Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
You're right that price is king, but Macs are cheaper than x86 PC's. Don't just do a CompUSA comparison of the hardware sticker-price, although Apple's notebooks, at least, will win that easily, and the desktops would surprise you if you added the comparable features to a PC.
Not true at all.
Sure, Apple has a ludicrous comparison of the low-end Titanium to a Sony Vaio on its website, which ignores that the Vaio is designed to sacrifice features and money to save weight. Compare instead to a customized Dell Inspiron 5000e, where you get a feature-for-feature equivalent machine for less money plus a free printer or scanner.
TCO, of course, is a different matter. But Mac purchase prices are higher than Dell purchase prices.
No matter what happens to the specialized Linux vendors, it is in the long-term interest of hardware vendors that currently support their own Unicies to reduce their development costs. Linux and the GPL allows these hardware vendors to implicitly pool their development efforts with each other and with a volunteer programming community, reducing costs.
A Martian agricultural colony could support both lunar and gas giant mining of Helium-3 with food for a lower marginal cost than any other option (except maybe O'Neil colonies). And helium-3 fusion is power without radioactive waste, without greehouse gasses and/or particulate matter, without the land use issues of Earth-based solar and wind and hydroelectric...
Sure, such a colony would first be closed greehouses and habitats. But if their role in the energy trade made them wealthy enough, they'd probably themselves start work on terraforming Mars.
Except that corporations are creatures of national laws. And the Outer Space Treaty treats all launches from the territory of any party to the treaty as if they were launched by the party.
And no company is sufficiently wealthy or powerful enough to be autonomous from its shareholders and its creditors and the U.S. government and the EU to pull it off, even if you had an AOL-Boeing-Exxon-GE-GM-Microsoft-Mobil-Nissan-Time Warner running around.
It wasn't a secret the military tried to keep; they told you straight out that the civilian channel had deliberate inaccuracies in it to degrade its military value for potential hostile powers.
Hardened military targets (bunkers) and mobile armored targets (tanks) are very hard to destroy with accuracies of 100 meters; they are very easy to destroy with accuracies in the single meter range. And hundred-meter accuracies were good enough for most civilian navigation, whether by hikers, boaters, or pilots.
And Clinton didn't lift the restrictions out of the goodness of his heart, either. It's just that techniques that compared the GPS-reported and known actual coordinates of landmarks allowed for correction of civilian data to military-level accuracy*. So separate levels of access were no longer benefiting national security.
*Ironically, the Coast Guard pioneered these techinques, since they weren't given access to the military data.
Tribes may have taken slaves, but not on the scale, or in the form, that white slave traders called for.
The large-scale slave trade was centuries old before the first black Africans were imported to the Americas. The Arab world imported millions across the Sahara; in no year did the number of blacks transported across the Atlantic exceed the number shipped across the Sahara.
And they died in far greater numbers in the Arab world than in the Americas; that's the reason why there are so many people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere and so few in the Arab countries.
The transatlantic trade had more men than the trans-Saharan did, which encouraged warring tribes to enslave enemy warriors and sell them. Previously, the warriors were killed them out-of-hand, captured boys were castrated, and the eunuchs and women were shipped across the Sahara.
And it was the European powers that ended not only the transatlantic slave trade, but the trans-Saharan trade.
Was the transatlantic trade evil? Yes. Was it worse than what was already happening? No.
Fine. You can use Protozilla to run Java apps instead of CGIs, too. Protozilla is a way to execute arbitrary code from your web browser using URIs, provided that you have authorized a URI handler to execute that code.
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about Protozilla's first alpha release. "Protozilla enables Mozilla to execute any CGI program on the local disk directly, without passing it through an HTTP server. It also allows stateless interprocess communication, the use of external programs as protocol handlers (telnet, ping, etc.), and the use of local-only pseudo-URLs (similar to about:)." This is a project by independent developers unconnected to the Mozilla browser effort that adds a lot of neat functionality.
Oh, please. The ethical problem there isn't the cloning, it's harvesting a living human being for organs, which is the same whther the harvestee is a clone, a close match chosen by genetic screening from the babies born in a third world city, or a guy mugged on the street.
Linus hasn't spent any effort requiring the use of the ®, and spent any effort controlling what is called Linux.
So, first, it's unlikely that Linus would try to stop the consortium from calling its project Linux. Second, these very wealthy corporations could go to court and have Linux be declared a generic term very easily, because of Linus's non-enforcement so far.
