As well as anti-reality.

"Stover worries that shifting responsibility for solutions to climate change from governments to individuals creates an 'every-man-for-himself' culture that actually works against energy solutions and does little to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions."

Right - because central planning is a much better idea <eye roll>.

The bottom line is that when I reduce my carbon footprint I save money, at least in the long run. I've invested hundreds of dollars in the last year in getting LED lights throughout the house. I'll make that money back within 5 years - I can already see the difference on my light bills. Next year I'm hoping to start my solar farm on my very large southern-facing roof. I'll likely have negative light bills when I'm done and it'll pay for itself within 3 or 4 years (yes, that's less than average and there's a reason for that having to do with my air conditioning and the solar panels taking heat off the house).

So, yeah, we need the grid upgraded. But at this stage we need a lot of people trying a lot of different things so that we can find out what works and what's economical. Ultimately, if it doesn't save me money it ain't gonna happen.

It's so funny to see stuff like this written so seriously by someone who doesn't understand basic economics.

Here's something to chew on: why does this "problem" only apply to taxis? Why don't we have a medallion system for grocery stores?

Be careful, your brain might catch fire thinking this hard....

So is claiming that limiting the number of taxis through a medallion system is for the benefit of consumers.

I don't think you know what "hyperbole" is.

His blood wasn't really an alcoholic drink, but at .20% a person is stone drunk. There's video of him standing around talking closely with other officers who would later claim that a) they didn't smell alcohol and b) he didn't act drunk. Neither claim is remotely credible.

In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more. I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson. Note also in Ferguson we find that blacks are more likely to be ticketed when pulled over, etc.

The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.

Note that doesn't invalidate what you say. The answer is far more complex than a simple fix.

Police are safer than they've ever been. The job isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. Yes, there are people who shoot at an officer who pulls them over. There are also people who shoot at the guy working the 2AM shift in Mapco. But I don't walk into Mapco at 2AM and have the guy pull a gun on me "just in case".

Right. In other words, a big part of the problem is cultural, both within law enforcement and from without. I know cops, too, and they're always talking in hushed tones about how it's just becoming so much more dangerous. A big part of why is that they don't feel they have as much support from the community as they used to. And a big part of that is a) municipalities using cops for revenue enhancement (see Ferguson) and b) cameras are now exposing just how much corruption there is in law enforcement and the justice system as a whole. See recent videos of a judge asking a prosecutor if she's going to charge a police officer with perjury after he obviously committed perjury as a good example.

Research shows that most raids on "drug houses" either turn up "no weapons" or a handgun. There's very little violent resistance.

Let me give you an example of why you're wrong. And I could come up with a hundred (literally) but I just need one. Take the David Bisard case in Indianapolis. You can look it up in Google, but short version: Bisard got stone drunk before work one day, jumped in his squad car, someone mentioned that they were doing a simple drug arrest on the radio, Bisard said he'd be right there, they said they didn't need him, he came up to a stop light where a bunch of cars and a couple of motorcycles were stopped, he hit the motorcycles going on top of one (killing the rider) and seriously injuring two other people. At that point he jumped out of his car and began screaming at the dead/dying guy under his car telling him that he should have got out of the way.

In all, 19 police officers of all ranks showed up at the scene. None of them had any idea (this is sarcasm) that he had been drinking. Finally, 3 hours after the accident and after they had stopped for snacks another officer took him for a blood draw at a clinic.

According to state law at the time the blood draw wasn't legally valid because none of the officers thought he was drunk and so, for it to be valid, it would have had to be done at the hospital where the people are "certified". In case you're wondering, his BAC was .20% 3 hours later. Yes: .20. His blood was an alcoholic drink.

Had any of the officers stepped up and said "yeah, I suspected he had been drinking" the blood draw would have been legal. They didn't search his car, his duffle bag, etc.

The prosecutor knew his job. He ran right to court and claimed he couldn't use the blood draw so there was just no way to make this a drunk driving incident. The people of the city had had enough bullshit by this point that in an election months later they put in a new prosecutor who made it plain that Bisard was going down if he got elected. He won handily and fought like hell to get the blood draw accepted in court.

Meanwhile, someone at the police department (they have no idea who (again, sarcasm)) took the blood samples in the evidence room out of the cooler. Bisard's lawyer would later claim that the evidence had been ruined and just couldn't be used because of that. His lawyer, by the way, paid for by the Fraternal Order of Police.

Bisard's world came crashing down during his trial when he wrecked his father-in-law's truck while stone drunk. He begged the officer to just take him home, but the officer was an honest man (note it's taken me this long in the story to get to an honest police officer - we've had 19 other officers and a prosecutor so far) who took him in. At that point the FOP could no longer hold the ruse that Bisard was being set up and they quit paying for his lawyer. Someone paid for a lawyer, though, as he never lost legal representation.

It's really easy to say there are a few bad apples. I hear that all the time. But let me tell you something - the guy who covers for the bad apple is worse than the bad apple. The original prosecutor, the 19 guys who never thought to see if Bisard was drunk - treating it as an "accident" instead of a "crime scene", the people who tried to destroy evidence - all of them are bad apples. Everybody in that department covered up for Bisard - after he killed a person and permanently injured two others.

