The burden of proof is on the one making a claim. So when someone wants to claim that gun ownership does not increase violent crime, that person has to prove that claim just as much as someone claiming it does. Pointing to other plausible compounding factors is a perfectly valid counterargument. You then have to eliminate those alternative explanations, just like Copernicus had to for his theory to survive.

You are of course correct that it is a very weak counterargument to simply say that "there could be explanations". But that is not what the GP did. The GP did propose a whole list of other factors that could affect violent crime rate.

It's more like "nothing is ever proven", which would be a more or less correct statement with regard to science. It is all about trying to come up with inconsistencies or alternative explanations. When you have thrown everything you've got at the theory and accounted for it all, it is usually accepted.

They use stereopsis for coarse scale depth and photometric stereo (three directions from the looks of it) for finer scale structures. And they seem to be using some tracking target to compensate for motion between these captures. Not a bad idea per se, but I don't think their numbers are particularly remarkable.

I'm not aware of any 3D capturing technique that captures an object "from all sides", unless it's comprised of multiple individual scanners who's data you then stitch into a single model, or a moving scanner (relative to the object's reference frame, so the object could be the one moving), in which case you're really building the model out of lots of tiny scans at different positions (e.g. sheets). In principle, either of these are more or less orthogonal to the choice of scanner. You could do it with this scanner; you'd just put them all in a box and calibrate the extrinsic parameters using some reference object.

The only things that I can think of that could be remotely considered scanning from "all sides" would be something that penetrates the object, like an x-ray CT scanner, ultrasonography or something of that sort, but that would be stretching it.

After having read some on their website, I get the sense that the primary novelty of Fuel3D is not the technology, but who they are marketing it towards. There are plenty of scanners, like the ones you mention, that have equal or better performance characteristics, but they pretty much always seem to be marketed towards either medical applications or manufacturing industries. Fuel3D, on the other hand, have the slogan "Fire up your creativity", visit Maker Faire, and so on. I imagine they hope to break into an emerging market segment before the other guys catch up.

Also, calling their accuracy, by which they mean noise level on a perfectly flat surface, of 0,3 mm on a 35 cm (diagonal) field of view "extremely high resolution" is quite a stretch. High compared to other cheap scanners, possibly, but at least an order of magnitude worse than industrial scanners of similar format.

I think it is an interesting concept to combine photometric measurements with geometric stereo in a single handheld unit, trying to get the best of both worlds, so to speak. But it certainly feels like they are overselling it.

Isn't the problem that smaller or medium sized web sites don't really have any option? Google is the "start menu" of the Internet for a whole lot of people, so any site that isn't the scale of Facebook or Twitter will be affected by how Google decides to rank them, whether they like it or not.

Ah, you must be talking about real men. ;-)

Well, as far as Git is concerned, that would be rather pointless, considering that committing in Git simply means copying an already saved file to a different directory locally. The only thing that protects you from is accidentally messing up the contents of the file and then saving it. And that is assuming that the IDE keeps the entire string of commits, instead of squashing them, creating an insanely bloated version history.

Of course you could set it up to automatically push the commit to a remote repository as well, in order to lose a slightly smaller amount of work if the hard-drive fails. I would use RAID instead.

Lame? For once, it was actualy a very clever variation of it.

This is an honest question.

Is there any penetration testing or statistics that suggests that dd-wrt and the likes are more secure, or is this an it-runs-Linux-so-it-must-be-good knee-jerk assumption?

I used to run dd-wrt on a router some years ago and liked it feature-wise and performance-wise. However, my confidence in its security took a pretty big hit when I read about this gaping security hole in 2009. It's the kind of issue that makes you doubt that some of the developers really know what they are doing.

As is the case with builders of pretty much any sufficiently complex system. The number of decisions and assumptions going into any reasonably advanced software is astounding, and the time spend on each of these is comparatively rather small. Furthermore, compared to other disciplines, I'd say software development man-hours usually involve a significantly higher ratio of "novel" solutions, since reuse of program logic through libraries is fairly easy. If you are an architect drawing a house, or a lawyer writing a contract text, much (though certainly not all) of what you do is repetition of something you have done a hundred times before. By the time a good programmer has solved the same programming problem twice, he/she has already made a library routine out of it. As long as there are humans developing the software, we can't expect perfect code, not today nor tomorrow.

