Ummm.... I see you ignore the fact that major portions of our manufacturing capability have been moved offshore. When was the last time you bought a TV made in the US? When was the last time you bought a major household appliance that was manufactured entirely in the US? How about a car? How long has it been since the majority of steel used in the US was made here?
It seems that the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organisations have been successful in lobbying the US administration into supporting their cause. This means that the US government will continue to (financially) support an industry that is simply outdated, and has failed to adapt to the changing market - which seems remarkably anti-capitalistic and anti-free market, even for a Democratic president.
Obama has surrounded himself with people that do not believe in the free market and whose heroes are people like Chairman Mao, Lenin, and Marx. He plainly states that he sought out Marxist professors and left wing radicals while in college. Assuming that he would believe differently than the people he has surrounded himself with stretches credulity to its breaking point.
So, how can anyone be surprised when he acts anti-capitalistic and anti-freemarket? If you are, you simply haven't paid attention to what he has done, rather than what he has said. He most definitely believes government knows best, and ought to control far more aspects of American life than it ever has before.
Unfortunately, "ask your doctor" isn't always good advice.
I've gone to quite a few different doctors over during my lifetime and only a few really know what the side effects are of the drugs they prescribe. A couple would literally refuse to believe my symptoms were side effects of the drugs they prescribed even though the symptoms started after beginning the use of the drug, and the symptoms were listed by the manufacturer as a side effect of the drug. In fact, a couple of times the symptoms were under the heading of "if you experience these symptoms contact your doctor immediately". IOW's even serious side effects are prone to be ignored by doctors when patients report them.
Yeah, I've seen it. To tell the truth though, I've yet to see a decent LCD monitor that came with dead pixels. Maybe I'm just extremely lucky in that regard, but that's the way it's been for me.
In my experience Newegg is head and shoulders above any other online retailer I've ever dealt with. Their customer service goes above and beyond on a regular basis.
Here's just one anecdote of what they've done for me. I bought a cheap monitor from them. Six months later it died. I needed a new monitor immediately as at that moment not having my computer available would have cost me quite a bit of money. I told NewEgg my situation and asked them what could be done.
I ended up buying a better monitor and NewEgg paid overnight shipping on the new monitor(I'm a couple of shipping zones away so it was fairly spendy), plus paid return freight on the old monitor. They made the offer. I didn't even have to request it.
They ended up paying out more than $100 in shipping costs on a $350 order to make things right for me. That's not the only time they have paid shipping costs for returned products either. Plus, they've never balked at any request to return anything. It's always been, "what can we do for you", no questions asked.
I've never run into changing pricing or shipping charges with NewEgg either. I have with Amazon. I've been surfing checking prices and when I've gone back to Amazon 1/2 hour later to order because they were the cheapest, the price has gone up as much as 20% the second time I enter their site.
The only other big retail establishment that I've ever done business with that is as serious as NewEgg is about customer service is Costco. They'll take anything back at any time. They even took an opened 25lb bag of cat food back because our dang cat wouldn't eat the stuff even when I mixed it with canned cat food. I didn't think they would take it back but figured I'd give it a try, and they did. The bag was still full so maybe that's why, but it was open.
What's the % of people who can diagnose a failed electronic/electrical component compared to a failed mechanical component? In my experience, and I spent ~20 years as an HVAC service tech, even in professional trades only a small % of people who can diagnose mechanical problems can diagnose electrical problems. In HVAC service, where understanding electrical issues is a big deal, the number of experienced service men who understand such basic fundamentals as what the difference between 6 ohms and 6 megohms means in a circuit is very small.
I only ran across 1 person, besides myself, in the HVAC service business who had a decent electrical background. That doesn't mean people with a decent understanding of electrical fundamentals don't exist, it just means they are a lot more rare than people who understand mechanical issues.
My experience in of 40+ years of using all types of mechanical equipment from vehicles, to construction equipment, to farm vehicles, to recreational vehicles, is that I've never had a mechanical linkage fail without warning. There are always symptoms beforehand: stiff pedal, soft pedal, sticky pedal easily broken loose, noise when using linkage, limited pedal travel, etc.... You don't get that with drive by wire. It's also repairable by a much larger percentage of drivers.
