growth, and flowering stages. That won't necessarily get you eC readings too, although it's possible. CO2 is another pain.
Don't get me wrong, one of my next life goals is to set something like that up. Most growers, however, just throw a $10 timer on the lights and forget about it. Geek factor aside, the ROI just doesn't justify a small unified automation system. If you have a warehouse-sized operation, you can probably afford to drop $4-10k on automation electronics. These will probably not be arduino-based.
P.S. Anyone who wants to contribute some electrical expertise, please send me an email.
This is relevant to my interests. I don't work with Drupal, but it does occasionally happen that a man page is not explicit enough. This would probably be a resource-of-last-resort after the man pages, docs, and google, but more information isn't usually harmful.
I do agree with you about the book reviews though -- I'll write one if you will.
Did you not read the responses to that question?
Linux runs on over two dozen processor architectures. Things that aren't integrated with the kernel don't have a prayer of working on different systems.
But okay, this isn't a huge issue, just the kernel's ability to talk to hardware. People are writing all sorts of drivers for Solaris, Mac OSX, and BSD, because they have stable ABIs. Heck, I like to write one of each a day -- before breakfast, if possible.
A stable ABI is a tradeoff: guaranteed compatibility for the short term, and guaranteed incompatibility for the long term. Eventually the OS vendor will change their driver interfaces, and unless the affected drivers are in the kernel, someone else is going to have to take some extra effort to fix them and distribute their changes.
Also, I'd like to introduce you to the concept of technical debt: The cost of maintaining bad code -- e.g., keeping around an obsolete API/ABI for compatibility's sake -- tends to accrue over time. In the context of the previous paragraph, Microsoft pushes this technical debt off to device manufacturers, with interest.
Lastly, in addition to the technical reasons, Linus likes the non-stable ABI and the GPL because they both force more code to be contributed back to the kernel. That's your soundbite answer. You're probably not going to make headway on this issue.
I leave the floor open to anyone who has tried and failed to get driver code into the kernel: i.e. those with a legitimate complaint.
Have you considered taking stress medication?
Linux works perfectly well on my desktop. Really I thought all those calls for mainstream desktop use were something of a joke: really, when was the last time you noticed anyone seriously advocating it? And what sort of response did that get?
I would be thrilled to not ever see mainstream use. I'm even glad you're not using Linux. There are lots more productive things than getting on random forums and bitching about problems. Why you think that Linux should cater to the drooling masses is pretty mystifying; didn't someone invent iPads for that? I cannot imagine these people contributing anything but support costs.
I'm not going to advocate for or against desktop use. I do have a bias, but I'm not about to inflict it on everyone around me. I fervently wish you would refrain from doing so.
And in seriousness, while your style of ranting is great for pageviews and you provoke spirited discussion, this sort of stress is not good for one's long-term health.
By the by, where is your store located?
...American version of Siberia, say North Dakota...
Hi! I can see Russia from somewhere in the US, and I don't think it's North Dakota.
It's not dogma, you just didn't understand it. You're only considering your own small corner of the computer world. Linux runs on a dozen or so architectures: which one of those do you want binary compatibility with?
Linux has a dominant share of the embedded computing market, as well as the server market, and is the overwhelming choice for high performance computing. The minimum requirements for a Linux system would blow your mind -- and don't include frivolities like an MMU. Making assumptions about kernel memory structures would be asinine.
Vista isn't even in the running for worst or least-compatible Microsoft OS of the last decade: the contenders would be (in no order) Windows CE, Windows Phone 7, and Windows RT. Or perhaps their Singularity project.
There are two distros whose focus is on stability, Debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and/or derivatives such as CentOS). I'd suggest you repeat your test with them, but it's really more manic ranting than a reproducible experiment.
You have this idea that Linux should be Windows, or that the desktop is a market that it needs to be successful in. I won't deride you for having these ideas, but you may be assured that the overwhelming majority of Linux users have no such concepts. Most Linux installations do not have a desktop. However, you can expect the same kernel drivers to work whether you're running on MIPS, Sparc, ARM, or x86-64.
Aside from the philosophical issues with having non-open components on an open source system, you are essentially suggesting that Linux should only be useful on the desktop, and supporting this idea with some bullshit anecdote about stability, and the hope that device manufacturers will say, "Oh golly gee! We didn't want to invest in Linux at all, but now that you have a stable ABI, we'll hire all the developers we need!" It's working out so well for BSD and Solaris, isn't it? And I know that I can use all my XP and Win95-era drivers on Win8. Heck, even OSX will happily use those PPC drivers on my Mountain Lion MBP.
You are not right. You are not even wrong. You are living in a completely different reality.
This question has been answered. Many times. You know this. I know this. I know you know this. You know that I know that you know this...well perhaps not but I'm sure you can ascribe opinions to me regardless.
I'm sure you can count this as being another example of how rude linux supporters are. If your question (and criticism) were in good faith, you would get more polite answers. As is, you simply manage to annoy people -- unless you're involved in writing drivers (and we know that you are not), this is a non-issue.
