This is how I envision the H1-B program working.

Likely not.

Wait.
You're saying there's video of him being chased from his gun toting friends by one guy with a pistol? For blocks? And none of his friends helped him at all? That might change my mind completely....but only if they essentially dragged him away, not if he followed along arguing, and if they physically forced him away from his friends, why didn't his friends try to help?

Again, I'll need some evidence of the pepper spray to believe it, because the videos of him running he wasn't acting like a person who had been pepper sprayed, not that it would excuse killing someone else, and I'm assuming the spray came after the first homicide.

(Edit: if the pepper spraying happened, and happened before he shot, then he has zero excuses for any of them. He couldn't see, so had no idea what was happening around him, who threw what, what was thrown, or who he was shooting. You can't see after being pepper sprayed. That makes every shot fired attempted murder of any random person in the area, not self defense. To be self defense, you must know who and what you're defending yourself from. If he was sprayed, he couldn't possibly know, nor could he properly aim.)

A plastic bag mistaken for a Molotov? Not by any American kid, all boys over 7 know what a Molotov looks like from movies and video games, they don't resemble empty plastic bags.

I think you're being biased. I may be too. I'm not excusing any threatening acts by protesters before he killed one, but do excuse any acts committed trying to apprehend him afterwards. (Edit: anything they did at that point would be real self defense, not just in their own minds.)

I can't find any way to excuse him, from going armed looking for trouble to leaving his group where he felt safe to mistaking a harmless object for a deadly one and killing someone out of fear to running away armed to shooting at his pursuers to not reporting it, every act indicates intentional murder and an attempt to escape. He might have had a reason, he may have even feared for his life, but he had no real reason, put himself in the situation that scared him, and opened fire for no GOOD reason.
Children often do things for bad reasons, that's one reason they shouldn't be let loose with firearms unaccompanied, especially not in high stress events like this.
It's not that he had no reason, it's that his reasoning was flawed on all points. He had no legitimate reason, and no legitimate excuse.

Btw, in case you don't recall, I'm not anti gun at all. I am anti armed groups traveling the country intent on killing unarmed people they disagree with, even if those people are being mean and scary, even if they're stealing. If they're committing arson, well maybe, that can be mass murder.

If you find a still live version of him being chased by armed protesters away from his friends, or threatened, I would be interested in seeing them. I find it impossible to envision. It's not that I'm not open to new info, it's only that I've seen none that excuse his killings.

(Edit: I'm looking at it like this....If a 17 year old kid wants to do extreme mountain climbing with little to no training, gets on the mountain and gets panicked and, thinking it will make him safer to have two ropes disconnects his partner's harness and they die, he had a reason, but not a legitimate reason, and not an excuse. This kid wanted to do extreme policing totally untrained, he panicked, people died because of his panicked actions. It's really that simple to me.)

...Maybe? It would absolutely annihilate at something like chess, or Go. I have a hard time imaging a good use case for having it actually run a video game, but I'm guessing few people working on early traditional computers could've envisioned any of the delightful diversions we now take as a given. Probably when I'm 80 kids will be playing quantum Minecraft in a layered omniverse of worlds, where removing a block in one world has consequences in nearby dimensions, with chaos theory realistically modeled and incorporated.

Some complex tasks a QC would absolutely rock at however. Feed it a long list of employees, hours of availability, and coverage requirements, and it should spit out a 100% optimum schedule immediately. Air traffic controllers (particularly at large hub airports) would likely find it helpful in coordinating flight plans. Logistics for manufacturing, shipping, etc. The downside is that encryption will likely be utterly fucked for a while, as a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could try all possible options at once. So it'll be interesting, but we're still 10+ years from any sort of commercial products, and they'll be like the computers of the 60s: huge and expensive, big iron for custom purposes. Or at least that's my semi-informed guess, I ain't no technoprophet.

Someone who really wants to get involved in bleeding-edge tech would do well to dive into this field. Writing the algorithms needed to run a task on a QC requires a completely different mindset than programming a traditional computer. I don't think people with years of experience with current programming methodologies would adapt well. At best they'd be nearly starting from scratch, at worst they'd have to work to un-learn what they already know.

I remember my "judgement day." Greif.

I discovered for myself that I, unknowingly, had written my own bible. I created all the rules that I thought I should hold dear. Little did I know that one day I would be judged by own bible.

Then I lost someone I loved. I became suicidal. I could not bear the loss and the pain.

My plan was to drive head on into a semi truck, thinking that hopefully the driver would survive somehow. I drove back and forth on the highway I picked to end my life.

I imagined what the crash would be like and who it would affect. Then I pictured something that stalled my plan.

