You say that, and yet the Government is still going to Apple to unlock that phone instead of just working out whatever 1+1 is.
You are correct in that nothing is fool proof, but it can still be made difficult enough for your opponents to decrypt it in a timely fashion. And while it's true that there are many dumb criminals out there who will use the default encryption settings, the smart ones will simply switch to a more secure system. And the smart ones are going to be the most likely to be committing the next 911.

Interesting. I think I got through puberty with an average or slightly below average level of acne / pimples. But my (rather large) nose is a goddamn pimple factory that refuses to subside with age. Still going strong halfway through my 30's. Not usually large / overly noticeable pimples, but small ones pretty much all the time.

I do have one complaint about the video though -- their discussion of the subject at hand is pretty much precisely 3 minutes long, then immediately followed by 38 seconds worth of shilling for Gates Foundation stuff. That may very well be a good cause, and maybe this isn't a paid advertisement for it, but it definitely falls into the category of bait and switch that is getting WAY too common in YT videos.

A) Make that segue clear, don't rush over it to try to hide it and then pretend like nobody will notice.

B) Announce clearly if you are shilling for it because you think it is a good cause, because you are getting paid or otherwise having your back scratched, or both.

C) It is a *bit* cheeky to have the ratio of content vs "special message" as low as 3 minutes vs 40 seconds.

Maybe I'm weird, but while all these people seem to struggle with old relationships and self-loathing, I simply struggle with the looming fact that I am ever so swiftly growing closer to the complete annihilation of self that is death.

They worry about who their Ex is seeing, I worry about my rational mind telling me that nothing exists (for me) after death so why bother with anything?

They try to salve their thoughts with the idea that they can improve if they work at it, while I try to desperately ignore all logical and scientific reasoning to try and have hope that there is some type of afterlife.

My 4 easy steps to losing weight:

1. Remove excess carbs
2. Drink lots of water
3. Exercise 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week
4. Realize that no matter what the fuck you do to lose weight, you are still going to die and, realistically, your weight doesn't matter as much as your overall health towards extending the date of your impending death sentence.

I'm pretty sure self driving vehicles are going to be killed off by the legal responsibilty problem.

If you're the only person in your self driving car, and it runs a little old lady over, who's at fault? If you're still going to be at fault, because it's your car, then people won't buy them in any great numbers. If you have to be just as attentive even though you have no control, people won't buy them.

I see self-correcting cars being popular. The car that decides "oh, you're an idiot, I'm gonna save you" and then does so.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

When I got to the party
They gave me a 40
And I must have been thirsty
'Cuz I drank it so quickly

When I got to the bedroom
There was somebody waiting
And it isn't my fault
That the barbarian raped me

When I went to get tested
I brought along my best friend
Melissa Mahoney
who had once been molested
And she knew how to get there
She knew all the nurses
They were all really friendly
But the test came up positive

(Chorus)
Uh-oh
I've seen better days
But I don't care
Oh I just sent a letter in the mail

When I got my abortion
I brought along my boyfriend
We got there an hour
Before the appointment
And outside the building
Were all these annoying fundamentalist Christians
We tried to ignore them

(Chorus)
Uh-oh
I've had better days
But I don't care
Oasis got my letter in the mail

(Up-Beat Break)

When vacation was over
The word was all over
That I was a crack whore
Melissa had told them
And do now we're not talking
Except we have tickets to see 'Blue in October'
And I think we're still going

(Chorus)
Uh-Oh
I've seen better days
But I don't care
Oh I just got a letter in the mail
Oasis and a photograph
It's autographed and everything
Melissa's gonna wet herself I swear

None of those things necessarily stop the device from working, and in my experience they're pretty durable. Until recently I was using a 6 year old iPhone, and the old one is still going strong after being passed on to a family member.

I was a big fan of Boingo since the moment I heard "Stay" back in 1986. I drove from Connecticut to Detroit on a weekend to see them because my sister had an extra ticket. Check out their last song "Change" on their last CD, an epic 16 minute tribute to the Beatles and just about everything else.

Glad to see Elfman is still going strong.

This is all fine and dandy, and kudos to people who take time to help others, but in my experiences......cops can still go fuck themselves. Not to worry though lantern53, I've never dealt with you in uniform, as far as I know. I bet you're the bee's knees. I can't judge you there. Maybe I'll even polish up your badge for ya one day. Press your uniform. Tune up the ol' squad car. I just hope someone makes a video of it, and it's posted here. So we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya, while the siftbot joyfully sheds a single unifying tear.

I think I'd still go with a Beagleboard Black. The thing you want is documentation and source code. I can't find any on Allwinner's site (and the other component's manufacturers aren't named), and given Allwinner is a Chinese company I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the English documentation. Likewise, the Broadcom SOC in the Raspberry Pi's full documentation is only available under NDA and then only to volume customers, which is BS (moreover, no source for the bare metal stuff--an opaque binary blob does that).

