Hah. The prosecutor threatens to prosecute for prison time then offers a plea deal for a misdemeanor charge.

You obviously don't know how prosecutors work.

Gun safety isn't that hard. You don't point the gun at anything you don't want to kill, regardless of whether you think it's loaded or not. Guns are designed to kill things, that purpose so you don't point them at things you don't intend to kill.

I still have a reaction of moving the gun if someone walks in front of the barrel when I'm cleaning it (ie no firing pin and a cleaning stick halfway down the barrel). Needless to say this rule was pretty effectively ingrained into my consciousness when I was learning to shoot at 12 years old.

I never said where the ideal zone moved would be a good place to grow things. In fact I've said exactly the opposite in the past. Ideal crop zones are determined by soil quality and moisture levels but moisture levels is determined by location and climate, in the past these zones have been directly above/below the tropic equatorial lines. Global climate change will change that relationship and likely move them further north while the desert zones currently on the tropics migrate north as well. As you note the soils in the north are poor and likely will not lead to good crop production.

But I strongly disagree humanity will go extinct or turn to a mad max type world. The climate will change and humanity will adapt, after some debilitating wars have appropriately thinned the population to the new levels the planet can support. The chances these wars will be nuclear is very small, more likely the poorer nations with large populations surpluses will be destroyed by famine and civil war along with a few nation-state wars mostly between the poorer nations fighting over limited food and supplies. Most of the nuclear armed states are far enough north that the change in crop zones more than likely won't move them out of the country.

This of course assumes we can contain the warming to a few degree's C. If we allow the warming to reach double digits than there will be catastrophic changes. The fact is that wind and solar power are now the cheapest power with small subsidies. In no time at all they will be significantly cheaper than even the cheapest dirtiest coal without any subsidy whatsover. This is remaking the power industry right now. US carbon emissions are falling even with increased power consumption because of this. Within 50 years I expect that the bulk of all power generated in the developed world will be by renewables. And with the power generated so cheap the developed world will be able to completely skip the dirty industrialization phase.

While humans have lived on this earth the planet through all of our history including an ice age or two the human species has seen a planet with between 240-260ppm of CO2. The industrial revolution and the subsequent mass burning of fossil fuels has seen that level rise to 400ppm. Humanity up until this point has never experienced a planet with this much CO2 in the atmosphere. That's reason enough to be scared.

IMO, the concern about climate change is what it will lead to, rising sea levels will displace millions. Entire nations are going to disappear. What do we do with all the people? Let them live with you? It's also going to result in dramatic changes in rainfall, potentially moving fertile crop zones hundreds of miles. The food crops we have created have also never seen a planet with this much C02. Some may go extinct due to insects or others threats that will thrive in the warmer planet. But that's ok right, you are ready to forgo food right?

Secured creditors are actually pretty rarely the majority or even a large portion of corporate debt. That's a debt that's secured against a specific asset. Most corporate debt, particularly for a company like Mandriva is against future earnings which is unsecured. Now the company might have a debt or two that's secured against some asset, say a debt for the copiers that's secured by the copiers themselves or some such but the amount of secured debt is generally going to be very low for a services company like Mandriva. And the only people in front of employees are the secured creditors who basically seize the asset they had secured, the employees stand in front of everyone else.

Unless something hokey is going on the employees that sued will get paid.

Mandriva marketed their "Frenchness" pretty heavily. For the CEO to get up and lambast the same political system he was using as marketing to win business just means he's a dick and I hope some of the money those employee's got comes out of his own pocket.

You aren't seeing how a harsh sentence helps the political career of the prosecutor and judge. It's called tough on crime. There are a lot of people, particularly black men, in jail for very long times so someone could be seen as tough on crime while a woman that did the same thing never even went to jail.

What a lovely post. Depicts everything that is wrong with the war on drugs.

You just equated drug use by consenting adults to child pornography, terrorism, slavery, mass murder and war crimes. Great job there! You forgot to scream think of the children at the end. Though I do give you bonus points for the betterment of humanity bullshit at the bottom, as if YOU get to decide what betters humanity.

