All testing depends on what a human guesses might go wrong, automated or otherwise. The advantage of automated testing is that you can perform those tests thousands of times faster than a human can.

It depends on the nature of your application, and how strong your test suites are, and how damaging it is to your customer or company if your product fails.

If your application has very strong and clear determinism along with few or no cross-interactions, then test cases can be fairly easy to write and can also (importantly) provide a comprehensive quality analysis. With good test cases, you can provide a full regression test multiple times per day. With sufficient confidence in your automated tests, some companies even deploy to production automatically upon successful test execution, this is called Continuous Deployment.

Not too many big shops can realistically provide sufficient test coverage for continuous deployment to be reliable, but small shops can get away with it much more easily. In part this is because their product is probably simpler and easier to test in an automated manner, plus the engineering staff probably understands every aspect of it extremely well (also a side effect of the simpler product).

Finally you can do continuous deployment if your product is a version controlled API. Your customers bind and test against a specific version, and the features of that version are locked, only bug fixes are deployed to that version, while new versions can safely be deployed because customers only use the newer version if they go out of their way to do so, and they presumably will provide test coverage of their own when they increment api versions.

This is a fairly common criticism of Flash, and it's also an invalid one. Flash is an open format, you can download the specification here on Adobe's website. There are even open source players available, see Gnash, Swfdec, and Lightspark. Unfortunately none of them are feature complete, and most are lacking some major features.

What Flash is not is an open standard. Meaning only Adobe gets to advance the standard, and I don't believe the licensing allows for there to be a fork of their standard. They'll tell you how to interoperate, but only they get to guide the technology and decide what to include.

Actually a light background is (somewhat counter-intuitively) easier on the eyes, especially in dim lighting scenarios. The reason comes down to the optical properties of your eyes, which we can talk about in camera terms. A narrow aperture creates a broad depth of field, while a narrow aperture creates a very shallow depth of field. Bright scenery requires a narrow aperture and a broad depth of field, while dark scenery (is certainly moodier) requires a wide open aperture and a very shallow depth of field.

That means that the brighter things are, the smaller your iris is, the more movement you can have in your head without your screen really going out of focus. Very dark setups with dark code (the stereotypical coding setup, it certainly looks cool) actually lead to more eye strain than a bright working environment and white background on your code. Eye strain is caused by constantly shifting focus, and that is alleviated by bright environs and bright code. Dark setups can require only a few millimeters of movement before your eyes are having to refocus. Bright setups can give you several centimeters of movement.

And that's at more than 3.5x the concentration too.

Nevermind that the boiling point of Ne is 27K, while the boiling point of He is 4.2K (roughly 1/7 the absolute temperature). That makes fractional distillation dramatically more efficient for Neon than Helium even if they were at similar concentrations. Fractional distillation is also the process used to separate radiogenic He from natural gas reserves, but with much higher concentrations, yield per energy investment is much higher. Fractional distillation of He from atmosphere is expensive.

There's a difference between being granted a bad patent, and litigating that bad patent. Apple doesn't get a free pass to generate lawsuits just because they were granted them.

So it's ok to steal as long as you don't directly make any money off the theft?

What's the per-device profit margin, and how many apps are shipped on the default firmware? Your recommended damages are probably a lot higher than the Swiss Railway would seek in terms of licensing costs.

Your article states that twice an Exxon Valdez seeps into the gulf naturally each year. Their methodology is pretty suspect - measuring the thickness of naturally occurring oil on the surface, extrapolating the expected bacterial consumption rate and natural churn rate, and multiplying this by the surface area of the gulf. But I'll accept their figures for the sake of argument. So that's 84,000 m^3. Deepwater Horizon was 780,000 m^3, 18.6 times larger.

You're saying that releasing 18 times that volume over the course of only a few months in a single location about 40 miles from a coast probably doesn't have much if any measurable ecological impact? Maybe Exxon Valdez was no big deal either, I mean that's the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure there are hundreds of times that much oil seeping naturally into the ocean, right?

The money quote from that article regarding whether there is a corresponding explosion of population of life that feeds on this bacteria:

So... no. If I had to speculate, the bacteria is most effective in high concentrations of dispersant. That dispersant is likely detrimental to higher lifeforms, so it's probably a smorgasbord of poisoned food. A shrimper who pulls in around 6% of his pre-disaster haul, that sounds like a completely devastated ecology. Also from the above article, they used dispersants right as tuna were spawning, and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature, so the effects of that might not hit the tuna fishing industry for 3 more years.

I, and others here, have given you several opportunities to corroborate your story with substantiating details, including offering specific questions you could answer to strengthen your case. Each time you ignore, redirect, or outright refuse to answer the questions. You have something to hide here, and the most likely thing that you're hiding is that your story is a lie. You have given me and others no reason to think otherwise.

If you refuse to corroborate, then yes, the only reasonable assumption is that you're a liar. I've welcomed you to demonstrate otherwise and you won't even make a superficial effort but once again take the offensive - attacking the questions rather than defending the premise.

What was his badge number, what city were you in and what was the date? Did you ask any questions of him while he was searching you and he refused to answer them? If the very first words he spoke were "you are free to go," how did he communicate to you that he was detaining you for search?

From the new 15 words of information you were so graciously willing to part with, you describe a single event, while earlier you said:

Or did both incidents played out exactly the same?

There are bad cops who overstep their authority and deserve to get called out for it, for example, read Carlos Miller's blog. I'm not convinced you were ever truly wronged by a cop though, your story is too light on details, too heavily peppered with unsubstantiated criticisms and insults, and even what little detail you're willing to part with is internally inconsistent.

