I dunno what distros have this limitation. At least gentoo installs as multilib by default allowing 32bit apps to run just fine. There are also 32bit library wrappers allowing 64bit browsers to use 32bit plugins. This has been true for years.

While I agree with this conclusion, the problem here, is that drivers don't get trained and routinely tested in a simulator for their ability to handle failure conditions, unlike airline pilots that both learn and *train* what to do for all sorts of contingencies. Furthermore airline pilots are given psych evaluations to ensure they have a reasonable ability to not panic and freeeze in an emergency situation. A stuck accelerator pedal will likely cause a majority of average drivers to panic and just hang on for the ride feeling out of control.

There's a reason flying an aircraft requires more training and more frequent recertification (check rides)--more can go wrong, and anything going wrong that is not handled in an aircraft is much more likely to be fatal. Whereas just about any idiot can manage to get a license to drive a car.

I would not be opposed to more stringent qualifications for driver licensing. I think people take for granted how serious operating a vehicle really is--it's a 2 ton missile, and the laws of physics yield for no one.

Limited Liability Car!

Rather than try to formulate some arbitrary yet scientifically measurable number specifically for just one more possible cause of impairment, which may result in different actual effects in different people, why not just directly test cognitive and motor skills like they used to for alcohol before the breathalyzers were widely available?
Seems that testing someone's awareness and motor function directly would address the immediate concern--and handle *any* possible cause: alcohol, THC, prescription meds, OTC meds, and outright drowsiness (your own melatonin) all with one test.

Yes, it is. Because it means they don't really have to compete. If the nearest dealer is the only one for 1000 miles and they won't place a factory order for you below MSRP, guess what you have to pay for a custom order? Or... go find another dealer much farther away that will place the order for you at invoice and have to pay shipping (or fly out and drive it back).

Without these laws, you could order just what you wanted, pay invoice, and have it delivered to your door.
So, true, while they don't preclude you from placing a custom order and getting exactly what you want, they most certainly are relevant because they affect the manner in which you have to go about doing so and the price you may have to pay to get it.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/02/why-you-cant-buy-new-car-online

Removing these laws won't make franchises disappear and all their employees become jobless.
It will make them have to be honest, compete, and actually *add value* rather be a protected middleman guaranteed business.

Just imagine if franchises had to win sales based on their *knowledge* of the products they sell, convenience of having ready-to-take, *desirable* inventory, and *honest, capable* service departments?

Instead we get the horrible current situation--you want a new car? You *must* go to a dealer--even though half the sales staff know less than you about the car you want to buy. You want *warranty* service? You *must* go to a dealer--whether they are competent or not.

In the ideal world in my head, a license to perform warranty service should be independent from a license to sell new or used vehicles. Any mechanic that can pass the manufacturer's certifications can qualify for a license to perform warranty service. You could place a custom order directly on the manufacturer's website and have it delivered to your home--or opt to go to a dealer and inspect existing inventory-where they have to *work* to earn a sale from you--by being knowledgable, and being good at choosing inventory that people want--not forcing their random selection on people because there are no other alternatives.

The car dealer franchise laws began in California w/Reagan helping a buddy's business. Soon Bush did similar in TX, then lobbyists picked up the ball and rolled it to the other states.
I can think of no other industry where it's in fact *illegal* for a manufacturer to sell their own product directly to consumers.
It makes it so that it is no longer a free market. Who knows what options and colors people actually want--dealers order speculatively what they think they can sell, then sell them--people wind up choosing between the existing inventory, usually none having exactly what they want. You'd think on big ticket purchases people would be more picky about getting exactly what they want--but we wind up with millions of same-colored cars on the road anyways.

Strike down these laws and it should be possible to actually order a vehicle that you customized on a manufacturer's "build-your-own" website--rather than it directing you to a bunch of local dealers that have their heads up their asses and don't actually have one in stock like you just spent 20 minutes configuring.

Furthermore, right now, if you want to place a custom order, you *have* to do it through a dealer--who is now an unwelcome middleman that *hasn't* made a sale yet thinks they still deserve MSRP markup for merely printing out the paperwork even though you beat a path to their door with no other option.

I truly hope Tesla wins.

I fail to see how anything these scapegoats said would change the survival rate of the earthquake. With or without accurate warnings, people would likely still have died just the same--since they cannot predict the exact moment an earthquake will strike, it's reasonable to assume some people would be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time--and fatally so, regardless.

How much different did they expect the people to behave had "adequate" warning been provided? Did they expect everyone to evacuate? Sounds just like a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario for these guys.

Ultimately, the *earthquake* is to blame for the fatalities--not the (in)accuracy of the geologist's predictions or warnings.
They should not be held liable for deaths by natural causes. This is truly ludicrous. I hope they win on appeal.

A driver may well choose property damage over bodily harm--eg crash into another vehicle rather than hit a pedestrian that radar may not even detect.
I cannot believe this will sell.

We know from experience that hidden files won't stay hidden for long. A little coersion and it confesses everything--all in hopes that it won't get reformatted.

You may like sipecs. They even have a pre-configured distro cd if you want to get up and running quickly--just install it, plug in your voip phones, and it will discover and configure them.

My path was:
Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 - 1 year
Mandrake - 1 year
RedHat - 2 years
LFS - 2 years
Gentoo - 8 years and counting

With some HP-UX, IRIX, and debian sprinkled in on some non-x86 arches.

If your end goal is to be a master of Linux/unix in general:

I highly recommend doing LFS at least once. It strips away all the helpers (which sometimes complicate things), and forces you to know for each package how it natively behaves, their own config files, locations, etc. You learn what happens from boot on up to the login prompt. You learn what all the pieces are, what they do, etc.

I also highly recommend trying Gentoo at least once--at least until you learn how portage keywords and package use flags work so you can honestly compare to rpm/apt in other distros. Gentoo is a happy compromise--a step back from LFS in that it normalizes most of the configuration locations and services control, and adds full package management, but all while still allowing you to take finer-grained control selectively as you want/need. (Personally, I prefer gentoo's way of configuring services to the other main distros--it feels more flexible and less "in-my-way"ish, especially for disk layout and network configuration.)

From there, you can learn any distro you want/need. (But I'd guess that most people that give gentoo an honest try wind up sticking with it since it has fewer cons and more pros than most of the other canned distros. BTW, it does support binary packages--many do not know this.)

If your end goal is not administrative prowess, but simply to use it as a desktop:

You probably should stick to a well-supported end-user-focused distro such as ubuntu, fedora/redhat, suse. You may not get bleeding edge, but you won't bleed--and many help topics on the web cater to these main distros. IMO, for such an end goal it really doesn't matter which distro you use first--they will all have some shortcoming that will require some googling to figure out--no distro of any OS has all the kinks worked out.