Yep, I know the conflict. I'm glad to have had that aspect of my education (dull as it was at the time), but I was already a compulsive reader, so they didn't discourage me. What happens with kids who aren't into reading in the first place?

My high school understood this -- the classes for remedial readers were so much fun that regular students sometimes took them too, and nearly all the kids came out of them with more desire to read, not less.

News flash, genius, we already have nukes. And we've used them. You don't have to trust us - it's too late.

They might be using nuclear in which case it's not dirty or polluting. The bottom line is that they're in the business of generating electricity in a certain way, it's pretty normal for them to keep doing what they're doing.

You might not like it. Fine. Get some folks together and build a solar energy electricity provider and sell to the grid. Others are doing it.

But don't act like existing utilities need to knock down their profitable coal plants just because you happen to not like them (even though you likely still use just as much electricity as anybody else).

I love this part, too:

"It includes exceptions for emergency situations, search-and-rescue efforts, traffic first responders, and inspection of wildfires. It allows other public agencies to use drones for other purposes — just not law enforcement."

First off, everything's an "emergency situation" now that we have a war on terror and a war on drugs. Second, this let's the use the old "inspection" ruse to use the drone as long as they can get some inspector to tag along.

I would recommend you all remember this when it's time to vote. Make stuff like this a big deal. Call them to the carpet at town hall meetings. Etc.

iOS 8 was at 46 percent after four days. Obviously, since Apple control all the hardware, it's much easier for them to get people to upgrade, but it's still a big problem for the Android ecosystem. Presumably, app developers are having to support fairly ancient versions of the operating system in order to reach a sizeable proportion of the market, whereas an iOS developer can reach 95% of the installed base with an iOS7+ app.

This is Swift. You just need a file called main.swift with this in it:

CreateGameThatIsSortOfLikeAngryBirdsAndMakeMeMillionsOfDollarsOvernight()

See... Swift is so good it's reduced your code size by 80% (including the missing line to return 0).

It's actually the second article in a series. The first article looks like it had some Swift in it.

No doubt there will be a new Slashdot story for each subsequent article. Because Swift.

Is anybody at all surprised except, maybe, said novices?

That's what my electric utility already does. I do have a slight problem with this:

"But you shouldn't quash an entire emerging industry just to protect an old and established one."

Nobody is quashing an emerging industry. What they're saying is that they don't want to have to buy electricity from everybody.

Forcing them to buy electricity was a bone thrown to the solar energy, as are the various tax incentives for installing solar. I actually want to install solar myself, badly, but I would prefer this to proceed with the least government interference.

It's called "principle", something that's uncommon in the left-wing world.

You have no idea what you're talking about. McDonald's can own stores and franchise the brand at the same time - nobody cares. I have no problem with auto dealers - the issue is that if Tesla wants to sell directly then they should be able to. The only reason to disallow it is to limit competition for entrenched players.

By the way, thanks for playing the part described above. If not you, somebody else would have. But you folks are always good for a laugh.

OS X comes with csh, bash, ksh and zsh. If you delete the link from sh to bash and replace it with a hard link to zsh, it probably secures your Mac.

You're probably not running a bash that isn't vulnerable. Neither of the first two patches completely fixed the issue. Personally, I don't think it'll be completely fixed until somebody patches bash to not interpret any of its environment variables as functions.

Which it should never have done in the first place.

So, my normal speaking voice then.

As it was explained to me by the engineering dept. at SoCalEdison, the more power I use, the more it costs them, so they'd rather I used less, and if I used none at all that would be perfect.

Incidentally Sam's Club has started putting little wind generators on the lampposts in their parking lots. Manager at the one I frequented in SoCal told me this had already dropped their power bill by 5%, which is significant if you're in retail (even bulk-wholesale-priced retail).

In later models, i.e. well after the 6502 was obsolete for general purpose computers, there was an 8 register that you could set to change which page was regarded as zero page. If that had been available from the start, it would have saved me a lot of time looking for locations that didn't zap the MS Basic interpreter on our Commodore PET. I seem to remember that the floating point accumulators were considered the best bet.