I agree, you could even go so far as let the government provide the money to everyone, and then rent out non-profit minimalist housing operated just to cover projected lifetime capital and maintenance expenses. Same result, less bureaucratic overhead. Be really easy to auto-debit rent from your incoming dividend payment - especially if you had a government-operated non-profit bank account designed specifically to handle everyone's dividend payments with minimal overhead. If the free market can do better, GREAT! Less demand for government housing and its bureaucratic inefficiencies, but there's always a backup option to keep the free market honest.
If it costs $X for the government to build and maintain a Hovel Tower apartment at break-even expense, then a private operator can probably do at least as well, and will have no reason to charge several hundred more unless they're offering genuine added value in terms of the quality of the environment, except for pure rent-seeking profiteering - and there's no reason we as a society should encourage such usury behavior. In the worst case, if If that means the residential property market is largely abandoned as an investment vehicle - so much the better, let people go back to being able to buy their own homes - a guaranteed income should help with that, and helps spread real long-term wealth into the hands of the masses.
We could do something similar for food - let the government produce K-rations or Soylent or whatever - something inexpensive with a long shelf life that's sufficient to keep people healthy, if bored, sold at cost. If you want to save some of your social dividend for other pursuits, you've got a nice baseline to fall back on - you probably can't get complete nutrition for cheaper than this.
Heck, we could even do it with medical insurance - let everyone buy into Medicare at projected average cost - if the free market can genuinely offer a better deal, or worth-while supplementary options, wonderful - but there's a solid baseline to keep them honest. Getting the profiteering out of the medical industry is likely to be a long, involved process, but giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices and demand minimum quality of service would probably be a step in the right direction - they would have outsized bargaining power, but also no profit motive, positioning them perfectly to strongly advocate for the interests of patients themselves - nobody wants to pay too much, but paying too little is even more expensive in the long run. "Breaking a leg in Europe costs the system $X to fix to everyone's satisfaction - over the next 10 years we'll be reducing the payout here to 2*$X, so you'd better start reorganizing to deliver at that price if you want our business - otherwise you're welcome
So, spend a minute with your new car and make a third key, what's the problem?
Once upon a time, new computers came with reinstall discs to get it back to factory settings when the hard drive eventually failed or was upgraded. Nowadays it tends to be just a hidden partition on the disk instead - which is lost along with the rest of the drive in the case of a hardware failure (or sufficiently severe software one) They (usually) offer a convenient route to make your own physical discs, though I've seen systems that restrict you to doing so only once (what's the logic on *that* one?)
It's a cheapskate move designed to exploit people's laziness and procrastination for profit, but at least the responsible owner has an easy option to protect themselves from it.
The pairing process is generally what puts the secret into the key dongle (or alternately, the corresponding secret into the car)
If the secret is hard-wired into the dongle, then there would be no way to make a duplicate key at all.
If the process for pairing the two is public, what stops me from walking up to your car with a new key, pairing the two, and driving it away?
You could design a process that requires a valid key to clone, but that tends to make it extremely expensive to create a new key when the last old key is lost, which happens.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of manufacturer exclusivity here - criminals will get their hands on the process regardless, but I think you're glossing over some serious technical details.
One thing to consider with "right to repair" movements, is that they usually don't address "non-repairable" items - things where manufacturing decisions make repair difficult or impossible, though that's certainly worth addressing, especially in the long term.
Usually the primary target is "dealer-only repair" - cars, farm equipment, appliances, etc., where they *are* designed to be repaired, but access to the necessary parts and tools is restricted to those who have preferential relationships with the manufacturer. This has gotten especially bad lately as many manufacturers have taken lessons from printer-ink sales tactics, where gratuitous electronics and copy-protection schemes are added for the express purpose of locking out off-brand replacements, and even servicing.
When you get into manufacturing repairability decisions, there's another thing that might be worth considering as well - right-to-recycle. China has stopped accepting the world's plastic waste in part because we've made it too difficult to recycle by doing things like bonding multiple layers of incompatible materials together - e.g. plastic, paper, and/or foil laminates, making it effectively impossible to recycle even remotely cost-effectively. (Another part is that we've gotten really bad about sorting our recyclable trash, with similar results, but that's a different topic altogether)
In this context they are asking, presumably, because they wish to communicate a concept, and take a stab at guessing what the word covering that concept would be, based on other words and general word-form construction rules, in a language they're not extremely fluent in - not because they saw it published somewhere. I said no, because the "word" they constructed is not socially accepted - which is the general measure of whether a construct is "a word" rather than just a construct used within an isolated group of people.
