Cheers, that's really interesting. Does pardoning the act still apply post conviction also? So if for example Snowden did face trial for leaking classified material for the leaks in general, and from some treason charge for leaking the stuff that he didn't need to leak, then must the whole act still be pardoned, or could he then be pardoned for just the leaking portion of the act, but not the treason portion of the act, and would his jail time then be adjusted for the single charge of treason with any years added for the leaking of classified material removed from his time only? I guess really, I'm asking, do partial pardons exist?
It sounds like there may well be some sensible rationale behind Obama's decision to have wanted to see a trial for Snowden before committing to any pardon.
I'm intrigued as to how pardons work legally and in terms of documentation. It seems pretty clear that presidents can pardon pre-try as many people here have evidenced, but what does that pardon look like? If there's been no charges and no trial, then how do they define what the pardon is for? If they pardon for presumed charges then isn't there a risk that when someone like Snowden comes back home they just get run through the system on different charges than were pardoned for? So for example if he pardoned Snowden for crimes of espionage and leaking state secrets then isn't there a risk he could be charged still, for say, treason?
If the pardon is more arbitrary and more general then isn't there a risk that the person could've committed other more serious, as yet unknown crimes which they're then absolved of via the generic pardon? What if for example Snowden was pardoned for his crimes but it turns out he has since been assisting the FSB beyond mere whistleblowing? If it's descriptive as to what actions the pardon is supposed to cover then I imagine that still leaves massive scope for legal wrangling as courts would surely need to determine what the wording actually covers?
I ask because I have no idea how this works, but it would certainly seem likely that not pardoning before charges, and relevance of charges in court, though not against the rules, would at least seem eminently sensible for everyone involved - it would make it clear exactly what the extent and limitations of the pardon are for, without leaving scope for later dispute on the extent of the pardon. I can see why, if this is the case, that Obama might want legal certainty on what he's actually pardoning before doing so even if other presidents may be a bit more laissez-faire about it.
"Our Nobel Peace Prize President dropped 26,000 bombs (real bombs, not little hand grenades) last year on various brown people (even though we are not at war)."
Why make it about skin colour? Your president was the same colour but he very clearly didn't bomb himself, so that was obviously not a factor in determining targets so why bring it up?
"BTW, has anyone considered that it might be preferable to address their grievances rather than just bomb them?"
Whilst I'd always agree for rational actors such as the IRA, FARC, and maybe even the Taliban, these actors aren't rational. You could make the same argument for the Nazis in WWII but given that their greivance was that they wanted to extinguish entire groups of humans to the tune of millions then it's not exactly a greivance that any reasonable human being can help address is it?
When the greivance in question is our very existence and way of life, then it's not merely that they're a bit upset about something and we can help make that better, it's that they want to extinguish our very existence, and the only response to that is to extinguish theirs first.
But if you believe otherwise, then do feel free to go and talk to them. I'll keep an eye on YouTube for a video of how you got on.
The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is the most heavily subsidised industry going. A nuclear plant for example is always going to be made to be responsible for complete costs of waste disposal, and yet fossil fuel plants, and cars are allowed to just spew their waste into the environment at no cost.
If you were to make the fossil fuel industry pay it's actual costs - i.e. impact on people's health for example, rather than expect people to subsidise them by paying for their own health issues caused by fossil fuel users then the cost of petrol cars, of power via fossil fuels and so forth would be untenable and the market would change overnight but with massive economic and social disruption as people fail to afford to adjust to paying what they actually should, rather than to continue using their fossil fuel based power source or car at the expense of others.
So given the difficulty in trying to just completely alter the entire economic model of most countries overnight by making it illegal for fossil fuel users and power plants to continue to be subsidised by, say, doubling the price of petrol and electricity from non-renewable sources it's easier to just give at least some kind of counter-subsidy to renewables.
The problem is that the "natural" rate of change you're referring to isn't the natural rate of change, it's a rate of change crippled by the fact that fossil fuel power plants and so forth receive massive indirect subsidies through the fact they're not faced to pay for the actual costs they incur on society.
If you want to learn more search for "fossil fuel externalities". You'll find no end of articles and papers trying to estimate the hidden costs of fossil fuels, and whilst estimates vary it's to the degree of hundreds of billions every year in the US alone. The problem is that the system has been manipulated so long by the fossil fuel industries due to the power of big oil et. al. that they're not even close to playing on a level playing field even with renewable subsidies - they're at a massive subsidised advantage over renewables even when renewables have the subsidies they do.
I think you're right, but I think it's a similar situation across the globe - realistically spy agencies in Russia, China and so forth shouldn't be doing those things to innocent citizens either so I don't think it's entirely a Western problem.
I think it's a general issue here that governments need to get together and accept that they all need to reign in their agencies before shit really does hit the fan with some mutual agreement to start actually following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (that governs against this sort of thing), and to start governing cyber operations against each other in the same way military operations are governed against each other - i.e. it's not just some routine thing you do on a whim, and that there are consequences for it.
I mean, let's be clear, the sort of shit you are describing already has in some countries has profoundly damaging real world consequences - the whole arab spring started in Tunisia precisely because overreaching security services eventually pushed one man just that bit too far for example.
So you're absolutely right to point out that uncontrolled security services can cause more harm than good if they are not reigned in appropriately, and if left to go to far, they in themselves can become a catalyst for national collapse as in the arab spring.
I'm actually rather concerned that contrary to the implication in the summary that this is no longer simply citizen hacking but in fact escalation of state sponsored hacking. It seems we're beginning to find out more and more that nation states are engaged in hacking from the hacks we know about for sure such as the North Korean hack of Sony, through to the ones that we can make a reasonable assumption on such as the Russian hacks of the DNC (even Trump finally said on Wednesday he thinks it was the Russians), through to those we simply don't know about.
