You have plenty of choice. A vote for a third candidate does not throw your vote away - even if that candidate is not elected, an increase in other party's showing sends a message to the incumbrents.
A third party candidate can easily mean the difference between success and victory if they split the vote. Numbers of votes significant enough to show third party interest are likely enough to tip the election if people consistently choose a third party candidate rather than one of the two main ones. The Democrats and Republicans love the idea of third party candidates because they can use it to manipulate the vote.
Quite frankly, I don't think any level of third party interest is going to get through to those people who vote straight tickets of Democrat and Republican regardless of issues. Most of them do it because that's how their parents vote, or that's how people they trust tell them to vote, or because people within their ethnic/social/religious group are supposed to vote that way. I personally disagree with those people who run those "get up and vote" programs. Most people in this country shouldn't be voting because they have no idea or real interest in the issues they're voting on.
On the other hand, I believe the Russian mafia receives a fair amount of funding via copyright violations. Still, that has nothing to do with politics in our country. This legislation frightens me. I'll make the appropriate letters/calls/emails to my representatives, but I suspect that the average joe doesn't realize how this will impact them, so I'll just be stroking my ego by being a drop in the bucket.
Keep in mind that variants and dialects of English can vary quite a bit, and the book itself says some speakers may be missing a few of the phonemes.
With, of course, the classic case of cot, caught, and bother, which are defined with three different phonemes, but where the average person in the use uses only two of them based upon region.
A billion dollars for intellectual property? Gosh, that's like charging $750 for copying one song... Seriously, though, how does one value these things? For that matter, what intellectual property is this? The article is rather vague.
What should be done is harsher peanalties in the case of accidents. Person gets into a minor fender bender because they were yapping on the phone? What happens now? A minor increase and insurance premuim, and they're back on the road. What should happen - take away their license for 3 months and send them to traffic school - they obviously don't know how to drive properly without distractions.
At one point I'd have been tempted to agree with you. We need to emphasize that there's more to an accident than buying your way out. However, I've been stuck without a car for weeks at a time before due to repairs or the like. I have no co-workers who live in my close vicinity. There is no adequate public transportation that could get me to my workplace around the right time and to and from the right location. Luckily, I've been an avid bike rider enough, and there are safe roads between there (not to mention that, compared to many of my co-workers, I live close to work, a 20 minute car drive or an hour bike ride). Otherwise, many towns just aren't built for people who don't own a car. Yes, the large cities have subways and busses. Very small towns, you can walk to everything. Most towns fall in that middle abyss where a car is the only way you're going to be able to live your life. Depriving people of a car more or less deprives them of a productive life. It's one of the reasons you see senior citizens edging down the road at 15 MPH because their cataracts keep them from seeing far enough to drive the speed limit.
The American writen test really is easy. There's a chunk on recognizing road signs, and soem questions aobut which way to turn your wheel when parking on a hill, how soon to turn on your blinker / turn off your high beams, etc. That's the test you take to get your license, and I think it's the same test you take to get a learner's permit. It's been so long that I don't exactly remember...
In Kentucky, at least while I was growing up, it was a written test (multiple choice) for the permit and a practical (in car driving around town) exam for the license. ^_^ One of the four written tests that they cycled around had the infamous question about what do to if a small animal dashes in front of you with the answers being a) Swerve to your left b) Swerve to your right c) Hit the brakes or d) Accelerate. D was the correct answer as it was overall the safest method for you and the cars around you. The practical exam (admittedly set in a small town) had you driving around town, doing proper stops, undershifting if you had a manual, parking on hills, and parallel parking (with real cars that the city didn't own).
I had to take an exam when I mvoed to Ohio, but it was all pretty obvious stuff and they ended the test after you had a certain number of questions right rather than force you to finish it. I've been told that there's no parallel parking, but they do force you to back into an array of cones without knocking any of them down.
Oh, and incidentally, I'm a manual transmission nut myself. In my family, you have to pass the driver's test in a manual transmission car. My parents figured that if you could pass it in a manual, you could do it in the automatic. ^_^ Besides which, there's just something about a person who can shift for themselves.
You and your cycling colleague should understand that while motorist use the road to reach from A to B for their business, you are using the same route for pleasure. Those two can not be put on the same foot.
