* I'm personally up about $50k in various investment accounts since election day
* DJIA has broken 19,000
* He's going to greatly scale back or end the H1B program
* It's starting like they're going to have a decent replacement for Obamacare
* Going to ditch these globalist trade agreements that have destroyed American jobs and pay
He wasn't my first choice, but I'm starting to see past the arrogance and attitude and am learning that this guy actually produces results. What a strange concept. I hate to underestimate him anymore at this point, starting to wonder if he could wind up being one of the Great Presidents. It was just hard to get past the asshole factor watching him campaign everyday.
The economic shifts since November 8 would arguable have happened regardless of who was elected. Markets hate uncertainty, and a large amount of uncertainty on the direction of the new president has been resolved.
Another point is the exchange rates. The USD has strengthened significantly since the election. This may make US investments more valuable, which would explain why US investments have shot upwards. However, the exchange rate shift is very bad for anyone trying to export American goods. Increasing exports is another one of Trump's economic promises and will be more difficult if the dollar stays strong or continues to strengthen. Consider the recent dramatic exchange rate shift as a ~4% tax on anyone importing American goods that wasn't there before.
Yeah, it's called Hydro because in BC, Quebec and Newfoundland/Labrador most of the electricity is Hydroelectric. Alberta and Saskatchewan use primarily coal. Ontario is the only province that uses primarily Nuclear, Hydroelectic and Natural Gas, but their power distribution network is called Hydro One.
There are only 14 coal plants in Canada. 7 of them are in Alberta. 3 in Saskatchewan, 2 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick has one of everything.
So shutting down the coal plants mostly impacts Alberta, and the fun fact is that Alberta can pretty much "mooch" off BC while it transitions to something else.
I am most familiar with the plants in Nova Scotia, so I will comment on those. Nova Scotia is essentially an island by both geography and the current grid. There is a HV line to New Brunswick, but capacity is only around 350MW. Nova Scotia does also have a line to Newfoundland but this is an underwater line of limited capacity also. Wind is not a reliable option, and utility-scale solar has issues due to the high latitude and punishing winters.
The power station at Lingan is ancient in terms of design, but the 4 units there have a capacity of 600MW (150MW ea). The outlook for this station has been bleak for many years and 2 of the units are already on a retirement schedule. The station at Point Aconi is much newer but capacity is only around 200MW if I recall correctly. The major issue for both is that the economy of Sydney (ex-mining town) is already very poor. Closing either, or both of these stations would be very detrimental to an area that already has serious economic and drug abuse problems. Conversion to natural gas firing is unlikely, the infrastructure isn't there like it is in the Halifax/Dartmouth area.
These two stations are economically questionable as-is, since coal is imported by barge. However, they have continued to endure since they are needed to supply power if the lines to other provinces are down for some reason. Keep in mind that the overland lines can and do experience failures during severe winter weather, and a large portion of the population relies on electricity to stay warm during the winter. Resistance heating is uncommon, but most heating systems rely on forced air or pumped hot water which requires electricity to operate. To fill the supply eliminated by taking Nova Scotia's coal plants offline, you would need either additional HV connections to other provinces, or you would need more natural gas power in the Halifax area. Either option would cost at least $1B. Add to that the economic issues of Sydney, and shutting down all the coal power in Nova Scotia becomes a much more difficult problem than most people realize.
5. With guarantees for fairness, he would have faced a court. Couldn't get those guarantees.
Nobody in the US government can make such a deal because the official position of the government must be that all trials are fair. A fairness guarantee would imply that some trials may not be fair. Although that may be the case, making such a guarantee does not really ensure that a trial would be fair either.
What form would those "guarantees" have taken? A wink and a promise from an elected official? A letter from an official representative? How high a level would the official have to be for it to be a sufficient "guarantee"? And who defines what is "fair"? There is not a good basis in US law for any of this.
It was a meaningless request, the US government can't make such a guarantee, and even if they did, such a statement would not be a meaningful promise anyway. I suspect that it was requested by Snowden either because he is looking for any way out of his situation, or he has no intention of returning and simply wants to paint the US government as being unreasonable. While the US government in this case is being a little unreasonable, that doesn't change the fact that Snowden's request for a fairness guarantee is also unreasonable.
I've known a lot of people who try homeopathic treatments, some of them work but they always seem like a scam. We did a homeopathic wart treatment for my son. It worked great, but the $200 'tincture' was basically just alcohol with some herbs and shit in it. The next time he had a wart on the other foot, we did the same thing but instead bought a 99 cent bottle of alcohol to put on the bandaid and it worked just as well.
My wife is not originally from this country and buys 'herbal' products all the time without realizing it. The national government of her birth country doesn't put up with this shit, it is illegal there. My wife isn't a chemist, the packaging looks nice and has comforting words like 'organic' and 'natural', and many of these products are on the shelf right next to the real medicine. It is far too easy for a regular person to unknowingly buy snake oil.
Run everything from wherever the hell you're currently doing it. Have a synched copy on a server in Russia that's encrypted up the wazoo. Never use it for live traffic.
