There is a whole lot of philosophical circle-jerkery going on here to rationalize a very simple position -- Stallman doesn't like the Pirate Party because piracy makes F/OSS software comparatively less attractive than commercial software. That is to say, the major competition among the tech-savvy is not $200 Windows vs. $0 Linux it's between $0 Windows vs. $0 Linux.
Stallman would like nothing more than for Windows (& all other commercial software) to have a 100% foolproof antipiracy scheme out of nothing more than simple free-market economics.
I got the impression that the writer didn't understand, either. Can any of you chemists/physicists explain this phenomena in layman's terms for us?
Intuitively, anything that happens spontaneously (e.g. water falling down in a gravitational field) must be downwards in free energy or else it wouldn't happen (with any significant probability). So you know that when you pour together your rum and coke into a glass, the final state (uniform mix) must be lower in free energy than the initial state (rum on the bottom, coke on top).
Slightly less intuitively, you can understand it very simply with a lattice model of solution under the assumption that there are no energetic effects (true to first order). Imagine the solvent as a lattice in which each square/cube (2D or 3D, your choice) can be occupied by solute or not -- now count up the configurations that correspond to a mixed solution versus an unmixed solution. That difference is configurational entropy and drives it to seek the macroscopic state with the most microscopic realizations since, in the absence of significant energetic effects, every microscopic state is equally likely.
... if they don't collect the IP address of the computer requesting the update? Just send it to "the internet" and hope that the routers magically send it to the right computer? Multicast? TOR-WGA?
The real protection of privacy should (IMHO) come from the fact that your ISP ought to require a court order anytime someone wants to look through their DHCP records to match an IP address with a real person. If they don't, then you should take a very hard look at their policy for discretionary (aka, non-legally compelled) disclosure and see if it meets your needs.
This is, incidentally, why the "street address" analogy is somewhat inapt -- there is a public dictionary mapping street addresses to names or, if you are unlisted, they can physically locate you. OTOH, you can't drive to 141.30.219.76 (yes, that's currently my IP -- OMG I posted personal information on the internet.
[ For the wiseasses that are going to whois that, yes, you can figure out what university I'm at right now. That narrows it down to a few dozen city blocks filled with many thousands of students using the school network. I'm fairly confident you couldn't find out anything about me without the IT department's help. ]
My personal experience with a Inspiron 1520 is that whole disk encryption significantly reduces battery life, which is a real usability problem.
Most likely, when I get back to the states (I only encrypted for some overseas travel anyway), I will decrypt it and move back to an encrypted truecrypt container for the small number of documents that are really sensitive.
People who suggest 'just write a patch' to put ZFS in Linux don't realize how much work it would be. Even after all that work you'd end up with a legally-questionable, difficult to distribute, suitable for personal use only version of ZFS which would probably be less reliable than the FUSE version. I can't imagine why nobody has stepped up to do it yet!
(1) I stand corrected as to the technical difficulties in the task.
(2) Distribution and legality would be easy -- just distribute it as source code + patches to the normal linux build system, which cannot possibly illegal. Let the end-user decide whether he feels that his actions violate the spirit of the GPL (violating the words is conceded, but it's ridiculous on its face that the wording is not flexible enough to allow the end user to basically compile both separately and link them together.)
I've long been immensely frustrated that you can't get kernel-space ZFS (sorry FUSE) compiled into a Linux kernel because of inane licensing issues*. Someone should write a patch for those of us that want to compile it ourselves on the theory that the FSF would be insane to sue a personal user of open-source software for daring to compile it with other open source software of a different flavor.
* Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, prohibits linking with code under certain licenses, such as CDDL, the license ZFS is released under. [Wikipedia]
but the freedom to spend/waste money you own is sacrosanct.
Why phrase it that way? The way I see it, I support my own freedom to spend money on things that I find valuable. As a tolerable (but yes, somewhat irritating at times) side effect of that freedom, I have to let you waste your money on silly trifles. Without your freedom to waste money, I can have no freedom to spend it.
When phrased in that way, the symmetry of the situation becomes readily apparent as does the more fundamental purpose of the protection in the first place -- that value is a subjective concept.
The professor is going to jail not for problems with observing the contract, but for breaking a pretty serious national security law.
Yes, but the contract makes clear that the information being disclosed is, in fact, protected. I would be more sympathetic to his position if the national security implications were a total mystery to him, instead of being clearly laid out.
I do truck with signing a contract that lays out very explicitly what obligations and restrictions to which you you are voluntarily agreeing. He knew (or absolutely should have known) that when you sign a contract to consult for the DOD, you are accepting these restrictions.
This is about as much YRO (which has meant YR for a long time now anyway) as any other mundane contractual disputes that turn up.
Your corvette is useless for doing anything other than dragging a maximum of two people around (with minimal luggage). No argument that they are a lot of fun to drive (if the police don't catch you). But, that is all they can really do.
