Regardless of if it is a web site or traveling to Mars, if someone says something is to be funded by advertising, what they mean is they don't know how to get the money.
It is likely that the economy overspends on advertising by a large degree. Most of it is in untracked, and Google and others succeed with relatively limited tracking - just showing someone looked at something, not tracking it back to sales at all.
Given the unpaid externalities of advertising -- for example, not being able to find the site you are looking for in the first page of search results, and slow loading web pages crapped up with ads, etc -- we should not encourage this type of behavior, and when two equal options are available, choose the one less advertised.
The big box failed because methane is coming out as well as oil, and at that presure and temperature the methane makes an ice with the water, which clogs it up. The bigger a box or cone you make, the more of this will form, and the oil and ice will float and lift it off.
You need a smaller box, not a bigger one, and possibly to heat it. You probably can't insulate it and let the hot oil keep it ice-free, because at that presure anything with air pockets like insulation has, is crushed flat and doesn't insulate any more.
Re:irrational or rational response?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Stack's note claims that his problems stem from $12,000 in unreported income that his wife had, and a piano that had been claimed as a business expense or asset that the IRS said was not. He also mentioned having his retirement reset to 0, but hey, that's about as common as having freckles or wearing glasses.
This caused him to destroy a house worth $250,000 and a plane that is probably worth $20,000 to $40,000. The unpaid tax on $12,000 might have been $4,000 at most, maybe doubled with penalties especially given his previous tax problems, and if he had written off a piano he should not have, at most that is another $5,000 in income - I'm presuming he didn't buy a Steinway Grand or something, if so I hope that also wasn't burned in the house.
His note also failed to mention that his ex-cultist wife had left him the day before. It is possible based on the manner in which the house burned that he had booby trapped in an attempt to kill her.
Now, this aspect of the tax code probably is screwed up. But it's a little like deciding to pass gun legislation in the heated atmosphere following a mass shooting; do we really want people in the mental condition of the last days of Joe Stack to be dictating our tax reform debate ?
If you cleared your mind of all the emotive pictures and chatter of the last week, and sat down and looked at the tax code and picked something that needed changing, would the treatment of technical contractors really be at the top of the list ? There's a lot of crap in there, from how deductions are counted for leasing versus purchase to whatever causes all those big corporations to pay no tax year after year.
Also, if you pick Joe Stack in his final days as your guide in tax law, note that he also complained bitterly about the tax exemptions of churches, particularly the Catholic church. I don't see the Joe Stack fans arguing for a change in that.
Why do you say Drupal requires a lot of file and configuration manipulation to go from 6.14 to 6.15 ? I have done this numerous times. What I did was, untar the new new php code on top of the old, run update.php, look through a list of things it was about to to do, click OK.
You are advised to put the site in "offline mode" (users can't log in to change data) while doing this, and back up your files and database before hand so you can revert, which I did. I did not have any problems though. I did it all from the browser without editting any files, for multiple fairly complecated sites.
Thanks for that link -- I think call recording is an essential feature of any phone.
Speaking of which, do you know of a call recorder app for Android that doesn't suck by attempting to record the incoming channel using the microphone or force you into speakerphone mode ?
But students and their parents are told the opposite. They are told that a college degree is the key to social and economic advancement, and that you can pay off any amount of debt if you can just make it through college. Discussions of higher education at the high school level consist mainly of "can I get in" and "how do I marshal the recources", parents and career counselor and college recruiters never discuss if it makes financial sense; it is taken for granted it is the smartest thing to do.
I think that is begining to change, articles calculating the payback from a college education are appearing more frequently.
It should be noted that in the case we are discussing, the girl is not suing because her degree fails to increase her employability. She is suing because the career office at the school (she claims) is not helping her as she was promised they would, apparently showing preference to placing the straight-A students in interviews, and ignoring her lower GPA.
However, everybody who reads or hears of this immediately begins discussing whether college educations are worth it. I think this means that society as a whole is deciding that college is too expensive for what you get.
