Ronnie Reagan and Ollie North were right! all the Nicaraguans are damned communists! Open Source?! this would never have happened if the USA had continued to fund the Contras!
"Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
And all the other domains of knowledge out there? Where does the history of art fit into your model? psychology? or perhaps medicine or law? As a PhD student I'd hope you'd see the world isn't that simple, and actually it's quite complex...
In the UK I think we call GFCI RCDs (Residual Current Devices). All new electrical installations, alterations and additions designed after 1st July 2008 for domestic houses have had to comply with the new BS 7671: 2008 requirements, and mean that RCDs now need to be provided to nearly all circuits within dwellings - at least, all those for use by 'ordinary persons'.
Basically any major electrical work done for about the last year and forwards means you need a new main consumer unit fitted to your house (the point where the single cable comes into your house and then splits off through the fuse box to the different circuits). The consumer unit has to have RCDs / GFCIs covering everything. Even the circuit that is dedicated to my little tiny front door electric bell needs one, as well as the lighting circuits and the mains power plug socket circuits.
"Blatantly unfair"... hmm... I take it you don't work in the business world?:-)
I agree it doesn't sound right but then lots of people on slashdot shout that NASA should behave more like a business concern and less like a bloated government department... being totally and blatantly unfair when it suits them to get the results they want is a good way towards operating like many major corporations...
gloriously off topic but who cares, it's just an idle chat space after all....
200g flour not the same as 200g of rice? run that one past me, I'm curious!:-)
Also I don't get your bit about cooking in metric needing special tools, suggesting that cooking in Imperial doesn't need special tools, that the overhead on using metric is higher than using Imperial. Over here in the UK most measuring devices do both but increasingly are metric so "special tools" is more like Imperial rather than metric. How does cooking 200g rice vs 200g flour need more tools than cooking 8oz rice vs 8oz flour?
Obviously too early in the morning for me but if a recipe asked for 200g flour and then 200g rice surely the weight is the same. They might displace different volumes but surely 200g is 200g on my scales? Recipes over here in the UK tend to be by weight rather than some things by weight and some things by volume (unless its a liquid).
Don't even get me started on US measurements of "cups" , that really confused me for a long time:-) I have lots of different cups in my cupboard and they are all different sizes. No idea which one is the official, standard sized one! Big chunky mugs for drinking tea when you're in the workshop, tea cups for nice meals, couple of little posh coffee cups for espressos, all different sizes.... no idea which is the official "cup".
No wonder the US space program is screwed, if you're taking perfectly fine reported measures in metric (20cm, 78cm) converting them into Imperial and guesstimating what you end up with.
I suppose 5% inaccuracy is fine for this but you'd be a bit worried if you were in space and the NASA guys were taking the ESA / Russian space agency data and saying "hang on a minute guys, we'll work that out to the nearest foot".
Nature will indeed sort it out, rain will wash the pollutants into your water courses, wind will blow dust off the waste piles and spread them across the wider area. Eventually the polluting agents will even out across the whole of your country.
It'll all work out. Might be a bit of a mess for the neighbours for a couple of hundred years though.
Using the Daily Mail as a reference lays you open to ridicule from UK readers. It's not exactly a reliable source of evidence. It's so bad there are even comedy Daily Mail headline generators out there.
Rubbish, I call your bluff. Flamebait that's got me posting, certainly not insightful on your knowledge of the UK.
"The U.S. is starting to more closely resemble an early version of Great Britain, which having lost its empire in World War II and the pounds status as global reserve currency is now mired in debt and can't even support its vastly diminished military or pay its civil servants."
- your history is wrong, do some reading. Great Britain could be argued to have been started in 1707, the Act of Union. So "early version of Great Britain" probably means, ooh, the first hundred years of GB. World War 2 started after 1807 and the nineteenth century was a period of empire growth for Great Britain. Loss of empire didn't really happen til mid twentieth century.
- "can't pay its civil servants": reference please?! I think this is rubbish. At least, I work in a university and I got paid this month, and I was chatting to my brother (a teacher in the public sector) and he got paid. So I can give you my workplace and his workplace as examples where civil servants are being paid. Believe me it would make major news here if people weren't being paid. Don't see any mention of it on the BBC website.
Never really understood this "3 strikes and you're out" theory. Law enforcement is too complex to be modelled after the rules of a US sports game. Can somebody explain how this idiotic idea came about, the thinking behind it?
