Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.
Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to take into account the fact that you really want it to be life, we all do, so we're going to give that conclusion an unusual weighting.
It could be an asteroid cloud, some sort of binary system with a black hold, an unusual type of star, a huge gas cloud that randomly sits in the path, some sort of analysis error, etc, etc.
We have a long history of looking at space and saying "this is really weird, life would cause weird things to happen... maybe it's life!!"
So far, in all of the cases we could resolve, it hasn't been life.
Right now a partial dyson sphere is possible, but definitely not probable.
Back when Howard Stern was their main focus they counted every form letter as a unique complaint. So those fringe religious groups would send in a million identical letters and the FCC would count one million complaints.
Which it was, sending a form letter that endorses a point of view is a unique complaint. It's not an original complaint, and you may want to way the fact that it takes a lot less effort to send a form letter than to write an original complain, but each person who send in one of those letters intended to complain.
This, however, is fundamentally different. Those hundreds of thousands of identical comments are really only one comment, the comment of the person who wrote the bot, that's not to mention the people who had their identity stolen and their name put on the comment.
My understanding is that most of the emails were in fact true. The DNC never claimed the emails were false, just complaining that their dirty laundry got out for everyone to see.
You're missing the point.
1) The content of the emails, in addition to being true, were also remarkably benign. All that really came up was the party generally favoured Clinton's camp, but didn't really do anything about it. The biggest smoking gun was an operative getting hold of a debate question and slipping it to the campaign (and we don't actually know if the campaign actually used the question to prep the candidate).
2) A big part of Russia's campaign was making the contents of the emails sound really bad and ominous.
3) Even if there was sketchy stuff in the emails the problem is we're only seeing one side's email. There was doubtless a lot of fishy stuff in the RNC emails, and I think Russia even hacked them too, but by sharing only the DNCs emails they were able to push the vote in a specific direction.
1. She admits she had sex with him with informed consent of what she was doing. 2. She admits she invited him to spend the night with her, in her bed.
Agreed.
3. Fornication is legal, rape is not. Chant that a 1000 times before proceeding if you have to, to understand why we're about to run into problems.
Also agreed, though I'm not sure why you think I don't understand or agree with this.
4. She claims she was asleep, but we have no proof she was asleep. 5. She claims she did not consent to this act, but consented to having sex with him hours earlier. 6. She has no evidence that can concretely back up another claim of coercion.
4-6 Is just a simple way of saying it was a case of he said/she said, and you wouldn't expect to find concrete evidence of coercion in a case like that, though an investigation can sometimes come up with real evidence. Such as Assange having bragged to a friend, or Assange forgetting his fabricated story during questioning and admitting guilt, or Assange simply admitting under questioning because he's a human who in some circumstances has trouble lying in person.
I didn't talk about the he said/she said aspect because I was talking about the crime as alleged, not evaluating the strength of the evidence or likelyhood of conviction.
If you are not a psychopath like many modern feminists
Wow, you just couldn't wait to take a weird gratuitous shot at feminists couldn't you?
you are not going to vote to convict on that evidence because there is literally nothing that passes muster on "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" that she was raped. In American courts in particular, if you gave the state a conviction on a case this flimsy, you might as well wipe your ass with the bill of rights and set it on fire when you're done.
Who said convict? The he was being extradited for questioning and a possible trial. An accusation of rape alone is not enough to convict, but it's sure as hell enough to question and investigate.
Funny how neither one of the alleged "victims" in this case wanted Assange charged with anything. They just wanted him to get tested for STDs.
I don't find that funny at all. Going through a sexual assault trial against a major public figure (full of extremely personal questions and constant character assassination), wanting justice but not necessarily prison time, etc, etc. There is a lot of stuff between fully consensual sex and forcible rape, and the legal system does not handle it well.
I think there's a couple things most people can agree on here: 1) Assange was in the wrong. 2) As sexual offences go there are far worse ones, and not everyone is agreed that Assange should have spent time in prison (or even face official legal penalties) for them.
I think there are a lot of people living in that grey area, some are leaving a steam of victims in their wake and others just made a mistake and need a reminder. I think there needs to be some sort of confidential parallel legal system, a combination of mandatory counselling and tab keeping, that can step in and intervene when someone has committed an act that is wrong, but the victim doesn't want to go through a whole trial process.
The victims could have gotten a feeling of validation and justice, and Assange could have gotten the message that he was acting way out of line.
Assange said, "[...] it by no means erases seven years of detention without charge under house arrest and almost five years here in this embassy without sunlight. Seven years without charge while my children grow up without me. That is not something I can forgive. It is not something I can forget."
I wonder why he was detained for seven year years?
Oh yeah, because he was dodging an arrest warrant for a crime (he allegedly) committed.
If he was concerned about being extradited to the US over wikileaks this doesn't change anything, the UK is just as likely (if not moreso) than to carry out an extradition request from the US.
Let's put this in a less charged context than rape. Suppose a woman did some lines of cocaine with a man and the claims "he forced me to do that last line of cocaine!" In a system that isn't based on presumed guilt, you know what the court and/or jury are going to see?
1. She was there of her own free will. 2. She did cocaine with him freely, by her own admission, for most of that time. 3. She lacks signs of coercion. 4. Police have found not traces of evidence to plausibly back up her sudden change of mind. 5. Another line of cocaine made it into her system.
