Frankly, I'm repulsed by this notion that "Hey, we gotta keep pumping out more kids so that we have a big base paying into social security to offset all the geezers taking their benefits". In any other situation, the notion of needing lots of new contributions to help fund the payouts to the holders of mature shares would be called what it really is: a pyramid scheme. Every pyramid scheme, eventually, runs out of sources of new influx as the system grows exponentially. And, in the case of population, it brings with it all sorts of negative consequences, like soaring housing costs in places that don't suck.

Frankly, I view population growth as akin to deficit spending... you can only get away with it for so long. So, rather than wait until we've exceeded the earth's capacity to support us, let's bite the bullet now. Let's embrace policies which encourage either zero-growth or population reduction and just accept the fact that it means that we'll all have to work a longer % of our life-expectancy.

... and for less contribution. I once saw a chart someone compiled where it showed the average tax rate paid by people of each age. For example, someone born in 1950... they added up the median income for a 16-year-old in 1966, a 17-year-old in 1967, etc, to get an idea of how much money they've earned over their entire life (adjusting for inflation, of course). They then looked at how much tax they paid, on average, at each of those ages to figure out, over your lifetime, what percentage of your earnings went to the 'gummint'. What they found was that, for senior citizens, because they paid such low tax rates back before the 70's or so, their effective lifetime tax-rate was something like less than half of someone in their 20's today.

There are a small handful of occasions in my life where I happened upon a solution for some common problem and, about a month later, found that someone had just come out with a similar solution, and NZB files were one of those. However, my idea was to have the posting apps upload some kind of manifest after they finished posting the content, while Newsbin had a bunch of mechanical turks busily aggregating the posts by hand.

Now, all of that manual effort was great for providing the critical mass of NZB files so that, nowadays, just about every newsreader supports them (and, in fact, there are a lot of apps which only do those, without any downloading of headers, etc., since it's so much easier to write an app which just takes an XML NZB file and just goes down the list of message-id's and requests them from the server). So, after all of these years of NZB's getting wildly popular, I had assumed that all of the major usenet posting applications had started implementing the original idea I had: just tacking on an NZB after uploading a batch of files.

I don't upload to usenet, so I don't have any experience with the popular binary-upload apps, so... does anybody out there know if they finally upload NZB's? If they do... then do we really need people manually creating NZB's anymore?

Exactly! When I read that, the first thing through my mind was "Oh, great! The world can hit the snooze button on the IPv6 rollout for another 18 months!"

Exactly. At first, when you learn about a few Arab-instigated wars Israel has had to fight off, you have a little sympathy for their argument that they need Gaza, Golan, and the West Bank as buffer zones as well as a little punishment upon their aggressors, with the notion being that "You'll get this back when you've learned your lesson".

But then you find out that they're displacing the people living in those areas and then just gifting that land to Israeli settlers and you're like "WTF?!?! How are they ever going to undo that? You can't just go to the settlers and say 'Okay. Time to come back home, we are giving that land back to the Palestinians...'".

So, yeah... when Israeli's call those areas "buffer zones" or anything implying that they're temporary for as long as their neighbors are hostile toward them, I don't believe them for a second.

So, when the interception rate gets high enough, I presume that the antagonists will shift to using huge numbers of smaller rockets. Either there will be too many inbound rockets to be intercepted, or they will be able to all be intercepted, but it will get hugely expensive at $100k for every rinky-dink rocket, or the Israelis will decide that, on a per-rocket basis, $100k is too much to spend based upon the marginal damage that inbound rocket would do, so they don't shoot it down, and then, based upon the number of rockets launched, they add up to significant damage.

Note, I'm not saying that the Israelis are wasting their time, or that their technology is stupid. To the contrary, I think it's pretty neat. But, it won't surprise me if their antagonists du-jur come up with some really cheap counter-measure.

Exactly. This is the exact point of the "You Didn't Build That" speech (and the Elizabeth Warren one which gave rise to it). Try getting your Subway franchise or tanning salon off the ground when there are roving bands of thugs and rebels going up and down the unpaved roads. Once you buy your own security force, one could argue that you're out the same amount of money.

Former anti-virus mogul... running from corrupt 3rd-world foot-soldiers through the jungle with a girl half his age?

I think Dos-Equis just found their new pitch-man. "I don't always run from corrupt Central-American governments, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis..."

I think that's a little unfair (and I'm the OP, by the way... and I'm going to address some of the other criticisms, here, so don't take all of this as being directed toward you). That's like saying that you're being lazy by using a testing suite to do your unit tests on the code you're working on. So, stop being lazy and go back to testing your code by hand.

