Where the hell are we going to get enough bio-diesel to make even a dent in the amount of dino-diesel the military uses? I used to serve on a Navy oiler. We carried something like 3.5 million gallons of marine diesel and another 3.5 million gallons of JP-5 (essentially highly purified diesel), and we went through it at a pretty good clip while on a deployment. I'm pretty sure that there's not enough french-fry grease in the universe to replace any significant part of this.
This is not to say that we shouldn't try to move away from fossil fuels, but I'm pretty sure none of the solutions mentioned (waste grease, camelina, etc) could possibly scale to an extent that would accomplish anything.
Apparently, they define wealth as basically net worth - assets minus liabilities. Well, how much of the 99% actually has a NEGATIVE net worth, and does that drag down the numbers?
Well, how the hell ELSE would you define wealth? Is your point that people with a negative net worth shouldn't count? Of course, everyone is pretty rich... as long as you exclude everyone who's, you know, not rich.
It may be that by this measure the top 50% has more wealth than the whole country put together. Be outraged! You're part of the 100% that has less money than the top 50%!
WTF does this even mean?
Dude, seriously, think before you post. I know, this is Slashdot, I must be new here, etc.
And, BTW, you know who pays when someone defaults? The U.S. government foots the bill, since these loans are federally guaranteed. So Uncle Sam gets to fund the bailout on that one too, just like he did with the banks and domestic car industry.
Student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy - Congress, a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Banking, Inc, wrote that provision into the new bankruptcy law a few years back. So this is another way that the student loan issue is even worse than the real estate issue - once you have this debt, there is literally no way to escape it. In this environment, you can't get a job, can't pay the loan, and go into default. If you ever do become gainfully employed, Uncle Sam will garnish your wages to pay for your rapidly increasing interest, penalties, and fees.
It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that people are fed up with it.
Dude, I'm not accustomed to seeing icons down the side of the screen either, but I got used to that in about a quarter of a second. Here's a news flash: OpenSuse is going to be different from old Ubuntu too. I'm kind of baffled by the idea that you'd give up on the whole operating system based on the position of icons.
You do realize, right, that all those private companies who are "more apt at the weather stuff" are doing it based on... weather data that they get for free from NOAA, right? Jesus, I wish the "seasteading" movement would get going, so we could export all our libertarians.
In that case you can just replace the HD. But if the UEFI partition goes bad, wouldn't you just be out of luck? Your new drive wouldn't contain the required signature to load the OS.
But my general feeling is that users sophisticated enough to wipe and replace their hard drive are probably sophisticated enough to understand not to wipe out that hidden partition labelled "UEFI". Sure, some won't be, and they'll suffer. But we're not talking about a very large portion of the population - your grandma is not going to be wiping and reloading the OS in the first place, and 1337 haxxxors are probably going to figure out how to do this safely.
... on a subject, and... and... more than one of them are posted... on the same website. Wow, what a mind-blowing concept. Seriously, dude, "Slashdot" is not a monolithic brain that has one and only one opinion on any given topic. UEFI is a controversial topic, and postings on Slashdot are going to reflect differing views.
Yes, landmines do automated killing every day. So do Harpoon missiles - give them a general location, they search, select a target (if there's more than one), and attack and destroy it, all without any human intervention whatsoever. So does the Phalanx system - you turn it on, and it tracks everything flying in the vicinity of the ship. It decides what it's going to shoot. So do all the various homing torpedoes. The Aegis Combat System has fully automated modes.
In short, "robotic" weapons have been in use for DECADES. Did the WaPo just notice?
Every Linux box I've ever had has started life as a Windows PC. My first was my older Windows box that I had already replaced, and loaded Linux on as a lark. Later, I got castoff but still good machines from work to use as file servers, etc, around the house. This is a really common use case.
That has nothing to do with who provided the security and everything to do with the fact that we've gone absolutely apeshit over airport security in recent years. Does anyone seriously think that handing off the TSA mission back to private contractors would magically make the groping, shoe-taking-off, invasive x-raying, etc; just go away?
