Why would the government know better than a particular person what is in that particular person's best interest for them to do?

Because they have more information about the global picture, a longer-term view, lack that person's bias and can consult expert opinion. How many of these are actually followed would be the difference between good and bad government IMO. And if you've read about behavioural economics, then you know that people don't act in their own self-interest a lot of the time due to how our brains work and evaluate things like sunk costs, risk vs. reward or relative value.

Also, asking about a particular person's best-interest is a straw man, government is about society as a whole, and because society is made of up of lots of people with all kinds of complex interconnections, often what is best for one particular person isn't what's best for everyone as a whole. Being a criminal might be best for one person, but negative for lots of other people - and you can't just have criminals, or they have nothing to steal.

The Daily Mail website has a different editorial staff and content entirely from the paper.

Julian Barbour's The End of Time is a good read by someone who's done a lot of work on this issue.

No, half of all gold ever mined has been mined since 1967.

The design of Powershell was heavily influenced by Perl...

Ah, so it does... doh. 20s versus 60m is quite a difference though!

The best thing about my alarm clock is waking up about ten minutes before it goes off. Never fails to amaze me :)

Seconded. Although I do find the transition quite obvious - unlike my daylight alarm clock which goes from dark to bright over half an hour, Flux does it in about five seconds. Once it's changed you don't notice the difference though, and it's definitely less glaring.

Well then it's a good thing you're not someone who'd twist someone's words to try and make it seem like there was meaning that wasn't there then, right?

Exactly, racism.

No, I've been here over a decade, and by and large it's the same as it ever was - there's just more people and a broader range of topics and views. And there's way less in the way of outright crap than there was ten years ago.

There's some articles about the template tag, web components and custom elements. HTML5 Rocks has some articles on the shadow DOM as well.

I very much suspect you're just overestimating the focus, attention span and memory of people - there's hundreds of ways our brains act irrationality in modern situations like this.

How do you even define cheating in that sort of task? If I go and search for it on Stack Overflow and find a decent solution, and then I can come in and talk it through showing I understand it, is that cheating? Or evidence of a useful ability to learn new things? I'd say the latter assuming they can talk through it... my current job had this sort of offline test before my interview and it's the best place I've worked at so far :)

This is Mach's Principle, and one of the things Einstein thought about while thinking up General Relativity. However, GR doesn't answer the question, and formulations such as Godel's universe break it in strange ways.