Even if we step back a few years we had the Syrian cyber army being quite active in it's hacking attempts. Given that Syria worked closely with North Korea on their attempted nuclear program (Syria's nuclear program destroyed by Israel in 2007 was shown to be a clone of North Korea's) then would it really be far fetched to assume that given that North Korea also has strong offensive hacking capabilities that it wasn't engaging with them on that too? Similarly the UEA ClimateGate hack was eventually believed based on analysis to be an act by Russia as it was carried out just days before a major climate conference in 2009 that sought to reduce emissions by cutting fossil fuel use - far and away the foundation of Russia's entire economy so they had clear interest also in sabotaging such an agreement and it worked, the conference was largely a failure as a result.
Of course it's not one sided, we know about Stuxnet being a likely US-Israeli attack, and we know that the five eyes countries have been engaging in these sorts of things for years thanks to the revelations by Snowden. I'm not saying it's just some countries or others doing it, on the contrary, I think everyone is doing it. Frankly I suspect at least some of the purported hacks by anonymous were merely just nation states using the broad anonymous idea as cover for their actions.
Could this Cellebrite hack for example be revenge by Iran for Stuxnet? At this point I do not think that's far-fetched for one minute, though hopefully time will tell.
My concern is that this is getting out of control. How long before this escalates and what we once laughed at as being paranoia, the idea of "cyber war" becomes a reality and someone decides to break a damn, or overload a powerplant? Ukraine already saw last year an outage on their powergrid because of hackers. Thankfully I believe no one died, but how long before someone does and it stops just being a cyber war?
We're learning more and more about this and so far solutions have been purely political and diplomatic. A couple of years back we were seeing constant hacks on the US from China, and this died down - I saw an article recently explaining what happened, and it turns out that there was more than meets the eye to the US charges against 5 Chinese mentioned here:
The images that the US used for these arrest warrants were apparently personal images the US themselves had stolen from these Chinese general's laptops after their own hacks against them. The effect was to send a public message to the Chinese that "we can do it too" and it seems to have been succesful as China/US relations on this front seem to have significantly improved and this seems to have been the driver for the China/US cyber agreement agreed late last year. It appears the Chinese cyber command got spooked when they saw their own non-publicly available data used to provide pictures in arrest warrants against them and forced a whole Chinese reconsideration of the issue.
It's clear therefore that increased state hacking isn't merely the paranoia that people once thought it was and that it's generally becoming more prolific, or at least, we're becoming far more aware of it as time goes on and more information is released. So the point I was going to make in reply to your post was this - I'm
It really depends what the service includes. The Microsoft/Sony offerings are very reasonable for what you get given the included free monthly games, so I think it's a bit silly to judge before knowing how much it'll cost and what it includes.
I agree, that's also why we shouldn't research anything else ever again because it's also all likely to not work with 100% perfection right away so there's no point bothering at all.
Interestingly in the UK we don't have that second step, but when I tried ordering anything through Alexa I couldn't get her to order anything other than my order history too, so the whole Prime-eligible items thing seemed to not work when I tried a few weeks ago and you were restricted to re-ordering past items only.
Regardless I've put a pin in place so you can't accidentally trigger a purchase from an advert or anything without also saying the pin, but given that I don't even use that feature I might as well use the other option that lets you turn off voice ordering completely. Amazon should probably make that the default unless someone asks to order then tell them how to enable it though really.
Okay if you want to keep being wrong just to convince yourself that you're right about every word you speak even if you have no idea what you're talking about then fine, have it your way. An odd stance to take when given evidence and the opportunity to find plenty more evidence (Google), but hey.
The fact is, Ford is behind the curve, maybe you have one, and that upsets you, but trying to deny reality just because of something as petty as that is, well, pretty much the definition of ignorance.
You're taking very specific examples and suggesting there must be nothing of relevance at all, which is a blatant fallacy. You're simply trying to convince yourself you're right, when in fact you're completely wrong.
Pretty much the entire field of aerodynamic modelling of cars, pretty much the entirety of material science related to cars starts with things like Formula 1 and NASCAR and gets us where we are now - with ever more fuel efficient cars, due to using lighter materials, and due to being more aerodynamic and so on and so forth. I don't know why you also think the design of a birdcage frame is irrelevant to highway situations, understanding of crumple zones and so on and so forth is in itself an example of something that was driven by the need to protect drivers when racing cars.
As cars go faster and faster, and need to be more and more fuel efficient, learning about everything from heat dissipation, to wait minimisation, to energy conservation is always being led by racing because they're at that forefront of trying to win the race. Typically the transformation follows a clear pattern - technological advancements turn up in something like a Formula 1, or NASCAR vehicle first, then they end up in high end sports cars quite quickly, from there they move into common consumer vehicles.
For example, the fact most modern cars don't really rust much, if at all is precisely because they use more plastics, more composite materials and so on and so forth that simply aren't effected by rust because they're also lighter. These materials and use of them in motor vehicles stems from the need to get race cars faster by carrying less weight, this is a prime example of the sort of technology transfer that started out in racing, and moved to high end sports cars, and is now in just about every car you'll find in a car lot that was made in the last 10 years.
Even if a consumer car doesn't need to go as fast as many race cars, it can still typically gain efficiency instead of speed from those technologies, because more fuel equals more weight, which means you need a more powerful engine which will typically be heavier also meaning you get stuck in a loop of competing problems, unless you improve fuel efficiency. This is no different to the problem with consumer cars, only people don't want to max out at 200mph, they do at least want to go further on less fuel.
But you don't have to take my word that you're wrong, there's more than enough written on the topic from independent sources if you're willing to do a simple search. Here are some examples:
Most racing endeavours, be it NASCAR or Formula 1 act as R&D programmes for car manufacturers - they turn it into a competition with massive coverage because it's makes these R&D programmes self funding. So yes, if you're winning NASCAR then it means you're leading R&D and that technology will feed into your next generation of cars. If a particular company hasn't done well in these events in some time then it's evidence that their R&D is falling behind and that they're becoming less competitive.
