My trick is to take a 4-way UK splitter. That way you only ever need one foreign adapter, and when your (disorganised) supervisor forgets something they can still charge their Mac sitting next to you. Standardisation of hardware interfaces is a big problem (mostly with the way markets work) - e.g. everyone had their own strange connectors for data on computers until USB *finally* became the standard. At one point Sony had some insane "memory stick" port that only worked on VIAOs, and each laptop came with only one "stick" of a fixed size... Given the global fragmentation of manufacture and usage of all the devices, I'd say a universal power interface is a long way off. unless you mean something like this ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18266022 ) which is a nightmare for any 115V/230V-specific appliances (which luckily doesn't include laptops and chargers)....

People in the learned/genetic flamewar - let's separate out two things: - Personality (MBTI, or similar, sets of behavioural preferences) - Behaviour (a function of personality and context.) Personality has both genetic and environmental components, and tends only to "settle down" when someone is about 7 (I don't have a reference for this, but I did just hear a lecture on it, and I trust the academic who gave it, at least on this point.) In any case, we can probably assert that there's a strong influence from genetics, especially outside of "extreme" environments. Behaviour is a function of personality, but it is also strongly influenced by context, and the context difference between single and multi-child households is huge. I would argue that parental (and indeed sibling) behaviour, is a strong driver of the child's behaviour; I'd be interested in studies that seek to find ways to separate out the genetic component (although they'd be difficult to implement owing to ethical rules; treating two twins differently, for instance, would probably be unacceptable, and unless they were isolated from each other there would be behavioural cross-pollination anyway!)