Compared to the typical trolling found on the internet, this seems a bit more like harassment or stalking, no?

It looks like someone else has taken tech like that and done something geared toward finding biomedical applications for it. The ideas and experiments in this abstract could perhaps be useful as a building block for some sort of basic tricorder. Reading the body's reaction to drugs and stress, screening neuropsych deficits, and possibly lots more by just simply scanning them with one single machine? That's Star Trek stuff.

I wonder if part of how they did this used human game play to train a neural network. A quick google of the idea makes it seem like that is plausible and has been done in at least one study, but I don't know if it is a widely used AI technique or not.

I think the people committing the violence are primarily to blame, but possibly not all. Whether or not any blame falls to those that made the film depends on their intent -- whether or not they were *hoping* for this to happen, based on the reaction seen after the Mohammed cartoon was published in the Netherlands. Reactions like this could aid their cause of trying to make people think muslims are the enemy of Judaism and Christianity. The question is whether the filmmakers are just idiots who want to run around yelling "fundamentalist islam bad, fundamentalist judeo-christianity good!", or if they are depraved enough to be hoping to incite violence to achieve their end of trying to convince people of what they are yelling.

None of this should be taken to mean that that the biggest moral failing here isn't with the people that resorted to violence in response to something someone said, but if the filmmakers were intentionally encouraging that sort of evil to occur, then they were being evil themselves.

If you look at TFA, the record low that was just surpassed was set between 2006 and 2009. The records only go back to 1979, but the previous record low was not set in 1979; rather, the trend has been downwards ever since the satellite observations began.

Considering that the military didn't really manage to do anything useful in the 34 minutes that elapsed between the second plane hitting the WTC and the Pentagon being struck on 9/11, I have my doubts about that estimate.

I've had enough experience with firecrackers that have fast fuses -- fast fused dynamite just sounds bad.

Seems like this would be hard to do without hands...

You misunderstand the nature of chaotic attractors such as the weather/climate system. The shape of a chaotic attractor defines the range of possible states that a system can take on. The dynamical evolution of a trajectory in the system from one state to another is chaotic, which limits predictability, but no such limitation on predictability necessarily exists for changes in the shape of the attractor itself.

Weather corresponds to a trajectory evolving on the attractor, and is thus difficult to impossible to predict on long time scales. Climate, however, corresponds to the shape of the attractor itself, so predicting evolution in the climate is a different problem than predicting the weather, and is not necessarily subject to the same limitations.

Consider the Lorenz attractor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system) as a simplified example: Weather prediction is analogous to predicting x(t),y(t), and z(t), while climate prediction is analogous to predicting changes in sigma, rho, and beta. In the simplified example of the Lorenz system, even though x, y, and z are unpredictable, sigma, rho, and beta are trivial to predict -- they are constant!

Obviously, the constant parameters that define the shape of the Lorenz attractor are an oversimplified analogy for the climate problem, since we at the very least know that that climate varies, but the lesson to draw from that example is that the predictability of weather is unrelated to the predictability of climate.

Did you even bother to read the GP's post before replying to it? He dislikes the tea party and agrees that this unconstitutional stuff has been going on for decades. His only complaint about Obama is that it has continued and in some ways worsened under his watch. How in the world does that makes him a racist? Oversensitive much?

I have no doubt there are many people that dislike Obama for stupid reasons like the fact that he's black. Those people are idiots. Disliking him because he is taking liberties with the rule of law, however, isn't any less legitimate or reasonable than it was with white presidents.

So, capitalism fails either way? I don't think "companies must lobby the government simply to be allowed to compete" sounds that much like capitalism. Unless you simply mean paying taxes, but that never seems to grant anyone the sort of treatment big media currently gets.

Partly correct. It's been years since I've had a QM class, so I'd have to dig through the wiki page for details, but Bell's Theorem states that no *local* hidden variable theory offers as complete a description of reality as traditional QM. Apparently, testable predictions can be drawn from the theorem, and so far none of the experiments done have contradicted it (although it may be rather early to call it confirmed, based on a quick look at the wiki page). In any case, none of this says anything about the possible existence of *non-local* hidden variable theories. A local hidden variable theory (IIRC) could render QM non-weird from a classical standpoint, but part of the usual QM weirdness is non-locality, so it currently appears we will be stuck with some sort of strangeness even if we find a more complete version of QM.