Not everyone throws away their vote on a Democrat or Republican. Some of us can think for ourselves and refuse to support the established powers. Independent and third-party voters still exist.

No.

I keep hearing people bitching about this Benghazi thing. It's been a while, but I still have no idea what all the controversy is about. My understanding is that our embassy got attacked, and the administration came out with one explanation for why it happened, but it turns out that there was another, better explanation in hindsight. Assuming that's correct, what's the cause for all the outrage? Why are people still muttering about impeaching Obama over this issue?

I didn't know the Flying Spaghetti Monster had a Multigrain cousin.

Now, you're being silly if you think that "alternative news media" exist. Bloggers aren't known for their investigative reporting prowess. Your best bet nowadays is to read multiple sources with conflicting biases. I'm a fan of Al Jazeera, Xinhua, and BBC, among others.

What, you wanted me to RTFA? Many of the comments here refer to Lauren as a female, and the name is typically that of a female. That being said, I feel like a bit of a douche for my previous comment, and it now seems evident that WOOFY GOOFY's comments may not be as uninformed as my first read suggested. My apologies, WOOFY GOOFY, and carry on!

Right, just like Nazis are supposed to gas Jews, and Sunnis are supposed to blow up Shi'ites. Don't bother thinking about whether or not any of this actually makes sense, it's just the natural order of things, yes?

I say if the NSA is supposed to engage in activity that harms the US diplomatically, harms US businesses, and harms American citizens, then it's only rational for us to want to dismantle the NSA in its entirety.

Quite the allegation!

Oh. Here I thought you had actually engaged in some deep analysis of the article. That you refer to Lauren Weinstein as a "he" leaves me in doubt.

They'll get as far as you take them.

Shit's not gonna change itself. Join today.

Any other power producer doesn't "feed into the grid". The reason they only get wholesale rates is because they dump their power onto high-voltage lines. There's retail power companies that operate switching substations that step-down the voltage on that power so it can be put on the low-voltage grid. As a residential solar user, you don't dump power on the high-voltage lines. You don't need a middle-man to step-down that voltage for you. Your solar power isn't having its voltage stepped-up to go onto the high-voltage lines. Your comparison is horribly flawed.

This might just be a shortcoming of the current pricing system. Back in the day, you got charged for power consumption, and that's it. Today, we've broken that out into generation cost and distribution cost. If you look at wholesale electricity pricing, this is the price for power from high-voltage distribution lines, typically only offered to customers with very high power consumption (>1MW). These customers are retail power companies, companies that own and operate switching substations that step-down the voltage of high-voltage lines to power the low-voltage distribution system. The costs that these retail power companies incur, are they included in the generation cost or the distribution cost?

Another way of phrasing this is: what accounts for the difference between wholesale and retail cost? Delivery to the low-voltage distribution lines? If so, then shouldn't residential solar users be getting the full retail price for any power they supply, since they're supplying it to the low-voltage distribution lines, doing the job of both "power plant operation" and "substation operation" themselves?

Really, this isn't rocket science, and it seems like there should be an objectively fair solution to the issue. That there's bickering going on suggests to me that one side of the equation is getting a bit greedy, and if I had to guess, I'd say it wasn't the residential solar users.

We don't have any workable solution for waste disposal when it comes to coal, oil, and gas power plants either, but I can't picture you using that argument against hydrocarbon energy generation. Maybe we can just dispose of nuclear waste by dispersing it in the air?

Tying to, supporting, semantics.

Instead of encouraging Nvidia to open up CUDA and other hardware vendors to support it, Apple opted to create a new standard, OpenCL. Of course, there's no technical reason [that I can see] why CUDA support couldn't be extended to non-Nvidia hardware, much like OpenCL support has been added to a variety of GPU hardware. That would've resulted in a world with one standard for GPGPU instead of the two we see today. Nvidia could've passed CUDA off to Khronos to alleviate any conflicts of interest. Also, I'd like to point out that OpenCL support was not always quite so universal, and targeting the OpenCL standard did not mean free choice of "any GPU".

That's my point. CUDA did exist. Apple could have used CUDA and worked to promote CUDA as the standard for all GPGPU. They didn't, for what I'm sure were perfectly valid reasons. But they could have, and that's why I'm saying it's not reasonable to blame Adobe over Apple.

Indeed, that's my point. However, I don't believe the converse is true. That is, while any real programmer should be able to easily pick up Node.js/javascript, I don't think it's quite as likely that someone with only a Node.js background will be too successful coding in a real language like C.

Based on my anecdotal and entirely subjective experience, someone that codes C is more likely to be a good coder than someone that codes Javascript.

I was being facetious, if that wasn't obvious. I was merely pointing out that "blaming" Adobe for supporting CUDA is no less subjective than "blaming" Apple for supporting OpenCL.

Also, it's worth pointing out that Apple didn't tie themselves to a standard so much as they created a new standard for everyone else to tie themselves to. It's not like OpenCL was an existing standard that Apple embraced.

Obligatory.

See, that's the thing. Perl isn't dead. Perl is still used extensively in system administration and for quick prototyping and proof-of-concept work. Python is still alive and well in the sciences as a supplement to MatLab and other similar tools. Perl and Python have both just about vanished from the web, though, as other server-side scripting tools have become more prevalent. This same tide that displaced Perl and Python from their traditional stomping grounds has also displaced Ruby. However, Perl and Python have found other niches where they thrive. Can the same really be said of Ruby?