Amazon is terrified of Alibaba's possible expansion into the US market. Alibaba is so much larger and can get better deals from the factories in China which Amazon doesn't have much hope of competing with. Online purchases are very price competitive with ppl shopping around for best deals, and Alibaba has a huge market advantage over their US-based rival, not to mention just sheer size.

In the end it's a win for consumers to have more competition in the online retail segment.

Do you still think Google is trying to stop the NSA from spying on you, when they are gathering the exact same information, and unlike the NSA, don't have any rules restricting their use.

When will we stop saying who can and cannot spy on us and steal our personal information, and start saying that the answer is nobody. Whether you're the NSA, or you're Google, you are evil. The end.

Small amounts of transfats can cause a large amount of health risk. Current rules allow food makers to say there is 0.0 grams of transfat per serving if there is less than .5 g transfat preserving. Unfortunately, a diet of 1 or 2 grams transfat daily is associated with all sorts of bad things, and you can easily rack it up by eating a couple servings of foods labeled 0.0 grams transfat. Transfat should be labeled in mg, not g, and reported with at least a precision of 0.1 g.

I agree in general but still sending a probe to Mars is a political stunt to show India is also coming up, not just China. There are million things India could be investing money into that would bring a better return in areas that you mention than this.

The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."

The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.

The Solomon Curve speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.

I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.

Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.

Huh? I'm a software engineer and don't understand the relevance of this statement, how can a jury? How does it confirm that there was a defect?

The question is: Is it enough to be relevant?

Given the myriad other hazards, and billions of other reasons that stereoscopic vision in hunter-animals evolved, the answer is pretty much No.

This is why it's controversial. It's "true" while also being absolute bollocks. It's like saying that without lead-acid batteries, cars wouldn't have evolved as they have. Well, no. But it doesn't mean that without lead-acid batteries cars couldn't have existed or anything like that.

P.S. The "wading in water made man stand upright" is just as controversial because, although it may be a FACTOR, the impact of that factor is the crucial question. It may well be zero. It may well be quite a lot. But chances are that it's such a minuscule factor that it's not worth spouting off about compared to thousands of other factors.

Evolution is not a case of "jumping off this cliff made birds suddenly grow wings". There are billions of factors over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations that all nudge towards small changes which impact upon the previous and next changes.

As such, this suggestion is almost complete bollocks, while being - on the surface - based on truthful data. But "snake-like predators might possibly have contributed a tiny bit to millions of years of our evolution along with million of other factors" isn't a headline that sells papers to journals.

They don't. They also straddle and salmon.

Get on the sidewalk with the other pedestrians if you can't follow vehicle traffic laws or if you feel unsafe. But when you do, follow pedestrian traffic laws exclusively. Don't pick and choose.

5. Intersections are death traps (if you use pedestrian crosswalks).

If you cycle on pedestrian crosswalks, you deserve whatever happens to you. You are a vehicle, use the road, it's safer for everyone.

So why doesn't this apply to pedestrians. They're on the sidewalk, moving slowly, and suddenly a car comes off the road towards them? Yes, it's very unlikely. Similarly, if you're in the bike lane and stopped at a light, then it is very rare something is suddenly going to ram into that lane from an angle. If you are moving you also have inertia and can not rapidly change direction (a little rain or a bit of oil on the road will mess up your well laid plans).

Yes, it can happen sometimes but it is rare compared to the number of bikes that don't bother stopping at all and rely on their elite cycling skills to let them break the law and still dodge objects with high inertia. Running that stop sign makes you vastly more likely to be hit by a car, splitting lanes makes you much more likely to be hit by a car, cutting in front of a car make you much more likely to be hit by a car. Stopping in the bike lane at the stop sign is the safest thing to do there.

