It's been months since I've read commented on a /. post. I picked a bad day to come back to look at /. I don't know what's real or fake any more. I have no idea (nor do I really care) what a 'moral right' is. Should I be outraged for being fooled by an April Fool's joke or outraged at Nature?

At least we'll always have this video of Steve Ballmer doing the monkey dance.

Oh, just wait for 3D laser sintering printers and then there'll be people printing metal gun parts. I do NOT look forward to that day.

I must have struck a nerve. Well, I suppose it could have been the KFTRC remark. I will have to use it more often. Regardless, I'm not against nuclear power, but I'm not blind to its hazards and the very very long term consequences our descendants tens of thousands of years from now will be dealing with for what we have done with nuclear power and weapons over the past hundred. We must be very conservative in how we use and deploy it.

The airline industry has a much better safety record than the nuclear power industry.They can tout the millions of people they don't kill each year because they intentionally work on safety. The nuclear industry argument is much the same argument that NASA used to launch Challenger. Just because it hasn't blown up yet means it's safe. We still haven't come up with a solution to deal with the tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel sitting in cooling pools at nuclear power plants all over the US. Sure can pretend that clean up of Fukushima and Chernobyl won't take decades if not centuries and will be off limits to human habitation for the same amount of time. But are you aware of all the nuclear accidents, military and civilian? Not to mention the worst nuclear contamination in US and Mexican history involving the recall of thousands of tons of contaminated steel. But you guys keep fucking that radioactive chicken.

Howard: CAN YOU PLEASE, just, help me?!

Althea: Alright, alright, hang on, stay calm. I need an orderly with a wheelchair, I got a robot hand grasping a man's penis out here.

Howard: You think you could be a little more discrete?!

Althea: I'm sorry, we don't have a code for a robot hand grasping a man's penis.

It was one minor incident in a conference full of win. I didn't even hear about it until the conference was over. 20% of the 2500 attendees were women. There were people from 41 countries. There were quite a few young programmers in attendance as well because of the education track. PyCon and the Python community has made great strides in outreach. In attendance, there were for organizations for women in tech: Pyladies, LadyCoders, Women Who Code, and CodeChix.

Here's the best take I've read on what happened and what should have happened:

Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

Everyone involved could have handled the situation better. I'm annoyed that this one incident, important for those directly involved, got blown way out of proportion and has shit on all the great things that PyCon achieved this year. Adria Richards does not deserve the abuse she's received even if she handled the situation wrong.

I could go for base 60 but base 64? Need a system that is also easily divisible by 3. And speaking of pi we should switch to using tau (2*pi) instead of pi.

numbering system. Numberphile has a compelling explanation with it's useful and easy to use though it's not pushing for it like this bunch.

butt.

we'd have fusion power in 30 years. And it's still 30 years away.

And this is from a guy on "super perv powder" who "recommended that the most effective way to take a dose is via rectal insertion, a procedure known as "plugging," writing: "Measure your dose, apply a small amount of saliva to just the tip of your middle finger, press it against the dose, insert. Doesn't really hurt as much as it sounds." Yeah, McAfee is so credible.

denialists (like Jim Inhofe) will build a snowman and say, "What climate change? Nyuck, nyunk." People are conflating climate with weather. Climate is an average of what has happened over a period of years, decades or even centuries.

Scientists can't definitively say that Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming any more than doctors say that one particular home run by Barry Bonds was as a result of steroid use. What both can say is that the likelihood of either is much increased by their respective underlying conditions.

I see little difference between Creationists who think the Earth is 6,000 years old and global warming deniers who think that humans aren't responsible for changing the climate by burning millions of years worth of sequestered carbon in less than three centuries. I'd really like to know how releasing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere in the geologic blink of an eye doesn't have an effect. On a separate note, humans have altered the nitrogen cycle through the Haber-Bosch process by removing nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it into the biosphere. That amount of nitrogen in the biosphere hadn't changed in over a hundred million years.

Yes. The "brown noise" was the subject of a South Park episode. Here's a relevant clip.

Well, we all know what the brown noise of smell is.