Neither cyclists nor pedestrians travel down the middle of the road.

As I said, only a small fraction of cyclists are hit while traveling down the road not near an intersection.

At an intersection, by definition, YOU'RE IN THE ROAD, whether you had been on a sidewalk or not. Now read that last sentence again, because you seem to be incapable of understanding that simple geometric fact.

The issue is that motorists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a sidewalk. Maybe instead of making cyclists stop and dismount at every goddamned driveway as you want, we should address the original source of the risk and institute a nationwide comprehensive 15 mph speed limit.

Where did you come up with that idea? Pedestrians are routinely killed at intersections, coming from sidewalks. Where do you get the idea that that's acceptable?

Maybe they're whiny because they hear unsubstantiated crap like this all the time from ill-informed people like you.

Pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. Please stop talking out of your ass.

Yet only something like 5% of bike injuries involve being rear-ended by cars on roads.

Almost all other cases would involve intersections of some sort, where being on the sidewalk doesn't help or is counterproductive. You're still vulnerable to the high-speed cars while crossing roads, and you're more likely to collide because they're not looking at where you're coming from.

If we could only arrange for every segment of every bike trip to enjoy a 3% downhill grade, a stiff tail wind, 40 degF dewpoint and partly cloudy skies, then almost nobody would even bother to buy a car.

You are not kept away from cars on a sidewalk.

Since drivers rarely look for traffic on sidewalks as they go in and out of driveways and side streets, you run a high risk of getting run over at every curb cut. At least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you when they bother to glance up from their cellphones.

Better still, it also came with DEBUG.COM.

Most people these days prefer to live a good deal longer than their earliest possible breeding time.

My theory is that the illiterate medieval peasants who invented those systems had an intuitive knowledge that a duodecimal number system would make a lot more sense than decimal, and they ended up creating various half-assed implementations of it for their measurements. (The mile thing is different; it's a Roman decimal measurement of steps).

Unfortunately we did end up using decimal, and reinforced it with Arabic numerals, which makes those intuitions worse than useless in the modern world.

Then how do you explain the fact that after well over a decade of people being "educated" that Triclosan in hand soap is useless and probably dangerous, almost every soap on the market is still laced with it?

I'll explain it: such education simply doesn't work. The average person can not hold enough factoids in their brains to make the correct decisions on all of the things they need to purchase in modern life. Morever, the manufacturers are constantly bombarding those same people with misinformation and half-truths to promote their products. (This soap is Antibacterial!!!)

Without a ban, tax tweaks, or large mandatory warning box on the package that says "This vacuum an ineficient power hog. Do not buy.", then absolutely nothing will happen. (I'll also point out that the difference between increasing the tax on one thing and rebating it on something else is purely academic. They're both effectively raising the share of overall tax burden on one set of goods and reducing it on the complementery set.)

In that case, you're not running file sync software. You're running a file transformation program.

The same thing would happen to Java files if you had a file transformation program that removed curly braces.

I bet you're that guy at the front of the line who misremebers the price of what you bought and makes them send the bagger sauntering to the back of the store for a price check, and then doesn't even start to open his 19th century checkbook until the final tally is rung up, and then fills the whole check out glacially topped off by a pointlessly legible signature, then finally hands the check over so that the cashier can slowly scribble the entire contents of your drivers license over it.

And you wonder why I'm so thankful for self checkouts, even though I'm not even nearly a "millenial".

Unlicensed doc: "The police called about a murderous drug-fueled rampage. Who did you say that test subject #37 was?"

Assistant: "Abby someone."

Doc: "Abby who?"

Assistant: "Abby... Normal."

It's because the fundamental equation that relates a rocket's performance and the mass fuel it requires to orbital velocities is exponential. This makes it work out so that any chemical rocket leaving earth has to have the vast majority of its weight as fuel, where as a rocket leaving the moon only about half of its weight as fuel.

What's more, the entire lunar module and its fuel supply is dead weight as far as the earth launch is concerned, which makes the earth rocket and its fuel multiple all the bigger. Then there's the issue of bringing along enough fuel to slow down the craft into lunar orbit, and escaping lunar orbit back to earth. The lunar lander didn't need to handle any of that, either.

You might want to look in the mirror.

Scripting languages usually feature dynamic, strong typing. (The runtime always knows exactly what type its dealing with.)

Most compiled languages have static, strong typing. C is somewhat of an exception, being relatively weakly typed. (It's easy to make all sorts of bizarre type casts, sometimes implicitely.)

A few languages are very weakly typed, such as Forth.

That will have to wait.

The HURD developers have just noticed that their code would be more elegant if it were implemented using the new features of a modern programming language, so they're now starting a ground up rewrite of the HURD kernel in Perl 6.