Society is going to be the problem here anyway. People are going to freak out at cases where the driving AI is responsible for a fatal accident. A quick search shows that 33808 people died in road accidents in the US, in 2009. And that's apparently a 60-year low. This still translates to some 92 traffic fatalities per day. But society accepts that... whereas I'm sure they would freak out if a full transition to self-driving cars happened, with the driver AI being responsible for 1 fatality per day. Fatality numbers could go down by almost two orders of magnitude, but people would feel less safe on the road because of "killer cars" out there.
I feel this is a big problem overall - people are willing to accept human controlled systems where the human factor regularly leads to accidents/injuries/deaths, but if that system can be automated with a much lower accident/injury/death rate, the society would not feel it's safe.
SGU isn't as bad with this as SG-1 was. Rush and Telford were shown to be in a horribly hopeless situation, but not dead. SG-1 had more Lazarus moments for characters, and Dr Jackson was killed and came back to life three times off the top of my head. And if you count alternate reality deaths, all main characters died several times.
If anything, it's more fitting to be depressed because space travel has advanced far, far less over the last 50 years than just about anything.
But no, the last decade did bring a fair bit of innovation, I think. Just a few things...
On the Internet front, not much technically new, but last decade is when it truly became widespread globally, instead of being largely limited to a few rich Western countries. From 2000 to 2010, Europe went from 105 million to 475 million Net users. Mideast went from 114M to 825M. Africa, where overall use remains very low, still went from 4M to 110M. [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm%5D
A lot of interesting stuff happened with cybernetic implants / mind controlled tech. The BrainGate allowed paraplegics to mentally control a robotic arm (see Matt Nagle).
Stem cell research has shown some very promising things. Shinya Yamanaka came up with some method to use non-embryonic stem cells by some reprogramming process I won't claim to understand.
Spirit & Opportunity discovered proof of liquid water once on Mars, while frozen water got discovered on the Moon. And the first private spaceflights took place in this decade.
As far as gadgets and such go, some are also rather important. Digital cameras became commonplace, which I'd say is a more important innovation than smartphones, for now at least. In terms of ease and convenience, Wi-Fi and flat LCD screens became popular - with Wi-Fi being widely used and LCDs essentially pushing CRTs off the market, personal computing became easier.
Come to think of it, mobile phones! Last decade is when they went from expensive to common. In 2000, in my area at least, they'd be mostly used by businessmen and those who really had a need, but over a few years mobile phones became so widespread that grannies and schoolchildren have them now, in the last few years they've also caused landline use at home to become less prevalent.
Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture gave a solution to one of the most important outstanding problems in mathematics.
A functional memristor was built at HP. This can be a very important technology.
3D printing has become feasible for use.
And to finish this post, Mycoplasma laboratorium. One of the most potentially interesting developments in recent times, while it could also pose major ethical issues and possible misuse.
Frankly, sounds horrible. I usually maximize by double-clicking the titlebar anyway, but I do minimize often, and now the options are to go through a context menu or use a two-hand keyboard shortcut only?
Different workspaces area great feature in GNOME and other common environments, but that has nothing to do with minimization. Just because I like using workspaces doesn't mean I don't want to minimize.
I'm still on Ubuntu 10.04 because I don't like where the UI has gone lately. Unity has for me been the worst desktop experience in a long time, and now GNOME is being all weird. Oh well, gonna stick with KDE.
This is what makes the militaries so dangerous around the world, how they train people to obey orders above all. I'm well aware that no military unit can function unless the soldiers know how to follow orders, but it does have the nasty side effect of conditioning at least some portion of the military to really obey any order, no matter how illegal or immoral.
failing to follow orders cannot go unpunished
Look at some recent examples from world news. In the last week, some Libyan pilots refused the order to bomb protestors, crashing their planes or flying to Malta. Are these the people that should be punished for not following orders? Are they more deserving of punishment than the other Libyan soldiers have obeyed orders to fire on protesters?
