they're cutting copper off and replacing it with fiber? Who cares?
FCC regulations require them to lease the copper to other broadband providers. They have no such obligation with the fiber. Once the copper is gone, you're locked into Verizon broadband (unless you switch to cable). At that point, especially for those households without cable available, Verizon has no reason not to jack up your prices and/or provide shitty service.
It's the same thing we always see from the telcos, and which explains the terrible Internet, cellular, and POTS service we have in the U.S. Instead of competing, they run whining to either Congress or the regulators for special protection. Because there is no way for consumers to counteract well-funded political interests, Congress gives them whatever they want, and they don't have to compete anymore.
The '86 Honda Accord was one of the best sedan designs, *ever*. That doesn't mean it would be competitive today. I don't think 5 computer years is that different from 20 car years.
5 years is an eternity in the computer business, and the product is just flat looking old. It's perfectly possible to update the aesthetics without losing a bit of functionality, as the TiBook -> AlBook and iBook G4 -> MacBook updates demonstrated. They could even keep the aluminum skin -- just make the anodizing a bit darker to match 2007 tastes, find a way to replace the gray plastic edges with iPhone-style rounded chrome or flush rounded aluminum (for example), provide a magnetic latch, and get rid of outdated design elements like the "cheese graters" and old-style keyboard lettering. While we're at it, can we have a Macbook-style easily accessible HD?
The 17" could get 2.5mm thinner. They could use the 9.5mm optical drive from the 15" models. Since the 17" has enough room for the optical drive to fit completely under the right palm rest, it doesn't have to fit under the keyboard like it does on the 15".
But the 17" is already too flexible... to make a 21mm thick 17" model work you'd almost have to have new case materials.
I think you're right, though, that the big gains will come from flat solid state HDs. I don't know how they'll deal with the optical drive issue in the models (all but the rumored MBP subnotebook) that need an optical drive.
In any case, it's time for new MBP form factors. The Al enclosure has to be one of the all-time best notebook designs -- it's still more functional and useful than most others -- but, for crying out loud, the 17" version was introduced in early 2003, and hasn't appreciably changed since!
Core 2 models run Vista x64 just fine, except that the Boot Camp drivers for the iSight, the sound hardware, and Mac-specific keyboard features don't work. Saying they "won't run" x64 is just as wrong as saying they "won't run" Linux.
It's pretty pointless, though, since no MacBook for the foreseeable future will accept more than 4 GB RAM.
Sure, Dell sells $2500 laptops, and Apple sells $1000 laptops. But neither of those will ever be bought in volume by businesses whose users just use Word and Excel. The sweet spot in business is the cheap 14" (4:3) or 15" widescreen laptop. Dell sells a million of those at $1000ish, in a configuration that is very good for basic business use, and that Apple (smartly, IMO) doesn't try to match. Apple might be able to bite off a small chunk of this market with a $1300-$1600 15" Macbook (which it really should sell because it would kick ass in the consumer market) but the box would still be too expensive and loaded with unnecessary features for plain business use.
I never said that Apples were bad value, for users who need their feature set; quite the contrary. There is no laptop that even comes close to a 17" MBP for its price. I own a 15" MBP and am seriously thinking of buying a 17" as well. But Apple (wisely, given the meaning of its brand) doesn't offer a machine with the set of features most useful to armies of business-bots.
You'll also notice, in the same Cnet link you gave me, that the Vision M -- rated at the same 98dB as the Xtra -- actually measured at only a few tenths of a dB higher than the iPod; no player achieved over 84dB. Your ZDNet Australia link didn't actually test the Xtra. It just quoted the rating.
I'm not dining yet, but I will actually start munching (deep-fried, please) if someone can show me anything (other than maybe an audiophile headphone amp) that can actually achieve 98dB S/N from a volume-controlled headphone jack in real-world testing. The number doesn't tell me the Creative products have good audio quality, it tells me that Creative (like many other companies, including Apple in the developer notes for its laptops) has no problem quoting bullshit audio specs.
Apple hasn't yet (afaik) aimed at a business which needs 2500 new terminals just to do spreadsheets and word processing.
Apple won't ever do that. Apple's brand is really all about content creation. Take iLife, the high-end display, and the loads of features out of a Mac and you don't have a Mac anymore, at least as far as Apple marketing is concerned.