And remember that you are a bicycle. I learned this lesson on a small motorcycle: you are invisible! Make sure you can be seen, don't wear a black jacket (night or day), have reflectors (believe me, the lycra makes you look dorky, the reflecting tape does not), have lights on even in the daylight, and use your damn arm signals when turning (moving arm is visible). If it is raining be even more paranoid as cars are going to be skidding and so will you, and you will be even more invisible than normal. Watch where the other cars are and be aware of where they're moving and where they're turning, and if you're moving too fast to determine this then slow down. If you're near an SUV or large car then remember that no one on the other side of that vehicle can see you. Don't be in a hurry to get to where you're going, this is not a race.

And take a safety class! Don't just rely on intuition or common sense. Every automobile driver has to take a test, the least you can do as a cyclist is take a class.

No, you have the fewest risk contingencies when you are still. That doesn't mean you have the lowest risk; it means you don't have any answers for "what if...".

Think of it this way: Running through a stop sign into a blind intersection puts you at risk of being run over by a car. 1 in 10 times, you are at risk for being run over by a car. You can swerve out of the way 99 out of 100 times. That means 1 in 1000 times, you will get hit by a car running stop signs. (Numbers made up)

Now, standing at stop signs, cars will collide with you 1 in 2,600 times. You can only evade this 1 out of 10 times. That means you have a 9 in 26,000 chance of getting hit, or 1 in 2889 chance.

In the first situation, you run a higher probability risk but you have a good risk-reducing contingency (ability to take action). In the second, you run a lower probability risk but have very poor risk-reducing contingency. The numbers I gave shows that the lower probability is actually a lower risk than the higher probability with contingency in this imaginary case.

My numbers are made up. You however simply stated a lack of contingency without any sort of consideration for risk probability: you predicate that having a contingency always equates to lower risk. I have shown that in principle this is wrong, and thus that you have shown nothing except that there are different risks and some have better contingencies; you have not shown whether one overall risk is bigger than the other.

I bicycled to work for a year. I bicycled everywhere for a year. I also drive, and ride light rail. I've been on both ends of this. In a year's time with 70% of my transportation being by bicycle (I actually tallied up my total gasoline MPG at 288mpg combined when factoring in my bike with my car), I've been threatened by cars while stationary 0 times. In that same time, I nearly smashed a black guy who ran a red light on his bicycle at night while wearing dark clothes on an unlit street; I nearly turned a white kid into a speed bump when he came the wrong way down a street and just appeared from behind a building and straight in front of my car (this is a no-lawn situation: the sidewalk is against the building and the street); I've observed other cyclists nearly getting creamed on half a dozen occasions while I was waiting at a signal for busy traffic; and so on.

Your anecdotal experience does not match my anecdotal experience. I was never in any danger narrowly averted by a heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering; I have been suddenly placed in situations where my heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering have saved others from becoming speed tables, and I've observed other drivers doing the same.

In the US at least, cyclists (and pedestrians) killed by motor vehicle operators are generally treated as freebies. To the degree that drivers avoid running over them, they're probably motivated more by an innate sense of decency and/or the annoyance value of having to stop for an hour or two until the police sweep up the bodies and then tell you not to do it again and send you on your way. Until this changes, cycling will not be a particularly safe activity here.

Could cycles be made safer, both to reduce risk and to reduce the coordination required to operate one. As I posted elsewhere, cycling currently excludes the elderly (for whom one fall could be catastrophic), the frail, and the otherwise uncoordinated (young or old, one encounter with a car can be catastrophic).

Some ideas:

1) Certainly they could be made more visible to cars, especially at night. For drivers, the tiny lights are hard to pickup visually against the background of the city, and things happen very fast at automobile speeds. Plus, one tiny light doesn't give any clue to the dimensions of the rest of the bike (in contrast, think of the yellow lights that outline trucks).

2) Separate bikes from cars. The different rates of speed seem to make combining them inherently dangerous. Some places already do this, with dedicated, and physically separate bike lanes. Look up Amsterdam to see examples.

3) Better stability? Why not tricycles, which don't fall over when stopping or turning too sharply? I suspect there must be some drawback, but it's transportation, not a race.