Not a red herring at all.

One...China doesn't have a power grid that's about a century old...they built most of theirs in the last 15 years. So it's a different architecture entirely. Ours looks a lot like extension cords plugged in, running north-south.

Two...the Chinese power grid is still wildly unstable...go there sometime and see for yourself.

Three...you're totally far off in your statement to begin with; China is not only more than two orders of magnitude more dirty than the US per watt in terms of all emissions (carbon, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals, etc.), they are also nowhere near getting to anything like Germany has. They may make a lot of PV equipment, but they don't use much of it themselves.

Or have you not noticed that every Chinese city is totally covered in smog?

It looks like about 2 percent of total generation capacity in the United States (which has a bit more than 1,000 GW).

And this is something that makes me crazy when talking about Germany's initiatives. I think what they're doing is fantastic, and definitely the way of the future, don't get me wrong. But there are posts in Slashdot that are the equivalent of, "Oh, let's just do the same thing here to...it looks easy!" And nothing could be farther from the truth.

Issue 1: Geographic size.
Renewables are great in that they *can* be cheap and are, almost always, quite clean. But in the US we have a couple of challenges. One, the best place for wind farms is not too close to large population centers. Sure you can put a few wind turbines here and there, but if you want meaningful amounts of power, you need to take advantage of lightly-populated regions with lots of reliable wind...and these aren't exactly close by to cities. Given the amount of area that a solar farm takes up, the same holds true there as well, though not always to the same degree of distance. Now, enter VARS. Without voltage support, the power won't travel these long distances. T. Boone Pickens made this mistake...he got ready to build out large wind farms, and then suddenly discovered that the distance over which the power had to travel to get to the people who needed it was a nightmare.

Issue 2: Balancing.
Power grids must keep generation and load in balance. Otherwise, you get multiple bad things, including underfrequency and overfrequency events. I won't go into the full details of that (it's a rabbit hole) but suffice to say that it is very very bad. And the balance doesn't just have to be within X power company, as they are interconnected with their neighbors. Entire groups of such companies themselves are organized into managed groups under the control of a Balancing Authority. In some markets there's energy trading, and in others it's more tightly regulated so that such speculation isn't permissible.

But I digress. Under the old way (nuclear, hydroelectric and fossil fuel generation) load was variably predictable and uncontrollable by the power companies, but generation was something they had solid control over. If load went up, they either increased output at a plant or spun up reserve capacity...if load went down, they went the other way. But when you have renewables, you lose a degree of that positive direct control. The wind slows down and your wind turbines suddenly push less power. The sun comes out and you suddenly have more watts on the grid than you want to have. In Hawaii, HECO has issued a moratorium on new solar panels on homes, because it's so bad that it's threatening to destabilize their grid...the only grid on the planet where one single modern power company has control of the whole thing. (Hawaii isn't interconnected because, well...see above over 'nightmare of pushing power over long distances'.) And just the number of people who have their own photovoltaic panels on their homes is causing them grief. Because of how unpredictable sunlight is...in Hawaii. Yeah, it really is that freakin' bananas. It was expected based on their ideal combination of zero interconnectivity, steady weather and fairly stable power consumption levels (not having industrial facilities makes load prediction pretty easy) that they could support 20% penetration of distributed power generation using PV. They're at 10% now, and in trouble.

So, yeah...in short: Germany's done a great job leading the way. But their power grid is 1/20th the size of ours in terms of power generation/usage, and their nation is also a fraction of ours in size. So what they did can't just be copied and pasted into the US to get us to the same proportion of renewable generation.

Yeah, but Intel and AMD will go bankrupt if they make chips just for "some of us." And if you look at where Intel has gotten their speed increases, very little of it in the past decade has been from clock speed. Ghz is no longer where the performance boost is to be found.

I'm a little confused as to why you're citing the chip's low low price of "less than $200" if you need liquid nitrogen to get it to perform the way you want it to. You do realize that cooling systems cost money, too...right? There's no point in being able to use a cheap processor to get to X performance benchmark if the required additional support systems cost thousands of dollars more than a more powerful and more expensive processor that can do it out of the box. Not to mention the fact that liquid nitrogen cooling isn't exactly hassle-free, especially in a household environment. And it's worth noting that even if you boost Ghz, you eventually run into choke points related to pushing data to and from the chip anyways. You can give the most important worker on an assembly line all the crystal meth they can eat, but they can't work any faster than the conveyor belt in front of them.

