There is a grand jury who disagrees with the version of events that you have imagined.

The grand jury is just as likely to be corrupt, and/or incompetent, and/or prejudiced, as the rest of the people involved with, and directed by, the systemically flawed justice system we have today. In addition, even assuming 100% competence on their part, the data that reached them can be (and often is) washed to provide a particular desired outcome.

The only takeaway I get from all this noise is that we'd be somewhat better off if police officers wore tamper-resistant AV recording gear when on duty (and in any jurisdiction that assigns them 24/7 authority, on duty or not, they should be wearing those cameras 24/7 as well. Personally, I think 24/7 authority is also a Very Bad Idea.)

There is no question that some individual police officers, and some groups of police, are corrupt. Given the seriousness of the authority and responsibility assigned to them, and their ability to ruin lives and families in a heartbeat, letting them run loose without any independent oversight seems like a very serious mistake to me, particularly now that monitoring their activities is well within the bounds of technical feasibility.

A bad cop is a horrible thing. It's also long past time for the blue wall of silence to creep its slimy ass into the black hole of history to join with some of humanity's other bottom-feeder behaviors.

Fuck, I barely speak English, I don't want to learn a new language.

English is fine. PHP on the other hand, is not.

It's more like several tenths of a percent native iron in the Lunar regolith, and typically the particles of iron are cemented to blobs of glass created by the heat of impact. You *can* separate the iron bits magnetically, but then you need an additional melting step to separate the slag from the iron. Other than that, I agree that native iron will be a useful product on the Lunar surface.

A chondrite type asteroid contains carbon and water (as hydrated minerals). These can be extracted and reformed into hydrocarbons and oxygen, which are an excellent fuel for *landing* on the Moon. Also asteroid rock brought back to a Lunar vicinity orbit can be in sunlight ~100% of the time, whereas a region at the Lunar pole which traps water ice would also have low sun exposure.

Rather than thinking of Moon and Near Earth Asteroids as competitors, think of asteroid rock placed near the Moon as a literal stepping stone. It would be a place to fuel your lander on the way to the surface. By lowering the total mass ratio to reach the Lunar surface, it makes it *easier* to get there. Now, if you can extract water ice, that helps you get back to orbit from the Moon's surface. Ideally you want to do both. The rocket equation imposes an exponential mass ratio based on delta-V. If you can refuel at multiple points instead of bringing it all from your point of origin, it changes the exponential into a linear problem. That's way way better.

Many good men are [racist]

No, they aren't. If you're racist, it's more than a "sin", it's an abject failure of humanity. Just the kind of thing that gets people hurt badly, often in large numbers. Your sin here is failing to recognize evil when it's right in your face.

Others are liars, or thieves, or adulterers.

There's no worthy point in this. None of these actions can serve to exonerate racism, or racists. The only cure for racism is to abandon it as a failed mode of thought. Every thinking being is an individual. When someone loses (or never gains) sight of that and lumps them into classes, regardless of what you call the process, it's a very, very bad thing.

All men have their sins.

No, they don't. Some people are intrinsically good; and some issues are not sins, for many varied reasons, not the least of which is an overly simplistic viewpoint of the person making the judgment. The idea that all are born with/into sin is a superstitious notion with absolutely no root in reality.

Yours is self-righteousness.

Pot, meet kettle.

Iron in the form of minerals is common in the Earth's crust. Iron in the form of metal isn't. Some other metallic elements mix well with molten iron, and sank to the core along with it.

Yes, he's ill. But the OS he wrote is better than any I've written so far--how about you?

Not sure, it's been a while ... message-passing, multi-tasking microkernel in the early 90s. Hand-rolled bare-metal HD drive controller and interrupt stack, with full ability to read and write FAT filesystems from reading the specs from the technical manual.

Haven't felt the need since OS class.

I have no idea what his does, I had to block the image of the scrolling glimpse into the abyss which was the screenshot of the OS before it induced a seizure.

Crazy doesn't mean stupid.

Nor does it mean "newsworthy".

I've known a couple of schizophrenics and various people with varying degrees mental illness. What I would not do is subject most of them to the interwebs without a buffer between them and what happens.

Does pandering to showing the OS someone with schizophrenia wrote help them in any way? Is what he writes actually healthy for him? Or does it just let him wallow in some of his obsessions?

So, sure, it's definitely blinking and flashing. Does it actually do anything other than embed his own rituals? I have no idea.

Have you tried version 2.0 yet? It replaced those with loaves and fishes. Has a recurring 3-day downtime though.

why have we started covering the crazy end of the tech spectrum?

What do you mean? We've always covered the GPL.

What the ... ?

SS, efficient? How the hell is transfer payments from the young and poor to the old an rich efficient? What metric are you using, money spent to votes bought?

Not quite sure what you need a cite on - That police in the US don't have the right to beat the shit out of you for no reason?

Yes. Does Officer Friendly actually get in trouble for breaking your arm? Or does he simply claim that you assaulted him, and possibly plant some drugs in your car to "find", and walk free? Because it sure seems like it's the latter.

While this is creepy, and might be interesting in a clinical sense ... why have we started covering the crazy end of the tech spectrum?

I'm afraid this just reads like "batshit crazy guy writes gibberish OS, come look at our ads".

Profiting from sending other people's children (or, put another way, excess population) to die in other countries which can't meaningfully fight back doesn't sound all that risky to me.

Neither Saddam nor Taliban could really fight back, yet those wars ended costing the US about a trillion dollars it could ill afford to lose. Furthermore, sending "excess population" to die risks revolution or at least demonstrations, like those during Vietnam war; and speaking of Vietnam, you also risk misjudging your enemy. Finally, in a capitalist economy everyone is a potential consumer helping drive up demand (and, more cynically, a potential worker helping drive down wages), and thus corporate profits - and this includes the enemy - so while some profit from the reconstruction, most are worse off.

Wars will end because both tree-hugging hippies and Mr. Burns want them to end. Even the Military-Industrial complex is better off fighting imaginary threats, which can be scaled and steered to pocket a maximum amount of money with minimum amount of expenses.

"Renewable energy technologies, as they exist today, simply won't work."
So, what? We should stop pursuing them altogether?

You really should read the IEEE article. It does a really good job explaining why their reasoning and conclusions have nothing to do with your knee-jerk reaction.

In a nutshell, they calculated what the best-case reduction in carbon emissions would be due to widescale adoption of renewables based on their economic feasibility and expected technological improvements. Then they used that to figure out what atmospheric carbon levels would be under this best-case scenario. CO2 levels would still be increasing. And since we already blew past the danger point of 350 ppm around 1990, we'd still be at risk of adverse climate change due to warming.

Basically, the number that climate change hinges upon is an amount. CO2 emissions are a rate - the first derivative of the amount (on the emissions side). Simply adopting renewables isn't enough. We have to adopt them quickly enough for the rate change to affect the amount in the desired direction. Don't do it quickly enough and things get worse (much worse) before they get better.

They gave up on an all-renewables plan because the economics of renewables simply aren't improving quickly enough to flip us from increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to reducing it, before we arrive at a disastrous scenario. It needs to be flipped faster, and the only way to do that without wreaking economic havoc to the energy sector is to rapidly adopt other carbon-neutral energy sources like nuclear.

You assume that economies can't lose any money in transition.

This is a flawed idea in that just refuses to consider political action in response.

This is a Tragedy of the Commons situation. If a country adopts policies which lose money in the transition, its economy shrinks and the economies of countries which don't lose money in the transition grows. Basically all that happens is the CO2-generating activity gets shifted from countries who decide it's worth sacrificing their economy to save the planet, to countries who decide they'd rather grow their economy. e.g. The U.S. decides gasoline oil and coal should be taxed so gasoline is now $10/gal. Manufacturing and production then flees to (say) India where they've decided not to tax fossil fuels. And the net result is that there's very little reduction in CO2 emissions.

The only way "political action" gets you out of this quandary is if you can get the vast majority of the world's population to follow your economic austerity measures. Not 50%, not 75%, probably closer to 90%-95%. Good luck with that. Basically for the economic austerity plan to work, everyone has to be on board. If a major player isn't or enough people secretly go against it, it fails.