I am not a big Trump fan, but he is our president. That said, this media BS of bashing Trump every 3 seconds is getting old, and people are seeing it for the partisan BS that it is:
Lets see, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and owns the Washington Post, but Joe sixpack doesn't know who Jeff Bezos is, but everyone knows Amazon, and Trump associates the two in his tweet. Not really all that inaccurate, just semantics and partisans looking for any negative story that they can put up about Trump without losing their jobs.
The reality is that we now have CNN firing 3 reporters for completely BS stories. We have a CNN reporter admitting on hidden camera that the Trump-Russia thing is total bullshit, and in general, we have 90% of the news stories on Trump being negative. Put yourself in his shoes. He gets elected and immediately gets slammed with this bogus Russia collusion investigation and the media is basically making up stories for months from anonymous sources that turn out not to be true (CNN stating that Comey would testify that he never told Trump that he was not being investigated and then the next day Comey testifies to the exact opposite, i.e. that he had told Trump several times that Trump was not being investigated but refused to make that information public, etc.)
I will not be at all surprised if when we drill down on the Russian collusion scandal, we actually find that this is an Obama/Clinton contingency plan to try to illegally steal an election.
Here are some undisputed facts on collusion with Russia: - Republicans have been hostile to Communist Russia for 7 decades, Democrats have been friendly. - Obama was caught on a hot mic telling the Russians that after his re-election he could be more flexible http://www.weeklystandard.com/... - Hillary Clinton presided over a deal where she allowed 20% of US Uranium resources to be sold to the Russians, after which millions of dollars were donated by the interested parties to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill gave a speech in Russia for around $1M, where his normal fee was around $100k https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0... - Hillary Clinton presided over the "Russian Reset" an attempt to normalize relations with Russia just a few months after they invaded Georgia (not the US State, the country)... http://www.politifact.com/trut... - President Obama learned of Russian hacking attempts in the summer of 2016, and yet he chose to do nothing (supposedly out of fear of revealing sources and methods, which is BS; the entire point of intelligence is to protect the country, if you don't do that, there is no point in having sources and methods in the first place), and now he may get his ass hauled in front of congress to explain why he did not try to better secure the election that his party is so upset about losing. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-...
I could go on, but you get the point. There is a Russian connection, but it is not Trump, it is Obama and Hillary, and the entire Russia-Trump collusion farce was a misdirect to try to thwart the investigation of the real scandals.
The entire Trump-Russia connection consists of a few Trump advisors who had business deals with Russia or Russian interests (try to find a successful multinational that doesn't do business in/with Russia, I bet Amazon has Russian deals) and one Trump advisor who jumped the gun after the election and started talking to the Russian ambasador before Trump was sworn in. Legal scholars say that this could have been prosecuted but highly likel
This is exactly what observed when I was a professor. Why universities haven't united against the onerous subscription fees I can't fathom, since 99% of the content comes from their employees anyway, it seems like it would be trivial to destroy the publishers, or at least bring their fees down to the reality of the service they provide...
The right way to do this is to get all the students and faculty behind a FOSS database in the Library of Congress online where all papers are concurrently published and free to access. Get the government grants in on it too. If the public pays for the research, the public gets access to the papers/derivative works for free. Much like the RIAA mafia, the usefulness of the scientific journals has ended, but we must eliminate them in a legal manner, and we should expect them to be a pain in the ass during their demise.
I agree that they have made progress towards making Windows more secure, but there is still a lot more that can be done. Hardening is about all we can ever hope for, since hacking a system is by definition always possible given enough time and resources (which is why real security in combination with air-gap and Faraday cages is used for hardware that really has to be secure; think NSA/classified military designs/etc.) The goal of hardening is to make large scale attacks infeasible. You will never eliminate the targeted attack in the consumer or even business space, but you can take measures to prevent things like Wanacry.
If MS were really serious about security on Windows, they would start offering $100K bounties on security flaws for Windows 10S and have an internal team that continuously rolls in patches to the flaws. In all reality, there are maybe a few thousand black hat hackers looking for security exploits to monetize who actually have the skill set to find flaws and craft attacks. If you can get 10x more white hats picking through your OS for cash, it is far more likely that the flaws (which always exist) will be found and patched before they get exploited. If the bounties are big enough, you will probably also flip some of the black hats, since there is a nice payout with the bonus of not risking getting thrown in jail.
Ad homonym does not further the discussion. AC was saying that his flight was grounded in 1967, not that it was over 120F. As others have stated on this thread, the less powerful planes have lower maximum temperature operating thresholds where they get grounded, so it is entirely possible that AC's flight was grounded due to a high but less than 120F temperature due to the flight being on a turboprop or even a regular prop (not sure what was flying commercial in 1967).
