... was going back for more. If you're going to rig a lottery, rig just one lottery, one whose prize will be big enough so you don't have to go back for more later. Then delete all traces of your hackery and never do anything illegal again. Otherwise a pattern starts to develop, leading to you getting caught.
Probably more sensible would be to rig it so you can get small payouts whenever you want. Most folks wouldn't consider that horribly suspicious, and if someone catches you winning $1,000 twice, you can just claim you play a lot and are lucky. You can even get other people (a different person each time) to go pick up your winnings, with a reasonable expectation they won't run off with it or turn you in. Your only real worry would be an IRS audit.
However, NOBODY is going to look at a former lottery programmer caching in a $million+ ticket and not find that suspicious, and there's nobody who they could trust to cash in that ticket for them and not to try to cheat them once they have the money.
If I do not have enough money to buy food how am I going to buy solar panels?
Still, its getting to the point where the subsidies are hardly even necessary. Panels are shockingly cheap now. Wal-Mart is selling them for roughly a Dollar a Watt. I tried doing the math a few weeks back, and if I'd bought enough panels to cover my summer bills here in Oklahoma at the beginning of May, they would have been paid off by the end of this month vs. the money I sent to the Electric company this summer. More to the point, I could wait for the summer crunch to end, then just buy $100 (100Watts more) a month. My summer electricity bill is 5 times that. Easy enough to swing within that budget one month at a time.
But of course it doesn't quite work like that. The inverter required to handle that much juice still runs about $10k, and you also need batteries so the power doesn't go out at night, etc. That's where those of us not named "Rockefeller" start to have trouble. Still, its at the point now where it would be sensible to build any new house with a solar system. And the prices on those other components are bound to be coming down too as mass production of them picks up.
Replacing all existing C code with rust is a wonderful idea. All those worries about hackers and safety-critical systems failing due to a surprising int/float conversion will be gone. The only danger we have to worry about from it any more is tetanus.
What's that? Rust is another programming language you say? Oh well, that's very different.
I understood exactly why I felt like was going to hate Sense8 with a passion while watching the pilot, only after I noticed Straczynski's name during the end credits
Well, as someone who loved B5 and thought Sense8 was kinda meh, I'm not sure the guy's name is really all that great of a guide. It didn't feel much like B5 at all. Basically once I saw enough of Sense8 to figure out the basic gist of what was going on (the people weren't just dreaming or something), there wasn't much there to keep me.
Jeremiah was kind of in-between. Once you got the basic gist of what happened and the situation they were in, the story itself was meh. But a couple of the characters were worth coming back for.
But I couldn't point any either of the later 2 and say: "This is clearly a JMS property!" if I hadn't known ahead of time. His "voice" in them is just not all that obvious, and neither is any special style.
But the networks told him that it was going to get canned after season 4, so he had to scramble around to rewrite things to bring it to a close early. But then they said it got renewed for a 5th season, right after it was too late to change it back round. Hence why the 5th season was a bit of a mess in comparison.
Interesting. I hung out on his Usenet ng at the time, and IIRC his story was that he wanted to show that there's no "happily ever after". Just like when WWII ended there was a huge mess that had to be cleaned up, when the "Shadow War" ended there were still some of their allies running around causing havoc in the ensing chaos that had to be dealt with.
But that was his story. It could be that you are correct in the main, and this was just how he tried to spin it as a positive. Normally I'd take horse's mouth over internet rando, but in this particular case...
Ironically both Babylon-5 and Sense8 had the same creator/show runner.
The difference was B5 was being created in a ratings-driven environment, and always had pretty good ratings, so it was able to survive (by the skin of its teeth some years), even in an environment that had turned hostile to independent productions.
Netflix, as this article mentions, just does not have the same incentives.
"a SJW". You only use "an" immediately before a vowel.
Protip: When you are calling someone else an "idiot", its best to check for grammatical errors, or the statement completely boomerangs.
