In seriousness though, atheism* does make an assertion about the meta-physical, in the same way that religions do. So how is it different? If a Christian claims Jesus is god and made the universe, a Muslim claims Allah is god and made the universe, and an atheist claims that the multiverse made the universe, how are two a religion and the other not? They are all making claims about something we do not know and the origins of the universe. It may be a strawman to claim that atheism* is a religion, but only as much as the claim that atheism* is not a religion is a strawman.
* (As in the "there is no god" atheism, moreso than the "I have seen no evidence for god, therefore have no reason to believe" atheism - i.e. hard atheism).
So why then do "agnostic atheists" call themselves such, to avoid confusion? Even knowing that there is a spectrum of belief (and non-belief), if someone says "atheist", I immediately think of them as the "asserting that there are no gods" type (to some degree). If your opinion is not one that asserts the non-existence of god(s), then why use that title and confuse people? I have since learned to check, but not everyone does (including, it appears, the GP).
I think this is where our terminology gets a little confusing: what he described (and you quoted) is the "atheistic agnostic"; i.e. "I do not think there is a god, and I'm not going to go look", which is different from an atheist ("There is no god"). I think one of the problems with the titles is that people who are even-minded agnostics call themselves atheists, which then gets read as "god-hater", and the conversation goes downhill... I would suggest that calling oneself an "atheist" is only wise if you actually assert that there is no god (rather than having uncertainty on the subject), or perhaps use "agnostic atheist"?
Also, I would disagree that agnosticism lacks intellectual integrity - in fact, I would say it is probably the most intellectually-honest position, certainly more so than an atheist, who ultimately is asserting something they actually cannot know for sure. The only other position that I would say is intellectually honest would be a theist with direct evidence for god, but that's another argument.:-) (And, even there, I would expect some degree of doubt due to observer bias etc).
I personally would like to see more people title themselves agnostic - I immediately have more respect for that than for someone who introduces themselves as an atheist.
Yes, technically, atheism is defined by being non-belief in the supernatural, however I think you may be confusing agnosticism (i.e. some form of "I don't know"), which is specifically not a belief as it claims no (or little) knowledge either way, with atheism, which asserts that "there is no god". Asserting a negative is still a belief, so the atheist (but not the agnostic) is still based to some degree on faith (even if that faith is in your understanding of the processes of the universe).
An agnostic can claim they do not have a belief, but an atheist cannot. And, many atheists I have met hold very strong views - in fact, quite often stronger than many religious people - but (somewhat illogically) want to claim that they don't have a faith and then get offended whenever someone tries to suggest that they are "just as fundamentalist" as another group. Belief in the scientific method (and that it works) still requires faith (though, arguably less than in divinity).
When I see someone say "atheism is not a belief", I wonder if they either haven't talked to any atheists or if they're using a different measure for different groups of people - we all believe something that is not based on rationality, I just find it kind of sad that very few people can actually be willing to say that about themselves.
As someone posted above, Android is basically Linux+Java, and that's growing extremely fast, as is gaming on mobile OSes. The point still stands for the desktop though.
Also sounds like the Daleks (who were apparently based on Nazism, so it figures) - they often seem to kill themselves or each other off because of "imperfection".
Just as something to think about: wouldn't open-source bioweapons be easier to defend against, as you'd be able to code an anti-viral as specific as the virus because you would know exactly how it functioned? I would imagine that if open-access knowledge on targeted viruses became a reality, then the first thing a lot of people would be doing would be designing a defence.
It's intriguing that both the name (Aryan) and the swastika are used in India: "Indo-Aryan" is one of the two largest people-groups in India (the other being "Dravidian"; the former are generally lighter-skinned and live in the north, the latter more southern with darker skin). Seeing a swastika on a Hindu temple was very confusing at first (though I believe the glyph is oriented the other way around to the Nazi symbol).
This raises a point about laws in general that seems to get missed quite a bit from modern debate: the effect on the populace as a whole should weigh heavier than the effect on one specific individual. We are so obsessed with an individual's rights, that we forget about the impact those rights have on everyone else - IMHO, we should be more concerned about an individual's responsibilities than their rights. Is the loss of the occasional single innocent person really that big a deal when you consider we're talking about people who would probably take several lives if we don't stop them?
