>As far as I know most (if not all?) of those hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes Nope.
> I guess you haven't seen the video recordings of Dems discussing and approving them? So wait... you think there were thousands of hoax hate crimes in the USA... but you think that video is real ?
>I think George Soros would be a far closer bet Right... conspiracy nut. You get all your news from infowars and breitbart do you ? There's no point debating. You can't have a rational discussion with irrational people. If Soros wants to achieve something, he doesn't hide, He doesn't use subterfuge. He doesn't engage in conspiracy. He just goes out and does it and says "fuck you". Ask the bank of England. Soros basically brought it to it's knees - and he didn't do anything secret, or pay anybody to do anything on his behalf - he just outsmarted them by understanding and predicting the market better than they did. You want to worry about rich people who engage in conspiracies to destroy your freedom and, indeed, kill you for profit -worry about the Koch brothers. Now THEY like to work in the shadows and use conspiracies. Soros doesn't - he doesn't need to - he is capable of achieving his aims in the light because what they mostly are, are things people tend to be glad about.
Erm no. That would be an ideal - but it really is a lot more complicated than that - how complicated varies by country. Asylum laws vary by country.
An asylum-seeker is never an illegal immigrant (contrary to how president Trump described the Australia deal) - it's legal under international law (As well as US and Australian domestic law btw) to show up at a border without a VISA or passport if you are a refugee. Of course, if your request for asylum is denied and you THEN go in you could BECOME an illegal immigrant but that would be a later issue.
Now whether you really are a refugee varies, and there is generally a judgement factor involved. Sometimes decisions are ridiculous. A few years ago Canada granted asylum to a Cape Townian on the premise that crime in South Africa was becoming a genocidal targetting of whites. Which is flagrantly untrue - in fact whites are the LEAST likely to be targetted by criminals. 8% of the population but far under 1% of crime victims. South Africa raised a huge diplomatic fuss over it, and Canadian higher-ups reversed the decision later (I also believe the particular moron who approved it was fired later). But they also, and much more frequently, deny legitimate applications with equally stupid judgement calls - over things like filling a form in wrong. What the bot does is collect the information the form actually wants in plain English and then generate a correctly filed application and mail it in for you. That's it. It makes sure your form is accurate and correctly filled in so you don't get denied by some pencil-pushing burocrat because you didn't cross a t or dot an i. After that - it's up to the usual processes to evaluate the request and make a decision. All the bot does is make sure your form is correct.
Generally helping people navigate the complexity of large burocracies more efficiently is a good thing.
That's a good start Mister Psycho - but a job in our administration does require a few other qualifications. Let me just verify these:
Do you have a record of saying flagrantly racist or white-supremacist things in public ? Any kind of formal proof ? An endorsement from a neo-nazi leader or a letter of condemnation from a civil rights leader maybe ?
Are you opposed to the taste of an old man's rectum ? Would you be unwilling to participate in the daily one-hour ass-kissing ceremony with the president ?
How are you at telling bald-faced lies to people who can literally SEE the proof of your lie as you tell it ?
When it's your turn to blow Putin - spit or swallow ? Please note there is only one right answer.
Any history of involvement with notoriously corrupt multi-nationals ? We're especially keen on Goldman-Sachs graduates.
How are you at wildly inflammatory and dangerous rhetoric ?
Any past history of actively trying to undermine or destroy the very office you are now seeking to represent ?
Nice little qualifier there 'organised' so you can include violence during organised protests - but exclude the THOUSANDS of hate crimes that happened since November 8 (and you only name the on Garmin engineer case as if that's a rare exception - it was merely the deadliest in a pattern that's been playing out across America daily).
Not to mention you seemingly ignoring that in Berkeley it turns out the people who did the violence were not even part of the protests. They were outsiders who came in, as a group, specifically to cause harm - and probably Trump supporters or anarchists, they had nothing to do with the organised protest. In fact, the people arrested for violence at Berkeley - do you know know what they all have in common ? Not ONE Of them was a student there.
Remember when Trump claimed (falsely) that Hillary was sending people to his rallies to pick fights ? There is actually EVIDENCE that people were sent to liberal protests to pick fights and get the protestors blamed for it. I'm not saying Trump or even a Trump supporter sent them... but somebody did and I rather doubt it was a liberal - we don't make a habit out of deliberately shooting ourselves in the foot.
