Would that solution be that more incidents which would have resulted in death instead resulted in injury after the change? It's a fairly obvious explanation -- but could be tested by looking for a change in number of deaths. As such, the statistics don't back it up.
What does have strong statistical backing is the "safety in numbers" effect -- every time the population of cyclist doubles, the accident rate for each individual goes down by about 1/3. Make cycling seem unsafe, so fewer people do it? It becomes less safe.
To do nothing to reduce the rate of accidents and only focus on their severity is foolish. The discussion needs to be about safety as a whole; it can't begin and end with helmets.
On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.
I've heard this one once or twice, but I haven't yet seen a citation. Do you have one?
I had to chuckle recently, just a little, at the irony of that biker in the U.S. taking part in a ride protesting over helmet laws. He was thrown over the handlebars and smashed his head on the road. If he'd been wearing a helmet, he would probably have lived.
On the individual, "$PERSON hits their head, how bad are they injured?" level, the statistics back you up on this.
On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.
Why? Damned good question. There's been speculation that wearing a helmet makes cyclists more careless, and a study finding that cars actually pass closer to a cyclist wearing a helmet than one without. The other likely explanation is that mandatory helmet laws (or even widespread helmet use) make cycling appear more dangerous than it actually is, leading fewer people to bike, reducing the safety-in-numbers effect (when other vehicles aren't accustomed to sharing the road they aren't looking for bicycles). (By the way -- compare the injury rate to that of the Netherlands, where nobody wears a helmet unless they're taking part in a race, and try that on for size).
On a related note -- did you know that mandatory seatbelt laws increase death rates among pedestrians? Drivers drive more recklessly because they feel safer -- and they are, but not the poor sods they happen to be sharing the road with.
So -- nanny state laws have unintended consequences. Even ones that seem like "common sense".
If one were to go to the trouble of using an internal VPN rather than standard wireless encryption, it would really make sense to go the one extra step and ensure that only traffic from the VPN tun device on the endpoint gets routed to the internet...
Maybe. My phone supports OpenVPN or IPsec, but I don't know about the PS3 or the Wii... and not having a "guest network" for visitors would be more than a little inhospitable. I've certainly had situations where I had a wireless home network with lighter security and a VPN running over it 24/7 (typically with that VPN's local endpoints being dedicated, work-only, company-owned machines).
If I knew I had the kind of situation discussed in TFA, I'd certainly go the extra mile... but absent that kind of urgency, I don't think that "VPN over wireless == VPN traffic *only*" necessarily follows.
Hmm -- I didn't catch that it was new accounts. Depending on how his corporate email system was secured, it may or may not have been necessary to steal username/password credentials to send messages appearing to be from the intended target.
My internally-geared, steel-frame folding bike weighs 15kg. How the hell do you make a carbon bike that heavy?
(Secondary reaction: I'm really not so sure that a carbon frame makes sense for a commuter. They have lousy failure modes [like aluminum -- ask my wife about that; her top tube spontaneously crushed in the middle of an intersection once], they can't really be repaired [whereas any corner of the world will have a welding shop able to enact emergency repairs on a steel frame], they're hard to trust after a minor accident due to the potential for invisible damage, and they're priced at a massive premium. Now, if I had the money and I were into racing, I'd buy a KirkLee frame in a heartbeat -- those things are absolutely droolworthy, despite being built by a fellow whose ego can be felt from miles away -- but even then, there's no way I'd risk making it my daily driver).
Then maybe his application should have checked for fucking compatibility before it installed itself.
Android applications have a manifest. The manifest indicates which phones it's compatible with. The Android Market checks the manifest and only displays applications to users with compatible phones. The Amazon Appstore doesn't.
In what way is this not Amazon's fault? If you're using a part of the Android API that promises to do filtering, anything that claims to be an Amazon application repository should fulfill its part of that contract and... filter! He was doing device compatibility checks in exactly the way that the Android documentation tells developers to do.
Had that been a webserver, the second core could have handled another download. A quad core machine would max out at four downloads. That's not 2% overhead in my math book. That's more like 2% real work, with the rest being encryption overhead.
