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In the UK nsect abundance has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years. I notice in woods where I used to constantly hear bird noise it is now mostly silent

I commented above with a similar statement.
GW is an issue but not the reason, due to the increased temp, soft winters many native birds are capable and do breed 2 times a year now yet population plummets.
There really is no safe pesticide when used on such a massively industrial scale.

Ah, the old "He's not a moron, he's just doing a really good job of pretending to be one for strategic reasons" argument. Well if he's pretending, he's really doing an amazing job:

https://www.apnews.com/a3309c4...

Although I don't see any positive results from doing so. He may have come close to bringing NK to the table but instead he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory:

https://nationalpost.com/opini...

If you think that North Korea has changed course at all since Trump took power, then they've pulled the wool over your eyes just like Trump's:

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

Also while pulling out of Syria was not a bad idea, the way he chose to announce it, as a surprise to everyone except himself, was idiotic:

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

...so the poor little plant died after its first day. https://www.theguardian.com/sc... Did Chinese stupidity really need to send a plant to the moon to discover that it would freeze and die during the moon's night time? Hello Chinese scientists! You are morons and copycats. Try something useful and original.

6. Escalating taxes on fossil fools for transportation use.

Eh. Sounds like all the campaigns to get Californians to take two gallon showers and to not flush for number ones - small potatoes when residents use less than 15% of the state's water supply. Most of it is used by industry - twenty million people could move out of the state tomorrow and you wouldn't even notice the difference.

It's the same for CO2 production. The world's single largest producer is the US military, with all those warships, aircraft, tanks, etc. And just 100 corporations produce 71% of the world's CO2 emissions. People driving Hummbers and dually pickups as passenger vehicles aren't helping....but they (and all other drivers) are a drop in the bucket.

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Explanation: https://www.theguardian.com/po...

The two videos of the conversation in question, sorry I don't have time codes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In the UK nsect abundance has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years. I notice in woods where I used to constantly hear bird noise it is now mostly silent

are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us?

Yes, if you read the reports they give some examples:

"However, several experimental facts do require the extension of the Standard Model and explanations are needed for observations such as the abundance of matter over antimatter, the striking evidence for dark matter and the non-zero neutrino masses. Theoretical issues such as the hierarchy problem, and, more in general, the dynamical origin of the Higgs mechanism, do likewise point to the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model."

Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration?

Huge amounts of money are already going towards bio-medical research, both by governments and commercial interests: "Globally, in excess of US$200bn is invested each year in biomedical research." link
There is already a multi-billion dollar international research project on fusion energy (see ITER). Fusion energy commercialization in an engineering challenge and not fundamental research and is already be addressed by commercial investment: Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, General Fusion, Helion Energy, LPPFusion, Proton Scientific and others.
Space exploration is being funded: "global government investment in space exploration totaled $14.6 billion in 2017" link and space exploration is also going commercial, witness SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and United Launch Alliance.

A guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics (and a consultant) thinks we should use nuclear power.>

In other words:

A guy who actually knows what the hell he is talking about comes up with great clean solution, is ridiculed by armchair pundit who apparently would rather watch the planet die than admit nuclear power was ever a good idea.

And climate scientists agree: Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change

The vast majority of people loved TLJ. It's consistently polled high, it had extremely high ratings when viewers were polled on opening day, and Blu-ray sales are through the roof.

Here is some of SWTLJ's unprecedented popularity and success.:

http://fortune.com/2018/01/18/... So successful that they stopped showing it. But hey - thd Chinses market means absolutely nothing, it's nonexistent amirite? Disney doesn't need any money from them.

Fiugurine/promotional item sales are through the roof - never better! http://fortune.com/2018/01/18/...

That's okay, no one needs that stuff anyhow.

https://www.theguardian.com/fi...

Everything is doing so well that they put further spinoff movies off. Becoming more popular by austerity.

You sound like an SJW version of Republicans defending Trickle-down theory. Other than that - I've managed to be pretty successful in life by thanking people when I get criticisms, analyzing them, and acting on them to improve my product. I recently retired from running an event that had thousands of passionate fans. They stayed passionate because I respected that and them. Even if I disagreed with them. This doesn't mean I would take actual abuse. I had rules of no name calling, no threats, and keep swearing to a minimum. But they always knew I would listen. And they kept sending money so the happieness index was high.

