Everybody with a fat connection, whether here, there, or anywhere else, will start using bit torrent when pigs fly. Bit torrent is very useful thing, but most people don't use it and most people never will.
If pigs did fly, and everybody used bit torrent, and the flight of pigs made unlimited transfer uneconomical, you could expect to see transfer limits imposed, or possibly throttling of bit torrent.
Also, it's not unusual for the terms of service, there or here, to prohibit the operation of servers in consumer DSL pools. Bit Torrent would certainly qualify as such, and some providers might enforce that provision against it. They don't have to do anything to people running it, just block or severely throttle torrents, and the problem will be contained.
I'm not saying I like those solutions, but I consider them likely.
I think this guy is more addicted to publicity than information
Uh, yeah, I'd say. My favorite line from the article comes from the description of him starting to experiment with wearable computers in the 1970s, where it says "He wore one to a high school dance." I bet he was real popular with the ladies. No doubt he was noticed, though.
I don't know what your experience in Japan is, but mine was as a network engineer at an ISP, and the local loop distances are really not significantly different than they are here. Moreover, those local loops have already been in the ground (or on the pole) for a long time; it's not like they have to run a new local loop to your house to install DSL. Finally, if you did have to run new local loops, even if the distance was shorter, I would expect the cost per kilometer to be higher in Japan, offsetting much or all of the distance savings.
DSL prices in Japan can often be comparable or maybe a little more than what they may be in many areas of the United States, but the big difference is the speed you get in Japan for that price. Take a look at this:
http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_adsl_e.html
Look at the line on the bottom of the pricing chart. You can get 40 megabit down DSL (Yes, 40!) for about 4000 yen/month. The exchange rate is about 107 yen to the dollar, so that's under 40 bucks, or looked at another way: it's $1 per megabit, how fast would you like to go?
Also, notice that the ISP fee is the same regardless of speed, and the telco fee varies by only 150 yen from the price of 1.5 meg service to the price of 40 meg service. I imagine that not many people in a 40 meg service area will go for the 1.5 meg service:-)
This small price differences reflect the facts that in Japan:
1) The DSL market has actually grown competitive;
2) It doesn't really cost you, as a telco, any more to make the line go faster if it will support it. It doesn't cost you that much more as an ISP either, because even if I have a 40 mpbs down DSL line, when was the last time you saw an FTP server that would feed you at that rate?
Here in LA, I have 2 meg down business cable (no restrictions, global static IP), and I can get near wire speed from an FTP site with a big pipe.
In Japan, I had 100 megabits from my desk to our network core, with only two Cisco switches in between, yet the fastest downloads I ever saw were on the order of 8 mbps, from an FTP site that was both close (only a few hops away) and had massive bandwidth, the biggest pipes in the whole country. I expect high-speed users probably see similar performance, or maybe less, because they aren't plugged right into the network core over 100 megabit ethernet. So what good does 40 megabit DSL do you if no FTP site will serve you at more than 8 - 10 mbps, and there are very few even of those? Unless your provider runs a huge FTP mirror and it has huge bandwidth to the DSL network, you'll never realize anywhere near the potential of that pipe.
In Japan, you can also get 100 megabit fiber to the home for not too much more than I pay for my business cable. Here's a price list:
http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_b_e.html
But again, what good does 100 megabit service do you if you can't pull at anywhere near that rate?
These highly competitive prices are despite the fact that nearly every aspect of running an ISP (or telco) in Japan is more costly than it is in the United States, and come from the fact that while it took a lot longer to get any kind of competition going in the telco market in Japan than it did here, they have at length done so. Best of all, the competition seems to be actually working as intended, whereas it has mostly failed here in the United States.
I mean really, look at their princesses; they are almost exactly the same. $45-$55 dollar price range You can get a princess for that price? Man, where do you live? Out here in California, that'll hardly get you a crack ho.
While I agree that RMS sometimes just doesn't know when to shut his mouth, he doesn't hate Debian. Correctly stating that the Debian project (disclosure: I run Debian Sid on all my machines) doesn't follow the FSF guidelines for being a completely Free distro does not mean he hates Debian. It means the Debian project has made a decision which makes it not 100 percent compatible with the FSF's definition. That's fine. Maybe someday it will be, maybe not. Myself, I kind of like the option of using non-free. If that goes away, well, it's not hard to add other repositories to my apt sources anyway.
No, if RMS hates Debian for anything, it's for having a working Hurd-based distro before the FSF:-)
I *DO* support this as a levy because there are no other reason to copy audio cds from a consumer end than to get around paying for it.
Actually, there's at least one other reason, a perfectly valid one: to make a backup copy, something that is moral, ethical, and legal under the aegis of fair use, at least in the United States.
Granted, I'm sort of lazy and have't done this on very many of my CDs, but I have made backups of some of them.
I don't make illegal copies. I don't have any. I have lots of CD-R/RW media, but it's all used for free software and backups, except for some original music that a couple friends and I recorded. Come to think of it, this holds true for anyone I know well enough to know if they do it or not: they all use their CD burners for legally made data CDs and/or original music that they wrote and performed themselves, not illegally copied music.
Even if burning illegal copies accounts for a lot or even most of music CD blanks, it is insupportable and unfair to say that the only reason a person would copy an audio CD is to avoid buying it. Especially as you someone involved in music, you should know better than to make such a blanket statement.
I agree with this, since is the only way to pressure both governments (US and Brazil) to find some alternative.
Reciprocity is fine, all visa arrangements are like that. I'm an American who lived abroad for almost ten years. In some places that meant being fingerprinted, in some it didn't. Oddly, one of the places where it wasn't required was a communist country with which the United States fought a long war. One of the places that did require it (but doesn't anymore) is one of our closest allies. Go figure.
Rather than finding an alternative to fingerprinting, I think that the 28 countries that are exempt should lose their exemption. Not only because 9/11 attackers and other terrorists live/lived in some of those countries, but out of fairness. The standard should be applied equally to everyone.
If I should happen to visit Brazil and they want my fingerprints, I'm fine with that. I hope they can get electronic means to do it, though; cardboard and ink is not only messy (I used to work for a bank in the 1980s, and it was a federal requirement that they take all 10 of your prints; it was done the old-fashioned way), but not terribly effective. With an electronic system, you can find out very quickly if the person whose prints you are cataloging is of interest to the law enforcement. Already, one person was apprehended that way here. It was someone who had previously been busted for forgery and related offenses and deported, but who was trying to re-enter the country with a Jamaican passport (forged, IIRC). The passport might have gotten him by, but the fingerprints gave him up.
