If your society travels between the stars, you can get all that want from ANY star. Solar power, fission, and raw materials are all at least as easy to find just floating in space (or on a random planet) as they are on an inhabited planet -- and anyone who's ever done ANYTHING with their hands knows that it's better to grab the raw materials that don't have random organic gunk all over them.
Unless, of course, Star Trek is right, and all aliens are essentially just like us. But I think that backs up my previous statement.
And then remove their union contract that states that they can never decrease their workforce, even if they don't need as many workers due to reduced volume.
Better idea: just negotiate this in their next contract. Any union worth its membership dues will recognize the occasionally necessity of layoffs, and be willing to trade a "no layoffs" policy for a fair layoffs policy. (ideally, one that spells out what criteria are used, and places laid off workers in a "hire back" list.)
NY state workers are almost all unionized, and the only reason that we haven't had any layoffs is that Paterson is a short-sighted moron, who made a dumb deal with the unions last year and tried to do something not addressed in the contract this year. (We ARE making ready for layoffs at the end of the year, when Paterson's moronic deal runs out.)
You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
Forget that! If we're imagining magic boxes, let's hook up all those lightning rods to a magic box that holds the power from the lightning strike, and then sends it out in bits and pieces...
It really irritates me every time I hear people complaining that a corporation is not thinking of its customers first, or its employees... That is not a corporations job. They're one and only job is to make money for their shareholders.
No, that's a corporation's fiduciary purpose. What their "job" is depends entirely on who you are.
If you work for a corporation, their job is to keep you dutifully employed.
If you supply a corporation, or sell its goods, their job is to buy the things you make or making the things you sell.
If you're a government, then a corporation's job is to improve the life of your citizenry, by engaging in a healthy marketplace.
And if you're a CUSTOMER of that corporation... well, then their job is to make you happy, and F- them if they forget it.
Probably have to agree with this. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because Americans with the social and business systems in place have shown repeatedly that they will hold onto current ideas so strongly...
Believe it or not, we have a way to fix that. Change the EPA's guidline to "your cars must get at least X miles-per-gallon" or "your cars must get no more than X gallons-per-mile" Watch how quickly the new number gets onto your local dealers' showroom floors.
WebOS has some open stuff in the base layer, but their entire GUI layer is pretty much closed, right?
No. Their UI layer is Mojo -- an HTML + JavaScript engine. Their window manager is the only part of the GUI that you can call "closed", but it's hackable as all hell.
And on top of that, Palm realises that they will live or die by their developer community. To homebrew on an iPhone, you need to void your warranty. (Yes, they might not call you on it -- but they CAN). To homebrew with the Pre, you just put the phone in developer mode, and you can do pretty much whatever you want.
I'd wager that WebOS is in some ways more open than Android -- but I haven't peeked at Google's Android machine too closely. WebOS is FAR, FAR closer to a "standard Linux system" than Apple ever would be, though. (YES, the darn thing runs Linux -- and there are homebrew apps by the dozen to get you a commnand line.)
Slogans is how the gestalt of democracy works. You hear the slogan, compare its implied argument towards your understanding of the facts, and either cheer or boo. This is not new, and I suspect if the ancient greeks and romans had better record-keeping (and movable type), you'd be able to find similar slogans as well.
if banks "know" that the customers are infected, why do they blithely sell online access and transactions as a benefit, without any cautions about security?
Because it's cheaper to pay for the amount of fraud that occurs than to lose customers by blarthering about a security risk that, in all honesty, most folk never run into.
Online security will only ever be good enough to where sneaking into someone's house and planting a keylogger is a little bit easier.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that big capital refuses to invest in any productive industry.
"Big capital" refusing to invest means that "small capital" can make a bigger margin. And then, once the 'productive' industry increases, "big capital" will invest more, margins will shrink, and "small capital" will go look for something else.
Capitalism is ruthlessly adapatable. You will starve to death, but capitalism will continue. Captialism won the cold war -- and capitalism is winning the drug war. If you feel that starving to death is a bad thing, then you're in favor of a change... but capitalism will continue on even then. If we socalize food, capitalism will move to grain. And then to tools. And then to just labor.