Intriguingly, my writing of this comment was interrupted by a fire drill: it's kind of insane to see how selfishly people act in a situation like that, showing more concern for their own inconvenience than for the fact that someone could be burning to death... I'm not too bothered if they themselves want to die in a fire (though I swear that should count as proof of insanity), but I am bothered that they don't think about the poor fire fighters who might have to come in after them.
As another commenter posted, that's an Ask Amazon question - I suggest hitting up the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Forums; we've had some good responses there
Another possible help is free webhosting - we use this; saves us paying for hosting, and has pretty reasonable throughput before you'd have to start paying. As for making money off ebooks, it's an uphill climb; yes, there are the occasional "overnight millionaire" types, but most of us just make a little bit on the side (we have ~40 childrens' ebooks, and don't make enough to live off, but it's a helpful side income while we're students). I could make plenty of other suggestions (and did in a comment further up), so let me know if there's anything else I can help with - more than happy to be of aid to a fellow ebook author. My biggest suggestion: ebooks are only as successful as their marketing (which you seem to have made a good start with by getting on Slashdot!)
Mod parent up - as someone involved in ebook publishing, I can vouch for the value of the two points he makes (print on demand makes hardly any profit, and authors on Amazon can - and should - go DRM-free).
Yes, Amazon completely lets you set the price: as far as I'm aware, the only limitation is $0.99 as a minimum (and maybe a ceiling as well?) As for cut, it's either you get 30%, or you get 70%-less-delivery (optional on books about $3 and up).
I believe it may even be possible to coax Amazon's auto-price-matching into making a book free.
So no, not a huge cut - even 30% royalties is more than you'd get through pretty much any traditional publishing/media distribution route.
We create children's ebooks, and have looked into a bunch of options here. A few ideas:
(1) $0.99 isn't a lot to pay; significantly more than free, but not a lot. Certainly, if you're wanting to make things available for educational purposes, then this might not be that good an idea.
(2) Amazon's Kindle Select program allows you to do 5 free promo days every three months or so, meaning that you could suggest on your site that people could pay now or wait a couple of weeks and get it while it's free. Disadvantage here is that I believe the Kindle Select terms mean you aren't allowed to "sell" it elsewhere.
(3) Ad-supported ebooks. As long as having ads in your work doesn't feel like selling your soul, this could be an option. This tends to lend itself to interactive ebooks more (e.g. ebooks as an app), but could still work in static-content books. If you've got an Android device, I came across one of these called "Cyberkill" - a free, ad-supported interactive ebook - which was sort of a "proof of concept" for the idea (we even discussed with the guy who runs that business as to whether it might work for us).
(4) Paid version available through normal channels, with something to the effect of, "This resource is available free to educators - contact us for details". This will mean you're manually emailing out copies (or download links), but unless it becomes wildly popular, that shouldn't be a huge amount of work.
(5) Put it both free (your site) and non-free (Amazon etc), and optionally tell people about the free version. If you do it right, the Amazon "price-matching" thing can mean that because it's free elsewhere, Amazon make it free as well (unsure of the specifics here, but I think I've seen it happen). Quite likely, you'll get fewer complaints than you expect: some people would rather pay $1 for the convenience (I know a friend who said this of Amazon's system, as a comparison with the "shamelessly downloaded" copy he had obtained - Amazon's "one-click purchase" was simpler, so he did that).
(6) Ask yourself: are you in this for others or for yourself? It sounds like it's a mixture, but at some point you have to trade-off the two options - either you're in it for the money or you're in it to make stuff available free. It would be nice if both worked, but we are competing with others' selfishness - either you exploit their selfishness (and make money), or give in to it and let most people get something from you without you gaining, except from the minority who decide to give back (e.g. the "donations" model), or you find a way of monetizing your giveaways (e.g. how Google operates - primary service (search) is free, secondary services (advertising on those search results) is where they make the $$).
Hope this helps - I'd be quite happy to discuss ebook promotional ideas if you like (no charge - just happy to help a fellow ebook author); easiest way to contact is probably via our website - just mention my Slashdot username so it gets to me.
I have a unique name. I have tried to find someone with the same name as me, and the closest I came was a dead guy from Australia, who had a different middle name. But, being unique is somewhat concerning because I can't hide, especially in a context like this (as it would be trivial for anyone on/. to try my name). But, the solution is that I simply don't put anything online that I don't want the world to know. Good thing I'm not famous for anything, so no one has any reason to try stalking me.
It would be useful if you could search for a person filtered on location or some other data (I once tried seeing what research had been published by one or two of my University lecturers - wasn't easy to find at all, and that's with relatively uncommon names).
