Erm, chimps and other apes can recognize their name.
That is, assuming you mean 'recognize' as 'realize that word applies to them'. Dogs and most animals that can hear can 'recognize' sounds, including one means 'They are making noises that means something is going to happen to me, so I will now react', but we don't have any evidence they realize that word refers to 'themselves', or that they have any such concept.
Apes, however, do recognize their name that when taught. They fully understand names, and even pronouns, and use them when signing.
And the distinction of completely mishandling the, what? Sixth worst natural disaster in U.S. history? Seventh?
And, what's more, the worse one that was completely handleable with current technology. I mean, there have been worse natural disasters, like floods and even hurricanes, but almost all those happened over a hundred years ago, or were things that no one could do anything about at the time, like the great freeze of 1950 or the tornados of 1974 or the San Francisco quake/fire of 1906.
The closest example to Katrina would be the Great Okeechobee hurricane/flood in 1928, which killed roughly the same number of people, and was before, you know, we had helicopters or computers or weather satelites to track hurricanes or even knew what the hell was going on.
Actually, that last bit hasn't changed, as the government, apparently, still doesn't know what the hell is going on, even when it's on the fucking news.
If you claim that going through the process of obtaining a warrant to conduct surveillance takes too long, then how about this: Select a group of judges. One or more of those judges shall be available 24/7/365. The federal law enforcement agencies will have a secure way to contact said judges (say secure phone lines, email, or fax access.) The judges will be required to respond to any requests for warrants received via that secure method within some reasonably short period of time. This gives judicial oversight to the process without adding a significant delay.
I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this IS FISA. The court always has at least two judges there, it is automatically classified and everyone is already cleared to handle the data, and, in addition, you can do them retroactively...you can start wiretapping and then go to the court within 72 hours.
Except this one was DEAD, you lunatics. He shot and killed it, thinking it was a polar bear, and then days later it was confirmed to be a hybrid.
What the hell did you think happened? He was out hunting and captured a one-ton animal, brought it back with him, had it DNA tested, and then blew its brains out?
I swear to God, people have not only stoped reading the articles, but now the stuff they're imagining the articles said doesn't even make any damn sense.
Except that not shooting them wouldn't do anything about the problem of them not having anywhere to live. The amount of polar bears is exactly correctly, even slightly too much, for the amount of area they have to live in.
The only way to get more polar bears is to give them more territory.
Complaining about the few people hunting them is like complaining about how few deers there are in a certain area because development has destroyed their habitat, and thus people shouldn't hit them with their cars. That's not going to do a damn thing to recover the deer population.
And in this case, we can't just 'move back', because 'we' aren't the problem(1). Humans rarely live where polar bears live. If the area is warm enough for humans, it's warm enough for other bears, like, oh, grizzlies, which come in and take the land away from the polar bears. (Because, apparently polar bears are incompetant and have only one advantage over other bears.)P>
So there are very few solutions: We can start hunting all bears slightly south except polar bears, we can figure out how to get more polar ice caps, or we can just accept the fact that polar bear population is a function of how much land exists that is isn't habitable by other bears.
1) That is, we aren't physically the problem. It's possibly that the shinking ice is due to human actions.
Wolves and dogs are the same species. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Feral dogs, and even some domesticated dogs, breed with wolves all the time. It's not some rare event that only happens in a blue moon or through delibrate meddling. Ergo, same species. It's only the fact that dogs live with humans and wolves don't that keeps them from merging back into one group.
What's really interesting is, because of that, wolf-dog hybrids are more likely to attack humans than wolves. Wolves, while sometimes willing to attack human-sized prey when pretty hungry, like deer and even cows, have had the fear of humans genetically instilled into them, and thus a human being is literally the last thing they will attack for food. All the ones that were willing to attack humans got killed ten thousand years ago.
Dogs, OTOH, are not generally willing to attack any prey larger than themselves. Note I said prey. Even vicious tamed dogs don't eat humans. Dogs, however, aren't afraid of humans at all, and hence feral ones will attack humans. So a wolf-dog hybrid is basically a dog that comes pre-feraled.
