Are you talking about the southern california driver who started a confrontation with two cyclists, then ended it by pulling around them and then slamming on the brakes, gravely injuring one of them? Then told a police officer he did it to "teach them a lesson"? He was convicted of multiple felonies, 6, I think, by a jury.

http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

I laughed when I saw the comment about cyclists being "provocative" right after the commenter says "you tell them to get out of your way."

Your comment shows the same bias. The reason they get their cars kicked and spit on is because they "buzz" a group of cyclists to "teach them a lesson" or honk at them to "get them out of my way" or scream "GET OUT OF THE ROAD" out their window.

You think we're second class, subservient road users. You think roads "are for cars." You fly into an absolute rage at the sight of two people riding their bicycles next to each other instead of one behind the other. You endanger our lives, and then when finally we have enough and stop being silent, you scream blue-bloody-murder about it.

As a pedestrian, I fail to see why having two-wheeled idiots blasting through red lights is safer for me.

Strawman. Nobody is suggested legalizing the behavior you describe. Also, drivers are blasting through those same lights, at equal or greater speed, presenting far more danger - but you already accept them doing so.

Second: In NYC, 99.9% or so of pedestrian injuries are due to motor vehicle drivers. The remainder are due to collisions with cyclists. The city does not track fault in such collisions. Ride a bike in the city and you'll learn quickly that pedestrians will step out into the road relying on their ears, right into the path of a cyclist doing 15mph. And then get angry when you manage to avoid not hitting them.

As cycling has exploded in popularity in NYC - increasing by an order of magnitude - pedestrian injuries from collisions with cyclists have fallen. Roads in NYC which have bike lanes added become safer for all road users (people in cars, people on bicycles, people on foot.)

Especially since their view (if they were looking) and mine are likely to be obstructed by the cars & vans they're overtaking (usually on the wrong side).

An average-height adult male riding a bicycle is substantially higher than the roofline of most passenger cars. Our ability to see around us is unmatched by any other road user; most drivers have a viewpoint that's around my waist. And then they're inside a box, where they have roof pillars and other objects obstructing their view.

The right to pass traffic on the "wrong" side aka the righthand side in the US, is a specifically codified right in many states. In my state, we are allowed to pass on the right, and there is even a specific section that specifies that it is not an excuse for a collision with a cyclist that they were passing other traffic on the right.

. They're a group of professionals.... who act like professionals.

First off, "study for a test that's hard" is not "professional." A professional is someone who spends years training in skills specific to their vocation (navigating a city, and driving a passenger car, is not a vocation-specific skill) in order to do it.

Second, calling london cab drivers professionals is a laugh. Fire up youtube and search for "london cyclist attack" and note video after video of cabbies attacking cyclists. If they're such professionals, why do they not understand the rules of the road (that allow the cyclist to be where they are), break the rules themselves, endanger the cyclist, and then attack them?

I've been using linux since 1998. I don't need a lecture on open source licensing.

Charging for access to data is fundamentally incompatible with claiming it's "open source" by many people's definitions.

open "sourced", not "open source."

http://osvdb.org/about

I was confused about how someone could be charged for access to "open source" information...

Here's the NPO, with two officers, backing it:
http://opensecurityfoundation....

You never used 10.4, did you?

Certain versions of 10.4 would randomly corrupt the filesystem such that files would start occupying the same chunk of disk space (crosslinked files, I think the term is?)

I saw someone get fired because of that bug (well, not really. She was fired because she was working on client files on her computer and not on the servers, which were backed up...and then the files were hosed by MacOS.)

I think it wasn't until 10.6 or so that many of the mystery problems (that cropped up and went away if you deleted+re-added something...printer, network interface, so on etc) were by and large solved.

10.7 and 10.8 are by and large rock solid. Any time someone comes to us complaining their Mac is crashing randomly, it's *always* a hardware failure. 10.9 is quite solid as well; I wish I could say the same for my late-2013 retina MBP. That and the changes to how MBP's sleep (no sleep indicator, and no way to separate "screen goes to sleep" from "computer goes to sleep", without hacking plists) pisses me off, but has yet to piss me off enough to get down to the Apple Store to have it looked at.

