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Comment Re:Good! (Score 4, Informative) 619

And you'd be wrong.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/motor...

The revenue from the collected Federal fuel taxes are deposited into the Highway Trust Fund, which has several accounts. Though the percentages vary depending on the fuel type, the majority (approximately 83 to 87%) is deposited into the Highway Account, to be used on road construction and maintenance. An additional amount (approximately 11 to 15%) goes to the Mass Transit Account, and for many fuels, 0.1 cents per gallon goes to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund.

Comment Re:A remember in the early 90 when I lived in the (Score 1) 314

Ridership on BART's SFO extension (actually all of the San Mateo County extension) is well below their projections (leaving San Mateo County / SamTrans on the hook for operational costs). There's no direct service (well, not usually) from Millbrae to SFO due to work rules and the cost of running such a bloated rail system. You typically have to go from Millbrae -> San Bruno -> SFO. Don't forget that BART doesn't time their schedule to coincide with Caltrain arrivals at Millbrae.

BART already runs to OAK. The shuttle bus drops you at the terminals. The fancy cable car connector you're thinking of is going to cost riders double ($6 each way, they just announced this), and will drop you at the far end of the parking lot, away from the terminals. This is progress?

And Caltrain? Well, there's a shuttle bus between the Santa Clara Caltrain station and the San Jose airport. Because funding public transit is a political football, Caltrain only runs hourly service much of the day. Oh, and despite the recently relocated Caltrain San Bruno station being on the same stretch of road as BART's San Bruno station, they're still about a mile apart (closer than before, but not by much).

It's not the taxis that are to blame for the abysmal public transit to airport scene, it's the folks that design these transit systems (folks like friggin Quentin Kopp).

Comment Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score 1) 461

The latest I've seen was this:

http://www.themalaysianinsider... ... which claims that Rolls did indeed get some engine data, and that MH does pay for ACARS. If MH 370 did turn around, that seems a bit unlike the ZU 522 because the intended flight path was nowhere near the Malacca Straits.

Comment Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score 2, Interesting) 461

The slashvertisement did mention the technology used in AF 447: ACARS. MH 370 may have been equipped with ACARS as well, but if it was, it would not be transmitting via satellite as there is no sat antenna on the vanished plane (9M-MRO). In fact, Malaysia Air has been pretty cagey about whether or not 9M-MRO had ACARS. If 9M-MRO *did* have ACARS installed, and the information *could have been* received/recorded there's still the question of whether or not Malaysia Air was paying for upkeep. If Malaysia Air (who's been in financial trouble for a while now) was too cheap to pay for ACARS, why would they pay for the slashvertised product?

Hell, 9M-MRO has Rolls Royce engines. Rolls Royce (and likely other engine manufacturers) offers remote health monitoring of their engines. You don't need an additional $100,000 device for basic tracking.

Let's not forget this salient point from the slashvertisement:

Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology.

Comment Re:Why (Score 1) 606

It's not. The idea is living and working in a town center (or generally just living near where you work). Google, for instance, busses its employes from dense neighborhoods in San Francisco to the middle of nowhere. Were it not for the shuttle busses, a large chunk of these commuters would chose instead to live close to where they work, in the middle of nowhere.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/01/21/study-40-percent-of-s-f-shuttle-riders-would-move-without-chartered-bus-service/

Comment Re:You don't generally pay taxes on the raw food (Score 2) 631

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States

According to Wikipedia:

Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia are the only states that levy sales tax on groceries. So, yeah, Americans don't generally pay sales tax on food used to prepare meals seems about right.

Comment Re:No way! (Score 3, Informative) 123

Uh. No.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/10/03/american-airlines-seats/1610189/

The work in question was either done in-house by American Airlines employees or in a contractor's facility in North Carolina. Unless North Carolina is now part of China, your fear mongering is just that.

Comment Re:What the hell (Score 3, Informative) 759

She wasn't eavesdropping.

Avdi Grimm said it best:

One other comment to address a bizarre accusation of hypocrisy that's come up a few times. If you cannot tell the difference between:

- someone tweeting a dick joke on their personal Twitter account, and;

- someone making a dick joke...
- ...while attending a tech industry conference
- ...that has a Code of Conduct
- ...as a representative of a sponsor
- ...while sitting in the middle of a crowded auditorium
- ...during a talk that others are trying to listen to
- ...but still loudly enough to be overheard ...if you seriously cannot identify any difference between those two scenarios, I really don't know if I have enough clue to help you. I can check the back room but in those quantities we'll probably have to back-order it.

I can understand the "overreaction" argument. But the "she's a hypocrite because she tweets dick jokes" argument just doesn't even get off the ground. Nor does "she was eavesdropping on a private conversation".

If that doesn't help, how about Richards' own blog post:

What I will share with you here is the backstory that led to this –

The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn’t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he’d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn’t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.

That would have been fine until the guy next to him

began making sexual forking jokes

I'll make this real simple: the PlayHaven guys weren't making private jokes, they were responding inappropriately to public comments.

Comment Re:More facetime (Score 1) 1145

Um, yes. Reread my comments. The only reason it was seen by "thousands and thousands of people" was because someone went looking through her tweets and shared the direct link to it. Unless you were to go explicitly looking for it, it's not readily visible. It's less like leaving a note on a bulletin board and more like leaving a note on the ceiling in front of someone's door. It's there if you look at it, but even if you walk by (follow a twitter user) you wouldn't see it without explicit effort.

Contrast that to the inappropriate jokes being made in response to a public conversation she was having with a third party.

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