Like in a housing shortage you’re hoarding property and profiting off it.

Housing shortages are caused by bad government policy: namely, low-density zoning. Direct your anger towards the entity that deserves it, and make them fix their fuck-up.

(Note: I’m not making some kind of Libertarian “all government is bad” argument here. I’m saying that in this specific case, the laws need to be changed.)

US, mid thirties, and I not only drive a manual transmission, I go out of my way to insist upon it. For example, I own a truck and an SUV made in the '90s because it’s difficult to find newer ones without an automatic.

thatsthejoke.jpg

Huh, that’s the kind of thing that would just make me start visualizing how many I could fit in there.

Not for long if Lennart has anything to say about it, I’m sure.

The European Union is a confederation, just like the United States under the Articles of Confederation was.

While DRM is the bane of everybody there are cases where trust and integrity is important and it’s an intriguing look into how hard it is to manage.

Nah, when the user wants to ensure trust and integrity in his own system, it works just fine. The problem comes when the user who needs to be able to access the data is simultaneously the adversary who needs to be stopped from accessing the data.

In other words, it’s one of those situations where the fact that it’s hard to manage is a gigantic clue that it’s wrongheaded to try to do so in the first place.

According to the Open Source Initiative (the folks who control whether things can be officially certified as “open source”), it basically is the same thing as Free Software. In fact, their definition was copied and pasted from the Debian Free Software guidelines.

People in North America identified with their colony/state first, and the United States second back in the 1700s. Give it time…

I get that they’re different countries, but different states here might as well be.

^ This guy Articles of Confederation.

(Seriously, the European Union basically has the same kind of structure now as the United States did between 1776 and 1789.)

Less than a week until Dragon*Con!

They were both apparently being broadcast by ABC at the time, too.

Edit: wait… return ! 0 ; wtf

I mean, returning non-zero exit status on error is just good practice. It even managed to evaluate to the same numerical value as EXIT_FAILURE when I tested it on my machine (gcc 11.4.0 linux x86-64), although I’m not sure if that’s always the case or if it’s undefined behavior.

This cursed code is quite well-written.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=abuse+of+the+c+preprocessor

Yes, as are n and i. Do they not deserve ‘fleekness?’

My argument applies to any cylindrical projection.

speeding is bad…

True.

…and that lowering car speeds is good…

Also true.

…so all these changes can be implemented.

No, see, that doesn’t follow because not “all” changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it’s just an afterthought.

It’s really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut “fix the geometry” down to “install lower speed limit signs” and still have it count as accomplishing something!

Well played.

I’m just as annoyed by the overuse of the Mercator projection as the next guy, but no, I don’t think we can blame it in this particular instance. Consider the similar case of a day/night map, which pretty clearly reads as 50/50 even when it’s Mercator:

(Upon further scrutiny comparing these two maps, I think the missing Antarctica might be a factor too.)

Also, relevant XKCD.

Look, you’re not wrong from a moral perspective; it’s just that your sentiment isn’t useful either.

• When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don’t speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.

• Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.

The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn’t ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it’s a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!