Surface pro 2s have been selling for as low as $300. That is $200 cheaper than an iPad Air, and they come with a digitizer (you know, so you can actually take real notes) and you can add a well-designed keyboard cover.
If you're an engineer looking for a high-end ultrabook, then yes, the Surface Pro can easily set you back $2000. However, for schoolwork, Microsoft actually seems to be providing a much better alternative than the iPad. An actual PC tablet running an i3 (not a toy running ARM) with an actual active digitizer and the ability to run desktop open source and commercial software.
For some reason, this reminded me of a passage from "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan. The computing world seems more and more divided between a small creative class (scientists, artists, programmers, engineers, writers, et cetera) who mostly use PCs (laptops, desktops, workstations, convertibles like the Surface) and a much larger consumer class (people who primarily use toy computers like the Apple TV, Xbox, iPad, iPhone, et cetera).
I don't doubt that tablets have the potential to be useful in education, but I really hope that schools don't start treating education as a consumable product, like a movie or webpage.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1. People who don't want to lug around two devices (the Surface Pro is an ultrabook and a tablet).
2. People who take notes with diagrams or mathematics, like students, researchers, engineers, et cetera (other than a few rather pricey Android tablets, the Surface Pro and its Windows-based brothers are the only tablets with digitizers).
3. People who want something like the Macbook air, only with better features for less money.
I mean, if all you want to do is surf porn on your couch while you watch football, then by all means, get an iPad, or better yet, a $300 Android tablet (better value for the money than an iPad). The Surface Pro is not a toy computer like the iPad or the Galaxy. It is a full-fat computer that happens to work pretty well as a tablet as well.
The market for a $2000 surface pro 3 running Windows and virtualizing Linux and loaded up with open source and professional software is very different than the market for a $400 iPad running iTunes and a bunch of entertainment apps for couch potatoes.
So when an Ubuntu live-CD wouldn't even load the graphics drivers necessary to see anything past the boot manager, that was my fault for, "trying to impose [my] Windows experience on it"?
The fact is, Linux driver support is impressive considering that the OS is given away for free, but it is hardly impressive in the overall sense.
Microsoft and Apple sell a lot of operating systems because the Windows and OS-X experience is pretty good for the average user. Linux distros struggle to give their OS away for free to PC users because, compared to the Windows and OS-X experience, the Linux experience is pretty subpar for the average user.
Which means, that like most windows tablets and laptops, you can probably get another OS to boot, but it probably won't be pretty.
In theory, some distros of Linux have support for digitizers and touchscreens but the reality is, Microsoft is the only game in town when it comes to having a almost two decades of development into x86 tablets. Apple hardware running OS-X has never had digitizers or touch-screens built-in and Linux distros have done their best to cobble-together support for tablet-PCs into the interface and kernel over the years, but it is a sophomoric effort at best (still impressive considering it is free).
But I bet by the year 2030, the Linux will be the best operating system to run on a Surface Pro 3, like it is today with computers from 2000.
The sapphire was for their iWatch and sapphire or ruby crystals are commonly used in high-end watches. I'm not sure if it is too brittle for a phone screen, but it is probably too expensive.
Actually, I don't see the problem. It is still legal to ride horses and bicycles in the streets. I imagine that in the future, you might add human-operated cars to that list. There might be more restrictions, like human-operated cars must stick to the right-hand lanes. The enforcement standards might also be much higher. Automated cars could auto-report any self-driven car that violates someone's right of way or commits another infraction, ensuring that only the best, most competent drivers are allowed to operate their vehicles without computer control.
I grew up in the suburbs and in my experience, suburbs combine the worst aspects of rural and urban living.
Row homes are built right next to each other, usually an eighth of an acre or less in the newer suburbs. Suburban apartments tend to be located on bigger plots that may have pools and gardens. On the whole though, there is the exact same lack of privacy as in the cities. In the city, single-family homes might have the walls built into each other and in the suburbs, they might have a small ally-way between them. Either way, you are not significantly further from your neighbor. Ditto for apartments.
There is less density in the suburbs (but many suburbs, especially those of major urban areas like San Francisco, LA, and New York still have higher population densities than many cities such as Atlanta or Houston), but there are still an awful lot of people. It is not like a rural area where you can actually largely get some privacy and away from others.
