I think the problem here might be that you don't know what oppression is. We think you're wrong; that's not oppression, it's disagreement. And given the number of people that think you're wrong, it might also be a good reason to consider whether maybe you are wrong.

I'm proud of who I am, including many things that are more 'who I am' than choices I have made. I don't think that confers some form of superiority on me. You can be proud of yourself without thinking you're better than anyone else.

I don't go round telling people I'm proud of who I am, but then I'm not part of a culture that has been the victim of systematic prejudice. The point of Tim Cook saying he's proud to be gay is to tell other people - who don't have the status or the confidence of Tim Cook - that being gay is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Frankly that's a valuable message to get across at this point in time.

Where are these water jets coming from and why is it not possible to move the data elsewhere for processing?

It doesn't have to be far - just far enough to get out of the water jets.

As the GP pointed out, with the constraints that you have set out the task may be impossible. The best thing you could do would be to explain what you're trying to achieve, since it's going to save you enormous effort if the constraints can be avoided.

I suspect that the problem here is that you're asking the wrong question. You are trying to solve a very hard problem - how do I run a high performance PC in a location where it will be blasted with water jets - but that's not actually what you want to do; you want to accomplish a task. You haven't posted the actual task, so all we know is that it takes place outside and there will be water jets. Even so, that's enough to make me sure that there will be a better way to solve this.

• - What space requirements do you have? Why can the sensors not go on one embedded device, with 10 metres of cable to the larger analysis box, which sits somewhere where it won't get pressure washed?
• - Have you considered a small, embedded PC that send the data back to your office? I know you've said this will be used outside, but this is the UK so you probably have some sort of wireless coverage. You may even have wired coverage, since you haven't given us any details of your setup.
• - How real-time does the data processing need to be? If the answer is "not very" you might be best just storing the raw data on an SSD and, again, analysing it elsewhere.

Without more data we can't give you a good solution, but even without more data I can tell you that trying to waterproof a high-performance PC (and, presumably, a generator to run it from) is not going to be the right idea.

I'm a commercial litigator. While it's true that companies would prefer not to sue their key partners, in reality it's very common for companies that work together to be involved in litigation. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they like it, but if you work with a company for a long time it's inevitable that you will have some disputes that you can't settle amicably. To an extent it's just a cost of doing business.

I think you're reading too much into the suits.

They use the suits because they've done a risk analysis taking into account both ease of transmission and lethality. The precautions recommended by the CDC for people working with Ebola are stricter than for people working with influenza, even though influenza is much more easily transmissible. The precautions recommended for HIV are as strict as those recommended for influenza, even though it is much less easily transmissible.

Obviously I don't know exactly how they do the balancing exercise, but where a disease is highly lethal with no known cure I suspect that they would be wearing suits even if transmission was almost impossible.

Just FYI - "malicious" has a specific legal meaning, rather than just being a subjective opinion. I don't know what the definition is in US federal law, but it's usually something along the lines of "intentional and without reasonable justification" (making "malicious and willful" somewhat tautologous, but that's not unusual in older legislation).

I haven't heard anyone saying that, and I certainly don't think it's what the GP said. What a lot of gun control activists do say is that if more people are armed then more confrontations will end up with someone being injured, and if more people are armed with particularly effective weapons like guns, more confrontations will end with someone seriously injured or dead.

First, it's worth pointing out that rape and violent crime rates are much more difficult to compare than murder rates - in a Western democracy a murder is likely to get recorded as a murder, while reporting rates and definitions of rape and violent crime can vary.

Second, which are these countries? If you were thinking of Canada - the GP's example - the top two results on Google (I didn't check any further) agree that the rates of murder, rape, violent crime and overall crime are all lower.

I'm sure you can find some countries that do worse than the US on some measures. But if that's your argument - that if you're allowed to pick which country to compare the US to, and if you're allowed to pick what to compare them on, then you can find examples that are worse - then you don't have much of an argument.

The problem with the US constitution is that it's a terrible piece of writing. Partly because it was the product of political compromise, so parts were kept deliberately vague, and partly because legal drafting at the time was, by modern standards, pretty poor.

A constitution should be incredibly precise about the rights that it protects and exactly how far it protects them. If it's not, then judges impose their views, or the views of the majority, and give them constitutional force. That's the opposite of what's desired! The whole point of the constitution is to set some fundamental decisions in stone - but instead they are being re-thought over time, and then those new decisions are elevated to have the power of the constitution!

The truth is that the second amendment adds very little to the gun control debate. You can point to half a dozen unclear points in only just over two dozen words. At the moment it means that you can restrict peoples' ownership of guns a bit, but not too much, because that's what some judges think is a reasonable position. According to Wikipedia, 100 years ago judges thought that more controls on gun ownership were reasonable, so the second amendment was less broad. In future maybe it will mean no restrictions are allowed at all, or maybe it will mean anything goes short of outright prohibition. None of these positions are any more right than any other, because the wording of the amendment is hopelessly vague.

I think that the point is that:
1. Black, hispanic and asian voters are significantly less likely to possess ID that is sufficient to meet the requirements of the laws. They are also less likely already to be registered to vote.
2. Election fraud is rare, and in-person fraud (the only type that could be prevented by these laws) is vanishingly rare.
3. These laws are being passed by Republican legislatures. Statistically, reducing the number of black, asian and hispanic voters is likely to improve their results in elections.

So what you have is a measure that claims to prevent a problem that doesn't exist, and, coincidentally, will make it harder for the party's opponents to vote.

I don't actually believe that that is a coincidence. I don't know whether it is racist or not, but I do think that elections should be fought by trying to convince the electorate that you are the best candidate, not by changing the procedure to make it harder for your opponents to vote.

What did the message actually say? I've noticed that some BBs seem to require slightly higher current than other phones - maybe your adapter isn't supplying enough juice?

I expect that there is a feature that they don't have, and that 2% of apps require, rather than that they have tried all the apps and identified which ones work.

I don't think Blackberry uses Google Play Services, so that may well be the feature that 2% of apps rely on.

No, it isn't. Nobody, other than a few people on Slashdot, think that "food waste" means "food that is being discarded anyway but has been put in the general trash bin rather than the composting bin". If anything, that would be wasted compost, since the stuff in question is not going to be eaten anyway by the time it goes in the wrong bin.

Amazingly it turns out the EPA actually has a definition of food waste, which agrees with the GP. They say it is "uneaten food and food preparation waste [from various sources". By that definition food that goes into the compost can be "food waste" - so a rule to make you put it in a different bin doesn't change the amount of "food waste" at all.

Why? Surely it's more efficient for one central organisation to collect everyone's trash than for everyone to do it separately? (As someone who has always had the local council pick up his trash, I'm genuinely curious)

You can't have a public hearing about every regulation proposed by Government, it would be a huge waste of time and money. There has to be some sort of minimum threshold - and surely a $1 fine designed to raise awareness of sorting your garbage falls on the "not worth a consultation" side?

In other words, do you actually think the council should have run a public consultation about this, or did you just see an opportunity to spout a "Government is bad!" soundbite?