Mm. Not only that, but Germans really do have very little airconditioning. Probably for this reason, but there's even a cultural avoidance of it.

What's amusing is encountering that same thing in, like, the south of France where you really could use it..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009"

So, he was almost dead on. October 22nd is 4.46 years ago.

Could be the parent was confusing embrittlement from stray neutrons with metal fatigue.

On that subject, I was amused that a dozen eggs for sale in the store were labeled "from vegetarian chickens!"

Translation. We aren't about to let our chickens free-range for bugs and such, so our chickens are fed a 100% vegetarian corn diet in their lil' cages.

Great. Same goal, more side effects. Also, the drugs are usually prescribed along with dietary changes.

Related:
http://healthland.time.com/201...

Lustig in his "Sugar, the Bitter Truth" youtube video claims the whole fat-is-evil thing started out based on a flawed study (one that failed to separate variables, and shaped an anti-fat public policy.

Food without fat tastes like cardboard, so Lustig says producers responded by cranking up the sugar. I'm sure the subsidising of corn and sugar didn't help. And certainly they are cheaper. But now they could argue their food was healthier "low fat" instead of having the bad mojo of it being made of cheaper lower quality ingredients.

The most sympathetic skeptical take on it would probably be: http://m8y.org/astrology.txt
snippet...
"The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... illusion you are probably seeing.

I ran into something similar on a YC discussion, of someone who was blatantly abusing store return policies.
Stores have liberal return policies because most people are good, and don't abuse it, so annoying customers too much in return policies has a higher cost to business than the occasional jerk.

As well as the cost of implementing the pin system, there's also the disincentive that a company that implements it is a higher hassle company than one that didn't. Up until now, the costs of fraud have been low enough that they've been worth it to provide people with the convenience.

About 14 years ago, a US bank actually sent me a chipped card, and a USB card reader. Was supposed to offer extra verification for online banking, and for a network of merchants using it. It never took off, I guess inertia and customer dislike of the hassle.

http://www.volokh.com/2014/01/...
"So, this makes a differenceâ"in a high-trust, low-fraud country it generally is not necessary to invest in as elaborate security protections as elsewhere. As an analogy, consider that in the U.S. very few restaurants, stores, or hotels routinely post visible armed guards at their front door, whereas this precaution is not uncommon in other countries."

because no one would misuse this tech to act creepy.

True story:

Back around 1989 I was maintaining a minicomputer system for a small chain of Auto Body Shops near Ft. Worth Texas. I got to know a lot about how the business works and made friends with some of the VERY blue collar guys who sanded, welded, painted and whatnot.

At that time the body shop had dedicated terminal that could dial up the Texas DMV database and retrieve the registration info for a given license plate. On at least two separate occasions I observed one of the shop guys using the terminal to get the name and address of a car they observed that was driven by an attractive woman. Nothing creepy or potentially dangerous there? Yeah.

Maybe we should study CCTV operators in England to make sure that attractive women, or any other category of people, aren't being watched more closely than everyone else.