Reality is, someone is going to name the guy and they are going to get the attention.

I understand why the sheriff doesn't want the name released but it's not within his purview to demand that media respect his wishes. It would get out one way or another, I don't really see what the hoo ha is about.

If it's just a general complaint about sensationalist reporting, there are plenty of sources of news that just give you the facts and don't turn it in to a sideshow. They are generally a bit more obscure (no frills actual reporting doesn't draw much attention) so you have to hunt for em, but they are out there.

It seemed to be made clear quite quickly that the clock parts were largely if not entirely stock, and from the look of it I would agree with that. That is mostly what's being seized on right now. I don't know what that means about his intentions, and really, from the guessing and assumptions one way or another, it does not seem that anyone else does either. I guess we'll find out.

Was he circuit bending? Was he simply putting an old clock in a new case? Did he fix it? Was he trying to provoke a reaction? Time will tell. I'll leave the speculation alone, because it's getting pretty ugly.

Oh look, I found the comment

...pretty much every edible plant (sans chemical agents) is going to combat cancer in one way or another. Going full raw vegan is a good start. ....This will happen by itself with a good diet.

Unknown.

If the ECB pulls ELA, the Greek banking system goes belly up. Again, consequences unknown, but Deutsche Bank for instance didn't seem particularly stable during the last months, so the denial of any contagion risk might have been premature. Additionally, Draghi is tasked with maintaining the stability of the Euro and taking away Greece's last lifeline might just be too far out of his mandate, even for him. Keeping ELA up without increasing the limit will achieve the same result within days though.

If Greece fails to make its payment to the IMF tomorrow, it's at the discretion of Lagarde whether she pulls the plug. Info has been somewhat contradictory, but there should be a 30 day window before the board has to call it a default.

If a default is triggered this week, it's up to the ECB and the EC again. They have shown unwillingness to let things go bust, all the recent months of muddling through should be testament to that.

They cannot have a failed state within Europe without feeding right into the anti-European parties on both ends of the spectrum; they cannot throw Greece out of the EZ; they cannot revitalise the Greek economy without doing a 180 against their own ideology; they cannot let Syriza pull Greece out of the shit without encouraging Podemos. It's an impasse alright.

Should the Greek people vote against the proposal, a proposal that is no longer on the table, it'll be back to negotiations. Should they vote in favour of it, and should it still be available to them at that time in the first place, Tsipras might even get a majority for it in parliament, but Syriza will blow apart right then and there. The left wing cannot agree to further enslavement.

If, however, everything goes sour and Greece does indeed exit the EZ, introduce a new Drachma, the whole shebang, then we're in uncharted terrorities. The situation in Greece would deteriorate even further, given how much they rely on imports, especially of fuel. And the EU, already shaky from the tens of thousands of bodies floating in the Med, the falling standard of living for tens of millions and the sustained unemployment of an entire generation; this fecking union cannot turn the cradle of democracy into a failed state and survive. The governments might be ok with it, but the French people would rip this shit to shreds one way or another, and rightfully so.

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

I thought your main (secondary) point was that she's a well known anti-sex worker/porn star that insults them with labels like 'prostituted women' and....well...and nothing, no other labels have been offered....so I guess she's NOT a well known anti-sex worker then? What IS your position? It's confusing.

I never have asserted any such thing about her, I only asked you to provide evidence of YOUR claims about her...I made none, so I have none to back up.
Again, I never asserted she was or wasn't anything, I did assert that your contention that she had no reason to disable comments or cancel one event except to silence critics, she had a very good reason besides that, and she didn't silence anyone because she held other events and (according to you) left open other venues for people to discuss her.
That's why your argument didn't hold water...and still doesn't, but you seem to have dropped that line and moved on to simply 'why do you love her' kind of strawman.

I'm defending nothing but truth in discussion, and your primary assertion ran contrary to that, and your secondary one needs confirmation one way or another.
I enable no one in that, but you might enable her supporters by putting forth easily dismissed reasons for disliking her. If you had good reasons you had shown me, I would dislike her (actually, I should say dislike her more, I've said time and time again I don't like her, I'm not a fan, she's a terrible spokesperson for anything)
So you can continue to ignore what I say and say I'm supporting and enabling a con artist if you wish, it won't make it true and only means you don't understand what I've said.

Ask the engineers whether religion influenced their lives or not - you don't speak for them.

"Religion" doesn't claim anything (it's not an entity). People who have religious beliefs sometimes have. I've never seen it claimed except in movies. Perhaps you live in an area where it is often claimed (and I feel sorry for you if that is the case). Either way - don't paint religious people the world over with the same brush because of your limited experience (note: everyone has limited experience one way or another - it's just the way it is).

