Posts by Rampant Spaniel

Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m

Re: Badge

You do know posts ( and their upvotes) as anonymous Noels don't count towards bronze and silver right :)

Facebook turns billion-dollar profit into tax refund

Re: Naive & sentimental comment -

There has to be some common sense, tax needs to be paid (and fair enough, not wasted either and its fair to debate how big government should be) but the current situation of politicians being for hire and companies being able to worm their way out of tax is just not one. I paid about 42% of my wage in direct federal and state tax this year. I got no break for school fees, I barely get a break for the nearly $30k in medical insurance premiums. I am sick and tired of being seen as a bottomless pit of money to be raided by either party. Enough money to have to pay tax, not enough to hide it and avoid tax. Screw AMT we need alternative maximum tax. This is supposed to be a democracy, not buy your way to a cheaper tax bill. We should all pay whats fair, but fair doesn't come into it for companies, they're selfish ****s but which politician is going to do anything about it and risk no funding for their next election.

Civilization peaks: BEER-dispensing arcade game created

Well said, as an expat I can concur. You won't get the same but you will get as good if you look. There's no point judging American beers on the basis of what you can get in an average bar. It's like judging British beer based on tesco lager (or burgers ;)). The market for decent boom juice is much smaller (as a percentage) than in the UK but the microbreweries do a great job. The odd one goes rogue and gets too commercial but there is no shortage of decent ale here although I do try and create one. Decent wine is a little harder to find but again it is out there.

You might not get the bishops fingers here but something like big swell ipa is alright :)

Firm moves to trademark 'Python' name out from under the language

yes assuming they want to be ranked #1 for phrases such as "moronic c***s" :) You are right though, this smells like the kind of stupidity that can only be created when the marketing team responds to an SEO spam email. Hey we can get you ranked #1 on google, it will only cost you your reputation and a lawsuit.

Satanic Renault takes hapless French bloke on 200km/h joyride

Re: Explicit Kill Switch

Oh so true!! Another one is friends trying to knock your sidestand down. Not great at lights, worse mid corner. I do appreciate the kill switches on bikes, I just notice that I do tend to flick it quite often when putting the cover on the bike and for some reason it's never the first thing I check when it won't start (I'm not a quick learner I guess!).

As for hands off the gas, this is true although you can ride no hands without much problem. All you need is 'budget cruise control' which requires no more than a rubber washer to provide a little friction and is not prone to random acceleration to full throttle.

Re: "he drove the car off the road when it ran out of petrol."

It's easy to be an armchair critic (I'm directing that at myself) but perhaps grinding the car into the armco might have slowed it down enough to safely deploy a stinger. You wouldn't actually have to hit anything head on, just pull alongside it then move closer and closer until you hit it then gradually increase the pressure. Or use that concrete wall they are fond of over there.

Also where there is a steep grade there is often a gravel trap for run away trucks, it's unlucky he didn't pass one! Given his issues with the car, he probably would have been ok with writing it off and getting a pug as a replacement!

Any other ides on how to stop a run away car?

If nothing else this has convinced me that electronic throttle controls are not worth it!

Re: Explicit Kill Switch

Funnily enough my bike has one, although it is in a place where it is frequently knocked :) Thinking about it, I can't recall a modern bike that I have ridden that doesn't have a kill switch of some kind on the handlebar, usually in an easy to reach \ knock position.

There are two problems that I can see, 1- somebody will always accidentally knock it, sods law says they do this and injure themselves and sue you and 2- if there is a sufficiently clever way of doing it, most buggers won't ever read the manual anyway. When I get a bike I get the shop manual and read it. I take it home, take it apart and put it back together because I'm deeply cynical and don't fancy riding around on something put together by the works exp kid who had 20 other bikes to de-crate and prep. Some folks go SHINY TOY and the destruction manual lives in the glove box\desk drawer collecting dust.

Whilst you are entirely correct, I think even if they did it we would still get these stories or ones about people accidentally turning off their car and crashing. We just let too many morons survive.

Spanish cops cuff 11 for €1m-a-year ransomware scam

Given the amount you can earn at RBS it would appear crime does still pay!

