"Next, an ad campaign that tells people "it's not cool to drive small cars" is going to sell big cars better than any ad campaign Detroit could ever come up with! (Think of public trends around anti-smoking and anti-marijuana ads.)"
First it was my understanding that those ads were actually effective. But that's not the point because I don't generally like tax money spent wagging fingers at citizens. But really, if you want to drive such a car, then why not make the relative cost of doing so proportional? Such vehicles increase insurance risk and environmental responsibility for everyone. Can I get a tax credit if I'm not generating the pollution or accidents or consuming all the fuel (my vehicle doesn't use as much fuel, but when prices go up due to scarcity, I have to pay for it disproportionally), or putting the most wear on the road? Besides a "gas tax" that sort of use fee I think would at least be a more free market reform (you want it? you pay for it).
"Leave it alone. The economy will work it out on its own. And the more you tamper with it, the more it will somehow backfire in your face."
So then we should at least stop subsidizing the domestic automobile market, and drop import tarrifs on foreign cars, because that would allow the market "to work it out". I understand free markets generally DO work themselves out (I am not contradicting that principal), but there are certainly political and other costs of just letting the market muddle about itself (how much longer do we need to be involved with those "crazy Arabs" before the market "works itself out"? The sooner the better I think...)
Do you have any efficiency examples from 70s onward? Those are the "decades" I was specifically referencing. That average fuel efficiency (taking into account cars/trucks) has remained unchanged since 1980s doesn't smack of progress to me. I agree that the market responds to what consumers want, but it's not as if car makers weren't persuading people to buy SUVs, or lobbying against fuel efficiency standards. It's not as if they live in a vacuum and are/solely/ responding to the market. If you don't want the end-goal to be reduced fuel consumption (for geopolitical reasons) and reduced fuel emissions (for environmental reasons)... fine, then we shouldn't have standards at all. But I for one, as a citizen, do see a need for reduced fuel consumption and emissions, and furthermore as an independent economic agent, I would LIKE to have more than just TWO practical options (and imported at that!) when looking for a low-emission vehicle. Therefore I don't think it is unreasonable for government to incentivize vehicles with low fuel consumption and emissions and de-incentivize high fuel consumption and emissions. As an added bonus, I personally think that the "alternative fuel" industry is a great domestic economic opportunity for jobs and innovation (witness rural farmers selling wind power and bio-fuel).
I don't see doing NOTHING as an appropriate solution to the fact that some (very few relatively) people use high-performance equipment and vehicles. Is it your contention that if we just "wait" that the last few decades of non-progress and lethargy in the domestic car industry will just reverse itself? Do you WANT people like me to send my dollars out of country to buy foreign low emission vehicles? That doesn't make sense to me.
I was considering an Insight, but I heard rumors of Honda discontinuing it (is this true??), and I don't want to get stuck X years down the road with a completely unsupported, unmaintainable expensive car. So I'm looking at the Prius's now.
I don't disagree with you generally, but would just like to point out:
"I don't care what they say, sooner or later an accident will happen where the batteries are ruptured and smear electrolyte all over passengers."
They said the same thing about gas tanks, and while there are some bad cars, despite the fact holywood shows cars blowing up like nuclear explosions when somebody looks at them sideways, they are actually not all that dangerous. I would presume the quality and reliability of batteries would improve also (given that your scenario is accurate to begin with), just as gas tanks did.
"Therefore, the cars will be scrapped more often after collisions."
A recent report shows that the trend is ALREADY towards more disposable cars due to all the high tech crap and tons of airbags and such in them. If the car is going to be "disposed" of anyway, perhaps it would be better if it were more efficient during its lifetime anyway?
You have to start somewhere...automobile makers haven't capitalized on many of the low hanging fruits to improve fuel efficiency for DECADES. Just think where computer technology, or aircraft design, has gone in the same intervening period. It is taking foreign car makers to pressure the US market to even begin this stuff (of course now we are being sold the pipe dream of hydrogen...just wait hydrogen is around the corner! Fusion power is around the corner! Magic faerie power with spring fresh scent is around the corner! In the mean time buy our Ford Exorbitant!)
Fuel efficiency is achievable, we just have to start and do it. We'd never achieve anything if we gave up when our first models weren't perfect.
"In other words, we need to assume the position of a cloner. We should not."
DAMN. You're right! We need to stop copying good ideas and instead spend a lot of time coming up with our own quirker platform that only we will ever use despite it's obvious technical superiority and geek cred! And I bet Microsoft even uses MATH...we need to stop "copying" them and stop using math right away. We need NEW ideas people! Think outside the box!
