Development and environmentally-sensitive areas are by far the minority of the reasons why the money isn't being spent, and have nothing to do with why a freeway with a rapidly decaying surface isn't being repaved. It has to do more with things like this, when $3.3 billion in gasoline tax revenue was used for general fund projects this year alone. Davis did the same thing on a fairly regular basis, as did Wilson. Even when Prop 42 was passed by California voters, mandating gasoline taxes be used solely for road projects, Sacramento got around that by "borrowing" the funds for purposes of balancing the budget, rather than cutting their projects.
I know that freeway construction is not cheap, nor is it always easy, but the simple fact that California is still growing rapidly cannot be ignored. We either accept the fact that California has a strong car culture and spend the money on new freeways or surface rail projects (I'm still ticked that the light rail project to link several cities in Orange County was hacked almost to death), or we deal with the gridlock.
Riverside County is a perfect example of this, where the 91 freeway is the primary artery into Orange County and significant parts of Los Angeles County. They've recently completed the process of adding a lane in each direction (for a total, IIRC, of four lanes, plus the carpool/toll lanes) through a combination of adding a few feet to each side and adjusting lane widths, but that's being done by a cooperation of the Orange County Transit Agency and Riverside County and cost several million dollars. However, even then the road is still locked up every morning, and plans exist for FIFTY THOUSAND additional homes to be built there in the next few years, with permits for nearly 20,000 already in hand. That's going to put tens of thousands more cars on those freeways, many of them on the 91, and the jobs are still mostly not in Riverside. They're off in Orange and LA Counties, meaning the still-crunched 91 and the often-jammed 15 freeways, not to mention the 215, 60, 10, and 71 (which is itself in bad shape from routing three lanes of traffic into one because of a widening project that never seems to end), will continue to be overfilled.
The most reasonable solution I've seen so far is double-decking the freeway, but a lot of people don't like it because of what they saw after the Loma Prieta earthquake when sections of the upper Nimitz Freeway collapsed onto the lower level. Others don't like it because of cost concerns. But it's the least expensive way to handle things without taking surrounding land through eminent domain for ever-widening freeways, some of which would have to reach eight or ten lanes in each direction for a permanently smooth traffic flow.
At the very least, let's see some of the interchanges redesigned. The 101/405 and 5/10/60 interchanges are badly in need of a complete rebuild. They did this at the 5/22/57 interchange in Orange County (not-so-affectionately known as the Orange Crush Interchange) and it really improved things by smoothing the flow, making the interchange more intuitive, and adding capacity to the individual interchanges that comprise the Crush. It took time and money to do, but when it opened, drivers were saving 10-15 minutes each way through a mere 2-3 miles of traffic.
However, without the money from the gasoline taxes, there's really not much that can be done. The 91 project I mentioned cost a few million dollars and was spent by local governments with the permission of CalTrans. Local governments cannot, by and large, afford the scale of costs necessary for the overhaul needed of the public highway system. That money should be coming from the coffers of the state containing the gasoline taxes that we pay that are supposed to be used for this kind of thing in the first place.
I won't be surprised if this kind of thing leads to a ballot initiat
Yeah, it happens at that time, but that can happen anywhere. Jams at that hour are almost always a result of CalTrans work or a fatal accident. For the most part, traffic jams run from 6am to 9:30am in the morning and 4pm to 7pm in the afternoons (plus or minus 30 minutes for all times). The CHP on some occasions will allow open use of the carpool lanes, but usually even in construction zones where it's reduced from four or five non-carpool lanes to one, they don't allow it.
I wish taxes on gas were used for maintaining the roads. If they were, we wouldn't have the severe congestion that gives California such a bad name in terms of traffic.
Here's what's happening in a nutshell:
A group of people decided that they wanted to get Californians to start using public transportation and not use their cars for so many things. So they decided to stop building freeways, on the hypothesis that if there was no more room on the freeways, people would stop coming to California. This goes back to Gov. Jerry Brown, and the idea failed miserably.
Next, they decided to build carpool lanes, which would encourage people to, if not taking public transportation, at least get a few more people in the same car. Wrong again. They don't even have a decent state-wide model for carpool lanes: in SoCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes 24 hours a day. In NorCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes only during normal rush-hour traffic, and are normal lanes otherwise. Hence, some freeways have had their capacity increased by anywhere from 20% to 50%, and the lanes are not usable by the vast majority of drivers.
