Google's self-driving cars have gone 300,000 miles without an accident. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30–42 average-teen-driver-years worth of driving. Statistically, about 1 in five teenagers reports having an accident in any given year. So we would expect that the same number of miles driven by teenagers would have resulted in, on average, 6–8 accidents—more if we're talking about teenagers in their first year of driving.

In other words, Google's self-driving cars are already at least an order of magnitude safer than teen drivers. That's probably a statistically significant difference.

No, thinking otherwise is being informed. You really should educate yourself on the issue, if you're remotely intellectually honest.

Go down to any poverty law center and ask for some information on bias in police interactions, on bias in charging, bail and sentencing.

You're being literally prejudiced in your beliefs, I'm saying you should get some facts and make an assessment there. If you think being armed with facts is "gullible and stupid" then you're not capable of having a reasoned discussion.

If the NTIS cannot charge for their service any longer for particular documents, they should stop providing those documents - or are they legally bound to supply the service regardless?

The fine article submission asks:

Is it a good thing that people who engineer for a living can now get their names on national news for parts designed 10 years ago? The next time your mail goes down, should we know the name of the guy whose code flaw may have caused that?

One key difference here is that the engineer(s) responsible for redesigning the switch and not changing the part number were not just implementing an everyday change that happened to be buggy. By not changing the part number, their actions are more akin to trying to fix a known bug that has exposed the company to huge potential liabilities, and then hacking the version control system to make it look like the bug was never there, in full intentional pursuit of obfuscation and ass-covering.

Cheers,

Wow, you actually believe that black men are entirely responsible for the way the police treat them.

Maybe you should examine that belief.

You're absolutely right. We're far from equal.

Women make 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs despite being about 50% of the workforce.

Women make up 20% of the Senate, despite being about 50% of the population. Women make up 18.9% of the House of Representatives despite being about 50% of the population.

And don't get me started on race! Black men are vastly more likely to have an interaction with police, be arrested, held on higher bail, convicted more frequently and given longer sentences than white men when all other factors (socioeconomic and past criminal record) are accounted for. Estimates are that blacks make up a little over 13% of the US population but just over 40% of the prison population, and have sentences averaging more than 20% longer. Crimes that were predominantly seen as a "black" thing - like possession of crack cocaine - were given disproportionately higher sentences than possession of regular cocaine. Even for drugs that are in common use across races, black users of marijuana are vastly more likely to do jail time than white users of marijuana.

And that's just scratching the surface and going after easily obtainable numbers that took me 30 seconds to Google. There's inequality all over the place, and I'm really glad you agree with me that the US's claims of equality are horseshit. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards fixing it.

Also, you're more than welcome to start up a United Caucasian College Fund with all the exact same rights and protections the United Negro College Fund has as long as you follow all the exact same rules and regulations required by law. You'll probably have a lot of people rolling their eyes and calling you a doofus for doing it, but hey, knock yourself out.

Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.

There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.

*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.

I think many people get stuck in thinking "one single database, thats it, my initial decision condemns me forever", when in-fact theres no shame in having many databases.

Stick the raw data into one database, choose the database that suits that.

Transform the data from the raw database into something you can use day to day, thats well structured etc, choose the database for that.

Transform the data from the day to day schemas into something that more suitable for archiving and long term reporting, again choose the database for that.

You don't have to have one single database type, every particular one has its strengths, so use them!

Theres probably an element of multithreaded access that needs to be taken into consideration here - writing to a single text file may get you into issues if the receiving webserver is multithreaded, meaning the threads will either have to queue for write locks, or write to a different file.

Database engines don't have this issue, so while it may be overkill, there may be reasons to have one irregardless.

The four freedoms are *your* ideal to aspire to, never forget that :) I'm all for people releasing their source code, if they want to - however, I don't feel people should be vilified purely because they choose not to.

Why does everyone in the world have to conform to your ideology? Those freedoms are part of your ideology, nothing more.

Why "full" copies of Visual Studio? What does the Express editions lack that kids would need? They have access to the full capabilities of the .Net framework, a full C/C++ environment and more - the Express editions really lack the surrounding IDE features that would be lost that early on in the developer learning curve, stuff like profiling etc.

We still have to work around issues in newer browsers, and not just IE either :(

You missed one major technical rule: all browsers on iOS that support local rendering are required to use the system rendering engine.

Actually, no, I'm pretty sure they're just not allowed to use any JavaScript engine other than the built-in JavaScriptCore. And as of iOS 7, it's theoretically possible to actually do so without using WebKit.

And yet on my Xbox360 I've been able to play games, movies, TV shows, access streaming services and live video for five years. How is that late to the game?