If it's powered of the grid when it isn't windy out, and it's powered entirely by renewable energy, wouldn't it be powered entirely by renewable energy if it used the grid all the time?
Sounds like they have excess generation capacity. They sell the power to the grid when the wind is high and buy it from the grid when the wind is too low to supply the local loads. If they buy less than they sell they can honestly say the load is (at least on the average) powered entirely by renewable resources.
It's not even a cheat: Peak wind power usually occurs when the peak demand on the grid is occurring. The wind farm doesn't just displace more fuel-burning at peak times than the data center causes at offpeak time. It displaces more costly fuels - both in money and pollution potential.
Is this one of those multi-level marketing (a.k.a. pyramid) schemes?
While they're similar, and MLMs attract scammers and workarounds to convert them, MLM and pyramid schemes are distinct.
In a pyramid scheme, all or part of the cost of joining up becomes income to the members of the path through the pyramid above the new member. In a MLM, only part of the price paid for the sales of actual products is raked off. (Think of a MLM as a manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer network with the wholesaler (and his cut) replaced by a pyramid of "associates".)
Pyramid schemes are generally illegal. MLMs are generally legal, if they keep their act clean.
Which is a very big IF. There are lots of ways for a MLM to skate around the rules and become a pyramid scheme. And even those which don't tend to become cultish and drift toward scamming.
But it does specify that anyone who advocates or takes steps to modify the portion of the constitution...
limiting the president to a single term... immediately loses any government office he holds and is banned from holding a government office for ten years.
... peculiarly, the Honduran Constitution does not include an impeachment procedure
But it does specify that anyone who advocates or takes steps to modify the portion of the constitution immediately loses any government office he holds and is banned from holding a government office for ten years.
This is what Zelaya did. The head of his party called for his ouster and the Supreme Court ruled that he was in violation of this section and no longer the President.
Even if the steps weren't explicitly laid out in advance this sounds like a constitutional impeachment procedure to me.
And it was a good rationale...when the populace was armed with muskets, and the government was armed with muskets.
Actually, at the time the population was armed with accurate-at-a-distance RIFLES (compared to the Brits' smoothbores), cannon, warships (merchant ships often carried cannon to fend off pirates and military ships of other countries).
Which doesn't really matter. Because you can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet.
The "liberator" pistol was a one-shot (and unscrew parts to reload) "zip gun". Made mostly of cheap stamped parts at a cost of under $10 it was air dropped by the thousands into German occupied areas in WW II. It came with a handgrip full of extra rounds and an instruction manual in comic book form:
- Here's how to load and fire it.
- Sneak up on the German soldier.
- Shoot him point-blank.
- Take HIS rifle and ammo.
- Give the Liberator and the remaining rounds to another resistance fighter who doesn't have a gun yet.
Now the populace is armed with, at best, assault rifles, and the government is armed with tanks.
Tanks without infantry support are cans of soldiers waiting to be cooked. Tanks WITH infantry support are crowds of soldiers waiting to be shot, blown up, burned, gassed,...
A good varmint gun qualifies as an exceptional sniper rifle. A shotgun at appropriate ranges is more firepower against advancing troops - though for a shorter time - than a machine gun.
But if the US government came against its own people you can bet that a bunch of 'em will honor their oaths to the constitution over orders. Think large-scale desertion and coat-turning WITH equipment. Opening of the armories for the population. Lots of ex-military, reserve, and state militia types (with THEIR armories full of stuff - including the tanks you're so concerned about) will be out on a constitutional side, too.
A determined population armed with a few guns can eventually prevail. (Even with a VERY few VERY low power guns they can do quite well. The starving denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto held off the bulk of the German Army for better than a week starting with a dozen handguns and sporting rifles.)
As to capabilities: The typical private gun owner who practices occasionally can shoot rings around the typical non-SWAT policeman.
The Second Amendment isn't just about making it possible for the people to resist the tyranny that the founders thought any government would gravitate toward. It's to make the population's advantage SO OVERWHELMING that no government official could delude himself that he might be able to win.
As I understand it the president in question was "ousted" by legal proceedings before the country's supreme court, brought by their legislature in the proper constitutional manner. Then their military followed the proper procedure to implement the decision.
