I'm a bit surprised at the prevailing sentiment on this thread. The guy has no frickin' legs, for pete's sake. The Olympics are supposed to celebrate human achievement and the will to overcome. If he hasn't overcome, then I don't know who has.
It's also a bit hypocritical to watch this guy teach himself not only how to walk again, but run again, and not only run, but compete like crazy, and criticize him for being 'enhanced' while turning mostly a blind eye to all the athletes with their legs who enhance themselves chemically. Sure, we feign outrage when they're caught, but if they get away with it we pretend they did it on their own.
Let him compete. I know I would feel a lot better about the future and humanity to see him overcome those odds and win.
Obama and Edwards are great candidates, but I was sure Hillary had an ace up her sleeve to skew the results. You can't skew caucuses where folks have to line up on one side of a room or other. But it's easy to hack the results of a Diebold vote.
I want vat-grown meat that you can produce in a unit you have in your home, like an herb garden for plants. Animal rights and all that doesn't really enter into it. It's more a question of knowing what goes into your food, without needing to own your own farm; and store-bought meat has been through dozens of hands and has picked up all sorts of pathogens in addition to the growth hormones and such that were originally put in it by the rancher.
Ancillary benefits are that you don't incur all the environmental costs of agricultural runoff, transportation, etc.
Combat, the usual. Later when I got a shiny new Laser 128 that I worked three summers to buy, I discovered the wonderful world of text-based porn. Can't remember the name of the game now, and google helpeth not, but it provided you with naughty sex tips and hints based on how long you thought you could do it for, 5 minutes, an hour, or ALL. NIGHT. LONG.
If the legal expert on the industry side of this debate, Mr. Cotton, is any indication, then it's clear why the content industries are shooting themselves in the foot. The man responsible for advising his clients on copyright in the digital age has no understanding of technology. Isn't that odd?
Would you hire, i dunno, a finance lawyer who knew nothing about finance? Would you hire an international trade lawyer who had never been outside of Sycamore, Illinois? No! Yet here the labels and studios are letting a handful of clueless characters in expensive suits strangle their businesses.
It's almost as though they've dynamited every track leading to Grand Central so the cluetrain cannot possibly arrive at the station.
Stories like these make me pine for a time when we'll be able to produce everything we need ourselves, a la Diamond Age. But the more advertisers insist on interrupting and irritating me, the more I want to have nothing more to do with them. Viral is fine, because if a friend thinks I might need something they know about, then I probably might. But anything else should be banned.
Happy to hear much of my wish list echoed by others, such as ending corporate personhood, banning lobbying, getting out of Iraq, universal healthcare, etc.
Here are others I haven't seen yet:
1. Comprehensive energy strategy to get off fossil fuels by 2015. Accomplished with mix of solar, wind, tidal, biomass, biodiesel, nuclear. Result: the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on fossil fuels will be reinvested in this country instead of flowing to suspect regimes who fund our enemies. Also, it will help avert catastrophic climate change.
2. National transportation strategy that builds up high-speed rail (a-la bullet train or TGV) as a way to alleviate air travel congestion and lower our national carbon footprint. Strongly encourage urban areas with sufficient population density to prioritize mass transit, walking, and cycling. (meshes with energy and climate strategy)
3. Start dealing with China. They are our largest strategic challenge in the 21st century, and they're gunning for us with everything they've got. If we don't get that foreign policy question right, it's world-ending.
4. Dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and forever and for all time ban the word "Homeland" in connection with the United States of America. Official description will be the tried-and-true, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."
5. Add Constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy.
6. Revise Federal Student Loan program to require all universities work to place 90% or greater of their graduates in jobs, or lose eligibility.
7. Apollo-like program to cure cancer, heart disease, and other perennial ills. Then give the cures to the world, for free. Let's contribute something lasting and positive as a civilization to the world. Also, it would be about the best apology we could make for Bush.
