> Maybe it will be useful in places where the cell
> carriers don't rape their customers, but using
> it in the USA

Er... the title clearly says "English". He's from England. We give 3G SIM cards away for free, no monthly cost and they remain active so long as you put a few quid credit on every other month or so.

I've got an emergency Nokia 2100 in my missus' car, has had about a ten quid in credit spent on it in the last year and the number is still active and the credit still valid.

England is only 500 miles long and relatively densely populated. It's dirt cheap to run a mobile phone network here. The cellular telcos don't need to rape their customers, they can be profitable just fine being cheap.

> Yes but try running a modern browser in that
> ammount of ram, and then load a modern web page.

Er... I'm browsing Slashdot using Elinks right now, to post this very comment. It's consuming just under 5MB and, as you can see, it works just fine.

So basically Twitter are saying that they'll do what a court in their own jurisdiction tells them to do.

Isn't that stating the bleedin' obvious? Seriously, did anyone expect Twitter company directors to say "Sure, I'll do jail time to defend some foreigner's rights to call the star of a sport that we don't even play, a slut."

AC: I do not own a radio,

I doubt that very much. Have you actually read the feature-list of your mobile phone?

AC > I wonder if they're using protection

Given that the undercover bobby fathered children with the people he was monitoring, I'd guess that'd be a no.

Mate, if you think we're a rip-off in the UK, I suggest you never visit France.

Sure, if you go to British bricks-and-mortar stores such as PC World, then our prices are pretty high. But if you shop online with Ebuyer, Dabs, Play.com etc. - even Amazon - then the prices are a little more normal. Certainly I've always found shopping online in the UK to be cheaper than shopping at a bricks-and-mortar store in the USA.

Also in the UK all the prices HAVE to include all taxes BY LAW. The price you see MUST be the price you pay - remember, we Brits value fair play over the freedom of shopkeepers to rip people off.

But I don't doubt for a moment that shopping online in the USA is cheaper. The USA is a quarter-way around the world closer to Taiwan, after all. If you want to ship from Taiwan to the USA, you can take a direct boat in a straight line to California. Whereas if you want to ship from Taiwan to the UK, you've got bits of India, the whole of Africa and a few bits of Europe in your way.

Oi! I loved Adric. He was a bored adolescent, who thought he was much cleverer than he actually was, with a haircut by his mum. And so was I at the time.

Adric was my hero.

(I liked Turlough too, though, so I realise my opinion doesn't carry much weight).

An EU standard means the following in practice:

The Germans will complain that everyone else does it inefficiently.

The Austrians will tell the Germans how to do it.

The Spanish will promise to do it tomorrow.

The Greeks will fake the documentation saying they've done it.

The Dutch will give parents and same-sex partners time off to do it.

The Czechs will charge foreigners extra for it.

Nobody will have any idea what the Portuguese are doing about it.

The Luxembourgers will interview everyone else on the radio about it.

The French will block the roads protesting about it.

The Danes will claim to have done it a thousand years ago.

The Swedes will only do it for six months a year.

The Polish will blame the Romanians and Hungarians for not doing it, or doing it too much, or not quite right.

The Maltese will earn a medal for it.

The Irish will invest their whole economy in it.

The Scottish will demand a subsidy to do it.

The Welsh won't do it until it's translated into a language that only people in Herefordshire and Shropshire actually use.

The English will do it immediately but moan about it forever after.

Turkey will pass a law making it illegal to do it in a headdress. The rest of the EU still won't let them join their club.

Sherlock Holmes. You can't get much more science and hero than that.

Real world? Any of the presenters of Mythbusters.

55mph as a "moderate highway speed"? In GERMANY? Clearly another USian who doesn't own a passport.

Germany is the land of the no-speed-limit autobahn. Elsewhere in Europe the usual speed limit on an interstate/motorway is just shy of 85mph (135km/h).

"Moderate highway speed" in Europe is typically 80mph.

In the UK the motorway speed limit is theoretically 70mph, but outside urban areas, you won't get a ticket below 85mph unless you're doing something else daft as well.

Travel on any highway in Europe at 55mph and you'll have articulated lorries (semi rig trucks) up your arse blaring their horns in no time.

I'm guessing you've not visited France much.

Farmers and fishermen use loopholes in the law to block entire interstates or major ferry ports for weeks on end.

There is a deep and wide cultural history of using legal loopholes to embellish protest.

From my eldest, daughter, aged 2-3:

"Uck's sake mummy, uck's sake" (frustration, learned from Nanny)
"Bollocks" (just randomly said at Sunday roast dinner with my parents - thankfully they were too deaf to notice)
"Ee's a hungry little bugger" (baby brother being guzzling milk - grandad owned up to that one)
"Grandad, you farted, say pardon me!" (thanks again, Nanny Potty Mouth)

But despite all the curse words, none of them were as cringeworthy as when, at her 3rd birthday party, she laid on her back, pulled up her skirt and shouted to all and sundry:

"TICKLE MY LA-LA!"

That's how the toilets work in McDonalds in various European cities with large numbers of tourists. Prague definitely had a system whereby a 4-digit unlock code for the toilet door was printed on the till receipt. I think it changed daily, though, not any more frequently than that.

The idea is to stop backpackers, druggies, tramps and, well, any freeloaders. I doubt they care whether you're a heroin addict so long as you spend some money and don't frighten off the other money-spenders (if they cared about heroin addicts, they'd use UV lighting; they don't).

The golden arches are sometimes referred to as "the international sign of the clean toilet" by British tourists on the continent. You'd be *shocked* what some Europeans think is acceptable as a public loo, especially in southern or eastern Europe.

One of the few things that British teashops get right and American cafés get wrong, is that in a teashop you almost always get waitress service, whereas in an American café you almost always don't. Teashops are one of the very few British places where waitress service still persists.

I can't stand waitress service in pubs (bars), but in teashops it is required. In a bar, the beer is already brewed; just stick it in a glass, there is no need to delay. In a teashop, the tea needs to brew, there is nothing to be gained by having it arrive faster. Coffee, ditto; I don't want to be standing around waiting whilst you perform all that rigmarole; just bring it to me when it's ready - if I wanted to watch theatre, I'd go to the theatre.

A lot of big town British teashops have converted to cafés (notably, Costa, who seem to outnumber Starbucks now), but thankfully in smaller towns the independent teashops are doing as well, if not better, than they have ever done.

And I like the historical connection between the British teashop and computing. The world's first business computer did stock ordering calculations for Lyons teashops.