>...why does it always seem to be "African American affirmative action" in practice?
Because, according to some viewpoints, 'minority' *means* African American.
I once wrote a grant for a school in Calexico (on the Mexican border) that was something like 90% Hispanic, with serious issues involve English skills and the like.
Was rejected by the federal government because I, quote, "Didn't talk about minorities in the district". It was mind boggling to me.
>Just to play devil's advocate, how is this more invasive than DUI checkpoints?
It's less invasive. DUI checkpoints are dragnets. In the case listed above, a guy called in to 9-11 to report that another driver had driven him off the road, and was driving recklessly around the freeway. This was considered adequate justification to conduct a traffic stop, at which point they found drugs in the car.
I actually don't see what the big deal is (Scali, I'm looking at you). People report things to the police all the time - if they can't follow up on them, then it sort of makes a mockery of citizens participating in keeping our streets safe.
It's not really an "anonymous" tip. As it was a 9-11 call, they presumably have the cell phone number for the person who called in, and could reasonably call them back and ask them to testify in court against the defendant if they needed to.
>The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality.
What the fuck?
No. Not in the slightest.
You can certainly argue against literal interpretations of Genesis, but most Christians do not and have not believed in a literal interpretation. Biblical literalism is a very modern phenomenon, dating to the start of the Fundamentalist movement with the publication of The Fundamentals in 1910.
1910 AD. Not BC.
Only someone with no understanding of either science methodology or history would make the claim that you did.
This change won't fix it. They're still doing billing based on net metering, which means a net zero consumer will still pay $0 (if I'm reading it right). They're just charging people with small solar systems a lot more.
PG&E does it with a monthly minimum for grid-tied solar systems, which is reasonable (or not, depending on the size of the minimum). But they're still lobbying hard to destroy rooftop solar in the state.
>Obviously this varies from region to region, but I was always led to understand that in hot locales, peak was late afternoon, when houses began to cool down, and businesses were still cooling....part of the reason why large solar plants are moving to molten salt -- to keep providing power in the early evening when the sun isn't directly overhead.
I have a digital monitor on my solar system, so I can track usage over time. It tilts to face the west, so it collects power through the afternoon.
6PM usually produces about 2/3rd of max production in the summer time.
The supply curve from my system matches the peak of the demand curve pretty well, which looks something like this: http://drmyronevans.files.word...
A lot of people, when criticizing solar, mistakenly use winter demand curves that peak earlier and later in the day.
Buffy and Summer Glau both had superpowers in their Whedonverses. Cordelia is a waif with no superpowers. She couldn't fight her way out of a Nordstrom's.
>I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.
Which is why I, as a solar customer, pay $12 a month to PG&E to maintain the grid.
It's interesting that OK thinks that it's OK to change solar customers higher *power rates* instead. This means that it will penalize people for having smaller solar installations, and still not recover any extra tariffs from large installations that break even (or come close to it).
I should also mention that PG&E has been lobbying furiously in the state to void the CA state senate's decision that they need to pay me 3c/kWh for any excess generation I produce. We're still freeloaders, somehow, even though they're technically the ones trying to freeload on us.
It's amazing how much bullshit they and their shills have spit over the issue, and how the local newspapers have lapped it up, uncritically.
Using such rationale, every tourist that visits overseas is a traitor. They "adhere" to a foreign country and "give them aid" (their tourist dollars) and harm the US (by not spending their dollars here).
>Should the man's life not be hell after that? Or should he simply be hung for treason?
Treason is "a citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the parent nation."
If you seriously think that the *people* of the United States are the enemies of the United States, and aiding them is "treason", then you are completely beyond any hope of redemption.
> Things that look or function remotely similarly to a gun are not to be tolerated. If you let kids shoot marshmallows at stacked plastic cups they might have fun, take pride in their mastery of ballistic trajectories, and you never know where that might lead... nerf... airsoft... a.22.
Clearly it is the result of too many people watching Ghostbusters in the 80s.
We need to ban dangerous marshmellow-based violence from our television and movie-screens.
>Why can't we have a pipeline that brings fresh water, instead of oil? That would be a lot more helpful. We've been a serious drought for years, and there's no sign it will let up.
You can. Coal slurry is shipped by pipeline, and then at the destination is separated into coal and pure water.
My dad is working on building a coal slurry pipeline from Montana to Baja California, building power plants there to sell cheap power to California, and using the water to build golf courses to get tourists to come.
