In its zeal to push the "see, government is inherently incompetent and inefficient" narrative, TFA completely neglects to mention the role of private contractors in all that. Who's landing these plums, and why aren't the contracts written with milestone payments, performance mandates, and clawback provisions for if/when the contractor fails to deliver? And we know integrating cruÅ¿ty legacy systems is no cakewalk, but there's zero analysis or technical detail of the cause of these failures. How do you spend upwards of half a billion dollars and have nothing to show for it? Who's rolling around in that money now, and why aren't they behind bars, or at least being sued?

People living in the tropics would be more interested in making things cooler than warmer, I reckon.

My room varies tremendously in temperature (40°-115°F between late night winters and midday summers - it's in a steel warehouse) and it is impossible to sleep late when it's hot. Conversely, it's hard to get out from under the covers when it's cold. A preindustrial society wouldn't be able to do much about the temperature but they would have a way of insulating themselves from light so as not to be woken by the sunrise shining on their faces. I suspect that's why the authors went with temperature as the main factor.

Have attendants perform thorough decontaminations before the user is allowed to leave. You know, like that scene in Silkwood.

I'm a little surprised no one has come up with drop-in replacements that look to their hosts exactly like floppy drives but use a more modern storage medium. It's unprofitable to ramp up mass production of old floppy disks, but I could see a cottage industry being able to form in replacement hardware. I mean, the 3.5" drives in the old CNC machines in the shop I used to work were probably the same drives you'd find in any PC, right? (I know things were less standardized before 3.5", but still a limited number of formats and mechanisms.)

Right, sushi is defined by the rice, not the presence of raw fish.

Damn it, I just got a cheap flip phone a couple of months ago! Now in 18 months I'll just look like I read some stupid trend piece and simply had to get on that bandwagon.

_{Can you still get pagers?}

China's got a very long list of emissions sources to address before they're going to mess with their rice paddies.

You don't have to do it that way at all. You call whatever script you want from your LaunchAgent and tell it when to fire, and you can do it via a graphical XML editor if that's such a hurdle.

Or you can put your scripts in /etc/periodic/(daily|weekly|monthly) if you want anacron functionality.

Or you can just keep on using cron! It is called by launchd, but that shouldn't make a difference. Point is, you're not forced to delve into launchd or write "lines upon lines" of XML to schedule jobs.

Don't forget college radio. It can be a crapshoot, but even in rural areas if you're near a college town there's a good chance at finding more eclectic playlists than ClearChannel.

(Is there such a thing as college radio in other parts of the world?)

Just restore from yesterday's daily offsite backup. What's that? You don't do that? Guess your data wasn't all that important to you then.

Or that the lines delineating human and proto-human species are blurrier than traditional taxonomy is adequate to describe. We don't have DNA samples from specimens that ancient, AFAIK.

Just put the carrier itself in the air and you can get rid of the catapults altogether.

Just as SWF is being dropped left and right. Like releasing an open alternative to RealPlayer in 2009.

I reckon there will be legacy Flash games and doodads floating around for a while yet, but it's in its autumn for sure.

If you fell out of this thing, would you die before you hit the ground?

Not left/right, but rather walking between the lady and the buildings the chamber pots were being emptied out of. With the advent of indoorish plumbing, the decorum switched to walking on the outside, that the gentleman might shield the lady from gutter contents splashed up by passing carriages.