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Comment Re:no free choice for gov't info like speed limits (Score 1) 1145

... the "free choice" argument does not work for monopoly players, especially the government itself.

Yes, we can't choose our own individual time zone or or own personal daylight saving time. They can only be done as a community. Similarly, units of measure have major implications for society as a whole and the government should standardise them.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 1145

Not yielding an inch, are they? Imagine the impact it would have on Subway.

I agree, asking for a 30.48 centimeter sandwich instead of a footlong just wouldn't work.

When Subway offer you a footlong, that is one foot to within, what, plus or minus half an inch? Converting to 30.48 centimetres implies a precision of .1 millimetres, which is ridiculous. Just a thirty would be fine, and about the same precision.

Hardware

Submission + - Preserving Great Tech for Posterity - the 6502 (swtch.com)

trebonian writes: For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 ( used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES). the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: (http://research.swtch.com/2011/01/mos-6502-and-best-layout-guy-in-world.html)
"A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) “transistor circuit” simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org."

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