But the reality is the ride and the electric car rental on the other end have to be cheaper than driving down there in one's own car. Arizona cities are textbook cases of sprawl. It is almost impossible to get around in them without a vehicle, especially in the summer.
True. But over time, cities tend to densify around transit hubs like train stations so that more people can take advantage of them. Transit should certainly meet the needs of the city, but the city can eventually change to take advantage of transit and hence make it more efficient.
You seem to have missed this but there was this Romulan dude who wanted to destroy Earth and the crew of the Enterprise spent most of the movie trying to stop him. The difference between this movie and Nemesis was this time they didn't cut out the scene that explained why he wanted to destroy Earth, and he had a more plausible story for how he came into possession of the super weapeon. You must have gone out to the bathroom and missed that part, but I'm damned if I know how you could have missed all his other appearances in the film.
I feel as though this movie really is a drastic departure from the Star Trek concept. I'm not going to see it until it comes out on DVD.
'Insightful' my ass!
Suggestion: Watch the freaking movie before commenting on it. Never mind the trailer (which by definition is only going to have action scenes) or what you 'feel,' just go and see the damn thing. In the meantime, shut the hell up!
Honestly, I can't understand the sheer stupidity of people who express an opinion on a movie they haven't seen just based on a trailer! What did these morons think of The Crying Game? An action flick with no twist in the tale? Jesus wept!
I disagree, there is justification. Television has the ability to be, to quote Jon Stewart, an "incredibly powerful tool of illumination." Were it left to market forces alone, it would be full of whatever junk TV and entertainment can be sold to the highest bidder. Public television plays a role in having a more educated populace. TV is a very different business from car manufacturing, it's an incredibly powerful medium that influences how people think. Informative TV packaged in a way that people want to watch in significant numbers is an important component in the marketplace of ideas. Unless of course you'd prefer the free market to prevail, resulting in a 'Fox News Channel' world where the majority of viewers believe in myths such as Saddam Hussein having something to do with 9/11.
All of human endeavour should not be about making a profit. Knowledge might not make economic sense in the short term, but believe me it's way more important than that.
A favourite pickup line of mine is "Oh, so you're reading _____." Kinda goes out the window with the Kindle since all books look the same, doesn't it? Bloody technology.
Caltrans, the highway agency, has been using goats to clear brush from beside freeways too. It has caused a few problems with gawkers slowing down to look at them at commute time causing massive backups, but apparently it's very economical. Cutting the stuff manually and then chipping it and hauling it away is hugely expensive, goats dispose of it in their own way and help to fertilize the ground.
"Antebellum" is an expression derived from Latin that means "before war" (ante, "before," and bellum, "war").
In United States history and historiography, "antebellum" is commonly used, in lieu of "pre-Civil War," in reference to the period of increasing sectionalism that led up to the American Civil War. In that sense, the Antebellum Period is often considered to have begun with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, though it is sometimes stipulated to extend back as early as 1812. The period after the Civil War is called the Reconstruction era.
How about we let individuals and businesses decide where they're going to put their R&D money, not some ivory-tower bureaucrats who are firmly removed from reality?
Ah, 'bureaucrats.' The label that right-wingers use to describe their fellow democratically elected representatives who just happen to sit on the other side of the aisle.
Wasn't it these 'bureaucrats' who built the interstate highway system?
Really: when it comes to deciding what to do with 3% of your income, don't you want YOU making that decision, instead of total strangers you don't know and who know you less and who are operating on non-sequitor ulterior motives?
Oh so now we have to know someone personally before we spend their tax dollars? Well we'd better stop building airports, stop maintaining the roads without which you wouldn't be able to haul your ungrateful ass to work in the morning, stop sweeping the litter off the streets, stop paying firemen to spend so much time sitting idle, and stop providing all the other essential services that most people consider essential ingredients of a reasonably civilized society.