And on the flip side, where good cities typically have enough density and proper urban design to allow you to get around easily without a car, in suburbs you are stuck with driving everywhere, often in the same heavy traffic that cities experience during rush hour, and there often are no viable alternatives. You rarely can just walk to the bar, the bodega, the cafe, the train station, the ferry, et cetera. You have to spend a lot of time and money driving, which is one of the reasons that suburban residents are much less healthy than urban residents.
As for "self-determination"? That is a joke. In rural areas, people typically leave you alone. In suburbs, it is often worse than the city, because suburbs are full of home-owners associations that have the legal right to dictate every aspect of what you do on your property, everything from the car you drive to your house color and law decoration.
The US, especially certain "cities" like Houston, have been endlessly expanding outward, creating an unsustainable mess and taking away precious natural resources such as parks and agricultural lands. This simply cannot continue.
Suburbs in major urban areas like New York, LA, and San Francisco have already been experiencing population density increases, to the point where the vast majority of the big ones are higher in population density than many actual cities (like Houston and Atlanta).
The solution is to redesign existing suburbs around high density, mixed-use (residential and commercial) transportation corridors (trains, canals with ferries, trollies, rapid bus lines). It is already happening in more sensible (and usually higher density) areas of the country.
Rural areas are a different matter. In many of them, car sharing may be impractical.
If the US thought they had enough evidence to move forward with a federal prosecution, they would have had their best allies (the Brits) hold him in custody while they filed the proper paperwork for an extradition. If the US had enough evidence to prove conspiracy to steal classified information in the US, then they almost certainly had enough evidence to file for a proper extradition from the UK, especially since the UK has an official secrets act (unlike the US).
Assange behaves as if he is above the law and cites paranoid fantasies that this is part of some grand conspiracy against him. Guess what Assange; the US government IS powerful and if the Attorney General thought he could prove a case against you in federal court, he wouldn't engage in some silly conspiracy. He would simply have had the British police arrest you in the middle of the night and have quickly extradited you to the US to face federal charges.
If you are going to bum around Europe raping women, it is best not to piss off the world's most powerful governments, because they are going to make sure you are held accountable for every wrongdoing you commit, whether it be not filling out your taxes properly or putting your dick where it doesn't belong.
If people are really following Nintendo so closely as to know about the impending release (and I am not sure how many really are) and they intend to wait and buy it, then Nintendo only loses a sale if they don't actually complete the purchase of the upgraded 3DS. The new 3DS very possibly has higher margins (while the old 3DS will be discounted to deplete stock) anyway, so Nintendo might end up making MORE money if people hold-out.
It is nothing like the Wii U. The Wii U's problem is that after the initial two million people who bought one the first month, very few people purchased it for the first year. The Wii U's problem was not that people were holding out for a future upgrade.
. . . making handheld games, I strongly suspect you are in error. People want to play games on the go. Smartphones are not exactly good gaming devices as they exist out of the box. Unless that changes, there is likely going to be a market for handheld gaming consoles for the foreseeable future.
People were making similar claims about the 3DS, that it was selling poorly because of smartphones, but it is currently the best-selling game console of this generation.
The Galileo probe was powered by the heat from the uncontrolled natural decay (fission) of a sub-critical mass of plutonium. Large-scale plants are powered by the heat from the controlled decay (fission) of a critical mass of plutonium or a similarly unstable material.
Probably the same people that think the most appropriate toy, for GIRLS, is a large-breasted supermodel. In retrospect, they should have marketed Barbie as a toy for 12-year old boys to play with and sold "realistic anatomy" kits before the availability of the internet in every American household.
. . . . but I'm not sure how viable Plutonium is as a power source. Most of the spacecraft that use it are quite large and heavy and not designed to land themselves (for instance, the Galileo spacecraft was Plutonium-powered while the lander it dropped was not).
Plutonium is one of the densest substances on Earth and I'm guessing the engine you need to turn heat into electricity is none-too lightweight.
My understanding is that radioactive batteries are only used on heavy, long-term missions where solar power is impractical for legitimate engineering and economic reasons that go far beyond simple public fear. If I am wrong, someone please correct me with good evidence.
Are you really going to argue semantics? Many commuters have their cars moved by ferries for a significant portion of their trip. They still say, "I drive to work", not, "I ferry to work." If a ferry or train is carrying your bicycle, I do not see how the semantics are any different.
I was excited to see that Subway to the Sea project. I think that 87 miles of track in LA counts not just their heavy rail line, but also their light rail. BART is just heavy rail and if you counted the MUNI light rail subways in San Francisco and the VTA light rail in Silicon Valley, it is a lot more rail.
