The power companies always win this game. They'll find reasons to increase rates even with demand down. Even more so, as the global population increases, fewer people will be living in their own houses - and fewer will have roofs to install rooftop solar on to.
We have Kennedy, Houston, and are building one in New Mexico. It is not at this point clear if the commercial guys are going to want to launch from the government facilities; should we take this as a suggestion that NASA is anticipating the construction of another commercial spaceport in the US somewhere?
But since the Obama administration lies to people and tells them it's OK to blow the whistle on corruption, then proceeds to ruin their lives anyway...that's somehow a good thing? Or a better thing? I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here...
Did you read the subject line? It is just as bad as before. Your likelihood of being prosecuted for whistleblowing is no worse now than it ever was before, it just gets more attention in the hyperpolarized political environment. This is just another crappy article posted to slashdot to get people reciting their favorite mantras about how terrible Obama is, in complete ignorance of the decades of the same exact shit that we have seen in this country before.
How exactly is the Obama administration taking action that is any different from the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration, the Reagan administration, or any other before then? The only difference is that the Obama administration pretends to be willing to protect whistleblowers; the previous administrations were openly opposed to them to the degree that nobody dared blow the whistle at all.
You have this backwards. Samzenpus thinks this is a great idea. He if far more MSNBC than FOXNews material.
Samzenpus's history of posting conservative FUD to the front page of slashdot for the sole purpose of making non-conservatives look bad is clear demonstration to the contrary of your claim. He has been allowed to post garbage like this to the front page for years.
Obama Presses China On Global Warming - Conservatives would argue global warming doesn't exist
Which makes Obama look like an out-of-touch disconnected-from-reality liberal/socialist/fascist/hippie/Un-american/tree-hugger
South Australia Hits 33% Renewal Energy Target 6 Years Early - Conservatives know renewables will never work
Which just reinforces the isolationist ideal that the American way is the best way and the rest of the world doesn't matter.
Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects - Conservatives know nuclear power is safe
Which would be responded to by conservatives with the old "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" argument.
Study Links Pacific Coastal Warming To Changing Winds - More climate change claptrap
Conservatives actually love that argument because it largely discredits the anthropogenic component of climate change for that part of the world. IF they were to bother to read the article, they could use it to reinforce their old adage of "this just happens on its own".
Me thinks you doth protest too much.
I think you haven't been paying attention to what makes it to the front page.
If you want proof that slashdot is not majority conservative then look at how slashdot responds to issues
I have...
drug laws
The paulowers on this site shout everyone else down with claims that legalizing everything will somehow make the world better. The very matter of drug laws is so hyperpolarized though that reasonable discussions are almost impossible everywhere.
global warming
Every week there is at least one article trying to debunk climate change. Almost never do we see a front page article supporting it.
the big bang
Even American conservatives are coming around to accept that the world is more than 6,000 years old. That said it is quite rare to see an article on it make it to the front page here as it just doesn't bring enough eyeballs.
gay marriage
Slashdot almost never touches on that topic on the front page, as it makes the conservative base look bad to endorse discrimination.
anything religious
Aside from the "atheists need Kirk" article last week, there has been almost nothing religious in terms of front page content here for quite a while.
I know it's hard to believe but there are more than 2 sides to the political spectrum.
Slashdot does not endorse the existence of more than two sides, because un-American. The rest of the world tends to see politics as being (at least) 2-dimensional rather than just a one-dimensional affair.
Before you try to claim to have some understanding of my motivations here.
I am not "harassing" samzenpus. Most likely he won't even read these comments. I am pointing out that samzenpus is just a prime example of how political - and conservative - this site has become. Slashdot used to be a place to come for news and discussions about technology. This article has nothing to do with technology, and samzenpus posts a lot of articles that don't have anything to do with technology.
This article - as shown by the atrocious headline - was posted to excite the conservative base here at slashdot.
If you put extra food in a landfill it becomes waste.
That is not the point of the headline. This awful headline was chosen to get people excited about the "nanny state", "dirty hippies", and all that bullshit. Look at the other terrible articles that he has shepherded to the front page that I have mentioned before, and you'll see that this is not an outlier but part of a trend.
