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Agree completely.

Also with reading Dennett's paper on the Turing Test: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/p...

Computers can win at the Turing test with a little clever programming and misdirection, i.e. not answering questions that computers can't answer and instead distracting the questioner with a "satisfactory" response. The kinds of tricks that PR, marketing, and politicians are great at and are formulaic in their simplicity to achieve.

I wonder if the panel of academics ever thought of asking a few Winograd Schema questions? http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/p... Failure to answer these is failure to present basic human intelligence. The key to this approach is that it relies on pragmatic meaning, i.e. what we mean/intend to say, rather than on linguistic (lexical and semantic) interpretation, i.e. what we actually say. AFAIK, even the most advanced and powerful computers are far from achieving this and we still don't really know how we do it either.

Planet Money summed this up pretty well for me:
Announcer: "Zoe, let's say I give you two investment vehicles. One is a piece of art, with a drawing on it. The other is a Government bond. Let's say they both will appreciate at the same rate, say, 3% above inflation. Which would you prefer to have?"
Zoe: "Is the Government bond pretty? Does looking at it, feeling it, or smelling it give me any form of pleasure?"
Announcer: "No, it looks, feels, and smells like a Government bond. It has a picture of an eagle on it."
Zoe: "I'm, um, going with the art."

This is a pretty simple example of why art underperforms typical investment vehicles. All things being equal, people prefer the art to the bond. That said, it drives demand for art up, and return for art down. While art may _hold_ its value (keep pace with inflation), it will not compare in its performance with similar investment vehicles (even if kept in pristine condition).

More info here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
and here: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jm...

No. You prove your extractor function is strong. If you don't do that you have nothing.

Dodis et al. proved that CBC-MAC is a strong extractor and that is what we use in our products as a result.

LCGs are not shown to be strong extractors to my knowledge. I can see how LCGs might fail completely if the input data isn't IID. Yuval Peres whiteners are in a similar state. There are proofs of its extraction properties, but only for IID data and you cannot get IID data out of the real world.

The problem is, comply with WHAT? Have you ever read the various "standard compliance requirements"?

Yes I have. I've read the entire HIPAA and HITECH acts, including the data transfer standards. It takes weeks just to get through the non-standards documents. Luckily I'm paid to do it.

They're usually worded in a way that leaves holes big enough to move planets through. You'll find a lot of talk about "reasonable" and "adequate" security without any kind of definition whatsoever what these words would mean.

That's not entirely false. There are many references to clarifications that will be provided by the Secretary of HHS (who tends to pass the buck to NIST these days) and also implicit references to industry best practices and explicitly to the "reasonable man" legal standard (which seems to be what you're referring to).

You will NEVER EVER find something that they could be pinned with, like "leave no default passwords" or "no guest accounts" or even "stateful firewall with [[list of features]]". Never. No chance.

Wrong. The only people who can't be "pinned" are the government regulators themselves - the compliance standards, as officially and legally clarified by the Secretary, explicitly reference things like FIPS 140-2 which have exact requirements. Failure to comply with those is punishable. The weasel-wording you've pointed out serves to protect and empower the regulators who are outside of the congressional legislative process, it does nothing to protect non-compliant hospitals, for example.

Of course it's a consultant's dream because no matter what you sell, you're complying. And it's of course no problem for the customer in question to be compliant to rules like that.

It's a consultant's dream alright, for two reasons - one, it's a gold mine because the rules constantly change as the Secretary makes "statements", and two, because people like you are spreading inaccurate information about liability. I can't tell you how many times I've heard fools say that "nobody will prosecute us for this..." setting themselves up for a board-mandated takeover of the IT department by consultants.

YES, IT IS POSSIBLE to obfuscate your online fingerprint into a chameleon-like polluting mess of data, but the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

Go to this website with your browser-----http://browserspy.dk/browser.php

All those result values are fingerprinting you (along with your IP address and MAC address) .
If you could make your browser randomly change EVERY ONE of those result values automatically at regular intervals, then you empower yourself with a chameleon-like internet fingerprint ....