>Obama isn't president anymore, but Trump is still fighting him and still can't understand why he's losing.
The answer, of course, is because he is basically shadowboxing the specter of Obama and not smart enough to know that the only thing you may achieve if you do punch your shadow is a broken fist.
Ajit Pai is his token immigrant from a country with a large Muslim population.
Just like Carson is his token black guy.
You using Pai as evidence of Trump not holding the views he keeps telling us he holds - does NOT prove us wrong, it just proves that you know tokenism is bullshit and you think we are all idiotic enough to NOT know that.
You'd actually have a more accurate picture if you said "If 1950's democrats saw what was being done in their party, the republicans, today".
Considering that after the civil rights act was passed all the dixiecrats joined the republican party, the Southern Blue states all went redder than Lord Dampnut's spraytan and all the liberal republicans joined the democrats (contrary to a popular myth though - this did not include MLK - who never supported or joined EITHER party).
fuck over them godless liberal elitists with their internets and their immoral netflix and chill. Do you really think the typical rustbelt, bible-thumper who voted for Trump cares if the internet gets destroyed ? Trump could tell them that destroying the internet would make it harder for companies to open factories in other countries and they'll come running into your local starbux tomorrow with a pair of wire-cutters trying to sabotage the wifi.
Aaah -but now you're assuming the best hill to do pumped storage is closer to the consumer than the generator is. What is much more likely is - you generate in an offshore windfarm, push to a hill 500km to the east, then have to run another 500km line from there to the town where people want the power. It makes much more sense to store at the generator and run a single line to the consumer. One side of a triangle is always shorter than the sum of the other two sides.
One advantage of replacing the water with air though is that you don't have to build the sphere quite as thick. Air inside gives counter-pressure which reduces the structural strength you need. A vaccuum-holding sphere in the ocean would need to be a LOT stronger, but for that same reason would store a lot more energy. I don't know which option they went with here.
So worst case scenario death toll = one ship ? Even if it's an American aircraft carrier or a cruise ship you're talking a death toll of a few hundred, and that's an absolute worst-case scenario of extremely unlikely coincidences where the sphere fails catastrophically at the exact moment the ship is above it.
On the other hand - dam breakage = flash flood on land. Any towns or villages downstream at risk of massive loss of life. Flash floods have, at times, killed millions of people. So we generally clear the immediate downstreams from big dams of settlements - when you can't do that, you can't build a dam.
But an absolute worst-case scenario of a few hundred dead people doesn't come close to the millions that could be killed if we build a land based hydro-power station in the wrong place.
Because cable losses go up exponentially with length of cable. Cables have resistance, the longer they are - the higher the resistance becomes. You can counter-act this somewhat by using thicker cables (which we do for long-range transmission) but there's an upper-limit to how thick you can make a cable economically and structurally-sound.
The closer you can put the storage to the generator, the less energy you lose to cable resistance. That is literally just cables getting hot. Heat which we can't use for any useful work.
Water-wheels do exactly that, and we've been using them for that purpose for thousands of years. But while a water-wheel could operate your mill or such - it doesn't really scale well if you want to produce electricity for more than one household.
>It makes me wonder if anyone has considered a turbine generation system for storm water runoff.
Yes... it's called "hydro-electric power" what the hell do you think rivers ARE if not storm water runoff. Building it in our artificial city riverletts is certainly possible but probably not very practical as they tend not to flow nearly fast enough to generate any significant amount of power. They may flow faster during big storms but those don't exactly happen with any reliable regularity.
>In what ways is this better than simply pumping water uphill into a holding tank or artificial reservoir? It can be done in places where there are no handy hills to pump up. Potential energy storage by height is directly determined by just how high you go - and the volume you store - the higher you can make the water fall - the more acceleration you get, and the faster your turbine can be turned). You can only get a little storage from a tank on a tower (at least one built at reasonable cost). Such systems can and have been used as home-energy storage for people on solar (for decades actually) but they don't scale well because the construction cost goes up exponentially as you increase volume and height - because water is pretty heavy stuff. It's a lot easier if you can use a dam on a mountain - or couple some pumps to an existing hydro-electric generator.