Is that really necessary? With current CDN technologies/strategies, would it not be a simple affair to put all Russia-based user data on a Russian server and pull it from there? The copy (nonlive version) could still be in the US or wherever. It's not as if I'm going to care about an extra 3 seconds of page loading time for the just-about-never times that I look at Russian Linkedin user profiles.
The law is still stupid but it doesn't sound particularly difficult to comply either.
FTA:
"The X-ray pulsar captures X-ray signals emitted from pulsars. By mapping those signals, they can be used to determine spacecraft location in deep space, which will eliminate the hours-long delays incurred in using ground-based navigation like the Deep Space Network and European Space Tracking network." (my emphasis)
All good stuff, and it has many practical peacetime applications. I wonder about how much of this technology can be applied to military hardware. We often forget that the space race is often at least 50% military in nature. Could the same sensors detect nuclear detonations on earth? Could the navigation method be a useful secondary method for ICBMs to navigate in addition to other guidance systems?
I think what is so remarkable about this is not so much China's individual achievements, but the fact that they clearly follow a long-term plan. Not to belittle American and Russian achievements, but they basically made it up as they went, and it did go much further than getting a bloke to the Moon and back again. NASA's scientists have always kept pushing for more exploration and shown great leadership, but the necessary, political will has been missing, and that is what the Chinese have. I think more or less everybody now agrees that China are definitely going to build one or more spacestations, and then go on to build a base on the Moon - and dare we hope, on to Mars? They have taken the lead, simple as that, and the rest of the world will follow. It feels good.
You could view it like that. Another viewpoint is that China, like the US and former USSR in the 1960s, are developing their space program as a complementary program to their ballistic missile programs. Maybe that's a very pessimistic view of the situation, but given all the sabre-rattling over small pacific islands, North Korea, etc, I think there is a strong case to be made that this is the case.
Doesn't matter, status of the relationship, regardless of how skeezy it is. In the US, you can't publish a sex tape without the consent of everyone that's in it. That's really the only question here. I'm not a fan of anyone in this story, but Gawker willfully, purposely, knowingly, blatantly broke the law. I'm no celebrity but as someone who likes his privacy, I'm pretty glad they got sued and lost.
It's interesting. When you see these 'leaked' sex tapes of celebrities that _aren't_ suing Gawker media, that's not a leak. That's a consensual, for-profit marketing ploy for said celeb.
Or an entity that can't be sued (anonymous torrent post, etc). But I agree, in most cases, sex tapes are probably authorized by the C-list celebrity.
Bernie might have been unelectable... in the 80s or even the 90s. He's not unelectable today: the country is a lot more Leftist than it ever was in history. Most people alive today were born after the end of the Soviet Union, so have no clue about the horrors of Communism. Which is why you have college students thinking that Socialism is a philosophy about maximizing the impact of social media. As it is, there is a huge percentage of the population that will strictly vote by party lines, and if one tosses in Bernie's crowds, he'd have thumped Trump in these polls
I disagree. Bernie really seemed to struggle with taking a centrist position. At some point in a primary race, the frontrunner needs to start to appear more moderate and gain mainstream supporters. I don't think it is possible to win a presidential election with only supporters from small segments of the population. Ted Cruz couldn't move beyond his religious right supporters. Trump's base has widened substantially but it is still narrower and closer to the party fringes than Hillary's. Sanders had huge support among the young and those disenfranchised with the party, but his views were consistently too far left for many people. I was not at all convinced on how he planned to pay for everything he proposed, despite the many good ideas.
I would have loved to see a Sanders-Trump debate, but it would have been a much closer election than the one we have now. For starters, Sanders and Trump agree on a lot of points and both could play up the 'outsider' card. Based on their primary campaigns, I would expect both to turn to their respective bases (Sanders moving left, Trump moving right) rather than trying to move towards the center. Sanders core supporters were very opinionated and vocal like Trump's are, and moving to the center might have been difficult for both of them. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I believe this would likely have ended up with a closer vote aligned along traditional party lines.
Yup it was touch and go whether america would join at all. Just had to wait until the old world powers had bankrupted themselves and destroyed their industry. It all worked out very nicely for the new world order.
The boon of having all the brightest displaced people move to the USA certainly didn't hurt either. The US was at that time, and still is, the safest place to be if you're worried about either terrorism or a real fighting war. The US reaped the benefits of importing a whole lot of german engineers and scientists for decades. Too bad we lost our balls at some point and are afraid of immigrants now.
Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
I agree that some part of the middle east wars were about oil, but there is a lot more going on also. I think it is important to realize that due to the hydraulic fracturing innovation and resulting boom, the US has more natural gas than we know what to do with, and oil prices remain very low. This may be part of a strategy to destabilize some other powers (Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc) since a large part of their national budget is related to oil income. If the cost of oil is 1/2 or 1/3 what it used to be, those countries are most certainly either feeling a heavy pinch now or are concerned about how long their savings will last.
On the issue of terrorism, we have created a location in the world where the people who want to fight about their religion can go fight. That location is really far away from the USA. The number of people who have died of terrorism in the US since 2000 is incredibly low compared to the amount of angst that the US government has generated. Probably because there is a 3500 mile wide ocean in between. Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting their proxy religious war in their own backyard, relatively out in the open. That's not a great outcome, but it might be the best of a lot of potentially worse outcomes.
