If someone disguises his house as an open shop, you can't be blamed for accidentally trespassing (but you should still leave when requested) A network is always private property unless it's operated by the government, so the point is moot. If your intent is to say that it's okay to use a shop's unsecured wifi without permission, you are seriously out in the woods. We're using the shop as an analogy here. I'm not talking about using a shop's wifi, I'm talking about entering private property which is open and advertised as such. Like a shop. Or open wifi (although you're not actually entering anything in that case).
Which may be intentionally open for you to use. Absolutely. But it is your responsibility to check with the owner first, or bear the risk of being held liable for trespass. If you want to enter a shop, do you first track down the owner of the shop to ask his permission to enter the shop?
Fortunately the protocol has foreseen in requests for permission and authorisation. The router has zero authority to give permission, unless you're aware of any access points who are legal owners of property. Only the owner of the property (or tenant with dominion) has the authority to grant or revoke permission. The "open" sign on a shop window has zero authority to grant permission to enter the shop, yet its presence counts as sufficient reason to assume you've got permission to enter as long as nobody asks you to leave. Thw wifi protocol just does this in a more explicit manner.
yes, but DHCP must do that to work. I could DDOS your computer and not be breaking the law according to you. DDOS isn't even part of this discussion. Why bring unrelated crimes into it in order to discredit perfectly legitimate behaviour?
The fact is, if you find an open network you have no way of knowing whether or not the owner intended it to be open. It's best to just assume it's an accident and that you DON'T have permission. No. It's best to assume it's intended to be open, because it is, and there's no other way of figuring out if it's intentional or not. And often it really is intentional.
Meanwhile, while using someone else's network, no matter how explicit or implicit your permission was, don't mess with his stuff.
During business hours, you're a business invitee to the property. You have tacit permission to enter, but the owner can still ask you to leave. Exactly. And then you leave. But until that happens, you are allowed to enter, and don't have to assume that the business owner will object.
There is no such license to enter private property. If the owner hasn't expressly authorized your presence, you're trespassing. And how do you tell the difference between a business and a residence? One has an open door with an "open" sign on it, and the other doesn't. If someone disguises his house as an open shop, you can't be blamed for accidentally trespassing (but you should still leave when requested).
The only way these are similar is that if you use an unsecured wifi network, you must take responsibility for the fact that you may be trespassing. Or you may not be.
Locked or unlocked, it's still their network. Which may be intentionally open for you to use.
If you want to be certain you're not doing anything improper, seek permission and don't use unsecured networks unless you know you've been authorized. Fortunately the protocol has foreseen in requests for permission and authorisation.
did you call up Google or Yahoo or your ISP or whoever provides it and ask them if you had permission to connect to their server? Did you call the person hosting TFA before clicking on the link asking if you had permission to access their server?
Obviously not, any more than I asked permission to enter a store. A web server is a lot different than a WAP in function and in intent. An unlocked door at a business and an unlocked door at a residence are similar. With a wifi connection, you can't tell if it's business or residence just by looking at it. The only way you can tell if it's open or not, is if it advertises itself as such. It's the only thing you can rely on, so it's what you have to rely on.
If someone buys a shop and uses it as a residence, but leaves the door open and the "open" sign on the door, can you really blame passersby for walking in, thinking it's a shop?
An unsecure wireless network is NOT an invitation, and negotiating a network connection does not equate implied permission to use the network. Yes it is. Yes it does.
Woosh! That's the sound of the joke going straight over your head. If you see a reply to your post modded Funny and you think it's serious, it's time to hang it up because no one is listening, Madonna. No. A lousy joke should never be a barrier to meaningful contributions. The GP has a very good point. Don't be an ass by insisting crappy jokes are more important.
Not exactly. Your neighbor may be transmitting a signal into your house, but it's most likely not for you to use.
Then he should keep his signal out of my house!
Besides, you transmit a signal into his house when you use his network. If that's not "breaking in" in this weird network-is-my-house analogy, I don't know what is.
It's just as much "breaking in" as his transmitting a signal into your house.
All this discussion about where the signal goes is meaningless. What matters is that there's an established protocol for requesting and receiving access. Stick to that protocol, and you should be fine. If he doesn't want his network to handle my requests and my traffic, then it's perfectly possible for him to set his router to refuse my traffic. And he neglects to do that, he still doesn't lose anything meaningful.
