Some of the reasons that people in the UK drive quite a lot:

a:) In the UK it's perfectly normal to drive long distances between major cities for things like business trips or weekends visiting relatives, e.g. London to Glasgow, a good 7-8 hours with a couple of short breaks, where as in the US it seems it would be more common to fly in similar situations.

b:) In Continental Europe, train services and public transport are far superior in just about every respect and have been the envy of the British for the last thirty years or so. In recent times things have got worse, with prices for longer train journeys reaching almost ridiculous levels if bought on the day of travel. Though in the cities buses can be pretty good, in rural areas they are awful, unless you like 1 hr journeys on bumpy roads that cost the same as the equivalent direct 20 min drive in your car.

c:) North American towns and smaller cities are far better equipped with local shops and services than their equivalents in the UK, particularly in more rural and "satellite town" areas. In the US and Canada I'd constantly be amazed by what was on offer in small towns that would in the UK just be villages with a single newsagent/minimarket, maybe a post office and a few pubs. People in the UK in places like this are used to driving 20 mins+ to a town/city in the area that's larger to get more than the most basic services or go to the supermarket. Both supermarkets and larger shopping malls in the UK are, on average, quite a lot more crowded than their equivalents in the US and Canada. My theory is that this is due to the higher costs of land, rent, and running a business on average here to due to our great population density, minimum wage laws and many restrictions on new development, leading to a consolidation of businesses into fewer, more concentrated areas - but it results in more 20-40 min drives for the significant semi-rural population.

d:) One reason why there are less cars per person in the UK, it's really expensive in the UK to keep a car road legal compared to other countries. Insurance and road tax add up to £600-£1500 per year for most drivers, for a fairly modest type of car. Insurance varies hugely depending on how sporty/big engined the car is and how young you are. You don't see 17-20 year olds driving SUVs / Jap sports coupes/ sports cars nearly as commonly as in the US or other countries because the insurance would be so expensive (it might not even be possible to buy insurance for some car/driver combinations). I think that's one reason why fatal accidents are lower here.

Good call, even though it's 6-7 years since I read that, it sprung to mind when I was looking at the map and I was planning on looking it up again.

The most obvious changes for me are the development of Guam and Hawaii as hubs of the pacific, where in the telegraph world Hawaii was an outpost and Guam wasn't on the map. Otherwise, it's surprising how similar the two maps are, even the level of development around the coast of Africa, which, although greater now was surprisingly developed in the telegraph world.

Some other games of similar vintage that I have found very playable still to this day, and stand out in terms of depth:

Jagged Alliance (1994):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagged_Alliance_2
Turn based tactical mercenary shooter. I remember playing this in 1994, but the game largely unchanged (except for screen resolution and color depth) was still being developed in 2005.

Betrayal at Krondor (1993)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_Krondor
Fantastic RPG that doesn't feel dated at all, very atmospheric with fun turn-based combat. According to PC Gamer the 'first ever' 3d RPG, though I find that hard to believe.

Microprose Night Hawk: F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 (1991)
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/4553/F-117A+Stealth+Fighter+2.0.html
One of the best flight sims ever made. Sequel to 1988 "F19 stealth fighter". Very simple 3d polygon graphics, but huge amounts of content, great presentation and a sense of freedom not found in any later flightsims I've played (except for one from 1996, A-10 Cuba!). Needs a keyboard overlay.

Quarantine (1994)
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/146/Quarantine.html
I still consider this futuristic taxi driving sim the most atmospheric game I've ever played. A succession of quality, varied levels, entertaining missions and a surprisingly responsive driving model. It's amazing how much of the fun and gameplay features of the 3D GTA games is found in this ancestor, the only thing really missing being the ability to get out of your taxi. You can however purchase weapons and upgrades to your taxi. Far more worth playing today than Doom or Doom 2 imo because of it's depth.

Ah the 2500+ Barton - a good CPU, I built a very similar system myself but running Win 2K (which I stubbornly held on to throughout the entire reign of XP) The CPU overclocked to 3200+ needed such a huge fan and heatsink, I remember it sounding like a vacuum cleaner was running when the system was on. First system I built was an AMD K6-2 with paired SIMMs and a 5.5 inch form factor Quantum 'bigfoot' HD

He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"

So was the small plastic box in his hand the phone he was talking on, or did he 'appear' to have something in both hands?

How would he have fiddled with the box with both hands full? Or was he fiddling with the phone? He must have fiddled with the phone in order to fiddle with the box, as if he wasn't talking on the phone when fiddling with the box he would have to fiddle with the phone afterwards in order to dial a call. Which would call into question the recorded sequence of events. It would only seem likely that he hid the box, then placed a call, and walked off while the call was going through.

