Because it's better than blindly putting your trust in salespeople. Look, mistakes happen. People have different interpretations of the cost of failure and different tolerance for risk. Things are going to blow up, and post hoc analysis will often identify changes that could have prevented the disaster. But unless you plan to design, validate and build everything yourself, you have to trust someone. So the question you're really asking is whether you should trust someone with quantitative, technical knowledge of the performance and capabilities of the system or should trust someone who just thinks it looks "ok."

Believe it or not, accident statistics and post-failure analysis are part of engineering (regardless of how much it looks like part of regulatory bureaucracy). Performance and failure tell the engineers where its appropriate to revise models and correct designs. This means fewer people get killed by lance-shaped hood ornaments or impaled on steering columns, and it means the next mode of failure is going to be more obscure. It's why we think only a moron would use cosmetically appealing aluminum whiskers to support a steering wheel or put a gas tank directly in front of the rear bumper. It's why traffic deaths have fallen from 150 per billion vehicle miles in 1935 to 15 today. So, yeah: trust engineering, not marketing or accounting.

No, that defines a crash. "Cause" is something that precedes "effect." To say that the effect happened because the effect happened is childish reasoning. Most children learn to relate cause and effect around 3 years old: it's a pretty basic concept.

They are. If you tailgate and wreck the car in front of you, the manufacturer is not liable. If you're switching radio stations and drive into a ditch, the manufacturer is not liable. However, if the your skis were made of balsa wood laminated with PLA, then the manufacturer may be liable when they shatter on the first mogul, and you break your leg.

In Georgia, that will get you a ticket for impeding traffic, not to mention a symphony of air horns and possibly a collection of bullet holes.

Fine by me. Industrial accidents are part of the price we pay for our life of ease. If I have to choose between a 3MI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima spread over 40 years, and a Kingston, Macondo, Valdez, Fergana Valley, Ixtoc, Chevron Richmond - you know, the list of fossil fuel accidents affecting tens of thousands of people is just too long to go through. Nevermind the occasional train derailment and fire.

You design things as best you can against the problems you can think of, and you design mitigation plans against the ones you can't. Every time a new problem comes up, you improve the design. You can not live in a perfectly safe world. If you use electricity, you could shock yourself. If someone produces electricity, they could blow up. If you don't use electricity, a grue might eat you in the dark. Choose your risk, but try to be rational about it. There's nothing inherently worse about the nuclear boogeyman than the coal boogeyman, except that you've been living with the coal boogeyman for 2000 years.

Spoken like a true cargo cultist.

And that's the point. There's a massive industry of snake oil salesmen out there proclaiming their concoction to be "eating right." Only foods that can be prepared with stone tools. High protein. High fat. Only plants raised in virgin soil and harvested by prepubescent girls singing Kumbaya. The app author is exactly one of those people, using the (false) claim that her particular diet cured her cancer. It will probably cure yours, too. And clean your colon and your car at the same time. Sure, you can eat "wrong," but you can also drink too much beer, smoke too many cigarettes, and even drink too much water. Not eating wrong isn't that hard; eating right is a snipe hunt.

I disagree that "no internet" is more censorship. The problem with censorship is that it distorts the appearance of reality. If you can read FOX news, but not MSNBC, then the TEA party look like rational people. If you censor news stories about drone strikes, then bloggers talking about children killed by drone strikes look like conspiracy nuts.

Maybe. As long as you don't violate their TOS. Same with wikipedia, as long as the content doesn't violate their community standards. They're still talking about a small number of organizations, and it's quite clear that those organizations are subject to political manipulation. Even Google had to cave to China, and it's a little fuzzy whether there's any facebook there.

If you can't use an information stream, you'll find one that works. If you have an information stream, you don't know it's distorted.

Are you crazy? There's only a million words in English and only a million six digit numbers, so the combination of real word + number has only a trillion possibilities. 2^40 possibilities, which will fall rapidly to a dictionary attack. It's as "strong" as 6 random, typeable characters.

The point of TFA is that while "12 characters, including three different character classes" sounds like 2^84, the reality is that people meet those conditions by using a real word with the first letter capitalized and a number. (rarely the reverse: Number-word)

You can push back: you can refuse to implement the stupid request or you can pack up and go home. If they're asking you to implement some new feature with no additional time or revenue, they are essentially asking for you to pay for that development out of your own pocket. Maybe your passion to develop great games is strong enough that you're willing to pay for the privilege to work on such a game. The publisher is probably counting on you to have invested so much of yourself in the project that you will. Once you've signed your project over to a publisher, you have to be willing to walk away.