I think that's part of the issue too. There are bicyclists who are using the road for business. I bike to get to and from places. There are motorists that drive for pleasure. I wouldn't be too surprised if it's becoming less common with soaring gas prices, but I know people who will cruise around just for the fun of driving.
Overall, I see no reason why cyclists and automobiles can't share the same road if both groups drive sensibly. There will always be idiot drivers who are convinced that bicyclists don't belong on the road and will harass them. There will always be idiot bicyclists who cuirse down the middle of a road at 5 MPH without lights or reflectors at twilight. The majority can co-exist peacefully.
Personally, I think that it's more than safety issues that drive the politics of the road. Bicyclists pay maybe $2000 for their bike if it's really high end and the only fuel they have to pay for is food. Automobile drivers spend $20,000 easy on a new car and then will put hundreds of dollars into the local economy via gasoline. Which side do you think the government's going to be taking? The bicyclists may be driving entirely sensibly in a way which is good for them and good for the environment, but they're not pumping the same amount of money into the community, not to mention that they're spurning the golden idol of gasoline.
You sacrifice some small piece of your ideology in exchange for real political power, until piece by piece you haven't got any ideology left, and it turns out you've become everything you set out to change.
Like the quote goes, "The problem with revolutions is that they generally turn you 360 degrees."
Do you always drive on the road only in the bicycle designated lanes?
*rolls eyes* Because, of course, putting all cyclists in the gutter, in an area which is flooded with trash most of the time and just plain flooded if it rains, is a good idea. Oh, and legally require them to be out of the immediate line of sight of drivers so that all it takes is a slight drift or a righthand turn and the bicyclist is sideswiped.
Even better, build unlit bike paths which also have pedestrians who insist on jogging around in dark sweatsuits without any lights indicating their positions, and require bicyclists to only use those paths.
The "bicycle safety" legislation has never been about cycling safety. It's all about trying to get the cyclists off of the road for the peace of mind of drivers who can't stand the idea of someone else sharing their road.
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
They kind of do that, moreso in Oblivion. Low-quality items that are mass-produced tend to be low value compared to their weight. In Oblivion, it was so low that they sold as 0. Morrowind, they tried, but they were foiled by that their weight system didn't allow weights below 0.01 and the lowest gold value was 1. So, unless the forks and parchment weighed a tenth of a pound, You could still steal large amounts and sell it.
The only other solution would be to take all your guns away and most people would be very disapointed with that.
Which they did at one point in the game. And yes, most of us screamed bloody murder at it.
Some of us take great pride in conserving our ammo and thereby collecting all 231 glass arrows in the game.
The magazine Computer Games had an article on this recently, with the writer complaining that there was no nude Alyx Vance skin yet. The argument he had was that modding has become more complex by a matter of degree. Reskinning a model in Half-life involved changing a texture map. Changing the shape of a model involved a budget copy of 3d Studio. Now, characters have reflection maps, soft lighting maps, etc (I don't remember what exactly he quoted) and the bar has become that much higher, just for changing one character. You can see the same thing in modding from Morrowind to Oblivion. Most mods are little changes, a new sword, some tweaked values. Yes, it's only recently out, but still... it's been years since you could do a skin up in Photoshop and that was it. Nowadays, you pretty much need to be modeller, a skinner, a programmer (to change other variables and shaders) or at least have a team with those values. And, with the growing complexity of the world, interconnection becomes more important. You can't just work independently on your part while another member of your team, in another state, works on his part, because the two are more tightly connected.
Game design is hard and the bar just keeps rising.
I think the folks who wrote Oblivion would better spend their time by making it so that having more than 2 human characters on screen doesn't grind an Athlon64 with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 6800 to 7-9 fps, or make the NPCs walk into each other before moving to go around
Och... I wish a lot of games would do that. Anyone remember seeing hordes of demons coming after them in Doom? And remember how Unreal had about two enemies per level? Doom used lowtech graphics and dumb intelligence, so they could have hordes. Unreal had beautful graphics and AI good enough to have the enemies strafing as they approached you (hey, it was high stuff back then) to avoid your fire. But that sophistication had a cost, the fact that the two highly-skilled opponents were the only creatures on the level. Unfortunately, games seem to have decided that the second method is the better one. The only FPS I can think of offhand that spurned that was the Serious Sam series. Both methods can work if not taken to extremes, but sometimes I really miss those clusterhordes...
