Advanced driving courses teach vehicle dynamics, skid control, proper reactionary techniques to road hazards, proactive hazard evaluation, and so on; they cost $300 here, and you can go all the way to $1500 for driving/racing combined classes. Learner's permit should be 6-12 months with at least 5 hours per week of driving and 100 combined driving hours in a 6 month period or 200 combined driving hours in one year;
I agree that licensing and learning needs to be improved and more involved but I disagree with mandatory waits and hours. All that does is forces people to do pointless busywork or in most cases, fabricate evidence. In Australia we have a mandatory number of hours for learner drivers (differs between states) and this is self recorded in a log book... or as they're better known, lie books.
Some (very few) people do learn to drive in 10 hours, others cant do it in 110 but most are in between. Mandatory waits just force people to sit on their hands. In my state (western Australia) there is a six month wait AFTER you pass your driving test before you're allowed to drive on your own, this means most learners sit around not driving and forgetting what they learned leading to worse novice drivers.
The best thing we can do isn't to make tests harder, rather require students to undergo a number of hours of training from a professional instructor. Teaching defensive driving from the word go will result in better drivers.
If you are going to mandate hours, mandate them after you pass a driving test (sans the mandatory wait). The test proves you know how to handle a car, but not how to handle real life driving situations. The test is useful but cant impart a lot of important skills. By having a student do additional practice after the test an instructor can focus on teaching important parts of roadcraft like courtesy, advanced parking manoeuvres, lane selection and discipline, speed discipline and handling traffic that you just cant test for in an hour or two. Also, but mandating the hours after the test is passed, the learner has more confidence and will stop second guessing themselves as much.
Remember when we used to have Hydrostatic licenses because you didn't pass your driver's test on a manual transmission?
Fortunately we still have this in Western Australia. A C class license is for an ordinary car (less than 8 seats, under 4.5 GVT), if you pass your test in a manual you get a C printed on your license, if you pass it in an Automatic you get CA and it's illegal for you to drive a manual (I've heard of dealers turning people with CA's away from sequential auto's, despite the state considering these being Automatics).
I dropped from 70mph to 20mph in one second today (good tires) because of other idiots on the road.
Are you counting reaction time or just stopping time?
The Project Mu brake pads on my old Honda could stop in that distance easily, but I'd still have to contend with my own reaction time... Which remands me why I need to get some Project Mu's on my Nissan (sadly, my budget does not stretch to Brembo callipers).
The test is simple: Turn the car on. Activate the right turn signal,
Whoa, whoa, whoa,
This test sounds really advanced. I drove in the US for a few weeks last year and the only time I saw an indicator used was on a car with Canadian plates.
Its better that you just give licenses to anyone who shows up or even better, just put them on the back of weeties boxes.
What they *should* do is just get it over with already.
Either ban them completely or stop restricting them at all.
Because prohibition doesn't work.
The US has bans of marijuana, has that disappeared? the little experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 30? Banning a substance means you lose all control over it. You end up with backyard smokes cut with woodshavings to make it cheaper (even more unhealthy than straight tobacco).
OTOH The problem with unrestricted smoking is that a lot of people who dont smoke will be affected by it. This is what Libertarians always ignore, almost everything you do has an effect on someone else.
Ultimately the people who dont smoke will outnumber those who do and smokers are so extremely unreasonable. Here's what happened in Australia. Non-smokers: Would you mind not smoking in the office please. Smoker: ITS MY RIGHT. I CAN DO WHATEVER I LIKE AN THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT (followed by stamping their feet)
So smoking was banned indoors.
Non-smokers: Would you mind not smoking near the entrance? Smoker: ITS MY RIGHT. I CAN DO WHATEVER I LIKE AN THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT (followed by stamping their feet)
So smokers must now smoke 5 metres away from building entrances.
Ultimately, smoking restrictions came about due to the extreme discourtesy of smokers.
The ban on large soft drinks did not come about because we dont have the same problem. If someone is drinking a large coke near you, you're not going to have to smell it on your clothes for the next 4 hours, if you're working in a place where people drink soft drinks, you're not forced to breathe it in. This is the bit Libertarians always ignore, then again reality and Libertarians were always at odds.
