I recently bought a ASUS product through Amazon (from Amazon itself, not market place). It had a nice discount and the product had just launched, so win win. I tried to register the product on the Asus website to claim my additional year of warranty (3 instead of 2), but the ASUS website refused to register any warranty. Contacted support and they told me I had bought a product without factory warranty. I did not even know that that existed or was legal?

It all boils down to margins. There are many sectos where margins are so low, standarized packaging is out of the question. Robots sound nice, but .. you need a large captial investment upfront. Plus, robots are not flexible (well, most of them). Try setting up a warehouse that can deal with Black Friday. If you do it fully automated, it means that 95% of the year capacity is unused and you actually lose money. So for peaks in demand, you will always need to have manual labour.

Implemented is a big word. It is a principle that exists, but in practice, has been killed by the Lobbying groups. The Dutch Government refused to vote for banning Glycophosphate as a resultt. Same with GenX and other forever chemicals - despite knowing the harm, companies have been permitted to dump them into drinking water reservoirs (!) for decades. All they need to do is come up with one botched study that clears chemical X and you are good to go. Even worse is the permitted use of chemical cocktails, where a dozen of pesticides are mixed, each at the maximum permitted dose and then sprayed onto crops. Just because an individual dose is safe, does not mean that using dozen is. But that is what happens with Strawberries, where they might use between 7 and 17 (!) different pesticides. Anyone with some sense would argue that that might be very unsafe untill proven otherwise, but no... So Precautionary Principle, great on paper, not in practice.

As such, TiO2 Nanoparticels are used in paints and coatings to create self cleaning surfaces. You may also find them in aircleaners, where the freed electrons break down airborn pollutants.

RFID tags are disabled at checkout, so they cannot track you outside of the store. Inditex is actually quite late with this, competitors moved to RFID years ago.

An even bigger ISP in the Netherlands uses/used the very same password for people who forgot their original more secure password.

Error correction does not always fix everything. The bits used for error correction can have errors as well after transmission. And sometimes there can be too many errors in the signal to be fixable with error correction.

That is either for short amounts of time or with proper equipment (G-Suit). When I flew glider planes, we used to go up to 6.5 -7G and it is really hard work to stay conscience. I have doubts about the elegance and euphoria described though, above 7G things really start to hurt, your nose will be dripping, ear wax will pop out of your ears, ... If you're physically weak, you'll probably have small arteries in your legs burst too due to the increases blood pressure.

Because many pre-compiled packages use conservative optimization flags and may lack specific code paths for certain processors and instruction sets. They might also have chosen a compiler which doesn't produce the fastest code around. I'm not sure how it stands today, but a few years back, ICC produced code up to 30% faster than GCC or MSVC.

The difference all depends on the type of application of course. Overall, you might only see a performance difference of 1-5%, but for specific parts of the application, performance increase may be anywhere between 10 to 200%.

Last, compiling yourself also means you can choose what gets compiled and what not. Which in turns reduces diskspace and memory usage of the executable and may increase security and performance a bit. For things like Kernels and such, you need to compile it yourself if you want support for specific things (ALTQ for PF under FreeBSD for instance).

Where I live (the Netherlands), below 100km/h there is a 3 km/h correction (3% correction above 100km/h), so driving 54km/h in a 50km/h zone can get you a fine. Granted, a police officer isn't likely to stop you, but driving past a speed trap (which we have a LOT of) is going to land you a ticket.

I'm using the Scarangel mod by Stulle, which has Maella bandwidth control + NAFC (network adapter feedback control). Plus, cFosSpeed trafficshaping which puts all packets of eMule.exe in the lowest class. Works like a charm, uses 99% of available bandwidth and I can still play EVE Online, login to servers with SSH or browse the web without lag.

Major problems HAVE been reported, especially with people already using their own Traffic Shaping solutions. I've never gotten v2 to work properly. Uploading fluctuates and uses only half of my upstream on average. Even though 100% of the upstream is available without congestion issues. eMule otoh has absolutely no issues using 99% of my upstream bandwidth.

"Greater good", "greater evil" and context are very relative terms and often abused to disguise acts which are just bad or evil. You mention a pretty good example, the CIA.

Impulse is good, IF you live in North America. Many (popular) titles on Impulse are US, Canada and Mexico only.

Parachutes don't work well in downdrafts, or very turbulent conditions where the risk of a parachute collapse is high. But I doubt he would have had the height and time to jump. Which is one of the reasons flying near mountains is so dangerous.