..or you could just be a decent human being and not run around verbally abusing people so you don't have to worry about it at all. Your choice I guess.
The researchers also predict America will reach its Paris Climate Accord targets in 2020 -- five years early --
Yay! We're saved!
Whoops, what's that? The permafrost is melting? Did I say "saved"? I'm sorry. I meant boned. We are totally boned.
Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over
This is like that false salvation moment near the end of the movie, right before the giant bad thing stands up behind the heroes and smiles at them. It ain't gonna be that easy.
Prisons have instituted ridiculously expensive phone plans to help pay for their costs.
This is wrong, placing an undue burden on both the families and the prisoners.
More to the point of the article, it creates what economists would call a market distortion that encourages a thriving black market in cellphones. As long as they don't allow phone service at anything approaching market rates, there will be black market phone service. This is as close as economics has to an immutable law. This situation is no different than the USSR back in the day trying (and failing miserably) to set their own currency conversion rates. Or Canute trying to order the tide.
So the contraband phone problem is 100% their own fault.
I figure "insightful +5", probably got a worthwhile take. But no, you lost me right here:
identity politics rag
The snide denial of issues that frankly dominate the lives of other people tells me all I need to know about the entire rest of the content. Its all a bunch of whiners trying to make a story out of nothing, right? There's no problem here at all, except those whiners. *Yawn*.
I think it's more that government doesn't have that fierce profit motive so they can offer a service at near cost price
Cox doesn't have that either. They are a monopoly in nearly every market they are in. As is probably reasonable, due to the extreme up-front cost in laying all that cable. Cable is what is known as a "Natural Monopoly". All the problems people associate with government-run services are really just classic problems with monopolies: the rules are just different when the people making the decisions don't have to worry about you running to a competitor.
The only real difference between a corporate monopoly and one run by the government is who it is accountable to. Government agencies are at least indirectly accountable to their voters. However, if you aren't a Cox shareholder, you have no say in decisions Cox makes like this one.
What rubs me in the wrong way is that the school would have criteria for what are considered acceptable plans for the future. They would not only be judging whether the student has thought about the future, but also the decision itself.
That's really scary. Where we have historically seen fuzzy criteria like this in places like crime sentencing, prosecutorial discretion, and voting literacy requirements, they have almost always resulted in higher standards being applied to minorities (particularly African Americans).
Lest you think your skin color makes you immune to this problem, this is just the fairly easily quantifiable effect. Black Americans are the canary in the coalmine for locating an unfair subjective system. If you or your kid manages to get a bad rep, or has a weird hairstyle/color, or heaven forbid, actually ticks off the school administration, that could be you too.
Pecos just was ignored, and was in a unique place geological being in a wide plane surrounded by mountain ranges and higher elevations, it created a type of hot-box effect. I was driving a 1983 GMC Sierra Classic at the time. The little orange needle that showed if you were in PRND1-2 melted in half and the spring pulled it to the left. My sisters walkman melted in it.
I thought so too. But it turns out we (Tulsa) only had an official high around 113 that year, even though things near roads like bank thermometers and my car thermometer were in the upper 120's. Our record high is still 115, from back during the dust bowl. So if I were you I'd check on that.
I have a convertible, and happened to be outside driving in mid-day on the hottest day that year when it was 113 (127 according to my car). I enjoy nature, and the heat. If I'm wearing shorts and the car is moving with the top down, that's generally plenty of cooling. On that day, I actually pulled over on the highway to put the top up. I'm a manly tough guy and all, but sitting in direct sunlight in that heat is just foolishness. If it actually got 15 degrees hotter somewhere than it was here that day, I certainly wouldn't want to even think about being outside. I doubt shade would even help much.
We're in for a fun century. Thankfully I'm in my 50's so I won't have to live through the end of it. Have fun cleaning up my generation's mess, everyone!
