Do you have any idea how hard it is to even admit to yourself what happened, let alone admit it to others, let alone go to the police? There's a reason most rapes go unreported.
I let my rapist walk me back to my car. What's the point in fighting *after* the fact? No, I never filed charges. I couldn't imagine going through that against someone who's *not* an international celebrity, let alone someone who is like Assange. Yes, it took days before I told anyone what happened to me, but it took about three months before I could manage to say "rape" without trying to couch it in terms like "unwanted sexual experience". You just want to forget about it. You just want it to go away. The last thing you want is to have to relive it and have everyone in the world trying to discredit you and treat you like some slut who's trying to "ruin some poor innocent guy's life". So no, I never went to the police. But if just a couple days after it happened I had happened to meet someone else who the *same guy* had done the *same sort of thing to*? I don't know how I would have reacted, but it definitely would have changed the picture.
Anyway, in case you actually care, here are the actual accusations against him. To which two British courts have reviewed the evidence and found the charges credible.
No, and nor can he be under Swedish law until he sets foot on Swedish soil again. Which is why the Swedes put in an extradition request and why the UK lower court - after examining the evidence and finding that not only did Assange probably violate Swedish law but would have violated UK law as well if the alleged acts occurred in the UK - approved his extradition warrant. And then the high court upheld it, finding no fault with the lower court's ruling. This is all proceeding as necessary for him to stand trial for what he's accused of in accordance with the laws of the respective countries.
I don't get Fox News, and nor would I watch it, but you clearly get your information from the Assange-fanboy echo chamber.
If you think an embassy is equipped to save lives in remotely the same way as a hospital, you're sadly mistaken. And do you think doctors are just going to abandon a hospital and loot it's equipment to haul it down to the Ecuadorian embassy because some guy inside got sick? Even if a team of paramedics comes in - i.e., the best "mobile" medical care you can get - well, there's a reason paramedics take sick people to the hospital instead of trying to treat them themselves.
I'm not talking about a little stomach bug. I'm talking about the reason we have hospitals - serious stuff. Everyone ends up in the hospital sooner or later. We all hope for "later", but we can't control that. Is the Ecuadorian embassy supposed to transform itself into a surgical theatre and have a medical team waiting on standby for him?
Yeah, there's probably not a country on Earth who's cooperated more with the US on the whole secret-extradition thing than the UK. The UK even ran some of the operations. Sweden handed over two people who came to the country illegally (to apply for asylum). That's nothing compared to what the UK has done. And, under a european arrest warrant, to re-extradite him from Sweden would require the UK to approve the re-extradition request anyway.
I take precisely the opposite anti-Assange stance as you. I support his work with Wikileaks and think it's as a whole been a good thing, and think if he was tried in the US, that'd be a major abuse of process. But I also think he shouldn't get a free pass on rape charges, and that the argument that a high-profile extradition to Sweden (wherein a second extradition would require a UK signature) is somehow more dangerous than simply being in the UK (the US's lapdog on foreign policy issues) is patently absurd.
Either way, he's got serious problems if he plans to spend the rest of his life in an embassy. Even assuming Ecuador approves his request, there's nor realistic way for him to get from the embassy to the country. And there's several legal options being explored to force the embassy to eject him. And the very least, sooner or later, he's going to get sick.
Well, the wikipedia article on him makes it sound a lot more complicated than that, in that "Under Spanish law, such wiretaps are only expressly permitted for terrorism cases and the legality of their use in other cases is more vague". There were a number of other charges too.
From the sound of it, he was a very popular judge among the left because he went hard after members of the former Franco government for crimes against humanity. But he sounds like he at the very least "bent the rules" to do so, and the right in Spain was more than willing to take him down for it.
To sum up your post: Deficit (more being spent than taken in) is too high, so the only possible solution is to cut spending (in two categories you list). Do you notice the gap in this logic? Here, I'll highlight it: Deficit (more being spent than taken in)
The current US deficit crisis isn't due to a spike in spending but a collapse in income.
