You do realize that Top Gear admits to having faked the episode, right?
Top Gear's exact statement:
"To fully recharge the batteries on this from a normal 13 amp socket like this takes 16 hours. So to get from here to the top of Scotland would take more than three days."
Which is 100% accurate. Note the phrase "standard 13 amp socket".
The *standard* Tesla charger takes about 3 hours to charge a fully dead battery,
Complete lie. That's using the 70watt 240v "Standard charger". Who the fuck has a dedicated 70w 220v circuit in their house for ONE outlet? Literally nobody. My buddy below has the beefiest box I've ever seen going it a residence, over 400 amps, and even HE doesn't have an outlet like this.
"The Roadster's battery has a capacity of 53kWh. Tesla quotes a charge time of 3-3.5, but that is based on charging from a 220V 80A circuit. If, on the other hand, you plug the car into a typical outlet in your living room, you would only have 15A flowing at 110V. That's 53,000W / (110V * 15) = 32.12 hours. So if you plan to get yourself a plug-in electric car with any kind of serious range, be prepared to have an electrician install a high current outlet to charge it. At the very least you'll want a 220V/40A circuit for overnight charging in 6-7 hours."
Every REAL WORLD test (exactly 2) I've seen of a Tesla it took a lot longer than 3 hours to charge from dead off a 220V/40A outlet. In one case it was around 8 hours, in the other I'm not sure. It took at least that long be we didn't look at it for 14 hours so it might have taken less that that. Somewhere between 10 and 14. He reported that he's seen this weird behavior where the car will report as 90% charged after about 4 hours but if he drives at that point his range is nothing, like 20 miles. As far as I can tell, he's never driven it more than 40 miles in a stretch.
I've ridden around in one. They're small and cramped (I'm 6'5") and can carry no cargo. The cool thing is that they're fast, the pickup is great, and they're very, very, quiet. It's the quiet that really gets you. They're also incredibly impractical. Arguably the least practical car I've ever been in except for the Lamborghinis. Even a Porsche is more practical (faster, better range, more cargo). The truth is that I was almost as impressed with the $5000 electric smart car/golf cart thing he had.
My friend also complained about service. Some gauge on his dash doesn't work and he wanted Telsa to either do pickup or drive him home (at this price you expect that level of service) and they wouldn't do it. He lives in Los Altos Hills, maybe 10 miles from the dealership.
The Tesla Roadster is a toy for the super-rich, at best. As a taxpayer I don't think we should give them a dime until they produce a credible business plan that shows them producing a $35,000 electric with 500 miles of range within a few years. That won't happen, which is why I think battery-driven electrics are a dead end.
The solution I've backed is hydrogen fuel cells, with the hydrogen generated by nuclear power.
"Buy American" is essentially a racist statement. You're implying that the value of an American is higher than that of someone from another country by saying that it's better to protect industries in this country to protect the jobs. At some point, we've got to start calling out "Buy American" for the racist statement that it is.
"American" does not refer to RACE. RACE, and this is greatly simplified, refers to skin color and other physical attributes. People of every race reside in the United States. What you're talking about is NATIONALISM. "Buy American" is a NATIONALISTIC statement. It implies that Americans think better of THEIR NATION than other nations.
Front and center is this policy of free trade. The idea of American competition is a total sham. We have been hearing for 50 years that opening our markets to the world would improve our standard of living, and induce the world to do the same, and neither has happened. Instead, the world is more protectionist than ever, makes every excuse to avoid reciprocating imports.
Please mod this up.
Any "conservative" or "libertarian" promotic so-called "free trade" is a liar and a fraud. They simply DO NOT WANT FREE TRADE. What they want is to have trade barriers altered to favor THEIR PRODUCTS. Not the American economy as a whole. Not the taxpayer. But themselves and their campaign donors. The same "free traders" that decry subsidized health care don't say one word about the MASSIVE US agricultural and energy subsidies, because they're making money in those industries. They're making money in the insurance companies as well which is why they fight tooth and nail to cut costs there. Insurance, basically ALL insurance in ALL forms, is a fraudulently used to abuse consumers.
As I've said numerous times before the #1 problem in America, far beyond "terrorists", the "drug war", etc. is CORPORATE fraud. Corporate fraud is the cause of the financial crisis. Corporate fraud eats up about 50% of every American's paycheck. I believe the problem has gotten so bad that LLCs have to cease to exist for fraud claims. The only solution at this point is to hold officers and major shareholders personally and individually criminally responsible for corporate fraud. We need a dedicated federal agency staffed by hundreds of agents doing NOTHING by corporate fraud prosecutions. Such an agency would cost $0. It would more than pay for itself in fines.