Fingerprinting may be time consuming and unpleasant, but we are at war and will be for quite some time to come. Under these circumstances, we need to check visitors more closely than we otherwise would. It's unfortunate, but necessary.
I am not in any way elitist. Please see my earlier response to that charge.
The rest of your post I substantially agree with, although we would probably disagree about where the constraints should be placed. I would certainly say that having every distro - or even every mainstream distro - using the same desktop by default would be an excessive constraint. Ideally, the installer would just ask you at startup which you want and than have all the same programs available on each, but I understand that supporting two desktops is a lot more work for the distributor, so I don't mind if they pick one. If the distro I like doesn't have the desktop I like, I'll build it myself if necessary.
It's all about signal to noise ratio. Haven't you ever seen a forum killed, or nearly so, from being overrun by the willfully ignorant? I have, and it's not a pretty sight.
I'm quite happy to help those who are new and willing to learn both Linux and the *nix Way. I was a beginner in *nix once myself, transitioning from a mainframe and Windows background. People who knew helped me become a person who knows. What I don't want is to waste my time on people who don't want to know, but just demand free help and wish to remain ignorant, or who think they're some kind of genius because they popped a Mandrake install CD in the drive and took all the defaults and now they're running Linux. They're usually willfully ignorant, too.
I am on a FreeBSD list, and I'll tell you, there is no one like that there. I've never seen one, ever. Anybody who can get FreeBSD installed has at least two clues to rub together, and they will grow from there. Linux was once that way, and I don't see it becoming less that way as a good thing. Popularity has a price, and it's steep.
Umm, no I don't realize that at all. I had a PC back when only the tech elite had them, and IBM and a good number of cloners found it to be quite financially viable.
If you go back even further, you'll find that even in the days when having a personal computer (they called them microcomputers then) meant getting a kit and assembling it yourself - and "assembling" didn't mean just plugging together some finished components, it often involved a soldering iron - a number of companies found that to be financially viable. Altair and Imsai were a couple of the big names then. Apple got started that way, too.
Later, finished computers became the norm, and the Apple II was one of the big sellers in that field. Who bought Apple IIs? That same tech elite that you think couldn't make a computer market financially viable, mostly. The Apple II was groundbreaking in that it was a computer that was easier to learn and was bought by large numbers of people who were not engineers or programmers or electronics freaks, but were nevertheless smart and curious.
That last is key. I never said, or even implied, that you should have to be a tech elite to own a computer. But being smart is desirable, being curious and willing to learn - including educating yourself via RTFM - is key. I think it's great that computers are available easily and cheaply, but it's not great that willfully ignorant people install Linux and then demand - not ask for - free help from those who educated themselves, just because they "tried this Linux thing."
*Some* recent Mandrake users are that type. It's the fault of the super-easy installer that makes it possible for any fool to get a working install of Mandrake on practically any hardware. Of course, some fools will try it.
An installer like that is, in principle, a Good Thing, but it does have some negative fallout. That happens particularly in the case of Mandrake because they have made a conscious decision to pursue that sort of user.
Why do I have disdain for Mandrake? Remember when Mandrake switched to CUPS? Remember how broken it was, and how it didn't start working well until 8.2 or maybe even 9.0? The Mandrake forums will filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth over that for a very long time. Many of Mandrake's users are beginners with Linux and the installer allows them to get something installed and working without any clue at all, and a lot of the *drak tools work pretty well, which encourages them to continue to have no clue. Mandrake encourages ignorance and doesn't encoruage learning the Unix Way. Without even going into the PITA aspect of dealing with people who have been so encourage, I'll just say that depending on *drak tools that you find only in Mandrake may allow you to work well enough when things are fine, that falls way short when things aren't fine. Things are more than occassionally not fine on Mandrake because they are so bleeding edge that they often ship broken stuff. My dad uses Mandrake, so I had a front-row seat to the CUPS debacle. I use Debian Unstable, and have found it to be consistently more stable and more bug-free than Mandrake production realeases. Pushing out stuff that broken in a newbie-oriented distro is unconscionable.
With that said, some of the sharpest Linux minds I've run across were using Mandrake, but on the other end of the spectrum, so are a lot of people who should have bought a Mac. If you don't know and don't want to know, a Mac is a great computer to have (with OS X, it's also a pretty great computer to have if you *do* know and want to know). Linux is not a good platform for the voluntarily ignorant, nor should it be made such.
Elistist crap? Not at all. Pardon me, but your ignorance is showing. *nix has been, for many years, a meritocracy. You gain respect in accordance with A) What you know, and B) Your willingness to learn and educate yourself. It is in no way elitist to expect people to do these things, and to expect people not wiling to do these things to continue using the operating system that encourages willful ignorance. I would be elitist if I said that being a Windows user means you are unworthy to try Unix, regardless of your intelligence or willingness to learn.
Nor is it unknowledgeable (call them clueless if you want, but everyone was a beginner once) newbies who bother me. All who seek clue are welcome. What I object to, as I made crystal clear in my original post, is the willfully ignorant. Those who do not know and do not wish to know, who want nothing but a handout. They commonly bring the attitude that "I tried this Linux thing, so you OWE me. When I demand help, you experienced people better hop to it, because if you don't, you suck and Linux sucks." If you participate in any newgroups, LUG lists, etc., you must surely have seen this attitude. It is that attitude that lead to a LUG of which I am a longtime member having to move to a nominally moderated list. The elected officers appointed two moderators, of which I am one, to assist the list master. Fortunately, when it became clear that those sorts of trolls would not be tolerated and anyone who did not cease and desist when warned risked being unsubbed, the trolls shut up and eventually went away.
How would moving to *BSD change anything? It's pretty simple. You don't find people like that using *BSD because they don't know enough, and will never know enough, to get the thing installed. You find few of them using Debian for the same reason. I like Debian's crufty installer because it keeps out the lazy and the willfully ignorant, and am less than thrilled about the project to make an "easy" installer for Debian.
Now you'll probably call me elitist again, but you'll be just as wrong as you were the first time.
So you have no problem when Microsoft takes a protocol such as Kerberos and adapts it just enough that it doesn't work with most other implementations? After all, they're just exercising their choice in how they implement the protocol, and choice is ALWAYS a good thing.
Come now, I really expect better of you than to raise such a false argument as this. Choice is the fact that Kerberos is an open standard. You and without reservation, that is a Good Thing. That is the strength of free/open source software. That doesn't mean people can't use that freedom of choice to do bad things, such as fork it and break compatibility for their own selfish ends rather than add functionality and contribute that functionality back to the main tree, but the presence of choice itself doesn't make this a bad thing. I think most citizens of democracies (of whatever type) would agree that democracy is a good thing, even though politicians often use that freedom for their own selfish ends without regard to what's good for the nation as a whole, and people often make foolish and uniformed choices in the laws and/or leaders for which they vote. These lapses, however, do not make us regard democracy - that is, choice - as a bad thing.
