The car is wet so has direct to ground connection since said car was parked in the dirt next to the baseball field. I didn't fill in every minor detail, but assume that people can read a bit into "a thunderstorm rolled in" which usually indicates lot of water is also coming down. I surely hope I don't have to point out that water is conductive.

So a metal handle is not conductive, and my hand being on the handle would transfer no energy from me to the car? Either you believe this happened in very modern times where cars are surely made with many low/non conductive materials or you don't know much about electricity.

First, I see all deaths as negative things so am not trying to belittle the loss of any lives. That said, I believe that the person you responded to was missing a sarcasm tag. We have gotten much better at detecting volcanic activity ahead of an event, but not always, and the severity of the event is always a big question mark. I remember reports about bulging at Mt. St. Helen that had scientists giving out warnings of another eminent eruption for about a year. I used to check a watch site they had set up with camera feeds directly to the internet (site may still be active?). Seems like it became a scenario of the boy crying wolf, so people started ignoring the warnings after a time.

We have had other volcanic events occur without warning, and this very well could be the case here. (Minutes of seismic activity as a warning is not really a warning for those on the volcano). Obviously tragic for anyone on the volcano at the time of the eruption, but not unheard of.

Leaving out Xerox seems to be pretty common, and not just with tablets. Xerox was one of the first companies with a commercial "windowing" graphical interface too.

The amount of funds that actually goes to ALS research from the Ice Bucket challenge is a very low percentage, while the people in charge of the charity are paying themselves well over living wages on the same charity dime. If you research various charities you will find that this is not a unique practice. I personally am very careful where my donations go, and would not donate to this one. This "charity" claims that 72.4% of the donations for "program expenses" which includes salaries. Here is a source in case you are interested, which shows that out of 24 million in donations they claim 21 million in "expenses" leaving a whopping 3 million for actual donation. Sadly this gets them a 4 star rating, because many charities only donate a fraction of a percent and yet can still be tax exempt "charities".

Microsoft could easily be using this for a similar objective. Obviously these programs entitle them to a tax write off, but longer term leads to reduced developer pay so increased profits. India and China have been increasing in costs, and are not that far from the US in costs for developers today. Obviously this is also used for public relations (propaganda).

I was struck as a kid, probably 11 or so years old, when a thunderstorm rolled in during a little league baseball game. I happened to be opening a car door, so was grounded when I was hit. My forearm turned black and blue, like a massive bruising, but I didn't feel any pain in my arm. I was blinded for a short time, my eyes were not closed when the lighting struck. Outside of a headache from the flash, I had no short or long term damage. Yes, I was extremely lucky to have been mostly grounded.

The Guinness record holder was struck 7 times, and lived to 71. Hard to say if the long term effects led to suicide, but an interview of him I heard long ago seemed to indicate a pretty normal guy.

TFA also indicates that not all incidents lead to permanent damage, physical or psychological. As with most events dealing with electricity, there are a massive number of factors involved making each event unique. For example, when I was in the military I saw two people guy get popped by a 550KW generator. Both guys mishandled the same coupling, both were in Texas and on similar training grounds. The primary different was weather and luck. One guy's clothing caught fire and he suffered only minor burns as they put his clothing out, the other guy died almost instantly. It was winter so rainy and wet when the first guy was popped, making its likely that his wet clothing caused a grounding effect which saved him. The second happened in the summer, extremely dry and hot.

This is overgeneralized. A script looking for bash will fail if, and only if, it's calling bash specific features that doesn't exist in the linked shell.

Surely those bash specific entities are used and exist for a reason, but the _majority_ of scripts calling bash don't care what SH derived shell they have because they don't use the bash specific features. They call bash for convenience only.

Example, take every script in my /etc/init.d/ directory and there are zero bash specific features being called.

I would think that the major hubs in the US didn't operate with this poor of a practice. Honestly, I'm flabbergasted. This is not something you can hide when it's exposed. What I find more surprising is that with this big of a deficiency, they didn't go with the "terrorist" card in order to deflect some of the backlash this should cause.

