I have 20k mp3s and none of them ever "get fucked". You most likely have a hardware problem with your machine if this is routinely happening to you.

And hey, if an album ever got fucked, well just redownload it!

"What if we do all the hard work of fixing the climate, only to get hit by an asteroid and have it all go to shit anyway?"

Wouldn't that mean we solved the hard problems and now have the infrastructure and know-how in place to solve the problem again but quicker and easier?

I think its far easier to troubleshoot and solve the same problem the second time. Considering in your theoretical example that we have already solved the problem once.

"Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem."

If the problem is rampent overconsumption, british columbia proves that increasing taxes does make people use less fuel.

"A report by Sustainable Prosperity entitled BCâ(TM)s Carbon Tax Shift After Five Years:An Environmental (and Economic) Success Story suggested that the policy had been a major success. During the time the tax had been in place, fossil fuel consumption had dropped 17.4% per capita (and fallen by 18.8% relative to the rest of Canada). These reductions occurred across all the fuel types covered by the tax (not just vehicle fuel)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Yes, I realize that everyone hates all taxes. I am not saying whether it is right or wrong, but the province of BC proves that it is effective at addressing the problem of too much carbon emissions being produced.

http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/tbs/t...

"it's amazing to me that we've actually reached the point where MS is getting flack for not adhering strongly enough to planned obsolescence"

After painstakingly upgrading the entire office to windows 7 over the last few years, recommending to all friends family and clients that they NEED to upgrade, I am somewhat conflicted.

Firstly, microsoft is making me look like a lying dick. When I heard about this IE vulnerability, I thought "awesome! now everyone that hummed hawed and complained at me for forcing upgrades will be apologizing!". So i am pretty pissed off that they now go back on their word and still support XP making me look like I didn't know what I was talking about.

On the other hand, I do like companies stepping up and patching bugs in legacy products. So I'm not terribly sure what to feel right now.

When in doubt, be pissed off at M$ I guess! Damned if you do and damned if you don't. I guess they did the "right" thing. But for how long? will they still be patching xp in 2025? I know a guy who still runs windows 98 with kernel extensions or something like that. He loves it!

"So I'd have to conclude that the problem lies between the pedals and the seat in this case.

And I know cause I drive [a tesla] daily and I have managed to double pedal a total of two-three times when being lazy..."

So there was a problem with the driver in your case as well then?
In my 20 years of driving many different cars, this has never happened to me. Not once. And I have size 15 feet, and regularly wear combat boots. The fact that you are saying you had the exact same experience on the exact same car - how can that NOT be a design flaw?

Your anecdote exactly proves his point! Unless you are calling yourself the problem. Do you really love tesla so much you would rather blame yourself?

She was just being nice. As the parent of an 11 year old, they make very bad liars. I just take everything my children say with a grain of salt. The thing with lies is if you understand peoples motivations in life, what they are interested in, what they desire. Then you can easily see when they are lying, withholding information or distorting their own memories to match with a current assumed reality.

I find that it's good practice to firstly identify peoples motivations and character and then look at everything they say through that prism.

"No teenage brain is. That is why parents also have to instill a reasonable work ethic and show them algorithms for reaching goals"

As the parent of an almost teenager I would say you are wrong. My kids will have a great work ethic, about things they enjoy. Obviously not everyone has the same interests.

For me, when I took programming courses in highschool, it made me realize how meticulous you would have to be to do it correctly. I would spend hours hunting down syntax errors (no internet back then) only to find out i put a comma in the wrong place. Math, I never knew why you would need it because we had computers and calculators. The theory was interesting but repetition - hell thats why we developed computers! to do the same low level repetative tasks over and over.

I loved taking apart computers, electronics, cars, etc and could do it for hours at a time, and I still do. So its not necessarily laziness. I just didnt see the point of doing the same math problems over and over when a computer could do the same operation a million times faster.

tldr, everyones interests are different, even "lazy" teenagers.

"So [outsourcing to the cloud is] like having the worldâ(TM)s best expert hired on to your team just managing your particular system. "

No, its more like having the cheapest possible person from the cheapest possible country, reading scripts and excerpts from manuals back to you while being oh so polite about it. And then after your 2 hour phone call, blaming any other vendor or technology you are using which *must* be the cause of all the problems.
Surely its not their flawless product, which even though they are in tech support and must listen to peoples issues all day, has absolutely zero flaws they are willing to admit.

Fact, no one cares more about your data than you do. That ain't never going to change.

This interview transcript (cant watch, get player error) is laughably sparse on any real strategy except "outsource to us!". I feel dumber for having read it.

So how do you explain canada then? I converted our business to chip and pin 3 or so years ago. It was either that or be on the hook for more fees from the credit card company.

