It doesn't change the fact that DNA testing is still multiple orders or magnitude more accurate than any other tools to solve crimes and it's not used as the only piece of evidence in a case. On the whole DNA keeps considerably more innocent people out of prison than it puts them in prison.
DNA tests not being absolutely 100% accurate has been known since law enforcement started using it as a tool to solve crimes. Anyone raising alarm right now is either decades late or just trying to stir up manufactured controversy.
The reason why DNA testing is so popular is that a false positive is a literally a one-in-a-million type scenario, which makes it several orders of magnitude more accurate and less likely to provide a false positive than any other investigative tool law enforcement has at it's disposal. There's a reason why a large part of the people who have been convicted and then found innocent in cases from before the use of DNA evidence became widespread have been done so using DNA testing.
In other words, like any of the investigative tools available to law enforcement, DNA testing is not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is several orders of magnitude more accurate than any other tool available to law enforcement meaning that if you're going to raise alarm over it's accuracy, you ought to raise an even bigger alarm over every other tool they have at their disposal.
One thing that repeatedly springs to mind is is repeated denial of the Armenian genocide. The man's repeatedly denied the genocide over many years and still hasn't admitted that it really happened like any sane person or person with some level of journalistic integrity would. No, now he's just doing a "no comment" spiel because of one of his co-hosts being Armenian with relatives that were actually killed in said genocide.
As for them somehow trying to be balanced, it's basically just the exact same spiel Fox News puts on once in a while when they want to be able to call themselves "Fair and Balanced" when anyone with who isn't an ideologue can tell that it's bullshit. You really shouldn't be convinced by the occasional lip service meant to convince their viewers who haven't turned into complete zombies that they're not a left wing Fox News anchored by a left wing Alex Jones.
You forgot the/s at the end. People, albeit mostly the really dim witted ones, may actually start to believe that the media is professional enough to actually do fact checking.
I'd hardly recommend anything by The Young Turks seeing how that lot started out pretty sane, but completely went off the deep end years ago. Their main host, Cenk Uygur, would be a left wing Alex Jones if it wasn't for that fact that unlike Alex, he isn't just playing the character of a raving loon, he actually is a complete raving loon.
Not the first time something like this has happened... Back in 2000 Sony Pictures created a made-up film critic called David Manning just so that they could put "quotes" from him on their posters and other marketing materials, even went as far as to attributing him to an actual weekly that did film reviews.
People eventually got suspicious and when Newsweek contacted the weekly he supposedly worked for they flat out said they'd never heard of him. Sony obviously didn't think they did anything wrong, which is hardly surprising seeing how around the same time they were caught having employees posing as movie goers in commercials, but they did eventually settle when sued.
The thing about planning any far reaching system is that you need to consider what the damage that can be done if people with less-than-noble intentions take control of the system and use it to further their own goals. It's not just the danger conservatives imposing their ideas on how you're supposed to live your life and think taking over the system, there's also their opposite numbers on the extreme who are particularly keen on trying to prevent people from having opinions that differ from their orthodoxy. If implemented as something run by the government this system is particularly vulnerable to politicians coming in and changing what's rewarded and what's punished to fit their goals.
If I had to come up with a name for this, it would be the "Monkey with a machine gun"-principle as I think that explains the idea itself pretty well.
Considering this and things like it have been talked about way before that show was made it's less the Chinese looking at a fictional dystopia for ideas to implement and more just the writers of a fictional dystopia hearing about Chinese plans and adding it to their fictional dystopia.
It's a horrifying idea none the less and only made even more horrifying by now having been implemented in the worst way possible in real life. Then again considering all the outrageous ways China has tried to control it's population over the decades in an effort to stop them from realizing the absurdity of their one party system this is probably business as usual from their perspective. If you can get thrown into some local Stasi equivalent's jail with nothing resembling a trial and coerced into confessing to all kinds of crazy things just for running a bookstore that sells books critical of the ruling party and system this may not even register for a lot people.
Is it just me, or does it seem like focusing your resources and trying to get the most out as little as possible has become something of a religion for companies? I know companies have in the past re-used platforms for multiple products, the best car industry example of this is the VW Golf chassis used in over a dozen different models from 4 different makes, but it seems like literally everyone wants to do that now.
It's not just re-using underlying tech, you also see companies more often not only farm out the production of both generic components and those specific to them, but also farm out the development of even the application-specific components to the subcontractors who make them. Boeing did with the 787 Dreamliner and the end result of that was huge delays and cost overruns along with some serious doubts on their safety and quality as leaked documents show that they've bypassed their own internal quality and safety standards for schedule-related reasons.
