The Royal Society in the UK did a report on geoengineering and concluded sulphate aerosols for example could be used to effect "a reduction of solar input by about 2%" to "balance the effect on global mean temperature of a doubling of CO2" for "total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars". Check out the Royal Society's report.
Delivering between 1 and 5 MtS/yr to the stratosphere is feasible. The mass involved is less than a tenth of the current annual payload of the global air transportation, and commercial transport aircraft already reach the lower stratosphere. Methods of delivering the required mass to the stratosphere depend on the required delivery altitude, assuming that the highest required altitude would be that needed to access the lower tropical stratosphere, about 20 km, then the most cost-effective delivery method would probably be a custom built fl eet of aircraft, although rockets, aircraft/rocket combinations, artillery and balloons have all been suggested. Very rough cost estimates based on existing aircraft and artillery technology suggest that costs would be of the order of 3 to 30 $/kg putting the total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars (US National Academy of Science 1992; Keith 2000; Blackstock et al. 2009). The environmental impacts of the delivery system itself would of course also need to be carefully considered.
I reckon if global warming turns out to be bad, something like this will be done because it's easier to get the Chinese to chip in for it than it is to get them to cripple their economy with steep CO2 emissions cuts. And if the Chinese won't cut CO2 emissions, global CO2 emissions won't come down
Another nice thing about this sort of scheme is that you don't need to be able to accurately predict long term climate. You simply need to look at the trend over the last few years and increase or decrease your sulphate pumping rate.
It's like having a human controlled thermostat for that planet.
During the 2012 election, Republicans who hated the daily onslaught of polling showing that Mitt Romney was headed toward a comfortable defeat turned to Dean Chambers, the man who launched the website Unskewed Polls. The poll numbers were wrong, he said, and by tweaking a few things, he could give a more accurate count. His final projection had Romney winning close to all 50 states.
Chambers has wisely abandoned the field of election forecasting, and this year says he thinks the various models predicting a Hillary Clinton victory are probably accurate. The models themselves are pretty confident. HuffPost Pollster is giving Clinton a 98 percent chance of winning, and The New York Times' model at The Upshot puts her chances at 85 percent.
There is one outlier, however, that is causing waves of panic among Democrats around the country, and injecting Trump backers with the hope that their guy might pull this thing off after all. Nate Silver's 538 model is giving Donald Trump a heart-stopping 35 percent chance of winning as of this weekend.
He ratcheted the panic up to 11 on Friday with his latest forecast, tweeting out, "Trump is about 3 points behind Clinton â and 3-point polling errors happen pretty often."
So who's right?
The beauty here is that we won't have to wait long to find out. But let's lay out now why we think we're right and 538 is wrong. Or, at least, why they're doing it wrong.
The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.
Silver calls this unskewing a "trend line adjustment." He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That's the number he sticks in his model â not the original number.
He may end up being right, but he's just guessing. A "trend line adjustment" is merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.
Guess who benefits from the unskewing?
By the time he's done adjusting the "trend line," Clinton has lost 0.2 points and Trump has gained 1.7 points. An adjustment of below 2 points may not seem like much, but it's enough to throw off his entire forecast, taking a comfortable 4.6 point Clinton lead and making it look like a nail-biter.
It's enough to close the gap between the two candidates to below 3 points, which allows Silver to say that it's now anybody's ballgame, because "3-point polling errors happen pretty often."
That line in itself is disingenuous, though. For the polls to be wrong, there wouldn't need to be one single 3-point error. All of the polls â all of them, as Brianna Keilar would put it â would have to be off by 3 points in the same direction. That's happened before, but in 2012 the error favored President Barack Obama. In 2014, it favored Republicans. Errors are just as likely to favor Clinton as they are to favor Trump, and they would have to favor Trump. And we still haven't accounted for the unique fact that one campaign has a get-out-the-vote operation, while the other doesn't.
By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized. "The idea that she's a prohibitive, 95 percent-plus favorite is hard to square with polling that has frequently shown 5- or 6-point swings within the span of a couple weeks, given that she only leads by 3 points or so now," he told Politico recently. "[E]verything depends on one's assumptions, but I think that our assumptions â a Clinton lead, sure, but high uncertainty
BTW if you want to find out what codec your Android device uses for A2DP enable "Bluetooth HCI snoop log" in "Developer Options". Toggle Bluetooth off and on so it reads the setting.
Connect to the device and stream some audio and then disconnect. Turn off the logging and toggle Bluetooth off and on so it reads the setting. Now you can adb pull btsnoop_hci.log and open it in Wireshark.
And that shows me that, as expected, an S5 talking to a Bragi The Headphone ends up using SBC because that's they best than can mutually agree on.
Source___ Destination Protocol Galaxy S5 BRAGI HP 48 SBC
Frame 630: 736 bytes on wire (5888 bits), 736 bytes captured (5888 bits) Bluetooth Bluetooth HCI H4 Bluetooth HCI ACL Packet Bluetooth L2CAP Protocol Bluetooth A2DP Profile Real-Time Transport Protocol Bluetooth SBC Codec
From a UK perspective I'd prefer it if we copied Taiwan when it comes to immigration post BREXIT. Taiwan works like this
* If you can get a job that pays the national average wage plus some percentage * and you have a degree
You get a Alien Registration Card which includes a work permit for one to two years
If you have five years of uninterrupted ARCs you can apply for a Alien Permanent Residence Card. You need to have a health check to make sure you don't have any nasty diseases and a clear criminal record check. Assuming all that passes you've got permanent residence.
The requirements are different if you want to come start a business and keep changing. However in practice it's not all that hard to do - easier than the US for example.
Permanent residence doesn't let you vote - you need citizenship for that. And you can only apply for that if you have no citizenship elsewhere. I.e. non Taiwanese have to resign their foreign citizenship if they want get Taiwan citizenship. This was obviously put in place to avoid having large numbers of Taiwan/Chinese dual citizens whose loyalty might be to China, but of course it catches Americans, Brits and Europeans too.
So Taiwan has relatively low numbers of foreigners resident, mostly on ARCs which are temporary. And the ones on APRCs cannot vote. Most of them teach English, a few run businesses. Taiwan is actually quite keen for foreigners to come to start a business and the rules are easier than the US ones.
