Actually, it's not the cost of an item, rather it's value that sways most purchases. The point was however, that currently consumers blindly trust a corrupt and deceptive labelling system rather than being held responsible for critical reasoning during the evaluation of a financial transaction.
Because lord knows everyone wants to spend 2 hours researching which brand of peanut butter they should be buying, and making sure their current preferred brand hasn't suddenly started adding addictive chemicals without bothering to change their labels.
Once you're done with that, it's time to spend another hour checking the currently available jam brands...
A true free market wouldn't be gentle or kind. However, it would be maximally efficent and effective.
It would be maximally efficient presuming that consumers did due diligence and researched via a decently wide range of independent sources for every product they purchase, rather than just believing the very widely propagated advertising. I suspect that's a rather unrealistic demand.
And when the two parties have practically the same opinion?! Let's face it, both parties only nominate moderates, i.e., middle of the road candiates. They both believe that what's good for corporate America is good for America. They both believe in a strong US military. Neither will affect any real change.
It would be more accurate to say both parties only nominate conservatives, in the truest sense of the word. That is, those who seek to maintain the status quo rather than seeking change.
Politically they aren't really all that moderate. By global standards both candidates are "right leaning" or "fiscally and socially conservative", or "conservative and authoritarian" depending on which (somewhat arbitrary) labelling scheme you wish to use. They appear moderate because they're in the middle of the views that get presented to the US public - which is to say, the views held by the Republican and Democrat party. The views of other parties, which represent a large part of the rest of the politcal spectrum are simply not heard.
they offered IE for free in the hope that they could "embrace and extend" the internet - stopping all other browsers, and thereby stopping all other platforms - but it didn't work. so why should they bother any more? there's nothing to be gained by owning the users browser.
There is still a lot ot be gained from owning the users browser, because at long last real rich GUI apps are starting to be available over the web. We were promised web applications a long time ago, but all we got were forms and web pages that, while providing an interface were quite slow, and had a very bare bones interface.
Microsofts big new technology advancement for Longhorn is XAML and Avalon which, in theory, brings real fast rich web applications to the world. In the meantime firefox/mozilla is busy with XUL and related technologies (if you want to see what XUL can do, take a look at this site).
Web applications are going to happen. They aren't going to replace locally installed apps entirely, but they will fill niches with, for instance, powerful webmail interfaces (that look and behave like a local GUI), tax calculation apps, calendaring services, and all those simple database frontends etc. The question then, is who is going to provide the architecture for Web Apps? MS desperately wants to be the one to do it - because web applications are potentially completely platform agnostic. If Web applications are all XAML, then you need Windows to use them, and MS strengthens their monopoly. If XUL gets a decent foothold, then any platform that has Mozilla, Firefox, or in fact any XUL implementation (XUL is open source and LGPL, so whoever wants to can implement it), is a viable platform for those web apps.
What MS fears most is a world where a decent chunk of applications are completely platform agnostic, because then people simply won't care about Windows. Lose the monopoly stranglehold, and MS will be in severe trouble.
To keep that monopoly stranglehold MS has to, if not win this latest browser war, at least keep the fight going long and hard enough that Longhorn has significant market share (that's well past the release date), and hence XAML is the most widely available architecture via which to deliver web apps, before Mozilla/Firefox gets any really significant market share.
One of the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein was that he sold oil for Euros and also converted the cash reserves of the nation to Euros (~ $10 billion). He served as a bad example to the region.
And now you claim the cost of occupying Iraq destabilizes the Dollar?
Actually I specifically tried to avoid any partisan politics or blame. I don't claim that occupying Iraq is destabilizing the US dollar. I'm claiming a large budget deficit in conjuction with a large current account deficit is certainly unhelpful to the US dollar. Equally important factors are the rise in acceptance of the Euro, and the improving European economy. There's also world attitudes toward the US, and world opinion of the US as an economic power.
Even if you want to blame the budget deficit entirely on Iraq (which would be foolish, it was already balloning well before Iraq, the war simply helped make it a little worse), you still have the current account deficit to consider (which is to say, the severe US trade imbalance), not to mention all the other signficant factors I just mentioned.
No, I'm not trying to blame this on Bush, or Iraq. This problem existed before Bush, and will continue to be a problem even if Kerry is elected instead. I would say that Bush has helped exacerbate the situation a little, but many of the major factors in this are things Bush has either little or no control over, or things he has generally ignored entirely.
The thing is economies kind of exist in a homeostatis. If the US dollar falls, it gives US manufacturing and US-based services a competitive edge - so in many quarters, the weakening of the US dollar is in fact welcomed.
I agree entirely that a weaker US dollar would be useful in certain areas. But again, that's another domino: where is US manufacturing? Most manufacturing has been outsourced oveseas, and very little takes place in the US. Certainly a dramatic fall in the US dollar would give a huge incentive to bring some of that manufacturing back (the benefits of free market economics providing incentives to rebalance systems), but I think we need to be realistic. Any such move to bring manufacturing back to the US in response to a severely weakened US dollar is going to take considerable time (the weaker side of free market economics is that it doesn't always work in human scale timeframes), and in the interim you'll have serious problems.
Also, there is the meantime factor that, should the US dollar fall severely against world currency you'll find the price of oil and other major commodities for the US absolutely skyrocket. That's going to cause massive inflation as the price of everything shifts upward to adjust. Consider that that will be in conjuction with downward pressure on the US job market as many companies try to shift away, and you have a very serious problem while waiting for manufacturing jobs to arrive.
I'm not implying that such a major shift wouldn't be compnesated for by global free markets, what I'm saying is that, during the preiod of flux during that time of readjustment the US economy is going to be facing massive inflation, and downward pressure on the job market. How long that situation will last (perhaps a couple of years, perhaps a decade) is pretty uncertain, but regardless it's going to be a very unpleasant thing to live through.
Ask you local representatives about it. Ask any US politician you get a chance to about it. It's worth discussing, even if it is a slim possibility, because the dangers are so severe.
Read the article. It's a bit of a long winded rant, but I agree with (and have been predicting myself) some of its key points.
The US dollar is weak, not helped by the massive budget and current account deficits. For now that doesn't matter too much (particularly the current account situation) because the US is viewed as a strong economic powerhouse, and the US dollar is in high demand because it is the standard currency for most major commodity markets.