Coyotes are a different story, as are foxes. There are reports of interbreeding, and some species even seems be the result of interbreeding in the past. But they don't appear to breed with wolves/dogs normally or easily.
Well, of course Sales should be at the top of the pile. They make all the money!
</sarcasm>
The problem is that in most companies there are three tiers: Sales (and Marketing, if seperate) at the top, Manufacturing actually making the thing in the middle, and Infrastructure, which does not directly make any products but enables them to be made and the rest of the company to operate.
The tier is a good idea. It is, indeed, more important if the assembly line is broken than if email is broken or the restrooms are out of order. In companies where the 'manufacturing process' is virtual and ideas are part of, however, email being down may effect the 'manufacturing process'. But that's all nitpicking.
The actual problem is that someone without critical thinking made Sales at the top. Sales is infrastructure, that provides 'money upkeep'. It's the least important infrastructure, in that you could, in theory, neglect it for months without it impacting manufacturing.
This is obviously not a good idea, much like it's not a good idea to neglect to file required business paperwork or neglect to change lightbulbs, but, nevertheless, incoming money is a rather indirect need in any competantly operated company.
Note I'm not saying that Sales needs less resources, per se, but they need a lower priority. They should have less of an impact on the rest of the company workers, ones who are attempting to produce good and services (Which is the only thing that actually is making money.) and the other infrastructure people. (Granted, they usually leave the other infrastructure pretty much alone.)
There is the same problem with 'Management', which, while not a division, nevertheless takes up quite a lot of time of the actual workers, when in reality any company could probably operate without any 'managing' for a month or so, barring random clerical work they do. (In fact, they usually have someone to do the clerical work for them.) Of course the problem is that Management is, by defination, there to take up time worker's time by interacting with them, so the solution is to actually have much less management.
Aren't there already professional (crime) organizations already set up for hacking and spamming purposes?
Organized crime does not produce the demand for spam, because they do not spam their products and services. (Their products and services are illegal, and hence providing contact points to the general population would be stupid.)
'Legitimate' companies produce the demand. Crime, organized or not, steps in to provide this illegal service to them.
Worrying about the actual people producing the spam and who they work for is not that useful. The people to go after are the people purchasing their services.
Poking hornet's nest is a good thing if the hornets get so riled up the start stinging everyone, including the fucking owner who lets them run wild and sting everyone, aka, the people paying the spammer.
Any sort of specially prepared meal is better than the other stuff.
And you grasp the 'They could recruit others' concept, so I don't understand why you still think profiling Arabs is worthwhile.(Incidentally, we can't magically tell Muslim Arabs from Christian or Jewish Arabs. More to the point, we can't tell black Muslims from other black people, or white Muslims from other white people. And sometimes, we can't even tell hispanics from Arabs.)
If we spend time on Arab-looking people, we must scan less other people. If terrorist know this, and there is no logical reason why they shouldn't, and can recruit non-Arab people, and there is no logical reason they cannot, then they can use those people to carry the weapons, and thanks to what you suggest, have better odds of getting them on the plane.
Trying to figure out who the terrorist are using easily evadable rules, and spending more time on those people and less time on others, only works if terrorists are morons. It helps any non-moron. The only rules we should be using are those that are very hard to evade, like their network of contacts, or if they're known to study under someone who's a radical, or appear to be doing inexplicably things with money that doesn't appear to be theirs.
And I haven't even gotten into the concept of a 'red herring'. You've got two or three people who are practically a known terrorist? Let's send them through security under a fake name...while we slip the poor black youth we recruited from Niger, dressed like a typical American teen, who's 'a student here, returning home to visit his sick mother.'. With a bomb.
Muslims just find it harder to find halal food than Jews finding kosker food, so 'fake it' more often. In reality, neither of them is 'acceptable' to the orthadox followers, in that they aren't certified as following the correct preparation. I know kosker is supposed to have a rabbi check out the process, and halal has much the same thing, although I forget the exact rule.
