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The truth is that the intermittency problem with wind and solar is so severe that when you get more than a few percent tied into the grid it actually has negative value.

Only if you do it stupidly. California is already seeing days where renewable make up 50% of their electric usage and their problems with negative value are relatively small, manageable and are in the process of being mitigated. BTW, the term for what you call intermittancy is the duck curve.

The smart way to do it is:

1. Improve the grid so that, for example, when the wind stops blowing off the east coast you can bring in electricity from the plain states to fill the gap.
2. Build natgas plants that can easily and rapidly spin up and down to also buffer the supply.
3. Include storage as part of the plants. California has recently added that to the law regulating all new forms commercial power generation in the state.

What you can't do is rely on baseload power (like nukes and coal) which get tons of subsidies in the form of guaranteed returns.

What's more, most of the energy used to PRODUCE solar panels, and much of the energy used to produce wind turbines, comes from soot-belching, coal-fired power plants in China, and most of the energy REPLACED BY these devices would have been produced in clean power plants with state-of-the-art "scrubbers" in North America, Europe & Australia.

That's all bullshit of the highest degree.
The energy required to manufacture wind turbines is recouped within about 6 months of operation.

And, in case anyone is interested:
The energy required to manufacture solar panels is a tiny fraction of how much they will generate over their lifetime.
In Middle Europe, where irradiance is about equal to that of Alaska, PV panels built with 10 year old manufacturing technology reached a net energy cost of zero within 3 years. In Southern Europe it was between 0.5 and 1.5 years.
Furthermore for every doubling in solar manufacturing capacity energy used to produce solar panels decreased by 12-13 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 17-24 percent. Over the last decade, solar manufacturing capacity has increased 10x.

As for "scrubbers" and coal, China is way ahead of the US.
China recently cancelled construction of 104 new coal plants equal to one third of the US's total installed coal capacity. Even then, China's coal regulations are so much cleaner than the US's that by 2020 not one single US coal plant would be clean enough to legally operate if it were in China.

And a low-tech analog system does not protect you from those things either.. If you blackmail or bribe someone does it matted if they press button X on a computer or a old analog control-panel?

But anyway, you would have to involve a lot more than just one person to put a place like that into meltdown... Sure they could cause damage to the place that would cost a shitload to fix, but the actual safety of people outside of the plant would not be affected...

I don't understand why people are focusing so much on nuclear power when there is a lot more serious targets that can cause major damage, and that requires a lot less effort...

Imagine someone shuting down the power in a country..
ref 1 : http://www.reuters.com/article...
ref 2 : http://www.businessinsider.com...
I remember there was a talk on blackhat or defcon where they discussed how to bring down the whole grid in the US (without specific details of course) and what they found out was that if they could bring down a few central hubs it would trigger a chain-reaction over the whole grid that would basically shut down power in the whole country.

Or have a look at what happened in Tianjun.. More people died there than in Fukushima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Please see the list of toxic materials released and the number of people that was evacuated from the area and number of people that died as a direct cause of it.

Instead of the fear-mongering... Lets try and focus on the important part instead.... How can we protect control/failsafe systems from being affected by a third-party in a destructive way?

Cite your sources.

You likely can't; you have that the wrong way round.

As a matter of fact, the US sets a precedent by heavily fining non-US companies at every opportunity. For example, when the LIBOR rate-rigging story broke, the New York AG fined British banks. Did any country in the EU fine JPMorgan over the insane dealings of the London Whale?

If you step back and look at this, what you find is that US multinational companies play one EU state off against the rest so that they are able to off-shore their profits without paying tax.

Or maybe you'd like this story, http://uk.reuters.com/article/..., about Starbucks, the US Coffee Shop chain, that paid no Corporation Tax on UK. From the article: "Accounts filed by its UK subsidiary show that since it opened in the UK in 1998 the company has racked up over 3 billion pounds ($4.8 billion) in coffee sales, and opened 735 outlets but paid only 8.6 million pounds in income taxes..."

What is likely to have happened in the background is that Apple and the US Government have discussed a way that the US Government would intervene on Apple's behalf in the EU. In return, Apple would then repatriate some of their vast off-shore, un-taxed profits so that in return the US government could tax it. Win-win. Apple don't have to pay the full amount; the US government gets some tax revenue.

