Like every brand of smartphone? Internet-connected microphones have been ubiquitous for years - that ship has long since sailed.
The discussion now is how to deal with them - how best to make sure they don't get abused (like this minor case), without losing too much of their utility.
Ah yes, an 8th grade biology teacher and denialist who's probably never even seen the Great Barrier Reef, writes a blog article speculating that the peer-reviewed scientific evidence from one of the foremost Reef scientists is all completely wrong, because... other reefs have in the past been bleached by different causes. And you think this is a "better explanation" why, exactly?
As usual, denialists can't scrape up any evidence that could survive peer review, so they spend their time denying the evidence that does.
They'll need to spend billions more - or at least fix the laws on land-clearing and fertiliser overuse - if they want a hope of saving the Reef and its $6B annual tourism income & 69,000 associated jobs.
There's plenty they could have done, and plenty they still could do. They could have started reducing emissions decades ago when the scientific evidence first became clear, and they could have invested in a world-leading solar industry instead of still more open-pit coal mines. They could also have given the Reef Marine Park Authority the funding and authority it needed to *effectively* deal with declining water quality, instead of the lip service it gets now, and at least reduced the huge additional stress on the Reef from agricultural run-off.
Instead, they've repealed our price on carbon, declared that "coal is good for humanity", green-lit even more coal mines, and approved a massive expansion & dredging operation for a coal export port right in the middle of the Reef's coastline (overruling the GBRMPA and even changing the law to allow themselves to ignore expert advice). And to cap it all off, last year they censored any mention of the Reef from a UNESCO report on World Heritage Tourism Sites at Risk (on the ironic grounds that it might affect tourism) - just as the 2016 bleaching event was killing off an unprecedented 67% of the coral in the Reef's northern third.
Even this extensive damage may have recovered somewhat, given 10-15 years of benign conditions, but a fourth bleaching event the very next year has crushed any hopes of that - the question now is whether we'll lose most of the middle third as well. But hey, at least the government has made sure we'll have coal for our tourists, if not coral.
Except that as my links show, Assad has been regularly carrying out chemical attacks for years. There's nothing "suspicious" about the timing, it's just another in a long series of atrocities. For the rebels to manufacture a false-flag attack on their own positions and children is ludicrous, particularly given that Assad has been carrying out absolutely genuine gas attacks with such regularity.
Putin's word is about as credible as Assad's, in this matter, even worse than Trump's. I'll believe the Human Rights Watch people long before I listen to any of those.
Meanwhile, I've linked to vast amounts of accumulated evidence from HRW including photos, interviews, medical studies and autopsies, while you've cited.. nothing. Take your doubt-mongering elsewhere.
Chemtrails, aliens, truthers, reptilians in the White House, the list goes on and they're all bullshit, even the last one. Just because the government really was spying on you does not suddenly mean the others were true all along, but too many people believe what they want to believe regardless of lack of evidence, or even evidence against it.
While the rest of us will stick to Occam's Razor, and keep assuming that wildly-unlikely stuff is almost certainly just more bullshit - unless and until someone produces extraordinary evidence - highlighting fact-checker sites can only help to stem the spread of the bullshit in the first place. So long as the fact-checkers highlighted always clearly show their own sources.
Checking sources can be fatiguing, but it's necessary for the important stuff, even for outlets you otherwise trust - and particularly for non-mainstream or contraversial sources. When you stop doing that, and start blindly accepting stories from *any* source - you'll quickly drown in the bullshit.
Syrian military jets attacked the site, according to every report - even the Russians agree with that. There's documented evidence that Syria has been carrying out chemical attacks repeatedly for years. And attempts to place blame on the rebels are implausible at best, described as "laughable" by experts from the US, Britain, Israel, Turkey, and others.
That explanation seems kind of tortuous. There's lots of things kids can't do when they're young, like driving cars, but nobody bats an eye talking about those, so that can't be the reason sex is treated so differently. And violence is a significantly bigger factor in kids' lives than in most adults - any parent knows kids that have to be taught to restrain their impulses and not hurt others. Providing counter- examples on the screen where violence is rewarded instead makes little sense outside of male fantasies.
I think it far more likely that the Western attitude towards sex and nudity is largely a cultural artefact from leftover religious ideals, such as Puritanism - the bible teaches shame in nakedness right from the beginning. I've also heard it suggested that this itself may be seen as a reaction against Roman excesses. But many non-Western cultures have pretty different views about sex and nakedness, some being very open about it - though Westerners often view those cultures as "primitive" as a result.