From a non-cyberspace example, even: I got to know someone I'm studying with quite well, and would hear about this friend's fiancé. When I actually met the fiancé, I found it slightly awkward, as I already knew the answers to all the usual introductory social questions (e.g. "What do you do?", "Where are you from?", etc). It was a little bit odd, because there was nothing to start a conversation with.
Similarly, if I googled someone to find out all about them (and was actually finding that person, not some other person with the same name as usually happens with anything except very rare names), I wouldn't have anything to discuss with them.
Guidance thrusters on the projectiles? Wouldn't need to be much, just enough to fix minor course errors. Simple enough tech, I would have thought (as long as it can survive the initial launch).
Downloading one file that then lets you do a complete install in ~20 minutes? Easy. Doing that then waiting for upwards of a couple hours in some cases for lots of fiddly updates (plus lost time when you forget to check if it needs yet another reboot).
Also, recovery partitions are useful sometimes: I worked in a computer repair shop, and we liked the "it needs a full reinstall" on machines with a good recovery partition - a couple of button presses, let it run, then follow up with half an hour of work at the tail end, two hours chargeable.:-) Not so nice when you had to do it all yourself (often starting with an offline hunt for the network driver... though, that's less common now) - still could only charge two hours, but sometimes took us more like 3 or 4.
I wonder: are there any third-party apps that can do this? I remember back in the XP days there was something that let us build a custom install disk and allowed us to slipstream drivers, updates, etc into it, reducing the number of reboots substantially (though I can't remember the name off the top of my head). If MS aren't going to do an updates package, I wonder if someone else has/will? (An "unofficial service pack").
Having worked in a PC support shop, it's painful when you get more than one or two customer machines needing a full "nuke and pave" rebuild of the OS... It would tie up our work area for ages as they sat there downloading and installing (especially bad on some of the slow, old customer machines that we had to deal with). It also meant several machines downloading the same thing over and over again, further slowing things down and tying up bandwidth (I tried to talk them into a transparent caching proxy or similar, and a WSUS server could have worked too, but it didn't happen as it was never enough of a priority). Someone had a disk with a bunch of slipstreamed updates, but I seem to recall that at the time we had only got that working for XP, not Vista or 7.
I'm running Win 7 and find I have to reboot about every few days, mainly because of constantly moving around dodgy wireless networks (primarily the University one that's tending to be overloaded at the moment, but another as well that has a flaky connection) - sometimes the machine gives up on trying to connect altogether until I clean boot it. Having said that, I am aware I'm probably not a common case and I do tend to tweak and do a bit more than just standard user so am probably stressing the OS more than most.
However, one thing that I've been thinking for years now that they should do is have something that creates an image of the OS immediately after a clean boot, and whenever the machine starts up after that, just pull that image straight from disk into memory - it would give a full boot in the same time as a restore from hibernate. Image would only need changing if/when something modified the startup sequences (though I guess that could be fairly often on Windows...) Maybe this is what they're trying to achieve.
Then again, I'm wondering why Windows still doesn't have other things like a dedicated swap partition (rather than letting the swap file "grow as needed" and get fragmented all over the disk), so again, perhaps I'm not a standard Windows user.:-)
Not always - for example, the city I live in is seeing a trend towards growing use of public transport (as the public transport systems improve and traffic demand grows). Certainly, if it costs $3 and takes 30 minutes to get to work by PT and the same by car, you're going to take the car, but if it's $2 and 20 minutes by PT but $8 and 50 minutes by car, the car is no longer more convenient and people start to change. Spending 2+ hours a day communiting isn't fun. The ideal transport system (I think) is one where you only have to walk a max of about a couple of hundred metres or so at each end, have no wait times, and don't have to drive the vehicle (so can read, relax, check Facebook, browse/. headlines, whatever while travelling), and PT systems like this are actually achieveable, and more convenient than a car-based system (and a better quality of life). It's just a matter of convincing people.:-)
However, you do have a point that people have this (sometimes irrational) love for their cars: when doing traffic modelling, correction factors for this have to be included as people will still use their cars even if they are more costly and less convenient... (This from a University lecture on traffic engineering).
