One that a slight slip anywhere in millions of lines of code could produce random memory corruptions with unpredictable consequences. Who would have believed that anybody would even dream of using a language with constructs such as ptr++. And we are surprised to find bugs...

+1. And obviously so.

+1

+1. Astronauts are obsolete technology, get over it. People may soon become obsolete for many other tasks as well.

An at least vaguely meaningful measure might be how much it raises the radiation in given environments compared to the background radiation. If 1% then it is not very significant regardless of how many trillion Bequerels are involved.

The experiments on the ISS are almost worthless. A solution looking for a problem. Certainly not worth their huge cost. The reason for having the ISS is most certainly not the science.

And for the enormous cost of servicing the Hubble it could have simply been replaced, several times over if necessary and with the latest technology each time.

The new Webb telescope will not have any human servicing, being too far away. If it needs any, a robot will be sent up to do the job.

Anthony

-1. What, exactly, would that achieve? Better to send some better robots to Mars that can actually dig some decent holes and look for life. Humans are obsolete technology for space exploration.

People are obsolete technology for space exploration. Have been for decades.

If the money wasted on manned exploration such as the ISS has actually been spent of useful things we would have the Webb telescope up and running some time ago, probes on Europa etc.

Get over it, Buck Rogers is just for TV. The real world aint like that. And the ISS is an extremely expensive way of producing a bit of TV.

I'm looking forward to Genuine People Personalities, particularly Marvin.

Remember that turkey that flew through a flock of geese and landed in the Hudson river? Us weekend warriors know that they just let their instruments fly the plane.

Given that is the case the display screens might as well show pretty scenery. Show a nice view over the mountains on a clear day rather than the ugly storm that is actually outside the aircraft. Or maybe just waves rolling in on a beach. Something soothing to pass the time. Airbus is not going to let the pilots actually control the plane anyway given that that often leads to disasters.

The major source of security issues is the bloated, complex software that we use. So as a first step how about a new standard "Secure HTML". It would look a lot like HTML 4.0 but with many things removed. Of course no JavaScript, IFrames or CSS. Very simple formatting. Content on a page would need to come form the same domain (no request forging). Links of page would always show the off page address, in plain ASCII. Etc.

Just enough to provide functional web pages without glitz. The goal being to make the entire browser code no bigger than the original Mosaic code. So that it can be thoroughly reviewed and made really bug free.

Normal users would not touch it. But for anyone with access to a SCADA system, for example, it could be mandatory. That cuts down one major source of infection.

Here in Australia (and I think the UK) a taxi driver license is cheap. But you also need a taxi CAR license costs several hundred thousand dollars. Nobody wealthy enough to own a taxi license actually drives a taxi. So taxi drivers are dirt poor, usually Indians on dubious visas. But the taxi owners love their right to tax fairs. Currently about 55% of a fair goes to the owner.

Uber is great if it breaks up that nonsense.

Surely Google already knows where it is best for you to go. It knows everything else about you...

Well, the Australian system is pretty fraud proof. Ballots are put into sealed boxes. Scrutineers appointed by the candidates supervise the count. I've been a scrutineer, and it is all pretty efficient and friendly in practice. Count is made on election night. And it is much, much cheaper than the computer systems.

The bigger problem is all that the MBAs in charge do is twiddle with the tinsel, and do not address the deeper problems in semantics that people have asked for. Such as being able to break up mangled conversations. Or add notes to an important conversation to summarize it. Or to add a meaningful heading. There are several others.

GMail used to be innovative. Hard core slash dotters will know that all sent mail belongs in one place only, namely a folder called Sent Mail. GMail introduced conversations to emails, producing threads (just like Usenet...). They also introduced the idea that the same email could be put in more than one folder (label) at the same time. So it could go in Sent Mail, CustomerX, ScalingIssues, and Outsanding all at the same time. Way beyond traditional IMAP.

These things were not done as the result of some market research survey. They were done because the engineers involved thought it would be cool. It would be the way that they personally would like to use email.

But that was before the MBA and user interface experts took over. Just change the window dressing, dumb things down, target the idiot user.

I am actually looking to move to Zoho mail.

As to slash dot, how about just recognizing blank lines as paragraph breaks. That would be enough.