Insurance is not there for you to pay for others, insurance is there for you to cover your own costs. So if you don't have insurance and you are in an accident, it is your problem. It's your health and other costs. If you have insurance, then after your deductible and up to whatever the cap is that you are paying for, you'll be covered.
If you are in an accident, it doesn't matter if you are responsible for it or not, your insurance is supposed to kick in above the deductible and cover your costs.
If you can show your insurance company that the responsibility is with the other driver(s), then it's up to your insurance company to go after that driver and/or his insurance. What does government have to do with any of it except providing huge subsidy to the insurance companies and thus driving the costs up?
I know this is an old thread but since this is about something happening in the UK I thought I would explain why in the UK it is important that government mandates all drivers have insurance. The main reason is that if someone runs over someone else or smashes into their car it is very difficult to go after them for any money if they do not have insurance.
Here in the UK you cannot be sued for money you do not have so a great many people who do not own their own home or have any savings could drive like crazy nut jobs without even having to worry about the costs they were inflicting on other people. I believe in many other countries you can sue people and they have to pay the money by instalments if they do not have it, here that is not possible for damages, only fines imposed by criminal courts.
So if you are a fairly poor individual who lives in rented social housing (you call them housing projects) you can drive round crashing into people at will providing you never get convicted of criminally bad driving by actually killing someone. Just driving like a twat and causing other people cars to go to the scrapheap prematurely is not a criminal offence here.
This sounds retarded but the poor over here have very little to lose so it is not far wrong. Maybe if we had fewer safety nets to stop people falling out of society like you do (in this country you can carry on claiming unemployment benefit your whole life, many now do) things would be different.
Never understood this. Why crush the car? Why not sell it? Change the locks if necessary, but it's not like the car is being punished here.
Because most of the time the people who drive without insurance drive around in pieces of crap that nobody would pay for.
Legally though I believe they can sell the car if they think it is worth anything. But who would be stupid enough to pay up for a nice new car then not pay a few hundred quid to insure it? Most new cars come with free insurance anyway over here.
This is a problem of-course, because eventually the cops will have the license plate recognition systems that are tied into insurance databases and all the other databases and it will be nearly impossible to drive without insurance, but imagine for a moment that everybody just stopped buying insurance, cancelled their insurance completely and drove without it.
Here in the UK we are already there, they are fitting ANPR systems into most police cars already. They are tied into the motor insurance database already. If you are driving a car without insurance it bleeps at them and they pull you over. Once they pull you over you can then tell them your insurance company and they ring them up and check, tell them your name and they look that up and check or they take your car there and then.
You then have a couple of weeks to collect your car (and pay the tow charges) before it gets sold or crushed.
Most UK residents I speak to actually agree with this. Insurance is there so that if you drive into someone elses car they do not have to pay for the damage you caused, you do in the way of higher insurance premiums. It also is used to compensate any people you run over for their injuries. People who are avoiding insurance are braking the law, and should be punished but they should also not be allowed to continue breaking the law. Immediately confiscating their car works pretty well in this regard.
You can buy another car, but then the same thing will happen and eventually you will have to turn up in court and explain your revolutionary actions to a judge. He might even have a good laugh before banning your from driving for a few years and fining you far more than you would ever have paid in insurance. He might even throw in prison for a bit although even if he does not you can still go there anyway if you want by refusing to pay the fine.
The alternative to a system like this is one where some uninsured shit bag can crash into you and you have no way of getting a new car without paying for it yourself and spending a fortune on laywers to try and go after them for money they probably do not have anyway.
Driving without insurance Britain is a very bad idea. The only way to get away with it is make sure you only ever buy foreign cars with European number plates that they cannot lookup in the ANPR system:)
Also, with regard to most of the second world war related stuff, it is worth remembering that we do not know how things would have turned out if the US had sat that one out. It is just as likely Stalin would have romped over most of Europe after the Russian successfully fought back Hitlers advance. Russia may well have come out of that war even stronger than it already did since us british would still have held out for a while without US help.
Once the Russians built those massive tank factory cities in Siberia they were in a very strong position, they could have held out for a long while even if Moscow had fallen. They were so damn remote that there was very little Germany could do against them and the German attempt to exterminate every Slav they came across made and sort of peace after they invaded a pretty unlikely occurrence.
Even if Russia did fall, would the US really have liked to go it alone in a world where Hitler had missiles and nuclear weapons? Without the German scientists that helped built the US rocket program the US would have been in very weak position, stuck between two utterly hostile empires. If Germany had conquered the British they would have gained the british nuclear knowledge and incorporated that into their own programme that already existed.
Sooner or later they would have come for the vast mineral resources held in the US even if it was only to fight each other. They may well have just nuked the crap out of Washington and New York as an opener, it was not like Hitler had not already demonstrated his willingness to slaughter civilians.
The simple fact is that the US sitting out that particular war was clearly not a great idea. The US joined the war as it had very little choice in the long run and one side attacked them anyway. A world where the US sat out and waited for one or both of the Axis powers to invade would be very different to the one in which we currently live and I very much doubt the US would be in a stronger position than it is.
The US entered the war allied with Russia, because it had to, not because it wanted to.
I understand we were thanked by the citizens of Afghanistan in New York a few years back, in September, for a similar action.
You understand incorrectly: we were thanked by a few of the citizens of Saudi Arabia, a couple of folks from U.A.E., and an Egyptian. They wanted to repay us for our longstanding support of the dictatorial governments in their countries, including sending our guys out to die for those dictators in 1991.
Yup, this is an often overlooked point in our media, Most of the attackers were from Saudi, the funding came from Saudi backers, and the mastermind was originally from Saudi. Even if you believe every detail of the official version then you come to wonder why the hell Saudi is still our ally.
Because the Safari settings wasn't just 'asking' not to be tracked, but rather was supposed to prevent cookies from being placed by 3rd parties (essentially web sites you hadn't directly visited). What google did was to simulate a fake form submission to this third party site in order to set a cookie.
Not similar at all to the honor system 'do not track' setting.
Some AC in this thread has posted that google only did this when the user had a Google and account and had ticked the box saying there did not mind being tracked. If that is true it does make things slightly less clear cut as to their wrong doing, especially being that Apple just blindly applied this setting to every users broswer with asking them.