My only real beef with the physics in Oblivion is how often running into a desk will send the items on its surface flying around the room as if an explosion had occurred. *wry grin* That and the tendency for odd physics chain reactions by picking up an item off the table... I probably have such a low CPU count that it's convinced the objects are sharing space and therefore it explodes in the fine manner of anyone who teleports into a solid object.
Not really. The main reason things are possible is because somebody went out and worked out how to do them.
Every good inventor has had to have some kind of inspiration to actually make the invention. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention — the inventor needs a particular device or effect, so he creates it — but sometimes they don't realize there is a need, or they don't have a basis to work from. Some brilliant researcher could be looking at the paper, smacking his forehead and crying "Now why didn't I think of that?" and proceed to apply his research in anti-anxiety drugs to create alcohol without negative effects. Sure, it's the end result guy who gets the patent (or, if the first guy is clever enough to pull off a very general patent, he may get it), but it was the inspiration of the person who posted the theoretical idea that got things off of the ground.
Heck, you see it all the time in programming. Someone points out a theoretical vulnerability in an encryption algorithm and next you know, someone's posted a practical implementation. Personally, I wonder if the original poster was trying to avoid DMCA lawsuits by getting someone else to be their catspaw, but the idea is there.
Actually, I seem to remember seeing a statistic saying that the average erect length is 5 inches. *wry grin* But I'm certainly not searching for that at work, so I'll have to rely on someone else looking up the statistic. It seems slightly small to me, but then again, that could be just the social bias that men have regarding men's penis sizes. Oddly enough, studies show that most women don't care all that much. After all, the vagina is only sensitive for the first three inches or so.
For that matter, even if we add in language saying that it has to orbit a star, what does that do to the binary-star systems were the stars are rotating each other?
When I was in high school, we had to do reports with video presentations. For whatever reason (I think I just thought it was cool at the time), my presentation involved me and a friend doing a "fight." It was quite laughable... it was obvious that the blows were missing by miles (including an infamous bit where I "hit" the guy and he remembered a few seconds later to react) and we thought we could speed it up. Wouldn't you know it, but it showed up in another (much more well done) student movie at our school, along with credits for me being the "martial arts director" for their film (they had no martial arts involved). You mean I could have sued them for massive amounts of money? Dang...
Obviously he's not laughing; thus you're not laughing WITH him, you're laughing AT him.
Reminds me of a situation at my old middle school. Our teacher reached up to pull down the overhead projector screen and accidentally pulled down the whole unit form the ceiling. She started laughing, so we joined in. All of a sudden, she turns, glares, and yells "Why are you lauughing at me?" One brave soul said, "Ma'am, we're not laught at you. We're laughing with you." to which she replied, "Do you see me laughing?"
I sometimes wonder if she really was laughing or if we just filled it in to justify ourselves. I could also see her initially laughing to counter shock, then realizing that she could have gotten hurt, sobering up, and changing her memories of what she did or didn't do.
I'm holding opinion until we see what the actual criteria for rejection were. I could see this as a situation where the letter said something along the lines of, "We found that you did not do sufficient work to establish your definition of evolution when surveying the people." The researcher, of course, would like to have a groundswell of earnest defense from reactionaries, so he rephrases it to sound like the government is advocating ID. In all the noise and hubbub, the government cuts its losses and pays him off rather than spend tons (metric tonnes, I'm sure) of money defending themselves.
If the "paranormal" reports of people who are able to "read" by sweeping their fingers and/or feet over text are credible, perhaps these kinds of photosensitive cells are the mechanism? It would not constitute "vision" per se, but perhaps the brain can, at least, decode the patterns of color changes across a surface with a fidelity sufficient to recognize and comprehend letterforms.
The general "scientific" explanation used is that the people are sensing the slight difference in heat between the black letters and white text (or the slightly raised surface of the ink). Now in actuality, the answer is usually that the person being tested is getting their cues in an even less legitimate manner, ranging from brief glimpses at the paper before being blindfolded (often unconsciously) to deliberate fakery.
Hope you've memorized your fingerprint, or at least carry around a copy of it.
I used to carry exact representations of all of my fingerprints until I realized what a security risk that was. Ten minutes with a hot stove and I'm once again risk free. Awfully hard to hold onto slick surfaces, though...
