The story and the many of the comments make mention of the 'company' that called the police on the kid that reported the vulnerability. It wasn't a company. I was the, as the article makes clear in it's first sentence:

"A teenager in Australia who thought he was doing a good deed by reporting a security vulnerability in a government website was reported to the police."

As much as the dominant culture of Slashdot is the sort that will take every opportunity to implicate private businesses in all manner of evil, distorting reality in this manner doesn't serve the anti-corporate cause. More to the point it demonstrates that whatever the drivers of the anti-business feelings of Slashdot editors and readers are, commitment to truth isn't amongst them.

NASA, in building a spacecraft that could go beyond low earth orbit, would inevitably have test runs of those systems to low earth orbit. Especially given the risk tolerance at NASA today, with requirements for backup spacecraft and all (remember the second shuttle waiting on the launch pad just in case at the end of that program?) So while their stated goals are beyond low earth orbit... I don't believe they'll do better again, if they manage to pull even a low earth orbit test flight off.

Space travel takes time, money, engineering talent, a willingness to take risks and perseverance. On most counts, there is none of that in the U.S. anymore. You can still find good engineers I suspect, but all other factors trump that. Can you imagine a concerted space initiative crossing presidential administrations in this day and age... even of the same party let alone crossing party lines? Kennedy and Nixon both had cold war agendas that drove their programs; Apollo for Kennedy probably wasn't hurt by his assassination, ensuring that later administrations would carry forward in the name of a beloved president. Nixon was convinced that the space shuttle could pluck Soviet satellites out of orbit and so saw compelling reason to go for it.

Today, announcing a bold national commitment to a new manned space program and putting words into action would draw at least a thousand interest groups claiming that their need was greater.... feed the poor, house the unhoused, create art, etc. This sort of thing wouldn't survive the appropriations process in this day and age... way too many people that vote now are dependent on handouts from the same source of funds to make it practical or popular. Never mind an economy that is shambles, despite the opinion of certain political and economic interests, and simply can't afford such an endeavour.

I'm only giving better than even odds that we get NASA astronauts back into low Earth orbit again in a NASA spacecraft... forget about anything more dramatic than that. The culture, finances and governance of the United States would need to change significantly for anything more grand than that. A nation that, in its self-inflicted race to champion the lowest common denominator in any endeavour, consumes itself with re-defining its ability to succeed with phases like 'the new normal' is not the kind of nation that can seriously pursue spacefaring.

Science missions fair better if only because there is less public profile to capture both support and (more importantly) opposition.... in those cases the drive to get money to interested congressional districts outweigh the demands of contrary interests for other spending priorities.

Because a utility box is completely different from a white van of course. A white van sits on the side of the road, whereas a utility box is a camera in your bedroom that blasts propaganda on a regular basis. Hence 1984.

And back we go to Tide and the "thinking" the "general public" (actually wide target demographic) presents to justify their emotional product selection.

Disregard the crappy generic link, here's the real Tide.

Doesn't that make you feel all better about paying the premium for Tide^H^H^H^HApple?

In a world with only light cars you use a tax system that makes sense in a world with only light cars. In a world with cars that do significantly more damage, you should not as it is NOT THE SAME WORLD.

An not-really-that-efficient sedan certainly will not do better with a bigger box on top...

There certainly are thirds, even if they are expressed in scalable percentages.

There are 33%, 66% and 67% percents, but as repeatedly stated decimals just don't divide into thirds cleanly, there are no thirds in the 3 feet to a yard sense. Point being that even division just isn't that important.

It doesn't come up as much in daily life..

I suspect what "comes up" and doesn't is quite dependent on what is easy to do. I find myself calculating the volume of containers quite often, it is very handy when adjusting volumetric yield sizes to pans/containers. I could measure the capacity by pouring water of course, but why mess around with that if your measuring system has the tools built in? I was not very pleased when trying to figure out how many cubic feet of soil it would take to fill up a tote with the volume given in gallons. Neither are the units related, nor is it easy to convert between cubic inches to cubic feet (unless you are well versed in cubic duodecimal calculations).

The thing about the customary measures is that they evolved with the uses they are put to. They are the result of what people found most useful rather than what was prescribed.

That's not really a fair description. Considering the plethora of contradictory standardized and customary units that were floating around before metric alone makes it questionable. The fact that many contradictory versions of the "same" units were in fact mandated at various times and places outright contradicts such a claim. I'd say it's more fair that customary measures are units that some people, at some point, found useful for their particular tasks and were subsequently adopted for broad usage via network effects.

That's the reason I keep beating the "arbitrarily precision" drum. When you have a system where conversions are easy, you can adopt whatever approximations are useful for the task, instead of dealing with someone else's foot or stride you can have yours and retain all the advantages of a cohesive measurement system with a few basic calculations. If the size of the standard 12 inch foot makes sense for your task and clean division by three is important, then there's nothing wrong with working in 30 cm increments (or 3 dm, if the task scales up more than down).

It is a useful intellectual exercise to consider a metric system not based on ten though. It would retain the natural cohesion between length and volume (and mass for for water). but might use halves and thirds rather than tenths.

Oh, absolutely, however I'd go for an all out base 16 change across the board. As I said, for practical purposes (1) approximations of repeating numbers are adequate as long as the system easily supports arbitrary precision, (2) there will be repeating numbers no matter what, (3) binary divisions are the only inches easily eyeballed and performed without a lot of fuss and/or special equipment. For example, high precision division of weight is very easy in a base 16 measurement system, whereas any base divisble by three is as problematic as decimal.

I'd imagine for that purpose 21 x 30 cm would be precise enough and the same number of digits. Not that I've ever had trouble remembering the extra 7... Of course I'm a nerd who knows that sqrt(2) is approximately 1.414 and can get there from 21 cm. Of course I know that precisely because I find the A series so cool.

Sounds like rounding to millimeters would be plenty accurate then.

There are no thirds in serious baking, it's all decimal in the form of baker's percentages that can be used with whatever weight units you want.

I'll note that it would probably reduce headaches quite a bit if the foot was removed from the yard/foot/inch equation, as it stands 3 parts is the only thing the yards divides evenly to for the next smallest unit. I'd rather deal straight with 36 inches, of course most people have decided to go the other way and ignore yards when inches are in use.

Overall yards are a prime example of the problems with US customary units: inconsistent divisions. Commonly used lengths go from 1760 to 3 to 12 to binary division (so there are common factors, but the bases don't normalize until you divide inches), and miles are usually given in feet, not yards to top it off. Plus I believe there are random sub-inch units, but I don't know how they fit, or don't fit into this "framework".

Then there's the lack of cohesion with dimensions and volume/weight disconnected. Volumes are at least mostly (ah, teaspoons) consistent with a binary division, however the individual divisions have names, half of which have been forgotten. So people learn seemingly arbitrary conversion factors between ounces and cups and quarts and gallons without knowing the underlaying system.

Err... disregard those numbers, I had a brainfart. Point is 11x17 has a completely different aspect ratio (1.5454...) than 11x8.5 (1.2941...) meaning that while it has twice the surface area it is useless for printing things designed for Letter besides printing two copies on one sheet. A3 is twice the size of A4 in area while retaining the aspect ratio.

I'm not entirely sure which point this answers, unless there is a common 16.5 x 10.5 paper format out there or somesuch.

A cup is a cup... except when you try to cut a recipe calling for a third cup in half. Stop obsessing over precision if all you care for is approximates. Also, once you've nailed grandma's bread recipe, recording to the nearest 5g-10g will really help you repeat it.