American cities are just plain built differently from others around the world. Quite simply, we've got more (desirable) land per capita than anywhere else, and Americans have the freedom (both social and economic) to go whereever we want to get a piece of land and build our own house on it. It's that little thing called "the American dream," y'know? Our cities are more spread out than others, especially when you get out of the Northeast (not coincidentally, the NE Corridor is the only place Amtrak makes money).
The places in America that *do* have working mass transit have high population density -- not as much so as Japan, but nearly on a par with European cities. High population density means there are enough people within walking distance of a train station to support it. That means the train company doesn't have to build and staff a parking lot, and the potential passengers won't have to decide whether to turn into the train station parking lot or just continue to their destinations in their car. More people using the train ==> more service, at more convenient times.
It's a vicious cycle. I like trains, but if it takes me 3 hours to go from Richmond suburb to Washington suburb by train (presuming I make the commuter train transfer just right in DC) vs. 1h45 to go door-to-door by car, hell, I'd drive even if the gas cost me $40 each way (like taking the train would) instead of the $8 it currently does.
Most of your rant was great (I jumped to Mac OS X for the same reasons you run Linux), but I just can't let this go:
"[Y]ou have to remember that if you exercise your own freedom effectively, war is not necessary."
That's only true if the other side also believes in effective exercise of freedom. In that case, everyone's happy. But if the other side doesn't, you can only exercise your freedom until they decide they're tired of your freedom and want to end it.
At that point, if you want to continue exercising that freedom, you have to fight (go to war, whatever your preferred terminology is) for it. Freedom isn't free -- it's been bought geopolitically in blood for hundreds of years, and bought judicially in countless dollars (pounds, euros/predecessors, yen) of legal fees.
Sure, if by "ethnically cleansed" you meant "watched the Palestinians get out of the way, then defended their homes as the armies of every surrounding Arab state rushed in to kill off the Jews."
The Arabs living in the former British protectorate of Palestine basically decided in '48 that they'd just head out for a little bit, let their cousins next door clear the Jews out, and create an Arab state. They didn't bet on the Israelis (a) being able to leave behind their self-destructive infighting and (b) kicking the Jordanians', Egyptians' and Syrians' collective asses.
That's what makes the "refugee camps" such a joke, albeit a sad one. These people were voluntary refugees. The Israeli Jews didn't run away, they defended their homes. The Palestinians could have done the same, but they didn't. Case closed. When it became clear Israel wasn't going away, the rest of the Arab world should have accepted the Palestinians into their societies rather than keeping them in camps for 55 years. Their failure to do the same, and subsequent usage of the Palestinians for political purposes is an indictment on them.
You're (deliberately?) misreading my statement. I said neighboring suburban districts -- sure, Podunk, WI will be substantially cheaper than NYC, but is Westchester County, NY c-o-l 1/3 the cost of NYC? I don't think so. I'd bet it's equal or slightly higher. I know I'd be paying a lot less to live in the City of Richmond than I am to live in the Short Pump area of Henrico County.
Dollars-to-dollars isn't a perfect comparison, but within a metropolitan area, it's pretty reasonable.
Actually, a spending increase would definitely improve student performance. Spending more on education leads to more qualified teachers, better facilities, and smaller classes, all of which contribute to a better learning environment.
The evidence indicates otherwise. Across the board, the school districts that spend the most per student are inner-city, failing systems like Atlanta, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Detroit, etc. -- usually several thousand more per student than the neighboring suburban districts. The extra money tends to go toward (1) gigantic, corrupt administrative bureaucracies and (2) security.
The single most important factor for a good learning environment is the presence of interested parents. Money doesn't help that.
Remember that in most inner city schools, the per-school IT person is an overworked librarian, and at the district level, the IT manager makes sure the report-card system works.
