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To be fair, Cooper only opposed gay marriage because, as he pointed out, it's his job as AG to represent the state of North Carolina. He was on record as opposing the ban.

He was lying. [aside]You can tell when politicians do that by checking to see if their lips are moving.[/aside]. Virginia's Attorney General was in a similar position, except it wasn't just a state law, it was written into the state Constitution. Yet he still refused to uphold the law. So Cooper was just blowing smoke up your ass. He defended the anti-gay marriage law because he decided that was the most politically beneficial position, and had a handy excuse to use for doing it.

Do you have any idea how much those things cost to maintain and operate? Not to mention the detrimental effects on performance, handling, and fuel economy of a 12-foot-tall, 12,000-pound turret on top of your vehicle. Though it would be good for attracting attention. And the torque it generates could probably spin your car around. I'll stick with a modest MRAP, with optional CROWS, just so I can feel safe when I drive to the grocery store. Besides, MRAPs are a bargain: $700,000 new, the US Department of Defense was selling them to local police departments for as little as $2500: "...all Page County had to pay was the cost of shipping it from a refurbishing plant in Texas."

What's most interesting is that it's usually the most religious people who buy into the Republican Party's ideology, which includes "grabbing whatever you can get" and espousing Ayn Rand-style objectivist philosophy.

Check out this story on npr: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/...

Basically it would appear religion is in politics for the same reason anything else is, fat cats want more money. Whoda thought?

I forgot to link the NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/...

1) The problem I see with the "Am I free to go?" question is that in all of the recorded interactions I have seen, the police officer more often than not just ignores the question.

Police: "Sir, can you tell me your address?"
Citizen: "Am I free to go?"
Police: "Sir, I need your address so I know if you should be on this street."
Citizen: "Am I free to go?"
Police: "Sir, do you live on this street or not?" ...and so on. Eventually the police officer will either concede the person is free to go, or will call for assistance.

You're correct. The next step is to say "I've repeatedly asked if I am free to go, and you haven't answered. Unless you tell me otherwise, I'm going to assume that I'm not free to go and am being detained. I refuse to answer any other questions without my attorney present" or conversely, "I've repeatedly asked if I am free to go and you haven't answered. Unless you tell me otherwise, I'm going to assume that I am free to go and will be on my way." If they then say "stop", that's detention.

5) At what point do we start holding North Carolina officers responsible when they unconstitutionally pull people over for a burned-out rear tail light? NC law only requires a single "stop lamp" on the rear of a car. The Walter Scott incident should have never happened, as it is reasonable for NC officers to know by now that NC law has held being pulled over for only a failed brake light is unconstitutional.

Yes and no... The Supreme Court held, 8-1, that even though stopping someone for a single broken tail light in North Carolina isn't legal, it's not unconstitutional, because it's reasonable for police to not know the law. :/

No, the destruction of nation-states (Libya, Syria, and Iraq) that created the conditions for ISIS to flourish are Clinton's responsibility. She was a policy-maker, not the policy-maker, but a policy-maker nonetheless who was in the room when these decisions were made.

Please explain how civil strife in nation-states like Syria where there is little American much like the Secretary of State's influence are Hillary Clinton's fault. Especially when Iraq's civil strife is caused by religious differences between Sunnis and Shia that have been brewing for the last 1400 years. You seem to not understand history.

She was a policy-maker, not the policy-maker, but a policy-maker nonetheless who was in the room when these decisions were made.

So the policy of the Obama administration are all on her? Really so you are at fault for what your boss or father decides?

.. when the price of oil (the biggest expense for them) dropped like a rock end of last year, did the airlines lower ticket prices or remove fuel surcharges? Nope.

Nobody should be required to buy into loss leaders or other pricing schemes like this.

And now they're taking a page out of the BSA's lawyer playbook with this "lost revenue" crap. Just because someone could have bought a $500 ticket from NY to SLC doesn't mean that $100 was stolen from United because they bought a $400 ticket that was NY to LA with a layover in SLC.

And then there's airline pricing in general. I always have a hard time feeling sorry for the airlines, but when the price of oil (the biggest expense for them) dropped like a rock end of last year, did the airlines lower ticket prices or remove fuel surcharges? Nope.