I think perhaps we need to define "desktop" here so that we better understand each other. It has come to take on the common meaning of "home user system" even though somebody's computer at work is also a desktop. It is the "home user" meaning that I am referring when I speak of the desktop. Linux is certainly ready for the corporate desktop, and I don't regard its use there as a bad thing, either. On the corporate desktop, generally, there are professionals available to look after the workstations and servers, and to help users with problems. Linux is fully ready for this role and has been for a while, thanks to application suites such as Star Office/OpenOffice.org.
It's a lot less ready for the home user desktop, not only for reasons pertaining to ease of use (burning CDs on Linux is still far more complicated than doing the same on Win/Mac, although the 2.6 kernel will take care of those issues, and Konqueror in KDE 3.2 will support drag-and-drop CD creation) but for the same reason that Windows isn't really ready for that market either: the world of networked computing has become a very hostile place, far more than it used it be, and not only Windows but most Linux distributions as well, has a default install that is far to open for a computer that may be connected to the Internet directly, without even NAT standing between it and the blackhats. On this score in particular, I think Mac OS X is more ready for the desktop than any other system, but that doesn't surprise me. Macs have always been hard to crack, relative to most other platforms.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the standard GUI argument. A user who uses Mandrake at work should be able to sit down at a SuSE machine at home and change the GUI to KDE if it comes with Gnome standard (could happen, now that Novell bought them) and then set to work. I will support your argument this far, though: distributors should not dick around with the default KDE or Gnome menus, they should use whatever the KDE or Gnome projects ship. If they want to add menus, OK, but don't remove or modify what's there by default. That's a bigger hassle for moving between distros than anything else I can think of. For example, my dad runs Mandrake and I run Debian Sid. We both use KDE, but his KDE looks a lot different than mine because Mandrake changes it quite a bit, and IMO they haven't made it better, just different. I'd like to see distributors all agree on that one point. Of course, Red Hat, via BlueTurd, remains the worst offender on that score.
It's even simpler than that. MS has their market share because IBM gave it to them by choosing them as the OS vendor for the IBM PC. All of the lock-in via proprietary formats and engineered lack of interoperability and highly predatory and monopolistic practices came after that. If IBM had chosen CPM as their OS or had written one from scratch, MS today would still be just an application vendor among many. A large one, probably, but still just an application vendor.
You seem to be under the impression that choice is always a good thing. It isn't.
I beg to differ.
Choice is, in fact, always a good thing. I'd think you were an MS supporter trolling, except for the fact that you're conversant with terms like "window manager," so it would appear that you're actually a slightly misguided Linux supporter, thus you merit an answer:-)
The reason why choice is always a good thing is that while you may be right that most users don't want to choose (and would almost certainly be right if you modified that to "many users don't want to choose), the fact remains that a significant percentage of us *do* want to choose. That's a major reason why we are using Linux (or *BSD) in the first place: we want to choose.
I'm sure you've noticed that your distribution whichever it is, comes with some set of reasonable defaults. It could be Gnome, it could be KDE, it could even be Fluxbox, IceWM, or something else. If a person using that distro wishes to customize nothing, it will work just fine as-is. However, if another person using it doesn't like any of the defaults and wants to change them all, that is possible and it will still work just fine. This is why choice is always a good thing.
It isn't even necessary that there be a single cross-distro standard, nor is it even desirable. A high degree of integration between KDE and Gnome is desirable, and having all KDE apps adopt the theme of Gnome if you are running under Gnome, or all Gnome and other GTK apps adopt the theme of KDE if you are running under KDE, is certainly a good thing. This doesn't need to (IMO) include any other window managers, since people using those are generally going their own way anyhow, but tight interoperability between Gnome and KDE is clearly a Good Thing.
This would enable developers to write either for Gnome or KDE, knowing that their app will look appropriate on either. As it stands now, though, you can already write for one or the other and your app will still work, all the user needs is libraries for both installed, something most (all?) distros do.
Linux was never meant to be "one size fits all" and not being that way is what has led, in large part, to the great amount of success it has had. I'm a former Red Hat user. I mostly chucked Red Hat after they came out with their "one size fits all" interface, Blue Curve, and the cracked logic behind it: you shouldn't choose Gnome or KDE based on what they look like or how they behave (rough quote of Havoc Pennington, from his explanation of Blue Curve). On the contrary, those are exactly the type of criteria on which people choose, and they are totally reasonable. When they came out with their "one year to EOL" policy, I completely my move to Debian and have never looked back. Indeed, it's so good I should have done it sooner.
Whether or not we want Linux to move to the desktop (and if "desktop" is defined as "the sort of people who really shouldn't even have a computer but are nevertheless dabbling in Linux with distros like Mandrake and Lindows" then the answer is a resounding "no!") - something I used to support very strongly five years ago but have now substantially re-thought, there's no need to make Linux one-size-fits-all. That would kill Linux rather than help it. As for Linux on the desktop, the only argument I really have for it now is that I'd rather see anything other than MS on the desktop, and after Microsoft is will and thoroughly crushed, I can retreat into FreeBSD. It has an installer strong enough to keep away the computer-stupid. Already, the clue level in Linux has fallen so far due to the influx of newbies who are ignorant, want to stay that way, and don't want to learn the Unix Way, that I'm contemplating to jumping ship to BSD this year anyway.
Actually, the cost of production argument (and let's not foget the marketing cost, which is not insignificant) is hardly specious. Production costs are indeed factored into the price of a DVD or CD.
Once production costs have been fully recovered, there remain only running costs of producing the CD or DVD. Put another way, the longer it is on the market at a given price point, the higher the profit margin, especially because production costs are heavily weighted toward the front; they want them recovered quickly. As you note, this is less true for movies than DVDs, because much of the production cost is recovered in the theater run. OTOH this makes the DVD an important *profit* source, because so much of the theater revenues went to paying for making the movie.
In the case of CDs, a CD release of a thirty year old album that was originally released in LP record format and later in cassette (and maybe eight-track) formats may have a lower sales volume than recently released music by popular bands, but if it was a hit album when new it will remain a steady seller and will have a higher profit margin than new releases, because the production cost is fully recovered and the marketing costs are minimal. Mostly, they just have to make it and put it in the record stores, where it will pretty much sell itself to people who like that music.