However, neither has pork, or shellfish, or a few other things. And hence if someone doesn't care about having their food 'certified', they just don't want to take a big bite of pork, the 'other' kind of food is fine.
And the GP is right, Jewish and Arab traditions are very very close in many ways, because they originally were the same, and because they have always lived in the same part of the world. Any similarities between Islam and Judism is almost always because Islam was almost entirely an Arab religion at the start. I.e., Semitic to Arab to Muslim, and Semitic to Jewish people to Jewish religion.
Whereas Christianity wandered off to Europe, and the European 'pagan' people within 100 years, so sucked up all those traditions. While Islam and Judism are single religions that came out of the same sets of people, Christianity is almost that same thing, out of the same people, applied to an entirely different set of people.
80 year old mexican catholic ladies and white agnostic american hippies
They're certainly more likely to be carrying weapons right now. Hey, you're just got to recruit one of them. The six other guys, who are suspicious-looking Arab men, can just get their weapons from that person once they're on the plane.
And how the hell do you know they're those things? I'm pretty certain there's a type of behavior called 'acting', where you pretend to be something you're not.
And I think you're ignoring the 60, in which there were, indeed, 'terrorist hippies'. Have you ever heard of the Weather Underground? They considered themselves at war with the US, and started bombing it. Repeated. While they didn't delibrately target civilians, it's somewhat hard to miss them when you blow up police stations and courthouses. (And they also attacked Gulf Oil offices.)
I can't think of any action in recent years by any 80 year old women, but it's not impossible for a 50 year old women to look and act like an 80 year old women, and assuming that Mexicans would never commit terrorist acts is to not watch the news, because a lot of them are getting rather pissed at the US over this illegal immigration thing. I'm sure there's at least one who could get unstable to the point of attacking the US. (Talk about the ultimate self-defeating action.)
And, of course, this is ignoring one of the biggest risk groups: Americans who are pissed at their government. This can be someone at any end of the political spectrum, from the far-religious to the far-socialist to the far-libertarian. (Who, respectively, tend to be militant about the lack of religion, the government letting poor people die, and too much taxes.) And I'm sure I forgot at least one 'far' in there.
Which is just sad, because 'jihad' means 'struggle', from what I understand. It can even mean 'interal struggle'. It's not really any weirder than people named 'Chastity'.
I challenge this Administration to a contest. Random fake guns, made of the same material as real guns but without any insides, and painted bright orange, will be sold in stores. As will fake knifes, colored the same.
Anyone can buy them, and the government is not allowed to track who does.
Now, we have a contest. At any point in any flight, these items can be handed over to the airplane staff, or dropped in one-way boxes in the bathrooms.
To make it somewhat realistic, penalty-wise, anyone caught smuggling one on the plane before the plane takes off will miss the flight, and have to spend a day in a holding cell at the airport. It won't be 'illegal', and it won't go on their record at all. It's like being dead in paintball. We got you, terrorist!
All collected guns and knifes are counted, and the weekly collection numbers must be reported.
That's not why the rules are in place, that's why the rules are claimed to be in place.
The rules are actually in place for two different reasons:
One, because security theatre is the sole thing our current Administration has ever been efficent at. The actual stopping of threats, or responding to disasters after the fact, or acting in the political stage to put pressure on said threats, it doesn't quite understand that yet. Nor does it, apparently, understand how to invade a county.(1) But it sure has 'running around looking like it's doing something' down pat.
The UK, sad to say, appears to be one of the few countries to actually either fall for this, or be willing to play along. (I don't know UK politics well enough to know which.) I've lost almost as much respect for the UK as for the US for putting up with their government.
Two, because the airline industry is a confusopoly, and hence is threatened by the large amount of information available online. If this keeps up, it won't be able to sell some tickets for six times as much as other tickets in the same class on the same flight. A large part of fighting this is assuring that tickets cannot be resold under any circumstances, which is what many of these 'security' measures are designed to prevent.
1) I say 'apparently' because, hey, I don't either. But, then again, I haven't tried to invade two of them, and I'm not gearing up to do it a third time.
