Well of course he has lieutenants, but they don't call the shots on major decisions, they can only advise him. Windows 8 is not something his lieutenants can just build and put out in the market without the CEO's say-so; it's such a huge thing to the company as a whole it had to have his approval. Plus, part of the impetus for Win8's Metro interface is this crazy idea of having a single UI across all devices, and that's something that spans company divisions, and again, would require CEO approval. Ballmer certainly isn't involved in every little detail of everything MS does, but for the really giant decisions like this, it's unfathomable to think he didn't at least take a look at it and sign off on it. And if you buy into hairyfeet's theories, Win8 is probably largely a product of Ballmer's insistence of trying to one-up Apple, because he's pissed that they got so popular with phones and tablets when MS's efforts in those spaces (which predated Apple's by many, many years) were all so lame and unsuccessful.
Well of course there's going to be exceptions here and there, but surely Gallo was very unusual this way at the time. As you said yourself, most companies knew better than to jump on the Vista bandwagon.
These days, surely it's worse; after the Vista debacle, the bigger companies are probably all very recalcitrant in migrating to new Windows versions. Most people seem to like Win7 just fine as a replacement for the very aged WinXP, but Win7 hasn't even been out all that long, so I seriously doubt that there's any significant number of companies moving to Win8 now. And don't forget, migrating to a new Windows version isn't that easy for a large (or midsize) company; it's not like Joe Homeuser who can switch to anything in a few hours. For many large companies, migrating to a new OS takes several years of planning and testing.
No, they don't. Steve is the CEO, what he says goes. I'm sure there's a bunch of other fools there who think Win8 is wonderful too (and have advised him of such, and of course some of them came up with it in the first place), but the only opinion which really counts in a corporation is the one person at the top.
Ones who have been abusing their bodies probably. Just look at Lindsay Lohan: she's going to have tons of aches and pains when she hits 40 (IF she survives that long).
Yep, that's the problem with meeting people in bars. You're extremely likely to meet an alcoholic. If you're not an alcoholic yourself, why would you want to deal with that?
You missed the parent's point: younger people have less baggage, in general. When you meet someone at age 18 and get married in your early 20s, there probably isn't much baggage there (unless they had an abusive upbringing or something). At such a young age, that partner hasn't been through a long string of bad relationships leaving him/her emotionally scarred (or, in the case of some introverts, he/she (usually he) hasn't been through long stretches of time without being able to get a date, and then becoming bitter about it). The older people get, the more baggage they accumulate, and the harder it gets to form a good relationship with someone.
Not to say it's impossible; maybe you'll get lucky and meet someone who's a nice, emotionally-balanced person who got married fairly young, had a really happy marriage, and then their spouse tragically died suddenly of unavoidable causes (auto accident, weird illness, etc.), and is now available for dating again. But that's a rare exception; when you're in your 30s or 40s or more, the vast majority of people who are available for dating are either 1) divorced and have had some very bad relationships, or 2) have been in very few relationships, if any, because they have very serious personality problems.
Yes, I know, "opposites attract," but the theme of online dating usually seems to be "find another Christian, like you," or "find another non-drinker, like you," or "find a geek, like you," or.... well, you get the picture: "find another you." So my impression, at least, is that online dating helps you find someone who is either like you or who already likes someone like you.
And what's the problem with that? Many people have certain things they're looking for in a partner, and with online dating you can much more quickly find available people who have those characteristics. Many, many Christians do NOT want to date non-Christians; their pastors constantly tell them "don't be unequally yoked" (translation: don't date non-Christians), so they just look for partners at their little church, and of course that's not much of a supply. Online dating lets them find people who go to different churches. Or, my personal problem, I don't drink (beyond a glass of wine once in a while), so I don't frequent bars and I'm not interested in dating alcoholics (which is what you'll likely find at a bar), so personally I had tons of trouble ever finding a date when I was younger; with online dating, you can meet people who also aren't big drinkers. For some odd reason, in America, there are only two primary places to find dates in "meatspace": in bars and in churches. So if you're neither an alcoholic nor a holy-roller, and if you're a male who works in a male-dominated industry (engineering and IT), you might find yourself with few decent options besides online dating.
No, they don't. Maybe a bunch of people there think so, but the only person whose opinion matters is Steve Ballmer, and I'm sure he thinks Win8 is wonderful.
By "registering" for use of a car, it also prevents abuse as if someone makes a mess of the car they can be identified, fined, and have access revoked.
The same thing can be done with PRT, the same way.
The problem with Google's self-driving car is that it does absolutely nothing for reducing energy usage, and doesn't do much if anything to improve transit speeds. It still requires the same ultra-inefficient 4000-lb cars guzzing gas (or using tons of electricity, if they move to electric cars; the energy needed to move 2-ton vehicles on high-friction rubber tires in stop-and-go traffic is far higher than for 800-lb ultra-aerodynamic pods moving nonstop on a maglev track). And people will still be stuck in stop-and-go traffic.
Educated people make less people, let's fucking educate people about fucking so they can utilize their organs responsibly and half the damn problems will evaporate.
I don't think it works that way; it's not that simple. There's tons of educated people in Latin America, and they still breed like rabbits, because their religion tells them to. Hell, there's a woman in a hospital in El Salvador right now who's going to die because they won't give her an abortion to get rid of the brain-dead fetus that's killer her. You think all those doctors aren't educated, nor the politicians who wrote those dumb laws?