I once did a large project in which I took a large, slow site in PHP (it was pretty complecated, it was a CRM with a lot of custom business logic) and rewrote all the core functionality from PHP to C / C++, and made it a "module" of PHP. The rewriting was mostly simple translation -- litterally removing all dollar signs, adding some types, and attempting to compile, and just fixing the compile errors until it would build. Then going back through it with a fine-tooth comb to track down all the memory leaks.
The speed increase from doing that is pretty surprising. Simple loops that do a bit of math or something speed up by 100 times, and a loop that creates and destroys an object within the loop will be 100,000 times faster. This is without actually trying to write fast C/C++ code, and not create and delete the same thing over and over in a loop -- just pure dumb translation of the code.
At that point, the web site guys can keep tweaking and changing the web page in PHP just like before; but they load that module in the php.ini and then they have a basic library of stuff, like login_user() or get_user_balance() and etc, that are really fast and do all the heavy lifting.
I would be surprised if Facebook has not already done this. How to do it is well documented in several books, and there are lots of PHP modules written in C/C++ to look at for examples.
I suspect that Facebook's VP is right that AMD and Intel exaggerate their claims, but is also generally true that most computer programs are more IO bound that you expect. This is not a reason to avoid something like I describe above; once you have the more complete control of programming in C, IO issues may be easier to find and address.
He also mentions that the servers offered by Dell and others aren't very power efficient or practicle for him, and he mentions Google designing their own servers. Nothing google did was really rocket science, from what we know, and Facebook probably doesn't have to go as far as they did to get a reasonable benefit. It's not that hard to set up motherboards to run without a case, booting off the network with no harddrive attached.
I maintain several mail servers for various clients. Dealing with spam takes up a lot of time and resources, but I have also spent a lot of time trying to get my legitimate fixed-IP business class IPs off of SORBS "dynamic IP" list. I think SORBS probably ended up being a net loss in the spam war, because admin resources that could have been spent fighting spam were instead spent trying to avoid friendly fire.
I would be interested in helping. As in, I won't just cheer you on on the internet, I might pitch in real money.
I am not so interested in a museum, or at least not just a museum -- some sort of museum seems appropriate for the place. I would be more interested in something like a "Hacker Space" with labs and workshops and possibly living arrangements, but on a bigger scale than hacker houses; more like a self-run graduate or research institute. I would like to be able to use the facilities like a Tech Shop ( http://techshop.ws/ ) if I lived close enough, pay a fee to be able send a design in to be made on a rapid protyping machine if we go that router, add myself to a waiting list to be able to live there a semester and take / teach classes, etc.
The structure should be some sort of corporation, with "members" buying shares, and each share should be priced high enough to keep the numbers manageable and low enough that not very many people would be economically excluded -- I would suggest 500 or 1000 dollars. Enough shares should be sold to fund what we want to do with a margin, and then no more; subsequent members would buy out an existing member's spot.
Decisions would have to be done democraticly via a system such as Debian uses or using something like DeliberativeAssembly.com . Of course officiers and a board would carry out actual immediate tasks, and long term decisions would be voted on at large, and the officiers and board be regularly elected, etc.
This particular piece of property might not be on the market by the time something was organized, but there are other places. If we make up a list of appropriate parameters -- size of space, with X miles of an airport, in a town with an Amtrak stop, etc, I am sure some structurly sound but unused factory building can be found somewhere away from the coasts for much less than 1.6 million.
But a "typical application" can usually be made to work fairly easily with MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Oracle, or any other SQL-ish database. These MySQL forks are not going to invent some extension of the SQL standard that is suddenly absolutely must-have. They will have incremental improvements mostly hidden by the SQL interface, such as replication, better indexing, etc.
