Fractions of the form 1/x have names for x=2,4,8 and 16. Fractions of the form x/y have names built using names of simpler fractions. Like you say thirty six to mean 30 + 6. So when a fraction is multiplied by a whole number, the whole numbers taken out and the rest renamed it gets quite complex. One memorizes these things. Indian currency during colonial days was a nightmare too. They used rupees-anna-paisa similar to pount-shilling-penny. 16 annas made a rupee and 12 paisa made one anna. And the weights and measures were also equally insane pound and ounces mixed up with Mogal units.

But when we were learning fraction tables by rote, (only a few "enrichment" students did this, and they called the "enrichment" stream advanced stream to give us some bragging rights), we were using metric system even in currency, 100 paisa = 1 rupee. We did this mainly because our teachers were tortured by this when they were kids and it is their turn to torture us. Continuity and circle of life and all that.

Russian nuclear subs are larger than this submarine

Sudden switch to a passive voice sentence fragment. Is that you Sarah Palin? Who's going to do the protection? You postulate some entity more powerful than the government that will enforce the property rights, but still will not abuse the very same powers for self aggrandization.

In most Indic languages fractions 1/8 and 1/16 have names in addition to half and quarter. There are rules to construct the names of fractions like 5/8. So the table goes like "one half is half, one quarter is quarter, one 1/8 is 1/8, one 1/16 is 1/16", "two halves are one, two quarters are half, two 1/8 are quarter, two 1/16 are 1/8", "three halves are one and a half, three quarters are three-quarters, three 1/8s are 3/8, three 1/16 are 3/16" like that it goes up to 16. Educated grownup reading these fractions would find it trivial. But if you substitute the named fractions and construct the names for fractions like 3/8 and 5/16 it makes it quite interesting.

Oh yeah, no true Scotsman....

If you assume everyone will voluntarily agree to respect the rights of the others, you are making the same mistake communists made. Absent reward, no one will work. That is communist problem. Absent enforcement no one will respect the rights of others. Enforcement can be done only by a government more powerful than the most powerful individual. The least onerous form of government is Democracy, which you disdain as mob rule.

Please go back to your ivory tower or freshman dorm.

I don't know why either. All the tables, sung in a sing-song tune was part of every nursery school in India. By the time my youngest sibling went to KG classes, there were some effort to stop at 10 x 10. But there was fierce resistance from the parents. Surprise was mutual learning Koreans go up to 20 x 20.

Have you heard of fractional multiplication tables? We did them too. "Tables class" was always the hour after lunch. One student leads the class singing one line at a time, the class follows. All the class teachers would be taking a nap in the "staff room".

We see traffic accidents all the time. More people die in automobile accidents every year than we lost in the entire Vietnam war. Does it mean the traffic laws are not effective? That we are better off without traffic rules and lights?

Goal of the law is NOT to bring about some form of utopian society. Legal behavior is the lowest standard for people to live by. Ethical and moral behavior should be voluntary, otherwise you would be infringing on the liberty of individuals. You must always have the right to be selfish, unethical and immoral. Persuading you not to be so is not the purview of the law. It should be illegal for one individual to infringe on the liberty of another individual. That is all law can do.

Anything more, it is not possible for law. Only education, understanding, empathy developed over decades can make people of disparate background live together.

Civil rights laws forced all businesses that benefit by the existence of the government, who benefit by the laws enforced by taxes paid by all to treat all people equally. If white people who were used to privilege, advantages etc before refused to play, if they kick scream and belly ache, it is their problem, not the laws. Over the years lots of lots of white people have seen the fundamental justice in civil rights laws and have accepted it. It was a problem created over centuries. It will be solved over several generations.

You postulate is as impractical as communism. You imagine laws would constrain very powerful individuals. But you also postulate government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. The moment one individual gets to be more powerful than the government, he/she would promptly drown it in the bathtub. There will be no effective enforcement of laws unless people, collectively, have the ability to control powerful individuals. That is democracy. That is precisely what happened in the civil rights laws. And this dude says that is going too far.

