The "War of Southern Absolute Disadvantage."

But that's what happens when you base your whole economy on slavery and blame other people because you can't compete with free market mass industrialization.

I guess they should have thought about that before selling States' Rights part and parcel with slavery.

Irradiated yes, radioactive no. The only way that truck will be of danger to anyone is if it runs over them.

Gamma radiation doesn't cause things to become radioactive. A common, really good and totally safe use of gamma radiation is to sterilize vacuum-packed food.

OTOH, most of us have the capacity to recognize the flaws of our species, and we are willing to accept economic inefficiencies in exchange for meeting intangible social and cultural benefits. We really aren't that bad, for the most part.

Techies tend to have mild BPD, believing most highly in rationality, criticism and determinism, so we're all a bit brain damaged when it comes to sociology and anthropology. I bet a lot of /.ers would think the Vulcans are a better species than humans, for example. They'd probably keep thinking that right up until the Vulcans make the perfectly logical choice to exterminate 10% of their population to correct their 10% structural unemployment.

A radiation therapy machine called Therac-25 had severe design flaws that caused it to kill several people. The AECL engineers and managers were overconfident and over-greedy, respectively, so even after a significant number of accidents they refused to admit that the machine was faulty.

Chances are the problem is quite serious, but Airbus' actuaries tell them that the short-run cost of performing immediate repairs is greater than the long-run cost of their insurance rates after a mechanical failure.

Yes, basically.

The teamsters would have signed up because they get work from the motion picture industry. Union solidarity pulls in AFL-CIO, electrical workers, fire fighters, construction workers, and law enforcement.

The rest sound fake because they are. Mostly large businesses and rich people who fund private associations to commit their sins, so they don't get literally executed when the revolution comes.

Everything except the Riemann hypothesis. Fuck complex analysis.

"MIT is overrated because I can't get into MIT."

Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.

My house has too many rats. I need to throw in some more so they have competition.

The object files will contain redundancies, such as symbols and template instantiations. Without good header management the linker (and profiler, since this is done per translation unit) will need vastly more memory.

Thank you for posting this. Filling the virtual address space of the linker probably does indicate some problems with the Firefox source code - crazy big translation units, for example - but it doesn't imply anything about the size or quality of the resulting binary.

I thought people on this site were supposed to know something about computers.

Regular 15 minute breaks.

Seriously.

If there's a shortage of qualified people in a field, the answer isn't to "encourage" (read: throw money at) the schools teaching in the field. The answer is for employers to man up, quit whining to the government, and pay the clearing wage.

EA, Activision/Blizzard,... anybody else who has a stick up their butt about Steam.

I use one game service: Steam. I have a lot of games on it. I'm also not huge into games any more, so almost everything I download is an impulse buy (usually during Steam sales.) There is absolutely zero chance that EA or its subsidiaries will ever make an Arab hunting simulation good enough that I would actually go out of my way to sign up for their service.

Steam allows it to persist because they want to serve the interests of their customers and their shareholders.

Steam is only a good service if it carries the games that people want to play. Most people want games from big publishers, and the big publishers won't sell to a store that won't let them conduct business as usual. They just aren't smart enough.