Most of the technologies relating to handling, stability, performance, design, and safety in modern consumer cars come from lessons learnt on the race track.
This is in large part why your consumer vehicle doesn't still break up and set on fire when you push it over 40mph and why crashes at 60mph are no longer guaranteed to be fatal.
"Nope. Not even close. All prices are set to maximize revenue - if a company can sell out every single widget in stock (tickets in this case) of course it is a sign they can raise the price and will take it as such. Econ 101."
Which you obviously failed because you're assuming infinite airport space and zero competition.
You're a fascinating example of someone who spends his life demonstrating to the world that he's not as smart as he thinks he is. You've been at this at least a decade, don't you get tired of making yourself look stupid?
Um, what? The story makes no sense? I saw this article and thought why is this even a story, this isn't a magical revelation, this has been simple fact for many years. I don't even know why this would be news to anyone, let alone people denying it.
The airline industry has long been doing this, they can't simply raise prices or add extra flights because that means they become less competitive against others flying the route, and they can't just add extra flights because it can sometimes be impossible to get hold of extra capacity on a route. Try getting a slot from Heathrow because you want to increase capacity, have fun waiting years until it's your turn in the queue as an airline requesting an extra slot on the airfield and flight plan.
It doesn't matter if they have to pay a few people compensation, paying double the flight cost charged every flight for one or two people isn't exactly a big deal when they've doubled up say 10 seats.
Consider they have 200 seats, they sell 210 tickets, 8 people don't show because they missed their connecting flight, or someone fell ill, or it was just a cancelled business trip and the tickets are non-refundable then sure they have to pay 2 people double the cost of the ticket as compensation, but that means they're still 206 tickets profit up on a flight that only holds 200 people.
It's really just an insurance type setup for the airlines, as long as they optimise their calculations based on data so as they maximise the number of tickets sold vs. the number of tickets actually used then they're going to increase their profits. This is exactly what they do and exactly what they have done since at least the 90s at busy airports. Yes there are people who know how to play the system, but that already gets factored into the calculations airlines make in terms of how many tickets to sell - it's a complex statistical operation and has to factor in things like local events; i.e. if there's been a damaging hurricane at the destination a lot more people might choose not to fly, so they oversubscribe seats by a higher number knowing they'll get more no-shows.
The news for me here is that people weren't aware of this, I always figured it was pretty common knowledge. I'd have thought pretty much anyone whose flown from a major airport would've known about this having seen it first hand and having asked any of the staff the question. This is even more the case as I figured people were more aware than ever nowadays of the sorts of profit maximisation analytics that occur at companies of which this is just another example.
The fact is flying a plane costs a lot of money, so they want to maximise the number of people on that flight. There's a heavy baseline cost of lifting that massive flying tube into the air, and the more tickets sold against that baseline the more profit for the airline. Simplistic mindset type free market economics of "they should just raise the prices!" don't work when you have constraints like airport capacity. Some countries/airports even enforce penalty costs on flights that aren't carrying sufficient numbers of passengers when the airport capacity is near maximum - they can't justify having a carrier taking up a slot that isn't carrying many people so issues like that too incentivise airlines to do everything they can to fill up their planes regardless of the impact on customers. It's a pretty shitty cutthroat industry in general in this regard.
This story is absolutely spot on, it's also at least 30 years too late to be called news too though unfortunately.
Maybe he could get around all that red tape of people not being able to communicate with him directly by say, running a private e-mail server or something?
The UI is shit, but my bigger concern this year has been content. It seems they blew the entire budget on TGT, which actually isn't even very good (slow and repetitive). Other than that I don't think there's really been much else.
To pretend it's a competitor to Netflix is just stupid, Netflix has new shit every month, Amazon only has a few bits of content in the December - Feb period - if you can pay monthly you might as well only subscribe for 2 or 3 months of the year if you're going to bother.
I don't even factor Instant Video into the value of my Prime Subscription any more, it's far too devoid of content to be worth it. There was a decent amount last year and the year before, but this year there's been hardly anything at all of value.
There's definitely a lot of ambiguity and I don't really know the answer to that one, you're right in that it's tricky, I don't think state in itself is particularly helpful unless it's prefixed with something - nation state, sovereign state, and so on. I think the problem is the term state is used much too interchangeably to denote everything from provinces, to dependencies, to individual countries, to amalgamations of countries. It's become a kind of catch all term that means completely different things depending on context.
If it were up to me though I'd just call the individual states in the US provinces like every other country does and mitigate at least some of the confusion, but I understand that might ruffle some feathers though:)
I rather think you missed the point, a country is not ANY defined political division. It's A defined political division.
There's a subtle difference there that you've failed to interpret. Your definition already fails in the face of England, Scotland, and Wales, because they are subdivisions of larger political identities (Great Britain) but are also countries.
Typically whether a geographic area is defined as a country or not depends on it's history as much as anything - this is why Taiwan is deemed a country because historically it always was, whereas Northern Ireland is not because it never was, even though it's siblings in England, Scotland, and Wales are.
A lot of people don't really understand how a country is defined, including yourself.
A country is merely a defined political division, that means it needs some kind of border, but even a government isn't technically necessary - consider Iraq post 2003 invasion, administered by the US and it's allies with the Iraqi government ousted, but still very much a country in itself, it didn't simply cease to exist as such. Taiwan most definitely is a country. This is much the same as England, Scotland, and Wales, which are also individual countries, but comprise the nation state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In this respect England demonstrates also why mere political division is sufficient to define a country as England doesn't have it's own government, it's governed by the government of the United Kingdom as a whole.
Countries can exist within countries, the presence of an overarching country does not mean Taiwan is not in itself also a country.
I doubt even China would have a problem with calling Taiwan a country, they'd have a problem if you start treating it like an independent nation state though by calling it's government and speaking to them directly, or if you started using the word "independent" when referring to Taiwan as a country.