You don't get to define what the term useful means as applied to my possessions. What's useful is something that satisfies my wants and desires. Period. There is no objective measure that you can apply to the happiness of others -- it makes no sense to tell someone that they will be just as happy with a pepperoni pizza as a sausage pizza, their enjoyment is something that is entirely subjective.
This is exactly the thing that I was ranting about in my GP! I don't want to live in a bland utilitarian world in which aesthetic and enjoyment are no longer valid reasons to want something. I don't want to justify every nice thing I have to some bean counter who sees the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Romanticism is not dead, not in America and I hope to god that it never will be.
They are selling it as MORE, not less, because there is MORE community, more local services and shops within walking distance, MORE connection with a MORE secure local economy that is MORE reliable, intimate and connected to servicing other local economy relationships of interdependence.
No thanks. I'm all for local control and if that's the kind of locality you would like to live in, I really do wish you the best. Unfortunately, this won't work for me on so many levels.
Let's start with the basics -- I live about a stone's throw from each of my neighbors and I like it that way. I would not chose to live at much higher density because I like having my space. Moreover, it removes the sources of petty conflict (random e.g. that's fresh in my mind: my friend got the police called on him for working on his truck in the driveway of his home, the cop had to politely explain to his neighbor that there's nothing illegal with that, even if it's loud and smelly). Similarly, I was reading about places that don't allow line drying (http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/lifestyles/home_garden/article/H-CLOT26_20090625-185602/276372/) because they don't like the way it looks. As people live closer and closer together, they get more and more meddlesome. God forbid I should burn my leaves instead of taking them to the city-approved dump where they can charge me $2/bag to take leaves!
[As an aside, I always find this very puzzling -- I know all my neighbors and their families and kids' names, my friend that lives in a apartment buildings and rowhouses and don't know any of their neighbors. As far as I can see, living in closer proximity does not, in fact, actually create intimacy but actually causes people to retreat further into their personal space. By you logic, Manhattan should be an oasis of personable and pleasantly polite folks.]
I don't want to have to spend $20 grand every 5 years or so to stay with a current vehicle if my town can be designed to provide most of my needs and I can just walk everywhere, and go HIRE a car on those rare occasions I do need a vehicle. What kind of moronic society continues to build an oil dependent mode of city plan when we are this close to peak oil anyway?
I have never spent $20k on a car and they've each lasted me in excess of 10 years. You don't have to stay current with the latest model if you don't want to (isn't freedom grand). As for the city development, why don't we agree, as I posited at the top, that your city can develop in line with your (plural) shared priorities and mine can develop like we like our cities. Also, there are no traffic jams in my area -- there just aren't enough residents. And I enjoy my ride to and from work, it gives me some time to think and watch the pretty scenery go by.
Basically, the gist of what I'm saying is that you may have a wonderful solution for some people but don't try to force it on the rest of us because it's not well suited to us.
The problem with this approach is that it conceives our current technology as static -- it's not. The entire point of my post is that we should be focusing our research on new technologies that are not niche-oriented towards environmentalists but tailored to provide what the mass market wants in an environmentally friendly way.
For instance, look at the difference between the (original) Insight and the Prius. The former is, environmentally speaking, a much better car -- it can get 70-80 MPG if you drive it right. The latter is somewhat disappointing as a hybrid, getting 40-50MPG, but it's also as roomy as a regular sedan and has interior appointments more in line with its price range than the Insight. Of course you know which sold more.
Basically what I'm saying is that unless you plan is to impose some sort of external control and ram these cars (or anything else) down people's throats, you are going to have to cater to their needs. Doing so will mean at least acknowledging (you don't have to accept) the mindset that many of us have -- that we deserve to live well and that we don't accept solutions that don't meet our needs. I'm still an environmentalist at heart, but I firmly believe that the way out is not to deprive people but to create technology that gives us what we want in a sustainable way.
And I assure you sir, I cannot. Or, to put it another way, I will probably opt to spend additional funds to ensure that my vehicle is fun to drive.
On a broader note, I fear that the modern environmentalism is pushing in the wrong direction by becoming ascetic -- by telling us that our wants and desires are bad because they are bad for the environment instead of focusing on way to satisfy those wants in an environmentally friendly way. That philosophy has some appeal to a particular group of people but the majority of Americans (AFAICT) are not particularly receptive to the notion of self-deprivation for the greater good.
Moreover, it's does less practical good to convince people that drives a small car that get ~35MPG to switch to a car that gets 100MPG (a pie-in-the-sky number) than to get someone that drives a 15MPG truck to switch to a more efficient one that gets 25MPG. The former change reduces gas usage over a year (15k mi) by 270 gal, the latter by 400 (the real fault here is that we use the inverse scale, instead of reporting GPM). Doing so, however, requires a change in mindset -- it's not about how we can make an environmentally friendly vehicles, it's about how we can make this vehicle more environmentally friendly without compromising the characteristics that caused people to buy it in the first place.