And third, such a consortium of wealthy corporations has the $$$ to advertise a new name, anyway.
Sure. Some Earth prokaryotes use (various) organic molecules or hydrogen sulfide as a basis for photosynthesis insstead of water. Other organisms, convert organic molecules to methane, break down nitrogenous molecules to nitrous oxide, etc.
As theoretical models, sulfuric acid chemistry could possibly be used by organism based on silicone (SiO) chains instead of carbon chains.
And a reaction that converts CO2 into stored CO, and releases energy with a 2 CO = C + CO2 reaction is also a theoretical possibility -- a cycle that would happen to release free oxygen, like the article mentions was detected on Venus, which has an atmosphere of mostly CO2...
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 2
The nine recognized planets, the Moon, Charon, and a wide variety of planetessimals are in orbits that can be described as concave to the Sun or convex in shape, depending on perspective -- the point being that the angular velocity of the objects wrt the Sun never changes sign.
And of that set of objects, ten are spherical due to their own gravity. So, IMVAO, the Moon should be counted as a tenth planet.
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
·
· Score: 2
1) Yes, it's a bit fuzzy where spheres become non-spheres.
2) Every object in the solar system does orbit the Sun, either on its own or as a consequence of its orbit around another body. Given that every one of those orbits are peturbed by other objects in the solar system, how do we distinguish which are in orbit around the Sun and which are in orbit around another body in the solar system?
You seem to suggest looking at the center of gravity of two objects in roughly the same solar orbit. In that case, Pluto is certainly not a planet, since the barycenter (center of gravity) of Pluto-Charon is outside of Pluto. More importantly, it leaves the degree of difference between two solar orbits for such classification undefined -- without such a definition, one could argue that there are no planets, since the center of gravity of (say) Neptune and Jupiter is outside of both bodies.
I suggest instead that we look at the nature of each object's orbit around the Sun. Of the spherical bodies in the solar system, ten have orbits that are always concave to the Sun (always convex in terms of geometric shape) -- the nine recognized planets and the Moon. Charon and many asteroids, comets, and other planetessimals also have such an orbit, but such objects are obviously irregularly-shaped.
The point is that the Moon is not clearly in orbit around the Earth -- it has a mutually perturbing joint orbit with the Earth around the Sun, instead.
Well, based on bones, we emerged 120,000 ya, but there may have been some soft tissue differences. The Great Leap Forward, marking the transition from bright-chimp semi-improvised tools to crafted, specialized tools didn't happen until 40,000 ya.
So I'd personally call humanity a 40,000-year-old species, on the basis that our behavior only became truly distinct in nature from that of the chimpanzee.
We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
·
· Score: 2
I really think that the basic problem is the lack of a simple definition of planet. I'd suggest that the definition have two components, and two alone:
1) Sufficient mass/gravity to form itself into a sphere (centrifugal force and tidal effects excepted).
2) An entirely concave orbit around a star.
Now, this would add one new planet to the current nine -- Earth's Moon. Other than those ten objects and the Sun, all are either irregular in shape and/or in planetary orbits that cause their solar orbit to be convex.
I'd really love to see your average armored division pacify guerillas.
Open battle is a good way for a resistance movement to get wiped out, true. There are other ways to fight -- just ask the Chechens, the Muhjadeen, the Viet Cong, the Maquis...
There's no way for each class to be truly self-supporting unless each class has to pay for the entire USPS infrastructure -- in which case the postal service would be making a massive profit. The economies of scale in sending all the classes through the same system are not an explicit subsidy, but they are an implicit one.
Sweeden is not socialist, despite the high taxes, extensive social welfare programs, and significant regulation. It is a free-market capitalist state with capital markets, contracts, profits, competition, and private ownership. Its system is fundamentally similar to that of Germany, Japan, or the U.S., despite a larger public sector.
Actually, Cringley acknowledged that you couldn't replace current high-end silicon with this stuff overnight. That was the whole damn point of the bow-gun analogy he gave.
Obviously, any technology with lower performance and lower price will start in the lower-end segment (wow!). In which segment you make money, which allows for R&D on reducing print size, which allows you to move up the chain, which makes more money, which allows more R&D, which allows you to move up the chain...
If this is fundamentally cheaper than silicon chips, then it'll probably first eat the markets in which chips in the Z80/6520 are still being sold (2-12 MHz, 5k-6k transistors), then the 8088/8086 processors (5-12 MHz, 30k transistors), then the 68000-class (68k transistors).
California deregualted wholesaling but not retailing. When natural gas went up in price, the production cost went up, so the deregulated, non-monopoly wholesalers raised their prices to cover the cost of the natural gas. (Most power stations built in the U.S. in the last five years were natural gas turbines).
However, the retail price is fixed by California regulators. As a result, the retail distribution monopoly is not allowed to increase its prices to account for the price increase in the natural gas.
And it isn't "deregulation"'s fault, despite all the whining. If generation were still regulated, it doesn't change the fact that wholesale natural gas went up in price. PG&E would merely have to pay high prices for natural gas and sell the generated electricity at a loss because of California's price controls.
Finally, free-market economists warned about this when California was "deregulating". A proper deregulation would have only fixed PG&E's distribution charge (the area where it still had a monopoly), while the power itself would be sold in proportion to the competitive wholesale price.
Socialism cannot work, because it lacks an information feedback mechnism. Since humans fallible and are not omniscient, it means that resources not only will not, but cannot be assigned to each part of the economy according to its need.
The profit mechanism, while imperfect, is the best such feedback mechanism ever developed to correct the inevitable miscalculations, producing a constant but lower level of wastage than either central planning or decentralized socialism can achieve.
If you have an allocation and information mechanism that works better and can be used in a socialist system, I suggest you send it to the surviving socialist government of your choice immediately. In twenty years that country's people will be the wealthiest on Earth, as its economy will be the most efficient on Earth.
When I click once on a file, I select it. A second time, I can rename it. Do it fast and I will run it.
Yes, but what does that have to do with having a right button available?
Look, on a modern automatic-transmission car, only park, reverse, and (over)drive are used by 90% of the people. The other options are still there, and we don't hear people whining about them. There are a dozen buttons on my blender, and I don't understand what eight of them do, but I don't hear anybody claiming that blenders are overly complicated devices. Only a tiny subsset of the vocabulary of most languages is used by the vast majority of the people, but nobody's calling on the Academie Francaise to eliminate 90% of the French vocabulary.
The problem of HCI is that people expect to use electronic devices without spending time learning to operate it, when they wouldn't dream of making such demands of mechanical devices. It's ludicrous, and should be viewed as such.
Now, yes, my various blender buttons are consistent in how they act, and that's an appropriate goal of HCI -- to provide consistency. But consistency is not an antonym of complexity, and HCI that operates on that assumption is inherently flawed.
A) I might as well abuse my +1 bonus. My original account had 98 karma as of the freeze, and this one has almost reached the cap of 50.
B) The U.S. Customary (which is not the same as British Imperial) is based on "multiples" just as much as metric. It is merely not based on a single consistent exponent base.
For example, liquid measurement in the U.S. Customary system is based on power of two. 1024 drams = 256 tablespoons = 128 fluid ounces = 32 gills = 16 cups = 8 pints = 4 quarts = 1 gallon, making conversion a matter of bit shifts on a computer.
C) I didn't claim it was as bad as the British Imperial or U.S. Customary system for daily use, merely that the theoretical underpinnings of the metric system were no more logical. Kinda like saying MacOS 9 and Windows Me are both structurally lousy operating systems, even though MacOS 9 is easier to use.
D) Er, how do you know who my countrymen are? That I've used the U.S. Customary system in this post is better evidence than my language, but it mostly makes it likely I've lived in the U.S. for a period of time (whether recently or in the past), and unlikely that I come from a country that used the British Imperial system (otherwise my examples would have drawn on that tradition). Perhaps I'm Filipino instead; the Phillipines did have fifty years of U.S. rule, with U.S. Customary as the measurement system of its rulers.
E) I didn't say it would be bad for the U.S. to change to the Metric system. I personally think it would be much nicer for daily use.
However, I also proposed in my post a new measurement system that, coupled with a new base-12 number system, would be superior to Metric in terms of both rationality and usability. It would even expand the possibilities of counting on your fingers -- each hand has 12 joints on its four fingers, and a thumb to track place value, allowing the pair to record numbers up to 144 (100 in dozenal/base 12 notation).
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that price is king, but Macs are cheaper than x86 PC's. Don't just do a CompUSA comparison of the hardware sticker-price, although Apple's notebooks, at least, will win that easily, and the desktops would surprise you if you added the comparable features to a PC.
Not true at all.
Sure, Apple has a ludicrous comparison of the low-end Titanium to a Sony Vaio on its website, which ignores that the Vaio is designed to sacrifice features and money to save weight. Compare instead to a customized Dell Inspiron 5000e, where you get a feature-for-feature equivalent machine for less money plus a free printer or scanner.
TCO, of course, is a different matter. But Mac purchase prices are higher than Dell purchase prices.
IBM, Compaq, HP, SGI, Sun, etc.
No matter what happens to the specialized Linux vendors, it is in the long-term interest of hardware vendors that currently support their own Unicies to reduce their development costs. Linux and the GPL allows these hardware vendors to implicitly pool their development efforts with each other and with a volunteer programming community, reducing costs.
Don't click here if you use Win9x.
Er, why not? I clicked there, and nothing happened.
OTOH, I am using Mozilla 0.7. Perhaps this is an IE bug?
Helium-3 and gravity.
A Martian agricultural colony could support both lunar and gas giant mining of Helium-3 with food for a lower marginal cost than any other option (except maybe O'Neil colonies). And helium-3 fusion is power without radioactive waste, without greehouse gasses and/or particulate matter, without the land use issues of Earth-based solar and wind and hydroelectric...
Sure, such a colony would first be closed greehouses and habitats. But if their role in the energy trade made them wealthy enough, they'd probably themselves start work on terraforming Mars.
Except that corporations are creatures of national laws. And the Outer Space Treaty treats all launches from the territory of any party to the treaty as if they were launched by the party.
e Warner running around.
And no company is sufficiently wealthy or powerful enough to be autonomous from its shareholders and its creditors and the U.S. government and the EU to pull it off, even if you had an AOL-Boeing-Exxon-GE-GM-Microsoft-Mobil-Nissan-Tim
Why don't you sell your computer and donate the cash (or at least your savings on electricity) to research efforts to cure cancer or AIDS?
Your computer expands your personal capabilities; a Mars colony will expand humanity's capabilities.
"sort of shifty"?
It wasn't a secret the military tried to keep; they told you straight out that the civilian channel had deliberate inaccuracies in it to degrade its military value for potential hostile powers.
Hardened military targets (bunkers) and mobile armored targets (tanks) are very hard to destroy with accuracies of 100 meters; they are very easy to destroy with accuracies in the single meter range. And hundred-meter accuracies were good enough for most civilian navigation, whether by hikers, boaters, or pilots.
And Clinton didn't lift the restrictions out of the goodness of his heart, either. It's just that techniques that compared the GPS-reported and known actual coordinates of landmarks allowed for correction of civilian data to military-level accuracy*. So separate levels of access were no longer benefiting national security.
*Ironically, the Coast Guard pioneered these techinques, since they weren't given access to the military data.
Tribes may have taken slaves, but not on the scale, or in the form, that white slave traders called for.
The large-scale slave trade was centuries old before the first black Africans were imported to the Americas. The Arab world imported millions across the Sahara; in no year did the number of blacks transported across the Atlantic exceed the number shipped across the Sahara.
And they died in far greater numbers in the Arab world than in the Americas; that's the reason why there are so many people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere and so few in the Arab countries.
The transatlantic trade had more men than the trans-Saharan did, which encouraged warring tribes to enslave enemy warriors and sell them. Previously, the warriors were killed them out-of-hand, captured boys were castrated, and the eunuchs and women were shipped across the Sahara.
And it was the European powers that ended not only the transatlantic slave trade, but the trans-Saharan trade.
Was the transatlantic trade evil? Yes. Was it worse than what was already happening? No.
Fine. You can use Protozilla to run Java apps instead of CGIs, too. Protozilla is a way to execute arbitrary code from your web browser using URIs, provided that you have authorized a URI handler to execute that code.
Mozdev.org Developing Protzilla
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about Protozilla's first alpha release. "Protozilla enables Mozilla to execute any CGI program on the local disk directly, without passing it through an HTTP server. It also allows stateless interprocess communication, the use of external programs as protocol handlers (telnet, ping, etc.), and the use of local-only pseudo-URLs (similar to about:)." This is a project by independent developers unconnected to the Mozilla browser effort that adds a lot of neat functionality.
Oh, please. The ethical problem there isn't the cloning, it's harvesting a living human being for organs, which is the same whther the harvestee is a clone, a close match chosen by genetic screening from the babies born in a third world city, or a guy mugged on the street.
