You have to explain how this scenario is collusion, not how a completely different scenario might be collusion.

Either you're confused or I am.

Snowden exposed that things were being used for tracking purposes. So why put scare quotes around tracking purposes? It's the exact nefarious thing you're talking about. They are advertising the purpose.

What is the NSA going to do with fingerprints that's worse than the advertised tracking purposes? Sorcery?

If you're going to think it's a government conspiracy, the scare quotes belong around a statement that the tracking will be limited. You say it like this: the tracking will be "limited to legitimate educational concerns" (note: I just made that up). That's where the scare quotes go.

Before asking wikipedia to take a math course, I suggest you read this wikipedia article, which aligns with the math courses I took: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

To be clear, I am in full agreement that there is no good reason to change a *default* to setting it to 0, and that letting just anything divided by 0 equal 0 is an insane default. You have to flip the question, "in what specialized circumstances would this ever be a good idea?".

However, maybe my imagination is just super powerful, but I certainly can imagine situations where you want something / 0 equal to 0, so long as that something is also 0. Measurements of rates-of-change.

Imagine one of the odometers with a needle that rotates around in an arc -- it always points to a value, usually 0. Like the odometer on most cars. Suppose it measures the average velocity of your trip. 0 km driven / 0 seconds driving -- measurement is 0. 0 bytes downloaded / 0 seconds downloading = downloading at 0 bps. If you put this into Calculus terms, these would be limits that converge to 0.

You might prefer to phrase it as f(X, Y) = X/Y where Y!=0, 0 where X=Y=0, undefined otherwise. That's even how I'd implement it in software (I certainly wouldn't do something crazy like overload the division operator). But that's functionally the same thing as defining 0/0 as 0, for that particular context.

This sounds extremely suspect, especially since a quick search suggests that the XBox One has substantially lower clock speeds, which I would naively expect to be traded off for substantially better clock-for-clock performance, even if we assume that the XBox One favoured multithreading or GPU much more heavily at the expense of single-threaded CPU. Do you have a citation?

Yes, I would rather you complain about those. They sound legitimate.

If I were making a language, I would strongly consider making whitespace work the way Python does (to enforce readable indenting standards), with the addition that mixing tabs and spaces is a syntax error, so you don't get those literally invisible bugs. I might even consider having both curly braces and meaningful whitespace: the level of indentation would act as a checksum on the correct number of open curly braces.

This is because bad indenting (aka bad use of whitespace) is also a common source of hard-to-find bugs. The famous "goto fail" bug is an example of a bug that is fairly common, and is actually resolved by meaningful whitespace. I imagine it was probably introduced from a merge conflict resolution, and then overlooked because it doesn't jump out at you unless you're looking for it. And also because the indentation in that file is a mess that only looks right if you set tabs to equal exactly four spaces, eliminating the one legitimate minor advantage of tabs over spaces. I mean, look at this: http://opensource.apple.com/so...

I'd also genuinely like to learn more about how anonymous functions are crippled by whitespace.

No, it's with both of them.

Adobe isn't trying to install Google Toolbar out of the kindness of its heart, or over Google's objections, or because it needs Google Toolbar technology. If it's trying to install Google Toolbar, it's because they accepted money from Google to do so. So yes, Google *is* exerting control over Flash's installer, and they are almost certainly *directly* responsible for it.

Bullshit.

Bullshit. Total bullshit.

Bulllllllllllshit. Citation needed. Also Association Fallacy.

"MY issue is more important than YOUR issue".

Also, you're claiming that Bahar Mustafa wasn't joking when she said "kill all white men"? When she responded to media by saying they were, and I quote:

  “in-jokes and ways that many people in the queer feminist community express ourselves” sent from her “personal account”.

It is *at worst* the same as what this guy is doing.

"Die cis scum" -- you can't *possibly* take that seriously. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/....

And End Father's Day? You know that was a 4chan hoax, right? Started from an account very subtly named "Straw Feminist"? http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...

There's no way you can possibly believe that people aren't joking when they say "die cis scum". There's no way. The only thing there that is remotely believable as something that is actually supported in real life is "end father's day", since father's day is ultimately as meaningless as mother's day. But it was a hoax.

Sunk costs fallacy? The Concorde was developed, like it or not. Those development costs are gone. So it's not relevant to your future actions unless you have a time machine to prevent the development of the Concorde in the first place.

Reckless endangerment is not victimless. The victims are those you recklessly endanger.

If we criminalized not having vaccines -- and I don't go that far (yet) -- the victim would be "everybody else" since you're a walking biological weapon.

This is similar to how attempted murder is still a crime even if you miss with your sniper rifle. I absolutely do not think it is always reasonable to wait until actual harm is done.

The problem we have here is that the rights of the child are being represented by two proxies: the government and the parents. It's widely (though not universally) agreed that both these groups have some claim over the child's welfare. The government can take children away from unfit parents, and whether or not that is used overzealously some parents are seriously unfit. On the other hand, parents get to make all kinds of choices for their kids, even at the inconvenience of government institutions.

The government has soundly listened to reason and decided that these vaccines are for everybody, and are so vitally important as to be subsidized. Most parents are in perfect agreement. Some few are taking the opposite path, and that's where the struggle lies.

That's common folk wisdom but every piece of evidence I've found on this suggests that the opposite effect is dominant due to anchoring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring).

You need to do the background research, figure out what an actually reasonable range is, then make the first offer ever-so-slightly unreasonable on the upside. Just making that offer will shift their perception of what reasonable is.

As others have noted, this is easier when you have a great alternative.

I found Chuck's product placement ads for Subway amazing actually. Rather than invisible, they were intentionally over-the-top to the point of being a clear parody. This on a show where significant time is spent in "Buy More" which is very clearly Best Buy.

The scenario explicitly included an ID check.

There's a bunch of what you say that I agree with*, but then you start going to crazy-town with your talk of "crypto-communists". Especially right after you proclaim "welfare for life" as a solution for the displaced people, which is the very essence of "to each according to their needs".

* In particular, I see "fewer jobs" as an intrinsically good thing. Yes, we all understand that leads to a wealth distribution problem. There are multiple possible outcomes.