Anyway, they've gotten plenty of money from Russia and Venezuela, so it's kind of hard to give them a fair judgement.

You don't know, but unless you have ad-block you probably have some of their cookies in your browser.

AOL had a ton of cash (still gets something like $50 million from dialup) after people switched to broadband, so the turned into a kind of venture capital, and bought a bunch of companies. Now they own leading 'web properties,' like Huffington Post and Tech Crunch.

AOL is producing a lot of 'high quality' content and can monetize it, whereas Yahoo is lacking in content, but has plenty of users. That is the thinking behind the activist investors who want to join the two together.

Other than a few activist investors, no one in either company wants to join together, as far as I can tell. The CEO of AOL says, "We've already been through one really bad merger, we don't want to do it again."

And that is why I hope never to be CEO.

Good job.

So you are saying if the communist country had access to a free market and the banking system, they would do better?

This is like the big flamewar back from the days of VMS vs Unix.

As for me, I'm happy that we've moved beyond 8+3.

You are right, the predictions that matter are the ones that are published.

And in those, he is pathetically wrong. Anyone can draw a trend line that extrapolates from present. Not as many people can program a super-computer to predict the future.

So far no one has been able to predict the future climate accurately, including Mr Hansen.

My feminist friends say she can do the job just as good as any man!

It doesn't even need to be a phone. If all you need is data inside the clean room, a PC or laptop will do as well.

I'm not sure what a data dependent change is.

Indeed, it's easy to think of situations where the opposite is true, where the noise is simpler in the 'effect' than in the 'cause,' because there is some attenuation factor in between that reduces the noise. That's more or less what a damper or shock absorber is designed to do. And a low pass filter in audio does the same thing.

Now you might say, "obviously a low-pass filter is in the way, and that's causing the difference" but that gets back to your point, where it's easy to figure out when you already know the system, but if you don't, then it's not so easy.

In other words, not always.

Well, I'm in favor of getting rid of the embargo, but it doesn't make much sense to call Cuba more successful than California.

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

Most often, they modify it and make it worse. j/k (not really)