I like Open Source software and Mozilla as much as the next guy, but doesn't it make sense to have your embedded controls be tightly integrated with the Operating System? I'd rather not need to have both IE and Gecko loaded into memory whenever I run Winamp.
Can I be the one to go out on a limb and blame the Ivy League for this?
The widespread general consensus I get from my fellow science majors (I'm a 3rd-year Physics Undergrad) is that state-run schools in the US provide a considerably more rigorous and difficult curriculum than their more prestigious private school counterparts do.
Of course, I'm obviously biased in this regard, but I can't help but get the impression that the Ivy League (and the private education system in general) has turned into a playground for the wealthy. I mean... they admit to lowering their own standards (considerably) for the children of their own alumni.
George Bush went to Yale. Enough said.
And of course, once it comes time to find a job, I have no doubt that the private school kid is going to get an automatic leg up.
I hate to be the person to jump in and say this, but: PC games have had online play since the dawn of time.
It's not something that Microsoft invented for the XBox, and it's not even remotely new. Although they've done a very admirable job of putting a nice interface on it, and marketing it to every 14 year old in North America. It's nothing particularly new, special, or innovative.
Nintendo shook things up, turned things in a direction where they've never gone before, and then had the balls to sell their console for half the price of everyone else (ie. so that their target audience could actually afford it, which is a concept increasingly lost to the console vendors these days)
Likewise, if you really think we ARE going to be developing more consoles like the XBox and PS3 from now on, we'd probably benefit from a console monoculture (ie. a standardized platform, considering that all Microsoft and Sony have been doing is to make incremental upgrades to their products). Platform-exclusive games also *suck* for the consumer.
... and a government that's doing everything its power to kill off all of those things.
Have you not been following the news lately? The child healthcare bill got struck down. Even the "think of the children" argument isn't good enough to support socialized healthcare in America (although it has thus far worked on every other piece of legislation where it's been brought up).
The US Dollar is certainly tanking, and the Iraq war has no end in sight. Both of these are "very bad things", but I'm not 100% convinced that one is causing the other. I was under the impression that our current economic problems were largely a result of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry.
At WWDC 2006, he mentioned that a few big features of Leopard were still under wraps to avoid being ripped off by Microsoft, or (more likely) because they weren't complete, and wouldn't be announced until the product ships...
My guess at this point is that it was just hype, but who knows?
What ever happened to those "extra features" Steve promised way back when Leopard was announced?
Can they please please please rewrite the Finder and the associated Open/Save controls from scratch? Managing files on OS X feels so awkward compared to every other OS out there. Hopefully the leopard finder will at the very least be properly multithreaded.
That said, I wasn't terribly excited for Leopard, as I had no real interest in Time Machine or the other "blockbuster" features. However, looking over the official feature list reveals some tantalizing treats. There are some especially nice developer/unix features -- DTrace, extensive support for Ruby, and 'bridges' to allow Ruby and Python apps to enjoy Cocoa and the OSX scripting interfaces. The Cocoa bridges should be immediately drool-inducing to Ruby and Python developers.
It's not in the list, but perhaps the biggest technological advance (in my opinion) is that Leopard will supposedly be completely resolution-independent, paving the way for very-high-resolution displays.
Looking to the future, Apple's next big move *needs* to be the implementation of a true metadata filesystem (preferably using ZFS). They can't let Microsoft beat them to it, and ZFS is simply too cool to pass up.
And to be perfectly, fair it would also be keeping with the team's history to continue the next two games in a similar fashion, and then choke on final four, losing to a team that nobody had ever heard of.
And naturally, there will be riots in regardless of whichever team wins the series.
Until said policies drain the public treasury, and exhaust (or drive away) those being taxed to support it. It's the bread-and-circuses thing all over again.
Can you provide examples of countries in which that's actually happened?