But those rely on geographic features that aren't available everywhere. Most notably they tend to be hard to find in places where wind power is at it's best. Mountains and hills are wind-breaks, so they tend to make wind power less effective (but pumped storage is often great for solar). On the other hand the meeting-point of land and sea is a natural wind-generator (due to the heat-storage differential between rock and water) - so a lot of wind-farms are on the sea-shore already. Using the nearby ocean's pressure as a storage technology could make perfect sense.
Part of the trick with renewables, unlike fossil fuels, is that they are far less one-size fits all. Your local geography has a huge influence on your options. Hydro is great - but only if you have the kind of rivers you can build the kind of dams in that generate it well. Geotherman is fantastic - but it's only available if you have active volcanoes. Solar and wind can be great (often in different places) but they need lots of storage to provide good baseload. All these factors influence what is the "best" combination in a specific region. And even when it comes to storage technology there is no one ideal answer, the best choice depends on what the local geography offers.
Normal hydro-storage depends on pumping water uphill - and that means you can only use it where there are hills or mountains nearby. But this only requires pressure, which is available in many places where drops aren't. It could certainly add to the options for large-scale storage.
It's big and expensive to build of course - but I'm not sure it's actually bigger and more expensive than a coal or solar plant. So it may still be a win.
Well, in the process where an agency could apply for an exemption to the default rule they could certainly raise it if a supplier made such a claim. At that point they could consider 1) A different supplier 2) Developing it in-house instead (if it's cheaper than the revised price)
or if neither is viable - they may grant an exemption - or a temporary one which says the government will wait at least 5 years to make it public or something.
I'd sign their petition. Anything that kills the boomers of quicker can only be good for America as a whole. If only we'd done that 2 years ago, Bernie Sanders would be president now.
Oh I know - I agree NASA is doing it the right way - my argument is that this should be the default for ALL software produced with ANY tax dollars - whether by a government agency or under a government contract. I would even extend it beyond "software" to "information".
In other words, I was arguing that the rest of government should copy NASA's policies regarding openness.
Slashdot Mirror
>As far as I know most (if not all?) of those hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes
Nope.
> I guess you haven't seen the video recordings of Dems discussing and approving them?
So wait... you think there were thousands of hoax hate crimes in the USA... but you think that video is real ?
>I think George Soros would be a far closer bet
Right... conspiracy nut. You get all your news from infowars and breitbart do you ? There's no point debating. You can't have a rational discussion with irrational people. If Soros wants to achieve something, he doesn't hide, He doesn't use subterfuge. He doesn't engage in conspiracy. He just goes out and does it and says "fuck you". Ask the bank of England. Soros basically brought it to it's knees - and he didn't do anything secret, or pay anybody to do anything on his behalf - he just outsmarted them by understanding and predicting the market better than they did.
You want to worry about rich people who engage in conspiracies to destroy your freedom and, indeed, kill you for profit -worry about the Koch brothers. Now THEY like to work in the shadows and use conspiracies. Soros doesn't - he doesn't need to - he is capable of achieving his aims in the light because what they mostly are, are things people tend to be glad about.
No, We don't "assume" that - we have facts and evidence that PROVE that.
You assume the opposite because you will believe anything if it gives you an excuse to try and keep your neighbourhood looking like you.
Erm no. That would be an ideal - but it really is a lot more complicated than that - how complicated varies by country. Asylum laws vary by country.
An asylum-seeker is never an illegal immigrant (contrary to how president Trump described the Australia deal) - it's legal under international law (As well as US and Australian domestic law btw) to show up at a border without a VISA or passport if you are a refugee. Of course, if your request for asylum is denied and you THEN go in you could BECOME an illegal immigrant but that would be a later issue.
Now whether you really are a refugee varies, and there is generally a judgement factor involved. Sometimes decisions are ridiculous. A few years ago Canada granted asylum to a Cape Townian on the premise that crime in South Africa was becoming a genocidal targetting of whites. Which is flagrantly untrue - in fact whites are the LEAST likely to be targetted by criminals. 8% of the population but far under 1% of crime victims. South Africa raised a huge diplomatic fuss over it, and Canadian higher-ups reversed the decision later (I also believe the particular moron who approved it was fired later).
But they also, and much more frequently, deny legitimate applications with equally stupid judgement calls - over things like filling a form in wrong. What the bot does is collect the information the form actually wants in plain English and then generate a correctly filed application and mail it in for you. That's it.