I know, my magnet high school occupied the third floor at one of those schools while I was there. We had a good technology coordinator and a team of 16 students doing stuff from basic network management to webmaster, root on the fac/staff e-mail and web server, etc. The school downstairs didn't want our help -- they didn't have anyone who could really coordinate with us in the building, and the city school system actively hated the white suburban kids (i.e. we had a school board member and former mayor calling us "a racist institution" my ninth-grade year), so the district administration wouldn't work with us.
Of course, they loved to claim us when it came time to publish standardized test scores. We kept their freaking district afloat.
Kinda curious why the Empo needs them, especially in the budget crunch. But I shouldn't complain (especially since I'm now an alumnus), I'll just watch University Surplus and score a used G4 from there for cheap once they retire them in favor of the G5s. (WOOHOO!)
Heck, the whole city of Boston, if you have any interest in American history at all. Plus MIT and Hahvahd.
But the Computer Museum is pretty high-quality. And Boston's an easy city to get around by mass transit, as opposed to much of the rest of this country. Resign yourself to the fact that you may have to rent a car a few times.
Personally, I'd prefer the government not take over private companies. Besides, Corel is Canadian, and I'd imagine the Canadian government might have something to say about that.
Ah, yes. Then the newly merged company can have those 125 useless workers drive up development costs and thus drive up the cost of the product in the marketplace, causing Palm/HS to lose even more market share to Sony and the WinCE brigade. That, in turn, will eventually force an even larger layoff or run the company into the ground. That way they can hurt EVERYONE at Palm and HS, instead of just the 125 at present.
I'd worry that e-paper won't get past the disposability problem.
One of the attractions of newspapers and magazines is that you can just get rid of them when you're done with them -- unless you have a compulsive desire to keep archives of the local paper, you probably throw it away, recycle it, or (in mass transit settings) leave it for the next guy once you're done with it. People already complain about having too much stuff to keep track of (hence the convergence attempts between PDAs, cell phones and digital cameras); an e-paper notebook would just add to that problem.
I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control, just like we have pop-up control now.
If it gets obnoxious enough, people will find ways around it.
That's a bit like accusing the Sierra Club of being influenced by Union Carbide.
You can find oil industry influence elsewhere, but the California Air Resources Board is well known for being one of the most radically environmentalist government agencies in the country. In general, if it screws big oil, CARB is happy; if it screws carmakers, CARB is even happier.
CARB is fully on the hybrid-vehicle bandwagon. CARB is so completely on this bandwagon that it has consistently refused to allow advanced European diesel technology (both from Euro carmakers and the European divisions of GM and Ford) into the state. This has created a financial disincentive to bring it into the US as a whole -- it makes the potential US market (with its fixed entry costs for safety redesign, certain emissions tweaks, etc.) smaller. CARB's stated reason is that allowing this intermediate step (which would cut fuel consumption ~30% per vehicle) would discourage further hybrid development.
I'm not sure why they decided to hose current electric vehicle development this way (although the pacemaker idea has some merit -- note the sign on the 7-Eleven door warning pacemaker wearers next time you walk in, and that's just for a microwave!). But I rather doubt CARB was influenced by the oil industry.
Wired commenced to suck when Conde Nast bought it.
on
Shift Calls it Quits
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I always thought of Wired as a "digital culture" magazine, but its credibility was based on having at least some intelligent technology coverage (more application- than tech-centric), and by employing good writers (and influential people from the industry who could also write).
When Conde Nast bought them, CN turned Wired into pure culture -- a pretty-pictures magazine like Conde Nast Traveler and all their other publications. They slimmed it down, changed to cheaper paper, and quit carrying intelligent commentary in favor of "this is the new cool thing, it costs $n,000 and can be bought at x." When Nicholas Negroponte quit writing his back-page column, I stopped buying Wired, and I've barely looked at it since.
