I've mostly stopped taking laptops on vacations too. Partly for being heavy and expensive, and partly because they're better at web surfing and killing time. I know that if I have a full laptop, I'll be tempted to spend lots of time messing with the internet in the hotel room or wherever. But I did't go wherever I went to sit around and surf the net - I can do that at home.
The phone can surf the net and stay in touch and do all of that stuff, but it's just a little annoying to use with the small screen and tiny keyboard. For me, it hits the sweet spot of good enough to get the information I actually need, but bad enough that I'm not sucked into hours of net surfing.
Interesting... it's hard to really judge without seeing more of what she's written, but it sounds more like someone venting a little after a rough day than someone really nasty.
Either way, it looks like her real crime is being identifiable while ranting about her workplace on the internet. Yeah, we all need to rant a little about how our job stinks without being worried about who we're offending, but doing it in such a way that your boss, co-workers, subordinates, or students and their parents can find it and associate it with you personally is just dumb. If your blog is public and you can be identified from it, then people who know you in real life are going to find it eventually. So if you're gonna blog, there's only two ways to go - squeaky clean and under your real name, or under a pseudonym with no personally identifiable information and telling the world exactly what you think. Anything in between is going to get you in trouble eventually.
Of course it's ironic that she's ranting about how dumb some of her kids are while getting caught for it...
What you're missing here is the scale, in addition to the nature of those things. Yeah, there have been violations of civil rights in the US, of arguable levels of legitimacy, but the real difference is that the number of people these things are happening to is basically tiny. How many people are in Gitmo, like 300-400 or so? Now look up how many people are in political prison in China and Iran and other such countries, with little reason for them being there except that they criticized the Government or pissed off someone powerful.
There's a big difference between reading about a few dozen people's rights being violated in the newspaper, when you've never met or even heard of them before, and when it happens to your neighbors, friends, and family on a routine basis. One generates some legitimate concern among average people, the other generates stark terror in the minds of the entire population. If you hear your good friend make an offhand remark critical of the Government one day and he disappears, with the police telling you to STFU before you disappear too, then you'd be quite justified in being terrified and you might be living in an actual police state. If you read about Gitmo in the newspaper and post rants about it on the Internet with nothing happening to you, then you aren't anywhere near being in a police state, and if this makes you terrified, then you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yup, they are. So what? Israel could easily pound the Palestinians 24/7 with indiscriminate artillery and airstrikes at almost no risk to themselves whenever they felt like it. Instead, they send in soldiers to put their lives at risk making their best attempt to kill only the actual terrorists. And for this, they get essentially no credit from the peace crowd. Meanwhile, the Palestinians almost exclusively target civilians when they could attack the IDF, albeit at somewhat higher risk to themselves, and somehow they're the good guys. Israeli soldiers risk their lives to keep the bad guys away from the women and children, even on the other side, while Palestinian soldiers risk their women and children's lives to protect themselves. Both sides do have ample reason to be royally pissed at the other, but look at what they do in response to their anger. As far as I'm concerned, that's all I need to know to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
What makes you think that the IDF is what they really want to hurt? The Palestinians have always had the ability to target the IDF with snipers and suicide bombers, but they target civilians instead. Or that they have barely enough food to eat.
Disagree. The second amendment is absolutely there primarily to allow the citizens to defend themselves against their own government run amok. It's the trigger point for that kind of violence that needs to be debated.
I agree that killing the guys from the "other" political party is wrong. That way leads anarchy - whoever leads the biggest and most violent band of thugs wins in the end, and it's dammed hard to see it ending in a more free country. As long as we have (mostly) free and fair elections, we all need to respect their results, even if we don't like the guy that got elected this time or last time or whatever.
That's why I believe that violence against the government is only justified in the case of the government refusing to abide by the results of elections or perpetrating massive, systematic election fraud. If that happens, then we already have a no-shit dictatorship, all bets are off, and anybody acting in support of the illegitimate government is fair game.
