Not "discrepancies", ignorant nonsense. "1984" and "Big Brother" have become catch phrases for entities, especially governments, that spy on and/or micromanage the lives of individuals. That sort of describes one aspect of the book, but there's a lot more to it than that. And many people who obviously only know the book through these catch phrases talk knowingly it as if that were all it were about.
For example, everybody "knows" that the fictional government in 1984 spies on all its citizens and has endless rules for regulating their behavior. In the actual book, Oceania's rulers basically ignores the "proles," who make up 90% of the population, except to make the odd troublemaker or gangster disappear, and to use various cultural influences (including drugs and pornography) to encourage a passive, indifferent attitude.
And there are no repressive laws, because there are no laws at all! (Though the proles are under the impression that the drugs and porn that are used to control them are actually illegal.) Far from being a vast, bureaucratic state, Oceania is a anarchic, barely-governed mess where nobody knows exactly what's going on. Despite the title of the book, even the actual year is uncertain.
And did I mention the government-sponsored riots? Soviet Russia it ain't.
The protaganist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth where (of course) he makes up lies. Except he himself has no idea of the truth behind the lies he creates. For example, he publishes reports that shoe production has exceeded targets, even though he's seen statistics that show production has fallen far short. Thing is, Smith is convinced that the statistics he's seen are themselves bogus, and nobody actually knows how many shoes are being made.
Now, Smith is under constant surveillance. But that's only because he's part of the "Outer Party" the junior members of INGSOC (usually just called The Party) who run things. They're bossed around by the "Inner Party" who have only slightly more privacy than he does. His behavior is tightly controlled, but though intimidation and "groupthink", not through repressive laws.
Smith is a sort of half-assed dissident who secretly opposes the rule of INGSOC. But not as secretly as he imagines. It turns out that the Inner Party knows all about him. And this is where most people's understanding of the book goes really off the beam. Because it's widely interpreted as a satire of the USSR. But if the Soviets knew about somebody who was working to overthrow him, they'd just haul him in and shoot him, with a show trial if the person was widely known.
That's not what happens to Smith. Oh, he does eventually get his show trial and execution, but not before, he's put through a brutal process designed to "cure" him. What's his condition? Well, his understanding of reality is at odds with the Party's so he's obviously delusional! The process works: the last words in the book are "He loved Big Brother." The Soviets were often accused of "mind control" but they never managed to take it that far!
From what I know of British history, the society described in 1984 is a satire of the the left-wing political theories that were trendy during and shortly after WW II. Orwell took these ideas and carried them to their logical (and absurd) extreme.
One other thing that most people "know" about Orwell was that he was against all things left wing. He was indeed very critical of the Soviets and their sympathizers and apologists. And his scathing description of Communist tactics during the Spanish Civil War are often quoted by the Right. But despite his differences with the Left, Orwell was in fact, a socialist who had strong opinions about the plight of working class Brits.
If filtering is your only issue, Slashdot's is easily disabled. For my part, I prefer to skip over the AC snipes, the "oh yeah?" posts, and other cruft.
Yes, bad moderation sometimes suppress comments that don't deserve it. The endless noise on unmoderated forums drowns out everything.
If they can require people to encrypt their email, the next evil plan will be to force everybody to supply crytographic certificates with each email. This will make it impossible to send anonymous email! No poison pen messages, no mailbox bombing, no sp...
If you're an ecommerce website, and you don't already use https for sensitive data (like credit card info), you are just begging to be ripped off. Or hadn't you noticed that little padlock icon that appears whenever you buy something online?
Maybe to those who grew up in the GUI-only world. But to us old-timers...
I'm probably an older timer than you — I first used a computer in 1971. I'm just more willing than you to change with the times.
The mental inflexibility of techies sometimes boggles my mind. I once worked in a pubs group where we delivered our content to the printer using postscript files generated by an ancient machine running Windows 3.1. Print shops had long since gone over to PDF, which you can generate on almost any platform. But the boss had to practically take her family hostage before the production person would agree to upgrade.
