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According to the wiki page, it just selects canned responses from its database. I think this approach just gets you garbage, or at the very least is a dead-end in trying to beat the Turing test.

The best Turing Test is probably the Loebner Prize and at least the contestants seem much better than Cleverbot. There's an example conversation from Suzette (the latest winner) here. (But it's hard to tell if that is typical or simply a lucky exchange for the computer.) But anyway, as is clear from this interesting story written by a contestant about the Loebner prize, bots are no where near winning that version of the Turing test, as long as the humans are paying attention.

Lies, Lies, and Damnable Lies. It is lies like these that give life to the fallacious arguments that Americans are grossly overpaid.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/how-much-would-the-ipad-2-cost-if-it-were-made-in-the-us-about-1-140/238508/

Average U.S. manufacturing/mining/construction compensation is $32.53/hour as of December, according to the BLS. Research firm iSuppli estimates the iPad 2 costs $10 to manufacture, which - using the $1.11/hour rate - works out to about 9 hours each to complete. If assembly and manufacture took the same amount of time in the U.S. as it does in China (another possibly unrealistic assumption), the cost of making each iPad 2 comes out to $292.77!

        Again, according to iSupply, the material cost for the 32gb iPad 2 WiFi + 3g - which sells for $729 - is about $325, or $335 including labor, which puts Apple's gross margin (ex shipping/handling) at 54%. Just using the simple math above, if the iPad 2 was made in the U.S it would cost $617.77, bringing Apple's gross margin down to 15.25%! Of course, Apple is not in the business of self-immolation, and given their relatively substantial pricing power, they could just make the iPad 2 more expensive, let's say, increasing the price to the point where their gross margins stayed intact, from $729 to $1,144.02!

When the heck did this expectation creep into peoples brains that any new social network must be the ultimate vehicle for social justice for all the oppressed people of the world

When people started to get the idea that our collective online behaviour should resemble our real-life behaviour.

In the past, bars and taverns, public parks, private halls and countless other meeting places were commonly used to organise groups for all kinds of purposes from politics to sports. Now, it's true that the landlord had the right to object to what you talked about, but the vast majority didn't. More to the point, if they recorded everything each person said, stored it in perpetuity and shared with with the authorities... well, we had names for people like that.

Now Google is saying one and all are welcome, that they'll make it easier to stay in touch with all of your friends, but if you're from Iran, or if you've been stalked, or if you are just a little drunk and careless, then caveat scriptor.

Yes, that's their right. Nobody is denying that. But just because they can do something doesn't mean they should, or that they're right to do it. Google keeps trying to tell people that what they're doing is uncontroversial, but that's simply not true. Google isn't keeping to 'real life' standards concerning names, they're creating an entirely unprecedented level of exposure for everyone who uses their service:

There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don't become part of the searchable Internet.

Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can't just say, "Down with the government," with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity.

So can we please stop pretending there's nothing unusual happening here? You're welcome to ridicule those who object, but at least have the courtesy to accept that this is not just empty whinging. People have legitimate concerns and criticisms here.

Absolutely. For another perspective, look here.

It might even be more complicated that you think.

"The Pharaoh was not God."

First, you wrote an interesting mix of things in your reply, so thanks. On this point,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_religion#Divine_pharaoh
"Egyptologists have long debated the degree to which the pharaoh was considered a god. It seems most likely that the Egyptians viewed royal authority itself as a divine force. Therefore, although the Egyptians recognized that the pharaoh was human and subject to human weakness, they simultaneously viewed him as a god, because the divine power of kingship was incarnate in him. He therefore acted as intermediary between Egypt's people and the gods.[25]"

Today, "The Market" is often seen as "God" in the USA, as suggested by Harvey Cox, Harvard theologian:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/

My point on hunters/gatherers is that we might soon have technology that lets people with access to land use solar panels to collect power for 3D printers that can print more solar panels and 3D printers, along with mining robots and agricultural robots. So, what do you call that lifestyle? See also Marshall Brain's Manna story.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We don't need "money" to buy food if we have the land and time and tools to grow it ourselves, or others give it to us (as we give them things), or if the government plans well to produce enough food and distribute it to those who need it, or if, sadly, people feel compelled to steal it (although theft is defined differently in different places, like if deer are "the kings" or not or if wild berries can be picked by anyone on undeveloped property). Those are all alternative ways people get food.

