Tin Hat Linux by the looks of it.

I was hoping for information on the tax hack that allows me to pay 13% in taxes.

The Canadian economy cannot afford a shortage of both maple syrup and hockey sticks.

I'm told that police have a way of "shutting the whole thing down" in the case of illegitimate DNA transfer.

I like your vision of a privacy-invasion free world.

Don't want to be videotaped? Don't go outside.
Don't want to be wiretapped? Don't use a phone.
Don't want medical records in the wild? Don't go to a doctor.

Visionary indeed.

At the rate Microsoft is going, they might as well add a "Windows 8 opt-out feature."

Imagine the analogies section:

Creationism : True ::

A) Science : Real
B) Evolution : False
C) Blacks : First-class Citizens
D) Education : Important

Guess the correct answer.

Just to add on: Multiple times I've been in situations where someone talks about Ayn Rand as an intellectual (or worse, a philosopher), and all those who actually read stuff have to kind of embarrassingly smile as not to shame the person. It's not even spiteful, it's just an embarrassing moment. Granted, usually the people in these conversations are useless slackers who sit around and read all day while collecting degrees (i.e., intellectuals). I guess this tells you what counts as erudition now, for better of for worse.

Ryan is the so-called "intellectual leader" of the Republican party. According to him, his intellectual hero is Ayn Rand. That is all.

Two reasons to be skeptical of any of the claims about BRAIN SIZE. (The abstract emphasizes other things like "global connectivity" so pelase don't read these comments as a destruction of TFA. More how Slashdot reported it.)

1. The history of intelligence testing. Read S. J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" and you'll find good reason to immediately be skeptical of any research such at this.
2. The statistical assumptions. So what's on the left hand side of the model? Obviously, some measure of intelligence. Thus the right hand side variables (size of different regions, etc.) are predicting an intelligence composite. Which assumes that intelligence is something determined in part by those right hand side variables or something correlated with those variables. These studies assume an at least semi-valid measure of intelligence. If they want to claim a causal relationship, I want a damn good measure of intelligence. Otherwise they're finding connections between something that may well be correlated with whatever we call intelligence, and we have no reason to believe brain size.

Furthermore, to say 6% of the variance is explained by brain size, we're assuming there's nothing unmeasured that doesn't also correlated with brain size and the dependent variable (intelligence). Historically, this situation has often presented itself. For example, when the better nourished happened to be more intelligent AND have bigger brains because of their nourishment.

A final problem with ALL intelligence research that wants to claim a causal relationship is that intelligence isn't something we can really manipulate in the lab, so we're always going to have to worry about endogeneity and selection issues. we can't control "how people get assigned to intelligence," and so we always may have something unmeasured which really explains what we find (by way of correlating with, for example, "global connectivity.")

Aside from being good business sense on the accounting side of things, this is also a PR move. The hip company pays the nerds who can help them out taking advantage of the CLOUD! I mean crowd. Did I say cloud?

I built a computer a few years ago for two reasons:

1) to show the class I was teaching how a computer was built
2) to have a computer to be hooked up to a TV for watching TV/movies/etc.

I put linux on it but to my annoyance, Netflix was impossible because of Silverlight/DRM. That pretty much ruined it for me and I put Windows on it. Little things like that, I think, explain a lot of why people won't switch.

What are all those aerospace researching bureaucrats doing all day if not sending people to the moon? The brilliance of this question is that it reveals a new way to determine whether or not we should cut government funded programs:

Is the program doing precisely what middle school students expect it to do? If not, the axe.

Consequently, this is a great way to connect with the average voter.

They note the importance of reading before the class in the article but don't follow up much on that. This is crucial.

This problem presents itself when teaching interactively: If students don't prepare ahead of time, the lesson totally stalls. Then they are trying to figure out problems with no basis for it. What happens? The professor often ends up lecturing. Then no time is left.

My intuition (based upon TAing Statistics as a PhD student and being a high school teacher of history, philosophy, and information technology) is that very few students read before lecture. I often didn't as an undergrad. Why? Because as long as the lectures re-tread text material, student can get away with using the text only as a reference, not as a primarily source of information. If students are required to be active participants, they HAVE to read ahead of time. Otherwise they have no way of actually figuring out how to use the knowledge from the reading.

I agree with the poster who mentioned the importance of assessing theoretically. A lot of students think that theoretical assessment is easy -- they don't have to remember a lot and can just use their brain to figure out the test. At least in the Stats class I helped teach, this simply wasn't true. Whenever we had problems sets or exam problems which were more or less plug and chug, the students did GREAT. However, when we started asking theoretical questions (which statistical test is appropriate here? Why? How do you test assumptions...? Critique this statistically informed research piece.), students really struggled -- which means they don't get it. That tells me they weren't really ready to use statistics.

I bet this could have been alleviated significantly if we had spent more time in class really working through problems which asked tough theoretical questions in groups as a class. But alas, we lectured, then I had 50 minutes weekly to try to answer their questions -- never enough -- and the quality of work struggled. Many students never really seemed ready to work independently with the concepts: I think a big reason for this is they were taught by being talked at... so when it was time to show they knew stats, the brightest did fine but the majority freaked out.

The 128kbps m4as, particularly with dance music, tend to have really flat bass. Doesn't sound too good.