To me that makes mechanical linkages much more "user friendly" and safer.
As to No, easier to make safe, doesn't equal safer end product.
Well, take a look at your own words.
But about simpler is much easier to make safe.
I fail to see how something that is much easier to make safe is not safer in the long run. It's the KISS principle. The more complex something is the more chances it has to break. It's that way with mechanical things and with software/electronic_equipment too. Keeping things simple is almost always the most cost-effective way to do things too.
The problems here are not about mechanical being safer (it isn't.) But about simpler is much easier to make safe.
Ummm.... Mechanical linkage is simpler than electronic control, and this makes it easier to make safe. Thus it's safer than electronic control by your own definition.
I think you're reading motivations into what I said that aren't there. But, I'm sorry I offended you. That wasn't my intent.
BTW, when I said "harm", I meant physical harm. That should have been obvious from the context of your words.
I wouldn't necessarily desire that either, but the way I see things the person placed themselves in the situation. They are responsible for their actions, and the consequences arising from those actions. No one else is. They knew when they screwed with someone else's life that there are consequences for doing so, what those consequences were, and did it anyway.
I have no sympathy for them. If they didn't want to end up in prison they shouldn't have been screwing with someone else's life. And, don't say that it's society's fault that they made the choices they did. I know what poverty is. I've been there and done that. I know what it's like to eat nothing but beans and potatoes because that's all you can afford.
I also know what it's like to be abused as a child. I've been there and been abused, quite badly. I know what it's like to live with absolutely zero support from my family for my entire life. However, I've never chosen to screw with someone else's life because it's easier--easier than getting a job and sacrificing to pay for my own education--to get the money everyone needs to survive.
In most instances, if you have a total mechanical failure you will have previously had symptoms/warnings so that you could find the problem before total failure. If you have a mechanical failure in an accelerator pedal linkage you can bounce the pedal, pull it up with your foot, etc.... That won't stop every stuck accelerator but it will solve a few of them and I have done so a few times. Under drive-by-wire there's nothing you can do.
Same with manual clutch and brake systems. Failure usually comes gradually and you have some indication of problem before total failure.
Give me a car that I can still work on and troubleshoot without spending a lot on expensive electronic tools and I'll take that any day over the new technology.
I've owned 5 Japanese vehicles now. A Mazda, a Subaru, a Toyota pickup, and 2 Hondas. None of them ever had any issues with rust, and the Mazda and Toyota spent almost 4 years in the ocean spray on the Oregon coast. On 4 out the 5 vehicles the odometers went/have_gone past 220,000 miles and two are still being used as daily drivers.
The Mazda was retired when a water hose broke and my wife ran the engine out of water completely frying the engine. At the time it was 15 years old, had over 220,000 miles on the odometer, and had no reliability issues. The only reason it was retired was there were no used engines to be found for it on the West Coast according to all the junk yards I talked to.
The Subaru was a gem of a car for the approximately 60,000 miles I drove it. I ended up needing a full-sized pickup though and so traded it in on a Ford F100.
My "newest" Honda is 11 years old and has 250,000+ miles on it. It burns no oil--the dipstick still says full at every 3000 mile oil change, gets 33 mpg on the highway, and the body panels, paint, and interior are still in good shape. No cracks in the dash, no tears in the rugs on the floors, and the seats are in good, if not great, condition. Even the trunk liner and trunk floor are still in good shape. It's a very reliable, very well-built car. All I do for it is fill it with gas, change the oil, and change the timing belt at recommended intervals, and buy tires. I haven't even had to do the brakes yet, although I've only had the car for the last 80,000 miles.
As long as G.M. cars could continue to be sold, making unreliable cars was more profitable. That's similar to making a sloppy computer operating system that is vulnerable to attacks. The sloppiness helps sell new versions.
I agree. All three of the Big 3 car companies first introduced built-in obsolescence back in the 70's.
