I believe he's bemoaning the complexity of frameworks and toolkits rather than the tools used to work with those frameworks and toolkits. Technically he's correct -- things are a lot more complex than they used to be for getting the most basic of tasks done.

But you know what? Business isn't interested in basic tasks any more. They want it secure. They want it scalable. They want a web front end, and a desktop client, and apps for Android and iOS. The days of the old "read billing file, produce accounting records" code have not gone away; those projects were just done 30-40 years ago and don't need to be rewritten, just tweaked from time to time to allow for changes in regulations such as tax law or liability.

Even the last company I worked for wasn't content with a mere rewrite and update of their core business with the new software -- they had a whole new plan of integrating another 5 or 10 vertical functionality features into the system (it was just an autodialer -- they wanted integrated CRM, push button customer calling, call answering, call forwarding, a full phone system with voice mail support and enhancements to the ever popular auto-answering system of branching menus and responses, and the ability to deploy the whole thing as a multi-client web service instead of deploying custom configured hardware to the client sites.)

The frameworks and toolkits have correspondingly become more complex in order to support those needs. Look at the transaction processing systems of old -- you'd buy a number of seperate products including a message queueing system, a report formatting tool, a database engine, and a transaction processor, each of which had their own APIs and documentation. Each tool was relatively simple, but getting them all coordinated and working together was hard as hell. Now you take JEE, buy just about any message processor and database you like, and it all largely works with the same API regardless of which vendor's tools you chose. So while the JEE framework is incredibly complex compared to a transaction processor of old, what it does in total is also saving you insane gobs of time integrating and debugging disparate products. So technically JEE is far simpler than things used to be, despite the ramp-up learning curve.

The same is true of every framework or toolkit I've used for over 10 years -- they tie together multiple vendors products consistently so that only small tweaks are needed to adapt to the vendor's products rather than whole-application re-writes if you decide to swap something out.

Hell, take a look at what I did with Java, six different vendor databases, and JDBC alone for http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net. The differences between each of those database integration layers are not subtle, but nor are they particularly arcane. All of the products have virtually the same feature set; there are just differences in how you use JDBC and stored procedures for each database. Compared to "the old days", it was a cake walk to do that integration and customization over the past 3-4 years. And remember I worked on that code by myself -- it wasn't a whole team of programmers dealing with the complexity. If one guy can produce that using standardized toolkits in 3-4 years, how can you say things are more complex than they were when it used to take a team of 100-150 programmers 2 years to produce something similar for one database?

Well, you are unlikely to be the *only* one who doesn't think this is all that impressive, because you're unlikely to be the only one who didn't read the article or looking up the device on the company's website.

The robot in question is designed to capture energy from surface waves for propulsion. So it is not a deep submersible, it waddles along a six meters below the surface, tethered to a streamlined surface buoy that it drags along and uses to capture wave energy. Making it through a major storm is a significant proof-of-concept for such a system.

I can't be the only one getting a squee moment from the fact that we might finally have a chance to create practical laser weapons.

Most companies are happy to turn a 10% profit after expenses, employees, and so forth. 20% is a fantasy for them.

Yet the greedy Wall Street pricks aren't happy with a 20% profit.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...

Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?

And so the police were duly called and the individual in question was arrested, right? Women aren't "commonly raped and abused by men" and neither are they beleaguered victims of a relentless onslaught of rapey abuse on the internet, at least no more so than anyone else. I've had lunatics tell me they were going to rape my mother in front of me - end result, they got banned like the losers they were and I never thought about them again, until now at least.

There's a new thing going on, you should check it out, it's called #womenagainstfeminism. Lot of interesting messages for the aspiring rape hysteria peddler on there.

The 'pedia says that it's an ancient delta of glacial sand that was subsequently exposed to a lot of water flow, washing out the silt and clay, leaving just the loose sand and gravel with nothing to cement it together.

To be fair, if you look at the scale of that thing, what fell is far deeper than tree roots are going to go.

