There are tires and tires, though. Whatever rate they are taxed at, I guarantee a sporty car will run softer, faster-wearing tires than will a luxury sedan. My wife and I bought our respective cars very near the same time six years ago, and they have very similar total milage on them today - within 5%. Since then, I have replaced my tires three times while she has only replaced hers once.
By taxing tires, you would encourage people to run the hardest, longest-wearing compounds they could find. This would reduce road safety, especially in cold or wet conditions, and could even cause more damage to road surfaces and more noise pollution. People would also tend to keep their tires longer relative to their rated life, possibly to the point where they were worn beyond safe operational condition.
A million others have already posted this, but the rational suggestions are:
(1) Increase the fuel tax. Self-explainatory.
(2) If a milage tax is preferable, it can be done in software by checking milage annually when the car is registered. If there is resistance to an annual tax collection like this on the grounds that incremental taxes (at each fill-up) are easier for consumers to swallow, have an option to pay monthly or whatever instead.
Or offload the issue to the gas-station attendants who are already present at every gas station in the state - have them punch the plate number and the odo reading into a hand-held computer. There will be errors of milage and plate number, but they can be mostly caught by well-designed software (plate ABC123 was seen last week with milage 12345, but now has milage 45678 - might be a typo) and can be cross-checked at registration time.
This still has troubling aspects as a car could be pinpointed to a particular place and time, but at least it's discrete points rather than a continuous stream.
The article makes it sound like a HS diploma is some kind of magical shield against societal problems:
Dropouts are more likely to face poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Typically high school dropouts earn $19,000 a year. High school graduates earn $28,000 a year on average. If you drop out of high school, your chances of running afoul of the law increase.
and others...
But correlation != causation. Being a tool who is likely to run afoul of the law is correlated to lack of a high school diploma, not the other way around. Capability and drive and good judgement are correlated with success, and also with surviving high school.
It upsets me when people play fast and loose with logic like this. The solution is to cure societal ills, not to encourage people to finish high school. If there were a mechanism in place to teach kids good judgement and drive, we'd end up improving graduation rates AND poverty rates, recidivism rates, drug use, violent crime, etc. Encouraging tools to finish high school will only increase the number of tools with HS diplomas.
"You carry your licence so that people know who you are"
I think this is a mis-statement. I carry my ID so I can provide evidence of my identity and of my qualification to drive an automobile to those who I believe have a need to know. I do not carry my ID so passersby can sniff my wallet (probably one of the worst turns of phrase I've ever made) and track me without my knowledge.
Since, according to my wife, I'm already a braindead moron (and a 33-year old one at that), can I expect nothing but improvement if I continue to drink beer?
Looking at the diagram, it looks like the warmer water produced from this is not dumped back into the lake, but sent off to enter the city's drinking-water supply. So when you crack the cold tap in your Ontario kitchen, it might be a few degrees warmer than otherwise.
This is water that's been pulled from the lake for years anyway -- the only thing that's changed is that it now passes through a heat exchanger before going into the water pipes of the city.
They could also be RADAR transcievers for automatic navigation systems in cars and trucks.
The vehicle could send a ping which includes information about its destination or path, and the marker could send back a ping which contains information about upcoming hazards, speed limit changes, construction zones, road conditions, etc.
Thus the road edges and distinctions between lanes can be discerned by the nav system by simple ranging, and additional info can be trasmitted by the road itself to the cars using it.
Personally, I use a company-issued pager. When it goes off, I use a company-issued cell phone to call in and advise I'm on my way. If the original poster's company doesn't want him using his personal cell, that's fine and even understandable, but they should be made aware of the scope of the potential issue this creates, after which they should be amenable to either making an exception to the rule or providing equivalent hardware.
And with company-owned hardware and a company-provided service, they can have documentation of calls made on the cell, so they can immediately see if time and resources are being wasted.
"when someone doesn't like one, they whinnnnneeeeee and complain instead of using the system to get the law changed."
It seems to me that Mr. Hiibel *is* using the system to get the law changed; he's using the Contitutional system of checks and balances. If you remember your Jr. High civics classes, there are (in the US) three braches of government specifically so that one or another can't get too powerful. Mr. Hiibel is simply using the Judical branch's power to attempt to check and balance thejudicial branch.
"Why are the RIAA still hounding Napster when the game has clearly evolved on to the next level? "
Because, as the entire Napster vs. RIAA saga has shown over and over again, the RIAA cannot evolve as quickly as the Net and its users (excepting aolers and other wannabes). The RIAA and its blood-brother the MPAA are all about protecting old ways of doing business in the face of irresistible paradigm shifts.
Worldwide, copyright and intellectual property laws will change immensely over the next 10 years, and if the RIAA and MPAA had any sense, they'd try to get ahead of that curve instead of dragging their heels.
But, as has already been noted many times here, they have no sense.
Peter Seebach notes in his Hacker FAQ at http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html that:
respect,
admiration,
compliments,
understanding,
discounts on expensive toys, and
money
are powerful motivators. Building from his ideas, I'd like to have a lab in which I could play. A few thousand dollars worth of computers and other equipment to work with would be nice. No, not for me to keep, or to take home, but just in a lab room somewhere at work. That, and the understanding that I would be free to work/play there as long as my other work was getting done would go a *long* way toward making me happier.
Slashdot Mirror
There are tires and tires, though. Whatever rate they are taxed at, I guarantee a sporty car will run softer, faster-wearing tires than will a luxury sedan. My wife and I bought our respective cars very near the same time six years ago, and they have very similar total milage on them today - within 5%. Since then, I have replaced my tires three times while she has only replaced hers once.
