I will agree almost everyone has a copy of windows, the question is how often do they use it. In my case I keep a copy of windows on my notebook computer, I will boot into it every few months to run windows update for those rare occasions when I need to run a windows only application, or go to an IE only web site.
The Gnome developers have been removing features with every release for over a decade, this is just the next step. Give them a few more years and they will remove all interaction and running Gnome will be just like running X with no window manager.
Because a base Debian install can still be small, so it is a great starting point for so many speciality distros. You try installing Red Hat or Fedora and even with lots of trimming it is hard to make it fit on anything smaller than a 9 gig drive.
I have to partially disagree with you here, the typical 5 year old car does start needing some major maintenance items, but the cost of these are usually around 1/4 the annual cost of payments on a new car. 20-30 or so years ago cars in the U.S. came with an odometer that rolled over at 100,000 miles now it is 1,000,000 miles, back then you could easily tell a 100,000 mile car from the very rare 200,000 mile variety, by comparison at work we just sold off our old semi-retired 13 year old mostly worn out spare pickup truck, it still ran, but had a long list of issues with 386,000 miles on the odometer such numbers were unheard of not long ago out of a cheap basic pickup truck.
As a 40 something year old, simply put, cars last a lot longer now than they used to. As a great example my 21 year old son is still driving his first car a '96 Camry which he learned to drive on at age 16. Maintenance has been mostly limited to typical wear items, and the random fairly cheap side view mirror or door handle off ebay with the exception of one major engine issue shortly after he inherited the car. From time to time I have an occasion to drive his car, other than being a bit under powered by today's standards it still drives well, even without all the newer ride control gizmos, at a casual glance the exterior styling could be confused with any number of much newer imports overall it is still a decent car and gets around 30 mpg. By comparison when I was his age a typical 15 year old car was a falling apart piece of junk that handled poorly, guzzled gas and generally ran unreliably.
Been there done that, this is much the same way that the Savings and Loan scandle occured 30-40 years ago, they too started with little or no regulation..
He signed away certain parts of those rights when he joined the military and agreed to be ruled by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The UCMJ is far more restrictive than laws that govern the general population, and provides confinement punishments for all sorts of offenses that people in civial life would feel are gross violaiton of their freedoml. (restriction on their social actions, movement, even making their own choices about their health care)
It is worse than that, the free nature of CL means the less than reputable sells can post ads over a wide area and run them for a long time waiting for someone to take the bait. Try searching for larger ticket items in the CL listings (things like RV's, camping trailers, generators, or even riding lawn mowers) and see for yourself what a large fraction of ads are obviously scams. It helps to use a helper CL search tool like searchtempest where you can scan all adds within XXX miles, once you find a suspicious ad for a deal that is too good to be true on an item, search for keywords out of that ad on a wider area, and see it listed with the same photo all over the place, but always with a local location..
You could probably charge a thousand kindles for the amount of electricity it takes for a powered filtration system to process drinking water for one family. A first generation Kindle quick charger draws 2 amps at 5 volts (10 watts), and will charge a kindle in a couple of hours providing enough power for it to run on for weeks.. A 10 watt solar panel is about the size of a large sheet of paper and costs around $30.
A kindle like e-paper deivce could be recharged by a small $25 solar panel no bigger than a sheet of paper, better yet it would probably provide enough charge capacity to be shared between several readers.
You may have a point, but the reality is to go around creeping along through a somewhat busy intersection is a recipe for getting into an accident also.
The problem is all speech can be called hate speech, so where to we draw the line? Don't get me wrong, I don't like this group, but feel they have the right to free speech, I don't feel they have the right to disrupt others while they practice free speech though.
How about don't stand in the road if you don't want to be hit? Just last weekend I was passenger in a car and we were almost in an accident with a driver that had already been in a minor car accident, it was twilight, he was standing at the drivers window of the car he had hit stopped in the turn lane by a traffic light. We were in the oncoming car driving through the intersection and could not see him until the last moment due the headlights being on in the car he was standing next to. We were lucky, and swerved into the right lane (4 lane street with center turn lane), and thankfully there was no car there when we did. From our approaching perspective there was no warning that there had been an accident (no hazard lights, etc.), it just looked like a couple of cars in the turn lane waiting for a break in traffic to turn. While driving you simply don't expect someone to be standing in the road in the blind spot created next to a car headlight on a somewhat dark street. The point I am trying to make with this is that people often use poor judgement after being in an accident, they are distracted by all sorts of things, stress, relief, as well as the need to talk with other drivers, call a tow truck, the police, etc. This makes them do stupid things like stand in the oncoming traffics lane in a place where they are obscured by the glare from the headlights of a car.
