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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

We are much better equipped to handle change if we're diversified.

We've seen oil prices spike too many times not to know better by now.

I think everyone can appreciate how sensible this is.

We still have oil energy for what looks like at least another decade, so we need to get our act together in this time.

Germany has made strides toward this goal.

Not really. The oceans are all linked, and a rise in one part would imply a rise in another part.

Sure, that's what common sense would tell you. But when it comes to a single station you have to account for the rise or fall of the land it's on. The gravitational attraction of things like mountain ranges and ice sheets affect local sea level. Changes in the prevailing winds or ocean currents also affect sea level. I found this article on the subject that talks about it. It's really a pretty fascinating subject, to me at least.

If you define 'good' as maximal help for a limited class of human beings at the expense of large swaths of the population and the planet.

Actually global poverty has recently been falling rapidly, mostly due to the adoption of capitalism in China.

The poor countries that display the greatest success today in poverty reduction are those that engage the most with the global capitalist economy.

Horatio Alger, is that you?

Your math sucks.

Investment has always been pretty speculative, so it's easy to pick on. It also involves "real" wealth -- the kind you nor I will ever have. You can look at Taleb as being a dumbed-down version of Mandelbrot (the fractal guy) and his work on market analysis.

You might also check out what these guys [pdf] discovered about CEO talent.

If you could learn how to succeed from reading a book, or listening to a motivational speaker, then everyone would be successful -- meaning no one would be. If it were some innate ability like IQ, then 'success' would follow a similar distribution pattern. This is not observed.

You live in a world that is chaotic, from top to bottom. It's like weather systems, except the laws aren't immutable. You can't predict weather with any certainty, how can you claim to have a formula for success? What could that be based on, if not sappy-headed romanticism?

Anonymous because otherwise I might be in danger of reading more of the mental vacuities that you dribble onto your keyboard.

Coitus obstructus was a method recommended in several Sanskrit texts which required pressing on the forepart of the testicle; the pressure of the finger there may block the urethra forcing semen into the bladder.

GRACE can resolve nearly uncorrelated mascons that are blocks 400km on each side with a noise floor of ~1cm equivalent water height. (This is latitude dependent because GRACE's denser ground tracks near the poles allow for better resolution.) Each mascon has a mass of ~1.6 gigatons, and a fully-loaded coal train is ~10 kilotons, so GRACE falls short by about five orders of magnitude.

The improved laser ranging on the GRACE follow-on will increase sensitivity, and David Wiese analyzes improvements due to lowering the satellites' altitude and/or adding more satellites to the GRACE system.

You're right to suspect that detecting a tiny change in local gravity is limited by uncertainties in models such as atmosphere dynamics. I've discussed how GPS occultation data (among many other data sources) can be used to reduce these uncertainties.

Other anthropogenic effects such as groundwater depletion can already be detected with GRACE. Rodell et al. 2009 (PDF) and Tiwari et al. 2009 (PDF) observed this in northern India, and Famiglietti et al. 2011 (PDF) recently observed similar groundwater depletion in California.

John Arquilla makes his living by delivering instruction to US military officers. I am frankly disgusted to know that a person in that position is willing and eager to apply the terminology of war to the task of securing civilian computer networks.

War, really? Let's see what Dr. Arquilla's distinguished predecessors have to say on the subject:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

From the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals at Nuremburg, 1946.

Pretty brutal, yes? I would certainly hope that Dr. Aquilla had the sense to consider this before he started spouting off about "cyberwar" to people whose decisions directly shape the military policy of the United States. Not everyone is going to possess the same appreciation for metaphor that he would appear to have.

For a neutral and detailed history of this issue: http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News%2526file=article%2526sid=149

EFF was actually involved in the lawsuit; the article above is far and away more informative and really puts bnetd and battlenet in the proper light; it might even make Blizzard look WORSE than the EFF site. Blizz fully endorsed an emulator named Kali, but quickly rescinded their position once Battle.net was released.

Dragons!!!

That would explain the "wonderful serpents" ...

If you just read down a few years:

"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."

