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I find it uncomfortable to hold a laptop in my lap and try to type. The angle is all wrong.

This might not be applicable, but could it be that you're just too short? I have a problem using my laptop if it's squished right up next to my beanbag, but if it's further down - at or just hanging over my knees - then typing isn't too bad. I'm just under 2 meters tall, so that helps a bit, too.

I'd have to agree that most laptops are really just portables, at least around here. Probably half of the people with laptops have a docking station @home for them as well as one here @work, and the rest just leave the laptops docked all the time.

slashdot easter egg:
HEAD slashdot.org | grep X-[B,F]

Try wget -qsO- slashdot.org | grep X-[B,F] instead... that'll fetch w/ headers and grep all at once. Now I just need to find mod_Futurama for my Apache!

The metric system is a misfeature. There are two things one wants to do with numbers, count things and measure things. For counting, thanks to the fingers, 10 is a natural base. For measuring, you often want to break things into equal parts, half, third, quarter, etc. The smallest natural base to make this easier is 12. So, most ancient systems used 10 for counting and 12 for measure.

The metric system was a product of the Age of Reason, which had as its basic premise that they were smarter than everybody before them. They decided to unify the two systems and chose 10 as the unifying base. This is backwards. For measuring, the ability to divide evenly is critical, counting can be done in any base. The logical choice would be to use 12 for everything, but that would really mess things up, so they changed the measure instead.

For its intended use, scientific measure, any base will work since you usually aren't dividing those up and it scales well. For day-to-day stuff, though, metric sucks.

Some shortcomings of metric

If you do a search for sucks on google, you'll notice that about 80% are ...sucks.com (or .org) sites. Most of them suck, though. Notably www.homedepotsucks.com and www.gapsucks.com are horribly out of date and look like a 4th grader dropout was hired to lead the design editor.

One caught my eye, however. And I Am Appalled! This is something that directly influences and affects all of us! metricsucks.com makes some bold, bald faced lies about who does and doesn't use metric!

Not to mention their clearly inferior message board. Suckers.

An American's experience with the metric system in Belgium. It has some good points.

Oh, so you order a "250 milliliter" or "quarter liter" instead of a pint at the pubs?
There is a great essay about how the metric system looks all good to write, but is way inconvenient to actually use. How do you divide a meter in thirds?, etc. It also tells about the origin of the fahrenheit scale as being a binary scale (64 degrees) between the freezing point of water and body temperature (96 originally) so that the scale could be accurately duplicated based on those two setpoints.

If that's true than good, the Metric system takes everythign we know about number theory and throws it out the window in favor of something that only has one saving grace, it's easy to move up or down in scale.

An essay on the Metric system puts it much better than I could.

If Metric is so great why isn't time based on divisions of 10? or trigonometry? They're both 12 based which is a good thing.

Feet and inches are certainly better suited to efficient everyday use.

See here for an Australian account of why imperial units are better for day-today use.
See here for a Dutch one.

The Imperial system is reproduceable.
The metric systems premise is to be based on the length of the arc from the north pole to the equator (1 metre = 10^-7 of the length of the arc) Only trouble is that the arc isn't uniform OR constant. And their measurements were off by 30 metres. Try and reproduce the metric system, and you might have some trouble.

How would you feel if I insisted that you speak English, under pain of a fine or a prison sentence for non-compliance?

Oh, and while you're thinking about that, try and measure out 1/3 of a metre.

security boar... - Is that like a guard dog? £100 fine.
evoluting - Now at least the last one was amusing, but this isn't even a word : £500 fine.

Referring back to the guy who was prosecuted for selling bananas by the pound, he was prosecuted on the idea that the 1972 European Communities act overrules the 1985 Weights and measures act. How can a law be overruled by one 13 years its predecessor? Surely then the 1972 EC act is countermanded by the 1963 weights and measures act?

Metrication has been forced on the UK population without any consent - the metric system has in this way set itself up as the enemy of democracy.
The only argument for exclusive metrication is a unified international system. When I go to a metric pub, I could ask for a half-litre/500ml of beer. Or I could ask for a pint, and get less than a pint. Or I could come up with a word which means "half-litre". But that wouldn't fit in with the standardized system, would it?

If efficiency is your goal, and you'll never reach it worshipping the metric system, then why not make language more efficient. Get rid of unnecessary verbs - you only ever need to say "more" or "less" "something". We'll use plus and minus, shall we? So "very stupid" becomes plusstupid, "extremely stupid" becomes double-plus-stupid etc. Now we can rid ourselves of the those nasty, inefficient antonyms, through negation. So double-plus-clever becomes double-plus-un-stupid. And we can get rid of synonyms too - how many different ways do you need to say the same thing? "Stupid" has in excess of a dozen (hehe) synonyms - out they go - we don't need them. Likewise "clever".

So the word-phrase "double-plus-un-stupid" covers what normal English could have an inefficient 144+ phrases for ("extremely" has ~12 synonyms, as does "clever") Remove the "un" and you've covered the same number of opposite phrases. We can take out unnecessary and inefficient qualifiers such as pronouns and conjunctions too. I'm going to go with my mate Orwell here and call this Double-talk. Why not take it further? "double" is such an inefficient way of saying "double" after all - why not replace it with a particular syllable - say "oo". We can leave "un" as it is - its quite efficient. "Stupid" has two syllables - we'll make that "stoo" to make it more efficient. So we've managed to get "extremely clever" to the syllables "oounstoo".

Thought apes stupid - plusunright. Apetalk doublepluseffective.

Metric is for Eurofags!