It makes sure your form is accurate and correctly filled in so you don't get denied by some pencil-pushing burocrat because you didn't cross a t or dot an i. After that - it's up to the usual processes to evaluate the request and make a decision. All the bot does is make sure your form is correct.
Generally helping people navigate the complexity of large burocracies more efficiently is a good thing.
That's a good start Mister Psycho - but a job in our administration does require a few other qualifications. Let me just verify these:
Do you have a record of saying flagrantly racist or white-supremacist things in public ? Any kind of formal proof ? An endorsement from a neo-nazi leader or a letter of condemnation from a civil rights leader maybe ?
Are you opposed to the taste of an old man's rectum ? Would you be unwilling to participate in the daily one-hour ass-kissing ceremony with the president ?
How are you at telling bald-faced lies to people who can literally SEE the proof of your lie as you tell it ?
When it's your turn to blow Putin - spit or swallow ? Please note there is only one right answer.
Any history of involvement with notoriously corrupt multi-nationals ? We're especially keen on Goldman-Sachs graduates.
How are you at wildly inflammatory and dangerous rhetoric ?
Any past history of actively trying to undermine or destroy the very office you are now seeking to represent ?
And there is absolutely no doubt that his daddy was one. Hell Fred Trump once got arrested for public violence at a KKK riot !
Nice little qualifier there 'organised' so you can include violence during organised protests - but exclude the THOUSANDS of hate crimes that happened since November 8 (and you only name the on Garmin engineer case as if that's a rare exception - it was merely the deadliest in a pattern that's been playing out across America daily).
Not to mention you seemingly ignoring that in Berkeley it turns out the people who did the violence were not even part of the protests. They were outsiders who came in, as a group, specifically to cause harm - and probably Trump supporters or anarchists, they had nothing to do with the organised protest. In fact, the people arrested for violence at Berkeley - do you know know what they all have in common ? Not ONE Of them was a student there.
Remember when Trump claimed (falsely) that Hillary was sending people to his rallies to pick fights ? There is actually EVIDENCE that people were sent to liberal protests to pick fights and get the protestors blamed for it. I'm not saying Trump or even a Trump supporter sent them... but somebody did and I rather doubt it was a liberal - we don't make a habit out of deliberately shooting ourselves in the foot.
>Obama isn't president anymore, but Trump is still fighting him and still can't understand why he's losing.
The answer, of course, is because he is basically shadowboxing the specter of Obama and not smart enough to know that the only thing you may achieve if you do punch your shadow is a broken fist.
Ajit Pai is his token immigrant from a country with a large Muslim population.
Just like Carson is his token black guy.
You using Pai as evidence of Trump not holding the views he keeps telling us he holds - does NOT prove us wrong, it just proves that you know tokenism is bullshit and you think we are all idiotic enough to NOT know that.
You'd actually have a more accurate picture if you said "If 1950's democrats saw what was being done in their party, the republicans, today".
Considering that after the civil rights act was passed all the dixiecrats joined the republican party, the Southern Blue states all went redder than Lord Dampnut's spraytan and all the liberal republicans joined the democrats (contrary to a popular myth though - this did not include MLK - who never supported or joined EITHER party).
I suddenly had an image in my head of the classic "This is a lighthouse... you're call" *
*Sadly, it's almost certainly not based on real events.
fuck over them godless liberal elitists with their internets and their immoral netflix and chill. Do you really think the typical rustbelt, bible-thumper who voted for Trump cares if the internet gets destroyed ?
Trump could tell them that destroying the internet would make it harder for companies to open factories in other countries and they'll come running into your local starbux tomorrow with a pair of wire-cutters trying to sabotage the wifi.
Aaah -but now you're assuming the best hill to do pumped storage is closer to the consumer than the generator is. What is much more likely is - you generate in an offshore windfarm, push to a hill 500km to the east, then have to run another 500km line from there to the town where people want the power. It makes much more sense to store at the generator and run a single line to the consumer. One side of a triangle is always shorter than the sum of the other two sides.
They could you, know, anchor the thing.
One advantage of replacing the water with air though is that you don't have to build the sphere quite as thick. Air inside gives counter-pressure which reduces the structural strength you need. A vaccuum-holding sphere in the ocean would need to be a LOT stronger, but for that same reason would store a lot more energy. I don't know which option they went with here.