8. Push for universal work elegibility for citizens of all U.N. signatory countries. If global capital is able to move about the world freely, then labor (you, me, and everyone who works) should be able to move about just as freely. Outsourcing, immigration, unemployment, and nationalistic bigotry all are solved or at least dramatically alleviated in one stroke.
9. International effort to colonize Mars and develop space travel sufficient to take us to other stars.
That's interesting. My grandmother has Alzheimer's and while she can remember people and events from 50 years ago with perfect clarity, it's the more recent stuff that escapes her.
Also, it's the ongoing challenge of her wandering off or forgetting basic needs that's been the hardest for my family to deal with. In fact it's sparked a whole family feud among my father and his brother and sister because they're grappling with how best to care for her.
So my family's case is the opposite of yours; and this drug sounds very promising because it would not only restore my 84-year old grandmother's quality of life (and her parents both lived to be over 100), but also stop the disease from shredding my family's ties.
I can't see the U.S. govt. these days basing its decision on trivial matters like freedom, justice, or our Constitution, but I can't imagine that business travellers would stand still for this very long. They're fine with the rabble having no rights, but as soon as they have to disclose their plans to secret paradigm-shifting project X to a Customs Agent, they'll scream bloody murder about free markets and open competition.
It was a nice week after Iowa to think that at last we might get a break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties. It's already been 20 years we've had to live with it (Bush Sr. 4, Clinton 8, Bush Jr. 8).
I like Edwards as much as Obama, but really wish he'd cut a deal with Obama for the VP slot so the anti-Hillary vote wouldn't be split. That would have put a hard stop to the Hillary campaign right there.
Obama would be the clearest signal to the country and world that America is set for a new course. An Obama/Edwards ticket would be even stronger.
Rail, light rail, subways, and buses do work for the majority of Americans who live in urban areas with sufficient population density. If you live in a rural area or a particularly poorly designed suburb, then you probably need a car.
Public transportation might not work for you personally where you are, but the advantages in an urban area with a good system are many:
--If you need to buy heavy things like lots of groceries, get them delivered. --Instead of raging at traffic, let someone else do the driving while you read, study, work, what have you. --Go from making car payments, buying expensive gas, paying for repairs, paying for parking, paying for insurance to buying a monthly transit pass at a fraction of the cost that fits neatly into your pocket. --Similarly, you never have to worry about car payments, the funny sound your car started making last week, where on god's green earth you're going to find parking this time of day, which auto insurance plan gives you better coverage, if thieves are going to steal your wheels or smash your windows and steal your radio or vandals key your doors, or how to get to work now that they've closed two lanes for construction on the Dan Ryan expressway. In other words it greatly reduces your expenses and simplifies your life to not have a car. --In urban areas, the time you save in not sitting in traffic or searching for parking or paying tolls on bridges and tunnels cancels out the extra 10 minutes you spend walking to a bus or subway stop. If your transit system has express buses or trains, you're likely to come out ahead on the time cost. --If you need to carry and keep stuff with you, take a backpack. --Route planning is easier than driving. No need for Onstar or Tom-Tom or Garmin. Just look at a route map. Easy. --Walking a couple blocks to and from your stops is good for you and wakes you up for a more productive work day. --Oh yeah, there's an advantage to the environment of public transportation too, but that's gravy.
It's been a decade since I bought a CD or paid any money for music. So it sounds odd to hear people still talking about CDs as a current technology, almost like stumbling across a spirited discussion of vacuum tubes when the rest of the universe has moved on.
But why does anyone bother paying for any music anymore? Even without p2p there are more sources for restriction-free music than you can shake a stick at. KEXP, IndyFeed, and NPR's Open Mike are just a handful of excellent podcasts that feature fantastic tracks from independent artists, free of charge. Then there are the thousands of MySpace pages for new bands.
There's just no reason or argument for doing any business with record labels on any level.
In addition to cargo and other utilitarian applications, airships could also provide pretty fine luxury leisure travel. Air cruises would be cool, because rather than endless vistas of just water you can travel over land at altitudes low enough to have a view. I'd take one over a sea cruise any day.
