Change 'hobby' to 'social drinking'. How about we take this logic and apply it to alcohol (as it relates to deaths due to drunk driving)? Any takers? If not, why not?

Well, although the UK haven't taken the extreme measure of banning alcohol, the penalties for driving or attempting to drive with excess alcohol are quite severe. The minimum penalty is a 1 year driving ban for a first offence (3 years ban if previously convicted within 10 years) and a fine of 125% of relevant weekly income (maximum £5,000), rising to a maximum of 5 years driving ban, and 6 months imprisionment (just for the driving offence, not taking into account any penalties for any other crimes committed at the time).

-- Pete.

I do my part, as a European I actively boycott travel to the USA. There have been several opportunities for both myself and others to take trips to the USA, and I have proposed and worked with alternative plans every time. It's not a lot, but it's what I can do.

As long as the USA has insane paranoid immigration policies and the TSA I will not travel there, and neither will my immediate family. (I did go to Miami many years ago for a conference, but that was back when things were still sensible)

"Visa Waiver" my ass, that's just a visa-lite. If I need to apply to enter, they can forget it. The last countries I needed to request a visa to enter were Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and as far as I could tell that was just a glorified way of squeezing extra cash out of visitors - and at least they didn't demand fingerprints and invasive grilling by border-guards. Mauritania border guards just wanted a small cash donation, and the others were happy with a ballpoint pen, an apple (he actually wanted sweets, but all we had was fruit) and an empty fuel-canister.

-- Pete.

(yes, in our household we still use wooden blocks and other toys that don't come in fancy packaging, and yes our kids can pretend that just about anything is phone, or a car, or a plane)

That's kids for you - my 1 yo daughter recently grabbed a pack of toothbrushes from the shopping trolley as we went around the supermarket, and started babbling into it as if it were a cellphone.

-- Pete.

Oh, and where the hell is the "per post" checkbox to indicate not to use the Karma Bonus? I know it used to exist, and some of my posts just aren't worthy of the +1. I don't want to turn it off on all my posts, but it's nice to sometimes preemptively mod myself down to 1.

And if you buy AppleCare you not only get Apple warranty for three years instead of one, but free phone support on top of that.

I live in Belgium, and my first year warranty came up on Monday this week for my MacBookPro Retina. I came very close to buying AppleCare, but I baulked at the cost at the last moment (340 Euro). With this new ruling, I'm glad I gave it a miss, if it only gives me 1 additional year of coverage, and free support calls that I won't use anyway...

Having said that, I've had quite a bad run with AppleCare, I bought it for my first MacBookPro, which was then stolen 1 week after I activated the AppleCare - AppleCare doesn't help much for a stolen laptop... I then didn't buy it for my replacement MacBookPro, which developed a fault (pink areas on the screen that should be white) after about 2 years and 360 days...doh.

-- Pete.

It was whoever that posted that ridiculous Tweet that deserved to be fired

She was fired. The two people who were fired was one of the devlopers making the jokes, and the woman who ignited a firestorm by tweeting it. Check the article carefully.

-- Pete.

It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.

Thanks to those ads back in the day X10 made it onto my "never ever buy" list. Whenever I hear about X10 (even now) those ads are the first thing that jump into my mind, and I suddenly become highly disinterested in purchasing.

-- Pete.

My point is that it is *incredibly* trivial to connect to a wireless router that has DHCP enabled and just use an IP address of your choosing

I recently ran into issues at home due to relying on this. I bought a firewall for my network, and assigned it as the DHCP server, I planned to have a DHCP allocation higher in the subnet, and to have most of my devices self-allocate an IP address lower down in the subnet (so I didn't need to have a static allocation via DHCP). To my surprise the self-allocated IPs weren't working, and couldn't get an outside connection, but anything allocated via DHCP could.

It seems that my firewall by default drops anything coming from an address not assigned via DHCP (which is nice actually, as it stops the behaviour listed in the quote). So I had to reserve DHCP addresses for my "known" devices, and have them assigned that way. Once I have everything assigned, I can restrict DHCP to the range of known devices, so anything else trying to connect will need to spoof a MAC to get an IP, and runs a very strong change of colliding (hence alerting me, and disrupting the offending traffic).

-- Pete.

I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.

Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.

This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.

-- Pete.

I have a time machine backup to an external hard-drive, I store important data additionally on a NAS with RAID-5 (the next time I buy a NAS it'll be RAID-6 with high reliability disks [URE rate of at least 10^15]), and I also upload to an online service.

I'm still toying with backing up the NAS to AWS, but I just don't have enough upstream bandwidth to make it comfortable.

-- Pete.

I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.

Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.

This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.

-- Pete.

I am buying all my reading material as e-books where possible now - I have an iPad and a Kindle, but I only use the iPad for reading large page PDF files, the Kindle is used for novels etc.

My main irritation is when I see e-books priced more expensively than hardcover books. Sure, I understand that ebooks are taxed at full rate in the UK as opposed to a reduced rate for paper books, but on the flip side there's no printing, materials, quality control, shipping, etc which is needed with physical goods. If I try and buy an ebook and it's above the price of the printed copy, then it's off my list of things to buy for a few years until it becomes reasonably priced.

-- Pete.

In a room of about 20 people you have a 50/50 chance of having the same birthday as someone else in the room.

No, no, no, no, no! In a room of about 20 people there is a 50/50 chance of having two people with the same birthday. This is absolutely different of you having the same birthday as someone else, which is about 5.5% chance.

-- Pete.

Ahh, I remember Sabena, I flew with them on fairly frequent flights from Brussels to UK in 2001, tickets were cheap as dirt, and the plane was almost empty as no-one trusted that the airline would still be in business the next week. I didn't mind one bit (I saved more than enough on my flights, and paid via credit card in case they went bust - if I lost a flight it wouldn't be the end of the world) - on a couple of flights the flight attendants outnumbered the passengers, so there was excellent service.

Of course they did eventually go bust in November 2001, and SN Brussels Airlines rose from the ashes, later becoming Brussels Airlines.

-- Pete.