High Speed Rail would have the EXACT same security measures as airplanes, except they would be even less safe as blowing up track is easy, especially when you have hundreds of miles to choose from.
BZZZT! WRONG! Try again...
The number of deaths due to terrorism is infintesimal. The number of deaths due to weather, mechanical failure, pilot error, etc, is pretty much all of them, and the vast majority of all those causes of death are practically eliminated when you're traveling on rails rather than an uncontrolled race track a mile off the ground... Running out of fuel wouldn't ever happen, and engine failure would just be a minor delay, rather than a 100% chance of a horrible crash. Weather would cease to be an issue, as mountains, other trains, sky scrapers, etc., won't jump up in front of you no matter how thick the fog... And did I mention volcanich ash?
To replace driving you need a public transporation system. To replace planes you need it to be cheaper, safer, and actually faster.
You only need to replace SOME driving to be vastly successful. There's most definitely a sweet spot, below the point where the speed of flying is worth the many, many wasted hours driving to/from the airport, going through security, and endless hassles with baggage, and changing flight schedules, and impacts of even minor weather conditions... and the other extreme where driving there directly is faster than driving to a train station. Between those two extremes, high speed trains could be wildly successful...
And the infrastructure is there. Every decent sized city has a train station. Far, far more cities have train stations than have a commercial airport, even when they don't get much attention from the press. And train stations have nice big parking lots so you don't need to take public transportation all the way from your door...
Until the budget is balanced, we don't need shit like this.
Congratulations! That is, in fact, the exact same kind of short-term thinking that got us so deep in debt to begin with, and never got it paid down again.
Just one question... Where the hell were you when we were running a surplus? That's right, like everyone else, you were aching to get your rebate check as the budget increased.
For the record, spending lots of money when times are good, and cutting way back when times are bad is precisely what made this recession so bad, and has made it so long lasting. What we need, and what you lack, is FORESIGHT. Spending money now on infrastructure will pay back several times over, and it will help boost the economy so the tax base is higher in the future. Its well recognized by economists that running up deficits while times are bad is worth the investment. Alternating between being a glutton and a miser will only serve to worsen economic swings.
The government will NOT default on its debt... If things get worse (they wont) and tax base can't cover the interest payments, then entitlements will simply have to be reduced to bridge the gap, as they're the majority of the burden, and are guaranteed to completely bankrupt the country in a couple decades (our debt wont). And besides that, what ever happened to tax increases? You don't even mention them, as if they don't exist... I'd be with you if you were yelling at Clinton to pay down the deficit further, not just barely pay a bit of it down. I'd be with you if you were yelling at Bush to cut spending, not expand it, and cut out the crap like the tax cuts and refund checks that ballooned the deficit, but damn near all phoney conservatives were silent as they wanted their taxes cut more than anyone else, damn the consequences. Those were the times to cut spending, and pay down the surplus, NOT NOW. Now we unequivocally, and undenyably NEED the fed to spend, and help bridge this recession to minimize the pain.
How do you feel about unemployment? Its a big cause of the growing deficit. Go right ahead and start preaching about how we should eliminate it to reduce the deficit, and throw those out of work families on the street.
I doubt highly that the availability of cheap games on mobile phones will make an appreciable dent in Nintendo's market share
Why not? Smartphones are considerably more capable than, say, a GB color. Sure, a few hardware buttons would help, but smartphones are more than capable of filling the small niche that is mobile gaming, just as they've filled every other niche mobile market. The #1 reason being people carry their phones with them everywhere, but don't always have their DS handy, so you're set whenever the opportunity arises. If you don't need the convenience that a smartphone offers, then you'd use something like a console, instead.
and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against.
This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.
Pretty much all the standard protocols came out with BSD/MITX licensed implementations. NFS, X11, and SSH come to mind.