Really? At least once a week there is a story like this, chosen to excite the conservatives and to try to make the liberals look bad. Can you show me an article posted in the past several months that does the opposite? No, you cannot.
This site carries a lot of political articles, and the vast overwhelming majority of them are for the conservatives. If the conservatives didn't have the overwhelming majority voice here then why do all the front page articles sway to their side when they are about political topics?
Maybe after the failed site redesign, the new owners are trying to increase page hits by turning/. into a drudge-like site with lots of misleading headlines.
I'm not sure which redesign you are referring to, but slashdot has been courting the drudge crowd for at least 5 full years now. With every passing year the site bends further to the right, further away from technology - and reality. I don't think we can really blame it on the owners, though; dice.com didn't buy slashdot (as an accompaniment to sites people actually use like sourceforge) until 2012.
I read the article, and am having a hard time seeing where the summary is incorrect.
The summary is reasonable, the headline is not. Samzenpus chose a headline that was written to make people angry at the "nanny state". He should have chosen a headline that actually describes what the City Council passed. Samzenpus likes to pass this kind of conservative FUD through to the front page to excite slashdot's conservative majority, regardless of whether or not it has any connection to technology - or reality.
Apparently they see that disposing of food in trash bins instead of compost is a waste. I don't see the problem with the headline.
That isn't what samzenpus is trying to get you to believe. samzenpus is a big believer in the conspiracy of the nanny state - see my journal article that links to all the bullshit he has funneled through to the front page - and he is trying to support the notion that the dirty hippies running Seattle are trying to force everyone to eat moldy vegetables. He isn't describing the wastefulness of compostable material entering the regular waste stream, he is trying to stir up fear of the imminent government takeover and micromanagement of your life.
He could have fit a headline in up there that accurately summarizes the article, but he chose not to. In the same amount of space, a headline along the lines of "Seattle passes ordinance to encourage composting of waste food" would have been orders of magnitude more accurate and informative. He chose this awful headline to stir up excitement with the conservative base that has been steadily taking over what used to be a technology site here at slashdot.
Even for the samzenpus failure machine, this article is terrible. In this case, the headline is a complete fabrication that does not reflect the reality of the article it links to or the ordinance passed by Seattle City Council. Sure, samzenpus is a hacktacular idiot who has many times before posted various rallying calls for conservatives to come have a circle-jerk here at slashdot, but this is even terrible for him. Will his next posting to the front page be about the "latte salute" from Obama?
Samzenpus, isn't it time you go find a job you're qualified for? You certainly aren't qualified as an editor, even at this website. Fox News might be hiring... or maybe townhall.com?
The trait of a PhD that is most marketable in industry is project management. As a grad student you had to see through your project all the way to its end. You should be selling that part of your training in your applications. If you wanted to do 9-5 programming, you probably should have gone for a Master's instead.
Those of us who remember the first time Dell hit the market - as a mail-order company with little to no retail presence (except perhaps Sam's Club?) - remember they were the first one to really make a big run at it with all off-the-shelf parts. The earliest Dell PCs even had standard ATX motherboards in them that could be easily upgraded if the owner so desired. This was a huge improvement over the rest of the PCs on the market at the time, which were mostly Packard-Bell systems that were a nightmare to repair and nearly impossible to upgrade beyond adding RAM. If they're going high-end now, it sounds like a return to how they got going.
Our current president will be remembered at the most conservative president to date in American history. So far the president who his playbook of actual actions has most closely resembled has been Reagan. Being as Reagan got us through the cold war by convincing the Russians that the Star Wars Missile Defense was real, we should expect a similar moonshot approach from Obama when he seeks to cement his own legacy.
Interesting that registrars will threaten sites that assist in obtaining illegal copies of software or media, but will do nothing whatsoever when they are shown that their customers are selling kiddie porn, illegal / counterfeit drugs, counterfeit anything else, etc...
Yeah, I know that slashdot's overwhelming conservative majority will mod this comment down into oblivion in retaliation, but that doesn't make it untrue.
