Not really. Other posters have described the effects of semis on the highways.
From a financial POV, money from federal excise taxes takes a long time to reach the states.
Political pressures also result in an inequitable distribution of tax revenue. States like Texas and California make a net gain in highway funding, while northeast states lose money.
Toll roads are the way. The New York State Thruway (I-90 and 140 miles of I-87) is a toll road where your toll is based on the number of axles on your car. Trucks pay like $50 to go from NYC to Buffalo.
And... unlike most roads in the northeast, the Thruway is in almost perfect condition since they have adequate funds to maintain the road.
Oil is already falling from the peak price levels, and the people who know what they are doing (the traders) anticipate the price to be around $36 in two years.
Oil is just another commodity, and is subject to swings as speculators throw money around.
If you honestly believe that China is stockpiling the amounts of petroleum that they would need to weather a period of oil shortages, you really need to get informed.
The only statement being made is the statement that you'll be getting every month from Toyota Credit.
Transportation is an economic activity. When gas becomes more expensive for extended periods of time or the government stops building "free" roads, the market will respond.
If you want performance, you are going to pay for it, either through gas, acqusition cost, or the installation and upkeep of some bizarro custom hybrid kit.
Even the Prius is a waste of money. You end up spending $20,000+ for an economy car, that gets around 45mpg. (The 60mpg claims are flawed due to the EPA testing model)
Plus, after your warranty runs out, your stuck with massive repair bills since you'll have to go to a Toyota dealer to have your electric motor and/or batteries replaced.
If you want an economy car with good performance, look at a Golf GTI or a mid 90's Toyota or Honda.
The return seems pretty slim for the amount of hassle and cost that you will put yourself through. Making huge powertrain and weight modifications to your car will likely have unexpected and bad consequences, which you will be on your own to fix.
IMHO, if you are truly economically sensitive to gas prices, I suggest that you buy a '94 or '95 Toyota Tercel/Corolla, Ford Escort or Honda Civic. You'll easily get 35-45mpg with these cars and spend a grand total of $3-5k for the whole vehicle.
If you want to make a statement about "saving" the environment, move closer to work.
I thought the point of the Linux "community" was that you could dissassemble your toaster and write Linux drivers for it to replace the manual controls?
Phillips has likely licenced the technology from another vendor who is unwilling to change the terms. The fact that they were willing to provide access to the code under NDA at little or no cost displays their good intentions.
If the Linux kernel team is going to fuck with binary code in the kernel, then alot of other devices are going to be broken.
During the Northeast Blackout last year, my cell phone was out for about 24 hours. I lived in a area with munipical power generation (that is 40% cheaper than the rest of the state) and had uninterrupted phone and electrical service.
You must have been asleep or doing other things. There are so many scenes and plot elements that are identical between the two movies...
I'm not knocking Star Wars at all, its a great movie. But listening to Lucas trying to explain away dozens of plot similarities was absolutely hilarious.
If you have a chance, look at the special features where Lucas tries to explain how basically every scene from Star Wars was copied from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress.
Except for the laser guns, it's the same story in the same film. Even the music is similar.
The government can regulate anything it chooses to. Logic and legislation often disagree.
For example, Anyone with a reasonably modern car or motorcycle can safely drive 80 or 90 mph on the expressways, yet the government chooses to enforce a universally-ignored 55 or 65 mph speed limit.
The police cannot seriously enforce this limit or cite all violators, yet the inane & insane law persists.
Ask the ATF and your Local police how they stop people from getting machine guns and pistols... Machine guns have been banned for years and years, yet people continue to get shot by them.
If from standard radio bands were having ill effects on people, we would have seen studies revealing some increased rates of cancer in certain professions.
For example, cops cradling radar guns in their laps were found to have elevated rates of testicular cancer. Police unions were concerned that walkie-talkies would have the same effect, and conducted all sorts of studies that found no correlation.
Rumors about cancer causing power lines and cell phones have been around for ages. If they were true, somebody would have come up with more conclusive evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
You have plenty of car buying choices, not a stark choice between a Prius and a Hummer.
Fortunately, there are enough suckers out there buying new cars so that people like me can buy them at the end of the lease.
Not really. Other posters have described the effects of semis on the highways.
From a financial POV, money from federal excise taxes takes a long time to reach the states.
Political pressures also result in an inequitable distribution of tax revenue. States like Texas and California make a net gain in highway funding, while northeast states lose money.
Toll roads are the way. The New York State Thruway (I-90 and 140 miles of I-87) is a toll road where your toll is based on the number of axles on your car. Trucks pay like $50 to go from NYC to Buffalo.
And... unlike most roads in the northeast, the Thruway is in almost perfect condition since they have adequate funds to maintain the road.
Actually, you're wrong about the roads.
Government sponsored roads were a government action that was initially seen as a way to keep the railroad and streetcar monopolies in check.
I would welcome toll highways -- it is ridiculous that trucking companies get to wear out roads with their huge trucks at our expense.
And it wants it arguments back!
Oil is already falling from the peak price levels, and the people who know what they are doing (the traders) anticipate the price to be around $36 in two years.
