Look, I'm not exactly unaware of the problems inherent in my choice. I live them every day, in upstate NY, year 'round.
I will make some points though. The reason I can do this and most can't is very simply because I do and they don't. I am not "genetically programmed" to be fit. In fact, if it were not for modern medical science I wouldn't even be alive. My own lungs are trying to kill me, and someday they will succeed. I am dwarf compared to the rest of my family and have a hard time digesting foods other people take for granted as standard fare. In fact, most of that standard fare will kill me. One of the side effects of this is arthritis in all my joints. I'm not Stephen Hawking, but I'm certainly not Mr. Olympia.
But an 11 year old girl who had never taken a long bicycle trip before pedaled with her family from California to NY. It really isn't that hard.
I can do what I do. And so could you, and 99.99% of the population *if they did.*
*Humans* are genetically programed for just this sort of energy output. Even the nearly dead ones without lungs, joints or digestive systems.
The downside is that they are clearly not as comfortable as an automobile. When it rains you get wet. When it's hot you sweat. When it snows you get cold. The wind is the cyclist's mortal enemy, not because it blows you off the road, it doesn't, because it slows you down.
If this stuff bothers you, don't do it. I'm not on a soap box saying you're evil if you drive.
However, I'm not going to say it's not a viable solution when I've found that it can be, and may be for you, even if you don't think so right now.
Fuel is cheap and pleasant to consume. Use makes you stronger instead of weaker. You spend nearly nothing on maintainence. You spend nothing on licenses, permits, insurance, etc. Having to worry about tickets is a virtually null issue, you never have to dig a bike out of a snow bank just to get started in the first place, and they're nifty, geeky little machines to boot.
And it may take you a bit longer to get where you're going, but. ..*you have to work that many fewer hours to pay for it.*
Am I an advocate? Yes, just as I'm an advocate for free software, and for the *same reasons.*
Am I a zealot? No. If you don't want to don't do it. But that's not the same as saying you *can't* do it. It's a choice.
I've had my butt reamed and my karma mugged for saying this before, but I've found a very effective way to solve my own personal transportation energy needs.
Being willing to haul my own ass around.
Talk about renewable energy. I just put a Macintosh Apple in the top hole (no not an Apple Macintosh), sooner or later it comes out the bottom hole, but in the meantime I get to move around.
Around the city center my ETA on a bicycle is about the same as a car. Between cities the bicycle ETA is about half a car's. Long hauls, well, the bicycle does drop to a third the average speed of a car.
I don't consider it a bad price to pay to make my fuel problem, "Hey, where's a good place for pizza around here?"
And to top it all off, it keeps my ass to a handy haulable size.
Assuming no friction you simply "Fred Flintstone" up to speed and go forever. Or maybe just use a big rubber band to get going.
With *any* car, if you assumed no friction all you would ever pay for were you accelerations anyway, which would give you a godzillion miles to the gallon with a conventional gasoline engine.
I advise never assuming any such thing.
At least not unless your name is "Veeger" or something.
"Young lady, in this house we will OBEY the sec. . . " Ah, you know the rest.
I'm sorry, really, but that has to be the lamest attempt at an AC accusation of Karma Whoring I've seen in a long time. Horribly boring and uninsulting, and predictable throughout.
At least don't include such a boring and obvious accusation of including a boring and obvious Homer reference in a thread custom made for, already half composed of, boring and obvious Homer references.
If you object to seeing the same lame shit on Slashdot over and over again, the solution is boring, obvious, predictable and you've seen it on Slashdot before.
On learning of this news Ford Motor Company immediately sent the universe a "cease and desist" letter, claiming violation of their trademark "Taurus."
While someone was trying to explain to a Ford executive that "Taurus" was a different word, and only applied to to an abstract portion of space, not the universe, and the word "Torus" refered to a donut shaped object, said executive got a blank look in his eye, muttered the words, "Hmmmmmmmmmmm, Donut," and wandered off.
Please note that I did *not* say that America rid the world of pirates. I specifically said "these" pirates.
The time we are talking about here is 1795-1802ish. There were no steam ships on either side.
Piracy as a general principle has yet to collapse, only now the pirates use motor speed boats, faster than most law enforcement has, against pleasure sailing craft, generally owned by people rather well off.
Your last sentence is insightful, however. As Woody Guthrie once wrote:
"Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen."
