Slashdot Mirror

Well, but you could also compare for alternative KDE defaults: openSUSE kde theme, Netrunner KDE theme, Chakra Kde theme,Nitrux Theme, Rosa Theme... There's a lot of distros who doesn't ship a vanilla KDE theme... But if you want a more moder-looking KDE.. you could wait for the default theme (wip) in Plasma Next.. for example, for Dolphin

and

Dumping $2.6 million worth of editable food

What's wrong with this picture?

Africa, the continent in need of this kind of aid, refuses to take even GMO food aid:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/afr...
Which is eminently safer than whatever's in this peanut butter.

It's often been said: The world doesn't have a food shortage problem. It has a distribution problem.

African, one of the most famine stricken places on earth has 60% of the worlds uncultivated arable land.
http://philmatibeceo.wordpress...

In the U.S. where food is plentiful, we end up throwing food away if it's even remotely suspect of carrying sickness.

It makes perfect sense to me.

A great creation, made using a great new technology, obviously thought of by a bright mind, and it's graduated in... wait for it... inches.

*Sight*

I guess that's what sets the US and Burma apart: one of the two countries can make antiquated objects with 21st century technology. (No wait! Even Burma is switching to the metric system!)

Calm the hell down there, junior. They still drive on the "wrong" side of the road when going to take a trip to see the Crown Jewels before tea time, so we're certainly not the only ones still wrapping ourselves around antiquated concepts or objects.

What you call antiquated others call standard or tradition.

A great creation, made using a great new technology, obviously thought of by a bright mind, and it's graduated in... wait for it... inches.

*Sight*

I guess that's what sets the US and Burma apart: one of the two countries can make antiquated objects with 21st century technology. (No wait! Even Burma is switching to the metric system!)

You are regurgitating what others have told you and trashing on the USA to try and culturally shame them into using metric 100%. Doesn't seem to be working as fast as you'd like. How about instead you start citing (and feeling) temperature in centigrade, switch all of your navigation software to meters, and discuss things in litres. You'll receive a lot of stares as you wonder why more people aren't on the same path as you.

Here's just one example to help you think a little outside the box someone has put you in. Ask someone in an "all metric" country like Canada how tall they are and watch what a lot of them reply. Go ahead and go into homes and take a look at thermostats and wonder why a bunch say "F". Stroll by a construction site and note how they measure lumber.

"keep plucking that chicken"

A great creation, made using a great new technology, obviously thought of by a bright mind, and it's graduated in... wait for it... inches.

*Sight*

I guess that's what sets the US and Burma apart: one of the two countries can make antiquated objects with 21st century technology. (No wait! Even Burma is switching to the metric system!)

Inches / metric is not an issue. Give this a moment's thought.
Just apply a scaling-factor to the design & print it, you'll have a metric version.

His dial-caliper design already has comments at thingiverse giving the size to print at to produce a metric version marked in mm.

A great creation, made using a great new technology, obviously thought of by a bright mind, and it's graduated in... wait for it... inches.

*Sight*

I guess that's what sets the US and Burma apart: one of the two countries can make antiquated objects with 21st century technology. (No wait! Even Burma is switching to the metric system!)

The only standard of living that has increased is the access to cheap electronic goods made in china. Sure your desktop computer might be equivalent to to a 1980's supercomputer, but the cost of housing, healthcare, food and energy all have skyrocketed while wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years.

If that were true, food, for example, would be an ever increasing share of our income, yet the opposite is true:

http://corncorps.wordpress.com...

For housing, people have chosen larger and larger homes, which also tells you that the money they have available for housing has increased, not decreased:

http://activerain.com/blogsvie...

Ditto for energy.

And all of that despite increases in taxes and expensive regulations.

Health care, of course, really does consume a larger and larger fraction of our income, but that's for two reasons: (1) regulation and poor policy are driving up costs enormously, and (2) health care in the US today really is in a completely different category than what it was 2-3 decades ago.

So, again, your statements are complete and utter bullshit, as the data shows. We're far better off today than we used to be, and if it weren't for dumb government regulations and interference in the market, we'd be even better off.

"I never know if you are lying or just confused. But what you say is not correct. Neither that there is any dispute, nor that you've ever pointed me to any page that says otherwise.

Confused or lying? Lying or confused? All in a single post."

Okay. On the outrageously infinitesimal probability that you have argued with me so frequently but missed the hundreds of links I have posted, here are just a few of them. First, about the physics. (If you are unfamiliar with how this relates to AGW, I suggest you look up some of the discussions of the physics of CO2-based AGW according to climate scientists, including the Stefan-Boltzmann law.)

No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Warmer Still.

Then, let's see... there are so many to choose from. I have 120 bookmarks of these from just the last couple of years... most of which I've linked to here. And more written down from years prior. Hey, here's one. About that "97% consensus". (Note here: this information did not come from Christopher Monckton, but he did write about it. The same points are available in more painstaking detail elsewhere. I linked to this same information from a different source a few days ago. The point being: don't try shooting the messenger. I'll just laugh at you. If you can refute the message, go ahead.)

