There is no Elmwood Ave. in Chicago, and anyway, all Chicago addresses need a directional prefix. There are Elmwood Aves. in Evanston and Oak Park; for the latter you'll also need a directional prefix.
Well, sort of. Regenerative braking has been used in electric vehicles since the early days of motorized transportation. Check Wikipedia. In addition to the examples they mentioned I'm pretty sure the GM EV-1 used one, too. As far as battery tech goes, there are plenty of incentives to work on it. Weight reduction has long been important in all types of vehicles. Hybrids cars are pretty complicated in their own right and a lot of the research has been toward making the more complicated powertrain work well, but they allow some of the efficiency improvements of electrics in-city while (1) still getting decent highway range and (2) not needing any new infrastructure.
I'm not saying hybrids are evil or useless, and I'm sure that some important tech for electric vehicles has matured through their mass production. On a pure technological level I don't think they contribute much to electric car development. The really good thing as far as EVs go is that they might allow a charging infrastructure to develop gradually, and thus make research into fast charging a more urgent commercial concern. I don't see an analog to that here. It's a win for efficiency, which is great, but I don't see much else.
Sorry for using the F word. It has probably distracted from my point about discrete quantities being no less scientific than continuous ones.
Binary prefixes weren't made by marketing people, they were made by the IEC; as far as I can tell they're the best suggestion yet for dealing with the ambiguity. It can indeed matter when doing actual calculations, especially when dealing with mathematical fields that relate to computing. Theoretical work in fields like signal processing, cryptography, compression, even some types of computer science, would consider the way storage is built to be an implementation detail. It might make more sense, for example, when changing the sampling rate from kHz to MHz, or the length of the signal being sampled by some factor, to change the amount of storage required without worrying about that implementation detail.
Well, it might make sense to one person but not another; that's what creates the ambiguity. An ambiguity that can be resolved very easily by putting a little 'i' in the prefixes and using pronunciations that sound kind of funny but will sound completely normal to the next generation.
I agree completely. I've fortunately never been hit, but I had a close call from behind once, while on a metal-grated bridge in Chicago (so I didn't have much traction when it happened). The driver got stuck at the next stoplight and I knocked on her window to tell her she needed to give me more clearance (hilariously, she seemed more terrified when I did this than I was when she almost hit me) and she said she didn't see me. She had a dog sitting on her lap.
I wouldn't necessarily mind driving tests, but I'm not sure they'd help very much. Anyone can pay attention for a half-hour to get the test done and then catch up on their voicemail on the way home. Furthermore, they'd cost a fair amount of money to implement, and even more money to provide alternate transportation to the idiots that got their licenses revoked (I'm pretty sure the states have to cover at least some of those costs for idiots that get their licenses revoked today, despite that it takes some serious crime for that to happen).
What I'd like to see is for police to enforce driving-while-celling laws where they exist. If Illinois State cops could set up a giant road checkpoint when the seat-belt law was introduced a few years ago, Chicago city cops can certainly set up a checkpoint looking for cell-talking drivers, who are actually putting other people in danger.
Hah, motorcyclists probably have it even worse than us pedal-pushers. If a motorcyclist was hit Utah would probably be looking into ways to ban motorcycles from busy roads.
If you ride in a bike lane you have to be very careful, because if you don't pay attention to traffic to your left as you approach an intersection you may wind up passing cars that are trying to make right turns. Many cities have poorly designed bike lanes that stretch all the way up to the intersection to the right of traffic that would turn right, which puts cyclists in danger.
Chicago does a reasonably good job. At large intersections with designated right-turn lanes for cars (Halsted approaching Roosevelt from the north, for example) the bike lane shifts left and the right turn lane for the cars is drawn to its right. The cross-over of car and bike traffic happens far enough before the intersection that cars are likely still going faster than bikes. At other intersections (just about every intersection from Halsted on the north side, for example) the bike lane stops before the intersection; it's clear that the bike and right-turning car traffic is supposed to merge in the space between the end of parallel parking and the intersection, and if you're moving faster than the approaching column of cars (quite common on Halsted) you're an idiot to hit that merge going very fast. If you're going to pass one of the right-turning cars you do it between the right-turner and the column to the left. If there's not space there then you wait. If you're not actually passing anyone don't worry; they can see you, and you have no control over the situation anyway.