I was pleasently suprised to see that LA is also expanding their commuter rail (Metrolink I think they call it). I know that they have been trying to expand it here (Caltrain is upgraded to 4 tracks, supposed to be electrified and grade separated in the future, and they are building a new commuter rail between Sonoma and Marin).
What makes LA completely dysfunctional is that unlike cities like Houston and Atlanta, LA actually has very high population density. It is nowhere on the level of New York or San Francisco, but the population density makes driving untenable during most of the day and since alternatives are almost non-existent (mostly buses that get stuck in the same traffic), you get a huge mess during rush hour.
It seems that teaching someone how to pass a lie-detector test is legal. These guys may have set him up by revealing to him that they intended to use the information to perjure themselves, at which point, he became a co-conspirator. I don't know. I am not a legal expert, because what he was teaching seems perfectly legit. Polygraph tests are somewhat dubious under even under the best circumstances and absolutely worthless if someone has a full understanding of how they work or they are an outlier.
Oil is not going to "run out". It simply will become more and more expensive to extract. At some point (around $10-15 per gallon) it will be economically worthwhile to simply convert coal to petroleum.
The environmental consequences of taking fossil fuels to the point at which we are in danger of "running out" would probably be severe enough to ensure our extinction as a technological species. We would have to worry about the destruction of our cities and societies from continuous burning of fossil fuels long before we would have to worry about running out of petroleum.
By your logic, we should stop encouraging people to ride trains because some people have claustrophobia and cannot board.
You are making a strawman fallacy by suggesting that people claim that 100% of the population should ride bicycles. Nobody is making that claim but you. What people are claiming is that we should support and encourage that option for the vast majority of the commuting population which has no disability that prevents them from riding a bicycle, the same as we should support and encourage train use for those who do not have a disability that prevents them from riding a train.
Our current culture in the US, where unsustainable transportation (driving personal automobiles) is prioritized over sustainable transit, needs to change, and the sooner the better.
The hope would be that people would start building sustainable transit BEFORE the roadways reached their breaking point, but cities like Atlanta, LA, and Houston have proved that humans really are not that smart.
At some point, you have to stop building endless low density suburbs and start infilling with high density transit corridors. The sooner this is done, the less severe the transportation and pollution problems will be in American cities.
Also, in cities like San Francisco or New York, you can bicycle over 50 miles to work, because the metropolitan area has put in options like trains, subways, and ferries which extend the range of the bicycle.
A prius is putting over 3000 lbs of force into a few square centimeters of roadway surface.
It does not cause as much damage as a fully-loaded big rig, but it does cause significant damage.
Look at the left-lanes of highways that are full of road damage. They were not caused by commercial trucks (which are banned from using them) but by cars, SUV's, and pickups.
Based on the evidence, I do not believe that market-driven solutions will work, because the solutions are long term (over many generations) but almost all profit-driven corporations focus on short-term returns to their current shareholders.
For instance, in terms of cost per kilowatt hour, solar solutions are usually within one standard deviation of the market-cost for electricity. However, no for-profit utility has expressed any interest in developing the massive infrastructure to take our electrical grid into the future and allow for effective deployment of a full solar solution. Only central planning is likely to accomplish that.
History has shown that "the market" has never been effective at stopping corporations from creating dangerous hazards, especially ones that manifest themselves diffusely over the long term.
Also, I would be interested in the source of your claim that the cost of mitigating damage due to global warming would be greater than the cost of reigning in carbon emissions today. Every credible source I have seen has strongly suggested the opposite. Places that have passed strong carbon regulations have not experienced any significant change in economic growth relative to those that continue to pollute (to the best of my knowledge) and the figures I have seen for the probable costs associated with sea-level rises alone is astronomical.
In fact, by most estimates I have seen, the cost of building infrastructure to protect occupied or industrially useful areas from rising sea levels far exceeds the cost of simply abandoning homes, factories, farms, bridges, roads, et cetera. Only in very dense urban areas will mitigating factors like seawalls be worth the costs and, even there, it is likely that many homes and businesses will simply be written off as hundreds of trillions of dollars in economic losses as the cost of mitigation exceeds the value of the real estate.
Slashdot Mirror
Surface pro 2s have been selling for as low as $300. That is $200 cheaper than an iPad Air, and they come with a digitizer (you know, so you can actually take real notes) and you can add a well-designed keyboard cover.
