Sure, but it also includes virtual memory that is paged out (for example, a page that was touched once long ago, and not used since), so it's still not a useful metric in a sense that GP means.

The obvious solution is to ensure that everyone has (or can get) an ID. It's not rocket science: most European countries do require an ID to vote, and no-one considers it discriminatory there, because the procedure of obtaining the ID is not.

And putting young people in prison and making them register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives does not?

If you think about it, it's actually the inevitable consequence of trying (successfully) to shoehorn Windows onto ARM tablets and phones. Now that both the kernel and the huge chunk of userspace are identical on all three, this means it had to be optimized a lot for both perf and size. But while those optimizations were a necessity for tablets and especially phones, the desktop also benefits, and the "freeze" of the minimum specs is the user-visible consequence.

(in practice, Win7 actually ran better than Vista on those minimal specs, and Win8.1 runs better still - again, a direct consequence of moving further towards the "one OS" goal)

You do realize that Windows uses free RAM for filesystem cache since Vista, right (just like Linux has been doing for many years before)? The amount of RAM "used", as reported in Task Manager, is basically meaningless.

The stupid far left people are usually also young. We basically assume that they're going to grow up eventually (I'll grant you that not all do, though...).

The stupid far right people tend to be significantly older, so they don't get the same leniency.

You don't actually use a decimal to measure outdoor temperature. You do use it to measure body temperature, where it actually matters (but then Fahrenheit is also not sufficiently precise to avoid it).

Vernor Vinge, "Deepness in the Sky" and/or "Fire upon the Deep".

It makes sense there because the characters in both aren't planet dwellers themselves, and interact with a lot of different cultures through trading - so there's no good criteria of day for them to standardize on, and no natural phenomenon to tie to. All they have is their clocks that just count time. Hence the use of kiloseconds and megaseconds.

The scale isn't actually all that inconvenient once you think about it, either. A kilosecond would be ~16 minutes. A megasecond is ~11 days. So an hour is ~4 ks, an Earth day ~80 ks.

It is still base ten, just a different way to express it - 1 meter 8 decimeters is 1.8 meters.

And pretty much no-one mixes units like that in practice, because it's obviously much easier to say 1.8 meter or 18 decimeters. He just suggested that those people who are used to feet+inches might do so to avoid that pesky decimal point that they're not used to using.

Speaking as someone who comes from a country that uses metric and decimal comma, I actually find the decimal point to be preferable - it's simply easier to write, and it's prominent enough without being too prominent, which I found the comma to be. On the other hand, I also don't like the American habit of grouping digits with commas - I think that spaces are a better fit for this, and less ambiguous.

The only answer is to vote 3rd party, otherwise you're just part of the problem by voting for a bad president. It doesn't matter if the 3rd-party candidate is destined to lose; it's that mentality that keeps the 3rd parties out of power, plus you can be held blameless for anything the president does if you didn't vote for him. If you vote for him and he's horrible, well you're to blame, and it's rather hypocritical to complain about him after-the-fact when you knew in the voting booth that he'd suck.

I didn't call you a liberal. My post was directed at all the Obama fans, not to you. Since you were bashing Obama, you obviously weren't much of an Obama fan or a tow-the-party-line liberal.

As for 2012, the answer is yes. Vote 3rd party. It's the only thing that makes sense, even if it's destined for failure. If you vote for a bad president, then you're partly responsible for all his actions. If you vote for someone else, you're not. Out of all these people complaining about Obama, if they actually voted for him, they're hypocrites, because they enabled him by voting for him. I voted for Johnson, so you can't blame me for any of Obama's messes. If more people had voted like me, we wouldn't be having so many problems.

The point is, it still doesn't let people get completely off the hook, and requires very elaborate schemes even for your best case (for them) scenario. It seems like a reasonable compromise to me, especially when going any further is impossible without severely compromising security ("backdoor" is just an euphemism for "known security hole", and carries the same implications).

So much wrong in this post...

AWB has expired years ago, but even when it was there, it had absolutely nothing to do with automatic weapons. Those have been regulated by NFA, GCA, and FOPA.

The standard infantry weapon of US Army today is M4A1 carbine, which has two firing modes: single shot, and full auto (they are not fully converted from M4 yet, but they're working on it). The reason cited for this is that experience in Afghanistan has showed that full auto is a necessity.

Also, US military has been the only one in the world that restricted its infantry weapons chambered in intermediary cartridges to three-round burst; everyone else who introduced such weapons enabled full auto for them (sometimes also having a three-round burst mode, more often not). So US is rather catching up on that front, after several decades of stupidity that was originally introduced in M16A2 design-by-[USMC]-committee process, because they took their "one shot - one kill" mantra a bit too serious. Army protested back then, but they were ignored largely for fiscal reasons.

The problem that he is trying to address, I think, is that buying it from a dealer leaves a record. First there's the NICS check - and yes, by law those are transient and remain in the system for a few days only, but I would be very surprised if NSA doesn't get to stash it somewhere in practice. Then there's the 4473 form that's filled in for that check to be performed, and that the dealer has to keep around basically forever. While the government doesn't get the form - which allows them to say that they do not maintain any kind of gun registry - in practice ATF can come to any licensed dealer and demand them to turn over all their 4473s, with no reason or explanation necessary. So in practice it's a kind of registry, just a distributed one, and it makes some libertarian-minded people uneasy.