I think the idea of cars that go >200mph that barely make a sound is pretty badass...
in other areas of "badass stuff" like planes, the stealth is unquestionably considered "badass"
there's no reason that "badassness" can't carry over from planes to cars
At 320 KPH you're tyre's alone are going to be pretty loud.
If you put performance run-flats on a Prius it will be loud at 80 KPH. The only reason electric cars are so quiet is the fact they have tyres designed for low road noise. Put some normal tyres on and that goes out the window (just swap the tyres from a GT86, they've got the same wheels as the Prius).
It's not the app. Yes, you can drive people around the city in your car, but once you start charging them to take them somewhere, you are operating a taxi service.
Either we overregulate these services and all taxi companies should be able to operate in an unregulated manner, or we have sufficient regulation and therefore Uber must play by the rules. But the status quo is certainly neither fair nor sustainable.
The problem services like Uber have is that if they had to play by the rules they wont be any cheaper than taxi services.
Uber just started operating in Perth, Western Australia and it's more expensive than taking a properly insured taxi with a licensed driver. Uber X is marginally cheaper if there is little to no traffic but Uber X dont operate here.
I have no problem with new taxi services, but I expect them to play by the rules. What happens if an Uber driver crashes and breaks the priceless Ming vase I happened to be transporting. In a regular taxi it would be covered by their liability insurance, with Uber, the driver has no such insurance and Uber will no doubt do everything they can to avoid paying and try to blame it on me. It would be up to me to take Uber to court for the money. If a taxi driver causes a serious accident due to dangerous, negligent or careless driving, they are stripped of their taxi drivers license... in fact the people who can no longer hold a taxi drivers license are probably driving for Uber right now.
Uber is not trying to change the system or even fight the system, it's trying ignore the system and this will never work because the system wont ignore Uber.
Why not just go to Chip and PIN...I dont seem to hear these stories in Canada or other places that use it, but I could be missing them...
I doubt Chip and Pin will close the security hole they have here. It's insecure POS's rather than insecure cards. Europe and Canada (and Australia) still have breaches but not as big as this for two reasons.
1). You're not allowed to pass the card details onto the POS. The POS passes the sale info to the processor and the processor passes back a PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard censored card number (the last four digits).
2). You're not permitted to store any payment details on the POS.
Breaches happen in Oz usually because someone isn't following the rules. Magstripe cards are a still accepted almost everywhere here.
However here most people have their card details stolen because their careless and/or stupid. NFC is going to change that though now that cards give the name, number and expiry date (everything on the front face of the card) to anything that asks for it wirelessly.
I'm sorry but when are password managers ever a good idea? Having 1 place with ALL your passwords ready to be stolen.
And yet, in reality, regardless of your personal security measures, you already have this today
It's called that one email address you have ALL of your accounts configured to send a password reset to when you forget it.
All you really need is access to your email and All Your Passwords are Belong to Us, so let's just stop bullshitting each other and bashing password managers. The overall security model sucks ass anyway.
I certainly dont have this today.
I've got 3 different email addresses and 1 phone number, this isn't including my work email and all ordered by security level. The password reset for slashdot doesn't go to the same email my address domain registrar or accountant. Below this I have another email address I use for signing onto services that I know are going to spam me. The low security accounts are not linked in any way to the high security accounts and my high security account is only accessed from devices I know are safe.
When throwaway email addresses are easy to get, I dont understand why anyone would have a single email address.
NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.
You know nothing about bank security.
First off, the NFC cards are not cryptographically secure in the slightest. In fact they give out your card number, name and expiry date to anything that asks for it and once a crim has your CC number they can do all manner of things with it from online transactions to cloning the card itself. This app for any NFC enabled android phone can read your card, last I checked the source code is available for the uncensored version. This is not top secret info, it was based on the specifications publicly available on Visas website.
Secondly, there's no requirement for EMV on any Australian terminal. We're closer to the US than Europe in that regard. Magstripe transactions are not controlled in any way, shape or form. I've got a Citibank Plus card that's a few years old and it hasn't got a chip. 100% magstripe and it's never been rejected anywhere (in fact it's been rejected less than NFC in my Mastercard and I use the Citibank card at least 10 times as often).
A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.
Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime.
If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.
It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.
This is why a phone is better than the NFC cards most people have in their wallet right now.
With a phone at least you can control who gets that information, a simple popup message saying "x terminal wants your details" with confirm or deny buttons (and an automatic deny in 15 seconds). Above this, you can actually implement some kind of cryptographically secure encryption like a PRNG or at the very least a 2nd factor of authentication.
