Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
Actually that is the one part that I cannot understand. His name is going to be dragged through the mud and, assuming he is innocent, his is going to be wrongfully accused and convicted in the court of public opinion. I can understand that he feels the USADA is being unjust and not giving him a fair "trial" but, if that is the case, sue them for defamation in court. Then he and they will both have to compete by the legal standard and not by their own made-up rules and those testifying will be doing so under threat of perjury not whatever penalty the USADA can deal out.
Bullshit. The risks of vaccination are tiny, and in a much lower order of magnitude of the risks of not being vaccinated.
Correct - as I stated and you quoted! The risks of the vaccine are a lot lower than the risks of the disease. However lower does not mean zero - there are still risks to having a vaccine. Google it (but beware the anti-vaxxer sites!). As a scientist I fully support vaccines - all my kids have been vaccinated as have I - but it would be dishonest to claim that vaccines have zero risk and because that risk is not zero I would be strongly opposed to forcing people to have them - but all in favour about educating them as to why they should choose to have them.
I wouldn't say that vaccines aren't profitable. What I will say is that they're closer to computer equipment profit margins(1%), not jewelry store ones(50+%) like designer drugs have.
Then why develop a vaccine for Chicken Pox? The rate of complications from the vaccine is comparable to the rate of complications from the disease (at least it was with the stats a few years ago). Worse, while catching chicken pox gives lifelong immunity but having the vaccine only gives ~10 years of protection (again this was as of several years ago when the vaccine was newer) so boosters are needed. However what is really terrible is that chicken pox is far more serious if you catch it as an adult. So if the vaccine immunity wears off and you forget to have a booster as an adult you can end up with a far more serious case of shingles.
The WHO used to primarily recommend the vaccine for developed countries only as a way to reduce lost productivity due to child care while a kid had the chicken pox disease. So if drug companies do not make money from vaccines why on earth did they invent this one? There are far more important diseases out there with serious health implications - why target a relatively innocuous disease, especially one which is far more serious as an adult? Our family has had every vaccination that is recommended except for this one but when our doctor suggested that we might want to skip this one until the kids were older in order to give them a chance to catch chicken pox we thought that this was strange advice and looked up why.
Meaning, if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's your right, but you shouldn't be allowed to send them to school...
...where they would get educated so any kids they have would be vaccinated! This will compound the problem making it worse. At the same time I would be very much against forcing someone to have a medical procedure performed. While it might benefit others with minimal risk to the person being vaccinated the same can be said of blood donation and we will end up on a slippery slope. Not to mention that while the risk of vaccination is tiny and far less that the risk from catching the disease that risk is not zero and you can imagine the outcry when someone gets unlucky and becomes seriously ill or dies from an enforced vaccination.
No society is a monolithic beast. However you can make generalizations about behaviour about the usual way in which it works. There may be some places in the US where this incident would have happened differently - either better or worse - but that does not invalidate an observation that the US public in general seems to be far more willing than other countries to allow witch-hunts. You can certainly argue that this might be an invalid hypothesis but to argue that the concept of "typical societal behaviour" is invalid because there is variation is akin to arguing that an average mark on an exam is an invalid concept because no student actually scored that mark.
It was not ONLY the TSA being stupid but they and their directives to all security agencies are at the heart of this type of issue.
I don't quite agree. The "surrounded by agents" bit only happened after passengers complained about feeling uncomfortable because of his tee-shirt. If passengers complained about someone I would expect any security operation to take it seriously. You could argue, and I would probably agree, that it was overkill once they learnt what people were uncomfortable about (real terrorists would never attract attention to themselves in this way) but the article explains that he was examined again more thoroughly and still allowed to board the aircraft. Had that been the end of the story I doubt we would have heard about it. "Idiot wearing anti-TSA slogan gets more rigourous security checks but is still allowed to board the aircraft" would hardly be newsworthy would it?
...but he had the balls to risk some heat to exercise his rights and bring attention to the stupidity of the TSA.