Formula 1 motor racing is a great driver of innovation that eventually makes its way into production cars.
Other sports lead to better products that filter their way down to popular use. I remember when clipless pedals were the preserve of professional cyclists, now they're affordable and any rider can get the benefit of them. Ditto for carbon fiber components that show up in many applications.
The Apollo space program had many spin-offs both technologically (not just Teflon) and organizationally (since such a complex project required new team-working techniques that made their way into conventional management planning).
Point: War may be a good driver of invention, but there are others too. Personally I prefer the ones that don't involve more efficient ways of killing.
Because the TV News isn't going to lose millions in ad revenue and probably more in relevance. If they don't announce something, nobody will watch anymore. Or they will simply turn to a channel that announces something, anything.
I disagree. In the UK it takes until the small hours of the morning for the result to become clear. And it makes for great TV! They call the exit poll result at the start of the show, but this is long after the polls have closed.
The results show in the Irish elections drags on for several days.
I don't see how faster results gives the networks more to show, that's the opposite of the case. I mean, look at reality TV shows like The Bachelor and look at how long they drag things out. Two hour season finales just to reveal which of two women he picked. Imagine an election system that drags the results out longer, they'd love it!
'Every little incident?' Where does it say that we have to report 'every little incident?'
I mean, what's it going to be next? Abolishing the police in case they abuse their powers and become the Stasi?
This initiative is quite clearly aimed at fighting crime, not spying on left wing groups in case they say something the government disagrees with.
As for your vigilante solution of getting people to carry weapons and take the law into their own hands, goodness knows where you're getting that straw man / slippery slope from. I'd be inclined to suspect that you're only kidding, but given some of the bizarre posts I've seen on here over the years from Americans concerning guns, I'm not sure what to think. (I refer to the serious support I got for a sarcastic proposal I made to make air travel 'safer' by allowing passengers to carry guns into the cabin. No, really.)
"Nothing makes a tyrant's job easier than the people policing themselves."
Reminds me of school. The people who used words like 'snitching' and were most upset about it were the bullies who liked to kick the crap out of kids smaller than themselves and thought they had the right to be protected from the consequences by some honor code that stops people from reporting any wrongdoing.
What exactly is wrong with reporting a crime that your neighbor did?
I'm glad I'm not the only person here who understands that, sometimes, people who are reported to the police find themselves in that position because they've committed a crime.
I'm also glad that most of the population of/. seems to live in crime-free areas where the only offense ever committed is the illegal downloading of a bit of music. Other people in this world have more serious problems to deal with and actually need to be able to report crime to the police.
Here is the news: Crime happens, and when it does it needs to be dealt with. Dealing with crime does not make one an Orwellian/big brother/Stasi/thought police/ninja stormtrooper. It makes you a responsible citizen.
Just like in East Germany (back in the day)... Spy on your neighbors, report back to The State!
So crime should only be reported by police and witnesses should shut up? Only in the old Eastern Bloc was there the concept of a witness submitting evidence of a crime? I beg to differ.
Yeah, it's not so much "Big Brother is watching you" it is "Little Brothers and Sisters are watching you".
This can't be good.
Can't it? Supposing you're walking home from the pub some night and you see an argument brewing. You pull out your phone and start filming, and you catch a local thug kicking the crap out of an innocent person over a bag of chips. Wouldn't it be nice to have somewhere to upload it to? Or supposing you have a problem with unruly kids terrorising the neighbourhood but the cops give the usual 'too busy' excuse and let them run riot.
Sure there's potential for abuse, but quite frankly that's what the checks and balances of the justice system are there for. For every abuse of a system like this that you can think of, I can think of a legitimate use.
Crime is a real problem in a lot of areas. Sometimes you need to be able to crack down on it, and enlisting the help of local people is often a key ingredient, particularly where police resources are over-stretched.
We've had non-police helping out with law enforcement for years, like traffic wardens(parking wardens), school crossing patrols, private security firms, etc. There's nothing sinister about it.
