It's pretty unusual to have the same product measured in two different units. It's also pretty unusual these days for the grocery store not to have a price-per-unit sticker. Finally, it is unusual not to have metric printed on the same label, right next to the standard units. Milk gallons have 3.78 L printed on them (or stamped into the plastic). If you end up here again, just remember that it's 16 oz to lbs or pints. 2 pints to a quart. 2 quarts to a half-gallon.

I'll admit to breaking out the calculator from time to time, but usually because the amounts are an odd amount (e.g. 333g or 11.75 oz). The price can also be any weird decimal, which can make the mental math difficult.

It is about race.

Do you know where the old gun control laws in this country came from? In 1966, the Black Panthers started carrying guns in public. In 1967, the California legislature passed a law against carrying guns in public, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The fastest way to get gun control today would be for the black demonstrators to carry guns every time a black man gets shot by a cop.

I should correct that: "no adherence to a common data schema" should probably be "proprietary, secretive, incompatible tweaks to the overly complex schema in order to proclaim compatibility." Because there's a difference.

No, the reason it's hard has nothing to do with "cloud", and everything to do with "no adherence to a common data schema". If the data was forced to follow a standardized schema, and if standardized service interfaces were required for participating in the government health plan, transferring it would be dead easy. But because different systems have evolved differently over time, the schemas are different, and so transfers remain painful. And because the government funded EPIC without demanding the creation or implementation of industry standards, we crapped away all that money strictly to make one company very, very rich.

The lesson here, kids? If you've got a shot at an upcoming government contract, your best investment dollar is spent on a Congressman. Donate lots of money to his campaign, and you could easily see a 1000 X return on investment. You won't get odds like that gambling on Wall Street.

I think it also tends to be much faster, for the same reason. Add ingredient, zero, add ingredient, zero, etc. You can tear through measuring a complicated set of ingredients in no time.

I tend to use grams unless the recipe actually specifies weight in US customary or if there is some particular motivation for using lb/oz. (Brewing supplies here, for example, are all sold by the pound or ounce, so it's useful to stick with those units.

Ooo, thanks for that! I long ago realized that the only actual value SAS provides is forcing companies to get a bunch of people together to agree on a common data schema, because the rest of their software is dirt simple, and even much of that is of shitty quality. But I didn't recognize the analogy to Stone Soup, and that's perfect!

Right. This is specifying the recipe by weight, though. It's just specifying it by relative weights, using a very convenient custom unit system.

The basic chemistry isn't terribly hard, but producing a consistent product is going to be tricky for a guy in his basement. Theoretically nothing is impossible for a really determined guy in his basement, but in practice if the bar is set high enough you can effectively eliminate the behavior from all but the most extreme people. Ultra-extreme people already get increased scrutiny from law enforcement, so the scope of abuse is at least somewhat containable.

Drug cartels today could manufacture their own guns, yet they don't. Or at least not in mass quantities, given how many guns they purchase from the US through various means (including in some cases directly from the US government).

The Mars Climate Orbiter was never intended to land, but it did.

And no. It had nothing to do with words with multiple meanings. Nobody in the US in engineering (or science, really) should be confused about what pound-seconds are. (This is despite the fact that both "pound" and "second" have multiple definitions.) What crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter is that the spec for a piece of software required that it produce results with one unit, and it instead produced results with a second unit. That's going to be a problem, regardless of whether the incorrect unit it produces is kN-s, dyn-s, lbf-s, cm-g/s, or kg-km/hr. (And if you think that scientists and engineers who use metric always use the SI base unit, you clearly don't do science or engineering.)

Congrats! Trust is definitely the best way to parent your kids.

Gun deaths in Australia dropped sharply after the ban was enacted. Here's a Washington Post article about the effect as well. Your figures about the UK are also wrong, but that is more understandable because they changed the way they counted gun crime which made it look like it increased after the ban was enacted--including nonfatal accidents into the records that were previously not recorded.

We all recognize the "every other release of Windows sucks" pattern, but their official naming schemes have only used sequential numbers with 2, 3, 7, and 8. (95 and 98 were clearly year identifiers, and don't fit their pattern.) 3 and 7 were good, and they were odd numbers. Not sure why they went with an even number this time.

I was recently lunching with a 'softie who called this their "Oh-god-we-are-soooo-sorry-about-the-whole-Windows-8-thing-and-we-promise-never-to-do-it-again release." To me that suggests that distance from Windows 8 is their primary goal. And frankly, they need it.

First, guns don't protect, never have, never will. That is not the function of a gun. So anyone on their high horse should look to see if they're suffering altitude sickness.

Second, the design of these specific rifles is a non-issue. The gun market is inherently grey, which means regulation is minimal to non-existent. There's no white hats in weaponry of any kind. And, yes, that includes the re-enactment stuff I work with. I know that, recognize that and accept it*. No shades, just a thick, pea-soup foggy grey.

*That is why I despise "goody two shoes" arguments from both extreme camps. This isn't black, this isn't white, this is murky grey. I own it for my part, I hold nobody to a higher standard than I hold myself, but I refuse to hold them to a lower one either. Own it.

Third, the design of any regular weapon is a non-issue, but nothing stops you from designing an irregular weapon. With modern cheap hardware, a 3D printer and suitable low-cost materials, a person is quite capable of designing a 3-5 mile range sniper rifle that can be controlled via telerobotics from the home. We already know that low-cost cruise missiles with ranges in excess of 100 miles can also be built at home. With 3D printing, the costs become lower. With advances in technology (remember, the $5000 100-mile cruise missile was designed over a decade ago and it wasn't even close to what budget efforts could do), you can expect far greater ranges, far greater precision and far greater payloads today.

This, again, goes back to this being grey hat technology. If a black hat wanted to use such devices, we'd know about. Or, rather, the survivors would. America still exists, so black hats either don't have the courage of their convictions or they don't have the skill. Either way, they're not worthy of consideration. Worthy of being dumped into a deep oceanic trench, bu not worthy of consideration.

White hats? If white hats were building actively guided systems capable of that sort of range, you'd be seeing miniature computer boards running Linux, Squid and Tor relays launched into stable orbits that crossed nations with restricted network access. We don't. We see "peace corps" infiltrators attempting to install such devices directly, along with who knows what malware, causing international incidents and seriously destabilizing international relations, as part of neocon stupidity. White hats putting in a passive alternative with no hostile software and no damage to other nations -- that's an OBVIOUS way to do good for everyone and to minimize harm. But, no, they either don't have the skill or the courage of their convictions.

So it's all grey. That's all there is. Thick, pea-soup fog.

It would be interesting if the whole thing is a big sting operation. Anybody who places an order for one gets a FBI file.

Not true. Gun regulation is a statistical win. You can't keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill or criminal 100% of the time, but if you work hard at it you can reduce gun deaths by a non-negligable amount per year. Look at European countries. They still have a lot of WWII surplus floating around plus plenty of guns in the hands of really hardened criminals, but thanks to strict regulation they have relatively few gun homicides compared to the US and school shootings are extremely rare compared to the regular occurrence they have become in the US.