It won't be long before the Google Glass tech will be put into glasses that don't look obvious and a little ridiculous. For those of you who think you're always going to be able to tell who's recording video of you with wearable Google Glass tech: think again.

Right now they look like "nerds" and "geeks" according to the people who are angry about losing their privacy (or who can't afford them). Pretty soon, they'll look like anyone with eyeglasses. I've seen people here talk about punching anyone they see wearing Google Glass looking at them. What are you going to do when this technology is so ubiquitous that anyone with glasses might be recording you?

Maybe the best we can hope for is that the tech is so widely-available, and moddable, that it's a level playing field (a very exposed playing field). But like it or not, it's coming.

5280 feet in a mile

Care to foot the bill (no pun intended) for all the land records that would have to change? Aside from the problem of changing, that 5280 feet is very convenient. How?

A square mile is a "section", which is 640 acres. Now 640 acres ought to be enough for anybody (heheh). You could be the "section boss"--a familiar phrase from the Old West. Take that section and cut it into 16 equal squares. You get 16 40-acre plots. You could have "40 acres and a mule" if you bought one--another familiar phrase with deep meaning to African-Americans. The 40 acres are conveniently divided again into 10 acres plots, then in half for a five acre lot. Five acre lots were common mini-estate sizes where I grew up for this reason.

OK fine, by all means define the foot in terms of metric; but remove it from all records and from the culture? No. Just. No.

Aside from that, the Metric system is no less arbitrary than our customary units. The only reason 10 matters is because we have 10 digits on our hands. An alien race might not. If you want something truly universal, consider Planck units. Otherwise, all the metric arguments just boil down to "my arbitrary system is better than yours".

If anything, a system where things are commonly divided into two is more "ready for the digital age" than one that uses base-10 everywhere.

All that aside, I've gotten used to some metric units over the years. Liters are nice enough; but Celcius? Fuggedaboutit. Each decade of the Fahrenheit scale has a readily associated "feel" that Celcius can't match. They're both arbitrary systems, so it's really just one person's preferance vs. another.

Here's the math that explains why you are wrong. When it comes to compatibility issues, like standards, it is easy for a laissez-faire system to get stuck on a local maxima. It is one of the primary reasons that a well regulated market can be a closer approximation of the theoretical ideal free market than can laissez-faire. This sort of problem is exactly why people institute governments.

Amdahl's laws are many.

Here are four of them.

0. Amdahl’s parallelism law: If a computation has a serial component S and a parallel component P, then the maximum speedup is (S+P)/S.
1. Amdahl’s balanced system law: A system needs a bit of IO per second for each instruction per second: about 8 MIPS per MBps.
2. Amdahl’s memory law: alpha=1: that is, in a balanced system the MB/MIPS ratio, called alpha, is 1.
3. Amdahl’s IO law: Programs do one IO per 50,000 instructions.

Corollary:

In any discussion of computer architecture, at least one member of the set of Amdahl's laws is bound to be relevant.

Did she also tell you that you're big boned rather than fat?

Is this a laptop only chipset, or does intel have goodies for those who like to be chained to their desks?

Yes, but they don't have a ground plug, so jacking off in the can while plugged in greatly increases the risks of severe electric shock.

Yes, "unlimited" doesn't exist because there are a finite amount of atoms in the universe.

I find it incredible that someone was actually able to consume 77TB of bandwidth in a month on a residential connection.

You find it incredible that a small ISP (which is essentially what he was running) that's streaming video to (I presume) most of it's users (from the sound of it) consumed 77TB of data in a month? The person who needs to have his nerd qualifications rechecked isn't the OP.

As opposed to burning 1000s of megawatts of energy the world doesn't have, sure.

The IQ of the dog is inversely proportional to how far it runs when you throw an imaginary stick.

And maybe that's part of intelligence. Catching yourself being stupid is infinitely smarter than not catching yourself being stupid.

They didn't ding him for using too much bandwidth. They did so because he freely admitted to their tech that he was running servers, and nearly ever consumer-grade internet subscription does not allow customers to run servers. They required him to upgrade to a business account if he was to continue running his servers.

I can dig a few inches down in my yard and hit clay. Fire it in a blast oven, and you get a ceramic. Cement is nothing more than limestone. You mix it with water, let it absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and you get calcium carbonate, which is the same composition as limestone. Concrete is just cement mixed with filler, like crushed rock.

It sounds like the objection was that he ran servers, the bandwidth thing was merely the trigger to ask.

I'm baffled ISPs still think "servers" are something that needs banning. Reminds me of when so many clueless ISPs banned NAT (or rather connection sharing between multiple PCs in general.)