Envisions appears to be a 1 or 2 man shop out of Anniston, Alabama, not exactly a technology hotbed. They have no production lined up from what I can see and if they do it's quite small.
If you read the press and look at the screenshots Envision it talking about the EVO as a desktop PC at least as much as a gaming device. This appears to be a toy of hobbists and hackers. And even then, it's a bit dubious. Your average Linux hacker (which is what Envisions is) could probably put together something similar themselves.
It's a niche product, much like previous Linux consoles. OpenPandora looks a lot more promising. Using emulators to compete with the handheld market seems more viable. Though I wish it was x86-based.
In practice, your criticism is somewhat apt because I don't know how well Cell Linux distro works with emulators and games available for Linux. Probably not well based on my experience with PowerPC. So almost any random x86 system would work better as a Linux gaming box than the PS3, including the EVO.
If they're already ignoring mandatory insurance laws at state level they'll just ignore the national one too.
The motivation not to pay would be reduced by lower fees and yes, some people would ignore it anyway. If necessary, a mandatory tax could be used attached to vehicle registration. The point is to reduce the cost by cutting out the middleman.
This is particularly true for the under 25 crowd, and especially under 18 crowd.... . In my mind, if one can own a 20 thousand dollar truck, one can pay insurance.
Virtually all of whom are broke. That teenage girl you're talking about simply DID NOT buy a $20K truck on her own. Her parents bought it and THEY should pay for the insurance. If THEY gave her the truck but wont' pay for insurance THAT'S THE PARENT'S FAULT! They should have bought her a cheaper car and actually paid the insurance.
A handful of rich kids whose parents are too stupid to pay for insurance should not be the basis of American public policy. Besides, there's a remedy here: Sue the parents.
So how exactly to plan to pay for that in a non city area where vary few people will actually use the system?
A single-payer auto insurance plan would be mandatory, everyone would pay into it through vehicle registration fees and perhaps a dedicated gasoline tax. Private auto insurance would be supplementary.
Or raise taxes for everyone $20-50/month
Why not? You have NO PROBLEM with people paying this money to insurance companies who spend it on cocaine and hookers, why would it be worse to give this money to the government instead?
I've found that libertarians and free marketeers seem to live in a magical fairyland where everything that is run by private enterprise is efficent and ethical and everything run by government is corrupt and inefficient. I used to be a libertarian, but I decided to live in the real world instead.
If you're skipping car insurance and hurt someone, you're against ONE single selected individual and you can bankrupt them for decades or the rest of their lives.
Which is why EVERYONE will not pay the insurance because The State will put them in prison for not paying taxes. Maybe you're advocating for debtor's prisons?
So choose if you're hurting our anonymous society a small bit or destroy one individual with name and face for the rest of their lives.
There is not such thing as "anonymous society". The very idea is contradictory. A "society" is just a collection of individuals. If you don't pay your taxes, you're starving children to death because some of that tax money goes to pay for feeding those starving kids. Of course, some of it also goes into murdering those same children.
I would rather start a revolution than to ruin an innocent family, I tell you.
Talk about hyperbole. Most insurance money goes into the hands of the shareholders who spend it on cocaine and hookers. It doesn't end up in the hands of "innocent families".
Let me use an extremely common situation that affects millions of Americans: parole.
A parolee CAN'T MOVE OR HE WILL GO TO JAIL. What are his options? 1 in 10 Americans is on parole or "monitored" in some way. Note that the new trend is to put people on some kind of "monitoring" for their entire lives, so a great many Americans will be in this situation.
Or how about the other side? Your husband is in prison, should you take the 8-hour round trip to see him on the bus or should you abandon him?
Says who? I have a serious problem with the notion that Americans are prisoners whose freedom to travel is subject to the completely arbitrary whims of the government.
Please note that you phrased this as a MORAL issue, not a legal one. I am well-aware that through arcane legal reasoning, US courts have ruled that motorists have no right to travel. I am not arguing the LEGAL issue.
As you pointed out, the driver should bear the responsibility of accidents while driving. But RIGHTS don't remove responsibilities. The "right to bear arms" does not also grant the right to murder. Having a "right to drive" would in no way impact the responsibility of drivers. The "driving as a privilege" attitude amounts to saying that because a tiny percentage of people are poor and can't pay in accidents, we should subject everyone to an arbitrary licensing scheme that does not work.
I hate to break it to you, but poor people need to work and drive and a licensing scheme is not going to stop them. Unless you feel like filling our prisons with even more innocent people. If someone can't afford insurance, the problem is with the INSURANCE companies, not with motorists.
