If one ordered potassium nitrate and Amazon's algorithm "suggested items include sulfur and charcoal", how is that not bomb-making ingredients?
Theoretically.
Making black powder that you can get any sort of a bang out of isn't as easy as Captain Kirk made it out to be. Not by a long shot. Voice of experience here.
My best batch I ran in the rock tumbler for a couple of days. Still, it was green powder. I didn't know about korning way back then, and if you don't do that, it's not going to have much kick.
High school chem labs don't have strong enough acids to make nitroglycerine.
Depends on when. Back when I was taking high school chemistry (1970 or so) the chemistry lab absolutely had nitric and sulfuric acids strong enough to nitrate organics, and the glycerine there on the shelf just waiting to be triply nitrated.
Other fun stuff: Sodium and potassium metal. White phosphorous.
Really scary stuff: Hydrofluoric acid. (Not sure about Derek Lowe, but that one is on my list of Things I Won't Work With.)
I can't say about now; I haven't been in a high school chemistry lab chemical storeroom in 47-ish years.
Jerry Pournelle (RIP) managed, at the age of 14, to make "about half a cup" of nitroglycerine without blowing himself up. The recipe was right there in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the ingredients easily obtained by a 14-year old farm kid in rural Tennessee in the 1940s. That took some smarts. The stupid ones trying the same would have atomized themselves.
The hog pond would never be the same again, though.
I'd like the opposite direction - remove corporate taxes altogether and instead tax capital gains (and the special dividend) at normal income tax rates.
I could go along with this for dividends, but for capital gains, I'd want the gain "taxed at normal income tax rates" to be adjusted for inflation over the period the assets were held. Same with interest income.
Of course, what "the usual suspects" are going to want to do is tax dividends and capital gains at normal rates, and increase the corporate income tax, too.
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
His views on climate were fairly nuanced. When you say "skeptic", a lot of the usual suspects are going to start shrieking "Denier!", but that's not what he was.
He expressed doubts that it was possible to determine "the global average temperature of the oceans" to within a tenth of a degree. He also expressed doubts about the "immediate impending doom" predictions.
However, he often said that adding huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere was an uncontrolled experiment that we ought not to be doing without knowing vastly more about the consequences than we did. His biggest push was for really understanding how climate systems work, and how CO2 was likely to affect it -- understanding to be demonstrated by taking the conditions in (say) 1800, and using that understanding to "post predict" conditions in 2017.
This. Every dang studio and every dang TV network is planning to have their very own subscription service for $$/month, just to see the one program of interest that they have, and I'm not doing it. I would probably have watched the new Star Trek series, but I'm not paying CBS $$/month subscription for their package of crap I'll never watch just for that one program.
I hadn't been tempted to go pirate before, but this is making me waver...
55.0.2 on Linux still runs my two can-not-live-without plugins -- NoScript and Tree Style Tabs.
Chrome, alas, has nothing like Tree Style Tabs. (Yeah, there's a plugin that does that hideous separate window thing, but that's hardly an adequate alternative.)
I'll just have to be sure and disable updates until and unless Tree Style Tabs has a WebExtension version.
It is strange that anybody bought in to this - the obvious effect has been that private clinics and hospitals have been able to offer higher pay, so any doctor worth his salt took work in the private sector if at all possible, thereby starving the NHS of their best staff.
So, basically, it's Britain's version of the Fugitive Slave Act.
I bought a package of the glasses from Amazon (third party was Beemo) and got the email about a week before saying "Don't use them! Amazon has not received confirmation from the supplier of your order that they sourced the item from a recommended manufacturer."
They seemed adequately dark. The sun (from a brief glance) was a dim orange sphere, and nothing else can be seen through them.
I did go ahead and get a pair of the real deal glasses. They had a metallic look to them that the Beemo ones did not, but the sun looked the same through them. I suppose the arguably fake ones might be passing UV that the real ones don't.
Either way, I didn't stare at the sun for minutes through the legit ones, either, just a quick look every now and then.
I suspect some of this may be a paperwork issue rather than a real one, though there were apparently some really bad fakes that I haven't run across.
I've been seeing a few cases where some miscreant obviously has access to real email conversations, and inserts something evil into it. In one case, in an ongoing conversation, an email "from" one of the participants with all the "On <date>, <foo> said:" reply chain for the legitimate conversation intact said "Check out this and let me know what you think", where "it" was the ever-popular Microsoft Word document that just said "Enable Content to view this". Of course, if the recipient does "Enable Content", the evil macros in the document will pwn him completely.
One even more evil, a legitimate conversation about a financial transaction. The thief inserted an email (once again, the reply chain of the legitimate conversation intact) saying "Oh, by the way, my bank account has changed, please wire it to...." some random money mule account. That one didn't get caught until the proper recipient started complaining about where his money was.