The problem is everyone gets distracted while driving from time to time, most of the time they get lucky and nothing bad happens, sometimes it does, sometimes it is worse than others. Maybe the distraction is a bee in the car, a sneeze, or a spilled cup of coffee, in this case the distraction may have been due to a piece of technology, a cell phone, but could have as easily been the radio, or trying to adjust power mirrors. If were going to punish someone for using an electronic communication device around the same time as an accident, where does the blame stop, do we punish the guy driving with a cold because he sneezed at the wrong moment and caused an accident?
It sounds like time fund research into deep water drilling, and start drilling for oil in all those places where we know it is, but drilling is off limits due to those ugly oil rigs. That and do sensible research into alternatives, it is also time to build nuclear power plants and tell the anti-nuke crowd that the 60's and 70's are over and live with it.
There are isolated examples of failures of the Interstate highway system, however I would tend to say the vast majority of it works well. The exceptions are the North east with its high population density, and areas like you describe where you have cities like Seattle that have grown along a natural boundary like a bay, mountain range, etc.
Since when has Amtrak cost less than flying? Well maybe for short trips, but try looking up the cost of a long distance Amtrak ticket in one of their private sleeper compartments (who wants a standard seat on a 36+ hour trip half way across the country). Two people in a mini sleeper compartment with no bathroom going from Texas to California one way was over $600, compare this to round trip airline tickets at about $300 per person even on relatively short notice (so this puts Amtrak at about double the airline price, takes 6 times longer to get there), if you want to have a real sleeper room with a private bathroom (micro toilet, sink, etc), seating and sleeping area for 3 (one in upper bunk, 2 in double wide lower bunk) the price goes up to $1450 (still one way).
Depending on the culture and stability in the country ground based infrastructure (particularly things like unmanned repeater sites, etc) make great targets for theft. The interenet is down again because someone stole the generator/solar panels, at the wireless repeater station on top of the mountain.
I don't know if I would go with quite visible in a 10 inch newtonian, maybe under near ideal skies it is faintly visible to experienced observers using averted imagination. By comparison for the type skies accessible within a couple of hours or driving time to the majority of the U.S. population and to clearly see an object of this brightness as something more than a faint cloud that one questions if they ever saw in the first place it would likely take a well built telescope of at least 15-18 inch size range, the cheapest on the used market being a dobsonian in perhaps in the price range of a couple of thousand dollars, with new prices well above that. Perhaps in my original message I was being optimistic about the number of replies this topic would get, but think the point remains basically true.
Translation, it is photographically within the reach of telescopes costing only a couple of thousand dollars, and from a good dark sky location visually within the reach of telescopes costing about as much as a typical reasonably nice used car (that is as a very dim pinpoint). The number of amateur telescopes in the world that can provide a decent view of this object is probably fewer than the number of people that will end up posting in this message thread.
Another problem is the cost of owning a second car, which includes registration, insurance, etc, in many areas this will add up to well over a thousand dollars per year. Assuming a 15+ year life of a second car getting limited use this adds up to a large fraction of the original purchase price of the car.
Insurance is a bigger one, if everyone has an all electric car for their daily driving, many if not most families will also need a gasoline (or diesel) car for long distance trips that are outside the daily commute range of the all electric car. Sure frequency of these trips will vary, and car rental etc. may for for those that don't need to travel that often. I know in my family we drive to places over 50 miles roughly once or twice per week, this would require a second vehicle which must be insured, often at a rate that is comparable to the purchase cost of the vehicle when calculated over the lifetime of the vehicle (assuming limited weekend use and purchase as a late model used car).
Wait a couple of years for those kids to get bigger, then they will want to bring friends along, etc. The automotive industry has always produced vehicles for this large market segment, there were the full sized cars with bench seats that could comfortably fit 5 adults, then station wagons with seating for 6 or 7 or even more, then came the mini-van, followed by the SUV and not the Crossovers.
There are still vast sections of the US that are stuck with dial up, and with the size of typical web pages today, where you find 3-5 minute load times for many commonly accessed pages, this means they are not on the internet for all practical purposes. Sure this does not show up as much of the online population as many of these people once had AOL, Earthlink, etc. dial up accounts, but have given up on them over years as bloated these web pages have rendered them useless, and therefore are not being counted as among internet users today. The sad fact is once you remove the "fake" broadband options with slow/low use caps like Hughes satellite service / cellular based service you find that just about any place in the U.S. that is more than a couple of miles from the nearest traffic light is stuck without any internet option other than dial up.
