I think he's being sarcastic.

It was Dana Ballard. IIRC, the work that I referred to was done when he was at Rochester. He seems to have a link to the peanut butter and jelly video up on his page, but I am not able to download it.

I couldn't gather much from TFA apart from that they recognized the activities and the learning model behind it. I don't recall how much training data Dr. Ballard used, but the activity recognition in real time was very accurate.

My Machine Learning professor at University of Texas was hugely into Reinforcement Learning. He and one of his graduate student had developed this kind of system many years ago. Basically, only using a simple video camera, the computer could identify correctly all sub-activities involved in making a peanut butter sandwich; such as 'open jar', 'jelly on bread', 'jar closed', etc. We were shown the video during first class of the course and it was pretty cool.

The MSR guys are doing interesting stuff but this is nothing groundbreaking.

I'm curious as to whether it happens in US as well. One of my Arab friends was strip searched at an airport and he was adamant that they did so only because of his Arab name and appearance.

The Israel's airport security model is very effective. But it is very difficult to follow in the US. You can google for a number of sources such as this. Excerpt:

While American and European security procedures rely mainly on technological solutions for screening luggage and passengers, Israel’s security philosophy is based on a mix of advanced detection devices and personal interaction with the passengers.The multi-layer system begins outside Israel’s biggest port of entry — Ben Gurion airport. Cars approaching the terminal are stopped by guards and asked one or two questions, usually about where they are coming from or what is the purpose of their visit. A nervous response, or one revealing an Arab accent, could trigger further scrutiny even before entering the airport.

When walking into the terminal, visitors pass by another set of security agents searching for passengers behaving suspiciously. The next stop for human evaluation is before the check-in counter, where passengers are required to show their travel documents and answer a series of seemingly standard questions from trained security personnel. (Did you pack your bags by yourself? How long did you spend in Israel? What was the purpose of your visit?) Screeners are interested more in the tone and body language than in the content of passengers’ replies.

This is also the point where profiling takes place: While most Jewish Israeli citizens will be waved through after the brief conversation, others, mainly Israeli Arabs and non-Jewish visitors, will be taken aside for lengthy questioning and a thorough luggage and physical check.

Login required for what? Certainly not for reading the article.

Can someone give me a good reason to use Thunderbird or any other mail client. I haven't felt the need for it ever since gmail arrived. I can access it from any machine, mobile or tablet. Attachments are becoming easier, yadda yadda. I genuinely trying to figure out when I would want to use a mail client. Maybe in an office environment where I would not like to forward emails to gmail?

I'm an absolute fan of Shiner Bock. Been my favorite for two years now. Cheers!

My bad. I never thought Slashdot could run a story on a programming book that I find it easy!

I am a novice level programmer in C++/Python and I thought I could benefit from this book. But the exercises seem to be ridiculously simple and it seems a book only suited for someone with zero or negligible programming background.

Out of curiosity, where did you try to find the send the coding offshore? India?

I'm pretty sure you'll be able to control when to contribute CPU cycles and when not.

I'm not American either but I do stay in US and follow the elections with passive interest for the same reasons as you do.

There was a thread on reddit where the owner of videobox.com (a porn site) answered any questions asked. While he says that the porn industry is sort of in decline in the sense, less and less people are paying for porn. His guess was that eventually all porn will be free and the industry will make money from "adult social interaction" which will still be paid.