Jesus Christ man, does anything in your day not somehow involve thinking about Trump?

Checks are a last vestige of a higher trust society.

I work for a European firm and they (their auditors) despise checks and can't comprehend how America can be so backward as to still use them.

Ironically we just had a customer involved in seven-digit fraud payments ...which couldn't have happened without electronic payments. Had they been "allowed" to pay us in checks like they used to, it simply couldn't have happened.

I'm not sure listing another random rule that allows the German state to arrest people is a "win".

In a way this is good news.
Seriously.

If Russia expected to win this conflict, it's unlikely even they are dumb enough to cause major nuclear leaks in territory they expect to hold.

It's possible this is a clue that they DON'T expect to do so, and we've advanced to the "well if I can't have it nobody can" scorched earth stage, which is very Russian.

Trump says thanks for letting him live free in there.

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

... For our elected officials, that is.

Considering that for the one-time investment of $150 and a half hour of your time you could not have to do that any more? Hell yes, you're crazy.

Samsung is collection of several companies and if you've ever spent any time working with them you quickly realize that they all prioritize other Samsung companies below other customers. I don't know whether it's because of anti-trust concerns, or market strategy, or just rivalry, but I've never seen any Samsung company that operated any differently. I worked quite a bit with Samsung Mobile and S.LSI, who are even quite interdependent (though S.LSI depends more on Samsung Mobile than the reverse), and they constantly ignored and even dissed one another.

There's no way your driver's ed class failed to mention that traffic is required to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing, and I think it's unlikely that your written test failed to include a question about school zone and school bus rules. Mine (Utah) certainly did.

In rural areas, like where I live, there aren't any marked crossings, and there really isn't any reasonable place to put them. If you mark a crossing it would only ever be used by the one or two houses near it, and only by school children, because there's really no need for anyone to walk across the street otherwise. The school buses stop directly in front of each child's house. There aren't any locations where a bus could pick up multiple children without making them have to walk an unreasonable distance, so each kid's house is a stop.

Also, the speed limit on my road is 45 mph, and cars routinely drive 55 mph... so having the "huge yellow beast" with flashing red lights and a flipped-out, flashing red stop sign is definitely necessary.

Yep. CAFE-style regulation is the wrong way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions. The right way is to impose a carbon tax, then let consumers vote with their wallets and engineers work to make the right tradeoffs to meet customer demand. My guess is that consumers would choose to buy the more fuel-efficient vehicles and engineers might make the same tradeoffs... but now it would be clear that those tradeoffs are worthwhile.

"There are serious effects now"
Really?

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repeatedly debunked as an artifact of our North-Atlantic-Data focus, in regards to both 'severe' storms and total hurricane energy, EITHER in the NAtl or globally), or
3) the 'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat whether we're talking regionally or global scales).

So please, elaborate these 'serious effects NOW'? What did I miss? The 'sinking islands' that aren't actually sinking?

Gas is pretty much exactly at its long-term, inflation-adjusted average price, and right where it was in the 1950s. Since then, it was a little higher in the 70s, a little lower in the 90s, a little higher in the early 2000s, but we're now back at the long-term normal price.

See https://afdc.energy.gov/data/1...

Whether the normal price of gas is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on your income and lifestyle, I'd think.