Yeah its nothing to be worried about, Im sure it will be all OK.
Actually, yeah.
If our government is not a tyranny, we have nothing to fear from them watching us.
If our government is a tyranny, they will watch us whether fear them or not.
So, nothing to worry about. Unless you have a quantum government, that can shift from non-tyranny to tyranny... but that NEVER happens. (Nope, never. Hitler wasn't elected, Russia wasn't mostly democratic before the Soviets siezed power, post-roman city-states never had the sheriff decided they were kings...)
It's not exactly rigorous, but it gets the main points across.
It's a load of bunk. (Biggest bit: A knife fight today is the same as a knife fight 10,000 years ago. Technology advances, but only to physical limits. Oh, and not only does nobody remember the Indians that Columbus met, but most Native peoples don't date themselves as "Post-Columbian" and "Pre-Columbian.")
Anyway, if an alien shows up and decides to "make contact", they'll be in one of two situations.
1: They didn't plan it, and this is an emergency or an accident. Offer help if you can, but only if they accept it. Mostly, just stay the @#$ out of their way and try not to get killed. And for the love of god, don't kill them until they've killed one of us. (Yes, that probably means that "first contact bob" would be "first trophy bob." if they're here to hunt. Sucks to be bob.)
2; They did plan it, and made contact deliberately. It doesn't take more than a day to notice that the species creating buildings and machines and launching crap into space is sentient, and they'll learn a hell of a lot more about us by watching us for another day or two rather than picking one of us at random and watching us flail around. Greet them in your common habit and vernacular FIRST, and only resort to random flailings and scribbling on the floor if they don't respond.
There are a lot of "cute" AP names around, but mine is what the thing came with. The extent of my interest in that equipment is knowing I've properly secured it
Re-naming an SSID away from stock is part of properly securing it. Unless you're far enough away from your neighbors that your equipment never sees their access points, having a distinct name is part of ensuring that any client you want on your network properly connects to your network, and doesn't occasionally drop to another network (either through software bug or user error.)
Imagine how many jobs we could create if people felt safe enough to be able to play these games in the real world.
A real free market requires a real socalist safety net. If you need to lie and work at a job you hate just so that you and yours can eat and have clothes on your back, then you don't have the freedom to attempt anything entrepreneurial at all -- and your employer will hesitant to fire you for the same reason you hesitant to quit, because you literally need that job to survive.
Eliminate the risk of death due to failure, and you will have a lot more folk attempt something new. (And while you're at it, toss the minimum wage laws. No reason to put an artificual floor on wages if you have a seperate mechanism to make sure everyone has food and shelter.)
I've owned a couple of tablets (bought from friends who grew tired of them), and worked on a few more. Generally, they do suck. Like it or not, you'll get to a point where you need to type something out, and voila, you wish you had a laptop.
I have an HP TX2 -- a convertable tablet PC, built from stock HP laptop components with a little bit added on and priced to be "consumer" level. I bought the thing for about $800 a year ago, with 4 GB of ram. Hardly "expensive", and at the time there wasn't a laptop in the same price range that would correct its only fault, slightly underpowered graphics.
The tablet features of the OS are hardly lacking. There's essentially the same pop-up keyboard/stylus area that Windows 7 has, and it's the best model for touch input you could hope for. Write out word by word, and the computed text appears in a small box below each word; tap on that box, and you can either choose from other matches or just correct it letter-by-letter. You can also just do letter-by-letter input (each letter is its own box, which is altered after you draw the letter) or use the keyboard button. And on top of that, Vista's GUI widgets are more than large enough for a finger or a stylus -- You don't REALLY think that XP and Vista got big buttons just to copy apple do you?
And since it's convertable, if I do need to type out something and don't want to hand-write it, I can just open it up, type what I want, and then close it again. And if it wasn't converatble... well, you'd do the same thing that I did with my old Palm PDA's.
If I sold you a car and it had a cupholder with a lock on it, and you had to pay me any amount of money at all for me to take that lock off so you have a place to conveniently set your drink, would you feel right about it? Worse yet, lets imagine that there's laws mandating that you're not allowed to drill or cut that lock off, even though it was sold to you with your car.