I probably haven't tried nearly as many flavors of Linux or Windows as you, but my experience has been the complete opposite. My Ubuntu install, running Gnome on a pretty average system (3.1ghz dual core AMD CPU, 4GB RAM, integrated video), feels lightning-fast and responsive compared to pretty much every other system I've ran so far. Especially the Windows systems I use at work, which admittedly are all XP systems infected with McAfee. I've always been kind of a junkie for really responsive UIs - it drives me nuts when Windows and IE7 always take half a second here and a second there to respond to every little command. My Linux system virtually never does this, which is why I'm happy to keep using it. And of course anything that makes it better yet is more than welcome.
I suppose the better question is who gets to define which political groupings are associated with each other and think what. Do Democrats get to associate Conservatives with Nazis? Do Republicans get to associate Liberals with Communists?
Sending cops and spies against terrorists works great when the nation and the general population they exist in doesn't support them. That's not at all the case in the middle east - all of the terrorist organizations there are supported by governments and by a substantial portion, if not a majority, of the population. Thus, all of the cops and spies in the world won't make any difference. They'll be lied to, run around in circles, scammed every which way, and they won't be able to do anything about it. Divisions of soldiers aren't a perfect solution either, but you can either take over the country or influence the government strongly. Either way, you can prevent terrorists from organizing on a large scale and carrying out attacks overseas. You also then have a shot at trying to change the opinion of the general population, and with a little skill and a little luck, you might just get them on your side and against the terrorists, which is when you really win.
Disagree on biological warfare - it was no more conceivable than nuclear weapons, since germ theory wasn't around or taken seriously by anyone until a century later. How can you spread a disease intentionally to a specific group of people when you don't have a clue how it spreads in the first place? Not to say that Smallpox did't decimate the native population, but nobody could have done it on purpose.
Especially with respect to point 1, there's lots of fields where various specialized hardware provides such a large competitive advantage that it's nearly impossible to stay in business without using it. Such specialized hardware and controlling software is usually made by 2-5 companies, all of which use lots of DRM. Writing your own stuff is impossibly expensive, and there will never be an open source version. So there's no choice but to use it and pay the price.
What's with the apparent re-definition of Terrorist as anyone who does something that you don't like? IMHO, Terrorist has a specific definition - an unofficial (non-Government sponsored) person or group who seeks to achieve a political goal through the use of violence targeted at civilians. The financial crisis isn't terrorism because there was no political goal and no violence. And calling it terrorism is a cheap shot at making the people behind it look even worse - like they need any help to look bad.
Only 2500 miles a year? I do like 12,000, and I'm on the low side of average among people I know. 2500 miles a year divided by 52 weeks a year averages to 48 miles a week. If I only traveled 48 miles a week, I probably wouldn't own a car at all and would just ride my bikes. Now that's cheap.
That's why a dog and a gun is best. The dog will scare away 95% of the bad guys, and for the rest, it will alert you and delay the bad guy long enough to grab your gun and get to him.
Somehow, I doubt that anyone will ever be able to implement encryption that is actually secure while being used by large segments of the population that really don't care that much. The only people who use high-quality encryption for pretty much any kind of communications are paranoid/curious geeks and people who have (or think they have) very good reasons for keeping their communications secret, e.g. some criminals, spies, the military, etc, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. The best we're likely to get is a system where the messages are encrypted over the air with a key that the carrier or some other central authority has, which will readily give the Government whatever it asks for, and probably won't be too hard to hack for anyone really motivated anyways. AFAIK, that's pretty much what we have now.
I'm not so sure about game designers being able to design a better system for the real world. In a video game, you can design every aspect about how every part of the world works in whatever way you please, all to suit the ultimate purpose of your game... and anybody who doesn't like how your virtual world works can leave or be rejected. The real world has a lot of rules about how things work that nobody can change, like how people actually interact with each other and how you go about actually producing the things that we need to have a first-world society. And you have to deal with everybody some way or other, including those who are actively trying to subvert your system in a variety of ways. And it has to be possible to actually move the world from what we have now to the new system without creating any major disasters.
Yeah, (mostly) Free-market capitalism + Democracy sucks sometimes, but so far it seems to suck less than every other system anyone has ever tried for organizing nation-sized groups of people. If you can think of a better system that satisfies all of the above conditions (and whichever other ones I forgot about or didn't bother typing up), we're all ears, but keep in mind that people who are probably smarter than both of us have been trying for centuries and haven't done any better yet.