While I agree that audiophile equipment is usually ridiculous, vacuum tubes do make a difference. They distort the signal in very agreeable ways.
In fact, this same effect is used by every famous overdriven guitar tone you've ever heard. Tubes are the element that give quality guitar amps their warmth and clarity. Every famous guitarist uses them for that reason. Alright, if you want distortion, I'm willing to accept vacuum tubes do it better. But what if I don't want distortion? For example when I'm shopping for my stero system instead of my guitar?
It's called proportional representation. You might want to add a sufficiently high threshold for entry into the parliaments (5% if you really like smallish parties, 10-15% if you want to keep the nutcases out for sure) A 5% threshold is quite high. I think that's about what Germany has (which has only a handful of parties). Netherland has a threshold of 0.67%, which makes it much easier for new parties to get into parliament.
One simple example of why this is good: the fastest growing party of the last 15 years is the Socialist Party. They started with only 2 seats, did good stuff, got noticed, got 5 seats the next election, 10 seats the one after that, and now, in some polls, they sometimes overtake one of the three big parties.
If they hadn't been allowed to start with 2 or 5 seats, they'd never have had the chance to grow this big. Ofcourse the downside is that sometimes a few nutcases manage to get a few seats, but they get voted out against in the next election. Besides, it's not like anyone will notice a few more nutcases in parliament.
Unfortunately, this would force the two big parties to form coalitions and compromises with the smaller parties if they want to run the countries. You assume there will always be two big parties. Netherland has three big parties, each of which wins or loses dozens of seats every election. They usually compromise with one of the other two big parties (which had kept the Christian Democrats in power for longer than the communist party in Russia until finally the labour party and the conservative liberals formed their first coalition in the '90s). Sometimes one of the largest of the smaller parties also joins in the coalition. Usually the moderately progressive liberals, but currently we've got for the first time a small conservative christian party in government, which results in hilarious situations on medical-ethical issues.
This is something neither of the big parties likes. The big parties run the country right now. This means that the chances of any change happening are zero. In the US, where two big parties have divided up the country, both would lose by changing the system, and they're the only ones who can change the system. It's unlikely anything will ever change, but that doesn't mean change is bad. It means the two parties are bad. Vote for others!
As long as we stick to the antiquated "one man, one vote" system we will only every have a two party system. If you'd read that link, it's not the "one man, one vote" that condemns the US to a two-party system, but the "winner takes all" district system. In proportional representation systems, you also have "one man, one vote", but there every vote gets represented in the parliament, and not just the majority votes in each district.
However, that's only relevant for seats in congress. For presidential elections, approval voting would probably be the most fair way to do it without marginalising third-party candidates.
The new definition of "planet" was quite good. Clear, straight to the point, and easy to apply to any object. Now, they add a new category that applies only to our solar system? We have lots of categories that apply only to our solar system. Near earth asteroids, for example.
Pluto's status as a planet was only an issue because "planet" happens to be the most prestigious category an object can be in. All other categories just need to be meaningful and useful to the people who need it. Apparently the IAU thinks plutoid is a meaningful category.
Raise the VAT Tax? The Value Added Tax Tax? So THAT'S why we're getting ripped off so much, we're actually getting taxed twice as much! Having run out of other things to tax, they're now taxing taxes.
Intresting, I'd have to look into it more. I guess the countrys name are the netherlands? Here in Sweden everyone say Holland and I just thought the Netherlands was the english name for it or something. We call our country "Nederland".
"Koninkrijk der Nederlanden" or even "Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden" (United Kingdom of the Netherlands), is only for when you want to get extremely formal and official (although the "United" might have been abolished when Belgium seceded, I'm not sure about that).
Holland was the most powerful province of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the province that did most of our trading and colonisation in the 16th and 17th century. So most Dutchmen that foreigners would meet, tended to be from Holland. In the 19th century, Holland was split into two provinces, so it would stop overshadowing the other provinces so much.
And then there's the word "Dutch". No idea why English speakers use it, but I suspect it comes from the very archaeic "Diets", which I think simply means "people", and is related to "Deutsch" (or "Duits" in Dutch), which refers to Germany. And "German" comes from "Germaan/Germaans" which refers to Germanic peoples, including the Angles, Jutes and Saxons that colonised England in the very early middle ages.
