The answer is Car driver hit a bike? Car driver is 100% liable for all the bicyclists medical bills, lost wages, AND loses the right to drive or own a car for the rest of their life.
That isn't going to prevent accidents. Moreover, what are you going to do when the car driver is poor? You can't sue poor people; they have nothing to sue for. You won't even get a lawyer to take your case unless you pay all the fees up-front with a retainer, and even then you'll never be able to collect. You also can't stop people from driving a car; people drive on suspended or revoked licenses all the time. The system won't lock them up for that, since it's not a violent crime.
The only way to make car drivers "scared shitless" is to make car-related offenses punishable by death. And that's never going to happen in this country.
Therefore, the only realistic solution is to build bike roads that are physically separate from car roads, and also to push to get rid of cars as much as possible, by building SkyTran systems instead.
Cycling would work fine if municipalities invest in it, and built bike roads totally separate from car roads. This is what they do in Copenhagen, and that isn't exactly a warm city, but it's the most bike-friendly city on the planet by most accounts.
I used to bike everywhere in my little college town in southwest Virginia, and it worked great, but that was because everything was close and there weren't a lot of drivers on the roads. It didn't snow often (maybe a few days a year), certainly not 3 feet, and it wasn't that cold most of the year. Dressing properly and warmly let me bike even when it was coldest; remember, when you're exercising, you generate a lot more heat so the cold isn't so bad. Rain can be dealt with with a rain jacket, but again it's rarely a problem. It never got to 100 in that area; that can be avoided by staying the fuck out of Phoenix and Vegas, which are hellholes and should be avoided for many other reasons. On the few days when the weather is too much, there was always the public town buses, which had bike racks on the front in case you got surprised by a thunderstorm and didn't feel like pedaling back home.
Yes, if you live in Phoenix or Minneapolis, cycling probably is a fantasy, but if you live in those places, maybe you should be asking yourself, "why the fuck am I living in a place with such horrible weather most of the year?" instead of worrying about alternative transportation modes. For people living in better places, the problem isn't weather, it's the cars.
No, the 100+ temps can be dealt with by not living in the fucking desert, and moving north. Of course, then you might have snow and cold-temperature problems, but in most temperate cities in the US these aren't problems except for a few days a year. They aren't a problem at all in the west-coast cities.
Exactly. One of the cities cited in the article is NYC; I live right next to Manhattan and visit frequently, and it's one of the least bike-friendly cities I've ever seen. Even in the few places where there's bike lanes, it's in no way safe, because of the crazy car drivers (esp. taxis). I even saw a biker hit by a taxi as soon as I got out of the bus station one day; the taxi didn't even stop. You have to be extremely reckless or insane to ride a bike in this crazy city.
NYC really strikes me as a "me too!!" city; it's weird how people here think this is "the greatest city on Earth" (why, I have no idea), but it always trying to play catch-up with some trend that another city started and does far better. First, it was IT tech; they tried pitching themselves as an alternative to Silicon Valley with the idiotic-sounding "Silicon Alley", but unlike Silicon Valley where things are clean and nice and there's lots of high-tech companies paying enormous salaries, here it's old and dirty, but the cost of living is higher (if you go by $/square foot tempered by commuting time; the public transit totally sucks if you live outside Manhattan), and the companies don't pay shit here, and think there's something wrong with you if you've ever worked someplace for less than 15 years. Now it's bicycling: Portland is the most bike-friendly city in the US by far, so now NYC wants to do a "me-too" on that too, and somehow try to convince everyone to hop on bicycles and not worry about getting hit by a speeding cab or a city bus while riding on streets that are about as smooth and well-maintained as those in Beirut, while breathing air as clean as that in Beijing. Heck, NYCers even try to convince themselves they're liberals, while they continually re-elect billionaire Republicans for their mayor.
It also doesn't compare apples to apples: how many miles are the riders riding, versus the car drivers, and what is the accident rate per-mile?
The simple fact is that bicycling (as much as I love it) is horrendously dangerous in urban areas, and the reason is cars (and even worse, SUVs). All these moves to build bike lanes are idiotic and wasteful, because they do absolutely nothing to physically separate bikes from cars, and cars will drive in the bike lanes whenever they want (which is, every time they need to take a right turn, or simply stop paying attention, or get drunk).
