In some cases, if there is active quality control and testing after initial manufacture, you can use the ones off the line which are not quite up to the full uncrippled spec but work at the crippled level. At the extreme, you can just test all of your output, bin it by quality, and honestly sell different products from the same manufacturing process- this can happen in CPU manufacture.
More often, the proportions of high to low quality manufactured do not match what the marketing people think the proportions of high-end to low-end should be (or the actual sales figures in the case of a mature product line) and so you just toss some of the high bin quality parts in with the lower quality parts until the proportions are correct.
Sort of, except Windows users are not exactly a "subset," they are the majority. And it's not like they are telling you that you can't vote at all.
Windows users are exactly and unequivocally a subset of the population. To disprove this you would need to prove that either there exist no Windows users in the population or that all members of the population are windows users. That this subset is a majority is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's a subset.
Majority or minority, what the proportions are is not the point. Making voting easier for a portion of the population will generate more votes from that portion, making voting more difficult for another portion will result in fewer votes from that portion. It's unfortunate, but the amount of hassle involved in casting a vote will change some people's minds as to whether or not to vote. Allowing politicians to make things easier for some would inspire active manipulation of votes- Candidate A would act to make it easier for a demographic who likes to vote for A to vote, (For example, if the segment of the population who have and would prefer to use a computer to vote would tend to prefer A) therefore indirectly garnering more votes for A.
Please be a bit more realistic, there really isn't anything to compare this to. Are you suggesting that IBrowse 1.0 for the Amiga should be supported as well? What about Netscape 2.3? Well, ideally, yeah, but then you take a big hit on potential security, which is the most important factor at the moment.
No, actually I think that a voting system that makes it much easier for voters who have a computer with any operating system and internet access to vote than individuals without is unfairly manipulating the voting pool and should be rejected. The fact that this would also require individuals to pay ~$100 to a specific corporation to make their voting easier is an additional problem, but not as bad as is the institutionalized encouragement of a certain subset of the voters to vote.
I object to any voting method which makes the difficulty involved in the casting of a vote asymmetric in any way among the entire voting population. Such 'reforms' are far too open to abuse and manipulation.
Having a method of voting require buying a specific product from a particular company would be intolerable, whatever the company was.
It wouldn't be just to make voting selectively easier for those people who own a John Deere(TM) lawn mower, and it's not just to make voting easier for those people who own a Microsoft Windows(TM) operating system.
Selectively making voting easier for only a subset of the population is a bad idea in the first place, but doing it for a corporate sponsor is even worse.
Hitlers Genocide was based on his idea of race. If it was just religion then Jews that converted would not have been put into the camps.
"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Sounds unambiguously religious to me. Hitler campaigned against athiests as godless communists to appeal to his Catholic constituents in the early 1930s. Whatever his personal beliefs were (or were not), he consistently claimed to be catholic and he used religion to gain and hold power.
To reject everyone who does evil in the name of a religion as having 'BAD FAITH' and discounting them makes no sense. If we consider the goodness of, say, everyone with facial hair- but then disqualify everyone with facial hair who does evil as falsely claiming to have facial hair, or of having "BAD FACIAL HAIR", then we can conclude that the remaining people with facial hair are much better people than average and that having facial hair therefore inspires goodness. This is nonsense- in the same way, dismissing evil religious people as 'not really religious' and then concluding that religious people are good is assuming your own conclusion.
you have a a duble blind experiment to prove that?
A double blind experiment on religion? How, exactly, could you make the participants in such a study blind to whether or not they are religious? Conversely, how would you make participants blind to their own scientific accomplishments? Once they're blind to whether or not they are religious, how do you objectively test whether or not they are religious?
My claim was correlation, not causation. A survey of members of the (US) National Academy of Science was published in the journal Nature on 23 July 1998, page 303: "Leading scientists still reject God" (I link to the table of contents, which I think are accesable without a subscription... but I could be wrong about that.) In it, all 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences were sent a survey and slightly over 50% responded. Of those, 7% responded that they had a personal belief in God, 72% that they had a personal disbelief, and 21% responded with doubt or agnosticism. This belief appears to be down from historical surveys of 'distinguished natural scientists', 28% of whom reported belief in God in a survey in 1914, and 15% reporting belief in 1933.
Original bias: If any of the many motivations behind a given war is not religious that war is considered not religious.