It was Charles Pickney of South Carolina who said this in 1796, while serving as Ambassador to France. It was said in the context of trying to gain French cooperation in putting down the pirates.
For the rest of his life Pickney was irritated by the fact that he was misquoted as having said, "Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute," and so made sure that the *proper* quote would be his gravestone inscription.
"Millions for defence, not one *damned* cent for tribute."
Confused the hell out me when I went looking for the Jargon File a few days ago. I kept going back to the site, over and over again, mind numb, reality falling apart, all that good stuff.
Bless you good sir for this link. You are humble and lovable.
No, no, not *that* kind of piracy. I mean *real* piracy. With ships, and cannon, and lots of a "Avast there"'s in it and stuff.
I think Doug Fairbanks might have something to do with it too, but I'm a little fuzzy on that part, so don't quote me.
Anyway, around the turn of the century, no, not *that* century. Ummmm, no, not that century either. 1700 to 1800. Various "states" in Northern Africa practiced actual piracy, capturing ships, ransoming the men on board or selling them into slavery if no ransom was paid.
Better yet, they could make a lot of money without any risk if they captured a few ships and then used the terror factor to demand *tribute* from other nations. The would be known as a "protection racket" if it were done on a smaller scale.
And it worked. Most of Europe caved in and payed the tribute. ( Not that the pirates didn't make the occasional "mistake" and sieze a lucrative looking prize anyway, but what the hell).
America held out. America had no Navy and no standing army. So they bloody well built them and went to war. In legitimate defense, of the world even (go figure). The modern Marine Corps was born out of this, and when the song mentions Tripoli this is the conflict it refers to.
The conflict lasted four years, but America, young, brash and still idealistic America, on its own, rid the world of these pirates.
Why am I going on about this?
Well, think about it, what is SCO doing right now?
Practicing true computer piracy, that's what. Demanding tribute on a claim that everyone knows is essentially bogus.
What do we do about it?
Well, an American congressman, in reaction to the demand for tribute from the pirates, made a statement that became the rallying cry in the war against the pirates of the Barbary Coast and an American policy for ever after ( well, at least until Reagan).
"Millions for defence. Not one damned penny for tribute."
That's the way to handle SCO. This is not a time to be "pragmatic" as the lawyer and the accountant see pragmatism.
At the very least SCO should be shunned and isolated. Compleat noncooperation throughout the entire industry. Ostracised in the literal sense. Banished to die in the wilderness. Call them Ishmael. SuSE shouldn't pull out of United Linux. SCO should be ejected.
But beyond that they should not be payed one single penny, not even to save millions in legal fees. They are pirates. They are demanding tribute AS pirates. They need to be crushed. Ultimately and completely.
Please. IBM, I implore you. Stay the course. Buy up what remains of their bloody legal corpse for fractions of a penny on the dollar *after* you have crushed them and reduced their value as a company to nil.
To tell you the truth a certain amount of serializing doesn't bother me. Some stories are just too complex to tell in a single book that can actually be sold and marketed these days.
I guess Harry Potter is as good an example as any of this. The legitimate story really is that long, and if the quality of the writting holds up, well, we're all winners for it.
It's the "franchising" that gets to me, particularly when the franchise is turned over to *other* writers.
C.J. Cherryh has created a few worlds and story lines that I simply adore, but she gets in over her head, calls in "help", just to cover a few chapters mind you, and then the whole thing just goes to hell.
Robert Asprin, in struggling with his worlds and his writer's block, has done much the same thing, ruining the worlds of Skeeve and Phule.
There isn't really anything that can be done about it, because it's simply good business from the point of view of both the publishers and author, but I don't have to like it.
In the above, second line the word "was" should be "saw."
The fact of the matter is that, yes, I *am* dyslexic, not just a bad speller and have to find a spelling/grammer checker that's "antidyslexic."
As you can see the word is a proper word either way around, and even the grammer parses, although the *meaning* becomes a bit strange.
I'll begin to believe we're making progress in AI when I see an antidyslexic spelling/grammer checker that actually works, since it will have to intuit "what I meant" from "what I said."
And of course in line 3 I added an extra "o" to god. That's just the batteries in my cordless keyboard going flat and it's repeating keys. Time to go to the store I guess. Spelling it with a lower case "g", however, was entirely intentional.
Not a movie trailer, but you're on the right track.
The first thought that popped into my head when I was the first "Countdown:Iraq" ad was:
"My good, they're going to be doing a "pregame" show of the war."