(from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : Eighth Century)

It looks like DNA from Lonesome George (along with many other specimens from the archipelago) were collected a few years ago and used in some analyses, suggesting they were at least partially sequenced. That article mentions sequencing of the full genome of Galapagos tortoises in general, but not necessarily George in particular. I would expect that it would be under way now if it wasn't already, however, especially with the recent affordability of sequencing.

I have found a paper on evolutionary rates of change. It calculates an instrinsic rate of evolution of .1 standard deviations per generation. If we call a generation roughly 20 years" we're looking at 25 generations over 500 years. Unless you can provide evidence of a relatively strong selection pressure towards some penis change that makes condoms less effective, I'm going to go ahead and stand by my original claim.

A universal system would be an object-oriented Codd DBM. It would be able to do absolutely anything.

We don't even need to bring in any kind of object-oriented terminology (since all the abuses in the last decades), let's just say that an RDBMS with a properly implemented type system would be such a universal system. But there's still quite some research to do, Date's Third Manifesto lays down the foundation but it still leaves some open problems.

Slowly.

I disagree here. A system based on the relation model is not inherently slow, it's just that more research needs to be done in several directions like how to physically store data and how to handle transactions.

Think of it: row-oriented storage vs. columnar storage or have a look the Transrelational approach http://bookboon.com/en/textbooks/it-programming/go-faster (e-book free download). Ok, it ended in nothing probably because its efficiency was overestimated, but the point is that we have a lot more to explore aout the physical implementations. Think about all the indexing techniques for specialized data or think about specialized scenarios: how far can we push filter predicates to the hardware level (e.g. Nettezza), even directly to disks; how efficient are b-trees (or any kind of tree) vs. skip lists when 99% of the database is in memory? And so on and so forth. Even research on transaction protocols needs to be done more, think for example at Calvin http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/calvin-sigmod12.pdf that promises to work on top of any kind of physical implementation.

The big problem I see here, addressed by NoSQL systems, is that people donìt want to understand their data, they simply want to store it and sort of retrieve it by simple means. Which doesn't quite fit with the relational model.

Then there's the problem of which estimates should be used?

Some people are saying over six meters.

How can you make public policy based on theories and projections that even those making them can't agree on?

Plus, it is easily imagined that zealous planners with political agendas could pick and choose data to shape development according to their agenda.

Here are the alternatives:

Mozilla's (these I wanted to improve. Note that they have explanations underneath):
https://img.skitch.com/20101222-nt2a3s3bkft4n8si81trwq6ww.png
https://img.skitch.com/20101222-8my23a7krc7xjppphnn6xtdyqy.png

And, Yale's from the above link (in my opinion, worse):
http://yale.edu/self/privacy64/2control1.jpg
http://yale.edu/self/privacy64/2control0.jpg

I hope mine are at least more clear than those. That's not to say they're ultimate clarity in pictography. Improvements are always welcome.

Here are the alternatives:

Mozilla's (these I wanted to improve. Note that they have explanations underneath):
https://img.skitch.com/20101222-nt2a3s3bkft4n8si81trwq6ww.png
https://img.skitch.com/20101222-8my23a7krc7xjppphnn6xtdyqy.png

And, Yale's from the above link (in my opinion, worse):
http://yale.edu/self/privacy64/2control1.jpg
http://yale.edu/self/privacy64/2control0.jpg

I hope mine are at least more clear than those. That's not to say they're ultimate clarity in pictography. Improvements are always welcome.

I wonder why there isn't more public transport going on here as the "Driving Under the Influence" laws get worse and worse.

there is plenty of public transport here (if by here you mean the US) it is just that here is a MUCH larger land mass (than the UK) and we're spread out all over the place. The US has a nationwide railway system similar to Europes for transcontinental travel but it isn't used much for passenger transport anymore which might be partially explained by this article

Take a look at their ratings of major sites. That's a simple feature comparison checklist chart, but hard to read. Graphically, all the info is conveyed with colors only, which is awful. From a graphical standpoint, the icons are non-obvious. The picture of a human in a circle means "you can view and export your personal data". From a data collection standpoint, everything is either self-reported or manually set for major web sites, so there's a scaling problem. From an accuracy standpoint, Facebook has "will alert you to material changes" and "you can access all of your data" set to True, which is somewhat questionable given Facebook's history in those areas.