Dude, far be it for me to interrupt your dreams of the libertarian paradise, but we ALREADY HAD privatized security service... you know, in the ancient days before the TSA. It certainly wasn't competitive, and anyone who's ever actually set foot inside an airport would know that it's NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE to put in multiple competing security checkpoint operations in there. That's just plain dumb.
Only in the small number of markets where multiple large airports service a single population.
And even there, you frequently didn't have any choice. In the DC area, there are three big airports: National (nobody here calls it "Reagan"), Dulles, and BWI. National and Dulles are both controlled by the Metro Washington Airports Authority, and use all the same vendors. BWI is so far away from those of us in Northern Virginia that it's a giant pain in the ass to use. So it's not like you're realistically going to be able to choose an airport based on the quality of the security staff.
The TSA is actually a relatively new thing - in the past, all the security was private. So, tell me, which airport did you go to where you had a choice of which security company was going to do your screening?
Privatizing all this again just leads back to where we were - with a bunch of even lower performing security staff than we have now, and no effective oversight.
Because a black market will develop to avoid the taxes and other government controls, and we will be back to square one.
The choice here isn't between the status quo and legalized drugs taxed to the point they cost the same is illegal drugs. The choice is between the status quo and legalized drugs that are taxed heavily, but still a lot cheaper than smuggled drugs. You could raise a TON of revenue on, say, weed, and still have it be a lot cheaper than it is now (as has been shown in states where weed is quasi-legal - prices have dropped enormously). That would pull an enormous amount of money out of the hands of cartels, and put it in government coffers, where it could be used for both better drug treatment AND more border enforcement. Sure, you'd likely have some black market - cigarettes and alcohol both are both traded this way to some extent. But when was the last time a black market cigarette dealer disemboweled someone over a bad trade?
If the narcotics black market evolved into something like the cigarette black market, that would actually be a giant step forward.
And she still doesn't have DSL. So I brought her computer to the library and downloaded all her Windows Updates for free.
So if you're one of those folks who 1) lives in an area not served by broadband, and 2) you have no way to bring any of your computers to where the broadband is... well, yeah, I guess you're screwed. But that does not amount to very many people.
Sure, this is a fraction of what we're flushing down the toilet in futile wars, but we're already stuck in those, and they're much more difficult to pull out of than a project that's still in the planning stages.
My understanding is that we're beyond the planning stages - substantial portions of the JWST have already been built. If we quit now, we'll just end up throwing that away. From Wikipedia:
The mission had been working towards a launch date in 2014, but during the summer of 2010 an independent review panel determined that 2015 was the earliest possible launch date, and even that would require a significant influx of additional funding.[4] Notably, this review commended the JWST project for being in excellent technical shape with most flight hardware making good progress to completion. The delay and cost overruns are due to an unrealistic original budget and insufficient program management. In response, NASA instituted significant management changes in the JWST project, but the need for increased funding has led to a substantial mission delay.
Congress is great at creating programs with sweeping missions, underfunding them, and then bitching when the programs go "over budget". Maybe the problems with the JWST aren't with NASA - I'm just saying.
No, actually I don't. It's not on the defense to prove the defendant innocent in the courtroom, and it's not on me to prove him innocent in the court of public opinion. The OP makes all kinds of accusations about Manning and has provided nothing other than personal attacks against people who dare to question any of this.
If one thinks Manning is guilty of something, how about some kind of actual evidence, rather than "OMG you must hate America".
How's that debt ceiling coming? I'd like to have mine raised. The mortgage is due tomorrow.
This is just an illustration of how stupid the "debt ceiling" concept is. You agreed to a mortgage with a payment schedule, and now a payment has come due. You didn't set a "debt ceiling" that requires you to get special permission from yourself to actually pay the bill, because... that would be stupid. You explicitly agreed you were going to pay the bill when you made the mortgage.
Mostly, arguments of the form "the government budget should operate more like a family budget" are dumb, because the government isn't like a family. But in the case of the debt ceiling, it's true.
This has nothing to do with which product is technically superior or who's feeling superior to whom. It has everything to do with the fact that since the release of Duke Nukem Forever, the Hurd is the world's most notorious instance of vaporware. That's what all the sniggering is about, and who can blame us?
