Many more of our inherent rights cannot and should not be sold at any cost — life, liberty, due process of law, free association, that sort of thing. There are limits to any rights, but these cannot be sold or traded lest we revert to slavery.

Take doctors and lawyers for example. To use their services effectively requires sharing a measure of your private information with them. However these professions are legally bound to protect your privacy by not disclosing it to any third parties without your express, written consent.

Does the term “rerun” even apply for on-demand streaming services? That usually refers to shows that are broadcast over the air any subsequent time after their original broadcast date.

I used to work for a Web hosting company which had a rather shady manager, who would regularly check the prices on their competitors and adjust their own prices to be right between the top two cheapest providers — no regard for the company’s actual costs or quality of service. It was a brain-dead simple algorithm, and no actual (intentional) collusion involved.

I’m still opposed to “electronic” signatures in general. It’s harder to prove that a document “signed” on the Web by typing in your name or some other well-known text was actually signed by the person they claim to be than it is to prove a written signature is authentic. Even documents that are “signed” by entering a password are only good so long as that password hasn’t been compromised.

The linked survey from last year shows that about half of respondents who want to eliminate the twice-yearly time change want permanent Daylight Savings. It also shows that a little more than half prefer to start their day when it’s light outside than when it’s dark. That’s a contradiction; it tells me that a significant portion of the population doesn’t really know how time works. You can’t have it both ways.

The caveat of Tesla’s FSD safety record is that only drivers who have demonstrated a high degree of safe driving habits are allowed into the beta program, and while FSD is active the driver is constantly reminded to keep their hand on the wheel and pay attention. That skews the results.

I have no plans on buying a “next” gaming console. I’m perfectly happy with the PC, Wii, and Wii U I’ve already got, and have plenty of games I haven’t had time to finish yet.

This “exclusive content” is a prime example of how vertical integration leads to a monopoly. Producers bar their content from all providers except their own, blocking fair competition. There ought to be a law against that.

The type of text editor you use — Eclipse, Emacs, Nano, Notepad, vi, or some other IDE or stand-alone editor — can have a large influence on whether your code is intended with tabs or spaces, as most code editors have their own defaults for indentation. I would speculate that the type of IDE or editor a programmer uses has a higher correlation to salary than just tabs vs. spaces.

The first home computer I used was the Atari 400/800 at my junior high school.

The first home computer my family owned was an Atari 400.

The first home computer I owned is the Atari ST, which I still have along with an Atari 800 XL that I bought second-hand later on.

How about 200 countries?

“The US remains the only industrialised country that has not adopted the metric system as its official system of measurement.” [Wikipedia]

“The NIST has identified the United States as the only industrialised country where the metric system is not the predominant system of units.” [ibid]

It’s not humans in general that are so stubborn, it’s just Americans.

I don’t have any trouble with going to bed around 04:00 – 05:00 and waking up around 12:00 – 13:00 hours (depending on the season.) Sometimes it’s a chore to convert between UTC and the local time everyone else still uses, but I work with computers most of the time, and it’s been very convenient not to have to do any mental conversions for system clocks.

I use Bacula for my home computer; it feels powerful enough for a small office, and is very versatile.

It has three main components: a client daemon that you install on the computers you want to back up, a storage daemon that you install on the computer that will write the backup files and/or tapes, and a director daemon which controls the backups. The director and storage daemons only run on unix-like operating systems (BSD, Linux, Solaris) but the client daemon has also been built for MS-Windows.

http://blog.bacula.org/

Reminds me of San Angeles circa 2032