Damnit! I have mod points, but I already posted. Somebody mod this up please; the parent is exactly right.

There's no reason why the infotainment system can't have read-only access to the engine control module (with write access physically prevented by the hardware). You won't be able to modify the engine management without physical access to the car, but that's the way it should be anyway.

Fuck off, fascist.

First, materials (primarily steel) comes from non-US locations (eg China).

So either use US steel, or hold China to the same environmental standards! You seem to think we some how "can't" do that, when really we only choose not to.

Second, incidental mining operations are carbon positive. Fugitive dust emissions...

Most dust is not made of carbon. (Exceptions include coal and carbonates like limestone, but those are not greenhouse gases unless you chemically decompose them. So don't do that!)

vehicular/equipment like gennies all running on coal/diesel for obvious reasons

What part of "run the equipment on biodiesel" did you not understand?

Those kinds of arguments are uniformly bullshit, because they assume that the construction and decommissioning activities, etc. somehow can't possibly also run on energy derived from the same source!

Equipment used to build nuclear plants can run on electricity generated by (previously-built) nuclear plants.

Feedstock for biodiesel can be harvested by farm equipment running on biodiesel.

Photovoltaic panel factories can run on solar electricity.

Or you can mix and match!

The idea that green power isn't "really" green because you need fossil fuels to build it is fucking moronic.

People defending Snowden as a pro-american whistleblower that should be pardonned by US authorities.

As one of those people, I'm very willing to forgive Snowden (and the journalists who are sorting through/releasing the info) if he accidentally mixed some disclosures of legitimate* NSA actions in with the many, many illegitimate ones.

Important caveats:

1. This assumes that (a) the release is accurate and (b) that Snowden is responsible for it. At the moment, we have no reason to believe that either is the case. In particular, I contend that it's much more likely for disclosures of legitimate* NSA activities to be falsely attributed to Snowden as a smear campaign than to be genuinely done by him.
2. You may notice that I used the word "legitimate" with an asterisk. By this I mean "legitimate from the US perspective." Other countries my disagree, but they don't get to decide what is and isn't legal under US law. They're free to defend themselves, of course... (Similarly: I don't get upset about foreign spy agencies attempting to attacking the US; I get upset at the NSA if it fails to stop them.)

So, let me get this straight: you want to keep the shitty status quo in telecom because "OMG the 'Free Market' is great!," but calling a third-party IT guy (the equivalent of your plumber example) when your router has a problem would be terrible?

I was actually half-trolling (implying that the US is no longer a first-world country), but intentionally wrote it so that it could be interpreted either way.

Besides, the US does use the metric system for a lot of things, including most manufacturing and science. A lot of goods people buy are really created in metric sizes, which are then converted when they print the label.

Zero first-world nations still use imperial measurements.

So would you rather we put a gun to your head and make you cough up $50 and have $10 of it go to waste, or put a gun to your head and make you cough up $80 ($40 plus another $40 to make sure the first $40 wasn't wasted)?

(Note that those are the only two choices. We have a gun to your head, remember? Refuse to choose and we pull the trigger.)

Seattle is a special case: apparently, your Internet access is fucked up because you keep electing shitty city councilpeople who make rules that ISPs hate. You should quit doing that.

IIRC, VB.NET is going away in the next version of .NET. (Good riddance, too!)

I had a sapphire radeon (talk about a nightmare combination)

What do you mean? (I just bought a Sapphire Radeon R7 260x; should I be worried?)

Today, Slashdot disparages narcc for not understanding "damning with faint praise" when he reads it.

So, what, it's written in Lisp with some Fortran libraries?

Why is that modded funny? It's not a half-bad idea!

(Of course, these days when you want half-Lisp, half-Fortran, you use a different syntax and call it Matlab (or GNU Octave). It's better than using C++, at any rate!)