But there's lots of possible futures involving a COLA and not all of them are dystopian.
I can see a couple of possibilities. I assume by "COLA" you mean a "basic income" that others here talk of. I can see it working differently for different people: for some, it would free them up from having to struggle to stay employed, so they can pursue something better, such as starting a new small business; in today's world, the risk involved is too great because they can't afford to lose their current paycheck, or they'll starve if their business venture fails, but with a basic income they'd be free to take chances like that, which could turn into something great. However, on the flip side, there'd be a bunch of people who'd just sit at home and play video games and use meth all day and just cause a lot of problems. People in the former group would want to get the hell away from people in the latter group, so they'd work hard to make money so they could afford to move away from the meth-heads, leaving them in ghettos. Now, this demand for nicer housing free of meth-heads will drive up costs of good housing (sounding familiar?), so the productive class will have to work harder and make more money to afford this, making their basic income useless because the cost of good housing (away from the meth-heads) is much higher than what the basic income affords. So now the productive people won't want to ever risk losing their jobs, so even with a basic income, they're not going to bother taking any risks, because though they won't starve to death, if they fail, they'll have to go move to the ghetto with the meth-heads, which isn't much better than living under a bridge (worse actually, in some ways). So, in summary, it seems to me that the basic income might not really change anything.
WTF does Obama have to do with that? Nothing would have been different with Romney or McCain, they're all the same. The politicians are all in the pockets of the banksters and financiers, and they're the true leaches of the people in group #1. Obama is nothing more than a puppet.
There's a balance: if you don't have any comments or documentation at all, how are you going to remember what you were thinking or intending 6 months later when you need to fix something, or even 3 weeks later? When I'm writing my own code for my own personal use, I don't exactly create extensive documentation, but I do as a matter of habit put comments at the beginning of every function describing its use, and in-line comments to describe what each code block does, because this proves invaluable later when I need to go back and modify it a week or two later to do something else or to fix a bug I find.
Drunk driving accidents are famous for usually killing or maiming the non-drunk person/people in the other car, while the drunk person lives (usually unscathed).
No, most accidents are not random, they're caused by someone doing something stupid. However, it's not usual that the stupid person suffers for his stupidity; all too often (if not most of the time), the stupid person walks away while some non-stupid innocent person gets hurt or killed.
Think about it: suppose you get into a car, and stupidly drive into some other car (or worse, a pedestrian or cyclist) with your car. Who's going to get hurt worse? You're most likely hitting the other person with the front of your car, which is probably the best-protected, as you have the entire front-end of your car (and its energy-absorbtion zone) between you and the other object. The other person, however, could be getting hit anywhere: in the rear end (causing whiplash if not worse), in the side ("t-bone"), where there's little protection, or if you're running into a pedestrian or biker they don't have any protection at all. It's not like drunk drivers are going around hitting people while driving sideways. Also, some physicists may have something to say about how energy is transferred in auto collisions (it's probably quite unequal).
If some drunk driver wraps his car around a tree, then no, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. But that's frequently not what happens; from what I've seen and read, it's usually someone else who pays for their sins.
If you put it in the air, you are back to needing fixed stops/sidings where the vehicle must either descend or the passenger must rise. Further, there needs to be a parallel track so that people continuing on need not stop for that one person.
Yes, so what? Of course these things would be there. It doesn't cost that much to add a metal platform for boarding and disembarking. Also, I'm not entirely sure to what degree, but the track surely has a certain amount of bend allowed, so that cars can come closer to the ground at stops. And of course there'd be a parallel track; again, the track isn't that expensive, not compared to the construction cost for asphalt roads (and especially not concrete highways).
Think about these things for a minute and pretty soon a universal version of this starts to look an awful lot like our current car based system, only with smaller, automated vehicles.
Yes, of course. That's the idea; it's supposed to eventually replace passenger cars for much of the population (except certain people, like contractors who drive in trucks loaded with all their equipment), or at least much of the traffic which consists of vehicles carrying only 1 or 2 people. But again, with the construction costs being much lower than roads (esp. freeways), and far far lower than light rail (which many medium-density cities have been trying to do lately), it's feasible.
If you want to allow for non-human transport,
Actually, this isn't in the plans from what I've seen. It's meant to move people, not be a complete replacement for all wheeled vehicles. Pallets can be moved with trucks. Trucks don't constitute much of the total traffic on roads, especially non-freeway roads. Things would be a lot better if all the roads in my town only had the occasional delivery truck, fire truck, ambulance, soccer mom minivan, rather than the constant roar of car after car with only 1 person inside, and all those people just going from place to place with no more cargo than a couple of grocery bags or a backpack are riding overhead in whisper-silent automated cars.
SkyTran might make sense as a supplement
Yes, exactly.
but it is not going to replace our current highway system, nor our subways system
It's not meant to. For NYC (Manhattan), it's not efficient enough, and the density is too high; subways are actually the best choice there. However, there's still a lot of car traffic there, and cabs, and that could all be replaced with a high-priced SkyTran (the system could automatically tack on a big $15-20 surcharge for destinations inside Manhattan). It's already expensive as hell to take a cab in NYC, so prices in that locality could be kept high to encourage more people to use the (cheaper) subways, so that only richer people or people in a big hurry bother with SkyTran there. However, that's Manhattan; the rest of NYC isn't like that. The other boroughs are much like other American cities in density, and Staten Island is basically a big suburb (as is much of northern NJ, across the river), so SkyTran would work well there I think. In fact, it could be a good way of transporting commuters from these low-density areas to subway stops at the edge of Manhattan, to continue their journey into the city using the subway (currently, most people either use the horribly slow and inconvenient NJ Transit and Long Island Railway trains, or the faster buses). But again, different systems for different places; while SkyTran isn't a replacement for subways in super-high-density places, there's only about two such places in the USA: Manhattan and SanFran (and I'm not so sure about that one either). Cities like OK City, Omaha, Louisville, Knoxville, Asheville, Mobile, Racine, Albuqueque, and many more don't have the density needed for subways, and would do well with SkyTran.
as you build out the PRT system, you'd need places on the edge of town/campus to park and switch to your new system.