I know the guys at the top will be paid a lot more than those at the bottom (which doesn't really make it any better, it just widens the spread) and that things are pretty poor in Spain right now, I just find it crazy that people are willing to risk so much for a middle management wage? I guess we are all wired differently, but as mentioned above (the 2000 quid hitmen) some people are way off the other end of the bell curve. I guess Hollywood conditions us to expect billion dollar electronic bank heists etc rather than murdering someone for the price of a 10 year old base model Corsa.

I know a million is a fair amount, but split 11 ways, even in Spain, thats not a huge sum of money. Lifes about risk and reward right? Most of us have a price for most things. If you have a chance to steal some money and the same risk of being caught irrespective of the amount, you are more likely to chance it if theres 100 million then if its 50 quid.

Either they are too stupid to believe they would get caught (like the bt copper rippers) or they have a very low price. Maybe it's just me but I always seem to find myself shocked at how little many of the criminals are making considering the risk they take.

Could you build a data-nomming HPC beast in a day? These kids can

Sounds like fun, any chance of them allowing an el reg commentard wildcard team in? Perhaps with the caveat that we would use only the most outlandish system? Liquid cooled raspberry pi super cluster? or a rack of dell c6100's from fleabay :-)

Official: America now a nation of broadband whingers

Re: reason to whine

Same here, one cable co (decent speed, high price), one traditional telco (bankrupt, slow, cheap) and the usual slew of wireless efforts. Sat is out due to HOA's from hell banning anything that upsets their demented angry retired asses.

I do kind of understand the logic behind offering markets and exclusivity with cable but when you effectively give a monopoly to a company then you have to be able to force them to update services and monitor pricing, as happens with water and power (at least in theory, in practice they do what the hell they want and the PUC rubber stamps it and collects the brown paper bag).

I'd have to agree my experience of both countries is the opposite. What might get passed off as 'whinging' is usually sarcasm (a national sport in England) or just jokes. We do tend to make plenty of excuses about certain sporting losses which is mostly what the Anzacs refer to, but this is mostly because they spent many years being considerably better than us at Rugby as we needed excuses even more than an Arsenal manager.

As for America, there is an element of entitlement creeping in (actually gushing in) which is resulting in more whining and less doing, but by and large I have always respected America for its ability to get stuff done by sheer might. Living and working in America really opens your eyes to whats behind the misconceptions many people have of America and Americans.

Generalizations fail miserably though, they are usually based in some element of truth over a certain percentage of a group but normally only enough to get noticed rather than enough to reliably be used.

Different countries do tend to have a different approach to problems. Take the Dambusters raid. We know the British approach, find a simple method of solving the issues of altitude and distance, spotlight altimeters and simple wooden bomb aimer that lined up with towers on the dam. Now had the Americans been conducting the raid I believe their approach would have been simple, send 20x as many bombers, using their advantage in size and basically just used brute force and sizable manufacturing resource. Had the Japanese been doing it I believe they would have probably had a fairly complicated manual timing system (watches and adjustment tables) or just simply flown the planes into the dam. The German's would likely have a similar timing system to the Japanese but based on a mechanical timing system that automatically factored in wind etc. None of them are bad \ better \ worse (unless you happen to be on team Japan as a suicide pilot), but countries tend to develop techniques for solving problems that play to their strengths be it industrial strength, ingenuity or a powerful devotion to a leader.

Just as we do that, we have different attitudes to problems, some joke, some are sarcastic, some quietly fix things, some whine. I would never underestimate the Americans. Piss them off and they can get stuff done and still do if politics isn't involved.

Must go, the cat just 'cut the cheese' (in American parlance) in the office.

Public told to go to hell, name Pluto's two new moons

Calvin and Hobbers :)

Big Windows updates may ship this summer – and every summer

Apple have a deliberate strategy or releasing frequent incremental, sanely priced, updates to their OS. There are a few reasons for this. Nice even yearly cashflow is one. Another is the the OS evolves over time in nice little incremental jumps, theres no huge jump to something 'strange' every 3-4 years, less people hold on until the next SP etc. The downsides are people only really compare each OS to the last one so it seems not to change much. I'm sure there are more of each :)

MS in the past have left quite a few years between each release to make a 'big bang' with each release and have tended to charge at least $100 to upgrade. What tends to happen is a bunch of folks get freaked out by big changes and never upgrade, another bunch wait at least a year before making the jump and plenty more get sticker shock (yet the same folks probably won't mind paying $40 a year every year but would freak at paying $120 in one go).

