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User: SuricouRaven

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  1. Re:Local population don't know better on Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Local populations are also very inconsistent.

    If you left it up to the local populations, most of the schools in Alabama would be teaching that Jesus is coming next year, evolution is a hoax made up by nazis to justify genocide, and climate change consists of those pages the teacher carefully cut out from the textbook. And the students would all live off of pizza and pie. Made with proper lard, not that low-fat hippy stuff.

  2. Re:Federal Juvenile Lunch Police Stand Down on Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps it shouldn't be, but when state and local governments have proven unwilling to so much as acknowledge the problem of unhealthy school meals in most areas, it has to fall to the federal government to intervene.

  3. Re:I think we can agree on some basic principles on Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    "School lunches should be balanced in nutrients. They should be available to any student regardless of income level. ... And students should want to eat them, to enjoy eating them."

    Pick any two.

  4. Re:Obligatory Jim Gaffigan joke on Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Or just mix the granola with a ton of honey.

    It's all-natural, organic honey, of course.

  5. Re:What's wrong with a packed lunch? on Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    And they are full of crap for good reasons:
    1. Crap is cheap. School budgets are always tight.
    2. The kids universally love it. Who doesn't enjoy pizza?

  6. "The first recorded cases of cancer appear about the time and place that wheat agriculture began."

    The first recorded cases of cancer are in ancient Egypt. They happen to correspond exactly with the earliest surviving medical texts. Cancer has always been around - it will kill all multicellular organisms in the end, unless something else kills them first.

  7. Perhaps it would be practical to send a balloon-probe of some sort? Or many tiny probes, all collecting weather data and transmitting it to an orbital relay, then back to earth.

  8. Because it's bloody cold! Under a hundred kelvin average surface temp.

    Mars is cold, but not *that* cold - around 200k. Cold is very helpful when keeping an atmosphere.

    A magnetic field is also very helpful. Titan has none, but it's close enough to Saturn to benefit from that protection.

  9. He clearly does not live in the UK. on DRM Will Be Gone By 2025, Predicts Cory Doctorow (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If anything, leaving the EU will serve as a pretext to make our copyright laws even stricter, and DRM even more legally-supporter.

    Why? Because very few voters care even the tiniest amount about copyright policy. It's just not an issue in elections, at all, not in the slightest, which means the only voice there to influence MPs comes from lobby groups who are happy to point out the economic success of the entertainment industry and hint at favorable media support and a bit of help with the fund-raising come next election season.

    Only days ago we passed the Digital Economy Act which, among many other things, increased the criminal penalty for copyright infringement from two years to ten. A provision that went largely unnoticed, as most of the attention of even the technical press has been on ridiculing another section of the act introduces another entirely unworkable attempt to restrict access to pornography on the internet.

  10. Maybe. on Ask Slashdot: Could We Build A Global Wireless Mesh Network? · · Score: 2

    The above critics are right - while such a construct might be possible in theory, the practical difficulties may be insurmountable.

    But there is one technology that could make it, if not feasible, at least a bit closer to that goal: Content-addressed networking. Build a decentralised store for static content into the network from the beginning. That way you don't need to get people from all over the world all trying to access one server to download a popular file - if the person next door already has it, they can take the file from that much-closer source automatically. I suggest using IPFS as the base for that functionality, as it's already decently mature, reliable, and has a very elegant data structure that can scale endlessly.

    Now you still need your mesh to enable real-time communication, but you've taken almost all the load relating to static content distribution off if it. The capacity requirements are slashed.

  11. I think a lot of people saw the election as "Douche v Asshole."

  12. Familiarity breeds typos.

    Why shouldn't the metropolitan areas have a say proportional to their population? That's the obvious way to do it: Everyone gets a vote, all votes are equal. The electoral college says that people in some states, specifically those with lower population, are worth more in votes than someone in a more populated state.

    If they are worth anything, that is. Another effect of the college system is the creation of safe and swing states: If you live in Texas or Alabama, you can be sure your vote means squat because your state is going to go R regardless. It means politicians focus all their campaigning on the swing states and try to win over voters there with promises and pandering, because there's no point wasting resources trying to woo a state where the college votes are a forgone conclusion.

    The whole system is inherently undemocratic, but reform is not politically feasible, so you're stuck with it.

