+1 to this.

It's fairly common for companies to have required IT products, such as RSA. Then they send their employees out to improve their knowledge of the "blessed" product(s).

The employees are often obligated to attend the conference, and are also (due to corporate policy) unable to say much, just in case those comments can be construed as company opinion.

So yeah... you have these poor attendees who are pretty much like "Look, I don't know anything anyway, my attendance was mandated by someone else. Why are you harassing me?"

He's saying that businesses should buy more expensive property at higher tax rates, in a slum, tear it all down, and rebuild everything new.

In other words: these companies should take it upon themselves to finance urban renewal.

Now I'm all for corporations being better citizens, and giving more back to the communities, but it is laughable to take an area the city can't take care of, and expect a corporation to somehow improve the area by moving in. Corporations aren't in business to make the area's neighborhoods better; that's the job of the city government.

I've seen a number of big, respected corporations in slums. (The Prudential is HQ'd at Broad & Market in Newark - hardly a shining pillar of civilization). The proximity of the company did nothing for the area.

Oklahoma's teachers had better use shorter words in their curriculum than their lobbyists used for the press.

Though I also think high schoolers should be required to work a minimum wage job before graduation, for at least a few months. That way, instead of abstract concepts, they know "it feels like this to earn $100.00."

WTF are you talking about? I'm in the continental US, and it's been the WARMEST winter in at least 20 years. We've been breaking record highs daily for almost two months.

Just because it's cold where you live doesn't mean it is cold everywhere.

You obviously haven't actually spent much time reading Timecube. After Timecube, everything else on the internet can easily be discounted.

Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.

Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.

In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.

To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.

I see no reason that insurance history could provide insight into the cause - be it fossil fuels, freon,

History is simply a record of observations; a dataset.

By itself, it doesn't provide much of anything. It's data.

Combined with our understanding of physics and chemistry, however, and the story changes significantly. We are able to chart what we know about the materials against what we see in the data, and tease out very relevant data.

Measured data over a period of time + physical and chemical knowledge = simulation. Whether it's a flight simulator, racing game, crash simulation, or fluid dynamics - the principles are the same. Over time, the simulations become more and more complex, and more and more accurate.

The process is along the lines of:

• Take what we know, and create a computer model that accurately models previously obtained data (ie. matches known data as closely as possible)

• Next, get a new slice of reality - such as crash two real cars together and film and instrument it to collect the desired data

• We input the same initial conditions into the simulation, and run the simulation

• We compare the results between the two, and improve the simulation model

It's a simple feedback system that improves over time.

High quality simulations are not simple, but they are based on simple building blocks, just like all human knowledge. Over time, the models become very accurate (and peer reviewed, often by a competing company whose interest is in disproving your model to their gain). Eventually, the simulation becomes close enough to reality that we base our decisions on the simulation, and tool up for production using simulated data. Verifying the simulation's accuracy is often little more than a formality with an already expected outcome. (And if the outcome is different, then it's an opportunity to improve the simulation model - and profit from that knowledge).

Modern simulations have reached the point where nearly everything that happens on a human scale (be it vehicle design, structures, radio transmission, or even diaper packaging) not only can be simulated with nearly perfect accuracy, but is routine to the point of being almost boring.

This was not always so. Only a couple of decades ago, simulations were crude affairs with very approximate results. Yet these crude simulations were more than sufficient to get us to the moon and back, as well as build the most powerful heavy lift rockets ever made.

While the order of complexity for simulating the climate is many, many orders of magnitude higher than what is required to simulate the structural and aerodynamic performance of the Saturn V or N1 rockets, our ability to perform such simulations has also increased many, many orders of magnitude.

A great deal of the academic papers with respect to climate science are about finding problems (and solutions) in the simulations. While it may sound like that means the model isn't any good, the reality is the discussion has reached the point of minutiae that increase the overall accuracy, but don't actually change the overall result (or prediction) significantly.

Also fire zones... more than a few people build their dream home in a wooded foothill, where they can't see their neighbors through the trees. There's a lot of prestige in building your home higher up the hill than the next person.

The problem is such areas are tinderboxes, and are poorly maintained from a land management perspective Irrigation, landscaping, and pesticides tends to increase the amount of overgrowth. The presence of humans (and our cars, electricity, and tendency to cook food) greatly increases the number of opportunities for a fire to start. It's not uncommon for a car's breaks to throw out sparks that start a fire, to say nothing of backyard fires and tobacco smoking.

Wildfires eventually strike, and destroy everything. It's a very common pattern in the Western US, where drought is common. The firefighters often call such areas the "stupid zone," as you have to be pretty thoughtless to build your house in the middle of a tinderbox. All it takes is one of your neighbors (miles away) to be either thoughtless or unlucky, and the whole area is torched.

In my experience, it's not that there aren't safe places to build. It's that the safe places are so... pedestrian; so conventional; so... bourgeoisie.

So these geniuses build their homes are built on cliffs, mountainsides, floodplains (near the river/creek), or in the wooded foothills.

BTRFS has a large number of features that are still in the "being implemented", or "planning" stages. In contrast, those features are already present, well tested, and in production for half a decade on ZFS. Many touted "future" features (such as encryption) of BTRFS are documented as "maybe in the future, if the planets are right, we'll implement this. But not anytime soon"

Comparing the two is like making up an imaginary timeline where ReiserFS 3 was 4-5 years old and in wide deployment while ext2 was being developed, with plans to implement journaling (ie. ext3) and extents (ie. ext4) still in the "TODO" stage.

My own BTRFS system is appallingly slow compared to running ext4 on the same hardware; in contrast zfsonlinux is amazing.

I'd mod you up if I could.

Xbox Live Gold is required for everything except downloading patches. It sounds like a fanboi who really knows nothing about the Xbox is proving his ignorance/making an ass of himeself.

There's nothing new here; the Xbox Live Gold has been a thing since the original Xbox.

Why do we want to homogenize discourse?

Simple: It's helpful to be aware of the mainstream in society. This isn't the same as homogenizing discourse; it's simply being well informed.

I'm a fan of Fever

Fever is an excellent RSS reader in its own right, but what sets it apart is "hot feeds", which is a list of feeds sorted using something vaguely similar to pagerank. If a story is linked several times, its 'temperature' goes up. It makes it easy to find interesting stories, without wading through thousands of entries.

And yet the incumbents enjoy something like an 80-90% reelection rate. That's the part that I don't understand. If Congress is doing such a lousy job, how do any of them last beyond one term?

While the actual election is relatively free of corruption, the selection process for candidates is anything but democratic. There are few primaries, and caucuses are easily (and regularly) stacked in a way to exclude participation; most citizens are locked out of the caucus process entirely.

Both caucuses and primaries have another overall problem: They are not about supporting a candidate; it's about supporting the party. As a result, instead of getting the most qualified and capable candidate, or even the candidate most likely to win the general election, you get the party favorite.

Once the general election comes around, you have two wing nuts, and you have to pick which one you hate less.

The whole system is set up to effectively shut out everyone but D's and the R's. It's considered a moral victory when a third party gets more than 2% of the vote...

Wrong! It's "By the way iFarted."