train manufacturers probably got mad at the airline industry"
No, the train manufacturers (except GM's EMD division...nothing like playing both sides, right?) were mad at the trucking industry, and Congress, which essentially did almost all it could to kill off rail. The rail industry's bite-back then are the weight stations on the highways for commercial trucks. I'd say it hasn't really worked all that much.
But I think that ChuckD's other comments are salient.
Well, there's probably a Linux server, somewhere, that all those POS terminals hook up to, that at the very least has the interfaces to pump the POS terminals' data into whatever other Enterprise software (retail management system, inventory system, accounting, etc). Maybe that software is running on Linux, too.
The Lowes here in McMinnville, OR, is IBM-based (store server is probably an AS400, the registers are those funky IBM registers, and the department workstations are all IBMs running 3270 software.
The GPL's enforceability depends entirely on the enforceability of copyright law. If you're wishing for copyright to become unenforceable because of the anonymous nature of the internet, you'd better be planning on a future in which the GPL is roadkill.
No, it would essentially make the BSD license the modus operandi of the whole world. GPL forces two things: attribution and sharing. If the world at least goes to the full exposure model, then the sharing side is out. So then the GPL would only differ from BSD in one main way: acknowledging the works of others that your work is derived from or based on.
GPL exists to push back against those who think that information exchange should essentially ONLY be contractural (i.e., exchange of "consideration", fully bound to terms in the contracts, NDAs, etc.), instead of a free and open process at its very base level, much like the academic world mostly is. It brings into the real world essentially the academic research peer review process, using the tools of the Oppressors to secure its place there.
Tangetially, this is the problem with an estate tax...personally, I have a serious issue with a government that directly PROFITS by the death of its citizens. Well, if you can be 1099'd for stealing cash out of the till, you pay top tax rate for any gambling/lottery winnings over $10,000, etc...
I don't have a problem with the estate tax, but it should be paid by the inheritees, not out of the estate. It's windfall income, just like capital gains, stock dividends, etc.
What is silly about Mountain View is that if one of the major US pro sports teams (NFL, NBA, Baseball) were to express interest in moving to Mountain View, if only the City Lords were to build them a stadium and give the team the proceeds from the concession sales and parking fees, chances are the city would bend over backwards to do so, for all the "indirect revenues", jobs, private enterprise around the stadium, etc., the team would generate for the city.
Of course, it's not quite like Nike and Beaverton, OR. Right now, the corporate campus for Nike sits on unincorporated land, but it's slowly being surrounded by incorporated Beaverton land. Nike fears getting its land incorporated into Beaverton, to the point that it lobbied the OR legislature to pass a law that essentially forbids Beaverton from doing so. Yet, Nike still depends on Beaverton services...
You've just been hired as the systems administrator for a system that handles millions of dollars worth of transactions daily. As far as you know, and were told, the backup systems work, and all has been tested. Just for kicks, you decide to check a random tape and restore it to a backup system. Uhoh. The system didn't restore. What do you do now? Test another randomly chosen tape? OK. It doesn't restore, either. Hmm... What if you do some more testing on your own, and your statistical analysis indicates that the odds of you recovering from backup today are about 1%, what do you do?
OK, you're the newbie, so maybe you can point this flaw out.
What if you've been on the job for the last 5 years, what then? What if it was your system design or you had some other sense of "ownership" in the system? What if you did have documentation at one time where your bosses signed off on the testing phase after telling you NOT to do it (time, budget, whatever)? What now?
And... in the US military, as you move higher in rank as a pilot, your flying time goes down considerably. The best place to be as a flyer is a CWO pilot in the US Army. At about O4 is when it starts making sense to decide whether to stay in for a full 25 years or not. If one does not like command administrivia and responsibilities, then flying commercial planes looks great.
Similar scope of things were brought up by a Boeing engineer while the FA18E/F (the Super Hornet) was being developed. It seemed there was an aerodynamic flaw in the wing's design that caused it to stall at certain angles of attack at transonic speed, or something like that. He tried to bring it up the chain of command, and all the proper channels, and, well, US military programs like this kind of take on lives of their own, in that if you question anything about the program, you have basically initiated the career-destruct sequence on yourself, no matter what your rank or position of importance is. So, he took it to the DoD's IG, etc., and finally started harping to his Congress critters, who started hearings, and Boeing apparantly figured out a cheeseball way to ameliorate the flaw slightly to their satisfaction. At the time, there was some serious "WTF do we need the FA18E/F for?" arguments going through Congress and other places, so the heat was on this whistleblower pretty intensely. They (DoD, Boeing, et al) rode this guy HARD, iirc.
