Politically, it was a nice extra justification for having HOV lanes
In fact, it seems to be the ONLY justification for HOV lanes. Study after study shows HOV lanes DON'T HELP. It's a very expensive subsidy for slightly faster bus trips. Throwing low-emission vehicles into the mix at least serves to somewhat decrease their uselessness.
Only recently have diesels cleaned up their act. They really were a polluting mess just a few years ago. And you can't expect the whole state to change overnight to accommodate new diesel cars. Instead, they get largely left out. That said, you certainly CAN get one. Additionally, even now, the ultra-fine emissions from diesels seem to have an unfortunate tendency to cause cancer in humans that breath much of it, according to studies. Not to mention that everyone I've heard make specific claims about how much better diesels are, makes a complete ass out of themselves, and quickly proves they don't actually understand what they're doing.
From what I can tell, California is about regulations that make people who don't know much feel good.
That's odd... You obviously don't know much, but don't seem to feel all that good about it.
it's almost like the DR consultants who say we need to spend a fortune on a DR site in case a nuclear bomb goes off and we need to run the business from 100 miles away.
Flood, earthquake, hurricane (yes, possible even in New York), sink hole, etc.
Are you really going to go primeval when any one of those things happens?
First thing, of course you're going to find out if your family is fine. Assuming so, then what? Not only has their home been destroyed, but your job is gone too, so you'll now be dependant on insurance (notoriously unwilling or unable to pay after disasters) and handouts.
Not that you should be spending billions on off-site data storage and redundant systems, but a large company being completely unable to survive the loss of a single building/office is quite short-sighted, even if it happens to cost some money up-front.
Seriously, a heat ray against a desert people? That's like throwing sand and large ocean waves at Hawaii. You might as well invite them back for warm tea in a room without air conditioning.
What, as opposed to a COLD RAY in the desert, where everyone routinely taunts the military forces in hopes of getting some relief from the heat?
I live in an actual police state. If I went to city hall with a group of people waving signs, we'd have the People's Armed Police up in our grill faster than you can say "Jiminy Cricket".
Peaceful protesters in the US are routinely hit with tear-gas, clubbed by the police, tazed, shot in the face with rubber bullets, etc.
Who needs to build it yourself? Last time I needed a new system, sites that allow you to custom configure a new PC were cheaper than buying the parts separately.
You should still expect to have to open the thing up and re-attach the fan that's flopping around, and the like, but even with that, it'll save you a lot of time, and maybe some money.
Yes, but the U.S. is the first country in the history of balance-of-power politics to think that the failure of its main enemy (the USSR) entitles it to something like control of the entire world, forever.
As opposed to, say, the British Empire, which acted exactly the same way without any such justification, but wasn't quite as successful as they wanted to be.
Frankly, the fact that the US is the big bad guy, speaks volumes for what a successful and positive effect US foreign policy has had. For all it's faults, the US has kept all other would-be empires at bay. Don't think China wouldn't be taking over half of Asia if not for the threat of the US.
That's not proof, that's correlation, which could be caused by any of a million different factors. My facts, like the fact the industrial revolution happened, despite cities that were much smaller, go directly to the point, and have not be refuted thus far.
Big cities house large numbers of people efficiently, they reduce infrastructure costs, and they serve as central distribution points.
Infrastructure costs for THE CITY GOVERNMENT may be reduced. Sky-high prices for land, housing, and commercial space, vastly overwhelm whatever efficiencies you can come up with.
The density of cities makes them useless as distribution points. You can't funnel that much traffic through a tiny point. Companies have been pushing out further and further for exactly those reasons.
Almost all the goods you get come from your nearest large city. That's where the highways go. That's where your money is managed. That's where the big airport is. Really, get a clue.
Wal-mart has some of the world's largest distribution centers, out in the desert, on the fringes of small cities. Some of the most major transportation and distribution hubs are nothing towns, 200+ miles from nowhere. And they don't exist to supply "big cities", they exist to supply the entire population, which would continue to exist even if none of them lived in major cities.
