Only inspections here are literally emissions tests, and there are protocols to perform emissions tests on non-OBD-II vehicles already.

I will continue to drive older, low-mileage cars. Right now my two vehicles are both of the 1995 model year and neither is OBD-II.

Additionally importantly, some books are simply worth more than others, even in low-volume batches, especially if the books are necessities to those buying them. That's part why textbooks are so expensive, and part why Patricia Cornwell is sold in grocery stores and is perpetually 20% off the cover price. If mass-market paperbacks and even new hardcover books were too much more expensive they probably just wouldn't sell.

I assume that a lot of e-books are the same way, and honestly, they're not priced well, and too many middle-men get in the way. e-books should be the author selling right to me. Call it the exact opposite of the music distribution model; author owns the work and potentially contracts-out editing and marketing, and retains all profit after costs are paid or shares profits as a percentage with editors and marketing depending on the arrangement that they come to.

That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.

When you've had a really, really good washing machine that handles a diverse set of fabrics with equal capability and relatively quietly washes them faster than the cycle time of the clothes dryer, you tend to not want to part with that machine.

Toploaders are the way to go. Frontloaders can suck it.

Homicide as a legal term and homicide as a language term are not the same thing actually. Any event where a human kills a human is homicide. That doesn't necessarily mean that a crime was committed through the act of killing though.

Note that I'm specifically not addressing the topic of abortion at all, for the sake of my post, I'm referring the to the killing of a human that exists outside the womb.

Is the fingerprint data going to the federal government or any other government entity outside of the school district food and nutrition department, or is the fingerprint data simply being used as a form of authentication, and then the data associated with the student's meal logged with the student's student information system tracking number?

In my experience with student information systems like SASI and Edupoint, there's a lot of information that the software tracks for the school district's purposes that isn't part of the export to the state reporting agency or to Title I or anything like that, and those systems usually don't even have DB columns for things like thumbprints. I expect that the IT department does an SIS export to the F&N department of enrollees, then the F&N department inputs thumbprints after importing the records list, so that when the kid puts their thumb on the scanner it looks up the record and confirms validity and notes the meal, then later exports the student number and meal, to either be sent to the SIS or to the state or federal agency. I very much doubt they're sending thumbprints between systems, the exports would take too damn long.

Thing is, while I do agree that a standard unit that allows for easy conversion has its advantages, the Metric System's units do not correlate well to real-world situations. 0 degrees Fahrenheit through 100 degrees Fahrenheit correspond well with the temperature range at which a human can work outdoors without resorting to special equipment. A foot, as it is similar to the anatomical part of the same name, is sized conveniently to work with in the physical world with things that the average person will interact with in arms-reach. A gallon of water is about at the limit of what most people can pour and handle in drinkable liquid.

I don't find the centimeter to be terribly useful, it's too big to replace the quarter-inch where high precision isn't important and the millimeter is too small in the same situations. There is no equivalent to the foot. Degrees Celsius are too far apart to make for gradation on weather maps; when all of the UK is at almost the same temperature on the scale it isn't doing a good job of differentiation. Likewise for tools; it's not common to find fractional units below 1/16 of an inch, but that is still larger than millimeters, so more wrenches and sockets are needed to cover a given size range than with SAE tools, and it's much easier to say above a certain size to stop using 1/16 inch divisions and use 1/8" or 1/4", but there is no clear case for when to start skipping whole-mm sizes.

I do agree that the Metric System works well for science. The relationship between joules, cubic centimeters, and degrees can really make science and engineering easy, and in those realms where the temperatures reach below the units-place digit and where the precision reaches down below tenths of millimeters it makes a lot of sense. It just seems...applied... to everything else whether it fits or not.

Admittedly I grew up in a Fractional world, but it still feels like SI isn't quite right even though it is internally consistent.

Yeah, was it so bad having a link to the discussion, oh, I donno, below the goddamn summary that one just finished reading?

If SoylentNews would get their goddamn color schemes where they looked good and weren't hard on the eyes like the burgundy I'd probably read there more often.

"I was just following orders" rarely works as a defense.

Thing is, he's right to a certain degree, in that the powerful usually have a degree of choice in what they do that isn't afforded to what the average person can do with regard to the law.

Look at the American South right before the Confederacy seceded. The population was around 9 million people, and over a third of those people were enslaved of African descent. Of the rest, probably a third were poor share-croppers and black freed-men or their descendants that were effectively serfs, vassals to the plantation owners on whose land they lived and worked. This was in a society that arguably was literally the richest in the world for a time; the wealthiest families centered around Charleston, South Carolina were richer than any royal families of any other countries in the world, all built on the backs of the people they exploited to toil for them. I suspect that this is why they expected the British Empire to side with them in the war, they thought the British and their class system would naturally align even though the British had discontinued direct slavery in the UK itself years earlier. Anyway, it literally took war and a million dead men to unseat those in power in the South, and even after slavery was legally abolished, we're still dealing with the fallout from it 150 years later.

Look at all of the major revolutions and you find that they resulted from the systematic abuse of accumulated power by the wealthy against the interests of the average person, and after revolution sometimes inequality reasserts itself. I've concluded that this is normal; just the way it is, and the altruisim that we believe to have existed in various parts of the world over time is either short-lived or else a fiction. That said we should still work toward it, but so many people at the bottom seem to think that give them one chance and they too can be at the top are willing to go against their own interests for a never-to-realize dream that it's getting harder and harder to push for that result.

I find that the vast majority of robocallers are actually robodialers, with an actual human being on the other end. My solution is to get incredibly verbally abusive to them. I'm entirely calm but I use language that would peel the paint on a battleship and get truckers to cry. The amusing part is when they stammer and get defensive that I'm treating them this way and I get to remind them, "hey, you called me, remember?"

The owner in a construction setting typically doesn't manage the day-to-day details, they leave that up to the Contractor. The Contractor (as in Capital-C) both maintains its own employees that are on-salary in some fashion for the duration of the job, and brings in Subcontractors as contractors (lowercase-c) for a limited duration for a specific aspect of the project with specific scope that isn't open-ended. The Subcontractor may employ salaried employees or may themselves use contractors (lowercase-c) depending on their business model.

Generally the defining points are in degrees of oversight and duration of employment. Those indiviuals engaged as contractors (lowercase-c) usually are overseen in big-picture ways and have shorter duration jobs. Those that are on-staff are probably managed more and their jobs are open-ended, there's no scope built-in to their retention that defines the completion of their business arrangement.

The recent impacts also weren't large enough to cause more than regional damage. Didn't even reach regional surface devastation like Tunguska or regional geologic devastation like Barringer Crater.

I'm assuming that we'll never be able to reliably detect impactors as small as Tunguska, but we might be able to detect Barringer-sized objects if we make an effort to look for them.

If one puts nuclear devices into orbit, I expect that would would place solid-fuel rockets into orbit attached to the nukes. So long as they're not segmented with O-rings like the ones on the Space Shuttle they can probably remain up there service-free for decades and still function as intended.

Just about all of the pre-Apollo American launches of humans into space was done with ICBM rockets. Lots and lots of satellites were also launched with ex-ICBM Titans/Titan IIs, and Atlas rockets through the eighties were based on the ICBM version of the Atlas.

Admittedly, these rockets were meant for orbital insertion or suborbital spaceflight, but that they have been adapted for nonhostile or less-hostile space applications implies that it would be possible to continue to do that, and that there is software/firecontrol that could be modified to do the job.