Because of the 'above average salary' requirement foreigners do not force down wages. And because of the requirement for a clear criminal record criminal foreigners cannot become permanent residence.
It's an example of what a small, de facto independent democracy can do with immigration policy. Meanwhile inside the EU the UK was forced to accept any EU citizens regardless of whether they were going to work. ECHR Article 8 made it very hard to deport non EU migrants who had committed a crime.
I.e. UK immigration policy is much less well tuned than Taiwan because of the UK's EU and ECHR membership. Meanwhile Taiwan, despite being de facto but not de jure independent managed to run a pretty sane immigration system.
They're actually great for watching videos on my tablet at the gym or listening to podcasts because they can block out outside sounds very effectively. However when I VOIP call people some of them complain it's less clear than my $20 7-11 headphones.
Because I'm in Asia I paid a fair bit more than that since they're imported ultra low volumes.
I.e. a fairly high end bluetooth headset is actually worse than a really cheap set of wired headphones. Plus of course bluetooth headsets are usually running in SBC mode unless the planets align sufficiently for them to run in a better codec - both the phone and the device must support the same high end codec.
Each A2DP service, of possibly many, is designed to uni-directionally transfer an audio stream in up to 2 channel stereo, either to or from the Bluetooth host.[2] This profile relies on AVDTP and GAVDP. It includes mandatory support for the low-complexity SBC codec (not to be confused with Bluetooth's voice-signal codecs such as CVSDM), and supports optionally MPEG-1 Part 3/MPEG-2 Part 3 (MP2 and MP3), MPEG-2 Part 7/MPEG-4 Part 3 (AAC and HE-AAC), and ATRAC, and is extensible to support manufacturer-defined codecs, such as aptX.[3]
So SBC is mandatory and the fallback compatibility option. If you buy your headset and phone from the same company you'd probably get MP3, AAC or aptX. Unfortunately my phone is an ageing Galaxy S5 and so I'm probably stuck with SBC - I couldn't figure out a way to see which codec is actually in use.
Of course this sort of thing is probably where iOS has an advantage over Android - Apple could just make sure both their Apple/Beats branded bluetooth devices and the latest handsets all support the same, possibly proprietary, codec and then Time Cook can give a Jobs style keynote about how great it is.
For what it's worth I used to be a firm believer in the Swedish model. What changed is that I spent four years in Sweden and became aware of the effect that welfare has on motivation. Refugees are particularly disadvantaged by it, but the effect on native Swedes is dire too.
Well none of those states claim to be socialist. They're multiparty democracies with a social democratic party.
And they don't have 'perfect human rights records'. All of them ban hate speech for example and defined hate speech widely enough that disagreeing with the groupthink is potentially illegal. E.g. disagreeing with state policies on mass immigration, or welfare.
They do all have high taxes though. Which is ironic as a society which taxes people heavily but grants them lots of benefits when they're unemployed is probably only possible with a small and culturally homogenous population. E.g. in a great article from Rosengard, an immigrant ghetto in Sweden
Yet there is an increasing sense, even on the left, that the combination of Sweden's welfare and migration policies was foredoomed. The "Swedish model", often seen as a middle way between communism and capitalism, dates back to the 1930s. The intellectual roots of the policy lie in the concept of folkhem ("people's home"); scholars have noticed its similarity to the interwar German idea of Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). One turned malignant, one did not, but they were grown in similar cultures.
Nick Johnson of Britain's Institute of Community Cohesion has studied race relations in various multicultural cities. "In both Sweden and Denmark," he says, "it was very striking that people on the left were saying they hadn't realised the extent to which their social model was predicated on a strong sense of nationalism. And diversity was starting to open the debate about the kind of society they want.
"Some were thinking that they can only maintain strong support for individuals if they control their borders. They are now facing the problem the UK has wrestled with for years: that of having a permanent ethnic minority underclass.
Of course dissenting on immigration is basically impossible in Sweden. Same in Germany. Unfortunately as Engels' article points out high welfare combined with a generous asylum policy means you end up with a lot of people who will probably never work. And they'll have children who will also never work. This is not good for social stability.
According to Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.",[1] including the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
However the Soviet conception of human rights was very different from conceptions prevalent in the West. According to Western legal theory, "it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the government", whereas Soviet law claimed the opposite.[2] The Soviet state was considered as the source of human rights.[3] Therefore, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government.[4] Extensive extra-judiciary powers were given to the Soviet secret police agencies. The regime abolished Western rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law and guarantees of property[5][6] which were considered as examples of "bourgeois morality" by the Soviet law theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky.[7] According to Vladimir Lenin, the purpose of socialist courts was "not to eliminate terror... but to substantiate it and legitimize in principle".[4]
Historian Robert Conquest described the Soviet electoral system as "a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities: a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror and guaranteeing human rights, elections in which there was only one candidate, and in which 99 percent voted; a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention."[8] Sergei Kovalev recalled "the famous article 125 of Constitution which enumerated all main citizen and political rights" in Soviet Union. But when he and other prisoners attempted to use this as a legal base for their abuse complaints, their prosecutor's argument was that "the Constitution was written not for you, but for American Negros, so that they know how happy lives Soviet citizens have".[9]
Crime was determined not as the infraction of law, but as any action which could threaten the Soviet state and society. For example, a desire to make a profit could be interpreted as a counter-revolutionary activity punishable by death.[4] The liquidation and deportation of millions peasants in 1928â"31 was carried out within the terms of Soviet Civil Code.[4] Some Soviet legal scholars even asserted that "criminal repression" may be applied in the absence of guilt.".[4] Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka explained: "Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."[10]
The purpose of public trials was "not to demonstrate the existence or absence of a crime â" that was predetermined by the appropriate party authorities â" but to provide yet another forum for political agitation and propaganda for the instruction of the citizenry (see Moscow Trials for example). Defense lawyers, who had to be party members, were required to take their client's guilt for granted..."[4]
In Marxism-Leninism you need to take away human rights from opponents of the regime in order to build socialism, otherwise those regime opponents will overthrow the regime and reinstate capitalism.
Ironically for the Russian Communist Party that might not have been true in 1917. It was mostly definitely true in
In 2010, Paul Chambers was convicted under the Communications Act after tweeting a joke about blowing up Robin Hood Airport in Nottingham. His conviction was overturned after a two-year legal battle
I always thought Perl was an abomination. Mind you I once got roped into writing some test code in Perl. And it was surprisingly OK. The code was structured into a bunch of functions and it was like writing C. Well except Perl at that point had no function prototypes so you had to manually make sure when you called something you passed things in the right order.
