That sucks; I'm sorry. OTOH, we're operating on a budget... Where in Nowhere are you, exactly?
We're glad and interested to see some international parties -- somewhat unexpected that the largest one organized is in Mexico City. But coverage in the U.S. is uneven; chalk it up to demographics, either weird or obvious, and luck.
Thoughtful response, with good points. Like a lot of things to do with computer networks, there are a lot of last-mile (or last-several-miles) problems.
For most of the last decade-plus, my answer to "How often do you need the long range?" would have been "several times a year." Have driven across the U.S. at least once for all but (IIRC) 2 of those years, and in the years when I was based on the east coast, I did TN --> PA quite a bit, often w/ a stop in MD, as well from TN, MD, or PA to rural New England, where the bird's eye view is often misleading when it comes to distances, and it can be uncomfortably far between gas stations because of windy roads and gas-eating inclines / gravel. (If you need to go 15 miles from convenient gas by winding up a road that's partly gravel and partly mud, it eats into things;))
I'm suddenly more static, so my needs are changing, and I'm trying to evaluate rationally along the lines you suggest. There is some contingent and circular logic, too -- if I had a car that couldn't do things like go to Big Bend, then I wouldn't need a car to go to Big Bend, and If I had only an in-town-range electric car, than I wouldn't run into the dilemma of risking my way off of a highway with it;) Choices, I know. But as of now, if a car can't go a few hundred miles and be gassed up for more in short order, it won't get me to various things I want to get to on weekends, or more occasional trips to family for holidays, etc. (This month, possibly Corpus Christi; next month Houston and the middle of Florida...) If I lived in NYC, I wouldn't own a car at all, I suspect.
So I'm still waiting for the electric car holy grail (or for them to be common enough that I could buy an unfashionable 3-year-old one as my around-town car), and very glad to see the charging possibilities grow.
Right now, my metric for car range is "Can I drive it to Las Vegas from Austin?"
Like you say, west Texas is tricky for that! (And the desert stretches from there to LV, too, or for that matter from LV to LA, but if you were going all the way to the coast it gets ever more plausible... )
There are so many possible scenarios / use cases, I'm sure for some people pure electrics make a lot of sense -- the "I commute 10 miles per day, and that's all this car does" situation. If I had a 2d car, I'd certainly consider a pure electric. I would enjoy zipping around town with less pump-price anxiety.
I anticipate that it'll go from:
- Useful in Silicon Valley and a few other places, for short commutes, to - Useful in many major and smaller percentage of medium-sized cities, for moderate commutes to - Useful along major highways, to - Useful in suburbia generally, to - Useful anywhere reasonably near population centers, to... [Here, I skip some steps]... to - Can go to the chili fest at Terlingua, in Big Bend National Park.
It's a leap between "commutes" to longer travel, though -- esp. if the commute involves being parked at a recharge point. And the gap between "major highways" to "Big bend" is a big one, too. I suspect that in 5 years (and I hope that's pessimistic), Austin to Vegas will be doable, because it seems plausible to me that I-10 will be sufficiently equipped, batteries will be sufficiently better, etc. But there's a whole lot of thin / brittle infrastructure (better than many places, I know) once you take that turn to anywhere *not* on the main road.
Actually, the name of the farm is a coincidence -- Weil just happens to be moving his tanks there, because he needs more room than his garage now, and because being in a greenhouse lets him use natural light instead of artificial.
(Agua Dulce is Spanish for "Sweet Water," and this in-city farm is named -- with localization;) -- after another one called "Sweet Water.")
That sounds like a cool video subject -- thanks for the tip;)
When I was at the organic farm where Lewis Weil is moving in his stuff, we talked about the conception I'd gotten from books about the nearish future (but mostly written in the early or mid '70s) that sometime soon we'd all be eating a lot of engineered algae... it's a slow future to arrive, but it was great to eat some of this ogo as a sample.
Not all the footage shot made the final video, but Lewis said that though he started out at the farmer's market, the demand from restaurants become so great that basically he's outgrown it now. (Between realizing that the seaweed he was already growing was edible and standing in front of a banner at the farmer's market, he says was only about 2 weeks.)