Our payment processor issued us new pinpads, as all equipment is leased. Some older POS software had to be retrofitted. Took about 2 months of work for a medium business with about 15 tills and that includes all emails and vendors writing updates. The whole country did it pretty much at the same time a few years ago, so the vendors knew they would have to update or they would lose business.

Now here in canada, there is exactly 1 store that i frequent that does not have chip and pin. Sure it offloads the burden onto the customer, but generally if peoples cards are compromised, its because of some kind of skimming and camera going on, same as at ATMs. Based on the volume of fraud transactions, the bank generally knows about the fraud before you do and issues you another card.

Contrast that to my friend who got back from the states. He was on a 3 day trip, no one uses chip and pin down there and his card was almost immediately compromised (he thinks the cab company that he used). They called him on the second day asking him if he had made any large volume purchases in new york (he was in the south).

Looking backwards, it seems kind of ridiculous that a few scribbles were allowed to authenticate large financial transactions for so long. No one ever contests a signature. I have never seen it happen. A pin on the other hand is a pin. You either have it or you dont.

"Who pays the cost to fix old, out-of-date drivers and firmware? Is HP supposed to do it out of the goodness of their heart?"

Bullshit. A firmware update generally addresses some sort of bug or deficiency. By not patching it freely, HP is admitting that they sold you a flawed product. So I should be able to then demand my money back. It is their RESPONSIBILITY to fix it!!

As others have said, the worst company with this is cisco. The second worst is sonicwall. Fuck sonicwall and their paid updates!! I had to throw out a perfectly good VPN appliance whoes compact flash card had died because they would not let me download a firmware for the unit. Not because I didnt have a service contract with them, but because I didnt have a service contract for that one particular VPN appliance. I had another contract with another appliance which we purchased later.

If the fix is already made, then keeping it from former customers unless they pay up is spiteful ransom. A firmware update is addressing flaws in the vendors product. The vendor would do well to get them fixed, or you get a very bad reputation such as sonicwall has with me now.

If I had to maintain support contracts with every vendor i've ever done business with on the off chance that one day I will need an update, I would not be able to ever purchase anything new. Your old assets would become drags. This is similar to why I always try and find open source software alternatives for everything I possibly can. Specifically because in software world, it is very common to charge for every update. Result, I don't buy much paid for software when I have open source alternatives. With hardware, its a lot harder to change products when some bug is encountered.

All this is is a giant ad for dell servers, who I have never had a problem with getting drivers or updates for. If dell can do it, then sure as shit HP can. I was actually looking at HP servers for a friend, but I guess I will be recommending dell now. HP fails it. Short term profits trump everything and I am so sick of it.

"Never, ever pirate anything. It spurs their belief that people really want their product, but just aren't willing to pay for it."

I guess you are no fan of libraries then.

"So you've studied Han's perspective then? No? Waste of your time? You do get your logical fallacy here right?"

Isn't his "perspective" creationism? Wouldn't that require believing in a god or gods?

I don't think hes talking about panspermia. Wouldn't creationism dictate that there is 1) a creator 2) that he has input in human events? and 3) that this creator is "super natural". In that case, what is there to study? It's impossible to prove there is a god short of god herself coming down. And even then, I would most likely believe it to be an intelligent alien race rather than some supernatural being.

Why would anyone give that "argument" any serious merit? I would think you would have to be religious in which case your reason and logic faculties are already damaged and probably could not participate in a debate in the first place. I doubt any non religious people believe in creationism.

Well its america, and even worse, florida. The courts already said you can kill whomever you want, you just have to say "he's coming right for us".

If I was in america, and everyone around me was armed and with the above mentality, YOUR GOD DAMN RIGHT I WOULD BE ARMED!

If everyone around you is a violent psychopath (this did occur in america), I would want to be protected personally.

"Point is, there will be backlash to people wearing internet-connected face-recognizing cameras, and it won't matter what the excuse."

I agree with your sentiment, but no matter how much backlash there is, you can't stop the train. Just look at smartphones, tiwitter, facebook. People don't give a shit about privacy at all. 70% of people carry a smartphone now. Things I would have thought unbelievable 10 years ago regularly happen now. People are fucking around on their phones in meetings regularly, putting a real life person "on hold" to pick up a cel phone call, breaking up with people over text message or email, not paying attention walking down the street because you are twiddiling your phone, texting while driving... the list goes on. All of these things are bad judgement, if not outright rude, in my opinion, but smart phone adoption has become so widespread so fast, that the social mores haven't matured along with them.

Google glass will be the exact same. It will have so big of an adoption rate, one day you will wake up and everyone will have one. Same as smart phones. Make them cheap enough and they will become ubiquitous.

Disclaimer, i dont have a smart phone, but would really love a google glass type chinese knockoff headset. Why? because I would be in control of the information. So many situations occur where a customer or acquaintance mis remembers a situation. It would pay for itself ten times over to have video recall. Once again, that I and I alone, controlled. None of this big brother cloud BS.