Yes, access to a wider variety of shops/services/jobs is nice. That's why people clustered into cities in the first place. You've got a much more energy-intensive way of achieving that.

Are there some things that need to be done out in the country? Yes. Are most of the people that live out in the country or in suburbs (the latter in the larger problem, in terms of cumulative effect) today doing that? No. For those that have a real need to be out there, higher fuel costs are just a cost of that line of work, which you can pass on to your urban customers. Somehow I don't think turning farmland into suburban subdivisions is going to help keep the agricultural system going.

It's not about wanting to interfere with anyone's life -- it's a recognition that we're burning more fossil fuel than we can sustain, and needing to bring down that consumption level. Increasing the cost of burning fossil fuel is an extremely powerful tool for achieving that. Government has already been interfering in our lives by discouraging cities in favor of suburbs through various policy decisions.

Before you complain about the tax money spent on cities, check where that tax money mostly comes from -- and don't forget to count people that live in the country or a suburb but commute into the city.

Carbon footprint/fossil fuel consumption is not the only reason I prefer the city (yes, there's waste there too -- the price of dirty, unsustainable energy needs to increase to motivate reduction in *all* sources of waste to manageable levels), and not all cities are the way you describe. There is a middle ground to be had between Levittown and Manhattan.

How does needing to drive for miles at 80 MPH just to get groceries or go to work make my life better? How do the suburbs magically make driving in snow easier? If I live in the city and don't need to keep a car around permanently, I can rent one for occasional trips to the suburbs/country.

I used to live in a duplex in Pittsburgh. I could walk to the grocery store and other local retail attractions -- or I could drive, it wasn't a problem. Parking was a minor nuisance compared to suburbia, but not that bad, and if the snow was bad I could take the bus or walk. I could walk or take the bus to/from the pub.

There was a large park with lots of wooded trails within walking distance, and if I lived elsewhere I could have arrived by bus or car (plenty of street parking in the area), or of course gone to another of the city's several parks. If I just wanted to see trees and squirrels and such, they were right outside my window. It doesn't have to be all concrete.

Schools don't magically turn to crap because of high floor-to-area ratios or the lack of a large parking lot out front. Urban schools suffer mainly because the tax base has fled to the suburbs, and because of the large percentage of students that don't come from a supportive environment at home (again because the middle class fled). Don't confuse the problems of cities with the problems of poverty. If you reverse the demographic migration (which appears to be happening, at least a little bit), things should improve.

As for buliding equity, you can buy a house or condo in the city, and you can rent in the suburbs.

Is the city -- be it a high-density one like New York or Chicago or a moderate-density one like Pittsburgh -- right for everyone? No. Are there some inconveniences (as well as some conveniences)? Sure, but "savagery" is a bit much unless you're talking about some very specific locations. And small towns can, if done right, can be walkable too. I never said suburbia was uncivilized, just that accessing the civilization that is there requires more energy.

Choices are good, as long as you pay your fair share for claiming luxuries that we don't have the resources to extend to everyone. But for a while now (it's starting to get a bit better lately, but not tremendously so), public policy has been pushing suburbanization through zoning, parking regulations, highway funding, tax policy, energy policy, etc. -- rather than letting development patterns respond to market demand.

I work near Parmer and Anderson Mill, so I'm stuck with the car no matter where I live. I live in the Arboretum area as a compromise between some level of local walkability and bus service, not-too-expensive and not-too-crappy apartments, and being not too far of a drive from work.

It's good to hear about some affordable central options -- Austin does seem to be making an effort to get away from its older zoning practices, though I think there's more that they could do (eliminate McMansion, allow duplexes and garage apartments on smaller lots across the entire central city, upzone transit corridors, relax minimum parking requirements, etc). The neighborhoods (a.k.a. people that already own central houses and want prices to be high and nothing to change) seem to have a pretty strong veto over such things (e.g. all the opt-outs on vertical mixed-use).

I bet there was a lot more activity (percentage-wise) in the core before the age of cheap driving (assuming a sufficiently old town). If (when) driving gets expensive again, you may see a renewed interest in that part of town, as well as in putting in more sidewalks.

You want to live in the sticks and still have an urban lifestyle (i.e. frequent access to the rest of civilization), you get to pay the costs of the dwindling resources that lifestyle consumes. As for small towns, the core of them is usually pretty walkable, but they've sprawled out with the automobile just as the larger cities have.