Apple may very well expand its enterprise efforts, but it's sensible enough to focus on enterprises that a Dell or IBM can't serve more cheaply and with less danger to brand equity. Those are, by definition, only enterprises where a majority or significant portion of the users are doing work much more technically demanding than word processing or spreadsheet manipulation.
Think about a MacBook Pro. What types of enterprise users really can get good value by paying $2500+ for a loaded MBP rather than $1000 for a business Dell? Only a few. Those are the only enterprise users Apple will pursue.
Especially in the '50s and '60s, design was only about form; huge sacrifices in function were made to have those pretty shapes. For me, a simple and functional design is much more honest and appealing. When I see '50s and '60s cars, I just see an enormous waste of space and weight, that doesn't contribute to performance, comfort, safety, economy, or any other part of the function of a car. I have the same reaction to those cars that I have to PC cases with fins and lights on them.
For me, some of the best designs ever are on very ordinary cars; they are those that allowed unusual innovations in function. The '86-'89 Honda Accord; the original Chrysler minivans; the current Prius (not for anything having to do with its propulsion, but for its packaging); the Volvo 145 wagon and its numerous descendants (through to the 740 and 960/V90 wagons); the first Scion xB, and, for an example from the '50s, the Mini.
And even from a purely aesthetic perspective, I find simpler better. Some of the prettiest cars for me are the '93 Mazda MX-6; the '92 Acura Legend; the current Audi A6 and A8 (especially the S8); both the original Infiniti G35 and new G37 coupes; and of course the 2000-era Volkswagens (the previous generation of Golfs, Jettas, and Passats). I'll be in the market for a new car in about a year and a half; if nothing changes, I'll probably buy a G37.
I will admit a station wagon would also work but I couldn't possibly...
Or a minivan. Or a crossover.
You realize that what you've just admitted is that you're...
1) putting most other drivers around you at risk, because of your high bumpers, poor braking and handling, and excess weight; 2) paying who knows how much extra in gas, and putting the resulting extra CO2 into the atmosphere; 3) actually *sacrificing* space compared to rational people-moving vehicles (because of your high floor and long hood)...
Fully agree. Given the various harms monster vehicles cause, the only way to rationally preserve people's freedom to drive them is to take steps to make their owners bear the costs imposed on all other motorists by their self-indulgent vehicle choice.
First, increase the gas tax until the drivers of heavier vehicles are paying their fair share of the road repair bill. (There are very rational arguments for subsidizing road wear caused by heavy vehicles, such as semis, used commercially. There are no rational arguments for subsidizing excess road wear by mindlessly heavy personal vehicles.)
Second, actuarially increase insurance premiums for large, poorly performing vehicles until they are in line with the extra deaths caused by those vehicles in collisions with rationally sized vehicles.
Third, given that truck-based vehicles in particular are much more challenging to drive safely than average cars (as they take much longer to stop, have less body control which means more likelihood of losing grip, and are far more prone to rollover), require special licensing. Of course given the variety of vehicles on the road any line we draw between normal vehicles and heavy, trucklike vehicles is likely to be arbitrary. But I'll propose one anyway: To drive a vehicle for personal use that is EITHER over 5000 pounds empty OR over 78" tall, you need a Class C CDL with the attendant training and much tougher skills test.
Manual typewriters didn't have pipe characters. Practice, and court rules, are slow to change. Today, you will often see pipe or vertical-line characters.
The general format of filings, as utilitarian as it is, serves a critical purpose, though... all the elements are simply presented and always in the same place, which makes life much, much easier for paper-drowned, incredibly overworked judges and court personnel.
It's an interesting question. The Office 2007 format represents the first big change to.doc since Word was broadly adopted in the legal profession, so no one has had to think about it yet.
My guess is that Word 97.doc will be fully supported by Word until MS decides to change the format *again*, whenever that may be. So, if their past practice is any indication, we'll be fine through 2013, but not past it.
Of course, open-source translators will have all that time to improve their compatibility. They already work well enough to read an old document, if not always to print a version that you could immediately file or send to a client. In the end, I think it will be the same as many other usse of Microsoft products: gross and inelegant... but it will more or less work. Remember, there was no significant open-source support for the really early Word formats; now there is.