It was not the TSA that were being stupid here - they passed him through all the security checks the first time without any particular issue. The problem here lies in the general reaction of US society. Yes the guy was being an idiot and living in the US should have known the likely outcome but why is it that nobody could recognise him for the idiot that he was and treat the situation appropriately? Blowing it out of all proportion like this only makes the authorities appear like idiots themselves and encourages more of this stupid behaviour because of all the attention their response gets. You would have thought that with a lesson like the Salem witch trials 300+ years ago US society would have learnt the lesson by now.
The alternative would be something like the BBC, where I'd have to pay $230 a year to watch NBC. $230 a year to watch ABC. $230 a year to watch CBS. And on and on and on.
No the BBC model is far better than that: you pay £145.50 each year to watch the BBC. This consists of multiple channels of high quality HD content plus an online service that lets you download content to watch offline later. You then get ITV, Channel 4 etc. thrown in for free with ads.
If they would let me do that from Canada I'd take them up in a flash. As it is my only option for anything close is to pay $880 (~£550) per year for cable to get the same amount of quality content split over 100 channels and interspersed with ads and low quality rubbish. The only channel that comes close in terms of quality is the CBC but it only provides one english-speaking channel and is severely hampered by lack of funding.
The BBC is by no means perfect and the funding model certainly has its flaws but the end result is something with a higher quality and lower cost than anything I have yet seen in any of the countries I've lived in.
Actually I agree that the upgrade issue is somewhat moot - I've never upgraded a laptop. However I have had to have several repaired. This has involved: replacing a dud battery, replacing a dead hard drive and replacing a faulty DVD drive. In each case it was a quick trip to the Apple store, a brief wait and presto my laptop was fixed.
What happens with the new machines is not so clear. While I do have everything backed up do I really want to have the hassle of getting a completely different machine every, single time I need a repair, no matter how trivial it is? Not only that but SSDs have a limited write cycle so, if they give me a different machine (because they cannot fix the old one) will they guarentee that the SSD is of the same age and with similar use characteristics to the machine I handed in? Will they also guarantee to erase any data on the old machine too since I cannot remove the drive and do it myself.
No it is not because China has nuclear weapons and, if pushed beyond some level would undoubtedly use them. Sure the US would retaliate in kind but you then end up with lots of losers and no winners...although on the bright side the ensuing nuclear winter would remove all concerns over global warming.
I would say that it's unwise to set a precedent in which you allow a suspect in a criminal matter to dictate the terms under which he'll agree to an interview about the charges.
In general I agree. However after you made a complete arse of yourself by releasing him and giving him permission to leave the country perhaps a degree of flexibility ought to be expected?
If you are not in a country, or a citizen of the country you are not obligated to obey that country's laws. Period.
I, and a vast majority of the UK completely agree. Unfortunately the US government does not and the spineless UK governments we have had for the past few elections have let them get away with it.
However I think it very unlikely that the US would want to try to extradite him from Sweden. Why not do it from the UK? The standard of evidence is minimal, whatever you are accused of does not have to be a crime in the UK, you don't even have to have ever even visited the US and even when over 90% of the populace disagree with it the home secretary will stil approve the extradition. I have trouble believing it will be that easy to extradite him from Sweden!
Providing that the premises remain part of a foreign mission. It is always possible to break diplomatic ties with a country and force them to close their embassy. While it seems remarkable that the government would be willing to do this to even a small, distant country like Ecuador over the case of someone like Assange it nevertheless remains a clear and legal possibility.
With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately...how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?
Two things to consider. First if the Carrington event was a near-extinction event why did the world's population survive intact (with the exception of a few unfortunately telegraph operators)? Second if a vast majority of the earth's population did die (i.e. a real near-extinction event) why would the survivors be interested in your video game data? In addition if the EM disturbance is so great that it erases hard drives everyone's computers will also have fried so even if they were somehow interested in the midst of dealing with an unprecedented global disaster they would not have any capability to use it.