Compare "The evolution of privacy on Facebook" Now that's an excellent, and original, graphical representation of Facebook's privacy issues.

Presenting detailed information with multiple icons creates confusing visual clutter. Here's the chart for the international standard fabric care icons found on clothing labels.A liquid-filled cup with two dots and an underline means "Machine wash, warm, permanent press". A triangle with two diagonal lines means "Bleach with non-chlorine bleach as needed". Did you know that? It's on most garments.

We've struggled with this problem for SiteTruth We collect information about the business behind a web site, and present it to the user through browser add-ons. Doing this both concisely and effectively is tough. Right now, we have red, yellow, and green icons, with "do not enter", question mark, and checkmark graphics. We're about to launch a new system which brings up a small "dog tag" on link mousover, with information about the business. The dog tag uses text, not icons.

Yes, there are very few credible scientists that have dissenting views on climate change. The big problem that's holding back real climate change policy reform in Washington is that a large minority of American's are uniformed about what the scientists think. Yale's Project on Climate Change Communication project published Global Warming's Six Americas in May 2011 (pdf) that concluded: 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by humans...but 35% of American adults are dismissive, doubtful, or disengaged about climate change.

ScienceFriday interviewed Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale's Project on Climate Change Communication today. You can listen to the audio: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/scifri20120504-hr1.mp3

Until we shrink the 35% of non-believers, Washington will probably continue to drag their feet. We have an Ad Proposal to Teach America that Climate Change is real and caused by humans. Our hope is the Ad will help shrink the 35% of non-believers so there is more pressure on the policy makers in Washington to fix the global warming problem.

Yes, there are very few credible scientists that have dissenting views on climate change. The big problem that's holding back real climate change policy reform in Washington is that a large minority of American's are uniformed about what the scientists think. Yale's Project on Climate Change Communication project published Global Warming's Six Americas in May 2011 (pdf) that concluded: 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by humans...but 35% of American adults are dismissive, doubtful, or disengaged about climate change.

ScienceFriday interviewed Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale's Project on Climate Change Communication today. You can listen to the audio: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/scifri20120504-hr1.mp3

Until we shrink the 35% of non-believers, Washington will probably continue to drag their feet. We have an Ad Proposal to Teach America that Climate Change is real and caused by humans. Our hope is the Ad will help shrink the 35% of non-believers so there is more pressure on the policy makers in Washington to fix the global warming problem.

Don't kid yourself that public debates such as those that occur here on slashdot don't make a difference; they do. Public opinion is changing and the reason is not that the government has released illustrated pamphlets, it's because just ordinary individuals everywhere, acting on their own initiative and motivated by their own conscience and understanding are waging an public war against deniers online, over dinner tables and in the media.

. If you doubt that we're effective, here's some good news for your efforts (about three quarters of the way down under the heading - Global Warming and Extreme Weather Events:)

http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Extreme-Weather-Climate-Preparedness.pdf

Highlight- 69% of Americans believe global warming is effecting the weather in the US.

then there's this, via TomDispatch.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/science/earth/americans-link-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-poll-says.html

and this:

63% of respondents believe the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/30/473484/public-opinion-the-death-of-public-support-for-global-warming-action-is-greatly-exaggerated/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email

and this:

65% of Americans backed the idea of imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/10/461246/gallup-americans-have-more-guts-than-obama-support-mandatory-controls-on-co2-emissions/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email

and this:

75% now support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/26/471840/poll-75-of-americans-support-co2-regulation-60-support-revenue-neutral-carbon-tax/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email

That would attract businesses by the droves I'd think...so, no loopholes, no corporate taxes

Except they're doing just fine with 0% US taxes by keeping the money all offshore with their employees. Why should they bring that money back into the country to hire more expensive employees that are going to demand enough pay to buy a house for their family instead of living 20 to a dirt hut or sleeping in a company cot in the barracks?

Yeah, that's one of the arguments I've found particularly odd, because it's not like others are putting words in the Confederates' mouths. The states each wrote declarations explaining why they seceded, which we can read to gain some insight into their stated reasons for leaving the union.

For example, in the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union", South Carolina's government makes it clear that their secession is pretty much entirely motivated by a desire to protect slavery from possibly being abolished.

