Much as I love debian, this is not true. Debian: 10 CPU types, and two ports that "never took part in a Debian stable release". NetBSD: 17 CPU types covering almost 50 hardware platforms (plus 6 experimental).
That's true. I was only counting linux distributions.
Every time somebody mentions dpendency problems, rpm etc. in any discussion, people always start yelling "debian, debian, use debian" and "apt, apt, apt!"
They are right about the first. Debian is probably the easiest distro to upgrade and maintain. Part of the secret is apt, that's true, but only a small part. The main reason debian "just works" and is so easy to maintain is the official repositories. You don't have dependency problems in debian (most of the time) because debian developers took enormous care to resolve all the dependency problems for you. Debian carefully backports(!) all security fixes they can, making sure that nothing breaks in the process, so that if there is a security hole fixed in say php, all your pages will just keep working like before. They have more packages than most other distros pot together, and they run on more hardware than enybody else. All this just takes some time.
I am not afraid debian will become irrelevant. There is a reason all these new distros are based on debian. And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian. Debian stable may not be the system for a hobbyist's desktop, but a large company or city or whatnot does not care about frequent releases. On the contrary, the longer they can go without major update the better. And when the update actually does come, debian makes it easy with their repositories, their stable/testing/unstable system, and apt.
And if you are a hobbyist, use testing/unstable and contribute your share. Debian is a community, not a company, and if use debian, you are part of the community. You want releases to happen more often? Then do your share. Do you use testing or unstable? Submit bug reports, fixes, if you are not a programmer, fix or update some bloody documentation, provide some missing icons, whatever! The only way debian can become irrelevant or obsolete is if we let it go irrelevant or obsolete.
I think you missed part of the press release. It said:
If we reach one million downloads, I will swim across the Atlantic. If we do NOT reach one million sales, the sales director will swim across the Atlantic.
User interfaces will probably not change that much, but the differences between Open Office and MS Office are not that great either. I would say they are about comparable to the differences between Office 95 and Office XP. I don't believe it matters at all which particular office package do kids learn. IMHO they are all equally crappy.
I have the same problem. I normally don't use Office, I use pdflatex. Sometimes, though, people e-mail me abstracts in word, and I have to convert them to pdf. I use PDFCreator
But for what I use it for, it's mostly usable, albeit not pretty. It's fine for letter writing, or timesheets. But writing a technical document is painful due to the missing outline mode and nasty graphics.
So in other words, it is just like MS Word. You write techincal documents in MS Word? I feel sorry for you.
I have heard this argument many times. Give me a break! The differences between computing now and computing by the time the kids leave school and enter workforce will be far larger than the differences between MS Office and Open Office now.
When I was at grad school, our department used one dual processor sparc station as a server for over a 100 thin clients. This was a math department, and usually there were several people running heavy computation on Mathematica and other software. Only very rarely (like once a month) you could notice any lag, that was usually at times when you actually had over 100 users loged in and working at the same time.
Now Linspire is trying to move Linux into that home desktop market, which I have to give it to them, is a lot harder than have Linux replace traditional UNIXes in the server market (which already is happening at a fast rate). So while I agree that it is a lot more secure to run services not under root, I don't think the average home user (think moms, grandmas, and sociology teachers;) should be expected to know about root, suid bits, and quotas. Most will unaliterally choose the more usable system over a more secure one if they couldn't get both.
But the point is, if the user interface to the system is well designed, they don't have to know anything about root, suid bits and quotas. They can have a machine that is both more usable and more secure, and it is job of companies as Linspire to give it to them. Instead, Robertson is saying: we can't be bothered about this, our user interface is a piece of crap, so we will simply let everybody run as root and forget about it. That's exactly what Microsoft did, and that's exactly the reason there is now so much spyware and other crap.
I did some extensive changes in/etc (some experimenting), and I was affraid I would mess up, so I made a copy of all the files I wanted to change to ~/etc, did the hanges there, went through them again, checked everything, su'ed to root, copied all of them to/etc. Then I wanted to clean up. It was about 3am, I was sleepy, and I accidentaly did rm -rf/etc instead of rm -rf ~/etc. It was fun (not). I didn't get much sleep that night.