Focusing on the efficiency of those larger cars & trucks (and sports cars), however, requires ditching the philosophy of asceticism and accepting that many people do not want to drive tiny underpowered cars (and they don't want to stop eating red meat or running the AC either, damnit) and working with them to minimize the impact of the cars they do drive, the meat they do eat and the AC they do run. If we can't get to there from here, then environmentalism will always be something that a few people care very strongly about and the rest of the population cares not at all.
I could kiss you for that post. I am a pretty big leftie (well, by American standards--here in Japan the same beliefs get me labeled a Nationalist--e.g. I think Japan should revoke Article 9 of the Constitution and rebuild their military and become a normal country again, China and Korea's whinges be damned), but I am vehemently pro-gun. It makes me fun at university functions.
Amen to that. I was out target practicing with the Pink Pistols (a gay gun advocacy group, link below) and they constantly say that they are much more warmly accepted at gun-shows and the like than they are at gay-rights conventions. As much as I am a liberal, this sort of behavior really irks me -- tolerance for competing views is in short supply.
Seriously? You think the weapons that civilians have on hand can take on the best-funded military the world has ever seen? You know, the one that has more resources than the next five biggest militaries COMBINED? I don't think you've thought about this very seriously.
125,000 troops in Iraq, the a country the size of California (with fewer people, I might add), you'd think we'd have this mopped up by now, except that somehow after the set-piece battle is done, it takes a whole lot of troops & police to create effective positive control over a civilian population. This is something Americans learned after the civil war -- the North won the war but the South very clearly won the reconstruction as the North (unfortunately) had neither the resources nor the political will to police the entire South to guarantee rights to the now-freed-slaves.
The military is a blunt weapon, not one that can be effectively used for fine-grained policing work. This is why the Soviets & company invested so much in secret police, becuase they needed a subtle way to control the masses in a fashion that didn't raise the public ire against them like the tanks did (the Chinese, since 1989 have advanced quite a bit in this respect). The E. German Stassi in particular had a file on every citizen -- this wasn't a massive waste, it was an integral part of a very effective system.
Now imagine that 125,000 man army spread across the entire US (or even just a region of it) with 60 million rifles and 65 million handguns (in 1994, gun ownership has only gone up since, especially after the last election). Even if the entire national guard joined the army (doubtful, many would defect and bring their weapons over the rebels anyway), there's still be ~500 armed civilians for each soldier.
Cites:
"A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (NSPOF), conducted in 1994, indicates that Americans own 192 million guns, with 36% of these consisting of rifles" from wikipedia.
[Note: this was a response to another, similar, reply to my OP -- yours got modded up, so I'm just copying the response with some edits to get more visibility. I don't know the proper etiquette for dealing with this situation.]
And part of the prevailing culture of England at the time was an attempt to justify imperial policies as being in the best interest of the colonized (often dubbed "the white man's burden"). So it's not just that you have white people, it's the message that it is the solemn duty of the white person to intervene (at times by force) in the affairs of others because he is the only one morally pure enough not to be tempted to evil by the power to rule them.
It's mythology with a very specific political and cultural message to it -- that the world needs white people to save them from their own inability to control themselves. I wouldn't really dub it racist, it's more of an interventionist-imperial thing really. IOW, it's not about which race is better than which, it's about the fact that you should take it into your own hands to go fix the evils in the world. That last thing Tolkien would want to suggest is that the people of the Shire should mind their own damned business instead of going on "adventures" in other peoples' countries in a misguided (but noble, of course, nothing here imputes the intentions) quest to rid the world of evil.
So much evil has been done by those with good intentions but poor understanding that believed they knew how to solve the world's problem. The obvious one is US intervention in the middle east: supporting the Shah against Mosaddeq, supporting the Taliban against the Soviets, supporting Saddam against the Iranians, supporting Kuwait against Saddam, removing Saddam. To me, it's quite clear that every time we try to rid the world of some obvious evil (and, let's face it, Saddam was a seriously evil human being, as were the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Ayatollahs in Iran) we only end up making things much worse.
Of course, I freely admit that I'm something of an isolationist (at least when it comes to military force, I'm all for the free trade of ideas and goods) so of course I'm biased like that.
Besides. According to Tolkien, he wanted to write mythology for England. England happens to be a land of white people. Middle Earth, IIRC, was supposed to be pre-current-England England. So most of the people are white. Because England is.
And part of the prevailing culture of England at the time was an attempt to justify imperial policies as being in the best interest of the colonized (often dubbed "the white man's burden"). So it's not just that you have white people, it's the message that it is the solemn duty of the white person to intervene (at times by force) in the affairs of others because he is the only one morally pure enough not to be tempted to evil by the power to rule them.
It's mythology with a very specific political and cultural message to it -- that the world needs white people to save them from their own inability to control themselves. I wouldn't really dub it racist, it's more of an interventionist-imperial thing really: -- the last thing that Tolkien would suggest that the people of the Shire do is mind their own business and not go mucking about having adventures in other peoples' countries.
