Design patterns (or OO for that matter) do not provide any help with actually making a program work. They are solely about organisational concerns. They assist in making large codebases readable, reusable, and maintainable.

The distinction, at least in my mind, is that OO focuses on 'natural' objects and design patterns focus on 'artificial' objects. Natural objects exist in the business domain of the program. Things like Manager is a subclass of Employee is a subclass of Person. Artificial objects do not exist in the business domain. They exist purely to solve programming problems. Thing like Singleton, Visitor, and Facade.

In either case, they are specialized tools for solving specific problems.

The widespread use of "Design Patterns" is useful in explaining why OO should NOT be taught to college freshmen.
I view design patterns as an alternative methodology to OO methodology. Design patterns allow the productive use of OO languages without the unproductive baggage of OO methodology.
OO languages were originally created to facilitate the pre-existing ideas of OO programming and OO design.
Then, when programmers actually had these languages, they evolved a way of using them that is radically different than what was originally intended.
Clearly, there is enough value in OO that the languages are worth using, and enough difficulties that the methodologies are not worth using.
I expect that the next generation of tools and methodologies will take what is good from OO, and forget the rest.
In the mean time, I don't see the value of explaining to college freshmen a set of tools that were meant to be used one way, but in practice should be used a different way. (Actually, I do think that is a valuable lesson. But I think most freshman level courses treat the techniques being taught as unambiguously good.)

Presumably, most of the cost in this system is the concentrators, not the PV cells. So, perhaps the PV cells can be replaced when they deteriorate without driving the overall system cost up too much.

The price of oil is based on the global market, balancing global supply with global demand. Most places tend to get their oil from the closest source to save a little on transportation costs. They pay the same price as people on the other side of the world getting their oil from the other side of the world, though. The cost savings of having your oil tankers take shorter trips is not enough to justify paying very much more for the oil.

Presumably, OPEC still has the power to raise oil prices by artificially limiting the supply of oil, the way they have done in the past. I don't believe they are doing so right now. Our current oil supply is limited by oil companies' decisions made over the past decade about how many oil wells to dig, based on the cost of digging each individual well, weighed against the projected price of oil.
For most oil producers, once they have sunk the money into building the oil well, it makes economic sense to suck the oil out of that well as fast as possible and sell it at the market price, whatever that happens to be. When the time cost of money is factored in, it is more profitable to sell your oil today at $100/barrel than ten years from now at $200/barrel. In contrast it frequently makes economic sense to delay drilling the oil well for a decade, until the price of oil rises enough to justify the drilling costs.

To summarize, the oil market is very efficient in the short term, using price fluctuation to exactly balance instantaneous supply with instantaneous demand. In the long term, it is highly speculative, with investors losing their shirts or making huge fortunes based on their ability to predict oil prices years in the future.

I believe you are misinformed. The US continues to be the worlds largest manufacturer, measured by value of goods produced. http://www.suite101.com/content/the-good-and-bad-of-american-manufacturing-a212189/

The US makes about 20% of the world's goods, which is about 12% of US economic output.

We make goods in the US. We just don't employ people to make the goods. It has long been a principle of our economic system that producing more goods with fewer people means more goods for everybody.

I share your concern for the increasing number of Americans who are economic outsiders. But the problem is not that we don't make stuff, or that the people who make stuff here aren't well compensated, or that the people who make stuff here can't compete with cheap overseas labor.

Perhaps you are not being patient enough. In the US, there are plenty of rich kids of with no personal merit. These kids maintain their spoiled and wealthy lifestyle only because they are supported by their parents. No one else in society is looking out for them or protecting their position, though.
I suspect that you will not find many of these people can maintain their wealth for more then a few generations. When the parents die, and the first generation of spoiled rich kids is on their own, they fritter away the money quickly enough. So the upper class may not have much merit, but there is constant turnover as they are replaced with people who do have merit.

On the other hand, when you look at those who actually have 'merit,' it often closely resembles an aptitude for screwing other people out of their money.

I don't think you have thought through the concept of comparative stress levels.