An interesting point, but I have a feeling that, at least for the foreseeable future, any space colonies will be far too dependent on expensive high technology gear to have the kind of political independence you're thinking of. Any person or group of people with enough money to even get into Earth orbit without drawing a Government paycheck probably also has enough money to buy lots of practical independence in plenty of places on Earth.
As far as I can tell, the US is just fine with most of the countries that currently have nuclear weapons (France, England, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, a few others I think). We don't care that much as long as we can reasonably believe that you can be deterred from using them aggressively by the possibility of a counter-strike. We're very worried if your country appears to be run by total nutjobs who regularly threaten to nuke other nations and don't seem to care about what might happen in reply (Iran, North Korea).
The evidence suggests that torture works quite well. See regimes such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Saddam's Iraq, etc, where the ruling party remains in power until either an outside force overthrows them or they give up.
If you're picking up random people off of the street to torture, then of course you're going to get whatever nonsense information they think will stop the pain. But if it's part of an actual investigation of a enemy group that actually exists, then you can follow up on information, come back to the people who gave it to you, screen out bad information, etc, until you get to the bottom of what's going on. Not to mention the question of how many people are actually capable of coming up with clever lies when they're in horrible pain with no end in sight and they know that the people asking the questions can find out if it's nonsense.
Of course, that's not to say that it's necessarily okay or the best solution to any particular problem. Obviously, there are a lot of moral and practical considerations to what you actually to do members of an enemy organization that you manage to get your hands on - overly harsh treatment may cause potential allies to turn away from you, cause neutral parties to take up active opposition to you, etc. But the idea that torture doesn't work is just total nonsense.
I won't bother ripping the moronic ideas, the complete ignorance of reality, or the grating elitism in this post, since that's already been taken care of. But I will point out the extreme political bias - betcha anything that if any Republican was President, the very thought of saying that nobody should dare to question the decisions of a President in a time of "great national emergency" would be the cue for torrents of ridicule and comparisons to Nazis and other totalitarian dictators. But when one of your boys is in office, it turns out that dictatorship is actually pretty neat, and you'll accuse anyone opposed to it of racism, sexism, homophobia, being paid off by "industry", or anything else that has the slightest chance of sticking.
That's what I hate the most about politics. For a surprising amount of people, there aren't really any principles, there's just the desire to get as much power as you possibly can for your party, no matter what. Anything the other party does, you'll find some reason to oppose, and anything your party does, you'll find some reason to justify. Even if you have to take completely opposite stances on the same issue. Isn't there anyone out there who doesn't want the Republicans OR the Democrats to become virtual kings?
I'm not a mechanic now, but I have worked at an auto shop. I don't think it's any different now with modern technology than how it's ever been. Good mechanics use all the tools at hand to find out what's really wrong, and then fix it. Crappy mechanics replace whatever part the flowchart, manual, or computer says is wrong and hope for the best. Computers only help both types do what they were already doing.
Of course the trouble is that most shops that I am aware of pay their mechanics based on fixing specific things - there's a specific amount they get paid for, say, replacing the O2 sensor or the throttle body or whatever, but there's no pay for figuring out what the hell is really wrong with the car. So it creates an incentive to find something to replace as quickly as possible, replace it, and get paid and move on to the next car. Even doing it wrong isn't that much of a disincentive - the car comes back and they guess something else to fix and hope that works too. Being a good guy and not getting the customer pissed is really the only incentive to do it right. I'm not saying that it's all bad or that I have a better system for how to pay mechanics in an auditable way*, but that's one of the issues.
* It's nice for the higher-up managers and accountants to do it this way because they can say "this guy replaced 20 O2 sensors this month, and each one takes X hours, so we pay him for that and everyone's happy. But this other guy says that he spent 20 hours this month diagnosing problems. How do I know he really spent 20 hours doing that and wasn't just screwing around?" You can't tell, because of the nature of troubleshooting, so it kinda slips through the cracks.