If you're really concerned about the injuries caused by uninsured motorists you should be arguing for a mandatory NATIONAL auto insurance plan with very low rates that will encourage poor people to participate and will cover those injured by the uninsured.
Like the other poster says, it seems to me that you're making a technical distinction without much meaning.
But I'd disagreeing with you on the point about cookies. Clearly Google services like Google's homepage track user behavior, like the users searches. What I'm arguing is that Google is probably sharing that data with advertisers in some form, and I'm arguing eventually that they will start individually profiling people and selling those profiles to advertisers.
Changing settings? For any day-to-day settings, there is a GUI for that. Etc. About the only time you don't have a GUI (assuming of course that this is on Ubuntu or similar, not Gentoo or Arch) is when you change a setting that to do the approximate Windows setting you would edit the registry
My experience has been that, in practice, you're going to spend a lot more time configuring text files in Linux than editing the registry on Windows if you're a user, especially a "Power" user. The previous example of adding a Ubuntu system to a domain that involved editing 4 text files bears this out. My opinion is that both the registry and config files (the Windows equivalent are.ini files) have their advantages and disadvantages. The big thing the registry has is centralization and the ability to SEARCH effectively, the downside is poor documentation inline but at least you have standardized syntax. Config files usually have better documentation within the config files, but can use cryptic syntax or options and more importantly can be buried in the filesystem and difficult to locate.
But the reality is that Windows is MUCH more GUI-oriented that Linux and while Microsoft itself uses direct registry edits for some things, few application developers do. And that's the key point. Almost all applications in Windows are configured through a GUI.
How did Microsoft "stab Novell in the back"? From what I can tell, this deal has only been good for them since it briefly brought the promise of better interoperability with Windows, which didn't happen because Novell dropped the ball and didn't produce anything. SLED really doesn't have better AD compatibility than any other version of Linux. Novell has simply failed to do anything interesting with SuSE. As you pointed out, Novell has lost the corporate market to Red Hat, and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.
NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K?
Worked fine for me. Win2k was a lot needier in terms of hardware than Netware/NDS, so that might have been your problem. Ease of use more than made up for the higher hardware requirements for me. The Netware clients (for ALL OS') sucked, but the Windows client was apocalyptic. About 1 in 3 logins failed on a freaking test network. This was entirely Novell's fault. Every single one of their customers used Windows on the desktop it was incumbent upon them to make a client that worked well in Windows, period. Hell, the Novell client STILL sucks and they've been working on it for 10 YEARS.
There's also the fact that NetWare took a nosedive in quality and features (relative to Windows) after version 4.1. As you pointed out, for all kinds of reasons Netware sucked as an application server.
Keep the data on the server, in a database, tied to your IP address and other information collected about you (OS, browser, time of day, etc) and do much more extensive research.
What makes you think they're not going this? I know for sure they keep geodata, which almost certainly means that they keep IPs. You might argue how useful that is given dynamic addresses, but virtually every DHCP pool is limited to a small geographic area and so you can narrow this down pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to get the city and in some areas this could narrow it down to a few blocks.
And I don't think you can take Google's word for it that they don't tie personal information you enter in services like GMail to advertising you receive via AdWords and other mechanisms. The potential revenue from this far exceeds the potential liability.
the issue is not that current battery technology can't adequately replace typical american highway needs
No, that IS the issue.
the issue is american car companies aren't even trying to solve the problem.
OF COURSE THEY ARE. Improved battery technology is an idea with many, many, many, applications from cellphones to cars to everything else and it's easily worth 10s of BILLIONS of dollars. Armies of thousands of engineers are busily working on improving battery technology right now. NEC, Sony, Samsung, etc. are pouring billions into this research.
What you don't seem to grasp is that improving energy density in electric batteries has proven to be an extremely difficult problem, even using increasingly exotic materials. Most of the promising technologies involve nanotech. Making pure electric cars would require at least an order of magnitude more energy density in batteries and that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
I'd consider this analogous to saying nuclear fusion was the solution to replace coal-fired power plants. Yeah, nuclear fusion is great but we're not going to have fusion power plants anytime soon (50 years on the inside, I'm personally thinking more in the 500 year timeframe).
Electric cars have been lingering at the high point because no significant car has been rough to market.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Cheap electric cars (less that $5000) have been widely available for a long time. Nobody wants them because they are all very small, very light, and have very limited range. Oh, and very unsafe because you have to lose almost all auto safety features to get the weight down. Neither the Volt nor the Tesla nor any other electric car will solve these problems.