Right. America's not communist. I don't think you could seriously make that argument, as we spent most of the 20th century defining communism as "any form of liberalism currently not embraced by America"
The Soviet sort of Communism is indeed on the decline. It might have been sound in theory, but it was quickly overrun by corruption (the real enemy) and the political systems evolved to counter that. You could also say that the sort "democracy" that we had in 1920 is also on the decline, and be perfectly correct in that assumption. It all depends upon how you mince your words.
China's playing it by the book. They're going through their capitalist phase (and making a killing off of it in the process). Whether or not they'll eventually close their doors and embrace "real" communism remains to be seen (although history seems to suggest this, as China's been an astonishingly introverted nation for pretty much all of recorded history up until now). If that does come to pass, it will (at least initially) be a 'very bad thing' for the rest of us, regardless of which economic religion you subscribe to.
Socialism, communism's less intimidating cousin, on the other hand, is far from dead, and has more or less been accepted in some form or another across the industrialized world (apart from the US, which has spent far too much effort fighting the reds to allow such a thing to happen). Although communism was never proven to be a successful economic system, socialist-capitalist policies (ie. nationalized healthcare) have proven to be extremely popular and successful in nations that have the economic resources to support them.
We have the Most Wanted List. That's good enough for me.
Unless you're being formally charged or investigated for a crime (ie. there's a legally-issued warrant), the government has no business doing this behind our backs.
But seriously. If there really were 755,000 "terrorists" in our midst, such a high level of dissent should be a pretty clear indication that the government is doing something seriously wrong to be pissing off that many people.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1) There are no virtual desktops on OS X. Yet (ie. tomorrow). Nevertheless, this is irrelevant because....
2) The concept of a "mainwindow" has never existed in Mac OS, even going back to the 80s. Every document gets its own window, and there is a permanent menubar for whatever application is in focus at the top of the screen. This is probably the single most distinctive aspect of Mac OS. As long as one of the documents is in focus, the whole application is in focus (X11 is perhaps vaguely similar in this regard)
3) When Photoshop loses focus (ie. you're working in something that is distinctively NOT Photoshop), the pallets disappear, but any open documents stay visible. This is standard behavior for all Mac OS applications -- even MS Word hides its toolbars when it loses focus. Think about it -- why would you want to see another application's tool pallets when you're not working in it? Restoring focus restores the pallets to their previous location.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ah. I suppose I was a bit unclear.
Windows' problem is not a technical one. IIRC, Windows 98 "properly" supported multi-monitor displays out of the box, and the support subsequently improved in Win2k and XP. I used to use Windows in a Multi-Monitor configuration all the time, and agree that it's about on par (if not superior) to Apple these days. There were also various extensions that ATI and nVidia added with their drivers that made the experience a bit smoother (ie. they did a better job of "remembering" where windows are supposed should be placed if an application is quit and re-opened).
Windows' problem is a conceptual one. The whole concept of "root" windows is arguably the Operating System's greatest limitation. Office did away with it in 2000 IIRC, and just gave each document its own window and item on the taskbar. Windows' metaphor of a document originally assumed that a given document will only ever need to interact with documents of the same type within the same application, hence the root windows. Apple took a more "multimedia" approach, giving us applications like ClarisWorks, which is still more or less unparalleled in its ability to seamlessly integrate dissimilar media types and sources into a single document. History has more or less proven that Apple's approach was the better of the two, and the whole "one app does it all" paradigm (ie. Microsoft Works) fell into obscurity.
I'd also peg this as the reason why Apple does drag-and-drop between applications SO much better. Microsoft's system of inter-application objects never really worked properly -- try embedding a not-officially-supported media file into powerpoint, and you'll see what I mean. Apple (and Quicktime especially) handle this much better -- if you install the proper (FOSS!) codec, you can seamlessly embed Flash (FLV) videos into any application that supports the Quicktime framework, which is virtually all of them -- iMovie, Final Cut, iTunes, Keynote, etc.....