Big companies like airlines have used obscure and convoluted pricing schemes for decades as a way to screw over the average customer. Seeing them get thrown back into their faces isn't illegal -- it's a sweet dose of justice.

Um... Climate Change?

Here is what the sitting Dem President has to say: “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.” - President Barack Obama, June 25, 2013" https://www.whitehouse.gov/ene...

Here is what the Dem candidate for President in 2016 says: "Clinton began her remarks at the National Clean Energy Summit by laying out the problems climate change is already causing today, including extreme weather and droughts. “[These are] the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face,” she said. “No matter what deniers say.”" http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hil...

Here is what the last Rep President had to say: " In 2001, President Bush decided to pull out of the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol, a worldwide agreement to try to keep greenhouse gases down. Environmentalists were aghast. The president said he had his reasons. "That I felt the Kyoto Treaty was unrealistic. It was not based upon science. The stated that mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way."" http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

And here is what a Rep candidate for 2016 has to say about it: " Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions whether global warming is real, arguing that the "data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing." "The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened," said Cruz." http://politicalticker.blogs.c...

So, yeah there are real differences between US political parties, particularly on the subject of this article, Climate Change

I Think that just goes to show that they target different members of the population, not that they have real meaningfully different agendas. They almost always vote the same on things like domestic spying, invading foreign countries, etc. The only thing they really fight over is how to slice the pie.

Um... Climate Change?

Here is what the sitting Dem President has to say:
“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.” - President Barack Obama, June 25, 2013"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ene...

Here is what the Dem candidate for President in 2016 says:
"Clinton began her remarks at the National Clean Energy Summit by laying out the problems climate change is already causing today, including extreme weather and droughts. “[These are] the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face,” she said. “No matter what deniers say.”"
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hil...

Here is what the last Rep President had to say:
" In 2001, President Bush decided to pull out of the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol, a worldwide agreement to try to keep greenhouse gases down. Environmentalists were aghast. The president said he had his reasons. "That I felt the Kyoto Treaty was unrealistic. It was not based upon science. The stated that mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way.""
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

And here is what a Rep candidate for 2016 has to say about it:
" Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions whether global warming is real, arguing that the "data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing." "The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened," said Cruz."
http://politicalticker.blogs.c...

So, yeah there are real differences between US political parties, particularly on the subject of this article, Climate Change

Let me guess, your search term was "Zionist lies from Slashdot"?

Because a few moments of googling for ME turned up the following links, which certainly suggest that the climate in France is certainly not particularly warm to Jewish people and moderate Muslims:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://time.com/3694100/france...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...
http://forward.com/news/breaki...

Please proceed to tell us about how all of these articles are just more examples of crackpot, Zionist activity.

Well, if your worried about it, have a few more children. Or alternatively, mentor some children.
You can absolutely improve someone's intelligence, especially children. Make a difference today.
citation - http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/...

Israel didn't start it, Hamas did.

No. The UK started it with the Balfour Declaration, then the Zionist Organization followed by with an invasion. Arabs started to resist the invasion, and the cycle began, with many sins since then by many players. But the origin was British colonialism and Jewish millenarianism. And the recent and ongoing brutality has been primarily of Israeli origin.

Who are the terrorists? The ones launching cowardly, hidden attacks, or the ones defending themselves?

There is nothing "cowardly" about hiding. That's how you win a battle. It's why we invented camouflage. That's the same charge the British leveled against American colonial fighters, that they wouldn't stand out in the open wearing bright colors and be shot like Real Men.

And the Palestinians have been on the defensive since 1917, that's the historical fact.

And that produce will have more minerals and grow bug free. Double win!

Yup. They use stuff like Azomite and Elomite (Rock Dusts) as soil amendments.

I used it for the 1st time last year and my garden's yeilds were amazing (I harvested double the plum tomatoes from the less plants - 132lbs in 2014/15 plants vs. 66lbs in 2013/18 plants

And that produce will have more minerals and grow bug free. Double win!

This sounds like a honeypot to me..

