"in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and "Fuck off Google", "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window"

"So we'll continue to work with the city on these fees, and in the meantime will fund MUNI passes for low income students [an existing program] for the next two years.'"

One of these groups is judged by our society as being "evil" and the other as "progressive".

You've got to be kidding, right? Imposing beliefs on children is EXACTLY what schools do, every day. Ever hear of political correctness?

Perhaps it should be rule number one, but actually it's Rule 16.2 of MISRA-C:2004 (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association, Guidelines for the use of the C language in critical systems):

Functions shall not call themselves, either directly or indirectly.

The rule actually appeared first in MISRA-C:1998. Each rule is accompanied by a detailed rationale that I will not reproduce verbatim here as the standard is not open; one must pay for the privilege. The rationale for 16.2 is that recursion may cause stack overflows. I only cite the rule itself because it appears in public testimony and also on the (first) page linked by this story ...... which you obviously did not read.

Because MISRA also disallows constructs such as function call indirection, self modifying code, etc. a compiler is entirely capable of detecting recursion and reporting the violation as an error. MISRA compliant compilers do exactly that.

Yes Virginia, the largest auto manufacturer on Earth ignores the very thing that was designed to prevent simple, common, easily predictable failures such as stack overflow despite the fact that the cost of compliance is much, much smaller than a rounding error for an outfit like Toyota.

Also, despite the fact that Industry dutifully identified this specific problem in a published standard at least 16 years ago, compliance is apparently not yet a requirement by government regulators. I suspect they're too busy investigating child seat manufacturers or Telsa batteries or whatever other politically high profile crisis that giant, engineer-free gaggle of NTSB lawyers fill their bankers hours with.

And that, kind reader, is why we must outlaw meat.

That is one genius sig.

No, he's right, the 17th Amendment has turned the Senate, which was originally intended to represent state vs. state, into a second House of Representatives, where Senators are simply elected at-large. This was a huge weakening in the careful balance of power that existed between the states and the federal government.

The counter-argument is any semblance of a balance of power between the states and the federal government was thrown out the door anyway by the Civil War. The northern states did not allow the southern states to withdraw from the union, beat them in the war, and then dictated the terms by which they could rejoin (their state constitutions had to be rewritten.)

Yeah, but a broken DIGITAL clock is wrong .... oh, darn.

You've got the right concept (separation of POWERS), but the wrong adversaries (church and state). The church has no civil power at all. The separation of it from the state is to protect the church from being corrupted by the state.

The adversaries the founders had in mind were the co-equal branches of government: executive, legislative, and the court. Each of these branches does have significant power.

Grrr. If you can't (won't?) state your opponent's point of view accurately, then why would you ever expect to have a decent conversation?

My accusation was limited to a lack of understanding; never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ... a lack of understanding, as they almost say.

Amen. Accountability. It's always been obvious to me why simply revising comments isn't tolerable and I'm glad that view predominates.

And AC isn't a counterpoint to accountability either, for whomever might want to throw that one back at me; AC elevates attributed comments, on several levels.

I'm pretty sure contemporary ideas about UX design are inappropriate for Slashdot. The one or two sentences that Twitter/Facebook/WhatsApp accommodate won't work here. This place indulges people that like to write, and people that don't mind lengthy posts.

The beta site shows a serious indifference to that; the amount of wasted space is just amazing. Fully 45% of the comments view is just empty, half of it gone to the infinitely long side bar that Beta fails to wrap into. No one that understands what this site is for could possibly have made that basic mistake for as long as Beta has been in the works.

Bootstrap et al. don't deal with "long form" threaded forums, so that design mentality won't work.

Here is a possibly novel idea that will actually be appreciated by at least this contributor, and probably most others; comment editing with revision control (a la Wikipedia.) It has to be revision controlled or the trolls will abuse editing. Allow readers to punish such trolls with moderation while the rest of us get the benefit of correcting minor mistakes.

There. That wasn't hard. A real improvement that caters to actual contributors, as opposed to hypothetical users that want to scribble a grammatically challenged half sentence 20 times an hour and don't read.

Anyhow, thanks for the step backwards on this and your participation in the conversation. You all could have gone bull-headed and made this situation even worse. So good on your for that.

None at all.

And yes, beta has serious problems. Regressing to having to bang on the "Load More..." button instead of "Load All Comments" while not logged in is one glaring example. The fact that comments don't flow around the end the right side ad bar is another.

This is not Twitter. People write lengthy comments here; please don't piss away space with huge margins and poor layout.

A petition of the White House to `Restore Net Neutrality By Directing the FCC to Classify Internet Providers as "Common Carriers" just attained the 100k signatures required for a response.

I'm sure a number of you would have liked to have known about that and signed it at the time... but the story submission was declined. Guess there were too many terribly important climate change stories or something.

A good point. When I took geometry in HS I didn't like it and resisted learning it. It all seemed like just a bunch of arbitrary axioms that one memorized in order to solve puzzles, to my way of thinking. Later on in my education I ran across Euclid's Elements, and the way he put those axioms together into a logical system was a thing of beauty and elegance that I understood intuitively. Same content, but I only had the aptitude to understand it one way, but not the other.