BSD is the same as ever. Quietly driving the world forward. There's no shortage of corporate contributors to FreeBSD. Linux just makes a better story, so the press gives it a lot of attention. After a few years, that has led to some major network effects. Same reason a joke of a database like MySQL gets so much attention, while PostgreSQL goes quietly along, running in the core of many mega corporations.
After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)
And what's with the Sun hate? SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.
This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes
If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...
You are horribly confused. Biased has two meanings, in vastly different contexts. In one, yes, it relates to how we perceive events. However, 99.999% of the time the term is used, its referring to giving a fair analysis of a topic or event based solely on the facts, and without distortion. the latter is most definitely possible, and happens all the time.
There is nothing --nothing --that actually stops women from contributing. If they do not want to do so, then so what?
As a man, there's a lot preventing me from contributing more to WP than I have. How are women getting this special treatment that all of WPs problems don't affect them?
Of course I know the answer to that... You are merely assuming that because you haven't seen anything overtly excluding women, you are assuming that the problems that exist in WP apply equally to all. However, an assumption is asl it is....
Not just service contacts by any means... If you've got 100 SCO severs and need to expand, rewriting your apps can be much more expensive that maintaining your legacy proprietary OS. I fully expect companies that already have a significant installed base of SCO severs (ala McDonalds), will continue to purchase new licenses for years to come. Remember, SCO is almost as old as DOS, and that continues to find new uses as well, no matter how much we'd all like to see it die off quickly, and for good. Even with the incredibly late start FreeDOS got, it continues to develop, even today... SCO will continue as well, with an even slower trailing off, as the OS is far more capable an modern, though slightly primitive compared to free alternatives.
The US government has done a good job, for a very long time, of producing reasonably unbiased news reporting. In fact it may well be the only country where the government funded news media is prohibited from broadcasting to its own citizens, specifically to prevent the temptation of political manipulation and interference from becoming too great.
Go right ahead and be righteously indignant, but we all know the track record of the two countries involved, and its hardly debatable whos interests are more in line with the Chinese peoples.
it's unfortunately pointless to pass up this job. You're just ensuring that you're the victim instead of someone else. Sadly, in a capitalistic society, that's not a sound plan to ensure your future and survival.
Morality always looks pointless. On a small scale it is. On a larger scale, however, it has significant effects. Salaries for those involved in producing pornographic materials remains high because fewer people are willing to do those jobs. Sure, one person that turns the job down isn't all that significant, but 100 people doing it, most definitely is. It still doesn't look like it, just as it doesn't look like any single raindrop is responsible for the flood, but it has very real effects.
Maybe he just caused the caused the salary requirements of that job to go up by $5,000, because they have to hire their second choice candidate. That shifts the economics, and with just a few people taking that kind of a stand, it might become less attractive to oursource.
And survival has nothing to do with it. Government assistance will allow anyone to live comfortably without working a day in their life. It won't be glamorous, and you won't have all the toys you'd like, but the safety net is there to allow you to live a principled life without fear.
Even if you jam all standard cell frequencies, that still leaves VoIP over Wifi. And while cell towers are fairly uniform, anybody could setup a powerful WiFi hotspot immediately outside the prison walls, and maybe even aim it with directional antennas. It would be extremely difficult to cut off prisoners next to an outside wall from all radio signals.
A detachable keyboard, in particular, is actually a big gain once the tablet gets small enough. You can still attach and use it whenever you want, but when you don't need it, you can have a substantially smaller and lighter device to carry around...
In general, separate pieces are a disadvantage if you need all of them, but integrated is a huge disadvantage if you don't need those add ons, but are stuck with the added size and weight (AND price) anyhow.
Is it really likely that tablets will be the de facto laptop replacement in five years?
Most definitely. Think about it. What's the big difference between a laptop and a tablet?
No drives: solid state has taken off, and the network is fast and ubiquitous enough that you don't need optical drives.
Few ports: Integration of features, and wireless tech has almost eliminated the need for wires, and hence, the ports they plugged into.
