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Looks like Quest^W Qwest^W CenturyLink is just going for Part Two of the original hit production: Broadband Subsidy Scam.

But don't worry if you're enjoying the show so far -- I have no doubt there will be a Part Three in 10 years or so.

"We aren't going to pretend this didn't happen." Except that is exactly what they did. You cannot even learn about the Nazis in Germany, as they ban all content the mentions them. America and the rest of the world gets Nazi and holocaust documentaries and novels, German citizens don't.

Are you joking or trying to be ironic?
There are endless complaints from German students of too much Nazis and holocausts.

Nazi/Holocaust education is mandatory in all of German schools.

Here's some links.
http://www.holocausttaskforce....
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
http://lernen-aus-der-geschich...

"Australia take note.... It's amazing what a bit of competition can do in this area."

First, Comcast has no competition. They are protected from it -- if you want Comcast in your area, you have to give them monopoly power. That's how they work. You're also assuming that Comcast has any intention of following through on this. They've made promises like this before, usually to secure funding. They take the money and run, rolling out networks that come nowhere close to the advertised speed while declaring success (and record profits).

Robert Cringely wrote about this eight years ago, discussing how the cable and telco companies received 200 billion dollars to roll out a bidirectional 45 Mbit network to the whole US back in the mid-90s. They didn't get pallets of cash, but they were allowed to put some surcharges on your monthly bill and received tax credits averaging $2000 / customer.

Eventually they claimed they only promised "broadband," and broadband was defined as Internet service with a download speed of 200 kbit/sec or more.

So when Comcast promises Gigabit cable for all, I'd love to know 1) What are the restrictions on the network, 2) Which neighborhoods -aren't- getting it, 3) What they're getting from the local municipalities in return (probably further banning of municipal broadband, and banning of competition to enforce Comcast's monopoly), and 4) What the funding source for this is. Somehow, I suspect that the funding for this isn't just being footed by Comcast. That's never been how they've operated in the past. They promise, they receive cash, they underdeliver, and they declare success despite the glaring failures around them.

What's with everyone predicting with certainty what will happen? Absolutely none of you know what will happen! The only way to find out is to try it.

Personally, as a moderate with libertarian leanings (although not a true Libertarian), I think it's worth a shot. The fact is that, like it or not, totally getting rid of the state welfare is politically impossible. However, we can make it less of a mess. Instead of having an alphabet soup of government welfare programs (and the bureaucratic overhead to go with it), it's not that crazy to just cut everyone a small check and be done with it. If the plan doesn't work, scrap it. It's hard for me to believe that the world will end (or even be significantly damaged) if we try it for a year. The economy is surprisingly resilient and has survived worse without serious damage.

FWIW, I'm not the only non-liberal with this idea. Here's an argument for basic gauranteed income published by the Cato Institute (Cato Unbound is one of their publications). Here is Charles Murry on the issue. (I'm not the biggest Murray fan, but he's certainly not on the left either.)

According to Wikipedia, it was over a million people moving to California alone from the US Midwest. Overall emigration from Oklahoma and neighboring states to regions outside the area, mostly to the western US, was around four million people.

Yeah, ah...NO.

Wikipedia
PBS

You can dig deep into your about:config settings and fix it there ((sorry - setting so obscure can't remember it! You might find it to turn it off but Grandmama won't)) and you are right!!! Firefox only pays lip service to privacy. And like their tieup with Adobe DRM https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-c..., their advertising page for "partners" http://adexchanger.com/ad-exch..., targeting you for advertising based on your browsing http://www.pcworld.com/article..., and now Disconnect.me, they're doing favors for businesses. Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Firefox has become a megacorporation. They are not for profit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... so that money doesn't to shareholders but it goes SOMEWHERE like executive salaries and just like a megacorporation they care more about cutting deals with other businesses than they do the public because we are not their customers. They are!

Sorry mods but this is NOT insightful as the poster does not understand how the Koran works.