Following comment regarding fencing: It's also an incredibly safe sport. I read an article in a sports mag years ago (sorry, can't remember which one) that rated sports based on injury frequency, and fencing was right next to golf.
From what I understand, most martial arts have a very low injury rate, as odd as that may sound. Part of it is that you're taught ways to avoid getting hurt (learning how to fall properly is an enormous benefit at times) but also that your opponents generally aren't trying to hurt you and are conscious of safety themselves. Supposedly, the majority of injuries in martial arts are from people who are coming back to it after some time and injure themselves trying to attain the same feats they could manage before leaving. I've been there before... your mind and your muscle reflexes say that you can kick above your head still and you can, at least until the strained groin muscles catch up to you... although the bigger problem is that you can accelerate your fist or foot as quickly as before, but you can't always stop it as well. Hello, hyper-extended joints.
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A third party candidate can easily mean the difference between success and victory if they split the vote. Numbers of votes significant enough to show third party interest are likely enough to tip the election if people consistently choose a third party candidate rather than one of the two main ones. The Democrats and Republicans love the idea of third party candidates because they can use it to manipulate the vote.
Quite frankly, I don't think any level of third party interest is going to get through to those people who vote straight tickets of Democrat and Republican regardless of issues. Most of them do it because that's how their parents vote, or that's how people they trust tell them to vote, or because people within their ethnic/social/religious group are supposed to vote that way. I personally disagree with those people who run those "get up and vote" programs. Most people in this country shouldn't be voting because they have no idea or real interest in the issues they're voting on.
On the other hand, I believe the Russian mafia receives a fair amount of funding via copyright violations. Still, that has nothing to do with politics in our country. This legislation frightens me. I'll make the appropriate letters/calls/emails to my representatives, but I suspect that the average joe doesn't realize how this will impact them, so I'll just be stroking my ego by being a drop in the bucket.
Keep in mind that variants and dialects of English can vary quite a bit, and the book itself says some speakers may be missing a few of the phonemes.
With, of course, the classic case of cot, caught, and bother, which are defined with three different phonemes, but where the average person in the use uses only two of them based upon region.
A billion dollars for intellectual property? Gosh, that's like charging $750 for copying one song... Seriously, though, how does one value these things? For that matter, what intellectual property is this? The article is rather vague.
Then they may have trouble knowing when to stop wiping.
What should be done is harsher peanalties in the case of accidents. Person gets into a minor fender bender because they were yapping on the phone? What happens now? A minor increase and insurance premuim, and they're back on the road. What should happen - take away their license for 3 months and send them to traffic school - they obviously don't know how to drive properly without distractions.
At one point I'd have been tempted to agree with you. We need to emphasize that there's more to an accident than buying your way out. However, I've been stuck without a car for weeks at a time before due to repairs or the like. I have no co-workers who live in my close vicinity. There is no adequate public transportation that could get me to my workplace around the right time and to and from the right location. Luckily, I've been an avid bike rider enough, and there are safe roads between there (not to mention that, compared to many of my co-workers, I live close to work, a 20 minute car drive or an hour bike ride). Otherwise, many towns just aren't built for people who don't own a car. Yes, the large cities have subways and busses. Very small towns, you can walk to everything. Most towns fall in that middle abyss where a car is the only way you're going to be able to live your life. Depriving people of a car more or less deprives them of a productive life. It's one of the reasons you see senior citizens edging down the road at 15 MPH because their cataracts keep them from seeing far enough to drive the speed limit.
In Kentucky, at least while I was growing up, it was a written test (multiple choice) for the permit and a practical (in car driving around town) exam for the license. ^_^ One of the four written tests that they cycled around had the infamous question about what do to if a small animal dashes in front of you with the answers being a) Swerve to your left b) Swerve to your right c) Hit the brakes or d) Accelerate. D was the correct answer as it was overall the safest method for you and the cars around you. The practical exam (admittedly set in a small town) had you driving around town, doing proper stops, undershifting if you had a manual, parking on hills, and parallel parking (with real cars that the city didn't own).
I had to take an exam when I mvoed to Ohio, but it was all pretty obvious stuff and they ended the test after you had a certain number of questions right rather than force you to finish it. I've been told that there's no parallel parking, but they do force you to back into an array of cones without knocking any of them down.