If these idiot mayors want to encourage bicycling, they need to build real bike roads, like they have in Copenhagen, where the bikes are the only thing on the road, not cars, and not pedestrians either. That's the only way to do it.
Most of those aren't supported on typical inexpensive web hosts, so they're useless. What good is a language if you can't actually use it anywhere?
And Perl used to be the king of server-side scripting, and it's all but died out. Are you going to try to argue that that was some kind of accident, and it really is better somehow even though everyone's given up on it?
You keep trying to brush off popularity like it's not important, when in fact it's one of the most important factors there is in a language. Popularity dictates support and availability.
Again, no suggestions for anything better. I've never seen them listed anywhere else, all I ever see is people whining about how bad PHP is.
If you'd ever used it for anything more complex than a web forum,
This implies that it IS a good language for simpler projects, which is exactly what I said before.
The only things PHP have going for it are accessibility to novice and/or weak developers, and wide availability.
These are extremely important features to many. What good is a language if you can't use it on most inexpensive web hosts? It's useless.
Just because it's "the only game in town" doesn't imply quality
Again, irrelevant. If it's the only game in town, then it's a lot better than the alternative, which is either nothing at all or something much harder to get working because it's not easily available.
If PHP were really so bad, someone would have come up with a better alternative by now. There's no shortage of programming languages out there, but PHP is doing fine, while there are practically no other alternatives, except maybe Perl which is pretty kludgy itself.
The problem is that a story isn't just the actor, it's the writer. There are two diametrically opposite problems in fanfic, and most falls into one or other trap: 1) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wrote the characters the way he did, he is forced to make the characters walk the same path, parrot the same old tired lines, and never progress in any way. 2) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wote the characters the way he did, he ends up creating a character progression that is completely out-of-character for the person in question.
No, this isn't a problem for shows like Star Trek. In case you didn't realize, there is no "writer" for ST episodes. Every episode had a different writer or writers. This isn't Harry Potter or whatever, it's a TV show where every episode was written by someone different, and unlike shows like Babylon 5 or LOST, there was no over-arching plot tying the episodes together. There may have been some collaboration among the writers to make sure they got the characters consistent and they kept the technical details more-or-less consistent (like using Jeffries tubes), but it's not like they had some master plan for how every character was going to develop throughout the series.
No. It's pretty much a sucky language all along the gamut of use cases.
How so? I used it for some simple website work, and it was extremely easy to get started and write simple code with it. I really don't get where all the hate comes from. Yes, the language is kinda messy compared to some others, but so is Perl. What's a better alternative? Java is verbose and unwieldy for a small, simple website, and not supported by cheap web hosts. Python maybe, but again it's frequently not supported by cheap web hosts, and it doesn't have a C-like syntax at all. And I don't think there's anything else that's so easy to embed into static HTML.
Every time I see someone complain about PHP, it just looks like a bunch of bitching and moaning, with zero constructive advice or suggestions for something better, and your post is no exception.
I generally stop at Whole Foods supermarkets to eat on road trips. They usually have nice hot bars with a good selection of quality food which doesn't cost a fortune (though still more than the crap at McD's).
Otherwise, Google Maps usually works well for finding someplace decent to eat.
And of course, it's a good idea to bring some food with you, just in case there isn't anything decent open when you need it.
Of course, they had to go slowly so it wasn't obvious that they used ubiquitous surveillance to catch him. Notice how there's no mention of the NSA in the press regarding this case, just some vaguery about shopping or travel patterns. The big difference between East Germany and the USA is that the US government can't be totally obvious about the use of surveillance to catch government criticizers, yet. But just look at what happened to this guy, and to the OWS protesters (lost their jobs, put on no-fly and do-not-employ lists, etc.), and then look at the public's response to this: they mostly support the government's actions. With a public this supportive of tyrannical government, the US will be like East Germany before you know it. And as long as the US doesn't try to commit mass genocide or something equally horrible, the misery of living in such a nation will only be lifted when the economy collapses due to competition from other nations and the government is forced to reform itself, which will likely take decades or more (East Germans had to live under that regime for around 45 years, for example).