The most likely hypothesis however is that the deed was carried out by a three armed perpetrator, holding the box in one hand, talking on the phone with the other, and using his extraneous appendage to "fiddle with the box".

Obviously a sign of an alien borne geocaching mind control conspiracy, the clued-in CIA and NSA providing a stand in human fall guy should it draw attention from the local bobbies.

Totally correct. This is why I don't play any recent FPS or action games, I just ignore the lot, don't even keep up to date on new games coming out anymore.

Developers just don't seem to care about the way games 'feel' anymore, it's only about how flashy the graphics are.

No matter if moving feels like swimming in treacle and aiming is like it would be after six temazepams and a bottle of whisky.

Twitch skill is seen as a bad thing nowadays as it can make people who are rubbish at computer games feel like they are rubbish at computer games.

The feel when playing a game built in the Quake 2 engine like CS 1.6 is fantastic, like the mouse is directly connected to your crosshairs. This is the only reason why there are still CS 1.6 tournaments around today - no one has released a good game since that isn't crippled for serious online competition by the graphics engine.

How much fun would table tennis be if your arm worked like aiming does in modern FPS games? I don't think anyone would play it. And that's what this is about - good gameplay is very hard to get right, but flashy graphics are an easy win that will always fool the masses.

Truly insightful post - I've never seen what is wrong with communism explained like this before and it's so obvious it's like being hit with a plank in the face. I think there are a lot of people out there who completely miss this point too.

I've always had a very bad opinion of speed cameras, they've never been shown to reduce accidents. The best approach I've seen to speeding was in New Zealand. There speed limits are fairly high compared with most other countries and drivers use common sense on when to go slower than the speed limit. Dangerous speeders are discouraged not so much by speed cameras (especially outside of cities), but by marked and unmarked patrol cars with onboard speed detectors - I 've been busted by one for doing 117kph along the Upper Buller Gorge in an Integra, I asked the copper about the system and he said it was effective independent of the relative movement of the vehicles. It totally beats guys at the side of the road with a speed gun - and you generally don't see much speeding because a patrol car could come around the corner at any second, and the 110kph speed limit is usually feels fast enough for all but the straightest road. But you know if you go out on the backroads at 3am, you aren't going to get snapped by a camera. Yes they have a very high accident rate but a lot of this is because there are almost no motorways and intercity or rural travel generally includes steep grades, mountain passes, one lane bridges etc, and many of these roads are fairly or totally empty and pass through wilderness, encouraging higher speeds. I remember overtaking a double tanker truck climbing up a 30km twisty minor road mountain pass at 2.30am going into a blind bend because I drove the road regularly and knew that at that time of night, 4 times out of 5 I wouldn't see a single vehicle in the whole half hour drive in either direction. I was desperate to get past, and knew the risk would be in the tens of thousands to one against a head on collision and decided to go for it.

No, but Uranus is hiding Q*bert!

I just gave it a go with every wish for it to be good, but it didn't seem to recognise my test artists (some mildly obscure drum & bass). I then tried "Metallica" to cover the opposite end of the spectrum, but got a 500 internal server error - an easter egg perhaps? Finally I tried US noise metal band "Lightning Bolt" but it returned an Enya song as a reccomendation. That's when I decided it wasn't built for my tastes! Nice design though.

The first example is good, but if you are searching for "The Police", it's unlikely any algorithm, or human observer would think you were searching for the band. If you searched for "The Police Band" (without quotes obviously) then I would say fair enough.

Otherwise it would be like searching for "big black cock" and being surprised that the results and ads were not about poultry.

For sure, it's a crappy way to do it.

The new ideas the article talks about with subsets are a great idea - if you could identify groups of users who might not have heard Pink Floyd, like teens or people who died before 1970, you could recommend it based on tastes among their peers just to them. Though I feel using such metrics is risky - leaving little room for non-conformism, or resting in peace for that matter.

Every recommendation algorithm I've seen does one or both of two things. The first being staying extremely close to things I have already expressed an interest in - never broadening my horizons.

That, or it suggests really popular things, for example with music always getting a string of well known, popular bands and artists like Radiohead or Pink Floyd suggested as bands I might like - because many people who like similar sorts of music to me like Radiohead, the algorithm thinks I would like Radiohead too - they can't seem to figure that I would already know if I liked Radiohead or not at this point. I've never found a way to tell a recommendation algorithm that Pink Floyd is OK but I want something less popular...

Can you elaborate on the fairy liquid/sea water incident?