You clearly have never actually tried to ride a bike path through a populated area. You'd know what I'm talking about. It's not yielding "once in a while", it's yielding every damn block. You would never drive a car down a street that had a 2-way stop sign every block, you'd go a few blocks over to the major street. This is what experienced cyclists, in practice, do. Furthermore, road intersections, by law, are designed with visibility and safety in mind. Intersections between bike paths and roads are not. Cars park right up to the edge and there are buildings or trees obstructing the view on each side. You often have to stick your wheel out into the road to see if it's safe to cross. One major reason for this is that bike paths are often built on old railroad right-of-ways, and in that use there was no need to design intersections for good visibility.
As you approach a bike path on a crossing street you see, at most, a yellow sign with a bike on it and white crosswalk markings where the path crosses the road. In an urban area an intersection between two roads will have whatever traffic control signs are necessary, then on the ground a stop line, a crosswalk, and then finally the crossing road. Since buildings can't be built and cars can't be parked right up to the intersection, the intersection is in the middle of a clearing that extends beyond it. You can see cross-traffic coming well before you're in the intersection.
Honestly, there are few bike paths that get enough traffic to justify designing highly visible intersections or controlling the intersection with anything other than a 2-way stop for the path. When I lived on the north side of Chicago I could have taken the lakefront bike path to and from work -- that path, being right by the lake, doesn't have many intersections. But those intersections are so poorly designed that it's actually safer to take Halsted St., passing lots of traffic, DePaul University, Boys' Town bars, several 6-way intersections, and coming within two blocks of Wrigley Field. And that's in the very rare and ideal case that a path can be built with few intersections and still pass through a densely populated area. The lakefront path is one of the most useful bike paths I've ever used and despite this every cyclist in Chicago still must learn to ride effectively on the roads. Many never do, and make stupid mistakes or take stupid risks. And so it is with cyclists everywhere.
The point of my original post isn't that cyclists should never yield. It's that bike paths are, even at their best, very limited, and in the average case completely useless. Cyclists should take the safest and most effective route available, and for most cyclists most of the time that won't involve a bike path, no matter how many are built. Cyclists must learn to effectively choose roads to ride and ride them.
Bike paths almost always suck because the intersections between them and real roads are unsafe due to poor visibility, and inefficient to ride because a rider has to yield at all intersections (they often lie parallel to a nearby street with stop signs that don't apply to the path itself, so drivers are either accelerating from the stop sign or focused on stopping for one several yards beyond the path). If they don't intersect real roads they almost certainly don't go anywhere useful -- even if they're just for recreation people need to get there from where they live. In the presence of bike paths a nearby real road is almost always the better way to get around (with some exceptions for trails that follow bodies of water, like Chicago's lakefront trail, which is sometimes OK).
Why must the modifier layout be symmetric? Because some keyboard you're used to has it that way (the typical keyboard today doesn't... it has a menu key on one side but not the other)? I'm pretty neutral on the placement of Ctrl; my current keyboard at home has it left of the A key and has no right Ctrl (it's a Sun Type 6 Unix board), but I get along fine at work with more typical layouts. When the Ctrl keys are on the bottom row, because they're on the corners, I tend to hit them with my palms instead of my fingers so I don't have to move my hands so much. When it's on the home row you don't need a right Ctrl because it's close enough to the middle of the board that you can still type with your left hand. Ctrl+Alt bindings are a pain on my keyboard, but they're pretty rare these days and they're not really necessary given the wealth of modifier keys on today's keyboards.
I agree about NumLock, except of course in the case where there's not room for a navigation block. I keep NumLock off when navigating web pages, because the numpad puts all the navigation keys in reach without moving my hand. I hardly think that's a pressing enough use to justify the feature. Software is, of course, perfectly capable of ignoring NumLock. IIRC Plan 9 always keeps the NumLock LED lit and treats those keys as number keys.
Right, because in practice all the people that want your password are skilled at watching keyboards, or have physical access to your computer when you're not around and have the know-how to install a keylogger or sniff EMF or whatever. Now, to be fair, in most places I've worked password blanking wouldn't have done much; I've never had my own locking office and my colleagues have usually been programmers. Also in most of these places I didn't have access to much that any of them wouldn't.
But in my parents' offices? You're telling me that password blanking does nothing to protect an accountant or lawyer from a co-worker with a grudge but rather little technical knowledge. Give the average office worker physical access to the machine for hours with nobody watching and he'll be foiled by the password. Door and window locks protect only against lousy criminals, but most criminals are pretty lousy -- padlocks are pretty weak, too, and they work great against the vast majority of people that weren't planning to steal your stuff until they just saw it out (an exception is bikes, which are expensive, parked in open and predictable places, and easy to get away on, and thus have both a crowd of dedicated thieves and a decent selection of tough locks and chains).