No costs other than those directly related to manufacturing it, plus its assigned percentage of the general corporate overhead, need to be recovered. That makes a CD of, say, Revolver, more profitable by percentage than, say, the latest Britney CD. That's why old albums released on CD cost nearly as much as new stuff; they can make a huge profit. Looked at another way, the record companies' old catalogs could be seen as helping to subsize their newer releases.
Everything isn't three times as expensive in Japan. I lived there for nine years and I paid less for my rent (roughly the same amount of space), less for some of my groceries, notably fish and chicken, did not need to own a car thanks to the great public transportation system, and my transportation costs to and from work were 100% paid by my employer (normal in Japan) in the form of a train pass (which I could use anytime for my own personal use as well; a train pass is good for unlimited use anywhere along your points of travel, so it saved me quite a bit).
I did make more money than I do here, that's true, but only about 20 per cent.
It's possible to make everything cost three times as much there, but you don't have to. On average, things cost more than here, but careful shopping can offset most of that. If you live in a part of the USA that has cheap housing, the relative cost might make it seem like the cost of living is double or more, from your point of view. However, I live in California, and LA, San Diego, and San Francisco would all look that way from such a viewpoint, too.
You're talking about other people's intelligence? Excuse me while I empty the contents of my stomach.
There, now I feel a bit better.
First, no one was wondering about how the glue gets out of the can, although I'm sure you find things like that extremely difficult. The discussion was about levels of toxicity and persistence, for which no evidence was presented. I apologize for using big, confusing words like that, but perhaps someone will explain them for you. I'm making this as simple as I can for you, because I know you're what it's PC to call "mentally challenged" these days. Please note that non-persistent agents are not particularly harmful to the environment, and many aerosols are not at all harmful to use without respirators (paint and glue do not fall into that category, but that was never at question; the whole question was one of persistence). You may want to reconsider who is suffering from RCIS (Recto-Cranial Inversion Syndrome) here, since you seem incapable both of comprehending what you read and of expressing yourself in writing at a level beyond what one commonly sees crudely spraypainted on freeway signs, or more commonly, scribbled on the bathroom wall.
Secondly, no one ever compared Hummers with average automobiles. The discussion was Hummer versus pickup trucks or other SUVs. No one has even now stated or even suggested, let alone present actual evidence, that a Hummer pollutes more than a pickup truck. Full-size pickups, like Hummers, typically have fairly large V-8 engines and weigh a lot. You also seem rather unfamiliar with the whole field of vehicle emissions, because otherwise you would know that there is far more to pollution levels than engine size. Without even pulling in engines that use other fuels such as diesel, propane, or natural gas, I will direct your attention to, say, a vehicle that has a four cylinder or small six cyclinder engine, but which is 20 - 25 years old. I guarantee that a brand new Hummer H2 produces lower emissions in all categories, larger engine notwithstanding. And not only lower emissions by percentage, but lower absolute numbers. That's how far emissions technology has come. An H2 might even beat a smaller vehicle that was only 10 - 15 years old Once a gun, you may want to consider the anatomy of your own cranium and whether it bears a striking resemblance to your nether regions. It's difficult to imagine that it does not.
Finally, what makes you think you have big, hairy nuts? I'm quite certain that if you ever had any to begin with, they were long ago removed when your parents brought you home from the county animal shelter. The nice people had the good sense to realize that while it was unlikely you would ever be able to reproduce outside of a laboratory, they couldn't take the chance. Unlike yourself, the person to whom I was replying has shown himself to be a person of consideration and intellect who just spoke overly passionately about something in which he strongly believes. You, on the other hand, are just a zitty, pre-pubsescent/. troll who hasn't the courage to post logged-in because he's a gonadless karma whore who sits in his mother's dark basement desperately wishing he could masturbate to porn all day but sadly unable to because of the aforementioned unfortunate experience at the animal shelter.
That, my friend, is how you insult someone. Four-letter words just don't cut it, although I'm sure if you can find your way back and read this, you'll unleash even more of them than before. Too bad it doesn't matter, because you've already proven to everyone who read your little tirade just what a fool you are. You have a lot to learn.
Now, the only question remaining is "Should this be modded a Troll or should this be modded flamebait?" I rather like flamebait, but who knows? It might wind up being Insightful after all. You, at least, might gain some insight from it if you take time to consider the lesson behind the verbal and mental buttwhipping you've just had.
Yeah, I would mod him up too, if I had any mod points, but despite my good karma, I've only gotten mod points once. Ever.
It makes me think that guy who said they track what you do when you post anonymously and will get you for it is not just whistling dixie, because once or twice I have been a logged in troll posting anonymously, if that's not an oxymoron:-)
In light of that experience, I think his recommendation was probably very good advice: Use a different browser to post any trolls or controversial stuff, and if you can, get a new dynamic IP (mine is static). If you don't use a different browser, delete all your/. cookies. Clearing the browsr cache probably isn't a bad idea, either.
Well, paint is not spray mount, so it would be best to conduct the experiment using the materials under discussion.
In either, case, the the experiment should not be conducted in a closed room. If the instructions for spray mount are anything like the instructions for spray paint, you should use it in a well-ventilated area, with respiratory protection.
You've ignored one central issue which I raised, which is the question of whether or not the solvents released when spraying spray mount are persistent. If they are persistent and harmful, then that is a factor. If they are not persistent (that is, they quickly degrade into non-harmful components), then spraying is no big deal, and it's main drawback would be that a spray can is a larger piece of waste and does not lend itself well to recycling.
I do not know the answer to the question of persistence, and I don't know if you do, either. If you do, no evidence for it has been presented. I think that's what the other poster was getting at, that if you want people to take your arguments seriously, they either need to be accompanied by evidence that you have expertise in your own right on the topic (and you may well have it), or you need to point to the evidence of third-party sources who would be accepted as expert, but you did neither, and the result is that while you may be right and may know of solid evidence to back up your claim, no one who isn't already convinced will be likely to side with you.
I don't much care for SUVs as commuting vehicles either, but my gripe is that they're so darned big and the people who drive them so darned inconsiderate, and most of them don't need the fscking things, they just drive them either to intimidate people in four-cyclinder economy cars (like me) or to make up for something else that isn't big enough. If I had a real need for an SUV (pulling a boat, carrying camping gear or hunting gear, etc.) I might get one and then be forced to commute in it because like most people, I can't really afford to keep a spare vehicle around. Most SUVs, I suspect, have never pulled a trailer, gone off road, carry camping hunting or fishing gear on a seldom or never basis, especially in California, and are just generally unnecessary. I find a four-door economy car to be large enough for myself, my wife, and two small kids, and that's the largest cargo most SUVs every carry.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody with a fat connection, whether here, there, or anywhere else, will start using bit torrent when pigs fly. Bit torrent is very useful thing, but most people don't use it and most people never will.