I'm sorry to hear about the poor train service you have -- but that's a local issue that needs to be taken up with the transit agency (and/or the politicians who are probably starving it for funding). I wish I had any transit service at all that went to the sprawly place where I work...

You claim to speak for all Americans and Europeans?

I would much rather live in a proper city (they're not all slums) than a suburb or exurb. I hate being tied to a huge hulk of oil-gobbling pollution-spewing metal that I must take everywhere I go (and always be sober to do so), with so much land being dedicated to the storage of said hulks of metal at every destination (you say you don't like concrete -- do you like asphalt?). Unfortunately, the city I live in (Austin, but it applies in much of the US) has zoned mostly low density and thus high density areas are expensive due to limited supply relative to demand, and jobs are scattered in the suburbs, so I'm stuck with the car.

If you like your exurb (but apparently not the one you work in, since you feel the need to commute), fine, but don't complain about gas tax increases or other driving charges to pay for your highways and to keep CO2 and oil consumption under control. Don't complain if you get charged higher utility rates than urban customers because you need more pipe/wire distance per person. Don't complain if more of your local taxes have to be spent on police and fire coverage to cover the same number of people. Don't complain if state/federal tax money is spent on the more efficient population centers, particularly for things like transit. Don't complain that natural gas/electricity has to be kept cheap so you can heat/cool your large detached house.

So they're still around by the time they become public domain -- and not locked away in rotted, obsolete, DRMed 95-year-old media.

Roads are for MOTOR vehicles in practice. Bicycling is recreation, not transportation.

Bullshit. That many places are hostile to bicycle use does not make it illegitimate as a transportation mode.

BTW I grew up in urban New Jersey and never knew anyone who got hit as a pedestrian. The accepted rules:

Stay the fuck off the road.

That's hard when there's no sidewalk or other place to walk. In many places in the US, people view pedestrians the same way you view bicycles.

Look before you cross so nothing is close enough to be ABLE to hit you.

So I should camp out at the corner for hours until traffic dies down, lest some driver turn without checking the crosswalk?

Once I was crossing at a crosswalk, with a walk signal. The turning car closest to me yielded. The car behind that one couldn't conceive of what was holding up his turn, and swerved around the car in front to turn from the far lane. Missed me by a couple feet.

Of course there are also idiot pedestrians and bicyclists that jump out into traffic recklessly, expecting people to slam on their brakes -- but even for those who are behaving reasonably, some audible warning of what the big hunks of metal are doing is useful. We can't look everywhere at once.

The point is that zombies, and many other things that you really don't want to happen to your single-user machine, can happen without root access (though probably with reduced ability to hide their activities).

It's increasingly making sense to put security boundaries between apps (especially Internet-facing ones), not just users -- at which point this is not just relevant to "multi-user" systems.

BTW, desktops can certainly be multi-user, whether it be multiple people that have legitimate physical access to the machine, a desktop that's also doing some server duties, etc.

You're assuming that those 100 men would vanish in the absence of employment -- rather than consume resources funded by unemployment, or perhaps another job that was viable only because the glut of available labor pushed wages low enough, or because the work week was shortened to spread the work among everyone.

People don't just go away because their job did.

Would it be a more productive use of that nuclear energy than displacing fossil fuel for existing electricity generation?

I'm not sure that providing an incentive to plant and cut down trees is better than reducing the incentive to cut down the trees that already exist.

Tax large-scale treecutting, and use the proceeds to plant trees.

I don't believe they advertise it as a "selectively filtered text message service". The only thing I can find about filtering from a quick glance at the messaging section of their website is this, which talks about user-controlled filtering: http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23533.xml

It's called a lease. Or a rental.

And guess what? They can't just put a sticker over the keyhole that says by breaking it, what you thought was a purchase (with paperwork to back it up) is actually a rental.

They actually have to get you to voluntarily enter into a different kind of agreement, up front.

The difference is with regulation we can try to manage risks beforehand, rather than just try to assign blame afterward -- and we don't need to worry who caused a specific harm. We can target activities which are known to be harmful in general, or which we don't know enough about and are too risky relative to their benefit.

Obviously it's not perfect, but what you propose would be worse.