Because any reasonably competent and conscientious NewEgg tech would re-image the drive anyway before restocking the machine? Or are you going to claim that if you remove and throw away the plastic film that covers the screen, etc., that the machine is "missing something it was sold with" and deny the return for that, too?
Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but the point is that it is extremely poor policy to restore a machine using the restore partition on the hard drive. Consequently, while technically, yes, the machine is not in original condition, it is (or at least should be) effectively of no importance to the ability to resell the machine, since it is (or again, should be) restored to original condition if NewEgg staff follows proper procedures.
It is conceivable, though how likely I have no idea, that the Linux drivers caused the damage.
My guess would be, "Not very likely."
I've run Linux on every single computer I've owned since ~2001 except for one (a MacBook Pro that I was issued at work), and I have yet to see a driver cause hardware damage. Additionally, I am a network admin at a company that uses Linux almost exclusively in our server room (we do have two Windows Terminal Servers, one Windows Application Server and one Windows SQL Server) and we provide Linux desktops to all of our remote users. Point being, I have maintained a *LOT* of Linux machines for over a decade, and still have never seen a modern Linux driver cause hardware damage (although, yes, I have heard the same reports about X drivers on really, really old Linux systems).
...and when upper management (your boss's boss) says, "service orders are on the way -- just go ahead and set this up." you do what? Draw a line in the sand and tell him you'll do it when you get a signed contract? He's a type-A personality. If I tell him I'm not doing it without a contract, I'll be out on the streets.
I'm not talking about a situation where I'll have a Career Limiting Move if the contracts aren't signed. I'm low enough on the food chain that I won't be the guy who gets canned for it, but it's not good for the company (and I do care about the company I work for) when we don't get paid for products we are providing because the contract was never finalized.
GPP is -- or at least, appears to be -- talking about long-term supportable projects. You describe how to get a system back up in a pinch. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. For something that is going to be supported long-term, GPP is right -- you will have the best product by doing it correctly. When the chips are down, however, and you need to put something in place for a day or two -- or even a month or two -- until you can get the equipment to do it right, then you are correct. The trick is knowing when it is appropriate to put in a hack, and when things need to be done The Right Way.
What you describe is what I call the "Just get it done" attitude, and it's one I've personally had for a very long time. People with this attitude sometimes do get themselves in trouble (I know I have) but they're also the guy who can pick something up and poke at it for an hour or two and produce a result, which is a useful skill to have, particularly if the shit hits the fan.
There are a couple of problems with this type of person, and to be clear, I tend that direction myself and fortunately, so does my boss. I've seen cases where we've built circuits on a verbal request, but then the service orders never get put in and the customer never got billed. I've seen cases where we got a project 75% complete, but then the customer pulled the plug before there was a contract signed, or the requirements were changed so that we had to start over. I've seen cases where what was documented and what was actually built were two entirely different things. And I've seen cases where a union was in a pissing match with...someone, I don't actually know who...and they got their collective boxers in a wad and grieved a bunch of guys and their managers because on the day that the order was due for a customer (after a month wait), they still hadn't even strung the CAT-5 in the data center, so a bunch of my coworkers just went in there and did it themselves.
I'd still much rather work with a "just get 'er done!" type than the typical bureaucrat, though!
Bear spray and air horns are good options, and I agree that if you want to shoot a bear -- especially a brown bear -- my shotgun is a better choice than my.44 but IMHO, the.44 in my shoulder holster is a much better choice than the shotgun I left inside because it was too bulky to carry.
I lived in Japan for seven years. I'm certain that that is the case -- or at least was, in the late '70s and early '80s. Regarding Canada, I know when we drove through on our way to Alaska from Maryland, we had to ship my dad's handguns, although we were allowed to bring his rifles through. As I mentioned to another commenter, perhaps the rules in Canada are different for foreigners than citizens. In any case, I stand corrected:)
You call that fair? It's none of our business if a wedding party is shooting rifles in a foreign country! It's THEIR frikken' country!