If you're an engineer looking for a high-end ultrabook, then yes, the Surface Pro can easily set you back $2000. However, for schoolwork, Microsoft actually seems to be providing a much better alternative than the iPad. An actual PC tablet running an i3 (not a toy running ARM) with an actual active digitizer and the ability to run desktop open source and commercial software.
For some reason, this reminded me of a passage from "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan. The computing world seems more and more divided between a small creative class (scientists, artists, programmers, engineers, writers, et cetera) who mostly use PCs (laptops, desktops, workstations, convertibles like the Surface) and a much larger consumer class (people who primarily use toy computers like the Apple TV, Xbox, iPad, iPhone, et cetera).
I don't doubt that tablets have the potential to be useful in education, but I really hope that schools don't start treating education as a consumable product, like a movie or webpage.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1. People who don't want to lug around two devices (the Surface Pro is an ultrabook and a tablet).
2. People who take notes with diagrams or mathematics, like students, researchers, engineers, et cetera (other than a few rather pricey Android tablets, the Surface Pro and its Windows-based brothers are the only tablets with digitizers).
3. People who want something like the Macbook air, only with better features for less money.
I mean, if all you want to do is surf porn on your couch while you watch football, then by all means, get an iPad, or better yet, a $300 Android tablet (better value for the money than an iPad). The Surface Pro is not a toy computer like the iPad or the Galaxy. It is a full-fat computer that happens to work pretty well as a tablet as well.
The market for a $2000 surface pro 3 running Windows and virtualizing Linux and loaded up with open source and professional software is very different than the market for a $400 iPad running iTunes and a bunch of entertainment apps for couch potatoes.
So when an Ubuntu live-CD wouldn't even load the graphics drivers necessary to see anything past the boot manager, that was my fault for, "trying to impose [my] Windows experience on it"?
The fact is, Linux driver support is impressive considering that the OS is given away for free, but it is hardly impressive in the overall sense.
Microsoft and Apple sell a lot of operating systems because the Windows and OS-X experience is pretty good for the average user. Linux distros struggle to give their OS away for free to PC users because, compared to the Windows and OS-X experience, the Linux experience is pretty subpar for the average user.
Which means, that like most windows tablets and laptops, you can probably get another OS to boot, but it probably won't be pretty.
In theory, some distros of Linux have support for digitizers and touchscreens but the reality is, Microsoft is the only game in town when it comes to having a almost two decades of development into x86 tablets. Apple hardware running OS-X has never had digitizers or touch-screens built-in and Linux distros have done their best to cobble-together support for tablet-PCs into the interface and kernel over the years, but it is a sophomoric effort at best (still impressive considering it is free).
But I bet by the year 2030, the Linux will be the best operating system to run on a Surface Pro 3, like it is today with computers from 2000.
The sapphire was for their iWatch and sapphire or ruby crystals are commonly used in high-end watches. I'm not sure if it is too brittle for a phone screen, but it is probably too expensive.
Actually, I don't see the problem. It is still legal to ride horses and bicycles in the streets. I imagine that in the future, you might add human-operated cars to that list. There might be more restrictions, like human-operated cars must stick to the right-hand lanes. The enforcement standards might also be much higher. Automated cars could auto-report any self-driven car that violates someone's right of way or commits another infraction, ensuring that only the best, most competent drivers are allowed to operate their vehicles without computer control.
I grew up in the suburbs and in my experience, suburbs combine the worst aspects of rural and urban living.
Row homes are built right next to each other, usually an eighth of an acre or less in the newer suburbs. Suburban apartments tend to be located on bigger plots that may have pools and gardens. On the whole though, there is the exact same lack of privacy as in the cities. In the city, single-family homes might have the walls built into each other and in the suburbs, they might have a small ally-way between them. Either way, you are not significantly further from your neighbor. Ditto for apartments.
There is less density in the suburbs (but many suburbs, especially those of major urban areas like San Francisco, LA, and New York still have higher population densities than many cities such as Atlanta or Houston), but there are still an awful lot of people. It is not like a rural area where you can actually largely get some privacy and away from others.
And on the flip side, where good cities typically have enough density and proper urban design to allow you to get around easily without a car, in suburbs you are stuck with driving everywhere, often in the same heavy traffic that cities experience during rush hour, and there often are no viable alternatives. You rarely can just walk to the bar, the bodega, the cafe, the train station, the ferry, et cetera. You have to spend a lot of time and money driving, which is one of the reasons that suburban residents are much less healthy than urban residents.
