What it really comes down to is that we don't know how to value complexity. People want to judge how a business is doing by comparing recent costs to recent expenses. If we really wanted to know, we'd have to get into things like "employee morale" and "long-term business potential of a product", but we don't really know how to measure those things and we can't easily figure out how to connect them to a business's operation. Business took a page from science and said, "If I can't measure it, it doesn't exist."
If you need to look at the big picture and make subtle judgements in order to understand the value of a thing, then that thing won't be valued very highly. Anyway, most executives are sociopaths who have clawed their way to the top.
Oh, yeah. I got another one for you: environmentalist who would complain and complain about carbon being released in the atmosphere, claim it's literally the end of the world, and then *still* oppose nuclear power in any form. Or they complain about pollution from old power plants, but also oppose the construction of new power plants that would allow the old plants to be decommissioned. Ideology run amok, in most cases.
I want public transportation more for the long term economic benefits than for the environmental benefits.
If the problem is that Google has created a headache for developers, that doesn't make me want to buy one of these things. Regardless, I've had enough dealings with carriers and cell phone manufacturers to doubt that they're innocent in delaying upgrades.
I'm just not sure that we can change out of a car-based city design now that we've had so much money, as you point out, invested into it.
Well I would not claim that this is a quick and easy problem to fix. The first thing is recognizing that our current way of dealing with things is not ideal, is not the only solution, and is not even the best solution. The next step is deciding which direction to go, which long-term goals to set. After that, you worry about what the next steps are that you can take toward that goal.
So I'm not even worried yet about trying to convince you that we should spend $X over the next Y years to build public transportation. I'm just trying to convince you that "everyone owns their own car" is actually not a very good model for transportation infrastructure, and that building public transportation is not inherently foolish, evil, or communist. If you agree with me that far, then I'm happy.
...I asked the students what it would take to get them to take public transportation instead of using their cars...
Meh... college kids aren't necessarily the most wise people to be asking these things. They think they're indestructible, they often aren't very aware of other ways of living, and they think cars are cool. Take away their parents' money and give them a viable public transportation system; their hands will be less cold and dead as they hand over the keys to the car.
Uh, no. Tea Baggers was a term that Rachel Maddow / Keith Olberman and such came up for them.
Early on in the whole thing, I saw news footage of teabaggers talking about "tea bagging" Congressman, having "tea bagging parties", and referring to the "tea bagging movement" and "tea bagging parties". Maybe they didn't refer to themselves specifically as "teabaggers", but they certainly brought it on themselves.
It was only after they realized what the slang meant that they tried to blame the media for giving them the name. Some of them still talk about "tea bagging" people.
I haven't seen any racism in the movement.
I'm not saying it's representitive of the "movement" in general, but it's in there: image and image. I've seen worse, including signs that reference having a ["n" word] in the white house, advocating killing Obama, and claiming that Obama hates white people, but didn't see them in my hasty search.
Essentially, it seems to me that what started as a Libertarian movement has been co-opted by the paranoid wing of the Republican party. Now apparently Sarah Palin and Glen Beck have positioned themselves as central figures in the teabagging movement. Yeah, I'm going to keep calling them that until they get reasonable. Of all the crappy stuff that our government does, these people are really most upset about providing health care and building infrastructure? Really?
Well it's really being driven by consumerism in general. Studios like it because (a) it will get you to go to the theaters; and (b) if 3D TVs do make it to market, they can re-sell you the same movies all over again. You bought them on VHS, then in the "Director's Cut", then the "Special Edition", then the "Special Edition DVD", then the "Super Ultra Director's Cut on BluRay: now with more crap that was cut out for good reason". If they can get you to buy it again in the "Super Ultra Director's Cut on 3D BluRay", then they'll be happy.
Meanwhile everyone and their grandmother has a 50" LED backlit LCD TV, so the TV manufacturers need to find a new gimmick to get you to buy a new TV. They're hoping 3D will be that new gimmick.
I don't know if consumers will go for it. I think part of the reason Bluray discs aren't selling is because of the uncertainty of when the next new big thing is coming out. As in, "I just got used to DVDs and now they're going obsolete. How many years after I amass a Bluray collection does the world decide that they're obsolete, and I'm expected to move to some new format? I guess I'd better not buy anything until this gets sorted out."
And besides, your brain really does take 2D pictures and extrapolate a 3rd dimension all on its own. You're basically saying, "I want to spend tons of money and wear stupid glasses so I can have a set of electronics do for me what my brain does automatically and instantaneously anyway." My personal feeling: not worth it.
I'm glad to see this. I'm a current iPhone user, but I'm considering moving to an Android phone. One of the things that has kept me from taking the plunge is the perception that the Android market is fragmented and manufacturers aren't bothering to update their existing models with the most advanced version of the OS available. I don't know if that's a reality, but that's my perception.
So what worries me is that I'll buy a Droid (or whichever model) and some feature will be buggy. The problem will be fixed in an OS update, but that update won't ever make it to my phone. Or some great new application will be released, but it won't work on my phone because I can't upgrade the OS.