As one wag noted about Rian Johnson's reaction to criticism - positively, I mimght add!"Eventually, Rian Johnson would hear the criticism made by fans, but ultimately decide it didn't matter." https://www.cinemablend.com/ne...

By the way - that would have been Johnson's last act in my employ. He'd be escorted out of the building by security. You work for me - you don't ignore the customer.

I take it that you approve of the idea that any criticsm must be responded to by calling the person offring it a sexist, racist, and too weak to handle your product. Because that was the Pro-TLJ narrative. https://www.salon.com/2018/07/...

Look - a critic might be wrong. But you don't just reject them by calling them names. They did care for your product enough to make the criticism. A variation on the "If we ignore the customer long enough, they'll quit bothering us"

Then there is the golden age of name calling: https://www.starwarsnewsnet.co... JJ. Abrams called them sexist and racist, but he really didn't because they are racist and sexist. Anytime you need your statements clarified its interesting.

Next time you get a performance review, try personally attacking your boss, if they offer anything other than glowing reviews of your perfection. Then deciding to ignore any critique. Then let us know how that works out for ya.

As I've told climate deniers, young earth creationists, anti-vaxxers, and now SJW Star Wars sycophants - You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Not even your alternative facts, Kellyanne!

You continue to attempt to use anecdotes and assertions as counterpoints to actual data. We can't and shouldn't try to count every time a conservative feels that their ideas are too terrible to share. They have free speech, not freedom from the social consequences of speech.

Also you don't read your own links. That NRA flag had to be removed not because it was an NRA flag but because it was an object outside of a window. If it were a Pride flag or a Care Bears banner it would've been treated the same way.

If Ben Shapiro's background-level of racism isn't strong enough for your senses, check out his statements on the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict.

Milo's over-the-top sexism and transphobia are legendary.

Have you ever heard of the concept of allowing a racist to speak so as to show the world his foolishness?

Oh yes, that was a terrible mistake. Debating terrible ideas doesn't help immunize people to it, people don't seem to need "immunizing," instead it spreads it to vulnerable populations who are almost impossible to "cure," and over the last few decades the world has tried it, with terrible consequences. If the "marketplace of ideas" school of thought had any merit, we would not have a renaissance of racism and an epidemic of fake news.

The same numbers we've been discussing show that many leftist professors have been shouted down - more than those on the right. Again I don't care about anecdotes, just real, hard data. Anecdotes are worthless. Imagine at least three anecdotes of a leftist professor being shouted down for each anecdote of a right-wing professor being shouted down that you can find, if you like anecdotes so much. That would be in line with the data.

I would like to see a better explanation of their methodology.

No, you fucking anti-science asshat, you wouldn't. If you had wanted to see it, you'd have read the linked article. Since you obviously don't care enough to put a lick of effort into educating yourself, I'll summarize for you, in the hopes you can at least make it through a /. comment:

We analyzed all terrestrial lands excluding Antarctica.

That said, the reason they can get to 5% is that they apply a "fragmentation metric" to the places with human impacts, and estimate them as falling off as you move away from where they find these impacts. They bin the human impacts by severity, and the higher the severity of the impact (open pit mining, e.g.) the further they estimate the impacts extend.

This is far from perfect, but it's not a terrible method. Running a railroad line through deserted land doesn't just impact the land under the tracks. During construction you're altering the land, changing the drainage, foliage, etc. There may be dumps of rock and soil from construction, or roads built to bring in materials. While in use, the pollution and noise isn't constrained to the immediate area. Animals who die on the tracks don't live under them generally.

Since they excluded Antarctica, and you noted Greenland, it's clear that you don't know about Camp Century. (Not that they necessarily picked up much of that, but holy shit.)

I think it's fair to argue that they made this "fragmentation metric" too large, but if you really want to do that, you're going to have to publish a rebuttal, not just post lazy, ignorant shit on /..

If you'd been motivated enough to even just skim the article, you'd find this graphic, which looks pretty much like what I personally expected, and probably in line with what you expected as well: https://wol-prod-cdn.literatum.... Since you you find this challenging, HM stands for Human Modification, and green is low, and red is high.

