Sure, there are knee-jerk environmentalists. Take any movement and I'll find you someone who takes that movement to its logical extreme. Christianity has Falwell. Conservatism has Coulter. Ad nauseum.
But I think you're missing that one of the largest, most prevalent streams of environmentalism isn't anti-nuclear, isn't anti-fossil fuel, perhaps isn't even anti-pesticide. It's simple conservation.
And you know, there are plenty of people working on things like low-emissions automobiles, more-insulative materials, and safer waste dumps.
The web is quickly turning into television - a bunch of stupid avertisements created by stupid people geared for stupid consumers. The web is still way better than anything else we got.
I disagree! The barriers to entry to the web are so much lower than they are to television that the web will never be reduced to TV's glossy (corporate) flash. Sure, some web sites will always be as you describe, fraught with ads and spyware, but try not to get too jaundiced. Web content has long been richer and more varied than television content, and I don't see this ever changing. I mean, for every one cable TV channel, there must be a hundred relatively in-depth blogs...
If your complaint is that our TV coverage is opinionated, then I've got news for you: it's always been that way. Newspapers have long held biases. Even now, we speak of "conservative" or "liberal" papers, and in Europe there are even a good number with a communist bent. And if your complaint is that newspapers have followed their profit motive to the expense of their coverage, then research the American journalism in the run-up to the Spanish-American war. Frankly, where it is possible to make money, money will be made. For better or worse, this is how all of capitalism works.
Just wanted to drop in one thing that I don't think has been stated here. The idea of traffic calming devices is not to make individual drivers calmer; the idea is to calm traffic on the aggregate. This might mean slowing it down, but more likely it implies reducing it in the first place. The environmental ideas are well known; sometimes however there is even the impetus of increasing sales by allowing people to more easily reach the stores they want to reach (ahem jaywalking) or simply to feel more comfortable. You encourage pedestrians and mass transit. Parking meters have nothing to do with this. As has now been said umpteen times, the parking meters are set up so that more people are able to park, if for shorter periods of time.
In fact let me just say that I heavily doubt that there is anything in this article that even vaguely has anything to do with smart growth. There is interest in Montreal in urban projects (a new tram line, the replacement of a freeway), but I can't recall any in that neighborhood. This Apple store will be right on Saint Catherine street, one of the busiest shopping drags in the town, which runs straight through downtown. Metro and pedestrian connectivity in the area is already very good and well-used, and you can only cut use of a major downtown artery so far. At best, implementing traffic calming here would be futile.
Let's not get too over the top here. No, I'm not a fan of Real ID either. I think it's expensive, kind of draconian, and largely unnecessary. But I am an American who has lived for recent multiyear segments in Canada and France, and let me put it this way: you can't escape totally from surveillance or ID cards, or any of those other little baddies that come from governments of various stripes. Governments are people, and people aren't perfect.
The French are proud of their democracy and consider themselves one of its founders and leading lights. (Frankly, with Rousseau and Montesquieu in the bag, they've got as much of a claim to democracy as the USA does.) And let me note that in France, ID is nationally issued and you're required to carry it everywhere. As an alien resident for a year, I was required to carry my passport and laminated visa (i.e. my French ID card) around wherever I went. (I did, sometimes.) Had I ever changed apartments, I would have been required by EU law to report my change of residence to the police. Yet I don't ever see the French complaining that their democracy is under threat because of IDs, and I've never seen any mention of the issue while glossing through either of the two big national political newspapers: Le Monde (leftist) or Le Figaro (rightist). If you wanted, you could make the conspiratorial claim that it's because they're in with the government; but I'd hazard just to guess that it's not perceived as a threat.
Do I like surveillance? God no! But please, let's just be sure to step outside the hyperbole and remind ourselves that a national ID card does not a police state make. And let's not talk in terms of who is or isn't the "greatest state," because quite frankly, all of us big rich Western democratic states have got our own problems. Sure, elements in the US are currently screaming "security! security!" as the executive branch grabs for power, but let's check out some of our friends: France has high unemployment as immigration spirals upward, Britain's got video cameras going up in every nook and cranny, Italy is trying to hold back an ex-prime minister who was making strides toward authoritarianism, and for God's sake, Canada is just trying to hold itself together. The way I see it, the best you can do is trade one set of problems for another.