Reversed bias: if any of the many motivations behind a given war is religious that war is considered a religious war.
I cannot think of a single war in which religion was not a factor.
Original bias: any good action done by someone professing a religion is considered to be caused by that religion.
Reversed bias: any evil action done by someone professing a religion is considered to be caused by that religion.
A lot of evil has happened because of faith. Everything from slavery having been supported widely by local ministers and biblical passages in which slavery was condoned, the Ku Klux Clan's religion-based cross-burning, the Hindu faith being used to justify and enable oppression of people of lower caste by people of higher caste, to Hitler's genocides based on religion. The official SS uniform belt buckle stated in large letters "Gott Mit Uns"('God is with us'.)
To clarify, I'm not stating that the above statement is an unbiased or fair summary of the effects of religion; rather, I'm saying that it's just as biased as the parent post's claims but in the opposite direction.
As to the appeal to scientific authority in the last paragraph, for every scientist who has a deep faith there are many who do not. Scientific accomplishment is strongly, inversely correlated with religious faith.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." - Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner for his work on Quantum Electrodynamics.
It is said that in order to teach a subject well you have to understand it well- this is likely one of the reasons it's so hard to teach or explain Quantum.
When trying to explain a complex subject simply, there comes a point where the only way to simplify a subject further is to either miss the point entirely or to get something drastically wrong. Quantum mechanics really can't be well described without lots and lots of math- the point where further simplification makes the explanation wrong happens when the 'simplified' explanation is still very complicated and hard to understand.
Centuries later, Shakespeare/ Shake-speare/ Shakespere/ Shakespear/ Shakspeare/ Shackspeare would continue this grand tradition of spelling things erratically, including his own name.
There existed no English dictionary at the time, and most formal documents (and nearly all scholarly texts) were written in Latin or Greek. In the second paragraph Chaucer states that the reason he was writing in English was that his young son for whom he's allegedly writing this didn't know Latin yet. Paragraphs two and three are basically a long justification (excuse?) for writing this whole thing in English, because literate people of the time were all expected to know Latin and Greek. One of the reasons many of Chaucer's works survived and are read to this day (e.g. Canterbury Tales) is that he was willing to write in English- unusual for the time.
Yes, that's an excellent example of them doing the right thing.
Mindless indoctrination of children is bad, mindless religious indoctrination of children is worse.
I realize it's easy to dismiss legal arguments as being partisan, but that's often missing the point. "Under God" is unambiguously monotheistic, and the Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The fact that you personally agree with the sentiment does not mean that it's just to force all Hindu, Buddhist, and athiest kids to say it.
Be aware that Tom's Hardware reports results in which Intel consistently performs better with respect to AMD in comparison to most other people's results.
It's thought that 2He may be formed as an intermediate by certain radioactive nuclei in states where single proton emission is forbidden -see this report. If it can exist, it would decay very very rapidly.
Troughton appeared as the second Doctor in color in both "The Three Doctors" and "The Five Doctors"; that could where the memories are coming from. There are numerous color still photographs as well from the time.
Yeah, the Mars team works for many years on a project, thinks up a cool idea for a memento which also has some practical use, then commission and buy it using their own salaries. The wasteful bastards!
Then, as the article clearly states, the watchmaker they commissioned (who is not a government employee) sells additional watches based on his design:
After he accommodates all rover team members who wish to own a custom-made Mars watch, he will market his patented rarity to the public.
That watchmaker once got some money from the personal wealth of someone who was a government employee at the time, so everything he makes from his invention is obviously wasteful government spending!
Please read the article. They are currently using a relatively small, relatively low power laser in a lab, but they believe the process is capable of being scaled up. From the article:
The key limitation of the technique seems to be its slow cutting speed, less than 1mm per second, which is restricted by the slow (20Hz) repetition rate of the laser. Li says that a UV laser with a higher repetition rate and output power could significantly increase the depth and speed of the cutting.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the country of Canada didn't exist in any form until 1867. The country the US was at war with in 1812 was Great Britain, and the result of that conflict was basically a tie (no land exchanged, no reparations, just a resumption of previous borders). See the Treaty of Ghent. This was also notable for the United States in that Great Britain recognized it as a country and not as a rebel province.