The problem is that people all too often use country as shorthand for independent sovereign state, but whilst all independent sovereign nation states are countries, not all countries are independent sovereign states, so it's important to not confuse the two.
I agree, though even with the Theresa May et. al. view of accepting the referendum results there are problems they're glossing over - Leave only won by 1.8%, but it's not clear that they can show all 51.8% prioritise immigration as their reasons for leaving, when prominent Leavers like Daniel Hannan say immigration wasn't the reason he wanted to leave I think it's entirely dishonest to make the case that immigration reform has to become before all else, even if we leave there's no evidence that a majority support leaving and screwing ourselves based primarily on immigration changes.
But this is why parliamentary scrutiny is of fundamental importance, to challenge the idea that a vote to Leave in the referendum is a vote for Theresa May's cabinet to be the sole decider of what shape that takes even if that completely defies the democratic will of the populace.
Even if you ran the referendum again, and even if Leave won again, which I suspect they wouldn't, I do not for one second believe you'd ever get a majority supporting exiting the European Economic Area even if we leave the EU, and yet that's exactly what they're proposing despite there being not even remotely near a majority for it. A substantial number of even the hardest Brexit voters still support the idea of remaining in the common market.
Thus May's government simply cannot keep claiming they have a democratic mandate, they were given a mandate for one thing and one thing only - leaving the EU, they have no mandate to decide anything else beyond that regarding immigration, access to markets and so on and so forth. Democracy is also not a one time thing, so I also absolutely agree that any package should be put to the people in a second referendum with the option of rejecting it and staying in the EU - democracy is about giving people choice to decide, and people's views change. It's not democracy if you refuse to recognise that change, otherwise we could merely declare the referendum result invalid because people previously voted to join in 1972, if singular votes define things for all eternity then why not that one? The whole argument against a second referendum is fundamentally democracy denying, despite the argument they make that it's a refusal to accept the will of the people - finding out the will of the people on a rolling basis by definition cannot be classed as refusing the will of the people.
I have both consoles (and a Wii U in fact) and whilst the PS4 can list more exclusives, the vast majority of them are just really shit indie titles.
The PS4's exclusive lineup is definitely looking up, but until now I feel the Xbox One has had far better exclusives. Things like Dead Rising 3 and Ryse at launch were far more fun than anything Sony had on offer, and since then they've had titles like Halo 5, Quantum Break, Gears of War 4, Sunset Overdrive.
I'm looking forward to The Last Guardian, and I did enjoy games like The Order 1886, not gotten around to Uncharted 4 yet though. LBP3 was just a bit boring, more of the same. I thought Street Fighter V was just fucking awful, Mortal Kombat was way better, as is Killer Instinct on the Xbox One.
But although the PS4 exclusive lineup is definitely improving, so is the Xbox One lineup also. Things like Halo Wars 2 and Crackdown 3 are likely to be box shifters.
All in all I definitely prefer the Xbox One's exclusive list regardless of it's relative size - like the PS4, 90% of the exclusive lists are just utter shit, so factoring out the utter shit closes the gap regardless by shrinking both console's lists drastically.
But really, if exclusives matter at all it begs the question as to why the Wii U isn't the top selling console of this generation, frankly it has far, more, far higher quality, far more fun exclusives than the other two combined - Mario 3D World, Pikmin 3, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Splatoon, Star Fox Zero, Mario Kart 8, Paper Mario: Color Splash. All these titles are far higher quality, and focus far more on being simply enjoyable than many exclusives on other consoles.
So I don't think you can realistically just relative merits and success by exclusives as an overriding factor anyway otherwise Nintendo would likely win hands down.
I think Sony simply have a powerful brand, and Microsoft ultimately fucked up early on above all else. Nintendo has struggled because it released an underpowered console in the face of last gen, when it should really have waited a few years and released a console with far more competitive specs. Specs shouldn't matter, but ultimately they are used to define or shame a brand, and unless you can pull off an upset as Nintendo did with the Wii where you have a differentiator that genuinely makes the specs irrelevant then low specs will get you fucked.
I think therefore it's really a combination of things that overall define the brand that matters - Sony has a reasonable set of excellent exclusives, it didn't have the DRM/spying rumours of the Xbox One, it has a massive general library, and it was a marginally more powerful device than the Xbox One at a lower price point. Those things combined are what have won things so far for Sony. It's worth noting that the Xbox One has made ground over the last year, I suspect this is because the tarnish of it's own brand from it's pre-release mis-steps are finally fading coupled with the good will it's gaining with new dashboard functionality and support for things like backwards compatibility. One shouldn't forget that last generation we had the exact reverse scenario - Sony started off behind due to a late release coupled with a tarnished brand from the past rootkit fiasco and so on and so forth, but eventually towards the end of the generation pretty much pulled things level with the 360 as the tarnish faded and it regained some good will with some of it's later releases (i.e. The Last of Us).
Ironically that one female home secretary before Theresa May was also brought down by the fact her husband was caught buying porn using the MP expenses system. So you're right, there's zero merit in his porn theory.
Not that I disagree with him that Theresa May is, and is acting like a defacto authoritarian dictator though. The fact she believes something as important as the terms for triggering Brexit shouldn't undergo parliamentary scrutiny is astounding. It's the single biggest change to British statute in 40 years and she thinks parliament shouldn't scrutinise the terms? She couldn't be more dictatorial if she tried.
Is there any statutory legal obligation to credit public holidays like Thanksgiving as leave for those who are made to work it in the US?
My wife works in retail and runs a few stores, and the only day they don't open now is Christmas day, however all 7 other UK public holidays are added to their leave so in some ways it works out for her as she can combine them all for an extra full week. Means she has something like 34 days leave a year now.