And even if your point were true (and it's not), that somehow means that Slashdot is irrelevant? That's a total non sequitur.
endangered people, programs, and processes that involve untold thousands of man-hours to mop up
[citation needed]. Even the Pentagon admits that there's no evidence anyone was endangered by this leak. So how about naming some of the "people, programs, and processes" that were endangered? I mean, besides the ones that involve the US gov't lying to the American people and then covering it up. I'm sure THOSE programs really were endangered.
Slashdot Mirror
Where the hell are we going to get enough bio-diesel to make even a dent in the amount of dino-diesel the military uses? I used to serve on a Navy oiler. We carried something like 3.5 million gallons of marine diesel and another 3.5 million gallons of JP-5 (essentially highly purified diesel), and we went through it at a pretty good clip while on a deployment. I'm pretty sure that there's not enough french-fry grease in the universe to replace any significant part of this.
This is not to say that we shouldn't try to move away from fossil fuels, but I'm pretty sure none of the solutions mentioned (waste grease, camelina, etc) could possibly scale to an extent that would accomplish anything.
... the Navy and Marine Corps don't operate any F-16's [/airplane_nazi]
... on Slashdot, and that's saying something.
Well, how the hell ELSE would you define wealth? Is your point that people with a negative net worth shouldn't count? Of course, everyone is pretty rich... as long as you exclude everyone who's, you know, not rich.
WTF does this even mean?
Dude, seriously, think before you post. I know, this is Slashdot, I must be new here, etc.
Student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy - Congress, a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Banking, Inc, wrote that provision into the new bankruptcy law a few years back. So this is another way that the student loan issue is even worse than the real estate issue - once you have this debt, there is literally no way to escape it. In this environment, you can't get a job, can't pay the loan, and go into default. If you ever do become gainfully employed, Uncle Sam will garnish your wages to pay for your rapidly increasing interest, penalties, and fees.
It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that people are fed up with it.
Dude, I'm not accustomed to seeing icons down the side of the screen either, but I got used to that in about a quarter of a second. Here's a news flash: OpenSuse is going to be different from old Ubuntu too. I'm kind of baffled by the idea that you'd give up on the whole operating system based on the position of icons.
tl;dr: things change. Deal.
You do realize, right, that all those private companies who are "more apt at the weather stuff" are doing it based on... weather data that they get for free from NOAA, right? Jesus, I wish the "seasteading" movement would get going, so we could export all our libertarians.
... but in the one I support (I'm a DOD contractor) degrees from places like Strayer, UOP, etc; are regarded as pretty much worthless.
In that case you can just replace the HD. But if the UEFI partition goes bad, wouldn't you just be out of luck? Your new drive wouldn't contain the required signature to load the OS.
But my general feeling is that users sophisticated enough to wipe and replace their hard drive are probably sophisticated enough to understand not to wipe out that hidden partition labelled "UEFI". Sure, some won't be, and they'll suffer. But we're not talking about a very large portion of the population - your grandma is not going to be wiping and reloading the OS in the first place, and 1337 haxxxors are probably going to figure out how to do this safely.
... on a subject, and... and... more than one of them are posted... on the same website. Wow, what a mind-blowing concept. Seriously, dude, "Slashdot" is not a monolithic brain that has one and only one opinion on any given topic. UEFI is a controversial topic, and postings on Slashdot are going to reflect differing views.
Yes, landmines do automated killing every day. So do Harpoon missiles - give them a general location, they search, select a target (if there's more than one), and attack and destroy it, all without any human intervention whatsoever. So does the Phalanx system - you turn it on, and it tracks everything flying in the vicinity of the ship. It decides what it's going to shoot. So do all the various homing torpedoes. The Aegis Combat System has fully automated modes.
In short, "robotic" weapons have been in use for DECADES. Did the WaPo just notice?
Every Linux box I've ever had has started life as a Windows PC. My first was my older Windows box that I had already replaced, and loaded Linux on as a lark. Later, I got castoff but still good machines from work to use as file servers, etc, around the house. This is a really common use case.
That has nothing to do with who provided the security and everything to do with the fact that we've gone absolutely apeshit over airport security in recent years. Does anyone seriously think that handing off the TSA mission back to private contractors would magically make the groping, shoe-taking-off, invasive x-raying, etc; just go away?