I don't think most AT&T DSL users are under contract. I signed up with them in three different residences in the last three years (for various unimportant reasons I had to start a new account every time) and never signed a contract. Usually you only have to sign contracts for cell phones (because cell companies are all actually one super-corporation owned by Satan, who is working out the legalese to have souls transferred to him by contract), or sometimes when there are promotional rates (which aren't nearly as typical of AT&T as of the cable companies).
In some cases I think that sort of thing is better for everyone. I didn't really get it until I worked for Nvidia (not my current job). Nvidia has to spend lots of engineering resources designing high-performance parts and features for certain engineering and visualization uses. In some cases the features aren't expensive to fabricate, but it's always more expensive to have more product runs. If you gave everyone all the features you'd leave yourself open to bare-bones competitors -- why do that when you can charge the people that use a feature for your engineering work on it and make the price competitive for everyone else?
Lots of modern web design practices are stupid, and specifying fonts is one of those practices. I bet if they hired a typical web designer their site would get less usable and bigger, and would fail to render nicely under a wider range of conditions.
I just don't get why you'd care that much about a website being stylish. You seem to concede that the site is not ugly and that it gets its point across. So they don't have anything cutting-edge to say about design. So what?
They're asking pirates to pay for something. 30 million of them? Hell, they won't make the 1000 necessary to get the law firm over their free transfer limit.
Oops, you're right, North Carolina. Bell Labs isn't what it was but I think there's other stuff in Jersey. I almost never go to the east (have only been east of Indiana once, can probably count the number of times I've been east of Illinois on two hands) so it's easy for me to lose track of what's there other than in a really broad sense.
A cyclist riding on a road with shoulders won't help you out any more than one riding on a road without. It's illegal, dangerous, and stupid to swerve on and off the shoulder around parked cars -- the correct way to ride is at a basically constant distance inside the right lane, far enough from parked cars that they really have to try to nail you with a door. On a shoulder-less road or generally one without parking on streets a cyclist can at least ride all the way to the edge.
And I can tell you, for sure, cyclists don't like riding on busy roads where it's hard to get around them. In a lot of places they don't have other serious options. Even for leisure riding most bike paths are inferior, primarily because their road crossings have poor visibility from the road and they tend to be laid out such that crossing any busy road is much more difficult than when crossing it on an actual street -- these issues, in practice, cause car-bike collisions. They also often have visibility problems affecting their own users: poor lighting, tight curves, and rapid grade changes. In Chicago, in various stretches, the lakefront bike trail has the advantage of running along the lake and thus having few street crossings. Even so, it exhibits all of these problems at various points -- the issues with car traffic while crossing Grand and Illinois downtown, and also on the roads going into the far-north side lakefront parks; the internal issues on the entire north side; on the south side it's really nice, but harder to access -- and it couldn't possibly be so nice without running along a lake and thus avoiding most street crossings.
If I was on a bike stuck behind a kid on a Big Wheels I could probably get around him in any number of ways depending on the type of path. Bikes are narrow and nimble vehicles. It's not any cyclist's fault that you drive solo to work in a car wide enough to hold three people, and if you want to be annoyed at someone, try the people that design vehicles and cities such that you have few options but to do so. Better yet, turn that annoyance into ideas.
There are lots of tech jobs in boring, sprawled wastelands in Massachusetts (the Rt. 128 stuff that people mention), New Jersey (Bell Labs comes to mind), and Virginia (ever hear of the Research Triangle?), just like there are in the boring sprawled wasteland of Silicon Valley. Furthermore, lots of programmers and math types sell their dignity for big paydays from investment banks and consulting firms in eastern financial centers (New York, obviously, but plenty of other northeastern cities).
I think the Midwest and maybe the South (I'm not as familiar with the South) are doing much worse in terms of having tech schools but not much of a tech sector. A lot of the manufacturing that drove a need for engineers in the area has left the region, and the computing industry hasn't done much. Graduates of the University of Illinois' fine CS and CompE programs have to go to the coasts to find the jobs they trained for. Well, that or go the investment/consulting route, but there's no amount of money you could pay me to put up with the bullshit that I hear goes on at those companies.
When you sign an employment contract you sign it based on the employment laws of the state you're actually working in. Perhaps most of EMC is technically located in Barbados, but the part that hired him was clearly not.
