With regards to a fatality it depends on what happened and why for when / if you get your license suspended or when you get it back.

As for drink driving that is a huge no no in Australia. We have Random Breath Tests (RBTs) where the coppers will stop every car travelling along a road and breath test you. .05 is the limit and if you blow over it is an instant 1 year ban from driving. If you are miles over you will get the book thrown at you. I have seen them close a 4 lane highway before and RBT everyone - 4 rows of 10 coppers.

The police are also, at their discretion, able to take a mouth swab for drugs. They normally profile you for that one ie. under 30 and driving out of an entertainment district at 3am.

I agree with your speed limit comment but I would also point out that the american cars I have driven in the states are truly awful. Last time I was over there I decided to hire a brand new mustang convertible and drive to the Napa Valley for the day. I distinctly remember coming to a bend in the highway at 55mph and seriously wondering if the car was going to make it round a highway bend or not. There was no feel in the steering wheel and the amount of body roll was unbelievable. The only way I can describe it was it felt like driving a water bed...... The next time we went to the states I hired a Golf. Didn't have the same "cool" factor as driving a mustang did but I felt safe.

ps the mustang had less than 2000 miles on it and we actually hired 2 and they were identical so I don't think I got a flogged out one or a lemon.

Having lived in Australia and the UK as well as driven a motorcycle 20000km around Europe and a car from LA to Miami I feel that I can comment without the citation.

Germany have the best drivers as they have the highest standard of awareness of other drivers on the road and they are very consistent in what they do. The behaviour on their autobahns and highways is completely predictable. The UK you need to learn what is the etiquette in order to be comfortable. They drive faster than their continental cousins on the same grade road, they tend to follow closer and generally require a lower gap. That said they are acutely aware of every other car on the road. They can do the zip merge and will let people in but if you are not from the uk you will find the spaces small.

America tends to be the opposite end of the spectrum to the UK. Technically I am sure their driving skills are find but awareness of others on the road appears to be zero. Keeping to the slow lane also seems to be an unknown art. Also on smaller streets stop signs and the like seem to be on a do I feel like following this today setup. If you are merging onto a highway you can pretty much bet the cars on the highway won't speed up or slow down to make life easier for you.

Australia sits half way between the UK and USA. There is slightly more awareness of other drivers (but not enough) people will accept a smaller gap and are more consistent drivers. Running stop signs and traffic lights is a big no no in Australia and most people don't do it.

I don't know about America but in Australia this would qualify as a criminal case. It is the same as what happened with the simpsons movie here. Basically Australia has thresholds which change the status, is the copyright infringement commercial in nature (ie are you selling the copies, is the value over $5000 and or is it BEFORE the release date.

Because the leak occurred before the theatrical release date it would shift into criminal statue here in Aus.

I need limited storage on my workstations as I have a freenas server filled with HDD. Anything I need space for goes on to it. Same comment for VMs and Games. I pretty much use steam for games and I have a big rig in the garage which does steam streaming nicely and should I need to (have to say it's rare) can do the vm work as well.

It depends on what you mean by work station usage and what is important to you.

I now always build my machines to be as silent as possible, even if it means a significant sacrifice to horsepower as I have a machine filled with fans for heavy lifting in my garage.

I also need limited storage in my workstation so it always gets an SSD. At the moment I am using the amd FM2 integrated GPU systems for my work stations. Never going to set the gaming world on fire and will lose in performance to an Intel I7. But you can build a ready to go machine for peanuts.

They have been the same physical layout but their aerodynamic profile isn't what this competition is designed to challenge. What they want to challenge is the electrical system. How much power can your cells generate, how efficiently can you transfer that power to your motor, how versatile is the motor and how well can you store that power for when the sun isn't as bright.

These aspects have continued to develop every year.

MotoGP and World SuperBike. The rules aren't really designed to slow the bikes down. It was supposedly to keep the costs down but that hasn't happened. It has had the effect of pushing a lot of the development into materials.

