The teacher who used their own last name as an admin password is an idiot and should be reprimanded.

But an unlocked door is not an invitation to come in and snoop around someone's house, even if all you do is swap some picture frames around. That's what the kid did. It was unauthorized tresspassing. He should be suspended. If he'd done something worse, he should be expelled and/or prosecuted. Also, we don't know what else he did, and even if it was nothing, not coming down hard on this will make other students think this kind of violation is not a big deal. Unauthorized access IS a big deal, because commonly enough it's done for nefarious purposes, like changing grades or getting a peek at exam questions. Also, tresspassing in general is wrong.

As for the two men kissing, who cares. In 100 years, that'll be as not a big deal as interracial kissing is right now. If the photo is overly sexual in some way, then perhaps there may be an added problem of inappropriateness. In our current culture and all things being equal, a photo of a man and a woman kissing is more likely to be considered "romantic", while two people of the same sex kissing is going to be interpreted more sexually. That's not exactly fair, though, and if the school were to openly interpret it that way, they'd get into a world of shit politically.

There are a lot of proponents that will tell you that you should learn the Dvorak keyboard. Why don't people learn it? Doing so is a big investment, without assurance of a big payoff. In fact, it's been shown that Dvorak is only marginally better than Qwerty. The theory is (and it's questionable) that Dvorak leads to faster typing because it's carefully optimized to speed typing. Qwerty isn't much worse than optimal because it's random, and random asymptotically approaches optimal in many cases. Consider random vs. LRU cache replacement policies. Also, the main reason people believe Dvorak is better is not because it's been shown to be the case objectively but because people have believed the marketing materials that came from the inventors of the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Ok, so going back to this investment idea, you have a choice between English, which sucks to learn but half the world knows, and some new language you just invented that nobody knows but which MAY (but you don't have proof) be easier to learn. Where are you going to spend your energy? Marginally higher learning effort with a clearly huge payoff or a marginally lower learning effort but a huge risk that you'll never find another speaker of the language?

I'm a conlang enthusiast. I've invented a few myself. But I did it as a means to tinker with ideas, explore, and learn about language. I never had any expectation that people would use them with any regularity. Actually, two of them I named "Ferengi" and "Cardassian," so you can see that it was driven in part by my interest in science fiction, which is FICTION.

So, invent your new language. Talk to people on the internet about it who are also interested in conlangs. It's a fun hobby. But be realistic about it. Most people don't give a crap about learning ANY second language (especially in the US, while elsewhere people get multiple languages because people are forced by circumstances or live in multilingual communities), and they're certainly not interested in languages for their own sake. This is why "free and open source software" is hard for politicians to grasp as being of any value (at least on an ethical level) because most people don't get it and really just don't care.

BTW, some others here have made some good points about irregularity and redundancy. Redundancy is vital to a language. We need it to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. If you eliminate the irregularities (which have been positively selected for because of their redundancy value), then you'll make the language perhaps easier to learn but harder to understand. Esperanto's regularity is not an asset, and native speakers have naturally introduced new irregularities to compensate for the drawbacks. So your ideal universal language would in fact be intentionally harder to learn so that as to minimize ambiguity in communication.

This religious freedom thing in Indiana is bullshit.

One of my best friends is a Methodist minister. He's the kind of Christian you want to be around. He's there just to help people solve problems in their lives and teach basic Christian concepts of forgiveness and repentance (which, in case you didn't know, means owning up to the shit you did).

Most religious people aren't like this. They use their religion as a means to feel superior and discriminate against others. That's why these laws in Indiana and Texas are dangerous. It's one thing to believe something. It's entirely another to treat other people as second-class citizens because either they believe differently or they have some attribute that your religion arbitrarily singled out that you or some religious figure decided is wrong.

So why do we do business with other countries? Hell, why do we want to do business with communist Cuba? Because our influence can be positive. They're backward people, and exposing them to our culture can do them some good. We don't turn a blind eye to it exactly, but screaming at them about how stupid they are is not going to change their minds. It'll make them angry and shoot bombs at us. On the other hand, Indiana is a US state, where this kind of political pressure and hollering CAN have a positive impact.

Ok, so why do religions think that homosexuality is wrong? Keep in mind that they come from the ancient world where things were different. These were times when populations were smaller, manpower was at a premium, and men had to be in charge of everything. You'll notice that in the ancient world, homosexuality among women wasn't particularly frowned upon, while it was often forbidden among men. Why? Because in those days, the sex act between two men was perceived as putting one of the men in the role of a woman, and you just couldn't h permit that. This is why pederasty was common, because it was between a man and a teenager, where the man maintained his position of power. Also, homosexality completely unchecked could have consequences, such as the population decline it caused in Sparta. So, because of certain neolitic beliefs and population issues, along with a desire to control who fathered a woman's children, certain religions codified certain rules about homosexuality.

