rafcavallaro

No, what the NSA is doing is illegal and unconstitutional: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.h...

That's why they keep their tortured legal pseudo-justification secret, because if it ever came to a public court, Federal judges would stop them collecting call records on millions of Americans for long periods of time. Read the link and discover why SCOTUS has said that long term surveillance violates the 4th Ammendment.

I've heard that the offer has been made, but there's no record of the transaction ever having been completed.

As someone who remembers just how dreadful search results were before google, I concur wholeheartedly. All the brilliant execution in the universe won't do you any good at all if no one wants to visit your site because your search results suck. Google was able to dominate because their far superior search results gave them lots of users to sell to advertisers.

In fairness, only if we, the people, allow our government to conduct surveillance on us, the citizens. We need to roll back the provisions of the patriot act and FISA that are currently being interpreted to allow the collection of data on citizens who are not suspected of any crime and without any warrants. Then advances in surveillance technology will not necessarily lead to more invasive surveillance of citizens.

How misleading of you! Why quote the DOJ's obviously biased opinion? Better to quote the simple fact pointed out on that very same groklaw page that the secret court did in fact make a ruling that some surveillance was a violation of the Fourth Ammendment and/or violated the spirit of the law:

"EFF asked the government for a copy of "any written opinion or order" of the FISA court in which the court held that the surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act (2008 version) "was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment" or had "circumvented the spirit of the law." After some of the usual back and forth in discovery, the government revealed that it had found one such [!], but it refused to provide it on the grounds that it had no authority under FISC rules "to release FISC opinions to a FOIA requester or any other member of the public without a FISC order." So that's why EFF is now approaching the court itself, asking for a ruling that the government is allowed to provide it. The ACLU asked, and was denied, once before for the same relief it now is asking for, but now, after the latest events and the President's encouragement of public debate saying it's healthy for a democracy, it is renewing its request."

Which means that exams need to be much more difficult. When I was a grad student Teaching Assistant at Harvard we had a newly hired professor who'd spent the last decade at Cal Berkley. He decided to give the same midterm exam he'd given many times before at Berkeley. When we TA's saw the exam we politely told him he needed to change it or the whole class would ace it. "Nonsense!" he said, "Harvard students aren't that much smarter than Berkeley students." We had to write and administer a second midterm because everyone scored 98, 99, or 100 on his Berkeley test.

Allende was unacceptable to the US before he even became president, so the claim that he was deposed due to your so called "abuses of power" is absurd on its face - he can't possibly have a abused power before taking power. Declassified documents prove indisputably that the US plotted his removal before he even took office: "Recent documents declassified under the Clinton administration's Chile Declassification Project show that the United States government and the CIA sought the overthrow of Allende in 1970 immediately before he took office ("Project FUBELT"). Many documents regarding the U.S. intervention in Chile remain classified." from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

Your parent meant "disirregardless" of couse :)

Snake Plisken? I thought you were dead!

Seriously, in English "green great dragon" is simply wrong - there's no semantic distinction here. Size before color, so it's "great green dragon." Just in case anyone is wondering "great" has the literal (non metaphorical) meaning "large in size."

The "stitch together the curriculum when needed" argument ignores the possibility that there is significant value to learning an interrelated body of knowledge, even several such interrelated bodies of knowledge, including their relationships to each other, at the same time. Education does not merely consist of acquiring a disarticulated set of independent factoids.

As someone who grew up in NYC I don't think many respondents here understand how depressing and lightless it is to live in an urban environment of 30 story buildings where you almost never see the sun. That which has drawn many people to San Francisco would be nearly completely destroyed if it were developed the way midtown manhattan is.

Bees are fed High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid pesticides and that low exposure, over time is killing hives: http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf

Just picking another, the researchers did in situ replication of pesticide doses known to be prevalent in working hives, along with control colonies that were untreated. Whats happening is that in the last decade beekeepers largely switched to feeding their colonies High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid pesticides. Their results:

"15 of 16 imidacloprid- treated hives (94%) were dead across 4 apiaries 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. Dead hives were remarkably empty except for stores of food and some pollen left, a resemblance of CCD."

While none of the control hives died.

Their conclusion:

"Data from this in situ study provide convincing evidence that exposure to sub-lethal levels of imidacloprid in HFCS causes honey bees to exhibit symptoms consistent to CCD 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. The survival of the control hives managed alongside with the pesticide-treated hives unequivocally augments this conclusion. The observed delayed mortality in honey bees caused by imidacloprid in HFCS is a novel and plausible mechanism for CCD, and should be validated in future studies."

