AFAIK the results of the FBI raid on Manasfort's home have not been publicly revealed. *I* sure don't know what they found, and I don't believe you do either.
I find Trump's public actions to be consistent with the claim that he was sponsored in some way by Russia. But given his personality that's not proof that he was. He has long had worship attitude towards dictators and tyrants, so it could just be hero worship. Neither choice causes me to thing better of him. There was speculation before the election that Russia had blackmail material on him, but my feeling was that given his actions during the campaign I couldn't imagine what possible blackmail material there could be. He didn't seem to be ashamed of any action...and the weird thing is neither were his supporters.
There's evidence that it was a Russian hack, but there isn't proof. And there isn't proof that there wasn't a Russian hack. Why would you expect evidence of either?
For that matter, saying it was internal corruption isn't proof that it wasn't masterminded by Russia. Or that it was. Why would you expect it to be?
Most things aren't really determinable. Now ask yourself why it matters. Some things are known, like that Trump publicly asked the Russians to hack the Democrats, and that Russia took all reasonable advantage. Some things can't be determined. You should base your actions and beliefs on known facts rather than on guesses of estimated plausibility as much as you can. When you can't tell for sure, then it's best to remain undecided...until you *need* to take some action that would be different if your guesses are correct. Then, of course, you go with your best guess, but you still shouldn't pretend it was more than your best guess.
I think you're applying the razor incorrectly. I'll agree that a direct copy to a usb stick was likely, but was that the original copy? I know of no evidence.
I can't choose between "somebody snuck in and copied it onto a usb stick" and "it was copied off somewhere, and sometime later THAT version was copied to a usb stick". Perhaps I'm missing relevant information, but I doubt it. I suspect that the information to make a decision isn't available.
P.S.: What relevance does trans-Atlantic communication speed have? It not like there aren't local servers available. It could even have transitioned through Amazon's cloud. Files get copied all the time, and often end up with time stamps based on when they were most recently copied...not that that couldn't be faked, but why even bother.
It's probably a more extreme statement than is accurate. The Mongols killed huge numbers of people *not* under their rule before being conquered. But I believe both China and Egypt developed a policy of when there was a crop failure stealing all the food from the "less loyal" provinces and distributing it to the loyal provinces. In both cases this resulted in massive deaths, but how much was just redistribution of deaths that would have happened anyway is uncertain.
You could also reasonably count all soldiers killed in war as people being killed by their own government. Especially those of draftees. But in cases where the action was defensive it's not clear that this isn't just redistributing deaths that would have happened anyway. You can even sometimes make that argument in wars of aggression.
All that said, population numbers have been increasing so rapidly, that you can basically ignore all deaths before about 1800 if you're just counting numbers. You could even declare that "anybody born over 100 years ago would be dead by now anyway". But governments are both one of the largest threats AND one of the largest defenders of human life at any one time. And your own government usually sits on both sides of that balance. Exceptions exist, like Pot Pol, but they are rare. And there are also exceptions in the other direction, also rare, and not very visible. Sweden probably counts as one in the decade of the 1990s. (You've got to index that by time, and you need to look at historic data to be sure that you aren't being mislead by biased news coverage. Also, consider Iceland. The government can't take credit for the defense given by isolation. Otherwise it would probably replace Sweden as my beneficial example.)
You've got a bit of a point. I keep a virtual copy of Red Hat 5.x specifically to allow me to run a few favorite games. But I run them under virtualization and with no internet connection.
OTOH, I gave up all my favorite windows games when I switched to Linux around 1995 (plus or minus a few years...the switch was fuzzy because for awhile I dual booted). And Wine *still* won't run those MSWind95 games well.