That said, my post still correctly indicts yours:
"Phoenix has only had three previous days with a temp of 120F or higher, all occurring in 1990 or later. Such temps were not recorded there any other time since 1890s."
To be correct: Humans in the last 127 years have only recorded three days over 120F in Phoenix, however, 127 years is virtually meaningless in the scope and scale of global temperatures. Even 2000 years of data is hardly probative.
Actually, no. If you do some research you will find that there is ample evidence in the last century that CO2 was already at and in some cases above 400 ppm, and the low historical numbers were cherry picked to prove global warming, not because of it.
Further, the 400 ppm it'self is a myth. If you research you learn that the values are based on one observation station in Hawaii (not the "globe") and that those values can fluctuate 600 ppm in a single day! AGW in general and "global" CO2 levels in particular have holes so big you could fly a plane through...
Faceless, uncountable charity is not a good thing, it is in fact just as bad if not worse than government assistance, and that is why most donations go to real, private charities, churches, etc. that provide assistance but also require accountability. It is high time that we stop pissing away our tax dollars to healthy adults who choose not to work because the over 6,000,000 open jobs https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... are not what they went to school for or it is beneath them, they are drug addicted, etc. If you are concerned for their kids, then take them away and place them with loving families who are not drug addicted (this should be done anyway).
Welfare, food stamps and the like provide no road map to self sufficiency and very little accountability (i.e. drug testing, job searching, etc.) whereas most private charities are much more interested (and by the way effective) in leveraging their funds as a stepping stone out of poverty/dependency. The entire entitlement class created by government exists to buy votes for the Democrats, rather than truly helping people to become self sufficient. (Democrats demonstrably don't care about the needy beyond buying their votes, as demonstrated by their personal behavior: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12...
I personally have donated thousands to private charities with good overhead ratios (google it) and $0 to any Gofundme and I never will because of the lack of accountability, vision, and support structure. If you are truly in need (and don't have thousands in the bank/clothes/shoes/electronics/boats/jet skis/ATVs etc. laying around), you are much better off working with local charities/churches and you are also much more likely to come out in a better position, rather than trying to use Gofundme.
The only caveat here is you need to research where you are giving to make sure they are legitimately helping. I would never donate to the Clinton Foundation for example, because for 2014 (most recent available tax filing) the foundation reported total expenses of a little over $91 million but grants of just $5.1 million were paid out. That’s not even 6 percent of the foundation’s money. Where the rest of that money went and how it was spent is highly suspect. They do other work, but are not transparent about the spending, which for a charity is a huge red flag.
The problem is that large companies like Comcast can absorb the damages asked, it is almost in the noise level of their profit margins. What will turn a CEOs pants brown is a federal law that ties damages for patterns of criminal misbehavior (this is intentional vandalism by multiple individuals) for profit to the previous years gross income. If you make a statue that requires damages for criminal misbehavior that benefits the company be at least 20% of annual gross income averaged over the last 3 years, that usually ends up being very painful to a company, probably 50% of net profits or more for the year. I would also throw in there language that all C-level management forfeit all bonuses for the next 2 years, since clearly they are either incompetent or criminally complicit. You make this mandatory, just like the 3 strikes laws.
Since corporations can't be criminally charged, it should put a company at risk of insolvency to engage in a pattern of criminal behavior for profit.
Windows 10S is nothing more than a play to walled garden Windows, by appealing to consumers fears, all while the customer pays for the pleasure. Hopefully someone will file a class action for false advertising (since actually hacking the OS was a trivial 3 hours for someone who knew what they were doing).
It is high time that companies take cyber security seriously, before someone hacks a windows computer running some critical system and causes a major accident (oh wait, that has happened multiple times already). For far too long companies have played fast and loose with the word secure.
Is it possible for MS to make a hardened version of Windows? Probably, but it would require a fundamental re-thinking of how windows runs, and there would be a performance hit. MS would have to spend real resources on the security aspect, and that would take resources away from developing the shiny interface tweaks that no one gives a shit about but the MBAs think is critical...
At one time, there were real gains made in home appliance efficiency, but regulators and politicians continued to push efficiency past what physics allows to kiss the asses of the environuts who failed high school physics, so you are left with a reasonably efficient appliance now made mostly useless by "green" regulations that violate the laws of physics and/or chemistry (like removing the phosphates from dishwasher soap http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/... )...
But it is not fraud, it is the manufacturer setting up the TV to the most conservative, test-favorable settings while the test is being run (this is completely reasonable and expected). It is possible that the TV can be viewed in this power saving, low resolution state, but if we the viewers want that UHD with HDR and high brightness, the TV can use more energy to accomplish this. The real culprit here is incompetent bureaucrats (surprise, surprise) and the test for not specifying a baseline resolution, brightness (in nit), and contrast ratio that should be adhered to for the test. Modifying the test parameters to define those settings and validating them with external sensors would create a consistent baseline for the test rather than wasting man hours coding firmware to recognize the test film.