Someone who has $108k for a Tesla Model S isn't going to go to McDonald's for food. And anyone with half a brain should know better than to eat there, given the horrible quality of their food and what it does to your body.
That might work ok with LNG, but it won't work with propane(LPG) or CNG because the energy density of those fuels is so much smaller than gasoline or diesel. A spare-tire-sized tank of propane would probably get you about 20 miles I'm guessing. There's a reason cars retrofitted with propane and CNG tanks need a gigantic tank taking up the entire trunk space (or in a pickup truck, about 1/3 of the cargo bed). You need a much, much larger volume of those fuels to get the same range as a typical gasoline vehicle.
Musk's business model for building power-trains is safe but the whole cars based on lithium batteries is rocky at best. Tesla's charging system is a joke, having to go park in some far off small town and wait a hour for your car to recharge is not a solution to range anxiety.
The Model S can go at least 200 miles between charges (depending on exact model, they have different battery packs available). Most people don't drive that far in a day, with the prime exception being road trips. Most people don't take a lot of road trips; they use their car for commuting and local travel. The charging system isn't a joke, it's a solution for those rare times that you want to take a road trip and would prefer to use your Tesla rather than renting a gas car to do it. Besides, what's wrong with waiting an hour? You need to stop for food anyway, so if you can recharge at or near the place you stop to eat, then you're not losing any time.
The location of the tanks is even safer than gas tanks. They're rarely located underneath the vehicle, but rather in the cargo space
Yep, that's the main problem with propane and LNG/CNG-powered cars. Since the big-ass tank is in the cargo space, you now have no more cargo space (or very little).
In most modern gas-powered cars I've seen, the gas tank is underneath the rear seat: it's between the two axles, yet in a space where there's no other practical use for that space. Most car owners like to have a decent amount of cargo room.
Hindenburg isn't transliterated, it's German, which uses the exact same alphabet as English (with the exception of four additional characters). So spelling does matter.
If you were talking about an Arabic or Chinese name, you'd be correct.
It was totaled after hitting a large piece of metal at speed. A similar-size gasoline car would have probably killed the driver, and probably caught on fire as well. Did you forget that everyone else is driving around with a tankful of highly flammable liquid in their car?
I like to bash Miguel de Icaza as much as the next guy, but he hasn't been involved with GNOME for many years now, so you can't blame the current state of GNOME on him. He left the project long before GNOME 3 was envisioned, more like back during the GNOME 1.x days or perhaps early early 2.x days IIRC.
The sad fact is, GNOME is largely under the control of Red Hat, as they employ several of the most prominent GNOME developers including Jon McCann. So if you want to blame someone for attempting to ruin desktop Linux with the abomination that is GNOME3, blame Red Hat.
You might want to go read about it some more; what you're talking about is preemption. The kernel has been preemptible for years now. Here's an article about it from 2002: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5600
The console crowd doesn't get to take advantage of PC hardware the way PC games do. Have you ever seen an Xbox hooked up to two or three monitors?
This is an alternative for PC gamers who might like to dump Windows and use an OS better suited for their games, coming from a company that already makes a lot of popular games. The people who will buy this thing are people who use PCs and are fans of Valve games.
The Linux fanboys don't need to buy the SteamBox; they'll just use their existing custom PC and run Steam on that, like they're already doing. This will merely help improve support for Steam on the Linux platform by getting the gfx card makers to better support Linux.
It seems to me from my limited work with PHP to everything I've read about it, that it's a great language if you're just building a fairly small and simple website (since it's supported by every dirt-cheap web hosting service out there and is fairly C-like in its syntax, plus it's really easy ), but totally sucks if you try to scale it up to anything really serious and high-performance. So why does anyone bother? If you're doing heavy-duty stuff, pick something better suited.
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The answer is Car driver hit a bike? Car driver is 100% liable for all the bicyclists medical bills, lost wages, AND loses the right to drive or own a car for the rest of their life.