VR & AR are like desktops vs mobile. In theory AR can do everything VR can do, and do it while you're out interacting the world, but while VR is tethered and physically isolating, it's also FAR better at providing many kinds of experiences, those where isolation doesn't matter or is actually a benefit. Just like how mobiles are popular and useful, but there's a lot they don't do well, and desktops remain vital for a lot of tasks.
We had a carbon tax in Australia, back in 2012. Started out at A$23/tonne and increased slowly, with initially-large (90%) waivers for major polluters that were also set to phase out over time. Proceeds from the tax were largely returned directly to the population via tax cuts to offset the small projected price bump, with the rest invested in carbon-neutral energy alternatives and climate mitigation.
The (right-wing) opposition, egged on by our big coal sector, swore up & down that it would lead to spiraling inflation and collapse small businesses, and blamed it for large electricity price hikes. In reality of course, the economic impact was hardly noticeable. Most prices barely changed, the average tax cut easily covered the electricity rises (which had started before the tax and were almost entirely due to long-overdue grid upgrades), "green power" plans became more popular, and CO2 emissions dropped slightly. A year went by, the carbon price increased to $24.15, and these trends continued as projected.
But the right-wing scare campaign intensified, terms like "wrecking ball", "python squeeze", and "axe the tax" were thrown about, and the carbon tax became a major political issue - enough to tip the scales at the next election, despite polling consistently showing that ~60% of Australians wanted climate action. The tax was quickly repealed, and CO2 emissions started climbing again.
But the biggest casualties were the politicians themselves, with both parties dissolving into chaos and every single prime minister in the last ten years getting replaced before they could even sit out a full term. Right now we have a centre-right guy who internally replaced an unpopular hard-liner PM just before election - reversing the leadership spill from 2009 where he was ousted by the hard-liner - while a near-identical leadership reverse happened to the centre-left party while they were in power, over this same issue. Result: Australian trust of politicians, poor at the best of times, hits a two-decade low.
Nah, Lambert still destroys the poles. Dymaxion ftw.
Really though, who cares about dead-tree maps in this day and age anyway, when everyone's phone can show a 3D rotating, zoomable & searchable globe, with a live cloud layer; when you can don a headset and fly your immersed, godlike perspective anywhere on the planet.
Alternatively, it's just as valid to say that GP's entire tax contributions to date covered the cost of a few metres of road near his house, and that everywhere else he/she drives, visits, steps foot in, gets treated at, etc, are all paid for by someone else. Including this research.
Obviously the director *does* consider intent to be a factor, in this case.
But that's still largely irrelevant, because he's the director of the FBI, not the director of the Department of Justice. If the DoJ chose to take up the case, they could subpoena the results of the investigation and bring any case they wanted, regardless of the FBI's opinions. When asked why they haven't, you prefer to believe in massively widespread corruption, rather than the far simpler assumption that they merely know something you don't.
You claim without any basis that no court case will ever be held, you offer only speculation about conspiracies as to why that might be, then you use that to excuse your own premature assumption of guilt.
Presumption of innocence has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a court case will be held in the future. It's needed because the evidence is not complete. If you could go around judging guilt based solely on a few selected facts and media reports, we wouldn't need court trials in the first place. I'm not sure why this means nothing to you.
I'm certainly not throwing out what the director has said. He clearly found evidence against her - and also said it wasn't sufficient to make a robust case that a prosecutor would bother with. You're the one that listened to the first part but ignored the second.
My whole point is, there's certainly evidence, but no proof - and you can't (and shouldn't) arrive at a definite conclusion without a full trial, where all the evidence (for and against) is examined in detail. Until that happens, we have the presumption of innocence for a very good reason - and it's not me who's leaping to conclusions based on the trial by media.
The director's statements do not preclude a full trial, and the DoJ could still decide to make a case out of it - if they wanted to. They don't seem to, though. Perhaps that's because they're all corrupt, if you're inclined towards the conspiratorial view, or rather more likely it's simply because there just isn't enough evidence to actually convict her of anything - which is clearly the view of people who know a lot more about that evidence than you or I.
Slashdot Mirror
Like every brand of smartphone? Internet-connected microphones have been ubiquitous for years - that ship has long since sailed.
The discussion now is how to deal with them - how best to make sure they don't get abused (like this minor case), without losing too much of their utility.
Ah yes, an 8th grade biology teacher and denialist who's probably never even seen the Great Barrier Reef, writes a blog article speculating that the peer-reviewed scientific evidence from one of the foremost Reef scientists is all completely wrong, because... other reefs have in the past been bleached by different causes. And you think this is a "better explanation" why, exactly?