So are you refusing to answer the question? You claim to have been stopped for no reason, searched for no reason, and had your civil liberties violated for no reason on multiple occasions. I don't think it's unreasonable for others to be curious about additional details, particularly since from your descriptions of the events, you have good cause for a formal complaint against these officers.

You got a badge number, right? Did you file a complaint? Were there extenuating circumstances (eg, you matched the description of the perpetrator of a recently committed crime)? What you're saying is so incredibly at odds with most people's experience, and you claim it happened multiple times (discounting the fluke aspect), but refuse to corroborate your story even far enough to describe any aspect of it in greater detail.

To be honest, it makes the story sound made up. It sounds like you have some beef with law enforcement in general, and are trying to make up a story to support your cynical view, but you overstepped, and realize that you can't reveal additional details without either taking your story farther into the realm of implausibility or exposing your story as a farce.

If you legitimately had your rights violated, then you should want to see the perpetrators of that crime punished, both for your own sake, as well as the sake of any potential future victims of theirs. Which means you should be providing as accurate, truthful, and thorough a description of the events as possible, including the location, date, time, officer's badge number, and as much additional detail as you can reasonably recall, such as the nature of the verbal interactions. Unless and until you're willing to do that, your story just sounds like you got caught out on a bullshit response, and are taking the offensive to protect your pride.

I'd love to be proven wrong. Note, I'm taking this path of confronting you over the other path available to me of spending all 5 of my mod points marking you as a troll, which I believe you most likely are. However I'll foe you for now so that I'm not baited into believing an uncorroborated story of yours some time in the future.

So do you see the failure of your reasoning? Should we only require Hep B vaccines for the children of bad parents? Or maybe policy needs to consider more than all the happy scenarios and concern itself with the troubling scenarios as well. I'd go one farther and say that it should primarily concern itself with the troubling scenarios.

But it is mentioned several ways in the NIH document I provided earlier.

Wait, what? How is a vaccine detrimental? I think you misunderstand the fundamental premise here.

Do you have some figures to suggest that the net damage is greater pre-vaccination than post-vaccination? Keep in mind you can't compare rates between a country with frequent vaccination against a country with infrequent vaccination because of herd immunity. Do you even have figures about death or disability related to HepB vaccines? You're making a lot of unsupported claims here.

I showed my sources, where are yours?

Oh ok, so a common vector for Hep B according to the NIH should not be a consideration in vaccine policy because you personally aren't affected by it. Cool.

I mentioned that. I also mentioned how vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system, and that immunocompromised patients are given higher doses than other patients - vaccines are inactivated or attenuated. They are enough for your immune system to learn from, but do not represent any significant strain on the immune system. Doses are carefully considered with that in mind.

All of them, I addressed them point by point by citing an authority.

Without question. And particularly for diseases which have strong herd immunity due to significant vaccination rates, the individual risk of receiving a vaccine may in fact outweigh the risk of not receiving the vaccine. However the collective risk is substantially less because you benefit from the vaccinations received by others. In fact, that's what this whole article is about, by weakening members of the herd, we weaken the whole herd.

And should vaccination policy include clauses such as "Unless you're good parents, and promise to remain disease free"?

Have you now? Maybe you should research a little farther, might I suggest the National Institute of Health's article on HepB. Let me quote a couple of entries from there:

* Direct contact with blood in health care settings
Seems like kids might be at roughly the same exposure risk as most adults who don't work in health care. Also I wonder if kids with HepB positive parents are at any risk of exposure to their parents' blood. Probably not, right?

* Sexual contact with an infected person
Sure, infants aren't having sex. Well, unless there's an abusive situation for them, but those kids deserve to get Hepatitis, right?

* Shared personal items (such as toothbrushes, razors, and nail clippers) with an infected person
I wonder if kids ever have their nails clipped. Only if they've given up their dream of having the world record for longest fingernails!

A couple more for good measure:
* The hepatitis B virus can be passed to an infant during childbirth if the mother is infected.
Risk factors for hepatitis B infection include: Being born, or having parents who were born in regions with high infection rates

Right there is a few thousand reasons to try harder to increase the vaccination rate. Also quoting infection rates of a commonly vaccinated against disease is a terrible argument against the need for that vaccination. Tetanus infection rates are pretty low, maybe that vaccination should be deprecated as well?

You realize, of course, that immune systems actually get stronger in response to threats. Vaccines don't leave you weaker, they leave you stronger. It's certainly possible to overwhelm an immune system - particularly a young one - but the tiny amount of virus in a vaccine does not introduce any significant immunostress in even a young or immunocompromised patient. In fact, standard treatment for all but incredibly ill patients (patients who are so ill they need to remain in quarantine) is to give a LARGER dose of a vaccine if their immune system is weak.

Sarcasm notwithstanding, I have not dismissed you as stupid, I've dismissed you as ill-informed. Your stupidity lies not in your lack of knowledge, but rather in how you attempt to spread your ignorance as fact and represent it as being highly informed when the very first response in a Google search for the disease name thoroughly debunks your entire position.

This is not different regardless of cross-licensing deals. The little guy with no patent warchest still faces a gauntlet of patents. Their biggest enemies are not megacorporations, they are various little patent trolls trying to score enough settlements to get a stronger legal team to go after increasingly large opponents. Megacorps don't pursue guys making $1M gross, any potential payout is dwarfed by the legal fees.

Anyway none of the startup ecosystem is dramatically influenced by the patent ecosystem at the high end, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence or not of cross-licensing.

I wanted that to be awesome, but the highest rated game is 3.5 stars and is composed exclusively of 30x30 colored squares? And still somehow the framerate is terrible? The next highest at just a pixel above 3 stars looks nicer, but only gets 4-5 fps.

Honestly, HTML5 is the right solution - eventually, but it's not ready to stand up against Flash just yet. These are the kinds of games a Commodore64 would have run, and faster.