I'm not saying any of this is good, or that I agree. But saying that these conflicts are based on oil is a very narrow viewpoint. There's a lot of things to consider. In my opinion the oil issue only a small part of the chessboard.
Those gull wing doors were always a gimmick, a "hook" to ensure coverage for the vehicle. I'm sure it's neat to watch them ponderously open and close via sensors, hydraulics and motors but there is a simpler, cheaper and practical solution - a regular car door, and if necessary a little catch on the mid row seats that slides them forward or tilts them. The regular door keeps out the rain, opens and closes more quickly, doesn't need a bunch of electronics to function and does the same job.
It's notable that the gull wing doors are always demoed in tight spaces because that's about the only place they tenuously offer any advantage, but since the front row has regular doors I'm not sure how that's supposed to make sense either.
Regular car doors are awful. The only advantage they have is that they are forgiving to design and build, and relatively cheap. I've never had enough garage space to open a car door fully. Parking lots are the same, with the added drama of other people possibly bumping your car with their doors.
Sliding doors are the best option I have seen. The door opening is enormous and makes loading goods, children, or persons of reduced mobility a lot easier. You only need about 8" of room to open a sliding door. Car companies seem to have sliding door technology pretty much matured, I haven't heard of widespread problems since the 1980s/1990s. If someone could figure out how to do sliding doors for the front doors of a car that didn't look too silly, it would probably be a real winner.
And auto-opening doors in general... just how fucking lazy do you have to be that opening your own car door is more effort than you're willing to exert?
It's a convenience thing. I never saw the value in sensor-based auto-unlocking doors until I had them. I never saw the point of auto-adjusting seats and mirrors (based on key fob ID) until I sold that car- sharing the car with my spouse became a lot more contentious. Luxury isn't (all) about feeling superior to other people. It is often about removing the small discomforts and inconveniences of life.
No, there's a lot more than providing an arcade experience involved. Thinking in three dimensions isn't quite as built-in to humans as you seem to think. Hell, half the drivers on the road can't handle thinking in flatland. What do you expect to happen in cubeland?
People better be thinking in at least 3 dimensions when they are driving on land because most control actions take a non-zero amount of time to take effect.
I've found pretty much all of that and more, higher quality, usually much lower prices, at my local Costco.
There's more than one 800 lb gorilla out there.
Costco sells a lot of crap too. I've been burned enough times that I ignore all their durable goods unless I have done the research in advance.
It also seems that just when we find a good commodity food product there (yogurts especially), they will drop it suddenly without an equivalent replacement.
From a physics standpoint, this is not true. Larger reactors help you have higher total neutron cross sections, both for elastic scattering / moderation and fission. A "small" nuclear reactor is defined by the IAEA as one that's less than 300MWe, although even reactors as big as 500MWe are sometimes referred to as "small". Per-reactor, not per-plant. Don't get me wrong, you can make reactors at any size - some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor). But it makes your already problematic economics even worse.
That said, I still do have more hope for small reactors than large ones, just simply from the standpoint of getting some degree of mass production and refinement through use. Still, the "nothing may go wrong" situation one faces with nuclear reactors and the "need to start from scratch if some flaw is developed in the basic design that prevents you from 'nothing may go wrong'" still bites.
Not to mention the effects of scaling on the steam turbine. In general, the larger the turbine, the more efficient it is, both thermodynamically and from a total cost of ownership standpoint. The choice of technology / vendors in any power plant today is generally picked by accountants running Net Present Value-type calculations.
Nonsense. There would be enormous use of fully open source alternatives to Google search, Gmail, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Destiny, and dozens of other similar projects. The best, to my knowledge, fully open source search engine is Yacy and it totally sucks. Running your own email server isn't too hard, but getting your mail to recipients on Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail without relaying through one of the big services is all but impossible. There are plenty of nice graphical fully open source video games out there, but nothing with the artwork or the voice acting or the visuals on par with a top of the line AAA game.
Nobody is making them because it's too damn difficult.
To be good, these things need experts in the field following good business and engineering practices. It's difficult, costly, and takes a lot of time, so only large international companies have much of a chance at being competitive. The forces of capitalism or government development seems to be the best ways currently to solve these kinds of massive undertakings. The internet has shown a lot of promise in allowing loosely-connected entities to collaborate, but once a project starts to look like it has value, somebody always takes the bone (or their part of the bone) and tries to personally benefit. Everybody needs to put food on the table at the end of the day.
People do listen to him. Most Americans would be challenged to name a living Nobel laureate. But in China, everyone knows who Chen-ning Yang is. He is a national icon. He is as well known in China as Kim Kardashian is in America. When he married Weng Fan, it was huge news. An American equivalent would be like when Brad Pitt married Angelina Jolie.
If he is speaking out against the collider, that carries a lot of weight. There is no way he can just be silenced. He has too much stature for that. Even Xi Jinping would not want to butt heads with him.
