Here the offence for driving whilst influenced by alcohol has been revised to be "Prescribed Concentration of Alcohol" which in the jurisdiction is 0.05 for normal drivers, 0.0 for provisionally licenced drivers (recently licenced ones) and variously for other categories of drivers like Taxis and Trucks.

As a result the offence is not a subjective one about onces capacities to drive but rather just the amount of alcohol in your blood.

As a consequence, the application of "Random Breath Tests" or RBT is a fundamental part of driving. The police require no warrant to randomly sample the driving populace for testing their breath for the presence of alcohol. A result in excess of the PCA means a test at a more accurate machine and subsequently a blood test if a driver refuses the breath test.

As a driver, my privacy is not invaded, I am not "targeted by the state" but rather a part of the duties attached to my _licence_ to operate a motor vehicle is the requirement to drive with less than the PCA in my blood. End of story.

You USA folk need to get clear on the distinction between rights and duties, one cannot have one without the other.

A random breath test (as we call it where I'm from) is a completely acceptable price to pay when travelling on a limited public resource (the roads) with a bunch of asshats that continue to drive drunk putting me in danger.

Or more straightforward, let all the passengers vet the other passengers on their flight. Maybe a reality TV type approach where each passenger is voted on or off the plane by all the other passengers.

It's only half a joke.

similarly in Russian -- "poguglit'" (effectively, "to google around"). I've not heard "vyguglit'" used yet, but it'd work as well :)

My cynical side says that it's because neither want you to be able to "extract" content from the things you use your phone for and rather than design the feature thoroughly to encompass uncopyable elements they just went for the zero case.

To be fair, man problems in software come down to the zero, one or many case in terms of design and in the case of copy and paste, I can imagine that the full implementation of what they want copy to be is very complicated. Simpler just to make it always impossible to copy rather than to decide when it is right and wrong.

It's this kind of thing that just shits me about digital restricitons.

Have all the other passengers on the plane vet each passenger. All the passengers get into the departure lounge, each gets a handset/chair with a red/green button as each passenger is called, all other passengers are entitled to vote red or green. If you get a majority of red you ain't on the plane. Sorry.

Naah, the correct punishment is for the offender to be offered the oppurtunity to repent their acting or else the offending team is actually allowed to hurt them as much as they are acting. I reckon diving would be out of the game in a minute. Particularly if teams started picking a "specialty" player who was say 2 metres tall and 125kg with a side line in debt collecting.

Try the "Total War" series. Turn based game where you can choose to play thebattles in a 3d world. Most excellent fun. It is something that a turn based game can get from a 3d zooming structure.

This reminds me of an idea I had some time ago, which might be an application for something like that (I've not read the article yet, so maybe they;re doing something different; but this might be interesting anyway :)

When refactoring code, it's not atypical to move whole snippets of code around. Reviewing the results of such a change (i.e., doing a diff between the versions) is usually nightmarish, since every diff tool I've ever seen is inherently line- or block-of-lines-oriented, and cannot recognize the simple (for a human) case of "I moved this function above that other function".

If the diff tool (and/or the related version control tool?) could be sufficiently language-aware, it might be able to recognize certain semantic units (functions, scope blocks, etc), and try to keep track of them. If this could be done, a diff output could actually be much more meaningful than what we get these days.

Not quite. It's a different way of thinking about the same thing.
As best as I remember "The Selfish Gene", it does present the gene as the unit of selection. The organism is discussed more as a just a useful vehicle (which exists due to multiple genes working to a common effect, but only because there's an advantage on the individual gene's level). I'm simplifying, but that's the gist of it.
If you didn't get a chance to read the book yet, try it. Interesting stuff.