It sounds like they added almost 50% more parking,
No, they cost a lot of parking spaces for what could have been just as easily provided just a very short distance away. It is not a simple trade being done here, you can't just say "oh we got 10 bike parking spaces at the expense of two car spots", because those two car spaces are in much higher demand and are much harder to provide than any bike parking is.
and minimised the average distance from vehicle to building entrance.
So what you are saying is that the people who are fit enough to ride bikes to work on a regular basis and rich enough to pay for special parking for them cannot walk another block to get from their special bike parking space to where they work.
The car drivers probably need the exercise
I rarely say this, but this time it is right to do so: fuck you. Who the hell are you to tell other people that they cannot park where they work because "they need the exercise"? And who the hell are you to tell people who live 20 miles away and have to commute to work that they must do so by bicycle? Where do you get off telling someone else that they should bike to work (and they can't park in the lockers without paying extra for it, by the way) when they need to do errands or get to other places quickly, or may have equipment they need to transport or just be on call for some reason and need to use a car?
Those lockers could have just as easily been put a very short distance away without costing any parking at all, but no, you think those spaces should be lost because the people who parked there "need the exercise". You are arrogant and an idiot.
How's that any different than when a transmission seizes up?
Gross large scale mechanical failure is typically much different than a computer or sensor failure. You can imagine no failure mode other than one that physically disables all drivetrain operation, not even one that leaves the car drivable but not autonomously?
I've had a clutch cable break while I was away from home. Lots of people might consider that a major drivetrain failure. Because I had a driver's license and knew how to drive, I was able to get the car home and then install a new cable the next morning myself. I've had GPS lose position and I could "take over" the navigation because I know how to drive. I've had exactly one large scale gross mechanical failure that required a tow truck, and that was when a car behind me saw the green light but missed the fact I was still stopped at the intersection in front of him.
Imagine an autonomous vehicle with a BSOD forcing it to stop, and the humans inside have no idea how to move the vehicle to a place of safety. What hilarity!
And when today's ubiquitous navigation system screwup has the car about to cross an active runway at a British airport, watch the fun as the people inside panic because they don't know how to keep it from happening or get out of the way of the airplane in their window.
No. There will always be a license involved, just to deal with contingencies. You do notice, I hope, that pilots still need licenses to fly even though a large part of the process is now autonomous for them, don't you? The recurrent training for an ATP working in a major airline doesn't deal just with the landing and takeoff -- manual parts. "Oh, the rest is automated, you don't need training to deal with that." They've had autonomous systems (autopilots) for a couple of decades and those systems STILL fail in sometimes wonderful and catastrophic ways.
Of course, it would be worth a lot more if we got more than someone's probably biased interpretation of one side of a phone call. Like, actual quotes would be a lot better. Even then, who knows what the questions were.
Realistically, electronically controlled vehicles will roll out in this order:
You mean "autonomous", don't you? Electronically controlled is close to what we have today for almost everything but actual steering. "Fly by wire".
6. Middle income people who can't qualifiy for a license.
If you can't qualify for a license, you aren't going to be able to take over from you car when you need to, and you won't be able to drive the last mile from your garage to the road with all the electronic navigation aids that will be required. Save lives? Turn the highway into a large parking lot when one car fails and the "driver" isn't qualified to pick his nose, much less manipulate the controls of his car to get it out of the way.
And for all the bright people who will immediately try telling me all the wonderful things autonomous cars do, you need to keep in mind that they don't exist in anything close to production form and the large scale interactions have not been determined in real life. Models of something that doesn't exist have no ground truth data to verify the model and shouldn't be trusted with millions of human lives.
I understood the comment. That question about court was trying to change the issue from following the law to trying to get out of a ticket.
The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him.
That author was me, and the issue wasn't the bike being stopped, it was the bike failing to stop at the stop sign he had. I didn't have a stop sign. I wasn't stopped. I wasn't giving up my right of way trying to convince the bike rider to enter the street I was on. The bike ran the stop sign, and the response was "my pet peeve is having to take my feet off the pedals so I don't fall over when I stop." Well, I'm sorry, but that's not an excuse for failing to stop.
Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists,
Oh my. I'm so sorry that the unpredictable nature of bicyclists obeying the traffic laws that they expect drivers to obey is annoying to them. Here's a simple solution to that: obey the law. End of problem. As a driver if I could predict that you as a bike rider would actually stop at the stop sign that controls your entry into the through street, then I wouldn't have to cringe every time you speed up and pray that you don't hit a bit of gravel, lose control/traction, and slip into my path as you make your high speed turn. I wouldn't have to guess whether you're going to become a "pedestrian" by swerving over into the crosswalk without slowing down. The annoyance a bike rider feels at being unpredictable could be solved easily.
Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so.
I'm sorry, but saying "but but but other people break the law too" isn't saying you don't approve of what bike riders are doing, it is trying to excuse it. If you're trying to say that you don't approve of bike riders breaking the law, then what drivers do is irrelevant. I don't approve of drivers breaking the law, but I don't try to excuse it by saying "look at all the bike riders who break the law, too." It is irrelevant what laws the bike riders break if the topic is what drivers do.
How many bike lockers fit in the space of 12 car parking spaces?
