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It wouldn't even need to be a 6 month period. If everybody was forced to hold shares for a single day, that would outright kill High-Frequency and Algo-based Trading. Hell, a mandatory holding period of 1 hour would probably do that.

It certainly would do what you claim, but you havent justified why you would want to kill algorithmic trading.

The effects of algorithmic trading have been studied, and its shown that the practice reduces the spreads between bids and asks, which translated directly into you getting better prices both when buying and selling than you would have gotten otherwise.

Please explain why you want to pay higher prices when buying and get less money when selling.

I realize that you probably didnt know that this was true, and if thats the case then you should step back and have a real long think about why you developed the opinion that you have and what you can do in the future to prevent mob irrationality from dominating your beliefs.

However, to use that to then say signed certs are completely useless is not just an exaggeration, it is completely wrong and inaccurate. You sir, are an alarmist

"completely useless" and "completely wrong" require context to be properly evaluated. Some people look at this http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/trust-tree/ and say no way in hades can I depend on every single one of these actors behaving properly to ensure the security of MY system.

The incidents you describe did not compromise the vast majority of SSL connections.

If one (intermediate) CA is compromised it becomes possible for holders to perform undetected MITM against *ALL* sites globally. Every site on the network has its effective security reduced to an untrusted certificate.

To say only a small number of them would actually be compromised by compromised key holder(s) is an unknowable assumption. It does not change the severity of a single compromise of any root or intermediate.

Only a tiny fraction, and only for a limited time span, since the beauty of the CA system is they are able to revoke cert's once discovered to be invalid.

This requires a compromise to be detected and reported.

At least with CA certs you have a 99.9%+ chance of having a secure connection.

I am not impressed by numbers pulled out of thin air but lets use this and assume 99.9% is correct. This means 1 out of a 1000 connections are insecure. Not something I would find acceptable as either an operator or end-user.

It wouldn't be that hard to write a script that would randomly swap your words with ones from a thesaurus run through Berkeley's FrameNet.

nevertheless conjecture it prevail comprehensible?
(but would it be understandable?)

It wouldn't be that hard to write a script that would randomly swap your words with ones from a thesaurus run through Berkeley's FrameNet so it makes sense. Boom, statistically impossible to detect the same author.

Additionally, with a little more effort you could alter your sentence length and swap prepositional phrases around with some pattern-matching algorithms.

So this graph is publish by the ICSI. They're getting into the "notary" game: http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/

They reference Perspectives as the pioneer of this scheme and also mention Convergence.

ICSI's Certificate Notary offers itself as different: "our notary collects certificates passively from live upstream traffic at multiple independent Internet sites, aggregating them into a central database in near-realtime." I'm not sure this is an improvement.

The article makes the astounding claim that this animal "hasn't evolved for 300 million years". Sounds like hogwash to me, but is there any indication that this is true?

Sure, fossil records. Let's go with NOAA since they're fairly well respected:

Hagfish is considered to be the most primitive vertebrate species either living or extinct (Collette and Klein-MacPhee 2002, Powell et al 2005). Hagfish evolved over at least 300 million years and have the same basic morphological traits of fossilized specimens (Bardack 1991).

And, then there's Berkeley:

The only fossil hagfish is Myxinikela siroka, a Pennsylvanian find from the Francis Creek Shale of northeastern Illinois (Bardack, 1991). The fossil was found within a siderite (iron carbonate) concretion, and preserves the paired tentacles, internal organs, and detail of the head and jaws. The similarity to modern hagfishes is striking, and suggests that there has been little evolutionary change in this group over the last 300 million years.

So, yes, is there is strong evidence that the morphology of hagfish hasn't changed in 300 million years. That's not to say there has been zero changes to it, but nothing radical.

If you can compare a modern specimen to a 300 million year old fossil and fine no differences, you pretty much conclude that it hasn't significantly evolved. Think coelacanth. Think crocodilians. Think MPAA. ;-)

Firstly the Nasa mistake was actually caused by Lockheed Martin. Lockheed's Deepwater fiasco cost an atrocious amount of money (Billions), and turned the Coast Guard's old (but still usable) cutters into scrap. According to congressional testimony these 8 cutters were unfit to gift to Panama to use in river patrol suffering from 'prematurely' cracked hulls. They would make those mistakes anyway, being (imho) the Microsoft of the Aerospace world.