There's a simple solution to this - tax profits in the country where they originate. If a multinational wants to trade in a country, they pay her taxes. End of.

I thought they did regional print on demand to avoid the high shipping costs.

OP is probably thinking of the time when the Federal Reserve sent pallets of cash into Iraq that disappeared without a trace.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash-idUSN0631295120070207

No, you're wrong.

Amazon is a public company, with stock traded on NASDAQ. Ownership is over 63% institutional. Jeff Bezos is the Chariman, President, CEO, and a large stockholder, but by no means "owns" Amazon.

The Washington Post is a privately held company, which Jeff Bezos purchased through a holding company (Nash Holdings, LLC) for $250 million in 2013. Yes, he indirectly "owns" The Washington Post.

Your descriptions of writing off of losses from WP to cover gains from Amazon is grossly inaccurate and ignorant of how business structures and taxes work in the United States.

I'm glad you had positive experiences. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't cut it, though.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

How do we know the NSA didn't pay M$ or apply pressure to insert that coding error in the first place? They've done similar things in the past.

They wouldn't do that. The NAACP "buried" that word years ago. http://www.reuters.com/article... . You can't make this stuff up.

So tell me, what amount of the projected $6 trillion cost of the Iraq war do *you* think was about protecting US oil supplies? Because almost any percentage would be dramatically more than the US has spent on renewables. Heck, the US "lost" more in the sofa cushions than it gives to renewables.

Twitter was in the secret courts in 2014

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-nsa-idUSKCN0HW1V520141007

He learned it from the President.

He learned it from the El Presidente.

FTFY.

The sheer magnitude of innocent people caught in that ginormous net is extremely unjust by any measure. That some Americans are terrified of a tiny minority of people from those countries wearing towels on their heads does not make it any more rational or just.

The United States is not under any international or domestic legal obligation to allow travelers or immigrants from elsewhere. We have that right as a sovereign nation to control our borders. As for "innocent people" and "unjust"......How's that White Man's Burden working out for you? Do we elect our public officials to do what is in the best interests of American citizens, or the best interests of foreigners? The two are often not overlapping on a Venn diagram.

That some Americans are terrified of a tiny minority of people from those countries wearing towels on their heads does not make it any more rational or just.

How tiny is the tiny minority? Is it 1% of Muslims? That's 18 million jihadis. Even if it were 1% of the 6 Travel Ban countries, that's 1.8 million jihadis. If we add those 1.8 million to the US population of ~326 million, they would be about 0.5% of Americans. Would you still shop at Wal-Mart if 1 out of every 200 customers was just waiting for the best time to blow himself up at the checkout line? Are you willing to accept that risk? For what purpose? What do we really lose by saying "You know what, I think we're just NOT going to let you guys come here until you get your shit straight." What are the second- and third-order effects of increasingly frequent terror attacks attributable to radical Islam? Effects on the economy? Effects on overall quality of life from the inevitable security theater?

Thing is, it's NOT a "tiny minority". Check out the data from the Pew Research Center: 2014 study. Look how many are at least kinda-sorta ok with the idea of using suicide bombings against CIVILIANS. Bangladesh? 47%. Turkey? 18%. Egypt? 24%. That means those 3 countries alone have 100 MILLION Muslims who think it's okay to blow up women and children in defense of Islam. Is that your idea of a "tiny minority"? Let's also throw in the 25% of American Muslims who agree with them: http://www.reuters.com/article...

Ya know if we were really smart....we would filter a Muslim ban by allowing women 16-30 a fast track to immigration. Women are usually politically radicalized by th

this has been extensively reported on. if you decide to ignore all of these sources, and instead make a decision based on some other unknown source (i.e. internal circle jerk), you might as well be a flat-earther, bigfoot hunter, UFO spotter, and loch ness fisherman. you put an unreachably high bar of evidence on things you don't want to believe, while putting a very low bar of evidence on things you want to believe. you have become that nutcase.

Seems about on the level of, "Doctors claim vaccines don't cause autism, but Jenny McCarthy doesn't agree," which started from and is largely maintained by the left.

