Re: 1969 film
I recall a party where we established that two South African guests had been in the same battle on different sides...
116 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2012
Surely, sheep dips are supposed to protect the sheep from diseases? So, while unpleasant, temporarily, they are designed(*) to be beneficial to the sheep.
Another thing I wonder about w.r. to vegans: Why would anyone keep pigs?
* I'll grant they might not be; and organophosphates are certainly not good for the farmer, but the principle stands.
You should try wearing a hi-viz tabbard saying "I'm nice to cyclists when I drive!". And clearly your dogs should wear hi-viz coats - and helmets. And, probably, some blinking lights. The more the better.
That's what cyclists get told all the time - shouldn't it apply to pedestrians and dogs, too?
All I want is for cyclists to offer the same courtesy to me when I am on foot walking the dog and conversing with other dog walkers.
I'm willing to bet a pint that if you put your confirmation bias aside, you'd find that most do. Just as most drivers drive fairly well around cyclists.
But the ones you remember are the ones that don't.
Even in largely pleasant populations you get some arseholes. Like cyclists who don't share shared paths, or dog walkers who believe in the dog poo fairy.
It is also worth remembering that London cyclists* have a fearsome reputation for scattering pedestrians by "furious cycling" on pavements, which is quite simply against the law in the first place....
It's against the law, but supposed to be tolerated - according to numerous relevant ministers - unless done inconsiderately. Now, I've only been in London for 25 years, but I don't recall encountering a cyclist in central London on the pavement - the pavements are usually far too crowded. Out in the sticks^H^H^H^HBarnet you do see it, but then the pavements there are usually a) wide and b) empty.
Nobody walks anywhere in the 'burbs. They have a 4x4 and they will drive it.
Oh and ignoring red lights
It's an absolute disgrace! Most drivers in London now seem to think orange means "put your foot down", and red means "I only have 5 seconds to go!". And don't get me started on the idiots blocking junctions and roundabouts and causing bloody mayhem for everyone else. They've spent all that money on cameras and it doesn't seem to have made a difference...
Oh..
You're talking about cyclists
Not drivers of cars and HGVs that regularly kill pedestrians?
Have pity. It's a sign of weakness, not a threat*. The ones that constantly RLJ are the ones that aren't fit
enough for a proper interval workout.
* on the whole. There are, rare, occasions when it makes sense to move ahead of the line to get out of the dangerous blind spot of the HGV that pulled up behind you.
Other places doubtless have comparable problems.</quote>
Lots of places have comparable problems to London with respect to air pollution and hit and run drivers; places with decent cycling infrastructure|high cyling mode share tend to have less.
But yeah. Shared use paths are stupid and counterproductive except in very low usage situations. It should be "Pedestrianised; considerate cycling allowed" [ which, e.g. Regents Canal is. But without any enforcement, these kind of regulations tend not to be worth...]
Unfortunately, there was three separate incidents and countless times that we were approached for money and harassed
There was three separate incidents? What a woeful indictment of whatever "education" system this scrote wiggled through?
The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. Assuming, as seems reasonable from the article, that he's a septic tank: It is extraordinarily difficult to get through the US eduction system without some rudimentary understanding of (aspects of) the constitution, or indeed (smaller aspects of) the philosophy behind it.
Given that he managed it, he's either extremely "precious", or home-schooled, or both. We can apportion blame appopriately.
"[1] I want to apologize for using the term riff raff. It was insensitive and counterproductive."
Oh no, that was one of the - few - well phrased parts of the articles. Don't apologise for the terms you used - apologise for meaning what you meant to say!
I wonder how many people died through a lack of state financing for the NHS, during this scam?
Given that the state had plenty of money to keep financing Trident, not to mention fighting several counterproductive wars (at least one of which was illegal): None.
That's never been what Equity markets are really about. And if it were, they wouldn't work - you need the speculators to provide the liquidity - and at least that benefits most participants.
Think back how much commission you'd have paid 20 years ago, compare that to now.
There's also the fact that when Labour gave the BoE independence - one of the few(*) good ideas they managed to implement - they tied them to the wrong inflation measure: RPIX, i.e. Retail Price Index Excluding Inflation. Which, in turn, led to interest rates being artificially low during the boom years, fueling house price inflation.
(*) the other one was FOI, and that didn't go far enough. Plus Tony is on record as regretting FOI. As you would, with an illegal war and thousands of deaths on your conscience. You'd regret giving citizens a little bit of insight into the government they pay for.
I'll agree with the concept of implementing laws at the lowest possible level - in fact, I think in a lot of cases the level should be a lot lower than it currently is. Why should income tax be the same in Newcastle as in London, for example? Or interest rates, for that matter (interest rates appropriate for London are almost certainly too high for Newcastle... but I digress).
Pray tell, are there any actual downsides to permanent driving lights? Apart from, possibly, aesthetics, but that's a matter of taste.
e-voting solves the wrong problem.
The reason people don't vote is, IMHO, because
a) they feel none of the parties represent them (*)
b) their votes, unless in a marginal seat, are essentially wasted anyway.
The solution to this is to
b) change the voting system to proportional representation
a) which would help smaller parties that are more representative to actually get into parliament.
(*) look at https://www.politicalcompass.org/, maybe do the test (anonymously), and see what how your results map on to the parties you could vote for. In my case, there's only one party standing that is even in the right quadrant. YMMV, but it's informative.
Given than over 42 people a day get caught and fined for speeding and that there must be at least two orders of magnitude more people who are either caught and let off or not caught it's pretty much proven that speeding in itself is not dangerous
That does not even remotely follow.
