This sounds completely backwards to me. The students who are already interested in the program are the ones who don't get to attend?

Are we still in a race to the bottom here? I thought society decided at some point that we should be encouraging our best and brightest ... I see I am mistaken.

Also, other than the hail and possibility of a tornado, it's a damn fine place to grow nursery stock. A lot of nursery stock in Colorado comes from Oklahoma (and other nearby tough climates for growing, I'm sure, I can only speak for CO).

They will eventually, but in the amount of time it takes for them to regrow, drastic environmental impacts may happen which destroy their habitat and make it no longer a fit for that particular plant. A simple example would be mountain flooding after a wildfire. When conifers burn, they will leave a sheet of wax on top of the dirt. When snow runoff season begins (or there are heavy rains, as seen in Colorado in 2013) the ground is not as good at sponging up the moisture and releasing it slowly down-river over the course of the season. Instead it beads off the surface and heads straight to the bottom, causing runoff to be more violent and increasing the risk of flash-flood events.

With those increased events, the habitat can be altered dramatically, possibly to the point where the trees that loved living there no longer find it suitable. Willows, dogwoods, cottonwoods, etc will all suffer as they are plants that would have increased risk (since they like living right next to the river). To compound the issue, there might be other plants that are now able to grow in areas where they couldn't before. The result of that is increased monoculture of forest species, which of course leads to increased risk of disease.

Can you begin to see the feedback loop? Increased disease, increased fire risk, increased flood risk, increased environment destruction, increased monoculture, and repeat.

The problem with wildfires now is that too many years of fire suppression has led to these situations where instead of smaller fires burning and replenishing areas periodically, we have massive fires that destroy massive areas and make it more difficult, if not impossible, for the area to recover.

I'm not sure I understand their definition of "deforestation". Is that only man-made, or does it include the work of insects, blight, and other maladies that wipe out huge swaths of forest?

Do you think that might be related to the increasing number of things that are totally fucked on our planet? I totally understand that hyperbole and sensationalism sell and that we are fed a steady diet of both, but don't throw the baby out of a moving car with a glass of water ... or whatever that saying is.

I don't understand how you can label Canada as losing all that forestation without mentioning MPB and other outbreaks which are on the rise.

Do they not realize that many of those forest fires wouldn't have happened outbreaks were less severe? This is ignoring the wildfire suppression that happened in the first place which contributed to the destruction being seen in the last few years.

Interesting to think that suppressing wildfires might actually contribute to climate change.

You know, if you keep doing ridiculous shit long enough (and getting away with it), eventually you can do something super ridiculous and send out the PR release on April 1. Everyone will think it's a joke.

What I find interesting is the opacity of this submission.

I read the summary, and based solely on how the summary is written, it comes off as a plausible story. I went to the comments and saw folks talking about AFD jokes, and then I thought, this was a joke? How is it funny?

Then, of course, I clicked a couple links and saw the reference and at this point ... and here's the interesting bit ... it actually got less funny.

Amazingly, when analyzed by an advanced comedic interpreter, this comment is scored as the funniest of the day.

Breakthrough? I remember using various commercial software that implemented python based scripting tools going back to the early-mid 90's.

I'm reading the description over and over, and I have absolutely no idea how this occurred. So there's an "autofill" check box that wasn't checked. How does this end up disclosing all of this information in the email?

I am forced to use Outlook for work and as a result I use it as minimally as possible. For some reason I still have to spend several seconds searching for the awkwardly placed "Send" button every time I need it. Forgive my lack of experience using an awful email client.

This is the fundamental issue I see with Christians and homosexuality. Christians make statements as you have, saying things like "hate the sin, love the sinner" to come across as less of an asshole. When it comes down to it, you view homosexuality as a life choice. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant to my point.

Because you view it as a life choice, the good Christian feels no guilt for calling someone an "abomination". It's their choice to be that way, you say, so it's their fault for being sinners.

At this point, I just can't see this as 100% true. I don't know what causes every homosexual to be a homosexual. I tangentially care about it, as I think it's an interesting subject from a biological standpoint, but what "caused" any given person to be homosexual is none of my fucking business just like what "caused" someone to have freckles and pale skin is none of my business. I am not here to play God or assume those powers. I am not here to evangelize my superiority over other people because they were born a certain way.

Christians need to accept that homosexuality isn't black and white a lifestyle choice and that the Bible's lessons on it are based on archaic knowledge of biological systems.

So you're saying we will be come a more educated society as a result? I jest, of course, but it's an interesting thought. Forcing people to retrain to another field will certainly broaden their knowledge of the world, or at least motivate people to have that broad array of knowledge in the first place.

This is pretty much what I do. I personally don't like all the generic words, and instead use variations of a similar pattern. I have several main patterns that I can determine which one to use based on a rule I know that takes the site's name into account. This is my base password.

Then I take the site's name and apply another rule to it. This becomes my salt.

Together they become a very complex password that is unique for each site and yet very easy for me to remember. An example (of course not close to what I use, but you get the idea) for Slashdot would be:

Slashdot.org - TLD is org so we use Gro.dotSlash as the hash + 19 (slashdot begins w/S, the 19th letter) + someone I love's DOB 9-18-80, so the full password is Gro.dotSlash1991880?

And CERN? Doesn't it make sense that every black hole in the universe at one time was a really tiny black hole? Is it a good idea to just start making a bunch of those?