It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.

Insurance only works because of uncertainty. The very concept of getting people to buy insurance depends on aggregating risk over a sufficiently large population.

When the insurance companies can actually offer people rates that come within a small margin of actual payouts (plus a hefty bit extra for the insurance company's cut) - Why would any sane person still pay for insurance? Put the same money in the bank and cut out the middle-man.

You do realize that if they are tracking you when you make a mistake and are in an accident they will hang you out to dry, wont pay your claim, and will be sitting at the other table in the court room if they can make a credible case that you breeched the terms of your insurance contract.

I always cringe a bit when I see the "put web cams in your house! For security!" commercials. It's just a mater of time until Xfinity or what not get's compromised and all those web cams you use to check your kids get used by other people... to "check your kids".

And at Martian gravity? Or at a pressure that compensates for the difference in gravity?

Mars has lower gravity than the Earth. If it works at Mars pressure and Earth Gravity, it will work better actually on Mars.

That said, I''d say the GP's assertion requires a cite - As far as I know, virtually no "Aero"dynamics-based means of propulsion or lift works on Mars. Any viable copter on Mars would require blades the size of a football field, which leads to a not inconsiderable problem of how you mount more than one of them to a probe the size of a small car.

That you can capture passwords with a camera.

WTF .. This place is really gone to the dumps..

Yes, they have a chainsaw under the seat.

Last i heard, if you dont protect your trademark you lose it. I dont think there are any 'humanitarian exceptions' to that rule.

However, they could 'lease' the rights to his family to use it, lets say for a dollar... Then they dont look like jerks, and dont risk the legal implications for inaction.

But then it occurred to me, it's not the card/usb-stick the dogs are smelling, it's the fact that some human touched it

No, the dog simply smells the chemicals in the device - Hell, if we can smell them, so can a dog. We just can't smell them well enough to find one hidden inside four containers at the back of a filing cabinet, whereas a dog can.

To your other point, however...


There's no way the dog can smell certain memory cards with certain content on it

Absolutely true, but largely irrelevant. They had a warrant to seize storage media, plain and simple. The dog just helped them find all of it.

That said, I still see a dog alerting to the smell of electronics as increasingly useless in the modern world. Assuming no malicious intent on the part of the handler (false, but let's roll with it for now), a drug dog can sniff out your bag of weed precisely because you don't have hundreds of bags of hypothetically-legal weed hidden around your apartment and they need to find the one illegal one. With electronics, however, I do have hundreds (possibly in the thousands) of circuit boards randomly scattered around my house - I'd dare say that even Joe Sixpack easily has over a hundred boards around the house, when even things like car keys and teddy bears and thermostats have them nowadays.

So while the police might love cataloging 150 individual drug charges for every seed they find in your carpet, they won't take quite the same sick pleasure in documenting your three computers, your smoke detectors, two external HDDs, your TVs, 18 thumbdrives, random old PC parts you have lying around, a third of your kid's action figures, your vintage SNES and dozens of games, a few hundred burned DVDs... And then someone actually needs to check out almost all of those to decide whether or not they have any storage capacity, and if so, what they contain? In all seriousness, if they raided my house for storage media, even narrowing it down to "real" storage devices (HDDs, burned DVDs, flash drives... as opposed to every recordable greeting card etc), someone could literally spend the rest of their life trying to decide whether or not they had found anything incriminating in the collection.

He also seems to spend most of his time enriching himself with bad pop science books and TV appearances. Maybe he did some useful science early in life but at this point he is NOT a scientist to admire or aspire to be.

Well, over there you are all socialists so the political label doesn't matter much anyway.

Well, to be fair crushing OPEC wouldn't be a bad idea.....

I didnt get the impression he was a liberal, that cant distinguish their socialist agenda from reality.

The facts are just ignored by the ignorant. Facts should eradicate any beliefs at time of presenting them.

Not supporting them is your right.

Them supporting their customers is their right. If their customers have issues, then they need to not use the products. I still suspect you have a severe issue with control and are staying away to avoid the problem. But hey, admitting you have the problem ( and avoiding triggers ) is the first step to recovery, so i commend you on that.