I live in a part of the country that's frequented by bears. Consequently, when I go hiking -- or for that matter, even when I'm working in my yard, since I've seen a momma bear and her three cubs in my driveway several times this summer -- I often carry a.44 Magnum. In Japan and Canada, private citizens aren't allowed to even own handguns. Would you still maintain that same attitude if Japanese or Canadian drones started flying over Alaska, enforcing THEIR idea of what a private citizen should or should not be allowed to do since, "in our country, people aren't allowed to own handguns. If you don't want to be mistaken for an armed force, don't act like one!"?
If any one nation were to develop overwhelming military technology and begin to use that force indiscriminately, they would quickly run out of allies around the world. Eventually you reach a point where overwhelmingly powerful technology is defeated by sheer numbers.
Did we uninvent peasant/citizen soldiers and nuclear weapons?
I think his point was that it is because of nuclear weapons that warfare has become asymmetric. There are relatively few nations with nuclear capability, and the IAE is desperately trying to keep it that way. Look at what's going on with Iran right now, for example.
Security and best practices are an academic concepts that are not taught in school...Slashdot is an unusual cross-section of people who tend to be security-minded so what appears to be common knowledge here is not representative of the software industry.
^^THIS!!!^^
I took a senior-level computer security class while working on my C.S. degree in college, and it was largely a waste of time. We spent half the semester working our way through various historical encryption algorithms trying to get *to* asymmetrical encryption (you know, Caesar's belt, various ROT-x ciphers, etc. -- i.e., stuff that should have been covered in the first week, maybe). We spent most of the rest of the semester dissecting DSA and RSA, and maybe two weeks talking about covert channels. We spent next to no time talking about one-way hashes, and salts were a completely foreign concept to me when I discovered them two or three years later when I started using Linux. As far as best practices for real-world computer security? I don't think that was ever even a FOOTNOTE in any of my C.S. courses.
Maybe I just went to a crappy school, but IMHO, my college education was woefully inadequate for the real world. Pretty much everything I use on a day-to-day basis was learned on my own, outside of college.
If you're a Ubuntu user and want to learn more about *nix but don't want to mess with Gentoo or a BSD, I totally recommend Slackware.
LOL. I was the opposite progression -- I started on Slack 7.1 (through 9 dot...something), got hired as a sys admin in a Solaris/BSD shop (although Slack was the desktop of choice there), then got a job in a shop that used Gentoo but now uses Ubuntu (the PHB's like that you can buy support from Canonical, even though we've never had to do it).
Slack was cool, and I probably wouldn't have gotten my break as a sys admin if I hadn't been a Slackware user (the Linux guy during the interview was a hard-core Slackware fanboi), but Gentoo is still my favorite distro.
There are 95 ASCII characters, which makes 95**8 = 6,634,204,312,890,625 possible 8 character passwords. At one million checks per second a brute force attack will take 6,634,204,312 seconds (210 years).
If you are trying to brute-force a specific password, then your argument makes sense. However, if you consider that most users are not/. tech geeks*, then some passwords are more likely than others. For example, "password," "secret," "topsecret," "jbond007" (yes, I saw that used in a professional environment once, sigh), and variants or these such as "s3cr3t," "53cr3t," or "53cr3+," etc. are a lot more likely than "mRqe2Ded", "7GNt4adL", etc. (which I generated with a Perl script). If you have access to the password hashes (which the crackers in this story do), then you compute hashes of common passwords and grep for them in the hash file. Voila! You now most likely have access to a boatload of user accounts.
*The assumption is that tech geeks know better and act accordingly. I'm aware that that's not always the case, however.
Your point still stands, but IMHO (and I live here) flying from Alaska to Russia in anything less robust and redundant than an airliner takes some serious cojones. That water is COLD. You don't want to ditch there in an in-flight emergency.
Crossing Knik Arm outside of Anchorage (maybe two miles wide?) is uncomfortable enough. My former employer used to cross the Arm at 600 feet, until he had an airplane lose power on take-off from Anchorage International (which is on the shores of Knik Arm). He managed to land on the remaining runway, but after that incident, if he couldn't get clearance to cross the Arm at a higher altitude, he took the long way down the arm rather than attempt to cross at low altitude again.