I have to admit though, I knew they did this as it broke the website I work on and it caused me a whole shit load of hassle so I am very biased. We provide an elearning solution that is often embedded in another companies site via an iframe. We only do this when the other party can't manage to use a web services approach we prefer. Obviously this requires a cookie to be stored on the users PC so that after the initial authentication has happened the iframe can navigate around without having to pass around the authentication token. It's not perfect but it is only a fallback. Apple broke this solution overnight without providing an easy way to add an exemption for certain trusted sites, thanks for that. (Cue lots of retards saying we should never have done it this way, your right, we should have told customers to go away and that we did not want their business if they could not get their heads around WSDL which was dominant at the time)
There are lots of stories when it's on-topic to post about Apple's wrongdoings. This story is for posting about Google's. Let's not be partisan here, we can spend enough time flaming both. And probably even Microsoft if they ever manage to do something relevant again...
Actually, Apple does have a part to play in this too. They chose to select a default setting under the guise of "protecting users privacy" that was actually more about hurting a competitor. Microsoft have just done exactly the same thing. Neither of these two companies give two shits about users privacy, they just want to hurt Google by any means necessary. Apple just love tracking users on the iphone in application adverts, I recall. Microsoft will probably build some sort of tracking crap or something into Bing or Windows 8 or whatever.
That is not to say Google did not utterly screw up here by trying to circumvent this setting as a great many users did actively want that ticked and probably were quite happy when they found it buried in the options page and noticed it was ticked for them. Most sheeple though would be none the wiser, and those people are the ones Apple and Microsoft are now determined to prevent Google from tracking in order to hurt Googles revenues and limit the amount they can throw into crazy projects like Android that are hurting them.
This is a just a stupid corporate war with us as pawns in the middle. Neither side really gives a shit about us, they just want two things:
Firstly, they want to get as much of our money as they can. Secondly, they want to discourage our money from going to their biggest competitors.
It is slightly more complicated with Google as they do not get their money from us directly but they are still reliant on our eyeballs viewing their ads so it is not actually that different. Less eyeballs, or less effective eyeball tracking still hurts them as much as selling fewer iPhones hurts Apple.
It's neither high caliber, nor capable of "mowing down just about anything".
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't 7.62 NATO a higher calibre than the 5.56 that is millitary standard issue and the 7.62 round that goes in an AK? Obviously the word high is relative but I think most people would consider that this counts. Sig describe it as "a large calibre carbine" on their website too but what do they know. This is the same stuff that feeds an M60.
In terms of mowing down anything you may be right, your averge Rhino or elephant would take at least 4 or 5 rounds to drop with this if you were a crap shot, and with that hair trigger that would take a whole 8 to 10 seconds to get off.
the us has not sewn fields of random landmines in iraq. they have used landmines exclusively for base perimeter defense and even then it is doubtful that there is much or even any of that in iraq (it is primarily used in the DPRK DMZ, where it makes sense). your claim about the future use of landmines is anti-american nonsense. in vietnam, the us had nearly zero use of landmines. the landmines in cambodia are almost entirely of Soviet origin (to balance it out and to blame americans on the issue in cambodia, the fiction of 'unexploded cluster mines' is used - to believe this, you'd also have to believe ridiculous overestimates that 10-20% of us air-dropped cluster munitions failed to explode).
The reason people count cluster munitions as landmine is because the US loves using weapons like this to prevent a hostile area being moved through freely by enemy forces:
That is why people could them as "Unexploded Cluster Munitions". The problem is the dud rate of mines that do not explode after 15 days and just sit there until some child picks it up and shakes it or something thereby bridging whatever electrical contact broke when was deployed. Additionally the self-destruct time is a relatively new concept, it did not exist in the BLU-43. The other issue is that most of the time the US considers the use of these weapons as classified.
With regard to Cambodia though you are spot on, most of them were laid by the Kymer Rouge so they probably were Soviet made:
GCHQ is hardly a security watchdog - the closest US equivalent would be the NSA.
They're the signals intercept and codebreaker agency of the UK government. One presumes they know their shit when they're looking for backdoors planted by the chinese intelligence servives.
This the interesting thing about GCHQ's remit. It is actually twofold. They are tasked with securing the UK's government communications and also breaking other peoples.
The most interesting story I ever heard about them involved the guy who is currently their chief mathematician: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks Particularly relevant is that when they figured out the Public Key Cryptography was actually possible, they expressly did not let anyone else know what they had found even though they decided not to use it themselves.
When it was finally declassified (20 years after someone else invented it and published, how paranoid is that?) I saw an interview with Clifford Cocks where he was asked about whether he thought anyone else would believe that he had really invented this now it had been in the public domain, his reply was something along the lines of the fact that he had been turning up at various international gatherings about cryptography for years and that most of the people in his field were incredibly suspicious about him anyway since he couldn't actually tell people anything about his work, who he worked for or why the hell he could ask an informed question about RSA cryptography when it was first being postulated by people who clearly had never shared their research with him until it was published.
It does make me think that if they did find any back doors there is sod all chance they would tell anyone else about them. They would quietly ask Huawei to remove them from the products sold to the UK government then let them exist in everybody else's gear. That is the response most in line with their government remit.
There are only really two options for broadband in the UK
1)Virgin media which is cable based
2) ADSL which you can pay various different companies for but they all have to use BT open reach to get the telephone line to your house.
Utter crap. There are many other options.
Firstly, in the vast majority of urban areas what is on offer is LLU ADSL2+ which is theoretically up to 24Mbps. This is often capped at 1Mbps upload but if you need to upload lots then SDSL is available in many places too. I just got a quote for my home address on the edge of London and Surrey and found I can get SDSL to the home (if I get a mortgage to pay for it, £600 per month but that is a commercial offering not really aimed at home users)
I just checked my home address on the sky website and found I can also get Sky Fibre to the home, offering 28.3Mbps (not up to, they actually said between 28.3 and 28.3Mbps). That is for £20 per month.
My current internet is a dirt cheap offering from talktalk. It is still an LLU account that offers up to 10Mbps. I just looked on their site though and they can offer up to 78Mbps for not that different to what I currently pay.
I tried my old address too that is in Manchester and found very similar results. In both places I can get fibre connections, and at similar speeds, off quite a few different companies.
The reality is that the internet market in the UK is saturated with different providers offering differing speeds. Maybe you were talking about rural areas but then you really should have made clear that you were not counting cities since that is where most people in the UK live. My home address is right on the outer most edge of London and I can still get fibre there. I am sure that would change if I moved 200 yards away but then I would be in the middle of a field with no road either.