Touch screen instead of a touch pad. Thia is at least a small improvement (i would kill for a laptop with a trackball, like the old days)
No keyboard: seems like a massive disadvantage, until you note the iPad cases with tiny bluetooth keyboards, and realize the keyboard is merely now detachable.
So, once you've gotten those issues out of the way, what's really changing from netbook to tablet? We're going to low power ARM architectures, which is enabling super light and slim laptops. Beyond that, its merely software improvements. Platforms that have taken on the best features of linux, like the app stores, and vastly improved security. Tighter integration between hardware and software which gives a vastly better user interface, and minimal hassle from end users.
Honestly, there's no reason you couldn't take a tablet, buy a few adapters and accessories, and do everything you previously needed a laptop for, just as us tech folks have repeatedly done over the years as the march of technology makes it difficult to find devices that still have those antiquated old features we still need (RS232 anyone?).
Personally, I can't wait to see things get standardized, so we can install our favorite distros on nice slim tablets, with a decent UI on top, while still having a full and familiar OS under the hood to use for real work, as often needed. Hell, I might even buy a bluetooth mouse to go with it...
Clusty has, for several years now, returned better search results than google. It has the added advantage of automatically displaying a list of categories and a count of results under each, allowing you to quickly glance over an see if it appears worthwhile to refine the search.
The downside forever has been that clusty largely ignores word order, and can't be forced to do an exact string search, so searching on a segment of song lyrics, or a series of common words that are only unique in their arrangement, becomes a nightmare. still the results are good enough to make that limitation tolerable.
There's one more limitation now. When it became Yippy, it got a new limitation, a strict censorship policy that can't be shut off, at least not yet.
Even high end microwaves often have a stationary tray. The fan could be eliminated to great effect.
The cost argument doesn't hold up with microwaves of all things. First you have to remember they cost more than a car when they were introduced. Much more recently, you have things like digital timers coming to dominate, despite added cost, complexity, and false precision, which just made it take longer to set. And how about the afore mentioned high end microwaves that still cheap out and omit a turn table.
Actually, instead of a gene, researchers will find a dramatic increase in percentages of individuals with homosexual tendencies, which led to a popular rights movement , was brought on, by estrogenic compounds found in plastics introduced during critical developmental stages, both pre and post natal. Once outlawed or obsoleted for unrelated reasons, the rights movement dies and homosexuality fades from popular culture, which then dramatically decreases their ranks as those who were merely impressionable no longer receive the positive feedback loop they crave. With homosexuality d largely fading from, public view.
Your theory sounds nice, but that's all it is, and you most certainly can't prove the slightest bit of it. For example, you mention the highly secular population in Europe and use that as evidence, but fail to explain why the USA has not followed the same model. In fact religiosity has remained largely constant, and you can't hope to show that all americans are highly ignorant. Nor does your model fit when eastern countries unaffected by events in the west that took a much different In some, atheism was the rule, rather than the exception, long before people had answers to to the questions of their daily existence. In other countries, the dominant beliefs were religious, yet did not offer the answers you refer to. by all means, try to explain these holes in your theory, without assuming they are insignificant and irrelevant.
It would be logical if you had metered power for charing cars that was taxed for road repairs. However I hold the much lower view of what they will want to do is to place GPS units on the cars so they can tax them by actual mileage.
Oh shut the hell up. The taxes on gasoline aren't enough to cover all the road work, not by a long shot. It merely happened to be a convenient thing to tax, and it had to be spent largely on roads to continue to justify it.
Right now, the lack of gas taxes is a nice subsidy for electric vehicle owners. If we have a world where only the rich can afford gasoline powered vehicles, cranking up the gas taxes will work even better. And when there's no gas taxes coming in at all... oh well. Crank up other taxes a bit, and pay for road maintenance out of the general fund, like everything else. How about a tire/rubber tax? Should be a reasonably fair distribution of the tax burden according to utilization.