Another advantage of keeping involved and contributing back is that you get to influence the direction in which the upstream project goes (if the maintainers aren't too obstinate). And through that you make better use of the work produced by people you don't have to pay. Also, contributing a patch back lets you exploit the quality assurance provided by the project, be it explicit or implicit in the fact that your patch will be used and tested in practice by a lot of more people.

I'd say it makes business sense to contribute back to BSD projects for anything that isn't the core technology of your company. If I run a hypothetical company that makes, let's say, raytracers for CGI effects, the advantages I have by keeping fixes in a logging framework or networking library to myself are very small. Contributing back gains me more. Those things aren't what my company is supposed to be good at anyway.

If we would be using a BSD licensed raytracing library, on the other hand, then it would be a different matter. But if you are a company whose business case is developing commercial raytracers, you'd better be far ahead of what's available through BSD licensed software in terms of raytracing, or you should ask yourself if you are in the right market. And if you have that expertise and it is what you use to compete, you would keep it in-house under any circumstances.

So I'd say (smart) companies contribute back whenever it's something that's outside of their core business, and otherwise not. So GPL or not doesn't really make a difference in regard to that -- it's not going to make a company give away what they use to compete, it only makes more companies stay away from your code. Then again, if that's what someone wants, as a matter of principle, then fair enough, it's their choice and I have nothing to say against it.

The Berne Convention says: "Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."

This is called the moral rights of a work, and in many countries it has a different time limit than the commercial rights and cannot be transferred from the original author. I am not sure how it would apply to your jingles example, but I know of one case in Sweden where a film maker successfully sued a TV network for showing his film with added breaks for TV commercials, even though the network had acquired the necessary distribution rights, arguing that they had distorted the creative expression of his film (or something along those lines).

The primary reason it's not used as an authoritative academic source is because it's a tertiary source, as are all encyclopaedias.

Neither is it an argument for keeping it legal, which was my point. In a cost-benefit analysis, what is the benefit of keeping it legal as opposed to the obvious costs?

Huh? What are you implying here? That if someone else publishes embarrassing material on you, that means you were mentally incompetent? Or that if you trust someone who later betrays you, you are also mentally incompetent? Or that if there even exists embarrassing pictures of you somewhere, you are mentally incompetent?

Also, when the fsck did this become a gender issue? I'm a guy, and I don't want others to maliciously post nude pics of me either, if they for some reason have gotten hold of any.

Really, why? Why does it matter how they got hold of the pictures? Presumably, they were not given to the perpetrator with an implied consent to publish them openly on-line. Or is that what you argue; that if some girl shares intimate pictures of herself with you in confidence, perhaps because she cares about you and trusts you, you should have the implied right to break that confidence and do with them whatever you like for whatever reasons, even if the sole purpose is to harm her? Why is that so important to you?

You are oversimplifying human psychology. For one thing, the laws have a normative function apart from the practical cost/benefit equation of getting caught, and that also affects human behaviour. As are you the situation with the carpenters; someone might walk in on them, or I might have a camera, the effect of which is much greater when I have the support of the state to prosecute them if they steal.

I can recommend you to read Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier, for an extensive treatment of how trust is created and works in modern society.

Saying "don't take nude pics if you don't want people seeing nude pics of you" doesn't really make an argument. My point is: why should we limit ourself to that narrow dichotomy when we don't need to? It's stupid and unnecessary. Sure people "are always going to do what feels good", including sharing nude pics of themselves to people they love in the expectation that they are kept private. Why should they be punished for it (by ridicule and shame) instead of (by law) the douche bag who intentionally and maliciously spread them? Yes, it's always going to be some risk having nude pics of you exist somewhere, obviously, but so what? You haven't really answered why you think it is such a good idea to allow revenge porn in the first place. Instead, you are blaming the victim, which I actually find rather distasteful -- a bit like "if you didn't want to get raped, why did you wear such a short skirt?".