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Comment Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score 1) 652

Comment Re:This is great news! (Score 1) 485

Depends on who you're killing with those bombs. Civilian deaths I have a problem with, but I have serious doubts on the civilian death toll numbers provided by our enemies. If we've killed thousands of militants to prevent them from killing, raping, or enslaving hundreds of thousands more, then so be it.

Comment Re:This is great news! (Score 2, Insightful) 485

Blame the following issues on Obama's amateur hour policies:

1. Isis - directly resulted from Obama's premature pullout in Iraq and subsequent flip-flop on intervening in Syria
2. Benghazi
3. Gridlock - if he hadn't rammed through his healthcare bill without compromising with Republicans, they'd be much better at doing the political horse-trading it takes to work across party lines to get things done. By pushing it without any buy-in from the other party - something that has never been done for a law on this scale before - he inaugurated a new era of do-nothing politics. The Republicans have held a grudge ever since. Hopefully when Harry Reid is out of the Senate majority post next week, we'll finally get some bills to the White House, where they're sure to be vetoed. He's been protecting Obama for years, preventing him from taking a formal stance on so many bipartisan initiatives by preventing bills from coming to the senate floor for a vote. O's going to pay a political price for each veto, I'm sure.
4. Mexican drug cartels invading Texas and Arizona
5. Russia's return to cold war stance, thousands dead in Ukraine
6. China's emergence as a belligerent military power in the pacific region
7. Botched diplomacy with China, Brazil, India, Russia, Europe, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on and on...

Comment Re:Not a chance (Score 1) 631

> American POS systems have no support for chip+pin

My new cards came with chips, and the POS systems that have been deployed to the stores I've visited in the last few months have readers. Chip+pin is coming to the US sooner than you anticipate.

Biotech

Black Swan Author: Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin 432

KentuckyFC writes It's 20 years since the FDA approved the Flavr Savr tomato for human consumption, the first genetically engineered food to gain this status. Today, roughly 85 per cent of corn and 90 per cent of soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. So it's easy to imagine that the scientific debate over the safety of genetically modified organisms has been largely settled. Not for Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and several academic colleagues who say that the risks have been vastly underestimated. They say that genetically modified organisms threaten harm on a global scale, both to ecosystems and to human health. That's different from many conventional risks that threaten harm on a local scale, like nuclear energy for example. They argue that this global threat means that the precautionary principle ought to be applied to severely limit the way genetically modified organisms can be used.
Transportation

What Will It Take To Make Automated Vehicles Legal In the US? 320

ashshy writes Tesla, Google, and many other companies are working on self-driving cars. When these autopilot systems become perfected and ubiquitous, the roads should be safer by orders of magnitude. So why doesn't Tesla CEO Elon Musk expect to reach that milestone until 2013 or so? Because the legal framework that supports American road rules is incredibly complex, and actually handled on a state-by-state basis. The Motley Fool explains which authorities Musk and his allies will have to convince before autopilot cars can hit the mainstream, and why the process will take another decade.

Comment Seriously considering leaving Linux for good. (Score 0) 774

I have been a consistent Linux user since the 1.x kernel back in the 90's. Before there was even X11 integration, before there was Red Hat even. I have never had a problem with changes to the ecosystem - Switching to Xorg? Fine. Ditching LILO for Grub? OK. But this... this systemd is terrible. It's replacing half the OS, it's fixing stuff that ain't broke, and honestly causing more frustration with trying to troubleshoot compatiblity, daemon startup, and whatnot...

I'm to the point in my career where I no longer need to care about this stuff. My server admin days have given way to more major infrastructure issues. The only things I use Linux for anymore is for my personal file server in my basement, and even that is running old Fedora 17. I've been messing around with SteamOS to play video games in Linux - a long held goal of mine - but I'm asking myself now, do I even care anymore?

I'm done with Linux. Screwing around too much with stuff that doesn't need to be messed with is giving me headaches and sucking up more of my time that I can better spend on other pursuits.

Goodbye, old friend. Maybe we'll meet again once this systemd bullshit passes.

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