Most people these days prefer to live a good deal longer than their earliest possible breeding time.

Ha!

Good luck with that. Corporate apps and products coming out TODAY require IE 8 and MS specific hacks just to run. Because of this my employer will only buy software written to run on IE 8. Not W3C.

You better plan to support IE 8 until 2019 when you are ready to switch to HTML 5 or we will buy from a competitor who will. 80% of all other large companies operate the same way so good luck.

No way we will run classic shell or Windows 8. We just upgraded to Windows 7 for crying out loud! So expect jquery to be used for years to come. Many grandmas too will continue to use XP and IE 8 as well and expect the same support we received for the last half decade.

PDF, and the source that was used to generate the HTML (FLP LaTeX according to the thank you section)

This recent quote from President Obama (re: illegal torture) comes to mind: "And my hope is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy but what we do when things are hard."

Interesting that wearing a wristwatch might now, again, be more eccentric than wearing a pocketwatch.

Sounds like weird innovation that as an old-school technologist I'm not comfortable with. I come to Slashdot for the opposite of those things.

Ever stop to think that maybe it was just a simple statement of fact and not meant to take all credit for being the first goddam person to get a Linux desktop install working? Chill out.

There's no consistent US/EU difference on that. Some states in the U.S. apply full sales tax to groceries (Alabama, Hawaii, Kansas, etc.), some apply a reduced tax (Georgia, Illinois, etc.), and some exempt groceries entirely (California, Texas, etc.). The same goes in the EU with VAT: some apply the full rate (Denmark), others apply a reduced rate (Belgium, France, etc.), and some exempt groceries entirely (UK, Malta).

If it's earned there, yes, though that's not always the case. Companies play a lot of games with where they choose to book expenses and income. Lots of companies are officially earning a lot of money in places like Luxembourg and Ireland that is really earned elsewhere.

My theory is that the illiterate medieval peasants who invented those systems had an intuitive knowledge that a duodecimal number system would make a lot more sense than decimal, and they ended up creating various half-assed implementations of it for their measurements. (The mile thing is different; it's a Roman decimal measurement of steps).

Unfortunately we did end up using decimal, and reinforced it with Arabic numerals, which makes those intuitions worse than useless in the modern world.

Then how do you explain the fact that after well over a decade of people being "educated" that Triclosan in hand soap is useless and probably dangerous, almost every soap on the market is still laced with it?

I'll explain it: such education simply doesn't work. The average person can not hold enough factoids in their brains to make the correct decisions on all of the things they need to purchase in modern life. Morever, the manufacturers are constantly bombarding those same people with misinformation and half-truths to promote their products. (This soap is Antibacterial!!!)

Without a ban, tax tweaks, or large mandatory warning box on the package that says "This vacuum an ineficient power hog. Do not buy.", then absolutely nothing will happen. (I'll also point out that the difference between increasing the tax on one thing and rebating it on something else is purely academic. They're both effectively raising the share of overall tax burden on one set of goods and reducing it on the complementery set.)

I do think kettles are getting more common in the U.S., but in the '90s they were almost unknown. Another factor imo is that microwaves have been ubiquitous in American kitchens for decades, and are commonly used to heat water, so there's already a common alternative to the stove. They're not a great option for boiling water, but they're a common way (in the U.S.) of making near-boiling water for brewing tea or making ramen.

Where in the EU are you washing clothes? Most people here (Scandinavia) live in apartment buildings that have a laundry room with industrial-strength washers/dryers, which take only 25-30 minutes to wash.

I think most people just add (cold) water and then microwave it, even though the instructions say to heat the water separately.

I don't think I ever saw an electric kettle in the US. People who drink coffee make it in a coffee pot, and people who drink tea are deported to Europe.