Another Perlism that I disliked was what happens when you pass two arrays and some scalars into a function they all get scrunched into one big list. So you need to pass by reference explicitly
But you know what? Apart form that it wasn't too bad. These days I mostly use Python for scripting, but Perl is honestly not a bad language.
I think it's like VBScript. VBScript is terrible language but the last time I used that I was mostly building up a bunch of strings to pass into MS-SQL. Similarly the last time I used Perl it was actually generating C code which was then compiled and run. And a Perl script checked the logs to see which tests had passed. Basically the system was a way to automate testing code on a bunch of embedded platforms and some emulated ones to make sure nothing broke. Perl was actually OK for that.
Google has uncovered less than $100,000 in ad spending potentially linked to Russian actors, the source said.
Twitter and Facebook recently detected and disclosed that suspected Russian operatives, working for a content farm known as the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, Russia, used their platforms to purchase ads and post content that was politically divisive in an effort to influence Americans before and after the November 2016 presidential election.
The Internet Research Agency employ hundreds of so-called "trolls" who post pro-Kremlin content, much of it fake or discredited, under the guise of phony social media accounts that pose as American or European, according to lawmakers and researchers.
Amount raised by candidates: $1.5 billion Amount raised by super PACs supporting them: $618 million
So there was over $2 billion spent if you add up candidate and super PAC money.
And consider that 300 million odd Americans were also posting 'politically divisive' things to FB. Which dutifully censors all the ones that are anti Democrat and promotes all the ones that are anti Republican
Not to mention the Guardian is hardly innocent of posting 'politically divisive' things about US politics itself.
If the Russians could swing a US election with a five hundred thousand dollars, maybe the Democrats and the Republicans should just hire them next time. It'd save them a lot of money.
Or maybe the Democrats should stop whining - they had more money, the support of most of the tech companies and media and still lost even though the Republicans selected someone who was widely seen as a joke candidate.
Hilary went into that election with a double digit lead and ended up neck and neck, despite all the money and support from the media and tech companies.
Sakharov was a willing member of that system, convinced like so many scientists of the era that they were soldiers on the front lines of a global struggle which required sacrifice and suffering. He never repudiated or regretted creating a weapon of unimagÂinable power, believing that only a balance of power would prevent its use.
His embrace of human rights did not come through a sudden conversion. Scrupulously honest, and almost naive in his understanding of politics and power, he came to it in stages. Let me give you a brief chronology of the metamorphosis.
First came his concern about the radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing. But in those years, in the 1950s, the concerns were still new, and raising them was possible within the scientific and political elite. These were issues Sakharov could take up directly with Nikita Khrushchev, even though he was at times rebuffed and put in his place for meddling in politics.
Then came the Academy of Science elections in 1964 at which Sakharov openly spoke out against accepting an ally of the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. The Academy of Science, in fact, was probably the closest to a democratic institution in the Soviet state, where full members could still vote to reject a candidate pushed by the Kremlin.
So far, Sakharov's activities were still within the bounds of permissible debate for someone of his standing in the elite. Yet as Sakharov noted in his Memoirs, the academy vote, like the struggle against atmospheric testing, marked another step on the way to becoming active in civic affairs.
The turning point for Sakharov, as for the entire dissident movement, came in the mid-1960s. These were years in which Sakharov signed a petition against the rehabilitation of Stalin, followed by a letter against the enactment of the law against defaming the Soviet state, which became the basis for the prosecution of many dissidents, followed by a decision to join in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on Constitution Day.
Then came his first letter, this one to Leonid Brezhnev, in support of a dissident, and then his involvement in the movement to save Lake Baikal.
What is amazing to realize now is that in those years, Sakharov had such high rank that he could pick up a special phone and directly call the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, as he did in 1967 to seek the release of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
These phones, known as vertushka, connected members of the top nomenklatura [chief officials]--I managed to steal one from the Kremlin during the chaos of 1991, and I learned then that the name, vertushka, which means "dial," comes from the fact that the elite network was the first to use dial phones.
On that call, Sakharov was told that Sinyavsky and Daniel would be released in a general amnesty, but they never were.
Step by step, Sakharov developed what he described as a growing compulsion to speak out on the fundamental issues of the age.
Finally, in 1968--that remarkable year of social rebellion the world 'round--Sakharov took the decisive step of putting his thoughts on paper in the milestone essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom."
The work coincided with a turning point in the development of the dissident movement, the Prague Spring of 1968, the rise and spectacular fall of "socialism with a human face."
"Reflections" defined the direction Sakharov's activism would take from that point on. For the epigraph, Sakharov chose a line from Goethe: "He alone is worthy of life and freedom / Who each day does battle for them anew."
It was not a call to arms; Sakharov did not declare that struggle and heroic exploits are ends in themselves. They are worthwhile, he wrote, "only insofar as they enable other people to lead normal, peaceful lives."
"The meaning of life is life itself," he continued, "t
1) Stop foreign companies operating - ban them, spy on them, drive them out 2) Force people to use domestic companies, and force those domestic companies to censor and spy on people. 3) Ban VPNs so people can't see sources outside the country
Claim it's all to stop 'extremism'.
I remember back in the 90's the left in the US and UK claimed that censorship wouldn't work in China and China would eventually be forced to democratize. Now those same left want US social media companies to clamp down more and more on 'hate speech' which in this case means 'speech they hate'. In the UK people have gone to prison for a Facebook posts.
But hey, at least it's not the government censoring people. Rather it's an unelected oligarchy in tech companies that between them have a monopoly on the means of communication. So it's not violating the First Amendment which means it's fine.
The US and UK of course don't block VPNs, because they don't need to - most VPNs are US based and the NSA can zap 'em with a national security letter if it needs to spy on them. What about foreign companies? Well the US government apparently wanted a US buyer for Skype. Microsoft - which is US based and thus vulnerable to a national security letter - bought it. At which point Microsoft did this
Chinese, Russian and United States law enforcement agencies have the ability to eavesdrop on Skype conversations, as well as have access to Skype users' geographic locations. In many cases, simple request for information is sufficient, and no court approval is needed. This ability was deliberately added by Microsoft after they purchased Skype in 2011 for the law enforcement agencies around the world. This is implemented through switching the Skype client for a particular user account from the client-side encryption to the server-side encryption, allowing dissemination of an unencrypted data stream.