It is a typical pattern, kind of like workplace mobbing. First, they dismiss your complaints. Then, they question your integrity. Then, they question your work behavior, your mental state, invent motives, etc., doing everything they can to discredit the whistleblower, whether factual or only slightly factual. All the while, arguing that things are under control, the whistleblower cannot substantiate anything, etc.
Actually, it *was* the fault of the plane, as Airbus did not have a "manual override" in their flight control systems, so once the pilots figured out things were fuggered, there was no chance in hell the plane was going to let them correct it. After this crash, and several others, they finally caved to conventional wisdom (sometimes the pilot actually IS right!) and it is in there now.
Diesel engines are fundamentally different from gas engines and cannot be modded. You can make your lawnmover run on LPG if you want, but you can forget diesel. (Not 100% sure about the LPG, because lawnmovers typically are 2-takt engines) If it would be possible, you would have seen a Ferrari Diesel by now. I would kill to have a Diesel these days, because my roadster is a gas guzzeler an it's not funny here in Europe. (25MPG... *sigh*)
Yes, the compression ratios are much higher (need stronger block, rods, crank shaft, bearings, etc), for one. Yet it did not stop Ford and GM from converting gas V8 engines to diesel (the current PowerStroke V8 is derived from the gas V8, and GM's gas-diesel conversion in the 80's completely SUCKED).
Most/all lawnmower engines in the US are 4-cycle, not two-cycle. Briggs & Stratton, Tecumseh, Kohler and Honda are the main suppliers of small 4-cycle engines used in lawn equipment. While a 2-cycle might have more power, torque/lower RPM are really needed for mowers.
Where power-to-weight is needed, then 2-cycle engines are used, like for chain saws, trimmers and blowers.
US readers might not believe me on this one, but their fuel is cheap, at least when compared to European prices.
Well, that's because gas is taxed at about 4x production costs everywhere else, too. And US drivers complain about "high" gas taxes... The costs to make gas are relatively consistent and equal around the world, actually.
An example is the new Ford Mustang (a tasty looking car, BTW). The 4L model gets around 200bhp, and about 19/28mpg. My Fiat Coupe is comparible, but gets 260bhp from a 2L engine, and more than 50mpg outside town (I don't live in a city)
What is the torque output for your 260 BHP 2L engine? It's probably about 150 ft/lb. The Ford V8 is probably 220-240 ft/lb. Is your Fiat Coupe equiped to US safety standards also? I'm going to bet that your Fiat probably weighs close to 1000 lbs less than the Rustang, too.
American drivers like big noise and big engines, while failing to grasp "power-to-weight" ratio. If it sounds fast and can light up the tires, that's good enough. At least here in the Portland, OR, area, I've seen at least 3 different Lotus Elises driving around. *SOME* American drivers have sort of a clue, but not enough...
And, car mfgrs and dealers are all too happy to pump up and cater to American drivers' narcissism. "king of the road!" "fear THIS!" blah blah blah. So SUV sales still do well. As much as I loathe and despise them, things would be much better if most of us were simply driving Chevy Sprints and their equivalents to work each day. So I drive a stupid Saturn SW2 instead, and won't be replacing it anytime soon. Of course, the SW2 can carry maybe two bales of hay or straw. The truck carries 1+ ton (20 bales)... Different tools for different jobs.
Hybrids are only there to keep the PR good....if only the Hybrids that are most popular were made by American companies. The only one on the market now is the Ford Escape Hybrid. GM's "hybrid"? Basically same 1500 pickup truck, with a huge battery pack (but same V8 engine). So this doesn't fly really.
Modernization of US cars? Well, at least where I'm at, this week unleaded gas is about $2.599-2.629/gal. Diesel is still over $3.00/gal. I can work on a gas engine at home. There are other costs involved with diesels that are higher than gas engines, also, at least with V8 diesel engines (they use about 4x as much oil, larger batteries needed, woe is thee if you run it out of diesel, etc). A VW TDI or MB CDI car would probably make for an ideal commuter car, even over a Prius/Civic Hybrid.