So worst case scenario death toll = one ship ? Even if it's an American aircraft carrier or a cruise ship you're talking a death toll of a few hundred, and that's an absolute worst-case scenario of extremely unlikely coincidences where the sphere fails catastrophically at the exact moment the ship is above it.
On the other hand - dam breakage = flash flood on land. Any towns or villages downstream at risk of massive loss of life. Flash floods have, at times, killed millions of people. So we generally clear the immediate downstreams from big dams of settlements - when you can't do that, you can't build a dam.
But an absolute worst-case scenario of a few hundred dead people doesn't come close to the millions that could be killed if we build a land based hydro-power station in the wrong place.
Because cable losses go up exponentially with length of cable. Cables have resistance, the longer they are - the higher the resistance becomes. You can counter-act this somewhat by using thicker cables (which we do for long-range transmission) but there's an upper-limit to how thick you can make a cable economically and structurally-sound.
The closer you can put the storage to the generator, the less energy you lose to cable resistance. That is literally just cables getting hot. Heat which we can't use for any useful work.
Water-wheels do exactly that, and we've been using them for that purpose for thousands of years. But while a water-wheel could operate your mill or such - it doesn't really scale well if you want to produce electricity for more than one household.
>It makes me wonder if anyone has considered a turbine generation system for storm water runoff.
Yes... it's called "hydro-electric power" what the hell do you think rivers ARE if not storm water runoff. Building it in our artificial city riverletts is certainly possible but probably not very practical as they tend not to flow nearly fast enough to generate any significant amount of power. They may flow faster during big storms but those don't exactly happen with any reliable regularity.
>In what ways is this better than simply pumping water uphill into a holding tank or artificial reservoir?
It can be done in places where there are no handy hills to pump up. Potential energy storage by height is directly determined by just how high you go - and the volume you store - the higher you can make the water fall - the more acceleration you get, and the faster your turbine can be turned). You can only get a little storage from a tank on a tower (at least one built at reasonable cost). Such systems can and have been used as home-energy storage for people on solar (for decades actually) but they don't scale well because the construction cost goes up exponentially as you increase volume and height - because water is pretty heavy stuff.
It's a lot easier if you can use a dam on a mountain - or couple some pumps to an existing hydro-electric generator.
But those rely on geographic features that aren't available everywhere. Most notably they tend to be hard to find in places where wind power is at it's best. Mountains and hills are wind-breaks, so they tend to make wind power less effective (but pumped storage is often great for solar). On the other hand the meeting-point of land and sea is a natural wind-generator (due to the heat-storage differential between rock and water) - so a lot of wind-farms are on the sea-shore already. Using the nearby ocean's pressure as a storage technology could make perfect sense.
Part of the trick with renewables, unlike fossil fuels, is that they are far less one-size fits all. Your local geography has a huge influence on your options. Hydro is great - but only if you have the kind of rivers you can build the kind of dams in that generate it well. Geotherman is fantastic - but it's only available if you have active volcanoes. Solar and wind can be great (often in different places) but they need lots of storage to provide good baseload. All these factors influence what is the "best" combination in a specific region. And even when it comes to storage technology there is no one ideal answer, the best choice depends on what the local geography offers.
Normal hydro-storage depends on pumping water uphill - and that means you can only use it where there are hills or mountains nearby. But this only requires pressure, which is available in many places where drops aren't. It could certainly add to the options for large-scale storage.
It's big and expensive to build of course - but I'm not sure it's actually bigger and more expensive than a coal or solar plant. So it may still be a win.
So the law already says essentially what I proposed. Cool.
Well, in the process where an agency could apply for an exemption to the default rule they could certainly raise it if a supplier made such a claim. At that point they could consider
1) A different supplier
2) Developing it in-house instead (if it's cheaper than the revised price)
or if neither is viable - they may grant an exemption - or a temporary one which says the government will wait at least 5 years to make it public or something.
Mmm we would need to mitigate that. We want to do it where there are lots of boomers and hardly anybody else.... Florida !
I'd sign their petition. Anything that kills the boomers of quicker can only be good for America as a whole. If only we'd done that 2 years ago, Bernie Sanders would be president now.
Oh I know - I agree NASA is doing it the right way - my argument is that this should be the default for ALL software produced with ANY tax dollars - whether by a government agency or under a government contract. I would even extend it beyond "software" to "information".
In other words, I was arguing that the rest of government should copy NASA's policies regarding openness.