joekicker

Bi and multi-lingual - my kinda gal. Gots to agree with you, though. It's amazing how many people call the Thais stupid BECAUSE a Thai cheated them. Kind of weird to me how many such farang there are who willingly live in Thailand. .

Answer's the same - there's no public forum. .

That is not even CLOSE to "most" of the terrorist attacks. Most of the real, actual terrorist attacks have been in the Moluccas, Kalimantan and the two "important" islands, Java and Sumatra, including several in Jakarta. And most of them were by JI, Jemaah Islamiyah, which has more grievances than Heinz has varieties. Weirdly (or not! depending on your stomach for conspiracy) JI is/was on the side of the military in Timor and West Papua -- even Aceh. I wouldn't for a millisecond trivialise the Sukarno/Suharto military operations, but I think it's useful to separate their suppression from actual, "random" terrorism. The military had predictable, sustained (and often terribly brutal) POLICIES, but for the terrorist attacks "random" is a good word. .

Most terrorist attacks in Bali are aimed at Australians. And carried out by Indonesians (and Malaysians). .

Why are you putting an Oxford education down like that? It's what the prime minister of your resident country has, after all. More to the point, why are you so dumb as to think English communication has something to do with intelligence? I mean, come on ... I could understand what your unintelligent, uneducated, partly English message was trying to communicate. I think. .

Blaming Bali for terrorist attacks would be like blaming Queensland for floods -- or New York for terrorist attacks that killed multiple Aussies. .

Gorgeous at... what? 85 years old? .

You got sick once, and Bali will forever pay? Nonsense. Bali is a terrific place, with wonderful people. Of course it's not for everyone, and not for you. That hardly says it's the shithole of the world -- which is most certainly is not, or even in line for the title. If you rate Bali that low, you haven't been to too many places. Sorry you got sick, but that's Bali's fault. .

I don't believe anyone uses the parking brake in Thailand - it's a flat country, pretty much, all you have to do is leave the car in gear. The double-parking in lots and garages has been going on for a couple of decades. If you don't get an actual parking spot, then you park behind another car, and leave the gearshift in neutral so it can be moved. I've never heard of a problem because of it. Most garages at least have attendants who also often help with the moving, but it's not the Thai psyche to smash someone's car for a thrill. For payback, maybe, but not for fun. .

At which point you're in Perth, still many hours of flight eastward from actually Australia (sorry, you tiny minority of Australians but there you are). There is a REASON there are buggarall flights from Bangkok to Darwin. .

Interesting to me first time I did it - you fly from Bangkok and you hit Australia in about five hours. It takes ANOTHER five hours to get to Sydney or Melbourne. .

About 1.5 per cent of Chinese have passports, but one heck of a lot more Chinese visit Thailand than Americans. According to the most recent statistics issued by the State Department in January of 2011, the number of Americans with passports is 114,464,041 - say, 37 per cent. .

The other possibility is that he was carrying that loot and bad guys found out and waylaid him. Either way, more to this than the first brief report. .

It really has been that kind of year, all year. There was actually parity of a weak sort, any team COULD beat any other team. I was unsurprised by the Jets beating the Pats AGAIN, but I wouldn't have bet very much if I had the chance, which I didn't. The Jets have enough to go to Dallas. Heck, any of the four do. I know they're underdogs, but the Jets already beat Pittsburgh this year, and Chicago already beat the Packs. I think anyone seriously bets these games is crazy. .

Boy, did I get beaten and humiliated this morning! I did say that Baltimore was beat up and a dark horse, so I saved a tiny bit of face, but I had the Falcons really deserving their No 1 seed, and Aaron Rogers did to them that he could do to me and my neighbourhood friends. THAT was a whipping, Green Bay style. I was very impressed. I don't agree, Gary, I didn't see a lot of luck in play there. Luck is what Pittsburgh had, and what Baltimore couldn't take advantage of. GB was just go-o-o-d. All I've got left is the same team everybody else has, how humiliating. I did actually get a bet on Seattle over New Orleans, so I'm a hair ahead of VicV. .

Once a year, the Thais publicly and proudly burn all the seized drugs that are no longer needed as evidence. It is always a huge pile that goes up in smoke. Without doubt, some seized drugs make it back to where they once belonged -- but not all or close to all. .