I'm not a big fan of Apple's tight control over application distribution, but at least they're keeping things pretty compatible and offering free upgrades to their newest OS version. If Motorola can show that they'll keep these things up to date, maybe I'll make the switch.
But also, regarding the idea that public transportation is more expensive, cars/roads are very expensive too. It's just that many of the costs are hidden.
Think about all the tax money spent on roads, bridges, etc. Now add to that the money all of us (everyone in the country) spend on our cars. Include gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. Plus our government subsidized gasoline production, ethanol production, etc., so add in all those subsidies. Now add in all the money the government has spent on subsidizing the car industry, too.
You probably think we're done, but that's not even all of it. Think about damages. How many car accidents are there every year? How much money is spent on repairing the cars in those accidents? How much life is lost, and how much is spent on hospital bills from those crashes? How much property damage is there? And think of all the money we spend on enforcing speed limits, drunk driving rules, associated court costs and jail time for offenders.
Still not done. Now think of the pollution. The air pollution from cars damages buildings, so add in all the maintenance and repair from that. Plus cleanup-- in areas with heavy traffic, car pollution adds a layer of soot to everything. Car pollution also adds to respiratory and cardiovascular disease in people, so figure in any additional health costs due to that. And if we assume for a second that global warming is real (I don't know your stance on that), then add in the eventual costs of offsetting that, as well as the risk of catastrophic environmental damage.
Think we're done now? Not quite: energy independence. How much of our wealth is exported to other countries for oil? Where do you think the funding for terrorism comes from? So if we're really getting bold, add in the economic damage of 9/11 and the Iraq war into the mix. We can't blame the whole thing on cars, so maybe we'll only assign some small percentage of the cost of the Iraq war to this equation.
So add up all the money we've talked about, and give me a number. Then you have your budget for public transportation. Sure, we have to come up with a similar list for public transportation, but I'll bet any amount of money that public transportation eventually comes out cheaper for our society as a whole.
But OC and LA make up one contiguous metropolitan area
Even in Manhattan, some areas have worse traffic than others. Driving in midtown can be a nightmare; go uptown and it's a breath of fresh air. Look at the entire NYC metro area (including all the boroughs and parts of NJ), and the difference is tremendous; Manhattan has much worse traffic than the surrounding areas in spite of having good public transportation. That doesn't mean that the public transportation isn't helping. I read an article recently about how NYC has added about half a million people in the past 10 years, yet the number of cars in the city have stayed the same.
Yes, LA can't be fixed by simply adding mass transit. It's a city designed for cars, hence my Windows ME analogy. You can't take a city designed for cars, tack on a bus route, and expect it all to work out.
The issue with it is that when you redirect public funds from roads to mass transit, the roads suffer
I suppose. Of course, if you redirect public funds from mass transit to roads, then mass transit suffers.
You only have limited tax money to play with.
Well you might have more if we weren't wasting so much on inefficient methods of travel. Admittedly that's playing the long game, but you get more taxes when there's economic growth, and you get better economic growth when there are big gains in efficiency due to improved infrastructure.
What tea baggers, as you call them, are protesting are the increases in government spending, not really the spending itself.
Well I didn't come up with the term "tea baggers". They came up with the name themselves and talked about "tea bagging" people. But what they're protesting is shifting and vague, depends on which tea bagger you ask and when you ask them. The "movement" covers everything from tax reform to Libertarian policies to anti-Obama racism to incoherent anti-government paranoia. But my main argument here is against the claim that building public infrastructure is "communist" unless you're talking about roads. Essentially the point of view is, "government action is evil unless it's something that I rely on, in which case it's perfectly fine." Public health care = evil, but I'm on Medicare so Medicare is fine. Public infrastructure = evil, but I like to drive so Interstate highways are fine.
LA and SF are cases in point. You can make road-based networks work, but you have to upgrade your roads as more people move into your area.
But cases in point of what? Cities that are designed under the assumption that everyone will have cars, and thereby force people to own cars? Part of the problem that you might not be seeing is that there comes a point where you simply *can't* build enough roads. In the extreme case, you look at a city like NYC where all the land is already taken up with roads and buildings. Washington DC is less extreme, but traffic is a constant mess because it's not practical to really build enough roads. I suspect LA is in the same boat as DC.
But the real question is, when you reach the saturation point, do you want your city to have anticipated and planned for the problem, building so that you can put in an effective public transportation system? Or do you want to live in a city where everything has been designed and zoned in such a way that you *need* a car?
Here's the takeaway point: it's not about building a huge unwieldy public transportation web that covers the mass of suburban sprawl; it's about trying to design our cities and towns better so that you can get most of your daily needs met within a 15 minute walk. If you start trying to think about well designed cities, public transportation is a natural consequence.
we can see that Orange County, which invested money in rods, is busy but usable. LA had a mayor that decided that investing the money in public transportation was instead the way to go. So they have a light rail system, a subway, and a nice bus system... and the worst roads in the country. When you drive south on the I-5 it's like a breath of fresh air when you cross over into OC. People go from 35 to 75.