"That's a 0.3% consensus, not 97%"

Because, you see, according to an actual survey of AMS members, it turns out that their opinion of AGW is actually based more on their "perception of consensus" (rather than science) and their "political ideology" (rather than science). Wow. I would never would have guessed that latter. Just kidding. I most certainly would have. But isn't that what you accused ME of? What a coincidence!

If you don't like reading about it on WUWT, here is a link so you can download the paper directly from the American Meteorological Society's own website.

How about some information regarding the actual CO2-based-warming climate models?

Hmm. How about: how IPCC has deliberately mislead the public.

And more of that: "IPCC Scientists Knew Data and Science Inadequacies Contradicted..."

Yet another reason bogus claims about expensive storms have been bogus...

How 114 out of 117 climate models studied exaggerated warming by a mean of over 100% (pdf). That one is from Nature.

No dispute? Hahahaha.

Wait... this wouldn't be complete (it isn't anyway, not by a long shot) without just a hint of the boatload of evidence that Steve Goddard has been compiling about dishonest temperature information being fed to us by our erstwhile "authorities" on the matter.

Well, hell. I could do this all day. So here's a list of more references you can read for yourself, all peer-reviewed. I'm not going to count them.

Bzzt. http://i1.minus.com/iPcccu2MDL... does not show the factual location of the pings. Read the caption. It shows "Examples" of pings that could have given the tracks that the NTSB released. The actual location of the pings has not been publicly released, even though the ping data must have strongly influenced the NTSB tracks that have been published. This image from minus.com was drawn by Scott Henderson, who has explained that the pings shown in the diagram were drawn to illustrate the process that the NTSB presumably employed. This artifice got some strong negative reactions, such as http://willyloman.wordpress.co...

Knowing the actual ping locations, particularly the 3:11 and 4:11 pings, could help clarify when the turn to the south took place and better pin down the complete track.

Pick one you like more... https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

Okay, let's go down the list (note that due to search history and change over time, your results may not match mine):

1) Similar to your original example. This is just getting kids to realize that 14-8 = 14 - (10 + 2 ) = (10-10) + 4 + 2. It only looks confusing because it's presented in a way that's unfamiliar to you.

2) No math issue with Common Core - simply a stupidly bad (racist) wording by a textbook writer - something that current textbooks have plenty of. (BTW. minus 2 points on reading comprehension for those posting the image. "slaves-picking-apples.jpg" versus "oranges" in the image.)

3) Sacrilege! There's more than one way to add two numbers together, and they're all equally valid! What's more, we're asking students to think about why that's the case, instead of just parroting back what the schoolmarm says in a sing-song voice!

4) I'm getting the distinct impression that "common core outrage" means "I do not understand the basic commutative and associative properties of addition". Again, we have different ways of adding and subtracting, this time shown by complexity level. Nothing here is surprising to anyone who remembers how they learned to add and subtract and has at least a passing familiarity with traditional tricks for mental math.

5) Not a math problem, but a question from a parent who's having trouble with helping their child. This I get. We went through the same issues with the "New Math" changes. It's not so much what you're teaching, but that the parents look at their child's homework and get intolerably confused. (Because it's being presented in a way that's unfamiliar to them). The 9+8 problem is obviously looking for 9 + 8 = 9 + ( 9 - 1 ) = 2 * 9 - 1 = 18 - 1 = 17. I'm not sure what's up with the "add doubles to 20; 5 + 5 = " but only because I'm not getting the whole problem. (e.g. was it a list of problems 1+1=; 2+2=;...5+5=... 19+19=...20+20=).

6) (Yes, infowars - I'm going systematically, and not picking and choosing.) Again, commutativity and associativity. 26 + 17 = 26 + (4 + 13 ) = 30 + 13 = 43

7) Finally! Something new. Here I agree the question is messed up, in the sense that the printer forgot to include the shaded portion. If they were shaded, the question should be simple to answer. But again, printing errors happened previously. (Though some arguments could be made that rushing to implement the new standard could result in more errors.)

(Three images which are only tangentially related, including a stock photo of a classroom)

11) "Gotcha" question were present in the previous scheme as well. They teach reading comprehension, and that you should think about things rather than blindly plugging-and-chugging.

(A rant and not a sample question.)

13) A multi-parter. 1. Bad question formatting, in that the parts and whole aren't represented consistently (what are those black circles supposed to be). Should be obvious that the problem is 6-5, though. 2. Does anyone have problems with 2? They provide a nice diagram and everything. 3. I presume "use cubes to solve" means manipulating physical blocks, as opposed to tak

Pick one you like more... https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

Okay, let's go down the list (note that due to search history and change over time, your results may not match mine):

1) Similar to your original example. This is just getting kids to realize that 14-8 = 14 - (10 + 2 ) = (10-10) + 4 + 2. It only looks confusing because it's presented in a way that's unfamiliar to you.