By taxing tires, you would encourage people to run the hardest, longest-wearing compounds they could find. This would reduce road safety, especially in cold or wet conditions, and could even cause more damage to road surfaces and more noise pollution. People would also tend to keep their tires longer relative to their rated life, possibly to the point where they were worn beyond safe operational condition.
A million others have already posted this, but the rational suggestions are:
(1) Increase the fuel tax. Self-explainatory.
(2) If a milage tax is preferable, it can be done in software by checking milage annually when the car is registered. If there is resistance to an annual tax collection like this on the grounds that incremental taxes (at each fill-up) are easier for consumers to swallow, have an option to pay monthly or whatever instead.
Or offload the issue to the gas-station attendants who are already present at every gas station in the state - have them punch the plate number and the odo reading into a hand-held computer. There will be errors of milage and plate number, but they can be mostly caught by well-designed software (plate ABC123 was seen last week with milage 12345, but now has milage 45678 - might be a typo) and can be cross-checked at registration time.
This still has troubling aspects as a car could be pinpointed to a particular place and time, but at least it's discrete points rather than a continuous stream.
The article makes it sound like a HS diploma is some kind of magical shield against societal problems:
Dropouts are more likely to face poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Typically high school dropouts earn $19,000 a year. High school graduates earn $28,000 a year on average.
If you drop out of high school, your chances of running afoul of the law increase.
and others...
But correlation != causation. Being a tool who is likely to run afoul of the law is correlated to lack of a high school diploma, not the other way around. Capability and drive and good judgement are correlated with success, and also with surviving high school.
It upsets me when people play fast and loose with logic like this. The solution is to cure societal ills, not to encourage people to finish high school. If there were a mechanism in place to teach kids good judgement and drive, we'd end up improving graduation rates AND poverty rates, recidivism rates, drug use, violent crime, etc. Encouraging tools to finish high school will only increase the number of tools with HS diplomas.
"You carry your licence so that people know who you are"
I think this is a mis-statement. I carry my ID so I can provide evidence of my identity and of my qualification to drive an automobile to those who I believe have a need to know. I do not carry my ID so passersby can sniff my wallet (probably one of the worst turns of phrase I've ever made) and track me without my knowledge.
Since, according to my wife, I'm already a braindead moron (and a 33-year old one at that), can I expect nothing but improvement if I continue to drink beer?
Looking at the diagram, it looks like the warmer water produced from this is not dumped back into the lake, but sent off to enter the city's drinking-water supply. So when you crack the cold tap in your Ontario kitchen, it might be a few degrees warmer than otherwise.
This is water that's been pulled from the lake for years anyway -- the only thing that's changed is that it now passes through a heat exchanger before going into the water pipes of the city.
They could also be RADAR transcievers for automatic navigation systems in cars and trucks.
The vehicle could send a ping which includes information about its destination or path, and the marker could send back a ping which contains information about upcoming hazards, speed limit changes, construction zones, road conditions, etc.
Thus the road edges and distinctions between lanes can be discerned by the nav system by simple ranging, and additional info can be trasmitted by the road itself to the cars using it.
Personally, I use a company-issued pager. When it goes off, I use a company-issued cell phone to call in and advise I'm on my way. If the original poster's company doesn't want him using his personal cell, that's fine and even understandable, but they should be made aware of the scope of the potential issue this creates, after which they should be amenable to either making an exception to the rule or providing equivalent hardware.
And with company-owned hardware and a company-provided service, they can have documentation of calls made on the cell, so they can immediately see if time and resources are being wasted.
"when someone doesn't like one, they whinnnnneeeeee and complain instead of using the system to get the law changed."
It seems to me that Mr. Hiibel *is* using the system to get the law changed; he's using the Contitutional system of checks and balances. If you remember your Jr. High civics classes, there are (in the US) three braches of government specifically so that one or another can't get too powerful. Mr. Hiibel is simply using the Judical branch's power to attempt to check and balance thejudicial branch.
No warlording in bed.
How long will it be until punks start running bots to improve their chances in cybercourt? PunkBusters may have a new market in this...
A couple points:
1) That was a TBird, not an XP. The AMD video shows an XP processor.
2) That's 9 minutes with the fan disconnected, but the heatsink still on the chip, NOT 9 minutes with no cooling whatsoever.
You DID watch the video, right?
"Why are the RIAA still hounding Napster when the game has clearly evolved on to the next level? " Because, as the entire Napster vs. RIAA saga has shown over and over again, the RIAA cannot evolve as quickly as the Net and its users (excepting aolers and other wannabes). The RIAA and its blood-brother the MPAA are all about protecting old ways of doing business in the face of irresistible paradigm shifts. Worldwide, copyright and intellectual property laws will change immensely over the next 10 years, and if the RIAA and MPAA had any sense, they'd try to get ahead of that curve instead of dragging their heels. But, as has already been noted many times here, they have no sense.
Peter Seebach notes in his Hacker FAQ at http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html that: respect, admiration, compliments, understanding, discounts on expensive toys, and money are powerful motivators. Building from his ideas, I'd like to have a lab in which I could play. A few thousand dollars worth of computers and other equipment to work with would be nice. No, not for me to keep, or to take home, but just in a lab room somewhere at work. That, and the understanding that I would be free to work/play there as long as my other work was getting done would go a *long* way toward making me happier.