We saw a project like this (at least) a couple years ago. Someone did something like this previously, when data plans were generally expensive but unlimited SMS was easily available.
The National Institutes of Health are one of (or perhaps the, depending on whom you ask) largest funding sources for research from the federal government. I know many people who have reviewed grant applications there, and they would be rather astonished to see
Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
Because at NIH indeed you are placed on a grant review board because of your techical knowledge of the matter. On top of that, the applications are all supported by citations in technical (and peer-reviewed) papers.
As best I understand funding at DOE and NSF works much the same way; your odds of getting funded are astronomically better if you have good primary literature to support the experiment you propose. Now, if your funding plans revolve around convincing your favorite congress-critter to write in a line (or a full bill) to get you some money, that might work too but it generally isn't the most reliable way to establish a career path.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god.
A circular argument.
No, for the argument that I presented later in the same post. The problem I have is the modern hijacking of the term atheist.
All the word smitihng doesn't convince me that there can be faith in "nothing" if a person is inclined to be an atheist.
If one declares there to be no god, they are making a statement of faith. It is of the same magnitude - though opposite orientation - as one made by someone declaring there to be a god.
Similarly, the classic definition of agnostic was a "doubter", one who questioned the existence of a deity. Then some of the "atheists" took on a faith of their own and pushed the classical atheists out in search of a new term to describe their standing.
Having faith that things I've never heard of that don't exist just seems like dividing by zero.
Perhaps I wasn't clear on this matter. My point is that people who specifically state a belief in there not being a particular (generally Abrahamic) god are calling themselves atheists when they are showing faith in that very statement. Similarly by the way that the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" have been redefined in modern times, one could reasonably describe any random person to likely be agnostic towards a deity that they have never heard of (unless they specifically subscribe to the existence of a different one in a way that prevents them from accepting any other).
Slashdot Mirror
The power companies always win this game. They'll find reasons to increase rates even with demand down. Even more so, as the global population increases, fewer people will be living in their own houses - and fewer will have roofs to install rooftop solar on to.
We have Kennedy, Houston, and are building one in New Mexico. It is not at this point clear if the commercial guys are going to want to launch from the government facilities; should we take this as a suggestion that NASA is anticipating the construction of another commercial spaceport in the US somewhere?
But since the Obama administration lies to people and tells them it's OK to blow the whistle on corruption, then proceeds to ruin their lives anyway...that's somehow a good thing? Or a better thing? I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here...
Did you read the subject line? It is just as bad as before. Your likelihood of being prosecuted for whistleblowing is no worse now than it ever was before, it just gets more attention in the hyperpolarized political environment. This is just another crappy article posted to slashdot to get people reciting their favorite mantras about how terrible Obama is, in complete ignorance of the decades of the same exact shit that we have seen in this country before.
How exactly is the Obama administration taking action that is any different from the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration, the Reagan administration, or any other before then? The only difference is that the Obama administration pretends to be willing to protect whistleblowers; the previous administrations were openly opposed to them to the degree that nobody dared blow the whistle at all.
You have this backwards. Samzenpus thinks this is a great idea. He if far more MSNBC than FOXNews material.
Samzenpus's history of posting conservative FUD to the front page of slashdot for the sole purpose of making non-conservatives look bad is clear demonstration to the contrary of your claim. He has been allowed to post garbage like this to the front page for years.
Obama Presses China On Global Warming - Conservatives would argue global warming doesn't exist
Which makes Obama look like an out-of-touch disconnected-from-reality liberal/socialist/fascist/hippie/Un-american/tree-hugger
South Australia Hits 33% Renewal Energy Target 6 Years Early - Conservatives know renewables will never work
Which just reinforces the isolationist ideal that the American way is the best way and the rest of the world doesn't matter.
Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects - Conservatives know nuclear power is safe
Which would be responded to by conservatives with the old "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" argument.
Study Links Pacific Coastal Warming To Changing Winds - More climate change claptrap
Conservatives actually love that argument because it largely discredits the anthropogenic component of climate change for that part of the world. IF they were to bother to read the article, they could use it to reinforce their old adage of "this just happens on its own".
