That's because posers that buy a proper 911 crash it, because they don't understand how a rear-engine car drives.
It turns out having the engine's weight hanging past the rear axle really matters, and Porsche has spent the last 30 years being stubborn and making tiny design improvements to counteract this effect, rather than what the Italians did - move the engine forward to the middle.
Because if you send a military unit crashing through an embassy showing that you have absolutely zero respect for diplomatic law, it opens up the hundreds of embassies and consulates that the US Department of State has scattered across the globe to similar.
The people in charge might be completely corrupt chucklefucks, but they do actually think about some of this shit before they do it.
It's quite different to grab a guy off the street and stuff him into a van and drive him to a private air strip where you've got a Gulfstream waiting, then it is to "storm" the embassy of a sovereign nation (an act of war) to grab someone.
In diplomatic law, that is invading the country who owns the embassy.
On display: the tolerance and acceptance of the 'progressives' wanting to replay the worst episodes of the 1940s - political purges involving the execution of people that don't agree with you.
Of course someone who writes a thesis on what could possibly happen in a post-Castro Cuba absolutely has to be a CIA spy. Especially if she was working for her country in the foreign service of her country at an Embassy.
And really, what anti-Castro group bigger than two or three Cuban exiles with a megaphone don't have CIA funding at some point?
So she has ties to two anti-Castro groups that get CIA money.
Are there any anti-Castro groups that DON'T get CIA money? I'm pretty sure that I could move to Miami and get some anti-Castro letterhead printed up and get some CIA money.
Well, then we agree on that. I apologize for the snark, but it's hard to tell some comments where the poster is in favor of human space flight from the other posters that just call everyone "space nutters" and think that human space flight is a total waste, even though Hubble would have actually been a total waste if it wasn't for human space flight to go and fix the fucking thing.
We didn't go to the moon in one easy step either - that's what Mercury and Gemini were for. A similar approach can and should be used for interplanetary exploration. This is, of course, massively over-simplified. Much like Apollo, getting to Mars would take materials and technology that haven't been invented yet. The good news is that in creating a need for something to do the job, it might actually get invented.
Oh, it would be hard? Well I guess we'd better all give up and go home. There's no point in even studying how it could be done, because a guy on Slashdot says that we can't do it in the next 10 minutes.
People once said it would be hard to sail across oceans too.
You are acting like the surface of Mars is Plutonium dust or something. It is not. And, it turns out we've spent a lot of time figuring out how to shield spacecraft from radiation.
I mean, we all know that every astronaut that has spent time in space is a cancer-riddled miserable person. Wait... no, they're healthier than you or me.
I work on a team that writes billing and invoicing software for my company. I can tell you with first hand experience that accountants have no fucking clue how a computer works, other than what they can do in Excel. Because of this, they want to do EVERYTHING in Excel whether it's even remotely the right tool or not.
Example: someone wants to export the general ledger from the billing system to an Excel spreadsheet, and doesn't understand why a two million row data set might be a problem for Excel.
These issues are exactly why "Business Intelligence" tools exist - to provide Excel-ish functions, backed by a real database. But they don't want to hear that, because it means that Excel might actually have limits, and they would have to learn a new tool.
Getting closer to TFA, I'm sure that somewhere in the IRS they have honest-to-goodness network engineers who set this shit up, or at least contractors that they paid to do it. Hardware failures happen in any data center, and you try to mitigate with redundancy and automatic fail-over. But it's never perfect, there's always something that gets missed, or something that doesn't work exactly as expected.
Because the US Tax Code is so fucked that some people don't ever know if they will be getting a refund or owe more until they do the paperwork in February.
I am one of those people. Last year I owed, this year I'm getting a refund.
I would absolutely LOVE a "-1,/dev/null" moderation option. It would increase the usefulness of the mod system, and be of a flavor that this site would immediately recognize.
Someone responding with nothing but "no" or epithets, or a profane screed that doesn't actually articulate any particular point of view other than questioning the heritage of the person being replied to is a shit post, and should be moderated accordingly.
Well, if moderators are doing what they are supposed to (Yeah, I know... how often does that actually happen?) they would be browsing at -1 in order to spot those kinds of comments and up-vote them accordingly.
