The number of interactions with wild animals carrying corona virus strains is orders of magnitude greater than the number of interactions with viruses in those labs (and the security protocols much worse). While it's possible that there was a lab accident, given what we know now the probability of that would be very low. 1% I think would generous.

That's actually pretty straight forward. There are many many different strains of corona virus in the wild, in many many populations of wild animals. Virus's mutate pretty quickly, It's pretty unusual for a virus strain to become both more virulent and more deadly, which is why we don't see that happen all the time, but given the number of mutations strains of the virus go through world wide it's not incompatible with the math that we see something like this happen every once in a while (without human involvement).
Typically what would happen is that a strain of the virus crosses from animals to humans in a fairly remote, low population part of the world (where people are more in contact with animal populations). Usually these strains aren't as virulent and cause havoc in a small area. The initial site of detection, a wet market is a place that is going to draw in people who come from remote regions and have large amounts of contact, who might not necessarily been in contact with other population centers.
When you look at the number of human animal interactions with species that could have been carriers for the strain in the wild vs in a lab (and with the safety precautions in even a badly run lab compared to in the wild encounters) then you arrive at a very low prior probability of a lab release.

Now having the virus show up in Wuhan first might seem like a stroke of luck (if it had traveled to a number of population centers before being picked up you would see something that looked more like SARS) but remember that those labs were placed in Wuhan because of the prevalence of corona virus strains in that region.

It's not a muslim ban because all muslim's are affected it's a muslim ban because it is clearly targetted at muslims with no real justification.

Australian here.
1) Most of the "uninhabbited" parts of Australia are not particularly conducive to most kinds of agriculture..
2) The police here take growing tobbacco as a much more seriously than growing weed.

Yeah that's pretty much a standard feature across most X11 desktops including KDE. The good ones allow you to move those bindings from 'alt' to 'meta' for aplications that use alt.

If you touch the top of the screen get te a full screen window, Left edge you get the left half of the screen, right edge the right half of the screen (on more modern UIs the left and the right edges are broken up into thirds where the lower and upper thirds resize the nidow to exactly one quarter of the desktop).

This method is a lot quicker and more convenient than manually moving or resizing windows.

if you can't see the usefulness in this then that would appear to be out of stubborness and lack of imagination

How much of the ongoing warming is because of mankind's CO2 emissions, vs changes in the Sun?

This is fairly easy to measure: let's concider this from two angles.

Warming via greenhouse gases (trapped radiation) predicts a pattern of warming, warming from external radiation predicts a different pattern. The pattern we are seeing is one where warming is concerntrated towards the poles, the stratosphere is cooling while the troposphere is warming, warming is occuring more at night than in the day etc. This points in the directionion of trapped radiation being the source of the warming with a high degree of probability

Secondly we have been observing the sun dirrectly for some time now and that data doesn't look like it can explain the recent warmng.

I think either you or your sources are getting their wires crossed. The study did no such thing. The study in question broke down papers into pro, anti and no discernable position (in the abstract of the paper). The authors of the study tried to contact the authors in this third group. They then put authors who responded pro or anti into those those categories. This still left a large group of papers which were then ignored, the next step would have been to read the papers in full but with over 10,000 papers I understand why they didn't do that. 98% is a reasonable number but should have error bars on it. Since not all research in the field needs to list a position WRT global warming I would be very suprised indeed if the actual number is lower than 90%. Some people have pointed out that if you limit the papers to those published in the last 20 years the number is higher than 98%.

If you can produce scientific papers which were rejected by peer review that shouldn't have been then I am all ears. The only thing I am aware that is remotely like this was in the hacked emails where a group of scientists talked about possibly trying to veeto a paper then not actually veetoing that paper.
It was published then very quickly critised for using faulty methodology.

Science kind of is done by consensus, In that the predictions are made the observations made and the experts come to a consensus on what the data means. For us who are not expert in the particular field knowing that the people who live and breath the stuff all agree about particular details is a valuable hueristic. We can get a better picture by cross referencing what the experts are saying but past that point you really have to become an expert yourself.

Now as for failed predictions I am willing to wager a small amount of money that you don't know what the actual predictions made my mainstream climate scientists are. The media doesn't do a really good job of explaining these (either on the pro or anti side), partly because as you know this stuff is more complicated than one can fit into a 5 minute news segment or a soundbite.

I will give you competence maybe and I would have given you intelligence if you had asked. Clearly people have underestimated Trump. If you think that trump might have integrity you need your head examined. Take a look at the details of the Trump University case - there is a reason the thing was settled out of court. If that's not enough have a look into trumps charity or ask yourself what is the deal with the obvious nepotism and failure to disengage with current business activities on the grounds of conflict of interest. Imagine that the same things were being said of Obama and see how ok you are with it.