>Keystone is at best a waste for America and at worst a natural disaster waiting to happen
Not having Keystone is a natural disaster that IS happening.
You think all that tar sand oil *isn't* flowing to Texas refineries right now? Try booking a rail ticket these days - our highways and rail lines are clogged to the brim with all the oil we're transporting south out of Canada, and it sure as shit isn't as safe as a pipeline.
In December, there was a rail oil spill that dumped 400 fucking thousand gallons of crude oil in North Dakota. It exploded, and sent a mushroom cloud of fire and toxic chemicals into the sky, causing a nearby town to be evacuated.
You think this is an isolated event? They're happening an average of ONE PER MONTH. There were three crude oil train derailments in January alone. The Lac-Megantic derailment killed 42 people from an oil train derailment and explosion.
You think these accidents are not damaging the environment? Bwahaha. Right. The Lac-Megantic forced the closure of drinking water sources for townships that still hasn't been cleaned up.
Supporting corn ethanol is how candidates win primaries, so it makes perfect sense for our presidents to support it.
>But from Corn? It is so stupid, it does not even deserve a proper adjective. It is even stupid to waste time making "studies" on it.
If we're going to eliminate corn ethanol (which we should), it will require putting pressure on politicians from non-corn belt states. And to do so will require studies like these.
Corn ethanol isn't good for the environment, and it drives food prices through the roof, both domestically and abroad.
I highly recommend reading The Economics of Food for anyone interested in the subject.
>But it sounds like an absurd example of a false economy: Even at relatively cheap schools, the cost of running a student through is nontrivial. It seems like complete insanity to waste expensive instructional time on somebody who can't concentrate properly for want of a few dollars worth of calories. Nobody's interests are well served by that.
The cost is to the student, not to the institution. It doesn't cost the institution more to educate a hungry student, even if they can't think as well.
I see it as part of the challenge of going to college. I made $18k a year in grad school working as a TA, while living in San Diego. From that, I had to pay for books, car/gas/insurance/registration fees, rent, food, and everything else. Which wasn't easy. But I did it, and graduated from college with only about four thousand dollars in student loans, and that I had to take out because my car's engine and transmission went out within three weeks of each other and I had to put them on my credit card.
It was like a game to me. I had a budget of $10 or less per day for food. Two $1 bacon cheeseburgers and a $1 frosty for lunch, a $4 bowl of rice and orange chicken for dinner, and I still had enough left over for a snack at night or in the afternoon. The next day I'd get a $5 footlong for lunch, and four tacos for $2 for dinner, and so forth.
People who are just eating Top Ramen are just doing it wrong, in my opinion.
>... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
Anyone who talks about income inequality as if it is a problem in and of itself is automatically labelled an idiot in my mind. Especially when they post (two out of three) references that don't work, and the one that does is just more of the same idiocy that you always hear when it comes to income inequality.
What matters is median wealth to the health of a society, not income inequality. You could have a perfectly equal society where everyone made 10 bucks a year. Or you could have a society where the median income was 100,000, but you had a handful of plutocrats running around. Which one would you prefer to live in? The second of course. Having a rich person floating around cause harm to you, in and of itself.
>So the entire industry is completely taxpayer supported bullshit. We're carrying an industry that has no use. And this in an era where water table is decreasing (corn is unbelievably thirsty), food prices and meat rising astronomically, etc.
Yes. Scientists and economists have known that corn ethanol is complete bullshit for a very long time now.
If you're interested in a good analysis of the subject, read the Economics of Food by Westhoff, which is mainly about the effects of biofuels on food prices. While ethanol is only a small fraction of demand for corn, due to the way the markets worked, it drive huge spikes in corn prices, which had downstream effects on corn mash (which the OP is referring to here), it altered the balance between white and yellow corn which caused food exports to Mexico to drop, leading to massive price spikes in tortillas there, leading to riots, various issues with trade protectionism, and so forth.
Given that there's absolutely no reason to use corn ethanol, the only reason that we still have it (and both major parties support it) is because corn farmers get first crack at choosing who our next president is.
If they implement feeding restrictions on corn mash, this will have very serious consequences on our food supply and will send price shocks throughout the world. It's a very bad idea.
You don't need to do "millions of lines of code". Hitting server and protocol codes is a very productive exercise - we turned up security vulnerabilities every time we did source code analysis.
