I can think of two places where there's custom stuff in a typical distro (which probably wouldn't be in a separate partition):/etc, where you might have some special configuration stuff (I have some custom udev rules, like for a USB device), and/usr/local. There might also be some stuff in/opt, for proprietary programs that may install themselves there.
Bullshit. Like how we're all forced to use Priority Inbox? Oh right, we're not. It's an option.
What Gmail has forced us to use (and does indeed suck) is the new UI they rolled out about a year ago, which is ugly and space-inefficient. However, that wasn't a change to the actual functionality of Gmail, just its appearance. I'm actually surprised someone hasn't come up with some way (Greasemonkey perhaps?) of "re-skinning" Gmail to make it look like the old one. But the functionality changes they've made are pretty much all optional. I like Priority Inbox, but there's nothing forcing you to use it. You can turn it off in Settings->Inbox->Inbox type.
I can't comment on the new Gmail until I use it, but email clients have to move beyond just a flat list of mostly useless content and evolve into something a little smarter.
They already have: it's called "filters". Gmail has them, but I'm sure most other clients (web-based and otherwise) have them too these days: you set up filters to automatically sort your mail. In Gmail, they have the "priority inbox" so you can show "starred" emails separately from others, or emails with a specific tag, etc. (The stars and tags are automatically applied based on your filters.)
It's no so much the team of developers, as it is their management. Managers are always trying to find stuff to make themselves look important and necessary to an organization, even if it's really just make-work. Managers want ever-larger budgets and ever-larger teams to manage, to justify their existence and make themselves look good and justify a higher salary for themselves, so they push unnecessary projects on their bosses to achieve this. You're not going to find any corporate managers who say "OK, we're all done with this big product's development and roll-out, and we consider it done, so let's plan now on how to scale back the operation to a maintenance mode, and move extra people into other development jobs working on other products for the company." Companies do put things into maintenance mode, sure (remember IE6 when MS stopped all development of it?), but only because the top management directs this, not because the managers who are heads of those product divisions request it.
See, I don't feel like going to the trouble of managing a bunch of separate accounts; I like having everything in one place, where I can do quick searches to find it, or look by folder (tag). It takes me a lot less time to just set up a few filters than to deal with multiple accounts. And yes, I'm on a bunch of mailing lists too (selecting daily digest mode helps, but only so much). But I don't want to see those in my mail email stream among actual important emails; I want those to stand out so I can respond to them quickly if necessary. With filters, I get exactly that. I will admit, I do have multiple email accounts, but they're all redirected to my Gmail account (and automatically tagged and starred and sorted based on which account they were forwarded from).
I mean, what is so difficult about reading all my incoming emails in the order I see them...like I've done with email since I first got email on the internet in about '93.
I first got email on the internet in 1992, and reading them in the order they come in isn't realistic any more: there's simply too much spam and non-important emails. That's why GMail's "Priority Inbox" is such a boon to me: I have it set so that different emails automatically have different tags and priorities set for me, and then the inbox is automatically sorted so that important emails are shown at the top, and unimportant emails are shown farther down, in different categories ("starred", "important", "everything else"). All the mailing list junk gets put in "everything else" and if I feel like looking at it sometime, I can, otherwise it just sits there, and I can see important emails right away in the upper categories.
The problems with GMail are 1) they changed the UI aesthetically about a year ago so it's ugly and less efficient, and 2) they keep trying to push this social bullshit on everyone.
Series hybrids are a really good compromise IMO; it's too bad there aren't more of them. But maybe it's a case of something looking good in theory but not working out so well in practice. If you think about it, one big problem with them is that they need two powertrains: a gasoline engine, plus an electric motor system and batteries. That's gotta cost a fortune. It costs a lot of money to build an engine, and it doesn't cost that much more money to build a 5L V8 engine than a 1.4L 4-cylinder engine. The small engine doesn't cost a proprortional fraction of the big engine. And electric powertrains cost a lot of money too, especially for the batteries (though here, the cost really is close to proportional; twice as much range will cost almost twice as much money in batteries, but the motor cost is fixed). The 3-phase motors and motor controllers used for electric cars aren't cheap (though they're probably cheaper than gas engines). So now, make a car with both a gas engine, electric motor/controller, and batteries, and you have an enormously expensive drivetrain. It's probably no wonder GM couldn't get the cost of the Volt down more.
