If you don't care about the taste, why not try sleeping?
Because not all of us have jobs where we're allowed to come to work late because we are "sleepy" (wait 'till you have kids - going to bed early doesn't guarantee a good night's sleep), and many of us have found that executives don't like it when we fall asleep in their early morning meetings... plus some of us have jobs were occasional late-night work is neccessary to do system maintenance - give me a cup of coffee in the late afternoon and I'm good to go 'till 2am.
I'm definitely one of those that doesn't drink coffee for the taste - I cover up the coffee taste with lots of cream and sugar.
If my company needs a specific technical skill, like if they need someone to use.Net to program our Sharepoint site, or they need someone to develop an iPhone app, if they don't already have someone with that experienc ein-house, their choices are to pay someone to learn the skill and "learn on the job" as they become proficient at the skill...Or they can send the task outside and let someone (or some company) who's already experienced in that skill do the work.
However, if they need help with a specific app, like their accounting system, payroll system, etc, then they will pay for training because there aren't that many people out there that already have experience with that specific system and it's almost always cheaper to train internal employees to run the system than to pay the vendor every time they want to write a new report.
Also, when they pay an employee to learn a marketable skill, that employee will likely use his new-found skill to seek a better paying job. But when they teach an employee how to run XYZ accounting system, there's much less chance of the employee finding a job with that skill, so the company's investment is safer. (not impossible though, our company lost our payroll specialist after he led us through a payrolll implementation and he went to work for a different company that uses that same payroll system).
The biggest joke is that they still make us come up with professional development goals for the year with the illusion that the company will give us the training to help us meet those goals, but of course it never happens. The guy that wants to learn.Net so he can help put financial data on the Intranet Sharepoint site ends up getting sent to an XYZ Accounting report writing class instead.
I'll probably be in the minority here, but I would say go with Sprint. Sure their data speeds aren't the fastest, but they are a good bit cheaper than Verizon, and their speeds are still plenty useable for web browsing, Pandora, and Netflix. Plus you get the added bonus of free roaming on Verizon's network if you're outside of Sprint's coverage areas. Pretty much anything is better than AT&T.
If you want good coverage while you're in between cities, stick with AT&T or Verizon.
On a recent road trip between SF and LA, there were many places where my Sprint phone (work phone) lost coverage but my Verizon phone maintained coverage (I know this because we had some issues going on at work and I was getting a lot of emails - in many instances, I could hear some emails come in to my Verizon phone, and it wasn't until 10 - 15 minutes later that I'd hear a group of queued up emails hit my Sprint phone).
My gf has an AT&T phone and there were a few places where she had cell phone coverage and I didn't, and vice versa. But she had more problems with maintaining a data connection (we took turns streaming Pandora, her AT&T phone dropped out more often than my Verizon phone).
The only thing that keeps me going to my local newspaper's site is the anonymous comment section. While there are some crazy and trolling comments, the anonymous nature of the system leads people to post more provocative points of view (and possibly even more honest opinions, but in any case, many opposing viewpoints are posted and discussed). Sure, there are sometimes personal attacks, but overall it's interesting to read opinions from other local people. There's a minimal moderating system where abusive comments can be reported (and sometimes that system itself is abused by people that want to get rid of opposing viewpoints), as well as a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system.
When another semi-local paper switched to a non-anonymous facebook commenting system, the usefulness of the comments went way down. (as did some of the more extreme views, but I don't mind reading those extreme views, or even wading through a number of useless "first post!" comments if it means getting more interesting comments).
But how will Kirk and the crew save the Whales and get back to the 23rd Century without that "nuclear wessel"? (evil grin)
They went back in time to 1986, so retiring the ship now won't affect the whale recovery. Geeze, what are they teaching kids in school today? Apparently not Starfleet future history.
DP Review has a review of this camera. It sounds like it has a long way to go. Due to the way lightfield works, the final resolution is fairly low, in this case only 1024x1024. I don't know if there's really a way around it, since they're substituting resolution for the depth of field focus feature.
But that's still high enough for the vast majority of people's snapshots. 1024x1024 yields a 5"x5" print at 200dpi, while most people seem to be satisfied with 4x6" prints.