You mean like the Park-n-Ride lots they already have?
The idea of PRT is that you'd build it out to everyplace in a suburban area. It's not an urban mass-transit system like a subway, in fact it's not as efficient as subways for moving lots of people, so it really isn't that well-suited for extremely high-density places like Manhattan. It's meant for lower-density places, like most other cities in America. Fully built-out, there should be a stop every quarter-mile or so, so you should never have far to walk.
It also doesn't address the non-personal transport needs of freight to buildings for which you'd need to still maintain the current rail/roadway systems in parallel.
Family sedans don't help with transporting freight either. So yes, you'd still need heavy rail and roads. PRT isn't meant to address every transportation problem out there, it's meant for providing a cheap and fast way to move people around, especially for commuting. If you need to tow a boat, then you're still going to need a truck and trailer, just like today's cabs, subways, light rails, and buses aren't going to help you with moving boats, pallets of cargo, or a month's worth of groceries from Costco. Yes, roads would still be needed, but there'd be a fraction of the traffic on them, so they wouldn't need so much maintenance and repair, and they wouldn't need so many lanes. Many of them could be narrowed, in fact. You wouldn't need 10-lane freeways in LA with a fully-built-out SkyTran system handling most of the commuting traffic (you'd probably still want 2-lane freeways for handling the truck traffic and other traffic which hasn't gone to SkyTran like soccer moms, Fedex trucks, SUV die-hards, limos, etc.).
You're not just an ass, you're a fucking moron. From Wiktionary, one of the definitions of "cull" is "A piece unfit for inclusion within a larger group; an inferior specimen." So if your goal is to improve the population, then you want to remove the poorest members of the population (e.g., the Darwin Award candidates). Auto accidents don't do that; they remove people entirely at random, and frequently our better members (because they can afford cars, unlike people who can only afford to take the bus, and middle-class-and-up people tend to be better educated and more productive for society). There was an article just today on Slashdot, IIRC, of some fairly well-known tech guy in Silicon Valley getting killed in an auto accident. Auto accidents don't kill just stupid people; they're usually caused by someone stupid, but then at least half the time (probably much more) they kill some innocent person who got in the stupid person's way.
Yes, it's a small fraction of our population, but it's also 50,000 people per year that don't need to die when we have the technology to prevent those deaths. Don't forget all the maimings and other injuries too, which aren't part of that number. It adds up to a significant cost to society (medical bills, loss of labor), which can be prevented with a better and cheaper transit system that takes advantage of new (computer) technology.
Go read the Wikipedia article about SkyTran, and the site itself at skytran.net. I'll attempt to answer your questions anyway:
This PRT, how much does it cost per ride? More than ten times the cost of the bus or the subway?
Theoretically, it should be much cheaper, because the per-mile cost of building it is perhaps 1/10 as much. Sticking up a bunch of utility poles (basically like telephone poles) and hanging some prefabricated tracks on them isn't especially time-consuming or laborious, unlike using multi-billion-dollar TBMs to bore tunnels for subways or having to shut down everything in the area to build a light-rail rail (this is what happened in Phoenix/Tempe; lots of businesses were put out of business because of the road closures).
How fast is it? Less than half as fast as a car? As slow as a bus?
Speeds of up to 100mph in the city, maybe 150mph outside. Also, since your car takes you right to your destination with no stops (no stoplights either), you don't waste time on any stops in between. So much, much faster than a car. (At intersections, the tracks run at different elevations so traffic can go in both directions simultaneously.)
How long does it take to get a PRT vehicle? As long as it takes to hail a taxicab?
Probably. There's stops at various locations, and presumably, high-traffic stops (like the mall) will have unoccupied cars travel to them automatically in anticipation of demand, and waiting for riders, while at low-traffic stops, you'll probably have to "hail" a car. However, with today's mobile technology, they'll probably make an "app" to reserve a car when you want, so you can have one ready for you at your neighborhood SkyTran stop in the morning, for instance.
Really, I think PRT will mostly compete with cabs at first. So they'll have to beat cabs in price, speed, and availability.
Considering the main cost is the construction cost (which again should be a tiny fraction of that for light rail or subways), and of course the original R&D cost (they need to acquire a mainframe or high-reliability server farm and build the software for running it), and the operating cost is next-to-nothing (two hairdryer's worth of electric power to run, and no costly driver to pay), it should be pretty cheap. Of course, governments have a way of screwing up things like this; that's the real danger. So price and speed should be easy, availability is up to how fast they build it out, versus the demand. If they don't build it out enough (e.g. don't buy enough cars to put on the system), and suddenly everyone wants to ride it because it's convenient, then availability will be poor until they buy more cars, but that should be an easy fix, which can be chalked up to "growing pains".