Especially when selling 0-days isn't actually illegal in most circumstances, only rather shady. Researchers do deals all the time. Total anonymity on one or both sides doesn't really help anyone. Hell, it's so commonplace they have discussed it on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

If anything this is just a new way to scam people out of money or to ferret out security researchers for further recruitment/waterboarding by the CIA.

Yes, Monsanto developed the terminator gene technology.

They have never used it in their products.

Yes, Monsanto enforces their contract that prohibits seed saving by farmers. If farmers want to use seed saved from harvest for the next year's crop, they have to use some other source for their initial seed. Most US and European farmers were already buying seed every year before GMO seed became available. This was less common with soybeans, but the trend was there.

NPR report on the Top Five Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds.

That's not "a" study, it's from a metastudy.

Yeah. a metastudy by a doctorate candidate. So brilliant, no one has heard of her neither before nor after, and the only reason we have heard of her at all, is that she manipulated the numbers to show, what progressives wanted to see.

Where are you getting that quote from the paper?

Those words are from the article you linked to. The popular text describing the paper.

There absolutely are some very demonstrable differences in certain psychological regards

Oh, wow. Great. Now, if psychology is affected — and we also know, that muscles are — could there not be other differences, subtle and otherwise? Could those hormones, that cause women to dress more provocatively and buy provocative clothes during fertility periods, be also having an effect on work and other pursuits?

We are approaching the question with different axioms — and come to different conclusions. You say: "Genders are equal, therefor any sign of differences proves sexism". I say: "There is little to no sexism, therefor the observed differences prove, genders are different."

Some of our arguments (all of yours, actually) are simply variations of the above...

Oh please, you're not seriously going to pretend that there weren't tremendous pressures in Victorian society for women to not be involved in STEM-style careers

Queen Victoria died in 1901. According to NPR, female participation in programming was on par with men until 1984. I don't buy NPR's explanations, but I believe their facts. Whatever the reason for females losing interest in mid-80ies, blaming "Victorian era" for it is stupid today and was stupid 30 years ago. Find yourself something else to blame...

But if you continue to insist, it is American "parochial" ("bigoted", "backwards", "retarded") attitudes, that are to blame, then you must first explain, why women in the even more parochial countries (like all of the ex-USSR) are doing better, rather than worse.

"I'll see your 50% and raise it to 100%" - how does this even make sense?

Here is how it make sense. You wrote: "one can decide that having 50% of the human population having a solid interest in the sort of careers most valuable to the improvement of the human condition is a good thing". I still think, having the entire 100% of the human population — both sexes, that is — having that "solid interest" is an even better thing.

This ridicule is what you get for speaking in (other people's) slogans, instead of your own sentences.

Nobody is talking about disinteresting men from pursuing STEM careers

Why, TFA is talking about exactly that: "for excluded male students by [...] a companion all-boys school that would emphasize English Language Arts". So, did I just catch you lying, or you didn't even read the write-up before posting?

"Are there laws or even customs, that prevent girls from entering a STEM field and excelling in it" - it's like you didn't even read my post.

I read it, and I still don't know, what you are talking about. "Victorian era"? Must be it...

And if one person wastes their time trying to become a physicist when they'd have made a better fry cook? Well whoop-di-freaking-doo. The world is still a better place.

No, the world is a worse place, if you force a would-be brilliant singer, designer, or a CEO into becoming

Feminists would like us to think, all of that is due solely to upbringing, but they offer no evidence

Well, there's this and other things like it: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Until about the mid-1980s, gender distribution in computer science was a lot more equal. Then something changed. Since you can't reasonably claim that human physiology has changed this profoundly in a few decades, the explanation must be sociological.

yeah and that's why most of you geniuses in the USA should be paid Chinese salaries and get used to it.

It's not like most of you in the USA are really that much better than workers in China earning Chinese level salaries:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

And it turns out that the job done in China was above par â" the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building,"

And as they learned, his schedule also included sending less than one-fifth of his salary to the Chinese firm.

Count of business owners making such a decision under capitalism: 1

Not the first or only time this has happened.

The best known example happened about a hundred years ago. One of the greatest capitalists of all time doubled the wage of roughly 14,000 employees. Not because he was generous or forced to do so by a government or union, but because it was a good business decision.