I wonder how many other airports are using a system with similar vulnerability.

I don't see this as just a problem with some guy who obviously did something wrong. Seems like lighting or other natural events could have the same impact.

Troll much? You moved from a formal fallacy to a fabrication. I never stated that the money vanished, go back and read my post again.

I should have also stated that I don't find it surprising that you immediately jump to ad hominem instead of discussing anything I wrote, followed by a thoroughly complete fabrication as an attempt to justify the ad hominem. And you call me insane, too funny.

I repeated nothing I stated previously, zero words or phrases. I did however state that you were basing most of your questions on an absolutely false belief (that the author is completely incompetent). I even provided that if you reconfigure the debate without the false beliefs and followed the Socratic method, I would surely debate.

If you can't handle debating rationally and reasonably, shame on you. Debating without guiding principles is a pissing match, not a debate.

I read your post, every time you make the false claim "you're mischaracterizing" you are attempting to claim that a professional writer, who makes their living by writing, is a failure at their job. It implies that one or more of the following occurred. 1) The author did not intentionally choose their words. 2) The author did not perform proper research. 3) The author unwittingly provided an opinion contrary to what they wanted. Your claim is absolute nonsense.

I did not make up the quotes provided. I extracted them from the article,in the order the author gave them, to ensure that the message of the document was maintained. Anyone can validate this by simply checking the source next to my quotes.

Most of your questions seem to stem from that same irrational perspective, that a professional writer is completely incompetent, so will be ignored. The following paragraph covers what remains of your post.

As to other companies that provide encryption technology, you can search the web and find thousands of examples dating back for decades. As to your implication that encryption is only used to thwart law enforcement, that implication is absolutely false. Lastly, your implication that a phone is somehow different than any other container for data is absolutely false.

If you wish to debate further I will demand that you follow the Socratic method. Reduce the questions to their simplest forms and debate each question individually. If you can not, or refuse to, do this I will not debate further. It is impossible to debate with someone that refuses to approach a subject rationally.

An appeal to ignorance (fallacy). You could easily prove me wrong by sharing budget line items, or income tax returns which showed someone received benefit from the income generated these programs generated.

Apple is a third party, and should not be required to provide the Government with back doors. The encryption, as stated above, removes them as a middle agent. A middle agent does not (and never did) prevent a judge from issuing a warrant nor does it prevent an agency/agent from issuing and exercising a warrant. A warrant is a legal issue between Law Enforcement and a Suspect, and nowhere does the US Constitution imply that third parties are to be placed between those two parties.

If you wish to pursue an argument of "harboring", please search the thread for another of my posts which provides an analogy for a Safe maker and Apple. If you believe that analogy incorrect I will be happy to debate under that posts section.

Perhaps providing a few facts will help you decide. In order to do so, lets remove the term "security tools" because this is not the only thing they are renting out. Let us also remove "NSA", as they are not the only Government agency that does this.

1. Government agencies are funded with Tax dollars. They do not use their own capital to develop products, they use your money and my money.
2. Your taxes have never been reduced by the Government reselling this technology. That is absolutely zero dollars you or I have seen in refunds due to "selling" what your investment pays for.
3. Government agencies are supposed to be reigned in by their Budgets. Lawful requests receive lawful funding, unlawful requests are supposed to be removed from the budget by Congressional committee prior to approving the budget.

These facts should then lead to several key questions that should be answered by not just the NSA, but all Government agency following similar procedures.

1. Does the funding reduce the tax payer footprint for the agency, or extend the budget beyond what Congress is approving?
2. What accountability is there for how revenue from "renting" is being spent?

Given that the answer to those two question are "increases budget, does not decrease tax payer burden" and "no accountability" this should be illegal on all fronts. It is used to bypass both Congressional oversight and legal restrictions on spending.

I'm right there with you if you were to say "Not all technology developed by the Government is bad.", but that is not the point of debate we should be making. Most technology is not inherently bad, it's the implementation and abuse that is bad.