FWIW, I had an S-Blazer with a 2.8L gasoline engine. It was horribly underpowered... reminded me of a Dodge Aries when trying for highway speed.

On the other hand, this guy stuck a 1.9L VW engine in his Vanagon.

"Ignorance of the law" was no excuse because the king who said that had all the laws posted in common language in the city square so that everyone could know the laws.

Are we talking Hammurabi (1772 BC) and his code? It's true he did the posting, though since only a few people could read and most of them worked for the government, it's hard to know how much it helped anybody aside from later historians. But there's no evidence he quipped about "ignorance of the law".

Interestingly, it's also an early example of government regulation of wages and prices (ferryboat rental will cost you 3 gerahs a day, and a day laborer gets 6 gerahs a day during the busy season).

It's been a long time since Babylon was a major power.

That means new languages should probably be at least a little C-like [... it should use] curly braces and cryptic operators [...] Furthermore, new languages should support familiar programming styles

What's the point of using a new language then? I found it liberating to get rid of the (function(){...})() cruft with the switch from Javascript to Coffeescript. According to TFA's philosophy, Coffee does it wrong because it alienates Javascript users. What would be the point of using it if it only offered "baby step" enhancements, at the expense of needing a Javascript interpreter/crosscompiler?

Or to say it with Alan Perlis:

19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. (Epigrams on programming -- original page seems down)

They did actually. When they started converting the Nordic pagans to Christianity, they tried to convince everyone that Thor, Odin, Loki were all actually daemons and not gods.

When you read what volcanic eruptions, atmospheric dust and the occasional eclipse could do to the sky and climate in the past, it wouldn't be surprising that people would blame supernatural causes (blood-red rain, red moon).

The strangest one is what explanation is there for immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. This seemed to have prompted a viking raid on Ireland at Lindisfarne.
A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine:

I was wondering whether it was the consequence of an earthquake.

From the book "Tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea, 2000 B.C.-2000 A.D.", p32
792 (possible 793), April 30,GV.
Adriatic Sea, Gulf of Venice. A strong earthquake enveloped the gulf and north eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea - in Istria and Dalmatia. From other data , a huge sea wave following a disastrous earthquake in the region of Friula and Istria, came upon the coast and devastated it; the shore of the Gulf of Venice was flooded. During the earthquake, the sky in the direction from Dalmatia to Istria assumed a bright flame-like red colour, long flame-coloured stripes appeared. The sea overflowed its shores, with the result that buildings were destroyed and lives were lost.

To be fair, our materialism has a lot to do with that.

No it doesn't.

"From its very beginnings, the software industry has suffered from having too many engineers," says David Gelertner, a professor of computer science at Yale University. "There are too many people who love computers and too few who are impatient with them." -- The Economist, December 3rd 2011, Technology Quarter, p. 27.

The average person doesn't want to futz with details of hardware and software. They just want to use it. They seem like mouth breathers and morons to hobbyists and professionals, reminiscent of the person who gets a car and when asked when they last changed the oil, they respond with a blank stare and "Change the oil?"

BUT - they are the market. They help keep us in the manner to which we are accustomed. Jobs understood it. That's why Apple devices are so locked down. The average person wants the functionality of the device so he can relay details of his proctosigmoidoscopy to his closest 137 friends. He doesn't care about the details of how the device operates. He just wants to hold it behind him, take a picture ("Smile, doc"), and get that shot on the social media.

Even programmers are the same way. You want to minimize the details you don't care about so you can focus on the details you do care about. C++: I just want to know the methods of an object I need without having to learn the implementation details. So, it seems to me that the average person needs to be given devices which support his use patterns and desires without. That means secure devices out of the box, devices which can be plugged in and are ready to use. Devices that even the "uninterested" can turn on and use. Because there's a lot of them out there. And their money's legal tender. They're going to get involved one way or another. Best to do it in a way that doesn't allow them to become walking malware portals.

http://www.yale.edu/law/leo/052005/papers/Warren.pdf

For your viewing pleasure:

http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/introduction-to-new-testament/content/sessions/lecture13.html

Even this series is too kind IMO, but it still meets my offering of integrity.