That is why I suggest there have always been five interwoven economies, of which exchange is only one (the others being subsistence, gift, planned, and theft):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Right now, in our society, exchange is dominant, though it is coupled with a growing rich/poor divide and flat real wages for 30+ years (despite productivity doubling or tripling during that time with the extra value just going to the top 1%). The system is failing in part because capitalism does not work if wealth is too concentrated. The wealthy tend to pull their money out of the real economy and put it in the "casino" economy of stuff like currency speculation, r into government bonds that finance wars, or even just by buying up all the land speculatively from other and keeping it idle etc..

I agree with you on the dysfunctional make-work aspects of our society, and explored that here, outlining many "transactions of decline" that can be used to create jobs, war being one of those transactions of decline, but others include endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanded prisons, increased sickness, and other things:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Or we can try to move beyond "work"; some ideas on that by others:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHTrwCstcM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ArkJmUOIqM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neNwAZSBMb0

I don't think v

"That post was made by Montgomery Scott when they came for the whales."

Either that or it was made by someone in many other cultures and many other times, before "the market" was enshrined as "God"; the following is by a Harvard theologian:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
    Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

Apparently there is some concern that Treasury may not be able to prioritize payments (this article says legal reasons, but I saw another yesterday that said there's no technical setup for letting them choose which cheques are run and which aren't).

But yes, there is a difference between hitting the debt limit and defaulting. Hitting the debt limit says "I'm not going to borrow any more money", while defaulting is reneging on existing agreements to pay back already-borrowed funds.

No, they weren't. The projected unemployment rate was 8.8% without stimulus and just under 8% with stimulus, with a footnote that some private forecasters said it would get as high as 11%. There are numerous other sources for that report, that was the administrations take on it, and their model was clearly crap one way or another since the actual unemployement rate with stimulus was higher than their models allowed for without it. There is no actual evidence that the stimulus decreased unemployement (it may have provably saved a few specific jobs, but those could have come at the expense of others). Politifact continues to use numbers from the CBO, which are useless for actually proving that jobs are saved, if for no other reason than they use the same model that was proven wrong by reality already.

Yes it is, likely it's worse, because even Masters is not what it used to be when education counted.

We had these talks already here, haven't we?

The culprit is the fact that government provides loans to anybody who wants them, the education system is aimed at eating up those loans and spitting the students out with huge debt and nothing to show for it, as the students are convinced by the system that they need a degree to get ANY job, never mind a job in their profession, because everybody is getting a degree. The money is being transfered from the tax payers/inflation via printing to the colleges, be they public or private, and the results of-course are rising prices for education and worsening of standards, as nobody is allowed to fail, people are graded on a curve, because a failing student only means that the college will make less money but the result of either passing or failing is pretty much the same, nothing of value is really taught anyway.

The problem is that nobody actually cares about the education itself, because it doesn't matter if you know anything or not, we have just discussed the reasons for that here as well, haven't we?

Who cares what you actually learn there if all you are concerned with is getting any degree just to get any job, so people go for the easiest subjects and in the process they accrue somewhat of mortgage size debts, while not learning anything useful there either. So this is inflation of the education process and it's happening because there are moral hazards created by the government with the loans and because there are no jobs anyway, the government is pushing all the manufacturing out of the West by causing capital flight by regulations/taxes, etc. The students stay in school much longer, accruing much more debt because they are scared of coming out into the real world, because obviously there are no jobs.

At some point some of them have to come out, but with the education they have many find that their next option is to go through another school, to take up law and to become a lawyer, so this is another problem created by the system - too many lawyers, because so many students are switching to that, thinking that this is the next possible step for them from their sociology major. Of-course they won't go into hard stuff, sciences, engineering, who blames them, there is no demand!

