And the complexity is (over a dozen?) orders of magnitude greater. And for which a decent amateur human still stands a pretty good chance against an average computer program.

For a second there, I was about to agree. Then I realised that you said "Chinese" and not "US".

And, on another note, stop using everything as a verb.

(You will "ace" the test, etc.)

I see the word: Revise.

I think: To look again. To revisit.

Just because you don't use it in that sense, doesn't mean others can't.

What bothers me about American English speakers is not that they've never heard these words - that's fair enough - but that they can't infer their meaning from the context and from the potential meaning of the words.

Pavement. Yeah, it's an odd word. But it's obviously something that's paved. Paving. Words that you have in your "dialect" too. The inference, however, never seems to be made.

And yet, when Americans/Canadians use words oddly, we're required to understand what they mean.

You don't need to be spot-on, but sometimes just a brief stint in etymology or even thinking of similar-sounding word-roots would help immensely in your understanding of "our" language.

I base my purchases on the RESPONSE to the reviews. Sellers have the ability to respond to any buyer's reviews, manufacturer's appear to have the ability to respond to product reviews (I have recently seen a particular product for solar panels where the producing company was responding to the FAQ and product reviews with corrections), and other product reviewers will often correct misconceptions about the product propagated by users (e.g. the reviews of the Samsung 850 SSD's etc.).

Nobody cares about a product, hotel, travel operator or whatever getting zero bad reviews - it just looks fake and suspicious, in fact. What we care about is how they responded to that.

The most enlightening responses I've seen are from companies with top customer service. And they even respond with comments like "Actually, we have no record of your stay whatsoever, reviewer. Would you care to give us a booking number so we can trace your problem?", etc. for the fake reviews. The responses are much more useful and indicative of good service than the occasional idiot that marks an Amazon product as "1-star" because some third-party seller sent it to the wrong address, etc.

"unauthenticated" that should be, obviously.

"Has Google Indexed Your Backup Drive?"

Yes, if you're a pillock that's configured your backup drive in such a way that you allow authenticated remote access to it from the Internet and it has FTP or HTTP protocols enabled.

"Has Google Indexed Your Naked Pictures Of Your Wife?"

Similar answer.

And come full-circle.

It works elsewhere just as you describe.

UK police still have "truncheons" (batons/night-sticks). In the 90's they abandoned use of US-style batons as they were too heavy and unwieldy. They do not carry guns at all. There are specialist units akin to calling in a SWAT team, etc. but ordinary police don't carry guns.

This is the problem - if you've never been given something, you don't miss it. The second it's "standard-issue" you'll never be able to prize it out of their hands again.

I wonder how you'd react as a copyright holder for someone telling you that you should just give your creation away for free because you haven't updated it in a while, and not pursue any copyright, trademark etc. infringements on it even so.

Some things are not as easy. Specifically, say you sold your software to a publishing house. They, or you, may own the copyright. Just because you can't sell it yourself any more (because of some exclusive contract with the publisher) doesn't mean you have the right to give it away or re-assign the copyright further. And vice versa. Say you die, and your estate holds the copyright... it's not as simple as just saying "give it away". Say the company that produced it owns the copyright but that company no longer exists and the copyright's been sold on to others. You may not have anyone with the right to distribute the game any more, but you may still have a legal obligation to defend the rights to it.

And variants of your scenario already exist. They are tucked into warranties and unofficial support and designs of OBD reader specific to particular models, etc. but they are there.

Nothing everything is as clear-cut as you might like.

"Stop means stop and get on the damn ground."

Does it? That's a pretty implicit assumption at the end you have there.

And, sorry, but people run from police EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR. Probably thousands of times. Running away is not EVER justification to shoot. The police are the ones who should know that the best. He might be running away because his rival gang member just appeared behind you and you haven't seen him. He might be running away because you threatened him. For all we know, the guy might have asked for his name and badge number and the officer refused to provide, shot him with a taser and then the guy was trying to escape from what someone he may have had genuine cause to believe was just trying to kill him by PRETENDING to be a cop.

Running "towards" something/someone, possibly. But running away, no. You give chase, you don't shoot.

There's a reason that police procedure manuals are HUGE. And why you can get out of actual crimes just by being arrested in an incorrect manner. Because at those critical points you play by the book because you cannot take account of every situation.

And I'm pretty sure that pulling your gun, firing indiscriminately (8 shots is overkill, and at least 2 went out into the ether where they could have harmed the public), etc. is pretty low down on the list of procedures you are expected to follow as a police officer.

