I treat such questions as passwords and never put real info in them. If they're basing it on info they think they already have, they should be slapped hard.

This, so much this! It really annoys me that sooo many sites all ask questions from the same pool of stupid biographical data, thereby making guessing them almost trivial for people like vengeful ex wives and rogue IT staff at any random website that collects password reset questions.

Mother's maiden name? "handlebar mustache"
First pet's name? "furious green ideas"

Granted, I don't tend to pick what I'd call really all that "secure" passwords for them, but I sure as hell don't give them real answers. Hell, half the questions they ask, I don't even know the right answer - "College roommate's home town"??? Seriously? WTF, I couldn't stand the guy, you can sum up the entirety of our conversation with "can you please wash your bedding this month?" and "I told you you couldn't make bacon in a hot-pot!"

I mean, if you were doing actual peer review, none of this would pass even a half-sentient peer's inpection.

This, so much this!

Seriously - If I don't do my job and my boss catches me playing online poker all day, should I attach a response to my HR writeup explaining that I have addressed my deficiency by rearranging my cube to make it harder for others to see my screen???


The problem here has nothing to do with people submitting fake papers, Springer. Rather, you need to stop hiring fake editors.

But you don't care, because it's the control that matters to you, no the consequences.

Fundamental attribution error, much?

1) Modern diesel engines burn cleaner than gasoline.

2) Modern wood-stoves can produce 1/10th the emissions of your granddad's outdoor wood boiler.

I don't know about agriculture as a source of air pollution, though I know the runoff causes massive damage to aquatic ecosystems.

The bigger problem here, we just have too damned many humans. Not too many cars, not too many woodstoves, not fuel-X vs fuel-Y, not farming-method-P vs farming-method-Q. We don't need emissions controls (well, we do, but I consider that secondart); we need population controls.

Nothing short of that will "fix" our pollution problem, our energy needs, our water needs, our space needs. Our planet just can't handle the size of our species.

Okay, Mr. Righteous Indignation - Please give me a historical example of ubiquitous in-home cameras leading to a war where millions died.

when I tell the house I want 2 eggs over easy a slice of toast and orange juice for breakfast at 6am I do not want eggs at 5am, toast at 6:30 and OJ at 3 in the afternoon

I put the butter in the pan, put the bread in the toaster, put the eggs in the pan, pour the OJ, flip the eggs, take the toast out, and flip the egg onto it. None of that requires Stratum-1 quality time, or even an internet connection.

More importantly - You have apparently confused "magic" for "the internet". The fact that your toaster has its own facebook feed (with 27,000 followers, no doubt!) doesn't mean that it can walk over to the pantry (dodging your robotic frying-pan on its way to get the eggs and butter, of course), take out the bread, remove that pesky little plastic clip without breaking it, take out two slices, put the clip back on (again without breaking it), then cook them for you.

Why does my toaster need to know the time more accurately than, say, a five minute window? For that matter, why does my toaster need internet access?

For that matter, why the hell do I want my two-ton thin-metal-shelled death trap visible on the internet while flinging its contents (me) down the highway at 80MPH?

Cameras in every home would kill millions. Literally.

You realize "1984", all similarities to reality aside, counts as a work of fiction, right? Not "history", merely speculation about one particular flavor of distopian society.

Still irrelevant - Google doesn't "owe" you free advertising.

Google exists as a publicly-traded for-profit company. They "just happen" to provide a tool for free that lets you find things online, but they have absolutely no obligation to make that tool "fair". If they want to put things that make them money at the top of the list, they can.

If they wanted to sort their search results by the number of cat references per result, they could do that, too. And none of us have the least right to complain about it.

Don't like it? Use Bing.

As is your idea of "true" suicidal people - most of them can't plan ahead. Most suicide attempts are impulsive.

Way to read your own biases into what I said.

Wanting to talk to someone does not mean the same thing as changing your facebook status to "just took a bottle of pills LOLWTFBBQ".

You also contradict yourself in your stance on this - So most suicides happen impulsively, but they fucking stop to talk about it on Facebook first? Impulsive means "Hey, I had a bad day, and whatd'ya know, I casually walked to the top of this bridge. Hey, I could jump!". Impulsive doesn't mean telling your 1500 closest friends you want to die and then giving them a few hours to make sure enough people read it. In any other context, we would call that proof of premeditated intent, not "impulsive".

The irony of all this - People who really just want to die don't post to Facebook about it. They get their affairs in order, make sure no one will need to deal with their shit (beyond the trauma of their final exit), and then just go off on a weekend "hiking trip" that they never come back from.

The people posting to Facebook about suicide want/need attention. So how does Facebook deal with this? Socially fucking isolate them??? Well done, Facebook! Now, I personally think more people should "just do it" and quit talking about it, but you've managed to enact a policy that will accomplish that goal far, far better than my own opinions ever could!

Fans die like carnival goldfish. So by far, I have dealt with more dead fans that any other single part. But they also replace easily enough, so, not really much of a "problem", just $5 to swap it out for a new one.

Now, for causing real problems, PSUs win by a landslide. They can range from extremely subtle, to system-destroying, but you very rarely have them just outright fail in a tidy, nondestructive way.

A lot of people said storage, which I find somewhat bizarre - I have maintained sizable (5-8 drives of the one-notch-below-cutting-edge size available at the time) home-built NASs for 20+ years now, and every few years I swap it out for a bigger, better model. I've easily run a century in drive-years. And no mistake, I've bought three or four drives that arrived DOA, but I've only ever had two fail after they had worked for a while (and one of those, I'd call "almost DOA", because while it lasted long enough to format it and bring it online, it didn't even survive trying to copy the data from its predecessor onto it). People love complaining about their HDDs dying, but in practice, they just don't really die all that often. Just watch your SMART data and replace failing drives at the first sign of trouble.

As for the rest of the options, again, I've had them arrive DOA, but they virtually never fail once they've worked for a few days.

WTF? Nobody that voted Nader was sane.

You seem to misunderstand the point.

No one who voted for Nader cared about his sanity - Burning the whole fucking thing down and start over looks a hell of a lot more appealing than yet another four years of the slow erosion of our rights.

We literally have political dissidents seeking asylum in Russia - Really think about that for a minute. Russia. The big enemy (drugs and terrorism and copyright violators and Cuba aside), notorious for its human rights abuses and opaque near-totalitarian government. And our political refugees flee there?

People didn't vote for Nader to vote for Nader. They voted for Nader to vote for "anyone else".

Don't just easily obfuscate foul play with the way it's supposed to be.

Oh, no mistake - It works exactly the way they intend it.

Poor people commit more crimes precisely because the upper classes dictate what ethical behavior is in such a way as to justify and reenforce their own values and behavior at the expense of other classes

Did you seriously mean to say that we've outlawed murder as a mere point of fashion?