In response, STEAM announced that users can opt-in to SSL for their protocols for an extra $1 per 10GB (to cover buying a few SSL accelerator cards). Australia briefly responded by blocking port 443 until the outcry of a million Aussies unable to get their email, buy porn or surf ebay.au with pitchforks made them "reconsider" the idea.
Just a random thought, on many mobile devices (where missed key-presses are more common), the screen shows only the least character pressed (e.g. h, *u **n,...) . This makes shoulder surfing much harder but also give feedback to the user about whether he's doing it right. Also, no, backspace does not reveal the previous letter -- once it's masked it never comes back.
If you wanted to be even more hardcore, mask the last letter (or, if you are into the whole UNIX paradigm, don't echo it back, but you should be using keys for SSH anyway) after 2 seconds or the next keypress.
Perhaps this was not the best choice in films if you want your people not to believe that "even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
On the other hand, it does reinforce the notion that brown people are a fallen race of brutes that are incapable of even the most basic language, let alone organized self-government. If the Iranians start believing that canard, then there goes the revolution.
Then again, JRRT's solution is that a nice little white dude from England will come fix it up for you because he's so damned pure of spirit and incorruptible by evil (hah). Of course, he will bring with him some elves and dwarves (also white), a wizard with the surname "the white" and some other random white dude that claims the right to be King because his daddy was King and he has a nice looking sword (that apparently being a perfectly good reason to assert your right to absolute authority).
Somehow, I don't think the Ayatollahs want that conclusion sinking in either.
People expect that when they buy an unlimited mobile internet plan that it should automatically be able to tether too.
And I expect a pony for christmas, still not going to happen. Expectations mean exactly zero in contract law where there is a written agreement. In the case of the wireless carriers, the service agreement is quite clear that the unlimited mobile internet plan can only be used on the mobile device.
Now, if the literature or the salespeople lied about that when asked (you know, when you have an expectation it's a good idea to ask whether everyone else has it too, otherwise the contradiction in unspoken expectations can be quite unfortunate) you'd have a pretty good case for fraud and misrepresentation. I'd love to see some citations to the effect that there was any misrepresentation of the fact that unlimited mobile internet does not include tethering.
If I bought unlimited access, they I get unlimited access and I have the right to shift content I download to anywhere I want.
If you bought unlimited access, that would be true. The terms and conditions on my wireless service (Sprint w/ unlimited data but not the Pre) simply do not state this. The terms are quite clear that I have unlimited bandwidth for use on my phone but that I may not use that bandwidth from any other device (without paying for the phone-as-modem plan). No sales person ever represented otherwise to me and I would like to see some citation to a claim to the contrary which would be the linchpin of any claim of fraud.
Your argument that you have the right to shift content to wherever you like makes no sense -- you have a written agreement with the carrier that clearly delineates the rights and responsibilities of both parties. The fact that you don't like the term or that you believe you have the "right" to ignore those terms is entirely meaningless. In fact, if you want to talk about fraud, it's breach of contrast to willfully violate the terms of your agreement with the wireless carrier.
As a side matter, why shouldn't the carriers (provided they advertise such a service honestly) be able to sell an "unlimited internet for your mobile device" plan? If the terms are upfront and the salefolk don't lie about it, it's up to consumers to decide if such a plan meets their needs.
I wish people would just STOP assuming that the weight of a car is a good representation of how it would do in a crash. What really matters is the materials used to construct the car, the method used to construct the car, and how the car is engineered. Why do people assume you need a (literal) ton, or more of steel to move a 180lb person safely?
Because the real-world data show a very high correlation between mass and survival odds. Of course, good methods and smart engineering help a lot (newer cars are also correlating with living, not surprisingly) but that fact remains that heavier cars just plain do better.
Introducing bigger cars into the market is a zero sum game for car safety, and a net safety loss for pedestrians. This car would be safe enough without all those SUV's.
A common but somehow very persistent myth. More than half of fatalities are of the form car + tree/guardrail/wall/... -- we can't make those things less massive. It's a fairly basic result of conservation of momentum that when objects collide, the lighter one get the most energy.
The highest death rates and lowest fuel consumption are for the lightest vehicles. Heavier vehicles have lower death rates and consume more fuel per mile, but the safety benefits of the added weight diminish as vehicles get heavier and heavier (meanwhile fuel consumption continues to increase). The optimum fleet mix to enhance safety would include fewer of the heaviest vehicles as well as the lightest ones.
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There is a whole lot of philosophical circle-jerkery going on here to rationalize a very simple position -- Stallman doesn't like the Pirate Party because piracy makes F/OSS software comparatively less attractive than commercial software. That is to say, the major competition among the tech-savvy is not $200 Windows vs. $0 Linux it's between $0 Windows vs. $0 Linux.