That may apply to the Italian auto industry (Fiat got brand new factory and was able to completely re-tool), but the Japanese car industry was mostly re-built by the British and the the project that lead to the creation of VW and the Bettle was started on Hitler's personal orders and was obviously pre Marshall Plan. Not only was the Beetle developed to the point of being ready for mass production pre WW2, they also finished the Wolfsburg factory (which is still VW's main factory) just as WW2 was getting under way.
The only reason it didn't go into mass production in 1940/1941 was the onset of WW2, which caused the factory to be used for the production of things like military vehicles based on the Beetle chassis, planes and the V1 flying bomb. Hell, after the war was over they even tried to give both the car and the factory away to the American and British car industries, but they simply didn't want it and the British Rootes Group evaluator even went as far as to say that it "wasn't worth a damn". As a result the factory and the car was given back to the Germans, the government of lower Saxony to be precise, and the Beetle went into mass production in 1945 (thou hamstrung for the first few years by a lack of materials).
I was wondering why the rather obvious keyboard factor was being ignored by people, but it seems like at least someone realized it...
As for why smartphones are the way they are also has to do with trying to ensure you can reach every part of the screen with the thumb of the hand you're holding the device in. When you turn the device on it's side to view video you also stop fiddling with the screen (you're watching video, not scrolling up and down a web page) so not being able to reach the other end of the display with the hand holding it from one side is not an issue. Tablets also use portrait mode displays as a matter of ergonomics and, like smartphones, they can easily be turned on their side for widescreen content, meaning that a portrait mode display doesn't ruin the device for video.
In the end, being stuck in portrait mode ruins the video viewing experience far more than than being stuck in widescreen mode ruins applications that essentially simulate reading or working on paper.
I find it kind of odd seeing how the Uber car had both LiDAR and sonar sensors that should have detected the pedestrian despite the darkness, but the car still didn't stop. The obvious suggestion as to why it didn't stop was that the control system simply couldn't react fast enough to the input from these sensor inputs, but I have a feeling it may be something else.
The thing I don't like about Tesla's Autopilot system is that at even slightly higher speeds it relies completely on the visible light cameras and image recognition to identify obstacles, other motorists, road signs and the contours of the road. This has lead to at least one fatality when a Model S driven by Autopilot crashed right into the back of a tractor trailer for the simple reason that it just couldn't tell the metallic grey color of the trailer from the sky. The company behind the tech Tesla's Autopilot system is based on, Israeli company Mobileye, had been telling Tesla for quite some time that they were overselling their system and using their tech for something it was never intended for and this was the final straw for them.
The way Tesla ties into this fatality is that Tesla chose Nvidia's Drive PX control and compute units for self-driving cars as their replacement. Like the Mobileye tech before it, the Drive PX-based system also builds first and foremost on image-recognition with visible light cameras and it's exactly the same tech that's used by Uber in their self-driving car program after they had to dump the tech stolen from Google. Thus to any system based on this tech, additional LiDAR and sonar sensors are just tacked on and thus not going to be acted upon as quickly as data coming in from the visible light cameras. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Uber hasn't even had the time to properly implement support for the LiDAR and radar sensors on their test cars into Nvidia's system.
Google/Waymo's self-driving tech on the other hand is primarily built around the LiDAR system, meaning that decisions made based on data from it is going to be acted on very rapidly. Unlike visible light cameras it's an expensive sensor, but it's not hampered by lighting conditions.
That piece of sidewalk on the median really doesn't make any sense and my guess as to why it's there is that it's some kind of remnant from the way that area used to be. The reason why I don't think it's a turning point for emergency vehicles is that it's clearly a sidewalk and to turn around at the "X" requires a vehicle with a very short turning circle. However seeing how there's no zebra crossings on either side only somebody who is completely careless or really needs to take that shortcut is going to use it.
This was more or less what I was going to write...
It's less that "the algorithm" has figured out that radical content is what glues people to the screen in the most effective way when it's literal job is to recommend content that's as interesting and engaging as possible for each given user. The proper contents of the video are completely beyond it's understanding, all it sees are the topics in the tags, how long people view the video, how many of them do, along with the likes and dislikes. If you're into running it's going to recommend you videos about running marathons and of those the ones with the most views and highest audience engagement.
What we're talking about is ascribing almost HAL 9000 type malice to a system simply too dumb to have anything of the sort.