Since then, Microsoft's been tweaking their "Window" metaphor to more closely match Apple's, and have been largely successful with it. However, vestiges of the "old way" are still seen in Applications like Photoshop. Because of the menubar issue, Adobe can't efficiently port Photoshop to Windows without ditching the root window (even though the technical limitations requiring the window were removed years ago). In order to do so, each canvas would require its own menubar, which would be hideously impractical unless the number of menu options were significantly reduced so that they'd fit (which wouldn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right).
As is its nature, X has of course had this capability since its inception, but like virtually every other aspect of X, it's so difficult to use and configure, it hardly ever gets used.
Multi-monitor support is one of the coolest and tragically underused technologies out there, and it's useful across the board -- have your source open on one monitor while writing a paper on the other, edit video on one monitor and preview on the other, canvas on one monitor - pallete on the other, code on one monitor, web preview on the other, presentation on one monitor, lecture notes on the other, and the list goes on and on and on.
Big honking LCDs are dirt-cheap these days, and the productivity increase you'll see by adding an extra monitor (or just having one big high-res monitor) are incredible. I've been cursing the heavens for the past few months, as I've been stuck on a tiny 12" 1024x768 PowerBook for the past few months -- great machine, but I find myself considerably less productive without a big screen (or more than one)
I was skeptical until I started poking around, and 2.4 looks like it just might be GIMP's time to come into the limelight. I've always hated it pretty strongly, but if they can pull together decent Mac/Windows ports, they'll likely have a winner on their hands.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The single-window paradigm is a limitation of Windows, and not necessarily Photoshop. The mac version handles multiple monitors gracefully, and always has. The tool palettes also disappear when the app's not in focus -- there's no reason why they need to be separate windows, or even visible when the app's not being used.
Photoshop is also one of the few apps where the "Menus at the top" scheme makes sense virtually all the time. There are cases in which I don't like it, but for applications like Photoshop or the GIMP, which commonly manage several windows at once, there is absolutely no doubt that Apple's windowing paradigm is the best of the bunch. It certainly accounts for a good portion of Apple's dominance in the creative design industry dating back to the 90s.
I believe that recent versions of PS gained the ability to pop the canvas and pallets out of the main "root" window on Windows. You've still got the root window hanging out somewhere with the menubar in it, but you don't actually need to have anything in it. It's not optimal, but it's a limitation of the OS more than anything else.
(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting Apple's got the best scheme overall. There are certainly situations where Windows or X are clearly more efficient, and there are a lot of aspects of the OS X GUI that "bug" me. My "ideal" GUI would probably be some combination of Windows 2000, Mac OSX, and Xfce)
Color me interested: How do you keep your $2000 bike safe from theft? I imagine that it would be a very lucrative target.
If I had to bike around NYC, I'd probably use something like a well-maintained 15-year-old road bike. Not flashy, but still a darn nice ride. (Once you've ridden on a decent road bike for a while, it's *really* hard to go back to anything else)
Of course, "home" for me has fluctuated so much for me the past few years, by the time I settle my transportation situation, it's time to pack up and go someplace else. The next time I have to pay to drag my bike on a plane, I'm ditching it and putting the $90 toward buying a nice one for once.
Of course, if you *do* drive to New Jersey all the time (ie. you're one of those insane revere-commuters) there's a strong argument for keeping your car parked in Secaucus or Hoboken (or Newark if you've got an armed guard).
Or just drop it all, and move to a cabin in the woods.
But considering that we burned the stuff in our cars, and painted every surface in our houses with the stuff for quite a long time without experiencing any sort of widespread lead poisoning pandemic.
Yes it's bad for you. But using the "think of the children" argument here doesn't make my point any less valid. A tiny amount of lead paint isn't a good thing either, and I agree that we should be monitoring imports and manufactured goods to make sure that they don't contain appreciable amounts of lead. However, compared to the amount of lead that every child in the industrialized world who grew up in the 20th century was exposed to, it's negligable.
Offtopic, but Google's been making some other new changes to GMail over the past few weeks. The most noticeable of them is that the disk space counter has been sped up dramatically. I'm at 4.3GB right now, which is close to 1.5 times as much space as I had two weeks ago.
