This is false. Violent crime is on a downward trend in the UK.

http://www.theguardian.com/new...

You are arguing that the USA is more violent than the UK for cultural reasons and yet you think the answer is to make lethal weapons more available in this violent society. That doesn't make sense at all.

Ban guns, or at least put restrictions on where they can be carried and how they must be stored and you will at least see several hundred fewer people being shot accidentally each year.

They travel at the speed of plot.

Yes, you're right but it doesn't matter. When Galileo comes on line, people will still call it GPS just like (in the UK at least) people talk about hoovers (vacuum cleaners), biros (ball point pens), podcasts (audio broadcast for downloading) and heroin (diacetylmorphine).

Because you still need ordinary brakes to bring the car to a complete stop.

Regenerative braking systems work by having a generator driven by the wheels that drives an electrical load - typically a battery charger. Charging the battery generates a current through the generator making it act like a motor but in the opposite direction to the way the wheels are making it spin.

Clearly storing charge in a battery is useless in a car whose only motive power is a rocket engine, so we can do away with that. We can just put a wire across the terminals of the generator. The generator itself can incorporate the axle as one of its parts, so it seems like it might work.

Of course, the wire will get very hot, so some form of cooling arrangement will be needed and since the wire is a continuous loop that goes through the generator, the cooling arrangement needs to keep the generator cool too.

Also, regenerative braking effect drops off at low speeds, so you'll need some ordinary disc brakes to bring the car to a complete halt.

This is all looking very complicated and heavy compared to the simple solution of metal discs and callipers.

Do you understand that the film would never have been made at all, if lots of people hadn't been prepared to pay money to see it?

The director, actors, writers, camera people, sound recordists, SFX people, editors, distributors etc etc all need to be paid. Only amateurs do it for nothing and professionals make a superior product.

No. it's the pressure that pushes the mercury up to the top of the tube, but the reason why it then flows down the other side is because the weight of the mercury on the down side is higher. The diagram makes it obvious that this must be the case because the water pressure in the lower beaker is obviously higher than the water pressure in the higher beaker.

I don't see any evidence that Kildall was a better than average businessman. In fact, the evidence is that he was quite a poor business man.

Wrong.

And you waste a load of shotgun shells that are going to be extremely valuable in the post apocalypse.

Yes it does. I just downloaded a copy of Gnu Readline. I want to use it as in my new proprietary application that will make me $$$$$. Does the licence restrict me from using it in that way? Yes. That is by design and I do not criticise the developers for making that decision.

That is also by design and I do not criticise Apple for making that choice.

Two reasons:

The idea that many eyes make all bugs shallow is a myth. Even most programmers don't bother auditing the open source code they download. I bet most of them don't really look beyond the API documentation.

Also, OpenSSL is one of the worst code bases you'll ever set eyes on. It's poorly documented and so complex, it'll make your eyes bleed.

^^ This.

Add a bit of OCR software and you have a system that can both be read by humans without the aid of special software and by computers to produce textual output with a bit of special software (you need a bit of special software anyway for QR codes, so you don't lose anything).

Bitcoin transactions will not be free in the long term. Once all the bit coins are mined, the people verifying the transactions will have to charge a fee unless they are using a bot net.

I keep hearing the "git is better than svn at handling conflicts" meme, but of course neither handles conflicts at all. A conflict is a file where the tool can't figure out how to merge two versions and therefore has to offload it to a human.

I've also heard on the Internet that git is better than svn at doing merges, but everybody I know who has used both git and svn in real production environments says the opposite.

In my company we use svn. I did consider moving us to git or - more likely - Mercurial (the hg user interface is more similar to svn so that would make the transition easier), but I found out that it is really easy to make a directory both an svn working copy and a git/hg repository just by using setting ignore properties so I can do local commits and still have a central svn repo.