Linus hasn't spent any effort requiring the use of the ®, and spent any effort controlling what is called Linux.
So, first, it's unlikely that Linus would try to stop the consortium from calling its project Linux. Second, these very wealthy corporations could go to court and have Linux be declared a generic term very easily, because of Linus's non-enforcement so far.
And third, such a consortium of wealthy corporations has the $$$ to advertise a new name, anyway.
Sure. Some Earth prokaryotes use (various) organic molecules or hydrogen sulfide as a basis for photosynthesis insstead of water. Other organisms, convert organic molecules to methane, break down nitrogenous molecules to nitrous oxide, etc.
As theoretical models, sulfuric acid chemistry could possibly be used by organism based on silicone (SiO) chains instead of carbon chains.
And a reaction that converts CO2 into stored CO, and releases energy with a 2 CO = C + CO2 reaction is also a theoretical possibility -- a cycle that would happen to release free oxygen, like the article mentions was detected on Venus, which has an atmosphere of mostly CO2...
The nine recognized planets, the Moon, Charon, and a wide variety of planetessimals are in orbits that can be described as concave to the Sun or convex in shape, depending on perspective -- the point being that the angular velocity of the objects wrt the Sun never changes sign.
And of that set of objects, ten are spherical due to their own gravity. So, IMVAO, the Moon should be counted as a tenth planet.
1) Yes, it's a bit fuzzy where spheres become non-spheres.
2) Every object in the solar system does orbit the Sun, either on its own or as a consequence of its orbit around another body. Given that every one of those orbits are peturbed by other objects in the solar system, how do we distinguish which are in orbit around the Sun and which are in orbit around another body in the solar system?
You seem to suggest looking at the center of gravity of two objects in roughly the same solar orbit. In that case, Pluto is certainly not a planet, since the barycenter (center of gravity) of Pluto-Charon is outside of Pluto. More importantly, it leaves the degree of difference between two solar orbits for such classification undefined -- without such a definition, one could argue that there are no planets, since the center of gravity of (say) Neptune and Jupiter is outside of both bodies.
I suggest instead that we look at the nature of each object's orbit around the Sun. Of the spherical bodies in the solar system, ten have orbits that are always concave to the Sun (always convex in terms of geometric shape) -- the nine recognized planets and the Moon. Charon and many asteroids, comets, and other planetessimals also have such an orbit, but such objects are obviously irregularly-shaped.
The point is that the Moon is not clearly in orbit around the Earth -- it has a mutually perturbing joint orbit with the Earth around the Sun, instead.
Well, based on bones, we emerged 120,000 ya, but there may have been some soft tissue differences. The Great Leap Forward, marking the transition from bright-chimp semi-improvised tools to crafted, specialized tools didn't happen until 40,000 ya.
So I'd personally call humanity a 40,000-year-old species, on the basis that our behavior only became truly distinct in nature from that of the chimpanzee.
I really think that the basic problem is the lack of a simple definition of planet. I'd suggest that the definition have two components, and two alone:
1) Sufficient mass/gravity to form itself into a sphere (centrifugal force and tidal effects excepted).
2) An entirely concave orbit around a star.
Now, this would add one new planet to the current nine -- Earth's Moon. Other than those ten objects and the Sun, all are either irregular in shape and/or in planetary orbits that cause their solar orbit to be convex.
I'd really love to see your average armored division pacify guerillas.
Open battle is a good way for a resistance movement to get wiped out, true. There are other ways to fight -- just ask the Chechens, the Muhjadeen, the Viet Cong, the Maquis...
There's no way for each class to be truly self-supporting unless each class has to pay for the entire USPS infrastructure -- in which case the postal service would be making a massive profit. The economies of scale in sending all the classes through the same system are not an explicit subsidy, but they are an implicit one.
Sweeden is not socialist, despite the high taxes, extensive social welfare programs, and significant regulation. It is a free-market capitalist state with capital markets, contracts, profits, competition, and private ownership. Its system is fundamentally similar to that of Germany, Japan, or the U.S., despite a larger public sector.
Actually, Cringley acknowledged that you couldn't replace current high-end silicon with this stuff overnight. That was the whole damn point of the bow-gun analogy he gave.
Obviously, any technology with lower performance and lower price will start in the lower-end segment (wow!). In which segment you make money, which allows for R&D on reducing print size, which allows you to move up the chain, which makes more money, which allows more R&D, which allows you to move up the chain...