Me thinks you doth protest too much.
I think you haven't been paying attention to what makes it to the front page.
If you want proof that slashdot is not majority conservative then look at how slashdot responds to issues
I have...
drug laws
The paulowers on this site shout everyone else down with claims that legalizing everything will somehow make the world better. The very matter of drug laws is so hyperpolarized though that reasonable discussions are almost impossible everywhere.
global warming
Every week there is at least one article trying to debunk climate change. Almost never do we see a front page article supporting it.
the big bang
Even American conservatives are coming around to accept that the world is more than 6,000 years old. That said it is quite rare to see an article on it make it to the front page here as it just doesn't bring enough eyeballs.
gay marriage
Slashdot almost never touches on that topic on the front page, as it makes the conservative base look bad to endorse discrimination.
anything religious
Aside from the "atheists need Kirk" article last week, there has been almost nothing religious in terms of front page content here for quite a while.
I know it's hard to believe but there are more than 2 sides to the political spectrum.
Slashdot does not endorse the existence of more than two sides, because un-American. The rest of the world tends to see politics as being (at least) 2-dimensional rather than just a one-dimensional affair.
He's just harassing samzenpus.
No. You should try taking your own advice of
take a look at his comments
Before you try to claim to have some understanding of my motivations here.
I am not "harassing" samzenpus. Most likely he won't even read these comments. I am pointing out that samzenpus is just a prime example of how political - and conservative - this site has become. Slashdot used to be a place to come for news and discussions about technology. This article has nothing to do with technology, and samzenpus posts a lot of articles that don't have anything to do with technology.
This article - as shown by the atrocious headline - was posted to excite the conservative base here at slashdot.
If you put extra food in a landfill it becomes waste.
That is not the point of the headline. This awful headline was chosen to get people excited about the "nanny state", "dirty hippies", and all that bullshit. Look at the other terrible articles that he has shepherded to the front page that I have mentioned before, and you'll see that this is not an outlier but part of a trend.
to excite slashdot's conservative majority
Um, yeah, that's crazy talk.
Really? At least once a week there is a story like this, chosen to excite the conservatives and to try to make the liberals look bad. Can you show me an article posted in the past several months that does the opposite? No, you cannot.
This site carries a lot of political articles, and the vast overwhelming majority of them are for the conservatives. If the conservatives didn't have the overwhelming majority voice here then why do all the front page articles sway to their side when they are about political topics?
Maybe after the failed site redesign, the new owners are trying to increase page hits by turning /. into a drudge-like site with lots of misleading headlines.
I'm not sure which redesign you are referring to, but slashdot has been courting the drudge crowd for at least 5 full years now. With every passing year the site bends further to the right, further away from technology - and reality. I don't think we can really blame it on the owners, though; dice.com didn't buy slashdot (as an accompaniment to sites people actually use like sourceforge) until 2012.
I read the article, and am having a hard time seeing where the summary is incorrect.
The summary is reasonable, the headline is not. Samzenpus chose a headline that was written to make people angry at the "nanny state". He should have chosen a headline that actually describes what the City Council passed. Samzenpus likes to pass this kind of conservative FUD through to the front page to excite slashdot's conservative majority, regardless of whether or not it has any connection to technology - or reality.
Apparently they see that disposing of food in trash bins instead of compost is a waste. I don't see the problem with the headline.
That isn't what samzenpus is trying to get you to believe. samzenpus is a big believer in the conspiracy of the nanny state - see my journal article that links to all the bullshit he has funneled through to the front page - and he is trying to support the notion that the dirty hippies running Seattle are trying to force everyone to eat moldy vegetables. He isn't describing the wastefulness of compostable material entering the regular waste stream, he is trying to stir up fear of the imminent government takeover and micromanagement of your life.
He could have fit a headline in up there that accurately summarizes the article, but he chose not to. In the same amount of space, a headline along the lines of "Seattle passes ordinance to encourage composting of waste food" would have been orders of magnitude more accurate and informative. He chose this awful headline to stir up excitement with the conservative base that has been steadily taking over what used to be a technology site here at slashdot.