100 million people didn't vote to give you the authority to spend their tax money as you see fit, for the benefit of the entire country.
The government paves the roads, there's absolutely no way to pretend that they shouldn't have the authority to decide how best they should be used. There's no remote hint of a MHO alternative.
The funny thing is, back when gas was 50 cents a gallon, they made cars that could carry 6 people, a decent amount of cargo, and haul a trailer. These days, with $4/gallon gas, you NEVER hear the words "station wagon".
Most Americans own 1 car, if they're lucky. Most FAMILIES own 2-3 cars, but that's very, very different, and often, all will need to be in-use at the same time, so one woefully impractical car won't be acceptible even there.
I work with a lot of very wealthy individuals, and next to none of them have multiple cars that only they drive. How could that even work? You'd have to hire someone to drive it for you, or make multiple trips when moving. And why would anyone want two vehicles? Frequently moving your stuff between the two, doing twice the maintenance, paying for twice the insurance, registration, etc. And what for? The base cost of vehicle ownership is high, and only goes down significantly when you put a large number of miles on it. Just the normal bluebook devaluation of your spare vehicle will easily surpass the added cost of an inefficient car, for all but the most extreme commuters.
A hybrid vehicle requires that there is more than one type of motor providing motive force.
Your definition of hybrid is wrong. No matter how many times you assert otherwise, it will still be wrong. A locomotive is the definition of a serial hybrid, and no amount of denying it will change that simple fact.
To be fair,there could well be two people in the same city, with identical salaries and home situations, with a similarly disparate result.
Some people are good with money while others aren't. If you spend much of your money on transient or disposable items, you simply end up with nothing to show for it. Pretty soon all those diners, movies, new tvs, etc., add up.
There's no need to get superstitious about it. A dot matrix printer is expensive and requires maintenance and consumable. it may be particularly difficult to erase the logs, but you're no better off than hooking up a standalone PC via null modem cable, or even an ethernet cable with a resistor on the TX line so it registers as live , but can't send packets, not even a basic handshake... Make that your syslog server and you're set. Your eats won't bleed during peak load either...
Very true. And furthermore, there's nothing stopping an average person from doing the same. You probably have at least some stock options, and if not, can buy stock in any public company, including the one you work for. if you decide the profits on the stock you own will be worth more than your salary, you could decline raises, or your salary all together. Your boss won't mind....
How about a simple coating on the glass? there would be some added cost, but I would much prefer a simple technological solution to an endless Sisyphean law enforcement task.
Slashdot Mirror
BZZZT! WRONG! Try again...
The number of deaths due to terrorism is infintesimal. The number of deaths due to weather, mechanical failure, pilot error, etc, is pretty much all of them, and the vast majority of all those causes of death are practically eliminated when you're traveling on rails rather than an uncontrolled race track a mile off the ground... Running out of fuel wouldn't ever happen, and engine failure would just be a minor delay, rather than a 100% chance of a horrible crash. Weather would cease to be an issue, as mountains, other trains, sky scrapers, etc., won't jump up in front of you no matter how thick the fog... And did I mention volcanich ash?
You only need to replace SOME driving to be vastly successful. There's most definitely a sweet spot, below the point where the speed of flying is worth the many, many wasted hours driving to/from the airport, going through security, and endless hassles with baggage, and changing flight schedules, and impacts of even minor weather conditions... and the other extreme where driving there directly is faster than driving to a train station. Between those two extremes, high speed trains could be wildly successful...
And the infrastructure is there. Every decent sized city has a train station. Far, far more cities have train stations than have a commercial airport, even when they don't get much attention from the press. And train stations have nice big parking lots so you don't need to take public transportation all the way from your door...
Congratulations! That is, in fact, the exact same kind of short-term thinking that got us so deep in debt to begin with, and never got it paid down again.
Just one question... Where the hell were you when we were running a surplus? That's right, like everyone else, you were aching to get your rebate check as the budget increased.
