I did some pretty thorough Google searching and as far as I can determine this article is an outright lie. There are about 60 actual farms involved in the lawsuit, and there has NEVER been a verifiable case where Monsanto has sued a farmer who had accidentally contaminated crops.
Obviously not very thorough, there have been many cases of Monsanto suing farmers for having Roundup ready plants in their fields due to contamination. This guy's website tells his story, he gives case dates and the courts where the cases were heard. Sounds pretty verifiable to me.
I do consider that an excuse - I certainly don't know all the idioms for languages I wasn't born with (nor all the idioms for my native language). I knew I was being pedantic, my apologies.
It is perfectly within a TSA agents job and rights that if they find someone transporting something that could be reasonably believed to be at least $10,000 to question the passenger at the very least if they are travelling internationally, and if they have documented the transport of the cash.
He is not talking about the TSA or leaving the country, he is talking about the police seizing large amounts of money in traffic stops, even when there is no evidence of a crime. Once they seize the money, you have to sue them to get it back. Since this is civil forfeiture, you do not have the same rights as if you were charged with a crime. The police sue the property itself. Perhaps the lawyers at Cornell put it better:
Unlike criminal forfeiture, civil forfeiture proceeds against the property, not the person. ...
Due to its civil nature, the roles of the parties change. Instead of prosecutor versus defendant, the hearing concerns a plaintiff, the United States in the case of Federal forfeitures, and a defendant, the property in question. The owner is effectively put in the position of being a third party claimant. Furthermore, civil hearings involve a more lenient burden of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt." Once the government establishes probable cause that the property is subject to forfeiture, the owner must prove by "preponderance of the evidence" that it is not. ...
Unless provided in statute (as in 18 U.S.C. 981(a)(2)), innocence of the owner is typically not a defense.
There have been many cases where money was seized without any evidence of a crime (here is a book about some of them). There is a clear incentive for police to seize money in this manner as they generally get some or all of the seized money to use for departmental operations. This behavior by law enforcement directly contradicts the text of the fourth amendment, another casualty of the drug war.
I'm from Belgium and on my electric bill there is a list of energy sources from which my electricity is made of. Nuclear only has a 2% portion.
Perhaps for your particular region, but an anecdote is not data. This 2004 report shows that 55% of Belgian electricity is generated by nuclear, a later study shows close to the same. Just because your bill claims a 2% mix doesn't mean that is representative of the energy mix in your country.
But what about the nuclear waste that has to be stored for a few thousands of years (although this is only a theoretical assumption).
You really think nuclear physicists don't know how to calculate half lives of fission products? If they didn't, they certainly couldn't operate nuclear reactors. Since there are operating reactors in the world it appears that we are actually capable of performing such calculations.
You can't compare it to a coal mine - coal mine deaths are severely restricted in number
Compared to deaths from nuclear? Last year 48 coal miners were killed in the United States alone, the worldwide total is much higher. How many were killed by nuclear plants in the same time frame?
coal burning deaths can be halted at any time
Can they? The US gets roughly half of its electricity from coal, we can't just stop burning it tomorrow. Even if we did stop tomorrow the CO2 already emitted will continue to warm the planet for years to come. Emissions from coal plants kill people constantly, one study estimated coal pollution shortens 24,000 lives every year. Coal causes more deaths than nuclear in all aspects - in mining, in operation and in pollution.
If your nuclear reactor goes boom, then you may end up contaminating the entire fucking biosphere for aeons
When has that happened? Chernobyl released a metric assload of radiation but it didn't "end up contaminating the entire fucking biosphere for aeons". What kind of accident are you envisioning that would do that? Which plant, which failure mode?
Yes, its all a matter of evaluating risks
And for some reason people seem to have difficulty objectively evaluating risk when nuclear is involved. The historical data show nuclear is extremely safe compared to coal but people fear nuclear power irrationally.
he reason nuclear power is "cheap", is principally because we have passed down the decommissioning (of the plant and waste fuel) costs to future generations
What? Companies that operate nuclear plants put money into the Nuclear Waste Fund and a decommissioning fund. Costs for waste disposal and decommissioning are paid out of these funds. How is that passing down the costs to future generations?
