Meh, thanks to forestry efforts we'll probably be self-sufficient on lumber in a decade or two. We're never going to win any awards for forestry extent, but we do have some lovely ones.
Then again, there is the old joke that every person in Iceland over the age of six knows.
Q: "How do you find your way out of an Icelandic forest?" A: "Stand up."
Huh? No, I'm here because I love Iceland. It's a wonderful country. Lively creative culture in town, always things going on, but then I can drive a few minutes outside of town and be in the middle of nowhere, with some of the most amazing landscapes on Earth.:)
Re, late term abortion: just over 1% of abortions are late term. Of these, the overwhelming majority are due to severe fetal deformities/other issues - commonly fatal. I ask people to put themselves in the mother's situation. You're pregnant, most of the way through your pregnancy and you receive the most devastating news you could get. Perhaps your child's brain never developed. Perhaps their lungs are deformed, and your only experience with your child will be watching them gasp and suffocate before they die. These are the real-world situations mothers face when having to make the decision about a late-term abortion. Random combinations of genes don't always play nicely. Meanwhile, you're still pregnant. You've still got people coming up, smiles on their faces, "Oh, when's the baby due? I bet you're so excited!", and having to explain to them every time that your child will die at birth.
What's the purpose of dragging it out? To make the mother suffer? To make the child suffer?
Another misconception is that late term abortions are D&E. They almost never are. Not only is it medically preferable to induce labour whenever the uterus is capable of it, but there comes a point where D&E isn't even a realistic medical possibility. If an induced miscarriage leads to a potentially viable child - evaluated by the same medical standards as for non-induced delivery - by law doctors are required to perform any life-saving procedures, within the same decisionmaking confines.
The Trump view of people "ripping babies" out of uteruses at "nine months" for no reason and killing them isn't even remotely close to the actuality. It's a unicorn. To be fair, Clinton misstated it also, describing the life of the mother as being a common cause for late-term abortion (it isn't).
Anyway, I think I've accidentally derailed things a bit here, and should apologize for that.
Sweden, eh? Iceland is my home - if you move, welcome to the Nordic club.:) Today's actually our election day here, and we may end up with a Pirate-headed government. I know the guy who's one of the most likely PM candidates if the pirates end up leading a coalition government; I think most Slashdotters would love him. Worked first setting up fab labs around the world and infrastructure for sharing medical/educational info in poor countries, then spent the past several years working on a project to datamine government reports to root out indications of secret diversion of money (corruption, weapons smuggling, things of that nature).
You have trouble believing that when both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president in the US have likewise been grossly irresponsible with email security?
I actually feel bad for the more moderate GOP elements. I grew up in a conservative family in the US (no longer live in the US - but US politics affects us all). While there's many in the party who love Trump, there's also a lot who despise him and all he stands for - but feel they have no other option.
While I have no sympathy for people who cast their vote out of bigotry (against races, religions, sexualities, genders, etc), for people who cast it out of ideology, I can fully understand, even where I don't agree. Example: much of my family is anti-abortion; I'm not. But there's no bigotry behind pro-lifers; it just comes down to a different worldview. To people like me, that which gives us our humanity, that which makes us "us" - personality, feelings, memories, reasoning, etc - all arises in the brain. No brain, no moral issues. To most pro-lifers, the root of humanity is a soul, gifted at conception. No amount of "reasoning" about the details of abortion will cause a person to just jump from one side of this divide to the other when the basic worldview premises that underlie the ethics are so disjoint.
Should I be hateful toward pro-lifers because they have a different worldview than me - even though they seek actions that harm me and people I care about? No - because they're not doing so out of hate or bigotry. I will politically resist them, but I still feel bad for them, and economic conservatives, and so forth in this election who ended up with this guy as their candidate, who they don't want to support but feel they have to. When Trump (barring a historically unprecedented upset) loses next week, I certainly won't be gloating. But as for any people voting for him out of ethnic, religious, sexuality or gender bigotry... yeah, enjoy venting your impotent rage, deplorables.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
Continuing...
she has the poorest record of telling the truth of any politician ever
Anyway, as for this hack: I actually doubt this was the US. One, the US generally gives "won't confirm or deny" statements in situations like this, rather than outright denial. Second, Ukraine has an awful lot of computer talent on their own, and all the motive in the world. A lot of people in the US don't realize that the industry that's booming the most in Ukraine right now is IT; they're a popular outsourcing destination for Europe.
