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When you have spent a lifetime scratching together a life, you actually have something to lose. [...] Once you are forced to deal with the real world, things start to change from your ideal, let's make a utopian society to, let's try to keep my family safe and fed.

When you have "spent a lifetime," period, you should be mature enough to understand that taking sides according to your myopic goals focused on your current time and place in life, does not translate to what's optimal for the society as a whole, which, by the way, includes you.

An Anti-Gun liberal is just someone who's wife/daughter/fiancee hasn't been attacked.

And you are just someone who wasn't born into an impoverished/unjust family/community/society, and didn't have to work or smile four times as much just to earn the same status, respect, or opportunities that other children were born possessing.

If you're willing to say that the "young" don't know what theyr'e doing because they haven't yet experienced certain aspects of life, i.e. their future lives, then why stop there? What makes you think that you know what you're doing, given that you haven't experienced certain aspects of life either, e.g. other people's lives?

Oh, wait, I get it. It's too hard to imagine being born again with a new hand, different family, different culture, and/or different race, and you'll be damned if you ever have to use abstract thought again!

See: Rawls.

I am a lifelong coder. Many years ago I suffered a very painful neck injury working on a laptop extended hours. 1+ yrs of physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractor didn't do very much at all to fix the problem. Then I started taking ballroom dance classes 3 times per week after work and within 3 months I never had any more neck pain. Ever!

If it's something you may enjoy, ballroom dancing (or other forms of dance) may help correct or maintain your body posture with many other side benefits including making new friends, developing social and presentation skills, and can even help make you smarter.

Actually I've been waiting for such stuff since the 1990s before those books were written. There were wearable computers back then already. And even Apple came up with the Newton in 1998. In 2000 and 2001 I even tried to do a few things to shift the direction a bit to make things more open (allow for a more open ecosystem to build on) e.g. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8162&cid=716672
But I failed...

Sometimes progress seems so slow. Look at this stuff from 50 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg
(and also Douglas Engelbart's Mother of all Demos: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html ).
We haven't really made that much progress in 50 years.

NASA has been doing reruns of 1960s stuff with new tech and trying to spin it as impressive. They haven't bothered trying to build a real space station where humans can actually live on rather than rot away on. New passenger jets are actually slower than those in the 1970s (but a lot more fuel efficient ;) ).

Ideas are easy. Implementation, getting mindshare and "buy-in" is the hard part. That's why patents are bad overall and slow down progress. You cannot build something decent using a typical vague and broad patent alone but you can stop someone trying to build something.

Progress in aerospace, computing, nuclear tech has been rather disappointing to me... There's been some progress in the medical tech front, so it's not all bad.

Progress in AI has been crap too, but I'm not keen on AI, prefer augmented humans (as mentioned already). We don't treat humans and other animals well, I don't see why we should create real AIs just to enslave and abuse, won't be good for us in many ways.

Stanford basically extended their part-time Honors Cooperative Program (HCP) through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), which films and distributes their online courses. Remote students pay full tuition to "attend" these classes online, and its quite popular despite the cost. You can get a MS degree in several engineering fields from Stanford by attending entirely online.

SCPD Website
HCP Website
The Stanford EE Department's Description of this program.

Stanford basically extended their part-time Honors Cooperative Program (HCP) through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), which films and distributes their online courses. Remote students pay full tuition to "attend" these classes online, and its quite popular despite the cost. You can get a MS degree in several engineering fields from Stanford by attending entirely online.

SCPD Website
HCP Website
The Stanford EE Department's Description of this program.

Stanford basically extended their part-time Honors Cooperative Program (HCP) through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), which films and distributes their online courses. Remote students pay full tuition to "attend" these classes online, and its quite popular despite the cost. You can get a MS degree in several engineering fields from Stanford by attending entirely online.

SCPD Website
HCP Website
The Stanford EE Department's Description of this program.

Protien folding simulation is such a large and basic need globally there ought to be enough large scale interest to make development of specialized ASICs to deal with these problems cost effective and exceedingly useful for all who need to do these simulations. A quick check of google shows such chips do in fact exist with unbelivable performance figures which kick the snot out countless tens of thousands of CPU/GPUs. There is no shortage of funding for medical research so it begs the question why waste CPU/GPU resources on folding simulations?

I still do seti and milkyway at home because there are no resources allocated for seti and milkyway at home is interesting to me personally.

First of all, protein folding is not the only thing they do, the Folding@HOME infrastructure is used by many for a variety of bio-molecular studies.