The modified Saturn V that delivered SkyLab, which was 60% the size of the ISS
Where are you getting that number? The mass of the ISS is ~370,000 Kg, Skylab was 77,000 Kg. The pressurized volume of the ISS is 837 cubic meters, for Skylab it was only 283 cubic meters. I am no fan of the Shuttle program but at least get your numbers straight.
I saw nothing in the article that says all of these voters selected Spanish as their language. The only close I saw was the explanation given by the poll worker.
The article only quoted one person, Joyce Ferrara. She said that her ballot had the problem, as well as that of her husband and "several other voters". if Ms. Ferrara voted in Spanish, it is not unreasonable to assume that her husband may have also voted in Spanish and if she is a Spanish speaker the people she chatted with after voting may have also been Spanish speakers. It is not a representative sample of voters, it is one woman and her acquaintances. Las Vegas is about 30% latino, running into other people at the polls who also are voting in Spanish does not seem to be a huge stretch.
The interface design is terrible but is it malicious? Probably not.
Your link doesn't seem to refute the story, in fact it seems to strengthen it. From the link:
But yes; Corrupt. I did not write exactly what I wanted and yes this was due to the thought of money out there, somewhere, somewhere at the end of the rainbow.
You know when someone's easy to bribe? When you don't even have to give them money, you just have to put it in his head that maybe, one day, someday, there might be some money....
So that's my story. I never took any money for any story.
On the other hand, I did refrain from going full-throttle on Steele because, without being told I should keep quiet and act as if I were bought off, I did in fact keep (mostly) quiet and act if I were (kinda) bought off. No one said I should do that, but I took it upon myself to act the way I thought a Good Soldier who wanted to take the king's coin should.
This guy seems proud of the fact that the GOP was able to buy him for NOTHING. Just the thought of money was enough to buy him.
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God:)
Do they? This page says that 40% of scientists surveyed believed in god (way less than the populace at large) and only 10% of "elite scientists" believe in god. I wouldn't consider 10% of scientists to be "most" of them.
Since you mention it, where's the intermediate insect wing in the fossil record?
Since insect wings fossilize poorly there has been no such fossil yet discovered. Fortunately, the theory of evolution is not just based on the fossil record. For example, this paper shows evidence for an intermediate insect wing using DNA analysis.
Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States.
I call shenanigans. Coal is the #1 energy producer in the US. The US gets 30% of it's power capacity and nearly 50 percent of it's produced power from coal. I would love for that to be different but that is the current state of affairs and it is unlikely to change soon since the US has large coal reserves and it is much cheaper to produce power using coal than any other current fuel.
That logic is terrible. Just because you can replace the air inside of a case faster with air outside does not mean you are cooling things faster. It's not the air volume of the case that matters, but the continuous air flow that cools things down. The size of the case has NOTHING to do with cooling potential, so your sentence shows you have no clue what you are talking about.
Actually, your logic is terrible. Here's a thought experiment for you: You have a sealed box the size of a house, the internal temperature is 100 degrees, cool air (say 50 degrees) can only move in from a 1" hole, and out from a small fan. After 1 hour what is the temperature inside the house? Now, same scenario but instead of a house you use a toilet paper roll.
Your thought experiment fails if you add a 500 watt heater to both spaces. The toilet paper roll will heat up very rapidly while it will be difficult to raise the temperature in the house, We aren't just cooling a space that is hot, we are cooling a space that is constantly heated. The bigger case has a higher thermal inertia - it takes more energy to heat it.
I've been completely happy with my interactions with cops here in the US. Every time I've been pulled over (for legitimate speeding) the cop was polite and nice, didn't throw his authority around. Another time one helped me catch a neighbor's horse that had gotten loose.
