You're having a hard time seeing the problem here because you're familiar with the units. FWIW, what you're feeling right now (the whole, "what's the problem?" feeling), is exactly how people in the US feel about their non-metric units. I use SI every day for work, so I'm familiar with metric (and like it very much), but not with the customary metric units (which break the elegance of SI to make people feel comfortable).

The issue with the units we've been discussing is "due to the many different conversion factors". All of the factors are multiples of ten, which helps, but the nice consistency in order of magnitude is lost. For example, mass is measured in grams and masses larger or smaller than a gram can be denoted by changing the order of magnitude associated with "gram"... except if the mass is above 10^6, in which case a new unit is used without a prefix (or sometimes with one). Converting between megagrams and milligrams is easy, as metric should be. But converting between tens of thousands of tonnes and milligrams is much less elegant.

You'll keep your tonnes and hectares for the same (invalid) reasons as Americans (and sometimes Brits) will keep their odd units and no argument will convince them otherwise.

I understand the rationalization for the creation of new units. What is happening with these new units, though, is the birth of a customary system. The origins of this particular customary system will be much more rational than any that came before it, but it will be just as clumsy and inconsistent as any other in the end. It's not that bad now, but wait until more silly units are made and people forget what twisted rationalizations begat those units.

What you're describing here is, quite literally, a "customary" system.

You've totally lost me here. "Megagram" is one of the most awesome unit names in existence. Seriously, work it in to conversation the next time you'd use tonne and see how much better the world is because of it.

The use of hectare (along with tonne, angstrom, and all the other customary metric units) deserves mockery. What's the point of having a nice metric system if you're going to make up new units instead of using the actual units provided by the system? This path leads directly back to customary units that can't be easily converted or computed (even if they were originally crafted from a rational system of units).

Yikes, you guys are just aching to get back to some customary system of units, aren't you? You have a beautiful system of easily scaled and converted units and immediately start shoehorning in goofy units like hectares and tonnes.

The highest DSL speed from CenturyLink at my house in Denver (in the city itself) is 1.5Mbps and they've been telling me that they'll be bumping up the speeds "soon" for years. They even send me flyers occasionally advertising speeds that they won't sell me.

My recommendation is to sign up for Comcast's business service is you are stuck with them. It's only marginally more expensive than residential service and it doesn't suck nearly as much.

So?

Replace "terrorists" with anything from "transvestite midgets that want to fondle my feet" to "billionaires that want to patronize my painting career" and the statement still has no bearing on your life if you don't ever come into contact with them.

He's not claiming that terrorists don't exist. Only that he has never, and is not likely to ever, interact with one in any meaningful way. Structuring your life around incredibly improbable events is a waste of time. Ordinary citizens who make any changes to their routine in anticipation of a terrorist attack in Canada (or the US or most of the world) are very likely in need of therapy.

What can't kill or otherwise impair the health of people? If we start down that road, Surgeon General's warning labels will become as helpful as Prop 65 warning labels are now.

Some good doctors slip through, though. Mostly where the uncorrelated sets of 'hypercompetitive egomaniacs' and 'good doctors' intersect.

If you're visualizing large or dynamic datasets, a hardware accelerated animation adds all sorts of value. Not everyone can produce meaningful conclusions from screenfuls of cascading text.

That's completely true, but if you're mostly concerned with third party apps phoning home, a local application like Little Snitch works well enough. Using it to get (at least for now) a decent view of how system processes are communicating is just gravy.

The fact that Little Snitch (which uses a kernel module to put itself into the flow of traffic) is capable of blocking OS traffic and sometimes borking system processes in ways that their logs indicate is unexpected shows that, at least for now, Apple probably isn't hiding traffic from it.

From the article:

The following occur with all privacy options enabled -- including disabling analytics (i.e., Diagnostics and Usage Data).

So even though it is presented as opt-out, it apparently isn't actually opt out.

I've noticed the same thing. With all of the "privacy" related options enabled, there is still a great deal of chatting with Apple servers. I'm seeing this with Little Snitch.

That's almost certainly not true because I'm always chiming in on those threads.

I can't find it now (which pisses me off to no end; my search fu is usually better than this), but there was a study published claiming that replacing ads with micropayments would cost users less than a dollar a day. Slashdot subscriptions are cheap. If people knew that they existed (I found out by reading through the FAQ on one boring day) or if they still worked (apparently?), I think that more people would chose to buy them.

That the few deployed ad-free content payment implementations suck doesn't prove that ad-free content payment is an unworkable idea.

No, it doesn't.

Your link only talks about one side of the energy budget. The whole equation takes the energy coming in from Sol into account.

In fact, your own link says, "Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation."

47 TW is less of a considerable amount than 173 PW.