What are you talking about? We had good 128-bit encryption back in the Clinton years; that's what the whole "weak vs strong" encryption issue was about (only 40-bit crypto was allowed to be exported).

>Don't imagine that a republican administration would be any more willing to let you keep your communication private. They might use different tactics, but secretly putting back doors in software is not really any better than a public campaign to install government backdoors in software.

I completely disagree. Doing something subversive that people don't like is better. Because then, when people inevitably and eventually find out, they get angry and do something about it. With the Democrat method, they actually convince people this crap is good for them.

If someone is going to screw me over, I'd rather them do it in a way that I don't know about it. There's nothing more annoying than someone screwing you over and gloating about it to your face.

You might think the latter is better because people will know about it sooner, but most voters are usually ridiculously naive, and will actually believe everything their party leadership tells them. When they find out they've been lied to, they get angry and demand change. But with the Democrats, they were never lied to.

Yes, I know Bush did a lot of spying, but that's different than encryption. Did any of Bush's honchos run around saying people shouldn't use encryption because the government needs to see it? Or pushing for laws banning the use of encryption, or trying to force everyone to have government-approved encryption chips with NSA backdoors built-in? Clinton did all of that, completely publicly, and now Obama's doing it.

Maybe I'm misremembering things, but I do remember "strong" (>40-bit) encryption being illegal to export during the Clinton years, and this finally being relaxed during the Bush years because it was so stupid and everyone outside the US already had it.

Yeah, Bush is evil and all, but I don't remember him being so obnoxiously paternalistic and publicly saying we should only be able to use computers with government backdoors; instead, he just did things behind everyone's backs.

I don't remember the Bush administration having much to say about encryption. I do remember Clinton trying to ban all non-escrowed encryption and put Clipper chips in everything, however.

No. That only works for horizontal centering

That's what I was talking about. I didn't realize you meant both vertically and horizontally.

Yes, it is rather lame.

Depends on the domain. Analog gauges are still popular

Sorry, you're right. I should have specified I'm really talking about cars here. For simple/low-cost applications, they still use analog mechanical gauges. For instance, the gauge on any air compressor is just a cheap mechanical gauge.

Also, mechanical gauges do tend to be very rugged. That's not a useful trait in a car, but for scuba gear it certainly is.

What did they expect? It was supposed to be the successor to the CRX and (first-gen) Insight, and was way worse than either of them. They should have made it out of aluminum, at the very least.

Even so, I really don't understand how it came out so bad. It's underpowered, but gets terrible gas mileage. I can go get a Mazda3 that's much bigger (4-door hatchback), and way more powerful (2.4L SkyActiv engine) and faster, and still get the same mpg (38). WTF? And the Mazda isn't even hybrid! It's just a gas engine, albeit with direct injection (which lots of cars these days have now). How did they manage to make a tiny little car with a tiny engine that's hybrid and still get such lousy mileage?

Also, I don't think the Prius is aluminum either. And it too is faster than the CR-Z while being much larger, and gets much better fuel economy. So aluminum might have helped a little, but not that much. It seems that Honda's engine tech is just plain obsolete now. Everyone else is doing much better even with steel frames (though there's more use of high-strength steel alloys these days).

There are plenty of cars now where an analogue speedometer isn't an option.

Have you been to a car dealership since the mid-1980s? I can't think of many cars which have digital speedometers only. Perhaps the Honda CR-Z, but that isn't exactly very popular (in fact, it's a flop; I'm surprised they still sell them). And even those cars still have analog tachometers (which is arguably much more important to be analog than the speedometer, because the tach changes so much faster).

No, it's an analog meter. It's receiving digital information, and using that to control a servomotor to position a needle, and looks a lot like old-time all-mechanical meters, but it's still analog in the sense that it's displaying information in an analog fashion, rather than as a numerical readout.

No one, outside of some small specialty manufacturers (including some old-time avionics makers), makes analog meters implemented mechanically any more, if you mean something where a cable turns some gears which turn a needle. They're all electrical and digitally-controlled now, and have been for some time, and for good reason: mechanical meters simply aren't as reliable or accurate.

You're missing my point (see especially my comment about the Tesla). Regardless of the actual mechanics of the instrument (moving needle vs. LCD screen that depicts an image of a moving needle), analog gauges aren't going away, probably ever. Yes, we'll probably just have LCD screens for our dashboards soon, but they're still going to show us images of analog gauges, because they're inherently more useful than a numerical readout.

Firefox implemented CSS variables back in version 31. Your claim is false.

Is that part of the CSS standard? No? Then it's irrelevant.

I'm not a web dev professionally, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about centering elements inside each other. It doesn't have an explicit way of doing it, which is rather dumb, but you have to create a div within a div, and then set the margins in the CSS to "auto".

There's plenty of analog meters being made every year. Just look at any automobile dashboard. They experimented with digital dashes back in the 80s and quickly abandoned them. Even Teslas, which have an LCD screen in the dashboard, have analog meters; they're just done in software, no different that a phone or PC that has an icon of an analog clock face.

Interestingly, though, modern cars with analog meters actually have them driven digitally; the indicator is really a servomotor, driven by digital information over a vehicle bus.

The reason analog instruments still prevail is because they can be interpreted easily at a glance (by looking at the position of the needle, rather than reading numerals and having to decide if those numbers are within a good range), and also because they show trends and rates of change which digital gauges do not.