There's already a mechanism in place for this situation.
Anonymous posting is still incredibly useful - I've seen a lot of comments from people inside the organization that TFA was about, where they wanted to clear up a few points, but couldn't do it in a way that is traceable back to them because they aren't authorized to speak on any kind of official record for the company.
Anonymity should be celebrated, rather than abolished.
Oh, then here's a quick hit list to endear the new corporate overlords onto the masses around here:
1. Unicode support. This should have been in place a decade ago.
2. HTTPS. Seriously now - we're expected to log in with a password, but you're probably still doing some half assed MD5 hashing or something that was broken years ago.
3. Revert whatever was done to metamoderation to what it was before. I haven't even seen anything about metamod in years, even though I used to see it all the time. Is it hidden now? Is it the pot of gold at the end of some rainbow you can never reach?
4. If you want a good laugh, check the box that says "Disable Advertising" and then witness that the front page is still festooned with ads. Big bar across the bottom of click-bait garbage I'd expect to see on Yahoo News. Late-loading boxes on the top-right of the front page that displace my messages right as I'm trying to click on them. Either just get rid of this lie-in-the-form-of-a-checkbox, or make it actually disable advertising.
5. Move the poll back to being a SlashBox on the right side, so that it can always be seen on the front page. It's useless to have it embedded as a story that crawls off the front, where people will stop responding. Larger sample size means more interesting results.
6. Hire at least one editor that understands basic spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Or, send a couple of the ones you've got to a remedial English course at the local community college. Yes, typos happen. No, not with the shocking frequency that we see from these "editors."
7. Contrary to what some others have said, low comment count doesn't necessarily correlate to the popularity of a subject. I will read discussions about topics that I have no comments to make, because I don't know enough about the subject to add anything to the discussion. The great thing about this: I'm learning about it right then, so that in the future I might be able to intelligently discuss it.
8. In the current moderation system, there is no way to denote that something is factually incorrect, so Troll, Overrated, Flamebait, etc. get misused. There should be a -1, Incorrect mod; if you've taken care of #3 on this list, you already have a system in place to prevent abuse.
9. The "lameness filter" really sucks, and prevents people from being able to post code snippets. This seems antithetical to a site for nerds that is 'sister' to an Open Source hosting site.
10. Rely less on the 'firehose' voting and more on curated content. Trust your editors - even though we bitch and moan about stories from $EDITOR, they've been here a while and understand the crowd. If they find something interesting, other people here probably will too. I would imagine that MANY people never even bother with the firehose, because the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible.
11. When relying on your editors, encourage them to editorialize less. This is what comments are for, and their opinion should be nowhere near the posted summary. Countless examples are available, but the most famous would be the introduction of the iPod which famously was disregarded by an editor here as "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
12. If a story on the front page is repeatedly tagged as "dupe" it should probably get called to an editor's attention. Or, instead of putting a bandage on the problem, come up with a better way to prevent dupe story posts.
It's within my rights as CEO to refuse service to a black / white / brown / old / young / gay / straight / christian / jewish / muslim / female / male person if I'm refusing service for a legitimate reason that has nothing to do with any of those things. Like, for example, if they are being a whiny twat because I didn't adjust my entire company's launch event to fit his schedule, and allow him to cut to the front of the line above any and every other paying customer also in attendance because he feels entitled.
Actually, TFA says that this guy was a douche many times over to BMW, and they never said they were taking the car back. That's the point he was trying to make.
Never mind that BMW probably deals with orders of magnitudes more douchebags then Tesla does, so it's just a regular thing for them. Same as Audi, Mercedes, Infiniti, Acura, Jaguar, etc. Douchebags come with the territory of selling luxury cars.
And yet, so did everyone else that was there, and they weren't doing the piss-and-moan. Why is this guy special and deserving of better treatment than everyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
That's because posers that buy a proper 911 crash it, because they don't understand how a rear-engine car drives.
It turns out having the engine's weight hanging past the rear axle really matters, and Porsche has spent the last 30 years being stubborn and making tiny design improvements to counteract this effect, rather than what the Italians did - move the engine forward to the middle.
Because if you send a military unit crashing through an embassy showing that you have absolutely zero respect for diplomatic law, it opens up the hundreds of embassies and consulates that the US Department of State has scattered across the globe to similar.