This is akin to loading your truck to it's weight limit, doing jackrabbit starts from every stoplight, pumping the gas and brake incessantly while driving and then complaining that your car gets 2x the advertised mileage. The reality is that how you use your things affects how efficient they are.
So for the last 100 years, or 0.0000002 of known temperature information http://www.climate4you.com/ima... we have a local high. I hate to break it to you, but your sample size is completely meaningless, regardless if you get a +5 on slashdot or not.
There are only three recognized temperature scales currently in use: Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. Centigrade is defunct and no longer used, except as a misnomer for Celsius. Celsius and Kelvin are interlinked in that they measure the same change of temperature per degree, but Celsius starts from the arbitrary triple point of the water molecule, while Kelvin starts at absolute zero (-273C).
The only real benefit to Fahrenheit over Celsius is that it inherently provides better resolution on smaller temperature changes without fractions. The typical atmospheric temperature range on a nice day is 68F to 90F, or a range of 22F. Or in Celsius: 20C to 32C or a range of 12C. Therefore, on a digital readout, you have to allot 2 digits in Fahrenheit (78F) or 3 digits in Celsius (25.6C) to have the same accuracy.
All that said, all my calculations always get converted to SI first, as it is a much easier and less error prone measurement system across the board and does not require fudge factors to correct for measurements not being tied to physical properties and/or not being base 10.
The reason that the meter definition originally passed through Paris was rooted in the French revolution. Afterwards, they wanted to break all ties with monarchy (the old imperial units were originally derived by monarchy, where the king picked arbitrary lengths: foot, inch, yard, etc) and tie units of measure to physical constants with a base 10 relationship. Granted that their earlier attempts were in some cases not constant enough for our scientific needs today, the SI organization has continued to work to make ever better measurement reference tools for the world.
You are incorrect on both counts. Selective breeding (which I assume is what you are referring to) is completely different than GMO. Selective breeding takes genes that already exist in the plant and amplifies them. You can get a bigger apple, an apple with higher sugar content, different color, but you will never get a fig, it is still an apple, and still has the same compounds in it. This is completely different than GMO. You will never get a new kind of crop with selective breeding. On the other hand, GMO is, for example, splicing in completely different genes (like the natural pesticide found in one plant) into another plant (like Corn) creating a genetically unique new kind of plant that has compounds that did not exist in the original crop.
Regarding the Roundup, it kills grass, including wheat. In around the year 2000 Monsanto began to market/sell Roundup to wheat farmers to increase their yield by hozing down the wheat near harvest time to kill it and make all the wheat harvestable at the same time. Only problem is that it is scientific fact that a significant amount of Roundup ends up in the wheat grain using this process which is now illegal in Europe and may have also been banned by this point in time by the FDA. Unlike when Roundup is used to kill weeds around crops that do not it up, Wheat does the exact opposite.
The more environuts put out this crap, the more reasonable people with half a brain see them for what they are: chicken little idiots with zero science behind them. There is zero scientific evidence that humans are causing global warming, or that global warming is a thing as defined by the global warming alarmists. (Check out the global temperature over the last 500,000 years: http://www.climate4you.com/ima... here's a hint: those historic warm periods were not caused by man).
I have been to Phoenix a number of times over the last 40 years, and it has always been damn hot:
"On average, there are 107 days annually with a high of at least 100 F (38 C) including most days from late May through early October. Highs top 110 F (43 C) an average of 18 days during the year. On June 26, 1990, the temperature reached an all-time recorded high of 122 F (50 C)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The record high was 27 years ago, hardly justification for global warming alarmisim...
I am willing to bet any amount of money that within 5 years of a balancing the research funding of anthropogenic global warming (i.e. giving grant money to study AGW) with natural global warming research funding, the scientists will completely abandon AGW as even a theory because the facts and history just don't back it up. Further, they will stop fudging data and mathematical models and most will agree that we are in a localized natural warming period that is good for most humans (ice ages destroy crops/reduce arable farmland and kill millions through starvation and exposure, but never mind reality). The few thousand island peoples who are negatively affected by the natural temperature rise will have to adapt, just like we all have since time before history, but for most of the world population, global warming is good. Florida will have to build some seawalls, just like the Netherlands, but that amounts to just a few dollars more a year in taxes, it's hardly the apocalypse. However, as long as all the federal research money is for AGW, so will all the "scientists" who are on the take of that money and their research which was funded to justify it.