And if the thought of wiring freaks you out, you can always just manually plug the switching UPS into either the other UPSes or the line power.
The problem is that this software and system are designed to charge batteries off solar panels. Well, that's nice, but there's all sorts of compexities there, like power drain and light level, that simply do not exist when charging from the grid. A monkey with a wristwatch could do it for you, literally.
I guess, in theory, it might be nice for the system to be able to say 'I have 12 hours of non-peak time, I can charge slowly' or 'I have 4 hours of non-peak time, I better charge quickly'...but, as that doesn't actually change within a power system, a better bet would just to find a UPS that you can adjust the charging rate of, and set it correctly.
That is an absurd scam. I could build an off-the-shelf system that does all this for the price of the UPSes + 30 dollars.
Get a bunch of UPSes.
Then go get an analog clock switching timer at Walmart for 5 dollars. And one of one of those light switches where you hook up two to control the same light.
Then get a tiny, '15 minute' UPS power strip, in addition to your other UPSs, which I will call the 'switching UPS'. It will have to power your entire business, so will only last for a few seconds, but that's all it needs.
Install the big UPSs behind the switching timer, which is then connected to the line power. You'll need a PC to monitor it.
Hook up the light switch backwards, where instead of it switching power between two lines (1), it's switching two lines of power to one output.
The two inputs to the switch are your UPS system and your line power. The output goes to the tiny switching UPS, which you then plug the rest of your system into.
The big UPSes charge at night. In the morning, you make sure the light switch is on 'UPS power' mode. You watch the UPS monitor. If it ever gets too low, you flip the switch and get back on 'line power' until the next day. The switching UPS is just to buffer that quarter second when you are switching from one power to the other.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they make UPS that have a relay they can trip when they are low on power, and thus you could probably make the entire system automated.
1) If you don't know what I'm talking about, I mean those rooms that have two switches controlling one light. They work by having the power run into one switch, and that switch has two lines to the other switch. Flipping the first switch merely determines which line the power runs down. The second switch runs only one line to the light, and which way you position that switch determines which line coming from the first switch is sent to that light. So, basically, we want the second half of that system, where the two lines are 'UPS' and 'power grid'.
It doesn't make any sense for a data center. Data centers already have, and would still need, generators. And enough battery power to let them get started.
Ah, but wait! They could use this as their batteries! Well, no. They'd look kinda stupid if the power went out at four in the afternoon, and their batteries were dead because they'd been running off them all afternoon to save money.
OTOH...a real cheap timer that only kept the batteries topped off from non-peak electricity might be a good idea, assuming they can afford to have them at 96% instead of 100% when electricity cut out. (Like I said, they'll be quickly switching to generators anyway.)
However, that could be done with a fricken analog outlet timer, not thousands more dollars worth of batteries. (In fact, UPSs should come with such a device built in.)
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That is, assuming you mean 'recognize' as 'realize that word applies to them'. Dogs and most animals that can hear can 'recognize' sounds, including one means 'They are making noises that means something is going to happen to me, so I will now react', but we don't have any evidence they realize that word refers to 'themselves', or that they have any such concept.
Apes, however, do recognize their name that when taught. They fully understand names, and even pronouns, and use them when signing.
'Stupidity' is relative. All normal human beings are smarter than any chimp, so, in a sense, the genes for 'stupidity' did disappear.
'Accounting scandal' actually usually means 'Stealing money from their shareholders'. I don't know what Qwest was doing specifically, though.
And, what's more, the worse one that was completely handleable with current technology. I mean, there have been worse natural disasters, like floods and even hurricanes, but almost all those happened over a hundred years ago, or were things that no one could do anything about at the time, like the great freeze of 1950 or the tornados of 1974 or the San Francisco quake/fire of 1906.
The closest example to Katrina would be the Great Okeechobee hurricane/flood in 1928, which killed roughly the same number of people, and was before, you know, we had helicopters or computers or weather satelites to track hurricanes or even knew what the hell was going on.
Actually, that last bit hasn't changed, as the government, apparently, still doesn't know what the hell is going on, even when it's on the fucking news.
