If gas prices suddenly tripled, people would compensate (to some extent) by making fewer trips to the supermarket, go out to dinner less, order DVDs instead of drive to the google plex, and so on.
Sounds like fun, I can't imagine why this hasn't been done yet!!!
Poor baby. Daddy wanna take your T-bird away?
(Oddly enough, I do think that it's fun... car driving, like many forms of "convenience" is a guarantee of a dull, boring existence... if you work through the challenges of doing without it,
the life on the other side will almost certainly be an improvement.)
Do you honestly believe that a politician would be involved with legislation specifically designed to get people to stop doing things that they enjoy?
Yeah, how can you live without spending hours of day behind the wheel of a car?
I'd rather not get involved with predicting the behavior of politicians, but I note that there
are folks out there floating wild and crazy ideas like replacing the income tax with a carbon tax.
Not to mention the huge negative impact it would have on our economy.
Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say. What if we made a massive investment in
modernizing our rail transport? That wouldn't be "good for the economy"?
Look up the actual costs of car-based living in the United States some time...
the hours people spend trapped on highways, the money tied up in decaying equipment
(that might otherwise have been invested, eh?), the sheer number of lives lost
to the eminently predictable "accidents" (around 40,000 a year in the US)... you think
all of this is "good for the economy"?
There is no need for a drastic measure to reduce fuel consumption. None.
I would want to double-check the figures, but my guess is that I agree with you.
I'm not under the impression that car exhaust is destroying the planet (now, coal powered
electricity generation, on the other hand... and perhaps the predicted hordes of Chinese vehicles, without even catalytic converters...). One thing that might push me the other way is
that it might reduce our dependance on imports from the Middle East (or more accurately, as I understand it, on prices that are strongly influenced by exports from the Middle East), and thus reduce the incentives for the politicians that you mentioned to play games over there.
What we need to do is SLOWLY reduce our fuel usage.
Raise the requirements for fuel efficiency on the car manufacturers slowly every few years.
Personally, I think you're confused about the real problems with cars, but you are certainly not alone.
A car-based life-style destroys your health, and wastes your money and time all in the service of weakening your community.
This is obviously a rare case event, but even the rarest events have to happen to someone; luckily for me, I didn't get hurt. Even if you don't believe this story (and I'm not expecting you to after all, this is Slashdot), at least admit that it carries more weight than the "SUV flipping over because they are too wide and trip on guardrails" claim.
Okay, let's check my memory of Bradsher's "High and Mighty"
(2002). Here's some quotes, from pages 153-156 (trade paper,
2003 edition published by publicaffairs):
Federally funded tests have found that SUV drivers can face disaster if they strike a glancing
blow at high speed against a guardrail with a top edge at 26 inches or lower. The rail can either
"trip" the vehicle, causing it to roll over, or may even fail to keep the SUV on the road at all.
Even when guardrails are high enough to prevent vehicles from
going over the top, their design poses special risks for SUVs.
The problem, once again, is that SUVs are designed for off-road
driving and have the wheels placed differently from car wheels.
The SUV's front wheels are close to the front of the vehicle with
very little of the vehicle's structure in front of them so that
they can climb up and over large rocks, or handle the transition
from flat ground to a steep incline.
The problem, according to researchers at the Texas Transportation
Institute, is that guradrails work best when they interact with
a vehicle's metal structure. Problems arise when one of a
vehicle's wheels gets far enough under the guardrail to snag the
pillar holding up the rail. Since the pillars are virtually
unbreakable, a snagged wheel either rips off or, if it stays on,
achors that corner of the vehicle to the pillar while the rest of
the vehicle swings around. In both cases, a rollover is likely.
SUVs were involved in fatal crashes with guardrails at a rate 20
percent higher than the typical vehicle. That is a surprisingly
high number, because heavier vehicles usually protect their
occupants better in guardrail crashes...
SUV design is also changing in ways that may make this problem
worse, not better. To reduce the risk of rollovers during
everyday driving and improve overall vehicle stability,
automakers have been mounting SUV wheels wider on new models. On
some of the best-selling new models, like the 2002 Ford Explorer
and Chevrolet vehicle, with very little metal in front of them.
So there you have it. I'd only give myself a B for memory on
this one, I was pretty close, but not dead-on -- not too bad for
a book I haven't looked at in years, I suppose.