Well first, it's not as simple as comparing any two places. Not to drag out trite sayings, but correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. Traffic is better in Orange County, fine. Are the same things going on in both areas? Is the the same population, same industries, same use of land? Where's the traffic flow coming from, and where is it going to? There are loads of variables.
Second, are people really utilizing the public transportation there? I haven't been to LA in... well I guess it's over 10 years now, but to my recollection, you kind of needed a car. It was all spread out, busy roads and highways all over the place. That's not what I'm talking about. Throwing a light rail into LA and expecting it to take care of your transportation problems is like throwing an antivirus onto Windows ME and expecting it to take care of your security problems.
If people were using public transportation very heavily, then it would probably mean it *is* alleviating a lot of the traffic problems. If you think traffic is bad now, imagine each of the public transportation riders in their own cars, adding to it.
But I suspect that most people aren't taking public transportation, and who can blame them. You live in a city where you really need a car to get by and live your life. Someone puts down bus route nearby, but you still need a car. You need to make all the payments and pay for insurance. Your car is just sitting in your driveway. Are you really going to walk 20 minutes to the bus stop, wait 30 minutes for the bus to show, ride for another 20 minutes, walk 15 minutes more to get to someplace that's a 10 minute drive away? Then you have to go through the whole thing again going home.
Now compare that to living in a city where the public transportation really genuinely takes you everywhere you need to go, quickly and cheaply. It runs pretty regularly, not a lot of waiting. It's at least moderately clean. Most of the things you need to live are within a few blocks of your house/apartment, and the rest are within a 20 minute bike ride or train ride. Are you really going to spend a couple hundred dollars on car payments, plus insurance, plus gas, plus tolls, plus parking, plus maintenance, plus... whatever? Why?
It's not quite like that. The notion of the suburbs didn't really exist before WWII - upon return, and coincident with several factors: the GI bill, the development of prefab construction making independent homes cheap, and societal norms changing so that being a homeowner was part and parcel of the father/leader of the household, caused the explosion of suburbs.
Something as big as the development of suburbs were bound to have many factors, but as you admit, it simply wouldn't have been possible without cars becoming so commonplace. They still aren't possible without the assumption that pretty much everyone will have their own car.
But the larger point I was trying to make was that, contrary to the view that our society would fall apart if everyone didn't have their own car, most people simply didn't have that kind of transportation option a few decades ago. Basically, we already know how to live without cars (that is, most people not needing cars in their day-to-day lives). We don't need to figure it out. The only reason we can't is because our cities have been so poorly planned.
And yes, in many areas, there was a conscious, deliberate, and sometimes even public decision to forgo expanding public transportation, in some cases even dismantling working systems, because cars w
I would bet IE9 is going to hand the video decoding off to the WMP components of the OS. As you said, Safari hands the decoding off to Quicktime (I think on Windows, too). Someone else here said Opera also doesn't include decoders, but tries to use the codecs that come with the OS.
Well people also misunderstand the whole idea of security; the point isn't really to make unauthorized access impossible. The point is to make it difficult, annoying, problematic, likely that you'll get caught trying to gain access-- in other words, to make attaining unauthorized access "not worth it" to prospective attackers.
So first you want to know who the prospective attackers are, what their skill set is, and how motivated they'll be to gain access. If your possible attackers are very skilled and very motivated, then you need to making gaining unauthorized access harder, increase the chances that anyone who tries will be caught. If your likely attackers are unmotivated amateurs, then you reach the level of diminishing returns much more quickly.
But I guess that part of the point here might be, when your IT guy tells a user to tighten security and the user doesn't follow instructions, how stupid is the user? the claim seems to be, "He's not stupid. It's just that the IT guy has motivation to increase security and the user doesn't." Fair enough.
On the other hand, even if users are making rational decisions, I'm not sure they're making them for rational reasons. You could convince me that it's often in a user's best interest to defy their company's IT guy, but you won't convince me that users never do these things simply out of defiance and even spite.
It's even more basic - in America, it's not possible to get by without a car.
That's pretty much what I was saying, but go on...
It has to do with population density.
Well... sort of. It has to do with *how we build our cities*. We general build our cities to have small downtown areas that aren't very livable, and then we surround them with miles and miles of suburban sprawl where you have to drive even to get to a grocery store or your neighborhood park. As far as I can tell, most Americans believe that this is the only option, and things could never exist another way.
However, it's really the result of deliberate decisions made a handful of decades ago. There wasn't really any such thing as "suburbs" 100 years ago. Lots of policy-makers decided to bet the future of America on the auto industry. Over several decades, they worked to dismantle public transportation systems, cut funding to train systems, and prop up the auto industry when necessary. We built roads everywhere, built highways everywhere, and it seemed for a while that it was a good solution.
Now we've come to understand that it's tremendously wasteful to expect each person to own, maintain, and fuel their own car. We can't build enough roads in and around major cities to handle all of the traffic. We can't keep up with the energy demand. The whole thing is unsustainable. Public transportation would be much more efficient, but we've been planning our cities and towns and suburbs around the idea that everyone would have a car.
It's not that everyone needs a car because we have low population density; it's that we have a low population density because we've spaced ourselves out on the assumption that everyone would have a car.