Once on my work machine, windows NT, I needed to find information about some driver, so I unziped this file I downloaded from HP. It unzipped to C:/, and there was about 200 files with all sorts of weird names. I wanted to clean it up, but was too lazy to figure out which files were they. I tried to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT, and I couldn't, so I figured I wasn't Administrator, and I would not be able to erase anything important. So I opened c:/ in explorer, selected everything and erased it. I could hear disk spin for a sec, and then the screen went blank. After that, I wasn't even able to boot the system. I turned the box over to our NT guys, and they were not able to do anything with it, they had to re-install the system. Aparently, even though I wasn't Administrator, they gave me some sort of elevated priviledges so I could install software on the box, which allowed me to erase some sort of vital file.
I think there is a huge difference between runnning as a root and running as a regular user. Root can very easily destroy the entire system, to the point where there is no way to access any data from the disk whatsoever. Regular user can delete all user data. The system will still be running, and in many cases at least some of the files can still be recovered. As a matter of fact, in the above example, explorer just moved the files to the trashcan. It was enough, though, to make the disk totally unaccessible.
This isn't example of anything. GPL is not any more viral than any other license.
All that GPL does is give you a permission to use certain copyrighted work. It says you can use it if you adhere to certain conditions. If you use the work and don't adhere to the conditions, you do so without permission and thus you are commiting a copyright violation. That is exactly the same as with any other license. If that happens, you can be sued and forced to 1) pay damages, if there are any 2) stop using the copyrighted work as part of your own work.
That means you may have to pay up and replace the GPLed code by something else. That's exactly the same as with any other license. You can NEVER be forced against your will to release your own work under the GPL.
The only difference between GPL, BSD style license and proprietary licenses are the conditions you have to satisfy to be allowed to use the software. BSD style license is more lenient thatn GPL, which is more lenient than a proprietary license.
GPL never makes you loose the copyright or even control of your own code. For example, you can take the exact same code and use it in a GPLed project and in a proprietary project, as long as the code is yours. What you cannot do is use somebody elses GPLed code in your proprietary project without their permission.
I wish there was that moderation category, because that's what the parent is.
GPL does not require you to "release the source code to anyone that asked for it". It requires you to distribute source code with your binaries. Only the people who got the binaries legaly have right to ask you for the source code. Of course they can then distribute it further.
It is also not true that "ase you may charge a nominal fee, but the fee can be no more than the cost of physical media or transfer fees such as paper, blank CDs or DVDs, postage if applicable, and the like". You can sell GPL licensed software if you want to, for any price you want to ask. But you have to include the source, and your customers have the right to distribute the software and its modification further, and even charge for it.
But anyway, if your internal software leaked out somehow, it wouldn't be consideted legal distribution, so you would not be required to distribute the source.
PDF is not entirely open format. Most of it is, but there are parts that Adobe keep secret.
Example: Using Acrobat v7 Professional, you can enable commenting "usage rights" (I love that term) which will allow people to comment and annotate the pdf document *using reader*!
It has to be done with Acrobat Professional, there does not seem to be any other way, and as far as I know, Adobe will not tell you how it is done. That seems to be one part of pdf that is not open.
I would love it if you could prove me wrong on this!
Most (if not all) the complains about pdf on that page are either are either made by people who were ignorant (it takes one click to enable continuous paging, without jumps), or about severely mis designed documents (for example navigation: pdf has exactly the same concept of hyper links as html, it is even scriptable by javascript).
The fact is, lot of stuff that is currently published in pdf probably should not be in pdf. But quoting users complaints is pretty lame, because if you switch a particular content from pdf to html, people are going to fuss that it doesn't display right with their browser, or it does not have pretty formating etc.
You can do great things with pdf, even for on-screen delivery. Look for example at this calculator, or at some presentation created with beamer or PPower4.
Well, actually, in this case, yes. Acrobat Reader is just that: a READER. It's doesn't hurt them to release it.
Actually, it does. I don't expect them to release source to reader any time soon. The reason is that Reader is a actually a crippleware, even though it's done in rather subtle way: Reader has one amazing feature: it lets you add comments and annotations to a pdf file. But not to every pdf file! You can only annotate pdf file that has annotation "user right" enabled. And the only way to enable that is using Acrobat Professional version! It seems that the api is hidden, and Adobe will not share it with authors of other pdf software.