Besides. I have a 1991 Ford F-250 pickup truck with the 350 V8 (4.9L). Was warned about the 460 V8 (7.x L)..."gets about 9mpg...empty or fully loaded". I reckon my truck gets about 15 mpg on the highway right now (it needs a tuneup pretty badly). If it was a 1970's V8 of the same size, it would probably get about 12. What does a new 2005 F250 with the 350 rate at? I think it's 12 city and 18-20 highway, which actually is pretty dang good improvement over time. But I'm not stupid enough to use it for a daily driver to an office job, either, yet too many other people are.
The only way to curb it in the US would be to make it economically unreal for most people to continue with their current driving choices, and the only real way to do that would be to quadruple gas taxes. Since this is done primarily on a state-by-state basis, it ain't going to happen. Even with the high gas prices of the last few weeks, it's not going to change much in the US unless it stays that way for a long time. After all, most people have to drive to work in the US. It's not realistic to move closer to work for most people for a variety of reasons (my reason in IL was that median house prices around Abbott Park, IL, were about $500K around 2000, and I still lived only about 17 miles/50 minutes away from it). Mass/rapid transit works or is workable only for a relatively small majority of workers. Being about 2 miles away from a Metra station in Chicagoland was great when I worked downtown (35 mile drive), but going from my house to Shaumburg had to be driven.
1. Hybrids are more expensive then their traditional counterparts.
Well... initial cost for a Prius is more than for a similarly equiped Toyota Echo/Corolla, but not that much more. The Prius is not a stripped down minimalistic economy car, so to be fair the Echo/Corolla should be similarly fitted out (i.e., air conditioner, CD stereo, etc).
So, let's say the Prius is $4000 more than for the Echo. Let's say that the usable (certainly if it was a company car, the depreciation lifetime for the car isn't going to be any more than 5 yrs) lifetime for both cars is 5 years. To make economic sense, the Prius has to save you $800/yr in gas compared to the Echo/Corolla, which it might very well do in an urban environment with stop-and-go traffic (the worse the traffic, the better). Wow, that's what the Prius is optimized for, whoodathunk? As gas prices go higher, the Prius becomes even more advantageous (but they're going back down, at least in my part of Oregon).
2. Batteries are expensive to replace. Yes, but they're *probably* not using el cheapo 36-month lead-acid batteries. NiMH? Yes, they're expensive, but they're set to last the usable lifetime of the car. When they start crapping out, time to buy a new car. It's an economy car. You wouldn't expect to get more than 100K miles from a Hyundai, KIA, Suzuki or other similar car, now, would you? Yes, I know most of those have outrageous warranties, but... with cars that cheap they're banking on you selling/trading in them WAY before 10 yrs/100K Miles. You pay for "core charge" on new car batteries anyways (in the US) if you don't bring in the dead one at the same time you buy the new one, which is ostensibly to pay for the recycling costs.
3. Batteries are not "good" for the environment. Neither are millions of cows farting. So what is your point, exactly? More hazardous waste is generated and disposed of simply by having to treat and bury coal powerplant fly ash compared to car battery disposal...
4. People who "plug in" to pre-charge (such as some Prius owners) -- are still paying for that electricity. So what?
5. The electricity used above still relies on a "non friendly" methods of production, which means your giving up gas here, but sacrificing coal (or nuclear, or insert method here) anyway. Again, so what? Refer to past arguments about efficiencies of central power generation. Me, personally? I'd take two or three nuke plants that could out-produce electricity than 30 coal plants. The waste is more hazardous, potentially, yes. But it seems far easier to deal with spent nuclear waste than it is to deal with tons and tons of (radioactive) fly ash that is caught, and the large amounts that are distributed daily into the air (woe to those downwind). I'd take the shipment of a spent nuclear powerplant pressure vessel (it's 100 tons of one big hunk of radioactive stainless steel. It ain't going anywhere if it falls off the truck) going through town than a trainload full of fly ash...
But that's just me.
As you can see, everyone wants all the benefits, but none of the downsides. What are we going to do with these millions of batteries when they need to be disposed?
What to do with the batteries? recycle them. But it sounds like you're willing to put up with the downsides of not having electrical vehicles (more smog, more expensive gas, more governmental controls over vehicles, etc.), which is fine, I suppose. It's far easier, and more economical overall, to make a "dirty" powerplant clean than it is to make and keep millions of cars emissions-clean. Since there isn't a "car owner's lobby", the power lobbies win out in legislatures. Which is too bad, really.