When you say, "I've read what's been posted online", I must repeat: did you read the actual emails, or things that other people wrote about them with little "gotcha!" excerpts?
Huh? Comey - a Republican - is being criticized for Democrats for organizing an 11-days-before-the-election hit-and-run against her, and your argument is that he's biased toward her? And that's why he did this 11 days before the election, I take it?
According to the investigation, only three emails on server had any classified marking on them. None contained classified headers, only (c) markings. The investigation determined that given HRC's lack of expertise in these regards, it's likely that she did not know what that symbol meant; classified documents are usually given to top officials with classified headers. She was however faulted for not treating sensitive information as classified regardless of whether or not it was marked as such, as is government policy.
Now, there was a lot more classified information on the server. At the time it was sent, 113 emails contained classified information, although as mentioned the overwhelming majority hadn't been marked when it was sent to her. During the investigation, investigators looked over all information and retroactively classified 2093 emails as containing information that should be classified. Of those 2093, HRC authored 104. But those were not classified at the time.
A separate report revealed that Powell had in his tenure received two classified emails in his private mail, and staffers of Condoleeza Rice received ten.
Yes, vote for the vaxxer-apologist who wants a moratorium on pesticides and whose primary economic policy initiative - ordering the Fed use quantitative easing to forgive student debt - is based on a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between the government and the Fed, and what quantitative easing even is.
I cannot support Hillary because she is corrupt. The depth of her corruption is breathtaking and her blatant disregard for the rule of law is a danger to the republic.
The depth of Republicans spending three decades trying to convince Americans that she's corrupt is what's breathtaking. How many bloody investigations have they held into her? Now, how many times has she been convicted?
Pete Williams is reporting that the emails have A) nothing to do with Wikileaks, and B) were not withheld by Clinton.
Beyond that, we know very, very little right now. Actually it's rather bizarre that Comey would throw a bombshell like this 11 days before the election. But let's see where it goes.
The US system is patently absurd. And no, they'll never change it. They don't even tackle the low-hanging fruit - for example, 1,2% of Americans have no voting representation in congress (DC, Puerto Rico, others).
1) Embassy voting is not a real thing. Nor would it make any sense, as different states handle elections differently, but embassies are a unified federal system. Nor does the US have embassies in every country. Nor are embassies guaranteed to be anywhere remotely near where a person lives within a country.
2) "Advance voting" makes no sense for expats. Believe it or not, some citizens live overseas. Including the military, by the way, who you apparently want to disenfranchise.
3) Your #1 case does nothing to guarantee vote privacy. The person can very well watch the individual fill out their ballot and then seal it up. All it does is make it harder/more expensive for the disabled to vote.
Because I still have citizenship and because I still have to fill out stupid freaking IRS returns every year (unlike every other country on earth concerning their expats)?
US citizenship is a big disadvantage to carry around and getting to vote is the one decent thing that one gets out of it as an expat.
With the added ability of also being able to cast a ballot in person, and have that override the online ones.
Indeed, it's not too hard to make a system with online voting deniable. And meanwhile, the current system which allows mail-in voting, does not guarantee deniability.
Solyndra was a bet that silicon prices would remain high. It was a way to get more power out of less silicon. The bet was wrong. With the drop in price in silicon, their death was inevitable. They also had a weird design decision, going for the concentrator. It made sense (in the economics of the time) to go for either concentrators or CIGS, but not both.
That said, the government took way too much flak - politically motivated - over Solyndra. With any diverse profile of startup investments, you expect some to fail. Economists analyzing the ARRA post-facto have been by and large given it quite positive evaluations for its effects on the economy. The loans program office had already wiped out the Solyndra loss just two years later.
Should have been "alumium". Next best is "aluminum" (like platinum, molybdenum, most all of the classic elements like plumbum, argentum, etc). "Aluminium" is right out. It was derived from from alumina, not "aluminia"; the i is supposed to be the joining stem (lithia/lithium, magnesia/magnesium, titania/titanium, etc). There are a couple element names that are as poorly formed as "aluminium", but not many.
Not to mention that Davy was the one who named it, and he named it "aluminum", but suggested "alumium" as an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, thanks to forestry efforts we'll probably be self-sufficient on lumber in a decade or two. We're never going to win any awards for forestry extent, but we do have some lovely ones.
Then again, there is the old joke that every person in Iceland over the age of six knows.
Q: "How do you find your way out of an Icelandic forest?"
A: "Stand up."