Stop being presumptive. I, as much as anyone, agree that stop means stop and *I* would stop - because I think it's a police officer and they asked me to stop. But there are a billion unknowns and there are also factors which easily affect even the simplest assumption that just because someone yells stop you should stop.

If you're a police officer, the vast majority of people you deal with every day will not be happy to see you, not want to do what you ask, and may well be hiding something. That makes it a deadly situation in which you have to be careful, but also means that you have to evaluate risks at all point.

The risk of a guy you've (allegedly) tasered who is running away? That he might get away. There's no record of violence. There's no threat to the officer. There's little threat to the public. And, as you see in the video, your colleague is just down the road anyway with a vehicle in which you can quickly recapture him.

Even drawing your gun (as an armed officer) would be subject to a disciplinary procedure in that instance in some countries. Let alone actually firing it. Let alone shooting to kill. Let along killing. Let alone all the other alleged actions and inconsistencies in statements just afterwards.

As much as you don't like it, a thug, a thief, a murderer, a rapist have pretty much the same rights as you unless a court decides otherwise. Even if the guy was wanted for murder, armed and dangerous - he was running away and had no visible firearm. He wasn't a threat until he pulled something.

It doesn't matter what the majority do. It matters what the police officer in front of you is doing.

Gunning down a person who is running away from them means they are a high-risk to your self, especially if you're filming, especially if you're providing evidence against them, especially if they could perceive you as a threat.

I have absolutely no fear of police in my country. The average man on the street is infinitely more dangerous to me. I have never had a run-in with police that wasn't amicable, friendly, and a few ended in laughter on both sides - even when I could see their reasoning and could be a risk to them. I've never had cause to be arrested. I've only ever seen weapons on the only armed officers I've ever seen in the UK, who work in airports. Those officers scare me and I stay away from them out of some kind of natural self-preservation. I don't have any reason to be a threat to them, but what they perceive as a threat may differ from my intention. I've never spoken to one. I don't find them approachable. I would not ask them directions, or joke, or even greet them as I would an ordinary police officer.

But to film a police officer of any type (armed or not)? That puts me into their scope (sometimes quite literally in the US!). Though in doing that I'm morally sound, it's also adding tension to the situation and if the guy I'm filming *is* corrupt, murderous, etc. or just having a bad day or thinks he saw me have something else in my hands, then that's my reputation/life at risk too. UK people have had their cameras confiscated and even evidence destroyed in the past (the chief police officer did put out a clarification to all their officers that they are NOT allowed to do that, but that just scares me more - they should already know that they are NOT allowd to do that).

I'm not saying I'd film, or wouldn't do it, but it still needs to be recognised as a risk to the person doing it, whatever the situation, and however good the majority of police are.

And, I'm sorry, I would have to think before I did something like film a police officer deliberately, or ask for their number (which identifies them and which they are required to give on demand and which generally means you intend to report them). I'd probably still do it, out of a sense of moral judgement, but millions of people would not. It's not as simple as it being safe in a "safe" country, and the UK where I live is much safer than the US when it comes to dealing with police.

I last visited the US in 2008.
I hold a full UK driving licence and have done since about the same time (I didn't drive until late in life).
I've held a full UK passport my entire life.

I freely travelled throughout Europe several times in the past few years and my girlfriend and I go to her home in Italy several times a year.

** Neither of us have ever given those biometrics to get the paperwork necessary.**

As I say, the closest is a photograph taken in a standard photo booth that they say is used for "facial recognition". That was necessary for my last driving licence/passport (shared system) and for her UK driving licence (she has an Italian passport - no biometrics).

The EU and the UK are - contrary to popular US belief - nowhere near as 1984 as you think we are. I have driven, on one journey, through six countries and only stopped once to buy a sticker for the car to allow motorway travel (paid in cash, at no point had to present ANY documentation to cross borders or use roads whatsoever).

My brother does not even have the driving licence or passport. He has ABSOLUTELY no photographic or biometric form of identification whatsoever. He opened a bank account with a birth certificate and an employer's letter just recently.

Sorry to disappoint you, but this is the norm over here in the UK. The last national ID card scheme was SCRAPPED because it was voluntary, so few people signed up and the cards were disabled, the data deleted and the scheme abolished. An official UK government identity scheme.

You can, of course, talk about how many CCTV cameras we have and how free you are. But that's just ignoring simple facts. Hell, I don't even go out of my way to avoid biometrics, but it's entirely optional and voluntary over here. The same throughout the majority of the EU.