Science doesn't do anything by itself. People use the scientific method to achieve things. In a device like this, it is a biomedical engineer doing most of the work. Funnily enough this happens to be my field (I moved over to it from health science a few years back - just a few years study left....).

Meanwhile, religious people built much of what you enjoy today which utilises the scientific method as a starting point.

Your idea of religion, while sometimes true in a very limited sense, is maligned and doesn't correspond with anything but the current anti-religion zeitgeist. Which is a pity because you seem like a smart person and could do much good for other people (and in general hating on people doesn't achieve that). Perhaps in time you'll reconsider people with religious beliefs in a better light.

Things like this can be frontpaged if need be. Actually i feel 32 votes is quite good for the amount of traffic we get these days. I'm sure the votes were actually a small percentage of sifters that actually saw the post. Many probably didn't care or were neutral which wouldn't be shown in voting. Also i think this is something that's considered and doesn't set anything in stone one way or another. Polls outcomes don't necessarily make it so.

As lucky was quoted as saying
"If the constituency stands united with a single voice, perhaps the site admins would reconsider the issue."

Hey kceaton1,

I'm sorry to hear about the narcolepsy and sleep paralysis. I remember watching a video someone put out recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PuvXpv0yDM) that sort of explained what it is like and it didn't seem like very much fun. I can't really imagine what you're going through. I have a friend who has narcolepsy but it must be a mild version because it seems like she kind of winds up to it and comes out of it pretty easy.

In regards to your question, I appreciate you not writing off my response as one thing or another. In regards to supernatural experiences, I can see why you have a lot of skepticism as well. You have experienced things on the order of what you've heard other people call supernatural experiences, but you have a natural explanation for them.

Having a supernatural experience can be hard to quantify, and usually when God is revealing something to you, it goes beyond sense impressions. You could perhaps write some of them off as one thing or another but three experiences in particular stand out to me as being undeniable. They aren't necessary what led me to Christ but they really defy any kind of naturalistic explanation.

The first was from before I was a Christian, when I was into the new age. At the time I was exploring a lot of eastern spiritual practices. There is one in particular, which I wont go into detail about, that for a few minutes allowed me to see with my eyes closed. When I was in the shower one day I closed my eyes to rinse my hair and when I did I was utterly shocked and amazed to be looking right at my feet and the water falling down upon them. It was real time and the only difference from normal vision was it had kind of an energetic haze over everything, kind of matrix looking. It was otherworldly but still completely in sync with my normal vision when I opened my eyes.

I wasn't hallucinating because I was able to test it in real time by opening and closing my eyes and looking at various things. It was all completely consistent and completely real. I could see what was going on to minute detail with my eyes closed and when I opened them everything matched perfectly, and vice versa. I wasn't dreaming because I immediately got out of the shower and told my then significant other who would vouch for that happening. It didn't last long but I did experience it and there isn't a naturalistic explanation.

The second thing that happened to me is that is undeniable is that I was physically healed by a Christian praying over me. My left leg used to be shorter than my right leg by a quarter inch. I know this because I measured it a few times and it caused me to walk somewhat unevenly. The man prayed for someone else who had the same problem except worse, and I saw their leg grow out and even up with the other. When I saw that I asked to be prayed for and the same thing happened to me. I know it did because I measured my legs and they are exactly the same length. I also had to learn how to walk correctly after this happened. Again, no naturalistic explanation.

The third thing happened at my baptism. I knew I needed to get baptized, although at the time I didn't really understand what it was all about. When I got baptized, it completely changed me. The easiest way to described it is, when I went into the water I was one person, and when I came back up I was a different person. Different in this sense, that I was cleansed on the inside. Emotionally and spiritually, it was like a thick black sludge had been removed from the walls of my heart. An emotional weight had been lifted, depression and anger and sadness disappeared; it was replaced with an incredible lightness, with true peace and joy. This wasn't superficial; I was utterly changed. I was a different and better (healed)person, and on top of that I could sense the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, from that moment on until now.

People have given me different explanations; hallucinations, psychotic break, etc. I've have a lot of experience with people who have mental illness; the things that happen to them aren't positive, they're negative. When they think they have entered Nirvana, their behavior is completely off and often self-destructive. Delusional psychosis doesn't heal, it hurts. One way or another, the whole thing is going to unravel because it isn't real. What has happened to me is very real and I experience Gods love, care and guidance every day of my life. The Lord is good, and He is faithful; He cares even about the little things of my life.