But it's going to take a government like the EU to force banks to do this. Right now it's easier for them to swallow the cost of fraud (which gets passed on to you anyway). Banks simply dont care about security because it costs money (capex, fraud is opex).
Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.
So what you're saying is that Apple is going to get nowhere.
Apple doesn't follow standards.
Google chose NFC for the Android phones because NFC was a standard, it was well defined, mature and compatible. I can read NFC enabled cards from my phone (all you need is the software to interpret the output). Its only a matter of time before I can make payments via NFC on my Android phone.
I am in Australia and have Visa PayWave attached to my card yet I never use it (using EFTPOS instead) because there are fees attached to PayWave but not EFTPOS (with my bank at least) and because EFTPOS transactions show up faster and better on my online banking.
Australian here, I'll explain this one.
In Australia you have three options when you pay by card, Savings, Cheque and Credit. These define what network the transaction goes through and that determines what fees and charges are applied to the transaction.
Savings and Cheque are part of the EFTPOS network and have a small per transaction fee (usually in the vicinity of A$0.20) that the merchant absorbs. This network is Aus/NZ specific and is not related to similarly named networks overseas. Credit routes the transaction though the Visa/Mastercard network. This has a per transaction fee plus a percentage of the transaction taken as a merchant service fee (anywhere between 0.5-4%, some high end cards like Amex have a 6% feee). It is entirely legal for a merchant to pass on this fee in Australia (and the Visa/Mastercard terms of service dont override Australian law). Now even if the merchant absorbs this fee, you end up paying in the form of higher prices (that are already too damn high in Oz)
Paypass/paywave automatically routes through credit, so you automatically get the higher fee.
If its anything like a real highway the slow lane will be the fast lane because all the idiots immedately go to the overtaking lane clogging it up. So people with half a brain use the slow lane to undertake everyone else.
If it's anything like a real highway, the slow lane will actually be the fast lane as everyone immediately goes to the passing lane and clogs it up, meaning people with half a brain end up undertaking everyone else using the slow lane.
I remain conflicted; as a moderately competent STEM educated person, I am aware of any number of ways of reducing Western cities to chaos without a lot of effort and no risk. Yet our jihadi brethren never succeed in pulling it off. 7/7 in London and the Boston bombing seem to have been independent efforts, not carried out by people in the jihadi chain of command. Which leads me to suspect a lot of the hype is FUD by our government, or at least its security agencies, to milk the situation for as much as possible. OTOH it is totally clear that IS and HAMAS are committed to doing very nasty things to anyone who gets in their way. Something weird is going on; I look forward to discovering the truth, but I have nasty suspicion we won't.
This.
Our governments are gunning for war and this seems like a very convenient intelligence coup. Besides, it's not like they weren't wrong about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, right, guys, right?
I can't imagine USA engineers designing and creating weapons of mass destruction. How could these bastards! I mean, education is always for good things, right? right?
Yep, the US would have to hire some Germans to do the job for them.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
I'm equally sure that there will be exponentially more situations where standard automation will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than average (or even well above-average) human drivers.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car". It's not wrong, but it is foolish, and it's a poor decision.
You could have just said "I dont actually understand the issue or how your statement relates to it", it would have been faster.
An AI at the moment is nowhere near as good as a terrible driver because the AI cannot deal with situations that have not already been programmed into is where as the worst of our drivers can. Sure it can handle common issues better, ones that have been predicted but it's the scenarios that haven't been programmed into it that it will fail horribly at. Sure you can set a default of "stop" if it doesn't know what to do but that is as dangerous as "set throttle to 100%". The thing is, uncommon situations on the road are not that uncommon.
What is worse, if you take 100 bad meat-based drivers they will all fail in different ways, if you take 100 autonomous cars, they will all fail in the same way.
Finally, and this was the GP's point, even a terribad driver will learn on their own. Google's car is not capable of this yet (and probably wont be for some time), for a problem with the autonomous cars AI to be corrected, the data will need to be taken back to Google and an update issued (I suppose it makes the term "crash dump" a little more literal). For this reason alone, 100% autonomous cars are a long, long way off.
In any case, most cyclists have cars too, so are paying the "road tax" anyway. Having said that, I would be quite happy to pay road tax on my bike - it might shut up people like you.
