Slashdot Mirror

My $0.02:
Probability Theory by E.T. Jaynes If you want to understand AI you need to read this (several times).
The Elements of Statistical Learning Hastie, Trevor, Tibshirani, Robert, Friedman, Jerome
Elements of Information Theory by Thomas M. Cover, Joy A. Thomas
Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Begino

The earliest instance of computer generated composition is that of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois in 1955-56. Using the Illiac high-speed digital computer, they succeeded in programming basic material and stylistic parameters which resulted in the Illiac Suite (1957). The score of the piece was composed by the computer and then transposed into traditional musical notation for performance by a string quartet.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html

IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest -- one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece -- a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention -- was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ''Emmy'') was genuine Bach.

You can download a literate programming version from Donald Knuth page here. Here is the direct link to the source file. That's much nicer.

You can download a literate programming version from Donald Knuth page here. Here is the direct link to the source file. That's much nicer.

They're working on reducing that number.

Well, you could just Google it but I'll hold your hand:
http://www.ecowatch.com/100-re...
http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
http://energyblog.nationalgeog...
https://www.scientificamerican...
http://energyblog.nationalgeog...
http://www.greenpeace.org/inte...

http://web.stanford.edu/class/sts175/NewFiles/Negroponte.%20Being%20Digital.pdf

That's only a few pages, but it gives you an idea. I had to read Negroponte's book as assigned reading, and I remember he predicted painted-on computer displays. This spray-on touchpad sounds like we're one step closer!

The market has no regret... some agents will, others won't.

That would be regret in the game theoretical sense. The regret of a strategy is the best payoff you could get minus the best you got; the "opportunity cost". There's an example here.

Since the market is based on individual predictors, the best it can do is somehow knowing the best predictor at each instant. That would correspond to zero regret. Any algorithm based on experts advice would have a regret greater than or equal to zero, even though it may not have an "emotional" regret.

... You have stupid companies willing to risk money on betting prediction AI, which is nowhere near even as good as what a person and a spreadsheet can do. Both of these things make uninformed people start to think, oh, AI is right around the corner. It's not. We are a century away from hard AI, if ever.

I'm an ML researcher, so I'm totally with you on the overall sentiment. We don't even know the right questions to ask, let along solve, in hard AI. However, the notion that a prediction AI is nowhere near as good as what a person can do is now behind us for a lot of tasks and what's happening now is deployment. For instance, a number of trained systems are better than humans at diagnosing radiology results:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/...

Strong AI is going to be garbage for a while, but whatever the name, machine learning doesn't have to be hard AI to change a lot our everyday lives.

A few years ago my nieces were really interested in this: http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

We did the image exercises. I started off doing most of the typing with their input, then they did some on their own. The cool thing with this library is you can go way off on a tangent. We made stripes of across some of the images for instance.

For what it's worth, my wife participated in an outreach program through her work to expose kids to programming. They sent a team to a school and each employee took a group of kids and did a different project. I suggested this one, which my wife customized a bit. It was by far the most popular project with the kids (I think they were 6th and 7th graders). Graphics are cool, especially the green-screen exercises.

Sorry Bram, but you are missing the point. Hashing is used in bitcoin precisely because it is useless. It can't be faked, and it can't be stored for later. It is an irrevocable commitment right now.

I wish you luck with monetizing distributed storage, or decentralized distribution, or whatever your new project ends up as. But the design of bitcoin is not a programming challenge for you to solve. It is a carefully interlocked design, made by someone (or some people) who has (or have) a far beyond average understanding of money and cryptography. Many people with less insight have attempted to "improve" things, and all have failed.

Well, I'm not defending Bram on his quest, but I would say that based on this presentation at least he seems to know enough to know that he doesn't know how to do it yet (which is one step above those that don't even know what they don't know yet)...

It all may be a failure in the end, but at least there is a germ of an idea in there (which is more than I can say for most snake oil).

The one on the "hype train" is you and only you.