Yes, there are now zillions of web-based forums. And nearly every one of them requires learning yet another GUI, often requiring javascript. So even if they're all accessible via browser, they all mangle the browser's semantics sufficiently that I have to remember a new set of controls for nearly every forum. I now follow only about half as many as I used to, and I keep detailed notes on how to use each of them, especially the ones that implement any of the pseudo-HTML markup schemes that are floating around.
Oh please. There are maybe 3 or 4 basic flavors of web forum. And even if the codes are different, most users don't bother with them anyway. Only people who are anal-retentive about formatting (like me) bother.
If you don't have the mental capacity to master a few user interfaces, I wonder at your ability to participate in an intelligent discussion. But then, most usenet discussions are long on verbiage and short on actual insight. Perhaps what you're missing is the ability to perform an effortless, thought-free braindump.
Having usenet access cut off is a problem mostly because...
It's not cut off. You just can't get it bundled with your Internet service any more. Try googling "usenet feeds".
And just because you do use it, doesn't make it mainstream.
Usenet is totally obsolete. It was designed around assumptions that haven't applied for a decade, maybe two. Modems are no longer used for server-to-server connections, and are rapidly disappearing for client-server connections (and obviously don't exist at all for Comcast users!), so the distribution model no longer makes any technical sense. What with spam, flamewars, and fancruft, the percentage of useful content has dropped to the single digits. And since all data goes to all servers, even if nobody reads it, it's not terribly efficient.
USENET survives for one reason: inertia. People have their hacked up clients and filters that they've used since Jimmy Carter was President, and don't want to change.
Even if you could convince me that you have a serious need to access Usenet, you couldn't convince me that Comcast has an obligation to carry it. I suppose the overhead for them is relatively small, but even so, it's obviously out of proportion to the benefit to their customers. Why should they serve up gigabytes of data that are only accessed by a tiny proportion of their customers, any one of whom only follows a few of the thousands of feeds.
In any case, it's not like Comcast is blocking Usenet. They just not providing free feeds any more. You can still subscribe to feed services very cheaply, or you can use Google Groups for free.
None of which should be interpreted as defending Comcast's various abuses of their semi-monopoly status. This just isn't one of them.
Not to defend the Iraq war (a major exercise in self-delusion) but note that it's cost us $500 billion so far. That much money is beyond any normal person's imagination, and sounds like it could buy anything. But compare it to the Apollo program, which cost about $150 billion in 2008 dollars.
I suppose that if we had three times the Apollo program, we could do a Mars equivalent, that would put a few people on the Martian service for a few days and bring them home. But what's the point? You can do a few things that you couldn't do with automated probes, but is that worth a half-trillion?
People talk about all the positive things we got from the Apollo program. But its biggest effect was the convince politicians and taxpayers that manned space travel is money pit of astronomical proportions. Repeating Apollo with an even more expensive target would be a major mistake.
If you find a half trillion dollars under your seat cushions and decide to use it to conquer space, please don't spend it on a silly trip to Mars. Spend it on technology that will further a permanent human presence in space, and give private entities some hope that serious space colonization will pay big bucks. That means boring stuff, like reusable vehicles that don't cost a billion dollars per launch.
When you state all your arguments as hypotheticals, any contradiction can be described as "overreacting". If you have actual opinions, why not state them?
I think I know why: You don't want to have an actual discussion or argument, you just want to score points against people who disagree with you. You're a sort of rhetorical Viet Cong: you don't try to hold any positions, you just make life unpleasant for your opponents until they get disgusted and go away.
That might be satisfying to your ego, but it shows a total unwillingness to listen to other peoples ideas or share your own. Kind of pointless, really.
