It is great, I used it in a web application that I wrote at work that shows and let the user edit a graph of building electric, gas and water meters. A button lets you calculate the relationships between meters. For example one meter may be split into two, the sum of the flows thru the two must equal the flow thru the first. So basically I set up a system of equations based on the graph that the user created , solved it using sympy, then show the user the flows thru some nodes (the unknowns) in terms of others. Very uselful indeed.
I pay cash too as much as I can, it freaked me out when my bank started classifying my expenses. That hostile talk you mention reminds me of when I talk about vehicular cycling, specially in northern european circles, where they are a lot into segregating cyclists. I think it is a similar paternalistic issue, hey this is good for you, resistance is futile!
The well designed bike lane does not exist, the whole idea of segregating by type of vehicle is wrong. And this is so because it contradicts the principles of traffic engineering. It is not done for safety but for political reasons.
The danger is actually the bike lane, because it puts you in the drivers blind spot, that kind of accident is so common it even has a name, it is called right hook (in right driving countries). It is easy to learn to avoid collisions with cars while driving a bicycle, one of the main lessons is do not ride on the bike lane, specially in intersections you should be in front of the other driver not on its side.
I don't understand that, as a cyclist I find it much more relaxing to just follow the rules and stop at a red light, if there is a car already waiting I wait behind it as he got there first. I would be much more anxious running a red light and doing a track stand trying to see if the intersection is free of other vehicles as I see many fools doing.
In fact I would say that the belief in perpetual growth is pretty much anti-science. It contradicts the evidence that the earth is a sphere to begin with.
I donate to the fsf. At one point I realized how much free software my company was using. Thanks to it I was getting paid. I thought it was only fair to give back. Of course it should have been my company that should have done that, but they were greedy morons at the time.
As a cyclist who have taken the effort to ride correctly not only I have to put up with motorists who think that the road belongs to them, also with bicycle activists who think it is best for me to ride as If I were a pedestrian on wheels and that of course the road also belongs to motorists. Now I also have to put up with people on the internet who say that I am a troll because I try to explain as best as I can how me and fellow cyclists are being mistreated by almost everyone.
Also the speed is not so different. The speed difference is even greater between bicycles and pedestrians yet you see places where they mix them. As a pedestrian I have been passed by cyclists which disappear much faster than a car when a car passes me as a cyclist.
Whenever I wanted to go to a place by bike I used to go into google maps then clicked on the "avoid freeways" option and I would take that route. Nowadays where I live I have to not only avoid freeways but streets or roads with bike paths, it is really awful. I've been riding my bike to work every day for the last 13 years and I realize that If I want to keep using the road safely and correctly I am going to have to buy a car or a motorcycle.
There is one basic rule of traffic engineering: first come first served. It allows for vehicles of different speeds to share the road. Your responsibility as a driver of a vehicle is to not drive so fast that you can not possibly stop within your field of view (you are not driving a train), that is enough to share the road with bicycles, tractors, horses or whatever. Of course drivers of cars do not want to be bothered with that an want the road all for themselves, that's why you still insist in getting cyclists off the roads, at least where there is enough space to do so. The fear of cars is very convenient for this purpose.
Of course the example here might not be so bad because it is so far away from the road that motorists may not know it is there. The moment they know and they see you on the regular road then they yell at you harass you.
There were bicycles in the Netherlands before they were segregated, a lot of them. Then they were kicked off the roads to let "progress" (i.e. the car) go unimpeded. Now yeah, they sell that as bike-friendly, so sad.
The problem segregating bicycles is that that automatically means that they are excluded from the best infrastructure which are the regular roads, which by the way do not belong to cars. I suffer that discrimination everyday when I ride my bike and there is a bike path adjacent to the road in places where I had no problem before, and that's after many years of riding so I can tell you that it is completely safe to share the road. Bike paths are built to kick us out of the roads it is pretty obvious to me now.
That's just insane, building two sets of parallel road systems, it's probably the most inefficient engineering ever, are you also going to build a new set when a new type of vehicle comes along? what about a scooter only road? And all of this because of the irrational believe that cyclists are inferior and can not share the road with motorists. I am so glad I don't live in Denmark.
Actually yeah, it's all a matter of scale. Of course we are animals and what we do is perfectly natural, like a volcano blowing up, any other species that had been so successful evolutionary speaking as ourselves would be doing the same thing. But that does not mean it is good for us or that can keep going on forever. It is probably what made us successful that will destroy us.