As someone who has heretofore defended your right to an opinion, even a contrary and disparaging opinion, please, on this issue: Shut. The Fuck. Up.
Your comments are nonsensical.
Let us begin by stating a general need for transportation: in advocating for personal vehicles, you agree with this. It is obvious that we are past the days where transportation was not a necessity: societies are increasingly mobile, and few will advocate a return to the days where a man lived his days without going further than ten miles from home.
Let us further not ignore the distinction between voluntary personal transportation needs and the common necessity of mass transportation: even in the era of the Internet, it is rare for people to meet all their needs without straying from their doorstop. If you cannot meet the basic requirements for life without transportation, then transportation is a basic requirement for life.
It can not be disputed that competitive markets are extremely efficient for certain classes of problems, where inefficient competitors are weeded out by virtue of having lower profit margins. This efficiency is largely driven by the capital requirements to start competing businesses. This leads to what are called "natural monopolies", where the capital requirements required to start a competing service are high enough to preclude any competition. These natural monopolies are the natural purview of government, and include water services, road networks, and many other utilities.
Personal transportation is not a natural monopoly; the capital required to enter that market is about the cost of a rickshaw or wheelbarrow. Mass transportation, however, is a natural monopoly: the capital requirements to meet the needs of a large number of people are large enough to preclude competition. You will rarely see competing bus lines within a city, and never competing railways.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that public transportation is being presented as a solution to all transportation needs, which is as valid as the idea that personal transportation is the only thing anyone needs. There will not ever be a one-size-fits all solution to both problems; the viability of both are highly dependent on scale. Understanding these concepts is fundamental to a rational discourse on the matter; please do not disqualify yourself from the discussion.
It is the right statistic because it is the only one that might support your claim. It is the wrong statistic because it does not represent the total cost of that mode of transportation, and does not give any predictive ability for the system as a whole. To say that this complex problem can be reduced to a single statistic is, as I said, entirely disingenuous.
pessimistic number because there is often more than one person in a car.
The number you're looking for is the marginal cost to add a passenger. It's one of many costs that tend to be far lower with public transportation. It's easy to add one more person to a bus. It's much more expensive to add one more car to the road.
Public transportation works better in high-density urban areas than in most the US.
Also cars work less well in high-density urban areas. Once you saturate your street capacity, it's hard to solve that problem with the methods you used to get to it. Funny thing, 250 million Americans live in urban areas. Wikipedia says 75% of the US shares about 3% of the land area. Most of the population is contained in urban areas that are quite as densely populated as Europe. But you know, public transit worked just fine when I was in rural Costa Rica last year too.
Really, though, I want to see some numbers for your argument. You've gotten the 'calling-your-opponent-an-idiot' tactic out of the way. Show me a study that shows how everyone-has-a-car is more efficient. The rest of the world will certainly want to learn about it.
One is a direct measurement and the other is a rate set by bureaucrats. FYI, the GSA reimbursement is about four cents lower than the BTS's estimate of ownership costs per mile.
As you might notice if you were more thorough in your reading, a naive cost estimate does not include many externalities and ignores economies of scale. You cannot simply assume that transportation costs scale linearly -- it's not as if there were a uniform distribution of persons.
It is entirely disingenuous to cherry-pick a single statistic out of a 129-page report and claim it as a disproof. I'd suggest you do more homework on this issue, but frankly the math is against you. The rest of the world understands this, they just didn't allow their transportation infrastructure to be held hostage by private interests.
The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]
There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.
I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?
I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).
In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.
For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.
Whenever I commute (as infrequently as possible), I cannot help but look and see the tens of thousands of dollars that each individual has chosen to spend on transportation, and imagine what spending a tenth of that money would have done for public transit.
It's a hidden tax which impacts the middle class most severely. It is a spectacular inefficiency, and in my opinion one of the strongest arguments against Libertarianism.
The other strong argument against Libertarianism is reality.
Have you seen the IOCCC code that looks like an airplane? It's a flight sim. Have you seen the DeCSS Gallery? Also, there's lots of code on the Daily WTF that is as creative as it is terrible.
How about CSS? Am I not coding or not designing when I write that?
When you're championing the rights of the individual, the question becomes -- which individual?
There's an old Soviet joke (the difference between Soviet Russia and fascist America is becoming less clear all the time):
A Chukchi returned home from the Communist Party Congress:
"I attended the Congress. They accepted the new program. They said: âEverything for man, everything for the benefit of Man!â(TM) And this Chukchi saw this Man with his own eyes. He was right there, in the Presidium."
Clearly we need people to champion the rights of individuals in order to resist the forces of government. The problem is, you probably shouldn't win that game.