Why does the headline pretend that it does? Didn't the person who posted this bother to read the article before passing it through to the front page?
And what does it have to do with technology?
Even for the samzenpus failure machine, this article is terrible. In this case, the headline is a complete fabrication that does not reflect the reality of the article it links to or the ordinance passed by Seattle City Council. Sure, samzenpus is a hacktacular idiot who has many times before posted various rallying calls for conservatives to come have a circle-jerk here at slashdot, but this is even terrible for him. Will his next posting to the front page be about the "latte salute" from Obama?
Samzenpus, isn't it time you go find a job you're qualified for? You certainly aren't qualified as an editor, even at this website. Fox News might be hiring... or maybe townhall.com?
... slashdot doesn't exist, either as it fell below the noise level of web traffic long ago. But yet here we are using it.
He wanted to start a moon base, let's volunteer him to work on that with the Russians. Really, truly, nothing could possibly go badly with that plan.
The trait of a PhD that is most marketable in industry is project management. As a grad student you had to see through your project all the way to its end. You should be selling that part of your training in your applications. If you wanted to do 9-5 programming, you probably should have gone for a Master's instead.
Those of us who remember the first time Dell hit the market - as a mail-order company with little to no retail presence (except perhaps Sam's Club?) - remember they were the first one to really make a big run at it with all off-the-shelf parts. The earliest Dell PCs even had standard ATX motherboards in them that could be easily upgraded if the owner so desired. This was a huge improvement over the rest of the PCs on the market at the time, which were mostly Packard-Bell systems that were a nightmare to repair and nearly impossible to upgrade beyond adding RAM. If they're going high-end now, it sounds like a return to how they got going.
Our current president will be remembered at the most conservative president to date in American history. So far the president who his playbook of actual actions has most closely resembled has been Reagan. Being as Reagan got us through the cold war by convincing the Russians that the Star Wars Missile Defense was real, we should expect a similar moonshot approach from Obama when he seeks to cement his own legacy.
Interesting that registrars will threaten sites that assist in obtaining illegal copies of software or media, but will do nothing whatsoever when they are shown that their customers are selling kiddie porn, illegal / counterfeit drugs, counterfeit anything else, etc...
... sounds like the GOP in the US.
Yeah, I know that slashdot's overwhelming conservative majority will mod this comment down into oblivion in retaliation, but that doesn't make it untrue.
We saw a project like this (at least) a couple years ago. Someone did something like this previously, when data plans were generally expensive but unlimited SMS was easily available.
Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
Because at NIH indeed you are placed on a grant review board because of your techical knowledge of the matter. On top of that, the applications are all supported by citations in technical (and peer-reviewed) papers.
As best I understand funding at DOE and NSF works much the same way; your odds of getting funded are astronomically better if you have good primary literature to support the experiment you propose. Now, if your funding plans revolve around convincing your favorite congress-critter to write in a line (or a full bill) to get you some money, that might work too but it generally isn't the most reliable way to establish a career path.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god.
A circular argument.
No, for the argument that I presented later in the same post. The problem I have is the modern hijacking of the term atheist.
All the word smitihng doesn't convince me that there can be faith in "nothing" if a person is inclined to be an atheist.
If one declares there to be no god, they are making a statement of faith. It is of the same magnitude - though opposite orientation - as one made by someone declaring there to be a god.
Similarly, the classic definition of agnostic was a "doubter", one who questioned the existence of a deity. Then some of the "atheists" took on a faith of their own and pushed the classical atheists out in search of a new term to describe their standing.
Having faith that things I've never heard of that don't exist just seems like dividing by zero.
Perhaps I wasn't clear on this matter. My point is that people who specifically state a belief in there not being a particular (generally Abrahamic) god are calling themselves atheists when they are showing faith in that very statement. Similarly by the way that the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" have been redefined in modern times, one could reasonably describe any random person to likely be agnostic towards a deity that they have never heard of (unless they specifically subscribe to the existence of a different one in a way that prevents them from accepting any other).
I'm pretty sure he was making a joke, there.