Instead of posting little bits, actually try it yourself (from the details in my other post). I have retried with the suggestions in this thread and as expected it doesn't work (the right image div is consistently placed/below/ the text div).
I am already aware of those sites, and yes, I read them. Fools. If you don't want to provide a solution yourself that is fine, but I am not going to go through all the pain again just to prove to random slashdotters that I am right.
I'm not sure what the "CSS positioning" spec you posted actually covers (since it looked just like an abstract), but when I was working on this, I worked off the w3c's reference:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp You can specify widths in percentages and pixels. That is not what I want (or if it/is/ what I want that is not what it means semantically in CSS).
[img][<-spaces->centered text (maybe with newlines)<-spaces->][img]
** don't wrap if possible **
(slashdot isn't the paragon of formatting so that may not come out right)
The image cells should take up only as much space as necessary, and the text cell should take up all remaining space. Of course, if I specify width="100%" I may either get what I expect to be correct (following from my knowledge of tables) that the text cell takes as much as it can, but some CSS renderers want it to mean "take up 100% of visible page width", which means that the page actually scrolls to the right because it is literally taking 100% of visible space. Either something is broken, or it is just not possible. Now this was several months ago, but if you can find a generic, non-hardcoded-pixel-widths, non-hardcoded-percentage-widths (because obviously as you expand the window the percentages change) to do this simple thing without introducing image widths etc., please tell me. I spent a lot of time, trying everything I could, and everything that was suggested to me in IRC, and could not do this with CSS alone, so I just fell back and used a table.
Well, I went on a CSS bender and discovered that while it is great for pretty much all mundane styling problems, it still sucks when trying to layout content in table-like columns. Simple things like just getting a three column layout with various justifications, or getting divisions that occupy as little space as possible (since you can't tell it to "occupy as little space as possible" you have to rely on hacks like saying, "ok, bound yourself by margin parameters which eat up all empty space") is heinously difficult and requires bizarre hacks. I had to fall back on tables in some cases just to get a simple header including centered text with justified (left and right, respectively) flanking images.
Let me give you a clue - while it may remain fun for you to "keep it real" by coding on open source,.Net and the Avalon/XAML platform threatens to displace a lot of the progress Linux has made, at least on the desktop. And we know that when MS owns the desktop they have great leverage to push on the server area. Every time MS comes up with something, the first reaction is to downplay it and shout that it has already been done before. IE was a joke too. Windows was a joke to. You can keep laughing, but unless there is a viable open source alternative to what MS is providing, we stand to get our lunch eaten. That is what is scary. That is what is scary for a lot of open source companies which are essentially loss-leading by pouring tons of money into free software and HOPING that by doing so they can open the market and reap rewards later..Net and Avalon/XAML threaten to crush that. It's not enough to say that it's nothing new or not a big deal. When all of Microsoft developers, and a large segment of the industry that MS influences, starts adopting it in droves, it WILL be a big deal. When MS develops something that will give their customers some value (whether or not you think it gives/you/ value), it is not enough to shout "bogeyman!"... you actually have to compete.
I am a Java developer, and I for one don't want my career derailed because there was never an open source alternative to compete with.Net.
Cool! I'll try that out. I currently use the hosts file to point to a local server (running on another machine which also serves my website), which I have designed to return "empty" content for the applicable requested file. E.g. if the ad requires a gif, a 1x1 transparent gif is returned, if a jpeg, then a 1x1 jpeg, etc. Of course, as I said, this only works for hosts not arbitrary URLs. I'll give PAC a shot.
Slashdot Mirror
"Vigilante justice is NOT legal"
Legal: no
Justified: yes
Funny: definitely
"The basic theme is, America is supposed to be the home of everything great."
Maybe instead: The basic theme is, America is supposed to be the home of the perception of everything great.
"Next, an ad campaign that tells people "it's not cool to drive small cars" is going to sell big cars better than any ad campaign Detroit could ever come up with! (Think of public trends around anti-smoking and anti-marijuana ads.)"
First it was my understanding that those ads were actually effective. But that's not the point because I don't generally like tax money spent wagging fingers at citizens. But really, if you want to drive such a car, then why not make the relative cost of doing so proportional? Such vehicles increase insurance risk and environmental responsibility for everyone. Can I get a tax credit if I'm not generating the pollution or accidents or consuming all the fuel (my vehicle doesn't use as much fuel, but when prices go up due to scarcity, I have to pay for it disproportionally), or putting the most wear on the road? Besides a "gas tax" that sort of use fee I think would at least be a more free market reform (you want it? you pay for it).
