"they couldn't secure financing for manufacturing and shipping the first batch of units"

If only we had a way to provide funding for products? We could set up websites that enabled people to post commercially unviable ideas, collect sales in advance, and then bullshit for two years about why they haven't shipped, promised features have been removed, etc.

We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2. Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.

> As an example, you say that this study from a Canadian university is racist and has been debunked extensively, which is clearly total bullshit.

The study was published in "Intelligence", which is a journal for the "International Society for Intelligence Research."

A quick google for "International Society for Intelligence Research racist" shows that recipients of it's "lifetime achievement award" and board members are widely criticized as promoting junk science, white supremacy, and furthering nazi concepts on race.

Let's take a look at some examples.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

According to sociocultural anthropologist Francisco Gil-White, in publishing studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, Linda Gottfredson is part of a concerted effort to legitimize racist ideology through pseudo-science, together with an assortment of other people with inadequate or completely missing scientific qualifications for studying human intelligence"

Rushton has been discredited for over thirty years and he's viewed as nothing more than pseudo-science fuel for white supremacists like you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And his co-author on that paper? An idiot who thinks racists like him are "the next galileos." https://www.google.com/search?...

He's so desperate to spread his bullshit that he paid to have a booklet about his work mailed to professors around the country

Rushton is a racist - this is both well known and extensively documented by comments he's made publicly and white supremacy publications he's contributed to. His science is beyond junk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The man has been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited scientifically as ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his prejudices, his testing methods as biased against black people, and using non-equivalent groups.

He was president of an institute classified as a hate group. He speaks routinely at eugenics conferences and has published articles in white supremacy magazines and online websites.

"Most bike accidents happen to inexperienced riders and/or idiots."

There is absolutely no evidence to support this incredibly victim-blaming comment. There is plenty of evidence to refute it, if you simply google the phrase "cyclist driver fault study"

Examples: http://www.executivestyle.com....

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05...

http://www.theguardian.com/lif...

You're a classic victim-blamer. See, it's those other, stupid, slower, more inexperienced cyclists who get hit. Not you. You're experienced. Dressed like a dayglo traffic cone clown. Covered in lights.

I live in New England, haven't owned a car in roughly a decade and have been commuting 20 minutes each way every day for work by bike in addition to whatever other daily transportation i need, and own/use snow tires for said bicycle. I also own a nice road bike which gets ridden on weeknight group rides and weekends. I started out on a $350 hybrid I bought from REI on special, and it lasted me several years and thousands of miles, until I decided I wanted something better.

So yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about. And incidentally, Minnesota has more bike commuters per capita than many much warmer locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There have been dozens of studies over the years showing that riding a bicycle for transportation, even slowly, brings health benefits over people who sit in their cars for transportation: https://www.google.com/search?...

Oh, and which is it? Everyone flying along so fast they'll fatally injure pedestrians they smack into? Or people who "toddle around with their heartrate under 100bpm so slow it doesn't do them any good"? Hmm?

Please, save the "you want to put grandma on an iceberg" crap. I wasn't advocating forcing people onto bicycles. I'm saying driverless cars aren't going to fix problems with congestion and pollution.

"Of course, the obvious question is: Will the bike stop at stop signs?"

And yet 99.9% of pedestrian injuries and deaths are caused by motor vehicle drivers, who also blow through stop signs and run red lights.

Where were the jokes about autonomous cars running red lights, and how cities won't be the same without cars speeding, running red lights, not stopping for pedestrians, double parking, making turns without yielding to oncoming traffic, etc?

When a bicyclist doesn't stop for a pedestrian, they bump and (both, probably) fall down. When a car doesn't stop for a pedestrian, the pedestrian ends up in the hospital, or dead.

A bicycle costs $500, emits no pollution, uses little roadway, doesn't cause wear and tear on infrastructure, generates no noise, and provides health benefits. An autonomous car costs....probably $100,000 minimum, uses a huge amount of energy/emits pollution, causes wear and tear on infrastructure, generates a lot of noise, and results in more sedentary behavior.

Do we really think the future is 200 bicycles for the price of one autonomous car?

Which do you think is computationally more expensive? Crawling a website, or serving the website being crawled?

Here's a hint: aside from the fact that one involves repeatedly parsing a scripting language, database calls, logging, etc and the other requires little more than generating URLs and downloading them....one involves random access retrieval and the other involves writing the stored data.

Also: the different in computing power between laptops and servers of similar age is less than an order of magnitude. Server equipment typically runs further from the bleeding edge than retail/consumer equipment, and often is kept in production much longer than consumer equipment.