If it was in the contract, and that was how most car companies sold cup holders, and drilling off that lock would magically cause the car company to deliver a second, third, and fourth car right to your driveway...
Yeah, I totally see how your analogy is completely appropriate. Cars and software are exactly the same thing.
The fanboys are right. You paid for a physical copy and the right to make such copies as needed to play Bioshock 2, a specific game. I don't see any problems at all with the manufacturers of the game deciding to put something useful in the otherwise wasted space on the read-only DVD that your game came on.
So, to continue your analogy... this is a magical trailer that sits in your trunk, not taking up any space or adding to your car's mass or lowering your fuel efficiency in any way, that you can pay a dealership to unlock and then have the ability to manifest this trailer at will.
(Is it a dick move to cut off a bit of your $70 game and charge someone an additional $5 for? Sure. But the move is no more or less dickish if they put the bits for said DLC on their servers or on the disk.)
I can't even see the State union getting upset about this, these employees will likely be Union members
I work for the NY State tax department's Office of Processing and Taxpayer Services. (When a NY resident pays their taxes, they pay us.)
Every year, we directly hire temporary phone staff for front-line taxpayer assistance -- jobs like "read over the scan of this guy's tax form and look for scanning errors" or "answer this phone call and read this scripted answer to them." These are jobs that could easily be filled by one of the local staffing agencies in Albany, but we hire them directly and, like you say, spend less to pay them more.
These "temporary" staff often have indefinite durations, and are a lot closer to "at-will ish" employment than truly "temporary." And every one of them is either a union member, or pays one of our two unions to represent them.
We can't hire them full-time under existing State terms because we cannot eliminate their positions when we don't need them any more
Hah! Sure the State can. Ever since the wall street bubble burst we've been in a hiring freeze, and state agencies are encouraged to downsize staff by offering the employee early retirement -- and eliminating their position.
Up until 15-20 years ago (practically) no college students had cell phones.
And in 1990, hardly any had laptops, you turned in all your work by hand, you had no internet connection (or internet) beyond maybe the Computer Science lab's mainframe, and calling home cost $.25 a minute. I could be wrong about the precise cost, but it sure as heck wasn't the "call across the country as cheaply as calling across the street" situation we have now.
(Things weren't that much better in 1995, btw. Maybe you had a laptop. If your parents were rich.)
Today, you simply are not well equipped if you do not have an internet connection, personal computer, and cell phone. ESPECIALLY if you are a college student not living at home. Heck, if I was entering college, I'd want a cell phone and laptop with data tethering -- you cut out one bill you don't need, and keep your one number whole the whole rest of your life is a jumble.
the prius is like a 5 year old car model and in all this time american "muscle" motor never came up with an answer.
The Prius is a car that, for a car of comparable size, is more expensive to build, more complex to repair, and nets out as more expensive over the general lifetime of a car. (Even if YOU don't own it for the whole time, most US cars run for a few hundred thousand miles before being scrapped.)
GM, who tried an electric car WAY back in the early 90's, decided to largely pass on the paralell hybrid tech of the Prius and its ilk, opting for only a small pseudo-hybrid option on a few of its models. (Essentially, a small electric motor/brake assist on the drive wheels.) Instead, they're rolling out an actually innovative serial hybrid this year. And if you take a moment to understand the difference, the change is profound.
The Prius and its ilk are "parallel hybrids." You have an underpowered classic internal-combustion motor driving the wheels via direct kinetic energy, with an electric motor also contributing kinetic energy from electrical power it gets from regenerative breaking or, for the modified ones, being plugged into a wall. It will NOT perform its full performance without any gas in the tank, and for most models you can't even drive it to a gas station 1 mile away if you don't have enough gas to start.
