A friend of mine went to Cuba on vacation and noted that pretty much every cabbie, hotel maid, and bus driver had at least a Master's degree. Largely courtesy of two things: free higher education and a lack of jobs to keep people out of school.
On the plus side, I hear that Cuban doctors are pretty good.
Now, I'd have to admit that we have free internet (I work for an ISP) but our internet bill would be around $30 a month if we didn't.
We used to pay about $80 for cable before we gave it up. Since I live in Canada, I don't really have access to Hulu.com, but CBC has all their content online, with all of the other stations (including most of the premium cable channels that we actually cared about) having about half of it, and growing.
The only thing I used to miss was Mythbusters, before discovery.ca started posting this week's episode. And if we really wanted to (and we have in the past) we could buy it on DVD. Most of the content we actually *want* to watch is available online, and we can watch it whenever we have free time - which is at a premium with a newborn and a 3-year-old. All without having to sign up for scads of crap that we're not in the least bit interested in.
The fact that the cable companies have never been interested in providing only the content that the customer wants has always been a sore point for me, as I hardly ever watched any of the basic cable channels.
You know what? I think it was about 10 years ago, possibly more, when I said "ICQ? *Why*? It's like IRC, but starts when you turn your computer on. I can do that with mIRC."
Apparently you haven't gone through this phase in your life yet. Here's a hint though: you're missing the boat. Stop being a curmudgeon at the age of what, 28?
Yes, I wanted to point that one out too. I suspect that it also has a lot to do with how Gran Turismo aims to be a driving *simulator* and not so much a game. Most game designers drop a certain level of realism from their games to make them more fun, but the designers of GT are a) car nuts and b) totally of the mind that driving race cars is plenty of fun all by itself, thankyouverymuch.
To prove his point, and to prove that not only is GT realistic, but works well as a racing trainer, Gran Turismo's director Kazunori Yamauchi competed in the Nurburgring 4 hour race and won his class, with no other training but 1,000 laps in Gran Turismo (and any futzing around he may have done in his own cars). It was the first time he actually raced on the track, and it's worth noting for those not in the know, that the Nurbergring Nordschlief (the full course - in this particular race it took Kazunori 10 minutes to complete a single lap) is the world's most difficult race track.
I'd be happy to let you drive a car without those safety features
Apparently you've never driven a car built before 1990.
Some people, they are even forced to drive them today, due to limited finances. Often they come with feature-filled with rust, dents in the door, and poorly functioning everything.
Well, obviously then it would be a complete waste of time to power all of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah with this technology, which uses a cheap and abundant source of power readily available in large swaths of those states. We'll just go right back to the business of building more coal power plants for them because we can't power New York and Seattle from there. Thanks for your input and foresight.
Congratulations. You have just demonstrated your extreme ignorance and lack of willingness to bother to click on the link to the original article (thus filling in your ignorance) in the most flamboyantly spectacular way possible. I award you the Golden RTFA.
Your post is filled to the brim with assumptions which are not valid.
Perhaps, but they're reasonable assumptions for practically everyone who lives in the suburbs. Most people who design their lives around owning a car think they *can't possibly live without one!!* An assumption in and of itself that is false.
There have been millions of families just like yours that never once needed a car. And lots of homeowners with yards who live in the city.
Oh, but *I* do. And so do lots of other parents that take transit. I see them every day.
Your grocery store would probably happily deliver your groceries. For free even. The size of your orders practically necessitates it.
And you'll notice that there aren't any seatbelts on a bus. The reason for that is twofold: your driver is a professional, and the bus has sufficient mass for it not to be a problem, especially at the speeds they travel. They even let you stand up on a bus, it's so safe. Thus you don't need booster seats.
You assert that I should be able to get by solely on public transport? You can see *no* reason for me to own a car?
Why not? I do. And I can see no reason for you to own a car.
You see, the problem is twofold here. You've basically painted yourself into a corner. You've had a car since you were 16, and you can't possibly conceive of the notion of not owning a car. Because you've always owned a car, the expense of owning a car has always been in your budget. It's factored into the sort of real estate you can afford. And the sort of real estate you can afford can only be found 25 Km from downtown. So you think you absolutely cannot live without a car.
I on the other hand, have never owned a car. Once upon a time, I even tried to get a driver's license, but failed miserably. So what's a guy like me to do?
