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User: M1FCJ

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Comments · 1,458

  1. Re:Autobahn on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    If only there was a sign warning the driver for a corner. Like a chevron... for sharp deviations or at least a bend sign which would be painted on a reflective surface so that when the headlights hit it, it would be visible from far far away... I'm sure someone will come up with something like that.

  2. Re:Autobahn on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    Surely the fault is not with the lighting but the Porsche driver going way too fast?

  3. Re:Highway lights??? on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    I don't understand, this must mean France's roads are even crappier! I get out of the Channel tunnel, turn left towards Belgium on E40 and as soon as I hit the good road with easy to read signs, I know I'm in Belgium. Following E40 all the way until I hit Tienen, the road is perfect. There, I stop at my destination and have a well-earned beer at my friends' place. I've done this many times in the last decade, on car and on motorbike and never I have seen a worse place than France when it comes to signs and road state.

  4. Re:I might just be a luddite, but on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    1am on a sunny day? It must be the North Pole! :)

    Jokes aside, I find that on bright sunlit countries, having the headlights on makes a big difference in visibility. When I drive across the plains of Anatolia in the heat of the summer you can't spot a car way far away speeding towards you but you can spot its headlights very easily. Also mirages on the asphalt make judgement of the distance quite tricky.

  5. Re:I might just be a luddite, but on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    Also Sweeden I guess, both my Saab and Volvo did the same. On the other hand, the lighting conditions are quite bad for the majority of the year over there therefore it makes sense. Souther countries usually don't have such restrictions.

  6. Re:I might just be a luddite, but on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    Probably a sign of getting older or the somewhat-recent-ish fashion of reflective clothing. These days I really like to wear reflective jackets etc. when I'm out & walking. When I am driving/riding I can see people like that a mile away and I feel safer in a similar clothing. Just having a reflective band across the body helps a lot in terms of visibility, the emergency-style full yellow-reflection stripes jackets are my favourites.

  7. Re:I might just be a luddite, but on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    Also there's the bunch of idiots in UK who drive with their fog-lights as well as their dipped main lights! All it does is to dazzle the people. I try not to slip into road-rage and slap a couple of foreheads.

  8. Re:I might just be a luddite, but on UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money · · Score: 1

    And this is a great reason why we need to slow the traffic down in towns to 20mph! Oxford has it right, 20mph within the city center, in any case during the rush hour the traffic is way slower and on my motorbike I get passed by cyclists all the time I'm there. Riding the bike London is even worse, average speed is well below 20mph. I live on a fast A road just at the exit of a town (A40) and the traffic is way too fast, I fear for the school kids' lives as they walk along the road on the pavement. More than once I have seen an idiot losing the control of their car and mounting the pavement at 30mph.

  9. Re:What's in a name on World's First Quadruple Limb Transplant Fails · · Score: 1

    Like in branch.

  10. Re:Europe's Shadow on France's Bold Drunk-Driving Legislation - Every Car To Carry a Breathalyzer · · Score: 1

    Sure, having a pair of analysers for $2 in the car just in case they're needed is a sign of the nanny state. If only we had more of these kind of nanny states.

  11. Re:A common sense regulation? WTF! on France's Bold Drunk-Driving Legislation - Every Car To Carry a Breathalyzer · · Score: 1

    If originally fitted by one, a not-working speedometer is an MOT failure here in UK and will make your car illegal to ride on public roads. On motorbikes this is usually worked around by having a bicycle speedometer (with magnets) fitted. I haven't seen any one of those on a car yet.

    I myself would prefer a GPS-enforced speeding limit. I really shouldn't have to drive / ride faster than the speed limit just to keep up with the traffic.

  12. Re:who's paying for it? on France's Bold Drunk-Driving Legislation - Every Car To Carry a Breathalyzer · · Score: 1

    That's why they sell it in pairs. Not that hard, is it?

  13. Re:good thing they don't have laws in france on France's Bold Drunk-Driving Legislation - Every Car To Carry a Breathalyzer · · Score: 1

    It is very, very easy not to drive drunk, when you're not drunk. Humans are very bad at judging risk and after a pint or two, the judgement of "can I get into the car to get to the corner store safely and came back" is usually made incorrectly. If you have a breath analyser handy, you can check if you're under the limit then off you go. If not, you stay at home.