Huh? No, I'm here because I love Iceland. It's a wonderful country. Lively creative culture in town, always things going on, but then I can drive a few minutes outside of town and be in the middle of nowhere, with some of the most amazing landscapes on Earth. :)
Re, late term abortion: just over 1% of abortions are late term. Of these, the overwhelming majority are due to severe fetal deformities/other issues - commonly fatal. I ask people to put themselves in the mother's situation. You're pregnant, most of the way through your pregnancy and you receive the most devastating news you could get. Perhaps your child's brain never developed. Perhaps their lungs are deformed, and your only experience with your child will be watching them gasp and suffocate before they die. These are the real-world situations mothers face when having to make the decision about a late-term abortion. Random combinations of genes don't always play nicely. Meanwhile, you're still pregnant. You've still got people coming up, smiles on their faces, "Oh, when's the baby due? I bet you're so excited!", and having to explain to them every time that your child will die at birth.
What's the purpose of dragging it out? To make the mother suffer? To make the child suffer?
Another misconception is that late term abortions are D&E. They almost never are. Not only is it medically preferable to induce labour whenever the uterus is capable of it, but there comes a point where D&E isn't even a realistic medical possibility. If an induced miscarriage leads to a potentially viable child - evaluated by the same medical standards as for non-induced delivery - by law doctors are required to perform any life-saving procedures, within the same decisionmaking confines.
The Trump view of people "ripping babies" out of uteruses at "nine months" for no reason and killing them isn't even remotely close to the actuality. It's a unicorn. To be fair, Clinton misstated it also, describing the life of the mother as being a common cause for late-term abortion (it isn't).
Anyway, I think I've accidentally derailed things a bit here, and should apologize for that.
Sweden, eh? Iceland is my home - if you move, welcome to the Nordic club. :) Today's actually our election day here, and we may end up with a Pirate-headed government. I know the guy who's one of the most likely PM candidates if the pirates end up leading a coalition government; I think most Slashdotters would love him. Worked first setting up fab labs around the world and infrastructure for sharing medical/educational info in poor countries, then spent the past several years working on a project to datamine government reports to root out indications of secret diversion of money (corruption, weapons smuggling, things of that nature).
You have trouble believing that when both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president in the US have likewise been grossly irresponsible with email security?
I actually feel bad for the more moderate GOP elements. I grew up in a conservative family in the US (no longer live in the US - but US politics affects us all). While there's many in the party who love Trump, there's also a lot who despise him and all he stands for - but feel they have no other option.
While I have no sympathy for people who cast their vote out of bigotry (against races, religions, sexualities, genders, etc), for people who cast it out of ideology, I can fully understand, even where I don't agree. Example: much of my family is anti-abortion; I'm not. But there's no bigotry behind pro-lifers; it just comes down to a different worldview. To people like me, that which gives us our humanity, that which makes us "us" - personality, feelings, memories, reasoning, etc - all arises in the brain. No brain, no moral issues. To most pro-lifers, the root of humanity is a soul, gifted at conception. No amount of "reasoning" about the details of abortion will cause a person to just jump from one side of this divide to the other when the basic worldview premises that underlie the ethics are so disjoint.
Should I be hateful toward pro-lifers because they have a different worldview than me - even though they seek actions that harm me and people I care about? No - because they're not doing so out of hate or bigotry. I will politically resist them, but I still feel bad for them, and economic conservatives, and so forth in this election who ended up with this guy as their candidate, who they don't want to support but feel they have to. When Trump (barring a historically unprecedented upset) loses next week, I certainly won't be gloating. But as for any people voting for him out of ethnic, religious, sexuality or gender bigotry... yeah, enjoy venting your impotent rage, deplorables.
What does Wikileaks have to do with the seizure of Crimea and occupation of Donbas?
Really? Here, let me help you out with that.
Continuing...
Have some nice charts
Anyway, as for this hack: I actually doubt this was the US. One, the US generally gives "won't confirm or deny" statements in situations like this, rather than outright denial. Second, Ukraine has an awful lot of computer talent on their own, and all the motive in the world. A lot of people in the US don't realize that the industry that's booming the most in Ukraine right now is IT; they're a popular outsourcing destination for Europe.
Not that Comey isn't trying to fix that. Interesting tweetstorm from former DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller:
When you say, "I've read what's been posted online", I must repeat: did you read the actual emails, or things that other people wrote about them with little "gotcha!" excerpts?
