Yes, I know this. My point was that there may come a time in the not-too-distant future when insurance companies push for legislation to allow them to deny coverage/claims on that basis.

But of the people I know, $20k isn't even a tenth of their yearly "fun car money", and compared to the reoccurring cost of insurance coverage that is a sunk cost even if you are never in an accident, this method can be much much cheaper for them in the long run.

If you're making enough that you can spend $200K just on fun car stuff, then yes, it's quite likely you can self-insure and not worry about that. The vast majority of people that like to tinker with their cars aren't in that income bracket, though. As regards the $20K bond - good luck if that's all you have to pay for in a serious accident. That quite possibly won't even cover the cost of the other car if it's totalled, much less medical expenses for another party that's seriously injured.

That has no chance of being prevented by this.

By this, probably not. Your insurance company might have something to say about rolling your own ECU though, and you just know they'll jump at the chance to deny more claims.

For all the complaints leveled at the NSA there has been no proof that they have ever used that information against it's own citizens.

From this Reuters story:

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

Many of us have seen what happens when that oily salesguy you'd like to to kick sells something which is complete fiction, and that it is now someone else's problem. His check clears, he gets a new car and a vacation, and everyone else is stuck building a fucking unicorn.

Scott Adams summed it up nicely.

although I always found it rather pleasant as it helps ignore pain as much as anything else.

That's pretty much what morphine does to me. It does very little to reduce the pain, but it makes me completely not care about it. That, and throw up a lot, like most narcotics do with me. For the life of me I can't understand how people get addicted to the stuff. I'd *much* rather be in pain than feeling nauseous.

I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

Interesting that you mention that - I've never really thought I could see UV, but I have noticed that black lights and UV LEDs have a weird intense brightness that makes me squint even though the visible light isn't that bright, and I can't really perceive a different color. Germicidal lamps don't cause the same effect for me.

Govt believes it needs to do whatever it takes to get the bad guys.

For varying interpretations of "bad guys".

Not needed, thanks. I've had enough exposure to enough platforms to know that they all have areas in which they suck equally.

They're excellent for web dev, because they're the only machines that are capable of running every browser.

Which would be great if the code they're writing needed to run on anything other than the Windows versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome in a very homogeneous enterprise/industrial environment.

I have never seen one which came from the factory with two different sizes of battery terminal bolt.

Me either - I was talking about the bolts that fasten the battery cable brackets to the frame and engine block. :-)

and even when there are standard parts (such as tires), they use so many different sizes that you will be lucky to own two cars with the same tire format.

Even more annoying than that are the myriad of fastener sizes in both metric and standard. Why do I need 2-3 different sockets just to remove the battery cable brackets? Is there *really* a solid reason that one bolt has to be 14mm and the other 1/2"?

Yes, not all requests are reasonable(you need a color-calibrated monitor that covers at least 99% of aRGB to write code, why?)

Funny that you mention that - the guy running the web side of the house recently talked the boss into MacBooks for all of the web staff, along with a bunch of extended gamut displays. We do no OS X or iOS development whatsoever, nothing that involves having to ensure what's on the display is the same as on the printed page, and everyone else (the vast majority of our staff) works exclusively with MS tools on MS infrastructure, and our IT guy has been fighting for years to get something better than the T1 back to the home office. I don't get it.

At least we're allowed to have as many displays as our desktops will allow.

Look no further than Samuel L. Jackson, who's a talented individual, but came off as stiff and wooden in the Star Wars movies.

"Hand me my lightsaber."
"Which one is it?"
"It's the one that says 'Bad Mother Fucker" on it."

At least he had a sense of humor about it. He was pretty damned funny in the Robot Chicken parody.