Monsanto and others like them have "poisoned the well" of GMO/science based foods. Monsanto based GMO corn has contaminated nearly all corn DNA with an inherent pesticide that 10% of people have violent allergies to, and maybe 40% have GI upset with... The practice of hozing down wheat with Roundup (a Monsanto product) that started in 2000 is likely the root cause of the massive spike in Celiac and Celiac like symptoms (maybe also IBS). The problem is that the FDA needs to start treating GMO like it treats drugs, with long periods of clinical trials and testing to ensure that any changes in the DNA of our food, or the chemicals in it when it arrives at the table are a net positive for humans.
The problem with GMO is it can have dire repercussions for the consumer and since it's inception has been targeted exclusively at improving profit margins instead of quality and nutrition. We may very well see the end of Wheat and Corn as large scale commercial food products thanks to GMO/Monsanto. People don't like getting stomach cramps, and if they can go gluten free and avoid them, they don't know or care that it is actually the Roundup residual in the wheat, rather than the Gluten, they just know they feel better.
Stupid is as stupid does, apparently. This lie has been spewed by the progressives for years to justify hatred of America, but lets look at the facts:
1. China was invaded by Japan very rapidly thanks to an army of Japanese saboteurs already living in China. Japan was brutal to the Chinese civilians (look it up). 2. Japan invaded the Philippines rapidly, aided by Japanese saboteurs, they were brutal to the Filipinos. 3. The Japanese in Japan and many in the US worshiped Hiro Hito (the emperor of Japan) as a god. His word and that of his generals was absolute. 4. The US rounded up the mostly un-integrated Japanese population and placed them in confinement for two reasons: Emperor worship and the high incidence of saboteurs in the Japanese population of other nations invaded/at war with Japan. No Japanese persons were physically abused for their nationality, nor were they executed like the Jews in Germany, they were detained for the duration of the war. You were more likely to die in combat as a non Japanese US male than experience any harm in a Japanese detainment camp as a Japanese male. 5. POWs captured by Japan were treated horribly, mutilated, beaten and treated as slaves and sub humans. Many died in POW camps, those who survived were often maimed for life due to abuse. Japanese POWs captured by the US were treated humanely and released after the war. 6. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without warning in a surprise attack intended to maximize the deaths of US soldiers. The US dropped warning leaflets over Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before the nuclear bombs. The children were all evacuated, and the only reason that anyone died in those bombings were the evil Japanese government that forced people to stay and work building guns, planes and tanks instead of evacuating. 7. After the war, US residents of Japanese decent were released back into society. None of them were executed or physically scarred. There may have been a few individual criminal acts by guards that happened in the Japanese detainment camps, but those that were discovered were punished. It was certainly not encouraged or condoned. 8. After the war, Japan was decimated. The US spent millions to rebuild Japan as an ally, we destroyed Emperor worship as a religion by demonstrating that the emperor was just a man, and created a stable democracy that is Japan of modern day.
If the Japanese today dislike the US for WW2 it is because of progressive lies and ignorance of the truth about what transpired.
I highly suspect that this is a defensive patent. Specifically, if Amazon holds the patent, they can sue any other company that tries to enact similar blocking (like Walmart) of the Amazon site for infringement of their patent. Walmart has been working hard to try and catch up with Amazon because it is clear that just like video streaming, online shopping is eating a lot of retail market share.
Apply for asylum in the US and start indie game shops here... I have many fond memories of classic Konami games: Contra, Castlevania, Belmonts Quest, Life Force (Salamander), Contra: Alien Wars, Gradius III, TMNT 4: Turtles in Time, etc. Make some updated, new games on the same concept with Unreal engine 2D graphics and put it up on steam and sell a few million copies at $9.99 a pop.
Not sure how you even function day to day with that level of reasoning capacity.
Furthermore, we aren't talking about nuclear, the story was about wind. If you have surplus wind, the turbines have a brake to slow down or even stop and can be locked in fixed position (no spinning = no output). It takes them under 10 minutes to spin back up, or a bit longer depending on conditions.
This is such bad mismanagement that it is very likely fraud. The appropriate bodies need to start looking very hard at the books. As the lead engineer I have brought a number of consumer products to market for right around $1M. Honestly, if Kickstarter and similar crowd funding companies expect to stay in the business, they need to set up some kind of business mentorship or have a board of directors that has oversight on any campaign that pulls in more than a certain threshold (over $100K or some such) to ensure that the investors money is not pissed away. Otherwise, people are just going to stop and crowdfunding will go the way of the pet rock and lawn darts...