The catch is that both of those factors can change. World opinion of the US has definitely been on the decline of late, and while the US economy might be creeping its way out of recession, the rest of the world isn't having any such problems. Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
There are some added factors the article doesn't really mention. A significant one is that Japan is pretty much the largets single owner of US debt - both budget and current account deficit: Japan is a huge buyer of US currency and government bonds. Japan has itself been in serious economic woes for the last decade and then some, but they are definitely on the improve. Should the Japanese economy kick into gear there will be a strong move toward dropping US investments, and investing locally. That's going to put a huge strain on US debt (it will effectively be getting recalled) while at the same time putting serious downward pressure on the US dollar as Japanese investors move to using yen for local investment.
All of these things add up to some very serious potential for the US dollar to have very major fall in the global currency market (and such a fall would only force more and more markets to switch to the "far more stable" Euro - the harder it falls, the worse it gets). Sould such a thing happen it will put very very serious pressure on the US economy. It is at that pointed that the much vaunted US innovation and entrepreneurialism will have to truly stand up and be counted. Unless it proves to be truly impressive indeed, the US could suffer an extremely major economic readjustment (think great depression).
Now, I wouldn't say any of this is likely, but it is a very very real possibility - the US dollar is surprisingly weak at the moment - and certainly there are plenty of dominoes poised. I'm surprised that these sorts of issues aren't of major concern during the current electoral cycle. Well, I guess I'm not that surprised, more disappointed.
What linux needs is a window manager thats more scalable. So that 1 guy could have his desktop set up in a *box config and another guy could have his set up in a fully loaded KDE type config, and yet they both use the same toolkits and stuff.
The closest thing to that right now is GNOME and XFCE. GNOME provides your big heavy "provide all the libraries you could need" approach (which is very useful for most people), while XFCE provides a fairly light fast Desktop environment. Both use GTK2, and share a certain amount of configuration.
Yes, XFCE is not as light as a pure *box WM, but then it is actually providing a reasonably rich desktop environment rather than just window management. It is a remarkably fast and light DE all things considered.
Okay, I just spent a while browsing the source, and really, it doesn't look that hard. Laying out the controls with XUL looks largely straightforward, and everything made perfect sense to me, and I know no XUL at all. The rest of the functionality is provided via javascript, and that's where a little more work went in, but it really doesn't look like anything more than one would expect for an app of that complexity.
All up, my general impression (having only skimmed through the source) is that it looks to be no more difficult to develop such an app than with anything else one might use instead.
I am very impressed. Many kudos to the mozilla people for making such things possible.
What's the over head involved in developing apps like this?
I'm afriad I don't know - I simply ran into a link to that, and had much the same reaction you did: "Wow! that is amazing - I didn't know you could do anything like that!".
Could any of the XUL experts here at Slashdot speak up as to how hard something like this is to write?
Jedidiah.
Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet
on
Gmail Adds Features
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You need to have Opera ID itself as Opera. GMail uses ActiveX to display itself in IE, probably to avoid lots of complications from odd Javascript problems with IE. Since Opera is IDing as IE, GMail is assuming it has ActiveX support, which it does not.
Interesting that they had to resort to ActiveX. An interesting question though, is how long it will be before they'll detect Firefox/Mozilla users and have a powerful XUL interface available - if you could do a nice interface as rich and as fast as this GMail would start looking very impressive (and people would be moving very fast to Firefox to get it).
Right when I installed OO I went to open the word processor. It's actually called a Text Editor. WHAT? Notepad and nano are text editors, this is supposed to a Word Processing suite! Further, the interface looks like Office 95 - honestly, people are visual and the interface makes me feel like I should be sitting in a tiny bricked wall office with no windows and a flickering flourescent light overhead. Sure, some may like that, but it's not most people. Finally, the product seems slow on WinXP - yes, it may be my setup, and your mileage my vary, but Word is snappy on my box so it doesn't matter.
This is exactly the sort of things people were saying about Mozilla 2 or 3 years ago:
"It's called mozilla, and has the build number in the bloody titlebar - who is going to use that?"
"The interface doesn't integrate with my Windows desktop, the menus behave differently, it looks bloody awful with those skins, and it's the GUI is so slow!"
"It's huge and clunky and takes forever to load."
"The usability of the interface just isn't there. Ctrl-T to open a new tab? Who is going to guess that?"
Are all typical sorts of comments about the mozilla project back then. Reality is that, for the longest time, mozilla was regarded as a huge, clunky contraption that was, at best, aping IE but badly. People claimed it was taking forever to develop with no real visible improvement, and in many senses they were right. Mozilla had been open source and worked on for a long time at that point, but in terms of what you could see it wasn't that impressive. The catch was they were mostly working on backend stuff, and cleaning up old Netscape code, reorganizing things, and generally just building up a structure to springboard off. That took a very long time, but once the background work started to get somewhere, and XUL started to get fast, and integrate with native toolkits etc. things started to fire up. All of a sudden there was a lot more emphasis on the frontend, and firefox and thunderbird sprung up as separate projects and started getting fast innovative GUIs with the sort of usability you would expect.
StarOffice was open sourced a lot later than Mozilla. A lot of the early work for OpenOffice.org was doing simple things like (for instance) uncoupling the applications from that awful fake desktop (does anyone remember that from StarOffice 5?!) so they ran as separate applications, cleaning up the code, and generally making things workable. New file formats were created and "missing" features were added. Right now OpenOffice.org is still in the sot of stages that mozilla was at in the milestones shortly before it went 1.0. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is getting much better native toolkit integration, a focus on cutting down startup time, and some work on starting to clean up the GUI. That is, the beginning of the work to start to provide a really polished application suite is happening now. You could think of OpenOffice.org 2.0 as equivalent to Firebird 0.1 if you like. An awful lot of very hard work has been going on behind the scenes, and finally the start of something a little more visible to average users in the way of polish is occuring. And OpenOffice.org 2.0 isn't even out yet...
It worth remembering that while everyone now praises Mozilla and Firefox as a massive success story of a truly slick and usable open source application, a very short time ago it was considered a poor clunky application with slow GUI and poor usability.
Give OpenOffice.org a chance - it is still in the process of gearing up its usability polish efforts. Sure, for now it is not the most slick looking application out there, but if you look at what it can do, and the rate that it is improving, you would see that it really is a very impressive open source project.
