As computer sophistication improves and functions increase in complexity, the "point and click" interface will become too cumbersome.
i think this is already true for many applications. if you watch an advanced user of just about any typical application, you will see that they likely preform most of the common commands via keyboard shortcuts rather than navigating the menus or toolbars to get them. in more extreme cases, such as AutoCAD, there is a command console where you type in commands to be performed, as there are so many different operations to perform that a menu or even shortcut based commands would be too cumbersome.
Think about all the web pages and applications that were displaying the odd five digit year. 11000 I think it was.
i think it would have been 19100 or 20100, depending on how the web page author in question wrote their code. the perl function that most people used at the time to figure out the year returned a 2 digit number that most people tended to treat as the last two digits of the year, instead of what it really was- the year minus 1900.
a lot of people simply did: $year = '19'.$year instead of: $year = 1900 + $year
if they thought they were being really clever, (or had spent any significant time working with software that was designed to 'gracefully' handle 2 digit year inputs) they might have done: $year = ($year > X) ? '19'.$year : '20'.$year (where X was usually somewhere between 40 and 70)
the problem in that case was a beginner's mistake. the perl language, and most platforms it ran on, were y2k compliant (although confusing), but many beginning and even semi-advanced perl programmers didn't realize it. although it seems obvious in hindsight, i have to admit to making that screwup once or twice myself back when i was still rather new to perl. (what seems more obvious is that perl really needed a better way of dealing with dates, something that it now has, albeit as a module, not builtin)
Is Comair going to try to go after SBS International for damages?
Most likely there's a small print clause in the software documentation to the effect of:
NOTE: This software can handle a limit of 32,700 schedule changes in one month. System behavior in the event of more than 32,700 schedule changes per month is undefined.
But 15 years ago when Comair was reviewing the software, 300 schedule changes per month probably seemed like a lot, so they promptly forgot the number and have acted ever since as if the number was effectively infinite.
So the lessons here are:
If you are a programmer, and you have to impose an arbitrary limit on something, always document that limit, no matter how high it is (even better if the limit is already specified in the contract or functional spec). even if the client completely ignores the documentation, your ass is covered.
If you deploy mission critical software, always find out all of the limits of your software, no matter how ridiculous they might be, and put into place a system or policy that will watch for when you approach those limits (and ideally prevent you from exceeding them). then if you hit a limit that was not documented, you can have somebody's ass served to you on a plate.
the problem the parent tried to point out is that there is not a fixed per seat cost- the fixed cost is per-flight. look at it this way: it doesn't cost $300 per person to fly a 300 seat jet from new york to chicago, rather it costs $75000 to fly the jet, whether it's full or empty. (or, if you want to be picky, it's probably more like $68000 + $30 per person (yes, i am completely pulling these numbers out my a**, but you should be able to get the general idea...))
now, if they can only fill up 25 seats, by your logic each seat would cost $3000. of course if they charge $3000 per seat, then they probably wouldn't even get 25 passengers, which means the price would be even higher. on the other hand, if they only charge $300 for the seat, then they only need to be able to get 250 people on the plane to cover their costs. any thing beyond that is extra profit. and if they fall short- say they only get 200 passengers due to a slow weekend or higher than expected competition- then they are still better off than if they charged $3000 per seat and only got 15 passengers.
basically, the airlines are playing a tricky game- they know how much it will cost to fly the airplane, and they have to guess at what price they can sell their tickets to maximize the revenue generated by ticket sales. your logic only works if the airlines can assume they will sell the same number of tickets no matter what they set the price at, something that is obviously not true. (if you've ever taken an economics class, go refresh your money on elastic vs. inelastic goods.)
all that said, i also wish the government would stop subsidizing the failed airlines to the extent that they are. if there are airlines out there that can operate and make a profit, there is no need to artificially prop up those that can't. and if some of the airlines go out of business because they are no longer subsidized, maybe that would give a little more business to amtrak for shorter distance travelling, and the government could stop subsidizing amtrak to the extent that they are as well....
it's not really a wall like you see in the movies (the abyss special edition comes to mind). it's a large swell or series of swells, hence why they were called "tidal waves" before it was understood that they really had nothing to do with tides.
