The Koch bros money supports their business, while Soros appears to spend money according to principle.

You mean there is a difference? Ah, sir (well, I imagine you are a sir), then you must hate freedom.

Let me explain. There is a purpose to the claim that the right and the left are equal in their moronics, spin, and moral failures: it liberates the claimant from the responsibility of taking sides. You are free to chose to be a tree hugger or a kkk racist and it doesn't matter! Left and right being the same thing is thus an axiom which guarantees freedom. If you doubt that axiom, you are against freedom, and I'm here to warn you that that will have consequences.

Naughty you.

Countryside not dying is valuable because the countryside doesn't die. I see...

So, why is it valuable to let the countryside die?

Go ahead, be the asshole you are.

Why is it valuable? Could you substantiate this claim â" without calling me names?

Because the countryside doesn't die, asshole?

Oh, I think failed this one.

But what makes you think, creation of such private monopolies is the secret goal of privatization's adherents?

I agree with you. Most adherents of privatization are just useful fools believing some fantasy free market stuff. The spoils go to the cunning investors that have the networks and skills to rig things in their favor.

A "fair price" of anything is what other people are willing to pay. Taxpayers may have spent a billion dollars on it, but if $10 million is the most anybody would pay (after an honest and open bidding), then that's what it ought to cost. Yes, taxpayers were cheated â" but not at the time of privatization...

Many things have high value to society but would be useless to an investor. For example, regular public transport to far away places so that the countryside doesn't die. That costs a lot, is valuable, but nobody would pay much to own it privately.

I wonder what it is that has robbed people like you of any fantasy and creativity for making arguments and counterarguments in your head. You know, that thing called critical thinking.

Also: please get wise. Money isn't the measure of everything.

Simple drones aren't that hard to make. Comparing a simple drone to the military drones is like comparing a hobby rocket to a space booster.

Maybe, but maybe not.

In any case, acomplished amateurs have done pretty impressive things even in the distant past with autonomous flight, so given a good stash of cash and using modern computing tech, it should be possible to build decent military drones. Probably not at the level of a USAF drone - but likely able to do the whole FPV+aiming+firing routine well enough to be a pretty serious weapon.

Further more, out of experience, especially for bigger projects, taking in freelancers is a very bad idea :

- You lose the knowledge about the project :

That can be managed, but it usually costs more, because you need to pay the freelancer for producing docs. Same thing goes for guarantees and code quality: you get what you pay for.

Were these rather generous photographs or partially obscured faces wearing hats in a crowd? Was the database of potential people in the billions? Identifying the subject of a selfie at your university might not be the most difficult task, but identifying everyone in an arbitrary crowd is going to be a lot more involved.

Even if identifying someone from a bad photo is nearly impossible, if you have enough bad photos and enough additional information, the task can become a lot easier. For example,

  - if you have a lot of photos from the same event, your database might find a string of photos of the same person that can, in the end, amount to a lot more information that what you could get from a single picture (for example, 3d cranial shape).

  - Additional circumstancial evidence will likely restrict your database. It the pics are from a concert by a certain band, the "crowd" is not billions of people but maybe just a handfull thousands.

  - There is another one based on cell phone tracking data. I leave that one as an exercise.

Basically, people have to understand that total surveillance is just around the corner, and that nothing short of a revolution will prevent a dystopia.

Since they give out two awards each year, I wonder what the other 18 guys did. Off the top of my head only Alan Kay comes to mind as being more deserving.

Well, Kiczales, des Rivieres, and Bobrow come to mind. It's not that well known, but the meta-object protocol and multiple dispatch are so much more powerfull than C++ OO that it is actually not funny.

Another title suggestion: Having a Twitter account does nothing but make an organization look unprofessional.

Have you been hiding under a rock? Nowadays, to look really professional you need a string of icons for different social media. Twitter, Facebook, and a bunch of others.

That it is utterly ridiculous - granted. That it looks unprofessional - unfortunately not to most people.

but I have seen it used in the real world to protect those dissenting against their government.

That's good news, and I'm happy to be wrong on this count. I worry, though, that TOR usage tells the SA secret service who is a dissenter.

here are plenty of innocent and justified uses for systems like tor, but for the average person associates tor with drugs by mail, child porn and murder for hire thanks to the media.

Truth be told, it's not the media. We live in a world that is far freer than many would like to acknowledge, and for most purposes tor is a hassle or pointless. The end result is that tor is mostly only used when there is a very good reason for it, and since we live in fairly free society, that reason tends to be stuff that gives tor a bad reputation.

There is also this paradoxon that, if we lived in a society where tor would make a difference, tor would most likely not exist or be useless. This is the situation in Saudi Arabia and other similar places. This is so because the real weakness of tor is that, since it is not possible to hide the exit or entry nodes themselves, the network is easy to shut down or to filter out.

Thanks, man, that sounds awesome!

It's a bit processed (with echos and stuff) but that's quite fine by me.

[...] Cortex-M3 ? Device drivers for basics, register access? Because, it would be awesome to have all these theoretical safety guarantees and stuff, while programming hardware.

Ada has that (google for "arm-none-eabi ada") and much, much more. Plus, it is a mature language with a fat piece of industry behind it.

This Rust language is yet another flashy thing that will not get anywhere.

Haven't you just disproved your own point?

No, of course not.

that if the vast majority of victims of Islam are innocent victims then the problem isn't actually with Islam but simply violent thugs?

Your sentence is gliberish, and doesn't say what you meant. But whatever.

Just like smoking causes cancer, which isn't anything the smokers actually want, Islam causes violence and grief without its adepts really wanting it. Of course everyone involved would be better off without it. Of course the humans that fall for Islam are victims. The problem is how to free them of that.

And just like admitting that you have a problem is the first step out of alcoholism or drug addiction, so it is the first step out of barbarism.

Islam is a problem. Look at the world today. Where is a free, prosperous Islamic state? Where? They are all host of no end of calamities and disgusting cruelty. Why?

You Will Know Them by Their Fruits.

As long as the top level politicians are disciples of the cult of Politically Correctness the real problem, the problem with the Islamic barbarism will still remain.

That is true. Admitting that there is a problem with islam would be a very big step towards improvement. But since this is categorically denied, it is not possible to find a solution.

BTW, the vast majority of the victims of radical islam are themselves muslims. Maybe it is time for muslims to stand up and say, no, peeps, contrary to what political correctness suggest, we actually do have a problem in our religion, and here in the west it is actually possible to do something about it.

The point, rather obviously, is not to exterminate muslims, but to make the fringes of islam less barbaric.