You've got to be a troll. There's no way that anyone could be as consistently and aggressively unreasonable without realising it.

Actually, it could be a good thing. Not being able to receive television signals without paying your license fee would mean that people who don't want to pay their license fee won't be hassled by endless threatening letters from the licensing authority. They'd be free to own a television and it'd be easy to prove they weren't using it illegitimately, thus saving them a fine.

</devil's advocate>

That'll be 15 amps at 110v: to get the same power out of a British socket would only require 7.5 amps which would be (relatively speaking) safer, surely?

As a kid I had a small-gauge slot car set that ran off a double-insulated adaptor with a plastic dummy ground pin that only served to open the shutters on the live and neutral sockets. Then it snapped off.

I can still remember the noise my mother made when she walked in on eight-year-old me prising a matchstick into a wall-socket trying to plug it in :)

Jesus Christ, I was expecting an article on Admiral Ackbar! NSFW, man, NSFW!

It was a Renault Megane. They did another test where the three presenters were driving cars made in the late 80s and early 90s (A Volvo 760, an Audi 80 and a Rover 416) into a wall at 30mph. I believe Clarkson chipped his thumb after misjudging his speed and crashing the Volvo at 40mph, but the others were fine.

In West Philidelphia?

But don't you think those old cars have a certain something that makes them worth taking care of? I drive a 2000 Mitsubishi Colt (Mirage for all you 'Merkins) and I seriously doubt that in forty years time there will be a single one left. Not because it isn't perfectly good as a method of getting to where you want to go; more because it wasn't designed in the same mindset as that '59 Bel Air. It's a white good- 3 1/2 metres of car. The Bel Air was sold on the buyers' aspirations- my Colt was sold because the first owner preferred it to riding the bus to work.

My laptop doesn't have a PC card slot for the adaptor. Do you think they'd do a USB one? (-:

That rear wheel steering is something else as far as turning circle goes, but I can see myself doing a three point turn and wiping out several innocent pedestrians by accident :-)

I work for a large UK supermarket chain (the largest, actually) and their computer systems and supporting software are pretty old. The tills run NT4 and the SBO/print queue manager is an IBM RS6000 (a PowerPC based machine, I believe) running OpenVMS.

The most up-to-date bits of kit are the checkout servers and the employee terminals- they run XP, but all of the software they run is either 16bit Windows stuff or terminal emulators to talk to that OpenVMS machine or the datacentres; having said that, I know of at least one store in our area that's still using an IBM 3151 orange-screen terminal. The in-house word processor is Ami Pro, a dreadful piece of software. I'd almost forgotten how annoying the 8.3 filename limit was :)

Anyway, with mission-critical stuff, the motto is usually "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". In our case, it seems to be "If it ain't completely broke, ignore it."

Modded as troll? Seriously, this is either funny or insightful.

I heard Douglas Adams quoted on the radio this morning. Seems to apply here.

No, Bendit is only similar to Beckham.

They made dual G4 Power Macs. I own one. Runs Leopard pretty nicely.