The Google 2% number was (1) for web serving, and (2) after making an insane bunch of optimizations -- that's not out-of-the-box performance. But they published those optimizations, so you can do them too.
That said -- my employer runs a large group of web sites doing actual commerce, and a single inexpensive VPS running stunnel is able to keep up with SSL for all of them at once -- we have failovers, of course, but haven't seen the need to make it active/active; the load is just too low. In short -- in the test above, you were doing something very, very wrong.
Yes, that sounds totally plausible and not at all contrived. I can well imagine many people being so eager to cheat at games that they will happily commit a complex and technically-demanding federal crime in order to gain a slight edge.
Huh? Set up your phone to proxy or VPN through your personal workstation. Run one of the many available man-in-the-middle proxies to replace the levels your phone downloads with easier ones, or ones that award you points for nothing.
Now, what part of intercepting YOUR communications from YOUR phone when they go through YOUR computer is a federal crime?
Yes. I pay for the roads with my fuel taxes. You do not.
At least here in Texas, vehicle registration and fuel taxes (partially) pay for highways -- but not for city streets.
City streets are paid out of the municipal fund, which cyclists pay into as much as anyone... arguably more, since we're spending more of our money locally (thus going into city coffers via sales taxes) instead of sending it to car companies and lenders.
(And note that I said "partially" -- highways are not even nearly covered by the relevant use taxes).
As for solution A, it also takes a certain willingness to use public transportation. It won't go to your driveway, you probably will have to walk 5 or 10 minutes to the nearest bus, tram or subway stop at both ends. It might rain, it might - at least up north - snow, it might be windy. If the tiniest bit of effort is too much, then people will drive anyway. At least some Americans I've run into have a mentality where public transportation has no hope to win.
Folding bikes are a great solution to the last-mile problem; there's the US-made Bike Friday for those who want something as comfortable to ride as a regular bike (and with a fold/unfold process ~3 seconds each way), the British-made Brompton for folks who prioritize having the smallest fold possible, and plenty of less-premium manufacturers for folks looking for a deal (...and then for folks who don't want to pedal there's the YikeBike, which is its own creature).
As for "people will drive anyway"... well, to a point. We've got plenty of folks taking the train from Cedar Park into downtown Austin and back -- that commute is just horrible otherwise. If we ever get gas prices adjusted to accurately reflect the externalities, I imagine that the sticker shock would be sufficient to adjust habits further.
Actually -- "taking the lane" when legal and appropriate is one of the things TS101 teaches. If there's more than one lane going in each direction, and the rightmost lane isn't wide enough for safe passing (here in Texas, there's only a legal presumption that this is true for a lane wider than 14 feet), using your lane positioning to prompt other drivers to change lanes can be considerably safer than encouraging them to pass as closely as possible by riding in the far right.
("When appropriate" is a key phrase -- courtesy is important too, and one wants to allow faster vehicles to pass easily whenever they can safely do so. However, my safety is more important than your convenience).
You might try taking the TS101 class offered nationwide by the League of American Bicyclists. Your local class will be tailored to your state and local laws -- but one thing they all teach is accident statistics. Riding on the sidewalk, even when legal, entails far more risk than riding in the street (being one of the top 3 causes of cyclist-at-fault accidents -- the other two being riding at night without lights and riding the wrong way on the street). [Another useful thing to come out of those accident statistics -- all but ~3% of accidents have avoidance or mitigation mechanisms available. Proper lane positioning, signalling, emergency manoeuvring, and simply following traffic laws all do a world of good].
When you're on the sidewalk, folks pulling in and out of driveways aren't generally looking for anything faster than a pedestrian. The advice you give could get people killed.
But CEOs don't do time in concrete cubes, they do time at resorts with fences around them.
Fences? Whatcha' talkin' bout?
Last time I visited someone at a minimum-security "camp", there weren't any fences... just the threat that if you left, they'd come and find you, and put you somewhere a lot less pleasant.
