- and soon they will have to recall them because they can explode in certain conditions, like when pressure builds up on the inside and suddenly applied externally.

Memorization is not a foundation for understanding. Anybody thinking that has not understood understanding. It is a common failure though, people thinking that recognizing data makes them understand anything. My guess would be they feel familiar and safe with that data, but understanding is not in the picture.

How does the kid buy $500 of in-game crap, you need the AppleID password for making purchases and each purchase gets a notification.

You really do not get it? It is pretty simple: That you are fully clueless and at the same time completely unaware of it is one thing. (Look up the "Dunning-Kruger effect at some time.) The other is that you are _not_ the only person reading here (talk about extreme ego...)

It is really no surprise that you are hiding even your pseudonym. But you seem to be unaware that this cowardly act removes all credibility (ego again), because nobody can look up what you said before and see your karma.

Is it possible to even fly 15000000 miles in a single lifetime?

(and still have a proper life, I mean, not living in airports and eating airport food)

Since getting a fitness tracker & scales (fitbit in my case) I lost 18kgs (just shy of 40lbs for our 'merkin friends) in 10 months, and have kept that weight off for more than a year. I do NOT attribute this to the devices, but to a change in diet & activity levels. The tracker & scales did provide targets, and maybe some motivation to keep hitting targets. In my case, 15,000 steps, 10km's & 60 minutes activity a day.

It may now be time to change my username :-)

(!fat)mal

All my lifetime there have been news every few years about how this company or that is just about to find a cure for cancer and then nothing ever happens. I can assure you that the cure for cancer will not be found in the next 100 years. Of course there will be advances in how cancer is treated but a full blown cure is not going to happen.

I hope this doesn't come across as an insult but:

1. What do you do for a living?

2. How old are you? ...a THREE digit ID?


I'm genuinely curious about the background of people who are as... let's say "non-cynical" as you seem to be. I genuinely wish I had the life you've had, such that a story like this seems ridiculously implausible.

If you haven't lived to see one or two spectacular fuckups--I mean of the really tragic sort, not just "the server just went up in flames"--then it's very hard to describe. Let me try anyway:

Upper-middle class people working in a bureaucratic setting is a recipe for a very special sort of refined, extra-powerful fuckups. Yes, the threat of being sued can sometimes cause people to wake up and act sensibly but it just as frequently causes them to double down. If you admit a mistake, you WILL get sued. If you keep ploughing on and the months pass and details get blurry and there's a lot of people involved, people are less likely to focus on you. Plus, the more time these people give themselves the more chances they have of finding evidence that their theories were correct.

This isn't something that happens fully consciously. Most humans lie to themselves all the time (in one way or another) but these are mild to moderately rich, reasonably intelligent, overworked humans who are in public contact positions (and much of those people are very emotional) and red tape all day long.

They are not paragons of introspection, and most of them probably learned a long time ago that the key to success doesn't have anything to do with repeatedly second-guessing their own diagnoses.

I have an undiagnosed stomach condition. After getting an endoscopy (paid for out of pocket, because I didn't have insurance out of the time), the specialist noticed "very mild" inflammation but nothing else. In his report, he gave a diagnosis of anxiety. He said that I was "probably" habitually swallowing air some kind of nervous tic (continuous unexplained belching is one of the key symptoms I was and to an extent still am having, along with occasional bouts of burning pain) and I should go see a psych for antianxiety medicines.

I was flummoxed. I did not walk into his office with an anxiety diagnosis. We didn't discuss mental health at all. And I was pretty fucking sure I wasn't swallowing air out of some kind of goddamn random nervous tic; however, he wouldn't talk to me any more or say anything else after that. And why should he? He knew I was uninsured and thus couldn't afford to pay for a bunch of random tests, and he knew the inflammation was mild enough to hand-wave away as irrelevant, but he can't very well say "nothing is wrong with you".

Doctors are overqualified, overstressed and overworked. Of course, none of us here on slashdot know what actually happened and we should keep an open mind and all of that...

But speaking only as a humble student of human behavior, someone has seen his fair share of Dilbert-esque catastrophes, I'd have to say that institutional incompetence is almost certainly more common than Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

The intersection of the set of people who can be described as power users and the set of people for whom entering a single command on the command line is too hard is probably zero.

......and became discontinued shortly after gaining popularity.