I had a pithy comment typed out about how it can't be worse than Iraq, but, you know, that's just tempting fate.
I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this IS FISA. The court always has at least two judges there, it is automatically classified and everyone is already cleared to handle the data, and, in addition, you can do them retroactively...you can start wiretapping and then go to the court within 72 hours.
What the hell did you think happened? He was out hunting and captured a one-ton animal, brought it back with him, had it DNA tested, and then blew its brains out?
I swear to God, people have not only stoped reading the articles, but now the stuff they're imagining the articles said doesn't even make any damn sense.
The only way to get more polar bears is to give them more territory.
Complaining about the few people hunting them is like complaining about how few deers there are in a certain area because development has destroyed their habitat, and thus people shouldn't hit them with their cars. That's not going to do a damn thing to recover the deer population.
And in this case, we can't just 'move back', because 'we' aren't the problem(1). Humans rarely live where polar bears live. If the area is warm enough for humans, it's warm enough for other bears, like, oh, grizzlies, which come in and take the land away from the polar bears. (Because, apparently polar bears are incompetant and have only one advantage over other bears.)P> So there are very few solutions: We can start hunting all bears slightly south except polar bears, we can figure out how to get more polar ice caps, or we can just accept the fact that polar bear population is a function of how much land exists that is isn't habitable by other bears.
1) That is, we aren't physically the problem. It's possibly that the shinking ice is due to human actions.
Remember, it's not the bear you have to run faster than...
How about the parents of the offspring? Are they fertile?
What's really interesting is, because of that, wolf-dog hybrids are more likely to attack humans than wolves. Wolves, while sometimes willing to attack human-sized prey when pretty hungry, like deer and even cows, have had the fear of humans genetically instilled into them, and thus a human being is literally the last thing they will attack for food. All the ones that were willing to attack humans got killed ten thousand years ago.
Dogs, OTOH, are not generally willing to attack any prey larger than themselves. Note I said prey. Even vicious tamed dogs don't eat humans. Dogs, however, aren't afraid of humans at all, and hence feral ones will attack humans. So a wolf-dog hybrid is basically a dog that comes pre-feraled.
Coyotes are a different story, as are foxes. There are reports of interbreeding, and some species even seems be the result of interbreeding in the past. But they don't appear to breed with wolves/dogs normally or easily.
Well, of course Sales should be at the top of the pile. They make all the money!
</sarcasm>
The problem is that in most companies there are three tiers: Sales (and Marketing, if seperate) at the top, Manufacturing actually making the thing in the middle, and Infrastructure, which does not directly make any products but enables them to be made and the rest of the company to operate.
The tier is a good idea. It is, indeed, more important if the assembly line is broken than if email is broken or the restrooms are out of order. In companies where the 'manufacturing process' is virtual and ideas are part of, however, email being down may effect the 'manufacturing process'. But that's all nitpicking.
The actual problem is that someone without critical thinking made Sales at the top. Sales is infrastructure, that provides 'money upkeep'. It's the least important infrastructure, in that you could, in theory, neglect it for months without it impacting manufacturing.
This is obviously not a good idea, much like it's not a good idea to neglect to file required business paperwork or neglect to change lightbulbs, but, nevertheless, incoming money is a rather indirect need in any competantly operated company.
Note I'm not saying that Sales needs less resources, per se, but they need a lower priority. They should have less of an impact on the rest of the company workers, ones who are attempting to produce good and services (Which is the only thing that actually is making money.) and the other infrastructure people. (Granted, they usually leave the other infrastructure pretty much alone.)
There is the same problem with 'Management', which, while not a division, nevertheless takes up quite a lot of time of the actual workers, when in reality any company could probably operate without any 'managing' for a month or so, barring random clerical work they do. (In fact, they usually have someone to do the clerical work for them.) Of course the problem is that Management is, by defination, there to take up time worker's time by interacting with them, so the solution is to actually have much less management.
Organized crime does not produce the demand for spam, because they do not spam their products and services. (Their products and services are illegal, and hence providing contact points to the general population would be stupid.)
