I have no special love for Tesla or Musk but I think I have to agree with him there. Looking at the facts, these fires are not a very big deal, especially given the age of the (mainstream) electric car market. Sure, efforts should be made to aleviate the issue but obviously, if an accident punctures a battery there's a chance of fire just as there is one if you puncture a gas tank.

For the price of a SLS machine, you can probably just buy a new wife...

For the record, I wasn't the AC you replied to though he appears to share my opinion.

To clarify, I may have been using more personal a form of 'you' than generalization calls for, but it really is what I meant. Take 'you' in my post as 'whoever happens to come across this', not s.petry specifically. Assumptions I made are just that and based on what little information this communication channel allowed me to gather, they weren't judgement. I'm sure I could have written that better as you've pointed out, so I won't try to dodge the blame there either. On the topic of excuses, english isn't my first language ;)

While my position is to personally take my share of the blame for the population's inability to keep government in check (happens in my country too), I find your opinion that the people aren't to blame understandable and I can genuinely respect your position.

My perspective is that we all share responsibility and blame for the government we put in power, how much crap we let them get away with and who that power ends up serving. I take blame (hopefully) as much as I take action. The fact that we disagree on where the blame lies doesn't prevent you from taking action and you earn that much more respect from me in doing so. As far as I'm concerned, we're on the same side.

The powers lying behind the scenes pulling strings are still only able to do so through our compliance and lack of action. It's tempting to blame them but they do it because they can and they can because we let them.

If you say the population isn't to blame, you imply that someone else should do something about it... Which only leaves the 'benevolent dictator' option. It's still up to the population to organize and fix things. The government isn't going to give up its control of the media and educational systems. It won't break up monopolies that serve it so well in any meaningful way.

The population still let all of that happen without much resistance. Ignorance and naiveté are convenient excuses but excuses aren't a shield from responsibility, merely a balm of sympathy to spread over the soreness of blame. It's up to *you* to educate whoever will listen to you about those things and teach them to do the same. You're part of the population, you're partly responsible for its progress or demise. To think of yourself as powerless is mostly a symptom of poor understanding of exponential spread.

While in theory, you're right, in practice, that is unsustainable. You *can* have someone principled and just in power but that is largely an exception to the norm. That position will always devolve and attract the lying cheats who will do anything to attain that power. The reason is pretty simple, the honest man typically has no real desire or need for power and will typically be at a great disadvantage for their unwillingness to cheat to maintain it.

That's disingenuous. Best you can do is blame the population for not offering principled people who run for office, or in the rare cases where this happens, blame the population for not supporting those guys in favor of the typical establishment stooges.

Even that isn't fair though... Would you risk of life-destroying consequences that rocking the boat too much in congress will most likely bring down upon you? Would you go head-up against the intelligence agency that can pull out or simply fabricate information to publicly humiliate and destroy you if you so much as threaten them? And even if none of that would stick, are you game to find out what other tricks those guys have to take you out of the picture? Would you wish it on someone else?

The bottom line is this: You didn't follow - or hold your politicians to - the constitution (that thing meant to limit the power of government). You now have a government with so much power that it can destroy anyone or anything threatening to take it away. And by 'you' I mean the population of the US.

Don't feel too bad about it though... You at least *have* a pretty good constitution to return to, hard as that goal may be to reach. The rest of the world isn't so lucky.

I do feel neglected lately.

Have laser, will travel.

The scam isn't the warming, the scam is the proposed solutions. Then again the best and brightest climate scientists we had in 2007 predicted no ice at the poles by 2013 so some of the measures we've taken last year must be working pretty damn well.

The powerful don't hold a significant portion of their wealth as cash in a bank account. Even stocks aremore resilient to inflation. Land is great for that, properties, some commodities... When you have that kind of wealth, protecting it from inflation is relatively trivial.

If they're smart, they'll just make it so you can build your own htpc-type hardware. I'm sure plenty of companies would be fine just having to place a "SteamOS Ready" label on hardware that they *already* make. If the target is Steam games, I don't expect them to use anything too esoteric in terms of hardware. It's most likely going to be a relatively modest PC. They already praised linux for ease developping with specific mention to Intel graphic drivers. If all that's required is Intel graphics and CPUs, it's not like compatible hardware is going to be hard to come by.

Technically on mechanical drives, ext4 benefits from defragging... So does btrfs.

'We' are in the same boat as the US, sans 2nd ammendment. Erosion of liberty, expansion of state power and loss of community are fairly global nowadays, just consider yourselves lucky that you have a good constitution to fall back on once the dust clears. The rest of the world isn't so lucky.

That's the problem right there though. We'll be expected to cower in fear while our neighbours are being 'disappeared'. I think the founders had a point on guns but they never thought that we wouldn't fight for each other. Yes, the government will always outgun you, their premise was that it couldn't outnumber you. SWAT doesn't go in without an agent/target ratio of about 5/1.

So people may have whatever debate they want on the 2nd amendment, it becomes pretty irrelevant if we all live in isolation. If you really want to fight tyranny, get to know your neighbours and build cohesion within your community. If the time comes when guns are actually useful, fighting alone is pointless.

Sure, we're not quite there yet. Erosion of our freedom still has a long way to go before that kind of extreme, last-resort scenario becomes a reality. I say invest in guns if you want, but don't bother if you aren't willing to invest a lot more in your community first.

Worthy of your name there, buddy... But while don't expect parent to be 100% right, I think you're overly optimistic when it comes to Intel's view of the market. You're probably right that they didn't care much about someone having to buy extra CPUs because they ruined the first one. They surely did care about people selling overclocked systems and digging away at their profit margins though. I think they got spooked when enthusiasts started buying celerons instead of pentiums to build decent gaming boxes on the cheap.

Their strategy is going to have to be different though... With CPUs, they can overcharge and cripple chips for the privilege to overclock but with Sandforce controllers, I doubt they'll be the only vendor.