Not in any way, no, I did not.

You're a liar.

I agree. I am nearly completely transparent and obvious and clear. I lack pretense or disguise.

No. It's true that the framers and most people who understand politics want the people to be ignorant about most issues in government, because otherwise, the people would be spending too much time watching government and not enough time enjoying life and being productive. Everyone should want to be ignorant about most things, especially most things government does. Otherwise you'll be miserable.

But it's not true that they want people to be ignorant, but with a delusion of lack of ignorance. You're just making things up.

There's no objective reason why it's a bad thing.

I'm a dope because you ... agreed with me? You think that little of yourself?

You're a liar.

Well, yes, people who believe what they are told -- and then profess to know those things -- without investigating it, are stupid.

Gruber was mostly right, although the word "stupid" is probably not what he meant. But the fact is that whoever believed it wasn't a tax, it wouldn't raise rates, it wouldn't force you to change plans and possibly doctors, etc., was ignorant. Not stupid, necessarily, but ignorant. That said, someone who is ignorant and thinks that he actually knows these things is kinda stupid. So all the news folks, for example, who said that what Republicans said about the ACA were lies ... they were stupid.

The fact is that almost everything the GOP said about the ACA was true. Federal funding of abortions, subsidies for illegals, massive government control defined at a later date by an administrator and not Congress, death panels, increased taxes and premiums, decreased choice ... all of it was and is true.

I'd expect an article talking about criminally prosecuting Gruber would at least make reference to some violation of the criminal code. I see no crime. Neither the author nor his interviewee mention any crime. He makes vague references to "Deceit. Fraud. Premeditated felonious theft.," but he simply gave his opinions; he didn't implement anything. The theft was by the government, not him. The fraud was perhaps aided by him, but no court has ever found that government fraud of this type is prosecutable, so prosecuting a private citizen for aiding the government in something that can't be prosecuted makes no sense.

The polygraph is just a modern version of Trial by Ordeal. Where about the only thing modernized is the type of witchcraft it detects.

It has the reliability and reputation of tealeaf-reading. Actually, more people probably believe in mysticism than lie detectors.

Under these circumstances, any organization relying on polygraph testing deserves everything it suffers. Believe Mystic Meg's advice on lottery numbers? You aren't entitled to a refund on either. Same applies here. Such devices should have been consigned to the scrap yard (and/or the museum of failed criminology) decades ago.

It's no more easy to be sympathetic to the ex-cop. The fact that he's basically correct is irrelevant. First, he's milking the market. Ten greenbacks for a digital book that's likely to be yanked by officialdom. Even Dangermouse was content with one. Besides, most of the tricks are well-known and meditation can take care of the rest.

From the looks of it, the guy also harasses negative reviewers. That's definitely strike two.

And I'm willing to bet that he has abused authority a few times himself. That's becoming par for the course.

Nonetheless, despite despising the lot, police harassment and the de-facto classification of failings within authority are absolute no-go areas and that supersedes my dislike of Doug Williams and his profiteering.

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

Especially when such basic facts as the timing of the Cambrian explosion are so wrong. It was 542M years ago, according to wikipedia, or 4B years after the earth formed. This summary implies the Cambrian explosion was 3B years sooner, unless by "tens of millions" they actually mean 3000 million.

He's complaining that the money he spent to defeat the influence of money in politics didn't have any influence.

The proper lesson is that his basic thesis is wrong, that money doesn't always win elections. Meg Whitman was another example (if you have to ask who she? and what election? then you prove my point -- google "meg whitman election").

But being a statist fuck, that won't be the lesson he sees. Lessig's done a lot of nice work otherwise, but he's off the rails on this.

Caused mainly by high quality tea. Coffee drinkers are thus entirely a figment of the imagination.

We have two options here.

Option #1: Include all organisms that are "alive" by some definition at two points in time (A and B) are alive at any point in time between A and B.

This eliminates all definitions that exclude known states for organisms. Which is most of them. All five "life processes" can be suspended in most/all organisms for indefinite periods of time. Since they are indefinite, you cannot assume any finite span of time being involved and therefore it is not the possession of properties that matters, only the potential for possession.

In fact, everything has to be written as potentials, in this model. There is nothing in this model which states that any feature has to exist simultaneously with any other feature.

Option #2: Abandon all notions of "life" entirely and go from the ground up.