If pigs did fly, and everybody used bit torrent, and the flight of pigs made unlimited transfer uneconomical, you could expect to see transfer limits imposed, or possibly throttling of bit torrent.
Also, it's not unusual for the terms of service, there or here, to prohibit the operation of servers in consumer DSL pools. Bit Torrent would certainly qualify as such, and some providers might enforce that provision against it. They don't have to do anything to people running it, just block or severely throttle torrents, and the problem will be contained.
I'm not saying I like those solutions, but I consider them likely.
Nah, they just think they're princesses. Which is why I married a girl who isn't from California :-)
Uh, yeah, I'd say. My favorite line from the article comes from the description of him starting to experiment with wearable computers in the 1970s, where it says "He wore one to a high school dance." I bet he was real popular with the ladies. No doubt he was noticed, though.
As a matter of fact it was. It was just a few hops from my desk, we peered with them in the KDD building in Otemachi :-)
I don't know what your experience in Japan is, but mine was as a network engineer at an ISP, and the local loop distances are really not significantly different than they are here. Moreover, those local loops have already been in the ground (or on the pole) for a long time; it's not like they have to run a new local loop to your house to install DSL. Finally, if you did have to run new local loops, even if the distance was shorter, I would expect the cost per kilometer to be higher in Japan, offsetting much or all of the distance savings.
:-)
DSL prices in Japan can often be comparable or maybe a little more than what they may be in many areas of the United States, but the big difference is the speed you get in Japan for that price. Take a look at this:
http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_adsl_e.html
Look at the line on the bottom of the pricing chart. You can get 40 megabit down DSL (Yes, 40!) for about 4000 yen/month. The exchange rate is about 107 yen to the dollar, so that's under 40 bucks, or looked at another way: it's $1 per megabit, how fast would you like to go?
Also, notice that the ISP fee is the same regardless of speed, and the telco fee varies by only 150 yen from the price of 1.5 meg service to the price of 40 meg service. I imagine that not many people in a 40 meg service area will go for the 1.5 meg service
This small price differences reflect the facts that in Japan:
1) The DSL market has actually grown competitive;
2) It doesn't really cost you, as a telco, any more to make the line go faster if it will support it. It doesn't cost you that much more as an ISP either, because even if I have a 40 mpbs down DSL line, when was the last time you saw an FTP server that would feed you at that rate?
Here in LA, I have 2 meg down business cable (no restrictions, global static IP), and I can get near wire speed from an FTP site with a big pipe.
In Japan, I had 100 megabits from my desk to our network core, with only two Cisco switches in between, yet the fastest downloads I ever saw were on the order of 8 mbps, from an FTP site that was both close (only a few hops away) and had massive bandwidth, the biggest pipes in the whole country. I expect high-speed users probably see similar performance, or maybe less, because they aren't plugged right into the network core over 100 megabit ethernet. So what good does 40 megabit DSL do you if no FTP site will serve you at more than 8 - 10 mbps, and there are very few even of those? Unless your provider runs a huge FTP mirror and it has huge bandwidth to the DSL network, you'll never realize anywhere near the potential of that pipe.
In Japan, you can also get 100 megabit fiber to the home for not too much more than I pay for my business cable. Here's a price list:
http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_b_e.html
But again, what good does 100 megabit service do you if you can't pull at anywhere near that rate?
These highly competitive prices are despite the fact that nearly every aspect of running an ISP (or telco) in Japan is more costly than it is in the United States, and come from the fact that while it took a lot longer to get any kind of competition going in the telco market in Japan than it did here, they have at length done so. Best of all, the competition seems to be actually working as intended, whereas it has mostly failed here in the United States.
I mean really, look at their princesses; they are almost exactly the same. $45-$55 dollar price range
You can get a princess for that price? Man, where do you live? Out here in California, that'll hardly get you a crack ho.
No, if RMS hates Debian for anything, it's for having a working Hurd-based distro before the FSF
Actually, there's at least one other reason, a perfectly valid one: to make a backup copy, something that is moral, ethical, and legal under the aegis of fair use, at least in the United States.
Granted, I'm sort of lazy and have't done this on very many of my CDs, but I have made backups of some of them.
I don't make illegal copies. I don't have any. I have lots of CD-R/RW media, but it's all used for free software and backups, except for some original music that a couple friends and I recorded. Come to think of it, this holds true for anyone I know well enough to know if they do it or not: they all use their CD burners for legally made data CDs and/or original music that they wrote and performed themselves, not illegally copied music.
Even if burning illegal copies accounts for a lot or even most of music CD blanks, it is insupportable and unfair to say that the only reason a person would copy an audio CD is to avoid buying it. Especially as you someone involved in music, you should know better than to make such a blanket statement.
Reciprocity is fine, all visa arrangements are like that. I'm an American who lived abroad for almost ten years. In some places that meant being fingerprinted, in some it didn't. Oddly, one of the places where it wasn't required was a communist country with which the United States fought a long war. One of the places that did require it (but doesn't anymore) is one of our closest allies. Go figure.
Rather than finding an alternative to fingerprinting, I think that the 28 countries that are exempt should lose their exemption. Not only because 9/11 attackers and other terrorists live/lived in some of those countries, but out of fairness. The standard should be applied equally to everyone.
If I should happen to visit Brazil and they want my fingerprints, I'm fine with that. I hope they can get electronic means to do it, though; cardboard and ink is not only messy (I used to work for a bank in the 1980s, and it was a federal requirement that they take all 10 of your prints; it was done the old-fashioned way), but not terribly effective. With an electronic system, you can find out very quickly if the person whose prints you are cataloging is of interest to the law enforcement. Already, one person was apprehended that way here. It was someone who had previously been busted for forgery and related offenses and deported, but who was trying to re-enter the country with a Jamaican passport (forged, IIRC). The passport might have gotten him by, but the fingerprints gave him up.
Fingerprinting may be time consuming and unpleasant, but we are at war and will be for quite some time to come. Under these circumstances, we need to check visitors more closely than we otherwise would. It's unfortunate, but necessary.
I am not in any way elitist. Please see my earlier response to that charge.
The rest of your post I substantially agree with, although we would probably disagree about where the constraints should be placed. I would certainly say that having every distro - or even every mainstream distro - using the same desktop by default would be an excessive constraint. Ideally, the installer would just ask you at startup which you want and than have all the same programs available on each, but I understand that supporting two desktops is a lot more work for the distributor, so I don't mind if they pick one. If the distro I like doesn't have the desktop I like, I'll build it myself if necessary.