This list.... email addresses with passwords... that is very likely how some of these scams are carried out.
My wife and I bundled the dogs into the RV and made the trek to John Day, Oregon. The town had mowed a big field next to their airport and run water and sewer lines for RVs.
The airport is on top of a hill, so there was a good view of the surrounding hills. My pictures of the total eclipse itself are on film that I just dropped off at a good photo shop (All the (expurgated) drug stores either don't do film at all any more, or don't return the (redacted) negatives.) but I set up my cell phone pointed west, and got a video of the arriving and departing umbra.
As anyone who's watched Dr. Strangelove knows, the DH only works if the other side knows about it.
So, either the Ruskies have told the Americans (who thus know, and are keeping quiet), or the Ruskies are -- as in the movie -- doing it horribly, horribly wrong.
(thick fake Rooskie accent) It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, Putin loves surprises.
Just about every "pollster" I've ever talked to wasn't doing real polls; they were doing push polls. So, I simply quit talking to pollsters. If the caller gives no Caller-ID, my phone doesn't even ring. If I don't recognize the number of the caller (assuming it gets past NoMoRoBo) I do not pick up. If I don't know you, leave a message, or give up calling.
If I had talked to a pollster, I'd probably have told that both major party candidates were anathema, and I was voting for the lesser evil.... Cthulhu.
Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.
"It's illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge," he wrote in the email.
"At will" or not, if he can make a case that Google fired him in retaliation of his making an NLRB charge, he may stand to cash in big time.
According to numerous studies, the IQ for men and women have different distributions, with women having less deviation than men, meaning women are more concentrated around the center of the graph, and men having greater numbers toward the extremes. These are measurable facts
And there's an obvious plausible mechanism for this:
For any characteristic that's on the X chromosome, males are more genetically fragile than females because they only have one copy. Females have two. It's like for that chromosome, females are doing Raid 1, males, just one disk and hope there isn't a problem with it. (See which sex gets hit hardest by Fragile X, for instance.) The Y chromosome just codes for "maleness", and that's pretty much it. (Not entirely, perhaps, but good enough for a first approximation.)
As in the results the previous commenter mentioned, this means on X-chromosome based characteristics, females will have some tendency to regress to the mean, while for males, what you've got on that one chromosome is it. More idiots, and more geniuses.
I'll believe the "50/50 sexists" are not hypocrites when they start agitating for equal representation of the sexes in prisons. Not holding my breath. (And no, I absolutely do NOT any "gender equality in prisons" movement; it would be stupid.)
And everything the Google memo is proved to be complete, total, 100% lies by the fact that Google Political Officers tracked down, identified, and fired the guy who dared voice an opinion that deviated from Goodthink.
TV News last night was lying through their teeth, as expected. They were asserting that the memo said "women can't program", which isn't even close to within the same galaxy as what the memo actually said.
Natural gas is so cheap because there's a glut, and there's a glut because of fracking.
It's still a fossil fuel, thus ultimately limited. It releases less CO2, because much of the energy comes from burning the hydrogen in the largely methane gas, but methane is quite a bit more greenhouse-y than CO2.
And The Usual Suspects are all hot and bothered about fracking, too, trying to get it banned. As they will reliably campaign to ban any technology whatsoever that actually risks producing enough energy to keep industrial civilization going. (See the editorials Paul Ehrlich wrote when it looked like Pons and Fleishmann were actually on to something.)
"Enough energy to keep industrial civilization powered" is the real unforgivable sin of nuclear power, not any of the excuses trotted out.
Make the manufacturer (not seller) of an IoT device liable for any actual damages that are caused by their IoT device getting hacked.
But "the manufacturer" is some outfit somewhere in China that can't easily be served with a lawsuit from the US. As soon any serious effort is made, it disappears, and some company with a different names starts selling the same thing.
I didn't vote for the SOB either, but seriously...
What's likely to get a better result?
Discussing issues with the current administration, trying to convince them, maybe get a little of what you want?
Or spend the next 3.5 years running around hair on fire frothing at the mouth shrieking "NOT MY PRESIDENT NAZI NAZI HITLER RESIST RESIST NAZI HITLER HITLER HITLER RUSSIA HITLER!"
I submit that the first option makes you look reasonable and maybe gets at least some fraction of what you want.
The second option gets none of what you want, and makes it more likely that you're going to have to be doing it for the next 7.5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
If one ordered potassium nitrate and Amazon's algorithm "suggested items include sulfur and charcoal", how is that not bomb-making ingredients?
Theoretically.
Making black powder that you can get any sort of a bang out of isn't as easy as Captain Kirk made it out to be. Not by a long shot. Voice of experience here.
My best batch I ran in the rock tumbler for a couple of days. Still, it was green powder. I didn't know about korning way back then, and if you don't do that, it's not going to have much kick.