I don't know about everyone in the legal field by a long shot. But, in the environments I'm familiar with, support gradually dwindled once WP shifted from DOS to Windows, partly because Windows key bindings sometimes conflicted with age-old WP ones and people had to relearn stuff anyway, partly because WP for Windows always has had some stability issues, and partly because the makers of expensive macro packages often used in law firms started to focus on developing for Word.
Today (I would estimate since about 2000-2002), Word is basically universal. People expect documents in Word format; not everyone can even read a.wpd anymore. Even the DOJ, one of the last WordPerfect holdouts, simultaneously uses Word and often needs to send or file documents in Word format.
Many of our scholars, while they generate terrific scholarly work, are just not computer-competent. I absolutely cannot imagine getting them to successfully install OpenOffice, or their IT departments (which are frequently not much better) to support it. (These are folks who call for support to ask things like "How do I make a table?") If you required ODF, you would lose some submissions from those who actually read the requirement, and get 99% of your others in.doc format (as I said, people don't even think about format -- if they are writing something, they just open Word, hit "Save," and send it.)
Every school I know about buys a site license for MS Office, and either extends that to students (at considerable expense) or *requires* students to purchase MS Office along with their computers. Honestly, the assumption of Word is so ingrained, trying to challenge it in the legal academic field would be emptying the ocean with a bucket.
Word has only changed file formats once in recent memory, between Word 95 and 97 (or 6.0 and 98 in the Mac versions).
I remember exactly the same issues that time. Word 97.doc format was not widely accepted until at least 1999. Once Vista and Office 2007 are widely adopted, which will occur within a three-year replacement cycle, and Office 2008 for Mac is well established, the new formats will become standard and there will no longer be a peep of protest, whether or not MS has fixed the issues with the formats.
I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.
In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.
If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)
I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.
FWIW, those iPods that have been criticized for sound quality, which don't include the 1G, have had very specific issues that only show up in certain settings. The 3G (and pre-photo 4G, to a lesser extent) had weak capacitors that reduced bass response at high levels. Some early 4Gs would occasionally emit hard drive noise through the earphones. That's it. iPods from day one have been famous for having exceptionally good DACs for portable devices. The lowly 1G shuffle, which has stronger caps and no noisy HD, may be the best-sounding portable device ever made.
On the list of things that will have the most impact on the environment that is way, way down the list in both terms of impact and return on investment as far as the environment goes.
I'm afraid you're flat wrong here.
The transportation and residential sectors combined make up more than half of our greenhouse gas emissions. I'm not talking about the switch from a Tahoe to a Prius, but from a Tahoe to something like a Chevy Volt (sized for real-world use, of course). Given most people's driving patterns, that could cut our CO2 emissions from transportation by more than half. Similarly, I'm thinking about houses that are grid-neutral most of the time (think solar roofs, on-site windmills, or whatever else can help power houses in x climate). These switches would have a *huge* impact on our CO2 emissions and none whatsoever on our lifestyle, if the policy framework were in place to support them.
It's not even that. They're either nakedly afraid of change or don't think it's worth the cost because they're going to heaven anyway.
If political will existed we could have vehicles that do everything SUVs do now, and houses just as big and comfy as the ones we have now, that had only a small fraction of the environmental impact. The technology is there; it's just a question of making it economically feasible.
The whole point of government is to address situations where market outcomes are bad for society. A government truly concerned with the interests of its citizens would have found a way to make clean houses and cars economically viable three decades ago.
There's not much political benefit to environmental stewardship when a considerable majority of your supporters have no interest in empirical truth. Most Bush voters believe exactly what parent said: Jesus will come again and they will be swept into heaven before the environmental consequences of their actions cause them any harm.
Interesting. Thanks for setting me straight. So the situation is not quite as dire as I imagined.
Still, why has Ford only put its system in one product, an aging, uncompetitive compact SUV, when Toyota has five different systems (Prius, Camry, Highlander/RX400h, GS450h, LS600hL) covering most segments of the market? I still suspect Ford (and GM even more severely) of dealing in bad faith here.
Slashdot Mirror
FCC regulations require them to lease the copper to other broadband providers. They have no such obligation with the fiber. Once the copper is gone, you're locked into Verizon broadband (unless you switch to cable). At that point, especially for those households without cable available, Verizon has no reason not to jack up your prices and/or provide shitty service.
