What happened /.?
It's like I don't even know you anymore.

They hate us so much, we must kill them.

How dare you, sir. How dare you pollute this debate with FACTS.

When I was in the fifth grade (1982), I visited the Caterpillar International headquarters' IT center in East Peoria. For some damfool reason, they had a robotic mail carrier that followed a trail of chemicals laid down into the carpeting to wander around the floor, carrying mail and such.

This was before email, I guess, but no, I don't know why they had it either. It was boss, though.

"at least 8 digits, alpha-numeric with at least one unique character!"

A surprisingly common password.

There is no way there were 700,000 people who wanted to watch Fast & Furious 6.

Two words:
Chicken Trebuchet.

And they said I was mad at the academy. Maaaaaaaad.

You realize that chart has a log scale, right? It is not a matter of designing for infinite life, it is a matter of designing for "infinite enough". This is how they make aluminum engine blocks and heads. Sure it will fail in fatigue eventually. But after 50 years or so, it is time to replace the dern thing anyway. In other words, fatigue strength is just one more variable to design around. Even if the part was made from titanium or steel, they still might make the decision to not design for "infinite" life due to other overriding design considerations. Weight, for example.

The concern with the wheel design was not fatigue itself, but rather a higher peak load during the fatigue cycle. The wheels were not designed for the type of terrain they landed on. More bad luck than bad planning because the type of terrain they landed on had not been observed on Mars before.

In my experience, it is very difficult to successfully design for conditions that have never been observed before.

Yay! I'm an extreme minority!

And who the fuck is Dane Cook?

I cry every damn time I read that one. And I don't care who knows. Heck. I cry just reading the wikipedia entry for Spirit.

That collection of nuts, bolts, and solar panels did more with less and used up every last bit of its capability in the pursuit of its mission. Yes I know I am anthropomorphising a bit (a lot), but I DON'T CARE.

No flying cars.

But we do have videos about how there are no flying cars on slashdot. That's worth something. Well, for very small values of "something", anyway.

You realize all those "chicks" are actually spam-bots using images culled from inactive instagram accounts, right?

And since when do "gangstas" post on /.?

The old maxim:
"If trebuchet is not the answer, you are asking the wrong question."

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trebuchet loaded with a dumptruck full of pennies.

We are talking about bandwidth, right?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

$260,000. I'm sure Verizon loses that in the couch cushions every other month.