Who cares, and how is it relevant? That lot is always 100% capacity with cars on work days, so any bike lockers there consume resources that could better be used for their intended purposes. And twice as many lockers could have been installed 200 feet away without using up any parking lot space at all. You can't park cars on the sidewalk, but you can park bikes there. Using car parking for bike lockers of any number is idiocy. The fact that the bike lockers could have gone elsewhere and in fact been increased in number is what makes using the parking lot space for cars a better use, BTW.
It was idiocy driven by vocal bike riders who thought that 200 feet was too far to walk so the lockers had to go THERE, fueled by a transit services administration with a goal of eliminating cars from campus altogether. One hand washed the other. The people who wound up having to park more than a half a mile away lost. (And if you are curious, that lot a half mile away is the football stadium lot, so when the home game comes to town on Nov. 1 (a workday) no employee OR student will be allowed to park there because athletic sponsors who get prime parking passes are more important than the normal function of education and research that the University conducts. The official position of the "parking services" department is "stay home and telecommute". That's a nice idea, a class of 100 freshmen English students being taught by a professor who had to "call it in".)
Where do you live that the car is always at fault? Around here, the motorist rarely gets any punishment even if they run over and kill a cyclist.
I live in a college town that is bicycle-friendly and automobile-antagonistic, where every car-bike collision is considered to be the driver's fault and never the biker (at least in the vocal bike community that always starts shouting that every time it happens). And car-pedestrian accidents are used to demonstrate the deadly abuse of the driving privilege, even when the accident happens in an unmarked crosswalk on a US highway at 3AM on a rainy night and the pedestrian is dressed in black clothing. Not only was the ped trying to be unseen, he challenged the car to a duel that the laws of physics guaranteed he'd lose. But the driver was at fault because he couldn't see someone who didn't want to be seen and didn't want to wait thirty seconds to cross the normally empty road after the car went by.
Perhaps your lack of civic and police support comes from being in the city that created Critical Mass, a mostly leaderless group of bike riders who seem to have the goal of deliberately screwing up the public streets for those you claim have a legal right to be there -- cars. On that website we find the suggestion "but just stopping through a whole light change sequence can make all the difference for a fun, convivial, social ride." And it makes for a complete clog of the traffic behind the "mass". A pretty good monkey-wrenching of the system. It really is hard to imagine why the police might not be impressed with a group of people who have the goal of creating as much congestion and confusion as possible while breaking the law.
Also from that site:
Generally, Critical Mass is an ongoing opportunity to do something quite different in our lives, but most months, and this one in particular, we collectively and unconsciously recreate a lot of what's worst about our selfish, inconsiderate, boorish culture, everyone for themselves, and a shocking lack of empathy and solidarity in the execution of this whole event.
A simple google on the phrase "critical mass" (adding "bicycle" to avoid nuclear weaponry references) returns many reports of CM riders deliberately provoking confrontations with cars and even buses (and yes, some drivers doing the provoking).
It's hard to ignore the stories like the one posted to a Portland blog for bikers, where the author was proud to have been part of a Chicago ride that blocked a six way intersection and kept an ambulance on a emergency run from getting through. (Here. About halfway down, search for "ambulance". Then search for "TriMet bus" to read an account of CM surrounding a bus, apparently angered that public mass transit was allowed on the streets.)
When one knows that CM was formed in SF, it's hard to accept your claim that most SF bike riders obey the laws. Or is it only when they are emboldened by being in a critical mass and unlikely to be arrested that they switch on the "ignore law" mode?
Who said anything about court? If you want to go there, how does the logic "it was inconvenient for me to have to unclip my feet from the pedals" work in court, were any bicyclists ever given tickets for failing to bother to even try stopping at a red light?
I said there was a significant difference, not that there was a legally justifiable defense against a ticket.
So are you saying that as long as the cyclist slows down and looks for opposing traffic then that's ok since he at least looked?
Now you're just making things up. I'm not the one trying to justify blatant disregard for the law by bicyclists based on a few car drivers breaking the law, too.
But it's disingenuous for a car driver to smugly point out "But bikes break the law all the time!" when car drivers are also guilty of traffic violations
It is not dishonest to point out that bike riders routinely completely and blatantly ignore the laws while most drivers obey them. I can't remember ever seeing a car driver speed up so he could blow through a stop sign, while I see that kind of behaviour on a daily basis from bike riders. And it is extremely rare for a driver to speed up so he can try to weave in between pedestrians in a marked crosswalk at an intersection with a stop sign, while it is common practice for bike riders. I've lost count of those bike riders in the bike lane next to me who have actually swerved into my lane so they could speed through a crosswalk full of peds, and the only reason I didn't hit him was because I was stopping as the law requires for such a situation.
It is a logical fallacy to claim that the illegal thing you are doing is ok because a few other people do other illegal things. It is not disingenuous to point out that fallacy, whether the person pointing it out drives a car or doesn't. And you'll notice that it isn't car drivers who are trying to get a pass on obeying the laws by claiming that they shouldn't have to stop at a red light because bicyclists don't bother obeying that law, it's always the bike riders who point their fingers at drivers whenever the issue of obeying the law pops up.
Cars may rarely proceed straight through a stop light in SF, but it's quite common to see cars roll through a red light to make a right turn on red if there's no opposing traffic..
There is a significant difference between a "California stop" and how a bicyclist treats a red light. The former is an admission that "yes, there is a law that says I must stop and I'm almost complying with it", the latter is "what law?". And the incomplete stop on a turn on red is a failure to come to a complete stop while executing an otherwise legal maneuver, while a bicyclist blowing through a red light is not only a failure to stop, but a failure in that he 'go-ed' when it was still illegal to do so. There is no "straight through on red" law anywhere in the country.
Neither bikes nor cars in downtown SF can claim moral superiority when it comes to following traffic laws.
The percentage of drivers who can claim moral superiority for actually obeying the law is significantly higher than the percentage of bicyclists who can claim the same thing. Continuing to argue that bikers aren't wrong for their flagrant disregard for traffic laws because some drivers break the law is a logical fallacy.
If you've got cars stacked up 2 feet from each other, then you're in stop and go traffic that's moving at a crawl - bikes aren't slowing you down, they are reducing the number of cars in front of you.
They aren't reducing the number of cars in front of me, and they never accelerate as well as a car. When stop turns to go and they can't keep up, yes, they are slowing the other traffic down.
Some car drivers obey the law, some don't.
Yes, I've seen a few drivers who run through stop signs. Never the consistent parade of them like I see with bicyclists. And a few who plow through occupied crosswalks, but not the consistent blatant disregard for pedestrians that local bicyclists demonstrate daily.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves - I can maintain a stopped trackstand for only a few seconds before i've got to unclip and put my feet down -
You want the privileges of riding in the street, you need to accept the responsibilities. That means STOP at stop signs and red lights. That means stop when a crosswalk has pedestrians in it. If that means you have to take your feet off the pedals to keep from falling over, well, take your feet off the pedals so you don't fall over. The argument that it is too inconvenient for you to obey the law doesn't work. It's inconvenient for me to stop at stop signs, too.
when a car has the right of way at a stop sign,
It is the side street the bike is on that has the stop sign, not the main one. In the situation I described the car has the right of way because he doesn't have a signal telling him otherwise. It is the bicyclist who is ignoring the rules of right of way, not the driver.
Encouraging cyclists to take the right of way when they don't have right of way just further encourages them to not respect right of way laws.
I never do that, and nothing I've written today talks about doing that. You don't have to encourage bicyclists to take the right of way, they do it naturally and without thought to the other people around them. That's life in a college town. YMMV.
Legal and safe solution: get off the damn bike and push it to your destination as a pedestrian. Walking a block or two isn't a hardship.
At this college campus, having to PARK your bike more than a block away from your office is considered a hardship, to the point that instead of installing bike lockers for the really expensive bikes in the same area other bike racks already were installed on the sidewalk, they confiscated 12 car parking spaces to put the lockers. The reason they couldn't put the lockers in place of the almost unused racks? Too far from offices, people who ride in would have to walk too far.
Contrast that to the official policy that those people who are now displaced from the car park are supposed to park a half a mile away or more. Idiocy at its best.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations).
Whenever I see a bicyclist say those words, he almost never follows them with "and the same responsibilities to obey the law". It's always in the context that bicyclists want to be treated by drivers as the law says they must, but them following the vehicular laws isn't important.
You say "*BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me" during a commute to work on city streets. So? There's a car two feet behind that car, and another one two feet behind him. It's called "rush hour", or in some smaller town, "rush minute". Part of commuting and quite legal.
You in particular may be very fastidious in obeying traffic signals and rules of the road, but since almost none of the riders I come across in this town bother with such trivialities it is impossible not to paint the entire riding population with the same brush.
In fact, to keep from killing many of your compatriots, it is necessary to assume they are going to ignore the law. A bike approaching the street you are on from a side street with a stop sign? Assume he isn't going to, assume he's going to actually speed up to challenge you for the right of way, and then he's going to either lay over in a sharp turn or side-step into the crosswalk to try to invoke the pedestrian in a crosswalk laws on you.
As a driver, I'm 5x more cautious with a biker around than a pedestrian, because they are so unpredictable and impatient.
As a driver in a college town, I consider pedestrians the one unpredictable hazard. They will stand on the corner looking at you approach until you can't stop and then they'll step into the crosswalk. Or they'll step into the crosswalk while you are a block away and wait to cross until you are forced to stop for them. Or they'll be walking parallel to the street as if they're going straight ahead and then do a quick 90 degree turn to step into the crosswalk in front of you. They'll cross halfway and then stop. One day I saw one that was walking BACKWARDS across the street. One moment he was on the far side of the street facing the other way and the next he was in my lane still facing the other way. Completely unpredictable.
Bicyclists are completely predictable. They will not stop at any stop sign and very rarely at red lights. They refuse to stop for pedestrians in either marked or unmarked crosswalks. A bike approaching an intersection where they have a stop sign and you don't will speed up to match your arrival and then lean over in a hard bank to turn into the street in front of you. If they are actually going to cross the street you are on, they'll blow past the stop sign and side-slip into the crosswalk, pretending to be pedestrians. A biker who wants to be on the sidewalk will go there, at full speed, even if you are standing in his way.
No, bicyclists are hardly unpredictable. You can predict with certainty they will do what is illegal. That's life in a college town where 99% of the people on bikes have no clue that "mortality" applies to them and no concern for the drivers they terrorize.
And it is remarkable to note that there are websites that demand an email address for certain things (login name, contact, etc) that are written to help the user avoid entering incorrect data by enforcing a FOUR CHARACTER MAXIMUM on the TLD. If you have an email under the.museum domain, you're screwed. And then all the XN- domains which, as I recall counting at the time, got up to 26 characters long.