Note: if you just click the FAI link, you won't see the results I'm referencing above. You have to select "DO - Open Class Gliders" in the "subclass" drop-down box, "Free Distance" in the "Type of Record" drop-down box and "World" in the "Record Zone" box. Sorry...I couldn't find a way to link to just the results I found.
Out of curiosity, what did your class do to determine the rocket's stability -- or did you just use the "TLAR" ("That Looks About Right") design principle?;)
[those who vote or are active in local politics...are] generally the worst people to make decisions since everyone who is more knowledgeable (or sane) is busy doing other things.
It sounds to me like you are trying to rationalize laziness. Here's your argument, as I understand it: the people who put a priority on voting and local politics aren't smart enough to make decisions, but those who you would trust to make good decisions aren't smart enough to make having a say in local politics a high priority. Seems to me your "smart people" either aren't smart enough to put their priorities where they should, or else they just believe that doing so won't make a difference. If they don't believe they will make a difference, then I would suggest rallying those who are like-minded to make voting and/or local politics a priority (and in my experience, it really isn't that much effort to get out there and vote -- the polls where I live are open for something like 12 hours a day, and employers *have* to allow you to take time during the business day to go vote when the polls are open).
He may not have the best delivery, but his point is valid. It's analogous to paper MCSE's (or CCNA's or whatever other acronym you want to use). When all you teach is how to recognize the best answer on a multiple guess test, you are doing your students a disservice.
I'd rather see who can actually apply the theory in a real-world situation (configure this PC as part of the domain, turn up a 10M port rate-limited to 5M on VLAN 42, calculate the center-of-gravity of this rocket and tell me if it will be stable or unstable if the center of pressure is located three and a half inches from the bottom of the body tube, etc.).
Now...a rocket blowing up is not "little" by any stretch of the imagination. And usually it doesn't provide a second chance (the event)....kids should be allowed to do more things, but unfortunately rocket building is not one of them.
You, sir, are a fine example of what is wrong with America. You know not what you are speaking of, and consequently, you are filled with fear because of what you don't know.
At 13, I blew up a model rocket engine in my face. Guess what? I'm still here (23 years later). No scars. No permanent damage. No missing appendages. I'm FINE, albeit I have a bit more respect for warning labels and for not doing stupid things that I frikken' KNOW are stupid, and yes, I knew what I was doing when I blew up the engine that it was a Really Dumb Idea (the engine wouldn't ignite, so I ground it up into a powder and tried to light it with a match -- kids don't try this at home!). I flew rockets from about age eight (with my dad doing most of the work) through college (solo) with not a single injury other than the above incident. In fact, I've carried on the tradition with my own kids now that I'm a dad myself; I'm currently building a twin-engine D-size rocket to boost an Arduino, which I'll be using to measure air temperature, air pressure and acceleration. I've had far more injuries due to riding a bicycle than I have had flying rockets -- do you therefore want to ban bicycles, too?
There's a reason they call that science: rocket science.
Ummm...because it's science, and involves rockets? What NASA or Space-X does *is* really hard, because they are dealing with very, very large, very, very powerful and very, very complex machines, which have to fly very precise trajectories. An A- through C-size model rocket is many, many orders of magnitude less complex and less dangerous, particularly if you don't try to DIY your engines. Building and flying such a rocket is well within the capabilities of a jr. high school student; designing and building such a rocket is well within the capabilities of a high school student with a little supervision from a high school science teacher.
Nutrition info is on everything, it hasn't helped.
That's because people generally don't track how many calories (or grams of fat or...) they eat throughout the day. I recently started tracking what I eat on loseit.com (no, I have no affiliation with them, other than as a happy user) and was surprised at how easy it is to overeat without realizing it. When I found the Android app that let's me just scan a barcode to add food that I ate, it became stupid-easy to track nutrition information. What I found was that I was consuming at least 500 calories more than I needed per day, and that some foods that I thought were healthy are surprisingly high in calories (like avocados and bagels) while some other foods that I expected to be really unhealthy (cheese danish) are much better than I thought.
Let's see...do I listen to my doctor or some random guy on the Internet? Ding, ding, ding, ding! Sorry, you lose.
