Funny!

Ha, ha..... but no, not so much. Since they have pretty much unlimited protection from any consequences of their actions in office, they don't really face any consequences. Thanks to Harry Connick Jr's dad and the US Supreme Court, we know that a prosecutor's entire office can even conspire to railroad innocent people and never be held accountable.

In the case of Mississippi's Hood, not only did he not back down in the face of overwhelming evidence that the "experts" he was using were fraudulent, he even got re-elected after people got to see one of his office's star expert witnesses on video tape manufacturing evidence to frame a defendant by creating bite marks in a murdered 2 year old's face using a dental mold of the defendant's teeth. Did they all go to jail? No. Did they all get disbarred? No. Did anybody get in any sort of trouble at all? Well, after a couple of years they quit using the guy caught on tape for any new cases. They still defend the old ones in court though.

Even more interesting to me than the collusion of the AG with an industry group is the willing participation of the media. News shows like 'Today" are not podunk operations, yet they play along with these sorts of things continuously without anyone really making mention of it.

It is more obvious when it is the political parties pulling the strings, but the same dynamic is at play. When the White House wants to focus on a topic for the week - let's say they are making a big push on immigration or defense - they'll arrange for all of the major news outlets to run parallel stories supporting their push. Or when one of the political parties has a message they want out, they run to the press and magically their message gets passed along as if it were original thought.

I understand the pressures to get stories out there, particularly with dwindling resources, but you'd think that a reporter worth his salt would be extremely skeptical when a PR guy comes around with a story that is obviously shilling for some company, industry, political party or candidate. With some of the political hit pieces over the years you might suspect that the reporter's political leanings are at play, but that doesn't really explain all of the corporate shilling. And it isn't just folks like the MPAA - we've seen a blizzard of these kinds of campaigns - either supporting a company or tearing them down. Like the coverage of Uber. They got tons of positive coverage early on, and then there's been a concerted effort to get stories out there that make them look bad. Things like "woman mugged by Uber driver" as a headline.

At least in this day and age we have the internet to help us get around the media filter presenting the preferred narrative, for good or ill. I guess this sort of thing has been going on forever, we just finally have a way to see it for ourselves with the immediacy of the internet. With the internet I get to see the representatives of the Taxi and Limousine industry out their pushing the anti-Uber angles and then watch the stories miraculously pop up on the Today show a week later.

This AG is already (in)famous for his use of obviously flawed forensic testimony to convict innocent people - even in death penalty cases.

The New York Times told me that a A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend only two months ago.

So we have the Globe and Mail along with the UN and Stats Canada up against the NYT and the "Bee Informed Partnership". Meaning the old "consider the source" adage isn't really up to the challenge....

That isn't just idle speculation either. In the last week or two I was listening to an astronomy podcast about the future of space science. They featured an ethicist who brought up just these points when talking about the proposed asteroid mining companies. He posited as a-priori truth that all of the asteroids belonged to all mankind and no country or company could claim any property rights in space. He had worked out an outline of a licensing scheme to allow some limited exploitation of resources - with compensation going to the countries that don't have space programs and cannot exploit the riches of space. Because their humanity gives them ownership of everything in space and their disadvantage gives them claim over any money being spent on space, or somesuch.

It was more than a little odd, as a statement of moral principle. But the base concept was that resources are finite, therefore the only ethical thing to do is only exploit them minimally and then compensate people who have no involvement whatever, be it by geographic proximity, forcible control of the resource, financial contribution to the endeavor.... I can't pretend I really followed his logic. But they seemed pretty convinced that it was the only reasonable course.

I don't work in this area, so I wouldn't know..... but are the different grid sizes significantly different? I would assume that going from 175^3 to 200^3 could be a major jump - the sort of thing that imposes big costs for handling exponentially increasing amounts of data.

They also don't want power-generating windmills near their homes. Is that because they cause cancer? And water treatment plants are generally not built in wealthy neighborhoods. Is this due to leukemia clusters? And they don't want adult video stores near their homes. Because of increased risk of polio?