In thinking about some of the other comments, I wonder how many people accused of crimes have been able to subpoena CCTV footage from police cameras and private surveillance in the same way that police seem to be able to.
It seems to me only fair that citizens should have as much latitude to monitor the public affairs of our government employees as they do us. But we should also have equal ability to access surveillance footage that is taken of us all daily without our consent in order to clear our names or draw attention to police misconduct and the like.
Watch BBC news coverage of America. They're far worthier of that appellation than any outlet in the United States, and they also mostly don't give a crap which political party or corporation they might offend by reporting the facts. As an additional plus, they are the one media operation that Rupert Murdoch can't buy and subvert.
It seems many other Americans agree, because the BBC news seems to have grown from being on only one channel (BBC America) morning and night, to four.
The first big change will be devolution from Manhattan-centricity. No one in the city or state has the political will to upgrade public transportation to accommodate the jump in ridership to work in Manhattan, so people will look to work closer to home. The devolution has already begun, with Jersey City in the lead (yes, technically not part of NYC, but for all practical intents and purposes it is), with Brooklyn not far behind it, and with Queens (Long-Island City) bringing up the rear.
The second big change will see the decline of automobile use in the city. Bikes will reclaim lanes, and pedestrian-only areas will be created in locations like Times Square, Midtown-east, Herald's Square, and around the WTC site. Also, tolls on the bridges and tunnels and reduction of parking opportunities will make it too expensive and inconvenient for 90% of car commuters.
The third big change will be an overall increase in greenery in the form of trees, planters, and green roofs. They'll be implemented to reduce energy usage and improve air quality, and consequently bring down the sky-high asthma rates for children in the city.
there's no sure-fire way to 100% guarantee nothing will happen on an airplane. A person could shove several pounds of semtec up their ass and detonate it that way. Or they could always do the good 'ole 12 Monkeys and infect themselves with Ebola before getting on the flight.
What the TSA and government in general should seriously consider is that, by pulling this kind of nonsense, they teach normally law-abiding citizens that the government is a more serious and pervasive threat to their freedom than any two-bit terrorist ever could be.
A web ad for a tech product or service that's served up on slashdot or thinkgeek is more likely to be something I'd be interested in than, say, anything sports or feminine hygiene related. So it's rather contextual a priori. 99% of the ads you see on TV are totally irrelevant and therefore irritating. Geico ads? No thanks, we take the subway.
Google's AdSense is helping push advertising from something that irritates the hell out of people to something that might be somewhat useful, in that the ads are even more relevant than from just general context.
The second, albeit weaker, argument for why web ads are more effective than TV ads is that they are more voluntary and less obtrusive yet there for people to click on if they're interested. So those who don't care about whatever it is pretty much just ignore it, and those it connects with can click through for more information and/or purchase.
I loathe every form of TV/Radio/Movie/Out-of-Home/Print advertising and actively resolve not to do business with those who use those media to steal my time and interrupt what I'm doing; yet with web ads I have found myself actually hitting the Back button to return to a page that had an ad which seemed interesting. It feels weird to say anything positive about any advertisement, but there you are.
Actually a score will usually do it. I previously ran interactive for the People's Choice Awards. It's not the Oscars, but the audience still numbers in the millions. We got no more than a couple hundred emails from the fans who voted on the award winners. The number of people who actually write in to any "authority" on any given subject is rather small. So you don't need thousands to influence the "authority."
We did modify what we were doing if a score or more indicated a trend. In one or two cases, we modified what we were doing by one person who had an insightful, well thought-out point to make. A word of caution, though, letter-writing campaigns are pretty easy to discern and tune out because they all come at the same time and use more or less the same wording.
The point is, you the individual letter/email writer have more power than conventional wisdom says you have.
Radio has been killed by ClearChannel's near total monopoly of the airwaves. Yes, they no longer have competition in radio, but they've ended the diversity held the audience's attention, and pushed commercials up to the point where you have to wade through 10 minutes of used-car ads to get to the 4 minutes of bland commercial pop.
