These same people, were they to act like that in the U.S., would have had the shit beat out of them at the very least, and could easily sustain life-threatening injuries. I'd take English and Welsh cops any day, thanks.

All U.S. banks I've been to do the same. Given how expensive marketing is in general, this seems like a fucking bargain.

Take your strawman back. Please.

Given 3 hours per charge time of iPhone 5s, and 0.1 pence cost of doing so, we have a daily cost, at full utilization, of 0.008 GBP per vestibule per day. Assuming 2 vestibules per car, and a car in constant operation, with the outlet constantly occupied by a charger, we're looking at a cost of roughly 5.84GBP per car per year. Given the overall car maintenance and railway operation costs, that's noise not worth paying any attention to.

Any "solution" to this imaginary "problem" will cost more than this. Even having someone qualified write a report as to why a solution is unnecessary will cost more than the yearly cost of electricity here.

TL;DR: Making a problem out of this makes one look very, very dumb.

The best engineering is the type of engineering that realizes that the scale of the problem is such that even having anyone qualified think long enough about the solution will cost more than the yearly "losses" due to the problem not being solved. The cost, to fully recharge (from flat battery) 1000 iPhones is about 1 pound. That's a very conservative figure. I don't know how many outlets are there for them to worry about, but even if a million phones get fully recharged per year that way, we're still talking about amounts that are, for a major rail operator, not unlike rounding errors. What's 1,000 pounds yearly of extra electricity cost for them? Nothing.

10Whr is about as much as you need at the outlet to fully charge an iPhone 5s, and that will cost about 0.1 pence worst case at industrial rates in London. 1 millipound.

You meant 0.1 cents worth, perchance?

You're overestimating the cost by 2 orders of magnitude.

Assume we were to recharge an iPhone 5s from a flat battery. You're storing 5.3Whr at, conservatively, 50% overall efficiency. You'll be taking ~10Whr, or 0.01kWhr from the outlet. At 20p per kWh, we're talking 0.20p, or 0.3 US cents. At industrial rates, it'll be less than half that.

vBulletin/phpBB style boards all look like crap and suffer from design and usability that makes me puke. They are truly horrible and it's beyond me why people still put up with that crap. Reddit's usability is very good, on par with stackexchange I'd think.

TL;DR: Their rankings show popularity of sites among those clueless enough to have malware installed on their machines.

It's not about the tourist aspect of the economy, it's about a completely broken governance at all levels, with rampant bribery, ineffectiveness, and a huge grey-market economy.

Isn't the real GPL violation that the sources don't include the keys that are needed to obtain the binary? The sources are essentially intentionally crippled, and are not the full source necessary to obtain the binary as distributed through the app store. IIRC, mac app store doesn't do DRM of any sort.

If you want to wait 45 minutes for your potatoes to cook, it's your thing. It's not my thing, though. Mine are done in 15 after the steam valve starts venting. Fuckin' big ass russets, uncut. If that means that i'm stuck in the 70s, so be it.

You don't know much about how to cook, then. Do you think that suddenly, what has worked for cooking in 1970s, doesn't anymore?

So, hybrid and electric owners magically wear the roads less? I don't think so.

I personally would love a per-mile tax at such a rate. Heck, I'd be OK with 2 cents. I pay more than that, per mile, in taxes at the pump. I drive about 400 miles per month, so that'd be $8. As far as I'm concerned, my and my wife's road use taxes wouldn't even zero out my state tax refund, and I'd be paying less at the pump. Win-win.

There has been much improvement in lowering thread and sync primitive overheads since 10.6, as well as improving the scheduler. About the only thing OS X really doesn't like is mechanical hard drives - it performs much worse from 10.9 onwards than Windows when you have a mechanical hard drive.