donall

What I meant to convey was that I don't believe there is a credible risk of many 10 year olds abusing drugs. And if any of them do it, I think the main problem in their life is not the availability of the drugs.

As for drinking in bars, when I say "too drunk" I mean dangerously drunk, not just making a fool of yourself and being rude to the staff. The point is that most bars won't let you die on their premises, or even come close to it. In most cultures, recreational alcohol consumption has a social aspect and this is desirable. Drinking in a field in secret in the dark means that if somebody does get into trouble, it's less likely to be noticed before it's too late.

As for people being kicked out of a bar for being too drunk, I think most people would just go home and sleep it off. The sort of person who will go to the effort of acquiring more alcohol and heading off alone to drink in secret probably has other problems.

Again, I'm struggling to say this concisely, so I think the important point is that limiting access to alcohol/other drugs merely attempts to relieve one of the symptoms of a larger problem. It's like trying to cure lung cancer with cough medicine.

When I was 10, I regularly bought beer and cigarettes in the shop near our house. I also bought bread, eggs, milk, etc. I was buying these things for my parents. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, except for the fact that I occasionally bought sweets for myself with the change. Unsurprisingly, as a 10 year old, I was more interested in strawberry chewing gum and red licorice than beer and cigarettes (which I had tried and found to be revolting).

When I was 10, my older brother turned 16. My father started including him when he ordered wine with dinner and he had the occasional beer with his friends. I have never seen any evidence of my brother abusing alcohol.

On the other hand, I saw plenty of alcohol abuse when we moved to Ireland. The strictness of the law here leads to the same problems associated with any other illegal drug abuse. Users (in this case, minors) consume it in secret and often in uncontrolled and dangerous ways. I'd much prefer to have a 16 year old kid being kicked out of a bar for being too drunk than drinking a litre of whiskey in a field, passing out and dying of exposure.

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According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

I know this is veering off-topic, but I think it's worth pointing out that not every instance of the word "fascist" is disrespectful and to deny people the right to use it is just as destructive as when it is misused by people who don't properly understand what it means.

In many cases it is still appropriate and it should be used to call a spade a spade. For example, many European countries have political parties that are directly descended from the fascist political parties of the 20th century (e.g. [1]). They retain their objetives, ideals and often even their signature salute. There are several politicians in government right now that I personally dislike and that I describe as fascist because that's exactly what they are. Fascist politics existed for decades before WWII and they continue to exist decades after.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_%28Spain%29

But your assertion that "they are recorded as suicides and the doctor and coroner are police appointed ones" suggests that there is a significant cover-up operation and that it heavily involves the Freemasons. I wasn't aware of the number of police who are masons (the article you linked to was interesting) but I don't see a verifiable connection between that and any alleged cover-ups.

I'm not saying that there definitely aren't a significant number of cover-ups involving masons, just that I'm not aware of any credible evidence that suggests that it is the case. If you have some, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Giving the government power to double their capacity to overreact because of future failures to understand technology just seems like a Bad Idea.

I often use enormously unsecure passwords when "signing up" for sites that require registration to continue. I've probably created dozens of accounts around the web with logins like 'qwerty:qwerty' or 'qwer4321:qwerfdsa'. This isn't because I'm a moron, it's because I will never need to access the account again and I therefore don't care about security. "qwerty" is easier to type into a password field twice (for confirmation) than "glxCdsXX3_2".

I would be interested in seeing an analysis of the actual usage of accounts with the most common passwords. It would be interesting to have a bot log into a large amount of cracked accounts and download any usage history or generated data that would indicate how often the account has been used. My guess is that a significant number of the common-password accounts would have the same date for "first created" and "last login". That data could be used to weight the frequencies of the common passwords and paint a much more interesting picture.

I think it's very easy to mistake "informative" for pedantic. In this case, the OP made it clear that he was unsure whether the word was correct and a3camero offered not just a correction, but a succinct explanation. I wish people would correct my grammar like that more often.

Now, Krystle and Dicey's are, afaik, both owned by the same hotel and they are officially classed as nightclubs. However, most of their clientele are not hotel guests and it's a very popular spot for after-work beers (particularly in the beer garden during the summer). I think, were Joyce around today, he would class it as a pub for the purposes of this experiment.

I think trying to go down Harcourt St. is a mistake as it's a well-known night spot.

