http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/

Startswithabang especially goes into some very nice details about astrophysics topics and has some smart people commenting.

I'm picturing "Devil Went Down To Georgia". Good vs evil violins. Epic.

Love the math curriculum, great fun. I did about 10 years of school math in 2 days. No wonder I hated math in school, it moved glacially slowly! Having so much packed into such a small time frame has been a great refresher course, and Khan rewards me with points and achievements. Holy cow, learning doesn't have to be painful! Who knew!?

... IF Netflix had at least same selection as the old video stores. Their current movie selection is terrible. Battle Los Angeles comes out on DVD, and so Battle of Los Angeles comes out on Netflix. This happens *often*, crappy rip-off D grade movies appear on streaming and the good stuff is available only on useless pieces of plastic.

It makes zero sense to me that the industry is hanging on so tooth-and-nail (vending machines? seriously?!) to the model of renting out physical media. If the movie worth the extra quality of having a good copy (e.g. LoTR), I WILL buy a DVD from amazon.

Renting plastic is an idea whose time has come and gone. The video stores all died but nothing has replaced them. No wonder piracy is reaching record levels...

Oh yeah! The failed economic policies of yesteryear. Great. Thanks.

Need more taxpayers - yeah right. You claim there's no class warfare but then plainly state that you think the middle class should pay.

AND STOP SAYING WE WANT TO INCREASE TAXES. All that needs to happen is that the Bush tax cuts that should have expired long ago, SHOULD ACTUALLY EXPIRE.

We don't want to raise the taxes you twonk, we JUST WANT THEM BACK AT REASONABLE LEVELS.

Heh that's pretty funny but I'd be happy if Hollywood could put out movies with a plot anywhere near that good. Even with Card's freaky stance on copyright and his religious proselytizing, he did manage to write a couple good books there.

Thinking about it though, after the third one in the series though it does start to go downhill fast. I wonder if Card himself has Hollywood-itis, the tendency to beat a dead horse until money stops falling out.

4 regular old marines that have more personality than most military types you meet - the black guy, the hispanic guy, generic WASP white guy and butch (but still cute and wears lipstick) lesbian girl - are sent new orders to show up to a secret base. In the secret base there's fancy new laser beam weapons that the marines are going to have to learn (queue montage).

But wait! Evil Liam Neeson has made a deal with the aliens and sold out our greatest secret! The fact that we start to suck at shooting things when the targets move faster.

Suddenly there's alien spaceships in the sky! Oh no, and they start moving faster and faster! So fast in fact that you can't actually see what's happening on the screen! How did they know our greatest weakness (DAMN YOU LIAM NEESON). The hispanic guy gets wounded, then the black guy dies. The white guy saves the day (by finishing the level) and the lesbian goes straight and marries the white guy. The hispanic guy is the best man at their wedding.

The end.

Pussies think everyone can get along and dicks just wanna fuck all the time without thinking it through.

But then you got your assholes, Chuck. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything.

So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while because pussies get fucked by dicks.

But dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck.

And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get?

You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

Well, sure, and that's why in more recent Drupal versions they switched to using PHP's PDO, which is much more explicit about what you need to do.

The point was, the tool works if you use it correctly. Using the car lock analogy from above, the place for the lock was there but the developer failed to put a lock in the hole.

I half agree. Some of the items in the list are indeed design mistakes, but others really are programmer mistakes.

The SQL injection one is the primary one I'm thinking is really a programmer error. Take this case from Drupal/PHP:

db_query("SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar='" . $_GET['bar'] . "'");

That is totally incorrect and SQL can easily be injected into the statement from outside. When the API is used *correctly* this is not an issue:

db_query('SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar="%s"', $_GET['bar']);

The difference is pretty subtle here and can easily be lost on newbies. As parameters to the db_query function, untrusted inputs are cleaned. I have seen the former code on several sites that I took over from a former developer, they are certainly NOT design errors.

We're getting offtopic here, but Bush wining the second time does NOT Prove that elections are rigged. What it actually caused Bush to get re-elected was a swift-boat campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating on John Kerry right before the election.

I'm replying not to just be pedantic and correct you, I just want to raise awareness of the power of lying TV advertisements - if you know what swiftboating is, you will have the mental tools to recognise it when it happens and respond accordingly.

Do democracy a favor and forward that Wiki article around ;-)

I could see many games and tools for making games running in a web browser. Having done both - native apps and web dev, I have to disagree.

The text handling capabilities alone put the browser WAY ahead of the alternatives. Not to mention you can make the flat parts of your UI in HTML, SVG, whatever. It's a handy environment with a lot of facilities that make app dev simpler.

The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)

I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).

It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.

Oh wow it would be so great if Netflix drops Silverlight. The DRM all tied up in it stops me using my paid Netflix account on Linux. Grr.