BUT GUESS WHAT ... there is no Firefox addon or other browser plugin for doing this !!!!!
because, as I said before, the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

ALONG WITH THE ABOVE, you need to constantly inject customized "noise" (masses of text) into your web queries to mislead algorithms such as Google, NSA etc into making a customized profile of you.
This can be done in Firefox by using the addon 'TrackMeNot'-----http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

All I have described is intended to totally empower userland.....BUT THIS DOES NOT SUIT organizations, companies and people whose business depends on shit like this and breaks their pretty little javascript-laced umblical cords connected to you.

YES, IT IS POSSIBLE to obfuscate your online fingerprint into a chameleon-like polluting mess of data, but the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

Go to this website with your browser-----http://browserspy.dk/browser.php

All those result values are fingerprinting you (along with your IP address and MAC address) .
If you could make your browser randomly change EVERY ONE of those result values automatically at regular intervals, then you empower yourself with a chameleon-like internet fingerprint ....

BUT GUESS WHAT ... there is no Firefox addon or other browser plugin for doing this !!!!!
because, as I said before, the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

ALONG WITH THE ABOVE, you need to constantly inject customized "noise" (masses of text) into your web queries to mislead algorithms such as Google, NSA etc into making a customized profile of you.
This can be done in Firefox by using the addon 'TrackMeNot'-----http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

All I have described is intended to totally empower userland.....BUT THIS DOES NOT SUIT organizations, companies and people whose business depends on shit like this and breaks their pretty little javascript-laced umblical cords connected to you.

YES, IT IS POSSIBLE to obfuscate your online fingerprint into a chameleon-like polluting mess of data, but the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

Go to this website with your browser-----http://browserspy.dk/browser.php

All those result values are fingerprinting you (along with your IP address and MAC address) .
If you could make your browser randomly change EVERY ONE of those result values automatically at regular intervals, then you empower yourself with a chameleon-like internet fingerprint ....

BUT GUESS WHAT ... there is no Firefox addon or other browser plugin for doing this !!!!!
because, as I said before, the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

ALONG WITH THE ABOVE, you need to constantly inject customized "noise" (masses of text) into your web queries to mislead algorithms such as Google, NSA etc into making a customized profile of you.
This can be done in Firefox by using the addon 'TrackMeNot'-----http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

All I have described is intended to totally empower userland.....BUT THIS DOES NOT SUIT organizations, companies and people whose business depends on shit like this and breaks their pretty little javascript-laced umblical cords connected to you.

YES, IT IS POSSIBLE to obfuscate your online fingerprint into a chameleon-like polluting mess of data, but the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

Go to this website with your browser-----http://browserspy.dk/browser.php

All those result values are fingerprinting you (along with your IP address and MAC address) .
If you could make your browser randomly change EVERY ONE of those result values automatically at regular intervals, then you empower yourself with a chameleon-like internet fingerprint ....

BUT GUESS WHAT ... there is no Firefox addon or other browser plugin for doing this !!!!!
because, as I said before, the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....

ALONG WITH THE ABOVE, you need to constantly inject customized "noise" (masses of text) into your web queries to mislead algorithms such as Google, NSA etc into making a customized profile of you.
This can be done in Firefox by using the addon 'TrackMeNot'-----http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

FINAL THOUGHTS:
All I have described is intended to totally empower userland.....BUT THIS DOES NOT SUIT organizations, companies and people whose business depends on shit like this and breaks their pretty little javascript-laced umblical cords connected to you.

First, do you know that Microsoft does break out its various segments?

Yes, but I haven't seen the newest data so I don't feel that I can discuss it intelligently. I'll look into it in the next couple of months, when I actually have some money to invest :)

Wal-Mart has a profit margin of 3.5% against Microsoft’s 28% - what does that tell us? Not much. 3.5% is stunning for retail, less so for technology.

Agreed, but - in general - retail stocks command less of a premium than higher-margin industries. Microsoft already has a low P/E for a tech firm, and I suspect margin pressure to be one culprit. Ironically, their low P/E is one reason I keep looking at them - I tend to look for beaten-down stocks.