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I will agree almost everyone has a copy of windows, the question is how often do they use it. In my case I keep a copy of windows on my notebook computer, I will boot into it every few months to run windows update for those rare occasions when I need to run a windows only application, or go to an IE only web site.
The Gnome developers have been removing features with every release for over a decade, this is just the next step. Give them a few more years and they will remove all interaction and running Gnome will be just like running X with no window manager.
Because a base Debian install can still be small, so it is a great starting point for so many speciality distros. You try installing Red Hat or Fedora and even with lots of trimming it is hard to make it fit on anything smaller than a 9 gig drive.
I have to partially disagree with you here, the typical 5 year old car does start needing some major maintenance items, but the cost of these are usually around 1/4 the annual cost of payments on a new car. 20-30 or so years ago cars in the U.S. came with an odometer that rolled over at 100,000 miles now it is 1,000,000 miles, back then you could easily tell a 100,000 mile car from the very rare 200,000 mile variety, by comparison at work we just sold off our old semi-retired 13 year old mostly worn out spare pickup truck, it still ran, but had a long list of issues with 386,000 miles on the odometer such numbers were unheard of not long ago out of a cheap basic pickup truck.
As a 40 something year old, simply put, cars last a lot longer now than they used to. As a great example my 21 year old son is still driving his first car a '96 Camry which he learned to drive on at age 16. Maintenance has been mostly limited to typical wear items, and the random fairly cheap side view mirror or door handle off ebay with the exception of one major engine issue shortly after he inherited the car. From time to time I have an occasion to drive his car, other than being a bit under powered by today's standards it still drives well, even without all the newer ride control gizmos, at a casual glance the exterior styling could be confused with any number of much newer imports overall it is still a decent car and gets around 30 mpg. By comparison when I was his age a typical 15 year old car was a falling apart piece of junk that handled poorly, guzzled gas and generally ran unreliably.
Been there done that, this is much the same way that the Savings and Loan scandle occured 30-40 years ago, they too started with little or no regulation..
He signed away certain parts of those rights when he joined the military and agreed to be ruled by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The UCMJ is far more restrictive than laws that govern the general population, and provides confinement punishments for all sorts of offenses that people in civial life would feel are gross violaiton of their freedoml. (restriction on their social actions, movement, even making their own choices about their health care)
It is worse than that, the free nature of CL means the less than reputable sells can post ads over a wide area and run them for a long time waiting for someone to take the bait. Try searching for larger ticket items in the CL listings (things like RV's, camping trailers, generators, or even riding lawn mowers) and see for yourself what a large fraction of ads are obviously scams. It helps to use a helper CL search tool like searchtempest where you can scan all adds within XXX miles, once you find a suspicious ad for a deal that is too good to be true on an item, search for keywords out of that ad on a wider area, and see it listed with the same photo all over the place, but always with a local location..
You could probably charge a thousand kindles for the amount of electricity it takes for a powered filtration system to process drinking water for one family. A first generation Kindle quick charger draws 2 amps at 5 volts (10 watts), and will charge a kindle in a couple of hours providing enough power for it to run on for weeks.. A 10 watt solar panel is about the size of a large sheet of paper and costs around $30.
A kindle like e-paper deivce could be recharged by a small $25 solar panel no bigger than a sheet of paper, better yet it would probably provide enough charge capacity to be shared between several readers.
BIOS battery
You may have a point, but the reality is to go around creeping along through a somewhat busy intersection is a recipe for getting into an accident also.
The problem is all speech can be called hate speech, so where to we draw the line? Don't get me wrong, I don't like this group, but feel they have the right to free speech, I don't feel they have the right to disrupt others while they practice free speech though.
How about don't stand in the road if you don't want to be hit? Just last weekend I was passenger in a car and we were almost in an accident with a driver that had already been in a minor car accident, it was twilight, he was standing at the drivers window of the car he had hit stopped in the turn lane by a traffic light. We were in the oncoming car driving through the intersection and could not see him until the last moment due the headlights being on in the car he was standing next to. We were lucky, and swerved into the right lane (4 lane street with center turn lane), and thankfully there was no car there when we did. From our approaching perspective there was no warning that there had been an accident (no hazard lights, etc.), it just looked like a couple of cars in the turn lane waiting for a break in traffic to turn. While driving you simply don't expect someone to be standing in the road in the blind spot created next to a car headlight on a somewhat dark street. The point I am trying to make with this is that people often use poor judgement after being in an accident, they are distracted by all sorts of things, stress, relief, as well as the need to talk with other drivers, call a tow truck, the police, etc. This makes them do stupid things like stand in the oncoming traffics lane in a place where they are obscured by the glare from the headlights of a car.
