When you are listening to low definition mp3's. It always makes me laugh to see folks with hi-fi head phones hooked up to an mp3 player listening to 64kbs - 128kbs music.

Yeah, but see, you can have your cake and eat it too. Eject someone if you don't get what you want, once you have the pretense to defy the US.

It's never about the moral high-ground. It's always about diplomatic leverage.

This excludes actions by populist elected bodies or particularly fickle monarchs. But in general if one nation is doing something to another nation, it's maneuvering by state and intelligence departments.

No, a surprise would be throwing US agents in jail. This is definitely regular international diplomacy stuff.

The occasional persona non grata happens.

Is is too much to ask that we could have some comments from posters who are interested in, you know, math and science?

I'm sure many of us are interested, but seriously out of our depth on the topic -- I don't even know what stupid questions to ask first without sounding even more stupid. :-P

I have no idea of what this actually means in terms of anything practical.

Here I was getting ready to dredge up all that symmetry and topology that got drilled in to me in grad school.

By all means, bust it out .. because the whinging about "soccer v football" are kind of boring, and I'd love to know what this actually implies to chemists. But since the extent of my chemistry background is from Grade 11, and since that was a very long time ago, this is a little out of my grasp.

I really with I could follow this part better ... it sounds like you guys are the only ones talking about the chemistry, and that's the part that I'm most baffled by. :-P

Jesus fuck. That's your go-to amazing moment for soccer? Don't waste your time watching the video, kids. The dude kicks the ball from a moderate distance at moderate speed and it goes into the net.

On behalf of those of us who didn't do so well in gym class ... that would be somewhat amazing. Even if the net was empty. ;-)

But here's question that has been puzzling chemists, topologists and..errr...soccer fans: is there a molecular analogue of the Brazuca?

OK ... so mathematicians proved you could have molecules with a symmetry similar to a new fangled soccer ball.

Is this good? Is it not good? Is it useful in any way? Or it this purely an intellectual exercise?

I'm afraid I don't grok chemistry with fullness, so I don't know if different symmetries give us different materials, or prettier chemicals.

I know shape usually defines the other kinds of bonds it can make, but I have no idea if this specific thing is of any benefit to anybody.

Can anybody give a lay summary for what the practical applications of this tidbit of knowledge actually are? Because I've got nothing solid here.

Uh, some of the earliest encryption algorithms ever created are immune to MITM.

Yes, and they were built for communications between two parties, who knew they'd be communicating, and could exchange keys in advance.

Now, tell me one which is applicable to the problem of a large number of potential users, all unknown up front, and coming from random devices.

The problem with modern public key encryption (and its strength as well) is that you don't need to pre-exchange keys. But this opens you up to MITM attacks.

Key exchange is hard. Managing all of those keys is really hard. You think a bank can maintain a list (and keep it secure) of the private keys of every individual customer?

The thing which holds the keys (and every vendor you deal with would have a separate copy) then becomes the next attack vector.

I think the generalized problem of establishing, trust, and a secure exchange of keys, is far harder and more complex in a world where you deal with lots of entities, who deal with lots of entities. This isn't things your average person are going to be willing to spend hours doing.

So we really need a new name for when a company regularly avoids so much tax that it makes a profit off the tax system and another one for when it regularly pays zero taxes and shifts all of it's profits to another country while also consuming resources in the host company.

I kinda like parasiticorp for the second one.

The first is probably more "Evil scum back leeching bastards" but that seems too mild.

With $10,000 on the line, it'll be interesting to see if anyone manages to crack the code.

OK, so they have a $10K prize.

Now, purely to play devil's advocate -- if someone manages to exploit the system and doesn't tell anybody, is there more to be gained by that?

Even if it's just maliciously 'bricking' these cars, it seems like this incentive isn't as much as some other activities could be.

Hell, you could probably ransom people's cars back to them for more than that.

That's because they keep shifting the goalposts.

This isn't "shifting" the goal posts. This is trying to actually come up with a meaningful metric for computer intelligence.

And the test which everyone was up in arms about was definitely not an indicator of computer intelligence, but narrowly defining the test in such a way as to make it look like they'd achieved it.

Their test was Can a computer program pretending to be a child speaking it's non-native language fool people, but it sure as hell wasn't a valid measure of how well we're doing with machine intelligence.

I think you're mischaracterizing both philosophy and science. If we accept the definition of philosophy as "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence" then most sciences are a subset of philosophy. And simply because there is a hierarchal structure to their categorization or origins does not give one authority over the other, any more than the first mammal has authority over lions. Neither do we say that lions have "far exceeded" the limits of mammals. Arguments that pit philosophy against science are just as nonsensical.