Stallman would like nothing more than for Windows (& all other commercial software) to have a 100% foolproof antipiracy scheme out of nothing more than simple free-market economics.
We discussed this to death: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1933254
I got the impression that the writer didn't understand, either. Can any of you chemists/physicists explain this phenomena in layman's terms for us?
Intuitively, anything that happens spontaneously (e.g. water falling down in a gravitational field) must be downwards in free energy or else it wouldn't happen (with any significant probability). So you know that when you pour together your rum and coke into a glass, the final state (uniform mix) must be lower in free energy than the initial state (rum on the bottom, coke on top).
Slightly less intuitively, you can understand it very simply with a lattice model of solution under the assumption that there are no energetic effects (true to first order). Imagine the solvent as a lattice in which each square/cube (2D or 3D, your choice) can be occupied by solute or not -- now count up the configurations that correspond to a mixed solution versus an unmixed solution. That difference is configurational entropy and drives it to seek the macroscopic state with the most microscopic realizations since, in the absence of significant energetic effects, every microscopic state is equally likely.
Of course, it's on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_of_mixing
... if they don't collect the IP address of the computer requesting the update? Just send it to "the internet" and hope that the routers magically send it to the right computer? Multicast? TOR-WGA?
The real protection of privacy should (IMHO) come from the fact that your ISP ought to require a court order anytime someone wants to look through their DHCP records to match an IP address with a real person. If they don't, then you should take a very hard look at their policy for discretionary (aka, non-legally compelled) disclosure and see if it meets your needs.
This is, incidentally, why the "street address" analogy is somewhat inapt -- there is a public dictionary mapping street addresses to names or, if you are unlisted, they can physically locate you. OTOH, you can't drive to 141.30.219.76 (yes, that's currently my IP -- OMG I posted personal information on the internet.
[ For the wiseasses that are going to whois that, yes, you can figure out what university I'm at right now. That narrows it down to a few dozen city blocks filled with many thousands of students using the school network. I'm fairly confident you couldn't find out anything about me without the IT department's help. ]
My personal experience with a Inspiron 1520 is that whole disk encryption significantly reduces battery life, which is a real usability problem.
Most likely, when I get back to the states (I only encrypted for some overseas travel anyway), I will decrypt it and move back to an encrypted truecrypt container for the small number of documents that are really sensitive.
People who suggest 'just write a patch' to put ZFS in Linux don't realize how much work it would be. Even after all that work you'd end up with a legally-questionable, difficult to distribute, suitable for personal use only version of ZFS which would probably be less reliable than the FUSE version. I can't imagine why nobody has stepped up to do it yet!
(1) I stand corrected as to the technical difficulties in the task.
(2) Distribution and legality would be easy -- just distribute it as source code + patches to the normal linux build system, which cannot possibly illegal. Let the end-user decide whether he feels that his actions violate the spirit of the GPL (violating the words is conceded, but it's ridiculous on its face that the wording is not flexible enough to allow the end user to basically compile both separately and link them together.)
I've long been immensely frustrated that you can't get kernel-space ZFS (sorry FUSE) compiled into a Linux kernel because of inane licensing issues*. Someone should write a patch for those of us that want to compile it ourselves on the theory that the FSF would be insane to sue a personal user of open-source software for daring to compile it with other open source software of a different flavor.
* Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, prohibits linking with code under certain licenses, such as CDDL, the license ZFS is released under. [Wikipedia]
but the freedom to spend/waste money you own is sacrosanct.
Why phrase it that way? The way I see it, I support my own freedom to spend money on things that I find valuable. As a tolerable (but yes, somewhat irritating at times) side effect of that freedom, I have to let you waste your money on silly trifles. Without your freedom to waste money, I can have no freedom to spend it.
When phrased in that way, the symmetry of the situation becomes readily apparent as does the more fundamental purpose of the protection in the first place -- that value is a subjective concept.
The professor is going to jail not for problems with observing the contract, but for breaking a pretty serious national security law.
Yes, but the contract makes clear that the information being disclosed is, in fact, protected. I would be more sympathetic to his position if the national security implications were a total mystery to him, instead of being clearly laid out.
Especially after being told not to...
I don't truck much with "being told" what to do.
I do truck with signing a contract that lays out very explicitly what obligations and restrictions to which you you are voluntarily agreeing. He knew (or absolutely should have known) that when you sign a contract to consult for the DOD, you are accepting these restrictions.
This is about as much YRO (which has meant YR for a long time now anyway) as any other mundane contractual disputes that turn up.
Your corvette is useless for doing anything other than dragging a maximum of two people around (with minimal luggage). No argument that they are a lot of fun to drive (if the police don't catch you). But, that is all they can really do.
You don't get to define what the term useful means as applied to my possessions. What's useful is something that satisfies my wants and desires. Period. There is no objective measure that you can apply to the happiness of others -- it makes no sense to tell someone that they will be just as happy with a pepperoni pizza as a sausage pizza, their enjoyment is something that is entirely subjective.
