Back when they were still regulating data transmission under common carrier rules, there was competition in the point of presence: the telco had to lease lines to the home at the same price to competitors as to their internal service provider. The consequence of this was that they could not use their stranglehold on the last mile to charge monopoly rents. They could still make money selling Internet, but if they screwed you (e.g. with a "fast lane") you could switch. Now there is no competition, and guess what? They are starting to put in fast lanes.
So what you're saying is that we can have a monopoly of greedy corporate bastards, or we can have a government-run monopoly that charges a price that's regulated by voters. And out of these two choices, you are selecting the former, because boo-hoo, the voters will set the price at cost, and the corporations want to make a profit, and that's not fair. Well fuck their profit. They want to own our eyeballs and sell them to the highest bidder. Fuck that.
You want your streets constantly being dug up and inexpertly patched? You want your neighbor's inexpertly pointed microwave dish frying your eyeballs? What you ought to be asking for is an end to deals between municipalities and individual providers, and no restrictions on who can get into the market. Maybe it makes sense for municipalities to install last-mile service. Maybe it doesn't. Why not let the local voters decide?
My Bike Friday tikit (16" wheels) does really well on long rides. I haven't noticed any issues with momentum. Your body mass is most of the mass of the vehicle; changing the size of the wheels has very little effect on your momentum. And as I mentioned on another comment thread, it does fine on bumpy dirt roads, but yes, you definitely don't want to go single-tracking with it. Hardly a significant problem for the target audience.
If you ride a racing bike up a curb without hopping it, you'll wind up with a snakebite flat, and possibly a bent rim. I suspect this bike would do better on a curb, although I still wouldn't do it. You can't hop a tandem unless you and your partner are a stunt team, regardless of wheel size.
29ers are great for clearing obstacles in the woods, but not so great on tight single track rides because the steering is slower. I have a Fuji Outland with 26" wheels and I've taken it over 18" logs without any trouble. You aren't going to take this offroad, so the fact that it can't clear a log isn't really a practical issue. Team riding on rough terrain would be an interesting exhibition sport, but the coordination required is way out of the league of the typical couple or parent/child combo this bike is being marketed toward. If nothing else, this bike simply isn't geared for offroad riding.
I have a Bike Friday Tikit, which has 16" wheels. It does just fine on potholed dirt roads. You wouldn't want to ride it over a log, but you're not going to do that with a street bike either. One really interesting thing about the smaller wheels is that it's easier to recover if you lock them up—I've had two occasions where I did something on my tikit that would have resulted in a crash on a road bike, but I was able to save it on the tikit: once I locked up my front wheel on a patch of ice coming down a steep hill, and my reflexive releasing of the brakes was enough to avoid going down. Another time I got the front wheel caught in Muni tracks (it's a travel bike!) and had to wrestle it back up, but the small size of the wheels made it easy to wrestle them out of the track and recover. I had a bad crash doing the same thing on the Muni tracks back when I was living in San Francisco and had a road bike. I was down on the ground before I had time to react. So I would not discount the small wheels from a safety perspective.
On the other hand, riding two-up so close together changes the physics of the bike pretty significantly. I wonder if he's done the math on center of gravity. I would expect the steering to be pretty twitchy, and I'd be curious to see how it handles with two riders on a descent, and also whether it's possible for the stoker to stand on an ascent. That said, I suspect in the right circumstances, this would be a blast to ride, and the price seems pretty reasonable to me.
This latter bit is a real problem in our Prius: you can't enter a destination without stopping. It lets you do other things, just not that. Really annoying, because it's almost always the case that when we need to enter directions, we're driving somewhere together. It would be nice if the NHTSA rules allowed for passengers.
Sounds pretty one-sided. So you want to have something that is "yours" that I can't have even though possession of it is non-rivalrous. What do I get in exchange for giving up the (implicit) right to have an instance of this thing?
Someone who buys the government and then uses the power they have bought to get the government to come down like a ton of bricks on whomever they designate is an entirely different class of sleazebag than someone who violates copyright, no matter how egregiously.
I think you missed my point. Whether he's an asshole, or how big an asshole he is, or whatever, he still ought to get due process, just like any other asshole. The Keystone Kops bent over backwards to fuck this one up, as if rule of law were a nicety that only applies to people they don't want to prosecute (yet). This kind of behavior deserves only one reward: due process, the same thing Mr. Dotcom is entitled to.
Oh, and please don't copy the car while I'm in it. That could get confusing, and my duplicate self will probably be just as attached to the duplicate car as I am to the original.
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
According to Snowden, he didn't have "stuff" to copy. So unless China has developed brain download technology, there's no copy to discuss. I guess Snowdon could have been lying about that, but what would be the point?
Whistleblowers don't just release things that are illegal. Lots of really evil behavior is "legal". That doesn't mean it's right, or that people will support it when they find out about it. Need I remind you about the FISA Amendments Act of 2008? That made lots of exciting things legal...
(a) if this were closed we still wouldn't know. (b) OpenSSL is actually really well known to be so ugly that nobody wants to have to look at it. Mountains of cruft piled on mountains.
Open source code quality on average is a bit better than closed, but it's certainly no panacea.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when they were still regulating data transmission under common carrier rules, there was competition in the point of presence: the telco had to lease lines to the home at the same price to competitors as to their internal service provider. The consequence of this was that they could not use their stranglehold on the last mile to charge monopoly rents. They could still make money selling Internet, but if they screwed you (e.g. with a "fast lane") you could switch. Now there is no competition, and guess what? They are starting to put in fast lanes.
