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Comment Re:Who's driving? (Score 1) 157

Your vehicle has a specifically identifiable and liable owner. The onus on you is to ensure your vehicle is used safely, that includes keeping track of people who may not drive it. Most states have legal requirements that you know the driver of the vehicle and have verified their driving permits, and as the owner the liability lies with you or the person who can legally admit to having committed the offense.

There's nothing inconsistent with the law here.

Fun fact in some countries these things are treated differently depending on how the infraction is identified. For example where I live a ticket issued by a police officer in person holds me liable and can result in the revocation of my license. However a ticket issued to the vehicle by an automatic camera can only hold a person financially liable as there's no way to verify who the person was. As such the owner gets the fine (which may be paid by anyone) but critically you cannot have your license revoked by an automated camera.

Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 157

Most places (in the US) utilize the 85th percentile rule - the speed at which 85% of traffic naturally travels = arbitrary and stupid.

You just defined a rule, i.e. the exact opposite of arbitrary. The speed you described is based on something physical. Also the reason the speed limit has an upper percentile is because two elements affect road safety: Total speed, and speed variance. The 85% rule exists to reduce upper speed variance improving road safety. It was set based on a statistical analysis of accidents, and the only "arbitrary" component of this is how many citizens are considered expendable to keep cars moving quickly, and even that wasn't completely arbitrary as that point was chosen to be a point below where the accident rate increases at a significantly higher rate.

Also the US government no longer recommends the use of the 85% rule and the guidance to states is to set speed limits based on local context and road design.

If you are distracted by speed limit signs to the point where you can't focus on driving, hand your license in. Especially in the USA where the skyline is made up of nothing but billboards and adverts.

Comment Re:...not that you should be speeding on public ro (Score 1) 157

Speeding is defined relative to an arbitrary value

Nope. There is nothing arbitrary about the value chosen. Because you don't understand the background trade-offs, or how the limits are set related to road safety, both in pre-engineered systems which define speed limits based on types of roads, and that weird system that the USA did employ for a while where the limit is set based on a percentile of the average road speed doesn't make it arbitrary.

And why have a limit in the first place? Well even when you set it based on crowd sourcing the average acceptable speed (bad way to do it since there's ample literature showing people overestimate their capabilities), you still have enhanced safety by reducing speed variance - i.e. getting the people going above average speed to stick to a limit.

Claiming that speed limits do not improve public safety is just stupid. Not ignorant, just stupid. You don't even need to research this to conceptually understand why your statement is wrong.

Comment Re:Laws are weird (Score 1) 157

The more effective and automatic enforcement is, the larger a problem there is going to be with the public.

I'm not sure why the public should have a problem paying a completely optional donation to the government. I mean they literally have signs on the side of the highway telling you what to do if you don't want to pay.

Comment Re:UK has them, Waze still useful (Score 1) 157

I think it even takes those sections into consideration when plotting routes based on "fastest". Quite useful information to have.

It does not more than any other speed limit. Cameras don't factor in to it. Waze and Google never time a path that considers the user going above the speed limit. In NL this also obeys the variable speed zones that change after 7pm. They only consider going at max speed limit, and below given current traffic movement. This happens in Germany too which is why you can easily shave off quite a bit of time on the autobahn since Google maxes both services at 130km/h, even if that speed is not a limit but a recommendation.

What you may be seeing is that Waze does take into account when the average speed camera is variable. E.g. the A20 variable zone where the averaging camera is in place is raised to 100km/h either side of the peak hour. It does take that into account.

Comment Re:Please sir (Score 1) 160

now imagine Iran got nukes...

Attacking nuclear facilities is at least moderately rational. Various countries have done that half a dozen times over the past few years. Attacking drone manufacturing and storage might also be reasonable.

But...

What does an illegal decapitation attack have to do with nukes? Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one? There is a fundamental difference between going after clear military targets to prevent Iran from developing weapons that threaten their neighbors and going after civilian and government targets.

If you don't stop them now. They will just dig deeper and try again. They will keep doing this until someone stops them.

No, they will keep doing this until they are a nuclear power. They've seen what denuclearization did for Ukraine, and it's hard to argue with their logic. Having nuclear weapons is a strong deterrent to invaders, who realize that the response could be swift and devastating at a scale that countries never recover from.

It's unclear what other things they will do at that point. We can only speculate. Mind you, I don't like the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran, but again, I see no evidence that anything happening over there right now is going to change anything, or even delay it enough to matter.

Iran knows it can close the strait any time it likes. Are you willing to just let them hold the world hostage? Pay them the toll and buy their oil so they can get to the nukes faster?