Libertarians want to eat the cake and have it too. They postulate some house of cards of laws, contracts etc. But they do not have any effective means of enforcing them, because enforcing them is infringing on the liberty of the individuals. At this point they are basically clueless kooks.

Well, if you allow computers to grade essays, then you should allow students access to AI based tools to generate essays by supplying keywords. Now that is fair competition. In America rich people will by high quality essay-generators for their school district. In socialist Australia government will supply all students with the same single-payer essay generator. Meanwhile Korean and Chinese parents will dutifully coach their children to memorize multiplication tables all the way to 20 times 20. (My Korean friend was surprised to learn we Indians went only till 16 x 16). Japanese would create essay-gochi, an app that you buy as a child and take care of it to produce high quality essays by the time you finish high school. Indians would write project proposals that require technical back-office teams (about three IT techies per student) to create and maintain the essay grading apps.

He is the guy who believes businesses are sacrosanct and if they want to ban blacks from sitting in lunch counters, they should be able to. He thinks such businesses would naturally go bankrupt without any government intervention, and civil rights legislation went too far.

In the long run of history, such businesses would go bankrupt, but the invisible hand of the economy dispenses justice in a collective average statistical sense over a long period of time. Generations of blacks would go discriminated against for decades before the invisible hand acts against the bad actors.

Humanity has experienced such total free economy. It took 1000 years for Europe to break out of the feudal system where inherited property based on land concentrated power at the very top. It took four centuries of combined effects of the renaissance, age of exploration, the industrial revolution and new found serfs in the colonies to break the feudal system. Pure libertarian solutions take centuries to take effect, they require seismic paradigm shifts and the breakdown is very violent. Culminating in a 30 year world war. (According to Churchill world war I and II are just one war spread over three decades).

Pure libertarianism is just marginally more practical than communism. Communism simply will not work because it disconnects incentives from effort. Libertarianism naturally leads to oligarchy. Liberal democracy, founded on acknowledging the usefulness and sinlessness of the profit motive to the society but moderated by large number collectively holding more power than any small group of oligarchs is what would work to give justice, peace and liberty to most people.

People fail to see the positives and always focus on the negative. Take this story for example. People should appreciate the fact that science holds the possibility... that somewhere sometime ... given the right circumstances ... non poisonous fecal cocktails could exist. Take heart folks.

Agile development will definitely come to the rescue of IBM and pull it out of failure. In fact so many companies have made tons and tons of money using Agile methodology.

The only thing they have to make sure to succeed is: "Sell/push/hawk/promote agile development tools".

But, when it comes to, the buyers and users of the Agile tools and methodology, the results are mixed.

Agile proponents have managed to sell the "no true scotsman" argument convincingly, probably because the management is willing let itself believe, "All we have to do is to give a few million dollars to this latest vendor selling the latest tools, all our problems will magically disappear".

It works well enough for me. Battery lasts almost two days. But I don't push it very hard.

Back when IBM executive predicted "the world will probably need six computers", the main computing model was a mainframe at a distant location and time share on it via (overpriced) telephone lines and VT-100 terminals. Eventually workstations appeared and the move was to get off the mainframe and do local computing. Then came along Sun, "The network is *the* computer" and diskless workstations that would boot into an X-11 display terminal off a distant server. Well, PCs came along and desktop became powerful enough to run even fluid mechanics simulations. Then came high performance computing, and now the cloud.

A bigger machine in a far away place always had the cost advantages of the economy of scale. Everytime there is a jump in connection speeds and bandwidth some customers found it cheaper to "out source" computing to a remote machine. But eventually the advantages of local storage and local computation adds up. So let us see how long this iteration lasts.

Can't you just wrap it in Aluminium foil and block the signals from getting in? Just put it inside the tin-foil hat and it should be able to go off line/