You can't reduce a problem beyond its core components and then ridicule it to make it go away.
The environmental impact of a Prius (or any other vehicle) has nothing to do with the weight of the vehicle, it has to do with the lifetime cost. A Prius or any other lithium battery vehicle.
Let's start with Lithium and ignore the quoting of fueleconomy.gov and its inaccuracies in many real-world scenarios (on ramp to off ramp, tank over tank driving; more than one passenger, etc.).
Frankly, a person has to throw logic completely out the window to accept vehicles powered by Lithium as superior to petroleum-only vehicles. What are the primary battle cries of anti-oil types? The oil supply is limited, we're funding dictatorships (only when a Republican is in power), we're polluting the world, production of petrolium/fossil fuels is destructive to the environment, and so on.
Guess what? Not only is Lithium much more rare than petroleum and in significantly shorter supply based on what's being used and in absolute terms, but it is much, much more harmful to the environment to both use and harvest. It's also massively expensive and time consuming to do so, only being made profitable by government subsidies for 'green' technology.
In terms of pounds of fuel burned, sure, the Prius is pretty awesome. Guess what? It only takes a couple (initially) split uranium atoms to power an explosion large enough to destroy cities. This may come as a surprise, but the energy density of materials, with regard to their availability, is different.
Unlike with radioactive isotopes, petroleum is very common. It outputs byproducts which are, compared to lithium, pretty damn benign: for fuck's sake, plants eat CO2. There are observable benefits to giving plants more of it, such as increased growth and higher produce yields, when appropriate.
Battery powered cars are stupid for the above reasons.
Guess what? (Warning, I'm going to use scare bolding.) If you're afraid of CO2 emissions, why don't you go and kill some people, or even.... yourself? You output around 356kg of CO2 a year, probably at least TWICE your body weight and possibly THREE to FOUR times as much. AND THAT's just from BREATHING! Gaia knows how many poor defenseless plants and/or animals had to die for you to survive the year.
Then you've got the manufacturing costs of a new vehicle, vs. using what you've already got. As money is at least a conservative representation of environmental impact, at what point do you hit break-even? That Prius (or any new vehicle, but specifically the Prius due to the world cost of lithium) is going to take a while before your gas guzzling, 25mpg Honda is surpassed.
Finally: "green" is not a "relative" term. It's a political term that gets loaded and shot at people who are in the "politically incorrect" minority, regardless of whether it fits - just like "racist", "sexist", and "bigot".
And no, driving less is not "always greener". You are forgetting to consider some very simple things, like degradation of assets. My computer is not just as cost efficient for me if I don't use it as if I were letting it sit here unused, because I'm not using it. It still costs (amortized) money, and over time the natural elements (in the case of cars, material weathering, rust, etc.) will take their toll on your assets, making them completely worthless. Like a computer which is used for its entire life vs. one which is never unboxed, a maintained vehicle driven 300k miles in its life is much more green than the same vehicle driven less due to the initial cost of said vehicle. (Granted, after maintenance and repairs, there's eventually going to be an energy and environmental impact break-even point.)
But then, I guess I'm thinking in absolutes, not relativistic terms where the "greenness" of something isn't measured on concrete, observable facts but on how it "feels" - eg. the observation that because I'm driving less, I'm being greener.
Good luck with this comment. I say the same thing in threads about these so-called energy efficient vehicles and invariably I get modded flaimbait or troll.
Though, fortunately for you, there don't appear to be nearly as many green home nazis as there are green car nazis.
From what I've observed, it is not only quicker but it is also less expensive long-term to avoid the zoning and planning commission. Make sure your ducks are mostly in a line first yourself (drainage fields, wetlands, etc.) and build.
As my dad always says, it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.
Of course, if you live in a fine-happy place like California or New York, you better get permission first.
1) Ignore 1a) while quietly fighting in the dark 2) Embrace 3) Extend 4) Extinguish
We're well into #2 right now. All the efforts to "embrace" have done nothing in the long run but help Microsoft further, while curtailing competition: Mono is still nowhere near viable, and neither is Samba 4. Novell is stumbling. So-called open projects Microsoft has released or contributed have only gone to fuel their closed technologies, contributing nothing substantial to the IT environment as a whole. Their "embrace" has solely been a token gesture.
Side thought: Wouldn't it be funny if Microsoft released a Linux-based phone?