The nice part about NoScript is the selective script blocking. With just the browser on its own, you can only turn JavaScript on entirely or off entirely. NoScript lets you turn on JavaScripts from the domains of the site that you're browsing, and block all others, like the dozens of scripts from all of the ads doing God knows what. Like on Slashdot, I can allow slashdot.org so that the threads all show up right, and still have the other scripts, reportedly from fsdn.com and doubleclick.net, blocked. You can block everything by default, and if you go to a page that doesn't work well enough, start enabling scripts until it works right while still blocking all of the nasty and annoying stuff.
Lots of people have already pointed out that by no means would nuclear war lead to human extinction, so I won't bother with that. But I will point out that IMHO, we are a long way away from being able to put a truly self-sustaining colony on another planet. This isn't like colonizing a new continent on Earth, where a few dozen people with the right skillset and tools can produce everything they need to survive from the local environment. People on Mars or the Moon will need a tremendous amount of high-tech gear to survive, and producing it locally will require a large population and a lot of technological infrastructure. I don't know that anyone has tried to do a realistic calculation of what would be needed, but I wouldn't be surprised if you needed at least tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands or millions to create a self-sustaining high-tech civilization. Just imagine the cost of establishing the physical infrastructure to do all the needed manufacturing on another planet and move all of those people there. And we haven't even gotten into exactly what sort of political and economic system those people will live under that will allow them to produce what they need to survive while also maintaining the knowledge base and physical infrastructure.
I'll register not-quite-agreement on 4. As I recall, the QuickTake didn't really fail or get it wrong so much as it was before it's time - according to Wikipedia, it captured at VGA resolution and stored a whopping 8 pictures in internal memory. Digital camera exploded only after the sensor technology got good enough to rival film cameras, the storage technology got good enough to store dozens or hundreds of film-quality shots, and the processing technology got good enough to do it all at least as fast as film cameras could shoot. The QuickTake failed on all 3, and so it failed in the market, just like pretty much all of the other digital cameras at the time.
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I've mostly stopped taking laptops on vacations too. Partly for being heavy and expensive, and partly because they're better at web surfing and killing time. I know that if I have a full laptop, I'll be tempted to spend lots of time messing with the internet in the hotel room or wherever. But I did't go wherever I went to sit around and surf the net - I can do that at home.
The phone can surf the net and stay in touch and do all of that stuff, but it's just a little annoying to use with the small screen and tiny keyboard. For me, it hits the sweet spot of good enough to get the information I actually need, but bad enough that I'm not sucked into hours of net surfing.
Interesting... it's hard to really judge without seeing more of what she's written, but it sounds more like someone venting a little after a rough day than someone really nasty.
Either way, it looks like her real crime is being identifiable while ranting about her workplace on the internet. Yeah, we all need to rant a little about how our job stinks without being worried about who we're offending, but doing it in such a way that your boss, co-workers, subordinates, or students and their parents can find it and associate it with you personally is just dumb. If your blog is public and you can be identified from it, then people who know you in real life are going to find it eventually. So if you're gonna blog, there's only two ways to go - squeaky clean and under your real name, or under a pseudonym with no personally identifiable information and telling the world exactly what you think. Anything in between is going to get you in trouble eventually.
Of course it's ironic that she's ranting about how dumb some of her kids are while getting caught for it...
What you're missing here is the scale, in addition to the nature of those things. Yeah, there have been violations of civil rights in the US, of arguable levels of legitimacy, but the real difference is that the number of people these things are happening to is basically tiny. How many people are in Gitmo, like 300-400 or so? Now look up how many people are in political prison in China and Iran and other such countries, with little reason for them being there except that they criticized the Government or pissed off someone powerful.