Bullshit.
High school chem labs don't have strong enough acids to make nitroglycerine.
Depends on when. Back when I was taking high school chemistry (1970 or so) the chemistry lab absolutely had nitric and sulfuric acids strong enough to nitrate organics, and the glycerine there on the shelf just waiting to be triply nitrated.
Other fun stuff: Sodium and potassium metal. White phosphorous.
Really scary stuff: Hydrofluoric acid. (Not sure about Derek Lowe, but that one is on my list of Things I Won't Work With.)
I can't say about now; I haven't been in a high school chemistry lab chemical storeroom in 47-ish years.
Jerry Pournelle (RIP) managed, at the age of 14, to make "about half a cup" of nitroglycerine without blowing himself up. The recipe was right there in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the ingredients easily obtained by a 14-year old farm kid in rural Tennessee in the 1940s. That took some smarts. The stupid ones trying the same would have atomized themselves.
The hog pond would never be the same again, though.
I'd like the opposite direction - remove corporate taxes altogether and instead tax capital gains (and the special dividend) at normal income tax rates.
I could go along with this for dividends, but for capital gains, I'd want the gain "taxed at normal income tax rates" to be adjusted for inflation over the period the assets were held. Same with interest income.
Of course, what "the usual suspects" are going to want to do is tax dividends and capital gains at normal rates, and increase the corporate income tax, too.
oooooowwwww
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
His views on climate were fairly nuanced. When you say "skeptic", a lot of the usual suspects are going to start shrieking "Denier!", but that's not what he was.
He expressed doubts that it was possible to determine "the global average temperature of the oceans" to within a tenth of a degree. He also expressed doubts about the "immediate impending doom" predictions.
However, he often said that adding huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere was an uncontrolled experiment that we ought not to be doing without knowing vastly more about the consequences than we did. His biggest push was for really understanding how climate systems work, and how CO2 was likely to affect it -- understanding to be demonstrated by taking the conditions in (say) 1800, and using that understanding to "post predict" conditions in 2017.
This. Every dang studio and every dang TV network is planning to have their very own subscription service for $$/month, just to see the one program of interest that they have, and I'm not doing it. I would probably have watched the new Star Trek series, but I'm not paying CBS $$/month subscription for their package of crap I'll never watch just for that one program.
I hadn't been tempted to go pirate before, but this is making me waver...
Ah, the author of Tree Style Tabs is actively working on a Web Extensions version, so it looks like I'll be in good shape there.
55.0.2 on Linux still runs my two can-not-live-without plugins -- NoScript and Tree Style Tabs.
Chrome, alas, has nothing like Tree Style Tabs. (Yeah, there's a plugin that does that hideous separate window thing, but that's hardly an adequate alternative.)
I'll just have to be sure and disable updates until and unless Tree Style Tabs has a WebExtension version.
It is strange that anybody bought in to this - the obvious effect has been that private clinics and hospitals have been able to offer higher pay, so any doctor worth his salt took work in the private sector if at all possible, thereby starving the NHS of their best staff.
So, basically, it's Britain's version of the Fugitive Slave Act.
I bought a package of the glasses from Amazon (third party was Beemo) and got the email about a week before saying "Don't use them! Amazon has not received confirmation from the supplier of your order that they sourced the item from a recommended manufacturer."
They seemed adequately dark. The sun (from a brief glance) was a dim orange sphere, and nothing else can be seen through them.
I did go ahead and get a pair of the real deal glasses. They had a metallic look to them that the Beemo ones did not, but the sun looked the same through them. I suppose the arguably fake ones might be passing UV that the real ones don't.
Either way, I didn't stare at the sun for minutes through the legit ones, either, just a quick look every now and then.
I suspect some of this may be a paperwork issue rather than a real one, though there were apparently some really bad fakes that I haven't run across.
I've been seeing a few cases where some miscreant obviously has access to real email conversations, and inserts something evil into it. In one case, in an ongoing conversation, an email "from" one of the participants with all the "On <date>, <foo> said:" reply chain for the legitimate conversation intact said "Check out this and let me know what you think", where "it" was the ever-popular Microsoft Word document that just said "Enable Content to view this". Of course, if the recipient does "Enable Content", the evil macros in the document will pwn him completely.
One even more evil, a legitimate conversation about a financial transaction. The thief inserted an email (once again, the reply chain of the legitimate conversation intact) saying "Oh, by the way, my bank account has changed, please wire it to...." some random money mule account. That one didn't get caught until the proper recipient started complaining about where his money was.
This list.... email addresses with passwords... that is very likely how some of these scams are carried out.
My wife and I bundled the dogs into the RV and made the trek to John Day, Oregon. The town had mowed a big field next to their airport and run water and sewer lines for RVs.