So I've made my choice. This fall it's back to the frozen North with me. And national ID cards had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But it's not even about states: it's about metropolitan areas. If you measure by states, you have the same problem as if you measure by country: you'll have centralized urban areas with higher densities, surrounded by much less populous areas. The state of New York is deceptive; even if it has the largest American city in it, that's balanced by its much less densely populated upstate region. California likewise. (The densest state? New Jersey, at 1,134.4 per square kilometer - not that it's got big cities, but that there's near-continuous low-density build-up covering about half of the state.)
And let me also note that it's not about "cities" either! Most people define cities as regions with certain single municipal governments, but a city isn't complete without its periphery - New York makes no sense if you don't include the parts of its metropolitan area in New Jersey and Connecticut. Suburbs do, by virtue of being spread out more, often require more resources for upkeep of things like telephone lines.
Finally, this PDF from the World Bank shows the US's rate of urbanization in 2003 at 78%, compared to the UK's at 90, Canada's at 79, France's at 76, Germany's at 88, Italy's at 67, etc. There is difference of course, but it's pretty clear to me that there isn't enough of a pattern for the rate of urbanization to really be a predictor for competitiveness in the broadband market (however you'd measure that anyway).
It so happens that there is date tagging in Google Earth: all you have to do is enable the DigitalGlobe Coverage layer, the last item in the Layers section of the sidebar. DigitalGlobe, I'll note, is the private company that supplies the pictures. This has worked in Canada and France, which are the two countries I work on; I'd think it would in the States as well.
IANA poor person. But I am trained in urban sociology, so I have some idea of what's going on here. And I have to question a lot of what you're saying.
Well certainly if you're talking about homeless and the poorest of the poor in any country that is true. However the Census Bureau in its annual report on poverty in the United States declared that there were nearly 35 million poor persons living in this country in 2002. Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.
First of all, what report did this come from? Could you post a link to at least an abstract of the paper?
Secondly, you've opened the bucket of worms labelled "how do we measure poverty?" One poverty line makes no sense, because it costs different amounts of money to live in different areas of the world. So maybe we'll try, as you did, to measure it by the things you can afford - but then what do we decide what are the "essential things" that all people should be able to own? And how do we arrive at a cost for those things? It's actually pretty contentious what "poverty" means.
And thirdly, the expenditures per person of pretty much everyone are going up now. Remember, the United States is the country that is deepest in debt in the world, and buying things in no way means that you're able to afford the things you're buying. Plus, since 1970 major demographic changes have swept through the country, not least of all the fact that most women now work as well. The more money you have, the more it burns a hole in your pocket.
Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
Or - they're on track to owning their own homes. And there is a difference. They probably have a large mortgage, spread out over something like 30 years, so they'll be paying forever, just as if it were rent (but they'll be the ones fixing leaks in the bathroom). One indicator that's often used to assess poverty is the percentage of income that goes into housing: if you're paying 50% of your income just to keep your mortgage steady, you're worse off than someone who pays 40% of their income to a landlord instead of to the bank.
Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
So either the building has air conditioning built in, meaning it's probably new, or the person has a window air conditioner. And considering that a lot of older low-income housing is in process of being torn down and replaced with buildings that aren't giant rectangular-prism shaped monstrosities, it shouldn't be a surprise that people have air conditioning now. But anyway, this is a strange statistic. First of all, since when is temperature a predictor of income? And by the way - by no means am I in the bottom quintile by income, and yet I haven't lived in a building with air conditioning for years.
Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person. The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
Since when is living space a good measure of income? True, if you own a mansion over acres and acres of land, you're probably rich. But, as pointed out in another comment above, if you have a small hole in a building in Tribeca, you're probably also rich.
