Moral of the story - imperial units are non-scientific, inconsistent and often have no agreed standard (e.g. pint) so use SI units!
I totally agree - A Norwegian mile is exactly 10 km, but it would be ridiculous to use that in international communications. Proponents of the imperial system claim that it works because readers know the unit referred to. Well - on the internet you often don't know where the writer's from. You english-speaking guys haven't even consistently defined your units, and operate with a ridiculous amount of different ounces, pints, gallons and even tons.
...but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
Which is pretty much why I rip the DRM out of any book I buy (for futureproofing) and only use my reader device offline, using Calibre to manage content.
Seconded. Amazon must be pretty confused by my reading habits -- with any book I buy from them I only ever view the cover page in KindlePC for about one second:)
Also normal people do not get pensions. Those went away decades ago.
Based on previous posts I believe you are American? What on earth do you do with elders who have worked a long life, but can't pay for a retirement home when they need more care than family can provide? In civilised countries pensions are included in your tax.
I just did this with my Linux installation with no sweat at all, and now the GF wants me to do it for her Windows (XP) box. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've had anything to do with Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about it. While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
The other reason I'm nervous is because it's my GF I'll be doing it for. If there's even the slightest hiccup, I'll have to throw her into the gaping maw of a volcano before I'll ever hear the end of it.
I do this fairly regularly at work with Win7, never had a hiccup. My procedure is to shrink and move the system partitions to the point where they'll fit on the SSD (and remove any surplus partitions from the table), and then use a Linux Live USB to dd (bs=4M) data from the HDD until the SSD is full. It's not sophisticated, but it works. Boot off your SSD and you're done. I wouldn't do this without backups, however:)
Even my cheap ass Kingston SSD made a huge difference in the responsiveness of my system. Office suites such as Outlook, Word, and the like are very disk-bound in performance, so it's no surprise that an SSD would make life much easier for business users. Starting Outlook or Word used to take forever, and now it just takes an annoying amount of time. The super-fast Windows boot time now lets me do away with sleep and hibernation. I just shut my system down and start each day afresh!
The reason an SSD will greatly improve the speed and responsiveness is mostly because of the very low access times compared to HDDs. When your OS boots and operates it frequently accesses a lot of relatively small files, the higher throughput doesn't have all that much of an effect, while access time certainly does. I revitalise old computers at work by installing these, and while MB/Sec rises to insane levels with never SSD drives, the perceived performance stays about the same in my experience. We buy cheap-ass SSDs because they will still certainly beat the pants off any HDD:)
Truth may be stranger than fiction (See Larry Niven's pupetters)
A Klemperer rosette, although Niven actually called it a Kemplerer rosette. Cool idea, but you'd probably need a "reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders" or four to make it stable.
It's sad that people invent stories to prove a point. I don't really have much to contribute, but I can mention that I believe those two spaces are mainly an English thing, I never heard of it before having used the internet for quite a while. I'm old enough to have taken a typewriting class at school, and never heard it mentioned there. In Norwegian, at least, it's expressly forbidden ("It should never be two spaces after each other" in Google's somewhat clumsy translation. That page is trustworthy, they gather language rules from all sorts of authoritative sources). I notice that you don't use them in your own post.
As an aside double spaces look "wrong" to me, maybe because I'm not used to them. The nerd part of me is inclined to think that no space should be necessary after a sentence, as the period or other sentence ending punctuations are separators on their own, but that messes with how the brain parses words. Besides, it just looks too damn ugly:)
Even if you don't ever plan to change a username, a username makes a poor primary key just for performance reasons. In MySQL, for example, primary keys should be kept short because every index will have a copy of every primary key.
I've had the misfortune to access the schema of an accounting system we had to use, and *every* FK was a string. Even if it was an integer. In a DB with 600+ tables, all connected. This ran on Oracle, and when I looked at the query analysis it was quite plain why it ran dog-slow even with a modest userbase. It used most of the IO and CPU on figuring out joins (I don't know the proper term, but I suspect this would not have been a problem if the FKs were ints). The table scans that ran (lots of them as well) required less resources than a single join. Changing it needs a redesign of the schema, but it can be done with minimal downtime.
When I confronted the vendor with this they blamed the oracle consultants, when I told the higher-ups in my own company that this was an abominable design they told me to shut up, and that the design must be perfect, as it was done by Oracle people. That's one of the reasons why I have no trust in what DB consultants do (I should probably become one myself, I'm pretty sure I could do a better job off the bat).
