I ride the bus to work. It's a non-issue. It's the right thing to do. No parking required, let somebody else deal with the traffic. I have a car that I drive on weekends. One day a week I drive to work to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days. The bus takes a little longer than driving, but not enough that I worry about it much. I save up mid-week errands for the day I drive my car.

If I'm going to downtown Vancouver I take the bus. Parking is scarce and expensive. The traffic is impossible. UGH!

...laura

Now if only video ads in general caused epileptic seizures, so we could get them banned too.

Sadly, for me, they only trigger an irresistible desire to close that browser tab.

Sure - I understand a website that is providing interesting content for free has to have advertisement to support it - and I am mostly ok with that - I just wish it was static text and pictures, instead of bloody annoyingly intrusive video ads.

Greed is infinite, and is ultimately about power and control. If it were possible, I am sure there would be those who would own the entire galaxy, if for no other reason that to say it's theirs.

Even now, you have executives that earn multi-million dollar salaries, with super yachts and homes that they use for a fraction of the year. What's the point? There is little additional benefit from having a 100 ft yacht compared to a 200ft yacht, but there is a huge difference in the money you have to have to pay for them.

All those dollars have been paid to a single executive to afford such things has been done so instead of making goods and services cheaper for the customer, or by paying better salaries to the rest of the company's employees.

Executive salaries in the 60s were typically 25x the average salary.
Now they are more than 200x the average salary. More efficient production is not going to change this.

How the hell did the motor manufacturer prevent the flight?

As you say, it's a prototype on loan for testing, and the contract terms explicitly say Siemens get to say what they can and can't do with it.

The Airbus thing is complete bull; they'd have zero interest in preventing a test flight like this, and plenty of professional interest in seeing it fly.

I dont think they will go to a paid subscription model. That would change them from being the only mainstream OS that costs money to the only mainstream OS that charges subscription fees. ms is losing really badly inthe phone/tablet market. Even their console isn't doing too well this time around ( http://www.techradar.com/us/ne... )

I can believe windows 10 will be the last version of windows and it will just be continually patched. ms sees the writing on the wall and when 10 is out they will be pushing their app store hard to get more pc programs into there so they get a 30% cut. All those sales will add up to more than they will ever get from a single customer in a OS sale. The app store will help their struggling phone and tablet line too.

They did the same thing with directx10. It was only available on vista which was new at the time. I think some people managed to hack the installer to install on xp but I never tried it. I jumped from xp to 7 like most people. I wouldn't be surprised if someone works out how to install d12 into 7. Most people will probably just go the easier route and upgrade to 10 to get d12 because it's free anyway.

It's all Greek to me...

...laura

Always ready to jump on a bandwagon, many new buildings in Vancouver are doing the same thing.

Most of our electricity here in B.C. comes from hydroelectric systems, so fossil fuels/emission elsewhere is a non-issue.

...laura

A middle-of-the-road EV like a Nissan Leaf would cover 98% of my driving. I can afford one easily. I could afford a Model S if I put my mind to it. I've even looked in to buying an old banger and converting it myself.

The problem is I have nowhere to plug one in. I live in an apartment building and there is no wiring in the parkade. Nor is there any requirement (or incentive) to retrofit the building. I've talked to the building management, but we've never come up with any answers.

New buildings must have EV support. Old ones don't.

...laura

...you insensitive clod!

That is only for tax purposes, more or less.

It is about rather more, and rather more important rights than that.

Marriage is about people being together, not about the government allowing it or not.

And that is only related to religion if you decide you want it to be.

Probably because Sony's entertainment division didn't want the playstation to be able to easily copy/read files easily over the network because any copying/reading makes "omg piracy!" pop up in their tunnel vision eyes. The ps3 and 4 support DLNA for streaming though which is something at least. DLNA was started by Sony I believe and is a open standard while CIFS is microsoft and a closed standard. SMB was only possible by reverse engineering SMB but microsoft often changes the standard giving *nix distributions a lot of headaches. Sony can make sure the playstation always supports DLNA but it's a lot harder for them to fix SMB when windows changes the standard.

Those are some good points made by mlts.

Even if console prices have come down like you say, they haven't come down as much as they should with zero copyright infringement. You can see this by comparing games that get released on consoles and the pc at the same time. The vast majority of the time, (maybe even all the time?), the pc release is cheaper than it is on a console. But at the same time the pc is the most open and 'pirated' platform. hmmm...

I think mlts has made some good points. It was always a sham blaming copyright infringement for the high price of software. Look at the price of a genuine windows licence worldwide. It is cheapest in the countries with high piracy rates. Hell, countries with high piracy rates get rewarded with lower prices while countries like Australia which has some of the lowest piracy rates pays some of the highest prices for software especially games on steam.

If you go back before there was any digital distribution for console games, the higher price for console games could be sort of justified by the buyer getting some of their money back by selling/trading in the game. But now that's gone too, once you buy it its worth basically nothing because you can't sell it to anyone. So not only have console companies kept prices higher with zero copyright infringement they've kept prices high after cutting out the second hard market.

2.5" inch drives require less power, generate less heat and are obviously smaller so the overall size of the console doesn't have to be as large.

I usually buy direct in store. Shipping time zero. Prices have adjusted, at least around here, so that in-store prices aren't much different from the online ones.

Typically I'm browsing at a book store on the way home from work, and discover a book I might like. I could order it and get it a few days later, or walk out the store, book in hand. I'm an adult, with disposable income, so a hundred yen or two price difference doesn't matter to me. Being able to get the book right then does. Amazon is great for finding out what other people think about the book before I buy it.

Another example was my used oscilloscope. Buying second-hand things online is a gamble, and returning it is a major pain (get a cardboard box, arrange for the return and get and fill in a return label, be home to do the delivery). I went to a local shop instead. They hooked it up right in the shop to make sure it worked and to show me the basics of using it. And had there been a problem they would have come by in a car to pick it up directly. Much better. But Amazon did tell me which of the available models were better for me.