"Leave it alone. The economy will work it out on its own. And the more you tamper with it, the more it will somehow backfire in your face."
So then we should at least stop subsidizing the domestic automobile market, and drop import tarrifs on foreign cars, because that would allow the market "to work it out". I understand free markets generally DO work themselves out (I am not contradicting that principal), but there are certainly political and other costs of just letting the market muddle about itself (how much longer do we need to be involved with those "crazy Arabs" before the market "works itself out"? The sooner the better I think...)
Do you have any efficiency examples from 70s onward? Those are the "decades" I was specifically referencing. That average fuel efficiency (taking into account cars/trucks) has remained unchanged since 1980s doesn't smack of progress to me. I agree that the market responds to what consumers want, but it's not as if car makers weren't persuading people to buy SUVs, or lobbying against fuel efficiency standards. It's not as if they live in a vacuum and are /solely/ responding to the market. If you don't want the end-goal to be reduced fuel consumption (for geopolitical reasons) and reduced fuel emissions (for environmental reasons)... fine, then we shouldn't have standards at all. But I for one, as a citizen, do see a need for reduced fuel consumption and emissions, and furthermore as an independent economic agent, I would LIKE to have more than just TWO practical options (and imported at that!) when looking for a low-emission vehicle. Therefore I don't think it is unreasonable for government to incentivize vehicles with low fuel consumption and emissions and de-incentivize high fuel consumption and emissions. As an added bonus, I personally think that the "alternative fuel" industry is a great domestic economic opportunity for jobs and innovation (witness rural farmers selling wind power and bio-fuel).
I don't see doing NOTHING as an appropriate solution to the fact that some (very few relatively) people use high-performance equipment and vehicles. Is it your contention that if we just "wait" that the last few decades of non-progress and lethargy in the domestic car industry will just reverse itself? Do you WANT people like me to send my dollars out of country to buy foreign low emission vehicles? That doesn't make sense to me.
And if somehow the required force is exerted on your hand, I think you have a larger problem than your RFID breaking...
I was considering an Insight, but I heard rumors of Honda discontinuing it (is this true??), and I don't want to get stuck X years down the road with a completely unsupported, unmaintainable expensive car. So I'm looking at the Prius's now.
I don't disagree with you generally, but would just like to point out:
"I don't care what they say, sooner or later an accident will happen where the batteries are ruptured and smear electrolyte all over passengers."
They said the same thing about gas tanks, and while there are some bad cars, despite the fact holywood shows cars blowing up like nuclear explosions when somebody looks at them sideways, they are actually not all that dangerous. I would presume the quality and reliability of batteries would improve also (given that your scenario is accurate to begin with), just as gas tanks did.
"Therefore, the cars will be scrapped more often after collisions."
A recent report shows that the trend is ALREADY towards more disposable cars due to all the high tech crap and tons of airbags and such in them. If the car is going to be "disposed" of anyway, perhaps it would be better if it were more efficient during its lifetime anyway?
You have to start somewhere...automobile makers haven't capitalized on many of the low hanging fruits to improve fuel efficiency for DECADES. Just think where computer technology, or aircraft design, has gone in the same intervening period. It is taking foreign car makers to pressure the US market to even begin this stuff (of course now we are being sold the pipe dream of hydrogen...just wait hydrogen is around the corner! Fusion power is around the corner! Magic faerie power with spring fresh scent is around the corner! In the mean time buy our Ford Exorbitant!)
Fuel efficiency is achievable, we just have to start and do it. We'd never achieve anything if we gave up when our first models weren't perfect.
"secret underground base and then the experiment went horribly wrong etc... so not just the monsters - the entire story line!"
Wow, you mean just like the FIRST DOOM?
conduits on a purely deprived basis?
throwing sponge?
"monospace" police force?
Sounds like a conspiracy to me!
Ahhh...a nice refreshing coke...
GLURG GLURG SPLORK COUGH CHOKE CHOKE CHOKE
<DEATH>
*ring* *ring* *ring*
Hello there, you've won a free SUV! Sir?
"In other words, we need to assume the position of a cloner. We should not."
DAMN. You're right! We need to stop copying good ideas and instead spend a lot of time coming up with our own quirker platform that only we will ever use despite it's obvious technical superiority and geek cred! And I bet Microsoft even uses MATH...we need to stop "copying" them and stop using math right away. We need NEW ideas people! Think outside the box!
sigh
"Can anyone guess what happens next? Anyone?"