The people who are extremely concerned about the proliferation of various linux distributions typically don't use linux very much, and talk and manage a lot. Perhaps you could try writing code that uses several different databases interchangably, and while you will end up with some ugly if-thens or #define statements, I think on the whole you will realize it isn't a very big issue. If some version of MySQL has a feature you like, use it, and you should feel confident in being able to switch to something else should that fork die.
I'm not a hardcore Intel boycotter, but as long as I'm going to pick something to semi-standardize on, I'm not going to pick Intel. AMD is not a corporate saint and would probably be as abusive if they had the market power, but when I have a choice, Intel won't get my business unless they seem to substantially change their behaviour over a long time period.
For years I used the ATI Rage Pro 128 MB AGP card in all my computers, because it worked reliably with all linuxes and other OS's and was cheap, and performance was more than good enough. At one point I bought 15 of the cards for $3 each on ebay, and used them one by one in various servers and desktops.
Now, most of the motherboards have PCI Express slots in them. I would like to use ATI cards with all open-source drivers. What is the equivalent card I should be purchasing ?
None of these points are completely true, but they are true enough to make me willing to invest in doing this:
* I don't like the caps, and Time Warner is more likely to stop implementing them if they are associated with people blocking ads. * People who don't see commercial advertising tend to become slightly smarter, a bit more interesting to talk to, slightly less likely to engage in political extremism in either direction, and have marginally less debt and be more properous, thus helping the economy overall. It is like the effect of removing a television from the household, but smaller. Blocking ads betters society in general. If you are pro-advertising, you are anti-Civilization and pro-Barbarianism.
With regards to your comment about increasing Firefox's install base: while I am using Firefox right now and very greatful for what it is, it is also a horrible piece of bloated, memory-hogging software that is not a good posterchild for Free Software. I hesitate to inflict the current version of Firefox on a person unfamilar with computers, using an older computer with only 512 MB of RAM or less, with or without adblocker. If the Firefox people got rid of all javascript based config files, and fixed the memory fragmentation problem, and developed a real plugin system that involved writing fast plugins in C and loading signed.so files instead of that XUL travesty, I might get behind it.
As Windows is to computing in general, Firefox is to Free Software: big user base, big code base, slow, and not much else to recommend it.
Galeon also sucks. I haven't tried out the Google Chrome browser yet.
Ad-blocking software usually acheives the same effect as "blocking at a higher level", because the appearence of the advertisement on the page is dependent on the browser sending a request for that ad. If the browser does not send that request, a tiny amount of upstream and a large amount of downstream bandwidth is saved.
We should use this as an opportunity to convince as many TimeWarner customers as possible to install ad-blocking software, on the argument that if they don't they are more likely to exceed their cap. Perhaps we could develope a modified OpenWRT or similar type router that blocked as much of that as possible, and convince people to install it.
What could have been done instead in 64,000 man hours of focused attention ? I bet Slashdot has an even greater negative effect on our nation's productivity.
Most of the comments here are negative. The criticisms about swappable drive bays being better and that ground should not be switched are all valid.
However, I think articles like this are good. More people should actually do stuff, even if they burn out a few harddrives or power supplies in the process.
I think this is an excellent suggestion. You should not allow import data of yours to not be backed up under your own controll. Keep in mind that if you have sensitive info in your email, there is one more way for it to leak out, of course.
If you need to preserve "labels" and other structure of the mailbox, look into the script "imapsync". You can set that to run once a night; for speed, you might have it just look at emails newer than 10 days or something. It is available at http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/
Imap access can also allow you to keep a local copy of all emails, in fact that's the way it is most often set up.
I prefer to set up imap, but that's because in my case I control the server, and keeping the mail on the server in one big spool file (which is how most pop servers do it) gets slow and clumsy. Keeping it in Maildir format is better. Of course you can provide pop access regardless of how the mail is stored, with courier or any other modern server. I would immagine that gmail uses custom code written by google to store and index and serve up everything.
