It's actually less confusing as written. "Milliard" always means 10^9, unambiguously, while "billion" can mean either 10^9 or 10^12 depending on language/country.

Milliard is still the only/universal/modern way of saying 10^9 in French and several other languages. The word "billion" does still mean 10^12 in long scale languages/countries. A bunch of other languages/countries use the long scale too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or putting flyers up around town and then paying in good old time tested hard cash at the door.

They also get in the way of building homes.

For a while (no idea about current situation) but where I used to live in the UK you could not build a property because the Environment Agency had enacted new rules which capped water run off into watercourses, and no council anywhere in the UK had manageable plans to actually meet it with new developments, so nothing got built.

The rules were well intentioned, but came down like a hammer and stopped everything.

"SpaceX has the right to eject all remaining Russians from the crew due to this case." - Probably not. SpaceX has contracts with NASA. NASA would probably be the deciding party here.

From what I heard it was like riding around in a Yugo in space. Have plenty of duct tape handy.

That's the stupidest thing I've seen posted all day.

My wife drove a Subaru before we met. One of her long time friends is a lesbian. Oh hell.

... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.

I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.

"We're still right, it's a terrible problem," only shows clear bias towards demonstrating there is a terrible problem, and that's how they missed this. All of them, peer review, everything. It's a massive methodology screw up that can easily be accounted for in STATA or whatever they're using. It is a solved problem to identify statistical outliers and compensate for or eliminate them.

What's "terrible" is this is more fodder for climate deniers and people with general scientific trust issues.

The only appropriate answer is, "We all made an egregious mistake." Don't tell us you're right, because that tells us that you went into statistical analysis with a foregone conclusion. Even if it's the correct conclusion, and it is, it reflects badly on the entire scientific community if you fuck up the evidence. Worse, some will assume you fucked with the evidence.

Mea culpa and STFU. Let the adults cover your butts and your reputations.

I work for a university branch campus. We have public patron cards available for $5 a semester (spring/summer/fall) that gives you full borrowing privileges for books and DVDs and public computer access, printing is extra. The only thing that you don't get is interlibrary loan and library database access. Sadly, we just removed our audiobook collection. I expect our music CD collection to go next.

Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.

Design language is a thing and has been since an industrial designer was an occupation. It encompasses the looks of something - like how John Deere equipment is green and yellow in particular ways. Apple had several design languages - anyone in the 90s is familiar with the Platinum design that encompassed the colors of the computers as well as the lines on the case.

It's also how you can tell a ThinkPad laptop even though they've been through different owners and many generations of computers.

It plays a much bigger part than you might imagine. Though for some things, like say, TVs, monitors and phones, it's fallen by the wayside because the functional bit has pretty much consumed all visible bits of it so there's no real need for a design of something that is just a screen.

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.