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  1. Re:You prove the point on How Safe Is Cycling? · · Score: 2

    I agree completely. I do precisely the same thing. I generally assumed that most motorists are criminally incompetent idiots. I know this is incorrect, and that the vast majority of motorists are good, law-abiding citizens and competent drivers who are aware of their surroundings. But when you're sharing the road with someone driving a 5 ton metal box at 3-4x your speed, assuming they're a moron can save your life.

    Not to defend idiot drivers, because there are plenty of them around, but cyclists can be difficult to see in numerous situations even under ideal weather/visibility condidtions. This is made worse when they're where they don't belong (weaving between cars, zipping into crosswalks and using them as a left-turn lane in states which allow right-on-red (NYC doesn't, much of NY does, and IL does, including Chicago except where marked), riding against traffic, moving erratically from using the sidewalk as a bike highway to cutting into traffic, often from in front of a parked truck or SUV that effectively hides there existence, etc. etc. etc.

    If cyclists were required to hold a valid drivers license, obey the rules of the road, and it were enforced at least as well as it is against cars, with the same consequences (such as points on your license for running red lights, etc.), then a whole lot less cyclists would die, irrespective of whether the accident "blame" is placed on the automobile driver for not having x-ray vision and going 5 miles over the 30MPH limit, or on the cyclist for driving like an idiot.

    I cycle around the city plenty, and it can get dicey, and there are drivers that need several hard whacks with a clue-bat, but they are dwarfed by the idiocy of other cyclists I observe every day...as often as not against other cyclists.

  2. The best way to make cycling safer on How Safe Is Cycling? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The best way to make cycling in major cities safer would be to

    1) require a drivers license to cycle on city streets
    2) require cyclists to obey all traffic laws (this is already true in many jurisdictions)
    3) disallow cyclists (and motorcycles) from weaving between lanes to move ahead in traffic. Require them to use lanes in the same manner as other vehicles (you don't see 2 smart cars trying to share one lane of traffic)
    4) enforce #1, #2 and #3 as aggressivley with cyclists as with automobiles, with the same penalties

    I have seen more pedestrians run down (or nearly run down) by cyclists running red lights, weaving in and out of slow moving traffic, transitioning from using the streets to using pedestrian crosswalks to thwart lights or make lefts from a right hand lane across traffic. I cannot count the number of times I've seen aggressive cyclists in New York and Chicago weave through cars, use the wrong side of the road (!!!), etc. and then get upset when someone nearly knocks them over because they weren't seen being where they didn't belong.

    If you require a level of competence (driver's license), require all vehicles using the roads to abide by the same laws (and enforce equally, with equal consequences), you'd go a long way toward improving cycling safety.

  3. Re:Well duh... on Why Julian Assange Should Embrace 'The Fifth Estate' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a movie, it's made for entertainment purposes.

    It's not meant to be taken seriously, so as long as the party being fun of doesn't, neither will the audience.

    History would indicate otherwise. The move "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson took terrible liberties with history, painting the British to be far worse than they ever were. One example, the movie contains a scene where locals were rounded up, herded into a church, and burned alive (with the church). This happened...in France, during world war II. So Mel Gibson and his writers took a Nazi atrocity perpetrated in France, and portrayed it as an atrocity committed by the British against Americans, when no such thing ever happened.

    Similiar falsehoods were spread in another Mel Gibson movie, Braveheart, regarding the Scottish rising up against the English (true) in reaction to various English atrocities against the Scots portrayed in the movie that were demonstrably false and never happened.

    The result in both cases: acts of intimidation, threats, and in some cases violence against the English by Americans (in the case of "The Patriot") and the Scots (in the case of "Braveheart"). These type of historical falsehoods are not rejected by audiences, and are in some cases taken very seriously. If similar falsehoods are being spread about Wikileaks and Julian Assange, then he is right to be pissed off, and right to push back.

  4. Stop Dismissing this with False Equivalencies on Saudi Justice: 10 Years and 2,000 Lashes For Internet Video of Naked Dancing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh for fucks sake please stop engaging in such false equivalencies. I know you appended the smiley in an effort to make a joke of this, and this isn't aimed at you personally. Far too many people really think it isn't that bad, and we shouldn't say anything because we're not perfect either, and your post (meant in jest or not) feeds into that notion.