Having a large "highlight reel" of cyclists antics from my dash cam, I dont give a flying fuck if cyclists pay for roads (cycle paths also some from tax money, but again I'm not fazed) I simply want them to be licensed so that they know the rules regarding riding on the road and road going cycles to be registered so when they're caught doing the wrong thing they can have their road going privileges taken off them.
Basically, I want them held to the same minimum standards as other road users (read: car drivers and motorcyclists).
However cyclists absolutely hate this idea because it will shatter the frail illusion that cyclists are perfect and everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. The mere mention that cyclist need to follow the same road rules as other road users get the Lycra warriors up in arms. Simple things like keeping left, not trying to undertake parked vehicles, abiding by red lights (cyclists running reds in Australia is endemic... and the same people want to make it that any accident between a bike and a car is automatically the cars fault) and staying in the cycle lane (in Australia is is illegal for a cyclists to ride in any other lane if there is a cycle lane present).
I've got no issue with sharing the roads... I just wish cyclists would extend the same courtesy to other road users.
" google cars should never be allowed on the road."
Not: " until they can reliable detect bicycles, driver-less cars shouldn't be sold to the public.
OK, once they reliably detect bicylces, what can they do about them.
I propose Goolge invents a door actuator to knock them down once detected within 0.5 metres to demonstrate the error of their way. If Google does not rise to the challenge, we'll give it to the Top Gear team.
Since the games say what they run on when you buy them, I wouldn't give your blind ass a refund either.
The only reason Steam even shows you titles which won't run on your platform by default is to trick you into buying them. It's intentionally deceptive.
I've seen this before.
Mac User installs Steam on their home PC, then installs it on their work PC. Their home PC is a Mac and their work PC is Windows. They buy stuff on their work PC and wonder why it doesn't work at home.
I work at a university. Glad I dont work in support any more. Those who can reach me are smart enough not to out themselves as Mac Users.
Umm, no. I have clients in Australia. My shit breaks, it's their choice, not mine, to get a refund, repair, or replacement.
The only thing at my discretion is whether I replace it with the exact same item, or I give them an upgraded model in its stead.
Welcome to utter bullshit land.
You dont have clients in Australia, you have at best, people you've ripped off and ignored further contact with as an overseas agent... but in more likelihood you're making the whole thing up.
Yes, an Australian will pursue you for a refund or at the very least ensure that people know not to do business with you again if they cant pursue you through an Australian court.
Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.
We fought Hitler and now Germany is a free and prosperous country at peace with its neighbors. China — where we dithered — not so much. Nor is North Korea — in the 60 years since we decided to "give peace a chance" there and not use nukes against the invading Chinese "volunteers", generations of millions lived in dire poverty and suffering, that they deserved even less than the Chinese soldiers.
This is wrong in so many ways.
The US did fight the Viet Minh, then the Viet Cong and the NVA... it was called the "Vietnam war" for fucks sake and you lost it. In the 15+ years of war (first against the French, then against the US) all that it did was drive more and more people to the other side.
The US did fight the Maoists, you supported the Kuomintang and General Chang Kai-Shek and you still lost it. During WWII, the US only provided aid and materials to the Chinese nationalists (the Kuomintang) and after WWII they were still defeated by the Maoists despite having superior equipment.
Minh and Mao both won because the US didn't understand the conflict. The governments of South Vietnam and Nationalist China were corrupt and oppressive. Mao and Minh had the support of the people because they were less brutal, less oppressive and less corrupt than the other government. It's the same story in Iran.
People like you are the "charlatans" proposing that a magic war will fix everything when history shows that it doesn't. Even WWII had a huge downside. It turned Soviet Russia from a backwater tin pot dictatorship collapsing under its own weight into a world power and ironically, its was the Russians who stopped the Nazi's. You're like the WWI generals proposing that one more "big push" will break the enemies back then sending all your men running towards the enemies machine guns hoping some will get through.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, that's meant to be your (yes one day I will learn to proof read and no apostrophe in tyres either.
I think the idea of cars that go >200mph that barely make a sound is pretty badass...
in other areas of "badass stuff" like planes, the stealth is unquestionably considered "badass"
there's no reason that "badassness" can't carry over from planes to cars
At 320 KPH you're tyre's alone are going to be pretty loud.
If you put performance run-flats on a Prius it will be loud at 80 KPH. The only reason electric cars are so quiet is the fact they have tyres designed for low road noise. Put some normal tyres on and that goes out the window (just swap the tyres from a GT86, they've got the same wheels as the Prius).
The real kicker will be the 8 hour pit stops.
"suddenly there is unfair competition?"