For the record, spending lots of money when times are good, and cutting way back when times are bad is precisely what made this recession so bad, and has made it so long lasting. What we need, and what you lack, is FORESIGHT. Spending money now on infrastructure will pay back several times over, and it will help boost the economy so the tax base is higher in the future. Its well recognized by economists that running up deficits while times are bad is worth the investment. Alternating between being a glutton and a miser will only serve to worsen economic swings.
The government will NOT default on its debt... If things get worse (they wont) and tax base can't cover the interest payments, then entitlements will simply have to be reduced to bridge the gap, as they're the majority of the burden, and are guaranteed to completely bankrupt the country in a couple decades (our debt wont). And besides that, what ever happened to tax increases? You don't even mention them, as if they don't exist... I'd be with you if you were yelling at Clinton to pay down the deficit further, not just barely pay a bit of it down. I'd be with you if you were yelling at Bush to cut spending, not expand it, and cut out the crap like the tax cuts and refund checks that ballooned the deficit, but damn near all phoney conservatives were silent as they wanted their taxes cut more than anyone else, damn the consequences. Those were the times to cut spending, and pay down the surplus, NOT NOW. Now we unequivocally, and undenyably NEED the fed to spend, and help bridge this recession to minimize the pain.
How do you feel about unemployment? Its a big cause of the growing deficit. Go right ahead and start preaching about how we should eliminate it to reduce the deficit, and throw those out of work families on the street.
Why not? Smartphones are considerably more capable than, say, a GB color. Sure, a few hardware buttons would help, but smartphones are more than capable of filling the small niche that is mobile gaming, just as they've filled every other niche mobile market. The #1 reason being people carry their phones with them everywhere, but don't always have their DS handy, so you're set whenever the opportunity arises. If you don't need the convenience that a smartphone offers, then you'd use something like a console, instead.
This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.
Pretty much all the standard protocols came out with BSD/MITX licensed implementations. NFS, X11, and SSH come to mind.
BSD is the same as ever. Quietly driving the world forward. There's no shortage of corporate contributors to FreeBSD. Linux just makes a better story, so the press gives it a lot of attention. After a few years, that has led to some major network effects. Same reason a joke of a database like MySQL gets so much attention, while PostgreSQL goes quietly along, running in the core of many mega corporations.
And what's with the Sun hate? SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.
If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...
You are horribly confused. Biased has two meanings, in vastly different contexts. In one, yes, it relates to how we perceive events. However, 99.999% of the time the term is used, its referring to giving a fair analysis of a topic or event based solely on the facts, and without distortion. the latter is most definitely possible, and happens all the time.
As a man, there's a lot preventing me from contributing more to WP than I have. How are women getting this special treatment that all of WPs problems don't affect them?
Of course I know the answer to that... You are merely assuming that because you haven't seen anything overtly excluding women, you are assuming that the problems that exist in WP apply equally to all. However, an assumption is asl it is....
Not just service contacts by any means... If you've got 100 SCO severs and need to expand, rewriting your apps can be much more expensive that maintaining your legacy proprietary OS. I fully expect companies that already have a significant installed base of SCO severs (ala McDonalds), will continue to purchase new licenses for years to come. Remember, SCO is almost as old as DOS, and that continues to find new uses as well, no matter how much we'd all like to see it die off quickly, and for good. Even with the incredibly late start FreeDOS got, it continues to develop, even today... SCO will continue as well, with an even slower trailing off, as the OS is far more capable an modern, though slightly primitive compared to free alternatives.
The US government has done a good job, for a very long time, of producing reasonably unbiased news reporting. In fact it may well be the only country where the government funded news media is prohibited from broadcasting to its own citizens, specifically to prevent the temptation of political manipulation and interference from becoming too great.
Go right ahead and be righteously indignant, but we all know the track record of the two countries involved, and its hardly debatable whos interests are more in line with the Chinese peoples.