I'm religious. It's usually the people who worship at the feet of Bill Nye but have never passed high school physics that really shrilly insist that Galileo was right.
Exactly. The second I hear a game is freer to play, I immediately assume all of these things about it, and it's up to the game designer to try to convince me to "buy" it anyway. The only one in recent memory that has done that for me is Path to Exile. The entire game is free to play, and all of the purchases are for cosmetic stuff, with, arguably, only additional stash space being something that might give you an advantage in the game.
I'm not sure why this is modded funny, it's absolutely correct. Both geocentrism and heliocentrism are equally right, or equally wrong, depending on your perspective.
>So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.
It came out in October 2012, but people have been screaming about it since the pre-release in 2011.
So about the same amount of time it took Blizzard to fix the clusterfuck called Diablo 3, and with the same amounts of fucks given by the general population.
>It will never happen, but if a law was passed that when the video is unavailable, the citizen's report is presumed to be true and complete, I'll bet those cameras would suddenly get a lot more reliable.
Indeed. This is the missing key ingredient.
I once got pulled over for speeding while driving doing the speed limit. I saw the cop coming down the road toward me, and had slowed down by the time he'd u-turned and pulled up behind me to tail me. I'd been speeding before, but this wasn't what he claimed in court - he said I was doing 78 (written statement) 87 (oral statement) while tailing me on the I-5.
I'd requested the camera footage of the event, but it mysteriously wasn't available to me.
So it was just the cop's word against mine, and the court will side with a cop every time, even though there was a serious discrepancy between his written and oral statement, and his video footage wasn't provided to me.
If the law stated that the presumption would go the other way (favoring the citizen over the cop) when video evidence disappears, it would eliminate the easiest source of police abuse of these tools.
Slashdot Mirror
>...why does it always seem to be "African American affirmative action" in practice?
Because, according to some viewpoints, 'minority' *means* African American.
I once wrote a grant for a school in Calexico (on the Mexican border) that was something like 90% Hispanic, with serious issues involve English skills and the like.
Was rejected by the federal government because I, quote, "Didn't talk about minorities in the district". It was mind boggling to me.
>Just to play devil's advocate, how is this more invasive than DUI checkpoints?
It's less invasive. DUI checkpoints are dragnets. In the case listed above, a guy called in to 9-11 to report that another driver had driven him off the road, and was driving recklessly around the freeway. This was considered adequate justification to conduct a traffic stop, at which point they found drugs in the car.
I actually don't see what the big deal is (Scali, I'm looking at you). People report things to the police all the time - if they can't follow up on them, then it sort of makes a mockery of citizens participating in keeping our streets safe.
It's not really an "anonymous" tip. As it was a 9-11 call, they presumably have the cell phone number for the person who called in, and could reasonably call them back and ask them to testify in court against the defendant if they needed to.
>The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality.
What the fuck?
No. Not in the slightest.
You can certainly argue against literal interpretations of Genesis, but most Christians do not and have not believed in a literal interpretation. Biblical literalism is a very modern phenomenon, dating to the start of the Fundamentalist movement with the publication of The Fundamentals in 1910.
1910 AD. Not BC.
Only someone with no understanding of either science methodology or history would make the claim that you did.
This change won't fix it. They're still doing billing based on net metering, which means a net zero consumer will still pay $0 (if I'm reading it right). They're just charging people with small solar systems a lot more.
PG&E does it with a monthly minimum for grid-tied solar systems, which is reasonable (or not, depending on the size of the minimum). But they're still lobbying hard to destroy rooftop solar in the state.
>Obviously this varies from region to region, but I was always led to understand that in hot locales, peak was late afternoon, when houses began to cool down, and businesses were still cooling. ...part of the reason why large solar plants are moving to molten salt -- to keep providing power in the early evening when the sun isn't directly overhead.
I have a digital monitor on my solar system, so I can track usage over time. It tilts to face the west, so it collects power through the afternoon.
6PM usually produces about 2/3rd of max production in the summer time.
The supply curve from my system matches the peak of the demand curve pretty well, which looks something like this: http://drmyronevans.files.word...
A lot of people, when criticizing solar, mistakenly use winter demand curves that peak earlier and later in the day.
Buffy and Summer Glau both had superpowers in their Whedonverses. Cordelia is a waif with no superpowers. She couldn't fight her way out of a Nordstrom's.
>I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.