It's certainly not going to satisfy a pro or serious amateur, but for everyday snapshots, even the current level of the technology is a big step forward since it can eliminate every out of focus shot (though camera shake is still an issue)
The whole post doesn't make any sense. He wants to make a simple non-commercial game for the purpose of learning, but he doesn't want to have to figure out how to program it and would like to find someone who already knows how to do it to write it for him. Wha?!
I don't think he's looking for someone to write it for him, he's looking for someone to guide him and point him in the right direction so he doesn't spin his wheels doing something one way that's going to lead him to a dead end. Maybe he'd learn more by doing it all on his own. Or maybe he'd learn bad habits that are hard to correct later.
I'm sorry, but 20 years of coding experience and you have no knowledge on how to model the physics? I myself find this highly suspect; seeing as how I had to go through this simple process in the 4th month after learning how to code in Java.
Really? You have at least 4 months of Java experience and you can't understand that not everyone has the same experience as you? He even said that experience includes coding GUI frontends to databases -- what part of this teaches him how to do 2D physics modeling? He may not even have formal computer science education, maybe he was a business analyst that took a few programming classes and moved over to development.
Game ideas are a dime a dozen. Think i had this same game idea 20 years ago... If he wants to control it. Learn to program and buy the art assets... Otherwise you usually make very little 'having an idea'...
He's looking for an unpaid amateur to assist him with putting together a non-commercial app that won't be sold.
Where is he going to get ripped off? No where did he say that he wanted to make money. Not everyone has profit as the end-goal of a project.
Maybe if it turns out well he can make a few bucks from it before it's copied by one of the big game makers, but it doesn't sound like he expects to make any money off of it.
Are you committing fraud by reading/posting on/. from work?
Uhh...depending on which time zone he's in, it might be his lunch hour. Many employers allow personal use of internet at work.
Even if it's normal working hours, that doesn't mean that he's not on an employer approved break. And if he's salaried, as long as he's putting in the 40 hours he's getting paid for, I'm not sure how he's defrauding his employer. In my timezone it's "normal" working hours, but since I was at the office until 1am last night working on an upgrade, I'm still at home and won't make it to the office until noon, if at all. Oh, and I've already put in 50 hours this week.
Will officers face sanctions for falsifying records?
The DA said:
Gascon said there did not appear to be any malicious intent behind the police officers’ actions. He said the coordinators were apparently just too lazy to perform the test required every 10 days.
Can I use that excuse when I get pulled over for rolling through a stop sign? "But I was just too lazy to stop, officer! Surely you can understand that!"
They might not have enough space for 3x the install (previous working copy, current copy, downloaded copy) and streaming a firmware update over wifi is just asking for trouble.
That may well be true, but it would be stupid since even a USB transfer can be interrupted or corrupt. And it doesn't change my point that security is not a reason to send customers a USB stick in the mail rather than letting their car download the update via Wifi.
Or, if they could be updated like the Kindle (3G or WiFi), Ford could handle them all without the owner getting involved. And they wouldn't need to mail out 30,000 USB sticks or CDs.
Plus, Ford could then get real feedback from how the car is performing.
Because no one ever took advantage of short-sighted manufacturers that aren't security-conscious to do anything malicious to a car. Oh, wait... Also, awesome insurance scam in the works if you can do a hostile takeover of a rich guy's car (the ones that will probably have cars with Wi-Fi) and make him get into a rear-end accident. BAM! Sweet-ass cash truck from his rich guy insurance agency. No cop will believe "My car got hacked."
A USB stick that arrives through the mail is hardly more secure than a Wifi update. It could even be less secure since an attacker could drop 10,000 of them in the mail anonymously without having to risk physical proximity to the car he's trying to hack.
Hopefully Ford uses digital signatures to validate the integrity of an update before the car will accept it, but signature validation works equally well (or poorly) whether its a USB Flash update or Wifi update.
If you have one server to do imap/pop3/smtp and a web interface to email, I'd just call it "mail.example.com". If you really must put your DNS server, then call it "mail-dns.example.com", but if the goal is fast dns lookups on the mail server, I'd just put in a local DNS cache and keep my corporate DNS server on a separate server (virtual or physical).