And that's exactly what it is. A pregame show, just like for the Superbowl or something.
Totally irrespective of the merits/demerits of the war itself the fact that we can, as a culture, promologate and tolerate such a thing is just mind boggling to me.
It makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
And it certainly makes some of the futures hypothesised by such as Heinlein, Niven and Huxley look that much more like prediction.
Ok, if you're having a bit of trouble because of the abstraction, let's try this.
A boulder isn't a boulder if you can put it in your pocket
A mountain isn't a mountain if you can step over it.
The difference between a mountain and a hill, and a boulder and a pebble, is ill defined, but still important
If someone says "go get me a pebble" you'll be bummed after spending days hauling 200 ton of granite back to him only to find out all he wanted was a bit of shot for his slingshot.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that all we're talking about here is an *arbitrary* naming convention strictly for the purposes of communication, so that someday someone, somewhere, says " I found a new planet today" and the person he says it to knows he didn't bring it home in his pocket. That's all.
It isn't sympathetic magic. We aren't dicking with *reality* here. Just names. Knowing something's name gives you no power over it.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew you'd show up. Hi. :)
.*you have to work that many fewer hours to pay for it.*
Look, I'm not exactly unaware of the problems inherent in my choice. I live them every day, in upstate NY, year 'round.
I will make some points though. The reason I can do this and most can't is very simply because I do and they don't. I am not "genetically programmed" to be fit. In fact, if it were not for modern medical science I wouldn't even be alive. My own lungs are trying to kill me, and someday they will succeed. I am dwarf compared to the rest of my family and have a hard time digesting foods other people take for granted as standard fare. In fact, most of that standard fare will kill me. One of the side effects of this is arthritis in all my joints. I'm not Stephen Hawking, but I'm certainly not Mr. Olympia.
But an 11 year old girl who had never taken a long bicycle trip before pedaled with her family from California to NY. It really isn't that hard.
I can do what I do. And so could you, and 99.99% of the population *if they did.*
*Humans* are genetically programed for just this sort of energy output. Even the nearly dead ones without lungs, joints or digestive systems.
The downside is that they are clearly not as comfortable as an automobile. When it rains you get wet. When it's hot you sweat. When it snows you get cold. The wind is the cyclist's mortal enemy, not because it blows you off the road, it doesn't, because it slows you down.
If this stuff bothers you, don't do it. I'm not on a soap box saying you're evil if you drive.
However, I'm not going to say it's not a viable solution when I've found that it can be, and may be for you, even if you don't think so right now.
Fuel is cheap and pleasant to consume. Use makes you stronger instead of weaker. You spend nearly nothing on maintainence. You spend nothing on licenses, permits, insurance, etc. Having to worry about tickets is a virtually null issue, you never have to dig a bike out of a snow bank just to get started in the first place, and they're nifty, geeky little machines to boot.
And it may take you a bit longer to get where you're going, but. .
Am I an advocate? Yes, just as I'm an advocate for free software, and for the *same reasons.*
Am I a zealot? No. If you don't want to don't do it. But that's not the same as saying you *can't* do it. It's a choice.
KFG
I've had my butt reamed and my karma mugged for saying this before, but I've found a very effective way to solve my own personal transportation energy needs.
Being willing to haul my own ass around.
Talk about renewable energy. I just put a Macintosh Apple in the top hole (no not an Apple Macintosh), sooner or later it comes out the bottom hole, but in the meantime I get to move around.
Around the city center my ETA on a bicycle is about the same as a car. Between cities the bicycle ETA is about half a car's. Long hauls, well, the bicycle does drop to a third the average speed of a car.
I don't consider it a bad price to pay to make my fuel problem, "Hey, where's a good place for pizza around here?"
And to top it all off, it keeps my ass to a handy haulable size.
KFG
Assuming no friction you simply "Fred Flintstone" up to speed and go forever. Or maybe just use a big rubber band to get going.
With *any* car, if you assumed no friction all you would ever pay for were you accelerations anyway, which would give you a godzillion miles to the gallon with a conventional gasoline engine.
I advise never assuming any such thing.
At least not unless your name is "Veeger" or something.
"Young lady, in this house we will OBEY the sec. . . " Ah, you know the rest.
KFG
Well maybe now it can do double duty as a "terminally hip" detector as well.
God help me when this stuff comes to K-Mart though.
