A lot of the "subsidies" the anti-fossil fuels sites use to bump up their numbers are actually just standard business practices used by everyone to spread costs over years. It's like patent trolling where they just add "claimed by the fossil fuel industry" instead of "on the internet" to the end of standard tax right offs to claim it's a special subsidy received by oil companies.

That's not to say there aren't some oil/gas specific subsidies but according to the CBO that number is approximately $3.2 billion/year (not 50 like you link claims). Compare that to the $7.3 billion renewables receive. Renewables also receive and extra 1.7+ billion in other government expenditures vs $500 million for fossil fuels.

Not to be too picky but part of a prosecutors job is to only prosecute case they know they can win. If a prosecutor does not believe they have the evidence to successfully convict someone they aren't suppose to charge them just to make other people feel good. In fact, prosecutors can be brought up on charges themselves for going after defendants they didn't in good faith believe they could convict even if they knew they were guilty.

Now, there are some that take that too far and only go after slam dunk cases, but in general most prosecutors will bring cases to trial where the odds of conviction are lower than 1:1. For some that might mean they go after anyone they think they have a 75% chance of convicting, some may be 60% and for some 50% might be good enough.

Real life isn't like a Law and Order episode where they try people with no real evidence hoping they'll confess on the stand and if they don't just move on to the next case.

That's true to a point. The monies directly seized by the Feds go into a single pool that they have complete control over (it is not regulated by congress) but the various federal agencies often partner up with state or local agencies and when doing so offer them a cut of the take.

1 stat from 2012 had just the IRS seizures in the neighborhood of 640 cases (almost 6 times the amount from just 7 years before) with less than 20% even resulting in charges being filed.

Due to the length of time it takes to process a claim against the government to get your money back and the sums involved (usually in the ballpark of $40k) most people take the standard offer of 50% and go home. Even when the victims win in court or the government just gives in, they have been known to skip out on paying the court costs, back interest and other expenses to the victim like they are legally required to.

This was a letter written to the lawyers of Lyndon McLennan from the U.S Attorney after theiy seized his life savings and he went public:

Whoever made [the case documents] public may serve their own interest but will not help this particular case. Your client needs to resolve this or litigate it. But publicity about it doesn’t help. It just ratchets up feelings in the agency. My offer is to return 50% of the money. The offer is good until March 30th COB.

He didn't settle and the case was later dropped and his money returned but none of his expenses were covered.

The Clinton Foundation spends a paltry amount on actual charitable works; in fact they spend as much on office supplies as charity. The vast majority of money is spent on paying Clintonites salaries during times they can't be paid by other official means (see Sidney Blumenthal) as well as paying for first class airfare and hotels for the Clintons and their friends.

There is a reason most charity watchdog groups refuse to classify the Clinton Foundation as a charity.

Any crime he may or may not have committed when he had contact with the 'victim' has had it's statute of limitations run out years ago.

The only actual possible crime here would be blackmail and in that case Hastert would be the victim not the perpetrator and since he's not pressing charges even that wouldn't be prosecutable.

These aren't cases of government screwing up, the government is behaving just how it wants to behave.

Money confiscated through these programs go directly to the branch that confiscates it so even in cases where cash deposits are perfectly reasonable many agencies go with the "take first, question never" approach.

Why bother filling out paperwork that Aunt Mae's Cupcake Emporium was just depositing the cash on hand at the end of the week when you can instead confiscate all of Aunt Mae's bank accounts and spend it buying whatever the hell you want for the office (the list of purchases with this type of confiscated cash is ridiculous since it doesn't have to follow regular budgetary processes). There are cases where government agencies seized money they knew 100% was legal and literally using it to throw themselves a party (including buying margaritas machines).

He was the winning entry in the SPD's 'hackathon' to produce a video redaction system to meet their needs (his request for video was also the main reason for having the hackathon in the first place buts that's not important).

He pretty much meets the definition of hobbyist hacker from Wikipedia or the #3 definition of hacker from webster "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer".

If you read the article you'd see that there are 3 possible versions of police video. #1 always exists, #2 will exist in most cases (when fully implemented) and #3 is only created upon request.

1) The raw video which is stored on DVD and available for any court proceedings. This version is not altered in any way.

2) The over-redacted version which this post is about. This version is intentionally altered to try and remove any identifying features from the subjects, including suspects and also filters out videos involving specific crimes (rape or involving kids). This video is not used for any legal proceedings; it's primary purpose is to allow interested parties to review police interactions with the public.

3) Videos legally requested under disclosure laws. These are manually redacted to remove the minimum required by law to protect peoples privacy. Depending on the subjects this would generally look like the videos you see on COPS where the subjects are clearly visible but some bystanders are blurred.

