voting hasn't changed a single thing in the US in the last 200 years

it's twenty feet long and fully enclosed. calling it a motorcycle because it has two wheels it really stretching the definition of the term.

State resources like ...?

Most university research groups do not have funds to buy bits of computing time here and there. For a project like this, the research group more likely has a dedicated computing cluster bought with grant money or sponsor money.

Symbolic speech is all well and good, but the trigger-happy cop who mistakes you for a rifle-toting terrorist is going to shoot first and ask questions later. There's no reason to put yourself at risk by openly carrying around something that resembles a weapon unless you intend to use it.

i bring my road bike to my office

so does one of my other employees

they don't really take up that much space

Mars has dust. Some iron, too, but mostly dust. We know what's over there already, and it's not much of a product if we don't have a way to get it home.

If not, I'm game.

we all know how popular flock turned out to be.

the event has had an increasing problem with guys showing up with cameras just to snap pics of the naked ladies, post them online, and charge people a fee to check them out. this certainly isn't the best approach to solve the problem, but there's little else they can do.

a good screen can last far longer than technology changes in delivering media to that screen.

there's a for-pay version of google apps which can be delivered over SSL. i don't know if the license terms are any different, or if the server-side storage is at all secure, but i'm willing to bet someone working for google could answer that question for you.

What if Jefferson's quote had been used in the article?

There are many fine traffic modeling journals out there. Physical Review E is not one of them. More telling is the lack of any references to any transportation journal articles regarding traffic flow models. While cellular automata approaches to modeling traffic flow have become increasingly popular in the last two decades, nothing in the abstract or citations leads me to believe they used an established traffic flow model.

they're not exactly fudging numbers

the FHWA puts out numbers valuing travel in terms of dollars. they do this for travel time and mileage, for both passenger vehicles and commercial trucks. how they get these numbers is questionable, but it's basically a combination of the money people earn from their jobs versus the length/duration of their commute. there are also breakdowns for different types of trips (work, shopping, leisure) and the length of the trip itself (a short trip has a different valuation per mile than a long one).

what the insurance people have done is to take these values and work them against the cost per mile of the variable-priced insurance policies and the average cost per mile of the fixed-price insurance policies. given some data on average trip lengths and distribution of trip purposes, you can build a monetization of travel under the two schemes.

the carbon savings comes from people driving less due to the higher cost of insurance relative to their valuation of their travel. if you're paying more for insurance because you drive to the liquor barn every other night to pick up a fifth of whiskey, you might think twice about obtaining such libation. saves money on liquor, too.

frankly, if this does go through in california and elsewhere, it could start to shift the USA away from suburbia hell back towards walkable town centers.