So I'd stick with just coping with ordinary disasters which affect, as an upper level, your local town or city. In fact even something like the Carrington event, while hugely disruptive to power grids and communications is unlikely to be powerful enough to affect computers and, given that we would likely have a day or so notice there would be time to power them down and make a tinfoil hat for them. So important stuff could be protected.
If the UK initiates an act of war against another foreign power
The UK government has not threatened anything of the sort. What it has threatened to do is shutdown the embassy. It has the right to do this under UK law as does any country otherwise it would never be possible to break diplomatic ties. The US and other European governments have done this to middle eastern countries for example. It might well harm diplomatic links with Ecuador - effectively the UK government would be cutting diplomatic ties with them - but I doubt that diplomatic ties with Ecuador are considered particularly valuable to the UK. On the other hand neither does extraditing Assange.
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming.
I doubt they would go for that since it would be hard to block it based on geographic location. One day the IOC might stop being so amazing hypocritical and practice what they preach ("bringing the world together through sport") by letting each nation's coverage be available worldwide instead of requiring divisive national firewalls...but given the money they make from it it seems doubtful. What was really annoying though was that, after wrestling through a CTV nightmare website of Silverlight a lot of the coverage up there for non-Canadian events was without any commentary.
and then you end up cutting out smart people who are not college material.
True, but when we were hiring IT staff we were looking for smart, educated people not just smart people. Sometimes just being smart is not enough. For example a smart IT person can cobble together a functioning system. However when they go on holiday and something breaks it is hard to fix things because they do things in non-standard ways. Also some are not as smart as they think and, while their solutions may work, they are not the best ones out there and may even suffer serious flaws which suddenly come to light.
If you only have one neutrino, that is no different than a "beam" of one.
Look at my definition of beam power and then tell me what the mean number of neutrinos per second is in your "neutrino beam of one" is....and in case your immediate gut response is "1" what happens if I measure it over a period of 2s, 1 hour, 1ms etc. For a single neutrino this quantity is meaningless and hence, so is the concept of power.
...new, as yet unspecified detection methods. So none of the rest of what you said matters.
Unless those detection mechanism rely on magic all of what I said will matter. The directional measurement depends on the simple interaction model i.e. neutrino interacts with detector and leaves some energy and momentum there. The direction of the momentum "deposited" will be the more similar to the neutrino direction for higher energy neutrinos. This is actually simple newtonian mechanics!
No, the point of a challenging degree program is to maintain academic standards. To be awarded a degree you need to have achieved a certain standard. If the sole aim was to limit the number of graduates in a program you would simply limit the enrolment. When we have been hiring IT staff one of the things we have looked for is a degree because this shows that they have some depth of knowledge beyond the basics. Sometimes the confidence that this brings can be very important for adapting to new situations.
I get that occasionally but not often because of the low humidity. However when it hit -44C one year (below -50C with wind chill) and I was out walking the dog I did notice my glasses start to make strange sounds and I was a little worried that the metal frames were contracting and putting strain on the glass lens!
Every time you move something from a cold place in to a warmer one (higher humidity in the air implicit, since higher temperature means higher point of saturation)
Actually that is not implicit. Up here in the frozen wastes of central Alberta in the winter the indoor humidity drops to incredibly low values of 10-20% because there is no moisture in the outside air because it is at -40C and even then has low humidity. This means that condensation is never really a problem - you might get a bit of it but it very quickly evaporates because of the incredibly low humidity inside. In fact the humidity gets so low that our data centre has a humidifier to bump it up to the safe operating range of machines.
Conversely in the UK where there is no extreme cold weather (yes I know the beeb goes nuts if London drops below -5C but sorry, that doesn't count!) but lots of humidity. As a kid I used to have far more problems with my glasses fogging up when I came inside during the winter that I do in Canada.
It's because we Americans are simply too stupid to select an election system that allows more than two parties
Please don't expect this to help. There are enough clueless idiots out there to fill any number of political party nominations. I'm not sure that choosing the least worse of 3 or more is much better than least worse of two. But you should definitely keep party membership lists private - it opens all sorts of possibilities for abuse otherwise.
