Instead of sending the info to people's smartphones, the city should use it to adjust the rates for parking meters to reflect real-time demand. When the parking spot vacancy rate falls below 15%, increase the meter rates, and if the vacancy rate rises above 15%, decrease the meter rates.
You'll never have to worry about finding a parking spot again, and you'll always be able to park close enough to right outside your destination.
Parking spots are a scarce resource, and we usually ration scarce resources via price, not queuing. Strangely it's only with roads we tolerate queuing instead of price, both for driving (waiting in traffic jams) and parking (circling the block).
Pedstrians who step on to the road without looking are a real danger to cyclists. It happens a lot on busy inner-city roads, and it's obviously caused by their assumption that vehicles make noise, an assumption that is wrong for both cyclists and EVs. The last thing I want is for that assumption to be reinforced by legislation. The better option is to mandate quieter (or silent) conventional cars, or just ban cars altogether. (OK, I know that aint gonna happen, but it would certainly make the streets safer. Quieter too.)
And exactly where does the government 'heavily subsidise' the EVIL OIL COMPANIES?
Gee, I dunno, spending all those billions of taxpayer dollars on roads and freeways? Building a transport system that is designed for motor vehicles instead of, say, bicycles and trains?
Shouldn't oil companies (or at least their customers) have to pay for their own transport infrastructure, ie, roads?
Investment in transport infrastructure drives land-use patterns. The situation you describe in the US is an artifact of 50 years of investment in highways combined with almosy zero (or negative) investment in mass transit.
Reverse that funding ratio and over the next 50 years you'll get densely populated cities with heavily utilised mass transit and the sprawl might all be returned to the farmland it was.
You can't assume that all other vehicles will be cars. I ride a bike in traffic, and the narrow lanes where I live make it necessary to for me to take the whole width of the lane. Is this outside your "limits of predictability"?
The argument that cyclists don't pay their way is absurd - the reality is the opposite; public funding of roads is a massive subsidy from those who don't drive a car to those who do. As a cyclist I'd love a system of user-pays for roads.
The article neglects the way that the transportation infrastructure affects how much transport is needed. If you rely on cars and trucks for most transport you end up with low-density sprawl and hence a very high number of miles travelled. If you rely on trains and bicycles you end up with high-density development and hence a much lower number of miles travelled.
In other words, when comparing transport modes you can't assume that the amount of miles will be the same.
They are inefficient due to the amount of space they require for driving and parking. It's all that space taken up by roads and parking that stretches out the distance between travel points.
Smaller vehicles such as bicycles require much less road space and parking space, thus making cities more compact, and therefore reducing fuel consumption even for those who drive.
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here.
If you build roads and no transit you get the US-style sprawl you describe. If you build transit and only minimal roads you get high-density transit-friendly development.
The transport infrastructure "drives" the style of city you get. Build it and they come.
...music listeners would have no logical reason to like a song just because others did...
It's not about liking a song because others have downloaded it, it's about downloading the song so that you keep up with what everybody else is doing. So you can talk about the song with everybody else. So you're not left behind in the social world.
* IINet Lawsuit - No Coincidence? - Claims that the lawsuit may be a tactic to force the ISP industry and the Australian govt to use a particular internet filtering product.
My experience with naive users is that they have only a hazy understanding of the existence of a file system. They think in terms of apps.
If I ask them "where did you save that file?" they say "in Open Office". If I ask "where do you save your MP3s?", they say "they're in Amarok". Using a file manager like Konqueror, Dolphin or Nautilus is unattractive to them; they don't see any benefit to it because they don't really understand that there is a file system underlying their usage of apps.
I'm not sure what the answer to this is. Having applications rigidly throw everything into/home is probably the best short-term solution.
As Vic Marks put it: "If Hawkeye was the umpire we'd have two day test matches."
It would be easy enough to configure Hawkeye to mimic the "batsmen-friendly" margin of human umpires.
You could do this by running Hawkeye for a couple of seasons in "trial-mode", where stats are collected to enable a comparison between Hawkeye's LBWs and regular human's LBWs.
You then uses those those stats to reconfigure Hawkeye's margin for error - you might end up with something like Hawkeye being configured to assume the stumps are 5 cm narrower and 5 cm shorter than they are.
The lesson, unlike the idiot from the CTC was suggesting, was NOT running red lights, but not creeping up on the left hand side (if you drive on the left) of traffic.
Creeping up (aka filtering) is fine as long as you only do it when the line of cars is stationary, and you merge into the line of cars before the light goes green.
I do this all the time. Filter to the front of the line, and then position myself directly in front of the first car. It's safe and it's legal, but it does piss off some car drivers, I guess because their assumption of motorist dominance/superiority has just been challenged.
Some people are so self-centered that they choose to drive vehicles that are so wide they take up almost the entire lane.
And then they complain that the people who choose to ride very narrow vehicles are being self-centered!
It's the wide vehicles that block traffic, not the narrow ones.
