They all would have been harder to fix if we didn't have Red Hat support. And because we had Red Hat support, it made explaining to our customers and vendors that we had patched the security holes so much simpler.

How is field work not science? How is field work appreciably different from office/lab work or academia that it warrants your implied "one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn't belong"? And why is self-reported not verifiable? How is "self-reported" different from survey results? The logical fallacies you invoke are more than sufficient to invalidate your ridiculous conclusion that science doesn't have a sexual assault problem--particularly given that the only acceptable number of men raping any number of women over any given measured span of time is zero. And as things currently stand, that number is well above zero.

Science, as a profession and as a culture, has a problem. And scientists everywhere ought to be embarrassed by that.

So many poor assumptions there. The average life expectancy was a lot less 100 years ago: http://demog.berkeley.edu/~and... Consequently, people got married earlier because they died sooner; this goes back through the beginning of recorded history, and it was really only in post-WWI 20th century that marrying while a teenager became not just not the norm, but socially frowned upon. Also, look at the drops in life expectancy in 1918 and 1943; what you are seeing it the effects of both world wars and the spanish influenza epidemic in 1918. So life wasn't just short, it was unpredictably precarious in a very real, life-limiting way.

While there are definitely observable fetish aspects to the celebration of youth in our current culture, we no longer marry immediately post-pubescent because, for the very most part, we no longer need to as a practical necessity to be able to have family or an otherwise "full life".

You assumptions on economics are so bad they border on ridiculous. Up until the 1920s, 30 percent or more of the US population were farmers: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/t... And yes, as the percentage of workers in agriculture declined, those in manufacturing rose; however, the real economic differentiator remains education, and that trend has only been slowly improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

You were kicked out of kindergarten as a child for not playing well with others, weren't you?

Or, if you require a religious analogy, if worship is an act of volition (i.e., you have to chose to worship God), then approval also has to be an act of volition; as opposed to tolerance, which simply involves a choice to ignore behavior that doesn't otherwise interfere with your personal choices. Or do you not believe in or not understand free will?

I get paid for cleaning up after things that don't work right the first time.

The average human is only of average intelligence, and average intelligence isn't all that smart.

If we ever get to the point where there are self-aware machines, it is infinitely more likely they will be borg-like with a collective consciousness than not, which means no one machine needs to "know" or be able to "remember" everything, just to know where in the network to access the knowledge repository.

And saying "only natural" about artificial constructs completely invalidates your conclusion, as does thinking humans optimize. People, in general, follow the path of least resistance. See my first sentence above for why.

It's more complex than that: Cassini has 3 RTGs, plus a dozen or so pellets in the Huygens probe to keep its instruments from completely freezing during the 7 year trip to Saturn. The ultimate "doomsday" scenario would have to have the entire spacecraft vaporizing less than a mile over a major metropolitan area, scattering plutonium dust as it goes. However, I would be much more concerned if it exploded over a fresh-water lake or reservoir, tainting the water supply. Given that 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, an ocean landing would have been much more likely had it crashed. The biggest risk was the launch: 1 in 40 rocket launches blow-up on the pad or before maximum velocity is reached.

Store credit has always been legal. Stores allowing customers to use credit from other stores it has a reciprocal agreement with for honoring store credit has always been legal. As long as a place of business is willing to accept US dollars, it can accept whatever other form of credit, discount, or voucher that it wants. And given that the federal constitution declares that the US dollar is the currency of the nation, the state law was, at best, redundant.

Individual states weighing in on bitcoin doesn't make it any more or any less valid or relevant in the market. When the IRS, SEC, and US Treasury finally make definitive policy statements specifically mentioning bitcoin, then you'll have your validity, or invalidity, as the case may be.

I haven't yet looked for it, but I suspect the law that authorizes the creation of the LECs in the first place would implicitly preclude them from filing for non-profit status in the first place, so the LECs have committed fraud by doing so, and should be prosecuted in Federal court accordingly.

If you really want to understand comics, get and read "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America". It's a part of American literary history that shouldn't be forgotten, and is indispensable for understanding the evolution of comic books. And then get a hold of every Justice Society of America comic, omnibus, and reprint that you can and starting reading from there through the 60s and 70s related titles. You will never look at modern comic books the same way again.

The 2nd law isn't violated as whatever falls into the black hole either becomes part of the singularity/Plank star, or is expelled during the transition via Hawking radiation. Your question on entropy doesn't make sense, as the cosmologists are postulating that the Plank star *is* the black hole.

I don't care what they do with beta, but if they get rid of classic, I will simply delete my account and stop reading slashtdot at all. Although, I suspect it will take a massive number of other people voting with their feet and leaving to get Dice to repent from pulling an ebay and "fixing" it until they break it.

Find reasons, both technical and financial, to make the most professional recommendation that you can to kill the project. This means just the facts, and no name calling (actual or implied), no editorializing about the lack of quality or organization of the project's goals, parameters, or guidelines or lack thereof--although anything obviously absent should be noted. Take a moral stand, if necessary, about your resolve to not take money under false pretenses, and that continuing the project would be just that. Implying that anyone else taking money for the project, contractor or employee, would be equally doing so falsely, may be either the exact needed thing to do, or the exact most wrong thing to do, depending upon your audience.

Lets see the test done with the human hand held still in front of the robot hand and not waving around or flying toward the robot to signal the start of the game, and the gesture not overly-dramatically done, and have the robot triggered from a verbal cue just like the human. Yes, I get that the Japanese love robot tech. But this isn't good robot tech, and it's certainly not good science, it's just rigged pseudo-drama.