He's already blamed them and people have complained about it because of his previous spats with the FBI.
For him blaming violent video games and movies is much more palatable than talking about lax gun laws or non-existent public mental healthcare services as his followers can't stand even the thought of additional gun laws, actually enforcing existing ones or the additional taxes that would need to be collected to pay for an actually working mental healthcare system.
Diversity can be a huge asset. There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas
There's definitely evidence of that, but only really in the sense of diversity of skills and ideas, not current day meaning of "diversity" which of race, gender, sexual orientation and other superficial traits. I point this out because a lot of people misuse this diversity proof as proof that superficial diversity is a good thing and should be pursued trough quotas, different standards and other ultimately counter-productive means. The benefits of the type of diversity most commonly talked about these days is actually on pretty shaky ground, with most studies finding no benefit or a very minor benefit/detriment.
Hey Facebook! Here's a better idea: Don't allow any election ads in the first place.
I know being a company you want all the business you can get, but sometimes it may actually be for the common good that you don't try to squeeze every penny out of everything you can squeeze.
The problem is that these things tend to be interpreted such a way that if someone says something is "harassment" or makes them feel uncomfortable, then that's taken as gospel and people's careers are seriously affected as they're kicked out of the community. We've seen this happen to people for expressing conservative views on their own personal blogs, being into a form of BSDM (with completely consensual partners of course) or just having unpopular opinions (remember seeing one person kicked off a project because he had a blog, under a pseudonym before being doxed, critical of democracy).
Technically a white nationalist can just be a white person who's a nationalist, but that doesn't mean that you should be completely open and welcoming to people who label themselves as white nationalists...
In my experience most feminists used to be very rational and people you could actually discuss issues with, but in this day and age you all too often see old feminists say that they're no longer feminists simply because what the word meant changed enough for them to no longer fall under it. They didn't change, but what feminism is did.
I know you're saying this as a joke, but it wouldn't be the first time a major project has been forked due to political reasons rather than any technical otherwise sensible reasons. Node.js for example has been forked more than once purely due to political reasons.
Looking at the labor board's decision I'd say it's pretty clear that the people who ruled against Damore made up their minds based on the faulty reporting that claimed the memo said something along the lines of "women can't do maths" and other fabrications. This is pretty clear from how when they had to base their decision on what's actually in the memo they chose the mention of women being more prone to neuroticism, which he backs up references to scientific studies, and the mention of male IQ being more unevenly distributed, which he also backs up with references to scientific studies.
Particularly the latter scientifically-backed point is so benign that claiming it's somehow sexist makes it clear that the labor board just went looking for stuff to be offended over and when they couldn't find anything genuinely offensive they went for the closest thing. A board that makes it's decisions based on bad information and then rather than changing it's mind when having to examine the actual facts has some serious serious issues.
I honestly can't say I'm surprised this is how it ended. In terms of content and audience CNN and Casey are so far apart I have a hard time understanding how anyone could think a synergy could be found. It probably was just some out of touch executive desperate to jumpstart an attempt at regaining the sub 30 market that broadcast news media has more or less completely lost.
Then again when you are CNN and part of a big corporation like Turner Broadcasting it's not exactly the end of the world if you end up throwing 25 million USD down the drain.
More probably than not they're just trying to get all the EU profits they didn't pay any taxes on back home as quickly as possible on now after the EU knows about this after someone blew the whistle on their illegal and secret deal with the Irish.
Thiel didn't shut them down because he was outed as gay, he shut them down because they kept reporting on his shady business deals.
I see the tin foil hat brigade has arrived...
In all seriousness, what really sparked Thiel's animosity towards Gawker was how they outed Thiel when they knew he was working with investors from countries with a less-than-positive view of gay people (Saudi Arabia even has the death sentence for gay people) and did so after Thiel had personally asked Nick Denton to not out him as gay. It's hard to figure out a more legitimate reason for someone to hold a grudge.
However what really killed Gawker was how they not only published something they knew had been filmed in private without the knowledge or permission of all the participants, did so knowing that said unwilling participant had expressed his clear disproval towards publishing the video and when a judge told them to take it down, they flat out refused and posted more articles based on that video.
You may not like this, but the reality is that the freedom of the press is not something that allows the media to do whatever they want and publish whatever they want to publish. All Thiel really did here was level the playing field as Terry Bollea would simply not have been able to afford anything like the kind of legal help Gawker was able to afford on his own after the tapes killed whatever was left of his career.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't change the fact that DNA testing is still multiple orders or magnitude more accurate than any other tools to solve crimes and it's not used as the only piece of evidence in a case. On the whole DNA keeps considerably more innocent people out of prison than it puts them in prison.