New tech isn't going to solve transportation problems. We already know how to solve transportation problems and it comes down to money for building new infrastructure, e.g, subways, light rail, high-speed heavy-rail, and transit-only lanes. All that is hugely expensive.
Wrong: those things don't solve transportation problems, because they're all 19th-century technology. Subways only work in extremely dense areas like Manhattan and SanFran, not in Louisville KY or Ames IA. Light rail sucks; it's slow and very expensive (they put it in Phoenix recently and it's terrible). That's why 20th-century technology like PRT is the solution: use automated cars to move people between points of their choosing, on demand (rather than according to a fixed schedule). There's a reason people hate public transit in most places: it's too slow and inflexible: why should I have to stand around for 55 minutes waiting for the next bus, when I can get in my car at any time at all and go where I want, when I want? The only way to do this level of convenience and speed with public transit is to move to PRT.
The other problem with the 19th-century tech you mentioned is the enormous cost and the disruption caused by construction. PRT doesn't have those problems: with SkyTran, you hang the rails from simple utility poles. There's no more disruption than with putting in some telephone poles. With cars weighing 1000 lbs or less, rather than train cars weighing many many tons, you don't need such massive infrastructure, or even to put it on the ground.
Also, Muni also has way too many stops on lines, sometimes less than 1 block apart (thus slowing them down). The agency wants to remove stops, but people don't want their closest stop removed.
Who the hell wants to walk 2 miles from the nearest stop to their destination? This is another reason this 19th-century tech is crap. With PRT, you can have stops anywhere you want; the automated cars only go to the stop where the occupants of the car want to go, instead of stopping at every stop in between.
People's attitudes have to change to make sacrifices for the greater good rather than it being about me, me, me.
Putting in backwards, obsolete, inefficient, and expensive transit systems does not serve the greater good, especially when we have the technology (and have had it for 40 years) to do something much better.
Not getting corrupted is easy. I'm sure I could pull that off. You just have to not be a sociopath or someone with a poor moral compass.
The problem is that if the kind of person who can't be corrupted, the likelihood of you getting elected is almost zero. The voters don't want such people as leaders, they want people who tell them what they want to hear and fool them with lies. So sociopaths get elected because they're good at lying and deception.
But yes, your point is correct: the problem with many problems is politics, not technology. The political hurdles are too great for a bunch of geeks to deal with, whereas it's quite feasible for us to work on problems on our laptop computers sitting in our offices, basements, bedrooms, or coffee shops and only having to communicate with each other (e.g., on lkml.org).
However, there's another aspect: when a problem and its solution are entirely in one domain, especially the domain of computing, that also makes things easier. Even if the political problems weren't a factor, other problems are less wieldy: building automobiles, aircraft, space stations, etc., requires more than just sitting in your basement or a nearby coffee shop typing away on a computer; you have to have lots of raw materials, factories, steel foundries, etc. Doing stuff solely on a computer is a lot easier in many ways than dealing with other physical things.
Sorry, didn't realize that statistic was OK-specific.
But when you say "drowning", do you mean from floods, or from pool accidents, or both? You can do something about flooding, but there's not much you can do about pool accidents beyond either education or banning swimming pools. You could mandate fences around pools to try to keep kids out, but that's not something for government tax dollars to be spent on (the pool owner has to pay for things like that).
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
Wasn't a society like this depicted in "Judge Dredd" (or rather the newer "Dredd" movie)? 98+% unemployment, everyone living in gigantic public housing buildings, crime rates out of control with ultraviolent gangs controlling things, etc.
You're right, there are a lot of problems that could be helped by new tech. Just look at transportation for instance: we spend a ton of money on it in the US, and it sucks: it's slow, we spend lots of time idling in traffic or at stoplights, our cars are driven by oil-burning, pollution-spewing horrifically inefficient engines, and 50,000 people die every year in auto accidents.
Tech could solve a lot of problems outside the online world, but the problem is that you have to have a good government that invests wisely in R&D, or at least you need a regulatory scheme that makes it possible for new tech to improve the situation. Why deal with all that government red tape when you can spend all your time working on a "hit app", Google Maps, a new handheld electronic device, etc.? All those things don't have much red tape at all: you build whatever you want, you put it out in the market, and you make money with it right away. You don't have to deal with all kinds of governmental problems with them.
Suppose I want to solve the transportation problem. An idea already exists: Personal Rapid Transit, such as SkyTran. It wouldn't be that hard to build; the passive maglev rails have already been built and proven to work, the computer/software tech needed for the cars to be autonomous is somewhat trivial compared to Google's infrastructure, and the cars themselves would be dirt-cheap compared to a modern car (gas or electric like Tesla). However, even if you could get funding for the initial R&D and production, there's more to building and deploying such a system than just getting a factory and building them: you have to get governments at all levels (federal down to local) to agree on it, to standardize on one system (so they can all link up), and new regulation set up to police it all and make sure it's safe, to secure right-of-way, etc. Add to that that it competes with existing technologies (namely GM, Ford, etc.), who have lobbyists who will try to shoot down anything that competes with privately-owned automobiles, just like they've done with various public transit systems in the past.
Or how about aviation? Think you can invent a better aircraft? Good luck getting past the FAA.
It's simply much easier to just sit at your computer and write a new software app. You don't have to deal with government regulators (who are applying decades-old regulations to brand-new ideas) when you do that.