The problem is everyone gets distracted while driving from time to time, most of the time they get lucky and nothing bad happens, sometimes it does, sometimes it is worse than others. Maybe the distraction is a bee in the car, a sneeze, or a spilled cup of coffee, in this case the distraction may have been due to a piece of technology, a cell phone, but could have as easily been the radio, or trying to adjust power mirrors. If were going to punish someone for using an electronic communication device around the same time as an accident, where does the blame stop, do we punish the guy driving with a cold because he sneezed at the wrong moment and caused an accident?
It sounds like time fund research into deep water drilling, and start drilling for oil in all those places where we know it is, but drilling is off limits due to those ugly oil rigs. That and do sensible research into alternatives, it is also time to build nuclear power plants and tell the anti-nuke crowd that the 60's and 70's are over and live with it.
There are isolated examples of failures of the Interstate highway system, however I would tend to say the vast majority of it works well. The exceptions are the North east with its high population density, and areas like you describe where you have cities like Seattle that have grown along a natural boundary like a bay, mountain range, etc.
Since when has Amtrak cost less than flying? Well maybe for short trips, but try looking up the cost of a long distance Amtrak ticket in one of their private sleeper compartments (who wants a standard seat on a 36+ hour trip half way across the country). Two people in a mini sleeper compartment with no bathroom going from Texas to California one way was over $600, compare this to round trip airline tickets at about $300 per person even on relatively short notice (so this puts Amtrak at about double the airline price, takes 6 times longer to get there), if you want to have a real sleeper room with a private bathroom (micro toilet, sink, etc), seating and sleeping area for 3 (one in upper bunk, 2 in double wide lower bunk) the price goes up to $1450 (still one way).
Depending on the culture and stability in the country ground based infrastructure (particularly things like unmanned repeater sites, etc) make great targets for theft. The interenet is down again because someone stole the generator/solar panels, at the wireless repeater station on top of the mountain.
I don't know if I would go with quite visible in a 10 inch newtonian, maybe under near ideal skies it is faintly visible to experienced observers using averted imagination. By comparison for the type skies accessible within a couple of hours or driving time to the majority of the U.S. population and to clearly see an object of this brightness as something more than a faint cloud that one questions if they ever saw in the first place it would likely take a well built telescope of at least 15-18 inch size range, the cheapest on the used market being a dobsonian in perhaps in the price range of a couple of thousand dollars, with new prices well above that. Perhaps in my original message I was being optimistic about the number of replies this topic would get, but think the point remains basically true.
Translation, it is photographically within the reach of telescopes costing only a couple of thousand dollars, and from a good dark sky location visually within the reach of telescopes costing about as much as a typical reasonably nice used car (that is as a very dim pinpoint). The number of amateur telescopes in the world that can provide a decent view of this object is probably fewer than the number of people that will end up posting in this message thread.
Another problem is the cost of owning a second car, which includes registration, insurance, etc, in many areas this will add up to well over a thousand dollars per year. Assuming a 15+ year life of a second car getting limited use this adds up to a large fraction of the original purchase price of the car.
Insurance is a bigger one, if everyone has an all electric car for their daily driving, many if not most families will also need a gasoline (or diesel) car for long distance trips that are outside the daily commute range of the all electric car. Sure frequency of these trips will vary, and car rental etc. may for for those that don't need to travel that often. I know in my family we drive to places over 50 miles roughly once or twice per week, this would require a second vehicle which must be insured, often at a rate that is comparable to the purchase cost of the vehicle when calculated over the lifetime of the vehicle (assuming limited weekend use and purchase as a late model used car).
Wait a couple of years for those kids to get bigger, then they will want to bring friends along, etc. The automotive industry has always produced vehicles for this large market segment, there were the full sized cars with bench seats that could comfortably fit 5 adults, then station wagons with seating for 6 or 7 or even more, then came the mini-van, followed by the SUV and not the Crossovers.
There are still vast sections of the US that are stuck with dial up, and with the size of typical web pages today, where you find 3-5 minute load times for many commonly accessed pages, this means they are not on the internet for all practical purposes. Sure this does not show up as much of the online population as many of these people once had AOL, Earthlink, etc. dial up accounts, but have given up on them over years as bloated these web pages have rendered them useless, and therefore are not being counted as among internet users today. The sad fact is once you remove the "fake" broadband options with slow/low use caps like Hughes satellite service / cellular based service you find that just about any place in the U.S. that is more than a couple of miles from the nearest traffic light is stuck without any internet option other than dial up.