    The United States may have put an inexperienced African-American in office ahead of a vastly more qualified female, but our gender (and other issues) are miniscule compared to how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other places.

    * Women are routinely murdered for stepping out of line, in despicable, dishonorable acts referred to by their perpetrators as "honor killings."
    * Women who offend the sensibilities of the men of their family are often locked up for life in a room with no light, no sound, and no outside contact beyond a tray of food being shoved under a door, a practice that makes solitary confinement in the US and other western states look like a picnic in comparison. The result is almost universal madness on the part of the victim, usually within a relatively short time. This practice is so common and entrenched that there is a term for this facility, the "woman's room" (not to be confused with a restroom or loo)
    * victims of rape are routinely charged and convicted of fornication, adultery, etc. for having the audacity of being a victim, and imprisoned or worse (see above). Worse, they are convicted merely on the word of a few men, while female testimony is dismissed (by law) and not considered as a counterweight. In many places, they are stoned to death.
    * Even women who manage to escape all of this and are considered "upstanding" by the psychotic standards of the culture can, at best, expect to be buried in the desert with no record of their passing (no marker, no death record, nothing). This after a life in servitude and bondage.
    * Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to leave the house without the company of a man, even if the man is a boy-child.
    * Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, on pain of severe punushment.

    and the list goes on. Women drowned in front of their entire families in the family swimming pool. Women disfigured by acid for refusing the advances of a suiter, and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

    People should read the book "Princess" by Jean Sasson, about the nightmare of being a Saudi Princess, arguably the most privileged and sheltered position a woman can occupy in that society. There are also several excellent, Iranian-made movies that depict, describe, and criticize the epidemic of female-stonings in that society, often with little or no evidence beyond the word of a husband keen to ditch his wife for a prettier woman, e.g. The Stoning of Soraya M.

    It's appalling, and we in the west have betrayed everything we purport to stand for, year after year and decade after decade, by cozying up to such regimes and abusive societies.

  5. Re:Reprehensible on Time Reporter "Can't Wait" To Justify Drone Strike On Julian Assange · · Score: 2, Informative

    If anyone else were advocating the violent death of another, it would be a crime; perhaps it's time for some standards to be applied to all - right, left, far left (journalists), far right (faux journalists at fox, etc.).

    FTFY

    The media in the US is by and large very conservative. The "liberal" media is a myth, the US media is anything but liberal, particularly the news media.

  6. Re:That's so sad. on Aging Is a Disease; Treat It Like One · · Score: 1

    That's nice, but he isn't speaking German, he's speaking English and in English it doesn't mean poison.

    Ah, but English is a Germanic language. Aging beyond young adulthood is deadly. If it is a gift, then it is a poisonous one, so the interlingual play on words is quite apropos.

  7. Re:SCIENCE! on New Treatment From Australia For All Cancers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    if we have a global nuclear war, does that mean science won?

    No. In all liklihood, it will mean religious fanatics in either America, some other region, or both, got their hands on nukes and decided to usher in whatever their version of post-apacalyptic "our religion now rules on Earth as it does in Heaven" millennium. By the time they realize what fools they were, we as a species have joined the other 99% of species in extinction.

    Regardless, it will mean the baser side of human nature won, and happened to use a scientificly derived tool as it defeated our better natures, and our species.

  8. Travel would be a lot less arduous on Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' · · Score: 2

    Take I-80 coast to coast. The big challenge is staying awake through 1000 miles of corn, but you'll start to appreciate just how much of it we grow.

    That's the beauty of 800mph travel. You only have to look at the corn for an hour and fifteen minutes, then you get a change of scenery. New York-Cleaveland-Chicago-KC-Denver would be a nice route to have, with maybe a southern spur St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, along with a second western route from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, Touscon, Pheonix, to LA. Add a northern routhe Chicago-Minneapolis-Bismarck-Billings-Misoula-Spokane-Portland, hooking up to a west coast link from Vancouver to San Diego and you have a pretty well connected country. Obviously speeds would have to be slower in the rockies, barring expensive tunneling projects, but it would still beat air travel between most of those cities.

  9. Re:Movie ad's disguised as science news? on Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'? · · Score: 1

    There would be far less complexity if the Ultra Rich decided to purchase something like Australia as well as all the drones that you could stick a shake at to attack anything that came within 500 miles, and then for sport lob a few high yield explosives into population centers that appear to be getting a little too uppity.