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Well of course he has lieutenants, but they don't call the shots on major decisions, they can only advise him. Windows 8 is not something his lieutenants can just build and put out in the market without the CEO's say-so; it's such a huge thing to the company as a whole it had to have his approval. Plus, part of the impetus for Win8's Metro interface is this crazy idea of having a single UI across all devices, and that's something that spans company divisions, and again, would require CEO approval. Ballmer certainly isn't involved in every little detail of everything MS does, but for the really giant decisions like this, it's unfathomable to think he didn't at least take a look at it and sign off on it. And if you buy into hairyfeet's theories, Win8 is probably largely a product of Ballmer's insistence of trying to one-up Apple, because he's pissed that they got so popular with phones and tablets when MS's efforts in those spaces (which predated Apple's by many, many years) were all so lame and unsuccessful.
Well of course there's going to be exceptions here and there, but surely Gallo was very unusual this way at the time. As you said yourself, most companies knew better than to jump on the Vista bandwagon.
These days, surely it's worse; after the Vista debacle, the bigger companies are probably all very recalcitrant in migrating to new Windows versions. Most people seem to like Win7 just fine as a replacement for the very aged WinXP, but Win7 hasn't even been out all that long, so I seriously doubt that there's any significant number of companies moving to Win8 now. And don't forget, migrating to a new Windows version isn't that easy for a large (or midsize) company; it's not like Joe Homeuser who can switch to anything in a few hours. For many large companies, migrating to a new OS takes several years of planning and testing.
No, they don't. Steve is the CEO, what he says goes. I'm sure there's a bunch of other fools there who think Win8 is wonderful too (and have advised him of such, and of course some of them came up with it in the first place), but the only opinion which really counts in a corporation is the one person at the top.
Ones who have been abusing their bodies probably. Just look at Lindsay Lohan: she's going to have tons of aches and pains when she hits 40 (IF she survives that long).
Yep, that's the problem with meeting people in bars. You're extremely likely to meet an alcoholic. If you're not an alcoholic yourself, why would you want to deal with that?
You missed the parent's point: younger people have less baggage, in general. When you meet someone at age 18 and get married in your early 20s, there probably isn't much baggage there (unless they had an abusive upbringing or something). At such a young age, that partner hasn't been through a long string of bad relationships leaving him/her emotionally scarred (or, in the case of some introverts, he/she (usually he) hasn't been through long stretches of time without being able to get a date, and then becoming bitter about it). The older people get, the more baggage they accumulate, and the harder it gets to form a good relationship with someone.
Not to say it's impossible; maybe you'll get lucky and meet someone who's a nice, emotionally-balanced person who got married fairly young, had a really happy marriage, and then their spouse tragically died suddenly of unavoidable causes (auto accident, weird illness, etc.), and is now available for dating again. But that's a rare exception; when you're in your 30s or 40s or more, the vast majority of people who are available for dating are either 1) divorced and have had some very bad relationships, or 2) have been in very few relationships, if any, because they have very serious personality problems.
Like Reddit you mean? Slashdot would be better if it did everything like Reddit.
Yes, I know, "opposites attract," but the theme of online dating usually seems to be "find another Christian, like you," or "find another non-drinker, like you," or "find a geek, like you," or.... well, you get the picture: "find another you." So my impression, at least, is that online dating helps you find someone who is either like you or who already likes someone like you.
And what's the problem with that? Many people have certain things they're looking for in a partner, and with online dating you can much more quickly find available people who have those characteristics. Many, many Christians do NOT want to date non-Christians; their pastors constantly tell them "don't be unequally yoked" (translation: don't date non-Christians), so they just look for partners at their little church, and of course that's not much of a supply. Online dating lets them find people who go to different churches. Or, my personal problem, I don't drink (beyond a glass of wine once in a while), so I don't frequent bars and I'm not interested in dating alcoholics (which is what you'll likely find at a bar), so personally I had tons of trouble ever finding a date when I was younger; with online dating, you can meet people who also aren't big drinkers. For some odd reason, in America, there are only two primary places to find dates in "meatspace": in bars and in churches. So if you're neither an alcoholic nor a holy-roller, and if you're a male who works in a male-dominated industry (engineering and IT), you might find yourself with few decent options besides online dating.
No, they don't. Maybe a bunch of people there think so, but the only person whose opinion matters is Steve Ballmer, and I'm sure he thinks Win8 is wonderful.
What kind of crappy employer do you have that has already switched to Win8? Just about every larger company out there has passed it up.
By "registering" for use of a car, it also prevents abuse as if someone makes a mess of the car they can be identified, fined, and have access revoked.
The same thing can be done with PRT, the same way.
The problem with Google's self-driving car is that it does absolutely nothing for reducing energy usage, and doesn't do much if anything to improve transit speeds. It still requires the same ultra-inefficient 4000-lb cars guzzing gas (or using tons of electricity, if they move to electric cars; the energy needed to move 2-ton vehicles on high-friction rubber tires in stop-and-go traffic is far higher than for 800-lb ultra-aerodynamic pods moving nonstop on a maglev track). And people will still be stuck in stop-and-go traffic.
Educated people make less people, let's fucking educate people about fucking so they can utilize their organs responsibly and half the damn problems will evaporate.
I don't think it works that way; it's not that simple. There's tons of educated people in Latin America, and they still breed like rabbits, because their religion tells them to. Hell, there's a woman in a hospital in El Salvador right now who's going to die because they won't give her an abortion to get rid of the brain-dead fetus that's killer her. You think all those doctors aren't educated, nor the politicians who wrote those dumb laws?