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Cheers, that's really interesting. Does pardoning the act still apply post conviction also? So if for example Snowden did face trial for leaking classified material for the leaks in general, and from some treason charge for leaking the stuff that he didn't need to leak, then must the whole act still be pardoned, or could he then be pardoned for just the leaking portion of the act, but not the treason portion of the act, and would his jail time then be adjusted for the single charge of treason with any years added for the leaking of classified material removed from his time only? I guess really, I'm asking, do partial pardons exist?
It sounds like there may well be some sensible rationale behind Obama's decision to have wanted to see a trial for Snowden before committing to any pardon.
I'm intrigued as to how pardons work legally and in terms of documentation. It seems pretty clear that presidents can pardon pre-try as many people here have evidenced, but what does that pardon look like? If there's been no charges and no trial, then how do they define what the pardon is for? If they pardon for presumed charges then isn't there a risk that when someone like Snowden comes back home they just get run through the system on different charges than were pardoned for? So for example if he pardoned Snowden for crimes of espionage and leaking state secrets then isn't there a risk he could be charged still, for say, treason?
If the pardon is more arbitrary and more general then isn't there a risk that the person could've committed other more serious, as yet unknown crimes which they're then absolved of via the generic pardon? What if for example Snowden was pardoned for his crimes but it turns out he has since been assisting the FSB beyond mere whistleblowing? If it's descriptive as to what actions the pardon is supposed to cover then I imagine that still leaves massive scope for legal wrangling as courts would surely need to determine what the wording actually covers?
I ask because I have no idea how this works, but it would certainly seem likely that not pardoning before charges, and relevance of charges in court, though not against the rules, would at least seem eminently sensible for everyone involved - it would make it clear exactly what the extent and limitations of the pardon are for, without leaving scope for later dispute on the extent of the pardon. I can see why, if this is the case, that Obama might want legal certainty on what he's actually pardoning before doing so even if other presidents may be a bit more laissez-faire about it.
"Our Nobel Peace Prize President dropped 26,000 bombs (real bombs, not little hand grenades) last year on various brown people (even though we are not at war)."
Why make it about skin colour? Your president was the same colour but he very clearly didn't bomb himself, so that was obviously not a factor in determining targets so why bring it up?
"BTW, has anyone considered that it might be preferable to address their grievances rather than just bomb them?"
Whilst I'd always agree for rational actors such as the IRA, FARC, and maybe even the Taliban, these actors aren't rational. You could make the same argument for the Nazis in WWII but given that their greivance was that they wanted to extinguish entire groups of humans to the tune of millions then it's not exactly a greivance that any reasonable human being can help address is it?
When the greivance in question is our very existence and way of life, then it's not merely that they're a bit upset about something and we can help make that better, it's that they want to extinguish our very existence, and the only response to that is to extinguish theirs first.
But if you believe otherwise, then do feel free to go and talk to them. I'll keep an eye on YouTube for a video of how you got on.
The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is the most heavily subsidised industry going. A nuclear plant for example is always going to be made to be responsible for complete costs of waste disposal, and yet fossil fuel plants, and cars are allowed to just spew their waste into the environment at no cost.
If you were to make the fossil fuel industry pay it's actual costs - i.e. impact on people's health for example, rather than expect people to subsidise them by paying for their own health issues caused by fossil fuel users then the cost of petrol cars, of power via fossil fuels and so forth would be untenable and the market would change overnight but with massive economic and social disruption as people fail to afford to adjust to paying what they actually should, rather than to continue using their fossil fuel based power source or car at the expense of others.
So given the difficulty in trying to just completely alter the entire economic model of most countries overnight by making it illegal for fossil fuel users and power plants to continue to be subsidised by, say, doubling the price of petrol and electricity from non-renewable sources it's easier to just give at least some kind of counter-subsidy to renewables.
The problem is that the "natural" rate of change you're referring to isn't the natural rate of change, it's a rate of change crippled by the fact that fossil fuel power plants and so forth receive massive indirect subsidies through the fact they're not faced to pay for the actual costs they incur on society.
If you want to learn more search for "fossil fuel externalities". You'll find no end of articles and papers trying to estimate the hidden costs of fossil fuels, and whilst estimates vary it's to the degree of hundreds of billions every year in the US alone. The problem is that the system has been manipulated so long by the fossil fuel industries due to the power of big oil et. al. that they're not even close to playing on a level playing field even with renewable subsidies - they're at a massive subsidised advantage over renewables even when renewables have the subsidies they do.
I think you're right, but I think it's a similar situation across the globe - realistically spy agencies in Russia, China and so forth shouldn't be doing those things to innocent citizens either so I don't think it's entirely a Western problem.
I think it's a general issue here that governments need to get together and accept that they all need to reign in their agencies before shit really does hit the fan with some mutual agreement to start actually following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (that governs against this sort of thing), and to start governing cyber operations against each other in the same way military operations are governed against each other - i.e. it's not just some routine thing you do on a whim, and that there are consequences for it.
I mean, let's be clear, the sort of shit you are describing already has in some countries has profoundly damaging real world consequences - the whole arab spring started in Tunisia precisely because overreaching security services eventually pushed one man just that bit too far for example.
So you're absolutely right to point out that uncontrolled security services can cause more harm than good if they are not reigned in appropriately, and if left to go to far, they in themselves can become a catalyst for national collapse as in the arab spring.
I'm actually rather concerned that contrary to the implication in the summary that this is no longer simply citizen hacking but in fact escalation of state sponsored hacking. It seems we're beginning to find out more and more that nation states are engaged in hacking from the hacks we know about for sure such as the North Korean hack of Sony, through to the ones that we can make a reasonable assumption on such as the Russian hacks of the DNC (even Trump finally said on Wednesday he thinks it was the Russians), through to those we simply don't know about.
