As an Englishman who's spent the last decade in the States...

It has nothing to do with my trying to fit in and everything to do with what I can get for a decent price at a decent quality.

If I'd like Shepherd's Pie, my options are very expensive faux Irish theme pubs or lousy quality from cheap theme pubs that have once seen a picture of what a Shepherd's Pie might look like. If I'd like a proper roast with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, I can go to a senior citizen trap and get decent beef, terrible fried potatoes and a look of bewilderment if I mention Yorkshire pudding. If I want a good curry (Partition and its immigrants have made it a staple in England), I can get something dire at the mall, something mediocre in my city (thank you H1Bs) but I have to (and do, regularly) drive 80 miles each way and pay about $50/person to get great baltis, kormas, etc.

Or, if I'd like pizza, I can choose from any of a dozen local pizza joints. If I'd like a burger, I can choose from any of twenty chains plus local specialty places. And Mexican offers me hundreds of hole in the wall places plus at least half a dozen major chains. I can eat at every one of those for well under $10 too.

So, yes, I eat like an American and my waist rapidly started to look like an American's too. It has nothing to do with trying to fit in and everything to do with what's available. Give me a Sainsbury's and a Tesco, a good chippy (no, those things Americans call English pub chips really aren't), a good kebab shop (gyros may start with the same ingredients but are nothing like a British kebab) and a lifetime's supply of Cadbury's, Ginsters, etc. and I'll stay the hell away from American assimilation.

I don't think it's even a national thing. Ask any Californian who'd visited what Mexican food is like in Minnesota (not unlike eating a photograph of a burrito: it looks like one but tastes like cardboard). Ask any Pennsylvanian what a cheesesteak is like in California (for the love of God, why would you put avocado and lettuce in it?). Those people will also assimilate to the good local foods rather than endure the terrible bastardizations of what they love back home. Nothing to do with fitting in, everything to do with availability.

If only there was some common saying about correllation not being equal to causation.

And now you may all proceed with the English food and dentistry jokes. You've been very patient.

Allegations from a woman. Try from a minor.

A neighbor was a teacher and accused of molesting two kids. The cops pulled him out of a classroom and ended his career there and then.

Two different kids? You'd assume he's got to be guilty. Turns out the first kid was told to lie by his mother as revenge over bad grades his brother got. One kid wasn't enough evidence so they arrested another kid for stealing a car and told him they'd drop the charges if he chose to "help us with our inquiries." After being told the first kid's confession, he said, "Yeah, that!" to avoid a criminal record.

Took two years for this to come out. Afterwards, his original school told him there were too many concerned parents who believed there couldn't be smoke without fire and he couldn't return there - and every other school found a justification to not hire.

A pretty much broken man, he was dead five years later, still in his 50s.

Those cops knew they were building a fake second half to their case and deliberately ended his career when they arrested him in front of the kids. Given the ultimate end result, that's one step away from manslaughter to me.

In this society, sex crime allegations destroy lives. A false accusation is, in many ways, just as destructive to a life as the alleged act. False accusers should absolutely face the punishment the falsely accused was threatened with, not a slap on the wrist. Similarly, given the accused may also be the victim of what is essentially a sex related crime, the same anonymity "victims" get should be preserved for the accused until they are found guilty. Sorry if that makes convictions a little bit harder but I'd be interested to see figures for what percentage are only convicted because their alleged crimes were publicized vs. the percentage of falsely accused. Something tells me we'd have less victims this way round.

As a lawful permanent resident but non-citizen, I'm ineligible. Apparently I do not understand your complex American legal system (which is mostly built off my British one minus pesky things like Habeus Corpus when they don't suit politicians).

Part of me wants to be bitter and mock the system. Then I remember how much everyone who is eligible seems to hate it and am grateful for never getting that semi-regular letter.

No, you've got it all wrong...

A kindly Japanese man sees Johnny and takes him under his wing. Johnny thinks he's going to be taught how to fight but instead gets taught how to wax cars and paint fences. Eventually Johnny realizes these are all awesome fighting moves. Mark tries to sweep Johnny's leg. Johnny uses a cool pose that, if done correctly, no can defend... unless you take a step backwards.

"they are outstripping the exponential curves of Moore's Law. By a big margin"

Moore's law simply states that the quantity of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a circuit doubles every two years.

This is a relatively new area of science. New techniques can be expected to evolve, as would refinements of existing techniques. As it moves from the domain of a very few skilled individuals at universities to more of a commodity where $100 buys you your family tree, economies of scale kick in. And then there's the technical refinement of a new process where successive revisions, even if transistor counts/quality/sizes remained the same, would ensure its own rate of change.