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Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
Actually that is the one part that I cannot understand. His name is going to be dragged through the mud and, assuming he is innocent, his is going to be wrongfully accused and convicted in the court of public opinion. I can understand that he feels the USADA is being unjust and not giving him a fair "trial" but, if that is the case, sue them for defamation in court. Then he and they will both have to compete by the legal standard and not by their own made-up rules and those testifying will be doing so under threat of perjury not whatever penalty the USADA can deal out.
Bullshit. The risks of vaccination are tiny, and in a much lower order of magnitude of the risks of not being vaccinated.
Correct - as I stated and you quoted! The risks of the vaccine are a lot lower than the risks of the disease. However lower does not mean zero - there are still risks to having a vaccine. Google it (but beware the anti-vaxxer sites!). As a scientist I fully support vaccines - all my kids have been vaccinated as have I - but it would be dishonest to claim that vaccines have zero risk and because that risk is not zero I would be strongly opposed to forcing people to have them - but all in favour about educating them as to why they should choose to have them.
I wouldn't say that vaccines aren't profitable. What I will say is that they're closer to computer equipment profit margins(1%), not jewelry store ones(50+%) like designer drugs have.
Then why develop a vaccine for Chicken Pox? The rate of complications from the vaccine is comparable to the rate of complications from the disease (at least it was with the stats a few years ago). Worse, while catching chicken pox gives lifelong immunity but having the vaccine only gives ~10 years of protection (again this was as of several years ago when the vaccine was newer) so boosters are needed. However what is really terrible is that chicken pox is far more serious if you catch it as an adult. So if the vaccine immunity wears off and you forget to have a booster as an adult you can end up with a far more serious case of shingles.
The WHO used to primarily recommend the vaccine for developed countries only as a way to reduce lost productivity due to child care while a kid had the chicken pox disease. So if drug companies do not make money from vaccines why on earth did they invent this one? There are far more important diseases out there with serious health implications - why target a relatively innocuous disease, especially one which is far more serious as an adult? Our family has had every vaccination that is recommended except for this one but when our doctor suggested that we might want to skip this one until the kids were older in order to give them a chance to catch chicken pox we thought that this was strange advice and looked up why.
Meaning, if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's your right, but you shouldn't be allowed to send them to school...
US society is not a monolithic beast.
No society is a monolithic beast. However you can make generalizations about behaviour about the usual way in which it works. There may be some places in the US where this incident would have happened differently - either better or worse - but that does not invalidate an observation that the US public in general seems to be far more willing than other countries to allow witch-hunts. You can certainly argue that this might be an invalid hypothesis but to argue that the concept of "typical societal behaviour" is invalid because there is variation is akin to arguing that an average mark on an exam is an invalid concept because no student actually scored that mark.
It was not ONLY the TSA being stupid but they and their directives to all security agencies are at the heart of this type of issue.
I don't quite agree. The "surrounded by agents" bit only happened after passengers complained about feeling uncomfortable because of his tee-shirt. If passengers complained about someone I would expect any security operation to take it seriously. You could argue, and I would probably agree, that it was overkill once they learnt what people were uncomfortable about (real terrorists would never attract attention to themselves in this way) but the article explains that he was examined again more thoroughly and still allowed to board the aircraft. Had that been the end of the story I doubt we would have heard about it. "Idiot wearing anti-TSA slogan gets more rigourous security checks but is still allowed to board the aircraft" would hardly be newsworthy would it?
...but he had the balls to risk some heat to exercise his rights and bring attention to the stupidity of the TSA.
It was not the TSA that were being stupid here - they passed him through all the security checks the first time without any particular issue. The problem here lies in the general reaction of US society. Yes the guy was being an idiot and living in the US should have known the likely outcome but why is it that nobody could recognise him for the idiot that he was and treat the situation appropriately? Blowing it out of all proportion like this only makes the authorities appear like idiots themselves and encourages more of this stupid behaviour because of all the attention their response gets. You would have thought that with a lesson like the Salem witch trials 300+ years ago US society would have learnt the lesson by now.
