I know gut instinct is what the Slashdot comments section runs on, but what actual, non-anecdotal evidence to we have that police officers give preferential treatment to people with these license-plate holders?

Has any of this actually been studied in a scientific way, and if so, what were the results?

Well, you have to admit that a response of "HAHAHA SUCKERS" would be a memorable one. I wonder if he considered doing that?

What in particular do you think will be different about my grandchildrens' Internet?

The point isn't to eliminate C code entirely, but to minimize the number of lines of C code that are executed.

If (statistically speaking) there will are likely to be N memory-error bugs per million lines of C code, then the number of memory-error bugs in a managed language will be proportional to the size of the interpreter, rather than proportional to the size of the program as a whole.

Add to that the fact that interpreters are generally written by expert programmers, and then they receive lots and lots of testing and debugging, and then (hopefully) become mature/stable shortly thereafter; whereas application code is often written by mediocre programmers and often receives only minimal testing and debugging.

Conclusion: Even if the underlying interpreter is written in C, using a managed language for security-critical applications is still a big win.

Or he made a dumb mistake, as 100% of programmers have done and will do again in the future. Anyone who expects programmers (even the best programmers) to never make mistakes is guaranteed to be disappointed.

The real issue here is that the development process did not detect the mistake and correct it in a timely manner. Code that is as security-critical as OpenSSL should really be code-reviewed and tested out the wahzoo before it is released to the public, so either that didn't happen, or it did happen and the process didn't detect this fault; either way a process-failure analysis and process improvements are called for.

I think I'd like to use a rail gun to shoot a hunk of metal at it at mach 7. Assuming I don't miss, the result should be a single projectile, twice as large, that drops straight down into the ocean. Right? ;^)

No; but this certainly moves the crazy-needle over a bit.

Anyone know how much damage a Smart Car can be expected to suffer when tipped like this?

(I'd imagine some crush/scratch damage to whatever body panel(s) are now supporting the car's weight, plus my co-worker says that various fluids are likely to drip out into places they aren't supposed to be)

Not if your roof has good sun. My condo building's HOA (in Southern California) was previously paying the local power company about $1000/month for electricity. We had SolarCity install solar panels on the roof under a Power Purchase Agreement; now we pay about $750/month for electricity. So that's about $12,000 in savings since 2010, and the HOA never had to spend a dime.

Yes, they got to install their solar panels on our roof. That hasn't been a problem for anyone.

I'll add that if you get a Mac with the Fusion Drive setup (or reconfigure your Mac to use that feature), things are even nicer, as you no longer have to manually shuffle your "hot" data onto or off of the SSD drive. Instead, whatever data you access often will automatically migrate to the SSD, and "cold" data that you don't access often will automatically migrate to the spinning disk (if necessary). Works great!

(Note that this does mean that if either the SSD or the spinning disk die, you've probably lost your data on both drives -- but that's what backups are for. Pay another $60 for a basic external drive for Time Machine to use, and you're golden)

ROFL.... "my mistake was the computer's fault, your mistake was a sign of your intellectual inadequacy".

Or perhaps the OP also has a virtual keyboard (or some other not-terribly-bright auto-correct mechanism) that auto-converted a slight misspelling of "their" (e.g. "ther") into "there" and wasn't noticed in time.

But don't let that stop you from telling the OP how superior your language skills are to his. You clearly are a prodigy, that's why you get to post to Slashdot.

Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

If you can think of a way to strengthen all of the links simultaneously, by all means post it and/or start a company and get rich selling your perfect-security technique.

If, on the other hand, you can't, then strengthening the links one at a time may be the best we can do. Unless you think it's better to leave them unnecessarily weak?

Can you provide a reference for this? Because I can't find any evidence that it actually happened. (I know some old men volunteered to go, but I can't find any evidence that TEPCO took them up on their offer)

Sure we have (by approximation, anyway):

1. Astronauts living in the Space Station start losing bone and muscle mass after a few weeks.
2. Researchers living in isolated conditions in Antarctica start suffering depression and other mental problems after a few months.
3. Volunteers living in BioSphere 2 found that their biological life support systems failed and they had to 'abandon ship' after 24 months.

Note that all three of the above represent "easy" scenarios, where help and/or an emergency return to Earth is always minutes, hours, or days away. On Mars (or en route to Mars), help from or escape to Earth would not be a likely option.