2) No math issue with Common Core - simply a stupidly bad (racist) wording by a textbook writer - something that current textbooks have plenty of. (BTW. minus 2 points on reading comprehension for those posting the image. "slaves-picking-apples.jpg" versus "oranges" in the image.)

3) Sacrilege! There's more than one way to add two numbers together, and they're all equally valid! What's more, we're asking students to think about why that's the case, instead of just parroting back what the schoolmarm says in a sing-song voice!

4) I'm getting the distinct impression that "common core outrage" means "I do not understand the basic commutative and associative properties of addition". Again, we have different ways of adding and subtracting, this time shown by complexity level. Nothing here is surprising to anyone who remembers how they learned to add and subtract and has at least a passing familiarity with traditional tricks for mental math.

5) Not a math problem, but a question from a parent who's having trouble with helping their child. This I get. We went through the same issues with the "New Math" changes. It's not so much what you're teaching, but that the parents look at their child's homework and get intolerably confused. (Because it's being presented in a way that's unfamiliar to them). The 9+8 problem is obviously looking for 9 + 8 = 9 + ( 9 - 1 ) = 2 * 9 - 1 = 18 - 1 = 17. I'm not sure what's up with the "add doubles to 20; 5 + 5 = " but only because I'm not getting the whole problem. (e.g. was it a list of problems 1+1=; 2+2=;...5+5=... 19+19=...20+20=).

6) (Yes, infowars - I'm going systematically, and not picking and choosing.) Again, commutativity and associativity. 26 + 17 = 26 + (4 + 13 ) = 30 + 13 = 43

7) Finally! Something new. Here I agree the question is messed up, in the sense that the printer forgot to include the shaded portion. If they were shaded, the question should be simple to answer. But again, printing errors happened previously. (Though some arguments could be made that rushing to implement the new standard could result in more errors.)

(Three images which are only tangentially related, including a stock photo of a classroom)

11) "Gotcha" question were present in the previous scheme as well. They teach reading comprehension, and that you should think about things rather than blindly plugging-and-chugging.

(A rant and not a sample question.)

13) A multi-parter. 1. Bad question formatting, in that the parts and whole aren't represented consistently (what are those black circles supposed to be). Should be obvious that the problem is 6-5, though. 2. Does anyone have problems with 2? They provide a nice diagram and everything. 3. I presume "use cubes to solve" means manipulating physical blocks, as opposed to tak

Unfortunately, this map has non-factual locations for the circles other than 8:11. The angle information for the earlier pings has not been released, but artwork was drawn up that estimated these earlier pings from the reported estimated tracks attributed to the NTSB. This artwork, drawn by Scott Henderson, was likely the source for the map on theaviationist.com's site. See http://willyloman.wordpress.co... for details.

Inmarsat has been coy about the exact value of the ping angles. They issued a press release that said that the information had been given to the Malaysian government, and that anyone who wanted details should contact Malaysia. See http://www.inmarsat.com/news/i... IMHO, they have been doing this because the earlier ping data may make clearer that the aircraft track takes it over Malaysia, where the lack of detection may be a source of official embarrassment.

The earlier ping data may also indicate whether MH370 overflew Indonesia, or whether it flew west to avoid Indonesia, and that has an effect on the plane's remaining range and the estimate of the flight's bearing when it presumably turned southward toward the 90E/45S region where the SAR operations have been focused lately. It would appear that this data was factored into the NTSB track estimates, but the lack of an official release of the angle data has hampered the armchair/amateur speculation about the location. IMHO, if MH370 avoided overflying Indonesia, it may have been a deliberate attempt to lay a false track in a west or northwest direction.

http://birdofparadox.wordpress...

Would you like to try another form of well-worn denialism? There's a whole list to choose from!

Has it ever occurred to you that I don't keep a mountain of references for every little study I've seen in a book, in a library, on the odd web site, etc.? Maybe I should start running to Wikipedia and adding citations for facts not readily available from there so I can use them in debate.

The stock answer for "I didn't know that" is "you're making that up." Like how "Natural flavor" is the secretion from a raccoon's anal glands. People are like, "You're making that up, that's not true." This was even lamp shaded in an early episode of Red vs Blue, where Grif explains to Sarge that there's a big cat called a puma. "... You're makin' that up." "I'M TELLING YOU, IT'S A REAL ANIMAL!"

There are multiple studies showing that murder rates in states without capital punishment are lower than murder rates in states with capital punishment. These studies attempt to argue that capital punishment increases murder rates, i.e. arguing a causal relationship flowing from state executions to violent crime, rather than flowing from violent crime to state execution. But these studies don't adequately compare similar socio-economic environments; to do that, you must show a state that has abolished the death penalty, and the immediate effects in the next 2-4 years. Even that may not be enough, as social and economic factors change rather quickly in many places.