Ultimately, it is all of us, not power companies, oil companies, etc., who pay for the externalized costs that are passed off by these companies. We should have some way to compell them to either make them reduce those costs (and possibly have to pay slightly more up-front), or make the shareholders have to deal with them when the time to deal with the externalized costs becomes obvious later on.
We all want Wal-Mart prices but the Nordstrom's "experience".
Funny thing, though, in California (maybe it was overthrown there, too), you pay an "environmental impact" fee of about $300 the first time you register a car in California not originally purchased in CA.
What need does a homeless man have for a fire department, or a carless man have for state police patrols and roads? Why should the poor pay for what the rich use most?
Homeless man gets hit by a drunk driver (ok, homeless man was drunk, too). The PD, FD and ambulances have to get there somehow... Actually, the infrastructure is used by/available for all. That it exists is a hard-to-measure benefit, but it is there.
My bite with the "sales tax" is that ostensibly, retail sales tax at Brick & Mortar stores helps to pay for some of that infrastructure that the business needs. Everything involved internally in a "e-sale" is individually taxed: telecom taxes are collected on all parties involved for the internet connections, gas taxes are paid by FedEx, UPS and USPS, property taxes by the company's actual business location (whether it is a legitimate place of business or some guy's mother's basement). What else really needs to be taxed on top of that?
Sales tax sucks, plain and simple. Yes, it was a factor in moving to Oregon. Oregon's personal income tax is pretty small (compared to California and Illinois...). On the flip side, Oregonians as a whole are ABSOLUTELY F'ING CLUELESS what high state taxes really are, and yet they complain about this or that not being funded from the state every day.
Well, you could look at it that way, or simply look at it as cheaper and better then letting kids run amok. School is cheaper than the legal system and prison system.
With SAP its IE or bust. Why is it necessary to navigate the thousand halls of links to access or change an amount of data I could fit on a 360k floppy?
A big part of this is because SAP does not use ODBC to provide connectivity to the database (which would be bad anyways, unless you know German), or to ABAP and other SAP data objects. Instead, client software talks to it through an RPC interface. Assuming the SAP admins will let you install it.
Otherwise, getting data out of it tends to mean setting up SAP reports to dump data to text files(but not to excel - still dumps only 16Krows (excel 7 limit), not 64Krows (excel 7+ limit).
Not a very end-user analyst friendly system.
Re:Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little
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You mean Microsoft finally invented it?
(old reference to a Calvin & Hobbes sunday cartoon strip)
Still, MS couldn't figure out a way in over 14 years to either add VBA events to table and query objects (i.e., triggers), or make linked tables more aware of backend database events/exceptions so that they cound be handled in the client side if need be (i.e., non-updatable view linked via ODBC is "updated", exception passed back to Access, and developer can then write essentially an INSTEAD OF trigger to put all the data in the right places)?
The best (but least popular) DB app GUI builder for Windows has been Delphi. Its database controls (TDataset) meets or exceeds the database "awareness" of Access, especially when compared to VB. While not exactly a complete MVC environment, TDataModule can let you encapsulate a LOT of business logic in a nice container. Etc.
The only so-called "database" that emphasizes it's GUI is Access
That's only if you're using Jet (i.e., access) to store the data. If you're using a real RDBMS, Access makes for a great database-aware front-end development environment. Since Jet also does not really support triggers, stored procs, etc., either, then it leaves it to the developer to try and do data integrity stuff mostly in the UI. Yes, this really does blow boogers.
Administration tools for commercial and OSS databases may be easy for small sites and novice DBA's that don't know their tools, but large applications rely on database scripts to handle configuration, not GUIs. The reason is simple: you can't put a mouse click into CVS/RCS/SCCS/???.
So, you write a document that says "click on this", "click on that", "enter 'XYZZY' for Froboz", etc., and check that in to your SCS. You then follow that script when implementing changes to test , qa or production. It very well could just say, "open a command line and run BlowAwayTheDatabase.sql", but when you have to depend on other people to migrate your changes to production, this is how you have to do it.
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train manufacturers probably got mad at the airline industry"
No, the train manufacturers (except GM's EMD division...nothing like playing both sides, right?) were mad at the trucking industry, and Congress, which essentially did almost all it could to kill off rail. The rail industry's bite-back then are the weight stations on the highways for commercial trucks. I'd say it hasn't really worked all that much.
