Once upon a time (and by that, I mean 15 years ago), after the elections ended, the winners did a little thing called "governing." To the layman, this looked like compromise. Bills passed, budgets were created (and even balanced sometimes), everyone got a little of what they wanted, and nobody got everything they wanted. They system worked.
Now, compromise isn't viewed as a goal, but a flaw. And then everyone wonders why nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed. The herd of assholes taking up residence in the Capitol are too busy using the issues to generate campaign funds through direct mailers and fundraiser web sites; which, by the way, is incentive to not fix the problems, because then you can't beat the opposition over the head with it for donated dollars.
It also provides an incredible opportunity to turn a plastic piece of shit into a national headline, if not one that gets read across the entire globe.
Congratulations, State dept. You just lent a huge megaphone to some guy that really wanted one.
I'm pretty sure that we learned on Sept. 11, 2001 that you don't need guns to hijack airplanes.
Sobecause you don't like guns, and you can make some weak shit argument involving terrorism, we should allow a terrible legal precedent and clear violation of the highest laws of the land?
Sorry, the Constitution trumps any treaty ratified by the Senate, or the Senate just violated their oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
This is clearly a case of the Federal government abridging free speech, so it is exactly about the First Amendment.
Limitations to creating nuclear arms isn't an information thing. The limitations are more related to obtaining materials of the proper quality and composition.
Smashing two lumps of highly enriched U-235 or Pu-239 together isn't that tough. Obtaining the highly-enriched U-235 or Pu-239 is.
There should be a graceful escalation of challenge, like there was in the beginning. Now, it's just level after level of 5-button-press murder, followed by end-of-quest baddies that take 7 attacks rather than 5, followed by a yawn. Then you sit in queues all day long grinding out an equipment set that gets you to an arbitrary item level average which is dictated by random numbers, which then allows you to grind out the next arbitrary item level average which is dictated by random numbers, allowing you into the third tier of random number granted items. And only after replacing every single item you have 3 times, are you even considered for inclusion in a group that can access the "difficult" switch.
Then, you finally hit the "difficult" switch, which ramps the difficulty in a vertical line to make it so that it is impossible to succeed unless you are either with an incredible team of people that can execute perfectly every time, or spend massive amounts of time hitting your head against the wall until you finally knock the wall down to see another wall in front of you.
If you have a regular group of people to do this with, then it can still be entertaining because you're discussing pretty much anything but the game while grinding through it. However, there needs to be a compelling reason for those people to continue showing up, and that disappeared before this massive pander to the Chinese gaming community expansion launched.
WoW has changed from being an entertaining game that you could play for a few hours a week and still be able to experience content, into daily / weekly chores that have to be done or else you can't do stuff.
It ceased to be something I wanted to do, and instead turned into a hamster wheel. Or, if you prefer, stopped being a covert hamster wheel with a sense of reward and turned into an overt hamster wheel with no reward whatsoever.
Just like previous MMOs I've played, that's when I hit the cancel button.
I quit because the majority of the people I played with quit too, and there was zero compelling content.
Since quitting, I've been playing through the Fallout series of games for much less money, and much more enjoyment. Next up (once it releases), Shadowrun Returns. And then after that, Wasteland 2.
Screw Blizzard and their wallet-bleed business strategy.
They can't move it. It's not barrels, it's leaky underground tanks of the nastiest liquid ever created by man - big ones. They can't even figure out how to pump that caustic radioactive shit across the property it's already on, much less move it across a border or three.
The biggest problem with things like this is that budgets and schedules are based on work that has been done before. Since no one has built a facility like this before, it's pretty much impossible to budget and schedule the construction of one. Also, it's not like you can go buy vitrification parts off a shelf somewhere, so the technology and equipment will have to be invented, hand-built, tested, and installed.
Hanford's waste isn't fuel rods. It's what fuel rods are turned into after being dissolved in acids to extract weapons-grade Plutonium. The vast majority is in a liquid state, combined with caustic chemicals as a waste product from the PUREX process.