There's a big difference between reading about a few dozen people's rights being violated in the newspaper, when you've never met or even heard of them before, and when it happens to your neighbors, friends, and family on a routine basis. One generates some legitimate concern among average people, the other generates stark terror in the minds of the entire population. If you hear your good friend make an offhand remark critical of the Government one day and he disappears, with the police telling you to STFU before you disappear too, then you'd be quite justified in being terrified and you might be living in an actual police state. If you read about Gitmo in the newspaper and post rants about it on the Internet with nothing happening to you, then you aren't anywhere near being in a police state, and if this makes you terrified, then you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yup, they are. So what? Israel could easily pound the Palestinians 24/7 with indiscriminate artillery and airstrikes at almost no risk to themselves whenever they felt like it. Instead, they send in soldiers to put their lives at risk making their best attempt to kill only the actual terrorists. And for this, they get essentially no credit from the peace crowd. Meanwhile, the Palestinians almost exclusively target civilians when they could attack the IDF, albeit at somewhat higher risk to themselves, and somehow they're the good guys. Israeli soldiers risk their lives to keep the bad guys away from the women and children, even on the other side, while Palestinian soldiers risk their women and children's lives to protect themselves. Both sides do have ample reason to be royally pissed at the other, but look at what they do in response to their anger. As far as I'm concerned, that's all I need to know to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
What makes you think that the IDF is what they really want to hurt? The Palestinians have always had the ability to target the IDF with snipers and suicide bombers, but they target civilians instead. Or that they have barely enough food to eat.
Disagree. The second amendment is absolutely there primarily to allow the citizens to defend themselves against their own government run amok. It's the trigger point for that kind of violence that needs to be debated.
I agree that killing the guys from the "other" political party is wrong. That way leads anarchy - whoever leads the biggest and most violent band of thugs wins in the end, and it's dammed hard to see it ending in a more free country. As long as we have (mostly) free and fair elections, we all need to respect their results, even if we don't like the guy that got elected this time or last time or whatever.
That's why I believe that violence against the government is only justified in the case of the government refusing to abide by the results of elections or perpetrating massive, systematic election fraud. If that happens, then we already have a no-shit dictatorship, all bets are off, and anybody acting in support of the illegitimate government is fair game.
I probably haven't tried nearly as many flavors of Linux or Windows as you, but my experience has been the complete opposite. My Ubuntu install, running Gnome on a pretty average system (3.1ghz dual core AMD CPU, 4GB RAM, integrated video), feels lightning-fast and responsive compared to pretty much every other system I've ran so far. Especially the Windows systems I use at work, which admittedly are all XP systems infected with McAfee. I've always been kind of a junkie for really responsive UIs - it drives me nuts when Windows and IE7 always take half a second here and a second there to respond to every little command. My Linux system virtually never does this, which is why I'm happy to keep using it. And of course anything that makes it better yet is more than welcome.
I suppose the better question is who gets to define which political groupings are associated with each other and think what. Do Democrats get to associate Conservatives with Nazis? Do Republicans get to associate Liberals with Communists?
Sending cops and spies against terrorists works great when the nation and the general population they exist in doesn't support them. That's not at all the case in the middle east - all of the terrorist organizations there are supported by governments and by a substantial portion, if not a majority, of the population. Thus, all of the cops and spies in the world won't make any difference. They'll be lied to, run around in circles, scammed every which way, and they won't be able to do anything about it. Divisions of soldiers aren't a perfect solution either, but you can either take over the country or influence the government strongly. Either way, you can prevent terrorists from organizing on a large scale and carrying out attacks overseas. You also then have a shot at trying to change the opinion of the general population, and with a little skill and a little luck, you might just get them on your side and against the terrorists, which is when you really win.
Disagree on biological warfare - it was no more conceivable than nuclear weapons, since germ theory wasn't around or taken seriously by anyone until a century later. How can you spread a disease intentionally to a specific group of people when you don't have a clue how it spreads in the first place? Not to say that Smallpox did't decimate the native population, but nobody could have done it on purpose.
Especially with respect to point 1, there's lots of fields where various specialized hardware provides such a large competitive advantage that it's nearly impossible to stay in business without using it. Such specialized hardware and controlling software is usually made by 2-5 companies, all of which use lots of DRM. Writing your own stuff is impossibly expensive, and there will never be an open source version. So there's no choice but to use it and pay the price.