As for the Tokyo incident, how do you not notice that an axle doesn't fit? If there is slop in it, it's pretty easy to tell there is a problem. The individuals responsible would find ways to make other costly mistakes. Besides these were ASIANS, come on man, if they can't do it, there is no hope for the rest of us. Unless Russians are better at math than Asians? Since we're all being so racist anyway...

I really dislike the idea of America having such racist standards, and it isn't that I am one of those double think monkeys, that loves the idea of celebrating our diversity through being 'Politically Correct', as celebrating diversity by removing it is impressively thoughtless.

Costly mistakes happen regardless (page iv)

I do agree that the metric system is a better system to use as it's flexibility, range, and ease of precisional use keep things more straight forward. I use it myself whenever I am calculating something that matters. I however recognize that it is a person's free choice to use whatever system they prefer. I don't believe in government mandates, I would rather have inefficiency with my freedom, so I won't gripe about it, and overall? It isn't that big of a deal. Converting from one system to another is just one small hassle of an engineering challenge, and life is not ideal. Think of the many many times that people throughout the world convert from one system of calculation, or measurement to another without error.

The biggest problem with our educational system is the way that we are taught. We should be presented with concepts, and have a very firm grasp of them BEFORE vocabulary is introduced. This gives the human mind (at least mine) a firm handle to actually conceptualize, and retain the area being studied. It is a lot like learning hands on for it's effectiveness. It needs to be known that understanding the concept is 90% of education. The vocabulary is necessary, but without a firm grasp on the concept, there is no foundation, and the inextricably linked series of memories that we like to call 'education' will be washed away, never to return. In our current state we would be far better of by polling people who have exited K-12 schools 5 years down the road, and only teaching the things that those people remembered...

Something like this, I reckon...

Fandroid [popsci.com] throwing stones in a glass house?

The parent's claim that Microsoft is strong arming people into a Walled Garden, and my post pointing out that Apple does the same thing, is something about Android? Thanks for keeping it relevant.

Cute, comparing Microsoft's desktop support to Apple's mobile support.

Oh, in that case lets break it down further. How's WinPhone 7 working out for the developers? Microsoft's Mobile support is even shorter and more fragmented than Apples, thanks for bringing that up.

They're still releasing security updates for Leopard, a six year old operating system.

You're honestly bringing up something which hasn't had an update in over a year? And comparing to a system which has been out for double that, and systems which receive regular updates? Why would Berkley have an article about end of support migrating off of it? Not to mention the successor (Snow Leopard) getting this nice article.

I believe I've found the paper. I think the relevant sentence is "In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available." (Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns)

. . . which is why I feel like you'd get a lot out of a good University Computer Science program. It seems like the technical school you are attending right now is just teaching you a single language, while a Computer Science degree will actually teach you how to program and think in a must more comprehensive way. With how far you were able to go teaching yourself, you could gain a lot.

Are you living in a place like California? If you can make it to a good program, like Berkeley, through community college or something like that, you really should go for it. If in doubt though, watch a webcast or two of their classes:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,87898FD0A141069E
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,1A2EBAC4283FE3EA

I never regretted going there, and they way they taught me to program was so much more advanced than anything I had been teaching myself at that point; it was really eye-opening. A lot of other schools with big undergraduate computer science programs (MIT and Stanford) have similar material available for free online, and it's all worth checking out.

I really hope I've convinced you that a degree in a good program is still worth quite a lot. It's also definitely helped me land a job much more easily.

. . . which is why I feel like you'd get a lot out of a good University Computer Science program. It seems like the technical school you are attending right now is just teaching you a single language, while a Computer Science degree will actually teach you how to program and think in a must more comprehensive way. With how far you were able to go teaching yourself, you could gain a lot.

