And if the activation servers are turned off, who's to say they will be willing or able to activate it over the phone?

There's a lot to be said for consideration on the roads... And riding two abreast when doing so makes it hard for faster vehicles to pass is extremely inconsiderate, irrespective of legality.
If you're doing something which unnecessarily inconveniences others why should they show you any consideration in return? There are many instances where the slowness and instability of a bike could make certain manoeuvres impossible or extremely dangerous, and car drivers will often allow bikes to pass when they aren't legally obliged to. The more you do to unnecessarily piss drivers off, the less they will do to help you.

The problem is that there are no license requirements for bikes, so many riders are totally unaware of the actual laws, and often highly inexperienced..
Drivers at least have to pass a test, and while there are plenty of bad drivers they should at least have some experience and understanding of the rules.

On a daily basis i see bikes ignoring red lights, while to see a car go through on red is pretty rare. Just yesterday i saw a bike come off of a footpath, go directly across a 2 lane road without slowing or checking for vehicles (causing several cars to hit the brakes) and into the wrong end of a one way street.

And it's no better as a pedestrian, i was shouted at by a bike rider who took issue with the fact i was in her way by walking down the sidewalk causing her to hit the brakes. It's illegal to ride there, why should i be forced to get out of the way of a bike speeding down the hill ringing a bell and shouting?

Also when trying to cross a road, you get a group of vehicles which pass you, and then a long spaced out stream of bikes that fill in the gap before the next group of vehicles - giving you no time to cross.

The UK system of vending machines in the airport is extremely convenient (and the vending machines typically support a bunch of languages and different network sims too), i wish other countries did something similar...

You can buy prepaid sims in most countries but often not in the airport, and quite often the pricing will only be displayed in the local language etc so it can be hard to work out what you're actually getting for your money (and quite easy to get ripped off in the small phone shops).

I just want a cheap prepaid sim that the people i'm visiting can call me on, and with a decent data allowance so i can use google maps etc. It would also be extremely convenient if you could buy them before you travel and have them shipped to you.

Just find something with PCI... Then you can use a fairly modern motherboard with easily obtainable ram in useful quantities, and use PCI cards for everything else - video, sound, and find an old SCSI controller instead of IDE.
The board/cpu itself should be fully compatible with the older software, and using pci cards solves the problem with lack of drivers for the older hardware.

Software is often more expensive than the hardware it runs on, and yet you still have a warranty which provides repair/replacement in the event of physical defects but nothing in the case of software defects.

And how would these rating agencies select the code they were going to audit?
They can't audit everything, so they would prioritise... Vendors would pay to have their code audited, and perhaps try to corrupt the process to get a better rating. OSS code would not be able to pay to get audited, and thus would never have a rating at all.

There are already various governments operating such schemes, they are extremely expensive and slow, with the final result being a small cartel of incumbent suppliers where the "approved" versions are horrendously out of date and often suffer from known vulnerabilities.

Not being able to figure anything out is a bad thing, the more complex your system is the greater chance of there being bugs, and if your system is important or widespread enough then *someone* will take the effort to figure it out and probably understand it a lot better than the people tasked with running it.

Having a complete understanding of how a system works should not allow that system to be compromised if it's well designed. Never rely on obscurity.

And what about a bug in the sandboxing?
Combined with the presence of the sandbox giving the user a false sense of security...

More importantly is the fact that aircraft are operated by trained pilots, and maintained by trained maintenance staff - both of whom have to undergo rigorous tests to ensure they are capable of doing the job and have a very good understanding of the aircraft they're working on.

Systems today are too complex for the users, and even the supposed administrators to understand... And all these added layers of extra "security product" just compound the problem. Many organisations are simply unaware of all the risks because they have no idea how most of these things actually work.

The iPhone 3G was released in 2008, if you've been using it for the past 2 years then it was 4 years old when you *started* using it...

While it's true that Apple obsolete the hardware fairly quickly, using microsoft as a counter example is ridiculous... Microsoft were pushing windows mobile 6.x when the iPhone 3g came out, the hardware this ran on is also obsolete and cannot run current windows versions, and unlike the iPhone old apps won't run at all on current versions. Windows phone 7 came out in 2010, and this os (as well as the hardware it ran on) has already been abandoned.

Apple are probably the least terrible when it comes to obsoleting the hardware.

As for trusting google, that's just as bad as trusting microsoft... But at least with android, you have the option of custom non-google rome.

Microsoft are terrible at long term support in the phone market...
Windows mobile was completely dropped and replaced with something totally incompatible...
Windows phone 7 was short lived, and replaced with something incompatible and most (all?) windows phone 7 handsets cannot be upgraded to 8.
It seems windows phone 8 is no better than android, with several devices running 8.0 not getting the update to 8.1.

If you want decent support on a phone, get a handset that's well supported by third party android rome. Or even go for Apple, they tend to support their handsets far longer than most other manufacturers.

Only it won't create such a race, since there are only two parties they will simply collaborate and basically take turns. Having to wait a few years for your next turn is far better than having to compromise on your goals by competing, or risking losing out to a third party.

So how do you trust a company? Profit is their primary goal, and if they feel that hiding a breach like this will be more profitable than disclosing it that's exactly what happens... Meanwhile, you now potentially have to also trust some criminals who have already demonstrated their willingness to commit blackmail.