Both companies have great products and not so great products. I put win 8 on a laptop to play with and once I got used to it, its pretty decent for playing around etc, metro works quite well (especially on a touchscreen) but I'm sticking with win 7 on work computers. I think MS missed a trick by not allowing you to have a 'classic' mode on win 8. It really wouldn't have killed them to do it and it would give it a wider range of appeal.

So similar to apples model? Frequent, cheaper updates. Seems to make sense and might move away from the 'waiting for sp1' syndrome if releases are less clearly defined.

Google exec defends search snooping, location tracking

Re: What a load of self serving tosh..

The nail is pretty well concussed!

BTW I wish I went to your school, 25% wasn't even a U :) 25% was when they asked you why you were deliberately giving incorrect answers! IIRC D was about 60%

HP clamps down on student labor in Chinese factories

Sure, HP or whoever doesn't want its vendors to GET CAUGHT using kids to screw together $300 laptops. If you want a laptop that costs sod all every corner will but cut. Just like when you want your microwaveable lasagna to cost 99p you get all the drugged up donkey you deserve in it. At the end of the day it's unrealistic to expect things like this not to happen when we put unrealistic expectations on the supply chain. We get all upset when another iphone\nexus\whatever factory gets raided and they find the employees that haven't been blown up are underage and being forced to work there by their school, but we still want out stuff cheaper than last year. Apple are the worst, they do it to keep their 30% margins.

200 million office workers gagging for a... Microsoft Surface?

Re: What's a "Surface"?

probably because of the way the question was worded :)

Q Would you like a surface to work on?

A Hell yes don't steal my desk!

Study: Gay marriage support linked to pr0n consumption

Re: re: Mechanism please.

I think being quiet is the problem :) Most topics these days (of the social kind) are debated by the extremes and those of us in the middle are too quiet. We need to be louder and then we might end up with more sensible, practical compromises.

Mechanism please.

This is absolute BS. Without a mechanism you have nothing more than a pretty graph from SPSS that highlights a coincidence (at best). There is a strong correlation between opposition to gay marriage and c**tishness. Marriage predates Christianity ergo they have no claim over the usage of the word.

LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks

I would love to see Base expanded to become more of a viable alternative to Access. Even the ability to access tables in other files (to allow for a front end \ back end split) would be welcomed.

It's great to see it maturing, I haven't upgraded MS Office in years but it's nice to know theres a decent free alternative.

Fed confirms but downplays Anonymous Super Bowl banker hack

The Illuminati?

The only club Bouncey is less likely to be a member of is Mensa.

Solar undercuts coal in New Mexico

FYI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage

70% efficiency isn't perfect, but 70% of the excess is better than 0%.

There's a lot of progress in using compressed air storage to act as a battery or buffer for energy sources like solar \ wind etc. It's pretty cheap and a lot better than the whole pumping between two lakes up and down a mountain approach.

Of course they still need coal or alternate methods, but that doesn't mean they cannot use solar, in general electricity use is highest during the day, industry at work, people at work \ home \ school etc rather than being asleep. Solar will take some of the pain off traditional plants allowing better scaling and reducing the need to invest in new traditional infrastructure. Why the hating on solar? It's not THE solution, but it is part of it.

Samsung: Never mind Steve Jobs, let's snap off a piece of stylus biz

Re: What will Oil companies do..

I predict them being very popular with teenage girls (after wearing out harry's broom) and theres potential for selling them with a free copy of 50 shades!

Report: Over 1.5 million UK drivers will have hydrogen cars by 2030

Re: What will Oil companies do..

Perhaps not, hYdrogen is likely to come from water using oodles of badger friendly offshore wind platform things or whatever shockingly wasteful and ghastly expensive 'eco friendly' disaster on wheels the junket brigade pick out of a hat.