Are you living in a place like California? If you can make it to a good program, like Berkeley, through community college or something like that, you really should go for it. If in doubt though, watch a webcast or two of their classes:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,87898FD0A141069E
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,1A2EBAC4283FE3EA

I never regretted going there, and they way they taught me to program was so much more advanced than anything I had been teaching myself at that point; it was really eye-opening. A lot of other schools with big undergraduate computer science programs (MIT and Stanford) have similar material available for free online, and it's all worth checking out.

I really hope I've convinced you that a degree in a good program is still worth quite a lot. It's also definitely helped me land a job much more easily.

Donate some CPU cycles to the cause:

There are World Community Grid projects for Clean Sustainable Water, Energy, and fighting lots of diseases. They previously had projects looking into improving the nutritious content in rice. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

It's powered by BOINC. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ which also let's you donate to so many other worthy projects. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

Donate some CPU cycles to the cause:

There are World Community Grid projects for Clean Sustainable Water, Energy, and fighting lots of diseases. They previously had projects looking into improving the nutritious content in rice. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

It's powered by BOINC. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ which also let's you donate to so many other worthy projects. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

Well, teaching an actual alien would involve a few more steps, such as
1. Locate an alien
2. Avoid being dissected and preserved in a methanol solution
3 = 2 x 1
4 = 2 x 2
etc....

You don't need a course to be a "MOOC". In America many Universities offer videos of their lectures and some offer notes and exercises too. Buy the textbook - secondhand, show some gritm put aside the time and you can learn anything. If you get stuck there are forums like 'mad scientists' where people will help you. Connect with others interested in learning the same thing. If you get stuck on a particular concept, check another textbook for an alternate explanation or check out Kahn Academy. Many tutors post short clips explaining concepts on Youtube too.

Some people ask if you get credit for these. Of course you don't, and I question the motives of those people: If you're more interested in buying a piece of paper, then buy the piece of paper. But if you want to learn, yes, it can be done.

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
http://ocw.uci.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/education?category=University
Some universities only make the podcasts available only on ITunes, but there are alternatives to Apple's walled garden: http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php


Can I add: A Pox on Australian degree factories (also known as 'Universities') who won't make their content available online because they are more interested in squeezing every last cent out of their students. The idea of accidentally helping someone terrifies them.

It was only after the shutdown that Clinton gave in on some of the measures he had opposed and had vetoed, and Republicans gave on some of their budget demands. I don't know enough details to say for certain, but it's at least arguable that Clinton moved center afterwards. I would contend that it was nice to have a congress with big enough balls willing to face down a Democratic President who vetoed their bills.

Really? the only balanced budget in recent history happened with a republican congress.

That may be technically true, but in fact the balanced budget came from the Clinton "Deficit Reduction Act of 1993," which was passed with no Republican votes whatsoever (aka "1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act"). The deficit reduction in the following years came directly from the policies enacted in that.

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/debt/1993reconciliationact.html
http://politicianscandal.com/316/what-is-the-deficit-reduction-act-of-1993

If you look at the graph of the US deficit, this act marks the sharp change from rising to falling slope.

The action of the Republican congress was that, after Gingrich took over, they abruptly changed their strategy from opposing the deficit reduction to going along with it. Nice going, they saw that it was actually working, and stopped opposing it. I do like that way of doing politics, but they are claiming credit for what they went along with, not what they started.

Check out this guy, who turned up a few year ago in San Jose, about an hour's drive south of SF.

Yes, many problems can be expressed as dense linear algebra, and so measuring and comparing LINPACK perf for these makes sense for those problems. However, many problems don't map well to dense linear algebra. The Berkeley "parallel dwarfs" paper expresses this idea better than I ever could: http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Dwarfs

Organic food has plenty of pesticides too. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.

So far, you have a good point...

Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects.

Yes, this also has been well-studied and documented.

These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic.

Holy {citation needed}, batman! There's nothing indicating that the natural pesticides (lectins etc) in commonly eaten fruits exhibit significant oral toxicity to humans in the concentrations encountered in these fruits. It would be unlikely too, given that we evolved for millions of years to effectively deal with these compounds.

From here:

However, researchers point out that the technology is decades from allowing users to read others’ thoughts and intentions, as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as “Brainstorm,” in which scientists recorded a person’s sensations so that others could experience them.

