Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23587916 <comment><USER3>
        > If anything, having a tatty, battered old
        > bike affords more status as it attests to
        > a long and lasting love.

As an Amsterdam resident: What a romantic characterization of our high crime rates! Yes, the reason I still ride a shitty old beater of a bike is definitely my long lasting love for that piece of shit, it's not because I know that if I buy anything fancy I'm going to have to never take my eyes off of it, least it be stolen in under half a minute in certain parts of town[1].

1\. [http://www.iamexpat.nl/blog/culture/amsterdam-wins- european-...](http://www.iamexpat.nl/blog/culture/amsterdam-wins-european- bike-stealing-championships-2015)

<comment><USER4> Can anyone explain why police don't do a huge crackdown on bike theft in Amsterdam? I heard repeatedly when I was there about how bad the theft is. Is there something stopping cops from putting out a dozen fancy bikes without locks every day and arresting everyone who grabs one and rides off? Is the legality of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment) different in the Netherlands?

Because it seems like a relatively small policing effort could enable a massive improvement in quality of life.

<comment><USER3> They do decoy bikes, e.g. here's a news article about a thief being caught by police stealing a decoy bike for the second time in 6 months published just 3 days ago (in Dutch, but it Google Translates):

[http://www.nhnieuws.nl/nieuws/207931/Fietsendief-in- Amsterda...](http://www.nhnieuws.nl/nieuws/207931/Fietsendief-in-Amsterdam- neemt-voor-tweede-keer-lokfiets-van-politie-mee)

The problem is that the police have other stuff to do, and they might as well be pissing in the wind with the amount of bike theft here. They could do a huge crackdown, but that's unsustainable and after the crackdown we'll be right back to the same theft rate.

Interestingly there was a case this year (currently going through appeals) where a judge ruled that a man stealing a bicycle in a residential neighborhood should be found not guilty because the police had created the circumstances of the bike's theft:

[http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/01/decoy-bikes- sh...](http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/01/decoy-bikes-should-not- be-too-tempting-say-judges/)

It's unclear what that means for bicycle entrapment in general, but an article in Parool (again, in Dutch) suggested that this may have implications for the methods of the Amsterdam police depending on how it goes:

[http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl/4/AMSTERDAM/article/detail/42...](http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl/4/AMSTERDAM/article/detail/4221116/2016/01/08/Mogelijk- einde-aan-lokfiets-als-opsporingsmiddel.dhtml)

<comment><USER5> > "The problem is that the police have other stuff to do, and they might as > well be pissing in the wind with the amount of bike theft here. They could > do a huge crackdown, but that's unsustainable and after the crackdown we'll > be right back to the same theft rate."

How about using CCTV at bicycle locking points? Combined with satellite imagery it should be a relatively non-resource intensive way to catch the thiefs. Of course, there's still the question of whether a surveillance-based solution is worse than the crime it's meant to address.

<comment><USER6> Let's not turn Dutch cities into another example of the horrifying panopticon that UK cities have become.

<comment><USER7> Dude, they already are. Cameras everywhere

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just came back from a week in Netherlands and stayed in Amsterdam. What a cool place to hang out and take in the sights. Cycling there is huge indeed. The big difference I noticed from Canada was the dedicated infrastructure they have in place. Dedicated cycling lanes everywhere, it's a proper form of transportation. As a tourist, this was weird, I nearly got mowed down a few times but because I was in the wrong and not paying attention. You quickly adapt and realize bike lanes are just as important to watch out for as vehicle lanes. The people are very friendly and nearly all speak English without issue.

I don't agree with cycling on the roads and highways here in Canada, it's chaos and frankly, dangerous. I don't really see if implementing what they have because it's already built in.

The thing that really jumped out at me was when I was waiting for a bus around zaanse schans, about an hour outside of Amsterdam in the country, there was an elementary school that just finished up for the day and every single student came out on bicycles. Myself and a group of Canadian's couldn't believe it. They all happily were socializing on their bikes tightly packed together while riding on the bike path in the country to their homes. Here in Canada nearly everyone takes a giant yellow school bus.

Very nice place, highly recommend checking it out if you have chance. Aside, saw the outside of the Atlassian Amsterdam office too ;)

<comment><USER9> > As a tourist, this was weird, I nearly got mowed down a few times but > because I was in the wrong and not paying attention. You quickly adapt and > realized bike lanes are just as important to watch out for as vehicle lanes.

You can also get mowed down in pedestrian area, on the pavement by impatient cyclist that don't like traffic jams and custom courtesy like stopping to let you cross a zebra crossing is non-existent with cyclists.

A definitive win for the environment, but terribly stressful with a pregnant woman or a toddler. There is just nowhere safe at all, even between the stall of art market.

Bicycles were the biggest disappointment of visiting Amsterdam.

<comment><USER10> This fear of cyclist seems very odd from my point of view since I often see strollers on bike lanes with parents that have no problem that bikes has to stop and go around them. I occasionally also see people in wheel chairs using the bike lane.

The fear would make sense if all that caused yearly deaths by cycling crashing into toddlers and people, but its is surprisingly rare. I have yet to hear about a single case here in Sweden, and we are almost as happy to use bikes as those in the Netherlands. The only thing that explains it is that the statistical risk of taking a stroller and walking against bike traffic seems similar to being in the park in a lane where joggers are running. The speed that people bike in a city is so low that they can react and slow down, similar to a jogger who is running. In contrast, cars driving on the road is going much faster and as such, it is significant more likely to be hit by a car than a bike. I would take a guess and say that it is even true in the Netherlands.

<comment><USER9> Is lethality the only criteria that can justify fear ? My cyclist colleagues are constantly afraid of pedestrians ( reverse problem than Amsterdam, in London, where infrastructure is inconsistent and pedestrian quite oblivious of cyclists ), they drive on the open road and regularly reach 20 mph speeds. The assumption that because they are cyclist they can brake instantly is the main cause they bump into pedestrians. There are very little genuine accident ( like wet road marking ) with pedestrian, always problem that could be avoided by not stepping in front of a 90 kg mass cycling at over 15 mph.

Amsterdam was supposed to be the example of integration (pedestrian / cyclist / car ) done right. It wasn't, just that the position of power between cyclist and pedestrian was reversed compared to London: instead of entitled mum with a stroller in the bike lane, you get entitled cyclist that blaze through a pedestrian area ringing his bell and shouting rather than controlling his speed.

<comment><USER10> 20mph is an interesting speed since a electric bike here in Sweden would be illegal if it reached those speeds. And as a owner of a legal electric bike I can say that regular bikes do not pass by at 20mph in the city. Even 15mph, which happens to be the legal max speed for a electric bike, would be unusual to see for a regular bike. Of course an open road would be different but pedestrian that walk against traffic there has a much bigger problem than the few cyclists that can reach 20mph unassisted.

Lethality is not the only criteria but accidents between pedestrians and cyclist is exceptional rare in relation to all the fear people feel towards cyclists. The opposite is true for cars. Ironically the fear towards cyclists seems to go down during winter (since bike lanes tend to be more free from snow and ice than the side walks) so during the time when the bike lane is the most dangerous it is also the time when most people are walking on them. There is thus a strong correlation between fear of bikes and lack of conveniences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing the article doesn't mention is how _long_ the bicycle trips are. Surely the relative compactness of their cities are a major contributing factor!

I live in America and commute on my bicycle almost every day. For me the biggest obstacle isn't the hills (which there are plenty of) or even sharing the road with cars (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) but the fact that in the quasi-suburban area in which I live, everything's so damned spread out that bicycling is very impractical.

<comment><USER12> > The famously flat Dutch terrain, combined with densely-populated areas, mean > that most journeys are of short duration and not too difficult to complete.

> Few Dutch people don lycra to get out on their bike, preferring to ride to > work, the shops or the pub in whatever clothes they think appropriate for > their final destination.

> Of course, the cycle paths lend themselves to sauntering along in summer > dresses in a way a death-defying, white-knuckle ride in rush-hour traffic > does not. It is also partly because of this that people don't need showers > at work to be able to commute by bike - it's a no-sweat experience.

So, reading with some context clues, the answer is "not long enough to work up a sweat."

<comment><USER13> People usually bike quite leisurely in the Netherlands. You can easily bike 10-15km in reasonable time without sweating, especially if you're used to riding a bike.

<comment><USER14> One difference between the NL, and most US cities, is climate. There's a large portion of the US that gets much hotter, and much colder than Amsterdam. My town gets 10 degrees F hotter, and 30 degrees F colder.

I ride in regular clothes during the summer, but it takes some planning, notably starting early in the morning and riding slowly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always enjoyed my cycling trips when I've been in the Netherlands - <USER2> just so calming and relaxing, and good for me - but without much stress. There aren't many hills, its for the most part very safe and bicyclists have a place in the transit system that feels very comfortable and, indeed 'right'. There really is something quite right about the feeling - you are getting fit, and going somewhere, and .. well, its just so easy to ride around.

After a month in the Netherlands, I always feel like going back to a car-based society is a huge step backwards. Like, there is a wall of concrete and asphalt and metal and fumes and busy-ness, and we're all just so trapped in it. Like prisoners.

<comment><USER16> I agree completely. I didn't even ride a bicycle there (I only learned how to ride recently), yet simply walking the streets of Amsterdam felt so right that I've decided to move there at least for a year. A decently-sized city without many cars is fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had watched about a million Dutch cycling videos before I went to the Netherlands, but it's even better than the videos make it out. Cycling in the Netherlands is safe, easy, and fun. I rode around with a four-year-old and an almost-two-year-old in a cargo bike and not for a second felt any stress or fear (and my kids absolutely loved it as well, fresh air and no carseats). I can't go half a mile in Seattle without worrying about getting run over. I basically gave up on cycling in America because I can't handle the adrenaline hangover anymore.

