Slashdot Mirror

Indeed. I was thinking the same. They would panic if you started playing bits from Tom Clancy films or TV shows like Dexter. Then, once several people are picked up by law enforcement, only to find they've been duped, they may reconsider the error of their ways.

I do find, however, that some people really don't care, and I see this as alarming. Apathetic people are the reason for companies and government getting away with stuff like this. My wife and I always leave our phones in another room when we need to talk about serious matters. Paranoid? No. Cautious? Yes. In fact, just yesterday, the BBC ran a story about mobile phones listening in on conversations...

Is Your Smartphone Listening to You?

So start explaining - Feel free to use their models and reconcile the disparity for the past 16 years. Good luck with that. You can't do it with CO2 mathematically and I think you know it, or should.

OTOH, There was a hell of a methane leak in California, just recently capped - http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc... . Using their scale, Methane is 25X more potent than CO2 and this one was a gusher. Methane BTW really is a gas that warms us. We can show it using the scientific method, unlike with CO2. There are also a number of other methane sources out there this year. So if you win and it's still doubtful, it wouldn't be because of MM CO2. It would be because of real warming gasses out there. Notice how Spencer doesn't even mention methane. Certainly he should know about it. I mean, this is in what he's supposedly knows about after all. So how can we take him seriously with such a blatant omission?

Never the less, feel free to start explaining. I think I have at least one bag of popcorn. This should be good.

Now it's not about capacity, but how much is being produced at any given moment?

It always was about how much is being produced, so I don't really know what you're talking about. Do you remember all those discussions about the problems of intermittent energy sources, non-dispatchable generation, power quality etc.? Those are about the same problem under different names, and those were discussed since the beginning.

And it's not only about how much, but also when: in 2010/2011 there were a lot of articles about wind turbines in the U.K. producing electricity when there was no need of it (and at the time the installed capacity was quite low) and so the government had to pay to halt them or had to buy energy it had no use for (and which can cause problems to the grid). For reference: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco... || http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... It

Primatives?! ..and how are you determining that people trying to escape a shitty system/situation are "primatives" (as if you are somehow enlightened)

Open your eyes. "Germany shocked by Cologne New Year gang assaults on women"

They wouldn't be "shocked" if they were paying attention. Sweden opened their door to Muslim immigration and is now the rape capital of the Western world.

Look at what happened in the UK in Rotherham, where they covered up what was happening because they didn't want to be "racist".

Look what happened in Egypt.

Oh, no, but we don't want to be "xenophobes"! We must open our doors and welfare systems to all comers. Anybody who speaks out against it is guilty of hate speech!

Totally agree. All I can do is add some supporting citations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...
Germany Backtracks on Tuition
By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
Published: August 25, 2013
(German colleges are now free again, like the Scandinavian countries. Under the German constitution, the 16 state governments control finance and education. A 2005 federal court decision allowed them to charge tuition. 8 states, in former West Germany, did, but it was unpopular and they reversed their policy. Lower Saxony charged €1,000 ($1,300)/year. An economist estimated that tuition caused 20,000 potential students (6.8% of all students) to forgo enrollment in 2007. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have free tuition, although Germany, with 2.5 million students, is the largest. Britain raised its tuition caps to £9,000 ($14,000). In France, most public universities charge a few hundred euros per year, though the grandes écoles are more expensive.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
7 countries where Americans can study at universities, in English, for free (or almost free)
By Rick Noack
October 29 2014
Since 1985, U.S. college costs have surged by about 500 percent, and tuition fees keep rising. In Germany, they've done the opposite.
The country's universities have been tuition-free since the beginning of October, when Lower Saxony became the last state to scrap the fees. Tuition rates were always low in Germany, but now the German government fully funds the education of its citizens -- and even of foreigners.
Explaining the change, Dorothee Stapelfeldt, a senator in the northern city of Hamburg, said tuition fees "discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany."
What might interest potential university students in the United States is that Germany offers some programs in English -- and it's not the only country. Let's take a look at the surprising -- and very cheap -- alternatives to pricey American college degrees.
Germany's higher education landscape primarily consists of internationally well-ranked public universities, some of which receive special funding because the government deems them "excellent institutions." What's more, Americans can earn a German undergraduate or graduate degree without speaking a word of German and without having to pay a single dollar of tuition fees: About 900 undergraduate or graduate degrees are offered exclusively in English, with courses ranging from engineering to social sciences. For some German degrees, you don't even have to formally apply.
In fact, the German government would be happy if you decided to make use of its higher education system. The vast degree offerings in English are intended to prepare German students to communicate in a foreign language, but also to attract foreign students, because the country needs more skilled workers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
How US students get a university degree for free in Germany
By Franz Strasser BBC News, Germany
3 June 2015
While the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees.
More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion).
(Hunter Bliss, South Carolina.)
Each semester, Hunter pays a