Newspapers, meanwhile, stopped doing real journalism 15 years ago. It's much easier to pay a fee for AP articles and an editor to arrange them on a page around ad space than to keep on a staff of journalists doing in-depth investigative pieces; heck, it's even cheaper to change a couple words in the press releases companies send to newspapers these days and print them verbatim than to license AP articles--that's what more and more "news" outlets are doing these days.
TV, well, reality programs are boring, and commercials are annoying, and the few programs worth watching are in endless re-runs thanks to the writer's strike; or, the movies they run on cable are just promotional vehicles for the sequels that are coincidentally debuting next Friday.
Movies and music./. readers know that story so I won't regurgitate it.
In short, greed, corporatism (is that redundant with greed?), and focus group-tested pap that the old media have pumped out in the last decade to maximize profits has alienated the audience. Craigslist and other segments of the Internet are simply doing a better job of taking over the few useful activities the old used to perform, but without all the baggage.
Everyone on/. knows this. The interesting thing will be to observe what happens when Craigslist and its cohorts sell out to the same corporate interests for the big score and start degrading the content. Will new challengers spring up online to steal their lunch in the same manner?
how would this puppy handle in the ice and snow if the only wheel with power is the one rear wheel? Spinning out on ice and snow is a challenge with rear-wheel drive in a car that has two wheels. Living in a northern state, my first thought on seeing a picture of the thing was that it must have all-wheel drive to cope in slippery conditions.
Couldn't drive motors be added to the other two wheels without increasing the weight that much? The one on the rear wheel in the video didn't look that large.
is not self-driving cars, but public transportation. And if you need something heavy moved, have it delivered or rent a pickup for a day. Owning and operating cars make sense where the population density falls below a certain threshhold, say in the country, but in sub/urban spaces, which is what we're talking about here, there's no good reason to use the car as the solution to personal transportation.
And that's just for logistical reasons. When you consider the cost to the environment, the justification weakens more. When you consider the cost to our foreign policy and national security in being dependent upon other countries for oil, the justification weakens still more. When you consider the sheer hassle and productivity lost to accidents, finding parking, breakdowns, time lost sitting in traffic, and aggravation of driving (people cutting you off, getting stuck behind a slow poke, etc), the justification almost evaporates. And when you think about what the $15K you drop on a car and the $5K/yr. worth of insurance, gas, parking, and repairs you have to put into it to keep it running, and the reality that the value of the thing itself loses half its value every year, versus what that money could do for you if you even put it into an index fund, then financially it's the last nail in the coffin for the justification of owning a car.
A key advantage is that trains travel from city center to city center. That means you get off work at 5:30pm, walk a couple blocks to the station, and you're off to your weekend getaway in Marin or Montreal. There's no searching for a taxi or airport shuttle or sitting in miles of stand-still traffic with all the other folks trying to get away for the weekend. That's a lot of time, expense, and aggravation saved.
Then there's the passenger experience. You could be cramped in an airline seat like veal, or you could have a seat that's the equivalent of business class or even a private compartment if you roll that way. You could be trapped in a car seat in said bumper-to-bumper traffic with your legs slowly going numb, or be able to get up and stretch your legs on a walk to the observation or dining car.
As a bonus for those who need fear as a motivator, a train can't be hijacked and crashed into the twin towers. If the train is maglev, then it's even safer because if any shenanigans did occur aboard then authorities could just switch off power to the track; the train will sit there until help arrives.
Anyone who's ever ridden on the TGV in France or the Shinkansen in Japan can testify to this. High-speed rail is awesome, and the United States would do well to implement it.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and many of the other Founding Fathers were masons. Freemasonry could be considered deist in that you must believe in a supreme being, but what you call that supreme being is not material. That is, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and even adherents to Wicca are eligible for membership in the fraternity.