In any case, the second point stands: the existance of a technical definition doesn't obviate the vernacular definition, and "wide wheelbase" (as opposed to "long wheelbase") is a pretty common term.
That would be "long wheelbase" and "wide track", FWIW.
Yes, "wide track width" appears to be the technical term in the automotive engineering world.
You obviously don't know the definition of wheelbase. FYI, it's the distance betweem the centerlines of the front and rear axles.
The definition on Wikipedia disagrees with you: "In automobiles, the wheelbase is the distance between the center of the front wheel, and the center of the rear wheel."; and also the phrase "wide wheelbase" is extremely common.
Eeek. I mis-read the line I just quoted, it in fact does agree with you. My apologies.
In any case, the second point stands: the existance of a technical definition doesn't obviate the vernacular definition, and "wide wheelbase" (as opposed to "long wheelbase") is a pretty common term.
If gas prices suddenly tripled, people would compensate (to some extent) by making fewer trips to the supermarket, go out to dinner less, order DVDs instead of drive to the google plex, and so on.
This is not 100%. As this world moves in the direction of technologically isolating people (working with a computer instead of a person, telecommuting, DVD's delivered, etc), people will FIND a reason to go out and be around other people (regardless of cost). It is the the High Tech, High Touch principal (people NEED human interaction).
I largely agree with you -- and I might add I neglected to add "they would carpool to work more".
And I would add that I wish people would get over the idea the only way to live life is sealed up
in little metal cages isolated from social interactions with the rest of the citizenry.
(I have a suspicion that this is one of the reasons that the country is falling apart:
People living in urban areas, using public transit, have a stronger sense of group identity,
a visceral grasp that the other people really are people. The United States
underwent a radical change in the post-car suburban era, and maybe that's part of the
result.)
You obviously don't know the definition of wheelbase. FYI, it's the distance betweem the centerlines of the front and rear axles.
The definition on Wikipedia disagrees with you: "In automobiles, the wheelbase is the distance between the center of the front wheel, and the center of the rear wheel."; and also the phrase "wide wheelbase" is extremely common.
Also, your contention that vehicles flip over due to snagging on guard rails makes no sense. Can you point to any online sources that support your assumption?
It's discussed in the book "High and MIghty" by Keith Bradsher. If I get a chance maybe I'll do some web searches for you later (but you might try to do a few yourself, you know).
The vast majority of cities in North America (I'm including Canada here) are designed around driving.
The count of numbers of "cities" matters less than the percentage of population living in post-car cities
or Real Places (as I tend to think of them). You're certainly correct that a lot of people have got themselves stuck in the 'burbs, but the percentage might only be as much as 50% or so, depending on where you draw the boundaries (e.g. a big chunk of the US population is supposed to be in the New York "tri-state" area, much of which has car-alternatives).
If we did a poll of/. users, I bet that the majority don't have a store within reasonable walking distance of their house that carries more than the basic essentials. (Sure you CAN walk to your local grocery store, but could you really do it all the time?)
All right, now you're talking about *time-efficiency* which is different from capability.
There's a peculiar illusion about car-usage by the way, where most people think it's a lot
faster than it really is... e.g. a trip of a few miles inside of San Francisco takes about the
same amount of time to drive as it does to bike it, once you add in all the time spent scoping for parking, sitting at lights, and so on...
Just as a thought experiment, try to imagine a practical alternative to driving to the supermarket.
My claim would be that most people could do it with a bike *and* a bike-trailer.
More over, a house in suburbia is seen by enough people as sort of a birthright and enough people are just generally hostile to the idea of living in higher urban density areas even though it's really the only way to really reduce dependency on cars.
Well, you see, it's rumored that there are some non-white people in them there satantic cities.
(I note with some grim amusement, a certain panic afflicting surbubia over the thought of
things like houses packed full of salvadorean immigrants -- white flight, denied!).
People talk about transit which doesn't work well in suburbia because the spread out population means lots of buses that are mostly empty or else living too far from the bus routes for the bus to be useful.
It's a tough one all right. Anyone who looks at the problem realizes that the 'burbs are fucked by
their zoning regulations, but you can't convince the 'burbians of that. At least not yet.
