Slashdot Mirror

I'm not actually sure which bias direction you're accusing me of, but nothing in my post was intended to convey that I don't have an opinion on the election. Quite the opposite and mostly very negative toward the two currently leading candidates.

As far as the superdelegates... their purpose is widely suggested by party leaders to be for racial/minority diversity (So minorities don't have to compete with the elite party leaders for delegate spots anymore), but there are very few people who actually believe that.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D) Congress: Unpledged delegates are our party leaders and elected officials who actually can make up their mind at any point and change their mind. We separate those so that we don’t have elected officials and party leaders running against the activists, but want to make sure are helping to diversify our convention. That is something we take great pride in. A Native-American cancer survivor. Those people should have an opportunity to be delegates, too. And they shouldn’t have to deal with very well-known officials and party leaders. And that’s why we separate them.

or

Kendra Cotton (D) political director: Democrats have quotas for gender and preferences for minorities to become pledged delegates, but they don’t give them too much power.

Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n...

To be fair, I have worked with some of these Westinghouse guys and they are fairly universally not up to the task of playing in this industry. I'm not surprised they have tripped over their own dicks.

Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n...

There is no such thing as nuclear waste, everything that comes out of a used fuel rod is extremely useful, rare and precious and very expensive.

If it is really so useful in practice, why is so much in "temporary" storage after years and years with the amounts stored growing ever larger? Why have the U.S., Japan and many other countries "re-racked" their fuel ponds to make room for more at spacing closer than what the original designs required for safety?

As of November 2010, Fukushima Daiichi had 1760 TONS of spent fuel in storage, using 84% of capacity. (That's taking re-racking into account)

The linked .pdf report gives some idea what a big deal it is to deal with the fuel stored in Japan.

http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/6-1_powerpoint.pdf

Yes, they're done some recycling too. It wasn't many years ago that they had a criticality accident at such a facility. Even after bone marrow transplantation and experiment stem cell therapy, they still had workers die. And a number of non-employees living nearby got above normal exposure.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident

And when I said waste, I didn't just mean spent fuel. There are other contaminated materials to deal with. Flying insects that got into things left behind from the old Hanford Washington facility were so radioactive that 210 TONS of material later contaminated by the bugs at a regular landfill had to be hauled off as radioactive waste.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/1998/10/22/tec_242588.shtml

Radiation is still turning up from things that happened 40 years ago. Beware if cooking rabbit stew....

http://www.king5.com/news/environment/Radioactive-rabbit-trapped-at-Hanford-106761238.html

If there's technology to make ALL of that waste safe and useful, I haven't heard about it. Breeder reactors do turn some into more fuel (or weapons). While that may be a significant source for fuel, I haven't seen any citations showing a percentage and/or tonnage of total radioactive waste that actually gets recycled in that way. Citations please.

Your guitar analogy is akin to Dell telling you what software you can run on your new computer.

GP's argument was that because something was the "product of [his] effort", he has the right to put any conditions he likes on the sale of it. So, yes, his claim and mine counterexample are both like Dell telling you what software you can run on your new computer - ridiculous.

A better analogy would be you buying a book of guitar tabs and not being allowed to share that book with a friend.

And, as I've been arguing for a decade now, sharing music is an essential part of the development and progression of the art.

The problem with software is that you can share that one program with more than just a couple of friends; you can share it with the entire world.

I'm sorry that you see sharing as a problem.

And if everyone can get the same software from you for free, there's no need to pay the developer.

You won't have to pay the developer for work he's already done, no. Guess what? Most COTS developers don't get paid via royalties anyway. And most developers aren't working on COTS products, but on individualized, bespoke systems.

If you want new software, you'll have to hire a developer. There'd still be plenty of programming jobs in a Free Software world.

School districts are wasting money left and right- even worse than a district buying expensive software is buying expensive software and NEVER USING it but paying for it every year. Here's a related story about school district's transportation "Oops!" http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/082408/edi_470472.shtml

Whilst a lot of criminals convert to a Theistic religion in prison (to escape punishment and get a reduced sentance) many of them were devoutly religious to begin with.

Except some who go through JailHouse Conversions come out a better person. Some justice systems, as some American Indian tribes did, use Restorative Justice wherein the offender works with the injured party, some thus gain an insight that might be called religious.

Nine years ago, I was interviewed for this article about the original OLGA kerfuffle.

Nine years. You'd think that after that long, the traditional music publishing industry might have learned something from their complete inability to stop the spread of on-line guitar tabs.

Hey, publishers: It's over. You lost. You're not going to get to stop people from talking about how to play music. Quit whining, join the world in the 21st century, and you might yet find a way to profit.

This is the only reference to it I could find in a quick Google search that didn't refer to government mind control chips or biblibcal prophecies about the mark of the beast. If you're interested, you could probably pull a list of the investigator's publications and see what he's done since then: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/011097/tech_r oboroach.html

Yes, OLGA has (apparently) broken the law.

No, it hasn't. Teaching people songs is fair use. If we're jamming at a party and I tell you, "Let's play `Knocking on Heaven's Door'. Oh, you don't know it? It G, D, and a little Am7/C hammer on thing," that's the way music works. Are you going to put a gag order on every guitarist?

Songwriters get paid royalties when people sing their songs in for-profit performaces. (Yes, the details are tricky, but the idea is IMHO basically sound.) OLGA is not just fair use, its existance is actively in songwriter's interests. Neil Young gets a nickel every time I play "Needle and the Damage Done", which I learned off of OLGA, at one of my gigs. (But not if I sing it in the shower, or at a party where I'm playing just for fun.) The people against this are parasitic "music publishers". Fsck them.

We've been through this before. (Note the date on that article.) OLGA's contents have long since been distributed to scores of other tab sites.

I think it might be to protect the song writers as they don't perform or record songs, but I agree, this is stupid.

Song writeres get royalties when amateur muscians - such as me - play their music at the local bar. Or when pros cover their songs in concert or on a recording.

Where do amateur muscians often learn the words and chords to songs? The net. Making it easier for musicians to learn songs helps songwriters.

Musicians have been fighting the publishing industry over this for over seven years. It's protectionism for buggy-whip manufacturers, no benefit for artists or creators at all.

They must have some evidence...

Here is the FBI's evidence against Richard Jewel:

One acquaintance described Jewell as ``an adrenaline junkie'' who craved action, and another said that Jewell expressed hope he would be ``right in the middle of it'' if police were needed during the Games.

A former law enforcement colleague - also unnamed in the documents - told the FBI Jewell was ``blackballed'' from police work because of his troubled record, and speculated Jewell might have seen Olympic heroism as a way of getting another police job.