It is very interesting how the subject of this war is taught in the three countries. Canadians seem to think 'they' defeated the US, in the US it's referred to as a draw but notable for Britain's recognition of its nationhood, and in Great Britain if it's mentioned at all it's a brief footnote on the far more important Napoleonic wars.
If you really want a DVD/CD drive, you can get one in the above for another $250, but I don't see why a supercomputer node would need one.
To match those specs even more closely (except for a better graphics card and the faster Opteron processors, or course) here's this:
Dual Opteron Workstation:
Two AMD Opteron 246 CPUs each w/ 1mb cache
Tyan S2875ANRF Tiger K8W motherboard w/ Gbit, FireWire
IO port: 2 x USB, 1 x Parallel, 1 x Serial, 1 x PS2 keyboard, 1 x PS2 mouse
4096mb PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM, Registered ECC, 4 DIMMs
3ware Escalade 8506-4 SATA RAID controllre, 4 ports
2 x WD 2500JD Caviar 250gb SATA drive, 7200RPM
NEC ND-1300A DVD-RW/DVD+RW/CD-RW drive, ATAPI
nVidia Quadro4 750 XGL graphics card, 128mb, dual head w/ DVI
Teac 1.44mb floppy drive
Pedestal case with 11 drive bays, 450W power supply
Logitech 3 button mouse
IBM 104-key PS/2 keyboard
Built-in two Gigabit network cards
Linux pre-configured, w/ CDs/Docs
MS Windows XP Professional installed for multi-boot, w/ CD/docs
No, the subject was building supercomputers! The two cited boxes in the great-grandparent post are certainly not "god box"es for that purpose. Well, some things are probably a bit overdone- no need for the graphics cards, DVD/CD drives, 56k internal modem (ha!), Windows OS. On the other hand, The SATA drives are inadequate and should be replaced with SCSI drives. Of course, the interconnects should be purchased seperately, but will likely cost several thousand per node.
The grandparent is talking about computers for end users, which is NOT the topic of discussion at the moment. It would be pointless and silly to use those computers for nodes of a supercomputer. It should be modded offtopic in my opinion, not troll, but at the moment it's modded "interesting" for reasons I don't see.
I have seen this reaction a few times from jackasses and I wonder why people are willing to dismiss a poster because the topic is a bit nerdy.
I'm completely fine with a book which has something probably not possible (say, long-distance personal teleportation) in an SF setting where the details are never discussed. That gives me no reason to think about it, and the author isn't trying to be pretentious about it. Even a very brief, non-detailed 'explanations' is okay ('using a phenomenon related to quantum tunneling', say.)
The problem arises when a half-assed explanation with numerous known problems obvious to someone with a technical background is given. That will annoy me, as it'll both trigger me to think about why it's impossible and it will also make me see the author as someone who tends to spew bullshit.
Authors should either get the science right or not talk about it at all... trying to bluff through science is what annoys me. This being said, I haven't read the book in question, so I don't know where it falls on this spectrum.
Re:What we DON'T know about other life existing. .
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All known forms of communication, including methods using separated subatomic particle waveforms with coupled spins are limited by the speed of EM transmission.
It is true that observing one of a pair of paired waveforms would collapse the other to the opposite spin, instantly; but no information is transferred faster than light in this way. The uncollapsed particle waveforms cannot be moved faster than light, and there's no way to tell by observing the waveform whether or not the conjugate pair had already been observed, so no information is passed. The same job could be done by putting opposite random results on pieces of paper and putting them in envelopes, and transporting them away from each other.
Faster than light communication is equivalent to time travel in a different relativistic reference frame, and as such its existence in the general case would violate causality.
We don't really have proof that causality holds true, but a lot of problems(and paradoxes) arise if it doesn't.
Re:We know other life exists
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...and even a very large number multiplied by an unknown probability[1] still results in an unknown product.
[1] we exist, so the probability can't be 0... but it can be less than 1/(the very large number from above), and we have no evidence one way or the other.
Re:We know other life exists
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The great-grandparent claimed that ILE (Intelligent Life Elsewhere) has to exist.
The grandparent requested proof of the claim of the great-grandparent, and then claimed that he highly doubts there is ILE, while acknowledging the possibility of its existence.
The parent then asked the grandparent to prove his claim.
The only claim made by Chess_the_cat was that Chess_the_cat highly doubts that there is ILE. I think that his making a statement that this is his belief is solid prima facie evidence that this is his belief, particularly since I see no reason for him to have lied about his own beliefs.