For starters, I bought a house near work. Hell, I don't even commute by transit anymore. I considered that to be an absolute necessity when buying a house. You however, did not, so you didn't even look, and you have no idea what's available. My wife on the other hand, works across town. So another necessity when buying a house was that it be well-serviced by transit. We're three blocks from the nearest Skytrain station. Another necessity was that it needed to be close to shopping. We're also three blocks from the nearest grocery store/mini mall. We can also buy flowers, sushi, liquor, pizza, DVDs and sporting equipment (to name a few) within that 3 block radius. About 10 blocks away is a major mall. Those 10 blocks can be walked if we're feeling ambitious and the weather's nice, but it's only 1 stop away by train too.
Oh, and your "I have kids" excuse is crap. Lots of people take their kids on the bus. I see it every day. And I'm one of those parents. I'd also bet dollars to doughnuts that at least one of your kids is over the age of 12. She can travel on her own now you know.
Is it reasonable to expect that I will load all of these items onto public transport and lug them from the nearest bus top to my house? What about when I need to buy materials for home improvement, for car maintenance, to buy large/heavy tools, etc.
No. But it's reasonable to expect delivery. When I was living downtown, I couldn't find a grocery store that *didn't* deliver. And the expectation was that your brought the groceries to the till rather than ordering by phone or internet. Same goes for furniture, building materials, large/heavy tools or kitchen sinks. You often have to pay extra for this (but not groceries), but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you're making in car payments and insurance alone. Nevermind the time and money spent on maintaining your own vehicle.
What if I have a sick kid who needs to go the pediatrician? Do you want my kid sitting near you?
And yet you have no qualms about sending him to day care or school? Not on the days he's sick of course, but those other days. The days he got sick. If I didn't want to risk getting sick, I wouldn't go outside. Or to the park. Or out with friends. Or to the movies. I just think that the benefits are worth the risks.
Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best).
Oh, I don't know about that. First of all, there's the solar-thermal plants that just went online in Spain. They have heat reservoirs sufficiently large enough to last through the night.
Second, the largest load on the American power grid is air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak times are ah, in summer, when it's hot and sunny. So chopping that peak off is real easy like, you know? This is so brain-dead obvious that even politicians are getting on board. If you add into the mix that most of those air conditioners and refrigerators (especially commercial refrigerators) could be replaced with ground source heating for their heat dissipation for huge efficiency gains, suddenly the problem doesn't look so huge after all.
This can and does work. In the technical support department.
You see, if you expect your users to support themselves, they need to have enough knowledge of their machines to do so. Unfortunately, about 90% of the entire workforce does not possess this knowledge.
So unless you're an ISP, and technical support is 90% of what you do, this won't work.
I'll believe them when I see them. They were due out last year, too. And maybe the year before that, but I wasn't paying attention in 2006.
EEStor is a tiny company, owned mostly by a tiny electric car company called ZENN. Neither will rise to relevance, and ZENN can't even sell cars in their own country thanks to Canadian laws and regulators who appear to be out to kill the company. If EEStor's claims could be believed in any way shape or form, Toyota would have bought them two years ago.
That's very true. I used to live in a small city (75,000), and let's just say that there was no love for cyclists. When a town has a large population of men named Chet who wear fleece-lined denim jackets in the winter and drive pickup trucks that are equal parts beat up and jacked up, it's pretty much a given.
On the other hand, if drivers frequently spend their afternoons driving slower than the speed limit because traffic conditions won't allow it, it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to people to take those extra two seconds to pass a cyclist with a little bit of civility.
Slashdot Mirror
So it looks like revenue at King will be going down a wee bit...
A friend of mine went to Cuba on vacation and noted that pretty much every cabbie, hotel maid, and bus driver had at least a Master's degree. Largely courtesy of two things: free higher education and a lack of jobs to keep people out of school.
On the plus side, I hear that Cuban doctors are pretty good.
You forgot the part where the other half of the working population gets offshored to China.
Oh that's nothing. I spent more time than that changing my newborn's diapers and/or clothes. Just today.
Now, I'd have to admit that we have free internet (I work for an ISP) but our internet bill would be around $30 a month if we didn't.
We used to pay about $80 for cable before we gave it up. Since I live in Canada, I don't really have access to Hulu.com, but CBC has all their content online, with all of the other stations (including most of the premium cable channels that we actually cared about) having about half of it, and growing.