No need to let a successful SMTP/POP/IMAP/HTTP hack also lead to a takeover of your DNS. Likewise, no need to let a successful DNS hack lead to a takeover of your mail server.
Whenever possible, IT should be able to identify server's location, platform and purpose by glancing at the name
Except when any of the server's location, platform or purpose changes, you'll have to change its name.
Right!
Is this a bad thing? Is it better to name the server SnowWhite and then having to remember whether SnowWhite is a DNS server or a Web server this week? Better to rename it (even better to reimage it) from prod-dns1 to dev-web1. I ship servers between datacenters so infrequently that renaming the server when it moves is not a problem.
"Cannot get 4 adults plus dog plus ancillaries in a Yaris."
Have multiple vehicles. I don't drive my F350 Ford or 366 big block Chevy truck unless I need to, but liability insurance is cheap and they are paid for.
Multiple vehicles allows selection of the right tool for the job.
Or rent what you need when you need it. We have a small car which we mainly use for commuting. When we need something bigger or with more cargo space (like a pickup), we rent from the city carshare program or a regular car rental agency which has surprisingly good weekend rates since they have a glut of cars from business travelers). The city carshare program is especially nice when I have to work late unexpectedly, they have cheap overnight rates and there are several locations within easy walking distance from work so I've always been able to get a car when I need it, even last minute. The overnight car rental rate is cheaper than it would cost to take a cab home.
Our occasional car rental bill is much lower than our car payment would be on a second car.
Don't feel bad. Doing math in your head has been replaced by calculators. Application of math is where it's at.
I know plenty of people who can do math in their head, but can't actually use it for anything outside of homework.
But you don't always have a calculator when you need one (or don't want to take the time to pull out your phone and start up the calculator app). Being able to do simple math in your head can be a huge advantage in life to do a quick sanity check on lots of things.
I recently spotted an error in some home purchase paperwork A number that was supposed to be 3% of the purchase price was actually 7%. The listing agent didn't believe me that it was wrong until she pulled out her calculator to run the numbers. It's trivial to estimate 3% of a number in your head - finding 3% of $325,000 means rounding down to $3K for 1% and multiplying by 3 to get $9K. It's not exact, but often a rough estimate is enough. I later ran all the numbers through a calculator to be sure they were exact, but I saved myself another day of waiting for corrected paperwork by having her correct it in her office instead of waiting until I got home to discover the error.
While it's true that most people have a calculator close at hand these days, how many people take the time to actually use it, especially when they think that someone else already used their calculator to calculate the numbers, so they assume it's already correct?
And I really can't believe how many people have to get a calculator to evenly add a tip and divide a lunch bill 4 ways! And then proceed to say "Ok, everyone owes $8.79" instead of just saying "$9".
1 barrel of crude oil makes 19.5 gallons of gas, so 0.016 barrel/day/person consumption rate in the EU = about.36 gallons of gas per day and 0.033 barrels/day/person consumption rate in the USA = about.64 gallons of gas per day. With a Toyota Prius at 50 mpg that makes for a round trip limit of 32 miles in the USA and 16 miles in the EU. If a Prius is hypermiled it can get about 60 mpg. However, the average light duty vehicles in the USA get about 24 mpg so that means if the USA tried to match the EU levels we are all going to be living a lot closer together... I better stock up on body deoderant..
I think that analysis is much too simplistic to be able to draw any conclusions. Not all oil is used for car transportation. Not every person in the country drives (think kids and elderly). And even for those that do drive, not everyone has a solo commute. When my wife and I drive to work, we go together, so we get 60 passenger mpg from our 30mpg car. But when I take the electric train I don't use any oil at all (since my city gets its power from hydroelectric sources, but even if it didn't, it would largely be powered by coal, not oil). But oil is used for lots of non personal transportation needs (i.e. trucking, trains, industrial uses, etc), so it's really hard to turn a "gallons/person" figure into a "commute miles/person".
In the USA, the average commute distance is 14.5 miles one-way . I couldn't find any numbers for Europe, but in the UK, the average is 8.5 miles/day
The smart thing about their 95% percentile calculation is that the bar keeps getting lower.
