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Every time one of these "pedestrian hit/almost hit" stories is posted a bunch of people come out of the woodwork claiming that it's their constitutional right to put on black jeans, a black t-shirt, and a black hoodie then run across dark streets and if they get hit it the driver's fault, physics be damned, we all just need to creep along in our cars at walking speed any time it's dark or there are trees or parked cars along the side of the road.

I suspect this is all just part of the larger War on Cars wherein a bunch of leftwing environazis decided it's absolutely intolerable that transportation is responsible for a whopping 31% of carbon emissions (note that figure is ALL transportation, including cars, semitrucks, trains, boats, and planes--I'd be surprised if cars were even half of that 31%), so we have to make life as miserable as possible for anyone who drives a car. I've seriously asked a bunch of my liberal friends what sort of sense does it make to harass people just trying to get to their jobs when, even if you completely eliminated cars, you'd still have, at best, 70% of present carbon emissions being spewed out by other sources, only to be met with blank stares. The current crop of environmentalist fedora-tippers do not care about facts or logic--they only care about feels, and their feels tell them that cars are the most horrible thing for the environment ever. Clearly the best way to combat climate change is to make our transportation system even more inefficient with road diets, bus-only lanes, and expensive toll roads. After all, cars sitting idling in traffic or creeping along at 5 mph is great for the environment, right guys?

For the record, I actually care about the environment and think we shouldn't fuck it up for future generations. But the current left wing in this country are a bunch of useful idiots that will cheer on government subsidies for absolutely moronic ideas because, to them, the environment is just a bit of bait to be used to get closer to their real goal--more government control. Try suggesting to one these people that market-based solutions can actually work (like, hey, you know one of the reasons electronics, cars, and residential/commercial HVAC have gotten incredibly more efficient in recent decades is because it benefits consumers by saving them money), and be prepared to be met with open hostility for having the gaul to suggest that corporations are anything but cartoon-caricature villains twirling their mustaches as smoke pours out of their factories.

I'll continue driving my car where I need to go, thanks very much. Your attempts to give me an "incentive" (hey, maybe if you use economic-related words people will actually think you know something about economics) to take the bus or ride a bike will fail because, to put it frankly, even sitting in my car crawling along at 5 mph is preferable to the government-run joke of a public transportation system:
- In my car, I don't have to worry about crackheads asking me for cigarettes or money and flipping their shit when I tell them "no". When did it become fucking acceptable for people to feel they're entitled to my hard-earned property?
- In a similar vein, my car doesn't smell like piss and shit.
- Literally every parking spot in every park&ride near me will be full before 7 am, and I'm not leaving three hours before I actually have to be somewhere.
- I recently took the bus into downtown to go to the Pride festival, on a Sunday (you can probably guess which city I'm in), you would think that the bus system might add some extra routes given that they know there's this huge festival that a lot of people are going to, right? Nope! Standing room only, ass-to-crotch on the way there and back. I feel bad for the peopl

Holy crap, listen to this pretentious caricature-of-a-human-being.

That's funny, I thought your original post was an example of Poe's Law.
You gamerhaters are at the point of self-caricature.

> That's like saying there's no real difference between an alcoholic and a person who occasionally goes out drinking on a Friday night.

This. There is a not so fine line between expecting a punch in the face in the spur of the moment, and going in heavily armed with automatic weapons, committing mass murder. So maybe a letter to the editor, with expletives, or running a counter-caricature would have been more balanced responses.

All in all, Charlie Hebdo is a stronger part of the immune system of the Western civilization than Francis Pope.

I watched the trailer. It looks like it's designed for 13 year old boys who wouldn't know a believable premise or nuance if it struck them in the head. It seems to be edited by the same Hollywood effects people that do action movies. I sense that this cacophony of fast moving images is supposed to quickly overload your brain and make you feel like what you're watching is more exciting than it is, but reality is it's just a crutch to fall back on when there's little to scrutinize beyond the special effects.

Beyond that, it appears to be the same old regurgitated storyline (stolen from Rambo and used on practically every FPS since 1992): It's you versus an army of cliched enemies (i.e. aliens, robots, robots created by aliens, nazis or some other 'evil' country that the US fought in the 20th century). The voice acting is full of nondescript caricature-like accents. The up-close textures look like they're from some generic game circa 2005, but other effects/shadows mask it fairly well.