Note though, that in general, public transit gets better the more people who are using it: there's a virtuous circle, it's easier to justify more buses, and more people use them, because there are more of them, and you don't have to wait as long, etc. It would not seem like that should be such an insanely difficult problem to crack... though admittedly I would not say it has been, in any 'burb that I'm familiar with.
Home delivery solves the problem to some degree, but you really can't organize cities around the idea of home delivery.
Tell that to Manhatten.
So basically, people HAVE to drive.
Nah, they think they have to drive. I would claim that anyone who's sufficiently motivated
can figure out ways to radically reduce or eliminate car driving from their lives (I'm down to a half-interest in a car that I hardly ever drive, myself). It might involve some mental flexibility to realize that if you pay more in rent and less in car payments your life will be better (more physical and social activity), but I don't think it's impossible for folks to get to that point.
Either the culture needs to change, and in some places that seems to be starting, or automobile efficiency needs to be greatly improved.
Actually, improving car mileage doesn't really do all that much for us. Americans obssess about the pollution coming out of car
This isn't directly criticizing you or the parent comment, as I definitely agree with you that SUVs and other large, low-MPG vehicles are reasonable vehicles for some people.
Nope. Minivans, possibly, but not SUVs. You need to look into this a little more: SUVs were
a completely insane fad, a candidate for a new edition of the "Madness of Crowds".
They're good for almost exactly nothing.--
(Myself, I wouldn't even want to use one as a skiing vehicle -- if I slide off into a ditch, I'd rather stay up-right.)
Hey guys: I have an idea: how about you try getting a vehicle sized for typical usage, rather than try to cover the entire range?
Then when you do something unusual, you rent something bigger.
Also: SUVs suck for hauling. A mini-van yes, but an SUV no.
And they don't mind you publicising that fact on the Internet? I'm British, but I would be horrified if someone published the fact that I'm a closet Blair (and, therefore, Bush) fanatic! I'd end up being killed!
He must not live in the San Francisco Bay area.
The rest of the country isn't quite there yet... give them a few months.
By this time next year you're going to see amazing amounts of denial and/or
denials on the subject. "Well, of course, I was never really one of
those Bush supporters."
Bush is the new Nixon.
For generations to come, Republicans will be saying "But he's not as bad as Dubya!"
As something of a tangent, the reason that gas taxes are a non-solution is that the demand is inelastic because the basic infrastructure of the country forces the existing level of consumption.
This can't possibly be right. Try looking up "traffic evaporation" some time. Driving has an illusion of being "free" -- the roads aren't toll roads, gas prices are kept cheap -- yes, even now, no one thinks much about the per-trip risk of crashes: so most of the costs seem like sunk, fixed costs -- so people do a lot more of it than they might if they had to pay the actual costs of a trip on every trip.
If gas prices suddenly tripled, people would compensate (to some extent) by making fewer trips to the supermarket, go out to dinner less, order DVDs instead of drive to the google plex, and so on.
Yes, it would take some time for them to try to find work closer to home (or vice-versa), to bug their local government to fix public transport, to put in better bicycling facilities, and so on... but that's not the only ways to compensate.
I won't debate you as I can't win on mpg. However on safty... that depends on whose safty you're talking about. Minivans (and most SUVs) are pretty darn safe to the occupents of the vehicle as long as they are driven properly.
Actually, you're pretty much wrong... People who buy SUVs tend to say one of the reasons is "safety", but that doesn't show up on the stats. SUVs are really badly designed in a lot of ways (apparently the syndrome is something like: in order to keep SUVs from tending to flip over, they need wide wheel bases that push the wheels out sideways so that they tend to snag on the posts of guardrails, and hence flip over more easily....).
Minivans, on the other hand, may very well be "safer", I don't know what the stats show, but I've at least heard that they're better than SUVs.
(I'm politely ignoring your hedge "as long as they're driven properly". No one plans on "having an accident". Arguably, part of the problem with SUVs is psychological: people think they're invulnerable inside them, so they drive worse.)
We keep hearing as much about the cost in $$$ as we do about the cost in lives. I lived through Viet Nam, and remember hearing about the cost in lives, but almost nothing about the cost in $$$. Yet I also keep hearing about our troops be under/improperly equipped in Iraq, and that we're running the War on-the-cheap. Yet it's so expensive.
