If we stopped investigating crashes after 2 months, we would have a lot more planes with serious safety issues in the air.

3 years ago I was involved in a contract to replace several thousand public school computers from Lenovo that had bad PSUs. The computers weren't just dying, they were actually catching fire.
Lenovo has been coasting on brand reputation for quite some time now.

Go into the Cricket store and the workers will be on a small tablet trying to punch in and change your account information. No shit - last time I went in there, they still had their full desktops, but they were only used for ringing up purchases. Other stuff was done on the tablet. The tablet this particular employee was using had issues connecting to the network, so it took forever, and I had time to ask her, "You can't just do it on the computer?" No, they are actually mandating employees to use tablets now.

Wal-Mart's security team takes shoplifters into a small interrogation room of sorts, asks them for their ID, and makes them sign some kind of agreement that has a blank for their SSN. Most people hand it right over hoping they won't get the police involved. (They may even be able to get this info after the fact from the police themselves, but that I'm not sure of.)

What this may get used for is things like tracking shoplifters. Wal-Mart and other large retailers will take down your name, driver's license number, SSN, and take your picture if you get caught shoplifting, with a warning that you are not allowed back on the company property, or they will consider it trespassing.

A system like this could be used to automatically track people who have shoplifted to either get tailed by security or kicked out of the store (and possibly charged with trespassing). It also wouldn't surprise me for the companies to share this info, either directly or through a background check / data-broker company, of which many already exist. Imagine being locked out of 90% of retailers in the country for shoplifting some candy when you were 17...

I don't see where they claimed to be concerned with privacy.

As far as I know there weren't any Germans in the 1940s researching how to change eye color. Can you source that?

Resistance to the ACA mobilized fast and hard, from the moment it was proposed, and court challenges to it have proceeded non-stop from the beginning right up to this year. There are fundamental flaws in the ACA (like insurance companies and employers still being the gatekeepers to healthcare) but they don't need "careful vetting" to spot.

This also makes me think, will you need insurance for a self-driving car? If two self-driving cars are involved in a collision, who is responsible for the damages? You could say the manufacturer is responsible - but what if it's a collision between a self-driving car and a human-driven car? Or, will manufacturers be willing to take on the burden of providing insurance for each car they sell?

It's easier to type, and convention. It's like "why are you limiting yourself to /usr when you could have /user?"

Good for you... most people were running 56k tops.

I don't think piracy was that big of a factor. Sure, it required no modding... but it did require you to downloaded several hundred megabytes per game. The Dreamcast was released in 1999, so that means over dialup. I'm too lazy to do the math, but my guess-o-meter says you would have to tie up your phone line for the better part of a week to complete 1 game download. And hope you don't get disconnected, because then you have to start over...

Spliffs are better before dinner, to enhance the meal. Of course, you can always smoke before AND after, that's usually what I do.

I was thinking more about people who have a natural aptitude for logic, critical thought, and independent study, but hard knocks often come into the picture too.

In the end it's about judging people on their merits, not their background or some rubber-stamped credentials.

Seems the price has jumped. When I bought my Asus *book (eeepc 1000he) it was $350. So I thought, hey, this new model must be way more capable right? Yet in the article it's stated:

Golly Gee Willikers, that's exactly why I bought the eeepc. And it still worked for those purposes in 2014. And I'd still be using it in 2015 too if WinXP got updates or there weren't Linux driver issues. (This model did not ship with Linux.) Hell, I did more than web surfing on it - it made a sweet portable SNES emulator, as well as something to watch movies on. I even did some basic video editing on it if you can believe it or not - although admittedly, processing effects and encoding took a while.

Given the hardware advances in the 6 years since the 1000HE was released, I find it hard to believe Asus can't put out a computer that serves the same purpose for the same amount of money. Or less money.

Perhaps it's just over-spec'd for the stated purpose. 8 GB and 1920x1080 for web surfing and document editing? My gaming rig runs on 4 GB and 1440x900.