A quick little rant about asinine component replacement

Why is it that people think they can take a wild guess and replace a missing component with some random part?
I mean, really! Do people not care if they are going to fry their box?
This particular rant was inspired by the dolt who decided to replace a bypass capacitor with a solder bridge and the other dolt who thought that because the SMT resistor he knocked off the board looked the same as other ones on the board, they must be the same value.! (for that matter same guy though he'd measure the components in circuit and that would be accurate!)



Well folks, I have to admit that sometimes I'm foaming at the mouth when I write these. Now here's the deal: Just because two components look the same does not mean they are the same! Furthermore as any and I mean ANY electronics textbook will tell you, you can NOT accurately measure a component's value while said component is in-circuit. Why? because there are other things in the circuit which will be in parallel with the component you are trying to measure and they will affect the measurement.
(never guaranteed that these rants would be coherent either did I...)
At to the guy who decided to bridge the missing cap with solder? He shorted out power and ground for his PSU and even if he didn't kill it, he did shorten it's life quite appreciably.

Rule of thumb:
* If it starts with a "C" it is a capacitor and you are better off not having it in circuit than bridging it with a short circuit.
* If it starts with an "R" it is a resistor and by bridging it you may short a pull-up or pull-down to (obviously I hope) power or ground. Doing this is not healthy for your box. The only time that outright shorting a resistor might work is if you are replacing a series termination resistor. This still is a poor idea though.