    Dear would-be Rich Overlord:

    I'll see your drones, and raise you one toxic airborn virus (vaccine not included), released as part of a dusting upwind of Australia along one of the prevailing jetstreams.

    --(signed) One Uppity Human

    Would be Overlord (between hacking coughs, spewing phlem laced with the remnants of his decaying internal organs): the space station idea might have been worth the cost...(more hacking coughs, followed by his final expiry)

  10. Re:Why? on Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" · · Score: 1

    +1 for this one. Reagan was the opposite of Carter, a full time political player with no interest in academical solutions

    And then we reached our true nadir with George Dubya, who proudly and vehemently proclaimed "I am not an intellectual!" It showed, too...we'll be digging out of the hole he put us in for the next 15 years, assuming we're lucky^H^H^H^H^H smart enough not to elect another one just like him...

  11. Re:one better on Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words · · Score: 1

    I'll describe the entire Earth in only 2:

    Mostly Harmless

    I'll describe it in one:

    shit

  12. Re:The UK, Italiy, Ireland, Germany; the list goes on The Pope Criminalizes Leaks · · Score: 1

    *sigh*

    Fucking slashdot won't let me post this in a timely manner. We really need an edit function, or a better preview mode.

    "linking the current pope" should read:

    "linking the then-current pope", i.e. the Pope who stepped down, not the one who replaced him.

  13. The UK, Italiy, Ireland, Germany; the list goes on on The Pope Criminalizes Leaks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, this is what did happen in the US. The church kept records of known child abusing priests, and did not report them to the police. The priests were simply moved to new locations, instead. This is why victims were later able to sue the church diocese, instead of just the priest. The church was guilty of hiding the crimes of the priests.

    The same thing happened in the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and a whole host of other countries. This is not a US problem, it's a world problem. The timing of the last pope stepping down was quite interesting...a week after an HBO documentary "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God" was released for general consumption, linking both the current Pope and his soon-to-be-sainted predecisor directly to the pedophile coverups and worse. In fact, Pope John-Paul II covered for his good pedophile friend up until he died and passed the mantle on to Ratzinger. I wonder if they'll make St. Pedo, I mean John-Paul II, the patron saint of children and knock the other guy aside?

    One thing is sure, mothers will still be carting their kids off to the churches, never mind the danger to their offspring. That, more than anything, illustrates the power of indoctrination and denial.

    http://www.hbo.com/#/schedule/detail/Mea+Maxima+Culpa%3A+Silence+in+the+House+of+God/562415

  14. Florida Man on Florida Law May Accidentally Ban Computers and Smartphones · · Score: 1

    Florida Man bans smart phones, computers, and the Internet!

  15. The run masterlessly on Book Review: Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It requires some agent to be installed on a target server which communicates back to the Puppet Master.

    You can run puppet in masterless mode, against a local copy of the manifests, either managed locally or checked out from a version control repository.

    Likewise with salt (my preferred choice over puppet, but both work), you can run either with a master host, or masterlessly. With salt the nice thing is, you can use the same config for both, just invoke the command differently (salt-call --local vs salt).

    Infosec is no reason not to automate, just don't automate with a master server if your policies don't permit it.

  16. Re:A great win for FreeBSD on PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD · · Score: 1

    Its good to see a BSD release picking up another major instance of commercial use. One of the obstacles the BSDs have faced is mindshare. Linux has had such an overpowering presence in the free/open world that it often overshadows the BSDs. That plays out in the commercial software that is available. If you look at high end vendor software, such as Oracle or other databases, or CAD tools, it is pretty rare to see much released for anything except Red Hat, or maybe Suse Linux. But getting the BSDs out where users are aware of it will definitely help.

    I've been a Linux aficianado since 0.1, but find *bsd appealing for a number of reasons.

    1. Portage version available (relatively seamless transition for playing around from Gentoo)
    2. Avoids the whoile systemd debacle
    3. avoids the udev debacle
    4. Did I mention it avoids systemd? So does Gentoo, but if enough lemmings follow Red Hat over the cliff, then *bsd it will be...

  17. Re:What an absolute c--t.. on BT Chief To Become British Government Minister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've had the misfortune to have to deal with this Ian guy and he's an UTTER UTTER c--t.

