It is rare for me to agree with the present administration but they got this one exactly right. In the UK merchants were punished for still using old weights and measures. I would really hate to see that here. Not our way.

I long ago wrote off Linkedin as an offensive spammer. They need to shut down.

Horses have huge eyes and aren't going extinct any time soon.

55 was set by President Nixon in 1974 on advice of Lee Iaccoca. Nixon's original idea was a 50 mph federal speed limit, or more accurately federal extortion of the states to individually impose that limit. Supposedly that would partly solve the Arab oil embargo of the time. It was much later that "safety" became a nanny-state excuse for what had become the most defied law in the USA since alcohol prohibition.

Even school zones can be abusive. A small city close to me kept its speed limit at 15mph many years after all others had gone to 25mph for downtown areas, and when they finally had to conform to state standards they defined two gigantic school zones that made most of the city main streets 20mph much of the day. At the same time, Hubbard (Ohio again) became infamous for its zero-tolerance (long before that term was coined and presented as a good thing) police force and its mayor's kangaroo court. I smell astroturf when I read defenses of this sort of official oppression.

Why are my comments on /. being deleted, whether anonymous or signed? I made one of the first comments on this story, mentioning New Rome and Ohio (my home state) and now it is gone. None of my comments have been defamatory or obscene, and this one wasn't even politically incorrect. Previous comments were, and they were gone real fast.

you sound exactly like the "public officials" of New Rome, Ohio defending their utterly corrupt "village". As a native and lifelong citizen of Ohio I am ashamed of this too-common "tradition" of my state with $$$$$$-inspired enforcement of traffic laws.

so I, living 55 miles south of Lake Erie all my life and haven't left the USA since a brief visit to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls almost 50 years ago, now have no fourth amendment rights at all. When I fought the then-new seatbelt laws 30 years ago I said it would lead to much worse but I never imagined this.

The USA has already gone metric for scientific and industrial uses. That's where it's needed; there is no need at all to shove it down the public's throat for ordinary uses like what was done in the UK.

Will it generate radio interference?

My first thought at seeing "AGOR-1" was "AGER-2" (Auxiliary General Environmental Research) aka USS Pueblo which was hijacked and still now held by North Korea. Pueblo was really a spy ship, and categorizing the USS Armstrong so very similarly leaves so little doubt about its real purpose too.

Is this a joke? Can the most civilized nation on earth sink to the level of the state criminals who stormed the American embassy in Iran?

I started with Netscape Mail in 1995 and then painlessly moved to Thunderbird when it was released. I've been with it ever since then and am unlikely to change. Most every new release has some small but nice improvement, and no major detriments of the sort that Firefox has suffered. I refuse to use the vaunted cloud or any sort of webmail.

How lovely to see the "privilege" mantra that's drilled so deep into our heads dragged out to justify even more intrusion. Alex Jones says this will include a microphone in the car and voice recording. Has anyone seen this from any other source? I can hope tha Alex went off the deep end there, but I am sure that by 2015 the "privilege" mantra wil be able to wear down the outrage and have us accept even this.

I wouldn't get anything at best buy even if it were free. Walmart almost the same.