So it's not surprising that they Founding Fathers would have built the same attitude into the DNA of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit surprised at the prevailing sentiment on this thread. The guy has no frickin' legs, for pete's sake. The Olympics are supposed to celebrate human achievement and the will to overcome. If he hasn't overcome, then I don't know who has.
It's also a bit hypocritical to watch this guy teach himself not only how to walk again, but run again, and not only run, but compete like crazy, and criticize him for being 'enhanced' while turning mostly a blind eye to all the athletes with their legs who enhance themselves chemically. Sure, we feign outrage when they're caught, but if they get away with it we pretend they did it on their own.
Let him compete. I know I would feel a lot better about the future and humanity to see him overcome those odds and win.
The color that is blacker than black is fuligin.
Obama and Edwards are great candidates, but I was sure Hillary had an ace up her sleeve to skew the results. You can't skew caucuses where folks have to line up on one side of a room or other. But it's easy to hack the results of a Diebold vote.
I want vat-grown meat that you can produce in a unit you have in your home, like an herb garden for plants. Animal rights and all that doesn't really enter into it. It's more a question of knowing what goes into your food, without needing to own your own farm; and store-bought meat has been through dozens of hands and has picked up all sorts of pathogens in addition to the growth hormones and such that were originally put in it by the rancher.
Ancillary benefits are that you don't incur all the environmental costs of agricultural runoff, transportation, etc.
Combat, the usual. Later when I got a shiny new Laser 128 that I worked three summers to buy, I discovered the wonderful world of text-based porn. Can't remember the name of the game now, and google helpeth not, but it provided you with naughty sex tips and hints based on how long you thought you could do it for, 5 minutes, an hour, or ALL. NIGHT. LONG.
Fond memories...
If the legal expert on the industry side of this debate, Mr. Cotton, is any indication, then it's clear why the content industries are shooting themselves in the foot. The man responsible for advising his clients on copyright in the digital age has no understanding of technology. Isn't that odd?
Would you hire, i dunno, a finance lawyer who knew nothing about finance? Would you hire an international trade lawyer who had never been outside of Sycamore, Illinois? No! Yet here the labels and studios are letting a handful of clueless characters in expensive suits strangle their businesses.
It's almost as though they've dynamited every track leading to Grand Central so the cluetrain cannot possibly arrive at the station.
Stories like these make me pine for a time when we'll be able to produce everything we need ourselves, a la Diamond Age. But the more advertisers insist on interrupting and irritating me, the more I want to have nothing more to do with them. Viral is fine, because if a friend thinks I might need something they know about, then I probably might. But anything else should be banned.
Happy to hear much of my wish list echoed by others, such as ending corporate personhood, banning lobbying, getting out of Iraq, universal healthcare, etc.
Here are others I haven't seen yet:
1. Comprehensive energy strategy to get off fossil fuels by 2015. Accomplished with mix of solar, wind, tidal, biomass, biodiesel, nuclear. Result: the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on fossil fuels will be reinvested in this country instead of flowing to suspect regimes who fund our enemies. Also, it will help avert catastrophic climate change.
2. National transportation strategy that builds up high-speed rail (a-la bullet train or TGV) as a way to alleviate air travel congestion and lower our national carbon footprint. Strongly encourage urban areas with sufficient population density to prioritize mass transit, walking, and cycling. (meshes with energy and climate strategy)
3. Start dealing with China. They are our largest strategic challenge in the 21st century, and they're gunning for us with everything they've got. If we don't get that foreign policy question right, it's world-ending.
4. Dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and forever and for all time ban the word "Homeland" in connection with the United States of America. Official description will be the tried-and-true, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."
5. Add Constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy.
6. Revise Federal Student Loan program to require all universities work to place 90% or greater of their graduates in jobs, or lose eligibility.
7. Apollo-like program to cure cancer, heart disease, and other perennial ills. Then give the cures to the world, for free. Let's contribute something lasting and positive as a civilization to the world. Also, it would be about the best apology we could make for Bush.