Even if we step back a few years we had the Syrian cyber army being quite active in it's hacking attempts. Given that Syria worked closely with North Korea on their attempted nuclear program (Syria's nuclear program destroyed by Israel in 2007 was shown to be a clone of North Korea's) then would it really be far fetched to assume that given that North Korea also has strong offensive hacking capabilities that it wasn't engaging with them on that too? Similarly the UEA ClimateGate hack was eventually believed based on analysis to be an act by Russia as it was carried out just days before a major climate conference in 2009 that sought to reduce emissions by cutting fossil fuel use - far and away the foundation of Russia's entire economy so they had clear interest also in sabotaging such an agreement and it worked, the conference was largely a failure as a result.
Of course it's not one sided, we know about Stuxnet being a likely US-Israeli attack, and we know that the five eyes countries have been engaging in these sorts of things for years thanks to the revelations by Snowden. I'm not saying it's just some countries or others doing it, on the contrary, I think everyone is doing it. Frankly I suspect at least some of the purported hacks by anonymous were merely just nation states using the broad anonymous idea as cover for their actions.
Could this Cellebrite hack for example be revenge by Iran for Stuxnet? At this point I do not think that's far-fetched for one minute, though hopefully time will tell.
My concern is that this is getting out of control. How long before this escalates and what we once laughed at as being paranoia, the idea of "cyber war" becomes a reality and someone decides to break a damn, or overload a powerplant? Ukraine already saw last year an outage on their powergrid because of hackers. Thankfully I believe no one died, but how long before someone does and it stops just being a cyber war?
We're learning more and more about this and so far solutions
have been purely political and diplomatic. A couple of years back we were seeing constant hacks on the US from China, and this died down - I saw an article recently explaining what happened, and it turns out that there was more than meets the eye to the US charges against 5 Chinese mentioned here:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...
The images that the US used for these arrest warrants were apparently personal images the US themselves had stolen from these Chinese general's laptops after their own hacks against them. The effect was to send a public message to the Chinese that "we can do it too" and it seems to have been succesful as China/US relations on this front seem to have significantly improved and this seems to have been the driver for the China/US cyber agreement agreed late last year. It appears the Chinese cyber command got spooked when they saw their own non-publicly available data used to provide pictures in arrest warrants against them and forced a whole Chinese reconsideration of the issue.
It's clear therefore that increased state hacking isn't merely the paranoia that people once thought it was and that it's generally becoming more prolific, or at least, we're becoming far more aware of it as time goes on and more information is released. So the point I was going to make in reply to your post was this - I'm
It really depends what the service includes. The Microsoft/Sony offerings are very reasonable for what you get given the included free monthly games, so I think it's a bit silly to judge before knowing how much it'll cost and what it includes.
I for one am glad that not poisoning the water supply is "trendy".
It's called Altaba because Alt+tab is exactly what you'll do if it turns up on your screen.
I agree, that's also why we shouldn't research anything else ever again because it's also all likely to not work with 100% perfection right away so there's no point bothering at all.
Interestingly in the UK we don't have that second step, but when I tried ordering anything through Alexa I couldn't get her to order anything other than my order history too, so the whole Prime-eligible items thing seemed to not work when I tried a few weeks ago and you were restricted to re-ordering past items only.
Regardless I've put a pin in place so you can't accidentally trigger a purchase from an advert or anything without also saying the pin, but given that I don't even use that feature I might as well use the other option that lets you turn off voice ordering completely. Amazon should probably make that the default unless someone asks to order then tell them how to enable it though really.
Okay if you want to keep being wrong just to convince yourself that you're right about every word you speak even if you have no idea what you're talking about then fine, have it your way. An odd stance to take when given evidence and the opportunity to find plenty more evidence (Google), but hey.
The fact is, Ford is behind the curve, maybe you have one, and that upsets you, but trying to deny reality just because of something as petty as that is, well, pretty much the definition of ignorance.
You're taking very specific examples and suggesting there must be nothing of relevance at all, which is a blatant fallacy. You're simply trying to convince yourself you're right, when in fact you're completely wrong.
Pretty much the entire field of aerodynamic modelling of cars, pretty much the entirety of material science related to cars starts with things like Formula 1 and NASCAR and gets us where we are now - with ever more fuel efficient cars, due to using lighter materials, and due to being more aerodynamic and so on and so forth. I don't know why you also think the design of a birdcage frame is irrelevant to highway situations, understanding of crumple zones and so on and so forth is in itself an example of something that was driven by the need to protect drivers when racing cars.
As cars go faster and faster, and need to be more and more fuel efficient, learning about everything from heat dissipation, to wait minimisation, to energy conservation is always being led by racing because they're at that forefront of trying to win the race. Typically the transformation follows a clear pattern - technological advancements turn up in something like a Formula 1, or NASCAR vehicle first, then they end up in high end sports cars quite quickly, from there they move into common consumer vehicles.
For example, the fact most modern cars don't really rust much, if at all is precisely because they use more plastics, more composite materials and so on and so forth that simply aren't effected by rust because they're also lighter. These materials and use of them in motor vehicles stems from the need to get race cars faster by carrying less weight, this is a prime example of the sort of technology transfer that started out in racing, and moved to high end sports cars, and is now in just about every car you'll find in a car lot that was made in the last 10 years.
Even if a consumer car doesn't need to go as fast as many race cars, it can still typically gain efficiency instead of speed from those technologies, because more fuel equals more weight, which means you need a more powerful engine which will typically be heavier also meaning you get stuck in a loop of competing problems, unless you improve fuel efficiency. This is no different to the problem with consumer cars, only people don't want to max out at 200mph, they do at least want to go further on less fuel.
But you don't have to take my word that you're wrong, there's more than enough written on the topic from independent sources if you're willing to do a simple search. Here are some examples:
http://www.engineering.com/Lib...
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...
Most racing endeavours, be it NASCAR or Formula 1 act as R&D programmes for car manufacturers - they turn it into a competition with massive coverage because it's makes these R&D programmes self funding. So yes, if you're winning NASCAR then it means you're leading R&D and that technology will feed into your next generation of cars. If a particular company hasn't done well in these events in some time then it's evidence that their R&D is falling behind and that they're becoming less competitive.
