So, while they deserve the year ban, the apology is nice. It's a shame we can never know what results a fair competition could have yielded ... and an even bigger shame that the media misreported Baidu as overpowering Google. I suppose the damage is done and the ILSVRC has made the right choice.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the classification problem but why isn't this run like most other classification problems (like Netflix and many other data challenges) where you get ~80% for training and the remaining 20% are held back for the final testing and scoring? Is the tagged data set too small to do this? Seems like wikimedia would contain a wealth of ripe public domain images for this purpose ...

https://books.google.com/books...

http://www.vdare.com/letters/t...

Here you go..

A month ago, Kevin Flanagan, age 41, found out that he`d be losing his job at the Bank of America`s Concord Technology Center and be required to train his h1b replacement. That same day, he took his lifeâ"in the parking lot of his former employer.

It wasn`t that Flanagan was surprised to lose his jobâ"he`d seen it coming for months, as his father told the paper. Flanagan had watched as veteran co-workers were forced to train newcomers from Indiaâ"then fired and replaced by the immigrants. One former employee told the CC Times that employees at Concord feel like they`re âoeon death row. Every day you think, `Is this the day I`m gone?` he said.â

This is odd since I've never had VLC crash once.

I'm surprised.

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Compared to the 2012 elections. The rate started lower but it's been accelerating. You can find the details with google.

You are going to have a rough time with current demographic trends plus the entire "republican party leadership seems to all be bisexual or gay" explosion taking place right now. Seriously- the republican party is starting to look like the catholic church.

Currently, conservative voters are dying over 1 million per year faster than replacement. It's a shift of almost 3 million votes for the 2016 elections.

liberals can be softheaded- but conservatives can be short sighted. Unchecked conservatism often leads to bloody revolution.

I felt tomorrowland was kind of a crap sandwich.

It had a confusing sucky start- a decent not terrible not awesome movie with some cool visuals in the middle- and the a stupid pointless tacked on kid's movie ending.

If it fails, part of the failure can be attributed to John Oliver.

That guy has done more to clean up government in 2 years on HBO than most politicians do in a 2 decades in office.

There was of course a lot of cgi in the movie but ...

the cgi was there to tell a story- not to render action scenes.

An action movie with rendered action doesn't connect emotionally.

When those guys swinging around on poles showed up- i had a gut reaction.

Making an action film and then using cgi for the action scenes usually lacks just enough realism that I don't have an emotional reaction to the action. That emotion is why I'm willing to put down good money to see a movie.

MM:FR was decent. As everyone else says- so little acting and so few words- but combined with incredible action scenes and a lot of genuine stunts. I probably won't ever see it again but I don't feel like I wasted my money.

Our defense spending has also been disproportionately high for close to three decades now.

And most corporations don't actually pay 35%. Some large notable corporations didn't even pay 10% for the last several years.

In part due to finding a way to bypass existing tax laws.

The understanding was-- you do business in region "X", you pay taxes in region "X" to support services (like roads, court systems, police). The businesses found a way to say, "Oh- I'm legally in region "Y" even tho I made billions of dollars in region "X" last year. In some cases (like ireland) they are finding it wasn't really legal in the first place... in other places they are closing the loophole.

You don't have perfect flexibility to raise your prices.

You might wish you did, but for most businesses, you don't.

The truth is somewhere in between you raising your prices 30% and you eating the entire tax. If you raise your prices 30%, you will sell less product. Often, raising them 30% will cut your business by more than 30%. So you raise prices by less - make a little less profit- and maximize the profits you can make at the new tax rate.

If the tax rate is unsustainable, then you'll go out of business.

Clearly with most of the targeted companies making record profits and more to the point, unusually high profit margins compared to other businesses - they have a lot of slack. They are just a new business and the government hasn't figured out how to take a share from them yet. But it will-- because police have to be paid, roads have to be maintained, the courts have to be run, and the military has to protect the country, etc. etc.

As a person who lightly dealt with tax software-- I can tell you it's not easy.

It's something we need to do, but it's ridiculously complicated with multiple overlapping taxing entities.
It won't be easy.