For a more in-depth, yet very accessible discussion, I would recommend "Speech and Language Processing" by Jurafsky & Martin (http://books.google.com/books/about/SPEECH_AND_LANGUAGE_PROC...). It's considered by many to be the Bible of NLP.

In my university, the big software houses all do serious recruiting on campus. The cream of the crop are generally offered jobs before they graduate (some are also hand picked by the faculty for postgraduate research). The careers office goes out of its way to try and ensure a seamless transition between school and work. In that sort of environment, somebody wishing to work for a startup would have to consciously reject the idea of working for Google/microsoft/IBM/whatever and actively seek something else (and you won't come across most startup jobs on Monster).

I think it boils down to the job offerings being good enough. Microsoft, for example, offer a fancy graduate program with a lot of travelling to interesting places where they certify you in all their main technologies. That training is supposed to seem like an extension of the college life, except it pays well. And its being offered to you before you sit your finals. Just about everybody you know thinks it's a great opportunity. Why go digging for hard to find jobs in companies that might not even exist tomorrow? (Rhetorical!)

Then again, my university is in Dublin, where we have a real shortage of programming talent, a few big name computing companies and almost no startup culture whatsoever. YMMV.

I spent a year neglecting my PhD and churning out code for this "startup" while the founders moved gradually further away from the idea of a social network and towards something akin to the million dollar home page. When I eventually quit, they couldn't find anybody naive enough to replace me and none of the other three guys (2 marketing, 1 graphic design) knew the first thing about programming, so the whole thing imploded.

I learned some good lessons from the experience, though.

If you sell only two products - sunscreen and gum - at a fixed price and most people are unlikely to buy more than a couple of each, you can draw up an easily memorisable table of all likely total costs. Assuming a finite number of notes in "normal" denominations (i.e. not a 8063 cruzeiro note) then it is probably also relatively straightforward to memorise all possible combinations of products and proffered notes. This memorisation might not happen consciously, but through endless repetition.

So if you buy a pack of gum for 300 cruzeiros and pay with a 1000 cruzeiro note, just like everybody else did that day, the kid will know that it's 700 in change from memory. Bring that same kid into a classroom, introduce a suite of new products at different prices and ask him/her to perform the same computations and it is quite understandable that he/she will not perform as well.

Now I'm not saying the classroom setting doesn't have an effect such as making the kids nervous, just that it would be important to control for this kind of memorisation. I couldn't access a full copy of the paper cited, so I don't know if it was taken into account...

I remember speaking to a friend of mine when Google released Wave. He said Wave was the first real home-grown "product" since GMail and it was his opinion that it was developed in Australia because the office there was a kind of skunkworks plant with little bureaucratic oversight compared to the other Google offices around the world (whether this is true, I don't know). He said Google were at the stage where they are big enough for middle management to stifle real innovation because the individual managers don't need to take the kind of risk required with greenlighting a project like Wave (and look how that turned out!).

To Google, buying an early-stage startup is a cost-effective way of outsourcing the risk-taking and that kind of acquisition is the closest they can now get to serious innovation and staying competitive.

Many of us in acadaemia are aware of a perceived phenomenon whereby "fashionable" (for want of a better word) topics get published and/or attract research. From a cynical (yet often accurate) perspective, researchers have become adept at framing their research proposals in the context of the topic du jour. I'm not saying the research is bad, just that funding is easier if you mention buzzwords.

My point is that acadaemia goes through cycles of particular interest in certain topics. The funding gets allocated to it and the journals are more likely to publish research relevant to the "fashionable" topic than other research. Now, I'm not saying the research is flawed; just that if you fund research into environmental change, you're probably going to find a lot of environmental change. If tomorrow you decide to massively fund research into extraterrestrial life, you will see a surge of papers in high-impact journals about that very subject. The environmental change hasn't gone away, it's just that fewer people are trying to publish data about it.

Perhaps for that reason we shouldn't be impressed by the sheer volume of research or the perceived quality of the publishing journals. We shouldn't panic because the number of papers on the subject has increased by several orders of magnitude in recent years. We should get a clear picture of what is going on, ignoring the funding bias, and once we have analysed the data from a balanced perspective and we see that it spells certain doom for all of us, then we can panic. ;)

An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day.

In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.