Correct. Coincidently, that's also why the pot in the Netherlands is of excellent quality: if they sell you garbage you would go back to complain (and you could even threaten to call the cops if you want to make a scene).

Dear mods,
I just noticed several of the "anonymous coward" posters are Chinese posters with useful insights, but with zero mod points. Even if you don't usually read ACs this might be a good occasion to make an exception.

I agree, but I would add another important point I picked up when training for naval officer: You have to keep some distance to give the men some room to goof off / bitch about the captain / etc. Specifically, we were told not to enter their quarters to have dinner with unless invited, and if invited for a drink/dinner to keep it brief. In a work situation it often may not be appropriate to go off and have lunch on your own somewhere, but I still think it's a good idea to make sure you are not always around them. (Of course, when you are making yourself scarce it may not be the best idea to do that by going home early, but that's another point)

You can leave it to slashdot to blame Microsoft for this whole state of affairs :-/

It is also a missed opportunity to provide a better standard. This was the cheapest alternative on the table for the phone companies. The other proposals that offered multiple voltages would have cost a few dollars more but saved a lot more of the environment. So it does not only have plus points.

It's not that simple: if you provide 2A to a cheap phone without any form of rate limiting then that phone will indeed blow up. Granted, that's pretty rare on modern phones, however as a safety measure a lot of phones will simply refuse to charge if you supply too much current.

d) they propose to standardize on a 2.5W version of micro-USB to charge phones, while most modern smart phones need around 5W and future fast-charging phones will need even more

It is not uncommon for people to store their web site assets in subversion. This means Apache will gladly serve your subversion hidden files to the world to anyone who asks for the appropriate page. A typical Rails stack + Capistrano setup will do unless properly configured.

I'm not sure if having IPv6 on the WAN side would be all that useful on a home router. Besides the fact that very few ISPs offer it yet, if you do have IPv6 on the WAN there is no need to use NAT so you might as well use a switch instead of a router.

We can reduce that a bit further:

Eat less

Exercising is healthy but it only helps with losing weight if you spend at least half an hour a day on it, and then only contributes about 10-20%. So forget about the exercising if weight is your problem, just eat less.

Exercising, while healthy and beneficial for several reasons, does not contribute significantly to losing weight. Your burn about 10%-20% more if you exercise half an hour a day. If you have a problem with exercising, or just don't feel like it, just eat 10-20% less. Lots of skinny people do no exercise at all. Overweight people have a hard enough time to muster the self-discipline to eat less, it is not a good idea to make it harder on them by telling them they should exercise if that will make them abandon the effort entirely.

It's also a good example of regulators asking industry for a solution will not find an optimal solution:

• Micro USB is only 5V and 500mA, that's just enough to power a phone but not useful for the next generation of fast charging batteries (the iPhone charger is 1000mA already)
• You have 20 charger in your house, only a very small part will be able to make do with this, so it is not universal at all
• USB is not certified to be used in wet environments like the kitchen or bathroom, another class of devices out the window
• It's not very user friendly, elder people need reading glasses to plug it in the right way up
• The connector is about 10 times more expensive than a simple 2 or 3 prong jobby

There are multi-voltage adapters available that adress all of the above problems, albeit they cost 50 cents more to produce, so the phone suppliers went for the cheap option.

That's putting it bluntly, but yes. Used incorrectly and/or in the wrong hands this would be bad, but that goes for any management tool. The reason most people in the discussion are focussing on how it applies to them is probably because most of them are not in a management position.