If he is that famous, all you would have to do is associate him with drugs. In 2010, [Charlie] Sheen was the highest paid actor on television. Now nobody respects him or cares about anything he says. Charlie Sheen actually is/was an addict but faking such a controversy can't be that difficult.
Yeah, well, when you see this many people engaging in such widespread consumer fraud and malfeasance, it comes from the top.
It has been documented and interviews with these employees recorded that they were under such pressure from bank managers (and they from VPs, etc) under threat of losing their jobs, that they felt they had to make their numbers in any way they had at their disposal. Including taking people's information that they'd been given for other legitimate purposes, and misusing it to create fake accounts.
1. Volkswagen engineers being pressured to have their vehicles pass emissions
2. Bank employees being pressured to sign up customers regardless of how infeasible
3. Cable/credit card company call center agents being pressured not to let a customer go under any circumstances
4. etc. etc. etc.
The list goes on and on -- these all come from the assholes at the top demanding something that's not possible and effectively incentivizing / requiring front-line employees to lie, cheat and steal from consumers.
Those are the people who should be even more aggressively prosecuted.
This attitude is common across many industries. Maybe I was naive in my 20s but the idiots you went to high school with never smartened up. There is no miraculous supply of intelligent people who manage companies. The people who manage companies are usually the people who are best at overselling, overpromising, underdelivering, screwing people to make a buck, and don't think the rules apply to them.
Ever use a search engine (in particular image searching)?
A string like "https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JmVq0i-tBJiPxGt5XOrDYDO6lyA=/0x16:1300x883/1280x854/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/48728355/playboy_march_16_cover_wide.0.0.jpg" is just a *fact* and should not be copyrightable. It simply *is not* the information that has been copyrighted.
To make this point even more clear- A URL is just an address. I can't copyright, for example, the address of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It just happens to be:
Palais de la Cour de Justice
Boulevard Konrad Adenauer
Kirchberg
L-2925 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
That's just a shorthand way of saying N 49.621036, E 6.143116 (which is actually posted on the Court's own website It's where you locate the copyrightable thing, and if an address is copyrightable, then giving directions is a crime. If you want to protect your copyright from public public view, you need to build a wall so people can't swing by the address and just look at it. People living in glass houses need to either put up curtains, or accept that people are going to look at them.
I have linked these addresses (both to their website and physical addresses) without permission. Calling that a crime is unworkable in both the physical and internet world.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
The idiots you went to high school with didn't suddenly get smart. People are quite dumb, on average.
That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
Anyone with a foot out the door of the company they are working for is in the same boat. Once I realized that the company needs me more than I need them, I was a lot more willing to stand up to management and forcefully push for needed changes. I just didn't care if I lost at that point since I wasn't planning on sticking around.
I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
"We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant,"
Uh, no you're not. You are running an energy saving campaign. You are not creating anything new power here.
I agree, but under some current regulatory models, such shenanigans are treated similarly as an actual power plant. To the grid, adding 50MW of supply is the same as subtracting 50MW of demand (in most cases). There are several things about this that greatly concern me, especially the part about a tech company entering the energy market and extracting large amounts of money while providing very little benefit.
Despite the reforms after Enron, the energy market is not regulated very well, regulation varies by location within the US, and some of the tricks being pulled would make Wall Street blush. It's a complicated system that requires a lot of specialized experience to understand. I work in the energy industry and we have a saying- "Whenever there is confusion, someone will exploit it".
Ok, abcnews does have it on front page, CNN, wsj, nytimes do not.
Blame readers.
At the end of the day newspapers are in the business of attracting readers. A story about NSA hacking tools is too esoteric for most of their readers and lacks the cool characters or personalized villains that drive narratives.
Even the last/. story only had 130 comments, and it's a story specifically about the NSA and hackers. If it barely interests the/. audience I don't imagine it's going to be a hit with the general public.
130 comments is a pretty good discussion on Slashdot. It may even be above average.
So we're going to discriminate white and asian applicants over one of another race?
Goodness, isn't that similar to what happened to blacks during the early 20th century too?
Being racist to stop racism doesn't solve the problem. It's just more racism.
It's a kludge to try to solve the problem of income inequality. My kids are mixed-race and enjoy all the advantages of a family in a comfortable financial position. They got more attention when they were very young since one parent could afford to stay home. That means they heard a lot more language on a daily basis. They go to a good Pre-K program and will go to a decent school when the time is right. They also have college savings plans so they won't have to worry (so much) about paying for college and can potentially make a better choice.
Poorer families are at a big disadvantage. They can't afford to live in neighborhoods with great schools, they can't afford to stay home for the first couple years of life, and won't be able to save as much for college. Poor kids will always be on an uphill climb to get to my kids level since my kids have enjoyed advantages from the very beginning.
I don't see race as being relevant to the above, other than the fact that minorities are disproportionately poor and therefore more affected by these problems. The best way to solve these issues is with universal Pre-K, paid paternity/maternity leave, and making sure that the schools in poor neighborhoods are equivalent to those in better neighborhoods. Trying to solve these problems with incentives and preferential treatment at hiring time is way too late.