I signed up for the New York Times online sometime around 2000. Not thinking anything of it, I allowed it to come to my current personal mailbox.
Having opted out of the offers at the time of account creation, I have yet to receive a single unsolicited e-mail from them, or anyone else, on that account.
I will continue to use one of the more reputable news sources on the Internet.
This is all well and good, but fundamentally, what is the difference between Sonoma and older versions of the Centrino chipset? It seems to me that Sonoma hasn't had much of a buzz up to now, and all this article says about it is that it's a"new Centrino platform". If this is just more of the same, I'm not interested . . . but if there's a real difference, could someone point to what that might be?
I'm in a Java programming class in a high school, and the person two computers down is a very heavy-set twit, and I don't know how he made it in. He's become reknowned in the class for his variable names, including:
bananaPancakes
nutPie
apple
And the piece de resistance:
wang
I repeat, this is a fairly heavy-set kid. Now we know his fixation.
Make Nissan Motors and Nissan Computers sit down and flip a coin. But then, coin.com is already registered, so I don't know where we can set up a high-profile Flip-A-Coin web site. But then, we can always sue coin.com too...
Anyway, I agree with most of what you said, with one exception. You seem to imply that your domain must be the name of your business. Nissan Motors' web site must be www.nissanmotors.com, and Ford's web site must be www.fordmotors.com. So nobody would be entitled to use www.nissan.com because it would not be the name of their business. Furthermore, your business would have a monopoly of that domain name across all current and future top-level domains.
But going back to "coin.com," would anyone be entitled to this domain? It seems unlikely that anyone would start a business called only "Coin." By your logic, shouldn't the people at coin.com be forced to use the domain name "edward_j_waddell_ltd.com"? Then, is anyone entitled to any domain name? Do we deserve the internet at all? Do we exist? What is the meaning of life?
This is quite a can of worms we have here. And I'm sure that although there is some solution, I am too lazy to go find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy hostility, Batman.
Sure, there are knee-jerk environmentalists. Take any movement and I'll find you someone who takes that movement to its logical extreme. Christianity has Falwell. Conservatism has Coulter. Ad nauseum.
But I think you're missing that one of the largest, most prevalent streams of environmentalism isn't anti-nuclear, isn't anti-fossil fuel, perhaps isn't even anti-pesticide. It's simple conservation.
And you know, there are plenty of people working on things like low-emissions automobiles, more-insulative materials, and safer waste dumps.
Aren't these guys also scientists and engineers?
The web is quickly turning into television - a bunch of stupid avertisements created by stupid people geared for stupid consumers. The web is still way better than anything else we got.
I disagree! The barriers to entry to the web are so much lower than they are to television that the web will never be reduced to TV's glossy (corporate) flash. Sure, some web sites will always be as you describe, fraught with ads and spyware, but try not to get too jaundiced. Web content has long been richer and more varied than television content, and I don't see this ever changing. I mean, for every one cable TV channel, there must be a hundred relatively in-depth blogs...
If your complaint is that our TV coverage is opinionated, then I've got news for you: it's always been that way. Newspapers have long held biases. Even now, we speak of "conservative" or "liberal" papers, and in Europe there are even a good number with a communist bent. And if your complaint is that newspapers have followed their profit motive to the expense of their coverage, then research the American journalism in the run-up to the Spanish-American war. Frankly, where it is possible to make money, money will be made. For better or worse, this is how all of capitalism works.
Just wanted to drop in one thing that I don't think has been stated here. The idea of traffic calming devices is not to make individual drivers calmer; the idea is to calm traffic on the aggregate. This might mean slowing it down, but more likely it implies reducing it in the first place. The environmental ideas are well known; sometimes however there is even the impetus of increasing sales by allowing people to more easily reach the stores they want to reach (ahem jaywalking) or simply to feel more comfortable. You encourage pedestrians and mass transit. Parking meters have nothing to do with this. As has now been said umpteen times, the parking meters are set up so that more people are able to park, if for shorter periods of time.
