Law enforcement has put a lot of money and resources into having ways to compromise devices after they've left the factory -- malicious dongles and the like. I wouldn't depend on a compromise needing to happen before you're a person of interest.
The adjustments they made to the constant values in DES, for instance, were eventually discovered to improve security against an attack vector that nobody outside the NSA yet knew existed. If the academic world had instead caught up and discovered that the NSA had instead been making changes to provide them a "back door", it would have eventually been found out -- potentially by the bad guys first -- and then, when it hit the academic world, we wouldn't be trusting them to help vet newer standards either.
I recently moved into a modern (6-year-old construction) condo in Austin's urban core (actually the east side, traditionally the high-crime area), and couldn't be happier.
Cost of living - lower. Quality of living - better. Mortgage, insurance, and other expenses on my condo are quite a lot cheaper than on the house up north, I don't need to drive to get places (commuting to work and the store via train+bike is considerably cheaper), and the HOA fee includes a whole bunch of things which used to be separate bills (Internet, natural gas, trash/recycling, water, professional lawn care, etc). And I have a huge, gated courtyard (shared with the neighbors, granted) big enough for my large dog to run in -- I can lob the ball as hard as I want and not worry about it going over a fence. Moreover, things which used to be budget-busting homeownership expenses (such as tearing up and re-pouring a concrete driveway with a plumbing break under it) are not even a drop in the bucket when shared among 200 neighbors.
Crime rates? Meet gates. Ground-floor properties are commercial (or are residential units accessible only from inside the courtyard); access to the residential units means getting buzzed in. Also, having a well-lit and well-cared-for exterior means we avoid the broken window effect, such that more criminal activity takes case in places that look run-down. I had a lot more trouble in my old neighborhood in the suburban sprawl (mostly with stereo systems stolen from cars and the like) than I do here.
Failing schools? Guilty as charged, which is why my friends with kids send them to private schools or move out to the 'burbs. On the other hand, either set (both the private-school friends and the burb-school friends) are paying vastly more, via their choice of property taxes or tuition fees. The schools here are indeed not so good, but then, they're cheap; we get what we pay for.
Political corruption? Not more than anywhere else. We've got one council member who's a serious policy wonk, takes his job seriously and represents my interests almost perfectly; one who's a sock puppet for the lower-density neighborhood HOAs (and thus is my enemy, but represents someone else's interests perfectly); and several who have their faults (which, yes, sometimes do involve directing funds in popular programs in ways which might be seen as pandering to a constituency), but they're not worse as a whole than any I've seen elsewhere.
Anyhow, as for "why people moved out of the cities" -- the larger-scale answer is that massive infrastructure (such as the interstate highway system) was built subsidizing that decision, and the many of the knock-on effects acted as reinforcement. Some of the problems you discuss, such as the quality of schools, fall into the set of symptoms caused by the exodus into suburbia -- not a part of the historical underpinnings thereof.
Make it artificially inexpensive to live a long distance from work and it's little surprise that individuals react to such -- even though total costs increase when the number of miles of road, water, power, and other infrastructure needed to service a given population rises. As a result, it's us folks in the urban core subsidizing the more-expensive-per-capita infrastructure serving folks out in the sprawl! Providing economic encouragement for urban living (by way of zoning and tax incentives favoring high-density mixed-use development) is the sensible thing for cities to do if they want to decrease their long-run per-capita infrastructure expenses.
If you only looked at the prices on brand new high rises being advertised by their developers, you'd think living downtown was expensive too, though it's nothing of the sort if you buy with an eye towards affordability. Don't knock urban living until you've taken a closer look.
Mind you, they have the resources to compromise the endpoints, but that's not the same thing as compromising the stream (even inasmuch as the effect is pretty much the same).
I can't speak for the UK -- but here in Texas, by my reading of the state traffic code, cyclists lose a great many privileges (including the ability to take a lane when [less than 14ft wide / reasonably necessary for safety / other conditions here]) when riding two abreast.
This doesn't make sense to me -- why would you want to encourage cyclists to take up more length by staggering themselves when on a heavily trafficked road?