It is not that margin et. al. is unimportant. It is that they cannot be used in isolation. They are just one input as you try to forecast future revenue.

100% agree. The same thing can be said about revenue. To use an absurd, extreme example... GM could increase revenue by selling every car at a loss... until their cash and credit dry up. But you'd be a silly investor if you bought based solely on the revenue increase. You obviously want to keep an eye on margins as well. On the other hand, you have growth players like Amazon. They reinvest almost every penny of their revenue into their business. Their operating margins are decent enough for retail, but they don't make any money. The market has rewarded them handsomely for this strategy.

the government DID NOT kill or imprison them all

in 1970 the US military killed college students

Why is this at +5, and the post you replied to at 0? It should be the reverse. There is the difference between "killing some" and "killing all", which in this case is the difference between a good point and a strawman.

I find it shameful to use this incident to argue for defeatism and rolling over in advance, when the very people who faced it back then did NOT: http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/collections/exhibits/arch/1970/70Images/Kent2.gif

I doubt what happened at Kent State even put a dent in the protests, maybe even the opposite.

If everybody protests, who is going to do the killing? You're aware the leaders of the world are depending on a lot of misled people working for them, right? Chauffeurs, pilots, cops, soldiers, doctors, nurses... the list is very long, and the so called elite are basically sitting ducks once the lies wear off.

Colleges Cut Men’s Programs to Satisfy Title IX
Sokal's Hoax
Yes, There’s a War on Boys in Schools
What About Our Boys?

The direction this is likely to go is easily predictable.

The Sokal affair was an academic exercise, comparing this to it is not adequate. On the other hand, indeed it's just like Jesux.

And this is a more direct link to it. The one in the article goes to Sokal's main page.

Not exactly what you described, but TrackMeNot is a browser add-on for Firefox & Chrome randomizes Google searches in non-repeating intervals that average a time length you can set. Poisson distribution in time, I believe. This creates a lot of "noise" for anybody tracking you via your searches: https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

"Perform fake google searches every day (search for stuff that you have no interest in whatsoever)."

There's even an extension for that..
http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

1. Fill your ISP logs with TrackMeNot http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
2. Know the US brands that willingly and knowingly helped the NSA and run any different OS/file systems.
3. Learn to think like a protester in 1980's Eastern Europe. Just keep been political active and know its all been filed, linked, watched, tracked, logged.....
Voice print, face scanning, OS, telco, ISP, cell tower tracking .. how many millions is been created/printed and spent on overtime and "cleared" contractors per person
4. Pay for other brands that are more privacy aware.

With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.

One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.

Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs.

Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World highlights the potential of this.)

The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.

Try this one http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~dodis/ps/rng.pdf

we should pollute their data. Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data, at least from monitoring people's browsing habits.

That's exactly the idea behind TrackMeNot, an add-on for Firefox/Chrome/Chromium. There are also add-ons that block or change your browser headers, to reduce the amount of information that is leaked.

we are really, really without any way out if we dont start inundating them with noise...
please, people, install at once trackmenot or paranoid browsing

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
http://boingboing.net/2013/08/18/paranoid-browsing-anti-profil.html

Start with trackmenot and go from there.

No Thank You. I used to use TMN for a while and many times it produced freakish stuff, not harmless looking garbage but the kind that would attract surveillance. Terrible Add On that you do not want unless you want the Feds knocking your door.

Start with trackmenot and go from there.

Berlowitz falsely claimed to have received a doctorate from New York University

I'm assuming she only lied on the grant applications since she was also the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at New York University. Presumably they would have noticed if she falsely claimed to have a doctorate from them.

I am not a trader. Trading is a fool's game. Short term stock valuations are basically a random walk, which is what you are trying to exploit. The fact is only about 15% of traders exceed market performance when trading costs are factored in at for any one year. Worse yet actively managed portfolios show NO correlation in performance from year to year and are tax inefficient as well. You might be successful for a few years if you are lucky, but time catches up to even the Bill Millers and Peter Lynchs. The big hedge funds with their high paid managers are the worst of all - ridiculous costs and terrible performance. Some of them famously went BK, Long Term Capital Management, staffed by Nobel Laureates. MF Global run by an ex-Goldman CEO.

