The report deals with a tragedy 11 years ago (Feb 2003), and how it could've been handled 11 years ago. Fast forward to February 2014. Let's use today's tech. We've got SpaceX and other commercial entities capable of launching supplies into orbit and rendezvouing with with ISS or a shuttle.

If any similar missions are undertaken in future, pay SpaceX/whomever, to have a launch vehicle with emergency supplies on standby. In a worst case, send up enough oxygen/water/rations/etc to allow the orbiting shuttle crew to survive longer on the orbiting shuttle. This would buy enough extra time to do a proper and safe inspection+launch of the rescue shuttle. In a best case, they might be able to carry out the necessary repairs and safely land the orbiting shuttle.

> How is building a vast company campus green
> compared to using already constructed buildings?

Are those "already constructed buildings" new, with sufficient electrical capacity to power your racks of servers, plus everybody's PC plus all the laser-printers in the building. And do they have efficient office layouts?

Or are they 19th-century "heritage buildings" that you can't legally knock down? In many cases, it's more expensive to gut the interior of a building and modernize it, than to simply knock it down and build a new one.

The "dialectizer" http://www.rinkworks.com/diale... "translates" English to Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. And there's an English to Ebonics translator at http://joel.net/EBONICS/Transl... so it won't be that difficult to get a translator that outputs 16-year-old-girl talk.

Include latest service packs and drivers, etc. That might make people forgive them... maybe.

That's great *FOR TABLET USERS*. But it sucks for desktop PC users. MS doesn't seem to understand the difference.

> NAT is an ugly hack that breaks shit.

Well... don't write shit programs. FTP "active mode" is an example of said shit. And don't be surprised if someone implements NAT on IPV6.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-J...

> At the very least, everyone needs to understand that their phones don't
> run on magic. And maybe fewer people would look for source code by opening
> an exe in Notepad.

And now for the "Obligatory Car Analogy". Does every driver really need to understand the Carmot Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... which is the basic theory underlying heat engines, including cars? Answer *NO*. Except for engine designers, most people only need to know how to *USE* their car...
* If it's a manual transmission, don't push the engine RPM past the red line on the tachometer
* If the "engine light" comes on, pull over to the side of the road and stop as soon as safely possible
* etc, etc.

Similarly, people need to know how to *USE* computers for their jobs, and at home. Just as everybody has "safe driving" pounded into their head, "safe computing" should also be taught.

Learn the basics of spreadsheets, word processors, email, etc. Scripting languages, spreadsheet macros, etc are nice. But VBA and Visual Basic and C++ for everybody is not necessary, nor possible.