Started by "the left"? Say what? "Left" and "Right" have nothing to do with this. "Doctors" are at least as likely to be members of "the left" if by that you mean social liberals as opposed to conservatives. Oh, wait, they are more likely:

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

http://www.reuters.com/article...

http://jamanetwork.com/journal...

The last article is very thoughtful and analyzes trends in political contributions specifically, fractionated by gender, race, and subspeciality. It indicates that left/right even for physicians is more likely to be a question of income, gender, race, speciality, and age than it is of "intelligence" per se, but it is a simple matter of fact that on average liberals are smarter than conservatives.

Now, if you want to get into pseudoscience, we can talk about the "conservatives" in Texas and Kansas and Missouri who are passing legislation to make masturbation a misdemeanor crime (Texas), teach intelligent design on a par with evolution in the schools, rewrite history so that the founding fathers are Good Christians as opposed to deists or atheists and suppress evidence to the contrary to prevent it from being mentioned in school, let alone taught.

Personally, I tend to think of science as mostly being social value neutral, but the glaring exception to this is when science collides (as it so often does!) with religion. This is beautifully reflected in surveys like this:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

although it is perhaps better summarized by this piece:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

To quote:

The more religious a person is, the more conservative he is, and this relationship is strongly mediated by the value placed on tradition — respect for customs and institutions. But even though religiousness and spirituality are highly correlated, the more spiritual a person is, the more liberal he is. This relationship is mediated by the value placed on universalism — social tolerance and concern for everyone’s welfare.

As with previous studies, conservatives were more conscientious (organized and self-disciplined), while liberals were more agreeable and more open to new ideas and experiences. The trend of conservatives being more religious and liberals being more spiritual held even when controlling for these personality factors, and when controlling for age, gender and socioeconomic status.

As a scientist, I interpret this as the more orthodox religious a person is, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because it is written down in a scriptural text somewhere and hence exempted somehow from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. The more spiritually religious they are, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because they "feel" like it must be true and their feelings are again exempt from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. You can see the problem -- liberals and conservatives are almost equally likely to accept at least some nonsense as truth if they are religious, and liberals and conservatives who are intelligent enough not to do this are, almost by definition, less likely to accept nonsense as truth whether or not it is religious simply because they apply the rules

If the Paris Accord only requires Presidential approval to be enforced, it only requires Presidential disapproval to end immediately.

If Obama can do it all by himself, Trump can undo it all by himself - immediately if desired.

And note that every other country that has a domestic ratification requirement for a treaty has followed that route and gotten the Paris Accord TREATY ratified domestically.

Like the UK.

Like Australia

Like India

Like China

Like Japan

The US doesn't have to leave the Paris Agreement because without Senate ratification the US never agreed to the TREATY.

Its in the http://www.reuters.com/article... as linked.

"..request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.."

it's not because someone finds something stupid that it's not true:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

China has been leading the way in renewables spending, and not just in nuclear. Also, fwiw, the money isn't going into the World Bank, it's just countries agreeing to spend money on THEIR OWN industries.

Source 1: http://www.publicfinanceintern...
Source 2: http://uk.reuters.com/article/...

Don't let facts get in the way of your argument:

The controversial government program that funded failed solar company Solyndra, and became a lighting rod in the 2012 presidential election, is officially in the black.

Where are these missing "several Billion" that you claim?

I have backed my assertions with citations. Either show some basis for your claims, or STFU.

Don't you mean "the failing New York Times"? Do you not quote your own orange clown in chief? Are you an incompetently programmed bot?

Fake News? Did, or did not Putin say this?

What about the Reuters article link that was provided? Is that also fake news?

This strongly implies that Vermont is using parallel construction in the gathering of evidence and prosecution of suspects. Parallel construction denies people the right of due process by denying them their right to know the evidence used against them.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

A lot of criminals are going to walk in Vermont when they're lawyers start making use of this A lot. . Maybe even all three of them.

The day before 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld stated publicly the pentagon could not account for 2.3 trillion dollars of their spending of taxpayer money. on 9/11 the accounting department of the pentagon was destroyed, Prior to this was the so called "trillion dollar bet" of the world stock market that drained South East Asia, Indonesia was hit hard and by CIA stats at that time, it was 88% Muslim. Later unaccounted for government spending reached over 8 trillion (i.e. http://www.reuters.com/article... , http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... ) and just google for these things if you don't like the links for others.