KFG
I'm sorry, really, but that has to be the lamest attempt at an AC accusation of Karma Whoring I've seen in a long time. Horribly boring and uninsulting, and predictable throughout.
At least don't include such a boring and obvious accusation of including a boring and obvious Homer reference in a thread custom made for, already half composed of, boring and obvious Homer references.
If you object to seeing the same lame shit on Slashdot over and over again, the solution is boring, obvious, predictable and you've seen it on Slashdot before.
Don't you *ever* listen?
KFG
On learning of this news Ford Motor Company immediately sent the universe a "cease and desist" letter, claiming violation of their trademark "Taurus."
While someone was trying to explain to a Ford executive that "Taurus" was a different word, and only applied to to an abstract portion of space, not the universe, and the word "Torus" refered to a donut shaped object, said executive got a blank look in his eye, muttered the words, "Hmmmmmmmmmmm, Donut," and wandered off.
KFG
Like most of us didn't see this coming, and even predict it, two and a half years ago?
As a matter of fact, didn't Nostradamus predict this? I think it was in some quatrain about the tyrant at the 45th parallel in the new world.
I'll bet you can even dick "Hister" around with numerology to make it turn out to be "Bill Gates," or at least "Borg."
Nothing to see here. It was all preordained.
KFG
"Kentucky Fried Gerbil?"
:)
Yeah, I get that a lot.
For what it's worth it's Kevin Fred Gavitt. Honest.
KFG
Third base.
KFG
Q.E.D.
KFG
Dear Sir,
.
Poster does not find his observation confusing. Indeed, he clearly understands enough C to pose the joke.
No, what he does is understand *mathmatics* to a degree that makes the joke. In other words, rather than being confused he is amused.
This indicates a certain intelligence as well.
Since you are confused by the humor of his little jest we can only asume. .
Oh, nevermind. It isn't worth it.
KFG
Please note that I did *not* say that America rid the world of pirates. I specifically said "these" pirates.
The time we are talking about here is 1795-1802ish. There were no steam ships on either side.
Piracy as a general principle has yet to collapse, only now the pirates use motor speed boats, faster than most law enforcement has, against pleasure sailing craft, generally owned by people rather well off.
Your last sentence is insightful, however. As Woody Guthrie once wrote:
"Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen."
KFG
It usually gets falsely attributed, but to Thomas Jefferson, for whom Pickney was in France, replacing. . . Thomas Jefferson.
They were interesting times.
KFG
You've never been divorced, have you?
Trust me. Criminal cases can only punish. Punishment has fixed limitations.
Civil cases can cause suffering ad infinitum.
KFG
It was Charles Pickney of South Carolina who said this in 1796, while serving as Ambassador to France. It was said in the context of trying to gain French cooperation in putting down the pirates.
For the rest of his life Pickney was irritated by the fact that he was misquoted as having said, "Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute," and so made sure that the *proper* quote would be his gravestone inscription.
"Millions for defence, not one *damned* cent for tribute."
(Emphasis mine)
See Bartlett's:
http://www.bartleby.com/100/690.37.html
KFG
Ah, but that would be too easy on them. They'd just end up dead that way.
Lawyers make them *suffer.* For a long, long time.
KFG
Confused the hell out me when I went looking for the Jargon File a few days ago. I kept going back to the site, over and over again, mind numb, reality falling apart, all that good stuff.
Bless you good sir for this link. You are humble and lovable.
Or something like that.
KFG
Or how about "The Linux Confederacy"?
KFG
No, no, not *that* kind of piracy. I mean *real* piracy. With ships, and cannon, and lots of a "Avast there"'s in it and stuff.
I think Doug Fairbanks might have something to do with it too, but I'm a little fuzzy on that part, so don't quote me.
Anyway, around the turn of the century, no, not *that* century. Ummmm, no, not that century either. 1700 to 1800. Various "states" in Northern Africa practiced actual piracy, capturing ships, ransoming the men on board or selling them into slavery if no ransom was paid.
Better yet, they could make a lot of money without any risk if they captured a few ships and then used the terror factor to demand *tribute* from other nations. The would be known as a "protection racket" if it were done on a smaller scale.
And it worked. Most of Europe caved in and payed the tribute. ( Not that the pirates didn't make the occasional "mistake" and sieze a lucrative looking prize anyway, but what the hell).