I personally expect that there is ILE (and no, I can't prove to you that this is what I think), but I disagree with the initial statement that it has to exist. I don't find it implausable that Chess_the_Cat does not expect that there is ILE.
Re:Extra Terresterials
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· Score: 3, Informative
Almost all space junk is in Earth orbit, as most space missions to date haven't gone past earth orbit. Past earth orbit... space is big enough that we'd have to deliberately seek out and aim toward our space junk to have a reasonable chance of encountering any.
I assume you're referring to the Mars rovers. On Mars, one big reason to send more landers is to look at new areas of the surface (Spirit is on much different terrain than previous landers were, in an area where some theorize there was water in the past.) Also, the logistics are terrible for recyling landers even if we wanted to land in the same spot- landing destinations are far from precise, and the equipment required to recycle parts of an old lander might be more massive than the usable parts obtainable from one. Plus, it would be one more thing which could go wrong in a mission that's difficult enough that missions to Mars often fail to even return a signal.
Years ago, the THG site published some very negative reviews on Intel chips in combination with Rambus. These were very damaging to Intel and Rambus at the time... but the articles are no longer available on the site and the person who wrote them (Van Smith) no longer works for THG.
Slashdot Mirror
More often, the proportions of high to low quality manufactured do not match what the marketing people think the proportions of high-end to low-end should be (or the actual sales figures in the case of a mature product line) and so you just toss some of the high bin quality parts in with the lower quality parts until the proportions are correct.
Majority or minority, what the proportions are is not the point. Making voting easier for a portion of the population will generate more votes from that portion, making voting more difficult for another portion will result in fewer votes from that portion. It's unfortunate, but the amount of hassle involved in casting a vote will change some people's minds as to whether or not to vote. Allowing politicians to make things easier for some would inspire active manipulation of votes- Candidate A would act to make it easier for a demographic who likes to vote for A to vote, (For example, if the segment of the population who have and would prefer to use a computer to vote would tend to prefer A) therefore indirectly garnering more votes for A.
No, actually I think that a voting system that makes it much easier for voters who have a computer with any operating system and internet access to vote than individuals without is unfairly manipulating the voting pool and should be rejected. The fact that this would also require individuals to pay ~$100 to a specific corporation to make their voting easier is an additional problem, but not as bad as is the institutionalized encouragement of a certain subset of the voters to vote.I object to any voting method which makes the difficulty involved in the casting of a vote asymmetric in any way among the entire voting population. Such 'reforms' are far too open to abuse and manipulation.
O no, it isn't. Tied in the greek, I suppose.
It wouldn't be just to make voting selectively easier for those people who own a John Deere(TM) lawn mower, and it's not just to make voting easier for those people who own a Microsoft Windows(TM) operating system.
Selectively making voting easier for only a subset of the population is a bad idea in the first place, but doing it for a corporate sponsor is even worse.
I couldn't resist.
I tried it, and that search resulted in no hits.
Sounds unambiguously religious to me. Hitler campaigned against athiests as godless communists to appeal to his Catholic constituents in the early 1930s. Whatever his personal beliefs were (or were not), he consistently claimed to be catholic and he used religion to gain and hold power.
To reject everyone who does evil in the name of a religion as having 'BAD FAITH' and discounting them makes no sense. If we consider the goodness of, say, everyone with facial hair- but then disqualify everyone with facial hair who does evil as falsely claiming to have facial hair, or of having "BAD FACIAL HAIR", then we can conclude that the remaining people with facial hair are much better people than average and that having facial hair therefore inspires goodness. This is nonsense- in the same way, dismissing evil religious people as 'not really religious' and then concluding that religious people are good is assuming your own conclusion.
A double blind experiment on religion? How, exactly, could you make the participants in such a study blind to whether or not they are religious? Conversely, how would you make participants blind to their own scientific accomplishments? Once they're blind to whether or not they are religious, how do you objectively test whether or not they are religious?My claim was correlation, not causation. A survey of members of the (US) National Academy of Science was published in the journal Nature on 23 July 1998, page 303: "Leading scientists still reject God" (I link to the table of contents, which I think are accesable without a subscription... but I could be wrong about that.) In it, all 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences were sent a survey and slightly over 50% responded. Of those, 7% responded that they had a personal belief in God, 72% that they had a personal disbelief, and 21% responded with doubt or agnosticism. This belief appears to be down from historical surveys of 'distinguished natural scientists', 28% of whom reported belief in God in a survey in 1914, and 15% reporting belief in 1933.