But I think that ChuckD's other comments are salient.
Well, there's probably a Linux server, somewhere, that all those POS terminals hook up to, that at the very least has the interfaces to pump the POS terminals' data into whatever other Enterprise software (retail management system, inventory system, accounting, etc). Maybe that software is running on Linux, too.
The Lowes here in McMinnville, OR, is IBM-based (store server is probably an AS400, the registers are those funky IBM registers, and the department workstations are all IBMs running 3270 software.
Point-of-Sale used to be a relatively good market for SCO as well... (I purposely avoided using POS because...well...)
I bet you watch "Lost" on ABC, though.
SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) ported well, too. Runs much faster in Linux than in Windows.
The GPL's enforceability depends entirely on the enforceability of copyright law. If you're wishing for copyright to become unenforceable because of the anonymous nature of the internet, you'd better be planning on a future in which the GPL is roadkill.
No, it would essentially make the BSD license the modus operandi of the whole world. GPL forces two things: attribution and sharing. If the world at least goes to the full exposure model, then the sharing side is out. So then the GPL would only differ from BSD in one main way: acknowledging the works of others that your work is derived from or based on.
GPL exists to push back against those who think that information exchange should essentially ONLY be contractural (i.e., exchange of "consideration", fully bound to terms in the contracts, NDAs, etc.), instead of a free and open process at its very base level, much like the academic world mostly is. It brings into the real world essentially the academic research peer review process, using the tools of the Oppressors to secure its place there.
Tangetially, this is the problem with an estate tax...personally, I have a serious issue with a government that directly PROFITS by the death of its citizens.
Well, if you can be 1099'd for stealing cash out of the till, you pay top tax rate for any gambling/lottery winnings over $10,000, etc...
I don't have a problem with the estate tax, but it should be paid by the inheritees, not out of the estate. It's windfall income, just like capital gains, stock dividends, etc.
What is silly about Mountain View is that if one of the major US pro sports teams (NFL, NBA, Baseball) were to express interest in moving to Mountain View, if only the City Lords were to build them a stadium and give the team the proceeds from the concession sales and parking fees, chances are the city would bend over backwards to do so, for all the "indirect revenues", jobs, private enterprise around the stadium, etc., the team would generate for the city.
Of course, it's not quite like Nike and Beaverton, OR. Right now, the corporate campus for Nike sits on unincorporated land, but it's slowly being surrounded by incorporated Beaverton land. Nike fears getting its land incorporated into Beaverton, to the point that it lobbied the OR legislature to pass a law that essentially forbids Beaverton from doing so. Yet, Nike still depends on Beaverton services...
Or, here's one.
You've just been hired as the systems administrator for a system that handles millions of dollars worth of transactions daily. As far as you know, and were told, the backup systems work, and all has been tested. Just for kicks, you decide to check a random tape and restore it to a backup system. Uhoh. The system didn't restore. What do you do now? Test another randomly chosen tape? OK. It doesn't restore, either.
Hmm... What if you do some more testing on your own, and your statistical analysis indicates that the odds of you recovering from backup today are about 1%, what do you do?
OK, you're the newbie, so maybe you can point this flaw out.
What if you've been on the job for the last 5 years, what then? What if it was your system design or you had some other sense of "ownership" in the system? What if you did have documentation at one time where your bosses signed off on the testing phase after telling you NOT to do it (time, budget, whatever)? What now?
And... in the US military, as you move higher in rank as a pilot, your flying time goes down considerably. The best place to be as a flyer is a CWO pilot in the US Army. At about O4 is when it starts making sense to decide whether to stay in for a full 25 years or not. If one does not like command administrivia and responsibilities, then flying commercial planes looks great.
Similar scope of things were brought up by a Boeing engineer while the FA18E/F (the Super Hornet) was being developed. It seemed there was an aerodynamic flaw in the wing's design that caused it to stall at certain angles of attack at transonic speed, or something like that. He tried to bring it up the chain of command, and all the proper channels, and, well, US military programs like this kind of take on lives of their own, in that if you question anything about the program, you have basically initiated the career-destruct sequence on yourself, no matter what your rank or position of importance is. So, he took it to the DoD's IG, etc., and finally started harping to his Congress critters, who started hearings, and Boeing apparantly figured out a cheeseball way to ameliorate the flaw slightly to their satisfaction. At the time, there was some serious "WTF do we need the FA18E/F for?" arguments going through Congress and other places, so the heat was on this whistleblower pretty intensely. They (DoD, Boeing, et al) rode this guy HARD, iirc.