These problems exist due to fundamental limitations in electric battery technology. They simply CANNOT make electric batteries with good enough energy density to make electric cars with anywhere near the speed and range of gasoline powered vehicles. This will require a revolution in battery technology that hasn't happened and according to all the physicists I know, WILL never happen.
Pure electric cars are non-starters. end of story. Gasoline/alcohol/hydrogen based hybrids are the future of automobiles unless you can convince people to go nuclear (the route *I* would choose, but everyone is paranoid about radiation).
what happens if in 5 years he runs over a group of children in a drunk driving incident? Do you really want a NASA module named after that? Is that going to be funny?
Tune into any TV news network in the United States and you'll almost certainly hear someone complaining about the government in short order.
Take Rush Limbaugh for example. Since Obama was elected he's been attacking Obama and his administration nonstop in very harsh language. He hasn't been hauled off to the gulag yet. Neither has Keith Olberman, who spent 8 years calling President Bush the "Worst Person in the World".
In the PRC (calling these thugs "China" just lends them legitimacy) these guys wouldn't even be on the air and if they somehow got on the air and dared to say anything remotely critical of the Communist Party they would be in jail and/or dead within days.
Until the PRC is a REAL multiparty democracy with REAL personal freedoms you people can shut the fuck up about how much the US is just like China. China is not a Western democracy with the rule of law and cherished personal freedoms. The PRC is a vicious totalitarian military dictatorship that stays in power solely through fear, torture, and murder. They threaten the REAL democracies that surround them like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. The PRC is the single most dangerous organization in the world today. The only thing we have to be thankful for is that the PRC is also corrupt and incompetent, which is what is currently keeping them from terrorizing their neighbors.
The fallback driver should have worked for these 2. It did work for the VGA card. I don't know why it didn't seem to work for the LAN card. I know it does work for that particular LAN card. That's exactly ONE driver you needed to install off a CD/thumbdrive/floppy.
Neither Vista nor XP handled it and I had to, as documented, go download the driver installers one by one, and install them one by one.
All 4 of the devices you mention have drivers on Windows Update. Your refusal to get these drivers off Windows Update doesn't mean they aren't there. The VGA and NIC card have drivers in Vista so they should have worked "out of the box".
They all worked fine out of the box on my Ubuntu install (which is where I just pulled the above information, since I'm still using the same laptop, only now I'm on 8.04).
The Windows XP install CD was made in 2001. None of the hardware you mentioned pre-dates 2001. Why did you think the drivers would be on the CD? Did you compare XP to a Linux distro released in 2001 (hint: not Ubuntu)?
Three years of using it as my only OS at work as a sysadmin for a mixed-platform environment would seem to disagree.
How can Ubuntu be your only OS in a "mixed-platform" environment? Those statements are contradictory. What are you using for a directory server/email? I can't think of any directory server other than OpenLDAP that runs on Ubuntu (at least not 3 years ago).
what "features" am I missing?
Print queuing, watermarking, resizing, choosing the correct output tray, choosing color vs greyscale, etc. You might not care about these features and they might not see much use in a small printer, but there you go. I mention this because this has proven to be a showstopping problem for desktop Linux installs I've worked with before. i.e. We have a $100,000 multifunction Xerox thing and the Linux drivers don't let me set the correct output tray or do much of anything else other than direct printing so our financial people can't print to legal paper.
a smaller, cooler version and everyone with a first-generation PS3 is really going to be kicking their own ass.
Unlikely. Cost reduction on the PS2 was achieved by removing features, like the hard drive, a halfway decent DVD-ROM drive, and backwards compatibility to the PS1. Likewise, Sony has been removing features, like backwards compatibility, from the PS3 as a cost-cutting measure. A cost-reduced PS3 is likely to have a inferior Blu-ray drive (maybe no DVD support?), no or smaller hard drive, no built-in wireless, etc.
The death penalty isn't an effective deterrent in the US because it's so rare.
This doesn't follow at all. Yes, executing MORE people would generate MORE fear would would generate greater deterrence. But it does not follow that there is NO deterrent effect from executing a smaller number of people. According to your reasoning if US executes 100 people in 2009 the death penalty "works" but if the US only executes 25 people the death penalty DOES NOT "work". And the exact number of people executed in the US is hardly common knowledge so I fail to see how this would have an affect on perception. On top of all that, a death sentence, even if you're not executed is in itself a more sever sentence than a life sentence due to segregation and special restrictions on death row inmates.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that Top Gear admits to having faked the episode, right?