Secondly, custom ASIC-based machines like Anton and MDGRAPE (which are AFAIK the only such machines around these days) consist of much more than a custom-chip, they use specialized interconnects, memory, software, etc. and cost a lot. The MDGRAPRE-4, the coming version of the Riken-developed custom molecular simulation machine costs $10M + $4M (development + manufacturing) which poses serious financial limitations to it. Moreover, these specialized machines are only able to run a handful of molecular dynamics algorithms and while fast, they are nowhere near as versatile as general-purpose codes like AMBER, GROMACS, NAMD, etc. Although it is true that these specialized machines are a few orders of magnitude faster in terms of absolute performance (i.e time to solution and not Flops), due to their limitations and the way they are used, some researchers argue that they employ a "brute force" approach to molecular simulations which is not cost-effective from the point of view of science/$ delivered. I personally wouldn't call machines like Anton and MDGRAPE a complete waste, they achieve impressive advances in hardware, software, and science results in a specific direction: pushing the limits of how fast can one run a single simulation. There are certainly other (some would say better) ways to get amazing results with general-purpose (super)-computers be it using massive clusters or cycles donated to folding Foldging@HOME.

Finally, let me explain why is there compute-resource shortage in the (bio-)molecular simulation filed which will remain for the foreseeable future no matter how much money do various governamental and non-governamental agencies pour into it. Molecular dynamics is extremely compute-intensive, a single iteration of the MD algorithm requires 10^8-10^10 Flops (not LINPACK Flops!), repeated for millions of times during a single simulation of a bio-molecular system (and such a simulation can take weeks even on a big machine). And that's still a few orders of magnitude short of what would be needed to simulate timescales at which biological processes take place. Therefore, any compute-resource available can be harnessed for molecular simulation research and Folding@HOME does a decent job at utilizing donated cycles. Admittedly, there are some in the community who think that Folding@HOME is wasteful, but that's a topic for another discussion.

Disclaimer: I am involved in the development of the GROMACS open-source molecular simulation package which is in fact on of the computational engines used by Folding@HOME. Still, I believe I have not been biased in the way I presented Folding@HOME and molecular dynamics in general.

This is a useful overview, but it doesn't cover the details of the confusing part.

My take is that the whole DOJ angle is part of HP looking for a scapegoat to cover both their own mismanagement and lack of ability to due anything useful with Autonomy's IP. It's a fishing expedition to find one, but they have no hard evidence yet of who's to blame. Autonomy itself used aggressive accounting measures to inflate its sale price, as all companies being acquired will try to do. What HP really wants is to ignore the whole thing and write off the loss, since catching any accounting mess should have happened before the purchase. But they can't just do that due to class action lawsuits saying it's HP who is at fault. So they're going through the motions of prosecuting other people to shift the blame, but so far they don't have any hard evidence of that fraud. If they did, they'd be leading with that.

Here's how I sequenced all the events here to sort out what happened:

• August 22, 2012: earnings are terrible, and we're going to blame the Enterprise Services division.
• November 20, 2012: The scapegoat picked for the bad performance of Enterprise Services is the Autonomy aquisition. HP wants to write off a 8.8B loss right now for that. They can't admit "we fucked up", so they blame accounting issues at Autonomy.
• November 21, 2012: The U.S. Department of Justice is called in to help push blame toward Autonomy, along with the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (Autonomy was originally a British company) and the SEC.
• November 26, 2012: a class action lawsuit is filed by HP stockholders. That claims this is all bullshit, and HP itself is the source of fraud here. Similar class action lawsuits are filed against the accounting firms involved.
• December 28, 2012: Former Autonomy head Mike Lynch points out that HP hasn't actually given out any detailed accounting for where that 8.8B figure comes from. And the US Justice department hasn't actually gotten him involved in things yet.

It may be the case that HP's forensic accounting here finds something lawsuit worthy. It's telling that so far, all they've done is contact the DOJ. If they had a smoking gun, they'd have sued the responsible partly directly instead. That's why I suspect this is just fishing without solid evidence so far.

>It would make the US troops seem more human

>That is a good point, but it's the only thing better about using animals.

I disagree. I believe in most situations it's best to make US soldiers seem, to the extent possible, like technodemons summoned from the cauldrons of American science wizards.