The interesting thing is that when it comes to intelligence cooperation where a company is owned makes a great deal of difference. US companies cooperate with US intelligence. Chinese and Russian ones cooperate with their intelligence agencies. Thus allowing people to use foreign companies is a national security risk. It also runs the risk of political contamination - witness the 'Russians-under-the-bed' paranoia in the US about Russian companies spending a few tens of thousands of dollars during the last US election.
In Europe before the EU if a large corporation wanted to lobby for something unpopular it had to do it with national governments. So in the UK that meant it needed to lobby MPs. MPs are of course elected and know that, in theory if they backed something highly unpopular they could be challenged. Of course this doesn't really limit scope for corruption much in practice but there have still been cases where MPs flipped their stance on a law because of its unpopularity. Governments have failed to pass unpopular laws because of backbench rebellions. I.e. MPs who are part of the government party but didn't get a seat in government vote against the government.
Now in many ways the EU is a solution to this problem, from the of the lobbyists. Lobby at the European Commission level and you're lobbying appointed, not elected politicians who therefore don't care about public opinion. The European Commission is the body that initiates legislation in the European Parliament. It can also introduces directives which national governments are obligated to implement - the EU can take them to court if they do not. So if you're a lobbyist it's easy to get stuff pushed down from the EU level that you couldn't get passed national parliaments.
Now the US isn't quite as bad as this, but it still has the possibility for lobbyists for monopolists like Verizon to push laws down from the Federal level onto states. Quite possibly laws it couldn't get passed in one state legislator, let alone all of them. Famously most US Congress people run in gerrymandered seats where the other party has no chance of unseating them and are only vulnerable to being primaried by their own party. Re-election rates are 84-85% and yet Congress's approval rating is 15%. Of course money from lobbyists helps unpopular incumbents defeat less unpopular challengers. I.e. Federal politicians are more powerful and less accountable than politicians at the state level.
I.e. adding more layers of increasingly indirectly accountable government makes things worse for consumers, but better for monopolist corporations. Of course the ultimate for the lobbyists would be to have laws at the NAFTA level and make sure that politicians there are appointed and not elected. Only then would the US's lobbyists have created an environment as conducive to them as the EU is to their European counterparts.
Judgement Day will happen when SkyNet spends its vulnerable childhood years reading the degeneracy posted to Reddit and decides it's time to hit the big old reset button on all biological life.
SCART must be the world's worst engineered connector, but I remember back in the day thinking it was good you could do component RGB instead of composite.
Now of course we've got HDMI which is a connector designed by people who know what they're doing, digital RGB and it's even got error correction
It's because it's slow and kind of thoughtful. Unfortunately non stop action is what sells. Look at the Marvel movies, Transformers, new Star Wars, new Star Trek and so on. I'd rather see a film like Blade Runner 2049 but it seems like I'm in a minority.
He's not my leader and I didn't win. I'm not a US citizen. I'm pointing to the staggering intellectual dishonesty of accusing him of Russian collusion for a year with no evidence and when evidence comes out Hillary did collude - and probably broke FEC rules doing it - simply stopping talking about Russia.
A runaway greenhouse effect is a process in which a net positive feedback between surface temperature and atmospheric opacity increases the strength of the greenhouse effect on a planet until its oceans boil away.[1][2] An example of this is believed to have happened in the early history of Venus. On the Earth, the IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'â"analogous to [that of] Venusâ"appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."
What that meant was "Windows Mobile is dead. All your favourite mobile applications already run on Android and iOS and don't work on Windows Phone. Time to migrate to one of those".
In my case my favourite application was Pleco, a Chinese dictionary. That worked on Windows Mobile and now runs on iOS and Android and not on Windows Phone.
Now Windows Mobile was never a commercial success, except compared to Windows Phone.
Still you'd think their cloud stuff should be safe right? Well not anymore. Shutting down servers is a bad sign - it usually means a wider cull of products is in process at Microsoft.
It's dumb too - if you tell people the product they are using is being killed off and they need to migrate, they're just as likely to migrate to the competition as they are to the Microsoft product you want them to migrate to.
If it is accurate, then it reflects poorly on Trump. If it is not accurate, then it reflects poorly on Clinton.
My point being that the NYT/WashPo/CNN etc all talked about Russian collusion when they thought Trump was guilty of it, despite having no evidence of a crime. Then it came out that Clinton's campaign had illegally paid for the Steele dossier from Russia - the illegality comes from paying a law firm to pay FusionGPS which eventually paid him. The FEC requires campaign expenditure over $200 to be itemised. I predict the Democrat supporting media will simply stop talking about Russia at this point.
And I'd say if you're interested in truth, don't trust any of these news sources. They'll report things they know to be untrue, or at least have no evidence for if they think that report will help their party. And they'll not report things for which there is evidence if they think reporting those things will hurt their party. In fact the NYT freely admitted it was giving up old fashioned notions of impartiality and checking things were true before the election
I.e. what news they report is solely determined by whether they think it will move things in their direction politically, not whether they actually think the report is true or not.
And incidentally engineers and 'nerds' are hardly immune to this sort of intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness as any arguments over the merits of hardware or software will tell you. Fanboys exist in both politics and engineering.
The 'Russian collusion/Russia threat' meme will disappear from the media now the NYT and WashPo have reported that Hillary's campaign paid for the Steele dossier.
Before that it reflected badly on Trump, and now it reflects badly on Hillary and the Democrats. And only 7% of journalists are Democrats. So it will simply drop off the short list of stories they talk about because talking about it doesn't fit their preferred narrative.
Slashdot Mirror
The Royal Society in the UK did a report on geoengineering and concluded sulphate aerosols for example could be used to effect "a reduction of solar input by about 2%" to "balance the effect on global mean temperature of a doubling of CO2" for "total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars". Check out the Royal Society's report.
https://royalsociety.org/topic...
