Multitouch significantly increases the number of simple gestures that can be created.

Does that include Flipping the Bird?

The idea of huge, exact numbers is foreign to physicists

Not entirely, sometimes exact arithmetic is useful for quick cross-checks in theoretical physics. And sometimes expressions get churned out with very long, rational coefficients...

Wasn't all this foretold in the Bhagavad Gita — some dude who "farted with the munificence of a thousand bums", if I recall correctly.

Ah. So basically beefcake and guns.

OK, the AC is trolling, but assuming it is being serious (it's hard to tell sometimes when it comes to libertarianism):

proprietary software could exist without government through explicit privately-enforceable contracts

What form should this "enforcement" take?

this isn't the Daily Mail comments section

GODWIN!

When did our kids becomes our enemies?

The moment they threw stuff over everybody's cars. The moment they intruded into my garden and pissed all over it. The moment they ripped an ornament from its base and deposited it in a gutter fifty metres down the road.

[Roadcraft] is available to the public, but is not specifically designed for civilian driving.

Hmm... well, despite the book's full title, there's a lot (pretty much everything, in fact) in Roadcraft that is entirely applicable civilian road-driving (especially the "non-physical" skills concerning attitude and observation). Nevertheless, as you pointed out, getting involved with the IAM (has its own book How to be an Advanced Driver, based on the Roadcraft System) and/or RoSPA RoADA (don't they tend to use Roadcraft directly?) is an excellent starting point for driving improvement.

If they were in a position to control the vehicle they could accelerate or decelerate to manoeuvre safely onto the roundabout either ahead or behind existing traffic. Of course that would also mean they have to look slightly earlier than at the last possible moment, but you can't have everything

Oh, God, heaven forbid your average driver ever make a plan...

Also have you ever been in a car with someone who does the official 'shuffle' steering all the bloody time, even when they're making a reasonably sharp turn? The combination of responsive power steering, repeated jerky movements and the fact that they are barely turning fast enough for the manoeuvre they are attempting is not confidence inspiring.

Pull-Push should be done in a smooth and progressive manner as part of controlled, planned driving. Shuffling the wheel as you described is "doin it rong". Nor is it the appropriate technique for all situations: Rotational Steering ("hand-over-hand", and there's a "proper" way to do this too) is often more convenient for slow-speed manoeuvring, or certain limited number of situations (see Roadcraft) where a lot of steering is needed very quickly (not that one should ordinarily be blasting through hazards so fast that very quick steering is needed...).

How do you left-foot brake if pressing the brake cuts the power?

I don't think it operates along the lines of "brakes applied" => "cut power regardless", there's a sequence of events required to activate the function (e.g., maybe it only cuts if the brakes are applied at or after an increase in engine power).

Yes, SSH is cryptographically secure enough to stop any such attack, and with a verified host-key the machine at the other end of the dodgy lookup can act as little more than an "unauthorised" router. But I wasn't making a statement about SSH's authentication strengths; I think in this case SSH raised the alarm before that, and so coincidentally alerted me that all was not well with the nameserver cache, something I'd so far taken for granted. Had reverse lookups been poisoned as well (how? An attacker would need to intercept my forward queries as well), well, what's an attacker going to do with all that encrypted data?

If you're worried that the possibility someone is going to perform an MITM attack on you is greater than infinitesimal

...or the DNS cache gets poisoned, as I once saw. (Thankfully, SSH does a reverse lookup as well and checks the result matches the input, and bails if they don't.)

That and certain drives also have a mind of their own and ignore any hdparm APM setting after a short while in favour of their own, absurdly aggressive setting. One I have (by default) unloads after 8 seconds of inactivity and the only way to change it is by some obscure DOS utility that I can't get to work. 8 seconds is crazy-low, and because the typical interval for disc activity on a Linux system under enthusiastic use is typically 10-15 seconds (or even when a bit idle, as lots of other things touch the filesystem in the backgrounds), the heads spend a lot of time loading and unloading. It's possible to tune the Linux VM subsystem to ouch the disc less often, but in practise doesn't make much of a difference. Windows XP does exactly the same. The disc manufacturer says Linux should not wake up the disc so frequently, but I don't see how that squares with the way a modern, multitasking operating system works; things touch the filesystem, and this must be synced in good time (I don't want 30 seconds' worth of dirty data just sitting in RAM). And besides, disc manufacturers should just make discs and leave VM policy to kernel designers.

ACPI does not normally (and from what I've seen, never) export any controls over battery charging, or even allow the user to choose power supply. The job of handling power is usually done by the embedded controller and its firmware, which also handles any charging (along with circuitry designed specifically for the job). This is designed for optimal performance of the system in mind and usually works very well. The operating system just monitors the state of the power supply and can make demand-related decisions (CPU power-state, screen brightness, sleep/shutdown) based upon a chosen policy. If batteries really are packing up early in the manner suggested, this is more likely down to a hardware/firmware/miscellaneous-ACPI-EC-horkage defect in the notebook itself, not the operating system.