Except that the waste at Hanford is waste from nuclear weapon production. It's reactor waste, where the fuel was under-utilized so that it would maximize the amount of Pu-239 created, then dissolved in caustic and nasty chemicals in order to extract that Pu-239 from all the other nasty shit. Then, as people did in the 1960s, they put it in tanks in the ground, because what could possibly go wrong with putting radioactive acid in the ground, within walking distance of the second largest river in North America?
To say that the problems at Hanford have nuclear power to blame is like saying that the mining industry is to blame for drone strikes, because they both use explosives. The problems at Hanford are completely separate.
So wait, they beat the single-digit of designs that used Intel Atom and failed, combined with the almost nothing of Android tablets not made by Samsung?
Well, by his own admission, they aren't made of steel; or are a very soft and hollow steel. One was crushed with a hammer in 1974 by mexican drug lords...
I could totally see Microsoft doing this to shove their compulsory licensing down business' throats: "If you enroll in the Enterprise Agreement, not only do you get the MDOP suite and App-V, but you gain the ability to not be crippled by Metro! Only in Windows 8 Enterprise Edition though!"
Also, breaking up a large company for a reason such as that is inherently stupid, because the company grew that large based upon combining efforts and creating efficiencies. A large retail enterprise uses a logistics chain to support entire regions of stores, creating cost advantages by centralizing distribution and product delivery. Breaking that up will only raise prices to the end user as redundant facilities and redundant transportation would be necessary, where they were not before.
Breaking up that company just put more trucks on the freeway to make the same deliveries, using more fuel and creating more pollution; with exactly zero value created.
This meme is very popular, but sometimes the task is much easier to state than execute.
I work for one of those "large companies" where we're on year 3 of a 10-year project to modernize the 18+ merchandizing systems dating back to the 1980s we use into one next-generation system that can be used for current merchandizing and ordering, as well as e-commerce and mobility applications. You can't just do that in a few weeks and expect 2600 stores and 50 manufacturing plants / logistics facilities to be turned around and done, unless you want to shut the entire company down for a few weeks and hire an army of IT guys at unimaginable cost. It takes time to develop, test, test again, develop again, redesign, develop more, test more, enter the hundreds of thousands of SKUs, product pictures and data, test some more, pilot, and then deploy and support.
Getting the C-level executives to not only understand the problem, but agree to be patient and keep paying the bills for the capital expenditure to get it done is not easy, but possible. It's especially hard when in their minds, what we're using now still works now, and would continue working into the foreseeable future.
We've had these scenarios come up time and time again - we've sequestered off a Windows 2000 Server on it's own network because it's the RIP for a $60,000 film printer for creating press plates. The business didn't think that spending $60k on a new film printer just because "IT doesn't want Windows 2000 Server around anymore" was a good justification.
Or, the Accounts Payable department using incredibly expensive batch scanners for ingesting invoices which never worked right unless it was using a specific software that only runs on OS/2. That one left us with one segment of Token Ring that was left on the network because of the amount of effort, spend, and time necessary to completely overhaul the AP systems and procedures; and that was after someone spending practically 4 months to make those scanners work on any other hardware and OS combination you can think of.
There's plenty more I can think of off the top of my head from just my company. If there isn't a positive return on the spend, it doesn't get spent. Change for the sake of "keeping up" isn't useful, especially when that capital can be instead used to open a new store, or make a manufacturing plant run 10% more efficiently by changing out some forklifts or something.
IT departments aren't incompetent, they are a cost center. Business doesn't like throwing money into cost centers unless there is a return on that investment.
There are 15 different versions coded to a specific browser because it was done 10 years ago when that specific browser had a 100% market share in the business, and 80%+ outside of it. They could either spend 2x the money to target something that wasn't necessary to eliminate what was seen as low risk at the time, or get it done faster and cheaper the way that they did, making the people who own the capital budgets happy.
Just because there was a massive shift in market share doesn't mean that people "sucked" 10 years ago. It's real easy to trash those decisions now, but the landscape was incredibly different then.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time (and by that, I mean 15 years ago), after the elections ended, the winners did a little thing called "governing." To the layman, this looked like compromise. Bills passed, budgets were created (and even balanced sometimes), everyone got a little of what they wanted, and nobody got everything they wanted. They system worked.