I live in south wales and the current waiting time for an apointment is about 9 weeks. I don't know if this is typical of everywhere in the country but i wouldn't be supprised if it was.
No, the rest of the country is nothing like south wales, that explains a lot.
Firstly, there is nothing there. It is a wonderful place to go on holiday but it is so remote it is untrue. Last time I was there was a few years ago but I could even get a signal on my mobile phone. In heavy rains my mate who's family live there can't even drive to the local town without using the 4X4 as the roads all flood.
Then there is the financial aspect. The reason nobody lays fibre that far into the countryside is that most of the people using it would be sheep. South Wales does not contribute very much to the economy does it? The cities are mostly decimated (Swansea is an utter hole, Cardiff is not too different) by the loss of industry and they do not show any signs of finding an alternate source of employment.
I would bet that you are still quite young, in which case you will probably leave the area as soon as you are able to move out and go to university. Other wise you must live in one of cities in question while you are still at university. In either of these cases you need to realise that most of the rest of the UK is very different. I would suggest you get on the M4 and go exploring. If by any chance you are a grown up then why are you still there? South Wales is not exactly an IT hotspot is it?
If if was that important, you should have sent it 'special delivery'. 'Recorded delivery' isn't worth much; you're just as well off getting 'Proof of posting' which is basically a receipt.
Yes, well recorded delivery does only cost £3 so that is not really surprising. Special delivery is more akin to the $20 Recorded that the USPO offers according to someone else in this thread although that is still loads cheaper at under £10 (that insures something up to £300 in value I believe). Recorded Delivery is really only designed for letters that have no value but you need a proof of reciept
I worked there for a few weeks, dreaming of that nice summer job where you're home by lunch time. My dreams were shattered. The place is run by idiots in a panic. They couldn't even provide me with hundred-year-old technology - a pushbike.
The post office do provide bikes, and they are cool. You probably didn't get one because they cost a fortune. They are made by Pashley who are probably one of the best bike manufacturers in the world if you want something that is heavy but could survive a head on collision with a truck and come of unscathed (Not so sure about the rider)
I used to have one of their unicycles years ago that someone lent me to learn on and it was amazing. It might be a bit heavier but in terms of abuse it would put up with it was great. If the post office gave a full bike to every part time member staff you could probably sell it for more than you got paid in wages
Depending on how the assets are packaged, the id approach is certainly not bad. What most of us are concerned about with a game is whether we'll still be able to play it in ten years.
Interestingly I tried to play COD: Airborne recently. I had a copy sitting around that I paid for at the time but never completed.I found no way of installing it and getting it to work under windows 7, which I suppose is not too surprising. In the end I noticed it for sale on Origin for less than a £10 and just bought another copy which installed fine. I probably could have persisted with getting the old copy to work but it was far less hassle to fork over a few more quid and be playing in no time.
Sometimes a steam like platform can actually enable you to play something for far longer than if you bought a bog standard dvd based game since the publisher do the work of tweaking it for new drivers and operating systems. My introduction to Steam was when I bought the HalfLife2 pack that came with an updated copy of HalfLife1 using the new engine. I had never played half-life when it came out so Valve had me hooked when they did that.
I'd far rather give my money to someone who's going to make more DRM-free games that I can actually install from an installer or a backup without having to deal with a crack that may be infested with a virus.
You can do that with Valve cant you?
No, you can't. You can back up the files in to an installer-looking package but you can't reinstall the game without jumping through DRM hoops. The installer runs steam to do the actual install, and steam must be updated before the game can be installed, and you must also be online to have the install "blessed" so that the game will run. You cannot restore or install anything Steam-powered without an internet connection.
I am not so sure about that since I somehow managed it. Maybe I used my mobiles phones internet or something though, I know I use it for ordering pizza when I'm there so it might have been online without me realising. I had forgotten I have to be online to download the steam client itself though so it makes sense.
The only thing is though is that I still do not really get why it is such a big issue. I do not really care about DRM providing it stays the hell out of my way most of the time.
I know that now I turn up and can legally play Skyrim without an internet connection by copying the save games from my home PC. Without steam the only way to do this legally would be to buy two copies of the game. Note the word legally in that sentence, it is very important since most other licences prevent you from legally installing the game on two separate PC's at the same time.
You can't do that. Everything is a political statement and in a capitalist system (let alone a mercantilist one) where you spend your money is your truest vote. If you give money to Valve for closed-source software in a closed-source ecosystem (Steam) then you're voting for more of the same.
Maybe you are right but the whole point of capitalism is that it gives you precious little choice in the long run.
Personally I work producing closed source proprietary software for a living. Not because I think it is a great model for the software I produce (it is an e-learning system similar to Moodle) but because my boss pays me to do so and the money I earn can be used to support my family.
I tried doing some other stuff first but I could not even earn half what I earn now so I gave up pissing into the wind.
With that said, where there's no Open or Free alternative, you're also voting for more games like the ones you buy. So, carry on, just understand what you're doing when you spend money. I'd rather give money to Valve than, say, EA... but I'd far rather give my money to someone who's going to make more DRM-free games that I can actually install from an installer or a backup without having to deal with a crack that may be infested with a virus.
You can do that with Valve cant you? I have my Steam account installed and running on 3 different Windows installs. One at home where I spend most of my time then Two at my holiday home (Windows XP and Windows 8 dual boot). I cannot be logged in to more than one at once but I never need to since I have no need to play more than one game at the same time. My holiday home has no internet so I backed up all my steam games to a portable hard drive then took that with me.
The only thing Steam prevents me from doing is reselling games to other people when I am done with them.
You could also consider, that basic software features like an OS, a web browser etc are something that everyone requires these days and should very much be free. On the other hand games are purely for entertainment, noone *needs* games. Them being non free isn't significantly harming anyone.
And instead of games being free and open up front, perhaps the ID approach would be acceptable for all concerned. Let them make their money from the game up front (its hard to argue that ID games haven't been successful), and then release the source later so that everyone can benefit from it. This was also the original spirit of copyright, give the author time to make money from his work and then release it so everyone can benefit later.
I love quake as a game, i bought a copy when it came out and thanks to the source being open i can still play it today without resorting to emulation. As an added bonus, the graphics look much better than they did originally.
Of course, this only works because you bought the game at the time. He hasn't open sourced all the artwork so you still need to buy a licence to that in order to play the open source version of Quake. The ID approach is great and all, but it is not enough to allow anyone to play the game as the artwork and graphics is all still covered by copyright and you need to buy them in order to use them.