Well.... they'd need to be pretty small, and also to not evaporate via Hawking radiation. Tiny black holes evaporating would release light at a known frequency that hasn't been detected (or hadn't been a decade ago, when I was paying attention). And the black holes would need to be primordial, because otherwise they'd affect the proportion of Lithium in the interstellar dust. So they can't have been engaging in nuclear reactions while that was being formed (*quite* early in the process). And they'd need to have a small enough capture cross-section that they wouldn't be capturing matter from a dense cloud back before the hyper inflation finished.
So you aren't talking about any normal black hole, but something rather special. Special enough to probably deserve a new name. I'm not sure what you're thinking the mass that would be necessary to create the gravity to cause the black hole is made from, but it would appear to need to be electrically neutral. The only thing that occurs to me is something like photonium, but how you'd get photons close enough and dense enough to create a Schwartzchild radius, even under those conditions, I can't imagine. Still, a black hole created of bound photons MIGHT not emit Hawking radiation. (I wouldn't want to bet on that, but the things would need to have a radius small enough that it might work.)
I actually think speculations about what exploded to create the big bang are more profitable than this one.
I don't think you should expect "conscientiousness" to be randomly distributed. In areas where people are stressed for other reasons one should expect "conscientiousness" to be lower. Your second point, however, that "then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town" does, indeed, appear valid.
A 20 minute sample sounds like honest direct observation. If a system is corrupt, I wouldn't expect someone who was complaining about it to be allowed to observe very long.
The problem with IRV and Condorcet voting is information overload. In order to choose between all the candidates you need to have some idea of what they all stand for. Even with the current system I often don't know anything about the Judges or school board members I'm supposed to vote for. Either IRV or Condorcet voting would make this worse.
You have a point, but not the one you probably think.
No candidate in recent times would have won a strict majority wins vote. What we've really got is a plurality wins vote, which means that if four candidates are running it's possible to win with 25.01% of the vote. And people know that, so they are coerced into voting for the one of the two front-runners who they despise least....or not even bothering to vote.
All systems have their problems. I favor the Condorcet system, many prefer the Instant Runoff system (which is easier to explain, and nearly as good). Plurality wins is a terrible system. It's main purpose is to get people to accept whichever candidate wins. (Well, truthfully it has the secondary purpose that nobody with enough power to challenge the system effectively should feel treated unfairly enough that they will do so. This goes back to the Magna Charta from Britain.)
While it is, indeed, tough to create fair voting district boundaries, to approximate fairness is relatively easy compared to the effort that is put into gerrymandering.
OTOH, since gerrymandering isn't a criminal activity, it's not, legally at least, corruption. I may think it *ought* to be, but that's a separate matter.
It may, or may not, be Trump propaganda. It's also, however, true. E.g., if it weren't for local corruption, it would be more difficult to hack voting machines...and impossible to do it remotely.
That said, for a politician to conspire with a foreign government against the US should be treated as a serious felony. Period. That neither means nor implies that that is the only problem going on...or even that it's the worst. (AFAIKT the Russians only engaged in propaganda and a bit of hacking of non-government systems. Much of what they did was legal by the laws of the US, and the rest doesn't seem to rise to the level of deportable crime...even if you could name an individual.) I think that the election was really decided because nobody really liked Hillary, and some (to my mind stupid) people liked Trump.
They've also occasionally gotten my name wrong when I changed party affiliation. Whoops, I guess I was registered twice. I didn't vote twice.
If the data were trustworthy, that would be good evidence of corruption, but it takes more than an assertion before I'll believe the data. (OTOH, most rural counties in California are conservative, so what are you even trying to prove?)
No. The problem is the size of the inventor pool. If there were 30 or 300 people inventing in an area, it would be a reasonable argument. If there are 300,000 it's quite weak. You're going to get more than one independent invention, and there's no reason to grant any particular one of them an exclusive monopoly.
If it were allowed as a defense against a patent that you had independently invented it, then you might have a valid point. Unfortunately, all to often something is granted for an "obvious patent" that really *is* obvious if you are trying to deal with the problem it addresses, but which you don't think of if you aren't, and which you wouldn't bother patenting anyway.
