Unfortunately in doing so, you cut the relevant rephrasing of the GGP's original (rhetorical) question:
Why does any non-empty set (a universe) exist at all for us to be able to say "even if I am mistaken, I am" within it? Why is this non-empty set more than just an abstract mathematical concept but has the unique quality of actually existing (as continuously empirically proven by your own first-hand observation of existing within it).
But to answer the other parts:
{ } is a stable state because it is a static declaration. It contains no rules that can change it, nor any axis for it to change on.
{ } is the "default" (comparison) state because we are considering why any universe exists; { } is no universe existing.
Sorry to pick on you for just one statement - but I see this often and it is wrong. If through science we discover we have been created as part of an experiment by an alien race then we would have discovered WHY we are here (i.e. to be part of an alien experiment). If the truth is that we came by accident then science has discovered WHY we are here (i.e. no reason).
You are mis-interpreting the "we" in his question as being a narrow set of people. To illustrate the point, I'll narrow the "we" even further. In terms of you and I, we can already explain WHY we are here: because our mummies and our daddies liked each other very much...
I usually suggest phrasing the question differently to make it a little more precise. Here is the mathematical empty set { }. It is perfectly self-consistent and is a steady-state declaration (it cannot change). However, clearly we are in a non-empty set. Why does any non-empty set (a universe) exist at all for us to be able to say "even if I am mistaken, I am" within it? Why is this non-empty set more than just an abstract mathematical concept but has the unique quality of actually existing (as continuously empirically proven by your own first-hand observation of existing within it).
Funnily enough, I just watched Sir David Attenborough explaining some scientific theories into just those things. There are some pretty logical things.
And why do you think there's actually an answer for why we're alive? Could it actually just be that conditions were right to allow single cells to form, thus starting the thing we call life? It's really not that much of a stretch.
What conditions? Here's the mathematical empty set: { }. Are the conditions right for a universe to appear within it yet? Presumably not, since it doesn't contain a rule for time or any conditions. Scientifically, we can extrapolate causality backwards to find out how the universe grew, but as the empty set contains no rules to cause anything, we can only empirically examine a non-empty set -- we can never extrapolate back to the empty set. Accordingly, it is impossible scientifically to answer the question "why is there a universe at all -- why isn't the set empty", and the question of why we exist remains a philosophical one and not a scientific one.
The UK has 36,700 more deaths in winter than in summer, mostly among the elderly. (Your blood thickens when you are cold and you are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.) So the most likely cause of the difference in death rates would be that US homes are better insulated, being generally newer, and have better heating.
It seems questionable to me that a typical new American house, made of vinyl siding over foam board, is necessarily better insulated than an older stone or brick home. But it's certainly the case that the U.K. is farther north than most of the U.S. population, so people have a colder environment regardless of insulation, and they get less sun, thus raising the risk of vitamin D deficiency, which has been tied to a host of health problems.
Many old Victorian homes are not the "cavity brick" you are imagining, but solid brick that leads to them being cold and often damp. It's a well-known problem.
Foam board would be much more insulating.
I think it's more likely that the metric used to measure health is a poor predictor of life expectancy. In fact, the article actually demonstrates as much. This could be because, say, the ability to run a few miles or the number of days spent with a cold each year might indicate good health, but doesn't mean you won't come down with a bad case of cancer or something else that may actually kill you. I suspect Americans are in worse overall health because they're less active and more overweight, wheras brits consume a whole lot more alcohol.
Even if the metric is a good predictor, the conclusions are still bogus. The medical system is not the "cause of death", so attributing death rates without considering the causes is silly. The UK has 36,700 more deaths in winter than in summer, mostly among the elderly. (Your blood thickens when you are cold and you are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.) So the most likely cause of the difference in death rates would be that US homes are better insulated, being generally newer, and have better heating. I'd guess social factors also have a big impact. The elderly in the UK probably have less contact with the community than in the US (social breakdown is a bit of a problem in Britain at the moment), with impacts like "you didn't have friends looking in on you every day, so nobody told you you should really see a doctor about that."
Actually, all speech is protected. There are no exceptions in the constitution. It's quite specific:
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech
See? "NO law." There you go. Not "some laws when we don't like speech", but NO LAW.