One more thing, as great as cycling is in Amsterdam, from what I can tell, it might be the least best place to cycle in the Netherlands, so if you only cycle in Amsterdam you're not even getting the best experience.

<comment><USER18> Cycling in Amsterdam is fun in a sort of stressy rollercoastery way. Utrecht is even worse.

If you're in the area though, I can highly recommend taking one of the many bike routes, in particular one that leads to the dunes near Amersfoort. From Amsterdam/Utrecht it's a perfect distance for a day trip and really beautiful.

<comment><USER17> The only stress I had in Amsterdam was "There are a lot of bikes here" and "Hard to pay attention to the road with all the great architecture." None of the "OMG that guy honking is going to murder me" stress you get in America.

I biked with the kids from Haarlem to Bloemendaal aan Zee. It was the best! Took me a while to figure out Bloemendaal aan Zee and Bloemendaal are different places, so there were some wrong turns, but it was fun all the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why wouldn't it be?

It's faster than the tram; a bike is cheap and cycling is free; its way easier to park than a car; its healthy; there are cycle paths everywhere (inside and between cities); and everyone else does it, so you usually have company.

<comment><USER20> While cycling is obviously much, much cheaper than a car, I'd argue its a myth to say it's 'free'. Start commuting a _reasonable_ distance regularly by bike and you are going to incur running costs, as well as often not insignificant investment in essential accessories you might need depending on where you live - clothing, panniers, lights, helmets, locks...

There's a fair amount of things on a bike that, like many other mechanical things, can need looking after to keep running well - new tires and tubes, CO2 cartridges if like me you are too lazy to manually pump, chains, cassettes, lubricant, wheels (eventually), brake pads/discs. If you don't have maintenance skills for adjusting things like derailleur cable tension/brakes you will probably need to budget for shop servicing too. It's often considerably more than non-cyclists expect, and often scales with use. If you ride regularly in foul weather, many of these items need attention much more often - there's nothing like road salt to prevent ice for causing just about everything on a bicycle drive train to rust if not cleaned off.

Not doing essential maintenance like chain replacements usually just increases costs in the long term - worn chains in turn accelerate wear on the cassette etc.

<comment><USER21> > essential accessories - clothing, panniers, lights, helmets, locks, new > tires and tubes, CO2 cartridges, chains, cassettes, lubricant, wheels > (eventually), brake pads/disks.

Mine came with a lock and lights. Tires last 10 years and aren't that expensive. Pumping tires has to happen a few times a year, come on. Never replaced a chain before the rest of the bike was due for replacement anyway. Never heard of anyone replacing cassettes. Lubricant is not expensive for how much it's needed (a euro a year maybe). New brake pads aren't expensive and they last years, disks last decades no idea how expensive they are (my bike from high school still doesn't need to have them replaced). Never used a pannier. Never wore a helmet that I can remember (I've had this discussion before here... I don't know anyone who wore one, nor anyone who sustained serious injury due to not wearing one). And special clothing, huh? What's wrong with the clothes you're wearing?

You're _greatly_ exaggerating. The only expensive part is buying a good one when it's new.

<comment><USER20> You've edited my post rather substantially to suit your own end in your "quote" \- at no point does my original post describe that entire list as essential - I merely gave examples of the kind of things that _can_ need maintenance.

> Tires last 10 years and aren't that expensive

> New brake pads aren't expensive and they last years

Ride 20 miles a day and lifespans like these are nigh on impossible. Especially if you have inclement weather to deal with.

> Never heard of anyone replacing cassettes.

Cassette lifespan is entirely dependent on maintenance, but if you abuse your bike you will find the derailleur starts 'jumping' on shifts after 400-600 miles or so. For me, this is every 3 or 4 months. They are designed as consumable parts, not unlike car brakes. This is one of several reasons why single speed bikes make great commuters if you can push a reasonable sized gear.

> And special clothing, huh? What's wrong with the clothes you're wearing?

What you are wearing is often not great if cycling in rain, snow or ice. Sitting at my desk in rain drenched, puddle stained clothing is never much fun. Similarly, many people understandably don't want to wear the clothes they sweated in for 10 miles on the way to work for a full day at the office...

<comment><USER18> I think the issue here is that other posters are describing things that I have no doubt are factually correct in Holland or wherever they're from. Your perspective is biking in a broader sense, and I have no reason to believe you're wrong about that. It's just very different from the specific situation in Holland: we rarely have snow or ice, and while it might seem like a rainy country, it's usually rain showers interspersed with dry periods. We take that into account in our bike rides, just as we do the public transit timetable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I recently bought an electric "bakfiets" [0], While in the city I never use the car anymore, the bakfiets is faster (24 kph + bike routes are always shorter in the city), can carry all groceries and 2 kids (1 in a Maxi Cosi) and I'm outside getting some exercise. It gets about 100 km on 1 charge (the less lazy you are the more km you get) and I can park it anywhere for free. It also lets me bike with my 4 y/o anywhere, when he gets tired he and his bike go into the bakfiets easily. These things are getting insanely popular nowadays, for good reasons. Now if only I would pay car taxes based on my mileage (kilometerage) instead of the weight of the car it would be a nice financial solution as well.

[0] [https://www.keilerfietsen.nl/product/keiler- bambini/](https://www.keilerfietsen.nl/product/keiler-bambini/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Its a combination of reasons:

\- Netherlands is compact (10km from town to town, bikable)

\- Netherlands is flat

\- Cities are old, and are not easy to navigate with cars

\- Cars are expensive

\- Infrastructure is in place (everywhere!)

\- Bikes are cheap

\- Biking is healthy

\- Biking is often faster in cities for <10km distances (better routes, no searching for parking place)

Note: If you want bikelanes in your city/country: Just start biking, the more and more people are biking, the more politics is forced to build infra. This is happening in Paris, Latvia, and more!

<comment><USER24> The climate is pretty convenient as well. No snow storms or heat waves, you only need a good rain suit :)

<comment><USER25> There's a heat wave happening right now though, 30 degrees+ (celsius) and damp, really not pleasant weather to go cycling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bicycles are an amazing transportation tool. Why are they so _unpopular_ everywhere else?

<comment><USER27> There are many factors, but IMO it has a lot to do with urban sprawl. I'd never consider living somewhere where I'd have to own a car to be able to do my groceries and to go work. In the same idea, I'd never take a job that requires me to do more than a 30 minutes commute by public transportation/biking distance. That makes me a perfect candidate for biking, unfortunately I'm more of an outlier. Most people, including my own family, would think that this way of thinking makes no sense. They all own a car (or two) and have an hour commute each way to be able to afford a bigger house/different lifestyle than they could in the city. Just look at any suburbs: the inhabitants clearly disagree with me.

<comment><USER28> > Just look at any suburbs: the inhabitants clearly disagree with me.

Some of us just have kids and have noticed that all the city housing is either incredibly expensive or in slums, _and_ the schools in the city proper are dangerous and terrible so we'd also have to pay for private school[0]. And we're not made of money.

I'd much rather live in the city—I _hate_ the car-centric lifestyle—but living there if I have enough money _not to_ but _not_ enough money to also pay for private k-12 schooling would be irresponsible. Plus there's the issue of having to balance commutes for two people in a dual-income household—one of us would almost certainly need a car anyway.

[0] This is true for my city at least. YMMV.

<comment><USER29> That's a chicken-and-egg problem too... inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools).

<comment><USER28> Well, more to the point they took their bound-to-be-good-students-on-average _children_ to the suburbs. If you do it right ( _i.e._ you don't make a bad choice and get ripped off) you're buying your kids' _peers_ more than anything else by paying to live in more affluent districts or (more directly) by paying private school tuition. This is why pouring money into poor districts rarely does much to educational quality—the money's _coincident_ with other factors that make rich(er) kids easy to teach and relatively unlikely to seriously disrupt class on a regular basis, miss large numbers of school days, _et c_ , and just giving the schools more money doesn't fix all that other stuff.

So it's still a chicken/egg problem but a much tougher one to resolve than if schools having too little money were even _a large part_ of the trouble. It's even a shitty situation for people who can afford to get their kids into better schools because there's pressure under this system to spend absolutely as much as you can on these things, because you will _definitely_ be improving your kids' chances in life by doing so.

It's a craptastic coordination problem that's _so bad_ things would _kind of_ be better if we just assigned schools based on some combination of parental income and education level, since that'd put most kids more or less where they are when we use willingness-and-ability-to-spend-money as a proxy for those things ( _i.e._ the current system) while keeping everyone from having to waste tons of money competing over blessed zip codes or paying private school tuition.

<comment><USER29> That's a well-put perspective.

... however...

I can't even picture the political shitstorm that would happen if someone suggested (openly) segregating schools by parental income and education level.

<comment><USER28> Oh, I know it's not politically feasible and is fairly horrible. It's damning of our current system, though, that it's _de facto_ very nearly the same thing _and also incredibly expensive /stressful_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm Dutch, but think we tend to underestimate the impact of the flatness of our country, and the size of other countries especially the States. I've cycled on my normal 7-gear bicycle (and that might be considered fancy) from Newcastle to Carlisle. Which is quite flat. I had to walk so much up hill as it was utterly impossible to climb 40 meters.