The thing is, WE HAVE NONE OF THESE ISSUES TODAY. Ok, sure we have AIDS, and sex between men is a more significant disease vector than between a man and a woman or between two women. But that's a matter of personal responsibility. Learn to control your urges a bit, use protection, and only have sex with people you know really really well. I don't care what your sexual orientation is, hooking up with random people puts you, them, and anyone else you sleep with at risk of disease and death. We shouldn't try to control who you sleep with, but we can make it a criminal or civil offense for you to give someone your disease. But the point is, we're not in a world where women should be subordinated to men, and we don't have a declining population. In the countries where there is a declining population, homosexuality isn't responsible -- it's women in the workforce without systems in place to allow them have children while also having careers and fathers still assuming that most of the child rearing responsibility should be shouldered by women. Women may have full civil rights on paper, but our culture still puts them between a rock and a hard place.

These fundamentalist Christians are dirty perverts. They spend way too much time thinking about what other people are doing in the privacy of their own homes, and then for some reason they want to get involved by going into those bedrooms and playing dominator/dominatrix and telling people what to do while they're having sex.

So how that Uber is going to make all this money from location data, are they going to give free rides? It seems unlikely, but it's possible that the revenue stream from subscribers to their database could exceed the operating costs for fuel, paying drivers, and other overheads. If they give free rides, they may be able to side-step some of the taxi laws, because they're not profiting directly from the riders.

I recall an AMD engineer presenting at MICRO in 2012 telling us that one of the problems with making wafers too thin is that they tend to curl up. I'm not sure whether the warping is inherent in the silicon or doesn't occur until after all the circuit layers are put on top. Regarding the article, the wafer doesn't start out thin. The circuits are formed, and then chips are (in a manner of speaking) shaved off the surface, exposing fresh GaAs to make another set of chips.

Crap, what happens if we crunch imaginary numbers instead?

When it comes to unprofessional language in commercial, scientific, and engineering endeavours, there seems to be two assumptions people make:

1. All women are offended by the sorts of words and phrases used by 9th graders in their daily speech.
2. No men are offended by the same sort of language.

Both assumptions are incorrect.

Now, in most situations, I think that people should be able to say what they want. You can talk about body parts in naughty ways, and you can say all manner of insulting things (right or wrong) about anybody's religion. Basically, anything short of threatening to kill people. And if people get offended, they can shove it. I think that the proper and polite thing to do is to make sure that someone who doesn't want to hear what you say isn't forced to listen -- that to read what you wrote or hear what you said requires some positive action on their part, so if they don't like it, it's their fault for seeking it out.

However, in a professional setting, it's time to act like an adult. Discussions of sex and insults about religions are out of place, not because they're *fundamentally* inappropriate, but because they're accepted as inappropriate for professional and public settings. I'm sorry. I don't care how much you and your pals get a kick out of jokes about Jews and dead babies, people shouldn't have to listen to it at the office.

So, then there's this ambiguous situation with FOSS projects. Is this play time or work time? It's kinda both. People do it for fun, but if you don't want to make it a public thing, then you don't put it up on github. If your objective is to get public participation in a technically-oriented project, unprofessional language is out of place. If you want people to take FOSS in general serious, then unprofessional language is out of place. Linus Torvalds didn't publish the source code to Linux because he thought it would be hillarious or an asshole thing to do. The purpose was to attract people into a development community around the project.

In general, I object to certain subject being out in public where it's shoved up everyone's noses. Nude beach? No problem, because you have to travel there to see it. Nude parade down my street? That depends on the purpose, but there are many ways in which human nudity can be a good thing, for artistic, educational, or scientific purposes. (In general, I wouldn't be offended unless it was just really tasteless.) What about people in the nude parade having sex while they travel on floats down my street? No fucking way. I'm not a huge fan of Islam, and I think that its adherents deserve a great deal of criticism, constructive and otherwise. On the other hand, I would find it unacceptable to have to a parade whose purpose was to shout anti-Islamic hate language for everyone to hear. Speaking of screwing in the streets, that's one of the things that bothers me about gay pride parades. Standing up against oppression from bigots who hate you for a perfectly natural thing is good (homosexuality is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom). However, this does not require that your presentation be so hypersexualized that I can't take my kids to see it. (Honestly, we just dont need sex in the streets. Gay people are as normal and weird as any other subset of the population, living their lives, working jobs, etc. Connecting "gay" with "hypersexual" in a public event gives people the wrong idea.)

The bottom line is that people need to learn to be considerate and have some professional decorum. If you're going to do or say something that might insult someone, do it in a principled way as a means to be constructive. Do it because you DO give a shit, not because you don't. This applies to FOSS projects as much as to any other situation.