Huh? Comey - a Republican - is being criticized for Democrats for organizing an 11-days-before-the-election hit-and-run against her, and your argument is that he's biased toward her? And that's why he did this 11 days before the election, I take it?
According to the investigation, only three emails on server had any classified marking on them. None contained classified headers, only (c) markings. The investigation determined that given HRC's lack of expertise in these regards, it's likely that she did not know what that symbol meant; classified documents are usually given to top officials with classified headers. She was however faulted for not treating sensitive information as classified regardless of whether or not it was marked as such, as is government policy.
Now, there was a lot more classified information on the server. At the time it was sent, 113 emails contained classified information, although as mentioned the overwhelming majority hadn't been marked when it was sent to her. During the investigation, investigators looked over all information and retroactively classified 2093 emails as containing information that should be classified. Of those 2093, HRC authored 104. But those were not classified at the time.
A separate report revealed that Powell had in his tenure received two classified emails in his private mail, and staffers of Condoleeza Rice received ten.
How many of the emails have you actually read, and which ones specifically are you basing that on?
Yes, vote for the vaxxer-apologist who wants a moratorium on pesticides and whose primary economic policy initiative - ordering the Fed use quantitative easing to forgive student debt - is based on a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between the government and the Fed, and what quantitative easing even is.
The depth of Republicans spending three decades trying to convince Americans that she's corrupt is what's breathtaking. How many bloody investigations have they held into her? Now, how many times has she been convicted?
1. They did not say that they are reopening the investigation. The memo itself makes that clear.
2. The emails are related to the server, but not from Clinton
Pete Williams is reporting that the emails have A) nothing to do with Wikileaks, and B) were not withheld by Clinton.
Beyond that, we know very, very little right now. Actually it's rather bizarre that Comey would throw a bombshell like this 11 days before the election. But let's see where it goes.
The US system is patently absurd. And no, they'll never change it. They don't even tackle the low-hanging fruit - for example, 1,2% of Americans have no voting representation in congress (DC, Puerto Rico, others).
1) Embassy voting is not a real thing. Nor would it make any sense, as different states handle elections differently, but embassies are a unified federal system. Nor does the US have embassies in every country. Nor are embassies guaranteed to be anywhere remotely near where a person lives within a country.
2) "Advance voting" makes no sense for expats. Believe it or not, some citizens live overseas. Including the military, by the way, who you apparently want to disenfranchise.
3) Your #1 case does nothing to guarantee vote privacy. The person can very well watch the individual fill out their ballot and then seal it up. All it does is make it harder/more expensive for the disabled to vote.
Because I still have citizenship and because I still have to fill out stupid freaking IRS returns every year (unlike every other country on earth concerning their expats)?
US citizenship is a big disadvantage to carry around and getting to vote is the one decent thing that one gets out of it as an expat.
So should I have to drive to the US across the North Atlantic from Iceland in order to vote? Nice "screw you" to expats you've got there.
With the added ability of also being able to cast a ballot in person, and have that override the online ones.
Indeed, it's not too hard to make a system with online voting deniable. And meanwhile, the current system which allows mail-in voting, does not guarantee deniability.
That 3% number is clearly nonsense. And you can contact the county offices to make sure your ballot was received and is in order (which I did).
My vote is overseas. They're counted at the same time as local votes. You're thinking of absentee ballots.
What state are you? Don't forget about the downballot races.
What about people who vote by mail?
Are your investments undergoing literally exponential production and sales curves? Are you unaware that scaleup costs tremendous amounts of money?
Solyndra was a bet that silicon prices would remain high. It was a way to get more power out of less silicon. The bet was wrong. With the drop in price in silicon, their death was inevitable. They also had a weird design decision, going for the concentrator. It made sense (in the economics of the time) to go for either concentrators or CIGS, but not both.
That said, the government took way too much flak - politically motivated - over Solyndra. With any diverse profile of startup investments, you expect some to fail. Economists analyzing the ARRA post-facto have been by and large given it quite positive evaluations for its effects on the economy. The loans program office had already wiped out the Solyndra loss just two years later.
Should have been "alumium". Next best is "aluminum" (like platinum, molybdenum, most all of the classic elements like plumbum, argentum, etc). "Aluminium" is right out. It was derived from from alumina, not "aluminia"; the i is supposed to be the joining stem (lithia/lithium, magnesia/magnesium, titania/titanium, etc). There are a couple element names that are as poorly formed as "aluminium", but not many.
Not to mention that Davy was the one who named it, and he named it "aluminum", but suggested "alumium" as an alternative.