    BT is a disgraceful company and the amount of people in the company I work for who have needed to use BT and been royally screwed over by them is shocking.

    At least he's leaving BT and going in to government where this behavior is expected I guess.

    As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:

    his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.

  18. Re:NIST definition - Cloud computing on Can Red Hat Do For OpenStack What It Did For Linux? · · Score: 1

    The fact that "cloud computing" needs 1.5 pages for definition alone is proof that the concept was created by the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

    And here I thought it was Tyrell Corp, developing it as a ploy to use up the limited lifespan of any Android foolish enough to escape their servitude.

  19. Break things that used to work? Sure on Can Red Hat Do For OpenStack What It Did For Linux? · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Can Red Hat do for Open Stack what it did for Linux?

    If by that, do you mean can Red Hat break things that have worked perfectly for years (clustering in FC13-16 vs 17+, and the godawful mess that is systemd replacing perfectly servicable and reliable UNIX mainstays such as sysv init, etc.), then the answer is most definitely:

    YES

    On a recent conference call with Red Hat, they dismissed Open Stack and touted their own proprietary products for "cloudy" type infrastructure. Bringing fuel into the fold won't be any different...they'll downplay open source fuel and tout their own version, with layers of proprietary, opaque add-ons of questionable value. The RH version will lag a version or two behind the upstream free version, and probably suffer some breakage due to RH addons. Same song as before, different day.

  20. Re:Recruiter Commision on $30,000 For a Developer Referral? · · Score: 1

    Obviously I've worked for some far shabbier employers than you :D

    But now you know, and armed with new knowledge you can avoid such in the future. I wouldn't have known the first time I used a recruiter either...I just had better luck than you. This is a real case where knowledge (in this case, of empoyer and recruiter codes of conduct and norms) is power.

  21. Re:The approach on Fake Mt. Gox Pages Aim To Infect Bitcoin Users · · Score: 2

    Details are scarce on how they are advertising.

    Slashdot

  22. Re:New opportunity on SCOTUS Says DNA Collection Permissible After Arrest · · Score: 1

    I'm sure they will just add a loophole after the first person files a law suit. It will be assumed to be secure once its shipped to a huge government data warehouse built for storing personally identifiable information. Then only the NSA, FBI, Chinese, and Russians will have it.

    And Humana, who will no doubt only use it for the good of their insured (or applying to be insured) patients.

  23. The paper is a joke now, but alas the story is not on Chicago Sun Times Swaps iPhone Training For Staff Photographers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    clues:

    - training in iPhone photography
    - firing of the photography staff
    - iPhone as a replacement for fancy, expensive DSLRs

    It's real, there was quite a bit of time dedicated to this story on Chicago Tonight a few days ago. The big joke is the Chicago Sun Times itself...once a respectable newspaper, now transforming itself into little more than an amateur blog. And using iPhones with their subpar optics...in the hands of people who know nothing about photography...the paper will be carrying Facebook quality pictures, or as another mentioned, the same pic as every other outlet via AP/UPI.

    Whatever bozo made this decision should be fired...his/her 6-figure salary will probably pay for 2 or 3 decent photographers, and they'll get a whole lot more value out of those photographers than they will the moron who made this decision. But then, I don't think the Chicago Sun Times is long for this world anyway (an end hastened by such collasal mismanagement).

    What we're watching is the final deathrows of a dying paper, in an industry on life support.

  24. Fuck Tax Cheats on Google Maps Used To Find Tax Cheats · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's only normal and expected. I would help authorities catch the assholes who don't pay their taxes.

    Agreed. Or put another way:

    Dear Tax Dodger,

    Fuck you. Pony up.

    Most Sincerely,

    The rest of us who pay our taxes honestly.

  25. Re:Why the IC in ICBM? on India's ICBM Will Carry Multiple Nuclear Warheads · · Score: 1

    umm... because China is fairly big and the larger cities are pretty far away from where these ICBMs will be launched?

    umm...hopefully that's "would be launched," not "will be launched." I'm no fan of the chinese political establishment, but in many ways (culturally, work-ethic wise, secular society, desire for stability) we and China should be natural allies, if they could just get past their control-freak authoritarianism and we could get past our emperial belligerence.