The term is character set. The site itself is served as UTF-8, but the posts are interpreted as iso-8859-1 (more or less equivalent to ASCII). UTF-8 uses a variable-length encoding to represent characters, and iso-8859-1 is single-byte. While it is uncommon these days, it's hardly non-standard.

“Fortunately — for those of us who have bothered to learn a little HTML — entities work just fine.”

I'm not suggesting you become a web developer, but maybe learning something instead of complaining would be time better spent. That said, I do have more or less the same complaint as the reason for my sig. That and, well, you know...

There is more than one North Pole. For one, there is North Pole, Alaska (which isn't even above the Arctic Circle!). More seriously, we have the magnetic north pole, where the compasses point to, and then the point where the Earth's rotational axis meets the Earth's surface. It's not quite accurate to say that the rotational axis moves relative to the Earth's surface, although the planet does wobble on its axis. However, we usually express that in terms of which point on the celestial sphere the Earth appears to rotate around, which changes every few thousand years. The point of which that rotation (known as the precession of the equinoxes) appears to rotate around is the ecliptic north pole, which can also be expressed as the point directly perpendicular to the plane of Earth's rotation around the Sun.

Out of all of them, North Pole, AK, is the worst. The others are harder to visit though.

The effectiveness of vitamin D as a cancer treatment is highly debatable, and anyone claiming otherwise (for or against) is mistaken or selling something. Not all UV radiation has the same effect on your skin. Tanning beds are tuned to make you tan; they are not particularly effective for vitamin D production.

You should avoid tanning. I am sure no one who has had skin cancer would recommend the experience. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Even if vitamin D were effective as a cancer remedy, it does not follow that tanning is a good way to get vitamin D. How much sun or dietary components you need to fulfill your body's needs for vitamin D is also difficult to estimate, and depend significantly on latitude, but there is little evidence to suggest that the amount of sun exposure required would produce or maintain changes of skin tone.

For what it's worth, I'm from Alaska and pretty used to taking vitamin D supplements throughout the winter. That and heavy drinking. I prefer living in the tropics and maintaining a natural tan. My mother was taken in by the vitamin D crowd when my father developed cancer, not to the point of rejecting traditional medicine, however. It is easy to find biased sources of information promoting many natural remedies; it is harder to find good studies. Like they say, "You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." If you're inclined to dispute any of the above please cite reputable studies. If, for any given remedy, one can't demonstrate a significant effect with a large group of people and a well-controlled study, it's a pretty useless remedy.

Yes, you can prove it. That is the whole point. Every true statement in math is based on a set of chosen axioms. Numbers follow each other in sequence because we have defined them to. Addition and logic work because we have chosen axioms that allow them to be true statements. You can choose other axioms, in which case you will be able to construct different tautologies or theorems.

Mathematics has no correspondence to anything in the real world. You can use it to model the real world, using numbers to represent bottlecaps, and using arithmetical methods to describe moving piles of them around. However, to borrow a phrase, "mathematics is more than just a physics of bottlecaps." Numbers aren't even that important a lot of math. Mathematics must be the same everywhere by definition. The difference between Euclidean Geometry and Non-Euclidean geometry is an example of what happens when we change our definitions. See also Peano arithmetic vs more complicated systems. It's not like we're discovering new truths about the universe when we're proving theorems. To some degree it's all wanking, just playing around in a constructed system Poets, plumbers, and engineers may have varying views of the universe; to a mathematician reality is just a special case.

The court does not define reality; if they have defined mathematical concepts to be real they are in error. I did not claim fire to be patentable, and did not address the subject of "it has been done before," nor do I consider that to be a good argument. Double entry bookkeeping, if it can be expressed as an algorithm, would not be patentable, but I do not believe that to be the case. You could make provably true statements about DEB, but I don't think you could reduce it to a logical tautology. The same would not be true of a data compression algorithm.

Any other questions?

Are you seriously asking what an abstract concept is?