It's kind of ironic to note that factcheck.org is run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which was founded by the media mogul Walter Annenberg. Far from being a flaming liberal, Annenberg was a lifelong Republican and a close friend of Ronald Reagan. A courageous and principled person, though I never agreed with his politics.
Does this association protect factcheck.org from accusations of liberal bias? Of course not. Anybody who says anything negative about any prominent conservative is an "obviously" biased liberal.
Right, like nobody's piling on Obama. Just because his email is more secure than Palin's doesn't mean he's benefiting from some geekish anti-Palin agenda.
a collection of 63,559 deleted Wikipedia pages that range from "vanity entries" or obscure points of reference to heavily edited topics that Wikipedia administrators eventually deemed fan fiction
There, fixed that for you.
Actually, administrators don't make the decisions about what gets deleted. In theory, a bunch of users discuss the issue until a consensus is reached, and then an administrator implements the consensus.
Of course, there are a bunch of problems with that model. Consensus in the TWiki community is as hard to find as a competent FEMA official. (Which is exactly why a Wiki is the wrong platform for a user-edited encyclopedia. But that's another issue.) So what ends up happening is that people argue and vote until some administrator decides that a consensus has been reached. The definition of "consensus" is entirely up to the administrator (usually it means a majority or two thirds of those voting). I suppose administrators could rig the system to suit themselves, but all the administrators I've had any contact with try to be fair. They're just not very consistent about what they consider fair!
One thing that is really silly is all the arguments over what's to trivial to be included. If your only claim to fame is that you lost an obscure election somewhere in the U.S., your biography will probably be deemed "unencyclopedic". But every person who's run for public office in Canada since the invention of the computer seems to rate an article. That's because somebody dumped a Canadian elections database into Wikipedia, and every time somebody tries to get one of them deleted, a bunch of Canadian users decide it's an attack on their national honor, and pack the "discussion".
Really, they should just forget about trying to filter out trivia. It's half the content, because that's all most users know how to contribute.
When are right wing fanboys going to realize that both "everybody does it" and "X did it and got away with it" are not ethical arguments? Outside the third-grade playground that is, and even there, the vice-principle tends not to listen.
Don't know if this is in this archive, but some not entirely together person (I don't think he understands that Star Trek is fiction) wrote a really good timeline of the Mirror Universe, going all the way back to the 20th century and Prince Clinton's assassination of Emperor Reagan. I was participating in Wikipedia deletion discussions at the time, and there was a unanimous vote to delete it, for obvious reasons. But I think everybody who voted felt bad about doing it, it was so carefully thought out.
The "something or other" suggested is conducting public business using private email. For Federal officials, that's illegal, because it amounts to hiding your paper trail. Don't know if Alaska has a similar law for State officials, but even if it doesn't, hiding her actions is not what you'd expect from the reformer Palin claims to be.
Of course, even if proven, Palin will just add these charges to her list of Things That Never Happened, like her initial support for the Bridge to Nowhere.
Overpriced. The Sun system I pointed to has as many QC AMDs and four times as much RAM for $100K less. That doesn't include all those option cards and external storage, but I doubt that would make up the difference.
(Blatant plug: I'm the docs lead for the Sun system.)
Free Software, specifically copyleft software, only places restrictions on distribution. "End users" should never be troubled with an "I agree" button.
Except that "free" software does in fact impose a EULA on users. True, it's very lenient license, but it does place restrictions on what you can and cannot do with the software.
Just because FOSS people dispense with the "I agree" nonsense (which probably doesn't really have any legal effect anyway) doesn't mean there's no agreement or restrictions. And in point of fact, the restrictions imposed by the GPL have been the source of much heated discussion.
Vista jokes aside, this is an HPC/Server system, not a desktop. And as such, it's a long way from being the most expensive Windows system you can buy. A fully loaded Sun Fire X4600 M2 can run you more than $35K.
