Not to be that guy who says we're living in a police state and quotes Orwell while knowing damn well the government isn't going to bust him in his mother's basement... but in at least one way, I would be willing to bet that we are far less free than Russia. And that would be freedom from surveillance. Between the various NSA programs to log our emails, track our calls, and monitor our online activity, I would be willing to bet that the average U.S. citizen sees far more surveillance than the average Russian citizen. It's not that Russia is morally superior here, it's that the NSA is probably a lot better at monitoring communications than its Russian counterpart. That being said, I suspect Russia has the ability to target dissidents, is more willing to use it, and is far more likely to act on intercepted data than the NSA. The NSA is probably a better spy, but not nearly as dangerous a spy.

Or maybe both of them can go into exile together in a third country. And Julian Assange can go there too. And they'll share an apartment together. It'd make a great sitcom. "Three hacker dissidents exiled from their native countries... now they're all living in one house! See what kind of wacky adventures they get into!"

OK, first of all, let's assume that the collision of two giant galactic black holes can fling stars out of the galactic center in a way that doesn't completely destroy any planetary systems within those star systems. How on earth does life get off of such a planet onto another? If a collision in the solar system were to launch a microbe-laden rock out of the star system, it's still traveling at a third of lightspeed. How do those microbes make a safe landing? For that matter, what about the planet that those microbes land on? Chicxulub is estimated to have released 100 million megatons of explosive energy, which is equivalent to giving every man woman and child on the planet a Hiroshima nuke and detonating them all at once. Now, the Chicxulub asteroid is estimated to have traveled around 20,000 km/sec. And .3 lightspeed is 100,000,000 m/sec, or about 5,000 times the speed of the Chicxulub asteroid. Since kinetic energy scales as velocity squared, we're dealing with an impact that is 25,000 Chicxulub asteroids. So imagine wiping the dinosaurs out. And then doing it again, 24,999 times. That's 2,500,000,000,000 megatons - 2.5 trillion megatons- of explosives. Even a much smaller asteroid- say, 1 km in diameter instead of 10 km- is still going to pack far more wallop than Chicxulub did, and create an extinction event. Even a single kilogram is going to come in with as much energy as a large H-bomb. My guess is that if these stars have any effect whatsoever on the evolution of life in the universe, it's probably not a terribly constructive one...

My take on Abrams is that he isn't the right guy to do Star Wars. Based on what I've seen from his Star Trek movies, his approach to storytelling is too intellectual- he's interested in complex storylines and clever plot twists. That's not what Star Wars is about. Star Wars is a modern fairy tail/myth/epic with lots of action and character-driven drama, but not much in the way of clever plot twists. Okay, I will give you the Luke I am Your Father bit, and the Now Witness the Power of this Fully Armed and Operational Death Star bit. But mostly, it's about plucky heroes and the odd scoundrel fighting black-clad villains and rescuing princesses, swordfighting and magic and spaceships and aliens. It's not about the head, it's about the heart, it's about feelings, and none of Abrams work has ever struck me as having the kind of soul needed to tell this sort of story. I guess I could sum it up by saying... I've got a bad feeling about this.

Two words: gun camera.

They started using gun cameras in WWII to look at the effectiveness of the aircraft, but you could use them on police firearms to hold police accountable when they draw their weapons. Here the main problem is the he-said they-said nature of the event. We don't know what happened because there is no recorded account of it. Using off-the-shelf technology, you could install a small iPhone style camera and microphone that activates whenever the safety of the weapon is taken off and enough storage for 10-15 minutes of footage and audio. The recorded footage would then be available to establish whether the officer was justified in drawing their weapon and, if fired, whether the firing of the weapon was justified. If the officer committed murder, we'd know. If it was justifiable, we'd know. Either way, we wouldn't have rioting in the streets right now.

It's worth remembering that the protests started out peacefully. It was the police who escalated things by responding to peaceful protests with armored vehicles, police in body armor carrying assault rifles, launching tear gas at people exercising their constitutionally protected rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. You have a police force that has abdicated its responsibility to protect and serve the population, and is instead acting like an occupying army and oppressing the community they are sworn to help. And this is after years of targeting the black community. If you act like an occupying force, it's hardly surprising if people start acting like insurgents.

To all the commenters claiming we've already known this for centuries... no, we haven't. There's no reason to presume a priori that large objects occur in "showers" like the smaller (ash particle to pea sized) objects that make up familiar meteor showers. And astrostatisticians are very unhappy with the quality of the statistics in this paper, and they are suggesting the null hypothesis can't be rejecting using better statistical tools: https://astrostatistics.wordpr...

until your rented car drives up to your front door with a big pile of puke on the front seat.

Anyone paid less than $100k/year will be forced to the fringes of the city,

I make that in Chicago. I interviewed with Amazon and was amazed at the rents for smaller places. You might want to revise that minimum up :-(

So how do companies recognize these valuable bosses? The study itself may provide the answer. If competency predicts happiness, then perhaps worker happiness is a predictor of competence? The implication is that perhaps employees should be given a bigger say in who gets promotions. I suppose we run the risk of bosses taking a bread-and-circuses approach to employee management, but it seems fairly obvious that if the people you're already managing are miserable, you shouldn't be promoted so that you manage even more people.

My brother has a company that builds wood / biofuel heated stirling engines. You get both electricity and heat so it is very efficient in the winter or whenever you have a heating need, like for hot tap water.

http://www.inresol.se/the-geni...

Cool as hell imho. But then ofcourse, im biased :D

Why not discover the truth by yourself? Personally i could not give a flying fuck if people want citations because you know what? Im sick and tired of talking to people with their own agenda. Anything that wont fit their political views they just have to throw their dung at. Some people you can show a video, a written signed letter, a person in dispute doing an own confession and their mother telling it but they still wont accept it.

There are people out there who strife for stupidity and ignorance like it was some kind of lofty goal. We truly have the governments we the people deserve.

Sweden has an agreement with the US to provide these logs in full. Totally against Swedish law and against every privacy law in the EU. No sane company should have any data what so ever in Swedish servers or companies.

Maybe you should try restating that without swearing. You know, so you'll sound grown up.

Microsoft is run by marketing alone. Research has no place there as it will never be able to influence any decisions.