If I wanted to make a point, I would have made a point, and it would have been explicit enough to be readily understandable.
Instead, I was doing nothing more than correcting a common misconception -- one even frequently seen among the President's supporters, who all too often took "change" to mean whatever they wanted to hear rather than listening to the details (which were spelled out for those paying attention).
Obama was very clear when on the campaign trail (and in statements prior to the campaign) that he thought the war in Afghanistan was important and should be escalated -- and that it would have been prosecuted more effectively were it not for the unnecessary and expensive distraction posed by the war in Iraq.
Beyond this correction, I make (and intend) no larger statement or point.
Don't even get me started on the irony of the current administration wanting to get the U.S. involved in a brand new foreign war when it has still been unable to extricate us from the previous TWO foreign wars that the prior administration got us involved in -- despite campaign promises to do exactly that.
Campaign promises were not to extract ourselves from both wars -- only one of them. Should have listened to the details closer.
Of course an attacker who steals your password database knows the salt values in use for each account.
But unless they have a rainbow table calculated with every possible salt value taken into account, they can't do a simple lookup on a precomputed map of hash values to top-5,000,000-common-passwords and hope to get a match... so their expense to actually break any of those passwords is much, much higher.
Certainly high-density housing dwellers, owners of small houses, owners of mobile homes, and people in weather-ill-suited places are probably not capable of personally owning any significant solar or wind.
A high-density housing dweller who owns their own place is exceptionally capable of having solar or wind capacity -- as they're sharing costs with their neighbours.
Owning 0.5% of a $15M set of shared resources (in addition to 100% of your personal dwelling studs-in) is pretty cheap... and having that many people you're sharing costs with means that what would be unbearable maintenance or repair expenses on your own become negligible.
Uh, shit can happen. I like my brain. I'd like to continue to be able to use it.
Then do you wear a helmet walking on the sidewalk too? Head injury rate per mile traveled has been measured in some areas to be higher for pedestrians than cyclists, after all.
Or, maybe, that's just a damned silly idea.
I've talked about the statistics around pro- and anti-helmet arguments elsewhere. See other thread. To summarize: Between the risk compensation effect (in which cyclists feel overconfident due to wearing a helmet, and its corresponding element in which drivers are less cautious when interacting with a cyclist who appears to be well-protected), the safety-in-numbers effect (wherein accident rate for each individual cyclist goes down by about 1/3 whenever the population of cyclists doubles), and the effect that aggressive helmet promotion has on the number of cyclists (national-scale mandatory helmet laws are generally recorded to at least halve the number of active cyclists), promoting helmets is seriously counterproductive to the cause of safety.
I wear one sometimes (when the value-add from having a large rear-view mirror and a helmet-mounted headlight are sufficient) -- but notably, that value-add is all about avoiding an accident, as opposed to surviving one.
Let's talk about avoidance for a moment, though. The statistical group I'm in puts me down for 113 crashes per million miles -- I'd like to think I'm personally due for less than that, as I follow the rules of the road better than most League-Certified Instructors I know, but let's run with the number. 1.5% of cycling accidents involve serious head injuries -- so that's 1.695 head injuries per million miles. Riding 100 miles per week isn't even going to get me to half a million miles in my lifetime, so we're talking about well under even odds for ever getting into an accident a helmet would have helped with. In my entire life. Of commuting 20 miles a day.
And, again, accident rates drop as the population of cyclists increases -- so if me wearing a helmet (or you actively spreading the idea that cycling is inherently dangerous) discourages other cyclists from getting on the road... well, it doesn't take a big increase in accident rate to overwhelm the decrease in accident severity which helmets provide only in a small subset of cases.
Before going in here, let me circle back and highlight -- my arguments are predicated on the taxes in question being effectively calculated to internalize externalities. If this assertion is not accurate, I don't assert that they hold.
Let me give you another example. What about the country vet? He'll have to travel a long long way to help sick farm animals. If he can't afford to do that, or boosts his prices to cover it so that farmers can't afford him, then the farming industry suffers and loses profits. Of course, they'll also be paying more to transport their produce into cities, so that'll become unaffordable, which means cities either do without, or prices of food rise yet again- far more than they have already.