Just to begin with, on your point on putting in so many hours, even ignoring how the people you cite in finance are often playing a zero sum game with each other and other people's money ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/25/110725fa_fact_cassidy ) that may add little social value overall, and 70% of what most doctors do is useless to harmful ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/ ), consider the law of diminishing returns on overwork:
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork: Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
"Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life," European social democracy -- particularly Germany's-- offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.
Salon spoke to Geoghegan over the phone about Germany's luxurious worker benefits, our own dysfunctional attitudes towards work, and how we can make our lives more like theirs. ...
We don't have any material value of leisure time, which is extremely valuable to people. We don't have any way of valuing what these European public goods are really worth. You know, it's 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it's zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I'd rather go to school at Humboldt.
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It's a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. It's why the collapse here is going to take a much more serious long-term toll in this country than in the decades ahead."

Someone speaking from a German point of view might suggest that if you have to work more than 40 hours a week, either you or your organization are not very competent, and if that much work did indeed need to be done, it would probably be better socially if it was done by

".. because those quacks peddling death in a pill ARE using coercion and violence. It's called "Take my pill or you are going to die. I guarantee this pill will let you live. Nothing else can save you." And that's what their sales pitches boil down to."

Are you talking about the conventional practicioners or the alternative ones?

"The Triumph of New-Age Medicine"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/
"Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care -- and they're trying to learn from it. ... The list of much-hyped and in some cases heavily prescribed drugs that have failed to do much to combat complex diseases, while presenting a real risk of horrific side effects, is a long one, including Avastin for cancer (blood clots, heart failure, and bowel perforation), Avandia for diabetes (heart attacks), and torcetrapib for heart disease (death). In many cases, the drugs used to treat the most-serious cancers add mere months to patients' lives, often at significant cost to quality of life. ... "

And quoting Marcia Angell:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. [Marcia Angell]"

Vitamin D, periodic fasting, and eating a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help prevent cancer, but it is harder to deal with cancer in those ways when you already have it (though they can sometimes still help). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. John Cannell for more information with references.

But it also seems like, as above, some (not all) mainstream practices for cancer really are pointless (but profitable).

My mother died of colon cancer (as part of her situation where she also had dementia). A surgeon pushed us into doing an operation for her cancer that I really regret as the testing, hospitalization and recovery process put her through a lot of trauma and did her no real good. A good thing to do with my anger, both at that surgeon and at myself for being persuaded by him, is to tell others how to have a good chance of preventing cancer, and a very much smaller chance at treating it with good nutrition, vitamin D, and sometimes fasting. I even just twittered something on that @ Hugo Chavez (with links to those references for Fuhrman and Cannell):
    http://twitter.com/#!/pdfernhout/status/95159429871321090

Cancer is a horrible disease, and anger about it is common. Like Mr. Fred Rogers might say, all feelings are legitimate, it's what we do with them that matters. I hope you can find something positive and constructive to do with your anger about cancer and those who take advantage of people suffering from it, whoever those people are.

... parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong. ... Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life.

On a similar note, the Atlantic recently ran this article about how
coddling children robs them of an important part of childhood.

When a parent says something like that they want their child to "just be a kid for one more year," that's just selfishness on their part. It isn't about letting the kid enjoy childhood, its about the parent holding their child's development back in order for the parent to take pleasure in the kid's innocence.

While it makes me smile too. I just hope this doesn't give an excuse to deflect the problem, and consume more resources tracking the LulzSec group instead of proper investigation of the actual News Corp.

I mean, it's not that they aren't trying to look like the victims instead of the perpetrators

Read this. Seems relevant.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/create-a-special-job-credit-for-the-long-term-unemployed/241989/

Employers would rather hire someone who already has a job, and because so few jobs are being created, they have plenty of those people to choose from. Nor are they entirely irrational. Research shows that long-term unemployment takes a toll on skills, industry knowledge, and psychological well-being--what economists call "human capital".

It depends mostly on how much cruelty is involved in the production. This doesn't look like much cruelty so it's theoretically not much of a problem. For me at least, there is a gross-out factor that's not part of the philosophy of being vegetarian or vegan. So I don't know what I personally would do.

