No, because getting a warrant now with too limited a scope might prevent them from ever getting admissible evidence for the other crimes, they are sending in non-federal agents to prevent a miscarriage of justice stemming from a legal technicality. Like how some big investigations go on for years before any overt action is taken, because a bust without enough admissible evidence is just a waste of time and money. But feel free to oversimplify things however you would like.

No, things have not changed as much as I would like. We're not living in a utopia. Not all of Obama's campaign promises have been met. The government isn't ceding all the ill gotten power it's grabbed in the last few years, it hasn't made itself transparent, and it's hard to say how far things will go in the right direction. However, it is quite disingenuous to say that nothing has changed and that things are not better than they were before.

So let's compromise: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(And it might be off topic to say so, but this isn't a power grab. At issue here is whether information in a file you already have a warrant for is off limits because you went in specifically looking for different information. People bitched and moaned about how stupid it was that patents were being granted for doing business things *on a computer* when there was nothing essentially new, why turn around and say that they way warrants work should change when they refer to things *on a computer*?)

Well, a large number of people did vote for McCain with Palin on the ticket (and it would be statistically unlikely if not one of them reads slashdot), but I think it proves your point. I certainly wouldn't have voted for Obama if I had believed he was a secret muslim, white hating, crazy pastor having, kenyan socialist out to destroy America. Maybe.

Is it really fair to compare people who went to universities to people who went to vocational college to focus on writing great software? Wouldn't it be better to compare them to people who went to vocational college to write regular software?

Of course, I don't know exactly what is taught at a vocational college, but my guess is that it revolves more around programming than computer science, and that is the difference. If you know how to program, and you know all about the standard libraries, than you can accomplish quite a lot. However, what you don't cover in a CS program is likely going to be picked up quickly on the job, while the theoretical underpinnings of a good CS degree will not just be picked up by someone who doesn't already have them.

Depending on the job, it might not make a difference at all. If you don't need fancy algorithms and data structures, if you're not doing OS coding, if everything is straight forward to implement, or if you never have to do anything that isn't already well covered by standard libraries, then going to a vocational school is probably great preparation. However, if that's not the case, then there are things you need to learn (either in or out of school).

It really does depend on the job, though. A man who knows how to design cogs and create vast machines of his own with them isn't going to have an advantage over a man who can just put cogs together following a diagram if the job is as part of an assembly line. So I would say, there are blue collar programming gigs, and there are white collar ones. For a blue collar one, either education level works fine, and are perhaps equivalent. For a white collar one, that's no longer the case.

So having something to export is bad because lobbying will yield laws preventing imports? Subsidies are different than tariffs or import bans.

In part due to OPEC, and in part due to speculation, gas prices soared not too long ago. As worldwide demand for oil increases, we are only going to have more problems. And the cost doesn't have to skyrocket unpredictably for it to cause major problems. A steady increase of 10% over inflation each year could easily cause problems faster than we can deal with it. In fact, it could be argued that we see the need for these technologies right now, but consumers don't buy what is in their best long term interests, they buy what is cheapest right now, and that creates an economic incentive for companies to do what is cheapest right now. The way U.S. capitalism is structured, most companies seem to do what is in the best interests of short to medium term profits. Subsidies are required to get the country to act in it's long term best interests.

Yes, subsidies can cause unintended side effects, and bad subsidies (e.g., subsidies for corn ethanol) would be disastrous. I can understand being wary. However, blindly saying "subsidies bad, free market good!" is likely to lead to equally bad results too.

Yes, and no. Yes, there are inefficiencies associated with subsidizing anything, and so, in the short term, there is an economic penalty for it. However, in the long run, there are many advantages. There are political issues relating to oil shortages, there are real economic gains to being a leader in new forms of energy (e.g., we can sell it to others), and since the money is going to be spent on the research and development eventually anyway, using subsidies and doing it now offers a few other perks: We aren't in a dire need to implement the first working thing on a wide scale if there are better things in the pipeline, we are diverting resources we have now instead of being forced to spend those we don't have later, we're creating jobs to get us through a bit of a rough patch, and keeping the middle class in the middle class (as opposed to waiting till they cannot afford anything resembling their current lifestyle) does a lot for both the country's morale and future economic prosperity. So maybe by some metrics, things would work out better if we let the market take care of everything, but there are other advantages which make this route at least as attractive, if not tangibly better.