Unless, of course, the username was the primary key, in which case the wtf is that you allow something that should be changeable to be a primary key.
Which reminds me... hi Valve!
Which is why I still sign in to Steam with a long-dead username @ a no-longer-existing domain. I was dumbfounded when it struck me why they couldn't change it. Of course it's possible and highly desirable for everyone involved to change that, and I still wonder why Valve, which employs some arguably extremely brilliant people, isn't able to do the change with a minimum of downtime. It probably plays hell on their db to use strings as keys as well? Can anyone enlighten me on this one?
The agnostic point of view means that it's OK to say you don't know.
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
I think most scientifically-minded atheists would say that there is no way to prove ("know") there isn't a God (not even to prove that the traditional, bearded, old-wise-male in the sky (if you're Christian) does not exist). I don't, and I still consider myself an atheist. It's just extremely unlikely that he exist, and it's not logically consistent that a traditional Christian God can have all the attributes christians claim. From another perspective, the human incentive to believe in higher powers is well understood. From there it's easy to draw the conclusion that actual existence of deities does not follow from human belief in deities. Most religions contradict other religions, thus most of them must be wrong. Saying with certainty that there is no higher power whatsoever is, however, pretty much attributing omniscience to yourself.
A perfect example of this is Peppered Moth Evolution, and believe it or not, the Wikipedia page explains it fairly well. This is an example of evolution within a species, where the alleles responsible for the change existed in the gene pool before the change. Natural selection caused one variation to take prominence over the other. But, the changes were only within the species. No speciation change occurred.
Moving the goalposts, are we? I'm not going to argue this further, but for your own sake you might want to tackle all the "Observed instances" in this other Wiki article, have at it. For instance, domestic sheep can no longer produce offspring with their wild counterpart because of human-induced speciation. By some interpretations that means that humans have been trespassing on the domains of God for millenia. Good luck, you'll need it.
What's disgusting and sad is how much a little human proofreading would have prevented, or at least lessened, this sort of thing.
Here you go. Not all Gutenberg books are flawless, but most are pretty damn good, and a high-profile work like this has surely been perused by enough eyeballs that it's likely to be the most correct version available in any form. Also, its ID is 2600:)
Oh, now I get it. I didn't understand at first that TFS meant 1000lbs at ground level in Earth's gravity field. So confusing!
No, it does not. Assuming you're from the U.S (that would explain some things), your pound as a unit of mass is defined in terms of the kg:
"In the United States, the avoirdupois pound as a unit of mass has been officially defined in terms of the kilogram since the Mendenhall Order of 1893."
You imply that it's clear what it means, which is obviously ridiculous as you're severely muddled on the issue. Of course, the grown-ups use SI-units to avoid this confusion. On a side note it would be amusing to request a quote for an otherwise serious request to SpaceX for lift to LEO with mass expressed in lbs:)
Ok, so you are saying that there is no reference frame in which a point with zero curvature exists?
Or are you saying that no point exists for which curvature is zero in all reference frames?
One would seem untrue. The other reaching pretty far to prove a point.
Zero gravity != free falling (you were originally talking about free falling, or micro gravity, as smarter people than both of us call it). And no, he didn't reach too far too "prove a point", you're just plain wrong. There is no point in the observable universe where forces from gravity are zero. Even if curvature is flat because forces even out, gravity is not absent.
This is one of the best Sci Fi books I have read. Get the whole series not the single stories in the WOOL OMNIBUS I'm looking forward to reading the new prequel
Wikipedia lists the series as "ongoing". Is the story arc in the omnibus finished? It seems interesting, and the price ($9.19 for me) is nice, but I'd rather hold out for the conclusion of any cliffhangers before even starting to read. Furthermore, where does Wool 6 - First shift fit in?:)
The fact that a director deemed it ready for a movie adaptation seems to imply that it's concluded, but I'd rather hear the opinion of someone with first-hand experience.
Dude. It's Adobe. Judging from their outward appearance, I suspect that their management chain actively discourages fixing bugs because it gets in the way of adding new bloat... err... features.
