Are you referring to Catholicism, which was founded by Constantine?

Constantine did not found the RCC. He just changed Roman law so that it would be legal. The RCC predates Constantine, and was solidly entrenched in Roman society by the time Constantine made it a legal religion. Constantine's change in Roman law wasn't proactive; it was reactive.

im surprised theres so much hate for H2. its true that most hydrogen today is from NG. but you realize that if you run your EV in many parts of the east coast you're basically running on coal? that's much worse.

Of course, I think most EVs are sold on the west coast, so that's probably a moot point. Besides, with EVs, you at least have the option of using clean energy (and even the ability to provide that energy yourself). With hydrogen, a truly green option doesn't even exist unless you use a grossly inefficient means of producing hydrogen, such as electrolysis of water, which is just horribly impractical.

also, aside from the $90k tesla, all EVs have horrible performance and range.

That's the fault of the shortsighted engineers who chose to put hitting a price point ahead of usability. It isn't inherent to EVs, just EVs made by people who either don't understand the market or are deliberately trying to kill that market out of fears over high reliability of EVs leading to fewer car sales in the long term—it's hard to say which.

All H2 vehicles are full purpose cars, like gasoline cars.

As long as you're within driving range of one of ten stations. By contrast, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand EV charging stations in California, and in a pinch, any electrical outlet can do the job, albeit more slowly. For that matter, a U-Haul trailer with a generator on it can probably keep you going indefinitely. :-D

"Whee! We're releasing the CO2 somewhere else instead of from your tailpipe, so now our car is green!"

What a load of crap.

IMO, the only subsidies and tax breaks should be for true electric vehicles, because they are the only ones that can realistically be powered from non-CO2-emitting power sources. Everything else is just a workaround—a step in the wrong direction, purely in the name of expediency, solely because doing it right is expensive and challenging, and fuel cells are (relatively) cheap and easy.

Err... pregnant. Safari's spell checker didn't flag that. Weird.

What are your feelings on birth control? Similar?

The difference is that there are people who can eat what they want and stay thin. Leavings things to evolution is often the safer bet.

There are people who can have sex all they want and never get pregant, too, but evolution doesn't select for them, at least in subsequent generations. :-)

Too bad there isn't a rule that says you lose your citizenship if you sponsor a bill that is declared unconstitutional. Wiping your @$$ with the highest law in the nation should come with a very high price. If it does not, then there's no real incentive to not keep whittling away at it until it becomes a worthless piece of paper... just as our Congress is doing.

The problem is often embedded in the processes and many times the new people fall into the same errors.

Well that's certainly a possibility, but if you do that enough times, you'll eventually get a new group of people with enough clue to look for the flaws in the processes, rather than continuing to do things the way they've always done things. The critical part is to replace more than just the top couple of layers of management. The farther down you go, the more likely you are to result in changes to the actual day-to-day processes. You probably don't have to change the bottom-tier of management, but you do have to make it clear to the second tier that they should be regularly asking the bottom tier for updates on changes to their processes, and if nothing is happening, give them the authority to change the bottom tier selectively.

I would argue a better model would be to split them up into several different agencies with more narrowly focused missions.

The problem is, that's what we had before, and then 9/11 happened, and everyone knee-jerked and said, "Why didn't you stop this?" and the answer was because things were so compartmentalized that the different agencies didn't talk to each other.

No, what's needed is to A. show them right from wrong, and B. establish clear oversight. Ideally, the second step would be to have parts of each spy agency working against one another, trying to dig up dirt on the others, to keep them from becoming complacent and bending the law when they see fit.

It makes me sick that the lowest level guards who were following orders were the ones who were drummed out of the service etc.

They should have been drummed out. Following an illegal order is illegal. As a member of the military, you're sworn to follow lawful orders. You're required by law to reject unlawful orders. And they should have known that torture is illegal.

The people who ordered this deserve to be tried for war crimes.

Everyone, from the top person who knew about this down to the bottom person who carried it out, should be tried for war crimes.