By W. Warren, do you mean Elizabeth Warren? (I can't find anything relevant for "W. Warren") In a recent interview with NPR, Elizabeth Warren unequivocally said she would not run for President:

But you don't want to run, still?

I do not.

This doesn't mean she won't throw her name in in the next 16 months, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I would love to see her run, too, but she is also a good force in Congress and I don't want to see that get more lopsided with her absence...

Yes, this. At some point in the past, women were better represented in the math and sciences. Decades ago, more women were doing technical stuff
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

And then at some point engineering and technology became a "bro" field and pushed a lot of women out, perhaps because of insecurity with their male dominancy hierarchy or whatever, or increased competition from not so many men going off to die in wars, or whatever.

Women are very useful to have in organizations, though. It's not just an equality thing. There are tangible benefits. Teams with women have better communication.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...
Product teams with women on them can develop better products that appeal to women and serve a wider customer base.

These kinds of things explain why a lot of large successful businesses are working hard to put more girls through STEM education to bring things back up from the 10 - 20% gender ratio where they are now. There aren't that many things you can do to effectively double your customer base. But appealing to women is a pretty big one. So yes, women are more highly sought-after than men in the tech industry. It's nothing to be concerned or ashamed of, it's just a real problem that exists and people are trying to address the issue.

Everyone else can stay and whine in silent desperation on your little male-dominated lonely island if you want. Evolution and the free market will take good care of you! :D

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsal...

Its not as cut and dry as you present it. Note that I posted a link to a site that most would say is favorable to Mrs Clinton.

Too lazy to google?

http://www.globalpost.com/disp...
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/...

Right accept that people who are overweight or mildly obese actually live longer:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...

I like how the article you linked to already has a refutation of this claim within it.

One of the experts who takes issue with Flegal's conclusions is epidemiologist Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health. He has read her new paper and says he's not buying it.

"This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it," he says.

Willett says it's not helpful to look simply at how body mass indexes, or BMIs, influence the risk of premature death, as this paper did, without knowing something about people's health or fitness. Some people are thin because they're ill, so of course they're at higher risk of dying. The study doesn't tease this apart.

Also, he says the analysis doesn't address the bigger, more important issues of quality of life. If an overweight person does live longer — is he or she living with chronic diseases?

"We have a huge amount of other literature showing that people who gain weight or are overweight have increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, many cancers and many other conditions," Willett says.

Right accept that people who are overweight or mildly obese actually live longer:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...

Methods are improving and materials are improving. As costs continue to drop and more materials become available, look around your home and ask: What objects could be replaced with replicas made of metal, ceramics, even advanced composites of wood or stone. A composite maplewood desk. A custom designed set of steel silverware. Porcelain plates. Ceramic bowls. Iron composite free weights. I have a painting I purchased at an art museum. It would be neat to be able to snap a photo, get home and have a replica suit of armor. Surely this won't cover everything, but certain kinds of objects will simply be available now, whether or not you purchased them directly (simply by having the materials necessary). It will be interesting to see how the market reacts, but in terms of the products that get replaced, to the innovations that build on top of this.

I heard some conservative radio host this morning. He was whining that CEO's are trying to make themselves a third political party and it should be an outrage. I thought this was excellent schadenfreude. The CEO's have been running the GOP for years, now we are seeing a split in the wealth class that mirrors the split in the working class.

I hope it was a good ride, but the "values voters" are finally turning on the hand that fed them. Wrapping things in religion is a great way to get your way. Until the "true believers" start to think your all on the same side and they want to use you just as much as you are using them.

This reminds me of a great episode of the Planet Money podcast: "How The Burrito Became A Sandwich" http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... If there is a Tax, there will be a loophole, and a fix, and a loophole, the burrito becomes a sandwich...

Short NPR "Planet Money" podcast about the history of spreadsheets, including interviews with the inventor of Visical:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

> Note: This episode contains explicit language.

> Spreadsheets used to be actual sheets of paper. Sometimes, a bunch of sheets of paper taped together.

