Whilst the proliferation of easy credit shoulders a lot of the blame, a significant amount still falls onto the shoulders of the credit addled. They could say "no" when the bank offers them an easy loan. They could say "no" I dont need an expensive car. They could say "no" to credit and pay cash/debit at the store.

They could say "no" to credit, live miserly, and then get in debt anyway due to, say, medical bills. Or they could use credit and at least have good memories on their deathbed.

Can an average person afford to buy a car?

No, but he has to anyway, since the car manufacturers bought up and destroyed public transport and city planners make sure it's almost impossible to live near work and services.

NF had its peak right before the big flix-gate (lol) when they upped the price, removed streaming and changed plans on everyone.

at that point, I dropped them and never looked back.

vpn is $10 or less. torrents are free. there are NO ADS in torrents. no drm, and good compression yet still watchable.

I have not found a reason to resume paying for content. if an enlightened company gives me a good reason, I could consider it. but I'm not interested in resuming netflix and now that they are starting to SHOW the dark side of their corp mentality, yeah, they are a done-deal and I predict a decline in their customer levels over time.

Wait, so do they rip the DVD/BDs, add in some ads, then re-burn them?

Of course, I still wouldn't see them, since I rip them before watching specifically to remove the ads and "unskippable" bullshit, but...

Oh! Wait - This only affects people already happily paying for a lower qual*BUFFERING*ity product. Never mind, then - Carry on with your paid inferior YouTube clone. ;)

-Keep every e-mail.

A follow-up to that - Document everything via email. Even that guy who does his damnedest to never go on the record with his requirements (and you'll meet plenty of them), summarize your conversation and email it to him for a yes/no confirmation that you understood his intent.

Of course, depending on who asks, this won't keep you from needing to fix other people's mistakes, but it can save your sanity, and possibly even your job, when Mr. Blowhard swears up and down that he told you X and you did Y.

The obvious response to which is

... "No."

I don't provide useful information to my opponent in a negotiation, simple as that.

"Oh, come now, Mr. Jones, I see from your pay stubs that you can afford a much nicer car than that Fiesta - Sorry, I must insist you buy a Fusion or Taurus!".

Yep Learn to say NO.

All companies are out to screw you. So you are a fool. A complete fool, if you give the company any loyalty.

Do not be afraid or feel bad to jump ship to another company that is offering something better. Also don't ever be afraid to ask for more money, because I guarantee you are underpaid.

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

The fact they aren't working there anymore suggest they weren't.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.

So the employees rather than shareholders, managers or the CEO got a fat paycheck for being good at their jobs. That's communism!

Glad to see DICE holding strong on their scumware downloaders.

I see your education on macs and OSX is so horribly outdated that your comment is essentially useless. Many do worry about it this is why several virus scanner companies are making products for OSX. Hell you can even get a free Avast for OSX. They would not even bothered if people were not asking for it.

"Just this space where you can hide and survive an OS wipe and reinstall." IF the user only put the unit to sleep and then woke it. Simply turning off the unit for a short time before OS wipe and reinstall defeats this potential hole.

I am betting that Windows, BSD, and Linux have a similar vulnerability lurking.

what? "the romans, they go to the house??"

This is evil incarnate.

So... Hitler was reborn as Slashdot? That explains why this place is so obsessed with karma.

If we could thrawl space for dissipated matter and energy and thus create new stars, wouldn't the stop the heat death?

That particular method won't work, since stars "burn" fuel and eventually all will be gone. However, combining general relativity with quantum physics might allow us to control the shape of spacetime in a way that basically amounts to creating new "baby" universes.

Alternatively, an expanding universe can not actually experience heat death, since the expansion itself causes the ambient temperature to fall. However, taking advantage of this fact would require giving up anything resembling our current fleshy forms. Of course, we'll probably end up doing that anyway, since mind uploading has obvious advantages once we leave the only known environment - Earth - where our bodies are actually convenient. And of course, it might turn out mind uploading is actually impossible, in which case we have problems.

And of course, it's always possible that the Laws of Thermodynamics are not, in fact, absolute, or more likely, don't mean what we think they mean. It wouldn't be the first time people jumped to conclusions without thinking of all the implications.