This is exactly the thing that I was ranting about in my GP! I don't want to live in a bland utilitarian world in which aesthetic and enjoyment are no longer valid reasons to want something. I don't want to justify every nice thing I have to some bean counter who sees the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Romanticism is not dead, not in America and I hope to god that it never will be.
They are selling it as MORE, not less, because there is MORE community, more local services and shops within walking distance, MORE connection with a MORE secure local economy that is MORE reliable, intimate and connected to servicing other local economy relationships of interdependence.
No thanks. I'm all for local control and if that's the kind of locality you would like to live in, I really do wish you the best. Unfortunately, this won't work for me on so many levels.
Let's start with the basics -- I live about a stone's throw from each of my neighbors and I like it that way. I would not chose to live at much higher density because I like having my space. Moreover, it removes the sources of petty conflict (random e.g. that's fresh in my mind: my friend got the police called on him for working on his truck in the driveway of his home, the cop had to politely explain to his neighbor that there's nothing illegal with that, even if it's loud and smelly). Similarly, I was reading about places that don't allow line drying (http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/lifestyles/home_garden/article/H-CLOT26_20090625-185602/276372/) because they don't like the way it looks. As people live closer and closer together, they get more and more meddlesome. God forbid I should burn my leaves instead of taking them to the city-approved dump where they can charge me $2/bag to take leaves!
[As an aside, I always find this very puzzling -- I know all my neighbors and their families and kids' names, my friend that lives in a apartment buildings and rowhouses and don't know any of their neighbors. As far as I can see, living in closer proximity does not, in fact, actually create intimacy but actually causes people to retreat further into their personal space. By you logic, Manhattan should be an oasis of personable and pleasantly polite folks.]
I don't want to have to spend $20 grand every 5 years or so to stay with a current vehicle if my town can be designed to provide most of my needs and I can just walk everywhere, and go HIRE a car on those rare occasions I do need a vehicle. What kind of moronic society continues to build an oil dependent mode of city plan when we are this close to peak oil anyway?
I have never spent $20k on a car and they've each lasted me in excess of 10 years. You don't have to stay current with the latest model if you don't want to (isn't freedom grand). As for the city development, why don't we agree, as I posited at the top, that your city can develop in line with your (plural) shared priorities and mine can develop like we like our cities. Also, there are no traffic jams in my area -- there just aren't enough residents. And I enjoy my ride to and from work, it gives me some time to think and watch the pretty scenery go by.
Basically, the gist of what I'm saying is that you may have a wonderful solution for some people but don't try to force it on the rest of us because it's not well suited to us.
The problem with this approach is that it conceives our current technology as static -- it's not. The entire point of my post is that we should be focusing our research on new technologies that are not niche-oriented towards environmentalists but tailored to provide what the mass market wants in an environmentally friendly way.
For instance, look at the difference between the (original) Insight and the Prius. The former is, environmentally speaking, a much better car -- it can get 70-80 MPG if you drive it right. The latter is somewhat disappointing as a hybrid, getting 40-50MPG, but it's also as roomy as a regular sedan and has interior appointments more in line with its price range than the Insight. Of course you know which sold more.
Basically what I'm saying is that unless you plan is to impose some sort of external control and ram these cars (or anything else) down people's throats, you are going to have to cater to their needs. Doing so will mean at least acknowledging (you don't have to accept) the mindset that many of us have -- that we deserve to live well and that we don't accept solutions that don't meet our needs. I'm still an environmentalist at heart, but I firmly believe that the way out is not to deprive people but to create technology that gives us what we want in a sustainable way.
Or, you can live with an underpowered vehicle.
And I assure you sir, I cannot. Or, to put it another way, I will probably opt to spend additional funds to ensure that my vehicle is fun to drive.
On a broader note, I fear that the modern environmentalism is pushing in the wrong direction by becoming ascetic -- by telling us that our wants and desires are bad because they are bad for the environment instead of focusing on way to satisfy those wants in an environmentally friendly way. That philosophy has some appeal to a particular group of people but the majority of Americans (AFAICT) are not particularly receptive to the notion of self-deprivation for the greater good.
Moreover, it's does less practical good to convince people that drives a small car that get ~35MPG to switch to a car that gets 100MPG (a pie-in-the-sky number) than to get someone that drives a 15MPG truck to switch to a more efficient one that gets 25MPG. The former change reduces gas usage over a year (15k mi) by 270 gal, the latter by 400 (the real fault here is that we use the inverse scale, instead of reporting GPM). Doing so, however, requires a change in mindset -- it's not about how we can make an environmentally friendly vehicles, it's about how we can make this vehicle more environmentally friendly without compromising the characteristics that caused people to buy it in the first place.