In the Netherlands quite a lot of people do live in a 50 km radius of their workplace. And 50 km would be a distance you'll travel by train or car. A daily comute of more then one hour in the Netherlands might be considered 'quite a while' but I guess this is different in the USA.

<comment><USER31> The three-speed hub gears that are typical in the Netherlands are practically unknown over here in the UK. Even the cheapest bicycles will have a 27-speed triple setup with an extremely low bottom gear. Mountain bikes completely took over the market in the 1990s, with a lasting legacy for almost all styles of bicycle.

A couple of cities are extremely challenging for cyclists (most notably Bristol) and we do have a few genuinely idiotic roads [1] but the hills aren't a huge obstacle for most cyclists on most routes. As long as you're cognisant of the need to slow down and pace yourself, the gearing does all the work for you. A moderately steep hill is no harder than a flat road when you're in a suitable gear, it's just slower.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEgjKpFqIJ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEgjKpFqIJ0)

<comment><USER32> That's not because the UK are so extremely hilly and adverse mountainous terrain (it's not) but because in car centric countries, shitty bike shaped objects sold in shops like WalMart dominate the market and what sells best to that audience that doesn't really actually use a bicycle? Cool looking mountain bikes with useless shocks and all the bells and whistles.

<comment><USER31> The mountain bike boom gave us the hybrid, which is an extremely useful bicycle - an upright bicycle with a rigid frame, wide-range gearing, efficient low-pressure slick tyres, plenty of clearance for mudguards and pannier rack bosses. It's a much more useful style of bicycle than the boom-era ten speed. The bike-shaped object is still around, but we now have a generation of much more savvy bike buyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> From having completed the London to Brighton bike ride at the weekend I have a good idea of what really makes the difference and that is having roads closed to motor vehicles. The London to Brighton route is closed to traffic and some of the rural stretches are as wide as a Dutch bike path. Up until now I have believed sharing the roads is how to go but now I know that cycling infrastructure is needed. It is the experience that matters and cycling away from the cars is a totally different thing to dodging traffic. It makes cycling more like walking in a park.

As an aside, I have thought about putting money down for an electric car but then I look at electric bicycles and finally settle for a normal bicycle. I hope more people question why the big box and get a two wheeler powered by a 5kg battery or their own oomph.

<comment><USER34> How are you going to get to places in heavy rain or snow?

<comment><USER35> Oh no, not snow!

> Not many cities can boast 27 percent of cyclists continue using their bikes > several times a week all year-round, especially not in cities with eight and > half months of winter or an average of 256 days of thermal winter and snow. > Oulu, Finland (population 191.000), however, is no ordinary town. It is a > town where 98 percent of the cycling network is maintained all winter and > all routes have street lighting.

[https://wintercyclingblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/oulu- finl...](https://wintercyclingblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/oulu-finland- winter-cycling-capital-of-the-world/)

With the right infrastructure and services, snow is no obstacle.

<comment><USER36> This is especially ironic in lieu of the fact that southern US loses their minds when a few inches of snow falls there, with people being equally unable to get anywhere by _car_ until the roads are plowed as they would be on a bicycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Southeast Asia is heavy on bikes, and used to be more so than now, and they didn't have infrastructure or culture --it was need. Japan is heavy into bikes too, and there aren't dedicated lanes, not that I'd object, but it's not necessary to make it popular.

The one thing in Japan, where accidents aren't as regular as in southeast Asia, is that both bikes and cars obey traffic signals --I think that helps a lot. Also many, many streets ate narrow, so everyone slows down, and aside from bosozuku, you don't have people going 40km/h down streets.

<comment><USER35> Right, in Japan you don't need dedicated lanes quite as much because of the narrowness of the streets, plus it being accepted to bike on the sidewalk when there's room. And of course density being high in Japan helps.

<comment><USER38> >accepted to bike on the sidewalk

When I walk on the sidewalk in Tokyo i'm always waiting to be clipped by a bicycle because I changed direction too quickly. You see people riding bikes through shoulder to shoulder crowds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The nice thing about having many cyclists is that there's a high demand for cycle parking spaces which means you can run a good business guiding cyclists to available space. This is what we do at LumiGuide. See: [https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/bicycle- parkin...](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/bicycle-parking- guidance-system-in-utrecht/)

</comment><comment><USER40> The Netherlands had the opportunity to hit the reset switch in the 1970s with public support, that pushed through the changes in infrastructure and culture to foster a cycling centric society.

I'm wondering if that could ever happen today, I think the motoring/oil and road lobbyists are so well entrenched and organised in governments across the world, I highly doubt it.

I live in London and would never dream of cycling here, I'd be too nervous to do it.

<comment><USER41> I cycled in London for several years, before I left.

Don't consider the route you drive, or that the bus takes. That's the awful main road.

Look on opencyclemap.com or similar, and see where there are quieter routes. Many areas of London block off residential roads with bollards, which let bikes through. Over half my commute to work was along the Thames Path, and most of the remainder along a road so narrow most cars avoided it, with these bollards in the middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Amazing infrastructure for cycling (at least in Amsterdam).

Its also pan flat, so it is very practical to get anywhere by bike, in the way that San Francisco's hills makes it very impractical.

<comment><USER35> And yet it is one of the highest bike rates for a major city in the US (having fairly good weather for biking certainly helps). So far, more and better infrastructure has led to more biking, just like you'd expect.

Plus, with the steady rise of ebikes, hills are only going to matter less and less over time.

<comment><USER43> Hear hear. And bikes reallybare a better sollution for traffic density (when possible) than counting on people carpooling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish more cities would push for the infrastructure and culture required for this to work... in my city there are few bike lanes (and not all interconnected, so you have to switch between bike lane and normal traffic lanes) and both cyclists and motorists are equally ignorant of how to behave around each other. (At least in enough quantity to make it a problem)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the superiority of the Netherlands when it comes to cycling is pretty clear, and has been for a long time. What bothers me about this superiority is the perceived need to point it out on a fairly regular basis.

It's very easy to look at one's fortunate circumstances and wonder why others can't replicate them, so why the constant incredulousness around how the Netherlands stands as an example that should be followed?

Perhaps shrinking every nation to the size and geographical structure of the Netherlands would help. Other nations could also raze their suburbs and reconstruct into quaint little villages with great respect for cyclists.

<comment><USER46> It wasn't always that way... [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam- bic...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle- capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Having spent a little tiny bit of time in the Netherlands in both Amsterdam and The Hague, I suspect it's simply the combination of a flat landscape combined with comfortable weather for strenuous outdoor activity and most people living in pre-car cities which are sized about right for pedestrian activities which fed into a virtuous cycle that both recognized these things and then built legal and physical infrastructure to support them, which in turn made cycling easier and more convenient and so on.

It's very hard to conveniently cycle around many other cities due to not having one or more of the three foundations needed to kick off the cycle. Even in non-optimal cities, putting a cycling infrastructure in place doesn't necessarily result in lots of cyclists and doesn't necessarily determine cycle usage.

For example, the entire U.S. state of Florida might be an ideal biking location. It's flat after all, but most of the state was built to support cars, and the weather can be mighty hot. It also has the highest cyclist fatality rate in the U.S. with Orlando specifically often called out as one of the worst cities in the world to cycle in.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've been living and working in The Hague for about 3 months.

Here there are bike paths everywhere (pretty much alongside every road) and they're quite wide. Bikes have their own set of traffic lights.

If you manage to get your hands on a yellow public transport card (ov- chipkaart) then you can even rent a bike from the train station (some train stations have a separate section where they keep the bikes) and it only costs about 3 Euros per day.

</comment><comment><USER49> Because cars are so extremely expensive here in the Netherlands.

The fact that the bicycle paths here are amazing in most of the country is secondary.

Bicycles are at extreme risk of theft in major cities. There is nothing to romanticize about crappy bicycles. People do not ride garbage old bikes by choice, but out of necessity. People ride garbage on rusty wheels because they have been burned by theft multiple times.

Criminals with trucks in Germany and the Netherlands routinely roll up to train stations and steal dozens of bicycles at a time, take them to get resprayed in Poland, then resell them.

If you chained your bicycle to something in a way that isn't aesthetically pleasing, the government will steal your bicycle and you will have to retrieve it at a cost plus your expensive lock will be destroyed. This assuming you can find your bike.

Don't be fooled into thinking that this is bicycle utopia. You are only less likely to get killed by a car. This is a huge plus. But the rest of the story is bleak.

And now for your amusement... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ay3r5Kpio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ay3r5Kpio)

</comment><comment><USER50> Thanks for asking BBC.

Here are some answers: -The Netherlands are flat. -Bikes only use renewable energy. -Riding a bike is healthy. -There is a lot of supporting infrastructure. -Car drivers are well trained, so that they don't impose as much of a risk as car drivers in other countries. -In stark contrast to other countries especially but not limited to the United States. In the Netherlands everything is reachable by bike. For example but not limited to: Workplace, school, kindergarten, grocery shop, shopping district, cinema.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's mild and flat.

<comment><USER52> The US has mild and flat cities; none of them touch the Netherlands when it comes to cycling support.

<comment><USER53> I think it needs to be mild, flat, and _dense_. And then AFAIK the government made a concerted effort to exploit those traits by building good cycling infrastructure.

<comment><USER52> We have mild, flat, and dense. Boston and NYC, for example.

I think the only missing piece in many cities is funding and prioritization.

