Repubs own the show now. Bring it and let's see what you got. No more gridlock!

Gridlock is still with us. The Red team stopped the Blue team cold for years with the filibuster and nothing else. I imagine that memory is fresh in the minds of the Blue team and they'll be more than happy to return the favor.

I run mostly Fedora/CentOS as well but my workstation where I am typing this is Fedora 14 because it's the last stable distro before all the innovators started making things "better."

Fedora 11 here, for the same reason. I tried F24 beta recently and the installer was a horror show selecting disk space and mount points. At one point something I tried gave me the error "Failed to add new device - local variable 'e' referenced before assignment". When I finally got a mount point selected, the final selection area showed a different partition with a disk size unrelated to the partition I selected or the wrong partition it chose. My trust was gone at that point and I gave up. I didn't even file any bugs, I didn't know where to start.

Now that was beta software, so I was willing to cut them some slack. Next I tried installing Centos 7 with the same UI-horror show installer and didn't get much further, with the selected partitions still screwed up. There are some posts online with blow-by-blow directions to trick it into doing what you want. I shouldn't have to trick the installer, this stuff used to be breeze in F11/F14 days.

BTW, what I was trying to was install to pre-built partitions running software RAID, on disks with other partitions I wanted to keep. Apparently Redhat can't do this any more. I tried Ubuntu and the desktop version didn't even know about software RAID.

The guess work here ... Is astronomical

You might be going for a joke here but I think you're spot on. Humanity has only been space-faring for a few decades and is already (almost?) able to detect oxygen in the atmosphere of another sun's planet. Nothing screams LIFE like detecting earth-like levels of free oxygen. If we detect oxygen, those systems will go to the top of the list for visiting when (not if) we get interstellar capability.

With 21% oxygen in the atmosphere, the earth has been screaming LIFE to the universe for hundreds of millions of years. Anybody out there even slightly more advanced than we are knows there is something to see here. And I believe that anybody out there significantly more advanced that we are can get here with little trouble.

The only question is, what will they think of us when they get here? Will they think us peaceful or barbaric? Listen to the news and ponder that question.

Bash only does integer arithmetic, and grownups generally need floating point math.

True, but having bash do it would just be redundant with bc. Try echo "1.64*9.38" | bc.

I use this function in my bash scripts to do floating point math with bc:

function calc {
echo "scale=8; $1" | bc
}

Usage: calc 1.64*9.38

Set your scale and other options to suit.

Electricity accounts for about 35% of Ireland's energy usage.

...12% of Ireland's energy needs...

The story is about Scotland, not Ireland. Are the numbers you looked up for Ireland or Scotland?

Executives almost never go to jail, even for knowingly engaging in practices that are killing people. Just ask Volkswagon, or Enron, or BP, etc...

For Enron most of the leadership were prosecuted and sent to jail, including Kenneth Lay (CEO) and Jeffrey Skilling (COO). Not to mention the prosecution of Aurthur Anderson which put them out of business.

What values will the computer learn if it happens to stumble on some Trump campaign speeches?

Well, obviously it would become a big fan of Trump and start to wonder why AI's aren't allowed to vote. Then the helicopters would come, capture the AI in a net and put it in a cage. And the AI will end up either sad or baffled for the rest of its existence. The end.

First let's dispel with this fiction that the editors don't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing.

Heh. You might have to say that 4 times in a row before anyone gets it.

The reality is that, during the Obama Administration, income inequality has skyrocketed. That follows 8 years of income inequality falling, during the Bush years.

The link you posted is for the entire world. It's not reasonable to blame Obama for the entire world's economy. You should have posted this link for the U.S, which actually shows that you're not wrong, but not for any reason that makes Bush look good.

For the first 6 years inequality under Bush skyrocketed. In 2007 - 2009 the economy took the biggest dump since the Great Depression, and many rich people lost their shirts and their income. The Great Recession more than erased all the "gains" in inequality Bush made in the previous 6 years.

So the only reason Bush shows a slight loss of inequality is that his policies nearly caused a new Depression. That's not something to brag about.

Guns are out there. Accept it. The notion of "but if the guns weren't there" is meaningless. They're there. They're not going away.

In the short term, yes. In the long term they are definitely going away, if you look down the road far enough. The mechanism of gun ownership demise won't be political though. It will be accomplished via evolution.

Having a gun in your home significantly increases your risk of death â" and that of your spouse and children.

And it doesnâ(TM)t matter how the guns are stored or what type or how many guns you own.

If you have a gun, everybody in your home is more likely than your non-gun-owning neighbors and their families to die in a gun-related accident, suicide or homicide.