Yes, that's a very nice summary, and our experience as well. It seems that each new upgrade aims to add bullet points to their feature list, once a bullet is on there, Adobe doesn't give a flying fuck whether it actually works well or not. If it doesn't work well expect to have to upgrade in order to see improvements (or not). To your examples I'll add epub export, which has been a "feature" since CS3, and as of CS5.5 it's still *horrible*. Image handling has actually degraded from CS4 (no "Keep original" anymore), and a blindingly obvious flaw like support for manual page breaks is still not part of it. Since our source documents are indd we still use it to export epubs, but I have to do an embarrassing amount of manual postprocessing to make them usable. Luckily *good* tools like Calibre and Sigil make that process bearable, but there should be no reason to replace font files manually because Adobe performs a ridiculous XOR mangling of fonts when embedding them in an epub.
New versions will bring new features while leaving all the old ones flawed, maybe with minor improvements, and of course bugs in the previous version is perceived as upgrade drivers (we were promised by support that the regex replace bug with \n and styles would be fixed with CS5.5, and... it's not. Same with the shitty support for hyperlinks and "invalid" destinations from Word, which will make Indesign crash instantly and optionally corrupt your document). Add to this that they make it impossible to plan for upgrades since every new version is a surprise release, and that Adobe actually sells "upgrade insurance", and it comes across as a goddamn racket.
Imagine a scenario where there is an accident or debris suddenly in front of you, and you absolutely cannot stop in time. Your choices are to ram a truck, or ram a pedestrian on the sidewalk.
While many human drivers would hit the truck, the AI would have to be pretty smart to aim for the bigger and harder object instead of the soft and small pedestrian.
A good AI would probably never end up in that situation. It happens in the first place because of human error or lack of attention. An AI can plan in order to *always* be able to stop before it hit any given obstacle. Even if a person ran into the road from out of view around a street corner this could be part of what the AI plans for; avoiding situations which are unpredictable because of lack of information.
I already can't read while in a moving car, and in a bus I still need a view of the road to avoid getting sick. Doubt robots would improve on that.
Uh, sorry about that. The rest of us already enjoys reading (or other things) while being transported, thank you. You sound like the people who want to abolish 3D-movies because they can't appreciate it for some reason or another (I don't really appreciate them myself, but I don't resent people enjoying them).
A safe distance of 1 foot is bullshit, but the distance that is pounded into every driver's head where I live is three *seconds*. It's not adhered to in real life, but I suspect that about two seconds is realistic. A driverless car needs a lot less distance than that. In addition, driverless cars would instantly follow the car in front in a congestion situation, avoiding the creation of "stoppage waves", which greatly contributes to creating the congestion in the first place. I read about this in an interesting paper about the maths of traffic congestion a while ago, but I can't find a link right now.
Which is funny, because people have been convicted of "operating a vehicle while under the influence" while riding a horse
Citation, please? Every place I've lived "drunk driving" laws ony applies to motorised vehicles of a certain class, notably electric wheelchairs are exempted. I lived in the mountains of Ecuador for a while, and there people used horses to get home while drunk as a matter of fact. Sometimes people would just drape a drunk guy across the back of his horse and give it a slap on the rump in order to get him home:)
It would use less fuel if everyone on the bus drove a geo metro rather then take the bus.
Uh, no? That's a ridiculous statement. A large diesel engine in a bus is vastly more efficient than 110 cars of any type, not to mention electric subway and tram cars. Another point: in my city many buses carry the slogan "I can replace 1 km of traffic congestion". It's true.
Sorry, but is takes longer and cost more for me to take the bus to work then to drive.
Well, if you take a bus to work and *then* drive away from work, it will take longer:) But seriously, one of the biggest advantages of public transportation where I live is that you can usually take a subway or a train, which is not affected by traffic. As for the cost aspect, "car people" tend to forget the *actual* cost of owning a car, which is not just fuel costs. Did you include insurance, taxes, devaluation, road tolls, parking fees, regular maintenance, wear parts replacement (tyres, for instance) and so on in that calculation? I thought not:)
Slashdot Mirror
Moral of the story - imperial units are non-scientific, inconsistent and often have no agreed standard (e.g. pint) so use SI units!
I totally agree - A Norwegian mile is exactly 10 km, but it would be ridiculous to use that in international communications. Proponents of the imperial system claim that it works because readers know the unit referred to. Well - on the internet you often don't know where the writer's from. You english-speaking guys haven't even consistently defined your units, and operate with a ridiculous amount of different ounces, pints, gallons and even tons.