It's as if a US president were impeached, tried, and convicted, his proper successor took over, and the military, police, and bureaucracy all acknowledged this and followed the legal orders of the new president.
A coup, on the other hand, is a takover of a country by a faction of the military, outside of normal legal proceedings (though they generally make some mouth noises about it being the right, proper, and allegedly temporary thing to do - the better to keep theose supporting the ousted government off balance.)
So will everybody on slashdot (or at least the bulk of us who have a clue) PLEASE stop calling it a COUP?
Yes I know our own press and government are using the C-word. But WE know better, don't we.
Back on the Xanadu project we called the single-server model for content the "Library of Alexandria" problem: A disaster wiping out the server (and its backups), like the burning of the Library of Alexandria when, for many works, it contained the only (or or one of very few) copies, permanently removes the documents served by that repository from the literature. (The solution is the "multiple record" - mass printing of dead-tree books prior to automation, broad distribution of the immutable content and versioning information in the case of an "electronic literature".)
Of course centralized and mutable serving of content also enables, and greatly simplifies, the "rewriting of history" described by Orwell in the two books in question. So it is particularly ironic that these are the ones that were pulled.
The summary would seem to indicate a classic methodology error: A selected sample.
Were kids who were in the juvenile justice system more likely to be young-adult crooks because of peer pressure in the system? Or were they in the system because they were young crooks on their way to becoming old crooks.
Of course to do a controlled experiment you'd have to randomly select some kids and put them into juvenile detention whether they committed any crime or not. Not particularly practical (and definitely not legal OR fair).
And doing so would (rightly) give the condemned innocent a belief that the justice system was a joke. Expect him to believe that, if he's going to be treated as a criminal anyway, he might as well enjoy some swag. (Which brings up the issue of how many innocent people condemned by criminal justice system error go on to become actual criminals.)
Was this decision rendered in a Belgian or US criminal court? TFA and the summary don't make this important distinction.
If it was in a Belgian court it's a "go whistle" to get the decree enforced. (But Yahoo executives will have to be careful about European travel in the future if they thumb their nose.) If it was in a US court it's a whole different can of worms.
Also: As I understand it the apoptosis mechanism is triggered, not just by internal events, but also by external things (like attacks by the immune system). Outside of functions during growth and maturation (like elminating the webbing between the toes), its main function seems to be in the destruction of cancers.
So suppressing it for a LONG time would allow existing cancers under attack to escape some of the attack. So taking this drug over a long period in expectation of a possible radiation attack should carry a significant cancer risk.
Fortunately it seems to be able to abort the cell death if taken during a significant interval AFTER radiation exposure. So using it only when needed would be fine, even in the event of nuclear attacks or accidents. If it works out anywhere close to these initial claims, stockpiling it for use when necessary seems like a dandy idea.
... this compound doesn't fix damage done by radiation - rather it prevents the body from killing off the damaged cells, thus preventing radiation sickness. The makers speculate that it will increase cancer risk, but they so far have not observed this in lab animals.
And that seems about right. (Actually it prevents the cells that are damaged from killing THEMSELVES off.)
After an intense dose of ionizing radiation there's a lot of broken stuff hanging around in a cell. Some of this triggers the suicide mechanism. But if the DNA isn't damaged (or isn't damaged in a significant and non-repairable way) by the radiation or the subsequent debris, it can typically recover (if it doesn't "slit its own wrists").
Cell suicide for local damage, to prevent possible cancer from mutated cells, is an appropriate response. But suicide of the bulk of the cells kills the person, when surviving with a somewhat higher cancer risk later is not.
So it seems to me that a drug that temporarily suppresses the mechanism, used to let the body survive a radiation exposure event that would otherwise kill it, is indeed likely to result in a living subject with a somewhat higher cancer risk.
But as I recall the released studies on cancer risks among survivors of single high-dose radiation events - like nuclear lab accidents and Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors - indicated a very small increase in cancer risk. So not seeing a significant bump in cancer rates among a small sample of lab animals in preliminary tests is hardly surprising.