* The first one is the long one that I put up on my web page for people to find on their own. It's got pretty much all the buzz words I'm familiar/comfortable with. I've only gotten a couple calls from this one. * The other three are "short" - about a third a page of work history/experience/projects and a third a page of "domain" experience (eg. one for Windows, one for Linux/Open Source, and a third which has a mix of both)
I've had very good success with these "basic competency" resumes. From what I can tell, unless the place actually has those crazy high requirements (and in which case, you'd be too busy to breath and wouldn't want to work there anyway), the short format does just fine. (They also say, "I don't need a job because I already make a lot, but here's the basics of what I can do. ")
A couple months/years from now we'll have these same companies pushing for lower wages and/or more H1B workers - "our profit margin isn't high enough, and we actually have to pay these people to do tedious, difficult tasks!"
Yes, you heard me: skills aren't important - at least long-term.
Skills come and go. I used to be skilled with Active Directory and C#, but I was messing with them every day. Now I'm messing with other things, and I'm skilled in them.
There are skills, and then there are competencies, life skills, and fundamental comprehension. Some of these things come through experience with many different systems over time, but others are foundational.
If you don't understand the foundational basics of computing sciences, nothing about these modern technologies will make sense in a short period of time. Hell, if you don't have that foundation, chances are you don't truly "understand" those technologies - you'll just be able to use them. To someone who understands the hardware changes and differences, hardware based virtualization is just (basically) splitting ring 0, and a GPU is just another type of processor capable of x computations in y cycles, or z transforms, or what have you.
Additionally, experience with different architectures and platforms additionally gives you a staging point for future changes. "x? Oh, that's just like y, which was pretty common 20 years ago."
Of course, once you get to the point where you're experienced in many things, with a core set of competencies, you become a contractor and fix all the shit other people break, don't understand, etc.: the brighter, more competent IT people who have developed soft skills do this; everyone else leaves the industry (see: high unemployment rate), go into IT management, or find a lower paying IT jobs (see: Progress 4GL and the like).
There hasn't been a future "IT" since around 2000; businesses have seen to that. Hell, IT sees to it, as our goal is to reduce the amount of human hours are necessary not only for us to do basic jobs but for our clients to do their jobs - ergo making us redundant. If IT organizations today managed networks in ways which were common even 5 years ago, there'd be twice the employment in IT as there is.
One final thing I will add: virtualization is a double edged sword. It's damn convenient for small and medium shops to take their aging NT4, 2K, etc. servers and throw them on new (virtualized) hardware. We've not been doing it long enough to see the end game, but I gaurantee you this: we will never get rid of legacy systems if we just keep virtualizing old, unsupported hosts. Virtualization turns those turds into immortal nightmares: no updates, security holes galore, and absolutely no support. Pray to whichever God you believe in that you won't be burdened with the support of these machines 5, 10, 15 years down the line. (And yes, I fully suspect we'll still see Windows 2000 hosts on our networks then - with custom ERP/MRS/etc. software, requiring IE6).
Illumos is currently working on replacing the few parts of the kernel which are still "closed source"; I believe they're fairly trivial things, mainly, from what I recall reading. Trivial, at least, compared to the Important Parts, like dtrace and zfs.
I may be mistaken, but haven't many of those Sun/Solaris developers kicked off the Oracle train, moving to companies like Nexenta where they can continue working on The Next Big Thing?
I'm not sure on the numbers but I know at least several of the important ones have.
Well, it's not so much any one thing, but a combination of things make it attractive to me as an administrator.
First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.
Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.
FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.
In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.
Linux will NEVER get ZFS support in mainline.
ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).
Sorry, fail: railroad tracks need regular replacement, too. Rail, as well as the trucks and cars which ride on them, need regular maintenance and repair. It costs a LOT more to repair a passenger car than it does something in a personal vehicle (if only due to the economy of scale).
Unlike my van, which I've got a personal investment in maintaining, the same is not true for public transit.
Something I've thought might be a good idea would be to convert urban streets to rail, but in a novel way: if you want to drive a vehicle within city limits, you've got to get it 'upgraded'/equipped with a single-wheel drive system (might be a bit difficult on modern front-wheel drive cars), which you would deploy but would be controlled by central GPS. You could then select your destination, and you'd be brought there automatically by the rail.
The automobile is most certainly not more of a ball and chain than an independence-granting device.
