Firing Mueller would be a severe political mistake, but it would not be a violation of the separation of powers. The DoJ is within the executive branch, not the judicial branch, so Trump has the authority to fire Mueller. If Mueller were under the judicial branch, Trump wouldn't be able to touch him (e.g. Trump cannot fire judges). So, that said, I believe that the one thing Trump could do to end his presidency would be to fire Mueller. If he rides it out, he'll probably make it through letting his lackeys take the fall.

538 has given some good history and analysis of special counsels: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffivethirtyeight.com%2Ffe...

It's all about statistics--and 30 is the life expectancy (average), not the oldest they can live. For instance, a bird, the robin, can live to around 15 years old before it dies of "natural causes", but it's life expectancy is about 1 year because so many things kill it (accidents, predator, etc.). There are lots of things that kill living beings besides old age, like lab experiments. So all of these factors work together so that there's a probability distribution and expectation on a being's length of life, even if they're "immortal".

If you use the summary's numbers, a 1/10000 chance of dying on any given day, then that means you have a 9999/10000 chance of surviving any day. You can run that fraction through any number of years to see what your probability of surviving that long is. (9999/10000)^(365*19) ~ 0.5, so you have a 50% chance of making it 19 years. (9999/10000)^(365*30) ~ 0.33, so you have about a 1/3 chance of making it past 30 years old. 1/10000 is slightly too high a death rate to support a life expectancy of 30 years (you can see it's about 19 years since the rate stays the same over time). You can actually back out the exact rate of death if you want to get an expectation of 30 years and assume a uniform daily death rate: x^(365*30) = 0.5 ==> x ~ 0.00006329 (which they probably rounded to 0.0001, or 1/10000).

This is why, even for humans, immortality wouldn't mean that we avoid death. I've read previously that our life expectancy would still be in the 600s, given the current rate of death. If you truly were immortal, I'm guessing that you would take less risks and could drive that number up into the 1000s, but I doubt it would ever get to the 10,000s. The way the world currently is, something is bound to eventually take each one of us out.

As a conservative, I stand with Democrat Ron Wyden in his position. And that fact made me realize something.

To liberals who often want to ban firearms: if you support Ron Wyden's reasoning about encryption, then please realize conservatives have been making the same arguments about firearms and the second amendment since forever. (e.g. if you ban strong encryption de jure, then only criminals will have strong encryption and that will be used against the average law abiding citizen).

To conservatives to often want the state to have strong enforcement powers: don't be hypocrites. If you support the FBI/NSA/CIA desires for compromised encryption for the effectiveness of law enforcement, realize that the same logic will be used against your second amendment rights.

We the people need to work together to make sure that the state doesn't abuse it's power, and this relates to encryption and firearms. Don't let the government use partisan politics to turn us against each other so that they can do as they please.

He did himself in the quickest and most painless way possible with three gunshot wounds to the back.

I don't know what happened in real life, but these things always look suspicious.

I absolutely loved this service. I'd upload my mp3s and get to play from the same library no matter what device I happened to be using. It really simplified library management.

Is there anything else out there like it? I'm a little tempted to just go with Plex and run it myself, but I always worry that my hardware will fail or my home internet connection will go down.

Was walking home to the dorms at UIUC back around 2001 and saw some lights in the sky. It looked like planes flying in V-formation across the sky--something like the Blue Angels would do. I thought it was pretty cool and kept my eye on it while walking, though as I remember back, none of the lights were blinking, which is what I'd expect for airplanes.

Then the strangest thing happened. They started moving around, but they didn't move in a way that would be possible for airplanes. They started circling around each other (still while the whole formation was moving). They looked like they were moving around like bugs, but the light still looked like plane or starlight--very far off. Then after about 5 seconds of this bizarre movement, the lights turned off.

I literally have no idea what to think of it. It didn't have the movement pattern of planes or missiles or drones or balloons. I do not think it was alien ships or anything like that (even that wouldn't make sense...the g-force on those objects if they were distant aircraft would have been incredible). Perhaps the only phenomenon that might make sense, and I stress "might," is ball lightning.

I wish I had a smart phone to record, but I don't think it would have helped. The lights were too far off that I don't think they have shown well on a phone's large field of view. The other issue is that by the time I saw something interesting worth recording, it would have been gone by the time I got the phone out and turned on. I can't even get the cute moments I see with my kids today--there's no way I would have recorded those lights in time. But they were very memorable.

What is this, the yearbook?

Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?

They're too busy demonetizing second amendment channels to realize that their kiddie porn industry is blooming.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FH0Atpwo_AuY

That's why he's a billionaire and we're not. He's got a drive that few others have. What made him rich was literally his life's passion, and you don't stop that because you've got a lot of presidential flash cards.

In related news, the fox has made the hen house safer from outside predators. Hens everywhere are rejoicing!

This looks to me like it would be one of the coolest ways to die.

Look, I don't inherently mind that they're doing this, but there's no way in hell they'd do something like this if Hillary won. They'd mumble about privacy and rights and fight in court. This is what I hate about partisan politics. It's like partisan has come to mean hypocrite--yes, on both sides.

I was about to mod you up after reading your first sentence, but then the second came. Look, we all know of people who hop on the bandwagon of science and are as stubborn as anyone. There are also plenty of religious folk who use their brains (in the voice of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word faith. I do not think it means what you think it means").

I don't think so.

One thing I recall from Combinatorial Algorithms was that all NP-complete problems were "essentially the same". What that meant was, if you had an NP-complete problem, you could transform it into another NP-complete problem. And what we spent way too much time doing was taking problems of unknown complexity and either trying to prove they were polynomial or transforming into an known NP-complete problem to prove that it too was NP-complete.

What that means is that if you can prove that P=NP in one case, then you've proven it for all cases, and if you've proven that P!=NP in one case, then you've proven it for all cases.

Scanning the paper, it looks like they took an NP-complete problem they were familiar with (Monotone Boolean Networks) and proved that for this particular algorithm, they have deduced that it's P!=NP by using bounds analysis. That generalizes, then, to P!=NP for all problems in the space. That is "Corollary 1" on page 36 in their paper, which is Turing Award worthy if true. I can't look at their paper and say whether or not what they did was correct, unfortunately, but their final step is sound.

I agree with eBay here: we can have no tolerance for terrorist activity. The only safe answer is to completely shut down eBay and PayPal. Please, won't you think of the children!