Slashdot Mirror
Was "Internet full of facts" supposed to be funny? I know the internet is full of a lot of things, but facts seem in the minority... ;-)
In seriousness though, atheism* does make an assertion about the meta-physical, in the same way that religions do. So how is it different? If a Christian claims Jesus is god and made the universe, a Muslim claims Allah is god and made the universe, and an atheist claims that the multiverse made the universe, how are two a religion and the other not? They are all making claims about something we do not know and the origins of the universe. It may be a strawman to claim that atheism* is a religion, but only as much as the claim that atheism* is not a religion is a strawman.
* (As in the "there is no god" atheism, moreso than the "I have seen no evidence for god, therefore have no reason to believe" atheism - i.e. hard atheism).
So why then do "agnostic atheists" call themselves such, to avoid confusion? Even knowing that there is a spectrum of belief (and non-belief), if someone says "atheist", I immediately think of them as the "asserting that there are no gods" type (to some degree). If your opinion is not one that asserts the non-existence of god(s), then why use that title and confuse people? I have since learned to check, but not everyone does (including, it appears, the GP).
I think this is where our terminology gets a little confusing: what he described (and you quoted) is the "atheistic agnostic"; i.e. "I do not think there is a god, and I'm not going to go look", which is different from an atheist ("There is no god"). I think one of the problems with the titles is that people who are even-minded agnostics call themselves atheists, which then gets read as "god-hater", and the conversation goes downhill... I would suggest that calling oneself an "atheist" is only wise if you actually assert that there is no god (rather than having uncertainty on the subject), or perhaps use "agnostic atheist"?
Also, I would disagree that agnosticism lacks intellectual integrity - in fact, I would say it is probably the most intellectually-honest position, certainly more so than an atheist, who ultimately is asserting something they actually cannot know for sure. The only other position that I would say is intellectually honest would be a theist with direct evidence for god, but that's another argument. :-) (And, even there, I would expect some degree of doubt due to observer bias etc).
I personally would like to see more people title themselves agnostic - I immediately have more respect for that than for someone who introduces themselves as an atheist.
Yes, technically, atheism is defined by being non-belief in the supernatural, however I think you may be confusing agnosticism (i.e. some form of "I don't know"), which is specifically not a belief as it claims no (or little) knowledge either way, with atheism, which asserts that "there is no god". Asserting a negative is still a belief, so the atheist (but not the agnostic) is still based to some degree on faith (even if that faith is in your understanding of the processes of the universe).
An agnostic can claim they do not have a belief, but an atheist cannot. And, many atheists I have met hold very strong views - in fact, quite often stronger than many religious people - but (somewhat illogically) want to claim that they don't have a faith and then get offended whenever someone tries to suggest that they are "just as fundamentalist" as another group. Belief in the scientific method (and that it works) still requires faith (though, arguably less than in divinity).
When I see someone say "atheism is not a belief", I wonder if they either haven't talked to any atheists or if they're using a different measure for different groups of people - we all believe something that is not based on rationality, I just find it kind of sad that very few people can actually be willing to say that about themselves.
SFr., kr, £... Still no $. :-)
As someone posted above, Android is basically Linux+Java, and that's growing extremely fast, as is gaming on mobile OSes. The point still stands for the desktop though.
Also sounds like the Daleks (who were apparently based on Nazism, so it figures) - they often seem to kill themselves or each other off because of "imperfection".
Just as something to think about: wouldn't open-source bioweapons be easier to defend against, as you'd be able to code an anti-viral as specific as the virus because you would know exactly how it functioned? I would imagine that if open-access knowledge on targeted viruses became a reality, then the first thing a lot of people would be doing would be designing a defence.
It's intriguing that both the name (Aryan) and the swastika are used in India: "Indo-Aryan" is one of the two largest people-groups in India (the other being "Dravidian"; the former are generally lighter-skinned and live in the north, the latter more southern with darker skin). Seeing a swastika on a Hindu temple was very confusing at first (though I believe the glyph is oriented the other way around to the Nazi symbol).
Even the name "swastika" is Sanskrit.
This raises a point about laws in general that seems to get missed quite a bit from modern debate: the effect on the populace as a whole should weigh heavier than the effect on one specific individual. We are so obsessed with an individual's rights, that we forget about the impact those rights have on everyone else - IMHO, we should be more concerned about an individual's responsibilities than their rights. Is the loss of the occasional single innocent person really that big a deal when you consider we're talking about people who would probably take several lives if we don't stop them?
