Your sig: "Eat Locals!" somehow does not go well with the case you just argued :-).

> I am sure if a common person used a database to collect information on the judge or the judge's family and then wrote a detailed plan of how the family was to be murdered, we would not be getting of with a simple misuse of private information.

Which is why the law will not allow that judge to take up that case because he will no longer be able to judge objectively. That argument... what if he did it to the judge?... is never a good argument.

He is talking about states in India, not US.

Jokes aside, many Indians just use laptops and 3G data cards which have quite cheap and affordable plans compared to US (start at $2 a month). So power cuts don't really effect computer use. If you are middle class in India, you probably might also have battery backup or a generator subscription for the house essentials.

> A power grid that can't be kept up reliably? That's not something customers want to see when you're trying to convince them to let you launch multi-million dollar pieces of equipment up into space.

Wanna bet? Go to Indian forums and try to find people complaining that no space projects should go on until they get uninterrupted power supply.

Don't do space projects that get us (or help get in near future) profits in foreign exchange said no Indian ever.

Civilized countries are not necessarily the same as militarized countries, just as a civilized man is not the same as an armed-to-the-teeth man. We have our gentlemen and we have our soldiers.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

> Educational research is profoundly flawed, and often reflected the biases of the researchers.
> Most education are humanities people, without the decades of training in the scientific process and statistics.

That's not true. Every one with a PhD is expected to have statistical training. You don't need "decades" of training in stats. Most hard science PhDs don't have that. 4-5 grad courses will generally do. Research projects with any quantitative component will typically consult a statistician for at least a sanity check.

Scientific process differs from discipline to discipline. As for rigor, it is mostly dependent on subject issues. Rigor is hard in any discipline where human subjects are involved and where the research question involves multiple factors that cannot be easily controlled for (often for the lack of money, since very large samples will be required, if done by the book - so researchers settle for more humble expectations of clarity).

As you said it yourself, brain research is still not quite operational for everyday use. Isn't brain research (whatever you mean by that: neuro science, psychology, psychiatry?) a hard science? Even something as basic as nutrition science is pretty poor today for the basic questions we have for it. So why have great expectations over education research? Its just the nature of the problem domain.

Snowden did not engage in civil disobedience in the vein of Gandhi/MLK/Thoreau. But that's fine. Civil disobedience is just one type of civil resistance. Civil disobedience only works against petty laws with limited punishment.

In this case, the legal consequences were dire. Can you name any act of civil disobedience (submitting oneself willingly to punishment as an act of disobedience) that carried the maximum possible punishment of death or life in prison? Gandhi, MLK and Thoreau broke laws where the punishment was just a few days/weeks/months. I am sure Snowden would gladly accept such a punishment if that was the choice, since the current alternative is to spend his whole life, in fear, in a foreign country.

What he did was different. He broke a law with dire repercussions in his attempt to expose constitutional violations. What you are suggesting is closer to telling the members of the White Rose Movement to willingly expose themselves to the law. Yes, I know: Godwin. A better US example would be demanding the FBI burglars to submit themselves to law. I happen to think the burglars did the right thing by not submitting themselves to the law then. Do you? How do you see Snowden as different from them?

Unlike the burglars, Snowden could not keep himself anonymous after the leak, since the NSA, unlike the case with the FBI burglary (since the burglars were completely unrelated to the FBI), would have quickly identified him. They sent someone to his house, almost immediately after the leak. So he had to run and go public. And if he ran to the only places that can resist US extradition, without going public as he did, he would have been easily labelled a spy. Going public made that charge not stick with most people. I believe that Snowden, once having chosen to expose the constitutional violations, had no real choices other than the ones he exercised.

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

True, but some unintentionally end up encouraging it and some discipline against it by design.
Its not the possibility that matters, but probability.

The problem here (Piketty, as well as Reinhart and Rogoff) isn't simple, data-intensive apps (that would be a business app developer's problem, perhaps you are one). It's demonstrating an innovative, scientific analysis in an easy to review format. These economist papers aren't that data intensive... they usually have much less data than a typical business app.

https://gist.github.com/vincen...
(169K as uncompressed text)

Its the analysis that is the value here. The rather short, and a computationally non-intensive analysis in Reinhart and Rogoff paper triggered financial effects to the tune of probably trillions of dollars across Europe, some would argue prematurely.

The solution for this problem is a statistical package with a notebook presentation. The ideal case would probably be R with knitr. It allows one to combine snippets of code, with data, output and documentation to discuss the analysis & results in easy to understand chunks.

IPython notebook is also an excellent alternative.
Here is a demonstration of how Reinhart-Rogoff paper should have submitted the data.
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gi...
I am sure, someone will do a Piketty one soon as well.

> Meh * 2

Those are your preferences. I have mine. But they are functional features nonetheless.

> you also get a bloated semantic desktop shoved down your throat for no good reason

As opposed to Windows (the post I am responding to) not having any features that I don't need?

> What makes you so sure?

It's not a question of being sure. I said *better* trust, not absolute trust, which does not exist.