I don't really like how the nomination is for the Internet as an entity, though I agree there needs to be a Peace Prize for it. The best candidate is probably Sir Tim Berners-Lee. To most people, the Web IS the Internet - let's face it, when people think of the Internet and its contributions to society, they probably do not think about BBS of olde or of Gopher servers. Berners-Lee also has the advantage of actually being personally responsible for something. Many important creations end up being the work of a larger group where it's hard to single anyone out. So given what the Internet means to people, Berners-Lee is probably the best single person to represent it.
Absolutely, do it, because of what the parent poster says.
Also consider that getting jobs straight out of university can be tricky for CS graduates. They do get jobs, but it's not always easy, oftentimes because it seems like everyone only wants to hire people with at least 3 years of experience (there was a story about hiring expectations yesterday I think). From an employer's perspective, it's very hard to know which CS graduates are better. You'll have a much easier time if something sets your CV apart from the rest when you graduate. It can be that you won some scholarship, or are an important contributor to some opensource project. A conference publication is one of those things that can set you apart. As an added bonus, as others have said, you might make useful connections there.
As for money, find out if your uni is willing to cover at least part of the expenses. I'm frankly bewildered by the idea that they'd expect you to pay for the entire thing out of your pocket, though I realize the USA might be different given that education is very expensive there. Still, it's likely the uni does have some funds for such cases, but you may have to be a bit pushy. Talk to your professor, see if he can put the pressure on someone to pay you. This is out of experience - I once attended a fairly expensive CS conference abroad (short notice on my paper being accepted, so the flight was expensive), and it took some pushiness by my professor to have me reimbursed.
I may not have the best perspective here, as someone who doesn't drive, but why would you want even someone with a BAS of 0.08% at the wheel? The effects do vary greatly per person, but 0.08% is enough for many people to affect attention span and fine muscle coordination. That's already a person that is not at their best capacity due to alcohol.
At least in the local news I get, drunk drivers tend not to be chronic drunks, but rather people who had a few drinks at a party or such and believed themselves to be in "good enough" shape to drive.
Absolutely. Drunk driving isn't close to the leading cause of preventable deaths, but I think that it's rather easily preventable. Just man up and institute real penalties for that. First offense, considerable fine, second time, permanent revocation of driving license.
I don't get the apparent sympathy towards drunk drivers. It's easy not to drive drunk. People who can't control themselves and do drive drunk are a danger, and need to be treated accordingly, as in not letting them drive. I'm aware that there are countries with lots of cars, the US first and foremost, and where cars are hugely important in some regions. To that I say, the people who really need cars still have a duty to use them responsibly. If they can't, they need to find an alternative.
While this remains a fair point, this bombing was in the arrivals hall, not in the queue for security checks. But yes, sadly, it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere decided to bomb one of the many areas of an airport you can get to without security checks. Although AFAIK, numerous Russian airports have the capability to operate checkpoints at entrances.
Quick note: it's free software, not necessarily Linux. The actual 18-page document which constitutes Putin's order doesn't mention GNU, Linux or any specific piece of software. According to the plan, in 2011 they'll form a "package" of free software that they need and in 2012 the government will be running a repository with it, so presumably it's next year for decisions on which software specifically it's going to be. Of course, Linux is very likely.
As for motivation, one of the big things in Russia now is the idea of getting their own Silicon Valley (Skolkovo) up and running. They want their own stuff. And the document includes mention of looking into possibilities of how to support homegrown Russian software developers. While I'm sure they're happy to get away from an American company, this is also beneficial for Russia if it indeed wants to make its own stuff. There's obviously no commercial Russian OS that could be used as a basis for, well, anything, but building a successful Linux distro with state backing would be quite possible for them in the long-term.
I'll add my own words of appreciation for you as fathers with the right approach to gifted children.