My argument is that implicit subsidies -- in which the cost to repair roads is hidden behind takes shared by all -- be replaced with either (1) market forces, or (2) explicit subsidies. If the market won't bear the county vet's prices accurately reflecting his costs, well -- that means that something about the system is needlessly inefficient. One way or another, however, the costs are borne by society -- it's a question of whether that happens through food prices, through general-fund taxes to pay for the roads, or through an explicit subsidy recognizing the county vet as a special case (and, thereby, making it clear and obvious to others that that subsidy is taking place, rather than having it be hidden and implicit).
You genuinely think people who who have sought after, high end skills, and genuinely make a difference in companies because of those skills, and hence tend to get paid more, and help generate more revenue for the company- hence paying more out of their pay cheques in tax, and hence generating more corporate tax revenues, are being subsidised over the high school run moms who don't work, or work low paid/part time jobs and so pay little to no tax, but also in countries like the UK get tax credits, and also consume tax resources for schools etc.? Seriously? The people you're talking about taxing more are the sort of people that generate the tax revenues that allow for schools to be built and run in the first place.
I'm not talking about whether an individual is receiving a net subsidy or a net outflow, but rather about whether the taxes and subsidies surrounding this specific aspect of their lives -- transportation -- is encouraging them to make economic decisions which accurately reflect the true costs and benefits of the choices they make. If having subsidized highways makes it appear cheaper to live in the suburbs, when having true costs exposed would reduce the total cost to society for that person to live in the urban core, how does it help anyone to distort the market in such a way as to encourage decisions which lead to higher total costs?
The goal isn't to punish anyone, but to have true costs visible, with externalities pushed back in, such that the actions in an individual's economic self-interest are also in the economic self-interest of society as a whole.
I sincerely doubt they are saving money on gas, as they are replacing it with the kinds of expensive food that you can use to sustain exercise.
There's a study I've seen that came to the result that an electric-assist bicycle was actually optimal beyond a certain distance, as all-human power increased caloric consumption worth more than the cost of the electricity (and the batteries that stored it), whereas the e-bike provided just enough exercise but not so much as to change dietary needs.
That said -- if the bike commuter crowd at work is eating luxury foods (trust me, you don't need sushi to commute by bike), in greater quantity than they would be consuming if they didn't have an active lifestyle, and are able to afford to do so via the money they don't spend on gasoline (and insurance, if they pay by the mile or avoid owning a car)... well, can't that be taken as part of a better quality of life?
Clothing and helmets - Helmets are necessary only to the extent that other road users make them so; in the Netherlands, they're used only for sport cycling -- nobody uses them for simple commuting -- and head injuries among cyclists are basically nonexistent. As for dedicated clothing, that's the domain of sport cyclists rather than commuters.
Showers can be shifted rather than increased to a substantial extent -- I personally tend to go for a fast morning commute (followed by a shower at work), and an easy evening commute (thus avoiding the need to shower again at home).
As only a small subset of cyclists have generator hubs and thus create their own power, cycling-oriented lighting systems are built with efficiency as a foremost concern (neither carrying heavy batteries nor running out of light is much fun -- so cyclists have been early investors in high-efficiency lighting technologies well before other segments of the population). Even cyclists with generator hubs care about getting as much light as possible with as little of their effort being drained to power that lighting, and thus have incentive to invest in efficiency.
Road damage is based on (axle weight)^4; thus, for bicycles, it's basically nothing.
Regarding "infrastructure for cycling" -- in the US, far and away the best cycling infrastructure is held by Portland, OR. They recently estimated the cost to rebuild it new, if it suddenly all went away, at $60M -- a price tag that would, at best, buy all of 3 miles of urban highway.
I don't doubt that there are unconsidered factors -- but actually having some knowledge of the subject matter is helpful when attempting to critique.
It hurts essential car users like couriers, commuters, and so forth, but does nothing to combat lazy people who take their kids 1 mile each way to school in the SUV when they could just as easily walk.
