Stash is just a temporary place to stash changes. It's useful, but if you don't want it it can be ignored.

You don't need a remote repository either. You can do everything locally. But if you do want to share things then there's no option here.

Workspace and local repository - not really a lot of choice on these. You need a local area where you're working.

So that just leaves the index. And honestly I have no idea why this is necessary. I can see how it might be useful to have an optional extra stage that we can do a partial commit but most people will do a bunch of changes and commit those.

It's still surprisingly secure in practice.

Sure, tapping the phone line is a simple enough procedure. I think it's just a button press for the police, and anyone with modest electronic skills and physical access can record anything that goes through the phone lines, but you'd have to set that up beforehand. Faxes and phone calls aren't logged in general. Only the numbers dialed and call lengths.

In this situation, nobody would have intercepted the images.

We're relying on unaccountable private companies for some pretty essential services.

Perhaps they should be more tightly regulated as public services, like utilities are. If they're as essential as they seem to be, locking people out is not something that should be left entirely to the whims of a for-profit company,

Time is easy when you don't make it hard by doing stupid things.

Not doing stupid things is the hard part.

Is astronomy only concerned with 1 second accuracy?

Seems that by doing away with this we can make things simpler. Make adjustments to the measurements with a look up table based on the offset of the Earth for the year in question. Or astronomers can use "Astronomer Time". There's no particular need for the Greenwich meridian to be the time we use for day to day tasks. Seems really bizarre that the whole world should shift to accommodate astronomers.

So it's a minimal value of losses. It's not going to be random. Just an underestimate.

They know how many stamps are sold, and they know how many letters are posted. So it's just a case of subtracting one from the other. It's probably an underestimate since some stamps are going to be lost or damaged.

It's a bit of an arms race so I imagine this won't keep tracking away for long. Still, good until they do.

This comes just a few days after I read about a company abolishing it. They're not the only company to notice it actually seems to discourage people from taking time off.

So what happens to international treaties when a country gains independence? Is there any explicit rule here? Presumably the US position is that any treaty made with Britain is still in force here and the Pakistani view is that it isn't.

New media has always been criticised as being harmful by old people who are stuck in the old media mentality.

TV used to be the target of criticism. When books became affordable to the masses, they were seen as harmful. Cinema caused a certain amount of concern in the 1930s.

Essentially they're all, at worst harmless, Most are actually positive. We respond well to stories. It's the primary way we communicate abstract concepts and ideas. Video games add an element of interactivity which increases our engagement.

But what if you want to do Windows specific stuff? Surely this is something Windows users want to do.

Already automated systems frequently take down non-infringing works, which is, even if the system works perfectly, an inconvenience to resolve.

Upload filters simply can't work. There's no way to determine what is and isn't an infringing copy. It's technically possible to determine if something is copyrighted, I guess, if there's a large enough library. But is it fair use? Does the user have permission from the copyright holder? Does the party claiming copyright actually hold the copyright? Filters can't decide this.

I agree. Bitcoin still being the dominant coin despite pretty much every coin being better in most respects makes me a little sceptical of the long term prospects.If crypto was the future, surely we'd switch to one that can handle the number of transactions we need.

What if I were to offer him gold? While it has a few uses, ultimately we bury most of it in vaults as a store of wealth. It's not doing anything or producing anything. Just storing value.

The same arguments seem to apply The only difference is precious metals have been here longer.

I don't want to defend bitcoin here too much, but the same arguments seem to encourage abandoning gold. And that might be a good idea but it would be a lot more controversial.