The problem is not that cops are bad guys, any more than anyone else is a bad guy. The problem is that they have an enhanced ability to be a bad guy and get away with it.
Even those "nice" cops are complicit in the problem because they cover up the wrongdoings of the bad officers by participating in the Blue Code of Silence. The problem is exacerbated by the glorification of the job by the media and the insular nature of most police departments ("us vs. them" mindset). Many officers feel that they are above the law and in most instances they are right.
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource. We can plant more and within enough time for it to be economical there is more timber. For oil to be a renewable resource we are going to have to bury a lot of organic material for a long time.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 1
It's more likely the little guys with the low salaries who get canned, fined, or jailed.
Or killed. Don't forget that 11 people died in this accident. There have been several reports of BP executives mandating procedures that may have led to the blowout. I very much doubt any high-level executives will be held accountable for this spill, they have money and in the american system money == bending justice to your bidding.
Thanks for running some of the numbers, although I don't know whether a 1000W heater is enough (I'm not saying it isn't - I'm saying that I don't know one way or the other). I do want to see it in action before I would consider buying it, though. I know the survivability with a gas engine and full tank and have developed the skills to maximize that survivability. I need to see actual tests of heating the car against the frigid outdoors for a few days straight on a 50% charge before I can really evaluate that.
But don't miss my real point. It is rare to get stuck in a snowbank beyond the point you can rock your car back out of it, but that's no excuse not to prepare for the possibility. It happens more often than serious collisions but you wouldn't want a car without airbags and seat belts, either. The cost-benefit on this works out in favor of gas engines so far.
Now you are moving the goalposts. In your original post you talked about "morning (and hope of rescue)" coming, now you are talking about spending a "few days straight" in the snowbank. This page says that idling your car uses about 1 gal/hour, to spend a few days in an idling gasoline car you are going to need a 40-60 gallon tank. My car carries about 10 gallons, even with a full tank I could only idle overnight. You are holding the electric car to a higher standard than the gasoline car. There are plenty of reasons not to use an electric car, you don't need to fabricate one.
I, on the other hand, can't justify that price. I live in a colder climate and cannot spend $50k on a vehicle I only drive four months of the year (that's what my motorcycle is for). It's a safety consideration. A traditional gas-powered car, when stuck in a snow bank, will idle with the heat running and keep you alive for a very long time. An electric car will let you freeze to death before morning (and hope of rescue) comes.
Why would the electric car let you freeze to death? If your vehicle has a 300 mile range it should have plenty of power to be able to keep you warm. For example, here is a truck that has a 35 mile range (I just chose a random car on a google search to get some numbers). It has twenty 6 volt, 210 amp hour batteries or 25,200 watt hours of capacity. If you were near a full charge when you got stuck, you could run a 1000 watt heater for 24 hours. Our hypothetical vehicle with a 300 mile range would have 210,000 wh of capacity. If you weren't running anything else you could run a 1000 watt heater for nearly nine days. The only time where you wouldn't have enough power to run a heater for a night would be if your battery pack was near empty, and you would be in the same situation if you allowed yourself to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with a nearly empty gas tank.
Of course there is always the observation that if you are consistently getting stuck in snowbanks enough that your life is threatened, you should evaluate your equipment or your driving skills. I live in a fairly snowy place as well and I can't remember the last time I had to spend the night in my car. With tire chains and a bag of sand/salt most cars can go through some gnarly weather. Add a cell phone (or sat phone if you really are THAT remote) and the chances of you having to spend the night in your car are close to nil.
Slashdot Mirror
I did some pretty thorough Google searching and as far as I can determine this article is an outright lie. There are about 60 actual farms involved in the lawsuit, and there has NEVER been a verifiable case where Monsanto has sued a farmer who had accidentally contaminated crops.