If the 95% mark is at 5GB today and they throttle back anyone that exceeds 5GB, no one will be able to go beyond 5GB of usage, so next month the 95% level might be 4.9GB. Then since no one can go much beyond 4.9GB, the next month it becomes 4.8GB. And so on.
Until finally, they are throttling once you hit 100KB of bandwidth and they can advertise the world's fastest wireless network since no one can use it. You can get one hit to speedtest.net to test your bandwidth and see your blazing 25mbit of bandwidth before they throttle you to 144kb of bandwidth.
this +10000000000, the fact though is that there seems to be a perception in North America that sweating is "bad" (look at all the endless commercials about anti-perspirants, I mean, if an anti-perspirant worked as advertised you'd die due to not being able to thermoregulate
I should add that I bike commute in the same t-shirt every morning for a week, sometimes two (I wear my work shirt home). And as long as I let it dry every day (by folding it loosely and putting it on top of my office bookcase, by the end of the week, the t-shirt still smells clean.
I've participated in a number of 24 hour running relay races (12 person teams, 200 miles, around 24 hours to complete). And the despite the fact that there are 6 runners cooped up in a minivan who have run a couple 6 mile relay legs in the heat and have had no chance to shower, it's not until around the last 8 hours of the race when people start to get stinky. Though by that time, sleep deprivation makes you not care so much:-)
Let's not get silly about this. The United States of America is approximately double land width of the EU,
Why does that matter? If I own an acre of land, I can build a 5,000 square foot monster house, or a modest 1000 square foot house. But if I build that 5000 sq ft house, I shouldn't complain that it costs more to heat, cool, and maintain that house. Likewise the population of the USA can spread out evenly across all land area, or they can live more densely to allow more efficient transportation options. Since we've apparently chosen the former, we shouldn't complain when gas hits $5/gallon and our lifestyle has become too expensive to maintain. We should have had a big wakeup call in the oil crisis in the '70's, but instead of spending the past 40 years building out efficient transportation options, we've chosen to continue to develop sprawling suburban areas that are far from workplaces.
and both USA & EU pay the same price for crude oil.
It's just the countries collecting the extra from the consumer as tax after it's been turned into the gasoline/diesel/etc that is the de facto standard in the area.
That's entirely the problem - the USA chose to give cheap gas to its citizens to let them build a lifestyle around it, while other nations taxed it and used the money to build alternative transportation infrastructure (and encourage the population to driver smaller, more fuel efficient cars).
The USA could do the same by taxing fuel to make it more expensive, but any changes are years away. But so far, we've chosen to pretend that fuel prices will always be low and continue to ignore the problem. It's much cheaper and easier to address increasing energy costs over decades than to find out that increasing global demand will triple fuel costs in the next 5 years. China and India are both becoming more modernized, and as their citizens demand the same energy intensive lifestyle that other developed countries enjoy, energy prices will rise. I don't think we're in danger of running out of fossil fuels anytime in the forseeable future, but as demand rises and fuels become more expensive to extract, prices will rise.
People can throw around all the metrics they want depending on which side they want to be on.
US more gas hog - compare estimated populations of ~315M US vs ~500M EU then calculate as you have done.
EU more gas hog - compare land mass of ~9.8M km2 US vs ~1.7M km2 EU. Using this, the comparison swings wildly in the other direction.
Statistics is all about choosing which best matches your opinion, view, or talking point.
Why would you use land mass? Just because the USA has more land mass doesn't mean that people *have* to be distributed evenly across that land mass. If energy efficiency is important, intelligent distribution of the population can minimize transportation based energy usage.
If energy conservation is not important, then just say so, but don't claim "But we *have* to use more gas because our country is bigger", when in reality, years of cheap gas have let us distribute our population in a manner that makes cost effective and energy efficient transportation difficult to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't care about the taste, why not try sleeping?
Because not all of us have jobs where we're allowed to come to work late because we are "sleepy" (wait 'till you have kids - going to bed early doesn't guarantee a good night's sleep), and many of us have found that executives don't like it when we fall asleep in their early morning meetings... plus some of us have jobs were occasional late-night work is neccessary to do system maintenance - give me a cup of coffee in the late afternoon and I'm good to go 'till 2am.