What you say is true of a non-reactive dust, like, say coal. But Plutonium is supposed to have a strong affinity for tissue that tends to lead it to lodge in the bones. So I don't think the kidneys and liver would excrete much. I suppose being a *heavy* metal wouldn't impair the actions of the mucus/cilia much, but I believe it would result in extensive absorption in the intestines.
If you are an expert in the field, then I apologize, for being so dubious about your explanation, as it *could* happen that way. It just don't think it would. OTOH, the prior reports I heard ("Immediate high amputation is the only possible treatment!") did have to do with larger particles lodging under the skin.
Where do you get your water? One reason for the cleanup is that it started leaking into the water. (They may have caught this almost immediately, I read the story a few years ago, but that was what finally convinced them to do the cleanup.)
Plutonium's a heavy metal. It's also quite chemically active. Probably most of what they inhaled that wasn't exhaled in the next breath will stay with them for life.
I'm no expert, but if that isn't true, I'd like to know the mechanism.
I'm speculating well out of my area of knowledge, but...
You're thinking of heating it considerably hotter than I was thinking of. I wasn't thinking of up to annealing temperature, but a bit below that. I wasn't so much thinking of growing the grain size as allowing impurities to dissipate (I think that's how it works). Vacuum welds can be pretty strong if you have a good vacuum and smooth surfaces, but get a little air or other impurity in there and they become a lot weaker. But clearly what I'm proposing would necessarily be for very small pieces. And you'd probably need to run the oven in a good vacuum. As you said, probably not practical.
You're pretty much right about the "Linux Foundation". "Well respected" isn't a reasonable description, unless you specify who is doing the respecting. The Linux Foundation has a history of questionable decisions and actions, and is actually less to be trusted than is Red Hat (which *used* to be reasonably trusted).
Actually, calling a agent "respected" is PR fluff unless you specify who is doing the respected. With the proper groups doing the respecting you could get "internationally respected bank robber" being a valid description. *I* respect Linus, but there are lots of people who don't. I also respect RMS, but again there are lots of people who don't. Note that this doesn't make *any* of us wrong. We may be judging by different criteria.
That sounds plausible. Cold welds usually aren't very strong. But perhaps you could heat it afterwards? You wouldn't want to get it up to the point where it started deforming, but holding it just below that for a day or so might make it a lot stronger.
Odd, I don't get skeptical unless they're asking ME to invest. It doesn't cost me anything to think where this might go, and I find the process enjoyable.
Now if I were going to make an action based on this, then that would be a different matter. But I've gotten mildly enthusiastic about loads of things dating back to the Astounding Science Fiction "Dean Drive" article. It's been enjoyable, and cheaper than most entertainment.
Yes, you are speculating. There is nothing about a solid electrolyte that means that you can have faster charge rates. Often it's just the opposite.
Perhaps that it correct, but it seems to me that a solid electrolyte battery might well be lighter (and tip resistant), so it might greatly facilitate a battery exchange approach. OTOH, that always bothers me, because unlike gas, which is nearly standardized, batteries degrade with repeated charges.
Depends on your use case. I need a car I can charge the battery of, and I can't get power to the curb. So for me a Prius would be a much better choice. Unfortunately, I also need a self-driving car...so it'll be a few years.
Needing to keep then at ~300C just limits the domain of use, it doesn't say they aren't useful. You wouldn't use something like that in a laptop, but it might make a great line ballast (wrong word?). Another responder said they are in current use at electric plants (to store heat?)...seems plausible.
300C isn't really all that hot, it just means you need good insulation, which means you don't use small batteries, and you don't use it where you need a small, light, battery.
OTOH, were they ever proposed to store electricity? I haven't heard that. The places I've heard them proposed they were storing heat to feed to a steam turbine or some such. It would be the turbine (or some such) that would produce the electricity.
