In Alberta, where there are more commercial bee keeping operations than anywhere in Canada, of honey and other types, and where neonic use is higher than in many other places. Bees are simply are not having the problems seen elsewhere. The bee keepers association here in Alberta is strongly opposed to an outright neonic ban because it would severely hurt their pollination and honey business. Without neonics there would be a lot less Canola and other crops to pollinate.

Now, this isn't to say that neonics aren't a big part of the problem of bees dying elsewhere. It could have to do with how the neonics are being used. In Alberta they are used when treating the seeds with fungicide, and typically they are placed in the ground with a gravity-fed drill, or an air drill that blows them into the ground. So all the neonic residue gets placed under the soil. In other places, they use vacuum planters (corn, soybeans) which blows neonic-laden dust into the air. So it could be this that contributes to the problem.

That can't change the fact that pressing on the accelerator increases fuel flow, which is going to raise emissions while the load is high.

It's easy to meet EPA standards on test bench. Out in the real world it becomes a lot harder. Heavy acceleration is bound to dump all kinds of particulates, NOx, and CO, despite pollution controls like catalytic converters. Things like catalytic converters and other pollution controls run best under constant conditions, with the proper amount of fuel to air, temperature, etc. All of which probably works well while cruising at constant speed down the open road. The moment you start doing stop and go, all bets are off. Hit the gas pedal hard and the fuel mixture goes fairly rich as the engine tries to keep up. I'm not a hypermiler freak, but I do tend to accelerate and brake conservatively (I have a CDL and drive big trucks occasionally as well, which influences my habits) which seems to anger people in city driving, unfortunately. I also try to take curves in a manner that makes things as smooth as possible.

Most people on the road seem to not care one bit about fuel consumption and race from light to light, without actually getting ahead of anyone doing that, nor actually getting anywhere faster. I'm sure emissions could be curtailed quite a bit if everyone just slowed down and cars limited their acceleration to something realistic.

I imagine these horribly-bad 25% of cars emitting the most pollution would do a lot better if people would drive them properly.

That doesn't change the fact that on the power grid itself, there is no storage, so any efficiency, even bad efficiency is better than nothing.

As to your used battery idea, it is not a good one. Most used batteries are car batteries. And no they are not an excellent way to add more storage capacity. A used car battery won't hold a charge, or deliver current. That's why they are replaced after all.

Linux audio sucked before pulseaudio. I would never go back to the old days.

What is undebuggable about systemd? What problems are you having? It's modular and verifiable, and it's quite a bit easier to debug service problems than init scripts (am I the only one to have to turn on set -x in an init script to find out what is going on with hacked scripting logic?). There are lots of reasons to dislike systemd particularly with how it deals with syslog, but your arguments seem a bit tired.

Yeah like Slashdot! The mobile site is useless so I always use the desktop version on my phone. Using it now actually. The thing is Slashdot used tohave a completely usable mobile site.

Had a year's worth of Sirius satellite radio with a new vehicle. Couldn't stand to listen to it. the sound quality was awful, just like you describe. Even talk stations were tinny and clipped and grating on the ears. Anything remotely "classical" as far as music was concerned was utter garbage. Analog FM sounds way better. And as you say, it's a codec issue more than a digital issue. A modern MP3 encoder such as LAME can create pretty good audio with a 64 kbs stereo stream.

I guess most people aren't discerning listeners though, because I know of many people who love their satellite radio.

Just because Minux has only 100 lines of assembly doesn't mean anything about Darwin, even if Darwin has microkernel components, so your association there is a bit fallacious. Unless it's changed recently, Darwin does have microkernel (mach in fact) underpinnings, but a complete FreeBSD subsystem is grafted onto that. So if anything Darwin is a hybrid kernel. Like most real systems out there, it's not a complete microkernel system.

As far as industries go, farming is in a rather unique situation. Manufacturing and processing plants, which can use a fair amount of water, simply pass on their increased costs to the consumer. Water conservation increases somewhat, which is good, while overall prices go up. Farmers, on the other hand, cannot pass on their costs to consumers. They are price takers. So simply making farmers pay more for water may help somewhat, but ultimately it will just drive farmers out of business. If enough farmers are driven out of business and production plummets (a likely scenario), supply will dwindle and prices will go up, which benefits the farmers who help on by the skin of their teeth. But overall it's a huge negative to everyone.

It's unfortunately that urban and rural areas are beginning to clash over water. More and more urban populations are so far removed from food production that they don't realize that cutting off farmers entirely is cutting off their own food supply, at least in part. CA is in a position where a lot of water is virtually exported in the form of exported foods, which is a problem (although a lot of food gets imported as well), but if consumers are willing to pay for it, farmers can and will switch to growing foods exclusively for local consumption.

Currently, as far as I can tell, most cities don't recycle water very much. They are dependent on a fresh source (hence the desalination plant), which goes through the city, and is then treated and released. There's very little technical reason why nearly 100% of the water that isn't lost to runoff or evaporation can't be recycled and put back into the potable supply. Surely if people are willing to shut farmers down they should be willing to recycle their own waste water, including sewer water. Maybe only 25-30% of water can be recycled, but that'd be a good help.

Bombing is going so well for us isn't it. And the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan with guns and bombs and prisons and such worked amazingly well. Just like these FBI stings work so well. Sure ISIS is slowly crumbling under the constant assault, and will likely be defeated soon. But when it's over the people who are left will be in more need than ever before, and even more vulnerable. ISIS2 will be even worse. In short it's just not working for anyone involved.

Look, at some point we will have to engage on an ideological level. We must find out why so many people are susceptible to fanatical messages and figure out how to convince them that the moderate way is better for everyone. If everyone did have adequate access to mental health care (to say nothing of basic health care, food, and jobs), then yes, ISIS would have had no power to begin with. Comparatively the US doesn't have the problems with certain populations and extremism that other nations in the middle east have, because of the fact that basic needs are usually met.

Perhaps western ideology has little to offer these people. If so then both they and we are in serious trouble.

As long as something is still radioactive, there is wasted energy (not to mention dangerous to store) that could be extracted. That's what the IFR program was all about. Process the material until it breaks down into things with such a short half life that it doesn't make sense to process them anymore. And at that point you have waste that has a radioactive half life of decades not centuries or thousands of years. And it sounds like in the short decade they were in operation, they were very successful.

As the article stated, the end of the IFR program was an entirely political decision, not a technical one. Given that we need the technology so desperately from a humankind point of view, it bothers me that politicians today won't even discuss the idea. They are willing to entertain conventional, inefficient nuclear energy, at least to give it lip service.

The good news is that in the future when logic prevails, all the stores of toxic nuclear waste can be mined for fuel for the next generation of IFRs. Provided it can be stored safely.

Except if you study the IFR idea, you'll find there are very few rational concerns about it. In fact it handily addresses all the traditional concerns about Nuclear energy. Safety, waste, etc. If the article linked to by the GP is correct, even the worry about plutonium bomb making is unwarranted as IFR technology simply can't be used to make a bomb. If this scientist is correct (and I see no evidence he's not--after all he worked on this project for many years), then any politician opposing IFR is irrational, or in a conflict of interest with some aspect of the energy sector.

QB64 is only a download away and presents a classic QB4.5 style text ide with an integrated compiler and debugger. It's as close to an out of box learning environment as you can get. And it can do graphics in an SDL window. Might be a perfect start for some budding programmer. Just encourage structured programming and you should be fine.

In a different vein, installing Python and IDLE isn't hard and gets you running very quickly.

I haven't anything at that price point. I gave half a dozen their point to point devices and they rock. I get a full 100MBs over about 800 feet. I'm very happy with them. Hope this issue with the kernel source gets sorted out. They seem like a good little company and they have good affordable hardware.

A local wireless ISP in my area uses their equipment exclusively. Works very well.

You misunderstand. By verbosity I don't mean boiler plate, java-style. I mean simply that there are more keywords. If/Then/Else/End if, Do Loop, For/Next. Again no worse than Pascal which you don't have any problems with.

QtCreator is much closer to the RAD concept than you state here. Callbacks can be filled out in the IDE. It's not like you state in your post. However, the RAD concept isn't always super flexible, and modern GUI systems like Qt and GTK all let you work on the GUI in a programmatic way that is often much more powerful, but still easy and flexible. If you insist on your definition of RAD you'll likely run into limitations (any RAD system) and be disappointed. It's a good concept but in practice I think you need more than that. Except for certain vertical markets, I don't really see the point of full RAD to be honest. Especially when a half dozen lines of explicit code can do the same thing, but exactly how I want it. The XML gui design is far far better in my opinion. Load the ui file, autoconnect the callbacks to your code, done.