Another example is free-range eggs. Harvesting eggs in this manner removes the cruelty inherent in most egg production. However, I was raised not eating eggs and still would never eat free-range eggs. That's the gross-out factor, which has no rational basis.

If you're actually interested in the thinking behind vegetarians and vegans, read this review of The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I think you picked up an an article that was subsequently corrected:

http://blogs.forbes.com/energysource/2010/04/07/exxon-says-it-does-pay-u-s-income-taxes/

Oh and by the way, they employed over 100,000 people that paid taxes as well.

You might also want to look at this about GE:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/did-ge-really-pay-no-us-taxes-in-2010/73178/

They had huge losses in the GE Capitol division and the losses washed out their profits of the other divisions. What is so hard to understand about this?

apparently copying books by hand builds character and appreciation

Funny coincidence: shortly after I read that, I saw an article in The Atlantic this very month arguing that Handwriting Builds Character.

*facepalm*

Considering that one of the two favorite candidate of the Tea Party participants is Herman Caine,

And considering he said he would want any muslim person in his administration, and only muslims, to take a loyalty oath, that says all you need to know about him and the Tea Party.

For reference

Of course he retracted his statement, two months later, but he said what he said so obviously he means it.

Three replies, yet they all argue against straw men and fail to address what I actually said. I read another book review today, in the Atlantic, by Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Joseph Lelyveld's new book on M. Gandhi. The review was fascinating. The book happens to be published by Knopf. Should I check who published Prof. Hitchens' many books to make sure none of those were also published by Knopf or a company that owns Knopf or is owned by them? If it turns out that they were, should I worry about a "conflict of interest" because of that? I fail to see how that wouldn't be ridiculous, and a ridiculous reason to impugn someone's character.

Not entirely true. Dubya put solar panels on the White House's garden shed:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/hey-george-w-bush-put-solar-panels-on-the-white-house-too/64151/

Personal Brain.

Except they never said six months. They said three months, insisted the solar panels would be too covered by dust to get enough power after that, and refused to consider any sort of cleaning system. Even when NASA gets something right, they get it completely wrong.

I see that you've been to Mars and understand the physics of dust in an alien atmosphere .... Oh, right. Anyhow, that isn't the issue at all. It's funding. Every NASA project is money constrained, so managers and boosters have all manner of strategems to make the most out of the system. Funding ground operations for 90 days is easier than funding ground observations for several years. Having a scientific package that meets it's goals in 90 days (and then goes ever onward) is much better than coming up with a 5 year plan and have some critical widget fail in three.

I really don't understand why everyone here is making such an issue of this. It's rocket science - it's an experiment. Sometimes experiments work, sometime they don't. Yes the lay press is all gaga about it but that's because the lay press has all of the intellect and introspective capabilities of a paramecium. It's working. It's making incredible scientific progress on the cheap. We should really be harping this aspect of the mission, not the warranty.

Slightly off topic. The Atlantic has a slide show on 11 things that Americans bizarrely get wrong about America. It doesn't mention NASA but does mention that a significant number of Americans think that PBS funding and foreign aid constitute a significant amount of the US budget (actual values are less than 1% in both cases). There is this meme that the American government does nothing good and spends too much doing it. While there is some truth to that, a more important lesson is that the US government does lots of good things for not very much money. And this is one of those times.

a link for the linkless: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

The problem is what if ALL the doctors and dentists do this? Then you don't have a choice, unless you happen to be a doctor and dentist (not or, and) yourself.

You still don't have a choice, unless you're the sort of doctor who can remove his own appendix.

I guarantee you that server doesn't have logic like, "if machine #2222 wins, don't pay out to #2222 (or anybody) again for x spins". It would be super illegal.

FWIW, packs of lotto scratch-cards DO work exactly like that:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/why-liquor-store-clerks-often-win-lotto/70786

"an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else "

That's funny until you realize he might just believe it, and then it's sad.

And then you realize he really DOESN"T believe it, and it's sadder still.