In most states, their is already a perfectly good system for raising revenue for roads. An excise tax is charged on motor vehicle fuel. The more you use the roads, the more you pay. Since lighter vehicles are more fuel efficient but also wear the roads less, more efficient cars pay less and big trucks pay more. Fuel for airplanes is exempted from the road excise tax since it implies no use of the roads, and in some cases diesel for agricultural use can also be exempted. The system is fair, and revenue automatically increases and decreases according to the needs of the system.
Basically, this system has every property that would make the automated toll system appealing.
In most states, this system has been gradually destroyed. In times when the gas tax produced more revenue than needed, the "earmark" of the money was violated, and it was appropriated to other uses; sometimes they would promise to replace it later and call it "borrowing" from the road fund, but such promises are generally fogotten in the scramble to share out money among the lobbiests in the next session. In times of high gas prices, their is pressure for the gas tax to be relaxed, at least temporarily.
More importanly, the revenue from the excise tax is not accumulated to fund larger one-time projects. Instead keeping the money, perhaps even lending it conservatively by buying Federal bonds or bonds from other States, and then paying for the large projects, we borrow the money by issuing bonds. Thus we pay interest when a more disciplined management of the money should allow us to collect it.
Given what has happened with the gas excise tax, why should we expect any better from the automated, or non-automated, tolls ? These tolls are also further encumbered by the fact that the bureaucracy and private interests necessary to administer this less efficient system will act to preserve it against all attacks.
There are numerous instances in this country of roads that were built on bonds, and then a toll system installed to "pay off the bonds" after which the road was supposed to revert to free. How many roads paid off those bonds and never had the toll booths removed ?
I believe that between fertilizing the oceans with iron, painting all roofs white to increase the albido, and could seeding, we can make this planet just like our native home.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of if it is a web site or traveling to Mars, if someone says something is to be funded by advertising, what they mean is they don't know how to get the money.
It is likely that the economy overspends on advertising by a large degree. Most of it is in untracked, and Google and others succeed with relatively limited tracking - just showing someone looked at something, not tracking it back to sales at all.
Given the unpaid externalities of advertising -- for example, not being able to find the site you are looking for in the first page of search results, and slow loading web pages crapped up with ads, etc -- we should not encourage this type of behavior, and when two equal options are available, choose the one less advertised.
The big box failed because methane is coming out as well as oil, and at that presure and temperature the methane makes an ice with the water, which clogs it up. The bigger a box or cone you make, the more of this will form, and the oil and ice will float and lift it off.
You need a smaller box, not a bigger one, and possibly to heat it. You probably can't insulate it and let the hot oil keep it ice-free, because at that presure anything with air pockets like insulation has, is crushed flat and doesn't insulate any more.
Stack's note claims that his problems stem from $12,000 in unreported income that his wife had, and a piano that had been claimed as a business expense or asset that the IRS said was not. He also mentioned having his retirement reset to 0, but hey, that's about as common as having freckles or wearing glasses.
This caused him to destroy a house worth $250,000 and a plane that is probably worth $20,000 to $40,000. The unpaid tax on $12,000 might have been $4,000 at most, maybe doubled with penalties especially given his previous tax problems, and if he had written off a piano he should not have, at most that is another $5,000 in income - I'm presuming he didn't buy a Steinway Grand or something, if so I hope that also wasn't burned in the house.
His note also failed to mention that his ex-cultist wife had left him the day before. It is possible based on the manner in which the house burned that he had booby trapped in an attempt to kill her.
Now, this aspect of the tax code probably is screwed up. But it's a little like deciding to pass gun legislation in the heated atmosphere following a mass shooting; do we really want people in the mental condition of the last days of Joe Stack to be dictating our tax reform debate ?
If you cleared your mind of all the emotive pictures and chatter of the last week, and sat down and looked at the tax code and picked something that needed changing, would the treatment of technical contractors really be at the top of the list ? There's a lot of crap in there, from how deductions are counted for leasing versus purchase to whatever causes all those big corporations to pay no tax year after year.