The alternative would be something like the BBC, where I'd have to pay $230 a year to watch NBC. $230 a year to watch ABC. $230 a year to watch CBS. And on and on and on.
No the BBC model is far better than that: you pay £145.50 each year to watch the BBC. This consists of multiple channels of high quality HD content plus an online service that lets you download content to watch offline later. You then get ITV, Channel 4 etc. thrown in for free with ads.
If they would let me do that from Canada I'd take them up in a flash. As it is my only option for anything close is to pay $880 (~£550) per year for cable to get the same amount of quality content split over 100 channels and interspersed with ads and low quality rubbish. The only channel that comes close in terms of quality is the CBC but it only provides one english-speaking channel and is severely hampered by lack of funding.
The BBC is by no means perfect and the funding model certainly has its flaws but the end result is something with a higher quality and lower cost than anything I have yet seen in any of the countries I've lived in.
Actually I agree that the upgrade issue is somewhat moot - I've never upgraded a laptop. However I have had to have several repaired. This has involved: replacing a dud battery, replacing a dead hard drive and replacing a faulty DVD drive. In each case it was a quick trip to the Apple store, a brief wait and presto my laptop was fixed.
What happens with the new machines is not so clear. While I do have everything backed up do I really want to have the hassle of getting a completely different machine every, single time I need a repair, no matter how trivial it is? Not only that but SSDs have a limited write cycle so, if they give me a different machine (because they cannot fix the old one) will they guarentee that the SSD is of the same age and with similar use characteristics to the machine I handed in? Will they also guarantee to erase any data on the old machine too since I cannot remove the drive and do it myself.
I wonder if that's true in modern times
No it is not because China has nuclear weapons and, if pushed beyond some level would undoubtedly use them. Sure the US would retaliate in kind but you then end up with lots of losers and no winners...although on the bright side the ensuing nuclear winter would remove all concerns over global warming.
I would say that it's unwise to set a precedent in which you allow a suspect in a criminal matter to dictate the terms under which he'll agree to an interview about the charges.
In general I agree. However after you made a complete arse of yourself by releasing him and giving him permission to leave the country perhaps a degree of flexibility ought to be expected?
If you are not in a country, or a citizen of the country you are not obligated to obey that country's laws. Period.
I, and a vast majority of the UK completely agree. Unfortunately the US government does not and the spineless UK governments we have had for the past few elections have let them get away with it.
However I think it very unlikely that the US would want to try to extradite him from Sweden. Why not do it from the UK? The standard of evidence is minimal, whatever you are accused of does not have to be a crime in the UK, you don't even have to have ever even visited the US and even when over 90% of the populace disagree with it the home secretary will stil approve the extradition. I have trouble believing it will be that easy to extradite him from Sweden!
Providing that the premises remain part of a foreign mission. It is always possible to break diplomatic ties with a country and force them to close their embassy. While it seems remarkable that the government would be willing to do this to even a small, distant country like Ecuador over the case of someone like Assange it nevertheless remains a clear and legal possibility.
With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately...how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?
Two things to consider. First if the Carrington event was a near-extinction event why did the world's population survive intact (with the exception of a few unfortunately telegraph operators)? Second if a vast majority of the earth's population did die (i.e. a real near-extinction event) why would the survivors be interested in your video game data? In addition if the EM disturbance is so great that it erases hard drives everyone's computers will also have fried so even if they were somehow interested in the midst of dealing with an unprecedented global disaster they would not have any capability to use it.
So I'd stick with just coping with ordinary disasters which affect, as an upper level, your local town or city. In fact even something like the Carrington event, while hugely disruptive to power grids and communications is unlikely to be powerful enough to affect computers and, given that we would likely have a day or so notice there would be time to power them down and make a tinfoil hat for them. So important stuff could be protected.