Then you have graphs like this, but with the long time scale and confounding factors the data is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox and so this graph is somewhat misleading (false evidence does not support my argument because it can be dispelled).

Then there's scientific studies, showing that i.e. Rhode Island has abolished the death penalty twice, and always reinstated it because the murder rate immediately increased. The murder rate, of course, immediately decreased after reinstatement. Which was my original argument--citation granted. This one's actually legitimate and carries weight.

So again: if the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is the primary deterrent, then the death penalty is a deterrent. If the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is not the primary deterrent--that is, if capital crimes carry an inherent risk of fatality so high as to make state executions a significantly minor proportion of actual deaths experienced by criminals as consequence for their crimes--then it is insignificant and does not act as a deterrent. Apparently at the time Rhode Island attempted to abolish the death penalty people were more likely to die by state execution than by bullet-to-the-face while committing crimes that would get them executed.

Maybe I put on a tinfoil hat this morning without realizing it, but I don't understand how this makes any sense at all, in the context of what was on the slides that first revealed PRISM to the world. If the program only involved sending out demands that companies have no choice but to follow, then there's nothing notable about when "PRISM collection began for each provider" (to quote the slides). All that date would be is the date that each company received their first demand from the government under this program, which is in no way meaningful. That's like saying, "I first served a warrant to Joe in May, and to Jim in July, and to Bob in September." Who cares? Why spend an entire slide on it, especially after you had already listed all of the "providers"?

Meanwhile, if I was an NSA representative and PRISM was actually a program based on exploiting vulnerabilities that we had either planted or discovered, I'd want to be doing everything possible to deflect attention from that possibility so that no one tried to patch the holes. That's especially true, now that the rumor mill is suggesting that Apple discovered the goto fail bug by auditing all software changes in and around the date that the slides said they were added to PRISM. With one company finding a bug the NSA could have used at exactly the time that the NSA says the company was added as a "provider" of data, the NSA may be sweating bullets that the others will follow suit and that the well will dry up. Not only that, they may be worried that the dates on that slide will give them an arrow pointing exactly to where they should be looking for holes.

Removing data points that did not fit their model, apply transformations to the data points that are not uniform across the entire dataset, using a filter that generates the same output even if the input was noise. Need I go on?

Yes, because you are repeating hearsay. The GP requested citations. You have provided nothing.

As the GP, I never expect any, because there isn't that much.

I could point out that there has been some suspect or even bad work on AGW. They might cite the study performed by a group in Argentina - The Universal Ecological Fund - was so bad and actually quite preposterous claiming that the planet would warm by 2.4 C - round 4.3 F. Interestingly enough, also from the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Scientists were all over this study as just plain bad.

And most surprising that the deniers do not quote from the paper "Misdiagnosis of Surface Temeperature Feedback" by Spencer and Braswell.

http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/...

This is the touchstone for AGW deniers who love to claim that NASA's temperature figures are all wrong, and that more heat escapes from the atmosphere than predicted.

Their model had no realistic ocean, no El Niino, nor La Nina, and no hydrological cycle. And all the parameters could be adjusted to give an infinite number of "best fits" from CO2 insensitive to very sensitive.

Some critical reading on the matter:

http://bbickmore.wordpress.com...

http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

In the end, we can pick and choose. We can get our science teachings form Scientists, or we can get our science knowledge from politicians and religious leaders.

Pffff! You don't need an app for that! http://fartingforboys.wordpres...

And I knew a guy back at the end of primary school who only had to lift his leg ever so slightly - no bending over needed. Humans can do crazy stuff with a bit of practice... and without having a ridiculous watch.

This is more like WWI than WWII.

In WWI you had a couple small local actions (triggered by ethnic minorities) that spawned larger conflicts. People kept escalating, in part due to treaty obligations, and the whole world was eventually fighting.

In WWII Hitler's plan was domination, he didn't care about Germans in Czechoslovakia, they were simply an excuse to get the ball rolling. The failure of appeasement was it gave Hitler additional power when he never had the intention of stopping.

In the current scenario many Russians legitimately believe that Crimea is properly part of Russia, a few years back I was a Russian action film where the main character kills some Ukrainian mafia and as he does so says “You bitches will answer to me for Sevastopol!”. So it isn't a purely cynical manoeuvre on his part.

So the big plan for Putin isn't to take over the world Hitler style, it's to take back the bits of territory that Russians think are supposed to be part of Russia. That's still really bad for the countries involved, but I don't know if it's something where we want to risk a world war involving nuclear powers.

Your wish was once frighteningly true. Dr. Lobotomy used to drive around in his lobotomobile doing lobotomies with an ice pick.

