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I seem to recall an article a while back about the Nave working on an unpowered exoskeleton to help sailors handle bulky loads and hold things in place with less fatigue...

Ahh.. here we go: FORTIS

Not just executing, but beheading AND crucifixion. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09... How very civilized.

Boehner also told the lawmakers that Pope Francis' visit to Congress the day before was a crystallizing moment, according to the lawmaker. Boehner then read the prayer of St. Francis to the conference after announcing his decision.

So yes, it looks like you were actually right on the money. It was going to happen eventually, but as to why today? The Pope did this.

> As what was done was deemed legal
Actually it was ruled ILLEGAL.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/...

The ruling came a month before the Patriot Act was set to expire anyway, so the court chose to delay enforcement of the ruling while Congress decided what, if any, surveillance to authorize in some new law. In other words, the court could have said:

"That's illegal. You must stop, and here are the details of what you must do and what you must not do ... You have 30 days to comply."

Instead, the court ruled:
"That's illegal. You must stop. Congress is busy working out the details right now, and that'll be done within 30 days anyway."

The snooping which the court ruled was not authorized under the Patriot Act ended for a few hours when P. Act expired on a Tuesday morning. Later that day, Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which said the NSA can't store the records, the phone companies must store them and respond to specific queries from the NSA.

Well, it was an executive order some time ago, on this end of the world. You have to figure you eventually saw this coming.

Foreign holdings of US debt are 37%, of that Japan holds more than China. The fact that this keeps coming up reinforces how low information the public really is.

unless somebody can show they got drunk against their will

Yeah, it's not like the majority of drivers have a yeast infection in the stomach. A Texas man blew an estimated 0.37% BAC in the ER after not having had a sip of alcoholic beverage.

Tesla has built what is slowly becoming a successful business using a tiny, TINY fraction of the cash that Apple has on hand, with a fraction of the access to the human resources that Apple has, based on brand recognition alone. Apple is sitting on over $200 billion in cash. To put this in perspective, that's four times the total value of GM (market cap of $48B currently).

Apple has never built a car, but Apple isn't a person. Apple has the resources to hire the best and brightest in the industry and to bring their design, supply chain access and incredible brand value to the table. I'm not going to write them off yet. If any company on earth could walk in and start building cars, it's Apple.

"So here we are talking about 500.000 cars instead of 20.000.000"

VW internal investigation has revealed 'discrepancies' in 11 million cars. This could be a bit bigger than initially reported. http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/2...

Volkswagen is not the first to write software that recognizes and adapts to the condition of being under test. Some 22 years ago my boss came downstairs and slapped an open copy of Infoworld on my desk. "How 'bout them apples?" He said. There was a gleam in his eye.

The article was the 8-Mar-1993 hardware column written by Steve Gibson (thanks Google!) and it created a novel scandal in the industry. Once again, a particular graphics card exhibited stellar -- even bizarre -- performance on the popular Winbench test.

Gibson and other had been tracking down and exposing a series of graphic benchmark cheats that turned out to be various tweaks in the software drivers that shipped with graphics cards, to exploit benchmark programs in various ways. He set his debugger on the driver but failed to find any point where the code branched during the test condition... and yet, his video hardware snoop clearly discerned that the card was deferring multiple writes of a certain text string "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back and sat on a tack." It turned out that this benchmark cheat had been written in as part of the microcode in the chip itself.

These days that might not seem so incredible, but remember. Flashable firmware is now the rule and chipsets are almost always designed with more than enough slack memory for field fixes and protocol upgrades, even (gasp!) malware. Many high level operations are pipelines to chip level directly. There's lots of elbow room, even double plus memory if you wish to keep the previous version in flash for a smooth rollback. But in the ROM days there was this unspoken assumption that such high-level antics as recognizing and adapting to test conditions at the chip level would be too difficult. This scandal swept that assumption under the rug. I especially like the manufacturer's sort-of confession, that those clever engineers of his were always coming up with new ways to get good WinBench scores. It was actually funny.