Morality always looks pointless. On a small scale it is. On a larger scale, however, it has significant effects. Salaries for those involved in producing pornographic materials remains high because fewer people are willing to do those jobs. Sure, one person that turns the job down isn't all that significant, but 100 people doing it, most definitely is. It still doesn't look like it, just as it doesn't look like any single raindrop is responsible for the flood, but it has very real effects.
Maybe he just caused the caused the salary requirements of that job to go up by $5,000, because they have to hire their second choice candidate. That shifts the economics, and with just a few people taking that kind of a stand, it might become less attractive to oursource.
And survival has nothing to do with it. Government assistance will allow anyone to live comfortably without working a day in their life. It won't be glamorous, and you won't have all the toys you'd like, but the safety net is there to allow you to live a principled life without fear.
Even if you jam all standard cell frequencies, that still leaves VoIP over Wifi. And while cell towers are fairly uniform, anybody could setup a powerful WiFi hotspot immediately outside the prison walls, and maybe even aim it with directional antennas. It would be extremely difficult to cut off prisoners next to an outside wall from all radio signals.
A detachable keyboard, in particular, is actually a big gain once the tablet gets small enough. You can still attach and use it whenever you want, but when you don't need it, you can have a substantially smaller and lighter device to carry around...
In general, separate pieces are a disadvantage if you need all of them, but integrated is a huge disadvantage if you don't need those add ons, but are stuck with the added size and weight (AND price) anyhow.
Most definitely. Think about it. What's the big difference between a laptop and a tablet?
No drives: solid state has taken off, and the network is fast and ubiquitous enough that you don't need optical drives.
Few ports: Integration of features, and wireless tech has almost eliminated the need for wires, and hence, the ports they plugged into.
Touch screen instead of a touch pad. Thia is at least a small improvement (i would kill for a laptop with a trackball, like the old days)
No keyboard: seems like a massive disadvantage, until you note the iPad cases with tiny bluetooth keyboards, and realize the keyboard is merely now detachable.
So, once you've gotten those issues out of the way, what's really changing from netbook to tablet? We're going to low power ARM architectures, which is enabling super light and slim laptops. Beyond that, its merely software improvements. Platforms that have taken on the best features of linux, like the app stores, and vastly improved security. Tighter integration between hardware and software which gives a vastly better user interface, and minimal hassle from end users.
Honestly, there's no reason you couldn't take a tablet, buy a few adapters and accessories, and do everything you previously needed a laptop for, just as us tech folks have repeatedly done over the years as the march of technology makes it difficult to find devices that still have those antiquated old features we still need (RS232 anyone?).
Personally, I can't wait to see things get standardized, so we can install our favorite distros on nice slim tablets, with a decent UI on top, while still having a full and familiar OS under the hood to use for real work, as often needed. Hell, I might even buy a bluetooth mouse to go with it...
Clusty has, for several years now, returned better search results than google. It has the added advantage of automatically displaying a list of categories and a count of results under each, allowing you to quickly glance over an see if it appears worthwhile to refine the search.
The downside forever has been that clusty largely ignores word order, and can't be forced to do an exact string search, so searching on a segment of song lyrics, or a series of common words that are only unique in their arrangement, becomes a nightmare. still the results are good enough to make that limitation tolerable.
There's one more limitation now. When it became Yippy, it got a new limitation, a strict censorship policy that can't be shut off, at least not yet.
Even high end microwaves often have a stationary tray. The fan could be eliminated to great effect.
The cost argument doesn't hold up with microwaves of all things. First you have to remember they cost more than a car when they were introduced. Much more recently, you have things like digital timers coming to dominate, despite added cost, complexity, and false precision, which just made it take longer to set. And how about the afore mentioned high end microwaves that still cheap out and omit a turn table.