Upon crashing into the truck I envisioned the people I love being crushed and dismembered in slow motion. My parents, siblings, friends, as though they were in the car with me.

In my death I would be the only survivor.

I had destroyed the world. With a single bullet, I could have destroyed the world. To me, that meant one thing. If I had the power to destroy the world, then I must have the power to save it. The only thing standing in my way was the bible I wrote for myself. Forgiving others was the easy part.

Forgiving myself was not so easy.

The very thing that almost killed me was now the thing I had to believe in.

Love.

Pure. Simple. Without demands or conditions.

Every human needs love. "There lies the rub."

I snatched the pebbles from the Master's hand. It was time for me to leave.

God was no different than great works of art, music, poetry.

If there is a God, it must be me because I now have the only power God ever had.

Love.

Unless of course it was blurrier, like from a security camera. Forensics would likely still be able to determine it's a fake, but it could well be that a damning clip could have a huge impact before that happens. I could absolutely envision scenarios where this sort of tech could easily ruin a person's life.

I'm having fun envisioning other movies taking a cue from this one and having the characters' wardrobes state their role. Jurassic Park geneticists in lab coats with "Scientist" on them, Rocky wearing shorts that say "Boxer" across his ass, James Bond in his "Spy" suit...

I'd hope so but its RT news... somehow i envision a group of political prisoners being told to laugh at gunpoint...

I had to take discrete math for computer science so I got a good grasp of it. It is merely envisioning everything as groups, rather than values. You don't have to DO anything to the groups, just realise what's inside those groups. In the end though it is merely a well organised way of indicating larger numbers for processing, not intended to find a specific number. I'm not sure what practicality there is for organizing the super large numbers like this either.

I just wish after the first line about his father being the best pilot ever they'd done a quick insert of child Anakin from Episode I racing his stupid little pod car thing.

Still, freaking excellent to see what I was envisioning when I watched Episode IV a couple of weeks ago (for the first time in near 20 years).

*quality

The thing is, traditional sifting is still compatible as many of these shows already have clips on YT. I like the idea the Soft ad a stronger engine for recommending but would you envision using the existing soft mechanism or some other queue / standalone system?

It was great, but kinda felt the ending was a bit ... lackluster? I supposed I envisioned a more sophisticated villain. Anyway, high hopes that this series keeps on delivering. The new season, new cast format is a great way to ensure the setting and characters don't go stale.

Wow, that's completely different than what I envisioned after reading about this in the news. I thought it would be something semi-reasonable; not this, wtf.

The year before last I had a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses at my door. I asked them a simple question - why would their god choose to create autistic people who are incapable of the belief that is sought from us? Being on the autistic spectrum myself I totally understood where I was coming from with the question, and felt entitled to ask it. They were stumped and I politely said goodbye to them. As they left with puzzled expressions the man turned back to me, and asked if he could return if he came up with an answer. I told him that would be fine, but to this day I have yet to hear back from him.

I really like Stephen Fry's answer to this question. I can't envision a rational reason ever being offered to him in response to his answer.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

Homology is a complex subject..it would take awhile to get into. I found a good link that illustrates the argument against it being a proof that macroevolution occured. If you want to take a look we could discuss further:

http://creation.com/does-homology-provide-evidence-of-evolutionary-naturalism

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

I guess it depends on who you ask?

Erwin, D.H. (2000) Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution. Evol. & Devel. 2:78-84.

the independence of macroevolution is affirmed not only by species selection but also by other processes such as effect sorting among species.

Lieberman, B.S. and Vrba, E.S. (2005) Gould on species selection. in MACROEVOLUTION: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency. E.S. Vrba and N. Eldredge eds. supplement to Paleobiology vol. 31(2) The Paleontological Society, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

Micro- and macroevolution are thus different levels of analysis of the same phenomenon: evolution. Macroevolution cannot solely be reduced to microevolution because it encompasses so many other phenomena: adaptive radiation, for example, cannot be reduced only to natural selection, though natural selection helps bring it about.

Scott, E.C. (2004) Evolution vs. creationism: an introduction. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press).

Macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution, and we must envision the process governing its course as being analogous to natural selection but operating at a higher level of organization.

Stanley, S. M. (1975) A theory of evolution above the species level. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 72: 646-650.

In conclusion, then, macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with microevolutionary theories, but macroevolutionary studies require the formulation of autonomous hypotheses and models (which must be tested using macroevolutionary evidence). In this (epistemologically) very important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution: macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study.

Ayala, F.J. (1983) Beyond Darwinism? The Challenge of Macroevolution to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution. reprinted in PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, M. Ruse ed. p. 118-133.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd. -(Simon Conway Morris, [palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK], "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11)