But most people's immediate reaction is to going to be to doubt the pure innocence not of "the" victim", but "THIS" victim. The cynicism is based within the very specific context of a specific situation, not in the general context of "sexuality".

Note: I did not write any of the comments about which you speak, but I've noticed the phenomenon and have paid specific attention to the discussions that evolve out of similar situations. That said...

It has nothing to do with women in particular. It has to do with unbridled cynicism.

People of certain privilege levels who fight against a particular issue and are then victimized by that specific issue are *cynically* thought to have manufactured the harm. Try these other headlines on for size and see if you don't have an inkling of cynicism:

(1) Fundamentalist Christian Claims Homosexual Couple Denied Him Service Due to Religion
(2) American Military Base in Afghanistan Attacked by Terrorists
(3) British National Party Activist Attacked in Immigrant Neighborhood

In each one of those hypothetical headlined situations, a genuinely innocent-acting person could have been harmed. The Fundie Christian could have been wearing a cross and the homosexual couple could have been vehemently atheist. The American Military Base could have already ended operations with the terrorist group attacking the base as a cheap shot. And the BNP member could have been walking through the neighborhood with no BNP or otherwise offensive indicia.

But most people's immediate reaction is to going to be to doubt the pure innocence of "the" victim", but "THIS" victim. The cynicism is based within the very specific context of a specific situation, not in the general context of "sexuality".

This is correct. It's only carpooling or "sharing the ride" if it's non-profit. That's why taxi-riding is not a valid form of "rideshare". The only REAL carpool/rideshare app I've seen is called Carma (https://carmacarpool.com/). Reimbursements are automatic per GPS and specific to the IRS mileage reimbursement. More people in the car? Cool -- it splits the cost automagically.

I want a human to be able to take control of whatever automated device acting as my conveyance. Train, plane, automobile-- it doesn't matter.

If I'm liable for the machinery and the lives carried by the machinery, I want to be able to determine the maximum speed, the maximum rate of acceleration (when not in an emergency), the route, and be able to take full control as necessary. It's not that I distrust computers... it's the squishy meat bags affecting and affected by the computers I don't trust. Humans program the computers and engineer the roads. Sh*t happens and not all sh*t is planned for. There's road kill, potential road kill, flat things on the road that can fly up into the under-carriage when run over-- there are plenty of reasons to be able to control an otherwise-autonomous automobile.

This is just PR for Elon Musk and Tesla. This is not the future. The plug-in EV is not the future of transportation.

I work for a major university system in California. Our job is to get scope 3 commuter emissions to zero by 2050. We finally had the real-life conversation about the viability of plug-in EVs being the savior to our conundrum and, boy, was everyone happy to say what they had researched and observed...

The first thing you have to realize as a workplace who wants to support plug-in EVs is that, in doing so, you are becoming a refueler-- a gas station. You're entering another business with costs, time demands, enforcement requirements, and drama.

Each of the campuses has 5-50+ EV chargers throughout their 5,000-40,000 parking stalls. They cost $5,000 -$9,000 on a good deal plus the cost of installation, power trenching, etc. Consider the cost of converting an entire parking system to being plug-in EV-compatible. Or even half the parking system and allowing only 4-hour charging ("top off"). And then there's the new electric substation. Oh, and plug in EVs aren't zero emissions. We're still on the hook for the power generation emissions that result from the electricity demand.

Finally, there's a major equity issues. The vast majority of EV buyers are rich and/or college-educated. Why? Well they have the disposable income with which to take advantage of temporary federal subsidies, but more importantly, they have garages in which to charge their EVs overnight. The low-income population by and large lives in apartments whose landlords are not even considering installing EV chargers.

And these Type 3 superchargers can only be worse. The faster you charge an EV, the more waste electricity. The more waste electricity, the more cost and the more emissions. It's great PR. It's really neat for a niche, nascent, and temporary market, but the future is in either hydrogen fuel cells or battery-swapping EVs.

You are required to drive safely. Too fast or too slow is unsafe. The trick is in the "too". The cop may cite you over for driving 1mph over the limit. You can try to fight it in court (as countless thousands do every day) with the excuse that you were "going with the flow of traffic", but if you're traveling in the rightmost lane, you are not required to travel as quickly as those driving in the leftmost lane, but you should probably be driving no slower than 5 under the limit on a freeway.