These are also the sites that enforce character limits on the local part of any email address, disallowing any but the common characters and ignoring all of the unusual ones, like '+'.
The same CBS that sells "24/7 access" to the cameras in the Big Brother house, and then turns them off whenever it wants to keep what's going on inside a secret? The CBS that started that experiment by giving free access and then figured out it could make tons of money by selling it?
The same CBS that forced Time Warner to drop them from the lineup because TW wouldn't pay the fees that CBS was demanding for their "programming" that they were broadcasting for free to anyone with an antenna? That CBS?
Just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same CBS.
and if someone wants to make something that potentially could help them (since they own the rights to it and the movies are popular),
Since the latest movies have rewritten the universe, I guess anything that relates to the old universe is public domain? The only thing the remake guys might have to pay royalties on is the patented technique of shining bright lights from off screen directly into the lens to create annoying and sometimes painful lens flare effects. I don't watch a lot of major productions anymore, but the new ST I did, and I swear the people in charge were doing everything they could to remind the viewers that they were watching a movie, and that the suspension of reality necessary for a good sci-fi flick wasn't necessary for this one. Every scene reminded you that there was a camera by creating deliberate artifacts, instead of trying to remove the camera as a middleman in the process.
Ok, so they'll go to the Pizza Hut tonight to work their normal shift. Then go to a brew place and bus a few tables. But they're still saving up for a PS5 and hoping someday to move out of their parent's basement.
The government cannot censor the speech of an employee, not because of employer-employee relationship, but because of the limits placed on government in general.
They fired him. He can still post crap as @NSCWonk or whatever it was. He can still do it for free. He's just not working for the people whose families he slandered anymore.
Why is this such a big deal? He went out of his way to insult people who employed him, including their families, and he got fired for it. What do you think they'd do, give him a Freedom Medal and have him to tea at the White House so he can learn stuff about Malia and Sascha he could post about?
It doesn't (or at least didn't use to) involve spying on someone's every private communication;
Tweets on twitter aren't private communications, dipshit. He was posting publicly and doing it knowing that he had followers in the same government agency where he worked. He knew because you can see who follows you, and he was certainly hearing the buzz his tweets were creating.
In other words, the same people he saw face to face on a regular basis were seeing his tweets. It doesn't take rocket science or ultra-invasive NSA spying for someone to correlate what they saw him doing with what the twit on twitter was tweeting about.
Again, tweeting unflattering remarks does not constitute a crime, unless you live in a totalitarian society.
He wasn't charged with a crime, dipshit, he was fired from his job because he was making inappropriate comments about his co-workers, his bosses, and their families. Get over it. It happens.
Why would you expect NOT to have your life scrutinized on an ongoing basis when you're in the middle of such sensitive work? You know what it entails when you sign up.
This. Especially for a security clearance, a common question is "what aliases do you now use and have you used in the past?" A twitter account name certainly counts as an alias. If he didn't reveal that on his clearance filing, then his clearance can and should be yanked. There goes his NSC job.
With this moronic logic, you probably don't think your local utility monopoly is a monopoly.
Well, when it comes to "employment", my local utility isn't a monopoly. Lots of people work other places. Only when it comes to the product the utility provides to the public is it a monopoly provider.
But then you've just pointed out the failure of your claim that the US government is a monopoly. It isn't a monopoly on employment to start with, and there are all kinds of other "governments" within the US if you really want to claim that "government employment" is a specific product the government provides to the customers. State, local, regional... all are government employers.
No, the claim that the "government is a monopoly" in this context is a clear sign that you are one of the people who thinks everything good and nice is supposed to be provided by the government to the citizens. The truth is the government has no monopoly on employment, not even employment of "policy wonks".
Notice how there's no mention of the NSA in the press regarding this case, just some vaguery about shopping or travel patterns.
It doesn't take NSA surveillance to identify someone by correlating their shopping and travel patterns with their tweets. After a while of someone publicly posting things like "Week in Italy at govt expense" and "Got a great deal at Macy's on shoes", and co-workers who notice that someone is gone to Italy for a week and wearing nice new shoes he says he got at Macy's... Yes, it will take more than two coincidences to create real suspicion, but it can and has been done before.
The travel part can even be someone who doesn't know him at all, just the guy who processes his expense reports. Hmmm, this guy is putting in travel expenses for all the same places this "anonymous tweeter" is saying he's at and at the same time. Gosh, do you think?
I don't know what this specific guy's tweets were, but if he's the type of person with the ego to BE tweeting in the first place, then he's probably not worried about telling his friends and co-workers all about things in his life too, and that creates the data to make the correlation.
That's strange. Politicians and political parties do it all the time.
Do what all the time? It's impossible to figure out the antecedant here.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that a government employee apparently requires more integrity than a politician holding high office.
Politicians "holding high office" are not employees that can be fired without a very large amount of effort. Impeachment or recall. A political appointee job is at the whim of the person who makes the appointment.
There are a large number of politicians who regularly get burned by stepping over the line, but yes, a large number that don't. I think you'll find that Weiner is currently being dogged by a lapse, as was Edwards in a recent presidential campaign, although neither are over insulting children. However, Sarah Palin's children were fair game.
Just curious if there was ever any info released about where the show planned to go in the short or long term.
Short term, they'll probably all meet at the Pizza Hut tonight and then go to a local brew place for a couple of beers.
