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Comment Re:Generating your own electricity .. (Score 1) 504

by Arker (#46811853) Attached to: Oklahoma Moves To Discourage Solar and Wind Power
" Well, actually, I use <ecode>, because <code> appears not to honor line breaks and <ecode> appears not to honor indentation, and, for code, the latter sucks less than the former."

Exactly the sort of Hobsons choice that you should NOT have to face, frankly. Text is text. It's absurd that 'designers' have so much trouble dealing with it.

Now that aside, notice you are talking about explicitly tagging your text, which I am not doing. I am only using the posting mode default setting, I rarely insert tags and when I do I switch posting modes.

"Neither of them appear to provide me with any advantages if I'm just posting text."

They are far from perfect but they do indeed suck a little less. I used to use the 'plain text' as my default but there are several cases where that mode will strip and/or add tags in a pseudo-random fashion and it pissed me off one time too many.

If I type in https://google.com/ I dont necessarily want that to converted into a link, for instance. Relatively minor.

If I type:

     a    b
x    4    5
y    3    2
z    1    8

Then I MUST use code or slashdot will simply destroy the entire paragraph. The amount of time I had to spend to make that short snippet of *text* display properly just now is significant and absurd. But if I were posting in any mode other than 'code' it would not have been an absurdly difficulty task to accomplish a simple and obvious result, it would have actually been IMPOSSIBLE.

ALSO I cannot even mention a tag (<tt> for example but there are many others) without switching to code. If I try to say "<tt> sucks" for instance I must do this with 'code' set - otherwise the tag does not appear, it is parsed and changes font for the rest of the post! Absurd.

Again, there should be no problem reading the text. If there is a problem reading the text, then local browser settings need to be corrected. While what slashdot is doing here is certainly not what I would call sane or recommend, it is in fact workable and that one stalker I have attracted is rather more insane for refusing to choose a readable <tt> font.

Comment Re:Generating your own electricity .. (Score 1) 504

by Arker (#46811595) Attached to: Oklahoma Moves To Discourage Solar and Wind Power
Actually I was not intending to make any point at all. I still have a recent journal entry up if you want to read it.

The TLDR is I chose the 'code' option after testing the available options and finding it sucks less. As an unintended side-effect of this my posts get wrapped in 'tt' tags which suggest a monospace font. I am fine with that suggestion, although it was not in intentional. If anyone finds this unreadable they only need to go to their browser settings and select a readable font for 'tt' text which they should have done already anyhow.

Comment Re:Generating your own electricity .. (Score 1) 504

by Arker (#46811515) Attached to: Oklahoma Moves To Discourage Solar and Wind Power
You know, about 35 years ago now, we invented something called the world wide web. This was an infrastructure which allows documents in a semantic markup language to be delivered all around the world on demand, and for the recipient of the document to see them in whatever form makes the most sense on their equipment.

It's still in use, and you are on it. If the form you are seeing on your screen is displeasing, you can simply change it. Really. A thing called browser settings. You should find out what browser you are using, and investigate the options. It will have a facility that allows you to ensure that all fonts displayed on your screen meet with your approval, all you have to do is use it.

Comment Re:Generating your own electricity .. (Score 1) 504

by Arker (#46810681) Attached to: Oklahoma Moves To Discourage Solar and Wind Power
There are fixed costs as well as scaling costs involved. IF as appears to be implied here the utilities involved bill only for the latter - the actual electricity used, then generating your own electricity could expose the error in their billing system. Let's say you are generating as much as you use, and are billed only for usage with a net-metering system, so your bill is... $0.

Well, that would actually be unfair, if it's happening, because obviously they still have fixed costs involved in servicing you, laying and maintaining lines, etc and you really are not paying 'your fair share' in that case. Generally I thought utilities actually split these charges out separately, which avoids that problem entirely - fixed costs are reflected in fixed items on your bill, separate from usage.

If they are billing only for usage, then what they must actually be doing is figuring in a tiny little increase in their rates to cover the fixed costs in aggregate already - it is inconceivable that they simply are not billing for it in any way of course.

So now, they would like - not to start itemized billing for fixed costs (and ever so slightly reduce their rates in the process) - no. Much better to simply charge punitive rates to small generators that they would really rather not have to deal with in the first place, hmm?

Comment Re:US Revelations vs. Confronting Putin (Score 2) 168

"The first thing that comes to mind is we wouldn't have even heard of this video if it didn't go according to script."

