I get why you'd express that sentiment. It's certainly plausible that this information isn't fully accurate.

The difference between a conspiracy that exists, and the conspiracy that actually happens can be tested simply:

Would an uninformed idiot think it's actually a good idea to do?
If yes? It's probably happening.
If no? Find a new theory.

It's not that idiots run everything. But idiots get involved in every piece of decision making, somehow.

You're doing god's work.

a cite

Now, while happiness does help us catch lies in advertising, we're also more likely to react positively to advertising in general when we're happy. Thus google's mission should be to make people happy at the expense of news quality, since they're in the advertising business.

There is also the fact that some failure modes will take both sides down. I've seen disk controllers overwrite shared LUNs, hosing both sides of the HA cluster (which is why I try to at least quiesce the DB or application so RTO/RPO in case of that failure mode is acceptable.)

HA can also be located on different points on the stack. For example, an Oracle DB server. It can be clustered on the Oracle application level (active/active or active/passive), or it can be sitting in a VMWare instance, clustered using vSphere HA, where the DB itself thinks it is a single instance, but in reality, it is sitting active/passive on two boxes.

Even if the backup stays up, failing back can be an issue. I've seen HA systems where it will happily drop to the backup node... but failing back to the primary can require a lot of downtime. For active/active setups, it can require a performance hit for resyncing.

Even on fairly simple things (yum updates from mirrors, AIX PTFs, Solaris patches, or Windows patches released from WSUS), I like babysitting the job.

There is a lot that can happen. A backup can fail, then the update can fail. Something relatively simple can go ka-boom. A kernel update doesn't "take" and the box falls back to the wrong kernel.

Even something stupid as having a bootable CD in the drive and the server deciding it wants to run the OS from that rather than from the FCA or onboard drives. Being physically there so one can rectify that mistake is a lot easier when planned as opposed to having to get up and drive to work at a moment's notice... and by that time, someone else likely has discovered it and is sending scathing E-mails to you, CC:5 tiers of management.

Friend google has prescribed me 3 doses of happy happy to be taken at the nearest confession booth.

Strictly speaking, the assertion mwvdlee makes is logical. You can't affirm the consequent like that. But it's completely unreasonable in that it freely disregards other available(and in fact trivially commonplace) information about how diseases, and HIV in particular, work.

You still can do pretty much any of those things on your own land, just as you could in the 1800s. You can build your own gun, drive an unregistered car, and perform practically any work for your own personal enjoyment.

What part of liberty allow you to do anything you damned well please on *somebody else's* property? Cause if you think you can fire a gun or perform Shakespeare or ride your 4 wheeler in my back yard then FUCK YOU! Because that's the American way.

For 18 months you take your infant to a doctor who pumps her full of drugs, which, while curing her of a terrible disease, gives her horrible side-effects. Then the doctors tell you they think she's cured, but that they want to continue the debilitating drug regimen "just to be sure." Is it really so irrational to say, "No, screw that. My daughter's better now. No need to subject my baby to all this continual agony"? Not saying this is what happened, but since you don't know the specifics and circumstances any better than I do, how about we just forego judgement on this woman?

Yeah, but the mother presumably knows that HIV is passed through breastmilk. So it seems unlikely she would continue to breastfeed longer than absolutely necessary (which, given the existence of formula, means the kid was almost certainly never breastfed).

Post 18 months? Possible, but unless the mother was actively trying to reinfect her kid...

Oh, no, that's absolutely an attempt at large-scale mental manipulation as well.

Because HIV has numerous properties that allow it to remain dormant in a host for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV#Replication_cycle

Possession is 90% of the law, defense is the other 10%. If you can get it and defend it, it's yours. It's the same principle on which ownership of every country on Earth is based.