But since I've been there (as a kid, no children myself yet), I have a question. Have you considered the possibility of having your respective children skip a grade or two? I don't know if the education system where you are allows it, but I hope it does. If a kid is in grade 2 and is constantly bored, that's not of much use to him or to the school. Whereas he might feel comfortable in grade 3 or 4. For myself at least grade-skipping was a positive experience, with the upsides definitely outweighing the downsides, so I think the option should be kept in mind.
Hard to tell if you're serious, but really, how would a military solution work against NK?
Yes, the North Korean military is very large, but it's suffering from ammunition and fuel shortages, it's undertrained and it is using obsolete equipment, mostly old Soviet hardware and their own designs that are essentially reworkings of the Soviet ones. The conventional military isn't a match for the South Korean military plus US troops stationed there, let alone additional US forces.
But NK has a huge amount of artillery. If attacked, the regime would know they're going down and they would pretty much level Seoul. I recall reading, though I can't source it now, that there's too much NK artillery to take out in a quick strike, even for the US military. So they can't be taken down militarily without huge sacrifices in the South.
Then there's the matter of the NK regime being crazy, despotic and the people brainwashed. If North Korea is attacked, they'll call up their military reserves and maybe start handing rifles out to peasants, telling them to fight for their leader. There would be huge human wave attacks, WW1 style. Ending their resistance would quite possibly require killing several million North Koreans... at which point it would be much closer to genocide than to liberation.
While North Korea is probably the number one regime in the world that needs to go, it seems extremely unlikely that external powers could take the regime down without killing much of the country. One can only hope the regime collapses due to internal instability, and that it happens in a somewhat bloodless fashion.
That site is definitely legit, and is one of the few ways to get a peek into what NK says. The "news" articles there a mixture of pathetic, funny and scary. AFAIK, their official sites are in other TLDs, like Japanese, Chinese and.net, but not.kp.
Does anyone else think WikiLeaks might have inadvertently helped the TSA? Seriously. A couple weeks ago there were many TSA stories online and I also said that things might improve since there are stories getting to national headlines. But for the past week, it seems WikiLeaks has been the number one thing in the news, even overshadowing the aftermath of North Korea shelling the South, as well as the huge fires in Israel. Sadly, attention being drawn to something else is precisely what the TSA needs.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
on
TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm European, my last flights were last week, so after those Yemen bomb attempts. I'm glad it hasn't, at least yet, caused any extra procedures to appear here in the EU. Anyway, somehow I always set metal detectors off. Must be my shoes. Last week, same as usual - walk through the metal detector, with my shoes on, the metal detector beeps, a security guard does a quick and professional pat-down. That's pretty quick, efficient and secure enough without resorting to outright humiliating treatment.
As much as I hate to say this, in a way this story is good news. I really am sorry for the family that had to go through this. But my perception of the American public is like that of a strong, sleepy bear. Might allow someone to poke him but once poked hard enough, it awakens and becomes very dangerous. It might be true that Americans have allowed too much civil liberty erosion in the past decade (at least judging from online news) but I have confidence that what America needs is a story or two that would make national headlines. A search of a panicking 3-year-old might well be it. Or let some TSA employee be caught on camera jerking off to images from the body-scan machines. Or let someone record TSA employees discussing the dick sizes of people sent through the process. A story that can make headlines in mainstream news, not just Slashdot, and is outrageous enough might just cause the society to raise a big enough stink about it so the government is forced to back down.
Granted, Geocities sites had a lot of terrible design. Blink and marquee tags, unreadable color combinations, cursor animations and sound on pages (aaaargh!) but doesn't anyone find that the simpler Geocities sites are better designed that many of today's sites? These days we have too many sites that take a long time to render, use too many Flash or other dynamic elements. On the other hand, a Geocities site like http://geociti.es/NapaValley/2267/, with simple backgrounds and vanilla links seem very much fine to me.
Speaking of unreasonable searches. IANAM (I am not an American) and IANAL but wouldn't the ruling of Kyllo v. United States apply here? That case concerned infrared, not x-ray, technology, but it applied to surveillance of a house with technology that doesn't require the user to enter a house. The ruling also mentioned that the device used was not available to the public - same as these backscatter vans.