The only thing I used to miss was Mythbusters, before discovery.ca started posting this week's episode. And if we really wanted to (and we have in the past) we could buy it on DVD. Most of the content we actually *want* to watch is available online, and we can watch it whenever we have free time - which is at a premium with a newborn and a 3-year-old. All without having to sign up for scads of crap that we're not in the least bit interested in.
The fact that the cable companies have never been interested in providing only the content that the customer wants has always been a sore point for me, as I hardly ever watched any of the basic cable channels.
Uh, excuse me? What does telephone service have to do with TV over the internet?
Not me. My wife can already run circles around me when it comes to "persistent sexual arousal."
And the worst part is that she's been out of action since her C-section 4 weeks ago. When the doctor gives her the OK, I'm *so* dead.
Not that I mind *too* much. ;)
You know what? I think it was about 10 years ago, possibly more, when I said "ICQ? *Why*? It's like IRC, but starts when you turn your computer on. I can do that with mIRC."
Apparently you haven't gone through this phase in your life yet. Here's a hint though: you're missing the boat. Stop being a curmudgeon at the age of what, 28?
Yes, I wanted to point that one out too. I suspect that it also has a lot to do with how Gran Turismo aims to be a driving *simulator* and not so much a game. Most game designers drop a certain level of realism from their games to make them more fun, but the designers of GT are a) car nuts and b) totally of the mind that driving race cars is plenty of fun all by itself, thankyouverymuch.
To prove his point, and to prove that not only is GT realistic, but works well as a racing trainer, Gran Turismo's director Kazunori Yamauchi competed in the Nurburgring 4 hour race and won his class, with no other training but 1,000 laps in Gran Turismo (and any futzing around he may have done in his own cars). It was the first time he actually raced on the track, and it's worth noting for those not in the know, that the Nurbergring Nordschlief (the full course - in this particular race it took Kazunori 10 minutes to complete a single lap) is the world's most difficult race track.
That aside, the original article is pretty funny.
I'd be happy to let you drive a car without those safety features
Apparently you've never driven a car built before 1990.
Some people, they are even forced to drive them today, due to limited finances. Often they come with feature-filled with rust, dents in the door, and poorly functioning everything.
Well, obviously then it would be a complete waste of time to power all of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah with this technology, which uses a cheap and abundant source of power readily available in large swaths of those states. We'll just go right back to the business of building more coal power plants for them because we can't power New York and Seattle from there. Thanks for your input and foresight.
Congratulations. You have just demonstrated your extreme ignorance and lack of willingness to bother to click on the link to the original article (thus filling in your ignorance) in the most flamboyantly spectacular way possible. I award you the Golden RTFA.
Your post is filled to the brim with assumptions which are not valid.
Perhaps, but they're reasonable assumptions for practically everyone who lives in the suburbs. Most people who design their lives around owning a car think they *can't possibly live without one!!* An assumption in and of itself that is false.
There have been millions of families just like yours that never once needed a car. And lots of homeowners with yards who live in the city.
My question is "Why the hell do you?" Don't you have laundry at home?
Maybe you should sell your car and buy a washer-dryer, hmm?
When we go to Grampa's place (which is about 40 Km away) we *do* take transit. The whole way even. It's really not that difficult.
I can't for the life of me imagine someone with a thick Taiwanese accent saying "we're going to open up a can of whoop-ass on Intel".
I can tell that you have no children.
Oh, but *I* do. And so do lots of other parents that take transit. I see them every day.
Your grocery store would probably happily deliver your groceries. For free even. The size of your orders practically necessitates it.
And you'll notice that there aren't any seatbelts on a bus. The reason for that is twofold: your driver is a professional, and the bus has sufficient mass for it not to be a problem, especially at the speeds they travel. They even let you stand up on a bus, it's so safe. Thus you don't need booster seats.
I am *not* making those trips with 2 young children on any form of public transportation.
Why not? I do.
You assert that I should be able to get by solely on public transport? You can see *no* reason for me to own a car?
Why not? I do. And I can see no reason for you to own a car.
You see, the problem is twofold here. You've basically painted yourself into a corner. You've had a car since you were 16, and you can't possibly conceive of the notion of not owning a car. Because you've always owned a car, the expense of owning a car has always been in your budget. It's factored into the sort of real estate you can afford. And the sort of real estate you can afford can only be found 25 Km from downtown. So you think you absolutely cannot live without a car.