The less known and the more presumed about a US soldier's abilities the easier it will be to fight. Give them night vision and guns that can shoot around corners. Give them air conditioned self supporting strength enhancing armor. Give them networks that let every soldier know where every other soldier in his squad is. Give them flying death robots and laser guns. Emulate every desired superpower you can from ESP to precognizance to golems and X-ray vision. Make every US soldier a nightmare for his enemies, inflating his capabilities beyond any enemy simulation and in the end we'll save money by not having to actually use these abilities.

Careful with the CamelCase, but http://etherape.sourceforge.net/ is a fun real-time connection visualizer. We used that for a lot of network demonstrations.

The command-line based "iftop" is also really nice to get a quick realtime overview of what's using bandwidth.

I think she'll have lots of fun with any of the Wardriving software, which would also give you maps.

For Android, there are a few pretty interesting real-time displays. "Wifi Analyzer" will have her running all over the place exploring wifi signal attenuation. "OpenSignal" is also a cool app I just started playing with that will let you do the same with cell towers, which also shows their location on a map. Also look at "GPS Status" to visualize where all of the GPS satellites are, and what kind of attenuation you'd get from each one's signal with trees / buildings / mountains in the way.

Have fun!

I think that the child can learn from http://class.stanford.edu/networking/Fall2012
There are some very basic informations. Pictorial representations, and concepts of flow, etc. I as a 13 year old became fixated on electronics, and this child may be fixated the same way on the TCP/IP.

Footnote: I pluraled information

The clack router is a little old but it's a great idea:

http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/clack/

There might be too much abstraction for someone first starting out, though.

First, if you are going to challenge others to do research, please be so kind as to show yours to back up your statements. So far what I've read from you has been almost all vague fundamentalist opinion.

The world you speak of where people were so altruistic and helpful, where villages came together to help each other out is exactly what those progressives and liberals have been trying to bring back. The problem with looking back and trying to compare it to today is that the numbers just don't work. The United States of America is not a small country anymore, it has grown into a very large country with very large and real global issues. You cannot run a large country like a small one. Population density has dramatically changed since times when small towns had to be somewhat self reliant. (population density from 1790) Life expectancy has risen rather dramatically as well.

So you have a growing population, longer life...how do you propose we take care of all these people? Hopeful charity? Part of the role of Government is to smooth out the dips during rough times. it is also to help promote beneficial rises to "fill the coffers" so to speak for the next dip. It is very hard for a community to invest in helping the poor and needy when they don't have the capability to do so.

If we are on the edge of social collapse, it is more because the government did not perform its role in protecting society from economic threats. People or business that cared little about the population of the country, but just took its monetary resources and left it wounded. Government, at its best, should limit the effect of greed on society; channel it, use it to protect the Society, grow the Society, and allow the Society to be free enough to live with dignity, freedom, and happiness.

Unfortunately, Greed won.

I don't know, Stanford Online has taught Cryptography and Networking- two upper level undergraduate CS courses at my university. And Coursera has a Databases course too. Sure, these courses might be vastly outnumbered by the number of "Python Introduction Tutorials", but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

A lot of vague marketing-speak in this article. "Deep learning"? The article basically talks about neural networks, just one of the techniques in machine learning. Neural networks were hyped for a long time, perhaps because of the catchy name.

You could have answered your own questions with a quick search, rather than assume that that which you are ignorant about is mere "marketing-speak."

deeplearning.net

Deep learning (Wikipedia)

Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning

>Hardly. Recognizing that there are differences between the sexes is common sense. Judging people's values and defining their roles solely by their sexes is sexism.

Those "differences" are provably superficial and purely cultural -as well proven by other cultures having radically different role expectations from sexes and both sexes playing into those different expectations with the same level as they do to the ones in ours.
Hell even in our own subcultures this view is greatly challenged. Consider for example the highly androgynous gender-roles of the metal and goth cultures - or the outright girly look of glam metal (which then ironically became equated with having the "guts to be glam" - the MOST masculine thing a man could do was to act feminine).

Superficial?

BWAAA HAA HAAA

Call me when a dude has a baby.

No my friend, the differences between the sexes exist only in the physical form.

Bullshit.

Substantial research has sought to understand why more boys than girls excel in math. However, given the many dimensions in which girls outperform boys, it may seem misplaced to focus on the dimension in which girls are falling short. Why not examine the gender gap in verbal test scores where females outperform males?

...

So why do girls and boys differ in the likelihood that they excel in math? One argument is that boys have and develop superior spatial skills and that this gives them an advantage in math. This difference could have an evolutionary foundation, as male tasks such as hunting may have required greater spatial orientation than typical female tasks (Gaulin and Hoffman, 1988).