Everyone who has the slightest grasp about the topci knows: artificial Neural Networks where invented some 70 years ago. So .... there goes your idotic idea of a hype.

Then again: while artificial neural networks obviously don't work like natural morons (oops) the way how they simulate their behaviour is in a mathematical sense: close enough.

As we all know you are super goood in insulting fellow /. ers but obviously completely incompetent in using google and educating your self, I give you two simple links:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

However I'm not confident, that you can read such complicated stuff.

When you start off with your head up your ass, you can only spout the bullshit that's collected in your mouth,

1 - the president doesn't have the authority to repeal an act, such as the Patriot Act....congress does; you know, like the republican house that did absolutely nothing while Obama was in office. You too fucking stupid to remember that far back?

2 - https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.bloomberg.com/poli...
http://www.rollcall.com/news/r...
I mean seriously, how fucking stupid do you have to be to not see EVERY damn news article about Gitmo closing had republicans blocking Obama from doing it? Are you seriously that fucking stupid, or is the problem you just can't fucking read?

3 - this just sounds like you being a typical whiny ass republican dipshit who can only spout catchwords they here coming out of some other republicans ass.

4 - just quit being a lying bitch. If you're in a red state that didn't expanded medicare, the problem is your fucking ideologically driven cocksucking republicans who'd rather see people die than get medical help.

5 - http://abcnews.go.com/Politics... You're just a fucking stupid parrot.

6 - have to say, i can't find this rabid-cocksucking-republican talking point anywhere, so i have to assume you're simply full of shit like all the other republicans conspiracy theory fuckwads. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov... for reading not tied to some cocksucking republican lying bitch. 7 - here you're just full of shit. opinions are like assholes... like you. Obama didn't obfuscate government transparency more than any other president before him, although VP Darth Cheney probably did much worse without cocksuckers like you saying anything about it. Now you have the worthless twat Trump in office, who appears to be bought and paid for by Russia, and a bunch of co-conspirator republican traitors who won't hold him accountable. Fucking republicans are what's wrong in this country.... traitors, liars, and all around pieces of shit.

You're talking about a very common homework problem in almost every introduction to quantum classes. THose same quantum classes should have taught to the limitations of the approximation. https://web.stanford.edu/group... Just go ahead and skip to slides on experimental error. Perturbation Theory gives you a nearly about a 2% error from experimental values even for the simplest properties of the simplest systems. This is not convincing evidence that reality can be modeled using simple differential equations on classical computers.

(Interestingly enough, it is logically possible for both sides of a contradiction to be false, but not for both sides to be true.)

Seems you are unaware of the existence of paraconsistent logic.

Data from the Chernobyl incident:

No deleterious effects of radiation could be observed in locations where radiological doses were less than or equal to 5 rad/year. Where doses between 5 and 400 rad/year were received, radiation effects were 'ecologically masked,' meaning that adverse effects on individual organisms were observed but no changes in populations or ecosystems occurred. Where doses were >400 rad/year, damaging effects on populations and communities occurred.

Cited source

Average yearly (300 mars days) radiation levels GCR dose rate at Gale Crater on Mars: .21 mGy*, (.021 rem) per day, or (365 * .021 to account for our reference which is per earth year) = ~7.6 rem/earthYear.

*Cited source

Handy conversion calculator

So yeah, if I put all that together properly, not as much of an issue as I'd thought at all.

I know "fake news" is getting us all worked up right now, but

"...fake news did not change the result 2016 presidential election, according to a study by researchers at Stanford and New York University released Thursday. ..."

Story: http://thehill.com/homenews/me...

Study: https://web.stanford.edu/~gent...