Top Gear's exact statement:
"To fully recharge the batteries on this from a normal 13 amp socket like this takes 16 hours. So to get from here to the top of Scotland would take more than three days."
Which is 100% accurate. Note the phrase "standard 13 amp socket".
The *standard* Tesla charger takes about 3 hours to charge a fully dead battery,
Complete lie. That's using the 70watt 240v "Standard charger". Who the fuck has a dedicated 70w 220v circuit in their house for ONE outlet? Literally nobody. My buddy below has the beefiest box I've ever seen going it a residence, over 400 amps, and even HE doesn't have an outlet like this.
"The Roadster's battery has a capacity of 53kWh. Tesla quotes a charge time of 3-3.5, but that is based on charging from a 220V 80A circuit. If, on the other hand, you plug the car into a typical outlet in your living room, you would only have 15A flowing at 110V. That's 53,000W / (110V * 15) = 32.12 hours. So if you plan to get yourself a plug-in electric car with any kind of serious range, be prepared to have an electrician install a high current outlet to charge it. At the very least you'll want a 220V/40A circuit for overnight charging in 6-7 hours."
Every REAL WORLD test (exactly 2) I've seen of a Tesla it took a lot longer than 3 hours to charge from dead off a 220V/40A outlet. In one case it was around 8 hours, in the other I'm not sure. It took at least that long be we didn't look at it for 14 hours so it might have taken less that that. Somewhere between 10 and 14. He reported that he's seen this weird behavior where the car will report as 90% charged after about 4 hours but if he drives at that point his range is nothing, like 20 miles. As far as I can tell, he's never driven it more than 40 miles in a stretch.
I've ridden around in one. They're small and cramped (I'm 6'5") and can carry no cargo. The cool thing is that they're fast, the pickup is great, and they're very, very, quiet. It's the quiet that really gets you. They're also incredibly impractical. Arguably the least practical car I've ever been in except for the Lamborghinis. Even a Porsche is more practical (faster, better range, more cargo). The truth is that I was almost as impressed with the $5000 electric smart car/golf cart thing he had.
My friend also complained about service. Some gauge on his dash doesn't work and he wanted Telsa to either do pickup or drive him home (at this price you expect that level of service) and they wouldn't do it. He lives in Los Altos Hills, maybe 10 miles from the dealership.
The Tesla Roadster is a toy for the super-rich, at best. As a taxpayer I don't think we should give them a dime until they produce a credible business plan that shows them producing a $35,000 electric with 500 miles of range within a few years. That won't happen, which is why I think battery-driven electrics are a dead end.
The solution I've backed is hydrogen fuel cells, with the hydrogen generated by nuclear power.
"Buy American" is essentially a racist statement. You're implying that the value of an American is higher than that of someone from another country by saying that it's better to protect industries in this country to protect the jobs. At some point, we've got to start calling out "Buy American" for the racist statement that it is.
"American" does not refer to RACE. RACE, and this is greatly simplified, refers to skin color and other physical attributes. People of every race reside in the United States. What you're talking about is NATIONALISM. "Buy American" is a NATIONALISTIC statement. It implies that Americans think better of THEIR NATION than other nations.
Front and center is this policy of free trade. The idea of American competition is a total sham. We have been hearing for 50 years that opening our markets to the world would improve our standard of living, and induce the world to do the same, and neither has happened. Instead, the world is more protectionist than ever, makes every excuse to avoid reciprocating imports.
Please mod this up.
Any "conservative" or "libertarian" promotic so-called "free trade" is a liar and a fraud. They simply DO NOT WANT FREE TRADE. What they want is to have trade barriers altered to favor THEIR PRODUCTS. Not the American economy as a whole. Not the taxpayer. But themselves and their campaign donors. The same "free traders" that decry subsidized health care don't say one word about the MASSIVE US agricultural and energy subsidies, because they're making money in those industries. They're making money in the insurance companies as well which is why they fight tooth and nail to cut costs there. Insurance, basically ALL insurance in ALL forms, is a fraudulently used to abuse consumers.
As I've said numerous times before the #1 problem in America, far beyond "terrorists", the "drug war", etc. is CORPORATE fraud. Corporate fraud is the cause of the financial crisis. Corporate fraud eats up about 50% of every American's paycheck. I believe the problem has gotten so bad that LLCs have to cease to exist for fraud claims. The only solution at this point is to hold officers and major shareholders personally and individually criminally responsible for corporate fraud. We need a dedicated federal agency staffed by hundreds of agents doing NOTHING by corporate fraud prosecutions. Such an agency would cost $0. It would more than pay for itself in fines.
That the Alamo Drafthouse is the best movie theater (chain) ever.
Envisions appears to be a 1 or 2 man shop out of Anniston, Alabama, not exactly a technology hotbed. They have no production lined up from what I can see and if they do it's quite small.
If you read the press and look at the screenshots Envision it talking about the EVO as a desktop PC at least as much as a gaming device. This appears to be a toy of hobbists and hackers. And even then, it's a bit dubious. Your average Linux hacker (which is what Envisions is) could probably put together something similar themselves.
It's a niche product, much like previous Linux consoles. OpenPandora looks a lot more promising. Using emulators to compete with the handheld market seems more viable. Though I wish it was x86-based.
In practice, your criticism is somewhat apt because I don't know how well Cell Linux distro works with emulators and games available for Linux. Probably not well based on my experience with PowerPC. So almost any random x86 system would work better as a Linux gaming box than the PS3, including the EVO.
Where did you get THIS statistic. That is way too high...
Sorry, 1 in 31.
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=49382
If they're already ignoring mandatory insurance laws at state level they'll just ignore the national one too.
The motivation not to pay would be reduced by lower fees and yes, some people would ignore it anyway. If necessary, a mandatory tax could be used attached to vehicle registration. The point is to reduce the cost by cutting out the middleman.
This is particularly true for the under 25 crowd, and especially under 18 crowd. ... . In my mind, if one can own a 20 thousand dollar truck, one can pay insurance.
Virtually all of whom are broke. That teenage girl you're talking about simply DID NOT buy a $20K truck on her own. Her parents bought it and THEY should pay for the insurance. If THEY gave her the truck but wont' pay for insurance THAT'S THE PARENT'S FAULT! They should have bought her a cheaper car and actually paid the insurance.
A handful of rich kids whose parents are too stupid to pay for insurance should not be the basis of American public policy. Besides, there's a remedy here: Sue the parents.
So how exactly to plan to pay for that in a non city area where vary few people will actually use the system?
A single-payer auto insurance plan would be mandatory, everyone would pay into it through vehicle registration fees and perhaps a dedicated gasoline tax. Private auto insurance would be supplementary.
Or raise taxes for everyone $20-50/month
Why not? You have NO PROBLEM with people paying this money to insurance companies who spend it on cocaine and hookers, why would it be worse to give this money to the government instead?
I've found that libertarians and free marketeers seem to live in a magical fairyland where everything that is run by private enterprise is efficent and ethical and everything run by government is corrupt and inefficient. I used to be a libertarian, but I decided to live in the real world instead.
If you're skipping car insurance and hurt someone, you're against ONE single selected individual and you can bankrupt them for decades or the rest of their lives.
Which is why EVERYONE will not pay the insurance because The State will put them in prison for not paying taxes. Maybe you're advocating for debtor's prisons?
So choose if you're hurting our anonymous society a small bit or destroy one individual with name and face for the rest of their lives.
There is not such thing as "anonymous society". The very idea is contradictory. A "society" is just a collection of individuals. If you don't pay your taxes, you're starving children to death because some of that tax money goes to pay for feeding those starving kids. Of course, some of it also goes into murdering those same children.
I would rather start a revolution than to ruin an innocent family, I tell you.
Talk about hyperbole. Most insurance money goes into the hands of the shareholders who spend it on cocaine and hookers. It doesn't end up in the hands of "innocent families".
Let me use an extremely common situation that affects millions of Americans: parole.
A parolee CAN'T MOVE OR HE WILL GO TO JAIL. What are his options? 1 in 10 Americans is on parole or "monitored" in some way. Note that the new trend is to put people on some kind of "monitoring" for their entire lives, so a great many Americans will be in this situation.
Or how about the other side? Your husband is in prison, should you take the 8-hour round trip to see him on the bus or should you abandon him?
It's not about comfort, it's about necessity.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Says who? I have a serious problem with the notion that Americans are prisoners whose freedom to travel is subject to the completely arbitrary whims of the government.
Please note that you phrased this as a MORAL issue, not a legal one. I am well-aware that through arcane legal reasoning, US courts have ruled that motorists have no right to travel. I am not arguing the LEGAL issue.
As you pointed out, the driver should bear the responsibility of accidents while driving. But RIGHTS don't remove responsibilities. The "right to bear arms" does not also grant the right to murder. Having a "right to drive" would in no way impact the responsibility of drivers. The "driving as a privilege" attitude amounts to saying that because a tiny percentage of people are poor and can't pay in accidents, we should subject everyone to an arbitrary licensing scheme that does not work.