I have bought every ID game since Doom2 came out though and never sell them secondhand so I love that he open sources the software later and lets me play it on my old Linux laptop while travelling.
You are free not to use Windows - right? No, actually, for many purposes, you are not.
Yes, actually you are always free not to use windows now thanks to Wine. It might be a million times harder to get a piece of software working under the Wine than under Windows but in most cases it can be done.
I do not believe in copyright, selling of software, or control of data by third parties. That makes me a zealot by neo-slashdot reasoning, but that doesn't make me wrong.
You are aware that without copyright Valve would be free to sell their own distribution of Linux and do exactly what you object to? The GPL is based on copyright. Without copyright you could take a GPL package and use it to build a proprietary piece of software, making a few changes so that it became incompatible with the original package so people had to buy your software. In the case of Valve they could make a few changes to the ELF format so their system ran all ELF binaries but only their system could run their binaries.
Free software advocates are neither zealots nor hippies. We simply see the pattern that proprietary software is always eventually a power grab.
No. Many of us write closed source software simply because we need money to feed our families and the particular niche we serve is one where the supported model is not likely to be successful. In the case of writing games they are so damn easy to use in most cases that you have to be able to charge people to access them in some way, either by having everything online and under your control or by restricting distribution of the software itself.
There is simply no other way to support the games that the market now demands. Other methods of distribution like freeware or shareware have been tried, but in the end every game company that has enjoyed a modicum of success has come back to the proprietary model in order to pay for the huge investment needed to produce the level of polished product that games have become.
The ridiculous amount of artwork, story and actors needed for most modern games makes GPL distribution very tricky. The people who do all this need paying and the people who play games like to see this crap. I bet that actually programming does not even make up a majority of the effort put in to modern game production.
If you can name a single decent game that is open source I bet I can name a better, similar one that is proprietary. Open source has its uses, but games are not ever going to work due to their target market and amount of supporting artwork needed.
Producing decent quality games is not a power grab, it is simply the only model that works to support something so damn easy to use.
Usually the kind of person who carries a gun and is willing to defend themselves with it pulls the gun out and shoots them instead of handing them the phone THEN pulling the gun out
Last time I was mugged they punched first and asked later. In my case they only asked because they were unable to knock me out then take my wallet and phone while I was unconcious. Carrying a gun or mace just means the next person they attack gets it used on them after it is taken off you.
The best way to avoid a mugging is to see it coming and deny them the element of surprise since if they can't surprise you they will most likely go and find someone else they can
Except that Unity is absolutely the worst kind of horror: unrepentant horror. They refuse to acknowledge that they've done wrong. I work in a company with a strong Linux element, and while ubuntu is the preferred distro, nobody runs unity. Describing KDE or Gnome as having run amok is somewhat unfair, the desktop in Linux has improved significantly over the past decade. I doubt they achieved all their goals, but they have achieved something significantly positive.
Which version of unity have you tried? I was lucky in that I upgraded my laptop from an LTS release quite recently. As a result of this I have been through all the versions of unity in quick succession. It has progressed from terrible to usable very quickly, in a version or two it may even be nice. I actually think it will be the best Linux UI within a year or two thanks to having a single controlling vision driving it.
It will let you call everyone who has a Gmail account... so in most cases they won't need to start using a new service.
Only if they keep their Gmail account open all the time. I also have a Gmail account with chat enabled but since I only open it in a browser when I actually want to send or read an email I probably hardly ever show as online.
Time to switch to something where we actually know what the software is doing.
Will Jitsi let me call everyone else I know who uses skype?
Trying to convince them all to ditch Skype due to the government monitoring them is a waste of time since most people in the world are not that bothered about it. They just the view that since they are noting anything wrong they have nothing to hide or that if government want to monitor them it will find a way anyway.
. If I pay you do two paint jobs, you do the first one very well, and the second so bad that you damaged the walls or something; I would obviously reduce the money you would get for the first job
That is why I would demand the money for the first job, after the first job was complete:)
Though I wouldn't be keen on the council monitoring it all I would certainly keep CCTV in my cab if I were a taxi driver as a deterrent. You hear of so many attacks on Taxi drivers, people running off without paying and false accusations of "improper behaviour" by female passengers that I would want it for self-protection.
As a cab user there are a few occasions when I would have liked to be in a cab with cctv. Most often when I got some asshole cab driver on a slow night who wanted to drive the longest route possible or forget to zero the meter when you get in.
I remember that when I was a student if you asked for the main halls of residence where first years lived and were in the centre of town late at night you were pretty much guaranteed to be driven in the wrong direction initially. Once you pointed out to the driver he was going the wrong way they were usually alight about it and turned round quickly.
The problem came if you were chatting or whatever and didn't notice until the guy had driven you a mile or two in the wrong direction, then you had to pay the fare and had no real come back. At least if the cab had cctv you could put in a complaint then there was some evidence and the driver couldn't just say that you told him to take that bullshit route that went via timbuktu.
You need a light at night because humans aren't bats or dolphins and don't navigate by sonar.
Bikes don't make very much noise (hence the little tinkly bell) and so pedestrians mightn't hear or see you coming at night and motorists mightn't notice you until it's too late. How can you not know or realize this?
I entirely agree with you when it comes to lights but the little tinkly bell is where I draw the line. If some moron pedestrian steps into the road in front of me they get an earful of abuse at the very least.
I generally cycle everywhere at a pretty fast pace since the UK speed limit on most roads is 30mph and I am unlikely to exceed that. I have hit one pedestrian because he saw a row of traffic and stepped down off the curb without noticing the green marked cycle lane at the side of the road. I hit another guy as he was in between two stationary cars in a row of traffic then stepped out as he could not see a car coming from the opposite direction, unfortunately I was overtaking the row of traffic and did not see him until he stepped in front of me.
Pedestrians do moronic crap like that all the time. It is not our fault our chosen method of transport makes less noise than a motorbike or car, it is their fault for not using their eyes before jumping into the road.
Nope, I am not taking away credits from Windows 7, but from Microsoft. Please read the GGPs post carefully, and my response (hell, read the title of these post carefully).
I do and I did.
Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
Why would you take back credit for some thing someone did 2 years ago based on them making a fuck up now? That is like saying I would take away you bachelor degree simply because you failed your doctorate.
Slashdot Mirror
I just made a comment that answers your question, your question is posed out of a misunderstanding of what insurance is.