GM's Volt and its ilk are "serial hybrids", like diesel-electric trains. The wheels are powered ONLY by an all-electric drivetrain, and the internal combustion engine serves only to produce additional electricity. The engine only runs at its peak efficiency, and doesn't need to run at all if the batteries have enough of a charge in them. You could literally drain your fuel tank dry, top off the battery charge, and then drive to a gas station 40 miles away. (And with fewer moving parts, a mass-market volt should last longer and be easier to maintain than its paralell-hybrid ilk.)
Why exactly is there a congressional case going on about this?
1: Because Toyota @#'ed its regulators, and is either malicious or incompetent. The responsive part of the federal government (Congress) is entertaining modifying the regulations, to ensure this doesn't happen with anyone else. (Did YOU know that most cars have a black-box, but Toyota uses a proprietary system that only they can access?)
2: Because there's no real difference between the government of Japan and the business of Japan. JAPAN should be the one hauling their executives before a committee.. but they're too "pro-business" to do that over such a small thing as "unintended acceleration."
3: Because it's an Election Year.
the US government has a controlling interest in most of Toyota's competitors in the USA
The fed has a controlling interest in TWO car companies, and it's the most passive owner either have ever had. Ford, Kia, Honda, and Hyndai are all, well, NOT owned in whole or in part by the federal government.
Oh, and while I don't own a Toyota (and after this, never will), I care because, well, I live in the United States, and drive on the US highways. You know, where the toyotas are randomly accelerating and crashing into other cars and houses and things.
Slashdot Mirror
Hawking's a moron.
If your society travels between the stars, you can get all that want from ANY star. Solar power, fission, and raw materials are all at least as easy to find just floating in space (or on a random planet) as they are on an inhabited planet -- and anyone who's ever done ANYTHING with their hands knows that it's better to grab the raw materials that don't have random organic gunk all over them.
Unless, of course, Star Trek is right, and all aliens are essentially just like us. But I think that backs up my previous statement.
And then remove their union contract that states that they can never decrease their workforce, even if they don't need as many workers due to reduced volume.
Better idea: just negotiate this in their next contract. Any union worth its membership dues will recognize the occasionally necessity of layoffs, and be willing to trade a "no layoffs" policy for a fair layoffs policy. (ideally, one that spells out what criteria are used, and places laid off workers in a "hire back" list.)
NY state workers are almost all unionized, and the only reason that we haven't had any layoffs is that Paterson is a short-sighted moron, who made a dumb deal with the unions last year and tried to do something not addressed in the contract this year. (We ARE making ready for layoffs at the end of the year, when Paterson's moronic deal runs out.)
You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
Forget that! If we're imagining magic boxes, let's hook up all those lightning rods to a magic box that holds the power from the lightning strike, and then sends it out in bits and pieces...
If each piece of data has 90% probability of not [being] read again...
Each piece of data has a 10% chance of being necessary. For any given sample, 1/10th of them will be necessary.
Now, a MUCH more useful set of data is probability over time. 1/10 within 10 years? 5 years? 1 week?
It really irritates me every time I hear people complaining that a corporation is not thinking of its customers first, or its employees... That is not a corporations job. They're one and only job is to make money for their shareholders.
No, that's a corporation's fiduciary purpose. What their "job" is depends entirely on who you are.
If you work for a corporation, their job is to keep you dutifully employed.
If you supply a corporation, or sell its goods, their job is to buy the things you make or making the things you sell.
If you're a government, then a corporation's job is to improve the life of your citizenry, by engaging in a healthy marketplace.
And if you're a CUSTOMER of that corporation... well, then their job is to make you happy, and F- them if they forget it.
I will NOT pay over $20 for a new game.
Which is why they don't care about you.
Probably have to agree with this. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because Americans with the social and business systems in place have shown repeatedly that they will hold onto current ideas so strongly...
Believe it or not, we have a way to fix that. Change the EPA's guidline to "your cars must get at least X miles-per-gallon" or "your cars must get no more than X gallons-per-mile" Watch how quickly the new number gets onto your local dealers' showroom floors.
WebOS has some open stuff in the base layer, but their entire GUI layer is pretty much closed, right?
No. Their UI layer is Mojo -- an HTML + JavaScript engine. Their window manager is the only part of the GUI that you can call "closed", but it's hackable as all hell.
