dual_sport_dork

Some of this may depend on your client. If you do a triple dash by itself on its own line:

You get a horizontal rule in most clients, including the default web UI and all of the major browser based clients I've tried.

In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that's got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I'll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it'll only throw a spot that's probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Including this very platform.

Lemmy will automatically render a double dash -- as an en dash, and a triple dash

as an em dash.

I usually just type alt + 0151, though, because I'm a nerd.

Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked "at" him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.

Only nine states have outlawed red light cameras. Your "many" statement you made earlier is, in fact, just "some."

The sixth amendment challenge has been proposed several times, but very few of the actual rulings I can find contained anyone successfully using this as an argument. One for instance is The People v. Khaled in California where the camera operators were not available for cross-examination. All the state has to do is provide their witnesses and the sixth challenge goes out the window.

Insofar as red light camera schemes have been declared unconstitutional in state courts, this is most often because the scheme in question exceeded the authority granted to cities and municipalities, which tried to go over the heads of their superseding states. You can call this a win since they were indeed declared "unconstitutional," but not for the reason you specified. The US Supreme Court has also been silent on the sixth amendment argument.

So, fixed that for you.

That's not how it works. I had to fight a ticket from one of these once.

An invalid ticket, for the record. I was innocent and I could prove it with dash cam footage. I did not run the red light, but as usual everybody acts like accusation is the same as guilt and you know how that song and dance goes.

First, those cameras are almost never operated by the state or the police. They're run by a private company which is under some kind of contract with your state or municipality. You'll find this is why racking up tickets from red light cameras usually can't put points on your license.

Anyway, you will face your accuser in court if you challenge the ticket. That person will be some lackey from the company that owns the cameras, whose job it is to show up to court. Theoretically this person was also supposed to have reviewed the evidence related to the incident in question, and this is what lets them get around that pesky constitutional requirement you mentioned. In my state the requirement is that two pictures must be shown, a before and after, positively depicting the vehicle in question crossing into the intersection. In my case the second picture was mysteriously absent from the ticket, which of course the state still treated as "valid" until I challenged it. This despite the conspicuous empty square on the printout they mailed me where that photo was supposed to be. The twerp from the camera company tried several tactics (unsuccessfully) to weasel out of producing the second picture until the judge forced him to. To no one's surprise whatsoever, it showed my car exactly in the same spot as the first picture and my ticket was dismissed.

I still had to take a day off of work to contest it, though, and the private entity knowingly lied and attempted to slap me with a fraudulent ticket knowing full well they would never actually be punished for doing so. And they weren't.

The guy whose case was right after mine on the docket was disputing a similarly bogus ticket, which he showed me. He was a big black dude with a Harley I saw parked outside. The "damning" photo evidence printed on his ticket showed a skinny white guy in a wife beater on a crotch rocket. I have to imagine he won his case as well, but I did not stick around to find out.

So the system is indeed still bullshit, but not in the way people expect.

That's because practically nobody here drives a car with a manual transmission, and the reason for those in Europe is (or originally was) to give drivers notice when they need to get back into gear.

A knock-on consequence of this is that nobody in the US knows how to drive, they just point the wheel vaguely in some direction and mash the skinny pedal. If they don't get the result they wanted, they stomp on the pedal harder. You ought to watch chucklefucks try to drive in the snow, especially those with SUVs and muscle cars with rear wheel drive. People treat the throttle as if it's the "make the car go in the direction I'm looking button" and the rest of us know that's not how it works.

Whenever this comes up I'm obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon's Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It's gold.

The last time I had to do this I pulled a rapier, actually. Although in my defense, the guy behind me jumped out with a tire iron first. It was purest happenstance that I had the thing in my back seat at the time but damned if the look on his face wasn't worth it.

I've recounted this tale before. I have to wonder how that guy tells people his side of that story...