A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Pretty much par for the course for these companies....

Well, considering E.T's favorite sellout^H^H^Hsnack was Reese's Pieces, they still need to dump some chocolate and artificial coloring.

"Tobacco is my favourite vegetable" -Frank Zappa

Because it's responsible for all the things people hate about web pages. Pop-up ads, pop under ads, floating ads, flash ads, flash exploits, java exploits....

Um...what? How is Javascript even remotely implicated in flash/java applet exploits?

But why would they change their course if it was an accident? If the crew became incapacitated, it was after someone deliberately steered them off course, not due to an accident, since if there was an accident they surely would have radioed for help.

Actually it could be both....in complex situations like the accident rate variables rarely change in isolation. Look at some of the official stats on accident and age and what you will find is that by far the biggest drops in fatalities are in the very young and very old age groups(in fact the rate of fatalities is actually increasing in the groups most likely to be using cell phones and driving....) This is probably due to increasingly stringent laws regarding teen and elderly drivers. Even Florida recently passed a law that requires the elderly to come in for an eye exam every year when they renew their license, before that they could renew by mail. Not saying cell phones are necessarily a cause in accidents, but your reasoning doesn't really hold.

So basically this is PGP, it's pgp for the web, but ultimately still PGP. How is this even remotely newsworthy? PGP is 23 years old, throwing it up on the web then calling what you are offering a "web service" is a joke. Real web services actually offer you know, services, beyond simple data retrieval, and I saw nothing in the paper that would allow for instance a server to scan a database table with user information in it in order to present the data in a useful fashion, or for the data to be useful at all beyond a pgp-encrypted file sharing/email service.

Google Helios flight 522. The plane continued on autopilot almost 2 hours after the pilots became incapacitated(and in that case jets were scrambled because the Greeks became alarmed when the plane entered their airspace but didn't respond to radio requests. The autopilot was able to continue on the pre-programmed course and go into holding over Athens. If the pilots of the Malaysian Airlines flight were indeed incapacitated without anyone else taking controls they almost certainly would have entered Chinese airspace and been noticed by Chinese military radar. The fact that this never happened argues against an accident causing the pilots to become incapacitated. If they were killed/incapacitated, it almost certainly was the work of another individual on the plane.

If everyone was either unconscious or dead the plane would have continued going to China. It would not have turned off it's transponders. I don't know why people keep on assuming these things since we already know what happens when the flight crew becomes incapacitated in flight. Hint, the autopilot doesn't think "I'm free, I'm free at last, time to go to Australia!" It will continue on it's flight path till it reaches the designated airport, then will go into a holding pattern.

You can also "simply run out of fuel" if the pilot is dead. There was an incident in the USA several years back where something like that happened on a private jet and it flew across half the country on auto-pilot before it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Yeah, but assuming that is what happened(and there were no other mechanical issues with the plane) the plane would have continued on it's pre-programmed heading and would have either circled the Beijing airport waiting for the (now deceased) pilots to tell it to land, or more likely would have been intercepted by Chinese air force jets when ATC was unable to contact the plane. See Helios Air for an example of where this happened. You'll note that despite the pilots being out of commission for most of the flight the airplane reached Athens then circled, totally on autopilot.

Google doesn't have nearly as much clout with baseband manufacturers as you might think. For most people, the choice isn't between an Android phone and no phone, it's between an Android phone and a different phone, both which will have a baseband. So to the baseband manufacturer, whether their product is running under Android or something else makes very little difference.

I guess is a manufacturer thought having an exclusive lock on Android phones was more profitable than what they are doing now they could go to Google and offer a deal, but since Google has very little control over the handset manufacturers it probably wouldn't have very much clout.

And yes, I am a fan, I am literally in the fan club, had an 8 foot map of Middle Earth as a child and I wore a Frodo Lives! button.

Could it also be that you are 20 years older than you were when you first read them? What enthralls us in middle school isn't necessarily what will entertain us when we get older. People, unlike books, change as they get older, and sometimes don't even notice themselves doing so...

Eh, the same thing can be said about gold as well. There was a lot more gold in the ground 1000 years ago than there is today and every day it gets harder and harder to find more gold.

*Ok, unlike bitcoin gold does have some industrial applications(monster cables notwithstanding), but most people use gold much like they use bitcoin. Maybe if they could make bitcoin bling....

This is actually changing quite rapidly as society changes and in a lot of areas of the (rich) world young women are starting to pull in more than men. While the culture in eastern Europe is certainly different, there was an eye-opening study published recently about young couples in the USA. For the first time since the study began more women than men are "marrying down"(here marrying down means marrying someone with a lower educational attainment than they have). This is largely out of necessity, but necessity often times breeds cultural shifts.

Not to mention there are always more poor people being born, and I doubt all the poor women are getting pregnant by rich men....

silly "chimp giving birth to a human" fallacious argument that creationists spew.

I don't know how silly that proposition is, I mean have you ever watched daytime tv?