There are some variations when you're not in a city. Where I live now, in Wyoming, most paved roads out of town have high speed limits and wide shoulders. It's safer to ride in the shoulder than anywhere else, you just have to be very careful approaching intersections. Fortunately there's usually excellent visibility due to the lack of buildings and very little traffic, and the very occasional right-turning traffic is going faster than you even through their turn, so you never have to worry about passing it.
The best way to make left turns varies a lot place to place. In Chicago I almost always did it like a car because when you can it's the easiest and fastest way. If I wasn't able to get left in time, or when turning off of very busy and wide streets like Ashland or Western I'd do a modified version of the "hook turn": enter the intersection in the rightmost lane of traffic and proceed through until reaching the rightmost lane of traffic on the cross street that's not turning right (or the bike lane, if there is one). Then position myself at the front of that lane (out of the way of my original street's traffic) and wait for the green. You don't have to go through crosswalks, and you never do anything unusual while crossing a lane that might be moving. I also used this turn a lot when I lived in California, because pretty much every road that goes anywhere is six lanes wide. At any rate, I almost never cross in the crosswalk like a pedestrian, as it creates transitions between pedestrian and vehicular behavior that are confusing and slow.
Drivers most places, I think, recognize hand signals, but that doesn't mean they're going to slow down and let you in any more than they would a car that was doing 15mph. Generally you'll be better recognized as a vehicle on the road when you ride straight in your lane (not ducking in and out of parked cars, or riding extremely close to them, as many cyclists do). And sometimes you just have to take a lane and ride right down the middle. If it's the only safe way, and there are lanes to your left for passing, don't let assholes that honk at you make you feel bad. You're doing the right thing, and only inconveniencing them a little tiny bit.
The fuck do you mean "not really a scientific measurement"? Size in bytes is a discrete quantity, not a continuous one, but that doesn't make it less scientific. There are some cases in computing generally where decimal prefixes make calculations easier and some where binary prefixes do. Sometimes measurements of bits and bytes can fall on both sides. We've all had a habit of using KB, MB, GB for both, but KiB, MiB, GiB makes it perfectly clear what we're doing in which case. No reason to be stubborn.
Yes, it's computationally convenient to use powers of two in some aspects of drivemaking, and computationally convenient to use powers of two in some types of programming, network operations, etc. So use the prefixes that explicitly mean this. Ki = 2^10, Mi = 2^20, etc. The calculations are exactly the same, the words just one syllable different, and you're actually being clear about what you mean.
Yes, cyclists who ride against the flow of traffic are dumb. A few more: fixie riders that ride in circles in front of the other lanes of traffic while stuck at a red light are dumb. Cyclists that try to sneak across at the start of a red light, and really most of them that run red lights generally, are dumb (I think it's perfectly reasonable for cyclists to treat red lights as 2-way stop signs when there is very little traffic, or when a light is controlled by a sensor that won't pick up the bike, but when doing so, you must observe the same caution you would going through a 2-way stop; I have never seen an accident or close-call result from this behavior). Cyclists that pass on the right near intersections are often dumb, as are cyclists that ride through intersections in the crosswalk at great speed (I have personally witnessed both of these behaviors result in accidents).
None of this excuses the callousness in the typical public attitude towards cyclists. In truth, if you're paying proper attention to the road you have almost no chance of hitting a cyclist, unless he's doing something dumb like passing on the right near an intersection. But many drivers, even responsible ones that I've talked to, seem to think car-bike collisions are a natural effect of cyclists being on the road. The fact is that at least one of them has to mess up for the accident to happen. If the collision involves running the cyclist down from behind (which is actually pretty rare) it's almost certainly the motorist's fault, and no sympathy should lie with him.
(source for some statements in this post is the book Effective Cycling)
Wow; I'm amazed it actually got publicity. In Illinois a couple years ago a driver veered onto the shoulder while downloading a ringtone and hit and killed a cyclist. Almost nobody cared. Well, maybe if it had been a pedestrian or motorist killed people would have paid attention; people in America seem to think that cyclists are fair game.
And why shouldn't parking generate revenue for the city? It's a limited public resource. Roads don't build themselves. Of all the money that goes into the city coffers charges for parking are probably some of the fairest. Much better that sales taxes, for example, and Chicago sales tax is already astronomical.
