God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

Nice reference. Except... doesn't John Henry die in the end? I mean... Human strength of spirit won out in the end, when presented with a singularly strong figure of indomitable strength. But ultimately, in that story, we the people, sacrificed that person to win one battle against "the system" or "the machine" and gain the people . A battle which didn't stop the progression of mechanized advancement.

But then again, perhaps that story is apt. As many strong spirited and vocal individuals will rise up against this, win some battles, some sacrificing their lives in the effort. But ultimately, the mechanization will still win out in the end. And the masses of people who cheered so loudly for those few strong individuals will cheer for the cheaper power that mechanization brings.

Getting people out of harms way is a GoodThing(tm). Why aren't people focusing on transitioning the workforce to another related field where they can continue to be gainfully employed and retain their pride? No, it's not an easy thing... but it's something that needs to be done. Just because the market changes doesn't mean that people should be left behind.

I suppose that's the lesson to be learned from John Henry... that advancement should not be at the expense of human lives and human livelihood.

Using a dirty bomb to trigger an overreaction in your enemy and use that overreaction to get more allys is a double edged-sword, really. Trading blows using conventional and makeshift bombs is one thing, but using a dirty "nuclear" device is clearly crossing a line. That could provide the perfect casus belli and warrant an invasion, even in the eyes of those would could side with Daesh in the first place, by virtue of the same mechanism that makes people go nuts when they hear the words "dirty bomb"

For the record, the operators at Chernobyl are not completely responsible for what happened, the RBMK reactor had serious design flaws, and the facility lacked containement.

Ah no, damn, I was talking about the second one, which you clearly stated was old.... stupid me.

Dude, that first video is accelerated 50 times!

That can be very serious, especially in children. My son has a mild hyperphenylalaninemia, which could severely impair his neuronal development if untreated. Well, there is no treatment in the strict sense, appart from thightly controlling his phenylalanine levels and since this amino acid is found in proteins, that can get tricky. One thing's for sure though, aspartame is completely prohibited.

Q: What would a language need to have to be able to replace English?

A: English. It would have to have English.

About 80% of France's electrical energy comes from nuclear power plants, with fossil at under 10%. So while power plants do technically emit as a whole, the problem is largely mitigated. Now, there's nuclear waste.

PCMCIA:

Get yourself a PCMCIA Compact flash adapter. You can copy your data to the compact flash drive. (requires drivers, so this may fail for you)

You can also get a PCMCIA network card. Probably only 10mbit, but still more than enough. You have Windows 3.11, which was Windows For Workgroups. If TCP/IP wasn't installed on that version, you can download and install WinSock, an early TCP/IP socket stack for Windows. (requires drivers, so this may fail for you)

Serial:

You can do link between two computers and transfer over serial... but this requires the right software and the right drivers, so this may be out of the question for you.

Emergency Boot Floppy:

Use an emergency boot floppy and boot linux off of the network with a pcmcia network card. You can then mount the filesystem Read-only and copy over the network. (requires linux server, linux skills or someone who can do this for you)

Extract the hard drive directly: (best option)

Yank the hard drive. See what kind it is. Get the appropriate laptop drive adapter cable and relevant USB adapter. Plug that into a newer computer and transfer off the files.

Of the options, the hard disk pull and copy option is really the best way to go, bar none. The only thing you would need to buy would be the right USB-to-laptop hard drive adapter. You can find them on amazon/ebay/etc. If you live near Sunnyvale, California, you can even stop by Weird Stuff and they might have it for a song.

25k USD already sounds expensive to me. In my country (France) one can graduate from a very good private school for about 15k EUR (and that's a 5 year course). Or stick to the public university and merely pay a ~500 EUR fee per year, including healthcare (but excluding books of course). Then again, the US has higher ranking universities (though I'd like to see a fair comparison between average graduates from an employer's standpoint)

Most haven't seen Nietzsche's ass.