Where did the money go? Funding of the deep state... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...

Stop funding the deep state and there will be more than enough.
got a problem with government, or not? http://3seas.org/pmwiki-gov/ click link, read and share, and with your representatives. Does Trump's use of the word "We" actually include the people? Lets find out!

I suspect that may be the answer. Lots of chemicals sold by international companies specializing in chemicals (e.g., Fisher, Baker) have switched their raw suppliers from Western sources to China. As we all know, you have to ride herd constantly on Chinese suppliers because they will take any shortcut they can to save money.

It wouldn't surprise me if the latest batches failed QC testing here in the States even after supposedly passing QA at their source. Even more fun, if FDA inspectors found problems anywhere in the supply chain it may take a while to remedy. With only two end product suppliers problems at one can cause a shortage very fast.

Hospira (a Pfizer company), which is the one that has the shortage, has had a recent history with quality control issue (problems with cardboard particulates in injectable vancomycin).

FWIW, in an email, a spokesman said the shortage is due to issues with a third-party supplier but not the API supplier. (API means active pharmaceutical ingredient), so it isn't likely to be the actual soda ash / bicarbonate supplier that is the issue per se, but perhaps some other company that supplies testing materials, or perhaps some packaging supplier. As I mentioned the USA is one of the largest suppliers of sodium bicarbonate, it seems unlikely that there is a simply sourcing problem with the basic ingredient and not something fixed by going to China.

Chinese spies hacking the CIA, they are just doing their job

Chinese spies are doing their job, that's right. But Snowden's treason, likely, made that job easier. The asshole has blood on his hands — blood of Americans and those foreigners, who chose to help us, be it for money or to destroy the Communist regime, or both.

That said, I can't wait for Snowden and Manning to come out condemning Trump for sharing intelligence with Russia.

Or this guy.

These expert scientists were working for the EPA prior to the start of the Flint Michigan water crisis, an EPA that is now being sued by 1700 Flint Michigan residents.

Scientists have tunnel vision. Someone that has spent a good portion of their life researching endangered species is of course going to think that the most important issue is endangered species. Someone that has spent a good portion of their life researching climate change is of course going to think that the most important issue is climate change.

Clean drinking water, even for a single small town, is of course way more important than just about anything else the EPA is regulating. Certainly more important than a potential harm to a species of salamander that is believed to already have such small populations that they are considered endangered.

People first, especially before the few dozen endangered whatevers that are left.

the Russians had *nothing whatsoever* to do with the US election

JFC!
Even President ManBaby has said the russians were involved:

resident-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday finally appeared to publicly say that Russia was behind the hacking and release of emails from within the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair.

"I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people," Trump said at his first press conference in 169 days.
'I think it was Russia': Trump finally concedes Russia responsible for election-related hacking

President-elect Donald Trump accepts the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia engaged in cyber attacks during the U.S. presidential election and may take action in response, his incoming chief of staff said on Sunday.

Reince Priebus said Trump believed Russia was behind the intrusions into the Democratic Party organizations, although Priebus did not clarify whether the president-elect agreed that the hacks were directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"He accepts the fact that this particular case was entities in Russia, so that's not the issue," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."
Trump acknowledges Russia role in U.S. election hacking: aide

Other remedies were offered, though they weren't easy options and didn't involve going back to more coal mining, which is why it was a tough option to choose. People in that region largely said "no thanks".

The clear, contrary message was "19th century style or nothing". You're right that in that circumstance Trump's bogus promises that the clock could somehow be turned back would be attractive to people. Unfortunately, coal isn't getting cheaper, safer, or less polluting by comparison to natural gas or to wind and solar. It isn't in more demand domestically or internationally. Worse, increasing automation/mechanization continues to tear a wide swath through what job market remains within the coal industry. The decline due to automation has been unfolding over multiple decades, and is not merely as a result of Obama's policies.

It's not about "not giving a shit", because that just isn't true. It's that this is a challenging problem and people said "no" to the other options. That's their call, but claiming other people don't care is unfair. Some do.

Unfortunately there are some people who evidently don't care, because they'd rather have a tax cut for billionaires and say "screw you" to the people in Appalachia who do want to change jobs.