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a big Trump fan, but he is our president. That said, this media BS of bashing Trump every 3 seconds is getting old, and people are seeing it for the partisan BS that it is:
Lets see, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and owns the Washington Post, but Joe sixpack doesn't know who Jeff Bezos is, but everyone knows Amazon, and Trump associates the two in his tweet. Not really all that inaccurate, just semantics and partisans looking for any negative story that they can put up about Trump without losing their jobs.
The reality is that we now have CNN firing 3 reporters for completely BS stories. We have a CNN reporter admitting on hidden camera that the Trump-Russia thing is total bullshit, and in general, we have 90% of the news stories on Trump being negative. Put yourself in his shoes. He gets elected and immediately gets slammed with this bogus Russia collusion investigation and the media is basically making up stories for months from anonymous sources that turn out not to be true (CNN stating that Comey would testify that he never told Trump that he was not being investigated and then the next day Comey testifies to the exact opposite, i.e. that he had told Trump several times that Trump was not being investigated but refused to make that information public, etc.)
I will not be at all surprised if when we drill down on the Russian collusion scandal, we actually find that this is an Obama/Clinton contingency plan to try to illegally steal an election.
Here are some undisputed facts on collusion with Russia:
- Republicans have been hostile to Communist Russia for 7 decades, Democrats have been friendly.
- Obama was caught on a hot mic telling the Russians that after his re-election he could be more flexible http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
- Hillary Clinton presided over a deal where she allowed 20% of US Uranium resources to be sold to the Russians, after which millions of dollars were donated by the interested parties to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill gave a speech in Russia for around $1M, where his normal fee was around $100k https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...
- Hillary Clinton presided over the "Russian Reset" an attempt to normalize relations with Russia just a few months after they invaded Georgia (not the US State, the country)... http://www.politifact.com/trut...
- President Obama learned of Russian hacking attempts in the summer of 2016, and yet he chose to do nothing (supposedly out of fear of revealing sources and methods, which is BS; the entire point of intelligence is to protect the country, if you don't do that, there is no point in having sources and methods in the first place), and now he may get his ass hauled in front of congress to explain why he did not try to better secure the election that his party is so upset about losing. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-...
I could go on, but you get the point. There is a Russian connection, but it is not Trump, it is Obama and Hillary, and the entire Russia-Trump collusion farce was a misdirect to try to thwart the investigation of the real scandals.
The entire Trump-Russia connection consists of a few Trump advisors who had business deals with Russia or Russian interests (try to find a successful multinational that doesn't do business in/with Russia, I bet Amazon has Russian deals) and one Trump advisor who jumped the gun after the election and started talking to the Russian ambasador before Trump was sworn in. Legal scholars say that this could have been prosecuted but highly likel
This is exactly what observed when I was a professor. Why universities haven't united against the onerous subscription fees I can't fathom, since 99% of the content comes from their employees anyway, it seems like it would be trivial to destroy the publishers, or at least bring their fees down to the reality of the service they provide...
The right way to do this is to get all the students and faculty behind a FOSS database in the Library of Congress online where all papers are concurrently published and free to access. Get the government grants in on it too. If the public pays for the research, the public gets access to the papers/derivative works for free. Much like the RIAA mafia, the usefulness of the scientific journals has ended, but we must eliminate them in a legal manner, and we should expect them to be a pain in the ass during their demise.
I agree that they have made progress towards making Windows more secure, but there is still a lot more that can be done. Hardening is about all we can ever hope for, since hacking a system is by definition always possible given enough time and resources (which is why real security in combination with air-gap and Faraday cages is used for hardware that really has to be secure; think NSA/classified military designs/etc.) The goal of hardening is to make large scale attacks infeasible. You will never eliminate the targeted attack in the consumer or even business space, but you can take measures to prevent things like Wanacry.
If MS were really serious about security on Windows, they would start offering $100K bounties on security flaws for Windows 10S and have an internal team that continuously rolls in patches to the flaws. In all reality, there are maybe a few thousand black hat hackers looking for security exploits to monetize who actually have the skill set to find flaws and craft attacks. If you can get 10x more white hats picking through your OS for cash, it is far more likely that the flaws (which always exist) will be found and patched before they get exploited. If the bounties are big enough, you will probably also flip some of the black hats, since there is a nice payout with the bonus of not risking getting thrown in jail.
Ad homonym does not further the discussion. AC was saying that his flight was grounded in 1967, not that it was over 120F. As others have stated on this thread, the less powerful planes have lower maximum temperature operating thresholds where they get grounded, so it is entirely possible that AC's flight was grounded due to a high but less than 120F temperature due to the flight being on a turboprop or even a regular prop (not sure what was flying commercial in 1967).
That said, my post still correctly indicts yours:
"Phoenix has only had three previous days with a temp of 120F or higher, all occurring in 1990 or later. Such temps were not recorded there any other time since 1890s."