A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.

That's mostly because the FBI doesn't consider prison rape to be a crime; I think the estimates I hear are typically around 200,000-300,000 male prison rape victims a year, which comes close to making the rape stats 50/50. There's also very little interest in figuring out the underreporting rate for male rape victims in open society; hell, in many places it isn't even a crime for a woman to rape a man because of the way rape was defined.

But even if you ignore all that: I'll take those odds. Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crime, and not only that, it's declined the most over the last decade or two as well. Men are several times more likely to be KILLED. Last time I checked, that was worse.

By the way: case clearance rates for female homicide victims are higher than for male homicide victims.

You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.

At least in the US, women kill more men than women.

Also, while gender issues folks are more than happy to do all sorts of mental gymnastics for other things: nobody is willing to touch "why do men commit robbery more?" with a ten foot pole because then they'd have to admit that traditional gender roles for men are still very much in place, men are judged heavily by their economic status, and men are committing crime by and large to house, feed, and clothe their families.

Lots of assistance for single mothers out there, like WIC. Single dads? Shit outta luck.

Guess what percentage of the US homeless population is male? Depending on the area, anywhere from 67% to 80% (NYC, for example, is 82%.) Oh, and the percentage of women in homeless shelters is higher than the percentage of homeless women total, showing women are better served.

Male privilege, my ass.

You know that noise you hear from Priuses that sounds like an electrical buzzing/whirring?

The car's drivetrain doesn't make that noise. That's artificial noise, designed specifically to warn pedestrians when the engine is inactive. I was surprised the first time I drove a Prius, because you can't hear that noise from inside the car. I'd assumed it would be louder.

The person text-walking is completely at fault. How stupid can you be to text-walk in a parking lot?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines still holds true.

Too finicky, too expensive, most people myself included don't have the need for one in their home, so on etc.

None of the "consumer" level units have come close to approaching the ease of use of a circa-1995 inkjet printer.

Heel and toe is a technique for blipping the gas pedal with the RIGHT foot while using the left foot to actuate the clutch, in order to have a smoother downshift by raising engine revs for the new lower gear.

Left foot braking was pioneered by Walter Rohl driving the turbocharged Audi rally cars. It's pointless in non-turbocharged cars, and completely pointless in an electric car.

This guy? It's a combination of elderly driver (notice most causes of "unintended" acceleration involve elderly drivers) and inappropriate footwear. Living in a northeast state, I can tell you that I learned my first winter as a driver (when I was 16-17) that boots were different from shoes when driving. This idiot is 65 and apparently just figured it out after almost 50 years of driving? Bullshit. This was just a bunch of sensationalist muckraking, complete with the scary stock photos of an "automobile crash."

Should the pedal spacing match other cars? Yes. Should the Tesla lock out acceleration when the brake pedal is pushed? Yes - most throttle-by-wire cars do this (and you can probably expect a software update soon, I'm guessing, though such a sensitive bit of code needs to be fully validated.) Was it the car's fault that he supposedly almost crashed? Nope.

It's virtually impossible to land a large plane in the water "safely"; if either wing or engine touches the water before the other, that side digs in and the plane cartwheels, ripping itself to shreds.

The hudson plane landing wasn't a miracle because of skill on the part of the pilot - it was a miracle because it was astronomically slim odds that the plane would continue in a straight line and remain intact.

Try this youtube video of Curtis visting the guys at Flitetest for a really great look at how it works, flying it, etc. from some guys who really know their RC stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Flitetest is pretty awesome, by the way; I stumbled across their channel a couple of months ago and have been quite entertained. They're the closest thing I can think of to "Top Gear, only with remote control things that fly."

And I do mean "things" that fly; they routinely have a "can we make ___ fly?" episodes. I think I recall one challenge involved getting a cinderblock into the air.

No.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )