...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?

"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."

No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?

Most people realize that you can't offshore everything.

But, IT is not one of those things you can't offshore.

I would venture a guess that nobody was ever charged with recklessly endangering 100 square blocks of New York, or destruction of property, or vandalism, or criminal mischief, or anything else...

Just to toss out...

The whole, "you have to reinstall windows often" thing is now out of date.

Windows 7 does not have this problem, I have several machines running 4 year old installs of Windows 7 without a problem, I expect they'll last to end of support without a reinstall.

That was true once, but the world moved on.

Your arguments are all fair and reasonable, for slightly older cars.

There are cars built in the last five years for which you can't do all that.

Sure, the hardware such as wires and oil are easy enough to mess with, but try reprogramming the new enhanced security system on a 2015 Suburban. It has a lift and level detector to sense if it is being picked up or if one wheel is off the ground. Calibrating that system requires special hardware and software, you have to take it to the dealer.

It also has features like adaptive cruise control, crash braking, 360 degree parking sensors, magnetic shocks, etc. that are also run by computer and need to be calibrated.

Cars are becoming rolling black boxes, self driving cars are coming in the next few years, you think you can fix that with a shop manual?

If you are still using XP and don't want to upgrade, then you really aren't a customer of Microsoft anyway.

MS wants to be paid, if you don't want to pay them, then why should they care about you?

Are you suggesting that you won't spend thousands of dollars upgrading your hardware, but would spend thousands of dollars paying MS for support?

That sounds nice, if Windows was dead outright. But it isn't, or have you forgotten about Vista, 7, and 8?

Those share a lot of code with XP, releasing that code is not that simple.

In addition, it isn't all Microsoft's code.

Yes, and they generally are. There are exceptions, but the general rule is 10 years for auto recalls.

This isn't Mann's critics pursuing him. This is part of a lawsuit that Mann filed against a journalist who criticized his work.

Mann filed the lawsuit, and the person he sued filed for subpoenas to get at Mann's emails because he believed that would reveal information he could use to defend the lawsuit.

This is a terrible decision, because it means you can be sued for libel (which is saying something abot someone that is alleged to be untrue) and then be prohibited from obtaining material to defend yourself (by showing that what you said is, in fact, true).

It is made worse by the fact that Mann is a government employee, because if this becomes the precedent, it will open the flood gates for government oppression via the civil court system, which has a lower standard of proof than the criminal system. If you criticize the government or its political employees, they can sue you, and you will be prohibited from obtaining evidence to defend yourself with.

"Shut up and swallow what we tell you" is basically what the court signed off on in this case.

Let me see:
- Half-height 3.5" 200MB IDE hard disk: bought used in 1993, came from a server. Worked until at least 2002-3. Might still work.
- Non-name mechanical keyboard (not the original IBM!) from the 90s that still works after a lot of abuse. Still has a great touch..
- CD player: Marantz CD 52 MkII: still works after 20 years, contrary to ALL CD/DVD-RW drives that I have bought for my PC since then and fail after 1-2yrs.
- HP Deskjet 500C. One of the first consumer inkjet printers. Built like a tank. Probably still works.
- Logitech G3: great mouse, used it until something heavy fell on it and broke the button.

As a general note, anything "server/workstation" grade that I bought has generally lasted a lot.

Now the negative surprises:
- Any cheap CD/DVD-RW (with the exception of Plextor units). These fail all the time.
- Exploding capacitors in the Athlon XP M/B
- Exploding capacitors in a cheap 250W AT (not ATX) PSU. I now only buy high-end PSUs, usually Seasonic.
- NVidia 8800GS passively cooled. Failed in a few months.
- Razer Deathadder: weird failures after 1 yr of light use.

I generally get few failures, mostly thanks to great PSUs that have very low ripple and noise. I think this greatly prolongs the life of electrical components by reducing capacitor fatigue. In fact, most of my old hardware is now in the hands of family/friends, that still use it.

Are there any benefits to having everything connected to just one vast address space? I certainly can't spot them. I think this is a solution to a problem that has already been solved in another (and better) way.

Although I may concede that it could potentially be useful to have a larger address space, I think it would be massively stupid to start frittering it away on insignificant frivolities like an "internet of things". I mean, would you want your fridge to have 'friends' on Facebook or start tweeting about its contents? When we're all worried about privacy?

Exactly. Empirical science is not about proving truth, but about discovering the flaws in our current theories in the hope that there is an ultimate truth behind it all, and that we will get ever closer to it by eliminating the things that don't match observations.

Of course you have to make it through the day without getting murdered. Detroit is exceeded only by New Orleans for murder capital of America (48 per 100,000 in 2011). Compare Silicon Valley (San Jose) at 4.6 per 100,000 in 2012. So by this time next year a couple thousand of those 4 million will be dead.

There's a lot more to avoid in Detroit than the snow. I guess that makes me a wuss.

Homeowners' Associations are like little Nazi dictatorships enforcing a bland conformity on everyone. "Think of my neighbors"? How about they worry about their own shit instead of the color of my deck railing?

...but I agree with the interpretation of the law.

IANAL, but if there is indeed an exemption section to the VA FOIA that states:
"Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher learningâ¦in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issuesâ¦where such data, records or information has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented." ...then pretty clearly this data is very specifically exactly that, exempt from the FOIA.

*PERSONALLY* if the research was funded by public funds, I find such an exemption execrable, but it's the law and its authors that are at fault, nor Mann at all.

PS and tangential to the point of the OP: Slashdot, it's fucking 2014. Perhaps we could invest in modern posting tech that lets us paste things like biased quotes without getting crap codes like âoe ?
Or maybe convert all postings to monotype courier, so we're reminded that slashdot's still only a handsbreath above a BBS?