Which grants more freedom? * taking the train to an interview or driving * taking the train/bus to get groceries or driving * packing the kids up and taking the train to grandmas -or- driving * going for a weekend picnic in the country on the train... and walking a dozen or so miles. * going on a business trip, takign a plane, a train, a bus, a taxi, and then doing the same on the way back, lugging your one small bag the whole two days... or driving.
The only place I can see an argument for trains is in highly urban environments, where subways are a better choice anyway in most cases (or simply pushing everything into the sea, as is the case in California).
I'd be interested in seeing someone who has a vehicle and makes statements like these go without their car for a month. Maybe some will be fine, being fewer than a couple miles from work or not having responsibilities outside of themselves.
Honestly, if a car is so much of a responsibility for you that it's a ball and chain, please never get married or have children. They are a mild inconvenience at best, for what they grant a person (or a family) in mobility - the ability to go about daily tasks, the ability to look for work while unemployed, and so on.
If you're not just one to shirk anything difficult, as your post suggests, maybe pick up a book or two on automotive repair? Or, I suppose, you could one day carry your family along in a rickshaw to the grocery; they're certainly less of a ball-and-chain than an automobile, after all!
High speed rail has none of the big downsides of air travel like the need to get to the airport 2 hours before the flight to check in, the need to pass through 3 layers of security, bans on liquids and other things, cramped seats etc.
You say that now, but just wait and see how creative something run by the government will be. I see no reason why the multitier security, liquid bans, and various other discomforts wouldn't likewise be enforced under the TSA.
Hint: look at Amtrak. It costs significantly more to travel per mile on Amtrak than it does to fly; it's slower, more cramped, less friendly, and you've got to wait longer. (And that was BEFORE 9/11, excluding the price difference, which is now. I'm sure it's even worse.)
I guess we'll just have to increase what we charge for production, then. You know, trivial things like:
* Corn * Wheat * Soy * Fuel (yeah, we make a fair amount of it) * Beef * Chicken * Pork * Machinery (used to pave your roads, build your sky rises, construct your high speed rail...) *
Don't get me wrong, I plan to move to a rural area as soon as economically feasible, but I don't think I should expect city-dwellers to pay for this luxury for me.
What luxury is that? Driving an automobile? Apparently you're not aware of what most "rural areas" in the US require. Yes, you can very easily die getting to work in the weather we've got out here without the protection of a vehicle. And when that's not a concern...
You also realize that if someone is being taxed more for the "luxury of driving" - this tax money going towards the construction of rail, which said people are not being given - then it's the rural people who will be getting gouged, right?
It's been shown time and time again that urban dwellers have a (significantly) higher carbon footprint because it takes more energy to maintain that way of life. It's been true since the first person grew his first field of corn and realized "hey, I can support a lot of people with this". While people in an urban area are in malls buying things, playing laser tag, eating at a restaurant, and doing whatever it is urban people do, people in rural and remote areas are spending time outdoors, cooking their own food and having simple social pleasures.
I actually like the parent's Doritos analogy - it's true when you think of it that way; there would be all sorts of uproar if physical goods were advertised and sold the way broadband is. "Up to" a dozen bagels in your order, or "up to" two patties on your burger would never fly. And who would work for pay on an "up to" scale? I'm sure companies would be happy to pay someone "up to" four hundred dollars an hour.
Been to a fast food restaurant lately?
No, they don't typically advertise things using words, but use pictures instead. But when and where have you been to a food establishment with pictures in the menus where the food looks anything like what you actually get? Usually, it's as little as 1/3 as large or a substantially smaller portion. The meat and veggies are of a significantly lower quality/grade and so on...
False advertising is everywhere. Most people just consider it "the eye of the beholder" though.
It really depends on where the limit is being imposed.
If I subscribe to a 10Mbit pipe, this should mean that my modem/router device and their network is able to sustain those rates. That's all. If I'm not able to pull content down at those rates, it doesn't mean they're in breach of the service terms - and that's likely why most ISPs put those terms in there. They can't control anything outside their network.
Now, if you can't get the advertised speeds on their network, that's another story.
What I think has happened is ISPs have upgraded some of their equipment to DOCSIS 3 to get the higher throughput, but DOCSIS 1 and DOCSIS 2 equipment is still out there - in homes as well as near the ends of nodes. This will bring the overall averages down - even if 90% of people get what they pay for, those people with 1Gbit FTTH pipes are going to be limited pretty close to home.