The thing is, while there will be more economic incentive to use alternative energy sources, and even though necessity is the mother of invention, there are technical hurdles to overcome, and we need to set of new infrastructure, and the science and engineering feats that must be accomplished will not just happen because we want them to. Maybe we can overcome the problems given enough time, but depending on how fast the price increases (thanks to increased development in countries like China and India, demand will be increasing even as supply drops), we may not be able to afford to wait.

Yes, the laws of supply and demand will prevent there from being real shortages, but when the economy slows because people can't afford to drive places (like work) or buy things that were shipped (like most food), when people are forced to make hard decisions, when the market for luxury goods disappears because people are spending most of their income on necessities because the next big thing in affordable fuels is still "just around the corner," will it matter that it isn't a shortage in the truest sense of the word?

Yes, far in the future, if we survive past when oil becomes truly scarce, either we will no longer use oil, or it will be used sparingly because we can't afford otherwise. Call it economics. Call it common sense. Call it whatever.

What you are overlooking is the transition period and the inelasticity of oil demand. There are a lot of things that run on oil. There are a lot of things that we have no good replacement in lieu of their oil consumption. When oil prices rise, if we don't have alternatives, then we will have no choice but to spend extra money on oil, which will cost more than it would because demand is higher. For some people, this will mean that they have less disposable income. For others, it will mean that they can no longer afford to drive to work. As the cost of shipping everything increases, some businesses stop being economically viable at prices the market can bear. Even if electric cars become the norm, how will things be shipped to Hawaii?

Yes, at higher prices, we will tap into oil shales, but because of the way oil is integral to so many things right now, nobody will be able to afford not to pay, and the consequences could be dire. Finding a way to wean ourselves off of oil will both postpone the problems of an oil shortage and lessen the cost when the shortage happens. The market won't magically cure our oil dependence, it will just give us a bigger incentive to cure it. It's better to act now, before everybody is had by the short hairs.

To put this all in a different way, if a drug dealer lost his supplier of heroin but he had a decent stockpile, then yes, down the road, his clients would no longer be using heroin. But in the mean time, they would pay more and more, go through horrible withdrawal as they could no longer afford to buy, and the aftermath would not be pretty. But if someone saw their plight, realized that the cost was going to skyrocket, and get them into rehab *before* they wasted their life savings, the cost (both human and monetary) would be greatly decreased.

Why should trojans be discounted? I have seen things from "trusted sources" be infected. Yes, things that don't require human interaction to spread are worse, but to tout "I don't need antivirus protection because I don't run windows and I'm too smart to ever get hit by a trojan" is both arrogant and stupid. No "trusted source" deserves the faith you are placing in them. Your trust can be misplaced. They can be compromised without realizing it. Remember the slogan: trust, but verify.

The problem is, finding new Mersenne primes doesn't actually give us any insight into whether there are an infinite number of them. Yes, the problem of finding perfect numbers (or rather, determining whether there are an infinite number of them, or whether there are any odd ones) has been a tantalizing problem since antiquity (as are most problems that are as easy to understand but as hard to prove), but individual examples like this aren't particularly important . Indeed, they are curiosities. And at the size and sparsity of the known Mersenne primes make it very unlikely that anybody will be able to find in them a usable pattern.

Don't get me wrong, many great discoveries have come from people studying curiosities, and I'm more than happy to let people continue searching for bigger and bigger Mersenne primes (or would be if there wasn't a real environmental impact associated to the energy cost from all those computer cycles devoted to the project), but I really don't want to confuse the importance of questions involving Mersenne primes with the triviality of determining that yet another Mersenne number is actually prime.