As for "self-determination"? That is a joke. In rural areas, people typically leave you alone. In suburbs, it is often worse than the city, because suburbs are full of home-owners associations that have the legal right to dictate every aspect of what you do on your property, everything from the car you drive to your house color and law decoration.
The US, especially certain "cities" like Houston, have been endlessly expanding outward, creating an unsustainable mess and taking away precious natural resources such as parks and agricultural lands. This simply cannot continue.
Suburbs in major urban areas like New York, LA, and San Francisco have already been experiencing population density increases, to the point where the vast majority of the big ones are higher in population density than many actual cities (like Houston and Atlanta).
The solution is to redesign existing suburbs around high density, mixed-use (residential and commercial) transportation corridors (trains, canals with ferries, trollies, rapid bus lines). It is already happening in more sensible (and usually higher density) areas of the country.
Rural areas are a different matter. In many of them, car sharing may be impractical.
The women testified under oath that he did rape them. That is why the Swedish government intends to charge him.
. . . a Swedish prison is probably NICER than the place he is staying now and his time in custody would count toward any sentence he might receive.
Assange is truly living in a prison built by his own mind, locked in his cell not by jailers, but by his own paranoia and megalomania.
If the US thought they had enough evidence to move forward with a federal prosecution, they would have had their best allies (the Brits) hold him in custody while they filed the proper paperwork for an extradition. If the US had enough evidence to prove conspiracy to steal classified information in the US, then they almost certainly had enough evidence to file for a proper extradition from the UK, especially since the UK has an official secrets act (unlike the US).
Assange behaves as if he is above the law and cites paranoid fantasies that this is part of some grand conspiracy against him. Guess what Assange; the US government IS powerful and if the Attorney General thought he could prove a case against you in federal court, he wouldn't engage in some silly conspiracy. He would simply have had the British police arrest you in the middle of the night and have quickly extradited you to the US to face federal charges.
If you are going to bum around Europe raping women, it is best not to piss off the world's most powerful governments, because they are going to make sure you are held accountable for every wrongdoing you commit, whether it be not filling out your taxes properly or putting your dick where it doesn't belong.
If people are really following Nintendo so closely as to know about the impending release (and I am not sure how many really are) and they intend to wait and buy it, then Nintendo only loses a sale if they don't actually complete the purchase of the upgraded 3DS. The new 3DS very possibly has higher margins (while the old 3DS will be discounted to deplete stock) anyway, so Nintendo might end up making MORE money if people hold-out.
It is nothing like the Wii U. The Wii U's problem is that after the initial two million people who bought one the first month, very few people purchased it for the first year. The Wii U's problem was not that people were holding out for a future upgrade.
. . . making handheld games, I strongly suspect you are in error. People want to play games on the go. Smartphones are not exactly good gaming devices as they exist out of the box. Unless that changes, there is likely going to be a market for handheld gaming consoles for the foreseeable future.
People were making similar claims about the 3DS, that it was selling poorly because of smartphones, but it is currently the best-selling game console of this generation.
Actually, I do understand the difference.
The Galileo probe was powered by the heat from the uncontrolled natural decay (fission) of a sub-critical mass of plutonium. Large-scale plants are powered by the heat from the controlled decay (fission) of a critical mass of plutonium or a similarly unstable material.
Perhaps you should not make assumptions.
Probably the same people that think the most appropriate toy, for GIRLS, is a large-breasted supermodel. In retrospect, they should have marketed Barbie as a toy for 12-year old boys to play with and sold "realistic anatomy" kits before the availability of the internet in every American household.
. . . . but I'm not sure how viable Plutonium is as a power source. Most of the spacecraft that use it are quite large and heavy and not designed to land themselves (for instance, the Galileo spacecraft was Plutonium-powered while the lander it dropped was not).
Plutonium is one of the densest substances on Earth and I'm guessing the engine you need to turn heat into electricity is none-too lightweight.
My understanding is that radioactive batteries are only used on heavy, long-term missions where solar power is impractical for legitimate engineering and economic reasons that go far beyond simple public fear. If I am wrong, someone please correct me with good evidence.
Are you really going to argue semantics? Many commuters have their cars moved by ferries for a significant portion of their trip. They still say, "I drive to work", not, "I ferry to work." If a ferry or train is carrying your bicycle, I do not see how the semantics are any different.