What it really means is that pdf is not really open format. Most of it is open, but it has some secret parts in it. If they opened reader, they would loose the secret. It would be good thing in my opinion, but they obviously don't share this opinion.
You are correct about this, but in my experience there is not that many programs where this would be a show stopper. I used to have an account on a solaris sparc-station, and I installed pretty much everything I was using in my home dir. I think at the and the only two software packages I used from/usr were gcc and tex. I installed my own window manager, terminal emulator, editor, graphics editor, terminal emulator (no, rxvt does not have to write to utmp/wtmp files), shell, several games, web browser, and I don't remember what else. I was doing that for 6 years and during that time I had never ran into a program that I would need that would not install in my home directory.
It's not the only system that operates 24 hours a day. One system I have a lot of experience with is the one in Prague. The subway shuts down from midnight to 4 or something like that, but they have very nice system of night buses and trams that can take you pretty much everywhere.
How does that work? If you think of a passport as something you need to enter another country, then if you need to get into the US, then you are by definition coming from another country, so you would have taken your passport when entering that other country in the first place...so you'll still have your passport when you return to try to get into the US, right? Or are people leaving the US with their passports, and leaving their passports abroad when they come back?
I think the point is that when you go to another country, its this other country that requires you to show your passport. Well, it so happens that Canada decided they don't really need to see a passport when you travel from the USA. So you can actually enter Canada from USA without a passport. If you know that, you will probably leave your passport at home. Canadians don't need to see it, you don't want to go to any other country, why bring it? The problem is, now you need it not to enter Canada, but to return back home.
Subsidized and run at a loss, until recently privitized--or so I understand.
Possibly. Many cities pump their tax money into their public transport system. The point is, most people who live there consider that to be a good investment, because it singnificantly improves life in the cities, and has good effect on commerce.
American mass-transit works very well, BTW. We call them "fast cars" and "the Interstate". I would think that Slashdot nerds would see the value in packet-based travelling.
There are advantages and disadvantages. Some problems: everybody has to drive. Try to go to a bar, you need a designated driver who will take you home. In most European cities, you can just simply go and have 5 beers, and you can always get home without any trouble. Or imagine you are a parent of a teenager who you know is not a very good driver. You also happen to know his friends are even worse. So what are you going to do? Keep him at home? Drive him everywhere? In most European cities, you don't have this problem at all. Second problem is parking. With a public transport system, you can only go where the bus/tram/train/subway/whatever goes. But with cars, you can only go to places you can park at. Together with general lack of sidewalks and crosswalks in many American cities, this can actually turn out to be even more restricting.
Rail works well in Europe because the cities are old and well established. NYC, for example, runs a pretty decent mass-transit service in the form of the subway system.
NYC system is fairly decent, and in addition to that, you can walk nearly everywhere, but it still does not remotly compare to most European cities.
We Americans also like our elbow room, and we value freedom and individuality--the ultimate expression of which is the Corvette.
Actually, for me the expression of my freedom and individuality is more my ability to walk to places, or get places without having to drag a large metal box on wheels with me. I feel much more free in most cities in Europe (and throw in NYC, Boston and couple more American cities), where I can get anywhere by public transit and foot, than in a typical midwestern city where you can only go where the highway takes you, and walking is pretty much out of question.
You're eating at the wrong places. Try something other than Applebee's. Of course, I'm from the South, and eating is a religion down here. Due to the melting-pot nature of America, you can get every kind of European food you can imagine, except the kind of food that people left Europe to get away from. Calf brains and kidney pie comes to mind.
If you're going to tell me that you can't get good food in New Orleans, I'll damn you to hell for lying.
And you will be completely right. However, USA is not all New Orleans, and there are entire states in midwest where you cannot even find bread that's edible. In most places, it's Applebee's or China Bufet, with the later being the better choice. If it wasn't for Chinese food... I don't even want to think about it. And calf brains and kidney pies are not European, the are British;)
That's because a laws that citizens think is stupid will immediately produce a black market in getting around said laws, and even people not participating in the black market will not turn it in if they learn of it.