Delivering between 1 and 5 MtS/yr to the stratosphere is feasible. The mass involved is less than a tenth of the current annual payload of the global air transportation, and commercial transport aircraft already reach the lower stratosphere. Methods of delivering the required mass to the stratosphere depend on the required delivery altitude, assuming that the highest required altitude would be that needed to access the lower tropical stratosphere, about 20 km, then the most cost-effective delivery method would probably be a custom built fl eet of aircraft, although rockets, aircraft/rocket combinations, artillery and balloons have all been suggested. Very rough cost estimates based on existing aircraft and artillery technology suggest that costs would be of the order of 3 to 30 $/kg putting the total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars (US National Academy of Science 1992; Keith 2000; Blackstock et al. 2009). The environmental impacts of the delivery system itself would of course also need to be carefully considered.
I reckon if global warming turns out to be bad, something like this will be done because it's easier to get the Chinese to chip in for it than it is to get them to cripple their economy with steep CO2 emissions cuts. And if the Chinese won't cut CO2 emissions, global CO2 emissions won't come down
https://photos.mongabay.com/09...
Another nice thing about this sort of scheme is that you don't need to be able to accurately predict long term climate. You simply need to look at the trend over the last few years and increase or decrease your sulphate pumping rate.
It's like having a human controlled thermostat for that planet.
Careful! The HuffPo will denounce you as un unpatriotic heathen if you say that the chances are less than 98% because 'that's what the numbers say".
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
During the 2012 election, Republicans who hated the daily onslaught of polling showing that Mitt Romney was headed toward a comfortable defeat turned to Dean Chambers, the man who launched the website Unskewed Polls. The poll numbers were wrong, he said, and by tweaking a few things, he could give a more accurate count. His final projection had Romney winning close to all 50 states.
Chambers has wisely abandoned the field of election forecasting, and this year says he thinks the various models predicting a Hillary Clinton victory are probably accurate. The models themselves are pretty confident. HuffPost Pollster is giving Clinton a 98 percent chance of winning, and The New York Times' model at The Upshot puts her chances at 85 percent.
There is one outlier, however, that is causing waves of panic among Democrats around the country, and injecting Trump backers with the hope that their guy might pull this thing off after all. Nate Silver's 538 model is giving Donald Trump a heart-stopping 35 percent chance of winning as of this weekend.
He ratcheted the panic up to 11 on Friday with his latest forecast, tweeting out, "Trump is about 3 points behind Clinton â and 3-point polling errors happen pretty often."
So who's right?
The beauty here is that we won't have to wait long to find out. But let's lay out now why we think we're right and 538 is wrong. Or, at least, why they're doing it wrong.
The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.
Silver calls this unskewing a "trend line adjustment." He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That's the number he sticks in his model â not the original number.
He may end up being right, but he's just guessing. A "trend line adjustment" is merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.
Guess who benefits from the unskewing?
By the time he's done adjusting the "trend line," Clinton has lost 0.2 points and Trump has gained 1.7 points. An adjustment of below 2 points may not seem like much, but it's enough to throw off his entire forecast, taking a comfortable 4.6 point Clinton lead and making it look like a nail-biter.
It's enough to close the gap between the two candidates to below 3 points, which allows Silver to say that it's now anybody's ballgame, because "3-point polling errors happen pretty often."
That line in itself is disingenuous, though. For the polls to be wrong, there wouldn't need to be one single 3-point error. All of the polls â all of them, as Brianna Keilar would put it â would have to be off by 3 points in the same direction. That's happened before, but in 2012 the error favored President Barack Obama. In 2014, it favored Republicans. Errors are just as likely to favor Clinton as they are to favor Trump, and they would have to favor Trump. And we still haven't accounted for the unique fact that one campaign has a get-out-the-vote operation, while the other doesn't.
By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized. "The idea that she's a prohibitive, 95 percent-plus favorite is hard to square with polling that has frequently shown 5- or 6-point swings within the span of a couple weeks, given that she only leads by 3 points or so now," he told Politico recently. "[E]verything depends on one's assumptions, but I think that our assumptions â a Clinton lead, sure, but high uncertainty
BTW if you want to find out what codec your Android device uses for A2DP enable "Bluetooth HCI snoop log" in "Developer Options". Toggle Bluetooth off and on so it reads the setting.
Connect to the device and stream some audio and then disconnect. Turn off the logging and toggle Bluetooth off and on so it reads the setting. Now you can adb pull btsnoop_hci.log and open it in Wireshark.
And that shows me that, as expected, an S5 talking to a Bragi The Headphone ends up using SBC because that's they best than can mutually agree on.
From a UK perspective I'd prefer it if we copied Taiwan when it comes to immigration post BREXIT. Taiwan works like this
* If you can get a job that pays the national average wage plus some percentage
* and you have a degree
You get a Alien Registration Card which includes a work permit for one to two years
If you have five years of uninterrupted ARCs you can apply for a Alien Permanent Residence Card. You need to have a health check to make sure you don't have any nasty diseases and a clear criminal record check. Assuming all that passes you've got permanent residence.
The requirements are different if you want to come start a business and keep changing. However in practice it's not all that hard to do - easier than the US for example.
Permanent residence doesn't let you vote - you need citizenship for that. And you can only apply for that if you have no citizenship elsewhere. I.e. non Taiwanese have to resign their foreign citizenship if they want get Taiwan citizenship. This was obviously put in place to avoid having large numbers of Taiwan/Chinese dual citizens whose loyalty might be to China, but of course it catches Americans, Brits and Europeans too.
So Taiwan has relatively low numbers of foreigners resident, mostly on ARCs which are temporary. And the ones on APRCs cannot vote. Most of them teach English, a few run businesses. Taiwan is actually quite keen for foreigners to come to start a business and the rules are easier than the US ones.
Because of the 'above average salary' requirement foreigners do not force down wages. And because of the requirement for a clear criminal record criminal foreigners cannot become permanent residence.
It's an example of what a small, de facto independent democracy can do with immigration policy. Meanwhile inside the EU the UK was forced to accept any EU citizens regardless of whether they were going to work. ECHR Article 8 made it very hard to deport non EU migrants who had committed a crime.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
I.e. UK immigration policy is much less well tuned than Taiwan because of the UK's EU and ECHR membership. Meanwhile Taiwan, despite being de facto but not de jure independent managed to run a pretty sane immigration system.
I've got a pair of these
https://www.bragi.com/theheadp...