Hacker News has "News for Startups". Many /. articles show up there first. The community has, generally, far fewer commentators and much less humor. Expect to see a lot of stories about new javascript libraries, and blog posts from random idio^H^H^H^H"entrepreneurs". Tag it "RTFPressRease"
People tell me good subreddits exist. I'm not sure I believe it. Tag it "RTFImageCaption"
Linux Weekly News comes with a free neck adjustment to facilitate looking down on things with fewer freedoms. Tag it "RTFLKML"
Ars Technica, and Wired are both brought to you by their corporate overlords. Hard to complain about the reporting, it's sanitized but not awful. There's no community to speak of at either. It gets tagged for you.
Or you could DIY TFA with a custom RSS feed. But unfortunately I don't think what you're looking for exists outside slashdot, even in its supposed decline. You may get better answers, though, by defining what kind of nerd you are.
Pish. Like there weren't always trolls and shills, and idiot moderators.
The moderation system works. Even Hacker News says so. Their main improvement is that there's no "funny" mod. Their main problem is that there's no "funny" mod. Also a relentless fixation on wheel-reinventing startup web technologies*, but that's to be expected.
Browsing the site at high moderation levels gives you an extremely high S/N ratio. Yes, it's sad that $name doesn't post here any more. Lots of great people still do, though. I'll stick around for the community here for as long as it exists.
Also, for the record, every problem I've ever had with the UI was solved by switching to D1. Sorry Soulskill :(
* this phrase brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Don't demonize your opponents. There's probably an order of magnitude more pro-Apple zealots, at least to judge by their sales numbers. He among us who has never been irrationally attached to an issue may throw the first stone.
First, one must take exception to the idea that source code is not creative. As examples, look at any IOCCC entries -- I like the flight simulator in the shape of an airplane. Secondly, you may examine the DeCSS Gallery and judge whether any of that may be considered a creative expression.
What you are perceiving as lack of creative expression, though, is the flaw in your arguments: software is not eligible for patent protection because it consists of mathematical operations.
Software is Math
To most students of Computer Science this is as inarguable as evolution in the biological sciences. At the fundamental level, modern computers only function is to carry out binary arithmetic. This ipso facto means that any function computers do is mathematical, but one might make the argument that things which are not inherently mathematical can nevertheless be modeled or represented using mathematics, and that software is something modeled in math rather being defined in it.
You would be very, very wrong. At the point in which Alan Turing laid out the foundations for all of computer science, no such calculating machines existed. Computers were designed as implementations of mathematical concepts. Programming languages grew out of a branch of mathematics called Lambda calculus, and Lisp in particular is fairly trivially convertible to mathematical statements. All concepts in computer science are defined in formal language which is inherently mathematical -- even the concept of a formal language itself. One consequence of this is that it is possible (though extremely difficult all but trivial programs) to construct a formal mathematical proof of any given program's correctness.
This is not to say that there can be no creativity involved in designing algorithms. However, there we may separate the concept from the expression of the concept, and say:
Math is Discovered, not Invented
This is admittedly a philosophical stance, but it has historically been the majority position. It is obvious that one may not "invent" the mathematical operations of arithmetic: they are a consequence of your choice of axioms. It is less obvious to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but the separation of true statements from false ones is not "invention".
The contrary position leads to absurdities, e.g. if mathematical laws did not exist before their discovery, then gravity could not have existed before Isaac Newton.
Monopolies on Mathematics are Absurd
It is again, intuitively obvious that patenting "1+1 = 2" is as absurd as patenting the process of obtaining patents. No person can have any exclusive right to a mathematical concept: they exist solely in the mind, and by definition are arrived at from pre-existing axioms. You can no more separate a mathematical concept from its derivation than you may an individual from his: it is the ultimate prior art. If you wish to use a part of the mathematical birthright of every man, the fruit of human genius, as means to your private profit, you may feel free. However, enlisting public resources to that end by claiming monopoly right to a concept, is criminal and offensive.
The same mathematical function may have varying representations. To protect a particular expression of an idea, we have something called "copyright".
Empirical Studies
Finally, we may view the chaos that has resulted from the legal fiction of software patents: there can be no more useless expenditure than to dispute the ownership of mathematical concepts. A more thorough discussion of the practicalities is out of scope, but you may peruse more scholarly treatments at your leisure.
Raspberry Pi a scam? only on /.
in any case, it's either a 32-bit scam, or a 200-bit scam.
At the moment, 1 BTC is about 100 bits' worth of scam.
Your calculations were orders of magnitude off: I'd be posting AC too.
Still working on the Libraries-of-Congress conversion.
Did you read the linked articles? Banks do exist that do not charge interest. I'm sorry if that breaks your brain.
It does not even have to be a "something for nothing" transaction; as a banker you could require a fixed 120% repayment. That is not, of course, how the existing interest-free lending institutions work.
Your handwaving about economics won't change math or thermodynamics.
Crowdfunding replaces a bank loan. It is interest-free lending for the Internet era. It is not investment. It has nothing to do with government or IPOs.
The problem with interest is that it is unsustainable.
It's much easier to believe that the mythology was cribbed from other sources or made up out of whole cloth.
That goes for the rest of the miraculous happenings too. It's almost as if someone wanted to hijack the moral teachings and substitute idol-worship. Even today the latter seems far more popular than the former.