Like the "Russia hacked the election" story the original threat being discussed was specifically hacking of electronic voting machines. When that was proved ridiculous, the phrase was re-framed to something more vague, saying that Russia "manipulated" the results by media...you know, exactly like the Martin Sheen "dump Trump" video attempted to do (and failed). https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And do you have any proof that walmart pays less to their floor workers than those local stores ever paid? Oh that's right, you don't, because it's just not true:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/i...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

Contrary to widespread belief, big-box stores and chains have increased wages in the retail sector as they have spread, according to “Do Large Modern Retailers Pay Premium Wages?” (NBER Working Paper No. 20313). Retail wages rise markedly with the size of the chain and the individual store, according to the study by Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Francine Lafontaine and Kathryn Shaw. As retail chains’ share of establishments has risen from one-fifth in 1963 to more than one-third by 2000, the number of jobs that pay better than traditional mom-and-pop stores has proliferated.

Speak of low skilled, you might try getting an education yourself before spewing that tired old urban myth tripe. Or better yet, at least try to examine all of the urban myths you hear with a critical eye rather than just accepting them as blind fact just because it's the cool thing to do, and do a little more research.

Remember that inside places like Jupiter and brown dwarfs, the percentage of deuterium is very low, compared to the percentage of ordinary hydrogen. This makes it quite rare for two deuterons to randomly approach each other --but in pure metallic deuterium, that fact is no longer valid. Also, it is not the density that matters (per the hypothesis); it is the fact that the electrons are no longer in fixed "orbits" when hydrogen exists in the metallic state. The electrons are loose, forming a "conduction band", and are free to approach hydrogen nuclei arbitrarily closely (because they are not in fixed orbits) This means electrons can get in-between two deuterons that happen to be randomly approaching each other, no matter how closely the deuterons approach each other, and cancel out their mutual repulsion, similar to what muons do in the phenomenon called "muon catalyzed fusion" (the muons are in orbit, but because they have 206 times the mass of electrons, they orbit 206 times closer to the nucleus than electrons, which allows separate deuterons to get close enough to fuse). Electron-catalyzed fusion cannot possibly work when the electrons are in fixed orbits, but in metallic deuterium, they won't be in fixed orbits.

It was about users being able to go into a mode indicating they wanted to receive compressed video at lower resolutions in exchange for not having it apply to their cap, (or in some cases, using their allotment less quickly). The "deals" made with content providers were contractual agreements, available to every content provider, even the tiniest of startups, at no cost. The agreement with the providers was either 1: do nothing, and if we notice you streaming HD video to a binge-on user, we'll try to compress/reduce it; but user still pays normal data rates. 2: work with us so we can know when data you serve up is streaming video, then we'll compress/reduce it when sending it to Binge-on users, and user gets free bandwidth. 3: Compress/reduce the video yourself, work with us so we can know when you're sending compressed video to binge-on users, and promise that you'll only send decent quality compressed video with binge-on users; and user gets free bandwidth 4: let us know you're opting out and that we shouldn't try to compress your data, regardless of the user requesting video being compressed by nature of being in binge-on mode.

You gave a much better description than I did

Arguably, there are problems with this offer, but it's far from the preferential-treatment anti-competitive deals that really get people up in arms about net-neutrality.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/d...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/s...

I believe there is even a few Slashdot article about it as well.

>That's not really true any longer, especially when it comes to computing, IT, and so forth. It's industry that's responsible for pretty much all of the innovation in these fields, and it has been this way since the 1980s.

This is plain wrong.

> None of the widely used programming languages today came out of academia. C and C++ came from industry research labs

The Ph.D dissertation title of Dennis Ritchie (1968) was "Program Structure and Computational Complexity". He developed C between 1969 and 1973. The basic bricks needed to create this language were clearly from academia.

Bjarne Stroustrup got a Ph.D. in computer science (1979). He began developing C++ in 1978 (then called "C with Classes"). And started to work in 1979 for Bell labs.

Most of the languages you are talking about were deeply rooted in concepts invented by academia. Is that really surprising that academia does not industrialize a language? The academia role is not to industrialize but to invent the basic bricks that industries will use.

>Another example is AI. Look how long it stagnated in academia. It wasn't until recently when the computing industry started working with it that it really took off and became useful.