Original bias: If any of the many motivations behind a given war is not religious that war is considered not religious.
Reversed bias: if any of the many motivations behind a given war is religious that war is considered a religious war.
I cannot think of a single war in which religion was not a factor.
Original bias: any good action done by someone professing a religion is considered to be caused by that religion.
Reversed bias: any evil action done by someone professing a religion is considered to be caused by that religion.
A lot of evil has happened because of faith. Everything from slavery having been supported widely by local ministers and biblical passages in which slavery was condoned, the Ku Klux Clan's religion-based cross-burning, the Hindu faith being used to justify and enable oppression of people of lower caste by people of higher caste, to Hitler's genocides based on religion. The official SS uniform belt buckle stated in large letters "Gott Mit Uns"('God is with us'.)
To clarify, I'm not stating that the above statement is an unbiased or fair summary of the effects of religion; rather, I'm saying that it's just as biased as the parent post's claims but in the opposite direction.
As to the appeal to scientific authority in the last paragraph, for every scientist who has a deep faith there are many who do not. Scientific accomplishment is strongly, inversely correlated with religious faith.
It is said that in order to teach a subject well you have to understand it well- this is likely one of the reasons it's so hard to teach or explain Quantum.
When trying to explain a complex subject simply, there comes a point where the only way to simplify a subject further is to either miss the point entirely or to get something drastically wrong. Quantum mechanics really can't be well described without lots and lots of math- the point where further simplification makes the explanation wrong happens when the 'simplified' explanation is still very complicated and hard to understand.
There existed no English dictionary at the time, and most formal documents (and nearly all scholarly texts) were written in Latin or Greek. In the second paragraph Chaucer states that the reason he was writing in English was that his young son for whom he's allegedly writing this didn't know Latin yet. Paragraphs two and three are basically a long justification (excuse?) for writing this whole thing in English, because literate people of the time were all expected to know Latin and Greek. One of the reasons many of Chaucer's works survived and are read to this day (e.g. Canterbury Tales) is that he was willing to write in English- unusual for the time.
Mindless indoctrination of children is bad, mindless religious indoctrination of children is worse.
I realize it's easy to dismiss legal arguments as being partisan, but that's often missing the point. "Under God" is unambiguously monotheistic, and the Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The fact that you personally agree with the sentiment does not mean that it's just to force all Hindu, Buddhist, and athiest kids to say it.
This appears to be deliberately skewed- for example, in their recent Athlon64/P4 comparison they ran they used slower memory sticks with 2-4-4-8 memory timings on the Athlon64 versus 2-2-2-5 timings on the P4.
It's thought that 2He may be formed as an intermediate by certain radioactive nuclei in states where single proton emission is forbidden -see this report. If it can exist, it would decay very very rapidly.
Troughton appeared as the second Doctor in color in both "The Three Doctors" and "The Five Doctors"; that could where the memories are coming from. There are numerous color still photographs as well from the time.
Then, as the article clearly states, the watchmaker they commissioned (who is not a government employee) sells additional watches based on his design: That watchmaker once got some money from the personal wealth of someone who was a government employee at the time, so everything he makes from his invention is obviously wasteful government spending!
It is very interesting how the subject of this war is taught in the three countries. Canadians seem to think 'they' defeated the US, in the US it's referred to as a draw but notable for Britain's recognition of its nationhood, and in Great Britain if it's mentioned at all it's a brief footnote on the far more important Napoleonic wars.
Everybody grab a broom, it's shenanigans!
Dual Opteron 2U Server:
Two AMD Opteron 246 CPUs each w/ 1mb cache
MSI K8D Master-F MS-9131 dual motherboard w/ 2 NICs
4096mb PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM, Registered ECC, 4 DIMMs
3ware Escalade 8506-4 SATA RAID controllre, 4 ports
2 x WD 2500JD Caviar 250gb SATA drive, 7200RPM
ATI Rage XL graphics card
2U rackmount chassis with sliding mounting rail kit, 420W power
Teac 1.44mb floppy drive
Built-in two Gigabit network cards
Linux pre-configured, w/ CDs/Docs
Two year replacement warranty
Price: $4917.00 (plus shipping)
If you really want a DVD/CD drive, you can get one in the above for another $250, but I don't see why a supercomputer node would need one.