Maybe there are some unique elements to the gameplay, but I'm having trouble getting excited about it. Hasn't this run-and-gun FPS genre been played out enough already? I mean, even Carmack went to go do something more useful with his time...

"No reason at all" is rather hyperbolic, unless one's a complete stump when it comes to geopolitics. Iraq was hardly some innocent bystander 'randomly mauled' as you imply: Here you have a revanchist state as a declared enemy of the US, wildly unpredictable, heavily armed, loaded with oil-money (barring sanctions), but diplomatically completely isolated. Sanctions were being violated, and even our allies (such as France and Germany) were crying about raising the sanctions regime.
Personally, I thought it was a PERFECT moment for us to topple him, as well as a much-needed reminder of American martial power post-Mogadishu. I'll completely agree that the occupation and follow-on program for Iraq was *completely* botched, no question. But the invasion itself? Diplomatically useful and well-timed. (One might further point out that he was our client in the 1980s, so 'cleaning up that mess' was really our problem as well.)

Further, your caricature-understanding of the Tea Party is amusing, but mostly wrong. One suspects your opinion was largely formed from editorial cartoons or perhaps Sarah Palin "bits" on Saturday Night Live? The T.E.A. acronym is of post-facto coinage, as the party's foundation was (only) a direct reference to the Boston Tea Party, protesting illegal and excessive taxation.

for posting a link to the House Republican leadership's one page caricature-ization of the bill?

C'mon mods...

but then I'm not an American, only a bemused spectator.

Maybe you should be informed instead of bemused. Let's work on that a little. The very name, "Tea Party" harkens back to an incident in 1773 where protestors dumped a bunch of East India tea which had been taxed by the British government into the Boston harbor. And that describes a fundamental property of the modern Tea Party. It is not a bunch of social conservatives protesting evolution or whatever. It is first and foremost a tax protest.

There are three basic and closely related beliefs shared by most people who consider themselves Tea Partiers. First, that the US government spends too much and on things which are not good priorities for a country with serious budget troubles. Second, that it taxes too much. Third, that the federal government has too much power.

Past that, it's an amorphous blob of beliefs though generally of some variation of conservative bent.

There are obvious villains to dislike. Obama may be good to his people (and there's about 30-35% of the US voting population who really likes him), but he is strongly disliked by Tea Partiers for several reasons. A key one is simply that he has shown for several years a strong disinterest in fiscal conservatism. He spent almost a year passing health care reform and only got on the budget reform bus after his party lost badly in the midterm elections in November 2010.

He's also an arrogant ass and probably likes playing the part. The whole birtherism thing came about because he refused for years to release birth certificate records. He still has yet to release his academic records. This is stuff I use to figure out what a presidential candidate is and does. It's all so damn retarded for a grown up to do.

We have the emergency, three years of 10% of GDP deficits. That's ridiculous overspending. Sure, Bush set Obama up the bomb in the 2008-2009 fiscal year (though it's worth noting that Obama could have stopped about $400 billion of the TARP bailout from being deployed and cut that year's deficit significantly), but the other two years are pure Obama. We have large spending bouts that purport to be Keynesian stimulus but fail the basic tests of Keynesian spending, they are neither near future spending nor infrastructure building (that is, they aren't investments). They do pass the kronyism test with labor unions and some other democrat constituents doing well.

The "it's worse than we feared" excuse doesn't seem to get a lot of traction when talking about these things.

We have quantitative easing, a massive secretive purchase of several trillion dollars of bonds and debt with no accountability and no assurance that these bonds are reliable (sure, some are US treasuries which should be highly reliable, but some could be junk quality stuff dumped by the banks for all we know, there's been times when the Fed has been the buyer of bonds).

And finally, we have a general and substantial hostility throughout the Obama administration towards employing people in the US with business owners both taking the blame for not creating jobs while simultaneously faced with higher costs and various landmines (such as paying extended health insurance benefits for laid off employees).