It is a typical pattern, kind of like workplace mobbing. First, they dismiss your complaints. Then, they question your integrity. Then, they question your work behavior, your mental state, invent motives, etc., doing everything they can to discredit the whistleblower, whether factual or only slightly factual. All the while, arguing that things are under control, the whistleblower cannot substantiate anything, etc.
Actually, it *was* the fault of the plane, as Airbus did not have a "manual override" in their flight control systems, so once the pilots figured out things were fuggered, there was no chance in hell the plane was going to let them correct it. After this crash, and several others, they finally caved to conventional wisdom (sometimes the pilot actually IS right!) and it is in there now.
Diesel engines are fundamentally different from gas engines and cannot be modded. You can make your lawnmover run on LPG if you want, but you can forget diesel. (Not 100% sure about the LPG, because lawnmovers typically are 2-takt engines) If it would be possible, you would have seen a Ferrari Diesel by now. I would kill to have a Diesel these days, because my roadster is a gas guzzeler an it's not funny here in Europe. (25MPG... *sigh*)
Yes, the compression ratios are much higher (need stronger block, rods, crank shaft, bearings, etc), for one. Yet it did not stop Ford and GM from converting gas V8 engines to diesel (the current PowerStroke V8 is derived from the gas V8, and GM's gas-diesel conversion in the 80's completely SUCKED).
Most/all lawnmower engines in the US are 4-cycle, not two-cycle. Briggs & Stratton, Tecumseh, Kohler and Honda are the main suppliers of small 4-cycle engines used in lawn equipment. While a 2-cycle might have more power, torque/lower RPM are really needed for mowers.
Where power-to-weight is needed, then 2-cycle engines are used, like for chain saws, trimmers and blowers.
US readers might not believe me on this one, but their fuel is cheap, at least when compared to European prices.
...if only the Hybrids that are most popular were made by American companies. The only one on the market now is the Ford Escape Hybrid. GM's "hybrid"? Basically same 1500 pickup truck, with a huge battery pack (but same V8 engine). So this doesn't fly really.
Well, that's because gas is taxed at about 4x production costs everywhere else, too. And US drivers complain about "high" gas taxes... The costs to make gas are relatively consistent and equal around the world, actually.
An example is the new Ford Mustang (a tasty looking car, BTW). The 4L model gets around 200bhp, and about 19/28mpg. My Fiat Coupe is comparible, but gets 260bhp from a 2L engine, and more than 50mpg outside town (I don't live in a city)
What is the torque output for your 260 BHP 2L engine? It's probably about 150 ft/lb. The Ford V8 is probably 220-240 ft/lb. Is your Fiat Coupe equiped to US safety standards also? I'm going to bet that your Fiat probably weighs close to 1000 lbs less than the Rustang, too.
American drivers like big noise and big engines, while failing to grasp "power-to-weight" ratio. If it sounds fast and can light up the tires, that's good enough. At least here in the Portland, OR, area, I've seen at least 3 different Lotus Elises driving around. *SOME* American drivers have sort of a clue, but not enough...
And, car mfgrs and dealers are all too happy to pump up and cater to American drivers' narcissism. "king of the road!" "fear THIS!" blah blah blah. So SUV sales still do well. As much as I loathe and despise them, things would be much better if most of us were simply driving Chevy Sprints and their equivalents to work each day. So I drive a stupid Saturn SW2 instead, and won't be replacing it anytime soon. Of course, the SW2 can carry maybe two bales of hay or straw. The truck carries 1+ ton (20 bales)... Different tools for different jobs.
Hybrids are only there to keep the PR good.
Modernization of US cars? Well, at least where I'm at, this week unleaded gas is about $2.599-2.629/gal. Diesel is still over $3.00/gal.
I can work on a gas engine at home. There are other costs involved with diesels that are higher than gas engines, also, at least with V8 diesel engines (they use about 4x as much oil, larger batteries needed, woe is thee if you run it out of diesel, etc). A VW TDI or MB CDI car would probably make for an ideal commuter car, even over a Prius/Civic Hybrid.
