Say what you will about the security or reliability of our current power grid, but it's got uptime measured in a whole shitload of 9's.
Funny you should mention that. I had an outage at my San Francisco Bay area townhouse just this morning. (While I was reading the electric bill. B-) ).
I'm in "rotating outage block 50" - i.e. I don't get rotating outages because I'm on the same chunk of the grid with some essential services. Like the local City Hall, cop shop, and fire station (which also went down), serving several miles of the major commute routes for this side of the bay. And maybe the west coast air traffic control center, which is just a few blocks away.
Of course the rural "vacation / retirement cabin" in Nevada has outages every month or so, often lengthly. Power there comes from the nearest substation via several tens of miles of elevated wiring (at an altitude of over a mile in the passes of the Sierras).
It will still be controlled by mega-corporations and will be able to impose the same restrictions as your current ISP. Simply replacing the physical media does not address the net neutrality issue. IMO, the only way this can be addressed is through laws which protect consumers and guarantee free (as in speech) and open access to the internet.
How about, rather than regulating the transit itself, requiring the separation of enterprises that provide "content" from those that provide bit plumbing? That could be done under antitrust laws. Alternatively, downgrading the transport of competing services below one's own could be interpreted as anticompetitive behavior - antitrust again. Remove the business tie-in and you remove much of the incentive for using selective QoS for anything but tuning transport characteristics to improve handling of each stream type.
And providing "Internet Service" with some pieces blocked or throttled, when the Internet originally deployed without such preferential transport, could be interpreted as false advertising. FCC doesn't have the authority? No problem. The FTC has all it needs.
And I have worked for the federal government. You aren't even ALLOWED on a computer that can access the Internet until you go through security training.
If it's anything like the security training I've seen in the private sector, it's a joke.
(My second favorite bit in one I saw was where the mandatory training would only run on Internet Explorer if you wanted your "grade" to count. My favorite part was where the script - which already has your single-login-id-for-everything-in-the-company asks you to enter your password so it can check whether it's a "good" one. B-b )
The question is: Why are they (government departments or enterprises) deploying Windows and related systems at all in a secure environment, rather than removing it entirely as fast as they can retrain their personnel? They're already known to be the most exploitable and exploited systems by orders of magnitude.
... vs someone like PFC Manning, who stupidly did it on purpose.
My impression is that Manning did it after considerable thought, out of a personal moral code which (though you or I may not agree with it) rated the disclosure as a moral act.
So "stupid" (as opposed to, perhaps, "misguided") doesn't necessarily apply to him. But it almost certainly does to whomever designed the handing of all those documents such that he could get hold of them. B-)
Hardly surprising, given that the Tea Party was organized on the Internet in the first place. Its existence was dependent on having a broadly-deployed communication medium that was usable by the common citizens and wasn't subjected to government or mainstream media censorship.
It's the first major US example of the Internet enabling an anti-establishment rebel/liberation movement. (Remember how much talk there used to be about how free network media would enable those? B-) )
You must really be popular at parties when you over-analyze every joke told...
One form of "nerd humor" is to respond to a joke as if it's straight and analyze it deeper until something else funny shows up. (It's similar to "deadpan humor".)
And you may be a redneck if you look forward to the upcoming family reunion because it's a great place to meet girls.
Ha ha. But...
You should be aware that "Redneck" is a racist (implies mixed American Indian and colonist ancestry) and culturalist epithet (coastal urban self-appointed elites looking down on other US cultural groups), on a par with "The N word" or other racial/cultural epithet of your choice.
And given that a major fraction of, for instance, rocket scientists (and other technologists) are Rednecks, you might want to think as carefully before posting such jokes to Slashdot as you would before performing George Carlin's "nigger nigger nigger" bit to an audience in Harlem.
Apple's iWork suite (Pages, KeyNote and Numbers) is rumored to be coming out at $20 per application, c.f. the current version at $80 for the bundle. That's a significant price drop but hardly a collapse (and could be self-compensating if it leads to more sales)...
Also: a significant chunk of the price of an application is the cost of packaging (media production, artwork, packaging and manual printing, package assembly,...), order processing, shipping & handling, middle-man profit margins, and the like. Replacing this with electronic distribution and only one middle-man to pay off results in a much larger share of the per-unit price going to the application provider. So the price can drop considerably before it starts cutting into his per-unit gross. Combined with possibly larger sales due to the lower price point, along with the app store's access to a broad market, and he might make out like a bandit.