And how do they get there? By pack mule? No, they go through the port in the next big city, and they come from another big city.
Sea-ports tend to be in big cities. There is no necessity for a port to be in a big city, however. In fact alternative ports are a big thing right now. I can point you to airports in the middle of the desert that have numerous large planes flying to/from China, daily. The ability to BYPASS those big cities is a MAJOR PLUS to distribution. The roads and rail lines are too congested, and the reality of big cities means expanding the infrastructure is extremely difficult to borderline impossible.
No, I'm simply pointing out the obvious, based on pretty much universally known economic facts.
Your dogma is irrelevant. I've provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, and you've still provided none. True believers like yourself don't let little things like facts get in their way. You've succeed only in wasting my time. Goodbye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
People step out on the road in front of me all the time,
You have a problem with idiots. Fine. I must submit, however, that the problems with quiet vehicles aren't the same issue (or the same people) at all.
People understand things in a context. If something is dangerous but quiet, they keep an eye on it. If something is dangerous only when it's making loud noises (commonly the case) then they come to depend on those noises to warn them of the danger. Now, something that has forever been in the latter class, is now something that MAY or MAY NOT make noise when it is dangerous. That really screws with people's perceptions... like someone running around acting like they're yelling at the top of their lungs, but no sound comes out. People have a hard time quickly interpreting the conflicting signals.
While pedestrians should be more careful, you can't deny there is now added danger. In a situation with numerous vehicles around you, you can't keep an eye on every one of them. While you should be scanning the field, those audio clues are still quite important, and may direct your vision.
I can think of little that is more dangerous than walking through a packed parking-lot full of silent cars... Lights are hard to see in the daylight. There's too many around to watch all of them individually, and there's enough idiot drivers, and poorly designed cars that plenty of pedestrians often have to jump out of the way of a car backing out right at them.
How would you feel, walking down the sidewalk, if you were informed that, at any time, a big block of pavement may be propelled 5 feet in the air, with no warning signs at all? Would you just chalk it up to "Watch where you're walking, idiot!"? Being a pedestrian just got a hell of a lot more dangerous.
Any one who thinks wireless networking will ever be safer than an old-fashioned hub is deluding themselves.
Care to explain how you can say that "VPN" over WiFi is safe, but WiFi can never be safe?
If the computational requirements weren't so high, there's nothing stopping WiFi manufacturers from integrating IPSec, or similarly well-proven network protocols into the standard.
And yes, I would say that WiFi with elementary encryption is more secure than a HUB of all things... While people don't typically know how to do it, there's not much stopping someone from picking-up the RF signal off a piece of CAT-5, from outside your building... That's how a cable tracer works to begin with.
Looking through the comments to the article, I saw nothing but intelligent and insightful discussion, something which hasn't been seen on slashdot (in anything but one-off quantities) in years now. The fall happened over quite some time, so jumping from slashdot today, to slashdot in 2004 was quite a shock... a shock to see how far we have fallen.
OTOH, a few of the same people are still around. Sadly, the current mediocre moderation system buries them in the static, while mindless rants, dogma, and complete misinformation that happens to sound nice, get the spotlight.
TFA also points out that languages accumulate cruft over time, and Go is a baby.
Only with Java did he complain about cruft. C / C++ have other problems listed. If Go is merely competitive with Java, it may yet see some extensive use.
HOWEVER, Google has a big problem with reinventing the wheel. They often release good bits of code which go nowhere. Google appears to be pet-projects galore. Maybe everything they do is just too specific to their own purposes, or perhaps they're just far too poor at interfacing with the community, and getting other people on-board.
. I don't want to spend several hours reinventing a wheel when I can use a mature language to do the same thing in fifteen minutes because someone else has already done the uninteresting grunt work.
This is the age old decision that has to be made for every program. Go with a low-level language which will be a lot of work to just initially get started, or a high-level language which will allow you to quickly get something that minimally works, but then you might find it not flexible enough to do exactly what you want, and/or with the performance that you want.