The current "Cray" is actually a new company that used to be called Tera Computer. Their connection with the original Cray is that in 2000 they bought some SGI assets that originated with Cray Research. One suspects that the only asset they really wanted was the Cray name. Ironically, when SGI owned Cray, they tried to phase out the Cray brand — with disastrous results.
Unlike the original Cray Research, Tera/Cray has always been moderately profitable. So this is not a dying gasp by any means.
I live in the San Francisco bay area, and nearly every highway that has even a small incline gets backed up because people don't know how to keep a steady speed while climbing a hill.
I live in the bay area too, and I just don't see this happening. Yes, people often impede traffic (and create a hazard) by driving too slowly. But as far as I can see, it has nothing to do with hills (which are mostly not that steep; I'll get to the exceptions in a moment). It seems to me that it's most often an attention issue: somebody's looking for a sign or an exit, or talking on the cell phone, and are unaware of what's happening around them.
Anyway, in my usual commute, the big slowdown is because of drivers in a hurry. These are the people who jump lanes on the freeway constantly, thinking they can get ahead of everybody else. Doesn't work, because almost everybody's doing the same thing. Plus they keep surprising other drivers, who hit their brakes, and cause exactly the kind of backup you blame on the slowpokes.
Then there are the folks who wait until the very last moment to merge into the exit lane....
But perhaps you're thinking of the really hilly areas, San Francisco itself. (Where I never drive, if I can avoid it.) There, the problem is simply that there are too many cars for the road system to handle. Even if you could magically flatten it out, it wouldn't get much better.
If you can tell OBL from any other guy with a beard and a keffiyeh, you're smarter than most people. In fact, most people can't tell a keffiyeh from a turban, which is why so many Sikhs have been victims of hate crimes lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Not "discrepancies", ignorant nonsense. "1984" and "Big Brother" have become catch phrases for entities, especially governments, that spy on and/or micromanage the lives of individuals. That sort of describes one aspect of the book, but there's a lot more to it than that. And many people who obviously only know the book through these catch phrases talk knowingly it as if that were all it were about.
For example, everybody "knows" that the fictional government in 1984 spies on all its citizens and has endless rules for regulating their behavior. In the actual book, Oceania's rulers basically ignores the "proles," who make up 90% of the population, except to make the odd troublemaker or gangster disappear, and to use various cultural influences (including drugs and pornography) to encourage a passive, indifferent attitude.
And there are no repressive laws, because there are no laws at all! (Though the proles are under the impression that the drugs and porn that are used to control them are actually illegal.) Far from being a vast, bureaucratic state, Oceania is a anarchic, barely-governed mess where nobody knows exactly what's going on. Despite the title of the book, even the actual year is uncertain.
And did I mention the government-sponsored riots? Soviet Russia it ain't.
The protaganist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth where (of course) he makes up lies. Except he himself has no idea of the truth behind the lies he creates. For example, he publishes reports that shoe production has exceeded targets, even though he's seen statistics that show production has fallen far short. Thing is, Smith is convinced that the statistics he's seen are themselves bogus, and nobody actually knows how many shoes are being made.
Now, Smith is under constant surveillance. But that's only because he's part of the "Outer Party" the junior members of INGSOC (usually just called The Party) who run things. They're bossed around by the "Inner Party" who have only slightly more privacy than he does. His behavior is tightly controlled, but though intimidation and "groupthink", not through repressive laws.
Smith is a sort of half-assed dissident who secretly opposes the rule of INGSOC. But not as secretly as he imagines. It turns out that the Inner Party knows all about him. And this is where most people's understanding of the book goes really off the beam. Because it's widely interpreted as a satire of the USSR. But if the Soviets knew about somebody who was working to overthrow him, they'd just haul him in and shoot him, with a show trial if the person was widely known.
That's not what happens to Smith. Oh, he does eventually get his show trial and execution, but not before, he's put through a brutal process designed to "cure" him. What's his condition? Well, his understanding of reality is at odds with the Party's so he's obviously delusional! The process works: the last words in the book are "He loved Big Brother." The Soviets were often accused of "mind control" but they never managed to take it that far!
