US airports are not on US soil, and the ability to issue US visas is not within the jurisdiction of the US? That's a new one.
You got one of the three right, but the other two, well, I'm pretty sure either of them make it an issue governed by the US constitution. If the constitution didn't apply, the US government wouldn't be involved at all.
I'd like to see a situation, and I believe it's achievable, where USB-C forces manufacturers to provide features that currently can be omitted because "It'd mean adding another port". It ought to be possible to plug any phone or tablet into a TV, but right now that's not possible because video output is considered an exotic feature and even though there's a standard for HDMI over microUSB (the TLA is MHL IIRC) it's considered a different standard, not part of USB.
Just moving from PS/2 (where mice and keyboards had similar ports but were not designed to work with the other type of input device) was a huge step in the right direction. A single digital port that does everything, with hardware inside a device automatically configuring to communicate over a single shared bus would be awesome.
It's harder than you think: as you increase the data rate, trying to synchronize all 8/16/32/whatever lines becomes close to impossible. Breaking the data into multibit chunks and sending each serially via a different channel is easier because each channel can run independently, without regard to latency.
I believe this type of thing is also why we've moved away from, say, CPUs with direct access to memory (instead CPUs have multiple layers of cache between them and the computer's real memory.) It'd be nice and much more efficient to have the memory in your computer deliver up 64 bit words to the CPU at 4 gigawords a second (ie in sync with the CPU's 4GHz clock), but good luck trying to make a parallel motherboard bus that can deliver that.
Most of us don't carry a bag around with us. We have a car we'd like to plug the phone into, headphones at our desk, headphones at home, etc. So yes, it works for your lifestyle, and probably works for most women (who carry a handbag) but for a significant number of us a dongle is extra gear we don't want to carry.
I don't honestly see why there's such a problem with the idea of phasing out analog in favor of digital, as opposed to Apple's - and apparently their devoted copiers - approach of trying to murder analog. Building phones with both sockets adds pennies to the cost and has pretty much no downside. So build them. And in the mean time encourage third parties to move over to devices with USB-C connectors.
We didn't do this in the switch from RCA to HDMI (on consumer sets, or VGA to HDMI on computers), why are we doing this with the much more ubiquitous analog headset jack?
That... makes sense. The theory of Plate Tectonics apparently dates back to 1912 (with elements of the theory predating it - largely observations that the two landmasses on either side of the Atlantic ocean look like they would fit into each other - but the first serious development starting around then), but it wasn't until the 1950s that the whole theory started to fit together and became the scientific consensus - so it's unlikely any book before the late 1950s would rule out any scientific hypothesis on the grounds that it conflicted with PT.
Pluto was discovered in 1930. So your book is definitely in that zone.
I read a book on dinosaurs from the early 1990s to my daughter the other day and had to correct it, it described scaly lizards and said they were all now extinct. Funny how that works.
As someone who lived in Reading, UK, during the 1990s, directly under the flight path of Concorde, I can safely say you're completely wrong. The noise pretty much drowned out everything and made even a regular conversation impossible.
The sonic boom issue was underplayed by the UK governments and airline industry for somewhat obvious reasons. As for the idea that the Americans were spreading FUD: they had no reason to. They had supersonic designs, they even persuaded the US government to start planning a network of airports to support SS flight linked with HSR (they actually broke ground on one in the Everglades, never finished due to the collapse of the market); if the market for supersonic travel had taken off they'd have had ample opportunity to make more sales.
It's noisy. Really noisy. You don't want current tech supersonic planes flying over your home, believe me you don't.
By choosing to use this broken library, the broken library code effectively becomes part of systemd.
But here's a question: Did you even bother to read the comment before replying to it, and before wrongly criticizing it?! OBVIOUSLY NOT! The comment you didn't read, yet still replied to, contained the following:
And yes, it's best practices, when implementing something like international domains to use a respected third party library rather than trying to roll your own, so they haven't made an error in relying upon it.
