Oh God. I had to read Ecotopia for a college course, and that was a real grind. Ecotopia is... a fucking horrible book. It presents a society that -can't- exist for many reasons, and handwaves away all the social and political issues that result in the collapse of utopian societies.
First, their was the disparaging attitude towards being hard-working, efficient, and getting things done. I think the scene where the Ecotopians were making fun of the outsider protagonist for drying the dishes quickly was one of the most egregious, and he said if he didn't work quickly, he wouldn't get anything done. The response was "sometimes a little goes a long way, John." WTF. Absolutely insipid. And the notion that Ecotopia would repel an invasion from the US by arming everyone in the Sierra with rocket launchers (which they no longer have the technology to make) was lol-worthy. That's the only way / most convenient way into the Pacific Northwest, didn't you know?
Not to mention the book was curiously racist, with blacks being segregated into certain areas (self-segregated, naturally) and gaining semi-independence, with that and the continuation of apartheid in South Africa being offered as proof that sadly, the races could never live in harmony. Of all the ways in which Ecotopia did NOT magically solve problems, that was a strange one to leave out. Somehow, Isreal was offered as proof of how resettling a race or ethnicity would work out just fine. Oh Lord.
Bitterly Books gives a fantastic rundown of the major problems. My problem with utopian societies is they completely disregard human nature and how people actually have conflicts: "A [ political ] meeting has no formal agenda [.] there are no Robert’s Rules of Order, no motions, no votes—instead, a gradual ventilation of feelings, some personal antagonisms worked through, and a gradual consensual focusing on what needs to be done. Once this consensus is achieved, people take pains to assuage the feelings of those members who have had to give ground in order to achieve the consensus.”
Jesus, that book was an assault on the brain. Between that and Atlas Shrugged, and I was almost ready to give up on Comparative Literature and Poly Sci entirely.
I don't buy that. When are the NSA's poor and unlawful decisions going to get appealed?
Here's the dirty secret most people don't like to talk about. Americans don't like getting snooped on, sure. A number of people don't like the NSA's actions. But more than that, Americans don't like terrorism, and they are quite insistent upon security. Security trumps privacy because the politicians know they'd be swinging from the proverbial nooses if they were to allow another major terrorist attack on US soil. That's what US citizens really want. They might complain about NSA overreaching, but they'll complain a hell of a lot more about security lapses. That's why you won't see much action taken by the NSA.
You damn well will abide "the ones who ride side by side", especially when they're explicitly allowed to do so by law in many states. It's the responsibility of the person who wants to pass, to wait until it is safe to do so. Go read your fucking driver's manual.
Are you fucking serious? You do not ride abreast. You do not ride in tandem. That's one of the primary bicycling rules and has been drilled into me by the organizers on every ride I've ever taken part of. Rule 1 is share the road. Rule 2, ride single file, dammit.
I think you should basically use whatever lane it is that leaves you a comfortable distance from the sides of cars. If the bike lane will do that, you'd better be in the bike line.
This is why I avoid many city streets -- most bikers just don't want to accept that there are some areas that are not safe to bike and should be avoided.
That's why I go on rides, NOT races. Well that and I'm not terribly fast. On the organized rides I go on, people are respectful, seem happy to be there, and everyone seems friendly and chatty. Races though, ehhh...
That being said, the mountain bikers are more my kind of people. That's pretty simple, a different crew, both more laid back, and a little wilder, and haven't met one yet with a nasty-ass attitude. So hop off your high dudgeon horse for a while, and accept the possibility that someone can just be relating a story without condemning an entire group
Well, I'm not the AC, but this is the impression I got from your post as well, that you thought the road bikers were asshats, and mountain bikers are generally better people. You hang with them instead. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that you thought the road bikers in the ride were a bunch of dicks.
The OP you responded to copped an unreasonable attitude though. Probably a road biker, they tend to do that.;-)
Of course it won't happen! They're extremely expensive to build and maintain, and if anyone tells you differently, they're probably trying to sell you a tube bikeway.:-) Most cities, at least in the US, do not have huge amounts of money to throw around.