Now, if you are a judge or jury who is not a psychopath, you are probably going to weigh that evidence and conclude that you have a non-trivial chance of being the implement of someone's revenge. You are a decent person who doesn't want to throw someone in prison on a "maybe" or a "it looks bad, but I don't know." You're going to side with Assange here.
Lets fix your "change of context" 1. They did cocaine 2. He asked if she wanted to do heroin, she refused. 3. So he waited till she was asleep, and then he gave her heroin.
Of course my change of context still doesn't perfectly capture the scenario, but at least it doesn't ignore the major features of the complaint!
Someone travelling from a poor neighborhood to a fast food joint when the work shift starts will be asked to pay more than someone going from movie theater to starbucks, because the former might not have any other transportation and can be squeezed dry.
Unlikely, the person in the poor neighbourhood is probably catching public transit (or biking, or walking).
If anything they're going to going to have trouble catching an Uber at all since the drivers will be making more money shuffling wealthier people back and forth from starbucks.
Comey? He testified two months ago saying that Trump didn't affect the investigation, so his letter now means that he either committed perjury before or is doing so now.
Really? Where?
On May 3rd Comey told the senate judiciary committee that "he was never told to stop an investigation for political reasons" and last week after being fired he claimed that Trump asked him in February to stop the investigation of Fynn. One of those is a lie.
Wrong. He was asked if anyone in the justice department had asked him to stop an investigation for political reasons.
Trump being wire-tapped? There are dozens of articles from January saying that intelligence services were spying on Trump, and when the moment he said that the leaks were illegal they started back-tracking.
There were (and still aren't) any (reputable) articles saying that Trump, personally, was surveilled or otherwise "wiretapped".
The NYT changed their headline from "wiretapping" to "surveilled" once Trump's accusation came out. http://www.headlinepolitics.co...
Good on them, keeping the word "wiretapping" might have confused casual readers who didn't recognize the fundamental differences between what the NYT article was talking about and Trump's claims.
Also, Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, claimed in an interview "to know nothing" about incidental eavesdropping on the Trump administration but then was later revealed to be the person (or one of the people) that was unmasking them. At the very least the investigation should continue as it's been doing. http://nypost.com/2017/04/03/s...
Again, nothing about wiretapping Trump.
As for the rest.
1) I haven't seen any reliable accounts of Flynn's transcripts, but the consensus has been that a) they left Russia with the idea that Trump would lift the sanctions and b) Flynn was definitely and deliberately deceiving people about what was discussed.
2) I don't give a damn about the fact that Obama's promise about "keeping your doctor" didn't hold up, though it's orders of magnitudes better than how many promises Trump would break if he signed the GOP bill. As for the penalties.
Remember the GOP bill keeps the ban on pre-existing conditions, so... if you don't have a ban on pre-existing conditions and you don't have a penalty for being uninsured then how do you encourage people to buy insurance? The GOP's solution is to give a 30% penalty on the first year you sign up.... which is not that bad.
So as a young healthy person I'll just go without insurance! And if I get sick I'll eat the 30% for a year... Remember that "death spiral" thing people ewere complaining about?
As for some of the ACA woes you have an administration who is publicly goating about the idea it could fail, the idea that Trump will deliberately sabotage the markets is scaring a lot of insurers (and thus forcing rates up).
3) Here's a hint, if your source contains sentences like "To recap, Corsi’s analysis showed that Congress explicitly declined to appropriate any funds to Section 1402 of the Affordable Care Act," then your source is trying to deceive you.
Congress most certainly did not "explicitly decline to appropriate" funds for section 1402, what happened is they directed the government to spend the money but forgot to include the explicit appropriation (not dissimilar to a software bug). The question before the courts right now is whether the government is allowed to spend that money, as was intended, or whether they should adopt a stricter interpretation and block the spending.
4) As for Pai he's a Republican who was extolling his party's ideology.
I'm not old enough to remember the 70s, but I am old enough to remember science books, articles, videos etc. referencing such science from the 70s.
There was absolutely a "new ice age" idea/theory that was given broad consideration and even acceptance. If the internet had existed and a shitty documentary had been made about it, you might even say there was a "consensus" or that "the science" was "settled".
If there was such a scientific consensus then where are the dozens of papers from the period endorsing the idea?
Reporters finding a good story in a speculative new theory does not make a scientific consensus make.
Of course it's kind of a pointless point to argue, so what if there had been a scientific consensus on cooling for a few years? It would just mean a particular field was wrong in its infancy, lots of ideas change when we study them in detail. Science isn't some random walk, scientific theories improve over time.
Let's see, my daily drive consists of hairpin turns and long(miles long) steep inclines and declines. My engine average RPM is ~4000(+/-500), due to the long steep inclines, and long steep declines. Yes, your engine RPMs will be high going down hill, when you rely on your engine and transmission for braking power. I'd have to replace my brakes every other month if I didn't.
I'm one of those freaks who actually does the speed limit. I'm never in a hurry to get nowhere. I just don't see the point of exceeding the speed limit. It's nerve wrecking having to worry about patrol offices and it's just plain unsafe to exceed the limit. I always find it hilarious, seeing someone in a hurry, to get nowhere, speed past me, only to be right next to them, at the same light, minutes later. I digress though.
I drive an average, well maintained Jeep, not some monster truck or underpowered economy car. Gas, sadly costs me ~150 a week. Unless you flat-landers are willing to fit the bill for a recharging station every 1/8 mile. I don't see how an electric vehicle is feasible or even practical, in my neck of the woods.