Long term, I think most of them will eventually move out of their parent's basement and go to college, and then probably move back. I think some of them are saving up for a PlayStation 5.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like they added almost 50% more parking,
No, they cost a lot of parking spaces for what could have been just as easily provided just a very short distance away. It is not a simple trade being done here, you can't just say "oh we got 10 bike parking spaces at the expense of two car spots", because those two car spaces are in much higher demand and are much harder to provide than any bike parking is.
and minimised the average distance from vehicle to building entrance.
So what you are saying is that the people who are fit enough to ride bikes to work on a regular basis and rich enough to pay for special parking for them cannot walk another block to get from their special bike parking space to where they work.
The car drivers probably need the exercise
I rarely say this, but this time it is right to do so: fuck you. Who the hell are you to tell other people that they cannot park where they work because "they need the exercise"? And who the hell are you to tell people who live 20 miles away and have to commute to work that they must do so by bicycle? Where do you get off telling someone else that they should bike to work (and they can't park in the lockers without paying extra for it, by the way) when they need to do errands or get to other places quickly, or may have equipment they need to transport or just be on call for some reason and need to use a car?
Those lockers could have just as easily been put a very short distance away without costing any parking at all, but no, you think those spaces should be lost because the people who parked there "need the exercise". You are arrogant and an idiot.
How's that any different than when a transmission seizes up?
Gross large scale mechanical failure is typically much different than a computer or sensor failure. You can imagine no failure mode other than one that physically disables all drivetrain operation, not even one that leaves the car drivable but not autonomously?
I've had a clutch cable break while I was away from home. Lots of people might consider that a major drivetrain failure. Because I had a driver's license and knew how to drive, I was able to get the car home and then install a new cable the next morning myself. I've had GPS lose position and I could "take over" the navigation because I know how to drive. I've had exactly one large scale gross mechanical failure that required a tow truck, and that was when a car behind me saw the green light but missed the fact I was still stopped at the intersection in front of him.
Imagine an autonomous vehicle with a BSOD forcing it to stop, and the humans inside have no idea how to move the vehicle to a place of safety. What hilarity!
And when today's ubiquitous navigation system screwup has the car about to cross an active runway at a British airport, watch the fun as the people inside panic because they don't know how to keep it from happening or get out of the way of the airplane in their window.
No. There will always be a license involved, just to deal with contingencies. You do notice, I hope, that pilots still need licenses to fly even though a large part of the process is now autonomous for them, don't you? The recurrent training for an ATP working in a major airline doesn't deal just with the landing and takeoff -- manual parts. "Oh, the rest is automated, you don't need training to deal with that." They've had autonomous systems (autopilots) for a couple of decades and those systems STILL fail in sometimes wonderful and catastrophic ways.
Of course, it would be worth a lot more if we got more than someone's probably biased interpretation of one side of a phone call. Like, actual quotes would be a lot better. Even then, who knows what the questions were.
Realistically, electronically controlled vehicles will roll out in this order:
You mean "autonomous", don't you? Electronically controlled is close to what we have today for almost everything but actual steering. "Fly by wire".
6. Middle income people who can't qualifiy for a license.
If you can't qualify for a license, you aren't going to be able to take over from you car when you need to, and you won't be able to drive the last mile from your garage to the road with all the electronic navigation aids that will be required. Save lives? Turn the highway into a large parking lot when one car fails and the "driver" isn't qualified to pick his nose, much less manipulate the controls of his car to get it out of the way.
And for all the bright people who will immediately try telling me all the wonderful things autonomous cars do, you need to keep in mind that they don't exist in anything close to production form and the large scale interactions have not been determined in real life. Models of something that doesn't exist have no ground truth data to verify the model and shouldn't be trusted with millions of human lives.
Did you not understand the comment?
I understood the comment. That question about court was trying to change the issue from following the law to trying to get out of a ticket.
The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him.
That author was me, and the issue wasn't the bike being stopped, it was the bike failing to stop at the stop sign he had. I didn't have a stop sign. I wasn't stopped. I wasn't giving up my right of way trying to convince the bike rider to enter the street I was on. The bike ran the stop sign, and the response was "my pet peeve is having to take my feet off the pedals so I don't fall over when I stop." Well, I'm sorry, but that's not an excuse for failing to stop.
Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists,
Oh my. I'm so sorry that the unpredictable nature of bicyclists obeying the traffic laws that they expect drivers to obey is annoying to them. Here's a simple solution to that: obey the law. End of problem. As a driver if I could predict that you as a bike rider would actually stop at the stop sign that controls your entry into the through street, then I wouldn't have to cringe every time you speed up and pray that you don't hit a bit of gravel, lose control/traction, and slip into my path as you make your high speed turn. I wouldn't have to guess whether you're going to become a "pedestrian" by swerving over into the crosswalk without slowing down. The annoyance a bike rider feels at being unpredictable could be solved easily.
Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so.
I'm sorry, but saying "but but but other people break the law too" isn't saying you don't approve of what bike riders are doing, it is trying to excuse it. If you're trying to say that you don't approve of bike riders breaking the law, then what drivers do is irrelevant. I don't approve of drivers breaking the law, but I don't try to excuse it by saying "look at all the bike riders who break the law, too." It is irrelevant what laws the bike riders break if the topic is what drivers do.
How many bike lockers fit in the space of 12 car parking spaces?
Who cares, and how is it relevant? That lot is always 100% capacity with cars on work days, so any bike lockers there consume resources that could better be used for their intended purposes. And twice as many lockers could have been installed 200 feet away without using up any parking lot space at all. You can't park cars on the sidewalk, but you can park bikes there. Using car parking for bike lockers of any number is idiocy. The fact that the bike lockers could have gone elsewhere and in fact been increased in number is what makes using the parking lot space for cars a better use, BTW.
It was idiocy driven by vocal bike riders who thought that 200 feet was too far to walk so the lockers had to go THERE, fueled by a transit services administration with a goal of eliminating cars from campus altogether. One hand washed the other. The people who wound up having to park more than a half a mile away lost. (And if you are curious, that lot a half mile away is the football stadium lot, so when the home game comes to town on Nov. 1 (a workday) no employee OR student will be allowed to park there because athletic sponsors who get prime parking passes are more important than the normal function of education and research that the University conducts. The official position of the "parking services" department is "stay home and telecommute". That's a nice idea, a class of 100 freshmen English students being taught by a professor who had to "call it in".)
Where do you live that the car is always at fault? Around here, the motorist rarely gets any punishment even if they run over and kill a cyclist.
I live in a college town that is bicycle-friendly and automobile-antagonistic, where every car-bike collision is considered to be the driver's fault and never the biker (at least in the vocal bike community that always starts shouting that every time it happens). And car-pedestrian accidents are used to demonstrate the deadly abuse of the driving privilege, even when the accident happens in an unmarked crosswalk on a US highway at 3AM on a rainy night and the pedestrian is dressed in black clothing. Not only was the ped trying to be unseen, he challenged the car to a duel that the laws of physics guaranteed he'd lose. But the driver was at fault because he couldn't see someone who didn't want to be seen and didn't want to wait thirty seconds to cross the normally empty road after the car went by.
Perhaps your lack of civic and police support comes from being in the city that created Critical Mass, a mostly leaderless group of bike riders who seem to have the goal of deliberately screwing up the public streets for those you claim have a legal right to be there -- cars. On that website we find the suggestion "but just stopping through a whole light change sequence can make all the difference for a fun, convivial, social ride." And it makes for a complete clog of the traffic behind the "mass". A pretty good monkey-wrenching of the system. It really is hard to imagine why the police might not be impressed with a group of people who have the goal of creating as much congestion and confusion as possible while breaking the law.
Also from that site:
A simple google on the phrase "critical mass" (adding "bicycle" to avoid nuclear weaponry references) returns many reports of CM riders deliberately provoking confrontations with cars and even buses (and yes, some drivers doing the provoking). It's hard to ignore the stories like the one posted to a Portland blog for bikers, where the author was proud to have been part of a Chicago ride that blocked a six way intersection and kept an ambulance on a emergency run from getting through. (Here. About halfway down, search for "ambulance". Then search for "TriMet bus" to read an account of CM surrounding a bus, apparently angered that public mass transit was allowed on the streets.)
When one knows that CM was formed in SF, it's hard to accept your claim that most SF bike riders obey the laws. Or is it only when they are emboldened by being in a critical mass and unlikely to be arrested that they switch on the "ignore law" mode?
How does that logic work in court?
Who said anything about court? If you want to go there, how does the logic "it was inconvenient for me to have to unclip my feet from the pedals" work in court, were any bicyclists ever given tickets for failing to bother to even try stopping at a red light?
I said there was a significant difference, not that there was a legally justifiable defense against a ticket.
So are you saying that as long as the cyclist slows down and looks for opposing traffic then that's ok since he at least looked?
Now you're just making things up. I'm not the one trying to justify blatant disregard for the law by bicyclists based on a few car drivers breaking the law, too.
But it's disingenuous for a car driver to smugly point out "But bikes break the law all the time!" when car drivers are also guilty of traffic violations
It is not dishonest to point out that bike riders routinely completely and blatantly ignore the laws while most drivers obey them. I can't remember ever seeing a car driver speed up so he could blow through a stop sign, while I see that kind of behaviour on a daily basis from bike riders. And it is extremely rare for a driver to speed up so he can try to weave in between pedestrians in a marked crosswalk at an intersection with a stop sign, while it is common practice for bike riders. I've lost count of those bike riders in the bike lane next to me who have actually swerved into my lane so they could speed through a crosswalk full of peds, and the only reason I didn't hit him was because I was stopping as the law requires for such a situation.
It is a logical fallacy to claim that the illegal thing you are doing is ok because a few other people do other illegal things. It is not disingenuous to point out that fallacy, whether the person pointing it out drives a car or doesn't. And you'll notice that it isn't car drivers who are trying to get a pass on obeying the laws by claiming that they shouldn't have to stop at a red light because bicyclists don't bother obeying that law, it's always the bike riders who point their fingers at drivers whenever the issue of obeying the law pops up.
Cars may rarely proceed straight through a stop light in SF, but it's quite common to see cars roll through a red light to make a right turn on red if there's no opposing traffic..
There is a significant difference between a "California stop" and how a bicyclist treats a red light. The former is an admission that "yes, there is a law that says I must stop and I'm almost complying with it", the latter is "what law?". And the incomplete stop on a turn on red is a failure to come to a complete stop while executing an otherwise legal maneuver, while a bicyclist blowing through a red light is not only a failure to stop, but a failure in that he 'go-ed' when it was still illegal to do so. There is no "straight through on red" law anywhere in the country.
