As i said, whether it's dangerous depends on a lot of things. There are plenty of places in my area where there are long stretches of sidewalk without driveways or crosswalks. There are people who ride at more or less a walking pace, which incurs no more danger than walking itself. There are places such as open beachfront areas where there are enough cyclists on sidewalks that drivers are conditioned to look for them. There are places where a roadway is grooved, or has badly placed drainage grates that make a sidewalk a safer option. And so on.

I'm a regular bike commuter. I generally avoid sidewalks, unless trails are routed over them. My post was primarily to correct the misinformation that cycling on the sidewalk is illegal; this is one of several commonly held myths about cycling law (another one, absurdly, being that cyclists must ride on sidewalks). In some places sidewalk cycling is illegal, and some places it's dangerous. It is not, however, universally both of these.

That could because riding on a sidewalk was not illegal.

That is, it is illegal in some places, but it's far from a universal law. In Washington, D.C., it is legal to ride on the sidewalk in most of the city, excluding a high-traffic area in the downtown. In Northern Virginia it is generally legal unless signed otherwise; in fact some of the trails in Arlington, just outside D.C., are routed over sidewalks.

Whether it's dangerous depends on a lot of things, including the expectations of the other sidewalk users. In the D.C. area, i can tell you, injuries to pedestrians from cyclists riding on the sidewalk are exceedingly rare.

Check your local laws, and please don't misinform.

Get to? I don't think so—nobody "gets to". But it is substantially less dangerous when you do it than it is when someone in an SUV does it, yes, altho your engine noise, lower position, and limited movement still put you at a significant observational disadvantage compared to a cyclist or pedestrian.

You are mistaken if you think a cyclist stopped at a light is safe from being struck by a vehicle. In fact, one of the reasons some cyclists blow lights is to take advantage of the relatively car-free segment of the road that lies on the other side of the light.

I guess maybe you should read the essay again. There's no point in my trying to explain it; it's perfectly clear if you bother.

I don't think you read the essay very thoroughly. The point was not that cyclists do not run stop signs; it is that pretty much everyone runs stop signs. The difference is that, when a cyclist does it, it's very rarely dangerous to anyone, and when it is dangerous, the danger is usually to the cyclist. But a cyclist running a stop sign has a much better read on the situation because he can actually see and hear what is around him. Similarly, people jaywalk constantly but very rarely get killed, because they aren't encased in soundproof glass and metal when they do so.

Meanwhile, the "1/20" you cite is a rather absurd abstraction; the average compliance for all vehicles in the study you refer to was only 22.8%. So fewer than 1 in 4 people in general are stopping at stop signs, but you think cyclists are somehow the problem when they're only 1-5% of the road population?

The essay doesn't say that cyclists should run stop signs (although in Idaho, stop signs are relaxed to yield signs for cyclists). It points out that there's nothing unique about their doing so, and compliance with stop signs is not a logical prerequisite for extending sympathy or protection to any particular population of road users. The irrational way drivers tend to respond when they see cyclists break a minor law is, in most cases, deeply hypocritical. Drivers annually kill in excess of 30,000 people in the U.S. alone. Cyclists kill a couple. The risk profile is several orders of magnitude different, but drivers don't seem to recognize that when they get all pissy because they just saw a cyclist run a stop sign.

Go hang out at a stop sign one day and count the percentage of cars you see actually stop. Pot, kettle, black.

http://washcycle.typepad.com/home/2008/07/the-myth-of-the.html

You know that most cyclists have cars, and drive, too, so they're paying fuel taxes right alongside you, right? But when they're riding their bikes, they're using up a lot less space on the roads, reducing congestion and leaving more room for you to get around. Compared with cars, bikes contribute virtually no wear on roads, and areas paved for bike traffic cost a fraction of what regular rated roads cost, because of the dramatically reduced load requirements. When cyclists get where they're going, they will lock up to a bike rack that fits 20 vehicles in the area of a parking space, leaving more parking for you to put your car in. They're also reducing gasoline demand, which might slightly lower the price you pay at the pump. As a driver, you stand to gain in numerous ways from others' cycling.

And fuel taxes don't cover the cost of the roads, anyway, mainly because they've been essentially stagnant while the cost of fuel increased fivefold. Drivers' use of the roads is heavily subsidized now by general taxation, so you don't get to point at cyclists and say they're the freeloaders.

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51-percent-of-u-s-road-spending/
http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/do-roads-pay-themselves

The part where it's limited by definition by having a 300 Mb/s downstream bandwidth. Clearly it is not in any sense "unlimited".

And then there's the stuff everyone else has already said regarding Verizon ToS, which is true.

Stan is not a girl: "né".

Happy birthday, Stan!

Minor correction: the O in NOAA is Oceanic, not Oceanographic.

Not to be confused with the Unitard Nations, which sets international standards for superhero costumes.

The Earth has enough fossil fuel to last hundreds more years.

At current rates of consumption, perhaps. With a 3 percent growth rate, consumption doubles every 24 years or so. Guess what that does to your prediction.

I'm amazed that no one seems to have mentioned the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday", from the album Foxtrot (1972). It tells a story of real estate speculators' collusion with corrupt genetic engineers:

This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot
Restriction on humanoid height

[Extract from conversation of Joe Ordinary in local puborama]:
I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold
It's said now that people will be shorter in height
They can fit twice as many in the same building site
(They say it's alright)

... if we're really losing all the COs, is in emergency telephone service during extended power outages.

My Verizon FiOS land-line only works for a few hours after a power outage starts, because they provide only a small UPS to operate the network interface at my site. No more full-time talk battery, folks.

Good point--i was overlooking the parent RAID.

They should have shut it down in the first place. It's wildly irresponsible and stupid for the FBI to have set up a replacement infrastructure.

Presumably the hosts that are compromised had a vulnerability. Leaving a working infrastructure in place has masked the signal not only that DNSChanger was installed, but that there might be an unpatched vulnerability. If they'd shut it down, staff would have looked at the boxes and identified that there was malware installed, then cleaned up the boxes in the process and fixed their patching process. Who knows what additional malware may have been installed in the interim using the same or other unpatched vulnerabilities, because the FBI meddled?

In addition, by taking the responsibility for maintaining a DNS infrastructure, they run the risk of contributing to another mass compromise if the replacement infrastructure is itself compromised or becomes the victim of a cache poisoning attack.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.