In fact let me just say that I heavily doubt that there is anything in this article that even vaguely has anything to do with smart growth. There is interest in Montreal in urban projects (a new tram line, the replacement of a freeway), but I can't recall any in that neighborhood. This Apple store will be right on Saint Catherine street, one of the busiest shopping drags in the town, which runs straight through downtown. Metro and pedestrian connectivity in the area is already very good and well-used, and you can only cut use of a major downtown artery so far. At best, implementing traffic calming here would be futile.
Let's not get too over the top here. No, I'm not a fan of Real ID either. I think it's expensive, kind of draconian, and largely unnecessary. But I am an American who has lived for recent multiyear segments in Canada and France, and let me put it this way: you can't escape totally from surveillance or ID cards, or any of those other little baddies that come from governments of various stripes. Governments are people, and people aren't perfect.
The French are proud of their democracy and consider themselves one of its founders and leading lights. (Frankly, with Rousseau and Montesquieu in the bag, they've got as much of a claim to democracy as the USA does.) And let me note that in France, ID is nationally issued and you're required to carry it everywhere. As an alien resident for a year, I was required to carry my passport and laminated visa (i.e. my French ID card) around wherever I went. (I did, sometimes.) Had I ever changed apartments, I would have been required by EU law to report my change of residence to the police. Yet I don't ever see the French complaining that their democracy is under threat because of IDs, and I've never seen any mention of the issue while glossing through either of the two big national political newspapers: Le Monde (leftist) or Le Figaro (rightist). If you wanted, you could make the conspiratorial claim that it's because they're in with the government; but I'd hazard just to guess that it's not perceived as a threat.
Do I like surveillance? God no! But please, let's just be sure to step outside the hyperbole and remind ourselves that a national ID card does not a police state make. And let's not talk in terms of who is or isn't the "greatest state," because quite frankly, all of us big rich Western democratic states have got our own problems. Sure, elements in the US are currently screaming "security! security!" as the executive branch grabs for power, but let's check out some of our friends: France has high unemployment as immigration spirals upward, Britain's got video cameras going up in every nook and cranny, Italy is trying to hold back an ex-prime minister who was making strides toward authoritarianism, and for God's sake, Canada is just trying to hold itself together. The way I see it, the best you can do is trade one set of problems for another.
So I've made my choice. This fall it's back to the frozen North with me. And national ID cards had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But it's not even about states: it's about metropolitan areas. If you measure by states, you have the same problem as if you measure by country: you'll have centralized urban areas with higher densities, surrounded by much less populous areas. The state of New York is deceptive; even if it has the largest American city in it, that's balanced by its much less densely populated upstate region. California likewise. (The densest state? New Jersey, at 1,134.4 per square kilometer - not that it's got big cities, but that there's near-continuous low-density build-up covering about half of the state.)
And let me also note that it's not about "cities" either! Most people define cities as regions with certain single municipal governments, but a city isn't complete without its periphery - New York makes no sense if you don't include the parts of its metropolitan area in New Jersey and Connecticut. Suburbs do, by virtue of being spread out more, often require more resources for upkeep of things like telephone lines.
Finally, this PDF from the World Bank shows the US's rate of urbanization in 2003 at 78%, compared to the UK's at 90, Canada's at 79, France's at 76, Germany's at 88, Italy's at 67, etc. There is difference of course, but it's pretty clear to me that there isn't enough of a pattern for the rate of urbanization to really be a predictor for competitiveness in the broadband market (however you'd measure that anyway).
It so happens that there is date tagging in Google Earth: all you have to do is enable the DigitalGlobe Coverage layer, the last item in the Layers section of the sidebar. DigitalGlobe, I'll note, is the private company that supplies the pictures. This has worked in Canada and France, which are the two countries I work on; I'd think it would in the States as well.
Well certainly if you're talking about homeless and the poorest of the poor in any country that is true. However the Census Bureau in its annual report on poverty in the United States declared that there were nearly 35 million poor persons living in this country in 2002. Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.