So, why don't you do everything in VB, instead of C++/Java?
To build things like the desktop PC you're using, or the Internet you're communicating over, to develop the medical advances you're enjoying, etc. requires big population centers.
You're welcome to prove it. Much is currently done in cities because that's where lots of people happen to be. Manufacturing, scientific advancements, inventions, etc. all happened when there were fewer people per sq km, and continue to happen in less dense areas.
And you may think that you're "sinking money into nearby cities", but your modest-size city (aka suburb) wouldn't have much manufacturing or places to go if it wasn't near a big city.
Utter nonsense. That's undeniably not the case here, and I'm sure there are innumerable other small cities (not suburbs) which are completely self-contained, with both people and industry, all completely indifferent to any large cities around them. With globalization, your products are just as likely to go to the other side of the planet as the next big city over.
You're still doing nothing but spouting laughable assertions.
I recall some recent research which came to the conclusion that parts of the Himalayas are the remotest on Earth. At least some parts of the year you can basically just fly to the South Pole.
Parts of the Himalayas may be difficult to physically reach, but they're not as bad off in many ways. Numerous orbiting communications satellites, for one thing, work everywhere on the planet EXCEPT for the poles.
Not sure about the specifics of this plant, but molton salt is so hot that it can produce power for DAYS (after the sun explodes)... It does not have to restart from a stop in the morning. That's the whole idea behind the thing, you can use a turbine about half as large, as it will be running around the clock, rather than needing a 3X larger turbine in the middle of the day. The output will just be slightly lower in the morning, and slowly increase throughout the day.
Molten salt is rely, really *corrosive*. Either they're spending tons of money up front on miles of stainless steel, or even more every year replacing the pipes as they corrode away.
Liquid sodium has been a common process used in industry for many years, long before it was first put into solar power plants. It's a solved (non) problem.
Of course, the GX is missing a lot of things that the Hybrid has standard - like an automatic transmission, [...] and power windows.
Hell, I'd pay extra NOT to have either of those. Why do you think people are buying new cars every five years? Because the crappy power window motor goes out, and the cost of getting a mechanic to replace one is astronomical. If you're a bit mechanically inclined, you can replace them yourself with after-market parts, but it's certainly hard, time-consuming work. Meanwhile, I've never had any problems with a manually operated window. In fact when my power windows went out, I replaced the whole mechanism with a manual one, and haven't had problems since.
When you make up your numbers, compare cars that aren't comparable, ignore the used hybrid market, or compare a used vehicle to a new hybrid, it's very easy to make hybrids look much more expensive than they are. It's also misleading and dishonest.
The GP specifically said a 4-year old, 2006 model hybrid. Bringing USED hybrids into the discussion is what's dishonest, here. The parent post may be using old figures, but the primary point is still valid.
Your whole theory is bullshit for the following reasons:
It's only in the recent past that cities have grown this dense. Sure, New York's been a mess for a century or so, but pretty much nowhere else, and yet, people lived just as comfortably as they do today.
There are innumerable less dense cities that more than pay for their own infrastructure. The modest-sized city I grew up in (with the quiet, river-front property) not only pays for it's own infrastructure, but gets screwed out of ABOUT HALF of local tax dollars by the county, and sunk into several nearby large cities.
Not to mention that there's not a major city on the planet that doesn't IMPORT it's water, raw materials, food, etc., from the nearest less densely packed areas.
Manufacturing is most certainly WORSE in a large city. I could provide you and endless laundry-list of companies who are FLEEING large cities, headed to areas with less congestion, and lower cost of living so their employees don't need to commute for hours every day.
There are also people working on leeching power from WiFi radio signals in order to recharge cell phones, with the consequence of reducing the range of your WiFi.
RF DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
When you wear black clothes and stand in front of a spotlight, does the light start to bend towards you? Does the amount of light going in other directions get reduced by any particular amount?