It's better than not having him at all I suppose. A Terminator movie just wouldn't be the same without him...or at least something that looks like him. Are they going to be using his real voice at least?...Not that there was a ton of dialogue for the terminator role.
That's the only reason he's such a successful actor IMHO. He can't deliver lines with any authenticity; the droning monotone of an android is the only role he can play convincingly.
(This isn't off-topic, please read to the end before modding.) During the recall election campaign he wasn't even able to deliver a single convincing line about any policies he had. Every time he was asked to list all the things he was going to cut back spending on, he sat there and rattled off a list of things that needed MORE spending. He pummeled Gray Davis for daring to raise the motor vehicle registration fee, pretty much basing his campaign on that. What did he do in February of this year? Raise the vehicle registration fee. Looks like politics isn't as easy as you thought it would be, is it, Arnie?
The guy is a fraud no matter what profession he goes into whether it's acting or politics.
I once uploaded a vid with music by Ulrich Schnauss, published by Domino Recording Co. I don't know if they're a big label or not but they were cool with me using the soundtrack because they get to post an iTunes 'buy now' button and an amazon.com 'buy now' button on my movie's page.
On the plus side, an enlightened record company can use this as a means of getting free advertising and driving sales as long as they don't find the video objectionable.
On the negative side, who's to say that all record companies are going to be so enlightened, and who's to say that their idea of objectionable is the same as the end user's? I'd hate to upload a video criticising, say, George W "shit for brains" Bush only to have it taken down because some record label executive happens to be a Fox News fan.
If they start using whatever Shazaam uses, we're screwed. In any case I'm sure this is the start of an arms race in which the fingerprinter keeps getting more and more elaborate to counter the effects of people trying to fool it.
Wiley points to a YouTube video called "What if." The video quotes educators from years gone by who were alarmed that chalk, pencils, ballpoint pens and calculators would make students lazy and stupid.
Did anyone manage to find the video that TFA didn't bother linking to?
As a side note: it is nice to see a car that stays about the same size. It is lighter and stronger than the current Ford Fiesta, with similar dimensions.
Yup. I've often marveled at the marketing savvy of the car companies. Each model just gets bigger every year, and eventually a new 'supermini' has to be reintroduced at the bottom of the range.
I remember when a Ford Escort was about the size of a modern Fiesta, and an old Cortina was about the size of a modern Escort, and the Sierra and later the Mondeo were comparable in size to the older generation Granada.
I love trains but... America just seems too big for inter-city travel. Wait 'til you find out how much it costs before you sign up for this.
Did anyone RTFA? He made it quite clear that we're talking about specific locations in the country where cities are grouped close enough together that high speed trains have an advantage over air travel.
Just look at Amtrak. Prices are too high and it is going broke.
Hardly anybody really uses a transit system in the U.S. That is why they have to paid for by the taxpayers. More people pay for bus and train systems than actually use them. The city I live in, opted out years ago because it was costing about $35,000 per year per rider. Whenever you look at actual cost per user, it isn't worth it. Just more waste of my money.
Motorists benefit from mass transit because it gets more cars out of your way. Would you really prefer all those buses to be emptied and the people dumped out into single-occupancy cars?
Where do you live, Seattle? I hear that the "I'm not paying to subsidize mass transit" attitude prevails up there, and they have the congestion they deserve as a result.
In the USA, the speed of air travel is a compelling advantage over rail. That's why passenger rail in this country declined from a major industry to a government-sponsored museum hobby.
If passenger rail travel were economically viable here, it wouldn't take tax money to keep it alive.
-jcr
The lobbying power of Detroit had more to do with rail's decline than economic reality. There are plenty of areas where rail could be competitive with road and air travel. Center of San Francisco to Center of LA would be so much easier by train than having to get all those connections to and from the airports if there was a high speed line connecting the two cities.