It's not the app. Yes, you can drive people around the city in your car, but once you start charging them to take them somewhere, you are operating a taxi service.
Either we overregulate these services and all taxi companies should be able to operate in an unregulated manner, or we have sufficient regulation and therefore Uber must play by the rules. But the status quo is certainly neither fair nor sustainable.
The problem services like Uber have is that if they had to play by the rules they wont be any cheaper than taxi services.
Uber just started operating in Perth, Western Australia and it's more expensive than taking a properly insured taxi with a licensed driver. Uber X is marginally cheaper if there is little to no traffic but Uber X dont operate here.
I have no problem with new taxi services, but I expect them to play by the rules. What happens if an Uber driver crashes and breaks the priceless Ming vase I happened to be transporting. In a regular taxi it would be covered by their liability insurance, with Uber, the driver has no such insurance and Uber will no doubt do everything they can to avoid paying and try to blame it on me. It would be up to me to take Uber to court for the money. If a taxi driver causes a serious accident due to dangerous, negligent or careless driving, they are stripped of their taxi drivers license... in fact the people who can no longer hold a taxi drivers license are probably driving for Uber right now.
Uber is not trying to change the system or even fight the system, it's trying ignore the system and this will never work because the system wont ignore Uber.
Why not just go to Chip and PIN...I dont seem to hear these stories in Canada or other places that use it, but I could be missing them...
I doubt Chip and Pin will close the security hole they have here. It's insecure POS's rather than insecure cards. Europe and Canada (and Australia) still have breaches but not as big as this for two reasons.
1). You're not allowed to pass the card details onto the POS. The POS passes the sale info to the processor and the processor passes back a PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard censored card number (the last four digits).
2). You're not permitted to store any payment details on the POS.
Breaches happen in Oz usually because someone isn't following the rules. Magstripe cards are a still accepted almost everywhere here.
However here most people have their card details stolen because their careless and/or stupid. NFC is going to change that though now that cards give the name, number and expiry date (everything on the front face of the card) to anything that asks for it wirelessly.
I'm sorry but when are password managers ever a good idea? Having 1 place with ALL your passwords ready to be stolen.
And yet, in reality, regardless of your personal security measures, you already have this today
It's called that one email address you have ALL of your accounts configured to send a password reset to when you forget it.
All you really need is access to your email and All Your Passwords are Belong to Us, so let's just stop bullshitting each other and bashing password managers. The overall security model sucks ass anyway.
I certainly dont have this today.
I've got 3 different email addresses and 1 phone number, this isn't including my work email and all ordered by security level. The password reset for slashdot doesn't go to the same email my address domain registrar or accountant. Below this I have another email address I use for signing onto services that I know are going to spam me. The low security accounts are not linked in any way to the high security accounts and my high security account is only accessed from devices I know are safe.
When throwaway email addresses are easy to get, I dont understand why anyone would have a single email address.
1) germany apparently forbid anything above 700 bq/Kg , whereas otehr country do it at 3000 Bq/Kg.
2) Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
I wish the article could have told that.
The isotope is C137.
Welcome to Auckland!
Please, god... no.
it's like Perth... but worse.
NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.
You know nothing about bank security.
First off, the NFC cards are not cryptographically secure in the slightest. In fact they give out your card number, name and expiry date to anything that asks for it and once a crim has your CC number they can do all manner of things with it from online transactions to cloning the card itself. This app for any NFC enabled android phone can read your card, last I checked the source code is available for the uncensored version. This is not top secret info, it was based on the specifications publicly available on Visas website.
Secondly, there's no requirement for EMV on any Australian terminal. We're closer to the US than Europe in that regard. Magstripe transactions are not controlled in any way, shape or form. I've got a Citibank Plus card that's a few years old and it hasn't got a chip. 100% magstripe and it's never been rejected anywhere (in fact it's been rejected less than NFC in my Mastercard and I use the Citibank card at least 10 times as often).
A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.
Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime. If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.
It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.
This is why a phone is better than the NFC cards most people have in their wallet right now.
The Paywave/Paypass NFC cards will give the card details to anything that asks for them. All the malicious software has to do is follow the spec available to the general public on Visas and Mastercards websites. That's how this little app came about (actually this is the censored version, the source code is available on github). The card gives out the number, name and expiry date... basically everything written on the front of the card. So harvesting CC numbers has become a lot easier.
With a phone at least you can control who gets that information, a simple popup message saying "x terminal wants your details" with confirm or deny buttons (and an automatic deny in 15 seconds). Above this, you can actually implement some kind of cryptographically secure encryption like a PRNG or at the very least a 2nd factor of authentication.