So then they jacked up gas tax rates, promising to build more freeways and add lanes to the congested parts (except then governors, Democrat and Republican, including Schwarzeneggar, started "borrowing" the funds from the gas tax to pay for general fund stuff, and the roads further deteriorated and failed to get expanded). The increases was also allegedly to encourage people to buy smaller vehicles that would be more fuel efficient and cause less wear and tear on the roads. Despite past measures that had largely failed because the California car culture is basically impossible to buck, people actually did buy newer, fuel-efficient cars (but still drive them alone), and gas tax revenues (and hence funding for pet projects that have nothing to do with the roads) went down.
So now they're in a corner. How do they get the taxes back? Why, based on mileage, of course! And with a GPS unit, they can also see when you go over the speed limit or perhaps lane change too often and send you automatic tickets or tax your auto insurance (who may also get a report on your driving habits and thus raise the rates on their own). This isn't part of the proposal *yet*, but I can imagine someone is thinking it.
They're also talking about watching when you're using certain high-use roads, and increase the tax based on congestion, so if you go to work on the 5 through Los Angeles or Orange County at 7:45am, then you get an extra tax because you're helping to cause slow traffic. You know what the really ironic thing is? The people behind this idea are almost exactly the same people who were yelling about how toll roads were going to punish the poor people who couldn't afford them, and now they've come up with a method to not only inflict what are essentially tolls, but to inflict them potentially on every single public road and street in the state.
(Wow, that's a big nutshell. I wonder if there's a walnut in there.)
There's an option on the same tab that allows you to block downloading or installing that turns off Automatic Updates completely. You can then turn off the warning about AU being off in the Security Center, or you can turn off the services for Security Center and Automatic Updates altogether.
Nader's not a green. He's a guy who simply enjoys grabbing just as much camera time as he can get, and the news networks are usually happy to provide it. He has, unfortunately, given a very bad image in the US to true Greens.
It may well have been one impatient user. There's at least one in every company I've ever been at. Usually we just chuckle at them behind their backs and do what we can to make sure proper licensing procedures are followed (including changing admin passwords where necessary and hoarding new software behind locked doors) when there's no one willing to fire the person. The company ends up paying for the software in most cases as it's supposed to, but if an audit were ever done, a few software keys wouldn't quite match up even though the counts would be roughly correct.
THe government cannot "easily" remove those protections. Certain 'reasonable' limitations can be made, but these are usually applied to people here for short trips, or on other temporary visas. Reading through the Constitution, it can be clearly seen where it requires citizenship for a particular right; just about all other rights refer to "the people" or "the states" in general, and have been decided by the courts to refer to any person (whether citizen or not) or any state government under its jurisdiction.
Your position about what is disgusting makes more sense now. I do believe strongly in the sovereignty of a nation's laws, though I do believe that it is okay for another state to denounce another's law. There are limits to this, but most countries are fairly reasonable about their laws, so the need for outside interference on that basis is fairly rare, and even then usually consists of trade sanctions or other economic or political barriers.
Only if it involves United States residents. Permanent residents have largely the same protections and rights as citizens. They have the right to free speech, free assembly, and due process just as citizens do.
And if we were to sign such a treaty, then it would fall under French law, because the soldiers would be housed in France. It then becomes a matter of French law. There's nothing disgusting about it. French law does not apply in the US, and US law does not apply in France. Sovereignty is preserved.
Not quite. The Constitution still trumps treaties. A treaty that involves forcing people to house foreign soldiers, for example, would not fly because the forced housing of soldiers in time of peace is forbidden by the Third Amendment. Should a treaty be found to be unconstitutional, that treaty (or at least that section) would be unenforceable.
And yes, the judge can (and probably will) request further information on the case regarding its progress and how it would be jeopardized by the release of information. That information will probably not become public until such time as the investigation is complete, but it will almost certainly be provided.
I like using WYSIWYG editors for initial layout. It's faster for me to throw together something and then fine-tune it later by editing the code. I just expect it to leave in code changes I make. At this point, Frontpage is less aggravating.
No I'm not kidding. How many Republicans really agree with those talk-radio whack-jobs?
More than there should be (and I tend to lean conservative). Judging by who is on what stations, I can see roughly how popular they are here. Savage is on a relatively small network in Los Angeles, while Rush is on the largest (KFI). Larry Elder is on KABC, which is of respectable size (and Larry is generally more respectable than the other two, though since his registration as a Republican, he's sounding too much like an apology outlet for my tastes).