He didn't "commit suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature."

After a prior similar episode which earned him a visit from the FBI in which they told him they'd caught him doing something illegal, declined to prosecute him but warned him not to do it again......he trespassed repeatedly onto the MIT campus, into buildings, into network closets, where he installed unauthorized computers. He then worked to intentionally bypass the network registration system, and then further to avoid MIT's network engineering group as they tried to figure out where his equipment was installed.

His data-dumping efforts were so aggressive that they interfered with JSTOR services for thousands of researchers around the world; his 'free the research' stunt actually interfered with their ability to work. Despite bringing JSTOR's servers to its knees, he installed a second laptop because the first wasn't pulling data fast enough. JSTOR attempted to block his system, but he kept changing IP addresses to subvert the ban, and finally, JSTOR had no choice but to block the entire MIT network.

JSTOR is not some evil "take guvvmint-paid-for research and hide it behind a paywall." JSTOR is a service which archives journals and then provides storage and searching across them all, to institutions which could never afford the journal subscriptions themselves. They're not-for-profit. The fees they charge go directly to paying for the capital and operating expenses necessary for storing, cataloging, and making available for download, millions of papers - and the inherent overhead in doing so.

To what goal, I might add? He would have ended up with a directory of PDFs. Now what? They have to get indexed, a web UI needs to be made, someone has to pay for all that server hardware and bandwidth and electricity and the people to maintain it all. Maybe we could set up a non-profit organization to make that all happen?

Oh....wait...that's...JSTOR.

Does anyone now realize that his stunt was just that? A publicity stunt? A fucking tarball of PDFs doesn't help academic researchers. The whole point behind JSTOR was to collect research, store it, and make it available both at affordable rates and in an accessible way.

This was like going to the village cooperative farm chicken coop (where people pay a small fee to house, feed, and care for their chickens), blowing up the only bridge to the farm to stop the police from getting to you (but also keeping all the townspeople from getting to the eggs they need for food), throwing open the doors to let the chickens out, and then being proud of yourself for "freeing the chickens so everyone can have a chicken."

Let us be absolutely clear: there is extensive proof of all of his crimes, and nobody has argued he did not commit them. The argument from some has been that somehow these crimes were legitimate or honorable.

He was offered plea deals, and even if it had gone to trial - as a white-collar, white male criminal - he never would have received the maximum sentencing. People saying "he would have gone to jail for 40 years" clearly do not spend any time reading the news, because prosecutors almost always ask for maximum sentencing, and rarely do they get it, EVEN FOR MURDERERS. It's highly likely he would have been given little more than parole.

Lastly: Swartz had a history of mental illness and suicidal thoughts - some of it public and irrefutable. He did not commit suicide because he was prosecuted. He committed suicide because he had a history of suicidal thoughts.

So, are you going to fix the annoying CDN/download system, ie the one that doesn't give simple URLs, but instead force every download through a CGI script, instead of using a proper fucking CDN, DNS round robin, or load balancer?

Do you have any idea how annoying it is to want to download a tarball from Sourceforge to a remote system I'm SSH'd to, but I can't copy the URL to the clipboard and paste it into the command line without escaping the ampersands, or having to manually rename the file?

Plus, let's be honest here: you're not fixing this crap because you all care about the open source community. You're fixing it because projects left in droves and your advertising revenue dropped. Stop pretending this is about anything other than money.

A friend of mine's account was banned because she was warning people on Twitter about Aaron Brown, now going by "Timmer", who was convicted of wire fraud and embezzlement, as well as lost a lawsuit after defrauding a charity, then left the US to escape having to pay. He's highly active in the Barcelona area, professes to be a wine expert.

She's been following his activity on twitter, and tweeting people who interact with him, warning them about him.

Bam - account permanently deactivated a few weeks ago. Gone. All her tweets, years worth, gone. Nobody to talk to, nobody to appeal to, no process. Account disabled, end of story.

Twitter is now allowing scammers to use its anti-harassment policies to silence people warning others about them. Good job, Twitter...

This is in part due to a lack of mechanisms and pathways for funding development work directly from the community

Someone should come up with a system to send other people money, even in small amounts.

Phosphates are incredibly bad for the environment. There's a reason they were phased out.

Detergents are more than plenty powerful enough - they're capable of etching glass if they're too strong (my mother's glasses are all an etched milky-white because for years she's filled the detergent box to capacity.)

You shouldn't be using more than a few teaspoons of anything. It doesn't take much to wash your dishes.

If it's not washing properly, something is wrong, like the water thermostat, for example.