Similarly, I've never seen such a word, but can reverse-engineer it to get at the probable meaning they were going for. If it were to see widespread adoption, then it would graduate into being a word (think "ain't"), but until then it's not really. You can construct all sorts of "demi-words", and maybe be understood, but your putting a gratuitous mental load on your listeners, and tend to sound like an idiot - just as you do if you misuse existing words in contexts where the intended concept is clear.
>There's no reason to update devices that were never designed to change
Unless part of their functionality is to withstand attack from attackers whose knowledge is constantly growing. And pickable locks are the only thing on your list that qualifies. And as far as that goes...
We have pickable locks because an unpickable lock is apparently impossible, at least while being remotely easy to use. And locks evolved a LOT before they reached their current state - which are secure enough to deter crimes of opportunity (i.e. they keep an honest man honest). It takes hours of practice, or moderately expensive purpose-built tools, to get good enough to pick an average modern lock - too much effort for pretty much anyone without premeditated criminal intent.
Invincibility is too expensive, even where it's possible. Security is all about lowering your risk by increasing the cost and risk to the attacker. And when any idiot who picks up the electronic version of a free set of decade old automated lockpicks from the corner website can walk into your house without even trying, take what they want, and trash the place, secure in the knowledge that they'll almost certainly never be caught - then you don't have any security worth speaking of.
>ANY device can be infected with a new exploit whether it's up to date or not. New fully updated equipment is no less of a risk than old out of date equipment.
Those are two very different statements. Yes, any device can be compromised by a new exploit - that's kind of the point of developing NEW exploits. But an outdated device can be compromised by a massively long list of well-known exploits - making it far more vulnerable. New exploits are generally financially valuable assets horded by those who know of them, and they will usually be rendered useless shortly after they become public knowledge. Fewer people attacking, means lower risks that you'll be attacked.
I don't know if it's still the case, perhaps the target is no longer as appealing, but I recall that back towards the end of Windows XP's product life, even before 7 came out, the rule of thumb was that a freshly installed copy of (non-updated) XP would be compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the internet - considerably faster than most people could download the updates necessary to secure it. Not that it was ever 100% secure, but there's a huge difference between going into battle in imperfect armor, and going in wearing nothing but a giant bullseye painted on your chest.
How is that not what I just said? Try rereading the first sentence of the second paragraph. Everything else is about the U.S., because that's the country being discussed.
Who invoked anyone else? Person A says "is X a word?", and person B says "no, X is not a word". That doesn't make it a word.
That I was able to use the word assembly patterns of English to make a reasonable conjecture as to what such a word might mean, and what a more likely word-assembly for a the concept I presumed they were aiming for, does not change the fact that neither is a generally accepted word - it just means that language is generally not completely arbitrary.
I was referring to the beginning of the U.S., arguably 1492 - humans haven't existed since any more fundamental beginning. But tribalism seems to have accompanied humanity from it's beginnings as as a technological species, and followed the early migrants to this continent, along with the several subsequent migrant waves, including the final (to date) European one.
Tribalism has been part of humanity, and part of the United States, since the beginning of each. You need only look at the ever-thriving anti-immigrant propaganda spread in early media to see for yourself - there've always been the unwanted - the Irish, the Germans - take your pick. Anyone with notable cultural differences has always been demonized in this country, and as the melting pot integrated their culture into its own - well then it shifted to "whites versus coloreds" - finally uniting the various "white races" only when there were enough non-whites to maintain similar levels of outrage, and this time without the possibility of integration. Division within the working classes has long been an important tool used by the powerful to maintain their position.
Did you reply to the right comment? You seem rather tangential. My entire point was that natives were routinely stripped of their acquired and inherited wealth, at gunpoint, and were never really granted any civil rights whatsoever until recently - only the temporary respecting of of tribal sovereignty until it became inconvenient to do so, at which point they were stripped of any rights at all.
In the long term they might have been better off being granted citizenshp - but nobody with any power had any intention of doing that.
And what exactly is SSS referring to? In context it sounds a bit genocidal, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Meh, just use UTC-based Unix time - it both ignores that daylight saving nonsense, AND leaves your data in a format compatible with pretty much everything else in the world.
