If the question was, "Will he be pardoned in the next 10 years", or even "Will he be pardoned during his lifetime", I would probably have gone with "no". But given that the Pope did eventually (hundreds of years later) apologize for the whole Galileo thing, I do think that eventually, someone somewhere down the road will almost certainly pardon Snowden; particularly when the events are so long gone that they don't matter anymore.

I voted 'No', because although I have an account, I haven't read it regularly... ever, I think. I prefer sharing with only my friends & family on Facebook, rather than interacting with random strangers.

I've been asking people this math puzzle as an intro to this topic:

Suppose you have a pond that covers over with lily pads every spring. The lily pads double every day. It takes 16 days for the pond to be completely covered. How long does it take to be half covered?

The answer, of course, is 15 days, which seems very counter-intuitive. But that's what exponential growth is like: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, FOOM!

So, now, imagine your hospital beds are 75% empty, and the case rate is doubling every 3.5 days. What's it going to look like in a week and a half?

That's why it's so important to slam on the brakes hard when you see that exponential growth.

The reason some pathogens are seasonal is due to the fact that, at least in the higher latitudes, which is where a large portion of humanity lives, fall and winter see most people indoors for a large portion of the time.

That doesn't make any sense. Think about your actual daily life in the winter, and then in the summer. Think about the opportunities you have for being infected by other sick people or infecting others. Are they really that different between summer and winter?

During the summer, I might spend *one* more hour outside on a weekday evening, and maybe a *couple* of extra hours outside on the weekend. That's almost entirely time I would have spent in my own house anyway. Moving from "14 hours a day indoors with my family" to "12 hours a day indoors with my family" isn't going to significantly reduce my chance of catching something from them. I spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, in stores or cafes, in my church, or in other people's houses. How is that supposed to translate to lower rates of a virus spreading?

While some scientists can be corrupted, Science itself cannot.

I'm as angry as anyone about scientists being disregarded, but this is just sloppy thinking. "Science" in your sentence cannot be corrupted because it has no clear meaning. No, the physical laws of the universe cannot be corrupted. But how do we know those laws? Well, we rely on scientists. And it turns out scientists are prone to fraud, groupthink, confirmation bias, wishful thinking, or just plain mistakes -- just like other people.

As a simple example, consider the fact that most of Captain Scott's expidition to the South Pole died of scurvy because the science of the time had "disproved" lemons as an effective prophylactic against scurvy.

And you can say, "Eventually science corrected itself". But that doesn't change the fact that 1) Captain Scott followed science, and his men died as a result 2) if he'd ignored science and instead done what his grandfather would have done, all his men would still be alive.

If "trust Science" means, "trust the physical laws of the universe", then that meaning is true but useless: I don't know what the physical laws of the universe are. If "trust Science" means, "Accept as truth the current scientific consensus", then it's better than nothing, but will still frequently lead you wrong.

I was going to say -- what's fundamentally different about Twitter?

I love the way of interacting with friends and family that FB enables, particularly as my family is now spread all across the globe. About a year ago, though, I determined that the "good" I was doing by combating misinformation on FB was being overwhelmed by the bad I was doing by making FB an attractive place to be in the first place, and so I quit.

But is Twitter any better?

Oh, see my first interpretation was:

• Apple has $245B
• Google has paid developers about half of what Apple has
• Therefore, Google has paid Android developers around $122.5B

The context of the resignation seems to be in response to being called out:

That's out of line, Bruce. I'm not sure where this FUD is coming from, but it's inappropriate.

And the "FUD" in question was this (further down, in response to Bradley Kuhn siding with Bruce):

Don't waste your time, Bradley. They were told not to listen to you, either.

I'm inclined to say I agree with the call-out.

Thing is the Jedi were objectively bad. Not only did they fail to stop Palpatine they helped create Vader through their strict dogma and amoral behaviour.

I mean, I agree with that. The prequels were absolutely terrible for lots of reasons, and the idiocy of the Jedi dogma -- without actually being critically examined as such -- were a big part of that. That is, an interesting story would have been to purposely explore how dogma and a plausible-but-actually-perverse set of morals infects an organization of people who are genuinely trying to Do the Right Thing, causing its downfall; but that's not what the prequels do.