Not a physicist or engineer, are you? Each square meter produces 400Watts (let's say some slight advances are made... there are 42% efficient solar cells, but they're expensive), for (say) 5 hours a day on average, for 365 days a year on average. Each square meter of solar thus produces about 730kWh per year, not your measly 14kWh.

How much roof space is there? Just for urban roofs, this paper ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/HeatIsland+WhiteRfs0911.pdf ) estimates it is about 2E11m^2, growing at last check about 200% per decade (but let's mostly ignore that part). Not counting rural roofs, etc, if each square meter produces about 7.3E5W*hour of solar a year, then you have: 1.46E7Whr, which works out to be about 146,000 TWhr per year. Comparable to your 142,000 TeraWatt-hours per year. Not counting non-urban roofs, which must make up a sizable portion of the total roof area, since land is at less of a premium and much of the world's population is rural.

So, you're wrong. To first order, the total area of the world's roofs is enough to produce as much power as the world currently uses. Of course, it might be more practical to put most of them in the desert.

    It means that we'll farm it to the edge of extinction, and then ponder what happened to them all... Kinda like...

Hunting whales for blubber, and then wondering why there whales are almost extinct.

Using pesticide on virtually everything, and then wondering why bees are dying off.

Farming marginally arid land, and being surprised by the result.

I'm not an environmentalist wingnut. Sometimes the answer to "what could possibly go wrong" is really obvious.

Gravity Probe B had what i believe is at least a comparable spec of gyroscope:

http://einstein.stanford.edu/TECH/technology1.html

"The SQUID magnetometers are so sensitive that a field change of only one quantum—equivalent to 5 x 10-14 gauss (1/10,000,000,000,000th of the Earth's magnetic field) and corresponding to a gyro tilt of 0.1 milliarcsecond (3x10-8 degrees)—is detectable. "

They've seen people who live under high voltage power lines seem to have a higher rate of cancer

So I would think it would be possibly dangerous to come close to fields where energy is passing through your body. The more energy involved the worse off I'd think people would be. I don't tend to worry much about low energy fields like cell phones or wifi. Yet if a job powered all the computers with remote energy so I'm exposed all day long, I'd have to decline that job. No sense risking cancer for any amount of money.

I see a few people posting on here saying that they try to contribute but their contributions are just reverted by other editors. However, no one supplies any examples in the edit histories. I'm suspicious. I've been editing lately, and haven't had any of my contributions reverted. I edited quite a bit maybe 6 months ago too, and had maybe two of those edits reverted. What are you people including as references for your edits? I'm guessing not much. If you want your edits to go through include an inline citation to your source; published academic works written by an expert on the topic at hand make the best sources generally. If you don't include that, don't be surprised that someone will doubt and delete it. I'm not saying that contributions aren't reverted for no good reason, I know this happens because it has happened to me; but in my experience this is rare.

As to TFA:

Obviously I'm not familiar with every Wikipedia article. I know that many important articles in philosophy are very poor and nowhere near "completion". Compare the current Platonic realism with the SEP article. Many important philosophy articles are lacking like this. This situation is similar for many important religion articles.

It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.

There are two serious issues with this claim. First, most (although not all) of the Flynn effect has occurred on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. That means that the smartest people may not be that much smarter, but the average intelligence has still gone up by a lot. See for example http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Second, people today seem to be in some ways smarter than many of the smart people a few thousand years ago. For example, it used to be a big deal that someone was able to read so well that they didn't need to murmur to themselves or move their lips, whereas now we consider reading out loud a sign of stupidity http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html. It is possible that part of this difference was simply cultural, and that silent reading was purely a matter of education and norms. But the fact that some old sources considered silent reading a sign of intelligence suggests otherwise.

In more recent times it has become apparent that people have an extraordinary capacity to deceive themselves. A couple of short examples include the argumentative theory of reason and the concept that social interactions can change how we remember events. Given this, how do you resolve Biblical scriptures which ultimately say, if you [yourself] were genuinely confused, only divine intervention would be able to resolve the issue. E.g. "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day."[John 6:44]

Excuse me? Since when has religion had much to do with morality?

I guess you've missed a few thousand years of history?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Religion and Morality

From the beginning of Western thought, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism. The present article will not try to step beyond these confines, since there are other articles on Eastern thought. The article proceeds chronologically, giving greatest length to the contemporary period. It attempts to explain the main options as they have occurred historically. The purpose of proceeding historically is to substantiate the claim that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history. . . . More . . .