We all suffocate on the fumes of bloated armchair pundits?
Did you love this world
And did this world not love you?
Don't give in 2000 man
Instead of posting little bits, actually try it yourself (from the details in my other post). I have retried with the suggestions in this thread and as expected it doesn't work (the right image div is consistently placed /below/ the text div).
I am already aware of those sites, and yes, I read them. Fools. If you don't want to provide a solution yourself that is fine, but I am not going to go through all the pain again just to prove to random slashdotters that I am right.
I'm not sure what the "CSS positioning" spec you posted actually covers (since it looked just like an abstract), but when I was working on this, I worked off the w3c's reference:
/is/ what I want that is not what it means semantically in CSS).
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp
You can specify widths in percentages and pixels. That is not what I want (or if it
[img][<-spaces->centered text (maybe with newlines)<-spaces->][img]
** don't wrap if possible **
(slashdot isn't the paragon of formatting so that may not come out right)
The image cells should take up only as much space as necessary, and the text cell should take up all remaining space. Of course, if I specify width="100%" I may either get what I expect to be correct (following from my knowledge of tables) that the text cell takes as much as it can, but some CSS renderers want it to mean "take up 100% of visible page width", which means that the page actually scrolls to the right because it is literally taking 100% of visible space. Either something is broken, or it is just not possible. Now this was several months ago, but if you can find a generic, non-hardcoded-pixel-widths, non-hardcoded-percentage-widths (because obviously as you expand the window the percentages change) to do this simple thing without introducing image widths etc., please tell me. I spent a lot of time, trying everything I could, and everything that was suggested to me in IRC, and could not do this with CSS alone, so I just fell back and used a table.
I'm aware of bluerobot's, but it, and all others I have seen, hardcode sizes (and so are not "natural") of columns.
Well, I went on a CSS bender and discovered that while it is great for pretty much all mundane styling problems, it still sucks when trying to layout content in table-like columns. Simple things like just getting a three column layout with various justifications, or getting divisions that occupy as little space as possible (since you can't tell it to "occupy as little space as possible" you have to rely on hacks like saying, "ok, bound yourself by margin parameters which eat up all empty space") is heinously difficult and requires bizarre hacks. I had to fall back on tables in some cases just to get a simple header including centered text with justified (left and right, respectively) flanking images.
The Matrix used religious iconography!
BURN IT BURN IT
We must not challenge people's assumptions about symbols! Think of the children!
Let me give you a clue - while it may remain fun for you to "keep it real" by coding on open source, .Net and the Avalon/XAML platform threatens to displace a lot of the progress Linux has made, at least on the desktop. And we know that when MS owns the desktop they have great leverage to push on the server area. Every time MS comes up with something, the first reaction is to downplay it and shout that it has already been done before. IE was a joke too. Windows was a joke to. You can keep laughing, but unless there is a viable open source alternative to what MS is providing, we stand to get our lunch eaten. That is what is scary. That is what is scary for a lot of open source companies which are essentially loss-leading by pouring tons of money into free software and HOPING that by doing so they can open the market and reap rewards later. .Net and Avalon/XAML threaten to crush that. It's not enough to say that it's nothing new or not a big deal. When all of Microsoft developers, and a large segment of the industry that MS influences, starts adopting it in droves, it WILL be a big deal. When MS develops something that will give their customers some value (whether or not you think it gives /you/ value), it is not enough to shout "bogeyman!"... you actually have to compete.
.Net.
I am a Java developer, and I for one don't want my career derailed because there was never an open source alternative to compete with
Cool! I'll try that out. I currently use the hosts file to point to a local server (running on another machine which also serves my website), which I have designed to return "empty" content for the applicable requested file. E.g. if the ad requires a gif, a 1x1 transparent gif is returned, if a jpeg, then a 1x1 jpeg, etc. Of course, as I said, this only works for hosts not arbitrary URLs. I'll give PAC a shot.
yeah, I tried squid once, but it's too much maintainence for me to run a whole seperate proxy server just to avoid ads
Some sites are starting to hardcode IP addresses, in which case the hosts file is useless.
Personally I think that there should be an generic framework for transforming any resource locator for all popular protocols.
So...next up is "One-click-and-hold-for-4-seconds-shopping" I suppose...
Or the ingenius radio/cd button which when pressed quickly goes to the next station/track, but when held, fast forwards/scans through the stations....