We don't imprison everyone who is involved in a fatal car accident. We accept that there are inherent risks in using roadways, and those risks include errors by other users of said roadways.

The problem is, this death was a result of systemic problems between the police and society at large, specifically the police thinking - correctly, it appears - that they're above the law.

The lack of prosecution in this case is NOT because the police are "above the law". The lack of prosecution in this case is because the law specifically allows the police to use electronic devices in the course of their duties while operating their vehicles. The same way the law allows the police to exceed the speed limit in certain cases, or allows them to park pretty much anywhere, or allows them to pull you over, or allows them to do any number of other things that a normal citizen can't do.

You may argue that it's a bad practice, but keep in mind that one person dying because officers are allowed to use electronic devices while driving doesn't necessarily mean that's bad practice any more than officers sometimes causing accidents because they can speed or run red lights in the course of their duties means those are overall bad practices either. We'd need to know how many people are hurt as a result of officers operating electronic devices while driving and compare that to how many people would be hurt if officers had to use the radio or pull over every time they needed to use electronic devices.

Regardless, there was no legal basis for criminal charges in this incident.

Unlikely. The full Falcon 9 has a good track record so far. Few rocket programs don't have at least one or two explosions along the way (and some have many more).

The video was captured by an onlooker. Because of the noise, SpaceX has to publish when tests happen, so fans know when to head to one of a couple of areas to watch and record them.

The "bad for wildlife" question basically comes down to:

* how much mass you have to move
* how much land area you have to occupy

per watt generated.

Coal and hydro lose because they both require a lot of mass (water and coal) and a lot of area (dammed waterway, mines and transport).

Nuclear and geothermal win because they both require very little mass and very little area other than the plant itself - uranium ore has at least 1000 times the energy per gram as coal.

Any kind of solar is in the middle because of the large area needed to capture relatively dilute solar energy.

The key element of a tortious interference claim is not the existence of a contract, it is third-party interference with a business or contractual relationship. sixoh1 was suggesting that someone might have a cause of action against Rightscorp, not the ISP, so the ISP's prerogative to terminate customer contracts is not relevant.

Similar logic applies to having the ISP cut off your connection entirely -- if they got statutory authority for one of them, I bet they could get the same kind of permission for the other (if the original language of the law doesn't cover both already).

Next up: Booting all of your connectivity -- mobile as well as hardline -- through one, integrated, Big Brother-ish app.

It's not the features that you stare at with no idea what they do that cause a problem. As you say, a quick look at the manual can help to sort that out (though it does add to the overall cognitive load). It's all the potentially subtle things that you don't even realise are features and so never look up and don't realise that, contrary to first inspection, the code is actually doing something subtly different to what you expect.

In the US, a typical manager earns some amount more than the people they manage. As a result, the average software engineer earns significantly more than the average non-engineering manager, and more than many engineering managers.

And in the US, doctors and lawyers are not comparable to software developers for two main reasons: they have significant legal duties towards their clients (and must carry malpractice insurance as a result), and it is a serious crime to practice medicine or law without a license (which is granted by the people already in the field). Doctors and lawyers typically have further education, as well, which is not required for software developers. We also hear chronic complaints about doctor shortages, too -- but thankfully none for lawyers :) The kind of doctors with the worst shortages are "primary care" doctors, rather than specialists and surgeons, who also make much less money than the specialists, and I think in the same neighborhood as software developers.

They have (or had) a mostly exclusive contract with GeoEye for one of their satellites, though the US government held priority over that in case they needed access to the imagery.

Google recently purchased SkyBox, and so may soon be launching its own constellation of smaller satellites. These will reportedly have high-res video capabilities, so it may be possible to watch traffic (or other things) moving in real- or near-real time.

They used the opportunity afforded by him leaving to kill MacLean Stevenson's character, but it wasn't out of spite. They did it to remind the audience that the show took place during a war. The studios were livid with the decision, as they had not been consulted and didn't like that they couldn't bring him back later.

You may be right that B5 was the first to plan it this way, though that wasn't the way it was originally phrased.

"And best of all, this was the first series to kill off 'major' characters"

That's not true. Off the top of my head, MASH killed Henry Blake, and that was probably the first time a major character was killed off in a major series (other than a cast member dying). It was much more sporadic before the 90s, but it did happen.

You missed the key word "potential" in that sentence. There are many thousands of good programmers in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area, although basically are already as employed as they wish to be. In the kind of places where you think a company might be able to relocate, there are probably dozens of programmers with the same level of skills. When a company wants to hire hundreds of good engineers, that is not very useful: they'd need to convince most of their workforce to relocate.

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Apple et al. *found* a free-market solution to their woes, and are now in court because government regulations say that their solution is not allowed.

US software developer salaries are much higher than in Europe when you control for cost of living. For example, most of the big cities in Europe have higher costs of living than Silicon Valley, but software developers earn much less there. You have to look pretty far down the list of US cities -- say, Charlotte (NC) or Peoria (IL) -- to find salaries that are roughly in line with expensive places in Europe. Companies stay in Silicon Valley because of infrastructure, network effects, and because there are a lot of potential employees in the area.

You're applying single-stage reasoning to an iterated game, which is a good way to lose in the iterated game. If company X hires an employee from company Y by making a better offer, how should company Y respond in order to maximize its own revenue? (It will almost always involve a counter-offer to the employee, and if that fails, company Y will probably try to hire away another experienced engineer for reasons that Fred Brooks described in The Mythical Man-Month.)

If you don't think there is a shortage of software developers in the US, why are developers in the US paid so much more than ones in Europe?

Also, there is no hard threshold to define an "actual" shortage when you're talking about such a large job market.