Lead acid batteries are still about half the price per kWh (look near the bottom, at the 48v x 400Ah bank), and come with the same 10 year warranty. Cars care about weight, houses don't.

The new thing here isn't battery storage of solar power, it's lithium-ion batteries instead of lead acid. The price performance for lithium-ion can't compete with lead acid yet, when weight isn't a factor.

Whistleblowers have been coming forward, the people have been loudly criticizing it, we elected the Presidential candidate who was most opposed to it in both of the last two elections (the second guy was distinctly more of a "lesser of two evils" than the first), and we've been taking them to court.

So, to recap, that's soap box, ballot box, and jury box that we've been using. To claim that we're letting them get away with it is to betray your ignorance of the facts. Short of revolution, we have done everything we can. This is the oligarchy ignoring the law and the will of the people.

"We need our opiate to manipulate the masses! It is hard enough to get ordinary people to accept self-destructive falsehoods when we package them with a message that the left is anti-religion. How can we sell our bullshit if we lose the church?!?" - Heartland Institute

And if "But I have other classes!" is the best excuse that you can come up with, then you're going to deserve it.

Hey, that's not fair. OP clearly stated that he was also busy trying to get laid and did not understand the course material. Clearly when you add those two elements he deserves at least a B-.

All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sure it does. (Not that one small pilot project solves the problem, I mean if the tech is scaled up.) It's carbon-neutral just like biofuels are, it does not add any net CO2 to the atmosphere: it only puts in what it took out to make the fuel in the first place. (I suppose your could even use it to remove CO2, to get us back to 350ppm via carbon sequestration -- make up a bunch of "blue crude" and then stick it underground, running an oil well in reverse.) The problem with greenhouse gas emissions is fossil carbon, which puts in carbon that was captured millions of years ago.

Except the Apps can't be installed if you refuse

Xposed Framework + XPrivacy. Boom.

What rational argument is there that makes it right to strip ownership from the copyright holder after a few decades? Does real estate become public domain after 100 years of ownership?

You have confused ideas with property. The only rational argument for using state force to punish people or make them pay for making a copy of a work is that doing so promotes the creation of more works. That excuse falls off rather rapidly once the author is dead.

A song is not real estate -- if I go into Bob Dylan's house it affects his life, if I sing one of his songs it doesn't -- and so your comparison makes no sense.

So, are you ready to demonstrate, how copyrights have sniffled the development of Jazz, Rock-n-Roll, or Rap, for example?

Famous Copyright Infringement Plagiarism cases in Music

Music Lawsuits: Blurred Lines Thoughts

HTH. HAND.

We trade "freedom" for "security" every day; it's called civilization

If you're trading freedom for security, you're doing it wrong. They are mutually dependent. You have both or neither, not one or the other.

What does it mean to not be free? It means you can't live your life as you want because someone -- the state, the group with a "monopoly on violence", where one exists -- will use violence to stop you. You don't have security when you are subject to state violence that restricts freedom.

And what is the reason we desire security? Because we can only live as we choose -- we can only live freely -- when others do not violently impose their will upon us. You don't have freedom when you are subject to violence that threatens your security.

The question then becomes, how do we organize to defend ourselves against violence, while at the same time not creating an organization that commits violence? The modern police state fails this challenge.

Israel didn't start it, Hamas did.

No. The UK started it with the Balfour Declaration, then the Zionist Organization followed by with an invasion. Arabs started to resist the invasion, and the cycle began, with many sins since then by many players. But the origin was British colonialism and Jewish millenarianism. And the recent and ongoing brutality has been primarily of Israeli origin.

Who are the terrorists? The ones launching cowardly, hidden attacks, or the ones defending themselves?

There is nothing "cowardly" about hiding. That's how you win a battle. It's why we invented camouflage. That's the same charge the British leveled against American colonial fighters, that they wouldn't stand out in the open wearing bright colors and be shot like Real Men.

And the Palestinians have been on the defensive since 1917, that's the historical fact.

To give an example, there are a number of women working in the games space who are targeted every time they express any sort of view. Some of these threats are simply extraordinarily disgusting.

"Targeted"? What exactly do you mean by that?

If you mean that people disagree loudly and vigorously when they speak, well, welcome to being an adult.

If you mean that people threaten them, an actual, credible threat is a crime. And in such instance Twitter should be forwarding info to help the police to catch the criminal.

But hyperbolic speech -- even speech you or I may find "extraordinarily disgusting" -- is not a credible threat. If you don't want to read disgusting speech, Twitter lets you block people. We've had the solution for dealing with asshats on-line since the glory days of USENET. It sounds like this: plonk.

Was Dr Martin Luther King Jr an SJW?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that while MLK was all about social justice, he wouldn't have been happy to be called a "warrior".

The term is well-known. Saith the wik,

In internet culture, the term has been used as a pejorative for someone campaigning against things they perceive to be instances of racism, sexism, homophobia or other social injustice. Frequently initialized as "SJW", it is used to accuse opponents of sanctimony, to insinuate pretense, as a pejorative, and as a general shorthand for a person believed to be overreacting to social issues. Although most commonly used to cast negative implications, some have attempted to reappropriate the term as a neutral or positive source of identity.

I'm all for social justice myself. But the fact that someone is arguing for social justice doesn't mean they have their facts or their reasoning straight. Heck, the fact that someone thinks they're arguing for social justice doesn't mean they are actually arguing for social justice, as opposed to riding a self-righteousness high.

TL;DR: The upside of being under continuous surveillance is that everyone else is too. It is the same argument as, "Because terrorists might get caught."

Here's just one example of the downside: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and similar will all have zero attendance as soon as employers stop hiring people who have been seen at an AA/NA meeting. That will be a reality within ten years, as private license plate tracking databases come online.

Doubt it? Ask yourself this: Would a typical "profit over everything" manager hire someone he knew was in NA? That guy is going to abuse these databases as they come online. That is reality.

+- WikiLeaks publishes The Sony Archives
Submitted by vivaoporto on Friday April 17, 2015 @09:39AM

"WikiLeaks published on its site a full, searchable archive of the data leaked during the high-profile hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment last year.

Some of its 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails highlights SPE inner works and thoughts on matters like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the case against Megaupload and the extradition of its founder Kim DotCom and the connections and alignments between Sony Pictures Entertainment and the US Democratic Party."

What surprises me is the similarity between both introductions not the completely different conclusion between both summaries. It is almost like there was an attempt to control the discussion of these leaks in the context of personal privacy (and of course it is an important part) but also burying the content of the leak itself and its political, social and economical implications.