Long-distance commuters are not a good thing, except as a short-term stopgap measure.
Having people who need to travel a long distance to work -- without the infrastructure to provide them a better means to do so than a single-occupancy vehicle -- means that city planning is being done poorly. High-density mixed-use development, or even just older-style zoning (from before everything was planned on the assumption that everyone would have a car) means that folks don't need a car to get around. Moreover, having the true costs of commuting exposed not only encourages better personal choices, but also means that one is no longer unfairly subsidizing a single mode of transportation and thereby making it harder to justify funds spent on others.
Bicycle and motorcycle couriers are very well-established -- in the middle of rush hour, average bicycle speed is substantially *faster* than average car speed in urban areas, and there've also been no end of 50cc-scooter-vs-supercar races in dense urban environments where the scooter has won handily.
In the case you give of a doctor commuting to a community -- if the taxes collected represent a genuine externality placed on others by that commute, well, those costs exist. You can either decide that they're worth paying in this case (and pay your out-of-town doctor more for the commute... presuming, of course, that you can't find one willing to move), or you can decide that they aren't -- but in either case, we're talking about taking real costs and placing them on the people incurring them. Roads are expensive. Congestion is expensive. Bringing in that out-of-town doctor costs money, and the amount of money involved shouldn't be hidden.
Let's talk for a minute about how expensive roads really are. Portland, OR has what's considered the best cycling infrastructure in the continental US. They calculated its replacement cost at $60M in 2008 dollars. Now, how many miles of highway do you think that $60M equivalent to? The replacement cost of the best transportation cycling infrastructure found anywhere in the US is equivalent to the cost to build between.8-4 miles of 4-lane urban freeway, or to build a single interchange.
The infrastructure you advocate is extremely expensive, and heavily subsidized by those who don't use it already. (Cyclists pay for city streets through property and sales taxes to their cities, but also pay for highways via the non-use taxes which now fund almost 50% of their development and maintenance).
Why should anyone -- commuters, couriers, salespeople -- get a free ride?
Actually, when we looked at this a few years ago cyclists killed about as many people per passenger mile as motorists. In the UK, anyway, I don't know whether cyclists in other parts of the world are as dangerous as the 'red lights don't apply to me and get off that pedestrian crossing because I'm not stopping' lycra loons over there.
Last time I was current on the statistics, full-time cycle commuting took two years off one's expected lifespan for the chance of accidents -- and added 11 back on for cardiopulmonary health.
The sport cyclists (the ones in lycra) are a lot less attentive to laws (and safety, and good common sense) than the serious commuter cyclists -- it's a tough thing to deal with as a cycle advocate, as they think they know everything and so won't attend classes unless a court makes them do so. That's a totally fixable problem, though -- it just means one needs to actively enforce traffic laws, and have a cycling-specific traffic safety class offenders get sent to when ticketed. My jurisdiction does this already.
Not a major disaster, just a global war between three groups of athiests.
...or between three groups of theists, for that matter.
That said -- information and devices for the retrieval thereof are small and ubiquitous enough that I'd be surprised to see a global war with human survivors reset the clock entirely. Nuclear warheads are expensive, and there are certainly large populated areas lacking target value to nuclear-armed nations -- even if the popularity of devices is low, it just takes one village full of OLPCs with Wikipedia preloaded to be preserving a whole lot of content... never mind all the converted Cold War bunkers now housing datacenters.
I have *some* desire to save power, and so I have CFLs installed in my stairways and basement. I have incandescents everywhere else (and am stocking up on them) because I have more desire to be able to dim. CFLs continue to be terrible about it, so I'm hopeful about LEDs. For the most part your point stands, but there are situations in which the comparison to incandescents is apt.
I have Home Depot's house brand LED bulbs in my kitchen, and they dim quite well; you might give them a try some time.
I want to play a single-player game offline? I can do that.
I want to install a game on multiple machines? I can do that.
I want to mod my single-player game? I can do that.
