While true, he was accused of the crime by police. Prosecutors then chose to carry forward the case. The judge allowed it to go forward. The jury convicted him based on the instructions of the judge.
Another court reviewed the verdict and found that the evidence of conspiracy was weak enough to toss it.
But the government is appealing that ruling.
It was the first case that came up on a google search - first search result for "thought crime conspiracy". The EFF got involved because of the morphing of computer fraud from hacking into a database into "violating the terms of service".
Basically, this is a nice cautionary tale for 'bad cases make for bad law'. Who knows if the original verdict or the reversal will stick? But he still faces life in prison for what plausibly was just online role playing. Yet another case where talking about something is much worse than actually doing it. Minus the cannibalism angle, you can murder someone and get much less than life in prison.
I don't know enough about the case to have an opinion. But I do know that if the people with the authority decide they want to get you, you are truly screwed. Particularly if those people are Federal prosecutors. Their power is so vast at this point that they pretty much just threaten people enough that they 'volunteer' to move to jail for a few years rather than risk life in prison.
There are biological foundations to this issue. I used to work with researchers at the Yerkes Primate Center who were working on this very problem. The idea is that males want to ensure the paternity of their children if they are going to expend resources raising them. So they are protective of their sex partner. Females want to ensure that they have the help they need in providing for their offspring, so they desire a faithful partner. These needs drive the species toward monogamy.
At the same time, females want to enhance the odds of successful offspring by having more than one mating partner. (Partners who would be notoriously bad as long term spouses are particularly attractive... the bad-boy alpha male) Males also want to enhance their chances of having successful offspring by having partners that do not require them to stay around and provide for the kids. So both genders have an incentive to secretly violate the monogamous bond.
Therefore you see a continuum of activities along these lines within and among human societies. One of the researchers reported that as many as 1/3 to 1/2 of all children in the pre-industrialized societies she examined were the result of illicit affairs. Most of these societies frowned on infidelity much more than we in the west do.
Enter game theory and genetics, which argue for a balancing act between the two competing needs, with different people taking different strategies and feeling different drives. Another researcher at Yerkes gave a talk about the "seven year itch". She had evidence that suggested a biological basis for the lagging emotions of marriages a few years along - with parallel evidence from other species. You know that "he's just not romantic any more" trope that is trotted out to explain a flagging libido and attraction to other partners? She had a theory that this was an instinctual result of changing hormones affecting the brain. The end result was to drive a woman to seek out other sex partners in order to ensure genetic diversity in her offspring.
So the answer is yes, it is complicated.
BTW, I'm in your camp. I would never consider cheating, and have a few decades of experience to back up that characterization of my own proclivities. But I do recognize that this is not everyone's experience. And I've been close enough to a few people who took a different path to know that it isn't just culture or upbringing that makes for fidelity.
This is the perfect kind of case for this sort of thing - not only is the talk about something criminal, it is disgusting and morally repugnant. Really easy to get everyone worked up over something like that.
Conspiring to skirt federal open records laws? Nah, not so much. Even if officials actually carry out that sort of conspiracy.
If a banker wants to write a memo telling how to screw customers, but then he never actually screws any customers over, nor do any of his underlings, then he's fine. That's no different than writing a fictional story about committing a murder.
#3 is different because that falls under the "incitement" condition.
Actually, I don't think this is correct. I'm not sure how far you have to go, but simply talking speculatively about committing a crime can be a crime. Sometimes a much more serious crime than the crime being discussed. It is called a "criminal conspiracy" and in many countries (including the US - see US v. Shabani) you don't need to take any overt actions in furtherance of the conspiracy in order to be convicted.
That's just an absolutely ridiculous take for anyone even remotely familiar with the Knox case. At no point in the proceedings did the Italian justice system live up to the barest minimum standards of justice of the industrialized world.
