Exactly because the window of time I had for fooling with home networking had closed.

Europe is bulding consensus on what technology sovereignty means. This is a self-interested statement within that discussion. At some point the EU will appoint at rapporteur to synthesise those viewports into a formal definition. The EC will use that to develop a programme of works which is satisfactory to the member states and other interested states.

The US is often lulled by the seemingly endless discursive nature of pan-European projects to think that they are not serious or effective. And then one day there is an Ariane or Airbus or Galileo.

As a result, universities rarely make decisions like corporations, where the CEO decides and everyone in the organisation toes the line. A policy like this is made by consultation with stakeholders, extensive and ongoing. As the article describes, this takes years even in a small university like MIT.

It's simply not within the power of the negotiators to reach a decision outside that policy: they'd be ignored by the university faculties, who would then make their own individual arrangements, and the funds available to the negotiators would not be agreed to (and far worse outcomes are possible, efforts by 'the administration' to make decisions against consensus are a common reason for the head of a university to be sacked). If the negotiators genuinely can't reach agreement, then negotiations have to be suspended, the progress reported to many interested parties within the university, and then a new consensus reached about the negotiation parameters.

Now no two universities are the same, and the degree of centralisation varies. But I hope this helps you understand that the 'policy' referred to in this article was itself the result of years of negotiation, and "you can change them at any time; they are your choices" doesn't describe the situation.

The difference in approach, outcome and size of expenditure between MIT and the University of California System in their negotiations with Elsevier interests university libraries everywhere when considering their own publications strategies. It is great that both institutions have been open about their budgets, their negotiation stance, and the outcome.

Books used roman numerals in copyright notices because the copyright notice was on the title page. Title pages used roman numerals because they looked better as title page display text than arabic numerals (so Volume II rather than Volume 2), and mixing numeral types looked ugly.

None of this was a hard and fast rule and house styles varied.

The government refused to bend. The public reaction lead to sufficient numbers in the Senate to disallow the enabling regulations (the very body which has previously passed the bill).

The first problem is that housing stock takes a lot of modification to get to modern energy usage (essentially, 0 joules after construction). We haven't started down that road in any serious way as a society, even though the technology is commercial and past early-adopter pricing. But living in that house, it's no different to living in any other nice house -- a McMansion has a big reception hall, my passive solar house has a airlock/mudroom -- that's not a difference in lifestyle, just in detail.

The second problem is transport. At a personal level this might mean EVs, except that they are so very expensive. You might afford to replace one of the family's cars, but not all of them. Public transport would appear to be an alternative, but if you don't have access to that already, then the build time for that is over a decade. So there's going to be an uncomfortable interim of, say, twenty years. Which I suspect will be filled with bikes and e-bikes, as adding bike lanes and bikeways are minor projects. There are times when your description of personal transport as "scaled up" is very true.

There are many small annoyances from being slightly ahead of the bulk of the population. But one of the things Covid-19 has done has been to make local government is far more open to change: they've flipped from sending me letters about my vegetable garden in my front yard, to asking me if I'd be happy for their staff to tour it and collect ideas.

The big jump between units (mm and m) is really useful as even the most preoccupied of coworkers will notice if the scale is out by a thousand. If the units were closer -- say 10x -- then there would be more ordering errors. That explains the absence of centimetres (10mm) from construction sites even though centimetres is a popular household unit.

Millimetres dominates construction as being close to the width of a cut it is the perfect-size unit. It's simple to work with because you simply count: in imperial a tad more than 1⅜" is 1½"; in metric a tad more than 35 is 36.

Even though we retain the same size of timber as in the imperial past, those sizes are now expressed in metric -- common sizes are 90x35, 120x45. So you can measure up an old house for a repair and order in timber of the same size. There are not pre- and post-metric timbers.