I must say I do not associate myself with any political party and do not even live in US.

But anyway, since you mentioned DOT, I'd assume you are in US. And as a matter of fact there is a standard 'Yellow change intervals' in US: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/traffops/signtech/signdel/trafficmanual-current.htm , chapter 9, section 9-04.5. It didn't take me too long to find that.

So, this effectively means that either US authorities on some levels were engaging in awfully dangerous and illegal activities by shortening yellow light time or that shortening is purely perceptual. I'm not sure which one it is :).

But RLCs have really nothing to do with any of this. If some authority can go against the law and make yellow light shorter than required - that is the problem unrelated to RLCs. It's like banning bullet proof vests after some policeman suffocates his wife in it.

RLCs act as a deterrent for some drivers to run red lights, and as such they can save lives, and so they should be used, not banned.

I'm not exactly sure the shortcomings of the law that you have described are actually shortcomings, for the following reasons:

1) Yes, van with older tires should keep larger distance - this is lawful and ethical thing to do. Just because it's a van, heavy vehicle , with, well, older tires. Thus it has longer stopping distance. The fact that drivers of such vehicles (or any vehicle for that matter) usually do not want to realise.

2) I'm not sure which country you live in, but I have a feeling that in any country getting insurance payments is hard enough that you would be willing to search for a buyer for your vehicle instead. And that's not to mention that you may be injured in such collision, more than you think, especially if you goal is to 'total' the vehicle. So, no person in their right mind would attempt this.

3) Probably most importantly. If you hit the brakes and someone hits you from behind - yes, they were following to closely. This is by the definition. And following to closely (and hitting someone as the result) is against the law. You might have done something ethically wrong by hitting the brakes for no reason and there is no law to punish you - that is true. But the other side did something ethically wrong and unlawful - and got punished. That is what law was intended to do.

    So I guess my point is that yes, law is not perfect. And yes, you can quickly change lanes and brake in front of somebody not giving them opportunity to get back far enough. But I would argue that current law is the best that we can get with currently deployed technology.

    Is better law possible? Probably, with onboard recorders, dash cameras and stuff, mandated by the law - better law would be possible. But I can only imagine the amount of whining about 'privacy' from people why think that are entitled to drive +20-30km/h over the speed limit.

    All in all - current law is probably the best possible in current situation. Which means that we, as a society should do our best to obey it. And not to blame the guy who was stopping for red light/squirrel/kitten or child on the road.

Your brakes may one day save some kid's life by the cost of rear end of your car. And you won't have to pay for it!
I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with ethics here, from your point of view.

Yes, humans in general are crappy in measuring times and distances. But that's what we have got. People should acknowledge this and drive safely according to human abilities and road conditions. But instead people risk, get injured, die themselves and kill other people - that is where ethics is damned.

Unfortunately I do not know the details about research around longer yellow times, specifically I do not know for how long it was conducted. I would guess that this measure might have positive effect on short/medium term, but in the long term people just accommodate it. And those who run red light would just account for it and push it to the limits again.

Unfortunately there are only two things that stop people from doing stupid things:
1) money. i.e. fines
2) pain, injury

In case of running red light latter induces pain on innocent people, so the real option left is money, i.e. fines.

Yes, there is a percentage of people who run red light occidentally once on their lives, because they are humans, not machines. But there's large part who does this routinely and on purpose - and for those longer yellow, delayed green or whatever measure wont work. Fine, license suspension, double insurance premiums might safe lives of others with the help or RLCs.

It is rather funny how people blame everything and everyone for accidents but not themselves. Yes, of course, RLC are to blame for collisions, not drivers who speed and follow too close! Drive according to rules and RLC won't cause any trouble. Moreover, it seems to me that accidents caused by RLC would be minor comparing to accidents caused by running red light. During this type of collision everybody is already braking, speeds are lower. Rear end collision in most cases hits the front of the car which is design to absorb this hit, also car in front slides forward and in most cases there are only one or two occupants in the front of the car, so they are not hit by car in the back. But if you look into commissions caused by running red light the story is different. Car running red light is actually accelerating in a hope to 'make it' - the speeds are higher. One of the vehicles is being hit in the side causing much more damage. So yeah, RLCs are a moneygrab. Just like any other type of law enforcement. And prisons are legitimate form of slavery. Anarchy - the way to go, right.