I hate to break it to you, but poor people need to work and drive and a licensing scheme is not going to stop them. Unless you feel like filling our prisons with even more innocent people. If someone can't afford insurance, the problem is with the INSURANCE companies, not with motorists.
If you're really concerned about the injuries caused by uninsured motorists you should be arguing for a mandatory NATIONAL auto insurance plan with very low rates that will encourage poor people to participate and will cover those injured by the uninsured.
Like the other poster says, it seems to me that you're making a technical distinction without much meaning.
But I'd disagreeing with you on the point about cookies. Clearly Google services like Google's homepage track user behavior, like the users searches. What I'm arguing is that Google is probably sharing that data with advertisers in some form, and I'm arguing eventually that they will start individually profiling people and selling those profiles to advertisers.
Changing settings? For any day-to-day settings, there is a GUI for that. Etc. About the only time you don't have a GUI (assuming of course that this is on Ubuntu or similar, not Gentoo or Arch) is when you change a setting that to do the approximate Windows setting you would edit the registry
My experience has been that, in practice, you're going to spend a lot more time configuring text files in Linux than editing the registry on Windows if you're a user, especially a "Power" user. The previous example of adding a Ubuntu system to a domain that involved editing 4 text files bears this out. My opinion is that both the registry and config files (the Windows equivalent are .ini files) have their advantages and disadvantages. The big thing the registry has is centralization and the ability to SEARCH effectively, the downside is poor documentation inline but at least you have standardized syntax. Config files usually have better documentation within the config files, but can use cryptic syntax or options and more importantly can be buried in the filesystem and difficult to locate.
But the reality is that Windows is MUCH more GUI-oriented that Linux and while Microsoft itself uses direct registry edits for some things, few application developers do. And that's the key point. Almost all applications in Windows are configured through a GUI.
How did Microsoft "stab Novell in the back"? From what I can tell, this deal has only been good for them since it briefly brought the promise of better interoperability with Windows, which didn't happen because Novell dropped the ball and didn't produce anything. SLED really doesn't have better AD compatibility than any other version of Linux. Novell has simply failed to do anything interesting with SuSE. As you pointed out, Novell has lost the corporate market to Red Hat, and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.
NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K?
Worked fine for me. Win2k was a lot needier in terms of hardware than Netware/NDS, so that might have been your problem. Ease of use more than made up for the higher hardware requirements for me. The Netware clients (for ALL OS') sucked, but the Windows client was apocalyptic. About 1 in 3 logins failed on a freaking test network. This was entirely Novell's fault. Every single one of their customers used Windows on the desktop it was incumbent upon them to make a client that worked well in Windows, period. Hell, the Novell client STILL sucks and they've been working on it for 10 YEARS.
There's also the fact that NetWare took a nosedive in quality and features (relative to Windows) after version 4.1. As you pointed out, for all kinds of reasons Netware sucked as an application server.
Keep the data on the server, in a database, tied to your IP address and other information collected about you (OS, browser, time of day, etc) and do much more extensive research.
What makes you think they're not going this? I know for sure they keep geodata, which almost certainly means that they keep IPs. You might argue how useful that is given dynamic addresses, but virtually every DHCP pool is limited to a small geographic area and so you can narrow this down pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to get the city and in some areas this could narrow it down to a few blocks.
And I don't think you can take Google's word for it that they don't tie personal information you enter in services like GMail to advertising you receive via AdWords and other mechanisms. The potential revenue from this far exceeds the potential liability.
the issue is not that current battery technology can't adequately replace typical american highway needs
No, that IS the issue.
the issue is american car companies aren't even trying to solve the problem.
OF COURSE THEY ARE. Improved battery technology is an idea with many, many, many, applications from cellphones to cars to everything else and it's easily worth 10s of BILLIONS of dollars. Armies of thousands of engineers are busily working on improving battery technology right now. NEC, Sony, Samsung, etc. are pouring billions into this research.
What you don't seem to grasp is that improving energy density in electric batteries has proven to be an extremely difficult problem, even using increasingly exotic materials. Most of the promising technologies involve nanotech. Making pure electric cars would require at least an order of magnitude more energy density in batteries and that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
I'd consider this analogous to saying nuclear fusion was the solution to replace coal-fired power plants. Yeah, nuclear fusion is great but we're not going to have fusion power plants anytime soon (50 years on the inside, I'm personally thinking more in the 500 year timeframe).
Electric cars have been lingering at the high point because no significant car has been rough to market.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Cheap electric cars (less that $5000) have been widely available for a long time. Nobody wants them because they are all very small, very light, and have very limited range. Oh, and very unsafe because you have to lose almost all auto safety features to get the weight down. Neither the Volt nor the Tesla nor any other electric car will solve these problems.