To be correct: Humans in the last 127 years have only recorded three days over 120F in Phoenix, however, 127 years is virtually meaningless in the scope and scale of global temperatures. Even 2000 years of data is hardly probative.
Actually, no. If you do some research you will find that there is ample evidence in the last century that CO2 was already at and in some cases above 400 ppm, and the low historical numbers were cherry picked to prove global warming, not because of it.
Further, the 400 ppm it'self is a myth. If you research you learn that the values are based on one observation station in Hawaii (not the "globe") and that those values can fluctuate 600 ppm in a single day! AGW in general and "global" CO2 levels in particular have holes so big you could fly a plane through...
This site is a good primer for those who actually want to know the facts on CO2: http://drtimball.com/2012/pre-...
Faceless, uncountable charity is not a good thing, it is in fact just as bad if not worse than government assistance, and that is why most donations go to real, private charities, churches, etc. that provide assistance but also require accountability. It is high time that we stop pissing away our tax dollars to healthy adults who choose not to work because the over 6,000,000 open jobs https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... are not what they went to school for or it is beneath them, they are drug addicted, etc. If you are concerned for their kids, then take them away and place them with loving families who are not drug addicted (this should be done anyway).
Welfare, food stamps and the like provide no road map to self sufficiency and very little accountability (i.e. drug testing, job searching, etc.) whereas most private charities are much more interested (and by the way effective) in leveraging their funds as a stepping stone out of poverty/dependency. The entire entitlement class created by government exists to buy votes for the Democrats, rather than truly helping people to become self sufficient. (Democrats demonstrably don't care about the needy beyond buying their votes, as demonstrated by their personal behavior: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12...
I personally have donated thousands to private charities with good overhead ratios (google it) and $0 to any Gofundme and I never will because of the lack of accountability, vision, and support structure. If you are truly in need (and don't have thousands in the bank/clothes/shoes/electronics/boats/jet skis/ATVs etc. laying around), you are much better off working with local charities/churches and you are also much more likely to come out in a better position, rather than trying to use Gofundme.
The only caveat here is you need to research where you are giving to make sure they are legitimately helping. I would never donate to the Clinton Foundation for example, because for 2014 (most recent available tax filing) the foundation reported total expenses of a little over $91 million but grants of just $5.1 million were paid out. That’s not even 6 percent of the foundation’s money. Where the rest of that money went and how it was spent is highly suspect. They do other work, but are not transparent about the spending, which for a charity is a huge red flag.
The problem is that large companies like Comcast can absorb the damages asked, it is almost in the noise level of their profit margins. What will turn a CEOs pants brown is a federal law that ties damages for patterns of criminal misbehavior (this is intentional vandalism by multiple individuals) for profit to the previous years gross income. If you make a statue that requires damages for criminal misbehavior that benefits the company be at least 20% of annual gross income averaged over the last 3 years, that usually ends up being very painful to a company, probably 50% of net profits or more for the year. I would also throw in there language that all C-level management forfeit all bonuses for the next 2 years, since clearly they are either incompetent or criminally complicit. You make this mandatory, just like the 3 strikes laws.
Since corporations can't be criminally charged, it should put a company at risk of insolvency to engage in a pattern of criminal behavior for profit.
Windows 10S is nothing more than a play to walled garden Windows, by appealing to consumers fears, all while the customer pays for the pleasure. Hopefully someone will file a class action for false advertising (since actually hacking the OS was a trivial 3 hours for someone who knew what they were doing).
It is high time that companies take cyber security seriously, before someone hacks a windows computer running some critical system and causes a major accident (oh wait, that has happened multiple times already). For far too long companies have played fast and loose with the word secure.
Is it possible for MS to make a hardened version of Windows? Probably, but it would require a fundamental re-thinking of how windows runs, and there would be a performance hit. MS would have to spend real resources on the security aspect, and that would take resources away from developing the shiny interface tweaks that no one gives a shit about but the MBAs think is critical...
At one time, there were real gains made in home appliance efficiency, but regulators and politicians continued to push efficiency past what physics allows to kiss the asses of the environuts who failed high school physics, so you are left with a reasonably efficient appliance now made mostly useless by "green" regulations that violate the laws of physics and/or chemistry (like removing the phosphates from dishwasher soap http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/... )...
Or you could, you know, switch to LED bulbs and pay $30/year for all your lights left on 24/7...
But it is not fraud, it is the manufacturer setting up the TV to the most conservative, test-favorable settings while the test is being run (this is completely reasonable and expected). It is possible that the TV can be viewed in this power saving, low resolution state, but if we the viewers want that UHD with HDR and high brightness, the TV can use more energy to accomplish this. The real culprit here is incompetent bureaucrats (surprise, surprise) and the test for not specifying a baseline resolution, brightness (in nit), and contrast ratio that should be adhered to for the test. Modifying the test parameters to define those settings and validating them with external sensors would create a consistent baseline for the test rather than wasting man hours coding firmware to recognize the test film.
