Use empty toilet paper rolls to take up the slack, that makes most cable messes a lot neater. Either for individual cables or for storage

My favourite is changing "ass" to "*ss". Exactly who thinks it's better to replace the letter "a" with a symbol that looks like an explicit, close-up view of the very anatomy you think is offensive? ( * )ss indeed.

FROM specifies which tables (or views), not which server, or network, or storage device.

That in itself isn't the point of SQL, rather it's non-procedural, meaning you don't specify how to get the data, you only describe the data you want (in terms of how it relates to others). If your data doesn't have that sort of structure, the "NOSQL" strategy is fine (and can be done in SQL anyway).

SQL's main problems are the inconsistent and sometimes misleading syntax, and the complexity of the where clauses. There are unpopular alternatives to the former (set based syntax is nice), but I'd really like to see deductive databases help with the latter. Foreign key constraints mean that the database can deduce much of the where clause itself, in the same way that Prolog resolves queries (I've seen a deductive database that uses a Prolog syntax, but there's no reason SQL can't be used instead). They're slower, but only for the first deduction, if it's cached), I don't know why they've never caught on.

That's a tangent, but at least it's irrelevant.

Number one thing I'd do, allow you to specify your own DNS root. You could start with a default system like now, but you could specify a system (by IP or hostname) as a different, independent root for small subdomains - maybe for testing, maybe because you don't want to shell out for hundreds of related domains, some which might have been taken already, maybe to get around censorship. I'll give examples.

Syntax option A: Bring back bang paths! "dns.antioppression.org!sheepstore.tibet" would indicate you want to use a DNS server at "dns.antioppression.org" to resolve "sheepstore.tibet". Note that ".tibet" isn't an official TLD - who cares? If you run "dns.antioppression.org" you can decide to use whatever you want for a domain. You could also chain DNSes, as well as using IP addresses: "12.34.56.78!our.dns!good.tokes.mj" would use a DNS that doesn't have a registered name to look up another, to look up a third host.

Syntax option B: "cloud.243(cloudproject)(technohost.com)" would indicate "technohost.com" is the DNS for the firm that you're buying server space on, "cloudproject" is your project DNS, and "cloud.243" is one of a thousand or so hosts that you want the world at large to be able to look up.

I like this idea because it gets rid of the single chokepoint being used these days for internet censorship, as well as excessive trademark enforcement. The downside is it opens up more opportunities for phishing or fraud. However, since the DNS lookup chain is visible, you can judge the reliability of the result based on how much you trust the intermediate systems.

After that, there's virtually no limit to how to name hosts, domains, subdomains, and whatever else you want to, since everyone can have their own DNS to play around with.

I guess it was - or I didn't double check my memory before hitting submit like I should have, but I was feeling lazy. At least I admitted in the post that I wasn't claiming much accuracy on that point.

Why not, it worked for ozone destroying CFCs.

More generally, it doesn't have to be a world mandate, just enough of it that the rest gives up, or joins voluntarily. In the U.S you can now find Bisphenol-A free products widely available and advertised as a benefit (particularly baby cups, bowls, etc.) because all products with that chemical have been banned in Canada. Similarly many smaller or developing countries basically just follow FDA decisions for drug approval.

For carbon emissions in particular, a "carbon tax" strategy in developed countries could be applied to imports from non-complying countries, hindering them in of European, North American, and developed Pacific economies until they comply, much like U.S based intellectual property laws have been spread to Australia (free trade requirement) and elsewhere.

Carbon gets absorbed naturally, though slowly, by natural processes. Also transformed to less damaging forms, such as methane oxidated to carbon dioxide. And human processes - paper buried in landfill will stay there for centuries, taking carbon dioxide out of the carbon .

Also, there is room for adjustment to changes in carbon levels. It's stressful on the species involved when this change happens too quickly, and some extinctions will probably occur, but as with most environmental changes, it will also open up new areas for some species to expand into. I remember an estimate that Earth could handle CO2 levels of around 400ppm without too much problem, so we have 50 ppm of leeway (that we're using up - I don't have a citation for this, sorry, so take it for what it's worth). So atmospheric carbon doesn't require reduction so much as limitation.

So in summary, you're pretty much wrong from the very start.

Even if you weren't, your "only two options" is also not correct, there are far more responses that reasonably intelligent people (apparently not you) can come up with.

That would require observing the Alice / Bob results first, thus "changing" the Victor photons before he can do anything.

The traditional way would have been currency devaluation, then massive inflation. The effect would have been to reduce expenditures uniformly through the entire economy, stabilising at a new, sustainable level - in effect, people would remain employed, but be paid less. Adopting the Euro meant this couldn't happen, so instead a large section of the population is selected to be paid zero or have benefits cut, while the rest retain their salaries.

There would still have been aftershocks of unemployment the old way, but nothing like what has happened in this case. It's kind of like a large tank of water, in one case you drain a third of it, in the other you make a chunk disappear - it may be the same amount, but in the latter case the waves caused by the rushing water causes more damage than removing it.