From what I'm seeing, there is no technology that can do what you said it can do in your original post.

It is total nonsense that most organic food doesn't contain pesticides (read http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html). They are simply necessary to maintain a large crop field. In fact, the chemicals they use have an increased risk to be harmful for YOU because they are not modified by humans. Our modications have made pestidices more specific to certain organisms, which means they impose less of a risk to other organisms. See this excellent Penn and Teller's Bullshit episode about organic food: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jq4DGEn9Is

Organic food has plenty of pesticides too. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.

Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects. These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic. You can prevent their formation (ie. make the fruit less toxic) by applying artificial pesticides when the insects appear.

How so? The age of the universe was 13.7 billion years in 2006, now its 14.6 billion years old. According to science, the universe has aged 900 million years in just six years.

Details of your statement aside, you have inadvertently alighted on the fundamental difference between science and religion: when new evidence comes in, science is obligated to change their theories to account for it, whereas religion is obligated to deny the evidence in order to preserve their beliefs.

Even more to the point, there are multiple methods of measuring the age of the universe. Some more precise than other; Some more accurate than other. They are not in huge contradiction with each other, certainly no where near the ridiculus claims religion is making. http://astro.berkeley.edu/~dperley/univage/univage.html

People really needs to learn statistic and in addition to findings, reporter really need be able to report on the uncertainty of the findings.

Was making the exact same post as parent. Many people are thinking about privacy in vehicular networks. For example, most systems for aggregating data from cars for showing traffic speed anonymize the data in various ways to try to protect privacy. Here are some details:

A project at the University of Illinois preserves privacy when reconstructing global maps based on data collected from cars: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h545111k4g217374/

Abstract: "The proliferation of sensors in devices of frequent use, such as mobile phones, offers unprecedented opportunities for forming self-selected communities around shared sensory data pools that enable community specific applications of mutual interest. Such applications have recently been termed participatory sensing. An important category of participatory sensing applications is one that construct maps of different phenomena (e.g., traffic speed, pollution) using vehicular participatory sensing. An example is sharing data from GPS-enabled cell-phones to map traffic or noise patterns. Concerns with data privacy are a key impediment to the proliferation of such applications. This paper presents theoretical foundations, a system implementation, and an experimental evaluation of a perturbation-based mechanism for ensuring privacy of location-tagged participatory sensing data while allowing correct reconstruction of community statistics of interest (computed from shared perturbed data). The system is applied to construct accurate traffic speed maps in a small campus town from shared GPS data of participating vehicles, where the individual vehicles are allowed to “lie” about their actual location and speed at all times. An extensive evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of the approach in concealing multi-dimensional, correlated, time-series data while allowing for accurate reconstruction of spatial statistics."

The Mobile Millennium project ( http://traffic.berkeley.edu/ ) from Berkeley uses "virtual trip lines": http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5871633

Abstract: "Traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with GPS receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy over dedicated infrastructure systems. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we describe a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique, followed by another system design in which we relax the privacy requirements to maximize the accuracy of real-time traffic estimation. We introduce virtual trip lines which are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide speed updates. These markers are placed to avoid specific privacy sensitive locations. They also allow aggregating and cloaking several location updates based on trip line identifiers, without knowing the actual geographic locations of these trip lines. Thus, they facilitate the design of a distributed architecture, in which no single entity has a complete knowledge of probe identities and fine-grained location information. We have implemented the system with GPS smartphone clients and conducted a controlled experiment with 100 phone-equipped drivers circling a highway segment, which was later extended into a year-long public deployment."

The Allen Commission found that the null corrector used to test the mirror had a lens installed 1.3mm out of position. Citation The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report chapter 7.

The mirror was wrong when it left the factory.

Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.

We had those top marginal tax rates in the past - remember when Kennedy cut down from th 90% marginal tax rate? Of course, back then the Federal Government was taking in about half the dollars per capita, in constant dollars - there were a LOT more exemptions. The actual effective tax rate was considerably lower (in 1955-1963, the Federal Government received roughly $3100 per US citizen in 2009 dollars, compared to the $6600 it received in 2009). Marginal tax rates were much higher, but the effective tax rate was lower because of the exemptions.