They're actually great for watching videos on my tablet at the gym or listening to podcasts because they can block out outside sounds very effectively. However when I VOIP call people some of them complain it's less clear than my $20 7-11 headphones.
The Headphone (dumb name) goes for $119 at NewEgg
https://www.newegg.com/Product...
Because I'm in Asia I paid a fair bit more than that since they're imported ultra low volumes.
I.e. a fairly high end bluetooth headset is actually worse than a really cheap set of wired headphones. Plus of course bluetooth headsets are usually running in SBC mode unless the planets align sufficiently for them to run in a better codec - both the phone and the device must support the same high end codec.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SBC is a low computational complexity which doesn't honestly bother me, but it bothers the hell out of some people.
Looking here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Each A2DP service, of possibly many, is designed to uni-directionally transfer an audio stream in up to 2 channel stereo, either to or from the Bluetooth host.[2] This profile relies on AVDTP and GAVDP. It includes mandatory support for the low-complexity SBC codec (not to be confused with Bluetooth's voice-signal codecs such as CVSDM), and supports optionally MPEG-1 Part 3/MPEG-2 Part 3 (MP2 and MP3), MPEG-2 Part 7/MPEG-4 Part 3 (AAC and HE-AAC), and ATRAC, and is extensible to support manufacturer-defined codecs, such as aptX.[3]
So SBC is mandatory and the fallback compatibility option. If you buy your headset and phone from the same company you'd probably get MP3, AAC or aptX. Unfortunately my phone is an ageing Galaxy S5 and so I'm probably stuck with SBC - I couldn't figure out a way to see which codec is actually in use.
Of course this sort of thing is probably where iOS has an advantage over Android - Apple could just make sure both their Apple/Beats branded bluetooth devices and the latest handsets all support the same, possibly proprietary, codec and then Time Cook can give a Jobs style keynote about how great it is.
Thanks for having a civil discussion!
For what it's worth I used to be a firm believer in the Swedish model. What changed is that I spent four years in Sweden and became aware of the effect that welfare has on motivation. Refugees are particularly disadvantaged by it, but the effect on native Swedes is dire too.
Well none of those states claim to be socialist. They're multiparty democracies with a social democratic party.
And they don't have 'perfect human rights records'. All of them ban hate speech for example and defined hate speech widely enough that disagreeing with the groupthink is potentially illegal. E.g. disagreeing with state policies on mass immigration, or welfare.
They do all have high taxes though. Which is ironic as a society which taxes people heavily but grants them lots of benefits when they're unemployed is probably only possible with a small and culturally homogenous population. E.g. in a great article from Rosengard, an immigrant ghetto in Sweden
https://archive.is/SQLl2
Yet there is an increasing sense, even on the left, that the combination of Sweden's welfare and migration policies was foredoomed. The "Swedish model", often seen as a middle way between communism and capitalism, dates back to the 1930s. The intellectual roots of the policy lie in the concept of folkhem ("people's home"); scholars have noticed its similarity to the interwar German idea of Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). One turned malignant, one did not, but they were grown in similar cultures.
Nick Johnson of Britain's Institute of Community Cohesion has studied race relations in various multicultural cities. "In both Sweden and Denmark," he says, "it was very striking that people on the left were saying they hadn't realised the extent to which their social model was predicated on a strong sense of nationalism. And diversity was starting to open the debate about the kind of society they want.
"Some were thinking that they can only maintain strong support for individuals if they control their borders. They are now facing the problem the UK has wrestled with for years: that of having a permanent ethnic minority underclass.
Of course dissenting on immigration is basically impossible in Sweden. Same in Germany. Unfortunately as Engels' article points out high welfare combined with a generous asylum policy means you end up with a lot of people who will probably never work. And they'll have children who will also never work. This is not good for social stability.
Marxism-Leninism was implicitly opposed to 'bourgeois' notions like human rights though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
According to Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.",[1] including the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
However the Soviet conception of human rights was very different from conceptions prevalent in the West. According to Western legal theory, "it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the government", whereas Soviet law claimed the opposite.[2] The Soviet state was considered as the source of human rights.[3] Therefore, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government.[4] Extensive extra-judiciary powers were given to the Soviet secret police agencies. The regime abolished Western rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law and guarantees of property[5][6] which were considered as examples of "bourgeois morality" by the Soviet law theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky.[7] According to Vladimir Lenin, the purpose of socialist courts was "not to eliminate terror ... but to substantiate it and legitimize in principle".[4]
Historian Robert Conquest described the Soviet electoral system as "a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities: a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror and guaranteeing human rights, elections in which there was only one candidate, and in which 99 percent voted; a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention."[8] Sergei Kovalev recalled "the famous article 125 of Constitution which enumerated all main citizen and political rights" in Soviet Union. But when he and other prisoners attempted to use this as a legal base for their abuse complaints, their prosecutor's argument was that "the Constitution was written not for you, but for American Negros, so that they know how happy lives Soviet citizens have".[9]
Crime was determined not as the infraction of law, but as any action which could threaten the Soviet state and society. For example, a desire to make a profit could be interpreted as a counter-revolutionary activity punishable by death.[4] The liquidation and deportation of millions peasants in 1928â"31 was carried out within the terms of Soviet Civil Code.[4] Some Soviet legal scholars even asserted that "criminal repression" may be applied in the absence of guilt.".[4] Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka explained: "Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."[10]
The purpose of public trials was "not to demonstrate the existence or absence of a crime â" that was predetermined by the appropriate party authorities â" but to provide yet another forum for political agitation and propaganda for the instruction of the citizenry (see Moscow Trials for example). Defense lawyers, who had to be party members, were required to take their client's guilt for granted..."[4]
In Marxism-Leninism you need to take away human rights from opponents of the regime in order to build socialism, otherwise those regime opponents will overthrow the regime and reinstate capitalism.
Ironically for the Russian Communist Party that might not have been true in 1917. It was mostly definitely true in
I said 'UK'. And I meant cases like this
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
In 2010, Paul Chambers was convicted under the Communications Act after tweeting a joke about blowing up Robin Hood Airport in Nottingham. His conviction was overturned after a two-year legal battle
I always thought Perl was an abomination. Mind you I once got roped into writing some test code in Perl. And it was surprisingly OK. The code was structured into a bunch of functions and it was like writing C. Well except Perl at that point had no function prototypes so you had to manually make sure when you called something you passed things in the right order.
