I am no fan of Perl, but if you have an application that is mission critical, has lots of legacy code, and just works, then you do not go about rewriting it just because there is some dislike for the language.

If it was something related, such as difficulty of finding suitable candidates for developer positions, then I would understand. But just because "perl is ossifying" does not cut it as a valid reason.

Actually, this is also incorrect. They do not decide what the law means, there is no decision involved. They attempt, to the most exactingly precise level possible, to determine what congress intended when the law was enacted. It is rare indeed that a law is so vague that it's intent cannot be determined with a reasonable amount of clarity.

Or, should I say, it used to be rare...

There's a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed.

What?

I've had that since 2013 on my Sony Xperia ZL.
And even before that on the Sony Xperia Arc.
And even before that on the Sony Xperia X10 since 2011.

Blackberry's market share is predicted to fall to 0.3% by 2018. And they will ship 50% less handsets this year than the past.

Here is the link.

The proper way is to install gdebi:

sudo aptitude install gdebi

Then, you install a downloaded .deb using gdebi:

sudo gdebi packagefile.deb

Gdebi will search for dependencies for that .deb and install them for you automatically.

Reverse anecdote ...

I had tonsillectomy as well, when I was around 5. Yes, in the 1960s it was very common.

But never suffered from memory loss. On the contrary, I was always told I had good memory.

No problem with muscle coordination too

Meanwhile in the north, we have had Wifi for many years at Toronto's Pearson airport ...

It must be comforting, living in a world of such naivete. At least, it will be until you wake up and realize where you are.

Glass (and obsidian for that matter) are crystalline in structure, making them hard and brittle. Exactly what you do not want in a road surface. Rock on the other hand is usually an amalgam of several materials, meaning that it can be scraped and chipped, but is less likely to develop cracks that propagate. Using regular ordinary gravel in asphalt also means that the rock pieces are not subject to localized large forces, as the exposed surfaces of the gravel stones flex away thanks to the bitumen. The twin properties of flexibility and a hard wearing surface are what make asphalt able to stand up to being hit with tonnes of force hundreds of thousands of times a year and still last decades between having to be relaid.

I agree that it's probably not the case that we can't do better, but the question is about current materials technology and economic viability. Could we do better if we spent $1m per square meter of road surface? Possibly, with those newly emerging exotic resins and fibers. Would a $1m/sqm price tag mean that the project has any chance of success? No.

When I said "solid bitumen", I was referring to traditional road materials, and not a bitumen only tarpit. Sorry for not being specific.

Also, "durable" is a relative term. We're talking about roads. Solar panels are durable when compared to, say, laptop screens. They are not durable in the context of road surfaces. Yes, there are amazing glass types around today, but once again, in the context of road surfaces, I don't think glass is, or could ever be, an appropriate material.

Bitumen+gravel is used because the stone gravel provides excellent wear resistance while the bitumen holds it in a flexible and self-healing suspension. It is still the best road surface material we have by a country mile.

You missed the whole point of durability that I mentioned.

In Thailand, many of the roads in the southern areas use glass balls as lane markers. They don't get driven over unless a wheel is in on the lane marker, hence, only a small fraction of the actual traffic. Nonetheless, it is plainly obvious that they just don't last. They are chipped and damaged to the point that they don't fulfill their function.

Roads are possibly the most abused surface mankind makes. No type of glass that we have access to could ever stand up to long term road wear. It's just not possible with today's tech. I really think that this is a grant scam, which is unfortunate, because the politicians being scammed will be less favourable to green projects the next time a real idea comes around.

What if the toaster was free, so long as you had to deal with a screen on the side with speakers that played ads with sound while it toasted your bread? Sure, *you* wouldn't willingly buy it, and *I* wouldn't willingly buy it, but if enough of the market did, we may end up with that being the business model for toasters and nothing else being available.

Google, Facebook and and their ilk are doing that exact thing. Their services are all free* (as in getting raped at the train station after dark).

I really hate to be skeptical, especially with a project with goals as desirable as this, however I just don't see it happening. Road surfaces receive an enormous amount of wear. The current state of materials technology just isn't able to deliver the properties that such a surface would need to have to provide the described functionality.

Don't get me wrong, I really, really want this to succeed. It's just that we still can't make a solid bitumen road resistant to cracks in the long term, so how can we hope to make electronics and other far more fragile components match or exceed that level of durability without making the costs skyrocket to the point that it is not economically viable. Airports, with their massive budgets, have runways with *some* of that functionality, and they already require regular maintenance. The $ per square meter spent on a runway at an airport is more than a few orders of magnitude more than that spent on public roads.

Anyway, let's watch and hope.

But the point is, I am in Southern Ontario, and searching on just the restaurant's name does not get me Restaurantica results at all on the first page. And, it used to be that Restaurantica did show up by searching just the restaurant's name, in the first couple of results.

Google has been "going local" for a while, showing you results in your area first. But this is the exact opposite.

I have seen this in a few sites I run. One is a business site, another is a special interest with specific demographics, and the third is a blog.

It all started with Google shuffling their algorithms, with Panda then Pengiun.

I saw traffic drop on all three sites. Some coninciding with Panda, and the other coninciding with Pengiun.

One site was the top site for certain search terms for many long years. Not anymore. That site saw a 7.5X drop in pageviews per month traffic. Another site saw 3.5X drop, and the third was 2.5X.

What is weird is that Google de-indexed one site because of "un-natural links". When I contacted them, I asked what the links are, so I can remove them. They never came back with any definitive information, and sent the same template email saying site de-indexed because of un-natural links. It took 3 or 4 tries, and then they reinstated the site back in the index. They never told me what the links are, and never explained why they de-listed the site nor why they reinstated it.

Another thing of note: some sites no longer show up in Google searches. For example, here in Canada we have a restaurant review site called Restaurantica. It used to show up in the first few searches for restaurants in the area (Southern Ontario). Now, I don't see it at all on the front page. Seems Google decided that Trip Advisor and Urban Spoon are the authoratitive ones for restaurant, and Restaurantica is third class or something.

I also noticed that the search quality for Google has gone downhill starting in 2011. Really stupid matching of terms, some partial strings even. I've never seen Google's search that bad before.

They are for sure dumbing things down, a general trend in the industry in the name of "user experience" and such. You see this in Firefox with the dumbed down Australis, which requires Classic Theme Restorer to undo some of the damage.

Sigh ...