See http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/14416.aspx for fares and http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf for a map of all Tube, rail and tram lines.

Tube:
£2.10 for a single journey in the central zone (any time).
£1.60 for a single short-ish journey not in the central zone (peak time).
£3 for a very long journey off-peak, £5 at peak (zone 6 to zone 1).

Bus: Any bus (or tram) journey is £1.40.

There is an automatic limit to what you pay if you use the contactless payment card (which everyone does), see the web page ("price cap"). There is a lower limit for only using buses or trams.

Road: driving between 7h-19h within (roughly) zone 1 costs £10.

I can't find reliable figures on the amount of subsidy. It seems to be mostly of interest to right-wing crackpots. The revenue from the £10 congestion charge is spent on public transport.

Fares have increased significantly with the current mayor, I think he has shifted what the subsidy pays for.

No unicorns and faeries in London, but I've never seen human faeces anywhere on public transport. Some years ago someone was almost sick on me in a lift -- she was very, very, drunk. Occasional pools of vomit in the corners of stations isn't especially unusual on a Friday or Saturday night, but the cleaners clean it up pretty quickly. Again, it's drunk people rather than mentally ill etc, and it's very bad form.

Drunk people on public transport can get injured. There's a set of advertisements urging people to take care, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzitalondon/292988703/in/photostream/ -- one of them is something about drinking/alcohol. Of course, the injuries are usually relatively minor, the person probably *very* drunk, and the bystanders unhurt. Falling down a long escalator or in front of a train can be fatal.

That reminds me of something I saw in Beijing: two policemen were carrying/dragging a man so drunk he was hardly able to walk through the station. I followed -- I wanted to know what they would do, and it was the direction for my transfer anyway. They took him to the platform, waited for the train, and helped him sit down. Then they left.

A long-running campaign in the UK helped alter the public perception of drink driving.

This larva is several bites large.

Or how about Gonimbrasia belina .

(Insects are sufficiently different to mammals that sanitary conditions are less important, so you have less to worry about there.)

Well, some of them are too small. But see this project (online catalogue of edible insects in central/west Africa). The first picture has larvae of a decent size.

(I've met someone who works on that project. He'll eat anything, and pretty much has to -- you can't visit a village then refuse the food they offer if you want permission to take photographs, insect samples etc.)

You may as well say the same about a prawn or crab, since that's just as "yuk" in some cultures.

I've tried waxworms and crickets (at the insect museum in New Orleans) and something on a stick in China. The waxworms and crickets tasted of cajun seasoning and fudge, since the museum was trying to make them palatable to unadventurous American children*, but the thing-on-a-stick was OK -- surprisingly meaty, like a prawn.

* They failed. The two teenage boys there at the same time as me ran away when they were told the fudge with insects in wasn't a joke. More for me!

I think you're probably correct about the lack of brand loyalty. Might most people think of Facebook roughly the way they think of email, or the telephone? Everyone has is, except some people who like to say they don't have it, since for some things it's the normal / easiest way to do something. It's just a utility though, and a better utility will replace it when it gets enough momentum.

Teenagers don't use Facebook (though they have an account). Their parents do (which is why they don't), but it's most popular with the 18-24 and 25-35 groups.

I prefer to Rtfm, so my employer sends me to QCon. I recommend it, it's useful to see all the new stuff in one place.

"Woman shoots intruders" makes a good story, "woman shot by intruders" is just a regular day in the USA.

Nevertheless, here's a couple of articles:
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/131161/
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/noble-la/TR15JA061K07R7VC6
http://omaha.com/article/20120912/NEWS/120919892

Continuing is pointless without some statistics. The report you link to has some, and prints in bold "The data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender; the reverse was reported more than 20 times more often.", but in the text notes that this is because the dataset didn't collect data where the defender was injured.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm shows a different side.

Frankly, I don't care to debate this -- I'm happy with the situation in my country, presumably you like your country's approach, and arguing over the Web is rarely useful.

No doubt there are also many cases of old men and women being shot by attackers, probably sometimes with their own gun.

The newspaper article links to their source. Their headline is embarrassingly misleading for what's supposed to be a serious newspaper.

The homicide rate is higher in the USA, the rape rate is higher, the major assault rate is higher, the car theft rate is higher.

In England and Wales the burglary rate and non-major assault rates are higher.

Yes. Knives and sticks are less dangerous: it's far easier to run away, and much clearer what the criminal is intending to do (it takes more movement on their part). It's also very difficult to accidentally kill bystanders.

Whoops, my figure was for 1 mph/second, not 3.3.

I was lazy and used Google. I have GNU units installed, but I forget to use it. It's much better than trying to coax Google into giving the correct conversion.

What's the problem? That *is* an acceleration.

(The SI measure is ms^-2, metres per second squared, or metres per second per second. 3.3 (miles/hour)/second = 0.44704 m s^-2.)

We English-speaker hide the meaning of technical words by using Latin or Greek. If you know some Latin or Greek that can often help understand the meaning of English.

What's "oxygen"? Greek for "acid maker". That corresponds to the German "Sauerstoff", "acid material". Many German technical words are made from normal German words, which helps understanding, IMO.

"Petroleum" = "rock oil", Greek and Latin. German: "Erdöl" -- earth oil, but Erd and Öl are normal, everyday words.

(I only speak a little German.)

In the UK the law is fair, and judges are fair (as far as I know), but in some areas the police -- on average -- aren't: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/apr/22/ethnic-minority-britons-stop-search-white

There's clearly potential for laws to be made that the lawmakers know will be selectively enforced, but I don't know the situation in the US.