Boredom is a big human factor in many accidents. We *should* be making a big deal about the boredom of people in charge of some incredibly dangerous weapons. Certainly in other safety related fields, boredom has resulted in serious fatal accidents (for example automation in airliners leading bored crews to trying experiments, leading to a crash). Attributing it to the "pussification of America" just shows this opinion to be rather ignorant of the serious consequences of ignoring human factors.

On the pussification of America, bring it on. If it makes the US a more peaceful place, and a country less likely to start wars, this bodes well for the planet. Pussification is good for our long term survival as a species now we have developed nuclear weapons.

I suspect we'll figure out how to transfer the contents of a human mind to a machine before we have the means to colonize Mars. I have the feeling that manned Mars missions similar to the Moon missions are still decades off, and an actual colonization attempt would be nothing short of centuries off.

The test pilot who unfortunately lost his life knew the risks. No one forced him to take the job. Equally no one should be able to tell him he couldn't do it because all he was testing was an aircraft to give rich people thrill rides. The article is just asinine.

Weather and climate prediction are two entirely different things.

Here's an analogy, it doesn't involve cars:

Take a pot of water and put it on the stove top, and turn the stove on. The analogy of the weather forecaster is that the weather forecaster is trying to predict every eddy, every bubble, every current in the pot of water. It gets extremely difficult to predict all the eddies even 10 seconds from now. The climate scientist on the other hand is just trying to predict the bulk temperature of the water in 2 minutes time. This is much easier to do and can be done with a lot more accuracy. In terms of global warming, the climate scientist is predicting how the rate of change will differ if you now put a lid on the pan, and what difference it will make if you (say) only half cover the pot versus putting the lid on completely.

Why would we end up with more arable land? Sure if you're used to looking at a Mercator projection map it looks like there's an awful lot of land above 60 degrees north, but simple geometry will tell you that this is not so, the horizontal distance shrinks in proportion to the cosine of degrees above the equator. For instance if you draw a square on a Mercator projection map at the equator, and this square is 1km x 1km and then moved this square up to 40N (where much of the arable currently is), the actual size underneath this square would now be 0.76km x 1km. Move this to 60N and it's now 0.5km x 1km, As you go further north, the horizontal dimension gets smaller at a much faster rate, go another 10 degrees north up to 70N and now your square is only 0.34km x 1km, so an area at 70N north that looks as big as an area at 40N is in reality only 45% of the area of the same sized looking area at 40N (and not only that you start running into the Arctic Ocean).

Actually you do hear this outcry, certainly in Europe - it's been a recurring theme that there are too few men in primary education, nursing etc.

This has the potential though to backfire quite badly on FTDI. The vast majority of users don't know that the thing they bought is fake, all they know is that it's FTDI branded and all of a sudden it doesn't work, and they blame FTDI, and FTDI gets a bad reputation for unreliable crap (even though the hardware was counterfeit).

If you're using an old machine, chances are you're not going to care much about 3D performance so toss the old graphics card and use the (very well supported) Intel integrated video that most machines have come with for a while.

That's a feature, not a defect. I run Debian on a bunch of servers. I like that it changes slowly. I like that it's not trying to be the bleeding edge. I like that migrating from one major version of Debian to the next is reasonably painless. For running a bunch of servers, I want something that follows the tried and trusted, not something that rides on the bleeding edge and something that has an absolutely rock solid packaging system. This is Debian, and it's why Debian is the right tool for this job.

If you want a distro that develops, there's always Ubuntu or Fedora.

From the context, this is not forking the kernel (this is just using mainline with patches for your distro).

Forking in this context means basically what Theo de Raadt did with NetBSD. OpenBSD was a NetBSD fork, completely new OS, team, etc. due to dissatisfaction with the NetBSD group and various personality conflicts he had with the NetBSD group. No one's done this with Linux yet.

We're doing very well at the moment, but we're doing very well by living unsustainably. Unless we do something about that reasonably soon we're going to blunder into our own collapse. There is absolutely zero sign we're going to do anything worthwhile about it so unfortunately at this moment in time I think it's reasonable to conclude that the current civilization has almost run its course.

I wager 80,000 turbines is a lot cheaper than 6 million cars (and uses vastly less material than 6 million cars and a vastly simpler supply chain). Yet Germany has no problem in producing 6 million cars.

A very large proportion would be offshore and not covering 1/3rd of the country. All powerplants require maintenance, and a wind turbine has few moving parts and is likely designed to run quite a long time without needing to be visited, and is lightly stressed compared to other power plants - no hot corrosive gases for example, and much lower power densities and temperatures for bearings to withstand. The turbine in a CCGT must by contrast withstand temperatures greater than the melting point of the metal is made out of and has elaborate cooling measures just to stop the first two turbine stages from melting (a fault during the starting procedure can easily wreck one).

If you're not trying to get rich, why not donate the patents to the Open Invention Network which will help defend open source software from patent attacks?

People can write equally vulnerable code in Python or Java or Ruby. The root cause is building SQL queries out of strings instead of using prepared parameterized statements (which I believe PHP has supported for a while -- not as long as Python or Perl or Java or Ruby, after all PHP has those god awful mysql_something functions instead of having something like perl's DBI from the get-go).

I think if you're building queries out of strings you're doing it wrong and asking for an SQL injection vulnerability. From looking at the thread it seems that it was a query that used a list, I think it would have been better to find some other method.