And while I agree that speeding per se isn't always a huge risk, e.g. on motorways(*), in towns it is. Because it's all about breaking distance, reaction time, and severity of impact - all of which are directly proportional to speed.
(*) on motorways it's - IMHO - tailgating. A large proportion of drivers in the UK have no idea what constitutes a safe distance
I hate to break it to you - when governments act like that, it's the end of the rule of law.
Government agencies are not above the law. They are allowed to do certain things, in certain circumstances, that private citizens are not - but it's not a carte blanche authorisation.
The Netherlands would certainly be well within their rights to prosecute any GCHQ agents they can tie to this break in... and the UK would have to extradite. The US generally considers that only its own laws are valid worldwide, anyway.....
You can't have perfect security, that's true. And most of what we see as "security" is, in Schneier's words, just "security theatre".
But there's precious little evidence that giving up freedoms increases security. And, more importantly, the "security" issue is not actually as important as we think(*). We've all seen the stat that more ppl died from avoiding air travel in the US after 9/11 than died from 9/11.
I haven't triple checked that fact, but I'm pretty damn sure more ppl dies in, say, OZ and UK from perfectly avoidable traffic accidents in the last 12 months than died from terrorism. The reason we focus on terrorism rather than significant risk is because we, as a species, are remarkably bad at intuitive statistics.
IOW, give any "free" nation time, regardless of the safeguards you try to put in place, and it'll eventually collapse from innate human imperfection.
Usually because people give in to authoritarian instincts. Look at Rome.
"Now you see that evil will always triumph...because good is dumb."
If terrorism in the last couple of years has proved anything beyond the barbarity of its perpetrators, it's proven that evil is, on average, way dumber than good.
(*): In most western countries. If you live in Iraq, Syria, or other countries, YMMV.
What exactly is the government's thinking for this?
Far be it from me to point out the obviously unwarranted assumption in that statement.
Do they really expect terrorists or child molesters or possessors of abuse photos and videos to go "Better not use encryption. I'll be breaking the law."
That was exactly what Labour expected when they introduced RIPA. "Oh, as a child-molesting, money laundering terrorists I could go to prison for two years if I don't reveal my key and my evil plans...or reveal the key and go down for life. Fair cop, there you go, guvnor, here's me keys". I'm paraphrasing my former Labour MP, only slightly exaggerating for comic effect. She couldn't see the flaw in her logic.. not that her Tory successor is much better.
Didn't work against the bad guys last time. Won't work against the bad guys this time. Much like banning handguns didn't stop crims using them. Does cause a lot of problems and inconvience for law-abiding folks, though.
It's the Sir Humphreys in the Home Office that have been pushing for total surveillance state for the last two decades. Why else would every Home Secretary start spouting the same line once they get into office?
All for dissing Cameron and co, but let's not forget that Labour effectively banned encryption (well, made not handing over your keys punishable by a prison sentence... so baned encryption from the government) with #RIPA, which, they assures us, would stop money laundering, child pornography and terrorism. So be grateful to our political classes that we don't have to worry about those three evils anymore. Particularly not terrorism, since that was all sorted out by Tony!
+1 for fines proportional to income. £X may be a lot or a little to you - £y% of annual income applies the same effect fairly to the whole population.
Fines expressed in day rates are quite common in continental Europe AFAIK.
Left/right lane pacers may be a nuisance to speeders(*), but the real problem in terms of danger are tailgaters. If you can't understand that your distance to the car in front should at the very least be 2 seconds(**), you shouldn't be driving (***)
* fetch me my tiny violin
** for the pedants: "the distance your own car travels in two seconds". Preferably expressed in lightyears for added piquancy(****)
*** anything faster than a mobility scooter.
**** and zeros after the decimal point.
<blockquote>Besides a French court cannot impose a driving ban on a UK license (or vice versa). The most they can do is fine you.</blockquote>
The French most certainly can ban you from driving in France. Just like the Swiss can ban you from driving in Switzerland, say for speeding.
Don't ask me how I know.
Mine's the one with the "go faster" stripes on the pockets/
That isn't a hard problem at all. The political will simply isn't there to do it:
Put in dedicated, segregated bike lanes. Dutch-style. That can easily take 30% of the local traffic off the road. If the cycle paths are good enough, and fully segregated, then kids can cycle to school, too, alleviating the dreaded school-run traffic.
I look forward to a careful explanation how uber taxis are going to solve the capacity problem that occurs when you mix London streets with large vehicles taking enormous amounts of road space for a single passenger - in other words: cars. And no, taxis aren't fundamentally different; while they work around the problem of parking, they do that by constantly taking space on the road. There may be a marginal increase in utilisation, but I doubt it's much beyond a rounding error.
So when you're in the back of your uber cab at rush hour, do get started on that essay. You'll have ample time. If you don't get distracted by the cyclists passing you.
<blockquote>Case statements in C are similarly despised by the purists, since they have the same effect as a GOTO.</blockquote>
Err. No they don't. Case statements are perfectly acceptable even for the most ardent structured programming fanatics.
Of course, all control flow statements are implenmented with gotos under the hood, but they limit where they can jump and make the code more understandable. That applies to switch/case statements as much as if/else or loops.
The one thing people might complain about is the break or (intentional?unintentional?) lack of break at the end of a case...
<blockquote>I'm late 40's, have rarely been out of work as a softie, and have just realised I am the oldest one in the new office I have just started in. Not seen any ageism in my career, so, am I lucky, or the norm</blockquote>
So you've not encountered any ageism as a young man? Well, knock me down with a feather! Next you'll be telling us that as a bloke you've not experienced much sexual discrimination, and that white people are rarely at the receiving end of racism....