I've an idea. Let's look at the countries who have the happiest populations, and do what they do.

So who’s the happiest? As has been the case the past five years, that distinction goes to countries that enjoy peace, freedom, good healthcare, quality education, a functioning political system and plenty of opportunity: Norway, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand.

So capitalism, tempered with socialism. The strength of capitalism is that customers flock to the best products, and others have incentives to create them. Its biggest weakness is that a small advantage can be leveraged to a strong market position, making them successful not because they're good, but because they have too much power to dictate the market. Similarly unchecked capitalism means the wealthy use that power and money to make themselves wealthier still at everyone else's expense by rewriting the rules that benefit themselves at the direct cost of the rest.

Socialism - i.e. good public healthcare, good schools, a fair and accessible political system that works for all, not the few, a social safety net, economic regulation etc etc paid for by redistributive taxation ameliorates the rawer edge of a capitalist system, and means many have the opportunity to be happy, not just the people who lucked into being at the very top. Taken too far it can impede or even punish innovation, and there's always the risk that the people dictating who gets what become the ones who get the most.

So a hybrid system it is.

But no matter the system label, if it allows a small group to exercise all the power (religious-run states, the leaders of the only allowed political party, military dictatorships, a country run by the most wealthy) then it will be a bad system where the vast majority suffer, to serve those at the top.

I was using it ironically.

Dammit, slashdot took out the strikethru html code. Now I look like a user sheeple.

Clearly you're not thinking hard enough like a naysayer.

Google are doing this because of their evil plan to block spam. You see, it will be popular with users sheeple, and they will flock to gmail's deceptively free service. And then the advertisers who used to send spam now have to go to google and pay for ads in gmail itself, instead of sending them and getting google to pay for the infrastructure.

And of course, google knows all about what you get in email and don't block, so they can tailor the ads just for you, and charge an even higher price!

Evil geniuses, those google people.

Even in the aerospace industry, there are software bugs. Very few, yes, because a lot more time and money is spent to track them down. There are mechanical failures too, despite the best engineering efforts. But anything we build has the potential to be flawed somewhere in the process. That's why we still put highly trained pilots in the things, for when something goes wrong - and even then, human error causes unintended faults, sometimes catastrophically.

If a car cost as much as a jet, and drivers went through as much training as a passenger pilot - and had to have a co-driver at all times - we'd be far safer on the roads.
After all, the vast majority of car crashes are driver error. And failure modes when you're at 30mph on wheels are a lot better on the whole than when at 30,000 feet. But if we built cars to the same standard, and held drivers to the same standard as aerospace engineering, only the rich could afford to.

There's a trade off between acceptable risk, and cost. Even though the designs get safer every year, maybe we allow too much risk in drivers and their cars. But absolute flaw free cars? Impossible.

It is too late to avoid major consequences. We're already going to see significant damage - worse flooding, rising sea levels, worse hurricanes, worse famines - from the CO2 and methane we've been emitting. The 2 deg C rise limit that's been agreed would be bad, but survivable, is going be very hard to hit, even if we take really radical action starting right now, i.e start shutting a lot of coal stations and not building more. It might even be impossible, even if we really, really try (note, we're not even pretending to try right now)

If we carry on as we are now though, we'll hit SIX degrees increase by the end of the century. That alone will be truly catastrophic, and likely will be bad enough to cripple us as an advanced species, let alone the billions of deaths. And that assumes we don't hit the tipping point - where the heat rise causes runaway greenhouse gas emissions (methane from permafrost, massively reduced albedo etc) - before that, at which point all bets are off that we survive at all.

TLDR; our kids and grandkids are already fucked. HOW fucked still remains up to us.

Republicans don't need tech or an agenda attractive to the majority to win elections, they learned a different tactic. They have a small hardcore of voters who do vote in local elections, unlike most. Add in Citizens United, and now money can outright buy an election with low turnout. That gave them control of many state legislatures, and that then allows them to push through voter ID suppression laws; along with ruthless redistricting in 2010 to pack democrat voters into a handful of very, very democratic districts, while giving republican candidates a much larger number of districts with narrow republican victories. And having entrenched their control of state legislatures, they roll back at the state level many of the civil liberty victories of the last 100 years.

You can see the same tactic with stuffing educational boards with the continuous attempts to insert religion into the science curriculum.

Getting out the vote for a Democratic presidential candidate is one thing; but the Democrats have a lot to learn about winning local elections from the Republicans and the Tea Party, or rather, from their wealthy backers.

Who needs to win an election the old fashioned way, when you can just use huge corporate slush funds to fool the gullible and fearful and declare a significant portion of your opponent's voters ineligible to vote?

I had to try a few different ones before I found ones that worked for me. To get the proper 'smoking' feeling - which to me is as addictive as the nicotine - I had to go to a beefier variable voltage battery. As long as the thread is compatible (510 or ego) you can pair pretty much any battery with any head, and the head is the more important bit to get right, though you do need variable voltage/wattage to get the best out of em. Plus you can always use an adapter if necessary.

I'm currently rocking the new joyetech C2 emode head/tank - it uses a standard 510 thread. Only really 'sputters' a little when at the very last few puffs, though like all atomizer/clearomizers I've tried, you do need to blow it out into a tissue every once in a while. No leaks yet! It's also known as the electron-S. The official emode battery is ok, but I prefer my cheap lavatube knockoff, though it is a bit big to carry around, so I use the lavatube at home and the emode goes in the car with me.