Personally, I'd like to see someone make a series hybrid car with a small diesel engine, and a more powerful motor than the Volt. I've seen some individuals or small groups build something like that, but no larger companies. I don't know how the economics would work out though, but again, in theory, it sounds good. Diesel generators are always much more economical to run than gas-powered generators, so using a diesel engine for electricity generation in an electric car should work out well. And it's been done in larger vehicles: it's exactly how locomotives and large construction vehicles work.
Sorry, dude, but if you're ok with that creepy shit, YOU are the weirdo
I'm NOT ok with that creepy shit. However, that makes me a weirdo, just like you.
Normal, everyday Americans are perfectly OK with that creepy shit. Since there's a lot more of them than there are people like you and me, we are, by definition, weirdos.
Then there's region locking, not owning the games you pay for, always online
Yep, those all suck, and look how people keep buying into that shit.
I see that either this console will bomb horribly, or you kids are even dumber than I gave you credit for.
I'm sorry, but it's going to be the latter. Kids these days are pretty dumb. Just look at how much they don't value privacy, as seen by how much of their lives they'll post on Facebook for everyone to see.
Yes, but SE Linux is not a distribution, it's a set of features (as the article says, a set of kernel mods and user-space tools) that distros can choose to adopt or not. It doesn't do anything such as handle how USB drives are used or other policies. What I'm proposing goes farther than that: instead of using any ol' distro, take a distro (probably using SE Linux), and add in lots of restrictions to make it more secure. Any typical distro will allow USB drives, for instance. Don't do that: make your custom distro disallow thumb drives, unless perhaps they're some sort of specially-formatted and encrypted thumb drive that's pre-approved. You could even make it so that only certain thumb drives are allowed to be used: since USB devices show up in enumeration with a particular vendorID and productID, you could make it so that only a few certain drives are allowed, such as a Patriot model X or whatever, and all others are disallowed. Then you could make it so that the drive uses a special partition type (and those without the partition type are disallowed), and uses an encrypted filesystem, with the key provided on the (internal) network from a secure source.
When you have access to the source, all kinds of things are possible. As for contractors, they can be required to use government-provided computers, and audited by the DoD.
The use of thumb drives (or other removable storage) should be severely restricted. Only get them from IT (who should scrub them) and not allowed in or out of the building except literally under guard. Same with laptops.
If the government were smart, they'd use Linux instead of Windows, and in addition, they'd make their own custom version of Linux. With that, they could enforce all kinds of things: only using specially-formatted and encrypted thumb drives, for instance. With access to the source code, you can make all kinds of crazy customizations to increase security.
and lock them up if you so much as left your desk to get coffee.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just hire someone to walk around and bring coffee and other things to the engineers at their desks? This is standard in India.
I don't know exactly why the F-35 is "massively expensive", but if a large chunk of that is labor costs, then China isn't exactly going to have a problem there. Also, if usage of rare earth elements is a significant factor in the F-35's cost, China doesn't have a problem there either. So China might be able to produce the plane very affordably for their own use.
Also, if they tweak the design to eliminate some of the compromises that have given it poor performance (namely the fact that they're trying to make 3 different versions of the same plane), they might eliminate some of the other problems with it.
The Tesla Model S costs a little over $50k IIRC, in the lowest-end configuration (which only differs from the highest-end configuration in the size of its battery pack; the low-end one has the least range). That's only a little more than typical family cars ($30-35k), and about the cost of many low-mid-end Mercedes and BMWs.
A couple of problems here: 1) diesel cars are really expensive. On a typical VW, for instance, getting the optional diesel engine adds $5k to the cost of the car. 2) diesel cars have low horsepower (we're comparing to the Tesla here), lower even than their gas-engine versions of the same car. 3) Diesel can be hard to find in some places (you can't use a normal big-truck refueling facility either, because the flow rate is too high and the nozzle is too big to fit) (of course, if you're comparing to the Tesla with its very limited number of SuperCharger stations, diesel comes out ahead).