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AFAIK the results of the FBI raid on Manasfort's home have not been publicly revealed. *I* sure don't know what they found, and I don't believe you do either.
I find Trump's public actions to be consistent with the claim that he was sponsored in some way by Russia. But given his personality that's not proof that he was. He has long had worship attitude towards dictators and tyrants, so it could just be hero worship. Neither choice causes me to thing better of him. There was speculation before the election that Russia had blackmail material on him, but my feeling was that given his actions during the campaign I couldn't imagine what possible blackmail material there could be. He didn't seem to be ashamed of any action...and the weird thing is neither were his supporters.
There's evidence that it was a Russian hack, but there isn't proof. And there isn't proof that there wasn't a Russian hack. Why would you expect evidence of either?
For that matter, saying it was internal corruption isn't proof that it wasn't masterminded by Russia. Or that it was. Why would you expect it to be?
Most things aren't really determinable. Now ask yourself why it matters. Some things are known, like that Trump publicly asked the Russians to hack the Democrats, and that Russia took all reasonable advantage. Some things can't be determined. You should base your actions and beliefs on known facts rather than on guesses of estimated plausibility as much as you can. When you can't tell for sure, then it's best to remain undecided...until you *need* to take some action that would be different if your guesses are correct. Then, of course, you go with your best guess, but you still shouldn't pretend it was more than your best guess.
I think you're applying the razor incorrectly. I'll agree that a direct copy to a usb stick was likely, but was that the original copy? I know of no evidence.
I can't choose between "somebody snuck in and copied it onto a usb stick" and "it was copied off somewhere, and sometime later THAT version was copied to a usb stick". Perhaps I'm missing relevant information, but I doubt it. I suspect that the information to make a decision isn't available.
P.S.: What relevance does trans-Atlantic communication speed have? It not like there aren't local servers available. It could even have transitioned through Amazon's cloud. Files get copied all the time, and often end up with time stamps based on when they were most recently copied...not that that couldn't be faked, but why even bother.
It's probably a more extreme statement than is accurate. The Mongols killed huge numbers of people *not* under their rule before being conquered. But I believe both China and Egypt developed a policy of when there was a crop failure stealing all the food from the "less loyal" provinces and distributing it to the loyal provinces. In both cases this resulted in massive deaths, but how much was just redistribution of deaths that would have happened anyway is uncertain.
You could also reasonably count all soldiers killed in war as people being killed by their own government. Especially those of draftees. But in cases where the action was defensive it's not clear that this isn't just redistributing deaths that would have happened anyway. You can even sometimes make that argument in wars of aggression.
All that said, population numbers have been increasing so rapidly, that you can basically ignore all deaths before about 1800 if you're just counting numbers. You could even declare that "anybody born over 100 years ago would be dead by now anyway". But governments are both one of the largest threats AND one of the largest defenders of human life at any one time. And your own government usually sits on both sides of that balance. Exceptions exist, like Pot Pol, but they are rare. And there are also exceptions in the other direction, also rare, and not very visible. Sweden probably counts as one in the decade of the 1990s. (You've got to index that by time, and you need to look at historic data to be sure that you aren't being mislead by biased news coverage. Also, consider Iceland. The government can't take credit for the defense given by isolation. Otherwise it would probably replace Sweden as my beneficial example.)
What's a centar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... doesn't seem to make sense in context.
You've got a bit of a point. I keep a virtual copy of Red Hat 5.x specifically to allow me to run a few favorite games. But I run them under virtualization and with no internet connection.
OTOH, I gave up all my favorite windows games when I switched to Linux around 1995 (plus or minus a few years...the switch was fuzzy because for awhile I dual booted). And Wine *still* won't run those MSWind95 games well.
