*whoosh*

What does a double shift have to do with an 80 hour DAY?

We use *Imperial* gallons in our fuel efficiency ratings. The numbers cannot be compared directly to US gallons, as there are ~4.5 liters per Imperial gallon, and 3.785 liters per US gallon.

Canada. We advertise fuel economy in both L/100km and mpg (Imperial)

The space shuttle was largely a new craft at every launch too: the fuel tank was new, the engines were rebuilt, tiles were replaced, boosters were remanufactured (and completely new every few flights)

I think it was the shuttle (might have been the Saturn V) that had around 4000 parts fail every flight.

The fiscal cliff is an artificial construct, in that the location of the cliff is completely arbitrary, and set by politicians. If they decide to remove the fiscal cliff by agreeing to more debt, it goes away. It's not a tangible limit.

The fiscal cliff has nothing to do with whether the US can actually afford to service its debts, but the media plays it out that way.

Granted, I completely agree that more debt is ridiculous.

I'm sure the parent poster is familiar with stop losses: they fall directly into the category of *deciding to sell without regard for cause*. Regardless of when the stop loss was set up, it was a decision that was made by a person to sell depending on conditions that do not consider cause.

You sure about this? You can run even the latest and greatest Windows versions of Steam games via playonlinux, which is basically a wrapper for WINE. Things have improved greatly in the last year or two.

Benefits: short term disability, then long term disability. Many full time employees have this, even in the non-unionized private sector.

And if you are the principal breadwinner you buy $50,000 or more in private critical illness insurance for when you have a heart attack, get cancer, etc and survive for more than 30 days. (Many Canadians don't know this insurance even exists).

I was replying to "Manufacturer-only dealers would probably be similar to those, complete with branded-only parts (incredibly marked up), changing interfaces, and closed, proprietary systems they tried their damndest to have sole access to."

Which is not true. Because of right-to-repair. Which means the franchise-only laws are not needed in the states where they exist.

They got them from someone who works at an authorized Toshiba services provider...duhhh...is my sarcasm detector broken?

Except that one of the very states that this lawsuit applies to (Mass) just passed a strong law that forces manufacturers to provide their diagnostic tools and information at a reasonable price to anyone who wishes to purchase them. And most if not all states have laws that do not allow voiding of a warranty because you got an independent to fix your vehicle. So no, it wouldn't be the same as Apple.

They want to be able to change setpoints to make people happy...without going in to work. I agree, data diode is a great idea...when you don't need to interact with the system.

There is no automated method of shutting off power at the local level. All disconnects and reconnects are done manually at the pole. Sad, but true. If they shut down the whole power system beforehand, everyone would run out of generator fuel before the disaster even happened. It's cheaper and easier to leave everything live and fix stuff that breaks. They are going to have to go out to site to fix the wires anyway, why waste time going around ahead of time? Also, if you shut everything off, how do you know where the problems are? You can't just turn the whole grid on and off either, the generating stations would go bonkers, especially nuclear. It takes days to shut them down and turn them on again.

Snow plow blades on road lows are kept off the surface by wear blocks, so they don't dig in to the surface.

This is very common in the HVAC industry. Customers want to be able to check on their building on their smart phone at home over the weekend. Even without that requirement, the systems get put on the local intranet with everything else because the customer will not provide a separate network nor allow us to add our own. Very few of our customers put HVAC controls on separate VLANs with no access to the Internet.