Precisely. No matter what alternative energy you come up with, as soon as it threatens to become practical to use it at scale, the environmentalists will find a problem with it and shut it down. Fuck em, just burn lignite.

Temperature goes up more or less linearly, and CO2 goes up more or less linearly. Thus they are well-correlated. There's not a lot of power to that correlation, as the article demonstrates itself by trying it with different lags (from 0 to 20 years -- would have been interesting if he'd tried negative lags); the data is too featureless to show anything interesting.

That's why software developers shouldn't insist on using the title Engineer. This kind of accountability is expected of an engineer, it's not an anomaly.

Engineers just build siege engines, they're not responsible if the siege fails.

Making mid-production changes in parts without changing the part number -- at least the customer-visible part number -- is not unheard-of, it's common.

Get a "Bad Cop/No Donut" bumper sticker, a LOT of cameras, drive the speed limit, and enjoy the eventual civil rights lawsuit.

Because if He does exist, they want to spy on him.

And also they've heard he notes the fall of every sparrow, and they'd really like to learn his methods.

This same crap keeps coming up on slashdot, where someone takes some 'evil patent' that's 'so obvious', hunts down an example of something vaguely similar, and shouts 'look, prior art, prior art! it's invalid!'.

As opposed to searching through some patents bought in a bankruptcy proceeding, hunting down an example of something vaguely similar, and shouting "infringement, infringement"? That strategy seems to work pretty well.

These are the same kind of idiots that seriously think apple patented a rounded rectangle,

They did. If you check their design patent, the shape itself was in fact the only thing they claimed. Everything else was excluded.

call microsoft a patent troll

One of Microsoft's patents claims doing a 64-bit CRC of song metadata and using that as a hash key. That's pretty trollish.

A FHSS based 2.4GHz cannot fail in this way. It doesn't stay on one frequency long enough for interference on that frequency to matter.

You don't have to knock out all that many to get a "glitch". Total loss of control is more difficult.

You'd have better luck if you deliberately hit either the aircraft or the transmitter with a strong enough signal to overwhelm the antenna. The equipment required to do that isn't generally sold. It'd have to be custom built.

Overwhelming the front end isn't too hard, all you need is a microwave oven magnetron, horn antenna, and power supply.

People are calling this thing a "drone", but I'm wondering if it's really more of a standard model R/C aircraft under real-time control from the pilot and without any sort of autopiloting capabilities. With those, if the control signal is lost, they won't hover and certainly won't return home, they will generally cut throttle and return control surfaces to neutral, dropping out of the sky.

Also that thing where it turned out the Star of Bethlehem was a sign of God genociding an intelligent species.

Prior to the DMCA, sites could be sued for any comment posted on their website, and have a good chance of losing (I don't know any case of this happening before the 1998, if someone else knows, that would be interesting).

In fact, the opposite was the case. You were not liable for copyrighted content posted by others. The DMCA didn't change that, but created a much stronger safe harbor which you lose by not obeying the DMCAs takedown provision, thus providing a strong incentive to follow those takedown provisions. A sneaky end-run around the First Amendment; you don't HAVE to obey the whims of those who send takedown letters, but in practice the incentive is overwhelming.

JSTOR, not Swartz, cut off access: "MIT was harmed in the process, Grimson said, with 10,000 researchers denied an important resource for several days as JSTOR sought to cut off the mass downloading."

Standard authoritarian tactic -- follow the chain of cause and effect back to the party you want to blame, then stop.

Which is just the opposite of what Martin Luther King said which is that if you break laws protesting an unjust law, you should gladly go to jail.

That tactic is out of date. The government has adapted to it. Now if you break laws protesting an unjust law, you are arrested and go to jail until your cause is long dead (or better yet, you are) and nobody even notices except a few unimportant true-believers.

Man won the Great Rodent War centuries ago.

His Magnificence, the Generallissimo Norvegicus, says you can go right on believing that if you like.

Yup, it's like the thousands of 'structurally deficient' bridges that are around the country - the engineers have examined them, they know they have serious deficiencies from lack of proper maintenance (or perhaps use above/beyond their design)... those bridges are almost sure to fail "sometime" in the future, but it's impossible to say when... could be tomorrow, or the thing could last another 10 years, but unless something is done, it will fail eventually.

And that turns out to be a less than useful warning. Even a well-built bridge will fail eventually without maintenance.

This hill seems to have been known to be quite a bit more dangerous than that, however. It seems to be basically a pile of rubble held up only by friction of the bottom part, which is constantly being worn away.