It's the same thing we always see from the telcos, and which explains the terrible Internet, cellular, and POTS service we have in the U.S. Instead of competing, they run whining to either Congress or the regulators for special protection. Because there is no way for consumers to counteract well-funded political interests, Congress gives them whatever they want, and they don't have to compete anymore.
The '86 Honda Accord was one of the best sedan designs, *ever*. That doesn't mean it would be competitive today. I don't think 5 computer years is that different from 20 car years.
5 years is an eternity in the computer business, and the product is just flat looking old. It's perfectly possible to update the aesthetics without losing a bit of functionality, as the TiBook -> AlBook and iBook G4 -> MacBook updates demonstrated. They could even keep the aluminum skin -- just make the anodizing a bit darker to match 2007 tastes, find a way to replace the gray plastic edges with iPhone-style rounded chrome or flush rounded aluminum (for example), provide a magnetic latch, and get rid of outdated design elements like the "cheese graters" and old-style keyboard lettering. While we're at it, can we have a Macbook-style easily accessible HD?
The 17" could get 2.5mm thinner. They could use the 9.5mm optical drive from the 15" models. Since the 17" has enough room for the optical drive to fit completely under the right palm rest, it doesn't have to fit under the keyboard like it does on the 15".
But the 17" is already too flexible... to make a 21mm thick 17" model work you'd almost have to have new case materials.
I think you're right, though, that the big gains will come from flat solid state HDs. I don't know how they'll deal with the optical drive issue in the models (all but the rumored MBP subnotebook) that need an optical drive.
In any case, it's time for new MBP form factors. The Al enclosure has to be one of the all-time best notebook designs -- it's still more functional and useful than most others -- but, for crying out loud, the 17" version was introduced in early 2003, and hasn't appreciably changed since!
Core 2 models run Vista x64 just fine, except that the Boot Camp drivers for the iSight, the sound hardware, and Mac-specific keyboard features don't work. Saying they "won't run" x64 is just as wrong as saying they "won't run" Linux.
It's pretty pointless, though, since no MacBook for the foreseeable future will accept more than 4 GB RAM.
Sure, Dell sells $2500 laptops, and Apple sells $1000 laptops. But neither of those will ever be bought in volume by businesses whose users just use Word and Excel. The sweet spot in business is the cheap 14" (4:3) or 15" widescreen laptop. Dell sells a million of those at $1000ish, in a configuration that is very good for basic business use, and that Apple (smartly, IMO) doesn't try to match. Apple might be able to bite off a small chunk of this market with a $1300-$1600 15" Macbook (which it really should sell because it would kick ass in the consumer market) but the box would still be too expensive and loaded with unnecessary features for plain business use.
I never said that Apples were bad value, for users who need their feature set; quite the contrary. There is no laptop that even comes close to a 17" MBP for its price. I own a 15" MBP and am seriously thinking of buying a 17" as well. But Apple (wisely, given the meaning of its brand) doesn't offer a machine with the set of features most useful to armies of business-bots.
You'll also notice, in the same Cnet link you gave me, that the Vision M -- rated at the same 98dB as the Xtra -- actually measured at only a few tenths of a dB higher than the iPod; no player achieved over 84dB. Your ZDNet Australia link didn't actually test the Xtra. It just quoted the rating.
I'm not dining yet, but I will actually start munching (deep-fried, please) if someone can show me anything (other than maybe an audiophile headphone amp) that can actually achieve 98dB S/N from a volume-controlled headphone jack in real-world testing. The number doesn't tell me the Creative products have good audio quality, it tells me that Creative (like many other companies, including Apple in the developer notes for its laptops) has no problem quoting bullshit audio specs.
You must be new here.
(Hint: Check out the "Preferences" tab on your user page.)
Apple won't ever do that. Apple's brand is really all about content creation. Take iLife, the high-end display, and the loads of features out of a Mac and you don't have a Mac anymore, at least as far as Apple marketing is concerned.
Apple may very well expand its enterprise efforts, but it's sensible enough to focus on enterprises that a Dell or IBM can't serve more cheaply and with less danger to brand equity. Those are, by definition, only enterprises where a majority or significant portion of the users are doing work much more technically demanding than word processing or spreadsheet manipulation.
