IME most workplaces have showers. It pays to ask; they can be well-hidden. Failing that, ride at an easy pace in the morning, wear breathable clothes etc. Cycling needn't be any harder than walking (unless you have huge hills or something).
Some things I just find easier with pen and paper. A pilot V-Pen (disposable fountain pen) and standard printer paper does me just fine. If I want to keep something for posterity, my mobile phone camera has plenty of resolution. If it's something ephemeral like editing I don't bother. I used to carry a notebook, but much prefer scrap paper + nice, scrap-paper-friendly, pen + camera.
Quite right. I see two issues with regexes: funky syntax and some important and non-obvious limitations. If you want to use them, these two things add up to a considerable barrier to entry. There are many examples of trivial pattern-matching languages (DOS wildcards, UNIX wildcards and SQL text matching to name but three) that address both of these issues by being easy to grasp and surprisingly useful.
I haven't actually tried this, but it seems easy to grasp and I've spent enough time busting up delimited strings that "surprisingly useful" is plausible too.
My experience of the bike-hire scheme in Brisbane (Australia) is that helmet laws are a problem, but not the problem. The legal requirement to wear a helmet is a bit tiresome, and the communal helmets they supply to get around it are a figleaf at best, but helmet law or no, riding a bicycle in Brisbane is harder than it has to be.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is road design and driver attitudes. Going any significant distance involves either riding (legally) on footpaths, or riding in traffic. There's a nice bicycle path along the river, plus some pictures of bikes in doorzones. That's about it for central Brisbane. It's not that hilly but it's definitely not flat. I don't mind riding in traffic, but I say that as a bike racer (albeit an old, fat bike racer) who used to be a courier. Driver attitudes, well, 95% of them are fine, maybe more. There's a small minority who are deranged and vicious and it's socially acceptable to behave that way in a car. It's all do-able, but it needs some unintuitive techniques (ride in the middle of the road in some situations, for example) and, ideally, a bit of fitness. I don't know as I'd recommend it to neophytes.
That helmet laws are the problem is an appealing conclusion, because it's a quick fix: repeal the helmet law. Changing infrastructure OTOH is hard and changing attitudes in harder still. I'd like it to be as simple as repealing a law, especially one where the benefits are so unclear. I just don't think it is.
In terms of the popularity of the bike hire scheme, I can only say that there are a couple of dozen hire bikes out the front of my workplace at the start of the day and it's down to a couple by day's end. I'm not aware of the official figures, but my highly subjective impression is that they're getting used more than when it started. A less convoluted signup process probably has something to do with it, plus the fact that it's a pleasant time of year to cycle.
Also the case in Australia and the UK. Not that the winner gets all their costs back (60% is a figure I've seen bandied around) but it still creates a significant disincentive. Probably a good thing in the case of patent trolls, but not necessarily in other situations.
"In an interview with Newsgeek, Gafni said that the production cost for his recycled bicycles is around $9-12 each, and he estimates it could be sold to a consumer for $60 to 90, depending on what parts they choose to add."
Assuming they're talking US dollars, that's roughly the price of a bike from the supermarket. Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think a cardboard bike is cool. I'd be particularly interested to hear about what they've done about things like bearings and attaching tyres.
The green side of it is interesting, as is the idea of an explicitly disposable bike. If it's easier to manufacture locally, or on a small scale or whatever, that'd be something. But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.
Yes, I'm a bit confused about how much you get for the $9 to $12 if the retail cost would be $60 to $90. Is that just an $81 markup, or does $9 only get you a frame without pedals and a chain?
On the other hand, Boston's Hubway cycle hire scheme [1] costs $12 for three days of membership. A bike for $12 could open up interesting avenues for similar bike uses as you wouldn't have to worry about getting the user to return it.
The $9 figure is the cost to make the bike, but doesn't cover the cost of moving it around, storing it or selling it. Given it's size and awkwardness to handle, it would be hard to charge much less for it. You have to factor in the opportunity cost that when you sell such a bike you are giving up almost 100 Square Feet of retail space that you could be using to sell products that are smaller and more valuable.
Don't confuse data used to persuade investors with end-user features and benefits. The article has quotes where Gafni talks about initial feedback from investors; I think it's reasonable to assume that the $9/$60 figures are efforts to establish a notion of expected margin, not a marketing pitch.