As such, could a lawyer explain how the use of these vans, at least pertaining to "viewing" homes, is not illegal per Kyllo v. United States?
I think the results would be more objective if the humans in the test didn't know what the test is all about. They shouldn't know that a judge is trying to tell who's a human and who's a computer. The humans should simply be told that, as part of an experiment, they're required to chat with another person. That would likely prevent people from deliberately acting like computers, etc.
I've had some similar experiences here (and a fun occasion when I cited my own site and that was fine), but to play the devil's advocate, how are the mods supposed to know if you really know your stuff or are full of shit? So you know about video games, but mods can't tell that. They also can't tell if you really have a Computer Science degree or not (besides, it's not like the degree automatically makes you an authority - I also have a CS degree and there's plenty of CS stuff I don't know).
Then again, there definitely are people who know enough and should be able to edit accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia could use a system where editors can (privately) provide proof of being an expert in an area, and then they get tagged as such by the moderators, provided they also have a positive history of contributions.
Yeah, that doesn't seem like good evidence at all. Mind you, I do consider it very likely that Israel is behind this. Israel has both the motivation and the capability to launch such an electronic attack at Iran. But as far as actual evidence goes, I'd like to see something more concrete. Assuming that the code really refers to the date and that it's not just a mistaken interpretation of a pointer to 0x00090579, there's still a lot of stuff that happened on that particular day.
Just tried this. Calculated the circumference of a circle with a radius of 1 meter using Pi to 7 digits (3.1415926) and using Pi to 100 digits. The discrepancy is around 1.0718 * 10^-7m, or around 107 nanometers. That's quite a small discrepancy, and even many scientific calculators will have a more precise value of Pi. By using 10 digits instead of 7, the discrepancy falls to 1.795 * 10^-10m, taking it into picometer range. Granted, this is not Planck length range, but goes a long way to show that yeah, quadrillions of digits is a bit overkill;)
Slashdot Mirror
Society is going to be the problem here anyway. People are going to freak out at cases where the driving AI is responsible for a fatal accident. A quick search shows that 33808 people died in road accidents in the US, in 2009. And that's apparently a 60-year low. This still translates to some 92 traffic fatalities per day. But society accepts that... whereas I'm sure they would freak out if a full transition to self-driving cars happened, with the driver AI being responsible for 1 fatality per day. Fatality numbers could go down by almost two orders of magnitude, but people would feel less safe on the road because of "killer cars" out there.
I feel this is a big problem overall - people are willing to accept human controlled systems where the human factor regularly leads to accidents/injuries/deaths, but if that system can be automated with a much lower accident/injury/death rate, the society would not feel it's safe.
SGU isn't as bad with this as SG-1 was. Rush and Telford were shown to be in a horribly hopeless situation, but not dead. SG-1 had more Lazarus moments for characters, and Dr Jackson was killed and came back to life three times off the top of my head. And if you count alternate reality deaths, all main characters died several times.
If anything, it's more fitting to be depressed because space travel has advanced far, far less over the last 50 years than just about anything.
But no, the last decade did bring a fair bit of innovation, I think. Just a few things...
On the Internet front, not much technically new, but last decade is when it truly became widespread globally, instead of being largely limited to a few rich Western countries. From 2000 to 2010, Europe went from 105 million to 475 million Net users. Mideast went from 114M to 825M. Africa, where overall use remains very low, still went from 4M to 110M. [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm%5D
A lot of interesting stuff happened with cybernetic implants / mind controlled tech. The BrainGate allowed paraplegics to mentally control a robotic arm (see Matt Nagle).
Stem cell research has shown some very promising things. Shinya Yamanaka came up with some method to use non-embryonic stem cells by some reprogramming process I won't claim to understand.
Spirit & Opportunity discovered proof of liquid water once on Mars, while frozen water got discovered on the Moon. And the first private spaceflights took place in this decade.