Bad conversion screws with colors and brightness. I watched the Stanley Cup Finals and a couple of baseball games in the UK in '01 when I was over there on a university choir tour, and they were (a) dim and (b) a bit off in the colors. Both were conversions from the ESPN feed, the same one I'd have been watching at home. Conversions from PAL to NTSC, like (for example) Champions League broadcasts on ESPN, usually look just as bad here.
One could probably tune the conversion to get better quality, but none of the programs we're talking about are really worth it to the broadcasters in question. Fox Sports World, on the other hand, seems to do pretty well, probably because virtually all their programming is converted, and it's worth the money to them to not have their entire channel look like ass.
...since practically every major road (Interstate highway, etc.) has a tollbooth where it leaves the state, operated by the state of New Jersey.
It's all semantics. IANAL, but I would bet that New Jersey claims the toll is for use of the portion of the road that's in New Jersey, not for the interstate portion of the trip (despite the fact that I have to pay the toll to use the Delaware Memorial Bridge to DE). For the use tax, since they're not calling it a tax on interstate sales, it's perfectly constitutional. It's just the state trying to claim money that it thinks it should have been paid at purchase (at least in Virginia). Whether it's right or not is a different question entirely.
Brick-and-mortar merchants' "agenda" == trying to sell you stuff. Internet == a new way to sell you stuff. And in case you haven't noticed, many of those brick-and-mortar merchants are now selling online as well.
If merchants like Wal-Mart haven't been charging sales tax on online orders (I don't know, I haven't ordered anything online from them), they've clearly been violating the law to do so. State laws almost uniformly say that if the company has nexus (a physical presence, like an office, store or distribution center), it's responsible for charging you sales tax.
On the other hand, you are responsible, in most states, for paying "use tax" (basically a different name for sales tax) on items you buy from out-of-state retailers who did not charge you any sales tax. Betcha didn't know that one. This agreement essentially fixes the problem that almost no one pays that tax, and it catches companies who had been trying to skirt the nexus rules.
E2 tends to be pretty left-wing. About the only place farther-left I know of that's not explicitly political is K5.
I'd argue that maybe Wikipedia is better for straight facts, but you'll never see good, creditable writing on there, because the system discourages taking ownership of one's own writing. Knowing that someone else can come along and edit my writing at his/her whim doesn't encourage me to contribute. A Wiki encourages the lowest common denominator to come along and change things at will.
(Your complaint about E2's supposed unfriendliness for discussions also really doesn't hold water when you're comparing E2 to Wikipedia. Or do you like being edited in a discussion? Personally, I prefer that my comments remain mine until I change them.)
Here in Richmond, VA, we have landline local number portability -- several people I know have jumped from Verizon to Cavalier Telephone and kept their phone numbers.
Nationally, the cell companies are fighting tooth-and-nail against number portability, though. Why? Because that'll kill one reason people stay with crappy cell carriers. If I could go to, say, Verizon Wireless without having to change my number, I'd have left SunCom behind when my contract expired. But SunCom is just good enough for now that it's not worth changing my number (particularly since I had been using my cell as my only phone for about six months until I got a landline in my new apartment).
My college roommate was one of the very first XM subscribers, and I picked it up as soon as I bought my new car. I love it -- particularly Deep Tracks (non-singles classic rock), BBC World Service, and Fred (classic alternative).
But if XM starts expanding their commercials to be as bad as the local FM stations (all Clear Channel, 20 minutes of synchronized commercials per hour), I'll dump them as fast as I can dial the 800 number. I'm not paying $10 a month for that to happen. I think the majority of XM subscribers would back me up too -- we moved to XM to get away from that. The added musical formats don't mean squat if you're not actually hearing music on the stations.
Slashdot Mirror
American cities are just plain built differently from others around the world. Quite simply, we've got more (desirable) land per capita than anywhere else, and Americans have the freedom (both social and economic) to go whereever we want to get a piece of land and build our own house on it. It's that little thing called "the American dream," y'know? Our cities are more spread out than others, especially when you get out of the Northeast (not coincidentally, the NE Corridor is the only place Amtrak makes money).
