Death Threats are unacceptable. I'm glad we're seeing journalists express their outrage exactly the same way they did when Jack Thompson received death threats and when Death Threats were made against the family of the Penny Arcade writers...

Oh wait, there was no outrage over these, if anything there was an atmosphere of "well, they deserved it". Of course, to condemn these would require news websites to accept some culpability for the drumming up the anger that lead to the abuse they received.

The hypocrisy and self serving nature of the journalists is probably best summed up by the "gamers are dead" articles. The basic argument presented by a disturbingly large number of them is basically "How dare you be sexist and comment on someone's sexual history you virgin man-children!" and the writers are completely unable to see the irony in doing that.

Lastly, a call for diversity is fine but you've need to accept that diversity is more than just LGBT and women. It's the rich and poor, old and young, the conservative and liberal, the religious and the atheist, The North American and the European (or any combination of continents). Gaming sites have readers from all these backgrounds. Maybe, just maybe there are lots of people don't like being lectured to by relatively well off 20-30 year old ultra liberal Americans? Maybe, when people disagree with political opinions presented on the website, the best response isn't name calling, shaming and banning. You belittle, censor, insult and claim superiority then wonder why there's a build up of hatred on the other side.

Ah someone who has seen Religulous and considers themselves an expert. Shame that documentary was full of crap. Most of the parallels/plagiarism he pointed out were reaching to an extreme or were a result of the stories that were stolen from actually being altered after the formation of Christianity and some stuff he flat out made up.

Plenty of car manufacturers will offer deals that you a guaranteed buyback value of a car 'bought' on PCP over here. It's usually a hook to get you to use that money as a deposit on buying another car from that dealer. Pay £3000 to 'buy' the 4 year old car you've been driving or get £3000, put that down as a deposit on a slightly better car and keep on paying what you were for your old car and have a bit of spare change to splash out on a holiday. I know Fiat offered this last time I went into a dealer.

As always with PCPs, sounds a great deal until you hand back the car and there's a 5p per mile over-usage penalty, that mark that looks like a fingerprint is totally a scratch that costs £100 to fix, you'll need to buy 4 new tyres despite the old ones only having 5000 miles on them...

Because of the news coverage, millions of people go a big reminder to renew their car tax and all decided to renew when they got home from work that day.

Rather than having these people spread out over a week or so, they all decided to renew in what was likely just a 3 hour period so the system probably got many times the traffic it normally does.

Now can they teach cyclists to understand hand turn signals?

It's probably pretty standard practice to send officers involved in accidents to hospital unless it's incredibly obvious that there couldn't be anything wrong with them.

Cheaper for them to have half a day's downtime and the price of going to ER than for them to have a non-obvious or seemingly minor injury that becomes serious because it didn't get treated (with all the lawsuits that go with it).

Flashing lights undoubtedly draw the attention of people behind them on the road.

The problem is they do their job too well and become mesmerizing, drawing attention away from actually driving. People become so focused on the lights they don't realise that they're driving dangerously close to the bike, they start to slowly edge onto the wrong side of the road or they simply miss hazards up ahead.

Lots of drivers dislike even simple blinking red lights because of this. This 'jumbotron' will actually make things far more dangerous for everyone involved and is even of questionable legality.

It's perhaps the biggest example of the Tesla Kool-aid that being able to walk away from an engine fire is seen as something incredible and amazing.

In almost all engine fires, the only way you'll fail to walk away is because you were physically unable (trapped or unconcious). I've a low end 2003 Skoda fabia (costs approx , if my engine were to catch fire, I'd get the heat sensor beeping at me, then the engine warning light would beep at me, then, if I hadn't stopped by then, it'd go into crawl home mode. I'd imagine if a lot of people read their car manual they would find their car will do something similar, yet people were going crazy over how amazing it was that Teslas could do this.

There is a big difference between expressing your personal opinion and colluding with others and organising a campaign where combined power of all the people involved makes you a powerful entity.

It's a road that leads to such wonderful things like blacklists for union members.

The term "jumping before he was pushed" comes to mind. To pretend that he would've kept his job if he hadn't quit is laughable.

Victim blaming is unhealthy because it shifts the focus away from companies trying to come up with better methods to secure accounts.

Why say "we're at fault for not securing our database and not hashing passwords in a way where rainbow tables are impractical" when you can say "they shouldn't have used such weak passwords!" and take the blame off of themselves?

Two factor authentication for example is a very effective way of securing 'stupid' users. Heck it's secure enough to enable a lot of banks to store two-way encrypted passwords and make their log in algorithms more robust against keyloggers (it's a myth that passwords have to be hashed for the best security). Two factor Authentication however is difficult and expensive so there's all the more incentive for blaming users who get infected with trojans or suffer when their passwords get compromised.

Drupal is great in that it's gotten me lots of jobs and also lessens the whole "we need you to learn the structure of our horrible proprietary CMS" situation.

It is depressing just how many horrible hacks you find you need to do for 'basic' things. At the end of large projects I always tend to find I've a huge number of indecipherable preprocess functions in template files and custom modules.

At least 99% of the time, someone has had the exact same issue you're having. Just a shame you have to sift through 100 post threads with dozens of different patches to try or people who fixed the problem but in Drupal 6 (it's going to be fun when Drupal 8 arrives and 99% of the message board becomes unhelpful)

(Needle, haystack) , (haystack, needle) is something that irritates. Ensures I'm never sure of my syntax when coding.

There are a couple of annoyances outside of that which are trap lots of people learning to code in the language:

"while (fgets($file))" doesn't return false when it should (eg at the end of the file or if there's an issue with the file handler like most readline functions in other languages do. Given this will often cause the server to become completely unresponsive until the script (hopefully) times out, it seems a massive oversight.

if ($variable = 5) . A simple typo that can take hours to debug and spot and most developers fall victim to it at least once. Is a warning really too much to ask?

The more effort you put into telling people something is safe and the more visible this effort is, the more people will naturally question just why they're having to make this effort.

When you order a burger from McDonalds you probably wouldn't be too happy if worker who gives it to you said "don't worry, the chances of you having got a burger that has been spat on are tiny so it is very unlikely I spat in it! Enjoy your meal!"

The weakness was apparently down to the site treating a txid (transaction ID) field as a unique identifier. Turns out not only was it not actually a unique transaction identifier, it could also be spoofed easily without altering the (real) destination for the transaction. Made it trivial to make fake deposits and real withdrawals.

MTGox's fault for not understanding a spec whilst using it to move vast sums around but it probably highlights the importance of good naming practices when creating a spec.