The Koran is NOT the bible, it does not have any conflicting passages, why? Because Muhammad had the benefit of seeing how the other religions worked and came up with a frankly brilliant little fix for all the conflicts. Its really very simple...if a rule comes later that conflicts with a rule that comes earlier then the latter one supersedes the earlier one which takes care of conflicting passages.

Of course this also blows the whole "religion of peace" BS as the Hadiths that have come for the last 200 years have been "jihad jihad jihad" and since they came later they supersede the earlier peaceful passages and since Muslims are allowed to lie to unbelievers to help spread the reach of Sharia this works to their advantage, simply quote the old passages and never mention they were replaced centuries ago by the jihad Hadiths.

Have you not wondered why these Islam apology groups can say they "condemn terrorism " or a specific terrorist but never come out and say this terrorism has broken the laws of Islam and should treat those that commit terrorism as not a follower of Islam? Its simple, its because they can lie to unbelievers but NOT about fellow Muslims and since they know the little rule about latter superseding they would be bearing false witness against groups that was in reality doing exactly what the faith tells them to, waging jihad.

I would urge everybody who has any doubts read up a little on Wahhabism, a good place to start would be this this frontline article and then read up about the Sunni and Shia, they all do the same thing and all follow the supersedes rule which means you can really only look at the last 200 years worth of hadiths as everything else is treated as history, and what are all the new hadiths? Jihad jihad jihad.

Most of us are looking forward to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

Are you shitting me? Most of us were looking forward to the advent of flying cars, too.

Earlier this week...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

And who do they think is going to be purchasing all these "autonomous vehicles" and with all the twenty-somethings and millennials moving back home with their parents, how do they think they're going to afford them?

Look, I don't mind advertisements on Slashdot, but goddamn, please stop with the press releases from "anonymous" parties.

You keep proving my point.

Repeating the same falsehood over and over again doesn't actually make it true you know.

The State Department cannot locate them. That does not mean Ms. Clinton did not turn them over.

Remember the old days when we mailed a check to a bank to pay the monthly mortgage or credit card statement? Ever have one 'get lost in the mail' or somehow not get it into their hands before the due date through no fault of your own? Do you recall what happens? Usually late charges as it was your responsibility (not theirs) to make sure that your payment arrived on time. Same actually can be seen in the terms & conditions of many online banks & payment systems today.

What does this have to do with Hillary? It was HER responsibility to turn over all documents, not that of the State Department to make sure they gather it all. It's why usually when on the way out of federal service you sign an OF-109, certifying under penalty of perjury that amongst other things:

1. I have surrendered to responsible officials all classified or administratively controlled documents and material with which I was charged or which I had in my possession, and I am not retaining in my possession, custody, or control, documents or material containing classified or administratively controlled information furnished to me during the course of such employment or developed as a consequence thereof, including any diaries, memorandums of conversation, or other documents of a personal nature that contain classified or administratively controlled information.

2. I have surrendered to responsible officials all unclassified documents and papers relating to the official business of the Government acquired by me while in the employ of the Department or USIA.

Such terms would seem to apply to even the SoS right? Oddly enough, (despite it being the norm).

Even without signing the document, the requirements to turn over all official documents still exists, the paperwork is just a reminder with a legal threat attach to drive the point home.

Coupled with the fact that certain documents which are known to have been created and/or received during her time in office which do not appear to be part of what she handed over to State upon her departure, we have really only 4 options:

1. She did not turn over the missing document
2. Somehow the documents became permanently lost during delivery
3. Somehow the documents became permanently lost after delivery
4. Somehow the documents became temporarily lost after delivery and will turn up eventually... say in a different box.

You seem to be pushing for #4 as a possible reason as to why the documents are not currently discoverable, yet as time goes on we will know if that is true or not (once the rest of the emails have been examined)... while certainly possible, given other false statements (only used one device, never sent/received classified information, etc), we have a pattern of dishonesty emerge that while it doesn't prove #1, does start to make it a more likely scenario, doubly so when this isn't the first time documents she was required to turn over mysteriously disappeared (though in the 90's case, reappeared)..

There is a reason federal employees use federal email systems and not personal ones, that way the burden on the employee to archive all documentation is far far less. By opting for her own system she made compliance that much harder, and legally any failure to comply is on her... hence the investigations.

Clearly you have a belief of what happened and are trying to make reality fit that belief. Good luc

I haven't seen "Trinity" yet, but will include it on my list to watch.

I'm certainly not an authority re this subject, but I can recommend an episode of the PBS series called "Secrets of the Dead." The episode is called "The World's Biggest Bomb." I've watched it at least four times now. I thought it had great detail and was very informative. I also thought it had a decent amount of historical narrative re each of the significant tests in both the US and the USSR.

Program Summary: Beginning in the 1950s, American and Soviet scientists engaged in a dangerous race to see who could build and detonate the world's largest bomb.

Nah, the slave ship schematics here and here show all "passengers" facing the same direction. It seems the current state of the art in passenger comfort of the aviation industry is at the level of your average slave ship.

Pirates is highly inaccurate. It's like the Saturday After School Special version of the birth of the PC industry.

Instead, I recommend Robert X. Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds, where he actually talks to the people involved. You get to hear it from the horses' mouths.

It was based on the research Cringely did for his book Accidental Empires, of which he wrote:

"Not that everyone is happy with me. Certainly Bill Gates doesn’t like to be characterized as a megalomaniac, and Steve Jobs doesn’t like to be described as a sociopath, but that’s what they are. Trust me."

How do you know this, for a fact? The planet Earth could remain "lucky" for the rest of the life of the solar system.

Remain lucky? You've got to be kidding. The Earth has never been lucky. Giant space rocks have been hitting the Earth on a regular basis since it came into existence. What makes you think that will somehow magically change? Have we run out of asteroids already? The chance that the Earth will never again be hit by a large extraterrestrial body is so infinitesimal, that for all practical purposes it is zero.

So yes, it is inevitable that another giant space rock is going to fall out of the sky at some point.

Knowing of the risk of an asteroid impact during the 1600s, would you ask that they devote considerable resources to prevention?

What do you mean by "considerable"? Would 1% of one year's worth of the world's economic output in the 1600s be "considerable" in your mind? Does 1% meet your definition of "massive amounts of resources"?

Today, Gross World Product is currently around 75 trillion dollars per year. Let's say the cost to build and test an asteroid defense system is two billion dollars over ten years, or two hundred million dollars per year. Two hundred million dollars is what, 0.0002857% of yearly GWP? Have I got that right? Someone better check my math on that.

Assuming my math is correct, do you really think 0.0002857% of the world's economy for ten years would be so damaging that it would cause hardship for...well, anyone?

I'm one of the people who voted to shut down Rancho Seco back in the day,

And "thar's yer problem". Energy problems are all political at this point, not technical. Nuclear plants are less dangerous than other forms of power, even including the crappy old light water reactors we have to deal with (and which should have gone extinct by now, except for politics, especially the dominance of public nuclear insurance).

One thing Gates could do, that would be really good, is to advance the progress of superconductors. It already is cost-effective to run superconducting cables for power, if your demand is as great as NYC, but it's still only good for short runs.

With superconductors we could even deal with the political problems of nuclear power by putting most of the plants out in the Nevada desert and running the power on superconductors to where it needs to get used. For that matter, he could fund studies of a theory of gravity that might help us get to high-temp superconductors faster.

There are dozens of variables that all interplay; presumably Gates is aware of those factors and won't be too narrow-minded. A quarter billion dollars in lobbying money for the diffuse energy consumers' interests would do tremendous good in our corrupt system that's otherwise intent on democracide.