Cannabis was outlawed in many/most states from the mid-1930's until recently - and is still today outlawed in most states. That's 85 years.

US Supreme Court rules gay marriage is legal nationwide

Change can happen very quickly. If Americans decide to go for Sanders/Hillary, it very probably will (via the SC).

Are you sure?
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
I couldn't find any reliable figures, but appears to be similar both ways (around 200k). Perhaps more interesting is that there are 1.2million!!! Brits in Australia.

These are quite serious concerns, example a recent pensioner suicide, due to the banks / govt, effectively STEALING this poor bastards money, it's outright theft. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35062239

They didn't steal his money. He wasnt saving with the bank, he was invested in the bank and the bank went bust. Why shouldn't he lose his money? Who should lose when a company goes bust?

The critics are increasing on this one, there's a lot of paranoia about ending physical currency, negative interest rates, bank bail ins, etc.
I generally tend to be partially susceptible to a good / interesting conspiracy theories, within reason. With this one, I'm starting to see it crop up though from a fairly significant amount of financial market doomsayers, although some of them seem to have reasonable credentials.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/ for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman

I don't know what to think personally. I certainly feel, based on a few years of reading some of this looney news, watching some of the youtube videos on how 'money is created' essentially, the printing since 08 of money and generally how finance is handled internationally that the whole world has no fucking clue of what's going on.

APPARENTLY the G20 meetings recently approved significantly more bank bail ins in many more countries, mine included.
These are quite serious concerns, example a recent pensioner suicide, due to the banks / govt, effectively STEALING this poor bastards money, it's outright theft.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35062239

Honestly at this rate some of the "new world order, new currency for ALL!" stuff is ... almost, ALMOST sounding fucking feasible. I'm willing to swallow a bit of the old conspiracy theory bullshit but as more and more evidence piles up, I'm begging to feel like it's time to buy a shitload of gold, silver and ammunition.

Well regardless of your thoughts on this post, how it's moderated, it's not going to change much - there's little, exceedingly little we can do if there's merit to any of this. So scaremongering aside that's the real concern, we simply don't have power as people in general.

NOTE / Disclaimer: Australian here, who DIDN'T buy into the ridiculous bubble housing market here, out of work now and living off cash saved, if that shit gets 'confiscated' there will be trouble.
I sure as heck do not need my savings, that I worked hard for, I scrimped for, I didn't go into debt for like most else, being confiscated / overly taxed or NIRP'd into oblivion. Disgusting concept.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=NIRP&hl=en&meta=&gws_rd=ssl (NIRP)

Since Hamas provides the casualty numbers and affiliations and the numbers are dramatically skewed, they very clearly reflect that the numbers you laid out include a LOT of combatants labeled as civilians.

Including women; if you had bothered to read my ice cream link.

But here's the thing; Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at civilian targets. You are basically giving them CREDIT just because many thousands of Israelis are not dead who would have been, if it were not for a very good missile defense system...