>Trying to get that number to sink deep down in, I really am, but it's just not happening.

Apple gets just about all the industry's profits... http://www.reuters.com/article...

> For the second quarter, the company's net income rose to $11.03 billion, or
> $2.10 per share, compared with $10.52 billion, or $1.90 per share, a year earlier.

And, oh yeah, Apple now has a quarter of a ***TRILLION*** dollars of cash.

Try to get that to sink in.

> Citizens of the world buy more than a billion Android phones a year now.

"Losing money on every sale, but making up for it in volume" does not get you a quarter of a trillion in the bank. The goal of a business is to make a profit, and Apple is doing that very nicely, thank you. I am not an Apple fanboi, and do not own any Apple products. I have Dell PCs and a Samsung tablet at home, so I'm neutral here.

also completely unrelated, but competing for air time today, is the other Apple story about a dip in shares and phone sales. this airpod story is a good distraction from the iphone sales drop because it has a big percent for satisfaction or something. On the other hand, Apple is probably worried that people are going to start selling stock off faster with any sign of weakness in iPhone sales too, so there is also this astroturfed story to reassure investors about how apple stock prices are up 20000% since their IPO.

Well played, Apple; that is how the richest company in the world polishes their turds.

I'm sure all the relevant important traffic for these sites was and is at least TLS encrypted, right? Right?

And it's not as if that espionage on banks isn't a totally normal thing:
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Not just a few banks or lowly consumer creditcard companies, but SWIFT itself, the system that all banks use to transfer money around the globe. Not just traffic but actual inside data.
Not to mention a ton of routers inside various banks all over the middle east.

It's hard to claim the school's a failure if they haven't been properly funded in the first place. http://www.reuters.com/article...

The phrase Super Mighty in English sounds childish. It's meant to diminish the perceived threat from North Korea.

The problem with your argument is that this phrase was used by North Korea itself, reported by Reuters:

The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, struck an aggressive tone earlier on Thursday.

"In the case of our super-mighty preemptive strike being launched, it will completely and immediately wipe out not only U.S. imperialists' invasion forces in South Korea and its surrounding areas but the U.S. mainland and reduce them to ashes," it said.

It is easy to forget while living in countries where the press is free and is expected to publish things that make the government look bad, that places like North Korea don't have such freedoms, and certainly not when you consider that the source is the official publication of the ruling political party.

Do you believe that North Korea used this phrase to deliberately diminish the seriousness of their threat?

That's the kind of propaganda that'll be everywhere, not just on the major Cable networks.

I hadn't heard the phrase before, so I did a quick google for it. It seems to be everywhere, not just the major cable networks. ABC, CBS, NBC, Reuters, USA Today, and The Telegraph are all hits high on the list.

I think it is a good thing when such statements are aired openly and by every news organization. I don't see how loosening the cap on coverage areas is going to change this specific situation at all. I also think that concerns about billionaires buying up media and manipulating the news are about two decades, at least, too late. It doesn't require just one billionaire buying all the news media to have this happen, just the fact that billionaires are in charge of setting news policy for the ones they already own.

Bernard Goldberg wrote a book about his experiences at CBS. It's a fascinating read, and it was written almost 20 years ago.

Target is about to go under from bad publicity on the right.

Who told you they were about to go under, and why do you believe them? The million bigots who signed their petition aren't target shoppers, anyway. They're wal-mart shoppers.

Target's not doing well and has been since before that ill-considered publicity stunt--and yes, I do think they did it entirely as an effort to get socially-conscious shoppers to come in, forgetting that their labor practices caused that boat to have sailed already...and without them.

I'd not precisely be surprised if Target started the ball rolling on the boycott, too.

> 'China has a lot of influence over North Korea,'

That is in fact true.

China is the DPRK's largest export market by far.
It goes like this:
#1 China $2.34 billion/yr
#2 India $98 million/yr

Their single largest export is coal, at just under $1B/yr.
And China just stopped buying it last week.

Surely "Anti-Establishment" and former Rothschild banker are so mutually exclusive that Reuters should be labelled "Fake News"?

Oh that explains why the Forbes 100 has been completely static for the last 200 years. Oh wait...