Personally I'd prefer if you called us Netherlanders and Netherlandic.
I don't remember the guys name but I think it was in Kongo (?) where he played around during late 189x and if I remember correctly until 190x before someone but it to halt.
I don't know much about the area but I was surprised it existed so close to "now", I thought things like that happened during 17xx or something. You might be talking about Tippu Tip, one of the last big slave traders from Zanzibar, who operated in Congo around the time Henry Morton Stanley claimed it for the Belgian king Leopold II, or more likely, you're talking about Congo Free State (Leopold II's ownership of Congo) and the attrocities committed there. According to some estimates, while Leopold II owned the Congo, the population dropped from 30 million to about 8 million.
Considering that history, it's not surprising that country is still a mess.
People get really stupid. Several times there were obnoxious assholes who suddenly hollered at me as they flew 6in by me. If I was startled in the wrong way that could've led to an accident.
Once, a guy in a jeep decided to play chicken with me. I wasn't aware till the last minute. I generally assume most motorists are insane and incompetent (though not quite out to kill me), and make sure I'm always able to ensure my own safety when riding my bicycle, and honking and hollering is usually easy to ignore if you're paying attention (which you always should be doing in traffic, no matter what your vehicle is).
This works quite well for me, but it may not protect you against real psychopaths who are out to kill you. Then again, not much will.
Fuck, I have the multi ton vehicle asshole. The only laws on the road are physics, and you fucking have no say on a bike. That's rather an anti-social attitude to have on the road.
Yes, but,... In an environment of unlimited tolerance of piracy why buy? Why become a "customer" when being a pirate offers 100% (or sometimes 110%) of the benefits? Piracy only offers more benefits when a legitimate copy uses invasive copy protection. The GP's point is exactly that of Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, publisher of Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, both of which were released with hardly any copy protection at all, for exactly this reason.
The benefit for legitimate buyers is easier access to patches; if you register your game with a legitimate key (which you can do on as many machines as you like), you can use a simple tool to automatically download the latest patch and lots of new features. With a pirated version you need to get each patch by hand. It's not much, but it does give the legitimate customer more value than the pirate.
Ofcourse it's also important to continue supporting your game. As soon as you stop releasing patches, new features and new content, the pirates catch up and the automatic update becomes useless.
If SCO wants to use a particular GNU kernel OS, but the developers won't sell SCO a lawfully made copy of the OS at any price, what should SCO do? Download it, or buy it from someone other than the developers who is willing to sell it to them.
There's no problem whatsoever with SCO using any kind of GNU code. There's only a problem if they want to redistribute it under a different license, or in some other way that violates the GPL.
The problem with many of these DRM/licensing schemes is that the user isn't even allowed to use the program. Or if he is technically allowed to use it, he may still be practicallly unablle to use it, because the publisher has intentionally crippled the software.
So you have problems with any copy protection, as long as it exclusively relies on "trust". Because of course copy-protection must raise hassels. There is some method of verifying you can run the software, and such methods can never be 100% accurate (there are lemons/shorts/ruination/reformats/internet outages/etc).
And the end result is this makes a legal copy of the game less reliable than a pirated version of the game. It undermines the value of the game.
It's not even about trust, it's about simple value for money. Publishers push potential customers towards piracy with increasingly invasive forms of DRM, harming their own market.
The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work, but it would work well enough to eliminate any other inconviences.
You mean like consoles? Sure, locked down game consoles are an option, but there will always be a market for games on open platforms. If existing publishers leave that market, new ones will move in.
According to the fueleconomy.gov site, the Tahoe will cost $3475/year @ 15k miles per year. The Accord will be $2464/year. So it will take roughly TWELVE YEARS or 180,000 miles to overcome the negative equity alone. Heaven forbid we include sales tax and depreciation on the new vehicle into the equation.
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: keep the gas guzzler. Only if that's the car you really want. Because if you keep the gas guzzler, you also still have to pay for it. The fact that you haven't paid much for it so far, doesn't automatically mean it's cheaper to keep it. It still costs money, and it costs a lot. The faster depreciation isn't going away by keeping it, and if you can't afford the fuel, switching to a cheaper and more economical car may still save you a lot of money, even if the sale of the SUV doesn't pay off the entire debt.
