I'm not calling Oldham a liar. I'm saying, GM's story means either they are calling him a liar, or they're saying the engineer in the car with him on his test drive just happened to be the one engineer who knew about the issue. How else can they say only one person knew about the issue?

However, reading a bit more closely, we could be talking about different time frames. I.E. in 2002 only one person knew, as the GM statement claims, and only later in 2004 did other engineers become aware.

Of course none of that explains how one person gets a part changed without changing the part number and there's no oversight or visibility, and what happened between 2004 and 2014.

According to this NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/...

Scott Oldham of Edmunds.com had a test drive of the Cobalt in 2004, with a GM engineer in the car. Multiple times Oldham's knee hit the key fob and car shut down.

Also, a major factor preventing identification of the ignition switch issue (or at least providing plausible deniability) is the part number. GM had 2 sets of cars: one set supposedly had this issue, the other did not. Both had the same ignition switch, so if there was a difference between the two sets, the ignition switch was not it.

Now we know the ignition switch was changed, but the part number stayed the same, making it difficult to correctly identify the issue. We're supposed to believe a single engineer was responsible for changing a part but not the part number?

Not that it matters much to me. My car searches start with Consumer Reports reviews and reliability ratings, and so no GM car has been in consideration for a while.

You're more average than you thought you were.

And ain't nothing really wrong with that.

I'm expressing serious concern about d_r's stability here

What am I, twelve? Go peddle that horseshit somewhere else.

Are you melting down? I'm really not interested in seeing something horrific about you on the news.

The sad thing is, you used to be better than this. Mind you, if freaking Rush Limbaugh goes to shit thanks to Obama's election, what I should I expect from mere mortals?

What about the Spruce Moose?

Huge oversight missing from the list.

is there really any reason to worry about this at all?

Less a worry and more a position on the risk/reward curve.

Hi. Organic farmer here.

The term organic is meaningless, and is as much a marketing tool as anything else. Buying organic food without checking out ingredients/growing methods is as stupid as not checking the provenance of anything else.

Having said that, there are many methods of protecting your crops that do not involve complex pesticides and other "highly unfriendly to certain types of living organisms" products. Really, it all boils down to whether you're lazy, or really want to produce and eat food that isn't going to do you or your environment any extra harm.

So do a little research before you buy. There's plenty of us growing this way and we're happy to detail exactly what we do and don't do to our food. Just ask.

We have other OS distributions that that live just fine on SD cards or sticks, already. If you want to bring computing to slums as a useful resource, the big problems are probably really:

1) actual hardware, shared or not, to run whatever open source OS you pick;
2) electricity to run the hardware and shelter for the hardware;
3) people to train those who have never used computers before, may have other literacy issues besides, and quite possibly speak dialects you will have difficulty getting localization for; and
4) affordable/free network access if these people want to use the internet.

I'll bet these are not the only issues, but if you don't address these, I suspect your money and time will be mostly wasted.

actually fit in your pocket

If you're a munchkin, sure. My 3GS (no case) fits neatly into the fob pocket of my Levis.

Because what you describe sounds more like the Hollywood version of a tech start up than any of the actual start-ups I've worked for and with.

Not that there can't be issues from the cultural differences between established companies and start-ups or between 40-something married with children and 20 & 30-something single, but if I'm looking to join a company as a programmer and Burning Man is on my list of concerns, I would not be looking to join this company.