TFA doesn't tell the whole truth. You cannot get Gnome 2 Look and Feel with Gnome 3. You just cannot. You cannot have workplaces in a grid, you cannot move and place your applets way you want, you cannot even have sensible task bar - one that is from applets doesn't even have context menus on buttons to allow one to move application to different workplace. It's like you spend couple of days tuning Gnome 3 and still get 'something' that is very far from what you've already had in Gnome 2 for many years. But that's only for starters. Then one can remember that with Gnome 2 often comes compiz with lot's of features and lots of eye candy. And that all begs a question - what exactly the purpose of the Gnome rewrite? It seems like their main goal was to copy all bad features from macos. And it was would have been perfectly fine if they didn't so badly break Gnome 2 with all their library changes. It's like one of the most popular DEs just seized to exist overnight. You upgrade you Ubuntu/Fedora/etc and... your desktop is no more. And you were so much used to it. I'm not against innovation in any way... But would it be better to perform experiments in the labs, not in schools/factories? Ubuntu with their Unity is much better in that sense - they did not take your choice away. But Gnome 3 did - and that's main problem.

Isn't cDNA just same DNA but written a bit differently? That is, it contains same information. And it looks like this ruling allows one to patent that information! The very same information that is used to produce proteins in YOUR body. This ruling sounds like - we cannot allow you to patent your record in MP3 format, but if you transcode it to FLAC - go ahead and patent it. Doesn't make any sense.

I wonder how long before there'll be well organized 'underground railway' of hard drives with everything one might be interested in? History repeats itself, doesn't it?

In Russia this often called 'thermorectal cryptanalysis' and soldering iron is a tool of choice for this sort of job.

..to achieve in court? This is the thing I truly do not understand. So suppose they get names out of those IPs and the bring those poor people to court. What next? All they have is the list of IPs from one of those companies that were mentioned on /. recently. I.e companies that are heavily affiliated with copyright owner. Can this list of IP addresses be hold as any sort of evidence? I mean anybody can go to whois service, get block of IPs Tekksavvy is using and randomly choose N IPs from it. Then sell this as 'prof of copyright infringement'. So whoever is producing this list has clear financial incentive to make it long and there is no way he can prove that that list of IPs was gathered in any way that correlates with any sort of copyright infringement. Will court accept such 'evidence'? This sounds to me like allowing victim's family to find and bring in DNA of the killer - not the thing generally allowed.

Hopefully their designs will become more earthy now.

Nvidia is creating Linux driver not because of good will, but because Linux gives Nvidia access to very fast growing market. And yes, Nvidia will notice if this market won't be accessible. Everybody else on that market will be just happy without Nvidia. In short: Nvidia needs good Linux driver more then Linux needs Nvidia at all.

What sort of trade secrets? It's not sarcasm, I'm really curious. From what I know all 'innovations' that make them competitive should already be patented. What else can they put into driver that they are giving away for reverse engineering by competitors?

Nvidia can go and reimplement (in a 'clean room') Linux kernel and it's APIs - nobody would have problems with that. But it seems like to much work for Nvidia. Instead it takes existing Linux environment, stuffs it with their blob and starts making money on selling chips for smartphones/tablets/etc. And it doesn't give anything back to the community. And that sounds like a violation of spirit of the GPL. And nobody asks Nvidia billions of dollars, nobody even asks Nvidia to give their chips for free. People just think it would be nice of Nvidia to open source its drivers. Drivers for products customers already payed for! It doesn't seems like to much to ask, does it?