Parent said "those who developed it" (the organization), as opposed to "the individual who developed it". One set is doubtless larger than the other.
More to a point -- almost every commercial organization I've been in has had one or two reviewers for each patch. Almost every well-organized open source project I've been in has had patches posted to an open mailing list that everyone is encouraged to review, and then required explicit approval from one or two individuals for merge.
You tell me which of those is the stronger process.
I'm an e-bike enthusiast. To put it briefly -- pedal-assist adds very, very little to the price of a bike; it's a sensor and slightly more smarts in the controller, all of which are very well-understood and widely implemented. The biggest difference between Chinese e-bikes and those seen in premium markets is the components used -- Chinese e-bikes, because they're built to be powered principally by the motor and to be motorcycle replacements rather than recreational equipment (albeit recreational equipment with a huge amount of utility value), can afford to use heavy, inexpensive, lead-acid batteries (which also are hard to dispose of cleanly, but that's a separate discussion) and cheap, low-end components that weigh a lot and result in poor ride quality. French and American e-bikes cater to a different market -- people who cycle by choice. As such, the demand is for a lightweight bicycle with excellent handling and high-end components that one can actually enjoy pedaling -- although there is no mandate for users to pedal in the American market, an e-bike you couldn't assist with your legs would be an absolute flop. Li-Ion batteries are expensive. High-end bicycle components are expensive -- my last truly high-end e-bike came with a wheelset made in France that retailed about $1kUSD and an internally-geared hub made in Germany that retails around $2kUSD (and is considered the finest available).
It's a completely different market, driven by a different kind of consumer. Of course the prices will be different -- the products are nothing like each other.
I stop my bike with its tires directly on the crack in the road indicating the induction loop sensor, but my lane doesn't get a green light unless and until a car pulls up behind me. Is a cyclist supposed to wait five to ten minutes for a car to pull up behind and "chaperone" the bicycle?
Here in Austin, one can call 311 about those issues, and if they get multiple reports about the same intersection they'll send a work crew out to fix it (usually after a few months, but hey, better than nothing).
The NYPD is now doing a lot more ticketing of cyclists. Frankly, a lot of this is deserved. I support cycling, and the expansion of bike infrastructure, but I constantly see NYC cyclists flagrantly violating traffic laws and endangering both motorists and pedestrians. Some cyclists here seem to think they have a special status than enables them to glide past everything and everyone else -- including red lights and stop signs -- and to charge thru traffic with impunity.
We have that here too. In terms of what we're trying to do about it -- the cycling community has worked with local courts to set up a "defensive driving" equivalent based on the League of American Bicyclists' Traffic Safety 101 curriculum (the full class is two days, at least as they give it here; I understand that the version used as the alternative to a ticket is shorter). There isn't really enough enforcement to get people into it, though -- and I hate seeing all the work I do to be a visible counterexample to the "scofflaw cyclist" stereotype be undone by folks who seem to just not care.
In any event -- it's good to hear that there's progress being made. I was half-expecting to hear about problems with adequate parking or available storage.
I'm curious to see walking, transit and cab use mentioned but cycling left out; is utility cycling uncommon in New York? If so, could you speculate as to why?
My wife and I live in Austin and go supermarket shopping fairly regularly -- her with her handbuilt cargo bike (steel frame, belt drive; front basket, large rear panniers, large basket mountable above them), me with my Bike Friday Tikit (and, for Costco trips, a 200lb-capacity cargo trailer running behind it). Finding a secure place to store the trailer looked like it might be an issue when we were moving into our current condominium, but the former owner got a statement from the board that it would be welcome in the regular bicycle parking under the stairs.
Then again, here in Austin, I've never been more than a few miles from the nearest grocer -- though the HEB just a few blocks from our current location is somewhat limited on selection, the Whole Foods landmark and headquarters is in easy cycling distance for occasions when we need something more exotic (and neither objects to the Tikit being used as a shopping cart when wheeled around folded with its pannier open; at Costco, by contrast, I've made a habit of locking up the trailer in the copious and mostly unused bike parking and bringing the bike inside folded in my cart).