This is not unique to Italy, although there were quite a few Italian quirks to the whole fiasco. Claiming that a prosecutor being able to successfully throw his weight around to defend the honor of the Italian legal system is somehow an indictment of the rights afforded US citizens is just plain silly.
And no, people successfully abusing their authority when they don't like what someone has to say is not unique to Italy. We just had a case in the US where a judge got pissed that some online commentors dissed her verdict in the Silk Road trial. That happened in a country where constitutional law and several directly related supreme court rulings have shown that this sort of behavior is illegal.
The moral: People with power are human beings. And human beings are capable of doing the wrong thing from time to time.
The cartoons that we all loved when we were kids in the 70's absolutely blew. But the live action stuff was way worse for the most part. Other than Sesame Street and The Electric Company, we had miserable crap like Zoom and much worse... the stylings of Sid and Marty Croft.
Amazon is doing a pretty good job with their new series. They have Annedroids as a direct competitor to the old Saturday Morning live action stuff. It is hokey, and the CGI is low budget. But it is pretty entertaining to the elementary school crowd. Gortimer Gibbon's is sort of a twilight zone meets the Hardy Boys for elementary school kids. Also pretty entertaining and fairly well done - if you are in the target demo.
Nothing to the level of the animated stuff available from Disney, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network though. Several of their animated series hold up from elementary all the way to adults. I really don't see college kids glomming onto any of these live action series as stoner favorites. So they aren't that great, but they are better than "Land of the Lost".
This has been my experience as well - dating back to the late 80's. A principle investigator is basically a grant-writing machine who has built enough of a reputation to get his grants funded. He also has to come up with new areas of inquiry and prod his students and post-docs into getting enough data to write a grant for that line of investigation.
They visit the lab, but pretty much never get to do the bench work. And the distance from the lab means that they cannot remember how long things take, so they are always wondering why everyone is so much slower to get the result than they expect.
Being a P.I. is even harder these days, because the funding for the NSF and NIH, etc. have not kept up with the demand. They used to write 2-3 grants expecting to get one funded. These days it is more like 5-8. That is a lot of wheel spinning - writing a grant is not in and of itself productive work.
This is the way it worked when I was in biomedical research 20 years ago. The grad student or post doc who did the work and wrote the paper got to be second author. The principle investigator with the grant got to be first author or last author, depending on the lab or paper. There's a whole cultural system for deciding the order of authors on papers, with varying collaborators getting credit.
In the papers I was involved with the P.I. of the lab that let us have some monoclonal antibody they had developed got to be an author, as did the chemist who synthesized a custom vitamin A derivative for the project. So did the PhD who started the project years ago as a grad student, but hadn't been involved in a dozen years. The lab assistant who did most of the work for the project might have gotten an acknowledgement.
Do you really buy that notion? A lot of people on Slashdot were around for the Reagan-Gorbachev talks. Reagan offered to eliminate all nuclear missiles and share a missile defense shield with the Soviets. The two leaders went off on a wild spree of cooperation, leaving their advisors behind, almost agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. They almost had that agreement done at Reykjavík. None of the advisors and tier-two politicians were on board at that point. As soon as they went back to their rooms the walking back began, but a deal was on the table that could have included sharing missile defense research with the Soviets, even though there was nothing that was remotely ready to deploy.
I don't know why that wouldn't count as US policy. The idea was simple..... sign a treaty to eliminate missiles that can reach each other's country. Build a missile defense system that can be used as a backup in case the other side keeps a handful of missiles around. Since you intend to abide by the treaty and eliminate your own missiles, sharing the defensive technology isn't a problem. The thing you gain is a sense of security for both sides.
At the time this was a hugely risky strategy for Reagan, because his defense department believed that the Soviets had a vast superiority in land forces like tanks, etc. Europe would likely have been apoplectic at such a treaty, since the deterrence of US involvement and their huge nuclear arsenal was a great hedge against a Soviet expansion into Europe. Eliminate the missiles and the US couldn't do much to stop the Soviets from taking over more European states - or so the thinking went. I think the conventional wisdom since that time is that the Soviet forces were vastly overrated, and their weaponry was not as formidable as the raw numbers would have indicated. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a bold move.