But this law wasn't made by Congress, so that all sounds rather academic. The videos are accused of breaching British law. (I'll leave it to the lawyers to argue the rights and wrongs of jurisdiction and the internet.) The US has merely been asked to action a take-down.
Why would a company just sit in the corner quietly letting the community distrust them, leave, and never want to come back. It's poor business and it smells a bit like someone else is pulling the strings.
All this smells of Oracle kicking a few heads...
Oracle's community relations might not be "nice" but they have unblocked some serious blockages. Remember, when Oracle bought Sun, the Java Community was effectively on strike, threatening to veto the Java 7 specification unless Sun gave in and gave proper support to Apache Harmony (and by extension Google Android) which would have doomed Sun's Java business. IBM had been long-since trying to pull the rug out from under Sun and "eclipse" Sun over Java, and they could do that because of its relative openness. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice issue is again where Sun's slight-openness was being used as a stick to beat the company with; if it was proprietary there'd be no issue, but because it is somewhat open Sun gets beaten with twigs for not doing more. Remember the flack they had for putting Java code into OpenOffice before the JVM was open source? Since Oracle have taken over, they've taken a tougher line that sounds community-unfriendly. But IBM has killed support for Harmony and fallen in line on Oracle's OpenJDK; much of the Java community has given up on the Harmony fight and the Java 7 spec looks like getting through -- even the Eclipse Foundation, Sun's former mortal enemy, is going to support it. Much of the community has been kicked off OpenOffice... coincidentally giving Oracle greater weight within the project to push its agenda through. Oracle probably won't get great press for their community relations, but they seem to be scarily effective at getting what they want out of the community of businesses (as opposed to the community of individual developers).
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of. These high-speed arbitrage and "quant" investors may make a profit without creating a product (though collectively their track record is not very good financially), but their profit margins are vanishingly small and they serve a critical role in equalizing prices between markets and keeping prices up to date as market conditions change. In short, your complaint about these trading practices smacks of jealousy and sour grapes, and it ignores the valuable role they serve in the markets.
Except that we're long since at the levels where high frequency trading is the only customer for its own increased efficiency. The only kind of purchase that can notice a difference from a 400 microsecond latency down to a 126 microsecond latency is a fully automated one, because it takes a human orders of magnitude longer just to twitch his finger towards the "go" button, let alone actually press it. To any non-algorithmic trade, latencies were already vanishingly small.
I'm not a lawyer of course... 33(B).1 of the National Heritage Act 2002 is
The Commision may exploit any intellectual property, or any other intangible asset, relating to ancient monuments or historic buildings.
Various case law in some jurisdictions (eg, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame vs Gentile Productions 1998 in the US) seem to allow companies to protect their building's images as trademarks even though the building is visible from public land.
So I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss English Heritage's claim as "unthinkable and ridiculous". (Or at least, it might be "ridiculous" to us on Slashdot, but they might still win.)
It'll be interesting to watch anyway.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt, more than China needs the US to buy its goods, there isn't much the US can do.
Apparently not -- apparently the Chinese government is worried about maintaining political order if there's any significant loss of employment (as there would be if Chinese manufactured goods became less competitive). Supposedly this has been at the heart of their reluctance actually to let the value of the yuan rise more than about 2%. It seems China really does think it needs the US to buy it's goods and that's partly why it keeps on buying up US debt even though it keeps looking more and more unsustainable.
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
But most people who care about what the Bible says do seek help in interpreting it, and it's opaque enough to allow hundreds of denominations with differing beliefs to flourish.
That's actually wrong -- different denomination does not mean different belief. Many of the well-known denominations differ mostly in how they organise themselves -- eg, the Presbyterian church is so called because it has presbyteries (a kind of committee) instead of bishops. There really aren't strong theological disagreements between the major protestant demoninations - the differences of opinion are few and minor, and there's probably more variation among people within a denomination than between denominations. You can verify check this for yourself quite simply -- go into a Christian bookshop and pick up a random set of bible studies. See if they advertise that they are designed for a particular denomination -- as surely if there were strong theological differences between the denominations they would need to.
Trying and failing to live up to "higher" standards is commendable. The same cannot be said for "basic" standards. There's a huge difference between trying to be polite to your coworkers on a day-to-day basis and failing, vs. preaching peace and love while arranging the Crusades
I was going to suggest talking to a local vicar or pastor to see what he has to say about all this, but actually he's probably out this weekend sacking Constantinople with an army knights on horseback, because y'know they do that every week...