The text is from a quote in a US newspaper. I suppose the editors could have babied you and put in a translation for your sensitive foreign eyes. However, this website is ALSO hosted in the US, and most of its editors and audience are US-based. So realistically, if you can't abide by seeing US units on things treated as the default, perhaps you should consider visiting non-US websites. I hear there are a lot of them on the interwebs these days.
One wonders if you demand your friends immediately replace their old ugly furniture when you visit their houses too...
No. As I said, Clinton's approach was to try to work with Congress to blunt the evil effects of what they were doing. So rather than having a modern style single-topic bill with an all-or-nothing veto fight, what they did was put a lot of stuff in there that liberals and moderates liked too.
Take the 1994 "Crime Bill". Yes, that gave us the evil Federal three-strikes legislation. However, it also included an assault weapons ban. Obama not only couldn't get something like that through his Congress, he didn't even try. There are 28 parents in Sandy Hook who would today be thinking about where to take their kids now that they just graduated 6th grade, rather than picking out new flowers for their graves, if we'd still had that legislation during his term.
Not that I'm blaming Obama here. He would have loved to strike deals like this with Congress. However, compromise generally requires give on both sides, and today's Republicans win their primaries by promising not to give an inch.
It was Bill Clinton, A FUCKING DEMOCRAT that federally deregulated the banks and federally instituted the racist 3-strikes law.
Presidents don't pass legislation, Congress does. They can veto legislation, but only if Congress can't sweeten it enough to get a 2/3 majority.
The Congress during all but the first 2 years of Clinton's term was heavily Republican, and run by Newt Gingrich. Bill was in a position where he could dedicate his remaining 6 years in office to being a speedbump, or work with them to blunt the hard edges off of the right-wing crap that the people of the USA elected that congress to pass.
Now you could argue that he should have totally gone speed-bump. However, he ran as a centrist, not as someone determined to stand up and fight for True Liberal Values. If the Democratic party wanted a guy to do that, they could have elected Jerry Brown (or Jesse Jackson like I did). They didn't. If Clinton had suddenly decided to be the line-in-the-sand Liberal guy, he would have been betraying his voters.
That of course was a bygone era. Today nobody on either side trusts our elections to be fair or representative of the Will of the People. Everyone other than My Guy(tm) clearly cheated somehow, and his voters don't count. So every individual politician is expected to go stand in front of the tanks with their arms out on every issue. We're frankly lucky we can still get Post Offices named.
But its not really reasonable to blame Clinton for every suboptimal thing the US Government did during those 8 years. Go find someone who voted for him in the primary, or for a Republican congressman, and yell at them.
I for one want the Star Trek future promised to me by Gene Roddenberry and Bill Hicks.
Fun fact: The same year Star Trek was showing us a workplace where a black woman was a ship's officer treated just like every other co-worker, George Wallace was running for POTUS, and won 5 states and 46 electoral votes on a platform of racial segregation. He won the vote nationwide among young white men.
What Roddenberry presented wasn't a "promise", but an alternate aspiration for what we could one day be. If any of it looks normal now, that's only because a lot of people wanted that future, and paid for it in blood, sweat, and tears. Sometimes with their lives.
Artists can show us possibilities, but if you want real-world change, making it happen is your job.
Slashdot Mirror
... was going back for more. If you're going to rig a lottery, rig just one lottery, one whose prize will be big enough so you don't have to go back for more later. Then delete all traces of your hackery and never do anything illegal again. Otherwise a pattern starts to develop, leading to you getting caught.
Probably more sensible would be to rig it so you can get small payouts whenever you want. Most folks wouldn't consider that horribly suspicious, and if someone catches you winning $1,000 twice, you can just claim you play a lot and are lucky. You can even get other people (a different person each time) to go pick up your winnings, with a reasonable expectation they won't run off with it or turn you in. Your only real worry would be an IRS audit.