No, it has not. You are just not aware of it. One of the reference book about AI (Most of the academics are no more using this terminology) by expert in the domain is "The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction" by Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author). Those guys are academics and if you check the references, you will see they refer nearly exclusively to academics.

The academics are the one inventing. Please stop, mapping your expectation to reality. Reality always win.

>That's not really true any longer, especially when it comes to computing, IT, and so forth. It's industry that's responsible for pretty much all of the innovation in these fields, and it has been this way since the 1980s.

This is plain wrong.

> None of the widely used programming languages today came out of academia. C and C++ came from industry research labs

The Ph.D dissertation title of Dennis Ritchie (1968) was "Program Structure and Computational Complexity". He developed C between 1969 and 1973. The basic bricks needed to create this language were clearly from academia.

Bjarne Stroustrup got a Ph.D. in computer science (1979). He began developing C++ in 1978 (then called "C with Classes"). And started to work in 1979 for Bell labs.

Most of the languages you are talking about were deeply rooted in concepts invented by academia. Is that really surprising that academia does not industrialize a language? The academia role is not to industrialize but to invent the basic bricks that industries will use.

>Another example is AI. Look how long it stagnated in academia. It wasn't until recently when the computing industry started working with it that it really took off and became useful.

No, it has not. You are just not aware of it. One of the reference book about AI (Most of the academics are no more using this terminology) by expert in the domain is "The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction" by Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author). Those guys are academics and if you check the references, you will see they refer nearly exclusively to academics.

The academics are the one inventing. Please stop, mapping your expectation to reality. Reality always win.

>That's not really true any longer, especially when it comes to computing, IT, and so forth. It's industry that's responsible for pretty much all of the innovation in these fields, and it has been this way since the 1980s.

This is plain wrong.

> None of the widely used programming languages today came out of academia. C and C++ came from industry research labs

The Ph.D dissertation title of Dennis Ritchie (1968) was "Program Structure and Computational Complexity". He developed C between 1969 and 1973. The basic bricks needed to create this language were clearly from academia.

Bjarne Stroustrup got a Ph.D. in computer science (1979). He began developing C++ in 1978 (then called "C with Classes"). And started to work in 1979 for Bell labs.

Most of the languages you are talking about were deeply rooted in concepts invented by academia. Is that really surprising that academia does not industrialize a language? The academia role is not to industrialize but to invent the basic bricks that industries will use.

>Another example is AI. Look how long it stagnated in academia. It wasn't until recently when the computing industry started working with it that it really took off and became useful.

No, it has not. You are just not aware of it. One of the reference book about AI (Most of the academics are no more using this terminology) by expert in the domain is "The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction" by Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author). Those guys are academics and if you check the references, you will see they refer nearly exclusively to academics.

The academics are the one inventing. Please stop, mapping your expectation to reality. Reality always win.

They are underperforming compared to public schools in other states, but are doing better than public schools in Michigan, which is the better comparison. Students are making up for previous deficits faster in Michigan charter schools than they are in Michigan public schools. Moreover, DeVos has been working on introducing more regulations and oversight of charter schools, which was one of the problems with her earlier work.

This isn't to say I support her, just that charter schools in MI are, in fact, doing better than you said.

Here's a reference for what I said. If the two definitions were different since they were coined, as you say, then when and why did they merge? (I don't necessarily expect you to know the answer to this, but an answer should exist.)

The Black's citation is interesting. I tried looking up a few other controversial words: apparently marriage is indeed between a man and a woman. Didn't know that. Apparently an infant is anyone under twenty-one years of age... Rape requires force, and abortion after the point of viability is not abortion at all. (Though it's also explicitly not murder. I couldn't figure out what it is, though the dictionary has a definition for something called foeticide which applies only if the abortion is illegal.)

Still, you made your point. I'd like to know how Black's comes up with these definitions, and what exactly they mean in a legal context. I have no legal training though. Seems like something I would enjoy.

