Trump's attorney Alina Habba contended that Carroll “had failed to show she is entitled to any damages at all” because she "actively sought the comments and the attention" she received.

Wow. They actually used the “she was asking for it” argument against a victim of sexual assault.

Also, he’s still not going to shut up about it and will land back in court under additional defamation charges.

No.

GOTO Hell is BASIC.

Evolutionary biologist here.

I know this is a recurring meme, and it does have a basis in truth. However, in my opinion, it vastly overemphasizes a single aspect of early humans at the expense of other and more important distinct human qualities (and I’m using this term to also refer to our closely related species and ancestors).

First, the real distinction is sociality. Humans are the most cooperative species of hominid. As someone once said, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. This translates into being able to coordinate efficient hunting practices in a variety of ecosystems.

Second, and very related, is social learning. Other species can also exhibit social learning, but never to the degree humans do. Most species figure out things in evolutionary time - what counts as food, what counts as danger, the best way to do X, etc. Humans do it daily and pass it on to each other. We learn to kill prey by setting fires in grasslands. We develop tools and teach each other how to make and use them. These are all interlocking effects. The bigger our brains get, the more helpless our babies are, so the more we need societies, which creates increasingly complex social dynamics, which rewards more complex brains, and so on.

In short, it’s intelligence and social learning replacing learning in evolutionary time that made humans successful, possibly to the point of self destruction.

Next, he’s going to say that he did repeat the oath, but he had his fingers crossed so it doesn’t count.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

Biden could order the military to kill all Republican members of Congress as well as any democrats who would support his impeachment for doing so. He could order the execution of all of their replacements as well. He could even order the execution of governors who appoint congresspeople who don’t support his agenda, and the voters who voted for them.

I’m sure this is exactly what the authors of the constitution intended.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?

Iran does not pose a credible military threat to Israel. They only have a couple of options - terrorist attacks from their proxies, maybe a cross-border incursion from Lebanon that would be a slaughter and change the balance of power there, or an air strike. Israel is so amped up right now that they’d respond with airstrikes inside Iran, and US carrier groups are in the area with no misunderstanding as to what they signify.

This is saber-rattling for theatrics.

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

Most of the people I know who are looking to move back to the Bay Area or Portland/Seattle are doing to because of the political climate, not the weather. A lot of people were pushed to move by their jobs, or elected to move because they saw a cost of living benefit. They figured they could do the blue city in a red state thing. With people like Abbott in charge, that’s no longer going to be a viable option.

We need legislation put in place that prevents companies from arbitrarily changing EULAs.

Changing a EULA should require the company to refund the price of the product (to be returned at the company’s expense), in addition to refunding customer purchases associated with the services associated with the product.

They need to be investigated as a criminal organization.

I think that it’s very patriotic of Trump to set piles of money on fire that could otherwise be used to elect republicans to Congress or the senate.

I think I remember reading he was basically released awaiting trial. I had honestly given up on seeing any justice in this case, so this is a positive development.

In our view, Hungary fulfills all the qualities of the rule of law

We self-certify our compliance and reject any review. Just give us money please.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

This is the car that a sixth grader draws in his notebook between a Cool S and a barbarian sword.

Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.