If you really cared at all you would consider the count of attempted fatalities, not the final result.

I work in IT, nevertheless NONE of my colleagues knew all the not so unimportant details of WTF FBI has actualy asked Apple to do, so here it is, just in case you also missed it:

FBI asked Apple to provide update that would:

1) Prevent the phone from erasing itself.
2) Allow to automate the process for trying out passcode combinations.
3) and without unnecessary delay.
4) and last, but not least: Control the process, but not know how it's done.
Source (BBC)

Now, pay attention to point 4.
FBI is fine with all that happening at Apple's HQ.

Where the FUCK did the "privacy concerns" come from, please? Would Apple itself leak that update? If so, couldn't they also somehow leak private key used to sign firmware updates?

it's already happening: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

But in a legal brief, Apple acknowledged that the phone in the meth case was running version 7 of the iPhone operating system, which means the company can access it. “For these devices, Apple has the technical ability to extract certain categories of unencrypted data from a passcode locked iOS device,” the company said in a court brief.

Two sentences later retrieving "certain categories of unencrypted data" becomes "cracking the iphone":

But as a general matter, yes, Apple could crack the iPhone for the government.

Here's the BBC chiming in with the "if you agree with Apple, you support beheading veterans" angle: http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

"If a court issued a warrant in the UK or United States to search somebody's house, you wouldn't stop them, you would allow them in - why should a smartphone be any different?

Gee I don't know, Ray, but I'm going to bank on houses being made out of wood, sweat, and tiers compared to my smartphone, which is more of a mathematics problem than a physical object.

The technical gap between those working on cases like this, those writing the laws, and those who are just the end-users operating devices like smartphones is large, but it's much, much more than just marketing at this point. This story wouldn't even be in the news if the government hadn't already bullied these companies into complying in the first place, hitting them with the one-two of "you're going to cause another 9/11" and "we're already reading everything anyway, don't make it harder for us" as a fait accompli.

This is one of the primary reasons for things such as the 4th amendment in the first place -- if the government only conducts reasonable searches, then people can be more trusting of the government only conducting reasonable searches. If the government oversteps its authority, and people lose some of their trust in the government to act in good faith, then searches which would otherwise be reasonable and routine start to meet resistance, especially when it is potentially costing giant corporations millions or billions of dollars.

That means that the content on anyone's phone can be stolen. Not just anyone's phone, but the phone of every politician in the world.

If politicians want to put a back door on our phones, those politicians need to use those same phones.

Which brings up another point. The US Federal Government can hack the German Chancellor's Iphone, but not the Iphone of some nut in California?

Red Hat managed to spend five years on Ceylon, a JVM language almost nobody wants to use.

Great to see a sane alternative gaining traction.

Everyone knows they should have named it Cylon - the Cylons had a plan for universal domination. Ceylon was deprecated for Sri Lanka.

But no, Kotlan is not a sane alternative and it's not gaining traction.

That may be. But the longest it has ever taken the Senate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee is 125 days.

Truth be told the average US citizen is *far* more in support of us staying out of the rest world than our leaders are. If we took a simple vote, like a true democracy instead of a republic, and said who wants to pull all our troops back to the US and guard our own borders it would pass. We really don't like being around the globe and would far rather keep the troops safe at home. However what the leadership does bears only a slight correlation with what the citizens would like (citation below). Let the world police itself is a popular concept among citizen, just not among our leaders. I am in this group and would love to give the world it's wish of no US world police. Citation: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.

Not really. If it was, they'd stop the farmers growing Alfalfa in the California deserts, then exporting it to China. The "BIG issue" is an utterly broken antiquated system of pre-1914 water rights.