By the 80's Chevy's 350 cid engines were complete junk. The cam lobes would wear out in 50,000 miles and cylinder walls in many of them were already so badly worn the blocks couldn't be saved during an attempted rebuild. Ford and Chrysler were not much, if any, better than GM, quality wise.
The Japanese got a stranglehold on the car business by building reliable, fuel-efficient vehicles. Their cars were running 250-300,000 miles without major repairs compared to less than 100,000 for the Big 3's cars, and cost a lot less to drive, even without looking at the reliability factor. Figure that in and there was no economic reason to "buy American".
The Big 3 screwed themselves by screwing over their own countrymen and then started advertising that you weren't "patriotic" if you didn't buy their unreliable, expensive-to-drive, expensive-to-maintain pieces of junk. The hypocrisy of it all really stunk to high heaven.
Toyota isn't the first to have this type of problem. It happened with Chrysler products, specifically Jeep, and it took them a long time to fix the issue too. They did as much stalling, prevaricating, and obfuscating as Toyota is doing now, they just weren't as tempting a political target as Toyota is.
Toyota is getting more bad press because both unions and politicians representing areas where there are American automobile manufacturers are located want this publicized/politicized. Unions because Toyota's plants aren't unionized, and politicians because of union donations and they want to hurt Toyota in the hopes that more people will buy American cars so their constituents will vote for them again.
I've seen weird things like this in the HVAC business too. I went out on a no heat service call and found a bad gas valve. I replaced the valve but the new one didn't work either. So, I ordered two new valves and they didn't work either. I ended up putting 4 new valves on that furnace before I found one that worked. It turned out all the valves came from the same factory shipment to the same wholesale supplier, and I wasn't the only one run into multiple bad gas valves. All of them had the same faulty solenoid coil.
That's the only time I saw multiple failed parts in a row in almost 20 years of doing service. So, any time I hear of someone having that kind of failure rate in something electrical I believe them, and don't blame them as my first response. I probably wouldn't have believed it if something similar hadn't happened me, but once you've seen it you know its very possible.
It's rare, but not only possible, it's ultimately inevitable. In any manufacturing process there's always some failed parts, and no mass manufacturer tests every product that rolls off the line. So, if a string of bad parts comes off the line between quality checks they get missed until the customer finds the problem.
No, I'm not arguing that science is synonymous with faith. If you're taking that from what I've said, you're reading that into it from your basic assumptions of what you THINK I'm going to say.
I'm saying the acceptance of things like evolution and the non-existence of God as fact on the basis of 1% of the data is basing that acceptance on faith in an assumption. Why? Because assumptions drawn from the initial 1% of the data of any large study are not a reliable indicator of the final analysis. If you disagree with that analysis say why.
Now, if things such as evolution are not taken as fact then they shouldn't be taught in school as if they are. And, people who base their life on the "rationality" of science should never think they are so sure about it that they can mock anyone else's beliefs. But, that is not what we see on an every day basis is it.... We see exactly the opposite. Anyone who doesn't accept evolution as fact is mocked, derided, etc.... Anyone who believes in God is mocked, called irrational, etc.... And, it's done on nothing more than a belief that the final result science will come up with is never going to be different than the assumptions drawn from the first 1% of the data.
I still have to disagree even though it was jest. When someone starts messing around with other people's lives it's a serious thing that can't be tolerated in a society if that society is to be/remain stable. The punishment needs to fit the crime, at least in my book. Letting someone do what they're best_at/like_the_most, as a form of punishment, is hardly a deterrent.
And, yes, I think deterrence works, if it is applied every time. The reason it doesn't work in our society is because the deterrent's are applied haphazardly/randomly. This haphazard application of punishment/deterrence has been proven to only increase negative behavior as it causes the perpetrators to believe they won't get caught/punished "this time". It's like any intelligent parent soon learns. If you want to correct your child's negative behavior you can't do it by correcting the child only every so often. You have to to apply discipline every time the negative behavior happens.
Ah. Okay, two can play at this game: So, you think selling pot is worth jail time at your expense Mr. Taxpayer?