So, before you go on, perhaps you can tell us why the systemd maintainers were wrong to adopt best practices in this case? Because I could have SWORN, sworn up and down, that the major criticism of systemd by its haters is that the authors insist on rewriting everything.
They haven't in this case. They've done exactly what the haters told them to do. And you're still going to criticize them?
How about just filing a bug ticket with the libidn team, and then shutting the fuck up?
Is that really the consensus because it doesn't make any sense, and I can't find anything to support it. The Pacific Ocean is only about 750M years old, the moon is somewhat older. Even if you assume the moon came out of materials originally where the plates underneath the Pacific were then, well, that doesn't make much sense either because they'd have been destroyed in the process.
I was under the impression that the consensus was an early proto-Earth was hit by something, usually thought to be a sister planet Theia, that caused the two planets to combine and break up into two, with the larger of the two forming Earth as we know it today, and the rest eventually reforming to make the moon. In the process the early Earth was effectively destroyed and recreated, the entire surface becoming a magma ocean, so you can't really say some identifiable part of it "became" the moon.
That's one issue. The other is that the precedent for "Oh, it's available in the store now!" were the solitaire suite games, which were wholly rewritten and changed into adware/nagware shadows of their former selves.
What's the betting that Paint is dead, and the Microsoft app called "Paint" in the store will also be a rewritten ad-infested "cloud-enabled" piece of crap?
No, the real problem is that a library, Libidn, that's used by resolver libraries including that apparently shipped with systemd has a bug in it. The library dates back to 2002, it's not even as if systemd was relying upon some bleeding edge library written specifically for it. And yes, it's best practices, when implementing something like international domains to use a respected third party library rather than trying to roll your own, so they haven't made an error in relying upon it.
This has nothing to do with systemd except for the fact the user happened to be using systemd at the time, and systemd happens to use this library. What next? A kernel bug gets blamed on systemd because systemd uses the kernel?
Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi be capable of the same thing, and cost around the same amount (once outfitted with the necessary hardware) as a router anyway? (Serious question, I've not tried it.)
Linux exists because Andrew Tanenbaum wasn't particularly interested in producing a 32 bit version of MINUX. Linux may be popular because the AT&T/BSD lawsuits, but it wasn't created in response to them.
If they sue you, then, well, you're probably bankrupt, even if you eventually win. Which certainly would be a deterrent to me, and would be to most of their other employees.
From the business's standpoint, it probably has nothing to lose. It's only going to sue if you've already made the facts public, so a lawsuit isn't actually going to make things worse.
STANDARDIZE the trailer time to _exactly_ 5 minutes.
I'd agree with. If they want to show more, they can always start before the movie does, not everyone arrives at exactly whatever time it's scheduled for...
Sorry to hear that. Sounds like Denver is seriously behind the curve.
Out of interest, am I the the only one who doesn't care that much about the trailers? It gives me a chance to find my seat, and maybe skip to the bathroom before the feature presentation, and occasionally (admittedly, only sometimes) I get to find out something is coming up I actually want to watch. Dunkirk for example was on during the Wonder Woman trailer, I'd not heard of it before that.
I don't know if you've been to a (mainstream, chain, in a moderately normal part of the country) cinema lately but they're seriously doing a lot to address your concerns, with large, comfortable, reclining seats, cup holders, and digital projection if they can't support 70mm or IMAX.
The improvement in seat quality has come at a cost that I've noticed most cinemas in my area now have so little capacity - bigger seats with more legroom means fewer seats - that they have had to resort to assigned seating for more popular movies. My wife and I watched Wonder Woman during the afternoon and there were only five spots in the theater where we could sit together.
Which, I guess, leaves snacks, but I've yet to come across a cinema that'll search your bag, or, you know, you could forgo them and eat before or after you've seen the film.