You can't study microplastic beads directly because once they reach the environment, they quickly become indistinguishable from other microplastic pollution.

http://www.beatthemicrobead.or...

I'm not an expert in this area but it looks like enough serious people are investigating it that I'll back them when they say to stop.

--- (from the link).

I R.C. Thompson, et al. âLost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?â(TM), in: Science, 304 (May 2004).

II P.K. Roy, et al., âDegradable Polyethylene: Fantasy or Realityâ(TM), in: Environmental Science and Technology, 2011, pp. 4217â"4227.

III M.C. Goldstein et al., âIncreased oceanic microplastic debris enhances oviposition in an endemic pelagic insectâ(TM), in: Biology Letters published on line 9 May 2012; C.J. Moore, âSynthetic polymers in the marine environment: A rapidly increasing, long-term threatâ(TM), in: Environmental Research108 (2008), pp. 131-139.

IV L.S. Fendall, M.A. Sewell, âContributing to marine pollution by washing your face: microplastics in facial cleansersâ(TM), in: Marine Pollution Bulletin, 58 (8) (2009), pp. 1225-1228.

V W.J. Sutherland et al., âA horizontal scan of global conservation issues for 2010â(TM), in: Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 25, pp. 1-7.

VI Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panelâ"GEF (2012). Impacts of Marine Debris on Biodiversity: Current Status and Potential Solutions, Montreal, Technical Series No. 67.

VII Chr.M. Boerger et al., âPlastic ingestion by planktivorous fishes in the North Pacific Central Gyreâ(TM), in: Marine Pollution Bulletin 60 (2010), pp. 2275-2278.

VIII Y. Mato et al., âPlastic Resin Pellets as a Transport Medium of Toxic Chemicals in the Marine Environmentâ(TM), in: Environmental Science & Technology, 2001, 35(2), pp.318-324.

IX H. Takada, et al., âAccumulation of plastic-derived chemicals in tissues of seabirds ingesting marine plasticsâ(TM) in: Marine Pollution Bulletin69 (2013), pp 219-222.

X E.M. Foekema et al., âPlastic in North Sea fishâ(TM), in: Environmental Science & Technology, 47 (2013), pp. 8818-8824.

XI P. Farrel en K. Nelson, âTrophic level transfer of microplastic: Mytilus edulis (L.) to Carcinus maenas (L.)â(TM), in: Environmental Pollution 177 (2013), pp. 1-3.

XII D. Lithner et al., âEnvironmental and health hazard ranking and assessment of plastic polymers based on chemical compositionâ(TM), in: Science of the total environment 409 (2011), pp. 3309â"3324.

XIII STAP. Marine Debris as a Global Environmental Problem: Introducing a solutions based framework focused on plastic. In A STAP Information Document, p. 40. Washington, DC: Global Environment Facility, 2011.

XIV L. Van Cauwenberghe, âOccurrence of microplastics in mussels (Mytilus edulis) and lugworms (Arenicola marina) collected along the French-Belgian-Dutch coast, in: J. Mees, et al. (ed.), Book of abstracts - VLIZ Young Marine Scientists' Day. Brugge, Belgium, 24 February 2012. VLIZ Special Publication, 55.

XV Cole M., et al., âMicro-plastic ingestion by zooplanktonâ(TM), in: Environmental Science & Technology, 2013 47 (12), pp. 6646-6655.

XVI G. Liebezeit, F. Dubaish, âMicroplastics in Beaches of the East Frisian Islands Spiegeroog and Kacheloplateâ(TM), in: Bulletin environmental contamination and toxicology, 89 (2012), p. 213-127.

XVII http://5gyres.org/how_to_get_i...

XVIII Leslie, H.A., Microplastic in Noordzee zwevend stof en cosmetica. Eindrapportage W-12/01, IVM Institute for Environmental Studies, Amsterdam, 2012.

XIXM.A. Browne et al., âAccumulations of microplastic on shorelines worldwide: sources and sinksâ(TM), in: Environmental Science &Technology 45 (2011), pp. 9175/9179; H.A. Leslie et al., âVerkennende studie naar lozing van microplastics door rwziâ(TM)sâ(TM) in: H2O 14/15 (juli 2012), pp. 45-47.