If you're starting to drift in a skid, hand position is going to matter less than how fast you can turn the wheel against the rotation to catch it before you overrotate and go off the road sideways. Some positions might be a bit better than others, but it really depends on what the wheel angle is when your tires decide to let go. :p

8 and 4 is pretty much mandatory in F1 cars because that's the only position that puts your fingers in the right place to hit the clutch and shift paddles properly. On those, there's also usually no wheel between 10 and 2.

I usually use left hand at about 8 or 9 with elbow on the windowsill, my right at about 5 with elbow on the armrest, or my knee at about 7 if I'm on a long stretch of empty highway. (For the narrow range of steering required at highway speeds, you'd be surprised how much control you have with just a knee.) Manual transmission, usually one hand on wheel at 9-ish and the other on the shift lever. Usually don't need much more torque on the wheel than that.

But I've got about 500k+ miles under my belt, so i'm a little more casual than some other drivers..

is manufactured. It's that some religious extremists in this country can't deal with the fact that the reality that hard science is discovering and exploring doesn't exactly match their creation myth of choice, and keep stirring the s*** because they're still trying to stuff that genie back in the bottle long after it's way too late.

There's only a "controversy" because they keep insisting it's "controversial" as a pretext to keep their foot in the door. And the fact is, creationism is not science, at best it's Bible-flavored pseudoscience that's already decided its conclusions and merely cherry-picks data to support those conclusions .. which is actually the opposite of science ..

True on first approximation, but that leads to the question of who goes first and takes one for the team, so to speak? And thus it becomes a Nash equilibrium, because people act as self-interested individuals, and few if any are willing to be in that first wave because very few people are willing to commit that much even to demonstrably noble ideals .. and making that strategy work requires enough people to be willing to move toward such a provocation that it's impossible to dismiss it as a few rogue troublemakers taunting our brave boys in blue. To paraphrase an earlier commenter in the thread, we're not mad enough for that strategy to work yet, because the anger hasn't reached critical mass yet, because too many people here still believe that legal==moral==ethical and fail to grasp the true insanity of militarized police acting extralegally as counterrevolutionaries. This country just has too many ways of either keeping things out of the news or drowning them in the noise of reality TV and celebrity gossip and NASCAR and football.

That's the thing. Would we know? No one who knows about the kinds of detentions that are authorized now (as of the NDAA taking effect yesterday) is allowed to tell anyone.

It's always a possibility, and it's always cause for concern. The agencies involved have given us (citizens) some simple assertions of goodwill saying they won't, but there's little or no actual accountability keeping them from doing so -- in the actual law, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from using any of the powers they've been given to round up protesters under the pretext of antiterrorism. And it's very likely that it could go on for quite some time without any news of it reaching the public. So, to answer your question, no, I can't give examples, but I wouldn't expect to be able to. We just don't know, and we can't know, for sure. Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but as things stand now, there are reasons we wouldn't be able to cite examples..

More often than not, people who protest here are worried about official tactics and strategies designed to neutralize protests in the first place. Getting arrested or even possibly shot can be an acceptable risk if you can get your message across in the process, which with many of the tactics in use here today is questionable at best. And as of yesterday, it's possible for certain three letter entities to grab us right off the street before we even get to where a protest is happening.

And trust me, there are plenty of people in this country who understand the profound injustice of herding anyone with any objections into "free speech zones" far from anywhere they could be effective at all. That's required some creative adjustments in protest tactics, and for the most part, the majority here are still so blinded by the mythology of the USA as a place where "it can't happen here" and there are still so few of us who see the reality that pushing too hard just gives the powers that be an excuse to crack down and shut us up by force. That will change, I'm sure, but the numbers just aren't there yet .. it's a hearts and minds game at present. Different country, different situation, different rules, different strategies.

Because here in the USA, if you do much more than that without really covering your ass, you become a "terrorist" and a guest of the government down in Gitmo. Dissenting speech is only "free" in theory here .. for all practical purposes, it might as well be illegal for all that you get to exercise it.