It's all about signal to noise ratio. Haven't you ever seen a forum killed, or nearly so, from being overrun by the willfully ignorant? I have, and it's not a pretty sight.
I'm quite happy to help those who are new and willing to learn both Linux and the *nix Way. I was a beginner in *nix once myself, transitioning from a mainframe and Windows background. People who knew helped me become a person who knows. What I don't want is to waste my time on people who don't want to know, but just demand free help and wish to remain ignorant, or who think they're some kind of genius because they popped a Mandrake install CD in the drive and took all the defaults and now they're running Linux. They're usually willfully ignorant, too.
I am on a FreeBSD list, and I'll tell you, there is no one like that there. I've never seen one, ever. Anybody who can get FreeBSD installed has at least two clues to rub together, and they will grow from there. Linux was once that way, and I don't see it becoming less that way as a good thing. Popularity has a price, and it's steep.
Umm, no I don't realize that at all. I had a PC back when only the tech elite had them, and IBM and a good number of cloners found it to be quite financially viable.
If you go back even further, you'll find that even in the days when having a personal computer (they called them microcomputers then) meant getting a kit and assembling it yourself - and
"assembling" didn't mean just plugging together some finished components, it often involved a soldering iron - a number of companies found that to be financially viable. Altair and Imsai were a couple of the big names then. Apple got started that way, too.
Later, finished computers became the norm, and the Apple II was one of the big sellers in that field. Who bought Apple IIs? That same tech elite that you think couldn't make a computer market financially viable, mostly. The Apple II was groundbreaking in that it was a computer that was easier to learn and was bought by large numbers of people who were not engineers or programmers or electronics freaks, but were nevertheless smart and curious.
That last is key. I never said, or even implied, that you should have to be a tech elite to own a computer. But being smart is desirable, being curious and willing to learn - including educating yourself via RTFM - is key. I think it's great that computers are available easily and cheaply, but it's not great that willfully ignorant people install Linux and then demand - not ask for - free help from those who educated themselves, just because they "tried this Linux thing."
OK, you're right. I'll modify that a bit.
*Some* recent Mandrake users are that type. It's the fault of the super-easy installer that makes it possible for any fool to get a working install of Mandrake on practically any hardware. Of course, some fools will try it.
An installer like that is, in principle, a Good Thing, but it does have some negative fallout. That happens particularly in the case of Mandrake because they have made a conscious decision to pursue that sort of user.
Why do I have disdain for Mandrake? Remember when Mandrake switched to CUPS? Remember how broken it was, and how it didn't start working well until 8.2 or maybe even 9.0? The Mandrake forums will filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth over that for a very long time. Many of Mandrake's users are beginners with Linux and the installer allows them to get something installed and working without any clue at all, and a lot of the *drak tools work pretty well, which encourages them to continue to have no clue. Mandrake encourages ignorance and doesn't encoruage learning the Unix Way. Without even going into the PITA aspect of dealing with people who have been so encourage, I'll just say that depending on *drak tools that you find only in Mandrake may allow you to work well enough when things are fine, that falls way short when things aren't fine. Things are more than occassionally not fine on Mandrake because they are so bleeding edge that they often ship broken stuff. My dad uses Mandrake, so I had a front-row seat to the CUPS debacle. I use Debian Unstable, and have found it to be consistently more stable and more bug-free than Mandrake production realeases. Pushing out stuff that broken in a newbie-oriented distro is unconscionable.
With that said, some of the sharpest Linux minds I've run across were using Mandrake, but on the other end of the spectrum, so are a lot of people who should have bought a Mac. If you don't know and don't want to know, a Mac is a great computer to have (with OS X, it's also a pretty great computer to have if you *do* know and want to know). Linux is not a good platform for the voluntarily ignorant, nor should it be made such.
Elistist crap? Not at all. Pardon me, but your ignorance is showing. *nix has been, for many years, a meritocracy. You gain respect in accordance with A) What you know, and B) Your willingness to learn and educate yourself. It is in no way elitist to expect people to do these things, and to expect people not wiling to do these things to continue using the operating system that encourages willful ignorance. I would be elitist if I said that being a Windows user means you are unworthy to try Unix, regardless of your intelligence or willingness to learn.
Nor is it unknowledgeable (call them clueless if you want, but everyone was a beginner once) newbies who bother me. All who seek clue are welcome. What I object to, as I made crystal clear in my original post, is the willfully ignorant. Those who do not know and do not wish to know, who want nothing but a handout. They commonly bring the attitude that "I tried this Linux thing, so you OWE me. When I demand help, you experienced people better hop to it, because if you don't, you suck and Linux sucks." If you participate in any newgroups, LUG lists, etc., you must surely have seen this attitude. It is that attitude that lead to a LUG of which I am a longtime member having to move to a nominally moderated list. The elected officers appointed two moderators, of which I am one, to assist the list master. Fortunately, when it became clear that those sorts of trolls would not be tolerated and anyone who did not cease and desist when warned risked being unsubbed, the trolls shut up and eventually went away.
How would moving to *BSD change anything? It's pretty simple. You don't find people like that using *BSD because they don't know enough, and will never know enough, to get the thing installed. You find few of them using Debian for the same reason. I like Debian's crufty installer because it keeps out the lazy and the willfully ignorant, and am less than thrilled about the project to make an "easy" installer for Debian.
Now you'll probably call me elitist again, but you'll be just as wrong as you were the first time.
So you have no problem when Microsoft takes a protocol such as Kerberos and adapts it just enough that it doesn't work with most other implementations? After all, they're just exercising their choice in how they implement the protocol, and choice is ALWAYS a good thing.
Come now, I really expect better of you than to raise such a false argument as this. Choice is the fact that Kerberos is an open standard. You and without reservation, that is a Good Thing. That is the strength of free/open source software. That doesn't mean people can't use that freedom of choice to do bad things, such as fork it and break compatibility for their own selfish ends rather than add functionality and contribute that functionality back to the main tree, but the presence of choice itself doesn't make this a bad thing. I think most citizens of democracies (of whatever type) would agree that democracy is a good thing, even though politicians often use that freedom for their own selfish ends without regard to what's good for the nation as a whole, and people often make foolish and uniformed choices in the laws and/or leaders for which they vote. These lapses, however, do not make us regard democracy - that is, choice - as a bad thing.