I'm definitely one of those that doesn't drink coffee for the taste - I cover up the coffee taste with lots of cream and sugar.
...because there's no information from authoritative experts on Wikipedia?
On the other hand, I'd love to own print copy of Britannica. Well, if it were up-to-date and not $1,400.
A 32 volume printed set and "up to date" are mutually exclusive.
I thought all companies were like this?
If my company needs a specific technical skill, like if they need someone to use .Net to program our Sharepoint site, or they need someone to develop an iPhone app, if they don't already have someone with that experienc ein-house, their choices are to pay someone to learn the skill and "learn on the job" as they become proficient at the skill...Or they can send the task outside and let someone (or some company) who's already experienced in that skill do the work.
However, if they need help with a specific app, like their accounting system, payroll system, etc, then they will pay for training because there aren't that many people out there that already have experience with that specific system and it's almost always cheaper to train internal employees to run the system than to pay the vendor every time they want to write a new report.
Also, when they pay an employee to learn a marketable skill, that employee will likely use his new-found skill to seek a better paying job. But when they teach an employee how to run XYZ accounting system, there's much less chance of the employee finding a job with that skill, so the company's investment is safer. (not impossible though, our company lost our payroll specialist after he led us through a payrolll implementation and he went to work for a different company that uses that same payroll system).
The biggest joke is that they still make us come up with professional development goals for the year with the illusion that the company will give us the training to help us meet those goals, but of course it never happens. The guy that wants to learn .Net so he can help put financial data on the Intranet Sharepoint site ends up getting sent to an XYZ Accounting report writing class instead.
I'll probably be in the minority here, but I would say go with Sprint. Sure their data speeds aren't the fastest, but they are a good bit cheaper than Verizon, and their speeds are still plenty useable for web browsing, Pandora, and Netflix. Plus you get the added bonus of free roaming on Verizon's network if you're outside of Sprint's coverage areas. Pretty much anything is better than AT&T.
If you want good coverage while you're in between cities, stick with AT&T or Verizon.
On a recent road trip between SF and LA, there were many places where my Sprint phone (work phone) lost coverage but my Verizon phone maintained coverage (I know this because we had some issues going on at work and I was getting a lot of emails - in many instances, I could hear some emails come in to my Verizon phone, and it wasn't until 10 - 15 minutes later that I'd hear a group of queued up emails hit my Sprint phone).
My gf has an AT&T phone and there were a few places where she had cell phone coverage and I didn't, and vice versa. But she had more problems with maintaining a data connection (we took turns streaming Pandora, her AT&T phone dropped out more often than my Verizon phone).
The only thing that keeps me going to my local newspaper's site is the anonymous comment section. While there are some crazy and trolling comments, the anonymous nature of the system leads people to post more provocative points of view (and possibly even more honest opinions, but in any case, many opposing viewpoints are posted and discussed). Sure, there are sometimes personal attacks, but overall it's interesting to read opinions from other local people. There's a minimal moderating system where abusive comments can be reported (and sometimes that system itself is abused by people that want to get rid of opposing viewpoints), as well as a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system.
When another semi-local paper switched to a non-anonymous facebook commenting system, the usefulness of the comments went way down. (as did some of the more extreme views, but I don't mind reading those extreme views, or even wading through a number of useless "first post!" comments if it means getting more interesting comments).
But how will Kirk and the crew save the Whales and get back to the 23rd Century without that "nuclear wessel"? (evil grin)
They went back in time to 1986, so retiring the ship now won't affect the whale recovery. Geeze, what are they teaching kids in school today? Apparently not Starfleet future history.
DP Review has a review of this camera. It sounds like it has a long way to go. Due to the way lightfield works, the final resolution is fairly low, in this case only 1024x1024. I don't know if there's really a way around it, since they're substituting resolution for the depth of field focus feature.
But that's still high enough for the vast majority of people's snapshots. 1024x1024 yields a 5"x5" print at 200dpi, while most people seem to be satisfied with 4x6" prints.
