"Nobody will be that dumb" is one of the most dangerous bets a person can make, regardless of context. Someone will always be "that dumb".

Programmers don't count starting at zero. They index items in collections starting at zero, because it makes certain actions more convenient when you're working at a very low level. But when it comes time to count the items, they start at 1 like everyone else.

So you can do anything you want with Wolfram language? The only limit is your imagination?

Will the first project be the long-awaited 1.0 version of Zombo.com?

HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. The only things that turn any profit at all are graphics-are-everything reskins of games developed back when it was profitable to focus on things that actually mattered, and those will only sustain the industry for so long. We're headed for another crash, one that Nintendo could have survived a generation ago when it resisted the HD gimmick. Now that it has fallen into that trap, though, it's as hosed as Sony's and Microsoft's gaming divisions will be.

It's useful to know enough about these things that you can discuss the basics with the people you work with. That said, you do not need a degree in marketing to speak marketer, and you do not need an MBA to speak boss.

Given the current economic and political climate, should we really be looking to Spain and Greece as models of government? It's not an exaggeration to say that the US is in bad shape, but there are still degrees.

The fact that it's unacceptable is what makes paying it an effective form of protest. Putting yourself into that position makes you better able to reach the hearts and minds of the people you are trying to influence. That's how civil disobeience works.

Part of using "civil disobedience" as a form of protest is paying the price. In fact, that's pretty much what makes it effective as a form of protest: it's a vital part of constructing the image you want to convey. Swartz did the deed without being prepared to pay the price. In that sense, he did indeed bring it upon himself.

Aaron Swartz did a lot of things, most of them good, some of them not so much. But the man was a fallen zealot, not a saint. It does nobody any good to put him on a pedestal.

Lefty here. It's actually not so bad. I suspect that this is part of why the traditional layout spaces them similarly to the ends of a D-pad: you righties don't seem to have any trouble using that, and for us lefties, it's a similar story with the buttons.

But I am concerned with this splaying them out over the corners of the center touch screen. It could have some advantages in cases where you're expected to alternate between different buttons, but on the whole I can't see it being all that comfortable.

It is perhaps ironic that the nations putting the most serious effort into a non-US-centric Internet have governments even less trustworthy than that of the US itself. Which is saying something, in light of the recent surveillance stuff, but it's no less true for that.

The open hardware is nice, but Intel totally blew it on the reasons why the RPi is popular: it's "powerful enough" while being very small and very cheap. Minnowboard's extra power isn't by enough to justify that kind of a price jump, and the rest falls squarely under YAGNI, therefore making no difference.

This is something of a pity. I'd like to see an RPi with more expandability, but I was thinking more along the lines of a single Thunderbolt port. You could do that without increasing the price or size by all that much, and it's an option Intel could have gone with. But instead they got the RPi market mixed up with the build-your-own-gaming-rig market, and that's just plain not going to end well.

OK, much as I believe in evolution, what you're saying here is simply not true. Evolution takes place over time scales so long that humanity as we know it has not been around for long enough to observe it directly in nature, even if the first humans had somehow innately had knowledge of the scientific method as we currently understand it (which they didn't, so the time we've been able to look is in fact even shorter). Even in the lab, while we have been able to engineer situations similar to those currently thought to drive evolution, we have not observed evolution itself: in particular, speciation still eludes us.

The other problem with your post is that you haven't really addressed the issue you're replying to, because what you've mentioned has nothing to do with falsification. You can't test the power of my tiger-repelling rock by showing that there are no tigers in the area. You have to put me in a tiger cage with the rock and watch me get eaten (or, if the tigers don't come near me, then maybe there's something to the rock after all. Or maybe not; further experiments will be needed). What you mention here is like demonstrating the power of the rock by claiming that there are no tigers in the area. The opposite is another problem that has thus far eluded biologists: how do you construct an experiment that would fail if evolution as we currently understand it were not true? That's still being worked on.

Failed experiments are not sexy. They do not get you grants, and so scientists don't like them (which is not an entirely selfish thing: even scientists have to eat). But when you're doing basic scientific research, your failed experiments are even more important than your successful ones, because they're the ones that actually allow you to eliminate possibilities. Our current obsession with successful experiments is one of ways in which contemporary scientific practice is fundamentally broken.

Make no mistake, I believe in evolution. But the mental discipline required by science is very, very high, and right now, you look like you fall short of the mark. Confidence, even very high confidence, is one thing, but there's a step beyond confidence which may well be the only thing science forbids. And it looks like you have taken it.

But if the NSA can get in, then it is only a matter of time before someone else figures out how. Whether or not I trust the NSA barely even matters, because I certainly don't trust this next entity.

This is why I prefer something the NSA can't get into: there's probably nobody else who can either. The NSA's cracking efforts hold considerable value for that reason: they can, and should, be letting us know when our machines are not secure enough. The problem arises when they fail to do this, which seems to have been the case in recent years.

Witnesses can be compelled to testify so that they cannot be intimidated into silence.

Two problems, actually. One is that we are dealing, not with a fear of risk, but a phobia towards it: the terms are related, to be sure, but the latter is taken to an irrational degree. If we don't want to spend our lives in padded rooms, then we must be willing to forego the mantra of "Never Again."

But the other problem comes in when the current political fashion of empathy-based arguments comes into play. We are asked to empathize with people who have been traumatized, in the moment of their trauma. Anyone would say "Never Again" in those circumstances: that's a large part of what it means to suffer trauma, and the very definition of empathy demands it from those practicing it. But the recently-traumatized are not known for their rational decision-making abilities. There's a reason we tell people to wait a year, or even longer, before making big decisions. There's a reason we devote whole branches of psychology to studying the effects of trauma. PTSD is no longer one monolithic thing, but a whole spectrum of defined conditions.

This, I think, is where the current phobias come from: a well-meaning but sorely misguided attempt to make decisions by empathizing with people who are in no condition to make those decisions. Pathos has its limits, and we have arrived at the current state by ignoring those limits. Certainly empathy has its place when it comes to the healing process, but when the time comes to make big decisions, we need to step back and look at things more rationally, even when rational thought means accepting the status quo.