Maybe if the ban had been in place and functional for a few years before such a ruling, people would have gotten used to smaller sized non-diet soda drinks anyway, and food service businesses would come up with a way to accommodate the new rules.
In the US, doesn't everyone offer a free refill on soft drinks (I believe you call it Soda)?
we don't have socialized healthcare in the USA, so piss off
and before Obama, I didn't have to be in insurance pool with smokers and lard-asses
Heres the thing, you were and you dont get a choice nor were you informed.
The revenue from your health insurance premiums goes into the general revenue pool which pays for everyone. If you didn't use them they went to someone else. This system is more socialist than the most socialist public healthcare system but you ignore that because someone is making profit off it. So smokers are in the same general revenue pool as you, in fact they need more money so they take from your smaller pool.
At least in Australia, the more you smoke the more tax you pay on it which goes to covering the costs of medical problems. Smoking is a choice, you can choose to quit as I did when they raised the tax 10 years ago or you can choose to keep paying.
It continually surprised me how stupid some smokers are though. Here they're trying to compare sugary drinks to smoking hoping that smoking will become less carcinogenic and become more accepted but in reality all their doing is making sugary drinks more dangerous than they really are (as sugary drinks can be enjoyed in moderation with no negative effects on health, quite unlike smoking). In Australia, smoking is heavily taxed and discouraged whilst sugary drinks dont get a mention in parliament, let alone a bill or motion, there's a reason for that..
Is there a per jump tax on skydiving or how do you'll handle that?
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from skydiving?
Is there a per mile tax on mountain biking or how do you'll handle that.
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from mountain biking?
Is there a tax on watching TV
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from watching TV?
How, exactly, does all this work?
Well first of all I shoot down your hyperbole. Then I explain how horribly wrong you are
None of the things you listed are inherently unhealthy. Every cigarette does damage, there is no healthy way to smoke and it does cost a lot of money. Significant portions of your health insurance goes to keeping smokers alive, in places like Canada and Australia where tobacco is heavily taxed this is recouped directly from the smokers and not from me (a non-smoker). In places like the US, this comes from general revenue collected from everyone.
What is with this policy? We've killed it - repeatedly and it just won't stay dead.
What seems way more likely to me is that this is being pushed hard by the copyright lobby, who, once they can legally obtain the data, will want to use it to go after people.
It's being proposed by George Brandis, the same guy who said it's OK to be a biggot and let Tony Abbott's chief of staff walk from a drink driving conviction.
It'll never pass (hostile senate and possible revolt from moderate back benchers).
But you're right. It's being pushed by the media conglomerates to get ISP's to spy on their own customers and then turn that data over to them so they can sue. Brandis is pretty much in the pockets of big media anyway (well I hope he is, if he's ruining his reputation for free he's a bigger idiot that I thought).
I dont think Brandis will survive as AG for Australia for very much longer. Tony Abbott is a sock puppet for the Liberal powerbrokers, but they've got to realise that Brandis is doing a lot of harm.
To explain the situation to our non Australian friends,
This is being proposed by the Atourney General of the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) George Brandis who is pretty much a complete and utter moron and in the pocket of the PM, Tony Abbott (who's went pretty far to the right and kept going).
Brandis first rose to fame in the 2013 election where he pardoned Tony Abbott's cheif of staff for a drink driving charge (for our American compatriots, this is a serious offence in Australia). Peta Credlin blew 0.075 (0.05 is the limit) which carries an automatic loss of license in the ACT. Claiming Credlin's "exemplary" character permitted her to walk scott free.
After the election, Brandis has been trying to change the Racial Discrimination Act to allow people to be biggots, this is primarily to help right wing shock jock Andrew Bolt to be a racist arsehole on television and not get sued for it.
He has also been on an anti-piracy campaign ever since Tony Abbott was elected.
tl;dr
George Brandis is a complete joke.
The Abbott government faces a hostile senate and is already extremely unpopular with voters (not even Murdoch can spin how unpopular they are). I highly doubt anything Brandis proposes will get through as the extreme right leadership of the Liberal party (yep, in Australia our conservatives are called the "Liberals") is facing a revolt from the moderates, with the narrowest of margins in the house of representatives and no majority in the senate, things like this wont happen.