The airport is on top of a hill, so there was a good view of the surrounding hills. My pictures of the total eclipse itself are on film that I just dropped off at a good photo shop (All the (expurgated) drug stores either don't do film at all any more, or don't return the (redacted) negatives.) but I set up my cell phone pointed west, and got a video of the arriving and departing umbra.
https://youtu.be/R3R-KSQ0tag
As anyone who's watched Dr. Strangelove knows, the DH only works if the other side knows about it.
So, either the Ruskies have told the Americans (who thus know, and are keeping quiet), or the Ruskies are -- as in the movie -- doing it horribly, horribly wrong.
(thick fake Rooskie accent) It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, Putin loves surprises.
Just about every "pollster" I've ever talked to wasn't doing real polls; they were doing push polls. So, I simply quit talking to pollsters. If the caller gives no Caller-ID, my phone doesn't even ring. If I don't recognize the number of the caller (assuming it gets past NoMoRoBo) I do not pick up. If I don't know you, leave a message, or give up calling.
If I had talked to a pollster, I'd probably have told that both major party candidates were anathema, and I was voting for the lesser evil.... Cthulhu.
(I settled for Johnson.)
Maybe Amazon will gouge less. (Meet the new Ticketmaster, same as the old Ticketmaster...)
They've basically built a company populated with rabid malcontents that are prepared to harm or kill their cow-orkers.
I think orking cows is unacceptable behavior even in California.
From https://www.reuters.com/articl...
"At will" or not, if he can make a case that Google fired him in retaliation of his making an NLRB charge, he may stand to cash in big time.
Regarding "dog whistles", I've always said, if someone keeps hearing "dog whistles" that no one else hears, maybe they're the dog.
According to numerous studies, the IQ for men and women have different distributions, with women having less deviation than men, meaning women are more concentrated around the center of the graph, and men having greater numbers toward the extremes. These are measurable facts
And there's an obvious plausible mechanism for this:
For any characteristic that's on the X chromosome, males are more genetically fragile than females because they only have one copy. Females have two. It's like for that chromosome, females are doing Raid 1, males, just one disk and hope there isn't a problem with it. (See which sex gets hit hardest by Fragile X, for instance.) The Y chromosome just codes for "maleness", and that's pretty much it. (Not entirely, perhaps, but good enough for a first approximation.)
As in the results the previous commenter mentioned, this means on X-chromosome based characteristics, females will have some tendency to regress to the mean, while for males, what you've got on that one chromosome is it. More idiots, and more geniuses.
I'll believe the "50/50 sexists" are not hypocrites when they start agitating for equal representation of the sexes in prisons. Not holding my breath. (And no, I absolutely do NOT any "gender equality in prisons" movement; it would be stupid.)
And everything the Google memo is proved to be complete, total, 100% lies by the fact that Google Political Officers tracked down, identified, and fired the guy who dared voice an opinion that deviated from Goodthink.
TV News last night was lying through their teeth, as expected. They were asserting that the memo said "women can't program", which isn't even close to within the same galaxy as what the memo actually said.
This. Data point: My Prius (Not pure electric, but uses regenerative braking) is still on its first set of brake pads at 130,000 miles or so.
Natural gas is so cheap because there's a glut, and there's a glut because of fracking.
It's still a fossil fuel, thus ultimately limited. It releases less CO2, because much of the energy comes from burning the hydrogen in the largely methane gas, but methane is quite a bit more greenhouse-y than CO2.
And The Usual Suspects are all hot and bothered about fracking, too, trying to get it banned. As they will reliably campaign to ban any technology whatsoever that actually risks producing enough energy to keep industrial civilization going. (See the editorials Paul Ehrlich wrote when it looked like Pons and Fleishmann were actually on to something.)
"Enough energy to keep industrial civilization powered" is the real unforgivable sin of nuclear power, not any of the excuses trotted out.
I have suggested this plan before.
Make the manufacturer (not seller) of an IoT device liable for any actual damages that are caused by their IoT device getting hacked.
But "the manufacturer" is some outfit somewhere in China that can't easily be served with a lawsuit from the US. As soon any serious effort is made, it disappears, and some company with a different names starts selling the same thing.
I didn't vote for the SOB either, but seriously...
What's likely to get a better result?
Discussing issues with the current administration, trying to convince them, maybe get a little of what you want?
Or spend the next 3.5 years running around hair on fire frothing at the mouth shrieking "NOT MY PRESIDENT NAZI NAZI HITLER RESIST RESIST NAZI HITLER HITLER HITLER RUSSIA HITLER!"
I submit that the first option makes you look reasonable and maybe gets at least some fraction of what you want.
The second option gets none of what you want, and makes it more likely that you're going to have to be doing it for the next 7.5 years.