That's why I stopped using my u-lock. Tough to crack, but also tough to use. If you have two bikes or a bike and a trailer, just lock them together. Hard to walk off with two of them. The point is to make it non-trivial to steal. If somebody can't just hop on and ride away, the odds of it getting stolen drops.
Those are exceptions and most definitely not the rule. Sure, there are rare occasions when a powerful engine can allow you to escape an accident - but those occasions in no way offset the accidents caused by excessive speed.
Don't get me wrong here. I enjoy acceleration as much (probably more) than the next guy. My daily driver is a motorcycle, after all, and even riding around invisibly on that I've never run into a situation where power got me out of a bad spot in traffic any better than brakes would have. If you want a fast car, truck, or van, by all means get one and drive the piss out of it - but claiming the extra power as a 'safety feature' holds about as much water as the diatribe from the 'loud pipes save lives' group. It's an excuse to get us to sell our wives on the bigger engines, but really doesn't have a basis in reality.
As a cyclist I make it a point to call out others who behave this way. As a driver I make it a point to call out drivers who behave badly around bikes. The good drivers and good cyclists far outnumber the bad ones, but it's the bad ones that keep this animosity going and makes the roads that much more dangerous.
BTW, the biggest engine you can get in a 4x4 for a full-size family is 6 L. This is for the 2013 GMC Savana Passenger Van. You can only get 5.3 L with the Chevy Express AWD. This is barely acceptable for a 3-ton vehicle with 15 seats.
Are you just *trying* to make Americans look bad? I'm gonna have to go on a tangent for a bit... I grew up in a large family. We had a big Ford van (1982 Econoline) with the inline-6 which was monstrous at 4.9L with a mind blowing 120 horsepower and something on the order of 200 ft/lb of torque. Today there inline fours with half that displacement making comparable power. Now my sister has an even larger (and heavier) Sprinter van with a mere 3L diesel. There's nothing "barely acceptable" about any of it. You're driving a van, not a drag racer. There's nothing wrong with taking 20 seconds to get up to 70 MPH. There's nothing wrong with taking it slow up the hills and using the pull-outs to let people pass.
Don't get me wrong, if you want a powerful van with some get up and go, more power to you. It's your money and I could care less - but to claim something with less power is barely acceptable just sends the wrong message. It's a van, dude, it's not gonna go 0 to 60 in seven seconds.
A lightweight bike lock is cheap and easy to use. Tie the bikes together or tie them together to a sign or bike rack or whatever is there, looping it through the trailer wheel. Odds are quite long that in the thirty minutes you're shopping somebody will notice your bikes, defeat your lock, and make off with them.
I won't argue against home delivery, but I figure I'll add what works for my shopping (for two). One of us goes to the store on the way home every two or three days. The store is on the way so it only adds fifteen to thirty minutes of time to the work day and however much fuel it takes to get in and out of the parking lot. I used to do the weekly or every other week grocery trip thing, but found I just bought stuff that I didn't use and ended up throwing out anyway.
I've seen this brought up a disturbingly high amount in this thread. Most of the calories we consume go to keeping us warm and alive - calorie intake for an active person is not significantly different than it is for a lazy bum. As for the CO2 equation - carbon exhaled comes from plants (or animals that eat plants) in a relatively closed loop. It's the transportation we're talking about that opens that loop up. The carbon you exhale was already taken from the atmosphere when your food was grown. The carbon burned by the trucks had been locked up and is being added to the system.
Granted, I very rarely make a trip just to go to the store. I've also never quite gotten why people would make a trip just to go to the store. I'm assuming for a US-centric forum like/., most folks drive to work. I'm sure most of those drives go within a block or two of a store...
In my household, 90% of the groceries are picked up on the way home from work. It's also close enough (half mile or so) that if I need something, I usually just put the dog on the leash and walk down there.
Wait a second... To "spend time" with your kids you choose to turn a thirty minute trip to the store into an hour and a half long stress-filled ordeal with kids running all over the store? I can't help but think there might be a better way of doing it...
I'm sure more often the store owner tells the customers "Hey, I just got a fresh bushel of cucumbers!" and half the households in the neighborhood eat cucumbers that day. It's not a bad way of doing things - if we got in the habit of eating what was available at the time, we could greatly increase the efficiency of food growing...