My SUV is 4WD, the roof is also reinforced and would withstand quite a rollover.
SUV's arent 4WD's.
The two are mutually exclusive. you either have an SUV which is an oversized road car, or a 4WD which is a terrible road car, but has a low range gearbox, locking differentials and underside protections amongst other off road components they dont put on SUV's.
Seeing as you neglected to name it, its fair to assume you have a soft roader.
Secondly, your SUV may survive due to its re-enforced roll cage but you wont. SUV's produce the most fatalities per vehicle because when they crash, they tend to roll and as I said (and you ignored) this caused more head and neck injuries. even hitting an already inflated air bag is enough to cause serious head trauma when rolling. side airbags are designed primarily to restrict lateral head movement in a head on crash, that side airbag becomes another thing to hit.
But the point was, an SUV isn't safer than a small hatchback, in fact, it's less safe than a hatch with the same safety features.
Which would be relevant if SUV's were remotely safe...
As it stood for a long time, SUVs were big...and little else. Any car with a decent roll cage and side-airbags was likely going to come out of all but the most disasterous scrapes much better, since it wouldn't be rolling and caving in the roof on it's occupants.
This.
When they say "larger cars are safer" they're talking about large sedan/saloon cars. SUV's and 4WD's with high centres of gravity are prone to rolling which increases the risk of head and neck injuries far beyond that of a smaller hatchback with less safety features. The thing about rolling is that by introducing additional degrees of freedom your head and neck will now move in more directions, potentially striking parts of the car (window, pillar, even airbags aren't much help).
Also, when they say "larger cars are safer" they always forget to say "by a negotiable amount". If you want to save lives on the road (not the least of which, your own life) put some effort into being a better driver.
Honda doesn't go "Oh by the way, you can't use your Civic anymore, since we can't be bothered to support it, but to show how nice we are, we'll provide a toolkit to help you port goods from your trunk to another company's vehicle".
Yes, Honda continued to support my Integra well past it's production life (production ceased in 2007, a recall notice to get the brake booster inspected came in 2013)... But no-one bought an Integra in beta. By the time the first one rolled out of the factory they were production cars.
You also dont pay $40,000 to Google for a beta service.
Even Honda wont go far out of it's way to support a EK/EJ Civic or DC5 Integra as they've been out of production for years... and you'll be expected to pay Honda for their time/parts.
I'm sure if you paid Google, you could get the support for terminated products.
Car companies do the same thing though, in that they develop and unveil fairly awesome concept cars but only integrate little bits and pieces into their product lines.
After years of watching Top Gear, this.
This is the latest prototype from Volkswagen/General Motors/Toyota, a fantastic car that is light, runs on 2 pounds of petrol a week, has the performance of a Ferrari... and they're not going to make it.
Much like these prototype cars, with prototype software and electronics, I'll believe it when it delivers.
I think it's good that Google tries new things rather than selling the same crap year in, year out like other big players in IT (Ahem, Microsoft, Apple) but it's also good when Google recognises that it's not that good of an idea and kills it unlike other big IT players (looking at you Microsoft).
They don't. They need to buy something with the money or withdray them. The transfers can easily be undone and the money will return to where they were taken from unless they are fully out of the electronic system.
Not really,
You launder electronic money in the same way you launder physical money. Through a semi-legit shell company. You dont need to take it out of the electronic system, you just need to take it out of the banks direct control. You cant actually do a chargeback when you dont know where the money went after step 2 because the shell company shut down and the "directors" are nowhere to be seen.
When you do a chargeback after being defrauded, banks eat the cost because they want to keep you addicted to the credit which earns them a very large mint in merchant service and interchange fees. The loss of you going back to cash or debit is worth thousands per year.
Yet another example of a retarded Libertarian with a slashdot account.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
Well yes.
100 drones are 100 potential accidents. 1 truck is 1 potential accident.
No, but if you aren't paying attention to the road (because you are texting), a helmet would come in handy if your bike hits a bump and you land on the pavement. It might make the difference between being dazed but getting up on your own or needing a trip to the hospital.
To be more accurate, if your bike takes a bump and you land on the pavement, if you've got a helmet on you've got a good chance of getting straight back up again.