DNA tests not being absolutely 100% accurate has been known since law enforcement started using it as a tool to solve crimes. Anyone raising alarm right now is either decades late or just trying to stir up manufactured controversy.
The reason why DNA testing is so popular is that a false positive is a literally a one-in-a-million type scenario, which makes it several orders of magnitude more accurate and less likely to provide a false positive than any other investigative tool law enforcement has at it's disposal. There's a reason why a large part of the people who have been convicted and then found innocent in cases from before the use of DNA evidence became widespread have been done so using DNA testing.
In other words, like any of the investigative tools available to law enforcement, DNA testing is not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is several orders of magnitude more accurate than any other tool available to law enforcement meaning that if you're going to raise alarm over it's accuracy, you ought to raise an even bigger alarm over every other tool they have at their disposal.
One thing that repeatedly springs to mind is is repeated denial of the Armenian genocide. The man's repeatedly denied the genocide over many years and still hasn't admitted that it really happened like any sane person or person with some level of journalistic integrity would. No, now he's just doing a "no comment" spiel because of one of his co-hosts being Armenian with relatives that were actually killed in said genocide.
As for them somehow trying to be balanced, it's basically just the exact same spiel Fox News puts on once in a while when they want to be able to call themselves "Fair and Balanced" when anyone with who isn't an ideologue can tell that it's bullshit. You really shouldn't be convinced by the occasional lip service meant to convince their viewers who haven't turned into complete zombies that they're not a left wing Fox News anchored by a left wing Alex Jones.
You forgot the /s at the end. People, albeit mostly the really dim witted ones, may actually start to believe that the media is professional enough to actually do fact checking.
I'd hardly recommend anything by The Young Turks seeing how that lot started out pretty sane, but completely went off the deep end years ago. Their main host, Cenk Uygur, would be a left wing Alex Jones if it wasn't for that fact that unlike Alex, he isn't just playing the character of a raving loon, he actually is a complete raving loon.
Not the first time something like this has happened... Back in 2000 Sony Pictures created a made-up film critic called David Manning just so that they could put "quotes" from him on their posters and other marketing materials, even went as far as to attributing him to an actual weekly that did film reviews.
People eventually got suspicious and when Newsweek contacted the weekly he supposedly worked for they flat out said they'd never heard of him. Sony obviously didn't think they did anything wrong, which is hardly surprising seeing how around the same time they were caught having employees posing as movie goers in commercials, but they did eventually settle when sued.
The thing about planning any far reaching system is that you need to consider what the damage that can be done if people with less-than-noble intentions take control of the system and use it to further their own goals. It's not just the danger conservatives imposing their ideas on how you're supposed to live your life and think taking over the system, there's also their opposite numbers on the extreme who are particularly keen on trying to prevent people from having opinions that differ from their orthodoxy. If implemented as something run by the government this system is particularly vulnerable to politicians coming in and changing what's rewarded and what's punished to fit their goals.
If I had to come up with a name for this, it would be the "Monkey with a machine gun"-principle as I think that explains the idea itself pretty well.
Considering this and things like it have been talked about way before that show was made it's less the Chinese looking at a fictional dystopia for ideas to implement and more just the writers of a fictional dystopia hearing about Chinese plans and adding it to their fictional dystopia.
It's a horrifying idea none the less and only made even more horrifying by now having been implemented in the worst way possible in real life. Then again considering all the outrageous ways China has tried to control it's population over the decades in an effort to stop them from realizing the absurdity of their one party system this is probably business as usual from their perspective. If you can get thrown into some local Stasi equivalent's jail with nothing resembling a trial and coerced into confessing to all kinds of crazy things just for running a bookstore that sells books critical of the ruling party and system this may not even register for a lot people.
Is it just me, or does it seem like focusing your resources and trying to get the most out as little as possible has become something of a religion for companies? I know companies have in the past re-used platforms for multiple products, the best car industry example of this is the VW Golf chassis used in over a dozen different models from 4 different makes, but it seems like literally everyone wants to do that now.
It's not just re-using underlying tech, you also see companies more often not only farm out the production of both generic components and those specific to them, but also farm out the development of even the application-specific components to the subcontractors who make them. Boeing did with the 787 Dreamliner and the end result of that was huge delays and cost overruns along with some serious doubts on their safety and quality as leaked documents show that they've bypassed their own internal quality and safety standards for schedule-related reasons.