> RAIDZ can be dynamically expanded

--To the best of my knowledge, not so much. You can create a pool of mirrors and expand that, but expanding a RAIDZ (ideally) should be done with the same number (and capacity) of drives that was in the original RAIDZ - for balancing purposes. Otherwise you get weird errors and possible performance impact. Building asymmetrical pools is fine in a VM, but on bare-metal you kinda have to start to question what to do if there's data loss.

http://serverfault.com/questio...

--You can expand the underlying disks in a pool, but it's a PITA and requires repetitive resilvers.

http://jsosic.wordpress.com/20...

http://www.itsacon.net/compute...

--Honestly, adding a 4-port SATA card to an existing system and using all-new drives is probably the best bet for expanding existing storage. You can buy 2-4TB drives depending on budget, copy the data over, and repurpose the existing pool of old/smaller drives until the HW starts failing.

PROTIP: With newer drives (4k sectors) you're better off setting the ASHIFT to 12 on your ZFS pool right off the bat. Will save you trouble later -- I speak from experience.

https://www.icts.uiowa.edu/con...

/ Btrfs has some promising features, but practically I would give it another ~2 years to get to production-ready as of this writing. Just my $2.02

You can't standardize education because you can't standardize people.

The problem isn't with the grades, it's with the utter lack of acknowledgement that different students learn in different ways.

Of course it would be, you don't ever hear of a metal band with some pansy ass name like Jupiter.

Heh... in fact...

http://visualioner.files.wordp...

If by "shove" you mean analyzing her story instead of blindly believing her without accountability, then sure these topics are shoving her into that category. Here is part of the other side, FYI.

When you lie to demonize a company, you are not a "whistle blower", you're just a liar.

This picture from the article alone might be a good indication of the other side of the argument.

All the eco-friendly stuff is ignored by building codes, so while this toilet might exist and have potential, good luck getting it to pass local codes for permitting

The places where a toilet like this would be most useful are not known for their strict observance of building codes.

"Concocted by the same expert cadre that’s brought us every post-1970 education boondoggle, and resting on the same gross unfamiliarity with actual classrooms and students, the arbitrary, biased, technology-laden, assessment-obsessed Common Core is the creature of the Gates Foundation, with entities like the Pearson conglomerate sitting at Mr. Gates’s right hand. Pearson is the largest textbook and education software publisher in the world, as well as the world’s dominant education assessment contractor. Mr. Gates’s connection to the computer and software business is also a matter of public record."

"The Community Center for Education Results (CCER) was responsible for creating the proposal to collect an extensive amount of student data on our children. This pertains to Bill Gates’ desire to collect student information for each child in this country that can be accessed by those producing and profiting from products to be sold to school"

Sure, we would have fewer premature deaths from respiratory illnesses, but that would mean more non-working octogenarians and nonagenarians. Studies out of Europe have shown that keeping people smoking and obese is much more economically viable because they tend to be productive up until retirement, or near-retirement, age, then die of a short illness. "Healthy" people, on the other hand, live a long time, fighting off repeated illnesses for a decade or two after retirement. Eliminating coal would probably have a similar effect.

http://daveatherton.wordpress....

I am playing devil's advocate here. I don't believe we should keep coal just to kill off retirees. After-all, I plan to be one someday.

font rendering issues on Windows

I will point out that it appears work is in progress

It has been "in progress" for so long that stationary might be a better term.

They start adding animations to html elements you can't restyle with CSS

Got a link to more information? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

There were wide-spread issues on their recent releases. You can only auto-update if you are rock-solid.

Link? I certainly never noticed any issues

Read the chrome product support forums or comment rolls on release announcements - its pretty depressing. Countless posts referring to the same set issues crashes, scrolling bugs, inability to pick items from select boxes, flash crashes, modal dialog faults etc.

http://frankcode.wordpress.com...

They already implemented it. It's been used in ChromeOS for a while.

I see. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the root of the problem. They have conflated a web-browser with an OS. No good will come from it except an unfocussed bloated browser and an anaemic OS.

Fed governors are certainly politicians (just not elected), and the Fed has existed only since 1914. Before that time, the US Treasury spent money directly to fund its budget. Even under the gold and silver standards, the government constantly had to increase its leverage on the gold backing, but the US dollar never collapsed.

My broader point is that events like the Weimar hyperinflation are not the result of politicians madly printing money for no reason. The Weimar hyperinflation occurred because of combination of circumstances in which Germany lost a war. France and Russia confiscated its manufacturing capacity by literally disassembling factories and shipping them away. Germany was made to pay enormously large reparations, which had to be rendered in gold. The reparations required more gold than ever existed in Germany, and Germany was estimated to need at least until 1990 to make up the difference. The response was to print more and more marks, in order to buy gold and other currencies from abroad, and also for domestic use. The resulting inflation forced people to spend any earned money immediately. This drove the re-establishment of the German manufacturing sector. In the meantime, a new bank was established which issued notes backed by immobile real assets, like farm land. Once the Rentenbank was large enough it was merged with the central bank, and began issuing a stable currency. The whole stabilization only took a few months.