----

The belief the is not god has been around long before then belief in any god.

If we want to accept the assumptions here, I think it is much more likely there was no thought of God as opposed to thinking there was no god. Allow me to illustrate. At present, you are very unlikely to have an opinion about the subject I am going to introduce. Does it really exist or not? Is it good? Is it bad? Will I like it? Will I loath it? Why? Because you have no idea what I am talking about, there is nothing for your mind to engage on, to decide on. You have no opinion since you don't even know what I am talking about. The subject is a sort of fish dish. Well, now there is something more concrete - probably most people like some sort of fish, some don't. Now you have more to go on, the mind is working. Thoughts about fish are beginning to form. Many people who have had fish are thinking a special fish dish could be interesting, and even good. Perhaps it is a special type of tuna, yum! Ah, but this is indeed a special fish dish - a Scandinavian, really Swedish, specialty. It is herring! Oh, but this is silly, most people have heard of herring, many have tried it, so it must be good, and we know herring exists! Ah, but this is "special" herring - it is canned herring, a common thing, but with a difference. . . the cans are bulging. . . the fish is fermenting, which is a polite way of saying rotting. Ick! Nobody would eat rotting food, especially meat, especially fish! This must be a joke, there is no way that could be true, no way anyone could like it. And think of the danger of botulism. . . . So, do people eat it? true or not? First we didn't even know the subject and could make no judgments. Then we came to know more, and more, and now we need to decide, do Swedish people eat rotting herring? A little more information - when the cans are opened, it smells like a used diaper mixed with rotten egg and raw onion . So, opinions are forming and reforming, we know more and more, and now we must decide. . . do people really eat rotten fish that smells like a soiled diaper, rotten eggs, and raw onion? Or do they simply do what anyone else would do, realize their special snack which might have been a tasty treat has actually spoiled, is now contaminated with deadly toxins from the microbes, and now must be thrown away? The answer is, sane people throw it away, it is crazy to eat rotting meat. That is, unless you are Swedish, and the fish is Surströmming . In that case the can is opened outdoors, to be polite, and the fish is served on various types of flat bread with potatoes, a slice of onion or various other things, a glass of akvavit or beer, and enjoyed. (More

Excuse me? Since when has religion had much to do with morality?

I guess you've missed a few thousand years of history?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Religion and Morality

From the beginning of Western thought, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism. The present article will not try to step beyond these confines, since there are other articles on Eastern thought. The article proceeds chronologically, giving greatest length to the contemporary period. It attempts to explain the main options as they have occurred historically. The purpose of proceeding historically is to substantiate the claim that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history. . . . More . . .

----

The belief the is not god has been around long before then belief in any god.

If we want to accept the assumptions here, I think it is much more likely there was no thought of God as opposed to thinking there was no god. Allow me to illustrate. At present, you are very unlikely to have an opinion about the subject I am going to introduce. Does it really exist or not? Is it good? Is it bad? Will I like it? Will I loath it? Why? Because you have no idea what I am talking about, there is nothing for your mind to engage on, to decide on. You have no opinion since you don't even know what I am talking about. The subject is a sort of fish dish. Well, now there is something more concrete - probably most people like some sort of fish, some don't. Now you have more to go on, the mind is working. Thoughts about fish are beginning to form. Many people who have had fish are thinking a special fish dish could be interesting, and even good. Perhaps it is a special type of tuna, yum! Ah, but this is indeed a special fish dish - a Scandinavian, really Swedish, specialty. It is herring! Oh, but this is silly, most people have heard of herring, many have tried it, so it must be good, and we know herring exists! Ah, but this is "special" herring - it is canned herring, a common thing, but with a difference. . . the cans are bulging. . . the fish is fermenting, which is a polite way of saying rotting. Ick! Nobody would eat rotting food, especially meat, especially fish! This must be a joke, there is no way that could be true, no way anyone could like it. And think of the danger of botulism. . . . So, do people eat it? true or not? First we didn't even know the subject and could make no judgments. Then we came to know more, and more, and now we need to decide, do Swedish people eat rotting herring? A little more information - when the cans are opened, it smells like a used diaper mixed with rotten egg and raw onion . So, opinions are forming and reforming, we know more and more, and now we must decide. . . do people really eat rotten fish that smells like a soiled diaper, rotten eggs, and raw onion? Or do they simply do what anyone else would do, realize their special snack which might have been a tasty treat has actually spoiled, is now contaminated with deadly toxins from the microbes, and now must be thrown away? The answer is, sane people throw it away, it is crazy to eat rotting meat. That is, unless you are Swedish, and the fish is Surströmming . In that case the can is opened outdoors, to be polite, and the fish is served on various types of flat bread with potatoes, a slice of onion or various other things, a glass of akvavit or beer, and enjoyed. (More

... efficiently on a classic Turing machine. This has been established since Feynman originally proposed it. So I simply don't understand the premise of this research. Not that this is hasn't come up before with SUSY string theorists.