I just spent 2 weeks in the Imperial Valley in Fall 2015, and 2 more weeks in the last month. You can drive through there but you can't really appreciate how damaging that style of industrial farming is to the environment until you actually go there. They are basically farming in a dust bowl by using open canal irrigation. The pesticides and fertilizer drain into the Salton Sea, an accidentally-created manmade body of water, which is drying up. As it dries up, a lot of the salts and chemicals in the water turn into a very fine dust. I drove out to the Salton Sea itself on a windy day and it looked like something straight out of Fallout 3. I could see no difference between the landscape there now and a nuclear wasteland. It's an ecological disaster. I've been to industrial farm towns all over the USA and I've never seen industrial farming like that before. The fact that it is allowed to continue to exist in California, of all states, just boggles my mind. And I work in coal power plants.

The refrain I heard often was "we grow xx% (double digit number) of the nation's fresh fruits and vegetables!". I am not going to dispute the figures. It isn't hard to gain a huge chunk of the market if you have free/cheap water, 350 days of sun, and an endless supply of cheap immigrant labor, however. That is a rare set of circumstances, and there isn't a farmer anywhere in the US that can compete against that.

Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.

Not really. If it was, they'd stop the farmers growing Alfalfa in the California deserts, then exporting it to China. The "BIG issue" is an utterly broken antiquated system of pre-1914 water rights.

Old news

Funny you should mention deer. Reindeer herders in Lapland have taken to spray-painting the antlers of their herds with reflective paint to cut down on the amount of roadkill:

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

I spoke to a guy up in Rovaniemi who looks after some. He described them as "terminally stupid".

European WWW, Swedish web site, and — per capita —
more Bittorrent traffic from Europe.

He said he had had an "epiphany" in space and later devoted his life to studying the mind and unexplained phenomena. He said he believed that aliens had visited Earth. ... Mitchell left the US space agency Nasa in 1972 and set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences which aimed to support "individual and collective transformation through consciousness research".

Source: BBC.

I think that is a first, no one tried to argue that Hillary isn't a felon :)

I know Sanders won't get everything he wants, but socialism isn't something positive in this country.

I can stand behind a national minimum income, as long as welfare and food stamps go away. It seems that it would about balance out. I just can't see it is positive that he wants to seriously raise taxes, as many are already taxed to the limit. If he raises taxes on corporations, it will just feed the trend of companies leaving the US for cheaper taxed shores.

http://www.bbc.com/news/electi...

When asked what his first 100 days as president would look like, Mr Sanders said he would push to enact universal healthcare, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and increase investment in infrastructure.

Whenever someone brings up $15/hr minimum wage, all I see is McDonald's replacing workers with robots as they become cheaper. I see many people losing their job as their work isn't worth $15/hr. I see high school kids unable to find work for their first jobs. I don't see a high minimum wage helping people, I see it closing many opportunities down.

"What my first days are about is bringing America together to end the decline of the middle class, to tell the wealthiest people in this country that, yes, they are going to start paying taxes and that we are going to have a government that works for all of us and not just big campaign contributors."

The wealthy pay taxes, it is near impossible to not pay taxes. Any change to the tax code that would change that would also hit the middle class, so I want to see his proposed changes.

I really do hope that someone better comes along, or that someone becomes more moderate and shows themselves to be worthy. The GOP side which usually follows my points of view more just looks like raving lunatics. I was sad to see Paul drop out though, as he tends to be pretty good (or at least I voted for his father...). As a native of Maryland though, I was happy to see O'Malley drop out, that guy had some odd policies while in Maryland, and I would be terrified of what he would do as president.

I've seen no evidence that Assange violated US law, or that the US government wants to charge him or do anything else to him.

I have no particular opinion on it either way; this from the BBC, though: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Despite the US not having made an extradition request, US Attorney General Eric Holder has previously said American officials were pursuing a "very serious criminal investigation" into the matter.

My point is that it's not inconsistent to believe that what Assange did was useful, while at the same time believing that the US could legitimately extradite him from Sweden for a trial if US prosecutors actually wanted to charge him. In different words, a courageous and useful act of civil disobedience shouldn't result in people being able to claim freedom from legal prosecution.

