Officially UK is using metric for most things now. When both my sons were born, we were given a weight with 5 significant figures. When I plugged it into a conversion, after a midwife made a comment about how much easier it used to be to give weights in pounds and ounces than these newfangled complex kilograms, it came out at an exact number of ounces. I strongly suspect the NHS scales have just been converted at the display level, and are still making their measurements to the nearest ounce.

Apparently rounding is impossible in the metric system, though we make extensive use of it when working with our naturally convenient imperial units.

It depends how old the pipe is. An 70 year old British pipe would have to grow by 46nm, while a similar aged US pipe would have to shrink by 51nm. And if it was 2 or 3 hundred years old, and from Scotland, France or Netherlands, it would even be outside the normal tolerance one might expect for such a pipe.

New Zealand also made the transition in 1972. But back then, the open road speed limit signs were a simple black diagonal line on a white background, as the government had been raising and lowering them since a few years before, and other speed limit signs were only at the changeover points, mostly at the entrances and exits to towns. Nowdays, all speed limit signs state the explicit speed limit, there are many more exceptions to the 50km/h urban, 100km/h rural, 70km/h buffer zone limits, such as urban arterial roads with 60, 70 and 80km/h limits, and some urban roads with 40, 30 or 20km/h limits, or rural roads with 70, 80 and 90 limits. Especially where a road is not following the usual rules, there are often extra speed signs at intervals, and always just before a speed camera site. So a changeover now would cost a lot more than back then. The UK is basically in the same boat, except they didn't make the change back when things were simpler.

You do realise that Thailand may have developed over the past decades, and that North-East Thailand may not be representative of the rest of the country, don't you?

Personally I think you're more likely to pick up diseases eating in "clean" hotels and chain restaurants staffed by poorly trained teenagers than a roadside stall run by an elderly couple whose livelihoods have depended on not poisoning their customers for decades. If you're spending a year in a country, you're going to have to get used to the local germs anyway, so take the plunge and live life.

The foreign places are bland because they use curry paste from a jar. About all you can taste is MSG and chilli power. Genuine Thai food uses fresh herbs and spices to get the flavour.

The advantages of 3G are that it is long range (unlike 802.15.4), and it is globally ubiquitous (unlike new IoT startups like OnRamp and SigFox, who currently have plans rather than networks).

The fights that break out in the morning with everyone trying to be 7th in line.

AnyData, Novatel Wireless, Vertex Telecom - that is just from Qualcomm's list of module suppliers using their chips.

is 300 mm^2 which is about 17.33 sq mm

Is the compression non-lossy?

Actually the problem with 3G is not the size of the module at all, but the fact that 3G drains the battery very fast, and the costs from the providers are vastly higher compared to other technologies.

3G doesn't drain the battery any faster than any other technology. If you're comparing with 2G, then yes a 3G module working at full data rate will drain a battery quicker than GPRS at full data rate, but if you have a constant amount of data available, the 3G will finish sending it much quicker, so its overall consumption will be lower. And idle consumption is lower for 3G than 2G. LTE may be better still, but outside major city centres and away from highways there are few places where you will find coverage.

As for cost from providers, that may be a problem you have with your provider, but it is not universal. In most parts of the world, data is charged the same, no matter what technology it is going over.

Busybox replaces GNU coreutils, not GNU bash.

And pregnancy — and subsequent child-rearing — do cost women professionally. Not because anybody is "sexist", but simply because you can not give a promising assignment to an employee, who just is not there (because she is on maternity leave).

The problem is this all too often extends into not giving women promising assignments because she just got married and might start making babies soon, or because she is about the age that society expects her to want to do that. That is why even in superficially equal societies such as we have in the West, women are still far from equal.

Why must they be a factor in changing weather patterns? Do you have evidence that the numbers of them or the frequency or scale of their eruptions has changed over the past hundred or so years?

....but all those have, or soon will have systemd. Which is what this is really about. It's nothing to do with servers, or desktops really. Its a rant against systemd from an old git (or more likely a cvs) who doesn't like change.