I was fighting a problem with some pretty severe eczema on my hands, and several dermatologists told me that diet had nothing to do with it. They prescribed various creams, lotions, etc. that ultimately only made the problem worse. I finally found a doctor who spent some time talking with me (what a concept!), and he advised me to stop eating anything containing HFCS*. I took his advice, and within three months, the problem was manageable. Now, close to three years later, it's pretty much gone. Yes, "plural of anecdote is not data," but it's working for me, so I'm sticking with it.
* The problem with HFCS, he said, is that your body can't break it down like it does other sugars, even though it does recognize it as a sugar. Therefore, when you eat HFCS, your body recognizes it as a sugar so it releases insulin to deal with it. That causes your body to process the other sugars in your bloodstream, but the HFCS is still there and so you still produce even more insulin to process the sugar. That makes you crave more sugar, so you eat more HFCS, rinse, repeat. Is he right? I don't know; I'm neither a nutritionist nor a chemist nor a biologist. All I know is that nixing HFCS from my diet has significantly helped me with both sugar cravings and skin health.
If you can't afford to insure your family on a 6-figure salary, you're doing it wrong. Perhaps you need to make some budget cuts in another area of your lifestyle? I don't (quite) make six figures, but my family is insured, and I even have some money left over after paying to bills to splurge on a few luxuries once in a while.
I do find it hilarious that those who look down on folks who buy a monster-sized $1 soda at the fountain are often the same types that will happily walk to the cooler and pull out a $2 bottle of water for purchase.
Ummm...why? IMHO, buying a $1 supertanker full of soda is a bad idea, and I quite honestly would rather have the $2 bottle of water. But that's not a decision based upon the price-point of the drinks in question; it's that I'd rather drink water than soda -- enough so that I'd pay twice the price to get the item I would prefer to have.
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Because any reasonably competent and conscientious NewEgg tech would re-image the drive anyway before restocking the machine? Or are you going to claim that if you remove and throw away the plastic film that covers the screen, etc., that the machine is "missing something it was sold with" and deny the return for that, too?
Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but the point is that it is extremely poor policy to restore a machine using the restore partition on the hard drive. Consequently, while technically, yes, the machine is not in original condition, it is (or at least should be) effectively of no importance to the ability to resell the machine, since it is (or again, should be) restored to original condition if NewEgg staff follows proper procedures.
It is conceivable, though how likely I have no idea, that the Linux drivers caused the damage.
My guess would be, "Not very likely."
I've run Linux on every single computer I've owned since ~2001 except for one (a MacBook Pro that I was issued at work), and I have yet to see a driver cause hardware damage. Additionally, I am a network admin at a company that uses Linux almost exclusively in our server room (we do have two Windows Terminal Servers, one Windows Application Server and one Windows SQL Server) and we provide Linux desktops to all of our remote users. Point being, I have maintained a *LOT* of Linux machines for over a decade, and still have never seen a modern Linux driver cause hardware damage (although, yes, I have heard the same reports about X drivers on really, really old Linux systems).
...and when upper management (your boss's boss) says, "service orders are on the way -- just go ahead and set this up." you do what? Draw a line in the sand and tell him you'll do it when you get a signed contract? He's a type-A personality. If I tell him I'm not doing it without a contract, I'll be out on the streets.
I'm not talking about a situation where I'll have a Career Limiting Move if the contracts aren't signed. I'm low enough on the food chain that I won't be the guy who gets canned for it, but it's not good for the company (and I do care about the company I work for) when we don't get paid for products we are providing because the contract was never finalized.
I think you are buying into a false dichotomy.
GPP is -- or at least, appears to be -- talking about long-term supportable projects. You describe how to get a system back up in a pinch. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. For something that is going to be supported long-term, GPP is right -- you will have the best product by doing it correctly. When the chips are down, however, and you need to put something in place for a day or two -- or even a month or two -- until you can get the equipment to do it right, then you are correct. The trick is knowing when it is appropriate to put in a hack, and when things need to be done The Right Way.