> Then, in the late '70s, a bored student invented the electronic spreadsheet. It transformed industries. But its effects ran deeper than that.

> As one journalist wrote more than 30 years ago, "The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view — reality by the numbers."

> Today's show was inspired by A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge, a 1984 article by Steven Levy.

Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male). And I actually like looking at pretty girls. But at what cost? Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Things like Booth Babes drive people away. For those of you interested, it is illuminating to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to what I'm sure will turn into a flame war..... (Complete disclosure: I posed something similar a few weeks ago, but it's such interesting stuff, I posted it again!)

I don't understand the train of thought that leads to the notion that quantum computing is a prerequisite for strong AI, unless there has been some research that has shown that the human brain is a quantum computer.

There is some investigation that suggests that quantum consciousness is possible based on interactions between microtubule structures inside of neurons. But there isn't really anything to suggest that much more happens inside of the brain that can't be explained by the classical interactions between axons and dendrites of a typical neural network that can be modeled satisfactorily by a simulation.

But I agree, quantum physics, like atomic radiation in the 50s and electromagnetism at the turn of the century, is the overhyped and poorly-understood cure-all of modern day science. If someone says something relies on quantum physics, it probably means they don't know what they're talking about and just hand-waving. Unless they're talking about quantum entanglement, in which case it might be useful for a tiny set of specially-constructed quantum cryptography problems. And just stop dreaming if they mention anything about quantum teleportation, in which they're surprised that they can't exactly keep fuzzy particles in buckets without some of the fuzziness "escaping"

But anyway, yes, computers replaced secretaries in the 50s. They're going to replace truck drivers over the next few decades.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Computers are not going to replace teachers anytime soon, though... the entire job of the teacher is to tell when the students aren't getting it via conventional scripted means.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

I'd encourage you to listen to the story as well.

This is the fallacy of small numbers, a.k.a. hasty generalization. There weren't many CS majors (of either gender) in the 80s, so the gender ratio will be less representative of a real trend (consider flipping ten coins. Your probability of getting 50% heads isn't as good as it would be if you flipped a thousand coins). Most of my software engineer peers who got degrees in that era actually studied other fields, such as math or electrical engineering.

That said, the drop from 10-15 years ago is completely valid and this is indeed a problem.

(disclaimer: I did not listen to that story and I don't have stats at the ready to prove my observations)

I guess you've never heard about the intense growing season in Alaska, resulting in giant vegetables and other crops - 65 lb. cabbages feet in diameter. 24 hour sunlight has amazing effects on some plants. (Of course in some cases this natural phenomenon has been encouraged by selective breeding, etc. but that's beside the point.)

Also, increased CO2 has been shown to be a powerful plant growth stimulant.

who, this germany?:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

americans are and should be angry at the NSA

but other countries complaining about the NSA is hypocrisy

if i was german, would i be worried about the NSA? or the BND and the BfV?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

if you live in a country outside the USA, and your biggest privacy concern is the NSA, you're a moron: your own country is doing everything the NSA is doing, and in many countries, far worse. obviously, they can also abuse you a lot easier than the USA can. and they do

again: i don't have a problem with americans complaining about the NSA. americans SHOULD complain about the NSA. but i do have a problem with other countries complaining about the NSA when they do the same or worse

Even though I do think brick and mortar stores should at least be aware of what Amazon is doing.

I assure you that they are acutely aware of what Amazon is doing.

The question still remains if Amazon can actually stop bleeding red and profit.

Amazon could be profitable tomorrow if they chose to be. You only have to look through their financial statements to show that. They reinvest heavily in growing the company and in some pretty speculative projects (Fire Phone) and as long as Bezos is CEO I don't see that changing. And honestly I think that is a good plan at least in principle - and so far the execution has been good. The biggest danger to Amazon is if a company like Walmart figures out a way to use their thousands of existing stores as warehouses in addition to being stores AND get people to think of them for online purchases.

Obviously Amazon is better on consumers and their obsessive need for instant gratification.

Umm, not so much. For most of Amazon's customer base there is at minimum a 24 hour delay before receiving any purchases. I can wander down to my local Walmart in about 15 minutes if I want "instant" gratification.