I think perhaps we need to define "desktop" here so that we better understand each other. It has come to take on the common meaning of "home user system" even though somebody's computer at work is also a desktop. It is the "home user" meaning that I am referring when I speak of the desktop. Linux is certainly ready for the corporate desktop, and I don't regard its use there as a bad thing, either. On the corporate desktop, generally, there are professionals available to look after the workstations and servers, and to help users with problems. Linux is fully ready for this role and has been for a while, thanks to application suites such as Star Office/OpenOffice.org.
It's a lot less ready for the home user desktop, not only for reasons pertaining to ease of use (burning CDs on Linux is still far more complicated than doing the same on Win/Mac, although the 2.6 kernel will take care of those issues, and Konqueror in KDE 3.2 will support drag-and-drop CD creation) but for the same reason that Windows isn't really ready for that market either: the world of networked computing has become a very hostile place, far more than it used it be, and not only Windows but most Linux distributions as well, has a default install that is far to open for a computer that may be connected to the Internet directly, without even NAT standing between it and the blackhats. On this score in particular, I think Mac OS X is more ready for the desktop than any other system, but that doesn't surprise me. Macs have always been hard to crack, relative to most other platforms.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the standard GUI argument. A user who uses Mandrake at work should be able to sit down at a SuSE machine at home and change the GUI to KDE if it comes with Gnome standard (could happen, now that Novell bought them) and then set to work. I will support your argument this far, though: distributors should not dick around with the default KDE or Gnome menus, they should use whatever the KDE or Gnome projects ship. If they want to add menus, OK, but don't remove or modify what's there by default. That's a bigger hassle for moving between distros than anything else I can think of. For example, my dad runs Mandrake and I run Debian Sid. We both use KDE, but his KDE looks a lot different than mine because Mandrake changes it quite a bit, and IMO they haven't made it better, just different. I'd like to see distributors all agree on that one point. Of course, Red Hat, via BlueTurd, remains the worst offender on that score.
It's even simpler than that. MS has their market share because IBM gave it to them by choosing them as the OS vendor for the IBM PC. All of the lock-in via proprietary formats and engineered lack of interoperability and highly predatory and monopolistic practices came after that. If IBM had chosen CPM as their OS or had written one from scratch, MS today would still be just an application vendor among many. A large one, probably, but still just an application vendor.
I beg to differ. Choice is, in fact, always a good thing. I'd think you were an MS supporter trolling, except for the fact that you're conversant with terms like "window manager," so it would appear that you're actually a slightly misguided Linux supporter, thus you merit an answer :-)
The reason why choice is always a good thing is that while you may be right that most users don't want to choose (and would almost certainly be right if you modified that to "many users don't want to choose), the fact remains that a significant percentage of us *do* want to choose. That's a major reason why we are using Linux (or *BSD) in the first place: we want to choose.
I'm sure you've noticed that your distribution whichever it is, comes with some set of reasonable defaults. It could be Gnome, it could be KDE, it could even be Fluxbox, IceWM, or something else. If a person using that distro wishes to customize nothing, it will work just fine as-is. However, if another person using it doesn't like any of the defaults and wants to change them all, that is possible and it will still work just fine. This is why choice is always a good thing.
It isn't even necessary that there be a single cross-distro standard, nor is it even desirable. A high degree of integration between KDE and Gnome is desirable, and having all KDE apps adopt the theme of Gnome if you are running under Gnome, or all Gnome and other GTK apps adopt the theme of KDE if you are running under KDE, is certainly a good thing. This doesn't need to (IMO) include any other window managers, since people using those are generally going their own way anyhow, but tight interoperability between Gnome and KDE is clearly a Good Thing.
This would enable developers to write either for Gnome or KDE, knowing that their app will look appropriate on either. As it stands now, though, you can already write for one or the other and your app will still work, all the user needs is libraries for both installed, something most (all?) distros do.
Linux was never meant to be "one size fits all" and not being that way is what has led, in large part, to the great amount of success it has had. I'm a former Red Hat user. I mostly chucked Red Hat after they came out with their "one size fits all" interface, Blue Curve, and the cracked logic behind it: you shouldn't choose Gnome or KDE based on what they look like or how they behave (rough quote of Havoc Pennington, from his explanation of Blue Curve). On the contrary, those are exactly the type of criteria on which people choose, and they are totally reasonable. When they came out with their "one year to EOL" policy, I completely my move to Debian and have never looked back. Indeed, it's so good I should have done it sooner.
Whether or not we want Linux to move to the desktop (and if "desktop" is defined as "the sort of people who really shouldn't even have a computer but are nevertheless dabbling in Linux with distros like Mandrake and Lindows" then the answer is a resounding "no!") - something I used to support very strongly five years ago but have now substantially re-thought, there's no need to make Linux one-size-fits-all. That would kill Linux rather than help it. As for Linux on the desktop, the only argument I really have for it now is that I'd rather see anything other than MS on the desktop, and after Microsoft is will and thoroughly crushed, I can retreat into FreeBSD. It has an installer strong enough to keep away the computer-stupid. Already, the clue level in Linux has fallen so far due to the influx of newbies who are ignorant, want to stay that way, and don't want to learn the Unix Way, that I'm contemplating to jumping ship to BSD this year anyway.
Actually, the cost of production argument (and let's not foget the marketing cost, which is not insignificant) is hardly specious. Production costs are indeed factored into the price of a DVD or CD.
Once production costs have been fully recovered, there remain only running costs of producing the CD or DVD. Put another way, the longer it is on the market at a given price point, the higher the profit margin, especially because production costs are heavily weighted toward the front; they want them recovered quickly. As you note, this is less true for movies than DVDs, because much of the production cost is recovered in the theater run. OTOH this makes the DVD an important *profit* source, because so much of the theater revenues went to paying for making the movie.
In the case of CDs, a CD release of a thirty year old album that was originally released in LP record format and later in cassette (and maybe eight-track) formats may have a lower sales volume than recently released music by popular bands, but if it was a hit album when new it will remain a steady seller and will have a higher profit margin than new releases, because the production cost is fully recovered and the marketing costs are minimal. Mostly, they just have to make it and put it in the record stores, where it will pretty much sell itself to people who like that music.
No costs other than those directly related to manufacturing it, plus its assigned percentage of the general corporate overhead, need to be recovered. That makes a CD of, say, Revolver, more profitable by percentage than, say, the latest Britney CD. That's why old albums released on CD cost nearly as much as new stuff; they can make a huge profit. Looked at another way, the record companies' old catalogs could be seen as helping to subsize their newer releases.