Surgeon is a stressful profession. When you screw up, people die. Sometimes they die when you don't screw up.
Police officer is a stressful profession. You must be prepared for sudden violence at any time.

Software engineer is a medium stress profession. You must deal with pressure from management to perform at a high level, and job insecurity.
Note that these stresses are common to almost every profession.

High stress means more stress than other professions, not just the simple presence of some job stress.

The big advantage for English is the number and distribution of people that already speak it, as shown here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers/.
English has by far the most non-native speakers of any language. If you are learning a language for the purpose of being able to speak to people from other countries, English gives you access to the most countries.
There is a feedback effect here. By being the most popular second language, English becomes the most desirable second language for those wanting to learn another language, which makes it more popular, etc.
I think that this feedback effect is more important than any technical differences between the languages. If technical differences mattered, we would all speak Esperanto.

This is a test of general dysfunction.
It doesn't tell you anything about teams that pass. But it tells a lot about teams that fail.
Everything on the list is a simple and easy thing a development team can do to improve productivity.
So, if a team is not doing these things, why not? What do they have against productivity?

This test will stop being useful when most development teams master the basics. But that time has not yet come.

You assume that the attacker has infinite resources, just because they are a nation state. There are no attackers that have infinite time, or infinite resistance to counterattack. The NSA does not need to fend off an attacker indefinitely, just long enough to identify the attacker and apply the appropriate countermeasures.

A few years back I read almost exactly the same article, but about deer hunting games.
Where once gaming had been dominated by wizards and space aliens, games about deer hunting for the redneck market had come out of nowhere to be the top seller. There were just so many more rednecks than computer geeks. And the rednecks, being new to gaming, were happy to play games with extremely low production values.

This is the same thing, but with girls instead of rednecks, and social networking instead of deer hunting.

It is all a natural transition from games by computer geeks for computer geeks to games by computer geeks for anyone with disposable income.

Reading the article I had to shake my head at the complaints that "Google should do something". Do they think the phone book people should boot him out or circle his name in red too?

Google should do something. Not because of any moral or ethical obligation, but because it is good business. There are numerous examples of internet businesses that have followed the pattern:
1) Attract lots of traffic, become immensely profitable.
2) Attract enough traffic to become appealing to parasites.
3) Become so infested with parasites that your site becomes aggravating to use.
4) Lose lots of money when all your traffic starts going elsewhere.
MySpace is a good example of this pattern. EBay and Facebook are well on their way.
Google has a long and mostly successful history of combating page rank parasites. Google understands that in order for them to succeed in their business, they must be trusted. Not trusted in the sense "I got screwed, but it wasn't google's fault." Trusted in the sense "I use google because they seem to know the site I was trying to find even when that's not exactly what I asked for."
The fact that one parasite has successfully exploited google search using this technique means that many more parasites will be following soon. Google needs figure out how to defeat this kind of parasite, or risk losing their hard earned trust.

Who is going to get his ass kicked when the cops catch him. Indonesia has the death penalty for being a jackass doesn't it?

I, for one, do consider this to be a capital crime.
In the United States, where free speech is considered to be an inalienable right, it is nevertheless illegal to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
This stunt is like shouting "Fire!" in a million crowded theaters.
It seems almost inevitable that when the dust clears we will find that several innocent people took this offical government warning at face value, behaved as if there were a tsunami on the way, and died as a result.
By what moral, ethical, or legal argument would you consider the jackass who sent the false alarm not responsible for these deaths?

Hasn't someone told you that here on slashdot we only understand car analogies? Get out of here, and take your damned houses with you!

That was a car analogy. It was just a really sloppy one, because he was working under a deadline.

The GPL offers, if I recall correctly, three different options for meeting your obligations to distribute the source code.
One of these options is to provide a website where the source code is available.
One of these options is to deliver a copy of the source code on a CD bundled with your product.
I don't remember what the third one was.
When my employer was determining how to comply, they found delivering the source code on a CD to be the least burdensome. The reason was that when you do it that way, your obligation is fully discharged at the time you deliver the CD. When you make the source code available on a web site, the website must remain available for five years (I think) after you stop distributing.