I've seen various ups and downs in the movie industry. I remember how terrible theaters were in the 1970s when my father took me to see The Jungle Book, and a little later, Star Wars, watching the former on a screen that probably wasn't more than 2-3x bigger than the TV I have today. Things slightly improved in the 1980s, largely because all of a sudden the cinemas had money to spend on long needed renovations, but by the mid-2000s we were back to dirty cinemas with cramped seats and, in one cinema I went to, the smell of pee.
But we seem to be back to the cinemas doing something about it and revamping their theaters. I don't know how long this will last, but I like it.
The train pictured doesn't have a locomotive, it appears to be a multiple unit, probably an EMU. (Multiple units are trains where one or more cars are self propelled.)
You can remove the timbers from a boat and replace them, that doesn't mean you can't name the boat! But for what it's worth, trains aren't broken up as often as you might think - typically once a train is on a route it stays the same consist for years. If the train is a DMU or EMU, then it usually stays as that consist for its entire life.
The other problem with your assumption is that the word "train" can differ depending on context. If I say "I'm taking the train to New York tonight", and you say "Oh, which one?", am I providing the most obvious answer if I say "Well, the one lead by locomotive 40126", or "The 6.23, I guess I better be at the station by quarter past six!"
Trains are named according to multiple criteria: a train can be a physical item, such as a trainset or just "Any train with this locomotive"; but a train can refer to the marketing of a specific timetabled route: for example, the US has lots of "named trains" like the Silver Star and the Texas Eagle.
Maintenance should be significantly lower than the NEC/Acela Express, given the primary issue with the latter is that it's 150 years old and showing it. Ridership should be similar to the combination of the Acela Express and Northeast Regional with similar fares.
The NEC is profitable BTW. Just saying. It's the reason why Texas Central and All Aboard Florida are doing their things.
A high flying passenger jet isn't really a good comparison for a number of reasons: it's a container of higher pressure air (it's relatively easy and easy on materials to contain 1 atmosphere of pressure - think about how you'd get a latex balloon and some wire to contain one atmosphere at 50,000 feet. Now think about how you'd use the same materials to keep the same amount of air at one atmosphere 30 feet below the surface of the ocean...);
Another problem is that passenger jets don't try to keep a perfect one bar of pressure when they're flying at high altitudes, which is why divers are told not to fly within 24 hours of a dive.
And a final problem is that, really, the pressure at 50,000 feet is about 0.1 atmospheres, whereas the pressure in a hyperloop tube will be a significant fraction of that. That said, building a container to protect 10% of an atmosphere from 100% outside probably isn't substantially different from building one to protect 1% of an atmosphere, it requires compressive strength only around 10% higher.
It's a fairly massive engineering challenge to keep 400 miles of tubing big enough to contain a Tesla Model 3 at a pressure of 1% (or even 10%) of an atmosphere. I'm not saying it's impossible, but... it's certainly going to be expensive and/or will leak rather a lot requiring substantial energy expenditures just to maintain the vacuum.
I'm personally more bothered about the fact it'll be a horrible traveling experience, but the engineering does seem a little off the wall from where I'm standing.
He's trying to fuck up public transportation by proposing "cheap" alternatives that, even if they work, will not be as cheap as he claims, and will on most metrics be horrible.
Maybe he believes in it, I don't know: I do know the CAHSR-killing original Hyperloop proposal was so bad it was impossible to assume it had been written in good faith. Just the fact this "replacement" only served two of the four cities CAHSR is aimed at, wasn't designed to cope with anything like as many passengers, and had end-points 50-100 miles away from the cities they served, was enough to draw that conclusion. That was before getting civil engineers in to dispute the costs.
So no, I don't give someone credit for merely "trying to do something". They have to be trying to do something worthwhile, not negative for me to support them.