If you think that's rare, look up Stephanie Lazarus - she's an LAPD cop who murdered someone in cold blood and got away with it for 20+ years. The only people harassed were those who investigated her.

I could go on and on. Thank God we have more cameras now.

Yeah, we know that no particular cop is a racist (I hear this all the time from apologists) but the numbers tell a different story. Blacks are more likely to be pulled over, more likely to be searched, more likely to be harassed, etc. Something's not right.

"But on August 11, 2011, however, BART took an unprecedented step. Under orders from BART police, the system shut down underground wireless service for three hours. The interruption covered stations in downtown San Francisco. In a statement, administrators clearly identified “organizers planning to disrupt BART service . . . us[ing] mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police” as the rationale behind the move."

https://www.aclu.org/blog/tech...

It has nothing to do with "bombs". We had to get the patriot act in order to fight terrorists.

"Of the 22,741 warrants issued since 2003, 21,838 (96%) were issued under the heading of "Narcotics."

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

How many times are we going to fall for this trick?

This is correct. See the youtube videos of people claiming Obama would pay their mortgage as a good example.

Uh, yeah, if you're a big enough sucker to buy their marketing. They are all for the drug war (I could end there and your comment would already be a smoking crater), they're anti-gun-rights ("duh, for the children! drool"), etc. Only a sucker buys their marketing bs.

Right, got it. Democrats are good, but if they're bad it's in the same ways that Republicans are bad. But Republicans are also bad in even more ways, so they're worse.

Got it.

You'll vote for Feinstein because she's not an evil Republican, right?

My wife is from the Philippines and I've traveled there a few times. One of the first things that one notices is that there are very few overweight people. I mean like one in a thousand. It's funny in a way because most young women have great legs even if they're not otherwise pretty.

But when they come to America they tend to gain weight rapidly. In the Philippines they eat a lot of starch. Actually, most calories probably come from starches. But they also tend to move around a lot more.

Here, the issue is not just the diet - it's also the sitting around watching TV or whatever, along with driving everywhere and walking only minimally.

Anyway, the point being that it's not just the food - it's the lifestyle.

"Poverty" and "income inequality" are very different. While the US has a fairly large income inequality, poverty isn't common. (Note that "poverty" to most people means "unable to meet basic needs"). The irony is in our culture that poor people tend to be overweight.

malloc isn't the problem, though. My point was that if you write it in the style of the code in the paper (don't keep track of the string length between character appends) then it'll still have to scan the string a million times. If you know ahead of time that you're going to append exactly one million characters to the string then you need but one malloc, right? I can make this program extremely fast in that manner but that's not what they're doing.

Well, yeah, but that's not going to work consistently. Worst case is if the string is on the stack you'll smash the stack and likely have a memory access error. If it's on the heap you'll likely get the error quicker.

I wouldn't even think of writing a program in the manner in which their sample was written, but if I was trying to solve their basic "problem" there are better ways to go about it.

I just reviewed it, but frankly, they're not my peers.

They actually understand the problem and state it near the end of the paper. The issue is pretty simple and when I read the /. summary I knew what the problem was. They're appending single bytes to a string. In both chosen languages - Java and Python - strings are immutable so the "concatenation" is way the hell more complex than simply sticking a byte in a memory location. What it involves is creating a new string object to hold both strings together. So, there's the overhead of object creation, memory copying, etc. Yes, by the time you're done it's a lot of extra work for the CPU.

I'm going to state this as nicely as I can: what they proved is that a complete moron can write code so stupidly that a modern CPU and RAM access can be slowed down to the extent that even disk access is faster. That's it.

Even if you wrote this in C in the style in which they did it the program would be slow. Since there's no way to "extend" a C string, it would require determining the length of the current string (which involves scanning the string for a null byte), malloc'ing a new buffer with one more byte, copying the old string and then adding the new character and new null byte. Scanning and copying are both going to require an operation for each byte (yeah, it could be optimized to take advantage of the computer's word length) on each iteration, with that byte count growing by "1" each time.

The sum of all integers up to N is N(N+1)/2. If N is 1,000,000 the sum is 500,000,500,000. So, counting bytes (looking for null) requires half a trillion operations and copying bytes requires another half trillion operations. Note that "operations" is multiple machine instructions for purposes of this discussion.

Yeah, modern computers are fast, but when you start throwing around a trillion operations it's going to take some time.

Writing to disk will be faster for a number of reasons, mainly because the OS is going to buffer the writes (and know the length of the buffer) and handle it much much better. It's not doing a disk operation every time they do a write. If they were to flush to disk every time they would still be waiting for it to finish.

There are a few notes, here. First, in Java and Python the string object likely holds a "length" value along with the actual character buffer. That would make it faster and not require all the operations the badly written C code that I describe above would require. But the overhead of objects, JVM, interpreter, etc. gets thrown into the mix. Second, if I were doing something like this in C I could keep the string length as part of a struct and at least make it that much faster. The point is that a good programmer wouldn't write code in this manner.

Anyway, this "paper" proves nothing except that really bad code will always suck. One would have to be an idiot to write anything close to what they've done here in a real-life scenario. I know because I've cleaned up other people's code that's on the level of this junk...

Like, maybe the coder chicks could wear bikinis while writing those functions and post selfies to prove it?

Yeah, I laughed when I saw that. Someone's pretty clueless.