Look, you're obviously childish and hostile, and probably trolling, but I'll answer a couple things anyway.
OOXML: the main problem with calling it a standard is not that there might be patented technology in it, but that it wasn't (from what I've read) a very good standard. It was long and confusing and had gaping holes that would make it difficult/impossible for someone else to make a real implementation from their documentation, but Microsoft rammed it through ISO anyhow. No one is complaining that H264 is a bad standard, though. The only complaint is that it's dangerous for a business-backed open source application to include support.
If you want me to sign a petition or write my congressman or something to say, "End software patents, support GPL, reform copyrights and patents, increase freedom, etc." then I'm right with you. Still, the reality is that people are moving to H264 as *the* standard video codec. That reality isn't made any better by forcing people to watch their H264 movies in a proprietary media player plug-in, rather than allowing them to view it in the media player of their choice.
And honestly, I don't think that should bother us all *that much*. ACID3 was not meant to be the be-all and end-all of browser tests. It's just one tool that browser developers can use to measure their progress towards standards compliance, but compliance is the goal.
So the real issues: Are how compliant is IE? Is it making good progress towards compliance? Is it an honest attempt by Microsoft, or are they giving a shady half-measure while sabotaging the standards?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but those are the questions that I'm concerned about. The overarching concern is, does your common everyday web developer need to use a bunch of tweaks and cut out features in order to get their pages to work properly on IE, or can they simply develop their pages to standard and assume that IE will work properly?
Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. The worst thing is googling for something and finding a lot of conflicting advice. Like one guy saying, "Oh, you want to do X? Well then install package Y. Some people will tell you to use package Z, but for reasons I won't go into here, that's a very bad move." Then another site will say, "DO NOT USE package Y. It's terrible and has lots of security problems. Use package Z." No further explanation.
So then you have to try to figure out, which of these guys knows what he's talking about? Was one of these pages written more recently than the other, and maybe the situation changed in between when they were written? Do either of these vague objections actually apply to my situation?
But... that's kind of hard to address. Opinions will differ.
When predicting the future, one can always say, "nuh uh!" I could say, "The world probably won't explode in the next 10 seconds," and you could say, "It might! Where's your evidence!"
And theoretically you'd be right, but in practical application it's childish and senseless. Yes, I'd prefer that everyone jump on board with standards that are completely unencumbered by patents. However, we don't know for sure that there even are any decent patent-free video codecs. Ogg is ok, though many believe it's not as good as H264 and it certainly doesn't have widespread hardware support. Still, we don't *know* that there are no patented technologies in Ogg Theora. There may be, but no one has come forward to ask for licenses for them.
Likewise, MPEG has not come forward and asked me to pay them for using x264. They're unlikely to, specifically because they *want* me to use the codec. They *want* it to be widespread so that they can get a cut of every bluray sale and every iTunes movie rental.
So better not make statements about which you know nothing if you do not wish to reveal to the world your idiocy.
Are you serious? What, are you 5 years old? Grow up.
Argue all you want about whether people are using patented technologies legally, but it doesn't really matter. Patent infringement isn't an absolute "crime". It's not like murder or something. You are using patents all the time in your daily life without licensing them, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not "infringement". No one has asked you not to use them. The patent holders haven't asked you to buy a license.
GIF graphic files were patent encumbered. MP3 is patent encumbered. H264 is patent encumbered. In practical terms, as far as whether they're adopted, it doesn't matter very much. Would I rather have all these patents voided so we can do whatever we want? Sure. Still, the real issue is how the patent holder will try to enforce things, and they're already walking a fine line.
Regardless, what we were really talking about is Flash. Flash doesn't actually diminish use of h264 anyway. It just serves as a media player which plays the same h264 files.
It depends on the goods, and it depends on the business model.
What matters isn't entirely freight throughput, but also cost. And all of that operates within the scope of things needing to get where they're going "fast enough". What constitutes "fast enough" depends on things like, whether the goods are perishable or time-sensitive, and whether your competitors can get there faster and easier. Plus, you do reach a point where, if the cost of going faster is negligible, then faster is better.
If you RTFA:
China benefits because it will be able to transport materials cheaply into manufacturing centers inside its borders and the Eastern Hemisphere benefits by getting a fast, efficient, low carbon transportation system.
Yes, I'm asserting that the H264 patent holders aren't going to go after any consumers. They don't care if you install VLC. They're far more interested in getting money from the TV/movie industry and from Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Given how incompetently AMTRAK has been run, and the relative success of the car, it's no wonder that Americans are suspicious of putting money into trains.
Well roads aren't generally expected to function as businesses. Hell, these days, neither are car companies.
I'm afraid it's more basic: Most Americans don't have any idea that it's possible to have a society where every person doesn't have their own car.
Slashdot Mirror
What it really comes down to is that we don't know how to value complexity. People want to judge how a business is doing by comparing recent costs to recent expenses. If we really wanted to know, we'd have to get into things like "employee morale" and "long-term business potential of a product", but we don't really know how to measure those things and we can't easily figure out how to connect them to a business's operation. Business took a page from science and said, "If I can't measure it, it doesn't exist."
