Thank you. You made me laugh.

Yeah I realized it was supposed to be funny after I responded to it (while it was "Score:0") and saw the "(Score:4, Funny)". I totally understand all the aspects of the humor after rereading it with its intended purpose.

While platinum and iridium (or irridium if we want to go with your spelling) are more corrosion-resistant than iron, they are not corrosion-proof. "Not a big factor" is fine for short periods of time. The hundreds of years this thing is expected to exist and the extreme precision that it is supposed to remain accurate to are enough to make "not a big factor" a "big enough factor" to worry about. If not, it would have been made out of whatever it is your brain is made out of. That appears to lose mass quite quickly.

You are correct. I should have said mass. I'm sure I would have picked up on it after several more proof reads, but this is Slashdot after all. We aren't expected to read the article, why should we read our own posts?

I guess I missed the humor tag in your original post.

A kilogram is NOT defined that way, it is converted from pounds that way. It was originally defined as the weight of one litre of water. It is now defined as being equal to a prototype held at the International Bureau for Weights and Measures.

I can only imagine it fluctuating as a result of corrosion. For example, if it were iron the act of rusting would alter the weight.

So far it seems that most of the responders here have missed half of the purpose of HTTPS. Sure, using HTTPS vs. HTTP means that the traffic is being encrypted between your web browser and the server, but that is only half of the reason to use HTTPS. The other half is that there is a certificate on the server you are going to that verifies the authenticity of the site. That certificate is signed by a trust chain, the root of which, is installed into your browser as a trusted authority. Websites use HTTPS to prove to you that you are communicating with the correct site, not just to make the traffic invisible to prying eyes. The need for verification of who the server is sending its email to is usually totally unnecessary since the company sending the email relied upon the customer to supply the correct one.

I'm going to make a blog post titled, "Is Making Government More Open and Connected a Bad Idea?" and we can power the world with the spinning heads of /. readers.

IANAL...He was their agent, and I believe that means that anything he did during the exercise of his duties they are responsible for. If they don't like his actions, they can dismiss him, but I don't think that has any bearing on the openness of the code.

Oh come on, it isn't any harder than hitting a womp rat from a T-16. That should have been totally planned for.