This is akin to loading your truck to it's weight limit, doing jackrabbit starts from every stoplight, pumping the gas and brake incessantly while driving and then complaining that your car gets 2x the advertised mileage. The reality is that how you use your things affects how efficient they are.
So for the last 100 years, or 0.0000002 of known temperature information http://www.climate4you.com/ima... we have a local high. I hate to break it to you, but your sample size is completely meaningless, regardless if you get a +5 on slashdot or not.
I wasn't aware that burning plant matter or making a shelter from plants and rocks was considered high technology...
There are only three recognized temperature scales currently in use: Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. Centigrade is defunct and no longer used, except as a misnomer for Celsius. Celsius and Kelvin are interlinked in that they measure the same change of temperature per degree, but Celsius starts from the arbitrary triple point of the water molecule, while Kelvin starts at absolute zero (-273C).
The only real benefit to Fahrenheit over Celsius is that it inherently provides better resolution on smaller temperature changes without fractions. The typical atmospheric temperature range on a nice day is 68F to 90F, or a range of 22F. Or in Celsius: 20C to 32C or a range of 12C. Therefore, on a digital readout, you have to allot 2 digits in Fahrenheit (78F) or 3 digits in Celsius (25.6C) to have the same accuracy.
All that said, all my calculations always get converted to SI first, as it is a much easier and less error prone measurement system across the board and does not require fudge factors to correct for measurements not being tied to physical properties and/or not being base 10.
The reason that the meter definition originally passed through Paris was rooted in the French revolution. Afterwards, they wanted to break all ties with monarchy (the old imperial units were originally derived by monarchy, where the king picked arbitrary lengths: foot, inch, yard, etc) and tie units of measure to physical constants with a base 10 relationship. Granted that their earlier attempts were in some cases not constant enough for our scientific needs today, the SI organization has continued to work to make ever better measurement reference tools for the world.
You are incorrect on both counts. Selective breeding (which I assume is what you are referring to) is completely different than GMO. Selective breeding takes genes that already exist in the plant and amplifies them. You can get a bigger apple, an apple with higher sugar content, different color, but you will never get a fig, it is still an apple, and still has the same compounds in it. This is completely different than GMO. You will never get a new kind of crop with selective breeding. On the other hand, GMO is, for example, splicing in completely different genes (like the natural pesticide found in one plant) into another plant (like Corn) creating a genetically unique new kind of plant that has compounds that did not exist in the original crop.
Regarding the Roundup, it kills grass, including wheat. In around the year 2000 Monsanto began to market/sell Roundup to wheat farmers to increase their yield by hozing down the wheat near harvest time to kill it and make all the wheat harvestable at the same time. Only problem is that it is scientific fact that a significant amount of Roundup ends up in the wheat grain using this process which is now illegal in Europe and may have also been banned by this point in time by the FDA. Unlike when Roundup is used to kill weeds around crops that do not it up, Wheat does the exact opposite.
The more environuts put out this crap, the more reasonable people with half a brain see them for what they are: chicken little idiots with zero science behind them. There is zero scientific evidence that humans are causing global warming, or that global warming is a thing as defined by the global warming alarmists. (Check out the global temperature over the last 500,000 years: http://www.climate4you.com/ima... here's a hint: those historic warm periods were not caused by man).
I have been to Phoenix a number of times over the last 40 years, and it has always been damn hot:
"On average, there are 107 days annually with a high of at least 100 F (38 C) including most days from late May through early October. Highs top 110 F (43 C) an average of 18 days during the year. On June 26, 1990, the temperature reached an all-time recorded high of 122 F (50 C)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The record high was 27 years ago, hardly justification for global warming alarmisim...
I am willing to bet any amount of money that within 5 years of a balancing the research funding of anthropogenic global warming (i.e. giving grant money to study AGW) with natural global warming research funding, the scientists will completely abandon AGW as even a theory because the facts and history just don't back it up. Further, they will stop fudging data and mathematical models and most will agree that we are in a localized natural warming period that is good for most humans (ice ages destroy crops/reduce arable farmland and kill millions through starvation and exposure, but never mind reality). The few thousand island peoples who are negatively affected by the natural temperature rise will have to adapt, just like we all have since time before history, but for most of the world population, global warming is good. Florida will have to build some seawalls, just like the Netherlands, but that amounts to just a few dollars more a year in taxes, it's hardly the apocalypse. However, as long as all the federal research money is for AGW, so will all the "scientists" who are on the take of that money and their research which was funded to justify it.
