^^This

The fact that a good chunk of the population has been repeatedly fed that scientists are every bit as corrupt as the politicians (and ironically enough, the big money backers) that they'd compromise their standards for cash has done more damage than and lack of personability or "warmness."

Those numerals originated in India, where the Arabs encountered and adopted them (and later transmitted them to Europe).

Imagine what Europe would be like if some foreign powers came in, colonised big chunks of it for a century or three, then drew borders for new countries that had nothing to do with ethnicity or language. So Milan is now the capital of the Styrian Republic, which comprises Lombardy, Styria, and most of Slovenia; the mix of languages shouldn't be a problem since we're going to educate all their kids in Korean, anyway, right? Then let's draw a nice straight line at an angle across France, and combine the part to the south of that with Catalonia. Let's call it "Franconia"--nevermind the locals already using that name for a different region of the continent--what do they know? And wouldn't it make things more convenient for us to administer if the Rhineland, the Netherlands, and peninsular Denmark were a single entity? And so on... and so on...

Now you know where the most of the national borders in the Mideast and Africa came from. And now maybe you're beginning to see why most if not all of these states are doomed to failure.

To buy or not to buy.

That is the question...

LK

You've not read much news from Europe lately, have you?

Correct--there was no Big Daddy In The Sky yesterday, there isn't one today, and I'm willing to bet there won't be one tomorrow, either.

You, SirMa'amOrFido, have just earned yourself a gold star.

Such as...?

He sounds like he works for Putin.

What do you mean, "descended" into anarchy? It fucking started that way.

I won't use a smartphone unless it has removable storage and a removable battery, one of the many reasons I keep accepting the free Samsung Galaxy phone rather than the free iPhone from my telco every 2 years.

iPhone != "most".

When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well.

Yes, for normal people, but we're nerds. We'll simply hack them, just like we jailbreak iPhones.

This story reminds me of something that happened in a bar a year or so ago. A fellow had a strange looking contraption that looked like it had something to do with a furnace. I asked him what it was, and he said it was an "obsolete" analog part that cost him twenty bucks new that he was installing in a friend's furnace to replace a burned up digital board that cost $200 used.

Look at cars, my last car had a digital circuit to control climate. If it had gone out, the replacement was $300. $300 for something that surely cost the automaker less than $5 to manufacture.

If I'm forced to buy an internet-connected toaster, you can bet its antennas will be the first parts to be removed.

A lot of reasons. I probably don't have a fixed IP address, I'd have to keep on top of security far more closely than with a PC, and I'd have to have at least two computers running 24/7/365 in case one went down, and I usually only have one or two running when I'm awake. The electricity alone would cost more than hosting.

I still remember people in 1996 asking me how to change the user's screen res using JavaScript so "they can view my site correctly" and getting all bent out of shape when I tried to explain to them why this was a horrible idea (and not allowed in any case).

None of the N1 launches were manned, and the US had already done a manned flyby of the Moon (the Apollo 8 mission, to be exact) exactly 2 months before the first N1 test shot was made in February 1969. The US landed 2 men on the Moon 5 months after that.

So, no, there was absolutely no chance at all of that happening.