The funny thing is, even if the US cut 100% of that spending overnight, it still wouldn't make up the deficit.
It's approximately the same ($1171/$1253B) (depending on whether you use the baseline or proposed budget), and only that bad because of the economy. Projections for the future are $612B/$977B in 2013 down to $175B/$510B in 2018.
[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]
You'd hardly know it from the results.
(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)
Cars rust. It's a fact of life. It's what happens to steel objects over time. The rate varies on climate (significantly), on build quality (steel quality, effectiveness of sealing it with paint, etc), and on maintenance (keeping the vehicle well painted), but even in perfect circumstances, a car will eventually turn into a heap of rust.
Even today, the area immediately around the Chernobyl sarcophagus has 300 times the radiation level of Guarapari. Additionally, there's a difference between just living in a place and a variety of activities that a person may want to do in a place, such as farming, livestock-raising, drinking freshwater sourced in the area, and so forth which dramatically change the individual risk. Lastly, how do you know that the levels of radiation in Guarapari aren't causing ill effects? Because there've been quite a few studies into animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They're thriving in terms of numbers because nobody hunts them anymore, but there are significant adverse health effects observed in the populations.
To have to delve into this again: Both Greenland and Iceland have icy areas and "green" areas; Iceland has a larger percent of "green" areas to be sure, but that doesn't stop it from having the largest glacier in Europe and getting lots of snow every winter, nor does it mean that there aren't even forests (albeit stubby) in Greenland.
Iceland was named by Flóki Vilgerðarson, who witnessed drifting pack ice during his first winter in Barðaströnd in Vestfirðir (the West Fjörds), something unknown in southwestern Norway where he was from (to be fair, it's relatively rare in Iceland, too, but not nearly so rare as in southwestern Norway). Must have seemed crazy to him, to see the sea itself frozen.
Greenland was named (although not discovered), as mentioned, by Eiríkr (TH)órvaldsson (commonly known as Erik the Red). He landed in the southwest side of Greenland. Look at the southwest side of Greenland in Google Maps with the satellite layer on and tell me what you see. It's green. There are quite significant areas of non-glaciated land there, which is why that's where Greenland's population lives. Greenland, as a whole, was not "melted" then "frozen" and now "melting again" on the order of a thousand years; that area has been, in historic times, constantly ice free, while most of the island has, likewise, been constantly ice covered. There's been advance and retreat of glaciers, but nothing so dramatic as what people are talking about here.
As for "Grænland": first, think of what was known about Greenland before Eiríkr. It's said that on a very clear day you can see Greenland from certain parts of Vestfirðir, although I've never tried myself. It's about 300 kilometers. About 50% of days here during the summer in Reykjavík we can see details on Snæfell which I think is something like 150 kilometers away, so I wouldn't discount it. If you could see it, all you'd see was icy mountains. Then Gunnbjarnarsker (Grunnbjörn's Skerries) were discovered off the Greenland coast before Eiríkr, which Snæbjörn Galti tried (and horribly failed) to colonize. The east coast of Greenland and the straits are just too harsh. But, exiled from Iceland for three years for murder, Eiríkr sailed through icy seas, and along the frozen coasts of Greenland, and then discovered... well, green. And lots of it. So should it really be a surprise that he named it that? Yes, the saga says that he wanted to give it a good name to encourage colonists, but that wasn't unusual; to him, it compared similarly to Iceland. He wasn't calling a frozen rock "green" to trick people.
So you've never brought a car in for a checkup and either gotten a clean bill of health or some minor fixes, and been told everything is running great, only to have something major bad happen not that long after?
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Yes, it's possible for radiation to have a fast kill, but most of the concerns are over very slow kills. Aka, you can't *stay* in the area. It's a disaster you can run from. Heck, it's a disaster you could crawl from. So the death tolls are generally going to be very low. The damage is economic, because while you can escape it, you can't *ignore* it. You can't just stay in a contaminated area. You can't just haul away and reuse contaminated infrastructure. You can't farm on contaminated land. Taking dozens of kilometers in all directions out of commission for decades is generally a devastating economic hit.