Except calendar aren't designed to track rotations of the Earth, they're designed to subdivide orbits so that people could effectively prepare for the changing of seasons well in advance, and served that purpose 10's of thousands of years before the Julian calendar was established. The inaccuracy of Julian calendar was itself due to insufficient correction, (they had 1 leap year every four) rather than not recognizing the fundamental problem. And considering that it took 100 years to drift (a bit less than) one year is probably largely responsible for its longevity - no person would live to see a year even one full day out of sync with what they were born to. And the fact that it was itself replaced by the Gregorian calendar, despite the heavy religious and political opposition, when it had drifted only about 12 days out of sync should be evidence of the fact that the basis of the calnedar was supposed to be the year..
You are the one who is confused - Clocks measure time directly, calendars don't. They subdivide years - aka seasonal cycles. Go ahead, find me a calendar that doesn't revolve around the solar year, used for anything but strictly ceremonial purposes.
As for a clock not measuring days accurately - I was referring to the common belief that 1 (average) day = 24 hours = 86,400 seconds, which is false. It's made even worse by the fact that the length of the diurnal cycle (measured solar noon-to-noon) actually changes throughout the year, at different rates depending on latitude, so that really sundials are one of the very few tools that accurately measures individual days. Days themselves are just far too variable and inconsistent to be a suitable basis for measuring anything. So, we really only have three possibilities for accurate time measurement of any relevance on Earth: an absolute time measure (clocks), a seasonal time measure (traditional calendars), and a lunar phase calendar, which doesn't align with either days or years, and is really only relevant to hunting and astronomy.
Imperial / U.S. Customary units work great - until you need to perform even the simplest calculation, at which point you get subjected to mild torture grinding through arbitrary unit conversions, or have to deal with scientists, engineers, anyone anywhere else in the world - at which point you invoke some much uglier unit conversion torture that relies on knowing the conversions between units you use commonly, and units you rarely use in a completely different system.
Actually some of it was - newer systems written by competent programmers tend to adopt Unix-time or similar, but that leaves a lot of legacy and... less competently coded programs. Quite a few databases, etc. do (did) in fact store dates as yy/mm/dd (or whatever) - probably because the person who first wrote it decided to do it that way without considering the long-term implications (perhaps because it was never intended to be a long-term solution), followed by many years of developers just holding their nose and dealing with it that way, rather than rewriting everything that interacted with the database.
Heck, I'd venture that the majority of the non-cosmetic Y2k repairs that were performed fell into two camps: updating to yyyy format, with a database update to prepend "19" to existing entries, to minimize actual code changes, or converting to 32-bit Unix time. The irony being that rewriting things to use "proper" unix time only pushed the problem 38 years down the road, while the yyyy kludge solved it for the next 8000 years.
I suppose I should say a *consistent* clock - one which holds the length of a second as constant over time. A sun dial accurately subdivides the day into sub-periods, but at the cost of constantly varying the length of those periods.
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices? Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities. The two serve very different functions, and overlap only insofar as both measure the elapse of time.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag, along with other forces that are less well understood (the electromagnetic and fluid dynamics governing the bulk of the Earth's internal motion are complicated and difficult to probe)
Solary is not a word, though from language patterns it would probably mean something like "sunny" if it was - "having the quality of solar", like "shiny" means "having the quality of shine". What concept where you trying to convey? Solarly (also apparently not a word) would be something like "relating to the sun", which I'm guessing might be what you mean.
The appropriate term though, the one that caused the creation of leap years in the first place, is "seasons". Without leap years the date of the solstices and equinoxes changes by about 100 days every 400 years - doesn't take long before you're celebrating the winter solstice in July (or December, in the southern hemisphere). Strictly speaking seasons have nothing to do with the sun itself, and everything to the current orientation of our planet's axis in relation to it.
Of course, the proper solution is obvious - we simply have to slow the Earth's rotation enough so that the length of a year is an integer multiple of the length of a day. Unfortunately tidal drag from the sun and moon are constantly lengthening our day, so we'd need to be constantly adjusting our rotation to compensate for that.... Unless we slowed down the Earth's rotation to something less than the moon's orbit, so that the combination of the moon speeding us up, and the sun slowing us down would balance out. Though that would cause the moon to spiral towards us, rather than away, which might eventually be a problem. It'd also more immediately throw out nice balance out of wack again. So I guess the only real solution is to jettison the moon entirely, and tidally lock the Earth with the sun so that gravity stops mucking things about so quickly. That would have the added benefit that you'd no longer need to convert between days and years at all - "time of day" would become a constant geographic property rather than something that changed over time. Sure, most life on Earth would probably perish, but that's a small price to pay for not having to deal with complicated leap-years anymore.
