It's easy to know and actually reported in the weather news. They give you the rainfall in inches per square foot (or in liters per square meter), and if you know the area affected by rain, you can calculate the volume of the rain.

thus the invention/"work around" of Translit and Volapuk encoding.

"Culture" is just a big cover we put over very different things. A physician and a physicist will have a big problem to read each other's scientific papers -- mostly they won't even know what the paper is about. And imagine someone from Switzerland and from Brasil try to talk to each other about their favorite outdoor activity during January, even if they find a language they both are fluent in!

Language is much more than just a communications protocol. Language has connotations, language is malleable by its speakers, language contains concepts of the world, language is even a tool to make a difference between insiders and outsiders. We will never be able to speak one common language. No physicist will ever be able to learn about all the terms a physician needs in his daily work, and most Brazilians will never learn anything about skiing in a certain valley of the Alps. Every generation comes up with new words for old facts just because the parents should not understand everything their children are talking about.

Each language has a big body of texts encoded in this language, which are unique to this language, and most of it was never translated into any other language (you don't believe it? How much of french TV programming was ever translated into English for instance?). The idea that most of the world's knowledge is available in English is completely misguided. It's just most of the knowledge you have that is available in English. But you are no benchmark of what knowledge is. If we switch to only one single language for everyone, all the text in all the other languages will be lost forever. How minuscule the english knowledge about non-english events is, can be easily demonstrated by asking you, how much you know about the events of the Summer of 1989 in Hungary. Nevertheless this is very important for the understanding of today's world, because the talks between Hungary's minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock during the Pan-European Picnic lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. There are hundreds of news paper articles and reports available in Hungarian and German, in Czech and in Romanian, there are scientific papers about the events in those languages, but how much are available in English? In the U.S. there is still the opinion prevalent that Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall in 1988 had something to do with it. (Fun fact: It hasn't.)

The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.

It's not random. The ability for adult insects to fly evolved gradually. That has nothing to do with the fact that insects go through metamorphosis, which most likely evolved independently and prior to the capability of flight

Your argument makes as much sense as saying: "I don't believe evolution because people can talk using air even though they spend 9 months sealed up in a bag of water."

Like Disney World, will it also have accompanying lodging.

Libertarians believe everyone has all the time of the world to do all the work of thousands of people all on his own everytime something is to decide. Somehow doing research and finding out things costs nothing in a libertarian world. No wonder they come up with such a fantastic economic value of a fully free, non regulated market.

You don't have to wait for someone to pop out of the woodworks. BPG is nothing but a still frame of HEVC video which is patented up the ass. Bellard and other open source video authors are accustomed to ignoring the patent situation because they don't really have a choice if you want to be interoperable, but that isn't an excuse for creating patent problems in a field where there are already widespread royalty free standards (JPEG, PNG).

But they had STYLE!

I don't know about NetHack. I started with Hack back in the late 80's, and have played that then NetHack off and on since, usually picking it up for a day to a few weeks then losing interest. Never finished the game. I'd usually play until I got a guy down pretty far with a great kit, then when he inevitably died from something stupid, I'd be annoyed and lose interest again.

It's a good game, maybe even a great game, but it's not a perfect game and it's not the best game ever. Too much of it is just not fun. The major design flaws in my mind:

* Once you hit the labyrinths and have to deal with the wizard following you around, it just becomes a grind. A little bit of a grind in order to achieve something afterwards is fine but when a game becomes work then that is not.
* It doesn't give you a fair way to figure out what to do. A lot of the actions required to finish the game are neither hinted at nor intuitive.
* It's too repetitive. It doesn't exercise my mind much; you just do the same things again and again.
* It's too time-consuming, and frequently unnecessarily so (which goes back to the repetitive point).


Anyway, just my thoughts.

The way to handle that is easy: Send a request for administrative assistance to Ireland, and then an irish judge will decide if Microsoft Ireland has to comply.

One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.

The uselessness of torture as an interrogation tool was conclusively described about 400 years ago in "Cautio criminalis" by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. You are free to ignore 400 years of knowledge though. But then you are just ignorant.