Logical Fallacy -- Changing the Subject: Attacking the Person

Logical Fallacy -- Changing the Subject: Attacking the Person.

Some more background information that was posted by Stanford last April
http://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/27/robotic-diver-recovers-treasures/.
IMO contains most the the details in TFA mentioned here.

5.2 million dollars sounds like a lot, would be curious to see how the price would go down over time...

I'd be interested to see how it performs against piezoelectric roads, which have a far lower price point: http://large.stanford.edu/cour... Also, unless the location is always sunny, some days it may barely generate any power at all? So depending on what performs better, it seems to me that a piezoelectric road would generate far more electricity on a busy street.

Yeah sure. I'll bet this experiment is about 99 percent testing the road surface instead of getting maximum bang for the buck out of the solar power. Also, since its powering street lamps, I suspect that there might be a battery or two in the loop as well, since the lights will be on during the night, when the sun isn't in the right place.

Now between us chachalacas, I doubt that solar roadways will be all that great for a long time. But I also remember in 1977 that Solar power from Crystalline silicon was . 76 per watt, and in 2015, it was .30 per watt. So I won't discount roadway solar yet. Let them do the experiments.

Yes, physical size allows for larger cranial volume which is directly linked to intelligence across all primates.

Is it? You do not cite anything to support this claim... At best, the notion is controversial...

This directly allows for greater intelligence later.

So, whales are smarter than us? Men — smarter than women?

The doubling was for bugs in TeX. Errata for TAoCP stayed at a fixed price, and he has written hundreds. If those had doubled each time, he'd be bankrupt.

Knuth is giving his annual Christmas lecture on Thursday, Dec 8, 2016, at 6:00 pm PST in the Huang Engineering Center's NVIDIA Auditorium. It will be webcast. See: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford... All of the previous lectures are online.

Volume one was my textbook for Algorithms many, many years ago, so I read it. I read volumes two and three when they first came out. I read some of the bits of volume four A. When I read 1-3, they were the best or only sources of their content. One of the key features is the use of assembly language for a mythical computer (later revised to be more RISC-like). i wrote an interpreter for MIX for my computer architecture class. Possible programming languages in the 1960s were FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL-60, IBM's PL/I, and IBM-s APL, and compilers did not optimize. The obvious real computer architecture to use was the original IBM 360 instructions set (Principles of Operation). Choosing any one of those would obsolete the books in five to ten years after publication.

My fantasy is to publish the draft of the original two volume Art of Computer Programming, started in 1962. When he started rewriting it, he planned for seven volumes, which are outlined on the end papers of the published volumes. The two volume original is a snapshot of Computer Science in the early 1960's.

a) you reveal your ignorance of agriculture. suffice to say, land isn't arable simply because of air temperatures. b) there is much evidence to the contrary. many common crop plants, in the face of higher temperatures or higher CO2 amounts, lose their agricultural usefulness. among the problems: -become toxic -don't grow -become more easily infested by pests

I have one critique here. Plant growth is increased by CO2 concentration, all else being equal. Dunno if you have access to journals, but there's data in the free part of this paper:

the growth stimulation of 156 plant species was found to be on average 37% http://link.springer.com/artic...

There's one recent study which was heavily publicized that found that CO2 concentration plus nitrogen level changes plus temperature changes (basically trying to fully replicate predicted post-warming conditions) decreased plantgrowth, and the headlines were frequently something like "High carbon dioxide levels can retard plant growth" http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02...

Headlines like that are bullshit; simulated post-warming environments can retard plant growth, not CO2 levels alone.

Actually, just to answer myself and respond to some valid criticisms below, I shouldn't have said 'low carbon', a better description might have been 'less polluted', which would have included 'low carbon'. Politicians tend to fix on and sell one or very few things, they are value monists: http://plato.stanford.edu/entr... whereas it's probably more useful to use a basket of measures, be pluralistic.

Seriously? He gave you the author and the topic, and you couldn't take 10 seconds with google?