So what you're saying is that we can have a monopoly of greedy corporate bastards, or we can have a government-run monopoly that charges a price that's regulated by voters. And out of these two choices, you are selecting the former, because boo-hoo, the voters will set the price at cost, and the corporations want to make a profit, and that's not fair. Well fuck their profit. They want to own our eyeballs and sell them to the highest bidder. Fuck that.
You want your streets constantly being dug up and inexpertly patched? You want your neighbor's inexpertly pointed microwave dish frying your eyeballs? What you ought to be asking for is an end to deals between municipalities and individual providers, and no restrictions on who can get into the market. Maybe it makes sense for municipalities to install last-mile service. Maybe it doesn't. Why not let the local voters decide?
So our choices are (1) an industry shill or (2) someone with no experience in the industry?
I beg to differ.
My Bike Friday tikit (16" wheels) does really well on long rides. I haven't noticed any issues with momentum. Your body mass is most of the mass of the vehicle; changing the size of the wheels has very little effect on your momentum. And as I mentioned on another comment thread, it does fine on bumpy dirt roads, but yes, you definitely don't want to go single-tracking with it. Hardly a significant problem for the target audience.
If you ride a racing bike up a curb without hopping it, you'll wind up with a snakebite flat, and possibly a bent rim. I suspect this bike would do better on a curb, although I still wouldn't do it. You can't hop a tandem unless you and your partner are a stunt team, regardless of wheel size.
29ers are great for clearing obstacles in the woods, but not so great on tight single track rides because the steering is slower. I have a Fuji Outland with 26" wheels and I've taken it over 18" logs without any trouble. You aren't going to take this offroad, so the fact that it can't clear a log isn't really a practical issue. Team riding on rough terrain would be an interesting exhibition sport, but the coordination required is way out of the league of the typical couple or parent/child combo this bike is being marketed toward. If nothing else, this bike simply isn't geared for offroad riding.
I have a Bike Friday Tikit, which has 16" wheels. It does just fine on potholed dirt roads. You wouldn't want to ride it over a log, but you're not going to do that with a street bike either. One really interesting thing about the smaller wheels is that it's easier to recover if you lock them up—I've had two occasions where I did something on my tikit that would have resulted in a crash on a road bike, but I was able to save it on the tikit: once I locked up my front wheel on a patch of ice coming down a steep hill, and my reflexive releasing of the brakes was enough to avoid going down. Another time I got the front wheel caught in Muni tracks (it's a travel bike!) and had to wrestle it back up, but the small size of the wheels made it easy to wrestle them out of the track and recover. I had a bad crash doing the same thing on the Muni tracks back when I was living in San Francisco and had a road bike. I was down on the ground before I had time to react. So I would not discount the small wheels from a safety perspective.
On the other hand, riding two-up so close together changes the physics of the bike pretty significantly. I wonder if he's done the math on center of gravity. I would expect the steering to be pretty twitchy, and I'd be curious to see how it handles with two riders on a descent, and also whether it's possible for the stoker to stand on an ascent. That said, I suspect in the right circumstances, this would be a blast to ride, and the price seems pretty reasonable to me.
This latter bit is a real problem in our Prius: you can't enter a destination without stopping. It lets you do other things, just not that. Really annoying, because it's almost always the case that when we need to enter directions, we're driving somewhere together. It would be nice if the NHTSA rules allowed for passengers.
Sounds pretty one-sided. So you want to have something that is "yours" that I can't have even though possession of it is non-rivalrous. What do I get in exchange for giving up the (implicit) right to have an instance of this thing?
Someone who buys the government and then uses the power they have bought to get the government to come down like a ton of bricks on whomever they designate is an entirely different class of sleazebag than someone who violates copyright, no matter how egregiously.
I think you missed my point. Whether he's an asshole, or how big an asshole he is, or whatever, he still ought to get due process, just like any other asshole. The Keystone Kops bent over backwards to fuck this one up, as if rule of law were a nicety that only applies to people they don't want to prosecute (yet). This kind of behavior deserves only one reward: due process, the same thing Mr. Dotcom is entitled to.
You didn't answer the question.
Good point. As soon as someone demonstrates a 3d xerox machine, I'll do that. Of course, you'd be better off copying something nicer...
Oh, and please don't copy the car while I'm in it. That could get confusing, and my duplicate self will probably be just as attached to the duplicate car as I am to the original.
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
What does it mean for a thing to be yours?
According to Snowden, he didn't have "stuff" to copy. So unless China has developed brain download technology, there's no copy to discuss. I guess Snowdon could have been lying about that, but what would be the point?
Whistleblowers don't just release things that are illegal. Lots of really evil behavior is "legal". That doesn't mean it's right, or that people will support it when they find out about it. Need I remind you about the FISA Amendments Act of 2008? That made lots of exciting things legal...
If simply being an asshole was just cause to terminate your civil rights, we'd all be behind bars.
Hundreds of millions of people _do_ do copyright infringement, because there are typically no adverse consequences.
FTFY.
(a) if this were closed we still wouldn't know.
(b) OpenSSL is actually really well known to be so ugly that nobody wants to have to look at it. Mountains of cruft piled on mountains.
Open source code quality on average is a bit better than closed, but it's certainly no panacea.
Just feed a bayesian analysis with postings from /. and use that to match against twitter. Should be able to get within 10%...
I see what you did there. :)
Do people actually ride bicycles long distances with a backpacks on? Haven't y'all heard of panniers?