However, NOBODY is going to look at a former lottery programmer caching in a $million+ ticket and not find that suspicious, and there's nobody who they could trust to cash in that ticket for them and not to try to cheat them once they have the money.
like "Only when an arrogant woman with 20 years of bad press and only one real skill (keeping her rivals at bay for 8 years) is the opponent.".
This ignores the fact that he beat about 16 people in the primaries.
Sounds like it was is SourceSafe compatibility mode.
If I do not have enough money to buy food how am I going to buy solar panels?
Still, its getting to the point where the subsidies are hardly even necessary. Panels are shockingly cheap now. Wal-Mart is selling them for roughly a Dollar a Watt. I tried doing the math a few weeks back, and if I'd bought enough panels to cover my summer bills here in Oklahoma at the beginning of May, they would have been paid off by the end of this month vs. the money I sent to the Electric company this summer. More to the point, I could wait for the summer crunch to end, then just buy $100 (100Watts more) a month. My summer electricity bill is 5 times that. Easy enough to swing within that budget one month at a time.
But of course it doesn't quite work like that. The inverter required to handle that much juice still runs about $10k, and you also need batteries so the power doesn't go out at night, etc. That's where those of us not named "Rockefeller" start to have trouble. Still, its at the point now where it would be sensible to build any new house with a solar system. And the prices on those other components are bound to be coming down too as mass production of them picks up.
In a statement, Bannon said he wanted to spend more time with Anthony Saramucci's family.
Gundotra joined Google in June 2007, after taking a one-year delay due to a Microsoft employee non-compete agreement.
So given the dev cycle for Office 2007 and OOXML, it very much could have been THE SAME GUY pushing OOXML
Great job! Now lets go check if he's also the same guy promoting Amigas over PC's with standardized SVGA cards on Usenet in the 1990's...
The new Ataribox console draws on some of the classic styling of the original Atari 2600 console but with a modernized flare
I guess it runs very hot.
Replacing all existing C code with rust is a wonderful idea. All those worries about hackers and safety-critical systems failing due to a surprising int/float conversion will be gone. The only danger we have to worry about from it any more is tetanus.
What's that? Rust is another programming language you say? Oh well, that's very different.
I understood exactly why I felt like was going to hate Sense8 with a passion while watching the pilot, only after I noticed Straczynski's name during the end credits
Well, as someone who loved B5 and thought Sense8 was kinda meh, I'm not sure the guy's name is really all that great of a guide. It didn't feel much like B5 at all. Basically once I saw enough of Sense8 to figure out the basic gist of what was going on (the people weren't just dreaming or something), there wasn't much there to keep me.
Jeremiah was kind of in-between. Once you got the basic gist of what happened and the situation they were in, the story itself was meh. But a couple of the characters were worth coming back for.
But I couldn't point any either of the later 2 and say: "This is clearly a JMS property!" if I hadn't known ahead of time. His "voice" in them is just not all that obvious, and neither is any special style.
But the networks told him that it was going to get canned after season 4, so he had to scramble around to rewrite things to bring it to a close early. But then they said it got renewed for a 5th season, right after it was too late to change it back round. Hence why the 5th season was a bit of a mess in comparison.
Interesting. I hung out on his Usenet ng at the time, and IIRC his story was that he wanted to show that there's no "happily ever after". Just like when WWII ended there was a huge mess that had to be cleaned up, when the "Shadow War" ended there were still some of their allies running around causing havoc in the ensing chaos that had to be dealt with.
But that was his story. It could be that you are correct in the main, and this was just how he tried to spin it as a positive. Normally I'd take horse's mouth over internet rando, but in this particular case ...
Ironically both Babylon-5 and Sense8 had the same creator/show runner.
The difference was B5 was being created in a ratings-driven environment, and always had pretty good ratings, so it was able to survive (by the skin of its teeth some years), even in an environment that had turned hostile to independent productions.
Netflix, as this article mentions, just does not have the same incentives.
an SJW.
