As soon as you put open source code into your product, it's part of your product, and the quality is your responsibility. If you are a small time developer, you can use "Google used it as well, and they didn't find the problem" as an excuse. If you are Google, that excuse doesn't work.

There's another reason that people seem to be ignoring: something that is "past due" will change out of that status, one way or another, after a short time. Something "in collection", not so much. One has to consider why it went into collection in the first place.

Another factor that is rather passed over in OP is that despite a few changes that were made for the better some years ago, they were actually pretty weak changes and credit reporting is still egregiously one-sided today.

Most companies of any size have whole departments that regularly report "past due" debt to collection agencies. But a consumer has many time-consuming and often expensive hoops to jump through to get that back off their record. In many ways it's still guilty-until-proven-innocent.

The fact that over generations people have become used to this travesty of justice just makes it all the more insidious.

After the deductibles and co-pays. I have a "platinum" plan through my employer; better insurance than anyone else I know and the co-pays still total up to a considerable amount. No deductibles for in-network on my plan, which makes me extremely fortunate. As a single guy I can afford the co-pays even with my modest salary but I can see how quickly they would bankrupt someone with a family, particularly if said family had one or more members with a chronic illness.

Incidentally, I was just exposed to rabies a few months ago:

Strike One: The only place to get the immunoglobulin is the ER, because it's very expensive (>$4,500) and has a short shelf-life. ER co-pay: $150
Strike Two: There's a set schedule for the vaccine, Days 0, 3, 7, and 14. You can get the vaccine from your primary, in theory, but of course my primary has a months long waiting list because we're driving PCPs out of business. Bottom line, I can't get appointments with them for Days 3 or 7, so that's two more trips to the ER. Additional co-pay total: $300
Strike Three: New York State ostensibly has a fund to pay for out of pocket expenses related to rabies exposures, but they only reimburse for the rabies vaccine and immunoglobulin. Since the ER decided to give me a tetanus shot on Day 0 NYS won't reimburse me, even though my out of pocket would have been $150 with or without this extra shot. Hooray for bureaucracy!

Totaling all this up, that stupid bat that found its way into my apartment has personally cost me $465 ($450 of ER co-pays, $15 of PCP co-pay) while my insurance company is on the hook for close to $7,000. My annual premium is about $6,000. So this one incident wiped out every penny they made on me and then some. I'm an otherwise healthy 32 year old marathon runner that ought to be subsidizing those who are less fortunate. Now imagine a family of four that were all exposed to the same scenario I was.....

You are simply proving you don't know what you're talking about.

Almost Latour's entire thesis is that S-B law says net heat transfer is either 0 or in one direction, from the hotter area to the colder. If the roles are reversed, and the colder item becomes the hotter, then the sign changes and the net heat transfer is still only in one direction... from hotter to colder.

And you don't know this because you didn't actually do any actual research about it.You claim "his blog post is still live" but link to an web archive. You haven't researched the topic.

You ignored due diligence, and because of that your "refutation" is nothing but a straw-man, which you continue to deny, either because you know it's a straw-man, and are just doubling down, or because you still refuse to perform the due diligence necessary to make an intelligent argument. The rest of this nonsense falls down because it's all house-of-cards based on your initial misunderstanding of Latour's actual thesis.

Just to be clear: shortly after Latour published that blog post, it became clear that the language he used implied that no radiation at all was absorbed by the warmer body. So a reader could not reasonably be blamed for inferring that. But Latour quickly apologized for the unfortunate wording and corrected himself to make it very clear he was referring to net, not absolute, heat transfer.

As such, just what part of the S-B law do you find controversial?

I don't blame you for inferring -- from that one blog post, which you like to in archive -- that what he meant was any heat transfer, rather than net. But again: he corrected that right away and anybody who knows jack shit about the subject knows that. But you, on the other hand, apparently refused to be bothered with due diligence. Imagine that.

Amazon's offering is substantially less flexible than that of existing players (shapeways is the name that comes to mind; but there are others), who already accept basically any STL that isn't horribly munged in some way and spit the result out in a number of different materials.

You still have to model the part, or buy a (currently rather expensive) 3d scanner to do it; but if you are willing to put on your CAD hat, you could have the part by next week, just not from Amazon. I wonder if they are just moving slowly, or worried about the copy cops coming after them once people start knocking off action figures or something...

It lacks the sci-fi appeal of pure printing; but there are a variety of techniques that use the 3d printed part as the first step and then subject it to additional treatment steps in order to make up for those sorts of deficiencies.

As long as the subsequent processing steps don't change the dimensions(or change them in predictable ways that you can compensate for) you can get away with whatever tempering, annealing, and so on your application requires.

Depends on what you pay.

A poorly calibrated fused filament unit will produce stringy junk that delaminates if you look at it funny. A well calibrated one will achieve something reasonably close to what the plastic it is using is actually capable of. Outside the cheap seats, you can print all kinds of things(especially if you count parts that require one or more additional processing steps as '3d printed'. Printing wax, for example, is pretty undemanding, and allows you to do lost-wax casts of more or less any shape that will cast properly, without needing a printer that can sinter or melt metals. Some of the techniques for producing ceramics are in the same vein, the printer just needs to tack the ceramic material together long enough for firing, which takes care of the mechanical properties.)

The one thing that is (relatively) easy with injection molding that 3d printing (to my knowledge) isn't so hot for is overmolds. When injection molding you can use insert molding or multi-shot systems to achieve the (enormously common and fairly popular) combination of a rigid plastic structure with an elastomeric surface treatment for grip or aesthetic reasons. For prototyping purposes you can get paint-like coatings that emulate elastomeric overmolds that you can brush on to 3d printed parts; but the quality isn't as good and production takes longer.

These are things that 3D printing doesn't do maybe. But most certaintly it is feasible. And once that's achieved, you will be able to create metals with a la carte properties.

I wouldn't say it's the "cheapest" option. If you want to go strictly software, you can use something like BitTorent Sync.

Before anybody jumps on me: I wrote "something like". No, it's not open source. But using iCloud or Azure are proprietary solutions too!

I don't "trust" BitTorrent Sync's security. But odds are it's fine for this kind of use. You can also control access to files by simply putting them in different folders, and giving different people access to them, or give out temporary authorization codes.

So don't misunderstand: I would not endorse its security unless BitTorrent agreed to an open security audit. But it's also a "free" solution. And it's available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. I think Linux too but I don't remember for sure.

You used the word "unless" correctly. So the police isn't going to pay. And who would be suing them?

It's been on TV network news, too.

Are you honestly equating process separation in multi-user OSes with rootkits?

This EA: you only get StarForce if you pre-order at select retail partners or buy the launch-day DLC...

Given that this is EA we are talking about, I can definitely believe that they'd somehow manage to be paranoid about 'piracy' of a game they are giving away. However, since it's also an older game(pre "Origin" store/client/pox-on-humanity and originally distributed largely on retail disks) and being given away it would be unsurprising if as little effort as possible was put into modifications for the new distribution.

Does anybody know how deeply baked-in SecuROM has to be? Would the developer/publisher have a 'clean' version that is then put through some sort of SecuROM conversion step, or would you have to go further back, and deeper, into the development process to cleanly rip it out?

I'm baffled at why including it would be worth much (especially if the license agreement involves any sort of volume-based payment, which would likely wipe out any minor benefits in audience tracking); but if it is sufficiently difficult to rip out then it would be understandable why EA wouldn't bother doing so(aside from just being evil).

It seems to be also quite foolish to fly a civilian aircraft over a war zone..