As usual, denialists can't scrape up any evidence that could survive peer review, so they spend their time denying the evidence that does.
They'll need to spend billions more - or at least fix the laws on land-clearing and fertiliser overuse - if they want a hope of saving the Reef and its $6B annual tourism income & 69,000 associated jobs.
There's plenty they could have done, and plenty they still could do. They could have started reducing emissions decades ago when the scientific evidence first became clear, and they could have invested in a world-leading solar industry instead of still more open-pit coal mines. They could also have given the Reef Marine Park Authority the funding and authority it needed to *effectively* deal with declining water quality, instead of the lip service it gets now, and at least reduced the huge additional stress on the Reef from agricultural run-off.
Instead, they've repealed our price on carbon, declared that "coal is good for humanity", green-lit even more coal mines, and approved a massive expansion & dredging operation for a coal export port right in the middle of the Reef's coastline (overruling the GBRMPA and even changing the law to allow themselves to ignore expert advice). And to cap it all off, last year they censored any mention of the Reef from a UNESCO report on World Heritage Tourism Sites at Risk (on the ironic grounds that it might affect tourism) - just as the 2016 bleaching event was killing off an unprecedented 67% of the coral in the Reef's northern third.
Even this extensive damage may have recovered somewhat, given 10-15 years of benign conditions, but a fourth bleaching event the very next year has crushed any hopes of that - the question now is whether we'll lose most of the middle third as well. But hey, at least the government has made sure we'll have coal for our tourists, if not coral.
Except that as my links show, Assad has been regularly carrying out chemical attacks for years. There's nothing "suspicious" about the timing, it's just another in a long series of atrocities. For the rebels to manufacture a false-flag attack on their own positions and children is ludicrous, particularly given that Assad has been carrying out absolutely genuine gas attacks with such regularity.
Putin's word is about as credible as Assad's, in this matter, even worse than Trump's. I'll believe the Human Rights Watch people long before I listen to any of those.
Meanwhile, I've linked to vast amounts of accumulated evidence from HRW including photos, interviews, medical studies and autopsies, while you've cited.. nothing. Take your doubt-mongering elsewhere.
Chemtrails, aliens, truthers, reptilians in the White House, the list goes on and they're all bullshit, even the last one. Just because the government really was spying on you does not suddenly mean the others were true all along, but too many people believe what they want to believe regardless of lack of evidence, or even evidence against it.
While the rest of us will stick to Occam's Razor, and keep assuming that wildly-unlikely stuff is almost certainly just more bullshit - unless and until someone produces extraordinary evidence - highlighting fact-checker sites can only help to stem the spread of the bullshit in the first place. So long as the fact-checkers highlighted always clearly show their own sources.
Checking sources can be fatiguing, but it's necessary for the important stuff, even for outlets you otherwise trust - and particularly for non-mainstream or contraversial sources. When you stop doing that, and start blindly accepting stories from *any* source - you'll quickly drown in the bullshit.
Syrian military jets attacked the site, according to every report - even the Russians agree with that. There's documented evidence that Syria has been carrying out chemical attacks repeatedly for years. And attempts to place blame on the rebels are implausible at best, described as "laughable" by experts from the US, Britain, Israel, Turkey, and others.
There's clear evidence of Assad using gas attacks for years, starting with the 2013 attack, and continuing in May 2014, in April 2015, in June 2015, in September 2016, and even more recently in November and December 2016.
This is simply the latest in a string of chemical attacks that Assad clearly feels he can use with impunity.
With Assad's own jets? Evidence says no.
That explanation seems kind of tortuous. There's lots of things kids can't do when they're young, like driving cars, but nobody bats an eye talking about those, so that can't be the reason sex is treated so differently. And violence is a significantly bigger factor in kids' lives than in most adults - any parent knows kids that have to be taught to restrain their impulses and not hurt others. Providing counter- examples on the screen where violence is rewarded instead makes little sense outside of male fantasies.
I think it far more likely that the Western attitude towards sex and nudity is largely a cultural artefact from leftover religious ideals, such as Puritanism - the bible teaches shame in nakedness right from the beginning. I've also heard it suggested that this itself may be seen as a reaction against Roman excesses. But many non-Western cultures have pretty different views about sex and nakedness, some being very open about it - though Westerners often view those cultures as "primitive" as a result.
VR & AR are like desktops vs mobile. In theory AR can do everything VR can do, and do it while you're out interacting the world, but while VR is tethered and physically isolating, it's also FAR better at providing many kinds of experiences, those where isolation doesn't matter or is actually a benefit. Just like how mobiles are popular and useful, but there's a lot they don't do well, and desktops remain vital for a lot of tasks.
