I can confirm through painful first-hand experience that the word 'angry' is entirely superfluous in that context.

People still steal car radios? Even the stock manufacturer fitted ones? Crikey.

I find I sometimes want music or the radio for distraction. If I get bored while driving I'm more likely to take unnecessary risks. If I'm enjoying my drive I'm more sedate.

So your answer is what? Destroy the quality of life for people in San Francisco?

I'd fucking love the US urban sprawl here in the UK. It would mean we had the masses of land available to spawl over.

More relevantly, it's not a felony to not drive without a licence. Sadly this seems to be an option many people are ignoring.

I've never used my driving license as ID for boarding an aircraft. Other forms of identification are available. Do you really think that people that don't drive also never fly??

Trains can take you between towns, not just across them.
Snow does not preclude bike riding.

Other than for commuting, taxis are cost-competitive to car ownership in the UK. They're frequently less convenient, but not more expensive, especially if you live in an urban location that lets you use public transport for a proportion of your journeys.

I appreciate you're playing devil's advocate but the barriers to not owning a car aren't insurmountable, even in the US. As someone else in the thread suggests, learn to drive safely or move to New York.

"Driving is a privilege" is not an excuse to penalise people unfairly for non-driving related matters such as child support.

The importance of driving for an inclusive social life and employment is not an excuse for dangerous driving.

If you don't notice a flashing green light barely in your peripheral vision I would start to wonder if you ought to be driving at all.

At my height, the steering wheel blocks out half the dashboard. And, no, I can't fix this problem with a phone book (even if such a thing was still available).

My problem is that I'm forced to recline to a halfway recumbent position to keep from mashing my head into the ceiling.

In many vehicles I end up reclined so far back that I can barely reach the steering wheel. And, no, this is not because I have short arms. It's because the rear passenger window has now entered my peripheral vision. If this strikes you as strange, then I suspect it's been a long while since you spent any quality time with sin/cosine. (I have a wine bottle a mere 2" too tall for one of my cupboard shelves. If I tilt it to 45 degrees it fits just fine.)

So then I have to crank the seat forward until my knees are striking the front dashboard. Strangely, I don't find this uncomfortable for my legs, unless I wish to move them.

My peripheral vision is now roughly oriented toward the driver's seat-belt pulley, and my eye level is horizontal to the tint line on the windscreen. By the time I get the steering adjusted to a comfortable position, it's almost a certainty that half the dashboard is occluded by the top half of the steering wheel.

I can't see stop lights, either, if I'm first to the light and I've pulled up to the stop line, unless I use the old ear-to-shoulder trick—or I spot some other aspect of the intersection control synchronized to the light I'm waiting on.

What look like large vehicles from the outside are usually just as bad. Sure, the cabin height is increased, but usually they take most of it away with a higher seat height (to better accommodate all those fancy seat motors whose very existence makes the seating position you most desire impossible to achieve).

You should book a week sometime in the Hobbit Hotel. It will do wonders for your imagination concerning the circumstances that others face. Probably you should do this before participating in the design of any mechanical thing to be used by anyone other than a jet fighter pilot (whose physiques are carefully restricted to the design environment).

Actions sometimes send messages, but they are not speech.

Non-verbal actions are not speech (excepting deaf people and Italians and anyone with secure tenure in hard rock D-block and postural nuance of a clever hostage being photographed by his or her kidnapper), but often they are speech acts (in cases too far multitudinous to list here).

You mean like the one I use on my PC? I call it a controller, but that's because I perceive a gamepad to have no analog thumbsticks.

It's the joy of a PC. I can use keyboard and mouse for strategy, FPS and RPG games (online / MMO / offline or otherwise), use HOTAS for flight/space sims, use a wheel or a controller for driving games and just use the mouse for Hexcells.

Or combine options. For Saints Row III the keyboard and mouse gives me the control and precision I want for moving around on foot, then switch to the controller when I'm in a car or aircraft.

But then, I've been using peripheral controllers of various forms for gaming with keyboard based programmable computers since before they came with a mouse...

I practically begged a friend to get a 970 on the PC he bought a week ago. Their pricing was so aggressive that as soon as you went within £40 of it the performance uplift was just too appealing to turn down. You get a PC that'll play new release games beautifully at 1920x1080 for another 4-5 years instead of just 2-3.

I gave up and went 16:9. I cheated though; I didn't drop to 1080 height, I switched to 2560x1440.

The aspect ratio is less important to me than having good vertical resolution. This way I get more vertical than 1920x1200 and the bonus of a few extra pixels on the sides too.

That's the bit that confuses and disappoints me. The consoles seem to be expecting 3GB of graphics RAM so it feels pretty asinine to release a PC card with only 2GB. Surely matching console performance in a midrange PC is a fairly basic expectation?

Nah, it means that Nvidia offer a range of graphics cards for gaming, and this one is not "cheap and nasty" and it's not "top end". It's sort of near the middle of the range.

Yeah, any card released in the last five years should be awesome for games released before 2005, so if those are the games you want to play then save your money and see how the onboard graphics cope with them before even buying a dedicated graphics card.

My year old graphics card is still coping fine with games released in the past few months at full detail and 2560x1440, so that gives you an idea of how far ahead of the current game demands the graphics cards are. 1920x1080 gaming is comparatively extremely cheap these days.