If you need to look at the big picture and make subtle judgements in order to understand the value of a thing, then that thing won't be valued very highly. Anyway, most executives are sociopaths who have clawed their way to the top.
But kids will spend hours doing boring grinding in WoW. They won't do the boring grinding of homework as readily. I think that's part of the point.
Aside from video services like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc, haven't we learned that Internet on our TV is kind of...lame?
So you're saying that, aside from good Internet services which are good, the Internet on the TV is lame...?
Prediction: the eventual plan is to get Hulu-like programming on YouTube, then release a YouTube set-top box that can replace cable TV.
Well... it's willing to walk away from China rather than being hacked.
Oh, yeah. I got another one for you: environmentalist who would complain and complain about carbon being released in the atmosphere, claim it's literally the end of the world, and then *still* oppose nuclear power in any form. Or they complain about pollution from old power plants, but also oppose the construction of new power plants that would allow the old plants to be decommissioned. Ideology run amok, in most cases.
I want public transportation more for the long term economic benefits than for the environmental benefits.
Or AT&T. (link)
Of course, getting the unlocked version means that it's not subsidized by the carrier. I'm not sure how much that bothers me.
If the problem is that Google has created a headache for developers, that doesn't make me want to buy one of these things. Regardless, I've had enough dealings with carriers and cell phone manufacturers to doubt that they're innocent in delaying upgrades.
I'm just not sure that we can change out of a car-based city design now that we've had so much money, as you point out, invested into it.
Well I would not claim that this is a quick and easy problem to fix. The first thing is recognizing that our current way of dealing with things is not ideal, is not the only solution, and is not even the best solution. The next step is deciding which direction to go, which long-term goals to set. After that, you worry about what the next steps are that you can take toward that goal.
So I'm not even worried yet about trying to convince you that we should spend $X over the next Y years to build public transportation. I'm just trying to convince you that "everyone owns their own car" is actually not a very good model for transportation infrastructure, and that building public transportation is not inherently foolish, evil, or communist. If you agree with me that far, then I'm happy.
...I asked the students what it would take to get them to take public transportation instead of using their cars...
Meh... college kids aren't necessarily the most wise people to be asking these things. They think they're indestructible, they often aren't very aware of other ways of living, and they think cars are cool. Take away their parents' money and give them a viable public transportation system; their hands will be less cold and dead as they hand over the keys to the car.
Uh, no. Tea Baggers was a term that Rachel Maddow / Keith Olberman and such came up for them.
Early on in the whole thing, I saw news footage of teabaggers talking about "tea bagging" Congressman, having "tea bagging parties", and referring to the "tea bagging movement" and "tea bagging parties". Maybe they didn't refer to themselves specifically as "teabaggers", but they certainly brought it on themselves.
It was only after they realized what the slang meant that they tried to blame the media for giving them the name. Some of them still talk about "tea bagging" people.
I haven't seen any racism in the movement.
I'm not saying it's representitive of the "movement" in general, but it's in there: image and image. I've seen worse, including signs that reference having a ["n" word] in the white house, advocating killing Obama, and claiming that Obama hates white people, but didn't see them in my hasty search.
Essentially, it seems to me that what started as a Libertarian movement has been co-opted by the paranoid wing of the Republican party. Now apparently Sarah Palin and Glen Beck have positioned themselves as central figures in the teabagging movement. Yeah, I'm going to keep calling them that until they get reasonable. Of all the crappy stuff that our government does, these people are really most upset about providing health care and building infrastructure? Really?
Well it's really being driven by consumerism in general. Studios like it because (a) it will get you to go to the theaters; and (b) if 3D TVs do make it to market, they can re-sell you the same movies all over again. You bought them on VHS, then in the "Director's Cut", then the "Special Edition", then the "Special Edition DVD", then the "Super Ultra Director's Cut on BluRay: now with more crap that was cut out for good reason". If they can get you to buy it again in the "Super Ultra Director's Cut on 3D BluRay", then they'll be happy.
Meanwhile everyone and their grandmother has a 50" LED backlit LCD TV, so the TV manufacturers need to find a new gimmick to get you to buy a new TV. They're hoping 3D will be that new gimmick.
I don't know if consumers will go for it. I think part of the reason Bluray discs aren't selling is because of the uncertainty of when the next new big thing is coming out. As in, "I just got used to DVDs and now they're going obsolete. How many years after I amass a Bluray collection does the world decide that they're obsolete, and I'm expected to move to some new format? I guess I'd better not buy anything until this gets sorted out."
And besides, your brain really does take 2D pictures and extrapolate a 3rd dimension all on its own. You're basically saying, "I want to spend tons of money and wear stupid glasses so I can have a set of electronics do for me what my brain does automatically and instantaneously anyway." My personal feeling: not worth it.
I'm glad to see this. I'm a current iPhone user, but I'm considering moving to an Android phone. One of the things that has kept me from taking the plunge is the perception that the Android market is fragmented and manufacturers aren't bothering to update their existing models with the most advanced version of the OS available. I don't know if that's a reality, but that's my perception.
