Actually, yes. These loans can't even be dismissed via bankruptcy and many government benefits are tied to the repayment of them.

Because no lender in their right mind would loan students money to begin with.

Student loans are unsecured - the student doesn't put up anything and can borrow easily $100K. And if the student can't find a job, it's not repaid. No lender would take that kind of risk, especially at a measly 7% interest rate - typical unsecured loans are closer to 20-30% (you know them as credit cards).

So the government has to put in some incentives otherwise financial institutions will not provide the loans as they're too risky. By making it non-dischargeable, the banks know that declaring bankruptcy will not make it go away for pennies on the dollar with no recourse (assuming they can get anything - secured creditors are paid first and often the money isn't sufficient to cover those so those take pennies on the dollar. Unsecured creditors typically get zilch).

It's just like if your company goes bankrupt - as an employee, your unpaid wages and benefits are unsecured, so you line up with the rest of the unsecured creditors to hope to get some money.

Back to Tesla, those DOE loans went to a lot of people. Few companies every paid even a portion back. Tesla managed to pay it back, early, with interest.

and fuck the attendant, who is probably complicit in the scheme.

Actually, the attendant pointed out the camera several times - and the fact that she was being recorded.

Even more than that, she identified herself as a celebrity and that she would post some crap about it all over TV.

So no sympathies at all. Even less so when you're trying to exert influence over others by using your authority.

And definitely no sympathy for her situation, because it was pointed out that everything she was doing and say was being recorded.

Perhaps her car was towed illegally. That doesn't excuse you for harassing the attendant and trying to use your position of power to influence them. Especially as the attendant repeatedly notifies her that she's under surveillance.

Anyhow, the response is not to be "nice" or "polite", it's to be "diplomatic". There's a time and a place for everything, and a time and a place where something is inappropriate. I don't know if it's social media or what, but it seems to have created a pile of self-entitled people who can muster up twitter to "shame" people and companies. Oh no, my package hasn't arrived yet? Tweet the company is awful and doesn't keep promises. Voila, package is now at door! Company didn't give me another free sample? Tweet, and there it is!

Unfortunately, the power company is still expected to make sure that the power comes in at the right voltage and frequency. And with control on only part of the inputs, that's a lot harder. The fewer inputs they control, the harder...

Theoretically, you can design a control system that'll handle the problem. But, so far, noone has bothered to, because noone's had a need to. As solar becomes more common that'll change, and the problems will go away.

Already exists, and Germany and California require all solar installations use smart inverters if they're going to hook to the grid. A smart inverter is a regular inverter except it's controllable as necessary.

They're able to do frequency detection (if the frequency drops, more power is needed on the grid, and if it rises, less power is needed and it should cut back. Even more advanced ones can invert with reactance.

Of course, it all means you can't dump all the power you generate into the grid - and if you're residential, it can also mean there's not enough transmission capacity to go from your house to the business and industrial district where it's needed most.

There's also something called "net metering" where the power company sells you electricity at retail price, and buys it at wholesale price.

Either way, if you're blessed with it, the general best idea is to just use it all - if you're in a sunny and hot location, well, use it to run the A/C when your system is producing maximum power (and maybe even use cold storage), because selling it back to the grid doesn't generally pay off,,,

The push for https everywhere also means there is more metadata floating around. If all your are looking at is the metadata and not the data stream, https gives an observer more info about what is going on than with just http. Once you get into properly verifing certs, both sides and an observer has more info to tie a converstaion between a specific client and a server.

You can see this yourself by getting something that does netflow and look at the data that comes from that.

The sediment in which the flakes were found was dated by magnetostratigraphy to have been deposited 3.3 million years ago, meaning the flakes cannot be younger than that age.

Remarkably, the article's authors did actually put that information into the article, so that people could possibly read it and become better informed. It's a shocking new concept called "communication".

It makes me cringe.

that's why they're doing it. Clear now?