It doesn't mean zero gas-powered cars will be sold, just that they'll be a niche market, and probably a lot more expensive and annoying as a result.
If the transition does happen soon I hope the electrics are up to snuff, otherwise you will be stuck with an increasingly expensive and hard-to-maintain technology.
Comey? He testified two months ago saying that Trump didn't affect the investigation, so his letter now means that he either committed perjury before or is doing so now.
Really? Where?
Trump being wire-tapped? There are dozens of articles from January saying that intelligence services were spying on Trump, and when the moment he said that the leaks were illegal they started back-tracking.
There were (and still aren't) any (reputable) articles saying that Trump, personally, was surveilled or otherwise "wiretapped".
Flynn's Russian communication? The phone call was over a month after the election and he was supposedly preparing a meeting with the Russian ambassador with Trump. Preparing meetings for the incoming administration is part of the job description.
He was telling the Russians that Trump would cancel the sanctions that had just been announced, we know this because the conversation was captured by US intelligence who was tapping the Russian ambassador's phone.
And then Flynn lied about it to the public and Mike Pence, which was perfectly fine until the lie was made public.
Health care bill? The only people that love it are the sick and elderly, which is good for them but you have to look at it as a whole. Everyone in the middle class has seen their premiums skyrocket to the point of not being able to afford it, to say nothing about people just entering the workforce.
Do you prefer the GOP Health Care bill? Because if you do you're like the only one.
there are reports of the ACA being funded by Fannie May and Freddie Mac profits, taking away from shareholders and decreasing the rate of home ownership in the country.
That's a new one even for me.
The people on the right claim that Net Neutrality was actually a guise for government control of the internet and a mechanism for blocking dissenters, a-la Great Firewall of China.
>"Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond"
And those of us who ENJOY driving, especially motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving) are royally screwed. But hey, I suppose a super-safe and boring life is so much more meaningful than a a free and enjoyable one with some risk....
Oh, make sure to ban bicycles and pedestrians too. Then start banning skateboards, roller skates/blades, horseback riding, skydiving, mounting climbing, target shooting, football, skiing, dogs, game consoles, whatever. Life is just not safe, you know.
Feel free to take whatever risks you like.
Just don't hit me with your hurling metal chunk of death machine.
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years.
...and I thought Stanford was, like, where smart people go? I mean, I'm all for EV's and all, but nothing short of an invasion of space aliens or global thermonuclear war is gonna sink fossil fuels in 8 years. Did he stick that in a footnote somewhere? Hell, I'd like to see what other fascinating reports Mr. Seba has published, like when when the giraffe's are going to eat our brains, or that all people will walk around around without pants by 2021, devastating the Levi Strauss Company. I would also like to experience the "inspiration" for this fascinating report. I expect it's green and sticky and comes from a "dispensary" in return for a "prescription" you get from a "doctor" for your "anxiety". I love California, I really do.
8 years is unlikely, but not completely improbable.
The thing to remember about global warming is it's real, it's serious, and sooner or later we'll deal with it because we'll simply have no choice. This guy is just arguing sooner.
Right now the major international holdouts are the political right in the US, followed by a few semi-autocratic fossil fuel based regimes (Middle East and Russia). Europe and China are already starting to take global warming seriously even with US inaction.
If something flips the US right you suddenly have a political consensus in the worlds biggest holdout, you're going to see a major international shift very quickly.
And once a big carbon tax is on the horizon then no consumer in their right mind is going to buy a new gas fuelled car, and no automotive company in their right mind is going to build one.
If he is such a bafoon why don't you win the next election and show us how smart you are? What's that? You don't have the brain power to form a strategy capable of winning? Then STFU you bafoon because you are dumber than the orange troll that is the current president.
If Trump has shown anything it's that the US is not a meritocracy.
What choice did they have? The GOP isn't the Democrats, there are no superdelegates to block a bad choice. I'm sure if the Republican establishment had had their way Jeb Bush would have been the nominee. Once he was nominated, there was little choice but to back him. The GOP's nomination process is pretty damned democratic, and the Democrats learned that having it too open can lead to candidates like McGovern.
The problem isn't that they didn't have superdelegates, the problem is they spent 8 years paving the way for someone like Trump.
Remember birthers, death panels, imaginary voter fraud complaints, or a constant stream of contradictory rhetoric about the ACA?
The GOP spent years pushing crazy rhetoric as theatre, they passed bills dismantling the ACA but didn't expect them to become law, the encouraged the conspiracy theories but didn't believe them.
Trump seems so extreme because he actually believes a lot of what the GOP and Fox News has been saying, and he built a base out of the Republican voters who were looking for a GOP candidate whose rhetoric matched their actions.
The reason being cited from what I'm reading so far is that he's being fired over mishandling the Clinton email probe. That his AG and Deputy signed off on it does not reassure me in the least.
There were a lot of big and sustained screw-ups on his part, seemingly from attempts to seem impartial by being as harsh as possible on Clinton.
The first time he testified to congress he literally gave the Republicans a bunch of campaign quotes by expressing opinions about Clinton being irresponsible and careless. It doesn't matter if that was his opinion or not, he wasn't there to talk about her responsibility, he was there to answer facts about the investigation. If he was worried about politicizing the FBI then that testimony did it.
