I imagine a Canadian could post the same sort of story about farmers in the bible belt as a way of taking a dig at their southern neighbors too eh.

They are getting 4 years of updates, because Apple is keeping them on the shelf for 3 1/2 years. iPhone 4 got iOS 7, because it was still on the shelves when it was announced (though taken off the shelves on the day it was released). The original iPad, which came out 3 months earlier with much the same level of hardware, did not even get iOS 6, because it was withdrawn from sale as soon as the iPad 2 came out.

The main difference here is the rate of release of new phones. Apple likes to keep 3 models of iPhones in the market for budget, midrange and high-end, and until the iPhone 5c, the midrange and budget categories were both covered by old models. Google tends to keep just one model in the market. Both companies continue to support minor releases on their most recently obsoleted hardware, but generally not major releases. Other companies selling Android phones do tend to abandon their low end models on release, but the high end ones are generally just as well supported as Apple and Google, with a little lag in release dates which is improving as Google tackles the issues which cause porting delays.

People like to beat up Android for ongoing support of devices, but Google is no different than Apple and other companies in this respect. The Nexus One was contemporary with the iPhone 3G, which was only supported up to iOS 4.2.1, released in June 2010, on the same day that sales of the iPhone 3G were discontinued. Nexus One was supported until Android 2.3.7, which was released around a year after sales were discontinued.

...which is run from within my editor of choice, emacs.

...which I run in a shell.

You seem to be confused about the program that emacs is replacing. It is not replacing vi, it is replacing init. Once you realize that, you will find it perfectly natural to run your shell inside Emacs.

It was as much the fault of the idiot who wrote the form as the oaf who filled it out, as far as I could make out from the reports.

Or in the case of the woman in the court case that allowed this judicial review, because an intern entering the data from an already approved visa application into the system ticks some boxes that were confusingly worded negative questions, and should have been left unticked.

On a platform where they're complete virgins?

The Nokia Asha is their best selling phone since the N900. I don't think this is lost on the company's new owners.

A lot of Japanese companies are fighting back against the overwork culture these days. It is usual to see all the lights turned out in the office over the lunch hour to discourage working through lunch, and many companies have no-overtime days where the office is closed at 6pm (I even met one guy a couple of weeks ago who said his company has started doing this every day of the week).

Diesel's have better performance than petrol engines at low rpm. So their acceleration from standing is much better, it's at higher speeds where a diesel needs a turbocharger to keep up with even quite low end petrol engines.

The Prius is a CVT. It doesn't need to go through these oscillations of downshifting and upshifting (which you used to see a lot going up hill in old 3-speed autos with their massive gap between gears that meant that neither gear was exactly right for the driving conditions). I have a non-Hybrid Toyota with CVT, and have also observed that its peak acceleration is with the pedal about half way to the floor. In a CVT, the engine speed is pretty much directly proportional to where the pedal is, and peak torque on most cars is around 4000 rpm, not 6500.

My guess is cheap universal chargers, that are designed to provide sufficient charging current at 100V (as used in Japan), and anything in excess above that results in excess power being dumped as heat. 240V is just a worst case.

Chip & sig is being rolled out by some national banks right now.

Chip and sig makes no sense whatsoever. The point of the PIN is that the chip will not divulge its information without a correct PIN being entered.

How exactly are you supposed to get an artificial bot to pass the Turing test without people being cleverly tricked? Isn't that the whole point?

If the poster checked from a second machine, they could update their post with a confirmation that it was indeed right.

I think you should update your post to clarify that Slashdot does not support updating of posts once they are submitted, least anyone get confused and spend time looking for that option.

You have to manually turn off roaming (most phones still have that setting - the carriers have only eliminated the force-roam setting).

If you don't have the option to turn off roaming, you can also manually select a network instead of setting it to auto.