The accident you refer to happened four years ago. A little over a year later Scaled Composites released their findings into the cause of the accident and shared everything they learned in how to more safely handle the materials they were using with the industry.

Since then I haven't heard of any accidents. So please inform us what other accidents have occured at Scaled Composites relating to the rocket motors.

Furthermore, I've love to hear about your sources that characterize the current state of Scaled Composites' rocket motor development as being "problematic".

I think your information is four years old. Scaled Composites already has a schedule in place that includes, later this year, firing the rocket motor in flight, possibly even putting SpaceShipTwo into space by the end of this year (but that will probably happen in early 2012). And by the end of 2012 we'll probably see the first paid flights.

The engines are fine.

Future PS3 games will require the latest firmware be installed in order to play.

There's no way in hell I want to install a firmware that intentionally creates a backdoor into my system.

Therefore I have no other choice but to stop buying PS3 games. Sony will be losing my (albeit small) source of revenue and perhaps others will handle the situation in a similar way. Thus Sony loses out on revenue they'd otherwise have had they not made this move.

And I wonder if those in such a position will turn to piracy simply because they don't want to install a backdoored firmware -- further hurting Sony's bottom line.

Sony really doesn't seem to think these things through.

Fixed vertical navigation elements are a bad design choice. Anyone whose browser window is shorter than the vertical navigation element will not be able to scroll down and access those items in the menu that are below the height of the browser window.

Links are no longer underlined in summaries. This is bad because it makes locating and identifying clickable text much more difficult. The color and contrast difference between the non-link black color and the dark-green link color is too small to make identifying links easy without the underlined text. Underlined text representing links is a convention that's been in place since the modern web came into being. It's what people expect and are use to. By removing the underline of links you're removing a very critical piece of usability from the design.

And lastly, but having a fixed horizontal element along the top you make linking to bookmarks (named anchors) within the web page far more problematic. The browser will move the window down to a position that puts the anchor at the top of the window. But the top of the window is now blocked by this horizontal bar. As a result anyone who clicks on a bookmark to a position in the page will then be forced to scroll up a bit to reveal the crucial first few lines of text that they're trying to get to. What's worse is if a user doesn't realize this they may wind up missing out on critical information and may come away from reading comments or an article with the wrong impression or understanding of the content.

You're assuming the NIC manufacturer is conducting audits in the first place. If they are, there's probably single person who maintains a list of good hash values for the firmware. Bribe that person and the audits won't matter.

The easier solution is to simply buy the cards from the OEM, flash them with a malicious firmware, then resell those cards at discount prices. Are NIC manufacturers purchasing off-the-shelf goods and conducting audits on those? Probably not.

And even then, you could always create a worm that detects your NIC and flashes the firmware then removes itself. You've been rooted and there's no trace at the OS level of it and even if the NIC manufacturer is auditing their products off-the-shelf they're not auditing the one in your computer.

Blizzard has had some crap QA issues before, but 4.0.1 was one of their most atrocious releases to the point that they said some of the Mage glyph bugs just simply can't be fixed right now and that they had to just deal with it. How does crap like that get by their QA? We're not talking about some arcane feature with a small bug, we're talking about a major component of the system that is totally broken.

I think you really see it in the patch notes, which tend to contain about 1/10th of the actual changes made in a given patch. For example 4.0.1 includes a ton of new UI features such as graphical elements used to alert the user that a special ability is ready to be used. However nothing was ever disclosed about it nor were players given a chance to learn what each graphical identity means when its displayed. It becomes trial and error. Watch for the new graphic to appear, now look at your list of buffs to see if there's some new, temp buff there. Wait for it to go away and see if the graphic goes away as well. That's a lot of tedious crap to deal with, especially when you're in the middle of a boss fight.

I wonder if this guy's approach to development by keeping development teams small is responsible for the poor quality of both documentation and product.

When there stops being data to the contrary, I guess.

Care to share the contrary data?

When do we move on from whether or not the planet is warming up to why it's warming up?

This is just mathematician masturbation and it drives me nuts.

Order of birth, as is the exclusivity of the day of birth, are not given in this problem. Therefore boy,girl and girl,boy should not be included as separate items in the set, but rather treated simply as one item. Also why the whole Tuesday thing should be ignored as well. We're not told the other child was or was not born on a Tuesday. The information is irrelevant.

* That the evidence shows that the risk of having a crash is increased both for vehicles traveling slower than the average speed, and for those traveling above the average speed.
* That the risk of being injured increases exponentially with speeds much faster than the median speed.
* That the severity of a crash depends on the vehicle speed change at impact.
* That there is limited evidence that suggests that lower speed limits result in lower speeds on a system wide basis.
* That most crashes related to speed involve speed too fast for the conditions.
* That more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of traffic calming.

Median speed. These stats are based around median speed. Increase the speed limit to 100mph and nothing changes according to these stats. So let's do that!

But

* That the severity of a crash depends on the vehicle speed change at impact.
* That most crashes related to speed involve speed too fast for the conditions.

Really? These are quoted as reasons for speed limits?

Did you know most crashes that occur when it's raining out are due to slippery roads caused by rain?
Did you know most crashes that happen at night are caused by low visibility?
Did you know that if you don't get into a car, you're less likely to be involved in a car accident?

Right, so let's put limits on rain, the night, and ban all cars.

The real cause for the vast majority of accidents is the driver simply not being aware of both his or her surroundings and his or her's car's abilities. Like trying to take an exit in a top-heavy SUV at 60 and not realizing you might just roll over or that the light has turned red so you should probably stop before you get to the intersection. If you want to make a real impact on automobile-related accidents then there needs to be a major overhaul in driver's ed to include on-track emergency driving training and as well as requiring drivers to take refresher courses (which include on-track emergency driving training) every 5 to 10 years. You want a template? Look at Sweden, who have one of the lowest automobile accident rates in the world.

This seems to prove that DRM is bad even for the companies that use it.

DRM on old software no longer maintained could make it difficult for companies to redistribute their old software via new channels in the future. Imagine how many DRM'd CD/DVD games there are that may never be made available through online distribution systems like Steam because the copyright owner can't break the CD/DVD requirement mechanism and are unable to recompile the code to remove that restriction.

Do you think the people who implemented such DRM back in the 1990s and early 2000s ever thought about such a possibility?

What future distribution channels will be created that current software won't be distributed through because of limitations created through implementing DRM? Maybe there's a whole new industry about to be born around legally cracking DRM for copyright owners? Or does the DMCA make cracking DRM illegal even if it's done by or on behalf of the copyright owner?