You are correct. I was confusing it with Cytoplasmic Transfer, a different procedure for dealing with infertility. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

The cases you've cherry-picked barely scratch the surface. They're not even the most recent examples.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com]

Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.

Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.

His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.

If Trump was a real scot that episode would have ended just like that XKCD cartoon except Trump would have shown up with claymore and a wearing a kilt, his comb-over waiving gracefully in the wind as he charged the wind turbines yelling: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never spoil the view from our golf-course!” with a really piss-poor imitation of a Scottish accent.

Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.

His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.

According to this slashdot post, which links to this BBC article, that's what at least one manufacturer is planning to do.

Felines accompanying their human companions have gone on to prey on the local wildlife, and they have been blamed for the global extinction of 33 species.

Cats don't just replace the local predators. They are better at killing than most other small predators. And they are also sadistic bastards who will torture prey before they kill them. They may not bring down moose, but everything smaller than them is just a toy to be killed.

I have two cats. The male is definitely a murderer. Nothing smaller than him can come into the apartment without being killed. And as I bought him to be a mouse catcher, I'm pretty much OK with this. But I wouldn't let him outside.

Hungary nationalists whip up anti-Roma feelings

This summer has seen an escalation of tension in parts of Hungary where ethnic Magyars live next to Roma (Gypsies) - tension exploited by the extreme right-wing Jobbik party and its allies.

The authorities are not enforcing laws banning the incitement of hatred, leaving Roma to face abuse by paramilitaries linked to Jobbik, which won 16% of the vote in the 2010 election.

Jobbik won a local election in the northeastern town of Gyongyospata last year after neo-Nazi thugs invaded and terrified Roma residents. The party is now targeting areas outside its northeastern heartland.

Hungary has an estimated 800,000 Roma, in a population of 10 million.

According to Krisztian Szabados of Political Capital, a Budapest think-tank, the issue of anti-Roma feeling has been swept under the carpet by all governments elected since the transition to democracy. "Inter-racial relations are a ticking bomb that's going to explode in the foreseeable future," he said.

The western Hungarian village of Devecser is still recovering from the caustic red sludge that swamped it in 2010 - toxic waste from an aluminium plant. But on 5 August there was a different kind of flood - 1,000 neo-Nazi demonstrators linked to Jobbik, angry at the Roma.

"You are going to die here!" the marchers shouted, throwing their water bottles and stones at what they thought might be Roma homes.

You are so dumb shit stupid that I don't think you are capable of dressing yourself. Does you mommy still wipe you shitty ass, or do you just walk around with a load of shit in you pants?

You wouldn't recognize a fact if it walked up to you and smacked you in the face with a brick, which is something that you really really deserve, like right now.

I just hope that Darwin was right and that your lack of meaningful intelligence keeps you from reproducing, because any more around like you could doom the human race. Send me your address and I'll send you something sharp and dangerous because you will start playing with it, maim yourself and bleed to death.

Well then, you should welcome me to your club.. Your panic is duly noted. Wake up, white people!

Remember when I wrote that people in the UK and Europe were afraid of reporting, investigating, or prosecuting immigrants for fear of being called racists? You just demonstrated my point with your little race baiting comment.

Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?

The Yorkshire town where 1,400 girls have been sexually abused by Asian men is a byword for depravity – all because people wouldn’t rock the multicultural boat

Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds
A 'new dimension' of sexual assault in Cologne
Germans outraged by mayor’s advice for women after raft of harassment
It’s not only Germany that covers up mass sex attacks by migrant men... Sweden’s record is shameful

hell yah, new sanctions already.