The unfortunate issue is that drivers have a really bad habit of justifying their speeding habits with bad or misinterpreted science. Some will say "speed doesn't kill, the speed differential kills" -- but that can be used to justify everyone driving at the speed limit just as easily as driving 10mph over the limit.

Or can it?

Actual research shows that the faster you go, the more likely you are to crash. This is due to infrastructural imperfections, hardware failure, or just driver failure. It's safer to drive slower. From the AAA report on the American Culture of Speed: "When travel speed increases by 1%, the injury crash rate increases by about 2%, the
serious injury crash rate increases by about 3%, and the fatal crash rate increases by about 4%."

When some say that "slow drivers cause accidents", they use the "cause" term incorrectly. In almost all instances, the slower driver didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere. Instead, the slower driver was ahead of an impatient driver and the impatient driver did something stupid.

So please, don't feel like you have justification to drive faster than the speed limit because some interpret the law beneficially to their own habits. Please remember that in 2012, there were 33,561 traffic deaths and in a full 30% of those deaths, speeding was a factor. (http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/overview-of-fatality-facts#Speeding)

The problem is the in the pendulum swing. The harder it swings, the less rational the reactionary force has to be. As it pertains to sexism, the historical weapon of chauvinists and the established patriarchy, those riding that pendulum to its furthest extent don't like to (no do they need to) have any introspective dialog regarding any double-standards or hypocrisy in their missions.

For the social reaction to sexism, the pendulum is swinging hard. Consider some of the issues wherein men are currently ridiculed for their interest and/or sensitivity:

Post-divorce child custody -- Still heavily biased toward the mother.
Post-divorce alimony -- A patriarchal concept still being fought by males, but rarely a peep in protest comes from the sex that benefits the most.
Male Circumcision -- Sometimes called "male genital mutilation" in an attempt to garner the same disgust as female genital mutilation, the fight against automatic male circumcision at birth is derided.
Rape -- While all of the western world vehemently fights to reduce the occurrence of female rape, man-on-man rape is thoroughly facilitated mass incarceration centers.
Gender Studies -- Most research universities have a Gender Studies department, but the research and education provided are typically "women's studies". There is little in the way of researching the history and evolution of masculinity (especially in the light of the equalization of rights).

Those riding the pendulum will say, "Oh, too bad! Sucks to be on the other side, doesn't it?" without consideration of who actually ran the patriarchy.

For males that grew up as part of the institutionalized patriarchy, these don't seem like a big deal. However, for the massive number of young males that grew up being taught that males and females are genuinely equal in most ways and should be treated equitably in all things, these double standards are unacceptable. These, amongst other issues, are the problems that young males face, despite not being part of the gender-biased systems of the past.

I'm OK with this. How can I get you on the Google Car sales team? ;)

You are correct about the Driver's Handbook and and the state law in regards to unsafe speed, but I think you missed the point. Why is everyone allowed to uniformly break the speed limit in the first place? Why not do some proper enforcement to bring the speeds back down?

If you're programming a module to complete a task and find that it needs to be written in such a way as to break existing rules to facilitate the rules being broken by other modules, don't you try to fix the problem from the ground up?

Additional question: I know most people are thinking about doing 75 in a 65 and thinking "whoopty doo, big deal". But what about 35mph in a 25mph school zone?

You are "driving" a Google automated car. You get pulled over for doing 10 over the speed limit. You didn't tell the car to do it, the programmers did. Who gets the ticket?

If you do, then that suggests that you have liability for the control of the vehicle. If that's the case, you probably shouldn't allow the car to make the choice whether or not to exceed the speed limit without your input.

If the programmer has liability, then say good by to automated automobiles! No one wants this liability.

Thus, Google cars will not automatically speed... but they may allow you to tell the car to exceed the speed limit... thus reducing the safety of the product overall.

If the speed limit is unsafe, that means that too many people around the car are traveling above the speed limit. This, in turn, means that there is insufficient traffic enforcement. I see two solutions...