It blurs the line between sci-fi and fantasy. I found it to be mind numbingly boring myself, though. I may pick it back up and finish it some day... don't tell me how it ends!
but the biggest hurdle is giving up on the infinitely inflated software sales (inflated such due to artificial scarcity of infinitely available bits)
Open source is great and all, but you're ignoring the supply side costs. You can't simply say "Supply is infinite, demand is limited, so the price must drop" without crunching the numbers. The bits may be infinitely available, but they need to be created to begin with. A comprehensive medical database program or control system for a piece of equipment will need an expensive up-front investment, far greater than that $10k upgrade cost for the software. Given some of the programs I've worked, I can easily see an up front cost in the hundreds of thousands getting something written, tested and certified. So now you have this specialized software that will go to a handful of users. Sure, each subsequent copy made will be have an infinitesimally small cost associated with it, but you still need to recoup that up-front cost to write it in the first place.
Linux may be great and all at embedded stuff, but if there isn't already a product out there for a tiny niche market, an OSS project isn't going to spawn out of the blue to fill it. Don't forget, users are not developers. A doctor and their staff are not going to branch into software development just to avoid a relatively small (in business terms) software cost.
You may be suffering from pedantic confusion... The plot doesn't need to be about evolving technology, more often then not it's just exploring contemporary philosophical questions through technology. Hell, the storyline in Star Trek VI was to explore the end of the Cold War - or do you not consider that "true" science fiction? Literature is always always about exploring ideas. The same ideas and plots can be set against any sort of backdrop - it's the setting and story that define the genre moreso than the philosophical underpinnings.
In any case, we're both wrong. Anybody who knows anything knows that Star Wars is a space western. Space cowboys, space slave bosses, space railroad men, space Pinkertons...
Laser blasts or magic missiles - from a story telling point of view it doesn't really matter. There's a reason science fiction and fantasy are often lumped together, they're practically the same thing.
It's Disney now. Chewbecca won't die, Han and Leia will live happily ever after, and Jacen will become a benevolent emperor and the supreme force of good!
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That's why I stopped using my u-lock. Tough to crack, but also tough to use. If you have two bikes or a bike and a trailer, just lock them together. Hard to walk off with two of them. The point is to make it non-trivial to steal. If somebody can't just hop on and ride away, the odds of it getting stolen drops.
Those are exceptions and most definitely not the rule. Sure, there are rare occasions when a powerful engine can allow you to escape an accident - but those occasions in no way offset the accidents caused by excessive speed.
Don't get me wrong here. I enjoy acceleration as much (probably more) than the next guy. My daily driver is a motorcycle, after all, and even riding around invisibly on that I've never run into a situation where power got me out of a bad spot in traffic any better than brakes would have. If you want a fast car, truck, or van, by all means get one and drive the piss out of it - but claiming the extra power as a 'safety feature' holds about as much water as the diatribe from the 'loud pipes save lives' group. It's an excuse to get us to sell our wives on the bigger engines, but really doesn't have a basis in reality.
As a cyclist I make it a point to call out others who behave this way. As a driver I make it a point to call out drivers who behave badly around bikes. The good drivers and good cyclists far outnumber the bad ones, but it's the bad ones that keep this animosity going and makes the roads that much more dangerous.
Woah... Where do you live that people are *that* shitty to each other?
On-ramps are not are that short. I love gunning it on an on-ramp as much as the next guy, but this is an extremely specious argument.
BTW, the biggest engine you can get in a 4x4 for a full-size family is 6 L. This is for the 2013 GMC Savana Passenger Van. You can only get 5.3 L with the Chevy Express AWD. This is barely acceptable for a 3-ton vehicle with 15 seats.
Are you just *trying* to make Americans look bad? I'm gonna have to go on a tangent for a bit... I grew up in a large family. We had a big Ford van (1982 Econoline) with the inline-6 which was monstrous at 4.9L with a mind blowing 120 horsepower and something on the order of 200 ft/lb of torque. Today there inline fours with half that displacement making comparable power. Now my sister has an even larger (and heavier) Sprinter van with a mere 3L diesel. There's nothing "barely acceptable" about any of it. You're driving a van, not a drag racer. There's nothing wrong with taking 20 seconds to get up to 70 MPH. There's nothing wrong with taking it slow up the hills and using the pull-outs to let people pass.
Don't get me wrong, if you want a powerful van with some get up and go, more power to you. It's your money and I could care less - but to claim something with less power is barely acceptable just sends the wrong message. It's a van, dude, it's not gonna go 0 to 60 in seven seconds.
My parents weren't nerds... Lots of nerds I know have decidedly non-nerdy parents. Have faith, nerd.