If I'm inclined to talk about the price in money, it's solely because
Republicans have this odd reputation as "fiscal conservatives",
and instead they appear to be bankrupting the country.
As for why "war on the cheap" would be expensive -- a lot of the tricks the
US likes to use these days are actually quite expensive, e.g. cruise missles.
If you try to substitute for ground troops with things like cruise missles,
what do you think would happen?
"Even inside the US, there were massive protests (largely unreported by the media) and people pointing this out."
Inside the US, the massive protests prior to and during the Iraq war have been all over the media. Are you referring to these, or something else?
The protest in San Francisco was one of the largest, densest gatherings of human beings I've ever seen in the city -- far larger than the annual Pride parade, for example.
The "San Francisco Chronicle" -- owned by the Hearst Corporation, despite the "San Francisco" in the name -- published ridiculously low estimates of the numbers of people who attended this protest, claiming to have figured it out scientifically working off of a aerial photos. If you actually study the photo that they used closely though,
you can tell that it was taken near the end of the protest march, when the crowd was already breaking up,
to filter their way over to the speaches at the Civic Center, or just to head home. I'm pretty sure I was sitting in
a coffee house a few blocks off the route when they snapped that photo.
I would call this a little worse than "under-reported" myself, I would say "falsely reported".
(You know, it's not like conservatives don't have an idea or two in their heads, but you wouldn't know it
from the current crop of Bush Regime apologists... if you guys get any further out of touch with reality you're
going to turn into extras on Gilligan's Island reruns.)
I'm not really sure anything in CP/M qualifies as massively inventive. Kildall's CP/M became popular not because it was inventive, but because it was there. It was a simple program loader with a very small library accessable to loaded applications. Many of the fundamentals in CP/M went back to libraries that came with the Intel test rig he was programming.
The fact that it was there at all was innovative. There was a time when serious computer professionals didn't think anything useful could be done with those toy "microprocessor" chips. If Kildall had patented it according to today's
standard legal practice, he would've tried to get a patent for "doing something useful with a microprocessor".
One of the things that was unique about CP/M -- and I would guess it was innovative -- was that it had some concept of device independance. It wasn't designed for a monoculture of a single machine architecture.
Yes, many aspects of it were copied into QD-OS (better known today as MSDOS), but these were compatibility hacks rather than functionality. Things like "System call 5 writes a character to the console" (or something, I forget which call did that.) FAT was copied too, but FAT is, frankly, obvious.
Uh... do you realize that the "Q-DOS" that Gates bought to repackage as PCDOS/MSDOS turned out to have been ripped off from CP/M? It was essentially an illegal fork of the code... that was proven in court later, you might want to try some web searches on this.
Kildall would probably have disagreed with you anyway. The guy was a programmer through and through. Despite all the anecdotes, the major reason IBM didn't have CP/M86 for the PC was because Kildall wasn't that interested in it as a project.
Actually, I regard that as just another anecdote. I've heard that he "didn't seem enthusiastic about it" or some such... but I don't think there's any way, realistically, that any of us can know what he might have said or done that might
have have given the IBM guys that impression.
Had he been so, it would have been released a year or two prior, and Seattle Computing's QD-OS wouldn't have been written because the need for it would have been absent. If he'd been interested, when the IBM people knocked on his door, they'd have been treated as any other OEM, rather than a group needing an entirely new product.
Once again, I think your perception of the history on this sounds somewhat off.
Re:Comment on Fedora in general.
on
Fedora Linux
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· Score: 1
cerelib wrote:
If the class were to study in detail the virtual memory system for the Linux kernel, would that compromise your ability to work on the virtual memory of another commercial operating system like Windows, OS X, VxWorks, or AIX?
No.
While most people might say 'no', the companies that own those operating systems might think otherwise.
(A) I've never heard of a case like this, ever. (B) They can think what they like, they'd still be wrong --
if a company refuses to hire you for a reason this stupid, you wouldn't want to work for them for very long any way.
Look at the recent headlines for the SCO vs IBM case. The current controversy is whether or not IBM's Linux developers had copies of AIX source code on their workstations.
It goes the other way. If you have access to proprietary crap, than you're a liability to a free software project, but not the other way around. Do you get it? Everyone has access to the free software, that's the point.
As far as legalties go, there is no way you can prove to anyone that you've never peeked at some GPL code.
Debian equivalences for rpm commands
on
Fedora Linux
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· Score: 1
Here's one "Rosetta Stone" (that talks up "wajig", which I'm not familiar with, though it looks pretty good):
There's a more complete table of apt vs. rpm commands in Krafft's "The Debian System" (No Starch Press).
By the way, Kfrafft, like most Debian folks, would tell you that the other distributions have caught up as far
as package management software goes, but still lack Debian's meticulous adherence to Policy.
Re:Comment on Fedora in general.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
cerelib (903469) wrote:
Your professor probably shouldn't be basing the curriculum around a GPL kernel. Something like that could affect your future job possibilities. I am guessing your professor picked the 2.4 kernel because it seems out of date, but that is not really important when it comes to legal matters like the GPL. It seems like concentrating on a more open kernel like a BSD would be a safer bet. Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but that seems rather careless on the part of your professor.
Yeah, okay, consider yourself corrected. You're completely wrong in every detail.
Can you explain where you encountered FUD of this magnitude?
Posting it on another project's developer mailing list is trolling.
Oh, like when Linus posted about Linux on the Minix list?
That'a an excellent example. When Linux first went trolling for
Minix people, he carefully posted a very humble-sounding, polite
message (the sort of thing you don't hear from him too often these days).
The Mark Shuttleworth message leads off with a heavy political jab at Novell
that I would guess is of somewhat dubious factual accuracy -- at least
I don't know quite what he's talking about:
Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent
framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the
community.
That sounds to me like the Bruce Perens take
on Novell's announcements, it may even be the groklaw take, it's not clear to
me that it's what Novell was really saying (at a guess, they didn't realize what they were
getting into, as weird as that sounds -- maybe they've been reading slashdot, and they figured
that TLAs like GPL/FSF/GNU were all just symptoms of silly "zealotry").
Anyway, all the posturing that everyone is doing about how Shuttleworth has violated some
great unspoken covenant or some such, it all comes down to the tone of what he said.
Imagine if he had made it short, made it seem folksy, and casual: then this great issue would
just evaporate.
(My favorite quote from the Groklaw article: "As for Novell, if history means anything, it will end up Microsoft roadkill.
It's so funny to me that nobody ever remembers what comes *after* the Embrace.".)
If China is "bad", and the USA trades with her, that makes the USA worse than China?
That's not a case I have any interest in advancing, but if I were going to I would point
out that it's been a long time since China has invaded another country. On the other hand,
it sure would be nice if they'd let Tibet go, eh?
That being said, no, I don't think China should have this status.
Well, we're agreed on something then. It's one of the odder quirks of the
American political scene, that "conservatives" are so gung ho about "globalization" (i.e.
providing financial support to the world's largest communist dictatorship).
I mean, how do get from "Cuba => embargo" to "China => 'we love you!'"?
(But anyway, I've been looking around for photos of the annual Chinese Torture and Imperialism celebration,
but I haven't turned up any. Got links?)
You think it's the fault of the left that China has most-favored nation trading status with the United States?
Yes:
On May 19, President Clinton announced that he would be renewing China's trading privileges in spite of its human rights record, and against the wishes of over sixty percent of Americans who are opposed to trading with the oppressive communist regime.
Very good Anonymous, you can read. Just not very well. Try looking down a tad further:
Ironically, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on June 3, 1989, the day President Bush was to inform Congress of his decision to renew MFN for the PRC.
China has had MFN status for several decades now... you can't pin it on Clinton alone.
(And yeah, the equation of "Democrats" and "Leftists" is pretty weak, but whatever.)
Why are the Chinese so lauded by the leftist frauds? The very things the leftists belligerently accuse the USA of-- torture, imperialism, corporatism-- those are openly celebrated in China.
Why are self-professed "rightists" so out of touch with reality, half of the time?
You think it's the fault of the left that China has most-favored nation trading status with the United States?
(News flash: Walmart is now classifed as left-wing).
In point of fact, the left has been complaining for some time about chinese sweatshops.
Which is not to say that the result is uninteresting, but the idea that you're going to pop gadgets based on this technology inside of MRI machines is a little ahead of it's time.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor baby. Daddy wanna take your T-bird away?