Similarly, making a 20% downpayment in advance doesn't make it any more attractive to sell the car than taking the same kind of money at a loss. In the end, money is money, no matter how you pay it. And a loss is a loss, whether you pay for it in terms or all at once. The loss may be hidden in terms and depreciation, but it's still there. The only good reason to keep the SUV is if you think gas prices will drop and the price of second hand SUVs will rise in the future. Then keeping your SUV may turn out to be a good investment.
Moral of the story: you've already lost the money. How much more money do you plan on losing in the future?
Re:Toyota knew the high price of oil was coming...
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The SUV Is Dethroned
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Really? Is that why they redesigned the Tundra (SOP was Jan '07) and Sequoia (SOP was Nov '07) to be even bigger and less fuel efficient?
Yeah, they've got quite the crystal ball those Toyota guys... I'm not familiar with their Tundra and Sequioa, but I'm pretty sure that their LandCruiser has to be the single most practical off-road car in the world. On holiday in Mali, when we left Timbucktoo (in a LandCruiser), the line of cars in front of the ferry was all LandCruisers, except for one Toyota Hilux. On the trail out (there's no road out there), we encountered lots of other LandCruisers, and only a single non-Toyota car: a Mitsubishi, and it had broken down.
I was told that if your LandCruiser breaks down in the middle of the desert, you can buy spare parts from camel-riding nomads (new models use the same parts as older models). You can't do that with any other car.
This, combined with the success of the Prius, gives me the impression that the people of Toyota have vision, and know how to corner a market.
It's technically illegal in Omaha, but no sane person rides in the street, as people will aim for you. Will aim for you? Am I misinterpreting this or are you saying Omaha motorists have murderous tendencies?
Unfortunately it's not the first time I've heard stories like this (riding a bicycle in Spain is rumoured to be suicidal, and your family will get sued for scratching the car or something), but for me, living in a country with more bicycles than people, this sounds very odd.
Over here, every city street has an official or virtual bicycle lane on the right side of the street. Unless there's a dedicated bicycle path.
Hell, the cops will tell you to get on the sidewalk. The bicycle cops? Ride on the sidewalk. Over here you risk a fine (or at least a stiff warning) if a cop spots you riding a bicycle in a pedestrian area. Bikes and pedestrians don't mix, unless the bike rides very slowly. And most bicyclists have somewhere to go, so they don't want to go that slowly.
I've actually never seen nor heard of a bicycle/ped crash. I've crashed or nearly crashed into a couple of pedestrians (usually tourists), but always because they crossed the street/bicycle path without watching where they're going, and then acting extremely erratic (jumping all over the place) once they realise what they're doing. This makes it nearly impossible to avoid them.
I've learned to brake hard when I spot a nutcase near a bicycle path.
I thought the nationalists were the communists... No. Taiwan is nationalist, mainland China is communist. I think (but could be wrong) that the nationalist were the first to revolt against Imperial China, and later the communists revolted against them and drove them out of everything except Taiwan (which was hardly considered part of China until then).
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Meanwhile, while using someone else's network, no matter how explicit or implicit your permission was, don't mess with his stuff.
Obviously not, any more than I asked permission to enter a store. A web server is a lot different than a WAP in function and in intent. An unlocked door at a business and an unlocked door at a residence are similar. With a wifi connection, you can't tell if it's business or residence just by looking at it. The only way you can tell if it's open or not, is if it advertises itself as such. It's the only thing you can rely on, so it's what you have to rely on.
If someone buys a shop and uses it as a residence, but leaves the door open and the "open" sign on the door, can you really blame passersby for walking in, thinking it's a shop?
Not exactly. Your neighbor may be transmitting a signal into your house, but it's most likely not for you to use.
Then he should keep his signal out of my house!Besides, you transmit a signal into his house when you use his network. If that's not "breaking in" in this weird network-is-my-house analogy, I don't know what is.
It's just as much "breaking in" as his transmitting a signal into your house.All this discussion about where the signal goes is meaningless. What matters is that there's an established protocol for requesting and receiving access. Stick to that protocol, and you should be fine. If he doesn't want his network to handle my requests and my traffic, then it's perfectly possible for him to set his router to refuse my traffic. And he neglects to do that, he still doesn't lose anything meaningful.