Besides. I have a 1991 Ford F-250 pickup truck with the 350 V8 (4.9L). Was warned about the 460 V8 (7.x L)..."gets about 9mpg...empty or fully loaded". I reckon my truck gets about 15 mpg on the highway right now (it needs a tuneup pretty badly). If it was a 1970's V8 of the same size, it would probably get about 12. What does a new 2005 F250 with the 350 rate at? I think it's 12 city and 18-20 highway, which actually is pretty dang good improvement over time. But I'm not stupid enough to use it for a daily driver to an office job, either, yet too many other people are.
The only way to curb it in the US would be to make it economically unreal for most people to continue with their current driving choices, and the only real way to do that would be to quadruple gas taxes. Since this is done primarily on a state-by-state basis, it ain't going to happen. Even with the high gas prices of the last few weeks, it's not going to change much in the US unless it stays that way for a long time.
After all, most people have to drive to work in the US. It's not realistic to move closer to work for most people for a variety of reasons (my reason in IL was that median house prices around Abbott Park, IL, were about $500K around 2000, and I still lived only about 17 miles/50 minutes away from it). Mass/rapid transit works or is workable only for a relatively small majority of workers. Being about 2 miles away from a Metra station in Chicagoland was great when I worked downtown (35 mile drive), but going from my house to Shaumburg had to be driven.
1. Hybrids are more expensive then their traditional counterparts.
Well... initial cost for a Prius is more than for a similarly equiped Toyota Echo/Corolla, but not that much more. The Prius is not a stripped down minimalistic economy car, so to be fair the Echo/Corolla should be similarly fitted out (i.e., air conditioner, CD stereo, etc).
So, let's say the Prius is $4000 more than for the Echo. Let's say that the usable (certainly if it was a company car, the depreciation lifetime for the car isn't going to be any more than 5 yrs) lifetime for both cars is 5 years. To make economic sense, the Prius has to save you $800/yr in gas compared to the Echo/Corolla, which it might very well do in an urban environment with stop-and-go traffic (the worse the traffic, the better). Wow, that's what the Prius is optimized for, whoodathunk? As gas prices go higher, the Prius becomes even more advantageous (but they're going back down, at least in my part of Oregon).
2. Batteries are expensive to replace.
Yes, but they're *probably* not using el cheapo 36-month lead-acid batteries. NiMH? Yes, they're expensive, but they're set to last the usable lifetime of the car. When they start crapping out, time to buy a new car. It's an economy car. You wouldn't expect to get more than 100K miles from a Hyundai, KIA, Suzuki or other similar car, now, would you? Yes, I know most of those have outrageous warranties, but... with cars that cheap they're banking on you selling/trading in them WAY before 10 yrs/100K Miles. You pay for "core charge" on new car batteries anyways (in the US) if you don't bring in the dead one at the same time you buy the new one, which is ostensibly to pay for the recycling costs.
3. Batteries are not "good" for the environment.
Neither are millions of cows farting. So what is your point, exactly? More hazardous waste is generated and disposed of simply by having to treat and bury coal powerplant fly ash compared to car battery disposal...
4. People who "plug in" to pre-charge (such as some Prius owners) -- are still paying for that electricity.
So what?
5. The electricity used above still relies on a "non friendly" methods of production, which means your giving up gas here, but sacrificing coal (or nuclear, or insert method here) anyway.
Again, so what? Refer to past arguments about efficiencies of central power generation. Me, personally? I'd take two or three nuke plants that could out-produce electricity than 30 coal plants. The waste is more hazardous, potentially, yes. But it seems far easier to deal with spent nuclear waste than it is to deal with tons and tons of (radioactive) fly ash that is caught, and the large amounts that are distributed daily into the air (woe to those downwind). I'd take the shipment of a spent nuclear powerplant pressure vessel (it's 100 tons of one big hunk of radioactive stainless steel. It ain't going anywhere if it falls off the truck) going through town than a trainload full of fly ash...
But that's just me.
As you can see, everyone wants all the benefits, but none of the downsides. What are we going to do with these millions of batteries when they need to be disposed?
What to do with the batteries? recycle them. But it sounds like you're willing to put up with the downsides of not having electrical vehicles (more smog, more expensive gas, more governmental controls over vehicles, etc.), which is fine, I suppose. It's far easier, and more economical overall, to make a "dirty" powerplant clean than it is to make and keep millions of cars emissions-clean. Since there isn't a "car owner's lobby", the power lobbies win out in legislatures. Which is too bad, really.