And it's probably a good thing to follow the employment laws of the state you actually work in. The company I work for is British, with a branch in Chicago, where I work. I wouldn't want to be dragged to the UK in the case of an employment dispute. And I certainly wouldn't want corporations venue-shopping for employment laws the way they currently do for taxes (and also certain kinds of lawsuits). It could only lead to a race to the bottom in terms of employee protection.
When West Virginia runs out of coal it will be ugly and poor (there's a "your mom" joke in there somewhere...), just like other ecologically devastated places.
The lithium can't do them any good in the ground, and they can get some fairly well-understood value by taking it out. But it's impossible to value now what could potentially be lost by the processes that remove it -- we don't know what damage could occur or whether it will be possible to mitigate effectively. And, to be sure, any foreign company that gets mining rights will take most of the profits for themselves, and stick the locals with the true uncertain part of whatever problems come about because of it (if there is toxic pollution of some sort caused by the mining process, for example).
I can't view TFA because it's a fucking video (the Web = HTTP, where the HT stands for HYPER TEXT... I'm sick of having to watch videos and listen to sound clips on the Web because they not only take away the benefits of TEXT, ie, that I can control the temporal aspect, but also the benefits of HYPER, ie, that there's a natural way to cross-reference documents)... but if the Bolivian government is deliberating how to make sure its resources work for its people and not against them, or even how it can be sure to get the best price for them (perhaps by waiting until it's scarcer, even), good for them. An exchange of Bolivia's lithium, and Bolivian labor to extract it, for some part of global automakers' wealth, could benefit both parties eventually but it will take lots of diligence on the part of the Bolivians not to get screwed in the exchange. To make sure that they can turn it into a lasting benefit for their people and not just a hole in the ground.
Yup. A dude I knew in college actually modified Linux to put drivers in one of the middle rings as a research project. Seemed like a cool project, and he had working demos of drivers crashing and restarting. I wonder why something like that hasn't caught on.
Actually, I don't know if processor architectures other than x86 have more than 2 levels of protection. That would probably deter a lot of people, and drive them instead to a more general microkernel design. And even then, you can restart a crashed driver but it's often harder to get the device back into a usable state. I actually think having the ability to recover from some driver crashes would be useful, but I think a lot of people would be discouraged by the fact that there would still be lots of unrecoverable crashes (this is the big issue with X11 -- even though the lion's share of a GPU driver lives outside the kernel, when it crashes the GPU is left in an unknown state, and there's tons of state on a GPU. Even if an X crash hadn't left you unable to use your input devices to get back to a terminal you probably wouldn't be able to show it. This is not to say it wouldn't be nice -- logging into the terminal blind to initiate a clean shutdown would be great).
Sounds to me like accelerated desktops aren't ready for prime-time.
I'm just curious, how badly was the UI hosed? Was it actually unusably bad? When I turned off 3D effects in Kubuntu (they make windowed 3D apps flicker, which is a show-stopper for me) a lot of stuff looked bad but it was still usable. Though seems to me the developers should still be making things look nice without acceleration, given how spotty it is.
But doesn't this happen on Windows, too? At least the slate of programs I use at work each have drastically different design.
Just don't get the idea into Linux distro makers that their apps have to all be visually coherent. On stock Kubuntu every GTK app I tried to use had big problems because of the GTK-QT wrapper -- Firefox had problems with fonts and checkboxes, Pidgin had really weird UI issues and wasn't responsive, gvim wouldn't even fucking start. Visual coherence can be nice I guess, but it absolutely must WORK.
Every time I've tried to use a modern, nice-looking desktop environment I've wound up switching off almost all the fancy visuals, as each seemed to cause more trouble than it was worth. And then eventually switching back to FVWM2, because it works, and is fast (actually it has some stupid bugs based on old assumptions -- KDE has many, but not all, of the same ones, and some that are worse). And when on Windows I always wind up with 1995-style window decs and all the effects off too.
Maybe I'm just conditioned from running Gentoo for years (just built a new computer and decided on Kubuntu for it) but I always run big upgrades overnight. I think the download took something like 7 hours with my crummy Internet connection but I didn't have to care.
Perhaps a trading system for hydrogen fuel cells would work better. I think we're not nearly as close to making fuel cell technology affordable, but, for the reasons you describe, battery-powered electrics wouldn't work very well for occasional drivers like me. I could very easily do exactly what you describe, get a battery replaced, not drive for a month, and then the battery would be ruined. Not only would the energy used to charge the battery be wasted, but also the energy used (and toxic pollution generated) to build the battery. Not very environmentally friendly.