If this is fundamentally cheaper than silicon chips, then it'll probably first eat the markets in which chips in the Z80/6520 are still being sold (2-12 MHz, 5k-6k transistors), then the 8088/8086 processors (5-12 MHz, 30k transistors), then the 68000-class (68k transistors).
Actually, you have it wrong.
California deregualted wholesaling but not retailing. When natural gas went up in price, the production cost went up, so the deregulated, non-monopoly wholesalers raised their prices to cover the cost of the natural gas. (Most power stations built in the U.S. in the last five years were natural gas turbines).
However, the retail price is fixed by California regulators. As a result, the retail distribution monopoly is not allowed to increase its prices to account for the price increase in the natural gas.
And it isn't "deregulation"'s fault, despite all the whining. If generation were still regulated, it doesn't change the fact that wholesale natural gas went up in price. PG&E would merely have to pay high prices for natural gas and sell the generated electricity at a loss because of California's price controls.
Finally, free-market economists warned about this when California was "deregulating". A proper deregulation would have only fixed PG&E's distribution charge (the area where it still had a monopoly), while the power itself would be sold in proportion to the competitive wholesale price.
Socialism cannot work, because it lacks an information feedback mechnism. Since humans fallible and are not omniscient, it means that resources not only will not, but cannot be assigned to each part of the economy according to its need.
The profit mechanism, while imperfect, is the best such feedback mechanism ever developed to correct the inevitable miscalculations, producing a constant but lower level of wastage than either central planning or decentralized socialism can achieve.
If you have an allocation and information mechanism that works better and can be used in a socialist system, I suggest you send it to the surviving socialist government of your choice immediately. In twenty years that country's people will be the wealthiest on Earth, as its economy will be the most efficient on Earth.
When I click once on a file, I select it. A second time, I can rename it. Do it fast and I will run it.
Yes, but what does that have to do with having a right button available?
Look, on a modern automatic-transmission car, only park, reverse, and (over)drive are used by 90% of the people. The other options are still there, and we don't hear people whining about them. There are a dozen buttons on my blender, and I don't understand what eight of them do, but I don't hear anybody claiming that blenders are overly complicated devices. Only a tiny subsset of the vocabulary of most languages is used by the vast majority of the people, but nobody's calling on the Academie Francaise to eliminate 90% of the French vocabulary.
The problem of HCI is that people expect to use electronic devices without spending time learning to operate it, when they wouldn't dream of making such demands of mechanical devices. It's ludicrous, and should be viewed as such.
Now, yes, my various blender buttons are consistent in how they act, and that's an appropriate goal of HCI -- to provide consistency. But consistency is not an antonym of complexity, and HCI that operates on that assumption is inherently flawed.
A) I might as well abuse my +1 bonus. My original account had 98 karma as of the freeze, and this one has almost reached the cap of 50.
B) The U.S. Customary (which is not the same as British Imperial) is based on "multiples" just as much as metric. It is merely not based on a single consistent exponent base.
For example, liquid measurement in the U.S. Customary system is based on power of two. 1024 drams = 256 tablespoons = 128 fluid ounces = 32 gills = 16 cups = 8 pints = 4 quarts = 1 gallon, making conversion a matter of bit shifts on a computer.
C) I didn't claim it was as bad as the British Imperial or U.S. Customary system for daily use, merely that the theoretical underpinnings of the metric system were no more logical. Kinda like saying MacOS 9 and Windows Me are both structurally lousy operating systems, even though MacOS 9 is easier to use.
D) Er, how do you know who my countrymen are? That I've used the U.S. Customary system in this post is better evidence than my language, but it mostly makes it likely I've lived in the U.S. for a period of time (whether recently or in the past), and unlikely that I come from a country that used the British Imperial system (otherwise my examples would have drawn on that tradition). Perhaps I'm Filipino instead; the Phillipines did have fifty years of U.S. rule, with U.S. Customary as the measurement system of its rulers.
E) I didn't say it would be bad for the U.S. to change to the Metric system. I personally think it would be much nicer for daily use.
However, I also proposed in my post a new measurement system that, coupled with a new base-12 number system, would be superior to Metric in terms of both rationality and usability. It would even expand the possibilities of counting on your fingers -- each hand has 12 joints on its four fingers, and a thumb to track place value, allowing the pair to record numbers up to 144 (100 in dozenal/base 12 notation).