The pilot would be someone who is being blackmailed to do this.

You mean.. he's a remotely-controlled agent? The pilot is a drone? No problem! Just apply the solution recursively.

I thought the definition of drone was that it is a remote-controlled aircraft. An autonomous missile isn't a drone and is therefore outside the scope of the problem.

..the possibility of malware infection of voters' computers.

You need to either be ok with that (i.e. botnet owners should have more votes than normal people, because the whole reason that people give their computers over to botnets, is that they want to personally have less power) or else you need to give up on the idea of online voting.

And since nobody sane is going to be ok with that (I think people will disagree with my above parenthesized assertion), then: give up on the idea online voting. By the time you "solve" the compromised-user-agent problem, you'll have lost 100% of the reason for online voting, as we see with the amusing idea of making people use multiple computers which are hopefully on competing botnets and therefore unable to reach enough consensus to vote the same way.

Just keep having people go to polling locations. Really, it's ok to do that.

Intel is lucky that Apple appears to have a barely concealed desire to kill the mac mini,

You could just as easily say "Gigabyte is lucky that Intel appears to have a barely concealed desire to kill the NUC."

I guess this is progress. People used to argue about which vendors offer the best values, but now they argue about which vendors hate themselves and their users to the least suicidal degree. Instead of "Apple sucks," it's now "Apple hates itself, second only to how much they hate you, the customer." Instead of "Intel's machines are a bit expensive compared to the OEMs who use the same Intel CPUs," it's "Intel sure is lucky that they aren't the most self-loathing computer builder out there," and so on.

I always knew psychology played a big role in branding, but now we're admitting it even to ourselves, while we buy their stuff. It just goes to show that whoever said "knowing is half the battle," was wrong.

Yes, there are too many market forces keeping the prices down. It's a race to the bottom. People, stop all this miserly shopping for the cheapest medical care! Sure, your tiny Wal-Care bills look attractive but have you considered that if you keep doing this, you're going to cut more mom'n'pop providers out unless they are also able to viciously cut costs?

We need to put Wal-Care (and other super-slim-margin health care providers) out of business, in order to protect the health care profession!

That's the type of federal government that most voters say they want. How is that not a country problem?

store up to 10 kWh of power.

..who doesn't even know the difference between power and energy. And you want to sell me batteries? Don't go bragging about how ignorant and incompetent you are, or at least don't let potential customers hear it.

It's a shame the pilot was so far away from the aircraft when the warhead was released.

Had this happened in 1945 and involved people on board a B-29, I don't think anyone would be very concerned, though some of the more sensitive might have muttered, "war is hell."

Had it been fired by an F-16 or A-10 in 1995, there would be more concern but I really don't think anyone would feel "shit happens" fails to adequately address the issue. Because shit does happen, after all.

But it's 2015 and, to our horror, we learn that the pilot wasn't on board the aircraft. It was a "drone." So this is very, very serious indeed.

The fact that they use the word "punishment" shows lack of understanding about what happened and is happening.

If you lie to me and get caught, and then I punch you in the nose, that's a punishment. But if you lie to me and get caught, and then after that I don't believe you whenever you tell me things, that's not punishment.

If Google and Mozilla are being "harsh" then the only ways one can honestly describe it, is that they have a "harsh opinion" or a "harsh estimate" of CNNIC's trustworthiness.

It's amusing to think that maybe some day this way of speaking will infect other areas. "That's sure a harsh calculation" or "this is a severe regex match" or "what a brutally spiteful and vindictive tree traversal."

Don't you people have any sense of humor anymore?

I think the problem is that he does have a sense of humor. If he didn't have one, then he would be politely laughing at the stupid posts, waiting for someone smarter than him to come along and let slip a clue that explains the joke. Little would such a humorless person realize, that there is no clue to give, because there isn't much of a joke to explain.

If you want to know whose ass that is, and why they're farting, then keep reading today's posts and maybe you'll get your answers amidst the day's deepening plot and theme. For the rest of us, though, Slashdot appears to be down today.

when that doesn't work (because the door is in "locked" state), the terrorist just threatens the (co)pilot inside to cabin to unlock or he'll kill the pilot and/or everyone else... At which point the pilot opens the door anyway.

He might open the door if he's armed (with the intent to come out blasting), but otherwise I don't think that's very likely.

Having a "Locked" position is idiotic to the extreme.

Unfortunately, not having a "Locked" position would be the same amount of idiotic.

Giving one pilot (in the cockpit) the means to basically lock himself in with no ability for the other pilot to enter is too great a danger.

But also failing to give one pilot the means to lock out the other pilot would be too great a danger.

Both scenarios presume one pilot who intends to destroy the aircraft and one pilot who intends to save it. That's the presumption either way, and however you approach the problem it's going to come down to whether the bad guy is locked into, or locked out of, the cockpit.

It's a coin toss, not 9/11-triggered-stupidity corruption.