Yeah, and hurricane Sandy was just a bit of rain. In my experience, nothing is more ubiquitous in software than bad design. Bad design is the difference between Photoshop and Gimp. Or between upstart and systemd. In special purpose software, like that tied to instrumentation or a proprietary database, there seems to be very little motivation to test or develop a good UI, but the users suffer through because they're tied to the underlying system. EMR are currently competing on the features of their backend, making presentations to administrators, and I don't expect the doc's get much consideration in that conversation.

They have done this. They problem is that have not said anything about the user interface. The result seems to be that the User Interface looks a lot like a military, hierarchical table designating every detail of an examination and diagnosis. Like:
Reflex, sensory, tactile, digit, left hand, index finger;
Reflex, sensory, tactile, digit, left hand, middle finger;
...
Each of those a mouse click and a display update, and you've got 10 digits.

The good news is that you now have explicit confirmation that feeling in each of those fingers was verified. The bad news is that you've taken a procedure that was "poke 10 fingers" and turned it into "poke 10 fingers, click 60 mouse buttons."

I'd like to think this is a natural consequence of coders living at the interface between bureaucrats and physicians, and I'd like to think that a few iterations of software will allow some of those details to be aggregated, but there's a huge difference between the old-style chart notation "Reflexes normal," and the medicare requirement that reflex testing can only be compensated if it documents a litany of specific tests.

Advances in switching technology reduced their costs of doing business. They allowed AT&T to replace armies of switchboard operators with inexpensive electronics. Their foray into wireless communication was Mobile Telephone Service. Real cell phone service was first introduced by NTT, in Japan, 4 years before the US. Some argue that slow adoption of cellular in the US was actually due to FCC regulation of the spectrum, but commercial cell service only became available after AT&T was broken up, and it was offered by one of the regional Baby Bells, not by AT&T.

I do prefer one pack of bureaucrats over the other. I prefer the bureaucrats who have to declare any gift more valuable than a cup of coffee to the bureaucrats allowed to accept campaign contributions. I prefer the bureaucrats subject to Inspector General auditing over those with "arm's length," private corporations (PACs) acting for their benefit. I prefer the bureaucrats who are subject to ethics laws over those who write ethics laws.

Many of the H1-b's would stay if they could. Most of the foreign students come here hoping that a US education visa will be a stepping stone to a work visa, will be a stepping stone to a green card. Unfortunately, xenophobia and the pressure to preserve jobs for current citizens have put very restrictive limits on the availability of long-term visas and green cards. H1b was developed as a compromise - get some of the foreign talent, but protect US workers by forcing the foreigners to leave. Ironic, isn't it, that the plan to protect US workers is now being blamed for the loss of domestic jobs.

Then you're not paying attention. Sure, all the politicians say they're committed to improving education, but they've been saying that for 200 years. It's the verbal equivalent of shaking hands.

Meanwhile, when the dollars hit the budget, it turns out that tax cuts, health care, and defense/police/security are much higher priorities. 20 years ago, the cost of educating a student in a state university was largely born by the state. Today, it's largely born by the student. You can look up your own state's numbers: here in Georgia, over the past 10 years, we've gone from 60% state funding to 38%. The per-student cost has gone up 3%/year, just like inflation, but the student's share has gone up 10%/year. The loss of state funding has encouraged these schools to more aggressively recruit foreign students and their uncapped tuition.

Curiously, because all of our politicians are wealthy, this makes the education they can provide for their own children just a little more valuable.

If you know you're "negotiating," you ask for more than you want based on the expectation that you'll meet in the middle, somewhere close to what you actually want. Some people love that - witness open air markets in most of the world where the price of everything is negotiable.

One imagines, if Reddit is really not going to negotiate on salary offers, that they will have to raise their 'opening' offer to something close to what prospective employees actually want. You can look at this as penalizing the people willing to go to the mat over that last $10/month, but it ought to benefit most people. After all, if "most people" were decent negotiators, don't you think car dealers would have abandoned negotiations by now?