If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Supporting VBA is just not going to happen. OO.org is getting Python scripting though, which should open up the OO.org to a lot more scrpting and extension than is currently the case. In the end people upgrade systems and have to replace outdated custom code, and that's what OO.org is relying on. Yes there are systems out there still running on COBOL because it works and they don't want to update, but COBOL is no longer the default standard. Likewise, in time, there will still be systems running on VBA and Word macros because it works and they don't want to upgrade, but VBA won't be the standard way of doing things like that.
Sure, that means there won't be a blinding flash and suddenly OO.org will have 50% market share, it'll need to be a steady increase as people replace old systems, or bring up new systems. Then again, slow and steady wins the race. In time (say 5 or 10 years) it is entirely possible that OO.org could have equal or greater market share to MS Office.
US politicians don't know how to conduct a conversation, they only know how to give speeches. Watch any interview with any major US politician, and note that the interviewer never interrupts, never asks for clarification, never redirects a question, never probes into anything the candidiate just said - they let the candidate give their short speech, then move on to the next question regardless.
Yes this is a big difference from Eurpean or, as you point out, even Canadian political discourse, but that's the way it is.
If you let the candidates talk to each other, and pose each other questions you might discover that they have a somewhat limited supply of pre-canned speeches on any given topic. The art of being a politician in the US is to be able to memorise a large number of speeches, and be good enough at extemporising any question you get asked so that you can lead straight in to your pre-prepared speech. Don't believe me? Watch an interview or a debate and notice that the question always receives a long answer that either leads into an anecdote, or allows the candidate to make a short series of points that are only very loosely related to the question at hand.
If I were in power, my regime would have impaling. Our current methods of gently killing people don't seem to be much of a deterrent, but I bet all those violent criminals and spammers would tow the line if they knew they were risking impaling.
Let's just be clear on what impaling meant - it wasn't just getting a sharp stick rammed through you. It was getting a (usually blunt) pole inserted in your rectum, and then having the pole stood vertically supporting you so your weight inexorably pushed the pole up through you. Death took days of excruciating agony. Crucifixion is a lark by comparison.
Well yes. He had a novel solution to poverty as well. He invited all the poor and homeless to a huge feast. Once they were gathered inside and were enjoying their meal, he had all the doors sealed, and burned the place to the ground. After that there were no poor in Wallachia - well, no one would admit to it anyway.
40) Intelectual Property - Yea, right. Like the candidates are going to understand this question. Course, it will be worth asking it just to see the confused look on Bush's face and another possible Bushism for the Calendar.
Look, the point of this is to ask questions that the candidates haven't been asked before, or aren't likely to be asked at some future point. A lot of the questions are pretty standard, or close to standard, but this one is so far off the track of what's traditionally asked that you expect both candidates to be baffled by it. To me that means it is an ideal question, because no one else is actually asking it of them, and I don't think it's at all likely anyone else (who actually gets to ask them questions) will either. This question should be asked.
Hell, even Michael Badnarik who is far more likely to have a few clues on such issues provided a sheer load of waffle in answer to this question when asked by Slashdot. I expect David Cobb to do much the same (as I presume it will be included with his questions). Who cares if we don't get a coherent answer, the fact that we don't should be a very good sign that we ought to keep asking this question, ever more pointedly, until we do get some real answers.
Admittedly the question would be better if they dropped the first sentence and just asked specifically about views on extending copyright, and reforming patent law. That would make for a pretty specific question where any waffling would be obvious.
It took me a week only to get familar with the very basics; how to install the damn thing, where to put stuff so latex finds it, which commands must be called in what order to get anything out of it, basic LaTex-syntax, how to decipher LaTeX error messages to navigate through dependency-hell, which classes to use, how to set options and in what order and by which method (different classes use different styles), how to get proper pdf output without crippling the fonts, how to position images at least close to where i want them etc. etc.
Sure it's complex if you need to meddle, and definitely it can be hard to learn, but that doesn't really contradict my point. My point was that, once I'd done a few hard yards (learning LaTeX, writing my own document classes) everything I needed to do was simple, and it was very usable. I wasn't saying that LaTeX in all is simple and usable, I was saying that, for doing what i wanted to do LaTeX let me create a system that was simple and usable. What I mean is this: I'm sure you could do, in Word and Powerpoint, exactly what i described in LaTeX - a mixed report/presentation format. In Word and Powerpoint though, you would be getting your hands very dirty hand hacking binary.doc files so that Powerpoint would accept them, and ignore all the bits you wanted it to. Compared to anything like that the LaTeX solution I created is both simple and usable.
With all that knowledge I'm still far from being able to do something supposedly simple as, say, design a custom letter head or footer.
I'll give you a hand on that one - what you want is the fancyhdr package. You can find some documentation here. It will at nleast give you an idea of what you can do - rememberign of course that you can include graphics in the headers and footers provided if you like.
Isn't this obvious? I'll bet of you scratch the surface- this is an award from the Casino History. Hoping to draw even more clients, the outpost will be a small hotel, complete with casino, in Geocentric orbit above Nevada, with your trip comped on a $5 million buy in of chips....
There is some seriousness to this though - what are the legal implications for something in orbit? Las Vegas is a gambling capital partly because it is one of the few places in the US where casino gambling is legal. Would US law naturally extend to a private station in orbit? I doubt it (though IANAL). Gambling is just the beginning if you can get a blank slate on law by being in orbit - absolutely anything goes. Forget Las Vegas or Amsterdam.
LaTeX is a horrible standard for Office documents. It's great for producing a finished product, ready to be printed with professional typesetting, but for things that need to be constantly edited or spreadsheets (hello!), it terribly unwieldy. Business execs don't have time to look at raw marked-up text and compile it in their heads while trying to edit it.
What drivel is this? We're talking about file formats, not editors. Do you hack on your Word documents as raw binary files? No, you have a nice GUI editor with WYSIWYG to edit, and have that translate to and save in Word format. What we're talking about is having LaTeX as the backend format that you save to rather Word format - we're still expecting a GUI editor. The fact that LaTeX is a human readable and editable format that would make recovery of damaged or corrupted files easier - well that's just a bonus.
I do admit that there aren't that many GUI editors that output LaTeX - that's because a lot of serious people got used to writing in raw markup before GUI editors were around, and so it has stayed that way to some extent. Take a look at Lyx, or Klyx if you like, both provide WYSIWYG frontends to LaTeX.
But really what you're highlighting is the complete lack of understanding that Microsoft has managed to foster. You can't separate the GUI frontend from the raw file format used to store the stuff - apparently to you its one and the same. That is a very bad misconception indeed.