So, off the top of my head, there are at least four different factors in addition to Moore's law. It's hardly surprising it's outstripping one of the five. Any new area of technology that also leverages transistor advances should do so.

From experience with them (detailed in this post: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1972312&cid=35044794)...

They deserve all the abuse they get and plenty more besides. We were absolutely polite and completely civil with the goon we got. He didn't even bother to utter a word and then screwed us over.

Yes, you can make the argument that he took months or years of abuse and that's why he's that rude. But, here's the thing... Perhaps people are that rude because people like him have treated completely polite people the way he did us. The guy we got was either the source of the problem or contributing to it with people who weren't. Whatever the case, he at least contributed and, in doing so, lost all sympathy from a formerly polite and respectful person. He is not innocent and lost the right to sympathy in my eyes.

My personal experience was:

No signs warning it was a toll. When we got right up to it, we saw there was a toll and it was cash only. We didn't have any cash so looked for somewhere to turn around. There wasn't anywhere. We pulled up to the booth and explained the situation, the knuckledragger didn't actually say a word to us. He just noted our license plate and waved us on.

OK, we figured. That's not too unpleasant a system. They'll send us a bill for the couple of dollars in the mail, maybe a website we can go to pay it on.

No. We got a $30 fine for running the toll. The toll we stopped at, explained we didn't have cash but were happy to pay any other way or would turn around if that wasn't OK.

Not only that but the fine notice allows you to not pay for a first offense IF you sign up for their automatic payment system... a system that deducts the first month to cover that alleged infraction and insists on pre-billing you, keeping more than the cost of the fine for future payments.

So, after we talked to the knuckledragger, thought we were just being offered an alternate way to pay, got waved on by him, then FINED for toll evasion? I, for one, will be dancing to the thought of his lost job. I'm sure he's well qualified for a role with the TSA so he won't be unemployed for long.

Yes, without a human there, there'll be no way to explain situations like that to an unfeeling machine. But when the humans were worthless examples of the species to begin with, monosylabic and leading you in to fines when you thought you'd simply asked for help? Precisely nothing will be lost.

Bitter? Me? ;)

He has proven no technical skills other than those he read from a book. So very, very possible.

In the modern tech based workplace, it has to be Friday.

Friday is the day when all of the "managers" (suits, project managers, etc.) realize they held meetings all week rather than doing the productive things they promised would be delivered.

Around 10am on Fridays, right as they're getting back from their first Starbucks run of the day, they usually start freaking out that the week's scheduled 40 hours hasn't been started yet. By 11, the Engineers are performing their well rehearsed "We don't launch on Fridays" speeches. By noon, the Engineers have realized it's going to be listened to about as much as it is every other week and get crunching. That leaves 6 hours - seven or eight by the time they stay late - to achieve an impressive 40 hours worth of work.

And thus, Friday is the most productive day in the modern tech based workplace.

Based on my admittedly limited understanding:

Backbone providers work on the assumption that data goes both ways: I don't charge you for shoving ten lumps of data down my tubes because you don't charge me for shoving what might be nine, might be eleven lumps of data down yours. We're all doing roughly the same thing so it all comes out in the wash.

When someone turns around and says, "Don't worry, I'll keep taking your ten lumps of data for free. Now here are the five hundred I'd like you to keep carrying for free, too. Oh, and by the way, yes I do charge the generator of all those lumps a hell of a lot for my transporting them to and dumping them on your tubes." then it's somewhat understandable to think the relationship's gone a bit one sided.

When Netflix is using fully 20% of prime time US bandwidth (source) and Level 3 are happily billing Netflix for the right to put that on the net, it's pretty understandable the other companies who have to shoulder what's become a very one sided relationship for free are a little touchy.

In this case, I'm tempted to agree it's not about stomping competition, not about charging one source more or less for a better or worse service, it's about whether the fundamental model for the backbone is being abused.

I'm for network neutrality. But isn't there also a degree to which neutral also means the neutral flow back and forth, not all of the data going one way with one company charging for it and expecting the others to just suck it up?

No one likes a COICA blocker.

I'm totally with you. It's like shirts without pocket protectors. Pocket protectors are a brilliant, sensible idea that adds utility to an otherwise poorly designed garment. What kind of sheeple would buy ones without them?

Another perspective would be that some people like getting laid. Pocket protectors are sold to nerds for whom every last bit of utility is vastly more important than appearance or likelihood of meeting a woman outside of an MMO and regular shirts are sold to the rest of the populace who are really quite happy without them as they're not carrying pens around in their shirt pockets anyway.

I propose an empirical test:

1) Get a new iPhone when it comes out. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new iPhone? What do you think of its design? Can I hold it? Wow, it really does feel thinner/lighter/whatever."