What you describe is what I call the "Just get it done" attitude, and it's one I've personally had for a very long time. People with this attitude sometimes do get themselves in trouble (I know I have) but they're also the guy who can pick something up and poke at it for an hour or two and produce a result, which is a useful skill to have, particularly if the shit hits the fan.
There are a couple of problems with this type of person, and to be clear, I tend that direction myself and fortunately, so does my boss. I've seen cases where we've built circuits on a verbal request, but then the service orders never get put in and the customer never got billed. I've seen cases where we got a project 75% complete, but then the customer pulled the plug before there was a contract signed, or the requirements were changed so that we had to start over. I've seen cases where what was documented and what was actually built were two entirely different things. And I've seen cases where a union was in a pissing match with...someone, I don't actually know who...and they got their collective boxers in a wad and grieved a bunch of guys and their managers because on the day that the order was due for a customer (after a month wait), they still hadn't even strung the CAT-5 in the data center, so a bunch of my coworkers just went in there and did it themselves.
I'd still much rather work with a "just get 'er done!" type than the typical bureaucrat, though!
They are indeed black bears.
.44 but IMHO, the .44 in my shoulder holster is a much better choice than the shotgun I left inside because it was too bulky to carry.
Bear spray and air horns are good options, and I agree that if you want to shoot a bear -- especially a brown bear -- my shotgun is a better choice than my
Do you really think the U.S. -- or any other nation -- could survive if the entire rest of the world united against us? Really?
I lived in Japan for seven years. I'm certain that that is the case -- or at least was, in the late '70s and early '80s. Regarding Canada, I know when we drove through on our way to Alaska from Maryland, we had to ship my dad's handguns, although we were allowed to bring his rifles through. As I mentioned to another commenter, perhaps the rules in Canada are different for foreigners than citizens. In any case, I stand corrected :)
I stand corrected. Perhaps it is that foreigners are not allowed to transport them through Canada, then? In any case, thanks for enlightening me :)
You call that fair? It's none of our business if a wedding party is shooting rifles in a foreign country! It's THEIR frikken' country!
.44 Magnum. In Japan and Canada, private citizens aren't allowed to even own handguns. Would you still maintain that same attitude if Japanese or Canadian drones started flying over Alaska, enforcing THEIR idea of what a private citizen should or should not be allowed to do since, "in our country, people aren't allowed to own handguns. If you don't want to be mistaken for an armed force, don't act like one!"?
I live in a part of the country that's frequented by bears. Consequently, when I go hiking -- or for that matter, even when I'm working in my yard, since I've seen a momma bear and her three cubs in my driveway several times this summer -- I often carry a
He is largely wrong, but not completely wrong.
If any one nation were to develop overwhelming military technology and begin to use that force indiscriminately, they would quickly run out of allies around the world. Eventually you reach a point where overwhelmingly powerful technology is defeated by sheer numbers.
Did we uninvent peasant/citizen soldiers and nuclear weapons?
I think his point was that it is because of nuclear weapons that warfare has become asymmetric. There are relatively few nations with nuclear capability, and the IAE is desperately trying to keep it that way. Look at what's going on with Iran right now, for example.
Security and best practices are an academic concepts that are not taught in school...Slashdot is an unusual cross-section of people who tend to be security-minded so what appears to be common knowledge here is not representative of the software industry.
^^THIS!!!^^
I took a senior-level computer security class while working on my C.S. degree in college, and it was largely a waste of time. We spent half the semester working our way through various historical encryption algorithms trying to get *to* asymmetrical encryption (you know, Caesar's belt, various ROT-x ciphers, etc. -- i.e., stuff that should have been covered in the first week, maybe). We spent most of the rest of the semester dissecting DSA and RSA, and maybe two weeks talking about covert channels. We spent next to no time talking about one-way hashes, and salts were a completely foreign concept to me when I discovered them two or three years later when I started using Linux. As far as best practices for real-world computer security? I don't think that was ever even a FOOTNOTE in any of my C.S. courses.
Maybe I just went to a crappy school, but IMHO, my college education was woefully inadequate for the real world. Pretty much everything I use on a day-to-day basis was learned on my own, outside of college.
If you're a Ubuntu user and want to learn more about *nix but don't want to mess with Gentoo or a BSD, I totally recommend Slackware.