If you're not wearing a helmet, you've got a good chance of permanent brain damage or death... Yes, you can be killed just from hitting the pavement (our heads are actually quite fragile).
Another problem is the prevailing belief that "I've got a helmet, I'm magically protected" and that helmets last forever. A helmet is good for one impact only. This is not just bicycle helmets but motorbike and racing car helmets.
The biggest problem with cyclists on the road is that there is no protective equipment known to man that will protect a rider who falls off in front of 60 KPH traffic. The only solution to this is to separate cyclists from motorists.
So you have conclusive proof the ban is being enforced and has produced a noticeable drop in mobile phone usage whilst driving?
Because if not, you're a prime example of the saying "figures dont lie, but liars figure".
Where I live, Western Australia we get charged $300 and gain 3 demerit points when caught on the phone whilst in the car. This hasn't deterred many people even though there have been multiple phone blitz done by WA Police. The last one was over the Easter long weekend, in 4 days they caught 150 people on the phone.
So I call bullshit on your claims, the reason the statistics haven't changed is because they underlying behaviour hasn't changed.
If you're curious, I drive a 2012 Kia Sorento EX V6 AWD Luxury Edition... Bought it last July for about $22K (Canadian) with less than 50,000km on it.
A $250 after market head unit will have the same function... I have the same functionality in my 2002 Nissan 200sx.
I never use it as I've got a rule that I never use the phone whilst in the car... When you drive a sports car any accident is bad, so you have to look out for all the distracted drivers who aren't looking out for you.
Did you pay as much for them as you did your Apple laptops?
My experience is that sub-1k laptops are crap no matter who assembles them. I've got a similar story to GP - bought an Inspiron 1520 back in 2007 and it's still going strong. I replaced the harddrive with an SSD and it's now my primary work machine that I carry to the office and on travel.
It's obvious he's making the whole thing up.
I've got an old Benq that I bought in 2007 thats still going, even after an encounter with my Might Boot(TM) that broke the screen. Runs Fedora Core and still works as a test server when I need it.
I paid $500 for that laptop in 2007.
Macs tend to have huge problems with overheating if you use them for anything processor intensive. In my experience, a Dell and Mac break at about the same rate having used both in the same environment. The difference is trying to get them fixed, Dell bend over backwards (especially if you're a corporate customer) and can get things fixed within 24 hours, on site. With Apple if anything breaks you need to take it to Apple and they take their sweet time in fixing it. We once had an iMac with a broken PSU, it took 10 days to replace.
- My Asus U36F, 2 years and not a problem.
- My Lenovo R400, 5 years and not a problem.
- I've got a 8 yr old Benq with a celeron processor that still works fine... well it would if I hadn't trod on it and broke the screen (I can still plug it into an external monitor and/or SSH to it).
- Work Dell Latitude 3500, broken speaker, fixed within 24 hours.
- Work Dell Latitude 3500, broken HDMI port, mainboard replaced within 24 hours
Now the Mac's.
Work iMac - broken PSU, out of commission 10 days.
Work Macbook Pro - broken (probably the main board), out of commission 22 days.
Work Macbook Pro - Overheated, never properly fixed (Apple claimed there was no problems with it), junked and replaced after 28 days... 28 days from new.
What we really need is to remove the gasoline tax and replace it with a mileage tax.
I'd have to disagree.
A mileage tax would be too open to outright fraud. People would adjust odometers or simply lie about the number of miles they do. Letting the government put a black box in every car is a bad (and expensive) idea and still open to tampering. Finally, a mileage tax does not take account of the efficiency or weight of the vehicle. a 2.5 ton V8 Land Rover uses more fuel, does more damage to the roads and does more environmental damage than a small 1200 KG I4 Toyota.
The easiest way to tax both miles driven and road damage fairly is to tax fuel. It does allow you to pay less tax by using less fuel, but that's pretty much the point.
I learned that the United Kingdom was short for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and in turn Great Britain encompassed England, Scotland, and Wales - i.e., the largest island of the British Isles.
Is this conceptualization completely obsolete, or have the terms just become fuzzy as usage devolves over the years?
Yes.
Geopolitical boundaries and definitions change over the years. Saying the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland aren't incorrect.
