I would say it depends on the item. I wanted a DVD player for the bedroom, my wife went to the local store and came back with cheapest ass DVD player she could find (if I had gone I would not have) so I plugged it in and was pleasantly surprised with all it’s features, so much so I went back the next day and bought another one for the lounge (and save playing them in the PSX2). That was more than 10 years ago, they are still going strong. However I used to buy mid range boots for hiking and would need to replace them once a year because I would work through the sole, bought an upper range pair and only have to change them every 3 years.

Haynes manuals are normally just as good (if not better since they give tips and advice, and howto's as well) Or you could just buy the workshop manual online, a couple years ago I bought the workshop manual for my CX500T - which is a pretty rare bike with no Haynes manual. There's one for the normal CX500, but not the CX500T and other than the physical engine the bikes are WAY different, one is aspirated the other fuel injection, with all the extra plumbing and wiring that entails.

Third that, am quiet happy to pay for watching something, but since Netflix is not even available in my country I just torrent it instead. All these stupid license agreements means that they are actually losing my money. I haven't pirated a game in years, I earn enough now that I am more than able to pay for them, and prefer to do so. It would be the same for movies if it was available here.

It's not a behind paywall, it's a free site. So no, my cookie is not of a sensitive nature, and is only used to keep session state.

What network administrator in his right mind would hand out the root certificate to the HTTPS proxy?

BTW love the

it's like you don't have any.

One of the articles mentions a disgruntled employee against whom a hit had been taken out. Want to bet he ran to the feds because he was scared and ratted on the silk road. I don't attribute any mystical hacking of TOR to the FBI, someone came forward and spilled the beans. The reason the FBI are keeping it quiet is that in this way it seems that the FBI can track you regardless of what you are doing. If they are planning on taking out the main TOR network it's for the precise reason that they CAN'T track you through it, and so taking it out is the only other option. So let's assume they DDOS the TOR directory authorities, if I DDOS'ed someone it would be a criminal offense. Why can they do it without being criminally charged? Also whoever thinks TOR is the "biggest means of circumventing the GFW" is an idiot. You would get much better speed by simply using a credit card to rent a $30 a year vps server in the states and installing squid. Firewall circumvented. Hell, there a plenty of free proxies out there which will allow you to do the same thing. The GFW is a joke, and only stops the ignorant.

I agree software is shipped without being tested to 99.999% quality. I buy a game on release day, come home slap the DVD in and install it (if it's not a steam game that is) and run it, it checks for patches, and downloads a 22gb "patch". So I stopped buying physical games, most games get released on steam, if I have to download the entire game regardless of whether I installed it from a dvd, I may as well just download it in the first place. I can't remember what game it was, but you could download the patch for the game before the game was even released. That says to me that they sent the code to the dvd fab knowing it was full of bugs.

But

Here's why code is not tested to 99.999% quality.

It costs too much. I work as a developer, I worked for a major bank on their project metrics team, so I had access to all their project data, planning, hours captured etc.etc. To make even a relatively small change to big software costs millions. Impact analysis by senior developers, assessments and documentation from system architects, meetings with management and business analysts etc. etc. All these people are not cheap. Before code even STARTS to change it can cost millions. Then the code changes and you have to do end to end testing, integration testing, regression testing etc. all involving people who pull a pay check, and depending on the code change you may need a new environment (ie. physical hardware) to test the change without impacting the rest of the business. I can hear all the agile pundits screaming, but if your testing cycle involves external parties, like every major bank in the country and the stock exchange, then 'agile' development is more expensive than waterfall development. So, it comes down to the testers to make sure there are no bugs. Developers subconsciously know how their code works, and do their unit testing accordingly, so when they send code to QA they think it's working 100% and there are no bugs. It's up to the testers to push the code in different ways to see if something breaks. But how good are the testers? Are they just ticking the blocks on the test plan? Are they trying weird and wonderful things outside of the test plan to see what happens? Probably not, it's hard to find good testers, it's a boring job. Hell it's hard to find good developers, never mind good senior developers. All of this means that code will never be tested to 99.999% reliability. EVER. IIRC they have had to do 2 patches on the mars rover which is on another bloody planet. If any software should have been tested to 99.999% reliability it should have been the software on the mars rover. But it wasn't, because it costs too much, and software / hardware and it's integration are very very complex things.

What if you don't commute using a car, you use a motorbike or bicycle instead. Lot's of times I have put off going home until the rain let up a bit or stopped. We tend to get sudden heavy showers a lot in spring, rains heavily for 20~30 minutes and then stops.

Unlike everything we used to buy, back in the day, which worked straight out the box with no issues whatsoever, like a baseball glove and a ball.
Go outside and play!
And get off my lawn!

Depends on what you are doing, putting peg A into slot B just needs a warm body. Coding, or doing someone's taxes etc. would definitely degrade over time.

If they implement this I will be going back to FireFox as my primary browser (I'm a web developer, I have almost every damn browser installed) I fail to see how going to my local newsite to read about the new antics of our clown politicians needs to be encrypted and load slower because the proxy can't cache it when a fellow work colleague visited the site earlier in the day. I will encrypt what I deem to be sensitive in nature. If the NSA or anybody else even gives a rats ass about me reading the news then good for them. I don't give a rats ass if they do know. My banking however, is a different matter. So a popup when I click on 70% of websites on the internet is going to get annoying damn quick. Do the chrome developers have shares in Thawte or VeriSign or something?

I used to back in my party days, woke up one afternoon and found someone sleeping in my cupboard. Left him there and went to find something to eat. Once after a serious night out I woke up and someone had cleaned my lounge, still don't know who it was.

We still have one technomoron here who keeps pushing to move everything to the cloud. We are in a country with dodgy overseas internet connections as it is and this artard want's to move everything offshore!

Like inciting a civil war in Libya then bombing it back into the stone age. Libya used to be a pretty good country to live in before the NATO "intervention" to stop the Libyan government from fighting extremist terrorists, oops sorry, "Freedom fighters", funded by the west and bolstering their numbers with mercenaries. The illegal invasion of Iraq also comes to mind, the US president didn't even bother asking congress to go to war, just brought down 2 towers and no one asked any questions. Why the fvck invade Iraq again? Bin Laden wasn't even in the country?

Only for managed code (.Net) the old COM stuff is still in the registry and as ugly as it ever was.

I am a programmer, it's what I do every day for a living. I am not an "engineer". My father was an engineer, he built power stations, I know the difference. Software "engineers" is a load of crap. You write code. End of story. It's like the fvcking janitor calling himself a Sanitation Engineer. You want to be an engineer then study for 20 years and you too can build power stations, instead of another cookie cutter website. Know your place, and stop giving yourself titles you don't deserve.