Electrolysis is by far the most likely method as all you need is water and elecktrickery and you also get oxygen which you can sell. If you use seawater on a large enough scale you might even make a bit of money selling other 'stuff' (theres actually all sorts of stuff in seawater besides salt, uranium for example). There is a chance that gas might be an economical form of energy for the power generation given the new scale gas craze.

The UK is lucky that many supermarkets have petrol stations whereas in other countries the majority of stations are owned by oil companies who might be ok with lpg but are unlikely to be jumping for joy at hydrogen.

Hydrogen isn't ideal in many ways but if generated by electrolysis then it might reduce the impact on our food resources caused by the monumentally retarded use of grain for ethanol (the Russians and Polish have a far better process) for fuel. It hopefully will also stop the even worse idea that digging up metals from vast tracts of South America to ship them around the world twice to end up in 'hybrids'. If they can make it survive an impact, do 260-300 miles on a 'tank' and cost about the same per mile as petrol \ gas then it's probably a decent idea, as long as we can sort out power generation without it costing a bloody fortune like those ship magnets they are obsessed with. It will likely start off cheap then as soon as people switch the govt will whack a shedload of tax on it.

Samsung mocks Apple lawsuit in SuperBowl teaser ad

Re: Misquote?

Yeah, samsung doesn't make any popular phones! Thats why Apple are trying so hard to cause trouble, because they aren't worried at all.

The S3 did ok, might even be a few folks waiting for an s4, they might even get it home without being robbed. Just because thousands of people don't camp out for weeks waiting for a phone doesn't mean it's crap. Shit you wanna see devotion, try thinking back to the queues outside toys r us for tracey island's!

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster remembered 10 years on

Re: The rescue options?

Sad but true. Personally I believe, given the risks they take, if a rescue had been possible (and if it was the best option to get them home safely) then it needed to happen. No arguments about cost, just a simple is it the best way if so do it.

Keeping them alive in orbit would be a matter of keeping them warm, watered, CO2 scrubbed and O2 levels acceptable. There has to be a contingency plan for shuttles to stay up longer due to bad weather so they could have managed to hold on until help arrived.

As for refusing access to ground telescopes and 'spy sats' on cost grounds, thats truly insane. What kind of souless beancounter would make that decision? Sure retasking a sat isn't easy nor is access cheap, but it isn't about money it is about responsibility. NASA were responsible for their safety, there shouldn't be any bean counting going on.

Commentards Ahoy! How about a Petabyte of storage?

Re: USB 3.0

Just for giggles, costco has 4tb usb 3.0 drives for about $170 on special :) Nice to see the drive prices falling again. Can you imagine the power plug chaos with that many external drives :)

Re: Q to the Reg

hmm very tempted to downvote for a non ironic use of management speak. Shame on you Drew! :)

Re: re: Anon in regards to space for programs...

Just search for any .ppt files with "camel toe" or "jamie oliver cookbook" in the file name, should free up a couple of hundred GB on any companies mail servers. People are also unlikely to complain, at least not twice.

BBC: What YOU spent on our lawyers in Secret Climate 28 debacle

If those scientists have any place discussing climate change it is likely that they have already published papers on the matter. Some of them are even quoted openly in the press, Baron May for example so any stance they already had was public knowledge, just like the list.

I am curious as to why the BBC had someone from the Church of England there?

Re: Downvoted, eh?

It did always make me chuckle that they couldn't just use video conferencing, not when theres an excuse for a junket!

Some great posts here, loved the comment about downvotes. A sure sign you pissed on some whackjobs chips.

Re: fooey

Plenty of them are, and theres just as many 'tree hugger' shills spouting phoney science. Thats the nature of things. Left unchecked business would undoubtably turn the planet into a giant slag heap, China is trying it's best to do so (the irony isn't lost on me). However, the basic truth is we simply do not know for sure how much impact we are having, how much is part of a natural cycle and how much our impact would be curbed by natural feedback. Thats before we even look at how possible feedback would affect us, like would it be algal blooms, do we mind them etc.

Right now we probably need to be curbing our impact (which it seems is starting to happen in the western world) and trying to use some real science to figure out what is going on not statistical models that have been fudged to make an ideological point.