From Andrew Sullivan at theatlantic.com

"I covered the Clintons for eight years. The one thing I learned about them is that they lie. It's reflexive to them; after decades of the lying that tends to infect the households of addicts, they don't have a normal person's understanding of truth and falsehood."

Well, he's either naive, or lying, when he claims there could even be something like 'an independent federal agency'. For that reason alone this is a dumb, bad, dangerous idea.

Then there's the First Amendment.

Copyright Law Is Killing Science
Christians are Killing Science
Funding Cuts are Killing Science
Patents are Killing Science
Junk Science is Killing Science
Conservatives are Killing Science
Publishing is Killing Science
Public Education is Killing Science
Corporations are Killing Science
Capitalism is Killing Science
Immigration is Killing Science
Feminism is Killing Science (!)
Political Correctness is Killing Science
Networks are Killing Science
Too Many Scientists are Killing Science
Too Few Scientists are Killing Science

SCIENCE IS DEAD

The waste is the biggest problem?
1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power.
2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat
3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste.
4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.

I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.

A pilot was sucked out the cockpit when the windshield blew out. Only his legs remained inside. How about studying real examples for data instead of speculating what might happen.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jet-pilot-sucked-out-2011-4
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/what-to-do-when-your-pilot-gets-sucked-out-the-plane-window/236860/

BS. The position that "Science is demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting" is a purist view that doesn't look at the realities of current science. If anything, engineering is the one that delivers. Physics and chemistry are probably the only sciences where you can typically get good repeatable results. Typically it's the engineers that are delivering something. Psychology, medicial research, economics, political "science".... hahahaha.

Look at the work of John Ioannidis.

Facebook does not encrypt the cookies so its vulnerable to session hijacking This process has been automated with a firefox plugin (Firesheep) so any 12 year old could do it.

Oddly enough we can thank the Tunisian Government for rollout of https on the whole session.

This gratuitous insult leads me to believe that you can't make a case based on facts and logic, so you're using personal attacks instead. Case closed.

You lose your case when you whined that that NYT and WSJ wasn't spoonfeeding you what you wanted to know. I frankly don't believe you. They aren't sloppy news sources. A few minutes of googling could have found news stories, opinion blogs, etc all talking about who the rebels are. I don't have respect for someone who can't do basic research.

It looks like these didn't wash off as much.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/jpq03111/s_j10_RTR2JQVV.jpg

What's even more disturbing is that the FAA is currently looking to move away from traditional radar and even human air traffic controllers, as part of their "NextGen" system. GPS is just fine as long as there is a redundancy in the system. But the idea of abandoning radar as if GPS were a time-tested system is a little scary.

Ok, here is a quote from a young tunisian directly linking the cable to the revolution. Here is an article about the tunisian government blocking a website which posted the leaked cable. Here is an article about Gaddafi's statement that the leaked cables were responsible for the revolution (you didn't ask for that but I saw it from the other article and it seemed relevant).

Again, I'm not saying that the leaks caused the revolution, only that they contributed to it. There's enough information here to support that hypothesis.

if this is to be believed, then we did it: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

Just like the smear job that was performed against those who wanted to know if this man who was completely unknown prior to suddenly becoming President and spent a great deal of his childhood in Kenya

Man it is bizarre that you would make the exact same egregiously ignorant error as Huckabee, two days before he did.
Is this a meme on a bunch of nutter websites that Huckabee thinks he can adopt to grab more votes?

Huckabee Thinks Obama 'Grew Up' in Kenya

If you med types want to arrogantly view yourselves as gods or even scientists because you know a little biology,

There isn't even much in the way of actual science or biology. For example, the well reputed author of Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science claims that "as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed".

The Turing Test may not last much longer. In a recent competition with 5-minute typing rounds, a computer nearly hit the magic 30% success rate.

I guess I should feel flattered.

Your argument seems to be that Israel is under threats and its gloomier than I'm making it out to be. Yes I realize that Israeli-Turkish relations are poor (which I blame Israel for), but the agreements are still in place. Don't underestimate Israel's peace treaties and economic ties.