Nevermind many of the various "voyages of discovery" that European nations conducted from the 1400s onward that went into uncharted territory, spending long times at sea,

"uncharted" does not equate with "unoccupied".

A couple of years ago, my commute to work included an 8 hour boat ride starting from port passed by Vasco de Gama on his outward trip to Calicut ; at that time, the port had been established for several centuries by Arab slave traders.

gyrocopters are the future of tasty Greek food delivery.

... which is currently in "development hell" due to a severe shortage of tasty Greeks to turn into food.

regulations that allow terrestrial radio stations to avoid paying royalties to artists and labels.

what property-rights hating country would allow that to happen?

Seriously, the stuff is all around us, from axle grease and lubricants found sitting in every vehicle on the planet (including junkyards),

Are you serious? Unless you're talking about a lubricant distributor's warehouse, you're not talking about more than a few months supply. That's what distributor's warehouses are for.

to existing-but-unused reservoirs sitting around idle in abandoned refineries and petroleum distribution companies scattered throughout.

I had a friend who worked in environmental clean up from abandoned petrol stations, and working in the oil industry myself (well, the both of us do now) I've got a better idea than most about the amount of paperwork involved in hydrocarbon handling. I simply do not believe that there are significant amounts of hydrocarbons in your putative "abandoned refineries". The paperwork would be horrendous and unrelenting, and in any case that feedstock is both valuable and dangerous. Do you have any conception of the number of isolations and lock-outs you need to get a confined space entry permit for accessing hydrocarbon storage tanks.

Citation needed.

(I'm going to guess that you come up with some story about hundreds of tonnes of contaminants which leaked out of a tank during the working life of a refinery. Which is not the same thing at all. Your first problem in exploiting such a "resource" is going to be mining the stuff - again - followed by separating it from the waste.

Love it, hate it .. but, honestly you simply can't discount a film franchise in which two of the four movies have had global revenues of over a billion dollars and shows up on the lists of highest grossing films.

You might not be able to discount them, but I certainly can. Crap remains crap even if it's designed to sell merchandise (Transformer-branded shit-paper, anyone?) and succeeds in that by means of brat's pester power.

I didn't actually know (or care, in the slightest) that they were a quadruple of films, or that they were high grossing. I only know of their interminable existence from the presence of mounds of promotional crap in the town centre.

The fire safe (as is typical for the class) should be rated for 1500 degrees for 30minutes while keeping the inside temperature below that necessary to char paper. The walls are heavily insulated and the seals on the door in extreme heat melt and seal the interior completely.

There are other things to consider which can seriously alter your fire situation.

(I'll point out that I have to do fire training including a number of evacuations through burning buildings every couple of years, and have been doing it since we routinely had people die in the training. It is very likely that I've spent more time in burning buildings in BA sets than the average Slashdotter, unless there are a lot of undeclared firefighters on the board. I work in the oil industry, and dieing in a fire is a non-trivial risk at work, in addition to the normal hazards of being at sea.)

Being in the UK, we build our houses with bricks, mortar and concrete, with minimal wood. Rather different to the US, I gather, and I'm not sure how that would alter the progress of fires there. If I were to get a fire safe, I'd probably mount it by either excavating into the floor of my garage (concrete) and covering it's access with a paving slab (40mm thick) ; or I'd mount it into the concrete and breeze block wall of the garage along the party wall with the neighbours. Since I don't keep significant flammables in the garage (that is in the shed, outside ; that can burn and I'd get a toasting fork instead of getting worried.) Either of those options should take hundreds of degrees off the exterior temperature of the fire safe. Putting it in the floor would be better temperature-wise, but not so good for protection from water damage. But since I've also got water-proof diving pouches and silica gel in abundance, I'm pretty sanguine about water.

Where to site a fire safe - for a combination of low fire risk and acceptable security (I wouldn't put it in the shed!) is going to have a very big effect on the conditions it is exposed to.

From the other end of the telescope - would what is essentially an imaging detector like a bubble chamber be suited to a high-data rate situation like the LHC?