  13. For consumers, I'd expect them to use pinning as a supplementary measure. It would limit the damage if someone did manage to get hold of a valid certificate, hopefully giving the bank time to react before the theft progresses from hundreds of thousands of dollars and into the tens of millions.

  14. Re:4 out of 30 are French on Russian-Controlled Telecom Hijacks Traffic For Mastercard, Visa, And 22 Other Services (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The election was so close that even the tiniest factor could have influenced the outcome. The email hacks revealed a little bit of dirt in the form of taking money from finance companies for speaking appearances, and it gave some information on DNC campaign plans to their Republican counterparts. It's possible that turned what would have been a narrow victory for Clinton into a narrow victory for Trump.

    Remember that Clinton actually got more votes. Trump got less, but he did best in states which the electoral collage failed. It's a part of the reason he is so heavily despised - a lot of people view him as having won on a technicality, by arcane rules established for a time long past.

  15. If your employees aren't allowed to steal some time at work, they'll burn out after a few months.

  16. Re:This is excellent news! on An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep -- and Humans Could Be Next (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    If they really cared about eliminating abortion, they'd be embracing contraception for everyone. Instead most of the organisations that oppose abortion also lobby against contraceptive education programs, against mandatory insurance coverage, and against government-provided or -subsidised contraception for the low income.

  17. Re:Yay for Men's rights... and other possibilities on An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep -- and Humans Could Be Next (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Those 'feminazis' do exist. They are just vanishingly small in number. Numbers don't matter in an attention economy - it's very convenient for opponents of feminism to just pick down the most extreme man-hating feminazi they can find, point a finger and shout 'see, this is what we fight against!' Dishonest, but effective.

  18. Re:Do we really need more people? on An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep -- and Humans Could Be Next (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    I work with children professionally.

    Larvae is a fitting insult.

  19. Re:Trump knows there's no future in coal on The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won't Cut It (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We've a similar thing here in Europe with the fishing industry. Fish stocks are dangerously low, and the EU has reacted by imposing strict quotas - though ones which ecologists keep saying are still not strict enough. This has incurred much anger from the fishing industry, because it's not just an occupation for them - it's a way of life, going back generations, and now they are being driven out of business by what they see as pointless regulations imposed upon them by distant politicians in Brussels.

    They don't seem able to accept that there is a good reason for restricting fishing.

  20. There are a few options, though none is really economical on a large scale. Compressed air storage, pumped storage, or just a really big building full of batteries. The better option might be real-time demand management. When the wind picks up, air conditioners across the country will turn on.

  21. Re:Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the plan on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 1

    Nothing, if it's managed well. It's essentially a very carefully orchestrated pyramid scheme, but one which is made to work by using the government's near-limitless ability to generate currency to back it up.The risk is that you are trusting in Congress not to do something stupid with their power to borrow, and... well, Congress. Would you trust them?

    If the bond scheme is over-used it becomes unstable, as an increasing portion of government income is diverted to servicing the debt. Then it can easily be pushed over the edge and lead to currency devaluation on a massive scale. This is a Very Bad Thing. So far this has not happened in the US (though it has in other countries), but the greater the national debt grows the greater the risk of such a disaster.

  22. Re:Vigorous debate? Surely you jest on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 2

    The right-leaning ones are just as bad. It happens whenever people commit their loyalty to any political ideology.

  23. Re:Not in Canada... on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 0

    If you frame basic income as a means to get women out of the workforce and back to child-rearing full time, you can probably get the religious faction to back it.

  24. Re:Unemployment on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 2

    New jobs keep being created because consumption constantly increases.

    When was the last time you stitched a hole in clothing? Hardly anyone does that now. It's just not worth the time when you can buy a whole new outfit for next to nothing. We get to enjoy exotic foods imported from around the world, low-cost just-about-everything. Even electronics, the most complicated machines every made, are not expendable items expected to be replaced after a few years.We get a diet rich in delicious resource-intensive meat, and even an entire advertising industry dedicated to making people buy things they don't need and probably don't even want.

    There has to be a limit to how much junk people will want to buy, no matter how cheap it gets. Besides, this consumerist lifestyle may be required to keep the economy running, but it's also very environmentally damaging.

  25. Re:Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the plan on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 1

    Do you own any government bonds? Well, there's your tiny slice of the national debt. It's money the government owes you.