Now, compromise isn't viewed as a goal, but a flaw. And then everyone wonders why nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed. The herd of assholes taking up residence in the Capitol are too busy using the issues to generate campaign funds through direct mailers and fundraiser web sites; which, by the way, is incentive to not fix the problems, because then you can't beat the opposition over the head with it for donated dollars.
It also provides an incredible opportunity to turn a plastic piece of shit into a national headline, if not one that gets read across the entire globe.
Congratulations, State dept. You just lent a huge megaphone to some guy that really wanted one.
It's also treasonous to swear a legal oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and then do everything you can to not do that.
See: the 537 elected members of the Federal Government, give or take a few.
Not voting is an overt vote for status quo. Clearly you don't care enough to participate, so you have no problems with what is happening.
I'm pretty sure that we learned on Sept. 11, 2001 that you don't need guns to hijack airplanes.
Sobecause you don't like guns, and you can make some weak shit argument involving terrorism, we should allow a terrible legal precedent and clear violation of the highest laws of the land?
Sorry, the Constitution trumps any treaty ratified by the Senate, or the Senate just violated their oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
This is clearly a case of the Federal government abridging free speech, so it is exactly about the First Amendment.
Limitations to creating nuclear arms isn't an information thing. The limitations are more related to obtaining materials of the proper quality and composition.
Smashing two lumps of highly enriched U-235 or Pu-239 together isn't that tough. Obtaining the highly-enriched U-235 or Pu-239 is.
There should be a graceful escalation of challenge, like there was in the beginning. Now, it's just level after level of 5-button-press murder, followed by end-of-quest baddies that take 7 attacks rather than 5, followed by a yawn. Then you sit in queues all day long grinding out an equipment set that gets you to an arbitrary item level average which is dictated by random numbers, which then allows you to grind out the next arbitrary item level average which is dictated by random numbers, allowing you into the third tier of random number granted items. And only after replacing every single item you have 3 times, are you even considered for inclusion in a group that can access the "difficult" switch.
Then, you finally hit the "difficult" switch, which ramps the difficulty in a vertical line to make it so that it is impossible to succeed unless you are either with an incredible team of people that can execute perfectly every time, or spend massive amounts of time hitting your head against the wall until you finally knock the wall down to see another wall in front of you.
If you have a regular group of people to do this with, then it can still be entertaining because you're discussing pretty much anything but the game while grinding through it. However, there needs to be a compelling reason for those people to continue showing up, and that disappeared before this massive pander to the Chinese gaming community expansion launched.
WoW has changed from being an entertaining game that you could play for a few hours a week and still be able to experience content, into daily / weekly chores that have to be done or else you can't do stuff.
It ceased to be something I wanted to do, and instead turned into a hamster wheel. Or, if you prefer, stopped being a covert hamster wheel with a sense of reward and turned into an overt hamster wheel with no reward whatsoever.
Just like previous MMOs I've played, that's when I hit the cancel button.
Add to your list Homeland, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead.
I quit because the majority of the people I played with quit too, and there was zero compelling content.
Since quitting, I've been playing through the Fallout series of games for much less money, and much more enjoyment. Next up (once it releases), Shadowrun Returns. And then after that, Wasteland 2.
Screw Blizzard and their wallet-bleed business strategy.
Yeah, but they're renewable. You're just returning the patchouli carbon back to the environment it came from to begin with. Like a wood fireplace!
They can't move it. It's not barrels, it's leaky underground tanks of the nastiest liquid ever created by man - big ones. They can't even figure out how to pump that caustic radioactive shit across the property it's already on, much less move it across a border or three.
Except that this is waste from nuclear weapons production, dating back to the 1940s.
Please explain how LFTR solves a problem that's already existed for 70 years?
The biggest problem with things like this is that budgets and schedules are based on work that has been done before. Since no one has built a facility like this before, it's pretty much impossible to budget and schedule the construction of one. Also, it's not like you can go buy vitrification parts off a shelf somewhere, so the technology and equipment will have to be invented, hand-built, tested, and installed.
Hanford's waste isn't fuel rods. It's what fuel rods are turned into after being dissolved in acids to extract weapons-grade Plutonium. The vast majority is in a liquid state, combined with caustic chemicals as a waste product from the PUREX process.