The advantage for Amazon of course if they can manage to streamline delivery and offer good prices is that they have less physical over head over a Walmart.

That's not really as true as you might think. That's something of a myth left over from the early days of Amazon. Amazon has been busy building warehouses all over the place to facilitate efficient and fast delivery and these incur substantially the same costs as brick and mortar stores. They are doing this so that Walmart and the rest don't steal a march on them and use their stores as warehouses. Remember that your local Walmart is almost certainly closer to you than your nearest Amazon warehouse so this means that Walmart could in theory be able to deliver products quite rapidly if they work out the system for doing so and they are among the best at logistics in the world.

The problem is, that State's are now implementing sales tax requirements and the online merchants may not be able to convince as easily consumers to buy merchandise online vs going to a store.

Again Amazon is actually supporting collection of sales tax now. They believe it actually works in their favor and they are probably right. The sales tax on internet sales was all but inevitable so Amazon is getting ahead of the problem early.

Planet Money did a good podcast episode on why buying a car is so horrible:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

It's not a programmer thing; just look at the comments to the Wall Street Journal article and you'll find the same complaints. I find that pedantry is mostly a class issue. The educated upper classes (and those who see themselves as such) use pedantry to place themselves above others they view as lower class and uneducated ("begging the question" being a perfect example). You will never hear complaints about Bostonians who don't pronounce "r" (*Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd."); you will hear endless complaints about black people who say "ax" instead of "ask" (even though "ax" is actually the original pronunciation). The Boston accent is perceived as cosmopolitan and part of a historic American tradition. African-American vernacular is saddled with poverty and ghetto stereotypes by those outside the communities.

By definition, "improper" English is how poor people speak.

Here are a few words from a posh Brit on the matter.

That's not entirely true. Several of us where I work poked fun at a Bostonian coworker's references to his "cah".

It's not a programmer thing; just look at the comments to the Wall Street Journal article and you'll find the same complaints. I find that pedantry is mostly a class issue. The educated upper classes (and those who see themselves as such) use pedantry to place themselves above others they view as lower class and uneducated ("begging the question" being a perfect example). You will never hear complaints about Bostonians who don't pronounce "r" (*Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd."); you will hear endless complaints about black people who say "ax" instead of "ask" (even though "ax" is actually the original pronunciation). The Boston accent is perceived as cosmopolitan and part of a historic American tradition. African-American vernacular is saddled with poverty and ghetto stereotypes by those outside the communities.

By definition, "improper" English is how poor people speak.

Here are a few words from a posh Brit on the matter.

Shaman is pretty good, if you're into that sort of thing.

I love your optimism. Love it!
However you are leaving out one critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to agriculture: Water.

Where can we start?
How about the Cripps Institue predictions about water in the Western US/Colorado River Basin, that are now playing out.
How about Californias Central Valley?
How about overdrilling and polluting the aquifer under Sao Paolo in Brazil?
What about the overdrilling in India due to cheap and illeagal diesel pumps?
Etc;

Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind?

Yes. It's basically a nonissue.

What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far?

Then they settle someplace else. No actual evidence exists however to indicate wind turbines are actually causing such an effect however on any sort of substantial scale.

How does that affect terraforming?

We're on Terra so terraforming on terra is meaningless.

What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?

The number of birds killed by wind turbines is a rounding error compared to the number killed by domestic cats.

The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis.

What energy crisis? We have no lack of energy. We have a pollution crisis due to a lack of clean energy sources. Wind is demonstrably cleaner than some of the alternatives. There is no ideal energy source with no problems so it's a minimization problem. What is the least worst way to supply energy without resulting in catastrophic climate effects.

The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.

There is no energy shortage. Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation. Starvation and hunger are distribution problems, not production problems. Crime has existed since the dawn of mankind and has nothing inherently to do with overpopulation. Same for disease. At most some of these problems can be exacerbated by population but population is not the root cause of any of them.