CORRECTIONS TO THE MANN et. al. (1998) PROXY DATA BASE AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SERIES

Everything I've read and heard on the recent earthquakes is that re-injection of spent water is as likely if not more likely the culprit than the actual extraction, particularly at high pressure near faults: http://news.stanford.edu/2015/...

Have a read of this paper, it explains why the African American vernacular isn't just English with mistakes.

Kind of like how American English isn't just English with mistakes.

Citation? and not some ridiculous skewed apple research, real research please.

That wasn't "ridiculously skewed Apple research". In fact, some very high-up on the original Mac team, most notably Jef Raskin, actually wanted a VERY multi-button mouse (I think 5 was what he wanted); so that pretty much negates any "corporate bias".

I don't have time to comb through a bunch of research; but the answer is in here. Search for "button" on that page.

Overview: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/n...

The conclusion - men are pigs. From the article, the first and foremost reason : Overt sexism, unwanted attention and sexual harassment create hostile working conditions.

The biggest problem in our workplace between men and women was the men were concerned that by saying the wrong thing, they were going to be fired. So communications with women were very guarded. That certainly isn't a friendly situation, but completely understandable. If you don't have a reason to talk to someone who can have you fired, you probably won't.

A lack of role models for women in technical fields is discouraging. "When faculty members are looking for the next person to win a Turing Award, which is computer science's Nobel Prize, they tend to look for people like the last ones who won such awards. This usually involves looking in the mirror,” Roberts said.

Seriously? a lack of women in technical role models? Here's 90 of them http://womenshistory.about.com... Here's 90 of them http://discovermagazine.com/20...

http://www.mnn.com/leaderboard... Some random ted talks, all by female scientists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And if you want yound ladies to have especially physically attractive role models there's always : https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/p... a physicist/Astronomer who manages to not look like the stereotype egghead.

So all I have to say, if Herr Professor hasn't found female role models to present to his students, well - that is his fault not menarepigs

His study is the typical "women are weak" model, where any negativity causes tehm to seek other careers, which presumably have no sexism and all men are perfect gentlemen. He can rail on about his women's school model for a million years, but it won't cure the problem.

Study on one aspect: https://depts.washington.edu/s...

So the problem appears that if a female encounters any stereotype that she disagrees with, it completely destroys her interest.

Movie: http://www.bigdreammovement.co...

I should come up with a list of links to copy/paste, that lot was just a quick Google search.

So - does this mean that there was something wrong with any woman who did not allow herself to be intimidated out of a science career that she was passionate about, but the passion was killed by anyone that didn't give her positivity?

I don't know specifically

Overview: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/n...

Study on one aspect: https://depts.washington.edu/s...

Movie: http://www.bigdreammovement.co...

I should come up with a list of links to copy/paste, that lot was just a quick Google search.

Going great, Soviet Union was destroyed, Central Europe was freed, Taliban was destroyed, what you fail to realize is that the Taliban were created by Pakistan, the US merely provided the funding. Of course, it's all the fault of the Shah of Iran abdicating and creating the groundswell of radical Islam extremists. Afghans are safer now than they were 20 years ago.

https://web.stanford.edu/class...

By the way, Solar is a net gain ALREADY

Your IV example is not a good example, that is actually something people are working on, here some quick list of some links:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://web.stanford.edu/group...

http://www.yissum.co.il/techno...

> Yeah, they stole the GUI/mouse from PARC

So? PARC didn't invent it either. They got it from Stanford.

RIP Douglas Engelbart. :(

"He was running Apple when I met him, but he was interested in the Macintosh at every level. It seemed to me that he was a person capable of making meaningful contributions in hardware, software, advertising, icons, fonts. Sure, he's a well-known and controversial figure, but I had a lot of respect for him because I never knew anybody who had such a broad band of ability to contribute good ideas in many realms. Not that every single idea was The Idea, or the best idea, or even good, or that he wouldn't listen to others. I think he definitely has a style of pushing back and being critical, to push you to see if you had explored every option. I remember him as great to work with, being excited over things that were new that we had done that we could show him, and it being a very motivating factor, because when he's happy and pleased with an idea he can make you feel great."

