So you prefer PVC for your water pipes? That tends to grow nasty stuff in it, and not be great at dealing with temperature shifts. Or cast iron, which rusts? Steel?

Copper is used in MANY systems, and almost universally in plumbing, the world over. US, UK, Mexico and Canada all use it as their primary potable water piping solution, and even the EU uses it commonly: https://books.google.com/books... water pipe european union&f=false

Really? I had to get a new battery for it, but my 2010 HP Envy 15 Macbook competitor is still running fine, and has a faster GPU than they ever had. And I've even been able to upgrade the RAM and replace the hard drive in it, hauled it with me on an airplane twice a week for over a year, and generally used the hell out of it.

Pipes have gotten bigger. It's harder to unintentionally DDoS a site any more, unless it's running out of someone's basement. And even then, I've got like 5Mbps upload on DSL... that's enough for a decent load. The market and commodity hardware wasn't that way when I first joined and sites got slashdotted semi-regularly.

Sometimes. Confidence combined with deference and recognition of that which you don't know is a different sort of confidence than brazen overconfidence like this "Scorpion" guy. If you can admit what you don't know easily, I'm more likely to believe you when you say you actually do know something. But it takes confidence to know the difference.

There's a 5th Amendment in France? Who knew.

It'll last longer than 88 years. The half life is 88 years... that means it's only halfway done after 88 years. All it's going to do is lose efficiency over the next thousand years or so.

He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).

The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.

What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...

Part of the problem is that CFL's do color banding, whereas incandescent is full spectrum. So even if the color profile is tuned to a reasonable value, it's still lacking output in fairly large color bands. Which, incidentally, is probably why your wife doesn't like it... women are more likely to have better color sensitivity than the average male, especially in the red/green bands

You should try some different bulbs... I live in the Denver area, and I have a CFL on my porchlight that lights up instantly every time, no matter how cold it is. Different brands can make a lot more difference than they should.

Did you have a choice of which CPU to match with which motherboard? Would you miss that choice if it were taken away from you?

I'm reasonably certain that "liberal" and telling people what to do are a bit at loggerheads...

So... if I go get some food and my expectation is that I get the right thing, and they give me the wrong thing, it's entirely possible that my expectations are just off, and I'm expecting too much?

They showed that the kids were all very good at getting answers when given a structured set of data and tests, but not when asked to design an experiment. That means that design skills are lacking relative to analysis skills. There's no running study needed.

You can teach an engineer to be a manager, or at least take over management tasks. You can't teach a manager to be an engineer.

Oh how I wish you were right. In some areas and with some people you might be correct. However, especially in the US, there is still a deep ingrained culture that assumes women know nothing about technology and math and engineering. > Also for decades movies have influenced culture to where it is well accepted across most cultures that women are intellectually equal to men, and can do anything they want. I WISH this were true. It's much better than it used to be, I'll give you that. But a large majority of people still view women unequally in intellect.