Some great comments! I can understand the need to protect true journalistic sources, but that doesn't include people who help you develop an editorial policy on a topic. The bbc's most valuable asset is its ability (in theory) to be totally independant. The bbc can spill the beans on anybody and anything including itself without fear of advertisers taking their money elsewhere. The beeb can also comission content that adds value to society (wildlife on one etc) rather than having to appeal solely to the lowest common denominator and produce endless trash.

The fact the the bbc feels the need to waste 20k trying to hide a list which is already in the public domain and should be public knowledge anyway, well the saddest thing is it isn't shocking.

There are journalistic sources and there are technical experts. One requires protection and the other the exact opposite. If I proclaim to be an expert in something and am hired on my reputation then it is only right that my reputation be on the line if I am wrong. Thats kind of how a reputation works.

This stinks of somebody in the bbc news having their own agenda and trying to influence the news. Cherry picking a panel of 'experts' and keeping them secret so you can make a story one sided is not journalism, it is propaganda. Carry on down that path and you get Fox news, msnbc and Comical Ali, although perhaps not in that order!

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square

Re: "The only issue..."

Olader versions of access used to have some amusing americacentric ways of dealing with dates but I can't remember having that issue with excel.

Access isn't awesome, but it can do some serious work if you stick within its intended scope. Despite having oracle to play with, access was the easiest way to quickly put together a project before lunch. It was shocking if you wanted to support 80 people, but when you worked in an environment where you would need to finish 2-3 different projects a day modelling data from customer accounts it did the job well, on pretty standard desktops for not that much money. It may have been 'dirty' but it could be pretty quick. I'm probably biased though :-) I think people expected it to be able to be oracle+forms etc all in a neat package when in reality it's a baby database with a decent ide that if you are desperate you can tie into a real db backend.

RIM blows on the dice, gets ready for its FINAL THROW

****ing managers

I just read elsewhere rim is being renamed blackberry. What an absolute waste of time and money that would have been better spent on bb10. It's not even like they had a bad rep (like NTL) or that their branding was confusing. Rebranding is not cheap, everything from website designs, letterheads, signage, contracts, swipe cards etc, everything has to change or the brand nazis get you and in a big company that isn't cheap! I can half understand a company like NTL rebranding, not that it would fool customers any, but rim needs compelling products not a name change that the vast majority of customers wouldn't notice anyway.

Naked intruder cracks one off in Florida rampage drama

Re: Intractable "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

Matt it was a joke. If you looked at what I have written I have been critical of both extremes.

Yes the UK went too far, but not by that much. The same solution wouldn't work in the US anyway, far higher gun ownership and far more guns in criminals hands. I don't advocate banning handguns, I think we need to create a situation where people don't feel they need a gun to be safe then the vast majority of the issues have gone away anyway.

We do need to look at ensuring guns are stored safely (and actually checking and making owners responsible for that), restricting the most lethal guns (primarily those with the ability to fire rapidly from a high capacity clip \ magazine ) and closing loopholes in buying weapons. We don't need to go overboard on banning weapons but we do need to drop the BS about it being down to video games.

There are a lot of factors contributing to gun misuse, social factors like education and a lack of parental guidance, piss poor mental healthcare for the poor etc. Just as much effort needs to be devoted to that. However the NRA won't budge and want to blame it all on movies and video games. That is what I meant. Not to mention the BS about how it's only ever gun free zones that shootings happen in, yeah fort hood is really a gun free zone. The same goes for the loony left who want to ban everything harder than shaving foam, thats a waste of time even discussing it. What do they think will happen? Gun owners will say oh ok then if they shout loud enough?

Both sides need to drop the BS and work on a real solution that fixes the actual problem. Responsible people with guns is not the problem. Loonies and criminals with guns is the problem.

Re Tony Martin,

Whilst I am not a fan of excessive force, Mr Martin had been the victim of multiple burglaries which the police had been unable to do anything about. As a society we devolved the responsibility for civil protection to the police. Between underfunding, a toothless justice system, piss poor rehabilitation and a general issue with society creating a significant amount of criminals the police are unable to provide a level of protection that we would all like to have. I don't condone shooting fleeing burglars in the back, but I do have an element of sympathy for Mr Martin.