That isn't going to prevent accidents. Moreover, what are you going to do when the car driver is poor? You can't sue poor people; they have nothing to sue for. You won't even get a lawyer to take your case unless you pay all the fees up-front with a retainer, and even then you'll never be able to collect. You also can't stop people from driving a car; people drive on suspended or revoked licenses all the time. The system won't lock them up for that, since it's not a violent crime.
The only way to make car drivers "scared shitless" is to make car-related offenses punishable by death. And that's never going to happen in this country.
Therefore, the only realistic solution is to build bike roads that are physically separate from car roads, and also to push to get rid of cars as much as possible, by building SkyTran systems instead.
That's why they invented the gym, not to mention the exercise bike which you can buy for a few hundred dollars to have your own at home.
Cycling would work fine if municipalities invest in it, and built bike roads totally separate from car roads. This is what they do in Copenhagen, and that isn't exactly a warm city, but it's the most bike-friendly city on the planet by most accounts.
I used to bike everywhere in my little college town in southwest Virginia, and it worked great, but that was because everything was close and there weren't a lot of drivers on the roads. It didn't snow often (maybe a few days a year), certainly not 3 feet, and it wasn't that cold most of the year. Dressing properly and warmly let me bike even when it was coldest; remember, when you're exercising, you generate a lot more heat so the cold isn't so bad. Rain can be dealt with with a rain jacket, but again it's rarely a problem. It never got to 100 in that area; that can be avoided by staying the fuck out of Phoenix and Vegas, which are hellholes and should be avoided for many other reasons. On the few days when the weather is too much, there was always the public town buses, which had bike racks on the front in case you got surprised by a thunderstorm and didn't feel like pedaling back home.
Yes, if you live in Phoenix or Minneapolis, cycling probably is a fantasy, but if you live in those places, maybe you should be asking yourself, "why the fuck am I living in a place with such horrible weather most of the year?" instead of worrying about alternative transportation modes. For people living in better places, the problem isn't weather, it's the cars.
No, the 100+ temps can be dealt with by not living in the fucking desert, and moving north. Of course, then you might have snow and cold-temperature problems, but in most temperate cities in the US these aren't problems except for a few days a year. They aren't a problem at all in the west-coast cities.
Exactly. One of the cities cited in the article is NYC; I live right next to Manhattan and visit frequently, and it's one of the least bike-friendly cities I've ever seen. Even in the few places where there's bike lanes, it's in no way safe, because of the crazy car drivers (esp. taxis). I even saw a biker hit by a taxi as soon as I got out of the bus station one day; the taxi didn't even stop. You have to be extremely reckless or insane to ride a bike in this crazy city.
NYC really strikes me as a "me too!!" city; it's weird how people here think this is "the greatest city on Earth" (why, I have no idea), but it always trying to play catch-up with some trend that another city started and does far better. First, it was IT tech; they tried pitching themselves as an alternative to Silicon Valley with the idiotic-sounding "Silicon Alley", but unlike Silicon Valley where things are clean and nice and there's lots of high-tech companies paying enormous salaries, here it's old and dirty, but the cost of living is higher (if you go by $/square foot tempered by commuting time; the public transit totally sucks if you live outside Manhattan), and the companies don't pay shit here, and think there's something wrong with you if you've ever worked someplace for less than 15 years. Now it's bicycling: Portland is the most bike-friendly city in the US by far, so now NYC wants to do a "me-too" on that too, and somehow try to convince everyone to hop on bicycles and not worry about getting hit by a speeding cab or a city bus while riding on streets that are about as smooth and well-maintained as those in Beirut, while breathing air as clean as that in Beijing. Heck, NYCers even try to convince themselves they're liberals, while they continually re-elect billionaire Republicans for their mayor.
It also doesn't compare apples to apples: how many miles are the riders riding, versus the car drivers, and what is the accident rate per-mile?
The simple fact is that bicycling (as much as I love it) is horrendously dangerous in urban areas, and the reason is cars (and even worse, SUVs). All these moves to build bike lanes are idiotic and wasteful, because they do absolutely nothing to physically separate bikes from cars, and cars will drive in the bike lanes whenever they want (which is, every time they need to take a right turn, or simply stop paying attention, or get drunk).