I think Dr. Evil's plan to detonate his nuclear warhead deep within the earth's core, thus causing *every* volcano on earth to erupt, already has this base covered....
of course if it sets off the yellowstone caldera, we may not care too much about the tsunami by the time it gets here...
it was actually spain, not mexico. there were a lot of causes behind the spanish american war, but the newspapers were primarily responsible for getting public support for the war. one of the primary culprits was william hearst, who wrote to one of his employees requesting to return home from an uneventful stay in havana, "please remain. you furnish the pictures and i'll furnish the war."
from wikipedia:
On February 15, 1898, the American battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor suffered an explosion and quickly sank with a loss of 260 men. Evidence as to the cause of the explosion was inconclusive and contradictory, but the American press, led by the two New York papers, proclaimed that this was certainly a despicable act of sabotage by the Spaniards. The press aroused the public to demand war, with the slogan "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!"....
US President William McKinley was not inclined towards war, and had long held out against intervention, but the Maine explosion so forcefully shaped public opinion that he had to agree.
i believe the earth's rotation already varies slightly from year to year and day to day as a result of weather patterns and normal seismic activity. so while this may be a larger than usual one time change, there is nothing to say that it won't reverse itself due to other eartquakes or volcanic eruptions sometime in the future.
i'm also pretty sure that the gps satellites are regularly repositioned slightly, and that they carry enough fuel to last some time, besides which, they would only have to be adjusted once to make up for the change, not continually. all they have to do is move a few feet (or maybe even less- to lazy to do the math at the moment) closer to the earth, and they will speed up appropriately to match the new period of earth's rotation.
I think that having lots of configurable options for a programming language is a bad idea. It leads to applications working on one installation of PHP, but not another.
i agree completely- i have had no end of problems with one of my co workers who continually writes code that requires register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc, no matter how many times i ask him not too. and even though i have told him that those options will be turned off for any new system that i set up, he still asks me why his code is breaking every time i set up a new site...
what's really annoying is that this guy is the most paranoid guy i've ever met when it comes to securing servers against remote shell exploits. apparently he couldn't care less whether he is writing exploitable web sites, though...
Imagine spring every day! And maybe changing the orbit of the Earth to adjust for global warming and cooling.
easier solution- just move to southern california. there still is some variation in seasons, though; you have spring, rainy spring, and windy spring (alternatively, forest fire spring on particularly dry years).
anyway, some of us actually like having seasons.
Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here
on
New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 1
i believe he said it would never vary by more than 6 days, but 90% of the time it would vary by 3 days or less.
i was under the impression that currently they only vary by a day or so- the winter solstice, for example is december 22nd +/- 1 day due to leap year variations. since 1980 it has always fallen on the 21st or the 22nd.
Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here
on
New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 1
weird. the way i learned it, 1 and 2 on that list were kinda mushed together into the first commandment.
3 through 9 correspond to what i learned as 2 through 8. 10 was split into 2 separate ones- the ninth covered the house, and the tenth covered everything else. (although it never did make any sense to me why that would require 2 commandments, as they always seemed like the same thing to me.)
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenb er g/luther/catechism/web/cat-02.html
Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here
on
New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 1
yeah, it would be a real bummer to have a calendar that discouraged honoring your mother and father.
if you know enough to go out and build your own computer from components, you should know enough to avoid crappy components. i've been building computers from scratch off and on for about 8 years, and the only part i ever had to rma was damaged in shipping. i did have a chipset cooler that died once, but it was so much easier to buy a new fan from micro center that i never even considered rma'ing it.
of course, if you're not up for that and are buying prebuilt systems, just make sure you look at what the warranty policy you are getting is, and make sure you buy from a reputable company that will back it up. (a quick search for relative quality of different brands and product lines wouldn't be a bad idea either.) os preference aside, most pc's are not inherently lower quality than a mac at the same price point (it's true that some are- even the best companies make some bad products, and even the worst occasionally get something right- but it's far from a forgone conclusion.) the bad reputation for pc's comes more from the flood of bargain basement machines, and the tendency of windows to slow to half its speed within a month or so due to nasty-ware.