8. Push for universal work elegibility for citizens of all U.N. signatory countries. If global capital is able to move about the world freely, then labor (you, me, and everyone who works) should be able to move about just as freely. Outsourcing, immigration, unemployment, and nationalistic bigotry all are solved or at least dramatically alleviated in one stroke.
9. International effort to colonize Mars and develop space travel sufficient to take us to other stars.
That's interesting. My grandmother has Alzheimer's and while she can remember people and events from 50 years ago with perfect clarity, it's the more recent stuff that escapes her.
Also, it's the ongoing challenge of her wandering off or forgetting basic needs that's been the hardest for my family to deal with. In fact it's sparked a whole family feud among my father and his brother and sister because they're grappling with how best to care for her.
So my family's case is the opposite of yours; and this drug sounds very promising because it would not only restore my 84-year old grandmother's quality of life (and her parents both lived to be over 100), but also stop the disease from shredding my family's ties.
I can't see the U.S. govt. these days basing its decision on trivial matters like freedom, justice, or our Constitution, but I can't imagine that business travellers would stand still for this very long. They're fine with the rabble having no rights, but as soon as they have to disclose their plans to secret paradigm-shifting project X to a Customs Agent, they'll scream bloody murder about free markets and open competition.
It was a nice week after Iowa to think that at last we might get a break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties. It's already been 20 years we've had to live with it (Bush Sr. 4, Clinton 8, Bush Jr. 8).
I like Edwards as much as Obama, but really wish he'd cut a deal with Obama for the VP slot so the anti-Hillary vote wouldn't be split. That would have put a hard stop to the Hillary campaign right there.
Obama would be the clearest signal to the country and world that America is set for a new course. An Obama/Edwards ticket would be even stronger.
Rail, light rail, subways, and buses do work for the majority of Americans who live in urban areas with sufficient population density. If you live in a rural area or a particularly poorly designed suburb, then you probably need a car.
Public transportation might not work for you personally where you are, but the advantages in an urban area with a good system are many:
--If you need to buy heavy things like lots of groceries, get them delivered.
--Instead of raging at traffic, let someone else do the driving while you read, study, work, what have you.
--Go from making car payments, buying expensive gas, paying for repairs, paying for parking, paying for insurance to buying a monthly transit pass at a fraction of the cost that fits neatly into your pocket.
--Similarly, you never have to worry about car payments, the funny sound your car started making last week, where on god's green earth you're going to find parking this time of day, which auto insurance plan gives you better coverage, if thieves are going to steal your wheels or smash your windows and steal your radio or vandals key your doors, or how to get to work now that they've closed two lanes for construction on the Dan Ryan expressway. In other words it greatly reduces your expenses and simplifies your life to not have a car.
--In urban areas, the time you save in not sitting in traffic or searching for parking or paying tolls on bridges and tunnels cancels out the extra 10 minutes you spend walking to a bus or subway stop. If your transit system has express buses or trains, you're likely to come out ahead on the time cost.
--If you need to carry and keep stuff with you, take a backpack.
--Route planning is easier than driving. No need for Onstar or Tom-Tom or Garmin. Just look at a route map. Easy.
--Walking a couple blocks to and from your stops is good for you and wakes you up for a more productive work day.
--Oh yeah, there's an advantage to the environment of public transportation too, but that's gravy.
It's been a decade since I bought a CD or paid any money for music. So it sounds odd to hear people still talking about CDs as a current technology, almost like stumbling across a spirited discussion of vacuum tubes when the rest of the universe has moved on.
But why does anyone bother paying for any music anymore? Even without p2p there are more sources for restriction-free music than you can shake a stick at. KEXP, IndyFeed, and NPR's Open Mike are just a handful of excellent podcasts that feature fantastic tracks from independent artists, free of charge. Then there are the thousands of MySpace pages for new bands.
There's just no reason or argument for doing any business with record labels on any level.
In addition to cargo and other utilitarian applications, airships could also provide pretty fine luxury leisure travel. Air cruises would be cool, because rather than endless vistas of just water you can travel over land at altitudes low enough to have a view. I'd take one over a sea cruise any day.