The bicycle doesn't need to be cheaper than the traditional alternative. In fact, it'd probably sell better if it were slightly more expensive than the alternative, while emphasizing its apparently significant advantages elsewhere: disposability, fashion novelty, and "green"ness, the latter always being valuable social signal, perhaps especially among people I know that are enthusiastic about bicycles.
I'm completely with you, but take it a bit further. Steel bike frames are basically perfect until they're useless. That is, if you don't let them rust, then they are literally as good as new until you fall over hard enough to crack or buckle them. Properly maintained, a quality steel frame could easily last 50 years.
A real eco solution would be to make cheap and simple 'supermarket bikes'
At the moment the $75 bikes in Walmart are terrible - but mostly because they try and copy $750 bikes with 24gears and full suspension.
If you wanted a green solution make very simple, single gear, hub brakes, steel frame bikes in the same factory for $50 and make millions of them.
There is a city bike rental scheme here, but like all the other rental/free bike schemes around the world - it uses some 'novel' bike design which somehow end up costing $1000 each! And so either require credit cards and security or they only distribute 10 of them around the city.
I didn't check it out much, but at the local sporting goods store in Seattle (Big-5) I saw a single speed with 700c rims, steel frame for about $110 I think maybe more maybe less.
If the crappy bike manufacturers of the world aren't making simple steel utilitarian bikes, they should be. I'd buy one and I already have 2 bikes.
Steel frame, steel handlebars (for safety), sealed bottom bracket, 5 speed rear derailleur and friction disc brakes. 25-30 lbs is fine. Doesn't need any aluminum except for the rims and the chainring.
I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!
Here even the outdoor gear coop charges >$900 for a single speed and says it's ideal for "urban life' - which tells you everything about the market for them.
> I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!
sitkack and I live in Seattle, where our downtown area has hills up to 19% incline, and other areas near downtown (considered bike-friendly areas) have up to 26%.
When speaking of tree-derived products, is recyclability a green feature?
Trees fix CO2, so having an excuse to grow more trees, sucking CO2 from the atmosphere, and depositing it in the form of bikes, may be a benefit.
It likely comes down to the amount of energy used in the manufacture. I don't actually know, but intuitively I'd guess that steel manufacture (or aluminum on lighter bikes) uses a lot more energy to manufacture.
For me the benefit of a cheap bike is that it then becomes disposable, meaning that no one wants to steal it and even if they did it would be no skin off your back.
Amsterdam has this problem solved in an interesting way. I am told there is a ring of drug addicts that steal and resell bikes for a living. You buy a bike from them for 8-10 euro, ride it around for a couple months until it gets stolen, then buy another stolen bike to replace it and repeat the cycle.
It's interesting, I suppose, to know that his production cost is $9-12, but that's really pointless, isn't it? The important figure to know is what it's going to cost me to get my hands on one. That's the $60-90 figure. Which makes bizarre the later paragraph about it being pointless to lock up a cheap bike like this, because the lock is going to cost more than the bicycle it purports to secure.
Excuse me? I'm sure bike locks exist that cost a Century or more, but I've never bought one. The locks I buy cost $10-20, which is still well below the purchase price of one of these cycles. And even if I could somehow buy one for the $12 production cost, I'd still lock it up. Because in addition to the annoyance of having lost my $12 possession, now I also have the inconvenience of having to call someone for a ride, or pay for cab fare.
Maybe you don't live in a city with a big bike theft problem? Here in DC, where I live, there are kids who wander around with bolt cutters lifting bikes from bike racks, and at least in my experience, they're just as likely to go for a cheap bike as an expensive one, so you pretty much have to have a bolt-cutter-proof lock, regardless of your bike, if you don't want to get it stolen, which means a tempered steel U lock. I've never seen one of those for $10. It's especially frustrating because while the old rule of thumb was that you should spend 10% of the value of the bike on a lock, there's a floor of about $30, at least here, because of how easy it is to defeat cheap locks, which means you end up way over-spending on locks if you ride a cheap bike.
The goal here, as I understand it, is to make the bikes so cheap that there's no resale market for either the bikes or the parts, which might mean a "keeps honest men honest" $10 lock would be good enough.