Also, if you pick Joe Stack in his final days as your guide in tax law, note that he also complained bitterly about the tax exemptions of churches, particularly the Catholic church. I don't see the Joe Stack fans arguing for a change in that.
Why do you say Drupal requires a lot of file and configuration manipulation to go from 6.14 to 6.15 ? I have done this numerous times. What I did was, untar the new new php code on top of the old, run update.php, look through a list of things it was about to to do, click OK.
You are advised to put the site in "offline mode" (users can't log in to change data) while doing this, and back up your files and database before hand so you can revert, which I did. I did not have any problems though. I did it all from the browser without editting any files, for multiple fairly complecated sites.
Thanks for that link -- I think call recording is an essential feature of any phone.
Speaking of which, do you know of a call recorder app for Android that doesn't suck by attempting to record the incoming channel using the microphone or force you into speakerphone mode ?
But students and their parents are told the opposite. They are told that a college degree is the key to social and economic advancement, and that you can pay off any amount of debt if you can just make it through college. Discussions of higher education at the high school level consist mainly of "can I get in" and "how do I marshal the recources", parents and career counselor and college recruiters never discuss if it makes financial sense; it is taken for granted it is the smartest thing to do.
I think that is begining to change, articles calculating the payback from a college education are appearing more frequently.
It should be noted that in the case we are discussing, the girl is not suing because her degree fails to increase her employability. She is suing because the career office at the school (she claims) is not helping her as she was promised they would, apparently showing preference to placing the straight-A students in interviews, and ignoring her lower GPA.
However, everybody who reads or hears of this immediately begins discussing whether college educations are worth it. I think this means that society as a whole is deciding that college is too expensive for what you get.
I once did a large project in which I took a large, slow site in PHP (it was pretty complecated, it was a CRM with a lot of custom business logic) and rewrote all the core functionality from PHP to C / C++, and made it a "module" of PHP. The rewriting was mostly simple translation -- litterally removing all dollar signs, adding some types, and attempting to compile, and just fixing the compile errors until it would build. Then going back through it with a fine-tooth comb to track down all the memory leaks.
The speed increase from doing that is pretty surprising. Simple loops that do a bit of math or something speed up by 100 times, and a loop that creates and destroys an object within the loop will be 100,000 times faster. This is without actually trying to write fast C/C++ code, and not create and delete the same thing over and over in a loop -- just pure dumb translation of the code.
At that point, the web site guys can keep tweaking and changing the web page in PHP just like before; but they load that module in the php.ini and then they have a basic library of stuff, like login_user() or get_user_balance() and etc, that are really fast and do all the heavy lifting.
I would be surprised if Facebook has not already done this. How to do it is well documented in several books, and there are lots of PHP modules written in C/C++ to look at for examples.
I suspect that Facebook's VP is right that AMD and Intel exaggerate their claims, but is also generally true that most computer programs are more IO bound that you expect. This is not a reason to avoid something like I describe above; once you have the more complete control of programming in C, IO issues may be easier to find and address.
He also mentions that the servers offered by Dell and others aren't very power efficient or practicle for him, and he mentions Google designing their own servers. Nothing google did was really rocket science, from what we know, and Facebook probably doesn't have to go as far as they did to get a reasonable benefit. It's not that hard to set up motherboards to run without a case, booting off the network with no harddrive attached.
I maintain several mail servers for various clients. Dealing with spam takes up a lot of time and resources, but I have also spent a lot of time trying to get my legitimate fixed-IP business class IPs off of SORBS "dynamic IP" list. I think SORBS probably ended up being a net loss in the spam war, because admin resources that could have been spent fighting spam were instead spent trying to avoid friendly fire.
I would be interested in helping. As in, I won't just cheer you on on the internet, I might pitch in real money.