Really? Well, I guess my English friends inadequately explained to me how the system worked when I lived over there. They had told me that a proportional representation scheme was how someone from the racist, nationalist party (whose name escapes me) had won a seat in parliament. The fact that he actually won a plurality of the votes somewhere scares me.

If you truly believe that the two parties are roughly equivalent and that both candidates are equally bad for the job, then, at least in Britain, you aren't throwing your vote away by choosing a third party candidate. No, you're not going to win the entire government, but you will end up with at least some representation. In the U.S., if a national third party were to get 25% of the vote in a years worth of Senate races, spread out roughly equally all across the country, absolutely nothing would come of it. If that happened in England, the third party would have a decent representation in parliament. So while it is very difficult in England for a third party to gain significant power, it is absolutely impossible in America (unless winning the presidency but having no support in congress counts as significant power, which would require a well funded, well connected, and charasmatic candidate, in addition to miraculous circumstances).

Why do you feel that anecdotal evidence has no value at all? Without anecdotal evidence, we wouldn't have theories to try to prove/disprove with real data. And while anecdotes can record statistically improbable events (with no way of discerning that the results are improbable), they do, at the very least, show what is possible. Additionally, for things you know nothing about, anecdotal evidence can be a useful way to form your initial opinions. Furthermore, for things that aren't scientific in nature (e.g., is the movie/restaurant any good?) anecdotal evidence can be invaluable.

While I am sure that many of the claims of chiropractors are bunk, I am also confident that the basic claims have at least some merit (realigning your back can relieve back pain but cannot cure ear infections or cancer). I accept or reject anecdotal evidence according to my own personal biases, so I agree that anecdotes are of little use for changing my opinions, but to say that anecdotal evidence has no particular value is dangerous. In fact, a friend of mine spoke out against anecdotal evidence, and then he died of cancer.

And the people who argue that HTML isn't computer code aren't web designers. And the people who argue that slashdot isn't interesting aren't slashdot readers. Ok, well, maybe not on the second point, but of course people who work with viruses are going to view their work differently than others will. It makes it sound better from the outside if they could convince people that viruses are alive. I bet you could find robot designers who would try to argue that their creations are alive too. As long as we insist on using vague human languages which have definitions that break down in corner cases (What is alive? Red? Funny?), we're going to have disagreements like this. In the end, it doesn't matter except for people's egos.

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "for profit", but there is a lot more than just the lectures that goes on at decent universities, and it doesn't come cheap.

Universities (which, for the sake of this discussion, are places where there are graduate studies and research being done, which we contrast with colleges, where there is just teaching and undergraduates) have several costs. Labs are expensive. And I don't mean the labs that students practice using pipettes in. The places where basic research occurs need equipment. And they don't run themselves. While grad students can do some of the work (and can be payed relatively cheaply), you need actual research level scientists too. They get paid less than they would in an industrial job, AND they have to teach. If you cut their budgets too much, they can't do their work, and if you cut their salaries too much, they would do much better to abandon ship. And while some of the money comes from tuition, a lot comes from both public and private sources who either have interests in education or interests in the research.

The upshot of this is that we are taught by experienced practitioners in our field of interest who have not only experience and perspective, but also keen insight into how the state of the art is changing.

Additionally, these people can offer unique guidance to those students who have true potential. They can help them get involved with ongoing research. They can guide them towards graduate level classes. Of course, talking about education for the best and the brightest might be completely antithetical to this discussion.

But given the number of people who go to college because it gives them better job prospects, is it that wrong that people pay to invest in their future?

Of course, my perspective here is from that of the sciences. I don't appreciate the benefit of being taught English by a professional literary critic or what benefit a university would offer a liberal arts student over a college. It also doesn't apply to people who are only going to college to party or to broaden their mind in an intangible sense. However, for the sciences or engineering disciplines*, it does seem reasonable that getting the education that we want requires money.

*And I'm not counting basic IT or programming in this. Computer science, yes. Something where an MSCE might matter? No.