To be fair the best information we had put Hillary way ahead this wasn't just the left, for instance the people offering bets on the outcome of the election had the odds at 5:1 against trump a week from the election those odds did schrink to 2:1 against the day before the election - I would say these people had a pretty strong motivation to accurately predict the winner.

Part of the reason this is so hard to accept is because the man is so clearly full of shit. It's really hard to accept that anybody would think it a good idea to go with the guy who when asked a question repeats the same phrase again and again without actually saying anything coherent. I know that politicians are generally good at this but trump takes it to a whole new level. In the cases where Trump did propose policy it did not match the rhetoric.

The reason that people think that Trump is going to dissolve the EPA is because he himself said that he wanted to eliminate the EPA. More recently he softened that stance to strongly limiting the powers of the EPA. The question then is - did he say those things because he wanted to appeal to the red team or because he wants to limit the powers of the EPA? Judging from the appointments made I would lean it favour of the later

Many of those appointments (but not all) do look like the opposite of draining the swamp, it's not just the left saying this. Being a surgeon doesn't particularly qualify for being in charge of housing policy, I am genuinely supprised that somebody would think that it would.

Lets take a look at Trumps own list of things he want to do in the first hundred days of office (google for it), There are several things in there that I support (things that Trump will have to fight his own party for) but a lot of things on that list scare the shit out of me (and for most of those things he will have the backing of a party that will control both houses of parliaent.) Do you think that people taking that list at face value are showing false emotion?.

Ok that is one of about 2 or 3 cabinet picks that might turn out alright - what's your point?

This comment is so misleading it hurts my head.

Jack *is* the Linux answer to ASIO/Core Audio and it is more than capable of competing with these in terms of scalabality and low latency performance.
In fact a lot of high end stand-alone audio hardware now runs embedded Linux and Jack internally.

You do have some difficulty caused by Jack not being historically that easy to set up and get to run smoothly
It's design requires the loosening of some security restrictions in order to be able to operate at really low latencies,
distro makers tend to care more about security. It also shares problems with Windows (but not Mac) where some PC hardware
just isn't designed to deliver low latency performance and that support for audio interfaces is a bit hit and miss.
This has lead to a situation where a lot of people in the enthusiast community (the ones using the onboard realtek cards)
have just demanded that everything work with alsa because they want to spend time makeing music not fiddling with the system.

The good news is that in 2016 - Distro's generally add the security exceptions when you install jack and as long as your interface is well supported
and your other hardware is fit to purpose jack will work without too much effort (at least that is the way it seems to me - but I have experience).
It's comparible to getting a Windows/ASIO setup running but not as smooth as MacOS/CoreAudio.

Further good news is that VST support for Linux is a thing and is supported by the available DAWs.
This means that should a company want to port their plugins to Linux they just need to replace system calls (if any)
and recompile.

You can't have small both, I would have thought this was obvious - governments have to be a certain size to be able to effectively keep corporations of a particular size in check. It's pretty clear that in the United States (from an outside perspective) that several of the larger business interests are pretty hell bent on getting rid on the government agencies that keep them in check, especially environmental and safety regulations.

Governments at least in democratic nations have at least some accountability to citizens of that nation and periodic elections allow the removal of really unpopular politicians without bloodshed. I agree that there are dangers associated with big government but I don't see a workable solution short term that doesn't include them.

Free university or at least free tuition is more common than you think it would be, particularly in Europe and at least, Bernie Sanders has a tax plan that sort of adds up, the candidates on the republican side are so far from doing that, you could completely defund the military (which isn't going to happen) and still not make up the difference.

ok had to look it up -- but honestly It looks like a car to me. People are strange.

Because the purpose of the IPCC is summarise all the scientific research done on the subject and evaluate the relative importance of each study. Think of it as a meta analysis.

This information is to be given to policy makers so they have as clear a picture of what the risks and likelihoods as we can currently provide.

You could insert a conspiracy in there but it would look exactly as it does if there was no conspiracy.

Remember also that we took steps to mitigate that risk...

Scientists don't and are taking that into account. We have a pretty good idea of what caused previous ice-ages - Positions of the continents, variations in the earths orbit and it is predicted that we will have to deal with that in some 10,000 or so years. There is also the consideration that we are trying to feed some 7 billion and rabidly growing people and while the planet might still be inhabitable it might only be able to sustain a small fraction of that population.

The important question is pay some now or risk it and probably pay a lot more in future.