Obviously not very thorough, there have been many cases of Monsanto suing farmers for having Roundup ready plants in their fields due to contamination. This guy's website tells his story, he gives case dates and the courts where the cases were heard. Sounds pretty verifiable to me.
Second language speaker
I do consider that an excuse - I certainly don't know all the idioms for languages I wasn't born with (nor all the idioms for my native language). I knew I was being pedantic, my apologies.
you'll be head and shoulders above most of the industry in one foul swoop.
<pedantic>Do you mean one fell swoop?</pedantic>
My new Win Vista laptop at work
You got a new laptop and it runs Vista? Why?????
It is perfectly within a TSA agents job and rights that if they find someone transporting something that could be reasonably believed to be at least $10,000 to question the passenger at the very least if they are travelling internationally, and if they have documented the transport of the cash.
He is not talking about the TSA or leaving the country, he is talking about the police seizing large amounts of money in traffic stops, even when there is no evidence of a crime. Once they seize the money, you have to sue them to get it back. Since this is civil forfeiture, you do not have the same rights as if you were charged with a crime. The police sue the property itself. Perhaps the lawyers at Cornell put it better:
Unlike criminal forfeiture, civil forfeiture proceeds against the property, not the person.
...
Due to its civil nature, the roles of the parties change. Instead of prosecutor versus defendant, the hearing concerns a plaintiff, the United States in the case of Federal forfeitures, and a defendant, the property in question. The owner is effectively put in the position of being a third party claimant. Furthermore, civil hearings involve a more lenient burden of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt." Once the government establishes probable cause that the property is subject to forfeiture, the owner must prove by "preponderance of the evidence" that it is not.
...
Unless provided in statute (as in 18 U.S.C. 981(a)(2)), innocence of the owner is typically not a defense.
There have been many cases where money was seized without any evidence of a crime (here is a book about some of them). There is a clear incentive for police to seize money in this manner as they generally get some or all of the seized money to use for departmental operations. This behavior by law enforcement directly contradicts the text of the fourth amendment, another casualty of the drug war.
How about:
The returned fakes were restocked on the shelve and sold to new, unwitting customers.
The word you were looking for is shelf. If /. employees don't ever edit anything, why are they called editors?
I'm from Belgium and on my electric bill there is a list of energy sources from which my electricity is made of. Nuclear only has a 2% portion.
Perhaps for your particular region, but an anecdote is not data. This 2004 report shows that 55% of Belgian electricity is generated by nuclear, a later study shows close to the same. Just because your bill claims a 2% mix doesn't mean that is representative of the energy mix in your country.
But what about the nuclear waste that has to be stored for a few thousands of years (although this is only a theoretical assumption).
You really think nuclear physicists don't know how to calculate half lives of fission products? If they didn't, they certainly couldn't operate nuclear reactors. Since there are operating reactors in the world it appears that we are actually capable of performing such calculations.
I read the article but I can't find the part about the ringing bells and taking our guns away. Can you kindly point me in the right direction?
Here is a Youtube video of the statements in question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4C7bvHv2w&feature=player_embedded
You can't compare it to a coal mine - coal mine deaths are severely restricted in number
Compared to deaths from nuclear? Last year 48 coal miners were killed in the United States alone, the worldwide total is much higher. How many were killed by nuclear plants in the same time frame?
coal burning deaths can be halted at any time
Can they? The US gets roughly half of its electricity from coal, we can't just stop burning it tomorrow. Even if we did stop tomorrow the CO2 already emitted will continue to warm the planet for years to come. Emissions from coal plants kill people constantly, one study estimated coal pollution shortens 24,000 lives every year. Coal causes more deaths than nuclear in all aspects - in mining, in operation and in pollution.
If your nuclear reactor goes boom, then you may end up contaminating the entire fucking biosphere for aeons
When has that happened? Chernobyl released a metric assload of radiation but it didn't "end up contaminating the entire fucking biosphere for aeons". What kind of accident are you envisioning that would do that? Which plant, which failure mode?