Yep, some of the things the US does in Latin America are fucking awful. It's a shame that the Americans involved in the following incident weren't arrested in Honduras, put on trial, and hanged from a short rope...

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people".

Every year that goes by, that becomes less and less of a winning strategy. The republican party has not been friendly to either women or minorities, and I can't imagine that they're all going to suddenly forget the party's history at some point in the coming decades and vote republican.

Awww, that's so cute! You believe that people vote based on well-informed reason. They won't remember a thing when the next election cycle is in full swing. They'll be bombarded from all sides with appeals to emotion & vilifying anyone they identify as "other." All of this will be enthusiastically reinforced by the main stream media and especially social media. After all, that's what social media is designed to do; keep people's eyes on their web pages by promoting indignant outrage inducing comments, headlines, & memes.

who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people".

Every year that goes by, that becomes less and less of a winning strategy. The republican party has not been friendly to either women or minorities, and I can't imagine that they're all going to suddenly forget the party's history at some point in the coming decades and vote republican.

You mean like this study which says they reduce accidents and fatalities? http://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Late...

Or maybe the one that specifically looked at Arizona and found no difference in number of collisions (though didn't look at injuries) and certainly didn't find a negative impact? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Maybe you want a wide spread study of some 550 speed cameras which showed a reduction in accidents and fatalities and at the same time directly looked at the very speed cameras that the Daily Mail and some other worthless rags claimed (incorrectly) increased accidents? https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Or this one from America that said also accidents are reduced and overall driver behaviour in the area improves: https://www.dailysignal.com/20...

I would give you result number 5 from my Google search but it's the same study as result number 2 and I don't want to waste your time.

The recent news blaming a 20 yo in his parents' bedroom for the hack of sensitive data about German politicians which was originally blamed on 'state actors' has confused the situation a great deal.

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

It also reminds us that at least some states aren't bothering to defend themselves properly.

The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.

No, the US and EU has learned from experience that Africa is a hard place to do business for a lot of reasons (corruption, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc.), which has made them cautious. The Chinese don't have experience with this, but they're quickly re-learning the colonial / imperial lessons that Western nations have learned. As the Chinese dump money into the continent, they're starting to learn that these projects aren't as simple or profitable. Raises the question of what happens when African nations start defaulting on Chinese loans? Will China be sucked into the same cycle of violence that Western nations are engaged in to try to protect or recoup their investments?

Someone should go back in time and tell Sean Penn, Jeremy Corbyn, and everyone else who was praising Venezuela or its leaders.

None of the other countries you've listed are socialist. They're all countries with market economies that don't go around nationalizing industries and driving them into the ground, try to implement central economic planning policies that are doomed to failure, or devolve into the types of dictatorships you get when you centralize that much power into the government.

China has already installed over 165 GW (equiv to about 200 or NG plants), 40 of which was installed this year. The original target was 105GW, which they blew past and now are considering a 210-270 GW target by 2020. Also, due to gov. incentives, China has the largest EV market in the world, with over 1 million sold to date and they're just maturing. Shenzhen, with 13 million people, runs 100% electric buses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/20...

The narrative that China and India are polluting to gain economic advantage is just RW radio garbage. They realize that fossil fuels are a dead end and the country with the most advancements in growing renewable energy market will prosper. We should be leading, but instead we're falling further behind and ceding the lead to China.

Trump has no agenda - any fool can see. He only cares about his "ratings" and "brand" (his words). He just regurgitates whatever Fox News, Hannity, and Limbaugh say, which reinforces what that audience saw on TV or heard on the radio. Just as Pruitt set out to destroy the EPA and hand it over to the regulated, this administration has sold the government to the highest bidder. Many of those companies that lobbied for tax cuts used those profits to buy back stocks, pay executives bonuses, then they continued to lay off and outsource workers. https://www.theguardian.com/us... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Well as long as we are pointing fingers lets make sure that we have plenty to point at. In 2018 China was up 4.7% and India by 6.3%. An according to this report, the US is only up by 2.5%. Interesting, both are well below even the 3.5% mark of the article. But yet, we leave those out and just post a US bashing article. The EU is doing good.

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The "absurdity" of social sciences is not really the issue. Scientific Journals have been caught publishing AI generated nonsense as computer science papers, publishing pharmaceutical company marketing as medical papers, publishing a request to be removed from their mailing list as a paper and accepting a made-up researcher with no credentials as an editor.

