I like to think that there were two millenniums– the People’s Millennium and the Pedants’ Millennium (either name can be adjusted to be kinder or more scathing). The People’s Millennium was more exciting to the average person, and also contained the threat of the Y2K bug. By the time the Pedants’ Millennium arrived, people were over the whole thing.

I had a fun Pedants’ Millennium myself, organizing a pub crawl that was so successful that only my friend and me made it to midnight. We sang O sole mio at 11 volume, accompanied by a pianola. Fun times.

One of the beauties of driverless cars is that heavy traffic will be a lot less of a problem. Even if a lane on the Golden Gate Bridge is blocked, other cars will know about it way ahead and be able to merge (which they also will do a lot better).

But the thin/short person and the Biggest Loser candidate are outliers, so unless there is a weight-loss convention or a supermodels’ meeting, you can derive the number of people from their weight reliably enough for these purposes.

Having the states responsible for running elections isn’t fair. Partisan state governments seem to think of all sorts of ways to prevent people from voting who are unlikely to vote the way the state government wants. So a poor black person (for example with a name resembling that of a convicted felon) might have a lesser chance of being able to vote in Florida than they would in another state. That’s not fair.

Having a 50.1% majority decide 100% of a state’s votes in the electoral college is not very representative.

Plurality voting is also problematic with more than one candidate.

The US is one of the world’s oldest democracies. If you’re first to get something, say an underground rail network, without a lot of upgrading work you’ll eventually have the world’s oldest and creakiest underground rail network. So I think the US democratic process could do with an overhaul, if only because other, newer, democracies have been able to develop their systems learning from older democracies’ problems.

In Eastern Germany in 1995, I saw an ornately and tastefully decorated apartment inside a building with a soul-crushing grey exterior.

I also got a ride (over cobblestones) in a Trabi, since consigned to history.

Maybe we can’t interact with them because they’re on the other side of the speed-of-light barrier.

In my first year of high school (1983) we were playing with an end-of-life MONECS PDP-11 system, pencilling BASIC on to cards one character at a time. It seemed a bit pointless as I’d already been programming a friend’s VIC-20 the year before. By 1984 or 1985 the Informatics room had a few BBC computers. I can’t remember learning anything on them though.

I switched nice years ago when I got DSL. Since then my old company has been bought out and assimilated by my new company.

So have I really switched?

I’m a sound engineer, and have to lean over to make myself heard clearly in the talkback, so for anything not overly complicated I use an extensive range of gestures.

And come to think of it, I sing in small ensembles and sometimes conduct musical groups, which also requires silent communication.

Reminds me of undeleting an email (not in the trash) on my aunt’s computer over the phone... one of my life’s achievements on a par with fixing up an audio file using Perl.

My housemate & I once took twelve rounds to achieve a non-draw. Maybe our RPS patterns synchronized like the periods of women who live together.

The idea that RPS (played between amateurs) is not quite random seems more appealing thatn just a random coincidence.

Well, I've enjoyed it for streaming netflix...and now Amazon prime movies too.

Hehe, our Sony Blu-Ray player spends about 70% of its time streaming and 30% playing DVDs. It has yet to have the pleasure of being introduced to a Blu-Ray disc.

My brain can reproduce any familiar music with all the melody, harmony and instrumentation all at once, as good as listening to an audio recording. I have no idea what proportion of people can do this, but if it’s similar to my other aural abilities, my guess would be not many. Happy to be proved wrong though.

For me, absolute pitch (perfect pitch) is being able to recall (“hear internally”) a particular frequency.

My Wilson Pickett compilation has two versions of Midnight Hour, the studio version, and a live version. The live version is twice as long and more than twice as exciting.

Hehe, yes, a proper relay goes "THUNK!"