Even if, for whatever reason, your lie detector actually worked sometimes people think they know some 'facts' when they have been only fed with false information.

Yeah, but you can't reveal something you don't know, so in that scenario, it would be physically impossible to get better intel through torture. So that's still not a valid argument for torture.

The middle step is always "?" (or "???" or "????"). And even though the last step might not be "profit", you can bet somebody did.

Fire every single person from the second level of management up to the top and replace them with competent, sane people. When the new crew arrives, assign them their first task: assembling evidence to prosecute the old crew. The line-level employees who know where the bodies are buried should be able to do this quite well, and the act of publicly ordering them to prosecute their former bosses should make it very clear that such abuses will never be tolerated again in the future.

Oh, and waterboard Bush and Cheney. I think the Supreme Court could be persuaded to look the other way and not declare it cruel and unusual until afterwards. :-)

BTW, how did you get Slashdot to let you indent content?

That's not C. What is this "foreach()" you speak of?

Presumably a function that calls another function using a function pointer.

With that said, a more idiomatic C syntax would be:

Or some such. And you'd probably wrap that in a function and call it addClassToElementsByTagName(char *tagName, char *newClass), at which point your calling code would be back to a one-liner again.

They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Cherry-picking. What's a "real choice"? What's "low-latency"? What's "modern"?

It's not cherry picking. "Real choice" means a choice that meets the legal definition of broadband, and has low enough latency that normal use of the Internet isn't painful.

The most critical word was "broadband", which has a strict legal definition. Going forward, that definition is 10 Mbps down, 2.9 Mbps up. AFAIK, only one satellite service can provide that (just barely), and DSL can only provide that (just barely) in a few rare places that support ADSL+ with Annex M, and even then, only within about 1,000 feet of a central office or specially configured remote terminal, if memory serves. So the vast majority of DSL and satellite service no longer qualifies as broadband.

Low latency typically means "not satellite". Satellite adds approximately half a second of round-trip latency. At such high latencies, the Internet does not work very well:

• Web browsers can only open so many connections at a time, and most browsers limit you to three per hostname. So if you have a hundred tiny resources on a page, the page would take a minimum of 15 seconds to load over a satellite link, regardless of the speed of that link. And that's best-case performance; the actual bandwidth limits compound this. Ad blocking is pretty much mandatory, and even then, you're going to be miserable.
• VoIP calls are painful with half a second latency. In addition to being challenging to avoid stepping on each other's sentences, such long latency wreaks havoc on the technology used to prevent feedback and remove echoes.
• Using ssh over such a connection? Fugghedaboudit.

Most consumers have only one usable choice that qualifies as broadband. In a few areas, folks have two. Even that isn't enough competition to provide real choice, because duopolies tend not to compete more than absolutely necessary unless one of them is a newcomer, and even then, only for a short time (after which the entrenched monopoly usually runs them out of business, but if they don't, then competition still invariably settles down).

Now if you'll think back to high school economics, with supply and demand (a free market), if the supply gets too low and the demand stays high, the price goes up, and once it gets to a certain point, it becomes profitable for another player to enter the market and compete, and supply increases, and the price drops back. However, that can only happen when the barriers to entry are low enough to allow other players to feasibly enter the market.

When you have a per-household cost of $2,500–$5,500 for fiber service, even if you're a monopoly, it is going to take you well over a decade to pay off the infrastructure costs, assuming typical service prices. A business considering jumping into such a market has to ask themselves, "Can I steal 50% of the customers in this market, and then hold out against an entrenched monopoly for 20 years without them undercutting me so much that they bury me?" I think you'll find the answer is always "no".

For this reason, you'll never get the steady stream of market disruption required for supply and demand to function properly as long as each ISP has to provide its own physical infrastructure. It is simply a non-starter.

What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?

It works acceptably in power delivery, though government-owned nonprofit corporations work a lot better. And Internet service is pretty similar in terms of the costs involved, minus the generation part. The nice thing about nonprofits is that they have no incentive to cut corners on infrastructure improvement, because the money has to go somewhere. and it can't go into the pockets of investors.