So yea, we have a movement with focus, a stirring emergency in the large deficits, and a great villain verging on cartoonish self-caricature. Hence, a movement was formed within two years of Obama getting elected. Does it consist of humans with all their typical foibles. Yep, sure does. Will it survive the coming election cycle and make good on some of those goals? I hope so, but these movements have a bad track record.

It's interesting to note how many attacks on the Tea Party are without substance. It's not just another conservative movement or a bunch of crazies. It's not astroturf from the Koch brothers or some chameleon movement that is what you want it to be. It's not a bunch of racists (I bet Obama p

I know you're being facetious, but what exactly is the basis for the premise that people who disagree with the way Apple does something are insulted and ridiculed?

Popularity-fueled-caricature.

To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.

Three things:

First and foremost, if you can't find porn that matches your idea of a "realistic body portrayal", then you're simply not looking. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that every taste within the bounds of legality - is catered for in spades.

Secondly, porn is supposed to be a fantasy setting. As such, you'd generally expect it to have only a tenuous connection with reality, just like no-one creates a car racing game where you trundle around town in a minivan picking up your kids from school and dropping them off at soccer.

Finally, the problems with body image in the world don't come from porn - which despite growing accessibility, it still a niche form of content - it comes from mainstream media. There are few magazines more damaging to women's body image expectations than magazines targeted directly at them. Women in Playboy or even things like Ralph look positively normal compared to the average model posing in Cosmo or the lingerie section of a Macy's catalog.

Actually, one might argue that there is a real social problem in female body image (and judging from the proliferation of drugs intended to increase penis size, male as well) in western society.

It could further be argued that much of this has to do with both the "soft porn" of the fashion industry, and the exaggerated bodies of "hard core" porn as well.

To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.

I've noticed that there is a range of extremely hot girls, none chubby, from the skinny-but-not-annorexic petites I love to the shapely-but-extremely-curvy sweeties that are eating just a bit more pie.

The funny thing is there's a LOT of girls like this.

It's not a matter of working their ass off doing 5 hours of aerobics a day. Any girl that plays a sport is going to stay in shape (lacross, soccer). Sure they might not be the "slim/athletic" girls that go in "super hot model" jobs, but they're not going to be "a little chubby" either... there's a size in between where they're slim, shapely, and extremely curvy. Most girls that aren't shoving down unhealthy amounts of food manage to have a soft body with just enough padding that they're girl shaped, not egg shaped (or columnar for that matter).

Healthy bodies are different: humans are sexually dimorphic, and there is a point where you stop looking like a man/woman and start looking like a fat asshole. That is where you're going downhill. There's no shortage of happy, healthy girls though. It's a little ridiculous when they're 130 pounds and complaining they need to lose 10 pounds ... they're just going to lose hips, or boobs, or soft curves along the legs... no cellulite, no ugly unsightly ripples or bulges, just shape. 180... 200 pound girls that are 5'2 and carrying 50% body fat are well out of shape though.

Actually, one might argue that there is a real social problem in female body image (and judging from the proliferation of drugs intended to increase penis size, male as well) in western society.

It could further be argued that much of this has to do with both the "soft porn" of the fashion industry, and the exaggerated bodies of "hard core" porn as well.

To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.

Your own response really casts doubt on your claims.

You claim that even when you read things you disagree with, you generally find "a nugget or two of useful information I didn't know about previously and from which I can benefit either directly or through researching further", and proceed to go into a long comical diatribe based on the implicit assumption this one brief "interaction" of ours entirely sums up our entire beings. Oh, yes, I'm sure you know everything about my information processing habits based on one Slashdot comment, and I'm sure that your extrapolation of that to the results of a century spent in a library is an entirely accurate non-caricature.

Yet you fail to even mention the Myung meta-analysis which I described, which (similar to the GQ article) divided up studies, announced that a certain sub-group of those studies presented an alarming result, and failed to show adequate consideration to the possibility that sub-grouping in the fashion they did introduced a co-founder. I'm sorry, should I have buried that nugget in piles of conspiracy-mongering clap-trap, so that you would be able to recognize it as information?