Oil is just another commodity, and is subject to swings as speculators throw money around.
If you honestly believe that China is stockpiling the amounts of petroleum that they would need to weather a period of oil shortages, you really need to get informed.
The only statement being made is the statement that you'll be getting every month from Toyota Credit.
Transportation is an economic activity. When gas becomes more expensive for extended periods of time or the government stops building "free" roads, the market will respond.
If you want performance, you are going to pay for it, either through gas, acqusition cost, or the installation and upkeep of some bizarro custom hybrid kit.
Even the Prius is a waste of money. You end up spending $20,000+ for an economy car, that gets around 45mpg. (The 60mpg claims are flawed due to the EPA testing model)
Plus, after your warranty runs out, your stuck with massive repair bills since you'll have to go to a Toyota dealer to have your electric motor and/or batteries replaced.
If you want an economy car with good performance, look at a Golf GTI or a mid 90's Toyota or Honda.
The return seems pretty slim for the amount of hassle and cost that you will put yourself through. Making huge powertrain and weight modifications to your car will likely have unexpected and bad consequences, which you will be on your own to fix.
IMHO, if you are truly economically sensitive to gas prices, I suggest that you buy a '94 or '95 Toyota Tercel/Corolla, Ford Escort or Honda Civic. You'll easily get 35-45mpg with these cars and spend a grand total of $3-5k for the whole vehicle.
If you want to make a statement about "saving" the environment, move closer to work.
While the RPM knows where to put itself, the user generally has no idea where it went.
And the RPM options to display where the files for a particular package are a little less than obvious to boot.
I thought the point of the Linux "community" was that you could dissassemble your toaster and write Linux drivers for it to replace the manual controls?
Phillips has likely licenced the technology from another vendor who is unwilling to change the terms. The fact that they were willing to provide access to the code under NDA at little or no cost displays their good intentions.
If the Linux kernel team is going to fuck with binary code in the kernel, then alot of other devices are going to be broken.
During the Northeast Blackout last year, my cell phone was out for about 24 hours. I lived in a area with munipical power generation (that is 40% cheaper than the rest of the state) and had uninterrupted phone and electrical service.
Interesting how nearly all of the security exploits that you hear about occur with programs written in C/C++.
I've used some enterprise apps that run on AIX, HP, Solaris, Windows and DEC Unix.
Try looking at something like Apache Coccoon, you'll be impressed.
Newer Java apps aren't the stupid applets of a few years ago...
Hello from Picasa
They also could use J2EE entitiy beans to feed the data to a Perl/Tk script.
You must have been asleep or doing other things. There are so many scenes and plot elements that are identical between the two movies...
I'm not knocking Star Wars at all, its a great movie. But listening to Lucas trying to explain away dozens of plot similarities was absolutely hilarious.
If you have a chance, look at the special features where Lucas tries to explain how basically every scene from Star Wars was copied from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress.
Except for the laser guns, it's the same story in the same film. Even the music is similar.
The government can regulate anything it chooses to. Logic and legislation often disagree.
For example, Anyone with a reasonably modern car or motorcycle can safely drive 80 or 90 mph on the expressways, yet the government chooses to enforce a universally-ignored 55 or 65 mph speed limit.
The police cannot seriously enforce this limit or cite all violators, yet the inane & insane law persists.
Good question.
Ask the ATF and your Local police how they stop people from getting machine guns and pistols... Machine guns have been banned for years and years, yet people continue to get shot by them.
Soldiers kill people and destroy things. Learning about peace would be a distraction.
Then encryption becomes illegal, dumbass.
Once upon a time, anyone with a few bucks and the desire could pick up a pistol or thompson gun at a department store and take it home.
Then gangsters began killing people with pistols and submachine guns, so we began tightly regulating their sale and use.
When the police convince the people that only criminals are using encryption, then encryption users will become criminals.
Of course Democrats would never stick protestors in a cage undearneath a loud overpass during the democratic convention now, would they?
Hackers are harmless dorks. Crackers are the evil ones. Learn the difference
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/
That's a bogus argument...
If from standard radio bands were having ill effects on people, we would have seen studies revealing some increased rates of cancer in certain professions.
For example, cops cradling radar guns in their laps were found to have elevated rates of testicular cancer. Police unions were concerned that walkie-talkies would have the same effect, and conducted all sorts of studies that found no correlation.
Rumors about cancer causing power lines and cell phones have been around for ages. If they were true, somebody would have come up with more conclusive evidence.
The "solution" of turning everything off on a general purpose computer is bunk. There has to be a balance between ease of use, function and security.
Sure, I can disable every network service and use Lynx to browse the web... but I lose too much in the process.
Unless your vision of the computing future is glorified dumb terminals sitting on top of TV sets, getting rid of functionality isn't the way.
The Linux fanboyism on this site is sickening.
Try sticking an unpatched Red Hat 6 box from 1998/9 on the public internet and see how many minutes it takes to be totally rooted.
Then you can put "R3dh/\7 s\_/X04z" in your sig.