The places in America that *do* have working mass transit have high population density -- not as much so as Japan, but nearly on a par with European cities. High population density means there are enough people within walking distance of a train station to support it. That means the train company doesn't have to build and staff a parking lot, and the potential passengers won't have to decide whether to turn into the train station parking lot or just continue to their destinations in their car. More people using the train ==> more service, at more convenient times.
It's a vicious cycle. I like trains, but if it takes me 3 hours to go from Richmond suburb to Washington suburb by train (presuming I make the commuter train transfer just right in DC) vs. 1h45 to go door-to-door by car, hell, I'd drive even if the gas cost me $40 each way (like taking the train would) instead of the $8 it currently does.
Most of your rant was great (I jumped to Mac OS X for the same reasons you run Linux), but I just can't let this go:
"[Y]ou have to remember that if you exercise your own freedom effectively, war is not necessary."
That's only true if the other side also believes in effective exercise of freedom. In that case, everyone's happy. But if the other side doesn't, you can only exercise your freedom until they decide they're tired of your freedom and want to end it.
At that point, if you want to continue exercising that freedom, you have to fight (go to war, whatever your preferred terminology is) for it. Freedom isn't free -- it's been bought geopolitically in blood for hundreds of years, and bought judicially in countless dollars (pounds, euros/predecessors, yen) of legal fees.
Sure, if by "ethnically cleansed" you meant "watched the Palestinians get out of the way, then defended their homes as the armies of every surrounding Arab state rushed in to kill off the Jews."
The Arabs living in the former British protectorate of Palestine basically decided in '48 that they'd just head out for a little bit, let their cousins next door clear the Jews out, and create an Arab state. They didn't bet on the Israelis (a) being able to leave behind their self-destructive infighting and (b) kicking the Jordanians', Egyptians' and Syrians' collective asses.
That's what makes the "refugee camps" such a joke, albeit a sad one. These people were voluntary refugees. The Israeli Jews didn't run away, they defended their homes. The Palestinians could have done the same, but they didn't. Case closed. When it became clear Israel wasn't going away, the rest of the Arab world should have accepted the Palestinians into their societies rather than keeping them in camps for 55 years. Their failure to do the same, and subsequent usage of the Palestinians for political purposes is an indictment on them.
You're (deliberately?) misreading my statement. I said neighboring suburban districts -- sure, Podunk, WI will be substantially cheaper than NYC, but is Westchester County, NY c-o-l 1/3 the cost of NYC? I don't think so. I'd bet it's equal or slightly higher. I know I'd be paying a lot less to live in the City of Richmond than I am to live in the Short Pump area of Henrico County.
Dollars-to-dollars isn't a perfect comparison, but within a metropolitan area, it's pretty reasonable.
Actually, a spending increase would definitely improve student performance. Spending more on education leads to more qualified teachers, better facilities, and smaller classes, all of which contribute to a better learning environment.
The evidence indicates otherwise. Across the board, the school districts that spend the most per student are inner-city, failing systems like Atlanta, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Detroit, etc. -- usually several thousand more per student than the neighboring suburban districts. The extra money tends to go toward (1) gigantic, corrupt administrative bureaucracies and (2) security.
The single most important factor for a good learning environment is the presence of interested parents. Money doesn't help that.
Remember that in most inner city schools, the per-school IT person is an overworked librarian, and at the district level, the IT manager makes sure the report-card system works.
I know, my magnet high school occupied the third floor at one of those schools while I was there. We had a good technology coordinator and a team of 16 students doing stuff from basic network management to webmaster, root on the fac/staff e-mail and web server, etc. The school downstairs didn't want our help -- they didn't have anyone who could really coordinate with us in the building, and the city school system actively hated the white suburban kids (i.e. we had a school board member and former mayor calling us "a racist institution" my ninth-grade year), so the district administration wouldn't work with us.
