Does "the media" cause young girls to associate boobs with women, and therefore cause the girls to later grow boobs, or is there perhaps a biological thing called hormones, which effect all manner of gender differences?

Of you look at people who take testerone or other steroids, you'll find that it has a very obvious effect on their behavior, by way of the hormone's effect on the brain. Over the course of millions of years, male brains evolved around their essential tasks of "go kill something and drag it home for dinner" along with "fight off the predator". See how muscle cars and football might stimulate something in the male brain which is now lacking in means to express the "kill something and drag it home" instinct? For these millions of years, females had a different role, to which their brains adapted. Neither is better or worse, our brains and other parts are different.

* obviously I'm speaking of the majority of men vs the majority of women. Exceptions exist - Chrisley probably wouldn't have survived and reproduced in the days of hunting wild boars to eat.

The truth about these agencies is bad. There is no need, and I would say it is harmful, to so distort their statements as to be lying about what they said. This story only harms whatever credibility Privacy International may have had.

What the court response actually said is that a court can grant a search warrant in a criminal case, not just a national a security related case. Okay, so what is the process for such warrants and under what conditions are they granted? What limitations are put on those warrants? What are the consequences for proceeding without a warrant or beyond a warrant? Those are very important questions, which need to be addressed. Pretending those questions don't exist and falsely claiming "they said they can spy on anyone they want, any time they want" is HARMFUL to privacy. A guaranteed way to always lose a fight is by misunderstanding what the fight is. PI has grossly misstated what we're fighting and done is all a disservice in doing so.

You have a point. On the other hand, many approaches that WERE impractical 10 or 20 years ago are quite practical now. Consider any solution that in involves a modern computer. Twenty years ago, you'd need a cluster of computers to do what can now be done on a cheap prepaid phone. Any solution to an individual's daily hassles that involves a multi-Ghz processor was written off as impractical. Now, there's an app for that.

Then there are all of the building-blocks that have become available. Facial recognition and machine vision in general cost a few million dollars ten or twenty years ago. Now it's a readily available service already built into the Android OS. When you have readily available modules to easily do what used to cost huge amounts of money, things suddenly become practical that weren't before.

Additionally, but in the same vein, the experts doing all the deep study for decades wouldn't have even THOUGHT of how to leverage technologies which were not available at the time. Knowing about the different technologies that are available or likely to become available, one sometimes sees solutions that you wouldn't think about if you weren't familiar with the tools.

Lastly, in my experience domain experts know a lot about how things are done. Their idea of how things should be done is often based on how they were taught to do it. That's an entirely different mindset from looking at it fresh and considering which methods are actually best suited to the current situation. I've been able to significantly improve processes simply by asking "why"? "Why is this data held in a Word document (actually three versions of the same document) rather than a spreadsheet?". The domain experts knew exactly which version of the Word document to send to each person, and had procedures for change control so that updates to one version normally ended up being reflected in the other versions. I pointed out the "hide column" menu item in Excel and now they no longer need to maintain three different copies of the data in order to look at different sets of attributes.

>. If one is not ignorant, then one need not concern themselves with such things.

You seem like the type of person who appreciates good information. Here's something I found interesting. It turns out that the people "ignorant" about computers are at significantly LOWER risk of exploits than those who work in IT, and the highest risk are programmers.

The highest amount of _damage_ is executives, but IT workers and programmers get hit more often, not less. I suspect it's because we a) install a lot more software, like VNC, open source stuff that occasionally is distributed with trojan attached, etc. b) muck about with admin privileges, allowing exceptions in our firewalls and such, and possibly c) have an inflated sense of security we attribute to our knowledge. I'm not sure of those reasons are correct, but statistically we do get exploited more often.

>. The reality is that the smart money is now with those who divest in fossil fuels first and put their earnings in alternative energy stocks will be the big winners

To be a bit more specific, the journal Nature has called Nanosolar "the poster child for Silicon Valley's interest in solar power". That sounds like an interesting stock. You might want to consider putting some of your money in that company.

Six years after Nature started pumping Nanosolar, in 2012 they announced they planned to actually start making solar panels pretty soon. I understand their stock is _real_ cheap right now.

Also, I heard Obama is backing two other promising companies, Fisker and Solyndra. He says they'll do great, so you might scoop up some of their stock.

I think it is perfectly reasonable for a self-driving car to (safely) pull over to the side of the road and come to a stop when there is a scenario which it is unable to handle on it's own.

Situations such as out of gas, major engine problems, tires no longer functioning properly, road closures with no available/allowed alternate route, or other 'I do not know what to do next, so I came to a stop in a reasonably safe location to ask for help' scenarios.

Admittedly you will want some way to verify that the shoulder is present when you do this, but other than that, stopping by the side of the road should be a valid failure mode.

I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to heart in some ways.

The SAG rate sheet specifies about $3,400 per week for most performers. Recognizing that they only get paid for the time they are on set, not the "work" time put into going to auditions, etc, so figure that's about $1,700 per week of work that they put in.

$1,700 week - yeah sounds like interchangeable people to me. Not the people hiring agents to negotiate for them.

A productivity difference of 10X-20X is well documented. I've seen it several times. Note that's average productivity over a year, not consistently every day. Here's an example:

  I've seen more than one instance in which a average, "competent" developer will spend 10 days writing a module to add feature X to some software, to solve business need Y. The expert/guru/rockstar will spend ten minutes changing a setting to solve the same problem.

So the average person spent ten working days, the expert spent ten minutes in this one case. The expert could then be only equally as productive for the rest of day and they will have accomplished in one day more than the first person accomplished in ten days. I very often solve business needs by _removing_ code, removing a restriction or problem. You can imagine that removing a blocking problem can easily be ten times as productive as the typical approach of solving new problems or handling new tasks by building new systems. Simply asking "why can't we use the existing system for this new task?", then tweaking the existing system to handle the new requirement, can be hugely more productive than starting out with the idea that new tasks require new systems to be built.

> wouldn't pay a couple of hours worth of work for union representation, what makes anyone think a developer would give 10-20% to an agent

The people who would want a union are precisely the opposite of those who would want an agent, in general. The union is about COLLECTIVE bargaining, "we all get _____". There's no "I", it's about "we, the workers", who are essentially interchangeable. An agent is about "here's why I'm special and you want to hire me, and I want ___, which you should give me because only I can give you ____".

Google isn't saying you can;t run a porn site. They'll even index your porn site and send traffic to it. They just don't want to run a porn site. Blogger is Google's site. They don't want THEIR site to be a porn site.

Google doesn't want to run a porn site. That makes them evil?

You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.

So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.

Seattle hasn't had a Republican mayor for about 80 years. The city council is all Democrats except for the one socialist.

If you don't like the government there - surprise you don't actually like Democrats, regardless of what your govrrnment-school teacher told you.

My reply didn't exactly match your comment, but I'd say it's true for counterfeiting too. Pick a random electronic device at a random big-box store. It's probably NOT counterfeit. It probably DOES have lax security.

Even more, I'm talking about testing like UL does. UL focuses primarily on fire safety, and it works - our electronic devices rarely catch fire. Fire safety is a success. Data safety is a miserable failure - I can personally hack most devices.