Combine that with companies over subscribing nodes, and you've got the same problem we had 10 years ago with early adoption. (Oh, and remember all the promises they were making and never kept?) Hardly new for ISPs.
Sometimes, I miss the small mom and pop dialup ISPs. You may have been limited to 9600/14400/36600/etc. baud but the people running things took pride in their work, it seemed.
Quite possibly because IPv6 is ugly. Very ugly. It's almost impossible to read, even if you can read it.
There are still plenty of scenarios where visually noticing an IP address is "wrong" for the situation still exist. IPv6 will make all but the most "professional" IT type have to start over in many ways, because most of them aren't network engineers.
My guess is that they may be basing the figures on assigned MAC addresses, though I could be mistaken.
However, the assumption that it'll quadruple in the next decade is a bit much. Even if there are four times more network devices created in the next decade than the last, the chances of them being anything but behind a NAT box is highly unlikely. I might double the employees in my office and increase their upstream, but we're still not using any more public IPv4 address space.
Same for me at home: my network has doubled in the past couple years, but I've never used any more than 1 IP address.
Also, I'm sure some ISPs will find creative ways to provide customers with cheap internet access behind a NAT connection. I'm not looking forward to that.
You could also get an ALIX board... they're comparable in cost and offer a lot more networking functionality; they're x86 boards and have much more processor and RAM than anything near the WRT54 stuff. They'll run a small to medium network's gateway device (running pfSense) with several VPNs, even - no problem.
OK, they're cool devices. But they've been around for, what, a year+ now? They promised they'd be coming down to the $50 price range "real soon now"; likewise with newer versions. I'm not seeing them, are you?
Meh. $100, is it? I think I'll pick up oh, any number of low-end components for that price which will still do the job.
$100 with eSATA or two NICs? Then we'll talk. ARM manufacturers really need to get on the ball if they don't want to have their lunch eaten by the Atom z6xx SoCs. No, they won't operate at 5 watts, but they'll be close enough.
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You can't reduce a problem beyond its core components and then ridicule it to make it go away.
The environmental impact of a Prius (or any other vehicle) has nothing to do with the weight of the vehicle, it has to do with the lifetime cost. A Prius or any other lithium battery vehicle.
Let's start with Lithium and ignore the quoting of fueleconomy.gov and its inaccuracies in many real-world scenarios (on ramp to off ramp, tank over tank driving; more than one passenger, etc.).
Frankly, a person has to throw logic completely out the window to accept vehicles powered by Lithium as superior to petroleum-only vehicles. What are the primary battle cries of anti-oil types? The oil supply is limited, we're funding dictatorships (only when a Republican is in power), we're polluting the world, production of petrolium/fossil fuels is destructive to the environment, and so on.
Guess what? Not only is Lithium much more rare than petroleum and in significantly shorter supply based on what's being used and in absolute terms, but it is much, much more harmful to the environment to both use and harvest. It's also massively expensive and time consuming to do so, only being made profitable by government subsidies for 'green' technology.
In terms of pounds of fuel burned, sure, the Prius is pretty awesome. Guess what? It only takes a couple (initially) split uranium atoms to power an explosion large enough to destroy cities. This may come as a surprise, but the energy density of materials, with regard to their availability, is different.
Unlike with radioactive isotopes, petroleum is very common. It outputs byproducts which are, compared to lithium, pretty damn benign: for fuck's sake, plants eat CO2. There are observable benefits to giving plants more of it, such as increased growth and higher produce yields, when appropriate.
Battery powered cars are stupid for the above reasons.
Guess what? (Warning, I'm going to use scare bolding.) If you're afraid of CO2 emissions, why don't you go and kill some people, or even.... yourself? You output around 356kg of CO2 a year, probably at least TWICE your body weight and possibly THREE to FOUR times as much. AND THAT's just from BREATHING! Gaia knows how many poor defenseless plants and/or animals had to die for you to survive the year.
Then you've got the manufacturing costs of a new vehicle, vs. using what you've already got. As money is at least a conservative representation of environmental impact, at what point do you hit break-even? That Prius (or any new vehicle, but specifically the Prius due to the world cost of lithium) is going to take a while before your gas guzzling, 25mpg Honda is surpassed.
Finally: "green" is not a "relative" term. It's a political term that gets loaded and shot at people who are in the "politically incorrect" minority, regardless of whether it fits - just like "racist", "sexist", and "bigot".