Honestly, after hearing the buzz about latex, I went and looked at it. Unless you're doing print setting for professional use, it's far too complicated and powerful.
LaTeX really isn't all that hard to learn, but it is very powerful. Want to know why I use LaTeX? I wrote a couple of document classes for LaTeX - now that took a little work but its done, and never has to be revisited - so that when I write a report I can simply put
\summary{bullet point summary of what follows...}
at the top of every paragraph as I write my report. What's the advantage of that? Well, as long as I do that, as well as LaTeX producing a beautifully formatted report, I can just change the documentclass from report to presentation and produce a beautifully formatted powerpoint style presentation from the summaries I gave.
I even have some finer points that let me share content (figures and graphs for instance, or perhaps a set of equations) across the report and presentation so they appear in both.
The power of simply writing a report with quick summaries every now and then, and at the end of it automatically having a slideshow presentation is stunning. Having both items, report and presentation, shared in one document so changes automatically propagate to both is amazing.
Show me how to do that in Word or Powerpoint in anything approaching the simplicity and ease of use that LaTeX provides and I'll consider switching. I don't think I'll be switching.
Monitors only go to 3rd world contries when asked by the host countries. It's a way of demonstrating to the world their legitamacy.
The US has no need to do this. 2000 was an anomoly where the results were so close that the differential was within the margin of error.
Given even just the issues with Diebold that have come to light so far, I think it is clear that some sort of external auditing would be good. The Diebold systems are sufficiently weak that all manner of things could happen. All it would take is some over zealous Democrat (just look at the forged memos to see they exist) and you could end up with John Kerry as your president. On the other side, you've got an over zealous Republican hacker, or the CEO of Diebold (who is merely a fairly zealous Republican). No matter who you support, you have plenty of reasons to be worried, and be supportive of this auditing.
Maybe it's because boeing is smart anough to relize that there isn't money in space travel. About the best you can do right now is selling space hardware to others (nasa) or launching commercial satilites.
Space travel lacks one big thing. A true compelling reason that everyone agrees on that makes it needed, and makes it worthwhile, to make money from space travel is all but impossible.
Correct, space travel is currently uneconomic. That does not make it pointless to invest in efforts researching it, because if you make it sufficently cheap, it will be economic. Whether space travel is "worth it" is a function of the cost of space travel. Bring that cost down, and all of a sudden your equation changes.
When flight was first invented it wasn't all that practical or economic either. Flying across oceans was simply beyond the range of aircraft, and rail and trucking was almost as fast as airplanes, but a hell of a lot less expensive. "Why would anyone use airplanes for transport? All you do is get a nice view from up there which isn't enough to sustain an industry. Building planes big enough to carry any sort of worthwhile load would be unbelievably expensive - there's just no money in it."
You don't need a compelling reason, you just need to keep researching new technology and improvements to make space travel cheap and efficient. That's what the X-prize is all about - bringing low cost reusable launch systems into existence. Scaled Composites looks like they've pulled it off too - though we'll have to wait to be sure.
What exactly is a mainstream use for these devices ?, why would everyone want one (even non geeks).
I think these are obviously speciality items, if need a small computer at your hand at any time then this is for you. But most people don't have any use for such a device.
I think that's extremely shortsighted. Being able to have a powerful versatile computer that had the features I mentioned (large screen size, and powerful input system) on hand at all times would become indespensible as software technology grew to meet it. Imagine being able to sit and watch a film on a decent sized screen wherever you are. Be able to video conference with friends anywhere any time. But it goes further if you get creative - imagine a restaurant offering a fully interactive menu with pictures, and ability to order throught he system, that you can pull up over the restaurants wifi network. Imagine having an extremely powerful notebook and calculator on hand at all times whenever you want to jot something down. Imagine having a wikipedia accessible anytime you want whenever you want to look something up. These are just whatever random ideas occurred to me quickly, many, many more are possible. The key is having a powerful enough system that it is worth having, and having the systems sufficnelt ubiquitous that you can readily assume that a lot of people will have one on hand.
On a serious note, what I do not understand about these companies, like the Tablet PC companies is that these devices are ideal complementary devices. Price the device at less than 1K and people will buy these devices. Price them near 2K and they will be niche devices that people will look at, comment as interesting, and move on.
I agree - few people are going to interested in such a device as their primary computing device - it just doesn't have the power, screen real estate, or usability (keyboards reamin about the best means for inputting textual data) of a lightweight laptop.
The advantages it offers are notable - its small, lightweight, and is fast and easy to use for small/quick tasks. It's those features that made palm pilots and the like popular. But those sorts of features make it ideal, as the previous poster said, as a secondary or complementary device - something you can have readily on hand for those moments when you don't need to do serious computing work (which tends to require screen size, processor power, and keyboard for input). As long as these devices are priced equivalently to lightweight laptops, they'll remain niche items.
The things that would bring these devices into the mainstream despite the cost are
(1) An effective input system - be that stunningly good handwriting recognition, quality subvocal speech recognition, or something we haven't thought of yet.
(2) A means to have the display size not bound by the immediate size of the device - be that through a projected display, a collapsible/foldable display or something else cunning.
Until those features are provided, it's an expensive toy.
Jedidiah.
Re:Flying car will always be available, tomorrow
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Flying cars will only be there because somebody just wanted to "do it". They won't be pratical. What will they accomplish that the automobile won't? Sure, they look good to somebody that looks up to the open sky, but if everyone had one, you wouldn't be flying "as the crow" everywhere. Rules of the air will be created (They're already there for the larger planes, less restrictive to smaller ones).
You're not well acquainted with 2D vs. 3D packing problems are you? Even if you are restricted to "air highways" you will still be greatly reducing traffic congenstion by packing in a 3D volume instead of a 2D road.
The there's routing - with the current roading scheme annoying things like buildings and general housing get in your way. With skyways as long as the basic altitude is high enough you'll be quickly eliminating most of those problems. Of course, if you think about it, that greatly eases the issue intersections too - there's not really a need for anywhere near as many because you can layer roads vertically - they don't need to cross at the same point (again we're into fun properties of 3-Space vs. 2-Space). Basicxally everything is automatically a freeway system with exits wherever needed - no construction efforts required.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not the cost of an item, rather it's value that sways most purchases. The point was however, that currently consumers blindly trust a corrupt and deceptive labelling system rather than being held responsible for critical reasoning during the evaluation of a financial transaction.