But there's lots of possible futures involving a COLA and not all of them are dystopian.
I can see a couple of possibilities. I assume by "COLA" you mean a "basic income" that others here talk of. I can see it working differently for different people: for some, it would free them up from having to struggle to stay employed, so they can pursue something better, such as starting a new small business; in today's world, the risk involved is too great because they can't afford to lose their current paycheck, or they'll starve if their business venture fails, but with a basic income they'd be free to take chances like that, which could turn into something great. However, on the flip side, there'd be a bunch of people who'd just sit at home and play video games and use meth all day and just cause a lot of problems. People in the former group would want to get the hell away from people in the latter group, so they'd work hard to make money so they could afford to move away from the meth-heads, leaving them in ghettos. Now, this demand for nicer housing free of meth-heads will drive up costs of good housing (sounding familiar?), so the productive class will have to work harder and make more money to afford this, making their basic income useless because the cost of good housing (away from the meth-heads) is much higher than what the basic income affords. So now the productive people won't want to ever risk losing their jobs, so even with a basic income, they're not going to bother taking any risks, because though they won't starve to death, if they fail, they'll have to go move to the ghetto with the meth-heads, which isn't much better than living under a bridge (worse actually, in some ways). So, in summary, it seems to me that the basic income might not really change anything.
WTF does Obama have to do with that? Nothing would have been different with Romney or McCain, they're all the same. The politicians are all in the pockets of the banksters and financiers, and they're the true leaches of the people in group #1. Obama is nothing more than a puppet.
There's a balance: if you don't have any comments or documentation at all, how are you going to remember what you were thinking or intending 6 months later when you need to fix something, or even 3 weeks later? When I'm writing my own code for my own personal use, I don't exactly create extensive documentation, but I do as a matter of habit put comments at the beginning of every function describing its use, and in-line comments to describe what each code block does, because this proves invaluable later when I need to go back and modify it a week or two later to do something else or to fix a bug I find.
Drunk driving accidents are famous for usually killing or maiming the non-drunk person/people in the other car, while the drunk person lives (usually unscathed).
No, most accidents are not random, they're caused by someone doing something stupid. However, it's not usual that the stupid person suffers for his stupidity; all too often (if not most of the time), the stupid person walks away while some non-stupid innocent person gets hurt or killed.
Think about it: suppose you get into a car, and stupidly drive into some other car (or worse, a pedestrian or cyclist) with your car. Who's going to get hurt worse? You're most likely hitting the other person with the front of your car, which is probably the best-protected, as you have the entire front-end of your car (and its energy-absorbtion zone) between you and the other object. The other person, however, could be getting hit anywhere: in the rear end (causing whiplash if not worse), in the side ("t-bone"), where there's little protection, or if you're running into a pedestrian or biker they don't have any protection at all. It's not like drunk drivers are going around hitting people while driving sideways. Also, some physicists may have something to say about how energy is transferred in auto collisions (it's probably quite unequal).
If some drunk driver wraps his car around a tree, then no, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. But that's frequently not what happens; from what I've seen and read, it's usually someone else who pays for their sins.
If you put it in the air, you are back to needing fixed stops/sidings where the vehicle must either descend or the passenger must rise. Further, there needs to be a parallel track so that people continuing on need not stop for that one person.
Yes, so what? Of course these things would be there. It doesn't cost that much to add a metal platform for boarding and disembarking. Also, I'm not entirely sure to what degree, but the track surely has a certain amount of bend allowed, so that cars can come closer to the ground at stops. And of course there'd be a parallel track; again, the track isn't that expensive, not compared to the construction cost for asphalt roads (and especially not concrete highways).
Think about these things for a minute and pretty soon a universal version of this starts to look an awful lot like our current car based system, only with smaller, automated vehicles.
Yes, of course. That's the idea; it's supposed to eventually replace passenger cars for much of the population (except certain people, like contractors who drive in trucks loaded with all their equipment), or at least much of the traffic which consists of vehicles carrying only 1 or 2 people. But again, with the construction costs being much lower than roads (esp. freeways), and far far lower than light rail (which many medium-density cities have been trying to do lately), it's feasible.
If you want to allow for non-human transport,
Actually, this isn't in the plans from what I've seen. It's meant to move people, not be a complete replacement for all wheeled vehicles. Pallets can be moved with trucks. Trucks don't constitute much of the total traffic on roads, especially non-freeway roads. Things would be a lot better if all the roads in my town only had the occasional delivery truck, fire truck, ambulance, soccer mom minivan, rather than the constant roar of car after car with only 1 person inside, and all those people just going from place to place with no more cargo than a couple of grocery bags or a backpack are riding overhead in whisper-silent automated cars.