Most of the technologies relating to handling, stability, performance, design, and safety in modern consumer cars come from lessons learnt on the race track.
This is in large part why your consumer vehicle doesn't still break up and set on fire when you push it over 40mph and why crashes at 60mph are no longer guaranteed to be fatal.
"Nope. Not even close. All prices are set to maximize revenue - if a company can sell out every single widget in stock (tickets in this case) of course it is a sign they can raise the price and will take it as such. Econ 101."
Which you obviously failed because you're assuming infinite airport space and zero competition.
You're a fascinating example of someone who spends his life demonstrating to the world that he's not as smart as he thinks he is. You've been at this at least a decade, don't you get tired of making yourself look stupid?
Um, what? The story makes no sense? I saw this article and thought why is this even a story, this isn't a magical revelation, this has been simple fact for many years. I don't even know why this would be news to anyone, let alone people denying it.
The airline industry has long been doing this, they can't simply raise prices or add extra flights because that means they become less competitive against others flying the route, and they can't just add extra flights because it can sometimes be impossible to get hold of extra capacity on a route. Try getting a slot from Heathrow because you want to increase capacity, have fun waiting years until it's your turn in the queue as an airline requesting an extra slot on the airfield and flight plan.
It doesn't matter if they have to pay a few people compensation, paying double the flight cost charged every flight for one or two people isn't exactly a big deal when they've doubled up say 10 seats.
Consider they have 200 seats, they sell 210 tickets, 8 people don't show because they missed their connecting flight, or someone fell ill, or it was just a cancelled business trip and the tickets are non-refundable then sure they have to pay 2 people double the cost of the ticket as compensation, but that means they're still 206 tickets profit up on a flight that only holds 200 people.
It's really just an insurance type setup for the airlines, as long as they optimise their calculations based on data so as they maximise the number of tickets sold vs. the number of tickets actually used then they're going to increase their profits. This is exactly what they do and exactly what they have done since at least the 90s at busy airports. Yes there are people who know how to play the system, but that already gets factored into the calculations airlines make in terms of how many tickets to sell - it's a complex statistical operation and has to factor in things like local events; i.e. if there's been a damaging hurricane at the destination a lot more people might choose not to fly, so they oversubscribe seats by a higher number knowing they'll get more no-shows.
The news for me here is that people weren't aware of this, I always figured it was pretty common knowledge. I'd have thought pretty much anyone whose flown from a major airport would've known about this having seen it first hand and having asked any of the staff the question. This is even more the case as I figured people were more aware than ever nowadays of the sorts of profit maximisation analytics that occur at companies of which this is just another example.
The fact is flying a plane costs a lot of money, so they want to maximise the number of people on that flight. There's a heavy baseline cost of lifting that massive flying tube into the air, and the more tickets sold against that baseline the more profit for the airline. Simplistic mindset type free market economics of "they should just raise the prices!" don't work when you have constraints like airport capacity. Some countries/airports even enforce penalty costs on flights that aren't carrying sufficient numbers of passengers when the airport capacity is near maximum - they can't justify having a carrier taking up a slot that isn't carrying many people so issues like that too incentivise airlines to do everything they can to fill up their planes regardless of the impact on customers. It's a pretty shitty cutthroat industry in general in this regard.
This story is absolutely spot on, it's also at least 30 years too late to be called news too though unfortunately.
Maybe he could get around all that red tape of people not being able to communicate with him directly by say, running a private e-mail server or something?
The UI is shit, but my bigger concern this year has been content. It seems they blew the entire budget on TGT, which actually isn't even very good (slow and repetitive). Other than that I don't think there's really been much else.
To pretend it's a competitor to Netflix is just stupid, Netflix has new shit every month, Amazon only has a few bits of content in the December - Feb period - if you can pay monthly you might as well only subscribe for 2 or 3 months of the year if you're going to bother.
I don't even factor Instant Video into the value of my Prime Subscription any more, it's far too devoid of content to be worth it. There was a decent amount last year and the year before, but this year there's been hardly anything at all of value.
There's definitely a lot of ambiguity and I don't really know the answer to that one, you're right in that it's tricky, I don't think state in itself is particularly helpful unless it's prefixed with something - nation state, sovereign state, and so on. I think the problem is the term state is used much too interchangeably to denote everything from provinces, to dependencies, to individual countries, to amalgamations of countries. It's become a kind of catch all term that means completely different things depending on context.
If it were up to me though I'd just call the individual states in the US provinces like every other country does and mitigate at least some of the confusion, but I understand that might ruffle some feathers though :)
I rather think you missed the point, a country is not ANY defined political division. It's A defined political division.
There's a subtle difference there that you've failed to interpret. Your definition already fails in the face of England, Scotland, and Wales, because they are subdivisions of larger political identities (Great Britain) but are also countries.
Typically whether a geographic area is defined as a country or not depends on it's history as much as anything - this is why Taiwan is deemed a country because historically it always was, whereas Northern Ireland is not because it never was, even though it's siblings in England, Scotland, and Wales are.
A lot of people don't really understand how a country is defined, including yourself.
A country is merely a defined political division, that means it needs some kind of border, but even a government isn't technically necessary - consider Iraq post 2003 invasion, administered by the US and it's allies with the Iraqi government ousted, but still very much a country in itself, it didn't simply cease to exist as such. Taiwan most definitely is a country. This is much the same as England, Scotland, and Wales, which are also individual countries, but comprise the nation state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In this respect England demonstrates also why mere political division is sufficient to define a country as England doesn't have it's own government, it's governed by the government of the United Kingdom as a whole.
Countries can exist within countries, the presence of an overarching country does not mean Taiwan is not in itself also a country.