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interviews/kare/jobs.html

passwords .. should be salted and hashed on the client.

Nobody does that. There are some systems that try to avoid sending a password over the wire (e.g. SRP), but they aren't widely implemented.

Most of the time, we depend on https to keep passwords secure.

Another fact: Big animals were disproportionately exterminated in all mass extinctions.

Another fact: you're completely wrong!

"The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species -- called "genera." And they found that increases in an organism's body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period -- but that this was not the case in the Earth's distant past.

Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal. "The extreme bias against large-bodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs," the researchers write."

I've provided a citation for my fact, now feel free to do so for yours, rather than declaring it one by fiat.

Fair use is fair use. It has nothing to do with competing.

This page and this page seem to disagree.

The lawyer is confusing that with trademark law, and probably should be disbarred for being either completely obtuse and ignorant of the law she claims to know, or disbarred for being a majorly disingenuous douchebag and outright lying.

Somebody is confused, but I don't think it's that lawyer.

an internal combustion engine - as used in a petrol-driven vehicle - gets around 20% efficiency

Actually, the engines themselves are 30% to 40% efficient on modern gasoline-powered cars. There are some additional losses in the transmission, which is something like 95 to 98% efficient. Running outside the optimal load range also makes the engine a lot less efficient, but that's only relevant in stop-and-go traffic, and hybrid electric systems largely solve the issue. Even non-hybrid cars do a lot better in this respect than they used to, by automatically stopping and starting the engine at lights, and having more gears.

The efficiency of the complete drivetrain of a new ICE vehicle is 20% (standard) to 35% (efficient hybrid) for stop-and-go, and considerably better on the highway.

That's 6.189km per kWh, or about 162 grams of carbon dioxide of emissions - using worst case carbon generation - per km travelled.

Electric cars aren't 100% efficient, either; total up the losses in charging and discharging (86% efficient), power conversion (97%), and the motor(s) themselves (91%), and the total efficiency of the drive train is more like 76%.

An electric car? The infrastructure is already in place; there is negligible marginal cost in getting the power from the plant to the car.

That's not true. Even in the USA, grid transmission is only about 94% efficient. (It's much worse in developing countries; for India it's estimated at 70%. The huge difference is because building and maintaining reliable, efficient power transmission and distribution is not cheap, and some places are too poor to do it well.)

So best case, with a diesel S-class vehicle, you're about one third better than the Model S; worst case (5+ litre petrol engine), you're 50% worse.

We must adjust your 162 g/km estimate upward by 40% to account for the EV inefficiencies that you ignored, which gives us a revised estimate of 227 g/km - worse than all but the most over-powered of the four Mercedes models found in the document that you linked.

Another factor to consider as well is the cost of transporting the fuel: trucks have to carry that fuel (diesel, petrol, etc.) to the station, and you have to drive to the station to refuel.

You can't pretend this is a useful or fair comparison if you only consider the supply chain for the contents of the ICE car's gas tank, and ignore everything else. Mining and moving coal has a substantial environmental and economic impact as well. So does mining Lithium for batteries, or refining and doping Silicon for solar panels, etc.

There are really only two reasonable ways to estimate the true environmental impact of a product:
1) Start from nothing but labour and raw natural resources (think minerals still in the ground, not steel) and work your way up every stage of the production, supply, and maintenance chain - you can't assume trains are moving coal, until you've figured out the full impact of making and running trains from scratch.
2) Or, assume that the selling price of an item already accounts for its environmental impact (partially true).

(1) is probably more accurate, but if you're going to do it you need to do it for everything, or at least apply

He's actually more subtle than that most of the time, which is what makes him such an asshat. He uses tactics like criticising African American vernacular as "wrong" and uneducated, when it definitely isn't. He become quite a pro.