You also fail to respond in any meaningful fashion to my exposure of the original article's misconception of the Frey effect, instead pulling what I like to call "the haystack gambit." "Oh, so you argue that A, do you? Well, you're wrong! You're so totally wrong! I am not even obligated to give specific reasons why anyone should believe that you're wrong; I will just tell you that the proof that you are absolutely wrong is contained in Wikipedia article X/somewhere in the complete writings of Y/on the side of a needle located in haystack Z! Now you cannot rebut me without poring through everything I chose to throw at you in order to try and figure out what the heck my argument actually is."

If you think that every moldering garbage heap of thought has in it, somewhere, some tiny little scrap which, even if it is not a scrap of truth, at least provides the material for a moment's consideration, you may be technically correct (or perhaps you just haven't spent enough time on the Internet.)

But as one grows older and learns to value one's time, one realizes that not every garbage heap contains a reward worth the effort of digging it out.

Not true. If you lose the ability to procreate before(?) having done so and live you are eligible

Thank you for clarifying and correcting me :)

Though I think my original parent is much more likely to die than self-sterilize; at least the imaginary self-caricature personae is...

"I've never heard of this before. Who came up with that bullshit interpretation?"

A few people did at the time. A few are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks#Allegations_of_racial_caricature

This issue was revisited with the latest Transformer film; a couple of the robots were seen to be racist caricatures and allusions were made to the Jar Jar controversy. Googling "jar-jar racist" will give you more background if you're interested. You obviously strongly disgree -- as do many people -- but this does not discount the fact that there was a raging controversy at the time.

"What's next? Because Yoda doesn't speak with correct grammar he's somehow racist too?"

I'll take this question at face value. There was no similar discussion of Yoda's accent that I recall. This is because Jar-Jar's accent was seen by many to be patterned after racist caricatures; Yoda's had no such similarities.

Someone has a great signature that says something like: There is no dislike mod, and no, troll, flamebait, overrated are not substitutes.

Please mod parent and myself up as I was not trolling.

"I've never heard of this before. Who came up with that bullshit interpretation?"

A few people did at the time. A few are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks#Allegations_of_racial_caricature

This issue was revisited with the latest Transformer film; a couple of the robots were seen to be racist caricatures and allusions were made to the Jar Jar controversy. Googling "jar-jar racist" will give you more background if you're interested. You obviously strongly disgree -- as do many people -- but this does not discount the fact that there was a raging controversy at the time.

"What's next? Because Yoda doesn't speak with correct grammar he's somehow racist too?"

I'll take this question at face value. There was no similar discussion of Yoda's accent that I recall. This is because Jar-Jar's accent was seen by many to be patterned after racist caricatures; Yoda's had no such similarities.

>Presumably, they would need to fill the Tech Lead role once they promoted him, so his old job would need to be filled.
Presume away, but you're incorrect. What management is telling you is that you are going to now work 7 days a week 365 days a year so you can perform all your current duties and add pointless meetings and shufling of papers to the task list.

>Only a cartoonishly f'ed up company would bring in two outside hires just to spite a long-time employee who does not want to be a manager.
Oh naivete, you are hilarious yet frightening. Almost all American companies in the current age are the evil self-caricature you describe.

They want you to perform 2 jobs for hte price of one and join the Nervous Nellie I'm-A-Martyr ranks of mangement so they can use you as judas goat/corporate slave/target of blame. It's a time honored tradition in corporate America.
That doesn't mean you should refuse it. That does mean you should realize the company is trying to maximize their profit on their investment in you. And you should do the same. After all, your engagement with the company is on a business basis. They are trying to squeeze you for every cent, you need to start playing the game to work as little as possible and make maximum use of your benefits.

"The IT Crowd" is cute & amusing but it's nowhere near hilarious as other UK comedies like "Coupling" or "The Green Room" I find "The IT Crowd" characters to be a bit over-caricatured for my taste and most of the humor is silly/low brow. On the other hand, they do have some good IT jokes now & again and it's probably the only show you'll see those on. IMHO, the best part of the show are all the IT references scattered around the set. They've definitely got true geeks on the staff.

It's also not at all binary compatible with the desktop Mac, so even if you _could_ install software, there is none. Because all the most-heralded user level apps for the Mac are closed source.

But people who don't understand and/or have never used the Tablet PC have their crude caricature-level rendition of it to shield them from reality.

That's just from my own personal knowledge. I'd bet you're wrong about most of the others too.