The next version of Winbench wrote random gobblegook to the screen instead.

Volkswagen shouldn't be laughing though about how easy it is to cheat, on the eve of self-driving cars. Neither should lab technicians testing for salmonella at peanut butter manufacturing plants.

No. That's called racketeering, and it is also quite illegal. The tobacco industry was caught and charged for doing the same thing. Their defense was that they"believed that their economic survival depended on their scheme to defraud," - http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/09...

You might want to consider the topology of NK (http://b.static.trunity.net/images/194500/600x617/scale/747px-north-korea-topography.png)

To "flatten" a country that's roughly the size of Indiana with mountain ranges is quite a bit different that doing it to a desert nation. You also get to deal with the tunnels and bunkers they've created: http://articles.orlandosentine...

Yes, the U.S. has bunker busters, but you have to know where to use them all. And the fact that NK has successfully tunneled into the ROK would indicate that the ability to detect them all is still lacking http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/02/...

The OJ Simpson Trial: Drama of the Century: I remember watching the gloves in the courtroom and thinking to myself, "He's not going to ask O.J. to put on the glove." That's too much of a risk. You never ask a question in a courtroom, much less do a demonstration where you don't know what the outcomes is. And it was like a slow motion disaster movie for the prosecution as O.J. milk the moment for all it was worth and pretended to try on those gloves.

Years of unrestrained spending, cheap lending and failure to implement financial reforms left Greece badly exposed when the global economic downturn struck.

So, no that is not how Greece got into trouble. Part of the problem is that the Euro coupled different performing economies together, so they couldn't just devalue Greece's currency so things from them would be cheaper.

Maybe you should try reading the fucking news, if the summary wasn't enough for you. "The 14-year-old's day ended not with praise, but punishment, after the school called police and he was arrested. " http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/...

What kind of "Bomber" doesn't detonate on the alarm, but alarms everyone to its presents?

Not every terrorist is clever professional. Most of them are just dumb shits who get caught trying to light their underwear or bring a jammed gun to their attack.

you said it, brother!


Face it, our voting machines are all rigged now.
How else can NOBODY vote for THAT GUY, but he keeps getting elected year-in and year-out?
Can't have the wrong lizard get elected, now can we?

A drone crashed into the seats at the U.S. Open and at a University of Kentucky football game.

So far, no one has had bodily harm from someone doing stupid things like this but, like everything else, it will happen and then the shit will hit the fan (or blood will hit the drone blades as the case may be).

Then you get the idiots who get confused and use their more lethal gun instead. As in using their gun instead of their taser. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/14/... (Warning - auto-playing video)

Makes me wonder how good other popular sites are at security.

Poor. Facebook had a flaw that allowed anyone to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall, for example.

We really should figure out this security thing.

Easy. "The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it." --Robert Morris Sr

over 75% of drivers drive for Uber and Lyft simultaneously

That may be true, but if so they are violating Uber's policy. Uber prohibits driving for Lyft. It is only relevant that Uber has this policy. It is not relevant that most drivers violate it.

If Uber wants to shift their "employees" back to classification as contractors, they might want to dump this policy, since it doesn't seem to be working for them anyway.

Corporate income tax rate in US is highest on the planet.

You dumb sonofabitch. Do you not know the difference between a corporate tax rate and how much a corporation actually pays?

http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/0...

Corporations in the US pay about as much as Ireland, which is known for it's low corporate tax rate. And less than Hong Kong.

The difference between the corporate tax rate in the US and the corporate tax rates in the rest of the developed world is that the rest of the world actually means what they say. It's not just a dodge to make citizens feel like corporations are paying their fair share, as it is in the US.

Re lemonade stand: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/...

and instead of thinking I was bull$hitting you could have googled it: The following will give you a good list.

https://www.google.com/webhp?s... Re 1970s - I agree in a large part of everday life - except for the ridiculous laws on drugs, sex.

But the overwhelming mercantile regulations were bad then too. You are a big corporation (airlines) you get protected. You make money. No competition. And prices are out of reach for everyone but the wealthy.