What's with the apparent re-definition of Terrorist as anyone who does something that you don't like? IMHO, Terrorist has a specific definition - an unofficial (non-Government sponsored) person or group who seeks to achieve a political goal through the use of violence targeted at civilians. The financial crisis isn't terrorism because there was no political goal and no violence. And calling it terrorism is a cheap shot at making the people behind it look even worse - like they need any help to look bad.
Only 2500 miles a year? I do like 12,000, and I'm on the low side of average among people I know. 2500 miles a year divided by 52 weeks a year averages to 48 miles a week. If I only traveled 48 miles a week, I probably wouldn't own a car at all and would just ride my bikes. Now that's cheap.
That's why a dog and a gun is best. The dog will scare away 95% of the bad guys, and for the rest, it will alert you and delay the bad guy long enough to grab your gun and get to him.
Somehow, I doubt that anyone will ever be able to implement encryption that is actually secure while being used by large segments of the population that really don't care that much. The only people who use high-quality encryption for pretty much any kind of communications are paranoid/curious geeks and people who have (or think they have) very good reasons for keeping their communications secret, e.g. some criminals, spies, the military, etc, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. The best we're likely to get is a system where the messages are encrypted over the air with a key that the carrier or some other central authority has, which will readily give the Government whatever it asks for, and probably won't be too hard to hack for anyone really motivated anyways. AFAIK, that's pretty much what we have now.
I'm not so sure about game designers being able to design a better system for the real world. In a video game, you can design every aspect about how every part of the world works in whatever way you please, all to suit the ultimate purpose of your game... and anybody who doesn't like how your virtual world works can leave or be rejected. The real world has a lot of rules about how things work that nobody can change, like how people actually interact with each other and how you go about actually producing the things that we need to have a first-world society. And you have to deal with everybody some way or other, including those who are actively trying to subvert your system in a variety of ways. And it has to be possible to actually move the world from what we have now to the new system without creating any major disasters.
Yeah, (mostly) Free-market capitalism + Democracy sucks sometimes, but so far it seems to suck less than every other system anyone has ever tried for organizing nation-sized groups of people. If you can think of a better system that satisfies all of the above conditions (and whichever other ones I forgot about or didn't bother typing up), we're all ears, but keep in mind that people who are probably smarter than both of us have been trying for centuries and haven't done any better yet.
An interesting point, but I have a feeling that, at least for the foreseeable future, any space colonies will be far too dependent on expensive high technology gear to have the kind of political independence you're thinking of. Any person or group of people with enough money to even get into Earth orbit without drawing a Government paycheck probably also has enough money to buy lots of practical independence in plenty of places on Earth.
As far as I can tell, the US is just fine with most of the countries that currently have nuclear weapons (France, England, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, a few others I think). We don't care that much as long as we can reasonably believe that you can be deterred from using them aggressively by the possibility of a counter-strike. We're very worried if your country appears to be run by total nutjobs who regularly threaten to nuke other nations and don't seem to care about what might happen in reply (Iran, North Korea).
The evidence suggests that torture works quite well. See regimes such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Saddam's Iraq, etc, where the ruling party remains in power until either an outside force overthrows them or they give up.
If you're picking up random people off of the street to torture, then of course you're going to get whatever nonsense information they think will stop the pain. But if it's part of an actual investigation of a enemy group that actually exists, then you can follow up on information, come back to the people who gave it to you, screen out bad information, etc, until you get to the bottom of what's going on. Not to mention the question of how many people are actually capable of coming up with clever lies when they're in horrible pain with no end in sight and they know that the people asking the questions can find out if it's nonsense.
Of course, that's not to say that it's necessarily okay or the best solution to any particular problem. Obviously, there are a lot of moral and practical considerations to what you actually to do members of an enemy organization that you manage to get your hands on - overly harsh treatment may cause potential allies to turn away from you, cause neutral parties to take up active opposition to you, etc. But the idea that torture doesn't work is just total nonsense.
