masterzora

- The truck driver does have a right to move into his blind spots if he has taken sufficient precautions to ensure that they are safe. This is completely different from "no right" to move into it.

- There is nothing absolving the car with which the truck collides of fault. [In actuality, blind spot collisions tend to be multiple causation with the car stupid enough to hang out in a blind spot sharing fault.]

- If you get hit by a truck and die, you're still dead regardless of who's at fault.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what I've been saying this entire time.

As for your hypothetical shooter, he may not have the right to shoot you, but nobody's going to be stupid enough to tell you that goading him into shooting you is not the wrong thing to do (which is about as far as that analogy is relevant).

Blind spot collisions tend to be found to have multiple causation with both drivers at fault. Yes, the truck driver shares some responsibility, but so does the idiot hanging out in the blind spot, and that's how they tend to be ruled.

More to the point, however, if you want to hang out in the truck's blind spots, I'm really not going to shed a tear for you if your car gets crushed.

Most, if not all, US states, at least, have a pretty prominent section in their drivers' manuals regarding proper driving around tractor-trailers and dealing with their blind spots. In theory, you have to know the information contained within this section to be allowed to legally drive. You are expected to adhere to it when driving around trucks and you will share fault in most blind-spot related collisions that occur with tractor-trailers.

And, yes, this does mean that it is possible (albeit unlikely) for a tractor-trailer to be totally not at fault in a rear-end on the basis of blind spots.

At any rate, the truck driver is charged with certain safety precautions when he does so but he is absolutely required to enter his blind spots just to drive the truck.

More importantly, though, the fact the truck driver requires certain safety precautions does not absolve you from having to be safe on the road.

If trucks had no right to "invade" blind spot they literally couldn't move forward because a car can easily hide in the front blind spot.

EDIT: Not saying you were necessarily in one, but most times I've seen cars "being run off the road" or "nearly getting hit" they've been in the wrong place so I've taken to asking.

There is but that doesn't mean restaurants necessarily follow said law. A lot of servers don't really have any means of actually properly enforcing it without just straight up losing their job in the best case so, in practice, you find people just staying silent as they get shafted.

I wish it could be that way, but things look a lot different when you're the driver and missing the load means your family's going to have a hard time eating.

If you're going to be complaining, the drivers aren't the people to complain about.

The article says "out 10 days and back for a couple" but that vastly depends on what kind of trucking you do. My dad's current schedule, for example, has him out for 5 or 6 and in for 1 or 2 (in a good week; recently there's been a few where he's only been out for 3 or 4 days which is a huge strain on the finances), but in the past he's had some short haul routes where he was home every day just long enough to sleep and before that, when I was young, he did some long hauls where I sometimes didn't see him for a month or more.

For the long haulers, even if their sister didn't die, odds are something has happened that they haven't had a chance to deal with.

The real take away message from this, though, is just respect and not to get upset if a truck is slowing you down for a minute.

I've known a number of truck drivers and I've seen even more than that. Generally speaking, as a group, they are better drivers and more aware of the road than the average driver on the road. Not all of them are, and some of them do make stupid mistakes or drive dangerously. Sadly, from what I've seen, even the safest ones get flipped off and honked at just because the car driving too closely behind them apparently thinks the truck should be driving faster.

The financial information is pretty spot-on. Some truck drivers are making $40K (or even more than that!). The shabbiness of this depends on where they're based, of course, but it can be pretty comfortable. Some drivers make significantly less than $40K. It's a function of mileage and experience, for the most part. I'd say $500/wk is probably lower than average, but it's certainly not unheard of. Especially right now (I hate the phrase "in the current economic climate", but it's kind of relevant right now) loads are getting harder and harder to come by and the further ones tend to be the first that go. The miles just aren't there and this can kill the driver's family's finances.

Really, when it comes down to it, if a driver runs you off the road, call the number on the back of the truck (please, have a passenger do it if there's one in the car). But if a truck is just slowing you down a little bit, I know you in particular may know that there's no cause to flip anyone off, but this knowledge seems to be lacking in some people on the road.

Since I need to manipulate my now playing often, having the ability to do so through vim would be basically godlike.

Now, if only it worked for a media player I actually used :/

Actually, I say "unfortunately", but I would actually be okay with it. The Beeb has some amazing content. But there are definitely more than a couple people with TVs who have no interest in cable (or BBC) subscriptions.

I know, this isn't a particularly difficult thing to work around, but I was amused that you replaced one bad assumption with another.

-- Chris Sauro, masterzora.net

Today I learned that I don't have a real name.

More seriously, though, most people I know IRL insist on not going by the name on their passport. If I had one, my name would be "Christopher", but I insist on "Chris" enough that I will not make my name "Christopher" on Google.

For a less silly example, though, most people I know whose names are not derived from their full legal names are some form of non-cisgendered people who simply don't identify with their given names. And, in the US at least, for most purposes it is simply not necessary to go the court-decreed route (we don't have a strict equivalence of a deed poll form for name changes as far as I know) and bringing court and public record into things can be unnecessary trouble until they fall out of those "most purposes".

Of course, these are only a couple of reasons why one might wish not to use their passport names online, but the main point is: it's rarely as simple as you think.

One of the saddest things I can remember (though, unfortunately, the details escape me due to time) was a couple of rape cases that occurred in the US maybe a decade or so ago. One was a case of a very violent rape where the sentence was something on the order of 15 years. The other was a case of statutory with a fully consenting 16- or 17-year old where the sentence was something closer to 40 years. I was pretty young at the time (if it was a decade exactly I would have been 12), but that's definitely when I first realised that the "won't somebody please think of the children" arguments are bullshit.

The speed of random boarding versus other viable methods is not a new result: I first heard about it years ago and I'm pretty sure it was old then.

(I emphasise viable because I'm pretty sure nothing can beat a perfectly strict back-to-front, but there's no way you're going to get that to actually happen with real customers.)

My real question is how changing boarding order affects the volume of overhead bins used. They kept emphasising that in the article, but I don't know what spacetime warping they are using.

I disagree, at least until e-books get much, much better. Dead tree books are still easier for me to read in a number of ways (ranging from actual ease of transferring information from the medium to the brain to not having the ability to open up TVTropes on my dead trees to the easy visual indicator letting me know that I've only got a couple more pages or that I should maybe stop for the night). I can quickly and easily jot down notes in the margin that are both apparent and easy to read on further rereads (the copy of The Count of Monte Cristo I have annotated over the years is a dear treasure to me) and I've yet to see anything that works so well in electronic form. Perhaps the most difficult thing to fix, though, is simply the way memory works. It often happens that I will want to reread a certain scene (or bit of information, in the case of nonfiction) but I don't really remember any good keywords from the scene, so an e-book search wouldn't do much good. Nevertheless, a strong visual memory is very helpful here: I'm usually able to quickly turn to the appropriate part of the book and start investigating bottom halves of left pages or what have you. From my experience, this same sort of search is far more tedious and less effective on e-books as they are today.

Now, is any of this universal? I hardly think so. It's not really complete, though, and I'm willing to bet that a large number of avid readers have their necessary features where e-books are lacking, and these extend beyond simple romanticism. I mean, sure, there is a lot of romanticism also buried in there (ever notice how the olfactory experience is so much richer with books than with Kindles?), but it's hardly the whole picutre.

That's not to say that e-books can't catch up to alleviate some of these issues, but I find it borderline ridiculous to say that there's no inherent value in the tangibility of a book.

It's been an known issue for years.