If the UK initiates an act of war against another foreign power
The UK government has not threatened anything of the sort. What it has threatened to do is shutdown the embassy. It has the right to do this under UK law as does any country otherwise it would never be possible to break diplomatic ties. The US and other European governments have done this to middle eastern countries for example. It might well harm diplomatic links with Ecuador - effectively the UK government would be cutting diplomatic ties with them - but I doubt that diplomatic ties with Ecuador are considered particularly valuable to the UK. On the other hand neither does extraditing Assange.
Because they are really bothered about that possible rape charge against him.
I think the more relevant thing is that the UK government is not really bothered by Ecuador.
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming.
I doubt they would go for that since it would be hard to block it based on geographic location. One day the IOC might stop being so amazing hypocritical and practice what they preach ("bringing the world together through sport") by letting each nation's coverage be available worldwide instead of requiring divisive national firewalls...but given the money they make from it it seems doubtful. What was really annoying though was that, after wrestling through a CTV nightmare website of Silverlight a lot of the coverage up there for non-Canadian events was without any commentary.
and then you end up cutting out smart people who are not college material.
True, but when we were hiring IT staff we were looking for smart, educated people not just smart people. Sometimes just being smart is not enough. For example a smart IT person can cobble together a functioning system. However when they go on holiday and something breaks it is hard to fix things because they do things in non-standard ways. Also some are not as smart as they think and, while their solutions may work, they are not the best ones out there and may even suffer serious flaws which suddenly come to light.
The spacecraft TRAVELLED 350 million miles to get there, but as of tonight, Mars is only about 157.5 million miles from Earth.
Kilometres, miles they are all the same to NASA, especially when dealing with Mars.
Vim is free.
What else you would expect for something that you literally flush down the toilet.
If you only have one neutrino, that is no different than a "beam" of one.
Look at my definition of beam power and then tell me what the mean number of neutrinos per second is in your "neutrino beam of one" is....and in case your immediate gut response is "1" what happens if I measure it over a period of 2s, 1 hour, 1ms etc. For a single neutrino this quantity is meaningless and hence, so is the concept of power.
...new, as yet unspecified detection methods. So none of the rest of what you said matters.
Unless those detection mechanism rely on magic all of what I said will matter. The directional measurement depends on the simple interaction model i.e. neutrino interacts with detector and leaves some energy and momentum there. The direction of the momentum "deposited" will be the more similar to the neutrino direction for higher energy neutrinos. This is actually simple newtonian mechanics!
No, the point of a challenging degree program is to maintain academic standards. To be awarded a degree you need to have achieved a certain standard. If the sole aim was to limit the number of graduates in a program you would simply limit the enrolment. When we have been hiring IT staff one of the things we have looked for is a degree because this shows that they have some depth of knowledge beyond the basics. Sometimes the confidence that this brings can be very important for adapting to new situations.
I get that occasionally but not often because of the low humidity. However when it hit -44C one year (below -50C with wind chill) and I was out walking the dog I did notice my glasses start to make strange sounds and I was a little worried that the metal frames were contracting and putting strain on the glass lens!
Every time you move something from a cold place in to a warmer one (higher humidity in the air implicit, since higher temperature means higher point of saturation)
Actually that is not implicit. Up here in the frozen wastes of central Alberta in the winter the indoor humidity drops to incredibly low values of 10-20% because there is no moisture in the outside air because it is at -40C and even then has low humidity. This means that condensation is never really a problem - you might get a bit of it but it very quickly evaporates because of the incredibly low humidity inside. In fact the humidity gets so low that our data centre has a humidifier to bump it up to the safe operating range of machines.
Conversely in the UK where there is no extreme cold weather (yes I know the beeb goes nuts if London drops below -5C but sorry, that doesn't count!) but lots of humidity. As a kid I used to have far more problems with my glasses fogging up when I came inside during the winter that I do in Canada.
It's because we Americans are simply too stupid to select an election system that allows more than two parties
Please don't expect this to help. There are enough clueless idiots out there to fill any number of political party nominations. I'm not sure that choosing the least worse of 3 or more is much better than least worse of two. But you should definitely keep party membership lists private - it opens all sorts of possibilities for abuse otherwise.