It depends on the details of the accident, what you want to classify as "safe", and what percent of contaminated land you want to declare "safe" (if you're talking about the core itself, you could get figures as high as "millions of years").
Either science and engineering is right or it isn't. If you think engineers can safely build a nuclear reactor and operate it for 40 years, why is 80 years different if they can demonstrate strong engineering judgement?
So you think a 20-year-old car drive 400,000 miles runs the same as 10-year-old car driven 200,000 miles?
Yeah, shouldn't it just be able to pump a current over the cable of known voltage and monitor the voltage drop at the other end to detect the cable's resistance? Any power that you pump in that's not coming out on the other side is heat. So you know how much your cable is heating. Assume a worst case scenario of a short cable (high heating per unit length), the thermal limits of the lowest-temperature insulation used in USB cables, and add in a safety factor based on the assumption of a cruddy cable with uneven heating... I'd think that'd be a pretty reliable approach, no?
Heck, you might be able to do better than that. If you have *very* precise pulse timing, you can figure out cable length, and thus unit resistance. I bet a clever electrical engineering student could come up with a way to measure the resistance of the cable independent of cable length using variable frequency AC, too. A capacitance test should let you figure out how much copper you're dealing with, and thus you can compare resistance to capacitance to get the cable diameter. There should be a number of ways to probe it.
Efficiency is not an issue is it. No matter what they do, no solar tech will ever get better than 20% efficient
Fascinating, because just from a quick Google search I find a company selling~30% efficient solar cells today, and that Sharp is at 43.5% in lab cells. I swear I've seen cells in the 30%s being sold commercially (albeit at very high prices), but I forget which company it was.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any idea how hard it is to even admit to yourself what happened, let alone admit it to others, let alone go to the police? There's a reason most rapes go unreported.
I let my rapist walk me back to my car. What's the point in fighting *after* the fact? No, I never filed charges. I couldn't imagine going through that against someone who's *not* an international celebrity, let alone someone who is like Assange. Yes, it took days before I told anyone what happened to me, but it took about three months before I could manage to say "rape" without trying to couch it in terms like "unwanted sexual experience". You just want to forget about it. You just want it to go away. The last thing you want is to have to relive it and have everyone in the world trying to discredit you and treat you like some slut who's trying to "ruin some poor innocent guy's life". So no, I never went to the police. But if just a couple days after it happened I had happened to meet someone else who the *same guy* had done the *same sort of thing to*? I don't know how I would have reacted, but it definitely would have changed the picture.
Anyway, in case you actually care, here are the actual accusations against him. To which two British courts have reviewed the evidence and found the charges credible.
No, and nor can he be under Swedish law until he sets foot on Swedish soil again. Which is why the Swedes put in an extradition request and why the UK lower court - after examining the evidence and finding that not only did Assange probably violate Swedish law but would have violated UK law as well if the alleged acts occurred in the UK - approved his extradition warrant. And then the high court upheld it, finding no fault with the lower court's ruling. This is all proceeding as necessary for him to stand trial for what he's accused of in accordance with the laws of the respective countries.
I don't get Fox News, and nor would I watch it, but you clearly get your information from the Assange-fanboy echo chamber.
If you think an embassy is equipped to save lives in remotely the same way as a hospital, you're sadly mistaken. And do you think doctors are just going to abandon a hospital and loot it's equipment to haul it down to the Ecuadorian embassy because some guy inside got sick? Even if a team of paramedics comes in - i.e., the best "mobile" medical care you can get - well, there's a reason paramedics take sick people to the hospital instead of trying to treat them themselves.
