In Massachusetts, the State (IIRC) took Toyota to court to require them to release the codes to independent mechanics so they could fix the cars and do warranty work. I think the State won, but I'm not sure, and it was tied pretty closely to existing MA law.

Would a password, or an item code that had to be entered in an instruction, such as "Enter 'F2-ABC' to select the proper module" - would the use of "F2-ABC" be a violation? IDK. It might even be trademarked, and trademarks never expire as long as they are maintained.

An older example: Back in the day, IBM sold two card punch/readers, IIRC the 620 and 630. One was much faster and more expensive than the other. According to what I was told back then, the difference was that the slower cheaper one had an extra circuit board that slowed it down. Remove the extra, and voila! faster - plus loss of warranty, no field service, etc. of course.

It's quite common on most cars to have a single wiring harness that includes all the plugs for the extra features, possibly for all models of the car. E.g. you might even fit wiring for a station wagon feature in a sedan. This allows a single inventory item to cover all versions of the car (i.e. cheaper), simplifies documentation, and avoids problems with the wrong harness being used, shipped for a car repair, etc. It would also be either impossible or overly expensive for dealers to install dealer add-ons otherwise. The cost of the wire and connectors is so low as to be in the noise.

Everybody picks on PHP. Like every language it's not perfect, by far. But by several orders of magnitude (my estimate), the vast majority of all vulnerabilities regardless of operating system have directly resulted from design flaws in C (and C++) - buffer overflows, pointer issues, assignment instead of evaluation in conditionals due to missing equals, etc. Even many/most of the vulnerabilities in PHP have been the result of these same C design flaws. While _some_ of those flaws can be argued to be necessary for writing at the bare metal level - device drivers and such, they are completely unnecessary for application programming.

The standard counter argument is that "C programmers (must) learn better programming habits, and deal with those things." To which I merely append, "Some ..." and note that many of these bugs have demonstrably been put there by highly skilled, experienced developers who know better, but just forgot "this one particular time."

It's enough to make one yearn for Haskell, or Erlang, or something. :D

Just for clarity, I have no idea what the "Electric Universe" is, and not much curiosity to find out. As for the last bit, it was just a reminder to the parent that "what we know to be true" ain't necessarily so.

There are lots of plausible reasons for the apparent lack of evidence regarding life intelligent or otherwise, which have been bandied about by many people. Just for starters, maybe we're the first intelligent life. But I wasn't arguing that point. Regardless of these questions or arguments, they are not 'evidence' about warp drive. That's all I'm saying. :)

OK, here I go on a wild toot. What if c^2 is negative? I.e. the "speed of light" is a complex number, or a pair of numbers, one of which is real and the other is imaginary? Then we might have c and c^2, and we can define the imaginary C=ic and C^2 = i^2c^2. This is different than the topic of negative mass, of course. I think I just boggled myself.

Actually, no. Occam's Razor (as others have noted) is more or less about choosing the simplest theory that fits the facts. Falsifiability is about whether a theory is testable or not.

I'll just add this irrelevant point: any theory that concerns the Universe as a whole, viewed as a system from outside, is inherently unfalsifiable, even though it may be true. I can say, "the Universe is blue, viewed from outside", and there is no way to prove that, so far.

Definition: "Crackpot: disagrees with me." :D

- that's not evidence. That's a question, for which the answer has not been determined. It's not even certain that the assertion upon which the question is based, "we have not heard from them", is true.

... given the existing theoretical model

we must always keep in mind that, just as Newton's model turned out to be incomplete, the present model may - nay is - incomplete. Or incorrect. Or ??

= my new catch-phrase, perhaps replacing "We're all gonna die!" - thanks! ;D

Ah, the

principle. IANA physicist, but I've never been happy with this here thingy. As the article states, "Wolfgang Pauli gave physics his exclusion principle as a way to explain the arrangement of electrons in an atom. His hypothesis was that only one electron can occupy a give quantum state." This is a principle without an explanation. It's one of those physics things that you have to take on faith, and because nothing works without it. AFAIK there's never been any real explanation of _why_ this principle exists, or what causes it to be true. I suppose this could be considered a kind of physics 'axiom', but that's still not very satisfactory.

Have any theorists tried to construct a plausible universe model where the exclusion principle is not true or not applicable (and everything doesn't just collapse in on itself, of course)?

Oh, BTW - this is just one of many examples where science does, in fact, depend on pure faith. This is a lesson to overly dogmatic anti-religionists - or, as WC Fields once said, "Everyone believes in something. I believe I'll have another drink." :D

Well, in truth some mass is just not quite _sure_, but is willing to go along with the consensus.
And some mass is on a downer, and just not the type to be 'up' all the time.

Actually I think the ban predated Nylon - it was Hearst's plan to force papermakers to use his licensed process for making paper out of wood, instead of hemp. He demonized in his newspapers, funded "Reefer Madness" and bribed Congress to include cannabis in the Volstead Act.