independant workers who paid in the 100kâ - 300kâ range to get a state-regulated taxi licence plate. ....

Please show evidence/source of what you write here and where in the Euro-Zone those prices appear.

For Paris, I found at least one English source: http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/08/07/anatomy-of-the-paris-taxi-market-past-present-future/. If you read French, you may try Wikipedia or this article in Le Figaro.

what would happen if the cab drivers would also act as Uber drivers?

They'd lose their taxi license / medallion, which they may have invested over 200,000 euros in, depending on where they operate. The license price is dropping, though, with the arrival of Uber and similar services.

That's the basic problem: the government used to enforce a license scarcity that drove prices so high that taxi drivers now consider it an investment or a retirement package. It's very like a housing price crash, except that the government has a direct responsibility for creating this bubble and letting it burst. No wonder taxi drivers are angry.

The problem, if I understood it correctly (not a given as I know only the german taxi situation well), is that french taxi have some hoop and loop to go thru (http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/F21907.xhtml roughly translated says you need a licence, you need to not have been guilty of certain crime, there is some lessons you ened to follow). All costs.

What the page you cite doesn't tell is that the number of licences is limited, like taxi medallions in some US cities; you can get one free after a couple of decades on the waiting list, or you can buy one from another taxi driver who retires. In Paris, the market value of such a license is over 200,000 euros; in some other cities, it's even higher. However, the arrival of Uber and similar services are making these values drop.

So, when they speak of "families" left out to dry, they actually mean that they won't be able to sell the license they invested in, as they expected to. A bit like a housing price crash, except that license prices used to be kept high by a state-mandated scarcity. I guess taxi drivers are lashing at the government for not enforcing this scarcity anymore.

I don't really have an opinion on this subject. I think the government is at fault for letting people depend on a business model and then not being consistent. On the other hand, it happens all the time with any change in subsidies and policies. And blocking roads is definitely a step too far, but it's not the first time: the French administration has never been a good negotiator in that kind of situations; violent strikes have kind of become the default solution...

I thought Mint just used Ubuntu packages?

Regular Mint, indeed, is based on Ubuntu and each Mint release is derived from the corresponding Ubuntu release. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is based on Debian, and doesn't really have releases: the packages get upgraded (from Debian Testing, I believe) perhaps twice a year.

On paper, I'd prefer LMDE's update scheme, but the apparent lack of day-to-day security updates is a big no-no.

I personally use Mint's Debian-based distro

How do you handle security updates? I thought this distribution (LMDE) was ideal for my needs until I realized that, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, practically no packages were being regularly updated despite vulnerabilities being discovered: LibreOffice, ffmpeg, file, apt, libnss, qemu to name some recent ones. Bash did get updated recently, and openssl eventually did after heartbleed, though I'm not sure it got all the updates.

I read some flamew^Wdebates on this topic online, which I think boil down to "LMDE is not a server OS, if you want security use Debian". This neglects the fact that even an end-user's desktop or workstation handles data from the network, which could be malware. To this kind of security philosophy, my reaction is that LMDE shouldn't be used except in very controlled environments.

As for regular Mint, I like it better than Ubuntu, though I was disappointed by their not supporting OS upgrades: as I understand it, installing a new Mint version requires a reinstall. (I tried doing it anyway, from 15 to 16 I think, and X broke. That's when I decided to try out LMDE, in fact.)

Any advice?

Bullet cluster, bitches!

You misspelled Go.

You mean Brand X?

Not to diminish ICE's accomplishments, but it didn't do rendezvous, only flybys. Rosetta will place itself in orbit then drop a lander on its target comet.

If you worked in this particular mission control group, how could you possibly resist setting all the clocks forward about 2 minutes on the day in question?

Hold that thought, think of the tense wait... Then consider that the signal was actually received 18 minutes later than expected.

...the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth

I think we can say exactly, as it's not a coincidence that the rotations align like that, it's a stable configuration of two bodies in orbit

Yes but there's still libration. Although the Moon's rotation and revolution periods are indeed exactly the same, its orbital speed changes slightly over each orbit. So "just about exactly" is justified too.

What is different about the quantum case is that you can send, say electrons, through the slits *indivdually*, one at a time and they somehow interfere, that is what is intuitively strange.

Correct, but you can also send individual photons and have the same counter-intuitive result. It is not a different case, electrons and photons are both quantum particles.

Not just NTP; the reference implementation. On the machines I checked last time around, those with the reference implementation handled time correctly; those with OpenNTPD just ignored the leap second and resynchronized later. I'll check again next summer, we'll see what happens.

Actually, there was a piece of news today, warning against possible blackouts next winter: although France does usually produce more electricity that it consumes, it imports power dto handle strong peak loads--especially from Germany, it was said. If Germany shuts down its own reactors, and the winter is again especially cold, there might be problems.

OTOH, next year is an election year in France, nuclear power is sure to be an issue, and the news I mentioned originates from the (pro-nuclear) government. Who knows how reliable it is?

Yeah? Just wait until Germany gets hit with a tsunami, like Japan did. That decision won't seem so dumb then.

Switzerland is an even better example on that point. :-) They too are heading towards shutting down their nuclear reactors.