SkyTran might make sense as a supplement
Yes, exactly.
but it is not going to replace our current highway system, nor our subways system
It's not meant to. For NYC (Manhattan), it's not efficient enough, and the density is too high; subways are actually the best choice there. However, there's still a lot of car traffic there, and cabs, and that could all be replaced with a high-priced SkyTran (the system could automatically tack on a big $15-20 surcharge for destinations inside Manhattan). It's already expensive as hell to take a cab in NYC, so prices in that locality could be kept high to encourage more people to use the (cheaper) subways, so that only richer people or people in a big hurry bother with SkyTran there. However, that's Manhattan; the rest of NYC isn't like that. The other boroughs are much like other American cities in density, and Staten Island is basically a big suburb (as is much of northern NJ, across the river), so SkyTran would work well there I think. In fact, it could be a good way of transporting commuters from these low-density areas to subway stops at the edge of Manhattan, to continue their journey into the city using the subway (currently, most people either use the horribly slow and inconvenient NJ Transit and Long Island Railway trains, or the faster buses). But again, different systems for different places; while SkyTran isn't a replacement for subways in super-high-density places, there's only about two such places in the USA: Manhattan and SanFran (and I'm not so sure about that one either). Cities like OK City, Omaha, Louisville, Knoxville, Asheville, Mobile, Racine, Albuqueque, and many more don't have the density needed for subways, and would do well with SkyTran.
as you build out the PRT system, you'd need places on the edge of town/campus to park and switch to your new system.
You mean like the Park-n-Ride lots they already have?
The idea of PRT is that you'd build it out to everyplace in a suburban area. It's not an urban mass-transit system like a subway, in fact it's not as efficient as subways for moving lots of people, so it really isn't that well-suited for extremely high-density places like Manhattan. It's meant for lower-density places, like most other cities in America. Fully built-out, there should be a stop every quarter-mile or so, so you should never have far to walk.
It also doesn't address the non-personal transport needs of freight to buildings for which you'd need to still maintain the current rail/roadway systems in parallel.
Family sedans don't help with transporting freight either. So yes, you'd still need heavy rail and roads. PRT isn't meant to address every transportation problem out there, it's meant for providing a cheap and fast way to move people around, especially for commuting. If you need to tow a boat, then you're still going to need a truck and trailer, just like today's cabs, subways, light rails, and buses aren't going to help you with moving boats, pallets of cargo, or a month's worth of groceries from Costco. Yes, roads would still be needed, but there'd be a fraction of the traffic on them, so they wouldn't need so much maintenance and repair, and they wouldn't need so many lanes. Many of them could be narrowed, in fact. You wouldn't need 10-lane freeways in LA with a fully-built-out SkyTran system handling most of the commuting traffic (you'd probably still want 2-lane freeways for handling the truck traffic and other traffic which hasn't gone to SkyTran like soccer moms, Fedex trucks, SUV die-hards, limos, etc.).
You're not just an ass, you're a fucking moron. From Wiktionary, one of the definitions of "cull" is "A piece unfit for inclusion within a larger group; an inferior specimen." So if your goal is to improve the population, then you want to remove the poorest members of the population (e.g., the Darwin Award candidates). Auto accidents don't do that; they remove people entirely at random, and frequently our better members (because they can afford cars, unlike people who can only afford to take the bus, and middle-class-and-up people tend to be better educated and more productive for society). There was an article just today on Slashdot, IIRC, of some fairly well-known tech guy in Silicon Valley getting killed in an auto accident. Auto accidents don't kill just stupid people; they're usually caused by someone stupid, but then at least half the time (probably much more) they kill some innocent person who got in the stupid person's way.
Yes, it's a small fraction of our population, but it's also 50,000 people per year that don't need to die when we have the technology to prevent those deaths. Don't forget all the maimings and other injuries too, which aren't part of that number. It adds up to a significant cost to society (medical bills, loss of labor), which can be prevented with a better and cheaper transit system that takes advantage of new (computer) technology.
Go read the Wikipedia article about SkyTran, and the site itself at skytran.net. I'll attempt to answer your questions anyway:
This PRT, how much does it cost per ride? More than ten times the cost of the bus or the subway?
Theoretically, it should be much cheaper, because the per-mile cost of building it is perhaps 1/10 as much. Sticking up a bunch of utility poles (basically like telephone poles) and hanging some prefabricated tracks on them isn't especially time-consuming or laborious, unlike using multi-billion-dollar TBMs to bore tunnels for subways or having to shut down everything in the area to build a light-rail rail (this is what happened in Phoenix/Tempe; lots of businesses were put out of business because of the road closures).
How fast is it? Less than half as fast as a car? As slow as a bus?
Speeds of up to 100mph in the city, maybe 150mph outside. Also, since your car takes you right to your destination with no stops (no stoplights either), you don't waste time on any stops in between. So much, much faster than a car. (At intersections, the tracks run at different elevations so traffic can go in both directions simultaneously.)
How long does it take to get a PRT vehicle? As long as it takes to hail a taxicab?
Probably. There's stops at various locations, and presumably, high-traffic stops (like the mall) will have unoccupied cars travel to them automatically in anticipation of demand, and waiting for riders, while at low-traffic stops, you'll probably have to "hail" a car. However, with today's mobile technology, they'll probably make an "app" to reserve a car when you want, so you can have one ready for you at your neighborhood SkyTran stop in the morning, for instance.
Really, I think PRT will mostly compete with cabs at first. So they'll have to beat cabs in price, speed, and availability.
Considering the main cost is the construction cost (which again should be a tiny fraction of that for light rail or subways), and of course the original R&D cost (they need to acquire a mainframe or high-reliability server farm and build the software for running it), and the operating cost is next-to-nothing (two hairdryer's worth of electric power to run, and no costly driver to pay), it should be pretty cheap. Of course, governments have a way of screwing up things like this; that's the real danger. So price and speed should be easy, availability is up to how fast they build it out, versus the demand. If they don't build it out enough (e.g. don't buy enough cars to put on the system), and suddenly everyone wants to ride it because it's convenient, then availability will be poor until they buy more cars, but that should be an easy fix, which can be chalked up to "growing pains".
