What worries me more is that the US aren't hideously embarrassed and resolving to tighten things up on their end but instead out to quell a single proponent of the discovered material. "Our systems failed and this guy got hold of it - I know, let's threaten to kill this guy and / or make his life hell!" not "Okay, let's fix this system".

Exactly.

Has everyone forgotten Gary McKinnon so quickly?

How history repeats itself.

Not actually a fallacy in this case.

It would be a fallacy if one were to use this particular case to define (in part) what Agile is or is not. But Agile is well-enough defined anyway that it is perfectly clear that this case is not Agile.

I was fired from a job because of Agile... Since then, I've had real Agile training... Still, my first Agile experience cost me my job.

I don't know enough about Agile to make a judgment myself, but you've practically said it yourself: your first experience wasn't Agile, it was just something that someone called 'Agile'.

there are idiots out there who want to have their search results filtered

It's far worse than people just filtering their search results.

Companies like Amazon make recommendations based on items you looked at previously. iTunes recommends music similar to the music you already have. Many commercial news sites allow you to customize your landing page so that you don't see news stories on subjects that don't interest you. Sites like Digg allow like-minded people to vote stories up and down so that you are more likely to see stories that fit well with your interests and world-view. Slashdot has a comment moderation system where ideas that don't fit with the group-think get hidden.

All so that we don't have to bother our poor little heads with things that disturb us.

I notice this very much when I am talking to certain people, but I think it is an issue with the telephone handset, not with the line (for landlines at least).

I assumed the cause is the feedback canceling mechanism in the handset. As handsets have become smaller, manufacturers have had to resort to more extreme measures to stop the microphone picking up the output of the speaker.

Some handsets seem to completely turn off the speaker whenever the microphone is picking up sound. This effectively means that the person talking into that handset has no way to know if the caller at the other end is trying to interject a comment or even interrupt.

This shouldn't be a problem, except that certain people seem to be almost irrationally uncomfortable with any moment of silence on a phone line, and so will just talk incessantly unless they know the person at the other end is trying to interrupt.

If you couple one of these people with such a feedback canceling handset, you end up with an enforced monologue (possibly followed by complaints that the other person never tells them anything).

So you choose your authorities very carefully, but it is still appeal to authority.

I actually agree with you and think you make a very important point. There is no way we could possibly apply methodological naturalism every time we had to make a decision. We all have to appeal to authority over and over again in order to hold all sorts of beliefs that are essential to us being able to function in everyday life.

We write off 'appeal to authority' far too readily as a valid means of determining what to believe. But yes, I entirely agree, we have to be very careful about which authorities to believe.

In the end it comes down to the question of who we put our faith in. I'm using the word 'faith' in its normal sense, not the opposite sense it has acquired when some people are talking about religion, that is, blind faith. Normal faith is a level of trust based on track record and is entirely rational. It is the reason someone might wait on a street corner for a lift even though they don't yet see the approaching car: past experience tells them that the person coming to collect them is reliable and will turn up as usual.

If we continue to put our faith in people who are faithful then we will generally not be disappointed. Similarly, we won't generally be dissapponted appealing to the authority of people who have a good track record of that authority.

The real reason the developer is poorly-placed to do the testing is that he has (presumably, if he is reasonably competent and motivated) already written and informally-tested the code to catch all the errors and corner cases he can think of.

So by the nature of the problem, the errors that you are asking the developer to catch are the very errors that haven't even occurred to the developer.

You might as well ask the question: "List for me all the potential problems you haven't thought of."

Except that in this case the argument does not depend on this distinction. If the argument is unaffected by a particular inaccuracy (or more to the point lack of clarity) then to attack the argument on this ground is to obfuscate what is actually important.

Truth is important. It would be better if the WHO website had been clearer about what they meant by "the world's first road traffic death". They don't mention that they are referring specifically to the death of a pedestrian caused by a motor vehicle hitting her, but I would hardly call that omission exaggeration or hyperbole - according to Wikipedia, the first road traffic death of any kind due to a motor vehicle was actually earlier, in 1869.

But that detail is insignificant compared to "1.2 million people are killed on roads every year and up to 50 million more are injured", and the fact that we seem to have become desensitised to this, which was the point of quoting that line from the coroner's report.