I doubt even China would have a problem with calling Taiwan a country, they'd have a problem if you start treating it like an independent nation state though by calling it's government and speaking to them directly, or if you started using the word "independent" when referring to Taiwan as a country.
The problem is that people all too often use country as shorthand for independent sovereign state, but whilst all independent sovereign nation states are countries, not all countries are independent sovereign states, so it's important to not confuse the two.
I agree, though even with the Theresa May et. al. view of accepting the referendum results there are problems they're glossing over - Leave only won by 1.8%, but it's not clear that they can show all 51.8% prioritise immigration as their reasons for leaving, when prominent Leavers like Daniel Hannan say immigration wasn't the reason he wanted to leave I think it's entirely dishonest to make the case that immigration reform has to become before all else, even if we leave there's no evidence that a majority support leaving and screwing ourselves based primarily on immigration changes.
But this is why parliamentary scrutiny is of fundamental importance, to challenge the idea that a vote to Leave in the referendum is a vote for Theresa May's cabinet to be the sole decider of what shape that takes even if that completely defies the democratic will of the populace.
Even if you ran the referendum again, and even if Leave won again, which I suspect they wouldn't, I do not for one second believe you'd ever get a majority supporting exiting the European Economic Area even if we leave the EU, and yet that's exactly what they're proposing despite there being not even remotely near a majority for it. A substantial number of even the hardest Brexit voters still support the idea of remaining in the common market.
Thus May's government simply cannot keep claiming they have a democratic mandate, they were given a mandate for one thing and one thing only - leaving the EU, they have no mandate to decide anything else beyond that regarding immigration, access to markets and so on and so forth. Democracy is also not a one time thing, so I also absolutely agree that any package should be put to the people in a second referendum with the option of rejecting it and staying in the EU - democracy is about giving people choice to decide, and people's views change. It's not democracy if you refuse to recognise that change, otherwise we could merely declare the referendum result invalid because people previously voted to join in 1972, if singular votes define things for all eternity then why not that one? The whole argument against a second referendum is fundamentally democracy denying, despite the argument they make that it's a refusal to accept the will of the people - finding out the will of the people on a rolling basis by definition cannot be classed as refusing the will of the people.
I have both consoles (and a Wii U in fact) and whilst the PS4 can list more exclusives, the vast majority of them are just really shit indie titles.
The PS4's exclusive lineup is definitely looking up, but until now I feel the Xbox One has had far better exclusives. Things like Dead Rising 3 and Ryse at launch were far more fun than anything Sony had on offer, and since then they've had titles like Halo 5, Quantum Break, Gears of War 4, Sunset Overdrive.
I'm looking forward to The Last Guardian, and I did enjoy games like The Order 1886, not gotten around to Uncharted 4 yet though. LBP3 was just a bit boring, more of the same. I thought Street Fighter V was just fucking awful, Mortal Kombat was way better, as is Killer Instinct on the Xbox One.
But although the PS4 exclusive lineup is definitely improving, so is the Xbox One lineup also. Things like Halo Wars 2 and Crackdown 3 are likely to be box shifters.
All in all I definitely prefer the Xbox One's exclusive list regardless of it's relative size - like the PS4, 90% of the exclusive lists are just utter shit, so factoring out the utter shit closes the gap regardless by shrinking both console's lists drastically.
But really, if exclusives matter at all it begs the question as to why the Wii U isn't the top selling console of this generation, frankly it has far, more, far higher quality, far more fun exclusives than the other two combined - Mario 3D World, Pikmin 3, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Splatoon, Star Fox Zero, Mario Kart 8, Paper Mario: Color Splash. All these titles are far higher quality, and focus far more on being simply enjoyable than many exclusives on other consoles.
So I don't think you can realistically just relative merits and success by exclusives as an overriding factor anyway otherwise Nintendo would likely win hands down.
I think Sony simply have a powerful brand, and Microsoft ultimately fucked up early on above all else. Nintendo has struggled because it released an underpowered console in the face of last gen, when it should really have waited a few years and released a console with far more competitive specs. Specs shouldn't matter, but ultimately they are used to define or shame a brand, and unless you can pull off an upset as Nintendo did with the Wii where you have a differentiator that genuinely makes the specs irrelevant then low specs will get you fucked.
I think therefore it's really a combination of things that overall define the brand that matters - Sony has a reasonable set of excellent exclusives, it didn't have the DRM/spying rumours of the Xbox One, it has a massive general library, and it was a marginally more powerful device than the Xbox One at a lower price point. Those things combined are what have won things so far for Sony. It's worth noting that the Xbox One has made ground over the last year, I suspect this is because the tarnish of it's own brand from it's pre-release mis-steps are finally fading coupled with the good will it's gaining with new dashboard functionality and support for things like backwards compatibility. One shouldn't forget that last generation we had the exact reverse scenario - Sony started off behind due to a late release coupled with a tarnished brand from the past rootkit fiasco and so on and so forth, but eventually towards the end of the generation pretty much pulled things level with the 360 as the tarnish faded and it regained some good will with some of it's later releases (i.e. The Last of Us).
Ironically that one female home secretary before Theresa May was also brought down by the fact her husband was caught buying porn using the MP expenses system. So you're right, there's zero merit in his porn theory.
Not that I disagree with him that Theresa May is, and is acting like a defacto authoritarian dictator though. The fact she believes something as important as the terms for triggering Brexit shouldn't undergo parliamentary scrutiny is astounding. It's the single biggest change to British statute in 40 years and she thinks parliament shouldn't scrutinise the terms? She couldn't be more dictatorial if she tried.
Is there any statutory legal obligation to credit public holidays like Thanksgiving as leave for those who are made to work it in the US?
My wife works in retail and runs a few stores, and the only day they don't open now is Christmas day, however all 7 other UK public holidays are added to their leave so in some ways it works out for her as she can combine them all for an extra full week. Means she has something like 34 days leave a year now.