Except that the waste at Hanford is waste from nuclear weapon production. It's reactor waste, where the fuel was under-utilized so that it would maximize the amount of Pu-239 created, then dissolved in caustic and nasty chemicals in order to extract that Pu-239 from all the other nasty shit. Then, as people did in the 1960s, they put it in tanks in the ground, because what could possibly go wrong with putting radioactive acid in the ground, within walking distance of the second largest river in North America?
To say that the problems at Hanford have nuclear power to blame is like saying that the mining industry is to blame for drone strikes, because they both use explosives. The problems at Hanford are completely separate.
So wait, they beat the single-digit of designs that used Intel Atom and failed, combined with the almost nothing of Android tablets not made by Samsung?
How impressive!
Well, by his own admission, they aren't made of steel; or are a very soft and hollow steel. One was crushed with a hammer in 1974 by mexican drug lords...
Man, a product that millions of people use, and are fiercely loyal to, and generates untold millions in revenue over the last 20 years is a failure?
I'd love to fail like that.
I could totally see Microsoft doing this to shove their compulsory licensing down business' throats: "If you enroll in the Enterprise Agreement, not only do you get the MDOP suite and App-V, but you gain the ability to not be crippled by Metro! Only in Windows 8 Enterprise Edition though!"
Also, breaking up a large company for a reason such as that is inherently stupid, because the company grew that large based upon combining efforts and creating efficiencies. A large retail enterprise uses a logistics chain to support entire regions of stores, creating cost advantages by centralizing distribution and product delivery. Breaking that up will only raise prices to the end user as redundant facilities and redundant transportation would be necessary, where they were not before.
Breaking up that company just put more trucks on the freeway to make the same deliveries, using more fuel and creating more pollution; with exactly zero value created.
This meme is very popular, but sometimes the task is much easier to state than execute.
I work for one of those "large companies" where we're on year 3 of a 10-year project to modernize the 18+ merchandizing systems dating back to the 1980s we use into one next-generation system that can be used for current merchandizing and ordering, as well as e-commerce and mobility applications. You can't just do that in a few weeks and expect 2600 stores and 50 manufacturing plants / logistics facilities to be turned around and done, unless you want to shut the entire company down for a few weeks and hire an army of IT guys at unimaginable cost. It takes time to develop, test, test again, develop again, redesign, develop more, test more, enter the hundreds of thousands of SKUs, product pictures and data, test some more, pilot, and then deploy and support.
Getting the C-level executives to not only understand the problem, but agree to be patient and keep paying the bills for the capital expenditure to get it done is not easy, but possible. It's especially hard when in their minds, what we're using now still works now, and would continue working into the foreseeable future.
We've had these scenarios come up time and time again - we've sequestered off a Windows 2000 Server on it's own network because it's the RIP for a $60,000 film printer for creating press plates. The business didn't think that spending $60k on a new film printer just because "IT doesn't want Windows 2000 Server around anymore" was a good justification.
Or, the Accounts Payable department using incredibly expensive batch scanners for ingesting invoices which never worked right unless it was using a specific software that only runs on OS/2. That one left us with one segment of Token Ring that was left on the network because of the amount of effort, spend, and time necessary to completely overhaul the AP systems and procedures; and that was after someone spending practically 4 months to make those scanners work on any other hardware and OS combination you can think of.
There's plenty more I can think of off the top of my head from just my company. If there isn't a positive return on the spend, it doesn't get spent. Change for the sake of "keeping up" isn't useful, especially when that capital can be instead used to open a new store, or make a manufacturing plant run 10% more efficiently by changing out some forklifts or something.
IT departments aren't incompetent, they are a cost center. Business doesn't like throwing money into cost centers unless there is a return on that investment.
There are 15 different versions coded to a specific browser because it was done 10 years ago when that specific browser had a 100% market share in the business, and 80%+ outside of it. They could either spend 2x the money to target something that wasn't necessary to eliminate what was seen as low risk at the time, or get it done faster and cheaper the way that they did, making the people who own the capital budgets happy.
Just because there was a massive shift in market share doesn't mean that people "sucked" 10 years ago. It's real easy to trash those decisions now, but the landscape was incredibly different then.