What should offer you satisfaction is that you're adopting the only sane approach. This benefits not only you, but also everyone else on the road. So each time it happens, slow down a bit, and don't give it any more thought than it deserves. Your actions will have a negligible effect on your own travel time, and that of everyone behind you. The added bonus for losing giving up some of your ego is that you'll get to where you're going safely, and in a better mood.
Thank you. This is exactly the approach I take when driving. I now think of driving as a cooperative endeavour rather than a competitive one. It disturbs me that this approach is so rare. More and more I choose to ride a bicycle rather than drive, and this feels even more "cooperative" than driving a car, despite the occasional negative reaction a cyclist gets from drivers who feel held up or inconvenienced.
I'd like to take 200 newborns, and divide them into two groups of 100, 50 of each gender in each group.
One group is only allowed to play with dolls and easybake ovens, the other group is only allowed to play with legos.
This experiment won't work unless it's blinded - nobody is to know which children are which sex, even the children themselves. Which is obviously impractical.
I tend to believe that gender roles are emphasised very strongly in our culture, even by those parents who say "..but I never bought my daughter frilly dresses" etc. There's a million ways in which all of us unconsciously encourage our sons and daughters to be "men" and "women", and it even starts in the womb (if the sex of the fetus is known).
All those who say it's all nature have a woefully inadequate sense of just how powerfully all-encompassing nurture is - it's not just the toys you had or the clothes you wore.
Free speech is the perfect example to illustrate my point. It is explicitly constructed as a right in the US Constitution, unlike Fair Use, which is part of the US common law.
Let me put it this way - a right means you can do something and nobody can stop you. Free speech is a right because the Const says it is.
A defence means you can stop somebody from doing something to you. Fair Use is a defense because the US common law says it is.
Rights are things you can claim in the absence of any restriction. They stand alone. Fair use is only a defence - it doesn't come into effect until somebody accuses you of copyright infringement.
I'm not saying this because I believe it to be a good thing - I'd be more than happy if fair use was a right. Unfortunately it's not.
You are under the mistaken assumption that the doctrine of Fair Use is a right. It is not, and never has been, a right. It is a defence to the charge of copyright infringement.
This legal distinction appears to be lost on most who contribute to the neverending copyright debate on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of sending the info to people's smartphones, the city should use it to adjust the rates for parking meters to reflect real-time demand. When the parking spot vacancy rate falls below 15%, increase the meter rates, and if the vacancy rate rises above 15%, decrease the meter rates. You'll never have to worry about finding a parking spot again, and you'll always be able to park close enough to right outside your destination. Parking spots are a scarce resource, and we usually ration scarce resources via price, not queuing. Strangely it's only with roads we tolerate queuing instead of price, both for driving (waiting in traffic jams) and parking (circling the block).
Pedstrians who step on to the road without looking are a real danger to cyclists. It happens a lot on busy inner-city roads, and it's obviously caused by their assumption that vehicles make noise, an assumption that is wrong for both cyclists and EVs. The last thing I want is for that assumption to be reinforced by legislation. The better option is to mandate quieter (or silent) conventional cars, or just ban cars altogether. (OK, I know that aint gonna happen, but it would certainly make the streets safer. Quieter too.)
...I also worry about how to change the lane when under the "bus."
The same way you change lanes when you have a vehicle either side of you - you don't.
Because Europeans impose massive taxes on fuel. Presumably because they hate poor people.
Seeing as car-ownership amongst poor people in Europe is much lower than amongst rich people, I think you have it backwards.
And exactly where does the government 'heavily subsidise' the EVIL OIL COMPANIES?
Gee, I dunno, spending all those billions of taxpayer dollars on roads and freeways? Building a transport system that is designed for motor vehicles instead of, say, bicycles and trains?
Shouldn't oil companies (or at least their customers) have to pay for their own transport infrastructure, ie, roads?
Investment in transport infrastructure drives land-use patterns. The situation you describe in the US is an artifact of 50 years of investment in highways combined with almosy zero (or negative) investment in mass transit. Reverse that funding ratio and over the next 50 years you'll get densely populated cities with heavily utilised mass transit and the sprawl might all be returned to the farmland it was.
You can't assume that all other vehicles will be cars. I ride a bike in traffic, and the narrow lanes where I live make it necessary to for me to take the whole width of the lane. Is this outside your "limits of predictability"?
The argument that cyclists don't pay their way is absurd - the reality is the opposite; public funding of roads is a massive subsidy from those who don't drive a car to those who do. As a cyclist I'd love a system of user-pays for roads.
The article neglects the way that the transportation infrastructure affects how much transport is needed. If you rely on cars and trucks for most transport you end up with low-density sprawl and hence a very high number of miles travelled. If you rely on trains and bicycles you end up with high-density development and hence a much lower number of miles travelled.
In other words, when comparing transport modes you can't assume that the amount of miles will be the same.
Cars are not inherently inefficient.
They are inefficient due to the amount of space they require for driving and parking. It's all that space taken up by roads and parking that stretches out the distance between travel points.