To match those specs even more closely (except for a better graphics card and the faster Opteron processors, or course) here's this:
Dual Opteron Workstation:
Two AMD Opteron 246 CPUs each w/ 1mb cache
Tyan S2875ANRF Tiger K8W motherboard w/ Gbit, FireWire
IO port: 2 x USB, 1 x Parallel, 1 x Serial, 1 x PS2 keyboard, 1 x PS2 mouse
4096mb PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM, Registered ECC, 4 DIMMs
3ware Escalade 8506-4 SATA RAID controllre, 4 ports
2 x WD 2500JD Caviar 250gb SATA drive, 7200RPM
NEC ND-1300A DVD-RW/DVD+RW/CD-RW drive, ATAPI
nVidia Quadro4 750 XGL graphics card, 128mb, dual head w/ DVI
Teac 1.44mb floppy drive
Pedestal case with 11 drive bays, 450W power supply
Logitech 3 button mouse
IBM 104-key PS/2 keyboard
Built-in two Gigabit network cards
Linux pre-configured, w/ CDs/Docs
MS Windows XP Professional installed for multi-boot, w/ CD/docs
Price: $5581.00
Yes, the Mac is more expensive for this type of system.
The grandparent is talking about computers for end users, which is NOT the topic of discussion at the moment. It would be pointless and silly to use those computers for nodes of a supercomputer. It should be modded offtopic in my opinion, not troll, but at the moment it's modded "interesting" for reasons I don't see.
I'm completely fine with a book which has something probably not possible (say, long-distance personal teleportation) in an SF setting where the details are never discussed. That gives me no reason to think about it, and the author isn't trying to be pretentious about it. Even a very brief, non-detailed 'explanations' is okay ('using a phenomenon related to quantum tunneling', say.)
The problem arises when a half-assed explanation with numerous known problems obvious to someone with a technical background is given. That will annoy me, as it'll both trigger me to think about why it's impossible and it will also make me see the author as someone who tends to spew bullshit.
Authors should either get the science right or not talk about it at all... trying to bluff through science is what annoys me. This being said, I haven't read the book in question, so I don't know where it falls on this spectrum.
It is true that observing one of a pair of paired waveforms would collapse the other to the opposite spin, instantly; but no information is transferred faster than light in this way. The uncollapsed particle waveforms cannot be moved faster than light, and there's no way to tell by observing the waveform whether or not the conjugate pair had already been observed, so no information is passed. The same job could be done by putting opposite random results on pieces of paper and putting them in envelopes, and transporting them away from each other.
Faster than light communication is equivalent to time travel in a different relativistic reference frame, and as such its existence in the general case would violate causality.
We don't really have proof that causality holds true, but a lot of problems(and paradoxes) arise if it doesn't.
[1] we exist, so the probability can't be 0... but it can be less than 1/(the very large number from above), and we have no evidence one way or the other.
The grandparent requested proof of the claim of the great-grandparent, and then claimed that he highly doubts there is ILE, while acknowledging the possibility of its existence.
The parent then asked the grandparent to prove his claim.
The only claim made by Chess_the_cat was that Chess_the_cat highly doubts that there is ILE. I think that his making a statement that this is his belief is solid prima facie evidence that this is his belief, particularly since I see no reason for him to have lied about his own beliefs.
I personally expect that there is ILE (and no, I can't prove to you that this is what I think), but I disagree with the initial statement that it has to exist. I don't find it implausable that Chess_the_Cat does not expect that there is ILE.
I assume you're referring to the Mars rovers. On Mars, one big reason to send more landers is to look at new areas of the surface (Spirit is on much different terrain than previous landers were, in an area where some theorize there was water in the past.) Also, the logistics are terrible for recyling landers even if we wanted to land in the same spot- landing destinations are far from precise, and the equipment required to recycle parts of an old lander might be more massive than the usable parts obtainable from one. Plus, it would be one more thing which could go wrong in a mission that's difficult enough that missions to Mars often fail to even return a signal.
After he left, THG retroactively edited authorship bylines on his articles. (his take) Not good journalism practice, and it was around this time when THG became very friendly to Intel and hostile to AMD.