I have been driving a Sonata Hybrid for more than a year and so far it has performed very close to the advertised 40mpg.

I am no hypermiler, just drive it less agressively, use syntetic oil and keep tires at 40psi.

I don't think getting news that your loved ones are ok after one of the biggest earthquakes in history is bullshit.

Here in Texas, I was driving back from a concert with my Cousin when she got a text from her bf in Chile about the earthquake just a minute after it ended. We were able to get "I'm ok" news from all our family living there within the first hour after the quake thanks to SMS.

Twitter started as a system where you could send an SMS that would be broadcasted to all your friends (subscribers). In fact you can still register your cellphone and use it to send updates instead of logging in. You can also set it to send you SMS every time specific people you follow posts updates.

The big earthquakes both in Chile and Japan proved SMS is a very useful form of communication in times of crisis: while voice lines got easily saturated making it almost impossible to talk to someone there, text messages kept being delivered quickly.

Every accident is preventable... after the fact.

What would have happened if we had applied the same mindset after the first fatal car or airplane accident? Would these technologies ever develop?

100% safety is impossible. There is always something you miss, and you will only discover after an accident. You can either get paralized by it and stop any further development while commissions investigate for years resulting in added bureaucracy or you can take calculated risks and press on.

The FAA would have never allowed the Wright Brothers to take off in their experimental plane, too unsafe.

I agree.

Trying to hold space travel to a 100% safety standard is ridiculous. If we held any new kind of transportation to such standard we would be still riding horse carriages.

I worked for Bechtel Corporation in a construction project for a big copper mine in the late 90's. I was in the team in charge of configuring and testing all the control systems through the plant and we started the day with a 10-15 minutes stand-up meeting with the subcontractors so we all were in the same page about the day's work.

You might know what everybody in your team did, but do you know what they are going to work today?. It might conflict with something you plan to do. Remember in a real agile team, tasks are not assigned but picked. Anybody can work on anything they want and somebody might plan to take on the next task you wanted.

Roadblocks are reported and then you move on to another task while the scrummaster takes care of them. You mention them on the daily stand-up just to remind her/him you cannot finish this other task until that issue is resolved.

What's curious is that despite being developing software for 12 years and scrummaster for 6 this is the first time I ever hear about this Dijkstra's algorithm.

Of course they are, their business model is all about controlling all phases of distribution, even artificially keeping supply low to increase prices (Disney Vault).

MU offered artists a system to cut the RIAA middlemen. RIAA members of course will do anything in their power to preserve their revenue streams, including calling political favors to remove the competition.

Indictments are one-sided towards the prosecution distorting everything and bending facts to make it look way worse than it really is. That is why you need a good lawyer if indicted.

Did you believe everything SCO claimed in their lawsuit against IBM?

This all plays into the open source movement--why don't people try making money off WORKING, rather than ROYALTIES? It's completely FUCKED beyond imagination.

Because royalties are a form of passive income and a key to build wealth. It's the best keep secret of rich people including lawyers and politicians. They all invest in forms of passive income and have a vested interest in protect their way of life.

I agree. I found 3D underwhelming and I skip movies if they are not playing in plain ol' 2D screens.

I guess the extra $5 for 3D glasses and a headache are taking their toll at the box office.

There is a BBC documentary somewhere in youtube where a submarine nuclear reactor engineer said GE took their reactor design (30 to 50 MW), made it 10+ times bigger and named it the Mark 1.

Power plant reactors are so huge and contain so much fuel it is physically impossible to contain a meltdown with current technology. Engineers solved this by declaring that "meltdowns can't happen" and added safety systems that made building nuclear power plants way more expensive than initially thought. Guess what?... meltdowns still happened.

If a nuclear submarine reactor melts down, they can just replace the reactor and be on their way. Can't do the same with 3-mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

After Fukushima, the only way I would ever support nuclear power is if they come up with a proven way to safely contain meltdowns. Smaller reactors at nuclear submarine scale might be one way.

This, every time I read a petition and people organizing against SOPA or whatever other law the *IAA comes up with I just face-palm and *cough* first amendment *cough*.

There is no need to organize against this law. The day it gets signed (if ever) it will get overturned on first amendment grounds.

Congress keeps trying to wipe their asses in the constitution and the courts will keep knocking them down.

I might be wrong but expecting infinite growth in stock prices doesn't sound sustainable. The biggest scam Wall Street has pulled is making investors focus on stock prices instead of dividends.

Focusing in dividends might be boring but they are a passive form of income, a good way to build wealth.

The issue with the way software patents are enforced currently is that, unlike a physical invention, you can't come up with a completely different approach to implement the idea and not violate it. In the physical domain, clean room reverse engineering is allowed, but software patents have been allowed to be so ambiguous your implementation is probably covered.

I think software patents could be fine as long as they are specific to a SINGLE IMPLEMENTATION of an algorithm or idea. If your patent was implemented in C++, then the same algorithm implemented in Perl or even COBOL SHOULD NOT BE COVERED.

Under this concept, the way to invalidate patent claims is to simply show in court a different implementation. This would take out the teeth out of patents, remove lawsuits based on vague claims that might or might not be covered while still "promoting the arts" since now you can both license your invention and allow others to improve on it.