What happened to hiring the best person for the job?

I used to work for a state agency that was under-represented in black employees when compared to the surrounding population. It was a matter of some concern until HR did an audit and found the percentage of African-American employees at the agency was proportional with the number of applicants. There was no systematic discrimination against blacks, they simply weren't applying for the jobs in the same numbers. So then HR switched to having job fairs in African-American communities and encouraging more people of color to apply for jobs. That didn't work, either. HR, which was by far the most racially diverse department in the agency, finally just said the bureaucratic version of "fuck it" and went back to business as usual. All that shit storm and concern over nothing.

Let me guess. The New B-52 IT upgrades feature a raft of combat-certified computers, all running Windows XP.

That thought makes me smile. Can you plan Hack-a-Bomber ?

I'm not serious, but the Pentagon and USAF have done dumber things.

Of course it uses carbon (and nitrogen, and a raft of other things) from the soil. However, unless you're planting that corn on a tar pit, the carbon in the soil isn't fossil carbon that's been in the soil for a million years. You might make the case that plants use marine carbonates dissolved in water, but that amount is very small compared to the mail building block of plants, and for photosynthetic plants, that's carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

I may not be a botanist, but I can work the numbers.

The thing is, ethanol has a lower energy density per litre (or gallon, if you are metrically challanged) than does gasoline, just as gasoline has a lower energy density than diesel fuel.

You get better mileage out of diesel than gasoline, and better mileage out of gasoline than ethanol, all things being equal. Laws of thermodynamics aren't to be bypassed. No amount of "clever" can change the basic fact that gasoline holds more energy than ethanol.

However, and this may count for something for you, as it does for me, ethanol releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that was taken out of the atmosphere to grow the crop that led to the ethanol. There is no net increase of CO2, as there is with fossil fuels. Of course, a cynic might point out (and I might be one) that the carbon in the fossil fuel was also in the atmosphere at one time, to the tune of no less than 1500 ppm in the Carboniferous period.

Using ethanol isn't for getting better mileage, it's for reducing carbon footprint, the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere when you go down to the corner store to buy a six-pack of beer. The beer, btw, doesn't add carbon to the atmosphere, because like the ethanol that's in it, that carbon came -out- of the atmosphere when the crops to make it were grown.

We lost our ad account when Google accused us of hosting porn. The "porn" they pointed out were links to fairly vanilla pictures posted by some of our long-time forum members. We weren't even hosting it. I appealed, they pointed out two more links like that one. Links.

I refused to remove content that really wasn't that offensive, posted by members and complied with our forum rules. It did open my eyes to how Google could be a giant, inflexible jackass.

If we were going to contaminate the Martians we should do it right and send them blankets laced with smallpox. Hey, it worked before.

Navy says that it envisions such systems having extensive use in first-response, search-and-rescue missions, or medical applications.

Just like drones were first used for intelligence gathering, search and rescue and communications relays.

I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now

I'm sure you're right. Just amazing too how customers, who might have otherwise used the same version of software for five or six years, suddenly warmed up to the idea of paying $600 a year, every year, year after year, and not really getting much in return for it. The video editors dropping Premiere is more than a minority. Sony and Avid have been gratefully accepting that new business. Since Apple tanked FCP with FCPX that leaves Avid, Vegas and a couple others to take up the slack.

This might be Corel's opportunity to kick up the functionality in PaintShop Pro.

the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet.

That's not what the manufacturers say, even companies that make both types of guns. They're well aware of what the stakes are when you need a firearm to work. Like you said, a lot of people are dismissing the technology without any actual data or experience with it.

I used to shoot competitively and any gun can fail, even my Sig. When they test those system they put thousands of rounds through those guns under highly variable shooting conditions. Yet people who shoot maybe once a month can somehow divine from a distance that the technology isn't good enough. Amazing that we have complete rubes with such astounding insight.

I've been trying to teach my dad how to use email on a tablet and the Android app is an exercise in frustration. It will present two different ways and dad gets confused. It's not like an interface that looks the same every time you approach it, so the less technically inclined can learn where the function buttons are located. It's a nightmare.

This may sound crass, but this is a problem that'll solve itself in a couple of decades

It's not crass, it's just a biological fact. That's what pisses me off about people attacking social security and medicare, that problem will solve itself over time. Expenses will climb to a peak and then level off as the population declines. By 2035 that big, fat swath of baby boomers will start running into the meat grinder of old age.

Focus on cost control and the actuarial tables will take care of the rest.

“Essentially I am in trouble for posting all of the stuff on Twitter,”

You're in trouble for bragging about it. It's amazing how many criminals get caught because they can't keep their mouth shut. To me that seems like Crime 101. The first rule of black hat hacking is you don't talk about black hat hacking.

Does anyone remember the history of the space station?

NASA spent billions (with a B) of dollars, and for a decade we had not one bolt flying in orbit. I used to call the project the Origami space station, made out of paper. It wasn't until the Russians went ahead and launched the first module that NASA got around to giving up on Powerpoint and Viewgraphs and meetings, and actually -did- something.

I just love it when people proudly proclaim that something isn't possible.

History shows that such pronouncements have a very poor track record.

When ever there is a radical shift in a large employment industry, there is economic devistation for a lot fo families

That's been true with every economic shift in history. The steel industry, automotive industry, that's just life. The transition to clean energy is going to devastate coal country. Too bad coal country wasn't working on developing a broader jobs base during the transition. Instead of building for the future, they wanted to score political points for keeping taxes low. Can't have it both ways.

If people stick with the coal industry when it's apparent to anyone with two neurons left to make a spark that it's a dying industry, then whose fault is that? We should hold up the march of technology and green energy for a handful of rubes living in the butt-crack of civilization? Yeah, we're not doing that.

Team up to create the pie, then fight for your pieces. I'm actually shocked Microsoft is participating. It's a good move and I'm not used to seeing Redmond do the smart thing. Maybe their collective IQ went up now that Ballmer is out of the picture.