TL;DR: The Weimar hyperinflation, which resulted from a confluence of political factors, may have scarred the German people, but it did re-inflate manufacturing in the run-up to the creation of a new mark, in a way which the gold standard would have impaired.

Finally, with respect to growth, there is no evidence that inflation up to ~40% has any correlation with reduced growth. So the obsession with extremely low inflation as a opposed to moderate ~4% inflation is really unjustified.

There is no way to avoid the war any longer. The invasion has happened.

You are oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

There is at the moment no legitimate Ukrainian government. Putin is a vile authoritarian asshole, but he is right about one thing: Yanukovych's de facto removal from office was a coup.

The illegitimate government of the United States I suppose should dissolve itself and place itself under its rightful leadership of the Queen, until such as time she and the British Parliament deign to grant independence?

What can we say about gross abuse of office (theft of $35 billion?) and the use of security forces as assassins of Yanukovich's opponents? How could Yanukovich have been removed "legitimately" under such conditions?

...

As for "an existential fight in the west", it's doubtful that Putin wants to absorb all of Ukraine. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a synthetic state, based on the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" set up by the USSR...which was created with a bunch of ethnic Russians exactly to keep Ukrainian nationalism in check. All in all, letting Crimea go back to Russia might be in everyone's best interest...but only if it's handled in a legitimate way. Right now, nothing happening over there has any legitimacy.

Ah, but the letter of the law does not count with Crimea, eh? Where is Russia's right of armed intervention enshrined in law? If Crimea wants to join Russia the let it hold a referendum under conditions of peace, and without Russian coercion. Where is the logic that disorder from Yanukovych's misrule should award Russia with Crimea?

There is no way to avoid the war any longer. The invasion has happened.

You are oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

There is at the moment no legitimate Ukrainian government. Putin is a vile authoritarian asshole, but he is right about one thing: Yanukovych's de facto removal from office was a coup.

Yanukovych can still make a claim of legitimate legal authority to invite Russian troops in.

And some part of the population in Crimea wants them there.

So, an "invasion"? Not clear.

As for "an existential fight in the west", it's doubtful that Putin wants to absorb all of Ukraine. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a synthetic state, based on the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" set up by the USSR...which was created with a bunch of ethnic Russians exactly to keep Ukrainian nationalism in check. All in all, letting Crimea go back to Russia might be in everyone's best interest...but only if it's handled in a legitimate way. Right now, nothing happening over there has any legitimacy.

>> A few dozen people might wind up with cancer someday because Japan uses nuclear power.

Nope. The first years it was close to 600 in the direct vincinity:
https://nuclearhistory.wordpre...

The number is not considering the widespread ingestion of contaminated agricultural produce, and is exponential over the years (or at least over the firt 300 years)

On the long run, Fukushima takes more lives than the tsunami. Much more.

At least none in the designated evacuation buildings deemed to be safe and high enough, where hundreds upon hundreds of people died. Where are the eyewitness reports of how those were crushed? (Oh right.) Where are the accusations of mayors and emergency planners who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people?

One thing is for sure. You don't care about people. You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia. You don't care about what people lost. Some 400.000 people lost everything, in many cases even friends and relatives, not to mention everything in their households. Documents, photos, clothes. Their homes? That goes without saying. And that's the problem.

I wanted to make the suggestion that everyone of the 100,000 or so people affected by the nuclear accident be paid half a million dollars. A family of four would get $2,000,000. Enough to start a new life. The problem is not the cost. $50bn is about a year's worth of coal, oil and gas being imported to replace nuclear power in Japan. The problem is the other 400,000 who will rightfully say that their losses were so much worse, that they should easily be entitled to get even more money.

Yes, it's a terrible accident and an avoidable one as well. It has been known since 1966 (p.50) that the Mark I BWR containment is unable to withstand a meltdown under any conditions, because it is too small. In case of a meltdown you either vent the containment in a controlled manner, or it leaks uncontrolled. Japan only saw the need to install filtered containment vents in any of its nuclear power plants in 2013 ... they must have had a problem in one of their nuclear plants or something. Strangely enough, neither Germany or France needed that kind of reminder to get to that point. They did it a quarter of a century before that. (And yes, it was after Chernobyl. But it's not like the Japanese never heard about that one.)

As a [whatever], I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament.

You can find a new lie to spread:

http://answers.yahoo.com/quest...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.rationalskepticism....
http://whyevolutionistrue.word...
http://prince.org/msg/105/3323...

Happens all the time. When a coworker expresses skepticism in the moon landing or the official 9-11 explanation, I don't jump to religion as cause.

BTW, I'm an atheist.

If it can't get up and move away, (no matter how awkwardly), it's not a robot.