Well.... they'd need to be pretty small, and also to not evaporate via Hawking radiation. Tiny black holes evaporating would release light at a known frequency that hasn't been detected (or hadn't been a decade ago, when I was paying attention). And the black holes would need to be primordial, because otherwise they'd affect the proportion of Lithium in the interstellar dust. So they can't have been engaging in nuclear reactions while that was being formed (*quite* early in the process). And they'd need to have a small enough capture cross-section that they wouldn't be capturing matter from a dense cloud back before the hyper inflation finished.
So you aren't talking about any normal black hole, but something rather special. Special enough to probably deserve a new name. I'm not sure what you're thinking the mass that would be necessary to create the gravity to cause the black hole is made from, but it would appear to need to be electrically neutral. The only thing that occurs to me is something like photonium, but how you'd get photons close enough and dense enough to create a Schwartzchild radius, even under those conditions, I can't imagine. Still, a black hole created of bound photons MIGHT not emit Hawking radiation. (I wouldn't want to bet on that, but the things would need to have a radius small enough that it might work.)
I actually think speculations about what exploded to create the big bang are more profitable than this one.
I don't think you should expect "conscientiousness" to be randomly distributed. In areas where people are stressed for other reasons one should expect "conscientiousness" to be lower. Your second point, however, that "then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town" does, indeed, appear valid.
A 20 minute sample sounds like honest direct observation. If a system is corrupt, I wouldn't expect someone who was complaining about it to be allowed to observe very long.
The problem with IRV and Condorcet voting is information overload. In order to choose between all the candidates you need to have some idea of what they all stand for. Even with the current system I often don't know anything about the Judges or school board members I'm supposed to vote for. Either IRV or Condorcet voting would make this worse.
You have a point, but not the one you probably think.
No candidate in recent times would have won a strict majority wins vote. What we've really got is a plurality wins vote, which means that if four candidates are running it's possible to win with 25.01% of the vote. And people know that, so they are coerced into voting for the one of the two front-runners who they despise least....or not even bothering to vote.
All systems have their problems. I favor the Condorcet system, many prefer the Instant Runoff system (which is easier to explain, and nearly as good). Plurality wins is a terrible system. It's main purpose is to get people to accept whichever candidate wins. (Well, truthfully it has the secondary purpose that nobody with enough power to challenge the system effectively should feel treated unfairly enough that they will do so. This goes back to the Magna Charta from Britain.)
While it is, indeed, tough to create fair voting district boundaries, to approximate fairness is relatively easy compared to the effort that is put into gerrymandering.
OTOH, since gerrymandering isn't a criminal activity, it's not, legally at least, corruption. I may think it *ought* to be, but that's a separate matter.
It may, or may not, be Trump propaganda. It's also, however, true. E.g., if it weren't for local corruption, it would be more difficult to hack voting machines...and impossible to do it remotely.
That said, for a politician to conspire with a foreign government against the US should be treated as a serious felony. Period. That neither means nor implies that that is the only problem going on...or even that it's the worst. (AFAIKT the Russians only engaged in propaganda and a bit of hacking of non-government systems. Much of what they did was legal by the laws of the US, and the rest doesn't seem to rise to the level of deportable crime...even if you could name an individual.) I think that the election was really decided because nobody really liked Hillary, and some (to my mind stupid) people liked Trump.
They've also occasionally gotten my name wrong when I changed party affiliation. Whoops, I guess I was registered twice. I didn't vote twice.
If the data were trustworthy, that would be good evidence of corruption, but it takes more than an assertion before I'll believe the data. (OTOH, most rural counties in California are conservative, so what are you even trying to prove?)
No. The problem is the size of the inventor pool. If there were 30 or 300 people inventing in an area, it would be a reasonable argument. If there are 300,000 it's quite weak. You're going to get more than one independent invention, and there's no reason to grant any particular one of them an exclusive monopoly.
If it were allowed as a defense against a patent that you had independently invented it, then you might have a valid point. Unfortunately, all to often something is granted for an "obvious patent" that really *is* obvious if you are trying to deal with the problem it addresses, but which you don't think of if you aren't, and which you wouldn't bother patenting anyway.