Come on, how many programmers do you know that write comments, meaningful or not?
Plenty. And the ones that do tend to have more functional programs, too. B-)
(My own code is heavily commented - to the point of providing a second full description of the design. And a colleague once said I'm the only person he'd trust to program his pacemaker. B-) )
The main players in the routing industry have been working on flow-aware routing for years.
(I'm in the hardware side of our company so I'm not sure where how many and which of the features built on the flow-based architecture are already in the field. But I'm willing to bet a significant chunk of change that that the full bore will be deployed on more than one name-brand company's product line and be the dominant paradigm in routing long before these guys can convince the telecoms and ISPs to adopt their product. No matter how many big names they have on staff - or how good their box is. Breaking into networking is HARD.)
But seriously, 2 MILLION to clean up some viruses?
According to TFA a lot of that was things like lost revenue from traffic tickets that died because a deadline passed while they couldn't be processed and penalties for delayed payment of obligations.
Instead of spending $2 million to *fix* virus issues, why not hire smarter people to *prevent* virus issues? I'm sure doing so would be much cheaper.
Instead of spending $20,000 to fix water damage, why not hire a contractor to patch the holes in the roof and walls where the rain gets in?
When you have enough holes in the roof it becomes cheaper to re-roof than to patch.
When you have enough holes in the roof, walls, window frames, floor, foundation, etc. it becomes cheaper to tear down the house and replace it with a tighter, better built one.
The issue raised by the article is whether the "Windows/Microsoft apps" and "Linux/FOSS apps" houses meet that last criterion.
It's instructive that the issue of whether the new house can hold the family ("Is Linux Ready For [whatever]?) is no longer in doubt - thanks to service organizations like IBM's. The debate has moved from whether Linux can do the job to whether it does it cheaper.
Where does the poster get the idea that the active ingredients in the pepper are less toxic than those in the more traditional tear gasses / "pepper" spray?
Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. Perhaps the peppers are MUCH more toxic than the tear gas agents - to people who haven't built up the production of detoxification enzymes that pepper eaters do, or to people exposed in other tissues (like eyes, skin, and lungs) than those the pepper normally contacts when eaten.
Until there is research to indicate that the peppers are less toxic than the teargas agents to ordinary, non-acclimatized people, a lower toxicity should not be claimed.
You have no "right" to know, I hate it when the public's "right" to know is touted because it is a fiction at best.
The United States, at least, is a republic. The voters select the people who make and enforce its laws, foreign policy, and wars, and replace them when, in the voters' opinion, they have performed poorly. To do so intelligently they, and those who are about to become voters, need accurate information about world events affecting and affected by the US, its actions, and their interests.
That sounds like "need to know" to me. Do they have a "right" to obtain information? How can you argue that they do not?
However, any given organization does not have a general "obligation to inform" on such subjects - beyond specific legally required obligations, typically related to itself. Just as a given individual's need for food does not create a requirement that a given grocery store provide it free, a voters' need for information does not require any information outlet to supply it. The owners and operators of each get to take their pick on what, if anything, they chose to report.
Not to mention that it's not filed under "your rights online". It's "business", "the courts", and "the almighty buck". Which all seem appropriate.
Ponzi schemes are "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters". Nerds might get sucked into them and need to be able to recognize them to avoid losing all they've saved. Nerds might create them - either in the markets or in other ways. They have a mathematical basis. They have a social engineering basis. I could go on.
With time off for good behavior, he could be out in 127.5 years.
As I understand it, in the Federal system there is no "time off for good behavior" or other sentence mitigations. Convicts serve full time unless the conviction is overturned on appeal or they are pardoned by the president.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's powered of the grid when it isn't windy out, and it's powered entirely by renewable energy, wouldn't it be powered entirely by renewable energy if it used the grid all the time?
Sounds like they have excess generation capacity. They sell the power to the grid when the wind is high and buy it from the grid when the wind is too low to supply the local loads. If they buy less than they sell they can honestly say the load is (at least on the average) powered entirely by renewable resources.
It's not even a cheat: Peak wind power usually occurs when the peak demand on the grid is occurring. The wind farm doesn't just displace more fuel-burning at peak times than the data center causes at offpeak time. It displaces more costly fuels - both in money and pollution potential.