N. fowleri can easily survive for 24 hours

But is it surviving? Does it even exist in our water system at present? I only know about this amoeba, because it became an issue up here in Minnesota when a boy swimming in Lake Minnewaska was believed to have contracted the disease and passed away. (Although, it was later determined that he died not from an amoeba but rather from bacterial meningitis.) But, as this was happening, it was shared that there's been only 35 confirmed deaths from amoebas over the last 10 years. Do we really need to concern and trouble ourselves over something killing 3.5 humans a year?

N. fowleri can easily survive for 24 hours

But is it surviving? Does it even exist in our water system at present? I only know about this amoeba, because it became an issue up here in Minnesota when a boy swimming in Lake Minnewaska was believed to have contracted the disease and passed away. (Although, it was later determined that he died not from an amoeba but rather from bacterial meningitis.) But, as this was happening, it was shared that there's been only 35 confirmed deaths from amoebas over the last 10 years. Do we really need to concern and trouble ourselves over something killing 3.5 humans a year?

The solution to this is already being discussed. It seems likely that in the future all cars will be equipt with vehicle-to-vehicle traffic control devices which will negotiate the right of way at intersections. The traffic signal will be on our dashboard. http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/14/...

Portuguese? Really? I'd believe Spanish in the Western Hemisphere. You must not have been following the economic news out of Brazil, Russia, or even China lately, either. Try this recent piece from CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/1...
A little statistic from the story: "Brazil's currency, the real, has fallen 24% against the US dollar this year to its lowest point since 2003."

"It's not clear if the Atlantic's below-normal season is related to climate change though.
"Hurricanes respond in complicated ways to their environment," said Timothy Hall, a research scientist who studies hurricanes at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a NASA publication in May. "It's one of the areas of climate change research where reasonable people can still disagree.""
I'm glad the armchair philosopher-troll-climatologists on slashdot know best.

Reminder that a presidential plane was grounded when rumors of snowden was on it:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07...

b-b-but my tinfoil hat

Right, and Germany is sunnier than the USA

Strawman. I never said anything of the sort.

You're right. I didn't see you anywhere in that video. It was just an interesting vdeo of what some folks on your side were talking about. We doing Oxford debate rules here?

Remind me again what portion of the INDUSTRIALIZED FIRST WORLD runs off of local wind turbines and/or local solar? Oh, that's right: not much. There's a perfectly good reason for that: it's not reliable power like grid power. Solar doesn't work when it's cloudy, at night, or when panels are covered by snow. Wind doesn't work unless it's windy.

And yet, looking at the Allegheny front near my place, there are a lot of wind turbines that seem to be running all the time. You occasionally see one in a turbine field that is stopped - I suspect that's for maintenance.

And as a small correction, the solar panels aren't charging at night. That's when we use the batteries tht the solar panels charge during the day. Works pretty well.

Grid power works all the time, every time.

Oh - bullshit. Here's a small sampling of your "works all the time, every time":

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25/...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

http://www.foxnews.com/weather...

Living here in the Northeast, we've had a lot of major power interruptions, that put that "Grid power works all the time, every time." claim as utter bunkum. The interruptions are generally due to freak weather, but caused me to get first a generator, and I'm now working my way over towards solar. Some of the interruptions have been around a week, and it doesn't take too many freezerfulls of spoiled food to make you think about the need for alternative power.

Power that isn't there when you need it most is rather useless.

I agree wholeheartedly. However, your vaunted grid is not the uninterruptible power source that you claim it is. I really needed the power not available from the grid until I got those alternatives. I can't rely on your promises for power. Thos promises don't make power come out of the wall sockets. It gets too cold when we're out of it for a week.

Oh, and nice dig at Fox News, not that it's remotely relevant to the discussion. But it does show your bias.

I'm not a liberal, if that's your implication. I'm a pragmatist who likes to point out bullshit. And yes, the idea that Germany is successful in their attempts to use solar power because they are sunnier than we are is bullshit.