Contrary to what you hear on/.(or in this case what the/.headline might lead you to believe) this service doesn't only work on Linux.
It supports linux- it also supports windows and mac users. So there are plenty of users out there to make developing and marketing such a service commercially viable at this time.
you are technically correct, but most people don't define virus that narrowly anymore. these days pretty much everyone considers any malware to be a virus.
a better example would be the buffer overflow in mutt that allowed a milicious email message to execute an arbitrary attachment. no it was not widely exploited, because at the time not many people used mutt or even linux in general. however, it is possible to write a viable virus for linux, or at the least would be if the user community was large enough.
linux is not completely immune to virii, even if its better design makes itmuch more immune than windows. people who believe that their operating system is immune are living with a false sense of secuirty.
unless there has been some significant new discovery about the cosmos that i am unaware of, the odds for the occurance of some cataclysmic event severr enough to wipe out all human life should be about the same for the next 100 years as for the last hundred years, and the hundred before that.... if there is a 1 in 455 chance of it happening in the next 100 years, then that should mean that there is a 1 in 45,500 chance of such an event happening in any given year.
given the fact that the human race has been around for ~2 million years so far, i think his odds are a little off. otherwise we should have been wiped out around 20 times already.
and this ignores the fact that the odds are most likely going down over time, as the level of event that would be required to wipe out the human race gets rarer and rarer the more we advance. an event that could have wiped out all of human life 2000 years ago wouldn't be nearly enough to do the job now...
oh, i don't know... maybe they could provide an easy to access information about what a program soes, and when it makes network connections the user may not know about. or they could remove any means for a program to set itself up to automatically start up at boot without user intervention. perhaps make it easy for users to find out what everything is that is starting up at boot instead of having to dig through the registry. don't allow programs to tamper with network or system settings in order to make removal difficult or risky.
that's four things i can think of off the top of my head, three of which could be done without having to make any significant architectual changes.
personally i wouldn't trust any virus or spyware removal utility from microsoft, as it was their glaring shortcomings that have caused viruses and spyware to be problems in the first place. if they can't figure out the cause of the problem, even though they, unlike any of the other anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors, are in position to actually do something about it, why should i trust them to fix the problem after the fact?
ever heard of lion? ok, technically a worm, not a virus, but still a malignant program that spread through linux systems without any user intervention. there have been others, too.
A few good volcanoes provide visible effect that the public can see and in some cases experience.
This is just not true, and if you're so stupid as to regurgitate such outright crap it indicates you haven't bothered doing the most cursory attempt to research any, like,... 'facts'.
While I am not going to argue the other points in your post or the parent post, (you are correct in that he made an awful lot of specious claims without any supporting data) the parent is completely correct on this one.
The last time Mount Pinatubo (in the Phillippines) errupted, it threw of weather patterns in most of North America for almost a year, and put so much ash in the atmosphere that the US west coast witnessed unbelievably spectacular sunsets for months.
The last time Mount St Helens erupted, the ski slopes in Colorado got more snow than they had in over a hundred years.
So yes, one good volcanic eruption will disrupt global weather patterns more than any human activity.
It's mainly the result of lack of foresight in (sub)urban planning in the United States. The US is the only country in the world that has developed its suburbs to the extent that we have, and therefore has succeeded in thinning out the population of the country to the point that public transportation is economically infeasible in all but the largest cities. That, plus the amount of federal money put into our highway systems, and the significantly lower gas taxes in the US than anywhere else in the world, is why it is pretty much assumed that every American adult will drive a car, and why there is no demand for public transportation in any but the largest and most congested cities.
i suspect this is also why bus systems tend to be so bad in most of the united states- most cities that have much demand for public transportation are so large and so congested that buses aren't considered to be much better than driving yourself, and therefore tend to be used mostly by the people that can't afford to drive, rather than people who don't want to drive.
besides the extra cost of putting in the rails, as opposed to just paving it over, trains cost far more to run and maintain than buses. and if you can run the buses two minutes apart without interruption, you can make up for the train's one real advantage over buses- the number of people you can carry on one train is a lot higher than the number of people you can carry on one bus- in all but the most high traffic areas.