The Soviets had their own reasons for not wanting to do the deal. But strategically it can only mean that you either don't trust that the US will eliminate their missiles or you are worried that your armies cannot defend your country without your own missiles. (Which is the same position the US was in, they were worried that their conventional forces could not defend against Soviet invasions in Europe)
On the connection issues, I wonder why these streaming services don't allow more caching of content. I'd expect that you could flag a movie that you want to watch and the player would download the whole thing for me in the background. I could either attempt to watch in real time or catch it much later, or anywhere in between.
But they don't work that way, which means that I have problems with amazon streaming from time to time. (I have Comcast Cable internet, and I have my suspicions as to the source of those streaming problems)
BTW - I relied on memory for the original post. It has been a few years. I should not have used the word "murdered", as the evidence seems to point to accidental drowning due to possible negligence by the defendant who was convicted of capital murder. There were other cases from the same time period that involved completely false allegations against two separate men (again, involving death row appeals) using the same expert witnesses. The murders were later tied to a different man who went on to kill again while innocent men languished in jail due to the absolute certain testimony of these forensic "experts".
Would it even be possible to make a containment system that could hold anti-matter that would weigh in at less than 10% of the mass of the anti-matter it contains?
In the case of Mississippi's Hood, not only did he not back down in the face of overwhelming evidence that the "experts" he was using were fraudulent, he even got re-elected after people got to see one of his office's star expert witnesses on video tape manufacturing evidence to frame a defendant by creating bite marks in a murdered 2 year old's face using a dental mold of the defendant's teeth. Did they all go to jail? No. Did they all get disbarred? No. Did anybody get in any sort of trouble at all? Well, after a couple of years they quit using the guy caught on tape for any new cases. They still defend the old ones in court though.
Even more interesting to me than the collusion of the AG with an industry group is the willing participation of the media. News shows like 'Today" are not podunk operations, yet they play along with these sorts of things continuously without anyone really making mention of it.
It is more obvious when it is the political parties pulling the strings, but the same dynamic is at play. When the White House wants to focus on a topic for the week - let's say they are making a big push on immigration or defense - they'll arrange for all of the major news outlets to run parallel stories supporting their push. Or when one of the political parties has a message they want out, they run to the press and magically their message gets passed along as if it were original thought.
I understand the pressures to get stories out there, particularly with dwindling resources, but you'd think that a reporter worth his salt would be extremely skeptical when a PR guy comes around with a story that is obviously shilling for some company, industry, political party or candidate. With some of the political hit pieces over the years you might suspect that the reporter's political leanings are at play, but that doesn't really explain all of the corporate shilling. And it isn't just folks like the MPAA - we've seen a blizzard of these kinds of campaigns - either supporting a company or tearing them down. Like the coverage of Uber. They got tons of positive coverage early on, and then there's been a concerted effort to get stories out there that make them look bad. Things like "woman mugged by Uber driver" as a headline.
At least in this day and age we have the internet to help us get around the media filter presenting the preferred narrative, for good or ill. I guess this sort of thing has been going on forever, we just finally have a way to see it for ourselves with the immediacy of the internet. With the internet I get to see the representatives of the Taxi and Limousine industry out their pushing the anti-Uber angles and then watch the stories miraculously pop up on the Today show a week later.
So we have the Globe and Mail along with the UN and Stats Canada up against the NYT and the "Bee Informed Partnership". Meaning the old "consider the source" adage isn't really up to the challenge....