Neither do I. Sadly, what we do or do not condone has no impact on what does and doesn't have a place here. It is here. It has been here since the beginning, and been embraced by both the public and those with power pretty much the entire time. Some of us may wish to eliminate it, but to say it has no place here is to deny past and present reality.
Nobody was trying to get them to assimilate. They massacred them, then drove out the survivors to land nobody wanted. Then, when people wanted that land they drove them out again, sometimes forcing them to walk vast distances without adequate supplies - in massacres only slightly less destructive than the original ones.
Assimilation would have involved giving them legal property and civil rights that would be honored, rather than sovereign immunity via treaties which were universally discarded as soon as they became inconvenient to the U.S. business interests of the day.
You might think that. I mean, I'm certain if you agreed to send a sack of gold for a dollar, they'd hold you to it. But if it went the other way - must be a software malfunction.
But hey, at least you know you can trust Google. I mean it was what, a couple weeks ago they swore that Google Duplex wasn't going to be used to automate call centers - and they stood by their word. It won't be Google Duplex, it'll be a related product that draws on the underlying technology.
So I assume you don't own a modern TV? Pretty much all of those have been running Linux for a decade plus. No wired or wireless router? Almost all of those run Linux. Ditto for most non-iPhone smartphones. Actually, pretty much any electronics that have more "brains" than your average microwave probably runs Linux - including many higher-end microwaves.
When you can get a fully functional computer-on-a-chip with as much operating system as you want for ~$5, custom-built electronics start looking a lot less attractive.
Perhaps because Putin's government makes out own deeply corrupt intelligence agencies look like lilly-white pillars of virtue in comparison. Russia is basically run like a mafia after all, and there is no honor among thieves.
Because they have bit as much right to be called Americans as the British, Germans, and French have to be called Europeans - America is the name of two whole continents, not just one country.
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I agree, you could even go so far as let the government provide the money to everyone, and then rent out non-profit minimalist housing operated just to cover projected lifetime capital and maintenance expenses. Same result, less bureaucratic overhead. Be really easy to auto-debit rent from your incoming dividend payment - especially if you had a government-operated non-profit bank account designed specifically to handle everyone's dividend payments with minimal overhead. If the free market can do better, GREAT! Less demand for government housing and its bureaucratic inefficiencies, but there's always a backup option to keep the free market honest.
If it costs $X for the government to build and maintain a Hovel Tower apartment at break-even expense, then a private operator can probably do at least as well, and will have no reason to charge several hundred more unless they're offering genuine added value in terms of the quality of the environment, except for pure rent-seeking profiteering - and there's no reason we as a society should encourage such usury behavior. In the worst case, if If that means the residential property market is largely abandoned as an investment vehicle - so much the better, let people go back to being able to buy their own homes - a guaranteed income should help with that, and helps spread real long-term wealth into the hands of the masses.
We could do something similar for food - let the government produce K-rations or Soylent or whatever - something inexpensive with a long shelf life that's sufficient to keep people healthy, if bored, sold at cost. If you want to save some of your social dividend for other pursuits, you've got a nice baseline to fall back on - you probably can't get complete nutrition for cheaper than this.
Heck, we could even do it with medical insurance - let everyone buy into Medicare at projected average cost - if the free market can genuinely offer a better deal, or worth-while supplementary options, wonderful - but there's a solid baseline to keep them honest. Getting the profiteering out of the medical industry is likely to be a long, involved process, but giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices and demand minimum quality of service would probably be a step in the right direction - they would have outsized bargaining power, but also no profit motive, positioning them perfectly to strongly advocate for the interests of patients themselves - nobody wants to pay too much, but paying too little is even more expensive in the long run. "Breaking a leg in Europe costs the system $X to fix to everyone's satisfaction - over the next 10 years we'll be reducing the payout here to 2*$X, so you'd better start reorganizing to deliver at that price if you want our business - otherwise you're welcome
So, spend a minute with your new car and make a third key, what's the problem?