Yes, I do. And I'm a former pot smoker. I smoked it for a couple of decades. I now recognize just how harmful it is, especially to anyone still in the formative years of their life. I don't think alcohol should be legal either. It's another tremendously destructive drug with its usage creating great costs to society as whole.
What's the value of a human being? What's the value of a life? Who has the right to mess with someone else's life? If anyone does mess with another person's life there needs to be stiff penalties in any workable society for doing so. Messing with someone else's life forfeits the criminal's right to live freely as if they will do it to one person they will do it to another, and another, and another.
skimmed the rest of your post and really there's nothing to reply to because you did not read the context of our conversation.
Ummmm.... I read the entire conversation. I also read your statement in which you couldn't be too mad for too long because money was one of the first forms of "virtualization". To that I say, so what? What's that got to do with anything? You get your identity stolen in our world today you are very liable to lose all your real property and your very real reputation and ability to work.
You're the one that floated the idea that because money was a form of virtualization you couldn't stay mad for long. That you wanted to see no harm come to someone who had stolen everything from you. I just asked why. Just because money is a "virtualized" form of wealth identity theft is any less heinous than stealing someone's real wealth? I see no difference because it's that "virtualized" wealth that makes it possible to get real property and to live a "real" life with some degree of comfort.
So, stealing your good name--credit rating--and all that you own is no different to you than beating you in a game of monopoly? It's just virtual, not real?
Before what you see as virtualized wealth stealing your identity meant stealing all your crops(your ability to feed yourself), your home, your livestock(your means of transportation and a food source), your land, and basically taking over your identity through the fact that they had all your possessions. You would see that as much more serious because there was no 'virtualized' currency involved?
Someone takes your identity today they impoverish you just the same way. They take your home, your land, your transportation, your ability to buy food. Plus, they take your reputation and sometimes your ability to earn a living as your credit rating is now looked at when applying for a job. Just how is that less harmful and somehow 'virtualized' through the existence of money?
Yeah, but you're still talking about giving spammers read and write access to web server files. I can't see how it could possibly end well. It would take just as much or more time to verify everything they did than to just do it yourself.
To me this is like taking an embezzler and putting them in a bank to work off their sentence.
Ummmm... The article points out that this area and the release of methane from it has not been studied before in any detail. There is certainly no history to point to and say that the methane being released now is greater than it was 30, 50, or 100 years ago. It just says it's a "surprising amount".
It's nothing but alarmist to say that something that's basically just been measured for the first time is something new. It's new to the scientists measuring it. That's true, but there is no evidence to point to that this hasn't gone on for a long time and that what's being released now is any more or less than it ever has been.
Coming to the conclusion that this is a problem is assuming facts not in evidence.
Sure, give a person who commits the computer crime of serving up illegal schemes to the public over the internet access to state computers used for serving content to the public over the internet. There's a brain storm that's sure to have great results.
Just how is this a troll? It's the truth. The coldest areas in the world are now being blamed for global warming, and the phenomena being blamed has been happening for thousands of years before anyone claimed global warming existed.
If pointing out the facts of the situation is a troll, then just about any factual post is a troll....
What is it? Ice caps cause global warming. The coldest part of the world is now responsible for the earth getting warmer.
It's ironic how all of these natural sources of methane/CO2 have existed for thousands of years before industrialization or we had anyone telling us that global warming existed, but now all these naturally occurring phenomenons are serious problems which are destroying earth's climate.
Sorry, but I call bullshit. If all these naturally occurring phenomena are responsible for negative changes in earth's climate the earth would have become inhabitable long ago.
Sorry, but I don't believe it, or at least not that this happened any time in the last 5 years.
You, an experienced Linux system admin, couldn't find a compatible keyboard? That just stretches my credulity beyond the breaking point. My experience has been just the opposite. Any keyboard I've ever plugged in has "just worked". Some keys that required Windows software to function might not work, or have a different function under Linux, but entire keyboards failing to work multiple times in a row under any modern kernel? Nope. I don't believe it.
Your claims of dependency hell also leave me doubting. What distro were you running, and how long ago did this supposedly happen?
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Flamebait? Everything I said is true. Just because you don't like what I said doesn't mean it's a troll or flamebait.