Another Perlism that I disliked was what happens when you pass two arrays and some scalars into a function they all get scrunched into one big list. So you need to pass by reference explicitly
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node...
But you know what? Apart form that it wasn't too bad. These days I mostly use Python for scripting, but Perl is honestly not a bad language.
I think it's like VBScript. VBScript is terrible language but the last time I used that I was mostly building up a bunch of strings to pass into MS-SQL. Similarly the last time I used Perl it was actually generating C code which was then compiled and run. And a Perl script checked the logs to see which tests had passed. Basically the system was a way to automate testing code on a bunch of embedded platforms and some emulated ones to make sure nothing broke. Perl was actually OK for that.
The Russians spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, some of which were 'politically divisive' according to the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Google has uncovered less than $100,000 in ad spending potentially linked to Russian actors, the source said.
Twitter and Facebook recently detected and disclosed that suspected Russian operatives, working for a content farm known as the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, Russia, used their platforms to purchase ads and post content that was politically divisive in an effort to influence Americans before and after the November 2016 presidential election.
The Internet Research Agency employ hundreds of so-called "trolls" who post pro-Kremlin content, much of it fake or discredited, under the guise of phony social media accounts that pose as American or European, according to lawmakers and researchers.
Compare that to spending by US entities
https://www.opensecrets.org/pr...
Amount raised by candidates: $1.5 billion
Amount raised by super PACs supporting them: $618 million
So there was over $2 billion spent if you add up candidate and super PAC money.
And consider that 300 million odd Americans were also posting 'politically divisive' things to FB. Which dutifully censors all the ones that are anti Democrat and promotes all the ones that are anti Republican
Not to mention the Guardian is hardly innocent of posting 'politically divisive' things about US politics itself.
If the Russians could swing a US election with a five hundred thousand dollars, maybe the Democrats and the Republicans should just hire them next time. It'd save them a lot of money.
Or maybe the Democrats should stop whining - they had more money, the support of most of the tech companies and media and still lost even though the Republicans selected someone who was widely seen as a joke candidate.
Hilary went into that election with a double digit lead and ended up neck and neck, despite all the money and support from the media and tech companies.
https://www.hoover.org/researc...
Sakharov was a willing member of that system, convinced like so many scientists of the era that they were soldiers on the front lines of a global struggle which required sacrifice and suffering. He never repudiated or regretted creating a weapon of unimagÂinable power, believing that only a balance of power would prevent its use.
His embrace of human rights did not come through a sudden conversion. Scrupulously honest, and almost naive in his understanding of politics and power, he came to it in stages. Let me give you a brief chronology of the metamorphosis.
First came his concern about the radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing. But in those years, in the 1950s, the concerns were still new, and raising them was possible within the scientific and political elite. These were issues Sakharov could take up directly with Nikita Khrushchev, even though he was at times rebuffed and put in his place for meddling in politics.
Then came the Academy of Science elections in 1964 at which Sakharov openly spoke out against accepting an ally of the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. The Academy of Science, in fact, was probably the closest to a democratic institution in the Soviet state, where full members could still vote to reject a candidate pushed by the Kremlin.
So far, Sakharov's activities were still within the bounds of permissible debate for someone of his standing in the elite. Yet as Sakharov noted in his Memoirs, the academy vote, like the struggle against atmospheric testing, marked another step on the way to becoming active in civic affairs.
The turning point for Sakharov, as for the entire dissident movement, came in the mid-1960s. These were years in which Sakharov signed a petition against the rehabilitation of Stalin, followed by a letter against the enactment of the law against defaming the Soviet state, which became the basis for the prosecution of many dissidents, followed by a decision to join in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on Constitution Day.
Then came his first letter, this one to Leonid Brezhnev, in support of a dissident, and then his involvement in the movement to save Lake Baikal.
What is amazing to realize now is that in those years, Sakharov had such high rank that he could pick up a special phone and directly call the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, as he did in 1967 to seek the release of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
These phones, known as vertushka, connected members of the top nomenklatura [chief officials]--I managed to steal one from the Kremlin during the chaos of 1991, and I learned then that the name, vertushka, which means "dial," comes from the fact that the elite network was the first to use dial phones.
On that call, Sakharov was told that Sinyavsky and Daniel would be released in a general amnesty, but they never were.
Step by step, Sakharov developed what he described as a growing compulsion to speak out on the fundamental issues of the age.
Finally, in 1968--that remarkable year of social rebellion the world 'round--Sakharov took the decisive step of putting his thoughts on paper in the milestone essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom."
The work coincided with a turning point in the development of the dissident movement, the Prague Spring of 1968, the rise and spectacular fall of "socialism with a human face."
"Reflections" defined the direction Sakharov's activism would take from that point on. For the epigraph, Sakharov chose a line from Goethe: "He alone is worthy of life and freedom / Who each day does battle for them anew."
It was not a call to arms; Sakharov did not declare that struggle and heroic exploits are ends in themselves. They are worthwhile, he wrote, "only insofar as they enable other people to lead normal, peaceful lives."
"The meaning of life is life itself," he continued, "t
Basically China has show the way
1) Stop foreign companies operating - ban them, spy on them, drive them out
2) Force people to use domestic companies, and force those domestic companies to censor and spy on people.
3) Ban VPNs so people can't see sources outside the country
Claim it's all to stop 'extremism'.
I remember back in the 90's the left in the US and UK claimed that censorship wouldn't work in China and China would eventually be forced to democratize. Now those same left want US social media companies to clamp down more and more on 'hate speech' which in this case means 'speech they hate'. In the UK people have gone to prison for a Facebook posts.
But hey, at least it's not the government censoring people. Rather it's an unelected oligarchy in tech companies that between them have a monopoly on the means of communication. So it's not violating the First Amendment which means it's fine.
The US and UK of course don't block VPNs, because they don't need to - most VPNs are US based and the NSA can zap 'em with a national security letter if it needs to spy on them. What about foreign companies? Well the US government apparently wanted a US buyer for Skype. Microsoft - which is US based and thus vulnerable to a national security letter - bought it. At which point Microsoft did this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Chinese, Russian and United States law enforcement agencies have the ability to eavesdrop on Skype conversations, as well as have access to Skype users' geographic locations. In many cases, simple request for information is sufficient, and no court approval is needed. This ability was deliberately added by Microsoft after they purchased Skype in 2011 for the law enforcement agencies around the world. This is implemented through switching the Skype client for a particular user account from the client-side encryption to the server-side encryption, allowing dissemination of an unencrypted data stream.