The "bullshit math" you refer to is known as Symbolic Logic. It provides a mechanism for reducing statements and concepts into operands, effectively...and by doing so you can more easily detect things like non-sequiturs, circular logic, self-contradiction, empty statements with no real meaning and the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" bullshit that is the basis of many knee-jerk legislative actions. The real beauty is that by sticking to the symbolic operands of a statement rather than the contextual content, you can strip away information that triggers an emotional response (terrorism, child porn, etc.) and recognize when someone is just plain full of shit.

And I agree greatly; teaching this is an excellent idea. It's a cornerstone of critical thinking, which in turn is a cornerstone of good citizenship in a democratic society. But if you don't seek it out as a college course, you'll probably never hear about it. That should change.

There's another layer to this, however. If you look at the practice exams for the AP CS course, you'll see that it's not computer science that's being tested as much as how to program in Java. Useful, yes, but not exactly as broad as the title would suggest.

It seems to me that if there's a desire for greater CS knowledge in high schools, then teaching things from an architectural level first would be a smarter choice. Much like driver's ed; you don't learn how to design an engine, but you learn that a car has one, and how it relates to the transmission, tires, brakes, etc. I would think that for the computer literacy purposes of most people, knowing how to finish an incomplete java applet is nowhere near as useful as understanding the way different parts of the architecture interact when they browse a website or set up a wireless network at home.

Why is it a bad thing that an organization tasked as the primary conductor of electronic surveillance of other nations is conducting electronic surveillance of other countries? And why is it a surprise? You are right: everyone expected them to do this, and they should. It's their job. If you read their charter, this is plainly clear in the first page. And that goes back to 1952, over 60 years ago.

Don't get me wrong, I think the NSA has gone too far with regard to American citizens. But spying on other nations? Who else SHOULD they spy on...they're a spy agency, for fuck's sake. Why is everyone acting like it's news that spies are spying? There are absolutely zero prohibitions with regard to this in our country...not in the Constitution, not in law, not even in policy. And when you really look at the complaints of other nations, it boils down to objections over how damned good the NSA is at it, since the complaining nations either have their own capabilities or are so primitive *cough, Afghanistan, cough* that they couldn't even dream of attempting it at this time, but are hardly squeaky-clean in their behavior in other areas.

Ah, but my point is still valid. Time Warner Cable is a content producer and distributor.

Exhibit A: A list of job postings related to video production at TWC. The details of what happened with that merger aren't as clean as you think. Yes, a lot of Time Warner related to production didn't go over to TWC...but some parts of it did, and there's been growth on top of that. Verticalization is the near future of content for video and movies. Netflix is producing television shows. Comcast is making movies. (At least Paramount got out of the goddamned amusement park business. What the hell was THAT all about?)

I think you have a point...but in this case I think the hate is well-founded.

I'm not the sort to jump onto the "Hate Google...they're evil!" bandwagon. I don't think that oil companies are inherently evil for doing what they do...we'd be screwed without their product, after all, and we're the ones demanding their production. And I happen to think that Netflix is really, really cool. But I've had phone, Internet, cable service through both cable providers and more traditional telecom providers, and also seen how things went with satellite TV for a family member. And to me, when I see commercials for those three verticals (cable, telecom, satellite tv) it looks like three pedophiles arguing over who would make the best kindergarten teacher.

When you look at the state of these industries in our nation and compare them to the rest of the developed Western world, we are behind, seriously so. And when pressed for how they would address this, the leaders of those industries came up with a plan that would bring us to 2008-level parity...in 2045. Yes, they said it would take nearly four decades for them to reach the point where Europe was, 6 years ago.

I wish there was a way to "home school" my TV and Internet access...

Well, heads up there...because TV/cable providers are major media producers AND distributors. NBC? Universal Studios? Comcast owns them...they're Comcast. Time Warner Cable? Just take off the "Cable" and you'll have a clue. And when you're talking about the MPAA, you're talking about an association of...movie production houses (like Universal and Time Warner). Granted, they aren't in the music industry, but I don't blame them...the music industry is still trying to figure out which end is up from the combination of iTunes/Amazon's upending of their distribution channel and the after effects of them deciding to sue their own customers like a bunch of idiots.