Hundreds of billions? You're forgetting that Musk has found ways to reduce the cost of tunneling from $1B/mile to 25c (and 10c at weekends.) His Hyperloop technology is revolutionary and won't be a barf ride, cramped, and ear splittingly loud so stop saying that - they've proven it works in NV or New Mexico by building a small test track where they totally proved that you can put things in pipes and make them move, which is the same thing yes it is.
This is an amazing technology, one of the variants Musk has been proposing is going to totally end the problems associated with roads and congestion by moving your car right to the centers of major metropolises like Chicago and New York City, which are both famous for having ample space to drive around and park.
Truly a visionary, and he's not just trying to cripple real public transportation projects politically by proposing "cheap", "private" alternatives in order to prop up his car company, so stop saying that.
Those bus networks are heavily subsidized and lose money in every case, because (again) physics
I'm not sure which country you live in, but FWIW when I lived in Britain they privatized the buses in the late 1980s, eliminating subsidies for all but some country routes. The buses survived, and actually to a certain extent improved somewhat, largely because the municipal bus companies weren't terribly well managed, and the threat of competition (and sometimes the actual onset of competition - Oxford Bus Company vs Thames Transit was a great example) forced long needed changes.
In the US I can see profitable bus services being a possibility in many places as long as the local governments takes transit seriously. The problem is, for the most part, they have a car-first mentality even in places where cars are poison (Miami springs to mind...) which leads to a lack of dedicated bus lanes, a refusal to encourage higher density corridors and endpoints, and so on, crippling buses and other forms of transit.
I'm not sure that "put something on the market, safety be damned" is going to get us there any faster although I do support the sentiment of less regulation.
It does make sense to me if the assumption is that the manufacturers will be on the hook 100% for safety (which, legally, I can't see how they couldn't be, and which is a model manufacturers have actively embraced.)
The issues I can see this solving are:
- Safety is currently oriented around driver driven cars. Driverless cars will need a different framework. That needs time to implement and it also needs experience, or trial and error, which isn't possible if you ban driverless cars (directly or indirectly)
- States working independently are likely to create incompatible safety frameworks which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to create vehicles that be sold everywhere and can drive everywhere.
I think it's a good idea, and I'm not a knee-jerk opponent of regulation.
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US airports are not on US soil, and the ability to issue US visas is not within the jurisdiction of the US? That's a new one.
You got one of the three right, but the other two, well, I'm pretty sure either of them make it an issue governed by the US constitution. If the constitution didn't apply, the US government wouldn't be involved at all.
I'd like to see a situation, and I believe it's achievable, where USB-C forces manufacturers to provide features that currently can be omitted because "It'd mean adding another port". It ought to be possible to plug any phone or tablet into a TV, but right now that's not possible because video output is considered an exotic feature and even though there's a standard for HDMI over microUSB (the TLA is MHL IIRC) it's considered a different standard, not part of USB.
Just moving from PS/2 (where mice and keyboards had similar ports but were not designed to work with the other type of input device) was a huge step in the right direction. A single digital port that does everything, with hardware inside a device automatically configuring to communicate over a single shared bus would be awesome.
It's harder than you think: as you increase the data rate, trying to synchronize all 8/16/32/whatever lines becomes close to impossible. Breaking the data into multibit chunks and sending each serially via a different channel is easier because each channel can run independently, without regard to latency.
I believe this type of thing is also why we've moved away from, say, CPUs with direct access to memory (instead CPUs have multiple layers of cache between them and the computer's real memory.) It'd be nice and much more efficient to have the memory in your computer deliver up 64 bit words to the CPU at 4 gigawords a second (ie in sync with the CPU's 4GHz clock), but good luck trying to make a parallel motherboard bus that can deliver that.
Most of us don't carry a bag around with us. We have a car we'd like to plug the phone into, headphones at our desk, headphones at home, etc. So yes, it works for your lifestyle, and probably works for most women (who carry a handbag) but for a significant number of us a dongle is extra gear we don't want to carry.