Losers: Existing retail outlets, wholesalers, and the rest of the support network those costs paid for.
A bigger hazard for the existing software providers is that electronic distribution drastically lowers the up-front sunk costs of bringing a product to market. This could result in increased competition from less-established and less-funded small developers.
Winners: Small developers and customers. And the app store, of course. B-)
Or the time the Crock Hunter was enthusing about how beautiful a female orangutan was and said female started doing what was clearly courtship behavior toward him. The expression on his face as he gradually realized what was going on - but still has to talk for the camera - was priceless.
(IMHO it's likely that the female, a great ape who was an orphan raised from an infant by humans, probably understood quite a bit of English and had socialized with humans so much she might have found them more attractive than members of her own species. Now here was one who says she's beautiful...)
Since her mind is my own, She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Except that, with the Y changed to X, the sexual-behavior structures of her brain will develop as female. So she'll be thinking of sex about as much as any other woman.
She'll be too closely related to have a significant probability of being sexually attracted to the singer (even in the absence of being raised together). Sexual attractiveness peaks at about the relatedness of second cousins. (Reasonable, since mathematical genetics suggests that an average of marriage to third cousins within a population of about 500 and six outcrosses per generation minimizes the number of generations for new detrimental mutations to be extinguished.)
(And, no, I didn't marry any of my cousins, first, second, third, or with any other known relatedness. Though I did attend the wedding of a second cousin who's IMHO quite a hottie. B-) )
Unfortunately its the aggregate of a pile of small independent undemanding tasks that drags modern PCs to a crawl. And these aren't even bottlenecking the CPU itself... to be honest I don't know what the bottleneck is right now in some items... I'll open up the task manager... cpu utilization will be comfortably low on all cores, hard drive lights are idle so it shouldn't be waiting on IO... and the progress bar is just sitting there... literally 20-30 seconds later things start happening again... WHAT THE HELL? What are the possible bottlenecks that cause this?
Might be thrashing or a task scheduler issue. Try a different OS on that machine to see if the performance changes, or try a similar machine configured with more memory.
But it might also be the Von Neumann Bottleneck. If your working set - either data or instructions - is bigger than the on-chip caches, you get constant cache misses. It's like thrashing but between cache and memory rather than between memory and the swap partition.
That idea used to sound better back when refusing to be searched wasn't considered "probable cause".
Refusal to be searched is not probable cause. Sample decision:
United States v. Fuentes (1997, Ninth Circuit): "Mere refusal to consent to a stop or search does not give rise to reasonable suspicion or probable cause."
I'm not clear on why drag racers would want it; it's not like long engine life is a big issue in racing.
To provide ALL the lubrication for the engine.
- No startup extra wear AT ALL on the bearings, keeping them smooth for the money run.
- No load on the engine, saving all the horses for the power train.
- Optimized pressure - high enough to handle the extra forces on the souped-up engine's bearings.
- KISS.
We all know how American cars compare to the rest of the auto industry when it comes to reliability.
Then your template is at least a decade out-of-date with one of them.
In a TCO showdown between a start-stop car from any of the three companies and a similarly priced American car, what car would you expect to come out on top?
Given that it is Ford I'd suggest that all they are thinking is 'Start-Stop' will be better then 'Stop-break-leak-fall apart-blow smoke-rust'.
You're badly out of date. The Ford family threw out the outside CEO and his cronies some time back and have turned the company around big-time, especially on quality issues.
Ford now produces some of the best stuff on the road (including the highest mileage hybrid), and does better than even the best Japanese cars on reliability (even BEFORE Toyota started having speed control issues).
They're also the only one of the big three that didn't need a government bailout/confiscation to stay open - let alone thrive.
And no I haven't worked for them for over a quarter century, nor do I own their stock. But since their turnaround I sure as hell buy their products.
How many cycles will a flywheel driving starter motor / solenoid setup last?
The extra starts will be with a HOT engine, with the lubrication already circulated, cylinders and coolant warmed, fuel pressurized, etc. This is a MUCH lighter load on the starter, flywheel gear teeth, and bearings.
TFA doesn't mention what will be used, but a spring / torsion system that captured the rotational inertia of the engine to stop it, and then used that stored energy to restart the engine would be great for warm restarts.