Doubtful. I'm no expert, but I would imagine that the amount of lead you'll absorb by handling a small toy covered in lead paint is going to be at least several orders of magnitude less than what you'd be inhaling from the emissions of every car, truck, and bus on the planet (and at 1970s emissions standards) every day.
A small toy with a coat of leaded paint is relatively inert in comparison, and even if you scraped every ounce of paint off of the toy and ingested it, I'd bet that your total exposure would be considerably less. Granted, the effects of massive single doses are probably going to be quite different than long-term exposure, and you'd probably die if you did ingest that much of a heavy metal in one go.
Widespread use of lead paint is a bad thing, as is the widespread use of leaded gas. Lead's been conclusively shown to be a carcinogen and something you want to avoid if you can. That said, unless you eat the stuff or are exposed to minute amounts in aerosol form for a prolonged period of time, it's probably not going to do a whole lot of damage. The people who produced/imported those toys should indeed be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but I don't think it's cause for widespread panic yet.
The NYC system doesn't directly move people out of the city. That's done by Amtrak, NJTransit, MetroNorth, and the Long Island Railroad. Each of those have considerably higher fares than the MTA Subways and buses.
Also take comfort in the fact that your currency is actually worth something these days. For the 21st Century, the US has taken over from Argentina to become the world capital for horrendously poor and irresponsible economic policy.
You can get a NYC monthly subway/bus pas for $76 the last time I checked.
Funny bit about urban planning, huh? It's one thing that we got completely and profoundly wrong in the past century. Suburbia was a compromise between dense urban areas and rural villages that never quite panned out, and left us with an unsustainable infrastructure, with all sorts of lovely side effects, among which included the demise of the concept of local business.
Oddly enough, the one place I lived where I never regretted not owning a car was Alaska. Granted, I never lived there during the winter when things would have been quite different, but public transportation and my bike were more than adequate.
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
I like Open Source software and Mozilla as much as the next guy, but doesn't it make sense to have your embedded controls be tightly integrated with the Operating System? I'd rather not need to have both IE and Gecko loaded into memory whenever I run Winamp.
Can I be the one to go out on a limb and blame the Ivy League for this?
The widespread general consensus I get from my fellow science majors (I'm a 3rd-year Physics Undergrad) is that state-run schools in the US provide a considerably more rigorous and difficult curriculum than their more prestigious private school counterparts do.
Of course, I'm obviously biased in this regard, but I can't help but get the impression that the Ivy League (and the private education system in general) has turned into a playground for the wealthy. I mean... they admit to lowering their own standards (considerably) for the children of their own alumni.
George Bush went to Yale. Enough said.
And of course, once it comes time to find a job, I have no doubt that the private school kid is going to get an automatic leg up.
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to teach IT majors something like Python that they'd actually have a decent chance of using?
Honestly, I can't fathom a reason as to why an IT guy would need to know C or VB.
I hate to be the person to jump in and say this, but: PC games have had online play since the dawn of time.
It's not something that Microsoft invented for the XBox, and it's not even remotely new. Although they've done a very admirable job of putting a nice interface on it, and marketing it to every 14 year old in North America. It's nothing particularly new, special, or innovative.
Nintendo shook things up, turned things in a direction where they've never gone before, and then had the balls to sell their console for half the price of everyone else (ie. so that their target audience could actually afford it, which is a concept increasingly lost to the console vendors these days)
Likewise, if you really think we ARE going to be developing more consoles like the XBox and PS3 from now on, we'd probably benefit from a console monoculture (ie. a standardized platform, considering that all Microsoft and Sony have been doing is to make incremental upgrades to their products). Platform-exclusive games also *suck* for the consumer.
... and a government that's doing everything its power to kill off all of those things.
Have you not been following the news lately? The child healthcare bill got struck down. Even the "think of the children" argument isn't good enough to support socialized healthcare in America (although it has thus far worked on every other piece of legislation where it's been brought up).