Actually did read the page and your comment. What I was however unprepared for is your apparent belief that the distinction between being killed by a car hitting you and being killed as a car occupant is vastly more important than than the point being made by the link.

OK, you win. The best way to discredit an argument is to pick a hole in an irrelevant detail.

No, I completely understood your point - that there are other ways of dying besides being hit by a motor car. No argument there.

But that is irrelevant when you had missed the point of the comment you were replying to, which was that, relating specifically to deaths caused by being hit by a motor car, while the first time this happened it was felt to be unacceptable, it has happened many millions of times again since then.

Um, the vehicles are all-electric. Admittedly, that isn't stated in the summary.

From the FAQ:

Is the solar panel used to recharge the vehicle batteries?

No, the solar panel is used to power the autonomous driving system only. Therefore cameras, lasers, PCs, and actuators are all powered by green energy, making the autonomous driving technology self-sustainable. The 'autonomous driver' is therefore seen as a plugin that is completely decoupled form the vehicle system and can be virtually adapted and installed on any vehicle.

How do you recharge the vehicles during the trip? Are there power outlets in the remote areas of the Siberia and China deserts?

Well, there are areas in which it is impossible to find power outlets and therefore recharging the vehicles would be impossible. In these areas we are using power generators. Remember that this is a test: should this be turned into a possible product, power outlets would be disseminated in the area covered by the vehicle.

Does it really have to be spelled out to you?

On 17 August 1896, 44-year-old Bridget Driscoll became the first person to be killed by a motor car.

the first person world-wide who died as a result of being hit by a car (not in a car crash) was Mrs Bridget Driscoll

The quote relates to the first person to be killed after being hit by a car. You may note the profound irony in the coroner's statement.

I agree with most of what you wrote, nevertheless, it is true that CFLs can take a long time to warm up.

It is a particular problem for the physically smaller CFLs. Manufacturers are doing all they can to get the size down so that they fit in the same space as an incandescent bulb, but as they reduce the size so the startup time seems to increase.

These small bulbs are the ones that are particularly difficult to replace with CFLs. Mind you, if I had my tinfoil hat handly I would probably claim that GE and the like are deliberately obstructing the adoption of CFLs by making conventional bulbs smaller and encouraging light fitting manufacturers to make their fittings smaller to suit.

The other problem I have is that the centre of the region from which the light is emitted is always further from the base of the light fitting than with an incandescent bulb. Even the most compact CFLs have this problem. It isn't the size of the tube that is at fault. It is the size of the bulbous plastic bit just behind (which I believe contains the ballast).

The effect is that when you put a CFL in a conventional light fitting, the light emerges at the wrong angle. It is particularly noticable with uplighters.

Having said that, I'm replacing all of the incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs.

Anybody who tried to turn the key off would have found themselves moving at highway speeds with dramatically decreased steering.

Have you ever tried it? In any sane car (and I except 2 tonne SUV monstrosities) you don't need power steering to steer effectively except at very low speed.

Brakes might be more of an issue, but even after turning off the engine, there is usually enough stored potential energy in the servo reservoir for a minute or two of braking.

So what would you suggest for say quality settings for an image format.

Numbers are a bit of an artificial construct when what you are really interested in is quality. This is a perfect example of the point I was trying to make. Since quality is an analogue scale, something like a slider might be appropriate. No numbers required.

Or what about when someone enters the order number from a package that has just arrived in goods inwards to receipt it and the order in question does not exist?

I'd question why an order has to be represented by a number, rather than the order itself. After all, it is not the number we are interested in. That's a bit irrelevant here though, because the error you asked about isn't the user's fault. The very different kind of issue I was trying to highlight is when the software allows users to try to do things that make no sense because the design of the software isn't right.

Or what about when your customer gives you thier customer number to order and the database says they are blocked and not allowed to order anything because they haven't been paying thier invoices?

Again, this isn't the kind of error I was talking about.

Or what about when something beyond your programs control (out of disk space, out of memory, network down etc) makes what should be a reasonable operation impossible?

As I said, 'where possible...'

For better or worse errors will happen and need to be reported.

Agreed. But where possible, the user interface should avoid giving the user a chance to do something that makes no sense.