Smaller vehicles such as bicycles require much less road space and parking space, thus making cities more compact, and therefore reducing fuel consumption even for those who drive.
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here.
If you build roads and no transit you get the US-style sprawl you describe. If you build transit and only minimal roads you get high-density transit-friendly development.
The transport infrastructure "drives" the style of city you get. Build it and they come.
It's not about liking a song because others have downloaded it, it's about downloading the song so that you keep up with what everybody else is doing. So you can talk about the song with everybody else. So you're not left behind in the social world.
That's a very logical reason.
For those who want to a more in-depth treatment of the issues particular to this case, try these articles:
* The Case Against IINet - In-depth analysis of the legal issues.
* IINet Lawsuit - No Coincidence? - Claims that the lawsuit may be a tactic to force the ISP industry and the Australian govt to use a particular internet filtering product.
My experience with naive users is that they have only a hazy understanding of the existence of a file system. They think in terms of apps. If I ask them "where did you save that file?" they say "in Open Office". If I ask "where do you save your MP3s?", they say "they're in Amarok". Using a file manager like Konqueror, Dolphin or Nautilus is unattractive to them; they don't see any benefit to it because they don't really understand that there is a file system underlying their usage of apps. I'm not sure what the answer to this is. Having applications rigidly throw everything into /home is probably the best short-term solution.
As Vic Marks put it: "If Hawkeye was the umpire we'd have two day test matches."
It would be easy enough to configure Hawkeye to mimic the "batsmen-friendly" margin of human umpires.
You could do this by running Hawkeye for a couple of seasons in "trial-mode", where stats are collected to enable a comparison between Hawkeye's LBWs and regular human's LBWs.
You then uses those those stats to reconfigure Hawkeye's margin for error - you might end up with something like Hawkeye being configured to assume the stumps are 5 cm narrower and 5 cm shorter than they are.
Creeping up (aka filtering) is fine as long as you only do it when the line of cars is stationary, and you merge into the line of cars before the light goes green.
I do this all the time. Filter to the front of the line, and then position myself directly in front of the first car. It's safe and it's legal, but it does piss off some car drivers, I guess because their assumption of motorist dominance/superiority has just been challenged.
Some people are so self-centered that they choose to drive vehicles that are so wide they take up almost the entire lane. And then they complain that the people who choose to ride very narrow vehicles are being self-centered! It's the wide vehicles that block traffic, not the narrow ones.
What should offer you satisfaction is that you're adopting the only sane approach. This benefits not only you, but also everyone else on the road. So each time it happens, slow down a bit, and don't give it any more thought than it deserves. Your actions will have a negligible effect on your own travel time, and that of everyone behind you. The added bonus for losing giving up some of your ego is that you'll get to where you're going safely, and in a better mood.
Thank you. This is exactly the approach I take when driving. I now think of driving as a cooperative endeavour rather than a competitive one. It disturbs me that this approach is so rare. More and more I choose to ride a bicycle rather than drive, and this feels even more "cooperative" than driving a car, despite the occasional negative reaction a cyclist gets from drivers who feel held up or inconvenienced.
A pedestrian wearing an ipod doesn't put anybody else in danger. A person driving a car, ipod or not, puts a lot of other people in danger.
Why punish the victims of other people's dangerous behaviour?
I'd like to take 200 newborns, and divide them into two groups of 100, 50 of each gender in each group.
One group is only allowed to play with dolls and easybake ovens, the other group is only allowed to play with legos.
This experiment won't work unless it's blinded - nobody is to know which children are which sex, even the children themselves. Which is obviously impractical.
I tend to believe that gender roles are emphasised very strongly in our culture, even by those parents who say "..but I never bought my daughter frilly dresses" etc. There's a million ways in which all of us unconsciously encourage our sons and daughters to be "men" and "women", and it even starts in the womb (if the sex of the fetus is known).
All those who say it's all nature have a woefully inadequate sense of just how powerfully all-encompassing nurture is - it's not just the toys you had or the clothes you wore.
Don't blame global warming - the real culprit is thugs with knives: Penguins killed in sickening beach attack
Free speech is the perfect example to illustrate my point. It is explicitly constructed as a right in the US Constitution, unlike Fair Use, which is part of the US common law.
Let me put it this way - a right means you can do something and nobody can stop you. Free speech is a right because the Const says it is.
A defence means you can stop somebody from doing something to you. Fair Use is a defense because the US common law says it is.
You're still not getting it.
Rights are things you can claim in the absence of any restriction. They stand alone. Fair use is only a defence - it doesn't come into effect until somebody accuses you of copyright infringement.
I'm not saying this because I believe it to be a good thing - I'd be more than happy if fair use was a right. Unfortunately it's not.
You are under the mistaken assumption that the doctrine of Fair Use is a right. It is not, and never has been, a right. It is a defence to the charge of copyright infringement.
This legal distinction appears to be lost on most who contribute to the neverending copyright debate on slashdot.
Because they use their monopoly status to crush competitors, and therefore retard growth and innovation throughout the entire software industry.
That's all.