And no, driving less is not "always greener". You are forgetting to consider some very simple things, like degradation of assets. My computer is not just as cost efficient for me if I don't use it as if I were letting it sit here unused, because I'm not using it. It still costs (amortized) money, and over time the natural elements (in the case of cars, material weathering, rust, etc.) will take their toll on your assets, making them completely worthless. Like a computer which is used for its entire life vs. one which is never unboxed, a maintained vehicle driven 300k miles in its life is much more green than the same vehicle driven less due to the initial cost of said vehicle. (Granted, after maintenance and repairs, there's eventually going to be an energy and environmental impact break-even point.)
But then, I guess I'm thinking in absolutes, not relativistic terms where the "greenness" of something isn't measured on concrete, observable facts but on how it "feels" - eg. the observation that because I'm driving less, I'm being greener.
Good luck with this comment. I say the same thing in threads about these so-called energy efficient vehicles and invariably I get modded flaimbait or troll.
Though, fortunately for you, there don't appear to be nearly as many green home nazis as there are green car nazis.
From what I've observed, it is not only quicker but it is also less expensive long-term to avoid the zoning and planning commission. Make sure your ducks are mostly in a line first yourself (drainage fields, wetlands, etc.) and build.
As my dad always says, it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.
Of course, if you live in a fine-happy place like California or New York, you better get permission first.
I thought the Four Stages of Microsoft were:
1) Ignore
1a) while quietly fighting in the dark
2) Embrace
3) Extend
4) Extinguish
We're well into #2 right now. All the efforts to "embrace" have done nothing in the long run but help Microsoft further, while curtailing competition: Mono is still nowhere near viable, and neither is Samba 4. Novell is stumbling. So-called open projects Microsoft has released or contributed have only gone to fuel their closed technologies, contributing nothing substantial to the IT environment as a whole. Their "embrace" has solely been a token gesture.
Side thought: Wouldn't it be funny if Microsoft released a Linux-based phone?
I've got four resumes:
* The first one is the long one that I put up on my web page for people to find on their own. It's got pretty much all the buzz words I'm familiar/comfortable with. I've only gotten a couple calls from this one.
* The other three are "short" - about a third a page of work history/experience/projects and a third a page of "domain" experience (eg. one for Windows, one for Linux/Open Source, and a third which has a mix of both)
I've had very good success with these "basic competency" resumes. From what I can tell, unless the place actually has those crazy high requirements (and in which case, you'd be too busy to breath and wouldn't want to work there anyway), the short format does just fine. (They also say, "I don't need a job because I already make a lot, but here's the basics of what I can do. ")
You are correct, without deviation or variance.
A couple months/years from now we'll have these same companies pushing for lower wages and/or more H1B workers - "our profit margin isn't high enough, and we actually have to pay these people to do tedious, difficult tasks!"
Yes, you heard me: skills aren't important - at least long-term.
Skills come and go. I used to be skilled with Active Directory and C#, but I was messing with them every day. Now I'm messing with other things, and I'm skilled in them.
There are skills, and then there are competencies, life skills, and fundamental comprehension. Some of these things come through experience with many different systems over time, but others are foundational.
If you don't understand the foundational basics of computing sciences, nothing about these modern technologies will make sense in a short period of time. Hell, if you don't have that foundation, chances are you don't truly "understand" those technologies - you'll just be able to use them. To someone who understands the hardware changes and differences, hardware based virtualization is just (basically) splitting ring 0, and a GPU is just another type of processor capable of x computations in y cycles, or z transforms, or what have you.
Additionally, experience with different architectures and platforms additionally gives you a staging point for future changes. "x? Oh, that's just like y, which was pretty common 20 years ago."
Of course, once you get to the point where you're experienced in many things, with a core set of competencies, you become a contractor and fix all the shit other people break, don't understand, etc.: the brighter, more competent IT people who have developed soft skills do this; everyone else leaves the industry (see: high unemployment rate), go into IT management, or find a lower paying IT jobs (see: Progress 4GL and the like).
There hasn't been a future "IT" since around 2000; businesses have seen to that. Hell, IT sees to it, as our goal is to reduce the amount of human hours are necessary not only for us to do basic jobs but for our clients to do their jobs - ergo making us redundant. If IT organizations today managed networks in ways which were common even 5 years ago, there'd be twice the employment in IT as there is.