Some would say Zionist and Saudi money is already doing its thing.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

BBC is going to launch a streaming service in the USA, the launch date is not currently known other than 2016. Don't know if it will offer their news service either:
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

Ultimately, the point here is if we don't keep working (spending) on nukes, advancing them, new models and all, the people who know about nukes will retire and die off, and no young-uns will learn the trade... which would be all cool, except that Iran and NK and Pakistan and fuck knows who else has started making them, and their politician bosses are going to sabre-rattle to get what they want. Strong first-world deterrent is, unfortunately, the only way to make sure those sabres stay buried in their scabbards, unused. OTOH, if all the expertise in nuclear weapons is overseas, we will be, in the words of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, in a world of shit.

There are two things to nukes: the warheads, and the delivery system. Turns out, the brass balls are in the latter. The nation with the biggest swinging dick is the one that can deliver nukes quickly, quietly, and precisely enough that the target cannot fire off a response. To maintain this, the U.S. is working on improving precision, and Vlad the Putin is working on stealth.

The Cold War is alive, people. Kim Jong-un may have already smuggled a nuke into a harbor near you, buried in one of a thousand shipping containers sitting around on the lot. The only difference between us and them? Ours are better, smaller, faster, and we got a shitload more of 'em. NK might be capable of taking out Long Beach, but with that he will have blown his wad, whereas our response can dig a crater big enough to permanently separate the South from the Korean peninsula. So, Kimmy keeps careful to keep all the nuke talk to just that.... talk.

Because the brown people might come and be able to sexually satisfy your wife unlike you with your micropeen?

No, but they WILL try to rape everything that moves.

Islam. The religion of rape. And misogyny. And homophobia.

I had no idea David Bowie died until I read it here on Slashdot! How come the mainstream media didn't report on this at all in the last 16 hours since it was formally announced?

I don't know where in the world you are. But in my part of the world the media have been talking about little else since early this morning.

There is nothing scientific about it, and the medical profession say the change has nothing to do with new scientific data. The sole motivation driving this was to make men equal to female.

As if this bullshit is going to reduce anyone with a penis to change their drinking habits. /s

Do you have a citation for that? The natural reason for it to vary by gender is because men are heavier than women, but in that case you're still better off giving both genders the same advice and giving them the option to scale by body mass. I don't see any other reason why men and women of the same size should have different alcohol recommendations.

This article contradicts you and suggests this is a case of the guidelines catching up with the science and medical advice.

Also: women typically have higher percentages of body fat, meaning that for the same overall weight, women have a smaller volume of water to dilute the alcohol and end up with a higher concentration. http://www.builtlean.com/2010/... Women have lower levels of alcohol dehydrogenase than men in youth but higher in middle age. http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.o...

There is nothing scientific about it, and the medical profession say the change has nothing to do with new scientific data. The sole motivation driving this was to make men equal to female.

As if this bullshit is going to reduce anyone with a penis to change their drinking habits. /s

Do you have a citation for that? The natural reason for it to vary by gender is because men are heavier than women, but in that case you're still better off giving both genders the same advice and giving them the option to scale by body mass. I don't see any other reason why men and women of the same size should have different alcohol recommendations.

This article contradicts you and suggests this is a case of the guidelines catching up with the science and medical advice.

If I understand the certification process, this is already being done with aviation and aerospace components and certain critical types of military equipment. If you purchase, for example, a grade 8 bolt and matching castle nut for an aviation application, it comes with a manufacturers document that guarantees it met spec when tested at their plant. The testing equipment the manufacturer uses also has its certificate(s) indicating who made it, when it was last calibrated, what the accuracy can be expected to be and so on. EVERY part on a commercial aircraft is supposed to have this chain of documented specs and testing.
All of that testing and record keeping adds to the manufacturing overhead, in turn greatly increasing cost. As a result; there is a thriving black market in stolen, superannuated or outright counterfeit aviation parts. There is enough margin there to make creating counterfeit documentation well worth the effort.

Yep, consider China fake parts 'used in US military equipment'.

in the name of patriotism

I wonder, does Obama mean with "patriotism" spying on abroad companies to give their US competitors a benefit? How Trump of him.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/e...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

http://www.telesurtv.net/engli...