Amazon and the homeless: a tale of two Long Island cities

https://www.theguardian.com/ci...

the wall will slow down the massive amount of of these people flooding in daily.

Massive? I'm not sure that's the word I would pick myself.

Total number of illegal border crossings in the us is about 500,000 per year. With roughly 365 days in a year that's about 1400 people per day. Only about half of the illegal border crossings are at the southern border though so we're looking at 700 entries per day.

On the northern border, people are leaving the US

Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:

• Apple iTunes flaw went unfixed for years and allowed remote access which enables spying and a lot more. There was also news of a hidden backdoor API in OS X for years which granted root privileges. This too could have enabled spying and a lot more.
• Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
• As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
• There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.

The folks charged with securing the border overwhelmingly want a wall to assist their job

Well, we have a lot of good reasons not to give a shit what they want. Fortunately, we don't usually let thugs and nazis make policy.

https://theintercept.com/2018/...

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Microsoft : "give us all your personal data and we can control who can access if for you. You can trust us."

This is dumber than Facebook wanting you to give them your nudes so they can make sure nobody posts them online.

Those opportunities will be hard to come by if the BIOS is a distant memory by the time networking is up.

That is absolutely false. If you can compromise the firmware then it does not matter what is loaded afterward, you can modify it as it is loaded or before it is loaded. Even if you boot with PXE or HTTPS the firmware still has to load the eventual image. You can have a persistent threat that does not require the flash part to be compromised as long as you have a mechanism available to launch your payload. And the fact that you think this is the epitome of the problem we are currently seeing. The people who write the firmware just cannot honestly conceive of the attacks surface that they are presenting. The only way you'd be able to prevent the kinds of attacks I am talking about is by not loading a single driver to communicate with untrusted hardware. And good luck ever booting a useful general purpose computer that never loads a drive controller or network controller.

A USB device could be a problem if you boot from it,

Again this is incorrect. A USB device could be a problem if you communicate with it. At all. Even if it is just to enumerate the available devices. The firmware could communicate with a USB device for many purposes that have nothing to do with booting the OS. Obviously the attack surface presented by enumerating the devices is not as great as the surface presented when trying to use the device but software bugs can exist anywhere and even a simple typo could open you up to attack.

Believe me, I am not trying to argue that there is no way to improve the situation. One of the nice things about Coreboot is that it does as little as absolutely necessary to initialize the system before passing control onto the OS. As you say, KISS reduces the opportunity for attackers by reducing the number of ways they can attack you. But there is no magic wand you can wave at security and that includes the wand of using ROM to load firmware.

if the BIOS is configured to boot from USB, but EFI and/or firmware updates won't change that. PCI devices could certainly be a problem,

And where does the USB controller sit? Inside the PCH on the PCI bus.

though less so now that chipsets have an IOMMU. If the option ROM contains an exploit, again neither EFI or the ability to update firmware will make it go away.

There have been attacks on IOMMU since at least 2011. And how do you mitigate this VT-D bypass? Through a firmware update. And you'd be naive to think that this is the only exploit possible against IOMMU.

I am aware of how many things have firmware in them. I write some of it. Ignoring the KISS principle is the problem. Ignoring it harder isn't the solution to that problem.

And what are you trying to keep more simple here? Because you're making it basically impossible for probably 95% of the population to update their firmware. By all means, strip out the cruft out of your firmware. Reduce your attack surface anywhere possible. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water and leave most of the world vulnerable by removing their ability to patch their firmware.

Maybe you should look at what Google has done with the Chromebook. They use the silicon vendor's hardware protection of the flash part. They have their Titan device that is able to detect modified flash. They require a physical presence check when tampering with the machine in a way that might compromise the integrity of the device. You have to hit the power button five times in a specific time interval. Assuming that they've implemented their hardware and software properly then you'll find that

To be fair, Amazon was selling a ton of cables that didn't meet the spec and were putting devices in danger of being legitimately damaged. Still, it'd doubtful they'll be able to prevent such junk on the platform as they still allow all kinds of counterfeit product for sale on their site. https://www.theguardian.com/te...

