You might inform him that renting a pickup costs $19.99 per day plus fuel. It's damn cheap. Also, most home big box stores have a truck you can rent by the hour for cheap too. This is why my wife and I only have two small Toyota economy cars and a motorcycle. No need for a pickup.

Curiosity managed to travel 350 million miles before falling to pieces.

However if you only count the distance traveled on the surface of Mars...then it's pretty typical for US made vehicles.

mail.google.com/mail/h

Problem solved.

One of the options was to be eaten by cannibalistic visitors but that implies they are human...or at least they eat each other and occasionally the odd human as a special treat.

Being eaten by other humans is nothing new and aliens aren't really on the list so I'll settle for getting shoved into an airlock.

Good points but sometimes it has taken Apple a very long time to catch up to what everyone else has been doing for a long time. The one that really bothered me was no copy/paste on the iphone. How long did that last? Ridiculous. That is a basic function that should have been there from day one and they put off fixing it for what seemed like forever. When I had the phone it really felt like Apple's attitude was: "We got our money. Sucks to be you."

That's provided your phone survived the accident you caused because you were following the shitty built-in navigation that sent you the wrong way on the freeway.

I read a discussion following the killing of a cyclist in a city near me. One of these comments was extremely enlightening. I don't remember all of it only the part that read: "BICYCLES ARE TOYS." Suddenly it all became clear to me. Many car drivers feel that bicycles are toys for kids and for entertainment and therefore should only be used off-road. Roads are for transportation and in this fellow's comment he said that the (US) government was to blame for encouraging the use of bicycles as a form of viable transportation.

That's how many motorized vehicle drivers feel so it's no wonder they hate having bicycles on the road.

Probably right. There's a good chance that the reason the course was created and made a requirement is because instructors were frustrated by students who didn't know how to write a term paper or use a spreadsheet program to analyse data. They see it as simply getting all students familiar with the tools they will be required to use in later courses.

Maybe it's a dumb idea but this seems like the perfect application for a PC kit that a parent and child could build together. The parent that missed the PC boom and the kid that is just getting old enough to start learning the ropes. A crate with motherboard, hard drive, power supply, DVD drive, chassis, RAM, monitor, mouse and keyboard with step by step instructions and maybe even a DVD to watch. Video upgrade could be added later on and the OS could be pre-loaded on the HDD already configured to work with the included hardware. Does anyone make something like this?

I suspect it has to do mostly with quantity. If they pulled that with hundreds of thousands of customers with defective computer monitors the effect on their reputation would be catastrophic. The plasma market is microscopic by comparison so they probably feel it's worth the gamble. Particularly when the replacement cost is so high.

I've not personally seen issues with Samsung LCD displays. I was speaking of their plasmas which seem to be poorly engineered compared to their competition. I base this on the fact that no other manufacturer has this issue (spontaneous cracking) and also from the feedback I have received from people who service them.

This is a particularly expensive failure as it requires replacement of televisions costing $1500 or more retail. Like i said they used to pony up and honor their warranty but they did an about face around 2 years ago and have denied everything (so far as I can tell) since then claiming that the customer is essentially lying. I find this attitude particularly offensive so I will take my business and my money elsewhere.

If you are curious google "samsung plasma cracked" and enjoy reading the hundreds of instances of Sammy plasma sets spontaneously cracking due to thermal management issues. This usually happens in warranty and Samsung used to replace the sets. But as time went by it was happening too often so suddenly Samsung policy changed and since then every case I have heard of has ended with them saying "user damage" and denying the claim. The only people I have read about getting their set replaced are those that filed suit in small claims court. Samsung does not want this to go to court!

In my own case my $2100 58" plasma popped and went black while my wife and I were watching a DVD from across the room. In the almost 3 years we have had it the screen has never been touched to my knowledge. Not even to clean it. We have been ridiculously careful and protective of it...to no avail. Closer inspection after the set stopped working revealed a crack about 2 feet long in the lower right corner of the screen. As expected..."user damage."

I'll never buy another Samsung product as long as there's an alternative after seeing how they fraudulently avoid their responsibilities.

There will almost certainly be a waiver for vehicles over a certain GVW. If a vehicle has a capacity over a certain point it will be exempted and can (and will) be made with fuel consumption around 10-15mpg just as they are today...and people will buy them and claim all the same bullshit reasons (big family, safety, etc). Look...the cars are not the problem. It's the attitude that creates the market for the gas guzzlers that is the problem. People across the pond have been happy to drive smaller and more efficient cars for years. What's our hangup?

Absolutely.

I work for HP and our enterprise class machines are top shelf. The problem is that HP seems to feel it needs to compete at the low-end of the market. If you want to compare apples to Apples then stack any of our high end desktop or mobile workstations against theirs. I think they will compare pretty favorably. The real issue is that we have sullied our reputation by selling low grade systems to the masses. Gone are the days of HP test and measurement equipment that you bought once and used for 30 years without a hiccup (Agilent still makes great tools). Or what about HP calculators (ending with the HP 48G series - all subsequent ones are junk, IMO)? They were lust objects among engineers then just like iPhones are among hipsters today.

Apple has a computer product line of about 10 items, give or take. HP has probably hundreds in just the PC market. We need to cut that back to maybe a dozen and get rid of the low end stuff. We're just fighting over scraps in that market and it just isn't worth it.

I always liked HP's VUE running on X.