For 99% of all people that is also a specious argument, since their cars are never used on private roads where it is possible to break the speed limit. Their venture onto private ground is limited to their driveway and private carparks, neither of which could remotely sustain a 150 km/t speed.

Also there is nothing wrong with the public saying that you are fine having a non-speed-limited car (we won't interfere with you privately owned possession), but we won't allow you to drive on our public roads, because that is actually a privilege and not a right and we get (through democracy) get to chose who drives on it. We already refuse plenty of people/cars.

This highlights exactly what is wrong with our current social structures. You kick the child out of a school because their parents don't volunteer enough? What the fuck? It is simply morally wrong to punish the child for the parent's failings. They already have a shitty lot in life due to uncaring parents and you are applauding making life even shittier for them?

If you kick out a child because their parents don't volunteer or you set the bar of entry so that you ATTRACT parents who are involved, you don't punish the uncaring and uninvolved parents, you punish their children. How can you possibly justify this?

"What you just described, was hard work on the part of yourself and your parents."

He didn't chose his parents and so the hard work done by his parents was from the poster's point-of-view; luck. Furthermore, his attitude of hard work was probably due to learning the same attitudes from his parents. So he was doubly lucky to have less constraints put upon him than peers with shitty parents.

Unless you find a way of chosing parents better, your start in life and your constraints in life are usually set for you. It is very, very rare to overcome poor, lazy, uneducated, uncaring and abusive parents AND school and reach university.

"You don't need speed limits if you have traffic jams."

Actually, you may need speed limits, not for safety but for reducing the traffic jam. Traffic jams are caused by sudden stops on the motorway and the fact that acceleration is not instant. This causes a shock wave propagating backwards throughout the motorway becoming much worse as it travels backwards.

They've found that if they can manage to reduce the speed of traffic at peak hours everyone gets into London quicker. It's much better everyone travels at 40mph to begin with as this makes it unlikely you'll suddenly have to drop to 0mph, which will cause tailbacks behind you.

My favourite of these arguments is the argument against speed-limiters on car:

Often used by people who don't like the idea of limiting a car to 150 km/h despite the fact that their country doesn't allow travel faster than 120 km/h anywhere. Because of this, they come up with all sorts of extremely unlikely scenarios where travelling really fast may save them. They also try very hard to ignore other solutions than driving really fast.

The war on drugs have totally torn several countries apart. They are now practically lawless, ruthless and scary places to live and even visit. All because of a fruitless fight to protect people from themselves. Sadly it will now be impossible (at least in the short to medium term) to bring these places back to stability, even if we finally gave up the war on drugs, because the drug cartels have amassed too much money and weaponry, all because of the immense profits possible because the product has been made illegal.

I wouldn't be surprised if the drug cartels have been bribing government officials to keep the hard line on drugs going.

I was wondering how impressive it was and attempted to resolve this with trigonometry to find the likely error distance 1 light year away.

This got me in trouble with precision (the angle is of the order 1.0e-11 in Radians) but knowing that the angle is a constant here, the error should scale linearly with the distance.
If we use 400,000 km as the distance to the moon, 1 light years is roughly 2.0e7 times the distance to the moon (Google search calculator).

Thus an error of 20mm = 2.0e-5 km error at 400000 km should give around 2.0e7 * 2.0e-5 km =~ 400 km, meaning at 1 light years away, their error is roughly on par with how far away Ryan Air puts you from your real destination.

Not quite. Windows 95 shipped without TCP/IP and it required the Plus-pack (which TBF was included in many OEM-versions) with Internet Explorer 1.0 to get a TCP/IP stack installed (or install third party software, like Netscape Navigator). Also Windows 3.11 for Workgroups got a TCP/IP add-on pack from Microsoft before Windows 95 was released. Microsoft eventually bundled their TCP/IP stack with Windows 95 in Service Pack 1 which also came with Internet Explorer 2.0.

I'm sure every OS-maker out there has something to learn from OpenBSD, but Theo De Raadt seems incapable of acknowledging that others may have different design criteria than OpenBSD. If they wish to support their customers and gain more business, Red Hat, Apple or Microsoft, for instance, cannot make security the only factor. They have to be quick at supporting some new hardware, provide ease-of-use features and add new features or be considered obsolete very quickly. The same goes for plenty of makers of hardware products.

If OpenBSD was capable of both extreme security and the quick development mentioned above, he'd have proper bragging rights for beating the other players. Otherwise he is simply playing a different game than them.

You have both. His mother will stop using the PC for all her Internet Browsing, Email checking and installing cutesy cats jumping across the top of the Windows and will use it only when she has to, i.e. for writing documents. She will do this voluntarily, because the iPad is so much easier and nicer to use in her sofa.

You also remove all admin priviliges, set it to auto install updates and install ad-block on the browser. She won't care if this inhibits her a little, because she has her iPad to play on.

You will then have removed the biggest attack vectors for her PC and her PC will be much, much safer and easier to manage. And due to the extremely limited use (she will probably use MS office much more rarely than she realises), the PC will last for years before any upgrade or even defragging is necessary.

What happens when the car realises it doesn't need the driver to get around and could easily pop down to the local garage itself when it needs spare parts or petrol/electricity? Or when it gets tired of smelling faintly of sick, or having its lovely seat fabric ruined by small humans?

And if it can tell a paper bag from a small animal from 200 ft, perhaps it can also distinguish a rubbish bin from a human so it knows WHICH ONE TO KILL?

I'm not saying this will happen, I'm just asking questions.

... because this was in the UK.

Furthermore, if I was selling a really expensive TV and a cheap DVD on eBay and got the addresses mixed up, I'd really hope the guy who mistakenly received the TV would be decent enough to send it back (at my expense) and not try to hide behind some "finder's keepers" law. The day everyone screws common decency and just follows the letter of the law as long as it benefits them, then we are truly lost as a society.

Send it back.

"In the case of digital currency, there is no short-term benefit for swapping coins, but there is no loss either."

Are you kidding? There's a major loss; making theft virtually untraceable and thus making theft considerably more attractive. Now even the not-so-clever criminals in western easy-to-reach-by-the-law countries can get in on the online theft game. Not just those that are good at hiding their tracks or are in countries that won't cooperate with your own country's police.

If someone steals your digital coins, they may end up virtually (ha!) anywhere, with little or no chance of ever find them again.

This is what we had with a cash-only economy, except much, much worse, since the thieves don't have to be physically close to you or your money. For most people, moving away from a cash-only economy has had the great benefit that their accumulated wealth is much better protected.

Also, corruption (which anonymous currency is fantastic for) is hardly a "friendly thought-crime which doesn't affect others".

It really isn't fair to compare the price in Europe in euros to a price in Canada in CAD. The price in Euros is priced to the European market with VAT and the European warranty requirements built in. You can't just convert the prices with a currency calculator and a European can't just legally order from Canada without paying VAT and import duties.

The HTC Desire is not to the best of my knowledge available contract free for CAD 300 in Europe and the Jolla won't cost EUR 399 when marketed in Canada.

This reminds me of a former co-worker of mine at a university in Britain. My co-worker was Indian, held an MSc and a Research Fellow position at said university, while also being halfway through a PhD at the same university.

He was scheduled to attend a conference in the US together with our line manager, but had to cancel as the US blankly refused him entrance on the grounds that the risk of him becoming an illegal immigrant was too high. Letters from the university did not help.

Now, you may well be proud of your country, but is it really realistic to expect someone to be so desperate to live in the US that they will drop a relevant, career-progressing and decently paid job in another Western country to work in the kitchen of a golf club as an illegal immigrant?

He now ironically works in the UK for a large, very high-tech US company.