Insurance is not there for you to pay for others, insurance is there for you to cover your own costs. So if you don't have insurance and you are in an accident, it is your problem. It's your health and other costs. If you have insurance, then after your deductible and up to whatever the cap is that you are paying for, you'll be covered.
If you are in an accident, it doesn't matter if you are responsible for it or not, your insurance is supposed to kick in above the deductible and cover your costs.
If you can show your insurance company that the responsibility is with the other driver(s), then it's up to your insurance company to go after that driver and/or his insurance. What does government have to do with any of it except providing huge subsidy to the insurance companies and thus driving the costs up?
I know this is an old thread but since this is about something happening in the UK I thought I would explain why in the UK it is important that government mandates all drivers have insurance. The main reason is that if someone runs over someone else or smashes into their car it is very difficult to go after them for any money if they do not have insurance.
Here in the UK you cannot be sued for money you do not have so a great many people who do not own their own home or have any savings could drive like crazy nut jobs without even having to worry about the costs they were inflicting on other people. I believe in many other countries you can sue people and they have to pay the money by instalments if they do not have it, here that is not possible for damages, only fines imposed by criminal courts.
So if you are a fairly poor individual who lives in rented social housing (you call them housing projects) you can drive round crashing into people at will providing you never get convicted of criminally bad driving by actually killing someone. Just driving like a twat and causing other people cars to go to the scrapheap prematurely is not a criminal offence here.
This sounds retarded but the poor over here have very little to lose so it is not far wrong. Maybe if we had fewer safety nets to stop people falling out of society like you do (in this country you can carry on claiming unemployment benefit your whole life, many now do) things would be different.
Never understood this. Why crush the car? Why not sell it? Change the locks if necessary, but it's not like the car is being punished here.
Because most of the time the people who drive without insurance drive around in pieces of crap that nobody would pay for.
Legally though I believe they can sell the car if they think it is worth anything. But who would be stupid enough to pay up for a nice new car then not pay a few hundred quid to insure it? Most new cars come with free insurance anyway over here.
This is a problem of-course, because eventually the cops will have the license plate recognition systems that are tied into insurance databases and all the other databases and it will be nearly impossible to drive without insurance, but imagine for a moment that everybody just stopped buying insurance, cancelled their insurance completely and drove without it.
Here in the UK we are already there, they are fitting ANPR systems into most police cars already. They are tied into the motor insurance database already. If you are driving a car without insurance it bleeps at them and they pull you over. Once they pull you over you can then tell them your insurance company and they ring them up and check, tell them your name and they look that up and check or they take your car there and then.
You then have a couple of weeks to collect your car (and pay the tow charges) before it gets sold or crushed.
Most UK residents I speak to actually agree with this. Insurance is there so that if you drive into someone elses car they do not have to pay for the damage you caused, you do in the way of higher insurance premiums. It also is used to compensate any people you run over for their injuries. People who are avoiding insurance are braking the law, and should be punished but they should also not be allowed to continue breaking the law. Immediately confiscating their car works pretty well in this regard.
You can buy another car, but then the same thing will happen and eventually you will have to turn up in court and explain your revolutionary actions to a judge. He might even have a good laugh before banning your from driving for a few years and fining you far more than you would ever have paid in insurance. He might even throw in prison for a bit although even if he does not you can still go there anyway if you want by refusing to pay the fine.
The alternative to a system like this is one where some uninsured shit bag can crash into you and you have no way of getting a new car without paying for it yourself and spending a fortune on laywers to try and go after them for money they probably do not have anyway.
Driving without insurance Britain is a very bad idea. The only way to get away with it is make sure you only ever buy foreign cars with European number plates that they cannot lookup in the ANPR system :)
Also, with regard to most of the second world war related stuff, it is worth remembering that we do not know how things would have turned out if the US had sat that one out. It is just as likely Stalin would have romped over most of Europe after the Russian successfully fought back Hitlers advance. Russia may well have come out of that war even stronger than it already did since us british would still have held out for a while without US help.
Once the Russians built those massive tank factory cities in Siberia they were in a very strong position, they could have held out for a long while even if Moscow had fallen. They were so damn remote that there was very little Germany could do against them and the German attempt to exterminate every Slav they came across made and sort of peace after they invaded a pretty unlikely occurrence.
Even if Russia did fall, would the US really have liked to go it alone in a world where Hitler had missiles and nuclear weapons? Without the German scientists that helped built the US rocket program the US would have been in very weak position, stuck between two utterly hostile empires. If Germany had conquered the British they would have gained the british nuclear knowledge and incorporated that into their own programme that already existed.
Sooner or later they would have come for the vast mineral resources held in the US even if it was only to fight each other. They may well have just nuked the crap out of Washington and New York as an opener, it was not like Hitler had not already demonstrated his willingness to slaughter civilians.
The simple fact is that the US sitting out that particular war was clearly not a great idea. The US joined the war as it had very little choice in the long run and one side attacked them anyway. A world where the US sat out and waited for one or both of the Axis powers to invade would be very different to the one in which we currently live and I very much doubt the US would be in a stronger position than it is.
The US entered the war allied with Russia, because it had to, not because it wanted to.
I understand we were thanked by the citizens of Afghanistan in New York a few years back, in September, for a similar action.
You understand incorrectly: we were thanked by a few of the citizens of Saudi Arabia, a couple of folks from U.A.E., and an Egyptian. They wanted to repay us for our longstanding support of the dictatorial governments in their countries, including sending our guys out to die for those dictators in 1991.
Yup, this is an often overlooked point in our media, Most of the attackers were from Saudi, the funding came from Saudi backers, and the mastermind was originally from Saudi. Even if you believe every detail of the official version then you come to wonder why the hell Saudi is still our ally.
Because the Safari settings wasn't just 'asking' not to be tracked, but rather was supposed to prevent cookies from being placed by 3rd parties (essentially web sites you hadn't directly visited). What google did was to simulate a fake form submission to this third party site in order to set a cookie.
Not similar at all to the honor system 'do not track' setting.
Some AC in this thread has posted that google only did this when the user had a Google and account and had ticked the box saying there did not mind being tracked. If that is true it does make things slightly less clear cut as to their wrong doing, especially being that Apple just blindly applied this setting to every users broswer with asking them.