And would be a real bummer if the engine happened to misfire on the start - at which point it would have to be cranked anyhow.
Ford once worked on such a system, using block of rubber as the spring. This got the internal nickname "the rubber band engine". That was back before computerized engine control and it was retired undeployed due to a lack of reliability.
Computer-controlled start was a holy grail among the engineers working on the first four generations of engine control computers (back when I was among them). But it's a hard problem to get reliable. So it only started appearing on cars within the last few years - perhaps after hybrids made solving the problem mandatory.
I'm betting on the system being based on the regular starter motor for non-hybrids. The starter is already there, so only software (and maybe materials upgrade for longer life) is required, rather than the addition of a new mechanism. But it would be interesting if the RBE finally makes it to the big time.
That small bit of sugar would be lost in the volume of sugar in a typical diet anyway.
Not necessarily. It may depend on a number of things. Like what sort of sugar it is (sucrose? fructose? lactose? Is the person producing lactase?), when it's taken (empty stomach? blood sugar already low?), what the source is and how it's processed (corn derivative? Were the bacterial enzymes used to produce it purified out {fat chance}?), whether the person is allergic to any of the impurities, etc.
For instance: A common placebo is, or once was, "milk sugar", i.e. lactose. A large part of the world's population does not produce lactase after infancy (and much of the rest drops production of it if not drinking milk regularly), so the sugar reaches their intestines (and the bacterial cultures growing there) intact. Presence of even a small periodic spike of lactose could swing the ongoing war among the various lines of intestinal bacteria in favor of the more benign sorts such as lactobacilis, shifting the pH and reducing the output of other bacterias' toxins.
Don't you think that might have a statistically significant effect on Irritable Bowel Syndrome?
Then there are binders like corn starch. (Corn allergy, anybody? What effects would a general immune system activation have on any number of syndromes? And you can get allergic to practically ANYTHING.) Dies / coloring (liver enzyme reactions...). I could go on.
"placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes"
ORLY?
What if a little sugar (or whatever the supposedly "inert substance" was that made up the pill) actually DOES do something useful to mitigate Irritable Bowel Syndrome?
A "sugar pill" would also cause a small bounce in blood sugar levels, which can have all SORTS of effects - both on the nervous system and a lot of other systems in the body. Ditto starch binders. Ditto traces of calcium. Etc.
Suppose some of the the "inert" placebo tablets, injectable solutions, etc. that have been used in decades of medical research aren't actually all that inert? That could blow a LOT of science out of the water.
Like an electric motor that's been unwrapped, flattened, and repeated over and over along a straight track. The stator coils are in the track and the "rotor" is the catapult runner.
To say "Congress wouldn't do what the President wanted" is the same as saying "the President failed to get Congress to do what he wanted."
Absolutely not.
The Congress is there to determine the "will of the people" and the President to execute it. They are often at odds about what should be done - and it's the job of Congress, not the President, to make the call. The President, as the guy that has to implement the results, has significant input - enough to override a small majority for the opposite view. But if the majority is significant, and the mandate is Constitutional, he has to suck it up and carry out the will of the People as expressed through Congress.
If the President is sufficiently charismatic to sway Congress to his position when it differs from that of a large majority of the population, he's not a great President. He's becoming an Emperor and/or Tyrant.
Now if the Congress deviates from the will of a large majority of the population (i.e. like right now) that's another issue. But it's between the people and Congress.
If you were expecting technical accuracy from our esteemed professional Slashdot editors, that day has not yet arrived.
Let's be fair to the editors. The "railgun" business (and mistake) is from the headline and text of TFA. (This is USUALLY the case when there are such technical mistakes in the headlines and/or text of slashdot articles.)
The editors' job is to sort out what stories are of interest, not to correct the stories (and potentially corrupt them further). The latter is OUR job as reply posters and (to a lesser extent) the job of the submitters (again with the caveat of potential further distortion). B-)
If you want to flame somebody, lay off the editor and flame the submitter.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you will about the security or reliability of our current power grid, but it's got uptime measured in a whole shitload of 9's.
Funny you should mention that. I had an outage at my San Francisco Bay area townhouse just this morning. (While I was reading the electric bill. B-) ).
I'm in "rotating outage block 50" - i.e. I don't get rotating outages because I'm on the same chunk of the grid with some essential services. Like the local City Hall, cop shop, and fire station (which also went down), serving several miles of the major commute routes for this side of the bay. And maybe the west coast air traffic control center, which is just a few blocks away.