If you're selling something as an educational development platform, some things are a lot more important than a few dollar's savings.

So I guess I'm going to sound like a bad guy here, but this seems truly idiotic and naive to me. Not buying the shirt just means you are not going to support their wages - while horrendous - are still obviously better than nothing or they wouldn't be working for it. It would be counter productive to not buy the shirt. It would also be counter productive to push for transparency in the fasion industry as labor would just be shifted. The only pressure I see working are trade deals that don't rape other people in the name of globalization. We need human centric trade deals with enforced import regulations. These trade deals must enforce worker rights to western standards - same worker protection laws. Any country that doesn't comply should not be allowed to import their goods here. While obviously wages are still going to be disparate, at least hours, unsafe working conditions, child labor laws, etc will be enforced. Unfortunately most trade deals are written and driven by business to do the opposite. That's what needs to change, and its the only thing I see working.

...Meh. I understand why that sucks, but I'm still going to:
1) Run Adblock Plus on everything, with element hiding helpers for other annoying shit like "hey, we noticed you are running adblock! please don't!"
2) Entirely avoid Facebook, not for any political or philosophical reasons, but because I have no interest in it
3) Be generally dismayed at how much power and economic influence the entire concept of advertising has in modern culture

"If the wings are moving faster than the aircraft, it's a helicopter and therefore unsafe."


Have a friend who works in helicopter maintenance.... he calls them "flying death machines".

And I'm still going for my first lesson soon

Not a surprise to me. We knew that the DA had thrown the case. They did NOT do what they normally do in a grand jury, which is to present evidence that shows or implies the 'defendants' guilt, and present it in a way that makes the 'defendant' look guilty, or at least looks like they could be guilty. They don't show evidence that might make the 'defendant' look not-guilty, and the 'defendant' does not testify. In this case, they handed over ALL their evidence, did not explain it except to provide explanations that fit the 'defendants' version, and did allow the 'defendant' to 'testify', in his own words, for days on end without any cross examination or question of his version. Now we have another story that they also instructed the 'jury' with long held unconstitutional 'laws'.
To me, this all adds up to 'jeopardy' never attaching in this case, due to prosecutorial misconduct. The DA is REQUIRED to represent the state, not the defendant, ZEALOUSLY. There can be little question that, in this case, no such zealous representation happened on the side of the state/people. For that reason, I hope a special prosecutor can still go after him for murder. I also really hope this DA will be disbarred, certainly removed as DA, but it's a thin hope.

Then slow down with theories of our impending demise, the IPCC doesn't support it. You want to talk about not denying the science, then you don't get to preach gloom and doom. Don't claim a large percentage of farmland is going to be lost to sea level rise by 2100. Don't claim coastlines are going to be pushed back 10 miles by a worst case 1 foot rise of sea level by 2100.

We are talking about advancements solving problems like a maximum sea level rise of a foot in the next 100 years, with best guesses being lower than that. I think it's modest to suggest our children's children will have figured out how to raise the dikes around places like New Orleans by a foot in the next 100 years.
The concord and moon trips are no longer happening because they are expensive. We can do them if we needed to, and more easily than the first time around. Finding out people aren't willing to pay the premium to shave an hour off their flight doesn't mean the technology no longer exists. Just because America no longer needs to prove they can lift massive quantities of nuclear warheads into orbit doesn't mean we couldn't still go to the moon again if it was needed. There's just no reason to do it, the tech exists still none the less.
Yes, there are social problems that confound the use of new technology. You fail to notice that is also the problem with feeding everybody. Food production isn't the problem, but rather the men with guns that control distribution. Stalin's mass starvation of millions was a social problem, not climate change or technology. Mao's was the same. North Koreas the same. All over Africa is the same. We have more than enough food, and plenty of charities work hard to send food over to places like Africa. Once the food gets there though the men with guns take most of it and people still starve. The reason Africa has so many crop failures is the violent displacement of the farmers. Exactly the same problem that saw millions starve in Russia, China and North Korea.
You are right that a changing climate could compound Africa's ag industry a bit, but it's a small hit compared to the violent displacement problem. Also, don't neglect to consider to impact of meaningful CO2 emission restrictions around the globe. A large scale global economic downturn probably means a lot more war, bloodshed, and starvation. If you do not reduce emissions enough to trigger that downturn and instead just 'marginally', you get stuck with both because Africa is still going to see virtually the same climate changes through the next hundred years.

And if you are worried about losing the glaciers in the Himalayas by 2100 there is very good reason to believe that's gonna be alright:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S41/39/84Q12/index.xml?section=topstories