Although you will upset the pendants... no matter what you say.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that licensing and learning needs to be improved and more involved but I disagree with mandatory waits and hours. All that does is forces people to do pointless busywork or in most cases, fabricate evidence. In Australia we have a mandatory number of hours for learner drivers (differs between states) and this is self recorded in a log book... or as they're better known, lie books.
Some (very few) people do learn to drive in 10 hours, others cant do it in 110 but most are in between. Mandatory waits just force people to sit on their hands. In my state (western Australia) there is a six month wait AFTER you pass your driving test before you're allowed to drive on your own, this means most learners sit around not driving and forgetting what they learned leading to worse novice drivers.
The best thing we can do isn't to make tests harder, rather require students to undergo a number of hours of training from a professional instructor. Teaching defensive driving from the word go will result in better drivers.
If you are going to mandate hours, mandate them after you pass a driving test (sans the mandatory wait). The test proves you know how to handle a car, but not how to handle real life driving situations. The test is useful but cant impart a lot of important skills. By having a student do additional practice after the test an instructor can focus on teaching important parts of roadcraft like courtesy, advanced parking manoeuvres, lane selection and discipline, speed discipline and handling traffic that you just cant test for in an hour or two. Also, but mandating the hours after the test is passed, the learner has more confidence and will stop second guessing themselves as much.
Fortunately we still have this in Western Australia. A C class license is for an ordinary car (less than 8 seats, under 4.5 GVT), if you pass your test in a manual you get a C printed on your license, if you pass it in an Automatic you get CA and it's illegal for you to drive a manual (I've heard of dealers turning people with CA's away from sequential auto's, despite the state considering these being Automatics).
Are you counting reaction time or just stopping time?
The Project Mu brake pads on my old Honda could stop in that distance easily, but I'd still have to contend with my own reaction time... Which remands me why I need to get some Project Mu's on my Nissan (sadly, my budget does not stretch to Brembo callipers).
Whoa, whoa, whoa,
This test sounds really advanced. I drove in the US for a few weeks last year and the only time I saw an indicator used was on a car with Canadian plates.
Its better that you just give licenses to anyone who shows up or even better, just put them on the back of weeties boxes.
What they *should* do is just get it over with already.
Either ban them completely or stop restricting them at all.
Because prohibition doesn't work.
The US has bans of marijuana, has that disappeared? the little experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 30? Banning a substance means you lose all control over it. You end up with backyard smokes cut with woodshavings to make it cheaper (even more unhealthy than straight tobacco).
OTOH The problem with unrestricted smoking is that a lot of people who dont smoke will be affected by it. This is what Libertarians always ignore, almost everything you do has an effect on someone else.
Ultimately the people who dont smoke will outnumber those who do and smokers are so extremely unreasonable. Here's what happened in Australia.
Non-smokers: Would you mind not smoking in the office please.
Smoker: ITS MY RIGHT. I CAN DO WHATEVER I LIKE AN THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT (followed by stamping their feet)
So smoking was banned indoors.
Non-smokers: Would you mind not smoking near the entrance?
Smoker: ITS MY RIGHT. I CAN DO WHATEVER I LIKE AN THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT, MY RIGHT (followed by stamping their feet)
So smokers must now smoke 5 metres away from building entrances.
Ultimately, smoking restrictions came about due to the extreme discourtesy of smokers.
The ban on large soft drinks did not come about because we dont have the same problem. If someone is drinking a large coke near you, you're not going to have to smell it on your clothes for the next 4 hours, if you're working in a place where people drink soft drinks, you're not forced to breathe it in. This is the bit Libertarians always ignore, then again reality and Libertarians were always at odds.
Maybe if the ban had been in place and functional for a few years before such a ruling, people would have gotten used to smaller sized non-diet soda drinks anyway, and food service businesses would come up with a way to accommodate the new rules.
In the US, doesn't everyone offer a free refill on soft drinks (I believe you call it Soda)?
Making a ban kind of pointless.
we don't have socialized healthcare in the USA, so piss off
and before Obama, I didn't have to be in insurance pool with smokers and lard-asses
Heres the thing, you were and you dont get a choice nor were you informed.
