No airline takeover/sabotage attempt that passengers could reach has succeeded since 911 (the most recent just a week or two ago when some idiot ran down the isles towards the cockpit door screaming - was tackled and pressed).

Stop locking the door altogether. If there's a problem, you'll have a line of people waiting to destroy whoever tries to take over a cockpit now. Threaten to hurt someone with a box cutter? Whatever damage you can do to one person is outweighed by every other person on that plane wanting to live.

Locking the cockpit doors has, to date, only brought disaster. You have to think that had the airplane that vanished had open cockpit access passengers could have got in there over the many hours the thing was off course (there are a lot of people that monitor aircraft position during flight).

Rooms go quiet when you enter, people cross the street to avoid meeting you on the sidewalk then cross back after you've passed.

Ok, how do random people on the street tell that you're not a tourist and are there to stay, and more importantly how do they tell you're not a native Quebecoi?

Taxis wont pick you up.

Ok, how exactly does a taxi driver look at you standing on the street and tell that you speak English instead of French? It's not like French people look significantly different from other white people (assuming you're white of course). (If you're not white, that's just plain ol' racism, not discrimination against non-French people. And it's not like all French speakers are white anyway; there's whole countries in Africa full of French speakers, plus lots of African-descent people in France.)

And why wouldn't you just learn French anyway?

Quebec is the only way for an English white person to get an idea what life was like for African Americans in the time immediately after emancipation.

It was like that for AAs all the way until the 1960s, and beyond in some places.

But you're still not making sense. How do people tell at a distance that you're a white native English speaker instead of a white native French speaker? French people do not look remarkably different from people of British or German ancestry, at least not enough to tell at a distance.

BS, this is the exact same thing every libertarian regurgitates and it isn't true. What you're describing is the Articles of Confederation. Those were tossed out in the 1790s in favor of the Constitution, which provides a much stronger central government though still with some federalism. What you describe also isn't feasible at all with all the tiny states we have, some no bigger than Luxembourg (which itself saw the value of union and created a trade union with Belgium and Netherlands, called Benelux, back in the 70s). That's why I propose breaking North America up into only handful of new nations, somewhere between 5 and 12. Each would have about the population of a good-sized European nation like France or Spain, not too small (small countries have no power or clout on their own) and not too large (large nations get you all the problems we have now, too much infighting and too much corruption due to too much diversity and disagreement between the regions). Then, coordinating 10 or less countries together in a more-limited trade union isn't that big a task, unlike trying to get 50 little (and some big) states to agree on anything.

While we're at it, we should eliminate all the state lines (each of these nations would probably have ~5 states) and redraw them in a more sensible ways, to account for local cultures and values, instead of just drawing straight lines on a map arbitrarily. A series of referendum elections, allowing people (probably at the county level) to choose which state they want to be in would fix this.

Same is true for subversion. In both cases you can develop and test your code and review your changes against what was last seen original copy.

It's admittedly been a while since I last used SVN, but it was not at all like Git; it was entirely centralized and required server access to do almost anything. Not every developer has a full copy of the repo, as they do with Git. It was pretty slow when I used it too (though nothing like ClearCase).

With Git, you can check in changes, create branches, etc. all you want without needing any network access at all. You only need network access and server access when you want to share those changes with others. This just isn't possible in a centralized version control system.

Github changes git into centralized subversion-like system

No, it doesn't. It facilitates sharing between developers, and that's all. This is not like a centralized VCS, where you need server access to actually do version-control.

but if it is down, your cooperation workflow is going to suffer badly.

No, not really. The whole point to the GitHub (or similar) server is to provide a single point to facilitate sharing. Without it, you'll need to do pushes and pulls directly between developers' machines, which obviously is inefficient, but is doable. However, it's also trivial to switch to a new central server at any time: just stop using the old one, clone the latest version of the repo (which whoever last pushed to GitHub would have) to the new server, have everyone point to the new server, and you're done. That's something you can't easily do with a centralized VCS.

It does seem like it'd be really nice if we had some easy way of replicating wikis and bugtrackers, so we could move those around as needed, like we do with Git.