I'm not talking about a little stomach bug. I'm talking about the reason we have hospitals - serious stuff. Everyone ends up in the hospital sooner or later. We all hope for "later", but we can't control that. Is the Ecuadorian embassy supposed to transform itself into a surgical theatre and have a medical team waiting on standby for him?
Yeah, there's probably not a country on Earth who's cooperated more with the US on the whole secret-extradition thing than the UK. The UK even ran some of the operations. Sweden handed over two people who came to the country illegally (to apply for asylum). That's nothing compared to what the UK has done. And, under a european arrest warrant, to re-extradite him from Sweden would require the UK to approve the re-extradition request anyway.
I take precisely the opposite anti-Assange stance as you. I support his work with Wikileaks and think it's as a whole been a good thing, and think if he was tried in the US, that'd be a major abuse of process. But I also think he shouldn't get a free pass on rape charges, and that the argument that a high-profile extradition to Sweden (wherein a second extradition would require a UK signature) is somehow more dangerous than simply being in the UK (the US's lapdog on foreign policy issues) is patently absurd.
Either way, he's got serious problems if he plans to spend the rest of his life in an embassy. Even assuming Ecuador approves his request, there's nor realistic way for him to get from the embassy to the country. And there's several legal options being explored to force the embassy to eject him. And the very least, sooner or later, he's going to get sick.
Well, the wikipedia article on him makes it sound a lot more complicated than that, in that "Under Spanish law, such wiretaps are only expressly permitted for terrorism cases and the legality of their use in other cases is more vague". There were a number of other charges too.
From the sound of it, he was a very popular judge among the left because he went hard after members of the former Franco government for crimes against humanity. But he sounds like he at the very least "bent the rules" to do so, and the right in Spain was more than willing to take him down for it.
Ah, the good 'ol days of Hampsterdance, grandfather of the Rickroll. ;)
To sum up your post: Deficit (more being spent than taken in) is too high, so the only possible solution is to cut spending (in two categories you list). Do you notice the gap in this logic? Here, I'll highlight it: Deficit (more being spent than taken in)
The current US deficit crisis isn't due to a spike in spending but a collapse in income.
It's approximately the same ($1171/$1253B) (depending on whether you use the baseline or proposed budget), and only that bad because of the economy. Projections for the future are $612B/$977B in 2013 down to $175B/$510B in 2018.
[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]
You'd hardly know it from the results.
(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)
Dear god, I hope they don't take their inspiration from video games!
My windows toaster is hardware accelerated. :) Unfortunately, it tends to overheat.
Cars rust. It's a fact of life. It's what happens to steel objects over time. The rate varies on climate (significantly), on build quality (steel quality, effectiveness of sealing it with paint, etc), and on maintenance (keeping the vehicle well painted), but even in perfect circumstances, a car will eventually turn into a heap of rust.
Even today, the area immediately around the Chernobyl sarcophagus has 300 times the radiation level of Guarapari. Additionally, there's a difference between just living in a place and a variety of activities that a person may want to do in a place, such as farming, livestock-raising, drinking freshwater sourced in the area, and so forth which dramatically change the individual risk. Lastly, how do you know that the levels of radiation in Guarapari aren't causing ill effects? Because there've been quite a few studies into animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They're thriving in terms of numbers because nobody hunts them anymore, but there are significant adverse health effects observed in the populations.
Yeah, it does, and eventually rusts out. And it's not exposed to the horribly destructive high radiation/corrosion environment of a nuclear core.
Yeah, but they also have a dramatically easier task, too.
To have to delve into this again: Both Greenland and Iceland have icy areas and "green" areas; Iceland has a larger percent of "green" areas to be sure, but that doesn't stop it from having the largest glacier in Europe and getting lots of snow every winter, nor does it mean that there aren't even forests (albeit stubby) in Greenland.
Iceland was named by Flóki Vilgerðarson, who witnessed drifting pack ice during his first winter in Barðaströnd in Vestfirðir (the West Fjörds), something unknown in southwestern Norway where he was from (to be fair, it's relatively rare in Iceland, too, but not nearly so rare as in southwestern Norway). Must have seemed crazy to him, to see the sea itself frozen.