Bicycles aren't practical or safe in many/most places around the US, even for short trips. No bike lanes, dangerous/idiot drivers who will hit you, inclement weather, etc.
Feels bad and is going to stop making the same mistake, and you come down all medieval on his arse calling him a dumbass and "not bright." Nice... Have you ever noticed what this makes you look like?
In my experience, it makes him look just like a typical Slashdot poster.
According to one of the HuffPost comments, PeTA's stated position is that animals should never be kept as pets, so it's preferable to kill them than to allow them to be kept as pets.
Well of course a few weirdos like you are going to abandon them at various points, depending on what they do. It's like that with anything. But the vast majority of their target market probably doesn't care about the always-on-internet requirement and will happily run out and buy the new Xbox and a bunch of crappy overpriced games for it. Remember, "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".
That was sort of the point of state governments in the first place.... until people like Abraham Lincoln screwed it up and turned America from a confederation into a strong centralized government. That is sort of the grinding axe on the part of the south-eastern states in America, where they were supposed to be independent republics with only a loose confederation that addressed very narrow and specific "national" needs on the "federal" level.
Sorry, but no. Go back and read your history. The US was a confederation only briefly, under the Articles of Confederation. It didn't last very long, because the central government was too weak to get the states to agree to anything. That's why they made the Constitution.
If you support the Constitution, then you support Federalism, and that means you explicitly reject the ideas of confederation. You can't have it both ways. The adoption of the Constitution completely ended the idea of "independent republics and a loose confederation".
This is why I propose breaking up the country into truly independent republics, not under any sort of confederation. They always lead to stronger centralized governments. Instead, the country should be broken up into independent republics which are themselves constitutional republics (much like the USA is now, but I think they'd be better off with Westminster Parliaments than the current system, but each republic can choose this for itself). If they want to form a free trade zone (like NAFTA or various other free-trade zones around the world), that's fine, but that should be the extent of their cooperation with each other.
Why would they do that? Only old people watch the news and weather on TV these days, and they certainly don't want to hear temperatures in Celsius (and the newscasters don't want to waste precious seconds on unnecessary information). The government has no right to force newscasters to use any particular units either.
Set a time line of 30 years to convert all manufacturing to metric tooling
Most manufacturing these days probably already uses metric.
When new production lines are rolled out they'll roll out in metric.
They already are, for the most part. You obviously don't work in American manufacturing. Even American cars are all designed in metric units and require metric tools to work on these days.
Its a barrier to scientific literacy when non-scientists aren't familiar with the units scientists use.
People whose jobs involve sitting in offices and talking all day, or other non-productive tasks, don't need scientific literacy. The people who do, already are familiar with the units scientists use. Go to a hospital and ask a nurse what units she dispenses medications and fluids in; hint: it's not fluid ounces. Go talk to a mechanic and ask him what tools he uses for working on cars; he only keeps the SAE tools for the older American cars.
Eliminating english units isn't just for scientists, it eliminates a needless conversion when bringing anything in or out of the country.
No, it doesn't. Go to the grocery store and look at any bottle or jar or container of anything there. It's already marked in dual units.
Its a pain in the ass to have metric and English tools.
You only have to do that if you're working on older American cars. Everyone's already moved to metric for cars.
Foreign companies manufacturing goods for the US have to comply with US regulations in English units
Citation needed. Manufacturing and design is all metric now as I said before.
Again, you people don't seem to understand: scientists and engineers are all already using metric (except for the defense contractors, at least in the mid-90s when I worked at one; they're a little weird, and the US Military probably likes it that other countries can't easily copy or service our equipment). And people working in technical industries are already using metric too. It's only the Joe Sixpacks who don't want to use it, and for most applications, it doesn't matter because there's zero downside to using Imperial/US units for everyday things. Suzy Homemaker does not do unit conversions when she's baking a cake or setting her thermostat. For everything where it matters, we've already converted to metric. And even many of the scientists and engineers and other people prefer US/Imperial units for certain things, like temperature. Fahrenheit is a better scale for humans than Celsius and it makes no sense to change.
What is the point of hanging onto English units as well?
Because the transition costs are enormous, and the taxpayers don't want to pay for it.