Intriguingly, my writing of this comment was interrupted by a fire drill: it's kind of insane to see how selfishly people act in a situation like that, showing more concern for their own inconvenience than for the fact that someone could be burning to death... I'm not too bothered if they themselves want to die in a fire (though I swear that should count as proof of insanity), but I am bothered that they don't think about the poor fire fighters who might have to come in after them.
As another commenter posted, that's an Ask Amazon question - I suggest hitting up the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Forums; we've had some good responses there
Another possible help is free webhosting - we use this; saves us paying for hosting, and has pretty reasonable throughput before you'd have to start paying. As for making money off ebooks, it's an uphill climb; yes, there are the occasional "overnight millionaire" types, but most of us just make a little bit on the side (we have ~40 childrens' ebooks, and don't make enough to live off, but it's a helpful side income while we're students). I could make plenty of other suggestions (and did in a comment further up), so let me know if there's anything else I can help with - more than happy to be of aid to a fellow ebook author. My biggest suggestion: ebooks are only as successful as their marketing (which you seem to have made a good start with by getting on Slashdot!)
Mod parent up - as someone involved in ebook publishing, I can vouch for the value of the two points he makes (print on demand makes hardly any profit, and authors on Amazon can - and should - go DRM-free).
Yes, Amazon completely lets you set the price: as far as I'm aware, the only limitation is $0.99 as a minimum (and maybe a ceiling as well?) As for cut, it's either you get 30%, or you get 70%-less-delivery (optional on books about $3 and up).
I believe it may even be possible to coax Amazon's auto-price-matching into making a book free.
So no, not a huge cut - even 30% royalties is more than you'd get through pretty much any traditional publishing/media distribution route.
We create children's ebooks, and have looked into a bunch of options here. A few ideas:
(1) $0.99 isn't a lot to pay; significantly more than free, but not a lot. Certainly, if you're wanting to make things available for educational purposes, then this might not be that good an idea.
(2) Amazon's Kindle Select program allows you to do 5 free promo days every three months or so, meaning that you could suggest on your site that people could pay now or wait a couple of weeks and get it while it's free. Disadvantage here is that I believe the Kindle Select terms mean you aren't allowed to "sell" it elsewhere.
(3) Ad-supported ebooks. As long as having ads in your work doesn't feel like selling your soul, this could be an option. This tends to lend itself to interactive ebooks more (e.g. ebooks as an app), but could still work in static-content books. If you've got an Android device, I came across one of these called "Cyberkill" - a free, ad-supported interactive ebook - which was sort of a "proof of concept" for the idea (we even discussed with the guy who runs that business as to whether it might work for us).
(4) Paid version available through normal channels, with something to the effect of, "This resource is available free to educators - contact us for details". This will mean you're manually emailing out copies (or download links), but unless it becomes wildly popular, that shouldn't be a huge amount of work.
(5) Put it both free (your site) and non-free (Amazon etc), and optionally tell people about the free version. If you do it right, the Amazon "price-matching" thing can mean that because it's free elsewhere, Amazon make it free as well (unsure of the specifics here, but I think I've seen it happen). Quite likely, you'll get fewer complaints than you expect: some people would rather pay $1 for the convenience (I know a friend who said this of Amazon's system, as a comparison with the "shamelessly downloaded" copy he had obtained - Amazon's "one-click purchase" was simpler, so he did that).
(6) Ask yourself: are you in this for others or for yourself? It sounds like it's a mixture, but at some point you have to trade-off the two options - either you're in it for the money or you're in it to make stuff available free. It would be nice if both worked, but we are competing with others' selfishness - either you exploit their selfishness (and make money), or give in to it and let most people get something from you without you gaining, except from the minority who decide to give back (e.g. the "donations" model), or you find a way of monetizing your giveaways (e.g. how Google operates - primary service (search) is free, secondary services (advertising on those search results) is where they make the $$).
Hope this helps - I'd be quite happy to discuss ebook promotional ideas if you like (no charge - just happy to help a fellow ebook author); easiest way to contact is probably via our website - just mention my Slashdot username so it gets to me.
Also, why do you think there are so many strange given names (or strange spellings) becoming popular now?
I have a unique name. I have tried to find someone with the same name as me, and the closest I came was a dead guy from Australia, who had a different middle name. But, being unique is somewhat concerning because I can't hide, especially in a context like this (as it would be trivial for anyone on /. to try my name). But, the solution is that I simply don't put anything online that I don't want the world to know. Good thing I'm not famous for anything, so no one has any reason to try stalking me.
