That’s because practically nobody here drives a car with a manual transmission, and the reason for those in Europe is (or originally was) to give drivers notice when they need to get back into gear.

A knock-on consequence of this is that nobody in the US knows how to drive, they just point the wheel vaguely in some direction and mash the skinny pedal. If they don’t get the result they wanted, they stomp on the pedal harder. You ought to watch chucklefucks try to drive in the snow, especially those with SUVs and muscle cars with rear wheel drive. People treat the throttle as if it’s the “make the car go in the direction I’m looking button” and the rest of us know that’s not how it works.

Whenever this comes up I’m obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It’s gold.

The last time I had to do this I pulled a rapier, actually. Although in my defense, the guy behind me jumped out with a tire iron first. It was purest happenstance that I had the thing in my back seat at the time but damned if the look on his face wasn’t worth it.

I’ve recounted this tale before. I have to wonder how that guy tells people his side of that story…

It’s not only natural, it’s a good idea. Especially if you are crossing a large road.

I ride a motorcycle more often than not (see user name) and it’s vital to ensure that the cross traffic is actually stopping when their light is red. You aren’t “protected” because your light is green, and there’s nothing physically stopping any asshole blowing the light and ramming into the side of you, probably without slowing down in the slightest first. That’s because they’re also staring at their phone. I can’t even go a week anymore without watching some moron sail straight through a red light right in front of me such that if I hadn’t spotted them first they would have run me over. And it’s happening more and more often as drivers are more distracted than ever before. A couple of years ago I’d only see this sort of thing once every few months.

And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

Drinkin’ beers an’ drivin’ yer trukk is a highly traditional pastime in the US deep south. Typically done in the middle of the night, in my experience, for the maximum probability of contacting the local wildlife or making friends at high speed with a tree.

There are only 36 states represented here by my count. It says “major” states, whatever that means. But 14 in total are missing either because of their smaller populations, or because their fatality rate is low enough that they would fall off the right hand side of the chart and thus wouldn’t fit the “America Drivers Bad” narrative quietly being implied, here.

Edit: I looked up the numbers for my state in the same year (and no, I’m not telling the public which one). We would be at 1.2 on this chart if my math is correct, which is well below even the shortest bar for Victoria, there.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.

It sure does. But America is the center of the world, right…?

People here in the US will say “in the South” and mean, like, Alabama. Not Tierra del Fuego.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Bull. I don’t even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.

Okay, but I would totally wield the forkchaku.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

In light of the above, then, I hereby propose that squirrels get renamed to “treegulls.”