Silly. U2's and SR71's were made redundant by satellites many decades ago. And would you prefer that the Iranians had a captured pilot along with their captured plane? OTOH if they're using UAVs, they're probably doing something that they can't do from a satellite.

From TFA:
"The plutonium was in an oxide form about one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter contained in fuel capsule, which itself was inside a graphite and ceramic fuel cask." - Leonard Dudzinski, a NASA program executive.

Is this another example of a NASA guy who doesn't understand metric units, or is the plutonium RTG really just a sphere not much wider than a hair?

And yet the F-35 is supposed to replace the F-16 on the export market. So many of America's allies are supposed to use this extremely expensive, dedicated bomber/strike-aircraft, as their primary self defense/air defense assert?

If the illegal drugs were legalized, you could grow cocain, opium and weed in your garden or greenhouse. And you could probably hire some redneck wizzkid to make meth-amphetamine for you. My point is that the drugs would be extremely cheap to produce in bulk (and users could make their own), and therefore there wouldn't be much money in trading them. Your ruthless drug lords would go bankrupt.

Here's a direct link to the actual codes, from TFA.

How many people actually believed that WMDs were the anything other than an excuse for starting that war? Back in 2003, most of those who were against the war certainly wasn't buying the WMD story. And I'm pretty sure that most of those who were in favor of the war, wanted it regardless of whether Saddam had a few WMD toys or not.

I've always thought that the WMD story was an excuse that nobody actually believed in. (To clarify: In 2003 some people may have believed that Saddam had a few WMDs, but nobody believed that those weapons were the real reason we invaded.)

I think that the point TFA is trying to make is, that the world would be a better place, if the NULL terminated C-string didn't exist.

Personally, I agree with that sentiment. Because a lot of people, including me, are sloppy, lazy coders...

Also, I think that PHK distinctly says that he doesn't blame anyone for the giant one-byte mistake.

I've never understood why there isn't a LED that indicates whether the camera is on, on every laptop computer. It's not like there's any shortage of LED's on the average laptop.

The Slashdot thread is long dead now, but I can still reply to you:

Yes, but Kepler is a relatively small and cheap telescope that's scheduled to die later next year. And it hasn't found anything really interesting yet (interesting in the context of an ET biology discovery).

In my opinion, attempts to find biological life on a planet outside our solar system. Is much more important than all the other research that NASA does. The robot cars that drive around on Mars are cute, and the pictures that the Cassini–Huygens send back from Saturn are pretty. But a space telescope finding ET life (even if it's just some spectral lines that has to be interpreted by astronomists), would shake the world. So my point is: huge, complicated, difficult, expensive space telescopes, should be the main focus of NASA's efforts. (my 2 cents, anyway. does 2 cents help?)

But imagine if JWST had spotted biological life on an Earth like planet 15 light years away. That would have been one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind. All the other things NASA does pales by comparison.

Why, in the name of Jeebus and Thor, did Nokia decide to make this creepy Microsoft executive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop their new CEO? It makes no sense!

His name is Wiggum, not Williams. And the first name is Clancy.

You could send a few bucks to Wikipedia.

Paperwork is important, I guess. But encryption should be more important to the air force generals.

Both the Japanese and the Germans got their asses handed to them in WW2, because they assumed that their crypto was good enough.

As I said. Weak encryption is better than no encryption at all. The Air force has had more than 10 years since Bosnia. When will they be ready to put some encryption on their video signals, for the benefit of the soldiers and marines on the ground?

Why are the military so goddam stupid? They have been transmitting video unencrypted ever since the Bosnia conflict. And apperantly they're still happily going on making same mistake as Joe Sixpack, setting up his new home wireless router.

Don't they understand that even the weakest simplest encryption, is 1000 times better than none at all?