Oh, also, what sidewalk? I'm talking about country roads on the extreme east side of Tucson. Roads like Freeman, Tanque Verde Loop, Old Spanish Trail, et cetera. These are roads that have bike lanes in both directions, but very little shoulder beyond that. And certainly no sidewalks. This isn't the center of town, or whatever you're imagining, I'm talking about. Of course I run on the sidewalk where there is one. Anyway, your post is a major misfire. You assume multiple things that aren't true. I'm sorry to hear about your bad experiences.

Lol. Well, I run in the "correct" direction in the bicycle lane, with the flow of automotive and bicycle traffic. In this way, I'm no different than a slow moving bike. Seriously. Think about it. Yes, that's right: there are traffic complexities even within a bike lane!

It's been years since I've logged into Slashdot and commented, but I have to say a few words regarding cyclists. I live in Tucson, Arizona, one of the better cities in the U.S. as far as bicycle lanes and places for cyclists to ride. I don't ride a bicycle; I don't even own one. I'm a runner, and I often find myself running along the side of roads, including in bicycle lanes. Over the course of the last four years, I've never had a bicyclist who wasn't courteous, usually yelling "runner!" to those coming up behind them. Cyclists have always given me plenty of room, and I've heard plenty of "doing good!" and other comments of encouragement from them, as they pass me. Likewise in higher traffic areas, where there are traffic lights, cars and pedestrians, I've seen (with just a few exceptions) cyclists obey the traffic laws and ride courteously around pedestrians. The problem, at least here in Tucson, isn't cyclists. The problem is the motorists. Somehow I get the feeling this is the case in every city in America.

about those torture memos with all this swine flu brouhaha, haven't we?

Ok, over the last couple weeks, several stories have made their way into the news about cybersecurity.

These stories overstate the threat, and, in particular, only serve to loudly announce things which are already well known. For example, the fact that DoD systems are probed continuously by the Chinese. But! That's always been true. Where were all the alarming sounding news reports last year? Two years ago? Ten years ago? Where was Jay Rockefeller's Senate bill, S. 773, which aims to restrict Internet freedom in the United States in previous years? We can all expect the media heat to increase even more as the public is whipped into a frenzy of fear, and then comes to accept that we need the Federal Government to restrict our Internet freedom--for our own safety, of course!

As these stories come through Slashdot, we all bicker amongst ourselves as to how grave the threat is. Or where it's coming from. Or how we might combat it. It's so predictable. And while we're distracted with these irrelevant (although admittedly interesting in some cases) discussions, Senate and House bills are moving through our Congress right now which I consider to be "Patriot Acts" for the Internet. Nobody is talking about those, though.

We get what we deserve when we demand nothing at all.

I read a book not too long ago called Higher Order Perl, which highlights how natural functional programming in Perl is. That's right. Perl has pretty nice syntactical support for functional programming, too. The object-oriented stuff is bolted on, clumsily, in my opinion. But functional Perl is just as natural as imperative Perl. I've been writing Perl for eight years, although much less in the last few years, but this familiarity makes the transition from imperative (or what most programmers actually do, which is combine imperative and OOP styles, esp. in languages where the OOP part is bolted on, like Perl and PHP) to functional pretty simple. I had meant to use functional Perl as a stepping stone to OCaml and Haskell. But now I'm having too much fun with functional Perl...there's just no way this can end well... =D