Around here, if I'm in a hurry a car would most likely be slower. I frequently beat friends who are driving to places while I am cycling, mostly because the bike lanes don't get clogged with traffic nearly as much as the car lanes, and there are a few very useful shortcuts on bike paths.

If I'm going someplace unfamiliar, though, having a navigation aid is pretty useful. I find that the voice directions from my phone mostly work.

I just spent two weeks in Italy, plus a couple of days in Ireland, and did not encounter a single place where my magstripe cards were not accepted. This included several ATMs, a couple of train ticket vending machines, and a few retail point-of-sale terminals. I did use cash for a lot of transactions, but unless I was just lucky every single time, I am not very convinced of the supposed universality of chip and pin.

Separating the O2 from the C is easy, but it takes energy -- that's why plants need sunlight to do it. If we had a source of clean energy with which to perform the separation, we'd be better off just using that source directly and never generating the CO2 in the first place.

Is there something wrong with the word "soldier"?

Game of Thrones won the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form award last year (for the entire season), so I don't think it's that surprising.

Yeah, but BSD isn't Linux. :-P

(I was just going to say, "I use BSD, you insensitive clod.")

My apartment is 640 square feet, and around here that's pretty spacious for one person. 850 square feet would be quite big. Why do you need so much space? Do you have a multi-person family, lots of pets, or is it just that you've become accustomed to spreading everything out?

I'm not the only one who feels this way, either -- there wouldn't be such high demand for apartments in places like Manhattan (where many apartments are much smaller) if people weren't happy living in such spaces. There are a lot of benefits to density -- things like arts and culture and the ability to walk places without jumping in a car -- as well as advantages to smaller living spaces (lower heating/cooling bills, not having lots of space to fill up with junk that you'll have to deal with when you get old, etc.).

Indeed, there are a lot of countries that have been sovereign nations at various discontinuous periods in history, with varying degrees of continuity between those periods. Iceland was independent for a few centuries at the beginning of the previous milennium before merging with Norway again, and counts its legislature as continuous since that time, but the map only counts its most recent independence. On the other hand, France is listed as having been independent since the end of the rule of Charlemagne, despite having changed types of government several times since then and being conquered by Germany in World War II.

The banner ad above the poll for me is advertising a T1 line for $199/month. Now I really feel like I've been transported back to the 90s. Does anyone use anything as slow as a T1 anymore, much less pay $200 for it? I guess if you need high reliability but don't care about bandwidth...

Of course, wind powered boats have been circumnavigating the globe since the 16th century, and can be faster, too. So this is interesting, but not exactly that impressive as a demonstration of eco-friendly sea travel.

There will be angst from the Republicans no matter what. Heck, if he proposed sticking to the status quo, they'd still angst that he wasn't doing enough to support business. But setting loftier goals might result in a better compromise when the Democrats inevitably cave to Republican demands.

What the summary fails to mention, and even TFA glosses over, is that Amtrak still doesn't have WiFi at all on many of its routes, and this upgrade does not include plans to add it to the ones that don't have it. Still, with luck this will be a significant improvement for the ones that do.