But it's going to take a government like the EU to force banks to do this. Right now it's easier for them to swallow the cost of fraud (which gets passed on to you anyway). Banks simply dont care about security because it costs money (capex, fraud is opex).
Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.
So what you're saying is that Apple is going to get nowhere.
Apple doesn't follow standards.
Google chose NFC for the Android phones because NFC was a standard, it was well defined, mature and compatible. I can read NFC enabled cards from my phone (all you need is the software to interpret the output). Its only a matter of time before I can make payments via NFC on my Android phone.
I am in Australia and have Visa PayWave attached to my card yet I never use it (using EFTPOS instead) because there are fees attached to PayWave but not EFTPOS (with my bank at least) and because EFTPOS transactions show up faster and better on my online banking.
Australian here, I'll explain this one.
In Australia you have three options when you pay by card, Savings, Cheque and Credit. These define what network the transaction goes through and that determines what fees and charges are applied to the transaction.
Savings and Cheque are part of the EFTPOS network and have a small per transaction fee (usually in the vicinity of A$0.20) that the merchant absorbs. This network is Aus/NZ specific and is not related to similarly named networks overseas.
Credit routes the transaction though the Visa/Mastercard network. This has a per transaction fee plus a percentage of the transaction taken as a merchant service fee (anywhere between 0.5-4%, some high end cards like Amex have a 6% feee). It is entirely legal for a merchant to pass on this fee in Australia (and the Visa/Mastercard terms of service dont override Australian law). Now even if the merchant absorbs this fee, you end up paying in the form of higher prices (that are already too damn high in Oz)
Paypass/paywave automatically routes through credit, so you automatically get the higher fee.
If its anything like a real highway the slow lane will be the fast lane because all the idiots immedately go to the overtaking lane clogging it up. So people with half a brain use the slow lane to undertake everyone else.
If it's anything like a real highway, the slow lane will actually be the fast lane as everyone immediately goes to the passing lane and clogs it up, meaning people with half a brain end up undertaking everyone else using the slow lane.
So Comcast is just trying to protect our moral integrity?
I remain conflicted; as a moderately competent STEM educated person, I am aware of any number of ways of reducing Western cities to chaos without a lot of effort and no risk. Yet our jihadi brethren never succeed in pulling it off. 7/7 in London and the Boston bombing seem to have been independent efforts, not carried out by people in the jihadi chain of command. Which leads me to suspect a lot of the hype is FUD by our government, or at least its security agencies, to milk the situation for as much as possible. OTOH it is totally clear that IS and HAMAS are committed to doing very nasty things to anyone who gets in their way. Something weird is going on; I look forward to discovering the truth, but I have nasty suspicion we won't.
This.
Our governments are gunning for war and this seems like a very convenient intelligence coup. Besides, it's not like they weren't wrong about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, right, guys, right?
I can't imagine USA engineers designing and creating weapons of mass destruction. How could these bastards! I mean, education is always for good things, right? right?
Yep, the US would have to hire some Germans to do the job for them.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
I'm equally sure that there will be exponentially more situations where standard automation will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than average (or even well above-average) human drivers.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car". It's not wrong, but it is foolish, and it's a poor decision.
You could have just said "I dont actually understand the issue or how your statement relates to it", it would have been faster.
An AI at the moment is nowhere near as good as a terrible driver because the AI cannot deal with situations that have not already been programmed into is where as the worst of our drivers can. Sure it can handle common issues better, ones that have been predicted but it's the scenarios that haven't been programmed into it that it will fail horribly at. Sure you can set a default of "stop" if it doesn't know what to do but that is as dangerous as "set throttle to 100%". The thing is, uncommon situations on the road are not that uncommon.
What is worse, if you take 100 bad meat-based drivers they will all fail in different ways, if you take 100 autonomous cars, they will all fail in the same way.
Finally, and this was the GP's point, even a terribad driver will learn on their own. Google's car is not capable of this yet (and probably wont be for some time), for a problem with the autonomous cars AI to be corrected, the data will need to be taken back to Google and an update issued (I suppose it makes the term "crash dump" a little more literal). For this reason alone, 100% autonomous cars are a long, long way off.
In any case, most cyclists have cars too, so are paying the "road tax" anyway. Having said that, I would be quite happy to pay road tax on my bike - it might shut up people like you.
