Perhaps choosing the cheapest legal solution is a better middle road?

I'm very sympathetic to that argument. My problem with SOPA was that it forced every ISP to help enforce someone else's property rights.

If you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you fire good staff next time around.

Alternatively: if you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you fire their "average" replacements next time around?

In practice, many firms eliminate the "average" section of staff and replace with fresh grads who aren't particularly likely to be better than "average" but are cheap.

Rinse and repeat often enough (and preferably with an incentive scheme that justifies average starting pay and ridiculous working hours with the promise of fantastic rewards if you manage not to get fired for the first three years) and bizarrely, you get a reputation for high standards.

You're referring to capitalism, the game where rich parents raise their entrepeneurial offspring.

You got me here. At the time of writing of my original comment it didn't occur to me that capitalism is an example of a game thst doesn't set the rules to level the playing field. I guess I was thinking about games with well-defined victory conditions and relatively short play time.

Scrabble is a play of words or meaning? Perhaps you're looking for the triple word scrore in today's crossword puzzle as well?

Steve Jobs is dead because he wouldn't listen to other people.

Irony being that some of these "native brits" would be descended from Indian/Pakistani immigrants.

Even more ironic is that these 2/3rd gen Brits are not to keen on the newer Eastern European immigrants.

I remember being a bit shocked by one of my school mates (on of the Ugandan Asians expelled by Amin) saying that he could understand voting for the BNP.

Yet more ironic is as yet unnaturalised migrants railing against immigrants - was a few days ago chatting to a Russian lass in London who was complaining about "Eastern Europeans" coming and taking "our jobs".

I just find the whole concept of nationality bizarre.

> I just find the whole concept of nationality bizarre.

Then let go of it and call it what it is - cages for the tax cattle.

Huge drop in oil prices has driven inflation lower (oil had been high for a long time). Nothing to see here.

tl;dr increasing urban density => decreasing car use

Truth is, more cars are being sold than ever before, but even this is levelling out.

Global bicycle production per capita, on the other hand, has halved since the 1970's

... so your boot isn't really 'locked' at all?

OnStar has been able to unlock your car remotely for 15 years... this looks like a creative use of that system. If you disagree, you should manually disconnect the OnStar system.

Up until ~2009MY cars, if you didn't pay for OnStar, they never activated your vehicle and they would never have access.

I think it was mostly a liability / strategy decision rather than a cost one, but you can imagine people calling up and begging OnStar to start a subscription when they need it and then cancelling immediately after. Or trying to subscribe if their car was stolen to track it down..

There is basically a one time access code that the deliveryman can enter to unlock it. After that, it's locked.