Forbes Magazine has only existed for 100 years. And companies make and drop off that list for all sorts of reasons.

In any case, use your head: companies constantly reinvent themselves in response to technological changes. It's the norm, not the exception.

And you are living under a rock if you haven't seen the stories about fossil fuel companies exploring alternative energy sources:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Etc.

Clearly there's some kind of "design flaw" in human biology then. Probably something that evolved since the industrial revolution. We should find a way to correct it so that we can get back to working stupid hours for our flawless, benevolent economic system.

Let's see. First we have more than one can reference on the swamp draining:
Search google for "Trump drain the swamp" and you'll find a quick 469,000 articles to reference.

As for the corporate profits, I think a quick review of his stock portfolio might shed some light:
http://www.businessinsider.com...

A quick search for his financials leads a to a whole lot more. He made a nice penny off the spike in oil last week after a little fireworks show.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06...
http://www.reuters.com/article...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

And one of his holdings stands to make a pretty penny on replacing those little rockets:
http://www.raytheon.com/capabi...

I can find you more if this isn't enough.

1) Does anyone have strong statistical evidence that the problem is Islam, and not a different common feature?

The percentage of terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar". To be more serious though, in unruly areas the border between terrorism, civil war, insurrection, sectarian fighting, war crimes, genocide and general lawlessness is quite blurry so it's hard to give a number everyone will agree on. But in Europe islamic terrorism has been the leading cause of terror in the 21st century. And unlike much of the terror of the past, it seems designed to create mass carnage and maximize civilian casualties. Same with the US even if you exclude 9/11 with Ford Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando leading the pack. Boston was pretty much a flop as deaths go, even if it swamped the news.

In other parts of the world it depends on how you count Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Nusra, Daesh etc. as opposed to all the other shit that goes down. The Arab Spring for example is a giant cluster fuck. Same with Eastern Ukraine, conflicts in CAR and Somalia in Africa etc. and if you go strictly by number of deaths it's nothing like the killing fields in an actual war. The Stockholm attack is roughly one bad bus accident. In Syria ~1000 civilians die every month. Even if you put Madrid, London 2005, Nice, Berlin, London 2017, Stockholm etc. together for more than a decade of terror you don't come close to a single month. The goal is more to say nobody's safe.

The question is more whether there's underlying tensions building up that will lead to something much, much bigger. After all, if you look in isolation it looks like the years between WWI and WWII were pretty peaceful. Then boom the casualties fly off the map. I'm not really optimistic by the results of "integration" so far, they might live here but many don't adjust much in terms of values or way of life, not even in the next generation. It took us centuries to go from the Dark Ages through enlightenment and women's suffrage to modern life, now we're starting over again for no sane reason I can think of. I guess we have a glutton for punishment.

That's why the lead investigator at the UN mentioned that the Ghouta attack in 2013 was most likely done the rebels then.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Also the CIA already knew that the rebels had access to Sarin; again certain information is cherry picked to suit the narrative that suits the government.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/s...

Maybe instead of stopping to research the matter the minute you find something that corroborates your opinion, you should investigate a bit further. Just the fact that you don't read about these bits of news in the US media, does not mean there is no information available.

Since Syrian army generals have defected to the rebels it would not be remotely surprising if Syrian chemical weapons ended up in rebel hands.

Note: I'm not saying it did happen. I'm just saying it's a feasible scenario.

There is a larger Sino-Korean political conflict right now that adds a lot of context to this judgment. The PRC government is angry at South Korea for permitting the deployment of an American THAAD missile defense system on the peninsula. The South Koreans allowed it because of the continuing missile launches by the North, but China views it as another step in American encirclement of China. In retaliation, the PRC has waged an economic attack on South Korea to punish them: banning Chinese tour groups from visiting Korea, suddenly shutting down Korean retailers and other businesses in China on administrative grounds, banning of South Korean imports, and a general harassment of Korean economic interests across the board. This could easily be just another salvo in this spat.

The irony of this hamfisted approach by the Chinese is that its actually galvanized Korean political sentiment against them. Whereas before, there was a robust debate on whether or not to deploy THAAD, with the anti-THAAD faction ascendant following the fall of the Korean president, the economic retaliation has temporarily shut down that debate. In polls, China has even passed Japan as the most hated country by South Koreans after North Korea due to this kerfuffle. If you know anything about the love-hate relationship between South Korea and Japan, this is a BIG deal.