Having a large "highlight reel" of cyclists antics from my dash cam, I dont give a flying fuck if cyclists pay for roads (cycle paths also some from tax money, but again I'm not fazed) I simply want them to be licensed so that they know the rules regarding riding on the road and road going cycles to be registered so when they're caught doing the wrong thing they can have their road going privileges taken off them.
Basically, I want them held to the same minimum standards as other road users (read: car drivers and motorcyclists).
However cyclists absolutely hate this idea because it will shatter the frail illusion that cyclists are perfect and everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. The mere mention that cyclist need to follow the same road rules as other road users get the Lycra warriors up in arms. Simple things like keeping left, not trying to undertake parked vehicles, abiding by red lights (cyclists running reds in Australia is endemic... and the same people want to make it that any accident between a bike and a car is automatically the cars fault) and staying in the cycle lane (in Australia is is illegal for a cyclists to ride in any other lane if there is a cycle lane present).
I've got no issue with sharing the roads... I just wish cyclists would extend the same courtesy to other road users.
" google cars should never be allowed on the road."
Not: " until they can reliable detect bicycles, driver-less cars shouldn't be sold to the public.
OK, once they reliably detect bicylces, what can they do about them.
I propose Goolge invents a door actuator to knock them down once detected within 0.5 metres to demonstrate the error of their way. If Google does not rise to the challenge, we'll give it to the Top Gear team.
I think I'll just call a cab instead. Unless you're at the bar every single night getting sloshed (in which case you have other problems),
Damn straight I've got problems. Why does the bar keep closing at 2 AM.
And the second you restart steam to update or go online to download a game, your other game is gone.
That's how it went when I got a refund on STALKER.
If you know how steam's folders are organised, there's a very, very easy way to get around that... yep, gone from steam but not from your HDD.
Not that I would ever advocate that kind of activity mind you.
Since the games say what they run on when you buy them, I wouldn't give your blind ass a refund either.
The only reason Steam even shows you titles which won't run on your platform by default is to trick you into buying them. It's intentionally deceptive.
I've seen this before.
Mac User installs Steam on their home PC, then installs it on their work PC. Their home PC is a Mac and their work PC is Windows. They buy stuff on their work PC and wonder why it doesn't work at home.
I work at a university. Glad I dont work in support any more. Those who can reach me are smart enough not to out themselves as Mac Users.
Umm, no. I have clients in Australia. My shit breaks, it's their choice, not mine, to get a refund, repair, or replacement.
The only thing at my discretion is whether I replace it with the exact same item, or I give them an upgraded model in its stead.
Welcome to utter bullshit land.
You dont have clients in Australia, you have at best, people you've ripped off and ignored further contact with as an overseas agent... but in more likelihood you're making the whole thing up.
Yes, an Australian will pursue you for a refund or at the very least ensure that people know not to do business with you again if they cant pursue you through an Australian court.
I bought ya Bioshock Infinite game on sale last weekend.
It's shithouse, I want me 22 bucks back ya flamin mongrels.
Yours sincerely,
Alf Flamin Stuart.
We fought Hitler and now Germany is a free and prosperous country at peace with its neighbors. China — where we dithered — not so much. Nor is North Korea — in the 60 years since we decided to "give peace a chance" there and not use nukes against the invading Chinese "volunteers", generations of millions lived in dire poverty and suffering, that they deserved even less than the Chinese soldiers.
This is wrong in so many ways.
The US did fight the Viet Minh, then the Viet Cong and the NVA... it was called the "Vietnam war" for fucks sake and you lost it. In the 15+ years of war (first against the French, then against the US) all that it did was drive more and more people to the other side.
The US did fight the Maoists, you supported the Kuomintang and General Chang Kai-Shek and you still lost it. During WWII, the US only provided aid and materials to the Chinese nationalists (the Kuomintang) and after WWII they were still defeated by the Maoists despite having superior equipment.
Minh and Mao both won because the US didn't understand the conflict. The governments of South Vietnam and Nationalist China were corrupt and oppressive. Mao and Minh had the support of the people because they were less brutal, less oppressive and less corrupt than the other government. It's the same story in Iran.
People like you are the "charlatans" proposing that a magic war will fix everything when history shows that it doesn't. Even WWII had a huge downside. It turned Soviet Russia from a backwater tin pot dictatorship collapsing under its own weight into a world power and ironically, its was the Russians who stopped the Nazi's. You're like the WWI generals proposing that one more "big push" will break the enemies back then sending all your men running towards the enemies machine guns hoping some will get through.