Oh, and incidentally, I'm a manual transmission nut myself. In my family, you have to pass the driver's test in a manual transmission car. My parents figured that if you could pass it in a manual, you could do it in the automatic. ^_^ Besides which, there's just something about a person who can shift for themselves.
I think that's part of the issue too. There are bicyclists who are using the road for business. I bike to get to and from places. There are motorists that drive for pleasure. I wouldn't be too surprised if it's becoming less common with soaring gas prices, but I know people who will cruise around just for the fun of driving.
Overall, I see no reason why cyclists and automobiles can't share the same road if both groups drive sensibly. There will always be idiot drivers who are convinced that bicyclists don't belong on the road and will harass them. There will always be idiot bicyclists who cuirse down the middle of a road at 5 MPH without lights or reflectors at twilight. The majority can co-exist peacefully.
Personally, I think that it's more than safety issues that drive the politics of the road. Bicyclists pay maybe $2000 for their bike if it's really high end and the only fuel they have to pay for is food. Automobile drivers spend $20,000 easy on a new car and then will put hundreds of dollars into the local economy via gasoline. Which side do you think the government's going to be taking? The bicyclists may be driving entirely sensibly in a way which is good for them and good for the environment, but they're not pumping the same amount of money into the community, not to mention that they're spurning the golden idol of gasoline.
You sacrifice some small piece of your ideology in exchange for real political power, until piece by piece you haven't got any ideology left, and it turns out you've become everything you set out to change.
Like the quote goes, "The problem with revolutions is that they generally turn you 360 degrees."
*rolls eyes* Because, of course, putting all cyclists in the gutter, in an area which is flooded with trash most of the time and just plain flooded if it rains, is a good idea. Oh, and legally require them to be out of the immediate line of sight of drivers so that all it takes is a slight drift or a righthand turn and the bicyclist is sideswiped.
Even better, build unlit bike paths which also have pedestrians who insist on jogging around in dark sweatsuits without any lights indicating their positions, and require bicyclists to only use those paths.
The "bicycle safety" legislation has never been about cycling safety. It's all about trying to get the cyclists off of the road for the peace of mind of drivers who can't stand the idea of someone else sharing their road.
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
They kind of do that, moreso in Oblivion. Low-quality items that are mass-produced tend to be low value compared to their weight. In Oblivion, it was so low that they sold as 0. Morrowind, they tried, but they were foiled by that their weight system didn't allow weights below 0.01 and the lowest gold value was 1. So, unless the forks and parchment weighed a tenth of a pound, You could still steal large amounts and sell it.
Which they did at one point in the game. And yes, most of us screamed bloody murder at it.
Some of us take great pride in conserving our ammo and thereby collecting all 231 glass arrows in the game.
Game design is hard and the bar just keeps rising.
Och... I wish a lot of games would do that. Anyone remember seeing hordes of demons coming after them in Doom? And remember how Unreal had about two enemies per level? Doom used lowtech graphics and dumb intelligence, so they could have hordes. Unreal had beautful graphics and AI good enough to have the enemies strafing as they approached you (hey, it was high stuff back then) to avoid your fire. But that sophistication had a cost, the fact that the two highly-skilled opponents were the only creatures on the level. Unfortunately, games seem to have decided that the second method is the better one. The only FPS I can think of offhand that spurned that was the Serious Sam series. Both methods can work if not taken to extremes, but sometimes I really miss those clusterhordes...
My only real beef with the physics in Oblivion is how often running into a desk will send the items on its surface flying around the room as if an explosion had occurred. *wry grin* That and the tendency for odd physics chain reactions by picking up an item off the table... I probably have such a low CPU count that it's convinced the objects are sharing space and therefore it explodes in the fine manner of anyone who teleports into a solid object.
Every good inventor has had to have some kind of inspiration to actually make the invention. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention — the inventor needs a particular device or effect, so he creates it — but sometimes they don't realize there is a need, or they don't have a basis to work from. Some brilliant researcher could be looking at the paper, smacking his forehead and crying "Now why didn't I think of that?" and proceed to apply his research in anti-anxiety drugs to create alcohol without negative effects. Sure, it's the end result guy who gets the patent (or, if the first guy is clever enough to pull off a very general patent, he may get it), but it was the inspiration of the person who posted the theoretical idea that got things off of the ground.
