Actually that vast majority of the world uses litres (l). Only the US (on the rare occasions it uses them), Canada and Australia typically use the capital 'L' for the abbreviated symbol. While both are now accepted abbreviations the original rule was that only SI units named after a person had a capital letter for an abbreviation although in the case of 'l' there is easy confusion with '1' in some fonts which is why some countries adopted the capital letter.

I don't think that showers are the problem. Try the insistence on a bright green lawn surrounded by trees, bushes and flowers. Growing that in the middle of what is effectively a desert takes a lot more water than one shower a day.

If the average family in Canada tried to grow tropical plants in their gardens using heat lamps in the winter to stop them from dying we would soon be having a major electricity crisis (well at least until the global warming from burning all that coal kicked in). If the average family in California expects to have a lush, green garden then you should expect to have a water crisis.

Imagine a life and civilization evolving, looking out at their immediate galactic neighbourhood, becoming aware that this glowing ball of light that their ancient ancestors worshiped is a star... and then growing an awareness of what that means for their future in a couple of billion years when it has heated up enough to terminate all life on their planet.

We don't need to do a thought experiment because we are in almost exactly the same predicament. It might be a couple of billion years rather than a few tens of millions but frankly it doesn't matter either way: on those timescales either we develop the technology to solve the problem or we go extinct. Besides I'd expect any planet close enough to the accretion disk to see it as a disk with the naked eye will be getting fried by the high energy x-rays it emits which is how we detect black holes from half way across the galaxy or even further.

Netflix sometimes releases the entire season of a show all at once, allowing people to download the entire season and binge-watch. Hence "binge-y".

IIRC, they first started with "House Of Cards" as an experiment, and found that a lot of people liked the ability to watch it all in a weekend, or 2-3 episodes per night for a week, or whatever.

Having to wait a week to see the next episode allows peoples' interest to wane. Also, for complex plotlines (see: "Lost"), people tend to forget important events that happened weeks prior and have trouble keeping up with the plot. If the event 5 episodes ago was last night (or the night before), people have a better time keeping immersed in the plot.

You stated - quite plainly - that this was "no coaching, no suggestion", obviously some strange legal definition of ""no coaching, no suggestion", of which I am unaware.

And of course, this is only coming from the complaint, which is the FBI's version of events.

If the FBI's version is this sketchy, what do you imagine the real situation was?

Or are you one of those people with "relatives in law enforcement", who have inside information about all officers being honest, forthright persons?

(Except for the ones caught on video, of course!)

Huh. You don't say. And here I was reading some excerpts from the original complaint:

[The FBI supplied, what Booker understood was, the explosives (actually inert material) needed for the bomb, then:]

CHS 1(*) provided Booker with a list of supplies that they needed to purchase in order to build the bomb.

Booker understood that CHS 1 and CHS 2 would build the VBIED

CHS 2 explained the function of the inert VBIED to Booker and demonstrated how to arm the device.

Out of curiosity, does this look like "no coaxing, no suggestion, that's 100% on him" to you?

Because, it doesn't to me...

(*) CHS stands for "Confidential Human Source", and means "FBI undercover agent"

I doubt it would be illegal in China since the Chinese government makes the laws there. Besides governments are known to break even their own laws when it comes to anything they deem to be national security...unless torture is now legal in the US?

Lest we forget our current state of affairs wrt privacy, note:

If the police can access the data, they can use it to determine lots of things about you. For example, they can probably detect if there's a meth lab upstream from the current location, and use this as a guide for the placement of more sensors. Eventually they'll narrow it down to a single household, and know where the meth lab is.

They could do this with drug use as well. They could find evidence of, say, cocaine use in the stream and use this to place more sensors, then narrow it down to an individual household. Then see if the household member is in a critical job, such as ambulance driver or surgeon.

...or any job, really. They could just alert your employer to the fact that "someone in your household" uses drugs.

They could determine the ethnic profile of individual homes from the food eaten.

They could determine the health of individuals living in individual homes in several ways - detecting diabetes, or obesity, or diet for example. Insurance companies would probably want this information.

And legally, their response would probably be "you have no right to privacy for anything that you flush into the public sewers", or "just as with driving or flying, you can choose not to do it" or some such.

I can see a lot of benefit from doing this (sewer monitoring in India is being used to show that polio has been eradicated), but we really need to get a handle on the privacy implications from the start, before the big abuses begin.

This will be like video cameras: expensive at first, then ubiquitous. Look to see a sensor at the outlet from each home in a couple of decades.