Ah, the resident Apple fanboys. Always so defensive. Clearly this story has nothing to do with Apple, and nobody has suggested that it does.
Now I'm pretty well distanced from the Palm-iTunes shenanigans, not owning any portable music player nor running an OS that iTunes supports. I think there's a pretty narrow range of belief systems that could lead to the conclusion that Palm's behavior is worse than Apple's in that case. First, if you believe that vertical monopolies are generally a good thing, and that protection of them is in everyone's interest. And, second, if you believe that Apple is good no matter what they do. Although I certainly recognize that Apple was within their rights legally, Palm's actions made both their device and Apple's software more useful and Apple's made both less useful. If you think Apple's behavior is better hand in your geek card.
You know, I used to feel very strongly this way. But there really is something to web applications. Consider Google Maps. Yeah, there's a desktop version, Google Earth, that has cooler-looking graphics, but for most practical navigation uses the Maps UI is better. It can easily hyperlink to the rest of the web, a completely new layout can be sent down with each page, and updates can be made (transit directions, multiple driving directions options, countless optimizations and minor fixes) without running some obnoxious updater binary.
And then there are things like mapmyrun.com. Great website, but I'm not sure I'd want their software on my native machine. Slashdot: a blog with an advanced commenting system (slashcode is big enough that they could probably define a protocol for delivering comments and allow desktop apps to handle display and posting in their own way, but the number of casual users they'd lose by requiring a desktop app download would be enormous).
Them damn kids on my lawn probably think I'm old-fashioned for wanting to keep my word-processing and e-mail off the web, but web apps aren't as completely useless as you claim.
There are differences between cell phones and other distractions; although I'm sure there's a distraction factor from both radios and conversations with passengers, the cell phone conversation demands more from the driver than either of these for the following reasons:
1. The driver can very easily tune out the radio. He knows that the radio doesn't care. Often when I'm driving and listening to a CD I'll realize that my favorite song played two tracks ago and I didn't even notice it go by. That might be less true of radio, especially if you're listening to a stimulating discussion, but at least you're not in the conversation and expected to reply. In long, boring stretches of freeway driving music can help keep a driver alert, while it's easy to just ignore when the situation requires it.
2. Passengers in the car with the driver can pick up non-verbal communication from the driver that requires less effort than speaking. A passenger knows when a difficult merge is coming up, or can look at the driver's eyes to see when he needs to really concentrate. In my experience, also, people on the phone expect answers quicker than people talking in-person. A lot of the ways we stall for time when responding to people aren't verbal -- one of the big ones is just being present. Phone calls tend to be a very demanding way to have a conversation. Often passengers help drivers navigate and operate the radio and heat or AC.
One of the key points is that driving the city streets causes more accidents than driving the freeway.
I really doubt that people will avoid freeways like the poster says, though. I think the extra gas used, the time wasted, and the additional risk of accidents outweigh the small advantage in insurance costs.
I should also mention that I haven't read the details of any pay-as-you-go insurance plans, but I'd be shocked if the math didn't work out so that 5k/yr drivers pay significantly more per mile, but significantly less per year than 100k/yr drivers. As has been mentioned many times, there are fixed time-dependent risks to car ownership and, presumably, lower accident risk per mile for heavier drivers (for a variety of reasons). Private insurers still set the rates and would be stupid to set them disproportionately.
It wouldn't surprise me if, all things being equal (driver experience and record, car make, model, home location, color, etc), a 5k/yr driver paid 5 times as much per mile and a quarter as much per year as a 100k/yr driver.
No. One day of insurance for a 100k/year driver covers on average 20 times as much driving as for a 5k/year driver. Maybe one mile of insurance should cost a bit less for a 100k/yr driver, but not a lot -- once you've been driving for several years you aren't gaining skills proportional to those extra miles.
I've never been asked about my yearly driving mileage for a car insurance quote. Given how little I drive I might be able to save money if I found an insurer that adjusted my rates based on that. According to TFA most people's insurance rates don't take into account how much they drive.
The big story is that the state of California wants to mandate pay-as-you-drive. A justification for this might be that people that don't drive much are subsidizing insurance for people that drive a lot, making it falsely economical, with regards to total risk caused, to drive a lot. And California wants to eliminate that. In theory, since the overall risk of accidents remains the same, the total amount of money paid in insurance premiums shouldn't change initially (as long as the market for insurance is perfectly competitive), but as people adjust to the new incentives they'll tend to drive somewhat less.