Then again, car ownership generally really doesn't work out for people that drive as little as I do. I pay the same per year in insurance as someone that drives 50 miles to work every day. It's really pretty rare for me to require a car in the city, although sometimes it gives me extra flexibility (the ability to visit family/friends too far away to bike to on a whim). In a world where battery-electric cars win out, hopefully car-share services would truly succeed in cities (there are a couple where I live, but they only yet serve the rich parts of the city... and I understand why they're starting out there, but they'll really have to serve everywhere to make an impact).
The whole point of my comment was that if you happen to get a direct rail connection from your town to St. Louis you're just flat out lucky. Rail service is expensive to set up and operate and inflexible once it's rolling. It only makes economic sense to build a limited number of rail lines where there are high volumes, especially for something like high-speed rail. If the trains are traveling at high speed they certainly won't spend energy stopping and starting again at every small town, or even every county seat, on the way between the two big cities that drive most of their traffic. You can't expect a high-speed train from Quincy to St. Louis any more than you can expect to fly there from your backyard.
All forms of transportation use energy. Trains are no magic bullet and cars are no magic evil. The fact is, if from where you live the cheapest way to get to St. Louis is by a shuttle van, a shuttle van running only as needed might be the most efficient way to transport the small number of people that need to get from Quincy to Lambert any given day. And if all these people are just going to the airport they're really better off riding a van straight to the airport than a train that's going to leave them downtown, where they have to catch a slow urban train to the airport. Either way, if you're talking about a that you'll need your car on the other end of, it's probably not a trip you have in common with many other people -- might as well just drive it. The fact that the non-common trip, usually involving suburbs, is so common says a lot more about our urban planning than it does about the transportation plan. Don't want to drive everywhere? Live in a big, dense city with a good transit system.
I just thought I should point out, also, that your idea of ferrying cars on trains doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole reason trains are often more efficient than cars is that each person accounts for much less space and mass in total. Tow the car and you lose a lot of that efficiency. To make that worth the energy they'd spend towing the car and the labor and time disruptions necessary to load the cars on and off the train they'd need to charge car-ferriers more money than they'd be willing to pay. It's like those idiotic PRT-like proposals to string together trains out of modular passenger cars, but worse.
For the most part there aren't shoes for experienced vs. inexperienced runners, with a few caveats and exceptions.
The biggest caveat I can think of is that inexperienced runners are less likely to understand their pronation tendencies and more likely to buy shoes based on fashion and how they feel after 10 steps of test jogging. So beginners are likely to get well-cushioned or lightweight shoes, and to ignore shoes that focus on pronation control. Still, experienced runners with a neutral stride will also ignore pronation control, and beginners certainly wouldn't be hurt by paying attention to it, and many do.
The biggest exception I can think if is racing shoes. Competitive runners wear lightweight "flats" for road racing and sometimes for speed workouts. The flats are basically similar to trainers but lighter and less cushioned. For track/cross-country races, though, they wear spikes. Running spikes are extremely flexible in every direction and have almost no cushioning or support at all. Running in spikes forces you up on the balls of your feet because that's where the spike plate is. In modern spikes the heel is protected with a tiny amount of foam and rubber but you still don't want to strike the ground with it. It feels very different from the heel-toe motion you ease into in trainers, with their abundant cushioning and stiffness. Now you can run on the balls of your feet in trainers, and some people do more than others. I'm a pretty big heel-toe guy on long runs, but when I really push the pace or run a track workout I switch over.
Elite competitive runners usually race in flats (if on road) or spikes (if on track or over field). Many of them do speed training in these shoes as well, but most do long runs in big heavy trainers, just like beginners. Runners like me, who are experienced but don't have any money or fame resting on their results (I have won prizes several times, once even a year's gym membership, but never money) usually aren't going to splurge on racing gear. We use our trainers for all our running because they're durable. I miss the feeling of racing in spikes a little (I've never owned flats), but I never run track races and rarely run cross-country races (not in high school anymore!) so there's not much point in having a pair.
I guess my point is that unless you're competing "for a reason" (the result of a race basically never matters, but team coaches can be very convincing) you're probably running in the same shoes as anyone else, no matter how good you are. Typically differences in running shoes are based on stride type, pronation, weight, and distance.
Streetcars are a lot different from intra-city rail. And they're a lot different from rapid transit systems, too. Streetcars filled a role more similar to city buses, which have major advantages in flexibility and ability to deal with city traffic. As the Wikipedia article you link mentions itself, cities that weren't involved in any conspiracy, not to mention European cities, also largely use buses for this purpose now as well.
Anyway, it has little to do with intra-city passenger rail, which would largely, like air travel, be used by business travelers. I'm not aware of any anti-Amtrak conspiracies. LA is just too damn far from NY for business travelers. So is Chicago. Amtrak still serves some corridors well in the northeast, and serves Chicago-Milwaukee well. Low-speed passenger rail can't serve distances like LA-SF or Chicago-Detroit very well, but high-speed rail might. Especially since the stations, unlike airports, can be located right downtown so the business travelers don't have to ride the subway for 45 minutes upon arrival.