New tech isn't going to solve transportation problems. We already know how to solve transportation problems and it comes down to money for building new infrastructure, e.g, subways, light rail, high-speed heavy-rail, and transit-only lanes. All that is hugely expensive.
Wrong: those things don't solve transportation problems, because they're all 19th-century technology. Subways only work in extremely dense areas like Manhattan and SanFran, not in Louisville KY or Ames IA. Light rail sucks; it's slow and very expensive (they put it in Phoenix recently and it's terrible). That's why 20th-century technology like PRT is the solution: use automated cars to move people between points of their choosing, on demand (rather than according to a fixed schedule). There's a reason people hate public transit in most places: it's too slow and inflexible: why should I have to stand around for 55 minutes waiting for the next bus, when I can get in my car at any time at all and go where I want, when I want? The only way to do this level of convenience and speed with public transit is to move to PRT.
The other problem with the 19th-century tech you mentioned is the enormous cost and the disruption caused by construction. PRT doesn't have those problems: with SkyTran, you hang the rails from simple utility poles. There's no more disruption than with putting in some telephone poles. With cars weighing 1000 lbs or less, rather than train cars weighing many many tons, you don't need such massive infrastructure, or even to put it on the ground.
Also, Muni also has way too many stops on lines, sometimes less than 1 block apart (thus slowing them down). The agency wants to remove stops, but people don't want their closest stop removed.
Who the hell wants to walk 2 miles from the nearest stop to their destination? This is another reason this 19th-century tech is crap. With PRT, you can have stops anywhere you want; the automated cars only go to the stop where the occupants of the car want to go, instead of stopping at every stop in between.
People's attitudes have to change to make sacrifices for the greater good rather than it being about me, me, me.
Putting in backwards, obsolete, inefficient, and expensive transit systems does not serve the greater good, especially when we have the technology (and have had it for 40 years) to do something much better.
Not getting corrupted is easy. I'm sure I could pull that off. You just have to not be a sociopath or someone with a poor moral compass.
The problem is that if the kind of person who can't be corrupted, the likelihood of you getting elected is almost zero. The voters don't want such people as leaders, they want people who tell them what they want to hear and fool them with lies. So sociopaths get elected because they're good at lying and deception.
But yes, your point is correct: the problem with many problems is politics, not technology. The political hurdles are too great for a bunch of geeks to deal with, whereas it's quite feasible for us to work on problems on our laptop computers sitting in our offices, basements, bedrooms, or coffee shops and only having to communicate with each other (e.g., on lkml.org).
However, there's another aspect: when a problem and its solution are entirely in one domain, especially the domain of computing, that also makes things easier. Even if the political problems weren't a factor, other problems are less wieldy: building automobiles, aircraft, space stations, etc., requires more than just sitting in your basement or a nearby coffee shop typing away on a computer; you have to have lots of raw materials, factories, steel foundries, etc. Doing stuff solely on a computer is a lot easier in many ways than dealing with other physical things.
Sorry, didn't realize that statistic was OK-specific.
But when you say "drowning", do you mean from floods, or from pool accidents, or both? You can do something about flooding, but there's not much you can do about pool accidents beyond either education or banning swimming pools. You could mandate fences around pools to try to keep kids out, but that's not something for government tax dollars to be spent on (the pool owner has to pay for things like that).
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
Wasn't a society like this depicted in "Judge Dredd" (or rather the newer "Dredd" movie)? 98+% unemployment, everyone living in gigantic public housing buildings, crime rates out of control with ultraviolent gangs controlling things, etc.
There's more to it than that.
You're right, there are a lot of problems that could be helped by new tech. Just look at transportation for instance: we spend a ton of money on it in the US, and it sucks: it's slow, we spend lots of time idling in traffic or at stoplights, our cars are driven by oil-burning, pollution-spewing horrifically inefficient engines, and 50,000 people die every year in auto accidents.
Tech could solve a lot of problems outside the online world, but the problem is that you have to have a good government that invests wisely in R&D, or at least you need a regulatory scheme that makes it possible for new tech to improve the situation. Why deal with all that government red tape when you can spend all your time working on a "hit app", Google Maps, a new handheld electronic device, etc.? All those things don't have much red tape at all: you build whatever you want, you put it out in the market, and you make money with it right away. You don't have to deal with all kinds of governmental problems with them.
Suppose I want to solve the transportation problem. An idea already exists: Personal Rapid Transit, such as SkyTran. It wouldn't be that hard to build; the passive maglev rails have already been built and proven to work, the computer/software tech needed for the cars to be autonomous is somewhat trivial compared to Google's infrastructure, and the cars themselves would be dirt-cheap compared to a modern car (gas or electric like Tesla). However, even if you could get funding for the initial R&D and production, there's more to building and deploying such a system than just getting a factory and building them: you have to get governments at all levels (federal down to local) to agree on it, to standardize on one system (so they can all link up), and new regulation set up to police it all and make sure it's safe, to secure right-of-way, etc. Add to that that it competes with existing technologies (namely GM, Ford, etc.), who have lobbyists who will try to shoot down anything that competes with privately-owned automobiles, just like they've done with various public transit systems in the past.
Or how about aviation? Think you can invent a better aircraft? Good luck getting past the FAA.
It's simply much easier to just sit at your computer and write a new software app. You don't have to deal with government regulators (who are applying decades-old regulations to brand-new ideas) when you do that.