From what I know of British history, the society described in 1984 is a satire of the the left-wing political theories that were trendy during and shortly after WW II. Orwell took these ideas and carried them to their logical (and absurd) extreme.
One other thing that most people "know" about Orwell was that he was against all things left wing. He was indeed very critical of the Soviets and their sympathizers and apologists. And his scathing description of Communist tactics during the Spanish Civil War are often quoted by the Right. But despite his differences with the Left, Orwell was in fact, a socialist who had strong opinions about the plight of working class Brits.
If filtering is your only issue, Slashdot's is easily disabled. For my part, I prefer to skip over the AC snipes, the "oh yeah?" posts, and other cruft.
Yes, bad moderation sometimes suppress comments that don't deserve it. The endless noise on unmoderated forums drowns out everything.
Don't judge a law by how it sounds. The actual text tends to be more useful.
Yeah, the dude was unfairly moderated down. What does that have to do with Usenet? Any system can have bad (or good) filtering.
If they can require people to encrypt their email, the next evil plan will be to force everybody to supply crytographic certificates with each email. This will make it impossible to send anonymous email! No poison pen messages, no mailbox bombing, no sp...
Oh. Never mind.
If you're an ecommerce website, and you don't already use https for sensitive data (like credit card info), you are just begging to be ripped off. Or hadn't you noticed that little padlock icon that appears whenever you buy something online?
Maybe to those who grew up in the GUI-only world. But to us old-timers...
I'm probably an older timer than you — I first used a computer in 1971. I'm just more willing than you to change with the times.
The mental inflexibility of techies sometimes boggles my mind. I once worked in a pubs group where we delivered our content to the printer using postscript files generated by an ancient machine running Windows 3.1. Print shops had long since gone over to PDF, which you can generate on almost any platform. But the boss had to practically take her family hostage before the production person would agree to upgrade.
Yes, there are now zillions of web-based forums. And nearly every one of them requires learning yet another GUI, often requiring javascript. So even if they're all accessible via browser, they all mangle the browser's semantics sufficiently that I have to remember a new set of controls for nearly every forum. I now follow only about half as many as I used to, and I keep detailed notes on how to use each of them, especially the ones that implement any of the pseudo-HTML markup schemes that are floating around.
Oh please. There are maybe 3 or 4 basic flavors of web forum. And even if the codes are different, most users don't bother with them anyway. Only people who are anal-retentive about formatting (like me) bother.
If you don't have the mental capacity to master a few user interfaces, I wonder at your ability to participate in an intelligent discussion. But then, most usenet discussions are long on verbiage and short on actual insight. Perhaps what you're missing is the ability to perform an effortless, thought-free braindump.
Having usenet access cut off is a problem mostly because...
It's not cut off. You just can't get it bundled with your Internet service any more. Try googling "usenet feeds".
How are you cut off? Google "usenet feeds" and you'll find a zillion sources. If you're too cheap to pay for it, use Google Groups.
Usenet isn't going away (unfortunately). Only Usenet bundled with home internet access is going away.
And just because you do use it, doesn't make it mainstream.
Usenet is totally obsolete. It was designed around assumptions that haven't applied for a decade, maybe two. Modems are no longer used for server-to-server connections, and are rapidly disappearing for client-server connections (and obviously don't exist at all for Comcast users!), so the distribution model no longer makes any technical sense. What with spam, flamewars, and fancruft, the percentage of useful content has dropped to the single digits. And since all data goes to all servers, even if nobody reads it, it's not terribly efficient.
USENET survives for one reason: inertia. People have their hacked up clients and filters that they've used since Jimmy Carter was President, and don't want to change.