As far as the single year of 2001 - there was a little thing called 9/11, and the tail end of the dot-com bubble that caused revenues to drop considerably. Check revenues in 2002 and 2003...

But let's go back to those hey-day years of the Clinton Administration. Look at the revenues the Federal Government had in 1999 - and compare it to the revenues today. About the same. Literally, the Federal Government is making as much money today as it did back in those glory days when all the talk was about the budget surplus. The difference? Spending was VASTLY lower than it is today. The Federal Government has exploded in size in the last 12 years, way beyond inflation, population growth, or any other metric than naked desire for power and control.

You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.

Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.

The Laffer Curve argument is basically a fraud. You can make the argument that government should always have low taxes, but you can't make it on that basis and have a leg to stand on.

It's almost certain lifespans will be reduced significantly, though we won't necessarily be told how many and by how much.

When asked why these results haven't been widely reported, Calidcott noted that Japanese officials are not sharing ultrasound results with foremost experts of thyroid nodules in children and accused the media of "practicing psychic numbing," saying that she doesn't understand why media outlets are choosing to ignore the nuclear fallout.

http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-children-have-abnormal-thyroid-growths-2012-7
 

When the above four studies are tallied in one table, it becomes obvious that the result of the thyroid examinations of children in the “Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey” is astonishing. This is because one-third of the children had developed “ cysts.” A “cyst” is a fluid-filled sac. Cysts don’t mean there is an immediate chance of developing thyroid cancer. However, it is apparent that something extraordinary is happening inside the thyroid gland, such as inflammation or changes in cellular properties.

Summarizing the thyroid ultrasound examination results from Japan and overseas, prevalence of “cysts” detected in children around the age of 10 is approximately 0.5-1.0%.

The fact that 35% of Fukushima children (average age around 10) have thyroid cysts strongly suggests that these children’s thyroid glands are negatively affected by undesirable environmental factors.

http://enenews.com/head-of-internal-medicine-at-japan-hospital-astonished-by-fukushima-thyroid-exams-immediate-evacuation-is-imperative-a-violation-of-human-rights-for-those-exposed-to-radiation

In June [2012], 56 percent of Japanese fish catches tested by the Japanese government were contaminated with cesium-137 and -134. (Both are human-made radioactive isotopes—produced through nuclear fission—of the element cesium.)

And 9.3 percent of the catches exceeded Japan’s official ceiling for cesium, which is 100 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg). (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to one nuclear disintegration per second.)

The numbers show that far from dissipating with time, as government officials and scientists in Canada and elsewhere claimed they would, levels of radiation from Fukushima have stayed stubbornly high in fish. In June 2012, the average contaminated fish catch had 65 becquerels of cesium per kilo. That’s much higher than the average of five Bq/kg found in the days after the accident back in March 2011, before cesium from Fukushima had spread widely through the region’s food chain.

In some species, radiation levels are actually higher this year than last.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/are-fish-pacific-ocean-and-japanese-coastal-and-inland-waters-safe-eat-16-months-after-fuk

Sevendsen et al, from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of South Carolina, demonstrated in 2010 that children who had been living in areas heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium have decreased pulmonary function.

http://fukushimavoice-eng.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/position-statement-what-is-currently.html

In undergrad (CS) I did more math than was required, and honours math at that. When I started grad school I was introduced to a transform we were using to analyze medical images. There's an article somewhere where I'm quoted as saying that some smart grad student is going to come along some day and improve the algorithm for calculating that transform so that it's actually practical. It turns out the smart grad student didn't come along, so I had to do it. That involved a lot of calculus, both continuous and discrete. Now I mostly develop new medical image processing techniques and analyze data, which involves fairly high level statistics. Statistics is all calculus and, when you get further on, calculus and linear algebra.

You say you want to be a game programmer? Here are some of the papers from SIGGRAPH this year. Take a read through some of them. This one might be a good place to start... most of the authors are from Pixar. How much math do you see? How much math do you understand? These are the algorithms you'll be working with by the time you graduate. Note that there isn't a lot of continuous calculus in these (but a lot of discrete!). Somebody has already done much of the hard work of discretizing it for you. That's not always the case.