Yes, its all a matter of evaluating risks
And for some reason people seem to have difficulty objectively evaluating risk when nuclear is involved. The historical data show nuclear is extremely safe compared to coal but people fear nuclear power irrationally.
he reason nuclear power is "cheap", is principally because we have passed down the decommissioning (of the plant and waste fuel) costs to future generations
What? Companies that operate nuclear plants put money into the Nuclear Waste Fund and a decommissioning fund. Costs for waste disposal and decommissioning are paid out of these funds. How is that passing down the costs to future generations?
but the statistics clearly reflect the good that is done by this initiative. Road fatalities have fallen by 2/3!!!
Yeah, and the number of pirates is affecting the global temperature. Correlation != causation.
"But what if there's nothing worth watching?"
I did not realize the networks had anything worth watching right now.
Maybe you spend too much time trying to act cool on Slashdot instead of catching some good T.V.
Perhaps he has more of a life than sitting growing fat in front of a television?
Yeah, growing fat in front of a computer is much better. Why do you douchebags who hate TV so much insist on reading and posting in TV threads?
what is going to be remembered about the 20th century?
Whalers on the Moon?
The modified Saturn V that delivered SkyLab, which was 60% the size of the ISS
Where are you getting that number? The mass of the ISS is ~370,000 Kg, Skylab was 77,000 Kg. The pressurized volume of the ISS is 837 cubic meters, for Skylab it was only 283 cubic meters. I am no fan of the Shuttle program but at least get your numbers straight.
I saw nothing in the article that says all of these voters selected Spanish as their language. The only close I saw was the explanation given by the poll worker.
The article only quoted one person, Joyce Ferrara. She said that her ballot had the problem, as well as that of her husband and "several other voters". if Ms. Ferrara voted in Spanish, it is not unreasonable to assume that her husband may have also voted in Spanish and if she is a Spanish speaker the people she chatted with after voting may have also been Spanish speakers. It is not a representative sample of voters, it is one woman and her acquaintances. Las Vegas is about 30% latino, running into other people at the polls who also are voting in Spanish does not seem to be a huge stretch.
The interface design is terrible but is it malicious? Probably not.
Your link doesn't seem to refute the story, in fact it seems to strengthen it. From the link:
This guy seems proud of the fact that the GOP was able to buy him for NOTHING. Just the thought of money was enough to buy him.
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God :)
Do they? This page says that 40% of scientists surveyed believed in god (way less than the populace at large) and only 10% of "elite scientists" believe in god. I wouldn't consider 10% of scientists to be "most" of them.
Since you mention it, where's the intermediate insect wing in the fossil record?
Since insect wings fossilize poorly there has been no such fossil yet discovered. Fortunately, the theory of evolution is not just based on the fossil record. For example, this paper shows evidence for an intermediate insect wing using DNA analysis.
TFS says:
Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States.
I call shenanigans. Coal is the #1 energy producer in the US. The US gets 30% of it's power capacity and nearly 50 percent of it's produced power from coal. I would love for that to be different but that is the current state of affairs and it is unlikely to change soon since the US has large coal reserves and it is much cheaper to produce power using coal than any other current fuel.
That logic is terrible. Just because you can replace the air inside of a case faster with air outside does not mean you are cooling things faster. It's not the air volume of the case that matters, but the continuous air flow that cools things down. The size of the case has NOTHING to do with cooling potential, so your sentence shows you have no clue what you are talking about.
Actually, your logic is terrible. Here's a thought experiment for you: You have a sealed box the size of a house, the internal temperature is 100 degrees, cool air (say 50 degrees) can only move in from a 1" hole, and out from a small fan. After 1 hour what is the temperature inside the house? Now, same scenario but instead of a house you use a toilet paper roll.
Your thought experiment fails if you add a 500 watt heater to both spaces. The toilet paper roll will heat up very rapidly while it will be difficult to raise the temperature in the house, We aren't just cooling a space that is hot, we are cooling a space that is constantly heated. The bigger case has a higher thermal inertia - it takes more energy to heat it.