That isn't just idle speculation either. In the last week or two I was listening to an astronomy podcast about the future of space science. They featured an ethicist who brought up just these points when talking about the proposed asteroid mining companies. He posited as a-priori truth that all of the asteroids belonged to all mankind and no country or company could claim any property rights in space. He had worked out an outline of a licensing scheme to allow some limited exploitation of resources - with compensation going to the countries that don't have space programs and cannot exploit the riches of space. Because their humanity gives them ownership of everything in space and their disadvantage gives them claim over any money being spent on space, or somesuch.
It was more than a little odd, as a statement of moral principle. But the base concept was that resources are finite, therefore the only ethical thing to do is only exploit them minimally and then compensate people who have no involvement whatever, be it by geographic proximity, forcible control of the resource, financial contribution to the endeavor.... I can't pretend I really followed his logic. But they seemed pretty convinced that it was the only reasonable course.
I don't work in this area, so I wouldn't know..... but are the different grid sizes significantly different? I would assume that going from 175^3 to 200^3 could be a major jump - the sort of thing that imposes big costs for handling exponentially increasing amounts of data.
They also don't want power-generating windmills near their homes. Is that because they cause cancer? And water treatment plants are generally not built in wealthy neighborhoods. Is this due to leukemia clusters? And they don't want adult video stores near their homes. Because of increased risk of polio?
Perhaps the NIMBY effect is slipshod and broad brushed against any disruption of the neighborhood, whether rationional or not.
This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.
When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.
Interestingly, HOAs do have the most scope and reach over your life (if you choose to live there). At least as pertains to your home life. The control how long your grass is, where you can park your car on your own property, what kind of toys you can put up for you kids in the yard, who can come over to your house, when and for how long.... they can be very intrusive. They can even have approval over the sale of the house when you decide to leave.
Pretty much just about anything they'd like can be in the HOA contract you agree to when you buy in. I live in HOA central down in south Florida. They are so pervasive that several of those weekend radio shows that are mostly advertisements for professional services are dedicated to HOA legal advice (both for homeowners and for HOA boards). I've not seen that elsewhere, but it seems to be a pretty hot topic around these parts. They have full slates of callers looking for solutions to perceived HOA abuses or homeowners who are resisting HOA mandates. On the few occasions that I've caught a few minutes, the legal experts seem to advise that "the HOA is going to win so just pay up" most of the time.
True. But you do have to not watch such videos to downplay the significance of such atrocities and leave it all as background noise. The same goes for famine in Africa, police abuses here, water contamination in India, AIDS in Africa, etc, etc...
If the ISIL videos were shown on the US and European TV news in heavy rotation, would the pressure on western governments be different?
If the death of Kelly Thomas had been covered by the national news in the same manner as more recent and famous police abuse cases, might the issues at hand be getting a different hearing at the national level? (or Lloyd Smalley and Lillian Weiss, killed in their sleep in a wrong-house drug raid - or any number of others)
The information you take in shapes your opinions and the priorities you set. Living in Greece, only a few hundred miles away from these atrocities and presumably being a Christian - one of the groups targeted by these atrocities - one could see how keeping tabs on the actions of these people would have some personal interest to our Greek Nationalist compatriot.
I have a Samsung S6. It will charge from 10% to fully charged in a little over an hour on a car fast charger while navigating and playing podcasts. I learned this while driving cross-country last week, sharing a charger with 2 other s6 users. 30 hours each way - might not have survived without the podcasts!
That being said, there's no reason that I can see for keeping the batteries so small. Doubling or even tripling the size of the battery wouldn't seriously impact it's ergonomics, and it would allow you to candy crush your way from NY to LA.
Slashdot Mirror
While true, he was accused of the crime by police. Prosecutors then chose to carry forward the case. The judge allowed it to go forward. The jury convicted him based on the instructions of the judge.
Another court reviewed the verdict and found that the evidence of conspiracy was weak enough to toss it.
But the government is appealing that ruling.
It was the first case that came up on a google search - first search result for "thought crime conspiracy". The EFF got involved because of the morphing of computer fraud from hacking into a database into "violating the terms of service".