I don't honestly see why there's such a problem with the idea of phasing out analog in favor of digital, as opposed to Apple's - and apparently their devoted copiers - approach of trying to murder analog. Building phones with both sockets adds pennies to the cost and has pretty much no downside. So build them. And in the mean time encourage third parties to move over to devices with USB-C connectors.
We didn't do this in the switch from RCA to HDMI (on consumer sets, or VGA to HDMI on computers), why are we doing this with the much more ubiquitous analog headset jack?
That... makes sense. The theory of Plate Tectonics apparently dates back to 1912 (with elements of the theory predating it - largely observations that the two landmasses on either side of the Atlantic ocean look like they would fit into each other - but the first serious development starting around then), but it wasn't until the 1950s that the whole theory started to fit together and became the scientific consensus - so it's unlikely any book before the late 1950s would rule out any scientific hypothesis on the grounds that it conflicted with PT.
Pluto was discovered in 1930. So your book is definitely in that zone.
I read a book on dinosaurs from the early 1990s to my daughter the other day and had to correct it, it described scaly lizards and said they were all now extinct. Funny how that works.
As someone who lived in Reading, UK, during the 1990s, directly under the flight path of Concorde, I can safely say you're completely wrong. The noise pretty much drowned out everything and made even a regular conversation impossible.
The sonic boom issue was underplayed by the UK governments and airline industry for somewhat obvious reasons. As for the idea that the Americans were spreading FUD: they had no reason to. They had supersonic designs, they even persuaded the US government to start planning a network of airports to support SS flight linked with HSR (they actually broke ground on one in the Everglades, never finished due to the collapse of the market); if the market for supersonic travel had taken off they'd have had ample opportunity to make more sales.
It's noisy. Really noisy. You don't want current tech supersonic planes flying over your home, believe me you don't.
But here's a question: Did you even bother to read the comment before replying to it, and before wrongly criticizing it?! OBVIOUSLY NOT! The comment you didn't read, yet still replied to, contained the following:
So, before you go on, perhaps you can tell us why the systemd maintainers were wrong to adopt best practices in this case? Because I could have SWORN, sworn up and down, that the major criticism of systemd by its haters is that the authors insist on rewriting everything.
They haven't in this case. They've done exactly what the haters told them to do. And you're still going to criticize them?
How about just filing a bug ticket with the libidn team, and then shutting the fuck up?
Is that really the consensus because it doesn't make any sense, and I can't find anything to support it. The Pacific Ocean is only about 750M years old, the moon is somewhat older. Even if you assume the moon came out of materials originally where the plates underneath the Pacific were then, well, that doesn't make much sense either because they'd have been destroyed in the process.
I was under the impression that the consensus was an early proto-Earth was hit by something, usually thought to be a sister planet Theia, that caused the two planets to combine and break up into two, with the larger of the two forming Earth as we know it today, and the rest eventually reforming to make the moon. In the process the early Earth was effectively destroyed and recreated, the entire surface becoming a magma ocean, so you can't really say some identifiable part of it "became" the moon.
If I'm wrong, I'd love to know!
That's one issue. The other is that the precedent for "Oh, it's available in the store now!" were the solitaire suite games, which were wholly rewritten and changed into adware/nagware shadows of their former selves.
What's the betting that Paint is dead, and the Microsoft app called "Paint" in the store will also be a rewritten ad-infested "cloud-enabled" piece of crap?
No, the real problem is that a library, Libidn, that's used by resolver libraries including that apparently shipped with systemd has a bug in it. The library dates back to 2002, it's not even as if systemd was relying upon some bleeding edge library written specifically for it. And yes, it's best practices, when implementing something like international domains to use a respected third party library rather than trying to roll your own, so they haven't made an error in relying upon it.
This has nothing to do with systemd except for the fact the user happened to be using systemd at the time, and systemd happens to use this library. What next? A kernel bug gets blamed on systemd because systemd uses the kernel?
The submitter is trolling.
Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi be capable of the same thing, and cost around the same amount (once outfitted with the necessary hardware) as a router anyway? (Serious question, I've not tried it.)
Linux exists because Andrew Tanenbaum wasn't particularly interested in producing a 32 bit version of MINUX. Linux may be popular because the AT&T/BSD lawsuits, but it wasn't created in response to them.
If they sue you, then, well, you're probably bankrupt, even if you eventually win. Which certainly would be a deterrent to me, and would be to most of their other employees.
From the business's standpoint, it probably has nothing to lose. It's only going to sue if you've already made the facts public, so a lawsuit isn't actually going to make things worse.
I'd agree with. If they want to show more, they can always start before the movie does, not everyone arrives at exactly whatever time it's scheduled for...
Sorry to hear that. Sounds like Denver is seriously behind the curve.
Out of interest, am I the the only one who doesn't care that much about the trailers? It gives me a chance to find my seat, and maybe skip to the bathroom before the feature presentation, and occasionally (admittedly, only sometimes) I get to find out something is coming up I actually want to watch. Dunkirk for example was on during the Wonder Woman trailer, I'd not heard of it before that.
I don't know if you've been to a (mainstream, chain, in a moderately normal part of the country) cinema lately but they're seriously doing a lot to address your concerns, with large, comfortable, reclining seats, cup holders, and digital projection if they can't support 70mm or IMAX.
The improvement in seat quality has come at a cost that I've noticed most cinemas in my area now have so little capacity - bigger seats with more legroom means fewer seats - that they have had to resort to assigned seating for more popular movies. My wife and I watched Wonder Woman during the afternoon and there were only five spots in the theater where we could sit together.
Which, I guess, leaves snacks, but I've yet to come across a cinema that'll search your bag, or, you know, you could forgo them and eat before or after you've seen the film.
I've seen various ups and downs in the movie industry. I remember how terrible theaters were in the 1970s when my father took me to see The Jungle Book, and a little later, Star Wars, watching the former on a screen that probably wasn't more than 2-3x bigger than the TV I have today. Things slightly improved in the 1980s, largely because all of a sudden the cinemas had money to spend on long needed renovations, but by the mid-2000s we were back to dirty cinemas with cramped seats and, in one cinema I went to, the smell of pee.
But we seem to be back to the cinemas doing something about it and revamping their theaters. I don't know how long this will last, but I like it.
The train pictured doesn't have a locomotive, it appears to be a multiple unit, probably an EMU. (Multiple units are trains where one or more cars are self propelled.)
You can remove the timbers from a boat and replace them, that doesn't mean you can't name the boat! But for what it's worth, trains aren't broken up as often as you might think - typically once a train is on a route it stays the same consist for years. If the train is a DMU or EMU, then it usually stays as that consist for its entire life.
The other problem with your assumption is that the word "train" can differ depending on context. If I say "I'm taking the train to New York tonight", and you say "Oh, which one?", am I providing the most obvious answer if I say "Well, the one lead by locomotive 40126", or "The 6.23, I guess I better be at the station by quarter past six!"
Trains are named according to multiple criteria: a train can be a physical item, such as a trainset or just "Any train with this locomotive"; but a train can refer to the marketing of a specific timetabled route: for example, the US has lots of "named trains" like the Silver Star and the Texas Eagle.
I hope this makes sense,
Maintenance should be significantly lower than the NEC/Acela Express, given the primary issue with the latter is that it's 150 years old and showing it. Ridership should be similar to the combination of the Acela Express and Northeast Regional with similar fares.
The NEC is profitable BTW. Just saying. It's the reason why Texas Central and All Aboard Florida are doing their things.
