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Comment Re:Passes (Score 3, Insightful) 73

This is why I loathe the euphemisms for death. I realised this when the man I sailed for (for over a decade) died. It wasn't a massive surprise, but still a shock. To most of us it was the end of an era. What struck me was that most of the others talked about "him passing", whereas I simply said " he died", and I caught a couple of glances when I said it like that.

As another example - my sister was with friends (in a marina on a friend's boat - we like our sailing) and a guy walks down the companionway and said "X is gone". My sister stops talking (people come and go from marinas all the time), and then continues talking. The guy says " are you stupid or what - X has died ", making her feel like a shit.

People die, it happens, but dispense with the euphemisms - there's nothing to be gained from them.

Comment Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? (Score 1) 468

Yeah, but they're insanely good fun to drive - no traction control, no ABS and power-to-weight of more than 300bhp/tonne (483 for an Atom). You do have to accept that if you get hit by anything larger than a 4x4, you're probably not going to come out alive, so it certainly improved my driving technique: visibility, visibility, visibility & never assume that people realise how fast you can accelerate.

Comment Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? (Score 1) 468

Ariel atoms weight about 600kg (1350lb), my old Westfield weighed 425kg (according to the DVLA), but now comparing it to the atom I'm not so sure. Is was probably more like 640kg.

According to this website, their FW400 with a carbon fibre monocoque was 400kg.
http://westfield-world.com/inf...

Comment Re:idiotic (Score 1) 413

You do realise the investigation into the deaths is related to a Tory MP from the 80s, don't you? It has no relation to the palace or Jeffrey Epstein.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Your comment shows how badly this Anonymous campaign can go (if they actually bother to do it) - people find it a lot easier just to fling accusations around with no attempt to even do a simple fact check.

Comment Re:Application installers suck. (Score 1) 324

The root password - what desktop distro has one of those? Debian says "Enter your password for administrative tasks" when it needs to be elevated. I agree the Google Earth package is terrible, but it's pretty much the only one I've come across that doesn't manage its dependencies properly.

It's not the sparing 2 minutes, it's the fact that an installer looks (or says) like it will take 10 minutes to do something, so you walk off. When you come back you find a dialog asking to be clicked covering the progress bar that is still at 5%. This doesn't happen often, but it does enough to be incredibly annoying.

Another issue I have with Windows is the fact that the UAC window sometimes doesn't grab focus, so you sit there like a zombie waiting for something to happen, and then realise the UAC dialog has appeared behind everything, and the only notification is an extra icon in the task bar.

Comment Re:Application installers suck. (Score 1) 324

Also, the standalone installer doesn't actually contain chrome, it requests the current version. This is pretty handy as it means I have it on a USB stick along with reg keys for disabling the asinine "click to remove the overlay so you can decide who to log in as", etc, and still know it will be immediately up-to-date.

Comment Re:Doesn't really matter if they do patch it (Score 1) 629

The main reason to upgrade is for development, as well as the desire to be able to install my own CA (without having the constant "network may be monitored by third party" warning*)

Anyhow, this prompted me to have another look, and finally typed in the correct set of keywords to bring me to an explanation to sideload the OTA update - obviously my google foo has been weak, as I always seemed to find instructions on flash the firmware rather than updating. Anyhow, once I had 5.0 installed, it immediately gave me an update for 5.0.1, so I can only assume that you can't go from 4.4.4 to 5.0.1 without 5.0, and they've remove 5.0 from being received OTA, so unless you're happy using adb, then you're SOL.

* And if anyone is remotely interested - you still get the retarded "A third party is capable of monitoring your network activity..." warning, because it won't allow me to trust my own CA that I installed on my own device.

Comment Doesn't really matter if they do patch it (Score 3, Insightful) 629

Even if Google were to patch 4.3, it's unlikely that it would ever hit anyone's device as the manufacturers are so shit at pushing out updates. Not that this is a defence for not patching it - Jelly Bean was only released 2.5 years ago.

And it's not just some manufacturers, Google is just as guilty - my [2013] Nexus 7 asked me whether I wanted to upgrade to Lollipop, I was busy at the time, so I hit no. Now I can't get the thing see that there *is* a new version - 5.0.2 was released 3 weeks ago, and it still says "Your system is up to date". Like fuck it is.

Comment Re:So they are doing what? (Score 1) 509

Exactly, a Fatwa falls under "inciting violence as it is explicitly calling for somebody's murder, which *should be* illegal in the UK - it's illegal to order a contract killing. Unfortunately, as we've seen in the past, the CPS doesn't charge people issuing them, probably for the same reasons that the authorities didn't want to investigate the Rotherham sex abuse because, as past MP Denis MacShane said "I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that."

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