Focusing on the efficiency of those larger cars & trucks (and sports cars), however, requires ditching the philosophy of asceticism and accepting that many people do not want to drive tiny underpowered cars (and they don't want to stop eating red meat or running the AC either, damnit) and working with them to minimize the impact of the cars they do drive, the meat they do eat and the AC they do run. If we can't get to there from here, then environmentalism will always be something that a few people care very strongly about and the rest of the population cares not at all.
I could kiss you for that post. I am a pretty big leftie (well, by American standards--here in Japan the same beliefs get me labeled a Nationalist--e.g. I think Japan should revoke Article 9 of the Constitution and rebuild their military and become a normal country again, China and Korea's whinges be damned), but I am vehemently pro-gun. It makes me fun at university functions.
Amen to that. I was out target practicing with the Pink Pistols (a gay gun advocacy group, link below) and they constantly say that they are much more warmly accepted at gun-shows and the like than they are at gay-rights conventions. As much as I am a liberal, this sort of behavior really irks me -- tolerance for competing views is in short supply.
http://www.pinkpistols.org/
Seriously? You think the weapons that civilians have on hand can take on the best-funded military the world has ever seen? You know, the one that has more resources than the next five biggest militaries COMBINED? I don't think you've thought about this very seriously.
125,000 troops in Iraq, the a country the size of California (with fewer people, I might add), you'd think we'd have this mopped up by now, except that somehow after the set-piece battle is done, it takes a whole lot of troops & police to create effective positive control over a civilian population. This is something Americans learned after the civil war -- the North won the war but the South very clearly won the reconstruction as the North (unfortunately) had neither the resources nor the political will to police the entire South to guarantee rights to the now-freed-slaves.
The military is a blunt weapon, not one that can be effectively used for fine-grained policing work. This is why the Soviets & company invested so much in secret police, becuase they needed a subtle way to control the masses in a fashion that didn't raise the public ire against them like the tanks did (the Chinese, since 1989 have advanced quite a bit in this respect). The E. German Stassi in particular had a file on every citizen -- this wasn't a massive waste, it was an integral part of a very effective system.
Now imagine that 125,000 man army spread across the entire US (or even just a region of it) with 60 million rifles and 65 million handguns (in 1994, gun ownership has only gone up since, especially after the last election). Even if the entire national guard joined the army (doubtful, many would defect and bring their weapons over the rebels anyway), there's still be ~500 armed civilians for each soldier.
Cites:
"A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (NSPOF), conducted in 1994, indicates that Americans own 192 million guns, with 36% of these consisting of rifles" from wikipedia.
[Note: this was a response to another, similar, reply to my OP -- yours got modded up, so I'm just copying the response with some edits to get more visibility. I don't know the proper etiquette for dealing with this situation.]
And part of the prevailing culture of England at the time was an attempt to justify imperial policies as being in the best interest of the colonized (often dubbed "the white man's burden"). So it's not just that you have white people, it's the message that it is the solemn duty of the white person to intervene (at times by force) in the affairs of others because he is the only one morally pure enough not to be tempted to evil by the power to rule them.
It's mythology with a very specific political and cultural message to it -- that the world needs white people to save them from their own inability to control themselves. I wouldn't really dub it racist, it's more of an interventionist-imperial thing really. IOW, it's not about which race is better than which, it's about the fact that you should take it into your own hands to go fix the evils in the world. That last thing Tolkien would want to suggest is that the people of the Shire should mind their own damned business instead of going on "adventures" in other peoples' countries in a misguided (but noble, of course, nothing here imputes the intentions) quest to rid the world of evil.
So much evil has been done by those with good intentions but poor understanding that believed they knew how to solve the world's problem. The obvious one is US intervention in the middle east: supporting the Shah against Mosaddeq, supporting the Taliban against the Soviets, supporting Saddam against the Iranians, supporting Kuwait against Saddam, removing Saddam. To me, it's quite clear that every time we try to rid the world of some obvious evil (and, let's face it, Saddam was a seriously evil human being, as were the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Ayatollahs in Iran) we only end up making things much worse.
Of course, I freely admit that I'm something of an isolationist (at least when it comes to military force, I'm all for the free trade of ideas and goods) so of course I'm biased like that.
Besides. According to Tolkien, he wanted to write mythology for England. England happens to be a land of white people. Middle Earth, IIRC, was supposed to be pre-current-England England. So most of the people are white. Because England is.
And part of the prevailing culture of England at the time was an attempt to justify imperial policies as being in the best interest of the colonized (often dubbed "the white man's burden"). So it's not just that you have white people, it's the message that it is the solemn duty of the white person to intervene (at times by force) in the affairs of others because he is the only one morally pure enough not to be tempted to evil by the power to rule them.
It's mythology with a very specific political and cultural message to it -- that the world needs white people to save them from their own inability to control themselves. I wouldn't really dub it racist, it's more of an interventionist-imperial thing really: -- the last thing that Tolkien would suggest that the people of the Shire do is mind their own business and not go mucking about having adventures in other peoples' countries.