Is this one of those multi-level marketing (a.k.a. pyramid) schemes?
While they're similar, and MLMs attract scammers and workarounds to convert them, MLM and pyramid schemes are distinct.
In a pyramid scheme, all or part of the cost of joining up becomes income to the members of the path through the pyramid above the new member. In a MLM, only part of the price paid for the sales of actual products is raked off. (Think of a MLM as a manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer network with the wholesaler (and his cut) replaced by a pyramid of "associates".)
Pyramid schemes are generally illegal. MLMs are generally legal, if they keep their act clean.
Which is a very big IF. There are lots of ways for a MLM to skate around the rules and become a pyramid scheme. And even those which don't tend to become cultish and drift toward scamming.
But it does specify that anyone who advocates or takes steps to modify the portion of the constitution ...
limiting the president to a single term ... immediately loses any government office he holds and is banned from holding a government office for ten years.
... peculiarly, the Honduran Constitution does not include an impeachment procedure
But it does specify that anyone who advocates or takes steps to modify the portion of the constitution immediately loses any government office he holds and is banned from holding a government office for ten years.
This is what Zelaya did. The head of his party called for his ouster and the Supreme Court ruled that he was in violation of this section and no longer the President.
Even if the steps weren't explicitly laid out in advance this sounds like a constitutional impeachment procedure to me.
And it was a good rationale...when the populace was armed with muskets, and the government was armed with muskets.
Actually, at the time the population was armed with accurate-at-a-distance RIFLES (compared to the Brits' smoothbores), cannon, warships (merchant ships often carried cannon to fend off pirates and military ships of other countries).
Which doesn't really matter. Because you can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet.
The "liberator" pistol was a one-shot (and unscrew parts to reload) "zip gun". Made mostly of cheap stamped parts at a cost of under $10 it was air dropped by the thousands into German occupied areas in WW II. It came with a handgrip full of extra rounds and an instruction manual in comic book form:
- Here's how to load and fire it.
- Sneak up on the German soldier.
- Shoot him point-blank.
- Take HIS rifle and ammo.
- Give the Liberator and the remaining rounds to another resistance fighter who doesn't have a gun yet.
Now the populace is armed with, at best, assault rifles, and the government is armed with tanks.
Tanks without infantry support are cans of soldiers waiting to be cooked. Tanks WITH infantry support are crowds of soldiers waiting to be shot, blown up, burned, gassed, ...
A good varmint gun qualifies as an exceptional sniper rifle. A shotgun at appropriate ranges is more firepower against advancing troops - though for a shorter time - than a machine gun.
But if the US government came against its own people you can bet that a bunch of 'em will honor their oaths to the constitution over orders. Think large-scale desertion and coat-turning WITH equipment. Opening of the armories for the population. Lots of ex-military, reserve, and state militia types (with THEIR armories full of stuff - including the tanks you're so concerned about) will be out on a constitutional side, too.
A determined population armed with a few guns can eventually prevail. (Even with a VERY few VERY low power guns they can do quite well. The starving denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto held off the bulk of the German Army for better than a week starting with a dozen handguns and sporting rifles.)
As to capabilities: The typical private gun owner who practices occasionally can shoot rings around the typical non-SWAT policeman.
The Second Amendment isn't just about making it possible for the people to resist the tyranny that the founders thought any government would gravitate toward. It's to make the population's advantage SO OVERWHELMING that no government official could delude himself that he might be able to win.
As I understand it the president in question was "ousted" by legal proceedings before the country's supreme court, brought by their legislature in the proper constitutional manner. Then their military followed the proper procedure to implement the decision.
It's as if a US president were impeached, tried, and convicted, his proper successor took over, and the military, police, and bureaucracy all acknowledged this and followed the legal orders of the new president.
A coup, on the other hand, is a takover of a country by a faction of the military, outside of normal legal proceedings (though they generally make some mouth noises about it being the right, proper, and allegedly temporary thing to do - the better to keep theose supporting the ousted government off balance.)