The general gist from here and elsewhere seems to be: concerns against nitrites and nitrates remain unabated, but not as definitive as the smoking link. "More research required" is the usual hedge at the end of almost every paper in medical research. Pinning down any delayed effect in a multi-factorial system with confidence is a slow process in research and is certainly prone to error. But it cannot be helped.

https://www.theguardian.com/so...

"Prof Tim Key, Cancer Research UK’s epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, said: Cancer Research UK supports IARC’s decision that there’s strong enough evidence to classify processed meat as a cause of cancer, and red meat as a probable cause of cancer."

The 2015 Lancet study is not easy to ignore.

https://www.thelancet.com/jour...
(fulltext paywalled)

The classic response from Industry:

The North American Meat Institute said defining red meat as a cancer hazard defied common sense.

“It was clear, sitting in the IARC meeting, that many of the panellists were aiming for a specific result despite old, weak, inconsistent, self-reported intake data,” said Betsy Booren, the institute’s vice-president of scientific affairs. “They tortured the data to ensure a specific outcome.

Sure, dietary science is rarely perfect since we can't put people in cages, control for everything and monitor them for years. Medical (or climate science for that matter) advise is often going to be from imperfect conclusions from best available evidence for now - people should understand that.

"EU must not burn the world's forests for 'renewable' energy"

See also: Unintended consequences

In some very specific cases, they even appear cost-efficient now. Such as South Australia's Tesla battery: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/27/south-australias-tesla-battery-on-track-to-make-back-a-third-of-cost-in-a-year

I expect that cases like that become more common as battery technology improves.

When farmers purchase a patented seed variety, they sign an agreement that they will not save and replant seeds produced from the seed they buy from us. More than 325,000 farmers a year buy seed under these agreements in the United States. Other seed companies sell their seed under similar provisions. They understand the basic simplicity of the agreement, which is that a business must be paid for its product. The vast majority of farmers understand and appreciate our research and are willing to pay for our inventions and the value they provide. They donâ(TM)t think it's fair that some farmers donâ(TM)t pay.

A very small percentage of farmers do not honor this agreement. Monsanto does become aware, through our own actions or through third-parties, of individuals who are suspected of violating our patents and agreements. Where we do find violations, we are able to settle most of these cases without ever going to trial. In many cases, these farmers remain our customers. Sometimes however, we are forced to resort to lawsuits. This is a relatively rare circumstance, with 147 lawsuits filed since 1997 in the United States. This averages about 8 per year for the past 18 years. To date, only 9 cases have gone through full trial. In every one of these instances, the jury or court decided in our favor.

Here is one such case:

The Bowman case has come about after the 75-year-old farmer bought soybeans from a grain elevator near his farm in Indiana and used them to plant a late-season second crop. He then used some of the resulting seeds to replant such crops in subsequent years. Because he bought them from a third party which put no restrictions on their use, Bowman has argued he is legally able to plant and replant them and that Monsanto's patent on the seeds' genes does not apply.

Monsanto, which has won its case against Bowman in lower courts, vociferously disagrees. It argues that it needs its patents in order to protect its business interests and provide a motivation for spending millions of dollars on research and development of hardier, disease-resistant seeds that can boost food yields.

You misunderstood the AC poster -- when he wrote "but for cloud", he meant "except for cloud".

Yes, Amazon reaps rich profits from its cloud division.

https://www.theguardian.com/me... higher-proportion-of-men-than-women-report-online-abuse-in-survey

This isn't terribly surprising. And it will be quite difficult to turn the online experience into one that caters to the most sensitive. In general, men just let it go, yet apparently it damages women terribly.

I don't buy Georgie Harman's ideat that it damages men as well, but that men don't seek treatment. Sorry, other than a direct threat of violence, the insults and abuse are just background noise.

What is more, the attempts on some sites to reign this "bad behavior" in are inconsistent, leading to draconian suppression in some cases, but not others. I haven't seen enough to figure a trend yet. I do know some posts I've commented on have been deleted after a male disagreed with a female. You start out trying to avoid abuse, and you end up squelching civil discourse.

And then there is tumblr. This one is pretty funny, as Tumblr's "porn detection algorithms" flag some pretty innocuous things as pornography https://arstechnica.com/gaming...