<comment><USER53> NYC is not mild compared to Amsterdam. According to this source (admittedly just the first I Googled), Amsterdam is on average 13F cooler in the summer, which IMO makes a huge difference when relying on it for your daily commute.

[1] [http://www.amsterdam.climatemps.com/vs/new- york.php](http://www.amsterdam.climatemps.com/vs/new-york.php)

<comment><USER54> There are many cycling-happy cities in Europe with different weather and geography[0]. Barcelona is pretty warm, for example.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2015/06/copenhagenize-worlds-most- bike...](https://www.wired.com/2015/06/copenhagenize-worlds-most-bike- friendly-cities/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I just want to add that the Netherlands can afford those nice infrastructures in part because it's a tax heaven since the 70s [1]

Also, please make the bay bridge have a bike path...personally I would just ban all the cars during the day but to each his solution.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_Netherl...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_Netherlands#Tax_haven)

<comment><USER56> How does not charging tax give the country public money to build infrastructure with?

<comment><USER55> When you're a tax heaven your attract all the companies and they pay their taxes in your country instead of where they really operate. See Ireland also (most big tech companies have their headquarters there).

see [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_competition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_competition)

leading to [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Aren't cars _really_ expensive to purchase in the Netherlands? Also, pushing biking at the expense of cars certainly helps. People in the US would go nuts if the Government starting reducing car lanes to install dedicated bike lanes.

<comment><USER58> Depends on your definition of "really" expensive, but as a Dutch citizen I can tell you that:

\- On average new cars are about twice as expensive compared to the USA, mostly due to tax. (A Mustang GT starts at 119.500 EUR, about 133k USD).

\- Insurance is mandatory

\- For each car you own you pay a monthly road tax (between 30-100 euro per month, depending on the car)

\- fuel prices are also quite high (~6,5USD per US gallon)

\- parking can also be very expensive in some regions (I pay 115 euro/month for my parking space)

Despite all that, most Dutch people still own a car, for practical and status purpose. However, due to the cost involved (fuel and parking) many Dutchies will prefer a bike if the trip is not that far.

<comment><USER59> A basic Mustang GT is only about 40k USD - so you're talking about 3-4x as expensive...?

<comment><USER60> A GT would set you back around $60k in the US, which is the v8 5 l which LeonM. The 2.3 ecoboost would cost around $60k usd in the Netherlands.

<comment><USER58> I was indeed talking about the 5.0 V8. Since the F series trucks are not sold in europe through the ford dealerships (only specialised import companies) I had to find an example of a car that it both sold in the USA and the Netherlands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I moved to the Netherlands from the US and lived there for almost 8 years. I completely adopted the bicycle lifestyle and would love to see more cities/countries adopt the bicycle priority.

</comment><comment><USER62> Grade separated bike lanes.

<comment><USER63> Most of them have no grade, and the ones that do are very low height. The safety feeling actually comes from sharing spaces, and not from being shielded - a result of road design, parking spaces and general city/street layout.

<comment><USER35> Sharing spaces works fine when speeds are low and streets are relatively narrow. It's still important to have physical separation for arterials, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> i was in Amsterdam seven years ago for work; the folks at the local shop i was there to do business with asked me to stay on an extra day and they would take me on a tour of Amsterdam.

we decided on a bike tour so we walked to a place where i could rent a bike. Of the 50 or 60 "top bar" (men's) bikes, every one was too big, even if they collapsed the seat post, the frames were still to big. (I'm 175 cm, or 5'9"?) I had to settle for a ladies' step-through.

</comment><comment><USER65> Netherlands is flat. A friendly reminder to some politicians.

</comment><comment><USER66> i cant seem to find any references to the 'no need for a parking place, no need for gas, brings two people at least, police not that much of a hassle when you cycle drunk (and if you really drank too much, you cant cycle...), usually in a city 10x faster due to one-way traffic etc'

And plenty of (serious) accidents happen here too involving cyclist. Though indeed, car drivers are generally in fear of hitting one for legal and insurance reasons.

</comment><comment><USER67> Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands?

I stopped cycling in the UK when they forced me to share the bike paths with cars. I then (eventually) got the fuck out of the UK.

</comment><comment><USER68> Barrier to entry is low

Easier to own/maintain/productively use a bike in a location like the Netherlands

</comment><comment><USER69> Because the taxes when buying the car, cost of the maintenance and of the insurance are outrageous in the Netherlands. They use bicycles because oftentimes that's all they can afford.

</comment><comment><USER70> A couple of other factors; I don't think the Netherlands has ever had more than a tiny car or oil industry.

<comment><USER71> Oh, they had a big oil industry. So much so that the term "Dutch disease" refers to what happens when oil dominates an economy.

<comment><USER72> That was natural gas from the Groningen fields, but Rotterdam has a giant refinery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> To celebrate Bicycle day since Amsterdam is all about getting high.

<comment><USER74> >Amsterdam is all about getting high.

A tired, unclever and ignorant stereotype.

<comment><USER73> It was a joke - jeez! I have lived there, and I know it's a stereotype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I did a casual bike tour through hundreds of miles of Netherlands and Belgium. We wore helmets, obviously.

Not wearing a helmet is inconsisent with having many standards for reflectors and traffic planning. Although someone maybe slightly more careful, falling on a bicycle means a risk for head injuries. Why not take reasonable precautions, including instructing people that helmets do not add safety to anything besides head injuries? They're not a panacea, but protect against certain classes of injuries.

Anecdotally: When I was a kid, an obscured oily patch of road contributed to a fall to one side, head first, and slide for about 10 feet and the helmet I was wearing cracked instead of my skull. Road rash but didn't die or end up with traumatic brain injury.

<comment><USER32> Well you can just as much slip on that oil patch and crack your head open as a pedestrian.. Of course those scenarios are very far removed from what actually causes injuries and death.

The Netherlands has a much much lower incidence of head injuries not because they wear styrofoam hats but they realized it's better to stop the trucks and cars from driving into people than in vain trying to soften the impact. Creating secure bike routes just has a tremendously higher return on investment compared to convincing people to wear helmets that bringing them up just labels you a shill in many peoples eyes, a concern troll distraction.</comment></comment>


NDrive GPS App Disappears from Apple App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgear.com/ndrive-gps-app-disappears-from-apple-app-store-kill-switch-the-culprit-0893419/

<comment><USER2> This article is a perfect time to lament the poor quality of many of these 'news' sites. Nowhere in the story does it say that Slashgear made any attempt to contact Apple and ask about this situation. Apple has an entire media department that you can call and ask (<http://www.apple.com/pr/>).

The worst case is that Apple will give you a no comment, or we'll get back to you. That you can report. But here all we have is a sentence wasted burbling _And considering that NDrive isn't the only GPS application available on the iPhone, or within the App Store proper, we're not sure why Apple would choose now, or this app, to pull that lever._

At the start of the article they claim _That would mostly be because Apple hasn't had any reason to use it_. Is that true? Did they ask Apple?

If you follow the blog chain backwards you'll come to someone who did call Apple, and has a possible explanation for why the application was removed: _it appears NDrive may not have fully licensed the map data used in the application_.

The entire article would be much more interesting if they'd called Apple and asked them a few questions. And then called NDrive and asked them about the map licensing, or called Teledata and asked them. You know, actually done some work towards the article rather than 'reporting' rumors.

Also, they need someone to look over their copy.

 _Several customers are reporting that the application called NDrive, which was developed by a small team to be a GPS alternative._

What did the customers do? Also, I'm pretty sure this small team did not develop an alternative to GPS. That would have required launching and maintaining a large number of satellites.

 _And then subsequently pulled from customer's iPhones as well._

One customer or many?

Some months ago I wrote a blog post about baggage tags used on airlines (<http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/whats-on-baggage-tag.html>). In it you'll see documented the work it took (with a little help from a friend) to get the answers I wanted.

And the other day I was writing something that appeared on The Times' web site and needed information about the status of the BT site at Goonhilly ([http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/06/sea-sand- sun-...](http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/06/sea-sand-sun-and- science-a-geek-holiday.html)). I simply called BT's media relations and they were very, very helpful. They even got me an answer on a day when half their staff were off on a training course.

<comment><USER3> While it would be a benefit to this story, I don't see why anybody should have a duty to write both sides of the story on their blog - I properly would have written to Apple, but if they didn't give a good reason I can't fault the guy for not posting it.

<comment><USER4> Its called Journalism, and many deplore the lack of it on blogs.

<comment><USER5> When did blogs become professional news organisations and therefore have to adhere to standards of journalistic integrity?

They're just websites, anyone can put one up and say anything they like as long as they don't break the law.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but they don't get to be called Journalists. They are just wankers with a keyboard.

<comment><USER6> Kind of like people commenting on social news sites?

<comment><USER4> Sort of - but with a responsibility to be fair and accurate. And on THIS site at least, folks tend to offer links, or have pertinent experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not true. People still have the app.

See: [http://www.razorianfly.com/2010/07/08/did-apple-just-use- the...](http://www.razorianfly.com/2010/07/08/did-apple-just-use-the-ios-kill- switch/)

 _[Update] – Multiple users are reporting to us via Twitter and in the comments section that NDrive is still present on both their iPhone and respective computers, therefore we're filing this one under: "Apple has -not- used the iOS kill switch … yet"._

</comment><comment><USER8> The kill-switch URL isn't exactly secret: <https://iphone- services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps>

Note the lack of any applications being listed there.