The revenue from your health insurance premiums goes into the general revenue pool which pays for everyone. If you didn't use them they went to someone else. This system is more socialist than the most socialist public healthcare system but you ignore that because someone is making profit off it. So smokers are in the same general revenue pool as you, in fact they need more money so they take from your smaller pool.
At least in Australia, the more you smoke the more tax you pay on it which goes to covering the costs of medical problems. Smoking is a choice, you can choose to quit as I did when they raised the tax 10 years ago or you can choose to keep paying.
It continually surprised me how stupid some smokers are though. Here they're trying to compare sugary drinks to smoking hoping that smoking will become less carcinogenic and become more accepted but in reality all their doing is making sugary drinks more dangerous than they really are (as sugary drinks can be enjoyed in moderation with no negative effects on health, quite unlike smoking). In Australia, smoking is heavily taxed and discouraged whilst sugary drinks dont get a mention in parliament, let alone a bill or motion, there's a reason for that..
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from skydiving?
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from mountain biking?
How many hospitalisations per 100,000 pop are there from watching TV?
Well first of all I shoot down your hyperbole. Then I explain how horribly wrong you are
None of the things you listed are inherently unhealthy. Every cigarette does damage, there is no healthy way to smoke and it does cost a lot of money. Significant portions of your health insurance goes to keeping smokers alive, in places like Canada and Australia where tobacco is heavily taxed this is recouped directly from the smokers and not from me (a non-smoker). In places like the US, this comes from general revenue collected from everyone.
What is with this policy? We've killed it - repeatedly and it just won't stay dead.
What seems way more likely to me is that this is being pushed hard by the copyright lobby, who, once they can legally obtain the data, will want to use it to go after people.
It's being proposed by George Brandis, the same guy who said it's OK to be a biggot and let Tony Abbott's chief of staff walk from a drink driving conviction.
It'll never pass (hostile senate and possible revolt from moderate back benchers).
But you're right. It's being pushed by the media conglomerates to get ISP's to spy on their own customers and then turn that data over to them so they can sue. Brandis is pretty much in the pockets of big media anyway (well I hope he is, if he's ruining his reputation for free he's a bigger idiot that I thought).
I dont think Brandis will survive as AG for Australia for very much longer. Tony Abbott is a sock puppet for the Liberal powerbrokers, but they've got to realise that Brandis is doing a lot of harm.
The ASIO is a wonderful organisation which has always put the democratic values of Australia first and never wasted any of its resources.
To explain the situation to our non Australian friends,
This is being proposed by the Atourney General of the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) George Brandis who is pretty much a complete and utter moron and in the pocket of the PM, Tony Abbott (who's went pretty far to the right and kept going).
Brandis first rose to fame in the 2013 election where he pardoned Tony Abbott's cheif of staff for a drink driving charge (for our American compatriots, this is a serious offence in Australia). Peta Credlin blew 0.075 (0.05 is the limit) which carries an automatic loss of license in the ACT. Claiming Credlin's "exemplary" character permitted her to walk scott free.
After the election, Brandis has been trying to change the Racial Discrimination Act to allow people to be biggots, this is primarily to help right wing shock jock Andrew Bolt to be a racist arsehole on television and not get sued for it.
He has also been on an anti-piracy campaign ever since Tony Abbott was elected.
tl;dr
George Brandis is a complete joke.
The Abbott government faces a hostile senate and is already extremely unpopular with voters (not even Murdoch can spin how unpopular they are). I highly doubt anything Brandis proposes will get through as the extreme right leadership of the Liberal party (yep, in Australia our conservatives are called the "Liberals") is facing a revolt from the moderates, with the narrowest of margins in the house of representatives and no majority in the senate, things like this wont happen.
SUV's arent 4WD's.
The two are mutually exclusive. you either have an SUV which is an oversized road car, or a 4WD which is a terrible road car, but has a low range gearbox, locking differentials and underside protections amongst other off road components they dont put on SUV's.
Seeing as you neglected to name it, its fair to assume you have a soft roader.
Secondly, your SUV may survive due to its re-enforced roll cage but you wont. SUV's produce the most fatalities per vehicle because when they crash, they tend to roll and as I said (and you ignored) this caused more head and neck injuries. even hitting an already inflated air bag is enough to cause serious head trauma when rolling. side airbags are designed primarily to restrict lateral head movement in a head on crash, that side airbag becomes another thing to hit.