Precisely. Joe Sixpack doesn't care. So why do we need to preserve the english system for him. He DOESNT care.
He DOES care. He doesn't want to change, plus, he's a taxpayer and will bitch to his Representatives if this change is pushed on him. The change has zero benefit for him, so why should he be forced into it or be forced to pay for it, just because it's easier for scientists, many of whom also don't care because they don't have trouble converting when necessary as you seem to?
There is no defined relationship betwen a gallon and a foot the way there is between a meter and a liter.
Pro-metric arguments seem to frequently come to this: unit conversion. The problem is, who cares? Why should I care that it isn't easy to convert between a gallon and a foot? When was the last time you actually did that anyway? Yes, it's really handy in science class to convert between meters and liters (e.g., 1 cubic cm = 1 mL), and in engineering practice this may be useful too (which is why much engineering work is done in SI units these days). But why should Joe Sixpack give a rat's ass about this? He's not a scientist or engineer, and never, ever does unit conversion.
The people who care about these things are already using metric units for their work. Everyone else doesn't care about these things; they just want to use units that are customary and convenient, and no one has demonstrated how metric units are any more convenient for everyday use than Imperial ones.
Believe it or not, a roadway where the speed limit is 55mph WILL be surveyed its full distance to within an inch of accuracy for elevation, the roadway bedding, incline, and curve - there's a lot of math that goes into it, and it's all thoroughly planned out.
Really? You make it seem like highway departments actually do things competently and in the interest of safety and accuracy. I find that hard to believe, since there are also guidelines and laws that yellow lights must be a certain duration (3.0s in most places I believe), yet many municipalities have been intentionally reducing these durations at intersections that have for-profit red-light cameras at them. Since this country and the governments at all levels are so thoroughly corrupt these days, I have a hard time believing that roadways are actually surveyed that accurately and bedding and all that done correctly, rather than contractors cutting corners to save money and then paying off inspectors to look the other way.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of two places where there's custom stuff in a typical distro (which probably wouldn't be in a separate partition): /etc, where you might have some special configuration stuff (I have some custom udev rules, like for a USB device), and /usr/local. There might also be some stuff in /opt, for proprietary programs that may install themselves there.
Bullshit. Like how we're all forced to use Priority Inbox? Oh right, we're not. It's an option.
What Gmail has forced us to use (and does indeed suck) is the new UI they rolled out about a year ago, which is ugly and space-inefficient. However, that wasn't a change to the actual functionality of Gmail, just its appearance. I'm actually surprised someone hasn't come up with some way (Greasemonkey perhaps?) of "re-skinning" Gmail to make it look like the old one. But the functionality changes they've made are pretty much all optional. I like Priority Inbox, but there's nothing forcing you to use it. You can turn it off in Settings->Inbox->Inbox type.
I can't comment on the new Gmail until I use it, but email clients have to move beyond just a flat list of mostly useless content and evolve into something a little smarter.
They already have: it's called "filters". Gmail has them, but I'm sure most other clients (web-based and otherwise) have them too these days: you set up filters to automatically sort your mail. In Gmail, they have the "priority inbox" so you can show "starred" emails separately from others, or emails with a specific tag, etc. (The stars and tags are automatically applied based on your filters.)
It's no so much the team of developers, as it is their management. Managers are always trying to find stuff to make themselves look important and necessary to an organization, even if it's really just make-work. Managers want ever-larger budgets and ever-larger teams to manage, to justify their existence and make themselves look good and justify a higher salary for themselves, so they push unnecessary projects on their bosses to achieve this. You're not going to find any corporate managers who say "OK, we're all done with this big product's development and roll-out, and we consider it done, so let's plan now on how to scale back the operation to a maintenance mode, and move extra people into other development jobs working on other products for the company." Companies do put things into maintenance mode, sure (remember IE6 when MS stopped all development of it?), but only because the top management directs this, not because the managers who are heads of those product divisions request it.
See, I don't feel like going to the trouble of managing a bunch of separate accounts; I like having everything in one place, where I can do quick searches to find it, or look by folder (tag). It takes me a lot less time to just set up a few filters than to deal with multiple accounts. And yes, I'm on a bunch of mailing lists too (selecting daily digest mode helps, but only so much). But I don't want to see those in my mail email stream among actual important emails; I want those to stand out so I can respond to them quickly if necessary. With filters, I get exactly that. I will admit, I do have multiple email accounts, but they're all redirected to my Gmail account (and automatically tagged and starred and sorted based on which account they were forwarded from).
I mean, what is so difficult about reading all my incoming emails in the order I see them...like I've done with email since I first got email on the internet in about '93.
I first got email on the internet in 1992, and reading them in the order they come in isn't realistic any more: there's simply too much spam and non-important emails. That's why GMail's "Priority Inbox" is such a boon to me: I have it set so that different emails automatically have different tags and priorities set for me, and then the inbox is automatically sorted so that important emails are shown at the top, and unimportant emails are shown farther down, in different categories ("starred", "important", "everything else"). All the mailing list junk gets put in "everything else" and if I feel like looking at it sometime, I can, otherwise it just sits there, and I can see important emails right away in the upper categories.
The problems with GMail are 1) they changed the UI aesthetically about a year ago so it's ugly and less efficient, and 2) they keep trying to push this social bullshit on everyone.
I never said the PeTA people were sane or rational.
Series hybrids are a really good compromise IMO; it's too bad there aren't more of them. But maybe it's a case of something looking good in theory but not working out so well in practice. If you think about it, one big problem with them is that they need two powertrains: a gasoline engine, plus an electric motor system and batteries. That's gotta cost a fortune. It costs a lot of money to build an engine, and it doesn't cost that much more money to build a 5L V8 engine than a 1.4L 4-cylinder engine. The small engine doesn't cost a proprortional fraction of the big engine. And electric powertrains cost a lot of money too, especially for the batteries (though here, the cost really is close to proportional; twice as much range will cost almost twice as much money in batteries, but the motor cost is fixed). The 3-phase motors and motor controllers used for electric cars aren't cheap (though they're probably cheaper than gas engines). So now, make a car with both a gas engine, electric motor/controller, and batteries, and you have an enormously expensive drivetrain. It's probably no wonder GM couldn't get the cost of the Volt down more.
Personally, I'd like to see someone make a series hybrid car with a small diesel engine, and a more powerful motor than the Volt. I've seen some individuals or small groups build something like that, but no larger companies. I don't know how the economics would work out though, but again, in theory, it sounds good. Diesel generators are always much more economical to run than gas-powered generators, so using a diesel engine for electricity generation in an electric car should work out well. And it's been done in larger vehicles: it's exactly how locomotives and large construction vehicles work.
Sorry, dude, but if you're ok with that creepy shit, YOU are the weirdo
I'm NOT ok with that creepy shit. However, that makes me a weirdo, just like you.
Normal, everyday Americans are perfectly OK with that creepy shit. Since there's a lot more of them than there are people like you and me, we are, by definition, weirdos.
Then there's region locking, not owning the games you pay for, always online
Yep, those all suck, and look how people keep buying into that shit.
I see that either this console will bomb horribly, or you kids are even dumber than I gave you credit for.
I'm sorry, but it's going to be the latter. Kids these days are pretty dumb. Just look at how much they don't value privacy, as seen by how much of their lives they'll post on Facebook for everyone to see.
Yes, but SE Linux is not a distribution, it's a set of features (as the article says, a set of kernel mods and user-space tools) that distros can choose to adopt or not. It doesn't do anything such as handle how USB drives are used or other policies. What I'm proposing goes farther than that: instead of using any ol' distro, take a distro (probably using SE Linux), and add in lots of restrictions to make it more secure. Any typical distro will allow USB drives, for instance. Don't do that: make your custom distro disallow thumb drives, unless perhaps they're some sort of specially-formatted and encrypted thumb drive that's pre-approved. You could even make it so that only certain thumb drives are allowed to be used: since USB devices show up in enumeration with a particular vendorID and productID, you could make it so that only a few certain drives are allowed, such as a Patriot model X or whatever, and all others are disallowed. Then you could make it so that the drive uses a special partition type (and those without the partition type are disallowed), and uses an encrypted filesystem, with the key provided on the (internal) network from a secure source.