So what worries me is that I'll buy a Droid (or whichever model) and some feature will be buggy. The problem will be fixed in an OS update, but that update won't ever make it to my phone. Or some great new application will be released, but it won't work on my phone because I can't upgrade the OS.
I'm not a big fan of Apple's tight control over application distribution, but at least they're keeping things pretty compatible and offering free upgrades to their newest OS version. If Motorola can show that they'll keep these things up to date, maybe I'll make the switch.
But also, regarding the idea that public transportation is more expensive, cars/roads are very expensive too. It's just that many of the costs are hidden.
Think about all the tax money spent on roads, bridges, etc. Now add to that the money all of us (everyone in the country) spend on our cars. Include gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. Plus our government subsidized gasoline production, ethanol production, etc., so add in all those subsidies. Now add in all the money the government has spent on subsidizing the car industry, too.
You probably think we're done, but that's not even all of it. Think about damages. How many car accidents are there every year? How much money is spent on repairing the cars in those accidents? How much life is lost, and how much is spent on hospital bills from those crashes? How much property damage is there? And think of all the money we spend on enforcing speed limits, drunk driving rules, associated court costs and jail time for offenders.
Still not done. Now think of the pollution. The air pollution from cars damages buildings, so add in all the maintenance and repair from that. Plus cleanup-- in areas with heavy traffic, car pollution adds a layer of soot to everything. Car pollution also adds to respiratory and cardiovascular disease in people, so figure in any additional health costs due to that. And if we assume for a second that global warming is real (I don't know your stance on that), then add in the eventual costs of offsetting that, as well as the risk of catastrophic environmental damage.
Think we're done now? Not quite: energy independence. How much of our wealth is exported to other countries for oil? Where do you think the funding for terrorism comes from? So if we're really getting bold, add in the economic damage of 9/11 and the Iraq war into the mix. We can't blame the whole thing on cars, so maybe we'll only assign some small percentage of the cost of the Iraq war to this equation.
So add up all the money we've talked about, and give me a number. Then you have your budget for public transportation. Sure, we have to come up with a similar list for public transportation, but I'll bet any amount of money that public transportation eventually comes out cheaper for our society as a whole.
But OC and LA make up one contiguous metropolitan area
Even in Manhattan, some areas have worse traffic than others. Driving in midtown can be a nightmare; go uptown and it's a breath of fresh air. Look at the entire NYC metro area (including all the boroughs and parts of NJ), and the difference is tremendous; Manhattan has much worse traffic than the surrounding areas in spite of having good public transportation. That doesn't mean that the public transportation isn't helping. I read an article recently about how NYC has added about half a million people in the past 10 years, yet the number of cars in the city have stayed the same.
Yes, LA can't be fixed by simply adding mass transit. It's a city designed for cars, hence my Windows ME analogy. You can't take a city designed for cars, tack on a bus route, and expect it all to work out.
The issue with it is that when you redirect public funds from roads to mass transit, the roads suffer
I suppose. Of course, if you redirect public funds from mass transit to roads, then mass transit suffers.
You only have limited tax money to play with.
Well you might have more if we weren't wasting so much on inefficient methods of travel. Admittedly that's playing the long game, but you get more taxes when there's economic growth, and you get better economic growth when there are big gains in efficiency due to improved infrastructure.
What tea baggers, as you call them, are protesting are the increases in government spending, not really the spending itself.
Well I didn't come up with the term "tea baggers". They came up with the name themselves and talked about "tea bagging" people. But what they're protesting is shifting and vague, depends on which tea bagger you ask and when you ask them. The "movement" covers everything from tax reform to Libertarian policies to anti-Obama racism to incoherent anti-government paranoia. But my main argument here is against the claim that building public infrastructure is "communist" unless you're talking about roads. Essentially the point of view is, "government action is evil unless it's something that I rely on, in which case it's perfectly fine." Public health care = evil, but I'm on Medicare so Medicare is fine. Public infrastructure = evil, but I like to drive so Interstate highways are fine.
LA and SF are cases in point. You can make road-based networks work, but you have to upgrade your roads as more people move into your area.
But cases in point of what? Cities that are designed under the assumption that everyone will have cars, and thereby force people to own cars? Part of the problem that you might not be seeing is that there comes a point where you simply *can't* build enough roads. In the extreme case, you look at a city like NYC where all the land is already taken up with roads and buildings. Washington DC is less extreme, but traffic is a constant mess because it's not practical to really build enough roads. I suspect LA is in the same boat as DC.
But the real question is, when you reach the saturation point, do you want your city to have anticipated and planned for the problem, building so that you can put in an effective public transportation system? Or do you want to live in a city where everything has been designed and zoned in such a way that you *need* a car?
Here's the takeaway point: it's not about building a huge unwieldy public transportation web that covers the mass of suburban sprawl; it's about trying to design our cities and towns better so that you can get most of your daily needs met within a 15 minute walk. If you start trying to think about well designed cities, public transportation is a natural consequence.
we can see that Orange County, which invested money in rods, is busy but usable. LA had a mayor that decided that investing the money in public transportation was instead the way to go. So they have a light rail system, a subway, and a nice bus system... and the worst roads in the country. When you drive south on the I-5 it's like a breath of fresh air when you cross over into OC. People go from 35 to 75.