The people in charge might be completely corrupt chucklefucks, but they do actually think about some of this shit before they do it.
It's quite different to grab a guy off the street and stuff him into a van and drive him to a private air strip where you've got a Gulfstream waiting, then it is to "storm" the embassy of a sovereign nation (an act of war) to grab someone.
In diplomatic law, that is invading the country who owns the embassy.
On display: the tolerance and acceptance of the 'progressives' wanting to replay the worst episodes of the 1940s - political purges involving the execution of people that don't agree with you.
Well done, idiot.
Typical Conspiracy-nut bullshit.
Of course someone who writes a thesis on what could possibly happen in a post-Castro Cuba absolutely has to be a CIA spy. Especially if she was working for her country in the foreign service of her country at an Embassy.
And really, what anti-Castro group bigger than two or three Cuban exiles with a megaphone don't have CIA funding at some point?
There's a reason why Sweden has one of the highest rape rates in the world
Don't tell Trump! He'll want Norway to build a wall and make the Swedes pay for it!
So she has ties to two anti-Castro groups that get CIA money.
Are there any anti-Castro groups that DON'T get CIA money? I'm pretty sure that I could move to Miami and get some anti-Castro letterhead printed up and get some CIA money.
Well, then we agree on that. I apologize for the snark, but it's hard to tell some comments where the poster is in favor of human space flight from the other posters that just call everyone "space nutters" and think that human space flight is a total waste, even though Hubble would have actually been a total waste if it wasn't for human space flight to go and fix the fucking thing.
We didn't go to the moon in one easy step either - that's what Mercury and Gemini were for. A similar approach can and should be used for interplanetary exploration. This is, of course, massively over-simplified. Much like Apollo, getting to Mars would take materials and technology that haven't been invented yet. The good news is that in creating a need for something to do the job, it might actually get invented.
So you agree with me then. There is a such thing as shitposting, and it gets moderated accordingly in the existing system.
Oh, it would be hard? Well I guess we'd better all give up and go home. There's no point in even studying how it could be done, because a guy on Slashdot says that we can't do it in the next 10 minutes.
People once said it would be hard to sail across oceans too.
You are acting like the surface of Mars is Plutonium dust or something. It is not. And, it turns out we've spent a lot of time figuring out how to shield spacecraft from radiation.
I mean, we all know that every astronaut that has spent time in space is a cancer-riddled miserable person. Wait... no, they're healthier than you or me.
I work on a team that writes billing and invoicing software for my company. I can tell you with first hand experience that accountants have no fucking clue how a computer works, other than what they can do in Excel. Because of this, they want to do EVERYTHING in Excel whether it's even remotely the right tool or not.
Example: someone wants to export the general ledger from the billing system to an Excel spreadsheet, and doesn't understand why a two million row data set might be a problem for Excel.
These issues are exactly why "Business Intelligence" tools exist - to provide Excel-ish functions, backed by a real database. But they don't want to hear that, because it means that Excel might actually have limits, and they would have to learn a new tool.
Getting closer to TFA, I'm sure that somewhere in the IRS they have honest-to-goodness network engineers who set this shit up, or at least contractors that they paid to do it. Hardware failures happen in any data center, and you try to mitigate with redundancy and automatic fail-over. But it's never perfect, there's always something that gets missed, or something that doesn't work exactly as expected.
Because the US Tax Code is so fucked that some people don't ever know if they will be getting a refund or owe more until they do the paperwork in February.
I am one of those people. Last year I owed, this year I'm getting a refund.
Are you posting from Zimbabwe? Because that's a strategy that worked out so well for Robert Mugabe, and also for the Weimar Republic 100 years ago.
I would absolutely LOVE a "-1, /dev/null" moderation option. It would increase the usefulness of the mod system, and be of a flavor that this site would immediately recognize.
Yeah, cloning Reddit isn't useful, as you just throw out the good that this system has in favor of the widely-documented bad that Reddit has.
There are ways to improve upon both, that don't involve a wholesale rip and replace of one for the other.
There's "trash" and then true shitposting.