I used to think that way when i lived in Chicago. I took the train on a regular basis, but avoided the bus system at all costs. The only experiences I had with buses in Chicago that I would remotely consider 'good' were on the major east/west lines to/from o'hare airport, and even then only in the very early hours of the morning.
When I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I was prepared to give up public transportation, as the only light rail they have in the Denver area runs south from Downtown Denver towards the Technology Center (south suburbs). Everything else in the Denver Metro Area is bus lines. But to my surprise, they buses run really well here. They get to the stops on time (moreso than even the trains ever did in Chicago) and they get you where you want to go quickly and without a lot of fuss. Of course, we'll have to see how long that lasts, now that the RTD has committed to extending their light rail system to cover most of the front range.
In short, there is nothing inherently inferior about buses (other than the number of people that can be carried on one bus vs. one train). Some studies have even shown that building dedicated bus lanes on larges streets and highways can be far more efficient and cost effective than any light rail service- trains cost an awful lot more to run than buses. what matters is where the transit authority is willing to put their money. in most larger cities, most of the funding goes to the trains, so buses (and their drivers and passengers) end up being 'second class'.
lastly, i suspect (although i may be talking out my a** here) another big reason for the foul attitude many bus drivers have in cities like Chicago is that they get paid less than the train drivers despite the fact that they actually have to do work, unlike driving the trains which in many cities has been automated to the point that the driver is pretty much there just to supervise the passengers. i half suspect that the only reason we don't see fully automated subway systems in this country is that it would be too politically difficult to put the train drivers out of a job.
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As computer sophistication improves and functions increase in complexity, the "point and click" interface will become too cumbersome.
i think this is already true for many applications. if you watch an advanced user of just about any typical application, you will see that they likely preform most of the common commands via keyboard shortcuts rather than navigating the menus or toolbars to get them. in more extreme cases, such as AutoCAD, there is a command console where you type in commands to be performed, as there are so many different operations to perform that a menu or even shortcut based commands would be too cumbersome.
Think about all the web pages and applications that were displaying the odd five digit year. 11000 I think it was.
i think it would have been 19100 or 20100, depending on how the web page author in question wrote their code. the perl function that most people used at the time to figure out the year returned a 2 digit number that most people tended to treat as the last two digits of the year, instead of what it really was- the year minus 1900.
a lot of people simply did:
$year = '19'.$year
instead of:
$year = 1900 + $year
if they thought they were being really clever, (or had spent any significant time working with software that was designed to 'gracefully' handle 2 digit year inputs) they might have done:
$year = ($year > X) ? '19'.$year : '20'.$year
(where X was usually somewhere between 40 and 70)
the problem in that case was a beginner's mistake. the perl language, and most platforms it ran on, were y2k compliant (although confusing), but many beginning and even semi-advanced perl programmers didn't realize it. although it seems obvious in hindsight, i have to admit to making that screwup once or twice myself back when i was still rather new to perl. (what seems more obvious is that perl really needed a better way of dealing with dates, something that it now has, albeit as a module, not builtin)
Is Comair going to try to go after SBS International for damages?
Most likely there's a small print clause in the software documentation to the effect of:
NOTE: This software can handle a limit of 32,700 schedule changes in one month. System behavior in the event of more than 32,700 schedule changes per month is undefined.
But 15 years ago when Comair was reviewing the software, 300 schedule changes per month probably seemed like a lot, so they promptly forgot the number and have acted ever since as if the number was effectively infinite.
So the lessons here are:
If you are a programmer, and you have to impose an arbitrary limit on something, always document that limit, no matter how high it is (even better if the limit is already specified in the contract or functional spec). even if the client completely ignores the documentation, your ass is covered.
