They soft landed, that's a success whether they are recovered or not. You didn't expect them to stand upright in the water like a buoy did you?

Because he knowingly went out of his way to make copies of seeds that he knew were protected by patent law. I hate Monsanto's business strategy, more because I think it completely undermines the potential for genetically modified seeds than anything else. But the guy knew exactly what he was doing. Just because he did it with a field and a bottle of round up instead of a genetics lab doesn't change the facts.

God I'm getting old.

This article feels like all those ads you see at the bottom of news stories that are disguised to look like related news. They all talk about how great things are in Detroit and how cheap the land and buildings are and how the economy is "booming". Is it sad that Slashdot has fallen so far that my suspicion meter is starting to move when I see articles like this?

It's been done several times in fact, though I don't know if it's ever really been a central plot line.

The Revelation Space series has shades of that, but it's mostly background information that doesn't come directly into play. The "Amerikano" generation ships that colonized nearby stars (often less than ideally inhabitable) which were massively outstripped once the "light huggers" which could make the trip in a few years subjective time.

The Sector General has something similar, though with FTL ships replacing the generation ships. I think they find one of the old ships drifting through space, the inhabitants all dead or nearly.

The intent of the (mostly) joke was in fact to put read heads under multiple sectors, cutting the rotation time in half (or more if you were to add more heads).

Multiple read heads! Cut seek time in half! (or quarter, or eighth depending on how crazy you want to go).

So... sink a steel pipe half a mile into the ground, it isn't that hard to create a heat gradient. That's of course, if it's possible to hit anywhere near decent efficiencies with standard materials, which is something I'll have to see in production before I fully believe.

More than 56% of developers should be millionaires before they hit retirement age, that is about what you need to comfortably retire today at age 60, in 20 years it won't be enough. To quote Number Two: A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days.

The Sears Tower (sorry... the Willis tower) was even designed to be modular. Its 9 stacks built into a single building, more stacks could be added to the edges, the shorter stacks could be expanded vertically at least to the height of the taller (and probably somewhat taller, not sure on that though).

Bullying is frequently battery, virtually almost always assault, and practically by definition criminal harassment.

The most concerning part comes at the end "Here's a 4 year old bug report showing the issue, and another, and another". OpenSLL is supposed to be security software... shouldn't happen.

You seem to be under the impression that because prisons are overcrowded we have stopped putting people in them. In reality we just pack a few more in; the violence, drug abuse, sexual assault, and gang membership this inevitably makes even worse is simply ignored.

You're making some assumptions there. Perhaps part of the problem with America's education system is that certain demographics are undeserved. I grew up in a small and poor town, attended public school and got an education that, while certainly not the best money could buy, was more than enough to prepare me for college and eventually the workforce. Meanwhile, school districts with comparable wealth in the inner city schools of the same state are underfunded trash.

Why the disparity? Part of it is cost, it simply costs more to operate a school in an inner city environment. Part of it is teachers, once inner city schools got the reputation they have many good teachers fled. Part of it is, undoubtedly, cultural. Inner city cultures (completely irrespective of race IMO) don't tend to value education as much so the school gets less support from the parents of students and has a much harder time fundraising even though wealth levels are about the same. The point is that the end result is lower quality schools, which in turn leads to poorer outcomes.

Damn, I chose 10-20, forgot all about the bundles I've bought. Probably should be the next option up at least, but at least those games I actually own and they don't try to nickel and dime me to death.