I am not so interested in a museum, or at least not just a museum -- some sort of museum seems appropriate for the place. I would be more interested in something like a "Hacker Space" with labs and workshops and possibly living arrangements, but on a bigger scale than hacker houses; more like a self-run graduate or research institute. I would like to be able to use the facilities like a Tech Shop ( http://techshop.ws/ ) if I lived close enough, pay a fee to be able send a design in to be made on a rapid protyping machine if we go that router, add myself to a waiting list to be able to live there a semester and take / teach classes, etc.
The structure should be some sort of corporation, with "members" buying shares, and each share should be priced high enough to keep the numbers manageable and low enough that not very many people would be economically excluded -- I would suggest 500 or 1000 dollars. Enough shares should be sold to fund what we want to do with a margin, and then no more; subsequent members would buy out an existing member's spot.
Decisions would have to be done democraticly via a system such as Debian uses or using something like DeliberativeAssembly.com . Of course officiers and a board would carry out actual immediate tasks, and long term decisions would be voted on at large, and the officiers and board be regularly elected, etc.
This particular piece of property might not be on the market by the time something was organized, but there are other places. If we make up a list of appropriate parameters -- size of space, with X miles of an airport, in a town with an Amtrak stop, etc, I am sure some structurly sound but unused factory building can be found somewhere away from the coasts for much less than 1.6 million.
But a "typical application" can usually be made to work fairly easily with MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Oracle, or any other SQL-ish database. These MySQL forks are not going to invent some extension of the SQL standard that is suddenly absolutely must-have. They will have incremental improvements mostly hidden by the SQL interface, such as replication, better indexing, etc.
The people who are extremely concerned about the proliferation of various linux distributions typically don't use linux very much, and talk and manage a lot. Perhaps you could try writing code that uses several different databases interchangably, and while you will end up with some ugly if-thens or #define statements, I think on the whole you will realize it isn't a very big issue. If some version of MySQL has a feature you like, use it, and you should feel confident in being able to switch to something else should that fork die.
I have done some googling, and I think I will try out the ATI Radeon 3450 as you suggest, thanks for the tip.
Perhaps you misread a "not" in my post . . . we are in agreement.
I'm not a hardcore Intel boycotter, but as long as I'm going to pick something to semi-standardize on, I'm not going to pick Intel. AMD is not a corporate saint and would probably be as abusive if they had the market power, but when I have a choice, Intel won't get my business unless they seem to substantially change their behaviour over a long time period.
For years I used the ATI Rage Pro 128 MB AGP card in all my computers, because it worked reliably with all linuxes and other OS's and was cheap, and performance was more than good enough. At one point I bought 15 of the cards for $3 each on ebay, and used them one by one in various servers and desktops.
Now, most of the motherboards have PCI Express slots in them. I would like to use ATI cards with all open-source drivers. What is the equivalent card I should be purchasing ?
None of these points are completely true, but they are true enough to make me willing to invest in doing this:
* I don't like the caps, and Time Warner is more likely to stop implementing them if they are associated with people blocking ads.
* People who don't see commercial advertising tend to become slightly smarter, a bit more interesting to talk to, slightly less likely to engage in political extremism in either direction, and have marginally less debt and be more properous, thus helping the economy overall. It is like the effect of removing a television from the household, but smaller. Blocking ads betters society in general. If you are pro-advertising, you are anti-Civilization and pro-Barbarianism.
With regards to your comment about increasing Firefox's install base: while I am using Firefox right now and very greatful for what it is, it is also a horrible piece of bloated, memory-hogging software that is not a good posterchild for Free Software. I hesitate to inflict the current version of Firefox on a person unfamilar with computers, using an older computer with only 512 MB of RAM or less, with or without adblocker. If the Firefox people got rid of all javascript based config files, and fixed the memory fragmentation problem, and developed a real plugin system that involved writing fast plugins in C and loading signed .so files instead of that XUL travesty, I might get behind it.
As Windows is to computing in general, Firefox is to Free Software: big user base, big code base, slow, and not much else to recommend it.
