Why would you think that? I mean yes, last I heard the Democrats are still planning to run her. But I don't understand why, because once the political machine starts revealing to the public what a rotten human being and traitor to America she has been, she is pretty much guaranteed to lose.

I think having a woman President might be a fine thing. I think Hillary Clinton as President would be an unmitigated disaster.

NO! Not "individual entitlement". Individual privacy. Huge difference.

Why should I allow Universal to spy on my Internet communications? Would you allow AT&T to spy on your phone conversations? Why or why not?

This is a big fight and it isn't about "entitlement", at all. It's about freedom and privacy. Get it straight.

They're going to NEED that new Gorilla Glass, due to all those phones with the app being touched with 11-foot poles.

Freenet is not "shady". In fact its purpose was the opposite of shady: to enable legitimate internet use without being spied on by others.

There are others, among them OneSwarm, created at the University of Washington.

These projects were intended to promote freedom and privacy. That isn't a "shady" goal. Though people who want to spy on you (like the government) try to pretend that it is.

No.

Most bittorrent clients force you to upload to others as you download. But that isn't a requirement of the protocol, it was a judgment call on the part of the programmers. They felt that if you don't share what you download, then "the community" of sharers will fall apart.

But the BitTorrent protocol has many perfectly legitimate uses today, other than just copyright infringement.

At least some BT clients allow you to control how much (or whether) you upload when you download. Or to share things you didn't download in the first place.

But the short answer is: no. There is no requirement in the BitTorrent protocol that you "share" everything.

No. The problem is that Bennet Haselton thinks that hashtags should be "owned" by the originators, and that nobody should be allowed to say things that aren't politically correct under those hashtags.

In other words, Haselton is promoting an "algorithm" for censorship.

When you get up on a soapbox to spout your views (which is basically what a hashtag is), you have no right to the entire streetcorner. Other people will get up on their soapboxes, too, and say things you probably don't like.

That's called "free speech".

No, it doesn't. In fact some of the foundational members of AI research (and other philosophers of mind) very much agree that what we call "intelligence" is not possible without self-awareness.

With all due respect, calling that "intelligence" is not very intelligent. Those things are very far from intelligence. It's plain old procedural software, written by humans to do specific things. Yes, sometimes those things include learning, but hell, we have mechanical devices sans electronics that learn. That isn't intelligence either. Nor is your smartphone even remotely "smart"... it only does things that humans programmed it specifically to do.

By whom? Certainly not by me, and I am a programmer. Deep Blue was a rule-based game engine. Essentially it generated different "dry run" possibilities until it found a winning strategy. In effect, it was little more than a trial-and-error chess move generator, even though it was very fast at doing so, allowing it to look farther ahead than previous machines.

And Watson is glorified Google Search + Wikipedia. It can search vast stores of information very fast, and make simple pre-programmed inferences from the data it finds. But although it represents the pinnacle of today's "AI" research, it isn't AI. Here's how you can tell it's not even a little bit "intelligent": when it makes mistakes, they tend to be spectacular. Its wrong answers are SO wrong, it is easy to see that it is mainly just echoing existing information, rather than reasoning about it.

So, no: these things aren't "generally accepted" by the experts as AI. The public, which largely doesn't understand how they work, may accept them as such, but that doesn't make it so. Another example: many people still think the Turing Test is a measure of intelligence; however, we now know that programs that have come closest to passing the Turing Test (the real one) are not intelligent at all. They're just programmed to create the illusion of intelligence.

I insist on using my own cable adapter (a Motorola Docsis 3). Actually insisting that customers use Comcast's own cable adapter/router is probably illegal. That's what got Ma Bell broken up.

I run my own public WiFi hotspot, as a "guest" network. Someone could say that's the same thing, but it's not: I decide when to turn it on or off, and I can block particular people from using it if I want. Yes, I supply the electricity but I do that voluntarily.

You are grossly oversimplifying the radiation physics of the situation.

Just one example: if your gas absorbs radiation, and becomes hotter, what happens to it? At the risk of oversimplifying things myself, it expands, and rises in the atmosphere. There, it radiates its heat out to space.