So will everybody on slashdot (or at least the bulk of us who have a clue) PLEASE stop calling it a COUP?
Yes I know our own press and government are using the C-word. But WE know better, don't we.
Thank you.
Back on the Xanadu project we called the single-server model for content the "Library of Alexandria" problem: A disaster wiping out the server (and its backups), like the burning of the Library of Alexandria when, for many works, it contained the only (or or one of very few) copies, permanently removes the documents served by that repository from the literature. (The solution is the "multiple record" - mass printing of dead-tree books prior to automation, broad distribution of the immutable content and versioning information in the case of an "electronic literature".)
Of course centralized and mutable serving of content also enables, and greatly simplifies, the "rewriting of history" described by Orwell in the two books in question. So it is particularly ironic that these are the ones that were pulled.
The summary would seem to indicate a classic methodology error: A selected sample.
Were kids who were in the juvenile justice system more likely to be young-adult crooks because of peer pressure in the system? Or were they in the system because they were young crooks on their way to becoming old crooks.
Of course to do a controlled experiment you'd have to randomly select some kids and put them into juvenile detention whether they committed any crime or not. Not particularly practical (and definitely not legal OR fair).
And doing so would (rightly) give the condemned innocent a belief that the justice system was a joke. Expect him to believe that, if he's going to be treated as a criminal anyway, he might as well enjoy some swag. (Which brings up the issue of how many innocent people condemned by criminal justice system error go on to become actual criminals.)
Was this decision rendered in a Belgian or US criminal court? TFA and the summary don't make this important distinction.
If it was in a Belgian court it's a "go whistle" to get the decree enforced. (But Yahoo executives will have to be careful about European travel in the future if they thumb their nose.) If it was in a US court it's a whole different can of worms.
Also: As I understand it the apoptosis mechanism is triggered, not just by internal events, but also by external things (like attacks by the immune system). Outside of functions during growth and maturation (like elminating the webbing between the toes), its main function seems to be in the destruction of cancers.
So suppressing it for a LONG time would allow existing cancers under attack to escape some of the attack. So taking this drug over a long period in expectation of a possible radiation attack should carry a significant cancer risk.
Fortunately it seems to be able to abort the cell death if taken during a significant interval AFTER radiation exposure. So using it only when needed would be fine, even in the event of nuclear attacks or accidents. If it works out anywhere close to these initial claims, stockpiling it for use when necessary seems like a dandy idea.
... this compound doesn't fix damage done by radiation - rather it prevents the body from killing off the damaged cells, thus preventing radiation sickness. The makers speculate that it will increase cancer risk, but they so far have not observed this in lab animals.
And that seems about right. (Actually it prevents the cells that are damaged from killing THEMSELVES off.)
After an intense dose of ionizing radiation there's a lot of broken stuff hanging around in a cell. Some of this triggers the suicide mechanism. But if the DNA isn't damaged (or isn't damaged in a significant and non-repairable way) by the radiation or the subsequent debris, it can typically recover (if it doesn't "slit its own wrists").
Cell suicide for local damage, to prevent possible cancer from mutated cells, is an appropriate response. But suicide of the bulk of the cells kills the person, when surviving with a somewhat higher cancer risk later is not.
So it seems to me that a drug that temporarily suppresses the mechanism, used to let the body survive a radiation exposure event that would otherwise kill it, is indeed likely to result in a living subject with a somewhat higher cancer risk.
But as I recall the released studies on cancer risks among survivors of single high-dose radiation events - like nuclear lab accidents and Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors - indicated a very small increase in cancer risk. So not seeing a significant bump in cancer rates among a small sample of lab animals in preliminary tests is hardly surprising.
So the claims seem plausible to me.
Come on, how many programmers do you know that write comments, meaningful or not?
Plenty. And the ones that do tend to have more functional programs, too. B-)
(My own code is heavily commented - to the point of providing a second full description of the design. And a colleague once said I'm the only person he'd trust to program his pacemaker. B-) )
Functions that don't do anything, no comments, worst piece of code ever!
Most of it doesn't code proteins or any of the other things that have been reverse-engineered so far. How do you know it's NOT comments?