A lightweight bike lock is cheap and easy to use. Tie the bikes together or tie them together to a sign or bike rack or whatever is there, looping it through the trailer wheel. Odds are quite long that in the thirty minutes you're shopping somebody will notice your bikes, defeat your lock, and make off with them.
I tip my hat to you, good sir.
Free? No. They cost about two months worth of gasoline...
Damn right she does, do you know how hard it is to simply order a PBR at a bar without feeling ironic these days? They ruin *EVERYTHING*
I won't argue against home delivery, but I figure I'll add what works for my shopping (for two). One of us goes to the store on the way home every two or three days. The store is on the way so it only adds fifteen to thirty minutes of time to the work day and however much fuel it takes to get in and out of the parking lot. I used to do the weekly or every other week grocery trip thing, but found I just bought stuff that I didn't use and ended up throwing out anyway.
For real, ask your grandpa, can I have his hand-me-downs?
I've seen this brought up a disturbingly high amount in this thread. Most of the calories we consume go to keeping us warm and alive - calorie intake for an active person is not significantly different than it is for a lazy bum. As for the CO2 equation - carbon exhaled comes from plants (or animals that eat plants) in a relatively closed loop. It's the transportation we're talking about that opens that loop up. The carbon you exhale was already taken from the atmosphere when your food was grown. The carbon burned by the trucks had been locked up and is being added to the system.
You forget, this is America, and we'll be DAMNED if we lug that gallon of milk and liter of cola any further than the god damn parking lot!
Dog food and beer.
/., most folks drive to work. I'm sure most of those drives go within a block or two of a store...
Granted, I very rarely make a trip just to go to the store. I've also never quite gotten why people would make a trip just to go to the store. I'm assuming for a US-centric forum like
In my household, 90% of the groceries are picked up on the way home from work. It's also close enough (half mile or so) that if I need something, I usually just put the dog on the leash and walk down there.
Wait a second... To "spend time" with your kids you choose to turn a thirty minute trip to the store into an hour and a half long stress-filled ordeal with kids running all over the store? I can't help but think there might be a better way of doing it...
I'm sure more often the store owner tells the customers "Hey, I just got a fresh bushel of cucumbers!" and half the households in the neighborhood eat cucumbers that day. It's not a bad way of doing things - if we got in the habit of eating what was available at the time, we could greatly increase the efficiency of food growing...
...You know how much you could have sold that toast for!?
It blurs the line between sci-fi and fantasy. I found it to be mind numbingly boring myself, though. I may pick it back up and finish it some day... don't tell me how it ends!
but the biggest hurdle is giving up on the infinitely inflated software sales (inflated such due to artificial scarcity of infinitely available bits)
Open source is great and all, but you're ignoring the supply side costs. You can't simply say "Supply is infinite, demand is limited, so the price must drop" without crunching the numbers. The bits may be infinitely available, but they need to be created to begin with. A comprehensive medical database program or control system for a piece of equipment will need an expensive up-front investment, far greater than that $10k upgrade cost for the software. Given some of the programs I've worked, I can easily see an up front cost in the hundreds of thousands getting something written, tested and certified. So now you have this specialized software that will go to a handful of users. Sure, each subsequent copy made will be have an infinitesimally small cost associated with it, but you still need to recoup that up-front cost to write it in the first place.
Linux may be great and all at embedded stuff, but if there isn't already a product out there for a tiny niche market, an OSS project isn't going to spawn out of the blue to fill it. Don't forget, users are not developers. A doctor and their staff are not going to branch into software development just to avoid a relatively small (in business terms) software cost.
You may be suffering from pedantic confusion... The plot doesn't need to be about evolving technology, more often then not it's just exploring contemporary philosophical questions through technology. Hell, the storyline in Star Trek VI was to explore the end of the Cold War - or do you not consider that "true" science fiction? Literature is always always about exploring ideas. The same ideas and plots can be set against any sort of backdrop - it's the setting and story that define the genre moreso than the philosophical underpinnings.
In any case, we're both wrong. Anybody who knows anything knows that Star Wars is a space western. Space cowboys, space slave bosses, space railroad men, space Pinkertons...
The new Trek was entertaining, I'll give it that, but the same could be said for The Fast and the Furious movies...
Laser blasts or magic missiles - from a story telling point of view it doesn't really matter. There's a reason science fiction and fantasy are often lumped together, they're practically the same thing.
It's Disney now. Chewbecca won't die, Han and Leia will live happily ever after, and Jacen will become a benevolent emperor and the supreme force of good!