If Mr. Freeman's invited better have some crowbars and other weapons ready in case alien creatures and head crabs jump out of the machinery! :)
He's already there.
...but standing behind them and taking notes is a whole level up from there.
Which is pretty much why I rip the DRM out of any book I buy (for futureproofing) and only use my reader device offline, using Calibre to manage content.
Seconded. Amazon must be pretty confused by my reading habits -- with any book I buy from them I only ever view the cover page in KindlePC for about one second :)
Also normal people do not get pensions. Those went away decades ago.
Based on previous posts I believe you are American? What on earth do you do with elders who have worked a long life, but can't pay for a retirement home when they need more care than family can provide? In civilised countries pensions are included in your tax.
Just went into my profile to try to remove / disable this POS and you are not even given the option to do so...
I am so close to closing my Facebook account it is not even funny anymore.
Way to being on the brink of showing them! I am almost very impressed with the resolute action you nearly resorted to :)
I just did this with my Linux installation with no sweat at all, and now the GF wants me to do it for her Windows (XP) box. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've had anything to do with Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about it. While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
The other reason I'm nervous is because it's my GF I'll be doing it for. If there's even the slightest hiccup, I'll have to throw her into the gaping maw of a volcano before I'll ever hear the end of it.
I do this fairly regularly at work with Win7, never had a hiccup. My procedure is to shrink and move the system partitions to the point where they'll fit on the SSD (and remove any surplus partitions from the table), and then use a Linux Live USB to dd (bs=4M) data from the HDD until the SSD is full. It's not sophisticated, but it works. Boot off your SSD and you're done. I wouldn't do this without backups, however :)
Even my cheap ass Kingston SSD made a huge difference in the responsiveness of my system. Office suites such as Outlook, Word, and the like are very disk-bound in performance, so it's no surprise that an SSD would make life much easier for business users. Starting Outlook or Word used to take forever, and now it just takes an annoying amount of time. The super-fast Windows boot time now lets me do away with sleep and hibernation. I just shut my system down and start each day afresh!
The reason an SSD will greatly improve the speed and responsiveness is mostly because of the very low access times compared to HDDs. When your OS boots and operates it frequently accesses a lot of relatively small files, the higher throughput doesn't have all that much of an effect, while access time certainly does. I revitalise old computers at work by installing these, and while MB/Sec rises to insane levels with never SSD drives, the perceived performance stays about the same in my experience. We buy cheap-ass SSDs because they will still certainly beat the pants off any HDD :)
Kepler/Klemeper/Kemplerer Rosette
Truth may be stranger than fiction (See Larry Niven's pupetters)
A Klemperer rosette, although Niven actually called it a Kemplerer rosette. Cool idea, but you'd probably need a "reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders" or four to make it stable.
Basically, he's a famous Troll.
Pretty much.
It's sad that people invent stories to prove a point. I don't really have much to contribute, but I can mention that I believe those two spaces are mainly an English thing, I never heard of it before having used the internet for quite a while. I'm old enough to have taken a typewriting class at school, and never heard it mentioned there. In Norwegian, at least, it's expressly forbidden ("It should never be two spaces after each other" in Google's somewhat clumsy translation. That page is trustworthy, they gather language rules from all sorts of authoritative sources). I notice that you don't use them in your own post.
As an aside double spaces look "wrong" to me, maybe because I'm not used to them. The nerd part of me is inclined to think that no space should be necessary after a sentence, as the period or other sentence ending punctuations are separators on their own, but that messes with how the brain parses words. Besides, it just looks too damn ugly :)
Even if you don't ever plan to change a username, a username makes a poor primary key just for performance reasons. In MySQL, for example, primary keys should be kept short because every index will have a copy of every primary key.
I've had the misfortune to access the schema of an accounting system we had to use, and *every* FK was a string. Even if it was an integer. In a DB with 600+ tables, all connected. This ran on Oracle, and when I looked at the query analysis it was quite plain why it ran dog-slow even with a modest userbase. It used most of the IO and CPU on figuring out joins (I don't know the proper term, but I suspect this would not have been a problem if the FKs were ints). The table scans that ran (lots of them as well) required less resources than a single join. Changing it needs a redesign of the schema, but it can be done with minimal downtime.