How long until making photocopies of your butt becomes a thing of the past?
How long until making photocopies of your butt so a picture of your mooning backside automatically gets emailed to the system administrator or your boss becomes the thing of the future!
For everyone not in the UK.
Our research and science in Australia will climb the rankings by default, making us look good, increasing investment and licensing opportunities. We'll be able to keep hiring local talent, as well as recruit from soon to be unemployed talent in the UK, at discount rates! Sure, we may have to be China's butt-buddy, but at least we won't be dumb, poor and stupid.
Probably not. The primary competition for scientists is not "UK vs Aus", but "academia vs industry or some other job". Cut three entry-level science jobs in the UK, and you don't end up with three extra early-career scientists applying for residency in Australia -- you probably end up with two extra bankers and a strategy consultant.
"Paper books are really dead -- they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,"
Huh? I've seen quite a few books recently. They're not gone. "they're gone [...], they're creating tablets" The paper books are creating tablets? Is he high on drugs or is that a literal translation that makes less sense in English?
It's a typo. He meant to say "they're creating tables". His teenage son has a table that's a plank of wood on four piles of unsold copies of Being Digital.
DHS, FBI, and his local police were all involved to deliver a warning (via the local police). Not very likely.
The Secret Service protects the president, and investigates threats to him (among other things, of course). Either they would have gone directly to the kid, or they would have gone through Interpol.
Nope. They wouldn't have gone through Interpol because Interpol's constitution bars it from handling political crimes. And the Secret Service wouldn't have gone directly to a teenager in the UK over this because it would have caused an international incident with the UK government. ("This is our turf, so you go through our police.") The Sun scenario sounds far more likely -- DHS are notified because it's "an overseas threat", they contact the FBI because the FBI have a relationship with the UK police, and the UK police then arrange for a local constable to knock on the teenager's door.
Anybody who uses "outside the domain of science" to describe anything doesn't understand what science is. If there is a god, and it has any sort of measurable effect on the universe then it is within the domain of science. Because we can measure its effects. We can test various religions' prayers to see if they get answered at a rate different from chance.
You are technically incorrect. That would require God to be deterministically repeatable (ie, not a person) before you could attempt it. You'll find yourself caught between your own definitions if you follow that line. Essentially "I'll only believe in God if my prayer experiment reliably passes," and then if it passes, "great, we've shown that if this prayer is uttered then reliably that will be the outcome and thus it is a mechanical force of nature and thus not God." Science is predicated on the assumption that the universe is ordered and repeatable, and there are plenty of things that, as a scientist, are well outside of my domain, and plenty more things where experimentation is impractical or inappropriate -- which is why there are plenty of other faculties within my university that are not the science faculty. How many eggs did Henry V have for breakfast on the morning of the Battle of Agincourt? Are all men created equal? Is proposition 8 unconstitutional? Which job offer should you accept? Good luck designing rigorous experiments that would pass peer review...
Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).
I went one step further -- I had a look at the engines themselves. For example, seekfind.org does not describe itself as a "general" search engine -- it describes itself specifically as an engine for searches related to Christian terms. If the article claimed it was a "general" search engine, then the article was wrong.
First off -- I applaud your use of open-note exams. That is the ONLY real-world way to learn and demonstrate knowledge. There is almost never a situation in the professional world where one must solve a problem with absolutely no references
Pretty much every technical job interview they will ever undergo these days will ask them to do exactly that. Often over the phone. I sometimes wonder why we as a programming community recognise that programming exams aren't actually very helpful for assessment in universities, but then insist that even crappier, tinier, and more limited programming tests are the only true measure of a candidate's abilities when we have to assess them ourselves.
Australia is known to have cleaned up its tax, banking and property sales with complex ID tracking at a points along every transaction.
Thats is what makes this so interesting.
Every small move in Australia is watched over many interconnected databases. Mostly for tax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_point_check
You make it sound like a super secure big brother system. An expired passport and a student card gets you over the 100 point threshold.