Monsanto and others like them have "poisoned the well" of GMO/science based foods. Monsanto based GMO corn has contaminated nearly all corn DNA with an inherent pesticide that 10% of people have violent allergies to, and maybe 40% have GI upset with... The practice of hozing down wheat with Roundup (a Monsanto product) that started in 2000 is likely the root cause of the massive spike in Celiac and Celiac like symptoms (maybe also IBS). The problem is that the FDA needs to start treating GMO like it treats drugs, with long periods of clinical trials and testing to ensure that any changes in the DNA of our food, or the chemicals in it when it arrives at the table are a net positive for humans.
The problem with GMO is it can have dire repercussions for the consumer and since it's inception has been targeted exclusively at improving profit margins instead of quality and nutrition. We may very well see the end of Wheat and Corn as large scale commercial food products thanks to GMO/Monsanto. People don't like getting stomach cramps, and if they can go gluten free and avoid them, they don't know or care that it is actually the Roundup residual in the wheat, rather than the Gluten, they just know they feel better.
Stupid is as stupid does, apparently. This lie has been spewed by the progressives for years to justify hatred of America, but lets look at the facts:
1. China was invaded by Japan very rapidly thanks to an army of Japanese saboteurs already living in China. Japan was brutal to the Chinese civilians (look it up).
2. Japan invaded the Philippines rapidly, aided by Japanese saboteurs, they were brutal to the Filipinos.
3. The Japanese in Japan and many in the US worshiped Hiro Hito (the emperor of Japan) as a god. His word and that of his generals was absolute.
4. The US rounded up the mostly un-integrated Japanese population and placed them in confinement for two reasons: Emperor worship and the high incidence of saboteurs in the Japanese population of other nations invaded/at war with Japan. No Japanese persons were physically abused for their nationality, nor were they executed like the Jews in Germany, they were detained for the duration of the war. You were more likely to die in combat as a non Japanese US male than experience any harm in a Japanese detainment camp as a Japanese male.
5. POWs captured by Japan were treated horribly, mutilated, beaten and treated as slaves and sub humans. Many died in POW camps, those who survived were often maimed for life due to abuse. Japanese POWs captured by the US were treated humanely and released after the war.
6. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without warning in a surprise attack intended to maximize the deaths of US soldiers. The US dropped warning leaflets over Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before the nuclear bombs. The children were all evacuated, and the only reason that anyone died in those bombings were the evil Japanese government that forced people to stay and work building guns, planes and tanks instead of evacuating.
7. After the war, US residents of Japanese decent were released back into society. None of them were executed or physically scarred. There may have been a few individual criminal acts by guards that happened in the Japanese detainment camps, but those that were discovered were punished. It was certainly not encouraged or condoned.
8. After the war, Japan was decimated. The US spent millions to rebuild Japan as an ally, we destroyed Emperor worship as a religion by demonstrating that the emperor was just a man, and created a stable democracy that is Japan of modern day.
If the Japanese today dislike the US for WW2 it is because of progressive lies and ignorance of the truth about what transpired.
I highly suspect that this is a defensive patent. Specifically, if Amazon holds the patent, they can sue any other company that tries to enact similar blocking (like Walmart) of the Amazon site for infringement of their patent. Walmart has been working hard to try and catch up with Amazon because it is clear that just like video streaming, online shopping is eating a lot of retail market share.
Apply for asylum in the US and start indie game shops here... I have many fond memories of classic Konami games: Contra, Castlevania, Belmonts Quest, Life Force (Salamander), Contra: Alien Wars, Gradius III, TMNT 4: Turtles in Time, etc. Make some updated, new games on the same concept with Unreal engine 2D graphics and put it up on steam and sell a few million copies at $9.99 a pop.
"Your assertion is idiotic:"
Not sure how you even function day to day with that level of reasoning capacity.
Furthermore, we aren't talking about nuclear, the story was about wind. If you have surplus wind, the turbines have a brake to slow down or even stop and can be locked in fixed position (no spinning = no output). It takes them under 10 minutes to spin back up, or a bit longer depending on conditions.
This is such bad mismanagement that it is very likely fraud. The appropriate bodies need to start looking very hard at the books. As the lead engineer I have brought a number of consumer products to market for right around $1M. Honestly, if Kickstarter and similar crowd funding companies expect to stay in the business, they need to set up some kind of business mentorship or have a board of directors that has oversight on any campaign that pulls in more than a certain threshold (over $100K or some such) to ensure that the investors money is not pissed away. Otherwise, people are just going to stop and crowdfunding will go the way of the pet rock and lawn darts...
*Politicians legally bribed or fooled through utter incompetence passed laws to make it happen
FTFY