Well first, it's not as simple as comparing any two places. Not to drag out trite sayings, but correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. Traffic is better in Orange County, fine. Are the same things going on in both areas? Is the the same population, same industries, same use of land? Where's the traffic flow coming from, and where is it going to? There are loads of variables.
Second, are people really utilizing the public transportation there? I haven't been to LA in... well I guess it's over 10 years now, but to my recollection, you kind of needed a car. It was all spread out, busy roads and highways all over the place. That's not what I'm talking about. Throwing a light rail into LA and expecting it to take care of your transportation problems is like throwing an antivirus onto Windows ME and expecting it to take care of your security problems.
If people were using public transportation very heavily, then it would probably mean it *is* alleviating a lot of the traffic problems. If you think traffic is bad now, imagine each of the public transportation riders in their own cars, adding to it.
But I suspect that most people aren't taking public transportation, and who can blame them. You live in a city where you really need a car to get by and live your life. Someone puts down bus route nearby, but you still need a car. You need to make all the payments and pay for insurance. Your car is just sitting in your driveway. Are you really going to walk 20 minutes to the bus stop, wait 30 minutes for the bus to show, ride for another 20 minutes, walk 15 minutes more to get to someplace that's a 10 minute drive away? Then you have to go through the whole thing again going home.
Now compare that to living in a city where the public transportation really genuinely takes you everywhere you need to go, quickly and cheaply. It runs pretty regularly, not a lot of waiting. It's at least moderately clean. Most of the things you need to live are within a few blocks of your house/apartment, and the rest are within a 20 minute bike ride or train ride. Are you really going to spend a couple hundred dollars on car payments, plus insurance, plus gas, plus tolls, plus parking, plus maintenance, plus... whatever? Why?
It's not quite like that. The notion of the suburbs didn't really exist before WWII - upon return, and coincident with several factors: the GI bill, the development of prefab construction making independent homes cheap, and societal norms changing so that being a homeowner was part and parcel of the father/leader of the household, caused the explosion of suburbs.
Something as big as the development of suburbs were bound to have many factors, but as you admit, it simply wouldn't have been possible without cars becoming so commonplace. They still aren't possible without the assumption that pretty much everyone will have their own car.
But the larger point I was trying to make was that, contrary to the view that our society would fall apart if everyone didn't have their own car, most people simply didn't have that kind of transportation option a few decades ago. Basically, we already know how to live without cars (that is, most people not needing cars in their day-to-day lives). We don't need to figure it out. The only reason we can't is because our cities have been so poorly planned.
And yes, in many areas, there was a conscious, deliberate, and sometimes even public decision to forgo expanding public transportation, in some cases even dismantling working systems, because cars w
I would bet IE9 is going to hand the video decoding off to the WMP components of the OS. As you said, Safari hands the decoding off to Quicktime (I think on Windows, too). Someone else here said Opera also doesn't include decoders, but tries to use the codecs that come with the OS.
Well people also misunderstand the whole idea of security; the point isn't really to make unauthorized access impossible. The point is to make it difficult, annoying, problematic, likely that you'll get caught trying to gain access-- in other words, to make attaining unauthorized access "not worth it" to prospective attackers.
So first you want to know who the prospective attackers are, what their skill set is, and how motivated they'll be to gain access. If your possible attackers are very skilled and very motivated, then you need to making gaining unauthorized access harder, increase the chances that anyone who tries will be caught. If your likely attackers are unmotivated amateurs, then you reach the level of diminishing returns much more quickly.
But I guess that part of the point here might be, when your IT guy tells a user to tighten security and the user doesn't follow instructions, how stupid is the user? the claim seems to be, "He's not stupid. It's just that the IT guy has motivation to increase security and the user doesn't." Fair enough.
On the other hand, even if users are making rational decisions, I'm not sure they're making them for rational reasons. You could convince me that it's often in a user's best interest to defy their company's IT guy, but you won't convince me that users never do these things simply out of defiance and even spite.
It's even more basic - in America, it's not possible to get by without a car.
That's pretty much what I was saying, but go on...
It has to do with population density.
Well... sort of. It has to do with *how we build our cities*. We general build our cities to have small downtown areas that aren't very livable, and then we surround them with miles and miles of suburban sprawl where you have to drive even to get to a grocery store or your neighborhood park. As far as I can tell, most Americans believe that this is the only option, and things could never exist another way.
However, it's really the result of deliberate decisions made a handful of decades ago. There wasn't really any such thing as "suburbs" 100 years ago. Lots of policy-makers decided to bet the future of America on the auto industry. Over several decades, they worked to dismantle public transportation systems, cut funding to train systems, and prop up the auto industry when necessary. We built roads everywhere, built highways everywhere, and it seemed for a while that it was a good solution.
Now we've come to understand that it's tremendously wasteful to expect each person to own, maintain, and fuel their own car. We can't build enough roads in and around major cities to handle all of the traffic. We can't keep up with the energy demand. The whole thing is unsustainable. Public transportation would be much more efficient, but we've been planning our cities and towns and suburbs around the idea that everyone would have a car.