Madison was wrong.

Well, he was "only" the guy, who was writing down the items, as they were discussed during the convention. Surely, he had some insights. Maybe, you — in the 21st century — know more about the intent of those ancient legislators, but you aren't sharing... You just flatly say "wrong" — like a good little tyrant you secretly wish to be... Sigh, as they say, Statists gonna state.

Other founding fathers such as Hamilton understood the General Welfare provision very broadly.

Some citations would be useful here... As well as arguments for why we should be taking Hamilton's opinion over that of Madison and Jefferson.

But, if he was really so good, why are you proposing we "cherry-pick" Hamilton's ideas — instead of also electing the top executive ("national governor") for life — and have him appoint state governors?

I, for one, dread the thought of how this country would've looked, had that sort of tyranny prevailed — Russia, where the presudent's tenure is de-facto life-long and where he is appointing local governments even de-jure, is a very close example, actually.

Moreover, I suspect, you would've hated it too — had you even known about the man, whose opinion on "General Welfare" you advocate. You are wrong — the interpretation of "General Welfare" pushed by the Statists opens up a whole to drive a freight-train through. This was, of course, obvious for centuries. For example, that same Madison said later (1794):

The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects...If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers but an indefinite one..."

Indeed, whether it is to ban speech, confiscate guns, perform warrantless searches, seize funds and property without trials, eavesdrop on citizens' communications — the government would simply need to claim, those are done "for General Welfare". It would be a dreadfully depressing country to live in... Oh, wait...

PBS has a great documentary on this as part of "Building the Hoover Dam". They have the full documentary posted on their website at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...

Here's a couple of really good excerpts:

Narrator: The Colorado was a river unlike any otherâ" dark and red with mud and silt from carving out the planetâ(TM)s most magnificent canyons. It ran wild until 1901, when Western farmers set out to tame it. Their plan was to water the desert. Developers dug a canal system that brought the River into lower California, and turned parched soil into a vast agricultural paradise they called the Imperial Valley. For four bountiful years, farmers thought they were living a miracle. Then, without warning, the river struck back. In 1905 the Colorado tore open the canal and flooded the valley, creating an inland sea across 150 square miles. Over the next two decades, floods would wipe out thousands of farmers. Millions of dollars were lost.

(later on, talking about the need for a dam to control the flow of water:)

W.P. Whitsett, Chairman, Metropolitan Water District (archival): We here in Southern California, weâ(TM)re building a great empire. If we are to survive and to grow, we must have the water that will enable us to maintain our mastery over the desert.

According to PBS, there are some robots that do move and may cross borders:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spiesfly/

Total transportation, US (including non-federal): $1.3 trillion
Total annual military expenditures: $650 billion
Total energy expenditures (including nuclear and oil): $1.2 trillion -----
Total: $3.2 trillion
As a percentage of GDP (which is $17trillion): 18%

By far the largest sector of the economy is the service sector.

Consider for example that the government still pays billions of dollars to telecoms. Do you really think it is worth paying billions to Verizon?

The golden gate bridge was built without government money, and there are plenty of private toll highways in America. They are super-annoying but we're probably going to get more of them (Japan has a lot of them and sometimes you can expect a $50 highway toll for driving a few hours). (Eisenhower had a lot of vision, and realized before many other people how valuable a highway system would be, but transportation would still get done in America without it, but people would be more clumped together and transportation costs would be higher than $1.3 trillion.).

This is an old debate. I found one article from the 1830s complaining that a government funded canal had gone over budget, saying, "it would have been done more cheaply and more efficiently by private industry." It's not going to be resolved any time soon.

I'm pretty sure I watched this on TV several months ago,
So I'm kind of surprised to see it being presented as fresh news now.

It's cool and all, but from what I can tell it was aired in February on PBS and they'll even sell you the DVD.

That was on the PBS series NOVA on Feb 11, 2015 - I saw it then. Way to be current anon.

