It's not just amazon.

I ordered a thermostat for my mustang last week. It was described as "sold and shipped by Walmart."

A couple of days later, I found an Autozone box on my porch. And not just the box, but the shipping return address was to auto zone!

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

Speaking as a layman, I think you're a bit confused by the differences in copyright and trademark and how they apply. Steamboat Willie is now in the Public Domain, meaning that you can show it, or even sell copies of it and Disney can't do anything to stop you. However, the characters are still trademarked by Disney meaning that you can't use them to make new cartoons without Disney's permission. The question here seems to be can you use parts of Steamboat Willie in an advertisement for your law firm, or do you still have to ask Disney's permission to use the characters.

Anyone remember dBase?

Quite well, TYVM. And, I know why its name was so short; do you? Hint: CP/M.

And if the person I asked had answered that he'd helped create wealth for the nation, I would have thanked him for a job well done. Military service isn't the only way to do something for your country, it's just the most obvious one.

Well, there's that too, but I prefer to think of it of deciding for myself which branch to serve in.

When you look at all of Europe, it's more like a weekly thing, and sometimes a daily thing. The ones that make the news are the bigger bombs like the thousand-pound bomb mentioned in TFS or the rare ones that cannot be made safe and have to be detonated in place, which can mean a lot of new business for window installers even with dampening.

You can't be the "baddest kick ass person on the block" without having an effective ability to fight. That means weapons, and it means training on how to use them most effectively. When going up against the Soviet Union, that means a nuclear arsenal. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we also helped ensure through deterrence that the Soviets never moved on Western Europe, and we helped ensure through diplomacy that World War III never broke out.

No, there are many ways to do things for your country other than military service. I was just showing how I served to avoid a "put up or shut up" situation.

You certainly have a right to your opinion, and I respect your right to follow your beliefs. However, I'd like to ask you what, if anything, you've ever done for your country or have you just held out your hand hoping your government would drop money into it?

And before you try turning the table on me and asking me the same question, let me tell you that I'm a Nam vet (Not, mind you, a "Viet Nam era veteran") who served in Uncle Sam's Navy and can proudly claim to be a member of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht club, having watched 6" shells hitting the water about 30 yards off my ship's fantail.

You oversimplify. I despise Rust, but it does address real problems. (I'm not sure how well, because I won't use it.) I'm thinking of thinks like deadlock, livelock, etc. As someone above pointed out, there are lots of applications that don't need to deal with that, and subsets can work for them. (The above poster worked in a domain where all memory could be pre-allocated.)

Rust felt like programming with one hand tied behind my back. So I dropped it. Only one reference to a given item it just too restrictive. Perhaps it is really Turing complete, but so is a Turing machine. But multi-threaded programs really do need a better approach. (My real beef with C++ (and C) though is their handling of unicode. So I'm currently experimenting with D [ https://dlang.org/ ], which seems pretty good for the current application (though honestly since it's I/O bound Python would be quite acceptable). )

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

>Has about the same importance as smart tech in a fridge for me.

I live in the desert, you insensitive clod! :_)

but seriously we doohave many days of 115-117F most summers. Self-replenishing ice is *important*.

it's not why we bought it, but our LG actually has two ice makers; one in the refrigerator door, which you can actually clean out, and another for larger square tubes in the upper freezer drawer (which we turn off for the cooler half of the year)

>A fridge will last for a decade or more,

you would *think* that, but my prior fridge was a Samsung.

The ice maker died of its own buildup just out of warranty, the drip tray for the water dispenser caused rust lines through the paint below it, and the whole thing failed at 4 or 5 years--we came out one morning and it was at 50.

Compare to the Samsung dryers whose stainless steel barrels tend to crack and go out of round, wanting a $400 replacement!

The refurbisher who came out with our temporary dryer told us that from his experience (primarily washers & dryers), Samsung had the highest failure rate, while the other Korean brand, lg,had the lowest, with everything else in between.

>Agree, and don't even allow my TStat's to connect to wifi.

Have you *read* the license on those?

I brought home a wifi thermostat, thinking it would be nice to be able to change it half an hour out when coming home, and then read the terms.

It was like a parody of the terms you find offered sarcastically around here.

Pretty much, "you agree that we can send armed goons into your house, torture your dog, rape your cat, and sell your children into slavery. We may do anything we want with your data, and even more so if someone is willing to pay us for it."

It went back.