Actually the only evidence that anyone did any renaming comes from a memo from Frank Luntz to GW Bush (Page 142, point 1), the two terms have different meanings and scientists had been using them for decades before Luntz deliberately conflated them.

The memo also serves as a great example of what it means to be a denier, ie: denying reality for fun and profit.

Good point. Feynman called the fundamental forces the "lowest layer of the onion", a point where our explanatory power stops and you are forced to accept that something exists without an explanation. I like to call these things "miracles". Perhaps we will explain these miracles one day and replace them with an even more fundamental set of miracles. Thing is, believing in the miracle of gravity does not require blind faith, nor does it require you to know how it came into being. I think consciousness is in the same category and the best "explanation" comes from Sagan (paraphrase): "Life is how the universe observes itself".

I think driverless cars will be a better solution to this problem. As someone who drives quite a lot for my work, I hope the day soon comes it is illegal to drive manually because it is too dangerous compared to our robotic chauffeurs. Judging by the way google navigation works for me, it won't be this year.

In the meantime, I agree with your first two solutions, the third is too drastic. Jail time if you cause an accident while texting perhaps but I don't think someone stuck in walking pace traffic who texts their wife they'll be late deserves jail time.

If this doesn't make you angry, upset and outraged, what will?

I can't get angry anymore.

I've spent the last 12 years watching the western world, and my own country in particular, fall apart in slow motion. Everything I thought I knew about the politics and the rule of law has been been invalidated three times over to the point where I can't make beleive anymore.

How can I be angry at an outcome which I knew was inevitable? And outcome produced by a system that is inherently dysfunctional? I may as well become angry at a bird for eating a worm as become angry at the US government for doing what everyone saw coming since 2001. What happens when a government is given arbitrary powers, an eternal enemy, and a compliant judiciary and media? We all know what happens. The government being in the west does not make it different and anyone who ever thought so (I include myself in this) was a fool.

I used to think that eventually, the political class would stoop so low they would hit rock bottom, and the resulting public outrage would sweep them away. I no longer see a logical rock bottom, apart from a return to hunter-gatherer status. I see a slow collapse of the west in general, and the US in particular, along the lines of the Soviet Union, which spent 80 years dying.

In 100 years time, things may be different. But don't expect anger or change in the next 20. Expect decline.

What's the use of turning off an option in a browser made by a company that acts hand in glove with its domestic intelligence agency? How can anyone trust one checkbox in Chrome after this?

No. I'm not even surprised that the newspapers are surprised.

It's obvious that the media is getting its own back for Holder's tapping of AP phones a few weeks back. This is simply a petty power struggle between a pair of jilted political class lovers.

Unfortunately, the populace is stupid, and so we will continue to see such erosion of privacy based upon the flimsiest of disingenuous excuses.

The population is not stupid. But there's only so much ordinary people can do when the entire state, civic, and industrial apperatus has been seized by an essentially criminal class.

He's in good company, Feynman taught his students that guessing was the first step in the scientific method, besides where else can you start?

I can only assume you admin a home network and have difficulty stopping yourself from fiddling with it.

12X the industry standard is an extraordinary claim but as usual there's absolutely zero detail of how the "maintenance" figure was calculated, eg: did they just divide the entire IT budget by the number of desktops?

It seems to me that the point of the article is to convince people that, and I quote, "it looks like the government is getting completely swindled by their PC supplier". The whole story smells of "negotiation by press release" to me, are the big IT contracts coming up for renewal by any chance?

Also the international component will make it inherently inaccurate, eg: Oz to UK is a 1/4 sec ping on a -very- good day.

Actually, given the outrightly criminal nature of that banking system, this is not an unreasonable suggestion. We already know that the likes of HFT companies regulalry engage in DDoS attacks against exchanges, so the skillset for this kind of work is there.

The slashdot summary is factual, it doesn't give an opinion on the accuracy or merits of the reenactment. In other words the summary is written as NEWS should be written, the fact it is reporting on IDF propaganda in no way makes it a tool of the IDF.

Sure, but why would you want to match bad taste with more bad taste?

The idea of starting with a user manual is to make sure everyone agrees on what "it" is. The difficulty/cost of implementing it is irrelevant at that stage. Once you have agreed "what it is" the customer wants then you can start figuring out how to implement it and what it will cost. Unfortunately this is rarely done which is why you often hear business people complain that devs don't understand and devs responding by saying business people don't know what they want. If your willing to build something that is vaguely specified then it's kind of obvious you will get vague results. There is no better fertilizer for PHB's than vague specifications.

Software that flies a plane has similar regulatory restraints as the engines that drive it In most places where software meets steel if the chief engineer has not performed due diligence on the software components he is personally liable for any damage or injury caused by the software. Do you recall the cost and legal fallout from Toyota's "sticky pedal" fiasco? I agree however that designing a car and a piece of software are very different activities, I think for all but extreme cases designing a car that can be manufactured by existing robots is far more complicated and laborious than writing a piece of corporate plumbing.