They don't need money from Amazon. They need money from Amazon's customers, who live in those states. Why should local purchases be taxed but not interstate delivery orders?

So everything states do is currently fully paid by property taxes (and income, etc), and the sales tax is collected for fun? :-P

Federal and state gas taxes are insufficient to pay for construction and maintenance of the highway system, much less all the regular streets that the last mile delivery trucks run on. Much like your property versus sales tax statement above, you seem to be falling for a fallacy that paying some part of the bill means you've paid the whole thing.

And that's before you factor in the other costs of burning that fuel, such as pollution, oil spills, and wars.

So maybe we shouldn't design our society so that it's a difficult-to-avoid part of everyday life?

Add car dependence to a drinking society, and you get a drinking and driving society. You may not like it, but I can't see why you'd be surprised.

So? What matters is the point at which your reactions and judgement are affected by a large enough degree that it warrants banning with severe punishment.

So you would support penalties equivalent to current DWI penalties for talking on a cell phone, talking to passengers, fiddling with the radio, forgetting to wear sunglasses (or putting them on while driving), getting lost in thought, etc? What about just being a bad driver?

I'd rather consider the magnitude of the impairment and set appropriate limits and punishments. There's a level that merits DWI-type punishment, but it's not zero.

Yeah, that's a politically winning slogan. Your agenda will be law in no time, I'm sure.

It's easier to demonize alcohol than many other sources of impairment, but there's a limit to how far you can push that before the huge number of relatively light social drinkers realize you're targeting them.

And this means that the likelihood of crashing under such circumstances is high enough to justify throwing people in jail?

Clearly there's some level of impairment where we have to say "no, that's not allowed", but that level is not "anything measurable".

The effect is so small that it's meaningless without considering what that individual's performance was before the alcohol, but it's large enough to throw people in jail?

Sure, but on average you're more likely to have more options over there.

Having a bus or train within walking distance of where you're going to sleep, especially one which runs late enough to get you back home after reasonable drinking hours, is not what I was referring to by "car-dependent".

And that assumes you're not trying to meet up with people who want to go to some suburban bar with no bus stop within a couple miles, and not even a sidewalk or shoulder on the (busy) only road back into the civilized part of town... which is not uncommon when you work at someplace similarly poorly located (which so many tech jobs seem to be).

I'm not saying it's an excuse for getting truly drunk in such a situation, but zero tolerance is going to be a hard sell.

Sure, if you're going to do a lot of drinking then you'd better figure something out. But does tibit really expect this to happen any time anyone so much as has a glass or two of wine or beer with a meal at a restaurant? And then remain immobilized for 24 hours?

Because you say so?

I would hope so. Do you think that makes you any less of an extremist?

You might end up killing someone when you drive completely sober. You have to consider the magnitude of the risk at a given degree of impairment when considering whether (and how severely) to criminalize it.

It's generally easier to not drive in Europe.

You would drive 25 hours after a sip of alcohol? Murderer! You never know how slowly you could be metabolizing it. Once you've had a sip, take away your license for life! In fact, you might drive without the license, so prison for life after sipping alcohol! :-P

Seriously, much of the US is so car-dependent that your rule would mean pretty much never drinking, even a sip. It sucks, but randomly severely punishing people that have had a couple beers is not the way to change it.

It is typically not illegal to walk on the side of a road. Street View at Main St and Deer Valley Dr did not show any signs prohibiting pedestrians, nor was the separate pedestrian path very visible, nor were there any signs indicating the presence of the path, how to access it, or where it leads.

It is also not typically considered the pedestrian's fault when a driver cannot control their weap^H^H^H^Hvehicle well enough to avoid hitting said pedestrian, provided the pedestrian doesn't do something particularly stupid (no, just walking on the side of the road doesn't count -- jay walking is a different story).

It's also not typically considered the map's fault, though.

This does not appear to have been a fucking freeway.

I believe the lower charge is for transactions that go through the debit networks (i.e. with a PIN), and don't involve Visa or Mastercard.

A liquor chain here gives a 5% "cash" discount for using either cash, or debit with PIN. You only pay full price if you do a credit transaction.

In other words, we should focus on solutions involving fairy dust and genie wishes. Or, "I support sustainability as long as it doesn't inconvenience me in the slightest."

The answer is not "let's all live in slums", though that could be the result if we wait until it's too late to change course. Yes, we should push hard on clean, renewable energy generation, and advanced recycling techniques --- but completely dismissing any conservation-based approaches is foolish. This is hard enough of a problem as it is.

Let's say my CPU draws on average 10W more than it needs to when some flash is running in the background (I frequently find firefox taking 100% of my CPU, and it's almost always a window with some flash advertisement whose closure makes it go away -- except when nothing but killing firefox will do it).

Suppose my computer is in this state an average of four hours per day.

Suppose I pay 10 cents per kWh. .01 kW * $.10/kWh * 4 hours * 365 days = $1.46

Not exactly breaking the bank (and I did hesitate to include it because I figured I'd get a response like this) but more than "one red cent", and it adds up to a small but non-trivial amount of waste when you multiply it by all users.

Plus, I've heard some people (on Windows, IIRC) claim that having flash running inhibits auto-suspend, which would make the waste significantly higher -- though to be fair, my experience with Windows auto-suspend is that breathing too heavily in the room could inhibit auto-suspend.

And then there's battery life for laptops and other portables...

Feel free to do the same to anyone saying "this sucks".

Will it be able to, for instance, stream recommended alternative videos or advertisements while the video is paused, for instance? It's not that I want that, but a lot of site owners do.

Sorry, but those site owners can fuck off. If I tell the browser (or component therein) that I want things to stop moving, stop making noise, and stop chewing up CPU cycles and running up my power bill, then I want them to STOP!

Flash is particularly bad in this regard, and this (along with its limited platform availability and general flakiness) is why I'm not a fan of it. When I can get a working, robust flash player that pays attention to *me* more than to the bits coming over the internet, let me know.

You realize that when you call mmap() on something that resides on a disk or similar device (as opposed to a special device such as /dev/mem), the OS will copy data to and from the disk as needed, right? And that you're not actually directly mapping the data on disk?

Neither hard disks nor SSDs expose a memory-like interface that could be used in the manner that Artraze suggests. It can be done with NOR flash, but such memory is slow and small and not something you would want to run general purpose computing off of.