Although I wouldn't necessarily say you have the "right" to be an asshole, it's vital that you have that freedom. Consider obscenity laws that restrict porn to certain venues. Those may or may not have some value, but laws that try to curtail it entirely are undoubtedly bad. Why? They would be part of the slippery slope of eroding out freedoms in other areas. Indeed, it is critically important to the health of our society that some people act in assholish ways, because it helps us to not get stuck with one defintion or another of what is acceptable. 60 years ago, it was unacceptable for a "negro" to sit at the front of a bus. However, we should all be grateful that Rosa Parks took the risk she did, because it played a role in a much needed overhaul of America's concepts of civil rights and fundamental human equality. In other words, you never know what "asshole move" might lead to a change for the better in society, rather than just being some random crap out of someone who never left junior high school. But at the same time, keep in mind that what Rosa Parks did wasn't meant to insult people, per se -- it was a deliberate and principled act against oppression. There's a stark contrast between that versus random potty talk on github that may play an insignificant role in some day allowing the word "fuck" to be said on broadcast TV.

I'm still of the opinion that we're dumping too much CO2 in to the air. Although I know that scientists make mistakes, scientific knowledge is never 100% perfect, and that science is a system of incrementally improving our knowledge, I'm not a science skeptic. Climate scientsts are better experts on this topic than I am, science is highly competitive (remember, they all compete for a very limited supply of grant money, so one scientists's failure is another's success, so they want to overturn each other's ideas), and peer-review is effective much more than it is ineffective.

That all being said, a perhaps a more accessible issue people should be talking about is all the other crap we're dumping into the air *besides* the CO2. We're poisoning ourselves. And besides the air, what about junk we're putting into our bodies from other sources, like pesticides, BPA, and all manner of other harmful chemicals?

Ok, so maybe global warming is something that will only kill our great-great-great-grandkids, and we don't care about them. What about the stuff that's killing us right now?

Critters love to go in crawl spaces. Some fine chicken wire would keep the mice out, but I'm not sure what you're going to do about the bugs. Raising it up on a platform on some slippery thin metal legs might help a bit, but anything that flies will go straight into the intake vent. Or how about hanging it from the floor boards at the ceiling of the crawl space?

Are you really that cramped for storage space that you have to put a computer into the crawl space? Can't you put something else in there in sealed up containers, like all those out-of-style clothes you're afraid to donate to the poor?

I'm just thinking that anything you do here is going to make this machine a pain to maintain. You will occasionally have to reboot it, even repair it. If it were a Linux machine, maybe you could go headless, but since it's a Windows machine, you pretty much have to have a monitor and keyboard or else get a server machine with IPMI. And if I were going to spend that much money, I wouldn't be caught dead putting it in a place where it's going to be subject to all manner of environmental hazards.

Fair enough.

I actually use all four of those browsers. I use Chrome for Google Docs, Firefox for high performance JavaScript applications and Safari for most everything else. Occasionally, I'm forced to boot Windows in a VM and use IE because of some idiots who tailored their legacy web app specifically for IE.

I've tried using just one, but each browser has or has had too many deal-breaker bugs. Actually, I used to use Firefox for everything, but there were too many problems with it, so I switched to Safari. It's improved a lot since then, but it doesn't integrate that well with Mac OS X or Google Docs, so I can't use it for everything. One reason I tend to avoid Chrome is that the developers are assholes. When I report bugs, they just argue with me and tell me I'm wrong. I actually formally studied HCI and cognitive engineering, so unlike those assholes, I know what I'm talking about.

I'm a professor at a university in upstate New York. Would you be interested in giving a talk here? How could I arrange that? What kinds of talks do you have that would be of interest to engineering students and faculty? (Or would Kelly's work be more interesting to such an audience?)

When you're hanging out with your friends, in person or online, you can use the English language any way you want. Seriously, I don't care.

But if you want to write something that is meant to be professional, where you expect some respect, then English has a set of rules for you to follow. The rules are an arbitrary consequence of history, but exactly what the rules are doesn't matter. What matters is having SOME kind of standard for common communication. There's no reason red should mean "stop." We just accept that as a convention, and if you don't follow it, you're going to crash. By having these common language conventions, it aids in clear communication that reduces ambiguity, and clear commuication has self-evident value in in science, journalism, politics, diplomacy, and countless other areas.

I get what you're saying. And you're right. "Docile" is exactly what they're after, in the negative sense of having people calm because they think everything's just okay.

That being said, maintaining a CALM population is generally a good thing. We'd prefer to minimize violence.

Of course, disinformation is a bad thing, and it's important that remain in a condition of philosophical debate over what's good and bad, and what the NYPD is doing is interfereing with honest philosophical debate.