What are you trying to say, that because France is smaller than the US that it's somehow easier for them to implement nukes? Sure, it takes fewer plants to power the country, but France, being smaller, has fewer resources, space, and less money. It might take longer to bring the US up to France's level of nuclear use, but there's no inherent reason it couldn't be done just because the US is large. Unless that would overwhelm the global uranium supply.
Need a widescreen to view long lines of code? I have a better solution. Buy a gun, shoot the fucker that wrote them, then break them up into a more readable style. Then you can get a normal 4:3 or 5:4 (1280x1024) monitor and have two files open side-by-side across the screen.
I take issue with your idea that Wikileaks goes against "any geek value". Other posters have addressed the fact that leaks happen regardless of Wikileaks' existence, and that the leaker stands to profit more by leaking elsewhere. I want to talk about the geek values involved.
First, Wikileaks is free to access and open to anyone. I think most geeks would think a corporate secret, if leaked, is better off out in the open than sold to a competitor. Second, often a leak itself is in accordance with geek values. The sort of technical secrets likely to be leaked there (given the incentives and likely values of the people involved) include details of DRM systems. I bet more geeks want DRM broken than want to keep corporate secrets.
I don't think there's a clear set of geek values, but I do think a lot of geeks' values align with Wikileaks for valid reasons; the values you state align more with corporate values. I'm not saying they're wrong, but they don't have much to do with geekiness.
I understand why you want to make it possible to travel as many places as possible. That's precisely why it's dumb to target bike paths instead of, if not freeways, at least major highways. Bike paths, on the whole, don't go anywhere particularly useful and are poorly designed for safety of fast-moving vehicles. They require extremely narrow and nimble vehicles moving fairly slowly to work even as poorly as they do now. The only users bike paths are well-suited for are pedestrians (and, because of the limited routes, mostly recreational ones), but bikes can usually squeeze their way on adequately (on some so-called bike paths they really can't). Anything faster, bulkier, and less maneuverable, as your vehicle would be, would be at best a poor citizen on a bike path.
As a cyclist I ride far more miles on major streets and highways than on bike paths even on recreational rides (this was even true when I lived in Silicon Valley, which has lots of relatively good bike paths along bodies of water and awful traffic) -- for practical rides I almost never use bike paths. I suspect with your vehicle that would be even more true. So instead, optimize for the major roads that you'll need to use if you want this vehicle to be your only one.
This all might look very different if we could rebuild our highway and bikeway systems, but that's just not going to happen. I really think what you're looking at is a two-wheeled motorcycle with enough power to handle major roads. Maybe with some sort of modification to protect you from the elements, although I personally think a set of waterproof clothing folded up in one of the luggage bags would be fine.
How do you plan to build a three-wheeled vehicle narrow enough to used bike paths and store like a bicycle? Obviously the seating arrangement can't be side-by-side... but I think once you want a third wheel, second seat, and shelter from the elements you're talking about a vehicle that's just too wide and cumbersome to steer to go on a bike path. Bike paths are bad enough when used by the very narrow and nimble vehicles they're intended for; these would be worse than rollerbladers and recomb bikers put together.
Bike paths aren't really a good design target anyway. There aren't that many of them compared to roads, and they're mostly very poorly designed for efficient and safe riding (much less driving!). Instead think about roads. In many places you're going to need to get it out on major roads to get where you're going, which means it either needs to be fast enough to keep up with traffic or narrow enough to be passed. At least until it takes over the world and transportation laws and infrastructure are reformed to fit its requirements.
Ultimately you're basically looking at a motorcycle. Many of them have two seats and luggage space, and if you're wearing the proper clothing for safety you're protected from the elements. Or just pedaling an old-fashioned bike.
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There is no Elmwood Ave. in Chicago, and anyway, all Chicago addresses need a directional prefix. There are Elmwood Aves. in Evanston and Oak Park; for the latter you'll also need a directional prefix.