Their is plenty of evidence that GMO's are very harmful, like being deficient in trace minerals. The World Health Organization has declared Roundup to be a likely carcinogen

Worse yet our insanely stupid farmers/Monsanto have found an even more dangerous way to poison us by using roundup on NON-GMO crops as a preharvest drying agent

.

As I understand it, string theory does actually make some predication that are likely testable. Most notable is super symmetry.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/b...
A major issue is the number of variations that mean you can knock down one and proponents of the other will cite it as evidence.

And from the traveler's perspective the universe is consistent and there's no information loss either. They still see an apparent horizon, a place where time appears to stop, but they never reach it, it always recedes ahead of them. To them, the area beyond that apparent horizon is also not part of spacetime, but nothing ever manages to enter it so no information appears to be lost.

They of course eventually get ripped apart by tidal forces, but their information doesn't disappear into a "no-hair" singularity, it remains to be released when the black hole evaporates. As a black hole evaporates, time showing the particles falling deeper and deeper into it becomes observable to the outside world (albeit incredibly distorted and with the matter ripped to bits).

Again, that's at least my understanding of Hawking's "black holes don't actually exist" concept, and it makes logical sense to me. From the perspective of a traveler, they're just falling to their deaths in an extreme sort of collapsed star. From the perspective of an outside observer, they've fallen into a spot where a the collapsed star has ripped a hole in spacetime that won't start back up (from our perspective) until the "hole" boils off. Nothing ever lost, nothing ever undefined, always part of our universe, just effectively frozen temporarily in time. From our perspective.

That's because many companies in the US exist as paper instruments to enforce government-granted monopoly

No.

And you managed to toss the Import Export bank in there too, without understanding what it is. (hint: it not only does NOT stifle competition, but strengthens the country's exports and ability to export, and turns a profit for the government (which reduces the deficit))

The market is there. The market exists. It is here, now. The toy manufacturers are catering to an already demonstrated predilection. Mattel didn't create the tendency for little girls to like one kind of thing and little boys to like another. At most, they reinforce those tendencies. Mommies and daddies apparently approve of those tendencies, because they also reinforce them.

We have some rather vocal female member here at slashdot. Maybe you should take a survey, to see what the worst obstacles they had, when they decided to pursue geekish careers. How many do you suppose were shot in the face, for daring to pursue male careers? http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ex... How many had acid thrown in their faces? http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WO...

Let's put things in perspective here. We do NOT ban women from any occupation, unlike some more barbaric societies seem to do. Nor do we ban men from any occupation. You are free to do whatever the hell you want to do.

Except, in this case, sexist assholes passing themselves off as "enlightened" are busy trying to tell women that they must enter the STEM careers. Women who CHOOSE to be home makers have no value.

Social engineering. Google is actively trying to change society, in effect, telling us all that we don't measure up to some standard that Google has set for us.

Arrogant bastards. I don't have to measure up to their standards, and neither do my sons or daughters, or grandsons or granddaughters.

Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science

OR

and don't steer them in that direction.

Which is it? I get the feeling it's that girls just aren't that interested. People like to point out that more girls were interested in the 80s but that was a very different era. Few people actually knew what was involved with "programming computers".

All of this effort reminds me of a similar misunderstanding that I came across years ago. In the 50s Lionel decided that girls didn't play with trains because they weren't "girly" enough. They were black and steel and perhaps too boyish. So the genius marketers came up with this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadsh...
http://www.lionel.com/Products...

Should you wish to see one in person go to Holiday World and check out the old toy museum.

It flopped badly. The reason was simple: girls generally don't like trains, but those who do want an authentic train. Black, steel, menacing - a real train.

Every time I see people trying hard to make computer science appeal to girls I see the same thing. It simply doesn't appeal to most girls, and to those to whom it does appeal it will have that appeal without any sugar coating.