It's not that everyone needs a car because we have low population density; it's that we have a low population density because we've spaced ourselves out on the assumption that everyone would have a car.
Look, you're obviously childish and hostile, and probably trolling, but I'll answer a couple things anyway.
OOXML: the main problem with calling it a standard is not that there might be patented technology in it, but that it wasn't (from what I've read) a very good standard. It was long and confusing and had gaping holes that would make it difficult/impossible for someone else to make a real implementation from their documentation, but Microsoft rammed it through ISO anyhow. No one is complaining that H264 is a bad standard, though. The only complaint is that it's dangerous for a business-backed open source application to include support.
If you want me to sign a petition or write my congressman or something to say, "End software patents, support GPL, reform copyrights and patents, increase freedom, etc." then I'm right with you. Still, the reality is that people are moving to H264 as *the* standard video codec. That reality isn't made any better by forcing people to watch their H264 movies in a proprietary media player plug-in, rather than allowing them to view it in the media player of their choice.
And honestly, I don't think that should bother us all *that much*. ACID3 was not meant to be the be-all and end-all of browser tests. It's just one tool that browser developers can use to measure their progress towards standards compliance, but compliance is the goal.
So the real issues: Are how compliant is IE? Is it making good progress towards compliance? Is it an honest attempt by Microsoft, or are they giving a shady half-measure while sabotaging the standards?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but those are the questions that I'm concerned about. The overarching concern is, does your common everyday web developer need to use a bunch of tweaks and cut out features in order to get their pages to work properly on IE, or can they simply develop their pages to standard and assume that IE will work properly?
Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. The worst thing is googling for something and finding a lot of conflicting advice. Like one guy saying, "Oh, you want to do X? Well then install package Y. Some people will tell you to use package Z, but for reasons I won't go into here, that's a very bad move." Then another site will say, "DO NOT USE package Y. It's terrible and has lots of security problems. Use package Z." No further explanation.
So then you have to try to figure out, which of these guys knows what he's talking about? Was one of these pages written more recently than the other, and maybe the situation changed in between when they were written? Do either of these vague objections actually apply to my situation?
But... that's kind of hard to address. Opinions will differ.
When predicting the future, one can always say, "nuh uh!" I could say, "The world probably won't explode in the next 10 seconds," and you could say, "It might! Where's your evidence!"
And theoretically you'd be right, but in practical application it's childish and senseless. Yes, I'd prefer that everyone jump on board with standards that are completely unencumbered by patents. However, we don't know for sure that there even are any decent patent-free video codecs. Ogg is ok, though many believe it's not as good as H264 and it certainly doesn't have widespread hardware support. Still, we don't *know* that there are no patented technologies in Ogg Theora. There may be, but no one has come forward to ask for licenses for them.
Likewise, MPEG has not come forward and asked me to pay them for using x264. They're unlikely to, specifically because they *want* me to use the codec. They *want* it to be widespread so that they can get a cut of every bluray sale and every iTunes movie rental.
So better not make statements about which you know nothing if you do not wish to reveal to the world your idiocy.
Are you serious? What, are you 5 years old? Grow up.
Argue all you want about whether people are using patented technologies legally, but it doesn't really matter. Patent infringement isn't an absolute "crime". It's not like murder or something. You are using patents all the time in your daily life without licensing them, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not "infringement". No one has asked you not to use them. The patent holders haven't asked you to buy a license.
GIF graphic files were patent encumbered. MP3 is patent encumbered. H264 is patent encumbered. In practical terms, as far as whether they're adopted, it doesn't matter very much. Would I rather have all these patents voided so we can do whatever we want? Sure. Still, the real issue is how the patent holder will try to enforce things, and they're already walking a fine line.
Regardless, what we were really talking about is Flash. Flash doesn't actually diminish use of h264 anyway. It just serves as a media player which plays the same h264 files.
It depends on the goods, and it depends on the business model.
What matters isn't entirely freight throughput, but also cost. And all of that operates within the scope of things needing to get where they're going "fast enough". What constitutes "fast enough" depends on things like, whether the goods are perishable or time-sensitive, and whether your competitors can get there faster and easier. Plus, you do reach a point where, if the cost of going faster is negligible, then faster is better.
If you RTFA:
China benefits because it will be able to transport materials cheaply into manufacturing centers inside its borders and the Eastern Hemisphere benefits by getting a fast, efficient, low carbon transportation system.
If my opinion isn't worth shit, what's yours worth?
At least I have "good sense" and "history" on my side. How many consumers got sued for MP3? How many consumers have been sued for H264 patents so far?
Yes, I'm asserting that the H264 patent holders aren't going to go after any consumers. They don't care if you install VLC. They're far more interested in getting money from the TV/movie industry and from Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Given how incompetently AMTRAK has been run, and the relative success of the car, it's no wonder that Americans are suspicious of putting money into trains.
Well roads aren't generally expected to function as businesses. Hell, these days, neither are car companies.
I'm afraid it's more basic: Most Americans don't have any idea that it's possible to have a society where every person doesn't have their own car.