    If they are cheap enough (a couple of euros), it pays for the risk management itself fairly easily.

  14. Re:Developers often make poor testers on What Does a Software Tester's Job Constitute? · · Score: 1

    Untrained testers will behave like monkeys with typewriters and sometimes find bugs. The quality of the bugs will be questionable. Professional tester will actually consider what can go wrong (like using boundary value analysis) and catch the issues where they are harder to track down. Also the tester will document the process (use case, testing scenario, test results) in an accountable manner and can save you from being sued at one point.

  15. Re:Good on Canonical Pulls Kubuntu Personnel Funding · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Found KDE complicated? You should go back to an etch-a-sketch.. Yikes, is this the quality of people using Linux these days?

  16. Re:Amounts to sacrificing the mission - on NASA Pulling Out of ESA-led ExoMars Mission? · · Score: 1

    Wake me up when that Rube Goldberg gadget they designed actually works.

  17. Re:cost on India Turns Down American Fighter Jets, Buys From France · · Score: 1

    The Kfir was at best a Mirage clone and was built to go around various arm embargoes at that time. It was also built based on secretly handed-over Dassault plans and equipment after De Gaulle publicly created an embargo. Finally Israeli got a lot of modern weapons from US and currently mostly rely on US-made planes - which wasn't the case way back then, they were mainly supplied by French. In any case it is alleged that many of the blocked aircraft ended up in Israel in crates.

  18. Re:Rafale F16 on India Turns Down American Fighter Jets, Buys From France · · Score: 1

    Please elaborate on how the secrets of an anti-ship missile results in total defeat of the air force?

  19. Re:Other old planes are still useful on Aging U-2 Will Fight On Into the Next Decade · · Score: 1

    It is also the plane US Air Force most wants to cancel. It's not fast, it's ugly and it does its job extremely well. That's why every decade some idiot in USAF pops up and demands a fast jet tank killer. F-16 was the favourite one a couple of decades ago, now I hear F-35 will be the one. Meanwhile, the reality has its own rules.

  20. Re:Not even good lies on Russian Official Implies Foul Play In Mars Probe Failure · · Score: 1

    They share the glory of launching humans into space with China at the moment. On the other hand, Russians don't have a good track record of creating a brand new design for a while. Kliper is dead, their shuttle did one flight and they haven't managed to design a single human-rated spacecraft since Soyuz and that was in 1960s. Sad fact: Both Russia and Western countries have stagnated.

  21. Re:Advice on What a Black Box Data Dump Looks Like · · Score: 1

    Because history has shown again and again that humans are very bad at judging risk.

  22. Re:Whilst here in the EU on What Could Have Been In the Public Domain Today, But Isn't · · Score: 1

    Sir Paul has a lot to answer. To fill a selected bunch's wallets with cash, a lot of other things are just disappearing. All of the out of print books will be gone, thrown away, slowly ending up in the £4 per 5 bin and so on. And all those old 50s LPs, getting broken one by one in charity shops.

  23. Re:Survival of the fittest, NOT evolution on Fish Evolve Immunity To Toxic Sludge · · Score: 1

    Not spontaneous? Obviously it's a random mutation causing a difference in biology was selected by environmental pressure. Evolution works.

  24. Re:GNOME Survey on Linux Mint Will Adopt Gnome 3 · · Score: 1

    SuSE broke their yast by switching to Zen stuff around version 10 and indeed it became really slow and bloated. That was the moment I ditched them. Before that it was the best RPM based distribution out there and Debian didn't even got an honorable mention in most places. Loss of RedHat's desktop distributions, SuSE's marriage with Ximian and later Microsoft and finally Ubuntu's rise happened about the same couple of years. These days even in EU openSUSE is a fringe distribution, Fedora is usually used by people who also tend to work with RHEL and almost all of the rest tend to use Ubuntu. As far as I can see Arch has replaced Gentoo as the tinkerer's distribution and unfortunately I don't have the time anymore.

    I used to use Yggdrasil and then switched to Slackware and very early RedHats. Those were the days. Nowadays I can't imagine running a distro on 4MB of RAM on a 386dx40. :)

  25. Re:For such a vital system. on Galileo To Be Europe's Answer To US GPS · · Score: 1

    The blogpost entry you've linked is... It's so stupid, it hurts...