As far as gadgets and such go, some are also rather important. Digital cameras became commonplace, which I'd say is a more important innovation than smartphones, for now at least. In terms of ease and convenience, Wi-Fi and flat LCD screens became popular - with Wi-Fi being widely used and LCDs essentially pushing CRTs off the market, personal computing became easier.
Come to think of it, mobile phones! Last decade is when they went from expensive to common. In 2000, in my area at least, they'd be mostly used by businessmen and those who really had a need, but over a few years mobile phones became so widespread that grannies and schoolchildren have them now, in the last few years they've also caused landline use at home to become less prevalent.
Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture gave a solution to one of the most important outstanding problems in mathematics.
A functional memristor was built at HP. This can be a very important technology.
3D printing has become feasible for use.
And to finish this post, Mycoplasma laboratorium. One of the most potentially interesting developments in recent times, while it could also pose major ethical issues and possible misuse.
Interesting decade!
Though judging by your nickname, you might be Eric Raymond ;)
Frankly, sounds horrible. I usually maximize by double-clicking the titlebar anyway, but I do minimize often, and now the options are to go through a context menu or use a two-hand keyboard shortcut only?
Different workspaces area great feature in GNOME and other common environments, but that has nothing to do with minimization. Just because I like using workspaces doesn't mean I don't want to minimize.
I'm still on Ubuntu 10.04 because I don't like where the UI has gone lately. Unity has for me been the worst desktop experience in a long time, and now GNOME is being all weird. Oh well, gonna stick with KDE.
failing to follow orders cannot go unpunished
Look at some recent examples from world news. In the last week, some Libyan pilots refused the order to bomb protestors, crashing their planes or flying to Malta. Are these the people that should be punished for not following orders? Are they more deserving of punishment than the other Libyan soldiers have obeyed orders to fire on protesters?
I don't really like how the nomination is for the Internet as an entity, though I agree there needs to be a Peace Prize for it. The best candidate is probably Sir Tim Berners-Lee. To most people, the Web IS the Internet - let's face it, when people think of the Internet and its contributions to society, they probably do not think about BBS of olde or of Gopher servers. Berners-Lee also has the advantage of actually being personally responsible for something. Many important creations end up being the work of a larger group where it's hard to single anyone out. So given what the Internet means to people, Berners-Lee is probably the best single person to represent it.
Absolutely, do it, because of what the parent poster says.
Also consider that getting jobs straight out of university can be tricky for CS graduates. They do get jobs, but it's not always easy, oftentimes because it seems like everyone only wants to hire people with at least 3 years of experience (there was a story about hiring expectations yesterday I think). From an employer's perspective, it's very hard to know which CS graduates are better. You'll have a much easier time if something sets your CV apart from the rest when you graduate. It can be that you won some scholarship, or are an important contributor to some opensource project. A conference publication is one of those things that can set you apart. As an added bonus, as others have said, you might make useful connections there.
As for money, find out if your uni is willing to cover at least part of the expenses. I'm frankly bewildered by the idea that they'd expect you to pay for the entire thing out of your pocket, though I realize the USA might be different given that education is very expensive there. Still, it's likely the uni does have some funds for such cases, but you may have to be a bit pushy. Talk to your professor, see if he can put the pressure on someone to pay you. This is out of experience - I once attended a fairly expensive CS conference abroad (short notice on my paper being accepted, so the flight was expensive), and it took some pushiness by my professor to have me reimbursed.
I may not have the best perspective here, as someone who doesn't drive, but why would you want even someone with a BAS of 0.08% at the wheel? The effects do vary greatly per person, but 0.08% is enough for many people to affect attention span and fine muscle coordination. That's already a person that is not at their best capacity due to alcohol.
At least in the local news I get, drunk drivers tend not to be chronic drunks, but rather people who had a few drinks at a party or such and believed themselves to be in "good enough" shape to drive.
Absolutely. Drunk driving isn't close to the leading cause of preventable deaths, but I think that it's rather easily preventable. Just man up and institute real penalties for that. First offense, considerable fine, second time, permanent revocation of driving license.