When you have access to the source, all kinds of things are possible. As for contractors, they can be required to use government-provided computers, and audited by the DoD.
The use of thumb drives (or other removable storage) should be severely restricted. Only get them from IT (who should scrub them) and not allowed in or out of the building except literally under guard. Same with laptops.
If the government were smart, they'd use Linux instead of Windows, and in addition, they'd make their own custom version of Linux. With that, they could enforce all kinds of things: only using specially-formatted and encrypted thumb drives, for instance. With access to the source code, you can make all kinds of crazy customizations to increase security.
and lock them up if you so much as left your desk to get coffee.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just hire someone to walk around and bring coffee and other things to the engineers at their desks? This is standard in India.
I don't know exactly why the F-35 is "massively expensive", but if a large chunk of that is labor costs, then China isn't exactly going to have a problem there. Also, if usage of rare earth elements is a significant factor in the F-35's cost, China doesn't have a problem there either. So China might be able to produce the plane very affordably for their own use.
Also, if they tweak the design to eliminate some of the compromises that have given it poor performance (namely the fact that they're trying to make 3 different versions of the same plane), they might eliminate some of the other problems with it.
The Tesla Model S costs a little over $50k IIRC, in the lowest-end configuration (which only differs from the highest-end configuration in the size of its battery pack; the low-end one has the least range). That's only a little more than typical family cars ($30-35k), and about the cost of many low-mid-end Mercedes and BMWs.
A couple of problems here: 1) diesel cars are really expensive. On a typical VW, for instance, getting the optional diesel engine adds $5k to the cost of the car. 2) diesel cars have low horsepower (we're comparing to the Tesla here), lower even than their gas-engine versions of the same car. 3) Diesel can be hard to find in some places (you can't use a normal big-truck refueling facility either, because the flow rate is too high and the nozzle is too big to fit) (of course, if you're comparing to the Tesla with its very limited number of SuperCharger stations, diesel comes out ahead).
Bicycles aren't practical or safe in many/most places around the US, even for short trips. No bike lanes, dangerous/idiot drivers who will hit you, inclement weather, etc.
Feels bad and is going to stop making the same mistake, and you come down all medieval on his arse calling him a dumbass and "not bright." Nice... Have you ever noticed what this makes you look like?
In my experience, it makes him look just like a typical Slashdot poster.
According to one of the HuffPost comments, PeTA's stated position is that animals should never be kept as pets, so it's preferable to kill them than to allow them to be kept as pets.
(the state where the shelter in question is located) does not.
Facility, not shelter. Shelters don't immediately murder animals given to it for the purpose of adoption.
Well of course a few weirdos like you are going to abandon them at various points, depending on what they do. It's like that with anything. But the vast majority of their target market probably doesn't care about the always-on-internet requirement and will happily run out and buy the new Xbox and a bunch of crappy overpriced games for it. Remember, "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".
That was sort of the point of state governments in the first place.... until people like Abraham Lincoln screwed it up and turned America from a confederation into a strong centralized government. That is sort of the grinding axe on the part of the south-eastern states in America, where they were supposed to be independent republics with only a loose confederation that addressed very narrow and specific "national" needs on the "federal" level.
Sorry, but no. Go back and read your history. The US was a confederation only briefly, under the Articles of Confederation. It didn't last very long, because the central government was too weak to get the states to agree to anything. That's why they made the Constitution.
If you support the Constitution, then you support Federalism, and that means you explicitly reject the ideas of confederation. You can't have it both ways. The adoption of the Constitution completely ended the idea of "independent republics and a loose confederation".
This is why I propose breaking up the country into truly independent republics, not under any sort of confederation. They always lead to stronger centralized governments. Instead, the country should be broken up into independent republics which are themselves constitutional republics (much like the USA is now, but I think they'd be better off with Westminster Parliaments than the current system, but each republic can choose this for itself). If they want to form a free trade zone (like NAFTA or various other free-trade zones around the world), that's fine, but that should be the extent of their cooperation with each other.
News & weather starts dual reporting units.
Why would they do that? Only old people watch the news and weather on TV these days, and they certainly don't want to hear temperatures in Celsius (and the newscasters don't want to waste precious seconds on unnecessary information). The government has no right to force newscasters to use any particular units either.