What next? You don't go to jail if you say "Simon says" before committing an offence? Police can't arrest you if you're not touching the ground when they catch up with you?
In the UK the default is a manual gearbox. The vast majority of cars are manual, and if you hire a rental car you generally have to ask for automatic, they will give you manual by default.
Here we have two different driving licences - automatic and manual. If you pass your test on an automatic, you're only allowed to drive an automatic. If you pass in a manual gearbox car, you can drive either when you pass. As a consequence the vast majority of people take their test in a manual car so they have the freedom to drive either after testing.
Nope, I wasn't trolling, having a bit of fun pointing out to the parent poster who said that a technology that didn't give you direct feedback with the road wasn't a good idea, and I was pointing out that many folk in the USA drive cars with gearboxes that automate processes for them (so why the concern?). Funny thing is loads of people picked up on my chat about manual vs automatic gearboxes and very few picked up on my comments on steering wheels vs joysticks etc. Ah well it's just a hang out and chat space so whatever people want to chat about is fine by me. I seem to have touched a nerve though:-)
It was a genuine comment by me though, the first time I ever drove an automatic was when I came to the USA for the first time when I was about 30, I'd driven manual cars for 12 years, and I was over for a mate's wedding. I had to pull him aside as we got off the plane at Miami from London and ask "how do you drive an automatic? I am about to pick one up in half an hour at the airport and I haven't a clue!". I was dead nervous, picked up the car and straight into 5 lanes of Miami rush hour traffic and I hadn't a clue what this automatic was doing or what the numbers on the automatic gearstick meant, if I was supposed to use them at all or when...
Just a case of getting used to the different device - after all, people use power steering so don't get the same feedback as manually feeling the steering wheel system turning on the road. 100 years ago a paddle / lever control was considered the way to go, not a wheel. Times change.
And horror of horrors, most US Americans drive cars that don't even have manual gearboxes. Frightens the living daylights out of me driving an automatic car!
You're driving along and suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears. Hey car, I want to decide when I want you to change gear, don't want you jumping up and down through the gearbox when you feel like it. I want to slowly lift off the clutch and get the engine to bite when I want it to bite. I guess that's just because my 25 years of driving cars has been in manual cars (UK) and driving an automatic happens once every couple of years for a week or so when I am on holiday in a country where automatic is what you get.
I think people will get used to joysticks in time just like all the other devices that remove us from the immediate experience of being in contact with the road. You might argue that you need a metre long joystick for that "fine grained control" but I think sailors have got over that issue in the last couple of hundred years...
Back to the old "countries using Imperial measures vs. customs using metric":-)
Another poster has noted Open Offices identifies 8 American countries using Imperial, rest of world (190 or so countries) using metric. Get with the 21st century, Americans! (and Burmese and Liberians as well I believe).
: -)
This morning I was printing a Powerpoint slide in A3 for a friend (long story) and the default screen asked me if I wanted it 16 1/4 inches by 7 1/2 furlongs or something. Millimetres please, I can't think in inches, I am 43 and I got taught mm and cm and metres at school from when I was 5 back in 1971.... (UK). Nobody my age or younger has been taught to measure in Imperial measures in UK schools. A lot of us know how to use them informally because that helps us deal with old folks, but it's not what we were formally taught.
Helped my mate locate to Brussels a few years ago for a weekend hire of a transit van plus ferry cost plus petrol. About £300 I think. Add on another £100 for the flight he took a couple of weeks before to sort out a flat if you like. Plus the beers he bought me, but I was in it for helping my mate and a fun weekend away.
He had to pay a deposit on a flat and buy a few things for his new place but then you have to do this if you move to a new place elsewhere in your own country.
"we're left in the cold because domestic students were passed in favor of these foreign students"
Could be a possibly misleading statement you make there. Could you define how foreign students are favoured over domestic students? Or is it that foreign students get higher grades than domestic students so universities and employers prefer them on grounds of merit?
"Of course, the people running the graduate programs are from these countries..."
Your reference please, or did you just make this up? I'd be happy with a simple statistic: number of people employed on graduate programs, broken down by nationality. That would prove or disprove your hypothesis and inform us of whether this is an argument based on facts or something that you just made up.