Amaizng how you moronic democrat retards totally ignore that Obama wanted exactly the same thing too:
https://thinkprogress.org/how-...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/new...

And that Hillary also called for it this time:
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Mother nature wins this year. She pulled the LARGE scale prank that people will never forget.

Colombia mudslide, flooding kill 254 in midnight deluge

She's got such a funny sense of humor.

...and it is, according to nearly every engineer in the autonomous vehicle business, including the head of Google's autonomous vehicle project, unsolvable. It is at the core of the current regulatory conflict between legislators, who want to keep a human in the loop, and most autonomous vehicle makers, who want humans out of the loop because of the unsolvability of the hand-off problem. Google has already stated they will not produce their autonomous vehicles until the government agrees to remove the human-in-the-loop requirement for operating autonomous vehicles on public roads.

The major exception to this received wisdom is Elon Musk at Tesla Motors, who pretty much believes that no problem is unsolvable. Yay for him; we need incurable optimists. If we are ever going to think our way out of the crap-sack world we are currently headed for, it will be because of technological optimists like Musk.

I realize that betting against Elon Musk is probably not a good strategy, but I do think the hand-off problem is not solvable, for any value of "solved" you care to assert. Human task switching is not fast enough at pedestrian velocities, let alone autobahn velocities. Dragging a human from their porn/spreadsheet/email/phonecall/whatever and expecting him/her to correctly grok a traffic problem in a fraction of a second is not realistic.

Or even several fractions of a second, if IBM's cognitive modelling of human drivers, which is what this expert system is actually doing, successfully expands the window for a driver to react. I am not sure that replacing a human with a robot that is programmed to learn to drive like a human is a win, but we'll have to see what happens. If we don't have a spike in traffic fatalities in BMWs (IBM will be rolling this package out in BMW models first, because they have already announced they are giving Watson to BMW) I will happily revise my estimation of the hand-off problem's solvability. :)

Why do you assume that?

A federal judge in Tennessee has approved a $27.8 million settlement from the Tennessee Valley Authority to more than 800 people affected by a 2008 accident that unleashed a wave of toxic coal sludge, plaintiffs’ lawyers said Tuesday.

Further, there will certainly be a legal battle in North Carolina when Duke tries to get it's customers to pay for their ash clean up mess:

Duke Energy has estimated its liability for cleanup and storage efforts at about $4.2 billion. The utility had spent more than $725 million through November.

The utility is expected to ask North Carolina regulators for rate increases this year that include cleanup costs passed along to its customers. Money recovered from insurers would reduce the price tag for consumers, the company said.

Those are just two examples.

India, pharmaceuticals, and ethics.
http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/...
What kind of assholes are these, that they would make bogus HIV drugs knowing that the fake drugs are causing people to die. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of early deaths, and perhaps millions. Their watered down antibiotics are probably a major cause of why antibiotic resistance is so prevalent there.

What's sad about this story is that Ranbaxy is not an unusual case.
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Reuters version -- "applicants who have ever been present in territory controlled by the Islamic State" * (link)
Verge version -- "applicants who have ever visited ISIS-controlled territory" (link)
Parent version -- "applications from people who like to hang out with ISIS" (above)

* Comprised in the majority of citizens who were victims, prisoners, kidnapped, abused, forced slaves and wives, i.e., any brown-skinned refugees.

Prior to this, I'd have thought America and especially its government agencies do not hack.

The US has a long history of hacking spying. One of the recent complaints against the NSA is they keep exploits for their own use, instead of finding them and fixing them (thus they potentially leave everyone exposed).

The Stuxnet attack was a difficult one to pull off because they had to go over an air-gap, and attack very expensive equipment (most of us don't have access to that equipment, and can't afford it).

Snowden reported quite a bit of hacking. It's also known that the NSA was monitoring Angela Merkel's phone, presumably through hacking it.

In a very cool hack, the US sent submarines to spy on Soviet underwater cables.

I've read reports that the US had a corporate espionage program in the 80s and 90s, but I can't find any reference to it right now somehow.