And on top of that, Palm realises that they will live or die by their developer community. To homebrew on an iPhone, you need to void your warranty. (Yes, they might not call you on it -- but they CAN). To homebrew with the Pre, you just put the phone in developer mode, and you can do pretty much whatever you want.
I'd wager that WebOS is in some ways more open than Android -- but I haven't peeked at Google's Android machine too closely. WebOS is FAR, FAR closer to a "standard Linux system" than Apple ever would be, though. (YES, the darn thing runs Linux -- and there are homebrew apps by the dozen to get you a commnand line.)
Do I understand correctly that I'm within my rights to suggest a cop "Fuck off.", but I can't advise him, "Go fuck yourself."?
You can say whatever the hell you want to a cop -- so long as you do not resist arrest and obey any lawful orders. It's just not always a good idea.
"No Liberty without Representation!"
"Live Free or Die!"
"Remember the Alamo!"
Slogans is how the gestalt of democracy works. You hear the slogan, compare its implied argument towards your understanding of the facts, and either cheer or boo. This is not new, and I suspect if the ancient greeks and romans had better record-keeping (and movable type), you'd be able to find similar slogans as well.
if banks "know" that the customers are infected, why do they blithely sell online access and transactions as a benefit, without any cautions about security?
Because it's cheaper to pay for the amount of fraud that occurs than to lose customers by blarthering about a security risk that, in all honesty, most folk never run into.
Online security will only ever be good enough to where sneaking into someone's house and planting a keylogger is a little bit easier.
Unless you're a lawyer, I don't think you're qualified to make that kind of comment
Let me amend his comment, then.
If the issue ends up in court, the MPEG-LA should lose.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that big capital refuses to invest in any productive industry.
"Big capital" refusing to invest means that "small capital" can make a bigger margin. And then, once the 'productive' industry increases, "big capital" will invest more, margins will shrink, and "small capital" will go look for something else.
Capitalism is ruthlessly adapatable. You will starve to death, but capitalism will continue. Captialism won the cold war -- and capitalism is winning the drug war. If you feel that starving to death is a bad thing, then you're in favor of a change... but capitalism will continue on even then. If we socalize food, capitalism will move to grain. And then to tools. And then to just labor.
Significant figures are important. In this case, the 2/3rds rule, being a constant, MUST be taken to at least 3 digits
*NO*.
You are measuring whole votes. Floating point math is improper here. To determine 2/3's, use order of operations and whole integers.
206 * 2 = 412
412/3 = 137r1.
Need over 137 (not "at least 137, over 137) votes to pass. Or, 138.
When certainty counts, stick with whole numbers. Especially when you have invidisible units.
Yeah its nothing to be worried about, Im sure it will be all OK.
Actually, yeah.
If our government is not a tyranny, we have nothing to fear from them watching us.
If our government is a tyranny, they will watch us whether fear them or not.
So, nothing to worry about. Unless you have a quantum government, that can shift from non-tyranny to tyranny... but that NEVER happens. (Nope, never. Hitler wasn't elected, Russia wasn't mostly democratic before the Soviets siezed power, post-roman city-states never had the sheriff decided they were kings...)
It's not exactly rigorous, but it gets the main points across.
It's a load of bunk. (Biggest bit: A knife fight today is the same as a knife fight 10,000 years ago. Technology advances, but only to physical limits. Oh, and not only does nobody remember the Indians that Columbus met, but most Native peoples don't date themselves as "Post-Columbian" and "Pre-Columbian.")
Anyway, if an alien shows up and decides to "make contact", they'll be in one of two situations.
1: They didn't plan it, and this is an emergency or an accident. Offer help if you can, but only if they accept it. Mostly, just stay the @#$ out of their way and try not to get killed. And for the love of god, don't kill them until they've killed one of us. (Yes, that probably means that "first contact bob" would be "first trophy bob." if they're here to hunt. Sucks to be bob.)