Which is why I, as a solar customer, pay $12 a month to PG&E to maintain the grid.
It's interesting that OK thinks that it's OK to change solar customers higher *power rates* instead. This means that it will penalize people for having smaller solar installations, and still not recover any extra tariffs from large installations that break even (or come close to it).
I should also mention that PG&E has been lobbying furiously in the state to void the CA state senate's decision that they need to pay me 3c/kWh for any excess generation I produce. We're still freeloaders, somehow, even though they're technically the ones trying to freeload on us.
It's amazing how much bullshit they and their shills have spit over the issue, and how the local newspapers have lapped it up, uncritically.
Using such rationale, every tourist that visits overseas is a traitor. They "adhere" to a foreign country and "give them aid" (their tourist dollars) and harm the US (by not spending their dollars here).
So it's a pretty fucking stupid rationale.
>Should the man's life not be hell after that? Or should he simply be hung for treason?
Treason is "a citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the parent nation."
If you seriously think that the *people* of the United States are the enemies of the United States, and aiding them is "treason", then you are completely beyond any hope of redemption.
> Things that look or function remotely similarly to a gun are not to be tolerated. If you let kids shoot marshmallows at stacked plastic cups they might have fun, take pride in their mastery of ballistic trajectories, and you never know where that might lead ... nerf ... airsoft ... a .22.
Clearly it is the result of too many people watching Ghostbusters in the 80s.
We need to ban dangerous marshmellow-based violence from our television and movie-screens.
>Why can't we have a pipeline that brings fresh water, instead of oil? That would be a lot more helpful. We've been a serious drought for years, and there's no sign it will let up.
You can. Coal slurry is shipped by pipeline, and then at the destination is separated into coal and pure water.
My dad is working on building a coal slurry pipeline from Montana to Baja California, building power plants there to sell cheap power to California, and using the water to build golf courses to get tourists to come.
>Keystone is at best a waste for America and at worst a natural disaster waiting to happen
Not having Keystone is a natural disaster that IS happening.
You think all that tar sand oil *isn't* flowing to Texas refineries right now? Try booking a rail ticket these days - our highways and rail lines are clogged to the brim with all the oil we're transporting south out of Canada, and it sure as shit isn't as safe as a pipeline.
In December, there was a rail oil spill that dumped 400 fucking thousand gallons of crude oil in North Dakota. It exploded, and sent a mushroom cloud of fire and toxic chemicals into the sky, causing a nearby town to be evacuated.
You think this is an isolated event? They're happening an average of ONE PER MONTH. There were three crude oil train derailments in January alone. The Lac-Megantic derailment killed 42 people from an oil train derailment and explosion.
You think these accidents are not damaging the environment? Bwahaha. Right. The Lac-Megantic forced the closure of drinking water sources for townships that still hasn't been cleaned up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
And that's not even getting into the trucking accidents.
You're an idiot if you want to keep the status quo. Pipelines are not perfect, but they are FAR, FAR safer than shipping crude oil by train and truck.
>It is brain-dead stupid!
Only from a science perspective.
Supporting corn ethanol is how candidates win primaries, so it makes perfect sense for our presidents to support it.
>But from Corn? It is so stupid, it does not even deserve a proper adjective. It is even stupid to waste time making "studies" on it.
If we're going to eliminate corn ethanol (which we should), it will require putting pressure on politicians from non-corn belt states. And to do so will require studies like these.
Corn ethanol isn't good for the environment, and it drives food prices through the roof, both domestically and abroad.
I highly recommend reading The Economics of Food for anyone interested in the subject.
>But it sounds like an absurd example of a false economy: Even at relatively cheap schools, the cost of running a student through is nontrivial. It seems like complete insanity to waste expensive instructional time on somebody who can't concentrate properly for want of a few dollars worth of calories. Nobody's interests are well served by that.
The cost is to the student, not to the institution. It doesn't cost the institution more to educate a hungry student, even if they can't think as well.
I see it as part of the challenge of going to college. I made $18k a year in grad school working as a TA, while living in San Diego. From that, I had to pay for books, car/gas/insurance/registration fees, rent, food, and everything else. Which wasn't easy. But I did it, and graduated from college with only about four thousand dollars in student loans, and that I had to take out because my car's engine and transmission went out within three weeks of each other and I had to put them on my credit card.