Since 1948, there's been a ruling by the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Paramount Pictures that concerned whether or not Paramount's vertical integration (movie production, movie distribution, movie theaters...with exclusive rights down the pipe) constituted a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Indeed, it turned out that it was, and as a result there has been a long-standing prohibition on that degree of integration from that day forward. Now, it's easy to just point and say, "Hey! If Comcast makes movies and shows movies on their own channels, that's a violation!" It isn't, the way the ruling exists, because Comcast also shows movies from other sources as well. But the needle has been moving in that direction, obviously. But in a way, this isn't a new problem either, and there's hope that it can be addressed.

Independent verification of any other claims?

ALSO ZERO

So, let's look at the base rate. Most shootings by police that are independently assessed or verified are justified. Thus, by all probability in the absence of independent means of verification, this one is too.

Objectivity and a lack of hard evidence cuts both ways, dude.

(And I know there were witnesses that actually obviate what I just said, objectively supporting the basis for the shooting. I wanted to point out the logical fallacy from the post I quoted.)

I think you fail to understand how cash and pills work, particularly in how they are packaged.

Money, you see, is mostly validated using visual means. A vendor tells me that something costs $15, and I hand over two bills...one that is worth $10 and one that is worth $5. He/she then looks at said bills, seeing that they are indeed money and also in the right denominations, and the transaction is concluded. If I hand over two $1 bills, the transaction will fail, or if I hand over pieces of paper that feel like money but aren't, then the transaction also fails. Conversely, at my end, I'm checking to see the value of the bills (and that they are the right kind of currency as well, in my case, since I have both euros and dollars in my wallet) are what I need to complete the transaction. So right there, two different parties check each bill once, visually.

Furthermore, the fact that money is visually assessed so frequently and by multiple parties makes for value in 'destroying' money by marking it in a manner that indicates that it has been wrongfully acquired. Marking from a dye pack accomplishes this. So, a dye pack destroys money by rendering it visually tainted.

Pills on the other hand, are stored inside bottles. The thing about bottles is that they are intended both to keep the pills together and facilitate physical shipping and inventory in pre-defined quantities, and also to protect them against contamination. And people who are buying prescription meds already assume that they are wrongfully acquired...and even if they are not, they are about to be anyways, so visual marking wouldn't matter on the bottles in the first place. Indeed, it may even help confirm that the goods are of high quality for having been stolen from a reputable source. And while money must be transferable between illicit and licit actors to retain its usefulness (what good is money you can only pay crooks with?), drugs that enter the black market stay there, so nobody cares if the law was broken in their acquisition. So a dye pack is useless in the context of prescription medication and may actually serve as an accidental validation of the provenance of the stolen goods.

Ira Winkler is a journalist now? That seems odd to me. Attrition.org has an excellent summary of all the different smells of bullshit that emanate from this guy. He also got thrown out of Microsoft after conning them into hiring him to teach a class on application security where he literally used little dinosaur figures to try and teach the class. He was feckless...and this was *before* Microsoft got as good at security as they are now, before they developed their own SDLC, etc.

When was this? The whole space program of both countries started as a competition between each other, for christ's sake. Yeah, they both did a rendezvous in mid-space and shook hands at one point, but it's also worth pointing out that our astronauts are military personnel, and that the USAF has a space-borne unmanned craft that has been busy at work for a few years now (if not longer). Any "outside the scope of international quarrels" activity is a thin veneer of neutrality, indeed.

Actually, on a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed vessel with the ability to start World War III, I would argue that for the purposes of recreational reading, security is more important than usability. Consider the failure modes of usability for an e-reader meant for recreation. Now consider the failure mode of security on a nuclear missile submarine.

I've tried to think of a way to make it updatable...including strong crypto that you'd need a keyloader to manage, so that only trusted devices could update or manage content on the readers. But ultimately, I couldn't find a way to make it so that the device wouldn't have to be considered a controlled asset...and that's essentially the situation they're trying to avoid in the first place. The sub is basically a gigantic SCIF, so if there's any doubt at all as to the device's capability for carrying data out of the environment, it becomes a lot harder to manage. And the OP speaks to it in terms of comparison to an e-reader like we'd have out in the open world; that's not what this is meant to be. It's meant to make it possible for sailors on the boat to have more books than they are used to having. It's a step forward.