If you deploy mission critical software, always find out all of the limits of your software, no matter how ridiculous they might be, and put into place a system or policy that will watch for when you approach those limits (and ideally prevent you from exceeding them). then if you hit a limit that was not documented, you can have somebody's ass served to you on a plate.
If a seat costs $300 sell it for at least $300
the problem the parent tried to point out is that there is not a fixed per seat cost- the fixed cost is per-flight. look at it this way: it doesn't cost $300 per person to fly a 300 seat jet from new york to chicago, rather it costs $75000 to fly the jet, whether it's full or empty. (or, if you want to be picky, it's probably more like $68000 + $30 per person (yes, i am completely pulling these numbers out my a**, but you should be able to get the general idea...))
now, if they can only fill up 25 seats, by your logic each seat would cost $3000. of course if they charge $3000 per seat, then they probably wouldn't even get 25 passengers, which means the price would be even higher. on the other hand, if they only charge $300 for the seat, then they only need to be able to get 250 people on the plane to cover their costs. any thing beyond that is extra profit. and if they fall short- say they only get 200 passengers due to a slow weekend or higher than expected competition- then they are still better off than if they charged $3000 per seat and only got 15 passengers.
basically, the airlines are playing a tricky game- they know how much it will cost to fly the airplane, and they have to guess at what price they can sell their tickets to maximize the revenue generated by ticket sales. your logic only works if the airlines can assume they will sell the same number of tickets no matter what they set the price at, something that is obviously not true. (if you've ever taken an economics class, go refresh your money on elastic vs. inelastic goods.)
all that said, i also wish the government would stop subsidizing the failed airlines to the extent that they are. if there are airlines out there that can operate and make a profit, there is no need to artificially prop up those that can't. and if some of the airlines go out of business because they are no longer subsidized, maybe that would give a little more business to amtrak for shorter distance travelling, and the government could stop subsidizing amtrak to the extent that they are as well....
it's not really a wall like you see in the movies (the abyss special edition comes to mind). it's a large swell or series of swells, hence why they were called "tidal waves" before it was understood that they really had nothing to do with tides.
I think Dr. Evil's plan to detonate his nuclear warhead deep within the earth's core, thus causing *every* volcano on earth to erupt, already has this base covered....
of course if it sets off the yellowstone caldera, we may not care too much about the tsunami by the time it gets here...
maybe not a bad idea, but good luck getting them to let you into the vault....
it was actually spain, not mexico. there were a lot of causes behind the spanish american war, but the newspapers were primarily responsible for getting public support for the war. one of the primary culprits was william hearst, who wrote to one of his employees requesting to return home from an uneventful stay in havana, "please remain. you furnish the pictures and i'll furnish the war."
from wikipedia:
On February 15, 1898, the American battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor suffered an explosion and quickly sank with a loss of 260 men. Evidence as to the cause of the explosion was inconclusive and contradictory, but the American press, led by the two New York papers, proclaimed that this was certainly a despicable act of sabotage by the Spaniards. The press aroused the public to demand war, with the slogan "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!"....
US President William McKinley was not inclined towards war, and had long held out against intervention, but the Maine explosion so forcefully shaped public opinion that he had to agree.
i believe the earth's rotation already varies slightly from year to year and day to day as a result of weather patterns and normal seismic activity. so while this may be a larger than usual one time change, there is nothing to say that it won't reverse itself due to other eartquakes or volcanic eruptions sometime in the future.
i'm also pretty sure that the gps satellites are regularly repositioned slightly, and that they carry enough fuel to last some time, besides which, they would only have to be adjusted once to make up for the change, not continually. all they have to do is move a few feet (or maybe even less- to lazy to do the math at the moment) closer to the earth, and they will speed up appropriately to match the new period of earth's rotation.
