It would be interesting to emphasize how SF has evolved with society. From Vern and Wells in Victorian Europe, to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land", which demonstrate both sides of American culture in the 1960's. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" is a terrific period piece, and Zelazny's "Lord of Light" is also a blast.

In my view, SF took a serious downward turn from the early 1980's, but there are exceptions, to be sure. With the entire range of SF at your disposal, there's no reason to select junk when there are so many gifted authors to study.

Because so many developers develop Open Source applications for personal satisfaction, they tend to focus on scratching their own itches.

A characteristic of usability testing is that your goal is to scratch the itch of your customers; your preferences have very little significance in the context of the test.

It doesn't take a genius to see a potential conflict in the two goals; on the other hand, a developer likes to see his code in actual use by actual human beings. To maximize this use, a developer must at least pay lip service to documentation and UI testing.

Many developers never make this conceptual leap, however.

Actually, you are very wrong. Compare the Socialist "modernization" of Russia under Lenin/Stalin from 1917-1960 with the Capitalist modernization of Japan from 1870 to 1914.

There's simply no comparison between the two rates of social advance.

This wasn't a troll. It was a reference to a previous article.

This article is an ideal example of a social engineering crack. Consider the comparative difficulty of a technical cracking job and compare it to the simplicity and cheapness of what actually took place. The solution was actually quite elegant in a sordid way.

I once worked for a company that was experiencing a surge of highly organized fraud originating from Romania. Before I left, we were preparing to develop a major anti-fraud application, etc., at great expense. At one meeting I suggested that we just hire a few Romanian private detectives to knock on some doors and quietly suggest to the lowlifes that it would be healthier to leave us alone; the other people in the meeting looked at me as though I were green.

LOL.

The simple truth is that nuclear power is good technology that solves a variety of sticky problems. Anti-nuclear propaganda films irrationally scared the public in to rejecting a highly beneficial and useful method of power generation. With the passage of years, the public has come to the realization that the sky isn't falling and that a modern, safe nuclear power system is good economics and good social policy. We should celebrate this return to sanity: it's reason triumphing over irrational fear.

Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.

Also, as a minor quibble point, the airborne modification of the helmet has additional padding on the interior which may affect the dynamic of the air gap between outer shell and liner. My assumption is that the study was performed on the standard helmet configuration, but it's worth observing that there are non-standard configurations in wide spread use.

A more interesting question to ask would be this: since Google lives and dies by AdWords revenue, will they ever manipulate their search results to increase the click count of their paid AdWords results ...

For instance, if there is a search on "Apple iPhone", the logical first result is the Apple iPhone splash page. If, for the sake of argument, Apple were to have bought the #1 position for the search term "Apple iPhone", they would be displayed twice: once for the #1 unpaid result and once for the #1 paid result.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that one could easily increase the number of clicks on the paid search result by suppressing the unpaid result.

Just a thought.

In the third-world wildlife either pays for itself or it vanishes, plain and simple. With a desperate population on the verge of starvation, any resource not viewed as life-improving will quickly vanish. That's why tourism and well-regulated sport hunting are so important to the management of wildlife in the third world. It's also why game ranches for commercial purposes are a necessary tool for the successful restoration of many endangered species. John Stossel's video article below is very illuminating, and offers a new way of viewing the issue.

http://jezebel.com/5249594/we-can-save-endangered-species-byeating-them

What about downloads? Does this mean we can watch every crime ever filmed? That would beat the heck out of COPS.

Youtube better watch out.

The fact that the Brady/Trident crowd can not distinguish between harmless video games and actual violent crime tells you all that you need to know about them.

For that matter, they can't tell the difference between law abiding firearms owners and criminals.

The best part of Capitalism is letting bad business fail. If the newspapers can't fund themselves legitimately through voluntary commerce, like any other business, they need to fail, as they deserve.

With tax-exempt status, they exists solely at the mercy of government legislation. What are the chances they will criticize the government that grants them favored status?

This is a recipe for State control of news dissemination.

If you were running Vista at home, you'd think the comment was funny too.

Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...

This is opening Pandora's Box.