What you say is true of a non-reactive dust, like, say coal. But Plutonium is supposed to have a strong affinity for tissue that tends to lead it to lodge in the bones. So I don't think the kidneys and liver would excrete much. I suppose being a *heavy* metal wouldn't impair the actions of the mucus/cilia much, but I believe it would result in extensive absorption in the intestines.
If you are an expert in the field, then I apologize, for being so dubious about your explanation, as it *could* happen that way. It just don't think it would. OTOH, the prior reports I heard ("Immediate high amputation is the only possible treatment!") did have to do with larger particles lodging under the skin.
Where do you get your water? One reason for the cleanup is that it started leaking into the water. (They may have caught this almost immediately, I read the story a few years ago, but that was what finally convinced them to do the cleanup.)
Plutonium's a heavy metal. It's also quite chemically active. Probably most of what they inhaled that wasn't exhaled in the next breath will stay with them for life.
I'm no expert, but if that isn't true, I'd like to know the mechanism.
I'm speculating well out of my area of knowledge, but...
You're thinking of heating it considerably hotter than I was thinking of. I wasn't thinking of up to annealing temperature, but a bit below that. I wasn't so much thinking of growing the grain size as allowing impurities to dissipate (I think that's how it works). Vacuum welds can be pretty strong if you have a good vacuum and smooth surfaces, but get a little air or other impurity in there and they become a lot weaker. But clearly what I'm proposing would necessarily be for very small pieces. And you'd probably need to run the oven in a good vacuum. As you said, probably not practical.
You're pretty much right about the "Linux Foundation". "Well respected" isn't a reasonable description, unless you specify who is doing the respecting. The Linux Foundation has a history of questionable decisions and actions, and is actually less to be trusted than is Red Hat (which *used* to be reasonably trusted).
Actually, calling a agent "respected" is PR fluff unless you specify who is doing the respected. With the proper groups doing the respecting you could get "internationally respected bank robber" being a valid description. *I* respect Linus, but there are lots of people who don't. I also respect RMS, but again there are lots of people who don't. Note that this doesn't make *any* of us wrong. We may be judging by different criteria.
That sounds plausible. Cold welds usually aren't very strong. But perhaps you could heat it afterwards? You wouldn't want to get it up to the point where it started deforming, but holding it just below that for a day or so might make it a lot stronger.
Odd, I don't get skeptical unless they're asking ME to invest. It doesn't cost me anything to think where this might go, and I find the process enjoyable.
Now if I were going to make an action based on this, then that would be a different matter. But I've gotten mildly enthusiastic about loads of things dating back to the Astounding Science Fiction "Dean Drive" article. It's been enjoyable, and cheaper than most entertainment.
Yes, you are speculating. There is nothing about a solid electrolyte that means that you can have faster charge rates. Often it's just the opposite.
Perhaps that it correct, but it seems to me that a solid electrolyte battery might well be lighter (and tip resistant), so it might greatly facilitate a battery exchange approach. OTOH, that always bothers me, because unlike gas, which is nearly standardized, batteries degrade with repeated charges.
Depends on your use case. I need a car I can charge the battery of, and I can't get power to the curb. So for me a Prius would be a much better choice. Unfortunately, I also need a self-driving car...so it'll be a few years.
Needing to keep then at ~300C just limits the domain of use, it doesn't say they aren't useful. You wouldn't use something like that in a laptop, but it might make a great line ballast (wrong word?). Another responder said they are in current use at electric plants (to store heat?)...seems plausible.
300C isn't really all that hot, it just means you need good insulation, which means you don't use small batteries, and you don't use it where you need a small, light, battery.
OTOH, were they ever proposed to store electricity? I haven't heard that. The places I've heard them proposed they were storing heat to feed to a steam turbine or some such. It would be the turbine (or some such) that would produce the electricity.