I have to admit though, I knew they did this as it broke the website I work on and it caused me a whole shit load of hassle so I am very biased. We provide an elearning solution that is often embedded in another companies site via an iframe. We only do this when the other party can't manage to use a web services approach we prefer. Obviously this requires a cookie to be stored on the users PC so that after the initial authentication has happened the iframe can navigate around without having to pass around the authentication token. It's not perfect but it is only a fallback. Apple broke this solution overnight without providing an easy way to add an exemption for certain trusted sites, thanks for that. (Cue lots of retards saying we should never have done it this way, your right, we should have told customers to go away and that we did not want their business if they could not get their heads around WSDL which was dominant at the time)
There are lots of stories when it's on-topic to post about Apple's wrongdoings. This story is for posting about Google's. Let's not be partisan here, we can spend enough time flaming both. And probably even Microsoft if they ever manage to do something relevant again...
Actually, Apple does have a part to play in this too. They chose to select a default setting under the guise of "protecting users privacy" that was actually more about hurting a competitor. Microsoft have just done exactly the same thing. Neither of these two companies give two shits about users privacy, they just want to hurt Google by any means necessary. Apple just love tracking users on the iphone in application adverts, I recall. Microsoft will probably build some sort of tracking crap or something into Bing or Windows 8 or whatever.
That is not to say Google did not utterly screw up here by trying to circumvent this setting as a great many users did actively want that ticked and probably were quite happy when they found it buried in the options page and noticed it was ticked for them. Most sheeple though would be none the wiser, and those people are the ones Apple and Microsoft are now determined to prevent Google from tracking in order to hurt Googles revenues and limit the amount they can throw into crazy projects like Android that are hurting them.
This is a just a stupid corporate war with us as pawns in the middle. Neither side really gives a shit about us, they just want two things:
Firstly, they want to get as much of our money as they can.
Secondly, they want to discourage our money from going to their biggest competitors.
It is slightly more complicated with Google as they do not get their money from us directly but they are still reliant on our eyeballs viewing their ads so it is not actually that different. Less eyeballs, or less effective eyeball tracking still hurts them as much as selling fewer iPhones hurts Apple.
It's neither high caliber, nor capable of "mowing down just about anything".
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't 7.62 NATO a higher calibre than the 5.56 that is millitary standard issue and the 7.62 round that goes in an AK? Obviously the word high is relative but I think most people would consider that this counts. Sig describe it as "a large calibre carbine" on their website too but what do they know. This is the same stuff that feeds an M60.
In terms of mowing down anything you may be right, your averge Rhino or elephant would take at least 4 or 5 rounds to drop with this if you were a crap shot, and with that hair trigger that would take a whole 8 to 10 seconds to get off.
the us has not sewn fields of random landmines in iraq. they have used landmines exclusively for base perimeter defense and even then it is doubtful that there is much or even any of that in iraq (it is primarily used in the DPRK DMZ, where it makes sense). your claim about the future use of landmines is anti-american nonsense. in vietnam, the us had nearly zero use of landmines. the landmines in cambodia are almost entirely of Soviet origin (to balance it out and to blame americans on the issue in cambodia, the fiction of 'unexploded cluster mines' is used - to believe this, you'd also have to believe ridiculous overestimates that 10-20% of us air-dropped cluster munitions failed to explode).
The reason people count cluster munitions as landmine is because the US loves using weapons like this to prevent a hostile area being moved through freely by enemy forces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system
That is why people could them as "Unexploded Cluster Munitions". The problem is the dud rate of mines that do not explode after 15 days and just sit there until some child picks it up and shakes it or something thereby bridging whatever electrical contact broke when was deployed. Additionally the self-destruct time is a relatively new concept, it did not exist in the BLU-43. The other issue is that most of the time the US considers the use of these weapons as classified.
With regard to Cambodia though you are spot on, most of them were laid by the Kymer Rouge so they probably were Soviet made:
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/mines.htm
GCHQ is hardly a security watchdog - the closest US equivalent would be the NSA.
They're the signals intercept and codebreaker agency of the UK government. One presumes they know their shit when they're looking for backdoors planted by the chinese intelligence servives.
This the interesting thing about GCHQ's remit. It is actually twofold. They are tasked with securing the UK's government communications and also breaking other peoples.
The most interesting story I ever heard about them involved the guy who is currently their chief mathematician: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks
Particularly relevant is that when they figured out the Public Key Cryptography was actually possible, they expressly did not let anyone else know what they had found even though they decided not to use it themselves.
When it was finally declassified (20 years after someone else invented it and published, how paranoid is that?) I saw an interview with Clifford Cocks where he was asked about whether he thought anyone else would believe that he had really invented this now it had been in the public domain, his reply was something along the lines of the fact that he had been turning up at various international gatherings about cryptography for years and that most of the people in his field were incredibly suspicious about him anyway since he couldn't actually tell people anything about his work, who he worked for or why the hell he could ask an informed question about RSA cryptography when it was first being postulated by people who clearly had never shared their research with him until it was published.
It does make me think that if they did find any back doors there is sod all chance they would tell anyone else about them. They would quietly ask Huawei to remove them from the products sold to the UK government then let them exist in everybody else's gear. That is the response most in line with their government remit.
There are only really two options for broadband in the UK
1)Virgin media which is cable based
2) ADSL which you can pay various different companies for but they all have to use BT open reach to get the telephone line to your house.
Utter crap. There are many other options.
Firstly, in the vast majority of urban areas what is on offer is LLU ADSL2+ which is theoretically up to 24Mbps. This is often capped at 1Mbps upload but if you need to upload lots then SDSL is available in many places too. I just got a quote for my home address on the edge of London and Surrey and found I can get SDSL to the home (if I get a mortgage to pay for it, £600 per month but that is a commercial offering not really aimed at home users)
I just checked my home address on the sky website and found I can also get Sky Fibre to the home, offering 28.3Mbps (not up to, they actually said between 28.3 and 28.3Mbps). That is for £20 per month.
My current internet is a dirt cheap offering from talktalk. It is still an LLU account that offers up to 10Mbps. I just looked on their site though and they can offer up to 78Mbps for not that different to what I currently pay.
I tried my old address too that is in Manchester and found very similar results. In both places I can get fibre connections, and at similar speeds, off quite a few different companies.
The reality is that the internet market in the UK is saturated with different providers offering differing speeds. Maybe you were talking about rural areas but then you really should have made clear that you were not counting cities since that is where most people in the UK live. My home address is right on the outer most edge of London and I can still get fibre there. I am sure that would change if I moved 200 yards away but then I would be in the middle of a field with no road either.
