I was too busy reading the RFC drafts via Gopher to bother with "formatting".

sPh

Assuming the parent is (1) not kidding (2) referring to wool socks, it is quite possible. Wool clothing was far better made 25 years ago than it is today, and far more durable than almost anything on the apparel market now. Not all change is "progress".

sPh

- - - - - If you choose small Italian cars as your unit of currency, they can always be driven, (providing value) no matter how much you've devalued them. - - - - -

You must have a special source of small Italian cars that aren't in the repair shop 360 days of the year.

sPh

= = = but why would someone spot their company 125k of cash on a credit card? = = =

For any corporate account small that GiganticCo, when you as an employee accept an Amex corporate card it has your name on it and you agree to be liable to Amex for all charges on the card, whether or not your employer pays through their direct-bill account. If the employee was direct to use his "corporate account" card as a p-card to pay for a major purchase, and his employer then failed to pay the invoice, well, he'd be in a heap-o-trouble.

sPh

= = = No, it's one of the dumbest ideas I've seen spread across the Internet lately. = = =

Interesting, since is a theme that occurs quite regularly in the work of Poul Anderson, one of the original SF libertarian tough guys. Anderson, writing in the 1950s, put the arrival of a post-scarcity society around 2100, but in many respects the developed world is there today [1]: full output can be sustained with a fraction of the population well below 1.00.

[1] Modulo the availability of petroleum of course

Yes, the various economic actors worked auto-magically in concert to clean up the Great Lakes in the early 1970s based on nothing except price signals!

Oh wait...

sPh

= = = Just how many teachers have tenure? = = =

Very, very few at the K-12 level (and not all that many at the college level either). And even where the concept of "tenure" exists in K-12, it is nothing like top-rank university tenure; teachers can be and are fired for all sorts of reasons not involving their performance (e.g. annoying a key school board member with their political views) tenure or no.

sPh

- - - - - It turns out, there's a special "extended range" mode that will put the battery at 100% instead of 90%. It reduces battery life.

Most normal people would consider "charging complete" to mean, you know, charging complete. - - - - -

Agreed. The idea that drivers will spend their time deciding what "mode" their vehicle is currently operating in, particularly when that mode is (a) invisible to the driver (b) reportedly reduces life of the key vehicle component, isn't a very good advertisement for all-electric vehicles.

sPh

I personally think that to the extent we still have personally driven automotive vehicles in 2032 they will look like today's Chevy Volt, except with a small diesel instead of gas. Pure electric isn't going to make it for many reasons, but auxiliary load (especially HVAC) is the big one.

I suspect that Facebook is being funded, if not operated, and at the least has certainly been heavily infiltrated by a US three-letter agency. NSA, CIA, NRO, one of those guys. The amount of information freely offered and the graph connections that have been growing since Day 1 are a staggering resource for spies. As would be a list of people who don't appear in the graphs.

sPh

= = = Unless you become a "person of interest" and the authorities start serving National Security letters and warrants on facebook for your account info. = = =

It doesn't have to be national security: federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was famous for indicting girlfriends/boyfriends and fiancees of his targets on bogus federal charges regardless of their non-involvement in the target investigation, and threatening them with long jail sentences unless they testified as directed against their SO. He's since retired but that's probably a common tactic of all federal prosecutors, and access to Facebook will give them more of what they want in this area. Remember that plastic water bottle you dropped while hiking in a protected wilderness area? Oops.

sPh

= = = More to the point, privacy is an illusion we create to hide us from ourselves. If you really want "privacy" then go hide in a cave all by yourself. If you want to keep secrets, don't tell anyone else. The moment you tell someone something you've lost control of that information. The internet just makes it easier to lose control of information. = = =

Try using your small business account to order up a Choicepoint profile of one Richard Cheney and see how far that theory takes you. If privacy is such an unimportant illusion why does every high-ranking corporate and government official have access to their records not only blocked but set up for immediate counterattack on access?

sPh

You're assuming that Facebook isn't being operated by the CIA or similar 3-letter agency, which isn't immediately obvious to me.

sPh

Particularly true in the ERP world - 80% of the midrange products out there (and at least one of the big boys) simply took their data structures from ASK MANMAN.

sPh

- - - - I find your comment quite odd on how society deals with a problem. They punish, instead of just changing policy into a better policy. - - - -

Large segments of US society don't believe that the situation you describe is bad policy, and a substantial percentage believe that even if it were punishment is good for the soul (literally and operationally). It is considered (by at least a plurality, if not a majority) a feature, not a bug. They want more of it too.

sPh

- - - - I forgot to note that HP did gave serious software development and consulting operations for a long time. How do you think the got HP-UX and MPE going. Then, OpenView, Allbase SQL and many more.- - - -

Those are all infrastructure components however. Much as I love infrastructure, software and systems that actually execute large-scale business processes are an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree. And generally much, much harder. HP developed the HP3000 and MPE, but it was ASK that wrote MANMAN.

sPh