There is fundamentally no distinction between living and non-living. All matter is "non-living", any concept of "life" has to be an abstract, non-physical concept that isn't binary but a gradation. In other words, it's not a property something has, it is a magnitude of a property of a collection of properties that something has. This model is necessary if you adhere to the deep oceanic origin of life theory. In this model, life formed in the deep oceanic trenches from an iron/sulphur matrix around which organic molecules (some sinking from the surface, some formed at the trench level) were bound. Since there is no binary living/non-living state in this model, this proto-proto-life must have a non-zero magnitude. (It is clearly more than the non-living structures around it, since it is a gateway to life, but it is clearly less than anything we'd classically consider "living".)

I would argue that in this model, anything that meets the classic five life processes meets or exceeds some threshold boundary, which you are entirely at liberty to call 1.0. Quasi-living things cannot equal or exceed this threshold value, definitely living things cannot fall below it. Furthermore, since all known living organisms contain processes that are critical to the function of the organism and which must have evolved at some point (something only living systems are capable of), all sub-processes of any living organism must have non-zero life, no matter how simple. (In computing terms, if you only have a notion of programs, then threads, procedures, functions, etc, are program-lites but still programmatic in nature.)

You will notice that in neither of these have I actually specified what a living organism must possess. In the first case, there must only be potentials for processes that are counter-entropic, but there is no formal description of what those processes would be. I don't need them to define life, I only need to know that counter-entropic behaviour of some sort is a non-zero possibility. In the second case, I don't even bother considering entropy. It is sufficient that there be a process which, by stepwise refinement, can be shown to be a valid sub-process at some depth of analysis of life. It simply doesn't matter if it organizes into something that is living in some sense we don't know about, just as in programmatic terms you don't care what links to a library file. If it contains some identifiable sub-process that has the potential to be a key part of a living thing, then it has non-zero life and whether that life meets some criteria or other can be left to biologists and philosophers.

These are, in my arrogant opinion, superior to classical definitions because I'm not looking at a specific something and calling it a benchmark. Which, from the perspective of early science, meant humans. If you like, I'm looking only at the fundamental specifications involved and saying that if there is non-zero overlap and that overlap is necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for life, then whatever possesses that overlap possesses enough to be considered on the spectrum.

I accept, completely, that this still doesn't guarantee covering everything. It does cover ALife and AI (provided that there exists a mapping that could, in principle, be used to convert physical life into ALife and vice versa), but it doesn't cover Isaac Asimov's speculation of silicon lifeforms unless there is a key component of the biology of such life that mirrors the biology of known carbon-based life. Just one component is enough, true, but a totally xenobiological system which has zero correspondence with known systems would not be recognizable by these approaches.

If they're wardriving, very easily. It's called nmap.

I would agree, except that most users live in outright denial, rarely (if ever) learn correctly from mistakes and frequently prefer to ignore their suffering until the harm is truly excessive.

Better critical thinking techniques need to be taught in school, along with practices that impede cognitive dissonance.

Further, there need to be recognized groups that have the authority to mentor those who aren't clued up.

If someone decided to stand on the curb for a long time, they'd probably be reported for suspicious activity. Casing a place is a very common precursor to a break-in. I see no reason for the monitoring of a private webcam to be treated any differently in that regard.

A more likely scenario would be for a criminal to drive past at night, see the car gone, and then check the internal cameras of the house for any activity to determine if it's easy to rob. If there's no baby, there's likely no babysitter either. It's just wardriving with intent.

A third scenario is that the criminals have got something equivalent to packet sniffing for speech. Back in the old pre-common-SSL days, it was common enough for a hostile packet sniffer to log packets that contained a field that was in credit card number format. You didn't have to break in to get all the personal data, you just grabbed it as it went by. You wouldn't then sit there waiting for interesting tidbits of information, you'd simply have your zombie botnet collect interesting-looking sound snippets. It doesn't have to recognize the words, just the patterns. We know for certain the security services had that in 2003 as part of Echelon and Moonpenny, and probably had that as far back as the late 1990s. It would be gross incompetence on the part of anyone dealing with IT security to blithely assume it's not reached the cybercriminal domain.

Hell, just the fact that the intelligence services can sniff for interesting data is a serious risk these days. Both British and American authorities have done some ethically questionable undercover work that (at best) bordered the criminal. And they're some of the better ones. Blatantly criminal endangerment, blackmail and other corrupt practices are widespread.