True, they are expensive, but that build quality and the availability of firmwares to do what you are looking for with just a quick flash makes them handy AF for keeping in a pocket to play with.
I have found several uses for mine which weren't in mind when I made my decision to purchase.
Unless a cop actually sees you doing a ridiculous speed they aren't going to check for P/W ratio or motor output
Electric scooters are illegal in the UK, but police don't have time or inclination to stop their widespread usage on public roads, and you're safe to ride past them unless you're doing something stupid.
So many things like this have people getting away with it that the laws are just ignored eventually.
When one has an incident ... Well, the hand wringers are out in droves telling everyone they told us so.
Underfunded and under resourced police can't cope with the workload, for a change.
One of the best reasons to pay after you eat is so you can question the bill in case of an unsatisfactory dish or service.
Tipping is optional in many areas, and can depend on the quality of the Front of House staff. Picking up a payment for £100 and finding £110 that was left because you've done a good job can be motivation to some people.
I wonder what on earth these people are dreaming of when they try to stop one person promoting a book by making a move guaranteed to kick off the Streisand Effect and having the whole media machine do it for her?
Maybe they're getting paid royalties on the publication?
Also, .torrent file available on TPB in 3 2 1 ... (It wasn't at time of posting).
I wouldn't recommend this without reservations, but I passed my bike test at 40 and got a 1 litre adventure sport motorcycle.
I'd ridden bikes in my youth and have been a professional driver for most of my life. Knowing how roads work, how dangerous all the other fools on them are, and being used to the hazards on UK roads, I started off slow. Every car driver is a "didn't see you, mate" waiting to happen.
The freedom and joy of riding through North Yorkshire, the beauty of the place, the days out in the sun, and the people you speak to make it a massive thing in my life that I wish I could do more of.
Financially it's ruinous to buy disposables when you can pick up a simple cigar sized vape with rechargeable battery and replaceable coil/pod for the same price, then refill it over and over again.
The amount of lithium ending up on the road and in bins is silly. The tax on vaping is putting the price of everything up, so now is the time to buy an Xross Pro or something that lasts all day.
For adults (who don't need to conceal their habit) it makes a lot of sense to buy coils/pods in quantity and keep a spare in the car/handbag.
Also ... Can we stop vilifying this life-saving habit? Smoking kills, we all know it. Vaping is MUCH safer and yes, just as addictive. Nicotine isn't the killer ingredient in smoking, so encourage people to vape, don't demonize them for it.
I've got a X to sell for £100. I can also sell Y, which costs £50. I'll advertise with the main selling price of Y and the main picture/description of X ... Profit!
Most people are selling X for £75, and a real bargain would be £50, so it doesn't seem 'too good to be true' that a seller would have a X for £50, on a good day.
It isn't Ali that's doing it, they're just complicit in not closing the loophole that's being exploited by sellers.
'Scare quotes' is not the only use of the double quote.
In this case it seems that the author is pointing out that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or conferred ownership of these public spaces.
Little flashing orange/yellow lights that give other road users a hint of what the driver intends.
If the light closest to you on the car you're looking at is on, they're probably going to cross your path, and with roundabouts, you ALWAYS give way to the right.
Each one of those junctions is a mandatory "Give Way" so it's pretty easy so just scan right and if there's nothing there, proceed.
The first time I drove a magic roundabout (in the 90s) I was a fairly new driver, not in my own city, in a pretty busy part of the day.
Not overthinking it helped. Treat each mini roundabout like a new junction; watch for the road positioning, 'head on a swivel' for the usual last second lane changes from unprepared drivers.
You're right in what you say about British drivers being mostly prepared to give way to a mistake. People generally don't want to foul up their day by having an RTA. There are hotheads though, and bullies. Being prepared to let these idiots do their thing without antagonising them is essential to incident free motoring.
I'm from York, in the north of England. It's a tourist city where people get lost and confused easily. Just letting them merge and figure it out is better for your stress level than leaning on the horn and barging through the gap they're trying to get into, plus it helps traffic stay moving. That one idiot who can't read signs and the paint on the road will hold up a whole junction if someone doesn't let them in, so just do it for everyone.
When I travel south it's observable how the attitudes change. More expectation that a gap will be filled quickly, rather than hesitantly, more use of the horn, more amber gambling.
It dawned on me a long time ago that at a junction, it helps the whole traffic system flow if each driver on the main road let one driver join in front of them.
I'm a professional driver and have been since the 90s.
The day will one day come where the shitty proprietary map providers that pay auto manufacturers to foist them on us get ousted and we can have a USB-C connection to the car's system display for our screen mirroring as standard.
In-vehicle audio and navigation is utterly useless. Costly updates, unfamiliar GUI's, distracting bells and whistles.
There are two SatNav's I've seen used by colleagues:
GOOG maps (thanks for messing up timeline last week, shitheads)
TomTom trucks (I drive large vehicles these days)
I'd love to have a screen that mirrors my phone, on the dash, not obscuring the windscreen, with connections to the steering wheel controls and the speakers.
Making do with a vent/suction holder is frustrating.
One gives stored records (including auto-typing) and 2FA.
One gives a second bank of records et al.
The third is a duress key which wipes the device.
Also, you can reflash your data to it from an encrypted backup in case you do use the duress PIN or lose the device.
I think it's pretty cool to put the key in, type an eight digit code, then press a button to type my Amazon/GMail login page into a browser bar, enter username, enter password, wait for the page to load, then enter the 2FA. All automatically.
Like a lot of people, I got fed up of the tech calls from relatives.
I put mother on Mint years ago. An old Toshiba laptop which she uses to read papers and play mahjongg. It ended up developing a hardware fault so I donated an iMac my SO no longer had a use for. Putting Mint on it was just a small mess around. Copied her home directory over, installed a short list of forced installed programs, and she was happy again.
Same story with my uncle. Tried to get my sister on Linux but her rotten employer insists on Windows software, and she is so untechnical that she stamps her feet at trying to use alternatives. She got a ThinkPad and a warning that "I do not use Windows, so you're on your own".
I had the honour of attending my (ex) step son's graduation a few years ago. Computer related degree, with honours and colours, very sharp young man. He thanked me for building him his first computer and attributed the degree to me putting Windows on it for his Lego games, but also dual boot Linux. I never pressured him to boot into Linux, but that horse wandered over and drunk deeply at some point. I told him it wasn't me; I just gave him a tool, and he decided to learn how to use it.
Linux has been my primary OS for a very long time. Every story on here or Slashdot where something terrible happens to it, or they try to put adverts in, program shops, take away more advanced functionality, make it harder to use, lock off settings people use; I just silently thank Linus for devoting his life and stress levels to giving us a very viable alternative.
That's not to say I haven't pulled my hair out at times. Kernel patches, out of tree modules, scripting, compatibility with MSFT formats, forks of major projects, drivers which all of a sudden require a version downgrade to carry on working (currently wpa_supplicant on Arch is in my IgnorePkg section on a MacBook Pro) and other annoyances are the reasons I sympathise with the people who say it's too hard to use and takes too long to make work on their setup.
Canonical did the world a favour I didn't think would turn out so well; it got a lot of noobs asking questions (obvious or otherwise) to fill the Interwebs with answers which make it a lot easier than the old days to fix an issue you find.
The year of Linux on the desktop is maybe going to happen, maybe not. But the number of people who have tried it, or even heard of it is growing. Working with the public for decades I've had the opportunity to ask random people about it and more than ever they don't see it as an esoteric and eldritch hacker OS, just an alternative.
Fast/private DNS, firewall, logs, VPN (WireGuard) ready to go.