I dunno, but you could ask New Zealand after paying them $600 for the privilege of not giving the people who could be potentially be hit by your craft something to say about it...

Apparently they think it's quite sane to charge so little money in return for making your permission or opinion moot.

Yes, but that was 0-60 straight up.

To win the race you need to move forward, and the largest piece left over from the explosion must cross the finish line.

*snip*

I've been in favor of doing just that for a long time now, before self-driving cars were involved or even a thing.

It's ironic you mention the test shouldn't be impossible difficult, but it seems the primary argument for handing out drivers licenses like candy is that for way over half the US population a test that is possible to fail effectively is impossible (which never sounded like a valid reason against it to me, but alas)

A funny story that happened to me when I went to take my first driving test, many moons ago...

I was 17 and pretty nervous and anxious about taking the official test (as tends to be my nature), so I purposely scheduled it on a later day than suggested in order to get as early a slot in the day as possible.
My thinking was that a driving instructor that has had to put up with bad drivers and dumb kid mistakes all day is likely to be pissed off, even if only on the inside. That was an additional stress I didn't want, so hopefully if I was first in the day, the instructor wouldn't have a full days worth of frustration pent up to potentially be taken out on me.

After a 10 day delay I was able to get slot #2 that morning. Sure not as good as slot #1, but how bad could one student before me possibly be?

As myself, my mother, and the mother of the girl in slot #1 were all standing at the front window of the DMV watching her do the parallel parking cone test, just as they finished the instructor opened the passenger door and stepped out of the vehicle, the car lurches forward with a brief screech and runs over the instructors foot!

First to be said, the instructor was not seriously injured, though I can only imagine how much that would hurt.
EMTs came and examined him and took him to the hospital for further examination.
An employee there was out talking to the instructor before they took him away, which is where the report of "no serious injury" came from, as well as determining another instructor would need to be assigned for the day.
(It turns out I was in slot #1 for the new instructor anyway!)

The girl and her mom were still at the DMV after I completed my test and returned and her mom was still chatting with my mom, which was a little surprising as I assumed they remained there due to the accident, something I figured would be involving a lot of paperwork of not a police report or something like that.

Nope, turns out the girl passed the rest of her testing, and despite running over the instructors foot with her car, was waiting on (and issued) her full privileged drivers license!

If that isn't reason enough to fail someone and keep them on a learners permit, I'm honestly not sure what one could do to fail it if they wanted to.

The driving test was already far too easy even back then, and from what I hear lately the written test is now multiple choice where they get to choose which questions to skip or answer, the cone test is now spread out further than the parking lot line guides we used, and the driving test itself is limited to four right turns going around the block.

I understand how today it is practically impossible to live without being able to drive to and from work, to and from the big grocery stores that replaced the corner-mart, and all of that...
But I still wish they would take into account how difficult it is for the rest of us to live when they allow people like this to pilot a 4000lb block of metal without the slightest idea how to control the thing.

The courts and entire legal system says you are wrong.

The law only says you must follow the law, and thusly following the law and being hit by someone breaking the law is not the law abiding person (or computers) fault, nor is it intended to be their problem.

(Even then it's only their problem in the sense the law abiding driver has to deal with fucktards like you causing harm to them, refusing to take responsibility for your law breaking, and the slowness of the courts in forcing you to make them whole again)

I'm not sure I agree with that, although admit you may be right.

I think telling people they can't drive a motor vehicle on the public roads anymore would be more comparable to ~100 years ago when the government told people they wouldn't be allowed to ride their horse or horse drawn carriage on the public roads anymore.

I bet most people back then also thought that would never work or be accepted by the public either.
Actually for all I know it DIDN'T go over well!

However here we are, not a single horse on the roads in the cities anyways, and even in the country it isn't the most common form of transportation anymore although you do still see it on occasion.

But just as its necessary/tolerated to have a horse on a country road at times, I suspect those same roads will tolerate human-driven motor vehicles just the same and likely for a long time to come.

In the city however? Doubtful.

As a country we have gone through such a transition before, so there's no reason to think it can't also be done again.

But I must admit you may still be correct. The opinion of the general public on what America should be and is has drastically changed in the last 100 years or so.

It used to mean "freedom" yet today more than the minority are in favor for a totalitarian police state.
It used to mean "chasing the American dream" but now that is hardly tolerated and less possible than ever before.
It used to mean curiosity and learning to those that wanted it, but today we imprison more children for doing the exact same things the judges, police, and lawyers (and the rest of us!) all did as kids too.

A strong anti-science and anti-progress movement to stop such a change from happening today like it did with horse drawn carriages wouldn't be a shocking surprise to me, sadly.

When given the choice between not stopping and rear-ending the car stopped in front of you, or stopping like you are required to do by law and being rear-ended yourself, I must seriously question why you advocate the more dangerous and the only illegal option of the two?

Plus 11 out of 10000 rear-end accidents per city per day doesn't sound at all like it is out of range, especially so considering those 11 are spread out over a vehicle fleet the size of Googles.

Take a small taxi or limo company with the same sized fleet and I would bet money on the spot they have had more than 11 vehicles rear-ended in the same time period.

Finally, in closing you just literally advocated 11 traffic violations should have been committed, when in reality Google's vehicles haven't violated a single one.
You do realize if you followed your own advice, after just 3-4 of those accidents you caused, you would have lost your drivers license and privileges by now, right?