Ultimately, the SJW crowd needs to understand that men and women - and boys and girls - are very different creatures who aren't interested in the same sorts of things. The roots of this are genetic and stem from the social order tens of thousands of years ago. Nothing's going to "fix" it, but, then again, there's nothing to fix.

...that's not entirely true...

Your argument would be compelling if not for the fact that one doesn't need this technology to build historical cases or networks. Investigators are perfectly capable of using forensics to find such connections after the fact. Of course such databases will be used retroactively, to the extent possible, but the stated goal of the intelligence community is to prevent attacks before they happen, not to pick up the pieces afterwards. See, for example, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...

There are some good volunteer defenders -- I've met them, especially at The Innocence Project. The term that's usually used to describe them is "overwhelmed." But you want a just system, you can't depend on getting justice only if a volunteer happens to be available and willing. Why don't we depend on unpaid volunteer prosecutors? That would even the contest.

If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that.

There's quite a bit of evidence. Here's what I got from a quick Google search:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

The Color of Justice
This study, released by the Justice Institute in February, 2000, found that in California, African American, Latino and Asian American youth are significantly more likely to be transferred to adult court and sentenced to incarceration than white youths who commit comparable crimes. Compared to white youths, minority youths are 2.8 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, 6.2 times more likely to wind up in adult court, and 7 times more likely to be sent to prison by adult court.

Youth Crime/Adult Time: Is Justice Served?
This study released on October 26, 2000 by Building Blocks for Youth, found that minority youth, particularly African American youth, were over-represented and received disparate treatment at several points in the process. In the 18 jurisdictions in the study, 82% of the cases that were filed in adult courts involved a minority.

And Justice for Some
This 2000 study was prepared by The National Council on Crime and Delinquency for the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative. It concludes that "African American juveniles are overrepresented with respect to their proportion in the population at every decision point" in the juvenile justice process.

Here's more:

http://www.ibtimes.com/ferguso...

If I wanted to get solid scientific evidence, I'd start with a law review article, maybe in Harvard Law Review or Yale Law Review.

Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.

You can't be perfect, but it's not "a little advantage." It's an unacceptable advantage. The money spent on defense should be equal to the money spent on prosecution, and commensurate with the costs of running the criminal justice system. If the taxpayers want to spend $500,000 to keep somebody in prison for 10 years, then those taxpayers should be willing to spend a similar amount of money to make sure the right person is convicted.

I think one of the reasons people accept this is the tradition of racism in this country, for example in Texas with its death penalty cases. The people who run society accept it when it happens to black people (and working class people) who aren't like them.

I realize no system is perfect, and I can accept the injustice of a multi-millionaire (or a cop) getting away with murder. But I can't accept the injustice of a poor man being executed for a murder he didn't commit, simply because Texas didn't want to spend as much money for a defense as they do for the prosecution.

One of the underlying problems is that the US has greater inequality than most developed countries. Poor people have disadvantages because there are more poor people here than most developed countries. You can't have a fair justice system with massive economic inequality.

Furthermore, taxpayers have funded verizon, qwest, etc to the tune of $200 billion. Compared to the so-called "private" business, EPB are fucking capitalist sharks.

That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

If someone is providing "material support" to terrorists then fuck them. Lets say Osama bin ladin is living in my house and I know it is him... and I and feeding him and giving him cover. That is an example of material support. If you're doing that... then allow me to say on behalf of the American people, that you can eat all the fucking dicks.

Exactly why is this a bad thing? I don't get it. Someone explain this to me?

Does material support not mean what I think it means? I don't understand.

Well, here's what it means according to law.

However, whether something counts as "material support" or not is, well, up to interpretation, as has been noted by a number of people.

> The competitor here was taxpayer funded.

No more so than comcast. EPB took out a bond in order to deploy - not taxes. They did gain access to a federal loan after deployment had started that was available to any qualified ISP.