Thanks,
Richard M. Daley, Mayor
Well, sort of. Regenerative braking has been used in electric vehicles since the early days of motorized transportation. Check Wikipedia. In addition to the examples they mentioned I'm pretty sure the GM EV-1 used one, too. As far as battery tech goes, there are plenty of incentives to work on it. Weight reduction has long been important in all types of vehicles. Hybrids cars are pretty complicated in their own right and a lot of the research has been toward making the more complicated powertrain work well, but they allow some of the efficiency improvements of electrics in-city while (1) still getting decent highway range and (2) not needing any new infrastructure.
I'm not saying hybrids are evil or useless, and I'm sure that some important tech for electric vehicles has matured through their mass production. On a pure technological level I don't think they contribute much to electric car development. The really good thing as far as EVs go is that they might allow a charging infrastructure to develop gradually, and thus make research into fast charging a more urgent commercial concern. I don't see an analog to that here. It's a win for efficiency, which is great, but I don't see much else.
Sorry for using the F word. It has probably distracted from my point about discrete quantities being no less scientific than continuous ones.
Binary prefixes weren't made by marketing people, they were made by the IEC; as far as I can tell they're the best suggestion yet for dealing with the ambiguity. It can indeed matter when doing actual calculations, especially when dealing with mathematical fields that relate to computing. Theoretical work in fields like signal processing, cryptography, compression, even some types of computer science, would consider the way storage is built to be an implementation detail. It might make more sense, for example, when changing the sampling rate from kHz to MHz, or the length of the signal being sampled by some factor, to change the amount of storage required without worrying about that implementation detail.
Well, it might make sense to one person but not another; that's what creates the ambiguity. An ambiguity that can be resolved very easily by putting a little 'i' in the prefixes and using pronunciations that sound kind of funny but will sound completely normal to the next generation.
I agree completely. I've fortunately never been hit, but I had a close call from behind once, while on a metal-grated bridge in Chicago (so I didn't have much traction when it happened). The driver got stuck at the next stoplight and I knocked on her window to tell her she needed to give me more clearance (hilariously, she seemed more terrified when I did this than I was when she almost hit me) and she said she didn't see me. She had a dog sitting on her lap.
I wouldn't necessarily mind driving tests, but I'm not sure they'd help very much. Anyone can pay attention for a half-hour to get the test done and then catch up on their voicemail on the way home. Furthermore, they'd cost a fair amount of money to implement, and even more money to provide alternate transportation to the idiots that got their licenses revoked (I'm pretty sure the states have to cover at least some of those costs for idiots that get their licenses revoked today, despite that it takes some serious crime for that to happen).
What I'd like to see is for police to enforce driving-while-celling laws where they exist. If Illinois State cops could set up a giant road checkpoint when the seat-belt law was introduced a few years ago, Chicago city cops can certainly set up a checkpoint looking for cell-talking drivers, who are actually putting other people in danger.
Hah, motorcyclists probably have it even worse than us pedal-pushers. If a motorcyclist was hit Utah would probably be looking into ways to ban motorcycles from busy roads.
If you ride in a bike lane you have to be very careful, because if you don't pay attention to traffic to your left as you approach an intersection you may wind up passing cars that are trying to make right turns. Many cities have poorly designed bike lanes that stretch all the way up to the intersection to the right of traffic that would turn right, which puts cyclists in danger.
Chicago does a reasonably good job. At large intersections with designated right-turn lanes for cars (Halsted approaching Roosevelt from the north, for example) the bike lane shifts left and the right turn lane for the cars is drawn to its right. The cross-over of car and bike traffic happens far enough before the intersection that cars are likely still going faster than bikes. At other intersections (just about every intersection from Halsted on the north side, for example) the bike lane stops before the intersection; it's clear that the bike and right-turning car traffic is supposed to merge in the space between the end of parallel parking and the intersection, and if you're moving faster than the approaching column of cars (quite common on Halsted) you're an idiot to hit that merge going very fast. If you're going to pass one of the right-turning cars you do it between the right-turner and the column to the left. If there's not space there then you wait. If you're not actually passing anyone don't worry; they can see you, and you have no control over the situation anyway.
There are some variations when you're not in a city. Where I live now, in Wyoming, most paved roads out of town have high speed limits and wide shoulders. It's safer to ride in the shoulder than anywhere else, you just have to be very careful approaching intersections. Fortunately there's usually excellent visibility due to the lack of buildings and very little traffic, and the very occasional right-turning traffic is going faster than you even through their turn, so you never have to worry about passing it.