No, I think the ISP's will only keep it for two years - but that is gauranteed.

Right now in the U.S. everyone blindly assumes the data is kept for NO years, and we aren't even given an imaginary date when it might be deleted.

The Australians are at least all aware for sure the data is being kept, in the U.S. it's still possible to imagine it is not... That's my point.

If you're not French (and don't like Quebec culture and language), then WTF are you doing living there? That's your own dumb fault for moving to a place you don't like.

This is why both Canada and the US should be abolished as nations, and new (smaller) nations should be formed in their places. Quebec should be an independent country, the west coast should have its own country, the US northeast should be a country (perhaps combined with Canada's maritime provinces) the US southeast should be a separate country, etc. Then these new countries can form a trade union much like the EU, with a shared currency (maybe) and free trade between them, but still having a huge amount of autonomy so that each region can do its own thing, such as legalizing pot (as the PacNW wants to do), or banning pot and abortion (as the Dixie states want to do).

Don't blame me, I never bought their crap or attended their shows. But yes, when you worship the "Free market", you get low-forehead crap like Nickelback, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Honey Boo Boo, The Kardashians, and the various Hollywood trash movies, so we can thank the masses of our fellow citizens for that.

You really don't understand what decentralized version control is, do you?

The whole point isn't to avoid any centralization at all, it's that you're not utterly reliant on it. It's somewhat similar to the argument between a big server and thin clients (where nearly all computation is on the server) and "thick clients" (PCs) and less-capable servers (for sharing files, etc.). With a big server, if that server goes down or the connection to it goes down, you're screwed, and can't do anything. With today's more common thick-client paradigm, if your office file server goes down, you can't easily share files with your coworkers and other things are inaccessible, but you can still get some work done using whatever local copies you have.

This is what DVCS is all about. With Git, you have a full copy of the repo just by virtue of having "checked out" a copy. You can still get some work done without access to the central server, whether it's down or your WiFi connection is down or your VPN is down. You can't do everything obviously, nor will you ever be able to, but that's not the point. And, in a worst-case scenario, if the central server just disappears one day without accessible backups, everyone with a copy checked out has the full repository, so it's possible to rebuild easily.

No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants.

WTF are you talking about? All those workers at the Ford plants in Mexico are not part of UAW.

If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany

You mean like all those VWs built in Mexico? You can probably get an Audi or Mercedes or BMW built in Germany, but if you're looking at something cheaper, it's made in Mexico.

That really doesn't explain anything and just sounds like conspiracy theory talk. How exactly does PayPal not technically being a bank give them such an advantage? Finally, why is it such a problem for PayPal to not be a bank, but for places like authorize.net and other credit-card processors it's OK? Also, I do believe Amazon Payments is doing something pretty similar to PayPal, and I never hear anyone complain that they're not a bank, nor did I ever hear anyone complain about Google Payments (which still exists BTW, but it's only used for buying stuff on the Google Play store now).

What banking regulations, exactly, are making it unprofitable for real banks? And what good are these regulations anyway? Why do we need these regulations? They sure didn't help prevent the whole 2008 financial disaster. In fact, after that disaster, the big banks all got free no-strings bailouts from the government. PayPal never got a bailout. So why are you acting like PayPal is somehow unethical and the banks aren't, when the banks are outright criminal?

"Truck Driver" is the most common job in the US now (well, only because the BLS separates "Teacher" into primary and secondary.

Go out and look at a city sometime. There are thousands of cars and trucks driving around, literally filling and overcrowding the streets. Now, what would they all be doing?

Yeah, drones aren't going to replace all of that, but they've got to be a cheaper way to deliver *most* of that eventually.

Take junk mail, for example. I can see the USPS trucks becoming semi-autonomous "drone carriers" that drive crates of mail around to each neighborhood, and then idle there while a small fleet of drones deliver your junk mail to your little mailbox "drop zones".

It will be cool getting your lunch and beer delivered by drone the first few times. And then it will become commonplace.

Way far out, drones will have the capacity and rating to carry commuters. And then it will literally hit the fan, so to speak.

Dude, they know. They've known for thousands of years.