Galeon also sucks. I haven't tried out the Google Chrome browser yet.
Ad-blocking software usually acheives the same effect as "blocking at a higher level", because the appearence of the advertisement on the page is dependent on the browser sending a request for that ad. If the browser does not send that request, a tiny amount of upstream and a large amount of downstream bandwidth is saved.
We should use this as an opportunity to convince as many TimeWarner customers as possible to install ad-blocking software, on the argument that if they don't they are more likely to exceed their cap. Perhaps we could develope a modified OpenWRT or similar type router that blocked as much of that as possible, and convince people to install it.
What could have been done instead in 64,000 man hours of focused attention ? I bet Slashdot has an even greater negative effect on our nation's productivity.
I second the recommendation of Request Tracker, or RT: http://bestpractical.com/rt/
However I have not used many other systems, although we tried to do this with GForge (GForge has come a long way since we were using it).
Also, I have found the people on #rt on irc.perl.org to be polite and helpful, even when my questions were stupid. Thanks guys !
Most of the comments here are negative. The criticisms about swappable drive bays being better and that ground should not be switched are all valid.
However, I think articles like this are good. More people should actually do stuff, even if they burn out a few harddrives or power supplies in the process.
I think this is an excellent suggestion. You should not allow import data of yours to not be backed up under your own controll. Keep in mind that if you have sensitive info in your email, there is one more way for it to leak out, of course.
If you need to preserve "labels" and other structure of the mailbox, look into the script "imapsync". You can set that to run once a night; for speed, you might have it just look at emails newer than 10 days or something. It is available at http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/
Imap access can also allow you to keep a local copy of all emails, in fact that's the way it is most often set up.
I prefer to set up imap, but that's because in my case I control the server, and keeping the mail on the server in one big spool file (which is how most pop servers do it) gets slow and clumsy. Keeping it in Maildir format is better. Of course you can provide pop access regardless of how the mail is stored, with courier or any other modern server. I would immagine that gmail uses custom code written by google to store and index and serve up everything.
That could be bandwidth intensive, though.
I might pay a small amount for a feed of the text-only news groups, you know like comp.*
Something like $20 / year, you are competeting with giganews of course.
In most states, their is already a perfectly good system for raising revenue for roads. An excise tax is charged on motor vehicle fuel. The more you use the roads, the more you pay. Since lighter vehicles are more fuel efficient but also wear the roads less, more efficient cars pay less and big trucks pay more. Fuel for airplanes is exempted from the road excise tax since it implies no use of the roads, and in some cases diesel for agricultural use can also be exempted. The system is fair, and revenue automatically increases and decreases according to the needs of the system.
Basically, this system has every property that would make the automated toll system appealing.
In most states, this system has been gradually destroyed. In times when the gas tax produced more revenue than needed, the "earmark" of the money was violated, and it was appropriated to other uses; sometimes they would promise to replace it later and call it "borrowing" from the road fund, but such promises are generally fogotten in the scramble to share out money among the lobbiests in the next session. In times of high gas prices, their is pressure for the gas tax to be relaxed, at least temporarily.
More importanly, the revenue from the excise tax is not accumulated to fund larger one-time projects. Instead keeping the money, perhaps even lending it conservatively by buying Federal bonds or bonds from other States, and then paying for the large projects, we borrow the money by issuing bonds. Thus we pay interest when a more disciplined management of the money should allow us to collect it.
Given what has happened with the gas excise tax, why should we expect any better from the automated, or non-automated, tolls ? These tolls are also further encumbered by the fact that the bureaucracy and private interests necessary to administer this less efficient system will act to preserve it against all attacks.
There are numerous instances in this country of roads that were built on bonds, and then a toll system installed to "pay off the bonds" after which the road was supposed to revert to free. How many roads paid off those bonds and never had the toll booths removed ?
I believe that between fertilizing the oceans with iron, painting all roofs white to increase the albido, and could seeding, we can make this planet just like our native home.