I'd say something about Air America, but I heard about two minutes of it one day on the way into work, and had to turn it off because I had arrived. It was pulled the next day over the legal and financial squabbling. I've not heard good things about it, though, from either political side. Those few friends who have been in areas where they can listen to it turned it off because it was mostly emotional bashing of the right, whereas the right-wing talk show hosts at least try to be on topic. (There are those on the left that do get to the facts. Mr. KABC is one of them, but he's not syndicated.)
No, they're staunchly conservative in their views, but not radical. Listen to Savage Nation once in a while (for as long as you can stand it) to find someone you can really label 'radical.'
The market in SoCal seems to be picking up, too. I ended six months of unemployment in January with a comfortable job, but starting about four months after that, I began receiving a number of calls for job interviews on varying topics -- NOC engineer, server specialist, entry-level Cisco, desktop support... pretty much the whole spectrum. I figured that the industry as a whole, which I'd heard from friends across the country was way off, was beginning to recover, since California is usually last to react to economic changes (our economic cycle lags a bit behind most of the nation, so while we're usually slow to end profitable cycles, we're also usually slow to get back into them).
I predict the lawyer's fees will be around $500m. Bravo, smartasses.
Before going into litigation using outside counsel, companies often will look to cap maximum expenses involved, and have anything over that reviewed by internal counsel. SCO's just the most visible to do this of late, but they're far from alone.
Separate progress dialogs seem to have been completely removed. Filtering about:config on "download" presents about 15 options, none of which seem to cover returning to the old way. I usually use the download manager, but sometimes I would like to have separate progress bars open.
I'd also like to see (and I should check on whether there's something in the tracker for this) an Advanced config panel that has a GUI for modifying those hidden variables. Maybe someone can do something on mozdev? I didn't see anything for this on my last trip through the list.
I tried Nvu recently, and wasn't particularly impressed. I found the program's refusal to save my code alterations (removing the annoying carriage returns) completely unacceptable.
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Development and environmentally-sensitive areas are by far the minority of the reasons why the money isn't being spent, and have nothing to do with why a freeway with a rapidly decaying surface isn't being repaved. It has to do more with things like this, when $3.3 billion in gasoline tax revenue was used for general fund projects this year alone. Davis did the same thing on a fairly regular basis, as did Wilson. Even when Prop 42 was passed by California voters, mandating gasoline taxes be used solely for road projects, Sacramento got around that by "borrowing" the funds for purposes of balancing the budget, rather than cutting their projects.
I know that freeway construction is not cheap, nor is it always easy, but the simple fact that California is still growing rapidly cannot be ignored. We either accept the fact that California has a strong car culture and spend the money on new freeways or surface rail projects (I'm still ticked that the light rail project to link several cities in Orange County was hacked almost to death), or we deal with the gridlock.
Riverside County is a perfect example of this, where the 91 freeway is the primary artery into Orange County and significant parts of Los Angeles County. They've recently completed the process of adding a lane in each direction (for a total, IIRC, of four lanes, plus the carpool/toll lanes) through a combination of adding a few feet to each side and adjusting lane widths, but that's being done by a cooperation of the Orange County Transit Agency and Riverside County and cost several million dollars. However, even then the road is still locked up every morning, and plans exist for FIFTY THOUSAND additional homes to be built there in the next few years, with permits for nearly 20,000 already in hand. That's going to put tens of thousands more cars on those freeways, many of them on the 91, and the jobs are still mostly not in Riverside. They're off in Orange and LA Counties, meaning the still-crunched 91 and the often-jammed 15 freeways, not to mention the 215, 60, 10, and 71 (which is itself in bad shape from routing three lanes of traffic into one because of a widening project that never seems to end), will continue to be overfilled.
The most reasonable solution I've seen so far is double-decking the freeway, but a lot of people don't like it because of what they saw after the Loma Prieta earthquake when sections of the upper Nimitz Freeway collapsed onto the lower level. Others don't like it because of cost concerns. But it's the least expensive way to handle things without taking surrounding land through eminent domain for ever-widening freeways, some of which would have to reach eight or ten lanes in each direction for a permanently smooth traffic flow.
At the very least, let's see some of the interchanges redesigned. The 101/405 and 5/10/60 interchanges are badly in need of a complete rebuild. They did this at the 5/22/57 interchange in Orange County (not-so-affectionately known as the Orange Crush Interchange) and it really improved things by smoothing the flow, making the interchange more intuitive, and adding capacity to the individual interchanges that comprise the Crush. It took time and money to do, but when it opened, drivers were saving 10-15 minutes each way through a mere 2-3 miles of traffic.