The best way to make left turns varies a lot place to place. In Chicago I almost always did it like a car because when you can it's the easiest and fastest way. If I wasn't able to get left in time, or when turning off of very busy and wide streets like Ashland or Western I'd do a modified version of the "hook turn": enter the intersection in the rightmost lane of traffic and proceed through until reaching the rightmost lane of traffic on the cross street that's not turning right (or the bike lane, if there is one). Then position myself at the front of that lane (out of the way of my original street's traffic) and wait for the green. You don't have to go through crosswalks, and you never do anything unusual while crossing a lane that might be moving. I also used this turn a lot when I lived in California, because pretty much every road that goes anywhere is six lanes wide. At any rate, I almost never cross in the crosswalk like a pedestrian, as it creates transitions between pedestrian and vehicular behavior that are confusing and slow.
Drivers most places, I think, recognize hand signals, but that doesn't mean they're going to slow down and let you in any more than they would a car that was doing 15mph. Generally you'll be better recognized as a vehicle on the road when you ride straight in your lane (not ducking in and out of parked cars, or riding extremely close to them, as many cyclists do). And sometimes you just have to take a lane and ride right down the middle. If it's the only safe way, and there are lanes to your left for passing, don't let assholes that honk at you make you feel bad. You're doing the right thing, and only inconveniencing them a little tiny bit.
The fuck do you mean "not really a scientific measurement"? Size in bytes is a discrete quantity, not a continuous one, but that doesn't make it less scientific. There are some cases in computing generally where decimal prefixes make calculations easier and some where binary prefixes do. Sometimes measurements of bits and bytes can fall on both sides. We've all had a habit of using KB, MB, GB for both, but KiB, MiB, GiB makes it perfectly clear what we're doing in which case. No reason to be stubborn.
Yes, it's computationally convenient to use powers of two in some aspects of drivemaking, and computationally convenient to use powers of two in some types of programming, network operations, etc. So use the prefixes that explicitly mean this. Ki = 2^10, Mi = 2^20, etc. The calculations are exactly the same, the words just one syllable different, and you're actually being clear about what you mean.
Yes, cyclists who ride against the flow of traffic are dumb. A few more: fixie riders that ride in circles in front of the other lanes of traffic while stuck at a red light are dumb. Cyclists that try to sneak across at the start of a red light, and really most of them that run red lights generally, are dumb (I think it's perfectly reasonable for cyclists to treat red lights as 2-way stop signs when there is very little traffic, or when a light is controlled by a sensor that won't pick up the bike, but when doing so, you must observe the same caution you would going through a 2-way stop; I have never seen an accident or close-call result from this behavior). Cyclists that pass on the right near intersections are often dumb, as are cyclists that ride through intersections in the crosswalk at great speed (I have personally witnessed both of these behaviors result in accidents).
None of this excuses the callousness in the typical public attitude towards cyclists. In truth, if you're paying proper attention to the road you have almost no chance of hitting a cyclist, unless he's doing something dumb like passing on the right near an intersection. But many drivers, even responsible ones that I've talked to, seem to think car-bike collisions are a natural effect of cyclists being on the road. The fact is that at least one of them has to mess up for the accident to happen. If the collision involves running the cyclist down from behind (which is actually pretty rare) it's almost certainly the motorist's fault, and no sympathy should lie with him.
(source for some statements in this post is the book Effective Cycling)
Wow; I'm amazed it actually got publicity. In Illinois a couple years ago a driver veered onto the shoulder while downloading a ringtone and hit and killed a cyclist. Almost nobody cared. Well, maybe if it had been a pedestrian or motorist killed people would have paid attention; people in America seem to think that cyclists are fair game.
And why shouldn't parking generate revenue for the city? It's a limited public resource. Roads don't build themselves. Of all the money that goes into the city coffers charges for parking are probably some of the fairest. Much better that sales taxes, for example, and Chicago sales tax is already astronomical.
Burbank is not Chicago. I haven't been to Burbank, but if it's an economical use of space in Burbank to put down free parking lots you can't even compare it to a real city (defined by density and layout -- Burbank is certainly a real place where people do real things, but it doesn't sound very urban) like Chicago. Parking meters are put on commercial streets because if they weren't people would park there indefinitely. The summary complains that it would cost $84 to park in some of these places for 24 hours. That's the point! To prevent people from doing that so that the street parking spots are open for convenient access to businesses and city buildings. You don't want parking across from City Hall or the main library downtown clogged with commuters, so use high per-hour rates to push them into parking garages. And you wouldn't want all the spots outside neighborhood cafés and restaurants occupied by residents, so you use meters to keep them on the residential streets (where, if there is a parking shortage, the landlords have an incentive to actually provide parking, which is somewhat rare in many older neighborhoods).