Someone responding with nothing but "no" or epithets, or a profane screed that doesn't actually articulate any particular point of view other than questioning the heritage of the person being replied to is a shit post, and should be moderated accordingly.
Well, if moderators are doing what they are supposed to (Yeah, I know... how often does that actually happen?) they would be browsing at -1 in order to spot those kinds of comments and up-vote them accordingly.
There's already a mechanism in place for this situation.
Anonymous posting is still incredibly useful - I've seen a lot of comments from people inside the organization that TFA was about, where they wanted to clear up a few points, but couldn't do it in a way that is traceable back to them because they aren't authorized to speak on any kind of official record for the company.
Anonymity should be celebrated, rather than abolished.
Oh, then here's a quick hit list to endear the new corporate overlords onto the masses around here:
1. Unicode support. This should have been in place a decade ago.
2. HTTPS. Seriously now - we're expected to log in with a password, but you're probably still doing some half assed MD5 hashing or something that was broken years ago.
3. Revert whatever was done to metamoderation to what it was before. I haven't even seen anything about metamod in years, even though I used to see it all the time. Is it hidden now? Is it the pot of gold at the end of some rainbow you can never reach?
4. If you want a good laugh, check the box that says "Disable Advertising" and then witness that the front page is still festooned with ads. Big bar across the bottom of click-bait garbage I'd expect to see on Yahoo News. Late-loading boxes on the top-right of the front page that displace my messages right as I'm trying to click on them. Either just get rid of this lie-in-the-form-of-a-checkbox, or make it actually disable advertising.
5. Move the poll back to being a SlashBox on the right side, so that it can always be seen on the front page. It's useless to have it embedded as a story that crawls off the front, where people will stop responding. Larger sample size means more interesting results.
6. Hire at least one editor that understands basic spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Or, send a couple of the ones you've got to a remedial English course at the local community college. Yes, typos happen. No, not with the shocking frequency that we see from these "editors."
7. Contrary to what some others have said, low comment count doesn't necessarily correlate to the popularity of a subject. I will read discussions about topics that I have no comments to make, because I don't know enough about the subject to add anything to the discussion. The great thing about this: I'm learning about it right then, so that in the future I might be able to intelligently discuss it.
8. In the current moderation system, there is no way to denote that something is factually incorrect, so Troll, Overrated, Flamebait, etc. get misused. There should be a -1, Incorrect mod; if you've taken care of #3 on this list, you already have a system in place to prevent abuse.
9. The "lameness filter" really sucks, and prevents people from being able to post code snippets. This seems antithetical to a site for nerds that is 'sister' to an Open Source hosting site.
10. Rely less on the 'firehose' voting and more on curated content. Trust your editors - even though we bitch and moan about stories from $EDITOR, they've been here a while and understand the crowd. If they find something interesting, other people here probably will too. I would imagine that MANY people never even bother with the firehose, because the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible.
11. When relying on your editors, encourage them to editorialize less. This is what comments are for, and their opinion should be nowhere near the posted summary. Countless examples are available, but the most famous would be the introduction of the iPod which famously was disregarded by an editor here as "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
12. If a story on the front page is repeatedly tagged as "dupe" it should probably get called to an editor's attention. Or, instead of putting a bandage on the problem, come up with a better way to prevent dupe story posts.
That's about all I can think of right now.
Mine is lower than yours.
But only just.
You must be new here....
It's within my rights as CEO to refuse service to a black / white / brown / old / young / gay / straight / christian / jewish / muslim / female / male person if I'm refusing service for a legitimate reason that has nothing to do with any of those things. Like, for example, if they are being a whiny twat because I didn't adjust my entire company's launch event to fit his schedule, and allow him to cut to the front of the line above any and every other paying customer also in attendance because he feels entitled.
Actually, TFA says that this guy was a douche many times over to BMW, and they never said they were taking the car back. That's the point he was trying to make.
Never mind that BMW probably deals with orders of magnitudes more douchebags then Tesla does, so it's just a regular thing for them. Same as Audi, Mercedes, Infiniti, Acura, Jaguar, etc. Douchebags come with the territory of selling luxury cars.
And yet, so did everyone else that was there, and they weren't doing the piss-and-moan. Why is this guy special and deserving of better treatment than everyone else?
Fuck him and his entitlement complex.