not correct - General Motors makes cars in Germany in its Opel subsidiary's factory, some of which are exported to the USA with Buick badges

Here in Europe the PT Cruiser did better than expected after adoption by older drivers - something about the body-shape, doors and ride height apparently made it comparatively easier to enter and exit for the stiff and arthritic than many of our more conventional vehicles

Also, Eurostar ("199mph under the channel") is limited to 62mph in the channel tunnel and 186mph absolute max at all other times.

"I was fucked in the ass by a shark yesterday"

Nobody's ever said that before

I guess that Shark Psychology is not a subject thats been studied much due to the intractability of the subjects and difficulty of objectively assessing their actions. Is it at all possible, however, that either by electromagnetic or psychological effects the tagging of a shark changes its behaviour? It strikes me that all the data discussed in the article is info about sharks that have been tagged by people.

I thought you could pass a Turing test by always answering "yes", "no" or "That would be an ecumenical question"

Designing a system to pass the test is what most IT outsourcing companies do !

Its when you try to do something useful with it that you find all your code is good for is giving convincing answers to the test it had to face. Although I guess if skynet will be obsessive/compulsive about getting into University the future would be a less perilous place....

Mine's called PRISM - trying to scare off the locals..

Mubarak wasnt bad for the Coptic minority (or for the gay minority as it happens). His sons took prominent part in a movement of moderate moslems who placed guards to protect Coptic churches. I think minority groups everywhere fear overwhelming majority rule.

IMO the 'support' was one of those forced gestures that democracies get caught in, to their general ridicule.

Having campaigned however reluctantly - for democracy it would have looked very bad then to denounce the victor. That sort of thing would instantly be compared to Chile, where in 1970 Salvatore Allende won a democratic election giving him a mandate for a form of Christian Socialism which entailed the nationalisation of some (profitable) American business operations in his country... and was overthrown and killed by a US-friendly right-winger (Augusto Pinochet) who was content to leave business in private hands.

Whether such an act of denunciation would look bad compared to how bad the present situation seems, is a question for more scholarly minds.

except naked flames

Events in the Middle-East begin, to me, to resemble the backstory to the late Iain M.Banks work. We've intervened in numerous ways in a society we don't really understand for a mixture of reasons in our own interests and also those which we perceived to be in the interests of the resident population.

And for cultural reasons we didnt comprehend, it's gone horribly wrong.

you will probably be a better driver than most: good luck

In the UK we have camera-controlled variable speed limits which measure the average speed of passing vehicles over 1km

Most drivers slow to about 4mph below the limit in order not to drift over it (easy to do in a 6 mile, free-slowing 50mph zone). I found the best solution to the stress of speed monitoring is to use an android phone as a head-up-display mounted next to the rear view mirror. the Torque app relays car instrumentation to the smartphone display, reading it from the ECU via a bluetooth adapter plugged into the car's management port. i look at the rear view every few moments anyway, now I have a large, bright display giving GPS speed, fuel economy and engine temperature alongside it, in my peripheral field of vision

I think theres a lot in that. Also - a lot of accidents happen in the hour spanning night and day... while people are making the transition from running on vision and observation of other vehicles and objects, to running down 2 beams of light and watching for reflections and motion. 9pm and later would be after dusk for a lot of the year