I've driven an American car, in fact I've driven a couple of them. It gets pretty tedious trying to keep up with normal UK motorway traffic with that 6.5 litre engine banging off the rev limiter at 80mph.

I guess if you can't work out how high your vehicle is, how a doorlock works, or how to change gear then you're going to run into some sort of problems...

Yeaahh.... That probably sounded a lot better inside your head, didn't it? Maybe it should have stayed there.

Have you ever driven an American car?
You get the high maintenance *and* the shit fuel economy - but not only that, you get poor braking and handling, lacklustre performance *and* poor ergonomics and aesthetics!
Now how's that for a package?

Bear in mind that the UK consists of four different countries and a bunch of principalities, and at least one country - Scotland - has entirely different laws and indeed an entirely different legal system to all the rest. About the only thing we share with the rest of the UK is our currency and our mains voltage.

Exactly. Here in the UK, the BBC channels are ad-free, iPlayer is ad-free and the rest of the FTA channels have about half as many adverts as the US. Sky TV is pretty ad-heavy, but then it's the same group of companies as Fox.

Don't want to pay *at all*? Don't get a TV licence (which is a bit selfish, since that pays for the ad-free BBC radio and TV, and is about £12 per month), and don't watch off-air TV or "live" iPlayer.

Of course bittorrent is *always* ad-free...

The Metropolitan Police are in London. That's one city. It's the capital city, and it's a pretty big city, so there is a police force that deal with pretty much just that. They don't even deal with the outlying parts of the Greater London area.

If the police in Washington DC rolled this out, would you say "US Police"? No, because that would be stupid. It's one city, not the whole country.

Oh, please! The US had one single very minor terrorist attack and everything there went to shit.

In the UK we were dealing with US-funded terrorism for a good five decades before that. Why should we be worried about a different set of right-wing extremist weirdy religious wackos this time?

We have the same unfair and unjust libel laws as the US, where the plaintiff has no protection against a defendant with deep enough pockets?

Now, that car you drove, did it have a little picture of a glass bulb-and-tube thermometer on the dashboard, possibly next to a little warning light or on the dial of a gauge? Now, when have you *ever* used a thermometer to measure the coolant temperature in a car? Assuming you're not doing some extremely specific tests on the cooling system.

It gets worse, though. My car has no fewer than three little thermometer warning lights. One has a wavy line across it to show it's for water temperature (because it looks like waves on the sea, which is water, presumably). One has a little drop beside it - what the hell is that? Oh, it's oil temperature, and it blinks if you give it the berries when the oil is cold and comes on steady if the oil gets too hot. The final one has a pair of gears beside it. Gearbox temperature? No, hydraulic oil temperature, with the gears symbolising a gear pump - odd, since it actually uses a swashplate pump but I guess that's harder to do in a little white icon on a red lamp cover.

The one thing they have in common is that if they light up, another red warning lamp twice the size with the word "STOP" written on it comes up as well.

I think the worst example of an icon I saw on a piece of software was some radio GPS locator stuff. When it was trying to connect to the radio it showed a little animated icon of a plug going into a socket, over and over - cheesy, but I guess it makes the point.

What totally baffled me about it was this - if it couldn't connect to the radio the icon changed to a guy with a black-and-white striped shirt waving his arms. Now, since the software was pretty crap this happened quite a lot. "Aw, no, it's gone stripey-shirt-guy" was the frequent complaint.

It was only months later that I mentioned this to someone at the company that produced the software, a company somewhere in the US. "Oh, that means it's timed out", the guy said.
"Really? How do you figure that?"
"Ah well it's a baseball umpire signalling time out, you see, having the icons saves having to translate all the error messages"

Yeah, maybe it works in the US, but in the rest of the world where no-one plays baseball it falls over pretty badly.