Title says it all. This is so awesome.

Seriously... Is that really the case?
I tell you, in the UK when there it snows, everything slows down to a halt.
It's @!*$ing ridiculous! In places in Europe it is illegal to not have snow tyres and it is a bloody damn good move.

That is pretty awesome.
I find it funny how the entire place just seems to shut down at the first sign of snowfall, though. It's like they haven't quite realized they're actually a northern european country.
Case in point; most of todays premiership matches are cancelled - to preserve "the safety of the public". Basically, people are told to stay indoors.

Well if there's CPU vs CPU in Fifa 10 (which there is, I believe) you can just do it yourself!

This is what I am talking about.

So does Denmark. As soon as it snows even just a little, all Danish train and bus services go straight to hell. As far as I know, that's not the case in Norway and Sweden. I wish our transport people would talk to your transport people, and find out how it's supposed to work.

Yep. All public services operate as normal even in blistering colds. There are of course problems here and there - but it's a matter of the occassional dead car battery, not entire public transport networks starting to leer.
The only noticeable effect of the relatively extreme cold we've had this week (-20 degrees celsius mostly all over except certain coastal areas, -30 to -40 degrees inland), is that people who work outdoors (construction mainly) have been put on leave. That, and a guy froze to death after returning from a holiday in the tropics - dressed in a t-shirt and khaki pants. He was found stiff on a walkway behind a store not far away from where he lived. Evidence suggests he tried to walk home. Well, that's just darwin in practice.
Another darwinian story of the cold is how some people attempt to heat their cars. Hint: sticking a powerful radiator fan on the inside of your engine cavity is not the way to do it.

It's similar here in Germany. People are told to stay indoors if they can. Yesterday some experts even recommended stocking food and other necessary goods for at least five days.
But I guess much of that is just the media, happy to have another "catastrophe" to report about.

I returned home from a vacation in Vietnam on January 5 and was happy to finally see a real winter. Haven't had those for what, 10 years?
It's hovering between -20 and -15° C and I'm happier than I've been in a long while :-D

Send me some snow damnit! We had over 40 today

The problem Britain has is that it only sees snowfall like this maybe two or three times a decade, and even then it's usually just for a couple of days. It's ludicrous to invest a lot of money for an eventuality that happens roughly 1% of the time.
That said, the idea that the country has 'shut down' is mostly a media invention. I was snowed in, but worked from home via VPN and RDP, as do a lot of office workers nowadays, but for most of the country it was business as usual.

A lot of the "not in northern Europe" is the fault of the Gulf Stream. It brings us the warmer weather from the equator, so we get very mild winters usually.
We're on the same latitudes as Norway, Canada, Alaska, etc, but get a hell of a lot less snow.
When that Atlantic Conveyor shuts down, we'll get hit to hell and back with nasty winters just like those places, and we'll not be prepared. We can barely cope, as mentioned above, with these little squalls of snow, let alone 3-5 months of it. :-\
Edit : Little known fact - the Earth is actually closer to the sun now, than it will be in the middle of summer ;) Axial tilt is what gives us "seasons". North pole is pointing away from the sun now, so there's more atmosphere to "warm up" before it gets to ground level.

In Japan, Honda ships snow from northern Europe countries for its winter driving test track in the summer.
Why did I retain that useless fact?

I'm currently in the middle of a 4 day stretch of over 40'C days. Could we have some middle ground between the two extremes please someone? anyone?
That is fairly neat an image though.

Let me get this straight. They ship tons of frozen water from one side of the planet to the other? I am... speechless.