Yeah, I wasn't proposing adding parentheses per se, just using them to make the alternate readings more apparent. I think I would just break it up into two sentences.
The company is proposing the money for programs similar to those to spay and neuter domestic cats. According to a government study, domestic cats kill over 1.4 billion birds a year.
Yeah, by the phrasing of the quote I thought it was saying the opposite.
The company is proposing the money for programs (such as those to spay and neuter domestic cats), which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year.
vs.
The company is proposing the money for programs such as those to spay and neuter (domestic cats, which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year).
I thought the general rule when working with prepositional phrases is to discard all of them to figure out what the antecedent of the aside* is: "such as those (to spay and neuter domestic cats)" is nested prepositional phrases.
* I feel like there's a more specific grammatical term than "aside" but can't think of it or find it on Google at the moment.
Or is there some actual causal connection that I can't see? I thought neutering animals was supposed to make them *less* aggressive, which would I assume mean fewer birds get killed by them.
The government study found that funding spaying and neutering dogs and cats kills 1.4 billion birds a year? Now *that's* an article I want to read!
It depends what the speed limit is. I'd say slam on the brakes if you're going 30 but accelerate through if you're going 40. But of course it all depends on how close the other driver is and how fast he's traveling, how much warning you have...
My point was that there are going to be times where speeding up will work better. Saying "100.00% compliance with the speed limit" is never going to cover all cases.
Or how about if you're already going the speed limit on a four-lane road in the second-left lane, a guy is coming up on your left, and some bozo starts wandering into your lane from the right. There is also someone right behind you. (This actually happened to me.) Your only options are to violate the speed limit, or let the guy hit you. Me, I tried to split the difference between the two cars and ended up hitting the guy on my left instead.
I don't see any reason why law enforcement with a warrant or probable cause couldn't
Ha ha...ha...sigh.
But that's a stretch.
So we're arguing degrees here. The difference between remote hijacking and all those other already-implemented safety features you've mentioned is that the latter assist the driver, not some external body who insist that they're doing it for our own good because they can decide better than us what that is. If you haven't guessed, I'm also against Trusted Computing(tm) and all the rest of that SecureBoot bull.
and as usual, those capabilities were introduced for convenience
The question is whether it's safer to do your own driving, or trust the programmers to have designed the AI sufficiently well to drive better than you. Drivers are pretty bad in general, so it may be a bit of a toss-up.
No, I meant when you have a green light and are entering the intersection normally, legally, at speed, and somebody runs a red light that will intersect you. And saying "they won't be close enough anyway" assumes that there aren't maniac drivers out there who defy all logic that can be reasonably expected of them. That's a deadly mistake to make, assuming that other drivers will drive safely.
When you make a 100% pronouncement, the edge cases are all that matters (assuming said pronouncement works for all the main cases). This is why so many people are arguing with you, I suspect.
Well, except for gender reassignment and whatever Michael Jackson did to become white...and the jury still being out on whether sexual orientation is 100% genetic...
But other than that, yeah.
The people modding you for speaking your mind
It's that anyone who doesn't immediately jump on board The Right Viewpoint on those women's issues articles is instantly labelled misogynistic. So in that view, probably 80% of Slashdot is Bad People.
In other news, it's a bad idea to expect the Internet to be polite and politically correct. Story at 10.
That you're arguing with a guy by the name of "Typical Slashdotter" is also dramatically ironic as hell.
I was paraphrasing a line from Dodgeball (third one down).
Ah. I take a commuter highway to work these days. All 3 of my accidents since I've moved into town (500k people) 2 years ago have been during my morning commute.
One on the highway, one on slick city streets, and one guy wandering into my lane and sideswiping me, for whatever it's worth.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but as you speed up doesn't your car slightly "ride up" on the road? So not as much of your tire surface is in contact with the ground anymore, making it harder to stop/maneuver suddenly. Cf. hydroplaning for applications.
Just a thought.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