Most DRM schemes are hated because they break things -- they stop you from attaching debuggers to even single-player games, they encrypt files so you can't modify them, they don't let you do extra installs when you have a legitimate reason to do so, they conflict with other tools. Steam, on the other hand, provides just enough DRM to get publishers to accept it... but stays the hell out of the way of the person trying to enjoy the property they paid for. As a pragmatist, I'm fine with that.
Sure, but not all claims are actually *defensible*. Just because the patent is granted doesn't mean that its scope isn't narrowed by the acknowledged prior art -- and a good number of claims have already been struck down or narrowed by the ongoing PTO review.
Oracle does have some claims that may have a chance of standing up, but anything so broad as to cover all bytecode+JIT combinations isn't going to be among them.
However, there's a question that no-one seems to be asking: if Mono was as open, and as free of IP encumberances as Miguel has always maintained it is, then what IP did they need?
Copyrights?
Not all incarnations of Mono are/were open source -- particularly, the mobile and embedded targets were, and remain, commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
"Before they left the factory"?
Law enforcement has put a lot of money and resources into having ways to compromise devices after they've left the factory -- malicious dongles and the like. I wouldn't depend on a compromise needing to happen before you're a person of interest.
There's history to look at.
The adjustments they made to the constant values in DES, for instance, were eventually discovered to improve security against an attack vector that nobody outside the NSA yet knew existed. If the academic world had instead caught up and discovered that the NSA had instead been making changes to provide them a "back door", it would have eventually been found out -- potentially by the bad guys first -- and then, when it hit the academic world, we wouldn't be trusting them to help vet newer standards either.
Hey, there --
I recently moved into a modern (6-year-old construction) condo in Austin's urban core (actually the east side, traditionally the high-crime area), and couldn't be happier.
Cost of living - lower. Quality of living - better. Mortgage, insurance, and other expenses on my condo are quite a lot cheaper than on the house up north, I don't need to drive to get places (commuting to work and the store via train+bike is considerably cheaper), and the HOA fee includes a whole bunch of things which used to be separate bills (Internet, natural gas, trash/recycling, water, professional lawn care, etc). And I have a huge, gated courtyard (shared with the neighbors, granted) big enough for my large dog to run in -- I can lob the ball as hard as I want and not worry about it going over a fence. Moreover, things which used to be budget-busting homeownership expenses (such as tearing up and re-pouring a concrete driveway with a plumbing break under it) are not even a drop in the bucket when shared among 200 neighbors.
Crime rates? Meet gates. Ground-floor properties are commercial (or are residential units accessible only from inside the courtyard); access to the residential units means getting buzzed in. Also, having a well-lit and well-cared-for exterior means we avoid the broken window effect, such that more criminal activity takes case in places that look run-down. I had a lot more trouble in my old neighborhood in the suburban sprawl (mostly with stereo systems stolen from cars and the like) than I do here.
Failing schools? Guilty as charged, which is why my friends with kids send them to private schools or move out to the 'burbs. On the other hand, either set (both the private-school friends and the burb-school friends) are paying vastly more, via their choice of property taxes or tuition fees. The schools here are indeed not so good, but then, they're cheap; we get what we pay for.
Political corruption? Not more than anywhere else. We've got one council member who's a serious policy wonk, takes his job seriously and represents my interests almost perfectly; one who's a sock puppet for the lower-density neighborhood HOAs (and thus is my enemy, but represents someone else's interests perfectly); and several who have their faults (which, yes, sometimes do involve directing funds in popular programs in ways which might be seen as pandering to a constituency), but they're not worse as a whole than any I've seen elsewhere.
Anyhow, as for "why people moved out of the cities" -- the larger-scale answer is that massive infrastructure (such as the interstate highway system) was built subsidizing that decision, and the many of the knock-on effects acted as reinforcement. Some of the problems you discuss, such as the quality of schools, fall into the set of symptoms caused by the exodus into suburbia -- not a part of the historical underpinnings thereof.
Make it artificially inexpensive to live a long distance from work and it's little surprise that individuals react to such -- even though total costs increase when the number of miles of road, water, power, and other infrastructure needed to service a given population rises. As a result, it's us folks in the urban core subsidizing the more-expensive-per-capita infrastructure serving folks out in the sprawl! Providing economic encouragement for urban living (by way of zoning and tax incentives favoring high-density mixed-use development) is the sensible thing for cities to do if they want to decrease their long-run per-capita infrastructure expenses.
If you only looked at the prices on brand new high rises being advertised by their developers, you'd think living downtown was expensive too, though it's nothing of the sort if you buy with an eye towards affordability. Don't knock urban living until you've taken a closer look.
No, they don't.
Mind you, they have the resources to compromise the endpoints, but that's not the same thing as compromising the stream (even inasmuch as the effect is pretty much the same).
I can't speak for the UK -- but here in Texas, by my reading of the state traffic code, cyclists lose a great many privileges (including the ability to take a lane when [less than 14ft wide / reasonably necessary for safety / other conditions here]) when riding two abreast.
This doesn't make sense to me -- why would you want to encourage cyclists to take up more length by staggering themselves when on a heavily trafficked road?
See other post.
If I wanted to make a point, I would have made a point, and it would have been explicit enough to be readily understandable.
Instead, I was doing nothing more than correcting a common misconception -- one even frequently seen among the President's supporters, who all too often took "change" to mean whatever they wanted to hear rather than listening to the details (which were spelled out for those paying attention).
Obama was very clear when on the campaign trail (and in statements prior to the campaign) that he thought the war in Afghanistan was important and should be escalated -- and that it would have been prosecuted more effectively were it not for the unnecessary and expensive distraction posed by the war in Iraq.
Beyond this correction, I make (and intend) no larger statement or point.
I think you're reading something into my statement which wasn't actually said.
Campaign promises were not to extract ourselves from both wars -- only one of them. Should have listened to the details closer.
Of course an attacker who steals your password database knows the salt values in use for each account.
But unless they have a rainbow table calculated with every possible salt value taken into account, they can't do a simple lookup on a precomputed map of hash values to top-5,000,000-common-passwords and hope to get a match... so their expense to actually break any of those passwords is much, much higher.
A high-density housing dweller who owns their own place is exceptionally capable of having solar or wind capacity -- as they're sharing costs with their neighbours.
Owning 0.5% of a $15M set of shared resources (in addition to 100% of your personal dwelling studs-in) is pretty cheap... and having that many people you're sharing costs with means that what would be unbearable maintenance or repair expenses on your own become negligible.
Why dig in on the "personal" side of ownership?
It's trivial to find individual testimonials on the importance of helmets.
On the other hand, the larger-scale statistics are distinctly unconvincing.
Given the choice between basing my decisions on personal stories or statistics? I choose the latter.
Then do you wear a helmet walking on the sidewalk too? Head injury rate per mile traveled has been measured in some areas to be higher for pedestrians than cyclists, after all.
Or, maybe, that's just a damned silly idea.
I've talked about the statistics around pro- and anti-helmet arguments elsewhere. See other thread. To summarize: Between the risk compensation effect (in which cyclists feel overconfident due to wearing a helmet, and its corresponding element in which drivers are less cautious when interacting with a cyclist who appears to be well-protected), the safety-in-numbers effect (wherein accident rate for each individual cyclist goes down by about 1/3 whenever the population of cyclists doubles), and the effect that aggressive helmet promotion has on the number of cyclists (national-scale mandatory helmet laws are generally recorded to at least halve the number of active cyclists), promoting helmets is seriously counterproductive to the cause of safety.
I wear one sometimes (when the value-add from having a large rear-view mirror and a helmet-mounted headlight are sufficient) -- but notably, that value-add is all about avoiding an accident, as opposed to surviving one.
Let's talk about avoidance for a moment, though. The statistical group I'm in puts me down for 113 crashes per million miles -- I'd like to think I'm personally due for less than that, as I follow the rules of the road better than most League-Certified Instructors I know, but let's run with the number. 1.5% of cycling accidents involve serious head injuries -- so that's 1.695 head injuries per million miles. Riding 100 miles per week isn't even going to get me to half a million miles in my lifetime, so we're talking about well under even odds for ever getting into an accident a helmet would have helped with. In my entire life. Of commuting 20 miles a day.