Oh the irony. Slashdot posts a story about bloggers not checking their stories and says:
"This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
It looks like you didn't check your reference, like the bloggers you accuse. It seems that the original quote was by British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, not Winston Churchill, and he said "boots" not "pants". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm
In the UK "pants" means "underwear" and not "trousers" as in the USA. Was Callaghan taking a quote from Churchill talking about underwear? I don't know. I'd welcome further reference hunting....
"it will be the content creators — the people in this hall"
I'd say the people at the media conference in that hall are senior media executives and are not the original content creators. The content creators are the people you're writing about: football players scoring goals in cup finals, poor souls surviving earthquakes, politicians making decisions. The reporters of this content are your journalists, and the editors on your papers compress these reports into what they think are readable collections. Probably the people "in this hall" are champagne swilling owners of said content processing teams. Not the content creators.
What's the length of time that men can keep secrets? What a rubbish piece of research: "all women are the same". Mind you I am guessing that "Wines of Chile" is not exactly up there with the major universities or research councils in terms of its peer-reviewed journal publishing record.
I'm really interested to hear your definition of "Europe". I think you'll struggle to find a definition everybody can agree with. Tell me what the boundaries or Europe are.
Accept that boundaries are always changing.
I grew up in the UK, when I was a kid people talked about "going to Europe for their holidays". A number of people in the UK do not consider themselves to be European. That's a good starting point if you want to discuss "what are the boundaries of Europe".
All rights are socially constructed and agreed by a community, there are no such things as inalienable rights. They are not laws of physics/nature. Try demanding your right to life in a pool full of hungry sharks or on the edge of a live volcano and see if the sharks or the volcano agree to uphold your rights out of philosophical principle.
Specific societies/communities/countries may declare that within their authority there are rights that they consider inalienable/ religious/sacred/ not open for debate but step beyond that society and you will find this is no longer true.
Try telling a US judge that you come from a land of cannibals so it's your inalienable right to hunt down and eat other humans. I'm sure they would tell you "in your place maybe but not in our country, pal!"
Maybe there are beliefs you adhere to regardless of what other people think but alienable rights - philosophical rights of others that all humans, sharks, volcanos, gas giants etc must adhere to? I don't think this is so.
So in the middle of the 80s, when things were pretty tense, it was clear the Soviet dictatorship was struggling and might do something a bit mad, and Reagan makes a gag on radio about declaring war on the Soviet Union? ("we start the bombing in five minutes"). He sure scared us Europeans. We're in the middle of a cold war and the USA has a semi-senile nutter who thinks winding up the nuclear armed totalitarian guys who are a couple of hundred miles away is a laugh?
If this is his idea of a joke, what's he really thinking? we all thought....
We got pretty scared then. I can believe the Soviet Union was equally nervous of this right wing hawk and decided to build some defence systems to avoid worst case scenarios.
Pedestrians must have a sense of responsibility. All road users should do. As a cyclist, I can tell you I am very passionate in my belief that car drivers also should have a sense of responsibility and alas a small minority do not, and drive like idiots (this is also true of cyclists).
If a person weighing 150lbs* bumps into me, I am happy enough to accept a spoken apology. Drivers of a ton of steel must take much more responsibility for their action as their mistakes KILL. I can tell you that a minority do not. When I lived in London I'd expect one near miss a week (as in possible hospitalisation) cycling to work and back in the city centre. Drivers turning without indicating and forcing me to hit the brakes/jump onto the pavement and possibly endanger pedestrians, drivers opening their car doors into the traffic a couple of metres ahead of me without checking for traffic, parked cars pulling out without checking their mirrors. Nearly been hit by them all.
You are very right, people should behave responsibly on the road, and those people driving larger vehicles definitely must be extra careful.
* As an aside my friend, lighten up and love yourself a bit more. "150 fleshbag" - what a terrible expression! Human bodies are fine engineering and beautiful things. Love yourself a little more. Get out and do some walking, cycle, rock climb, enjoy that body! It's what you've got to live in so love it, enjoy it, use it to the limit, don't despite it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ronnie Reagan and Ollie North were right! all the Nicaraguans are damned communists! Open Source?! this would never have happened if the USA had continued to fund the Contras!
"Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
And all the other domains of knowledge out there? Where does the history of art fit into your model? psychology? or perhaps medicine or law? As a PhD student I'd hope you'd see the world isn't that simple, and actually it's quite complex...