Fear and punishment might give you a stiffy but they don't work. What we want is rehabilitated prisoners not people more angry and violent than when they went in.

Bullshit. Fear and punishment most certainly does work and works very well. Giving them an xbox360 isn't exactly punishment, perhaps if you understood what punishment is then you might understand why it works. No it doesn't work on everyone, and those that it doesnt' work on generally are not capable of rehabilitation. They do not understand the basic principle of cause and effect, you can't fix that by talking to them by the time they get to prison.

What evidence do you base this opinion on? Do places with high punishment systems have less crime than those that have more rehab focused ones? A quick search seems to indicate the opposite:

http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/Final_ALER07.pdf

Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach
M. Keith Chen, Yale University and Cowles Foundation, and Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago and NBER
We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime. Though small sample sizes limit the precision of our estimates, we argue that our findings may have important implications for prison policy, and that our methodology is likely to be applicable beyond the particular context we study.

The PRIMARY purpose of prison is punishment and separating someone from society so they don't pose a threat; a DETERRENT from committing crimes in the future. Rehabilitation is important, but is not the primary function of a prison, despite the fact it's important. However, allowing someone to play video games does NOTHING to rehabilitate them.

Other than fulfilling your sense of "justice" (or maybe "vengeance") why do you think punishment should be the primary purpose of prison? Do you have any evidence that less pleasant jails act as a more effective deterrent than more pleasant ones?

I would think that the primary purpose of the whole police/judicial system would be to minimize the harm that "miscreants" do to society at large. Thus the primary goal of the whole system should be prevention of crime. For the individual criminal incarcerated, society's primary interest would be to minimize repeat offense, but I suppose if there was evidence that mistreatment of prisoners had significant deterrent effect I guess that would be a consideration. However the opposite seems to be the case in what studies I could easily find. See for example from 2007

http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/Final_ALER07.pdf

Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach
M. Keith Chen, Yale University and Cowles Foundation, and Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago and NBER

We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime. Though small sample sizes limit the precision of our estimates, we argue that our findings may have important implications for prison policy, and that our methodology is likely to be applicable beyond the particular

Deal with it. University graduates are better. Have you ever dealt with the mouth-breathers at community colleges? They have courses in welding and pipefitting, for God's sake. I don't think the Ivies have those sorts of courses.

No, instead they have courses like Expressive dance and Puppetry in performance. No thanks, I'll stick with the pipe fitters, at least they can do something. Also, if this is the best your lauded Ivy league schools can do in web design, you may want to hire a community college grade for your web site. At least they know a bit about web site design. That page looks like it was ripped off from geo cities, badly

The dose makes the poison. http://learn.caim.yale.edu/chemsafe/references/dose.html

Your body is ~60% water, but you can die by drinking too much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication. Every day we are bathed in DNA-damaging ionizing radiation called sunlight, yet we somehow don't all get skin cancer. And yes, you can drink safe amounts of water and receive unsafe amounts of radiation. But understanding the difference between A causing B "always" and the messy reality that it involves a safe and unsafe range is the difference between being a paranoid lunatic and a sane and educated person.

Now they just need to do that with CO2. Release the O2 and sequester the carbon to make graphite, graphene, and/or diamond.

The artificial leaf epithet would seem to be a better fit for binding up carbon and producing O2.

Now they just need to do that with CO2. Release the O2 and sequester the carbon to make graphite, graphene, and/or diamond.

You can watch a very nice series of lectures on game theory from Yale at http://www.academicearth.org/courses/game-theory
You can also download that same set of lectures from http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/

I watched the whole thing and really enjoyed it.

Really. When and what part of the Bible was changed? And WHO knows this? That's news to me. The AC above said that there are 1000 manuscripts of the NT, but that's inaccurate. there are ~25,000 manuscripts found to date of the NT. Except for some minor spelling errors, they're virtually totally identical. These manuscripts are found all over the world. If there was any error or change introduced in the past, that should have been reflected in some of the manuscripts, leaving the 25,000 manuscripts differing from each other. However, that's not the case. So it's one thing to say you don't believe the Bible was directly inspired by God, but it'd be disingenuous to believe that the Bible, especially the NT has been altered.

Read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, (or similar book) it's a large topic.