There was a landslide on my land a few years ago... actually just 50-100 meters from where I'm getting ready to build my house (but the terrain is different, that's a groundwater-infiltrated glacial till-underlain marsh while my house site is basalt bedrock). It's weird looking at pictures of this giant slide, how much it looks like a 20x bigger version of my little one, from the smooth, rimmed conchoidal scarp to the river-damming piles of debris at the bottom. In my case, there were no trees, but there was grass. The grass managed to hold it for a while... but not forever. The roots just don't run deep enough. In my case, the solution (in progress) is surely just to plant water-tolerant trees (here's to hoping that dawn redwood and swamp cypress can survive in Iceland...). But what sort of trees could anchor such a massive slope as the Oso one? I know a lot of desert trees like mesquite can have super-deep root systems, but they wouldn't grow in Washington.

Supported by what you intellectual goatse, the paranoid online ravings of professional victims getting PTSD from twitter who are in fact the most privileged people to ever walk the earth?

You do realize how commonly men are beaten and murdered, don't you?

Eat your red herrings on your own time. And the next time you pick a red herring in a discussion about rape, you might want to pick one that doesn't also apply virtually equally to women.

Carrying a knife will even things out quite nicely, though. Clawing out eyes works pretty good, too.

Great, so let me see if I've got you right. I'm supposed to walk around armed at all times (illegal here), and try to claw out the eyes of someone who's strong enough to pick me up and carry me up a hill as if it's nothing and could almost certainly easily beat me to a pulp, and if I don't, then it's my fault and its not really rape? Is this what you'd consider a just society, just laws and just standards? Where through no fault of her own a woman can be given the choice between "be f***ed by some guy you don't want to" or "get most likely beaten to a pulp and then f***ed by him", and if she chooses the former, even if she says no over a hundred times and tries repeatedly to walk away, then there's no crime?

I found the cited article (always with the indirect sources...) ("No Penis, No Problem"), but I'm having trouble tracking down some of their data for further analysis.

For example, I found the CIUS data on rates of arrest for various sex crimes, and the numbers match, but they don't define non-rape "sex offenses except forceable rape and prostitution" anywhere that I can locate. Given that indecent exposure, for example, is usually classified as a sex offense excluding forcible rape and prostitution, that kind of matters.

I tried to track down that "large survey of college-age women" (cite 111), but the citation is just to a book which isn't available online (at least not the relevant part). I cross-checked the author's name and the claimed data and found no peer-reviewed publications about it.

The cite for 112 is the same as for 111.

The cite for 116 is interesting because most of the results I find when I search for it are criticizing the authors for using bad methodology to support a "satanism scare", that nursery school teachers are ritually sexually molesting children for satanic purposes. It was only focusing on cases supposedly connected to satanism, and was alleging that there's a widespread problem with women running day care centers hold satanic parties with the whole staff taking part in mass sex abuse. Needless to say, this was another book, not a peer-reviewed paper.

The cite for 117 is the same as for 111.

Oh, and for this?

Females using implements still didn't count as attackers of males under that one either, natch

May I direct you to:

14-27.5. Second-degree sexual offense.
(a) A person is guilty of a sexual offense in the second degree if the person engages in a sexual act with another person:
(1) By force and against the will of the other person; or
(2) Who is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless, and the person performing the act knows or should reasonably know that the other person is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

and

Sexual act also means the penetration, however slight, by any object into the genital or anal opening of another person's body: provided, that it shall be an affirmative defense that the penetration was for accepted medical purposes.

Oh, gee, but some guy gave some "bitches, they got it easy about rape" rant and you believed him.

Again, another case of "info I heard from some guy that made me mad so I'm repeating it here".

North Carolina's rape law The basics? North Carolina does indeed consider only vaginal sexual assault "rape" (first degree or second degree), but immediately below that they list the crime of "sexual assault" (again, first degree or second degree), which covers everything else and has the exact same penalties. So it's just a state legal terminology issue and has no practical consequences.

These things take 10 seconds to look up, is that really that onerous to do before pushing a "women are a bunch of coddled whiners when it comes to rape and men are the real victims" attitude on public forums?