I won't bother ripping the moronic ideas, the complete ignorance of reality, or the grating elitism in this post, since that's already been taken care of. But I will point out the extreme political bias - betcha anything that if any Republican was President, the very thought of saying that nobody should dare to question the decisions of a President in a time of "great national emergency" would be the cue for torrents of ridicule and comparisons to Nazis and other totalitarian dictators. But when one of your boys is in office, it turns out that dictatorship is actually pretty neat, and you'll accuse anyone opposed to it of racism, sexism, homophobia, being paid off by "industry", or anything else that has the slightest chance of sticking.
That's what I hate the most about politics. For a surprising amount of people, there aren't really any principles, there's just the desire to get as much power as you possibly can for your party, no matter what. Anything the other party does, you'll find some reason to oppose, and anything your party does, you'll find some reason to justify. Even if you have to take completely opposite stances on the same issue. Isn't there anyone out there who doesn't want the Republicans OR the Democrats to become virtual kings?
I'm not a mechanic now, but I have worked at an auto shop. I don't think it's any different now with modern technology than how it's ever been. Good mechanics use all the tools at hand to find out what's really wrong, and then fix it. Crappy mechanics replace whatever part the flowchart, manual, or computer says is wrong and hope for the best. Computers only help both types do what they were already doing.
Of course the trouble is that most shops that I am aware of pay their mechanics based on fixing specific things - there's a specific amount they get paid for, say, replacing the O2 sensor or the throttle body or whatever, but there's no pay for figuring out what the hell is really wrong with the car. So it creates an incentive to find something to replace as quickly as possible, replace it, and get paid and move on to the next car. Even doing it wrong isn't that much of a disincentive - the car comes back and they guess something else to fix and hope that works too. Being a good guy and not getting the customer pissed is really the only incentive to do it right. I'm not saying that it's all bad or that I have a better system for how to pay mechanics in an auditable way*, but that's one of the issues.
* It's nice for the higher-up managers and accountants to do it this way because they can say "this guy replaced 20 O2 sensors this month, and each one takes X hours, so we pay him for that and everyone's happy. But this other guy says that he spent 20 hours this month diagnosing problems. How do I know he really spent 20 hours doing that and wasn't just screwing around?" You can't tell, because of the nature of troubleshooting, so it kinda slips through the cracks.
Don't worry, we'll all be using the PS5,629, and I'm sure Sony will have solved the problem by then!
The nice part about NoScript is the selective script blocking. With just the browser on its own, you can only turn JavaScript on entirely or off entirely. NoScript lets you turn on JavaScripts from the domains of the site that you're browsing, and block all others, like the dozens of scripts from all of the ads doing God knows what. Like on Slashdot, I can allow slashdot.org so that the threads all show up right, and still have the other scripts, reportedly from fsdn.com and doubleclick.net, blocked. You can block everything by default, and if you go to a page that doesn't work well enough, start enabling scripts until it works right while still blocking all of the nasty and annoying stuff.
Lots of people have already pointed out that by no means would nuclear war lead to human extinction, so I won't bother with that. But I will point out that IMHO, we are a long way away from being able to put a truly self-sustaining colony on another planet. This isn't like colonizing a new continent on Earth, where a few dozen people with the right skillset and tools can produce everything they need to survive from the local environment. People on Mars or the Moon will need a tremendous amount of high-tech gear to survive, and producing it locally will require a large population and a lot of technological infrastructure. I don't know that anyone has tried to do a realistic calculation of what would be needed, but I wouldn't be surprised if you needed at least tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands or millions to create a self-sustaining high-tech civilization. Just imagine the cost of establishing the physical infrastructure to do all the needed manufacturing on another planet and move all of those people there. And we haven't even gotten into exactly what sort of political and economic system those people will live under that will allow them to produce what they need to survive while also maintaining the knowledge base and physical infrastructure.
I'll register not-quite-agreement on 4. As I recall, the QuickTake didn't really fail or get it wrong so much as it was before it's time - according to Wikipedia, it captured at VGA resolution and stored a whopping 8 pictures in internal memory. Digital camera exploded only after the sensor technology got good enough to rival film cameras, the storage technology got good enough to store dozens or hundreds of film-quality shots, and the processing technology got good enough to do it all at least as fast as film cameras could shoot. The QuickTake failed on all 3, and so it failed in the market, just like pretty much all of the other digital cameras at the time.