I on the other hand, have never owned a car. Once upon a time, I even tried to get a driver's license, but failed miserably. So what's a guy like me to do?
For starters, I bought a house near work. Hell, I don't even commute by transit anymore. I considered that to be an absolute necessity when buying a house. You however, did not, so you didn't even look, and you have no idea what's available. My wife on the other hand, works across town. So another necessity when buying a house was that it be well-serviced by transit. We're three blocks from the nearest Skytrain station. Another necessity was that it needed to be close to shopping. We're also three blocks from the nearest grocery store/mini mall. We can also buy flowers, sushi, liquor, pizza, DVDs and sporting equipment (to name a few) within that 3 block radius. About 10 blocks away is a major mall. Those 10 blocks can be walked if we're feeling ambitious and the weather's nice, but it's only 1 stop away by train too.
Oh, and your "I have kids" excuse is crap. Lots of people take their kids on the bus. I see it every day. And I'm one of those parents. I'd also bet dollars to doughnuts that at least one of your kids is over the age of 12. She can travel on her own now you know.
Is it reasonable to expect that I will load all of these items onto public transport and lug them from the nearest bus top to my house? What about when I need to buy materials for home improvement, for car maintenance, to buy large/heavy tools, etc.
No. But it's reasonable to expect delivery. When I was living downtown, I couldn't find a grocery store that *didn't* deliver. And the expectation was that your brought the groceries to the till rather than ordering by phone or internet. Same goes for furniture, building materials, large/heavy tools or kitchen sinks. You often have to pay extra for this (but not groceries), but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you're making in car payments and insurance alone. Nevermind the time and money spent on maintaining your own vehicle.
What if I have a sick kid who needs to go the pediatrician? Do you want my kid sitting near you?
And yet you have no qualms about sending him to day care or school? Not on the days he's sick of course, but those other days. The days he got sick. If I didn't want to risk getting sick, I wouldn't go outside. Or to the park. Or out with friends. Or to the movies. I just think that the benefits are worth the risks.
Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best).
Oh, I don't know about that. First of all, there's the solar-thermal plants that just went online in Spain. They have heat reservoirs sufficiently large enough to last through the night.
Second, the largest load on the American power grid is air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak times are ah, in summer, when it's hot and sunny. So chopping that peak off is real easy like, you know? This is so brain-dead obvious that even politicians are getting on board. If you add into the mix that most of those air conditioners and refrigerators (especially commercial refrigerators) could be replaced with ground source heating for their heat dissipation for huge efficiency gains, suddenly the problem doesn't look so huge after all.
And caffeine also has a nasty tendency towards increasing stress and blood pressure, increasing your risk of a stroke.
Thank you and have a nice day.
This can and does work. In the technical support department.
You see, if you expect your users to support themselves, they need to have enough knowledge of their machines to do so. Unfortunately, about 90% of the entire workforce does not possess this knowledge.
So unless you're an ISP, and technical support is 90% of what you do, this won't work.
I'm not sure, but we have documented evidence that screaming "Don't tase me bro!" isn't how you do it.
The EEStor supercapacitors due out this year
This is what I say to EEStor's supercapacitors:
I'll believe them when I see them. They were due out last year, too. And maybe the year before that, but I wasn't paying attention in 2006.
EEStor is a tiny company, owned mostly by a tiny electric car company called ZENN. Neither will rise to relevance, and ZENN can't even sell cars in their own country thanks to Canadian laws and regulators who appear to be out to kill the company. If EEStor's claims could be believed in any way shape or form, Toyota would have bought them two years ago.
That's very true. I used to live in a small city (75,000), and let's just say that there was no love for cyclists. When a town has a large population of men named Chet who wear fleece-lined denim jackets in the winter and drive pickup trucks that are equal parts beat up and jacked up, it's pretty much a given.
On the other hand, if drivers frequently spend their afternoons driving slower than the speed limit because traffic conditions won't allow it, it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to people to take those extra two seconds to pass a cyclist with a little bit of civility.
At least, that's my take on it.
I've noted on a few occasions that a U-lock makes a damn fine set of 8-inch long brass knuckles.
But I've also noted that I don't need them anywhere near as often now that I avoid riding on arterial streets as much as possible.