I think you two are thinking along the correct lines. Although ex-military types may have the better training and discipline, they still generally have a well adjusted moral compass (at first), but the criminal types don't. The criminals may still have the upper hand, until the shooting starts, since they don't care for others.

The key point that shows this is a scam is the fact that they are equipped and stocked for one year. In almost all scenarios where you would need something like this, one year later is not much less lethal than the day you got into the shelter. Generally speaking, if you take it seriously, you should aim for 25 years.

I also find the claim that the shelter will sustain a direct hit by a nuclear bomb ludicrous. I think they do not realize what a nuke can do in lay down deployment. Nuclear bunkers that are built for direct hit are a thick outer shell and an inner shell connected by hydraulic shock absorbents. Most nuclear shelters where designed with the calculated risk that they will not survive a direct hit, since you will not waste a nuke on civil targets. (If that is true, is a totally different question.)

Looks out of window, yup coal plant still running as base load / backup for wind.

Power generation of wind may be the cheapest, but it generally is not factored into the equation, that other power plants need to be ready to take up the slack when demand rises or generation drops. But since that is the problem of the network operator, not the power plant operator, this is generally handled under "transmission costs". The network operators pay reliable power plants run on standby and these are commonly nuclear, coal and gas power plants. This is then partially subsidized, a subsidy that is commonly not associated with the wind power generation.

Ignoring the financial aspect of it all, as long as coal and gas power plants serve as base load providers for wind and solar, no ecological gain is achieved. The problem is that big coal power plants need the better part of a day to go from cold to operational, but need to switch into the network within seconds. The result is that they run in standby, which still produces 75% of the CO2 but adds no power to the Grid.

What if that ubernerd, brony and pony BDSM loving person is your no. 1 contributor? Who cares what it does while not coding, if the code is awesome, functional and just fits in?

This is more a matter of priorities. Generally speaking in open source development everybody is time poor. You get a bunch of requests on input on how do to something, half of them never become contributors, even if you invest time. As a result idle chatter on possible solutions is held to a minimum. On the other hand a patch must either be accepted or rejected. As a result it must be reviewed and thus it will get focus form core developers. Although it may appear so, it has nothing to do with power display, it is simple a human trait to work on the important things (accepting & rejecting patches) and mostly ignoring idle chatter. This is one of the reasons you don't generally hear much in mailing lists by the core developers.

The irony if it all is that Brooks himself proposed solutions how to cope with the Mythical Man Month. One of them was the "surgical team". In that developers are supported by additional staff. That is you don't add programmers to the team, you add specialists that take tasks of the hands of the programmers so that the programmers can work more efficient. If I see this correct, TFA is suggesting just that; split the problem into smaller problems (divide and conquer) and then put additional staff on hand to manage the Ops part and closely mesh them with the Dev part, thus DevOps. If people would actually read the damned book they would not spout nonsense the they are "proving this decades-old theory wrong", when actually implementing variations on solutions proposed in 1975!

In addition to that, the issue of gender is sort of fake. Since most open source is done online and everybody hides behind nicknames and avatars gender the last thing you know about a contributor. You just can't tell the gender un1c0rn23@gmail.com and if you can something is deeply wrong with that person. This is about software development and not a singles bar.

I find the "I'm a girl and you hurt my feelings" type of articles and posts really odd. Somehow you should sense that the contributor is a woman and thus be "nice" to her; like accept all patches unquestioned or something. I have shied away from some projects where the meritocracy was too deeply entrenched, but the last thing I would think about was writing a long article how mean these people are...

I think in this case the issue was not really the fraud protection, but the abysmal customer service. Similar things happened to my, but one phone call always resolves the issue; even at 11PM on Sunday.

Yes they will and that is a future you need to get to grips with. Now these systems that are tested now will still have a driver on board. They may reduce the regulation on mandatory breaks and maximum working hours, but we are talking 5-10% reduction in workforce. I seriously don't think that any real autonomous car or truck will be fielded any time soon, within the next ten years.

Trains are only efficient if you can get the train full. For example, take mail. For about the same capacity, you can send one train with 7 carriages once a week or one truck every day. Sure the trucks are probably more expensive, but the customer would rather have their book tomorrow morning for a higher fee, than in a week. Trains only work where really large amount of freight is transported from one location to the other and the actual duration of trip is not that important. These are thinks like raw materials, such as coal; a domain where you will also see river barges.

I once drove a car that was fitted with adaptive cruise control and lane assist. I very rarely needed to do anything, just watch traffic and be ready when the systems disengaged or misbehaved. This system is basically a beefed up version of the combination of the two.

This feels quite like the autopilot on an airplane. You focus on the big picture tasks and don't concentrate on the minute details of flying the airplane. The result is that the pilot is more alert over a longer period of time.

I can see these type of systems work, well before we see fully autonomous cars. The Google cars look interesting, but are a joke if you look at the details and the amount of precise and accurate data that needs to be fed into the system. These systems work of the bat and need little extra data and can rely on nothing but their sensors.

Yes, but it aren't these cars. Even in their worst config they where quite harmless in comparison to cars 10 years ago.

Although I agree with the general gist of your comment; I could not disagree more strongly about learning a "proper object oriented language". I would rather have you learn functional programming than object oriented; but optimally both. The problem is that allot of object oriented code is redundant and bloated, generally stemming from kingdom of the nouns type syndrome. Hybrid languages like C++ or JavaScript are genius in that you can mix functional and object oriented programming to form a concise solution to the problem.

Google is a search engine, it should not be liable to the content it indexes. The "right to be forgotten" as applies to say Facebook makes sense, if you close your account you have the right that all content about you and of you is deleted. What google is handling is not data about people, it's data about publicly available web sites. If a news outlet reports falsely about you, bring it up to them (slander and libel laws). But articles that are truthful a few years in the past should not be magically delisted.

Yes but it appears that only the French are bonkers enough to think to apply the law world wide.