Greenland was named (although not discovered), as mentioned, by Eiríkr (TH)órvaldsson (commonly known as Erik the Red). He landed in the southwest side of Greenland. Look at the southwest side of Greenland in Google Maps with the satellite layer on and tell me what you see. It's green. There are quite significant areas of non-glaciated land there, which is why that's where Greenland's population lives. Greenland, as a whole, was not "melted" then "frozen" and now "melting again" on the order of a thousand years; that area has been, in historic times, constantly ice free, while most of the island has, likewise, been constantly ice covered. There's been advance and retreat of glaciers, but nothing so dramatic as what people are talking about here.
As for "Grænland": first, think of what was known about Greenland before Eiríkr. It's said that on a very clear day you can see Greenland from certain parts of Vestfirðir, although I've never tried myself. It's about 300 kilometers. About 50% of days here during the summer in Reykjavík we can see details on Snæfell which I think is something like 150 kilometers away, so I wouldn't discount it. If you could see it, all you'd see was icy mountains. Then Gunnbjarnarsker (Grunnbjörn's Skerries) were discovered off the Greenland coast before Eiríkr, which Snæbjörn Galti tried (and horribly failed) to colonize. The east coast of Greenland and the straits are just too harsh. But, exiled from Iceland for three years for murder, Eiríkr sailed through icy seas, and along the frozen coasts of Greenland, and then discovered... well, green. And lots of it. So should it really be a surprise that he named it that? Yes, the saga says that he wanted to give it a good name to encourage colonists, but that wasn't unusual; to him, it compared similarly to Iceland. He wasn't calling a frozen rock "green" to trick people.
So you've never brought a car in for a checkup and either gotten a clean bill of health or some minor fixes, and been told everything is running great, only to have something major bad happen not that long after?
If you haven't, I bet someone you know has.
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Yes, it's possible for radiation to have a fast kill, but most of the concerns are over very slow kills. Aka, you can't *stay* in the area. It's a disaster you can run from. Heck, it's a disaster you could crawl from. So the death tolls are generally going to be very low. The damage is economic, because while you can escape it, you can't *ignore* it. You can't just stay in a contaminated area. You can't just haul away and reuse contaminated infrastructure. You can't farm on contaminated land. Taking dozens of kilometers in all directions out of commission for decades is generally a devastating economic hit.
Even if lots of people don't die.
It depends on the details of the accident, what you want to classify as "safe", and what percent of contaminated land you want to declare "safe" (if you're talking about the core itself, you could get figures as high as "millions of years").
The hype fairy moved on to different projects.
So you think a 20-year-old car drive 400,000 miles runs the same as 10-year-old car driven 200,000 miles?
Yeah, shouldn't it just be able to pump a current over the cable of known voltage and monitor the voltage drop at the other end to detect the cable's resistance? Any power that you pump in that's not coming out on the other side is heat. So you know how much your cable is heating. Assume a worst case scenario of a short cable (high heating per unit length), the thermal limits of the lowest-temperature insulation used in USB cables, and add in a safety factor based on the assumption of a cruddy cable with uneven heating... I'd think that'd be a pretty reliable approach, no?
Heck, you might be able to do better than that. If you have *very* precise pulse timing, you can figure out cable length, and thus unit resistance. I bet a clever electrical engineering student could come up with a way to measure the resistance of the cable independent of cable length using variable frequency AC, too. A capacitance test should let you figure out how much copper you're dealing with, and thus you can compare resistance to capacitance to get the cable diameter. There should be a number of ways to probe it.
Fascinating, because just from a quick Google search I find a company selling~30% efficient solar cells today, and that Sharp is at 43.5% in lab cells. I swear I've seen cells in the 30%s being sold commercially (albeit at very high prices), but I forget which company it was.