These planets are in no way Earth-like, the 'super Earth' designation is just one of planet size.
Which means they are in one way Earth-like: they're (presumably) rocky, instead of gas giants.In fact, this same effect is used by every famous overdriven guitar tone you've ever heard. Tubes are the element that give quality guitar amps their warmth and clarity. Every famous guitarist uses them for that reason. Alright, if you want distortion, I'm willing to accept vacuum tubes do it better. But what if I don't want distortion? For example when I'm shopping for my stero system instead of my guitar?
One simple example of why this is good: the fastest growing party of the last 15 years is the Socialist Party. They started with only 2 seats, did good stuff, got noticed, got 5 seats the next election, 10 seats the one after that, and now, in some polls, they sometimes overtake one of the three big parties.
If they hadn't been allowed to start with 2 or 5 seats, they'd never have had the chance to grow this big. Ofcourse the downside is that sometimes a few nutcases manage to get a few seats, but they get voted out against in the next election. Besides, it's not like anyone will notice a few more nutcases in parliament. Unfortunately, this would force the two big parties to form coalitions and compromises with the smaller parties if they want to run the countries. You assume there will always be two big parties. Netherland has three big parties, each of which wins or loses dozens of seats every election. They usually compromise with one of the other two big parties (which had kept the Christian Democrats in power for longer than the communist party in Russia until finally the labour party and the conservative liberals formed their first coalition in the '90s). Sometimes one of the largest of the smaller parties also joins in the coalition. Usually the moderately progressive liberals, but currently we've got for the first time a small conservative christian party in government, which results in hilarious situations on medical-ethical issues. This is something neither of the big parties likes. The big parties run the country right now. This means that the chances of any change happening are zero. In the US, where two big parties have divided up the country, both would lose by changing the system, and they're the only ones who can change the system. It's unlikely anything will ever change, but that doesn't mean change is bad. It means the two parties are bad. Vote for others!
However, that's only relevant for seats in congress. For presidential elections, approval voting would probably be the most fair way to do it without marginalising third-party candidates.
Pluto's status as a planet was only an issue because "planet" happens to be the most prestigious category an object can be in. All other categories just need to be meaningful and useful to the people who need it. Apparently the IAU thinks plutoid is a meaningful category.
So THAT'S why we're getting ripped off so much, we're actually getting taxed twice as much! Having run out of other things to tax, they're now taxing taxes.
"Koninkrijk der Nederlanden" or even "Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden" (United Kingdom of the Netherlands), is only for when you want to get extremely formal and official (although the "United" might have been abolished when Belgium seceded, I'm not sure about that).
Holland was the most powerful province of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the province that did most of our trading and colonisation in the 16th and 17th century. So most Dutchmen that foreigners would meet, tended to be from Holland. In the 19th century, Holland was split into two provinces, so it would stop overshadowing the other provinces so much.
And then there's the word "Dutch". No idea why English speakers use it, but I suspect it comes from the very archaeic "Diets", which I think simply means "people", and is related to "Deutsch" (or "Duits" in Dutch), which refers to Germany. And "German" comes from "Germaan/Germaans" which refers to Germanic peoples, including the Angles, Jutes and Saxons that colonised England in the very early middle ages.
Personally I'd prefer if you called us Netherlanders and Netherlandic.
I don't know much about the area but I was surprised it existed so close to "now", I thought things like that happened during 17xx or something. You might be talking about Tippu Tip, one of the last big slave traders from Zanzibar, who operated in Congo around the time Henry Morton Stanley claimed it for the Belgian king Leopold II, or more likely, you're talking about Congo Free State (Leopold II's ownership of Congo) and the attrocities committed there. According to some estimates, while Leopold II owned the Congo, the population dropped from 30 million to about 8 million.
Considering that history, it's not surprising that country is still a mess.
Once, a guy in a jeep decided to play chicken with me. I wasn't aware till the last minute. I generally assume most motorists are insane and incompetent (though not quite out to kill me), and make sure I'm always able to ensure my own safety when riding my bicycle, and honking and hollering is usually easy to ignore if you're paying attention (which you always should be doing in traffic, no matter what your vehicle is).
This works quite well for me, but it may not protect you against real psychopaths who are out to kill you. Then again, not much will.