You must really hate it when teenagers keep proving you wrong with science.
We had a carbon tax in Australia, back in 2012. Started out at A$23/tonne and increased slowly, with initially-large (90%) waivers for major polluters that were also set to phase out over time. Proceeds from the tax were largely returned directly to the population via tax cuts to offset the small projected price bump, with the rest invested in carbon-neutral energy alternatives and climate mitigation.
The (right-wing) opposition, egged on by our big coal sector, swore up & down that it would lead to spiraling inflation and collapse small businesses, and blamed it for large electricity price hikes. In reality of course, the economic impact was hardly noticeable. Most prices barely changed, the average tax cut easily covered the electricity rises (which had started before the tax and were almost entirely due to long-overdue grid upgrades), "green power" plans became more popular, and CO2 emissions dropped slightly. A year went by, the carbon price increased to $24.15, and these trends continued as projected.
But the right-wing scare campaign intensified, terms like "wrecking ball", "python squeeze", and "axe the tax" were thrown about, and the carbon tax became a major political issue - enough to tip the scales at the next election, despite polling consistently showing that ~60% of Australians wanted climate action. The tax was quickly repealed, and CO2 emissions started climbing again.
But the biggest casualties were the politicians themselves, with both parties dissolving into chaos and every single prime minister in the last ten years getting replaced before they could even sit out a full term. Right now we have a centre-right guy who internally replaced an unpopular hard-liner PM just before election - reversing the leadership spill from 2009 where he was ousted by the hard-liner - while a near-identical leadership reverse happened to the centre-left party while they were in power, over this same issue. Result: Australian trust of politicians, poor at the best of times, hits a two-decade low.
pick the best solution based on those priorities
Oh, so there is a best solution for school needs?
Nah, Lambert still destroys the poles. Dymaxion ftw.
Really though, who cares about dead-tree maps in this day and age anyway, when everyone's phone can show a 3D rotating, zoomable & searchable globe, with a live cloud layer; when you can don a headset and fly your immersed, godlike perspective anywhere on the planet.
The gorilla ate their partner, not their lunch.
Alternatively, it's just as valid to say that GP's entire tax contributions to date covered the cost of a few metres of road near his house, and that everywhere else he/she drives, visits, steps foot in, gets treated at, etc, are all paid for by someone else. Including this research.
I was wrong - that's an older paper. See this thread for the right one.
When did I ever argue that a judge should not hear any case, or this one?
What evidence is being withheld? Did you miss where the FBI released everything from their investigations?
I'll say it yet again: Presumption of innocence. It's important, regardless of your suspicions.
Thanks for the correction. The new paper doesn't appear on Qinghua Ding's publications page, and I've yet to find a non-paywalled link.
Obviously the director *does* consider intent to be a factor, in this case.
But that's still largely irrelevant, because he's the director of the FBI, not the director of the Department of Justice. If the DoJ chose to take up the case, they could subpoena the results of the investigation and bring any case they wanted, regardless of the FBI's opinions. When asked why they haven't, you prefer to believe in massively widespread corruption, rather than the far simpler assumption that they merely know something you don't.
You claim without any basis that no court case will ever be held, you offer only speculation about conspiracies as to why that might be, then you use that to excuse your own premature assumption of guilt.
Presumption of innocence has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a court case will be held in the future. It's needed because the evidence is not complete. If you could go around judging guilt based solely on a few selected facts and media reports, we wouldn't need court trials in the first place. I'm not sure why this means nothing to you.
See here.
Ding Q, J. M. Wallace, D. S. Battisti, E. J. Steig, A. J. E. Gallant, H. J. Ki, L Geng: Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland, [PDF] Nature, 509, 209-212, (2014)
I'm certainly not throwing out what the director has said. He clearly found evidence against her - and also said it wasn't sufficient to make a robust case that a prosecutor would bother with. You're the one that listened to the first part but ignored the second.
My whole point is, there's certainly evidence, but no proof - and you can't (and shouldn't) arrive at a definite conclusion without a full trial, where all the evidence (for and against) is examined in detail. Until that happens, we have the presumption of innocence for a very good reason - and it's not me who's leaping to conclusions based on the trial by media.
The director's statements do not preclude a full trial, and the DoJ could still decide to make a case out of it - if they wanted to. They don't seem to, though. Perhaps that's because they're all corrupt, if you're inclined towards the conspiratorial view, or rather more likely it's simply because there just isn't enough evidence to actually convict her of anything - which is clearly the view of people who know a lot more about that evidence than you or I.