The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that CO2 was, in fact, a pollutant, and under the terms of the Clean Air Act, the EPA was required to regulate it.
Dude, far be it for me to interrupt your dreams of the libertarian paradise, but we ALREADY HAD privatized security service... you know, in the ancient days before the TSA. It certainly wasn't competitive, and anyone who's ever actually set foot inside an airport would know that it's NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE to put in multiple competing security checkpoint operations in there. That's just plain dumb.
And even there, you frequently didn't have any choice. In the DC area, there are three big airports: National (nobody here calls it "Reagan"), Dulles, and BWI. National and Dulles are both controlled by the Metro Washington Airports Authority, and use all the same vendors. BWI is so far away from those of us in Northern Virginia that it's a giant pain in the ass to use. So it's not like you're realistically going to be able to choose an airport based on the quality of the security staff.
The TSA is actually a relatively new thing - in the past, all the security was private. So, tell me, which airport did you go to where you had a choice of which security company was going to do your screening?
Privatizing all this again just leads back to where we were - with a bunch of even lower performing security staff than we have now, and no effective oversight.
The choice here isn't between the status quo and legalized drugs taxed to the point they cost the same is illegal drugs. The choice is between the status quo and legalized drugs that are taxed heavily, but still a lot cheaper than smuggled drugs. You could raise a TON of revenue on, say, weed, and still have it be a lot cheaper than it is now (as has been shown in states where weed is quasi-legal - prices have dropped enormously). That would pull an enormous amount of money out of the hands of cartels, and put it in government coffers, where it could be used for both better drug treatment AND more border enforcement. Sure, you'd likely have some black market - cigarettes and alcohol both are both traded this way to some extent. But when was the last time a black market cigarette dealer disemboweled someone over a bad trade?
If the narcotics black market evolved into something like the cigarette black market, that would actually be a giant step forward.
And she still doesn't have DSL. So I brought her computer to the library and downloaded all her Windows Updates for free.
So if you're one of those folks who 1) lives in an area not served by broadband, and 2) you have no way to bring any of your computers to where the broadband is... well, yeah, I guess you're screwed. But that does not amount to very many people.
My understanding is that we're beyond the planning stages - substantial portions of the JWST have already been built. If we quit now, we'll just end up throwing that away. From Wikipedia:
Congress is great at creating programs with sweeping missions, underfunding them, and then bitching when the programs go "over budget". Maybe the problems with the JWST aren't with NASA - I'm just saying.
No, actually I don't. It's not on the defense to prove the defendant innocent in the courtroom, and it's not on me to prove him innocent in the court of public opinion. The OP makes all kinds of accusations about Manning and has provided nothing other than personal attacks against people who dare to question any of this.
If one thinks Manning is guilty of something, how about some kind of actual evidence, rather than "OMG you must hate America".
This is just an illustration of how stupid the "debt ceiling" concept is. You agreed to a mortgage with a payment schedule, and now a payment has come due. You didn't set a "debt ceiling" that requires you to get special permission from yourself to actually pay the bill, because... that would be stupid. You explicitly agreed you were going to pay the bill when you made the mortgage.
Mostly, arguments of the form "the government budget should operate more like a family budget" are dumb, because the government isn't like a family. But in the case of the debt ceiling, it's true.
Developers of HURD think HURD is superior to the competition. Film at 11.
I guess we should have specified that we wanted an INDEPENDENT look at whether the HURD was superior.
This has nothing to do with which product is technically superior or who's feeling superior to whom. It has everything to do with the fact that since the release of Duke Nukem Forever, the Hurd is the world's most notorious instance of vaporware. That's what all the sniggering is about, and who can blame us?
And even if your point were true (and it's not), that somehow means that Slashdot is irrelevant? That's a total non sequitur.
[citation needed]. Even the Pentagon admits that there's no evidence anyone was endangered by this leak. So how about naming some of the "people, programs, and processes" that were endangered? I mean, besides the ones that involve the US gov't lying to the American people and then covering it up. I'm sure THOSE programs really were endangered.