I am a Christian not simply because I have seen miracles, it is because I believe the gospel. I know I am a sinner and that I need a Savior. I know that Savior is the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for my sins and was raised to life on the third day. The Lord has made that clear to me and I don't have any trouble agreeing with Him. He gave it all for me; why should I do any less? Before I knew the Lord I was resigned to a meaningless death. Today, I have a living hope. But I didn't come to be a Christian because I am afraid of death. I came to be a Christian because God revealed Himself to me, that He created me for a reason, and that my true fulfillment and purpose can only be found in Him. Since I have given my life to Jesus Christ, I have found that to be completely true, in ways I could never have imagined. My life affirms the truth of this scripture:

Ephesians 3:20 Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
Ephesians 3:21 to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, forever. Amen.

@ChaosEngine

Is a waiter staff really able to contribute that much to the experience though? I've always felt that food quality, environment, speed of service are far more important. Politeness, being available at the right times are all very routine nowadays.

When you do want more information on a menu item or a recommendation they can be helpful but whether you want that is largely out of their control. Otherwise, I've never really felt one way or another about a waiter, overwhelmingly they all do a satisfactory job.

That's why I reckon the purpose Yelp/TripAdvisor serve in restaurant reviews is far superior to tipping and those exist everywhere. You can be more exact, no single employee is disproportionately affected and arguably the potential for attracting other repeat customers is more beneficial than a one off tip.

Slow down with the theories that our 'advancements' will solve all problems, not create more, because all the things you listed have been fairly disastrous in the long run, many being large parts of the issue at hand, climate change, and things like putting a man on the moon or traveling the globe in hours have gone backwards, meaning it was simpler to do either 35-45 years ago than it is today (we can't get to the moon with NASA today, or get on a concord). Assuming new tech will come along and solve the problems we can't solve today is wishful thinking, assuming they'll come with no strings attached means you aren't paying attention, all new tech is a double edged sword in one way or another.
IF humans could harness their tech, capital, and energy altruistically, yes, we could solve world hunger, disease, displacement, etc. Humans have never in history done that though.
We already can't feed a large percentage of the planet. If a large percentage of farmable land is lost to sea level rise (won't take much) and also a large population displaced by the same (a HUGE percentage of people live within 10 miles of a coast or estuary), we're screwed. It will mean less food, less land to grow food, more displaced people, less fresh water, fewer fisheries, etc. We can't solve a single one of these problems today. What evidence do you have we could solve it tomorrow, when conditions will be exponentially less favorable?
For instance, something like 1/3 of the population survives on glacial water. It's disappearing faster than predicted. There's simply no technology to solve that problem, even desalination doesn't work to get water into Nepal. People seem to like water and keeping their insides moist, how would you suggest we placate them?

Because the internet (and everything else) is for porn. Sex drives most everything about the human race, one way or another.

I can't remember who said it, but I've always liked this quote:

Capitalism is a great engine for innovation, but it's a shitty way to have a just and fair society. (after googling, it seems lots of people have said something to that effect)

Capitalism is great, but it needs to be controlled.

I will disagree though. Voters have the power to make some huge changes The corporate world may have a huge influence over Gov't, but it's dependent on the populace not giving a damn and looking the other way.

There will come a point where people are pushed to a tipping point, then things will happen. Hopefully in a peaceful fashion. One way or another it will happen, because as Hedges already pointed out. Truly unrestricted capitalism will destroy itself.

The oligarchy is trying to create a modernized system of serfdom and perpetual debt. Give people the illusion of freedom, but they're really not. Every major life decision in the modern world usually involves going into significant debt and spending decades digging yourself out.

Want a good education? Gonna have to go into massive debt. Even if you're successful, it will take a long time to get out.

Want to get married? society says you have to have an expensive ring and go into debt for probably 30 years to get a house for your family. And you wonder why more and more people are flipping the bird to the "traditional family unit"

Want a decent car just so you can get around? Even more debt

Hope you never get divorced, because that's still more debt.

Hope you're lucky enough to not have a major accident or illness either. Yep, more debt.

I know a lot of people are able to successfully navigate these things and still come out ahead, but they're quickly becoming the exception, and not the rule. And it's often a question of luck, not of skill or smarts or being chosen of your preferred deity. blind stupid luck. So those that make it have no cause to look down their nose at those who didn't make it.

There is a reason feudalism system got thrown out. It's just been repackaged to fool people. When enough people realize it, it will be thrown off again.

Every day there's another example of Israel bullying others in one way or another, unashamedly. I feel like it's time to shame them instead of back them.