I live and bike in NYC and often carry two locks, one which cost me $80-90 and another that cost me $40-50. My commuter bike is more expensive than my locks, but not by that much.
Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.
But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.
I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.
I'd argue that the cheap bike problem is only currently solved in that cheap, good quality, second-hand bikes are available in most markets.
If this bike barely lasts as long, it'll at least have sold the problem of having all these useless lumps of metal lying around once your cheap bike has died.
> I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.
Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem
It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.
It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.
Good point, I think you and I probably agree here, but I was presuming this bike would be a lot easier to recycle. The fact that there's no direct mention of this in the article is a bit suspicious, so you may well be right and there's no real advantage here.
Not necessarily. The costly part of recycling is separating materials.
If this has cardboard with a waterproof coating or plastic skin (as it appears) or is glued to other components like the rubber tires then it could be very expensive to process. And at the end you are left with almost worthless cardboard.
An aluminium or steel bike is recycled in exactly the same way as a car - and we have got very good at that process - and at the end you have valuable scrap aluminium.
This bike is most likely (some large percentage) glue. It is basically a fiberglass and epoxy design only using cardboard. Recycling THIS thing is going to be a real bitch. I think it should be built, but it isn't an _answer_ to anything other than human curiosity.
Bear in mind that this is a decision of a delegate of the Commissioner of Patents. This decision won't bind anyone except, presumably, the Commissioner of Patents. Its value as a legal precedent anywhere else in the world is roughly zero.
IANAL, but Australia and the US have a free trade agreement that specifically includes patent rights and one of the strongest arguments against its ratification here was that Australian developers would be subject to frivolous patent troll lawsuits just as they are there.
If that is the case (a big if), I suppose there could be some legal implication in the US, but you'd have to ask a patent lawyer with intimate knowledge of the FT agreement to be sure.
In the IP sphere, free trade agreements are more often focused on the types of laws countries must put in place to protect (or limit, depending on your point of view :)) IP within their own country. So, for example, the US-Australian FTA requires that both countries provides for copyright to exist for at least the author's life + 70 years, or that the only grounds for the revocation of a patent are those that would mean the initial filing was invalid.
The USFTA doesn't automatically mean that Australian IP decisions gain legal significance in the US, or vice versa. For this decision to actually have any impact on Amazon's patent in the US, someone would have to litigate it. The Australian decision could certainly be used as evidence in that litigation (as the questions of novelty would be similar), but as noted about would not have any binding authority.
Thanks for the clarification. A bit off-topic but are you sure about the author's life + 70 years copyright agreement? I remember during the controversy where copies of Orwell's "1984" was remotely wiped off a number of Kindle's, there was some discussion about how Orwell's works were now out of copyright in Australia (and elsewhere) but are not in the US. (eg. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/)
>who steals chains??? - apparently the thief had a chain tool handy to break the chain).
Reusable joining link? No tools required. As to the point of doing it, well, I had the QR skewers stolen off my bike once. Stealing a chain makes at least as much sense.
I wish people would stop calling this sort of thing "piracy". Proper piracy -robbery, abduction and so forth on the high seas - is a continuing problem. This is hardly in the same league. May I suggest using "theft" instead, which at least is more or less accurate.
general definition of theft (not legal): the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession.
When I go to Youtube and listen to an extremely good song by Twilightning or Edguy, what am I taking from the band? Due to a few different reasons (money, I don't have to) I have never run across anything I will pay money to listen to or watch, books being a small exception since I like well made hardcovers a la Practical Common Lisp. I will, however, refer others to the good movies or music I stumble upon.
Unlike many proponents of torrents, I heavily disagree that all music should be free; that simply is not sustainable in my opinion. Not enough people will then go out of their way to pay for it and I have no idea how well bands do when it comes to concerts/merchandise. I do think that free music benefits bands but that overall benefit increases exponentially with how hard it is to obtain it, because those of us who would never have listened to a band's music before the internet (finding obscure bands via radio is nigh impossible) will often refer them to friends, while the rest who are willing to pay take the easier route - this is important - and buy music.
Currently, torrents, youtube (amusingly, even the official youtube versions are often worse to listen to due to censorship - VEVO is a good example) and other avenues are the better choice for anyone with loose morals, after taking into account risk and ease of access.
tl;dr those of you who will pay for music should subsidize the rest of us.
