Discussions

I agree with you Oberon, however alternatives are not as available as many would like to think.

High % Ethanol blended fuels are one option, except for that only a small fraction of cars on the road today can handle it.

Hydrogen is another, sadly there are no commercially available cars that can take it, nor an infrastructure for its sale if such cars were available.

Hybrid vehicles are another direction... however the existence of only a handful of commercially available vehicles in the US which command rather steep prices and long waiting lists make them a less viable option.

Electric would be the ideal... the problem is how do we generate the electricity? You gave many different options... none of which can unfortunately be brought to bear in any reasonable amount of time or scale.

The problem with any alternative is the time required to change to it, and regardless of external pressure, such a transition would not be cheap or easy for most involved.

What is the public transportation system like up there Jeremy? The United States, unlike most nations was built around the concept of cheap fuel through our interstate highway system which lead to the spread out of people and communities you find here, while simultaneously virtually ignoring any semblance of useful transportation outside of the major cities.

Yes, that was a mistake, however having others say “now you know what the rest of us have been going through” is pretty pointless given that most of those saying that have other alternatives.

I have a co-worker who lives in Brookings, SD and commutes daily to Sioux Falls, SD (about an hour away). He could move to Sioux Falls, but then his wife would have to commute daily back to Brookings for school.

Another co-worker will be getting married in December and moving to Vermillion, SD (just over an hour from Sioux Falls). He too could stay here and have his wife drive, but the extreme commute would still exist.

I hate to sound like a doomsayer; however places like South Dakota will utterly collapse if fuel prices cannot be brought down soon. This state does not have the population to be able to support any sort or wide scale public transportation system short of a handful of token busses in the a couple major (for South Dakota) cities.

Hybrid automobiles are a fine idea for future use for use on surface roads and highways... but what about the fields and the farmers? Electric or hybrid tractors and combines are not exactly common, or even if they were, cheap to buy given the extreme cost of such farm equipment.

Regardless of what kind of prices the rest of the world was paying, the US will have one of the hardest times coping because we do not have the secondary infrastructure that many other places do.

Bah, no insult of Micro$oft can be taken seriously without the required dollar signs!

After all... which sounds more insulting?

OMG M$ is teh suX0rz!!!

or

OMG MS is teh suX0rz!!!

W3bbo wrote:

When Windows 1.0 came out, it was $99

When Windows XP came out, it was $229

Even taking 1985-2005 inflation into account, Windows XP still costs more.

Let us not forget that Windows XP has a couple of added features that set it apart from Windows 1.0, or any of the previous versions of Windows for that matter.

Yes, it costs a bit more, but you are certainly getting a heck of a lot more too.

Karim wrote:

dahat wrote: All of this talk of Clippy... who cares? So long as the Sarge Office Assistant comes preinstalled with Office 12, I’ll be happy.

Uh... there is such a thing?

Yup.

Back in the ‘old days’ of Red vs Blue (Season 1), someone actually did create a Sarge Office Assistant and I still run it to this day on both my home and work PCs.

You can DL a copy from http://knightgames.net/vault/general/sargeOA.zip

Unfortunately, AFAIK, it has not been updated since it’s initial creation.

All of this talk of Clippy... who cares? So long as the Sarge Office Assistant comes preinstalled with Office 12, I’ll be happy.

Already it has such great lines like:

“Where do you want to go today dirtbag?”

“Could you put that in a memo and title it ‘S&*t I already know!’”

Now we need to have some new lines added like:

“The only thing that really scares me is corn”

“How’d you like it if I tossed your C# manual in the latrine”

“Corn at eleven o’clock!”

Blogger is pretty simple and basic in large part because there haven’t been any major upgrades to it in years. Oh how I wish it supported tags.

W3bbo wrote:

You can tell when an ISP is going to rat on you if their WHOIS page has an email address specifically for Suponeas

Unfortunately ISP’s (in the US) tend not to have much of a choice under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

Russia? Turkey? Ha!

Try co-loing with Havenco on the Principality of Sealand.

Why there? Really the only content prohibited by Principalities law is spam and child pr0n. Heck, Havenco’s AUP explicitly says:

Sealand currently has no specific regulations regarding patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, DMCA or music sharing services.

Orbit, the programmer of the service doesn’t need to save your IP, only the RIAA or one of their hired hands does (ie BayTSP).

It is unfortunately a common practice for some organizations to connect to such services, search for certain files, note what users have them, attempt to DL them (to make sure that they are what it is labeled), all the while nothing all of the info they can about the sharer.