What works reliably is diversification, cost minimization and time, which yields this:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html

I don't care if an individual stock goes boom. I don't put a significant percentage of my money in any one company. And I am certainly not hopping from stock to stock like the boobs on CNBC would have you do.

And it isn't about buy and hold. It's about realizing what the statistics of the broad market are, and moving from one asset class to another to when your diversification becomes unbalanced due to valuation changes. For example in 2009 I was buying hand over fist because my bonds were up and stocks were down.

Now let's look at your ridiculous suggestion that the value of a stock is completely unrelated to the financial strength of a company. Suppose a company's value goes to zero, i.e. it goes bankrupt. What is it's value then? 0. So in fact there is a clearly demonstrable relationship at least at one point.

It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories ... they certainly made claims that ripping is in fact illegal.

If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.

The MAFIAA may be entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. And the fact of this matter is plain and simply, "Fuck you, MAFIAA."

What was that about no recognition of format shifting? I didn't even have to do the shifting, Amazon did it for me.

It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories ... they certainly made claims that ripping is in fact illegal.

If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.

It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.

Interesting read, but it doesn't address the questions at hand:
Are cryptography advances and computer advances hand-in-hand? I believe the answer to that question is still no.
Are big crypto advances in a next generation public key algorithm limited by our knowledge? I believe the answer to that question is still yes.

For example, the McEliece-like crypto system (which seems suspiciously analogus to your LWE paper) did not appear to have any major advances for many years (probably because sending around huge matrices is a real bummer and attempts to reduces this reduced the security parameters). We also have no direct knowledge about its quantum resistance other than some assumptions. Who knows, but its security profile may be very entwined with algorithms for error-correction of quantum states for quantum computers (which is an interesting topic apparently still in it's infancy). Unlike the study of factoring and discrete logarithms which have undergone lots of study and has a huge knowledge base, we have likely only scratched the surface on other computationally hard algorithms to use as a basis for a public key system. Maybe they aren't really hard at all. At this point, we don't really know. For example, the McElice system's security parameters needed to be updated after some advances in classical information theory knowledge like this...

In contrast, if we knew about this wonderful system but computers to do it aren't big/powerful enough yet to implement it practically, that would be one thing. I think we actually lack the knowledge base to meaningfully change our public key infrastructure today (which should keep all those researcher employed for a good while longer).

It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.

Also don't do it electronically. We spent centuries perfecting manual systems and they are as simple to implement as the choice to do so, they are just a little slower. Next up is generate volumes upon volumes of false automatically generated data with tools similar to http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ but covering other facets of information generation. You should ideally generate 10 times as much false as true data, with computers heck a hundred times is easy and it floods their system because they retain and yours remains clean because it only takes a few extra computing cycles to create it and you don't keep it.

https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Make Firefox send out periodically issued randomised search-queries to popular search engines all day, everyday :)

Gross margin of 38% is not in the greedy range on what planet? Of course you have to specify what kind of gross margin you are talking about. EBITDASG&A/Sales? EBITDA/Sales? EBIT/Sales? EBIT(1-t)/Sales?

Even if you are talking EBITDASG&A/Sales, 38% is high. Even the Aerospace/Defense industry who brought you the $500 hammer makes do with 21%. Electric Utilities, 30%. Electronics, 20%. Engineering & Construction, 11%. Steel, 19%. Trucking, 19%.

If instead you are talking about EBIT/Sales, 38% is just off the charts. The only industry higher is Financial Services.

EBITDASG&A is earnings before all costs - i.e., raw earnings.
EBIT is earnings before interest and taxes.

Junk DNA is basically this:

http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/CSCI-GA.2965-001/geneticalgex

We are very complex machines with LOTS of unexpected connections. Take out one little bit of "junk" DNA, the whole thing collapses because of the utterly bizarre inter-dependencies that have evolved over millions of years.

This project http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ but for gTalk/gMail as your browser opens?
That would be very neat :)

[citation provided]

George Stratton did an experiment on perceptual adaptation in the 1980's.

