Sentry Mode adds a unique layer of protection to Tesla vehicles by continuously monitoring the environment around a car when it’s left unattended. When enabled, Sentry Mode enters a “Standby” state, like many home alarm systems, which uses the car’s external cameras to detect potential threats. If a minimal threat is detected, such as someone leaning on a car, Sentry Mode switches to an “Alert” state and displays a message on the touchscreen warning that its cameras are recording. If a more severe threat is detected, such as someone breaking a window, Sentry Mode switches to an “Alarm” state, which activates the car alarm, increases the brightness of the center display, and plays music at maximum volume from the car’s audio system.

If a car switches to “Alarm” state, owners will also receive an alert from their Tesla mobile app notifying them that an incident has occurred. They’ll be able to download a video recording of an incident (which begins 10 minutes prior to the time a threat was detected) by inserting a formatted USB drive into their car before they enable Sentry Mode.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/sentry-mode-guarding-your-Tesla?utm_campaign=cooke&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

That's why they have ball boys and bug girls on standby.

Was gone for the weekend and it turned into word fights (almost)...

It is so hard to carry on a discussion... the heat too easily turned up. Sorry if I contributed in the heat.

Thing is, I don't think any of us need to argue for God's omnipotent or his non-existence. God can select to do or not do anything he wants. He can choose to reveal Himself to a believer or a non-believer, or NOT to. What's the point. It has been argued for millennia and I doubt we are "The Chosen One(s)" to end this. And I think, most of us in our Western society, whether you're Christian or not, we know quite a bit about the Bible CONTENT. But the 99.99% of us non-Bible-scholars probably don't know the exact CONTEXT of the tough stuff. The churches avoid them too for obvious reasons.

For me the important things is, there are really horrible things done in history (and present) in the name of religion. Allow me to be a bit self-serving and consider these terrible, inhumane events as evil beings hijacking their religions so they can get away Scot-free. We can't allow that in this day & age. Hold the evil doers & hypocrites accountable, not the religion.

When I read the Bible, I see all the crap that makes no sense too, but I see the discrepancy as humanity making progress. There are so many years between us & the Bible's original writings (or oral pass-me-downs), words & meaning invariably changed (and not always for the better). Could it be the clear-as-day word "gossip" (its Hebrew equivalent) was not part of its language yet? Therefore Paul said those sexist things (in our modern eye)? Or just people speak funny in those days? I can't be sure.

So, I *try* to figure out the meaning of those difficult Bible verses by keeping the context of Jesus' teachings in mind. I mean, come on, all he want is us all having compassion towards each other, be respectful of God and oh, there's the promise of heaven. Like, THAT'S IT, that's the gist of it. Anything else is pretty secondary & incidental to me. The part that concerns between human-human interact? Yes, it's hard to put in practice. But it's not hard to understand what's needed to be done. E.g. If someone offends my religion, should I go on the defensive and then all Super-Saiyan retaliation mode? Or should put my focus into finding out why he offended me and try to understand the reasoning behind it, and if possible, do something positive about it? I believe Jesus asks of us the latter.

Thing is, as a Christian (granted, some Christian might not consider me one that much, maybe?), I'm OK to leave a lot of things in the Bible in the "gray zone"... because it is *I* that haven't the smarts to comprehend what's written fully. But I do think I understand its purpose enough to know what I need to do to be better. The world is full of hurt, we can't just standby and focus on sometimes pointless fights (ironically I'm typing this post, lol, mea culpa, but hope it's worth it), better put more energy on making things better -- like Jesus, arguably the most progressive thinker/doer of its time, wanted to make the world a better place. Jesus didn't spend his time setting up a religion, he was there for a peace & compassion revolution.