If you want something to read in the meantime find some information on differences between the Suptuagint and the Latin Vulgate :

"The sources of the many differences between the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate and the Masoretic text have long been discussed by scholars. Following the Renaissance, a common opinion among some humanists was that the LXX translators bungled the translation from the Hebrew and that the LXX became more corrupt with time. The most widely accepted view today is that the original Septuagint provided a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant that differed from the ancestor of the Masoretic text as well as those of the Latin Vulgate, where both of the latter seem to have a more similar textual heritage."

Note that the corrupted Vulgate was the version in use in the west during much of the christian era. The gist of it is that the bible is the result of copy of a copy of a copy ... where scribes inserted errors, worked from incomplete manuscripts and misinterpreted margin notes as being part of the text as well as working from a translation of a translation of an original (with possibility for misinterpretation from the original as words were written without vowels as well as plain mistranslation) in first place.

Also, the so-called "Q source" is most likely nothing more than the gospel of Mark, which was the earliest gospel of the four. I'm sure that the gospel of Mark inspired the others ones. In fact, here's how the gospel of Luke begins "Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught." (Luke 1:1-4, NLT)

So please do your homework. I'm not sure a quick search in Wikipedia really counts :Q

I'm quoting wikipedia here, but I read this information in multiple sources as well as having been taught it in catholic school. Scholars who have done textual analysis of the bible disagree with your opinion on the Q source :

"The Q source (also Q document or Q) is a hypothetical written source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. Q (short for the German Quelle, or "source") is defined as the "common" material found in Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. This ancient text supposedly contained the logia or quotations from Jesus"

I don't think I really need to into how unreliable eyewitness testimony is even right after the fact, let alone a generation later after the story has been told, retold and reinterpreted in the light of tradition and custom.

I know this link http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/downloads. It is possible that the content is the same as on youtube.

Why don't you try Yale's version... download it and look it when you want \o/
Yale Game theory

The Open Yale Courses has a well-curated and complete introduction to Game Theory that I strongly recommend: check it out! The Problem Sets, Syllabus, along with videos and transcripts are all available.
http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory

This has been tried. See the story of "TakemymoneyandnoEulasapply@aol.com." That seems to have had no effect. For an overview of current law, see this legal commentary on terms of use.

When companies have tried to enforce the provisions of an EULA against consumers, the courts have not been that supportive. This usually comes up involving mandatory arbitration clauses and anti-class-action provisions. PayPal lost in court on that one.

There is a market for used "supercomputers". Yale recently purchased one. http://dailybulletin.yale.edu/article.aspx?id=8382 It was number 146 in the list of top 500 supercomputers, and they got it for a fraction of the cost when new.

The other big thing that I would love to have in a database is ability to scale the database to multiple machines, so have a logical database span multiple disks on multiple machines, have multiple postgres processes running against those multiple disk

This exists for Postgres in the form of Yale's HadoopDB project: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/hadoopdb-an-open-source-parallel-database.html

HadoopDB is comprised of Postgres on each node (database layer), Hadoop/MapReduce as a communication layer that coordinates the multiple nodes each running Postgres, and Hive as the translation layer. The result is a shared-nothing parallel database, that business analysts can interact with using a SQL-like language. [Technical details can be found in the following paper.]

as well as for commercial forks of Postgres such as EMC's GreenPlum.

Which also happens in the US.

Apple are the heavyweight in cheap consumer electronics, and American owned. We should be asking why they aren't building in the US, especially as most of what they "build" is putting together other companies' components.

And we should be defining what "make (or made)" and "build (or built)" mean. If I buy a motherboard from taiwan and build a computer from it in the US, is it "Made in America"? What if the motherboard is from taiwan, CPU from Arizona, hard drive and case from China, power supply from California and I build the computer in Dallas, is it "Made in America"? What if the parts are mostly from the US but they're assembled in Mexico, what is that? And we can take it further, what if the parts are made in the US but the rare earth elements used in those parts are from China, where is it "made"?

Car manufactures have been playing this game for years, buying parts from overseas but assembling the car in the US and calling them "American made". It's so bad that there's a American-Made Index where they rate cars based on how many of their parts come from the US and vehicles like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are more "American made" than the Chevy Traverse or Ford Explorer and American icons like the F-150 and Silverado don't even make the list, so people buying trucks from Ford or GM thinking they're supporting America really aren't, they'd be better off buying a Toyota Tundra.