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You clearly have never actually tried to ride a bike path through a populated area. You'd know what I'm talking about. It's not yielding "once in a while", it's yielding every damn block. You would never drive a car down a street that had a 2-way stop sign every block, you'd go a few blocks over to the major street. This is what experienced cyclists, in practice, do. Furthermore, road intersections, by law, are designed with visibility and safety in mind. Intersections between bike paths and roads are not. Cars park right up to the edge and there are buildings or trees obstructing the view on each side. You often have to stick your wheel out into the road to see if it's safe to cross. One major reason for this is that bike paths are often built on old railroad right-of-ways, and in that use there was no need to design intersections for good visibility.
As you approach a bike path on a crossing street you see, at most, a yellow sign with a bike on it and white crosswalk markings where the path crosses the road. In an urban area an intersection between two roads will have whatever traffic control signs are necessary, then on the ground a stop line, a crosswalk, and then finally the crossing road. Since buildings can't be built and cars can't be parked right up to the intersection, the intersection is in the middle of a clearing that extends beyond it. You can see cross-traffic coming well before you're in the intersection.
Honestly, there are few bike paths that get enough traffic to justify designing highly visible intersections or controlling the intersection with anything other than a 2-way stop for the path. When I lived on the north side of Chicago I could have taken the lakefront bike path to and from work -- that path, being right by the lake, doesn't have many intersections. But those intersections are so poorly designed that it's actually safer to take Halsted St., passing lots of traffic, DePaul University, Boys' Town bars, several 6-way intersections, and coming within two blocks of Wrigley Field. And that's in the very rare and ideal case that a path can be built with few intersections and still pass through a densely populated area. The lakefront path is one of the most useful bike paths I've ever used and despite this every cyclist in Chicago still must learn to ride effectively on the roads. Many never do, and make stupid mistakes or take stupid risks. And so it is with cyclists everywhere.
The point of my original post isn't that cyclists should never yield. It's that bike paths are, even at their best, very limited, and in the average case completely useless. Cyclists should take the safest and most effective route available, and for most cyclists most of the time that won't involve a bike path, no matter how many are built. Cyclists must learn to effectively choose roads to ride and ride them.
Bike paths almost always suck because the intersections between them and real roads are unsafe due to poor visibility, and inefficient to ride because a rider has to yield at all intersections (they often lie parallel to a nearby street with stop signs that don't apply to the path itself, so drivers are either accelerating from the stop sign or focused on stopping for one several yards beyond the path). If they don't intersect real roads they almost certainly don't go anywhere useful -- even if they're just for recreation people need to get there from where they live. In the presence of bike paths a nearby real road is almost always the better way to get around (with some exceptions for trails that follow bodies of water, like Chicago's lakefront trail, which is sometimes OK).
Clearly GP wanted two Us on his keyboard.
A vi user that only uses Esc 700 times a week isn't getting much work done!
I agree about NumLock, except of course in the case where there's not room for a navigation block. I keep NumLock off when navigating web pages, because the numpad puts all the navigation keys in reach without moving my hand. I hardly think that's a pressing enough use to justify the feature. Software is, of course, perfectly capable of ignoring NumLock. IIRC Plan 9 always keeps the NumLock LED lit and treats those keys as number keys.
Right, because in practice all the people that want your password are skilled at watching keyboards, or have physical access to your computer when you're not around and have the know-how to install a keylogger or sniff EMF or whatever. Now, to be fair, in most places I've worked password blanking wouldn't have done much; I've never had my own locking office and my colleagues have usually been programmers. Also in most of these places I didn't have access to much that any of them wouldn't.
But in my parents' offices? You're telling me that password blanking does nothing to protect an accountant or lawyer from a co-worker with a grudge but rather little technical knowledge. Give the average office worker physical access to the machine for hours with nobody watching and he'll be foiled by the password. Door and window locks protect only against lousy criminals, but most criminals are pretty lousy -- padlocks are pretty weak, too, and they work great against the vast majority of people that weren't planning to steal your stuff until they just saw it out (an exception is bikes, which are expensive, parked in open and predictable places, and easy to get away on, and thus have both a crowd of dedicated thieves and a decent selection of tough locks and chains).
You know that guy Kukulski that the story quotes? You can find his email address on the City of Bozeman website.