But being at Wheatsville, that's close enough to a farmer's market, eh?;)
Funny: My grandmother was a stickler for grammar and spelling; I remember her correcting my use of "license plate." "No, it's a registration plate or registration tag. The driver gets the license."
Use / private / cash -- that seems like the best way:)
For *new* purchases, as far as I know, the whole instant-background check applies (legally) to all private U.S. firearms buyers; the claim (which I don't esp. buy) is that these records are not kept, and do not constitute a registry.
It does raise lots of questions about the current registration / tracking regime, though. For people who want to home-build a (legal, personal) gun, the BATFE has provisions for applying for a serial number to then inscribe/afix to the result. The details are eluding my memory right now, though, perhaps someone with more recent steeping will be able to expand...
I've never done it full time on RV-based, but I've spent sometimes more than a month away from my conventional home, and working from the road on either solo or two-person road trips. For a few years I did a 4-6 week cross-country trip from Seattle to various east coast destinations and back. Some great upsides to it:
- While gas is (relative to the rest of the world) cheap in the U.S., it gives a (again, relative) bargain on seeing an interesting country. If you have friends scattered over North America and the flexibility in schedule to visit them, it's more economical than dozens of commercial plane flights. I've gotten to see old friends all over the country this way, and that's a hard thing to overprice, because seeing friends in small batches is my ideal social experience. It's neat to catch up to people, make dinner with them, see how their kids resemble them or not, etc.
- You can follow the seasons as you see fit. I happen to like Seattle weather year 'round, Texas weather part of the year, and New England mountain weather when I'm not the one driving on a road made of equal parts ice, mud, and gravel.
But I was driving a passenger car, not an RV -- I spent my nights either parked in a safe spot (safish, at least), visiting with friends and family, camping, or at a hotel. While RVs are cool technology, as you know the big ones take a lot of gas and take more planning to park for the night.
Besides gas and parking, the worst-case scenarios with a full-size RV could be pretty bad... if you hit ice and slip off the road, even if no one's injured it takes a pretty big effort to get it back on the road. Even without going off the road, there are camp roads, long driveways, and twisty paths along which I'd rather be in my nimble little car than in anything much bigger. When I have idly considered trying the RV-only life for a while, my plan has always been for a small one, like a RoadTek conversion van or just a small SUV outfitted for sleeping -- I'd rather pay for shower facilities on a piecemeal basis than have a vehicle big enough to contain a full-size one. (There are some van-sized shower units, but I wonder whether they're too much contortion and hassle...)
Horses for courses; if RV travel is your thing, you may see the worst-case scenarios as easy to avoid or just interesting challenges, and just build in the expense or hassle of getting places the RV won't easily reach.
Connectivity is getting better all the time. I have used a Mi-Fi connection quite a bit (using both Verizon and Virgin devices), and found it to be a mixed blessing: when it works, it's fine, but slow as the 3G device that it is, and a bit flaky. When it doesn't work, well, I hope you don't *really* need to be online in the next little while. As with cellphones, the coverage map is always a lie. (Verizon, on this one front, has had better customer service and more consistent coverage, but the actual service is much more expensive; Virgin, in my experience -- matched by Samzenpus's -- tends to fail more often, and for longer at a stretch, and has customer service that Douglas Adams could have used without exaggeration in some part of the Hitchhiker's books. Cheery, youth-oriented, and hip is not what I want in a phone tree.
But with the carrying capacity of an RV, there are now some decent satellite options, and of course many more 3G/4G internet choices, including tethering. All depends how much your per-month budget for communications is, and how much your work requires being ensconced in your own office / surroundings and how much you need big data transfers. Even with "unlimited" service, if you've got a 3G connection, you're not watching streaming video much;) [If you're patient, low-bandwidth video -- YouTube, for instance -- can work pretty well.] Some days, I can work fine from a Starbucks, and do -- that's been a frequent spot from which to work: they are nearly always friendly, have good-enough-for-me coffee, and sometimes nice cush
My experience with a low-end B/W Lexmark laser (not sure of model, sorry, and it's in storage right now because of a move) has been positive. I bought it cheaply, used, with not many pages run through it yet and what I assume is a starter cartridge; no problems yet, works fine with Linux. (For all I know, it's a PITA on Windows, though;))
Says Wikipedia: USADA is "is taxpayer-funded non-profit organization."