Some of the more amusing things that Tumblr is protecting the sensitive from are some cute little candles a woman knitted. Some dinosaur drawings, two fully clothed males with their arms around each other. Spiderman's head, Alex Ovechkin taking a nap with the Stanley cup, a dog sitting in a shopping cart. Not in the article, but another case was a guy who collected gemstones and posted beautiful pictures online. Yup - Tumblr reported it as porn. The unfortunate irony is that Tumblr was a source of imagery for the LGBT community as well as women, who might feel a little awkward going to places like Pornhub or porn.com. They re pissing off the more sensitive among us.

And I don't have the hard data, but I suspect that the heavy hand of suppression is weighted toward keeping the men in line. Not certain about that, but a number of the things I've found suppressed were right after a male disagreed with a woman's post. None were abusive or profane, just simple disagreement.

So back to the abuse - how do we eliminate abuse when some people consider not agreeing with them as abuse? I've seen people do exactly that over the years. And the Jessica Price twitter assault on a guy who had a respectful criticism shows it continues.

The only way to avoid going down that perpetually offended rabbit hole is to ignore their demands.

https://www.theguardian.com/me...

https://www.theguardian.com/me... higher-proportion-of-men-than-women-report-online-abuse-in-survey

Here's the article that describes the original 'trial' that they did at Holburn station in London.

Having caught the tube there many times I find it pretty easy to believe that making them standing only would save some time for some people - what you refer to as 'exceptional demand' is pretty much normal there in peak hour where the wait on entry is a problem.

It would however make it worse for /me/ because I'm one of the few people that actually does walk up that long steep escalator!

I was googling along this articles thought process. And found the following.
2015 out of Australia - http://theconversation.com/uni...
2011 from the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/te...

I have read the comments here, and actually have no quarrels with either argument. But this topic has been around for a long time, and probably will always be a topic.

If you read the literature (or just Google) you'll see that others have also managed to eliminate the plaques in various ways. However it remains unclear whether removal of the plaques leads to cognitive improvements. In some cases the animal models show improvement and in other cases not. The situation is even more unclear in people. There's a quick overview here. My own hunch is that a combination of early detection and then a treatment of some sort will be the way forward. Probably cognitive impairement will be hard to fix.

Cambridge Analytica is dead – but its obscure network is alive and well “The company’s executives have formed a web of linked companies, suggesting its work will continue”

Cambridge Analytica and SCL: How I peered inside the propaganda machine

Cambridge Analytica staff set up new firm

“we must look first at Cambridge Analytica, LLC .. is a Delaware Limited Liability Company that was formed in June of 2014 .. the larger the database Cambridge controls, along with its ability to demonstrate the value proposition for its analytical tools, the greater the likelihood Cambridge will be retained by political entities.”

While you're running your dicksucker, you might want to note that the military was deployed a few hours ago.

Stupid fucker.

It appears to me that the advocates for the Tumblr porn ban are a coalition of religious conservatives and radical feminists. But whenever I've seen this theory mentioned, the feminists vocally deny it, and claim that, "Mainstream feminism is generally sex-positive".

I suspect that these denials are disingenuous. In fact, there is plenty of evidence of mainstream feminists advocating similar bans. For example, there was the Page 3 topless photo ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/19/has-the-sun-axed-page-3-topless-pictures

There was the Booth Babe ban:

https://kotaku.com/5916237/e3-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-pax-ban-on-booth-babes

And, of course, there is a very vocal anti-porn branch of femimism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Porn_Culture

I suspect that when somebody says that "Mainstream feminism is generally sex-positive," they're only supportive of a very specific, tightly-controlled, pro-feminist sort of sex.

There's an interesting quirk in human psychology that makes negative facts and news seem more salient than positive ones. For media that thrives on reader attention (and that's both new and old media), this naturally leads to more emphasis on the negative.

I think this is a bias worth noting and pushing back on. The world is pretty far from perfect, but there's also huge helpings of good news all around us.