And, again, accident rates drop as the population of cyclists increases -- so if me wearing a helmet (or you actively spreading the idea that cycling is inherently dangerous) discourages other cyclists from getting on the road... well, it doesn't take a big increase in accident rate to overwhelm the decrease in accident severity which helmets provide only in a small subset of cases.
Before going in here, let me circle back and highlight -- my arguments are predicated on the taxes in question being effectively calculated to internalize externalities. If this assertion is not accurate, I don't assert that they hold.
My argument is that implicit subsidies -- in which the cost to repair roads is hidden behind takes shared by all -- be replaced with either (1) market forces, or (2) explicit subsidies. If the market won't bear the county vet's prices accurately reflecting his costs, well -- that means that something about the system is needlessly inefficient. One way or another, however, the costs are borne by society -- it's a question of whether that happens through food prices, through general-fund taxes to pay for the roads, or through an explicit subsidy recognizing the county vet as a special case (and, thereby, making it clear and obvious to others that that subsidy is taking place, rather than having it be hidden and implicit).
I'm not talking about whether an individual is receiving a net subsidy or a net outflow, but rather about whether the taxes and subsidies surrounding this specific aspect of their lives -- transportation -- is encouraging them to make economic decisions which accurately reflect the true costs and benefits of the choices they make. If having subsidized highways makes it appear cheaper to live in the suburbs, when having true costs exposed would reduce the total cost to society for that person to live in the urban core, how does it help anyone to distort the market in such a way as to encourage decisions which lead to higher total costs?
The goal isn't to punish anyone, but to have true costs visible, with externalities pushed back in, such that the actions in an individual's economic self-interest are also in the economic self-interest of society as a whole.
There's a study I've seen that came to the result that an electric-assist bicycle was actually optimal beyond a certain distance, as all-human power increased caloric consumption worth more than the cost of the electricity (and the batteries that stored it), whereas the e-bike provided just enough exercise but not so much as to change dietary needs.
That said -- if the bike commuter crowd at work is eating luxury foods (trust me, you don't need sushi to commute by bike), in greater quantity than they would be consuming if they didn't have an active lifestyle, and are able to afford to do so via the money they don't spend on gasoline (and insurance, if they pay by the mile or avoid owning a car)... well, can't that be taken as part of a better quality of life?
Let's go down that list.
Clothing and helmets - Helmets are necessary only to the extent that other road users make them so; in the Netherlands, they're used only for sport cycling -- nobody uses them for simple commuting -- and head injuries among cyclists are basically nonexistent. As for dedicated clothing, that's the domain of sport cyclists rather than commuters.
Showers can be shifted rather than increased to a substantial extent -- I personally tend to go for a fast morning commute (followed by a shower at work), and an easy evening commute (thus avoiding the need to shower again at home).
As only a small subset of cyclists have generator hubs and thus create their own power, cycling-oriented lighting systems are built with efficiency as a foremost concern (neither carrying heavy batteries nor running out of light is much fun -- so cyclists have been early investors in high-efficiency lighting technologies well before other segments of the population). Even cyclists with generator hubs care about getting as much light as possible with as little of their effort being drained to power that lighting, and thus have incentive to invest in efficiency.
Road damage is based on (axle weight)^4; thus, for bicycles, it's basically nothing.
Regarding "infrastructure for cycling" -- in the US, far and away the best cycling infrastructure is held by Portland, OR. They recently estimated the cost to rebuild it new, if it suddenly all went away, at $60M -- a price tag that would, at best, buy all of 3 miles of urban highway.
I don't doubt that there are unconsidered factors -- but actually having some knowledge of the subject matter is helpful when attempting to critique.
Long-distance commuters are not a good thing, except as a short-term stopgap measure.