Next, when Weiner's laptop surfaced. He apparently became obsessed over the idea that it would have contained evidence of bad intent, believed his techs who said they couldn't review all the emails before the election, and was worried that it meant his testimony about the investigation being complete was no longer true.
First, it's fairly clear Clinton was just clueless when it came to the potential email issues, if Comey thought he was going to find something he has crappy instincts.
Second, any competent tech could have whipped up a shell script to compare those emails in a few hours, the fact he thought they would have to manually review every email meant he either had incompetent techs, meaning he was a terrible leader. Or his techs were deliberately misleading him, meaning he was a terrible leader. Either way he was a terrible leader.
Lastly, actually going through with the letter, he had to know that would be a massive election story. The idea that this was better than his testimony being retro-actively incorrect is ludicrous and an example of terrible judgment.
This is at best a minor, minor thing, one far less problematic than errors made by past FBI directors - ones that left people dead for instance.
He changed the outcome of an election, and considering the current administration that carries with it a pretty high body count.
.. which leaves me with absolutely zero confidence that this is anything but an excuse to get rid of him and put a compliant stooge in that will quash the ongoing investigations.
Here I'm in complete agreement. Comey wasn't fired for his job performance, if there's one thing we can conclude from the Trump administration is that if you want a job you should list incompetence at the top of your resumee.
Would it work? Probably not, no more than Nixon replacing the Attorney General in order to get special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired quashed the Watergate investigation/scandal. At worst, I think you'd see the damning evidence start to leak out into the open, spurring more action.
Again I'm in agreement, at this point I'd be shocked if Trump wasn't actively colluding with Putin and I suspect Trump is doing everything he can to derail an investigation.
At this point I suspect his plan is to get enough of his ppl in place that they people with evidence are forced to leak, and when they do he'll try to focus the discussion on the leakers rather than the evidence.
Not really, Liberals understand that the joke was inappropriate, but not really homophobic.
The joke was inferring a relationship between two heterosexual men where the weaker one sexually submits to the stronger one for protection, basically a "prison bitch".
All the complaints are just political theatre, Conservatives don't actually care that if it's homophobic or not, they just know it sounds homophobic and that's enough to trigger the faux-outrage.
Ajit Pai is just playing the part of the establishment Republican captured by the Trump administration.
1 billion USD is a large sum. Is it because they fear president Trump's wrath? Or is it part of a deal that involves bringing back tax-free some cash from offshore?
c) It could have nothing to do with Trump.
Now here's the real question, regardless of the reason do you give Trump credit?
Giving Trump some jobs to crow about should protect you from regulatory action, and maybe even result in a favourable ruling thrown your way.
But Apple has a very progressive target demographic, one that is unlikely to look kindly on giving Trump political favours.
Yeah, what bullshit to think that an ad appearing immediately before a video might get associated with a video.
Yes, frankly, what bullshit.
Unless an ad is an explicit tie-in with the video content, I am not going to assume that the advertiser gives any endorsement (or rejection) of the content. Why would I?
So lets ignore the entire (in my opinion legitimate) problem of negative impression through association, and instead just concentrate on just the people who, when they see a video before an ad, assume the advertiser more or less chose to advertise on that specific video (or style of video).
Now consider a video posted by a neoNazi.
Think about the people who realize you didn't choose that video (or don't realize but don't care), how much is that ad impression worth to you?
Now think about the people who see the video, don't like neoNazis, and think you're deliberately supporting neoNazis. Now think of them telling their friends that you support neoNazis. How much is that going to cost you?
That second group doesn't have to be very large before it's really not worth your while to advertise on Youtube if you can't avoid the neoNazis.
Advertisers were successfully bullshitted into believing that their brands would be tarnished by appearing next to "offensive" videos.
Yeah, what bullshit to think that an ad appearing immediately before a video might get associated with a video.
The problem is that YouTube went overboard and now considers everything "offensive" that's not basically cute kittens playing with yarn, not just extremists videos demanding the execution of everything who follows the wrong delusion.
No, the problem is not that Google considers those videos "offensive". It's that advertisers consider them "offensive" and don't want to advertise on them.
You can still post a video that isn't "family friendly", but big companies don't want to advertise on your video and Google won't make them.
Personally I am not convinced either way because the climate data has become so political.
Being political just means the politicians on one side decided they didn't like the conclusions so it became a political controversy.
You have people who were all in and suddenly come out saying its all a ruse and data has been cooked to fit the political agenda.
I haven't seen any of that, at least not outside a very small fringe.
As for scientists as a whole being politicized, what else are they supposed to do? The scientists have been under a sustained political attack for over a decade, how can they defend themselves without becoming politicized.
That's not science when even believers begin to doubt the data. The problem is that political agendas don't follow data, they follow what they fabricate as the truth. What we need is more science and less trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
What we need is for the denialists to start sincerely looking at evidence and engaging with science instead of trying to blow up every hint of inconsistency.
Science is built around admitting the limits of your own analysis and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. This puts scientists in an impossible bind, admit the error bounds in your conclusions and the denialists claim you're saying nothing, and AGW isn't happening at all. Downplay the error bounds and reality will occasionally exceed those bounds, and then denialsts say you were wrong and can't be trusted.
The right conclusion is to tell denialists to STFU until they grow up and start taking the task of public discourse seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.
Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to take into account the fact that you really want it to be life, we all do, so we're going to give that conclusion an unusual weighting.
It could be an asteroid cloud, some sort of binary system with a black hold, an unusual type of star, a huge gas cloud that randomly sits in the path, some sort of analysis error, etc, etc.