My point is that today Israel is stronger than it ever was before and is at a lower state of risk than it was in the past. In 1967 it was Israel versus Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and helped out by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, and the PLO. Today in 2011 you have a peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan, Iraq is no longer a threat, Syria is relatively neutralized as a threat, and the PA brought violence down to lower levels than the 60s. Heck, the Egyptian public is quite unhappy with Israel but they want to keep the peace treaty.

Is Israel facing zero risk today? No, clearly Israel has to deal with the mess over the settlements and the worsening relationship with Iran, but if you want to be realistic you can't use outdated ideas as I was saying earlier. Try to realize how far it's come along.

Algeria's probably taken a page from Tunisia, and is stealing logins like Tunisia did. That was just last month, I'm surprised people have forgotten about it already.

Facebook responded to Tunisia's attempts then, from the article:

Sullivan's team rapidly coded a two-step response to the problem. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. The Https protocol encrypts the information you send across it, so it's not susceptible to the keylogging strategy employed by the Tunisian ISPs.

The second technical solution they implemented was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the malicious code was running. Like Facebook's version of a "mother's maiden name" question to get access to your old password, it asks you to identify your friends in photos to complete an account login.

They rolled out the new solutions to 100% of Tunisia by Monday morning, five days after they'd realized what was happening. It wasn't a totally perfect solution. Most specifically, ISPs can force a downgrade of https to http, but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.

I have no doubt that if they're seeing something similar they'll implement the same thing to block Algeria from continuing to do this.

Tunisia also tried packet sniffing to steal the Facebook passwords of everyone in the country, so they could delete the pages that were being used to coordinate protests. I'm sure it's only a matter of hours before someone at Facebook employs the same solution for Algeria, forcing everyone in Algeria to connect by SSL and turning on face-based identity verification, a feature whose introduction has already been discussed here on Slashdot

as if tens of thousands of people in jail

But they feed the 'prison-industrial complex'!

Quote: "Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers"

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/4669/

Take note of the year!

CC.

Did you ever hear of the National Institutes of Health?

http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=13733&query=home

Sounding Board
Biomedical Research and Health AdvancesNEJM | February 9, 2011 | Topics: Other Health Issues
Hamilton Moses, III, M.D., and Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D.

In 1945, the President’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote in Science, the Endless Frontier 1 that basic scientific research was “the pacemaker of technological progress” and that “new products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.” He recommended the creation of what would become the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was created in 1948, and the National Science Foundation, created in 1950.

The biomedical-research enterprise in the United States soon became the envy of other nations, as well as the primary source of the world’s new drugs and medical devices. Since 1945, biomedical research has been viewed as the essential contributor to improving the health of individuals and populations, in both the developed and developing world.

Financing of research was ensured by the successes in the early 1950s of polio vaccination, antibiotics, and antipsychotic agents. Equally dramatic advances in surgery and medical devices, such as cardiopulmonary bypass, dialysis, and organ transplantation, followed in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the conversion of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and some cancers from uniformly fatal diseases to chronic conditions created an expectation that similar advances would occur for other devastating diseases.

P.S. Vannevar is not related to George. He invented the Internet in 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/

Flat out wrong.

Public opinion polling shows the majority of Egyptians want to keep the peace treaty with Israel
Also The New York Times is publishing statistics that Egyptians are liking the US more than before; 45% positive rating vs 29% negative rating.

Agree, and the go-to article on this is always James Fallows' "The Connection Has Been Reset" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/-ldquo-the-connection-has-been-reset-rdquo/6650/ Well worth a read if you're interested in this issue. Short version: The literally Orwellian internal censorship is so effective that the government can shut down almost any unpleasant message from spreading beyond a plugged-in elite (the Chinese equivalent of Slashdot readers). Fetishizing breaching the external firewall is just one small length of pipe needed to reach even the new urban middle class of Chinese.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies"

I know of situations where the push to patent has delayed publication and caused academics to be secretive. We ideally need a basic income, a gift economy, and other social innovations to rethink how those who want to work in the public interest are supported.

*cough* stock options *cough*
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/steve-jobs-in-2010-620-million-in-stocks-1-in-salary/69083/