This differs completely from the adaptation of expectation that takes place when lens of propaganda driven public education is promoted, a priori, then erased over time by continual exposure to reality. You don't just wake up one day and figure out that the American Dream should be referred to as the Grand Illusion. It takes much longer to figure out that your government, and other 'fiduciaries', might not be up to the task of reflecting your expectations. Your intellectual habits suffer from confirmation bias .

The University system should provide Sanctuary for its students. It takes the most brilliant and promising children of each generation, and takes the best of them to the frontiers of human knowledge, and encourages and teaches them to push and develop these frontiers. This is one of the highest callings of the University system. This also gives the Universities a great responsibility -- to protect those young bright minds who are going boldly where none has gone before. They need to provide Sanctuary for these students, to have their back when they push the boundaries of our society. This does not cover murder or other violent sociopathic acts. But it should protect students from most of the reckless overreaching laws, and especially in all gray areas of our society. Rather than give students up for minor unlawful activities, the University system should give them Sanctuary. When they do give them up, they break this Sanctuary promise to their students. They teach them and encourage them to the frontiers of our society, and then betray them when they give them up to local (or federal) gendarmes.

I call on ALL University administrators to develop proactive policies of Sanctuary, which should include refusing EVER to give up students for minor or gray area "crimes". They should at the very least, refuse all cooperation with police agents, and at the best, provide a defense for students. But NEVER break your moral contract with the students you teach, by turning them over to outside law. This policy can include ejecting students who break University laws. But it should never extend further than sanctions or expulsions. The University systems should develop a non-cooperation understanding with all police forces. Exceptions only would include violent sociopathic crimes such as rape, murder, violent assault, bombings, etc. But the University should be a Sanctuary for non-violent crimes where the student (or faculty for that matter) is pushing the boundaries of society.

This awesome article at New York University, The University as Sanctuary, says it more powerfully and elegantly than I ever could.

How does Lott's study coincide with the elimination of lead from the environment or Roe vs. Wade, etc.? Is everyone flogging a different horse in the same harness? Cherry-picking among causal factors for political purposes is as bad as cherry-picking data.

"Our bottom line assessment on all these hypotheses is therefore as follows: each may contain an element of truth, and nothing we have done proves they are false. Any claim that these hypotheses explain large components of the fluctuations in crime, however, does not seem consistent with the aggregate data."

from What Do Economists Know About Crime? (pdf)

I agree, but other studies find differently: Link.

In particular, if you look at the data from the first study, there was basically just no p > .05 for that correlation. Mass transit can be an important part of long-term congestion reduction, but it hasn't worked everywhere. In context, it has worked here, charlotte, NC.

Satirical scientific articles are a field of literature ripe for expansion. The only one I know of to have really found a wide readership (at least among those who follow modern literature) is Georges Perec's Cantatrix Sopranica L. .

Or this paper.

Of course, the Sokal hoax paper is also a brilliant piece of writing.

And here ya go.

What I find really uncanny is that from one perspective this is an example of life imitating art.

The somewhat infamous and critically celebrated Stelarc has conducted a few experiments on his body to attach new sensory organs to his body and connect his body to larger networks. Ping body is a pretty famous one, but the one I have in mind is his "Ear on Arm". Partially quoting:

The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm. By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear. The body is a living system which isn't easy to surgically sculpt. And recovery time is needed after the surgical procedures. There were several serious problems that occurred: a necrosis during the skin expansion process necessitated excising it and rotating the position of the ear around the arm. Ironically, this proved to be the original site that the 3D model and animation was visualized. Anyway, the inner forearm was anatomically a good site for the ear construction. The skin is thin and smooth there, and ergonomically locating it on the inner forearm minimizes the inadvertent knocking or scraping of the ear.

Your post reminded me of this: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

EBITDA is short for "Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization". The profit that you're seeing referred to is after taking all of those things out.

If you'd like to be able to compare apples to apples, here's a list which has some average EBIDTA margins by industry.

To expand on your post...