Recent motogp changes that I don't like include:
Control tyres - you used to have michelin, dunlop and bridgestone developing tyres to suit the characterestics of a particular bike. Because the tyres had different wear characteristics you saw different tyres perform better on different tracks. They went all Bridgestone first and are going all Michelin in 2016.
Engine design - the requirement that the engines not be over square (ie the cylinder bore must not exceed the piston stroke). This basically acts as a rev limiter without going to crazy expensive materials. It also means that in some aspects the engines are behind modern road bikes as several road bikes have over square engines as they produce higher top power
Fuel limits - the fuel limits have been going down over time. This has the effect of capping power output across a race. It means you have to design a bike to carry more speed all the time. It actually makes the motogp act more like the smaller classes where corner speed is king. Go back to the 500cc 2 stroke era and you had bikes that sacrificed handling for crazy power. What they lost in the corners they made up in the straights (see screamer vs big bang engine design in the Honda NSR 500 for an example internal to one manufacturer)

To be fair though there have been some huge jumps in electronics. Things like the way the Honda cuts the ignition on upshifts so that the power of the engine doesn't cause micro spins of the back wheel giving them a couple of 10ths a lap was very cool. The launch control technology is also amazing (if you want to see what happens when you think your traction control is on when it is not search for Lorenzo practice highside)

The big problem going forward is that the owners of MotoGP have managed to acquire the rights to WSBK and the first thing they have done is dumb down the bikes so there is a bigger gap between the motogp and the WSBK.

Actually I prefer the larger rips by far. Story is hugely important and I am willing to watch something of low quality if it is good enough. But I will always go a high rate 1080 if given the choice.

I also bought a bluray drive for my pc and rip away with that.

I have 2 dedicated servers, 1 is a micro atom box which runs mysql, squid, dans guardian, torrents, dhcp, mail etc. And another which is a freenas box holding all my storage. I share the data off the freenas box both via samba and nfs. Samba for the windows and handheld devices and nfs for the shuttle atom xbmcbuntu boxes I have behind the tvs. I have 3 of those and so that I can share what has been watched and the like they all push data to the mysql server.

The freenas box runs a script which pings each one of the front ends on a 5 minute cycle. If they are all offline then it waits 3 mins, pings again and then shuts itself down if it doesn't get a response. All the front ends when turned on send a WOL packet to the freenas box. Total time to boot is 3.5 minutes from pressing the power button on the front ends.

About 5 years ago I paid the money and had a professional run cat 5 through the walls so I have 20 ports all coming back to a rack.

I have also now stuck my main gaming PC in the rack and I use the steam streaming to my laptop when I want to play games (Dell Latitude with full docking station)

Then they would all look alike but with 50 cubic feet of storage.

That is the problem with any engineering challenge where the conditions of a test are repeated over and over. Everyone will naturally move towards the same design as, without a major technological break through, that design is the most efficient concept.

It is the major reason I hate the direction motorcycle racing is going. By bringing in more rules about what is and isn't allowed they are reducing the possible solutions.

Also I would add. I have done a large number of long haul flights with my two girls and I learnt something from a pilot I met once. His advice was carry the kids car seat and put them in that. So now you will see me wheeling a compact fold up pram with two car seats precariously balanced on top of them as I make my way through the airport. When I get on the plane the car seat gets strapped into the chair and the kid into the car seat.

Two big reasons - 1 the can't get out of those. 5 point harness and a kid proof clip. 2 the first time my eldest had a seat of her own was the worst flight of my life. She would fall asleep in her chair and slump against the airplane seat belt. It would slowly loosen off till she fell out of the seat. Can you imaging the horror of a 2 year old who keeps being woken up every 15 minutes on a 24 hour flight... Oh dear god.... I spent 5 hours on the last leg walking back and forth in the crew area carrying her as it was the only way to stop the screaming.......

Spot on. I have the pram that is the size of a small car when I am at home and a super lighter super compact push chair when travelling. Not only does it fold up small and light it has like a rifle sling strap on it that allows it to be easily carried on my back. I managed to comfortably walk up a gazillion stairs to the Giant Buddha in Hong Kong with the kid on my shoulders and the stroller across my back.

WHy can't you pick your seats anyway? I log on to my favourite airlines web page 72 hrs before departure. I pick the seat I want, tick the box that says I'm not carrying any bombs or giant knives and then print out my boarding pass.

I walk through security. Straight to my gate and on to the plane. Add an extra 2 minutes if I have checked luggage to have assigned to my boarding pass.

I'm sorry but WHAT???? No assigned seating? That is just asking for agro! You would get people fighting in the line!

I fly A LOT and there is no way I would fly on a just stack yourself in flight.