First of all, what report did this come from? Could you post a link to at least an abstract of the paper?
Secondly, you've opened the bucket of worms labelled "how do we measure poverty?" One poverty line makes no sense, because it costs different amounts of money to live in different areas of the world. So maybe we'll try, as you did, to measure it by the things you can afford - but then what do we decide what are the "essential things" that all people should be able to own? And how do we arrive at a cost for those things? It's actually pretty contentious what "poverty" means.
And thirdly, the expenditures per person of pretty much everyone are going up now. Remember, the United States is the country that is deepest in debt in the world, and buying things in no way means that you're able to afford the things you're buying. Plus, since 1970 major demographic changes have swept through the country, not least of all the fact that most women now work as well. The more money you have, the more it burns a hole in your pocket.
Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
Or - they're on track to owning their own homes. And there is a difference. They probably have a large mortgage, spread out over something like 30 years, so they'll be paying forever, just as if it were rent (but they'll be the ones fixing leaks in the bathroom). One indicator that's often used to assess poverty is the percentage of income that goes into housing: if you're paying 50% of your income just to keep your mortgage steady, you're worse off than someone who pays 40% of their income to a landlord instead of to the bank.
Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
So either the building has air conditioning built in, meaning it's probably new, or the person has a window air conditioner. And considering that a lot of older low-income housing is in process of being torn down and replaced with buildings that aren't giant rectangular-prism shaped monstrosities, it shouldn't be a surprise that people have air conditioning now. But anyway, this is a strange statistic. First of all, since when is temperature a predictor of income? And by the way - by no means am I in the bottom quintile by income, and yet I haven't lived in a building with air conditioning for years.
Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
Since when is living space a good measure of income? True, if you own a mansion over acres and acres of land, you're probably rich. But, as pointed out in another comment above, if you have a small hole in a building in Tribeca, you're probably also rich.
But anyway, t
I signed up for the New York Times online sometime around 2000. Not thinking anything of it, I allowed it to come to my current personal mailbox.
Having opted out of the offers at the time of account creation, I have yet to receive a single unsolicited e-mail from them, or anyone else, on that account.
I will continue to use one of the more reputable news sources on the Internet.
You might want to check out the Free Object-Oriented License, written by those compression pioneers over at lzip.
Highly, highly recommended reading. If you're curious about the tone of the license, consider the acronym formed by its title.
This is all well and good, but fundamentally, what is the difference between Sonoma and older versions of the Centrino chipset? It seems to me that Sonoma hasn't had much of a buzz up to now, and all this article says about it is that it's a"new Centrino platform". If this is just more of the same, I'm not interested . . . but if there's a real difference, could someone point to what that might be?
What is the DMCA's policy on older software?
Does this mean that older versions of PGP now belong to Network Associates and are subject to the company's will? Even if they were free?
And the piece de resistance:
I repeat, this is a fairly heavy-set kid. Now we know his fixation.
Make Nissan Motors and Nissan Computers sit down and flip a coin. But then, coin.com is already registered, so I don't know where we can set up a high-profile Flip-A-Coin web site. But then, we can always sue coin.com too...
Anyway, I agree with most of what you said, with one exception. You seem to imply that your domain must be the name of your business. Nissan Motors' web site must be www.nissanmotors.com, and Ford's web site must be www.fordmotors.com. So nobody would be entitled to use www.nissan.com because it would not be the name of their business. Furthermore, your business would have a monopoly of that domain name across all current and future top-level domains.
But going back to "coin.com," would anyone be entitled to this domain? It seems unlikely that anyone would start a business called only "Coin." By your logic, shouldn't the people at coin.com be forced to use the domain name "edward_j_waddell_ltd.com"? Then, is anyone entitled to any domain name? Do we deserve the internet at all? Do we exist? What is the meaning of life?
This is quite a can of worms we have here. And I'm sure that although there is some solution, I am too lazy to go find it.
sam