HFT has improved market stability. Specifically look at "Largest percentage changes"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_in_the_Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average

To expand a bit further the largest daily percentage losses in almost 25 years happened in 2008, which happens to be the 9th biggest fall in the market. So out of the top 10 worst days of the market only one has happened since the advent of HFT.

I had the privilege to see this presentation in person and it makes quite a bit of sense.
http://www.orie.cornell.edu/engineering2/customcf/iws_events_calendar/files/cfem_20120314_0.pdf

To expand further upon a positive of HFT the observation of the market for micro infrasturcthre changes which can help exchanges to mitigate issues with HFT please read up on this.

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/cons/groups/content/documents/webasset/con_035928.pdf

Hope this helps.

19,187 separate attacks? Can we get a citation for this? Or some methodology?

4.75 attacks per day in the world is a lot? Hardly.

You'll need to follow up on this yourself, but just to get you started.. . . .

If memory serves me, there are at least 20 countries experiencing either an Islamist insurgency and/or terrorism include: India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand, Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Somalia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Yemen, and others.

577 glorious pages of incidents at Iraq Body Count (The observant among you will notice that attacks against Iraqis haven't stopped despite the US pullout, so no, the war didn't end.

Taliban Attacks 100 Times per Day

Afghanistan: Update. Daily reporting from Afghanistan indicates the Taliban have sustained at least 100 attacks and security incidents per day since the start of the spring offensive. That is a high number for a group supposedly on the ropes.

From 2010 - Afghanistan: 57 Insurgent Attacks a Day (the insufferable)

Negotiations are certain to be part of the mix in any attempt to resolve the crisis. The military situation is getting worse. There were 400 attacks in the past week in Afghanistan, 60 percent of them by roadside bomb There were over 1,000 roadside bomb attacks in April 2010, twice as many as in April 2009.

This number of attacks per day, some 57, about 34 of them roadside bombs, is breathtaking. That level of violence is what characterized Iraq in March, 2005, before the Sunni-Shiite civil war. The year 2005 was a bloody year in Iraq, and nobody but then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doubted we were mired in a vicious guerrilla war.

That is only two countries out of the many marked by Islamist violence. What about Thailand?

Terrorism in South Thailand

Looking at the Thai news, one can notice that almost every day people are being killed or injured due to terrorist attacks in South Thailand. Federal Foreign Offices around the world warn tourists to visit these areas because of mortal danger

That doesn't include Iran's attempts to kill Israeli diplomats in Thailand, as they have in various other nations in the last several months.

Pity the Yezhidi.
The Vanishing Yezidi of Iraq

The worst incident occurred on August 14, 2007, when four coordinated truck bombs exploded in two Yezidi villages, killing at least 500 people and wounding more than 1,500. It was the second deadliest terrorist attack in world history after 9/11.

Of course there are plenty more mass casualty attacks. I'll leave that as an exercise for you. You could check out the Bali bombing, the 7/7 bombing, the Madrid bombing, plenty of markets being bombed in Iraq.

The US has been fortunate in that it has been able to foil many attempts by would-be Jihadis, but sadly not all, including the "workplace violence" of Major Hasan at Fort Hood (13 dead, 31 wounded). (May Justice be done upon him.)

Just a few recent reports from the US:
FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012

Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization

Yes via http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Browsers all over the UK doing randomised search-queries to popular search engines every few mins.

peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.

This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas).

Actually, it can work, and it has, both in rural areas and poor countries. All at low cost and maintenance. There are devices like the mesh potato that have been used to build networks in South Africa. And the WiLD projects have deployed networks with links ... yes, up to 100km.

Just look at all these mesh networks deployed or in process!

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Let it run in your fav browser and have it use a set of search engines creating a random cloud of false searches when your online.
You IP will have AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing looking for terms from the daily mainstream press.
Average frequency and other settings can be used to fill logs all day everyday ;)
When you do search try something like startpage.com

Inaccurate unscientific ramblings, sound bites and clichés do not support your argument. That not only goes for hkmwbz but also Soulskill (the author of this topic who so brazenly declares the science is all but settled), JD, Shavano and Blueg3 below. Global Warming / Climate Change is NOT scientific fact, it is THEORY presently being developed and there is still much to learn. Blind supporters of global warming make outrageous claims and forget that all of this is THEORY which must be backed up with evidence. There are no 'denialists' - that is not even a word! You offer NO LINKS to scientific studies to back up your outrageous claims, so I will.

