Not to mention that if you type in google.com you may be redirected to a local country site. If someone wanted google.de, they would have typed google.de in the address bar to begin with!

But stereotypes about Russian people are all true! They are all scary and depressed psychopaths! That's why nobody is their friend!

It certainly isn't the case that they are reclusive because they have a hard time making friends due to the stereotypes. That would be ridiculous.

In my industry (steam and gas turbines), GE stands for "Good Enough".

Well, that's giving Disney too much credit I think. This was a long time in the works with several different departments and at least a dozen people involved. You have to have meetings with the outside contractor, draft a contract, get approvals, arrange payment methods, etc etc. You need to have meetings with HR, and they have to get all the preparations in place to fire the American workers. Somebody has to coordinate employee orientations and reassign assets from all the terminated employees to the replacement workers.

This was a carefully planned operation with many people involved. It was deliberately done, step by step, over the course of months or even years. The only mistake is that people found out about it.

You can't (or at least you shouldn't) fry anything in Olive oil. It will smoke and degrade into potentially unhealthy chemicals.

It's not worth their time. They either wrote off the loss or their insurance company paid or they backcharged the merchants. Spending any additional time on nailing the criminal wouldn't benefit them in any way. It would be purely for vengeance.

Weed is not a tranquilizer. I don't think you've ever tried it. I am more careful when driving stoned than when I drive clearheaded. The larger the dose, the more paranoid I get that something bad is going to happen if I don't dedicate 100% of my attention to the act. High drivers drive slower and are more relaxed (and possibly paranoid of rearending someone) so they don't generally tailgate. This is such a common reaction that it is a stereotype.

If its all marijuana, and revenue, that's about 130kg of weed using a weed price of $11.5/gram (Priceofweed.com, Texas, High Quality, based on 9568 samples). Thats a lot of weed shipments- roughly 175 grams per business day.

Chinese people may not be universally unscrupulous, but it is definitely a lot more common than in other countries. When is the last time a German or Australian was at a trade show and wasted a competitor's time, asking questions that are obviously related to copying their business, taking detailed notes, and photos of everything? I have never seen it happen or witness such a thing. But without fail, at every trade show I go to, there are several Chinese delegations who go around doing this to every booth in the show. It's a cultural etiquette mismatch. Chinese people (despite, or because of, their totalitarian government?) also seem to have a difficult time following any kind of rule.

Why would they make it cheaper? They can sell expensive razor blade handles AND expensive razor blades.

Wow you weren't kidding. There is a ridiculous number of listings on ebay. If I were younger and had more time, I might be tempted. A more recent chip would still give a better $/performance though. Especially if you factor in power costs.

There are two different bills that the GP referenced, the Grid Act and the SHIELD Act.

The GRID act gives special emergency powers to The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to order utilities to do something. This was widely rejected by the industry because some of the powers could force the utility to keep their plants online, even if their machines were being damaged. That's not reasonable. If a grid problem gets to the point where it is damaging generators and other grid infrastructure, we should shut it down. Intentionally damaging a bunch of generators isn't going to keep the grid online if things get to that point.

The SHIELD act was about electromagnetic interference. FERC asked NERC last month to look into this some more. I would rather a government agency with some knowledge and experience on the matter write the rules, rather than a bunch of politicians who are pushing a bill that a lobbyist wrote.

Which is probably one of the reasons that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (The federal agency "FERC") asked the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (FERC's rulemaking organization "NERC") to investigate this. Less than a month ago. And their documents look like a common-sense plan.

The quote from Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country. ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."

is just ridiculous in that context. FERC is the government agency responsible and they have asked their rulemaking body to make or revise some rules on the subject. And NERC is not a lobbying group. They make rules. The reporting requirements for some of their rules are onerous for the utilities (although they are generally common-sense and reasonable). I have a hard time believing they are in anybody's pocket.

Yep, this guy is full of crap. The telling statement is:
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country. ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."

That's very misleading. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a government agency that has powers to make rules regarding the grid. They decided that this is a highly technical industry, so they basically created the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to investigate potential issues, draft rules, and get the industry on board with them. FERC tells NERC which kind of rule they want, NERC drafts it. Then FERC decides if the draft rules should be made law. NERC doesn't have any legal powers to protect the grid, they are just a rulemaking organization. So the statement "no part of the U.S. government that has legal powers to order them to protect the grid" is very misleading since NERC doesn't have the power to protect the grid anyway. That's FERC's job.

If NERC is in the industry's pocket, they aren't in it very deep. They have made rules regarding cybersecurity and IT systems that have cost utilities hundreds of thousands (small utilities) to millions (large utilities). Just look at some of their recent filings (proposed rules.) Especially this one - The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Report on the Potential Impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Clean Power Plan—Chapter 7 Reliability Assurance Mechanism. If NERC was in the industry's pocket, this would be some drivel about how the EPA's clean power plan was rubbish. It isn't. It basically just says "hey this EPA plan might affect grid reliability, we better develop a metric to measure grid reliability". It's very reasonable and obviously written by an engineer, not a lobbyist.