Ummm.... I see you ignore the fact that major portions of our manufacturing capability have been moved offshore. When was the last time you bought a TV made in the US? When was the last time you bought a major household appliance that was manufactured entirely in the US? How about a car? How long has it been since the majority of steel used in the US was made here?
It seems that the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organisations have been successful in lobbying the US administration into supporting their cause. This means that the US government will continue to (financially) support an industry that is simply outdated, and has failed to adapt to the changing market - which seems remarkably anti-capitalistic and anti-free market, even for a Democratic president.
Obama has surrounded himself with people that do not believe in the free market and whose heroes are people like Chairman Mao, Lenin, and Marx. He plainly states that he sought out Marxist professors and left wing radicals while in college. Assuming that he would believe differently than the people he has surrounded himself with stretches credulity to its breaking point.
So, how can anyone be surprised when he acts anti-capitalistic and anti-freemarket? If you are, you simply haven't paid attention to what he has done, rather than what he has said. He most definitely believes government knows best, and ought to control far more aspects of American life than it ever has before.
Unfortunately, "ask your doctor" isn't always good advice.
I've gone to quite a few different doctors over during my lifetime and only a few really know what the side effects are of the drugs they prescribe. A couple would literally refuse to believe my symptoms were side effects of the drugs they prescribed even though the symptoms started after beginning the use of the drug, and the symptoms were listed by the manufacturer as a side effect of the drug. In fact, a couple of times the symptoms were under the heading of "if you experience these symptoms contact your doctor immediately". IOW's even serious side effects are prone to be ignored by doctors when patients report them.
Yeah, I've seen it. To tell the truth though, I've yet to see a decent LCD monitor that came with dead pixels. Maybe I'm just extremely lucky in that regard, but that's the way it's been for me.
In my experience Newegg is head and shoulders above any other online retailer I've ever dealt with. Their customer service goes above and beyond on a regular basis.
Here's just one anecdote of what they've done for me. I bought a cheap monitor from them. Six months later it died. I needed a new monitor immediately as at that moment not having my computer available would have cost me quite a bit of money. I told NewEgg my situation and asked them what could be done.
I ended up buying a better monitor and NewEgg paid overnight shipping on the new monitor(I'm a couple of shipping zones away so it was fairly spendy), plus paid return freight on the old monitor. They made the offer. I didn't even have to request it.
They ended up paying out more than $100 in shipping costs on a $350 order to make things right for me. That's not the only time they have paid shipping costs for returned products either. Plus, they've never balked at any request to return anything. It's always been, "what can we do for you", no questions asked.
I've never run into changing pricing or shipping charges with NewEgg either. I have with Amazon. I've been surfing checking prices and when I've gone back to Amazon 1/2 hour later to order because they were the cheapest, the price has gone up as much as 20% the second time I enter their site.
The only other big retail establishment that I've ever done business with that is as serious as NewEgg is about customer service is Costco. They'll take anything back at any time. They even took an opened 25lb bag of cat food back because our dang cat wouldn't eat the stuff even when I mixed it with canned cat food. I didn't think they would take it back but figured I'd give it a try, and they did. The bag was still full so maybe that's why, but it was open.
I'll just comment on your last paragraph.
What's the % of people who can diagnose a failed electronic/electrical component compared to a failed mechanical component? In my experience, and I spent ~20 years as an HVAC service tech, even in professional trades only a small % of people who can diagnose mechanical problems can diagnose electrical problems. In HVAC service, where understanding electrical issues is a big deal, the number of experienced service men who understand such basic fundamentals as what the difference between 6 ohms and 6 megohms means in a circuit is very small.
I only ran across 1 person, besides myself, in the HVAC service business who had a decent electrical background. That doesn't mean people with a decent understanding of electrical fundamentals don't exist, it just means they are a lot more rare than people who understand mechanical issues.
My experience in of 40+ years of using all types of mechanical equipment from vehicles, to construction equipment, to farm vehicles, to recreational vehicles, is that I've never had a mechanical linkage fail without warning. There are always symptoms beforehand: stiff pedal, soft pedal, sticky pedal easily broken loose, noise when using linkage, limited pedal travel, etc.... You don't get that with drive by wire. It's also repairable by a much larger percentage of drivers.