Obviously if the metal, chemicals and other rare materials were mined in the US to make the parts in the US used to assemble the device in the US then it's 100% American made, but that's almost never going to happen so we need to clear this up before we can call something "Made in America".

There were many more factors besides slavery that led to the Civil War and the confederacy.

Your statements demonstrate a determinedly ignorant commitment to apologetics for the Confederacy. Your suggestion that anything other than slavery was the casus belli take only a few minutes with Google to utterly refute, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for attempting to excuse these evil-doers.

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world ... a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." -- Mississippi's declaration of secession

"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable". -- Texas Secession Convention

South Carolina's declaration noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had interfered with the return of fugitive slaves.

"We went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought." -- Confederate Col. John S. Mosby

Jefferson Davis himself, in his address at the ratification of the Confederate constitution -- a speech that is nothing but a fairy tale about the wonders of slavery, the evils of abolitionists, and his ignorance about the U.S. Constitution -- said:

In addition to the long-continued and deep-seated resentment felt by the Southern States at the persistent abuse of the powers they had delegated to the Congress, for the purpose of enriching the manufacturing and shipping classes of the North at the expense of the South, there has existed for nearly half a century another subject of discord, involving interests of such transcendent magnitude as at all times to create the apprehension in the minds of many devoted lovers of the Union that its permanence was impossible. When the several States delegated certain powers to the United States Congress, a large portion of the laboring population consisted of African slaves imported into the colonies by the mother country. In twelve out of the thirteen States negro slavery existed, and the right of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized in the Constitution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape of the slave. The increase in the number of slaves by further importation from Africa was also secured by a clause forbidding Congress to prohibit the slave trade anterior to a certain date, and in no clause can there be found any delegation of power to the Congress authorizing it in any manner to legislate to the prejudice, detriment, or discouragement owners of that species of property, or excluding it from the protection of the Government.

...

As soon, how ever, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures a

Define pornography.

Even the US Supreme Court can't do it objectively - the closest they got was when former Justice Frankfurter said "...I know it when I see it"

Not exactly something you can hinge an objective proof on, is it?

Honestly though, you'd think the guy would stop and think about it before he did it, and at least be prepared for the possible consequences.

Probably.
The seems valid to me. I can't help but not that your example is no no way like what they did.

http://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/papers/egan-et-al.pdf

In a nut shell. When there where 3 stickers A,B,C and a child like A,B equally, and C less. After being given a choice between A And C, the child chose A. Afterwords, the child perfered A over B. Or if the choice was between B and C, afterward the child liked B more then A. Don't let my simple explanation lead you to believe they where actually in A,B,C order. they where randomized.

I was surprised to find this paper. I had read it a while ago, and we discussed it to some length. The conclusions seem sound. You're presentation of what they did is incorrect.

There are several other studies that show the same thing. Once someone has made a choice, they immediately defend that choice and ignore contrary evidence. It's an interesting subject, being able to hold contradictory beliefs with equal strength.

Look at people who make irrational choice and then defend them.

Flotilla is a statement against the Gaza blockade AKA collective punishment on general civilian population.

False. Israel allows non-military goods to enter Gaza, in large volumes. Egypt opened its border with Gaza quite some time ago.

The gazans are suffering because of small number of islamists and their israeli counterparts, who wish to have the palestinian areas fully included in a Greater Israel.

False. Israel completely left Gaza in 2005. They left behind large numbers of greenhouses, which they had been paid for by Bill Gates.

Of course, the residents of Gaza then proceeded to destroy the greenhouses. There was no letup in Hamas terror attacks after Israel left Gaza, clearly showing the lie of "land for peace".

The problem behind the conflict is that Israel exists, period. Large number of Arabs & Muslims refuse to accept this under any circumstances. Don't believe me? Read their own documents, like the Hamas Charter. In particular:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it"

"Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious."

"Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)."

If the human rights were universally applied Israel and palestinians would live in either two distinct nations or in one nation of Israel

Both were rejected by the Arabs.