Even if you could convince me that you have a serious need to access Usenet, you couldn't convince me that Comcast has an obligation to carry it. I suppose the overhead for them is relatively small, but even so, it's obviously out of proportion to the benefit to their customers. Why should they serve up gigabytes of data that are only accessed by a tiny proportion of their customers, any one of whom only follows a few of the thousands of feeds.
In any case, it's not like Comcast is blocking Usenet. They just not providing free feeds any more. You can still subscribe to feed services very cheaply, or you can use Google Groups for free.
None of which should be interpreted as defending Comcast's various abuses of their semi-monopoly status. This just isn't one of them.
Not to defend the Iraq war (a major exercise in self-delusion) but note that it's cost us $500 billion so far. That much money is beyond any normal person's imagination, and sounds like it could buy anything. But compare it to the Apollo program, which cost about $150 billion in 2008 dollars.
I suppose that if we had three times the Apollo program, we could do a Mars equivalent, that would put a few people on the Martian service for a few days and bring them home. But what's the point? You can do a few things that you couldn't do with automated probes, but is that worth a half-trillion?
People talk about all the positive things we got from the Apollo program. But its biggest effect was the convince politicians and taxpayers that manned space travel is money pit of astronomical proportions. Repeating Apollo with an even more expensive target would be a major mistake.
If you find a half trillion dollars under your seat cushions and decide to use it to conquer space, please don't spend it on a silly trip to Mars. Spend it on technology that will further a permanent human presence in space, and give private entities some hope that serious space colonization will pay big bucks. That means boring stuff, like reusable vehicles that don't cost a billion dollars per launch.
When you state all your arguments as hypotheticals, any contradiction can be described as "overreacting". If you have actual opinions, why not state them?
I think I know why: You don't want to have an actual discussion or argument, you just want to score points against people who disagree with you. You're a sort of rhetorical Viet Cong: you don't try to hold any positions, you just make life unpleasant for your opponents until they get disgusted and go away.
That might be satisfying to your ego, but it shows a total unwillingness to listen to other peoples ideas or share your own. Kind of pointless, really.
It's kind of ironic to note that factcheck.org is run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which was founded by the media mogul Walter Annenberg. Far from being a flaming liberal, Annenberg was a lifelong Republican and a close friend of Ronald Reagan. A courageous and principled person, though I never agreed with his politics.
Does this association protect factcheck.org from accusations of liberal bias? Of course not. Anybody who says anything negative about any prominent conservative is an "obviously" biased liberal.
Right, like nobody's piling on Obama. Just because his email is more secure than Palin's doesn't mean he's benefiting from some geekish anti-Palin agenda.
Just because I'm not infatuated by Obama doesn't make me a right-wing fanboy.
No it doesn't. It's making excuses for a shallows hypocritical politician that does the trick.
a collection of 63,559 deleted Wikipedia pages that range from "vanity entries" or obscure points of reference to heavily edited topics that Wikipedia administrators eventually deemed fan fiction
There, fixed that for you.
Actually, administrators don't make the decisions about what gets deleted. In theory, a bunch of users discuss the issue until a consensus is reached, and then an administrator implements the consensus.
Of course, there are a bunch of problems with that model. Consensus in the TWiki community is as hard to find as a competent FEMA official. (Which is exactly why a Wiki is the wrong platform for a user-edited encyclopedia. But that's another issue.) So what ends up happening is that people argue and vote until some administrator decides that a consensus has been reached. The definition of "consensus" is entirely up to the administrator (usually it means a majority or two thirds of those voting). I suppose administrators could rig the system to suit themselves, but all the administrators I've had any contact with try to be fair. They're just not very consistent about what they consider fair!
One thing that is really silly is all the arguments over what's to trivial to be included. If your only claim to fame is that you lost an obscure election somewhere in the U.S., your biography will probably be deemed "unencyclopedic". But every person who's run for public office in Canada since the invention of the computer seems to rate an article. That's because somebody dumped a Canadian elections database into Wikipedia, and every time somebody tries to get one of them deleted, a bunch of Canadian users decide it's an attack on their national honor, and pack the "discussion".
