Take a look at a Black and Tan.

Which is on the top: the Irish or the British. :)

hawk

perhaps the rest of the Common Market would have gone back to the old Roman measure?

A pound (livre/whatever) of silver being divided into 20 units, each of which was divided into 12 pennies was hardly a British development.

hawk

>We have a certain failed Mars probe to prove the case.

You mean the one that slammed into the ground because some idiot used metric units instead of real ones and miscalculated the thrust? :_)

hawk

Nah, it's just inflation.

Kind of like how a buck used to get you a great burger, but now only the dregs of the menu.

Two enormous rocky-ice things in orbit around one another used to be enough to get you a planet, but no longer . . .

hawk, pretty sure that it's not about a disney trademark . . .

<devil's advocate>
The opposite is implied, that you have no right to refuse reasonable searches and seizures or warrants issued upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. That it is possible for the police to "break into" your device is similar to how it's possible for the police to break into your home or for that matter, pull out a gun and shoot you dead. Whether or not that's legal depends on the circumstances and whether or not your device is encrypted or not won't change the legality. This is more like building a safe with built-in sensors that'll self-destruct the contents with thermite if the police wants to drill it, should "police-proof" systems be a consumer commodity? Yes, I know the government can be the bad guy but they're not the only bad guy, there are real criminals being caught through a constitutionally valid process. It doesn't say "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against all searches and seizures, shall not be violated"

The real issue here is that you don't trust the government to play by the rules, which given the NSA affair and such is probably not a bad thing. A backdoor doesn't mean it has to be a covert backdoor though, it could be that the next time you enter your PIN you get a pop-up saying "Your phone has been searched by law enforcement. Here's a scan of a signed warrant authorizing the search. For further details, contact [police department] on [number]." Granted, it's not so safe as it being impossible, but getting your chance in court is what you get if they break down your door by mistake. And if they shoot you dead by a misunderstanding, you don't even get that. Besides, last I checked he didn't actually want to outlaw it which would create a whole lot of problems for open source and everything else without a back door. He's saying it would be bad for law enforcement, which would be good for criminals and ultimately worse for the general public. Right or wrong, he's certainly got the right to make the argument.

Imagine we would find a lifeform like in Lems' Solaris. Not many species but one single one occuping a planet.
A Super-Amobea that won the evolutionary race some hundred million years ago or something.
Would it have a conscience? If yes, what kind of conscience?
Would scientists discuss, wether it is ethical to take a probe or not? Would we be hurting a being? Would be deem it ethical (or not) to send probes into it/down there? ...
Interesting questions.

But then again, I'd say it's probably just land exposed and covered by tides.
Meeeh. Boooooring.

I mean, I don't exactly believe in the Star Trek universe which is even more fairy tale than most religions. Where are we in their world order - are we equals, enemies, slaves, pets, food, pests or just a honking big X-factor that threaten their very existence? Since their military power would be mostly unknown it'd be real easy to get paranoid. Just dealing with wacko humans is bad enough, what do you really know about an alien or how they think? Nothing. I think we'd jump right into a military arms race which might end very badly for at least one of us. Perhaps both, if MAD still applies on an interplanetary scale.

'"To quote, or double quote, that is the question'" - Not Shakespeare

That all sounds like things I've had in the past, perhaps not all at once but unless I'd been to Ebola-infected countries lately I might not think much of it. The infected person came from Liberia, but if a Texan that hadn't left the state for ages starts showing symptoms it's a lot less obvious. All it takes is one of those die-hard unbelievers in modern medicine who won't seek help until he's half way down the list of serious symptoms and you're in trouble.

Well, how many times have you seen "let's make our own date/time/number/argument/xml parser"?

<consultant mode>
Well, I'd put it in a 2x2 matrix with low/high impact, low/high corporate usage. High/highs is stuff like your office suite, a lot of people use it and quite a lot. Low/high are things like time sheet recording, people need to do it but it's a very minor part of their work day. Both of these you generally need to have good solutions for since you'd be wasting so many people's time otherwise, the heavily used of course more so. Low/lows you don't really need to care much about, unless they add up to some extraordinary amounts. The killer is often the high/lows, basically the specialized tools a few in your organization use.

The (strike:problem) challenge is that these tools are different. For example, your graphics department might rely heavily on Photoshop. Nobody else in the business might care about that, but they again have their own tools they care about. Retraining, lost productivity and lower output quality can be significant costs. Existing workflows and procedures must be migrated. Forced migration may lead to employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover as they want to continue their career towards becoming a Photoshop expert. Those costs have to be considered relative to the gains of making a migration. I can do an in-depth study, if you got funding...
</consultant mode>

Seriously though, I think more plans about migrating to Linux dies from a thousand cuts rather than one fatal blow. I haven't done an OS migration but I've seen some others, the major issues are under control. It's all those minor "uh oh, we didn't think of that" issues with emergency band-aids and workarounds that tends to turn it into a fire fighting exercise.

For computer generated graphics custom workflows and creating tools to animate things others can't have has been the driving force. There's plenty of complex interactions between models, textures, animations, physics simulations and various like creating a whole army from a few parameterized models and AI. No tool does everything well and often there's some secret sauce you want integrated into the workflow. Photoshop on the other hand mostly seems like a one-stop shop, you hand a skilled person the image and what you want done and he'll produce an end result. Efficiency seems to be the primary driver, not integration or customization.

Well, allowing JavaScript gives people who'd like to de-anonymize you:

a) A much bigger attack surface, rendering engines are rather safe while scripting engines are quite risky by comparison.
b) Much more accurate ways to fingerprint users through querying the system.
c) Much simpler ways to use AJAX to create traffic patterns to trace you through the system.

That the TorBrowser developers (Tor is just the transport layer - it speaks TCP/IP, not HTTP) choose to leave JavaScript enabled is more a pragmatic choice so users don't experience a "broken web". But if you need the protection Tor has to offer, then you probably should disable JavaScript and find yourself web 1.0 services to serve your needs. Otherwise you're probably better off just getting a cheap VPN.

No, they're very good at reproducing things and if you haven't got teachers or you haven't got skilled teachers or you haven't got interested teachers then the computer at least give kids a chance to learn. Unlike here in western society for these kids education is a precious resource that they know is essential to have a decent future, first you have to give them the opportunities before you start worrying about motivating them to make use of them.

I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.

The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.

Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).

...laura