The things that are priorities in the USA have always puzzled me. Students pay an absolutely insane amount of money for an education that is very mediocre. It is clear that the American education is failing. About half of the population voted for a man who does not believe in science. But somehow, the main priorities for universities seems to be enforcing diversity and gender-neutral pronouns?
I am not saying that thinking about this is wrong, there is just a deep disconnect with the realities that people live in, and many people seem to have a problem viewing things from another perspective.
That is absolutely false. Since I have my computer science/math degree my linkedin inbox has been flooded with messages from recruiters. I can guarantee you that they are not looking for an English major.
It seems that there has been a networking issue, rather than software issue. So blaming code(rs) here is like blaming manufacturers of TV that doesn't work for you because you have no electricity.
Sometimes you just have to bicycle close to cars. Even if you take the effort to see inside parked cars (it is probably better to just watch the road), it is simply impossible to evade suddenly opening car doors if they are opened at just the wrong time.
Its a bit like saying that cyclists just have to avoid you if you would suddenly jump on the biking line.
When I'm on the freeway in the carpool lane which is flowing well, and the rest of the lanes are clogged and moving slowly, I slow down, too, as someone might suddenly pull into the carpool lane from the clogged lane. I have the right of way, but I'd prefer not to rear end anyone with at 50 mph difference in speed.
The same when biking past a row of stopped cars. Slow down, as one might open their door. It's just self-preservation.
What's the point of being in the right if you're dead?
The point is both parties in these situations should be mindful of the hazard. Yet only one of them is not personally at any significant risk of injury (or, in most of the US at least, prosecution) so is it terribly surprising to find that party is the one that needs the most encouragement?
And the difference between your scenarios is that many streets have nowhere for cyclists to ride except in the door zone, and bikes are much less visible to merging drivers/exiting pedestrians than cars, especially when those car users don't have a mindset that expects them.
Personally I almost never ride in the door zone, but that's because I'm very aggressive about taking the lane from motorists, which is a skill many cyclists are not comfortable with (and frankly our infrastructure shouldn't require them to be).
Sure, both should be mindful of the hazard. But as you said, since the cyclist is the one who'll get hurt, he needs to take extra care, even if it is ethically and legally the other guy's responsibility.
I've talked to many cyclists about this, and they invariably get angry with me about it. But like I said, what good does it to do be legally and ethically in the right when you get maimed or killed?
When I ride my bike, I treat cars like they are going to kill me. So far, it has kept me alive. Riding fast in the door zone is simply foolish, and the cyclist does have a choice - slow down!
The motorcycle community seems to have given up expecting cars to change, and they ride defensively as a result. The long time riders I've talked to all have a much more pragmatic view on this than the cyclists do. They ride on the assumption that they are invisible to cars.
It's also common sense as a pedestrian to look both ways when crossing a crosswalk. That doesn't mean it's not the driver's legal responsibility to stop.
I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues.
From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.
It's mostly historical - Ubuntu shipped it as the default when it was still unstable. This lead to a lot of people learning about it and lots of 'try killing pulseaudio if something goes wrong' advice.
The reality now is it is very stable and has a huge number of powerful features. Personally I think it is great, and have no issues with it.
In its initial (Ubuntu) release it would crash your desktop any time Firefox loaded a page that included flash content, which was a lot of pages back then. You had to choose between totally disabling Flash (again, kind of a big deal at the time) and attempting to excise PulseAudio and get Alsa's sanity back.
I chose the third way of dropping Desktop Linux. I just don't have time for that kind of crap anymore.
That is the reason indeed. For years Pulseaudio was a pain in the backside to use - not just on Ubuntu but on Debian as well. I still dislike it and think it's overengineered but today it works pretty well to be honest; as long as your setup isn't anything too exotic.
Part of the problem is that the early releases were pretty bad - sometimes even requiring patches that were only published in the Fedora package to work correctly (like, they literally hadn't upstreamed by the developers at all at the time). PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else. They just released what I think is probably the first bugfix-only release in the project's history a couple of days ago. This certainly wasn't a case of the prior releases being so good they didn't need fixing either.
I had to laugh - I'm using Ubuntu, and every time I want to listen to music (or watch a video, or play a game) I have to pulseaudio -k, because for some reason it boots up with some horrid 8-bit 22khz distortion over it all.
I had the opposite experience with Debian Sid a few days ago. I'd been using ALSA for everything without problems, but I was getting annoyed with the forced animations in Evince so I installed Okular instead (which has no forced animations). This brought in a big collection of dependencies, including PulseAudio. MPV immediately stopped working, even after manually configuring it for PulseAudio output. But it turned out PulseAudio wasn't a mandatory dependency for Okular, so I uninstalled it and everything worked perfectly again.
On my 8 year old desktop system (8GB ram, 2.5GHz AMD Phenon II) it feels subjectively faster than Evince because of better UI latency. Resource-intensive is a good thing if the resources are used effectively, eg. for more aggressive speculative rendering, which seems to be the case. On mobile I might care a little more, but the forced animation in Evince (and a growing number of GNOME apps) is a deal-breaker, so I'd prefer Okular even on mobile.