The US Dollar is certainly tanking, and the Iraq war has no end in sight. Both of these are "very bad things", but I'm not 100% convinced that one is causing the other. I was under the impression that our current economic problems were largely a result of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry.
That said, Iraq's not helping.
At WWDC 2006, he mentioned that a few big features of Leopard were still under wraps to avoid being ripped off by Microsoft, or (more likely) because they weren't complete, and wouldn't be announced until the product ships...
My guess at this point is that it was just hype, but who knows?
What ever happened to those "extra features" Steve promised way back when Leopard was announced?
Can they please please please rewrite the Finder and the associated Open/Save controls from scratch? Managing files on OS X feels so awkward compared to every other OS out there. Hopefully the leopard finder will at the very least be properly multithreaded.
That said, I wasn't terribly excited for Leopard, as I had no real interest in Time Machine or the other "blockbuster" features. However, looking over the official feature list reveals some tantalizing treats. There are some especially nice developer/unix features -- DTrace, extensive support for Ruby, and 'bridges' to allow Ruby and Python apps to enjoy Cocoa and the OSX scripting interfaces. The Cocoa bridges should be immediately drool-inducing to Ruby and Python developers.
It's not in the list, but perhaps the biggest technological advance (in my opinion) is that Leopard will supposedly be completely resolution-independent, paving the way for very-high-resolution displays.
Looking to the future, Apple's next big move *needs* to be the implementation of a true metadata filesystem (preferably using ZFS). They can't let Microsoft beat them to it, and ZFS is simply too cool to pass up.
And to be perfectly, fair it would also be keeping with the team's history to continue the next two games in a similar fashion, and then choke on final four, losing to a team that nobody had ever heard of.
And naturally, there will be riots in regardless of whichever team wins the series.
To be perfectly fair, they're playing against a team that most people have never even heard of.
Can you provide examples of countries in which that's actually happened?
Right. America's not communist. I don't think you could seriously make that argument, as we spent most of the 20th century defining communism as "any form of liberalism currently not embraced by America"
The Soviet sort of Communism is indeed on the decline. It might have been sound in theory, but it was quickly overrun by corruption (the real enemy) and the political systems evolved to counter that. You could also say that the sort "democracy" that we had in 1920 is also on the decline, and be perfectly correct in that assumption. It all depends upon how you mince your words.
China's playing it by the book. They're going through their capitalist phase (and making a killing off of it in the process). Whether or not they'll eventually close their doors and embrace "real" communism remains to be seen (although history seems to suggest this, as China's been an astonishingly introverted nation for pretty much all of recorded history up until now). If that does come to pass, it will (at least initially) be a 'very bad thing' for the rest of us, regardless of which economic religion you subscribe to.
Socialism, communism's less intimidating cousin, on the other hand, is far from dead, and has more or less been accepted in some form or another across the industrialized world (apart from the US, which has spent far too much effort fighting the reds to allow such a thing to happen). Although communism was never proven to be a successful economic system, socialist-capitalist policies (ie. nationalized healthcare) have proven to be extremely popular and successful in nations that have the economic resources to support them.
We have the Most Wanted List. That's good enough for me.
Unless you're being formally charged or investigated for a crime (ie. there's a legally-issued warrant), the government has no business doing this behind our backs.
But seriously. If there really were 755,000 "terrorists" in our midst, such a high level of dissent should be a pretty clear indication that the government is doing something seriously wrong to be pissing off that many people.
1) There are no virtual desktops on OS X. Yet (ie. tomorrow). Nevertheless, this is irrelevant because....
2) The concept of a "mainwindow" has never existed in Mac OS, even going back to the 80s. Every document gets its own window, and there is a permanent menubar for whatever application is in focus at the top of the screen. This is probably the single most distinctive aspect of Mac OS. As long as one of the documents is in focus, the whole application is in focus (X11 is perhaps vaguely similar in this regard)
3) When Photoshop loses focus (ie. you're working in something that is distinctively NOT Photoshop), the pallets disappear, but any open documents stay visible. This is standard behavior for all Mac OS applications -- even MS Word hides its toolbars when it loses focus. Think about it -- why would you want to see another application's tool pallets when you're not working in it? Restoring focus restores the pallets to their previous location.