According to the sourced wiki article the use of pot went up a small amount while all the harder drugs saw measurable drops in use. They are also probably getting much more reliable statistics now that people don't need to lie.

I just don't buy that audio can't be used. With an array of high quality microphones spread over an area fed into a software radio and some pretty hefty computing power you should be able to look for the rhythmic audio that your typical copter type drones will generate. Because even if they change the size and shape of the rotors all that does is change the frequency not the amplitudes you will see from the rhythmic action.

With some proper math and the right computing power you should be able to identify drones pretty rapidly with fourier analysis and the same microphone array could use Doppler effects to calculate position, and the directional vector. Combine this with some systems to double check such as heat, RF and conventional high band doppler radar and you should have a system that will get 99% of the drones and even provide targeting to a shoot down type system.

The key here is you need some pretty dam good microphones spread over a pretty large area feeding into a pretty massive computer array. It wouldn't be cheap or easy. The easy thing is use a doppler radar system that cross-checks it against RF emissions to eliminate birds. But IMO the best system would use all three, high band doppler radar, RF emissions and audio (and maybe even heat). With three cross checks you should be able to get pretty good accuracy.

The 2lbs would kill you dropped 10' if and only if the 2lbs is relatively compact dense, durable material like say a steel ball, if that 2 pounds is spread over 1 square foot and made of plastic it's probably not going to kill you or even put you in the hospital (though you may end up with a concussion).

Size and shape matter quite a bit in such a discussion and you can't talk about that without also talking about the accuracy of dropping such an object because a 2lb steel ball isn't going to be that big and trying to land that right on someone's head with a radio controlled drone is going to be pretty fucking hard even without wind.

They KNEW he was DPR because he solicited advertisements for the site in various places including USENET using traceable accounts when he set it up. How they found the server is an open question but not really an issue given the other evidence they already had including the seized laptop. They probably had him under surveillance for months.

They had a lot of evidence he was DPR and he's admitted it in filing since. Regardless of his trial arguments that he wasn't running the site anymore there was plenty of evidence he was.

How they found the server and copied it before they got him is an open question but it's probably a very small piece of evidence for how they got him. They didn't get him by getting the server, they got him the old fashioned way. Even if the server was gotten through NSA help it wouldn't have impacted the conviction. My bet is that they did something like they did with DPR 2.0, they infiltrated or compromised the site enough to get it to install a homing beacon and reveal it's true location.

DPR 2.0 was more careful and couldn't be tied as easily so they infiltrated the sites support and developed enough information to identify him. The problem with these sites is that to really make them function you need to use javascript and running javascript on TOR is a big no no. It's right in basic warnings they give you when you download TOR that you should under no circumstance allow javascript to run because it can do a lot of things that will identify you. All the feds had to do with Silkroad 1 and 2 was hack in enough to get a rouge script running that would identify the server and anyone that connected to it.

Doing TOR security properly isn't trivial, it's actually quite hard. And building a secure website is even harder when it has to be secure against ever sending data out over the general internet. On top of that you can't use JS or allow any of it to run and you have to watch security like a hawk because if your security isn't PERFECT you are done. Perfect security is very very hard.

I had the exact same reaction. I prefer low sugar (or commonly called bitter) chocolate. Chocolate and coffee are about the same bitterness, if you can drink coffee black but don't like unsweetened or low sugar chocolate you are crazy. If you can't consume either without a huge dose of sugar and cream (what makes milk chocolate) you are frankly a pussy.

You don't need a pile of sugar and cream added to something like coffee or chocolate to enjoy it. A lot of people like low sugar or unsweetened chocolate just fine.

Most non-scientists in the US don't either. The young earth creationists are a VERY small group, I'd guess less than 0.5%. They are generally very vocal and congregate to "discuss" this view so it makes them seem larger than they are.

Every time the USPTO tries what you suggest they get sued by every applicant and quickly exhaust their entire budget in legal fees. Congress wouldn't provide additional money for a legal defense fund so they just started approving basically everything.