Think about a MacBook Pro. What types of enterprise users really can get good value by paying $2500+ for a loaded MBP rather than $1000 for a business Dell? Only a few. Those are the only enterprise users Apple will pursue.
If you're talking about the bundled headphones, maybe. I've never used a Zen Xtra.
But if you're talking about the player itself (using the same headphones) I'll eat an iPod box if you can point to solid evidence of this.
I'll stick up for the recent cars.
Especially in the '50s and '60s, design was only about form; huge sacrifices in function were made to have those pretty shapes. For me, a simple and functional design is much more honest and appealing. When I see '50s and '60s cars, I just see an enormous waste of space and weight, that doesn't contribute to performance, comfort, safety, economy, or any other part of the function of a car. I have the same reaction to those cars that I have to PC cases with fins and lights on them.
For me, some of the best designs ever are on very ordinary cars; they are those that allowed unusual innovations in function. The '86-'89 Honda Accord; the original Chrysler minivans; the current Prius (not for anything having to do with its propulsion, but for its packaging); the Volvo 145 wagon and its numerous descendants (through to the 740 and 960/V90 wagons); the first Scion xB, and, for an example from the '50s, the Mini.
And even from a purely aesthetic perspective, I find simpler better. Some of the prettiest cars for me are the '93 Mazda MX-6; the '92 Acura Legend; the current Audi A6 and A8 (especially the S8); both the original Infiniti G35 and new G37 coupes; and of course the 2000-era Volkswagens (the previous generation of Golfs, Jettas, and Passats). I'll be in the market for a new car in about a year and a half; if nothing changes, I'll probably buy a G37.
Or a minivan. Or a crossover.
You realize that what you've just admitted is that you're ...
1) putting most other drivers around you at risk, because of your high bumpers, poor braking and handling, and excess weight; ...
2) paying who knows how much extra in gas, and putting the resulting extra CO2 into the atmosphere;
3) actually *sacrificing* space compared to rational people-moving vehicles (because of your high floor and long hood)
... because you're insecure about how you look.
Fully agree. Given the various harms monster vehicles cause, the only way to rationally preserve people's freedom to drive them is to take steps to make their owners bear the costs imposed on all other motorists by their self-indulgent vehicle choice.
First, increase the gas tax until the drivers of heavier vehicles are paying their fair share of the road repair bill. (There are very rational arguments for subsidizing road wear caused by heavy vehicles, such as semis, used commercially. There are no rational arguments for subsidizing excess road wear by mindlessly heavy personal vehicles.)
Second, actuarially increase insurance premiums for large, poorly performing vehicles until they are in line with the extra deaths caused by those vehicles in collisions with rationally sized vehicles.
Third, given that truck-based vehicles in particular are much more challenging to drive safely than average cars (as they take much longer to stop, have less body control which means more likelihood of losing grip, and are far more prone to rollover), require special licensing. Of course given the variety of vehicles on the road any line we draw between normal vehicles and heavy, trucklike vehicles is likely to be arbitrary. But I'll propose one anyway: To drive a vehicle for personal use that is EITHER over 5000 pounds empty OR over 78" tall, you need a Class C CDL with the attendant training and much tougher skills test.
Manual typewriters didn't have pipe characters. Practice, and court rules, are slow to change. Today, you will often see pipe or vertical-line characters.
The general format of filings, as utilitarian as it is, serves a critical purpose, though... all the elements are simply presented and always in the same place, which makes life much, much easier for paper-drowned, incredibly overworked judges and court personnel.
It's an interesting question. The Office 2007 format represents the first big change to .doc since Word was broadly adopted in the legal profession, so no one has had to think about it yet.
My guess is that Word 97 .doc will be fully supported by Word until MS decides to change the format *again*, whenever that may be. So, if their past practice is any indication, we'll be fine through 2013, but not past it.
Of course, open-source translators will have all that time to improve their compatibility. They already work well enough to read an old document, if not always to print a version that you could immediately file or send to a client. In the end, I think it will be the same as many other usse of Microsoft products: gross and inelegant... but it will more or less work. Remember, there was no significant open-source support for the really early Word formats; now there is.
