trmsw

Agreed! Plus with my handwriting, who's ever going to be able to tell the difference?

my knee-jerk reaction is: and because streets aren't just for cars!

But more pragmatically, vehicular cycling is often the best choice because of visibility and predictability, and also as regards driver awareness and expectation: it at least seems safer if drivers are accustomed to sharing the road than if they never have to.

Definitely. Brussels was designed for cars (and Belgium is very car-centric in many ways) but it's got much better for cycling in the ~15 years I've been here, thanks to a mixture of incremental improvements and political "big pushes".

This reminded me of the rules for fiction in Flaubert's Parrot. They don't include any mention of whimsy, in fact, but it was fun rereading them.

The "all sorts of other whimsical attractions" is especially bad.

Upping the sensitivity and switching to the soft rim cap makes a huge difference. We have ThinkPads at work and I'm not surprised most of my colleagues don't like the Trackpoint with its default cap and settings; Lenovo aren't doing it and favours.

So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?

Here (well, UK and Belgium) I think the police would not charge you if you passed a test (but they might several times).

One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.

What would make it a frivolous charge? I mean, if the test is reasonably reliable and shows the driver had more than the legal limit of alcohol in their blood, What's there to contest?

Mandatory helmet laws for cyclists are a red herring intended to shift blame and attention onto cyclists' behaviour rather than address the real problems, namely: bad infrastructure, cars, and drivers. As long as policymakers do nothing to counteract the current trend of cars that are increasingly dangerous to other road users and that at the same time encourage / tolerate inattentive drivers, it would simply be in bad faith to adopt a policy that would impose legal penalties on the victims of this trend.

A better way to make cyclists and pedestrians safer would be more stringent laws against dangerous car designs, and some enforcement of the existing laws. We are starting to see US-style monster pickups and SUVs here in Belgium and they are a fucking abomination - far too large for city streets - and their extra weight and height plus reduced visibility make them dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.

You might lack the emotions, but you've absolutely nailed the mentality. Bravo.

He didn't deeply insult an entire people - have you read the book?

I found those burners too weak for stir-frying. I suspect that unless you have special ventilation, a burner that's hot enough for wok cooking will not be safe for indoor use. Ours is used outside because that's where the gas bottle has to be kept and because apparently it generates too much carbon monoxide to be safely used inside. And because we have three small children and this thing burns with a foot-high flame like a jet afterburner. It's great fun

For me it's gel pens. Pilot G-Tec ones are great.

You're welcome. It's an attention economy these days

Upvoting this just for the title ... and was disappointed by the article. Rats.

Well technically it's priority not right of way. My guess is that the concept was only codified with the introduction of traffic laws, which in most places didn't happen before the 20th century. Until then, "priority" in land probably came down to common sense: size, conventions, and social status.

Rule 170 of the highway code: "watch out for pedestrians crossing a road into which you are turning. If they have started to cross they have priority, so give way"

In what sort of situations have you needed to write more Java to use a Java library from Clojure? I've never felt the need to do this. It's sometimes helpful to write a Clojure wrapper for a Java library on order to use it in a more Clojure-y way.

Gel pens are even nicer IMO. Pilot do very nice ones but the 0.38mm Muji ones are also great and a bit cheaper

If only some people (like me) want to see street names, maybe it could be an optional layer. You enable the layer it adds a pointer and a label above the map showing the name of whatever's under the pointer. To get the name of something you could either move the map in the normal way or move the pointer.

And even in 1911, Scott's expedition suffered from scurvy, mainly because they misunderstood its cause! http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

YMMV - I was raised a Catholic and never got any literalist stuff about creation, or nonsense about dinosaur bones being planted to confuse us. Nor is it in the catechism as such - there is quite enough unbelievable stuff in there as it is...

It's only rude if you believe that the customer has to respect the hard work and good intentions that went into the product, and make allowances if it doesn't "just work". They don't.

Calling a thing a "piece of shit" and leaving a critical review isn't rude behaviour. This isn't tea time at Buckingham Palace.

I think "berate" is unnecessary: in the context the type of shouting is completely clear, and "engueuler" is used much more commonly than "berate" so IMO using it would be to change the tone without improving the meaning.

And when robots get there I wonder if they will resent cyclists for the computational cost they impose - and if they will find endless ways to rationalise that resentment (cyclists break the rules, cyclists don't pay road tax etc). I cycle and drive and when I drive I hate cyclists and find it very hard not to blame them for it, but it's just because they make driving harder

XPath 2 supports conditionals so you could put all that in a single select expression.

I agree. The general standard is good (my wife's experience of giving birth here was much better than my sisters'in the UK) and if you have the money you can choose to pay more for comfort or convenience.

Only "on" in French is specifically for persons whereas "it" is for things and not persons. It is properly considered derogatory to refer to a person as a thing - hardly a quirk. "On" is also non-specific and can't stand in for he or her. The advantage or quirk in French is the singular possessive pronouns follow the gender of the thing possessed not the possessor. Edit: to clarify, my objection is that "on" is not an example of a gender-neutral all-purpose or sentience-neutral pronoun. Not having one of these is hardly a quirk (just a pita).