However, without the money from the gasoline taxes, there's really not much that can be done. The 91 project I mentioned cost a few million dollars and was spent by local governments with the permission of CalTrans. Local governments cannot, by and large, afford the scale of costs necessary for the overhaul needed of the public highway system. That money should be coming from the coffers of the state containing the gasoline taxes that we pay that are supposed to be used for this kind of thing in the first place.
I won't be surprised if this kind of thing leads to a ballot initiat
Yeah, it happens at that time, but that can happen anywhere. Jams at that hour are almost always a result of CalTrans work or a fatal accident. For the most part, traffic jams run from 6am to 9:30am in the morning and 4pm to 7pm in the afternoons (plus or minus 30 minutes for all times). The CHP on some occasions will allow open use of the carpool lanes, but usually even in construction zones where it's reduced from four or five non-carpool lanes to one, they don't allow it.
Stupid.
I wish taxes on gas were used for maintaining the roads. If they were, we wouldn't have the severe congestion that gives California such a bad name in terms of traffic.
Here's what's happening in a nutshell:
A group of people decided that they wanted to get Californians to start using public transportation and not use their cars for so many things. So they decided to stop building freeways, on the hypothesis that if there was no more room on the freeways, people would stop coming to California. This goes back to Gov. Jerry Brown, and the idea failed miserably.
Next, they decided to build carpool lanes, which would encourage people to, if not taking public transportation, at least get a few more people in the same car. Wrong again. They don't even have a decent state-wide model for carpool lanes: in SoCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes 24 hours a day. In NorCal, carpool lanes are carpool lanes only during normal rush-hour traffic, and are normal lanes otherwise. Hence, some freeways have had their capacity increased by anywhere from 20% to 50%, and the lanes are not usable by the vast majority of drivers.
So then they jacked up gas tax rates, promising to build more freeways and add lanes to the congested parts (except then governors, Democrat and Republican, including Schwarzeneggar, started "borrowing" the funds from the gas tax to pay for general fund stuff, and the roads further deteriorated and failed to get expanded). The increases was also allegedly to encourage people to buy smaller vehicles that would be more fuel efficient and cause less wear and tear on the roads. Despite past measures that had largely failed because the California car culture is basically impossible to buck, people actually did buy newer, fuel-efficient cars (but still drive them alone), and gas tax revenues (and hence funding for pet projects that have nothing to do with the roads) went down.
So now they're in a corner. How do they get the taxes back? Why, based on mileage, of course! And with a GPS unit, they can also see when you go over the speed limit or perhaps lane change too often and send you automatic tickets or tax your auto insurance (who may also get a report on your driving habits and thus raise the rates on their own). This isn't part of the proposal *yet*, but I can imagine someone is thinking it.
They're also talking about watching when you're using certain high-use roads, and increase the tax based on congestion, so if you go to work on the 5 through Los Angeles or Orange County at 7:45am, then you get an extra tax because you're helping to cause slow traffic. You know what the really ironic thing is? The people behind this idea are almost exactly the same people who were yelling about how toll roads were going to punish the poor people who couldn't afford them, and now they've come up with a method to not only inflict what are essentially tolls, but to inflict them potentially on every single public road and street in the state.
(Wow, that's a big nutshell. I wonder if there's a walnut in there.)
There's an option on the same tab that allows you to block downloading or installing that turns off Automatic Updates completely. You can then turn off the warning about AU being off in the Security Center, or you can turn off the services for Security Center and Automatic Updates altogether.
They will make available a program that guesses which files are bad?
Can I rename my home movies with names like "Terminator.mpg" and then sue them when the file is deleted?
Nader's not a green. He's a guy who simply enjoys grabbing just as much camera time as he can get, and the news networks are usually happy to provide it. He has, unfortunately, given a very bad image in the US to true Greens.
I hope they were using UDP. The potential additional lag for TCP's acknowledgement mechanism would be horrendous.
Current Hubble instruments:
Initial James Webb Telescope instruments:
The only real overlap is in Near-Infrared. It's important that the Hubble be saved, as the Webb telescope has virtually no non-IR capabilities.
Sam Rockwell is playing him.
And I thought the general shape of the Heart of Gold was that of a sneaker... or am I completely missing some section of my memory?
Sometimes, no, they're not checking.
And do you know all of the tags that are inserted in each and every application you use?
I thought not.
It may well have been one impatient user. There's at least one in every company I've ever been at. Usually we just chuckle at them behind their backs and do what we can to make sure proper licensing procedures are followed (including changing admin passwords where necessary and hoarding new software behind locked doors) when there's no one willing to fire the person. The company ends up paying for the software in most cases as it's supposed to, but if an audit were ever done, a few software keys wouldn't quite match up even though the counts would be roughly correct.