Because lord knows everyone wants to spend 2 hours researching which brand of peanut butter they should be buying, and making sure their current preferred brand hasn't suddenly started adding addictive chemicals without bothering to change their labels.
Once you're done with that, it's time to spend another hour checking the currently available jam brands...
A true free market wouldn't be gentle or kind. However, it would be maximally efficent and effective.
It would be maximally efficient presuming that consumers did due diligence and researched via a decently wide range of independent sources for every product they purchase, rather than just believing the very widely propagated advertising. I suspect that's a rather unrealistic demand.
Jedidiah.
And when the two parties have practically the same opinion?! Let's face it, both parties only nominate moderates, i.e., middle of the road candiates. They both believe that what's good for corporate America is good for America. They both believe in a strong US military. Neither will affect any real change.
It would be more accurate to say both parties only nominate conservatives, in the truest sense of the word. That is, those who seek to maintain the status quo rather than seeking change.
Politically they aren't really all that moderate. By global standards both candidates are "right leaning" or "fiscally and socially conservative", or "conservative and authoritarian" depending on which (somewhat arbitrary) labelling scheme you wish to use. They appear moderate because they're in the middle of the views that get presented to the US public - which is to say, the views held by the Republican and Democrat party. The views of other parties, which represent a large part of the rest of the politcal spectrum are simply not heard.
Jedidiah.
they offered IE for free in the hope that they could "embrace and extend" the internet - stopping all other browsers, and thereby stopping all other platforms - but it didn't work. so why should they bother any more? there's nothing to be gained by owning the users browser.
There is still a lot ot be gained from owning the users browser, because at long last real rich GUI apps are starting to be available over the web. We were promised web applications a long time ago, but all we got were forms and web pages that, while providing an interface were quite slow, and had a very bare bones interface.
Microsofts big new technology advancement for Longhorn is XAML and Avalon which, in theory, brings real fast rich web applications to the world. In the meantime firefox/mozilla is busy with XUL and related technologies (if you want to see what XUL can do, take a look at this site).
Web applications are going to happen. They aren't going to replace locally installed apps entirely, but they will fill niches with, for instance, powerful webmail interfaces (that look and behave like a local GUI), tax calculation apps, calendaring services, and all those simple database frontends etc. The question then, is who is going to provide the architecture for Web Apps? MS desperately wants to be the one to do it - because web applications are potentially completely platform agnostic. If Web applications are all XAML, then you need Windows to use them, and MS strengthens their monopoly. If XUL gets a decent foothold, then any platform that has Mozilla, Firefox, or in fact any XUL implementation (XUL is open source and LGPL, so whoever wants to can implement it), is a viable platform for those web apps.
What MS fears most is a world where a decent chunk of applications are completely platform agnostic, because then people simply won't care about Windows. Lose the monopoly stranglehold, and MS will be in severe trouble.
To keep that monopoly stranglehold MS has to, if not win this latest browser war, at least keep the fight going long and hard enough that Longhorn has significant market share (that's well past the release date), and hence XAML is the most widely available architecture via which to deliver web apps, before Mozilla/Firefox gets any really significant market share.
This war is surprisingly important.
Jedidiah.
One of the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein was that he sold oil for Euros and also converted the cash reserves of the nation to Euros (~ $10 billion). He served as a bad example to the region.
And now you claim the cost of occupying Iraq destabilizes the Dollar?
Actually I specifically tried to avoid any partisan politics or blame. I don't claim that occupying Iraq is destabilizing the US dollar. I'm claiming a large budget deficit in conjuction with a large current account deficit is certainly unhelpful to the US dollar. Equally important factors are the rise in acceptance of the Euro, and the improving European economy. There's also world attitudes toward the US, and world opinion of the US as an economic power.
Even if you want to blame the budget deficit entirely on Iraq (which would be foolish, it was already balloning well before Iraq, the war simply helped make it a little worse), you still have the current account deficit to consider (which is to say, the severe US trade imbalance), not to mention all the other signficant factors I just mentioned.
No, I'm not trying to blame this on Bush, or Iraq. This problem existed before Bush, and will continue to be a problem even if Kerry is elected instead. I would say that Bush has helped exacerbate the situation a little, but many of the major factors in this are things Bush has either little or no control over, or things he has generally ignored entirely.
Jedidiah.
The thing is economies kind of exist in a homeostatis. If the US dollar falls, it gives US manufacturing and US-based services a competitive edge - so in many quarters, the weakening of the US dollar is in fact welcomed.
I agree entirely that a weaker US dollar would be useful in certain areas. But again, that's another domino: where is US manufacturing? Most manufacturing has been outsourced oveseas, and very little takes place in the US. Certainly a dramatic fall in the US dollar would give a huge incentive to bring some of that manufacturing back (the benefits of free market economics providing incentives to rebalance systems), but I think we need to be realistic. Any such move to bring manufacturing back to the US in response to a severely weakened US dollar is going to take considerable time (the weaker side of free market economics is that it doesn't always work in human scale timeframes), and in the interim you'll have serious problems.
Also, there is the meantime factor that, should the US dollar fall severely against world currency you'll find the price of oil and other major commodities for the US absolutely skyrocket. That's going to cause massive inflation as the price of everything shifts upward to adjust. Consider that that will be in conjuction with downward pressure on the US job market as many companies try to shift away, and you have a very serious problem while waiting for manufacturing jobs to arrive.
I'm not implying that such a major shift wouldn't be compnesated for by global free markets, what I'm saying is that, during the preiod of flux during that time of readjustment the US economy is going to be facing massive inflation, and downward pressure on the job market. How long that situation will last (perhaps a couple of years, perhaps a decade) is pretty uncertain, but regardless it's going to be a very unpleasant thing to live through.
Ask you local representatives about it. Ask any US politician you get a chance to about it. It's worth discussing, even if it is a slim possibility, because the dangers are so severe.
Jedidiah.
Read the article. It's a bit of a long winded rant, but I agree with (and have been predicting myself) some of its key points.
The US dollar is weak, not helped by the massive budget and current account deficits. For now that doesn't matter too much (particularly the current account situation) because the US is viewed as a strong economic powerhouse, and the US dollar is in high demand because it is the standard currency for most major commodity markets.