Once upon a time, new computers came with reinstall discs to get it back to factory settings when the hard drive eventually failed or was upgraded. Nowadays it tends to be just a hidden partition on the disk instead - which is lost along with the rest of the drive in the case of a hardware failure (or sufficiently severe software one) They (usually) offer a convenient route to make your own physical discs, though I've seen systems that restrict you to doing so only once (what's the logic on *that* one?)
It's a cheapskate move designed to exploit people's laziness and procrastination for profit, but at least the responsible owner has an easy option to protect themselves from it.
The pairing process is generally what puts the secret into the key dongle (or alternately, the corresponding secret into the car)
If the secret is hard-wired into the dongle, then there would be no way to make a duplicate key at all.
If the process for pairing the two is public, what stops me from walking up to your car with a new key, pairing the two, and driving it away?
You could design a process that requires a valid key to clone, but that tends to make it extremely expensive to create a new key when the last old key is lost, which happens.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of manufacturer exclusivity here - criminals will get their hands on the process regardless, but I think you're glossing over some serious technical details.
One thing to consider with "right to repair" movements, is that they usually don't address "non-repairable" items - things where manufacturing decisions make repair difficult or impossible, though that's certainly worth addressing, especially in the long term.
Usually the primary target is "dealer-only repair" - cars, farm equipment, appliances, etc., where they *are* designed to be repaired, but access to the necessary parts and tools is restricted to those who have preferential relationships with the manufacturer. This has gotten especially bad lately as many manufacturers have taken lessons from printer-ink sales tactics, where gratuitous electronics and copy-protection schemes are added for the express purpose of locking out off-brand replacements, and even servicing.
When you get into manufacturing repairability decisions, there's another thing that might be worth considering as well - right-to-recycle. China has stopped accepting the world's plastic waste in part because we've made it too difficult to recycle by doing things like bonding multiple layers of incompatible materials together - e.g. plastic, paper, and/or foil laminates, making it effectively impossible to recycle even remotely cost-effectively. (Another part is that we've gotten really bad about sorting our recyclable trash, with similar results, but that's a different topic altogether)
In this context they are asking, presumably, because they wish to communicate a concept, and take a stab at guessing what the word covering that concept would be, based on other words and general word-form construction rules, in a language they're not extremely fluent in - not because they saw it published somewhere. I said no, because the "word" they constructed is not socially accepted - which is the general measure of whether a construct is "a word" rather than just a construct used within an isolated group of people.
Similarly, I've never seen such a word, but can reverse-engineer it to get at the probable meaning they were going for. If it were to see widespread adoption, then it would graduate into being a word (think "ain't"), but until then it's not really. You can construct all sorts of "demi-words", and maybe be understood, but your putting a gratuitous mental load on your listeners, and tend to sound like an idiot - just as you do if you misuse existing words in contexts where the intended concept is clear.
>There's no reason to update devices that were never designed to change
Unless part of their functionality is to withstand attack from attackers whose knowledge is constantly growing. And pickable locks are the only thing on your list that qualifies. And as far as that goes...
We have pickable locks because an unpickable lock is apparently impossible, at least while being remotely easy to use. And locks evolved a LOT before they reached their current state - which are secure enough to deter crimes of opportunity (i.e. they keep an honest man honest). It takes hours of practice, or moderately expensive purpose-built tools, to get good enough to pick an average modern lock - too much effort for pretty much anyone without premeditated criminal intent.
Invincibility is too expensive, even where it's possible. Security is all about lowering your risk by increasing the cost and risk to the attacker. And when any idiot who picks up the electronic version of a free set of decade old automated lockpicks from the corner website can walk into your house without even trying, take what they want, and trash the place, secure in the knowledge that they'll almost certainly never be caught - then you don't have any security worth speaking of.
>ANY device can be infected with a new exploit whether it's up to date or not. New fully updated equipment is no less of a risk than old out of date equipment.
Those are two very different statements. Yes, any device can be compromised by a new exploit - that's kind of the point of developing NEW exploits. But an outdated device can be compromised by a massively long list of well-known exploits - making it far more vulnerable. New exploits are generally financially valuable assets horded by those who know of them, and they will usually be rendered useless shortly after they become public knowledge. Fewer people attacking, means lower risks that you'll be attacked.
I don't know if it's still the case, perhaps the target is no longer as appealing, but I recall that back towards the end of Windows XP's product life, even before 7 came out, the rule of thumb was that a freshly installed copy of (non-updated) XP would be compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the internet - considerably faster than most people could download the updates necessary to secure it. Not that it was ever 100% secure, but there's a huge difference between going into battle in imperfect armor, and going in wearing nothing but a giant bullseye painted on your chest.