Of course not. And so it is with RF. At WORST, the only thing you can do is create a very narrow "dark spot" if you are directly between the source and destination. At BEST, you're merely turning into electricity what would otherwise naturally turn to HEAT as it is absorbed by your body.
If copyright was enforced then 99% of those chinese people would simply never have had any of this stuff at all. They would be using locally chinese produced media, or freely available media instead.
There is no "locally chinese produced media", really just very low budget TV soap operas. A side effect of rampant piracy.
Most of these people simply couldn't afford to pay what US media companies demand.
US media companies are very good at pricing by region. Go to Korea for your DVDs, and you'll find they're dirt cheap in comparison to here in the US.
There have been many attempts to sell extremely low-priced media in China, something on the order of $1 each. At the stated $3.5 billion figure, every man, woman and child in the country could afford about 3 movies, and with the reality of families, that turns into a decent number of films per household, per year.
I'm sure they're happier getting dozens of movies every year, before they're out in theatres, but they could most certainly afford to go legit.
It does show where the US governments priorities lie tho, they are willing to lean on the chinese over copyrights but couldn't care less about human rights or the environment.
The government has been leaning on China over human rights for years, and things are slowly getting better.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, it seems to be the ONLY justification for HOV lanes. Study after study shows HOV lanes DON'T HELP. It's a very expensive subsidy for slightly faster bus trips. Throwing low-emission vehicles into the mix at least serves to somewhat decrease their uselessness.
Only recently have diesels cleaned up their act. They really were a polluting mess just a few years ago. And you can't expect the whole state to change overnight to accommodate new diesel cars. Instead, they get largely left out. That said, you certainly CAN get one. Additionally, even now, the ultra-fine emissions from diesels seem to have an unfortunate tendency to cause cancer in humans that breath much of it, according to studies. Not to mention that everyone I've heard make specific claims about how much better diesels are, makes a complete ass out of themselves, and quickly proves they don't actually understand what they're doing.
That's odd... You obviously don't know much, but don't seem to feel all that good about it.
Flood, earthquake, hurricane (yes, possible even in New York), sink hole, etc.
Are you really going to go primeval when any one of those things happens?
First thing, of course you're going to find out if your family is fine. Assuming so, then what? Not only has their home been destroyed, but your job is gone too, so you'll now be dependant on insurance (notoriously unwilling or unable to pay after disasters) and handouts.
Not that you should be spending billions on off-site data storage and redundant systems, but a large company being completely unable to survive the loss of a single building/office is quite short-sighted, even if it happens to cost some money up-front.
What, as opposed to a COLD RAY in the desert, where everyone routinely taunts the military forces in hopes of getting some relief from the heat?
Peaceful protesters in the US are routinely hit with tear-gas, clubbed by the police, tazed, shot in the face with rubber bullets, etc.
"Supercollider!? I just met 'er!"
Who needs to build it yourself? Last time I needed a new system, sites that allow you to custom configure a new PC were cheaper than buying the parts separately.
3BTech has a new, low-end PC starting at $170 (shipped): http://3btech.net/3btecocospam.html
These guys might be a good choice as well: http://www.ascendtech.us/
You should still expect to have to open the thing up and re-attach the fan that's flopping around, and the like, but even with that, it'll save you a lot of time, and maybe some money.
As opposed to, say, the British Empire, which acted exactly the same way without any such justification, but wasn't quite as successful as they wanted to be.
Frankly, the fact that the US is the big bad guy, speaks volumes for what a successful and positive effect US foreign policy has had. For all it's faults, the US has kept all other would-be empires at bay. Don't think China wouldn't be taking over half of Asia if not for the threat of the US.
That's not proof, that's correlation, which could be caused by any of a million different factors. My facts, like the fact the industrial revolution happened, despite cities that were much smaller, go directly to the point, and have not be refuted thus far.
Infrastructure costs for THE CITY GOVERNMENT may be reduced. Sky-high prices for land, housing, and commercial space, vastly overwhelm whatever efficiencies you can come up with.