I don't get the apparent sympathy towards drunk drivers. It's easy not to drive drunk. People who can't control themselves and do drive drunk are a danger, and need to be treated accordingly, as in not letting them drive. I'm aware that there are countries with lots of cars, the US first and foremost, and where cars are hugely important in some regions. To that I say, the people who really need cars still have a duty to use them responsibly. If they can't, they need to find an alternative.
While this remains a fair point, this bombing was in the arrivals hall, not in the queue for security checks. But yes, sadly, it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere decided to bomb one of the many areas of an airport you can get to without security checks. Although AFAIK, numerous Russian airports have the capability to operate checkpoints at entrances.
Quick note: it's free software, not necessarily Linux. The actual 18-page document which constitutes Putin's order doesn't mention GNU, Linux or any specific piece of software. According to the plan, in 2011 they'll form a "package" of free software that they need and in 2012 the government will be running a repository with it, so presumably it's next year for decisions on which software specifically it's going to be. Of course, Linux is very likely.
As for motivation, one of the big things in Russia now is the idea of getting their own Silicon Valley (Skolkovo) up and running. They want their own stuff. And the document includes mention of looking into possibilities of how to support homegrown Russian software developers. While I'm sure they're happy to get away from an American company, this is also beneficial for Russia if it indeed wants to make its own stuff. There's obviously no commercial Russian OS that could be used as a basis for, well, anything, but building a successful Linux distro with state backing would be quite possible for them in the long-term.
I'll add my own words of appreciation for you as fathers with the right approach to gifted children.
But since I've been there (as a kid, no children myself yet), I have a question. Have you considered the possibility of having your respective children skip a grade or two? I don't know if the education system where you are allows it, but I hope it does. If a kid is in grade 2 and is constantly bored, that's not of much use to him or to the school. Whereas he might feel comfortable in grade 3 or 4. For myself at least grade-skipping was a positive experience, with the upsides definitely outweighing the downsides, so I think the option should be kept in mind.
Hard to tell if you're serious, but really, how would a military solution work against NK?
Yes, the North Korean military is very large, but it's suffering from ammunition and fuel shortages, it's undertrained and it is using obsolete equipment, mostly old Soviet hardware and their own designs that are essentially reworkings of the Soviet ones. The conventional military isn't a match for the South Korean military plus US troops stationed there, let alone additional US forces.
But NK has a huge amount of artillery. If attacked, the regime would know they're going down and they would pretty much level Seoul. I recall reading, though I can't source it now, that there's too much NK artillery to take out in a quick strike, even for the US military. So they can't be taken down militarily without huge sacrifices in the South.
Then there's the matter of the NK regime being crazy, despotic and the people brainwashed. If North Korea is attacked, they'll call up their military reserves and maybe start handing rifles out to peasants, telling them to fight for their leader. There would be huge human wave attacks, WW1 style. Ending their resistance would quite possibly require killing several million North Koreans... at which point it would be much closer to genocide than to liberation.
While North Korea is probably the number one regime in the world that needs to go, it seems extremely unlikely that external powers could take the regime down without killing much of the country. One can only hope the regime collapses due to internal instability, and that it happens in a somewhat bloodless fashion.
That site is definitely legit, and is one of the few ways to get a peek into what NK says. The "news" articles there a mixture of pathetic, funny and scary. AFAIK, their official sites are in other TLDs, like Japanese, Chinese and .net, but not .kp.
Does anyone else think WikiLeaks might have inadvertently helped the TSA? Seriously. A couple weeks ago there were many TSA stories online and I also said that things might improve since there are stories getting to national headlines. But for the past week, it seems WikiLeaks has been the number one thing in the news, even overshadowing the aftermath of North Korea shelling the South, as well as the huge fires in Israel. Sadly, attention being drawn to something else is precisely what the TSA needs.