Solution A: Allow automated vehicles to routinely exceed the speed limit thus contributing to the unsafe environment.
Solution B: Implement appropriate traffic enforcement and raise city revenue on the reckless habits of traffic offenders.

Why the hell is Solution A even being considered?

If the speed limit is unsafe, that means that too many people around the car attempting to travel at "only" the speed limit. This, in turn, means that there is insufficient traffic enforcement. I see two solutions...

Solution A: Allow automated vehicles to routinely exceed the speed limit thus contributing to the unsafe environment.
Solution B: Implement appropriate traffic enforcement and raise city revenue on the reckless habits of traffic offenders.

Why the hell is Solution A even being considered?

Yes, just like this. Browse at "0" and you see stuff like this. Thank you for being a great example to pla's post!

My partner and I have been together for almost 13 years. We have one of those very good relationships where we talk about problems instead of getting to the point of yelling, etc. She has a very audacious sense of humor and feels comfortable joking about spousal abuse (amongst other things) because she knows that spousal abuse is such a foreign concept in our relationship. ("I know I said I would cook tonight, but I'm ordering pizza. Please don't beat me...") I say the same back.

If someone didn't understand the context and overheard us joking in this way, they might think there was an actual issue with violence in our household. And I think this is the impetus with the new censorship rule on Fark. If you're not a frequenter of Fark discussions and stumble across one of many memes without the historical context, you'll think everyone there is a rape-shrugging, gay-bashing, general hater. And you would be wrong.

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Let's talk about a couple of the memes:

40 lbs. Box of Rape (http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2Z7SafOiCXM/hqdefault.jpg) - If you simply read someone threaten to "send a 40 lbs. box of rape" to another person, you'd think that was a horrible concept. Boxed rape!? The idea alone is atrocious. That is until you figure out that someone took a photo of a box of rapeseed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed), considered the homonym audaciously humorous, and put it online. The internet went wild with the hilariously outlandish concept of "boxed rape" (the action, not the seed) and it has since been part of tongue-in-cheek, context-driven discussion.

Blazing Saddles references - The Mel Brooks movie 'Blazing Saddles' is synonymous with audacious humor and if any one work of artistic endeavor was to embody the spirit of Fark, it would be this movie. It addresses rape, penis size, stereotypes (beneficial and detrimental), racism, homophobia-- nothing is so sacred that it cannot be laughed at. But consider the actual context-- Mel Brooks projects absurdity upon each of these ideas by making their offenders look absolutely ridiculous. And for the most part, Fark feels and acts within the same vein.

Glenn Beck's mythical crime in 1990 - Fark is one of the grand purveyors of the myth that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990. They publicized the hoax not as a means of directly implicating Glenn Beck in a crime that never happened, but to demonstrate the effectiveness of the political messaging system that was/is constantly making extreme accusations in the form of inquiry. So Fark (amongst others) shot back. "Why hasn't Glenn Beck denied...?"

'Legitimate' Rape - A couple years back, a conservative politician stated that abortions do not need to be available to women because in the case of 'legitimate rape', the female body has a means of preventing any impregnation at all. This, of course, is absolutely absurd... which is why Fark latched onto it. It's demonstrative of really, really stupid politician commenting on thing about which he knows little and Fark thrives on such snafus. So when a story comes up regarding rape, you're likely to see the idea of "legitimate rape" be brought up-- not because they're suggesting a distinction, but because they're restating the absurdity of this concept.
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If you are under the impression that Fark users tell jokes that promote rape, sexism, racism, or discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation, then you don't know Fark. Farkers celebrate every gain in the realm of gay rights and attack heinous acts with derision.

If you don't understand that Fark's use of rape, sexism, and homosexuality in their humor comes from a Mel Brooks-style commentary on the absurdity various ideals and actions, then you don't understand Fark. It's disappointing that this kind of humor will no longer be tolerated as it pertains to these specific topics because it's a cathartic outlet for audacious humor in a good direction.

Personally, I never liked PvP games. Invariably, the loser gets sick and tired of the game, sometimes offended, and what started as a fun idea ends with anger and discontent.

I'm more of a PvE gamer. Give me something that I and a couple friends could do with an external enemy or a joined goal and everyone comes out happier at the end.