I know, right? Now, a usability improvement facebook, that would be worth reporting, if only to keep the public alert as to the dangers of being struck by airborne swine.

"at the end of the day the processor is going to have to run machine code, and one way or the other you can tap the processor's activity to read the "decrypted" code"

Sure, and one way to reconstruct the program is to provide it every possible input and map the outputs. For that matter, one way to reconstruct the program is simply to load it up, see what it does, and code your own version that does the same thing.

But the question is how deeply you can inspect the algorithms based on what you see happening in the processor, and what I believe they are claiming is that they take the algorithms and reimplement them in such a way that, while they do what they were written to do, they do it in a new complicated way which cannot be analyzed to deduce the original simple way upon which it was based.

Science articles, one would presume, are written for persons interested in science. The idea that there is some broad swath of persons who wish to understand quantum mechanics but stand to be chased off by a simple formula strikes me as unlikely.

If it is a problem, then the logic is the kind of the logic that will perpetuate the problem: the reason math is not as digestible to a public audience is because they're not accustomed to it, and they're not accustomed to it because the media is choosing not to present it to them.

A doctoral thesis may be hundreds of pages and the embedding of figures, equations, citations, footnotes, etc., is something fundamentally important to what is being presented, not something you figure out after-the-fact, and certainly not something you want to figure out twice using an entirely different set of tools. Anyway, your assumption is that the purpose of using LaTeX is 100% stylistic. A lot of us use it because it's easier and saves time for what we are trying to achieve. Your method with be rather counterproductive on that point.

For movie watching a high IQ only gets in the way.

As for 'why', that is simple, we don't like endings. We want the story to continue. You might as well ask why people pay for expensive veterinary treaments when they could simply have their pets euthanized. People go to the zoo and they don't just remark on what an economical conversion the rhinos are of hay into edible meat, they marvel and awe and say what a beautiful creature it is.

I am often the one on the practical side of things, and I think the occasional rainforest has to go so humans can prosper. Certainly, too, die off is a natural aspect of speciation, and if we are going to let earth continue developing we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to losing many millions of species.

But if we were 100% practical there would be no point to anything. And for every person who irrationally promotes one species over another, there is someone who is equally irrational about preferring unchecked deforestation so he can enjoy cheap toothpicks. If you want money to be spent in preserving the environment, you should get behind absolutely anything which inspires people. Because for 90% of persons you will encounter, the alternative to wanting to keep beautiful rhinos around is not to promote a perfect cost-benefit use of the environment, it is for them to simply stop caring about the environment at all.

For nation states, foreign spying *is* the moral high-road.

Look, why do countries keep secrets in the first place? In an ideal world, they wouldn't feel the need to. They keep them because they're playing games of one-upmanship and sabotauge and petty nationalism. Secrets are, as a point of fact, weapons, and spying is the means by which those weapons are disarmed. We have less nuclear stockpiling when the US and Russia can verify for themselves the number of nukes the other has, vs. having to assume the worst. We have less wars when countries can relieve their paranoia their neighbors might be massing troops and mortars on the border, or aren't as far ahead of them technologically. Humanity avoids a great deal of redundant research and other wasted resources when countries steal science and technology from each other.

The best case would be to not have secrets and have every nation working together for the common good, but that's never going to happen and spying on each other is the most pragmatic alternative.

In my experience, scientists and engineers come ladled with doubts on human authority. In fact, it is often something that derives their dislike of the humanities—they trust numbers and figures, but when it comes to interpreting poems or arguing politics, their skepticism leads them to wish little to do with it. (and if it's not skepticism then it's their relative lack of skill)

I go to an engineering school which has almost no arts program. (Some english, history, and philosophy -- just what we need for general accreditation.) Although I myself am pretty keen on literature and many of the humanities, I hear all the gripes from the engineers. And I can tell you exactly what is wrong with this "scientists need humanities to understand such and such" approach. Scientists and engineers understand exactly what they need to achieve what they want, and thoroughly resent being shoe-horned into somebody else's idea of a well-rounded graduate when it has absolutely nothing to do with their personal interest or goals.

If you want the STEM crowd to embrace the humanities, stop trying to justify why they should join your program and come up with a new program especially for them. Let their literature be Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. Teach them "Art in Fractional Dimension with Computer Generated Imagery." Give them a music class where they build instruments and synthesizers. Let them walk into the classroom and feel on the very first day like they have something to contribute.

When science and math students walk into a humanities classroom and all their talent and ability in math and science is immediately considered moot, it's not them rejecting the humanities, it's the humanities rejecting them.

This whole issue began with the IRS's announced apology for specifically targetting conservative groups. A number of progressives have condemned the IRS' previous actions. We could go into details and compare point by point the discrepances between the IRS's treatment of conservative and other groups but we really don't need to unless you would like to tack on to your theory an explanation why the IRS is admitting to and apologizing for something they apparently didn't do before there is even any political pressure.

I think it's less likely the IRS is inventing conspiracies about themselves to corroborate and more likely that you are reflexively batting for your own politics regardless of the facts.

If they had religious objections to invoking the police, it would be irrelevant. The police are still going to track down the robbers and arrest them regardless of whether mom and pop want to file charges. In structuring our society, we have arbitrarily decided to make a legal distinction between certain types of injustice. It used to be the case where I live that domestic violence was not prosecuted unless the abused wanted to press charges. You'd think if someone was being abused they would want their abuser to get what was coming to them. But that is not always the case, I suppose we decided we wanted the abuser to face justice regardless, because now they will be prosecuted by default.