America held out. America had no Navy and no standing army. So they bloody well built them and went to war. In legitimate defense, of the world even (go figure). The modern Marine Corps was born out of this, and when the song mentions Tripoli this is the conflict it refers to.
The conflict lasted four years, but America, young, brash and still idealistic America, on its own, rid the world of these pirates.
Why am I going on about this?
Well, think about it, what is SCO doing right now?
Practicing true computer piracy, that's what. Demanding tribute on a claim that everyone knows is essentially bogus.
What do we do about it?
Well, an American congressman, in reaction to the demand for tribute from the pirates, made a statement that became the rallying cry in the war against the pirates of the Barbary Coast and an American policy for ever after ( well, at least until Reagan).
"Millions for defence. Not one damned penny for tribute."
That's the way to handle SCO. This is not a time to be "pragmatic" as the lawyer and the accountant see pragmatism.
At the very least SCO should be shunned and isolated. Compleat noncooperation throughout the entire industry. Ostracised in the literal sense. Banished to die in the wilderness. Call them Ishmael. SuSE shouldn't pull out of United Linux. SCO should be ejected.
But beyond that they should not be payed one single penny, not even to save millions in legal fees. They are pirates. They are demanding tribute AS pirates. They need to be crushed. Ultimately and completely.
Please. IBM, I implore you. Stay the course. Buy up what remains of their bloody legal corpse for fractions of a penny on the dollar *after* you have crushed them and reduced their value as a company to nil.
But not one damned penny for tribute.
KFG
Be sure to pipe to a file when you do that. If your brain is anything like mine that's going to be one *long* listing.
KFG
To tell you the truth a certain amount of serializing doesn't bother me. Some stories are just too complex to tell in a single book that can actually be sold and marketed these days.
I guess Harry Potter is as good an example as any of this. The legitimate story really is that long, and if the quality of the writting holds up, well, we're all winners for it.
It's the "franchising" that gets to me, particularly when the franchise is turned over to *other* writers.
C.J. Cherryh has created a few worlds and story lines that I simply adore, but she gets in over her head, calls in "help", just to cover a few chapters mind you, and then the whole thing just goes to hell.
Robert Asprin, in struggling with his worlds and his writer's block, has done much the same thing, ruining the worlds of Skeeve and Phule.
There isn't really anything that can be done about it, because it's simply good business from the point of view of both the publishers and author, but I don't have to like it.
KFG
In the above, second line the word "was" should be "saw."
The fact of the matter is that, yes, I *am* dyslexic, not just a bad speller and have to find a spelling/grammer checker that's "antidyslexic."
As you can see the word is a proper word either way around, and even the grammer parses, although the *meaning* becomes a bit strange.
I'll begin to believe we're making progress in AI when I see an antidyslexic spelling/grammer checker that actually works, since it will have to intuit "what I meant" from "what I said."
And of course in line 3 I added an extra "o" to god. That's just the batteries in my cordless keyboard going flat and it's repeating keys. Time to go to the store I guess. Spelling it with a lower case "g", however, was entirely intentional.
KFG
Not a movie trailer, but you're on the right track.
The first thought that popped into my head when I was the first "Countdown:Iraq" ad was:
"My good, they're going to be doing a "pregame" show of the war."
And that's exactly what it is. A pregame show, just like for the Superbowl or something.
Totally irrespective of the merits/demerits of the war itself the fact that we can, as a culture, promologate and tolerate such a thing is just mind boggling to me.
It makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
And it certainly makes some of the futures hypothesised by such as Heinlein, Niven and Huxley look that much more like prediction.
KFG
Ok, if you're having a bit of trouble because of the abstraction, let's try this.
A boulder isn't a boulder if you can put it in your pocket
A mountain isn't a mountain if you can step over it.
The difference between a mountain and a hill, and a boulder and a pebble, is ill defined, but still important
If someone says "go get me a pebble" you'll be bummed after spending days hauling 200 ton of granite back to him only to find out all he wanted was a bit of shot for his slingshot.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that all we're talking about here is an *arbitrary* naming convention strictly for the purposes of communication, so that someday someone, somewhere, says " I found a new planet today" and the person he says it to knows he didn't bring it home in his pocket. That's all.
It isn't sympathetic magic. We aren't dicking with *reality* here. Just names. Knowing something's name gives you no power over it.
KFG
Well yeah, that's true. I went out in the big blue room once and the place was full of hairy predatory monsters.
Now I just stay home with my cat.
KFG