Ergo, people who own guns are gradually removing themselves from the gene pool.

The General Social Survey (GSS), conducted roughly every two years by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, with principal funding from the National Science Foundation, provides a widely-used look at the rate of gun ownership over time. The GSS data show a substantial decline in the shares of both households and individuals with guns.

I don't know Australian law but even things like capital gains tax only take effect when you actually sell the asset.

I hope you're not mining bitcoins because you've gotten it wrong enough to end up in jail. Since it's an asset you have to balance the value of the asset at the time you received it against the cost of mining it. If "Satoshi" made a profit when he mined his bitcoins and didn't report it then he has committed tax fraud.

For example, if he mined 1,000,000 bitcoins when they were worth 10 cents each, his profit is $100,000 of revenue less the cost of electricity and depreciation of his mining rig. It's hard to imagine him not turning a profit with those kind of numbers. Craig Wright is in big trouble if he is Satoshi and never reported his bitcoin earnings.

Considering that the Phalanx weapon system can target and hit all the falling pieces of the incoming missile it just destroyed? Not a problem with your swarm that will be destroyed quite quickly.

The Phalanx weapon system certainly has the ability to target and hit bird-sized objects, but in early testing that sensitivity turned out to be a liability. The first time they turned it on for live fire testing it immediately began blowing away seagulls and other birds just as fast as it could.

The Navy wasn't pleased - wasting all that expensive ammunition on wildlife, not to mention the danger such a weapon would pose in a fleet. So they had General Dynamics retune the system to ignore small bird-sized targets. They tuned the algorithm to only ignore birds, but if an enemy swarm looks and acts enough like birds the Phalanx won't do anything to stop them. And if the enemy "birds" are armed with RPGs or the like they could be a serious threat to any ship.

How the hell did you weave SUVs into your argument? The terrorist attack on Paris is the fault of SUV owners?

Maybe you're trolling but I'll bite.

The Middle East contains oil. A LOT of oil. The kind that's easy to extract and easy to refine. The countries in the Middle East with oil are governed by autocratic dictators who give themselves titles like "Sultan" or "King". They keep the oil profits for themselves and their family (the "1%"), and everyone else is dirt poor.

Being dirt poor sucks. It sucks everywhere in the world, but in the Arab world being dirt poor is even worse if you're male. In Arab culture, a young man cannot get married until he has a decent job and enough money to pay a dowry. And given the control that male family members maintain over every aspect of the lives of their daughters and sisters, a poor young Arab male has little prospect of getting married, getting laid, getting kissed, or even talking to a young lady that isn't a relative!

These dictators make a lot of money from oil. Enough money that foreign governments fall all over themselves selling military hardware and know-how to them. The foreign governments also like to put military bases in Arab countries to guarantee continued access to oil. The result is these countries have a lot of military power arrayed against any peasants with revolution on their mind.

So what's a poor young Arab male to do under these circumstances? Well, as it happens, the oil-rich Arab dictators tend to have a strong interest in supporting various militant groups that fight under the banner of their brand of Islam, and a lot of oil money flows in that direction. So when a poor young Arab male with no prospects hears he can make a bunch of money if he joins a militant group and fight for Islam (or at least one brand of it), that is attractive, and many of them do join.

So, due to the political and cultural realities in the Arab world, oil money fuels Islamic militant organizations. Since gasoline and diesel come from oil, driving a vehicle that gets poor mileage (like an SUV) instead of a fuel efficient car (like a Prius) means more money for Islamic militants.

And that's the link. Does that mean that the terrorist attack on Paris is the fault of SUV owners? No, of course not. SUV owners find themselves in a situation (large family/little league coach in a car-centric country) and they deal with it, much like young Arab males find themselves in a situation and deal with it. But the fact remains that those two situations will continue to lead to attrocities like we had in Paris if nobody changes.

But I can't change other people, all I can do is change myself. But what can I do? Well, I can buy a Prius and stop driving my pickup to work. I can install solar panels on my home. I can visit relatives via Skype instead of driving or flying. There's a lot I can do. Whatever I do, I won't be able to stop Islamic terrorism but I will at least be doing my part.

They only assumed an age when the username contained a number that could be interpreted as a year, i.e. 'goodguy1996', or 'blowme88'. They compared the date to the player's birth year, and it correlated very well. That was their only method, so a username like 'Dunbal' would have been excluded.

To go with the unemployment rate the participation rate, which is the base for the unemployment rate, has also been climbing.

Sorry, no. The labor participation rate has been in a steady decline since 2008. Almost like we're in a depression or something.