BerkleeX: BCM-MB110x Introduction to the Music Business - goes into great detail on the in's and out's of proving copyright infringement (taught by John P. Kellogg, Esq - you might be able to access the archived course)

Basically you need to satisfy three requirements 1. actually have a copyright (easy if you filed correctly), 2. prior access to the work (harder to prove), and 3. substantial similarity (one for the musicologists and then the jury).

most copyright infringement claims are settled out of court (e.g. "I Want a New Drug" vs "Ghostbusters"). A big factor in so many settlements is that you can be ordered to pay court costs if you lose and that juries are never a sure thing (but that is just my opinion)

I don't have an opinion on this specific case - but I will defend the concept of the copyright as crucial to the "creative" industry

in the "duck and run" category this case has my attention ...

It's absolutely a shakedown. The Bail industry was an early exploiter of campaign finance loopholes and cronyism.
For more information: http://www.npr.org/series/1229...

like those 47 senators, i guess you need an education on how the us government actually works, from a fucking iranian of all people, because you're too ignorant of how your own country actually works before opening your uneducated mouth:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

Zarif expressed astonishment that some members of US Congress find it appropriate to write to leaders of another country against their own President and administration. He pointed out that from reading the open letter, it seems that the authors not only do not understand international law, but are not fully cognizant of the nuances of their own Constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy.

Foreign Minister Zarif added that "I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations.

The Iranian Foreign Minister added that "change of administration does not in any way relieve the next administration from international obligations undertaken by its predecessor in a possible agreement about Irans peaceful nuclear program." He continued "I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law."

Where was zarif educated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

At age 17, he left Iran for the United States. Zarif attended Drew College Preparatory School, a private college-preparatory high school located in San Francisco, California.[5] He went on to study at San Francisco State University, from which he gained a BA in International Relations in 1981 and an MA in the same subject in 1982.[6] Following this, Zarif continued his studies at the Graduate School of International Studies (now named the Josef Korbel School of International Studies) at the University of Denver, from which he obtained a second MA in International Relations in 1984 and this was followed by a PhD in International Law and Policy in 1988.[7][8] His thesis was entitled: "Self-Defense in International Law and Policy".[9]

zarif actually understand us law better than 47 senators

better than the hordes of propagandized americans like yourself

that's pretty fucking pathetic that you understand your own government less than an iranian

That just isn't my experience, nor does it reflect the reality of the market. Every company that I know that uses H1B pays very well (I don't use them).

Don't rely on anecdotes.
The top ten H1B employers, encompassing nearly half of all H1B visas, are off-shoring companies. They use the visa to bring someone in for a year or two and then send them back along with the job they had been doing.

> There is no law saying that any medium needs to label an advertisement as such.

Actually there is. Does slashdot qualify? Probably not. Does hothardware qualify? Borderline. Plus there are so many ways to compensate without actually using money, so loopholes abound.

> *well, this used to be true...

For that, there is AdDetector. It puts a big red banner at the top of many such 'articles.'

The linked article give it a C. That's quite a bit higher than Kenneth Turan implies in his review: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/...

Don't believe everything you read. If I had mod points I would have upvoted lkcl's earlier post.

I saw the late night show of Chappie yesterday. I am a science fiction nut (especially hard scifi and cyberpunk - Neal Asher, Peter F Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, etc.). Chappie is not hard scifi, nor is it grand theatric soap opera. But it paints a vision of how robots and AI would eventually get integrated into society. And I *loved* the movie for it. If you see District 9 (the director's earlier work), you will see that Neill Blomkamp has a very distinct and unique viewpoint. He focused not on technology, not on robotics and special effects, but on how all this will eventually coexist in our super fu*ked up world.

And the irony is thick in the movie. You have a bunch of outlaws - violent thugs - that first ridicule the robot/AI and try to take advantage of it, but eventually respect the being for what it is - an independent consciousness. Chappie eventually becomes part of the family. And I agree with the director's vision. The urban backdrop of modern day South Africa / JoBurg - it personifies a certain grittiness and bizarreness that just works perfectly for the story.

Sure, the movie and story has huge shortcomings. But for me, the main storyline, unique viewpoint, and the way it is directed - it all adds up to make a superb movie.

It is also worth reading Neal Asher for an even more violent and futuristic version of what this movie essentially is.

The linked article give it a C. That's quite a bit higher than Kenneth Turan implies in his review: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/...