Or do what the Japanese do: every bike has a serial number etched into the frame and is registered to you (similar to a car). If your bike is ever stolen, the police can trivially find it by the serial number and return it.
I believe every modern bike has a unique frame number stamped. If the police recovered a known-stolen bike it could be returned. However, buyers and bike shops don't make a habit of running frame numbers past the theft database, so it's mostly useless.
Every car has a serial number in several places, in theory it should be trivial to find a stolen one, yet plenty of cars are stolen each yer. Clearly this does not solve the problem.
It solves the problem in Japan. Japan just isn't like other countries; they have citizens who actually care about their society and don't want to be seen as leeches on it.
It's no wonder they don't want to import a bunch of foreigners. I can just imagine how their society would be completely ruined if they allowed millions of Americans to move in. Bike theft would be the least of their problems.
The question is - would japan have a bike theft problem without bike registration scheme? I suspect not, for the reasons you mentioned. In which case, the registration numbers are more of a curiosity than anything.
My own country(Poland) had mandatory bike registration 30 years ago(during communist rule) and no, it didn't stop bike theft.
This is another example of something that works great in Japan and wouldn't work at all elsewhere. In other countries (esp. anywhere in the Americas), this would never work, because there's no shortage of someone willing to buy something that may be stolen.
You will never get people to stop discriminating against those who they deem "disgusting" or "deviant" in some way, so the best thing is to keep matters private as much as possible. It's just not in some people's nature to live and let live - they are absolutely sure they know what's right and wrong. Or just look at donglegate - two guys make a joke between themselves, which is deemed offensive to women and both lose their jobs. In such a political climate it is absolutely not safe to share any personal details anywhere public. People have lost their livelihoods for posting that they don't like their jobs or their manager on facebook and forgetting to make the post private.
So no, I am absolutely not OK with allowing the sharing of my private life. I'm not OK with people knowing what dark jokes I've said about Nazis, I'm not OK with people knowing how I've cursed a minority in a moment of anger, I'm not OK with anyone knowing what I wrote in my diary.
I know that you can't stop the flow of information and that you're responsible for protecting yourself, but we should have some law to offer recompense to the party whose private life was exposed.
I guess this post was provoked by the recent Hogan vs Gawker case. I'm a bit divided on that - on the one hand it obviously damaged his reputation and career, and Gawker are responsible for that. You could argue that that is accidental damages, i.e. they didn't know the extent of the effect their actions would have. I guess it might make sense to offer insurance against that for the press - to cover court fees and damages arising from damaging a public figure during reporting. On the other hand, this is now posted, public, known and there is no silencing it. I would never ask Gawker to take down the sex tape, as that would both interfere with the freedom of the press and be absolutely ineffective in stopping the spreading of information. So my compromise is to both have Gawker pay, but not take down the video. I think this should make both equally unsatisfied, so it's the best compromise.
Could this then be a general compromise? If you share private details of someone doing something lawful, which damages his/her life, you are responsible and have to recompense him/her in some way (i.e. the court decides on how much you owe), but given the reality of the internet, the information can't be taken down.
Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants. The typewriter one is a direct translation from the layout used on typewriters, which usually is well thought out. The phonetic one just assigns keys to their phonetic latin equivalents or when there's no equivalent, to a letter that kind of looks like it, or is just free. Since cyrillic has more letters than latin, you lose the `, [, and ] keys (at least in Bulgarian phonetic). All keyboards sold here have two letters on each key - one for the US layout and one for the typewriter layout. And still the majority of people prefer to just use the phonetic layout simply because it works with their existing muscle memory. For a while the most popular Windows 95 and XP program was FlexType - it let you type cyrillic letters using the phonetic layout back when Windows only had the typewriter layout available.
We moved to Skype because of the end-to-end encryption, the group chats feature, the ability to talk and the network effect from others using it and us not wanting to use two clients at once. Oh, and with Skype file transfers would just work, while no ICQ client would ever let me initiate a file transfer to another person, or if it did, it would go though servers on the other end of the world.
Can you be prevented from buying more stock if you say you do intend to acquire? As in, can the company tell you flat-out to stop buying, because of course they can always raise the price or sell to someone else, etc.
Capcom have already re-re-...-re-released Street Fighter II for every platform, I don't think anyone will buy Street Fighter II Original Arcade Edition.
Mostly usable unless you use nVidia or AMD with the binary drivers. AMD are going to be supported in the near future via their open-source amdgpu driver (for GPUs from 2015 onward) and nVidia will show up with a new driver that will support Wayland, any day now, we "promise".
Huh. I would have thought that the woman in question is assertive and putting an asshole in his place, but now that you've told me society at large thinks of her as a bitch, I'll make sure to fall in line.
Do not try that mock outrage here. You know exactly what was said. It is not a new thing that most people will think that an assertive woman is acting like a bitch, even if they're doing the same thing a man is doing.
> But I hope you're going to start with the really destructive ones, like Alcohol and Nicotine before you start looking at the less harmful ones such as cannabis.
Well, to be fair, I wouldn't mind executing alcoholics and smokers. But you can have the best of both worlds - provide help and healthcare to ones who have fallen in drug use and execute the ones who can't complete rehab.