I don't think most AT&T DSL users are under contract. I signed up with them in three different residences in the last three years (for various unimportant reasons I had to start a new account every time) and never signed a contract. Usually you only have to sign contracts for cell phones (because cell companies are all actually one super-corporation owned by Satan, who is working out the legalese to have souls transferred to him by contract), or sometimes when there are promotional rates (which aren't nearly as typical of AT&T as of the cable companies).
In some cases I think that sort of thing is better for everyone. I didn't really get it until I worked for Nvidia (not my current job). Nvidia has to spend lots of engineering resources designing high-performance parts and features for certain engineering and visualization uses. In some cases the features aren't expensive to fabricate, but it's always more expensive to have more product runs. If you gave everyone all the features you'd leave yourself open to bare-bones competitors -- why do that when you can charge the people that use a feature for your engineering work on it and make the price competitive for everyone else?
Lots of modern web design practices are stupid, and specifying fonts is one of those practices. I bet if they hired a typical web designer their site would get less usable and bigger, and would fail to render nicely under a wider range of conditions.
I just don't get why you'd care that much about a website being stylish. You seem to concede that the site is not ugly and that it gets its point across. So they don't have anything cutting-edge to say about design. So what?
They're asking pirates to pay for something. 30 million of them? Hell, they won't make the 1000 necessary to get the law firm over their free transfer limit.
Oops, you're right, North Carolina. Bell Labs isn't what it was but I think there's other stuff in Jersey. I almost never go to the east (have only been east of Indiana once, can probably count the number of times I've been east of Illinois on two hands) so it's easy for me to lose track of what's there other than in a really broad sense.
A cyclist riding on a road with shoulders won't help you out any more than one riding on a road without. It's illegal, dangerous, and stupid to swerve on and off the shoulder around parked cars -- the correct way to ride is at a basically constant distance inside the right lane, far enough from parked cars that they really have to try to nail you with a door. On a shoulder-less road or generally one without parking on streets a cyclist can at least ride all the way to the edge.
And I can tell you, for sure, cyclists don't like riding on busy roads where it's hard to get around them. In a lot of places they don't have other serious options. Even for leisure riding most bike paths are inferior, primarily because their road crossings have poor visibility from the road and they tend to be laid out such that crossing any busy road is much more difficult than when crossing it on an actual street -- these issues, in practice, cause car-bike collisions. They also often have visibility problems affecting their own users: poor lighting, tight curves, and rapid grade changes. In Chicago, in various stretches, the lakefront bike trail has the advantage of running along the lake and thus having few street crossings. Even so, it exhibits all of these problems at various points -- the issues with car traffic while crossing Grand and Illinois downtown, and also on the roads going into the far-north side lakefront parks; the internal issues on the entire north side; on the south side it's really nice, but harder to access -- and it couldn't possibly be so nice without running along a lake and thus avoiding most street crossings.
If I was on a bike stuck behind a kid on a Big Wheels I could probably get around him in any number of ways depending on the type of path. Bikes are narrow and nimble vehicles. It's not any cyclist's fault that you drive solo to work in a car wide enough to hold three people, and if you want to be annoyed at someone, try the people that design vehicles and cities such that you have few options but to do so. Better yet, turn that annoyance into ideas.
There are lots of tech jobs in boring, sprawled wastelands in Massachusetts (the Rt. 128 stuff that people mention), New Jersey (Bell Labs comes to mind), and Virginia (ever hear of the Research Triangle?), just like there are in the boring sprawled wasteland of Silicon Valley. Furthermore, lots of programmers and math types sell their dignity for big paydays from investment banks and consulting firms in eastern financial centers (New York, obviously, but plenty of other northeastern cities).
I think the Midwest and maybe the South (I'm not as familiar with the South) are doing much worse in terms of having tech schools but not much of a tech sector. A lot of the manufacturing that drove a need for engineers in the area has left the region, and the computing industry hasn't done much. Graduates of the University of Illinois' fine CS and CompE programs have to go to the coasts to find the jobs they trained for. Well, that or go the investment/consulting route, but there's no amount of money you could pay me to put up with the bullshit that I hear goes on at those companies.
When you sign an employment contract you sign it based on the employment laws of the state you're actually working in. Perhaps most of EMC is technically located in Barbados, but the part that hired him was clearly not.
And it's probably a good thing to follow the employment laws of the state you actually work in. The company I work for is British, with a branch in Chicago, where I work. I wouldn't want to be dragged to the UK in the case of an employment dispute. And I certainly wouldn't want corporations venue-shopping for employment laws the way they currently do for taxes (and also certain kinds of lawsuits). It could only lead to a race to the bottom in terms of employee protection.
When West Virginia runs out of coal it will be ugly and poor (there's a "your mom" joke in there somewhere...), just like other ecologically devastated places.
