Actually, a lot of cabs take plastic, and although you're right about buses, the Baltimore Light Rail ticket machines accept credit cards as well.

This is on land, remember. At sea, the horizon is much more definite. On land, "sunset" can be when the sun drops behind a hill. This is part of the reason I don't keep a sextant in my car.

As for the square miles issue, yes, borders are linear. However, the cameras could be placed anywhere within, say, 200 yards of the border, so that you're looking at largish areas to search. Knowing that the camera is somewhere within a square block isn't the same thing as laying hands on it--and that's assuming that it isn't moved every so often.

So if I rolled into Luxembourg and applied for a job, there'd be no problem, right? Or just hung out on a street corner begging?

Pissing people off is almost the least of it. That calls for an army, not a border crossing guard.

There's an additional discussion around how much sovereignty is given up in joining the EU, and the Union itself certainly has border control. Perhaps Luxembourg doesn't need it for the same reason that Maryland doesn't.

So can you show me a country that doesn't try to maintain its territorial integrity?

Cool. Ask for documentation, and receive documentation. Thank you.

Well, yes, and then, no.

Back in the Olden Days, when machines with oddly-large registers were pretty common (60 bits, for instance, was the word size I recall for a number of CDC machines,) then yes, word size was as you describe.

However, somewhere along the line, probably in the PDP-11 era, the 16-bit word became pretty widely accepted, so that back when I was programming in eight bits, nobody ever referred to an eight-bit value as a word, but rather simply as a "byte" or "eight bits." Double-precision arithmetic routines alowed one to work with words on a 6502, for instance.

So you're saying that American street slang is derived from the London Exchange? Pardon my skepticism, but I'd like to see that documented.

Surely phrases like, "Never a truer word was spoken" would be more familiar to Americans.

Well, it's a double entendre--"word" is a vernacular term for "truth," or "that's right" ("The Sun rises in the East" "Word!") as well as being a (maybe obsolete? I'm old and stuff) term for a 16-bit storage unit, often a "short int," so hilarity ensues (for very small values of hilarity.)

Like a check for $000,000.00?

Actually, I'd like a check like that from Google. I'd hang it on my wall.

OK, we'll go with 0% success. My point is that the failure of any one implementation does not invalidate the concept. Edison tried hundreds of wrong ways to make a light bulb, none of which demonstrated that the light bulb was unworkable.

Oh, and the Scud hunting in Gulf One was largely an air exercise, as I recall, and of course they went after the launchers. It's always preferable to destroy the enemy on the ground (or in harbor, or asleep in barracks) then when they're incoming. The Japanese didn't bomb Pearl Harbor because it's impractical to sink ships at sea--it's just easier to hit slow- or non-moving targets.

Regardless, what isn't possible is is to design a system that can accurately track and shoot down missiles in flight. As the Patriot defence system so patently demonstrated.

You're right. Just as the failure of Samuel Langley's aircraft demonstrated that man would never fly, the failure of an anti-aircraft missile to destroy only half of the ballistic missiles (targets moving at what, twice the speed of the targets it was designed to destroy?) demonstrates that ABM's will never work.

"Farding?" As in "putting on cosmetics?"

Was this "years ago" like sometime before the American Revolution?

Zippers may be the only thing that separates us from the great apes.