How is that not what I just said? Try rereading the first sentence of the second paragraph. Everything else is about the U.S., because that's the country being discussed.
Who invoked anyone else? Person A says "is X a word?", and person B says "no, X is not a word". That doesn't make it a word.
That I was able to use the word assembly patterns of English to make a reasonable conjecture as to what such a word might mean, and what a more likely word-assembly for a the concept I presumed they were aiming for, does not change the fact that neither is a generally accepted word - it just means that language is generally not completely arbitrary.
I was referring to the beginning of the U.S., arguably 1492 - humans haven't existed since any more fundamental beginning. But tribalism seems to have accompanied humanity from it's beginnings as as a technological species, and followed the early migrants to this continent, along with the several subsequent migrant waves, including the final (to date) European one.
Tribalism has been part of humanity, and part of the United States, since the beginning of each. You need only look at the ever-thriving anti-immigrant propaganda spread in early media to see for yourself - there've always been the unwanted - the Irish, the Germans - take your pick. Anyone with notable cultural differences has always been demonized in this country, and as the melting pot integrated their culture into its own - well then it shifted to "whites versus coloreds" - finally uniting the various "white races" only when there were enough non-whites to maintain similar levels of outrage, and this time without the possibility of integration. Division within the working classes has long been an important tool used by the powerful to maintain their position.
Did you reply to the right comment? You seem rather tangential. My entire point was that natives were routinely stripped of their acquired and inherited wealth, at gunpoint, and were never really granted any civil rights whatsoever until recently - only the temporary respecting of of tribal sovereignty until it became inconvenient to do so, at which point they were stripped of any rights at all.
In the long term they might have been better off being granted citizenshp - but nobody with any power had any intention of doing that.
And what exactly is SSS referring to? In context it sounds a bit genocidal, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Meh, just use UTC-based Unix time - it both ignores that daylight saving nonsense, AND leaves your data in a format compatible with pretty much everything else in the world.
Sorry - that bit near the top should have have been "took 100 years to drift a bit less than one day"
Except calendar aren't designed to track rotations of the Earth, they're designed to subdivide orbits so that people could effectively prepare for the changing of seasons well in advance, and served that purpose 10's of thousands of years before the Julian calendar was established. The inaccuracy of Julian calendar was itself due to insufficient correction, (they had 1 leap year every four) rather than not recognizing the fundamental problem. And considering that it took 100 years to drift (a bit less than) one year is probably largely responsible for its longevity - no person would live to see a year even one full day out of sync with what they were born to. And the fact that it was itself replaced by the Gregorian calendar, despite the heavy religious and political opposition, when it had drifted only about 12 days out of sync should be evidence of the fact that the basis of the calnedar was supposed to be the year..
You are the one who is confused - Clocks measure time directly, calendars don't. They subdivide years - aka seasonal cycles. Go ahead, find me a calendar that doesn't revolve around the solar year, used for anything but strictly ceremonial purposes.
As for a clock not measuring days accurately - I was referring to the common belief that 1 (average) day = 24 hours = 86,400 seconds, which is false. It's made even worse by the fact that the length of the diurnal cycle (measured solar noon-to-noon) actually changes throughout the year, at different rates depending on latitude, so that really sundials are one of the very few tools that accurately measures individual days. Days themselves are just far too variable and inconsistent to be a suitable basis for measuring anything. So, we really only have three possibilities for accurate time measurement of any relevance on Earth: an absolute time measure (clocks), a seasonal time measure (traditional calendars), and a lunar phase calendar, which doesn't align with either days or years, and is really only relevant to hunting and astronomy.
Not nearly so well as the Japanese calendar.
Imperial / U.S. Customary units work great - until you need to perform even the simplest calculation, at which point you get subjected to mild torture grinding through arbitrary unit conversions, or have to deal with scientists, engineers, anyone anywhere else in the world - at which point you invoke some much uglier unit conversion torture that relies on knowing the conversions between units you use commonly, and units you rarely use in a completely different system.