Seriously, this is an easy one to verify; a reporter wouldn't even need to call Apple for a response. I'm no Apple fanboy, but there doesn't appear to be much to see here.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is a long gap between stuff that gets pulled from the Appstore and stuff pulled from off your iPhone. In the later, stuff gets pulled from the store all the time. Either it's broken, violates a license agreement, or is malicious (ie. steals stuff from your addressbook). I've yet to encounter an app that was taken off the iPhone. I do have apps that were taken from the appstore.

Which is why I found this article a bit unconvincing. "Users reported...." How many? 1? 10? 10000?

</comment><comment><USER10> So when Apple ganks an application like this, do people automatically receive a refund?

<comment><USER11> It doesn't concern the kill-switch, but I still have the tethering application, NetShare, that was quickly banished from the App Store and still installs and works fine.

<comment><USER12> They didn't use the kill-switch on that at all, did they? I thought that was just banned from the app store, but not removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is seriously weird, I hope Apple has a good reason for this that goes beyond 'we don't like this kind of apps anymore'. While Google also used it's kill-switch recently, it was against malicious software, while this App doesn't look particular harmful.

<comment><USER6> It's harmful to the $7.99-a-month-for-GPS model.

(Of course, GPS navigation is already 100% free on Android. But only hippies and communists use Linux, so...)

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure why you're getting downmodded...this is exactly why they pulled google voice and exactly why they won't approve a grooveshark app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's possible this may be due to false advertising. I bought the Canada maps version on June 16 for $4.99, and it turned out to be a two week evaluation edition, something that I did not see anywhere in the app description before purchasing it.

Something on their support page made reference to a spurious expiry message, so I thought this message might be a mistake; I wasn't sure until it actually did expire at the end of the month. By the time I'd noticed they'd pulled it from the store. The app was still on my iPad, and is still in my iTunes, so I don't think Apple killed it with the switch.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pure speculation but maybe NDrive is improperly licensing and distributing the map data?

</comment><comment><USER17> If that turns out to be the case, it's interesting to contrast the two different approaches in transparency that Apple and Google took in using their kill switches.

<comment><USER18> Turns out it isn't the case.</comment></comment>


U.S. submarines will soon very tactical nuclear weapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a22550758/us-submarines-will-soon-carry-tactical-nuclear-weapons/ <comment><USER2> They already carry _strategic_ nuclear missiles (ICBMs); this provides more situational flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER3> "will soon carry"?</comment>


Kickstarter apologizes for hosting pickup/rape how-to guide - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/21/kickstarter-seduction-guides/

<comment><AUTHOR> Justification for putting the world "rape" in submission title (excerpt from guide): "Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don't ask for permission. Be dominant. _Force her to rebuff your advances._ "

Sourced from here: [http://caseymalone.com/post/53339539674/this-is-not- fucking-...](http://caseymalone.com/post/53339539674/this-is-not-fucking- harmless)</comment>


Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-deaths-20160831-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> Not that I don't think 6k birds isn't an unfortunate number, but even if we built 1,000 more of these power plants they'd only kill about 0.20% of the amount of birds killed by cats in the US every year [0].

[0] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats- wi...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wild-birds- mammals-study/1873871/)

<comment><USER3> You are comparing an artificial man-made killing machine with natural predator. With your logic, one day robots will be able to justify killing their human overlords.

<comment> nommm-nommm House cats are not indigenous to the majority of the world and certainly not to North America. The robots comment doesn't follow.

<comment><USER4> Cats are indigenous to every continent save Antarctica. One of the most widespread, adaptable creatures in the world. Housecats are not genetically different from wild cats - they can interbreed and often do.

<comment><USER5> Mountain lions and lynx are indigenous to North America, neither hunt songbirds. House cats are from the Near East.

<comment><USER4> Bobcat?

<comment><USER5> Yes, there's those too. Same group as the Lynx. But neither Lynx, Bobcat, nor Mountain Lion are decimating bird populations.

<comment><USER4> Hm. Cats come from the Fertile Crescent but that was 10,000 years ago. Since then they've gone everywhere. I wonder when they first came to North America? Was it just hundreds of years ago, or thousands?

<comment><USER6> Domestic cats come from the Fertile Crescent.

The animals they were domesticated from have been present in much of Africa, Asia and Europe for a couple million years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property."

Well, nice to hear the ACME(tm) solar plant trap finally did the trick for Wile E. Coyote...

<comment><USER8> Clearly the solution is to paint a black half-circle on the fence that looks like a tunnel. The roadrunners will be able to pass through but not the hapless coyote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's 16 birds a day. Unless the birds are endangered, that seems like a relatively small number for 390 MW of mostly green power.

<comment><USER10> 74 MW of solar power in 2015 (up by a factor of about 1.4 from 2014 but still only about 2/3 the planned output). At the cost of $2.2B, and 3500 acres (14 km^2) of steel and precision-ground glass and wilderness.

<comment><USER10> Update: The 74 MW figure is given by EIA as "net solar generation". The plant also burns natural gas, and made slightly more power in total (which still rounds to 74 MW on average for the year). In particular, it burned 564,814 mcf of natgas, which is worth 9 MW in our existing fleet of combined-cycle power plants. But Ivanpah made < 1 MW out of it, according to EIA.

It's unclear how EIA is partitioning the plant's output. If we use the total generation and subtract the potential (or CO2-equivalent) value of the natgas, it made only 66 MW from the sun.

<comment><USER11> Wikipedia cites 652,375 MWh of "solar only" production in 2015, with natural gas consumption listed separately. That works out to an average 74.4 MW output from the sun alone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Ivanpah_Total)

Out of curiosity, why did you subtract the potential natgas from the actual solar output, instead of the actual gas output you just cited?

<comment><USER10> It's not clear how the natgas output is being measured. It's used to bring the working fluid up to temperature. Either the true solar output is lower than stated or the plant is using natgas extremely inefficiently (getting 0.9 instead of 9 MW of it). In the latter case, it's still a cost of obtaining the solar energy that should be accounted for.

Wikipedia has the total and solar-only figures switched, as can be seen by visiting the citations given. The solar-only figure is 644,506 MWh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how many birds are killed by coal and natural gas to produce 390 MW

<comment><USER10> I don't have any estimates for coal handy, but here are some other numbers for reference:

Syncrude says their tar sand surface mining operations (the most extensive form of oil mining in wide practice) kill 2.5 birds/PJ.

For wind power, estimates of annual bird deaths for the U.S. circa 2013 include 234,000[1], 440,000[2], and 573,000 (including 83,000 raptors and not including 888,000 bats)[3]. EIA says wind made 507 PJ in 2012[4]. So it's something like 800/PJ.

For the U.S., a 2014 meta-analysis[5] gives 600 million[6] fatal collisions with buildings each year. A 2013 study says, "free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually".[7]

Ivanpah made 74 MW of solar electricity in 2015 (644,506 MWh, according to EIA). So 2600/PJ.

[1] [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.10.007](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.10.007)

[2] [http://1.usa.gov/IhyaHv](http://1.usa.gov/IhyaHv) p.188

[3] [http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wsb.260](http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wsb.260)

[4] [http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html)

[5] [http://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1](http://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1)

[6] They give a range from 365-988 and a median of 599. Gotta love that kind of precision!

[7] [http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380)

<comment><USER12> >Syncrude says their tar sand surface mining operations (the most extensive form of oil mining in wide practice) kill 2.5 birds/PJ.

That seems way too low. I feel like I've read about huge bird kills from migratory birds landing in the containment ponds.

<comment><USER10> It may be. Oil has a really high energy density though.

Overall, surface mining of tar sands has to be one of the worst ways to get energy (in situ extraction techniques like SAGD do somewhat better).

<comment><USER12> That's true. I hadn't considered energy density.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Call me a jerk, but what is the real problem here? Can someone bother to actually quantify the risk to the ecosystem? There are plenty of unfortunate ways that different critters die all the time whether natural or unnatural. However, the mere fact that it is sad to think about means nothing.

</comment><comment><USER14> "coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence" i've heard that before...

<comment><USER15> The coyotes in the Mojave buy their traps on Amazon instead of relying on the Acme Corporation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if they have tried or are considering spreading a scented substance (a powder?) in the immediate area. It wouldn't stop birds from flying into the solar plant, but it might condition the roadrunners such that they know not to run in that direction when fleeing a coyote.

It could be costly anywhere else, but in the mojave desert, scent probably lingers for a much longer period of time. That's my guess, anyway.

<comment><USER17> I don't know roadrunners specifically, but in general birds don't have a great sense of smell, and don't much use it day to day.

A visual warning would work better for birds. I wonder if there is something about the fence that makes it "invisible" to roadrunners.

<comment><USER18> Methyl anthranilate [0], commonly used as artificial grape flavoring and naturally found in Concord grapes, is a bird repellent. They can certainly smell it, if not other odors.

If you want to keep birds out of your strawberry patch, for instance, you can sprinkle packets of grape Kool-Aid over it.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_anthranilate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_anthranilate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ivanpah is a black mark on renewable energy. Its price was ridiculously expensive, and it has failed to perform to expectations.

The good news is that the industry has learned from it. Almost nobody is doing concentrated solar thermal anymore - photovoltaics are better in nearly every way.

<comment><USER20> What are the numbers behind your statement? Price info is easy enough to find, but what's the conversion rate from KW of solar energy to KW of electrical energy for concentrated solar thermal vs. PV? And is that the right metric to use?

<comment><USER19> The right metric is probably cost per annual kWh.

1 kW of photovoltaic (PV) will generate about 1,800 kWh per year over its lifetime, and costs probably about $1,800 to build at utility scale. So $1 per annual kWh.