Well, no, actually *I* won't. That was my main point. But what *I* have to do may not bear on others, which was my other point. Still wondering if the OP's licence had expired. Or not. If his licence was up to date, it is very weird reasoning by his personal clerk of the day, but that was what I stated - that it's all so seemingly random. .

NB: Seems this needs repeating every time any issue comes up. The treatment you get at a Thai government office depends on the office and on the person serving you, and the day of the week and the time of day. It can be, and usually is random. That said. I've never heard of this. Never heard of a passport demand after the first licence issue, either. Was your licence past due? .

New England is the only team that sticks out, really. All the others have a real shot, including Seattle. I picked New England but I think Atlanta can beat them. I think Baltimore has a really good chance. Those were my originals, and I still like them. .

Not really. A true computer "virus" is patterned after a real-life virus - its sole goal is to replicate. Anything else it happens to do, such as kill the host, is extra. It requires a host in order to live and to replicate. If the host dies, the virus dies -- which is why no "good" computer virus will actually kill its host or the computer - the host of the host. I can understand when people use short forms and all, but actually a virus (and a trojan) are subject to close and exact definitions - just as a medical virus. "Malware" is just a fancy way of saying "bad stuff" (mal = bad) and adware is fairly broad but exists to help spread a (commercial) message. Each of the threats has an actual name. Malware is a safe blanket name. .

If you mean LITERALLY "virus" it's debatable. If you mean malware, trojans, sniffers, adware and the like, you are wrong.... well, technically YOU personally might not have encountered one, but thousands and thousands exist. Just for fun many years ago back in the "Friday the 13th" days, I wrote such an actual virus myself, in batch language yet. The user-victim went about his business as always, doing exactly what he did yesterday, but today he got a virus. It was just for fun, and never got off my own computer, but it worked. Today there are all kinds of really well-crafted exploits that hit you from looking at a web page (Microsoft.com was one such page for a while) or by reading an email -- big companies' legitimate newsletters have been hit by these. Back in the day, ANSI Escape codes got a lot of DOS users into terrible trouble from attackers. These days, scripts can do the darndest things if crafted just right and placed just so on web pages. Browsers aren't all that secure, really. As a friend of mine says, the only safe computer is unplugged, stripped of all drives, embedded in concrete and sunk in a very deep part of the ocean. Today's victim TYPICALLY doesn't actually start up the "virus". He is probably clumsy, probably carefree, probably careless, but in the end he is using the wrong browser at the wrong time on the wrong website, and Joe Viruswriter simply walks in and roots his machine and does what he wants with it. I do agree that the very best software protection against attacks is the software between your ears. Smarter, more knowledgeable, more experienced and more aware people get a LOT fewer attacks than the opposite. I actually do not doubt for a moment that you are 14 years virus-free. There are a lot of really slack-jawed computer users, as you say. I agree with all of that. But if you use a computer, you are not entirely safe from virtual attacks, doesn't matter how smart you are. And these days "computer" takes in a lot of other territory like phones and pads and music players, say. .

The problem is that you don't really know this. NB: I think people should ONLY use security programs (and real-life security) that they are confident in. But you can't tell if Avast, your own good habits, good luck or the gold-dust fairy perched on your left shoulder has kept you worry-free. Also, you can't actually tell if you DON'T have malware - no program exists to prove that negative. I just feel the need sometimes to dump a few clouds over the sun. But it IS real. .

These are both great (free) small programs for blurring faces and an awful lot more -- Paint.Net would be better, in my opinion. So is PhotoFiltre, the rough equivalent of Paint.Net. For blurring faces only, Microsoft Paint is great. Some of the programs -- Photoshop, PSP, The GIMP -- are fantastic software but way, WAY overkill to blur faces on some snapshots. .

I can't think of a reason to pay for security for PCs -- Windows at least, but Mac and Linux too. There are a number of EXCELLENT products. One of them that is getting great reviews including from me is Microsoft Security Essentials. .

The dollar is higher. Bloomberg: The dollar was near a one-month high against the currencies of major U.S. trading partners as global stocks fell on concern European countries will struggle to find demand for bonds at auctions this week. The euro fluctuated after touching the lowest level versus the dollar since September on speculation Germany and France will encourage Portugal to seek a bailout package. Norway’s krone and the Swedish krona advanced as economic reports indicated expansion in the Nordic region. Australia’s dollar dropped to a three-week low as floods worsened in Queensland and China’s trade surplus fell short of economists’ forecasts. Plus that. .