Neither bikes nor cars in downtown SF can claim moral superiority when it comes to following traffic laws.
The percentage of drivers who can claim moral superiority for actually obeying the law is significantly higher than the percentage of bicyclists who can claim the same thing. Continuing to argue that bikers aren't wrong for their flagrant disregard for traffic laws because some drivers break the law is a logical fallacy.
If you've got cars stacked up 2 feet from each other, then you're in stop and go traffic that's moving at a crawl - bikes aren't slowing you down, they are reducing the number of cars in front of you.
They aren't reducing the number of cars in front of me, and they never accelerate as well as a car. When stop turns to go and they can't keep up, yes, they are slowing the other traffic down.
Some car drivers obey the law, some don't.
Yes, I've seen a few drivers who run through stop signs. Never the consistent parade of them like I see with bicyclists. And a few who plow through occupied crosswalks, but not the consistent blatant disregard for pedestrians that local bicyclists demonstrate daily.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves - I can maintain a stopped trackstand for only a few seconds before i've got to unclip and put my feet down -
You want the privileges of riding in the street, you need to accept the responsibilities. That means STOP at stop signs and red lights. That means stop when a crosswalk has pedestrians in it. If that means you have to take your feet off the pedals to keep from falling over, well, take your feet off the pedals so you don't fall over. The argument that it is too inconvenient for you to obey the law doesn't work. It's inconvenient for me to stop at stop signs, too.
when a car has the right of way at a stop sign,
It is the side street the bike is on that has the stop sign, not the main one. In the situation I described the car has the right of way because he doesn't have a signal telling him otherwise. It is the bicyclist who is ignoring the rules of right of way, not the driver.
Encouraging cyclists to take the right of way when they don't have right of way just further encourages them to not respect right of way laws.
I never do that, and nothing I've written today talks about doing that. You don't have to encourage bicyclists to take the right of way, they do it naturally and without thought to the other people around them. That's life in a college town. YMMV.
Legal and safe solution: get off the damn bike and push it to your destination as a pedestrian. Walking a block or two isn't a hardship.
At this college campus, having to PARK your bike more than a block away from your office is considered a hardship, to the point that instead of installing bike lockers for the really expensive bikes in the same area other bike racks already were installed on the sidewalk, they confiscated 12 car parking spaces to put the lockers. The reason they couldn't put the lockers in place of the almost unused racks? Too far from offices, people who ride in would have to walk too far.
Contrast that to the official policy that those people who are now displaced from the car park are supposed to park a half a mile away or more. Idiocy at its best.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations).
Whenever I see a bicyclist say those words, he almost never follows them with "and the same responsibilities to obey the law". It's always in the context that bicyclists want to be treated by drivers as the law says they must, but them following the vehicular laws isn't important.
You say "*BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me" during a commute to work on city streets. So? There's a car two feet behind that car, and another one two feet behind him. It's called "rush hour", or in some smaller town, "rush minute". Part of commuting and quite legal.
You in particular may be very fastidious in obeying traffic signals and rules of the road, but since almost none of the riders I come across in this town bother with such trivialities it is impossible not to paint the entire riding population with the same brush. In fact, to keep from killing many of your compatriots, it is necessary to assume they are going to ignore the law. A bike approaching the street you are on from a side street with a stop sign? Assume he isn't going to, assume he's going to actually speed up to challenge you for the right of way, and then he's going to either lay over in a sharp turn or side-step into the crosswalk to try to invoke the pedestrian in a crosswalk laws on you.
Sorry, but that's real world experience.
As a driver, I'm 5x more cautious with a biker around than a pedestrian, because they are so unpredictable and impatient.
As a driver in a college town, I consider pedestrians the one unpredictable hazard. They will stand on the corner looking at you approach until you can't stop and then they'll step into the crosswalk. Or they'll step into the crosswalk while you are a block away and wait to cross until you are forced to stop for them. Or they'll be walking parallel to the street as if they're going straight ahead and then do a quick 90 degree turn to step into the crosswalk in front of you. They'll cross halfway and then stop. One day I saw one that was walking BACKWARDS across the street. One moment he was on the far side of the street facing the other way and the next he was in my lane still facing the other way. Completely unpredictable.
Bicyclists are completely predictable. They will not stop at any stop sign and very rarely at red lights. They refuse to stop for pedestrians in either marked or unmarked crosswalks. A bike approaching an intersection where they have a stop sign and you don't will speed up to match your arrival and then lean over in a hard bank to turn into the street in front of you. If they are actually going to cross the street you are on, they'll blow past the stop sign and side-slip into the crosswalk, pretending to be pedestrians. A biker who wants to be on the sidewalk will go there, at full speed, even if you are standing in his way.
No, bicyclists are hardly unpredictable. You can predict with certainty they will do what is illegal. That's life in a college town where 99% of the people on bikes have no clue that "mortality" applies to them and no concern for the drivers they terrorize.
Anyway, I'm gonna go kill some time on the shabakaat
Ick. Shabacow tastes much better than shabakaat. Shabasheep, yum. And shababacon? Yabba dabba shaba!
Whoosh.
These are also the sites that enforce character limits on the local part of any email address, disallowing any but the common characters and ignoring all of the unusual ones, like '+'.
Maybe because CBS "gets it"?