These guys would like to have a word with you.

Anonymous because

1) 'James Jeffery' defaced the the site with Anonymous logo and anti-abortion rhetoric.
2) Posted claim on @Anonymous on twitter
3) Was 'Ratted Out' by FBI informant Sabu.

Hacker Makes Anonymous Look Like Assholes By Attacking Abortion Provider In Their Name

The cairo-ickle blog has maintained very interesting benchmarks of the different cairo rendering backends. The short story is that every hardware accelered backend except for sandybridge SNA has performed worse than the software implementation. And in some cases the hardware acceleration is significantly less stable. I'm curious to see if this finally pushes Glamor over the hump and makes it faster than the software path.

One of the problems with JPEG is that it works (caveat about luma/chroma subsampling) on 8x8 pixel blocks. This is great for medium-resolution images (e.g. 72-200dpi range), but not so great for high-resolution (e.g. 1200dpi).

I grabbed a 3032x1986 image (warning: large image), and here's what I got.

PNG, compression level 9: 6.1MB
JPEG 4:4:4 100: 2.7MB
JPEG 4:4:4 95: 1.2MB
JPEG 4:0:0 95: 0.9MB
WEBP 100: 1.5MB
WEBP 95: 0.5MB

Note that I have no experience with all of the WebP options. I just used -m 6 -q quality in both cases. This isn't a huge image, just a large one. So actually, I can believe the 10x figure above depending on what the original image was.

It's odd to me that people are so apt to "persuade" others using various methods instead of simply educating people so that they make informed decisions. Epecially from people on tech sites where it would be assumed that we subscribe to science and education. Read this thread and you will see everything from threats to blocking information from people to accomplish the 'everyone gets vaccinated' theme.

You hint at it, but don't say it like I do above. Different vaccines have different levels of risk for both potential harm from the disease and potential harm for the vaccine. Some of these are extremely high (Plague/Gardasil) while others are in my opinion acceptable (Measles/Mumps). Claiming a risk is high or low does not remove the risk and make vaccines perfectly safe. My level of acceptance does not mean that you as a "Free" person have the same level of acceptance. I'd rather show you the risks and let you decide from an educated perspective. This is especially true when you have an infant of your own that has to start on immunizations.

Statistics are used to skew numbers drastically in favor of vaccines. Doctors questioning the statistics are smeared and won't get published in a science journal, but the papers exist. I found this in a quick search which shows how the statistics are simply wrong for measles. Any reduction in outbreak is credited to the vaccine, while we know that there are numerous other factors. Diseases like Polio have been reduced at least as much by sanitation as by the vaccine. If you do a bit of research on your own (Google) you will find similar papers/presentations/statistics showing that the vaccine is probably not as good as certain marketing campaigns tell you.

The point was, and is, why not let people make an educated decision for themselves and their children? As a veteran, I have had more vaccines than most people. I'm not against vaccines at all personally. My son however had the chicken pox vaccine and became seriously ill right after the vaccine. The vaccine also caused him to get chicken pox a second time. The state of Michigan required it for all children even if they had chicken pox, then due to numerous cases similar to my son's they dropped the requirement (that was over a decade ago and since he's been immunizes I don't honestly know the current laws). If I had a 2nd kid I would have refused to allow them to get the vaccine. Not because I believe _all_ vaccines are bad but because some are simply not worth the risk.

as in Paul "Profit" Offit

http://childhealthsafety.wordp...

http://childhealthsafety.wordp...

Well if you buy in 2014, then you can avoid Honda and Hyundai as well. Later on you may have to avoid BMW, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia, Mitsubishi, Nissan, PSA, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota, . . . basically you've got Renault,Fiat, China FAW, SAIC left then.

It's not so much about trickle down as about volume. If you took the entire space budget and applied
it directly to poverty it wouldn't make a dent. Basic research makes up a small fraction of a country's
budget but has the potential to produce a million time return. Think antibiotics, combines, etc..
Here is a good explaination: http://launiusr.wordpress.com/...

For example, this essay by a gay man can be found on the BBC website

Boils down to "Well, I'm not going to do that. It feels weird..." He doesn't want it, great, but he even says that he's not against the idea, it's just "not for him." Good for him. I'm straight and marriage is "not for me," either. Even if I misread and he IS against the idea, his reason boils down to "I don't want it." Not legitimate.

And here is a blog by a gay man who disavows the gay marriage movement: http://nogaymarriage.wordpress...

He says takes issue with the insistence on "marriage" terminology, and the narcissism of the weddings, as opposed to "civil unions" and the like getting the same legal rights. (And then goes on to rant about "economically ignorant liberals" and tax breaks.)

Here is a site with lots of links on the subject: http://www.againstequality.org...

Complains about gay marriage "propaganda", not gay marriage.

The so-called Bank of England is a UK asset...