Really, they should just forget about trying to filter out trivia. It's half the content, because that's all most users know how to contribute.
When are right wing fanboys going to realize that both "everybody does it" and "X did it and got away with it" are not ethical arguments? Outside the third-grade playground that is, and even there, the vice-principle tends not to listen.
Don't know if this is in this archive, but some not entirely together person (I don't think he understands that Star Trek is fiction) wrote a really good timeline of the Mirror Universe, going all the way back to the 20th century and Prince Clinton's assassination of Emperor Reagan. I was participating in Wikipedia deletion discussions at the time, and there was a unanimous vote to delete it, for obvious reasons. But I think everybody who voted felt bad about doing it, it was so carefully thought out.
The "something or other" suggested is conducting public business using private email. For Federal officials, that's illegal, because it amounts to hiding your paper trail. Don't know if Alaska has a similar law for State officials, but even if it doesn't, hiding her actions is not what you'd expect from the reformer Palin claims to be.
Of course, even if proven, Palin will just add these charges to her list of Things That Never Happened, like her initial support for the Bridge to Nowhere.
Overpriced. The Sun system I pointed to has as many QC AMDs and four times as much RAM for $100K less. That doesn't include all those option cards and external storage, but I doubt that would make up the difference.
(Blatant plug: I'm the docs lead for the Sun system.)
Free Software, specifically copyleft software, only places restrictions on distribution. "End users" should never be troubled with an "I agree" button.
Except that "free" software does in fact impose a EULA on users. True, it's very lenient license, but it does place restrictions on what you can and cannot do with the software.
Just because FOSS people dispense with the "I agree" nonsense (which probably doesn't really have any legal effect anyway) doesn't mean there's no agreement or restrictions. And in point of fact, the restrictions imposed by the GPL have been the source of much heated discussion.
Vista jokes aside, this is an HPC/Server system, not a desktop. And as such, it's a long way from being the most expensive Windows system you can buy. A fully loaded Sun Fire X4600 M2 can run you more than $35K.
The current "Cray" is actually a new company that used to be called Tera Computer. Their connection with the original Cray is that in 2000 they bought some SGI assets that originated with Cray Research. One suspects that the only asset they really wanted was the Cray name. Ironically, when SGI owned Cray, they tried to phase out the Cray brand — with disastrous results.
Unlike the original Cray Research, Tera/Cray has always been moderately profitable. So this is not a dying gasp by any means.
I live in the San Francisco bay area, and nearly every highway that has even a small incline gets backed up because people don't know how to keep a steady speed while climbing a hill.
I live in the bay area too, and I just don't see this happening. Yes, people often impede traffic (and create a hazard) by driving too slowly. But as far as I can see, it has nothing to do with hills (which are mostly not that steep; I'll get to the exceptions in a moment). It seems to me that it's most often an attention issue: somebody's looking for a sign or an exit, or talking on the cell phone, and are unaware of what's happening around them.
Anyway, in my usual commute, the big slowdown is because of drivers in a hurry. These are the people who jump lanes on the freeway constantly, thinking they can get ahead of everybody else. Doesn't work, because almost everybody's doing the same thing. Plus they keep surprising other drivers, who hit their brakes, and cause exactly the kind of backup you blame on the slowpokes.
Then there are the folks who wait until the very last moment to merge into the exit lane....
But perhaps you're thinking of the really hilly areas, San Francisco itself. (Where I never drive, if I can avoid it.) There, the problem is simply that there are too many cars for the road system to handle. Even if you could magically flatten it out, it wouldn't get much better.
If you can tell OBL from any other guy with a beard and a keffiyeh, you're smarter than most people. In fact, most people can't tell a keffiyeh from a turban, which is why so many Sikhs have been victims of hate crimes lately.
There ain't no such thing as a free beer!