In the UK I think we call GFCI RCDs (Residual Current Devices). All new electrical installations, alterations and additions designed after 1st July 2008 for domestic houses have had to comply with the new BS 7671: 2008 requirements, and mean that RCDs now need to be provided to nearly all circuits within dwellings - at least, all those for use by 'ordinary persons'.
Basically any major electrical work done for about the last year and forwards means you need a new main consumer unit fitted to your house (the point where the single cable comes into your house and then splits off through the fuse box to the different circuits). The consumer unit has to have RCDs / GFCIs covering everything. Even the circuit that is dedicated to my little tiny front door electric bell needs one, as well as the lighting circuits and the mains power plug socket circuits.
"Blatantly unfair" ... hmm... I take it you don't work in the business world? :-)
I agree it doesn't sound right but then lots of people on slashdot shout that NASA should behave more like a business concern and less like a bloated government department... being totally and blatantly unfair when it suits them to get the results they want is a good way towards operating like many major corporations...
gloriously off topic but who cares, it's just an idle chat space after all....
200g flour not the same as 200g of rice? run that one past me, I'm curious! :-)
Also I don't get your bit about cooking in metric needing special tools, suggesting that cooking in Imperial doesn't need special tools, that the overhead on using metric is higher than using Imperial. Over here in the UK most measuring devices do both but increasingly are metric so "special tools" is more like Imperial rather than metric. How does cooking 200g rice vs 200g flour need more tools than cooking 8oz rice vs 8oz flour?
Obviously too early in the morning for me but if a recipe asked for 200g flour and then 200g rice surely the weight is the same. They might displace different volumes but surely 200g is 200g on my scales? Recipes over here in the UK tend to be by weight rather than some things by weight and some things by volume (unless its a liquid).
Don't even get me started on US measurements of "cups" , that really confused me for a long time :-) I have lots of different cups in my cupboard and they are all different sizes. No idea which one is the official, standard sized one! Big chunky mugs for drinking tea when you're in the workshop, tea cups for nice meals, couple of little posh coffee cups for espressos, all different sizes.... no idea which is the official "cup".
cheers, idling away the morn...
No wonder the US space program is screwed, if you're taking perfectly fine reported measures in metric (20cm, 78cm) converting them into Imperial and guesstimating what you end up with.
I suppose 5% inaccuracy is fine for this but you'd be a bit worried if you were in space and the NASA guys were taking the ESA / Russian space agency data and saying "hang on a minute guys, we'll work that out to the nearest foot".
Nature will indeed sort it out, rain will wash the pollutants into your water courses, wind will blow dust off the waste piles and spread them across the wider area. Eventually the polluting agents will even out across the whole of your country.
It'll all work out. Might be a bit of a mess for the neighbours for a couple of hundred years though.
Using the Daily Mail as a reference lays you open to ridicule from UK readers. It's not exactly a reliable source of evidence. It's so bad there are even comedy Daily Mail headline generators out there.
Rubbish, I call your bluff. Flamebait that's got me posting, certainly not insightful on your knowledge of the UK.
"The U.S. is starting to more closely resemble an early version of Great Britain, which having lost its empire in World War II and the pounds status as global reserve currency is now mired in debt and can't even support its vastly diminished military or pay its civil servants."
- your history is wrong, do some reading. Great Britain could be argued to have been started in 1707, the Act of Union. So "early version of Great Britain" probably means, ooh, the first hundred years of GB. World War 2 started after 1807 and the nineteenth century was a period of empire growth for Great Britain. Loss of empire didn't really happen til mid twentieth century.
- "can't pay its civil servants": reference please?! I think this is rubbish. At least, I work in a university and I got paid this month, and I was chatting to my brother (a teacher in the public sector) and he got paid. So I can give you my workplace and his workplace as examples where civil servants are being paid. Believe me it would make major news here if people weren't being paid. Don't see any mention of it on the BBC website.
Never really understood this "3 strikes and you're out" theory. Law enforcement is too complex to be modelled after the rules of a US sports game. Can somebody explain how this idiotic idea came about, the thinking behind it?
What next? You don't go to jail if you say "Simon says" before committing an offence? Police can't arrest you if you're not touching the ground when they catch up with you?
"Can you imagine the lateral stress on the structure if you attempted to build it horizontally and then hoist?
Ask the Russians, that's how they rig the Soyuz rockets. Been doing it pretty successfully for 40 years or so now.
