The Talmud (basically, the Jewish law codex) contains an interesting discussion about this. Consider one man dropping a pot from the top floor of a building, and before the pot hits the ground, a man walking in the street hit it with a stick and breaks it. Now, who is responsible for the vase breaking? The man on the ground actually broke it, but even if he didn't, it would have broken a second later when it hit the ground.
Similarly, when somebody fills a house with so many explosives they can no longer be gently disarmed, he already caused it to be destroyed. The fact it has not yet been destroyed, and the actual destruction will be caused a bit later (perhaps by a policeman lighting a match) doesn't change the fact that it was the tenant who started the inevitable destruction, not the police.

Most commenters in this discussion badmouth the traffic cops, and speeding laws, because they assume that these laws suck in South Africa, just like they suck in their own country like the USA or the UK and so on.

But in fact, when I visited South Africa, I was suprised to see that the situation is actually different - and better - in South Africa; In much of the rest of the world, speed limits are relatively arbitrary. E.g., the speed limit used to be 50 miles per hour throughout the US (although this changed somewhat in recent years), and is 90 km per hour in highways throughout Israel. Since modern cars can easily go much more than that, drivers have gotten used to break the speed laws all the time, and (rightly) feel the cops are pigs (to use the original poster's terms) and are out to get them - not to catch criminals.

But in South Africa, my experience (from driving along and around the N2 for about a week) is that the speed limit on the highway is *not* arbitrary. Every few miles, the speed limit changes depending on actual road conditions - sometimes when the road is bad, it is just 90 km/h, but in good stretches, it becomes 120km/h. My feeling in South Africa was that indeed, someone who goes over the posted speed limit is really doing something wrong. It is really dangerous to go over 120, and when the speed limit says 90, you would really be stupid to do over 90 because there is a real reason why this limit, and not 120, was posted.

When the speed limits make sense, and only criminals and crazy drivers break them, why would you want to fight a system to catch those criminals and crazy drivers?

So all the people badmouthing South Africa on this thread - better learn from South Africa (at least on this issue...) instead of just assuming that everything is wrong in that country.

This is actually not true. I've often been downloading TV series and movies from the 60's, 70's and 80's, things I would never see on today's Television channels but bittorrent allows me to watch. Think of any tv show you liked as a child (or your father liked as a child), be it Star Trek (the original series), Little House on the Prairie or whatever - and you can watch it on bittorrent.

This is ridiculous. Why say that the Ipad will kill the $2000 DVD player when.... The $100 DVD player has already killed it????

After all, for $100-$200 you can get a fine portable player which can: 1. Connect to car or home electricity (with Ipad you need to buy more power supplies). 2. Play physical dvd's and/or movies on flash disk or memory cards (Ipad only has internal memory), 3. hang on the front sit's head rest (the ipad doesn't come with any solution for that), 4. Sit comfortably on your horizontal lap while the display is tilted (you can't do this on the flat ipad).

So what is so new with the ipad in this sense?

The parent is described as "computer-handicapped", so let's put it in terms he or she will understand: Consider, instead those old-fashed toys of yesteryear. Or consider the TV which many kids of my generation had in their rooms.

Could you imagine a parent asking that his children's toys will automatically stop working on 10pm? Or that his TV cannot be turned on when the child is grounded, or perhaps show only certain channels at certain times? Or the toys checking themselves and letting the parent know when one of them gets broken?

This is all ridiculous, of course. With toys and TV you simply couldn't even imagine doing this. With a computer you can *imagine* doing it, but it doesn't mean it makes sense to do it. A child will always find ways to break such technological rules, especially if the parent is so-called "computer-handicapped".

I don't know about you, but the cocaine isn't the thing that worries me - I'm more worried about the fact that 90% of the bills I use have been up someone's nose!

I've been using Zsh (the Z shell) for years, because it had better completion, and a richer bourne-shell and ksh-based programming language including also associative arrays and the co-process.
So it would appear that bash finally caught up. But zsh has continued to improve. I'll be sticking with zsh for now, until I see that bash really caught up.