Ah, the resident Apple fanboys. Always so defensive. Clearly this story has nothing to do with Apple, and nobody has suggested that it does.
Now I'm pretty well distanced from the Palm-iTunes shenanigans, not owning any portable music player nor running an OS that iTunes supports. I think there's a pretty narrow range of belief systems that could lead to the conclusion that Palm's behavior is worse than Apple's in that case. First, if you believe that vertical monopolies are generally a good thing, and that protection of them is in everyone's interest. And, second, if you believe that Apple is good no matter what they do. Although I certainly recognize that Apple was within their rights legally, Palm's actions made both their device and Apple's software more useful and Apple's made both less useful. If you think Apple's behavior is better hand in your geek card.
You know, I used to feel very strongly this way. But there really is something to web applications. Consider Google Maps. Yeah, there's a desktop version, Google Earth, that has cooler-looking graphics, but for most practical navigation uses the Maps UI is better. It can easily hyperlink to the rest of the web, a completely new layout can be sent down with each page, and updates can be made (transit directions, multiple driving directions options, countless optimizations and minor fixes) without running some obnoxious updater binary.
And then there are things like mapmyrun.com. Great website, but I'm not sure I'd want their software on my native machine. Slashdot: a blog with an advanced commenting system (slashcode is big enough that they could probably define a protocol for delivering comments and allow desktop apps to handle display and posting in their own way, but the number of casual users they'd lose by requiring a desktop app download would be enormous).
Them damn kids on my lawn probably think I'm old-fashioned for wanting to keep my word-processing and e-mail off the web, but web apps aren't as completely useless as you claim.
There are differences between cell phones and other distractions; although I'm sure there's a distraction factor from both radios and conversations with passengers, the cell phone conversation demands more from the driver than either of these for the following reasons:
1. The driver can very easily tune out the radio. He knows that the radio doesn't care. Often when I'm driving and listening to a CD I'll realize that my favorite song played two tracks ago and I didn't even notice it go by. That might be less true of radio, especially if you're listening to a stimulating discussion, but at least you're not in the conversation and expected to reply. In long, boring stretches of freeway driving music can help keep a driver alert, while it's easy to just ignore when the situation requires it.
2. Passengers in the car with the driver can pick up non-verbal communication from the driver that requires less effort than speaking. A passenger knows when a difficult merge is coming up, or can look at the driver's eyes to see when he needs to really concentrate. In my experience, also, people on the phone expect answers quicker than people talking in-person. A lot of the ways we stall for time when responding to people aren't verbal -- one of the big ones is just being present. Phone calls tend to be a very demanding way to have a conversation. Often passengers help drivers navigate and operate the radio and heat or AC.
One of the key points is that driving the city streets causes more accidents than driving the freeway.
I really doubt that people will avoid freeways like the poster says, though. I think the extra gas used, the time wasted, and the additional risk of accidents outweigh the small advantage in insurance costs.
I should also mention that I haven't read the details of any pay-as-you-go insurance plans, but I'd be shocked if the math didn't work out so that 5k/yr drivers pay significantly more per mile, but significantly less per year than 100k/yr drivers. As has been mentioned many times, there are fixed time-dependent risks to car ownership and, presumably, lower accident risk per mile for heavier drivers (for a variety of reasons). Private insurers still set the rates and would be stupid to set them disproportionately.
It wouldn't surprise me if, all things being equal (driver experience and record, car make, model, home location, color, etc), a 5k/yr driver paid 5 times as much per mile and a quarter as much per year as a 100k/yr driver.
No. One day of insurance for a 100k/year driver covers on average 20 times as much driving as for a 5k/year driver. Maybe one mile of insurance should cost a bit less for a 100k/yr driver, but not a lot -- once you've been driving for several years you aren't gaining skills proportional to those extra miles.
I've never been asked about my yearly driving mileage for a car insurance quote. Given how little I drive I might be able to save money if I found an insurer that adjusted my rates based on that. According to TFA most people's insurance rates don't take into account how much they drive.