The interesting thing is that when it comes to intelligence cooperation where a company is owned makes a great deal of difference. US companies cooperate with US intelligence. Chinese and Russian ones cooperate with their intelligence agencies. Thus allowing people to use foreign companies is a national security risk. It also runs the risk of political contamination - witness the 'Russians-under-the-bed' paranoia in the US about Russian companies spending a few tens of thousands of dollars during the last US election.
Girlfriend in GANada?
In Europe before the EU if a large corporation wanted to lobby for something unpopular it had to do it with national governments. So in the UK that meant it needed to lobby MPs. MPs are of course elected and know that, in theory if they backed something highly unpopular they could be challenged. Of course this doesn't really limit scope for corruption much in practice but there have still been cases where MPs flipped their stance on a law because of its unpopularity. Governments have failed to pass unpopular laws because of backbench rebellions. I.e. MPs who are part of the government party but didn't get a seat in government vote against the government.
Now in many ways the EU is a solution to this problem, from the of the lobbyists. Lobby at the European Commission level and you're lobbying appointed, not elected politicians who therefore don't care about public opinion. The European Commission is the body that initiates legislation in the European Parliament. It can also introduces directives which national governments are obligated to implement - the EU can take them to court if they do not. So if you're a lobbyist it's easy to get stuff pushed down from the EU level that you couldn't get passed national parliaments.
Now the US isn't quite as bad as this, but it still has the possibility for lobbyists for monopolists like Verizon to push laws down from the Federal level onto states. Quite possibly laws it couldn't get passed in one state legislator, let alone all of them. Famously most US Congress people run in gerrymandered seats where the other party has no chance of unseating them and are only vulnerable to being primaried by their own party. Re-election rates are 84-85% and yet Congress's approval rating is 15%. Of course money from lobbyists helps unpopular incumbents defeat less unpopular challengers. I.e. Federal politicians are more powerful and less accountable than politicians at the state level.
I.e. adding more layers of increasingly indirectly accountable government makes things worse for consumers, but better for monopolist corporations. Of course the ultimate for the lobbyists would be to have laws at the NAFTA level and make sure that politicians there are appointed and not elected. Only then would the US's lobbyists have created an environment as conducive to them as the EU is to their European counterparts.
Judgement Day will happen when SkyNet spends its vulnerable childhood years reading the degeneracy posted to Reddit and decides it's time to hit the big old reset button on all biological life.
SCART must be the world's worst engineered connector, but I remember back in the day thinking it was good you could do component RGB instead of composite.
Now of course we've got HDMI which is a connector designed by people who know what they're doing, digital RGB and it's even got error correction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your bits will become dangerously oblong if you don't use a Monster(tm) Isotopically Pure(tm) High Electron Mobility gold cable.
Walter Peck from the EPA was a secondary antagonist in Ghostbusters
http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/...
It's because it's slow and kind of thoughtful. Unfortunately non stop action is what sells. Look at the Marvel movies, Transformers, new Star Wars, new Star Trek and so on. I'd rather see a film like Blade Runner 2049 but it seems like I'm in a minority.
He's not my leader and I didn't win. I'm not a US citizen. I'm pointing to the staggering intellectual dishonesty of accusing him of Russian collusion for a year with no evidence and when evidence comes out Hillary did collude - and probably broke FEC rules doing it - simply stopping talking about Russia.
Even the IPCC say there is virtually no chance of anthropogenic activities causing a runaway greenhouse effect a la Venus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A runaway greenhouse effect is a process in which a net positive feedback between surface temperature and atmospheric opacity increases the strength of the greenhouse effect on a planet until its oceans boil away.[1][2] An example of this is believed to have happened in the early history of Venus. On the Earth, the IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'â"analogous to [that of] Venusâ"appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."
https://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/s... page 11
I remember when Microsoft killed off MyPhone and the Windows Mobile app store.
http://www.bgr.in/news/microso...
What that meant was "Windows Mobile is dead. All your favourite mobile applications already run on Android and iOS and don't work on Windows Phone. Time to migrate to one of those".
In my case my favourite application was Pleco, a Chinese dictionary. That worked on Windows Mobile and now runs on iOS and Android and not on Windows Phone.
Now Windows Mobile was never a commercial success, except compared to Windows Phone.
Still you'd think their cloud stuff should be safe right? Well not anymore. Shutting down servers is a bad sign - it usually means a wider cull of products is in process at Microsoft.
It's dumb too - if you tell people the product they are using is being killed off and they need to migrate, they're just as likely to migrate to the competition as they are to the Microsoft product you want them to migrate to.
If it is accurate, then it reflects poorly on Trump. If it is not accurate, then it reflects poorly on Clinton.
My point being that the NYT/WashPo/CNN etc all talked about Russian collusion when they thought Trump was guilty of it, despite having no evidence of a crime. Then it came out that Clinton's campaign had illegally paid for the Steele dossier from Russia - the illegality comes from paying a law firm to pay FusionGPS which eventually paid him. The FEC requires campaign expenditure over $200 to be itemised. I predict the Democrat supporting media will simply stop talking about Russia at this point.
And I'd say if you're interested in truth, don't trust any of these news sources. They'll report things they know to be untrue, or at least have no evidence for if they think that report will help their party. And they'll not report things for which there is evidence if they think reporting those things will hurt their party. In fact the NYT freely admitted it was giving up old fashioned notions of impartiality and checking things were true before the election
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
I.e. what news they report is solely determined by whether they think it will move things in their direction politically, not whether they actually think the report is true or not.
And incidentally engineers and 'nerds' are hardly immune to this sort of intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness as any arguments over the merits of hardware or software will tell you. Fanboys exist in both politics and engineering.
The 'Russian collusion/Russia threat' meme will disappear from the media now the NYT and WashPo have reported that Hillary's campaign paid for the Steele dossier.
Before that it reflected badly on Trump, and now it reflects badly on Hillary and the Democrats. And only 7% of journalists are Democrats. So it will simply drop off the short list of stories they talk about because talking about it doesn't fit their preferred narrative.