Urban Heat Islands are definitely real, especially in rapidly growing countries like China. See this paper published by the Journal of Geophysical Research:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/new-paper-uhi-alive-and-well-in-china/

So hkmwbz you are certifiably wrong there. Then you persist with your clichés

there's a huge amount of evidence that the warming is caused by humans.

Really? Show us your evidence. Where are your links? What is definitely an undisputed scientific fact is how little scientists know and how much they are still learning today.

Then we have JD (below) making ridiculous statements like:

The current imbalanced rise in CO2 is much more troubling because studies show that plants do NOT like massive levels of CO2 unless they come combined with massive levels of O2.

JD what makes you think CO2 is presently imbalanced? Where is the evidence for your statement? Do you actually know what the present percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere is??? It presently is around 0.039445%. Do you have any idea how the increase in CO2 has increased during the last 50 years? It has increased from 0.032 to 0.0395, or by approximately 25%. Here is the data:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Look at that graph. Its a fairly straight line over a period of 50 years. Fairly straight line despite the dramatic jump in CO2 emissions since the mid-1800's (PDF). Even though human population has more than doubled during the last 50 years! Even though the number of cars has increased 800% from 122 Million in 1960 to over 1 Billion today. And yet somehow our planet's climate just keeps on balancing things out and the rate of increase of CO2 is fairly constant. But wait, JD definitely said "imbalanced rise".

JD continues:

CO2 rises alone, without any other alteration to the environment, will cause plant growth to decline and is eventually toxic.

Really? Where is your scientific evidence? The reality is CO2 is a fertilizer to plants. Plants LOVE CO2, even without a corresponding rise in O2 (wrong again). Even in high concentrations CO2 continues to act as a fertilizer. Here are some links from climate change advocates which you seem to blindly trust:

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/fertilizationeffect
http://www.good.is/post/rick-santorum-thinks-carbon-dioxide-isn-t-harmful-to-plants-tell-that-to-a-plant/

The relevant journal is a non-traditional "open access journal" where articles are freely available (pseudo-random sample; others here), but article authors pay the publisher to publish. It's similar to self-publishing. I imagine TOISCIJ is not respected at all since in a brief search the only info I could find on it was related to the fake paper incident. While it is technically a "peer reviewed journal" (or at least it calls itself that, present evidence to the contrary), it's misleading not to immediately point out how it differs from most people's idea of traditional "peer reviewed journals".

Some scandals along the same lines:
  * The Bogdanov affair, where two French twins, one a mathematician and the other a physicist, published apparent nonsense in respectable journals. Physicist John Baez (singer Joan's cousin, actually) called the papers "a mishmash of superficially plausible sentences containing the right buzzwords in approximately the right order. There is no logic or cohesion in what they write."
  * The Schön scandal, where a German physicist claimed breakthroughs and published a number of papers. Journals withdrawing his papers include Science, Physical Review, Applied Physics Letters, Advanced Materials, and Nature.
  * The Sokal affair, where a physicist published a rather hilarious paper in the journal Social Text. To be fair, that article was not peer-reviewed by a physicist.

I know, it's a real catch 22. The block let's you block up 500 crap SEO web sites and the more that participate the more SEO web sites that die. I already use http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/, obscure usage (it makes many more searches than I do) and I use more than one search engine (search engine specific to data type) but when you are in a hurry and want the best results to come up on the first page. Not wanting to fuck around for 10 minutes (sometimes far longer) wading through crap you're not interested in, you don't really end up with many options, devil and the deep blue sea.

Google is also very conscious and nervous about blocking results companies who are paying to advertise with them ie blocking ebay (if I want results from Ebay I will search Ebay). I want my search engine blacklist, you don't want it you don't use it but I am already appreciating it.

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.