The density of cities makes them useless as distribution points. You can't funnel that much traffic through a tiny point. Companies have been pushing out further and further for exactly those reasons.
Wal-mart has some of the world's largest distribution centers, out in the desert, on the fringes of small cities. Some of the most major transportation and distribution hubs are nothing towns, 200+ miles from nowhere. And they don't exist to supply "big cities", they exist to supply the entire population, which would continue to exist even if none of them lived in major cities.
Sea-ports tend to be in big cities. There is no necessity for a port to be in a big city, however. In fact alternative ports are a big thing right now. I can point you to airports in the middle of the desert that have numerous large planes flying to/from China, daily. The ability to BYPASS those big cities is a MAJOR PLUS to distribution. The roads and rail lines are too congested, and the reality of big cities means expanding the infrastructure is extremely difficult to borderline impossible.
Your dogma is irrelevant. I've provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, and you've still provided none. True believers like yourself don't let little things like facts get in their way. You've succeed only in wasting my time. Goodbye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
You have a problem with idiots. Fine. I must submit, however, that the problems with quiet vehicles aren't the same issue (or the same people) at all.
People understand things in a context. If something is dangerous but quiet, they keep an eye on it. If something is dangerous only when it's making loud noises (commonly the case) then they come to depend on those noises to warn them of the danger. Now, something that has forever been in the latter class, is now something that MAY or MAY NOT make noise when it is dangerous. That really screws with people's perceptions... like someone running around acting like they're yelling at the top of their lungs, but no sound comes out. People have a hard time quickly interpreting the conflicting signals.
While pedestrians should be more careful, you can't deny there is now added danger. In a situation with numerous vehicles around you, you can't keep an eye on every one of them. While you should be scanning the field, those audio clues are still quite important, and may direct your vision.
I can think of little that is more dangerous than walking through a packed parking-lot full of silent cars... Lights are hard to see in the daylight. There's too many around to watch all of them individually, and there's enough idiot drivers, and poorly designed cars that plenty of pedestrians often have to jump out of the way of a car backing out right at them.
How would you feel, walking down the sidewalk, if you were informed that, at any time, a big block of pavement may be propelled 5 feet in the air, with no warning signs at all? Would you just chalk it up to "Watch where you're walking, idiot!"? Being a pedestrian just got a hell of a lot more dangerous.
Care to explain how you can say that "VPN" over WiFi is safe, but WiFi can never be safe?
If the computational requirements weren't so high, there's nothing stopping WiFi manufacturers from integrating IPSec, or similarly well-proven network protocols into the standard.
And yes, I would say that WiFi with elementary encryption is more secure than a HUB of all things... While people don't typically know how to do it, there's not much stopping someone from picking-up the RF signal off a piece of CAT-5, from outside your building... That's how a cable tracer works to begin with.
A GREAT link! Thanks.
Looking through the comments to the article, I saw nothing but intelligent and insightful discussion, something which hasn't been seen on slashdot (in anything but one-off quantities) in years now. The fall happened over quite some time, so jumping from slashdot today, to slashdot in 2004 was quite a shock... a shock to see how far we have fallen.
OTOH, a few of the same people are still around. Sadly, the current mediocre moderation system buries them in the static, while mindless rants, dogma, and complete misinformation that happens to sound nice, get the spotlight.
I want Slashdot back.
Only with Java did he complain about cruft. C / C++ have other problems listed. If Go is merely competitive with Java, it may yet see some extensive use.
HOWEVER, Google has a big problem with reinventing the wheel. They often release good bits of code which go nowhere. Google appears to be pet-projects galore. Maybe everything they do is just too specific to their own purposes, or perhaps they're just far too poor at interfacing with the community, and getting other people on-board.
This is the age old decision that has to be made for every program. Go with a low-level language which will be a lot of work to just initially get started, or a high-level language which will allow you to quickly get something that minimally works, but then you might find it not flexible enough to do exactly what you want, and/or with the performance that you want.
So, why don't you do everything in VB, instead of C++/Java?