Slashdot Mirror
* I'm personally up about $50k in various investment accounts since election day * DJIA has broken 19,000 * He's going to greatly scale back or end the H1B program * It's starting like they're going to have a decent replacement for Obamacare * Going to ditch these globalist trade agreements that have destroyed American jobs and pay He wasn't my first choice, but I'm starting to see past the arrogance and attitude and am learning that this guy actually produces results. What a strange concept. I hate to underestimate him anymore at this point, starting to wonder if he could wind up being one of the Great Presidents. It was just hard to get past the asshole factor watching him campaign everyday.
The economic shifts since November 8 would arguable have happened regardless of who was elected. Markets hate uncertainty, and a large amount of uncertainty on the direction of the new president has been resolved.
Another point is the exchange rates. The USD has strengthened significantly since the election. This may make US investments more valuable, which would explain why US investments have shot upwards. However, the exchange rate shift is very bad for anyone trying to export American goods. Increasing exports is another one of Trump's economic promises and will be more difficult if the dollar stays strong or continues to strengthen. Consider the recent dramatic exchange rate shift as a ~4% tax on anyone importing American goods that wasn't there before.
Yeah, it's called Hydro because in BC, Quebec and Newfoundland/Labrador most of the electricity is Hydroelectric. Alberta and Saskatchewan use primarily coal. Ontario is the only province that uses primarily Nuclear, Hydroelectic and Natural Gas, but their power distribution network is called Hydro One.
There are only 14 coal plants in Canada. 7 of them are in Alberta. 3 in Saskatchewan, 2 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick has one of everything.
So shutting down the coal plants mostly impacts Alberta, and the fun fact is that Alberta can pretty much "mooch" off BC while it transitions to something else.
I am most familiar with the plants in Nova Scotia, so I will comment on those. Nova Scotia is essentially an island by both geography and the current grid. There is a HV line to New Brunswick, but capacity is only around 350MW. Nova Scotia does also have a line to Newfoundland but this is an underwater line of limited capacity also. Wind is not a reliable option, and utility-scale solar has issues due to the high latitude and punishing winters.
The power station at Lingan is ancient in terms of design, but the 4 units there have a capacity of 600MW (150MW ea). The outlook for this station has been bleak for many years and 2 of the units are already on a retirement schedule. The station at Point Aconi is much newer but capacity is only around 200MW if I recall correctly. The major issue for both is that the economy of Sydney (ex-mining town) is already very poor. Closing either, or both of these stations would be very detrimental to an area that already has serious economic and drug abuse problems. Conversion to natural gas firing is unlikely, the infrastructure isn't there like it is in the Halifax/Dartmouth area.
These two stations are economically questionable as-is, since coal is imported by barge. However, they have continued to endure since they are needed to supply power if the lines to other provinces are down for some reason. Keep in mind that the overland lines can and do experience failures during severe winter weather, and a large portion of the population relies on electricity to stay warm during the winter. Resistance heating is uncommon, but most heating systems rely on forced air or pumped hot water which requires electricity to operate. To fill the supply eliminated by taking Nova Scotia's coal plants offline, you would need either additional HV connections to other provinces, or you would need more natural gas power in the Halifax area. Either option would cost at least $1B. Add to that the economic issues of Sydney, and shutting down all the coal power in Nova Scotia becomes a much more difficult problem than most people realize.
5. With guarantees for fairness, he would have faced a court. Couldn't get those guarantees.
Nobody in the US government can make such a deal because the official position of the government must be that all trials are fair. A fairness guarantee would imply that some trials may not be fair. Although that may be the case, making such a guarantee does not really ensure that a trial would be fair either.
What form would those "guarantees" have taken? A wink and a promise from an elected official? A letter from an official representative? How high a level would the official have to be for it to be a sufficient "guarantee"? And who defines what is "fair"? There is not a good basis in US law for any of this.
It was a meaningless request, the US government can't make such a guarantee, and even if they did, such a statement would not be a meaningful promise anyway. I suspect that it was requested by Snowden either because he is looking for any way out of his situation, or he has no intention of returning and simply wants to paint the US government as being unreasonable. While the US government in this case is being a little unreasonable, that doesn't change the fact that Snowden's request for a fairness guarantee is also unreasonable.
I've known a lot of people who try homeopathic treatments, some of them work but they always seem like a scam. We did a homeopathic wart treatment for my son. It worked great, but the $200 'tincture' was basically just alcohol with some herbs and shit in it. The next time he had a wart on the other foot, we did the same thing but instead bought a 99 cent bottle of alcohol to put on the bandaid and it worked just as well.
My wife is not originally from this country and buys 'herbal' products all the time without realizing it. The national government of her birth country doesn't put up with this shit, it is illegal there. My wife isn't a chemist, the packaging looks nice and has comforting words like 'organic' and 'natural', and many of these products are on the shelf right next to the real medicine. It is far too easy for a regular person to unknowingly buy snake oil.
Run everything from wherever the hell you're currently doing it. Have a synched copy on a server in Russia that's encrypted up the wazoo. Never use it for live traffic.