It simply flies into the face of what these days is known about computational complexity.

Apparently some physicists are completely ignoring this branch of theoretical computer science.

Now if the question was that the universe might be a quantum computing simulation that'll make more sense, as these can also efficiently simulate field theories.

But my understanding is that this is not what they are investigating here.

The nearest I can find is this, to appear in the Houston Law Review: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125515

Particularly these sentences on pp. 3-4:

"In 2012, Google spent $12.5B to buy Motorola Mobility and its patents, and $5.2B in 2011 on R&D. In 2011, Apple spent $2.4B on R&D but contributed more, approximately $2.6B, to a single transaction to buy patents from Nortel."

There are citations on all four figures, including a note that Google says $5.5 billion of the price for Motorola Mobility was for their patents.

The author, Colleen Chien, is actually a law professor at Santa Clara, not at Stanford. According to her CV she did her undergrad at Stanford and had a fellowship at the Stanford law school for eight months in 2006, but she doesn't list any more recent affiliation with Stanford. There is a draft of her article under Stanford's domain: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/ipsc/Paper%20PDF/Chien,%20Colleen%20-%20Paper.pdf

Regardless of whether this is actually the NYT's source, and why--if it is--they affiliated it with Stanford, the numbers seem good (you can find the citations on the draft linked above).

[I tracked this down by googling "site:stanford.edu apple google research and development patent" which brought up the draft I linked as the third result. After verifying that it contained the relevant information it was easy to find the listing on SSRN and to track down Colleen Chien's page at Santa Clara. Now that you know my tricks, you, too, can become a master of google-fu, and not have to rely on me to find sources for you!]

From what I recall vaguely, Mars has some sort of GPS system set up. Searching it they use GPS towers that give GPS to a small area.

Complexity theory. The card is answering questions about hidden state that's too large to brute-force. They can use an Interactive Proof to verify that you know the hidden state.

Even with perfect information about the card's flaws, you'd need more time than the heat death of the universe to brute force questions that can be answered by the graphics card in a tiny fraction of a second.

The reason this phrase is so catchy is that it's counter-intuitive, and easily proven to be true. People love to use it as a "gotcha" phrase, PRECISELY because in regular life correlation does in fact usually imply causation.

I agree, and this cannot be overstated. I worry that the use of this phrase is almost more dangerous than the mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation.

To be precise, in most of the examples people love to trot out, correlation does imply causation, just not direct causation. A and B might be correlated because they are both caused by the same thing. While a correlation between obesity and TV watching doesn't imply that TV watching causes obesity, the correlation is good evidence that one causes the other or that there is a third thing, laziness perhaps, that causes both.

Of course there are counter examples to this assumption, called Reichenbach's principle, but they are even more rare.

Knuth's source for TeX and METAFONT does this (he created the technique to enable him to write the system).

I've found (re)writing a program as a literate program results in a much cleaner representation of the code and algorithms and a clearer, more understandable manual.

DEK has since written an entire book on the concept (_Literate Programming_ a CLSI series book) a decade ago, but one seldom sees source so provided.

There are some really cool example programs which're quite interesting (and educational) to read, for example:

Will Crowther's game Adventure - available here: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/advent .w.gz (with an offer of a $2.56 reward check if one can find a bug), or as a document to just read here: http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

Or a CWEB version of the RPN calculator for K&R's C Book: http://www.literateprogramming.com/krcwsamp.pdf

Surely at least one copy of _The TeXbook_ and the other volumes of _Computers & Typesetting_ will survive:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/abcde.html

which is why I've never understood why Project Gutenberg handicapped itself in its beginning w/ no tagging at all.

I don't completely trust studies either. For me, the main thing that matter are what I *do* trust (e.g. axioms, conclusions derived from first principles) and what I can do with the options before me.

Its reasonable to deduce from first principles that organic food has similar inherent nutrition (Vitamins, minerals) compared to non-organic. This is because (assuming non-GMO crops), both types of food grew using similar genetic processes. However, organic food has less pesticide residue. As pesticides are mostly toxins that affect humans too, this has the effect of lowering the *overall* nutrition of non-organic food.