In thinking about some of the other comments, I wonder how many people accused of crimes have been able to subpoena CCTV footage from police cameras and private surveillance in the same way that police seem to be able to.
It seems to me only fair that citizens should have as much latitude to monitor the public affairs of our government employees as they do us. But we should also have equal ability to access surveillance footage that is taken of us all daily without our consent in order to clear our names or draw attention to police misconduct and the like.
Watch BBC news coverage of America. They're far worthier of that appellation than any outlet in the United States, and they also mostly don't give a crap which political party or corporation they might offend by reporting the facts. As an additional plus, they are the one media operation that Rupert Murdoch can't buy and subvert.
It seems many other Americans agree, because the BBC news seems to have grown from being on only one channel (BBC America) morning and night, to four.
The first big change will be devolution from Manhattan-centricity. No one in the city or state has the political will to upgrade public transportation to accommodate the jump in ridership to work in Manhattan, so people will look to work closer to home. The devolution has already begun, with Jersey City in the lead (yes, technically not part of NYC, but for all practical intents and purposes it is), with Brooklyn not far behind it, and with Queens (Long-Island City) bringing up the rear.
The second big change will see the decline of automobile use in the city. Bikes will reclaim lanes, and pedestrian-only areas will be created in locations like Times Square, Midtown-east, Herald's Square, and around the WTC site. Also, tolls on the bridges and tunnels and reduction of parking opportunities will make it too expensive and inconvenient for 90% of car commuters.
The third big change will be an overall increase in greenery in the form of trees, planters, and green roofs. They'll be implemented to reduce energy usage and improve air quality, and consequently bring down the sky-high asthma rates for children in the city.
there's no sure-fire way to 100% guarantee nothing will happen on an airplane. A person could shove several pounds of semtec up their ass and detonate it that way. Or they could always do the good 'ole 12 Monkeys and infect themselves with Ebola before getting on the flight.
What the TSA and government in general should seriously consider is that, by pulling this kind of nonsense, they teach normally law-abiding citizens that the government is a more serious and pervasive threat to their freedom than any two-bit terrorist ever could be.
A web ad for a tech product or service that's served up on slashdot or thinkgeek is more likely to be something I'd be interested in than, say, anything sports or feminine hygiene related. So it's rather contextual a priori. 99% of the ads you see on TV are totally irrelevant and therefore irritating. Geico ads? No thanks, we take the subway.
Google's AdSense is helping push advertising from something that irritates the hell out of people to something that might be somewhat useful, in that the ads are even more relevant than from just general context.
The second, albeit weaker, argument for why web ads are more effective than TV ads is that they are more voluntary and less obtrusive yet there for people to click on if they're interested. So those who don't care about whatever it is pretty much just ignore it, and those it connects with can click through for more information and/or purchase.
I loathe every form of TV/Radio/Movie/Out-of-Home/Print advertising and actively resolve not to do business with those who use those media to steal my time and interrupt what I'm doing; yet with web ads I have found myself actually hitting the Back button to return to a page that had an ad which seemed interesting. It feels weird to say anything positive about any advertisement, but there you are.
Actually a score will usually do it. I previously ran interactive for the People's Choice Awards. It's not the Oscars, but the audience still numbers in the millions. We got no more than a couple hundred emails from the fans who voted on the award winners. The number of people who actually write in to any "authority" on any given subject is rather small. So you don't need thousands to influence the "authority."
We did modify what we were doing if a score or more indicated a trend. In one or two cases, we modified what we were doing by one person who had an insightful, well thought-out point to make. A word of caution, though, letter-writing campaigns are pretty easy to discern and tune out because they all come at the same time and use more or less the same wording.
The point is, you the individual letter/email writer have more power than conventional wisdom says you have.
for their own downfall.
/. readers know that story so I won't regurgitate it.
/. knows this. The interesting thing will be to observe what happens when Craigslist and its cohorts sell out to the same corporate interests for the big score and start degrading the content. Will new challengers spring up online to steal their lunch in the same manner?