That, and another reason: all those new security measures assume that more restrictions automatically means better security. But that's not true. More stringent security measures interfere more with life of ordinary people, and get more in the way. Regardless whether people think the measures are justified, they will soon start seeing them as obstacles and try to get around them ("these measured are important to stop bad guys, but I am not a bad guy, so if I get around somehow, it's OK" type of reasoning).
It's sort of similar to computer security. For example you may require everybody on your network to change their password every month. Sounds like a good idea, untill you realize that finding a good password is not easy, and people who are forced to do it every month will necessarily end up using a lot of lousy passwords, writing them on pieces of paper and taping them onto their monitors, switching between two or three passwords over and over again and so on. The result will be no improvement in security whatsoever. And you can explain to people over and over how important is it to use good passwords, keeping them secret, etc, and they can completely understand what you mean, but it just gets way too annoying, so after a while, most people will give up.
What happened in the Eastern Europe was a combination of these two things: you had to have a stupid permit for everything. Most people never really agreed with these laws, and in the end even those who were supposed to enforce them found it all too painful and difficult, so after a while nobody really gave a hoot. You ended up with a society where everybody was perpetually braking the law. In such situation, anybody who wanted could squeal on you fow whatever reason, and if you were unlucky enough to run into a cop that needed to fullfill his quota, you could easily get into lot of trouble without doing anything wrong at all.
In the end, there was no increase in security, bad guys could still do whatever they wanted. The effect was instead more controll over ordinary citizens. Everybody was vulnerable, and that was exactly what the Party wanted.
This is great point! Communist were very good at checking IDs and all that crap. In USSR, you had to had a freeking permission to travel from one city to another. In all communist countries, you had carry an ID booklet with you all the time, and the cops had a right to inspect your ID at any time they wanted. There were all sorts of restrictions on where you could or couldn't do. But if you really wanted to get somewhere, it was always possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Much as I love debian, this is not true.
Debian: 10 CPU types, and two ports that "never took part in a Debian stable release".
NetBSD: 17 CPU types covering almost 50 hardware platforms (plus 6 experimental).
That's true. I was only counting linux distributions.
Nothing new here. The same thing happened with tuxracer. Including the fork.
Every time somebody mentions dpendency problems, rpm etc. in any discussion, people always start yelling "debian, debian, use debian" and "apt, apt, apt!"
They are right about the first. Debian is probably the easiest distro to upgrade and maintain. Part of the secret is apt, that's true, but only a small part. The main reason debian "just works" and is so easy to maintain is the official repositories. You don't have dependency problems in debian (most of the time) because debian developers took enormous care to resolve all the dependency problems for you. Debian carefully backports(!) all security fixes they can, making sure that nothing breaks in the process, so that if there is a security hole fixed in say php, all your pages will just keep working like before. They have more packages than most other distros pot together, and they run on more hardware than enybody else. All this just takes some time.
I am not afraid debian will become irrelevant. There is a reason all these new distros are based on debian. And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian. Debian stable may not be the system for a hobbyist's desktop, but a large company or city or whatnot does not care about frequent releases. On the contrary, the longer they can go without major update the better. And when the update actually does come, debian makes it easy with their repositories, their stable/testing/unstable system, and apt.
And if you are a hobbyist, use testing/unstable and contribute your share. Debian is a community, not a company, and if use debian, you are part of the community. You want releases to happen more often? Then do your share. Do you use testing or unstable? Submit bug reports, fixes, if you are not a programmer, fix or update some bloody documentation, provide some missing icons, whatever! The only way debian can become irrelevant or obsolete is if we let it go irrelevant or obsolete.
I think you missed part of the press release. It said:
If we reach one million downloads, I will swim across the Atlantic. If we do NOT reach one million sales, the sales director will swim across the Atlantic.
User interfaces will probably not change that much, but the differences between Open Office and MS Office are not that great either. I would say they are about comparable to the differences between Office 95 and Office XP. I don't believe it matters at all which particular office package do kids learn. IMHO they are all equally crappy.
I have the same problem. I normally don't use Office, I use pdflatex. Sometimes, though, people e-mail me abstracts in word, and I have to convert them to pdf. I use
PDFCreator
So far it worked for me like a charm.