'Legitimate' companies produce the demand. Crime, organized or not, steps in to provide this illegal service to them.
Worrying about the actual people producing the spam and who they work for is not that useful. The people to go after are the people purchasing their services.
I just checked. It's not.
Poking hornet's nest is a good thing if the hornets get so riled up the start stinging everyone, including the fucking owner who lets them run wild and sting everyone, aka, the people paying the spammer.
And you grasp the 'They could recruit others' concept, so I don't understand why you still think profiling Arabs is worthwhile.(Incidentally, we can't magically tell Muslim Arabs from Christian or Jewish Arabs. More to the point, we can't tell black Muslims from other black people, or white Muslims from other white people. And sometimes, we can't even tell hispanics from Arabs.)
If we spend time on Arab-looking people, we must scan less other people. If terrorist know this, and there is no logical reason why they shouldn't, and can recruit non-Arab people, and there is no logical reason they cannot, then they can use those people to carry the weapons, and thanks to what you suggest, have better odds of getting them on the plane.
Trying to figure out who the terrorist are using easily evadable rules, and spending more time on those people and less time on others, only works if terrorists are morons. It helps any non-moron. The only rules we should be using are those that are very hard to evade, like their network of contacts, or if they're known to study under someone who's a radical, or appear to be doing inexplicably things with money that doesn't appear to be theirs.
And I haven't even gotten into the concept of a 'red herring'. You've got two or three people who are practically a known terrorist? Let's send them through security under a fake name...while we slip the poor black youth we recruited from Niger, dressed like a typical American teen, who's 'a student here, returning home to visit his sick mother.'. With a bomb.
However, neither has pork, or shellfish, or a few other things. And hence if someone doesn't care about having their food 'certified', they just don't want to take a big bite of pork, the 'other' kind of food is fine.
And the GP is right, Jewish and Arab traditions are very very close in many ways, because they originally were the same, and because they have always lived in the same part of the world. Any similarities between Islam and Judism is almost always because Islam was almost entirely an Arab religion at the start. I.e., Semitic to Arab to Muslim, and Semitic to Jewish people to Jewish religion.
Whereas Christianity wandered off to Europe, and the European 'pagan' people within 100 years, so sucked up all those traditions. While Islam and Judism are single religions that came out of the same sets of people, Christianity is almost that same thing, out of the same people, applied to an entirely different set of people.
They're certainly more likely to be carrying weapons right now. Hey, you're just got to recruit one of them. The six other guys, who are suspicious-looking Arab men, can just get their weapons from that person once they're on the plane.
And how the hell do you know they're those things? I'm pretty certain there's a type of behavior called 'acting', where you pretend to be something you're not.
And I think you're ignoring the 60, in which there were, indeed, 'terrorist hippies'. Have you ever heard of the Weather Underground? They considered themselves at war with the US, and started bombing it. Repeated. While they didn't delibrately target civilians, it's somewhat hard to miss them when you blow up police stations and courthouses. (And they also attacked Gulf Oil offices.)
I can't think of any action in recent years by any 80 year old women, but it's not impossible for a 50 year old women to look and act like an 80 year old women, and assuming that Mexicans would never commit terrorist acts is to not watch the news, because a lot of them are getting rather pissed at the US over this illegal immigration thing. I'm sure there's at least one who could get unstable to the point of attacking the US. (Talk about the ultimate self-defeating action.)
And, of course, this is ignoring one of the biggest risk groups: Americans who are pissed at their government. This can be someone at any end of the political spectrum, from the far-religious to the far-socialist to the far-libertarian. (Who, respectively, tend to be militant about the lack of religion, the government letting poor people die, and too much taxes.) And I'm sure I forgot at least one 'far' in there.
Which is just sad, because 'jihad' means 'struggle', from what I understand. It can even mean 'interal struggle'. It's not really any weirder than people named 'Chastity'.
Anyone can buy them, and the government is not allowed to track who does.