Obama's plan simply will not work because he plans to mix freight and passenger rail routes. I would not call the examples in Japan and France a _financial_ success, but they are indeed impressive technologically. However, neither of those systems would work if they did not dedicate their tracks to passenger transportation. Freight would slow everything down dramatically.
Freight and high speed passenger trains share the same lines in the UK. Granted, reliability isn't perfect, but at least an alternative to the congested motorways exists.
Slashdot Mirror
True. But over time, cities tend to densify around transit hubs like train stations so that more people can take advantage of them. Transit should certainly meet the needs of the city, but the city can eventually change to take advantage of transit and hence make it more efficient.
You seem to have missed this but there was this Romulan dude who wanted to destroy Earth and the crew of the Enterprise spent most of the movie trying to stop him. The difference between this movie and Nemesis was this time they didn't cut out the scene that explained why he wanted to destroy Earth, and he had a more plausible story for how he came into possession of the super weapeon. You must have gone out to the bathroom and missed that part, but I'm damned if I know how you could have missed all his other appearances in the film.
'Insightful' my ass!
Suggestion: Watch the freaking movie before commenting on it. Never mind the trailer (which by definition is only going to have action scenes) or what you 'feel,' just go and see the damn thing. In the meantime, shut the hell up!
Honestly, I can't understand the sheer stupidity of people who express an opinion on a movie they haven't seen just based on a trailer! What did these morons think of The Crying Game? An action flick with no twist in the tale? Jesus wept!
I disagree, there is justification. Television has the ability to be, to quote Jon Stewart, an "incredibly powerful tool of illumination." Were it left to market forces alone, it would be full of whatever junk TV and entertainment can be sold to the highest bidder. Public television plays a role in having a more educated populace. TV is a very different business from car manufacturing, it's an incredibly powerful medium that influences how people think. Informative TV packaged in a way that people want to watch in significant numbers is an important component in the marketplace of ideas. Unless of course you'd prefer the free market to prevail, resulting in a 'Fox News Channel' world where the majority of viewers believe in myths such as Saddam Hussein having something to do with 9/11.
All of human endeavour should not be about making a profit. Knowledge might not make economic sense in the short term, but believe me it's way more important than that.
A favourite pickup line of mine is "Oh, so you're reading _____." Kinda goes out the window with the Kindle since all books look the same, doesn't it? Bloody technology.
Caltrans, the highway agency, has been using goats to clear brush from beside freeways too. It has caused a few problems with gawkers slowing down to look at them at commute time causing massive backups, but apparently it's very economical. Cutting the stuff manually and then chipping it and hauling it away is hugely expensive, goats dispose of it in their own way and help to fertilize the ground.
From wiki:
You learn something new every day.
How about we let individuals and businesses decide where they're going to put their R&D money, not some ivory-tower bureaucrats who are firmly removed from reality?
Ah, 'bureaucrats.' The label that right-wingers use to describe their fellow democratically elected representatives who just happen to sit on the other side of the aisle.
Wasn't it these 'bureaucrats' who built the interstate highway system?
Really: when it comes to deciding what to do with 3% of your income, don't you want YOU making that decision, instead of total strangers you don't know and who know you less and who are operating on non-sequitor ulterior motives?
Oh so now we have to know someone personally before we spend their tax dollars? Well we'd better stop building airports, stop maintaining the roads without which you wouldn't be able to haul your ungrateful ass to work in the morning, stop sweeping the litter off the streets, stop paying firemen to spend so much time sitting idle, and stop providing all the other essential services that most people consider essential ingredients of a reasonably civilized society.
Formula 1 motor racing is a great driver of innovation that eventually makes its way into production cars.
Other sports lead to better products that filter their way down to popular use. I remember when clipless pedals were the preserve of professional cyclists, now they're affordable and any rider can get the benefit of them. Ditto for carbon fiber components that show up in many applications.