Of course, they loved to claim us when it came time to publish standardized test scores. We kept their freaking district afloat.
Well, maybe 2. The chairs are pretty comfortable.
Kinda curious why the Empo needs them, especially in the budget crunch. But I shouldn't complain (especially since I'm now an alumnus), I'll just watch University Surplus and score a used G4 from there for cheap once they retire them in favor of the G5s. (WOOHOO!)
There are a lot worse bugs out there.
Stay away from that particular poontang -- you don't know where it's been, and what I have heard scares me.
Heck, the whole city of Boston, if you have any interest in American history at all. Plus MIT and Hahvahd.
But the Computer Museum is pretty high-quality. And Boston's an easy city to get around by mass transit, as opposed to much of the rest of this country. Resign yourself to the fact that you may have to rent a car a few times.
Personally, I'd prefer the government not take over private companies. Besides, Corel is Canadian, and I'd imagine the Canadian government might have something to say about that.
...ESR with RMS.
Ah, yes. Then the newly merged company can have those 125 useless workers drive up development costs and thus drive up the cost of the product in the marketplace, causing Palm/HS to lose even more market share to Sony and the WinCE brigade. That, in turn, will eventually force an even larger layoff or run the company into the ground. That way they can hurt EVERYONE at Palm and HS, instead of just the 125 at present.
Mod above comment -1: Shortsighted.
The nutrient paste might come out on top.
I'd worry that e-paper won't get past the disposability problem.
One of the attractions of newspapers and magazines is that you can just get rid of them when you're done with them -- unless you have a compulsive desire to keep archives of the local paper, you probably throw it away, recycle it, or (in mass transit settings) leave it for the next guy once you're done with it. People already complain about having too much stuff to keep track of (hence the convergence attempts between PDAs, cell phones and digital cameras); an e-paper notebook would just add to that problem.
I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control, just like we have pop-up control now.
If it gets obnoxious enough, people will find ways around it.
Endorsement, in the Google sense, doesn't mean that you endorse the views espoused in the linked-to page. It simply means that you believe the linked-to page accurately represents the text inside your what blah is about</a> tags. I personally think Dennis Kucinich is a steaming pile of crap, but the link from his name in my most recent blog entry goes to a news story that should be relevant to anyone searching for "Dennis Kucinich".
You're not making a moral judgment on the page, you're just "voting" on what the page represents with the text you use for the link.
Little Green Footballs has the before(1), before(2) and after shots here.
That's a bit like accusing the Sierra Club of being influenced by Union Carbide.
You can find oil industry influence elsewhere, but the California Air Resources Board is well known for being one of the most radically environmentalist government agencies in the country. In general, if it screws big oil, CARB is happy; if it screws carmakers, CARB is even happier.
CARB is fully on the hybrid-vehicle bandwagon. CARB is so completely on this bandwagon that it has consistently refused to allow advanced European diesel technology (both from Euro carmakers and the European divisions of GM and Ford) into the state. This has created a financial disincentive to bring it into the US as a whole -- it makes the potential US market (with its fixed entry costs for safety redesign, certain emissions tweaks, etc.) smaller. CARB's stated reason is that allowing this intermediate step (which would cut fuel consumption ~30% per vehicle) would discourage further hybrid development.
I'm not sure why they decided to hose current electric vehicle development this way (although the pacemaker idea has some merit -- note the sign on the 7-Eleven door warning pacemaker wearers next time you walk in, and that's just for a microwave!). But I rather doubt CARB was influenced by the oil industry.
I always thought of Wired as a "digital culture" magazine, but its credibility was based on having at least some intelligent technology coverage (more application- than tech-centric), and by employing good writers (and influential people from the industry who could also write).
When Conde Nast bought them, CN turned Wired into pure culture -- a pretty-pictures magazine like Conde Nast Traveler and all their other publications. They slimmed it down, changed to cheaper paper, and quit carrying intelligent commentary in favor of "this is the new cool thing, it costs $n,000 and can be bought at x." When Nicholas Negroponte quit writing his back-page column, I stopped buying Wired, and I've barely looked at it since.