In the UK the default is a manual gearbox. The vast majority of cars are manual, and if you hire a rental car you generally have to ask for automatic, they will give you manual by default.
Here we have two different driving licences - automatic and manual. If you pass your test on an automatic, you're only allowed to drive an automatic. If you pass in a manual gearbox car, you can drive either when you pass. As a consequence the vast majority of people take their test in a manual car so they have the freedom to drive either after testing.
Nope, I wasn't trolling, having a bit of fun pointing out to the parent poster who said that a technology that didn't give you direct feedback with the road wasn't a good idea, and I was pointing out that many folk in the USA drive cars with gearboxes that automate processes for them (so why the concern?). Funny thing is loads of people picked up on my chat about manual vs automatic gearboxes and very few picked up on my comments on steering wheels vs joysticks etc. Ah well it's just a hang out and chat space so whatever people want to chat about is fine by me. I seem to have touched a nerve though :-)
It was a genuine comment by me though, the first time I ever drove an automatic was when I came to the USA for the first time when I was about 30, I'd driven manual cars for 12 years, and I was over for a mate's wedding. I had to pull him aside as we got off the plane at Miami from London and ask "how do you drive an automatic? I am about to pick one up in half an hour at the airport and I haven't a clue!". I was dead nervous, picked up the car and straight into 5 lanes of Miami rush hour traffic and I hadn't a clue what this automatic was doing or what the numbers on the automatic gearstick meant, if I was supposed to use them at all or when...
Just a case of getting used to the different device - after all, people use power steering so don't get the same feedback as manually feeling the steering wheel system turning on the road. 100 years ago a paddle / lever control was considered the way to go, not a wheel. Times change.
And horror of horrors, most US Americans drive cars that don't even have manual gearboxes. Frightens the living daylights out of me driving an automatic car!
You're driving along and suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears. Hey car, I want to decide when I want you to change gear, don't want you jumping up and down through the gearbox when you feel like it. I want to slowly lift off the clutch and get the engine to bite when I want it to bite. I guess that's just because my 25 years of driving cars has been in manual cars (UK) and driving an automatic happens once every couple of years for a week or so when I am on holiday in a country where automatic is what you get.
I think people will get used to joysticks in time just like all the other devices that remove us from the immediate experience of being in contact with the road. You might argue that you need a metre long joystick for that "fine grained control" but I think sailors have got over that issue in the last couple of hundred years...
Low sales ahead in the UK as British punters embarrassed to go into their book shops and libraries and ask for Nook e-books? :-)
For non-UK folks, "Nooky" is cheeky old fashioned slang for sex, so "nooky book" would mean a porno novel....
Back to the old "countries using Imperial measures vs. customs using metric" :-)
Another poster has noted Open Offices identifies 8 American countries using Imperial, rest of world (190 or so countries) using metric. Get with the 21st century, Americans! (and Burmese and Liberians as well I believe).
: -)
This morning I was printing a Powerpoint slide in A3 for a friend (long story) and the default screen asked me if I wanted it 16 1/4 inches by 7 1/2 furlongs or something. Millimetres please, I can't think in inches, I am 43 and I got taught mm and cm and metres at school from when I was 5 back in 1971.... (UK). Nobody my age or younger has been taught to measure in Imperial measures in UK schools. A lot of us know how to use them informally because that helps us deal with old folks, but it's not what we were formally taught.
Helped my mate locate to Brussels a few years ago for a weekend hire of a transit van plus ferry cost plus petrol. About £300 I think. Add on another £100 for the flight he took a couple of weeks before to sort out a flat if you like. Plus the beers he bought me, but I was in it for helping my mate and a fun weekend away.
He had to pay a deposit on a flat and buy a few things for his new place but then you have to do this if you move to a new place elsewhere in your own country.
"we're left in the cold because domestic students were passed in favor of these foreign students"
Could be a possibly misleading statement you make there. Could you define how foreign students are favoured over domestic students? Or is it that foreign students get higher grades than domestic students so universities and employers prefer them on grounds of merit?
"Of course, the people running the graduate programs are from these countries..."
Your reference please, or did you just make this up? I'd be happy with a simple statistic: number of people employed on graduate programs, broken down by nationality. That would prove or disprove your hypothesis and inform us of whether this is an argument based on facts or something that you just made up.