Now, we have a contest. At any point in any flight, these items can be handed over to the airplane staff, or dropped in one-way boxes in the bathrooms.
To make it somewhat realistic, penalty-wise, anyone caught smuggling one on the plane before the plane takes off will miss the flight, and have to spend a day in a holding cell at the airport. It won't be 'illegal', and it won't go on their record at all. It's like being dead in paintball. We got you, terrorist!
All collected guns and knifes are counted, and the weekly collection numbers must be reported.
We'll see how good airline security is then.
Yes, because people commiting identity theft would never stoop so low as to use stolen credit cards!
The rules are actually in place for two different reasons:
One, because security theatre is the sole thing our current Administration has ever been efficent at. The actual stopping of threats, or responding to disasters after the fact, or acting in the political stage to put pressure on said threats, it doesn't quite understand that yet. Nor does it, apparently, understand how to invade a county.(1) But it sure has 'running around looking like it's doing something' down pat.
The UK, sad to say, appears to be one of the few countries to actually either fall for this, or be willing to play along. (I don't know UK politics well enough to know which.) I've lost almost as much respect for the UK as for the US for putting up with their government.
Two, because the airline industry is a confusopoly, and hence is threatened by the large amount of information available online. If this keeps up, it won't be able to sell some tickets for six times as much as other tickets in the same class on the same flight. A large part of fighting this is assuring that tickets cannot be resold under any circumstances, which is what many of these 'security' measures are designed to prevent.
1) I say 'apparently' because, hey, I don't either. But, then again, I haven't tried to invade two of them, and I'm not gearing up to do it a third time.
The problem is that this software and system are designed to charge batteries off solar panels. Well, that's nice, but there's all sorts of compexities there, like power drain and light level, that simply do not exist when charging from the grid. A monkey with a wristwatch could do it for you, literally.
I guess, in theory, it might be nice for the system to be able to say 'I have 12 hours of non-peak time, I can charge slowly' or 'I have 4 hours of non-peak time, I better charge quickly'...but, as that doesn't actually change within a power system, a better bet would just to find a UPS that you can adjust the charging rate of, and set it correctly.
Get a bunch of UPSes.
Then go get an analog clock switching timer at Walmart for 5 dollars. And one of one of those light switches where you hook up two to control the same light.
Then get a tiny, '15 minute' UPS power strip, in addition to your other UPSs, which I will call the 'switching UPS'. It will have to power your entire business, so will only last for a few seconds, but that's all it needs.
Install the big UPSs behind the switching timer, which is then connected to the line power. You'll need a PC to monitor it.
Hook up the light switch backwards, where instead of it switching power between two lines (1), it's switching two lines of power to one output.
The two inputs to the switch are your UPS system and your line power. The output goes to the tiny switching UPS, which you then plug the rest of your system into.
The big UPSes charge at night. In the morning, you make sure the light switch is on 'UPS power' mode. You watch the UPS monitor. If it ever gets too low, you flip the switch and get back on 'line power' until the next day. The switching UPS is just to buffer that quarter second when you are switching from one power to the other.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they make UPS that have a relay they can trip when they are low on power, and thus you could probably make the entire system automated.
1) If you don't know what I'm talking about, I mean those rooms that have two switches controlling one light. They work by having the power run into one switch, and that switch has two lines to the other switch. Flipping the first switch merely determines which line the power runs down. The second switch runs only one line to the light, and which way you position that switch determines which line coming from the first switch is sent to that light. So, basically, we want the second half of that system, where the two lines are 'UPS' and 'power grid'.
Ah, but wait! They could use this as their batteries! Well, no. They'd look kinda stupid if the power went out at four in the afternoon, and their batteries were dead because they'd been running off them all afternoon to save money.
OTOH...a real cheap timer that only kept the batteries topped off from non-peak electricity might be a good idea, assuming they can afford to have them at 96% instead of 100% when electricity cut out. (Like I said, they'll be quickly switching to generators anyway.)
However, that could be done with a fricken analog outlet timer, not thousands more dollars worth of batteries. (In fact, UPSs should come with such a device built in.)