Of course the rural "vacation / retirement cabin" in Nevada has outages every month or so, often lengthly. Power there comes from the nearest substation via several tens of miles of elevated wiring (at an altitude of over a mile in the passes of the Sierras).
Well, the bulk electric system is designed to "one event in 10 years", which works out to about 99.95% uptime.
Depends on the duration of the event.
Hams are largely protected by notching, but there are many other vitally important services which are at risk.
Except that the ARRL found out that, in at least one deployment, the BPL company left out the notch filters - both for Ham and for Aircraft bands.
It will still be controlled by mega-corporations and will be able to impose the same restrictions as your current ISP. Simply replacing the physical media does not address the net neutrality issue. IMO, the only way this can be addressed is through laws which protect consumers and guarantee free (as in speech) and open access to the internet.
How about, rather than regulating the transit itself, requiring the separation of enterprises that provide "content" from those that provide bit plumbing? That could be done under antitrust laws. Alternatively, downgrading the transport of competing services below one's own could be interpreted as anticompetitive behavior - antitrust again. Remove the business tie-in and you remove much of the incentive for using selective QoS for anything but tuning transport characteristics to improve handling of each stream type.
And providing "Internet Service" with some pieces blocked or throttled, when the Internet originally deployed without such preferential transport, could be interpreted as false advertising. FCC doesn't have the authority? No problem. The FTC has all it needs.
And I have worked for the federal government. You aren't even ALLOWED on a computer that can access the Internet until you go through security training.
If it's anything like the security training I've seen in the private sector, it's a joke.
(My second favorite bit in one I saw was where the mandatory training would only run on Internet Explorer if you wanted your "grade" to count. My favorite part was where the script - which already has your single-login-id-for-everything-in-the-company asks you to enter your password so it can check whether it's a "good" one. B-b )
The question is: Why are they (government departments or enterprises) deploying Windows and related systems at all in a secure environment, rather than removing it entirely as fast as they can retrain their personnel? They're already known to be the most exploitable and exploited systems by orders of magnitude.
... vs someone like PFC Manning, who stupidly did it on purpose.
My impression is that Manning did it after considerable thought, out of a personal moral code which (though you or I may not agree with it) rated the disclosure as a moral act.
So "stupid" (as opposed to, perhaps, "misguided") doesn't necessarily apply to him. But it almost certainly does to whomever designed the handing of all those documents such that he could get hold of them. B-)
Still if it was some kid, a call from the Interpol to Belarus police, and the employees probably could have they files back.
I think the point was that copies of files were sent to the server, not that the files were sent there and deleted on the original machine.
So it's not that they're missing, just that somebody has access to sensitive information that he shouldn't be able to look at.
They know how to use email, ...
Hardly surprising, given that the Tea Party was organized on the Internet in the first place. Its existence was dependent on having a broadly-deployed communication medium that was usable by the common citizens and wasn't subjected to government or mainstream media censorship.
It's the first major US example of the Internet enabling an anti-establishment rebel/liberation movement. (Remember how much talk there used to be about how free network media would enable those? B-) )
At various points in history, women were considered the prurient gender, the gender that always wanted sex, ...
Good point.
But my point was not whether she'd be interested in sex, but whether she'd be interested in sex with him in particular.
You must really be popular at parties when you over-analyze every joke told...
One form of "nerd humor" is to respond to a joke as if it's straight and analyze it deeper until something else funny shows up. (It's similar to "deadpan humor".)
And you may be a redneck if you look forward to the upcoming family reunion because it's a great place to meet girls.
Ha ha. But...
You should be aware that "Redneck" is a racist (implies mixed American Indian and colonist ancestry) and culturalist epithet (coastal urban self-appointed elites looking down on other US cultural groups), on a par with "The N word" or other racial/cultural epithet of your choice.
And given that a major fraction of, for instance, rocket scientists (and other technologists) are Rednecks, you might want to think as carefully before posting such jokes to Slashdot as you would before performing George Carlin's "nigger nigger nigger" bit to an audience in Harlem.
Apple's iWork suite (Pages, KeyNote and Numbers) is rumored to be coming out at $20 per application, c.f. the current version at $80 for the bundle. That's a significant price drop but hardly a collapse (and could be self-compensating if it leads to more sales) ...