*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.

OK, I've heard of a lot of statements regarding our college graduates, but this bullshit takes the cake.

Why? Well because technically you need a fucking job in order to actually pay taxes on it.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
How US students get a university degree for free in Germany
By Franz Strasser BBC News, Germany
3 June 2015
While the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees.
More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion).
(Hunter Bliss, South Carolina.)
Each semester, Hunter pays a fee of â111 ($120) to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, to get his degree in physics.
Included in that fee is a public transportation ticket that enables Hunter to travel freely around Munich.
Health insurance for students in Germany is â80 ($87) a month, much less than what Amy would have had to pay in the US to add him to her plan.
To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year.
At his nearest school back home, the University of South Carolina, that amount would not have covered the tuition fees. Even with scholarships, that would have totalled about $10,000 a year. Housing, books and living expenses would make that number much higher.
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."

To me death is an obvious part of the life cycle, which is the base for evolution

I wouldn't say death is a prerequisite. "Competition for quantity" may be effective in driving evolution also. Those variations that are the most common will be the more efficient or prolific replicators, and that's why they are more common.

Mutations that produce faster replicators will be more common, creating a feedback mechanism to "reward" them, where the reward is quantity of existence rather than mere survival.

If you have a big enough breeding ground, the difference between slow replicators and fast replicators can make a huge difference and be a big driver of variation.

Who knows, maybe Earth's very first species, a really really slow replicator, is still around. But since there's only say 500 of them, no scientist will ever find any.

Note that slow-replicating bacteria have been found inside deep buried rocks. Some speculate they reproduce roughly once every 10,000 years (which is more prolific than most slashdotters :-)

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

And that is why there is e.g. Gorrila tape.

No one has ever won a Nobel Prize with either duct tape or Gorilla Tape.

Yes, politics, corruption and violence would never allow any country in North Africa to develop a solar power plant... Except it's already being done. Morocco is not only building a massive solar power facility in the Sahara, with melted salt to store the energy, but is also developing power lines to export the electricity to Europe under the straight of Gibraltar.

Faced with a shrinking budget and poor economic conditions, . . .

This can't be right. Every Russian troll everywhere will tell you there is nothing wrong in Russia. The sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and theft of Crimea are having no effect. Everything is fine.

Yet these same trolls can't explain why their banks keep failing, why their biggest quasi-bank, VEB, needs $13 billion to keep itself afloat, why every other week another article comes out, such as this one, saying more and more programs are getting cut or eliminated, why pensioners are having their money allowance reduced, or why, based on current projections, Russia will run out of money before the end of 2016.

Corrupt fascist oligarchs such as Putin will tend to have this effect on a country, especially when the mothers of the Russian soldiers killed invading Ukraine are not allowed to talk about their son's deaths because deaths of soldiers during "peace time" are state secrets.

The longer Russia keeps invading and attacking its neighbors, the more it keeps trying to bully its neighbors, the longer sanctions will stay. The trolls can whine all they want about the sanctions not having any effect, but the louder they squeal the more one knows they're hurting.

There's a reason former Soviet bloc countries have embraced the freedoms of the West rather than the repression of Soviet Russia. They know all too well the indignities and injustice served upon them by Russia. Witness the deportations of Tartars from Crimea, the daily raids on Tartar homes to see if there is any "subversive" material, the refusal by the Russians to allow Tartars to speak their own language or have their own schools.

Russia will suffer until it either dies or changes. Unfortunately the Russian people are too stupid to make change happen.

I guess you can always walk where you want to go, although it has certain limits on its practicality.

Definitely has limitations when you live in Hawai`i as I do.

Only if you're lazy. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America."

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

Fucking stupid, but context is everything, except to bureaucrats.

The Ukraine, like the Netherlands, is prefixed, mr. Asshole.

You mean like these guys did in Ukraine?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

It's pretty amazing what some well placed thermite can do to a power grid.