Smaller families, more invested in each child, less social interaction because of the child-abducting boogeymen (even though they are statistically insignificant and getting more so with each year). We've got a generation of kids that are growing up inside and not learning how to interact with people in non-sterile environments. When forced to deal with people that they can't just hit block on or ignore, they freeze up. Socialization is very much downplayed in our current culture, and it's apparently sorely needed by many.

Don't take this as me saying they have to like everyone they meet. But you do have to learn some basic "get along with each other" skills that I'm finding many kids lack any more.

The problem is the "could". We have a system that's set up to railroad people into the system with those "coulds". "You COULD get 7 years, or plead guilty and get off after 3 months, but it's an adult charge", but then you've got a jail and your strikes started. For what is generally just a stupid juvenile mistake.

Prosecutorial discretion is not often used in a very discretionary manner.

I don't think anyone was trying to get him out of punishment. I think the chorus here is calling to not treat him as an adult, as our system is wont to do. The "years in prison" line in the news blurb is what set all this off, and that is completely inappropriate given his age and his crime. It shouldn't even be an option to an overzealous prosecutor.

Even if you didn't get through to him specifically, there are quite possibly other people more on the fence that don't use stupid acronyms like "SJW" as if it's somehow a pejorative, and they may be influenced by your comments to look deeper into it. We don't need everyone to admit that we've got a problem to start solving it, just enough people to achieve critical mass.

That's one of the reasons that I like T-Mobile. I can go over my data allotment, and all they do is throttle me.

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?