It's something that doesn't exist in the real world. If the justices could not come up with a definition, they're disturbingly ignorant. Mathematics is entirely dependent on your choice of axioms. You can accept Euclid's fifth postulate, and discover a composite truth of Euclidean geometry, or reject it and describe some aspect of non-Euclidean geometry. Both are equally valid (though not at the same time) and both describe the real world to some degree. They are however solely logical concepts which do not exist in any real sense. Empirical facts, (e.g. "fire burns things") are true based on observations about the real world, and are only true to the limits of our observational abilities. Mathematical truths are true regardless of observations; they are true in all possible universes, whether those universes include observers.

To quote Phillip K. Dick, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Math is not real. Asserting ownership rights over a non-real concept is a popular delusion, but one which should not be tolerated. The cynic in me would suggest that the reason for the Court's confusion in these matters is that they are making an analogy to the concept of justice, which is also both abstract and widely sold.

Your argument is entirely false.

Mathematical fact is a different kind of truth than statements about the real world. Truths produced by means of different methodologies are generally not comparable. For example:

• "2 + 2 = 4" (mathematical truth)
• "the sky is blue" (empirical truth)
• "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet" (religious truth)

Mathematical truth is always true, given a set of axioms. Empirical truth is only true to the limits of our observations. Religious truth is an oxymoron.

The fundamental difference between a machine and an algorithm is what you have stated: a machine uses a set of facts, in our current discussion mathematical facts. As vux984 said, software is a description of facts. In theory, all algorithms could be run in your head. By all means patent a device to perform these operations -- patent a dozen different machines. Implement a Curta Calculator using bamboo, chrysanthemums, and birdsong, and another device which calculates digits of pi by applying thumbscrews to grad students. However, treating the underlying math as if it had a real existence is to misunderstand what math is. Devices are not algorithms; they do not depend on your choice of axioms. Logical statements or mathematical statements can be represented or implemented by things that exist in the real world, but in the words of Phillip K. Dick, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and mathematics fails this criterion.

It is a popular pasttime of capitalists to claim ownership of things which do not have a real existence. This is eminently rational, and I would be happy to remunerate them in any similarly non-existent coin.

I was curious. For all the complaining I've heard from Republicans about 'evil liberals who want to take our guns', I'd never encountered anyone who actually wanted to do that. It's possible that I need to get out more.

I could have emailed him directly I suppose, and I did just now, but you and I seem to disagree on what is an appropriate interview question. Others seemed to have covered the technical questions. I did ask another more topical question, but I think Bruce answered it directly in the comment thread. I apologize for any inconvenience, but note that it seems to have spawned quite a bit of discussion. I suppose I would have hoped for less attention on the subject, but it's too late now. Given the negative reactions from yourself, other commenters, and the slightly less than entirely polite response from Bruce, I may think twice the next time.

I did ask another question about Open Source, which Bruce answered immediately in the comment thread. I discovered that he was against the private ownership of firearms via his personal site, and like I said, I thought that his position was mythical. I am sure that he also has opinions about those other matters, but he doesn't advertise them. I apologize for any inconvenience.

An alternative would be to use Tree Style Tabs, and placing the tab bar on the side of the screen. I find it answers quite well, and I didn't notice the tab UI change. I have a habit of opening a bunch of links from e.g. a wikipedia page, browsing each for a while, perhaps opening deeper links, and then wanting to close the whole tree. If you think that might match your browsing habits, give TST a try.

I use firefox on an atom netbook with 2GB of RAM, with 20-200 tabs open at any given time. I occasionally debug javascript as part of my work activities, so I have a ton of web development plugins installed, plus a tab tree plugin, plus SQLite Manager, and then of course NoScript, Adblock, etc. I'm using Crunchbang Linux, and Iceweasel 30 from Debian backports.

If you have the time, you may want to try some debugging, because this is not quite the most limited x86 machine sold in anything that we might call recent history, but damn close to it. Performance has never been an issue. Good luck.

I don't know about stupid and incompetent, but you're entirely wrong as to the fundamentals of the 2008 financial crisis.