I think that having lots of configurable options for a programming language is a bad idea. It leads to applications working on one installation of PHP, but not another.
i agree completely- i have had no end of problems with one of my co workers who continually writes code that requires register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc, no matter how many times i ask him not too. and even though i have told him that those options will be turned off for any new system that i set up, he still asks me why his code is breaking every time i set up a new site...
what's really annoying is that this guy is the most paranoid guy i've ever met when it comes to securing servers against remote shell exploits. apparently he couldn't care less whether he is writing exploitable web sites, though...
Imagine spring every day! And maybe changing the orbit of the Earth to adjust for global warming and cooling.
easier solution- just move to southern california. there still is some variation in seasons, though; you have spring, rainy spring, and windy spring (alternatively, forest fire spring on particularly dry years).
anyway, some of us actually like having seasons.
i believe he said it would never vary by more than 6 days, but 90% of the time it would vary by 3 days or less.
i was under the impression that currently they only vary by a day or so- the winter solstice, for example is december 22nd +/- 1 day due to leap year variations. since 1980 it has always fallen on the 21st or the 22nd.
weird. the way i learned it, 1 and 2 on that list were kinda mushed together into the first commandment.
b er g/luther/catechism/web/cat-02.html
3 through 9 correspond to what i learned as 2 through 8. 10 was split into 2 separate ones- the ninth covered the house, and the tenth covered everything else. (although it never did make any sense to me why that would require 2 commandments, as they always seemed like the same thing to me.)
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/witten
yeah, it would be a real bummer to have a calendar that discouraged honoring your mother and father.
if you know enough to go out and build your own computer from components, you should know enough to avoid crappy components. i've been building computers from scratch off and on for about 8 years, and the only part i ever had to rma was damaged in shipping. i did have a chipset cooler that died once, but it was so much easier to buy a new fan from micro center that i never even considered rma'ing it.
of course, if you're not up for that and are buying prebuilt systems, just make sure you look at what the warranty policy you are getting is, and make sure you buy from a reputable company that will back it up. (a quick search for relative quality of different brands and product lines wouldn't be a bad idea either.) os preference aside, most pc's are not inherently lower quality than a mac at the same price point (it's true that some are- even the best companies make some bad products, and even the worst occasionally get something right- but it's far from a forgone conclusion.) the bad reputation for pc's comes more from the flood of bargain basement machines, and the tendency of windows to slow to half its speed within a month or so due to nasty-ware.
Contrary to what you hear on /.(or in this case what the /.headline might lead you to believe) this service doesn't only work on Linux.
It supports linux- it also supports windows and mac users. So there are plenty of users out there to make developing and marketing such a service commercially viable at this time.
you are technically correct, but most people don't define virus that narrowly anymore. these days pretty much everyone considers any malware to be a virus.
a better example would be the buffer overflow in mutt that allowed a milicious email message to execute an arbitrary attachment. no it was not widely exploited, because at the time not many people used mutt or even linux in general. however, it is possible to write a viable virus for linux, or at the least would be if the user community was large enough.
linux is not completely immune to virii, even if its better design makes itmuch more immune than windows. people who believe that their operating system is immune are living with a false sense of secuirty.
and what is he basing those odds off of?
unless there has been some significant new discovery about the cosmos that i am unaware of, the odds for the occurance of some cataclysmic event severr enough to wipe out all human life should be about the same for the next 100 years as for the last hundred years, and the hundred before that.... if there is a 1 in 455 chance of it happening in the next 100 years, then that should mean that there is a 1 in 45,500 chance of such an event happening in any given year.
given the fact that the human race has been around for ~2 million years so far, i think his odds are a little off. otherwise we should have been wiped out around 20 times already.
and this ignores the fact that the odds are most likely going down over time, as the level of event that would be required to wipe out the human race gets rarer and rarer the more we advance. an event that could have wiped out all of human life 2000 years ago wouldn't be nearly enough to do the job now...
oh, i don't know... maybe they could provide an easy to access information about what a program soes, and when it makes network connections the user may not know about. or they could remove any means for a program to set itself up to automatically start up at boot without user intervention. perhaps make it easy for users to find out what everything is that is starting up at boot instead of having to dig through the registry. don't allow programs to tamper with network or system settings in order to make removal difficult or risky.