The catch is that both of those factors can change. World opinion of the US has definitely been on the decline of late, and while the US economy might be creeping its way out of recession, the rest of the world isn't having any such problems. Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
There are some added factors the article doesn't really mention. A significant one is that Japan is pretty much the largets single owner of US debt - both budget and current account deficit: Japan is a huge buyer of US currency and government bonds. Japan has itself been in serious economic woes for the last decade and then some, but they are definitely on the improve. Should the Japanese economy kick into gear there will be a strong move toward dropping US investments, and investing locally. That's going to put a huge strain on US debt (it will effectively be getting recalled) while at the same time putting serious downward pressure on the US dollar as Japanese investors move to using yen for local investment.
All of these things add up to some very serious potential for the US dollar to have very major fall in the global currency market (and such a fall would only force more and more markets to switch to the "far more stable" Euro - the harder it falls, the worse it gets). Sould such a thing happen it will put very very serious pressure on the US economy. It is at that pointed that the much vaunted US innovation and entrepreneurialism will have to truly stand up and be counted. Unless it proves to be truly impressive indeed, the US could suffer an extremely major economic readjustment (think great depression).
Now, I wouldn't say any of this is likely, but it is a very very real possibility - the US dollar is surprisingly weak at the moment - and certainly there are plenty of dominoes poised. I'm surprised that these sorts of issues aren't of major concern during the current electoral cycle. Well, I guess I'm not that surprised, more disappointed.
Jedidiah.
What linux needs is a window manager thats more scalable. So that 1 guy could have his desktop set up in a *box config and another guy could have his set up in a fully loaded KDE type config, and yet they both use the same toolkits and stuff.
The closest thing to that right now is GNOME and XFCE. GNOME provides your big heavy "provide all the libraries you could need" approach (which is very useful for most people), while XFCE provides a fairly light fast Desktop environment. Both use GTK2, and share a certain amount of configuration.
Yes, XFCE is not as light as a pure *box WM, but then it is actually providing a reasonably rich desktop environment rather than just window management. It is a remarkably fast and light DE all things considered.
Jedidiah.
Okay, I just spent a while browsing the source, and really, it doesn't look that hard. Laying out the controls with XUL looks largely straightforward, and everything made perfect sense to me, and I know no XUL at all. The rest of the functionality is provided via javascript, and that's where a little more work went in, but it really doesn't look like anything more than one would expect for an app of that complexity.
All up, my general impression (having only skimmed through the source) is that it looks to be no more difficult to develop such an app than with anything else one might use instead.
I am very impressed. Many kudos to the mozilla people for making such things possible.
Jedidiah.
What's the over head involved in developing apps like this?
I'm afriad I don't know - I simply ran into a link to that, and had much the same reaction you did: "Wow! that is amazing - I didn't know you could do anything like that!".
Could any of the XUL experts here at Slashdot speak up as to how hard something like this is to write?
Jedidiah.
You need to have Opera ID itself as Opera. GMail uses ActiveX to display itself in IE, probably to avoid lots of complications from odd Javascript problems with IE. Since Opera is IDing as IE, GMail is assuming it has ActiveX support, which it does not.
Interesting that they had to resort to ActiveX. An interesting question though, is how long it will be before they'll detect Firefox/Mozilla users and have a powerful XUL interface available - if you could do a nice interface as rich and as fast as this GMail would start looking very impressive (and people would be moving very fast to Firefox to get it).
Jedidiah.
Right when I installed OO I went to open the word processor. It's actually called a Text Editor. WHAT? Notepad and nano are text editors, this is supposed to a Word Processing suite! Further, the interface looks like Office 95 - honestly, people are visual and the interface makes me feel like I should be sitting in a tiny bricked wall office with no windows and a flickering flourescent light overhead. Sure, some may like that, but it's not most people. Finally, the product seems slow on WinXP - yes, it may be my setup, and your mileage my vary, but Word is snappy on my box so it doesn't matter.
This is exactly the sort of things people were saying about Mozilla 2 or 3 years ago:
"It's called mozilla, and has the build number in the bloody titlebar - who is going to use that?"
"The interface doesn't integrate with my Windows desktop, the menus behave differently, it looks bloody awful with those skins, and it's the GUI is so slow!"
"It's huge and clunky and takes forever to load."
"The usability of the interface just isn't there. Ctrl-T to open a new tab? Who is going to guess that?"
Are all typical sorts of comments about the mozilla project back then. Reality is that, for the longest time, mozilla was regarded as a huge, clunky contraption that was, at best, aping IE but badly. People claimed it was taking forever to develop with no real visible improvement, and in many senses they were right. Mozilla had been open source and worked on for a long time at that point, but in terms of what you could see it wasn't that impressive. The catch was they were mostly working on backend stuff, and cleaning up old Netscape code, reorganizing things, and generally just building up a structure to springboard off. That took a very long time, but once the background work started to get somewhere, and XUL started to get fast, and integrate with native toolkits etc. things started to fire up. All of a sudden there was a lot more emphasis on the frontend, and firefox and thunderbird sprung up as separate projects and started getting fast innovative GUIs with the sort of usability you would expect.
StarOffice was open sourced a lot later than Mozilla. A lot of the early work for OpenOffice.org was doing simple things like (for instance) uncoupling the applications from that awful fake desktop (does anyone remember that from StarOffice 5?!) so they ran as separate applications, cleaning up the code, and generally making things workable. New file formats were created and "missing" features were added. Right now OpenOffice.org is still in the sot of stages that mozilla was at in the milestones shortly before it went 1.0. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is getting much better native toolkit integration, a focus on cutting down startup time, and some work on starting to clean up the GUI. That is, the beginning of the work to start to provide a really polished application suite is happening now. You could think of OpenOffice.org 2.0 as equivalent to Firebird 0.1 if you like. An awful lot of very hard work has been going on behind the scenes, and finally the start of something a little more visible to average users in the way of polish is occuring. And OpenOffice.org 2.0 isn't even out yet...
It worth remembering that while everyone now praises Mozilla and Firefox as a massive success story of a truly slick and usable open source application, a very short time ago it was considered a poor clunky application with slow GUI and poor usability.
Give OpenOffice.org a chance - it is still in the process of gearing up its usability polish efforts. Sure, for now it is not the most slick looking application out there, but if you look at what it can do, and the rate that it is improving, you would see that it really is a very impressive open source project.