The lithium can't do them any good in the ground, and they can get some fairly well-understood value by taking it out. But it's impossible to value now what could potentially be lost by the processes that remove it -- we don't know what damage could occur or whether it will be possible to mitigate effectively. And, to be sure, any foreign company that gets mining rights will take most of the profits for themselves, and stick the locals with the true uncertain part of whatever problems come about because of it (if there is toxic pollution of some sort caused by the mining process, for example).
I can't view TFA because it's a fucking video (the Web = HTTP, where the HT stands for HYPER TEXT... I'm sick of having to watch videos and listen to sound clips on the Web because they not only take away the benefits of TEXT, ie, that I can control the temporal aspect, but also the benefits of HYPER, ie, that there's a natural way to cross-reference documents)... but if the Bolivian government is deliberating how to make sure its resources work for its people and not against them, or even how it can be sure to get the best price for them (perhaps by waiting until it's scarcer, even), good for them. An exchange of Bolivia's lithium, and Bolivian labor to extract it, for some part of global automakers' wealth, could benefit both parties eventually but it will take lots of diligence on the part of the Bolivians not to get screwed in the exchange. To make sure that they can turn it into a lasting benefit for their people and not just a hole in the ground.
Yup. A dude I knew in college actually modified Linux to put drivers in one of the middle rings as a research project. Seemed like a cool project, and he had working demos of drivers crashing and restarting. I wonder why something like that hasn't caught on.
Actually, I don't know if processor architectures other than x86 have more than 2 levels of protection. That would probably deter a lot of people, and drive them instead to a more general microkernel design. And even then, you can restart a crashed driver but it's often harder to get the device back into a usable state. I actually think having the ability to recover from some driver crashes would be useful, but I think a lot of people would be discouraged by the fact that there would still be lots of unrecoverable crashes (this is the big issue with X11 -- even though the lion's share of a GPU driver lives outside the kernel, when it crashes the GPU is left in an unknown state, and there's tons of state on a GPU. Even if an X crash hadn't left you unable to use your input devices to get back to a terminal you probably wouldn't be able to show it. This is not to say it wouldn't be nice -- logging into the terminal blind to initiate a clean shutdown would be great).
Sounds to me like accelerated desktops aren't ready for prime-time.
I'm just curious, how badly was the UI hosed? Was it actually unusably bad? When I turned off 3D effects in Kubuntu (they make windowed 3D apps flicker, which is a show-stopper for me) a lot of stuff looked bad but it was still usable. Though seems to me the developers should still be making things look nice without acceleration, given how spotty it is.
But doesn't this happen on Windows, too? At least the slate of programs I use at work each have drastically different design.
Just don't get the idea into Linux distro makers that their apps have to all be visually coherent. On stock Kubuntu every GTK app I tried to use had big problems because of the GTK-QT wrapper -- Firefox had problems with fonts and checkboxes, Pidgin had really weird UI issues and wasn't responsive, gvim wouldn't even fucking start. Visual coherence can be nice I guess, but it absolutely must WORK.
Every time I've tried to use a modern, nice-looking desktop environment I've wound up switching off almost all the fancy visuals, as each seemed to cause more trouble than it was worth. And then eventually switching back to FVWM2, because it works, and is fast (actually it has some stupid bugs based on old assumptions -- KDE has many, but not all, of the same ones, and some that are worse). And when on Windows I always wind up with 1995-style window decs and all the effects off too.
Maybe I'm just conditioned from running Gentoo for years (just built a new computer and decided on Kubuntu for it) but I always run big upgrades overnight. I think the download took something like 7 hours with my crummy Internet connection but I didn't have to care.
Right, and when you burn it it turns into carbon dioxide and water.
Perhaps a trading system for hydrogen fuel cells would work better. I think we're not nearly as close to making fuel cell technology affordable, but, for the reasons you describe, battery-powered electrics wouldn't work very well for occasional drivers like me. I could very easily do exactly what you describe, get a battery replaced, not drive for a month, and then the battery would be ruined. Not only would the energy used to charge the battery be wasted, but also the energy used (and toxic pollution generated) to build the battery. Not very environmentally friendly.
Then again, car ownership generally really doesn't work out for people that drive as little as I do. I pay the same per year in insurance as someone that drives 50 miles to work every day. It's really pretty rare for me to require a car in the city, although sometimes it gives me extra flexibility (the ability to visit family/friends too far away to bike to on a whim). In a world where battery-electric cars win out, hopefully car-share services would truly succeed in cities (there are a couple where I live, but they only yet serve the rich parts of the city... and I understand why they're starting out there, but they'll really have to serve everywhere to make an impact).