But we were talking about lane switches here. If you're going 10 miles and hour and you switch over into a lane where traffic goes 30 miles an hour, then yes, you could very much be causing an accident if traffic is anywhere near. It can happen with two cars as well (and I see it all the time on the freeway when traffic is slow and someone tries to switch over into the HOV lane).
Not sure where you live, but I haven't seen that myself in a loooong time. I can't remember the last time I saw a driver just blow through a red light. Bicyclist? Just saw that this evening.
Those work because drivers assume that you're a motorcycle, and if you're a motorcycle then you're a lot heavier, and more likely to cause damage to their car.
....
Does anyone REALLY believe this? That the only thing that stops a person from hitting bicyclists, pedestrians, or anything else is the possible scratch to a car? The whole.. not wanting to kill someone doesn't enter the thought? Manslaughter? Insurance hassles? Police reports? No, what stops them is worrying they'll have to buff out a scratch?
You are making the accusation. Why should the burden not be on you?
Devil's advocate, the accused doesn't need to prove the accuser is not the copyright owner. The threshold is a bit lower than that. Accuser files take down. Accused files "Nah-uh." We're back where we started, and the accuser can sue or not sue.
Where do you get this notion that the law doesn't apply to you, me, or anybody else other than some special elite?
Oh, I don't think even the original poster was trying to argue that the law doesn't apply to you or I. The problem is that the while technically the law applies to the larger stakeholders, to get the law enforced requires a lot of resources.
Are you really serious about this belief that laws don't matter and don't actually protect anybody but somebody with seven+ figures in their bank account?
Is that not self-evident? Lawyers are not cheap. You are asking them to spend hundreds of hours on a case where they bill three figures/hour.. wait, where is that money going to come from? The average American does not have the financial resources to sue a large organization. Your best hope is that the case is onerous enough that someone like EFF or the ACLU will agree to join your side (in which case the other side will likely settle without a trial), but that sounds like a real gamble.
And if it's not safe for you to ride abreast due to traffic conditions, which include both the rate of flow and the posted speed limit, then it's illegal for you to do so
My understanding, or at least what I was told at various organized cycling events, was that riders should never ride abreast. Some people like doing that because they're talking to each other, but it's never kosher.
Unless, of course, they allowed him access to Facebook between his arrest and his release.
Why..... why would they ever allow that? What PD would think that would be a good idea? If they did, then maybe the police should get the hammer just for sheer stupidity.
Yeah, I hate to do this too, but the chronology of events seems to be: *) Police cut off burglar bars, smash in door. *) Police announce themselves, then enter. *) Grandmother fires shot. *) Police fire back.
"39 shots, five or six of which hit." Some of those hits were on each other, further cementing their reputation as Keystone Kops.
That was the editor I was exposed to in college. When I decided I wanted to be a sysadmin years later I taught myself vi because I knew I'd be laughed out of the building if I ran "pico/etc/sendmail.cf" or such.
No. The typical 486 motherboard had 4 simm slots. Anybody who didn't populate them with 4MB simms was a fucking idiot.
Or in college. Or just "not rich."
This was back before remember prices came down, in the early 90s memory was still f'ing expensive. I remember I could start a kernel compile when I went to bed and wake up to find it still going thanks to the hard drive thrashing.
I scrimped and saved and managed to double my ram to 8 MB. Kernel compiles took about 1/4 the time after that. I still couldn't run both X and a compile at the same time though...
What if you bought a OTA DVR and hosted it in a data center and streamed from it?
That might be a grey area.
Now, what if you rented a OTA DVR and hosted it in a data center and streamed from it?
Where is the line? The ownership? What service the money is being sent specifically for? Where the box is located?
It seems the line is: who does the work. The end result can be the same, but who does the work and who owns the equipment and network seems to be of paramount importance.
