I don't get it. Is this saying we shouldn't put thorium reactors into widespread operation because they're not currently widespread in general operation?

Or if you live in a place where laws matter less than which religious leader has the most well armed followers.

I'm all for it. The more religious leaders push their luck and do stuff like this the sooner people who were listening to them will start to realize that it's all the same everywhere. The only difference is the degree of craziness and whose interests it's serving. When somebody comes down with a fatwa banning soccer or samosas, all I can think is, Good. Stop being coy about it and remind everybody who's paying attention what this shit is really all about.

It's like writing an essay. The quality of the source code really depends on a number of things; whether it was something new or familiar to the programmer, how distracting/peaceful the environment was, how much time was available to polish up and refine the code, and whether there was any framework that they could use (such as node based programming, GUI widgets, or the TCP/IP network layer models, template files for writing new modules).

It's known that the date of birth and geographic latitude does affect personality, but that's down to how sunlight affects the mothers' hormones, and consequently brain development while in the womb.

I think this "No Losers" bologna came from those schools which just had a single annual school sports day. Everyone attended (ninety plus students in each year), and each year in each race, the same half dozen students kept winning. So six students go home with a handful of medals, and everyone else go back home empty handed. And that was the one and only competition there was. No spelling bees, science fairs, art exhibitions, book reading competitions.

More because they feel they can manage their own land resources better than the Eurocrats in London or Brussels can.
As an example, have a look at the situation in Somerset and Devon. Eurocrats pay farmers to cut down trees and clear land, but those trees helped remove water from the ground. Then the Eurocrats fund a scheme to return the rivers to their natural state and create a bird sanctuary. But those rivers helped remove heavy rainfall from the ground. Result? Third world living conditions for thousands of people for weeks.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Agreed - it's a POS.

I installed Pitivi .15.2 from from the repos. It literally took me less than 2 minutes to crash it. It died as soon as I imported an mp3 to use as audio. (NOTE: Their website says not to report .15.2 bugs. They are evidently not supporting it anymore)

Then, following the suggestions posted here, I grabbed the latest version from source (which through trial and error, I found required adding a source repo and installing build dependencies before attempting to install from source). I configured it, built it, and tried to run it. It immediately errored out, complaining that I need to install yet more missing dependencies (GES this time). I googled the problem, saw lots of people complaing about this, and found some vague instructions on the pitivi wiki (http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Building_with_GES) explaining how to install it.

At this point, I threw in the towel.

I'll go so far as to say the bug is probably real (looking at the analysis raises some serious questions), but I'll also guess that most of the people reporting it are actaully reporting human error that produces the same result. IIRC, when this was starting to make the news, somebody did a histogram of the ages of the people involved and noticed that it looked nothing like the distribution of the ages of owners of that paritcular car. Lots of elderly folks. So either the software bug recognizes old people, old people have a driving style that triggers it, old people are more likely to report the problem than ignore it, or a lot of those people screwed up and didn't realize it.

If your concern is that computers will do a worse job of looking at the objects in 3 dimensional space around them and solving the kinematics problems required to avoid obstacles than humans do, I think you can rest easy. Reacting quickly to the sudden appearance of a pedestrian is one thing that a human has almost no chance of beating a human at. Even better, the car's LIDAR system will log what happened so if something does go wrong, we know who is at fault.

The liability problem could be legislated in a pretty straightforward way. Limit the exposure of the manufacturer to the same level of liability a typical human driver would have. Require owners to hold liability insurance (this is nothing new). Realistically, the insurance companies will have a very good idea of the likelihood of a human driver crashing vs an automated car crashing and will set rates appropriately. I would bet good money that outside of icy/snowy locations, the rates for an automated car will be lower than for a human driver after only a year or two of trial time.

A lot of time we're blinded to the probability of things happening by the scariness of those things. Realistically, being hit by a computer controlled car is no different than being hit by a car driven by a drunk driver, a distracted 30 year old, or an inexperienced 16 year old. The only question is which is more likely to happen per vehicle mile. On dry roads, most accidents are caused by a drive not paying attention or doing something risky. Accidents caused by complex social interactions that a computer couldn't figue out are far rarer than accidents caused by some nitwit playing with his cell phone. If computers completely solve the 80% problem and make the 20% problem 10% worse, I'm OK with that.

And apparently there is a new weather phenomenon called super-thunder which can shatter windows:

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/st...

I thought they were journalists.

Some of them probably think they are too. I'm not sure that it's always applicable. If you do journalism by interviewing people on TV, they're journalists. If you do journalism by researching stuff and putting together news stories, probably not so much.

If they're entertainers, they are not, by definition, journalists.

What definition is that? There's a reason the word "infotainment" exists. People aren't watching Bill O'Reilly to get news distilled and efficiently transported into their brains. They're watching him to see him bust heads, but they also get some news in the process. Baseball players play baseball on camera, but they're entertainers. Porn stars have sex on camera, but they're entertainers. Bottom line is that if your job is to put butts in chairs and eyes on screens, you're an entertainer for the purposes of figuring out what your salary should be.

I think that like you, I'm inclined to dole the word "journalist" out a little less generously. If you're just reading news that somebody else gathered, you're not a journalist. If you interview newsworthy people and get information out of them for public consumption? I'd say that qualifies as journalism.

Oh, I read it. It just wasn't worth a comment.