And never underestimate the teaching power of a public (and clearly nonviolent) drum circle in certain places at certain times .. ;)

Worth noting the difference between de facto and de jure here. The police are not above the law in a purely de jure sense as there is theoretically some degree of accountability. Practically speaking, in most cases, they are above the law to some extent in a de facto sense, because it's extremely difficult for ordinary citizens to make complaints against them stick in court.

(Although in most states, the state police do have oversight responsibility over local PD's, and the FBI has oversight responsibility over state and local police. Which is one of many reasons local PD's aren't fond of state police or the Feds. And one reason you do want to be able to find contact info for your state police and FBI in the phone book.)

Which comes back to my ongoing objection to airline security implementation in general -- there's no guarantee you won't get stuck in an airport far away from home with no way to get to your destination or back home, because someone halfway to your destination decided to throw a fit over some minor technicality. And in situations where that does happen, there's also no guarantee you won't become a "suspected terrorist" if, in the heat of the moment, you object to any part of the process a little too loudly. It's little consolation that that's rare if you're the 1 in 10,000+ whose luck just ran out.

The problem is that airline officials or anyone else in charge of letting you get on a plane is apparently *allowed* to make a judgment call like this at any airport along your route. If I'm going to be stopped for some stupid random thing like this (and it is a stupid random thing), I'm going to be a lot less pissed off if it means I can't get on the flight at my home airport, and have a way home, than if it means I've gotten halfway across the country 500-1000 miles from home and then all of a sudden can't fly anywhere and I have no surface transportation home or shipping for my checked baggage. One reason I don't fly when i can avoid it is unpredictability of what will be flagged in security at any given airport, plus the ease with which it's possible for a social outlier like me to become a "suspicious person" and subject to all of the treatment that triggers.

Now, that may be hard to avoid for international flights where the airport of departure from the country isn't my home airport, but if an airline official is going to pull a dickish move like this, the least he/she can do is refund my international ticket and comp me a *domestic* flight back home, plus waivers on any extra fees to route my checked baggage home as well. Not sure if they were offered that as well as the option to stay in a hotel while the passport snafu is straightened out, but I do wonder ..

And little or no understanding of how it works or how to use it as anything other than yet another few-to-many information channel they can listen to or watch, but can't talk back to in any real sense. And you're right that that's the direction it's going, but some of us aren't thrilled about that..

And overzealous enforcement of those irrational laws does even more ..

.. VHS was such poor quality that the fact that it won out over Beta always amazed me. Chroma channel of such poor bandwidth that the best you could say of VHS color is that you'd maybe get a blob of more or less the right color around that black and white object in the luma channel. Longitudinal audio tracks that did a record wipe effect any time a kink in the tape went over the audio head (granted, the RF audio on later stereo VHS was somewhat better). I thought about trying to edit on it once, but decided I didn't want to bother without any way to implement a timecode track. Even the 2 hour mode was crummy enough to not be anywhere close to broadcast quality, and that was in the analog vestigial-sideband 480i SD NTSC-M days of composite video.

And cleaning tape heads, and aligning transports, and dreading the day the pinch roller got a bit too sticky and unwound your only copy of your favorite movie into a rat's nest inside the VCR. (And yes, I've extracted a few such tape nests from family members' VCR's. Entirely too many of them learned that I knew how to fix the things.)

Beta was better. 3/4" U-Matic showed me what good was when it came to videotape formats. I was happy to leave VHS behind when I was able to record on Digital-8 format in broadcast quality, and once I got a camera that would record on an SD card in 720p I never looked back. I have heard that VHS tape makes reasonably good magnetic card stripes, though ..

Is that another way of saying "love it or leave it"?

Whether it's FUD or not depends completely on the balance of the risk/benefit analysis in terms of deploying it in this society. Given that the overall attitude of the known players both in government and corporate management is that technology of this kind is for their benefit and not ours (however much the corporate management may claim otherwise!), it's kind of a nice fantasy to believe that something that invasive will only ever be used to make the customer experience better. It probably will, but only for well behaved "normal" customers who don't trip any misbehavior profiles. Some of us have no desire to be well behaved or "normal".

And it's also kind of a nice fantasy to believe that law enforcement or corrupt political administartions would never abuse something like this to single out inconveniently opinionated people for covert action. IMHO, at least.