So, just like Congress spending time on baseball persecutions, this is tax money being spent on enforcing the rules in non-essential, voluntary, recreational activities -- even it's not an official government bureaucracy, funding means control, so this is essentially a gov't body.
Personally, I have no problem with any given organization (for Scrabble, for competitive waiting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op39GUkQhmc, for concrete canoes -- http://concretecanoe.org/, for particular religious beliefs http://www.lds.org/?lang=eng...) setting whatever rules they want, so long as the people involved choose to accept it, or choose to challenge it, etc, so long as there's no coercion. If you don't like the big chili competition in Terlingua (as some didn't), you can break off and start *another* big chili competition in Terlingua (and some people did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terlingua,_Texas). If the govt's going to get involved, it should be a matter of public safety, preventing fraud, etc. .
By contrast, I'm offended that so much as a single penny of taxpayer money went toward this.
From the Wikipedia page you cite: "Not to be confused with assault rifle,"
The terms are not synonymous. "Assault rifle" (to those who know guns) has a specific meaning that includes select fire and some other features; "assault weapon" (as in Assault Weapons Ban) is much looser.
So in that sense, you can believe (hey, it's your time) that a semi-automatic gun "is an assault weapon," but this does not make true that a semi-auto can be an assault *rifle.*
I suspect we'd agree on the inanity of needing to point this out, at the very least in a country with the U.S.'s 2d Amendment, but because the original submitter wrote:
"This means that people without gun licenses â" or people who have had their licenses revoked â" could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun."
I wanted to clarify a bit, so I added the part pointing out that licensure (in the U.S., in most places) isn't exactly an issue at play. Some state / local gov'ts -- Hawaii, notably, but many cities, too -- have demonstrated that the part of "shall not be infringed" they don't understand is at least four words long.
You could also have an off-the-books gun (completely within the law) in many states simply by buying a used gun in a private sale; some people think that's a bad thing, but don't lump me in with them.
" You were probably confused by the term "assault rifle" which is commonly assumed to mean an automatic weapon, but in fact (in the US) is legally defined as a weapon that has a detachable magazine and at least two of several cosmetic features such as a forward grip or a barrel shroud."
While I mostly agree with the thrust of your post, I have two gripes:
1) "Assault *rifle*" has a more definite meaning; it's "assault weapon" that is commonly taken to mean an automatic weapon
2) There's the AWB-and-related-followons or similar nincompoop state laws which demonize those features and ban certain guns, but only define "assault weapon" in that context; I don't think it's quite fair to say that "assault weapon" has a widely applicable legal definition. Mostly, it remains a term of hysteria and contempt / panic.
Does the article link here send you to a paywall? It doesn't hit a paywall for me, and I'm certainly not a WSJ subscriber or anything -- we try to avoid paywalled* sources (and if a paywalled source *is* linked, our intent is to label it).
Nowadays, "paywalled" is a continuum, though, rather than a binary... some sites, like the NYT, are free of charge for x-many articles per month, or require trivial not-exactly-registration, like some sites that have required zip-code entry, to satisfy their marketing departments, I guess.
WSJ has a mix of articles, many of which are fully paywalled, but again, this one doesn't appear to be at all blocked to me...
Slashdot Mirror
That sucks; I'm sorry. OTOH, we're operating on a budget ... Where in Nowhere are you, exactly?
We're glad and interested to see some international parties -- somewhat unexpected that the largest one organized is in Mexico City. But coverage in the U.S. is uneven; chalk it up to demographics, either weird or obvious, and luck.
They may send me a few extra shirts, so, hopefully the answer's Yes. Remind me in person that you asked, in case someone must go figuratively hungry.
Thoughtful response, with good points. Like a lot of things to do with computer networks, there are a lot of last-mile (or last-several-miles) problems.
For most of the last decade-plus, my answer to "How often do you need the long range?" would have been "several times a year." Have driven across the U.S. at least once for all but (IIRC) 2 of those years, and in the years when I was based on the east coast, I did TN --> PA quite a bit, often w/ a stop in MD, as well from TN, MD, or PA to rural New England, where the bird's eye view is often misleading when it comes to distances, and it can be uncomfortably far between gas stations because of windy roads and gas-eating inclines / gravel. (If you need to go 15 miles from convenient gas by winding up a road that's partly gravel and partly mud, it eats into things ;))
I'm suddenly more static, so my needs are changing, and I'm trying to evaluate rationally along the lines you suggest. There is some contingent and circular logic, too -- if I had a car that couldn't do things like go to Big Bend, then I wouldn't need a car to go to Big Bend, and If I had only an in-town-range electric car, than I wouldn't run into the dilemma of risking my way off of a highway with it ;) Choices, I know. But as of now, if a car can't go a few hundred miles and be gassed up for more in short order, it won't get me to various things I want to get to on weekends, or more occasional trips to family for holidays, etc. (This month, possibly Corpus Christi; next month Houston and the middle of Florida ...) If I lived in NYC, I wouldn't own a car at all, I suspect.
So I'm still waiting for the electric car holy grail (or for them to be common enough that I could buy an unfashionable 3-year-old one as my around-town car), and very glad to see the charging possibilities grow.
Yep.
Right now, my metric for car range is "Can I drive it to Las Vegas from Austin?"
Like you say, west Texas is tricky for that! (And the desert stretches from there to LV, too, or for that matter from LV to LA, but if you were going all the way to the coast it gets ever more plausible ... )
There are so many possible scenarios / use cases, I'm sure for some people pure electrics make a lot of sense -- the "I commute 10 miles per day, and that's all this car does" situation. If I had a 2d car, I'd certainly consider a pure electric. I would enjoy zipping around town with less pump-price anxiety.
I anticipate that it'll go from:
- Useful in Silicon Valley and a few other places, for short commutes, to ... ... to
- Useful in many major and smaller percentage of medium-sized cities, for moderate commutes to
- Useful along major highways, to
- Useful in suburbia generally, to
- Useful anywhere reasonably near population centers, to
[Here, I skip some steps]
- Can go to the chili fest at Terlingua, in Big Bend National Park.
It's a leap between "commutes" to longer travel, though -- esp. if the commute involves being parked at a recharge point. And the gap between "major highways" to "Big bend" is a big one, too. I suspect that in 5 years (and I hope that's pessimistic), Austin to Vegas will be doable, because it seems plausible to me that I-10 will be sufficiently equipped, batteries will be sufficiently better, etc. But there's a whole lot of thin / brittle infrastructure (better than many places, I know) once you take that turn to anywhere *not* on the main road.
Hey, I've only been punched in the face a few times, and none of them was while editing Slashdot!
Alternatively, why stop there, when there's the possibility of a full-on hubbub, or even a fracas?
(We would love to hear complaints, though, esp. if delivered with good ideas on resolving them.)
timothy
Where is your "other"? :)
Always a dilemma in creating finite lists of options ... ;
Hi there!
Actually, the name of the farm is a coincidence -- Weil just happens to be moving his tanks there, because he needs more room than his garage now, and because being in a greenhouse lets him use natural light instead of artificial.
(Agua Dulce is Spanish for "Sweet Water," and this in-city farm is named -- with localization ;) -- after another one called "Sweet Water.")
That sounds like a cool video subject -- thanks for the tip ;)
When I was at the organic farm where Lewis Weil is moving in his stuff, we talked about the conception I'd gotten from books about the nearish future (but mostly written in the early or mid '70s) that sometime soon we'd all be eating a lot of engineered algae ... it's a slow future to arrive, but it was great to eat some of this ogo as a sample.
Not all the footage shot made the final video, but Lewis said that though he started out at the farmer's market, the demand from restaurants become so great that basically he's outgrown it now. (Between realizing that the seaweed he was already growing was edible and standing in front of a banner at the farmer's market, he says was only about 2 weeks.)
But being at Wheatsville, that's close enough to a farmer's market, eh? ;)
Funny: My grandmother was a stickler for grammar and spelling; I remember her correcting my use of "license plate." "No, it's a registration plate or registration tag. The driver gets the license."
Use / private / cash -- that seems like the best way :)
For *new* purchases, as far as I know, the whole instant-background check applies (legally) to all private U.S. firearms buyers; the claim (which I don't esp. buy) is that these records are not kept, and do not constitute a registry.
That's an interesting use of "field day" :)
It does raise lots of questions about the current registration / tracking regime, though. For people who want to home-build a (legal, personal) gun, the BATFE has provisions for applying for a serial number to then inscribe/afix to the result. The details are eluding my memory right now, though, perhaps someone with more recent steeping will be able to expand ...
I've never done it full time on RV-based, but I've spent sometimes more than a month away from my conventional home, and working from the road on either solo or two-person road trips. For a few years I did a 4-6 week cross-country trip from Seattle to various east coast destinations and back. Some great upsides to it:
- While gas is (relative to the rest of the world) cheap in the U.S., it gives a (again, relative) bargain on seeing an interesting country. If you have friends scattered over North America and the flexibility in schedule to visit them, it's more economical than dozens of commercial plane flights. I've gotten to see old friends all over the country this way, and that's a hard thing to overprice, because seeing friends in small batches is my ideal social experience. It's neat to catch up to people, make dinner with them, see how their kids resemble them or not, etc.
- You can follow the seasons as you see fit. I happen to like Seattle weather year 'round, Texas weather part of the year, and New England mountain weather when I'm not the one driving on a road made of equal parts ice, mud, and gravel.
But I was driving a passenger car, not an RV -- I spent my nights either parked in a safe spot (safish, at least), visiting with friends and family, camping, or at a hotel. While RVs are cool technology, as you know the big ones take a lot of gas and take more planning to park for the night.
Besides gas and parking, the worst-case scenarios with a full-size RV could be pretty bad ... if you hit ice and slip off the road, even if no one's injured it takes a pretty big effort to get it back on the road. Even without going off the road, there are camp roads, long driveways, and twisty paths along which I'd rather be in my nimble little car than in anything much bigger. When I have idly considered trying the RV-only life for a while, my plan has always been for a small one, like a RoadTek conversion van or just a small SUV outfitted for sleeping -- I'd rather pay for shower facilities on a piecemeal basis than have a vehicle big enough to contain a full-size one. (There are some van-sized shower units, but I wonder whether they're too much contortion and hassle ...)
Horses for courses; if RV travel is your thing, you may see the worst-case scenarios as easy to avoid or just interesting challenges, and just build in the expense or hassle of getting places the RV won't easily reach.
Connectivity is getting better all the time. I have used a Mi-Fi connection quite a bit (using both Verizon and Virgin devices), and found it to be a mixed blessing: when it works, it's fine, but slow as the 3G device that it is, and a bit flaky. When it doesn't work, well, I hope you don't *really* need to be online in the next little while. As with cellphones, the coverage map is always a lie. (Verizon, on this one front, has had better customer service and more consistent coverage, but the actual service is much more expensive; Virgin, in my experience -- matched by Samzenpus's -- tends to fail more often, and for longer at a stretch, and has customer service that Douglas Adams could have used without exaggeration in some part of the Hitchhiker's books. Cheery, youth-oriented, and hip is not what I want in a phone tree.
But with the carrying capacity of an RV, there are now some decent satellite options, and of course many more 3G/4G internet choices, including tethering. All depends how much your per-month budget for communications is, and how much your work requires being ensconced in your own office / surroundings and how much you need big data transfers. Even with "unlimited" service, if you've got a 3G connection, you're not watching streaming video much ;) [If you're patient, low-bandwidth video -- YouTube, for instance -- can work pretty well.] Some days, I can work fine from a Starbucks, and do -- that's been a frequent spot from which to work: they are nearly always friendly, have good-enough-for-me coffee, and sometimes nice cush
My experience with a low-end B/W Lexmark laser (not sure of model, sorry, and it's in storage right now because of a move) has been positive. I bought it cheaply, used, with not many pages run through it yet and what I assume is a starter cartridge; no problems yet, works fine with Linux. (For all I know, it's a PITA on Windows, though ;))
It should be one with unlimited data, and good coverage, at least in outlying areas.
Says Wikipedia: USADA is "is taxpayer-funded non-profit organization."
So, just like Congress spending time on baseball persecutions, this is tax money being spent on enforcing the rules in non-essential, voluntary, recreational activities -- even it's not an official government bureaucracy, funding means control, so this is essentially a gov't body.
Personally, I have no problem with any given organization (for Scrabble, for competitive waiting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op39GUkQhmc, for concrete canoes -- http://concretecanoe.org/, for particular religious beliefs http://www.lds.org/?lang=eng ...) setting whatever rules they want, so long as the people involved choose to accept it, or choose to challenge it, etc, so long as there's no coercion. If you don't like the big chili competition in Terlingua (as some didn't), you can break off and start *another* big chili competition in Terlingua (and some people did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terlingua,_Texas). If the govt's going to get involved, it should be a matter of public safety, preventing fraud, etc. .
By contrast, I'm offended that so much as a single penny of taxpayer money went toward this.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/sales-tax-rates-major-us-cities -- and with those other taxes in mind, it does hit 10pct in at least a few places. (Not sure how up to date this chart is, though.)
You're right -- sorry.
I blame cerebral flatulence.
But can you pop in the SIM to use it in another phone, and stay on the same plan?
Or do they somehow limit it to phones that were bought *as* GoPhones?
From the Wikipedia page you cite: "Not to be confused with assault rifle,"
The terms are not synonymous. "Assault rifle" (to those who know guns) has a specific meaning that includes select fire and some other features; "assault weapon" (as in Assault Weapons Ban) is much looser.
So in that sense, you can believe (hey, it's your time) that a semi-automatic gun "is an assault weapon," but this does not make true that a semi-auto can be an assault *rifle.*
Yep.
I am all for language being flexible, but when terms are used to confuse and demonize like that, worth some digging in and informing.
Tim
I suspect we'd agree on the inanity of needing to point this out, at the very least in a country with the U.S.'s 2d Amendment, but because the original submitter wrote:
"This means that people without gun licenses â" or people who have had their licenses revoked â" could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun."
I wanted to clarify a bit, so I added the part pointing out that licensure (in the U.S., in most places) isn't exactly an issue at play. Some state / local gov'ts -- Hawaii, notably, but many cities, too -- have demonstrated that the part of "shall not be infringed" they don't understand is at least four words long.
You could also have an off-the-books gun (completely within the law) in many states simply by buying a used gun in a private sale; some people think that's a bad thing, but don't lump me in with them.
timothy
" You were probably confused by the term "assault rifle" which is commonly assumed to mean an automatic weapon, but in fact (in the US) is legally defined as a weapon that has a detachable magazine and at least two of several cosmetic features such as a forward grip or a barrel shroud."
While I mostly agree with the thrust of your post, I have two gripes:
1) "Assault *rifle*" has a more definite meaning; it's "assault weapon" that is commonly taken to mean an automatic weapon
2) There's the AWB-and-related-followons or similar nincompoop state laws which demonize those features and ban certain guns, but only define "assault weapon" in that context; I don't think it's quite fair to say that "assault weapon" has a widely applicable legal definition. Mostly, it remains a term of hysteria and contempt / panic.
timothy
Does the article link here send you to a paywall? It doesn't hit a paywall for me, and I'm certainly not a WSJ subscriber or anything -- we try to avoid paywalled* sources (and if a paywalled source *is* linked, our intent is to label it).
Nowadays, "paywalled" is a continuum, though, rather than a binary ... some sites, like the NYT, are free of charge for x-many articles per month, or require trivial not-exactly-registration, like some sites that have required zip-code entry, to satisfy their marketing departments, I guess.
WSJ has a mix of articles, many of which are fully paywalled, but again, this one doesn't appear to be at all blocked to me ...
I haven't yet used the iOS version, but the word was that Yes, it works just as the other versions do, incl. synching.
timothy