Furthermore, taxpayers have funded verizon, qwest, etc to the tune of $200 billion. Compared to the so-called "private" business, EPB are fucking capitalist sharks.

http://video.pbs.org/video/236... The recent Frontline documentary "American Terrorist" (which investigates American-born David Coleman Headley and his involvement in the Mumbai assault and the thwarted attack on a Danish newspaper) seemed to reach a similar conclusion. It was originally touted as an NSA bulk data collection success story by high level officials, but they had to backpedal as the truth emerged.

The conclusion seems to be that while they are able to collect a vast amount of information, they are unable to process and analyze all of the information gathered and connect it to individuals that warrant investigation. And Headley was extremely messy in many situations (e.g. directly contacting wanted terrorist leaders) where others certainly are not--so messy that my confidence in the NSA's abilities has diminished (this is assuming bulk data collection is a good thing to begin with, and I don't think it is). The data collected mainly became useful *after* an incident rather than being used to thwart an attack.

Perhaps things have changed by now as this is an investigation of something that happened several years ago, but I highly recommend the documentary.

They do that already with pumped-storage.

Pumped storage has an RTE (round-trip-efficiency) of about 80%. Modern li-ion batteries are over 90%. Pumped storage requires very specific geography (two reservoirs separated by a hill). Batteries will work anywhere.

There are also some liquid batteries.

The most common "flow" batteries are based on vanadium redox, and have an RTE of 65-75%.

Li-ion is just too expensive and maintenance-intensive to use grid scale.

Well, the point of this announcement is that Li-ion is getting cheaper. Li-ion grid storage still won't make sense in the middle of America, where power is cheap, and grids are wide. But it make make sense in places like Hawaii ($0.40 / kw-hr), where grid stability is already a problem.

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.

Definitely true. Not a problem to be ignored.

On the other hand, Japan has some of the best public infrastructure in the world. I wonder what the US infrastructure would look like if it could divert 50% of the military spending to infrastructure.

It'd look like the Works Progress Administration from the New Deal era following the great depression of course, but with minimum bidder, rather than an actual attempt to guarantee jobs for people who would otherwise starve to death, because a WPA infrastructure project can be restarted over and over again every 10-15 years and create more blue collar jobs than it would if the building, roads, and dams were built to last 75 years instead of just 15.

In other words, big government boondoggle to create ditch digging jobs for people not qualified for other jobs.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...

Some facts about the U.S. justice system:

* The Reid technique is widely used for interrogations, a technique notorious for its effectiveness in enticing false confessions.
* Only 5 % of convicted felons had their case tried in court; the rest make a plea bargain (typically under threats of excessively long prison sentences and/or the death penalty).
* Judges are elected, subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.
* At least 4 % of people sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent.
* The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, not just relative to the population size, but in absolute numbers.
* U.S. private prisons sees $3+ billion in annual revenue... Not that that has anything to do with the above issues, I'm sure.

The U.S. justice system is broken in so many ways, I'm certainly forgetting some things.

I guess PBS got it wrong about HRC using a private e-mail server exclusively. But that would put them at odds with Hillary Clinton herself who admitted she used her personal e-mail server for Government business. But if we can't trust her own word on this matter - how can we trust her as President?

the EU is more prosperous than the US, with a similar population, higher GDP, healthier economy, healthier people, more econonomically secure people, people who live longer, and people who wont far as far or as fast because they have ACTUAL welfare (unlike the POS we call 'welfare' in this nation).

the EU does all this, while having more regulations in their economy. ie, theire economy is "less free" than the US's.
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as for your question of why the US is successful?
Cotton and slave labor.
That's why.
The US benefited from a unique confluence of circumstances. Much of colonial expansion by the european powers was driven by economic desires, such as the desire to grow cotton (England controlled India in order to grow contton). The US also had prime cotton growing capability. And the US also still had something else, something that England was slowly abandoning: cheap labor in the form of slaves.