The Apollo space program had many spin-offs both technologically (not just Teflon) and organizationally (since such a complex project required new team-working techniques that made their way into conventional management planning).
Point: War may be a good driver of invention, but there are others too. Personally I prefer the ones that don't involve more efficient ways of killing.
I disagree. In the UK it takes until the small hours of the morning for the result to become clear. And it makes for great TV! They call the exit poll result at the start of the show, but this is long after the polls have closed.
The results show in the Irish elections drags on for several days.
I don't see how faster results gives the networks more to show, that's the opposite of the case. I mean, look at reality TV shows like The Bachelor and look at how long they drag things out. Two hour season finales just to reveal which of two women he picked. Imagine an election system that drags the results out longer, they'd love it!
'Every little incident?' Where does it say that we have to report 'every little incident?'
I mean, what's it going to be next? Abolishing the police in case they abuse their powers and become the Stasi?
This initiative is quite clearly aimed at fighting crime, not spying on left wing groups in case they say something the government disagrees with.
As for your vigilante solution of getting people to carry weapons and take the law into their own hands, goodness knows where you're getting that straw man / slippery slope from. I'd be inclined to suspect that you're only kidding, but given some of the bizarre posts I've seen on here over the years from Americans concerning guns, I'm not sure what to think. (I refer to the serious support I got for a sarcastic proposal I made to make air travel 'safer' by allowing passengers to carry guns into the cabin. No, really.)
I propose calling the site SnitchTube.
"Nothing makes a tyrant's job easier than the people policing themselves."
Reminds me of school. The people who used words like 'snitching' and were most upset about it were the bullies who liked to kick the crap out of kids smaller than themselves and thought they had the right to be protected from the consequences by some honor code that stops people from reporting any wrongdoing.
What exactly is wrong with reporting a crime that your neighbor did?
I'm glad I'm not the only person here who understands that, sometimes, people who are reported to the police find themselves in that position because they've committed a crime.
I'm also glad that most of the population of /. seems to live in crime-free areas where the only offense ever committed is the illegal downloading of a bit of music. Other people in this world have more serious problems to deal with and actually need to be able to report crime to the police.
Here is the news: Crime happens, and when it does it needs to be dealt with. Dealing with crime does not make one an Orwellian/big brother/Stasi/thought police/ninja stormtrooper. It makes you a responsible citizen.
Just like in East Germany (back in the day)... Spy on your neighbors, report back to The State!
So crime should only be reported by police and witnesses should shut up? Only in the old Eastern Bloc was there the concept of a witness submitting evidence of a crime? I beg to differ.
Yeah, it's not so much "Big Brother is watching you" it is "Little Brothers and Sisters are watching you".
This can't be good.
Can't it? Supposing you're walking home from the pub some night and you see an argument brewing. You pull out your phone and start filming, and you catch a local thug kicking the crap out of an innocent person over a bag of chips. Wouldn't it be nice to have somewhere to upload it to? Or supposing you have a problem with unruly kids terrorising the neighbourhood but the cops give the usual 'too busy' excuse and let them run riot.
Sure there's potential for abuse, but quite frankly that's what the checks and balances of the justice system are there for. For every abuse of a system like this that you can think of, I can think of a legitimate use.
Crime is a real problem in a lot of areas. Sometimes you need to be able to crack down on it, and enlisting the help of local people is often a key ingredient, particularly where police resources are over-stretched.
We've had non-police helping out with law enforcement for years, like traffic wardens(parking wardens), school crossing patrols, private security firms, etc. There's nothing sinister about it.
It's better than not having him at all I suppose. A Terminator movie just wouldn't be the same without him...or at least something that looks like him. Are they going to be using his real voice at least?...Not that there was a ton of dialogue for the terminator role.
That's the only reason he's such a successful actor IMHO. He can't deliver lines with any authenticity; the droning monotone of an android is the only role he can play convincingly.