That may apply to the Italian auto industry (Fiat got brand new factory and was able to completely re-tool), but the Japanese car industry was mostly re-built by the British and the the project that lead to the creation of VW and the Bettle was started on Hitler's personal orders and was obviously pre Marshall Plan. Not only was the Beetle developed to the point of being ready for mass production pre WW2, they also finished the Wolfsburg factory (which is still VW's main factory) just as WW2 was getting under way.
The only reason it didn't go into mass production in 1940/1941 was the onset of WW2, which caused the factory to be used for the production of things like military vehicles based on the Beetle chassis, planes and the V1 flying bomb. Hell, after the war was over they even tried to give both the car and the factory away to the American and British car industries, but they simply didn't want it and the British Rootes Group evaluator even went as far as to say that it "wasn't worth a damn". As a result the factory and the car was given back to the Germans, the government of lower Saxony to be precise, and the Beetle went into mass production in 1945 (thou hamstrung for the first few years by a lack of materials).
I was wondering why the rather obvious keyboard factor was being ignored by people, but it seems like at least someone realized it...
As for why smartphones are the way they are also has to do with trying to ensure you can reach every part of the screen with the thumb of the hand you're holding the device in. When you turn the device on it's side to view video you also stop fiddling with the screen (you're watching video, not scrolling up and down a web page) so not being able to reach the other end of the display with the hand holding it from one side is not an issue. Tablets also use portrait mode displays as a matter of ergonomics and, like smartphones, they can easily be turned on their side for widescreen content, meaning that a portrait mode display doesn't ruin the device for video.
In the end, being stuck in portrait mode ruins the video viewing experience far more than than being stuck in widescreen mode ruins applications that essentially simulate reading or working on paper.
It's more like they're suing Facebook for allowing advertisers to chose who to spam with better accuracy than usual.
I find it kind of odd seeing how the Uber car had both LiDAR and sonar sensors that should have detected the pedestrian despite the darkness, but the car still didn't stop. The obvious suggestion as to why it didn't stop was that the control system simply couldn't react fast enough to the input from these sensor inputs, but I have a feeling it may be something else.
The thing I don't like about Tesla's Autopilot system is that at even slightly higher speeds it relies completely on the visible light cameras and image recognition to identify obstacles, other motorists, road signs and the contours of the road. This has lead to at least one fatality when a Model S driven by Autopilot crashed right into the back of a tractor trailer for the simple reason that it just couldn't tell the metallic grey color of the trailer from the sky. The company behind the tech Tesla's Autopilot system is based on, Israeli company Mobileye, had been telling Tesla for quite some time that they were overselling their system and using their tech for something it was never intended for and this was the final straw for them.
The way Tesla ties into this fatality is that Tesla chose Nvidia's Drive PX control and compute units for self-driving cars as their replacement. Like the Mobileye tech before it, the Drive PX-based system also builds first and foremost on image-recognition with visible light cameras and it's exactly the same tech that's used by Uber in their self-driving car program after they had to dump the tech stolen from Google. Thus to any system based on this tech, additional LiDAR and sonar sensors are just tacked on and thus not going to be acted upon as quickly as data coming in from the visible light cameras. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Uber hasn't even had the time to properly implement support for the LiDAR and radar sensors on their test cars into Nvidia's system.
Google/Waymo's self-driving tech on the other hand is primarily built around the LiDAR system, meaning that decisions made based on data from it is going to be acted on very rapidly. Unlike visible light cameras it's an expensive sensor, but it's not hampered by lighting conditions.
That piece of sidewalk on the median really doesn't make any sense and my guess as to why it's there is that it's some kind of remnant from the way that area used to be. The reason why I don't think it's a turning point for emergency vehicles is that it's clearly a sidewalk and to turn around at the "X" requires a vehicle with a very short turning circle. However seeing how there's no zebra crossings on either side only somebody who is completely careless or really needs to take that shortcut is going to use it.
This was more or less what I was going to write...
It's less that "the algorithm" has figured out that radical content is what glues people to the screen in the most effective way when it's literal job is to recommend content that's as interesting and engaging as possible for each given user. The proper contents of the video are completely beyond it's understanding, all it sees are the topics in the tags, how long people view the video, how many of them do, along with the likes and dislikes. If you're into running it's going to recommend you videos about running marathons and of those the ones with the most views and highest audience engagement.
What we're talking about is ascribing almost HAL 9000 type malice to a system simply too dumb to have anything of the sort.