It's certainly not going to satisfy a pro or serious amateur, but for everyday snapshots, even the current level of the technology is a big step forward since it can eliminate every out of focus shot (though camera shake is still an issue)
The whole post doesn't make any sense. He wants to make a simple non-commercial game for the purpose of learning, but he doesn't want to have to figure out how to program it and would like to find someone who already knows how to do it to write it for him. Wha?!
I don't think he's looking for someone to write it for him, he's looking for someone to guide him and point him in the right direction so he doesn't spin his wheels doing something one way that's going to lead him to a dead end. Maybe he'd learn more by doing it all on his own. Or maybe he'd learn bad habits that are hard to correct later.
I'm sorry, but 20 years of coding experience and you have no knowledge on how to model the physics?
I myself find this highly suspect; seeing as how I had to go through this simple process in the 4th month after learning how to code in Java.
Really? You have at least 4 months of Java experience and you can't understand that not everyone has the same experience as you? He even said that experience includes coding GUI frontends to databases -- what part of this teaches him how to do 2D physics modeling? He may not even have formal computer science education, maybe he was a business analyst that took a few programming classes and moved over to development.
I smell someone is going to rip this dude off...
Game ideas are a dime a dozen. Think i had this same game idea 20 years ago... If he wants to control it. Learn to program and buy the art assets... Otherwise you usually make very little 'having an idea'...
He's looking for an unpaid amateur to assist him with putting together a non-commercial app that won't be sold.
Where is he going to get ripped off? No where did he say that he wanted to make money. Not everyone has profit as the end-goal of a project.
Maybe if it turns out well he can make a few bucks from it before it's copied by one of the big game makers, but it doesn't sound like he expects to make any money off of it.
Are you committing fraud by reading/posting on /. from work?
Uhh...depending on which time zone he's in, it might be his lunch hour. Many employers allow personal use of internet at work.
Even if it's normal working hours, that doesn't mean that he's not on an employer approved break. And if he's salaried, as long as he's putting in the 40 hours he's getting paid for, I'm not sure how he's defrauding his employer. In my timezone it's "normal" working hours, but since I was at the office until 1am last night working on an upgrade, I'm still at home and won't make it to the office until noon, if at all. Oh, and I've already put in 50 hours this week.
Will officers face sanctions for falsifying records?
The DA said:
Gascon said there did not appear to be any malicious intent behind the police officers’ actions. He said the coordinators were apparently just too lazy to perform the test required every 10 days.
Can I use that excuse when I get pulled over for rolling through a stop sign? "But I was just too lazy to stop, officer! Surely you can understand that!"
They might not have enough space for 3x the install (previous working copy, current copy, downloaded copy) and streaming a firmware update over wifi is just asking for trouble.
That may well be true, but it would be stupid since even a USB transfer can be interrupted or corrupt. And it doesn't change my point that security is not a reason to send customers a USB stick in the mail rather than letting their car download the update via Wifi.
Or, if they could be updated like the Kindle (3G or WiFi), Ford could handle them all without the owner getting involved. And they wouldn't need to mail out 30,000 USB sticks or CDs.
Plus, Ford could then get real feedback from how the car is performing.
Because no one ever took advantage of short-sighted manufacturers that aren't security-conscious to do anything malicious to a car. Oh, wait...
Also, awesome insurance scam in the works if you can do a hostile takeover of a rich guy's car (the ones that will probably have cars with Wi-Fi) and make him get into a rear-end accident. BAM! Sweet-ass cash truck from his rich guy insurance agency. No cop will believe "My car got hacked."
A USB stick that arrives through the mail is hardly more secure than a Wifi update. It could even be less secure since an attacker could drop 10,000 of them in the mail anonymously without having to risk physical proximity to the car he's trying to hack.
Hopefully Ford uses digital signatures to validate the integrity of an update before the car will accept it, but signature validation works equally well (or poorly) whether its a USB Flash update or Wifi update.
If you have one server to do imap/pop3/smtp and a web interface to email, I'd just call it "mail.example.com". If you really must put your DNS server, then call it "mail-dns.example.com", but if the goal is fast dns lookups on the mail server, I'd just put in a local DNS cache and keep my corporate DNS server on a separate server (virtual or physical).