Hard to take the opinion of someone who by all rights should have a suspended license over a fleet of vehicles and drivers that haven't violated any traffic laws to date.

Yes, exactly, they would be censoring you.

Not illegally censoring you, not censoring you in violation of any constitutional amendments, but they would certainly be censoring you.

In fact as the topic of discussion at hand is about, they arguably are not even in the wrong for that form of censorship.
It is their conservative newspaper, their soapbox so to speak. They have the moral right to decline letting you use their soapbox.

They likely have the legal right to do so as well, although that can be trickier depending on the details. Certain forms of discrimination Are after all illegal for citizens to perform.

Also if it was an issue of the newspaper controlling ALL the soapboxes that could be available, that would certainly have a good argument for not being legal. It may need a monopolistic practices charge from a judge first, but that may certainly be possible.
Since you defined "conservative newspaper" that does imply there are other sub-types of newspaper out there, and assuming they are each controlled by different parties (IE no monopoly issues) it would very likely not even be considered a problem legally. You would have other soapboxes to use, and in that example could very well find one more in line with the anarchist theme which would publish the paper.

It also matters a lot if you can make your own soapbox or not.
In the case of the press, you can make your own soapbox to use, so being denied the use of other peoples soapboxes isn't a legal issue.
If that was practically or fully impossible to do, that would be a valid and good argument that it is illegal censorship.

I don't believe in your example it would be illegal discrimination or censorship, but honestly there are so many laws out there and so many differences state to state that I could very easily be wrong.

But legal or illegal doesn't really matter, the act itself is still called "censorship".

http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/censorship

Censorship: Censorship blocks something from being read, heard, or seen.
To "censor" is to review something and to choose to remove or hide parts of it that are considered unacceptable.

A decision made by a private company to "choose what to include in what they publish" is *exactly* the act of blocking something from being read, heard, or seen by reviewing it and choosing to hide (not publish) it.

How do you figure that isn't censorship? It is literally the dictionary definition of censorship!

No definition anywhere of that word involves "government" - anywhere

The first amendment in the US even proves that. That is the amendment that says censorship performed BY the government is illegal.

Why specify censorship by the government if no other forms of censorship existed or were possible?

If Reddit allows that, next thing you know it may escalate up to the Dyson gangstas siphoning the dirt out of our cars for their pics:

http://dbagging.com/wp-content...

Then where would America be!

If you uninstall Flash plugin from Firefox, Youtube will detect no flash plugin and instead use HTML5 video which works natively.

But just having the Flash plugin, be it disabled or blocked or if you have Javascript lie, will cause Youtube to fall back to trying (and failing) to use the Flash player.

A good "emergency" tip for youtube, although all the other websites without HTML5 video versions (aka all the other ones I use) will of course remain broken - or in the case of Flash per-page blocking, will break even further than before.

I don't know why youtube actually searches your extension list to choose flash vs html5 players instead of something more sane like checking if the plugin loaded on their page (to handle blocked and disabled flash), or just give you a choice which player to use...

Now if only blip and twitch would add html5 video support, for me at least much of this flash crap would be taken care of.

If course it matters, it's a beta! Duh.

That's two weeks of lost beta testing and compatibility verification with your companies software and existing infrastructure. That's potentially another two week delay in being able to successfully deploy it.

It may not matter much or a lot, but it certainly does matter.

In my case it only slightly matters, but I only have 45 days remaining of my free license for the new version of our ERP client I'm testing for compatibility.
Now I admit I already ran into a couple show-stopper bugs with the ERP client, so I already know we won't be deploying in the next three months. But had those issues not already come up that would be roughly a third of my testing window gone.

You only don't think it doesn't matter and not care right up until something critical doesn't work, then you will complain I didn't do enough testing :P

As much as I tend to poke fun at your corporate overlords policies, a big congrats and thumbs up are in order to both the review team and whomever made that part of the java.com website!

Shh! Please don't jinx me.

I'm currently in negotiations with the University of Toronto to secure funding and resources to start up my Unicorn and Care Bare Dissection class: Biology 666

Doesn't look too heavy of use to me.

With no Java in my browser, I can read all the text on that page, see all the menu links and even click them to go to the target pages, and see only a single Java applet (well, after clicking their agree button)

Even better, when I do try to detect my Java version I see text output on the page that is both
A) there and readable, and
B) factually correct!

It says it can't determine my Java version, which is fairly accurate as I have no Java for it to detect the version of.
It doesn't show a blank page, or an error that Java isn't installed, or have most of the page missing like the original poster claimed would happen.

I have to admit, and I hate saying it about a company like Oracle, but that page is both very light on Java usage and probably one of the best implementations of graceful fail back and browser plugin handling in general that I've seen.

That is pretty much the problem, they apparently only could afford the one backup radio link
(after the problem of the primary fiber break of course)

So they could afford and did have One radio transceiver using a dish, and it was damaged as well.

As far as a ground station at the island goes, there is little difference to a large storm between a microwave transceiver and a satellite transceiver. If they still only had the one backup dish at the same location just of the other type, it would have been damaged just the same.

The obvious joke answer is: clearly they needed TWO backup links!
Or to quote from Futurama: