Stipulate that
- There Is Nothing To See Here, Move Along, and
- Nuremberg Defense, and
- Conservatives Are Just Lightweight Metallic Headwear Aficionados, and
- If The Tea Parties Hadn't Worn That Short Skirt To The Bar Where The Violent Illegal Alien Was Cleaning The Federal Agent's Hog-Leg, The Tea Party Probably Wouldn't Have Been Ventilated.
Those zany conservatives. Always going for the victim narrative.

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

Conservatives won't like it because it supports the thesis I have been repeating for some time - that the republicans voted against the ACA not because they disliked the contents but because they didn't want Obama to get the credit for a health care reform bill.

Liberals won't like it because it shows how the ACA is just the next offspring of a long lineage of conservative bills that line the pockets of big businesses in the guise of improving health care.

Slashdot "libertarians" won't like it because it isn't a youtube video of Ron Paul

Smitty won't like it because I posted a link to it :)

Since slashdot is slashdotting my slashdot account with random logouts.

I went to SlashCode.com and saw there was a link for the code that runs Slashdot (well, probably several versions ago). Fine. I have a file called Bundle-Slash-2.5.2.tar.gz . There's a link for instructions, BUT it's a dead link.

I wonder how long it will take before I have something useful?

If I can get it running, I'll let you all know... Pudge, if you're reading this... A little guidance would be greatly appreciated. :)

August 6, 2017 could be a momentous day - this could be the day we have definitive proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

We currently have a list of 11 FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), two of them are almost certainly from the same source, FRB 110220 and FRB 1401514, as can be seen from their detected locations.

FRB 110220 2011/02/20 01:55:48.957 22h34' -12deg 24'

FRB 140514 2014/05/14 17:14:11.06 22h34' -12deg 18'

We have not been looking for this type of astronomical phenomenon for very long, and have not yet devoted many resources to the search (likely the list of FRBs will rise). There are probably multiple ways in which FRBs can be generated -- most of them quite exotic and rare -- neutron star mergers and Blitzars are candidates. These type of phenomenon would not repeat in the same location. There are certain types of hypothesized stellar flares that could be recurrent, of course they wouldn't be recurrent on a constant time scale. So should there be an FRB on August 6, 2017 (08:29:24 UTC to be precise), then we are looking at the first unequivocal evidence of a extraterrestrial signal of intelligent origin.

I have a Select Statement that returns 4 rows. When used in a stored procedure as input to an Insert Into, though, it was returning five rows. I commented out SET NOCOUNT ON; which is added by the SQL 2014 template. It then returned 4 rows. To test that was what was really going on, I uncommented out SET NOCOUNT ON; and it is now returning 4 rows properly.

I made no other changes.

Anybody else ever run into anything like this??

So Reddit - where most veteran Slashdotters have been hanging out these days - is melting down, and for good reason.

I've been coming back here more lately.

But man, there's things that Reddit does better. No limit on mod points, for one. A better story queue mechanism for another.

There is a window here, if Slashdot admins have the balls to try. Implement Reddit's up vote system and subreddits. Maybe limit the latter to departments more traditional for Slashdot, but allow all users to submit stories in the Reddit manner. Hell, just clone the thing! You'd get a huge amount of your readership back.

Maybe the Slashdot front page is curated a la /r/bestof to get that moderator filtered quality for the front page, but subslashes should be open season.

Is the spirit of Rob Malda still alive in /. HQ? Can a tiger team code this in a hurry? You should.

Ah, nobody will ever read this....

Remember the motorized retracting radio antenna option that some cars had back in the 70's/80's? Well I want something like that, only on the driver's side of the car. And I want it to be a pipe with an elbow that can be raised like a submarine periscope. Only instead of lenses, I want it to be hollow. And instead of being an air intake like those snorkels on Hummers and Jeeps, I want it to be connected to the exhaust system and have a valve that can be actuated from a control in the cabin.

This way when I'm stopped at a traffic light, and next to me on my left is a big-ass truck jacked up off the ground with its "tailpipe" aimed right at my driver side window, smogging me out, I can flip a switch and return the favor and redirect my noxious emissions into one of *his* windows. (Or even better, a rubber hose that can be extended out from the car sideways to slip over the offender's tail^Wsidepipe, and reroute their own exhaust back at them!)

p.s. Speaking of automotive "why is this shit even legal?", how come motorcycles don't have to have mufflers? I have to notice one coming up on me and quick stick a finger in the appropriate ear so that blood doesn't shoot out of it when the guy roars by. I can be just about to fall asleep and one will go by on the main street down the block from me.

So I guess I also could use a 125 dB loudspeaker, which is just the threshold of pain but no real damage, on a turret on the car's roof, that automatically tracks an above-average loud noisemaking object, and when in range delivers a massive sound pulse of this.

A polar bear
Eats a bowler pair.
Into the Arctic he falls.
His dying wish,
As he passes a fish:
"Have better luck with my balls."

Then again, this could show up on the test:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/06/28/made-to-order-4/

Taking a breather from Amazon Web Services study.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7644157&cid=50043823

Last Monday we had a front page article asking about the "effectiveness" of ISP-level spam filters. I eventually responded with a rehash of my central thesis on slashdot, pointing out that spam is an economic problem and filters will never resolve it.

My comment was generally well received (as seen by the moderations applied to it), though clearly some people were confused by it. Note for example two anonymous applications of the standard form, neither of which showed good comprehension of my comment. Overall my comment fielded 13 replies, many of which seemed to struggle with my statement in one way or another.

However the one who really failed most dramatically was this comment claiming - based on nothing at all - that everything I said was completely wrong. I eventually challenged his faith in spam filters, which apparently caused him to take off the gloves and make it personal.

In fact, so personal, that he kept bringing the conversation back to himself. Eventually I got tired of trying to bring the discussion back to being about spam, and he apparently got tired of talking about himself.

Even for this crowd, that was an odd discussion. Something like 18 comments from him in ~5 days and possibly not a single fact across the lot of them.

What's that other term again, that only can be applied to democrats? Similar to a type of shoe, but clearly it can't fit Scott Walker's wavering stance on the confederate flag.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7612903&cid=50002991

Talking to a Caribbean-based business acquaintance this week reminded me that, no matter my feelings for the Obama administration, I will be eternally grateful that he's taken Cuba off the table. Because in the pantheon of stupid american wedge issues, the Cuban embargo is near-lock for the title IMO.

Bonus conspiracy fun: The lifting of the embargo, and its timing could be seen as a nice little spoiler for the only 2 GOP candidates who have any shot at beating Hillary next year, Bush and Rubio. Most of the other candidates can choose a wide range of answers when presented with questions on the topic, whereas the Floridians actually have serious history and ties on this, making finessing the issue that much harder.

Oh, and before someone thinks they're clever by telling me that President Perry or whoever would just go back to the status quo faster than you can say "fuck you liberals!", good luck with that. The GOP only cared that it reliably delivered Florida's electoral votes, and it stopped doing that a good couple of cycles ago. It's dead, Jim.