In response, STEAM announced that users can opt-in to SSL for their protocols for an extra $1 per 10GB (to cover buying a few SSL accelerator cards). Australia briefly responded by blocking port 443 until the outcry of a million Aussies unable to get their email, buy porn or surf ebay.au with pitchforks made them "reconsider" the idea.
Just a random thought, on many mobile devices (where missed key-presses are more common), the screen shows only the least character pressed (e.g. h, *u **n, ...) . This makes shoulder surfing much harder but also give feedback to the user about whether he's doing it right. Also, no, backspace does not reveal the previous letter -- once it's masked it never comes back.
If you wanted to be even more hardcore, mask the last letter (or, if you are into the whole UNIX paradigm, don't echo it back, but you should be using keys for SSH anyway) after 2 seconds or the next keypress.
Perhaps this was not the best choice in films if you want your people not to believe that "even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
On the other hand, it does reinforce the notion that brown people are a fallen race of brutes that are incapable of even the most basic language, let alone organized self-government. If the Iranians start believing that canard, then there goes the revolution.
Then again, JRRT's solution is that a nice little white dude from England will come fix it up for you because he's so damned pure of spirit and incorruptible by evil (hah). Of course, he will bring with him some elves and dwarves (also white), a wizard with the surname "the white" and some other random white dude that claims the right to be King because his daddy was King and he has a nice looking sword (that apparently being a perfectly good reason to assert your right to absolute authority).
Somehow, I don't think the Ayatollahs want that conclusion sinking in either.
Was anyone really expecting the greedy phone companies to give us tethering?
Was anyone really expecting unlimited mobile internet to include tethering?
Does anyone really think that unlimited data for your phone and unlimited data for your laptop are really the same (or so similar) as products?
Did people with these expectations bother to ask the salespeople to clarify or, failing that, to read their service agreement?
Do people on slashdot always have to ask annoyingly rhetorical questions instead of simply stating what they think in declarative sentences?
Did I just answer my own question?
People expect that when they buy an unlimited mobile internet plan that it should automatically be able to tether too.
And I expect a pony for christmas, still not going to happen. Expectations mean exactly zero in contract law where there is a written agreement. In the case of the wireless carriers, the service agreement is quite clear that the unlimited mobile internet plan can only be used on the mobile device.
Now, if the literature or the salespeople lied about that when asked (you know, when you have an expectation it's a good idea to ask whether everyone else has it too, otherwise the contradiction in unspoken expectations can be quite unfortunate) you'd have a pretty good case for fraud and misrepresentation. I'd love to see some citations to the effect that there was any misrepresentation of the fact that unlimited mobile internet does not include tethering.
If I bought unlimited access, they I get unlimited access and I have the right to shift content I download to anywhere I want.
If you bought unlimited access, that would be true. The terms and conditions on my wireless service (Sprint w/ unlimited data but not the Pre) simply do not state this. The terms are quite clear that I have unlimited bandwidth for use on my phone but that I may not use that bandwidth from any other device (without paying for the phone-as-modem plan). No sales person ever represented otherwise to me and I would like to see some citation to a claim to the contrary which would be the linchpin of any claim of fraud.
Your argument that you have the right to shift content to wherever you like makes no sense -- you have a written agreement with the carrier that clearly delineates the rights and responsibilities of both parties. The fact that you don't like the term or that you believe you have the "right" to ignore those terms is entirely meaningless. In fact, if you want to talk about fraud, it's breach of contrast to willfully violate the terms of your agreement with the wireless carrier.
As a side matter, why shouldn't the carriers (provided they advertise such a service honestly) be able to sell an "unlimited internet for your mobile device" plan? If the terms are upfront and the salefolk don't lie about it, it's up to consumers to decide if such a plan meets their needs.
I wish people would just STOP assuming that the weight of a car is a good representation of how it would do in a crash. What really matters is the materials used to construct the car, the method used to construct the car, and how the car is engineered. Why do people assume you need a (literal) ton, or more of steel to move a 180lb person safely?
Because the real-world data show a very high correlation between mass and survival odds. Of course, good methods and smart engineering help a lot (newer cars are also correlating with living, not surprisingly) but that fact remains that heavier cars just plain do better.
Introducing bigger cars into the market is a zero sum game for car safety, and a net safety loss for pedestrians.
This car would be safe enough without all those SUV's.
A common but somehow very persistent myth. More than half of fatalities are of the form car + tree/guardrail/wall/... -- we can't make those things less massive. It's a fairly basic result of conservation of momentum that when objects collide, the lighter one get the most energy.
The highest death rates and lowest fuel consumption are for the lightest
vehicles. Heavier vehicles have lower death rates and consume more fuel
per mile, but the safety benefits of the added weight diminish as vehicles
get heavier and heavier (meanwhile fuel consumption continues to increase).
The optimum fleet mix to enhance safety would include fewer of the heaviest
vehicles as well as the lightest ones.
http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4102.pdf [pdf]