If you haven't read much Gibson, then it's a mismash of half-baked ideas without the development and focus to carry it through.
If you're a Gibson fan, by contrast, the context from the books/stories/etc make the movie make a good deal of sense, and thereby into a moderately fun flick.
Why is this phone $420 and only available with T-mobile? Is this really a competitive handset?
Dual-core CPU, 4G radio, latest-generation 3D acceleration, DVI output (and the hardware is more than adequate for streaming a great-quality picture off Netflix over that DVI output). I bought it as future-proofing, but the consumer justification for the markup is that it's gamer equipment... nothing about a "freedom premium".
Slashdot Mirror
Would that solution be that more incidents which would have resulted in death instead resulted in injury after the change? It's a fairly obvious explanation -- but could be tested by looking for a change in number of deaths. As such, the statistics don't back it up.
What does have strong statistical backing is the "safety in numbers" effect -- every time the population of cyclist doubles, the accident rate for each individual goes down by about 1/3. Make cycling seem unsafe, so fewer people do it? It becomes less safe.
To do nothing to reduce the rate of accidents and only focus on their severity is foolish. The discussion needs to be about safety as a whole; it can't begin and end with helmets.
See:
On the individual, "$PERSON hits their head, how bad are they injured?" level, the statistics back you up on this.
On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.
Why? Damned good question. There's been speculation that wearing a helmet makes cyclists more careless, and a study finding that cars actually pass closer to a cyclist wearing a helmet than one without. The other likely explanation is that mandatory helmet laws (or even widespread helmet use) make cycling appear more dangerous than it actually is, leading fewer people to bike, reducing the safety-in-numbers effect (when other vehicles aren't accustomed to sharing the road they aren't looking for bicycles). (By the way -- compare the injury rate to that of the Netherlands, where nobody wears a helmet unless they're taking part in a race, and try that on for size).
On a related note -- did you know that mandatory seatbelt laws increase death rates among pedestrians? Drivers drive more recklessly because they feel safer -- and they are, but not the poor sods they happen to be sharing the road with.
So -- nanny state laws have unintended consequences. Even ones that seem like "common sense".
Maybe. My phone supports OpenVPN or IPsec, but I don't know about the PS3 or the Wii... and not having a "guest network" for visitors would be more than a little inhospitable. I've certainly had situations where I had a wireless home network with lighter security and a VPN running over it 24/7 (typically with that VPN's local endpoints being dedicated, work-only, company-owned machines).
If I knew I had the kind of situation discussed in TFA, I'd certainly go the extra mile... but absent that kind of urgency, I don't think that "VPN over wireless == VPN traffic *only*" necessarily follows.
Hmm -- I didn't catch that it was new accounts. Depending on how his corporate email system was secured, it may or may not have been necessary to steal username/password credentials to send messages appearing to be from the intended target.
The neighbor would have been able to use him as a source address for traffic -- but *not* to steal his usernames and passwords out of the air.
Your carbon-frame bike weighs 15kg?!
My internally-geared, steel-frame folding bike weighs 15kg. How the hell do you make a carbon bike that heavy?
(Secondary reaction: I'm really not so sure that a carbon frame makes sense for a commuter. They have lousy failure modes [like aluminum -- ask my wife about that; her top tube spontaneously crushed in the middle of an intersection once], they can't really be repaired [whereas any corner of the world will have a welding shop able to enact emergency repairs on a steel frame], they're hard to trust after a minor accident due to the potential for invisible damage, and they're priced at a massive premium. Now, if I had the money and I were into racing, I'd buy a KirkLee frame in a heartbeat -- those things are absolutely droolworthy, despite being built by a fellow whose ego can be felt from miles away -- but even then, there's no way I'd risk making it my daily driver).
Android applications have a manifest. The manifest indicates which phones it's compatible with. The Android Market checks the manifest and only displays applications to users with compatible phones. The Amazon Appstore doesn't.