There's the small joyetech ecom that uses the same C2 atomizer, so should be good, but not tried that yet. The C2 atomizer inside the head itself lasts me about 2-3 weeks before it needs cleaning; a few cleans then it needs replacing outright (you keep the rest of the tank)

Before I switched to this one, I used the kanger T3S (ego thread) that was pretty good. The coils needed cleaning about once a week. My wife uses a chinese variant that has dual coil and very warm smoke; the K3 DCS only available from totallywicked, but it's the only head that seems to work for her. Prone to cracking though with certain liquids. She uses my old batteries, the relative thin ego-c twist. It's pretty decent, and a good step up to variable voltage, but does tend to stop working a bit too quickly for my taste; we've had to buy several replacements over the last year, so it's cheaper in the long run to get a proper variable voltage battery compartment with replaceable batteries, if you don't mind the size.

The high goes away pretty quickly as your brain adapts, though nicotine remains a mild stimulant. After that, you mainly just get the relief of feeding the addiction - you go into withdrawal pretty quickly once you're addicted. In addition, it's psychologically addictive as you get used to the relief, and associate it with the physical act of smoking. Thus quitting is very hard, even with nicotine replacement therapy, and why most who try to quit fail, repeatedly. Nicotine is supposedly as hard to quit as heroin.

Personally, I've switched to vaping from e-cigs. The same stress relief my brain associates with the physical act of smoking, a much lower dose of nicotine* (similar to caffeine in its effects) without all the tar, benzene and the many other carcinogens from combustion. Better to quit outright of course, but this is a workable half-way house for now, and much cheaper to boot.

* I've scaled down the amount of nicotine in the liquid to much lower than I started with.

'Carbon pollution' is used as a shorthand for the several carbon-based greenhouse gases (released by human activity) that are heating up our atmosphere by trapping solar radiation.

carbon dioxide of course is the main anthropogenic culprit from fossil fuels; but it also covers methane (CH4), which is a more potent greenhouse gas per mole than CO2 and comes primarily from natural gas and oil mining, and then animal based food production, and finally landfills. Carbon monoxide is also a greenhouse gas, though a weak one - it's main effect is to strip OH radicals from the upper atmosphere, which would otherwise be breaking down methane. It can also lead to the formation of ozone, another greenhouse gas.

So carbon pollution covers several gases that are causing unwanted effects in our atmosphere; as opposed to just talking about one, carbon dioxide.

Cricket, on the other hand...

I got presents for my nephews that arrived late (from a seller that only shipped in-country), so I was delayed shipping them on to where they live. Entirely my fault for not ordering earlier, and I fully warned my sister that they would likely arrive after xmas, and sent extras with my parents (they were tight on room for luggage, so could only send small presents that way). Estimated delivery window fell right around xmas.

As it turned out, they only took 4 working days to cross europe, and arrived on xmas eve. Very grateful, and thankful for the delivery guys working right up to xmas to get stuff there in time - and if it had arrived after, as I fully expected to, I certainly wouldn't have complained.

People bitching because stuff ordered xmas 23rd didn't arrive on the 24th across a country the size of the US? Blimey, talk about a sense of entitlement.

Of course the magnitude of the offence matters.

"The law does not concern itself with trifles" - usually referred to as 'de minimis' in laws. With most laws, you need to commit an offence of a significant enough seriousness to even be an offence. Once you get past that point, there is also the broad principle of proportionality, i.e. let the punishment fit the crime. Then you factor in intent, state of mind etc.

Speeding and parking illegally can lead to risk to others, so even relatively 'small' offences can have large consequences, and that's why they're taken somewhat seriously, beyond the actual consequences (which are usually, though not always, pretty much nil). Charging an electric car in a stationary parking spot? Not so much.

The correct response here was for the officer to inform the school, and then they could decide if they wanted to file a civil suit to get their 5c back. Invoking criminal theft just makes an ass of the police officer and the law.

Except the nexus 5 is likely to come in around half the price of the iPhone 5S (off contract) at $350. And quite a bit cheaper than the 5C, while blowing the latter away in performance terms.

It might only be the 2nd fastest overall, but at bang-per-buck, it's damned impressive. Personally, I'm hoping they bring back the very cheap nexus 4's; there's nothing even close to the quality/performance in that price range on android, and my wife is after a new android phone but doesn't want to spend too much.

Because it's a major article (it was near the top of the list of most-read articles on the telegraph site when I saw it yesterday) in a major serious newspaper read an awful lot by the right-wing management class in the UK. Ironically, it's also the paper read by many members of the (governing in coalition) Tory party, who are the ones who had the plan to revamp IT teaching to be more than 'this is how Microsoft Office works'.

It might be a troll article, but it IS how a lot of people think. So if you want insight into how British management think of coders, and IT guys in general, then there you are. We're a bunch of dull, weirdo tradesmen with a fungible skill. And that's why IT is being shat on from a great height in many companies, because we don't have some loudmouth 'ideas' guy, aka a suitable MBA type in their view, making us do useful stuff instead of muttering in a corner.

So if you're in IT, and you have a clueless dept head (some are good, some are crap, management has both types), then you need to basically become your own promoter and 'ideas' guy, in order to liaise with management and shape what they want (assuming they know what they want to achieve, which is not always the case) into something realistic and actually achievable, while making them think it was their idea.