One final thing I will add: virtualization is a double edged sword. It's damn convenient for small and medium shops to take their aging NT4, 2K, etc. servers and throw them on new (virtualized) hardware. We've not been doing it long enough to see the end game, but I gaurantee you this: we will never get rid of legacy systems if we just keep virtualizing old, unsupported hosts. Virtualization turns those turds into immortal nightmares: no updates, security holes galore, and absolutely no support. Pray to whichever God you believe in that you won't be burdened with the support of these machines 5, 10, 15 years down the line. (And yes, I fully suspect we'll still see Windows 2000 hosts on our networks then - with custom ERP/MRS/etc. software, requiring IE6).
Illumos is currently working on replacing the few parts of the kernel which are still "closed source"; I believe they're fairly trivial things, mainly, from what I recall reading. Trivial, at least, compared to the Important Parts, like dtrace and zfs.
I may be mistaken, but haven't many of those Sun/Solaris developers kicked off the Oracle train, moving to companies like Nexenta where they can continue working on The Next Big Thing?
I'm not sure on the numbers but I know at least several of the important ones have.
Well, it's not so much any one thing, but a combination of things make it attractive to me as an administrator.
First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.
Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.
FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.
In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.
Linux will NEVER get ZFS support in mainline.
ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).
Sorry, fail: railroad tracks need regular replacement, too. Rail, as well as the trucks and cars which ride on them, need regular maintenance and repair. It costs a LOT more to repair a passenger car than it does something in a personal vehicle (if only due to the economy of scale).
Unlike my van, which I've got a personal investment in maintaining, the same is not true for public transit.
I buy another one for $200?
This one, I got for free.
Something I've thought might be a good idea would be to convert urban streets to rail, but in a novel way: if you want to drive a vehicle within city limits, you've got to get it 'upgraded'/equipped with a single-wheel drive system (might be a bit difficult on modern front-wheel drive cars), which you would deploy but would be controlled by central GPS. You could then select your destination, and you'd be brought there automatically by the rail.
The automobile is most certainly not more of a ball and chain than an independence-granting device.
Which grants more freedom?
* taking the train to an interview or driving
* taking the train/bus to get groceries or driving
* packing the kids up and taking the train to grandmas -or- driving
* going for a weekend picnic in the country on the train... and walking a dozen or so miles.
* going on a business trip, takign a plane, a train, a bus, a taxi, and then doing the same on the way back, lugging your one small bag the whole two days... or driving.
The only place I can see an argument for trains is in highly urban environments, where subways are a better choice anyway in most cases (or simply pushing everything into the sea, as is the case in California).
I'd be interested in seeing someone who has a vehicle and makes statements like these go without their car for a month. Maybe some will be fine, being fewer than a couple miles from work or not having responsibilities outside of themselves.
Honestly, if a car is so much of a responsibility for you that it's a ball and chain, please never get married or have children. They are a mild inconvenience at best, for what they grant a person (or a family) in mobility - the ability to go about daily tasks, the ability to look for work while unemployed, and so on.
If you're not just one to shirk anything difficult, as your post suggests, maybe pick up a book or two on automotive repair? Or, I suppose, you could one day carry your family along in a rickshaw to the grocery; they're certainly less of a ball-and-chain than an automobile, after all!
High speed rail has none of the big downsides of air travel like the need to get to the airport 2 hours before the flight to check in, the need to pass through 3 layers of security, bans on liquids and other things, cramped seats etc.
You say that now, but just wait and see how creative something run by the government will be. I see no reason why the multitier security, liquid bans, and various other discomforts wouldn't likewise be enforced under the TSA.
Hint: look at Amtrak. It costs significantly more to travel per mile on Amtrak than it does to fly; it's slower, more cramped, less friendly, and you've got to wait longer. (And that was BEFORE 9/11, excluding the price difference, which is now. I'm sure it's even worse.)
My 20-year-old van with one passenger has a lower carbon footprint than someone traveling on high-efficiency highspeed rail. Why?
Because the energy put into building the van is already spent and done with. Not true for the HSR.
I guess we'll just have to increase what we charge for production, then. You know, trivial things like:
* Corn
* Wheat
* Soy
* Fuel (yeah, we make a fair amount of it)
* Beef
* Chicken
* Pork
* Machinery (used to pave your roads, build your sky rises, construct your high speed rail...)
*
Don't get me wrong, I plan to move to a rural area as soon as economically feasible, but I don't think I should expect city-dwellers to pay for this luxury for me.