THe government cannot "easily" remove those protections. Certain 'reasonable' limitations can be made, but these are usually applied to people here for short trips, or on other temporary visas. Reading through the Constitution, it can be clearly seen where it requires citizenship for a particular right; just about all other rights refer to "the people" or "the states" in general, and have been decided by the courts to refer to any person (whether citizen or not) or any state government under its jurisdiction.
Your position about what is disgusting makes more sense now. I do believe strongly in the sovereignty of a nation's laws, though I do believe that it is okay for another state to denounce another's law. There are limits to this, but most countries are fairly reasonable about their laws, so the need for outside interference on that basis is fairly rare, and even then usually consists of trade sanctions or other economic or political barriers.
We are Perl of Borg?
Only if it involves United States residents. Permanent residents have largely the same protections and rights as citizens. They have the right to free speech, free assembly, and due process just as citizens do.
And if we were to sign such a treaty, then it would fall under French law, because the soldiers would be housed in France. It then becomes a matter of French law. There's nothing disgusting about it. French law does not apply in the US, and US law does not apply in France. Sovereignty is preserved.
Not quite. The Constitution still trumps treaties. A treaty that involves forcing people to house foreign soldiers, for example, would not fly because the forced housing of soldiers in time of peace is forbidden by the Third Amendment. Should a treaty be found to be unconstitutional, that treaty (or at least that section) would be unenforceable.
Yes, a judge still has to rule on the situation.
And yes, the judge can (and probably will) request further information on the case regarding its progress and how it would be jeopardized by the release of information. That information will probably not become public until such time as the investigation is complete, but it will almost certainly be provided.
I like using WYSIWYG editors for initial layout. It's faster for me to throw together something and then fine-tune it later by editing the code. I just expect it to leave in code changes I make. At this point, Frontpage is less aggravating.
No I'm not kidding. How many Republicans really agree with those talk-radio whack-jobs?
More than there should be (and I tend to lean conservative). Judging by who is on what stations, I can see roughly how popular they are here. Savage is on a relatively small network in Los Angeles, while Rush is on the largest (KFI). Larry Elder is on KABC, which is of respectable size (and Larry is generally more respectable than the other two, though since his registration as a Republican, he's sounding too much like an apology outlet for my tastes).
I'd say something about Air America, but I heard about two minutes of it one day on the way into work, and had to turn it off because I had arrived. It was pulled the next day over the legal and financial squabbling. I've not heard good things about it, though, from either political side. Those few friends who have been in areas where they can listen to it turned it off because it was mostly emotional bashing of the right, whereas the right-wing talk show hosts at least try to be on topic. (There are those on the left that do get to the facts. Mr. KABC is one of them, but he's not syndicated.)
No, they're staunchly conservative in their views, but not radical. Listen to Savage Nation once in a while (for as long as you can stand it) to find someone you can really label 'radical.'
Can we meet in four years and check how each other has fared?
And just for the long term, can you provide your definition of "middle class"?
The market in SoCal seems to be picking up, too. I ended six months of unemployment in January with a comfortable job, but starting about four months after that, I began receiving a number of calls for job interviews on varying topics -- NOC engineer, server specialist, entry-level Cisco, desktop support... pretty much the whole spectrum. I figured that the industry as a whole, which I'd heard from friends across the country was way off, was beginning to recover, since California is usually last to react to economic changes (our economic cycle lags a bit behind most of the nation, so while we're usually slow to end profitable cycles, we're also usually slow to get back into them).
/me squeezes in a few more
World of Knights of the Grand Solid Halo-Life Quest-Cry 3
I predict the lawyer's fees will be around $500m. Bravo, smartasses.
Before going into litigation using outside counsel, companies often will look to cap maximum expenses involved, and have anything over that reviewed by internal counsel. SCO's just the most visible to do this of late, but they're far from alone.
Separate progress dialogs seem to have been completely removed. Filtering about:config on "download" presents about 15 options, none of which seem to cover returning to the old way. I usually use the download manager, but sometimes I would like to have separate progress bars open.
I'd also like to see (and I should check on whether there's something in the tracker for this) an Advanced config panel that has a GUI for modifying those hidden variables. Maybe someone can do something on mozdev? I didn't see anything for this on my last trip through the list.
I tried Nvu recently, and wasn't particularly impressed. I found the program's refusal to save my code alterations (removing the annoying carriage returns) completely unacceptable.
Ah, well, back to vim for my page editing...