Actually, my comment was 95% joke. Their fuel that is "nitrogen enriched" does not contain additional volatile molecules. It's actually a marketing scheme for their detergent blend. Even though I'm sure it's similar to other detergents, the marketing also turns me off because NO2 is also a harmful pollutant (I suspect you were thinking of N2O when you typed that).

Which is the very reason I question the marketing effort behind "nitrogen-enriched" fuel. I don't want the most common diatomic molecule in the atmosphere displacing good, energy-rich, hydrocarbon chains in the fuel I'm buying. It's like selling me gasoline with some percentage of ethanol blended in for the same price as gasoline or charging me more for pure ethanol (I will, however, make exceptions for pure ethanol made from a single grain type containing adulterants from being rested for an extended period in a barrel), that is, dishonesty in labeling.

This is exactly what I'm saying: You move as if moving your body. The same signals that would go to your limbs through your nervous system could simply be intercepted and interpreted by a computer.

Our bodies are not terribly different from a basic electronic circuit, wiring in a car, a bus in a computer, or even a network, aside from the mechanism of signalling (which is not actually that different). I wouldn't be surprised if nanotechnology reached a level where this would be possible within the next century.

For better immersion, we'd be better off if we could somehow intercept nerve signals to the body. Thinking "move forward" isn't the same as "getting up, balancing, and walking", which could theoretically be done completely virtually if we could intercept signals from the brain to the body.

If we did that, we could also feed the body movement commands separate from the brain. Imagine playing a video game for a couple hours while our body rides an exercise bicycle through computer control (at varying intensities based on lactic acid feedback). You could play a video game or work in a virtual environment while your body is essentially at the gym.

"Assault rifles" are, by definition, automatic at some level (fire more than one shot with a single trigger pull). It's improbable that this person had any type of automatic weapon or assault rifle. Semi-auto isn't unreasonable to expect, in which case it was probably simply a "rifle", which might not sound as menacing, but that's exactly what it was. This doesn't make it less deadly. In fact, curiously, automatic weapons in the hands of untrained people tend to be less effective because the shooters waste more ammunition and can't control them as well. Semi-automatic weapons are much easier to get accurate hits with, while burst-fire weapons are far easier to kill with (especially with small-caliber ammunition, like modern assault rifles used by American forces).

To describe the weapon as an "assault rifle" is absolutely incorrect usage and pure sensationalism.

There's a difference between them being generated and sent in an email (which is not exceptionally dangerous because it should be temporal (that is, you force a change when they log in and only allow it to be used within a brief window of time) and sending you an email with a stored password on request. Don't mistake the two. Again, the implication that they're storing your password with no more than a basic reversible cipher is very troubling.

What replaced Ubuntu? It's still wildly popular.

I prefer vi(m), but drop to nano when a machine doesn't have it (which is rare, but common enough to be annoying).

Of course, if I have root and I'm working on more than a few small edits, you'd better believe there'll be vim on there before I log out.

I actually like upstart for my simple daemons on embedded systems. Why? I'd need to craft my own init scripts anyway, so I might as well use something that handles this effectively without also loading/running DJB's daemontools.

Nothing annoys me more than plain text passwords in emails. Double bonus points if it's a password for something sensitive like my financial information (ex: 401(k), which are among the worst offenders in the bad security department...it's not like they have the largest sum of money in my name, after all).

The other disconcerting thing (probably the most frightening) is that they sent you your password in plain text. This means that your password is, at most, protected with a reversible cipher and is likely stored with no protection at all. That means if someone broke in (which doesn't even mean a threat from outside is necessary, and there are probably tens, if not hundreds, of people with accounts and/or passwords to get to the database) they could get your password and potentially every one you ever used. Then the real social engineering begins, when they call your bank with all your legitimate information and every likely password for your account in hand... Scary.

...if the population of Japan, particularly in the relatively-rural region near the Fukushima reactor, were not well past reproductive age. They do realize they are in the second-oldest (demographically) country in the world, right?

If the workers don't have protection already, something is very wrong.

This sounds like a bigger trainwreck than many mixed-HTML PHP sites (which is the dirtiest thing about the language). A well-written PHP-based site will do what you say, but it will have no echo statements or anything else along these lines. Instead, it will use templates with placeholders that it fills with data. When I've worked in PHP, I've done this since the early 2000s. It's simply the only way to keep it clean, readable, and delineate logic from presentation. An added bonus is that you can usually teach a web designer to work with/around simple placeholders much easier than teaching them not to screw up your code.

Herein lies the problem. There really isn't another decent cross-platform scripting language for web development. Even the shift toward JavaScript on both sides is full of epic failure (after all, we're talking about JavaScript here, which is only marginally better than the other client-side messes it replaced). Wikipedia uses PHP (albeit with front-end caching), so it clearly can be done right. The fundamental problem with PHP is that it has roughly 15 years of crufty functions with nonexistent naming conventions and senselessly-random parameter orders (contrast this with Python and Perl, two other wildly-popular scripting languages).

Also, don't say "Java", which is a mess that requires outrageously heavy backend support to make it useful for web development. Scripting is the best solution for the large percentage of sites that don't have huge teams and budgets. It's also the best choice for sites with rapidly-changing requirements.