LOL. I was the opposite progression -- I started on Slack 7.1 (through 9 dot...something), got hired as a sys admin in a Solaris/BSD shop (although Slack was the desktop of choice there), then got a job in a shop that used Gentoo but now uses Ubuntu (the PHB's like that you can buy support from Canonical, even though we've never had to do it).
Slack was cool, and I probably wouldn't have gotten my break as a sys admin if I hadn't been a Slackware user (the Linux guy during the interview was a hard-core Slackware fanboi), but Gentoo is still my favorite distro.
There are 95 ASCII characters, which makes 95**8 = 6,634,204,312,890,625 possible 8 character passwords. At one million checks per second a brute force attack will take 6,634,204,312 seconds (210 years).
If you are trying to brute-force a specific password, then your argument makes sense. However, if you consider that most users are not /. tech geeks*, then some passwords are more likely than others. For example, "password," "secret," "topsecret," "jbond007" (yes, I saw that used in a professional environment once, sigh), and variants or these such as "s3cr3t," "53cr3t," or "53cr3+," etc. are a lot more likely than "mRqe2Ded", "7GNt4adL", etc. (which I generated with a Perl script). If you have access to the password hashes (which the crackers in this story do), then you compute hashes of common passwords and grep for them in the hash file. Voila! You now most likely have access to a boatload of user accounts.
*The assumption is that tech geeks know better and act accordingly. I'm aware that that's not always the case, however.
Your point still stands, but IMHO (and I live here) flying from Alaska to Russia in anything less robust and redundant than an airliner takes some serious cojones. That water is COLD. You don't want to ditch there in an in-flight emergency.
Crossing Knik Arm outside of Anchorage (maybe two miles wide?) is uncomfortable enough. My former employer used to cross the Arm at 600 feet, until he had an airplane lose power on take-off from Anchorage International (which is on the shores of Knik Arm). He managed to land on the remaining runway, but after that incident, if he couldn't get clearance to cross the Arm at a higher altitude, he took the long way down the arm rather than attempt to cross at low altitude again.
Considering that the FAI lists the world record for free distance for open-class GLIDERS at 2259km (1403 miles), then I'd have to agree with GPP that no, 515 miles for a POWERED airplane (even solar powered) isn't all that impressive.
Note: if you just click the FAI link, you won't see the results I'm referencing above. You have to select "DO - Open Class Gliders" in the "subclass" drop-down box, "Free Distance" in the "Type of Record" drop-down box and "World" in the "Record Zone" box. Sorry...I couldn't find a way to link to just the results I found.
Out of curiosity, what did your class do to determine the rocket's stability -- or did you just use the "TLAR" ("That Looks About Right") design principle? ;)
[those who vote or are active in local politics...are] generally the worst people to make decisions since everyone who is more knowledgeable (or sane) is busy doing other things.
It sounds to me like you are trying to rationalize laziness. Here's your argument, as I understand it: the people who put a priority on voting and local politics aren't smart enough to make decisions, but those who you would trust to make good decisions aren't smart enough to make having a say in local politics a high priority. Seems to me your "smart people" either aren't smart enough to put their priorities where they should, or else they just believe that doing so won't make a difference. If they don't believe they will make a difference, then I would suggest rallying those who are like-minded to make voting and/or local politics a priority (and in my experience, it really isn't that much effort to get out there and vote -- the polls where I live are open for something like 12 hours a day, and employers *have* to allow you to take time during the business day to go vote when the polls are open).
He may not have the best delivery, but his point is valid. It's analogous to paper MCSE's (or CCNA's or whatever other acronym you want to use). When all you teach is how to recognize the best answer on a multiple guess test, you are doing your students a disservice.
I'd rather see who can actually apply the theory in a real-world situation (configure this PC as part of the domain, turn up a 10M port rate-limited to 5M on VLAN 42, calculate the center-of-gravity of this rocket and tell me if it will be stable or unstable if the center of pressure is located three and a half inches from the bottom of the body tube, etc.).
Now...a rocket blowing up is not "little" by any stretch of the imagination. And usually it doesn't provide a second chance (the event)....kids should be allowed to do more things, but unfortunately rocket building is not one of them.