Seriously sad that when the topic touches on religion, there're way too much stereotypes & presumptions on every sides. I see the reality as far more nuanced. I can understand, and in fact conditionally support, a lot of the abolition of "Religion" with its ritualistic practices in today's society. I really don't trust anyone loudly proclaiming themselves "devout" but support sexist/racist/unjust policies. The smell of hypocrisy, ulterior motives & power corruption are too great. Don't sheepishly give them the political & God forbid... military power to do great harm to humanity. History has proven that time & again.

This is insane! He obviously had a concussion the way he was stumbling around and repeating himself.

So much incompetence - starting with the person that hired the guy who thought it was OK to assault a passenger.

How did the all of the other staff just standby and watch this happen?

My mind is blown.

I hope this poor gentlemen is compensated very well.

I'm quite pro gun rights generally, but to me it seems insane that "self defense" is the #1 stated reason for owning a gun in the US now.

Jim Jeffries' bit on self defense covers my concerns in a pretty funny but honest way. In your home, keeping your guns in an accessible place where they could easily be used in a self-defense situation makes them not safe. Much more likely to have accidents, or have a criminal end up with them and using them on you. Securely storing them away from ammo to prevent those issues precludes using them for self defense. Catch-22.

For concealed carry, that's a bit different. With the right kind of setup, I suppose that I must admit that the risks of accidents could be low, the chances of needing to use the weapon low, but some real potential for situations where some people would be better off having a weapon than not.

...There are some *major* caveats to that, though. For example, if I was black, I'd never concealed carry because that seems like a recipe for disaster. Is that fair, or reasonable? Fuck no. But it is reality.

I think personally as a white country-bumpkin dude, if I was going to carry semi-frequently, I'd go with the old redneck standby of a shotgun or hunting rifle on a rack in the back window of my pickup. Lock it to the rack with a combination lock, and keep ammo separately in a glove compartment or something with another combination lock. If I actually needed it, it would be there.


One thing I do agree with @Mordhaus 100% on is that suicides should NOT be considered, or at the very least should be specifically denoted as suicides, when showing numbers for "gun violence" or "gun crimes".

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It's all happening, but our badge maker is on holiday. Standby!

"The Indian Grave Drainage District in Quincy, Illinois still has three operational Model 32 engines, and three engines are on standby as back-up power generators in Delta, Colorado."

That's impressive and disturbing at the same time. I know the old stuff is often more reliable and cheaper to acquire, but surely a surplus tank engine from the boneyard would be easier to maintain.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Who makes this crap music? Seriously, so many of these videos seem to have some generic pop-group on standby, ready to make some shitty song in context with the video.

Sorry for the hate, but really... What's up with this?

since they mentioned the old standby excuse of "gateway drug", but didn't really answer it very well, this is what i've always said in response -

honestly, the opposite is true. if you try pot, and you like it, you're not more likely to try every other illegal drug. you're probably less likely to.
none of the potheads i know bother with any other drugs.

why would you take a chance on far more dangerous, expensive, and addictive substances, when pot is cheap, readily available, non-addictive, and has no risk of overdose?

does enjoying coffee make anyone want to try meth, simply because they're both stimulants?

So weird! All I needed to do was copy the embed code in again, no hassle at all. Next time maybe let me know if you wanna sort the thumbnail and I'll standby! Please don't worry about re-promoting it, it's been less than an hour anyway, peeps will still get to see it. Thanks a lot!

In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
It happened again.

I put a thumbnail on your FoD video
http://videosift.com/video/Mike-Tyson-Is-Herman-Cain-Campaign-Promises

And the video disappeared again!!
I invoked lucky760 in a comment and told him about both times this has happened.

I'm sorry that you'll miss some votes while it's broken--I'll promote it again once it's fixed.

??????

Oh give me a break. Really?

You can't have a boy boisterously lip syncing/dancing to lyrics like:

He ain't even gotta try to put the mac on
He just gotta give me that look, when he give me that look
Then the panties comin' off, off, uhrg!

...and have it not sound/look gay.

I didn't make any commentary with my channel assignment; and I standby what I said originally: this is gay.