Slashdot Mirror
[eh lets cut down on the verbosity]
Unfortunately in doing so, you cut the relevant rephrasing of the GGP's original (rhetorical) question:
Why does any non-empty set (a universe) exist at all for us to be able to say "even if I am mistaken, I am" within it? Why is this non-empty set more than just an abstract mathematical concept but has the unique quality of actually existing (as continuously empirically proven by your own first-hand observation of existing within it).
But to answer the other parts:
{ } is a stable state because it is a static declaration. It contains no rules that can change it, nor any axis for it to change on.
{ } is the "default" (comparison) state because we are considering why any universe exists; { } is no universe existing.
Science cannot explain WHY we are here
Sorry to pick on you for just one statement - but I see this often and it is wrong. If through science we discover we have been created as part of an experiment by an alien race then we would have discovered WHY we are here (i.e. to be part of an alien experiment). If the truth is that we came by accident then science has discovered WHY we are here (i.e. no reason).
You are mis-interpreting the "we" in his question as being a narrow set of people. To illustrate the point, I'll narrow the "we" even further. In terms of you and I, we can already explain WHY we are here: because our mummies and our daddies liked each other very much ...
I usually suggest phrasing the question differently to make it a little more precise. Here is the mathematical empty set { }. It is perfectly self-consistent and is a steady-state declaration (it cannot change). However, clearly we are in a non-empty set. Why does any non-empty set (a universe) exist at all for us to be able to say "even if I am mistaken, I am" within it? Why is this non-empty set more than just an abstract mathematical concept but has the unique quality of actually existing (as continuously empirically proven by your own first-hand observation of existing within it).
Funnily enough, I just watched Sir David Attenborough explaining some scientific theories into just those things. There are some pretty logical things.
And why do you think there's actually an answer for why we're alive? Could it actually just be that conditions were right to allow single cells to form, thus starting the thing we call life? It's really not that much of a stretch.
What conditions? Here's the mathematical empty set: { }. Are the conditions right for a universe to appear within it yet? Presumably not, since it doesn't contain a rule for time or any conditions. Scientifically, we can extrapolate causality backwards to find out how the universe grew, but as the empty set contains no rules to cause anything, we can only empirically examine a non-empty set -- we can never extrapolate back to the empty set. Accordingly, it is impossible scientifically to answer the question "why is there a universe at all -- why isn't the set empty", and the question of why we exist remains a philosophical one and not a scientific one.
It seems questionable to me that a typical new American house, made of vinyl siding over foam board, is necessarily better insulated than an older stone or brick home. But it's certainly the case that the U.K. is farther north than most of the U.S. population, so people have a colder environment regardless of insulation, and they get less sun, thus raising the risk of vitamin D deficiency, which has been tied to a host of health problems.
Many old Victorian homes are not the "cavity brick" you are imagining, but solid brick that leads to them being cold and often damp. It's a well-known problem. Foam board would be much more insulating.
I clicked expecting a discussion of the article, and instead I got a placebo discussion about US healthcare reform and taxes!
I think it's more likely that the metric used to measure health is a poor predictor of life expectancy. In fact, the article actually demonstrates as much. This could be because, say, the ability to run a few miles or the number of days spent with a cold each year might indicate good health, but doesn't mean you won't come down with a bad case of cancer or something else that may actually kill you. I suspect Americans are in worse overall health because they're less active and more overweight, wheras brits consume a whole lot more alcohol.
Even if the metric is a good predictor, the conclusions are still bogus. The medical system is not the "cause of death", so attributing death rates without considering the causes is silly. The UK has 36,700 more deaths in winter than in summer, mostly among the elderly. (Your blood thickens when you are cold and you are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.) So the most likely cause of the difference in death rates would be that US homes are better insulated, being generally newer, and have better heating. I'd guess social factors also have a big impact. The elderly in the UK probably have less contact with the community than in the US (social breakdown is a bit of a problem in Britain at the moment), with impacts like "you didn't have friends looking in on you every day, so nobody told you you should really see a doctor about that."
Corporations are not people. Therefore the first amendment does not address the actions of a corporation.
I've never yet met a corporation that did not consist of people.
Actually, all speech is protected. There are no exceptions in the constitution. It's quite specific:
See? "NO law." There you go. Not "some laws when we don't like speech", but NO LAW.
But this law wasn't made by Congress, so that all sounds rather academic. The videos are accused of breaching British law. (I'll leave it to the lawyers to argue the rights and wrongs of jurisdiction and the internet.) The US has merely been asked to action a take-down.