And the overall point of that post is that Fox News is not the only group spreading bullshit about alternative forms of power.

Especially when those folk write:

Grid power works all the time, every time

So really what was that? Was the quote bullshit? Or do you actually believe that :

Grid power works all the time, every time

Because it certainly doesn't.

Not even in Germany.

Was it ever determined to be incompetence of the Bush administration, or are you just spouting off?

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"

Yes, as a matter of fact. Bush was too incompetent to know his flunky was too incompetent:

the Democratic lawmaker cited several e-mails that he said show Brown's failures. In one, as employees looked for direction and support on the ravaged Gulf Coast, Brown offered to "tweak" the federal response.

Two days after Katrina hit, Marty Bahamonde, one of the only FEMA employees in New Orleans, wrote to Brown that "the situation is past critical" and listed problems including many people near death and food and water running out at the Superdome.

Brown's entire response was: "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" (Copies of e-mails posted by critic -- PDF)

On September 12 Brown resigned, 10 days after President Bush told him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

And, in case you don't scroll far enough in that article:

Brown took over FEMA in 2003 with little experience in emergency management. He joined the agency in 2001 as legal counsel to his friend, then-FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's 2000 campaign manager. When Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003 Brown assumed the top job.

Before joining the Bush administration, Brown spent a decade as the stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

So, a man without proper experience failed to act and then offered to "tweak" the response, as if it was a minor thing.

So how about you stop thinking of this as a partisan issue. It really does come down to an unqualified crony of Bush failing to act, and Bush acting like it was all going according to plan.

But it is always more convenient to blame your political opponent, even if it is lazy.

Yes, yes it is. Only in this case it's you doing that.

Sure, having universal flu protection would be nice. But I don't know how I would feel about having THAT many autisms injected into me.

Ha ha. But seriously... As I understand it:

A large number of researchers (many funded by sources with no connection to drug companies) attempted to reproduce the research claiming to find a link between vaccinations and autism. They were not able to do so.

It was discovered that the original researcher who claimed the connection was funded by a consortium of trial lawyers.

The journal (BMJ), in which the original research was published, retracted it, investigated the study, and concluded that the author had "misrepresented or altered" the medical histories of the 12 subjects in question, in what appears to be a deliberate hoax.

More in this CNN article.

I fully intend to vote Deez Nuts for president!

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/21/...

It's not just RNC servers that were involved, but the White House server as well. There's a CNN story from 2007 that gives more details.

"This story is really now a two-part issue," CREW's Melanie Sloan told CNN. "First there's the use of the RNC e-mail server that's inappropriate by White House officials and secondly we've also learned that there were between March of 2003 and October of 2005 apparently over 5 million e-mail that were not preserved and these are e-mail on the regular White House server."

This is why if I build a custom house, I am hiring an architect/engineer and a professional construction manager that is not associated with the contractor to make sure it is built to spec. A well designed and built house can do amazing things. Unfortunately, most people are only willing to pay for appearance and ignore performance.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/22/...

CNN says he had 30,000. I am sure he paid them off

According to CNN, she actively used multiple personal electronic devices at the time, including one that was prominently mocked for being as big as four phones.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/...

Of course, the SJW press is busily trying to not call him a terrorist, despite the plain evidence that he was, and was even known for his previous involvement with jihadists.

Blame the European counterterrorism officals for that. "The train attack has not officially been classified as an act of terrorism, although the senior European counterterrorism official indicated it could be." -- CNN. Also blame the right, for jumping the gun and calling it a terrorist attack immediately .

These guys weren't armed with anything more than good training, and the mental preparedness to take action in a crisis, nevermind the guts to do so at considerable personal risk.

The average person will most likely freeze in a crisis, just out of sheer human nature. It takes a lot of training to overcome that, and to build up the instinct to act (nevermind in a beneficial manner), which in a combat situation is often the difference between life and death.

It's fun when people make assumptions based on their own biases... The latest update from CNN mentions that a civilian was also involved in subduing the shooter. "The three men -- a member of the Air Force, an inactive National Guard member and a civilian -- responded quickly, possibly preventing a deadly attack on the high-speed Thalys train." So, what were you saying about the average person again?