To me that makes mechanical linkages much more "user friendly" and safer.
As to No, easier to make safe, doesn't equal safer end product.
Well, take a look at your own words.
But about simpler is much easier to make safe.
I fail to see how something that is much easier to make safe is not safer in the long run. It's the KISS principle. The more complex something is the more chances it has to break. It's that way with mechanical things and with software/electronic_equipment too. Keeping things simple is almost always the most cost-effective way to do things too.
The problems here are not about mechanical being safer (it isn't.) But about simpler is much easier to make safe.
Ummm.... Mechanical linkage is simpler than electronic control, and this makes it easier to make safe. Thus it's safer than electronic control by your own definition.
I think you're reading motivations into what I said that aren't there. But, I'm sorry I offended you. That wasn't my intent.
BTW, when I said "harm", I meant physical harm. That should have been obvious from the context of your words.
I wouldn't necessarily desire that either, but the way I see things the person placed themselves in the situation. They are responsible for their actions, and the consequences arising from those actions. No one else is. They knew when they screwed with someone else's life that there are consequences for doing so, what those consequences were, and did it anyway.
I have no sympathy for them. If they didn't want to end up in prison they shouldn't have been screwing with someone else's life. And, don't say that it's society's fault that they made the choices they did. I know what poverty is. I've been there and done that. I know what it's like to eat nothing but beans and potatoes because that's all you can afford.
I also know what it's like to be abused as a child. I've been there and been abused, quite badly. I know what it's like to live with absolutely zero support from my family for my entire life. However, I've never chosen to screw with someone else's life because it's easier--easier than getting a job and sacrificing to pay for my own education--to get the money everyone needs to survive.
In most instances, if you have a total mechanical failure you will have previously had symptoms/warnings so that you could find the problem before total failure. If you have a mechanical failure in an accelerator pedal linkage you can bounce the pedal, pull it up with your foot, etc.... That won't stop every stuck accelerator but it will solve a few of them and I have done so a few times. Under drive-by-wire there's nothing you can do.
Same with manual clutch and brake systems. Failure usually comes gradually and you have some indication of problem before total failure.
Give me a car that I can still work on and troubleshoot without spending a lot on expensive electronic tools and I'll take that any day over the new technology.
I've owned 5 Japanese vehicles now. A Mazda, a Subaru, a Toyota pickup, and 2 Hondas. None of them ever had any issues with rust, and the Mazda and Toyota spent almost 4 years in the ocean spray on the Oregon coast. On 4 out the 5 vehicles the odometers went/have_gone past 220,000 miles and two are still being used as daily drivers.
The Mazda was retired when a water hose broke and my wife ran the engine out of water completely frying the engine. At the time it was 15 years old, had over 220,000 miles on the odometer, and had no reliability issues. The only reason it was retired was there were no used engines to be found for it on the West Coast according to all the junk yards I talked to.
The Subaru was a gem of a car for the approximately 60,000 miles I drove it. I ended up needing a full-sized pickup though and so traded it in on a Ford F100.
My "newest" Honda is 11 years old and has 250,000+ miles on it. It burns no oil--the dipstick still says full at every 3000 mile oil change, gets 33 mpg on the highway, and the body panels, paint, and interior are still in good shape. No cracks in the dash, no tears in the rugs on the floors, and the seats are in good, if not great, condition. Even the trunk liner and trunk floor are still in good shape. It's a very reliable, very well-built car. All I do for it is fill it with gas, change the oil, and change the timing belt at recommended intervals, and buy tires. I haven't even had to do the brakes yet, although I've only had the car for the last 80,000 miles.
As long as G.M. cars could continue to be sold, making unreliable cars was more profitable. That's similar to making a sloppy computer operating system that is vulnerable to attacks. The sloppiness helps sell new versions.
I agree. All three of the Big 3 car companies first introduced built-in obsolescence back in the 70's.