It is just as arbitrary deciding we are going to rely on a civil enforcement of contract law. In fact, we do have measures to protect certain disadvantaged people in contracts---minors, people with mental defects---but so far not people averse to filing lawsuits. Just because the Amish are willing to allow injustice to be perpetrated against them doesn't make it okay and doesn't mean we as a society are obliged to accept it, any more than we are obliged to allow physical abuse simply because the abused wants to remain in the relationship.

The reason the Amish don't wish to file a lawsuit is because they have a different set of priorities. Their goal is to make their lives a compelling argument for what they believe in. They are instructed to shun lawsuits because legal disputes often result in discord and when it comes to a choice between the money or maintaining goodwill they suppose money is not that important. You're right that it is their choice to make. But it doesn't change the fact that they are being wronged and cheated. I don't understand why you think they need to be actively trying to get the better of their oppressors before we're allowed to be sympathetic.

Nobody likes democracy unless it's on their side. The enlightened masses who see things your way are a boon, the dazed luddites who dare to disagree a real drag. Giving up some sovereignty can be quite handy to get things the way you want them without all those ignorant plebes standing in the way. Heck, the new arrangement might be quite popular---there's no reason everybody can't get something out of the deal. Of course, the problem with having a government of governments of governments is that, the farther you abstract the roles, the less connection the people in charge have to the citizens at the base of the system.

In this case, do they know anyone who does casual hacking, any whitehats, do they remember smart kids causing a bit of mischief starting off because that's what kids do? Of course, not. They have read the stories about cyberattacks and heard from their corporate friends that this is an issue and they will solve it at the only level and by the only means they are prepared to solve it.

And better stick in some minimum sentencing guidelines because who knows what those weird parochial judges might do if allowed to act on their own sensibilities.

"Eat this and you, too, can look like a whale!"

You misconstrue the nature of the battle. It is not against malware, anymore than a modern war is againsts guns and bullets. It is against the malware authors. Yes, some variant of "malware" can always be imagined to succeed against any software-level security. But the vast majority of that hypothetical malware is completely irrelevant because no one is ever going to write it. What is missing from consideration is the time and money invested into making the malware work, to how long it is effective, and what the financial payoff will be. The more you increase the burden and reduce the payoff, the more you have shifted the balance toward the good guys. More flexible malware identification mechanisms are big wins not because they are undefeatable but because they make the bad guys work harder. And, as a matter of fact, if you can generalize malicious code based on a few samples, you can effectively have the bad guys working against each other. (Virus 1, using exploit, is successful, second guy notes virus 1's success, analyzes it, produces virus 2 using same exploit, virus 3 also uses same exploit; based on comparison of three viruses, database is able to identify common exploit and innoculate against all subsequent programs which would otherwise rely on said exploit.)

I hope they don't have a different perspective. If they do, we should pretty much nuke them ourselves right now---our tolerance for their rhetoric is couched in the belief that it really is just talk. If they were seriously convinced that they were on the verge of war, willing to use nukes against us or South Korea or Japan, and willing to take just about anything as provocation, we would not want to be following a policy of "let them get the first nuke fired off at us before we do anything."

The reason for using the real specimens is precisely to avoid the kind of speculation we are engaged in right now. Their value as a deterrent (or blackmail) is directly proportional to our confidence in their functionality, deliverability, etc. Ever having to use them is a losing proposition--North Korea would become a sea of glass minutes after the fact. (That assurance of destruction would normally make their nukes useless as a conventional bargaining chip, which is why NK has to up the crazy factor so that we *aren't quite 100% sure* about their intent, and they can demand concessions.) Thus, the only purpose the nukes serve is as a bargaining chip. If seeing fake nukes reduces our belief in their feasibility by 5%, that represents a 5% loss on their investment in that bargaining chip. Not a good play. On the other hand, if they only have one serviceable missile, or otherwise would be embarassing themselves with an honest display, it would be well-worth trying to drum up their apparent tactical abilities.

Yeah, the difference is that the latter are strictly financial concerns to the company, and what you are talking about is giving *the company* rights to protect those financial concerns. It may be that men are the more expensive to higher in each case (maybe they're just statistically less reliable). But rather than chasing after all of those distinctions (which may or may not in cases be prejudiced rather than mathematical) we prefer to say everyone is considered equal at the time of higher.

But what we are talking about right now is the physical differences of the person whose rights are being protected. Are you against the American's with Disabilities Act? Are handicapped parking spaces an abridgment of American equality since only a select portion of the population is permitted to use them? If it's unfair that women get more time off than men for pregancy, do you also think it is unfair that they get more time off than men for having cervical cancer?

The fact is men can work straight through a pregnancy doing all manner of exerting activity without missing a beat. Women can't. Not they shouldn't. Not we don't think they should have to because we're chauvinists. THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY DO SO unless we want to cause them and/or the child serious harm. Giving them maternity leave is required not to advantage them but to make their situation equal to that of men. And if the child is going to be breastfed, the woman is going to need to be there longer to take care of it, because she's the one who can do it. (And if we just want the family to have some time together, then I suppose that is why we are allocating paternity leave as well, in which case, how about yahoo is offering 4 weeks recovery time to the person who just had a major medical incident, plus 8 weeks to both parents to enjoy their new family.)

Honestly, forcing equality where it's not a matter of equality is the surest way to weaken the whole concept. There is a very logical rational of why people should be treated equally, it is called fairness. When you stop considering fairness and just consider whether certain numbers are equal to one another, you are not going to have a stable or desirable system.