All this irks of inside deals.
Why would a company just sit in the corner quietly letting the community distrust them, leave, and never want to come back. It's poor business and it smells a bit like someone else is pulling the strings.
All this smells of Oracle kicking a few heads...
Oracle's community relations might not be "nice" but they have unblocked some serious blockages. Remember, when Oracle bought Sun, the Java Community was effectively on strike, threatening to veto the Java 7 specification unless Sun gave in and gave proper support to Apache Harmony (and by extension Google Android) which would have doomed Sun's Java business. IBM had been long-since trying to pull the rug out from under Sun and "eclipse" Sun over Java, and they could do that because of its relative openness. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice issue is again where Sun's slight-openness was being used as a stick to beat the company with; if it was proprietary there'd be no issue, but because it is somewhat open Sun gets beaten with twigs for not doing more. Remember the flack they had for putting Java code into OpenOffice before the JVM was open source? Since Oracle have taken over, they've taken a tougher line that sounds community-unfriendly. But IBM has killed support for Harmony and fallen in line on Oracle's OpenJDK; much of the Java community has given up on the Harmony fight and the Java 7 spec looks like getting through -- even the Eclipse Foundation, Sun's former mortal enemy, is going to support it. Much of the community has been kicked off OpenOffice... coincidentally giving Oracle greater weight within the project to push its agenda through. Oracle probably won't get great press for their community relations, but they seem to be scarily effective at getting what they want out of the community of businesses (as opposed to the community of individual developers).
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of. These high-speed arbitrage and "quant" investors may make a profit without creating a product (though collectively their track record is not very good financially), but their profit margins are vanishingly small and they serve a critical role in equalizing prices between markets and keeping prices up to date as market conditions change. In short, your complaint about these trading practices smacks of jealousy and sour grapes, and it ignores the valuable role they serve in the markets.
Except that we're long since at the levels where high frequency trading is the only customer for its own increased efficiency. The only kind of purchase that can notice a difference from a 400 microsecond latency down to a 126 microsecond latency is a fully automated one, because it takes a human orders of magnitude longer just to twitch his finger towards the "go" button, let alone actually press it. To any non-algorithmic trade, latencies were already vanishingly small.
The Stonehenge claim is more in line with European public law than Anglo-Saxon tradition (the irony is thick here).
Not quite as thick... Stonehenge predates the Angle and Saxon arrival in Britain too by a few thousand years!
The Commision may exploit any intellectual property, or any other intangible asset, relating to ancient monuments or historic buildings.
Various case law in some jurisdictions (eg, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame vs Gentile Productions 1998 in the US) seem to allow companies to protect their building's images as trademarks even though the building is visible from public land. So I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss English Heritage's claim as "unthinkable and ridiculous". (Or at least, it might be "ridiculous" to us on Slashdot, but they might still win.) It'll be interesting to watch anyway.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt, more than China needs the US to buy its goods, there isn't much the US can do.
Apparently not -- apparently the Chinese government is worried about maintaining political order if there's any significant loss of employment (as there would be if Chinese manufactured goods became less competitive). Supposedly this has been at the heart of their reluctance actually to let the value of the yuan rise more than about 2%. It seems China really does think it needs the US to buy it's goods and that's partly why it keeps on buying up US debt even though it keeps looking more and more unsustainable.
Since you really do need sheep to do anything, long story short, he won the game.
Ok, so New Zealand is fine then, but what's the US going to do?
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
But most people who care about what the Bible says do seek help in interpreting it, and it's opaque enough to allow hundreds of denominations with differing beliefs to flourish.
That's actually wrong -- different denomination does not mean different belief. Many of the well-known denominations differ mostly in how they organise themselves -- eg, the Presbyterian church is so called because it has presbyteries (a kind of committee) instead of bishops. There really aren't strong theological disagreements between the major protestant demoninations - the differences of opinion are few and minor, and there's probably more variation among people within a denomination than between denominations. You can verify check this for yourself quite simply -- go into a Christian bookshop and pick up a random set of bible studies. See if they advertise that they are designed for a particular denomination -- as surely if there were strong theological differences between the denominations they would need to.