"a SJW". You only use "an" immediately before a vowel.
Protip: When you are calling someone else an "idiot", its best to check for grammatical errors, or the statement completely boomerangs.
..or you could just be a decent human being and not run around verbally abusing people so you don't have to worry about it at all. Your choice I guess.
The researchers also predict America will reach its Paris Climate Accord targets in 2020 -- five years early --
Yay! We're saved!
Whoops, what's that? The permafrost is melting? Did I say "saved"? I'm sorry. I meant boned. We are totally boned.
Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over
This is like that false salvation moment near the end of the movie, right before the giant bad thing stands up behind the heroes and smiles at them. It ain't gonna be that easy.
Prisons have instituted ridiculously expensive phone plans to help pay for their costs.
This is wrong, placing an undue burden on both the families and the prisoners.
More to the point of the article, it creates what economists would call a market distortion that encourages a thriving black market in cellphones. As long as they don't allow phone service at anything approaching market rates, there will be black market phone service. This is as close as economics has to an immutable law. This situation is no different than the USSR back in the day trying (and failing miserably) to set their own currency conversion rates. Or Canute trying to order the tide.
So the contraband phone problem is 100% their own fault.
identity politics rag
The snide denial of issues that frankly dominate the lives of other people tells me all I need to know about the entire rest of the content. Its all a bunch of whiners trying to make a story out of nothing, right? There's no problem here at all, except those whiners. *Yawn*.
I think it's more that government doesn't have that fierce profit motive so they can offer a service at near cost price
Cox doesn't have that either. They are a monopoly in nearly every market they are in. As is probably reasonable, due to the extreme up-front cost in laying all that cable. Cable is what is known as a "Natural Monopoly". All the problems people associate with government-run services are really just classic problems with monopolies: the rules are just different when the people making the decisions don't have to worry about you running to a competitor.
The only real difference between a corporate monopoly and one run by the government is who it is accountable to. Government agencies are at least indirectly accountable to their voters. However, if you aren't a Cox shareholder, you have no say in decisions Cox makes like this one.
What rubs me in the wrong way is that the school would have criteria for what are considered acceptable plans for the future. They would not only be judging whether the student has thought about the future, but also the decision itself.
That's really scary. Where we have historically seen fuzzy criteria like this in places like crime sentencing, prosecutorial discretion, and voting literacy requirements, they have almost always resulted in higher standards being applied to minorities (particularly African Americans).
Lest you think your skin color makes you immune to this problem, this is just the fairly easily quantifiable effect. Black Americans are the canary in the coalmine for locating an unfair subjective system. If you or your kid manages to get a bad rep, or has a weird hairstyle/color, or heaven forbid, actually ticks off the school administration, that could be you too.
Their vacuum tube supplier went out of business.
If you've never heard it before though, you really should. The sound is amazing. So much warmer than those digital cellphones.
Pecos just was ignored, and was in a unique place geological being in a wide plane surrounded by mountain ranges and higher elevations, it created a type of hot-box effect. I was driving a 1983 GMC Sierra Classic at the time. The little orange needle that showed if you were in PRND1-2 melted in half and the spring pulled it to the left. My sisters walkman melted in it.
Ahhh. Didn't notice you'd mentioned your town name. Your official record high for Pecos, TX is 118 (from back in 1968).
So that really hot day you remember? Picture it being more than 10 degrees hotter than that.
my home town made it to 128 one summer.
I thought so too. But it turns out we (Tulsa) only had an official high around 113 that year, even though things near roads like bank thermometers and my car thermometer were in the upper 120's. Our record high is still 115, from back during the dust bowl. So if I were you I'd check on that.