Actually, instead of a gene, researchers will find a dramatic increase in percentages of individuals with homosexual tendencies, which led to a popular rights movement , was brought on, by estrogenic compounds found in plastics introduced during critical developmental stages, both pre and post natal. Once outlawed or obsoleted for unrelated reasons, the rights movement dies and homosexuality fades from popular culture, which then dramatically decreases their ranks as those who were merely impressionable no longer receive the positive feedback loop they crave. With homosexuality d largely fading from, public view.
Your theory sounds nice, but that's all it is, and you most certainly can't prove the slightest bit of it. For example, you mention the highly secular population in Europe and use that as evidence, but fail to explain why the USA has not followed the same model. In fact religiosity has remained largely constant, and you can't hope to show that all americans are highly ignorant. Nor does your model fit when eastern countries unaffected by events in the west that took a much different In some, atheism was the rule, rather than the exception, long before people had answers to to the questions of their daily existence. In other countries, the dominant beliefs were religious, yet did not offer the answers you refer to. by all means, try to explain these holes in your theory, without assuming they are insignificant and irrelevant.
Oh shut the hell up. The taxes on gasoline aren't enough to cover all the road work, not by a long shot. It merely happened to be a convenient thing to tax, and it had to be spent largely on roads to continue to justify it.
Right now, the lack of gas taxes is a nice subsidy for electric vehicle owners. If we have a world where only the rich can afford gasoline powered vehicles, cranking up the gas taxes will work even better. And when there's no gas taxes coming in at all... oh well. Crank up other taxes a bit, and pay for road maintenance out of the general fund, like everything else. How about a tire/rubber tax? Should be a reasonably fair distribution of the tax burden according to utilization.
100 million people didn't vote to give you the authority to spend their tax money as you see fit, for the benefit of the entire country.
The government paves the roads, there's absolutely no way to pretend that they shouldn't have the authority to decide how best they should be used. There's no remote hint of a MHO alternative.
The funny thing is, back when gas was 50 cents a gallon, they made cars that could carry 6 people, a decent amount of cargo, and haul a trailer. These days, with $4/gallon gas, you NEVER hear the words "station wagon".
Most Americans own 1 car, if they're lucky. Most FAMILIES own 2-3 cars, but that's very, very different, and often, all will need to be in-use at the same time, so one woefully impractical car won't be acceptible even there.
I work with a lot of very wealthy individuals, and next to none of them have multiple cars that only they drive. How could that even work? You'd have to hire someone to drive it for you, or make multiple trips when moving. And why would anyone want two vehicles? Frequently moving your stuff between the two, doing twice the maintenance, paying for twice the insurance, registration, etc. And what for? The base cost of vehicle ownership is high, and only goes down significantly when you put a large number of miles on it. Just the normal bluebook devaluation of your spare vehicle will easily surpass the added cost of an inefficient car, for all but the most extreme commuters.
Your definition of hybrid is wrong. No matter how many times you assert otherwise, it will still be wrong. A locomotive is the definition of a serial hybrid, and no amount of denying it will change that simple fact.
To be fair,there could well be two people in the same city, with identical salaries and home situations, with a similarly disparate result.
Some people are good with money while others aren't. If you spend much of your money on transient or disposable items, you simply end up with nothing to show for it. Pretty soon all those diners, movies, new tvs, etc., add up.
There's no need to get superstitious about it. A dot matrix printer is expensive and requires maintenance and consumable. it may be particularly difficult to erase the logs, but you're no better off than hooking up a standalone PC via null modem cable, or even an ethernet cable with a resistor on the TX line so it registers as live , but can't send packets, not even a basic handshake... Make that your syslog server and you're set. Your eats won't bleed during peak load either...
Very true. And furthermore, there's nothing stopping an average person from doing the same. You probably have at least some stock options, and if not, can buy stock in any public company, including the one you work for. if you decide the profits on the stock you own will be worth more than your salary, you could decline raises, or your salary all together. Your boss won't mind....
How about a simple coating on the glass? there would be some added cost, but I would much prefer a simple technological solution to an endless Sisyphean law enforcement task.