Trying and failing to live up to "higher" standards is commendable. The same cannot be said for "basic" standards. There's a huge difference between trying to be polite to your coworkers on a day-to-day basis and failing, vs. preaching peace and love while arranging the Crusades
I was going to suggest talking to a local vicar or pastor to see what he has to say about all this, but actually he's probably out this weekend sacking Constantinople with an army knights on horseback, because y'know they do that every week...
How long until making photocopies of your butt becomes a thing of the past?
How long until making photocopies of your butt so a picture of your mooning backside automatically gets emailed to the system administrator or your boss becomes the thing of the future!
For everyone not in the UK. Our research and science in Australia will climb the rankings by default, making us look good, increasing investment and licensing opportunities. We'll be able to keep hiring local talent, as well as recruit from soon to be unemployed talent in the UK, at discount rates! Sure, we may have to be China's butt-buddy, but at least we won't be dumb, poor and stupid.
Probably not. The primary competition for scientists is not "UK vs Aus", but "academia vs industry or some other job". Cut three entry-level science jobs in the UK, and you don't end up with three extra early-career scientists applying for residency in Australia -- you probably end up with two extra bankers and a strategy consultant.
"Paper books are really dead -- they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,"
Huh? I've seen quite a few books recently. They're not gone.
"they're gone [...], they're creating tablets"
The paper books are creating tablets? Is he high on drugs or is that a literal translation that makes less sense in English?
It's a typo. He meant to say "they're creating tables". His teenage son has a table that's a plank of wood on four piles of unsold copies of Being Digital.
DHS, FBI, and his local police were all involved to deliver a warning (via the local police). Not very likely. The Secret Service protects the president, and investigates threats to him (among other things, of course). Either they would have gone directly to the kid, or they would have gone through Interpol.
Nope. They wouldn't have gone through Interpol because Interpol's constitution bars it from handling political crimes. And the Secret Service wouldn't have gone directly to a teenager in the UK over this because it would have caused an international incident with the UK government. ("This is our turf, so you go through our police.") The Sun scenario sounds far more likely -- DHS are notified because it's "an overseas threat", they contact the FBI because the FBI have a relationship with the UK police, and the UK police then arrange for a local constable to knock on the teenager's door.
Anybody who uses "outside the domain of science" to describe anything doesn't understand what science is. If there is a god, and it has any sort of measurable effect on the universe then it is within the domain of science. Because we can measure its effects. We can test various religions' prayers to see if they get answered at a rate different from chance.
You are technically incorrect. That would require God to be deterministically repeatable (ie, not a person) before you could attempt it. You'll find yourself caught between your own definitions if you follow that line. Essentially "I'll only believe in God if my prayer experiment reliably passes," and then if it passes, "great, we've shown that if this prayer is uttered then reliably that will be the outcome and thus it is a mechanical force of nature and thus not God." Science is predicated on the assumption that the universe is ordered and repeatable, and there are plenty of things that, as a scientist, are well outside of my domain, and plenty more things where experimentation is impractical or inappropriate -- which is why there are plenty of other faculties within my university that are not the science faculty. How many eggs did Henry V have for breakfast on the morning of the Battle of Agincourt? Are all men created equal? Is proposition 8 unconstitutional? Which job offer should you accept? Good luck designing rigorous experiments that would pass peer review...
Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).
I went one step further -- I had a look at the engines themselves. For example, seekfind.org does not describe itself as a "general" search engine -- it describes itself specifically as an engine for searches related to Christian terms. If the article claimed it was a "general" search engine, then the article was wrong.
First off -- I applaud your use of open-note exams. That is the ONLY real-world way to learn and demonstrate knowledge. There is almost never a situation in the professional world where one must solve a problem with absolutely no references
Pretty much every technical job interview they will ever undergo these days will ask them to do exactly that. Often over the phone. I sometimes wonder why we as a programming community recognise that programming exams aren't actually very helpful for assessment in universities, but then insist that even crappier, tinier, and more limited programming tests are the only true measure of a candidate's abilities when we have to assess them ourselves.
Australia is known to have cleaned up its tax, banking and property sales with complex ID tracking at a points along every transaction. Thats is what makes this so interesting. Every small move in Australia is watched over many interconnected databases. Mostly for tax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_point_check
You make it sound like a super secure big brother system. An expired passport and a student card gets you over the 100 point threshold.