He's already blamed them and people have complained about it because of his previous spats with the FBI.
For him blaming violent video games and movies is much more palatable than talking about lax gun laws or non-existent public mental healthcare services as his followers can't stand even the thought of additional gun laws, actually enforcing existing ones or the additional taxes that would need to be collected to pay for an actually working mental healthcare system.
Diversity can be a huge asset. There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas
There's definitely evidence of that, but only really in the sense of diversity of skills and ideas, not current day meaning of "diversity" which of race, gender, sexual orientation and other superficial traits. I point this out because a lot of people misuse this diversity proof as proof that superficial diversity is a good thing and should be pursued trough quotas, different standards and other ultimately counter-productive means. The benefits of the type of diversity most commonly talked about these days is actually on pretty shaky ground, with most studies finding no benefit or a very minor benefit/detriment.
Hey Facebook! Here's a better idea: Don't allow any election ads in the first place.
I know being a company you want all the business you can get, but sometimes it may actually be for the common good that you don't try to squeeze every penny out of everything you can squeeze.
The problem is that these things tend to be interpreted such a way that if someone says something is "harassment" or makes them feel uncomfortable, then that's taken as gospel and people's careers are seriously affected as they're kicked out of the community. We've seen this happen to people for expressing conservative views on their own personal blogs, being into a form of BSDM (with completely consensual partners of course) or just having unpopular opinions (remember seeing one person kicked off a project because he had a blog, under a pseudonym before being doxed, critical of democracy).
Technically a white nationalist can just be a white person who's a nationalist, but that doesn't mean that you should be completely open and welcoming to people who label themselves as white nationalists...
In my experience most feminists used to be very rational and people you could actually discuss issues with, but in this day and age you all too often see old feminists say that they're no longer feminists simply because what the word meant changed enough for them to no longer fall under it. They didn't change, but what feminism is did.
I know you're saying this as a joke, but it wouldn't be the first time a major project has been forked due to political reasons rather than any technical otherwise sensible reasons. Node.js for example has been forked more than once purely due to political reasons.
Looking at the labor board's decision I'd say it's pretty clear that the people who ruled against Damore made up their minds based on the faulty reporting that claimed the memo said something along the lines of "women can't do maths" and other fabrications. This is pretty clear from how when they had to base their decision on what's actually in the memo they chose the mention of women being more prone to neuroticism, which he backs up references to scientific studies, and the mention of male IQ being more unevenly distributed, which he also backs up with references to scientific studies.
Particularly the latter scientifically-backed point is so benign that claiming it's somehow sexist makes it clear that the labor board just went looking for stuff to be offended over and when they couldn't find anything genuinely offensive they went for the closest thing. A board that makes it's decisions based on bad information and then rather than changing it's mind when having to examine the actual facts has some serious serious issues.
I honestly can't say I'm surprised this is how it ended. In terms of content and audience CNN and Casey are so far apart I have a hard time understanding how anyone could think a synergy could be found. It probably was just some out of touch executive desperate to jumpstart an attempt at regaining the sub 30 market that broadcast news media has more or less completely lost.
Then again when you are CNN and part of a big corporation like Turner Broadcasting it's not exactly the end of the world if you end up throwing 25 million USD down the drain.
More probably than not they're just trying to get all the EU profits they didn't pay any taxes on back home as quickly as possible on now after the EU knows about this after someone blew the whistle on their illegal and secret deal with the Irish.
Thiel didn't shut them down because he was outed as gay, he shut them down because they kept reporting on his shady business deals.
I see the tin foil hat brigade has arrived... In all seriousness, what really sparked Thiel's animosity towards Gawker was how they outed Thiel when they knew he was working with investors from countries with a less-than-positive view of gay people (Saudi Arabia even has the death sentence for gay people) and did so after Thiel had personally asked Nick Denton to not out him as gay. It's hard to figure out a more legitimate reason for someone to hold a grudge.
However what really killed Gawker was how they not only published something they knew had been filmed in private without the knowledge or permission of all the participants, did so knowing that said unwilling participant had expressed his clear disproval towards publishing the video and when a judge told them to take it down, they flat out refused and posted more articles based on that video.
You may not like this, but the reality is that the freedom of the press is not something that allows the media to do whatever they want and publish whatever they want to publish. All Thiel really did here was level the playing field as Terry Bollea would simply not have been able to afford anything like the kind of legal help Gawker was able to afford on his own after the tapes killed whatever was left of his career.