These problems exist due to fundamental limitations in electric battery technology. They simply CANNOT make electric batteries with good enough energy density to make electric cars with anywhere near the speed and range of gasoline powered vehicles. This will require a revolution in battery technology that hasn't happened and according to all the physicists I know, WILL never happen.
Pure electric cars are non-starters. end of story. Gasoline/alcohol/hydrogen based hybrids are the future of automobiles unless you can convince people to go nuclear (the route *I* would choose, but everyone is paranoid about radiation).
what happens if in 5 years he runs over a group of children in a drunk driving incident? Do you really want a NASA module named after that? Is that going to be funny?
Yes, it will be even funnier.
Um, no.
Tune into any TV news network in the United States and you'll almost certainly hear someone complaining about the government in short order.
Take Rush Limbaugh for example. Since Obama was elected he's been attacking Obama and his administration nonstop in very harsh language. He hasn't been hauled off to the gulag yet. Neither has Keith Olberman, who spent 8 years calling President Bush the "Worst Person in the World".
In the PRC (calling these thugs "China" just lends them legitimacy) these guys wouldn't even be on the air and if they somehow got on the air and dared to say anything remotely critical of the Communist Party they would be in jail and/or dead within days.
Until the PRC is a REAL multiparty democracy with REAL personal freedoms you people can shut the fuck up about how much the US is just like China. China is not a Western democracy with the rule of law and cherished personal freedoms. The PRC is a vicious totalitarian military dictatorship that stays in power solely through fear, torture, and murder. They threaten the REAL democracies that surround them like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. The PRC is the single most dangerous organization in the world today. The only thing we have to be thankful for is that the PRC is also corrupt and incompetent, which is what is currently keeping them from terrorizing their neighbors.
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/
02:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
The fallback driver should have worked for these 2. It did work for the VGA card. I don't know why it didn't seem to work for the LAN card. I know it does work for that particular LAN card. That's exactly ONE driver you needed to install off a CD/thumbdrive/floppy.
Neither Vista nor XP handled it and I had to, as documented, go download the driver installers one by one, and install them one by one.
All 4 of the devices you mention have drivers on Windows Update. Your refusal to get these drivers off Windows Update doesn't mean they aren't there. The VGA and NIC card have drivers in Vista so they should have worked "out of the box".
They all worked fine out of the box on my Ubuntu install (which is where I just pulled the above information, since I'm still using the same laptop, only now I'm on 8.04).
The Windows XP install CD was made in 2001. None of the hardware you mentioned pre-dates 2001. Why did you think the drivers would be on the CD? Did you compare XP to a Linux distro released in 2001 (hint: not Ubuntu)?
Three years of using it as my only OS at work as a sysadmin for a mixed-platform environment would seem to disagree.
How can Ubuntu be your only OS in a "mixed-platform" environment? Those statements are contradictory. What are you using for a directory server/email? I can't think of any directory server other than OpenLDAP that runs on Ubuntu (at least not 3 years ago).
what "features" am I missing?
Print queuing, watermarking, resizing, choosing the correct output tray, choosing color vs greyscale, etc. You might not care about these features and they might not see much use in a small printer, but there you go. I mention this because this has proven to be a showstopping problem for desktop Linux installs I've worked with before. i.e. We have a $100,000 multifunction Xerox thing and the Linux drivers don't let me set the correct output tray or do much of anything else other than direct printing so our financial people can't print to legal paper.
a smaller, cooler version and everyone with a first-generation PS3 is really going to be kicking their own ass.
Unlikely. Cost reduction on the PS2 was achieved by removing features, like the hard drive, a halfway decent DVD-ROM drive, and backwards compatibility to the PS1. Likewise, Sony has been removing features, like backwards compatibility, from the PS3 as a cost-cutting measure. A cost-reduced PS3 is likely to have a inferior Blu-ray drive (maybe no DVD support?), no or smaller hard drive, no built-in wireless, etc.
The death penalty isn't an effective deterrent in the US because it's so rare.
This doesn't follow at all. Yes, executing MORE people would generate MORE fear would would generate greater deterrence. But it does not follow that there is NO deterrent effect from executing a smaller number of people. According to your reasoning if US executes 100 people in 2009 the death penalty "works" but if the US only executes 25 people the death penalty DOES NOT "work". And the exact number of people executed in the US is hardly common knowledge so I fail to see how this would have an affect on perception. On top of all that, a death sentence, even if you're not executed is in itself a more sever sentence than a life sentence due to segregation and special restrictions on death row inmates.