That's not to say currency union can't work well. The U.S did it for over two centuries. But it results in a loss of sovereignty as local governments are limited in what they can do, either voluntarily, or involuntarily when an economy implodes and needs rescuing (like Greece - I think this happened in post-revolution U.S.A as well, setting the standard for federal-state relationships almost from the beginning).

The CoCo was an attempt to salvage a product to provide a low cost "videotex" terminal for farmers called AgVision (this is why the background was green, to seem "farm"-y). The product failed (farmers didn't think this "electrical net working" thing had anything to add to farming, or maybe the services like prices or weather reports just weren't worth the subscription price), but the cost reduction work by Motorola (which is why the 6809 was used) inspired also developing a home computer.

Actually, that is the reason given for the changes. Specifically, the language is "known" to be so racist that it puts people off of reading it (and parents prevent their children as well). A "safe" version would remove that tabboo and more people would read it and realise it's not racist. The original still exists, for those who, now knowing better, want to read it and see what the difference is.

Here's something to consider - what if it's not "things" that become intelligent? What if intelligence becomes emergent from everyday activities?

Specifically, business. Ever since the first time-and-motion studies and assembly lines, businesses have been trying to codify and standardise best practices for more and more higher level activities. Generally this is in the form of "assistance" to remove the repetitive or redundant wading through raw data or shuffling paper. For example, do you know anyone with a physical "In-box" these days? It's all email - company memos are no longer typed pages, questions get sent and answered globally, etc. Similarly groupware and wikis let people collaborate without time-consuming meetings that get off-track and miss the point anyway. More recently data mining and business intelligence applications have been taking the fuzzy human judgement out of routine decisions. Loan applications are approved electronically in a fraction of the time they used to be, for simple cases.

More and more decision activities are being turned over to software - because they're boring, and because the software does a better job, for the most part (minus a few global stock market crashes as the bugs get worked out). At the same time, lower level activities are still being automated. It's been said that today "all companies are software companies, they just don't know it yet". Many companies get their software packaged from elsewhere - in which case, they're really being run by the software suppliers, they're just going through the motions. Or they don't, and get overtaken by companies which benefit from innovative ideas from all over the planet added to the software.

So when a business software infrastructure has the complexity to make complex decisions better than the people running the company, because it has far more data than a human could process in a lifetime, does it become "intelligent"? If not immediately, how about down the road? If software run companies outperform human run ones, so that the latter go out of business or get bought out, who would notice? Given that humans still get the money and write the announcements and graphically design the web site for other humans.

If that sofware becomes intelligent, then where is the intelligent "machine"? It's spread out across the world, on constantly interchangable machines, storage, networks. Maybe rented from one day to the next, the software might scoot around different servers and companies often enough nobody can tell just where it resides (you know about 90% or your atoms and molecules are replaced annually, but you're still "you").

Intelligent machines may eventually happen, as iPhones with Siri or hospital computers with Watson. But I'm pretty sure intelligence in the form of corporations is inevitable (Charles Stross's book "Accelerando" examines what this type of scenarion might be like - in one case, the main characters negotiate with a Ponzi Scheme in corporation form).

The government spent millions on technology, then shut it down after the Soviet spies stole it, so the USSR had the technology and Canada (who paid for it) didn't? Is that the sort of thing that passes for logic in your mind?

Cutting costs for production often shows up elsewhere. In the Arrow's case, maintenance was an afterthought, sometimes requiring unscrewing entire panels. Lining up the holes to re-fasten them was nearly impossible with the tension changed. Also it had major landing gear problems. It was an amazing jet, but a lot of its shortcomings were somewhat whitewashed in order to win support to continue the program.

I think the real problem is trying to measure code readability. Policies and coding standards try to address the issue while avoiding it by mandating frills that they think will kind or "imply" readability - function length, number of spaces in parentheses, badly defined Hungarian notation (dead, thankfully), Javadoc or similar commenting standards, and so on. But there's no getting around the fact that the only way to measure code readability is to read it.

This means that you need to put code review at the centre of the process. Not necessarily anything heavyweight, but just require that one other developer reads and understands the code (and points out any obvious flaws) before committing - with the limit that any questions the reviewer has should only be answered by changes in the code, because a question implies a readability problem. The developer can add comments, or rename variables, or restructure the code to make it clearer, but the end result should be readable code with fewer bugs (bugs live in hard-to-understand code, simply adding some intermediate variables to a complex formula can make them go away).

As long as the code review itself doesn't get bogged down with issues of How The World Should Indent and things like that - that's always a risk with developers looking at each others code.

There is a different mindset between Japanese companies, such as FujiFilm, and American ones like Kodak. Japanese companies usually try to diversify at all times (not when in decline), so FujiFilm expanded from film to photocopiers, displays, and anything else they could (within Japan, large companies are often extremely diversified. Nintendo once ran taxis, Mitsubishi Electric makes elevators and televisions, Yamaha makes music keyboards and motorcycles). American companies have the phrase "core competency" as a mantra, and will often sell off profitable divisions (the entire technical equipment side of HP) or even wind them down if they're not profitable enough (HP calculators). The name for this is "unlocking shareholder value", and maybe it does, but it tends to weaken companies which no longer have the flexibility to adapt to market changes. Rather than one division growing while another shrinks, one spun-off company grows while another goes bankrupt.