The idea is that by providing the second type of videos they can reduce FOIA or similar legal requests because in most cases seeing exactly who was involved is much less important as seeing what was done to and by each person involved in the incident. Before the existence of the over-redacted versions every request to view police body cams resulted in the the need to create a manually redacted version and this took up to 1 hour/minute to process.

Men's studies is not what you think it is, it's actually just a women's studies course taught from the perspective that all men are the problem and is often controlled by and taught by the same radical feminists in charge of the women's studies course.

Women's studies = "Women are the greatest"
Men's Studies = "Men are the worst"

Or maybe, just maybe, knowing that there are only 245 Republican congressman and 188 Democrats the gp was just commenting on the fact that a vote of 388 indicates exactly what he/she stated, that the bill has bipartisan support and is more likely than not to stand up to any challenges (at least in the House).

The word "guess" doesn't even appear in their comment.

A large part of the additional flooding is because Florida land management is terrible. Due to high demand for real estate flood plains and swamps are being converted to new developments and surprise, when you take away the natural areas for water to flow in an area completely surrounded by water other areas will suddenly see flooding.

And as soon as the interest in climate change science dies down either because a solution is found or it's show to be all hype a very large portion of those same tax based scientists who tagged "climate change" to their end of their research projects will suddenly find themselves out of a job.

Public researchers rely on public funding to keep their jobs and public funding relies on public interest. Public interest relies on someone showing that the research can have real world affects but as soon as the public no longer believes the field of study to be that important than the money goes away and so do the jobs.

Fossil fuel companies won't really lose all that much as the transition to a less fossil fuel reliant system comes into place because, surprise, they are also heavily invested in alternative energy sources. The last numbers I saw had them at about 65% of US business investments in new energy systems.

So who really has more invested in AGW, companies who will make millions either way (and profit margins on oil aren't all that great compared to a lot of other fields) or researchers whose very livelihoods rely on keeping AGW on top of the news cycle.

Not really sure what the point of this question is. In case you haven't seen a calendar recently it's 2015 so the fact UV only came out in 2011 is next to meaningless.

Things change in the home video world from time to time and collectors are always faced with the decision to upgrade or simply maintain what they already have. For those who transition they have two choices to make;

1) Maintain both systems which on the UV side requires next to no work since most internet capable video devices can playback UV movies but does require the person to maintain specific hardware to access their iTunes library.

or

2) Convert/re-purchase the things you really want in the new system. This can be expensive but is not unusual for a collector.

It's a choice that has been made several times over by most video collectors and I'm sure will be made again at some point in the future, possibly when 4k really takes off and iTunes and/or UV offer 4k upgrades from their previous 1080p only versions.

Never used iTunes for Music so can't answer that. I use 7digital for my music and haven't had an issue with them.

For movies I routinely purchase moves from Vudu, CinemaNow and Cineplex and since they are all UltraViolet compatible I can dl or stream any movies purchased from any of those stores through whichever app I happen to like best on whichever device I happen to be on. Unlike iTunes, I'm not locked into waiting for one store to have a sale, I can shop around multiple sites to find the best price. So when Vudu has a sale I might buy a new release HD movie from them for $9 and then watch it through the CinemaNow app on my Firestick or Roku or dl it for later viewing through Flixster on my tablet.

The other benefit is you can have multiple users linked to a single Ultraviolet library so if they purchase anything I can watch their movies too.

By this logic no two companies can ever join in a beneficial partnership because every other company in a similar field isn't involved. Unless you're definition of 'harming' a competitor is doing a better job of marketing yourself to customers, I still can't really see the harm being done to tinyindiesite?

You still pay for your music service, you just don't get it applied to your data cap at a particular phone company. Yes, that allows Pandora users on T-Mobile to get more use of their phones/music but it doesn't prevent tinymobilesite from operating on T-mobile through any other ISP.

For the record, all the talk of t-mobile is moot anyway since any music service can register with them to be used without data restrictions. As someone else pointed out, a person managed to register his home computer to be his personal streaming service.

My point is that even if that weren't the case, it's not up to T-Mobile or Pandora to help tinyindiesite get a leg up. As long as T-Mobile isn't the only possible ISP through which tinyindiesite can operate and they aren't artificially affecting transfer speeds to affect tiny's performance then it's up to tiny to make their service competitive either through pricing, quality or making their own deals. Having the government step in to make things fair rarely if ever works out for the market and it's consumers in the long run. The government has some responsibility to provide protections (anti-dumping practices and such) but in general government involvement causes more problems than it solves. In fact there's a current Supreme Court case about raisins in which the government, to make things fair, want to confiscate 1 million pounds of a growers product, without any compensation, or have them pay $700k in fines, so that they (the government) can properly manipulate the raisin market. It's very similar to the Canadian Wheat Board which routinely forced farmers to let their crops rot instead of selling them for prices they (the government agency) deemed appropriate.