(Oddly enough, I do think that it's fun... car driving, like many forms of "convenience" is a guarantee of a dull, boring existence... if you work through the challenges of doing without it, the life on the other side will almost certainly be an improvement.)
Yeah, how can you live without spending hours of day behind the wheel of a car?
I'd rather not get involved with predicting the behavior of politicians, but I note that there are folks out there floating wild and crazy ideas like replacing the income tax with a carbon tax.
Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say. What if we made a massive investment in modernizing our rail transport? That wouldn't be "good for the economy"? Look up the actual costs of car-based living in the United States some time... the hours people spend trapped on highways, the money tied up in decaying equipment (that might otherwise have been invested, eh?), the sheer number of lives lost to the eminently predictable "accidents" (around 40,000 a year in the US)... you think all of this is "good for the economy"?
I would want to double-check the figures, but my guess is that I agree with you. I'm not under the impression that car exhaust is destroying the planet (now, coal powered electricity generation, on the other hand... and perhaps the predicted hordes of Chinese vehicles, without even catalytic converters...). One thing that might push me the other way is that it might reduce our dependance on imports from the Middle East (or more accurately, as I understand it, on prices that are strongly influenced by exports from the Middle East), and thus reduce the incentives for the politicians that you mentioned to play games over there.
Personally, I think you're confused about the real problems with cars, but you are certainly not alone.
A car-based life-style destroys your health, and wastes your money and time all in the service of weakening your community.
Okay, let's check my memory of Bradsher's "High and Mighty" (2002). Here's some quotes, from pages 153-156 (trade paper, 2003 edition published by publicaffairs):
So there you have it. I'd only give myself a B for memory on this one, I was pretty close, but not dead-on -- not too bad for a book I haven't looked at in years, I suppose.
Yes, "wide track width" appears to be the technical term in the automotive engineering world.
Eeek. I mis-read the line I just quoted, it in fact does agree with you. My apologies.
In any case, the second point stands: the existance of a technical definition doesn't obviate the vernacular definition, and "wide wheelbase" (as opposed to "long wheelbase") is a pretty common term.
I largely agree with you -- and I might add I neglected to add "they would carpool to work more".
And I would add that I wish people would get over the idea the only way to live life is sealed up in little metal cages isolated from social interactions with the rest of the citizenry.
(I have a suspicion that this is one of the reasons that the country is falling apart: People living in urban areas, using public transit, have a stronger sense of group identity, a visceral grasp that the other people really are people. The United States underwent a radical change in the post-car suburban era, and maybe that's part of the result.)
The definition on Wikipedia disagrees with you: "In automobiles, the wheelbase is the distance between the center of the front wheel, and the center of the rear wheel."; and also the phrase "wide wheelbase" is extremely common.
It's discussed in the book "High and MIghty" by Keith Bradsher. If I get a chance maybe I'll do some web searches for you later (but you might try to do a few yourself, you know).
The count of numbers of "cities" matters less than the percentage of population living in post-car cities or Real Places (as I tend to think of them). You're certainly correct that a lot of people have got themselves stuck in the 'burbs, but the percentage might only be as much as 50% or so, depending on where you draw the boundaries (e.g. a big chunk of the US population is supposed to be in the New York "tri-state" area, much of which has car-alternatives).
All right, now you're talking about *time-efficiency* which is different from capability. There's a peculiar illusion about car-usage by the way, where most people think it's a lot faster than it really is... e.g. a trip of a few miles inside of San Francisco takes about the same amount of time to drive as it does to bike it, once you add in all the time spent scoping for parking, sitting at lights, and so on...
Just as a thought experiment, try to imagine a practical alternative to driving to the supermarket. My claim would be that most people could do it with a bike *and* a bike-trailer.
Well, you see, it's rumored that there are some non-white people in them there satantic cities. (I note with some grim amusement, a certain panic afflicting surbubia over the thought of things like houses packed full of salvadorean immigrants -- white flight, denied!).
It's a tough one all right. Anyone who looks at the problem realizes that the 'burbs are fucked by their zoning regulations, but you can't convince the 'burbians of that. At least not yet.