You can probably get away with not learning any math and being a run of the mill code monkey. If you want to be good at what you do though, learn the math.

There is some criticism in here too...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1712765
http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2011-08-16/capital-markets-cooperative-research-hft
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/hender/HFT-PD.pdf
https://www2.bc.edu/~taillard/Seminar_spring_2012_files/Hirschey.pdf

That should get you started. There are plenty of references to the literature for you to follow if you're so inclined.

Some quotes:
On net, it is probable HFTs have a positive impact on market quality. (Hirschey 2011)
The emergence of HFTs has coincided with a substantial decrease in quoted and realized spreads on exchanges (Castura, Litzenberger, Gorelick, and Dwivedi 2010).
In our interpretation, HFTs are traders that make the market extremely ecient, by incorporating information as soon as it becomes available. (Jovanovic and Menkveld 2011)

I knew you'd be back.

Ha ha. Shut up you little bitch. You're back too.

What deals? The imaginary ones you made up? I don't know of any specific deals made in the 80s by Microsoft with OEMs that explicitly locked out alternative OSes, can you cite some?

Do I look like your research department you dumb snot? Go back to fucking your sister, Cletus. When you're done you can practice your learning here.

So far, computer simulations have not helped us understand or find dark matter

Here's a map.

So what is going on? Why haven’t the computer gods delivered? This state of affairs has persisted in the face of colossal increases in available computational power.

Math is hard!

The Chinese policy is not really one to emulate. Here are some resources explaining why:

1. China’s Population Destiny: The Looming Crisis. This explains the demographic changes (way to many men due to the excessing aborting of girls), and an aging population that will likely cause much of China to become old before they become rich. If that proves to be true and Chinese economic growth stalls then the policy may even prove to be counter productive over a longer time frame since poorer people have higher birthrates.

2. Encourages Voluntary Limits, A June 1998 report from U.S. Embassy Beijing.. This explains that China's policy is not that effective as compared with voluntary efforts.

All this is well explained in the recent Ted talk by Hans Rosling: Hans Rosling: Religions and babies

Rosling's talk also makes it clear that religion has very little effect if any. The main consideration is the economic well being of the population. A prosperous people will have fewer children because they do not rely on the children for their "social security", so there is no need to have as many children as possible to ensure their own future welfare. Also, the children of economically well off people are also well cared for, and expensive, so people have fewer of them.

Of course global waning cannot be denied. A few years ago I was more open minded regarded climate skepticism, but the berkeley study(skeptical science finds evidence for global warming), plus this recent weather has removed all my doubts regarding climate change.

Rapidly declining advertising revenues continue to be the industry’s core problem. The losses in 2011 were slightly worse than those of 2010 – 7.3% compared to 6.3%. Ad revenues are now less than half what they were in 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/business/media/quarterly-profit-falls-12-2-at-times-co.html

The New York Times Company reported on Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit declined 12.2 percent as rising subscription and digital advertising revenue at its largest newspapers could not offset the continued drop-off in print advertising.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120703-702076.html

Mediaset SpA (MS.MI), Italy's largest private broadcaster, expects advertising revenue in its home market to decline in the first half of 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/08/itv-advertising-sales-drop

ITV expected to report first decline in ad revenues for 18 months

http://www.exa.com.au/articles/autumn_09/

Meanwhile, free to air broadcasters have experienced multi-million dollar dives in profits and are writing their assets down as worthless. Channel 7, 9 and 10 are crippled by debt and funding problems in the face of declining advertising revenues and changing trends. Likewise, print media is experiencing huge decreases in both readership and advertising revenue.

http://www.filmneweurope.com/news/romania/declining-ad-revenues-at-romanian-tv

The deficit of the Romanian's public TV, SRTV (www.tvr.ro), decreased by 0.71% in 2011, to €36.7 million Euro, while revenue from advertising was 7.4 million euro in 2011, down 24.06% from 2010.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-15/sbs-admits-financial-trouble/3830502

SBS battling falling ad revenue

http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/digital-transform/print-editions-decline/

A steady decline in print circulation and a precipitous drop in advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially classified advertising, have taken their toll on newspapers and newspaper chains.