Things are more complicated for CSP, because it usually has thermal storage built in. This allows it to generate more kWh of energy per kW of max power. For example Crescent Dunes generates is 110 MW, and generates 501 GWh per year: 4,500 kWh per kW. But it cost $1 billion to build, so it's about $2 per annual kWh.

Ivanpah does not have storage. Its cost per annual kWh is over $3.

(I am glossing over the fact that PV lasts for "just" 25-30 years and CSP lasts longer. Revenue generated 30 years from now is not worth very much.)

EDIT: to answer your question about "conversion rate from KW of solar energy to KW of electrical energy" \- this does not matter, at least here in the US. We have way, way, way more solar energy hitting the ground than we will ever need. Converting it efficiently just doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the U.S. we eat over 20 million birds __every day __. Not saying they shouldn 't make some effort to reduce the number of unintended bird deaths. But give me a break!

</comment><comment><USER22> Would be amazing if there was some futuristic tracking of the birds, then obscure the relevant part of the mirrors with lcds so they can fly without being cooked.

</comment><comment><USER23> 6000 birds/years in one location is a very big deal.

> But company officials suggest that estimates of the number of birds killed > annually at the site are exaggerated, and federal wildlife authorities > believe they are too low.

In practically all cases like these, "company officials" always say things are exaggerated. Whether it's about the effects of smoking, pesticide residues in foods, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was sort of hoping they'd have a video...

<comment><USER25> Here is one. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6s2zu4_2U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6s2zu4_2U)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be interesting to compare how many birds are killed by flying into the windows of glass skyscrapers.

Anyhow, it's good that solar thermal will soon not be cost competitive vs solar PV + battery.

</comment><comment><USER27> What is the alternative ? Building a nuclear power plant ? the same newspaper will come up with a story of how nuclear waste is going to kill babies with cancer. We need to calm.

<comment><USER28> We should all kill ourselves and let nature return to unmolested beauty.

I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What if they ran a ring of flood lights (to attract insects) to create a fence around the solar plant, so birds wouldn't enter the plant area itself?

<comment><USER30> But wouldn't increased insects cause the solar panels needing to be cleaned a lot more and cause reduced efficiency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> and fossil fuels are directly responsible for the largest ecological disasters the planet has ever seen, so...

</comment><comment><USER32> kfc kills more

</comment><comment><USER33> Flagged because this is an attempt to turn non-news into something clickbaity.</comment>


What happened to programming-books.com? - <AUTHOR>

A couple years ago I found a great site called something like 'programming-books.com' (but not exactly that).
It let users submit links to their favorite books for various programming languages, and write a short blurb about why they're so good.  You could include their Amazon page and the website would grab a cover picture.
I've since lost that bookmark and am trying to find it again, anyone know what site I'm talking about?  Is it still around? <comment><USER2> Did you mean: _programmingbooks.org_ ?

If yes, you can see the old pages here, which are definitely useful:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080731211843/http://www.program...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080731211843/http://www.programmingbooks.org/)

I especially liked the section "Books Every Programmer Should Read." Don't know why the site is inactive, but thankfully archive.org has most of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's it, thanks! I think I'll try to contact Shane and find out what happened to it.

<comment><USER2> Cool, please post a follow-up if you find out why the site is down, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got in touch with Shane, his response:

"server hard drive crashed and I lost all the data :(. I was stupid and did not have backups. I plan on bringing it back sometime this year."

So good news. I wonder if archive.org will give him a copy of it, since they still have the entire site backed up.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the follow-up! Oh well, at least those programming and CS books the site had collected tend towards being classics, and have some staying power. So the archive.org pages are still very useful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/09/10/facebook-mentions/ <comment><AUTHOR> This isn't technologically fascinating in the least, but I think it's funny how much Facebook, Inc. is aping Twitter, Inc.'s features. Well, I'm about to go for a quick shop at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to pick up the newest Microsoft Corporation product!</comment>


Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ <comment><USER2> Parallel universe: [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg282...](http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg28200.html)

      If we look at LibreOffice and compare:

      LibreOffice, that is *good* (not more) software and
      *excellent* public relations.

      OpenOffice, that is *excellent* software and *pretty bad*
      public relations.

Proof: [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg282...](http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg28203.html)

      Secondly, as alluded to above, we should prepare ourselves
      for the FUD, the "AOO is dead" victory chants, the numerous
      anti-AOO and anti-Apache spewings, etc... There are some
      who will use this as a self-serving soapboxing opportunity,
      and warp the facts into some Bizarro alternate universe
      history. We should be there to set the facts straight but
      also resign ourselves to the fact that their voices will
      likely be louder than ours.

      [...]

      But the main reason why, imo, was because we were also
      end-user. End users needed to make a *choice* between
      AOO and SomethingElse.

Don't say the word.

      By no longer being an end-user application, that goes away.

End users play no role any more? Good luck with that.

<comment><USER3> How exactly is OO _excellent_ and LO _good_?

What is that based on? Please back that up.

<comment><USER4> My experience would be the contrary. I felt Libre Office had better document compatibility and a better user experience, so I stopped using Open Office. Maybe it improved since then. I would also like to see something to back up the claim you are talking about.

<comment><USER2> Please ask the author on the OO-dev mailing list, I just quoted him

[http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg282...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg28200.html)

<comment><USER3> I misread your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could they drop openoffice, then rename libreoffice to openoffice? That would be fantastic

<comment><USER6> This. Name natters. IME 90% of people I know who want to quickly look through a PowerPoint on Linux will install OpenOffice. Even when they hear that libre is the better version 80% of them would stay with oo as it is the "real" oo.

<comment><USER7> I agree in the case of the Windows/OS X environment, where brand awareness of LibreOffice is low, but in the Linux world... my distribution (Debian) doesn't even package OpenOffice, and I don't know _any_ Linux user who uses OOo.

<comment><USER8> Here's one. Never thought it necessary to change. OO works just fine.

<comment><USER9> And another one to some extent: oOo uses its own font rendering, the LO team (I gather) moved over to using libraries (harfbuzz) available in host OS for font rendering. I seem to have better results on former under some circumstances.

I have not had any round-trip editing problems flitting between the two under Linuxen of various kinds.

<comment><USER8> I didnt know this but at a more general level I am reluctant to "upgrade" what's already working fine due to this very fiddling with new stuff which is a common failing of the FOSS model in my experience (people wanting to add shiny things instead of making existing stuff better - Firefox, GNOME etc). This is one of the main reasons I did not migrate to LO.

<comment><USER10> Are you using a distro from 2010? Because I believe most of the major Linux distros include LIbreOffice as part of the default install.

<comment><USER8> I just checked - the latest I use is centos 7.1 which does have libreoffice already installed, however my daily machine is older and I had to install OO manually there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apache should never have accepted this hot potato from Oracle in the first place.

<comment><USER12> Why do you think so?

It's not clear that they could have known this would not be sustainable at the time, and I don't see how the hot potato staying with Oracle would have been a better option.

<comment><USER11> It was immediately obvious at the time, I remember it as such. The devs jumped ship to LibreOffice. All Oracle was left with was a brand and a moribund codebase, and for some reason Apache accepted it. Why didn't Oracle give it to LibreOffice? Because they were sore at being bypassed, it looked like. The correct thing for Apache to do would have been to say, nope mate, we don't want to be part of your childish feud, keep it, trash it, or give it to the people who are actually doing the work.

<comment><USER13> If Apache had not accepted it, Oracle was NOT going to donate it to TDF. Instead, Oracle would simply have shuttered it, or sold it to IBM. There was no workable plan ever that would have resulted in the OO code going to TDF.

Even if AOO had never done a single release, LO still benefited enormously from OO going to Apache, since once at Apache, there was known and public IP provenance, AND the code was relicensed to ALv2. This allowed LO to inherit that provenance, relicense their stuff on AOO as needed, and close what had been a possible nasty IP hole.

<comment><USER14> The Apache Foundation could simply have accepted the OpenOffice.org codebase+trademarks from Oracle, then donate to LibreOffice.

But they did not do so. The Apache Foundation does not have experience with software that end-users use. They have experience with server software. That was their undoing.

<comment><USER15> At the time of the donation, The Document Foundation had an (understandably) antagonistic relationship with Oracle and legal foundations which were firming up but not yet solid. The assets were not going to TDF from Oracle directly.

In accepting the proposal for a new Apache OpenOffice project, the ASF accepted not only the assets from Oracle but also a community, distinct from the LibreOffice community, that wanted to work with those assets. That community had to be given a chance. Without all those things, the deal could not have been completed.

<comment><USER16> What community? The only community around OpenOffice.org were the Sun/Oracle devs + the Go-OO devs getting it to work on Linux.

The Go-OO devs forked it into LibreOffice and then Oracle shuttered their own work and reassigned their devs to other projects. Only a tiny handful of devs not part of Go-OO remained, and they had not been instrumental in actually maintaining the codebase as these other two groups had.

There was no community around Apache OpenOffice.

<comment><USER15> There were enough people on the "Initial Committers" list here to persuade the Apache Incubator PMC to adopt the project: [http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal](http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal)

Subsequently, there were enough people to vet and prepare multiple releases over the next couple years after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the document foundation should get the brand, instant of Apache squatting. It's still far better known that libreoffice.

<comment><USER18> It made a sense few years ago, now Libre Office has a brand of its own. I don't think having the ownership would be useful now.