We pay tax, I'm 100% legitimately British, my girlfriend is Italian with settlement rights in UK due to EU rules, we exist as normal citizens (natural citizen in my case). And I'll state again - THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL RECORDS OF ANY BIOMETRIC FOR ME. Except possibly one photograph that *I* took in a photo booth.

The same could apply to evolution, to most of cosmology, to archaeology, to Egyptology, how the pyramids were made, to how cells formed, to just about every aspect of science.

It's just sheer ignorance to suggest that it's not worth pursuing.

Science is about looking what's ALREADY out there. Formulating a theory that ties some parts of it together and maybe how it originated.
Then testing your theory on other, sometimes unrelated parts of the universe. If they work, great, we have a certain amount of knowledge and ability to predict what might happen next. If they don't, great, we know that we have the wrong idea / made an incorrect correlation somewhere. Both are knowledge you can use to improve your next hypothesis and so get closer to a probable answer.

Without simple bases like these, you can't answer the bigger questions. And suggesting the knowledge is useless because "we'll never know exactly what happened" is like saying that studying an air-crash into the Alps is pointless because "we'll never know exactly what happened"... there's still things to deduce, lessons to learn, knowledge that you can use going forward to improve people's lives.

You're an idiot. And a not particularly forward-thinking one either. Proving that, even only to a certain probability, the Earth, Moon and this object were of the same composition suggests where all of them might have come from. It suggests what to look for. It suggests how planets themselves might form. That suggests how we might find places where planets might be likely to form. That suggests how we look for those places. That suggests what might be interesting areas of the universe.

In the same way that some dickhead can claim that the world just popped into existence 6000 years ago and consider themselves "just as correct" as hundreds of years of scientific study by hundreds of thousands of scholars, you're just as much an idiot to suggest that this knowledge is as worthless as you claim.

And the reason you see so many earth-moon-creation theories (actually hypotheses until they are proven) and papers every month? Because it matters. And because each one - by its disproval - gets us closer to an answer, and builds on the knowledge of the previous, and is an area of intense study by respected scientists. And all that stuff in the news you see about how we've located thousands of planets around foreign stars that we didn't even know were there before, how we've managed to detect Earth-like ones in that, how we might choose candidates to mine in the future? That's all possible because of those papers.

And, even simpler than that, just simple geology here on Earth is improved by that knowledge.

If you don't get that science is merely a way to predict the future using the evidence of the past, you're a fucking moron.

"Passengers must have a biometric passport to use the system."

No different to the UK gates which have the same facility. But nobody is under any obligation to provide biometrics beyond a photo to get a passport. If you don't have a biometric passport (i.e. almost everybody), you have to use the normal channel and not the e-gate.

And I tell you precisely how any people I've ever seen walk through the e-gates at London Stansted, Gatwick or Heathrow (considered the world's busiest airport up until very recently) for the many years they've been in place? About 0.01%. The queues in Stansted border control, in particular, can number several thousand people and STILL barely a handful will go through the e-gates and they do so voluntarily.

Last time I walked through the queue there, someone was trying to get people to use them but acting official and checking if you have an e-passport and getting you to use that queue. I said "No, thanks", and joined the normal queue. By far I was not the only person to do so.

And, to be honest, I've been through Amsterdam several times. I've never needed to pass through an airport. You can drive across the french, dutch and german borders and not even notice you've done so until your phone goes off to tell you what a text message costs in that country.

I guarantee you that they'd barely need to anyway.

To my knowledge, nobody on this planet has an official record of my retina, and not of my fingerprint. Maybe "unofficially", as in they scooped it from something without my consent of knowledge, but I've travelled all over the world and never been required to give either.

I have a current driving licence, a current passport, etc. all the usual gubbins and have not once been required to give either of the above.

I'm sure someone will tell me some rubbish about facial biometrics and the shape of my chin, etc. but I'm not at all convinced on that either and we all know what simple cosmetics can achieve in the cheapest of TV shows.

It's not that biometrics aren't capable of doing this. It's that they AREN'T being deployed. I'm sure if I was an illegal who was getting arrested, etc. that there'd be some record of fingerprints somewhere, but I'm also pretty sure that espionage - as such - isn't hindered in the slighest because they tend to steer clear of entering countries illegally (or visibly), getting caught, and getting arrested. Because, biometrics or not, that's just not a useful thing to be doing, given their remit.