When I confronted the vendor with this they blamed the oracle consultants, when I told the higher-ups in my own company that this was an abominable design they told me to shut up, and that the design must be perfect, as it was done by Oracle people. That's one of the reasons why I have no trust in what DB consultants do (I should probably become one myself, I'm pretty sure I could do a better job off the bat).
Unless, of course, the username was the primary key, in which case the wtf is that you allow something that should be changeable to be a primary key.
Which reminds me... hi Valve!
Which is why I still sign in to Steam with a long-dead username @ a no-longer-existing domain. I was dumbfounded when it struck me why they couldn't change it. Of course it's possible and highly desirable for everyone involved to change that, and I still wonder why Valve, which employs some arguably extremely brilliant people, isn't able to do the change with a minimum of downtime. It probably plays hell on their db to use strings as keys as well? Can anyone enlighten me on this one?
The agnostic point of view means that it's OK to say you don't know.
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
I think most scientifically-minded atheists would say that there is no way to prove ("know") there isn't a God (not even to prove that the traditional, bearded, old-wise-male in the sky (if you're Christian) does not exist). I don't, and I still consider myself an atheist. It's just extremely unlikely that he exist, and it's not logically consistent that a traditional Christian God can have all the attributes christians claim. From another perspective, the human incentive to believe in higher powers is well understood. From there it's easy to draw the conclusion that actual existence of deities does not follow from human belief in deities. Most religions contradict other religions, thus most of them must be wrong. Saying with certainty that there is no higher power whatsoever is, however, pretty much attributing omniscience to yourself.
A perfect example of this is Peppered Moth Evolution, and believe it or not, the Wikipedia page explains it fairly well. This is an example of evolution within a species, where the alleles responsible for the change existed in the gene pool before the change. Natural selection caused one variation to take prominence over the other. But, the changes were only within the species. No speciation change occurred.
Moving the goalposts, are we? I'm not going to argue this further, but for your own sake you might want to tackle all the "Observed instances" in this other Wiki article, have at it. For instance, domestic sheep can no longer produce offspring with their wild counterpart because of human-induced speciation. By some interpretations that means that humans have been trespassing on the domains of God for millenia. Good luck, you'll need it.
What's disgusting and sad is how much a little human proofreading would have prevented, or at least lessened, this sort of thing.
Here you go. Not all Gutenberg books are flawless, but most are pretty damn good, and a high-profile work like this has surely been perused by enough eyeballs that it's likely to be the most correct version available in any form. Also, its ID is 2600 :)
You mean 31 slugs.
Oh, now I get it. I didn't understand at first that TFS meant 1000lbs at ground level in Earth's gravity field. So confusing!
No, it does not. Assuming you're from the U.S (that would explain some things), your pound as a unit of mass is defined in terms of the kg:
"In the United States, the avoirdupois pound as a unit of mass has been officially defined in terms of the kilogram since the Mendenhall Order of 1893."
You imply that it's clear what it means, which is obviously ridiculous as you're severely muddled on the issue. Of course, the grown-ups use SI-units to avoid this confusion. On a side note it would be amusing to request a quote for an otherwise serious request to SpaceX for lift to LEO with mass expressed in lbs :)
Ok, so you are saying that there is no reference frame in which a point with zero curvature exists?
Or are you saying that no point exists for which curvature is zero in all reference frames?
One would seem untrue. The other reaching pretty far to prove a point.
Zero gravity != free falling (you were originally talking about free falling, or micro gravity, as smarter people than both of us call it). And no, he didn't reach too far too "prove a point", you're just plain wrong. There is no point in the observable universe where forces from gravity are zero. Even if curvature is flat because forces even out, gravity is not absent.
This is one of the best Sci Fi books I have read. Get the whole series not the single stories in the WOOL OMNIBUS I'm looking forward to reading the new prequel
Wikipedia lists the series as "ongoing". Is the story arc in the omnibus finished? It seems interesting, and the price ($9.19 for me) is nice, but I'd rather hold out for the conclusion of any cliffhangers before even starting to read. Furthermore, where does Wool 6 - First shift fit in? :)
The fact that a director deemed it ready for a movie adaptation seems to imply that it's concluded, but I'd rather hear the opinion of someone with first-hand experience.
Dude. It's Adobe. Judging from their outward appearance, I suspect that their management chain actively discourages fixing bugs because it gets in the way of adding new bloat... err... features.