And this drivel gets +5 insightful?

It was a live call-in show. Yes, they have these things in Russia, and more amazingly, their President has the cajones to go on one and take callers. The Soviet Union fell a long, long time ago you know.

Snowdens question was the first gambit in a line of attack that leads to parsing essentially the same lie the NSA still tries. They actually collect everything, and stick it in a database, but they arent really supposed to pull it back out without a reason, so since most of the stuff in the database never gets looked at by a human, they want to say they arent *really* collecting it all. They only want to admit to collecting the stuff they admit to going back and looking at later, and say it's not mass surveillance, it's targeted. But that's just not how the technology works.

If you want to be able to come back in 6 months and pick out a single call to listen to, you have to record ALL the calls and keep them stored for some time in order to enable this. And maybe there is one call in there that winds up being of use in a criminal investigation, great. Along with 200 that are useful for blackmail or extortion? Do we think the intelligence agents who have access to this information are angels who could never consider doing anything wrong, or incompetents who could work there every day for years but never find a way to get away with anything?

Comment Re:Sorry (Score 1) 25

"the pax Americana has been a great cost avoidance for the European social welfare states, who can maintain smaller, localized defense forces, knowing that the 800lb gorilla is there."

Sure the short term incentive for them is clear, but why should the US taxpayer be expected to go along with this?

Back in the day, it was because the Soviet Union was considered a credible and common threat. The Russian Federation is neither, yet the bill for confronting him only increases.

"Let's not be surprised at any of these unsurprising developments."

Not surprised at all, I caught onto the racket years ago. Just disappointed at how little the oath of office seems to mean these days.

Comment Re:Sorry (Score 1) 25

"I think that anecdote points to a broader, American Exceptionalism-based difficulty: we regularly hold peaceful revolutions at the ballot box. While the rest of the world, and Russians are arguably among the more egregious cases, have much greater policy time horizons, the U.S. has trouble remembering anything."

Too much truth to that, but it does not mean we should not try to do better.

"The State Department should provide a more "traditional" geo-political interface, but then you come to the question of to what degree agreements with the U.S.S.R. hold any sway. One might be tempted to pretend something like the referenced agreement never happened. Fine. But you really don't want the Russians weaponizing space, as we agreed to eschew in the Outer Space Treaty, do you?"

Exactly.

Now with that thought in mind think back on how the US government has in fact treated Russia since the Soviet Union dissolved. Is it just me or does it seem like our government as a whole actually WANTS to provoke them into something drastic like that? First off, why expand, instead of disband, NATO if we are not planning to attack Russia? And why pour all this 'democracy promotion' money into the likes of Svoboda if we are not actively scheming against Russia? I have no trouble believing this has been on the Russians minds all this time because it has certainly been on mine, and I cannot come up with another credible answer.

The Europeans were involved at first and they were thinking of expanding the EU to the Ukraine (which was probably a bad idea from the get-go given their economic woes) but they have since backed off quite a bit. Less because of their economic woes and more because of the sheer unsavoriness of the new regime.  You could see street protests bring down several EU governments if they even get close to admitting a country where the likes of Svoboda is in government, and I've started seeing admissions that there is no way in hell Ukraine will be invited to the EU for the foreseeable future.

"While I understand that paranoia is the Russian national sport, I still thing BHO was a complete fool for, inter alia, abandoning the missile shield in Poland."

Really?

What value would it have been?

I mean in general I think interceptors are a great idea, but there? Whose missiles would it ever have a chance to intercept, if not the Russians? The Iranians never had missiles with that range and are unlikely to develop them, and still less likely to actually use them. Turkey is a member of NATO after all, and who else outside of Europe has the range to hit that area? Seems like a damn short list.

It does not seem paranoid to me for them to worry that a missile site ostensibly aimed at Iran, yet not in range of Iran, but nicely in range of them, might actually be intended for use against them. Combine that with the color revolutions, the expansion of Nato, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the recent events in Libya (Russia agreed to a resolution with strict limitations only to see the limitations ignored basically from day one, and a regime friendly to them eliminated as a result,) and Syria (where the Russians have refused to agree to even a token resolution because after Libya they simply do not trust us not to do the same thing again) - I do not think it's paranoid for the Russians to feel a bit persecuted.

That's without even mentioning some of the cruder anti-russian propaganda that you can be sure is being rebroadcast for them with captions.

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