The "protesters" in Ferguson right now are burning cars, breaking into stores, in general being asshats.

They're not interested in any kind of justice. They're only interested in revenge.

Yup, because nothing says "trust" like search results based off of government mandates, right?

If the cost of stopping the sea level rising is a million deaths worldwide [...] is that better or worse than even abandoning countries and low-lying areas entirely? I have no idea. And unfortunately, it always seems that no-one else does either.

Not only do these people not know, but even worse, they do not care. They just go ahead and do it anyway.

Why is the parent modded down as a troll?

The post is entirely correct. These other sources of energy are not efficient and reliable enough to be financially viable right now. This may change in ten or twenty years, but right now, solar and wind just aren't where they need to be.

Slashdot itself is becoming less and less a site for geeks and nerds. It has been infected by dogmatic brats who cannot tolerate discussion. This is just one example of many - I'm sure you'll find more as the comments flow in.

This is a fantastic effort that will help people such as myself. I run sites across a dozen or so hosts, but they don't generate income and I really don't want to drop all that money into certificates. If I can get free certificates from a good CA then I'll gladly bump all my sites over to HTTPS.

Thank you!

Many of these things are, in fact, progressive policies - but we must ensure that we're talking about the same progressivism. In American politics, a progressive is someone who believes in a large, power government that has a strong control over the economy and societal norms under the guise of "reform" and "progress."

An example of historical progressive policy would be Prohibition. But don't take my word for it; Last Call is a fantastic book that covers some of this material. If you're the anti-book type, Wikipedia mentions it as well.

So:
Largest corporate handout in history? Progressive.
Expansion of the military-industrial complex? Progressive.
More laws at the state and federal level? Progressive.
Raising taxes on people? The concept of an income tax is a progressive policy.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by clout in STEM work, so I'm not sure how to place it, but many of the things you listed are, in fact, big government progressive ideals. These are the things that FDR, Teddy, Wilson, and others loved. You know what the worst part is? This is a little secret the politicians won't tell you...

The (R) and the (D) are both progressive. The (R) are less progressive, but they're still progressive. They, too, enjoy increased spending, government handouts, boondoggles, choosing winners and losers in the marketplace, and using the law to enforce their own personal moral viewpoints. So remember, when you vote for that (R) or the (D), you're ultimately getting the same thing.

I would like you, and everyone else, to remember something about the office of the president. This is very important:

The president does not write laws.

So when someone running for the office of president says, "I will do X," you need to ask yourself if the president is really capable of doing that.

Yes; the president can have some influence on how laws are written and which ones to write, but laws must be passed by congress first, and then approved by the president. That's how it is supposed to work. So next time some president comes along and promises "I will make dancing naked down the street covered in mustard while singing show tunes at midnight legal across the nation," you have to call him out and let him know that no, that office cannot make something legal or illegal.

The current day question, it seems, is if the office of the president has the right to outright ignore certain laws and choose not to enforce them. One can argue that the law hasn't changed, a legal or illegal act remains legal or illegal, only the enforcement of the law has changed, but to me that is a dangerous road to go down. We're supposed to live in a nation of laws, and if the president can choose to enforce or not enforce on a whim, then the laws stop mattering. To me, this is no different than unilaterally rescinding a law, as if the law never existed, a de facto change of the law.

We'll see what the Supreme Court says about this soon, I think; Obama is threatening to do just that, and I imagine there will be a challenge to his decision, and I can't imagine that it won't go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Should one decide to support (or not support) his actions, I would like to to think about what you would feel if "the other guy" was in charge and had the exact same capabilities. Don't support it because "your guy" is in office now, and then stop supporting it because "the other guy" is in office later. If it isn't right for person A to do it, then it isn't right for person B either.

I think this country would be in better shape if people focused more on principals and less on making sure that "my guy wins."

I was greatly amused when the HR department at my company was looking for "Pearl" developers.

I could be totally wrong, but I'm going to guess that the paper applications have no real value; the real data is stored in a database file. It's easy to remove personally identifiable fields from the tables and leave the non-personal data for analysis. Shred the paper, anonymize the digital data, keep it around and release it to the public perhaps.

That kind of data could be very useful in some kind of complex economic modelling software, or perhaps the data over time can use used as an economic or some other indicator, or perhaps an unusual change in the normal pattern could indicate something. I don't know what the actual data is specifically, but if it is stripped of personally identifiable bits then I'm sure someone would find it very valuable. Given how easy it should be to provide, why not?

Because Americans are no longer educated about their government or their history, and as long as they can catch the latest episode of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo they really don't care about what is happening. Those of us who DO care and pay attention are in the extreme minority. No matter how loudly we shout about the problems we're racing into, the rest of America looks at as like we're some crazy conspiracy theorists.

It doesn't help that many of the large news outlets are government sycophants, refusing to carry news that may damage the current administration. Note that this behavior is not limited to CBS or our current administration. They're all corrupt to some degree.

But yeah, nobody gives a shit, give them some Soma, all is well. Aldous Huxly was right.

Unfortunately I see far less fear mongering and fraudulent reporting on Fox than I do on MSNBC or CBS. I'm not saying that any of those networks are great - they're not - but when Canada allows Al-Jazeera and declines to carry Fox, one does start to wonder if the real issue is reporting and not simply politics.

That depends on if you're someone who takes every word literally (which is very precarious once you learn about the evolution of Biblical texts) or someone who is happy to take a large part of the Bible as metaphor. As an example, the beginning of Genesis famously states that the world took 6 days to create and that the 7th day was rest.

Only the most literal of readers would believe that it took six actual days; something that isn't even possible, since a "day" is a full revolution of the earth, and that wasn't even created on the first "day". It's metaphor, trying to explain how the world was created in stages.

Once can view the Garden of Eden story as metaphor as well, how the human psyche moved from an animal state of innocence (unable to comprehend advanced concepts like shame, guilt, etc.) and to a state where it can comprehend more complex ideas.

Then there's all of those laws; a lot of them pertain to sanitation so that you don't get sick or spread illness. When the Plague was ravaging Europe, the Jewish people had a much lower infection rate because they followed these rules.

Some parts of the Bible are pretty interesting and insightful, and even if it gets some things wrong in a scientific sense - especially if taken literally - some things may not be quite as wrong as a lot of people think.

I say this as a Pagan-ish type, by the way; I have no personal reason to put parts of the Bible in a positive light.

Once must also take into consideration that the people who put forth those ideas were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had. I'm sure that in 500 years people will look back at us and say, "Wow, those guys sure were dumb, why didn't they see X, Y, and Z for what it really was?"

One book that does provide a very good treatment of where science and religion overlap is The Universe in a Single Atom by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. One of the core concepts of the book is what I described above; old religious texts were written a long time ago and those people didn't know all of the things we do now. He promotes science as a good thing, and says that if science can prove that a certain religious law, theory, philosophical point, etc., can be proven wrong by science, then it is the religion that should change.

He also talks about how science and religion exist to answer fundamentally different questions. Science tells us "how" something happens, but religion helps us answer what it means in a philosophical sense.

It's an excellent book and well worth reading by religious, non-religious, science, and non-science alike.