In what way is this not Amazon's fault? If you're using a part of the Android API that promises to do filtering, anything that claims to be an Amazon application repository should fulfill its part of that contract and... filter! He was doing device compatibility checks in exactly the way that the Android documentation tells developers to do.
The Google 2% number was (1) for web serving, and (2) after making an insane bunch of optimizations -- that's not out-of-the-box performance. But they published those optimizations, so you can do them too.
That said -- my employer runs a large group of web sites doing actual commerce, and a single inexpensive VPS running stunnel is able to keep up with SSL for all of them at once -- we have failovers, of course, but haven't seen the need to make it active/active; the load is just too low. In short -- in the test above, you were doing something very, very wrong.
Huh? Set up your phone to proxy or VPN through your personal workstation. Run one of the many available man-in-the-middle proxies to replace the levels your phone downloads with easier ones, or ones that award you points for nothing.
Now, what part of intercepting YOUR communications from YOUR phone when they go through YOUR computer is a federal crime?
At least here in Texas, vehicle registration and fuel taxes (partially) pay for highways -- but not for city streets.
City streets are paid out of the municipal fund, which cyclists pay into as much as anyone... arguably more, since we're spending more of our money locally (thus going into city coffers via sales taxes) instead of sending it to car companies and lenders.
(And note that I said "partially" -- highways are not even nearly covered by the relevant use taxes).
Folding bikes are a great solution to the last-mile problem; there's the US-made Bike Friday for those who want something as comfortable to ride as a regular bike (and with a fold/unfold process ~3 seconds each way), the British-made Brompton for folks who prioritize having the smallest fold possible, and plenty of less-premium manufacturers for folks looking for a deal (...and then for folks who don't want to pedal there's the YikeBike, which is its own creature).
As for "people will drive anyway"... well, to a point. We've got plenty of folks taking the train from Cedar Park into downtown Austin and back -- that commute is just horrible otherwise. If we ever get gas prices adjusted to accurately reflect the externalities, I imagine that the sticker shock would be sufficient to adjust habits further.
(No, gas taxes don't pay for road development cost in the US -- not even close).
Actually -- "taking the lane" when legal and appropriate is one of the things TS101 teaches. If there's more than one lane going in each direction, and the rightmost lane isn't wide enough for safe passing (here in Texas, there's only a legal presumption that this is true for a lane wider than 14 feet), using your lane positioning to prompt other drivers to change lanes can be considerably safer than encouraging them to pass as closely as possible by riding in the far right.
("When appropriate" is a key phrase -- courtesy is important too, and one wants to allow faster vehicles to pass easily whenever they can safely do so. However, my safety is more important than your convenience).
Actually -- that's part of the point.
Give people a road in which they don't feel safe unless they pay attention, and... they pay attention, and the accident rate goes down!
There's been a movement towards removing some marking and signage for just this reason, and the accident statistics are encouraging.
You might try taking the TS101 class offered nationwide by the League of American Bicyclists. Your local class will be tailored to your state and local laws -- but one thing they all teach is accident statistics. Riding on the sidewalk, even when legal, entails far more risk than riding in the street (being one of the top 3 causes of cyclist-at-fault accidents -- the other two being riding at night without lights and riding the wrong way on the street). [Another useful thing to come out of those accident statistics -- all but ~3% of accidents have avoidance or mitigation mechanisms available. Proper lane positioning, signalling, emergency manoeuvring, and simply following traffic laws all do a world of good].
When you're on the sidewalk, folks pulling in and out of driveways aren't generally looking for anything faster than a pedestrian. The advice you give could get people killed.
Fences? Whatcha' talkin' bout?
Last time I visited someone at a minimum-security "camp", there weren't any fences... just the threat that if you left, they'd come and find you, and put you somewhere a lot less pleasant.
Parent said "those who developed it" (the organization), as opposed to "the individual who developed it". One set is doubtless larger than the other.
More to a point -- almost every commercial organization I've been in has had one or two reviewers for each patch. Almost every well-organized open source project I've been in has had patches posted to an open mailing list that everyone is encouraged to review, and then required explicit approval from one or two individuals for merge.