But for what I use it for, it's mostly usable, albeit not pretty. It's fine for letter writing, or timesheets. But writing a technical document is painful due to the missing outline mode and nasty graphics.
So in other words, it is just like MS Word. You write techincal documents in MS Word? I feel sorry for you.
I have heard this argument many times. Give me a break! The differences between computing now and computing by the time the kids leave school and enter workforce will be far larger than the differences between MS Office and Open Office now.
When I was at grad school, our department used one dual processor sparc station as a server for over a 100 thin clients. This was a math department, and usually there were several people running heavy computation on Mathematica and other software. Only very rarely (like once a month) you could notice any lag, that was usually at times when you actually had over 100 users loged in and working at the same time.
Now Linspire is trying to move Linux into that home desktop market, which I have to give it to them, is a lot harder than have Linux replace traditional UNIXes in the server market (which already is happening at a fast rate). So while I agree that it is a lot more secure to run services not under root, I don't think the average home user (think moms, grandmas, and sociology teachers ;) should be expected to know about root, suid bits, and quotas. Most will unaliterally choose the more usable system over a more secure one if they couldn't get both.
But the point is, if the user interface to the system is well designed, they don't have to know anything about root, suid bits and quotas. They can have a machine that is both more usable and more secure, and it is job of companies as Linspire to give it to them. Instead, Robertson is saying: we can't be bothered about this, our user interface is a piece of crap, so we will simply let everybody run as root and forget about it. That's exactly what Microsoft did, and that's exactly the reason there is now so much spyware and other crap.
Once I have accidentally done rm -Rf /etc.
/etc (some experimenting), and I was affraid I would mess up, so I made a copy of all the files I wanted to change to ~/etc, did the hanges there, went through them again, checked everything, su'ed to root, copied all of them to /etc. Then I wanted to clean up. It was about 3am, I was sleepy, and I accidentaly did rm -rf /etc instead of rm -rf ~/etc. It was fun (not). I didn't get much sleep that night.
I did some extensive changes in
Once on my work machine, windows NT, I needed to find information about some driver, so I unziped this file I downloaded from HP. It unzipped to C:/, and there was about 200 files with all sorts of weird names. I wanted to clean it up, but was too lazy to figure out which files were they. I tried to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT, and I couldn't, so I figured I wasn't Administrator, and I would not be able to erase anything important. So I opened c:/ in explorer, selected everything and erased it. I could hear disk spin for a sec, and then the screen went blank. After that, I wasn't even able to boot the system. I turned the box over to our NT guys, and they were not able to do anything with it, they had to re-install the system. Aparently, even though I wasn't Administrator, they gave me some sort of elevated priviledges so I could install software on the box, which allowed me to erase some sort of vital file.
I think there is a huge difference between runnning as a root and running as a regular user. Root can very easily destroy the entire system, to the point where there is no way to access any data from the disk whatsoever. Regular user can delete all user data. The system will still be running, and in many cases at least some of the files can still be recovered. As a matter of fact, in the above example, explorer just moved the files to the trashcan. It was enough, though, to make the disk totally unaccessible.
Unless you are storing your fonts inside the document itself.
That's exactly the problem! Some formats (e.g. pdf) let you include fonts in the document, so that the document will display the same way everywhere.
The question is whether a document with embedded font constitutes a derivative work.
This isn't example of anything. GPL is not any more viral than any other license.
All that GPL does is give you a permission to use certain copyrighted work. It says you can use it if you adhere to certain conditions. If you use the work and don't adhere to the conditions, you do so without permission and thus you are commiting a copyright violation. That is exactly the same as with any other license. If that happens, you can be sued and forced to
1) pay damages, if there are any
2) stop using the copyrighted work as part of your own work.
That means you may have to pay up and replace the GPLed code by something else. That's exactly the same as with any other license. You can NEVER be forced against your will to release your own work under the GPL.
The only difference between GPL, BSD style license and proprietary licenses are the conditions you have to satisfy to be allowed to use the software. BSD style license is more lenient thatn GPL, which is more lenient than a proprietary license.
GPL never makes you loose the copyright or even control of your own code. For example, you can take the exact same code and use it in a GPLed project and in a proprietary project, as long as the code is yours. What you cannot do is use somebody elses GPLed code in your proprietary project without their permission.