Heck, you see it all the time in programming. Someone points out a theoretical vulnerability in an encryption algorithm and next you know, someone's posted a practical implementation. Personally, I wonder if the original poster was trying to avoid DMCA lawsuits by getting someone else to be their catspaw, but the idea is there.
Or, you could always join Quitters, Inc....
Actually, I seem to remember seeing a statistic saying that the average erect length is 5 inches. *wry grin* But I'm certainly not searching for that at work, so I'll have to rely on someone else looking up the statistic. It seems slightly small to me, but then again, that could be just the social bias that men have regarding men's penis sizes. Oddly enough, studies show that most women don't care all that much. After all, the vagina is only sensitive for the first three inches or so.
wow. you don't have much humour, do you?
Oh, I don't think he's been that badly purged...
For that matter, even if we add in language saying that it has to orbit a star, what does that do to the binary-star systems were the stars are rotating each other?
When I was in high school, we had to do reports with video presentations. For whatever reason (I think I just thought it was cool at the time), my presentation involved me and a friend doing a "fight." It was quite laughable... it was obvious that the blows were missing by miles (including an infamous bit where I "hit" the guy and he remembered a few seconds later to react) and we thought we could speed it up. Wouldn't you know it, but it showed up in another (much more well done) student movie at our school, along with credits for me being the "martial arts director" for their film (they had no martial arts involved). You mean I could have sued them for massive amounts of money? Dang...
Reminds me of a situation at my old middle school. Our teacher reached up to pull down the overhead projector screen and accidentally pulled down the whole unit form the ceiling. She started laughing, so we joined in. All of a sudden, she turns, glares, and yells "Why are you lauughing at me?" One brave soul said, "Ma'am, we're not laught at you. We're laughing with you." to which she replied, "Do you see me laughing?"
I sometimes wonder if she really was laughing or if we just filled it in to justify ourselves. I could also see her initially laughing to counter shock, then realizing that she could have gotten hurt, sobering up, and changing her memories of what she did or didn't do.
I'm holding opinion until we see what the actual criteria for rejection were. I could see this as a situation where the letter said something along the lines of, "We found that you did not do sufficient work to establish your definition of evolution when surveying the people." The researcher, of course, would like to have a groundswell of earnest defense from reactionaries, so he rephrases it to sound like the government is advocating ID. In all the noise and hubbub, the government cuts its losses and pays him off rather than spend tons (metric tonnes, I'm sure) of money defending themselves.
If the "paranormal" reports of people who are able to "read" by sweeping their fingers and/or feet over text are credible, perhaps these kinds of photosensitive cells are the mechanism? It would not constitute "vision" per se, but perhaps the brain can, at least, decode the patterns of color changes across a surface with a fidelity sufficient to recognize and comprehend letterforms.
The general "scientific" explanation used is that the people are sensing the slight difference in heat between the black letters and white text (or the slightly raised surface of the ink). Now in actuality, the answer is usually that the person being tested is getting their cues in an even less legitimate manner, ranging from brief glimpses at the paper before being blindfolded (often unconsciously) to deliberate fakery.
Hope you've memorized your fingerprint, or at least carry around a copy of it.
I used to carry exact representations of all of my fingerprints until I realized what a security risk that was. Ten minutes with a hot stove and I'm once again risk free. Awfully hard to hold onto slick surfaces, though...
It's also an incredibly safe sport. I read an article in a sports mag years ago (sorry, can't remember which one) that rated sports based on injury frequency, and fencing was right next to golf.
From what I understand, most martial arts have a very low injury rate, as odd as that may sound. Part of it is that you're taught ways to avoid getting hurt (learning how to fall properly is an enormous benefit at times) but also that your opponents generally aren't trying to hurt you and are conscious of safety themselves. Supposedly, the majority of injuries in martial arts are from people who are coming back to it after some time and injure themselves trying to attain the same feats they could manage before leaving. I've been there before... your mind and your muscle reflexes say that you can kick above your head still and you can, at least until the strained groin muscles catch up to you... although the bigger problem is that you can accelerate your fist or foot as quickly as before, but you can't always stop it as well. Hello, hyper-extended joints.