Room for Improvement...

• Windows Vista: Need I say more ?

• Old apples: Supermarkets should not be allowed to sell apples which have been in cold storage for months unless they state how old they are. When the deliciously crisp, new season apples come out, a lot of stale old apples are still for sale along side them and its hard to tell which is which. Stale, floury apples that have been stored for 12 months are enough to turn you off fruit!

• Ridculously large serves: Why can't you buy a muffin or cake slice that is a reasonable size and doesn't leaving you feeling sick after you eat it all ? Why can't serves be smaller and prices correspondingly lower ?

• Car stereo standards: Car manufacturers and makers of car stereo systems should get together and agree on standard plugs for connecting them and standard mounting space and brackets. Compare how simple it is to plug a new CD drive or disk drive into a PC and what a pain it is to install a car radio. With computers its just plug and play. With car stereos you have to have a pair of side cutters, pliers, bullet connectors or crimp connectors, soldering iron, etc. And then the damn thing is often too deep for the slot in the car and sticks out.

• Smoking licenses: Licenses should be issued to current smokers for the supply of cigarettes and tobacco. No new members should be allowed to join this license scheme after a certain period (e.g. a year). Therefore, no teenagers would be able to take up this disgusting and very unhealthy habit in the future. The problem would die out with the current generation of smokers.

• Stickers: Those annoying super-sticky stickers shouldn't be placed on apples and other fruit. They're a pain to get off, and they cause pollution when discarded. The same goes for super-sticky stickers on so many things that you buy. You have to use a solvent like turps to get them off sometimes. Often the sticker is placed over some information on the packet that you really want to read, but when you remove the sticker half the text disappears underneath it!

• Charging water by the litre: Why isn't town water charged by the litre instead of only excess water rates when you exceed a certain (and very large) usage ? Being charged for exactly the amount of water you use with a small flat connection charge - similar to telephone - would encourage people to conserve water. The result would be that the true value of water in such an arid country as Australia would be factored into its price. This would encourage people to be more careful with their water usage and would mean that less rivers would need to be dammed in the future to supply our water needs.

• Unnecessary preservatives: It really bugs me that food manufacturers fill our foods with toxins in the name of keeping food fresh longer. Sure, it probably saves the supermarkets money in food spoilage, but are we slowly poisoning ourselves and our children? A number of the additives are thought to cause hyper-activity in children and yet are not banned. It is becoming increasingly difficult to buy food which is not tainted in this way.