We have a long history of looking at space and saying "this is really weird, life would cause weird things to happen... maybe it's life!!"
So far, in all of the cases we could resolve, it hasn't been life.
Right now a partial dyson sphere is possible, but definitely not probable.
Back when Howard Stern was their main focus they counted every form letter as a unique complaint. So those fringe religious groups would send in a million identical letters and the FCC would count one million complaints.
Which it was, sending a form letter that endorses a point of view is a unique complaint. It's not an original complaint, and you may want to way the fact that it takes a lot less effort to send a form letter than to write an original complain, but each person who send in one of those letters intended to complain.
This, however, is fundamentally different. Those hundreds of thousands of identical comments are really only one comment, the comment of the person who wrote the bot, that's not to mention the people who had their identity stolen and their name put on the comment.
My understanding is that most of the emails were in fact true. The DNC never claimed the emails were false, just complaining that their dirty laundry got out for everyone to see.
You're missing the point.
1) The content of the emails, in addition to being true, were also remarkably benign. All that really came up was the party generally favoured Clinton's camp, but didn't really do anything about it. The biggest smoking gun was an operative getting hold of a debate question and slipping it to the campaign (and we don't actually know if the campaign actually used the question to prep the candidate).
2) A big part of Russia's campaign was making the contents of the emails sound really bad and ominous.
3) Even if there was sketchy stuff in the emails the problem is we're only seeing one side's email. There was doubtless a lot of fishy stuff in the RNC emails, and I think Russia even hacked them too, but by sharing only the DNCs emails they were able to push the vote in a specific direction.
1. She admits she had sex with him with informed consent of what she was doing.
2. She admits she invited him to spend the night with her, in her bed.
Agreed.
3. Fornication is legal, rape is not. Chant that a 1000 times before proceeding if you have to, to understand why we're about to run into problems.
Also agreed, though I'm not sure why you think I don't understand or agree with this.
4. She claims she was asleep, but we have no proof she was asleep.
5. She claims she did not consent to this act, but consented to having sex with him hours earlier.
6. She has no evidence that can concretely back up another claim of coercion.
4-6 Is just a simple way of saying it was a case of he said/she said, and you wouldn't expect to find concrete evidence of coercion in a case like that, though an investigation can sometimes come up with real evidence. Such as Assange having bragged to a friend, or Assange forgetting his fabricated story during questioning and admitting guilt, or Assange simply admitting under questioning because he's a human who in some circumstances has trouble lying in person.
I didn't talk about the he said/she said aspect because I was talking about the crime as alleged, not evaluating the strength of the evidence or likelyhood of conviction.
If you are not a psychopath like many modern feminists
Wow, you just couldn't wait to take a weird gratuitous shot at feminists couldn't you?
you are not going to vote to convict on that evidence because there is literally nothing that passes muster on "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" that she was raped. In American courts in particular, if you gave the state a conviction on a case this flimsy, you might as well wipe your ass with the bill of rights and set it on fire when you're done.
Who said convict? The he was being extradited for questioning and a possible trial. An accusation of rape alone is not enough to convict, but it's sure as hell enough to question and investigate.
Funny how neither one of the alleged "victims" in this case wanted Assange charged with anything. They just wanted him to get tested for STDs.
I don't find that funny at all. Going through a sexual assault trial against a major public figure (full of extremely personal questions and constant character assassination), wanting justice but not necessarily prison time, etc, etc. There is a lot of stuff between fully consensual sex and forcible rape, and the legal system does not handle it well.
I think there's a couple things most people can agree on here:
1) Assange was in the wrong.
2) As sexual offences go there are far worse ones, and not everyone is agreed that Assange should have spent time in prison (or even face official legal penalties) for them.
I think there are a lot of people living in that grey area, some are leaving a steam of victims in their wake and others just made a mistake and need a reminder. I think there needs to be some sort of confidential parallel legal system, a combination of mandatory counselling and tab keeping, that can step in and intervene when someone has committed an act that is wrong, but the victim doesn't want to go through a whole trial process.
The victims could have gotten a feeling of validation and justice, and Assange could have gotten the message that he was acting way out of line.
Assange said, "[...] it by no means erases seven years of detention without charge under house arrest and almost five years here in this embassy without sunlight. Seven years without charge while my children grow up without me. That is not something I can forgive. It is not something I can forget."
I wonder why he was detained for seven year years?
Oh yeah, because he was dodging an arrest warrant for a crime (he allegedly) committed.
If he was concerned about being extradited to the US over wikileaks this doesn't change anything, the UK is just as likely (if not moreso) than to carry out an extradition request from the US.
Let's put this in a less charged context than rape. Suppose a woman did some lines of cocaine with a man and the claims "he forced me to do that last line of cocaine!" In a system that isn't based on presumed guilt, you know what the court and/or jury are going to see?
1. She was there of her own free will.
2. She did cocaine with him freely, by her own admission, for most of that time.
3. She lacks signs of coercion.
4. Police have found not traces of evidence to plausibly back up her sudden change of mind.
5. Another line of cocaine made it into her system.
Now, if you are a judge or jury who is not a psychopath, you are probably going to weigh that evidence and conclude that you have a non-trivial chance of being the implement of someone's revenge. You are a decent person who doesn't want to throw someone in prison on a "maybe" or a "it looks bad, but I don't know." You're going to side with Assange here.