I live in south wales and the current waiting time for an apointment is about 9 weeks. I don't know if this is typical of everywhere in the country but i wouldn't be supprised if it was.
No, the rest of the country is nothing like south wales, that explains a lot.
Firstly, there is nothing there. It is a wonderful place to go on holiday but it is so remote it is untrue. Last time I was there was a few years ago but I could even get a signal on my mobile phone. In heavy rains my mate who's family live there can't even drive to the local town without using the 4X4 as the roads all flood.
Then there is the financial aspect. The reason nobody lays fibre that far into the countryside is that most of the people using it would be sheep. South Wales does not contribute very much to the economy does it? The cities are mostly decimated (Swansea is an utter hole, Cardiff is not too different) by the loss of industry and they do not show any signs of finding an alternate source of employment.
I would bet that you are still quite young, in which case you will probably leave the area as soon as you are able to move out and go to university. Other wise you must live in one of cities in question while you are still at university. In either of these cases you need to realise that most of the rest of the UK is very different. I would suggest you get on the M4 and go exploring. If by any chance you are a grown up then why are you still there? South Wales is not exactly an IT hotspot is it?
If if was that important, you should have sent it 'special delivery'. 'Recorded delivery' isn't worth much; you're just as well off getting 'Proof of posting' which is basically a receipt.
Yes, well recorded delivery does only cost £3 so that is not really surprising. Special delivery is more akin to the $20 Recorded that the USPO offers according to someone else in this thread although that is still loads cheaper at under £10 (that insures something up to £300 in value I believe). Recorded Delivery is really only designed for letters that have no value but you need a proof of reciept
I worked there for a few weeks, dreaming of that nice summer job where you're home by lunch time. My dreams were shattered. The place is run by idiots in a panic. They couldn't even provide me with hundred-year-old technology - a pushbike.
The post office do provide bikes, and they are cool. You probably didn't get one because they cost a fortune. They are made by Pashley who are probably one of the best bike manufacturers in the world if you want something that is heavy but could survive a head on collision with a truck and come of unscathed (Not so sure about the rider)
http://www.pashley.co.uk/
I used to have one of their unicycles years ago that someone lent me to learn on and it was amazing. It might be a bit heavier but in terms of abuse it would put up with it was great. If the post office gave a full bike to every part time member staff you could probably sell it for more than you got paid in wages
Depending on how the assets are packaged, the id approach is certainly not bad. What most of us are concerned about with a game is whether we'll still be able to play it in ten years.
Interestingly I tried to play COD: Airborne recently. I had a copy sitting around that I paid for at the time but never completed.I found no way of installing it and getting it to work under windows 7, which I suppose is not too surprising. In the end I noticed it for sale on Origin for less than a £10 and just bought another copy which installed fine. I probably could have persisted with getting the old copy to work but it was far less hassle to fork over a few more quid and be playing in no time.
Sometimes a steam like platform can actually enable you to play something for far longer than if you bought a bog standard dvd based game since the publisher do the work of tweaking it for new drivers and operating systems. My introduction to Steam was when I bought the HalfLife2 pack that came with an updated copy of HalfLife1 using the new engine. I had never played half-life when it came out so Valve had me hooked when they did that.
I'd far rather give my money to someone who's going to make more DRM-free games that I can actually install from an installer or a backup without having to deal with a crack that may be infested with a virus.
You can do that with Valve cant you?
No, you can't. You can back up the files in to an installer-looking package but you can't reinstall the game without jumping through DRM hoops. The installer runs steam to do the actual install, and steam must be updated before the game can be installed, and you must also be online to have the install "blessed" so that the game will run. You cannot restore or install anything Steam-powered without an internet connection.
I am not so sure about that since I somehow managed it. Maybe I used my mobiles phones internet or something though, I know I use it for ordering pizza when I'm there so it might have been online without me realising. I had forgotten I have to be online to download the steam client itself though so it makes sense.
The only thing is though is that I still do not really get why it is such a big issue. I do not really care about DRM providing it stays the hell out of my way most of the time.
I know that now I turn up and can legally play Skyrim without an internet connection by copying the save games from my home PC. Without steam the only way to do this legally would be to buy two copies of the game. Note the word legally in that sentence, it is very important since most other licences prevent you from legally installing the game on two separate PC's at the same time.
You can't do that. Everything is a political statement and in a capitalist system (let alone a mercantilist one) where you spend your money is your truest vote. If you give money to Valve for closed-source software in a closed-source ecosystem (Steam) then you're voting for more of the same.
Maybe you are right but the whole point of capitalism is that it gives you precious little choice in the long run.
Personally I work producing closed source proprietary software for a living. Not because I think it is a great model for the software I produce (it is an e-learning system similar to Moodle) but because my boss pays me to do so and the money I earn can be used to support my family.
I tried doing some other stuff first but I could not even earn half what I earn now so I gave up pissing into the wind.
With that said, where there's no Open or Free alternative, you're also voting for more games like the ones you buy. So, carry on, just understand what you're doing when you spend money. I'd rather give money to Valve than, say, EA... but I'd far rather give my money to someone who's going to make more DRM-free games that I can actually install from an installer or a backup without having to deal with a crack that may be infested with a virus.
You can do that with Valve cant you? I have my Steam account installed and running on 3 different Windows installs. One at home where I spend most of my time then Two at my holiday home (Windows XP and Windows 8 dual boot). I cannot be logged in to more than one at once but I never need to since I have no need to play more than one game at the same time. My holiday home has no internet so I backed up all my steam games to a portable hard drive then took that with me.
The only thing Steam prevents me from doing is reselling games to other people when I am done with them.
You could also consider, that basic software features like an OS, a web browser etc are something that everyone requires these days and should very much be free.
On the other hand games are purely for entertainment, noone *needs* games. Them being non free isn't significantly harming anyone.
And instead of games being free and open up front, perhaps the ID approach would be acceptable for all concerned. Let them make their money from the game up front (its hard to argue that ID games haven't been successful), and then release the source later so that everyone can benefit from it. This was also the original spirit of copyright, give the author time to make money from his work and then release it so everyone can benefit later.
I love quake as a game, i bought a copy when it came out and thanks to the source being open i can still play it today without resorting to emulation. As an added bonus, the graphics look much better than they did originally.
Of course, this only works because you bought the game at the time. He hasn't open sourced all the artwork so you still need to buy a licence to that in order to play the open source version of Quake. The ID approach is great and all, but it is not enough to allow anyone to play the game as the artwork and graphics is all still covered by copyright and you need to buy them in order to use them.