My personal opinion is that grading is a Q/A step in the teaching process. Teaching is when you're actually "generating product", in the sense that you're putting knowledge into brains where it previously wasn't. Grading is just checking to see if it actually worked and, every minute you're grading is a minute you're not teaching. So, it seems to me that, the more you can automate the grading (just like automating testing of your code), the more you can focus on actually producing (ie, adding knowledge to those malleable little brains).

Also, keep in mind that she teaches about 4-5 very un-related courses (video production, electronic media, freehand drawing, printing techniques), each with it's own set of students who either A) are trying to contrive ways to avoid doing the actual work or B) want to actually learn, but who can't follow directions for shit (I used to grade for math, physics, and CS in college, and, even at that level, it's amazing at how hard students seem to make it for you to give them the credit they deserve). What you end up with is about 25 homework submissions, none of which look alike, and you've got to figure out which ones are properly demonstrating the learned skills and which ones are just blowing it off. The submissions which look almost perfect require some painstaking attention because the kid is either really good (and deserves 100%) or they just copied the end result (and deserves a 0), so the stakes are higher with those than with the other submissions. Now, multiply all that work by 4-5 classes of kids. That's why she was at the school, grading, through the whole 3-day weekend. Fun way to spend your long weekend, eh? Now, what was that again about lazy teachers, basking in the warm glow of union protection while they run their feet through the sand at the beach?

So that's where I came in. When I saw her comparing images, side by side... overlaying them, adjusting transparencies to find differences, my first reaction was (due to the "hubris" and "impatience" traits of programmers) "Hey, I'm a programmer. I can write you an application which just compares all of them and tells you which ones are identical faster than you can drag-and-drop them into the app". Then, she could get on to thinking up cool projects for the next week. But, alas, as I thought about it, MD5's wouldn't work (as the students sometimes change names of layers or make other trivial changes). And, also, the "impatience" programmer trait kicked in and I said "Somebody has to have solved this problem before". Now, we did realize that she could just provide a flat image of the target result, but the problem still stuck in my mind, since I'm a programmer, but fuzzy image comparison is not my forte, so I figured I'd ask. This wasn't started by her asking me to find some way for her to automate her grading so she could duck out early and hit the nail salon. This was started by me, reflexively seeking a way to automate a boring, labor-intensive process (like unit-testing) so that she could get on to the creative parts of teaching and also because I was curious about open-source image processing stuff out there, these days.

I'm going to make a plug for National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/), here.

Part of why the election prediction is tricky is because of the electoral college. It doesn't matter what the mean and standard deviations of the nationwide polls are, since the states aggregate their votes and (with the exception of Nebraska, I think) give all of their electoral votes to one candidate. So, people like Nate have to look at the probability curves for all 50 states (let's leave out Puerto Rico and military bases for this) and work through each probability of either candidate winning any of the states. Basically, they run through 2^50 permutations, starting with the probability that Romney wins all 50 and (since that would result in Romney winning the election) adding that probability to his probability of being elected. Add to that the probabilities of him winning 49 states P(Romney wins everything but Alabama), P(Romney wins everything but Alaska), etc. through to P(Romney wins everything but Wyoming), and then do that for all 1225 combinations of him winning 48, etc..

When you get down to him winning about 35-40 states, you have to just limit yourself to the combinations of states which would give him enough electoral votes, of course. Then, when you've added all that up, you've got his percent chance of winning (which is the number on the red line on the top graph on Nate's blog). Now, you go and do all that for Obama.

But this is all much more messy than it needs to be, and state-by-state electoral voting just leads to a few states getting a disproportionate amount of gov't pork (and political advertising) as politicians try to buy the votes of a few swing states. However, no state wants to switch to Nebraska's model of proportional electoral votes, because that would dilute the votes that go to their probable candidate. For example, California (which voted about 60% Obama, and usually votes Democrat) doesn't want to see 40% of it's 55 electoral votes go to a Republican. Same goes for Texas not wanting any of their electoral votes going to Democratic candidates. What you get is a stand-off where the red and blue states look at each other and say "You go first!".

So, some enterprising individual figured out a nice solution: ignore your own state vote and just give all of your state's electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote. Some states have already adopted legislation for this, but the legislation doesn't kick in until there are enough states on-board to give 270 electoral votes. Turns out that they're already half-way to the 270 target. At that point, the NPV-participating states will guarantee that the winner of the popular vote wins the election, no matter what the non-NPV states do.

Somebody patent couches with periscopes so people can watch from behind them. And mannequins with webcams in their eyes which re-broadcast the program over the local wifi. This will be a goldmine!

Meh... on the other hand, screw it. Just take a picture of one dude on a couch, print it on a card, and then sell it with a little bracket which dangles it right in front of the Kinect's eye.