The big story is that the state of California wants to mandate pay-as-you-drive. A justification for this might be that people that don't drive much are subsidizing insurance for people that drive a lot, making it falsely economical, with regards to total risk caused, to drive a lot. And California wants to eliminate that. In theory, since the overall risk of accidents remains the same, the total amount of money paid in insurance premiums shouldn't change initially (as long as the market for insurance is perfectly competitive), but as people adjust to the new incentives they'll tend to drive somewhat less.
Yeah, you have to cover up your cover-up, and make sure you don't botch that!
What are you trying to say, that because France is smaller than the US that it's somehow easier for them to implement nukes? Sure, it takes fewer plants to power the country, but France, being smaller, has fewer resources, space, and less money. It might take longer to bring the US up to France's level of nuclear use, but there's no inherent reason it couldn't be done just because the US is large. Unless that would overwhelm the global uranium supply.
Need a widescreen to view long lines of code? I have a better solution. Buy a gun, shoot the fucker that wrote them, then break them up into a more readable style. Then you can get a normal 4:3 or 5:4 (1280x1024) monitor and have two files open side-by-side across the screen.
I take issue with your idea that Wikileaks goes against "any geek value". Other posters have addressed the fact that leaks happen regardless of Wikileaks' existence, and that the leaker stands to profit more by leaking elsewhere. I want to talk about the geek values involved.
First, Wikileaks is free to access and open to anyone. I think most geeks would think a corporate secret, if leaked, is better off out in the open than sold to a competitor. Second, often a leak itself is in accordance with geek values. The sort of technical secrets likely to be leaked there (given the incentives and likely values of the people involved) include details of DRM systems. I bet more geeks want DRM broken than want to keep corporate secrets.
I don't think there's a clear set of geek values, but I do think a lot of geeks' values align with Wikileaks for valid reasons; the values you state align more with corporate values. I'm not saying they're wrong, but they don't have much to do with geekiness.
I understand why you want to make it possible to travel as many places as possible. That's precisely why it's dumb to target bike paths instead of, if not freeways, at least major highways. Bike paths, on the whole, don't go anywhere particularly useful and are poorly designed for safety of fast-moving vehicles. They require extremely narrow and nimble vehicles moving fairly slowly to work even as poorly as they do now. The only users bike paths are well-suited for are pedestrians (and, because of the limited routes, mostly recreational ones), but bikes can usually squeeze their way on adequately (on some so-called bike paths they really can't). Anything faster, bulkier, and less maneuverable, as your vehicle would be, would be at best a poor citizen on a bike path.
As a cyclist I ride far more miles on major streets and highways than on bike paths even on recreational rides (this was even true when I lived in Silicon Valley, which has lots of relatively good bike paths along bodies of water and awful traffic) -- for practical rides I almost never use bike paths. I suspect with your vehicle that would be even more true. So instead, optimize for the major roads that you'll need to use if you want this vehicle to be your only one.
This all might look very different if we could rebuild our highway and bikeway systems, but that's just not going to happen. I really think what you're looking at is a two-wheeled motorcycle with enough power to handle major roads. Maybe with some sort of modification to protect you from the elements, although I personally think a set of waterproof clothing folded up in one of the luggage bags would be fine.
How do you plan to build a three-wheeled vehicle narrow enough to used bike paths and store like a bicycle? Obviously the seating arrangement can't be side-by-side... but I think once you want a third wheel, second seat, and shelter from the elements you're talking about a vehicle that's just too wide and cumbersome to steer to go on a bike path. Bike paths are bad enough when used by the very narrow and nimble vehicles they're intended for; these would be worse than rollerbladers and recomb bikers put together.
Bike paths aren't really a good design target anyway. There aren't that many of them compared to roads, and they're mostly very poorly designed for efficient and safe riding (much less driving!). Instead think about roads. In many places you're going to need to get it out on major roads to get where you're going, which means it either needs to be fast enough to keep up with traffic or narrow enough to be passed. At least until it takes over the world and transportation laws and infrastructure are reformed to fit its requirements.
Ultimately you're basically looking at a motorcycle. Many of them have two seats and luggage space, and if you're wearing the proper clothing for safety you're protected from the elements. Or just pedaling an old-fashioned bike.