Actually some of it was - newer systems written by competent programmers tend to adopt Unix-time or similar, but that leaves a lot of legacy and... less competently coded programs. Quite a few databases, etc. do (did) in fact store dates as yy/mm/dd (or whatever) - probably because the person who first wrote it decided to do it that way without considering the long-term implications (perhaps because it was never intended to be a long-term solution), followed by many years of developers just holding their nose and dealing with it that way, rather than rewriting everything that interacted with the database.
Heck, I'd venture that the majority of the non-cosmetic Y2k repairs that were performed fell into two camps: updating to yyyy format, with a database update to prepend "19" to existing entries, to minimize actual code changes, or converting to 32-bit Unix time. The irony being that rewriting things to use "proper" unix time only pushed the problem 38 years down the road, while the yyyy kludge solved it for the next 8000 years.
I suppose I should say a *consistent* clock - one which holds the length of a second as constant over time. A sun dial accurately subdivides the day into sub-periods, but at the cost of constantly varying the length of those periods.
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices? Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities. The two serve very different functions, and overlap only insofar as both measure the elapse of time.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag, along with other forces that are less well understood (the electromagnetic and fluid dynamics governing the bulk of the Earth's internal motion are complicated and difficult to probe)
Solary is not a word, though from language patterns it would probably mean something like "sunny" if it was - "having the quality of solar", like "shiny" means "having the quality of shine". What concept where you trying to convey? Solarly (also apparently not a word) would be something like "relating to the sun", which I'm guessing might be what you mean.
The appropriate term though, the one that caused the creation of leap years in the first place, is "seasons". Without leap years the date of the solstices and equinoxes changes by about 100 days every 400 years - doesn't take long before you're celebrating the winter solstice in July (or December, in the southern hemisphere). Strictly speaking seasons have nothing to do with the sun itself, and everything to the current orientation of our planet's axis in relation to it.
Of course, the proper solution is obvious - we simply have to slow the Earth's rotation enough so that the length of a year is an integer multiple of the length of a day. Unfortunately tidal drag from the sun and moon are constantly lengthening our day, so we'd need to be constantly adjusting our rotation to compensate for that.... Unless we slowed down the Earth's rotation to something less than the moon's orbit, so that the combination of the moon speeding us up, and the sun slowing us down would balance out. Though that would cause the moon to spiral towards us, rather than away, which might eventually be a problem. It'd also more immediately throw out nice balance out of wack again. So I guess the only real solution is to jettison the moon entirely, and tidally lock the Earth with the sun so that gravity stops mucking things about so quickly. That would have the added benefit that you'd no longer need to convert between days and years at all - "time of day" would become a constant geographic property rather than something that changed over time. Sure, most life on Earth would probably perish, but that's a small price to pay for not having to deal with complicated leap-years anymore.
Neither do I. Sadly, what we do or do not condone has no impact on what does and doesn't have a place here. It is here. It has been here since the beginning, and been embraced by both the public and those with power pretty much the entire time. Some of us may wish to eliminate it, but to say it has no place here is to deny past and present reality.
Nobody was trying to get them to assimilate. They massacred them, then drove out the survivors to land nobody wanted. Then, when people wanted that land they drove them out again, sometimes forcing them to walk vast distances without adequate supplies - in massacres only slightly less destructive than the original ones.
Assimilation would have involved giving them legal property and civil rights that would be honored, rather than sovereign immunity via treaties which were universally discarded as soon as they became inconvenient to the U.S. business interests of the day.
You might think that. I mean, I'm certain if you agreed to send a sack of gold for a dollar, they'd hold you to it. But if it went the other way - must be a software malfunction.
But hey, at least you know you can trust Google. I mean it was what, a couple weeks ago they swore that Google Duplex wasn't going to be used to automate call centers - and they stood by their word. It won't be Google Duplex, it'll be a related product that draws on the underlying technology.
So I assume you don't own a modern TV? Pretty much all of those have been running Linux for a decade plus. No wired or wireless router? Almost all of those run Linux. Ditto for most non-iPhone smartphones. Actually, pretty much any electronics that have more "brains" than your average microwave probably runs Linux - including many higher-end microwaves.
When you can get a fully functional computer-on-a-chip with as much operating system as you want for ~$5, custom-built electronics start looking a lot less attractive.
Perhaps because Putin's government makes out own deeply corrupt intelligence agencies look like lilly-white pillars of virtue in comparison. Russia is basically run like a mafia after all, and there is no honor among thieves.
Because they have bit as much right to be called Americans as the British, Germans, and French have to be called Europeans - America is the name of two whole continents, not just one country.