I've been completely happy with my interactions with cops here in the US. Every time I've been pulled over (for legitimate speeding) the cop was polite and nice, didn't throw his authority around. Another time one helped me catch a neighbor's horse that had gotten loose.
The problem is not that cops are bad guys, any more than anyone else is a bad guy. The problem is that they have an enhanced ability to be a bad guy and get away with it.
Even those "nice" cops are complicit in the problem because they cover up the wrongdoings of the bad officers by participating in the Blue Code of Silence. The problem is exacerbated by the glorification of the job by the media and the insular nature of most police departments ("us vs. them" mindset). Many officers feel that they are above the law and in most instances they are right.
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource. We can plant more and within enough time for it to be economical there is more timber. For oil to be a renewable resource we are going to have to bury a lot of organic material for a long time.
It's more likely the little guys with the low salaries who get canned, fined, or jailed.
Or killed. Don't forget that 11 people died in this accident. There have been several reports of BP executives mandating procedures that may have led to the blowout. I very much doubt any high-level executives will be held accountable for this spill, they have money and in the american system money == bending justice to your bidding.
Thanks for running some of the numbers, although I don't know whether a 1000W heater is enough (I'm not saying it isn't - I'm saying that I don't know one way or the other). I do want to see it in action before I would consider buying it, though. I know the survivability with a gas engine and full tank and have developed the skills to maximize that survivability. I need to see actual tests of heating the car against the frigid outdoors for a few days straight on a 50% charge before I can really evaluate that.
But don't miss my real point. It is rare to get stuck in a snowbank beyond the point you can rock your car back out of it, but that's no excuse not to prepare for the possibility. It happens more often than serious collisions but you wouldn't want a car without airbags and seat belts, either. The cost-benefit on this works out in favor of gas engines so far.
Now you are moving the goalposts. In your original post you talked about "morning (and hope of rescue)" coming, now you are talking about spending a "few days straight" in the snowbank. This page says that idling your car uses about 1 gal/hour, to spend a few days in an idling gasoline car you are going to need a 40-60 gallon tank. My car carries about 10 gallons, even with a full tank I could only idle overnight. You are holding the electric car to a higher standard than the gasoline car. There are plenty of reasons not to use an electric car, you don't need to fabricate one.
Oops, I forgot the link to the truck I mentioned - here it is.
I, on the other hand, can't justify that price. I live in a colder climate and cannot spend $50k on a vehicle I only drive four months of the year (that's what my motorcycle is for). It's a safety consideration. A traditional gas-powered car, when stuck in a snow bank, will idle with the heat running and keep you alive for a very long time. An electric car will let you freeze to death before morning (and hope of rescue) comes.
Why would the electric car let you freeze to death? If your vehicle has a 300 mile range it should have plenty of power to be able to keep you warm. For example, here is a truck that has a 35 mile range (I just chose a random car on a google search to get some numbers). It has twenty 6 volt, 210 amp hour batteries or 25,200 watt hours of capacity. If you were near a full charge when you got stuck, you could run a 1000 watt heater for 24 hours. Our hypothetical vehicle with a 300 mile range would have 210,000 wh of capacity. If you weren't running anything else you could run a 1000 watt heater for nearly nine days. The only time where you wouldn't have enough power to run a heater for a night would be if your battery pack was near empty, and you would be in the same situation if you allowed yourself to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with a nearly empty gas tank.
Of course there is always the observation that if you are consistently getting stuck in snowbanks enough that your life is threatened, you should evaluate your equipment or your driving skills. I live in a fairly snowy place as well and I can't remember the last time I had to spend the night in my car. With tire chains and a bag of sand/salt most cars can go through some gnarly weather. Add a cell phone (or sat phone if you really are THAT remote) and the chances of you having to spend the night in your car are close to nil.