If I have to pay my fathers child support debts (that he refused to pay to my mom for care of me) I will seriously go postal...

I meant to draw a parallel between the states implied warranty for manufactured goods and software development. From a end user perspective I don't see why software should be treated differently than hardware. The whole line of reasoning that it cannot be enforced because a third party sold the product (and may have set expectations incorrectly is bunk). If someone sold me a car by telling me that it worked under water and I drove it off the end of the pier, I would not have a case against the manufacturer, I would have to sue the person who told me the car would run underwater (or maybe better yet be accountable for my own actions in not reading the information provided by the manufacturer).

In the state of Maine we have an implied warranty law that states that if an item fails to function as advertised due to a manufacturers defect within 4 years the consumer can initiate legal action against the manufacturer. As 4 years is about an average lifespan for a computer I feel four years is fair. I for one feel that Microsoft has gone far above and beyond the call of duty maintaining XP for as long as it has. Personally I wish MS would ditch the one OS to rule them all mentality and develop multiple operating systems with multiple UI's and turn them over faster. Given their resources they could foster a atmosphere of friendly competition within the company to see which Operating systems sold the best. I would be willing to bet companies would snap up a pre-packaged locked down desktop OS that came with a simple to use application distribution system (build a secure APT like system for windows). Anyone who has used System Center to lock down desktops would agree that it should not be this complex, if you built a desktop OS to be centrally managed from the get go it could be so much easier.

I disagree, This article is a joke. Let me introduce one variable. Weight.. Add a hundred or drop 50 lbs and people have a hard time recognizing someone they went to high school with. The idea that a person could reliably identify someone with only genetic information is a joke. That is not to say that if you add other factors into the search you could not possibly use genetic facial reconstruction to aid in identifying people, Just that it is not a magic bullet. I would be willing to bet if you did a random sample of as few as 50 people you would find that the reconstruction they produced for this article is a abnormality.

As a systems/network administrator I must say that If you are relying on general purpose wan connection for life or death services you are doing it wrong. Where I work we physically segment everything that is truly critical. The fire and alarm systems have multiple redundant connections including two that are 100% separate from our data network. The closest thing we have to a critical system running on a general purpose network is the use of SIP to provide connections from our phones to the PBX and that system has had a number of minor problems in the 7 years we have been using it. Ultimately if a phone call gets dropped in an office building the chances of someone dying because of it are truly minuscule. If on the other hand a drive by wire function fails you have a lot larger chance of death. I believe they will segment mission critical systems to a dedicate physical bus with redundant links in any proposed in car network. That way a entertainment system cannot interfere with the operation of say the headlights. My comment was made to expose the naivete of the original post and not to offer any truly insightful criticism.

Lucas123 wants to stream audio and video across the same switches as his throttle by wire?????, I say we sell tickets to this event!

I agree that the complexities of the world are hard to model, that does not mean the basis for the story is incorrect. Food prices have long been tied to an increase of social unrest (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_documents/130308_Bellemare%20Food%20Price%20Volatility%20and%20Social%20Unrest%20January.PDF provides a decent analysis of the situation). Those who write off the tie between food prices and rioting do so to their own detriment.

Honestly I think blocking the merger is the wrong approach to anti-trust. What we should to is mandate the separation of content distribution and connectivity. The cable companies are leveraging their connectivity monopoly created by the cable Franchise agreements to create a larger monopoly. These franchise agreements were created for the purpose of making content available to under served customers. Now that there are multiple connectivity options (DSL, Cable modem, Fiber...etc) we should decouple the local connectivity from the content distribution. Let those who have DSL or FIBER from another vendor sign up for Time Warner CABLE TV content (via streaming service) and let people served by TW data connections choose another TV provider.

As a so called cord cutter they way I see it is the cable companies are leveraging their cable TV monopolies to dominate the ISP/Telecom markets. The real anti-trust push should not be to stop the merger of comcast and time warner but to require separation of services in an area where a company has a monopoly. That is to say make them spin off their core networking and content distribution services into a separate company/corporation.

You just have to drop the phone from higher than 3 feet. I have had 8 smart phones in the past 10 years. They are all designed to fail. The last decent phone that I had was a Nokia 6200 series.

My understanding based upon reading the originally posted materials was that they published their reliability findings based upon their own experience. I did not see anywhere that they claimed that it was comprehensive research into the reliability of hard drives. We should not crap upon backblaze because people could not be bothered to read the articles and made some faulty assumptions based upon the headlines, to do so would just serve to dissuade others from releasing their experiences. As for the argument about some of the hardware having known faults... If a company does not want bad press they should do more quality control before releasing crappy hardware...

I would actually go further, and site the prevalence of mood disorders as exactly the type of malaise of the spirit he was predicting.

As if, I suppose you are now going to tell me that the posts to damnyouautocorrect are fake.

why would I want to buy a new PC when my 5 year old quad core 3Ghz AMD system with 12 GB of ram with a R5770 graphics card can do 99.99% of what I want in a desktop. Honestly it boots and runs every program I throw at it almost as fast as the new $1200 I7 I have at work(as perceived by the human Eye and not some benchmark). If the innovation in desktop processors/graphics cards kept up with mobiles I would buy a new desktop. But for now there is no need.

Having more pixels is all well and good but I would rather have a higher frame rate so that we do not have to rely so heavily on interpolation to reduce artifacts in action shots.