So essentially anyone can do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences, knowing full well someone else gets to pick up the tab.

I don't think anyone ever sets out to become an addict because rehab is publicly funded.

Just keep taking from everyone else so someone doesn't have to be an adult and take responsibility for their actions.

You'll pay either way, either to cach, prosecute and lock them up or to get them rehab. The latter is vastly more cost effective. Why do you not want the cost effective choice?

Sure I insulted you, but only after you started making up lies about my.

And you have no idea what sexist means. I suggest you consult a dictionary as you're illiterate as well as a liar.

Goodbye.

Bye bye! :)

Electricity ? I pay for electricity.

I guess the massive country scale infrastructure like the grid doesn't exist then. Good to know.

While the company is publicly-owner, it is not providing me with a "free" service. Internet ? It'ss not a public service either. My ISP is actually a private company.

The internet was invented by the US government. And it's much bigger than just your ISP.

Navigable waterways ? Seriously ? Did the government create rivers from nothing ?

nav-i-guh-bul. Not some random stretch of river, but ones that can be used reliably by large boats for trade. Oh and also there are canals.

Safe food ? I'm not sure they're that safe when you see the amount of fat people you have south of the border.

You are truly ignorant as to how bad things can be. Try living in Islamabad for a bit, or go find some poor consular officer from there to chat to. They seem to spend half the time on the toilet due to the quality of the food.

Police protection ? Where ? The police doesn't protect me, they merely sort out the mess after it happened (and forbid me to french-kiss my girlfriend on a bench because they judged it to be "indecent").

So the murders and robbers they catch and jail whi can therefore not murder or rob anyone else doesn't do a single thing useful?

Fire protection ? Once again, firemen mostly clean-up the mess.

Are you insane or just stupid? Please, please find somewhere where there is no parasite around to rob you at gunpoint to force you to pay for a fire service.

Schools ? I don't have kids, so I shouldn't pay for schools.

If you think having a large uneducated underclass is a good idea, well then I have news for you: it's not. That sort of thing leads to crime, so you have to spend more on the police. Or in your case guns and a private army to guard you.

The thing is, this is why we have governments. Because if left up to indiciduals, they would make the most amazingly self-defeating choices which would stop the country running in any meaningful manner.

A month's groceries? Well I could easily just take two or three hour-long bus trips instead.

Or you could order 4 months worth online, and you only have to be at home for the 2 hour delivery slot. They even deliver both before and after work hours. Oh and delivery is free too, so ou save on the fuel cost and time for that car trip.

Rain at the bus stop?

If you don't have sheltered bus stops where you live, you could always invest in an umbrella.

Your generalisation is incorrect. You'd know this if you visited a city with working public transportation. If you haven't visited somewhere like London which has a very useful working bus system then you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to busses.

Better to use small driverless vans, and increase the number of vans on the road during peak times.

I disagree. At peak times, the capacity is limited by the capacity of the roads. Adding more vehicles will make things worse not better. You really want a bunch of 90 passenger busses. I looked up the numbers. In the UK at rush hour, cars have an occupancy of 1.2. On certain routes the busses are packed, which is about 90 people. They replace around 300m of lane space with about 12m of lane space in the most crowded areas.

One might be better off from an efficiency point of view switching to smaller vehicles at non peak hours but at peak times you really want the high capacity vehicles.

The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.

I guess all those bankers on the number 48 from London Bridge into the city are a complete hallucination then?

Buses are per person mile very inefficient in energy use, pollution and especially convenience. They are only efficient in the first two when full to capacity which they are only during major commute rushes.

That's not true. Busses even when pretty empty are efficient. A modern bus weighs about 8 times that of a small car, is a hybrid (which really does help substantially for city driving) and has a single large engine which is generally a bit more efficient than a collection of smaller ones. As a result a bus only needs a few people on board before it matches a car for efficiency.

Given a maximum capacity of about 90 people, I'd estimate that even at 10% full the bus will win in terms of efficiency. There are other factors which probably help in the busses favour, since busses aren't built for high acceleration and are also driven by more competent professionals than cars on average.

Anyway I found this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

Seems that busses are in the range 5 to 8 MPG roughly. Cars are largely around the 30 mark for decent cars. At that point even the worse busses only need 6 passengers to equal the efficieincy of single occupancy cars.

The average occupancy in the UK is apparently 1.58:

http://www.publications.parlia...

meaning compared to the worse busses you'd need 9 people to match the efficiency of cars, with the least efficient busses. Coincidentally, this is about the same as the average bus occupancy in the UK as well.

People tend to use busses differently from cars. During commuting, occupancy is only 1.2 per car and busses are fuller.

So, I'd say your claim that busses are inefficient are misplaced.

Or I can drive to work in under 20 minutes (including walking/parking time) at rush hour, on roads made slower by the fucking bus lanes.

I've encountered a lot of car people who seem to think any money or space spent on public transport is a waste of money that could be better spent on cars. This is to me colossally self defeating.

At rush hour when the roads and busses are nearly full, a full bus can carry around 80 to 90 people. Assuming everyone's massively stuck in traffic and there are no gaps between the cars, that's about 300m of lane space. More if people are actually moving. It does not take a lot of busses before the lane space available to cars is actually improved. And people won't take the busses if they have no bus lanes because they'll suck massively.

You can't just make roads bigger and bigger without end. If you want to improve the traffic system the best thing you can do is invest heavily in public transport so the roads are there for the people that actually need them because the public transport will effectively remove many many people from the roads.

Why do you need to be at the stop 5 minutes before?

I ask this as a regular bus user, in London. Note however we have GPS bus tracking with public APIs, so you always know pretty accurately when the next bus will actually arrive. If you don't have that, the problem is with the bus system, not busses in general.

Saving 2.5 hours a day (assuming that he was doing this twice a day) would be worth a big price tag to me.

I know people (well a person) who sold his car for precisely this reason. The GP was getting 2.5 hours of exercise per day. He must have been very fit.

I'd imagine this problem has been getting worse as they've tweaked the rules to make headers easier and much more common. When the ball weighted 75kg of wet leather and had massive prominent stitches runing across it, heading was somewhat less common.

Same.

An article about a tricky source port of a well known game to a tricky console. Perfect article for nerds which is why, after all, I'm here. And I don't really care if the person who submitted it is the person who wrote it. Doesn't make it any less interesting.

Male neurons are wired dramatically differently than females. Take for example a previous slashdot summary whose TFA indicated that females develop higher literacy skills earlier than males...an obvious sign of anatomic difference as far as the physical brain is concerned.

First, that's an interesting definition of dramatic there. Secondly, I take it that you're an expert on developmental human biology then so you know this is CERTAINLY an anatomical thing rather than an a developmental thing?