Lets fix your "change of context"
1. They did cocaine
2. He asked if she wanted to do heroin, she refused.
3. So he waited till she was asleep, and then he gave her heroin.
Of course my change of context still doesn't perfectly capture the scenario, but at least it doesn't ignore the major features of the complaint!
Someone travelling from a poor neighborhood to a fast food joint when the work shift starts will be asked to pay more than someone going from movie theater to starbucks, because the former might not have any other transportation and can be squeezed dry.
Unlikely, the person in the poor neighbourhood is probably catching public transit (or biking, or walking).
If anything they're going to going to have trouble catching an Uber at all since the drivers will be making more money shuffling wealthier people back and forth from starbucks.
Name one scandal that's based in reality?
Comey? He testified two months ago saying that Trump didn't affect the investigation, so his letter now means that he either committed perjury before or is doing so now.
Really? Where?
On May 3rd Comey told the senate judiciary committee that "he was never told to stop an investigation for political reasons" and last week after being fired he claimed that Trump asked him in February to stop the investigation of Fynn. One of those is a lie.
Wrong. He was asked if anyone in the justice department had asked him to stop an investigation for political reasons.
Trump being wire-tapped? There are dozens of articles from January saying that intelligence services were spying on Trump, and when the moment he said that the leaks were illegal they started back-tracking.
There were (and still aren't) any (reputable) articles saying that Trump, personally, was surveilled or otherwise "wiretapped".
The NYT changed their headline from "wiretapping" to "surveilled" once Trump's accusation came out. http://www.headlinepolitics.co...
Good on them, keeping the word "wiretapping" might have confused casual readers who didn't recognize the fundamental differences between what the NYT article was talking about and Trump's claims.
Also, Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, claimed in an interview "to know nothing" about incidental eavesdropping on the Trump administration but then was later revealed to be the person (or one of the people) that was unmasking them. At the very least the investigation should continue as it's been doing. http://nypost.com/2017/04/03/s...
Again, nothing about wiretapping Trump.
As for the rest.
1) I haven't seen any reliable accounts of Flynn's transcripts, but the consensus has been that a) they left Russia with the idea that Trump would lift the sanctions and b) Flynn was definitely and deliberately deceiving people about what was discussed.
2) I don't give a damn about the fact that Obama's promise about "keeping your doctor" didn't hold up, though it's orders of magnitudes better than how many promises Trump would break if he signed the GOP bill. As for the penalties.
Remember the GOP bill keeps the ban on pre-existing conditions, so... if you don't have a ban on pre-existing conditions and you don't have a penalty for being uninsured then how do you encourage people to buy insurance? The GOP's solution is to give a 30% penalty on the first year you sign up.... which is not that bad.
So as a young healthy person I'll just go without insurance! And if I get sick I'll eat the 30% for a year... Remember that "death spiral" thing people ewere complaining about?
As for some of the ACA woes you have an administration who is publicly goating about the idea it could fail, the idea that Trump will deliberately sabotage the markets is scaring a lot of insurers (and thus forcing rates up).
3) Here's a hint, if your source contains sentences like "To recap, Corsi’s analysis showed that Congress explicitly declined to appropriate any funds to Section 1402 of the Affordable Care Act," then your source is trying to deceive you.
Congress most certainly did not "explicitly decline to appropriate" funds for section 1402, what happened is they directed the government to spend the money but forgot to include the explicit appropriation (not dissimilar to a software bug). The question before the courts right now is whether the government is allowed to spend that money, as was intended, or whether they should adopt a stricter interpretation and block the spending.
4) As for Pai he's a Republican who was extolling his party's ideology.
I'm not old enough to remember the 70s, but I am old enough to remember science books, articles, videos etc. referencing such science from the 70s.
There was absolutely a "new ice age" idea/theory that was given broad consideration and even acceptance. If the internet had existed and a shitty documentary had been made about it, you might even say there was a "consensus" or that "the science" was "settled".
If there was such a scientific consensus then where are the dozens of papers from the period endorsing the idea?
Reporters finding a good story in a speculative new theory does not make a scientific consensus make.
Of course it's kind of a pointless point to argue, so what if there had been a scientific consensus on cooling for a few years? It would just mean a particular field was wrong in its infancy, lots of ideas change when we study them in detail. Science isn't some random walk, scientific theories improve over time.
Let's see, my daily drive consists of hairpin turns and long(miles long) steep inclines and declines. My engine average RPM is ~4000(+/-500), due to the long steep inclines, and long steep declines. Yes, your engine RPMs will be high going down hill, when you rely on your engine and transmission for braking power. I'd have to replace my brakes every other month if I didn't.
I'm one of those freaks who actually does the speed limit. I'm never in a hurry to get nowhere. I just don't see the point of exceeding the speed limit. It's nerve wrecking having to worry about patrol offices and it's just plain unsafe to exceed the limit. I always find it hilarious, seeing someone in a hurry, to get nowhere, speed past me, only to be right next to them, at the same light, minutes later. I digress though.
I drive an average, well maintained Jeep, not some monster truck or underpowered economy car. Gas, sadly costs me ~150 a week. Unless you flat-landers are willing to fit the bill for a recharging station every 1/8 mile. I don't see how an electric vehicle is feasible or even practical, in my neck of the woods.
It doesn't mean zero gas-powered cars will be sold, just that they'll be a niche market, and probably a lot more expensive and annoying as a result.