If you have ever lived on a farm you might have an idea of just how remote you can be. The police might only be a few minutes away from your semi in an emergency but they can be half an hour away from a farm the same goes for the other emergency services. When you are in a situation where you are repeatedly burgled and left to feel helpless because the people who are supposed to protect you cannot, then it becomes a little more understandable that Mr Martin would be pushed to more drastic action. When you do not feel safe in your own home things change. Yes it wasn't ideal, but the ideal solution was the police catch the pikeys breaking into his farm, that didn't happen. I hope I wouldn't resort to what he did, but I can understand why he did. I haven't been in that situation, but I have had to wait 30 minutes for an ambulance whilst doing CPR (you try doing 15 minutes of pressups) because some moron tourist got drunk and caused a pileup at the same time somebody had a heart attack in the water. Thankfully an AED and oxygen saved the person, but unless you have felt that helpless you can't really understand. I'm not saying he was right, just that it is understandable given how he was let down. Manslaughter diminished responsibility seemed like the right sentence.

Re: Intractable "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

@intractable.

Thanks for the kind words. I wouldn't worry too much about visiting the USA without a weapon. Hawai'i has no concealed carry, relatively low gun ownership (lots of hunting keeps it from being the lowest), and no concealed carry. Other than strapped to a police officer or when out hunting you aren't going to see a gun in Hawai'i. I also think that my not having a gun helped stop the situations I got into from escalating, although I also understand that had they escalated further a gun would have been handy. I did consider buying a gun but on balance I felt for home protection a baseball bat is effective enough and has less risk of collateral damage (again I respect my choice may be different from others :) ).

The whole situation is pretty screwed, i know a few canuks through work and they just cannot understand how some people won't compromise or see an kind of middle ground. Between the ultra libs who want to ban anything more lethal than a spork and the ultimate warrior types who batten down the hatches and scram the guberments coming for my guns theres very little chance of any common sense occurring. What we will get is a bunch of half hearted and mostly useless laws. The NRA and their counterparts exacerbate the situation, like some unions they push shit way too far to maintain popularity. Unfortunately normal folks don't tend to have lobby groups so we (and middle of the road compromises) get lost in the shouting.

As much as I respect the right to bear arms and how important it is, especially for home protection in some areas, there has to be some level of compromise about more extreme weapons. A handgun with 10 rounds is capable of doing a lot of damage, but when you have someone storming a school with a semi auto with a high capacity magazine and a pump action shotgun they are going to be able to do a lot more damage and be a lot harder to stop.

Only a few republicans were harmed in the making of this sense.

Re: "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

Sisk is entirely correct. The states created the federal government and devolved limited powers to it. There are many areas where the federal government has no power whatsoever beyond being able to bribe states (like forcing states to adopt a speed limit or face the federal government not providing funding for highways). This is largely at odds to what most of us know from lives in constitutional monarchies and similar. I'm not sure it is any better or worse, just making a clarification for those of us who would assume the federal government largely had carte blanche. This is no small way contributed to the local motorcycle licence test being a 30 question multiple choice test and a quick wobble around some cones. Forget all the simulations cbt \ das etc in the UK. After proving you can ride a scooter around a cone you are entitled to ride a pangiale or a zx14. Not that any locals can pronounce pangiale :) Apparently it's pan-e-gail.

As for banning cars for causing more deaths, you'd need to look at the number of people who own a car or a gun and how often they use each. Roughly there are more guns than cars, but more car owners than gun owners. I really would not like to try and figure out but I would love to see harder road tests and harsher punishments for drunk driving. A friends wife was recently killed by a drunk driver in a truck (no licence, drunk, crossed the centerline whilst using his cellphone), the driver was out of prison before the wifes passenger was out of hospital. Apparently it's ok because he was sorry and he was just driving home from the bar which is a well known situation when it's ok to drive pissed.