Jedidiah
If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Supporting VBA is just not going to happen. OO.org is getting Python scripting though, which should open up the OO.org to a lot more scrpting and extension than is currently the case. In the end people upgrade systems and have to replace outdated custom code, and that's what OO.org is relying on. Yes there are systems out there still running on COBOL because it works and they don't want to update, but COBOL is no longer the default standard. Likewise, in time, there will still be systems running on VBA and Word macros because it works and they don't want to upgrade, but VBA won't be the standard way of doing things like that.
Sure, that means there won't be a blinding flash and suddenly OO.org will have 50% market share, it'll need to be a steady increase as people replace old systems, or bring up new systems. Then again, slow and steady wins the race. In time (say 5 or 10 years) it is entirely possible that OO.org could have equal or greater market share to MS Office.
Jedidiah.
No talking to each other. Wow.
US politicians don't know how to conduct a conversation, they only know how to give speeches. Watch any interview with any major US politician, and note that the interviewer never interrupts, never asks for clarification, never redirects a question, never probes into anything the candidiate just said - they let the candidate give their short speech, then move on to the next question regardless.
Yes this is a big difference from Eurpean or, as you point out, even Canadian political discourse, but that's the way it is.
If you let the candidates talk to each other, and pose each other questions you might discover that they have a somewhat limited supply of pre-canned speeches on any given topic. The art of being a politician in the US is to be able to memorise a large number of speeches, and be good enough at extemporising any question you get asked so that you can lead straight in to your pre-prepared speech. Don't believe me? Watch an interview or a debate and notice that the question always receives a long answer that either leads into an anecdote, or allows the candidate to make a short series of points that are only very loosely related to the question at hand.
Jedidiah.
If I were in power, my regime would have impaling. Our current methods of gently killing people don't seem to be much of a deterrent, but I bet all those violent criminals and spammers would tow the line if they knew they were risking impaling.
Let's just be clear on what impaling meant - it wasn't just getting a sharp stick rammed through you. It was getting a (usually blunt) pole inserted in your rectum, and then having the pole stood vertically supporting you so your weight inexorably pushed the pole up through you. Death took days of excruciating agony. Crucifixion is a lark by comparison.
Jedidiah.
But look how much crime went down under Vlad!
Well yes. He had a novel solution to poverty as well. He invited all the poor and homeless to a huge feast. Once they were gathered inside and were enjoying their meal, he had all the doors sealed, and burned the place to the ground. After that there were no poor in Wallachia - well, no one would admit to it anyway.
Jedidiah.
40) Intelectual Property - Yea, right. Like the candidates are going to understand this question. Course, it will be worth asking it just to see the confused look on Bush's face and another possible Bushism for the Calendar.
Look, the point of this is to ask questions that the candidates haven't been asked before, or aren't likely to be asked at some future point. A lot of the questions are pretty standard, or close to standard, but this one is so far off the track of what's traditionally asked that you expect both candidates to be baffled by it. To me that means it is an ideal question, because no one else is actually asking it of them, and I don't think it's at all likely anyone else (who actually gets to ask them questions) will either. This question should be asked.
Hell, even Michael Badnarik who is far more likely to have a few clues on such issues provided a sheer load of waffle in answer to this question when asked by Slashdot. I expect David Cobb to do much the same (as I presume it will be included with his questions). Who cares if we don't get a coherent answer, the fact that we don't should be a very good sign that we ought to keep asking this question, ever more pointedly, until we do get some real answers.
Admittedly the question would be better if they dropped the first sentence and just asked specifically about views on extending copyright, and reforming patent law. That would make for a pretty specific question where any waffling would be obvious.
Jedidiah.
It took me a week only to get familar with the very basics; how to install the damn thing, where to put stuff so latex finds it, which commands must be called in what order to get anything out of it, basic LaTex-syntax, how to decipher LaTeX error messages to navigate through dependency-hell, which classes to use, how to set options and in what order and by which method (different classes use different styles), how to get proper pdf output without crippling the fonts, how to position images at least close to where i want them etc. etc.
.doc files so that Powerpoint would accept them, and ignore all the bits you wanted it to. Compared to anything like that the LaTeX solution I created is both simple and usable.
Sure it's complex if you need to meddle, and definitely it can be hard to learn, but that doesn't really contradict my point. My point was that, once I'd done a few hard yards (learning LaTeX, writing my own document classes) everything I needed to do was simple, and it was very usable. I wasn't saying that LaTeX in all is simple and usable, I was saying that, for doing what i wanted to do LaTeX let me create a system that was simple and usable. What I mean is this: I'm sure you could do, in Word and Powerpoint, exactly what i described in LaTeX - a mixed report/presentation format. In Word and Powerpoint though, you would be getting your hands very dirty hand hacking binary
With all that knowledge I'm still far from being able to do something supposedly simple as, say, design a custom letter head or footer.
I'll give you a hand on that one - what you want is the fancyhdr package. You can find some documentation here. It will at nleast give you an idea of what you can do - rememberign of course that you can include graphics in the headers and footers provided if you like.
Jedidiah.
Isn't this obvious? I'll bet of you scratch the surface- this is an award from the Casino History. Hoping to draw even more clients, the outpost will be a small hotel, complete with casino, in Geocentric orbit above Nevada, with your trip comped on a $5 million buy in of chips....
There is some seriousness to this though - what are the legal implications for something in orbit? Las Vegas is a gambling capital partly because it is one of the few places in the US where casino gambling is legal. Would US law naturally extend to a private station in orbit? I doubt it (though IANAL). Gambling is just the beginning if you can get a blank slate on law by being in orbit - absolutely anything goes. Forget Las Vegas or Amsterdam.
Jedidiah.
LaTeX is a horrible standard for Office documents. It's great for producing a finished product, ready to be printed with professional typesetting, but for things that need to be constantly edited or spreadsheets (hello!), it terribly unwieldy. Business execs don't have time to look at raw marked-up text and compile it in their heads while trying to edit it.
What drivel is this? We're talking about file formats, not editors. Do you hack on your Word documents as raw binary files? No, you have a nice GUI editor with WYSIWYG to edit, and have that translate to and save in Word format. What we're talking about is having LaTeX as the backend format that you save to rather Word format - we're still expecting a GUI editor. The fact that LaTeX is a human readable and editable format that would make recovery of damaged or corrupted files easier - well that's just a bonus.
I do admit that there aren't that many GUI editors that output LaTeX - that's because a lot of serious people got used to writing in raw markup before GUI editors were around, and so it has stayed that way to some extent. Take a look at Lyx, or Klyx if you like, both provide WYSIWYG frontends to LaTeX.
