It is all too easy to join the mob, shout invectives at the speaker and drown out reasoned debate. This post has it exactly right. We don't know yet whether the 36 state system simply underestimated the traffic, has some sloppy coding - which will be corrected quickly, or has fatally flawed architecture that cannot be easily corrected. Did they use Top Down Design, Bottom Up Design, or perhaps, as seems more likely, the designers are advocates for the Agile Software Manifesto. By January, we will know a great deal more about what they did, what went right and what went wrong. The are important lessons here for anyone who writes software, and it is too early to make valid conclusions until the details are made public.

You got the wrong Arthur Dent quote - should have been this: “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

So where is the part about the captured Space Aliens and their ship?

credit for the invention belongs to Dr. Joseph V. Foa who was awarded US Patent 3213802 for a "train in a tube" in 1965. This was the basis for a number of years of research into the concept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s.

(Did I misread the headline?) Monsanto, Unocal, Dow Chemical, and Goldman Sachs are a far greater threat to human existence. When it comes to Evil, Verizon is merely an annoyance.

to function without interference, we would not have such problems. Right? Maybe Ron Paul, or one of his disciples will explain how that works in a case like this.

If you want this kind of fiction on a daily basis, just watch Fox "News"

The observation is well taken. Prior to the Iraq war, Debka had a series of stories from "inside sources" who said that Sadam had constructed vast underground bunkers in the desert in which he had hidden his weapons of mass destruction. It is hard to tell whether a story on Debka is intelligence or propaganda.

and you expect to be censored, make sure there are plenty of draft copies floating around your agency, and send one to Wikileaks for review.

As most slashdotters already know, nothing slows your computer down more effectively than Mcafee AV--even if you have the latest and fastest Intel CPU. Optimizing Mcaffe's code would probably add more real horsepower to Intel's processors and be less expensive than designing a new generation of chips.

How does this bozo think owning "British Sky Broadcasting" gives him a trademark for sky? If he gets away with this he will next go after British Airways and British Petroleum, followed by British Broadcasting Corporation and American Broadcasting Corporation.

That may satisfy our biases, however drawing a conclusion from this data without first adjusting for the distribution of Toyota owner ages is just plain bad analysis. Drawing a conclusion from such a small sample, and the large number of cases in which no age is listed are both factors that weaken the point of the article. Aren't the number of Toyota cases close to 100? Don't other manufacturers have similar problems? Sound conclusions require rigorous analysis.