2) Get a new Android phone. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new Evo X2? Does it have the 1.2 or the 1.2.1 antenna? Have they released a firmware hack yet? Screenshotting is so elegant once I hacked mine, installed a custom app, uninstalled that one and installed one that works on my model."

Did group 1 or group 2 get more respondents? Would you actually want to sleep with any of group 2? OK, scratch that, this is Slashdot and we're all happy to date to our level. But imagine you're part of the rest of the population.

I'm being facetious, of course - though, for much of the population, what'll get them laid really is a big consideration. That's why we live in a world with expensive clothes and expensive cars.

In my own case, the criteria was simple: My wife already hates me for giving her four different interfaces she has to learn to use just to watch the damn TV, all because I thought Netflix and Hulu plus YouTube would be a good cable replacement then wanted to try a 360 in one room and a PS3 in another. Giving her a phone that just works, that she can call me and say, "How do I do X"? and it'll be a couple of clicks away, not a, "Well, you need to root it first, then go to this obscure site, download this package, now if you install it correctly, you'll get to do the feature in a way that's totally inconsistent to how everything else you're used to on the phone works." is a huge thing.

Apple made a decision to go with "it just works." That simplifies and dumbs down what you can do but, for a HUGE number of people, that's vastly more important than wringing every last option out after hours of painful tweaking. To most people, it's a phone with some extra cool features. They'd really like their phone to just work, not need a constant uphill struggle to learn it and then relearn it when next year's model comes out and the carriers dick with everything.

By nerd criteria, Android is vastly superior. By many other people's criteria, the iPhone is superior. The trick is understanding the criteria people judge by and recognizing that just because other people's value systems are not the same as yours, that doesn't make them wrong for using criteria that're different to your own.

The lightest option for carrying around in a mobile environment is speech recognition. Your vocal chords travel around with you anyway. If you decide you need a headset, they're lighter than pretty much any mouse, trackpad or trackball. Best of all, your voice puts absolutely zero strain on your carpal tunnel.

Of course, it sucks for things like coding but if risking your carpal tunnels means getting to never use computers, limited access is still infinity times better than no access.

That addresses the lightest possible options for mobile use. Honestly though, if you're suffering enough from your carpal tunnels that you can't use computers/can only use them in restricted form and you really can't get by with your voice... Man up and carry a slightly bigger bag and the weight of a trackball. In the scheme of things, a slightly bulkier bag and the extra few ounces of a trackball or whatever bulky ergonomic solution works best for you is way less than the suffering bad carpal tunnels will give you.

While you're at it: Who really uses laptops in that many places anyway? Buy a dock, a really good ergonomic pointing device and a really good ergonomic keyboard (I've been impressed with the SafeType keyboards though they suck for cursor/numpad/key combination access) for each major location you use it (home office, work). Sure, that'll run you several hundred bucks per location but it costs way less than surgery, time off from work or losing your career. That protects you for 90% of the time most of us ever use our laptops. The other 10%? Do you really need to use it in Starbucks (if you're a MacBook Pro owner, I take it all back, you bought the thing to look "creative" and Starbucks is critical for that)? Do you really need to use your laptop in meetings (buy a dictaphone if your wrists matter that much and transcribe in a healthier environment later)?

The point of all of the above is that with a few small compromises, there's no reason laptop use needs to be any worse than desktop use. And those small compromises? They're a lot smaller than the pain of carpal tunnels, lost income and surgery.

The terrorists have actually recruited exactly the same number of liberal arts students as engineers. But it's only been nine years and the liberal arts students haven't got out of bed yet. They totally intend to attack something and have some really great ideas that'll totally change the neo facist world order but, well, Oprah was on. Plus, do you know how hard it is to hide explosives on your crotch when you're wearing your little sister's skinny jeans!

I'm assuming there's some legal definition for "expectation" that, in traditional legal form, has no bearing on what the word means to normal humans?

Otherwise, it would seem there are two pretty easy outs:

1) Anyone who uses file sharing networks sends their ISP a letter saying, "I expect you to maintain my privacy." Short of the ISP writing back to them and saying, "no," they now have an established expectation.

2) ISPs who don't want to carry the costs of media industry fishing trips put in their sales blurb, "We maintain your privacy." Now users of those ISPs have an expectation of privacy.

In normal English, either case would establish an expectation amongst users for their privacy to be maintained. That courts may have [illogically] ruled users of general ISPs somehow don't have that expectation but that doesn't matter as ISPs/users would have now established and clarified a superceding expectation.

Of course, like I said, legal definitions rarely match common sense or actual English. ;)