If these idiot mayors want to encourage bicycling, they need to build real bike roads, like they have in Copenhagen, where the bikes are the only thing on the road, not cars, and not pedestrians either. That's the only way to do it.
Most of those aren't supported on typical inexpensive web hosts, so they're useless. What good is a language if you can't actually use it anywhere?
And Perl used to be the king of server-side scripting, and it's all but died out. Are you going to try to argue that that was some kind of accident, and it really is better somehow even though everyone's given up on it?
You keep trying to brush off popularity like it's not important, when in fact it's one of the most important factors there is in a language. Popularity dictates support and availability.
Again, no suggestions for anything better. I've never seen them listed anywhere else, all I ever see is people whining about how bad PHP is.
If you'd ever used it for anything more complex than a web forum,
This implies that it IS a good language for simpler projects, which is exactly what I said before.
The only things PHP have going for it are accessibility to novice and/or weak developers, and wide availability.
These are extremely important features to many. What good is a language if you can't use it on most inexpensive web hosts? It's useless.
Just because it's "the only game in town" doesn't imply quality
Again, irrelevant. If it's the only game in town, then it's a lot better than the alternative, which is either nothing at all or something much harder to get working because it's not easily available.
If PHP were really so bad, someone would have come up with a better alternative by now. There's no shortage of programming languages out there, but PHP is doing fine, while there are practically no other alternatives, except maybe Perl which is pretty kludgy itself.
The problem is that a story isn't just the actor, it's the writer. There are two diametrically opposite problems in fanfic, and most falls into one or other trap:
1) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wrote the characters the way he did, he is forced to make the characters walk the same path, parrot the same old tired lines, and never progress in any way.
2) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wote the characters the way he did, he ends up creating a character progression that is completely out-of-character for the person in question.
No, this isn't a problem for shows like Star Trek. In case you didn't realize, there is no "writer" for ST episodes. Every episode had a different writer or writers. This isn't Harry Potter or whatever, it's a TV show where every episode was written by someone different, and unlike shows like Babylon 5 or LOST, there was no over-arching plot tying the episodes together. There may have been some collaboration among the writers to make sure they got the characters consistent and they kept the technical details more-or-less consistent (like using Jeffries tubes), but it's not like they had some master plan for how every character was going to develop throughout the series.
No. It's pretty much a sucky language all along the gamut of use cases.
How so? I used it for some simple website work, and it was extremely easy to get started and write simple code with it. I really don't get where all the hate comes from. Yes, the language is kinda messy compared to some others, but so is Perl. What's a better alternative? Java is verbose and unwieldy for a small, simple website, and not supported by cheap web hosts. Python maybe, but again it's frequently not supported by cheap web hosts, and it doesn't have a C-like syntax at all. And I don't think there's anything else that's so easy to embed into static HTML.
Every time I see someone complain about PHP, it just looks like a bunch of bitching and moaning, with zero constructive advice or suggestions for something better, and your post is no exception.
I generally stop at Whole Foods supermarkets to eat on road trips. They usually have nice hot bars with a good selection of quality food which doesn't cost a fortune (though still more than the crap at McD's).
Otherwise, Google Maps usually works well for finding someplace decent to eat.
And of course, it's a good idea to bring some food with you, just in case there isn't anything decent open when you need it.
Of course, they had to go slowly so it wasn't obvious that they used ubiquitous surveillance to catch him. Notice how there's no mention of the NSA in the press regarding this case, just some vaguery about shopping or travel patterns. The big difference between East Germany and the USA is that the US government can't be totally obvious about the use of surveillance to catch government criticizers, yet. But just look at what happened to this guy, and to the OWS protesters (lost their jobs, put on no-fly and do-not-employ lists, etc.), and then look at the public's response to this: they mostly support the government's actions. With a public this supportive of tyrannical government, the US will be like East Germany before you know it. And as long as the US doesn't try to commit mass genocide or something equally horrible, the misery of living in such a nation will only be lifted when the economy collapses due to competition from other nations and the government is forced to reform itself, which will likely take decades or more (East Germans had to live under that regime for around 45 years, for example).
