You know that some people with XXY chromosomes are identified as female right?

In some states it's illegal to refuse to show ID to the police. Washington was at one point one of those laws until the state supreme court overturned the law declaring it unconstitutional.

http://www.rei.com/help/feedback/privacyfb.html

That is the link to send them an email about "privacy". I am sending them an email outlining that if the details are true as they are being presented that I am shocked and embarrassed that REI loss prevention would help with this.

I am an REI member and I shop at the downtown Seattle location often. I am providing them with my membership number and I hope to hear back from them. As a coop they really don't have any interesting in pissing off their members so we will see how this goes.

At the same time if it is false then this guy is accusing them of something false. I am however inclined to believe him.

Also recently I looked up some of the laws around this completely unrelated to this. In Washington state there was once a law requiring a citizen to present ID to a police officer without a crime being committed. Refusing to show ID was a crime itself. This law was struck down as unconstitutional by the WA state supreme court. If there really was no law being broken it is not obstruction to not present ID, the court was very clear about that.

You are right that fans and power supplies usually go first. I personally use a little bit of an overpowered power supply so it runs cooler and more stable.

Also I think the more general concern I have is that possibly planning for a 15 year lifespan might be the wrong way of looking into this. It is always much better to have a flexible upgrade and repair plan than try and force something to last much longer than it is intended. Make no mistake that consumer hardware is not intended to last 15 years.

I would much rather look at something like software of a data base that can upgrade smoothly in the future.

The Thai King has very little real power but he yields immense moral authority and is very popular.

According to whom? My understanding is thew king claims a 100% rate of adoring followers yet this is backed up by the force of law. It is illegal to speak anything negative about the king so of course he is "universally adored". It's all a bunch of crap to anyone in America anyway. I am quick to accuse my own government of being corrupt and suppressing dissent but this goes to show that we in America don't have it the worst by a long shot. It puts it all in perspective.

I think you are worrying about self driving too much. Self driving cars are not simply going to blindly following a path only to have a tiny nudge throw off everything. They will be constantly aware of their surroundings and be making sure they are on course. Arguably we have the AI to do this today or very soon it just has not been implemented into a car.

I think the lawyer is looking for the guy to say "oh man I am about to sit the pants off this sucker and go retire somewhere nice." I don't think they are going to try and decide how bad he REALLY felt based on what emoticons he used.

You think the individual soldier is supporting dictators? Of course not, they are simply completing their mission on the ground that in turn may end up helping a dictator but that was all setup way above their head and they have no control over some of the long term effects of their actions are. That's why we have a representative government. I guess you are the one propping up dictators after all since you are responsible for the leaders in our own government.

This is such a misunderstanding of alcohol related injuries I am not sure how to get through to you. I can however start explaining. Alcohol related crashes are almost never when a drunk person cannot stay on the road and goes off and hits something/someone. It is almost always a situation that might have caused a sober person to crash but definitely will cause a drunk person to crash. Someone not seeing the drunk driver or the other way around. All kinds of other risks are involved here and alcohol is just the one that seals the deal.

One of the big reasons we have so many alcohol related crashes is because people get up to somewhere above the legal limit but they say "hey the law doesn't know wtf they are talking about, I'm fine to drive". Then once they get home they don't trust the limits at all. Eventually someone is going to get hurt doing that and in your entire life it may never be you. It's when people think they are the exception that things really start to get dangerous.

Even if a stack of DVDs and a hard drive were the exact same price per gigabyte you would still want to have the hard drive. The hard drive offers considerable more value than a stack of DVDs that cannot the average seek time of any random data is about a minute as you have to find the disc, load the disc, and so on.

As it stands now if you want to backup large chunks of data such as an entire HD then you should not be going with DVDs. If you want to backup DVDs or small files then DVDs are fine.

Ouch it hurts to remind me. So our ratio was $200 billion for how many thousand homes connected? Oh wait that was a big fat zero, nevermind.

Could you inject some type of padding or filler in to make the data appear less evenly distributed when in reality the filler simply follows some pattern that can be easily removed later? I know this is not going to actually make it more secure but it could obfuscate the fact that the data exists.

Oh please don't even start. I have been all over Europe where everyone drinks the same piss water lager just with a label in a different language. Piss beer is fine and even recommended for certain food pairings (bbq and spicy food). The weak beer has its place and it does not involve you getting on your high horse about how much better you are for not drinking it.