According to wikipedia, that had software problems that ended up killing people What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?

The original post was about bad user interfaces causing harm to people. Changes breaking the user experience was only one of the issues.

In Therac's case the bug WAS primarily in the user interface:
  - Due to a race condition, if a button happened to be pressed at the wrong moment and the menu filled out in a particular order, the device would configure the electron beam for x-ray generation rather than electron beam generation (high electron beam current, no scanning) but not position the target, flattening filter, collimator, or ion-chamber x-ray sensor in the beamway, resulting in a configuration that irradiated the patient with beta radiation, rather than x-rays, at 100x a normal dose.)
  - The machine DID detect that there was a problem. But it reported it as "MALFUNCTION nn" - where nn was a number from 1 to 64 and not explained in the manual. If the operator entered "P" (proceed), it would then go ahead and operate in the improper mode anyhow.

Both the second part and most of the first part sound like user interface problem to me.

I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course.

First, I think that's a ridiculous assertion. Smart farmers don't diversify because the taxpayers bear the risk of their crop failure, or of crashing prices; they have insufficient incentive to diversify.

Second, if we had a true free market, dumb farmers would go out of business and we would be left with smart farmers allocating resources efficiently. Isn't that the point of economic libertarianism?

Note: I am far from libertarian.

Don't know about the Therac, but I've read of a number of cases where poor user interfaces resulted in warnings being ignored and medicine being given improperly. Presumably in order to 'protect' themselves the company had every little possibility throw a warning, to the point that they didn't have a 'I really mean it this time!' warning. Stuff like administering around 50 times the intended dose of an antibiotic to a person.

I tend to consider myself a moderate libertarian, but even I recognize that 'diversification' in this sense is expensive in that it wrecks your efficiency. As was mentioned earlier, a lot of the equipment that makes farming corn profitable even with lots of competition is extremely specialized for working with corn, but still freaking expensive, even if it can process tens, hundreds, or even millions of acres of corn a year. Seriously, some of those big harvesters are measured in acres harvested per minute.

Thus, in order to make a profit, you need to be as large and specialized as possible. The demand for staple crops - corn, wheat, rice, beans, and such is high enough to justify said investments year in and year out. It's a rather high amount of capital investment, so normally speaking you're only going to see fields expand at a limited pace year to year.

As a result, even 'diversifying' can kill your business as you're out-competed by the specialists.

On the other hand, having seen multiple meltdowns and supply shocks, I can tell you that I do NOT want to see this with food. It's bad enough that pork spikes because of some disease(last one I think was imported from China, killed 2/3rds of the piglets infected).

The problem is that while I'm philosophically against paying farmers not to farm, the situation is freaking complex, and any transition from the current situation to a more philosophically 'pure' one is going to have to be carefully planned. I can't give two shits about e-businesses, the housing market, or automobiles in the face of how bad a truly screwed we could be in a 'farming crash'. We have enough problems, real and potential, with our food as is.

That's what cellular construction would be for - the bugs get into one room, or maybe one building. You then do the equivalent of nuking that area, repairing whatever was broken that let the bugs in before hitting it with whatever's necessary to kill all the bugs, their eggs, etc... Then you restock/reseed.

But seriously, I've seen what they do in these rooms - they wear the same sort of clean-room gear people working in chip fabs wear.

Someone started uploading all the HackingTeam source code to GitHub ... There are also some signing keys for kernel drivers in here.

IMHO:

Anyone with a project hosted on git hub should pull a backup copy NOW!

Hosting this leak on git hub could lead to moves by authorities to contain it - which could have the side effect of making GitHub and/or some projects on it unavailable - temporarily or permanently.

Better safe than sorry.

... will this help bona fide security researchers with their work on fighting exploits on all platforms ... ?

I wonder if this will also help people trying to write open software for closed devices? Signing keys, driver sources with spyware installed, ... Not only does it expose the malware bypassing the user's security, it may also expose the internal details of how the devices are driven and/or how to compromise the malware's and devices' anti-user "security".

(I have often wondered how many of the closed-driver devices have the code closed just for business reasons and how many are closed because that's where the spyware has been installed and they can't let the source out - even sanitized - because that would lead to the spyware's exposure.)

What do you mean by cyclical? Do you mean the livestock/fertilizer/crop/fodder cycle? Do you mean crop rotation? Or something else entirely?

Just curious, since I'm not aware of either cyclical production or crop rotation being a requirement for organic farming (although both are considered best practices).

The goal is to intimidate the makers of such designs. Arrest first and ask questions later, when such designs get out.

It's also to make it harder for "the common man" to arm himself - in case a Schelling Point is reached and a LOT of people suddenly decide that they need to arm themselves against the government or its puppeteers. By slowing them down, and reducing the number and quality of designs available, the powers that be have more time to react and try to divide and reconquer.

Of course intimidating designers is a big part of that.

This is not the first time they did this. In fact it has quite an interesting history in cryptography that was classified as a munition for just this reason.

Which is why OpenBSD is hosted from outside the US. (It's NOT just that Theo happens to live in Canada.)

It was a forum. It was somewhere between a forum and a wiki. It was user-generated content to start them off. It wasn't until the studios were giving them direct (and often advanced) information that they could have even operated without millions of unpaid drones, entering in movies and the information about them.

So this stylized wiki one day cut off the access to the millions who built it. They've tried adding things like reviews, tips, errors, trivia, and all that, but the "value" is the same value people like me gave it for free (back in the pre-monetized days), not realizing we were working for free for someone else's profit.

User content created news aggregation site screws up big.

When weren't we talking about Slashdot?

It's OK. I'm from Colorado, I know what you really meant.

The goal was to complete the challenge. They ALL failed. It was a failure, this isn't debatable.

That doesn't mean nothing was gained, many things were learned certainly, but it was still a failure of its goal.

In my opinion it was a massive failure because pretty much none of those robots could adapt to an unexpected task (getting up) at all, and it's pretty much impossible that no one knew their bot would fall down.

Every contestant was pitifully unprepared, so EPIC FAIL if you ask me.

Worked for IMDB.