Note though, that in general, public transit gets better the more people who are using it: there's a virtuous circle, it's easier to justify more buses, and more people use them, because there are more of them, and you don't have to wait as long, etc. It would not seem like that should be such an insanely difficult problem to crack... though admittedly I would not say it has been, in any 'burb that I'm familiar with.
Tell that to Manhatten.
Nah, they think they have to drive. I would claim that anyone who's sufficiently motivated can figure out ways to radically reduce or eliminate car driving from their lives (I'm down to a half-interest in a car that I hardly ever drive, myself). It might involve some mental flexibility to realize that if you pay more in rent and less in car payments your life will be better (more physical and social activity), but I don't think it's impossible for folks to get to that point.
Actually, improving car mileage doesn't really do all that much for us. Americans obssess about the pollution coming out of car
Nope. Minivans, possibly, but not SUVs. You need to look into this a little more: SUVs were a completely insane fad, a candidate for a new edition of the "Madness of Crowds". They're good for almost exactly nothing.--
(Myself, I wouldn't even want to use one as a skiing vehicle -- if I slide off into a ditch, I'd rather stay up-right.)
Also: SUVs suck for hauling. A mini-van yes, but an SUV no.
He must not live in the San Francisco Bay area.
The rest of the country isn't quite there yet... give them a few months. By this time next year you're going to see amazing amounts of denial and/or denials on the subject. "Well, of course, I was never really one of those Bush supporters."
Bush is the new Nixon. For generations to come, Republicans will be saying "But he's not as bad as Dubya!"
This can't possibly be right. Try looking up "traffic evaporation" some time. Driving has an illusion of being "free" -- the roads aren't toll roads, gas prices are kept cheap -- yes, even now, no one thinks much about the per-trip risk of crashes: so most of the costs seem like sunk, fixed costs -- so people do a lot more of it than they might if they had to pay the actual costs of a trip on every trip.
If gas prices suddenly tripled, people would compensate (to some extent) by making fewer trips to the supermarket, go out to dinner less, order DVDs instead of drive to the google plex, and so on.
Yes, it would take some time for them to try to find work closer to home (or vice-versa), to bug their local government to fix public transport, to put in better bicycling facilities, and so on... but that's not the only ways to compensate.
Actually, you're pretty much wrong... People who buy SUVs tend to say one of the reasons is "safety", but that doesn't show up on the stats. SUVs are really badly designed in a lot of ways (apparently the syndrome is something like: in order to keep SUVs from tending to flip over, they need wide wheel bases that push the wheels out sideways so that they tend to snag on the posts of guardrails, and hence flip over more easily....).
Minivans, on the other hand, may very well be "safer", I don't know what the stats show, but I've at least heard that they're better than SUVs.
(I'm politely ignoring your hedge "as long as they're driven properly". No one plans on "having an accident". Arguably, part of the problem with SUVs is psychological: people think they're invulnerable inside them, so they drive worse.)
If I'm inclined to talk about the price in money, it's solely because Republicans have this odd reputation as "fiscal conservatives", and instead they appear to be bankrupting the country.
As for why "war on the cheap" would be expensive -- a lot of the tricks the US likes to use these days are actually quite expensive, e.g. cruise missles. If you try to substitute for ground troops with things like cruise missles, what do you think would happen?
The protest in San Francisco was one of the largest, densest gatherings of human beings I've ever seen in the city -- far larger than the annual Pride parade, for example.
The "San Francisco Chronicle" -- owned by the Hearst Corporation, despite the "San Francisco" in the name -- published ridiculously low estimates of the numbers of people who attended this protest, claiming to have figured it out scientifically working off of a aerial photos. If you actually study the photo that they used closely though, you can tell that it was taken near the end of the protest march, when the crowd was already breaking up, to filter their way over to the speaches at the Civic Center, or just to head home. I'm pretty sure I was sitting in a coffee house a few blocks off the route when they snapped that photo.
I would call this a little worse than "under-reported" myself, I would say "falsely reported".
(You know, it's not like conservatives don't have an idea or two in their heads, but you wouldn't know it from the current crop of Bush Regime apologists... if you guys get any further out of touch with reality you're going to turn into extras on Gilligan's Island reruns.)
Yeah, I was just wondering "How did this get through my Katz filter?"
Thankfully, my sappy-new-movie-filter will save me from seeing the subject of this story.