The US came to dominate the world cottom market, growing hte lions share. But the margins even larger than everyone else because they didnt have to pay their workers. Everyone bought the cotton, bringing money into the US economy. Money that was invested and used to buy other things.

Really, the economy of hte entire western world was built on Cotton, primarily US cotton, and by extension then on slavery. The US was simply the biggest beneficiary, and that momentum carried our country's economy for many many decades, and really, still is. even the majority of current economic wealth is traced backwards through history, through each subsequent investment, originates in cotton profits.

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/h...
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/africa...
http://www.labornotes.org/blog...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://news.nationalgeographic...

So, where are all the environmentalists demanding we build integral fast reactors as fast as we can? We have a huge 300,000 year light-water-reactor waste problem, a huge CO2 problem, and only one source of energy that can satisfy all the demand that humans have and will have as the other billions are lifted out of poverty. There's only one known technology that cleans up the mess and provides the power.

But how does solving the problem concentrate power in the hands of governments, right? Big shocker that it was Al Gore who lead the charge to cancel the IFR program. Total coincidence. That's why Obama won't even take Branson's calls about building them now, on his dime.

Just tax carbon and the oceans will be saved, amirite?

The silver lining is that China will build them and eventually America will be forced by the harsh realities of economics to buy them from the Chinese manufacturers, as China replaces the US as the center of industrialization. Unless Americans start refusing to be controlled by sociopaths first.

The natural grassland in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle areas which could tolerate drought and stabilized the soil was plowed up to plant wheat in the 1920's. When the drought and winds came the topsoil blew away. The drought was natural, but the response of the plowed up land was geoengineered. Great documentary on it by Ken Burns/PBS a couple of years ago. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/du...

I don't know why you think so.

Here's an interview on PBS: "I went to visit indigenous people and hunter-gatherers...they don’t get that much meat because hunting is hard work."

Look at the chart half-way down, of some of the hunter/gatherer tribes that still exist. There is huge variety in one they eat....some are mostly meat, some are mostly plants.
The Paleo diet today isn't good for your health.
Unsurprisingly, here is a study in Nature that points out copying Paleolithic diets would not be very useful anyway (not in the least because we've evolved since then, through the Neolithic era).

The paleo diet is yet another fully trademarked fad diet.

... (thanks to Arkansas native Bill Clinton's "No Child Left Behind" act ...

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President George W. Bush's education-reform bill, was signed into law on Jan. 8, 2002.

sadly corporations aren't exactly the pinnacle of scientific research

Facts say otherwise

Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )

Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.

Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.

No, just hope a believe. HOPE you know this guy, documented here; Belief is just the nicest of fellows. Just like I hope and believe the NSA isn't doing something they shouldn't, until someone outed them we had never heard of before.

I do not think bringing Snowden into the example really works on this one, as he did actually steal classified info and post it to the internet/news, no belief needed. I do hope he gets a fair and public trial though, but I believe he will never make it to court.

The main pusher of climate change, the guy who alarmed congress in 1988 participated in political theater in order to do so. He even admits to it being politicized.

You are either ignoring reality in order to hang on to some glimpse of legitimation or not paying attention at all.

The main pusher of climate change, the guy who alarmed congress in 1988 participated in political theater in order to do so. He even admits to it being politicized.

You are either ignoring reality in order to hang on to some glimpse of legitimation or not paying attention at all.

It's questionable whether there even is a bubble. The vast majority of Americans graduate from college without large debts.

Further most of the graduates with large debts and defaulting on those loans are students that attended for profits colleges like the one mentioned in the article.

For profit colleges have 10% of all students but 44% of all student load defaults.

Median Student Debt is 2007-8 for Four Year Institutions
Public: $7,960
Private Not For Profit: $17,040
For Proit: $31,190

Reference

Front Line on For Profit Colleges

For profit college students have the highest student loan default rate.

National Accreditation is worse than regional.