Oh the irony. Slashdot posts a story about bloggers not checking their stories and says:
"This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
It looks like you didn't check your reference, like the bloggers you accuse.
It seems that the original quote was by British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, not Winston Churchill, and he said "boots" not "pants".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm
In the UK "pants" means "underwear" and not "trousers" as in the USA. Was Callaghan taking a quote from Churchill talking about underwear? I don't know. I'd welcome further reference hunting....
"it will be the content creators — the people in this hall"
I'd say the people at the media conference in that hall are senior media executives and are not the original content creators. The content creators are the people you're writing about: football players scoring goals in cup finals, poor souls surviving earthquakes, politicians making decisions. The reporters of this content are your journalists, and the editors on your papers compress these reports into what they think are readable collections. Probably the people "in this hall" are champagne swilling owners of said content processing teams. Not the content creators.
What's the length of time that men can keep secrets? What a rubbish piece of research: "all women are the same". Mind you I am guessing that "Wines of Chile" is not exactly up there with the major universities or research councils in terms of its peer-reviewed journal publishing record.
I'm really interested to hear your definition of "Europe". I think you'll struggle to find a definition everybody can agree with. Tell me what the boundaries or Europe are.
Accept that boundaries are always changing.
I grew up in the UK, when I was a kid people talked about "going to Europe for their holidays". A number of people in the UK do not consider themselves to be European. That's a good starting point if you want to discuss "what are the boundaries of Europe".
All rights are socially constructed and agreed by a community, there are no such things as inalienable rights. They are not laws of physics/nature. Try demanding your right to life in a pool full of hungry sharks or on the edge of a live volcano and see if the sharks or the volcano agree to uphold your rights out of philosophical principle.
Specific societies/communities/countries may declare that within their authority there are rights that they consider inalienable/ religious/sacred/ not open for debate but step beyond that society and you will find this is no longer true.
Try telling a US judge that you come from a land of cannibals so it's your inalienable right to hunt down and eat other humans. I'm sure they would tell you "in your place maybe but not in our country, pal!"
Maybe there are beliefs you adhere to regardless of what other people think but alienable rights - philosophical rights of others that all humans, sharks, volcanos, gas giants etc must adhere to? I don't think this is so.
So in the middle of the 80s, when things were pretty tense, it was clear the Soviet dictatorship was struggling and might do something a bit mad, and Reagan makes a gag on radio about declaring war on the Soviet Union? ("we start the bombing in five minutes"). He sure scared us Europeans. We're in the middle of a cold war and the USA has a semi-senile nutter who thinks winding up the nuclear armed totalitarian guys who are a couple of hundred miles away is a laugh?
If this is his idea of a joke, what's he really thinking? we all thought....
We got pretty scared then. I can believe the Soviet Union was equally nervous of this right wing hawk and decided to build some defence systems to avoid worst case scenarios.
Pedestrians must have a sense of responsibility. All road users should do. As a cyclist, I can tell you I am very passionate in my belief that car drivers also should have a sense of responsibility and alas a small minority do not, and drive like idiots (this is also true of cyclists).
If a person weighing 150lbs* bumps into me, I am happy enough to accept a spoken apology. Drivers of a ton of steel must take much more responsibility for their action as their mistakes KILL. I can tell you that a minority do not. When I lived in London I'd expect one near miss a week (as in possible hospitalisation) cycling to work and back in the city centre. Drivers turning without indicating and forcing me to hit the brakes/jump onto the pavement and possibly endanger pedestrians, drivers opening their car doors into the traffic a couple of metres ahead of me without checking for traffic, parked cars pulling out without checking their mirrors. Nearly been hit by them all.
You are very right, people should behave responsibly on the road, and those people driving larger vehicles definitely must be extra careful.
* As an aside my friend, lighten up and love yourself a bit more. "150 fleshbag" - what a terrible expression! Human bodies are fine engineering and beautiful things. Love yourself a little more. Get out and do some walking, cycle, rock climb, enjoy that body! It's what you've got to live in so love it, enjoy it, use it to the limit, don't despite it :-)
Coincidently, Ben Goldacre was presenting at the Royal Institution today on "Bad Science" - poor media reporting of science. You can view the stream from tomorrow afternoon at The Times Higher Education website: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/webcast.html . Event details for the RI debate here: http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayEvent&id=948