Sometimes. Confidence combined with deference and recognition of that which you don't know is a different sort of confidence than brazen overconfidence like this "Scorpion" guy. If you can admit what you don't know easily, I'm more likely to believe you when you say you actually do know something. But it takes confidence to know the difference.

There's a 5th Amendment in France? Who knew.

It'll last longer than 88 years. The half life is 88 years... that means it's only halfway done after 88 years. All it's going to do is lose efficiency over the next thousand years or so.

He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).

The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.

What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...

Part of the problem is that CFL's do color banding, whereas incandescent is full spectrum. So even if the color profile is tuned to a reasonable value, it's still lacking output in fairly large color bands. Which, incidentally, is probably why your wife doesn't like it... women are more likely to have better color sensitivity than the average male, especially in the red/green bands

You should try some different bulbs... I live in the Denver area, and I have a CFL on my porchlight that lights up instantly every time, no matter how cold it is. Different brands can make a lot more difference than they should.

Did you have a choice of which CPU to match with which motherboard? Would you miss that choice if it were taken away from you?

I'm reasonably certain that "liberal" and telling people what to do are a bit at loggerheads...

So... if I go get some food and my expectation is that I get the right thing, and they give me the wrong thing, it's entirely possible that my expectations are just off, and I'm expecting too much?

They showed that the kids were all very good at getting answers when given a structured set of data and tests, but not when asked to design an experiment. That means that design skills are lacking relative to analysis skills. There's no running study needed.

You can teach an engineer to be a manager, or at least take over management tasks. You can't teach a manager to be an engineer.

To some extent. But it could be pretty strongly argued that disallowing tethering is part of an unconscionable contract (what with their right reserved to change terms whenever they want). Which, IIRC, generally renders whole contract null.

That makes me think of the Darkwing Duck episode where the dinosaurs had the rubber roads and the stone wheels... it's a massive misapplication of energy and work, even if it is intellectually interesting.

They don't? Since when? There's not a single hard disk out there that will saturate an SATA2 port. And all modern Intel boards have at least 2 SATA3 ports.

If you go aftermarket cooling, you can almost certainly hit 4.5GHz on stock voltages. Right now I'm doing 4.8GHz on stock voltage with a 2500K.