that's four things i can think of off the top of my head, three of which could be done without having to make any significant architectual changes.
personally i wouldn't trust any virus or spyware removal utility from microsoft, as it was their glaring shortcomings that have caused viruses and spyware to be problems in the first place. if they can't figure out the cause of the problem, even though they, unlike any of the other anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors, are in position to actually do something about it, why should i trust them to fix the problem after the fact?
ever heard of lion?
ok, technically a worm, not a virus, but still a malignant program that spread through linux systems without any user intervention. there have been others, too.
A few good volcanoes provide visible effect that the public can see and in some cases experience.
This is just not true, and if you're so stupid as to regurgitate such outright crap it indicates you haven't bothered doing the most cursory attempt to research any, like,... 'facts'.
While I am not going to argue the other points in your post or the parent post, (you are correct in that he made an awful lot of specious claims without any supporting data) the parent is completely correct on this one.
The last time Mount Pinatubo (in the Phillippines) errupted, it threw of weather patterns in most of North America for almost a year, and put so much ash in the atmosphere that the US west coast witnessed unbelievably spectacular sunsets for months.
The last time Mount St Helens erupted, the ski slopes in Colorado got more snow than they had in over a hundred years.
So yes, one good volcanic eruption will disrupt global weather patterns more than any human activity.
It's mainly the result of lack of foresight in (sub)urban planning in the United States. The US is the only country in the world that has developed its suburbs to the extent that we have, and therefore has succeeded in thinning out the population of the country to the point that public transportation is economically infeasible in all but the largest cities. That, plus the amount of federal money put into our highway systems, and the significantly lower gas taxes in the US than anywhere else in the world, is why it is pretty much assumed that every American adult will drive a car, and why there is no demand for public transportation in any but the largest and most congested cities.
i suspect this is also why bus systems tend to be so bad in most of the united states- most cities that have much demand for public transportation are so large and so congested that buses aren't considered to be much better than driving yourself, and therefore tend to be used mostly by the people that can't afford to drive, rather than people who don't want to drive.
besides the extra cost of putting in the rails, as opposed to just paving it over, trains cost far more to run and maintain than buses. and if you can run the buses two minutes apart without interruption, you can make up for the train's one real advantage over buses- the number of people you can carry on one train is a lot higher than the number of people you can carry on one bus- in all but the most high traffic areas.
I used to think that way when i lived in Chicago. I took the train on a regular basis, but avoided the bus system at all costs. The only experiences I had with buses in Chicago that I would remotely consider 'good' were on the major east/west lines to/from o'hare airport, and even then only in the very early hours of the morning.
When I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I was prepared to give up public transportation, as the only light rail they have in the Denver area runs south from Downtown Denver towards the Technology Center (south suburbs). Everything else in the Denver Metro Area is bus lines. But to my surprise, they buses run really well here. They get to the stops on time (moreso than even the trains ever did in Chicago) and they get you where you want to go quickly and without a lot of fuss. Of course, we'll have to see how long that lasts, now that the RTD has committed to extending their light rail system to cover most of the front range.
In short, there is nothing inherently inferior about buses (other than the number of people that can be carried on one bus vs. one train). Some studies have even shown that building dedicated bus lanes on larges streets and highways can be far more efficient and cost effective than any light rail service- trains cost an awful lot more to run than buses. what matters is where the transit authority is willing to put their money. in most larger cities, most of the funding goes to the trains, so buses (and their drivers and passengers) end up being 'second class'.
lastly, i suspect (although i may be talking out my a** here) another big reason for the foul attitude many bus drivers have in cities like Chicago is that they get paid less than the train drivers despite the fact that they actually have to do work, unlike driving the trains which in many cities has been automated to the point that the driver is pretty much there just to supervise the passengers. i half suspect that the only reason we don't see fully automated subway systems in this country is that it would be too politically difficult to put the train drivers out of a job.
maybe i used caps lock.