Which is why the metric system has separate units for mass and weight/force.

But that's not the case with the pound, it is used for both (sometimes, but not always more specifically as pound-force or pound-mass)

Don't believe Wikipedia? How about the NIST?

The real world is not always as simple as what you learned in 5th grade science, when your teacher said "The pound is a unit of weight, not mass", he was correct and incorrect at the same time due to the ambiguous nature of the unit.

quote>Why would they use a measure of WEIGHT instead of a measure of MASS?

Ton is already ambiguous, but since it is a USA media article, its safe to assume that they meant what is also known as the short ton, or 2000 pounds. The pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg, so it is, by definition, a unit of mass.

It's not like they "forgot" that users might want to add new books, the inability of any updatable storage was a design requirement to prevent it from being used for espionage or as a channel to inadvertently bring malware aboard a ship.

Though it seems that there are so many ways for a person to smuggle a MicroSD card into a secure area that an eReader is probably not a huge concern.

We have are 12 dev/test servers that I didn't bother to patch because they'll be decommissioned in a month or two along with the rest of the datacenter they are in, and even though they support SSL connections (with a disposable cert from our private CA), they are generally only used with HTTP and have no private data to protect, and are almost completely unused now.

If someone wants to spend time trying to steal the server's private key or steal user data from the server, that's fine with me, I'd rather have them spend time on my disposable server than someone's real server.

Yes and no. Technically, the airport is part of San Francisco, but it's geographically separate from SF -- you leave the city of SF to get to the airport, then you're back in the city when you're at the airport.

Public transit funding is only "absurd" if you ignore the huge subsidies that go to cars.

30% of SF residents have no car, still a ways to go to catch up to NYC's 55% but that number is growing.

CIty planners have already spent decades planning low density communities across the country, But it turns out that people still need to go to the office -- telecommuting still hasn't fulfilled it's promise of letting workers stay at home, even Google with unlimited technology resources still ships its employees 40 miles from SF to GoogleHQ. It's a lot easier to get people to the office when they live and work in the same high density city than when homes and businesses are spread over a large low density area. You can see this when you look at the difference in transit effectiveness in San Jose versus San Francisco.

It's only a fail if you think owning a car is necessary. SF has always had crowded narrow streets designed back when people still used horse and buggies to get around. Its way too late to create endless roads like LA and since even after devoting around a third of land area to roads, LA is still the most congested region in the country...city planners throughout the country are starting to realize that accomodatng more re cars is not sustainable and are emphasizing other forms of transit. SF has had a 'transit first' planning policy for decades so anyone that lives here and is surprised that its difficult to get around by car is in the wrong city. Transit in SF is far from perfect yet it's still one of the few cities in the country where its possible to live without a car.

You have a much different definition of "simple" than most people. Few people (who are not techies) find transferring a file via GPG or TrueCrypt to be "simple". Even getting them to download the file from a cloud provider can be a chore "I clicked on the link but nothing happened! What do you mean I need to look in my Downloads folder?"

This is one case where it makes sense -- cops not only have physical protection (guns, etc), but they also have legal protection - if your phone tells you that your stolen phone is at 101 Main Street and you go to that address, bang on the door and start threatening the guy that answers to give up the phone before you kick his ass, you may find yourself in jail over the threats when it turns out that the phone was really in the basement apartment at 101A Main St (assuming, of course, that the guy you're demanding the phone from doesn't just kick *your* ass, and when he tells the cops that he felt threatened, he'll get the benefit of the doubt since you were at his house). The cops don't have to make any threats when they knock on the door -- the threat is implied.

Unless you were targeted for some specific espionage (you weren't), the phone thief doesn't care about the data on your phone. If they can unlock it, they might take a quick look through your pictures for naked pics of your wife, but they aren't going to use a compute cluster to try to brute force your passcode -- they are just going to wipe it and resell it.

If you have data on your phone that you can't replace, you were bound to lose it eventually anyway - phones die for lots of reasons unrelated to theft. Make regular backups (local or cloud based).

I dunno, I was a "real nerd" in high school and college - never played D&D or got into comic books, but spent way too much time in a computer lab (high school job gave me unlimited access to a VAX - and uunet!), and think the show is funny. Maybe because I see a lot of myself and my friends in the characters. Though we never hooked up with any women nearly as hot as Penny, Bernadette, or even Amy Farah Fowler.

My mom threw away my old Atari 2600 console in the late 1980's along with a dozen cartridges. If anyone wants to mount an expedition to recover it, I can tell you approximately where it's buried. Oh, and there were some umm... magazines with it that I used to keep under my bed, you can keep the 2600, but I'd like to have the magazines back for educational purposes --I haven't finished reading the articles.

I don't think you understand how Netflix works -- they don't push movies over my broadband connection without permission. Instead, they send me content that I asked for -- which is the entire reason I have a high speed internet connection in the first place. If I wasn't watching streaming video, instead of a 25mbit cable internet connection, I'd have a 3 - 6mbit DSL connection for less cost.

If the cable company can't afford to handle the traffic with their infrastructure, then they ought to increase their rates. I'm happy to pay the cable company a fair price for internet service, but I don't want to pay it in hidden charges for all of the bandwidth heavy websites I use, I want to see exactly how much internet service costs so I can shop around to different providers and to make it more likely that a competitor will step in as the price of service increases.

Why do you think the local loop was the bottle neck? Netflix speeds increased literally overnight after they paid Comcast to upgrade the internet connection at the peering points, no local loop upgrades needed.

Looks like he might be able to fit it into an old Motorola MicroTAC phone body:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Ahh, so you're on a crusade to stop the evolution of the English language.

Alack, I fear your wood gardyloo shan't end in a fain result, meseems evolution is too puissant and your quest will end in wanion.