(and yes I have been sneered at for crossing against the light at 3 am in German provincial towns where nothing moves after midnight except the drunks and it was the drunks who sneered at me.)

My Cherman correspondent informs me that crossing the road against pedestrian lights is a traffic offence as serious, in the eyes of the law, as running a red light in a car. Accordingly, you can lose your driving license for it.

That such a law exists and is (in some areas) enforced tells you something about Chermans, but it also explains why they wait for the green ampelmensch.

The pirated copy (and subsequent pirated copies of other EA games) works flawlessly.

The ad seems pointless, but not as retarded as the tv ad currently doing the rounds in .nl, where you see a sort of very bad Super Mario knockoff with the tag line “original games work better”. Yes, that will really deter people from downloading copies, not knockoffs, of your games.

Wasn’t it the Swiss about whom Engels (or someone) said that they could never be revolutionaries, because they wouldn’t storm a railway station without buying platform tickets first?
Or shades of Jerry Cornelius driving down the deserted King’s Road, stopping at red lights as the Americans napalm the buildings around him…

Unless they know much about how advertising is sold, in which case they will think, “Hm, airport authority couldn’t get a paying customer for this location so they put up our PSA.”

#26 Jacob Christensen: “In Sweden…cars have to stop at pedestrian crossings”: is this noteworthy? The same is true in GB and Ireland. Although not apparently in France; though I have heard (from an unreliable source) that pedestrians knocked down there while jaywalking will receive no sympathy from insurers and little from hospitals.

Re “loser”: there is already double-meaning in “loser” in the sense of “wretched failure of a person”; (1) “one who loses/fails” (opposite: winner) and (2) “one who ought to be lost/ditched” (opposite: keeper).

I have had the same experience in downtown Toronto, where I was the only person to cross against a light when there was no vehicular traffic to speak of. In the Maritimes (well, Halifax, at least) there is a similar reluctance to jaywalk in the sense of crossing not in a cross-walk, but this is made up for by the vigor with which motorists stop for pedestrians at cross-walks.

I knew the revolution was not at hand in 1970 when I went to Ward Circle in NW DC to protest the invasion of Cambodia. Some American University students had blockaded the circle to stop traffic and one particularly adventuresome student was urging all of his peers to cross against the red light. They didn’t.

Of course, during the Cultural Revolutions some ed Guards wanted to change Red to go and Green to stop. Don’t know if they ever did.

This policy may reflect the primacy of the car over the pedestrian here—the Sunset Strip riots of the mid-60s had something to do with the fact that you would get a ticket for loitering if you were a teenaged pedestrian, but not if you were a teenaged driver.

In Danish and Swedish “loser” (“taber”/”förlorare”) has the same double meaning as in English.

Pirating – boy, that is one h%&! of an issue in Swedish politics right now. But I can’t recall seeing posters of this kind.