But the point was, an SUV isn't safer than a small hatchback, in fact, it's less safe than a hatch with the same safety features.
Which would be relevant if SUV's were remotely safe...
As it stood for a long time, SUVs were big...and little else. Any car with a decent roll cage and side-airbags was likely going to come out of all but the most disasterous scrapes much better, since it wouldn't be rolling and caving in the roof on it's occupants.
This.
When they say "larger cars are safer" they're talking about large sedan/saloon cars. SUV's and 4WD's with high centres of gravity are prone to rolling which increases the risk of head and neck injuries far beyond that of a smaller hatchback with less safety features. The thing about rolling is that by introducing additional degrees of freedom your head and neck will now move in more directions, potentially striking parts of the car (window, pillar, even airbags aren't much help). Also, when they say "larger cars are safer" they always forget to say "by a negotiable amount". If you want to save lives on the road (not the least of which, your own life) put some effort into being a better driver.
Honda doesn't go "Oh by the way, you can't use your Civic anymore, since we can't be bothered to support it, but to show how nice we are, we'll provide a toolkit to help you port goods from your trunk to another company's vehicle".
Yes, Honda continued to support my Integra well past it's production life (production ceased in 2007, a recall notice to get the brake booster inspected came in 2013)... But no-one bought an Integra in beta. By the time the first one rolled out of the factory they were production cars. You also dont pay $40,000 to Google for a beta service.
Even Honda wont go far out of it's way to support a EK/EJ Civic or DC5 Integra as they've been out of production for years... and you'll be expected to pay Honda for their time/parts.
I'm sure if you paid Google, you could get the support for terminated products.
After years of watching Top Gear, this.
This is the latest prototype from Volkswagen/General Motors/Toyota, a fantastic car that is light, runs on 2 pounds of petrol a week, has the performance of a Ferrari... and they're not going to make it.
Much like these prototype cars, with prototype software and electronics, I'll believe it when it delivers.
I think it's good that Google tries new things rather than selling the same crap year in, year out like other big players in IT (Ahem, Microsoft, Apple) but it's also good when Google recognises that it's not that good of an idea and kills it unlike other big IT players (looking at you Microsoft).
They don't. They need to buy something with the money or withdray them. The transfers can easily be undone and the money will return to where they were taken from unless they are fully out of the electronic system.
Not really,
You launder electronic money in the same way you launder physical money. Through a semi-legit shell company. You dont need to take it out of the electronic system, you just need to take it out of the banks direct control. You cant actually do a chargeback when you dont know where the money went after step 2 because the shell company shut down and the "directors" are nowhere to be seen.
When you do a chargeback after being defrauded, banks eat the cost because they want to keep you addicted to the credit which earns them a very large mint in merchant service and interchange fees. The loss of you going back to cash or debit is worth thousands per year.
Why do you think banks are trustworthy.. or good at security?
So cheat codes are alive and well - they just now start with $ sign.
And this is why I steadfastly remain a PC gamer.
Bypassing the $ sign for DLC is a quick and painless process.
Shove them in a big zip-lock bag. Rot contained.
Make it opaque, so no one can see dead rotting guy.
That sounds like its a good idea until someone opens the bag to make sure Frank was really dead.
Yet another example of a retarded Libertarian with a slashdot account.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
Well yes.
100 drones are 100 potential accidents. 1 truck is 1 potential accident.
No, but if you aren't paying attention to the road (because you are texting), a helmet would come in handy if your bike hits a bump and you land on the pavement. It might make the difference between being dazed but getting up on your own or needing a trip to the hospital.
To be more accurate, if your bike takes a bump and you land on the pavement, if you've got a helmet on you've got a good chance of getting straight back up again.
If you're not wearing a helmet, you've got a good chance of permanent brain damage or death... Yes, you can be killed just from hitting the pavement (our heads are actually quite fragile).
Another problem is the prevailing belief that "I've got a helmet, I'm magically protected" and that helmets last forever. A helmet is good for one impact only. This is not just bicycle helmets but motorbike and racing car helmets.