Yes, that's a very nice summary, and our experience as well. It seems that each new upgrade aims to add bullet points to their feature list, once a bullet is on there, Adobe doesn't give a flying fuck whether it actually works well or not. If it doesn't work well expect to have to upgrade in order to see improvements (or not). To your examples I'll add epub export, which has been a "feature" since CS3, and as of CS5.5 it's still *horrible*. Image handling has actually degraded from CS4 (no "Keep original" anymore), and a blindingly obvious flaw like support for manual page breaks is still not part of it. Since our source documents are indd we still use it to export epubs, but I have to do an embarrassing amount of manual postprocessing to make them usable. Luckily *good* tools like Calibre and Sigil make that process bearable, but there should be no reason to replace font files manually because Adobe performs a ridiculous XOR mangling of fonts when embedding them in an epub.
New versions will bring new features while leaving all the old ones flawed, maybe with minor improvements, and of course bugs in the previous version is perceived as upgrade drivers (we were promised by support that the regex replace bug with \n and styles would be fixed with CS5.5, and... it's not. Same with the shitty support for hyperlinks and "invalid" destinations from Word, which will make Indesign crash instantly and optionally corrupt your document). Add to this that they make it impossible to plan for upgrades since every new version is a surprise release, and that Adobe actually sells "upgrade insurance", and it comes across as a goddamn racket.
I work when - guess what - I'm at work. I'm not going to do an extra couple of hours work for free every week by working in my car.
In any case, I like driving. What kind of sad boring person would you have to be to sit with your nose in your laptop ignoring everything around you?
You're the epitome of the glass-half-empty person. I wish you luck in rectifying your attitude problems, the glass is actually half full :)
Imagine a scenario where there is an accident or debris suddenly in front of you, and you absolutely cannot stop in time. Your choices are to ram a truck, or ram a pedestrian on the sidewalk.
While many human drivers would hit the truck, the AI would have to be pretty smart to aim for the bigger and harder object instead of the soft and small pedestrian.
A good AI would probably never end up in that situation. It happens in the first place because of human error or lack of attention. An AI can plan in order to *always* be able to stop before it hit any given obstacle. Even if a person ran into the road from out of view around a street corner this could be part of what the AI plans for; avoiding situations which are unpredictable because of lack of information.
I seriously hope that innovators won't listen to you. Oh wait, they don't, which is why we have technological progression at all.
I already can't read while in a moving car, and in a bus I still need a view of the road to avoid getting sick. Doubt robots would improve on that.
Uh, sorry about that. The rest of us already enjoys reading (or other things) while being transported, thank you. You sound like the people who want to abolish 3D-movies because they can't appreciate it for some reason or another (I don't really appreciate them myself, but I don't resent people enjoying them).
A safe distance of 1 foot is bullshit, but the distance that is pounded into every driver's head where I live is three *seconds*. It's not adhered to in real life, but I suspect that about two seconds is realistic. A driverless car needs a lot less distance than that. In addition, driverless cars would instantly follow the car in front in a congestion situation, avoiding the creation of "stoppage waves", which greatly contributes to creating the congestion in the first place. I read about this in an interesting paper about the maths of traffic congestion a while ago, but I can't find a link right now.
Which is funny, because people have been convicted of "operating a vehicle while under the influence" while riding a horse
Citation, please? Every place I've lived "drunk driving" laws ony applies to motorised vehicles of a certain class, notably electric wheelchairs are exempted. I lived in the mountains of Ecuador for a while, and there people used horses to get home while drunk as a matter of fact. Sometimes people would just drape a drunk guy across the back of his horse and give it a slap on the rump in order to get him home :)
It would use less fuel if everyone on the bus drove a geo metro rather then take the bus.
Uh, no? That's a ridiculous statement. A large diesel engine in a bus is vastly more efficient than 110 cars of any type, not to mention electric subway and tram cars. Another point: in my city many buses carry the slogan "I can replace 1 km of traffic congestion". It's true.
Sorry, but is takes longer and cost more for me to take the bus to work then to drive.
Well, if you take a bus to work and *then* drive away from work, it will take longer :) But seriously, one of the biggest advantages of public transportation where I live is that you can usually take a subway or a train, which is not affected by traffic. As for the cost aspect, "car people" tend to forget the *actual* cost of owning a car, which is not just fuel costs. Did you include insurance, taxes, devaluation, road tolls, parking fees, regular maintenance, wear parts replacement (tyres, for instance) and so on in that calculation? I thought not :)