Ah. I suppose I was a bit unclear.
Windows' problem is not a technical one. IIRC, Windows 98 "properly" supported multi-monitor displays out of the box, and the support subsequently improved in Win2k and XP. I used to use Windows in a Multi-Monitor configuration all the time, and agree that it's about on par (if not superior) to Apple these days. There were also various extensions that ATI and nVidia added with their drivers that made the experience a bit smoother (ie. they did a better job of "remembering" where windows are supposed should be placed if an application is quit and re-opened).
Windows' problem is a conceptual one. The whole concept of "root" windows is arguably the Operating System's greatest limitation. Office did away with it in 2000 IIRC, and just gave each document its own window and item on the taskbar. Windows' metaphor of a document originally assumed that a given document will only ever need to interact with documents of the same type within the same application, hence the root windows. Apple took a more "multimedia" approach, giving us applications like ClarisWorks, which is still more or less unparalleled in its ability to seamlessly integrate dissimilar media types and sources into a single document. History has more or less proven that Apple's approach was the better of the two, and the whole "one app does it all" paradigm (ie. Microsoft Works) fell into obscurity.
I'd also peg this as the reason why Apple does drag-and-drop between applications SO much better. Microsoft's system of inter-application objects never really worked properly -- try embedding a not-officially-supported media file into powerpoint, and you'll see what I mean. Apple (and Quicktime especially) handle this much better -- if you install the proper (FOSS!) codec, you can seamlessly embed Flash (FLV) videos into any application that supports the Quicktime framework, which is virtually all of them -- iMovie, Final Cut, iTunes, Keynote, etc.....
Since then, Microsoft's been tweaking their "Window" metaphor to more closely match Apple's, and have been largely successful with it. However, vestiges of the "old way" are still seen in Applications like Photoshop. Because of the menubar issue, Adobe can't efficiently port Photoshop to Windows without ditching the root window (even though the technical limitations requiring the window were removed years ago). In order to do so, each canvas would require its own menubar, which would be hideously impractical unless the number of menu options were significantly reduced so that they'd fit (which wouldn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right).
As is its nature, X has of course had this capability since its inception, but like virtually every other aspect of X, it's so difficult to use and configure, it hardly ever gets used.
Multi-monitor support is one of the coolest and tragically underused technologies out there, and it's useful across the board -- have your source open on one monitor while writing a paper on the other, edit video on one monitor and preview on the other, canvas on one monitor - pallete on the other, code on one monitor, web preview on the other, presentation on one monitor, lecture notes on the other, and the list goes on and on and on.
Big honking LCDs are dirt-cheap these days, and the productivity increase you'll see by adding an extra monitor (or just having one big high-res monitor) are incredible. I've been cursing the heavens for the past few months, as I've been stuck on a tiny 12" 1024x768 PowerBook for the past few months -- great machine, but I find myself considerably less productive without a big screen (or more than one)
Can you say "Killer App"?
I was skeptical until I started poking around, and 2.4 looks like it just might be GIMP's time to come into the limelight. I've always hated it pretty strongly, but if they can pull together decent Mac/Windows ports, they'll likely have a winner on their hands.
The single-window paradigm is a limitation of Windows, and not necessarily Photoshop. The mac version handles multiple monitors gracefully, and always has. The tool palettes also disappear when the app's not in focus -- there's no reason why they need to be separate windows, or even visible when the app's not being used.
Photoshop is also one of the few apps where the "Menus at the top" scheme makes sense virtually all the time. There are cases in which I don't like it, but for applications like Photoshop or the GIMP, which commonly manage several windows at once, there is absolutely no doubt that Apple's windowing paradigm is the best of the bunch. It certainly accounts for a good portion of Apple's dominance in the creative design industry dating back to the 90s.
