18,000 people died in 2006 from DUI crashes.

That's 4,000 more than homicides. So yes, it's pretty "heinous" and should get "insane" punishment. The problem is the punishments aren't insane enough; they sound "insane", but the criminals just get right back in their cars and kill/main more people.

Every time you get behind the wheel and you're drunk/high, you're loading a handgun with a bullet, spinning the chamber, and pointing it at innocent people on the road, and pulling the trigger.

The difference is that you're very often driving to a store where they happily sell you that gun and bullet knowing full well you're going to get into your car and play roulette with it.

No gun store in the country would sell you a gun knowing you'd do that, yet millions of bars serve patrons who drove to their establishments, knowing full well they're going to get back into their cars, drunk.

Dear Richard Allen Black,

"my road and fuel taxes"

There's no such thing as a road tax, and fuel taxes don't pay for roads. Not even close, because they haven't been adjusted for fuel efficiency nor for inflation since before you were born. In almost every country, roads are paid for by property and income taxes.

Second, your car (especially if you drive an SUV or pickup) causes wear and tear on the road. My bicycle does not. Your state has one of the highest highway death rates in the country, so while my bicycle doesn't cause property damage, injury and death...your car sure as hell does, and at great cost to others and the state.

Third, you live in Montana, which is in the top ten in terms of states which take the most in federal taxes relative to what the federal government spends on you. You're leeches, by a ratio of 2:1; you pay $4k in taxes and the federal government spends $8k on your stupid, ignorant ass. Those roads you drive on? You didn't pay for them, hick.

Where's my rebate check from you and your road-damaging, federal-tax-leeching "d-bags"?

If someone on a bike runs a red light or stop sign and they get hit, that's their bad and that's on them; they'll get no sympathy from me.

Thank goodness, then, that most cyclist crashes are not from the cyclist running a red light or stop sign, but instead the fault of the motorist who hits them. Try googling "study cyclists fault crashes", and note how in almost every country and city, it's the same story.

White does not always help. If you ride at night, use bright headlights and taillaights. I commute by bicycle and have lights on regardless of time of day. Too many drivers just do not pay sufficient attention.

Bright headlights and taillights do not always help. If you ride at night, use dayglo clothing, flags, strobe lights, and pyrotechnics. Too many drivers just do not pay sufficient attention.

If they're "not paying attention" (aka not looking at the road), please explain to me how "being more visible" will help....

I've been hit in the middle of the day, I've been doored despite having a very bright headlight, and I've been cut off ("right hooked") by someone who just passed me, again in the day. Visibility has nothing to do with it. It's about drivers thinking they have the right of way over us universally, and it's about drivers not looking.

In most studies, the number of crashes vs time has little to do with daylight, and everything to do with rush hour - ie people driving aggressively, and traffic density.

He's not "blaming the victim," he's pointing out a safety tip for those of you who don't understand the basic physics of how our eyes work, you Fuck.

Yes, actually, the poster (we don't know it's a "he"...) is perpetuating victim-blaming of cyclists for their injuries and deaths. It's rampant in the US.

1)The cause is unknown (ie, it's not known that visibility was the problem, so how he was dressed is moot) 2)The onus is not on cyclists to dress in a particular way, the onus is on people with the very nice headlights on the front of a very deadly machine to operate that machine properly and be able to avoid a 6 foot tall, 3 foot wide object in the road traveling in the same direction as them 3)In stories like these, people (especially those who don't cycle) take it as an opportunity to condescendingly lecture those of us who do, about how to ride our bicycles. Seth, for example, was apparently an avid cycling advocate, which means he was damn well aware of how to ride "safely", probably knew the laws better than most drivers, and almost certainly had lights, which means he was plenty "visible."

In almost every story about cyclist injuries and deaths, the comments are hateful, vile, and portray the problem as being everything from cyclists merely being present, to how they behave (despite the fact that drivers are at fault in the vast majority of crashes, as numerous studies have proven), to, yes, how they dress. We're apparently at fault if we're not dressed like psycho day-glo clowns.

Let's take a look at some of the comments on TFA, shall we?

• "they don't belong on the roads."
• "Riding a bicycle at 9pm on a major road is a statistic about to happen. How many people are going to have to die before laws are changed concerning cyclists?"
• "Did the bike have lights? Was the man in night riding "bright" clothes?"
• "If a bicyclist is going to be riding at nights - you need some kind of reflective wear so that the vehicles can better see them - I'm not taking sides, but I've driven on roads at night and have passed bicyclists and could barely see them"
• "the car driver might not have been in the wrong...a bike, at 9pm is close to invisible, especially with glare of oncoming headlights."
• "he should have been wearing reflective clothing too..I didn't see anything in the article about him wearing reflective clothing..."
• "I hate seeing cyclists on the road! roads are too dangerous for bikes, period."

Now do you understand why the comment wasn't appropriate? The comparison to rape victims is quite accurate; rape victims used to be blamed for going out at night, or not having a "friend" (male) with them, to not carrying self-defense devices, to being dressed "like that."

I was just struck by a driver recently. The ER doctor finished up his exam by instructing me to "ride defensively" and "bike carefully." I had been operating legally and prudently, and the driver in a split second cut me off and stopped - blocking the road. There was nothing I could do. I was a victim. And the ER doctor was lecturing me, implying it was my fault for not being "careful" enough.

You should - vehicular assault is a serious offence, and if your video can be used to prove malice, those sociopathic pricks will be confined to a cell where they belong.

BWHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA. I had someone sideswipe me and then intentionally "brake check" me (looked in his mirror right at me, glaring, and slammed on his brakes, with nothing in front of him, no intersection, etc.) I gave the cops a complete plate and description and they said there was nothing they could do, because I hadn't been injured - even though the driver, in side-swiping me, had caused a "collision" and by leaving, a hit-and-run - and by stopping in the middle of the road, driven recklessly.

I've been wanting a dash cam for the opposite reason - a lot of the cyclists around here are either stupid or have a deathwish, judging by how flagrantly they violate right-of-way laws.

No, "a lot" of cyclists don't have deathwishes nor are they stupid. You just think they do, because they're a minority outgroup - so you exaggerate negative attributes. The vast majority of cyclist crashes are caused by drivers operating recklessly or illegally. And what right-of-way laws would those be, by the way? Let me guess: you think that you have a right of way over someone on a bicycle, right? Yeah, you don't, actually.

I work with a man from Egypt, a Christian with family over there. I asked him what he thought about all this and his eyes lit up, "my family is finally free."

Great! So they can now start suppressing gays, abortion, science, etc just like they do here in the US!

Trading one form of hatred for another isn't progress.

The reality is that Chavez did more for social conditions in his country than any other president in living memory.

Yeah, except for those rampant human rights abuses. "Social conditions" includes things like free speech, whether you feel you can get justice, feel safe. Even if what you claimed were true - that his people were better off with him than without him - the ends do not justify the means.

Whether US government officials (not "USA"; don't confuse a country's government or leadership with its people) found him a threat and a risk (not "hated him viciously") is irrelevant to Chavez's power-grubbing, human-rights-abusing, autocratic ruling. That you use the word "vicious" to describe the US government's attitude towards him, instead of how he treated his own people, shows that you have a serious perspective problem.

They're no longer really part of the first world.

Sigh. Yet another person who doesn't understand what "third world", "first world", etc mean.

"Worlds" rank countries whether they're with us (NATO/democratic: 1st) vs them (non-democratic/communists, 2nd) vs undeveloped economy (3rd), no, actually.

You're assuming the statistics come from the police.

...is a logical fallacy, and named as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope ...among others.

She didn't post any "evidence." She posted her account, which could be anything from 100% false to 100% true. If she smashed the guy in the temple with a coffee mug and caused profuse bleeding, there should've been ample evidence of at least her hitting him, there'd be blood in the hotel room, etc. The police don't just yawn and walk away from a rape report where there's evidence. And why did the conference organizers suddenly give her the cold shoulder? Oh, wait, right, Teh Patriarchy, I forgot...

She contacted the police immediately. The police indicated a lack of will to pursue the matter.

And why is that, exactly?

Are we going to pretend that Poland is some sort of ooga-booga sketchy-european criminal-justice wasteland compared to the US? Because Poland, 6th largest state in the EU, has half the rate of sexual assault of the US. In fact, looking down the list, I don't see a single crime that is more common in Poland than the US.

First off, a "cheap but okay bike" is not $150. I can't stand this (nor can most bike shop employees, who are really, really, REALLY fucking tired of people strolling in and having wildly unrealistic expectations for what a bicycle costs.)

Bicycles are not toys, and they should not be priced like one. They should be priced compared to the expense of a public transit pass ($60/month in my city for bus+subway), a scooter, or car expenses. How much is a typical monthly car payment?(Answer:$452) How much do you put into that car per month in gas? (Answer: about $250/month.) Insurance? (Answer: about $800/year) Etc.

Second: bike rental systems (these are not "bike shares", despite the popular bastardization of the term) are popular because:

• They can be used for spontaneous and/or one-way trips. For example, I'm going out with friends tonight, and they don't bike; I don't want to have to leave my bike at work. I rode a bike share bike into work instead of taking my for-transportation bike. Or maybe it's going to rain in the morning but the evening commute will be spectacularly nice. Or maybe the roads are clogged and the busses running behind; I can hop on a bike share bike.
• You don't have to store the bike. While many buildings are getting better at this, most don't have bike storage, and it's usually a bit of a pain. Same at many workplaces, though again, lots of places are getting better at this, in part because there's often a financial incentive from the health insurance company.
• You don't need to worry about maintenance and repairs.
• It's amortized, basically. Instead of having to spend $500 on a solid commuter bike, you can spend $X/month/year. And in some ways, it's easier to track for purposes of taxes on commuting expenses.
• They are heavily aimed at tourists, despite claims to the contrary. Looking at the deployment maps this is pretty obvious - they stations tend to be around touristy areas in many cities. Bicycles are the perfect speed for touring an area; slow enough to take it all in, but fast enough to cover a good amount of area.

This a problem that doesn't exist. You establish a chain of evidence and authority for the binaries via signing and checksums, starting with the upstream. Upstream publishes source and there's signing of the announcement which contains checksums. Package maintainer compiles the source. The generated package includes checksums. Your repo's packages are signed by the repo's key.

You can, at any point in time with most packaging systems, verify that every single one of your installed binaries' checksums match the checksums of the binaries generated by the package maintainer.

If you don't trust the maintainer to not insert something evil, download the distro source package and compile it yourself.

If you suspect the distro source package, all you have to do is run a checksum of the copy of the upstream tarball vs the tarball inside the source package, and then all you need to do is review the patches the distro is applying.

If you suspect the upstream, you download it and spend the next year going through it. Good luck...