With this moronic logic, you probably don't think your local utility monopoly is a monopoly.
Someone who has $108k for a Tesla Model S isn't going to go to McDonald's for food. And anyone with half a brain should know better than to eat there, given the horrible quality of their food and what it does to your body.
That might work ok with LNG, but it won't work with propane(LPG) or CNG because the energy density of those fuels is so much smaller than gasoline or diesel. A spare-tire-sized tank of propane would probably get you about 20 miles I'm guessing. There's a reason cars retrofitted with propane and CNG tanks need a gigantic tank taking up the entire trunk space (or in a pickup truck, about 1/3 of the cargo bed). You need a much, much larger volume of those fuels to get the same range as a typical gasoline vehicle.
Just pointing out how today's Democrats really aren't as different from the Tea Partiers as they think they are.
Musk's business model for building power-trains is safe but the whole cars based on lithium batteries is rocky at best. Tesla's charging system is a joke, having to go park in some far off small town and wait a hour for your car to recharge is not a solution to range anxiety.
The Model S can go at least 200 miles between charges (depending on exact model, they have different battery packs available). Most people don't drive that far in a day, with the prime exception being road trips. Most people don't take a lot of road trips; they use their car for commuting and local travel. The charging system isn't a joke, it's a solution for those rare times that you want to take a road trip and would prefer to use your Tesla rather than renting a gas car to do it. Besides, what's wrong with waiting an hour? You need to stop for food anyway, so if you can recharge at or near the place you stop to eat, then you're not losing any time.
The location of the tanks is even safer than gas tanks. They're rarely located underneath the vehicle, but rather in the cargo space
Yep, that's the main problem with propane and LNG/CNG-powered cars. Since the big-ass tank is in the cargo space, you now have no more cargo space (or very little).
In most modern gas-powered cars I've seen, the gas tank is underneath the rear seat: it's between the two axles, yet in a space where there's no other practical use for that space. Most car owners like to have a decent amount of cargo room.
Hindenburg isn't transliterated, it's German, which uses the exact same alphabet as English (with the exception of four additional characters). So spelling does matter.
If you were talking about an Arabic or Chinese name, you'd be correct.
It was totaled after hitting a large piece of metal at speed. A similar-size gasoline car would have probably killed the driver, and probably caught on fire as well. Did you forget that everyone else is driving around with a tankful of highly flammable liquid in their car?
I like to bash Miguel de Icaza as much as the next guy, but he hasn't been involved with GNOME for many years now, so you can't blame the current state of GNOME on him. He left the project long before GNOME 3 was envisioned, more like back during the GNOME 1.x days or perhaps early early 2.x days IIRC.
The sad fact is, GNOME is largely under the control of Red Hat, as they employ several of the most prominent GNOME developers including Jon McCann. So if you want to blame someone for attempting to ruin desktop Linux with the abomination that is GNOME3, blame Red Hat.
You might want to go read about it some more; what you're talking about is preemption. The kernel has been preemptible for years now. Here's an article about it from 2002: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5600
The console crowd doesn't get to take advantage of PC hardware the way PC games do. Have you ever seen an Xbox hooked up to two or three monitors?
This is an alternative for PC gamers who might like to dump Windows and use an OS better suited for their games, coming from a company that already makes a lot of popular games. The people who will buy this thing are people who use PCs and are fans of Valve games.
The Linux fanboys don't need to buy the SteamBox; they'll just use their existing custom PC and run Steam on that, like they're already doing. This will merely help improve support for Steam on the Linux platform by getting the gfx card makers to better support Linux.
Stupid Slashdot; when are they going to get with the times and allow editing?
What I meant to say was:
and is fairly C-like in its syntax, plus it's really easy to embed into otherwise static HTML code.
It seems to me from my limited work with PHP to everything I've read about it, that it's a great language if you're just building a fairly small and simple website (since it's supported by every dirt-cheap web hosting service out there and is fairly C-like in its syntax, plus it's really easy ), but totally sucks if you try to scale it up to anything really serious and high-performance. So why does anyone bother? If you're doing heavy-duty stuff, pick something better suited.