Having people who need to travel a long distance to work -- without the infrastructure to provide them a better means to do so than a single-occupancy vehicle -- means that city planning is being done poorly. High-density mixed-use development, or even just older-style zoning (from before everything was planned on the assumption that everyone would have a car) means that folks don't need a car to get around. Moreover, having the true costs of commuting exposed not only encourages better personal choices, but also means that one is no longer unfairly subsidizing a single mode of transportation and thereby making it harder to justify funds spent on others.
Bicycle and motorcycle couriers are very well-established -- in the middle of rush hour, average bicycle speed is substantially *faster* than average car speed in urban areas, and there've also been no end of 50cc-scooter-vs-supercar races in dense urban environments where the scooter has won handily.
In the case you give of a doctor commuting to a community -- if the taxes collected represent a genuine externality placed on others by that commute, well, those costs exist. You can either decide that they're worth paying in this case (and pay your out-of-town doctor more for the commute... presuming, of course, that you can't find one willing to move), or you can decide that they aren't -- but in either case, we're talking about taking real costs and placing them on the people incurring them. Roads are expensive. Congestion is expensive. Bringing in that out-of-town doctor costs money, and the amount of money involved shouldn't be hidden.
Let's talk for a minute about how expensive roads really are. Portland, OR has what's considered the best cycling infrastructure in the continental US. They calculated its replacement cost at $60M in 2008 dollars. Now, how many miles of highway do you think that $60M equivalent to? The replacement cost of the best transportation cycling infrastructure found anywhere in the US is equivalent to the cost to build between .8-4 miles of 4-lane urban freeway, or to build a single interchange.
The infrastructure you advocate is extremely expensive, and heavily subsidized by those who don't use it already. (Cyclists pay for city streets through property and sales taxes to their cities, but also pay for highways via the non-use taxes which now fund almost 50% of their development and maintenance).
Why should anyone -- commuters, couriers, salespeople -- get a free ride?
Last time I was current on the statistics, full-time cycle commuting took two years off one's expected lifespan for the chance of accidents -- and added 11 back on for cardiopulmonary health.
The sport cyclists (the ones in lycra) are a lot less attentive to laws (and safety, and good common sense) than the serious commuter cyclists -- it's a tough thing to deal with as a cycle advocate, as they think they know everything and so won't attend classes unless a court makes them do so. That's a totally fixable problem, though -- it just means one needs to actively enforce traffic laws, and have a cycling-specific traffic safety class offenders get sent to when ticketed. My jurisdiction does this already.
That said -- information and devices for the retrieval thereof are small and ubiquitous enough that I'd be surprised to see a global war with human survivors reset the clock entirely. Nuclear warheads are expensive, and there are certainly large populated areas lacking target value to nuclear-armed nations -- even if the popularity of devices is low, it just takes one village full of OLPCs with Wikipedia preloaded to be preserving a whole lot of content... never mind all the converted Cold War bunkers now housing datacenters.
I have Home Depot's house brand LED bulbs in my kitchen, and they dim quite well; you might give them a try some time.
Try unpacking the data files bundled with any game on GameTap. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Steam's DRM stays the hell out of my way.
I want to play a single-player game offline? I can do that.
I want to install a game on multiple machines? I can do that.
I want to mod my single-player game? I can do that.
Most DRM schemes are hated because they break things -- they stop you from attaching debuggers to even single-player games, they encrypt files so you can't modify them, they don't let you do extra installs when you have a legitimate reason to do so, they conflict with other tools. Steam, on the other hand, provides just enough DRM to get publishers to accept it... but stays the hell out of the way of the person trying to enjoy the property they paid for. As a pragmatist, I'm fine with that.
Sure, but not all claims are actually *defensible*. Just because the patent is granted doesn't mean that its scope isn't narrowed by the acknowledged prior art -- and a good number of claims have already been struck down or narrowed by the ongoing PTO review.
Oracle does have some claims that may have a chance of standing up, but anything so broad as to cover all bytecode+JIT combinations isn't going to be among them.
Something with transactional memory -- say, Clojure. STM is a *vastly* saner way to deal with concurrency than manual lock management.
Copyrights?
Not all incarnations of Mono are/were open source -- particularly, the mobile and embedded targets were, and remain, commercial.