It would be useful if you could search for a person filtered on location or some other data (I once tried seeing what research had been published by one or two of my University lecturers - wasn't easy to find at all, and that's with relatively uncommon names).
From a non-cyberspace example, even: I got to know someone I'm studying with quite well, and would hear about this friend's fiancé. When I actually met the fiancé, I found it slightly awkward, as I already knew the answers to all the usual introductory social questions (e.g. "What do you do?", "Where are you from?", etc). It was a little bit odd, because there was nothing to start a conversation with.
Similarly, if I googled someone to find out all about them (and was actually finding that person, not some other person with the same name as usually happens with anything except very rare names), I wouldn't have anything to discuss with them.
"An iPhone and a Nexus 4 walk into a bar..."
So what's the punchline?
Guidance thrusters on the projectiles? Wouldn't need to be much, just enough to fix minor course errors. Simple enough tech, I would have thought (as long as it can survive the initial launch).
Simple answer: speed and time.
Downloading one file that then lets you do a complete install in ~20 minutes? Easy. Doing that then waiting for upwards of a couple hours in some cases for lots of fiddly updates (plus lost time when you forget to check if it needs yet another reboot).
Also, recovery partitions are useful sometimes: I worked in a computer repair shop, and we liked the "it needs a full reinstall" on machines with a good recovery partition - a couple of button presses, let it run, then follow up with half an hour of work at the tail end, two hours chargeable. :-) Not so nice when you had to do it all yourself (often starting with an offline hunt for the network driver... though, that's less common now) - still could only charge two hours, but sometimes took us more like 3 or 4.
I wonder: are there any third-party apps that can do this? I remember back in the XP days there was something that let us build a custom install disk and allowed us to slipstream drivers, updates, etc into it, reducing the number of reboots substantially (though I can't remember the name off the top of my head). If MS aren't going to do an updates package, I wonder if someone else has/will? (An "unofficial service pack").
Having worked in a PC support shop, it's painful when you get more than one or two customer machines needing a full "nuke and pave" rebuild of the OS... It would tie up our work area for ages as they sat there downloading and installing (especially bad on some of the slow, old customer machines that we had to deal with). It also meant several machines downloading the same thing over and over again, further slowing things down and tying up bandwidth (I tried to talk them into a transparent caching proxy or similar, and a WSUS server could have worked too, but it didn't happen as it was never enough of a priority). Someone had a disk with a bunch of slipstreamed updates, but I seem to recall that at the time we had only got that working for XP, not Vista or 7.
I'm running Win 7 and find I have to reboot about every few days, mainly because of constantly moving around dodgy wireless networks (primarily the University one that's tending to be overloaded at the moment, but another as well that has a flaky connection) - sometimes the machine gives up on trying to connect altogether until I clean boot it. Having said that, I am aware I'm probably not a common case and I do tend to tweak and do a bit more than just standard user so am probably stressing the OS more than most.
However, one thing that I've been thinking for years now that they should do is have something that creates an image of the OS immediately after a clean boot, and whenever the machine starts up after that, just pull that image straight from disk into memory - it would give a full boot in the same time as a restore from hibernate. Image would only need changing if/when something modified the startup sequences (though I guess that could be fairly often on Windows...) Maybe this is what they're trying to achieve.
Then again, I'm wondering why Windows still doesn't have other things like a dedicated swap partition (rather than letting the swap file "grow as needed" and get fragmented all over the disk), so again, perhaps I'm not a standard Windows user. :-)
Not always - for example, the city I live in is seeing a trend towards growing use of public transport (as the public transport systems improve and traffic demand grows). Certainly, if it costs $3 and takes 30 minutes to get to work by PT and the same by car, you're going to take the car, but if it's $2 and 20 minutes by PT but $8 and 50 minutes by car, the car is no longer more convenient and people start to change. Spending 2+ hours a day communiting isn't fun. The ideal transport system (I think) is one where you only have to walk a max of about a couple of hundred metres or so at each end, have no wait times, and don't have to drive the vehicle (so can read, relax, check Facebook, browse /. headlines, whatever while travelling), and PT systems like this are actually achieveable, and more convenient than a car-based system (and a better quality of life). It's just a matter of convincing people. :-)
However, you do have a point that people have this (sometimes irrational) love for their cars: when doing traffic modelling, correction factors for this have to be included as people will still use their cars even if they are more costly and less convenient... (This from a University lecture on traffic engineering).