By the 80's Chevy's 350 cid engines were complete junk. The cam lobes would wear out in 50,000 miles and cylinder walls in many of them were already so badly worn the blocks couldn't be saved during an attempted rebuild. Ford and Chrysler were not much, if any, better than GM, quality wise.
The Japanese got a stranglehold on the car business by building reliable, fuel-efficient vehicles. Their cars were running 250-300,000 miles without major repairs compared to less than 100,000 for the Big 3's cars, and cost a lot less to drive, even without looking at the reliability factor. Figure that in and there was no economic reason to "buy American".
The Big 3 screwed themselves by screwing over their own countrymen and then started advertising that you weren't "patriotic" if you didn't buy their unreliable, expensive-to-drive, expensive-to-maintain pieces of junk. The hypocrisy of it all really stunk to high heaven.
Toyota isn't the first to have this type of problem. It happened with Chrysler products, specifically Jeep, and it took them a long time to fix the issue too. They did as much stalling, prevaricating, and obfuscating as Toyota is doing now, they just weren't as tempting a political target as Toyota is.
Toyota is getting more bad press because both unions and politicians representing areas where there are American automobile manufacturers are located want this publicized/politicized. Unions because Toyota's plants aren't unionized, and politicians because of union donations and they want to hurt Toyota in the hopes that more people will buy American cars so their constituents will vote for them again.
I've seen weird things like this in the HVAC business too. I went out on a no heat service call and found a bad gas valve. I replaced the valve but the new one didn't work either. So, I ordered two new valves and they didn't work either. I ended up putting 4 new valves on that furnace before I found one that worked. It turned out all the valves came from the same factory shipment to the same wholesale supplier, and I wasn't the only one run into multiple bad gas valves. All of them had the same faulty solenoid coil.
That's the only time I saw multiple failed parts in a row in almost 20 years of doing service. So, any time I hear of someone having that kind of failure rate in something electrical I believe them, and don't blame them as my first response. I probably wouldn't have believed it if something similar hadn't happened me, but once you've seen it you know its very possible.
It's rare, but not only possible, it's ultimately inevitable. In any manufacturing process there's always some failed parts, and no mass manufacturer tests every product that rolls off the line. So, if a string of bad parts comes off the line between quality checks they get missed until the customer finds the problem.
No, I'm not arguing that science is synonymous with faith. If you're taking that from what I've said, you're reading that into it from your basic assumptions of what you THINK I'm going to say.
I'm saying the acceptance of things like evolution and the non-existence of God as fact on the basis of 1% of the data is basing that acceptance on faith in an assumption. Why? Because assumptions drawn from the initial 1% of the data of any large study are not a reliable indicator of the final analysis. If you disagree with that analysis say why.
Now, if things such as evolution are not taken as fact then they shouldn't be taught in school as if they are. And, people who base their life on the "rationality" of science should never think they are so sure about it that they can mock anyone else's beliefs. But, that is not what we see on an every day basis is it.... We see exactly the opposite. Anyone who doesn't accept evolution as fact is mocked, derided, etc.... Anyone who believes in God is mocked, called irrational, etc.... And, it's done on nothing more than a belief that the final result science will come up with is never going to be different than the assumptions drawn from the first 1% of the data.
That's funny. :)
I still have to disagree even though it was jest. When someone starts messing around with other people's lives it's a serious thing that can't be tolerated in a society if that society is to be/remain stable. The punishment needs to fit the crime, at least in my book. Letting someone do what they're best_at/like_the_most, as a form of punishment, is hardly a deterrent.
And, yes, I think deterrence works, if it is applied every time. The reason it doesn't work in our society is because the deterrent's are applied haphazardly/randomly. This haphazard application of punishment/deterrence has been proven to only increase negative behavior as it causes the perpetrators to believe they won't get caught/punished "this time". It's like any intelligent parent soon learns. If you want to correct your child's negative behavior you can't do it by correcting the child only every so often. You have to to apply discipline every time the negative behavior happens.
Ah. Okay, two can play at this game: So, you think selling pot is worth jail time at your expense Mr. Taxpayer?