It was like a game to me. I had a budget of $10 or less per day for food. Two $1 bacon cheeseburgers and a $1 frosty for lunch, a $4 bowl of rice and orange chicken for dinner, and I still had enough left over for a snack at night or in the afternoon. The next day I'd get a $5 footlong for lunch, and four tacos for $2 for dinner, and so forth.
People who are just eating Top Ramen are just doing it wrong, in my opinion.
>... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
Anyone who talks about income inequality as if it is a problem in and of itself is automatically labelled an idiot in my mind. Especially when they post (two out of three) references that don't work, and the one that does is just more of the same idiocy that you always hear when it comes to income inequality.
What matters is median wealth to the health of a society, not income inequality. You could have a perfectly equal society where everyone made 10 bucks a year. Or you could have a society where the median income was 100,000, but you had a handful of plutocrats running around. Which one would you prefer to live in? The second of course. Having a rich person floating around cause harm to you, in and of itself.
>So the entire industry is completely taxpayer supported bullshit. We're carrying an industry that has no use. And this in an era where water table is decreasing (corn is unbelievably thirsty), food prices and meat rising astronomically, etc.
Yes. Scientists and economists have known that corn ethanol is complete bullshit for a very long time now.
If you're interested in a good analysis of the subject, read the Economics of Food by Westhoff, which is mainly about the effects of biofuels on food prices. While ethanol is only a small fraction of demand for corn, due to the way the markets worked, it drive huge spikes in corn prices, which had downstream effects on corn mash (which the OP is referring to here), it altered the balance between white and yellow corn which caused food exports to Mexico to drop, leading to massive price spikes in tortillas there, leading to riots, various issues with trade protectionism, and so forth.
Given that there's absolutely no reason to use corn ethanol, the only reason that we still have it (and both major parties support it) is because corn farmers get first crack at choosing who our next president is.
If they implement feeding restrictions on corn mash, this will have very serious consequences on our food supply and will send price shocks throughout the world. It's a very bad idea.
You don't need to do "millions of lines of code". Hitting server and protocol codes is a very productive exercise - we turned up security vulnerabilities every time we did source code analysis.
OpenSSH is only 60,000 lines of code.
>You seriously think that black hats bother with reading millions of lines of code ...yes?
That's what we did in Bennett Yee's security class. "Here's the source code for a server I'm running. Go break it."
I'm religious. It's usually the people who worship at the feet of Bill Nye but have never passed high school physics that really shrilly insist that Galileo was right.
>I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer
As do I (in both cases).
However, I was able to get small business insurance relatively cheaply ($200ish a month) prior to marrying my wife and getting on her plan.
Bog standard Kaiser HMO insurance, not one of those scammy plans that you're talking about.
Exactly. The second I hear a game is freer to play, I immediately assume all of these things about it, and it's up to the game designer to try to convince me to "buy" it anyway. The only one in recent memory that has done that for me is Path to Exile. The entire game is free to play, and all of the purchases are for cosmetic stuff, with, arguably, only additional stash space being something that might give you an advantage in the game.
I'm not sure why this is modded funny, it's absolutely correct. Both geocentrism and heliocentrism are equally right, or equally wrong, depending on your perspective.
>By this logic, if the company hires black CEO and customer leave because of that, CEO should step down? Is this how it works?
Only if you don't like the black man's political agenda. That's how it works in modern America.
>So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.
It came out in October 2012, but people have been screaming about it since the pre-release in 2011.
So about the same amount of time it took Blizzard to fix the clusterfuck called Diablo 3, and with the same amounts of fucks given by the general population.
>It will never happen, but if a law was passed that when the video is unavailable, the citizen's report is presumed to be true and complete, I'll bet those cameras would suddenly get a lot more reliable.
Indeed. This is the missing key ingredient.
I once got pulled over for speeding while driving doing the speed limit. I saw the cop coming down the road toward me, and had slowed down by the time he'd u-turned and pulled up behind me to tail me. I'd been speeding before, but this wasn't what he claimed in court - he said I was doing 78 (written statement) 87 (oral statement) while tailing me on the I-5.
I'd requested the camera footage of the event, but it mysteriously wasn't available to me.
So it was just the cop's word against mine, and the court will side with a cop every time, even though there was a serious discrepancy between his written and oral statement, and his video footage wasn't provided to me.
If the law stated that the presumption would go the other way (favoring the citizen over the cop) when video evidence disappears, it would eliminate the easiest source of police abuse of these tools.