As a low lying country Holland is at risk due to rising sea levels. Clearly being tall enough to keep your head above water is an advantage. ;-)

Firstly, not all manhole covers are round. I've seen triangular ones in Nashua and Japan, and there are a lot of rectangular ones in Italy.

Secondly, the reason manhole covers are round generally is that during the industrial age the four major machining operations were casting, cutting, turning, and drilling, and since the covers had to be reasonably accurate while being mass produced they were made by turning (ie - on a lathe).

Thirdly, this is a variation of a "Fermi problem", after Enrico Fermi who famously used it to determine whether an interview candidate could think logically and make back-of-the-envelope questions. However, this question in particular is famous, available to anyone who could look it up on the internet. Along with the answer.

That 'kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Since the question and answer are so readily available, I have to assume that you, the interviewer didn't actually make up your own question. But it looks like *you* happen to enjoy these sorts of questions, and I'm sure that you had to answer your share of these when you interviewed for the company.

That being said, I'm also interviewing your company, to see if I actually want to work here. Since you like questions like this, here's one for you...

(NB: I don't like working for idiots.)

Indeed there are smart people but that does not mean that they always get the right answer. In my own field of particle physics there was an experiment a few years ago that persuaded itself that they had evidence of faster than light neutrinos. Everyone outside that experiment, without the expert knowledge of the detector which this group had, decided that this had to be due to a mistake and sure enough it turned out that they did not have a GPS cable plugged in correctly.

Moral of the story: being smart does not make you immune from coming up with stupid ideas. It is never wrong to question new ideas which appear to have flaws. If there is a good reason why such criticisms are wrong the experts should be able to explain why.

True but isn't that precisely because they have a pilot on board? How many times is there a mechanical glitch or system failure which leads to no serious problem at all because the pilots takeover and do things manually? How many times is there a situation where the pilots can do something creative to save the plane like landing on the Hudson river?

Heartbleed was The Little Logo That Could. Like the peace sign of the 60s, the happy face of the 70s. It broke a decades-long trend of overzealous graphic design to portray security vulnerabilities.

For years! Over-matted and often disingenuously constructed stock photo montages of so-called 'security', 'hacker' or 'cybercrime' objects on highly saturated over-stylized texture backgrounds. You know what I mean: the kind of schlock that looks great on the screen but it is a design train wreck if you attempt to drop it onto a business card or T-shirt. Network news teasers and splashes beyond count. Just what is that supposed to mean anyway? A padlock on a bit-tornado? A Hamburgler robber mask on a credit card? A dagger spewing colorful Puff the Magic Dragon Bit Barf? Fingers on a keyboard (hacker fingers!!)?

Simplicity and scalability is power in logo design. A great logo must be simple enough to stencil, to reproduce. In your face elegant, coat and tails casual. Equally at home atop a skyscraper or fresh from a spray can in the 'Hood. Codenomicon really outdid themselves on this one, a touch of Art Deco and a ton of tasteful restraint. All lines are either gracefully curved or straight and vertical. It does not matter how you affix a Heartbleed logo, it will command the attention without silly tricks. Its topological genus of one is a master stroke of genius, and preserves its visual identity even if hastily drawn.

The Heartbleed logo is the first logo designed in almost 50 years that has no need for a drop shadow.
There can be no higher praise.

I did not argue that lithium was not a fire hazard only that, in the right circumstances, aluminium can be as well so there is still a need to be careful.

...and does autonomous traffic avoidance in the crowded skies on approach to a busy airport? There are planes in holding patterns, on approach to land, transitioning between the too, taking off etc. etc. Even with fantastically well trained, intelligent human pilots onboard we need central coordination to avoid disaster otherwise why would we have air traffic control? How much more likely would disaster be if all those planes suddenly found themselves without a pilot?

It's worse than that - all they need to do is jam it which would be trivially easy to do. For example if you put powerful transmitters into a van, parked it somewhere on the approach path to a busy airport and turned it on you would suddenly have craft who were on approach lose all control and by the time authorities tracked down the van and shut it off who knows how many planes would have crashed.

Remote control planes with passengers on are a stupendously bad idea. There is no way I'm flying on a plane which is not under the control of someone onboard whose life also depends on the plane landing safely. Even with such a strong motivation as that we have seen disaster happen - how much more likely will it be if the pilots are sitting remotely and have even less at stake? Suddenly things like disgruntled employees crashing planes becomes imaginable.