Set a time line of 30 years to convert all manufacturing to metric tooling
Most manufacturing these days probably already uses metric.
When new production lines are rolled out they'll roll out in metric.
They already are, for the most part. You obviously don't work in American manufacturing. Even American cars are all designed in metric units and require metric tools to work on these days.
Its a barrier to scientific literacy when non-scientists aren't familiar with the units scientists use.
People whose jobs involve sitting in offices and talking all day, or other non-productive tasks, don't need scientific literacy. The people who do, already are familiar with the units scientists use. Go to a hospital and ask a nurse what units she dispenses medications and fluids in; hint: it's not fluid ounces. Go talk to a mechanic and ask him what tools he uses for working on cars; he only keeps the SAE tools for the older American cars.
Eliminating english units isn't just for scientists, it eliminates a needless conversion when bringing anything in or out of the country.
No, it doesn't. Go to the grocery store and look at any bottle or jar or container of anything there. It's already marked in dual units.
Its a pain in the ass to have metric and English tools.
You only have to do that if you're working on older American cars. Everyone's already moved to metric for cars.
Foreign companies manufacturing goods for the US have to comply with US regulations in English units
Citation needed. Manufacturing and design is all metric now as I said before.
Again, you people don't seem to understand: scientists and engineers are all already using metric (except for the defense contractors, at least in the mid-90s when I worked at one; they're a little weird, and the US Military probably likes it that other countries can't easily copy or service our equipment). And people working in technical industries are already using metric too. It's only the Joe Sixpacks who don't want to use it, and for most applications, it doesn't matter because there's zero downside to using Imperial/US units for everyday things. Suzy Homemaker does not do unit conversions when she's baking a cake or setting her thermostat. For everything where it matters, we've already converted to metric. And even many of the scientists and engineers and other people prefer US/Imperial units for certain things, like temperature. Fahrenheit is a better scale for humans than Celsius and it makes no sense to change.
What is the point of hanging onto English units as well?
Because the transition costs are enormous, and the taxpayers don't want to pay for it.
Precisely. Joe Sixpack doesn't care. So why do we need to preserve the english system for him. He DOESNT care.
He DOES care. He doesn't want to change, plus, he's a taxpayer and will bitch to his Representatives if this change is pushed on him. The change has zero benefit for him, so why should he be forced into it or be forced to pay for it, just because it's easier for scientists, many of whom also don't care because they don't have trouble converting when necessary as you seem to?
There is no defined relationship betwen a gallon and a foot the way there is between a meter and a liter.
Pro-metric arguments seem to frequently come to this: unit conversion. The problem is, who cares? Why should I care that it isn't easy to convert between a gallon and a foot? When was the last time you actually did that anyway? Yes, it's really handy in science class to convert between meters and liters (e.g., 1 cubic cm = 1 mL), and in engineering practice this may be useful too (which is why much engineering work is done in SI units these days). But why should Joe Sixpack give a rat's ass about this? He's not a scientist or engineer, and never, ever does unit conversion.
The people who care about these things are already using metric units for their work. Everyone else doesn't care about these things; they just want to use units that are customary and convenient, and no one has demonstrated how metric units are any more convenient for everyday use than Imperial ones.
All our product packages these days do have both systems marked on them ("1lb/454g") here in the US. I'm pretty sure it's required by law.
How do Americans react? They don't care. Most of them look at the Imperial version and ignore the metric one.
Believe it or not, a roadway where the speed limit is 55mph WILL be surveyed its full distance to within an inch of accuracy for elevation, the roadway bedding, incline, and curve - there's a lot of math that goes into it, and it's all thoroughly planned out.
Really? You make it seem like highway departments actually do things competently and in the interest of safety and accuracy. I find that hard to believe, since there are also guidelines and laws that yellow lights must be a certain duration (3.0s in most places I believe), yet many municipalities have been intentionally reducing these durations at intersections that have for-profit red-light cameras at them. Since this country and the governments at all levels are so thoroughly corrupt these days, I have a hard time believing that roadways are actually surveyed that accurately and bedding and all that done correctly, rather than contractors cutting corners to save money and then paying off inspectors to look the other way.