This study backs up this conclusion :...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/09/04/3581865.htm
http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/september/organic.html

The non-organic food most probably had better yields. But if I can obtain organic food at an affordable price, the per-hectare crop yield becomes immaterial -- for me, organic is better as its toxins are fewer.

you said Stanford researchers claim that the evacuation caused 600 additional death by car traffic, didn't you

Nope.

After all I don't know the "stanford researchers" or their data as you did not provide a link.

I did provide a hint. I assume you know how to use other websites than /. Perhaps my assumption was not valid. Do you know what Stanford is?

if someone shows me so called "data" that contradicts everything I know, the first thing is skepticism

So you are saying that your personal beliefs (often called religion) makes any claims based on real data invalid? Do you know what Stanford is?

I suggest you simply fly to japan and visit the evacuated area

It's been four years since I was in Japan last. I would love to go. Not to look at the geography of an area to determine how many people died though. You see, that isn't even remotely possible. So, where does your data (you haven't actually presented any so far) come from? Why would you have better knowledge than the researchers at Stanford?

Here is an article from Stanford on the research. I used something kinda cool called google and input "stanford" and "fukushima". this is what I got.. Magic.

Or melting ice could cause massive algae blooms, pull staggering quantities of carbon from the ocean and perpetuate our 800,000,000 year old oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.

Nah. There can't be any mechanisms in the biosphere to prevent the Earth going Venus. It has been surviving by pure luck all this time until we came along and ruined it.

It's not a matter of opinion. It's common usage.

You remember correctly, people have been doing this for years. I have no idea why TFA calls this "world first bionic eye", perhaps there is something new about their particular method, although it doesn't sound very impressive compared to other options.

Here is a list of some companies producing retinal implants (incl. Bionic Vision from TFA): http://www.upgradeyourbody.com/catalog/bionics/eyes/ At least some of those are already past clinical trials and available commercially.

The latest, greatest breakthrough:
Scientists reverse engineer eye-brain signaling, enabling next generation of implants

More links on retinal implants:
Wikipedia - Retinal implant
1000-electrode implant developed in Stanford
Long-term trials started in Oxford in 2010
Phase II trials of 1500-electrode implant by Retina Implant AG (2011)
Argus II implant goes to market
Bio-Retina 576-pixel implant to start trials in 2013

The Frankencamera might give you an idea what this would be good for, especially this video.

The Frankencamera might give you an idea what this would be good for, especially this video.

The full quote from the article that Miguel "believes that a large portion of the software developers that could have taken Linux to greater heights defected to other platforms, including not only Apple OS X but — more importantly — the web" is very true for me. I used to program Gnome apps but now focus entirely on web app development.

The modern trend is summed up nicely in a lecture by John Ousterhout of TCL fame on web application development at Stanford found at http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=WebApplications. The relevant one here is his first video in which he draws a tombstone on the blackboard and writes "Download Install Binaries RIP" in it and predicts the only applications anyone will be installing this way in the near future will be browsers.

My money is on Prof Ousterhout — Google's documents have already replaced MS Office for me (I work for a company where getting Excel installed on my PC was impossible, but that's no problem now since Google provides a spreadsheet via my browser which is far superior since the files it creates are more securely stored and shareable).

Now all the hassles with different operating systems and GUIs fall away for application developers who can use browsers as their universal canvas. For us Unix old timers, this might sound like an Emacs future (and recal Emacs did spawn Mosaic, the father of Netscape and grandad of Firefox), but it's now reality.

You raise some good points. Here, try this article. Surprisingly it addresses the points in the summary quite well.

I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.

However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

- Source

US foundaton gives Africa countries donations to buy drugs from US pharma companies. They also encouraged South Africa and India to not develop their own generic AIDS drugs, rather buy them at full price from western drug companies. Loans for the payment of such are available at an affordable rate of interest.

Malaria vaccine results face scrutiny.

"New research shows that Intellectual Ventures is tied to at least 1,300 shell companies whose sole purpose is to coerce real companies into buying patent license that they don't want or need. Those who resist the "patent trolls" are dragged into nightmarish lawsuits."

the server carries a verifier for each user, which allows it to authenticate the client but which, if compromised, would not allow the attacker to impersonate the client

Death can be reversible or non reversible.

