I suspect novice lawyers who so happen to lack scruples are uncertain about what they are likely to get away with, so they start out not behaving egregiously scummy. At times goes on, the scummy lawyers eventually figure out "cash cows". The "cash cows" are improved in their moneymaking aspect with volume. Volume in legal gray areas breeds minor mistakes. Minor mistakes breed complacence that leads to major mistakes. Every major mistake brings a small chance of pissing off an unusually astute judge.

You are assuming the hard stuff is the easy stuff, just because it is easy to describe with abstract human language. It is easy to say "simulate a healthy brain down at the cellular level", just like it is easy to say "track every grain of sand in a sandstorm". But actually doing either is very, very, very hard, and tweaking up the amount of computing power on hand does not really help. The hard part is not the computations. The hard part is getting the initial conditions correct.

It is not the computing power that is the problem, it is understanding what you are trying to simulate well enough that simulation is possible.

I suppose it might be possible to use a super advanced future electron microscope to, say, tear apart your brain a few molecules at a time and examine it one piece at a time. That might give enough data. Or it might not. And having vaporized your brain, does that data help? Can I combine that data with another data set from a second or a hundredth vaporized and formerly living brain to get the data I need. Hard to say. This is speculation. This is science fiction that might lead to real science decades in the future.

That we lack the data to even guess at what reasonable initial conditions would be is not speculation. That is a fact. That we are not even close is not speculation. That is a fact.

Please mod parent up.

It is not a question of computing power, but whether the feedback loops down at the cellular level are correct. And even if those are correct, there are intermediate structures that must be tuned or the "brain" is a useless jumble. And even if those are very close, it would still take only tiny errors in initial conditions for the "brain" to be insane or otherwise crippled.

Correct. This is a necessary rule, or parties would fear any kind of concession during an unsuccessful negotiation would tie their hands if the matter eventually ends up in a courtroom. That would poison any effort to avoid trial.

The space shuttle was always a military-industrial complex socialism dressed up in a NASA publicity stunt. The very lucrative American aeronautics companies did not want to compete with a viable Russian space program, even after the Cold War was very obviously over.

The biggest problem is South Korea would complain about the US precipitating a war, for good reason. They dislike the North Korean gov't, of course, but NK is quite capable of flattening half of Seoul with conventional weapons.

This is a situation where the US just needs to be a calm adult and let South Korea take the lead.

In the long game, continued NK belligerence as we have seen over the last decade will eventually provoke Japan to build a nuclear deterrence. The threat of that expensive future nuclear arms is what is going to get China to talk some sense into NK...eventually. In the short term, China has incentive to do nothing. In the long term, China is probably more worried about being boxed in a nuclear Japan and a nuclear South Korea (and a nuclear India) than it cares about Korea.

In the uglier scenarios, QA started with an explicitly optimistic schedule and then were asked to do less testing four or five times.

If someone tries to finger QA for a bug getting through, they will simply get laughed at.

I am a QA person with a couple non-engineering science degrees. I think what gives me the edge is the ability to imagine what might go wrong, and the curiosity to inform that kind of brainstorming.

I admit I do it for the paycheck. While it is not glamorous, it can be fun.

I would also note a certain disincentive towards moving into Dev, based on having been around the block. When a project goes completely to hell, the Devs get "asked" to work 70 hour weeks. Strangely enough, the QA workload drops off...because it is not possible to do much testing on something that does not work.

Your annual Dev salary is certainly higher, but how does your pay rate per hour of stress work out?

Cem Kaner makes the argument that the most important person in the QA department for a company is the CEO. If the CEO sets reasonable expectations, then constructive conversations about investments in quality are possible.

The majority of CEOs are sales guy who are inclined to kowtow to the sales and marketing side, but are want someone else to take the heat if things go badly. Thus they carefully avoid making commitments about quality. Without expectations set, it does not really matter what a QA engineer says. They will get steamrolled by the tacit decision to always ship made at the C-level.

Mod parent up, please.

Perhaps there should be courses for various specialized workplace skill sets available at university, but that is a really lousy model for designing a major.

#1 is muddier than you are trying to suggest. Using a BB gun at close range sounds like clear intent to cause an injury, and any action to intentionally injure that results in death can arguably be manslaughter. We have not established that the student in question intended to create what could be defined as an explosion.

Please mod parent up.

Doing anything and everything hard is about doing things that are likely to be mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes.

Cleaning up after your mistake is part of the game. Learn from it. Move forward.

In fact, I would strenuously argue what we have here is a wonderful age appropriate mistake, and the last thing we want to do is punish this behavior.

"Teaching to the test" is mostly a problem is your tests are very flawed. The tests do not need to be egregiously flawed, but it is expensive in time & expertise to create and maintain and administer and grade good quality tests.

Tests that are cheap to make and cheap to grade have many flaws. NCLB only cares about the common kinds of tests, all of which are cheaply done. That is the root of the problem.

It is traditional for the People (the gov't) to speak on behalf of the victims of injuries that result in death, not the family. That is a big part of the point of having a crime called murder in the first place -- so that we stay away from the clan-based justice that ruled the Dark Ages and other barbaric times.

In the black girl's case, there is not even an injury, yet the People are supposed to get involved? Are we supposed to care about the embarrassment of a school official over a dead child?

Fair points. I take a "nuanced" view that Peak Oil is partially correct. The widely held assumption at the time, believed not only by this particular theorist, was that a prosperous world economy could not run on $40 per barrel oil and $60 oil could crash the economy. Now we know that there are some problems, but the world economy can at least wheeze forward on $100 oil. Given time, the economy could adjust to even higher oil prices.

In a roundabout way, I am suggesting that Peak Oil may be wrong or (partially) right, but it is probably unimportant. As long as the transition happens slowly, the ability of the world economy to adjust to high oil prices has been underestimated in many quarters.

The other thing to consider is that Peak Oil, defined narrowly, might be correct, but alternative hydrocarbons such as gas from fracking can alleviate demand on crude oil.