You're welcome to prove it. Much is currently done in cities because that's where lots of people happen to be. Manufacturing, scientific advancements, inventions, etc. all happened when there were fewer people per sq km, and continue to happen in less dense areas.
Utter nonsense. That's undeniably not the case here, and I'm sure there are innumerable other small cities (not suburbs) which are completely self-contained, with both people and industry, all completely indifferent to any large cities around them. With globalization, your products are just as likely to go to the other side of the planet as the next big city over.
You're still doing nothing but spouting laughable assertions.
This isn't a tablet story, it's a OLPC story. And with the Indian government's backing, it'll probably really be put into production.
A $35 tablet would be nice... Just needs a $5 keyboard.
Parts of the Himalayas may be difficult to physically reach, but they're not as bad off in many ways. Numerous orbiting communications satellites, for one thing, work everywhere on the planet EXCEPT for the poles.
Yes, because it's a great idea to have all of our energy supplied by middle-east countries </sarcasm>
Not sure about the specifics of this plant, but molton salt is so hot that it can produce power for DAYS (after the sun explodes)... It does not have to restart from a stop in the morning. That's the whole idea behind the thing, you can use a turbine about half as large, as it will be running around the clock, rather than needing a 3X larger turbine in the middle of the day. The output will just be slightly lower in the morning, and slowly increase throughout the day.
Liquid sodium has been a common process used in industry for many years, long before it was first put into solar power plants. It's a solved (non) problem.
Hell, I'd pay extra NOT to have either of those. Why do you think people are buying new cars every five years? Because the crappy power window motor goes out, and the cost of getting a mechanic to replace one is astronomical. If you're a bit mechanically inclined, you can replace them yourself with after-market parts, but it's certainly hard, time-consuming work. Meanwhile, I've never had any problems with a manually operated window. In fact when my power windows went out, I replaced the whole mechanism with a manual one, and haven't had problems since.
The GP specifically said a 4-year old, 2006 model hybrid. Bringing USED hybrids into the discussion is what's dishonest, here. The parent post may be using old figures, but the primary point is still valid.
I would be HIGHLY MOTIVATED to learn.
Your whole theory is bullshit for the following reasons:
It's only in the recent past that cities have grown this dense. Sure, New York's been a mess for a century or so, but pretty much nowhere else, and yet, people lived just as comfortably as they do today.
There are innumerable less dense cities that more than pay for their own infrastructure. The modest-sized city I grew up in (with the quiet, river-front property) not only pays for it's own infrastructure, but gets screwed out of ABOUT HALF of local tax dollars by the county, and sunk into several nearby large cities.
Not to mention that there's not a major city on the planet that doesn't IMPORT it's water, raw materials, food, etc., from the nearest less densely packed areas.
Manufacturing is most certainly WORSE in a large city. I could provide you and endless laundry-list of companies who are FLEEING large cities, headed to areas with less congestion, and lower cost of living so their employees don't need to commute for hours every day.
RF DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
When you wear black clothes and stand in front of a spotlight, does the light start to bend towards you? Does the amount of light going in other directions get reduced by any particular amount?
Of course not. And so it is with RF. At WORST, the only thing you can do is create a very narrow "dark spot" if you are directly between the source and destination. At BEST, you're merely turning into electricity what would otherwise naturally turn to HEAT as it is absorbed by your body.
There is no "locally chinese produced media", really just very low budget TV soap operas. A side effect of rampant piracy.
US media companies are very good at pricing by region. Go to Korea for your DVDs, and you'll find they're dirt cheap in comparison to here in the US.
There have been many attempts to sell extremely low-priced media in China, something on the order of $1 each. At the stated $3.5 billion figure, every man, woman and child in the country could afford about 3 movies, and with the reality of families, that turns into a decent number of films per household, per year.
I'm sure they're happier getting dozens of movies every year, before they're out in theatres, but they could most certainly afford to go legit.
The government has been leaning on China over human rights for years, and things are slowly getting better.