It's nice to make this about individual responsibility, but that's just not what happened. You probably heard the terms "credit default swap" and "mortgage derivatives" but didn't understand them. Essentially what was happening was major financial companies found that they could package up a bunch of low-rated mortgage-backed securities, hide the information about the individual loans, and turn a bunch of shitty loans into an AAA-rated security, and then trade the risk to someone else. Moody's and S&P were getting their cut from rating these things, and did not even have the information to be able to rate them properly. Then we have the credit default swaps, which were a little-understood and unregulated market, but essentially a way for companies to trade debt as if it were an asset, specifically all of the risk they were exposed to as part of these MBS deals. The concept of trading debt as an asset is not new, but it really only works when you have a good idea of how risky the debt is. There was a booming market[1] in these credit default swaps right up until the first wave of foreclosures hit and the MBS market started crumbling, and then whoever was left holding the bag got screwed.

Banks generally don't do stupid things, even when the government wants them to. They sure as shit don't advertise things that are going to lose money. There were a lot of people with a vested interest in pinning this on the individual consumer and the government, but the seeds were sown with the repeal of Glass-Steagal. The federal loan program ticked along quietly for over a decade, but the mortgage market exploded due to the derivatives market. Taking a shitty subprime mortgage and packing it into an AAA-rated security was like printing money. There was no governmental obligation to offer NINJA loans, for example, and yet Wikipedia has a lovely advertisement offering free money to essentially anyone with a pulse. The loans peaked in 2006; 2008 marked the first round of foreclosures.

Wikipedia has a good but lengthy article on the subprime mortgage crisis, and "The Big Short" is a good read that covers the origins and fallout of the crisis. You can also read the Financial Crisis Inquiriy Commission report. In point of fact, reading anything about the subject would be an improvement in your understanding; your specific theory has been destroyed in any number of sources. It's a complicated subject, and to be honest the exact details of a lot of these things escape me, but you have seized upon a simple answer that suits your preexisting beliefs. Start from the evidence and work backwards instead -- why did Bear Stearns collapse? It wasn't because they were issuing mortgages. This will save you from looking like an ignorant Wall Street stooge in the future.

[1] "The volume of CDS outstanding increased 100-fold from 1998 to 2008, with estimates of the debt covered by CDS contracts, as of November 2008, ranging from US$33 to $47 trillion"

It's perhaps unlikely at this point that we will ever develop anything which we will recognize as "true" AI. We may have to first develop a theory of what intelligence actually is, but until then the Turing test will have to do. Siri, Watson, and even Cleverbot are equal to the A.I. of the science fiction of yesteryear, but are considered mere "parlour tricks" today. AI research must be a depressing study in that respect, similar to commercially viable fusion power -- no matter how much progress is made, the ultimate goal is never less distant.

This post brought to you by a machine learning algorithm.

Wait, do we suddenly not trust buses now? I wouldn't mind late-night services, but having the same route availability 24/7 would be a pointless waste of money. It should be obvious that far fewer people travel at night.

If I had a boss, and he suggested that I work overtime hours, and that entailed transportation issues, I would insist on reimbursement for travel expenses. Then I would schedule a daily taxi pickup, and have the number of a couple other alternative services handy just in case. I'm not going to address the rest of your fearmongering except to say that while you may have an argument against specific situations, you fail to make a general case against public transportation.

The reason that many people own cars is twofold, first that we design cities to be primarily accessible by cars (at least during the age of cheap oil), and secondly the automotive industry destroyed alternative transportation. Given that we're burning millions of years' worth of oil annually, I would say that the age of the personal automobile is rapidly passing. Whatever problems public transportation has, we will have to solve.

So traditionally Jews used their father's name as a surname e.g. 'ben Moshe'. In the late 18th Century various governments, including the Austrian Empire, tried to integrate Jews more fully, both by granting them rights as citizens, and by forcing them to adopt some of the local customs, such as having a hereditary surname. Napoleon did the same thing. In Czarist Russia, the Jews were allowed to choose surnames. In most of the German states, well.

Zuckerberg ('sugar mountain') got off lucky. We also had Mandelbrot ('almond bread'), and various of the type pleasant word + natural feature, e.g. Goldbach ('gold brook') or Rosenblum. Those people who were unlucky, well...

Long story short, the type of compound surname he has is very strongly associated with Germanic Jewish ancestry. And yes, as far as that goes, he's Jewish. The linked article goes into more detail, and is pretty interesting, if you have a spare minute.