Ultimately, it is all of us, not power companies, oil companies, etc., who pay for the externalized costs that are passed off by these companies. We should have some way to compell them to either make them reduce those costs (and possibly have to pay slightly more up-front), or make the shareholders have to deal with them when the time to deal with the externalized costs becomes obvious later on.
We all want Wal-Mart prices but the Nordstrom's "experience".
Well, "cria" is Spanish for "baby". Baby llamas and alpacas are simply called "cria". Take that analogy for what it is...
Funny thing, though, in California (maybe it was overthrown there, too), you pay an "environmental impact" fee of about $300 the first time you register a car in California not originally purchased in CA.
What need does a homeless man have for a fire department, or a carless man have for state police patrols and roads? Why should the poor pay for what the rich use most?
Homeless man gets hit by a drunk driver (ok, homeless man was drunk, too). The PD, FD and ambulances have to get there somehow...
Actually, the infrastructure is used by/available for all. That it exists is a hard-to-measure benefit, but it is there.
My bite with the "sales tax" is that ostensibly, retail sales tax at Brick & Mortar stores helps to pay for some of that infrastructure that the business needs. Everything involved internally in a "e-sale" is individually taxed: telecom taxes are collected on all parties involved for the internet connections, gas taxes are paid by FedEx, UPS and USPS, property taxes by the company's actual business location (whether it is a legitimate place of business or some guy's mother's basement). What else really needs to be taxed on top of that?
Sales tax sucks, plain and simple. Yes, it was a factor in moving to Oregon. Oregon's personal income tax is pretty small (compared to California and Illinois...). On the flip side, Oregonians as a whole are ABSOLUTELY F'ING CLUELESS what high state taxes really are, and yet they complain about this or that not being funded from the state every day.
Well, you could look at it that way, or simply look at it as cheaper and better then letting kids run amok. School is cheaper than the legal system and prison system.
Hmm... Rails has some pretty interesting AJAX "effects" built-in.
The only problem I see with Zimbra is that it would probably be painfully slow over dialup.
With SAP its IE or bust. Why is it necessary to navigate the thousand halls of links to access or change an amount of data I could fit on a 360k floppy?
A big part of this is because SAP does not use ODBC to provide connectivity to the database (which would be bad anyways, unless you know German), or to ABAP and other SAP data objects. Instead, client software talks to it through an RPC interface. Assuming the SAP admins will let you install it.
Otherwise, getting data out of it tends to mean setting up SAP reports to dump data to text files(but not to excel - still dumps only 16Krows (excel 7 limit), not 64Krows (excel 7+ limit).
Not a very end-user analyst friendly system.
You mean Microsoft finally invented it?
(old reference to a Calvin & Hobbes sunday cartoon strip)
Still, MS couldn't figure out a way in over 14 years to either add VBA events to table and query objects (i.e., triggers), or make linked tables more aware of backend database events/exceptions so that they cound be handled in the client side if need be (i.e., non-updatable view linked via ODBC is "updated", exception passed back to Access, and developer can then write essentially an INSTEAD OF trigger to put all the data in the right places)?
The best (but least popular) DB app GUI builder for Windows has been Delphi. Its database controls (TDataset) meets or exceeds the database "awareness" of Access, especially when compared to VB. While not exactly a complete MVC environment, TDataModule can let you encapsulate a LOT of business logic in a nice container. Etc.
The only so-called "database" that emphasizes it's GUI is Access
That's only if you're using Jet (i.e., access) to store the data. If you're using a real RDBMS, Access makes for a great database-aware front-end development environment. Since Jet also does not really support triggers, stored procs, etc., either, then it leaves it to the developer to try and do data integrity stuff mostly in the UI. Yes, this really does blow boogers.
Administration tools for commercial and OSS databases may be easy for small sites and novice DBA's that don't know their tools, but large applications rely on database scripts to handle configuration, not GUIs. The reason is simple: you can't put a mouse click into CVS/RCS/SCCS/???.
So, you write a document that says "click on this", "click on that", "enter 'XYZZY' for Froboz", etc., and check that in to your SCS. You then follow that script when implementing changes to test , qa or production. It very well could just say, "open a command line and run BlowAwayTheDatabase.sql", but when you have to depend on other people to migrate your changes to production, this is how you have to do it.