<comment><USER19> OpenOffice still a much stronger brand outside of the Linux community. Basically all the non-technical people I know (including some very non- technical people like my father-in-law) know that OpenOffice is the free alternative for MS Office. I'll bet not one of them have heard of Libre Office.

<comment><USER20> I know some people using LibreOffice, because some technical friend or I installed it for them, and keep calling it OpenOffice even if they see the LibreOffice dialog every time it starts. I think it's a brand who's become the name of a product class, like Xerox in its heydays.

<comment><USER21> This is me. My mind still thinks OpenOffice, then I remember it's really LibreOffice now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is really depressing reading the thread to see that how some members just can't let it go. I'm totally pro-diversity and support different projects and forks with different priorities but AOO's track record and sitting on top of a valuable brand has been a net loss for the open source in office area. I wouldn't mind it at all had they continue to develop their own thing named SolidOffice or whatnot, but I know companies which still use Openoffice on Windows, because that is what they have had always used, nevermind it doesn't even get prompt security updates.

</comment><comment><USER23> OpenOffice's website design, marketing efforts, and documentation are less friendly to non-technical people that those of LibreOffice, the most prominent fork of OpenOffice. Subtle "superficial" details matter a lot to non-technical people -- for example, LibreOffice's web page has a "Get Help" link, instead of a "Support" page.

In addition, LibreOffice has been the default office suite in key GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu for many years.

As a result, the LibreOffice fork has been more widely adopted than OpenOffice, leading to the present situation.

One possible path for the OpenOffice folks would be to copy the Linux kernel and become an "upstream project" that others use to create a range of office- suite distributions like LibreOffice. In other words, _stop packaging and marketing OpenOffice to end-users. Stop competing for end-users with downstream projects._

<comment><USER13> "One possible solution would be for the OpenOffice folks to copy the Linux kernel and become an "upstream project" that others use to create a range of office-suite distributions like LibreOffice."

... which were _exactly_ the thoughts and reasons behind Apache accepting OO in the 1st place. For various reasons this obviously never happened. But it WAS the idea from the start.

<comment><USER24> Interestingly, that could have happened. Not only did LO make the effort of rebasing all their changes on top of a particular AOO release, they also were set up to incorporate all the new work from AOO into their branch. For instance, they quickly incorporated the sidebar code. Even today, one of the LO developers still goes over each AOO change, merging any worthwhile ones.

What actually happened? For some reason, development on AOO stalled. What little work still happens on it, is almost always replicating work LO already did two, three, sometimes five years ago. See it for yourself at [https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/tru...](https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/trunk) : pick a commit, and look for the "Notes" field. For instance, picking "Port main/fileaccess to gbuild" I see the note "prefer: 1f9bc2b2aa8168f9c164044058b117d2a17d83ad"; that git hash is for a LO commit from 2011 ([https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?h=aoo/...](https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?h=aoo/trunk&id=1f9bc2b2aa8168f9c164044058b117d2a17d83ad)).

In the meantime, LO did a _lot_ of cleanup work. Finishing the build system move to gbuild, cleaning warnings across all the code base, removing plenty of obsolete or unused code, running several static checkers, and more. As I noted at [https://lwn.net/Articles/699108/](https://lwn.net/Articles/699108/), the recent AOO CVE was probably found and fixed on LO two years ago, as a result of running a fuzzer together with valgrind. If you wanted to pick an "upstream project" to base an office suite on today, it makes more sense to pick LO instead of AOO.

<comment><USER13> I think you are proving my point... AOO was "plundered" by LO but LO never gave anything back. So any "co-opporation" was extremely one-sided and one- direction. It was hoped that LO, as good FOSS neighbors, would donate back, even though they didn't _have_ to, just as we hope that our corporate neighbors also donate back. We trust in altruism rather than in forcing it. It just so happens in this case that our trust was somewhat misguided.

<comment><USER25> Elsewhere in this thread, grandinj of LO notes that he _tried_ to donate back and there weren't enough people at Apache to do anything with the patches.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414681)

So you did get your wish, but it's not the LO people at fault.

<comment><USER13> I'd like to see some of those patches...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Follow the actual (open and public) discussion:

[https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/6d3bb86f8abc1ae88f3aa3a...](https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/6d3bb86f8abc1ae88f3aa3aa08c65721f71a951c07a967b8d288ee3a@%3Cdev.openoffice.apache.org%3E)

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought everyone interested in a FOSS office suite was using libreoffice.

<comment><USER27> > libreoffice

I hate that name. As a German I have no idea how to pronounce it and it's even harder for my non-techy friends. The name "Open office" has a very nice flow and everybody knows how to pronounce it, but "libre office"?

They should have selected an easier name for that project.

<comment><USER2> It is just a name.

Really problematic was that after Oracle did not wanted to continue the OpenOffice(.org) project, Apache accepted to take it over. That kept the website people knew up and help spread the false image that OpenOffice is an active project with serious people and development effort behind it.

<comment><USER28> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and… "

<comment><USER29> Naming things and off by one errors

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Simplest instant solution: 301 every page about openoffice to a page about libreoffice.

<comment><USER31> aaaaauuuurrrrgh that's sound in principle but placing 301 on a domain like that is really, really bad.

<comment><USER32> 301 redirects are the herpes of the Internet.

You make one mistake, and it's with you for the rest of eternity.

<comment><USER33> Oh shit, thanks, I had just set up a 301 redirect on my personal page this morning when I meant to use a 302, your post made me realize the mistake.

I was sure it was the other way around 301->temporary, 302->permanent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well, my prediction[1] came true even faster than I anticipated. I don't understand why so many people seem so desperate to see AOO fail and go away. Hey look, if you prefer LO, fine. Some of us prefer AOO for our own reasons. There's no reason to take glee in seeing a project struggle.

Anyway, none of this means the project is actually going to be retired. It's just a discussion around something that might happen.

[1]: [http://www.mail- archive.com/dev%40openoffice.apache.org/msg2...](http://www.mail- archive.com/dev%40openoffice.apache.org/msg28192.html)

<comment><USER35> > I don't understand why so many people seem so desperate to see AOO fail and > go away.

In my case, the reason is splash-damage from the inverse-goodwill I have for Oracle and how their stewardship of OO (or lack thereof). To start off Sun handled the OOO-patchset (proto-LibreOffice) poorly, they should have merged it to mainline. Then Oracle came along and shat on the community leading to an outright fork. This I guess is par for the course for Oracle (see Hudson/Jenkins for another Oracle-instigated implosion).

I think the Apache Software Foundation allowed themselves to be 'used' by allowing Oracle to dump a dying AOO into their hands. At the time, it was clear that LibreOffice had won the the war that started in the OOO-patchset days, I don't know what the ASF thought would happen, but I hope they learn something from it.

<comment><USER34> _I think the Apache Software Foundation allowed themselves to be 'used' by allowing Oracle to dump a dying AOO into their hands._

"Used" how? Apache taking on AOO has been a win for Open Source in the general sense regardless of what happens to the project going forward. A large base of code which was previously locked up under Oracle's copyright is now licensed under the ALv2 for perpetuity.

 _At the time, it was clear that LibreOffice had won the the war that started in the OOO-patchset days,_

There's no "war". Maybe the LO people see it that way, but we don't. AOO is for people who want AOO. The people who prefer LO (or something else) are not our enemies. They're just people with different preferences.

 _I don 't know what the ASF thought would happen, but I hope they learn something from it._

What did happen? IBM donated a bunch of code, volunteers have contributed more, and AOO is a better product today than what it was when Oracle handed over the code. That's a Good Thing. None of which is to try and compare AOO to LO, and none of which is to say that AOO doesn't have flaws. But it's a product that has been used by a ton of people for productive ends over the past few years.

<comment><USER35> I will reitatate that I was explaining why _I_ have ill-will towards Oracles handling of the situation. I am not affiliated with LO beyond being a happy user, I have never been a maintainer or a regular contributor (to any project for that matter).

> "Used" how? Apache taking on AOO has been a win for Open Source in the > general sense regardless of what happens to the project going forward.

A better win for Open Source in general (IMO) would have been Oracle handing over the IP to the Document Foundation- that's were the OO developers and community _were_. I have nothing againts the ASF, and nothing but contempt for Oracle's behavior.

From where I stand, Oracle 'used' the ASF donation to spite the DF - you may agree or disagree on that point.

> There's no "war

It was a figure of speech.

> What did happen?

Let's recap: the ASF accepted the donation of a project that had lost developers to a competing fork, and was showing glaring signs of having lost steam. More importantly, _the volunteers /'community' had moved on to LO_[1]. Now the ASF is finally contemplating the idea of putting down the project. I would be sad if the ASF concludes that there is nothing to be learnt from this episode.

1\. A single datapoint: Virtually all Linux distros shipped LO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know if this would impact on NeoOffice, the Mac native port? They seem to draw code from both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

[Side note: the way NeoOffice asks for yearly donations in order to access binary updates is very smart. Synergy also uses this method, and NeoOffice & Synergy are the first GPL projects I've regularly contributed to as a result.]

<comment><USER37> I used NeoOffice a long time ago when OpenOffice required X11 on OS X. Now that LibreOffice works natively on OS X, what does NeoOffice offer now? Is it like Camino was to Firefox?

<comment><USER36> While I've not tried LibreOffice (downloading now!), I think the Camino / Firefox comparison is a good one. My reason for choosing NeoOffice was because I wanted the most Mac-like experience and without a dependency on Java.