If the transition does happen soon I hope the electrics are up to snuff, otherwise you will be stuck with an increasingly expensive and hard-to-maintain technology.
Name one scandal that's based in reality?
Comey? He testified two months ago saying that Trump didn't affect the investigation, so his letter now means that he either committed perjury before or is doing so now.
Really? Where?
Trump being wire-tapped? There are dozens of articles from January saying that intelligence services were spying on Trump, and when the moment he said that the leaks were illegal they started back-tracking.
There were (and still aren't) any (reputable) articles saying that Trump, personally, was surveilled or otherwise "wiretapped".
Flynn's Russian communication? The phone call was over a month after the election and he was supposedly preparing a meeting with the Russian ambassador with Trump. Preparing meetings for the incoming administration is part of the job description.
He was telling the Russians that Trump would cancel the sanctions that had just been announced, we know this because the conversation was captured by US intelligence who was tapping the Russian ambassador's phone.
And then Flynn lied about it to the public and Mike Pence, which was perfectly fine until the lie was made public.
Health care bill? The only people that love it are the sick and elderly, which is good for them but you have to look at it as a whole. Everyone in the middle class has seen their premiums skyrocket to the point of not being able to afford it, to say nothing about people just entering the workforce.
Do you prefer the GOP Health Care bill? Because if you do you're like the only one.
there are reports of the ACA being funded by Fannie May and Freddie Mac profits, taking away from shareholders and decreasing the rate of home ownership in the country.
That's a new one even for me.
The people on the right claim that Net Neutrality was actually a guise for government control of the internet and a mechanism for blocking dissenters, a-la Great Firewall of China.
Then "people on the right" are wildly misled.
>"Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond"
And those of us who ENJOY driving, especially motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving) are royally screwed. But hey, I suppose a super-safe and boring life is so much more meaningful than a a free and enjoyable one with some risk....
Oh, make sure to ban bicycles and pedestrians too. Then start banning skateboards, roller skates/blades, horseback riding, skydiving, mounting climbing, target shooting, football, skiing, dogs, game consoles, whatever. Life is just not safe, you know.
Feel free to take whatever risks you like.
Just don't hit me with your hurling metal chunk of death machine.
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years.
...and I thought Stanford was, like, where smart people go? I mean, I'm all for EV's and all, but nothing short of an invasion of space aliens or global thermonuclear war is gonna sink fossil fuels in 8 years. Did he stick that in a footnote somewhere?
Hell, I'd like to see what other fascinating reports Mr. Seba has published, like when when the giraffe's are going to eat our brains, or that all people will walk around around without pants by 2021, devastating the Levi Strauss Company.
I would also like to experience the "inspiration" for this fascinating report. I expect it's green and sticky and comes from a "dispensary" in return for a "prescription" you get from a "doctor" for your "anxiety".
I love California, I really do.
8 years is unlikely, but not completely improbable.
The thing to remember about global warming is it's real, it's serious, and sooner or later we'll deal with it because we'll simply have no choice. This guy is just arguing sooner.
Right now the major international holdouts are the political right in the US, followed by a few semi-autocratic fossil fuel based regimes (Middle East and Russia). Europe and China are already starting to take global warming seriously even with US inaction.
If something flips the US right you suddenly have a political consensus in the worlds biggest holdout, you're going to see a major international shift very quickly.
And once a big carbon tax is on the horizon then no consumer in their right mind is going to buy a new gas fuelled car, and no automotive company in their right mind is going to build one.
If he is such a bafoon why don't you win the next election and show us how smart you are? What's that? You don't have the brain power to form a strategy capable of winning? Then STFU you bafoon because you are dumber than the orange troll that is the current president.
If Trump has shown anything it's that the US is not a meritocracy.
Trump is preparing to veto his first bill in defence of privacy!
What choice did they have? The GOP isn't the Democrats, there are no superdelegates to block a bad choice. I'm sure if the Republican establishment had had their way Jeb Bush would have been the nominee. Once he was nominated, there was little choice but to back him. The GOP's nomination process is pretty damned democratic, and the Democrats learned that having it too open can lead to candidates like McGovern.
The problem isn't that they didn't have superdelegates, the problem is they spent 8 years paving the way for someone like Trump.
Remember birthers, death panels, imaginary voter fraud complaints, or a constant stream of contradictory rhetoric about the ACA?
The GOP spent years pushing crazy rhetoric as theatre, they passed bills dismantling the ACA but didn't expect them to become law, the encouraged the conspiracy theories but didn't believe them.
Trump seems so extreme because he actually believes a lot of what the GOP and Fox News has been saying, and he built a base out of the Republican voters who were looking for a GOP candidate whose rhetoric matched their actions.
The reason being cited from what I'm reading so far is that he's being fired over mishandling the Clinton email probe. That his AG and Deputy signed off on it does not reassure me in the least.
There were a lot of big and sustained screw-ups on his part, seemingly from attempts to seem impartial by being as harsh as possible on Clinton.
The first time he testified to congress he literally gave the Republicans a bunch of campaign quotes by expressing opinions about Clinton being irresponsible and careless. It doesn't matter if that was his opinion or not, he wasn't there to talk about her responsibility, he was there to answer facts about the investigation. If he was worried about politicizing the FBI then that testimony did it.
