There's no shortage of food in the world overall. There's only uneven distribution/consumption, and that's nothing to do with GMO or not GMO, and everything to do with politics and profit.

Even more bizarre in Australia, which is by now fairly thoroughly metricated, having mostly gone over in 1970. Height and weight, most people now know metric BUT babies are still routinely referred to in pounds and ounces, and inches - the grandmother effect, I guess, but slowly changing. Hardware, while always shown in metric, is a mixture. People will want 3.3m of 2x4 timber, or 30m of 1/2" copper pipe. I reckon it will be another decade or two before all the old guys have been gone long enough. Beer is no drama - we love our beer down under, and want every ml. But the various measures tend to have names which are neither metric nor imperial, so depending on where you are in the country, you might get a pony, a pot, a middy, or a schooner. Under the influence of British-style pubs you can get a pint, however, though some short-change you with a pissy little US pint.

Only a couple of months ago I ditched around half a cubic metre of CD-ROMs and floppies: shareware, MSDN, TechNet, Novell SEL, hardware drivers, even shrink-wrapped MS-DOS, XTree Gold, ...

About 15 years ago, when a large Windows (NT) project was having trouble getting DNS to work properly at scale on NT, the SEs went to the source to ask how Microsoft themselves made it work. The sheepish answer was *cough*unix*cough*

Yes! A person perceiving this as poetry is like a person perceiving a (natural) landscape as beautiful. The intelligence is in the perceiver, not the "creator".

Absolutely agree. I started as a hobbyist with a 1MHz Signetics 2650 and 1kB RAM - I thought that was pretty cool. I had a book (dead trees) with details for a robot with trainable semi-random autonomous behavior and deviceless remote control (you whistled at it) that ran the 8085 and less than 1kB RAM. You can do PLENTY with a Pi.

Backward? Do you mean it should be "kills this discovery and buys these girls out", or "buys this discovery and kills these girls"?

actually, looking at the article (!), they may want to promote safer cycling, not just recycling

... if there's a sign, and they've relocated the board-burning a few miles, things must be much better.

Liquid Nitrogen? I'd say VERY cool. Even cold.

My first experience of remote tech support was in 1986, when one of our systems in Bahrain needed support. The only communications available were phone or Telex. With timezone differences, we used Telex. I had to anticipate what might happen, describe what to look for, detail what to type, etc. without knowing if they'd get it right until the return Telex the next day. One of the trickier bits was describing what keys to press, as Telex had a far more limited character set than the computer keyboard. I would spend the first half of a message defining what keys I meant. Later experience showed me that users tend to lie: "Would you check that the cable is plugged in, please?" 3 microseconds later "Yep!" So I started resorting to "Please unplug the cable" 10 seconds later "OK". "Now plug it in again, please, and make sure it is the right way up and all the way in".