I think your objection misses the fundamental point of the paper which is that blindly applying formulae (in this case Bayesian ones) without considering the part these computations play in the whole scientific process leads to bad science. Specifically, it leads to assuming that the correct model is already among those being considered. The authors say this is often not the case and assuming so often leads to stagnation in the relevant discipline.

This isn't an article that hands the readers a set of rote instructions, it's a warning that rote application is bad science because good science doesn't merely compare existing models with the data, good science proposes new and better models. This is fundamentally an article on the philosophy of science so leaving out the philosophy would make the article pointless.

In general, people who are good at symbolic manipulation are often in search of a methodology that allows them to only do symbolic manipulation and relieves them of the difficult task of doing semantics as well. The article is saying that there's no free lunch here - we have to do the semantics as well, we have to understand why models don't perform well and come up with the creative insights necessary to replace them with new ones.

I think we already have a good idea why humor is funny. In our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, who also laugh (i.e., the chimp equivalent of laughter) when tickled, laughter is essentially a call meaning "non threat."

Jokes are funny because they relate a story of the transition of the object of laughter from potential threat, to non-threat. For example, a high status individual is a potential economic and social adversary and therefore a potential threat.

Consider: If someone slips on a banana peel it is only funny if it is a high status or would-be high status individual. If a handicapped child slipped on a banana peel it would only engender sympathy, not laughter. If a pompous or powerful and aggressive person slips on a banana peel it is funny because that person has instantly gone from the status of potential threat - someone to be reckoned with - to the status of non-threat.

Jokes, especially those with punch lines, follow a narrative thread where some person or persons make a sudden transition from high to low status, from threat to non-threat.

Substitute "treat like a pariah" for "eliminate" and you're good to go!

The tiobe index has lisp in the top 20 (at 13th) while Haskell is at 33rd, so lisp is more popular than Haskell even though lisp is over a half century old. Being in the top twenty after 50 years looks like the very definition of "survivor" to me.

The fact that someone has a web page devoted to this particular eggcorn doesn't change the fact that it is an eggcorn: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4566

That presumption, that strong AI is inevitable, is precisely the point in contention. The fact that it has been a decade away for nearly a half century argues against its inevitability, not for it.

It doesn't apply to any diet. For example, a simple caloric restriction diet might simply require that you leave half of everything you're served on your plate and never have seconds. This would allow you to eat anything in any social context, just not as much. A low carb diet would require you to forego the cake and ice cream entirely at your own child's birthday, etc.

lisp is much more regular in syntax than most popular languages, and Xah's page that you point to amounts to little more than saying "I don't know lisp well, so I find various aspects of the language - backquote, quote, unquote-splicing, etc. - confusing."

Your parent implies that not getting functional programming concepts makes one a "blue collar" (i.e., less sophisticated, more commodity) programmer. Presumably, understanding functional programming is one necessary requirement of upgrading to "white collar" (i.e., more sophisticated, less replaceable) programmer.

They spoke French, having adopted it after their conquest of, and settlement in Normandy. French, not Norse, was their court language both in Normandy, and later, after the 1066 conquest, in England.

I know this was tongue in cheek, but:

insulin insensitivity = adult onset diabetes

so be prepared to have some toes or feet amputated (or to maybe just go blind) if you stay up with those donuts.

And not just "some" but a proportion of profitable traders greater than what we would expect due to chance - i.e. the existence of some lottery winners does not prove that playing the lottery is in general profitable.

Add to this the fact that it is very much in the interest of one of the larger mobile players, Apple, to keep the native experience superior to the html5 mobile browser experience in order to differentiate their iOS offering from a generic "mobile web browser." For example, WebGL is only available for iAds, not for mobile Safari web apps, while openGL is of course available to native iOS apps.

He said "term limits" not "remove all power from elected officials." We already have what you call a "permanent bureaucracy" - it's called the civil service. It executes orders from elected officials - the President, cabinet officers, and every civil servant's paycheck is dependent on the good will of Congress.

Limiting the influence of lobbyist's campaign contributions will empower ordinary citizens since elected officials will be more dependent on pleasing us to get elected rather than pleasing large donors so they can use large donor money to run media campaigns to get elected. Reducing the influence of large campaign donors will not give the civil service any more power than it has now.

Because human drivers have the ability to exit the vehicle and "dissuade" the obstructionist child. In fact, the mere threat of exiting the vehicle has been known to send children running.