• Continuing the trend, nearly 70M people in dire poverty gain access to electricity
• Extreme global poverty continues its decline, although it's getting harder to make progress on that front
• The US death rate from cancer continues its steady yearly drop. Cumulatively, this has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths
• The pack of criminals who made a wholesale business of taking sex slaves in war lost their last city
• The world continues its steady march towards universal literacy. You can't embed pictures in /. (for reaaaalllly goatse reasons) but the figures here are really striking
• The Long Peace continues for another year, meaning millions of lives impacted
• Cigarette smoking, a leading cause of totally preventable death, fell to its lowest rate in the US
• Automobile deaths per vehicle mile continued to drop

Most of these (Daesh not withstanding, but threw them in just because they were really vile) follow the same pattern: slow but steady progress. It's hardly clickbait -- in fact these are not even specific events you can point to, they are trends seen on the scale of decades. And on the scale of decades, the world is consistently becoming a less-bad place.

a) Anybody else remember the "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" days of Microsoft.

b) Microsoft could have pushed out an update to Edge in a matter of hours if they really wanted to. This is just a pot calling a kettle 'black'.

Like fucking hell it is.

Microsoft never actively aided a murderous totalitarian government in suppressing their population.

It's one thing to go beyond the law in trying to gain market dominance.

It's another fucking thing entirely to help a government with a history of killing the better part of one hundred million people in controlling their people's thoughts.

Microsoft was naughty.

GOOGLE IS FUCKING EVIL

Are you trying to pull a "No True Scotsman"? Really? Got news for ya buddy but this whole thing was started by Tumblr kissing up to Apple and Apple is as SJW as they come .

So unless you are gonna seriously try to stand there and say one of the most leftist corps in all of CA is "conservative"? I'm afraid I have to steal a line from Mel Brooks and say what you are spewing is "bullshit bullshit aaaannnnddd BULLSHIT!"

Isn't the nature of the screen time tantamount (sic)? If the kid spends his screen time reading books, watching lectures, and discussing thought provoking content, isn't that obviously going to have a very different effect compared to scrolling through instagram all day?

While I suspect that most people will intuitively agree with your question / assertion, I'm not sure that the 'value judgements' that will almost certainly follow will necessarily hold water. You're also brushing over an equally valid question which is: Is the effect of reading paper books or attending a live lecture in person identical to the effect of reading the same book in electronic form or watching a video of the same lecture?

In her book,Mind Change, Susan Greenfield relates that the electronic forms of learning are, or at least tend to be, less effective than learning gained otherwise. This always made a certain amount of sense to me because of the way our brains seem to 'tag' memories, allowing access to them via various different routes. If, for example, all our reading is done on the same computer we're missing out on the 'physical' memories of the books (colour, size, weight, texture, location, smell, etc.) so we can no longer rely on them as individual keys to access the remembered content of those various books, we just have the one key trying to link to all the books we read on that device. Furthermore it's highly likely that we lose a physical sense of location within the books where a particular piece of information was first read. Weaker links lead to weaker memories, and weaker memories are less likely to be retained over time, at least without refreshing, hence strengthening, them.

In fairness, having linked to her book, I feel I should probably also link to a critique of her work and stated opinions, not only in the interests of balance, but also because it's easy to become blinded by what we believe to be true to the point that we no longer question that belief.

Your statement / question seems to me to run a very real risk of falling into this category of belief.

In his apparent mad rush to drag the U.S. back to the 1940's technologically, socialogically, and politically, the gods-be-damned Trump administration will likely defund, kill off, and bury any and all research into practical fusion reactor technology, and instead insist on building more coal-fired power plants. Give 'em enough rope, and he'll probably try to outlaw solar power and wind power, too. Never mind what that'll do even in the short term to nationwide air quality and people's respiratory health, his science adviser assures him there's no connection between asthma, and other respiratory diseases, and air pollution.

Meanwhile countries like China will forge ahead and likely master fusion technology ahead of the U.S., and rub our faces in it in front of the rest of the world, making the U.S. look like even a bigger laughingstock than it already has been made to look like in the last 2 years, if you can believe that's even possible. If Trump, somehow, against all odds and against all common sense, manages to get re-elected in 2020, all I can tell you is: better start learning to speak Mandarin and Russian.

Almost identical Guardian article from 2015.

https://www.theguardian.com/sc...

You know, until they can get it working in a way that doesn't cause them to make the news.

Why would you believe a government that scammed you a trillion dollars by falsifying claims of Iraq WMDs, that was shown to spying on China, their own "friends", and you, and that hijacked a hostage for negotiation just last week?