True, but the world of programming is full of these people. If your entire team is full of them, you won't even realise it.

There's a reason for this.

There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many of them spent at work. Workplaces will eventually settle on the most efficient tools. These aren't going to be the most powerful tools or even the simplest to use, but the ones who give people the most bang for their buck.

For communications, there's e-mail, IM, and the phone. For document management, there (should be) CMS. For sharing company documents, there's the internal website. For socializing, there's the water cooler.

Where these tools fit in... well, they don't. It takes more effort ("active champions, community managers, and a strategy to nurture") to make them work than the benefits gained over using the aforementioned methods.

Social sites like Facebook work because the links between people are usually physically separated relative to the importance of the communication (the more important the communication, the farther the physical separation). The physical networks are wide and slow, so the digital version has a purpose by making the networks closer and faster. At work, the physical network is close and fast. There's no need for a digital replacement, especially a complex one.

Disclaimer: We also "use" Yammer at work, but the conent is asinine mostly (at least when it's not someone being passive aggressive).

We should put you in front of Stephen Colbert and a camera and see how well you do listing twin primes.

In any case, it's brown and comes from cows.

Yes and no. On one hand, it wasn't the perfect landing. On the other hand, they waited 10 years for a successful landing. And it happened. That's gotta count for something.

Remember that ESA probe to Mars that died when it got there? These guys could've waited 10 years to find out that their probe crashed into the comet, or overshot it, or some other calamity befell the lander rendering it inoperative.

Instead, they did their science, got their data, and have a chance at doing a bit more in the future. That they couldn't do more is unfortunate, but there's a reason they demarcated certain tasks as primary and put enough juice into the thing to complete all of them.

The probability of abject failure was much higher than the probability of any success, even if imperfect. The fact that this was a partial success, and I would argue it's mostly a success, is worth something.

You're relying an awful lot on the service to do the vetting and the work of ensuring passenger (your) safety. Are you sure they're actually doing what they say they're doing?

A lot of regulations are preventative in nature, rather than reactive in the same sense that a metal gate is preventative, but a closed circuit camera is reactive. You seem to think it's sufficient to just have reactive measures in place.

In Australia Telstra maintain the copper line, if there's a problem you log the fault and they fix it within 2 days or they have to pay you. Unless they file a claim for a natural disaster, which can give them an extra couple days to fix it.

At the other end of the copper, your wire may be patched directly into your ISP's equipment. Though in practice I think there are only 2 or 3 companies running the DSLAM's. Smaller ISP's then lease them per line.

All the dinosaurs live in Florida and Arizona so we're safe for now.

Rather than sparking rapid evolution, maybe the high O2 concentrations led to (or allowed) the development of hard tissue in existing complex organisms. Ocean acidification dissolves the shells of clams, corals, etc. and increased O2 levels could coincide with decreased CO2 levels (probably because the organisms creating all the O2 had to get it from somewhere).

This being Slashdot (and the link being paywalled) I have not bothered to read the linked article. Hell, I've barely bothered to read the summary.

Weston has the potential to clean up the UI quirks, I hope they're headed in the right direction. It's way past time we got rid of X11, it's been holding us back for far too long. If they can't do it, I doubt anyone else will bother.

For 20-ish years windows games have been optimised for windows proprietary drivers, and vice versa. That's a lot of invested effort from both sides, that the linux eco-system hasn't had. Frankly I'm surprised at the recent rate of improvements, but linux is still a long way from parity.

There are simply too many moving parts to the usable Internet (the WWW). Everything from the browser to the DNS request can be compromised. And the browser itself is complex, speaking at a minimum of three languages (HTML, CSSx, Javascript) which, even if one or two are disabled, may still leak information.

And then, let's talk operating system. Unless your OS air gapped, it probably has holes in it that are exploitable. In fact, anything that interfaces with the network will potentially have exploitable holes. It could even be a side channel attack.

Finally, we get to the router. The router does most of what your computer does: DNS resolution, packet forwarding, etc. If the router is insecure in any way, you're also in trouble. If the router is compromised from the start (phone home, secret log, etc.), it's game over. Worse, unless you're running a DD-WRT router (and even if you are running one), you can't even audit the logic in your router.

If you want the kind of security that TOR promises, you're going to need to secure everything from the router to the browser. And that's hard. Chromebook is the closest thing, and even then you can't completely trust hardware you didn't build yourself.

One of these things is not like the other.

I'm guessing here, but probably because the matter comprising the disc is homogenous. Since all planets start forming at roughly the same time, if the material were all approximately the same throughout, then the areas of local maximum gravity that are collecting the particles will be equidistant.

What happens next will be interesting, because with this assumption, there's more material as you get farther form the disc. That means the farther you go out, the larger the planets will become (you can sorta see that in our own solar system). The interactions between these newly-formed bodies will determine the eventual planetary sizes and positions, and if they collapse back into the star or get flung out into space or somehow manage a stable orbit.

Actually, at $0.02 earnings per share, they're profitable already.

Musk released all of the patents Tesla owns related to electric cars. I'm almost certain that if the other car manufacturers don't have a competing product in the works, they're smoking some really good stuff. Oil subsidies will only get them so far.

I can't wait for the Model 3. Once that hits the streets, you'll be seeing a lot more Teslas.