2; They did plan it, and made contact deliberately. It doesn't take more than a day to notice that the species creating buildings and machines and launching crap into space is sentient, and they'll learn a hell of a lot more about us by watching us for another day or two rather than picking one of us at random and watching us flail around. Greet them in your common habit and vernacular FIRST, and only resort to random flailings and scribbling on the floor if they don't respond.
There are a lot of "cute" AP names around, but mine is what the thing came with. The extent of my interest in that equipment is knowing I've properly secured it
Re-naming an SSID away from stock is part of properly securing it. Unless you're far enough away from your neighbors that your equipment never sees their access points, having a distinct name is part of ensuring that any client you want on your network properly connects to your network, and doesn't occasionally drop to another network (either through software bug or user error.)
Imagine how many jobs we could create if people felt safe enough to be able to play these games in the real world.
A real free market requires a real socalist safety net. If you need to lie and work at a job you hate just so that you and yours can eat and have clothes on your back, then you don't have the freedom to attempt anything entrepreneurial at all -- and your employer will hesitant to fire you for the same reason you hesitant to quit, because you literally need that job to survive.
Eliminate the risk of death due to failure, and you will have a lot more folk attempt something new. (And while you're at it, toss the minimum wage laws. No reason to put an artificual floor on wages if you have a seperate mechanism to make sure everyone has food and shelter.)
I've owned a couple of tablets (bought from friends who grew tired of them), and worked on a few more. Generally, they do suck. Like it or not, you'll get to a point where you need to type something out, and voila, you wish you had a laptop.
I have an HP TX2 -- a convertable tablet PC, built from stock HP laptop components with a little bit added on and priced to be "consumer" level. I bought the thing for about $800 a year ago, with 4 GB of ram. Hardly "expensive", and at the time there wasn't a laptop in the same price range that would correct its only fault, slightly underpowered graphics.
The tablet features of the OS are hardly lacking. There's essentially the same pop-up keyboard/stylus area that Windows 7 has, and it's the best model for touch input you could hope for. Write out word by word, and the computed text appears in a small box below each word; tap on that box, and you can either choose from other matches or just correct it letter-by-letter. You can also just do letter-by-letter input (each letter is its own box, which is altered after you draw the letter) or use the keyboard button. And on top of that, Vista's GUI widgets are more than large enough for a finger or a stylus -- You don't REALLY think that XP and Vista got big buttons just to copy apple do you?
And since it's convertable, if I do need to type out something and don't want to hand-write it, I can just open it up, type what I want, and then close it again. And if it wasn't converatble... well, you'd do the same thing that I did with my old Palm PDA's.
Use a #!@#%ing fold-able bluetooth keyboard.
If I sold you a car and it had a cupholder with a lock on it, and you had to pay me any amount of money at all for me to take that lock off so you have a place to conveniently set your drink, would you feel right about it? Worse yet, lets imagine that there's laws mandating that you're not allowed to drill or cut that lock off, even though it was sold to you with your car.
If it was in the contract, and that was how most car companies sold cup holders, and drilling off that lock would magically cause the car company to deliver a second, third, and fourth car right to your driveway...
Yeah, I totally see how your analogy is completely appropriate. Cars and software are exactly the same thing.
The fanboys are right. You paid for a physical copy and the right to make such copies as needed to play Bioshock 2, a specific game. I don't see any problems at all with the manufacturers of the game deciding to put something useful in the otherwise wasted space on the read-only DVD that your game came on.
So, to continue your analogy... this is a magical trailer that sits in your trunk, not taking up any space or adding to your car's mass or lowering your fuel efficiency in any way, that you can pay a dealership to unlock and then have the ability to manifest this trailer at will.
(Is it a dick move to cut off a bit of your $70 game and charge someone an additional $5 for? Sure. But the move is no more or less dickish if they put the bits for said DLC on their servers or on the disk.)
if we are unwilling to answer such basic question, people will just get scared (and subconsciously assume that "Linux is not ready for the desktop").
That's not an assumption, that's a conclusion.
I can't even see the State union getting upset about this, these employees will likely be Union members
I work for the NY State tax department's Office of Processing and Taxpayer Services. (When a NY resident pays their taxes, they pay us.)