But really what you're highlighting is the complete lack of understanding that Microsoft has managed to foster. You can't separate the GUI frontend from the raw file format used to store the stuff - apparently to you its one and the same. That is a very bad misconception indeed.
Jedidiah.
LaTeX really isn't all that hard to learn, but it is very powerful. Want to know why I use LaTeX? I wrote a couple of document classes for LaTeX - now that took a little work but its done, and never has to be revisited - so that when I write a report I can simply putat the top of every paragraph as I write my report. What's the advantage of that? Well, as long as I do that, as well as LaTeX producing a beautifully formatted report, I can just change the documentclass from report to presentation and produce a beautifully formatted powerpoint style presentation from the summaries I gave.
I even have some finer points that let me share content (figures and graphs for instance, or perhaps a set of equations) across the report and presentation so they appear in both.
The power of simply writing a report with quick summaries every now and then, and at the end of it automatically having a slideshow presentation is stunning. Having both items, report and presentation, shared in one document so changes automatically propagate to both is amazing.
Show me how to do that in Word or Powerpoint in anything approaching the simplicity and ease of use that LaTeX provides and I'll consider switching. I don't think I'll be switching.
Jedidiah.
Monitors only go to 3rd world contries when asked by the host countries. It's a way of demonstrating to the world their legitamacy.
The US has no need to do this. 2000 was an anomoly where the results were so close that the differential was within the margin of error.
Given even just the issues with Diebold that have come to light so far, I think it is clear that some sort of external auditing would be good. The Diebold systems are sufficiently weak that all manner of things could happen. All it would take is some over zealous Democrat (just look at the forged memos to see they exist) and you could end up with John Kerry as your president. On the other side, you've got an over zealous Republican hacker, or the CEO of Diebold (who is merely a fairly zealous Republican). No matter who you support, you have plenty of reasons to be worried, and be supportive of this auditing.
Jedidiah.
Maybe it's because boeing is smart anough to relize that there isn't money in space travel. About the best you can do right now is selling space hardware to others (nasa) or launching commercial satilites.
Space travel lacks one big thing. A true compelling reason that everyone agrees on that makes it needed, and makes it worthwhile, to make money from space travel is all but impossible.
Correct, space travel is currently uneconomic. That does not make it pointless to invest in efforts researching it, because if you make it sufficently cheap, it will be economic. Whether space travel is "worth it" is a function of the cost of space travel. Bring that cost down, and all of a sudden your equation changes.
When flight was first invented it wasn't all that practical or economic either. Flying across oceans was simply beyond the range of aircraft, and rail and trucking was almost as fast as airplanes, but a hell of a lot less expensive. "Why would anyone use airplanes for transport? All you do is get a nice view from up there which isn't enough to sustain an industry. Building planes big enough to carry any sort of worthwhile load would be unbelievably expensive - there's just no money in it."
You don't need a compelling reason, you just need to keep researching new technology and improvements to make space travel cheap and efficient. That's what the X-prize is all about - bringing low cost reusable launch systems into existence. Scaled Composites looks like they've pulled it off too - though we'll have to wait to be sure.
Jedidiah.
What exactly is a mainstream use for these devices ?, why would everyone want one (even non geeks).
I think these are obviously speciality items, if need a small computer at your hand at any time then this is for you. But most people don't have any use for such a device.
I think that's extremely shortsighted. Being able to have a powerful versatile computer that had the features I mentioned (large screen size, and powerful input system) on hand at all times would become indespensible as software technology grew to meet it. Imagine being able to sit and watch a film on a decent sized screen wherever you are. Be able to video conference with friends anywhere any time. But it goes further if you get creative - imagine a restaurant offering a fully interactive menu with pictures, and ability to order throught he system, that you can pull up over the restaurants wifi network. Imagine having an extremely powerful notebook and calculator on hand at all times whenever you want to jot something down. Imagine having a wikipedia accessible anytime you want whenever you want to look something up. These are just whatever random ideas occurred to me quickly, many, many more are possible. The key is having a powerful enough system that it is worth having, and having the systems sufficnelt ubiquitous that you can readily assume that a lot of people will have one on hand.
Jedidiah.
On a serious note, what I do not understand about these companies, like the Tablet PC companies is that these devices are ideal complementary devices. Price the device at less than 1K and people will buy these devices. Price them near 2K and they will be niche devices that people will look at, comment as interesting, and move on.
I agree - few people are going to interested in such a device as their primary computing device - it just doesn't have the power, screen real estate, or usability (keyboards reamin about the best means for inputting textual data) of a lightweight laptop.
The advantages it offers are notable - its small, lightweight, and is fast and easy to use for small/quick tasks. It's those features that made palm pilots and the like popular. But those sorts of features make it ideal, as the previous poster said, as a secondary or complementary device - something you can have readily on hand for those moments when you don't need to do serious computing work (which tends to require screen size, processor power, and keyboard for input). As long as these devices are priced equivalently to lightweight laptops, they'll remain niche items.
The things that would bring these devices into the mainstream despite the cost are
(1) An effective input system - be that stunningly good handwriting recognition, quality subvocal speech recognition, or something we haven't thought of yet.
(2) A means to have the display size not bound by the immediate size of the device - be that through a projected display, a collapsible/foldable display or something else cunning.
Until those features are provided, it's an expensive toy.
Jedidiah.
Flying cars will only be there because somebody just wanted to "do it". They won't be pratical. What will they accomplish that the automobile won't? Sure, they look good to somebody that looks up to the open sky, but if everyone had one, you wouldn't be flying "as the crow" everywhere. Rules of the air will be created (They're already there for the larger planes, less restrictive to smaller ones).
You're not well acquainted with 2D vs. 3D packing problems are you? Even if you are restricted to "air highways" you will still be greatly reducing traffic congenstion by packing in a 3D volume instead of a 2D road.
The there's routing - with the current roading scheme annoying things like buildings and general housing get in your way. With skyways as long as the basic altitude is high enough you'll be quickly eliminating most of those problems. Of course, if you think about it, that greatly eases the issue intersections too - there's not really a need for anywhere near as many because you can layer roads vertically - they don't need to cross at the same point (again we're into fun properties of 3-Space vs. 2-Space). Basicxally everything is automatically a freeway system with exits wherever needed - no construction efforts required.
Jedidiah.