Everyone has fight or flight instincts and each situation is different. I would expect armed forces personnel to be more likely to respond quickly. That being said, it doesn't negate the fact that there are civilians who keep their heads in a crisis and who would respond.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/21/...

... it's the stupidity of using an email that's not a decoy.

Sure, a person can be tracked and traced via credit card number and address, but most people don't have the raw data or a database to put it and certainly no skill level regarding same.

But a lady puts her husband's email address into a web site and gets a hit?

She and her husband had been having marital issues lately, and she figured she'd plug his personal email address into a search tool.

It was a match, and she immediately called him. Here's how she remembers the conversation:

"What do you know about this website, Ashley Madison?" she asked.

He makes a big name for himself preaching family values and the church, condemning those which don't follow it God's righteous path, and has allegedly molested people in the past.

It probably seemed like a good place as any to start digging

According to the latest numbers, he is gaining on Hillary (liarly?), and only 6 points behind her.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/19/...

Troll for pointing out what happened to another critic of Putin?

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/27/...

Or are we to believe that Putin's ordering of a criminal investigation will really find the people who did it who were widely believed to be acting on Putin's orders?

"Inciting violence will only get yourself ostracized and jailed"

Yup, even on a small scale.

You guessed wrong about the shootings in Norway and now you're rolling the dice again, don't you learn?

Ironically, ISIS is playing you like a fiddle:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08...

Thanks to Drudge for posting it.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/1...

The people who take their children to the range and teach proper handling and shooting are not the people committing crimes with firearms that the police must deal with.

Right?

Don't forget "Don't happen to live on the route of a crooked UPS/USPS/Fedex driver" - fortunately only the dogs were killed in this one. But the raided Maryland Mayor is still rather pissed.

Storyline - package full of drugs found addressed to Mayor's house. They 'allowed it to be delivered*'. Mayor, seeing package addressed to wife on stoop, brings it inside and sticks it on the kitchen table for her. SWAT subsequently busts in and kills their dogs.

Turns out that it was the package delivery service driver that was crooked. They'd address packages for people along his route, mail them, but he'd intercept them before delivery.

Political shitstorm ensues as the Mayor actually knows how to make things painful for the department for raiding him and shooting his dogs. Even with this shitstorm, Sheriff refuses to apologize for raid, killing his dogs, illegal no-knock warrant, etc...

*Actually outside of normal shipping, an undercover officer placed it at the door.

He did have a plan. Says it clearly couldn't work now. It doesn't seem like a very Republican platform, to be sure. Of course, at the moment, he seems to be doing more to advance the chances of a Democratic candidate than Hillary is. Seems like every time he opens his Trump hole, another 4-5% of the country decides they want to vote Democrat.

Yes, most people who bothered to look at the name "Jane Q. Public" have referred to me here on Slashdot as a gal. Why do you have such a problem with that?

Jane, you're shamelessly bragging about being a good liar. But a really good liar could keep piling on the lies, insisting that he'd always just been talking about Slashdot. When Jane said he's "not a lesbian" he obviously that meant he's not a Slashdot lesbian, which explains his Slashdot fantasies about Slashdot fucking Slashdot "hot guys". Jane even had news for guys about how crude Slashdot women are in the Slashdot locker room.

Jane seems to dimly understand that his dishonesty is very inappropriate, but only when others like Rachel Dolezal do it.

But think about this, Lonny. Wouldn't it be worse if Rachel had responded by shamelessly bragging about being a good liar? Wouldn't she seem like a psychopath who couldn't experience shame, so she just piles lies on top of lies?

Again, you've already admitted that you lied a lot when you were younger, but claimed that you got over it. But since you're still shamelessly bragging about being a good liar, did you really "get over" lying a lot?

"@RatbagsDotCom You're a liar (which you have just proven beyond doubt), and present yourself as something you are not. You're a hypocrite." [Lonny Eachus, 2012-02-04]