Basically, this is a nice cautionary tale for 'bad cases make for bad law'. Who knows if the original verdict or the reversal will stick? But he still faces life in prison for what plausibly was just online role playing. Yet another case where talking about something is much worse than actually doing it. Minus the cannibalism angle, you can murder someone and get much less than life in prison.
I don't know enough about the case to have an opinion. But I do know that if the people with the authority decide they want to get you, you are truly screwed. Particularly if those people are Federal prosecutors. Their power is so vast at this point that they pretty much just threaten people enough that they 'volunteer' to move to jail for a few years rather than risk life in prison.
There are biological foundations to this issue. I used to work with researchers at the Yerkes Primate Center who were working on this very problem. The idea is that males want to ensure the paternity of their children if they are going to expend resources raising them. So they are protective of their sex partner. Females want to ensure that they have the help they need in providing for their offspring, so they desire a faithful partner. These needs drive the species toward monogamy.
At the same time, females want to enhance the odds of successful offspring by having more than one mating partner. (Partners who would be notoriously bad as long term spouses are particularly attractive ... the bad-boy alpha male) Males also want to enhance their chances of having successful offspring by having partners that do not require them to stay around and provide for the kids. So both genders have an incentive to secretly violate the monogamous bond.
Therefore you see a continuum of activities along these lines within and among human societies. One of the researchers reported that as many as 1/3 to 1/2 of all children in the pre-industrialized societies she examined were the result of illicit affairs. Most of these societies frowned on infidelity much more than we in the west do.
Enter game theory and genetics, which argue for a balancing act between the two competing needs, with different people taking different strategies and feeling different drives. Another researcher at Yerkes gave a talk about the "seven year itch". She had evidence that suggested a biological basis for the lagging emotions of marriages a few years along - with parallel evidence from other species. You know that "he's just not romantic any more" trope that is trotted out to explain a flagging libido and attraction to other partners? She had a theory that this was an instinctual result of changing hormones affecting the brain. The end result was to drive a woman to seek out other sex partners in order to ensure genetic diversity in her offspring.
So the answer is yes, it is complicated.
BTW, I'm in your camp. I would never consider cheating, and have a few decades of experience to back up that characterization of my own proclivities. But I do recognize that this is not everyone's experience. And I've been close enough to a few people who took a different path to know that it isn't just culture or upbringing that makes for fidelity.
This guy was arrested and convicted of conspiracy for fantasizing about kidnapping and canibalizing women in online chat rooms. He claims it was just fantasy role playing.
This is the perfect kind of case for this sort of thing - not only is the talk about something criminal, it is disgusting and morally repugnant. Really easy to get everyone worked up over something like that.
Conspiring to skirt federal open records laws? Nah, not so much. Even if officials actually carry out that sort of conspiracy.
If a banker wants to write a memo telling how to screw customers, but then he never actually screws any customers over, nor do any of his underlings, then he's fine. That's no different than writing a fictional story about committing a murder.
#3 is different because that falls under the "incitement" condition.
Actually, I don't think this is correct. I'm not sure how far you have to go, but simply talking speculatively about committing a crime can be a crime. Sometimes a much more serious crime than the crime being discussed. It is called a "criminal conspiracy" and in many countries (including the US - see US v. Shabani) you don't need to take any overt actions in furtherance of the conspiracy in order to be convicted.
That's just an absolutely ridiculous take for anyone even remotely familiar with the Knox case. At no point in the proceedings did the Italian justice system live up to the barest minimum standards of justice of the industrialized world.
This is not unique to Italy, although there were quite a few Italian quirks to the whole fiasco. Claiming that a prosecutor being able to successfully throw his weight around to defend the honor of the Italian legal system is somehow an indictment of the rights afforded US citizens is just plain silly.
And no, people successfully abusing their authority when they don't like what someone has to say is not unique to Italy. We just had a case in the US where a judge got pissed that some online commentors dissed her verdict in the Silk Road trial. That happened in a country where constitutional law and several directly related supreme court rulings have shown that this sort of behavior is illegal.