Bad conversion screws with colors and brightness. I watched the Stanley Cup Finals and a couple of baseball games in the UK in '01 when I was over there on a university choir tour, and they were (a) dim and (b) a bit off in the colors. Both were conversions from the ESPN feed, the same one I'd have been watching at home. Conversions from PAL to NTSC, like (for example) Champions League broadcasts on ESPN, usually look just as bad here.
One could probably tune the conversion to get better quality, but none of the programs we're talking about are really worth it to the broadcasters in question. Fox Sports World, on the other hand, seems to do pretty well, probably because virtually all their programming is converted, and it's worth the money to them to not have their entire channel look like ass.
...since practically every major road (Interstate highway, etc.) has a tollbooth where it leaves the state, operated by the state of New Jersey.
It's all semantics. IANAL, but I would bet that New Jersey claims the toll is for use of the portion of the road that's in New Jersey, not for the interstate portion of the trip (despite the fact that I have to pay the toll to use the Delaware Memorial Bridge to DE). For the use tax, since they're not calling it a tax on interstate sales, it's perfectly constitutional. It's just the state trying to claim money that it thinks it should have been paid at purchase (at least in Virginia). Whether it's right or not is a different question entirely.
Brick-and-mortar merchants' "agenda" == trying to sell you stuff. Internet == a new way to sell you stuff. And in case you haven't noticed, many of those brick-and-mortar merchants are now selling online as well.
If merchants like Wal-Mart haven't been charging sales tax on online orders (I don't know, I haven't ordered anything online from them), they've clearly been violating the law to do so. State laws almost uniformly say that if the company has nexus (a physical presence, like an office, store or distribution center), it's responsible for charging you sales tax.
On the other hand, you are responsible, in most states, for paying "use tax" (basically a different name for sales tax) on items you buy from out-of-state retailers who did not charge you any sales tax. Betcha didn't know that one. This agreement essentially fixes the problem that almost no one pays that tax, and it catches companies who had been trying to skirt the nexus rules.
E2 tends to be pretty left-wing. About the only place farther-left I know of that's not explicitly political is K5.
I'd argue that maybe Wikipedia is better for straight facts, but you'll never see good, creditable writing on there, because the system discourages taking ownership of one's own writing. Knowing that someone else can come along and edit my writing at his/her whim doesn't encourage me to contribute. A Wiki encourages the lowest common denominator to come along and change things at will.
(Your complaint about E2's supposed unfriendliness for discussions also really doesn't hold water when you're comparing E2 to Wikipedia. Or do you like being edited in a discussion? Personally, I prefer that my comments remain mine until I change them.)
Here in Richmond, VA, we have landline local number portability -- several people I know have jumped from Verizon to Cavalier Telephone and kept their phone numbers.
Nationally, the cell companies are fighting tooth-and-nail against number portability, though. Why? Because that'll kill one reason people stay with crappy cell carriers. If I could go to, say, Verizon Wireless without having to change my number, I'd have left SunCom behind when my contract expired. But SunCom is just good enough for now that it's not worth changing my number (particularly since I had been using my cell as my only phone for about six months until I got a landline in my new apartment).
My college roommate was one of the very first XM subscribers, and I picked it up as soon as I bought my new car. I love it -- particularly Deep Tracks (non-singles classic rock), BBC World Service, and Fred (classic alternative).
But if XM starts expanding their commercials to be as bad as the local FM stations (all Clear Channel, 20 minutes of synchronized commercials per hour), I'll dump them as fast as I can dial the 800 number. I'm not paying $10 a month for that to happen. I think the majority of XM subscribers would back me up too -- we moved to XM to get away from that. The added musical formats don't mean squat if you're not actually hearing music on the stations.