I used Uber for the first time on Satur^W Sunday morning in London, and although the registration number of the car was correct, the driver wasn't the one pictured. I assumed they were sharing a single car / account.

Is this uncommon?

The scale bar is very useful in unfamiliar countries. Is the next building to my hotel is 2km away, or 200m, or 20m? Can I walk to the beach?

It's much quicker to look at a scale than to ask for directions, especially when I don't know what the destinations are called.

400-600mL.

("3.4oz" is obviously an approximation of 100mL, which is the volume used outside the US.)

Assuming China is more like Europe than the US on this one, you probably transfer the money directly into your friend's account using a computer or smartphone.

I'm about to sign a contract for employment in a wealthy European country. It states upfront that severance pay is 2-6 months, depending on length of service. Balancing this, my notice period will be 3 months.

If the company can't afford to pay on these terms them it's going bust. They should have made these developers redundant 6 months earlier (or whatever) but instead took a gamble.

Apples will be made from applewood.

Wormwood fibre would surely lead to electronic hallucination.

Only for the products you buy, so why not charge the purchaser, rather than subsidising the transport of their purchases?

If goods you buy are transported by ship, you pay a tiny amount for the maintenance and fuel of the ship, but your neighbour doesn't.

The last time a bridge collapsed in the UK due to a maintenence problem seems to be 50 years ago. I think we've got this one sorted...

(Bridges have been washed away by floodwater within the last decade, usually really old ones. If the river profile was changed by a land use change upstream, that could be blamed on inadequate processes.)

There are laser location sensors in several underground stations in London that have construction work nearby. One laser thing on a robot seems to routinely measure the distance to many fixed targets.

GPS isn't an option, so you could still be right that it's cheaper.

$1000M for 9 miles of light rail isn't completely crazy (expensive, but believable). The average cost in the UK is £25M/mile ($40M), but Edinburgh's cost £100M/mile ($156M). A lot of the cost is moving whatever's buried under the road out of the way, to allow future repairs without disrupting the tram.

It's a lot cheaper to build something outside a city on worthless land, whether rail or road.

The 2009 cost per mile for building a 2+2 road in the UK was £13M, for a basic two-lane road £8M. Are you sure your final figure is correct?

(NB the British rail costs will include all appropriate safety systems. This article is interesting. It's over 8 years since a passenger on a train died in Britain, though some have died falling down stairs/escalators, off platforms etc.)

There are four London Underground lines with Automatic Train Operation. There's even a Wikipedia category: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It's not 100% automatic, the driver has to press a button to close the doors, and another (I think) to tell the train "go when ready".

165mph through Ashford, Kent.

(I'm sure there are faster examples, and this isn't the top speed of the train, but that could be the track layout rather than the urban area.)

I don't think much has changed from older usage. The terms "motor car", "motor vehicle", "motor boat", "motorway", "motorbike", etc aren't new.

Fuel is the easy one -- the truck pulls into a fuel station, and the attendant fills it up. The truck company has a contract with the fuel station franchise.

Lots of journeys probably don't involve any complicated roads. Port or rail freight yard to supermarket distribution centre, from there to the out-of-town supermarket, etc.

The core demographic seems to be grouchy, middle-aged, American libertarians, going by the comments.

See http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/... in fact, average age was 38.2 in 2012. Can I assume no new users, and say the average is now over 40?