(And if terrestrial life was engineered and it IS comments, do they qualify as "holy writ"?)
The main players in the routing industry have been working on flow-aware routing for years.
(I'm in the hardware side of our company so I'm not sure where how many and which of the features built on the flow-based architecture are already in the field. But I'm willing to bet a significant chunk of change that that the full bore will be deployed on more than one name-brand company's product line and be the dominant paradigm in routing long before these guys can convince the telecoms and ISPs to adopt their product. No matter how many big names they have on staff - or how good their box is. Breaking into networking is HARD.)
What happens when you need to call Roto-Rooter?
Except that your car probably won't start unless it can call up the NSA and tell them your location.
Then don't EVER turn off the ignition when under a bridge or in a garage. B-)
But seriously, 2 MILLION to clean up some viruses?
According to TFA a lot of that was things like lost revenue from traffic tickets that died because a deadline passed while they couldn't be processed and penalties for delayed payment of obligations.
Instead of spending $2 million to *fix* virus issues, why not hire smarter people to *prevent* virus issues? I'm sure doing so would be much cheaper.
Instead of spending $20,000 to fix water damage, why not hire a contractor to patch the holes in the roof and walls where the rain gets in?
When you have enough holes in the roof it becomes cheaper to re-roof than to patch.
When you have enough holes in the roof, walls, window frames, floor, foundation, etc. it becomes cheaper to tear down the house and replace it with a tighter, better built one.
The issue raised by the article is whether the "Windows/Microsoft apps" and "Linux/FOSS apps" houses meet that last criterion.
It's instructive that the issue of whether the new house can hold the family ("Is Linux Ready For [whatever]?) is no longer in doubt - thanks to service organizations like IBM's. The debate has moved from whether Linux can do the job to whether it does it cheaper.
Where does the poster get the idea that the active ingredients in the pepper are less toxic than those in the more traditional tear gasses / "pepper" spray?
Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. Perhaps the peppers are MUCH more toxic than the tear gas agents - to people who haven't built up the production of detoxification enzymes that pepper eaters do, or to people exposed in other tissues (like eyes, skin, and lungs) than those the pepper normally contacts when eaten.
Until there is research to indicate that the peppers are less toxic than the teargas agents to ordinary, non-acclimatized people, a lower toxicity should not be claimed.
Not to mention that it's not filed under "your rights online". It's "business", "the courts", and "the almighty buck". Which all seem appropriate.
(Oops. Missed that the section IS "Your Rights Online". Hmmm...)
You have no "right" to know, I hate it when the public's "right" to know is touted because it is a fiction at best.
The United States, at least, is a republic. The voters select the people who make and enforce its laws, foreign policy, and wars, and replace them when, in the voters' opinion, they have performed poorly. To do so intelligently they, and those who are about to become voters, need accurate information about world events affecting and affected by the US, its actions, and their interests.
That sounds like "need to know" to me. Do they have a "right" to obtain information? How can you argue that they do not?
However, any given organization does not have a general "obligation to inform" on such subjects - beyond specific legally required obligations, typically related to itself. Just as a given individual's need for food does not create a requirement that a given grocery store provide it free, a voters' need for information does not require any information outlet to supply it. The owners and operators of each get to take their pick on what, if anything, they chose to report.
Many counts of rape: many x 10 years Many counts of murder: many x 25 years One count of Fraud: 150 years / ?
It was eleven counts - of varying sorts. 150 years for eleven federal counts comes out to about 13 2/3 years per count.
Not to mention that it's not filed under "your rights online". It's "business", "the courts", and "the almighty buck". Which all seem appropriate.
Ponzi schemes are "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters". Nerds might get sucked into them and need to be able to recognize them to avoid losing all they've saved. Nerds might create them - either in the markets or in other ways. They have a mathematical basis. They have a social engineering basis. I could go on.
With time off for good behavior, he could be out in 127.5 years.
As I understand it, in the Federal system there is no "time off for good behavior" or other sentence mitigations. Convicts serve full time unless the conviction is overturned on appeal or they are pardoned by the president.
How long will it take for the National Sex Offender Registry overlay to be created?
About twenty minutes after one of the developers reads your post.