Stuff I've wanted to know hasn't been readily available for a long time anyway. I want to know things like:

• maximum brightness, if the screen is legible outdoors in full sun
• battery life at maximum brightness
• If the keyboard still has physical pgup/pgdn keys or not
• max effective speaker loudness
• how upgradable the RAM is
• how the rear corners are, in terms of trying to actually use it on a lap

Some of this stuff can be found out through vendor sources but a good chunk of it can be a PITA to find without getting hands-on with the laptop. As a consequence I've either bought used or bought from places like Costco where I can get a feel for the device. If I'm going to drop $1500 I want the thing to work to my tastes and ambiguity in such a transaction is annoying.

If you have to contact the admins to justify yourself rather than even being as simple as pre-signing-up through a web form and then the admins reviewing signups to approve then that's only one step from not being able to sign up at all.

A whole lot of print publications that later went hybrid and then online-only didn't make it even five years past the end of their print versions. It's surprising that they managed to go over a decade without closing up.

And to be frank about it, I'm surprised that the lights are still on at all here on Slashdot. Can't sign-up for new accounts anymore, they're clearly not trying to keep the site alive through new users, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day I go to pull up the URL and instead get a thanks-for-all-the-fish message.

I'm opposed to for-profit prisons because it adds further incentive to criminalize activities and to increase sentencing. I further take exception to the notion that prisoners can work in a given occupation for basically no real compensation, but once trained would be ineligible to work in that given profession once released from prison. Wildland firefighting immediately comes to mind as an occupation that relies fairly heavily on prison labor but where ex-cons are generally ineligible for hire after being released.

But the entire nature of the criminal justice system is pretty messed up here. Sentencing is uneven, consideration for some kind of reprieve is also uneven, and incarceration conditions are uneven and outright draconian in places. We don't even really know what we want out of it either and so many people think in terms of absolutes that there's no grounds for consensus or negotiated compromise.

I don't find it wrong when a change was proposed and accepted to blame the specific administration that has made a choice to reverse that change.

You're forgetting the employer-side costs like payroll taxes and medical insurance.

That said, I still agree that it's ridiculous to charge that much to inmates, and that largely the costs should be borne on society. Additionally it should be possible to evaluate which inmates are more likely or less likely to use their telephone privileges for unauthorized purposes and to weight how much in the way of resources are committed to the monitoring of their communications. There's a difference between a trustee-inmate slated for release's call being recorded and archived as a perfunctory step, compared to a trustee-inmate with no near-term prospects for release having an automated transcription generated by speech-to-text software and archived, versus a conventional inmate who may be recorded, transcribed, archived, and flagged for random review of the transcription and/or audio call itself, versus inmates who are evaluated to need mandatory review of transcripts or recordings or even live-monitoring of calls and involvement of investigative authorities during calls.

At some point the review process shouldn't even be a prison function either, it should be a law enforcement function as the reason for the monitoring is to prevent further crimes being orchestrated from behind bars.

This is too little, too late.

It's already become common to set up cellular hotspots where even picocell sites can't reach. It's also become common to set up phone-over-carrier-wifi where phones will connect to an org's wifi network specifically set up through an org like Ameriband where calls and texts tunnel to the carrier, but data is offloaded to the host org's corporate internet connection and thus their policies. And DAS has been around for so long that I've seen systems lifecycle, and then the lifecycled-systems go into fault due to age and requiring lifecycle again.

There's also an argument to be made that if the R&D aspects of developing both solar and wind power are somewhat open, in the sense that one's domestic materials science and manufacturing and fairly easily make domestic examples of just about every technical development that comes out of another country. An argument that it actually makes sense to let someone else go through the painful and expensive R&D to find the dead-ends, the problems, the hangups, and to then implement starting at a particular point in the process that didn't require spending all that money on the initial R&D or the dead-ends.

Likewise there's an argument to be made against widespread adoption of a particular early tech example even if one chooses to perform domestic research and development. Refine the technical aspects to a threshold where one is willing to accept particular efficiencies, lifecycle, disposal costs based on that lifecycle, etc.

Most people seem to forget that big industry doesn't usually do commodity procurement for their capital purchases. When they choose to invest in something, they want that investment to pay off. It's shortsighted to adopt solar panel A, then replace it with A.1, then with A.2, then with A.2.a, then with A.2.b, etc. It may make sense to let someone else develop and iterate the A-series, then to let them start working on the B-series, pay attention to what they come up with, then develop say, B.2.a and implement that widely. Watch them go through the C-series and D-series, then invest in D.3.m or wait until E-series is in development and hop back on the R&D bandwagon again.

Most of the PhDs I've known are in the private sector, doing basic research for companies.

PhDs don't have to work in academia while still being able to use their degrees.

Shouldn't it be possible to design farm equipment that could run off of diesel fuel for the short term but switch to E85 once ethanol-producing agriculture is scaled for it?

I mention E85 because as a hydrocarbon its carbon comes from the atmosphere and photosynthesis pays some of the energy costs associated with producing it. It's not digging up carbon long-sequestered deep in the ground in order to burn it, it's taking carbon out of the air, turning it into fuel, then burning the fuel to release it back into the air. Engines that run on E85 commonly have compression ratios of around 14:1, while diesels tend to start around 15:1. Seems like it's merely an engineering problem to design farm equipment that would initially run on existing fuel production but could migrate to a new fuel when it's produced in sufficient quantity.

The effects of cold welding are reasonably well known in vacuum conditions; it would not be a surprise if this effect is essentially attributable to it. Would be nice to be proven otherwise though, particularly if such effects could be seen within Earth's ambient atmosphere at STP conditions.

I feel I can be outraged. I have a Samsung 24" display that I brought into work and it stopped working. Fortunately work was willing to replace the display that I had sourced with one in work's inventory, but it was very annoying that a 1920x1200 display with DVI and HDMI inputs had its drivers removed and would only run at 640x480.

...then there's not a lot of difference compared to the status quo.

My point was to reduce the dependence on it, not to try to eliminate it. At this point we've invented so many uses for the leftover oil byproducts from the fuel refining process that I doubt we'll be able to truly eliminate them, but if the petroleum wax, or the polystyrene coating is net reduction in the quantity of oil required compared to making the full-plastic bottles.

Also fund research into those non-petroleum plastics and create and enforce labeling laws, so that consumers can know with certainty that if they're buying these alternative plastics what exactly goes in to them.

You're treating this like it's a binary proposition.

The GP post is correct, if it's left in the ground then the carbon in the hydrocarbon soup remains contained, sequestered. The GP post didn't say anything about all of the byproducts that society has become accustomed to, you brought up all of that.

A great many products that people buy and use only exist or came to exist because of a desire to find a use for the byproducts of crude oil refining for fuel purposes. There are other ways of accomplishing the tasks that many of these products do. Hell, it's not a stretch of an argument that products made from wood, where the growth and harvest of timber is managed, are closer to zero-carbon since forests get their carbon from the air itself. So even if the wood products are burned at the end of their usefulness, they're just releasing the carbon taken from the air right back into the air again. And they don't even have to be burned, they can be landfilled, leaving the carbon captured from the original timber further captured.

We would do well as a planet if we reduced our dependence on crude oil for transportation and heat, and stopped making excuses for why we need cheap plastic crap that was invented to use the byproducts left of from producing petroleum-fuels as justification for pumping oil. We may never stop pumping oil as it has proven itself useful, but removing it from the ground simply to burn it when there are other energy sources available is wasteful.