, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle,

As a cyclist, that makes sense. It could also explain the instinct to change direction by banking rather than simply turning the vehicle in the plane, as one would do with a 4-wheeled vehicle on land, or through use of a rudder with a boat. As anyone who has ever ridden a bike at high speed knows, you don't turn by twisting the handlebars.

I work in an R&D lab, but in between daily tasks there is a lot of downtime, which I spend at my desk, staring at my computer.

I say this as a manager in an R&D lab:

I want to hire self motivated people. And co-ops are a great way to end up with a full time position. But I will avoid like the plague people who sit staring at their computer because they weren't told what to do. If you weren't told what to do, ask what to do. If you get no guidance, suggest a side project of your own to work when you don't have other tasks. Failing that, if you're a scientist, find some journal articles and get smarter.

I wholeheartedly support the effort to get in shape, but I wouldn't start treating on-the-job downtime as an opportunity to engage in extracurricular activity. It might suggest you're not serious about your co-op. I realize you're probably young and think you're doing enough if you're doing what you told, but the people who get ahead are those who motivate themselves.

Best of luck in your co-op.

What the FUCK is a FUCKING lawyer doing working as a FUCKING VP for a software company?

VP is a title that has been subject to the corporate version of grade inflation. At my company we have VPs of everything. I'm sure they have multiple VPs in most every group, and not having a single lawyer at the VP level would be a bit conspicuous.

Now if they had a lawyer for one of the main C-level executive positions, that would be different. But this is just big-company title inflation.

I agree. Of the agencies I want to be extra cautious, FAA is at the top of the list along with the FDA. NHTSA, and other agencies that are responsible for making sure that the products and services we use don't kill us.

It's not like they can pull the plane over until they find out which device is screwing with the avionics, were such a thing to happen..

Ooooh, internet tough guy! Hey, by the way - putting three periods instead of one at the end of all your sentences doesn't make you sound intelligent. And a lack of capital letters doesn't make you e.e. cummings.

Grow up and move out of Mom's basement, kid.

There are a thousand other things wrong with Linux right now and nobody seems interested in fixing them (yes, I'm doing my part, but I only have so much free time to spend fixing random issues and maintaining my own packages). No, instead, we're going to dump all our time and effort into making a device that was NEVER DESIGNED TO RUN LINUX, well, run Linux.

Until relatively recently, no device was *ever* designed to run linux. If the Linux community accepted that approach, Linux wouldn't run on anything.

I think it's important, and sends a message to big companies, that Linux run on everything. It tells them, you will not avoid us. You cannot lock your shit down. No matter what you do, we'll be there.

If I was more clever, I'd do a rendition of a Police song to accentuate the point.

The way this is written is so absurdly biased; if you want to promote Android devices, just come out and say it.

I don't think they're trying to. I'd infer one a few possibilities, possibly more than one:

*Apple has, through a marketing blitz, become synonymous with personal electronic gadget. So a crime wave of electronic gadget theft makes people think Apple.

*Apple devices have a high market share, so their devices probably constitute a high fraction of gadget thefts

*Apple devices may have a better black market value due to ubiquity and appeal.

The quotes come from city officials - I don't think they have any sort of anti-Apple bias

The way the slashdot summary is written is clearly joking, sonic boom *whoosh* sound impending

It's just a kernel patch? That's kind of a big deal if you've made the kernel your life's work. That's kind of a slippery slope to nobody giving a shit about their jobs unless they're life or death.

I'm a firm believer in tailoring management style to whatever is necessary for the employee to get the message. Some employees you would never need to get that way with because they take the message that you proscribed. Some need to eat a dose of humble pie. And I'd say getting hammered publicly on LKML qualifies.

And I hate to say it, but I'm not sure even Linus' barrage did the trick, since the last line of Mario's response to the quoted post was "Sometimes shit happens. Sorry for that."

I don't know about you, but I don't think this is a guy for whom "pretty please" is going to make enough of an impact.

I think most of the disagreement depends on the definition of "society". Binning coarsely, we have group A who wants a libertarian anarchy. Group B wants to pay for shared infrastructure, but not the welfare state. Group C wants a social democracy with a variety of personal, non-infrastructure services guaranteed as rights. Lines blur of course, but that's the general idea.

Choose your own definition of society. I'm not sure exactly who you mean with your comments - I agree with you on the group A nuts who think that private enterprise will develop useful markets, electrical grids, roads, etc. However, I agree with those who dearly want to pay for infrastructure, but don't want to have to pay everybody's personal bills as the cover charge into "society".

It seems to be the rage these days to knock any online review site. Restauranteurs hate yelp, authors hate amazon, etc. Guess what - nothing's perfect, but they're pretty good. Are the Amazon ratings perfect? No, especially for situations with few reviews. But who the hell doesn't already know that and take it into account?

I like amazon's ratings system a lot. You can tell a lot from the distribution of scores. You have the actual reviews you can actually read. They flag the most useful favorable/unfavorable review, and in my experience, they really are useful. They also aggregate commonly mentioned topics, so you can identify common themes with respect to a product - like a common defect.

Same thing with yelp. Sure, the scores can be skewed by hipsters, yuppies, or assholes who make it their life's mission to review things and be clever. But more often than not, I've found the reviews to be fair. And I've also found that reading a handful of positive reviews and negative reviews gives you a very good impression of a place - same with amazon.

So no, these review systems aren't perfect. But they're really good, and as a result I'm much more likely to actually like the stuff I buy than back in the bad old days when you waited until someone you know bought something you want, or bite the bullet yourself. It's much better now, and just because there's room for improvement doesn't mean we should throw it all away.

I built mine outside - anything bigger than 36" and I'd have had to widen the door to get it in the house!

I hadn't seen the mining sets before - those look really cool. Might be something for birthday, thanks for the tip.

Completely agree. First off, one is fully entitled to throw their instructions away. One of the things I like about the playsets is that you get a diversity of interesting pieces to use. So you build it their way the first time, then it just becomes an interesting bag of parts.

Not to mention which, they do still sell bulk bricks, and bulk specialty pieces. So if that's what you want for your kids, buy it. Of course, if the same kids who lack the creativity to make their own designs have parents who lack the ability to do actual research, that I buy.

I liked building legos when I was a kid, and now my kids do. I built them a 36" square recessed table for them - just for legos - so they can build things and not have to worry about cleaning up, or about the legos falling on the floor. I love coming home from work and seeing how their designs have evolved. No instructions in sight.

(Seriously. If there are 100 shootings per day, out of 250 million persons in the USA, your chances of being so shot on any given day are 4 places to the right of the decimal point in terms of percentages-- (borrowed possibly false statistic from previous poster.) At that rate, you are more likely to die in an airline catastrophe.

What the fork? 11k people die from gun related homicide per year. Can't say the same for airline catastrophes, can we?

The solution to deaths like these is NOT "gun control".

That's an unjustified conclusion. It might be, or it might be part of it.

The solution to deaths like this is to get people the help they so desperately need, without any overtones of disparagment, or of belittling the people who need that help.

OK, fine. Except when the patient stops taking the medication - which happens often - are you sufficiently willing to solve the problem that you're willing to involuntarily commit the patient? Isn't that a whole lot more infringing on liberty than getting rid of the guns?

(If not a gun, then perhaps a bomb, or poison, or any number of other methods.)

I keep seeing this but it seems rather unjustified. Assembling a bomb isn't easy. Particularly one that takes out more than a few people. Poison is pretty hard too. Additionally, the violent nature of guns makes them so damned appealing - thanks to the Columbine generation there. Take away the guns, you take away the appeal, I think.