I'm European, my last flights were last week, so after those Yemen bomb attempts. I'm glad it hasn't, at least yet, caused any extra procedures to appear here in the EU. Anyway, somehow I always set metal detectors off. Must be my shoes. Last week, same as usual - walk through the metal detector, with my shoes on, the metal detector beeps, a security guard does a quick and professional pat-down. That's pretty quick, efficient and secure enough without resorting to outright humiliating treatment.
As much as I hate to say this, in a way this story is good news. I really am sorry for the family that had to go through this. But my perception of the American public is like that of a strong, sleepy bear. Might allow someone to poke him but once poked hard enough, it awakens and becomes very dangerous. It might be true that Americans have allowed too much civil liberty erosion in the past decade (at least judging from online news) but I have confidence that what America needs is a story or two that would make national headlines. A search of a panicking 3-year-old might well be it. Or let some TSA employee be caught on camera jerking off to images from the body-scan machines. Or let someone record TSA employees discussing the dick sizes of people sent through the process. A story that can make headlines in mainstream news, not just Slashdot, and is outrageous enough might just cause the society to raise a big enough stink about it so the government is forced to back down.
Granted, Geocities sites had a lot of terrible design. Blink and marquee tags, unreadable color combinations, cursor animations and sound on pages (aaaargh!) but doesn't anyone find that the simpler Geocities sites are better designed that many of today's sites? These days we have too many sites that take a long time to render, use too many Flash or other dynamic elements. On the other hand, a Geocities site like http://geociti.es/NapaValley/2267/, with simple backgrounds and vanilla links seem very much fine to me.
Hey, as that non-American, I am wondering what or who Judge Judy is ;)
Speaking of unreasonable searches. IANAM (I am not an American) and IANAL but wouldn't the ruling of Kyllo v. United States apply here? That case concerned infrared, not x-ray, technology, but it applied to surveillance of a house with technology that doesn't require the user to enter a house. The ruling also mentioned that the device used was not available to the public - same as these backscatter vans.
As such, could a lawyer explain how the use of these vans, at least pertaining to "viewing" homes, is not illegal per Kyllo v. United States?
I think the results would be more objective if the humans in the test didn't know what the test is all about. They shouldn't know that a judge is trying to tell who's a human and who's a computer. The humans should simply be told that, as part of an experiment, they're required to chat with another person. That would likely prevent people from deliberately acting like computers, etc.
Yay. Opening the conversation with "Hi, are you Suzette?" produces "I haven't given it much thought". Not very intelligent.
I've had some similar experiences here (and a fun occasion when I cited my own site and that was fine), but to play the devil's advocate, how are the mods supposed to know if you really know your stuff or are full of shit? So you know about video games, but mods can't tell that. They also can't tell if you really have a Computer Science degree or not (besides, it's not like the degree automatically makes you an authority - I also have a CS degree and there's plenty of CS stuff I don't know).
Then again, there definitely are people who know enough and should be able to edit accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia could use a system where editors can (privately) provide proof of being an expert in an area, and then they get tagged as such by the moderators, provided they also have a positive history of contributions.
Yeah, that doesn't seem like good evidence at all. Mind you, I do consider it very likely that Israel is behind this. Israel has both the motivation and the capability to launch such an electronic attack at Iran. But as far as actual evidence goes, I'd like to see something more concrete. Assuming that the code really refers to the date and that it's not just a mistaken interpretation of a pointer to 0x00090579, there's still a lot of stuff that happened on that particular day.
Just tried this. Calculated the circumference of a circle with a radius of 1 meter using Pi to 7 digits (3.1415926) and using Pi to 100 digits. The discrepancy is around 1.0718 * 10^-7m, or around 107 nanometers. That's quite a small discrepancy, and even many scientific calculators will have a more precise value of Pi. By using 10 digits instead of 7, the discrepancy falls to 1.795 * 10^-10m, taking it into picometer range. Granted, this is not Planck length range, but goes a long way to show that yeah, quadrillions of digits is a bit overkill ;)