The same CBS that sells "24/7 access" to the cameras in the Big Brother house, and then turns them off whenever it wants to keep what's going on inside a secret? The CBS that started that experiment by giving free access and then figured out it could make tons of money by selling it?
The same CBS that forced Time Warner to drop them from the lineup because TW wouldn't pay the fees that CBS was demanding for their "programming" that they were broadcasting for free to anyone with an antenna? That CBS?
Just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same CBS.
and if someone wants to make something that potentially could help them (since they own the rights to it and the movies are popular),
Since the latest movies have rewritten the universe, I guess anything that relates to the old universe is public domain? The only thing the remake guys might have to pay royalties on is the patented technique of shining bright lights from off screen directly into the lens to create annoying and sometimes painful lens flare effects. I don't watch a lot of major productions anymore, but the new ST I did, and I swear the people in charge were doing everything they could to remind the viewers that they were watching a movie, and that the suspension of reality necessary for a good sci-fi flick wasn't necessary for this one. Every scene reminded you that there was a camera by creating deliberate artifacts, instead of trying to remove the camera as a middleman in the process.
Ok, so they'll go to the Pizza Hut tonight to work their normal shift. Then go to a brew place and bus a few tables. But they're still saving up for a PS5 and hoping someday to move out of their parent's basement.
The government cannot censor the speech of an employee, not because of employer-employee relationship, but because of the limits placed on government in general.
They fired him. He can still post crap as @NSCWonk or whatever it was. He can still do it for free. He's just not working for the people whose families he slandered anymore.
Why is this such a big deal? He went out of his way to insult people who employed him, including their families, and he got fired for it. What do you think they'd do, give him a Freedom Medal and have him to tea at the White House so he can learn stuff about Malia and Sascha he could post about?
It doesn't (or at least didn't use to) involve spying on someone's every private communication;
Tweets on twitter aren't private communications, dipshit. He was posting publicly and doing it knowing that he had followers in the same government agency where he worked. He knew because you can see who follows you, and he was certainly hearing the buzz his tweets were creating.
In other words, the same people he saw face to face on a regular basis were seeing his tweets. It doesn't take rocket science or ultra-invasive NSA spying for someone to correlate what they saw him doing with what the twit on twitter was tweeting about.
Again, tweeting unflattering remarks does not constitute a crime, unless you live in a totalitarian society.
He wasn't charged with a crime, dipshit, he was fired from his job because he was making inappropriate comments about his co-workers, his bosses, and their families. Get over it. It happens.
Why would you expect NOT to have your life scrutinized on an ongoing basis when you're in the middle of such sensitive work? You know what it entails when you sign up.
This. Especially for a security clearance, a common question is "what aliases do you now use and have you used in the past?" A twitter account name certainly counts as an alias. If he didn't reveal that on his clearance filing, then his clearance can and should be yanked. There goes his NSC job.
With this moronic logic, you probably don't think your local utility monopoly is a monopoly.
Well, when it comes to "employment", my local utility isn't a monopoly. Lots of people work other places. Only when it comes to the product the utility provides to the public is it a monopoly provider.
But then you've just pointed out the failure of your claim that the US government is a monopoly. It isn't a monopoly on employment to start with, and there are all kinds of other "governments" within the US if you really want to claim that "government employment" is a specific product the government provides to the customers. State, local, regional ... all are government employers.
No, the claim that the "government is a monopoly" in this context is a clear sign that you are one of the people who thinks everything good and nice is supposed to be provided by the government to the citizens. The truth is the government has no monopoly on employment, not even employment of "policy wonks".
Notice how there's no mention of the NSA in the press regarding this case, just some vaguery about shopping or travel patterns.
It doesn't take NSA surveillance to identify someone by correlating their shopping and travel patterns with their tweets. After a while of someone publicly posting things like "Week in Italy at govt expense" and "Got a great deal at Macy's on shoes", and co-workers who notice that someone is gone to Italy for a week and wearing nice new shoes he says he got at Macy's... Yes, it will take more than two coincidences to create real suspicion, but it can and has been done before.
The travel part can even be someone who doesn't know him at all, just the guy who processes his expense reports. Hmmm, this guy is putting in travel expenses for all the same places this "anonymous tweeter" is saying he's at and at the same time. Gosh, do you think?
I don't know what this specific guy's tweets were, but if he's the type of person with the ego to BE tweeting in the first place, then he's probably not worried about telling his friends and co-workers all about things in his life too, and that creates the data to make the correlation.
That's strange. Politicians and political parties do it all the time.
Do what all the time? It's impossible to figure out the antecedant here.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that a government employee apparently requires more integrity than a politician holding high office.
Politicians "holding high office" are not employees that can be fired without a very large amount of effort. Impeachment or recall. A political appointee job is at the whim of the person who makes the appointment.
There are a large number of politicians who regularly get burned by stepping over the line, but yes, a large number that don't. I think you'll find that Weiner is currently being dogged by a lapse, as was Edwards in a recent presidential campaign, although neither are over insulting children. However, Sarah Palin's children were fair game.
Just curious if there was ever any info released about where the show planned to go in the short or long term.
Short term, they'll probably all meet at the Pizza Hut tonight and then go to a local brew place for a couple of beers.
Long term, I think most of them will eventually move out of their parent's basement and go to college, and then probably move back. I think some of them are saving up for a PlayStation 5.