You tell me which of those is the stronger process.
Who ever said "none, because many eyes..." rather than "fewer, because many eyes..."?
It's a strawman. Nobody sensible ever made that claim.
Howdy, there --
I'm an e-bike enthusiast. To put it briefly -- pedal-assist adds very, very little to the price of a bike; it's a sensor and slightly more smarts in the controller, all of which are very well-understood and widely implemented. The biggest difference between Chinese e-bikes and those seen in premium markets is the components used -- Chinese e-bikes, because they're built to be powered principally by the motor and to be motorcycle replacements rather than recreational equipment (albeit recreational equipment with a huge amount of utility value), can afford to use heavy, inexpensive, lead-acid batteries (which also are hard to dispose of cleanly, but that's a separate discussion) and cheap, low-end components that weigh a lot and result in poor ride quality. French and American e-bikes cater to a different market -- people who cycle by choice. As such, the demand is for a lightweight bicycle with excellent handling and high-end components that one can actually enjoy pedaling -- although there is no mandate for users to pedal in the American market, an e-bike you couldn't assist with your legs would be an absolute flop. Li-Ion batteries are expensive. High-end bicycle components are expensive -- my last truly high-end e-bike came with a wheelset made in France that retailed about $1kUSD and an internally-geared hub made in Germany that retails around $2kUSD (and is considered the finest available).
It's a completely different market, driven by a different kind of consumer. Of course the prices will be different -- the products are nothing like each other.
Here in Austin, one can call 311 about those issues, and if they get multiple reports about the same intersection they'll send a work crew out to fix it (usually after a few months, but hey, better than nothing).
We have that here too. In terms of what we're trying to do about it -- the cycling community has worked with local courts to set up a "defensive driving" equivalent based on the League of American Bicyclists' Traffic Safety 101 curriculum (the full class is two days, at least as they give it here; I understand that the version used as the alternative to a ticket is shorter). There isn't really enough enforcement to get people into it, though -- and I hate seeing all the work I do to be a visible counterexample to the "scofflaw cyclist" stereotype be undone by folks who seem to just not care.
In any event -- it's good to hear that there's progress being made. I was half-expecting to hear about problems with adequate parking or available storage.
I'm curious to see walking, transit and cab use mentioned but cycling left out; is utility cycling uncommon in New York? If so, could you speculate as to why?
My wife and I live in Austin and go supermarket shopping fairly regularly -- her with her handbuilt cargo bike (steel frame, belt drive; front basket, large rear panniers, large basket mountable above them), me with my Bike Friday Tikit (and, for Costco trips, a 200lb-capacity cargo trailer running behind it). Finding a secure place to store the trailer looked like it might be an issue when we were moving into our current condominium, but the former owner got a statement from the board that it would be welcome in the regular bicycle parking under the stairs.
Then again, here in Austin, I've never been more than a few miles from the nearest grocer -- though the HEB just a few blocks from our current location is somewhat limited on selection, the Whole Foods landmark and headquarters is in easy cycling distance for occasions when we need something more exotic (and neither objects to the Tikit being used as a shopping cart when wheeled around folded with its pannier open; at Costco, by contrast, I've made a habit of locking up the trailer in the copious and mostly unused bike parking and bringing the bike inside folded in my cart).
My impression is thus:
If you haven't read much Gibson, then it's a mismash of half-baked ideas without the development and focus to carry it through.
If you're a Gibson fan, by contrast, the context from the books/stories/etc make the movie make a good deal of sense, and thereby into a moderately fun flick.
Dual-core CPU, 4G radio, latest-generation 3D acceleration, DVI output (and the hardware is more than adequate for streaming a great-quality picture off Netflix over that DVI output). I bought it as future-proofing, but the consumer justification for the markup is that it's gamer equipment... nothing about a "freedom premium".
My LG P-999 (aka T-Mobile G2x) would beg to differ with you. So would my phone before that (an HTC Hero) and my phone before that (an HTC Dream).
Also -- missed the announcement from HTC they would be unlocking their future bootloaders?