The moral: People with power are human beings. And human beings are capable of doing the wrong thing from time to time.
I'll see your Babar and raise you a "Fraggle Rock"
The cartoons that we all loved when we were kids in the 70's absolutely blew. But the live action stuff was way worse for the most part. Other than Sesame Street and The Electric Company, we had miserable crap like Zoom and much worse... the stylings of Sid and Marty Croft.
Amazon is doing a pretty good job with their new series. They have Annedroids as a direct competitor to the old Saturday Morning live action stuff. It is hokey, and the CGI is low budget. But it is pretty entertaining to the elementary school crowd. Gortimer Gibbon's is sort of a twilight zone meets the Hardy Boys for elementary school kids. Also pretty entertaining and fairly well done - if you are in the target demo.
Nothing to the level of the animated stuff available from Disney, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network though. Several of their animated series hold up from elementary all the way to adults. I really don't see college kids glomming onto any of these live action series as stoner favorites. So they aren't that great, but they are better than "Land of the Lost".
This has been my experience as well - dating back to the late 80's. A principle investigator is basically a grant-writing machine who has built enough of a reputation to get his grants funded. He also has to come up with new areas of inquiry and prod his students and post-docs into getting enough data to write a grant for that line of investigation.
They visit the lab, but pretty much never get to do the bench work. And the distance from the lab means that they cannot remember how long things take, so they are always wondering why everyone is so much slower to get the result than they expect.
Being a P.I. is even harder these days, because the funding for the NSF and NIH, etc. have not kept up with the demand. They used to write 2-3 grants expecting to get one funded. These days it is more like 5-8. That is a lot of wheel spinning - writing a grant is not in and of itself productive work.
This is the way it worked when I was in biomedical research 20 years ago. The grad student or post doc who did the work and wrote the paper got to be second author. The principle investigator with the grant got to be first author or last author, depending on the lab or paper. There's a whole cultural system for deciding the order of authors on papers, with varying collaborators getting credit.
In the papers I was involved with the P.I. of the lab that let us have some monoclonal antibody they had developed got to be an author, as did the chemist who synthesized a custom vitamin A derivative for the project. So did the PhD who started the project years ago as a grad student, but hadn't been involved in a dozen years. The lab assistant who did most of the work for the project might have gotten an acknowledgement.
Do you really buy that notion? A lot of people on Slashdot were around for the Reagan-Gorbachev talks. Reagan offered to eliminate all nuclear missiles and share a missile defense shield with the Soviets. The two leaders went off on a wild spree of cooperation, leaving their advisors behind, almost agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. They almost had that agreement done at Reykjavík. None of the advisors and tier-two politicians were on board at that point. As soon as they went back to their rooms the walking back began, but a deal was on the table that could have included sharing missile defense research with the Soviets, even though there was nothing that was remotely ready to deploy.
I don't know why that wouldn't count as US policy. The idea was simple..... sign a treaty to eliminate missiles that can reach each other's country. Build a missile defense system that can be used as a backup in case the other side keeps a handful of missiles around. Since you intend to abide by the treaty and eliminate your own missiles, sharing the defensive technology isn't a problem. The thing you gain is a sense of security for both sides.
At the time this was a hugely risky strategy for Reagan, because his defense department believed that the Soviets had a vast superiority in land forces like tanks, etc. Europe would likely have been apoplectic at such a treaty, since the deterrence of US involvement and their huge nuclear arsenal was a great hedge against a Soviet expansion into Europe. Eliminate the missiles and the US couldn't do much to stop the Soviets from taking over more European states - or so the thinking went. I think the conventional wisdom since that time is that the Soviet forces were vastly overrated, and their weaponry was not as formidable as the raw numbers would have indicated. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a bold move.