You, sir, are a fine example of what is wrong with America. You know not what you are speaking of, and consequently, you are filled with fear because of what you don't know.
At 13, I blew up a model rocket engine in my face. Guess what? I'm still here (23 years later). No scars. No permanent damage. No missing appendages. I'm FINE, albeit I have a bit more respect for warning labels and for not doing stupid things that I frikken' KNOW are stupid, and yes, I knew what I was doing when I blew up the engine that it was a Really Dumb Idea (the engine wouldn't ignite, so I ground it up into a powder and tried to light it with a match -- kids don't try this at home!). I flew rockets from about age eight (with my dad doing most of the work) through college (solo) with not a single injury other than the above incident. In fact, I've carried on the tradition with my own kids now that I'm a dad myself; I'm currently building a twin-engine D-size rocket to boost an Arduino, which I'll be using to measure air temperature, air pressure and acceleration. I've had far more injuries due to riding a bicycle than I have had flying rockets -- do you therefore want to ban bicycles, too?
There's a reason they call that science: rocket science.
Ummm...because it's science, and involves rockets? What NASA or Space-X does *is* really hard, because they are dealing with very, very large, very, very powerful and very, very complex machines, which have to fly very precise trajectories. An A- through C-size model rocket is many, many orders of magnitude less complex and less dangerous, particularly if you don't try to DIY your engines. Building and flying such a rocket is well within the capabilities of a jr. high school student; designing and building such a rocket is well within the capabilities of a high school student with a little supervision from a high school science teacher.
Nutrition info is on everything, it hasn't helped.
That's because people generally don't track how many calories (or grams of fat or...) they eat throughout the day. I recently started tracking what I eat on loseit.com (no, I have no affiliation with them, other than as a happy user) and was surprised at how easy it is to overeat without realizing it. When I found the Android app that let's me just scan a barcode to add food that I ate, it became stupid-easy to track nutrition information. What I found was that I was consuming at least 500 calories more than I needed per day, and that some foods that I thought were healthy are surprisingly high in calories (like avocados and bagels) while some other foods that I expected to be really unhealthy (cheese danish) are much better than I thought.
Let's see...do I listen to my doctor or some random guy on the Internet? Ding, ding, ding, ding! Sorry, you lose.
I was fighting a problem with some pretty severe eczema on my hands, and several dermatologists told me that diet had nothing to do with it. They prescribed various creams, lotions, etc. that ultimately only made the problem worse. I finally found a doctor who spent some time talking with me (what a concept!), and he advised me to stop eating anything containing HFCS*. I took his advice, and within three months, the problem was manageable. Now, close to three years later, it's pretty much gone. Yes, "plural of anecdote is not data," but it's working for me, so I'm sticking with it.
* The problem with HFCS, he said, is that your body can't break it down like it does other sugars, even though it does recognize it as a sugar. Therefore, when you eat HFCS, your body recognizes it as a sugar so it releases insulin to deal with it. That causes your body to process the other sugars in your bloodstream, but the HFCS is still there and so you still produce even more insulin to process the sugar. That makes you crave more sugar, so you eat more HFCS, rinse, repeat. Is he right? I don't know; I'm neither a nutritionist nor a chemist nor a biologist. All I know is that nixing HFCS from my diet has significantly helped me with both sugar cravings and skin health.
If you can't afford to insure your family on a 6-figure salary, you're doing it wrong. Perhaps you need to make some budget cuts in another area of your lifestyle? I don't (quite) make six figures, but my family is insured, and I even have some money left over after paying to bills to splurge on a few luxuries once in a while.
I do find it hilarious that those who look down on folks who buy a monster-sized $1 soda at the fountain are often the same types that will happily walk to the cooler and pull out a $2 bottle of water for purchase.
Ummm...why? IMHO, buying a $1 supertanker full of soda is a bad idea, and I quite honestly would rather have the $2 bottle of water. But that's not a decision based upon the price-point of the drinks in question; it's that I'd rather drink water than soda -- enough so that I'd pay twice the price to get the item I would prefer to have.