Everything isn't three times as expensive in Japan. I lived there for nine years and I paid less for my rent (roughly the same amount of space), less for some of my groceries, notably fish and chicken, did not need to own a car thanks to the great public transportation system, and my transportation costs to and from work were 100% paid by my employer (normal in Japan) in the form of a train pass (which I could use anytime for my own personal use as well; a train pass is good for unlimited use anywhere along your points of travel, so it saved me quite a bit).
I did make more money than I do here, that's true, but only about 20 per cent.
It's possible to make everything cost three times as much there, but you don't have to. On average, things cost more than here, but careful shopping can offset most of that. If you live in a part of the USA that has cheap housing, the relative cost might make it seem like the cost of living is double or more, from your point of view. However, I live in California, and LA, San Diego, and San Francisco would all look that way from such a viewpoint, too.
the spent solid-fueled boosters would fall onto Brazil, and that would probably torque the Brazilians off
Payback for all the spent Brazilian spam that falls on on us.
Uh, did you read the not-so-fine print? The part that says "pre-teen Super Model?" Which translates roughly into English as "Jailbait Super Model?"
The Viking landers were around 576 Kilograms, around 200 pounds of which was fuel.
Now, see, that's just the sort of mixing of Metric and Imperial measure that got us in trouble on Mars before
You're talking about other people's intelligence? Excuse me while I empty the contents of my stomach.
/. troll who hasn't the courage to post logged-in because he's a gonadless karma whore who sits in his mother's dark basement desperately wishing he could masturbate to porn all day but sadly unable to because of the aforementioned unfortunate experience at the animal shelter.
There, now I feel a bit better.
First, no one was wondering about how the glue gets out of the can, although I'm sure you find things like that extremely difficult. The discussion was about levels of toxicity and persistence, for which no evidence was presented. I apologize for using big, confusing words like that, but perhaps someone will explain them for you. I'm making this as simple as I can for you, because I know you're what it's PC to call "mentally challenged" these days. Please note that non-persistent agents are not particularly harmful to the environment, and many aerosols are not at all harmful to use without respirators (paint and glue do not fall into that category, but that was never at question; the whole question was one of persistence). You may want to reconsider who is suffering from RCIS (Recto-Cranial Inversion Syndrome) here, since you seem incapable both of comprehending what you read and of expressing yourself in writing at a level beyond what one commonly sees crudely spraypainted on freeway signs, or more commonly, scribbled on the bathroom wall.
Secondly, no one ever compared Hummers with average automobiles. The discussion was Hummer versus pickup trucks or other SUVs. No one has even now stated or even suggested, let alone present actual evidence, that a Hummer pollutes more than a pickup truck. Full-size pickups, like Hummers, typically have fairly large V-8 engines and weigh a lot. You also seem rather unfamiliar with the whole field of vehicle emissions, because otherwise you would know that there is far more to pollution levels than engine size. Without even pulling in engines that use other fuels such as diesel, propane, or natural gas, I will direct your attention to, say, a vehicle that has a four cylinder or small six cyclinder engine, but which is 20 - 25 years old. I guarantee that a brand new Hummer H2 produces lower emissions in all categories, larger engine notwithstanding. And not only lower emissions by percentage, but lower absolute numbers. That's how far emissions technology has come. An H2 might even beat a smaller vehicle that was only 10 - 15 years old Once a gun, you may want to consider the anatomy of your own cranium and whether it bears a striking resemblance to your nether regions. It's difficult to imagine that it does not.
Finally, what makes you think you have big, hairy nuts? I'm quite certain that if you ever had any to begin with, they were long ago removed when your parents brought you home from the county animal shelter. The nice people had the good sense to realize that while it was unlikely you would ever be able to reproduce outside of a laboratory, they couldn't take the chance. Unlike yourself, the person to whom I was replying has shown himself to be a person of consideration and intellect who just spoke overly passionately about something in which he strongly believes. You, on the other hand, are just a zitty, pre-pubsescent
That, my friend, is how you insult someone. Four-letter words just don't cut it, although I'm sure if you can find your way back and read this, you'll unleash even more of them than before. Too bad it doesn't matter, because you've already proven to everyone who read your little tirade just what a fool you are. You have a lot to learn.
Now, the only question remaining is "Should this be modded a Troll or should this be modded flamebait?" I rather like flamebait, but who knows? It might wind up being Insightful after all. You, at least, might gain some insight from it if you take time to consider the lesson behind the verbal and mental buttwhipping you've just had.
Yeah, I would mod him up too, if I had any mod points, but despite my good karma, I've only gotten mod points once. Ever.
:-)
/. cookies. Clearing the browsr cache probably isn't a bad idea, either.
It makes me think that guy who said they track what you do when you post anonymously and will get you for it is not just whistling dixie, because once or twice I have been a logged in troll posting anonymously, if that's not an oxymoron
In light of that experience, I think his recommendation was probably very good advice: Use a different browser to post any trolls or controversial stuff, and if you can, get a new dynamic IP (mine is static). If you don't use a different browser, delete all your
Well, paint is not spray mount, so it would be best to conduct the experiment using the materials under discussion.
In either, case, the the experiment should not be conducted in a closed room. If the instructions for spray mount are anything like the instructions for spray paint, you should use it in a well-ventilated area, with respiratory protection.
You've ignored one central issue which I raised, which is the question of whether or not the solvents released when spraying spray mount are persistent. If they are persistent and harmful, then that is a factor. If they are not persistent (that is, they quickly degrade into non-harmful components), then spraying is no big deal, and it's main drawback would be that a spray can is a larger piece of waste and does not lend itself well to recycling.
I do not know the answer to the question of persistence, and I don't know if you do, either. If you do, no evidence for it has been presented. I think that's what the other poster was getting at, that if you want people to take your arguments seriously, they either need to be accompanied by evidence that you have expertise in your own right on the topic (and you may well have it), or you need to point to the evidence of third-party sources who would be accepted as expert, but you did neither, and the result is that while you may be right and may know of solid evidence to back up your claim, no one who isn't already convinced will be likely to side with you.
I don't much care for SUVs as commuting vehicles either, but my gripe is that they're so darned big and the people who drive them so darned inconsiderate, and most of them don't need the fscking things, they just drive them either to intimidate people in four-cyclinder economy cars (like me) or to make up for something else that isn't big enough. If I had a real need for an SUV (pulling a boat, carrying camping gear or hunting gear, etc.) I might get one and then be forced to commute in it because like most people, I can't really afford to keep a spare vehicle around. Most SUVs, I suspect, have never pulled a trailer, gone off road, carry camping hunting or fishing gear on a seldom or never basis, especially in California, and are just generally unnecessary. I find a four-door economy car to be large enough for myself, my wife, and two small kids, and that's the largest cargo most SUVs every carry.