No need to let a successful SMTP/POP/IMAP/HTTP hack also lead to a takeover of your DNS. Likewise, no need to let a successful DNS hack lead to a takeover of your mail server.
Except when any of the server's location, platform or purpose changes, you'll have to change its name.
Right!
Is this a bad thing? Is it better to name the server SnowWhite and then having to remember whether SnowWhite is a DNS server or a Web server this week? Better to rename it (even better to reimage it) from prod-dns1 to dev-web1. I ship servers between datacenters so infrequently that renaming the server when it moves is not a problem.
This guy has a nice analysis of why it costs over $6 per mile to drive his Lamborghini:
http://supercarrentalsinc.com/lamborghini-gallardo-buyers-guide-part-v-ownership-cost-estimate/
Of course, if you drive more, you'll bring the cost per mile down.
"Cannot get 4 adults plus dog plus ancillaries in a Yaris."
Have multiple vehicles. I don't drive my F350 Ford or 366 big block Chevy truck unless I need to, but liability insurance is cheap and they are paid for.
Multiple vehicles allows selection of the right tool for the job.
Or rent what you need when you need it. We have a small car which we mainly use for commuting. When we need something bigger or with more cargo space (like a pickup), we rent from the city carshare program or a regular car rental agency which has surprisingly good weekend rates since they have a glut of cars from business travelers). The city carshare program is especially nice when I have to work late unexpectedly, they have cheap overnight rates and there are several locations within easy walking distance from work so I've always been able to get a car when I need it, even last minute. The overnight car rental rate is cheaper than it would cost to take a cab home.
Our occasional car rental bill is much lower than our car payment would be on a second car.
Don't feel bad. Doing math in your head has been replaced by calculators. Application of math is where it's at.
I know plenty of people who can do math in their head, but can't actually use it for anything outside of homework.
But you don't always have a calculator when you need one (or don't want to take the time to pull out your phone and start up the calculator app). Being able to do simple math in your head can be a huge advantage in life to do a quick sanity check on lots of things.
I recently spotted an error in some home purchase paperwork A number that was supposed to be 3% of the purchase price was actually 7%. The listing agent didn't believe me that it was wrong until she pulled out her calculator to run the numbers. It's trivial to estimate 3% of a number in your head - finding 3% of $325,000 means rounding down to $3K for 1% and multiplying by 3 to get $9K. It's not exact, but often a rough estimate is enough. I later ran all the numbers through a calculator to be sure they were exact, but I saved myself another day of waiting for corrected paperwork by having her correct it in her office instead of waiting until I got home to discover the error.
While it's true that most people have a calculator close at hand these days, how many people take the time to actually use it, especially when they think that someone else already used their calculator to calculate the numbers, so they assume it's already correct?
And I really can't believe how many people have to get a calculator to evenly add a tip and divide a lunch bill 4 ways! And then proceed to say "Ok, everyone owes $8.79" instead of just saying "$9".
1 barrel of crude oil makes 19.5 gallons of gas, so 0.016 barrel/day/person consumption rate in the EU = about .36 gallons of gas per day and 0.033 barrels/day/person consumption rate in the USA = about .64 gallons of gas per day. With a Toyota Prius at 50 mpg that makes for a round trip limit of 32 miles in the USA and 16 miles in the EU. If a Prius is hypermiled it can get about 60 mpg. However, the average light duty vehicles in the USA get about 24 mpg so that means if the USA tried to match the EU levels we are all going to be living a lot closer together... I better stock up on body deoderant..
I think that analysis is much too simplistic to be able to draw any conclusions. Not all oil is used for car transportation. Not every person in the country drives (think kids and elderly). And even for those that do drive, not everyone has a solo commute. When my wife and I drive to work, we go together, so we get 60 passenger mpg from our 30mpg car. But when I take the electric train I don't use any oil at all (since my city gets its power from hydroelectric sources, but even if it didn't, it would largely be powered by coal, not oil). But oil is used for lots of non personal transportation needs (i.e. trucking, trains, industrial uses, etc), so it's really hard to turn a "gallons/person" figure into a "commute miles/person".