Next, when Weiner's laptop surfaced. He apparently became obsessed over the idea that it would have contained evidence of bad intent, believed his techs who said they couldn't review all the emails before the election, and was worried that it meant his testimony about the investigation being complete was no longer true.
First, it's fairly clear Clinton was just clueless when it came to the potential email issues, if Comey thought he was going to find something he has crappy instincts.
Second, any competent tech could have whipped up a shell script to compare those emails in a few hours, the fact he thought they would have to manually review every email meant he either had incompetent techs, meaning he was a terrible leader. Or his techs were deliberately misleading him, meaning he was a terrible leader. Either way he was a terrible leader.
Lastly, actually going through with the letter, he had to know that would be a massive election story. The idea that this was better than his testimony being retro-actively incorrect is ludicrous and an example of terrible judgment.
This is at best a minor, minor thing, one far less problematic than errors made by past FBI directors - ones that left people dead for instance.
He changed the outcome of an election, and considering the current administration that carries with it a pretty high body count.
.. which leaves me with absolutely zero confidence that this is anything but an excuse to get rid of him and put a compliant stooge in that will quash the ongoing investigations.
Here I'm in complete agreement. Comey wasn't fired for his job performance, if there's one thing we can conclude from the Trump administration is that if you want a job you should list incompetence at the top of your resumee.
Would it work? Probably not, no more than Nixon replacing the Attorney General in order to get special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired quashed the Watergate investigation/scandal. At worst, I think you'd see the damning evidence start to leak out into the open, spurring more action.
Again I'm in agreement, at this point I'd be shocked if Trump wasn't actively colluding with Putin and I suspect Trump is doing everything he can to derail an investigation.
At this point I suspect his plan is to get enough of his ppl in place that they people with evidence are forced to leak, and when they do he'll try to focus the discussion on the leakers rather than the evidence.
The Libs are eating their own now
Not really, Liberals understand that the joke was inappropriate, but not really homophobic.
The joke was inferring a relationship between two heterosexual men where the weaker one sexually submits to the stronger one for protection, basically a "prison bitch".
All the complaints are just political theatre, Conservatives don't actually care that if it's homophobic or not, they just know it sounds homophobic and that's enough to trigger the faux-outrage.
Ajit Pai is just playing the part of the establishment Republican captured by the Trump administration.
1 billion USD is a large sum. Is it because they fear president Trump's wrath? Or is it part of a deal that involves bringing back tax-free some cash from offshore?
c) It could have nothing to do with Trump.
Now here's the real question, regardless of the reason do you give Trump credit?
Giving Trump some jobs to crow about should protect you from regulatory action, and maybe even result in a favourable ruling thrown your way.
But Apple has a very progressive target demographic, one that is unlikely to look kindly on giving Trump political favours.
Such is life under crony capitalism.
Yeah, what bullshit to think that an ad appearing immediately before a video might get associated with a video.
Yes, frankly, what bullshit.
Unless an ad is an explicit tie-in with the video content, I am not going to assume that the advertiser gives any endorsement (or rejection) of the content. Why would I?
So lets ignore the entire (in my opinion legitimate) problem of negative impression through association, and instead just concentrate on just the people who, when they see a video before an ad, assume the advertiser more or less chose to advertise on that specific video (or style of video).
Now consider a video posted by a neoNazi.
Think about the people who realize you didn't choose that video (or don't realize but don't care), how much is that ad impression worth to you?
Now think about the people who see the video, don't like neoNazis, and think you're deliberately supporting neoNazis. Now think of them telling their friends that you support neoNazis. How much is that going to cost you?
That second group doesn't have to be very large before it's really not worth your while to advertise on Youtube if you can't avoid the neoNazis.
How can an employed adult spend 12 hours on media? Either they don't work yet or they don't work any more!
Why don't you ask him?
Advertisers were successfully bullshitted into believing that their brands would be tarnished by appearing next to "offensive" videos.
Yeah, what bullshit to think that an ad appearing immediately before a video might get associated with a video.
The problem is that YouTube went overboard and now considers everything "offensive" that's not basically cute kittens playing with yarn, not just extremists videos demanding the execution of everything who follows the wrong delusion.
No, the problem is not that Google considers those videos "offensive". It's that advertisers consider them "offensive" and don't want to advertise on them.
You can still post a video that isn't "family friendly", but big companies don't want to advertise on your video and Google won't make them.
After all, who needs data when you have ideology?
Personally I am not convinced either way because the climate data has become so political.
Being political just means the politicians on one side decided they didn't like the conclusions so it became a political controversy.
You have people who were all in and suddenly come out saying its all a ruse and data has been cooked to fit the political agenda.
I haven't seen any of that, at least not outside a very small fringe.
As for scientists as a whole being politicized, what else are they supposed to do? The scientists have been under a sustained political attack for over a decade, how can they defend themselves without becoming politicized.
That's not science when even believers begin to doubt the data. The problem is that political agendas don't follow data, they follow what they fabricate as the truth. What we need is more science and less trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
What we need is for the denialists to start sincerely looking at evidence and engaging with science instead of trying to blow up every hint of inconsistency.
Science is built around admitting the limits of your own analysis and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. This puts scientists in an impossible bind, admit the error bounds in your conclusions and the denialists claim you're saying nothing, and AGW isn't happening at all. Downplay the error bounds and reality will occasionally exceed those bounds, and then denialsts say you were wrong and can't be trusted.
The right conclusion is to tell denialists to STFU until they grow up and start taking the task of public discourse seriously.