Also: a significant chunk of the price of an application is the cost of packaging (media production, artwork, packaging and manual printing, package assembly, ...), order processing, shipping & handling, middle-man profit margins, and the like. Replacing this with electronic distribution and only one middle-man to pay off results in a much larger share of the per-unit price going to the application provider. So the price can drop considerably before it starts cutting into his per-unit gross. Combined with possibly larger sales due to the lower price point, along with the app store's access to a broad market, and he might make out like a bandit.
Losers: Existing retail outlets, wholesalers, and the rest of the support network those costs paid for.
A bigger hazard for the existing software providers is that electronic distribution drastically lowers the up-front sunk costs of bringing a product to market. This could result in increased competition from less-established and less-funded small developers.
Winners: Small developers and customers. And the app store, of course. B-)
Or the time the Crock Hunter was enthusing about how beautiful a female orangutan was and said female started doing what was clearly courtship behavior toward him. The expression on his face as he gradually realized what was going on - but still has to talk for the camera - was priceless.
(IMHO it's likely that the female, a great ape who was an orphan raised from an infant by humans, probably understood quite a bit of English and had socialized with humans so much she might have found them more attractive than members of her own species. Now here was one who says she's beautiful ...)
Since her mind is my own,
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Except that, with the Y changed to X, the sexual-behavior structures of her brain will develop as female. So she'll be thinking of sex about as much as any other woman.
She'll be too closely related to have a significant probability of being sexually attracted to the singer (even in the absence of being raised together). Sexual attractiveness peaks at about the relatedness of second cousins. (Reasonable, since mathematical genetics suggests that an average of marriage to third cousins within a population of about 500 and six outcrosses per generation minimizes the number of generations for new detrimental mutations to be extinguished.)
(And, no, I didn't marry any of my cousins, first, second, third, or with any other known relatedness. Though I did attend the wedding of a second cousin who's IMHO quite a hottie. B-) )
So, who is marrying who?
Yes.
Unfortunately its the aggregate of a pile of small independent undemanding tasks that drags modern PCs to a crawl. And these aren't even bottlenecking the CPU itself... to be honest I don't know what the bottleneck is right now in some items... I'll open up the task manager... cpu utilization will be comfortably low on all cores, hard drive lights are idle so it shouldn't be waiting on IO... and the progress bar is just sitting there... literally 20-30 seconds later things start happening again... WHAT THE HELL? What are the possible bottlenecks that cause this?
Might be thrashing or a task scheduler issue. Try a different OS on that machine to see if the performance changes, or try a similar machine configured with more memory.
But it might also be the Von Neumann Bottleneck. If your working set - either data or instructions - is bigger than the on-chip caches, you get constant cache misses. It's like thrashing but between cache and memory rather than between memory and the swap partition.
That idea used to sound better back when refusing to be searched wasn't considered "probable cause".
Refusal to be searched is not probable cause. Sample decision:
United States v. Fuentes (1997, Ninth Circuit): "Mere refusal to consent to a stop or search does not give rise to reasonable suspicion or probable cause."
I'm not clear on why drag racers would want it; it's not like long engine life is a big issue in racing.
To provide ALL the lubrication for the engine.
- No startup extra wear AT ALL on the bearings, keeping them smooth for the money run.
- No load on the engine, saving all the horses for the power train.
- Optimized pressure - high enough to handle the extra forces on the souped-up engine's bearings.
- KISS.
We all know how American cars compare to the rest of the auto industry when it comes to reliability.
Then your template is at least a decade out-of-date with one of them.
In a TCO showdown between a start-stop car from any of the three companies and a similarly priced American car, what car would you expect to come out on top?
Ford.
Given that it is Ford I'd suggest that all they are thinking is 'Start-Stop' will be better then 'Stop-break-leak-fall apart-blow smoke-rust'.
You're badly out of date. The Ford family threw out the outside CEO and his cronies some time back and have turned the company around big-time, especially on quality issues.
Ford now produces some of the best stuff on the road (including the highest mileage hybrid), and does better than even the best Japanese cars on reliability (even BEFORE Toyota started having speed control issues).
They're also the only one of the big three that didn't need a government bailout/confiscation to stay open - let alone thrive.
And no I haven't worked for them for over a quarter century, nor do I own their stock. But since their turnaround I sure as hell buy their products.
How many cycles will a flywheel driving starter motor / solenoid setup last?