What luxury is that? Driving an automobile? Apparently you're not aware of what most "rural areas" in the US require. Yes, you can very easily die getting to work in the weather we've got out here without the protection of a vehicle. And when that's not a concern...
You also realize that if someone is being taxed more for the "luxury of driving" - this tax money going towards the construction of rail, which said people are not being given - then it's the rural people who will be getting gouged, right?
It's been shown time and time again that urban dwellers have a (significantly) higher carbon footprint because it takes more energy to maintain that way of life. It's been true since the first person grew his first field of corn and realized "hey, I can support a lot of people with this". While people in an urban area are in malls buying things, playing laser tag, eating at a restaurant, and doing whatever it is urban people do, people in rural and remote areas are spending time outdoors, cooking their own food and having simple social pleasures.
I actually like the parent's Doritos analogy - it's true when you think of it that way; there would be all sorts of uproar if physical goods were advertised and sold the way broadband is.
"Up to" a dozen bagels in your order, or "up to" two patties on your burger would never fly. And who would work for pay on an "up to" scale? I'm sure companies would be happy to pay someone "up to" four hundred dollars an hour.
Been to a fast food restaurant lately?
No, they don't typically advertise things using words, but use pictures instead. But when and where have you been to a food establishment with pictures in the menus where the food looks anything like what you actually get? Usually, it's as little as 1/3 as large or a substantially smaller portion. The meat and veggies are of a significantly lower quality/grade and so on...
False advertising is everywhere. Most people just consider it "the eye of the beholder" though.
It really depends on where the limit is being imposed.
If I subscribe to a 10Mbit pipe, this should mean that my modem/router device and their network is able to sustain those rates. That's all. If I'm not able to pull content down at those rates, it doesn't mean they're in breach of the service terms - and that's likely why most ISPs put those terms in there. They can't control anything outside their network.
Now, if you can't get the advertised speeds on their network, that's another story.
What I think has happened is ISPs have upgraded some of their equipment to DOCSIS 3 to get the higher throughput, but DOCSIS 1 and DOCSIS 2 equipment is still out there - in homes as well as near the ends of nodes. This will bring the overall averages down - even if 90% of people get what they pay for, those people with 1Gbit FTTH pipes are going to be limited pretty close to home.
Combine that with companies over subscribing nodes, and you've got the same problem we had 10 years ago with early adoption. (Oh, and remember all the promises they were making and never kept?) Hardly new for ISPs.
Sometimes, I miss the small mom and pop dialup ISPs. You may have been limited to 9600/14400/36600/etc. baud but the people running things took pride in their work, it seemed.
Just think of it this way... with whiskoline, you'll always blow an over the limit level. :-/
Nonsense.
What a horrible waste of scotch whiskey. :-/
Quite possibly because IPv6 is ugly. Very ugly. It's almost impossible to read, even if you can read it.
There are still plenty of scenarios where visually noticing an IP address is "wrong" for the situation still exist. IPv6 will make all but the most "professional" IT type have to start over in many ways, because most of them aren't network engineers.
My guess is that they may be basing the figures on assigned MAC addresses, though I could be mistaken.
However, the assumption that it'll quadruple in the next decade is a bit much. Even if there are four times more network devices created in the next decade than the last, the chances of them being anything but behind a NAT box is highly unlikely. I might double the employees in my office and increase their upstream, but we're still not using any more public IPv4 address space.
Same for me at home: my network has doubled in the past couple years, but I've never used any more than 1 IP address.
Also, I'm sure some ISPs will find creative ways to provide customers with cheap internet access behind a NAT connection. I'm not looking forward to that.
You could also get an ALIX board... they're comparable in cost and offer a lot more networking functionality; they're x86 boards and have much more processor and RAM than anything near the WRT54 stuff. They'll run a small to medium network's gateway device (running pfSense) with several VPNs, even - no problem.
Yeah, seriously. Enough!
OK, they're cool devices. But they've been around for, what, a year+ now? They promised they'd be coming down to the $50 price range "real soon now"; likewise with newer versions. I'm not seeing them, are you?
Meh. $100, is it? I think I'll pick up oh, any number of low-end components for that price which will still do the job.
$100 with eSATA or two NICs? Then we'll talk. ARM manufacturers really need to get on the ball if they don't want to have their lunch eaten by the Atom z6xx SoCs. No, they won't operate at 5 watts, but they'll be close enough.