Who are the big three actually pushing the anti-vax message?

Wakefield, a disgraced con-artist doctor.

McCarthy, a former playboy model.

Carrey, a formerly big comic actor.

It's not exactly the A-list of public thinkers.

The only reason they're successful is because they're the only ones willing to pull out the rhetorical big guns (think of the children! big bad pharma!), and everyone on the side of science is so damn respectful.

It's time to start calling them out. Wakefield is a fraud who not only experimented on children and fabricated evidence for money but continues to build a career based on lying to keep people away from life-saving medicine.

Carrey and McCarthy are the pinnacle of arrogance and ignorance. So confident in their own brilliance that they're willing to ignore thousands and thousands of scientists who are doing nothing but trying to help people.

Things should be nasty, they should be treated with open and consistent scorn and mockery in the media every time they poke their heads up.

Do that and this anti-vax BS goes away very quickly.

For every thing Russia does you can pull up something from the US that sounds similarly bad unless you go into some nuanced detail.

But there's one big difference. In the US you have the luxury of this stuff being debated in government, in the media, on talk radio, on the Internet, and in person. Active censorship or oppression of these discussions is extremely rare.

Do you think you could do the same in Russia?

I'm not saying the US is great, it's done, and continues to do, some really awful things. But the worst things done by the US government are absolutely routine in Russia.

Cue all the thin people claiming that healthy eating and willpower are the keys to being thin and the fat people responding that weight is dominated by genetics.

He's basically been under house arrest for the last two years, I wonder if it isn't starting to take its toll.

But Obama has been protecting the CIA all along and is still defending the CIA and members of the Bush administration. And McCain is well on board with going against the CIA. Moreover the CIA report actually defends Bush by finding that he was in the dark too, and when he found out about it in 2006 most of the worst stuff stopped.

True the Fox Republicans seem to be solidly in favour of the CIA and torture, but Fox takes politicized positions on almost everything, that doesn't mean the non-Fox actors are motivated by politics. Torture is unambiguously illegal by international law and US law, even politicians sometimes do things because they're the right things to do.

Maybe, but indefinite detention in Guantanamo isn't a solution.

I never said the drone killings were good or justified, I've always opposed them and know many on the left who agree.

But they are justifiable in a different way than the torture (and the countries the US performs drone strikes in have generally agreed to it).

I guess you're reading the different sources because I've seen lots of coverage and criticism. And why shouldn't there be trials for the terrorists, isn't terrorism a crime?

I'm not sure about Spain. But as for any other society that endorses torture, I'll happily call them uncivilized. Cvilized vs uncivilized is generally understood as a moral judgement, not something measured on the human development index.

Actually I've heard continuous outcry about the drone killings, but this specific thing is about torture.

There's also a difference in the degree to which the two things can be rationalized.

For the drones it's really hard to fight a conflict without killing anyone, so you can discuss the validity of the conflict and civilians casualties and other factors, but the fundamental idea that you can kill your enemies is fairly well established.

But the idea you can torture? Almost every civilized society has said a blanket no.

I'm not sure if Oren Etzioni is any more qualified to speculate about strong AI than Galileo was to speculate about the surface of Mars.

If we ever create strong AI it will be because we've discovered a lot of big new stuff, and some of that stuff will overturn the assumptions that guide Etzioni's judgement.

The problem with this model is you're trying to determine if MS is an American company, an Irish company, or something else. A difficult question considering the games that corporations play with their charters.

And the chain of command doesn't necessarily resolve things. If every subdivision has someone with the authority to view the emails do courts from every country get to access them? Does it matter where the CEO or the relevant VP lives? And while MS is incorporated in the US a lot of big corporations aren't.

The US state example doesn't really apply because although states have different laws they're all under the same ultimate legal system.

Let the hatefest begin!

Your metaphor is off. It isn't about the court compelling you to produce the document, it's about compelling the foreign confederate to produce the document.

In this case I think the US courts should have some mechanism for petitioning the Irish courts to allow them to perform the search. Justice is still served, but each country still maintains its sovereignty.

I get the arguments that they don't host anything and they're just a medium for people to exchange files. But their name is literally The Pirate Bay, their business model is about as close to explicit piracy as you can get.

I'm frankly shocked they've remained open this long.

More than asymmetrical, it has to be utterly unambiguous.

People will always give their side the benefit of the doubt and the good guy isn't always clear. Bin Laden killed 3k in an utterly indefensible act, the Iraq war killed 100k in a much more defensible act. In the west it's easy to consider Bil Laden's act as the greater evil. Afterall he explicitly tried to kill as many people as possible with the goal of starting a wider war. The Iraq war, even if it were a mistake, wasn't started with the objective of mass casualties.

However, if you're from the middle east, and find it easier to identify with the dead Iraqis than the dead Americans, then you might consider the far greater number of Iraqi casualties to make that the worse crime.

Or in Ukraine, where Russia is are using the NATO intervensions in Bosnia and Libya, and the US invasion of Iraq, as justifications for their own actions. It doesn't matter if they're right, it's incredibly easy to rationalize the acts of your side. Just to be certain that you're not one of the bad guys yourself you need to keep your actions way above reproach.

So it sounds like you want them to ask on install if it's a mobile or desktop device, and install a touchscreen or desktop UI accordingly.

What he is saying is they'll auto-detect if it's a mobile or desktop device, and have the UI work as a touchscreen or desktop UI accordingly.

I'm not sure I see why you approach is the right idea and their approach is a disaster?

Even using clicks as a metric making clickbait can be a mistake.

Clickbait attracts casual one-time viewers, they have no loyalty and are just clicking on whomever has the latest viral article. If someone starts doing viral better than you then your traffic drops off a cliff.

But if you don't do clickbait and have writers that develop a unique voice then you now have a monopoly because you're the only one of the planet publishing that voice. It might not make you rich, but as long as you have that writer the traffic is reliable.