Stuxnet got onto Iranian centrifuges disconnected from the Internet and in locked and secured facilities. The problem is that at some point, someone has to communicate with these systems, so perfect security isn't possible... even just talking to them runs into the "little Bobby tables" problem.

Excellent idea. Needs to be tweaked somehow to support phones\tablets that don't have (standard) USB ports. But the idea is good.

It's a chicken/egg question. Do boys buy most comic books because girls have no interest in such things? Or do boys buy most comic books because the existing books are all marketed to boys? Historically, the answer has been believed to be the first option, but society generally has discovered over the last 50 years that with comic books as with many other things, the answer is the latter option... people make assumptions about what boys and girls want and thus drive the market thereby leaving out many consumers who don't fit the stereotypes.

Not hypocrisy. The law also protects against youth discrimination, but because that is so much rarer, the law goes into much greater detail on what constitutes discrimination against elders. Basically, the law bans all age discrimination in employment -- judge on merit and ability, not on age -- but spells out in detail all the questions you cannot ask during an interview in an effort to try to ferret out someone's age.

I think you miss the point of the question. AC wants to know why we just bombarded a planet with our debris -- scarring another world rather than take the extra fuel to clean up our mess and avoid adding to the craters on Mercury. This is a sentiment I've heard elsewhere -- that the extra science time wasn't worth the environmental cost of dumping our stuff on Mercury.

AC: What you miss is that Mercury is a lifeless rock already marked by tons of craters. One more makes little difference. There wasn't any benefit from the view of anyone working on the project in avoiding impacting Mercury. If this were Mars or someplace that humans might one day live, that would be different.

All the EULAs will just get updated to include a clause saying, "And you give us the right to share." The problem seems to be that if you *can* give permission then you will be coerced into giving permission. That implies that, just like a contract of enforced slavery is illegal in USA even if signed willingly, any agreement that gives permission for sharing is illegal. That would solve the problem of coercion but would wipe out a whole bunch of services that people actually like and want.

I don't have an answer, but I am pretty sure that just barring the data sharing would not actually change anything except the EULAs.

What if you made the default password the date the system was turned on? Sure, it's a simple 8 digit numeric value, but it would be somewhat unique per machine or local bank of machines. Don't ask them for a default password, tell them what it is and make them go change it. Various studies suggest they probably won't.

His math is fine. It's his civics estimate of US population that's a problem, and he wasn't claiming expertise there.

I think KingOfBash's point is that in the future, there may not be any "licensed drivers", only "licensed passengers". And if you lose that license, there wouldn't be any of those other options that you point toward -- the robots would turn you down for a ride.

Depends. How much do airlines pay in insurance to cover the possibility of disasters? How much would that decrease through automation?
How much do they pay in maintenance? How much would that decrease if the plane were always piloted exactly as spec'd?
There's many variables that come into play that could easily make this financially viable. I don't know enough about the industry to say whether or not it would actually be.

Consider the comment at the end of the summary: "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail."
We just had a human brain fail -- in the computer sense -- in Europe. I sometimes wonder whether we have too much tech in the cockpit right now. A computer that stays focused on the act of flying as fewer mental "moving parts" than a human brain that has a life outside the cockpit.

Sounds like a user interface problem. Users won't get accustomed to it if unsecure sites are mauve text on navy blue background. Or something equally egregious and harder to use.

This is why you should treat employees as criminals from their first day on the job. Then there's no difference when the last day comes.
Right? :-)

> I think i know why she isnt a computer programmer

She's a psychologist. That's pretty close to a computer programmer. Psychologists do their work on a biological computer and without the aid of a debugger and without the programmer's greatest tool: the reboot. But in both cases, it is trying to work out where the logical inconsistencies are and apply code patches to get the system to respond correctly to input.