Radio has been killed by ClearChannel's near total monopoly of the airwaves. Yes, they no longer have competition in radio, but they've ended the diversity held the audience's attention, and pushed commercials up to the point where you have to wade through 10 minutes of used-car ads to get to the 4 minutes of bland commercial pop.
Newspapers, meanwhile, stopped doing real journalism 15 years ago. It's much easier to pay a fee for AP articles and an editor to arrange them on a page around ad space than to keep on a staff of journalists doing in-depth investigative pieces; heck, it's even cheaper to change a couple words in the press releases companies send to newspapers these days and print them verbatim than to license AP articles--that's what more and more "news" outlets are doing these days.
TV, well, reality programs are boring, and commercials are annoying, and the few programs worth watching are in endless re-runs thanks to the writer's strike; or, the movies they run on cable are just promotional vehicles for the sequels that are coincidentally debuting next Friday.
Movies and music.
In short, greed, corporatism (is that redundant with greed?), and focus group-tested pap that the old media have pumped out in the last decade to maximize profits has alienated the audience. Craigslist and other segments of the Internet are simply doing a better job of taking over the few useful activities the old used to perform, but without all the baggage.
Everyone on
how would this puppy handle in the ice and snow if the only wheel with power is the one rear wheel? Spinning out on ice and snow is a challenge with rear-wheel drive in a car that has two wheels. Living in a northern state, my first thought on seeing a picture of the thing was that it must have all-wheel drive to cope in slippery conditions.
Couldn't drive motors be added to the other two wheels without increasing the weight that much? The one on the rear wheel in the video didn't look that large.
is not self-driving cars, but public transportation. And if you need something heavy moved, have it delivered or rent a pickup for a day. Owning and operating cars make sense where the population density falls below a certain threshhold, say in the country, but in sub/urban spaces, which is what we're talking about here, there's no good reason to use the car as the solution to personal transportation.
And that's just for logistical reasons. When you consider the cost to the environment, the justification weakens more. When you consider the cost to our foreign policy and national security in being dependent upon other countries for oil, the justification weakens still more. When you consider the sheer hassle and productivity lost to accidents, finding parking, breakdowns, time lost sitting in traffic, and aggravation of driving (people cutting you off, getting stuck behind a slow poke, etc), the justification almost evaporates. And when you think about what the $15K you drop on a car and the $5K/yr. worth of insurance, gas, parking, and repairs you have to put into it to keep it running, and the reality that the value of the thing itself loses half its value every year, versus what that money could do for you if you even put it into an index fund, then financially it's the last nail in the coffin for the justification of owning a car.
A key advantage is that trains travel from city center to city center. That means you get off work at 5:30pm, walk a couple blocks to the station, and you're off to your weekend getaway in Marin or Montreal. There's no searching for a taxi or airport shuttle or sitting in miles of stand-still traffic with all the other folks trying to get away for the weekend. That's a lot of time, expense, and aggravation saved.
Then there's the passenger experience. You could be cramped in an airline seat like veal, or you could have a seat that's the equivalent of business class or even a private compartment if you roll that way. You could be trapped in a car seat in said bumper-to-bumper traffic with your legs slowly going numb, or be able to get up and stretch your legs on a walk to the observation or dining car.
As a bonus for those who need fear as a motivator, a train can't be hijacked and crashed into the twin towers. If the train is maglev, then it's even safer because if any shenanigans did occur aboard then authorities could just switch off power to the track; the train will sit there until help arrives.
Anyone who's ever ridden on the TGV in France or the Shinkansen in Japan can testify to this. High-speed rail is awesome, and the United States would do well to implement it.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and many of the other Founding Fathers were masons. Freemasonry could be considered deist in that you must believe in a supreme being, but what you call that supreme being is not material. That is, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and even adherents to Wicca are eligible for membership in the fraternity.
So it's not surprising that they Founding Fathers would have built the same attitude into the DNA of the United States.