I have a convertible, and happened to be outside driving in mid-day on the hottest day that year when it was 113 (127 according to my car). I enjoy nature, and the heat. If I'm wearing shorts and the car is moving with the top down, that's generally plenty of cooling. On that day, I actually pulled over on the highway to put the top up. I'm a manly tough guy and all, but sitting in direct sunlight in that heat is just foolishness. If it actually got 15 degrees hotter somewhere than it was here that day, I certainly wouldn't want to even think about being outside. I doubt shade would even help much.
We're in for a fun century. Thankfully I'm in my 50's so I won't have to live through the end of it. Have fun cleaning up my generation's mess, everyone!
Isn't Iran in the old Mesopotamia region?
No, it is not. They are neighbors, but if you want to map ancient to modern terms, Mesopotamia = Iraq. Persia = Iran.
The text is from a quote in a US newspaper. I suppose the editors could have babied you and put in a translation for your sensitive foreign eyes. However, this website is ALSO hosted in the US, and most of its editors and audience are US-based. So realistically, if you can't abide by seeing US units on things treated as the default, perhaps you should consider visiting non-US websites. I hear there are a lot of them on the interwebs these days.
One wonders if you demand your friends immediately replace their old ugly furniture when you visit their houses too...
So did congress do it? Override his veto, I mean?
No. As I said, Clinton's approach was to try to work with Congress to blunt the evil effects of what they were doing. So rather than having a modern style single-topic bill with an all-or-nothing veto fight, what they did was put a lot of stuff in there that liberals and moderates liked too.
Take the 1994 "Crime Bill". Yes, that gave us the evil Federal three-strikes legislation. However, it also included an assault weapons ban. Obama not only couldn't get something like that through his Congress, he didn't even try. There are 28 parents in Sandy Hook who would today be thinking about where to take their kids now that they just graduated 6th grade, rather than picking out new flowers for their graves, if we'd still had that legislation during his term.
Not that I'm blaming Obama here. He would have loved to strike deals like this with Congress. However, compromise generally requires give on both sides, and today's Republicans win their primaries by promising not to give an inch.
It was Bill Clinton, A FUCKING DEMOCRAT that federally deregulated the banks and federally instituted the racist 3-strikes law.
Presidents don't pass legislation, Congress does. They can veto legislation, but only if Congress can't sweeten it enough to get a 2/3 majority.
The Congress during all but the first 2 years of Clinton's term was heavily Republican, and run by Newt Gingrich. Bill was in a position where he could dedicate his remaining 6 years in office to being a speedbump, or work with them to blunt the hard edges off of the right-wing crap that the people of the USA elected that congress to pass.
Now you could argue that he should have totally gone speed-bump. However, he ran as a centrist, not as someone determined to stand up and fight for True Liberal Values. If the Democratic party wanted a guy to do that, they could have elected Jerry Brown (or Jesse Jackson like I did). They didn't. If Clinton had suddenly decided to be the line-in-the-sand Liberal guy, he would have been betraying his voters.
That of course was a bygone era. Today nobody on either side trusts our elections to be fair or representative of the Will of the People. Everyone other than My Guy(tm) clearly cheated somehow, and his voters don't count. So every individual politician is expected to go stand in front of the tanks with their arms out on every issue. We're frankly lucky we can still get Post Offices named.
But its not really reasonable to blame Clinton for every suboptimal thing the US Government did during those 8 years. Go find someone who voted for him in the primary, or for a Republican congressman, and yell at them.
I for one want the Star Trek future promised to me by Gene Roddenberry and Bill Hicks.
Fun fact: The same year Star Trek was showing us a workplace where a black woman was a ship's officer treated just like every other co-worker, George Wallace was running for POTUS, and won 5 states and 46 electoral votes on a platform of racial segregation. He won the vote nationwide among young white men.
What Roddenberry presented wasn't a "promise", but an alternate aspiration for what we could one day be. If any of it looks normal now, that's only because a lot of people wanted that future, and paid for it in blood, sweat, and tears. Sometimes with their lives.
Artists can show us possibilities, but if you want real-world change, making it happen is your job.