I have bought every ID game since Doom2 came out though and never sell them secondhand so I love that he open sources the software later and lets me play it on my old Linux laptop while travelling.
You are free not to use Windows - right? No, actually, for many purposes, you are not.
Yes, actually you are always free not to use windows now thanks to Wine. It might be a million times harder to get a piece of software working under the Wine than under Windows but in most cases it can be done.
I do not believe in copyright, selling of software, or control of data by third parties. That makes me a zealot by neo-slashdot reasoning, but that doesn't make me wrong.
You are aware that without copyright Valve would be free to sell their own distribution of Linux and do exactly what you object to? The GPL is based on copyright. Without copyright you could take a GPL package and use it to build a proprietary piece of software, making a few changes so that it became incompatible with the original package so people had to buy your software. In the case of Valve they could make a few changes to the ELF format so their system ran all ELF binaries but only their system could run their binaries.
Free software advocates are neither zealots nor hippies. We simply see the pattern that proprietary software is always eventually a power grab.
No. Many of us write closed source software simply because we need money to feed our families and the particular niche we serve is one where the supported model is not likely to be successful. In the case of writing games they are so damn easy to use in most cases that you have to be able to charge people to access them in some way, either by having everything online and under your control or by restricting distribution of the software itself.
There is simply no other way to support the games that the market now demands. Other methods of distribution like freeware or shareware have been tried, but in the end every game company that has enjoyed a modicum of success has come back to the proprietary model in order to pay for the huge investment needed to produce the level of polished product that games have become.
The ridiculous amount of artwork, story and actors needed for most modern games makes GPL distribution very tricky. The people who do all this need paying and the people who play games like to see this crap. I bet that actually programming does not even make up a majority of the effort put in to modern game production.
If you can name a single decent game that is open source I bet I can name a better, similar one that is proprietary. Open source has its uses, but games are not ever going to work due to their target market and amount of supporting artwork needed.
Producing decent quality games is not a power grab, it is simply the only model that works to support something so damn easy to use.
Usually the kind of person who carries a gun and is willing to defend themselves with it pulls the gun out and shoots them instead of handing them the phone THEN pulling the gun out
Last time I was mugged they punched first and asked later. In my case they only asked because they were unable to knock me out then take my wallet and phone while I was unconcious. Carrying a gun or mace just means the next person they attack gets it used on them after it is taken off you.
The best way to avoid a mugging is to see it coming and deny them the element of surprise since if they can't surprise you they will most likely go and find someone else they can
Except that Unity is absolutely the worst kind of horror: unrepentant horror. They refuse to acknowledge that they've done wrong. I work in a company with a strong Linux element, and while ubuntu is the preferred distro, nobody runs unity. Describing KDE or Gnome as having run amok is somewhat unfair, the desktop in Linux has improved significantly over the past decade. I doubt they achieved all their goals, but they have achieved something significantly positive.
Which version of unity have you tried? I was lucky in that I upgraded my laptop from an LTS release quite recently. As a result of this I have been through all the versions of unity in quick succession. It has progressed from terrible to usable very quickly, in a version or two it may even be nice. I actually think it will be the best Linux UI within a year or two thanks to having a single controlling vision driving it.
It will let you call everyone who has a Gmail account ... so in most cases they won't need to start using a new service.
Only if they keep their Gmail account open all the time. I also have a Gmail account with chat enabled but since I only open it in a browser when I actually want to send or read an email I probably hardly ever show as online.
Time to switch to something where we actually know what the software is doing.
Will Jitsi let me call everyone else I know who uses skype?
Trying to convince them all to ditch Skype due to the government monitoring them is a waste of time since most people in the world are not that bothered about it. They just the view that since they are noting anything wrong they have nothing to hide or that if government want to monitor them it will find a way anyway.
. If I pay you do two paint jobs, you do the first one very well, and the second so bad that you damaged the walls or something; I would obviously reduce the money you would get for the first job
That is why I would demand the money for the first job, after the first job was complete :)
Though I wouldn't be keen on the council monitoring it all I would certainly keep CCTV in my cab if I were a taxi driver as a deterrent. You hear of so many attacks on Taxi drivers, people running off without paying and false accusations of "improper behaviour" by female passengers that I would want it for self-protection.
As a cab user there are a few occasions when I would have liked to be in a cab with cctv. Most often when I got some asshole cab driver on a slow night who wanted to drive the longest route possible or forget to zero the meter when you get in.
I remember that when I was a student if you asked for the main halls of residence where first years lived and were in the centre of town late at night you were pretty much guaranteed to be driven in the wrong direction initially. Once you pointed out to the driver he was going the wrong way they were usually alight about it and turned round quickly.
The problem came if you were chatting or whatever and didn't notice until the guy had driven you a mile or two in the wrong direction, then you had to pay the fare and had no real come back. At least if the cab had cctv you could put in a complaint then there was some evidence and the driver couldn't just say that you told him to take that bullshit route that went via timbuktu.
Silliness? Are you soft in the head?
You need a light at night because humans aren't bats or dolphins and don't navigate by sonar.
Bikes don't make very much noise (hence the little tinkly bell) and so pedestrians mightn't hear or see you coming at night and motorists mightn't notice you until it's too late. How can you not know or realize this?
I entirely agree with you when it comes to lights but the little tinkly bell is where I draw the line. If some moron pedestrian steps into the road in front of me they get an earful of abuse at the very least.
I generally cycle everywhere at a pretty fast pace since the UK speed limit on most roads is 30mph and I am unlikely to exceed that. I have hit one pedestrian because he saw a row of traffic and stepped down off the curb without noticing the green marked cycle lane at the side of the road. I hit another guy as he was in between two stationary cars in a row of traffic then stepped out as he could not see a car coming from the opposite direction, unfortunately I was overtaking the row of traffic and did not see him until he stepped in front of me.
Pedestrians do moronic crap like that all the time. It is not our fault our chosen method of transport makes less noise than a motorbike or car, it is their fault for not using their eyes before jumping into the road.
Nope, I am not taking away credits from Windows 7, but from Microsoft. Please read the GGPs post carefully, and my response (hell, read the title of these post carefully).
I do and I did.
Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
Why would you take back credit for some thing someone did 2 years ago based on them making a fuck up now? That is like saying I would take away you bachelor degree simply because you failed your doctorate.