Is anything that the U.S. government is doing right now going to change that reality? The way you prevent them from laying mines is the same way that you prevent oil from leaving Iran — bombing ships the second they leave the harbor. If you're not willing to start with a full air and naval blockade, you've already failed, and the only thing continuing the war can do is increase the number of ways that you've failed.

Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 157

Most speed limits are arbitrarily set and have no legitimate reason other than to generate revenue from speeding tickets.

Most speed limits are in residential areas, as most road miles are in residential areas - those speed limits are not set to generate speeding ticket revenue, or do you really think it would be safe to drive, say, 40-45 MPH down a neighborhood street?

At 3 A.M.? Probably. At 3 P.M.? Unlikely.

Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is pedestrians. After dark, this concern goes way down. At some point, it becomes effectively zero, and the only thing increasing the risk is the number of driveway entrances, and in particular, blind driveway entrances.

School zones are another place where the speed limit is set for safety, not revenue generation - it has to do with reaction times, stopping distance, etc.

And, of course, the presence of small children who behave erratically. In general, you should drive those speeds whenever you see evidence that small children are playing or are likely to be playing anyway, e.g. when driving past parks before sunset, when you see small children walking down the sidewalk while tossing a ball back and forth, etc.

And when there's no evidence of children, it doesn't make sense to slow down nearly as much.

Cyclists and pedestrians are also a big risk. They often behave in unpredictable ways. Also, if you pull out in front of cyclists, this is a very bad thing. But all of those factors are also highly timing-dependent. When there are no cyclists nearby, a road can be 45 MPH, but when cyclists are nearby, you need to slow down. Drivers need to have the situational awareness to realize that driving at the speed limit is not always safe, because the alternative is for the speed limits to be set so low that they are always safe, which results in miserably slow roads.

I've heard of neighborhoods pushing for 5 MPH (8 KPH) speed limits. When cyclists and even some pedestrians would be ticketed for exceeding the speed limit, you're doing it wrong. Even at 15MPH, there's only a 9% chance of an accident seriously hurting a pedestrian even if you don't slow down at all, so the benefit would only come from drivers who are completely not paying attention, and would likely be cancelled out by a higher number of drivers zoning out and not paying attention, in which case the chances of pulling out in front of a cyclist (who realistically won't be going that slowly) goes up. No free lunch. But that doesn't keep people who don't understand statistics from saying "If 25 (residential default) is good, 5 is better."

Comment Re:Pause on Hike (Score 2) 40

I've always wondered how willing companies would be to hike prices if subscriptions would automatically pause on a price increase, and the consumer would need to approve the new price for the subscription to continue.

Probably very. The issue is still one-sided, even if an approval is required. There's this idea that consumers don't notice the price increase or don't realise it's happening, but in reality consumers are somewhat captive. What you going to do paybitch, suddenly stop watching that thing you're enjoying in the middle of the season? Spotify prices increase, do I a) go buy new hardware that supports some other service, or b) just pay the $1 per month.

And that is the justification too. It's not $15 / month, it's $1 more per month. I can afford $1 right? - The mind of a consumer.

Comment Re:DirectIP (Score 1) 29

Many games still do this, but not via directIP. You still do rely on having an external matchmaking service. But that can be offloaded to Steam, PSN, or whatever.
E.g. Helldivers II. The host server can even be a Playstation.

The thing is this doesn't work for every type of game. It works best for private games played with friends, not big public spectacles. When you include skill based matchmaking it becomes even harder, where suddenly your network connection is at the mercy of some random dude's internet quality rather than knowing you've got a pretty decent datacentre somewhere on your continent handling things.

There's benefits and downsides everywhere.

Comment Re:You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 1) 29

Not sure what problem you're trying to fix. The issue with servers has always been that to punch through NAT you need the server to contact the client. But that issue was always that there was an attempt to connect to the address of a server directly, we live in a "matchmaking" world or an "invite" world. You can still of course connect to servers directly but that and only that will fail.

I am behind a NAT, a friend of mine is behind CG-NAT, we have no problems playing for example 7 Days To Die, which very much relies on the server running on his machine (not a dedicated server, but the principle still applies). Steam is used for matchmaking which allows to establish a two way connection that traverses NAT on both sides. It is able to work just fine connecting to someone's private server at home as it is public servers.

Likewise remote play together works just fine as well (the session being hosted by the person who owns the game). As do games like Split Fiction, or the ever popular Helldivers II (where one player is a host and the other(s) a client). All this doesn't require a remote server in a datacentre, but it does rely on a mechanism to start a session, in the case of all of the above we do it via Steam friends, or the PSN in the case of Helldivers when we do crossplay and the server resides on someone's Playstation.

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