The benefit for legitimate buyers is easier access to patches; if you register your game with a legitimate key (which you can do on as many machines as you like), you can use a simple tool to automatically download the latest patch and lots of new features. With a pirated version you need to get each patch by hand. It's not much, but it does give the legitimate customer more value than the pirate.
Ofcourse it's also important to continue supporting your game. As soon as you stop releasing patches, new features and new content, the pirates catch up and the automatic update becomes useless.
There's no problem whatsoever with SCO using any kind of GNU code. There's only a problem if they want to redistribute it under a different license, or in some other way that violates the GPL.
The problem with many of these DRM/licensing schemes is that the user isn't even allowed to use the program. Or if he is technically allowed to use it, he may still be practicallly unablle to use it, because the publisher has intentionally crippled the software.
So you have problems with any copy protection, as long as it exclusively relies on "trust". Because of course copy-protection must raise hassels. There is some method of verifying you can run the software, and such methods can never be 100% accurate (there are lemons/shorts/ruination/reformats/internet outages/etc).
And the end result is this makes a legal copy of the game less reliable than a pirated version of the game. It undermines the value of the game.It's not even about trust, it's about simple value for money. Publishers push potential customers towards piracy with increasingly invasive forms of DRM, harming their own market.
The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work, but it would work well enough to eliminate any other inconviences.
You mean like consoles? Sure, locked down game consoles are an option, but there will always be a market for games on open platforms. If existing publishers leave that market, new ones will move in.Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: keep the gas guzzler. Only if that's the car you really want. Because if you keep the gas guzzler, you also still have to pay for it. The fact that you haven't paid much for it so far, doesn't automatically mean it's cheaper to keep it. It still costs money, and it costs a lot. The faster depreciation isn't going away by keeping it, and if you can't afford the fuel, switching to a cheaper and more economical car may still save you a lot of money, even if the sale of the SUV doesn't pay off the entire debt.
Similarly, making a 20% downpayment in advance doesn't make it any more attractive to sell the car than taking the same kind of money at a loss. In the end, money is money, no matter how you pay it. And a loss is a loss, whether you pay for it in terms or all at once. The loss may be hidden in terms and depreciation, but it's still there. The only good reason to keep the SUV is if you think gas prices will drop and the price of second hand SUVs will rise in the future. Then keeping your SUV may turn out to be a good investment.
Moral of the story: you've already lost the money. How much more money do you plan on losing in the future?
Yeah, they've got quite the crystal ball those Toyota guys... I'm not familiar with their Tundra and Sequioa, but I'm pretty sure that their LandCruiser has to be the single most practical off-road car in the world. On holiday in Mali, when we left Timbucktoo (in a LandCruiser), the line of cars in front of the ferry was all LandCruisers, except for one Toyota Hilux. On the trail out (there's no road out there), we encountered lots of other LandCruisers, and only a single non-Toyota car: a Mitsubishi, and it had broken down.
I was told that if your LandCruiser breaks down in the middle of the desert, you can buy spare parts from camel-riding nomads (new models use the same parts as older models). You can't do that with any other car.
This, combined with the success of the Prius, gives me the impression that the people of Toyota have vision, and know how to corner a market.
Unfortunately it's not the first time I've heard stories like this (riding a bicycle in Spain is rumoured to be suicidal, and your family will get sued for scratching the car or something), but for me, living in a country with more bicycles than people, this sounds very odd.
Over here, every city street has an official or virtual bicycle lane on the right side of the street. Unless there's a dedicated bicycle path. Hell, the cops will tell you to get on the sidewalk. The bicycle cops? Ride on the sidewalk. Over here you risk a fine (or at least a stiff warning) if a cop spots you riding a bicycle in a pedestrian area. Bikes and pedestrians don't mix, unless the bike rides very slowly. And most bicyclists have somewhere to go, so they don't want to go that slowly. I've actually never seen nor heard of a bicycle/ped crash. I've crashed or nearly crashed into a couple of pedestrians (usually tourists), but always because they crossed the street/bicycle path without watching where they're going, and then acting extremely erratic (jumping all over the place) once they realise what they're doing. This makes it nearly impossible to avoid them.
I've learned to brake hard when I spot a nutcase near a bicycle path.