(This isn't off-topic, please read to the end before modding.) During the recall election campaign he wasn't even able to deliver a single convincing line about any policies he had. Every time he was asked to list all the things he was going to cut back spending on, he sat there and rattled off a list of things that needed MORE spending. He pummeled Gray Davis for daring to raise the motor vehicle registration fee, pretty much basing his campaign on that. What did he do in February of this year? Raise the vehicle registration fee. Looks like politics isn't as easy as you thought it would be, is it, Arnie?
The guy is a fraud no matter what profession he goes into whether it's acting or politics.
I once uploaded a vid with music by Ulrich Schnauss, published by Domino Recording Co. I don't know if they're a big label or not but they were cool with me using the soundtrack because they get to post an iTunes 'buy now' button and an amazon.com 'buy now' button on my movie's page.
On the plus side, an enlightened record company can use this as a means of getting free advertising and driving sales as long as they don't find the video objectionable.
On the negative side, who's to say that all record companies are going to be so enlightened, and who's to say that their idea of objectionable is the same as the end user's? I'd hate to upload a video criticising, say, George W "shit for brains" Bush only to have it taken down because some record label executive happens to be a Fox News fan.
If they start using whatever Shazaam uses, we're screwed. In any case I'm sure this is the start of an arms race in which the fingerprinter keeps getting more and more elaborate to counter the effects of people trying to fool it.
Only if you eradicate the ewoks first. God those things are annoying. But hopefully tasty.
I'm pretty sure they became extinct after the debris from the Death Star fell on the Sanctuary Moon.
Did anyone manage to find the video that TFA didn't bother linking to?
As a side note: it is nice to see a car that stays about the same size. It is lighter and stronger than the current Ford Fiesta, with similar dimensions.
Yup. I've often marveled at the marketing savvy of the car companies. Each model just gets bigger every year, and eventually a new 'supermini' has to be reintroduced at the bottom of the range.
I remember when a Ford Escort was about the size of a modern Fiesta, and an old Cortina was about the size of a modern Escort, and the Sierra and later the Mondeo were comparable in size to the older generation Granada.
I love trains but ... America just seems too big for inter-city travel. Wait 'til you find out how much it costs before you sign up for this.
Did anyone RTFA? He made it quite clear that we're talking about specific locations in the country where cities are grouped close enough together that high speed trains have an advantage over air travel.
Just look at Amtrak. Prices are too high and it is going broke.
Hardly anybody really uses a transit system in the U.S. That is why they have to paid for by the taxpayers. More people pay for bus and train systems than actually use them. The city I live in, opted out years ago because it was costing about $35,000 per year per rider. Whenever you look at actual cost per user, it isn't worth it. Just more waste of my money.
Motorists benefit from mass transit because it gets more cars out of your way. Would you really prefer all those buses to be emptied and the people dumped out into single-occupancy cars?
Where do you live, Seattle? I hear that the "I'm not paying to subsidize mass transit" attitude prevails up there, and they have the congestion they deserve as a result.
In the USA, the speed of air travel is a compelling advantage over rail. That's why passenger rail in this country declined from a major industry to a government-sponsored museum hobby.
If passenger rail travel were economically viable here, it wouldn't take tax money to keep it alive.
-jcr
The lobbying power of Detroit had more to do with rail's decline than economic reality. There are plenty of areas where rail could be competitive with road and air travel. Center of San Francisco to Center of LA would be so much easier by train than having to get all those connections to and from the airports if there was a high speed line connecting the two cities.
Obama's plan simply will not work because he plans to mix freight and passenger rail routes. I would not call the examples in Japan and France a _financial_ success, but they are indeed impressive technologically. However, neither of those systems would work if they did not dedicate their tracks to passenger transportation. Freight would slow everything down dramatically.
Freight and high speed passenger trains share the same lines in the UK. Granted, reliability isn't perfect, but at least an alternative to the congested motorways exists.