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You should see the driving and biking conditions in Seattle. Expecting a bike to stop on a dime when coming down a hill just after it rains is wholly unrealistic.


First, I don't understand why you need to "stop on a dime" to avoid a stationary object ahead?

Second, a huge part of safely operating any vehicle in an environment (especially a chaotic one you share with cars, bikes, and pedestrians) is awareness of your surroundings and the ability to avoid collisions. This is seriously driving / biking 101.

If you are zooming around on your bike and just thinking "hope no objects / people / cars are sitting stationary in my way because there's no way I can stop and I'll definitely hit them", then you're a dangerous menace.


s/bike/car and good luck in court. "But I couldn't stop! The road was wet!"


Maybe you shouldn't be cycling in Seattle then?


Coming down a hill at 20Mph in a bike lane that should be at least partially clear on a wet day (very common in Seattle) is perfectly legal. Running into a large unexpected object in the path is hardly the cyclists fault.


> perfectly legal

Well, not necessarily.

If your reflexes are good enough, and your brakes are good enough, and your tires are good enough, that you can safely stop a bike going 20mph on a wet downhill section, then yes; you are still in control of your vehicle and operating at a safe speed. No legal problems there.

But maybe your reflexes aren't that good because you haven't had coffee yet. Or maybe your brakes are worn down. Or maybe you're on crazy thin road tires that have effectively no traction going downhill in the rain. Or some combination of all three.

The point being, if it's not physically possible for you to stop that bike in whatever time interval is required, are you really operating that vehicle safely? Probably not.

And to the extent that you're legally required to operate at a safe speed and maintain control of your vehicle, your behavior would no longer be "perfectly legal."

So 20 mph + downhill + wet roads may very well be illegal for some combinations of cyclist and bicycle but not others. It seems premature to declare that perfectly legal in all cases.


I tried telling that to the insurance agency when I rear-ended a car that suddenly stopped in front of me. It didn't work.


Someone suddenly stopping shouldn't be unexpected, nor is it necessarily against the rules of the road. Hacker News is fun and all but consistently gets beaten by 15 seconds of googling e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/nyregion/double-parking-i...


If you can't see whether there's a large object in your path within time to stop, you're going too fast. There could be a fallen or slow bicyclist in the lane.


This is so obviously, indisputably true. How can anyone be downvoting?


You’ve clearly never been going downhill on a bike and had someone illegally stop their car or pull out in front of you. Bikes take more distance to stop than cars.


You've clearly never considered the necessity of matching your speed to conditions and surroundings and whatever surprises they may hold.

I have. For close on fourty years of much cycling and driving. Which may be a contributing factor in my never having suffered an accident.


No, it's always their fault. /s


That’s the point. People in cars have to be able to avoid objects in front of them (whether that’s drivers suddenly stopping or other obstructions) and so do bicyclists.


Mainly due to the average consumer not being interested in installing an app for something like LetGo or OfferUp (Craigslist competitors). Even Facebook works well in a mobile browser, with push notifications even!


Why should it matter, said officer shouldn't be querying NCIC to dox his neighbor. I doubt he actually bothered to use the local parcel viewer.


It matters because to make the inference that he was connected to the police and misused police resources to find her information, that information has to not be readily available to the general public.

If she had been an owner, the information would be available to the public, and not even all that odd for a neighbor to look up (I look up sales records for houses that sell in my neighborhood to see what they sold for, for example, to get an idea of how the market is).


In this case, Renter. Just moved. License would still have old address. You couldn't have "accidentally" found someone like that.


Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime in and of itself that officers and anyone else with access (admin personnel & some security guards) are commonly prosecuted for.

We should have a right to security in our information, and privacy of it from meddlers and nefarious actors like the aformentioned neighbor. Sadly, many of my fellow Americans are all to happy to claim they have nothing to hide, despite how much that attitude continues to hurt them.


> Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I don't think we can trust people to make a system that, e.g., automatically collects and stores the locations of all cars with plates visible to all the roving police cars -- and then not use that information improperly.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually choose deliberate ignorance of certain things we could know because although the knowledge could be helpful in certain cases, it's also too dangerous.


There shouldn't need to be such a choice. Make both more difficult - license plate tracking and inappropriate lookups.


Dark background, light text for Firefox Android is pretty good, makes reading websites much easier for me!


Its so underpowered though, other Allwinner SBC vendors already have H2+to H5 boards for cheap (eg: $6.99 for an OrangePi Zero), even an H2+ chip has 4x the cores at a similar clock as the CHIP.


This market moves so fast that you have to release new products 1-2 times per year to stay near the top in performance in a given price band.

C.H.I.P.'s claim to fame, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're the first kickstarter I bought that delivered on time.


I was definitely not a fan of Grand Rapids for the 2 weeks I spent there. Walking around the block (despite there being decent sidewalks) was basically unheard of, and crossing the street was akin to running across a freeway.

The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".


Welcome to having America's latest STD! Its bigger than Hepatitis (at 3 million), and costs about the same to cure ($80k to $90k a person).

Relationships are delayed, careers are set back and our economy is slowly bled. Much like healthcare!


Don't even get started on health care. I worked in health insurance for three years and lived outside the US for about the same time. I saw a lot of waste in our health insurance industry and a foreign market that was superior in almost every way, even for very serious conditions. I wrote a post about it a while back:

http://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-t...


Bellevue College might be the biggest, but its far from the best. They tend to hire current UW professors to teach one class a quarter, stuff the rest of the dept with teachers that were able to get canned at the Seattle Colleges and UW satellites, and hope for the best.

Many of my friends who went there have horror stories about their teachers which I'd be hard pressed to encounter at Seattle Central College or North Seattle College.

Nearly every community college in the Puget Sound decided about a decade ago to shed the community branding and add a handful of 4 year degrees. Problem is the material you learn in upper level CS classes at UW and its satellites is quite different than what North Seattle College and Seattle Central College require (eg: a whole class on SQL Server, C# as the Intro CS class at Seattle Central rathr than the state mandated Python, etc).


US is pretty dismal at graduation rates overall - Department of Education is not even tracking the percent of graduates completing a 4-year degree in 4 years anymore, instead preferring a generous 6-year completion metric for a 4-year degree, which stands at 59% https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

41% of all US undergraduate students have nothing material to show 6 years down the road except for the mounts of student debt. The quoted figure of 22% of those debts being in some kind of default starts looking optimistic.


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