In the USA, the average commute distance is 14.5 miles one-way . I couldn't find any numbers for Europe, but in the UK, the average is 8.5 miles/day
The smart thing about their 95% percentile calculation is that the bar keeps getting lower.
If the 95% mark is at 5GB today and they throttle back anyone that exceeds 5GB, no one will be able to go beyond 5GB of usage, so next month the 95% level might be 4.9GB. Then since no one can go much beyond 4.9GB, the next month it becomes 4.8GB. And so on.
Until finally, they are throttling once you hit 100KB of bandwidth and they can advertise the world's fastest wireless network since no one can use it. You can get one hit to speedtest.net to test your bandwidth and see your blazing 25mbit of bandwidth before they throttle you to 144kb of bandwidth.
Sounds like a good strategy.
I'm sorry what is the 2nd person plural?
I believe that would be you'uns (sometimes pronounced "yens" or "yins"). For example: "Are you'uns going to the store?"
this +10000000000, the fact though is that there seems to be a perception in North America that sweating is "bad" (look at all the endless commercials about anti-perspirants, I mean, if an anti-perspirant worked as advertised you'd die due to not being able to thermoregulate
I should add that I bike commute in the same t-shirt every morning for a week, sometimes two (I wear my work shirt home). And as long as I let it dry every day (by folding it loosely and putting it on top of my office bookcase, by the end of the week, the t-shirt still smells clean.
I've participated in a number of 24 hour running relay races (12 person teams, 200 miles, around 24 hours to complete). And the despite the fact that there are 6 runners cooped up in a minivan who have run a couple 6 mile relay legs in the heat and have had no chance to shower, it's not until around the last 8 hours of the race when people start to get stinky. Though by that time, sleep deprivation makes you not care so much :-)
Let's not get silly about this. The United States of America is approximately double land width of the EU,
Why does that matter? If I own an acre of land, I can build a 5,000 square foot monster house, or a modest 1000 square foot house. But if I build that 5000 sq ft house, I shouldn't complain that it costs more to heat, cool, and maintain that house. Likewise the population of the USA can spread out evenly across all land area, or they can live more densely to allow more efficient transportation options. Since we've apparently chosen the former, we shouldn't complain when gas hits $5/gallon and our lifestyle has become too expensive to maintain. We should have had a big wakeup call in the oil crisis in the '70's, but instead of spending the past 40 years building out efficient transportation options, we've chosen to continue to develop sprawling suburban areas that are far from workplaces.
and both USA & EU pay the same price for crude oil.
It's just the countries collecting the extra from the consumer as tax after it's been turned into the gasoline/diesel/etc that is the de facto standard in the area.
That's entirely the problem - the USA chose to give cheap gas to its citizens to let them build a lifestyle around it, while other nations taxed it and used the money to build alternative transportation infrastructure (and encourage the population to driver smaller, more fuel efficient cars).
The USA could do the same by taxing fuel to make it more expensive, but any changes are years away. But so far, we've chosen to pretend that fuel prices will always be low and continue to ignore the problem. It's much cheaper and easier to address increasing energy costs over decades than to find out that increasing global demand will triple fuel costs in the next 5 years. China and India are both becoming more modernized, and as their citizens demand the same energy intensive lifestyle that other developed countries enjoy, energy prices will rise. I don't think we're in danger of running out of fossil fuels anytime in the forseeable future, but as demand rises and fuels become more expensive to extract, prices will rise.
People can throw around all the metrics they want depending on which side they want to be on.
US more gas hog - compare estimated populations of ~315M US vs ~500M EU then calculate as you have done.
EU more gas hog - compare land mass of ~9.8M km2 US vs ~1.7M km2 EU. Using this, the comparison swings wildly in the other direction.
Statistics is all about choosing which best matches your opinion, view, or talking point.
Why would you use land mass? Just because the USA has more land mass doesn't mean that people *have* to be distributed evenly across that land mass. If energy efficiency is important, intelligent distribution of the population can minimize transportation based energy usage.
If energy conservation is not important, then just say so, but don't claim "But we *have* to use more gas because our country is bigger", when in reality, years of cheap gas have let us distribute our population in a manner that makes cost effective and energy efficient transportation difficult to achieve.