Re: "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law

@Juan

Fingerprint \ biometric bedside gun safes open very quickly, you would likely have the gun in your hands before you wiped the sleep out of your eyes :-)

If you want to take shots at gun owners you do need to understand the situation and also realise not everybody who has a weapon thinks they're the love child of Chuck Norris and Rambo. There are a whole shitload of nutters with guns, but theres also a lot of normal, responsible people who keep a gun secured for home protection, sport or work (pest control \ livestock etc). Not everyone who owns an Audi is a tit, I'm sure there are normal Audi owners who know how to use an indicator and don't tailgate you at 120mph. Not everyone who owns a gun or supports the rights of others to do so is a loon :-)

Theres no way in hell I would sleep with an unsecured weapon in the house. Thats how kids get shot. Way too many people have weapons that aren't secured because this is the united states of I don't have to be responsible for my own actions. It would seem (the reports I read were all vague) that is how the gunman got his mothers weapons when he shot the kids Sandy hook recently.

Re: "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

@ Matt, no worries :-) if it has 2 wheels you can make it fun ! The winja was only a rental, it was that or a gs and I still have some self respect. You can even get your knee (but not albow :-() down on a vespa. Next bike is probably a triumph explorer but the new daytona r has my eye. Roads are too bad here for the daytona though. The kwakas are alright, just a bit more unpredictable in handling over say a honda (which can be good or bad). I really miss the Lake district for fun rides though.

Re: "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

@ Matt

Worse than a pink Vespa, it was a ninja which apparenting made me a '****ing gook' as I dared to ride it in chopper land. Apparently some people take things like that very seriously!

The press does itself no credit trying to spin stories that show things working as they should. Like the recent story about an off duty cop who shot a loony attempting to storm a cinema with a semi auto rifle. The 'right' said the 'left' media tried to supress the story. Shit the 'left' loved that story because it was guns and gun law working. If a cinema full of people started attempting to defend themselves (with varying amounts of training, skill and gun types) in a darkened room you would end up with a lot of dead people. Somebody with extensive training and experience shot a loony, this is how it is supposed to work. Trying to spin it makes you look like mentalists who think you won't get pregnant from being raped. How they dare call it fox, foxes are smarter than them! They should rename it wilted shrub or krill.

Re: "a little more careful murdering people under the Stand Your Ground law "

I would hope the warning shots were fired up, the vast majority of American homes are made mostly of wood and there would be a risk of a stray bullet fragment injuring someone. Unpopular as it seems to be to suggest it, but they do seem to have been relatively restrained in their response. 3 warning shots is fair warning. If my kids had been in the house and it was me with the gun and he was running to my kids room there wouldn't have been a need for a 5th shot. However, I'm happy sticking at the baseball bat + angry cat level of home protection for now.

It is easy to assume that all gun owners are nutters, most of the ones I knew growing up were drunk farmers (although they treated guns with respect), but unfortunately there was a definite spin put on this article because it's currently an easy cheap shot. Not all gun owners wander down the high street kitted out like they are hunting Predators. Some people live in places where mental, hopped up carnies break into your house, drink your carpet cleaner and hump your shag pile. I think I'd sleep a little easier with a gun in a safe by my bed if I lived there especially if my kids were in the house.

I would love to live in a country where nobody felt the need to carry, but until the police \ justice system & rehabilitation programmes are resourced appropriately and deliver the results I respect people wanting to protect themselves and their families in their home. There are however the fruitcakes who take it too far but thats another story. Now sure pretty much everyone will jump on the bandwagon and whack the downvote button, and yes guns are crap especially in the wrong hands, but until the underlying problem is fixed I can understand why some people feel the need to protect themselves in that manner.

In over 30 years in the UK I never had a gun pointed at me, in the US it's happened on average once a year (once because I was riding the wrong style of motorcycle?) and I rarely visit states that allow carry. It's a different world over there!

Don't like your cell network? Legal unlocking ends TONIGHT in US

Re: So who gave this Librarian so much power,anyway ?

The financial gain \ commercial gain sounds like its aimed at shops doing it. If i unlock my own phone just so i can use it on another network wouldn't seem to come under those right?

Can I unlock it when I go abroad on vay cay shun then bring it back in the country unlocked?

I had hoped given the severity of the financial crisis the guberment would be working on more important matters than this, like perhaps the shonky tax code?

So is it illegal to unlock your own but network operators can still unlock them???

Nothing to do with all those iphones ending up on tmobs network then.

If the net ops wanted this it will hurt them. I'll just buy an unlocked phone from amazon and use it on mobipcs :-)