The fact that it was there at all was innovative. There was a time when serious computer professionals didn't think anything useful could be done with those toy "microprocessor" chips. If Kildall had patented it according to today's standard legal practice, he would've tried to get a patent for "doing something useful with a microprocessor".
One of the things that was unique about CP/M -- and I would guess it was innovative -- was that it had some concept of device independance. It wasn't designed for a monoculture of a single machine architecture.
Uh... do you realize that the "Q-DOS" that Gates bought to repackage as PCDOS/MSDOS turned out to have been ripped off from CP/M? It was essentially an illegal fork of the code... that was proven in court later, you might want to try some web searches on this.
Actually, I regard that as just another anecdote. I've heard that he "didn't seem enthusiastic about it" or some such... but I don't think there's any way, realistically, that any of us can know what he might have said or done that might have have given the IBM guys that impression.
Once again, I think your perception of the history on this sounds somewhat off.
No.
(A) I've never heard of a case like this, ever. (B) They can think what they like, they'd still be wrong -- if a company refuses to hire you for a reason this stupid, you wouldn't want to work for them for very long any way.
It goes the other way. If you have access to proprietary crap, than you're a liability to a free software project, but not the other way around. Do you get it? Everyone has access to the free software, that's the point. As far as legalties go, there is no way you can prove to anyone that you've never peeked at some GPL code.
rpm, apt-get, wajig
There's a more complete table of apt vs. rpm commands in Krafft's "The Debian System" (No Starch Press).
By the way, Kfrafft, like most Debian folks, would tell you that the other distributions have caught up as far as package management software goes, but still lack Debian's meticulous adherence to Policy.
Yeah, okay, consider yourself corrected. You're completely wrong in every detail.
Can you explain where you encountered FUD of this magnitude?
(The GPL is not viral, but stupidity is.)
That'a an excellent example. When Linux first went trolling for Minix people, he carefully posted a very humble-sounding, polite message (the sort of thing you don't hear from him too often these days).
The Mark Shuttleworth message leads off with a heavy political jab at Novell that I would guess is of somewhat dubious factual accuracy -- at least I don't know quite what he's talking about:
That sounds to me like the Bruce Perens take on Novell's announcements, it may even be the groklaw take, it's not clear to me that it's what Novell was really saying (at a guess, they didn't realize what they were getting into, as weird as that sounds -- maybe they've been reading slashdot, and they figured that TLAs like GPL/FSF/GNU were all just symptoms of silly "zealotry").
Anyway, all the posturing that everyone is doing about how Shuttleworth has violated some great unspoken covenant or some such, it all comes down to the tone of what he said. Imagine if he had made it short, made it seem folksy, and casual: then this great issue would just evaporate.
(My favorite quote from the Groklaw article: "As for Novell, if history means anything, it will end up Microsoft roadkill. It's so funny to me that nobody ever remembers what comes *after* the Embrace.".)
That's not a case I have any interest in advancing, but if I were going to I would point out that it's been a long time since China has invaded another country. On the other hand, it sure would be nice if they'd let Tibet go, eh?
Well, we're agreed on something then. It's one of the odder quirks of the American political scene, that "conservatives" are so gung ho about "globalization" (i.e. providing financial support to the world's largest communist dictatorship). I mean, how do get from "Cuba => embargo" to "China => 'we love you!'"?
(But anyway, I've been looking around for photos of the annual Chinese Torture and Imperialism celebration, but I haven't turned up any. Got links?)
Very good Anonymous, you can read. Just not very well. Try looking down a tad further:
China has had MFN status for several decades now... you can't pin it on Clinton alone.
(And yeah, the equation of "Democrats" and "Leftists" is pretty weak, but whatever.)
Keeanu Reeves.
(I guess I'll skip the obvious Dubya joke.)
Why are self-professed "rightists" so out of touch with reality, half of the time?
You think it's the fault of the left that China has most-favored nation trading status with the United States? (News flash: Walmart is now classifed as left-wing).
In point of fact, the left has been complaining for some time about chinese sweatshops.
(And "openly celebrated"? Huh?).
Of course there are, but this isn't one of them.
Which is not to say that the result is uninteresting, but the idea that you're going to pop gadgets based on this technology inside of MRI machines is a little ahead of it's time.