Perhaps the NIMBY effect is slipshod and broad brushed against any disruption of the neighborhood, whether rationional or not.

This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.

The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?

The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.

When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.

Interestingly, HOAs do have the most scope and reach over your life (if you choose to live there). At least as pertains to your home life. The control how long your grass is, where you can park your car on your own property, what kind of toys you can put up for you kids in the yard, who can come over to your house, when and for how long.... they can be very intrusive. They can even have approval over the sale of the house when you decide to leave.

Pretty much just about anything they'd like can be in the HOA contract you agree to when you buy in. I live in HOA central down in south Florida. They are so pervasive that several of those weekend radio shows that are mostly advertisements for professional services are dedicated to HOA legal advice (both for homeowners and for HOA boards). I've not seen that elsewhere, but it seems to be a pretty hot topic around these parts. They have full slates of callers looking for solutions to perceived HOA abuses or homeowners who are resisting HOA mandates. On the few occasions that I've caught a few minutes, the legal experts seem to advise that "the HOA is going to win so just pay up" most of the time.

True. But you do have to not watch such videos to downplay the significance of such atrocities and leave it all as background noise. The same goes for famine in Africa, police abuses here, water contamination in India, AIDS in Africa, etc, etc...

If the ISIL videos were shown on the US and European TV news in heavy rotation, would the pressure on western governments be different?

If the death of Kelly Thomas had been covered by the national news in the same manner as more recent and famous police abuse cases, might the issues at hand be getting a different hearing at the national level? (or Lloyd Smalley and Lillian Weiss, killed in their sleep in a wrong-house drug raid - or any number of others)

The information you take in shapes your opinions and the priorities you set. Living in Greece, only a few hundred miles away from these atrocities and presumably being a Christian - one of the groups targeted by these atrocities - one could see how keeping tabs on the actions of these people would have some personal interest to our Greek Nationalist compatriot.

I have a Samsung S6. It will charge from 10% to fully charged in a little over an hour on a car fast charger while navigating and playing podcasts. I learned this while driving cross-country last week, sharing a charger with 2 other s6 users. 30 hours each way - might not have survived without the podcasts!

That being said, there's no reason that I can see for keeping the batteries so small. Doubling or even tripling the size of the battery wouldn't seriously impact it's ergonomics, and it would allow you to candy crush your way from NY to LA.

The guy in charge of selling data center computing as a service thinks that most companies should buy their data center computing from a company like his instead of rolling their own.

And this is surprising or controversial why?

In other news, the guy from Cisco thinks that companies will be looking to Cisco for fast, stable networking. And the guy from Intel thinks that companies will be looking to Intel for power efficient data center solutions.

This doesn't make them luddites.... it makes them salesmen.

This is certainly one of the motivations. ,This article provides a lot of good links on the topic.

By combining anti-structuring laws with asset forfeiture the feds can steal most anything they'd like. There have been a lot of stories in recent years about small businesses that make frequent deposits under 10k getting their accounts and even their business siezed.

All without even an allegation of any criminal activity other than making deposits that are below the threshold for reporting. The drug warriors thought they were playing a game of gotcha with the drug kingpins. Nice work, geniuses....

it's unclear exactly how Daimler plans to produce its batteries in a larger-scale energy-storage operation.

Perhaps by writing big checks to battery suppliers like Tesla and Panasonic? And of course from their current supplier for electric vehicles: A123Systems.

Any time a single device (or drug, or supplement, or treatment) purports to treat a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ailments, your first instinct should be heavy skepticism. Also, when a device purports to work for ailments that have soft endpoints and are amenable to placebo effect, you should evaluate any study carefully. The literature is filled with studies that purport to show promising results, only to collapse when more rigorous methods are applied.

epilepsy, depression, stroke, tinnitus, heart failure, migraines, asthma,

With the exception of stroke and heart failure, this is a list of ailments that are commonly targeted by scam medicine, because they are conditions that will often be self-reported as improved no matter what the intervention. When more rigorous measurements are applied, these effects tend to evaporate.

Let's hope it works, but let's look for some well done studies too.