A high flying passenger jet isn't really a good comparison for a number of reasons: it's a container of higher pressure air (it's relatively easy and easy on materials to contain 1 atmosphere of pressure - think about how you'd get a latex balloon and some wire to contain one atmosphere at 50,000 feet. Now think about how you'd use the same materials to keep the same amount of air at one atmosphere 30 feet below the surface of the ocean...);
Another problem is that passenger jets don't try to keep a perfect one bar of pressure when they're flying at high altitudes, which is why divers are told not to fly within 24 hours of a dive.
And a final problem is that, really, the pressure at 50,000 feet is about 0.1 atmospheres, whereas the pressure in a hyperloop tube will be a significant fraction of that. That said, building a container to protect 10% of an atmosphere from 100% outside probably isn't substantially different from building one to protect 1% of an atmosphere, it requires compressive strength only around 10% higher.
It's a fairly massive engineering challenge to keep 400 miles of tubing big enough to contain a Tesla Model 3 at a pressure of 1% (or even 10%) of an atmosphere. I'm not saying it's impossible, but... it's certainly going to be expensive and/or will leak rather a lot requiring substantial energy expenditures just to maintain the vacuum.
I'm personally more bothered about the fact it'll be a horrible traveling experience, but the engineering does seem a little off the wall from where I'm standing.
True, I once got verbal consent to DVR an NFL football game, rather than the express written consent I needed.
Damned game didn't record.
He's trying to fuck up public transportation by proposing "cheap" alternatives that, even if they work, will not be as cheap as he claims, and will on most metrics be horrible.
Maybe he believes in it, I don't know: I do know the CAHSR-killing original Hyperloop proposal was so bad it was impossible to assume it had been written in good faith. Just the fact this "replacement" only served two of the four cities CAHSR is aimed at, wasn't designed to cope with anything like as many passengers, and had end-points 50-100 miles away from the cities they served, was enough to draw that conclusion. That was before getting civil engineers in to dispute the costs.
So no, I don't give someone credit for merely "trying to do something". They have to be trying to do something worthwhile, not negative for me to support them.
Hundreds of billions? You're forgetting that Musk has found ways to reduce the cost of tunneling from $1B/mile to 25c (and 10c at weekends.) His Hyperloop technology is revolutionary and won't be a barf ride, cramped, and ear splittingly loud so stop saying that - they've proven it works in NV or New Mexico by building a small test track where they totally proved that you can put things in pipes and make them move, which is the same thing yes it is.
This is an amazing technology, one of the variants Musk has been proposing is going to totally end the problems associated with roads and congestion by moving your car right to the centers of major metropolises like Chicago and New York City, which are both famous for having ample space to drive around and park.
Truly a visionary, and he's not just trying to cripple real public transportation projects politically by proposing "cheap", "private" alternatives in order to prop up his car company, so stop saying that.
I'm not sure which country you live in, but FWIW when I lived in Britain they privatized the buses in the late 1980s, eliminating subsidies for all but some country routes. The buses survived, and actually to a certain extent improved somewhat, largely because the municipal bus companies weren't terribly well managed, and the threat of competition (and sometimes the actual onset of competition - Oxford Bus Company vs Thames Transit was a great example) forced long needed changes.
In the US I can see profitable bus services being a possibility in many places as long as the local governments takes transit seriously. The problem is, for the most part, they have a car-first mentality even in places where cars are poison (Miami springs to mind...) which leads to a lack of dedicated bus lanes, a refusal to encourage higher density corridors and endpoints, and so on, crippling buses and other forms of transit.
It does make sense to me if the assumption is that the manufacturers will be on the hook 100% for safety (which, legally, I can't see how they couldn't be, and which is a model manufacturers have actively embraced.)
The issues I can see this solving are:
- Safety is currently oriented around driver driven cars. Driverless cars will need a different framework. That needs time to implement and it also needs experience, or trial and error, which isn't possible if you ban driverless cars (directly or indirectly)
- States working independently are likely to create incompatible safety frameworks which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to create vehicles that be sold everywhere and can drive everywhere.
I think it's a good idea, and I'm not a knee-jerk opponent of regulation.