I believe that recent versions of PS gained the ability to pop the canvas and pallets out of the main "root" window on Windows. You've still got the root window hanging out somewhere with the menubar in it, but you don't actually need to have anything in it. It's not optimal, but it's a limitation of the OS more than anything else.
(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting Apple's got the best scheme overall. There are certainly situations where Windows or X are clearly more efficient, and there are a lot of aspects of the OS X GUI that "bug" me. My "ideal" GUI would probably be some combination of Windows 2000, Mac OSX, and Xfce)
Color me interested: How do you keep your $2000 bike safe from theft? I imagine that it would be a very lucrative target.
If I had to bike around NYC, I'd probably use something like a well-maintained 15-year-old road bike. Not flashy, but still a darn nice ride. (Once you've ridden on a decent road bike for a while, it's *really* hard to go back to anything else)
Of course, "home" for me has fluctuated so much for me the past few years, by the time I settle my transportation situation, it's time to pack up and go someplace else. The next time I have to pay to drag my bike on a plane, I'm ditching it and putting the $90 toward buying a nice one for once.
Of course, if you *do* drive to New Jersey all the time (ie. you're one of those insane revere-commuters) there's a strong argument for keeping your car parked in Secaucus or Hoboken (or Newark if you've got an armed guard).
Or just drop it all, and move to a cabin in the woods.
Right.
But considering that we burned the stuff in our cars, and painted every surface in our houses with the stuff for quite a long time without experiencing any sort of widespread lead poisoning pandemic.
Yes it's bad for you. But using the "think of the children" argument here doesn't make my point any less valid. A tiny amount of lead paint isn't a good thing either, and I agree that we should be monitoring imports and manufactured goods to make sure that they don't contain appreciable amounts of lead. However, compared to the amount of lead that every child in the industrialized world who grew up in the 20th century was exposed to, it's negligable.
It's just like the guide says. Don't Panic.
Offtopic, but Google's been making some other new changes to GMail over the past few weeks. The most noticeable of them is that the disk space counter has been sped up dramatically. I'm at 4.3GB right now, which is close to 1.5 times as much space as I had two weeks ago.
You're absolutely right. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame..
It'll never take off.
Doubtful. I'm no expert, but I would imagine that the amount of lead you'll absorb by handling a small toy covered in lead paint is going to be at least several orders of magnitude less than what you'd be inhaling from the emissions of every car, truck, and bus on the planet (and at 1970s emissions standards) every day.
A small toy with a coat of leaded paint is relatively inert in comparison, and even if you scraped every ounce of paint off of the toy and ingested it, I'd bet that your total exposure would be considerably less. Granted, the effects of massive single doses are probably going to be quite different than long-term exposure, and you'd probably die if you did ingest that much of a heavy metal in one go.
Widespread use of lead paint is a bad thing, as is the widespread use of leaded gas. Lead's been conclusively shown to be a carcinogen and something you want to avoid if you can. That said, unless you eat the stuff or are exposed to minute amounts in aerosol form for a prolonged period of time, it's probably not going to do a whole lot of damage. The people who produced/imported those toys should indeed be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but I don't think it's cause for widespread panic yet.
The NYC system doesn't directly move people out of the city. That's done by Amtrak, NJTransit, MetroNorth, and the Long Island Railroad. Each of those have considerably higher fares than the MTA Subways and buses.
Also take comfort in the fact that your currency is actually worth something these days. For the 21st Century, the US has taken over from Argentina to become the world capital for horrendously poor and irresponsible economic policy.
You can get a NYC monthly subway/bus pas for $76 the last time I checked.
Funny bit about urban planning, huh? It's one thing that we got completely and profoundly wrong in the past century. Suburbia was a compromise between dense urban areas and rural villages that never quite panned out, and left us with an unsustainable infrastructure, with all sorts of lovely side effects, among which included the demise of the concept of local business.
Oddly enough, the one place I lived where I never regretted not owning a car was Alaska. Granted, I never lived there during the winter when things would have been quite different, but public transportation and my bike were more than adequate.
A stepladder is provided as part of the safety equipment.