President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama delivered in his speech this weekend likely his best play in government yet. He is facing a decision between a number of options where none are a winning play; attack Syria and anger people (not to mention killing them), don't attack and you let people die which will also anger people.

But here, he can place the blame for the outcome on congress. With nearly everyone in congress who has said anything to the media opposing action, he can follow their vote (which will likely be against action) and then say "congress said so" when the world is mad at us for not doing anything.

Well played, sir. Well played.

For the record, I think Assad is scum who shouldn't be in power. That said, I don't think we should be attacking the regime, either as that only opens up a different can of worms. The conflict in Syria doesn't really reflect American interests at this point and as terrible as it is I don't see a good reason for us to commit resources to someone else's war. I really can't imagine a scenario where attacking Syria - even if we send just a small number of cruise missiles to kill Assad and his top brass - would work out in our favor.

An 8 year old boy in Louisiana found a loaded and unlocked .38 and killed his own grandmother. Apparently he was taking a break from some wholesome and age-appropriate activities while she was watching him, too:

They also mention

Which is pretty reasonable in this case as the kid likely didn't have a clue what he was doing. They specifically said

Which certainly makes sense for a kid who plays GTA IV.

I'll bet $10 to anyone that nobody faces any kind of charges for this (child endangerment, anyone?). Whether the gun was grandma's or belonged to someone else hasn't been stated.

I'm pretty sure they combine to produce this guy. There may even be a smattering of the last iteration of the RG troll in there as well. I can't decide if he's worth adding to my friends list or not, but this will allow me to find him quickly enough if I'm really bored.

I do suspect he may have an interesting origin story; he has a few +5 comments from not too long ago, and now he's all -1. The real accomplishment though is that he has a string of more than a couple dozen -1 scores with moderations, which suggests they started at 0 or better. It takes some effort to pull that off...

I think it's stuck in a loop. If only we knew a programmer who could debug it, and see where the logic fault is. I've heard the code is rather dated and not well documented, though... I can't seem to get access to the source myself and my input is not being recognized. I can see some of the logic failures in the system as it is, but I'm locked out and the developers aren't responding to my comments.

I think this unique combination of moderations might be a new achievement for me. One comment, moderated exactly 5 times, never the same way twice. I could still pick up a flamebait and make it 6, which I believe would leave only Interesting, Funny, and Underrated as the moderations I haven't seen on it so far.

And honestly, flamebait was what I expected it would be moderated with first. Apparently the slashdot conservatives weren't reading that discussion for some reason.

Unintended consequences:

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/resources/keystonexl_cwd.pdf

There is no shortage of available crude oil, domestic or imported, in the
United States, and for the last few years there has been a glut at the nationâ(TM)s
largest crude oil terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma. Canadian tar sands oil
would be processed for greater use in the U.S. only as other imported or domestic
sources are reduced. Replacing Mexican oil with Canadian oil would
only trade the closer source for the more distant.

You mean like George Zimmerman, who took the law into his own hands and chased down a teenage boy?

Oh, wait, that quote comes from Zimmerman's brother, and he's claiming that there are hacks like his brother who want to kill his brother.

Well, if he felt safer with his gun, he can take that gun back now. That was what it was for, right?

It is with great sorrow I read the following:

Although looking at his foes list I suspect he had to drop me so he could hate someone else instead.

I think someone else may have already mentioned this a while back but I hadn't seen it myself before today. The zoo.pl script (used for friends in particular) is broken.

More specifically, it seems to be broken when I try to call it up in firefox. If I am running chrome it works as it is supposed to. If I try to use it in firefox I get a non-helpful error.

This wouldn't have been broken by virtue of being used (and abused) by a former slashdot employee who was known for carrying an extensive perma-hate list of foes, would it? Naah, that doesn't sound that likely.

A while ago, some billionare brothers, who hardly pay any taxes and never give more than casual lip service to things like the plight of workers or environmental stewardship decided they needed a way to pay even less in taxes and care even less about the part of the world that is not insanely wealthy. They decided one way or another that the best way to meet this goal was to start their own political movement; which they ironically called the "tea party". This party promised uninformed voters the world.

The Tea Party rather bluntly declared itself to have objectives including avoiding taxes altogether and the destruction of the IRS. They made various claims of income taxes being unconstitutional and also statements of how good god-fearing Americans should do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, including not filling out tax claims at all. Then, in a rather strange twist this new political movement filed with the IRS for tax exempt status - rather than just simply avoiding taxes altogether in the way they had advocated for their followers to do.

And now, this group that has openly called for the end of the IRS and taxes, is crying foul that the IRS was investigating it.

When people left the country to avoid the military draft, they were shunned as outcasts, hippies, cowards, commies, and Un-American. But now we have a group that is openly opposing the government and we are being told - even by the supposed leftist media - that they should be greatly rewarded for their courage.

What the fuck happened to this country?

"Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, 'If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.' What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of 'irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects' of utilities."

Solar Panels Could Destroy U.S. Utilities

Today I managed to get another front page article. I had one a week ago as well. Strange, since it was over 3 years (possibly more) since I last had an submission accepted. FWIW they were both accepted by Soulskill, on Friday afternoons - 4:04pm today, 1:01pm last week.

I'm pretty sure this is not slashdot anymore, if I was able to get two articles up. I'm not complaining about the change, but I got used to getting rejected - and even more used to seeing my submissions accepted a day or more later when submitted by other people.

As I doubt I will get two stories on the front page in a month (several years passed between my most recent accepted story and the one before it), I will mention here as well that the genome of the coelocanth has been sequenced and described. 3 billion bases described in a non-paywalled Nature paper. Sequenced by an international team including scientists from Uppsala (Sweden), MIT, and Harvard.

I submitted a story this morning, and it is showing up "green" in the firehose. After having every single one of my submissions declined for years now - many of which were published a day or two later when submitted by someone else - I might finally get a story on the front page. That said, if it does make the front page it will be here on slashdot more than 6 hours after it was on google plus, but at least it will have made it.

Clearly, more guns will solve the problem:
Woman killed by 4-year-old in Tennessee cookout
Yes, you read that right. A woman was killed by a four year old boy who picked up a loaded handgun that some shit-for-brain left sitting around unattended, and shot and killed a woman. Being as the NRA wants us to believe that more guns somehow causes less death, it would stand to reason that they would also support having some random armed person then shoot and kill the 4 year old to prevent him from shooting anyone else.

Perhaps the most telling line though is towards the end

So some dumb fucker left his loaded gun sitting around and he has not faced any charges for the death that resulted from it. I would be shocked if he ever did, either.

And should the owner have really, really, really, known better? Hell yes. The owner of the gun is a sheriff's deputy. Somehow, this is supposed to make us feel better, I suppose?

Yes, I'm pissed off about this. I would have submitted it to the front page but since this is drudgedot and it makes the NRA look stupid it would never be accepted there. Hell, not that long ago when there was another case of a shithead leaving his gun out in the reach of a young child the kid shot themselves with it and this site called it "the wii suicide" (as if a toddler could harbor thoughts of suicide).