Not true. All direct conversion and superheterodyne receivers contain circuitry that oscillates at the receiver's IF frequency. A very small amount of that RF leaks out and can be detected from nearby. Radar detector-detectors use this technique.

The story goes that the TV van in England uses IF detection to find TVs that are not licensed, but much doubt has been cast on this story.

No need for that. All they need to do is update the SETI@Home client (BOINC) to also mine for Bitcoins.

Where can I see the fossil of a the midway-between-dinosaur-and-bird animal?

You can probably start with Google... but if you'd like a link, here's one to a relevant wikipedia article.

If that's not birdlike enough for you, how about this one?

Just because they're more closely related to each other than they are to us doesn't mean they're equally related to us. For insatnce, imagine the three in a line on a "genetic distance" map, with humans at one end of the line, one of (chimps, bonobos) at the other end, and the other nearly in the middle between us.

Yeah, it kinda does, unless they've been around long enough to have developed different rates of genetic drift, which would be extremely unlikely in species that have diverged so recently. I'm not sure what you mean by a "genetic distance map", but a standard clade map, as shown here should make it clear why bonobos and chimps are equadistant from humans (and why humans/bonobos/chimps are almost certainly equadistant from gorillas).

A quick CTRL-F on "salary" and "money" turned up no matches at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/viz/rank.html. And just to add a bit of flamebait. I guess that's what we can expect from an institution with the political and economic philosophy of Berkeley.

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

That's not "micro-evolution", that's overeating. That has nothing to do with genetics, which is what evolution is about.

Overeating results in those with weight related health issues to die off sooner...resulting in a species that has a genetic code which is overall more "resistant" to the effects of overeating...sound familiar?

This page does a decent job of defining micro-evolution.

There is no such thing as micro-evolution. The term is only used by creationists.

Wikipedia and Berkeley University disagree with you.

Well, the last time this happend (stuxnet) it fuku'd up an unintended target.

I would argue that placing emphasis only on the Turing test itself is a distraction from the broad field of AI. For example, there is a ton of really cool work coming from various labs ( http://www.ias.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/ , http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/video_highlights.html).

There are many achievements met and progress made, e.g. Peters group's ping pong robot, just not the ones researchers promised many years ago.

"Of course, back then, you worked till the day you died, since there was no Social Security. "

In 1913, life expectancy was age 50, so that means that a person circa 1913 would have to work 15 years beyond the day they die to collect Social Security. In other words, people didn't live long enough to need social security in 1913.

Yes, there are, all to the glory of the Fuehrer and the Third Reich. Yeah, right.

Already posted this elsewhere --- Sen. Alan Cranston, on his return to the U.S. from Germany, finding an expurgated version for sale which had some Americans admiring Hitler, translated all the unpleasant parts, and published them:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Cranston/cranston-con2.html

The problem is that in the past, it was edited down by the Nazi party, so as to be unobjectionable --- arguably even admirable.

It was such a condensed version which was published in the U.S. before Word War II and which had many Americans admiring Hitler.

Sen. Alan Cranston, on his return to the U.S. from Germany, finding this version for sale, translated all the unpleasant parts, and published them:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Cranston/cranston-con2.html

There needs to be a control in place so that only the compleat text is published, preferably w/ footnotes detailing the inaccuracies and lies and putting forward the unambiguous facts.

William

when did I say any of that? We currently live in a decently educated society. So, NO... I didn't say that I don't want to live in the USA of today. And that is because more people are able to afford higher education. and NO I don't believe that high school is not enough - even private schools.
If you are looking for further examples, look to any first world nation. If you are looking for a contrast comparison, look to any third world nation. Notice any distinct patterns? Figure there may be a correlation? I know that you would love to save an extra few dollars on your taxes (and we really are talking a small amount), but the consequences are simply not worth those savings, IMHO. Lastly, if you really need a professional opinion, rather than common sense, I would direct here http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf .
I would go as far to say that the decrease in average education levels, created by increased costs in higher education from our taxes NOT going toward it, would result in crime levels that offset the savings in increased police budgets. That is, in the end you wouldn't be saving any money.