I guess you never bothered with the Chocobo nonsense to get Knights of the Round.
I thought that was one of the more fun mini-games in a game a game which had many poorly-designed minigames.
But you didn't need Knights of the Round to beat the game either. KotR, maxed Master Materia, etc, made the last boss a one-shottable joke. Final Fantasy is the series that lets you train, should you wish to, your power levels far far beyond that needed to break the game. At least they super-hard optional bosses that can't be defeated unless you do that sort of thing.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the idea of vigilantes.
I'm pretty quick to dismiss them.
Law enforcement simply can not do the job in all too many cases. And even when the cops catch bad guys we get stuck with huge court expenses and if we punish that is a money killer as well. So you have a problem with dope turning your neighborhood into a hell pit. All of a sudden you start finding users and sellers hanging from street lamps. The problem goes away!
Life is not a comic book.
Got a problem with cars getting broken into? Can the cops solve it? And when vigilantes start asking who is doing what in a community you can bet they get answers.
And probably the wrong answers. Then your idiot vigilante (I know, redundant) is the problem, probably a worse problem than already existed in the neighborhood.
Modular construction. Been around for ages for PV.
So we're going to replace every module every week? Because those things will get scratched up FAST. Most cities and rural areas simply can't afford to repair the low-cost roads until years down the line. How on earth are they supposed to be able to repair the high-cost ones?
There will always be a lot of crud on the road. There will always be a lot of crud on tires. Crud will always be ground into the roadway throughout the day. In the winter water will freeze in those cracks and cause more erosion. They will sit there not generating power because no one will be able to afford to replace them.
Slashdot Mirror
Read your history. There was a reason why it was called the "Greatest Generation".
Tom Brokaw's feelings of guilt and inferiority?
Absolutely true.
The two times USA has been bombed during the WW2 were the Pearl Harbor incident and the bombing of Fort Stevens.
Hawaii didn't become a state until 1959
It was still US soil in 1941, an unincorporated territory.
Ba-dum!
Oh God. I had to read Ecotopia for a college course, and that was a real grind. Ecotopia is... a fucking horrible book. It presents a society that -can't- exist for many reasons, and handwaves away all the social and political issues that result in the collapse of utopian societies.
First, their was the disparaging attitude towards being hard-working, efficient, and getting things done. I think the scene where the Ecotopians were making fun of the outsider protagonist for drying the dishes quickly was one of the most egregious, and he said if he didn't work quickly, he wouldn't get anything done. The response was "sometimes a little goes a long way, John." WTF. Absolutely insipid. And the notion that Ecotopia would repel an invasion from the US by arming everyone in the Sierra with rocket launchers (which they no longer have the technology to make) was lol-worthy. That's the only way / most convenient way into the Pacific Northwest, didn't you know?
Not to mention the book was curiously racist, with blacks being segregated into certain areas (self-segregated, naturally) and gaining semi-independence, with that and the continuation of apartheid in South Africa being offered as proof that sadly, the races could never live in harmony. Of all the ways in which Ecotopia did NOT magically solve problems, that was a strange one to leave out. Somehow, Isreal was offered as proof of how resettling a race or ethnicity would work out just fine. Oh Lord.
Bitterly Books gives a fantastic rundown of the major problems. My problem with utopian societies is they completely disregard human nature and how people actually have conflicts: "A [ political ] meeting has no formal agenda [.] there are no Robert’s Rules of Order, no motions, no votes—instead, a gradual ventilation of feelings, some personal antagonisms worked through, and a gradual consensual focusing on what needs to be done. Once this consensus is achieved, people take pains to assuage the feelings of those members who have had to give ground in order to achieve the consensus.”
Jesus, that book was an assault on the brain. Between that and Atlas Shrugged, and I was almost ready to give up on Comparative Literature and Poly Sci entirely.
I don't buy that. When are the NSA's poor and unlawful decisions going to get appealed?
Here's the dirty secret most people don't like to talk about. Americans don't like getting snooped on, sure. A number of people don't like the NSA's actions. But more than that, Americans don't like terrorism, and they are quite insistent upon security. Security trumps privacy because the politicians know they'd be swinging from the proverbial nooses if they were to allow another major terrorist attack on US soil. That's what US citizens really want. They might complain about NSA overreaching, but they'll complain a hell of a lot more about security lapses. That's why you won't see much action taken by the NSA.
You damn well will abide "the ones who ride side by side", especially when they're explicitly allowed to do so by law in many states. It's the responsibility of the person who wants to pass, to wait until it is safe to do so. Go read your fucking driver's manual.
Are you fucking serious? You do not ride abreast. You do not ride in tandem. That's one of the primary bicycling rules and has been drilled into me by the organizers on every ride I've ever taken part of. Rule 1 is share the road. Rule 2, ride single file, dammit.
I think you should basically use whatever lane it is that leaves you a comfortable distance from the sides of cars. If the bike lane will do that, you'd better be in the bike line.
This is why I avoid many city streets -- most bikers just don't want to accept that there are some areas that are not safe to bike and should be avoided.
That's why I go on rides, NOT races. Well that and I'm not terribly fast. On the organized rides I go on, people are respectful, seem happy to be there, and everyone seems friendly and chatty. Races though, ehhh...
That being said, the mountain bikers are more my kind of people. That's pretty simple, a different crew, both more laid back, and a little wilder, and haven't met one yet with a nasty-ass attitude. So hop off your high dudgeon horse for a while, and accept the possibility that someone can just be relating a story without condemning an entire group
Well, I'm not the AC, but this is the impression I got from your post as well, that you thought the road bikers were asshats, and mountain bikers are generally better people. You hang with them instead. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that you thought the road bikers in the ride were a bunch of dicks.
The OP you responded to copped an unreasonable attitude though. Probably a road biker, they tend to do that. ;-)
That's not what http://slashdot.org/comments.p... says.
He's giving the insurance company line, not what the vehicle code says, barring stupid things like merging into close traffic going much faster.
Of course it won't happen! They're extremely expensive to build and maintain, and if anyone tells you differently, they're probably trying to sell you a tube bikeway. :-) Most cities, at least in the US, do not have huge amounts of money to throw around.
But we were talking about lane switches here. If you're going 10 miles and hour and you switch over into a lane where traffic goes 30 miles an hour, then yes, you could very much be causing an accident if traffic is anywhere near. It can happen with two cars as well (and I see it all the time on the freeway when traffic is slow and someone tries to switch over into the HOV lane).
Not sure where you live, but I haven't seen that myself in a loooong time. I can't remember the last time I saw a driver just blow through a red light. Bicyclist? Just saw that this evening.
Those work because drivers assume that you're a motorcycle, and if you're a motorcycle then you're a lot heavier, and more likely to cause damage to their car.
....
Does anyone REALLY believe this? That the only thing that stops a person from hitting bicyclists, pedestrians, or anything else is the possible scratch to a car? The whole.. not wanting to kill someone doesn't enter the thought? Manslaughter? Insurance hassles? Police reports? No, what stops them is worrying they'll have to buff out a scratch?
You are making the accusation. Why should the burden not be on you?
Devil's advocate, the accused doesn't need to prove the accuser is not the copyright owner. The threshold is a bit lower than that. Accuser files take down. Accused files "Nah-uh." We're back where we started, and the accuser can sue or not sue.
Where do you get this notion that the law doesn't apply to you, me, or anybody else other than some special elite?
Oh, I don't think even the original poster was trying to argue that the law doesn't apply to you or I. The problem is that the while technically the law applies to the larger stakeholders, to get the law enforced requires a lot of resources.
Are you really serious about this belief that laws don't matter and don't actually protect anybody but somebody with seven+ figures in their bank account?
Is that not self-evident? Lawyers are not cheap. You are asking them to spend hundreds of hours on a case where they bill three figures/hour.. wait, where is that money going to come from? The average American does not have the financial resources to sue a large organization. Your best hope is that the case is onerous enough that someone like EFF or the ACLU will agree to join your side (in which case the other side will likely settle without a trial), but that sounds like a real gamble.
And if it's not safe for you to ride abreast due to traffic conditions, which include both the rate of flow and the posted speed limit, then it's illegal for you to do so
My understanding, or at least what I was told at various organized cycling events, was that riders should never ride abreast. Some people like doing that because they're talking to each other, but it's never kosher.
Unless, of course, they allowed him access to Facebook between his arrest and his release.
Why..... why would they ever allow that? What PD would think that would be a good idea?
If they did, then maybe the police should get the hammer just for sheer stupidity.
Yeah, I hate to do this too, but the chronology of events seems to be:
*) Police cut off burglar bars, smash in door.
*) Police announce themselves, then enter.
*) Grandmother fires shot.
*) Police fire back.
"39 shots, five or six of which hit." Some of those hits were on each other, further cementing their reputation as Keystone Kops.
What about if you learned pico first? :D
That was the editor I was exposed to in college. When I decided I wanted to be a sysadmin years later I taught myself vi because I knew I'd be laughed out of the building if I ran "pico /etc/sendmail.cf" or such.
No. The typical 486 motherboard had 4 simm slots. Anybody who didn't populate them with 4MB simms was a fucking idiot.
Or in college. Or just "not rich."
This was back before remember prices came down, in the early 90s memory was still f'ing expensive.
I remember I could start a kernel compile when I went to bed and wake up to find it still going thanks to the hard drive thrashing.
I scrimped and saved and managed to double my ram to 8 MB. Kernel compiles took about 1/4 the time after that. I still couldn't run both X and a compile at the same time though...
It's almost like you're claiming all work is productive and useful.
What if you bought a OTA DVR and hosted it in a data center and streamed from it?
That might be a grey area.
Now, what if you rented a OTA DVR and hosted it in a data center and streamed from it?
Where is the line? The ownership? What service the money is being sent specifically for? Where the box is located?
It seems the line is: who does the work. The end result can be the same, but who does the work and who owns the equipment and network seems to be of paramount importance.
I guess you never bothered with the Chocobo nonsense to get Knights of the Round.
I thought that was one of the more fun mini-games in a game a game which had many poorly-designed minigames.
But you didn't need Knights of the Round to beat the game either. KotR, maxed Master Materia, etc, made the last boss a one-shottable joke.
Final Fantasy is the series that lets you train, should you wish to, your power levels far far beyond that needed to break the game. At least they super-hard optional bosses that can't be defeated unless you do that sort of thing.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the idea of vigilantes.
I'm pretty quick to dismiss them.
Law enforcement simply can not do the job in all too many cases. And even when the cops catch bad guys we get stuck with huge court expenses and if we punish that is a money killer as well. So you have a problem with dope turning your neighborhood into a hell pit. All of a sudden you start finding users and sellers hanging from street lamps. The problem goes away!
Life is not a comic book.
Got a problem with cars getting broken into? Can the cops solve it? And when vigilantes start asking who is doing what in a community you can bet they get answers.
And probably the wrong answers. Then your idiot vigilante (I know, redundant) is the problem, probably a worse problem than already existed in the neighborhood.
But what's most likely to happen is this: https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-d...
Modular construction. Been around for ages for PV.
So we're going to replace every module every week? Because those things will get scratched up FAST. Most cities and rural areas simply can't afford to repair the low-cost roads until years down the line. How on earth are they supposed to be able to repair the high-cost ones?
There will always be a lot of crud on the road. There will always be a lot of crud on tires. Crud will always be ground into the roadway throughout the day. In the winter water will freeze in those cracks and cause more erosion. They will sit there not generating power because no one will be able to afford to replace them.