I wish there was that moderation category, because that's what the parent is.
GPL does not require you to "release the source code to anyone that asked for it". It requires you to distribute source code with your binaries. Only the people who got the binaries legaly have right to ask you for the source code. Of course they can then distribute it further.
It is also not true that "ase you may charge a nominal fee, but the fee can be no more than the cost of physical media or transfer fees such as paper, blank CDs or DVDs, postage if applicable, and the like". You can sell GPL licensed software if you want to, for any price you want to ask. But you have to include the source, and your customers have the right to distribute the software and its modification further, and even charge for it.
But anyway, if your internal software leaked out somehow, it wouldn't be consideted legal distribution, so you would not be required to distribute the source.
PDF is not entirely open format. Most of it is, but there are parts that Adobe keep secret.
Example: Using Acrobat v7 Professional, you can enable commenting "usage rights" (I love that term) which will allow people to comment and annotate the pdf document *using reader*!
It has to be done with Acrobat Professional, there does not seem to be any other way, and as far as I know, Adobe will not tell you how it is done. That seems to be one part of pdf that is not open.
I would love it if you could prove me wrong on this!
Most (if not all) the complains about pdf on that page are either are either made by people who were ignorant (it takes one click to enable continuous paging, without jumps), or about severely mis designed documents (for example navigation: pdf has exactly the same concept of hyper links as html, it is even scriptable by javascript).
The fact is, lot of stuff that is currently published in pdf probably should not be in pdf. But quoting users complaints is pretty lame, because if you switch a particular content from pdf to html, people are going to fuss that it doesn't display right with their browser, or it does not have pretty formating etc.
You can do great things with pdf, even for on-screen delivery. Look for example at this calculator,
or at some presentation created with beamer or PPower4.
Well, actually, in this case, yes. Acrobat Reader is just that: a READER. It's doesn't hurt them to release it.
Actually, it does. I don't expect them to release source to reader any time soon. The reason is that Reader is a actually a crippleware, even though it's done in rather subtle way: Reader has one amazing feature: it lets you add comments and annotations to a pdf file. But not to every pdf file! You can only annotate pdf file that has annotation "user right" enabled. And the only way to enable that is using Acrobat Professional version! It seems that the api is hidden, and Adobe will not share it with authors of other pdf software.
What it really means is that pdf is not really open format. Most of it is open, but it has some secret parts in it. If they opened reader, they would loose the secret. It would be good thing in my opinion, but they obviously don't share this opinion.
You are correct about this, but in my experience there is not that many programs where this would be a show stopper. I used to have an account on a solaris sparc-station, and I installed pretty much everything I was using in my home dir. I think at the and the only two software packages I used from /usr were gcc and tex. I installed my own window manager, terminal emulator, editor, graphics editor, terminal emulator (no, rxvt does not have to write to utmp/wtmp files), shell, several games, web browser, and I don't remember what else. I was doing that for 6 years and during that time I had never ran into a program that I would need that would not install in my home directory.
It's not the only system that operates 24 hours a day. One system I have a lot of experience with is the one in Prague. The subway shuts down from midnight to 4 or something like that, but they have very nice system of night buses and trams that can take you pretty much everywhere.
How does that work? If you think of a passport as something you need to enter another country, then if you need to get into the US, then you are by definition coming from another country, so you would have taken your passport when entering that other country in the first place...so you'll still have your passport when you return to try to get into the US, right? Or are people leaving the US with their passports, and leaving their passports abroad when they come back?
I think the point is that when you go to another country, its this other country that requires you to show your passport. Well, it so happens that Canada decided they don't really need to see a passport when you travel from the USA. So you can actually enter Canada from USA without a passport. If you know that, you will probably leave your passport at home. Canadians don't need to see it, you don't want to go to any other country, why bring it? The problem is, now you need it not to enter Canada, but to return back home.
Subsidized and run at a loss, until recently privitized--or so I understand.
... I don't even want to think about it. And calf brains and kidney pies are not European, the are British ;)
Possibly. Many cities pump their tax money into their public transport system. The point is, most people who live there consider that to be a good investment, because it singnificantly improves life in the cities, and has good effect on commerce.