But The Last Jedi doesn't do that either. It has Yoda burning all remnants of any history of an organization that he was deeply involved in, and that in Episodes 5 and 6 he seemed to still deeply love. Burning all those texts basically guarantees you're going to re-make all the same mistakes they made. The best thing you could do is to try to learn where things went wrong and put things on the right track, not burn the whole thing to the ground. That kind of dismissive, "the Jedi sucked; do your own thing!" is out of character with the whole series, and is obviously more a jarring imposition by the author than an organic extension of the story.

When I was at university, I had a friend who, before he went to see a movie, would dutifully read the review in the campus newspaper. If the critics liked it, he figured it would be awful and didn't go see it. If the critics blasted it, he figured it must be pretty fun.

I heard once that you should only really review a genre that you like. If you dislike science fiction in general, then your review of any particular scifi book is going to be pretty worthless, since it's probably going to be mainly criticizing things you dislike about the genre in general. Only someone who actually likes scifi can tell a good scifi book from a bad one.

The same one probably holds for The Rise of Skywalker. Come critics seemed to like The Last Jedi because it dissed the whole "Jedi religion" thing, because it said your heritage and parenting and "destiny" didn't matter. But you know what? The whole thing with "ancient religion", "destiny", and wrestling with your heritage were a core part of what people liked about the films. If that's not your thing, why did you watch the movie? If you want to tell a story about space wizards that doesn't have those things, why don't you make your own fictional universe, rather than trying to change someone else's?

When the main complaints about "The Rise of Skywalker" from critics were, "It goes back on all the new direction that the Last Jedi introduced", I knew I was probably going to enjoy the film. One has to expect a certain number of things one has to overlook. (After two Death Stars were blown up, why on earth did they want to build a third one in The Force Awakens? Don't want to give any spoilers, but there are questionable decisions on the part of the Bad Guys of a similar nature.) And I enjoyed it more than I was expecting. It was a good, fun film, in the Star Wars tradition, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Since you have experienced elevated CO2, what do you think? I pay a lot of attention to my thoughts. I don't detect any difference in the quality of my thinking when the CO2 level is higher.

When I was at university, I'd frequently have the experience in a particular class of being very drowsy -- completely unable to stay awake. After the class I'd go find a bench in the atrium to take a quick power-nap, only to be completely wide awake. Eventually I concluded that it must be the CO2 in the classroom: it was a mid-afternoon class (so had been populated by breathing humans for 5-6 hours already), and it was in a back corner of the building with only a single door for an entrance and no windows.

Either me or everyone in the US is missing something here.

I almost never get robocalls on my UK mobile phone. Why? Because it costs the caller 0.35 GBP to talk to me. It doesn't matter if they're from the US, or from India, or wherever. Nobody cares if the number is spoofed -- the rate of return is just too low for spam calling to be cost-effective.

The US *must* already have some wayof dealing with this back-propagation of cost, because if you call my UK mobile from the US you're going to get charged that $0.50/minute. All you have to do is turn that on, and boom -- suddenly the numbers for robocalls don't make much sense anymore. No need for this crazy regulation, cryptographic verification, whatever.

And you know what? If someone really wants to call you out of the blue, they still can. But they've got to make sure it's worth at least $0.50, rather than $0.0001 or whatever it is.

So, am I missing something, or is the entire US population missing something?

Why is he leaving? The senate won't convict and he's highly likely to not only win 2020 but smashingly and the party will ride his coat tails to owning congress and the Supreme Court. Impeachment just caused the D party a generations worth of damage.

If The People of the United States genuinely approve of this sort of abuse of power, then our country is basically over anyway. There's a time to go all-in, and I think this is one of those times.

Where's the "0: Just So Wrong" mod when you need it?

Close to zero is not zero. To me that sounds like false advertising. The fact that it is legal does not make it ok, it makes it worse.

I'm inclined to agree with you here.

If you say something is vegetarian; you should not fry it in animal fat.

Right, and if BK said it was vegetarian, they should certainly be held to account. But if all they said was "0% beef", then I think there's a pretty good chance they'll prevail.