I was excited to see that Subway to the Sea project. I think that 87 miles of track in LA counts not just their heavy rail line, but also their light rail. BART is just heavy rail and if you counted the MUNI light rail subways in San Francisco and the VTA light rail in Silicon Valley, it is a lot more rail.
I was pleasently suprised to see that LA is also expanding their commuter rail (Metrolink I think they call it). I know that they have been trying to expand it here (Caltrain is upgraded to 4 tracks, supposed to be electrified and grade separated in the future, and they are building a new commuter rail between Sonoma and Marin).
What makes LA completely dysfunctional is that unlike cities like Houston and Atlanta, LA actually has very high population density. It is nowhere on the level of New York or San Francisco, but the population density makes driving untenable during most of the day and since alternatives are almost non-existent (mostly buses that get stuck in the same traffic), you get a huge mess during rush hour.
It seems that teaching someone how to pass a lie-detector test is legal. These guys may have set him up by revealing to him that they intended to use the information to perjure themselves, at which point, he became a co-conspirator. I don't know. I am not a legal expert, because what he was teaching seems perfectly legit. Polygraph tests are somewhat dubious under even under the best circumstances and absolutely worthless if someone has a full understanding of how they work or they are an outlier.
I hope he has a good lawyer.
Oil is not going to "run out". It simply will become more and more expensive to extract. At some point (around $10-15 per gallon) it will be economically worthwhile to simply convert coal to petroleum.
The environmental consequences of taking fossil fuels to the point at which we are in danger of "running out" would probably be severe enough to ensure our extinction as a technological species. We would have to worry about the destruction of our cities and societies from continuous burning of fossil fuels long before we would have to worry about running out of petroleum.
By your logic, we should stop encouraging people to ride trains because some people have claustrophobia and cannot board.
You are making a strawman fallacy by suggesting that people claim that 100% of the population should ride bicycles. Nobody is making that claim but you. What people are claiming is that we should support and encourage that option for the vast majority of the commuting population which has no disability that prevents them from riding a bicycle, the same as we should support and encourage train use for those who do not have a disability that prevents them from riding a train.
Our current culture in the US, where unsustainable transportation (driving personal automobiles) is prioritized over sustainable transit, needs to change, and the sooner the better.
The hope would be that people would start building sustainable transit BEFORE the roadways reached their breaking point, but cities like Atlanta, LA, and Houston have proved that humans really are not that smart.
At some point, you have to stop building endless low density suburbs and start infilling with high density transit corridors. The sooner this is done, the less severe the transportation and pollution problems will be in American cities.
Also, in cities like San Francisco or New York, you can bicycle over 50 miles to work, because the metropolitan area has put in options like trains, subways, and ferries which extend the range of the bicycle.
A prius is putting over 3000 lbs of force into a few square centimeters of roadway surface.
It does not cause as much damage as a fully-loaded big rig, but it does cause significant damage.
Look at the left-lanes of highways that are full of road damage. They were not caused by commercial trucks (which are banned from using them) but by cars, SUV's, and pickups.
Based on the evidence, I do not believe that market-driven solutions will work, because the solutions are long term (over many generations) but almost all profit-driven corporations focus on short-term returns to their current shareholders.
For instance, in terms of cost per kilowatt hour, solar solutions are usually within one standard deviation of the market-cost for electricity. However, no for-profit utility has expressed any interest in developing the massive infrastructure to take our electrical grid into the future and allow for effective deployment of a full solar solution. Only central planning is likely to accomplish that.
History has shown that "the market" has never been effective at stopping corporations from creating dangerous hazards, especially ones that manifest themselves diffusely over the long term.
Also, I would be interested in the source of your claim that the cost of mitigating damage due to global warming would be greater than the cost of reigning in carbon emissions today. Every credible source I have seen has strongly suggested the opposite. Places that have passed strong carbon regulations have not experienced any significant change in economic growth relative to those that continue to pollute (to the best of my knowledge) and the figures I have seen for the probable costs associated with sea-level rises alone is astronomical.
In fact, by most estimates I have seen, the cost of building infrastructure to protect occupied or industrially useful areas from rising sea levels far exceeds the cost of simply abandoning homes, factories, farms, bridges, roads, et cetera. Only in very dense urban areas will mitigating factors like seawalls be worth the costs and, even there, it is likely that many homes and businesses will simply be written off as hundreds of trillions of dollars in economic losses as the cost of mitigation exceeds the value of the real estate.