The Soviets had their own reasons for not wanting to do the deal. But strategically it can only mean that you either don't trust that the US will eliminate their missiles or you are worried that your armies cannot defend your country without your own missiles. (Which is the same position the US was in, they were worried that their conventional forces could not defend against Soviet invasions in Europe)
On the connection issues, I wonder why these streaming services don't allow more caching of content. I'd expect that you could flag a movie that you want to watch and the player would download the whole thing for me in the background. I could either attempt to watch in real time or catch it much later, or anywhere in between.
But they don't work that way, which means that I have problems with amazon streaming from time to time. (I have Comcast Cable internet, and I have my suspicions as to the source of those streaming problems)
BTW - I relied on memory for the original post. It has been a few years. I should not have used the word "murdered", as the evidence seems to point to accidental drowning due to possible negligence by the defendant who was convicted of capital murder. There were other cases from the same time period that involved completely false allegations against two separate men (again, involving death row appeals) using the same expert witnesses. The murders were later tied to a different man who went on to kill again while innocent men languished in jail due to the absolute certain testimony of these forensic "experts".
Here is where I first read about the case with video of the expert witness creating false evidence. It references the video links but no longer seems to be hosting the video. HuffPo has a clip from the video still up.
This was a death penalty case, and the video of the examination was not unearthed until after the defendant was sentenced to death.
Would it even be possible to make a containment system that could hold anti-matter that would weigh in at less than 10% of the mass of the anti-matter it contains?
Perhaps if their behavior crosses legal lines, they will be disbarred.
Funny!
Ha, ha..... but no, not so much. Since they have pretty much unlimited protection from any consequences of their actions in office, they don't really face any consequences. Thanks to Harry Connick Jr's dad and the US Supreme Court, we know that a prosecutor's entire office can even conspire to railroad innocent people and never be held accountable.
In the case of Mississippi's Hood, not only did he not back down in the face of overwhelming evidence that the "experts" he was using were fraudulent, he even got re-elected after people got to see one of his office's star expert witnesses on video tape manufacturing evidence to frame a defendant by creating bite marks in a murdered 2 year old's face using a dental mold of the defendant's teeth. Did they all go to jail? No. Did they all get disbarred? No. Did anybody get in any sort of trouble at all? Well, after a couple of years they quit using the guy caught on tape for any new cases. They still defend the old ones in court though.
Even more interesting to me than the collusion of the AG with an industry group is the willing participation of the media. News shows like 'Today" are not podunk operations, yet they play along with these sorts of things continuously without anyone really making mention of it.
It is more obvious when it is the political parties pulling the strings, but the same dynamic is at play. When the White House wants to focus on a topic for the week - let's say they are making a big push on immigration or defense - they'll arrange for all of the major news outlets to run parallel stories supporting their push. Or when one of the political parties has a message they want out, they run to the press and magically their message gets passed along as if it were original thought.
I understand the pressures to get stories out there, particularly with dwindling resources, but you'd think that a reporter worth his salt would be extremely skeptical when a PR guy comes around with a story that is obviously shilling for some company, industry, political party or candidate. With some of the political hit pieces over the years you might suspect that the reporter's political leanings are at play, but that doesn't really explain all of the corporate shilling. And it isn't just folks like the MPAA - we've seen a blizzard of these kinds of campaigns - either supporting a company or tearing them down. Like the coverage of Uber. They got tons of positive coverage early on, and then there's been a concerted effort to get stories out there that make them look bad. Things like "woman mugged by Uber driver" as a headline.
At least in this day and age we have the internet to help us get around the media filter presenting the preferred narrative, for good or ill. I guess this sort of thing has been going on forever, we just finally have a way to see it for ourselves with the immediacy of the internet. With the internet I get to see the representatives of the Taxi and Limousine industry out their pushing the anti-Uber angles and then watch the stories miraculously pop up on the Today show a week later.
This AG is already (in)famous for his use of obviously flawed forensic testimony to convict innocent people - even in death penalty cases.
