What makes this complicated is that I think that's a reflection of America. My congressman _is_ a really good representative for me: he's a smart gay liberal who has started several successful tech companies. I vote for him because he's doing stuff I like. My aunt's congressman is a good representative for her: a pro-life, pro-gun conservative creationist pastor. She votes for him because he's doing stuff she likes.
We'd like to think that there's a logical disconnect between "congress is crazy" and "my congress person is awesome" but that's not necessarily true: we, as a country, have an extremely wide spectrum of opinion. Jim Hightower used to say there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. If congress is a dead armadillo, midway between what I want them to be and my aunt wants them to be, my aunt and I can both be contemptuous of congress while liking our personal representatives, and both of us can be logically consistent in doing so.

Lactose intolerance is complex. The Tuareg of Saharan Africa have lower lactose intolerance rates than Finnish people, for instance. It mostly has to do with whether a group has spent a long time as nomadic herders or not, and adult persistence of lactase activity appears to be caused by several different mutations, that arose spontaneously. http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthr... has a nice list of adult lactase activity in different ethnic groups.

So, why wouldn't he reach out to one of the 3 letter agencies involved with things like this (namely the FBI)? At the very least with their help he could have pulled in the 3 companies into a conference call, explained what was going on, and gotten this resolved pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to say "Here is the information that was used to open the account, block all recent changes." Or did the hacker somehow get control of his phone too? Am I missing something?

Because Danica Patrick in skimpy clothing sells.

There was a fairly interesting Radiolab podcast about a program that shipped New York City's biosolids to Colorado for use as fertilizer: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
It includes a significant discussion of waste treatment, pathogens, and the economics of shipping what some municipalities call hazardous waste cross-country.

I'm the GP, and I actually *like* OSX, but my reason is pretty simple; I hate dealing with desktop UNIX. Having to spend days to get 3d acceleration and the desktop configured "just so," only to have the next OS update torch all of my settings to a state where it may be impossible to recover... well... it's just not worth it to me. That's why I pay the apple tax; it's an exchange for not having to do all of that work, and it's worth it for me to never have to see glxgears ever again. I'm not a fanboy by any means; I'm a pragmatist. But I will say that OSX did finally bring about the fabled "year of the *nix desktop," it just wasn't linux, it was BSD. And it wasn't really heralded as such.

Did you know that Goebel approached edison and attempted to sell him the patent for the lightbulb, but Edison refused, allowing Goebel to fall into destitution and die penniless. He then went to his destitute widow and offered her a fraction of the original asking price, effectively screwing Goebel's estate out of any royalties of the invention that Edison is most well known for? That's my whole issue here; people who steal other people's work, or who lie and cheat to get their hands on it. Edison was an asshole, if you don't believe me, just look at how he treated Goebel.

Fact for you: I am writing this comment on a mac, running OSX. What pisses me off is that people are crazy Steve Jobs fanboys without realizing that he had little to no technical ability. He was a sales guy, and had an idea about how things should work and how they should look. That's it. He didn't build anything. The original apple was built by Woz, and Jobs helped to sell it. Don't believe me? You can download the schematics for it; they're entirely the work of Woz. The same with the Apple II. Jobs' sole contribution to the projects was color suggestions on the boxes. His career would have not started except for the work of other people, whom he later screwed over at any chance he could take. He was like Edison, find engineers, find ways to suck work out of them or get them to put patents under your umbrella, and then take all of the credit. They won't sell? Blackmail, cheat, harass until you can get the patents under your control. He was a disgusting human being. The fact that he admitted other people were involved in this video is surprising. For those of us who met him, he was a royal douche who is incredibly overrated. The world is in a far worse place for losing Dennis Ritchie than it is Steve Jobs.

Actually, historically speaking, he did not have any part in the original apples. That was all Woz. Steve Jobs was just notoriously good at selling; he was in no way, shape, or form an engineer.

Interesting, usually people are too busy fellating him to remember that his sole contribution to the actual original apple was "Hey, the PSU should be beige." The rest of the work was Woz and the others.

I chalk him up to being in the same ilk as Edison. He couldn't do much of anything himself, so he did everything he could to maniuplate, steal, and threaten other peoples' work out of them so he could hold the patents. He's a scumbag and the world is better off without him, even if he did help make things better as a side effect of his self-centeredness. I just think there's a special place in hell for people who are willing to rip off their best friend (a la when he screwed over Wozniak during the whole chip-reduction thing).

...Steve Jobs take credit for other people's work in this video, just like always.

Honestly not sure; this was back when a 2GB drive was "big," and we never had an issue getting the few WD's replaced that failed.

It's also a study in the law of large numbers. If 10 million people all say seagate's drives suck, there is a very good possibility that seagate's drives do in fact suck.

Weird; for the longest time WD was my go-to brand for hard drives, especially considering early on they had an incredible no-questions-asked replacement policy if you got in touch with their support. I had 2 seagate drives those days, and both failed within a few months of purchase. To this day I rarely use them. It wasn't until recently I started picking up hitachi (conventional) and samsung (SSD) drives, and I could not be happier with them. I really only buy WD/Seagate for external data warehousing.