The extra starts will be with a HOT engine, with the lubrication already circulated, cylinders and coolant warmed, fuel pressurized, etc. This is a MUCH lighter load on the starter, flywheel gear teeth, and bearings.
TFA doesn't mention what will be used, but a spring / torsion system that captured the rotational inertia of the engine to stop it, and then used that stored energy to restart the engine would be great for warm restarts.
And would be a real bummer if the engine happened to misfire on the start - at which point it would have to be cranked anyhow.
Ford once worked on such a system, using block of rubber as the spring. This got the internal nickname "the rubber band engine". That was back before computerized engine control and it was retired undeployed due to a lack of reliability.
Computer-controlled start was a holy grail among the engineers working on the first four generations of engine control computers (back when I was among them). But it's a hard problem to get reliable. So it only started appearing on cars within the last few years - perhaps after hybrids made solving the problem mandatory.
I'm betting on the system being based on the regular starter motor for non-hybrids. The starter is already there, so only software (and maybe materials upgrade for longer life) is required, rather than the addition of a new mechanism. But it would be interesting if the RBE finally makes it to the big time.
That small bit of sugar would be lost in the volume of sugar in a typical diet anyway.
Not necessarily. It may depend on a number of things. Like what sort of sugar it is (sucrose? fructose? lactose? Is the person producing lactase?), when it's taken (empty stomach? blood sugar already low?), what the source is and how it's processed (corn derivative? Were the bacterial enzymes used to produce it purified out {fat chance}?), whether the person is allergic to any of the impurities, etc.
For instance: A common placebo is, or once was, "milk sugar", i.e. lactose. A large part of the world's population does not produce lactase after infancy (and much of the rest drops production of it if not drinking milk regularly), so the sugar reaches their intestines (and the bacterial cultures growing there) intact. Presence of even a small periodic spike of lactose could swing the ongoing war among the various lines of intestinal bacteria in favor of the more benign sorts such as lactobacilis, shifting the pH and reducing the output of other bacterias' toxins.
Don't you think that might have a statistically significant effect on Irritable Bowel Syndrome?
Then there are binders like corn starch. (Corn allergy, anybody? What effects would a general immune system activation have on any number of syndromes? And you can get allergic to practically ANYTHING.) Dies / coloring (liver enzyme reactions ...). I could go on.
Study says:
"placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes"
ORLY?
What if a little sugar (or whatever the supposedly "inert substance" was that made up the pill) actually DOES do something useful to mitigate Irritable Bowel Syndrome?
A "sugar pill" would also cause a small bounce in blood sugar levels, which can have all SORTS of effects - both on the nervous system and a lot of other systems in the body. Ditto starch binders. Ditto traces of calcium. Etc.
Suppose some of the the "inert" placebo tablets, injectable solutions, etc. that have been used in decades of medical research aren't actually all that inert? That could blow a LOT of science out of the water.
How the hell do they work?!
Like an electric motor that's been unwrapped, flattened, and repeated over and over along a straight track. The stator coils are in the track and the "rotor" is the catapult runner.
To say "Congress wouldn't do what the President wanted" is the same as saying "the President failed to get Congress to do what he wanted."
Absolutely not.
The Congress is there to determine the "will of the people" and the President to execute it. They are often at odds about what should be done - and it's the job of Congress, not the President, to make the call. The President, as the guy that has to implement the results, has significant input - enough to override a small majority for the opposite view. But if the majority is significant, and the mandate is Constitutional, he has to suck it up and carry out the will of the People as expressed through Congress.
If the President is sufficiently charismatic to sway Congress to his position when it differs from that of a large majority of the population, he's not a great President. He's becoming an Emperor and/or Tyrant.
Now if the Congress deviates from the will of a large majority of the population (i.e. like right now) that's another issue. But it's between the people and Congress.
If you were expecting technical accuracy from our esteemed professional Slashdot editors, that day has not yet arrived.
Let's be fair to the editors. The "railgun" business (and mistake) is from the headline and text of TFA. (This is USUALLY the case when there are such technical mistakes in the headlines and/or text of slashdot articles.)
The editors' job is to sort out what stories are of interest, not to correct the stories (and potentially corrupt them further). The latter is OUR job as reply posters and (to a lesser extent) the job of the submitters (again with the caveat of potential further distortion). B-)
If you want to flame somebody, lay off the editor and flame the submitter.