Yeah, that's my worry. It looks like the design materials projected 60,000 daily trips once it's fully up and operating, with a 10-minute peak headway. If we make the optimistic assumption that these are all displacing single-occupant-car roundtrips, that's 30,000 cars taken off the road (in reality, some are probably displacing bus trips). Which is not nothing, but may not be enough to significantly affect congestion in or out of Santa Monica.

I do think the smaller cars can be interesting if coupled with high-frequency service. The Copenhagen Metro is an example of this kind of "light metro", which runs only 3-car trains, but it runs them at 2-minute headways during peak times, and 6-8 minutes off-peak. But it's: 1) fully grade-separated; and 2) fully automatic train control (no driver).

Will be interesting to see whether the Expo Line extension from Culver City to Santa Monica (opening 2015 or 2016) helps at all. Might not be high-volume enough to matter though, even if it's successful in terms of ridership (it's a light-rail line, not a full metro).

Google Maps used to send you down random side streets thinking it would save 3 minutes, which it often didn't (my least favorite was when it took you on a route that ended up requiring you to take an unprotected left through traffic, something that on its own easily ate any time savings and more). I notice they're a bit more conservative on that in the past few years; they only tell me to hop off the freeway and take a surface street when it's really going to save a significant amount of time.

The real solution for this neighborhood, though, is to complain to their local politicians. If the neighborhood isn't intended to be a through route, it's pretty easy to make it unattractive as a through route, e.g. by making some of the streets one-way. That's not uncommon at all in traffic planning.

The ISS itself uses radiation-hardened computers, but these "AstroPI" are just using stock chips. The only thing different afaict is the custom peripheral board. I would guess the duration of the experiment, combined with it not really being a mission-critical part, makes radiation hardening not needed.

How are poor white or asian boys discriminated against? They are the least likely to have had any programming experience before college, so would be treated the same as underrepresented minorities who have no programming experience before college.

A goal of the program is indeed to retain women and underrepresented minorities, but the mechanism used to do so is solely by separating the intro classes between "have no programming experience" and "have programming experience". They believe that doing so will make the program friendlier to the people on the "no experience" category, who are more likely to be women or underrepresented minorities. But it would equally apply to anyone who has no programming experience, such as a poor white kid who has never coded before college.

Isn't this based on merit? As far as I can tell they're proposing that kids who already know some programming be put into a different CS101 track than those who can't. White and black kids who know programming would go into one track, and white and black kids who don't know any programming would go into the other one. You might expect there to be a different mix of kids in each of these groups (because more white kids have been introduced to programming before college), but the decision is not based on race.

I often buy physical books because I like to have them on my bookshelf and the tactile experience of reading a paper book... even though from a practicality perspective, ebooks are easier to refer to and carry around. So I end up often having both a paper and ebook version. If you want to do something like that with music, then I can see the appeal of vinyl over CD as the physical format: CDs have smaller artwork and are generally less interesting as objects to own and play. So might as well get vinyl for the physical copy, and an mp3 (or ogg or flac) for a digital copy, and skip the CD.

A similar case is when you want to deploy to a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider like Heroku or Redhat OpenShift. Scheme isn't popular enough for any of these to support Scheme apps directly, but they do almost all support Java apps. So if you can deploy your Scheme app as a Java app, you can run it there.

There is no mechanism to force owners to become active in a company's daily affairs. That's one of the key benefits of incorporation: if shit hits the fan, you just declare bankruptcy and walk away unscathed. Owners have no responsibility to the company, and legal judgments cannot touch them as individuals. So no, it would not be forcing anyone to work for the company against their will. If everyone just quit the company, it would fold and it'd be up to a bankruptcy court to try to find a buyer or otherwise liquidate the assets.

I agree for private cars. The situation with buses is less clear. If you have overhead wires, of course you can run an electric bus on the grid, but most cities don't want to put that in (possible exceptions for BRT lines, but even those seem to usually not be electrified). And with current battery tech, a battery-powered electric bus is challenging. So I think the current trend of LNG buses being slowly rolled out has at least some life in it.

Most of the first $15m went towards R&D and custom manufacturing costs for some tech demos, like a hydrogen-powered bus. That's about what I'd expect that to cost, given fully-loaded engineering salaries (~$200-300k/yr after overhead) and how expensive it is to build one-off things. Might not have been worth building in the first place, though.

I think it's becoming increasingly clear that electric is a better choice. But Japan (both the government and industry) went pretty heavily into investing in fuel-cell tech some decades ago, when it was less clear which tech would win. And they don't seem willing to concede quite yet that electric cars now clearly are going to beat fuel-cell cars.

That does seem like the better solution, but probably not within the court's power. In an antitrust case a court can issue injunctions relating to a company's business practices or changes in business practices, but can't invalidate a patent. Congress could certainly pass such a law though, and probably should.

Despite the legal analogy, companies aren't really people. If you also made it illegal for people to quit the company, that would be akin to slavery. But requiring a company to do something is not slavery.

Technically "The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme".

Scheme was first specified in a 1975 report, which was revised in 1978. The 1978 report was called "The Revised Report on Scheme, A Dialect of Lisp". The next version of Scheme, in 1985, initiated the current trend, by naming itself, "The Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme", or "R2RS" for short. Since then it functions as sort of a version number, so R3RS was the successor to R2RS, and so on. But from R3RS onward, nobody actually writes out the "Revised Revised..." part.