The biggest problem with cyclists on the road is that there is no protective equipment known to man that will protect a rider who falls off in front of 60 KPH traffic. The only solution to this is to separate cyclists from motorists.
So you have conclusive proof the ban is being enforced and has produced a noticeable drop in mobile phone usage whilst driving?
Because if not, you're a prime example of the saying "figures dont lie, but liars figure".
Where I live, Western Australia we get charged $300 and gain 3 demerit points when caught on the phone whilst in the car. This hasn't deterred many people even though there have been multiple phone blitz done by WA Police. The last one was over the Easter long weekend, in 4 days they caught 150 people on the phone.
So I call bullshit on your claims, the reason the statistics haven't changed is because they underlying behaviour hasn't changed.
If you're curious, I drive a 2012 Kia Sorento EX V6 AWD Luxury Edition... Bought it last July for about $22K (Canadian) with less than 50,000km on it.
A $250 after market head unit will have the same function... I have the same functionality in my 2002 Nissan 200sx.
I never use it as I've got a rule that I never use the phone whilst in the car... When you drive a sports car any accident is bad, so you have to look out for all the distracted drivers who aren't looking out for you.
Did you pay as much for them as you did your Apple laptops?
My experience is that sub-1k laptops are crap no matter who assembles them. I've got a similar story to GP - bought an Inspiron 1520 back in 2007 and it's still going strong. I replaced the harddrive with an SSD and it's now my primary work machine that I carry to the office and on travel.
It's obvious he's making the whole thing up.
I've got an old Benq that I bought in 2007 thats still going, even after an encounter with my Might Boot(TM) that broke the screen. Runs Fedora Core and still works as a test server when I need it.
I paid $500 for that laptop in 2007.
Macs tend to have huge problems with overheating if you use them for anything processor intensive. In my experience, a Dell and Mac break at about the same rate having used both in the same environment. The difference is trying to get them fixed, Dell bend over backwards (especially if you're a corporate customer) and can get things fixed within 24 hours, on site. With Apple if anything breaks you need to take it to Apple and they take their sweet time in fixing it. We once had an iMac with a broken PSU, it took 10 days to replace.
Hmmm, anecdotal data.
Lets see if I can counter it.
- My Asus U36F, 2 years and not a problem.
- My Lenovo R400, 5 years and not a problem.
- I've got a 8 yr old Benq with a celeron processor that still works fine... well it would if I hadn't trod on it and broke the screen (I can still plug it into an external monitor and/or SSH to it).
- Work Dell Latitude 3500, broken speaker, fixed within 24 hours.
- Work Dell Latitude 3500, broken HDMI port, mainboard replaced within 24 hours
Now the Mac's.
Work iMac - broken PSU, out of commission 10 days.
Work Macbook Pro - broken (probably the main board), out of commission 22 days.
Work Macbook Pro - Overheated, never properly fixed (Apple claimed there was no problems with it), junked and replaced after 28 days... 28 days from new.
So we still buy Dells, but not Macs.
But bikes don't cause much wear-and-tear on the roads or emit toxins into the air.
Flat out not true.
Bicycle riders are the nations largest source of smug, a known and dangerous pollutant.
What we really need is to remove the gasoline tax and replace it with a mileage tax.
I'd have to disagree.
A mileage tax would be too open to outright fraud. People would adjust odometers or simply lie about the number of miles they do. Letting the government put a black box in every car is a bad (and expensive) idea and still open to tampering. Finally, a mileage tax does not take account of the efficiency or weight of the vehicle. a 2.5 ton V8 Land Rover uses more fuel, does more damage to the roads and does more environmental damage than a small 1200 KG I4 Toyota.
The easiest way to tax both miles driven and road damage fairly is to tax fuel. It does allow you to pay less tax by using less fuel, but that's pretty much the point.
I learned that the United Kingdom was short for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and in turn Great Britain encompassed England, Scotland, and Wales - i.e., the largest island of the British Isles.
Is this conceptualization completely obsolete, or have the terms just become fuzzy as usage devolves over the years?
Yes.
Geopolitical boundaries and definitions change over the years. Saying the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland aren't incorrect.
Although you will upset the pendants... no matter what you say.