The New York Times told me that a A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend only two months ago.
So we have the Globe and Mail along with the UN and Stats Canada up against the NYT and the "Bee Informed Partnership". Meaning the old "consider the source" adage isn't really up to the challenge....
That isn't just idle speculation either. In the last week or two I was listening to an astronomy podcast about the future of space science. They featured an ethicist who brought up just these points when talking about the proposed asteroid mining companies. He posited as a-priori truth that all of the asteroids belonged to all mankind and no country or company could claim any property rights in space. He had worked out an outline of a licensing scheme to allow some limited exploitation of resources - with compensation going to the countries that don't have space programs and cannot exploit the riches of space. Because their humanity gives them ownership of everything in space and their disadvantage gives them claim over any money being spent on space, or somesuch.
It was more than a little odd, as a statement of moral principle. But the base concept was that resources are finite, therefore the only ethical thing to do is only exploit them minimally and then compensate people who have no involvement whatever, be it by geographic proximity, forcible control of the resource, financial contribution to the endeavor.... I can't pretend I really followed his logic. But they seemed pretty convinced that it was the only reasonable course.
I don't work in this area, so I wouldn't know..... but are the different grid sizes significantly different? I would assume that going from 175^3 to 200^3 could be a major jump - the sort of thing that imposes big costs for handling exponentially increasing amounts of data.
They also don't want power-generating windmills near their homes. Is that because they cause cancer? And water treatment plants are generally not built in wealthy neighborhoods. Is this due to leukemia clusters? And they don't want adult video stores near their homes. Because of increased risk of polio?
Perhaps the NIMBY effect is slipshod and broad brushed against any disruption of the neighborhood, whether rationional or not.
This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.
When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.
Interestingly, HOAs do have the most scope and reach over your life (if you choose to live there). At least as pertains to your home life. The control how long your grass is, where you can park your car on your own property, what kind of toys you can put up for you kids in the yard, who can come over to your house, when and for how long.... they can be very intrusive. They can even have approval over the sale of the house when you decide to leave.
Pretty much just about anything they'd like can be in the HOA contract you agree to when you buy in. I live in HOA central down in south Florida. They are so pervasive that several of those weekend radio shows that are mostly advertisements for professional services are dedicated to HOA legal advice (both for homeowners and for HOA boards). I've not seen that elsewhere, but it seems to be a pretty hot topic around these parts. They have full slates of callers looking for solutions to perceived HOA abuses or homeowners who are resisting HOA mandates. On the few occasions that I've caught a few minutes, the legal experts seem to advise that "the HOA is going to win so just pay up" most of the time.
True. But you do have to not watch such videos to downplay the significance of such atrocities and leave it all as background noise. The same goes for famine in Africa, police abuses here, water contamination in India, AIDS in Africa, etc, etc...
If the ISIL videos were shown on the US and European TV news in heavy rotation, would the pressure on western governments be different?
If the death of Kelly Thomas had been covered by the national news in the same manner as more recent and famous police abuse cases, might the issues at hand be getting a different hearing at the national level? (or Lloyd Smalley and Lillian Weiss, killed in their sleep in a wrong-house drug raid - or any number of others)
The information you take in shapes your opinions and the priorities you set. Living in Greece, only a few hundred miles away from these atrocities and presumably being a Christian - one of the groups targeted by these atrocities - one could see how keeping tabs on the actions of these people would have some personal interest to our Greek Nationalist compatriot.
I have a Samsung S6. It will charge from 10% to fully charged in a little over an hour on a car fast charger while navigating and playing podcasts. I learned this while driving cross-country last week, sharing a charger with 2 other s6 users. 30 hours each way - might not have survived without the podcasts!
That being said, there's no reason that I can see for keeping the batteries so small. Doubling or even tripling the size of the battery wouldn't seriously impact it's ergonomics, and it would allow you to candy crush your way from NY to LA.