You say they're uniquely American, but they're depressingly popular in the UK as well...

Not so much the retarded American truck sized ones, but there are a lot of Range Rovers, BMW X5s, Porsche Cayennes and so on around here. Mostly (badly) driven by mum with one tiny kid in the back seat. Sigh. I have to weave in and out of a lot of them trying to work out how to park outside schools on my cycle to work.

I agree - I'm just posting to add the other thing that nobody's mentioned yet...

The rails sing when a train's approaching. I've waited at level crossings a few times when the barriers have come down, and well before you can hear the rumble of the train, you can hear a fairly high pitched tone from the tracks, similar to running your finger round a wine glass. In my experience, that's the first and most obvious sign of an approaching train.

Well, a couple of papers.

And I deliberately don't call them "news"papers.

Asimov already did that, in (I think) Robots and Empire. The 4th book in the Elijah Bailey series anyway. The Solarians had programmed their robots that having a Solarian accent was an essential part of being human, so anyone who sounded foreign was fair game.

From other comments in the thread, I think it's more like 20% of Slashdotters don't live in the US.

I live in the UK in a 1 bedroom flat (with my other half), we have a laptop each which are basically on all evening, a server which is on 24/7 (just passed 200 days uptime) and obvious other stuff like fridge, freezer, electric oven and so forth. We do have gas fired central heating and on-demand hot water, so that cuts down on it a bit. Oh, and we don't have air con.

Our electric bill averages to £17/month and apparently we pay 12p/unit (1 unit = 1kwh), bringing us out to just under 2000 kwh per year. That's actually less than I estimated when I filled in the questionnaire. Ooops.

And yeah, I'm not really all that careful with my electricity usage - we have energy saving bulbs and whatnot, but I don't worry much about turning stuff off.

You're sort of right... It's not straight line acceleration that's fun, but cornering, which as any physicist will tell you is also an acceleration. Not having to slow down for corners is even better.

(I also have an MX-5, or Miata to the Americans in the audience, although mine's a bit newer than the GP's and still has most of its 140 horsepower)

Which is a complete joke, given the amount of energy used in making a new car. It makes even less sense an an ecological move than as an economic one.

But I (the hypothetical I) am not responsible for those 10,000 copies. With my upstream, I might have uploaded 2, or maybe even 10 copies of the film at the most. If other people have then copied my copies, that's not my responsibility.

To use the Disney T-shirts being sold out of the back of a van analogy, that's like me reprinting the T-shirts, selling 10 of them from my van and then some of the people I'd sold them to making their own copies of my T-shirt and selling them from their vans. I'm not responsible for what they do.

I can switch to multiple monitors without logging out - I do have to use the resolution tool though. And Compiz crashes and it drops back to Metacity when I go to multiple monitors, so it's certainly not perfect. I think that's due to not having enough graphics memory though.

Given that the vast majority of road building and maintenance costs are paid from taxes other than those remotely driving related (in the US, especially!) and that bikes cause virtually no damage to roads, compared to cars I think that the cyclists are already paying more than their fair share via income tax and other taxes.

Another issue passing on the right when traffic is stopped at a light; I just spent time trying to get around you and now you illegally pass me while I am at a light so I have to do it again.

You say this, but as a cyclist I get annoyed by cars which overtake me, then immediately have to stop behind a parked car to let cars coming in the other direction through... If they'd stayed behind me, I'd've been able to carry on in the half-lane that's left between the parked car and the oncoming car. Instead, I have to stop behind the car because they're blocking the road.

And it takes a lot more (human) effort to get a bike going and up to speed again than a car...

Also, I'm one of those rare cyclists who /does/ obey the road laws - I don't jump red lights, I do overtake on the correct side, and so on.

I'm not sure I agree... I can be fairly forgetful, so there've been a few times when having the car beep when I turn off the engine and open the door with the lights on has been very useful! Granted, some of your examples (like the seat belt one) are excessive, and I wouldn't want that, but sometimes they're useful.

I guess what's needed is an on/off switch for the warning beeper... But then, that's /another/ control on what may already be a rather crowded dashboard.

What I do find annoying sometimes is my other half's car's indicator warning sound. By law, the car has to make /some/ sound to let you know the indicators are on, and most cars do that with a clicking relay sound as the lights go on and off. Hers makes an almost musical "bink, bonk, bink, bonk" noise...

I disagree with you both, although this could be because I have a UK perspective on the issue. Over here, you can either buy "locked" phones, which typically come with a pay-as-you-go sim. Regarding these, I basically agree with you, the network has subsidised them heavily, so they're not really "your" phone.

On the other hand, you can get phones on contract. This involves signing up for a specified number of months, and possibly paying something up front. In this case, you're buying the phone, however you're essentially buying it on credit and paying it off over 12-24 months. In this case (at least over here) the phones generally come unlocked, so you can move to a different network if you wish, but you'll still have to pay your contract's monthly fee, even if you don't use the network.

In the latter case, I feel it's perfectly fair to consider the phone to belong to the customer. They've paid for it, and the service.

The other difference between the US and the UK is this ridiculous notion of crippled phones - over here, they might sometimes be locked to a network to cover the subsidy, but I've never had one which has had features deliberately disabled by the network which is what preventing you rooting the device basically amounts to.

You can get back to the 50% score if you look at it as:

news [ ]
for nerds [x]
stuff [x]
that matters [ ]

My girlfriend's Corsa has the reverse left and up, like that, unlike my MX-5, which is right and down. I think I prefer the left and up style really, I feel like I'm less likely to try and put it in there accidentally as you have to pull a collar up, and it frees up space for a sixth gear (the 6 speed MX-5 has 6 right and down, and reverse further right and down, which strikes me as silly).