I don't know about everyone in the legal field by a long shot. But, in the environments I'm familiar with, support gradually dwindled once WP shifted from DOS to Windows, partly because Windows key bindings sometimes conflicted with age-old WP ones and people had to relearn stuff anyway, partly because WP for Windows always has had some stability issues, and partly because the makers of expensive macro packages often used in law firms started to focus on developing for Word.
Today (I would estimate since about 2000-2002), Word is basically universal. People expect documents in Word format; not everyone can even read a .wpd anymore. Even the DOJ, one of the last WordPerfect holdouts, simultaneously uses Word and often needs to send or file documents in Word format.
I'm in law. Feel free to make your own joke here.
Many of our scholars, while they generate terrific scholarly work, are just not computer-competent. I absolutely cannot imagine getting them to successfully install OpenOffice, or their IT departments (which are frequently not much better) to support it. (These are folks who call for support to ask things like "How do I make a table?") If you required ODF, you would lose some submissions from those who actually read the requirement, and get 99% of your others in .doc format (as I said, people don't even think about format -- if they are writing something, they just open Word, hit "Save," and send it.)
Every school I know about buys a site license for MS Office, and either extends that to students (at considerable expense) or *requires* students to purchase MS Office along with their computers. Honestly, the assumption of Word is so ingrained, trying to challenge it in the legal academic field would be emptying the ocean with a bucket.
Word has only changed file formats once in recent memory, between Word 95 and 97 (or 6.0 and 98 in the Mac versions).
I remember exactly the same issues that time. Word 97 .doc format was not widely accepted until at least 1999. Once Vista and Office 2007 are widely adopted, which will occur within a three-year replacement cycle, and Office 2008 for Mac is well established, the new formats will become standard and there will no longer be a peep of protest, whether or not MS has fixed the issues with the formats.
I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.
In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.
If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)
I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.
Depends if you're playing violin or piano. On the violin, index = 1; on the piano, index = 2.
You know Ballmer has always wished he could squirt *something*.
Thus the Zune...
Stop pulling things out of your behind.
From the nostalgia machine: 5GB iPod review
FWIW, those iPods that have been criticized for sound quality, which don't include the 1G, have had very specific issues that only show up in certain settings. The 3G (and pre-photo 4G, to a lesser extent) had weak capacitors that reduced bass response at high levels. Some early 4Gs would occasionally emit hard drive noise through the earphones. That's it. iPods from day one have been famous for having exceptionally good DACs for portable devices. The lowly 1G shuffle, which has stronger caps and no noisy HD, may be the best-sounding portable device ever made.
I'm afraid you're flat wrong here.
The transportation and residential sectors combined make up more than half of our greenhouse gas emissions. I'm not talking about the switch from a Tahoe to a Prius, but from a Tahoe to something like a Chevy Volt (sized for real-world use, of course). Given most people's driving patterns, that could cut our CO2 emissions from transportation by more than half. Similarly, I'm thinking about houses that are grid-neutral most of the time (think solar roofs, on-site windmills, or whatever else can help power houses in x climate). These switches would have a *huge* impact on our CO2 emissions and none whatsoever on our lifestyle, if the policy framework were in place to support them.
It's not even that. They're either nakedly afraid of change or don't think it's worth the cost because they're going to heaven anyway.
If political will existed we could have vehicles that do everything SUVs do now, and houses just as big and comfy as the ones we have now, that had only a small fraction of the environmental impact. The technology is there; it's just a question of making it economically feasible.
The whole point of government is to address situations where market outcomes are bad for society. A government truly concerned with the interests of its citizens would have found a way to make clean houses and cars economically viable three decades ago.
Parent is not a troll. It's an informative post.
There's not much political benefit to environmental stewardship when a considerable majority of your supporters have no interest in empirical truth. Most Bush voters believe exactly what parent said: Jesus will come again and they will be swept into heaven before the environmental consequences of their actions cause them any harm.
Interesting. Thanks for setting me straight. So the situation is not quite as dire as I imagined.
Still, why has Ford only put its system in one product, an aging, uncompetitive compact SUV, when Toyota has five different systems (Prius, Camry, Highlander/RX400h, GS450h, LS600hL) covering most segments of the market? I still suspect Ford (and GM even more severely) of dealing in bad faith here.