All of the examples they gave in the article break one of the fundamental rules in that XKCD strip. The words shouldn't be words that are easily associated with each other. Of course picking a quote straight out of fiction is stupid. Four random 4-6 letter words that don't appear together in common language usage would be harder to crack for people using the strategy in the article http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/

Push this "controversy" as far as they can without actually getting themselves kicked out of the program because they only come off looking really good and cool and the government agency looks like its splitting hairs and being a baby. Of course Tesla is proud of how safe they've made their cars, and they want people to know how safe their cars are, and now people will know that they scored so high they got in trouble for saying how high they scored.

This didn't result in the loss of human life. Who knows what might have happened? The plug could have come undone. My father manages the (clean) water for a property and even a small plug left unfastened can leak insane amounts of water in a short period of time.

Guess I should have read the article more closely. Originally, the phrasing and headline (sigh, sensationalization anybody?) made it seem like it was intentional. Seems like it wasn't which means my previous comment was made out of ignorance. Sorry, I will try to be better at this.

The problem is the goddamn double standard. Spray a few ounces of spray paint on a wall, and you get criminal charges pressed against you. Hell there was a guy arrested for writing in chalk outside Bank of America, on the sidewalks... wash away chalk. But dump 50k gallons of polluted water into the wild and it's all NBD.

That poor woman. I hope she doesn't blame herself. These people are snakes.

The situation of Valve is unique. The culture there, from everything I have read on the company, is one comprised of highly skilled, motivated individuals committed to conceiving and developing incredibly high quality products. The hiring process for the company is unique, most of their hires come from people in the company noticing something of quality that the person has accomplished. Their artists, designers etc. are hired almost exclusively based on previous accomplishments. They find people that have already demonstrated their passion and self motivation. Not every company is capable of fostering that kind of environment. The companies that tend to have something close to Valve's extreme case are other creative companies. So, could other game studios do the same thing? Yes. Could Ford accomplish this? Nope.

Are not utilities. Electricity, gas, water, and sewage are all fundamentally integral to society. The bottom line is that your life is not threatened if you decide you can't use facebook or google because you don't like the way they handle your information. There are also plenty of competing services available to you. Stop whining for the government to make companies do what you want. Vote with your money. If you don't like facebook's service, don't use it, same for google, or any other service.

I can guarantee that the banks will have made billions more money from defrauding honest people than they will pay out in "fines". But is the term fines really applicable? When you commit a crime on a global scale, that a regular person would get 20 or more years in prison for, and you get off with paying a fine that doesn't even amount to the profit from your fraud. Isn't that really more like bribery?

Not troves.

Did you read the rest of my post? Competition is happening. Competitors are cropping up all over the place, one of which is one of the most powerful companies in technology.

Competition will solve this problem. It may take a little while but Google's beta test of their ISP service seems to be going well and has the telcos running scared (even reportedly going door to door in KC checking on customer satisfaction). Google is making a move here and I can't believe they intend to come to some sort of gentlemen's agreement with the telcos considering one of the motivations for Google entering the market was to thwart extortion attempts by the major ISPs where they were attempting to force Google to pay them a fee in order for them to deliver Google's content at the higher speeds, when we already pay them for the service of delivering Google's content to us. This move by Google smacks of the style of the old industrialists, like Rockefeller building oil pipelines to circumvent back door deals made by the railroads to charge him more money for shipping oil. This industry is still young, but if Google proves it can be profitable to lay new fiber and thereby dispels the idea that we have to use the existing infrastructure of the telcos, we will see even more new players enter the market. Already many cities are partnering with local companies and universities to offer residents high quality local ISPs for less money. I think it's too early in this industry to jump on the whole "we need the government to fix this for us" train... in the end I can't see that being a great answer anyway... especially when you consider that all conventional utilities have to do is provide consistent power/water supply to their customers, and there is a lower quality of service ceiling than in the ISP game.

Whatever method the robot does use, I bet the Chinese government blames it on poor coding.

We've already lost manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, that ship has sailed. Couldn't it therefor be argued that a move to robot based manufacturing would benefit the U.S. in the long run? If the majority of manufacturing jobs are in Asia, then the move to a robot based manufacturing workforce would bring manufacturing back to the U.S. We would be able to produce higher quality goods, at a higher rate, for a lower cost, and wouldn't have to spend any money getting them across the pacific ocean. If we couple this with changes to the education system, to train more innovators, inventors, artists, thinkers, scientists, doctors, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and mathematicians, instead of using our education system to train the majority of people to perform menial tasks such as those required by the industrial revolution of the early 1900s, we might be able to increase the rate of the advancement of the human race exponentially.

This is a laugh, it's not really possible for even boiling water to cause third degree burns in under five seconds. I've seen two third degree burns in my ten years of working in food service. Both were caused by accidents involving 350 degree plus deep friar oil. I've seen many people get second degree burns from scalding and boiling water but not third. Third degree burns require all three layers of skin to have been completely killed and nerve endings fried to be classified in that way. Coffee is generally served at a temperature of 160-175 degrees for full flavor, for the temperature to have been sixty degrees higher than that, it would have had to have been hotter than boiling point. Also the claim in the lawsuit that water this hot can cause third degree burns in under two seconds seems inaccurate to me as today I splashed myself with boiling water this morning and have not incurred third degree burns or anything like them.