The whole point of my comment was that if you happen to get a direct rail connection from your town to St. Louis you're just flat out lucky. Rail service is expensive to set up and operate and inflexible once it's rolling. It only makes economic sense to build a limited number of rail lines where there are high volumes, especially for something like high-speed rail. If the trains are traveling at high speed they certainly won't spend energy stopping and starting again at every small town, or even every county seat, on the way between the two big cities that drive most of their traffic. You can't expect a high-speed train from Quincy to St. Louis any more than you can expect to fly there from your backyard.
All forms of transportation use energy. Trains are no magic bullet and cars are no magic evil. The fact is, if from where you live the cheapest way to get to St. Louis is by a shuttle van, a shuttle van running only as needed might be the most efficient way to transport the small number of people that need to get from Quincy to Lambert any given day. And if all these people are just going to the airport they're really better off riding a van straight to the airport than a train that's going to leave them downtown, where they have to catch a slow urban train to the airport. Either way, if you're talking about a that you'll need your car on the other end of, it's probably not a trip you have in common with many other people -- might as well just drive it. The fact that the non-common trip, usually involving suburbs, is so common says a lot more about our urban planning than it does about the transportation plan. Don't want to drive everywhere? Live in a big, dense city with a good transit system.
I just thought I should point out, also, that your idea of ferrying cars on trains doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole reason trains are often more efficient than cars is that each person accounts for much less space and mass in total. Tow the car and you lose a lot of that efficiency. To make that worth the energy they'd spend towing the car and the labor and time disruptions necessary to load the cars on and off the train they'd need to charge car-ferriers more money than they'd be willing to pay. It's like those idiotic PRT-like proposals to string together trains out of modular passenger cars, but worse.
For the most part there aren't shoes for experienced vs. inexperienced runners, with a few caveats and exceptions.
The biggest caveat I can think of is that inexperienced runners are less likely to understand their pronation tendencies and more likely to buy shoes based on fashion and how they feel after 10 steps of test jogging. So beginners are likely to get well-cushioned or lightweight shoes, and to ignore shoes that focus on pronation control. Still, experienced runners with a neutral stride will also ignore pronation control, and beginners certainly wouldn't be hurt by paying attention to it, and many do.
The biggest exception I can think if is racing shoes. Competitive runners wear lightweight "flats" for road racing and sometimes for speed workouts. The flats are basically similar to trainers but lighter and less cushioned. For track/cross-country races, though, they wear spikes. Running spikes are extremely flexible in every direction and have almost no cushioning or support at all. Running in spikes forces you up on the balls of your feet because that's where the spike plate is. In modern spikes the heel is protected with a tiny amount of foam and rubber but you still don't want to strike the ground with it. It feels very different from the heel-toe motion you ease into in trainers, with their abundant cushioning and stiffness. Now you can run on the balls of your feet in trainers, and some people do more than others. I'm a pretty big heel-toe guy on long runs, but when I really push the pace or run a track workout I switch over.
Elite competitive runners usually race in flats (if on road) or spikes (if on track or over field). Many of them do speed training in these shoes as well, but most do long runs in big heavy trainers, just like beginners. Runners like me, who are experienced but don't have any money or fame resting on their results (I have won prizes several times, once even a year's gym membership, but never money) usually aren't going to splurge on racing gear. We use our trainers for all our running because they're durable. I miss the feeling of racing in spikes a little (I've never owned flats), but I never run track races and rarely run cross-country races (not in high school anymore!) so there's not much point in having a pair.
I guess my point is that unless you're competing "for a reason" (the result of a race basically never matters, but team coaches can be very convincing) you're probably running in the same shoes as anyone else, no matter how good you are. Typically differences in running shoes are based on stride type, pronation, weight, and distance.
Streetcars are a lot different from intra-city rail. And they're a lot different from rapid transit systems, too. Streetcars filled a role more similar to city buses, which have major advantages in flexibility and ability to deal with city traffic. As the Wikipedia article you link mentions itself, cities that weren't involved in any conspiracy, not to mention European cities, also largely use buses for this purpose now as well.
Anyway, it has little to do with intra-city passenger rail, which would largely, like air travel, be used by business travelers. I'm not aware of any anti-Amtrak conspiracies. LA is just too damn far from NY for business travelers. So is Chicago. Amtrak still serves some corridors well in the northeast, and serves Chicago-Milwaukee well. Low-speed passenger rail can't serve distances like LA-SF or Chicago-Detroit very well, but high-speed rail might. Especially since the stations, unlike airports, can be located right downtown so the business travelers don't have to ride the subway for 45 minutes upon arrival.