Wow, I had no intention of sparking such a vigorous and pedantic debate.

I simply made the observation that as odd as it sounds to measure fuel economy in square metres, there does in fact exist a physically meaningful interpretation of that number.

I certainly don't think it's useful in any way, and neither does anyone else in this thread, so you're arguing against a strawman.

Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.

Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.

My Accord gets about 10L/100km, or 0.01m^3/100000m or 1e-7 m^2. This is equivalent to one tenth of a square millimetre.

Which means a strip of gasoline down the centre of the lane, with a cross-sectional area of one tenth of a square millimetre, would be enough to power my car as it drives.

Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?

It's also well known that children tend to have trouble with categorizing animals. Frequently they'll overgeneralize - calling every 4-legged animal a dog, for example - and it's only with constant correction that their category boundaries become adjusted properly.

Or you could just have pointers to letters in the English alphabet! Then you can store all your emails in only 26 bytes (plus some overhead for the pointers).

I need that much every second, at least!

So instead of a 6" layer of oil on the Gulf of Mexico's coastline, you'd rather have a 1" layer of oil on the Atlantic ocean's coastline? Both are very very damaging, but localizing the damage is the best way to help things recover quickly.

The beta sometimes crashes? The horror!

Clearly they won't fix those for the final version.

That comma is just out of place and makes the sentence hard to parse.

This is the first actually well-informed post in this thread.

But for your second post, not your first.

Hence the joke?

The electronics usually brake the car, unless it's a Toyota, in which case they don't brake the car since they're broken.

Unless it's a Toyota.

Yup, now all you have to do is get people to use it.