American mass-transit works very well, BTW. We call them "fast cars" and "the Interstate". I would think that Slashdot nerds would see the value in packet-based travelling.
There are advantages and disadvantages. Some problems: everybody has to drive. Try to go to a bar, you need a designated driver who will take you home. In most European cities, you can just simply go and have 5 beers, and you can always get home without any trouble. Or imagine you are a parent of a teenager who you know is not a very good driver. You also happen to know his friends are even worse. So what are you going to do? Keep him at home? Drive him everywhere? In most European cities, you don't have this problem at all. Second problem is parking. With a public transport system, you can only go where the bus/tram/train/subway/whatever goes. But with cars, you can only go to places you can park at. Together with general lack of sidewalks and crosswalks in many American cities, this can actually turn out to be even more restricting.
Rail works well in Europe because the cities are old and well established. NYC, for example, runs a pretty decent mass-transit service in the form of the subway system.
NYC system is fairly decent, and in addition to that, you can walk nearly everywhere, but it still does not remotly compare to most European cities.
We Americans also like our elbow room, and we value freedom and individuality--the ultimate expression of which is the Corvette.
Actually, for me the expression of my freedom and individuality is more my ability to walk to places, or get places without having to drag a large metal box on wheels with me. I feel much more free in most cities in Europe (and throw in NYC, Boston and couple more American cities), where I can get anywhere by public transit and foot, than in a typical midwestern city where you can only go where the highway takes you, and walking is pretty much out of question.
You're eating at the wrong places. Try something other than Applebee's. Of course, I'm from the South, and eating is a religion down here. Due to the melting-pot nature of America, you can get every kind of European food you can imagine, except the kind of food that people left Europe to get away from. Calf brains and kidney pie comes to mind.
If you're going to tell me that you can't get good food in New Orleans, I'll damn you to hell for lying.
And you will be completely right. However, USA is not all New Orleans, and there are entire states in midwest where you cannot even find bread that's edible. In most places, it's Applebee's or China Bufet, with the later being the better choice. If it wasn't for Chinese food
That's because a laws that citizens think is stupid will immediately produce a black market in getting around said laws, and even people not participating in the black market will not turn it in if they learn of it.
That, and another reason: all those new security measures assume that more restrictions automatically means better security. But that's not true. More stringent security measures interfere more with life of ordinary people, and get more in the way. Regardless whether people think the measures are justified, they will soon start seeing them as obstacles and try to get around them ("these measured are important to stop bad guys, but I am not a bad guy, so if I get around somehow, it's OK" type of reasoning).
It's sort of similar to computer security. For example you may require everybody on your network to change their password every month. Sounds like a good idea, untill you realize that finding a good password is not easy, and people who are forced to do it every month will necessarily end up using a lot of lousy passwords, writing them on pieces of paper and taping them onto their monitors, switching between two or three passwords over and over again and so on. The result will be no improvement in security whatsoever. And you can explain to people over and over how important is it to use good passwords, keeping them secret, etc, and they can completely understand what you mean, but it just gets way too annoying, so after a while, most people will give up.
What happened in the Eastern Europe was a combination of these two things: you had to have a stupid permit for everything. Most people never really agreed with these laws, and in the end even those who were supposed to enforce them found it all too painful and difficult, so after a while nobody really gave a hoot. You ended up with a society where everybody was perpetually braking the law. In such situation, anybody who wanted could squeal on you fow whatever reason, and if you were unlucky enough to run into a cop that needed to fullfill his quota, you could easily get into lot of trouble without doing anything wrong at all.
In the end, there was no increase in security, bad guys could still do whatever they wanted. The effect was instead more controll over ordinary citizens. Everybody was vulnerable, and that was exactly what the Party wanted.
This is great point! Communist were very good at checking IDs and all that crap. In USSR, you had to had a freeking permission to travel from one city to another. In all communist countries, you had carry an ID booklet with you all the time, and the cops had a right to inspect your ID at any time they wanted. There were all sorts of restrictions on where you could or couldn't do. But if you really wanted to get somewhere, it was always possible.
Yeah, and then there were those guys that were trying to throw a WV Beetle from Golden Gate bridge. Those were Canadians, too, weren't they?
You may know how to subtract, but you sure don't know how to read.