Is that really necessary? With current CDN technologies/strategies, would it not be a simple affair to put all Russia-based user data on a Russian server and pull it from there? The copy (nonlive version) could still be in the US or wherever. It's not as if I'm going to care about an extra 3 seconds of page loading time for the just-about-never times that I look at Russian Linkedin user profiles.
The law is still stupid but it doesn't sound particularly difficult to comply either.
FTA: "The X-ray pulsar captures X-ray signals emitted from pulsars. By mapping those signals, they can be used to determine spacecraft location in deep space, which will eliminate the hours-long delays incurred in using ground-based navigation like the Deep Space Network and European Space Tracking network." (my emphasis)
All good stuff, and it has many practical peacetime applications. I wonder about how much of this technology can be applied to military hardware. We often forget that the space race is often at least 50% military in nature. Could the same sensors detect nuclear detonations on earth? Could the navigation method be a useful secondary method for ICBMs to navigate in addition to other guidance systems?
I think what is so remarkable about this is not so much China's individual achievements, but the fact that they clearly follow a long-term plan. Not to belittle American and Russian achievements, but they basically made it up as they went, and it did go much further than getting a bloke to the Moon and back again. NASA's scientists have always kept pushing for more exploration and shown great leadership, but the necessary, political will has been missing, and that is what the Chinese have. I think more or less everybody now agrees that China are definitely going to build one or more spacestations, and then go on to build a base on the Moon - and dare we hope, on to Mars? They have taken the lead, simple as that, and the rest of the world will follow. It feels good.
You could view it like that. Another viewpoint is that China, like the US and former USSR in the 1960s, are developing their space program as a complementary program to their ballistic missile programs. Maybe that's a very pessimistic view of the situation, but given all the sabre-rattling over small pacific islands, North Korea, etc, I think there is a strong case to be made that this is the case.
Doesn't matter, status of the relationship, regardless of how skeezy it is. In the US, you can't publish a sex tape without the consent of everyone that's in it. That's really the only question here. I'm not a fan of anyone in this story, but Gawker willfully, purposely, knowingly, blatantly broke the law. I'm no celebrity but as someone who likes his privacy, I'm pretty glad they got sued and lost.
It's interesting. When you see these 'leaked' sex tapes of celebrities that _aren't_ suing Gawker media, that's not a leak. That's a consensual, for-profit marketing ploy for said celeb.
Or an entity that can't be sued (anonymous torrent post, etc). But I agree, in most cases, sex tapes are probably authorized by the C-list celebrity.
Bernie might have been unelectable... in the 80s or even the 90s. He's not unelectable today: the country is a lot more Leftist than it ever was in history. Most people alive today were born after the end of the Soviet Union, so have no clue about the horrors of Communism. Which is why you have college students thinking that Socialism is a philosophy about maximizing the impact of social media. As it is, there is a huge percentage of the population that will strictly vote by party lines, and if one tosses in Bernie's crowds, he'd have thumped Trump in these polls
I disagree. Bernie really seemed to struggle with taking a centrist position. At some point in a primary race, the frontrunner needs to start to appear more moderate and gain mainstream supporters. I don't think it is possible to win a presidential election with only supporters from small segments of the population. Ted Cruz couldn't move beyond his religious right supporters. Trump's base has widened substantially but it is still narrower and closer to the party fringes than Hillary's. Sanders had huge support among the young and those disenfranchised with the party, but his views were consistently too far left for many people. I was not at all convinced on how he planned to pay for everything he proposed, despite the many good ideas.
I would have loved to see a Sanders-Trump debate, but it would have been a much closer election than the one we have now. For starters, Sanders and Trump agree on a lot of points and both could play up the 'outsider' card. Based on their primary campaigns, I would expect both to turn to their respective bases (Sanders moving left, Trump moving right) rather than trying to move towards the center. Sanders core supporters were very opinionated and vocal like Trump's are, and moving to the center might have been difficult for both of them. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I believe this would likely have ended up with a closer vote aligned along traditional party lines.
Yup it was touch and go whether america would join at all. Just had to wait until the old world powers had bankrupted themselves and destroyed their industry. It all worked out very nicely for the new world order.
The boon of having all the brightest displaced people move to the USA certainly didn't hurt either. The US was at that time, and still is, the safest place to be if you're worried about either terrorism or a real fighting war. The US reaped the benefits of importing a whole lot of german engineers and scientists for decades. Too bad we lost our balls at some point and are afraid of immigrants now.
Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
I agree that some part of the middle east wars were about oil, but there is a lot more going on also. I think it is important to realize that due to the hydraulic fracturing innovation and resulting boom, the US has more natural gas than we know what to do with, and oil prices remain very low. This may be part of a strategy to destabilize some other powers (Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc) since a large part of their national budget is related to oil income. If the cost of oil is 1/2 or 1/3 what it used to be, those countries are most certainly either feeling a heavy pinch now or are concerned about how long their savings will last.
On the issue of terrorism, we have created a location in the world where the people who want to fight about their religion can go fight. That location is really far away from the USA. The number of people who have died of terrorism in the US since 2000 is incredibly low compared to the amount of angst that the US government has generated. Probably because there is a 3500 mile wide ocean in between. Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting their proxy religious war in their own backyard, relatively out in the open. That's not a great outcome, but it might be the best of a lot of potentially worse outcomes.
I'm not saying any of this is good, or that I agree. But saying that these conflicts are based on oil is a very narrow viewpoint. There's a lot of things to consider. In my opinion the oil issue only a small part of the chessboard.
Those gull wing doors were always a gimmick, a "hook" to ensure coverage for the vehicle. I'm sure it's neat to watch them ponderously open and close via sensors, hydraulics and motors but there is a simpler, cheaper and practical solution - a regular car door, and if necessary a little catch on the mid row seats that slides them forward or tilts them. The regular door keeps out the rain, opens and closes more quickly, doesn't need a bunch of electronics to function and does the same job.
It's notable that the gull wing doors are always demoed in tight spaces because that's about the only place they tenuously offer any advantage, but since the front row has regular doors I'm not sure how that's supposed to make sense either.
Regular car doors are awful. The only advantage they have is that they are forgiving to design and build, and relatively cheap. I've never had enough garage space to open a car door fully. Parking lots are the same, with the added drama of other people possibly bumping your car with their doors.
Sliding doors are the best option I have seen. The door opening is enormous and makes loading goods, children, or persons of reduced mobility a lot easier. You only need about 8" of room to open a sliding door. Car companies seem to have sliding door technology pretty much matured, I haven't heard of widespread problems since the 1980s/1990s. If someone could figure out how to do sliding doors for the front doors of a car that didn't look too silly, it would probably be a real winner.
And auto-opening doors in general... just how fucking lazy do you have to be that opening your own car door is more effort than you're willing to exert?
It's a convenience thing. I never saw the value in sensor-based auto-unlocking doors until I had them. I never saw the point of auto-adjusting seats and mirrors (based on key fob ID) until I sold that car- sharing the car with my spouse became a lot more contentious. Luxury isn't (all) about feeling superior to other people. It is often about removing the small discomforts and inconveniences of life.
No, there's a lot more than providing an arcade experience involved. Thinking in three dimensions isn't quite as built-in to humans as you seem to think. Hell, half the drivers on the road can't handle thinking in flatland. What do you expect to happen in cubeland?
People better be thinking in at least 3 dimensions when they are driving on land because most control actions take a non-zero amount of time to take effect.
I've found pretty much all of that and more, higher quality, usually much lower prices, at my local Costco.
There's more than one 800 lb gorilla out there.
Costco sells a lot of crap too. I've been burned enough times that I ignore all their durable goods unless I have done the research in advance.
It also seems that just when we find a good commodity food product there (yogurts especially), they will drop it suddenly without an equivalent replacement.
From a physics standpoint, this is not true. Larger reactors help you have higher total neutron cross sections, both for elastic scattering / moderation and fission. A "small" nuclear reactor is defined by the IAEA as one that's less than 300MWe, although even reactors as big as 500MWe are sometimes referred to as "small". Per-reactor, not per-plant. Don't get me wrong, you can make reactors at any size - some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor). But it makes your already problematic economics even worse.
That said, I still do have more hope for small reactors than large ones, just simply from the standpoint of getting some degree of mass production and refinement through use. Still, the "nothing may go wrong" situation one faces with nuclear reactors and the "need to start from scratch if some flaw is developed in the basic design that prevents you from 'nothing may go wrong'" still bites.
Not to mention the effects of scaling on the steam turbine. In general, the larger the turbine, the more efficient it is, both thermodynamically and from a total cost of ownership standpoint. The choice of technology / vendors in any power plant today is generally picked by accountants running Net Present Value-type calculations.
Nonsense. There would be enormous use of fully open source alternatives to Google search, Gmail, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Destiny, and dozens of other similar projects. The best, to my knowledge, fully open source search engine is Yacy and it totally sucks. Running your own email server isn't too hard, but getting your mail to recipients on Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail without relaying through one of the big services is all but impossible. There are plenty of nice graphical fully open source video games out there, but nothing with the artwork or the voice acting or the visuals on par with a top of the line AAA game. Nobody is making them because it's too damn difficult.
To be good, these things need experts in the field following good business and engineering practices. It's difficult, costly, and takes a lot of time, so only large international companies have much of a chance at being competitive. The forces of capitalism or government development seems to be the best ways currently to solve these kinds of massive undertakings. The internet has shown a lot of promise in allowing loosely-connected entities to collaborate, but once a project starts to look like it has value, somebody always takes the bone (or their part of the bone) and tries to personally benefit. Everybody needs to put food on the table at the end of the day.
People should listen to him.
People do listen to him. Most Americans would be challenged to name a living Nobel laureate. But in China, everyone knows who Chen-ning Yang is. He is a national icon. He is as well known in China as Kim Kardashian is in America. When he married Weng Fan, it was huge news. An American equivalent would be like when Brad Pitt married Angelina Jolie.
If he is speaking out against the collider, that carries a lot of weight. There is no way he can just be silenced. He has too much stature for that. Even Xi Jinping would not want to butt heads with him.
If he is that famous, all you would have to do is associate him with drugs. In 2010, [Charlie] Sheen was the highest paid actor on television. Now nobody respects him or cares about anything he says. Charlie Sheen actually is/was an addict but faking such a controversy can't be that difficult.