It looks like the main difference/advantage right now is integration with the native Mac font rendering & grammar/spellcheck engines, according to the front page of the NeoOffice website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This was all but expected once Oracle sent OOo to the open source retirement home. LibreOffice continues to thrive and has replaced all the OOo installs at my workplace.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also this discussion on the mailing list, where I asked (recently, August 3rd) if it is a viable idea to somehow combine efforts with LibreOffice again:

[http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg277...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg27754.html)

<comment><USER34> There's effectively a one-way merge already. LO can - and do - consume patches contributed to AOO. But, for a variety of reasons, that are mostly historical as far as I can tell, the LO developers have generally been unwilling to contribute code in the other direction.

An outright "merger" of the two projects seems unlikely due to the licensing differences and the associated thinking. Some people prefer permissive licenses like the ALv2, others prefer the GPL/LGPL world. So getting everybody to agree on that is probably a non-starter.

<comment><USER39> That's not true. Seversl of us are quite happy to contribute our LO patches to OO. But they just don't have any manpower to merge them.

<comment><USER34> Sure, I didn't say _all_ LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way.

OTOH, maybe things have changed since I formed that impression. At any rate, your willingness to do so is appreciated. As far-fetched as it sounds, I still hold out hope that one day the two projects can have an amicable co-existence and collaborate to a greater extent (than today).

<comment><USER13> _Sure, I didn 't say all LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way_

I will share a story.

Awhile ago I was employed by Red Hat and, as we know, Red Hat has a number of developers working on LO. I was talking w/ our CTO at the time and suggested that it would be a Good Thing if Red Hat allowed all our code donated to LO be triple-licensed (MPL/GPL/ALv2) so that AOO could benefit from these contributions. He thought it was a great idea since it showed that Red Hat was all about open source and true universal sharing.

But when we asked the developers they refused to do so. The explanations were either (1) We refuse to contribute to permissive projects or (2) We have been told by TDF that they will not accept any of our contributions so licensed.

So the "resistance" in code flowing to AOO is, in fact, reality. My hope is that we can change that for the benefit of the entire OO eco-system.

The "enemy", lest we forget, is MSO, not any of the OO implementations.

<comment><USER40> I got intrigued by your claims, so I dug up that old e-mail exchange. And I failed to find anything that would substatiate (2). So you misremember at best; at worst you're outright lying to make TDF the bad guys.

Btw, the claim that Red Hat's CTO (or anyone else at RH) "thought it was a great idea" seems to be a bit exaggerated as well. The words you yourself used at that time were "... saw the logic of it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Ars Technica: "OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down"

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/09/openof...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/09/openoffice-after-years-of-neglect-could-shut-down/)

</comment><comment><USER41> How did the whole Oracle buys Sun thing work out for the OSS projets in general?

Did LibreOffice and MariaDB get all the core devs?

<comment><USER42> Oracle _killed_ OpenSolaris. They literally moved Solaris back to being closed-source. With no justification, even, beyond Oracle not liking open- source. Undoing the massive amount of work the Solaris team made in order to open-source it in the first place. There's no more source code releases for Solaris now.

Unsurprisingly, almost all the core Solaris team walked.

This talk is informative: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why does Open/LibreOffice matter anymore?

This is a sincere question. I'm well aware of why OO was a big deal circa 2000 when I was using it (if I'm getting the dates right). I cannot figure out why it matters anymore, or why it will matter in 10 years.

Back when every year was going to be the year of "Linux on the desktop" the linchpin was MS Office. That's because we didn't have the million different SaaS products we have today, products tailor made for jobs only Office would be considered for.

Basically MS Office was a hammer and everything was a nail. This is not the world today.

Today there are a number of viable alternatives and there continues to be innovation around the jobs MS Office was traditionally used for.

Someone is going to bring up: vendor lock in, Freedom, etc... I don't get those arguments any more.

<comment><USER44> The simplest argument is that if your job requires you to share documents with other people who are used to using Office document formats as their standard exchange medium, then unless you convince those people to move away from that format -- which may require either moving everyone _else_ they exchange documents away from that format, or treating you as a special snowflake -- you're stuck.

If you're in a tech space full of plain text document formats, dealing with folks who love Markdown and use programmer-centric diff tools, all of this can certainly be irrelevant. (I'm in that space in my day job and with personal projects that don't involve other people.) But for a lot of, well, _office jobs,_ that's a non-starter. And Google Docs, while it has some great things to recommend it, doesn't have the feature set Office does. (There's a long- standing observation that while most users only use 20% of Microsoft Word's features, for any two given users that 20% may not be identical.)

I work with fiction editors, and I _need_ to be able round-trip manuscripts with embedded comments and revision tracking. Google Docs doesn't cut it for me. Actually, none of the OO-based suites (LO, AOO or NeoOffice) were able to round-trip transparently with Microsoft Word in my admittedly limited testing back in 2014, although that may no longer be the case. (They all have the required functionality, but bits and bobs of formatting and metadata would go away when the document moved from LO to Word back to LO.)

tl;dr: LibreOffice will matter as long as Microsoft Office matters, and whether we like it or not, in an awful lot of the business world, Microsoft Office still matters a whole lot.

<comment><USER45> i think a fairly good benchmark is that those entities which _require_ ms-word will be the ones that tend to disappear over the course of the next 5-10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I honestly didn't know that AOO was still updated, as I've really not seen _anyone_ use it in the last three years.

Upon re-trying it out right now, it actually seems perfectly fine...I kind of wonder why no one uses it.

</comment><comment><USER47> I literally downloaded this for the first time in years the yesterday. This is really sad news.

</comment><comment><USER48> Here's an idea. If OpenOffice has no contributors. How about all the libreoffice folks start committing to both code bases or mirror them, whatever? Maybe the only thing that differs between the code bases is some splash screen and text resource bundles, ultimately.

Why not bury the hatchet, devs?

<comment><USER49> What's the point of that wasted effort? What you're asking is "if X has no contributors, why don't Y people become contributors and start contributing?"

Currently there _are_ differences between code bases. If the OpenOffice team wants to abandon OO codebase and distribute a version of LibreOffice with some splash screen and text resource changes, then they're free to do so, it's open source.

<comment><USER48> I was thinking more like a takeover of the Open Office codebase since its organization has collapsed. Take over the administration, steering committee, etc.

I can see that the codebases have diverged, but will a lot be lost if Open Office's codebase was clobbered with the LibreOffice sources?

<comment><USER50> Apache wouldn't permit that due to their distaste for LibreOffice's licensing (read: copyleft).

<comment><USER15> LibreOffice doesn't like Apache's licensing, but AOO is happy to share the code with them and they are happy to consume it.

Both sides have strong beliefs, but the licensing situation benefits the copyleft faction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> i think what is growing is markdown types and such. i like.

</comment><comment><USER52> About damn time.

</comment><comment><USER53> Have OpenOffice actually done anything.

<comment><USER54> This image would suggest it got some code from StarOffice and alter some releases: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/St...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg/1949px- StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg.png)

<comment><USER55> Well, here it looks like Apache OpenOffice made a couple of releases.

<comment><USER53> Barely.

<comment><USER15> There was substantial development energy for a while. Notably, there was a large donation from IBM of code that had been in Symfony.

<comment><USER53> And yet their build system is still the same as it pretty much has always been. There is no easy way to sustain any sort of development energy with a developer unfriendly system like that one.

LibreOffice realised this early on and did the hard yards to fix fundamental issues like the crappy build system, and to put into place developer friendly infrastructure like gerrit. The OpenOffice team didn't see this as important or even necessary, and now they are withering on the vine, but complaining about it quite a lot.

That Symphony code can only take you so far. That was integrated several years ago. What have they done since then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Thanks Oracle!

</comment><comment><USER57> LibreOffice should go back to its Java roots. It was a dumb decision to move away from an excellent language and platform.

<comment><USER58> This doesn't make much sense, since Staroffice predates Java by quite a number of years.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you memorize syntax and common API for a new language? - <AUTHOR> I'm sure a lot of people here will recommend doing a lot of side projects, but is there a more boring yet effective way? Similar to flash cards instead of writing for vocabulary. The biggest contextual block from coding with an unfamiliar language is the syntax and basic API.<p>If I could draw an analogy, it would be trying to learn a language in a foreign country without any fundamental understanding. I find it much easier to absorb new materials when I have a basic set of common phrases memorized beforehand. <comment><USER2> For the past seven years, whenever I learn something new, I put it into my set of Anki ([https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)) cards. Details tied to a job are tied to that particular job; when I leave, I delete those cards. Almost everything else stays.

Anki may have been designed for learning languages, but it's a great system for learning anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know sexp; I don't need to learn new syntax. I only need to learn new API.</comment>


How Taking a 20-Minute Walk Every Day Transformed My Approach to Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3035004/the-future-of-work/how-taking-a-20-minute-walk-every-day-transformed-my-approach-to-work

<comment><USER2> Some schools here advocate this: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morning- exercise-to-spark-kids...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morning-exercise-to- spark-kids-learning-1.993446)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! With regards to morning exercises, my father who grew up in Korea said that all the grade school kids did morning exercises every single day. It was an organized event that required the entire school's participation. I think even some companies in Korea partake in similar organized activities for the whole company.

I also hear this practice is common in other East Asian countries like China. Here's a video of Korean elementary school kids participating in morning exercises:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi2TqeCQ2Do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi2TqeCQ2Do)</comment></comment>


How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week - <AUTHOR> http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/

<comment><USER2> Any ideas on referral prizes for a free, social, app? The nice thing about selling razors is that you can give them away and people want them.. How would Snapchat have done something like this?</comment>