Yeah , usenet is still around. There arn't many servers that still carry it even for a price, but there is one good free one - aioe.org though how much longer it'll be around is anyones guess. Google seem to be doing their best to stuff up google groups however.

Quite. Its amazing how many people today still think the internet = the web. Mention stuff like ftp, gopher, archie or WAIS and you just get blank looks.

Agreed. Byte was shutdown for unknown reasons buy its publisher - its circulation at the time was still way higher than most tech magazines. It could easily have still made a ton of money and still be going.

... that MS is hemorrhaging all its decent technical staff and now the idiots are taking over the asylum at the technical level just like they've already done at the design and management level? One thing MS was usually pretty good at was testing its service packs/updates/[insert name of the week here] but this just seems like they really didn't bother doing it properly , or , they didn't have the technical know-how to do it.

I don't know many antifreezes that work at -230C , do you?

Yes, very good. Except discarded beer cans and rocks arn't usually found every 2 metres on a motorway that you do 70mph on.

They had no choice economically. None of the former states could have afforded to maintain them - then what?

Besides, while most of those former states are stable , Georgia and now Ukraine no longer are. Can you imagine nuclear weapons being added to the mix? The fewer countries that have them the better , and if thats unfair thats just tough luck. The future of humanity trumps individual nations pissing contests.

... of the solar system 4 billion years ago and not more recently , then the chances of that water still being liquid without any further external heating - the energy from the sun at plutos orbit is so slight its irrelevant - I suspect are pretty damn close to zero.

Mainly because they don't work as well as is claimed. Having a couple of dots of light every few metres isn't nearly as clear as having glowing road lines. I suppose however in their favour the eyes last much longer.

Another issue however with cats eyes is the effect they have on tyres. Its conveniently never mentioned by the govn but driving over hard lumps of metal in the road - even if they do squash down a bit - at high speed over the years when changing lanes will wear out your tyres faster and can I suspect even cause failures if the tyre is already on the verge of going.

Most people don't live in a country with exceptional winter weather like that. For the relatively mild winters that northern europe gets and hence the reasonable state of the roads - headlights are fine.

" I haven't introduced any term except zero, and I've got all the nonnegative integers."

Yes you have - you introduced the concept of a set. A set in this mathematical scenario is something.

Back to the drawing board for you.

"you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why"."

No, sorry, you're not going to get away with using the "its semantics" argument. The question why is there something rather than nothing is a fundamental concept that owes nothing to language.

As I pointed out in another post - you can create nothing out of something , ie 1 + -1 = 0, but you can't do anything with that zero on its own unless you introduce a non zero term - eg a quantum fluctuation.

Quantum fluctuations are something. The question should actually be "Where do quantum fluctuations come from" to which a physicist will probably reply - "they just happen". Which is feck all use to anyone as an answer. Might just as well say the universe just happened or the God/The Sphagetti Monster created it.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

However do what you like to zero - you're not getting any other value from it unless you have another value -ie something non zero - to begin with. This theory does nothing to explain how something arose from nothing.

Agreed. I've been in a panic i-might-die situation once in my life and anyone who believes you can think rationally in that situation without a LOT of training is wrong. Fear takes over and fear is the most powerful emotion we have.