Yes, but that's often where many aspiring software engineers first learn of her, or Ada Lovelace. Ask how many aeronautical engineers first heard of the Wright Brothers from a college textbook on aeronautical engineering.

"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."

I don't doubt that mdsolar has a point of view that could be characterized as an "agenda", but your conclusion about his intent being obfuscation rather than to inform sounds like a bit of propaganda to dismiss anyone who disagrees with you. Frankly, it seems like you're the one attempting to obfuscate things by bringing up irrelevancies to distract from the actual, informative content of the article (which is, as noted, a factual report written in neutral terms and quite newsworthy). Simply put, you don't like the truth, so you attempt to discredit it by deflecting attention away from it and instead to the person who brought it to our attention. The truth is what it is, regardless of who brought it forth and what their motivations were for bringing it to our attention.

Your agenda is no less clear to the folks who really do pay attention.

Well, you can either take advantage of the PosReady thing or not. If you do, yes, it may be that only some rather than all your security vulnerabilities will be patched. If you don't, it will be the case that none rather than some are patched.

Healthy human compassion.

We care for them too.

That would be a false dilemma. If the two options were mutually exclusive, what you said would make sense. As it is, what you said is just idiotic.

Again, basic human compassion. You should try it sometime...

This is why I put at least a Clamp-O-Tron Jr. on everything I launch.

Note, by the way, that that includes rewatching the originals. Rewatching them as an adult pretty much killed any interest in Star Wars in me. I find myself wondering why I ever thought they were great. Then I remember I also loved Knight Rider. Children have no standards, and I was no exception.

Honestly, I barely even noticed the lens flares. They're hard to see over the much larger, more glaring travesties being committed to the Trek-franchise during the film.

That's not saying much...

If someone burned down Congress today, half the country would be cheering...

But yes. It's quite amusing what they teach American kids about the War of 1812.

When they started negotiating the treaty to end the war, the British, having won it (Canadian troops did much of the winning, but they were still part of the Empire back then), started by demanding territorial concessions, as is the usual case when winning a war. The Americans asserted that the British couldn't hold the territory they'd taken and refused to give it up, and the British were tired of fighting several wars at once (they were busy fighting Napoleon for most of the war and didn't devote much effort to the minor sideshow that was the war with the USA) so they gave in and agreed to simply return to status quo ante bellum, i.e. the state of affairs before the war began. Some would try to spin that as a "draw", but the British were fine with the state of affairs before the war, it was the US that declared the war in the first place, claiming that the state of affairs prior to the war were intolerable. Although no territory was lost, it was, in fact, a unequivocal defeat for the US. However, several of the reasons the US declared war to begin with were over measures the British were using to fight Napoleon. With Napoleon defeated, those measures came to an end (not because the British gave in, they continued to assert they had the right to do as they did -- they just had no more need to continue doing them). That plus some battlefield victories that occurred after the war was over but before news reached America of the signing of the peace treaty enabled the politicians in Washington to spin the defeat into an illusion of victory, and to this day, you will find many Americans who think they never lost a war before Vietnam, that we actually achieved our objectives in the War of 1812, and that the major victories weren't pointlessly fought after the war was already over but news hadn't reached us yet. Some of this comes from a slanted and incomplete way the story is taught in American classrooms, and some from flat-out misinformation. But in any case, don't be surprised if most Americans are completely incredulous when you try to remind us of the fact that we actually fought a war with the Canadians once... and they kicked our asses.

Unfortunately, deregulated markets also lead to centralized planning, and it doesn't cease to be a problem when the central planning occurs in a corporate boardroom instead of a politburo. I find it ironic that since the collapse of the Soviet system, America has been moving closer and closer to centrally planned economies, with power consolidating in a few (sometimes even one) corporation in every major market sector, while the supposed anti-communist party cheers on and aids in the deregulation, forgetting that a true free market requires regulation, or it soon is captured by the biggest fish and ceases to be a free market in any meaningful sense.

Indeed. No system ever lives up to its ideals, but they still matter. They can make a difference even when they aren't ever realized.

Ah yes, I remember being taught that myth too. Alas, the reality of language has never been that simple, in any time.

Maybe... but Gallente ships prefer with melee-range weapons. :p

When asked for advice, I usually start with a "best practices" answer, and then follow up with "but if that's too much, at least do ..." Basically, the best answer, followed by the answer that's most likely to be followed if they decide the best answer is too difficult/time-consuming/more effort than it's worth/whatever.

It is a bad summary, but only because the wording is ambiguous, not that it's factually incorrect. The statement you're objecting to is perfectly correct in one interpretation, and dead wrong in another. Your own counter-statement, "it is not required of the opponent to play rock 50% of the time," is equally ambiguous. In fact, 50% of the time (assuming a fair coin), the opponent is required to play rock, so it's true that "it is required of the opponent to play rock, 50% of the time". Leaving out the comma yields a true sentence (assuming the correct interpretation is chosen of the now even more ambiguous sentence) that contradicts the quoted sentence of yours, assuming you parse your sentence as "it is not required: that the opponent play rock 50% of the time", but does not contradict it at all if your sentence is parsed "it is not required that the opponent play rock, 50% of the time", since 50% of the time, the opponent can choose freely, and thus is 50% of the time, is not required to make any particular choice. So, both the summary and your explanation of what's wrong with it contain statements that not factually incorrect, just ambiguously worded such that a reader might interpret it to mean something that is incorrect rather than something that is correct.

This is a textbook example of why programming computers in plain English would be a monstrously bad idea.