Every year, we directly hire temporary phone staff for front-line taxpayer assistance -- jobs like "read over the scan of this guy's tax form and look for scanning errors" or "answer this phone call and read this scripted answer to them." These are jobs that could easily be filled by one of the local staffing agencies in Albany, but we hire them directly and, like you say, spend less to pay them more.
These "temporary" staff often have indefinite durations, and are a lot closer to "at-will ish" employment than truly "temporary." And every one of them is either a union member, or pays one of our two unions to represent them.
We can't hire them full-time under existing State terms because we cannot eliminate their positions when we don't need them any more
Hah! Sure the State can. Ever since the wall street bubble burst we've been in a hiring freeze, and state agencies are encouraged to downsize staff by offering the employee early retirement -- and eliminating their position.
Up until 15-20 years ago (practically) no college students had cell phones.
And in 1990, hardly any had laptops, you turned in all your work by hand, you had no internet connection (or internet) beyond maybe the Computer Science lab's mainframe, and calling home cost $.25 a minute. I could be wrong about the precise cost, but it sure as heck wasn't the "call across the country as cheaply as calling across the street" situation we have now.
(Things weren't that much better in 1995, btw. Maybe you had a laptop. If your parents were rich.)
Today, you simply are not well equipped if you do not have an internet connection, personal computer, and cell phone. ESPECIALLY if you are a college student not living at home. Heck, if I was entering college, I'd want a cell phone and laptop with data tethering -- you cut out one bill you don't need, and keep your one number whole the whole rest of your life is a jumble.
the prius is like a 5 year old car model and in all this time american "muscle" motor never came up with an answer.
The Prius is a car that, for a car of comparable size, is more expensive to build, more complex to repair, and nets out as more expensive over the general lifetime of a car. (Even if YOU don't own it for the whole time, most US cars run for a few hundred thousand miles before being scrapped.)
GM, who tried an electric car WAY back in the early 90's, decided to largely pass on the paralell hybrid tech of the Prius and its ilk, opting for only a small pseudo-hybrid option on a few of its models. (Essentially, a small electric motor/brake assist on the drive wheels.) Instead, they're rolling out an actually innovative serial hybrid this year. And if you take a moment to understand the difference, the change is profound.
The Prius and its ilk are "parallel hybrids." You have an underpowered classic internal-combustion motor driving the wheels via direct kinetic energy, with an electric motor also contributing kinetic energy from electrical power it gets from regenerative breaking or, for the modified ones, being plugged into a wall. It will NOT perform its full performance without any gas in the tank, and for most models you can't even drive it to a gas station 1 mile away if you don't have enough gas to start.
GM's Volt and its ilk are "serial hybrids", like diesel-electric trains. The wheels are powered ONLY by an all-electric drivetrain, and the internal combustion engine serves only to produce additional electricity. The engine only runs at its peak efficiency, and doesn't need to run at all if the batteries have enough of a charge in them. You could literally drain your fuel tank dry, top off the battery charge, and then drive to a gas station 40 miles away. (And with fewer moving parts, a mass-market volt should last longer and be easier to maintain than its paralell-hybrid ilk.)
Why exactly is there a congressional case going on about this?
1: Because Toyota @#'ed its regulators, and is either malicious or incompetent. The responsive part of the federal government (Congress) is entertaining modifying the regulations, to ensure this doesn't happen with anyone else. (Did YOU know that most cars have a black-box, but Toyota uses a proprietary system that only they can access?)
2: Because there's no real difference between the government of Japan and the business of Japan. JAPAN should be the one hauling their executives before a committee.. but they're too "pro-business" to do that over such a small thing as "unintended acceleration."
3: Because it's an Election Year.
the US government has a controlling interest in most of Toyota's competitors in the USA
The fed has a controlling interest in TWO car companies, and it's the most passive owner either have ever had. Ford, Kia, Honda, and Hyndai are all, well, NOT owned in whole or in part by the federal government.
Oh, and while I don't own a Toyota (and after this, never will), I care because, well, I live in the United States, and drive on the US highways. You know, where the toyotas are randomly accelerating and crashing into other cars and houses and things.