<face-palm> Sorry, no. Just no. I don't care if you're an MD; words have meaning. If a person's heart stops and you revive him by cardio resuscitation, you are not reanimating a dead person. You are stopping a person from dying. I'll lay heavy odds that you would do the right thing if the patient's heart and breathing stop and the patient loses consciousness, because I have high regard and respect for anyone who has successfully passed through the grueling process of becoming a medical doctor. But I would argue that proper use of terms is particularly important in the field.

Wikipedia: "Death is the cessation or permanent termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism." Cessation; not interruption.

Merriam-Webster.com: "a permanent cessation of all vital functions: the end of life."

Dictionary.com: "the end of life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an organism."

MedicalDictionary.theFreeDictionary.com: "Death is defined as the cessation of all vital functions of the body including the heartbeat, brain activity (including the brain stem), and breathing." Cessation, not interruption.

Euthanasia.procon.org: "the cessation of life; permanent cessation of all vital bodily functions. For legal and medical purposes, the following definition of death has been proposed-the irreversible cessation of all of the following: (1) total cerebral function, usually assessed by EEG as flat-line (2) spontaneous function of the respiratory system, and (3) spontaneous function of the circulatory system..." There are those pesky words again, permanent and irreversible.

The Definition of Death (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy: "According to the organismic definition, death is the irreversible loss of functioning of the organism as a whole (Becker 1975; Bernat, Culver, and Gert 1981)." ... "According to the mainstream whole-brain approach, the human brain plays the crucial role of integrating major bodily functions so only the death of the entire brain is necessary and sufficient for a human being's death (Bernat, Culver, and Gert 1981)." ... "According to the higher-brain standard, human death is the irreversible cessation of the capacity for consciousness...Although no jurisdiction has adopted the higher-brain standard, it enjoys the support of many scholars (see, e.g., Veatch 1975; Engelhardt 1975; Green and Wikler 1980; Gervais 1986; Bartlett and Youngner 1988; Puccetti 1988; Rich 1997; and Baker 2000)." Each of those three definitions shares the necessary component of "irreversible".

I'm sure diversity in doing things instead of single mindedness is nearly always valuable.

Lera Boroditsky's research has come up with results that challenge some basic assumptions in linguistics. One such finding is that rather than language simply expressing thought processes, it shapes mental models of the world.

Here:
"The cohort of Japanese men in the Honolulu Heart Program studies has a life expectancy that is longer than their counterparts in Japan, and Japan has the longest life expectancy of any country in the world."

While it is probably not ready for full-scale deployment, it is technically possible to upgrade our highways to charge cars as they drive. If we perfected this technology and upgraded our road systems to take advantage of it, electric car batteries wouldn't have to be as big as they are now. With smaller batteries, electric cars would immediately become much cheaper as well as lighter and even more efficient.

Even if charging roads don't become a reality, I think people will quickly warm up to electric cars as the prices come down. They are much cheaper to fuel and you can refuel at home. Their engines have fewer moving parts, are more reliable, and more efficient. Electric engines also have great torque and can provide considerable acceleration. Plus, they are not as dependent on a transmission which means they can provide a smoother ride.

I don't expect most families with two cars to have two electric cars in the timeline Musk is talking about, but I would be surprised if one of their two cars wasn't an electric by then. And that alone would bring the percentage of electric cars relatively close to Musk's 50%.

...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.

I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable

In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.

Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/may/money-influence-elections-052112.html

These stanford researches show that there's (usually) a limit to the influence money has over elections themselves.

Things I hope they tackle next:

1. Influence money has over who gets on the ballot
2. Influence money has over elected officials

No, if spending on marketing generates more revenue than spending on R&D then of course they should be doing that. And in an industry with high fixed costs and low variable costs you should expect marketing to get more funding - that's simple math.

Of course a significant portion of that evil marketing and advertising budget is actually subsidizing medication costs for poor people (which shouldn't be necessary of course, but the US health system is broken):

Free samples given to physicians totaled $6.6 billion of retail value, representing 51.9 percent of the drug promotion expenditures.

- http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2003/may/Pharmaceutical.html

I certainly was given samples by a doctor back when I had no job and no medical insurance. I seriously doubt I was in a unique position, or that doctors could find many other uses for such samples.

Note, given that the marginal cost of creating a unit of product is a fraction of the retail value a unit of product (fixed and variable costs again) there's likely some tax advantages to such spending (I'm not an accountant and hence I could be wrong of course) in which case you would expect a high spend in that area and reducing spending in that area wouldn't increase spending in other areas which do not have a tax incentive.