Yeah, well, when you see this many people engaging in such widespread consumer fraud and malfeasance, it comes from the top. It has been documented and interviews with these employees recorded that they were under such pressure from bank managers (and they from VPs, etc) under threat of losing their jobs, that they felt they had to make their numbers in any way they had at their disposal. Including taking people's information that they'd been given for other legitimate purposes, and misusing it to create fake accounts. 1. Volkswagen engineers being pressured to have their vehicles pass emissions 2. Bank employees being pressured to sign up customers regardless of how infeasible 3. Cable/credit card company call center agents being pressured not to let a customer go under any circumstances 4. etc. etc. etc. The list goes on and on -- these all come from the assholes at the top demanding something that's not possible and effectively incentivizing / requiring front-line employees to lie, cheat and steal from consumers. Those are the people who should be even more aggressively prosecuted.
This attitude is common across many industries. Maybe I was naive in my 20s but the idiots you went to high school with never smartened up. There is no miraculous supply of intelligent people who manage companies. The people who manage companies are usually the people who are best at overselling, overpromising, underdelivering, screwing people to make a buck, and don't think the rules apply to them.
What's so bad about that?
Ever use a search engine (in particular image searching)?
A string like "https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JmVq0i-tBJiPxGt5XOrDYDO6lyA=/0x16:1300x883/1280x854/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/48728355/playboy_march_16_cover_wide.0.0.jpg" is just a *fact* and should not be copyrightable. It simply *is not* the information that has been copyrighted.
To make this point even more clear- A URL is just an address. I can't copyright, for example, the address of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It just happens to be:
Palais de la Cour de Justice
Boulevard Konrad Adenauer
Kirchberg
L-2925 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
That's just a shorthand way of saying N 49.621036, E 6.143116 (which is actually posted on the Court's own website It's where you locate the copyrightable thing, and if an address is copyrightable, then giving directions is a crime. If you want to protect your copyright from public public view, you need to build a wall so people can't swing by the address and just look at it. People living in glass houses need to either put up curtains, or accept that people are going to look at them.
I have linked these addresses (both to their website and physical addresses) without permission. Calling that a crime is unworkable in both the physical and internet world.
These people have no money yet they walk around with expensive cellphones..
That is not a problem limited to "the poor". 47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 to meet an unexpected expense.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
The idiots you went to high school with didn't suddenly get smart. People are quite dumb, on average.
That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
Anyone with a foot out the door of the company they are working for is in the same boat. Once I realized that the company needs me more than I need them, I was a lot more willing to stand up to management and forcefully push for needed changes. I just didn't care if I lost at that point since I wasn't planning on sticking around.
I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
"We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant,"
Uh, no you're not. You are running an energy saving campaign. You are not creating anything new power here.
I agree, but under some current regulatory models, such shenanigans are treated similarly as an actual power plant. To the grid, adding 50MW of supply is the same as subtracting 50MW of demand (in most cases). There are several things about this that greatly concern me, especially the part about a tech company entering the energy market and extracting large amounts of money while providing very little benefit.
Despite the reforms after Enron, the energy market is not regulated very well, regulation varies by location within the US, and some of the tricks being pulled would make Wall Street blush. It's a complicated system that requires a lot of specialized experience to understand. I work in the energy industry and we have a saying- "Whenever there is confusion, someone will exploit it".
Ok, abcnews does have it on front page, CNN, wsj, nytimes do not.
Blame readers.
At the end of the day newspapers are in the business of attracting readers. A story about NSA hacking tools is too esoteric for most of their readers and lacks the cool characters or personalized villains that drive narratives.
Even the last /. story only had 130 comments, and it's a story specifically about the NSA and hackers. If it barely interests the /. audience I don't imagine it's going to be a hit with the general public.
130 comments is a pretty good discussion on Slashdot. It may even be above average.
So we're going to discriminate white and asian applicants over one of another race?
Goodness, isn't that similar to what happened to blacks during the early 20th century too?
Being racist to stop racism doesn't solve the problem. It's just more racism.
It's a kludge to try to solve the problem of income inequality. My kids are mixed-race and enjoy all the advantages of a family in a comfortable financial position. They got more attention when they were very young since one parent could afford to stay home. That means they heard a lot more language on a daily basis. They go to a good Pre-K program and will go to a decent school when the time is right. They also have college savings plans so they won't have to worry (so much) about paying for college and can potentially make a better choice.
Poorer families are at a big disadvantage. They can't afford to live in neighborhoods with great schools, they can't afford to stay home for the first couple years of life, and won't be able to save as much for college. Poor kids will always be on an uphill climb to get to my kids level since my kids have enjoyed advantages from the very beginning.
I don't see race as being relevant to the above, other than the fact that minorities are disproportionately poor and therefore more affected by these problems. The best way to solve these issues is with universal Pre-K, paid paternity/maternity leave, and making sure that the schools in poor neighborhoods are equivalent to those in better neighborhoods. Trying to solve these problems with incentives and preferential treatment at hiring time is way too late.