Maybe not. According to a sassenach professor of public law living in Glasgow:

The currency is not Scotland's (and it's not England's either). It is the currency of the United Kingdom. If Scotland votes Yes to independence it will have voted to leave the United Kingdom: that's exactly what âoeindependenceâ means â" independence from the United Kingdom. If Scotland leaves the UK it leaves the UK's public institutions, which would become the institutions of the rest of the UK. The UK's assets and liabilities would fall to be apportioned equitably between the rUK and an independent Scotland, but the pound is neither an asset nor a liability. Any gold or other reserves left in the Bank of England would fall to be apportioned. So would the national debt. But the pound itself would not.

The SNP's Currency Nightmare

Have you ever heard a legitimate (i.e. excluding religious) argument against gay marriage?

How about arguments against it made by gays? There are at least some who believe that the gay-marriage movement is unnessary or counter-productive.

For example, this essay by a gay man can be found on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

And here is a blog by a gay man who disavows the gay marriage movement: http://nogaymarriage.wordpress...

Here is a site with lots of links on the subject: http://www.againstequality.org...

Admittedly, the positions taken in these essays are not as strong as those of certain religions organizations, but they are definitly arguments against gay marriage.

Another former IBMer here, also with a 5-digit Slashdot ID. But I left years and years ago when I saw where things were headed.

Way back in the day, IBM was a technology company first. TJ Watson drove the company and took massive chances on things like the 360. IBM regularly bet the company on new ideas and regularly took chances with big projects and big ideas.

These days IBM management really has no clue where they're driving the company nor about technology. We used to have a black joke that IBM management wouldn't invest in a new technology until they saw it on the cover of Businessweek, but they've lived up to that recently.

To give you idea of what's gone wrong at IBM I'd direct you to a (paywalled) article at the WSJ from last month and summarized well at http://annexresearch.wordpress.... The key point to see how well management has performed is to look at the amount of stock IBM has outstanding. It's gone from 2.3B shares in 1995 to around 1.1B today. Do the math on how much money that represents and you can see that what IBM management has been "investing in" has been stock repurchases, not new products. That IBM management can't find anything better to do with their money shows just how out of touch with technology they are.

So call me a victim of "the classic lazy crutch of the worker" if you will, but I'm quite able to show you a raft of companies that have created innovations and value with far, far less than IBM has spent on stock repurchases.

Your IT guys probably suck then. I've been evaluating Mavericks since it was in beta, and only with 10.9.2 is it an OS that works with all our infrastructure at the same time; so only this week have I even thought about qualifying it to run on our network. This has been the case with every version of OS X - if you mass move a production environment to a .0 or .1 release since 10.5, you're asking for it; I can't count the number of times that DirectoryServices or SMB has been broken in early life releases, and I've been using OS X since it still had the Mac OS 9 UI on it (original Mac OS X Server 1.0).

If you have an automated application deployment system that's worth talking about, it's drop-dead simple to create an upgrade PKG that completely automatically upgrades any supported Mac to 10.9.2, and even in-line any other packages for agents or frameworks that you need. The only issue we'll have is with laptops, as we're forced to use a data-at-rest encryption software that isn't named FileVault. For those, we'll have to mass-decrypt them before deploying, then re-encrypt afterwards.

No.. No, WindBourne I think you're confused. Here - let me clarify:

GM & Chrysler have fully repaid their TARP "bailout" money.
http://spellchek.wordpress.com...
Ford never took TARP money - they did line of credit prior to TARP's existence.

I also think you are confused about the point I was making with the Ford F-150 pickup truck. Let me make it clearer for you:
I am not comparing the F150 to the Model S, or any other Tesla vehicle. What I was doing was demonstrating that Tesla is, and shall remain a small "boutique" automaker. Even if Tesla sells the 350,000 cars you claim they hope to in 2017, that number still come remotely close to the nearly 600,000 Ford F150 pickups that sold in 2013. That is just one vehicle, for one automaker. That does not include all the other cars & trucks Ford manufactures, nor does it include General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Range Rover, or others.

Tesla does not exist in a vacuum. Their only growth opportunity is to erode market share amongst wealthy buyers who were already in the market for a $70,000 + luxury vehicle, and would not have considered a cheaper car by a domestic, Japanese or Korean automaker. The problem is that there is a very small number of those buyers with six figure incomes to purchase them.

The average household income in the United States in 2013 was $51,017 with over 15% of Americans - 46.5 million people - living in poverty.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/1...

I assure you the 90+ percent of American earning those salaries are not lining up to buy $70,000 ++ Tesla electric cars. They ARE however gobbling up Honda Civics by the metric fuckton.

I hope this made my point clearer.

Yes exactly. Here and here, Flight Director Wayne Hale describes the efforts of NASA's TopMgmt to halt further analysis, refuse any help from the DOD, insist that nothing could be done, and squelch any chance of rescue.