Simple radiative heating of an already-warmer surface by cooler gases is a physical impossibility. Further, it doesn't happen via conduction or convection because convection carries warm gases AWAY from the surface.

So while I may not accept the gravimetric theory of warming on its face, neither does your explanation explain "greenhouse" warming.

There is a very good point to the statement, and not everything we already know to be true must be proven in front of us here on Slashdot.

That climate science, to date, has been poor at prognostication is indisputably true. Stating it in a discussion like this has a purpose: to point that fact out to those who were not already aware of it.

The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.

The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to. They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.

You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.

It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.

(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)

That's absurd. Whatever your opinion of MCSE, you aren't going to get one without knowing what a subnet mask is.

Well, the fact is that mainstream textbooks which deal with radiative heat transfer (I have at least 3 of them, maybe 4 if I look around) show Spencer's conclusion about his little gedankeneksperiment to be quite wrong.

As I have stated to that person (I prefer not to mention names in this case) many times: I do not deny that there may be a greenhouse effect of some sort, but if there is, it doesn't work via the simple back-radiation mechanism that is usually given as the explanation. That explanation violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Latour's original written explanation was rather short and rough; one could wish he had been more thorough. Then there might have been less controversy about it.)

Nevertheless I did not merely echo his statements but took the trouble to research the subject myself. My textbooks do agree with Latour about his main point, which is that direct warming of a surface via back-radiation from a cooler atmosphere is impossible, just as Spencer's warming of the only heat source by a cooler passive plate is impossible.

I've been all over this topic with many people. Some compare the back-radiation concept to an insulator such as a blanket (100% incorrect), or even worse, a reflector. Also 100% incorrect, but worse because there seems to be more of an intuitive connection... which is quite false. Most people just don't really understand radiative heat transfer. So much is clear. One person tried to tell me that IR reflection from the underside of a cloud was proof of back-radiation.

Sigh. It has been an uphill battle.

In the interest of goodwill I would warn you about trying to argue with this person. I have documented proof that (a) he doesn't argue honestly, (b) he will personally hound and harass people, especially if they prove him wrong. He doesn't seem to be able to accept being wrong.

For example: he insisted on debating Roy Spencer's radiation experiment. I agreed to do so only on the condition that it was understood that I was debating only Spencer's experiment, not global warming.

When I showed him that the mainstream physics, textbook solutions to the temperatures in Spencer's experiment disagreed with his (and Spencer's) conclusions, he hasn't ceased demanding that I solve it a different way of his own devising, which doesn't appear in any textbook on radiative heat transfer, anywhere.

He is still doing so, when the whim strikes him; he did it again just a few days ago. And as you can see, even though I told him in no uncertain terms that we were debating only Spencer's experiment (his agreement can still be seen here on Slashdot), he insists that I am a "Sky Dragon Slayer", simply because I stated that Pierre Latour's radiation physics were correct. (For the record, I have never read the "Sky Dragon" books.)

I do assert that there is no solidly demonstrated cause for concern over CO2. This person conflates that position of mine, with my use of textbook physics to refute Spencer, as somehow proving I am a Sky Dragon Slayer.

If you insist on arguing with him, prepare to have your words repeated -- for years -- out of context and in distorted and misleading ways. I suppose it's possible that it's some kind of personal vendetta against just me, but I suspect an actual personality flaw.

CEASE misreprenting my position and my words.

We had an agreement: when we discussed Spencer's "back radiation" experiment, I made it abundantly clear that we were discussion ONLY Spencer's experiment, not "greenhouse warming".

Since then, you have consistently, improperly, and dishonestly misrepresented argument as including "global warming" even after repeated statements that I did not make that argument, and in fact you agreed that you understood this before we had our long discussion of Spencer's experiment..

If you cannot represent my position correctly and honestly (and you have repeatedly demonstrated your unwillingness to do so), then don't try to tell other people what my arguments are. Quotes taken out of context from 5 years ago also count against you, not for you.

CEASE misrepresenting my words. You have been warned repeatedly.