Yes, I do. And I'm a former pot smoker. I smoked it for a couple of decades. I now recognize just how harmful it is, especially to anyone still in the formative years of their life. I don't think alcohol should be legal either. It's another tremendously destructive drug with its usage creating great costs to society as whole.
What's the value of a human being? What's the value of a life? Who has the right to mess with someone else's life? If anyone does mess with another person's life there needs to be stiff penalties in any workable society for doing so. Messing with someone else's life forfeits the criminal's right to live freely as if they will do it to one person they will do it to another, and another, and another.
skimmed the rest of your post and really there's nothing to reply to because you did not read the context of our conversation.
Ummmm.... I read the entire conversation. I also read your statement in which you couldn't be too mad for too long because money was one of the first forms of "virtualization". To that I say, so what? What's that got to do with anything? You get your identity stolen in our world today you are very liable to lose all your real property and your very real reputation and ability to work.
You're the one that floated the idea that because money was a form of virtualization you couldn't stay mad for long. That you wanted to see no harm come to someone who had stolen everything from you. I just asked why. Just because money is a "virtualized" form of wealth identity theft is any less heinous than stealing someone's real wealth? I see no difference because it's that "virtualized" wealth that makes it possible to get real property and to live a "real" life with some degree of comfort.
So, stealing your good name--credit rating--and all that you own is no different to you than beating you in a game of monopoly? It's just virtual, not real?
Before what you see as virtualized wealth stealing your identity meant stealing all your crops(your ability to feed yourself), your home, your livestock(your means of transportation and a food source), your land, and basically taking over your identity through the fact that they had all your possessions. You would see that as much more serious because there was no 'virtualized' currency involved?
Someone takes your identity today they impoverish you just the same way. They take your home, your land, your transportation, your ability to buy food. Plus, they take your reputation and sometimes your ability to earn a living as your credit rating is now looked at when applying for a job. Just how is that less harmful and somehow 'virtualized' through the existence of money?
Yeah, but you're still talking about giving spammers read and write access to web server files. I can't see how it could possibly end well. It would take just as much or more time to verify everything they did than to just do it yourself.
To me this is like taking an embezzler and putting them in a bank to work off their sentence.
Ummmm... The article points out that this area and the release of methane from it has not been studied before in any detail. There is certainly no history to point to and say that the methane being released now is greater than it was 30, 50, or 100 years ago. It just says it's a "surprising amount".
It's nothing but alarmist to say that something that's basically just been measured for the first time is something new. It's new to the scientists measuring it. That's true, but there is no evidence to point to that this hasn't gone on for a long time and that what's being released now is any more or less than it ever has been.
Coming to the conclusion that this is a problem is assuming facts not in evidence.
Sure, give a person who commits the computer crime of serving up illegal schemes to the public over the internet access to state computers used for serving content to the public over the internet. There's a brain storm that's sure to have great results.
Just how is this a troll? It's the truth. The coldest areas in the world are now being blamed for global warming, and the phenomena being blamed has been happening for thousands of years before anyone claimed global warming existed.
If pointing out the facts of the situation is a troll, then just about any factual post is a troll....
What is it? Ice caps cause global warming. The coldest part of the world is now responsible for the earth getting warmer.
It's ironic how all of these natural sources of methane/CO2 have existed for thousands of years before industrialization or we had anyone telling us that global warming existed, but now all these naturally occurring phenomenons are serious problems which are destroying earth's climate.
Sorry, but I call bullshit. If all these naturally occurring phenomena are responsible for negative changes in earth's climate the earth would have become inhabitable long ago.
Sorry, but I don't believe it, or at least not that this happened any time in the last 5 years.
You, an experienced Linux system admin, couldn't find a compatible keyboard? That just stretches my credulity beyond the breaking point. My experience has been just the opposite. Any keyboard I've ever plugged in has "just worked". Some keys that required Windows software to function might not work, or have a different function under Linux, but entire keyboards failing to work multiple times in a row under any modern kernel? Nope. I don't believe it.
Your claims of dependency hell also leave me doubting. What distro were you running, and how long ago did this supposedly happen?