A majority of Republicans voted for it as well. The real question is who added this particular provision, and are they still in office? I'm not sure how to dig up that crucial bit of info.

FYI, they've cancelled the policy and are encouraging people targeted by it to contact them for a refund.

They cancelled this policy almost immediately after it was brought to light.

Absolute nonsense. How many wounded veterans are we paying for thanks to Bush? Shall Obama just throw them out on the streets? Even the healthy veterans will cost us a fortune for the next half-century or so. And how much money have we given away under Bush's tax cuts and Medicare Part D? Obama had to fight like hell for years to get rid of even a portion of the the tax cuts.

Obama's not a dictator. He can't just "change a massive deficit to a surplus in a single year just by adjusting the numbers in [the] budget." Blaming him for the Bush deficit is dishonest in the extreme.

The patent is probably a tad more specific than "fingerprint scanner". It's easy to imagine all sorts of novel developments in fingerprint scanning technology that would absolutely deserve to be patentable. Not saying that's the case here. I'm not familiar with the case, and don't particularly care. But I see this on Slashdot all the time -- people simplifying a patent down to a single phrase, and then declaring it to be obvious.

Fuck off. That font is hideous and unreadable, and I shouldn't need to go digging in any settings to fix the mess you created.

You don't even seem to understand why a fixed-width font would be useful. It "mucks with your text the least"? You realize that you're writing in paragraphs, right? And that not everyone in the world is going to have their browser window at the same width?

You're just trying to be a special snowflake and show everyone how smart and techy you are.

When the mine gets low, people will shift their investments back to basic research, and start looking for new mines.

That's already happening. The transistor was game changing, and drove several decades of the most rapid advancement in human history. Now that we're getting near the end of what silicon can do, people are performing serious research in things like graphene.

I happen to own a book that contains all the secrets of the universe. Everything you could ever want to know is within its covers. The only catch is that you can't read it. No one can, and no one ever will. Is my book worth anything?

Information in and of itself is worthless. Knowledge that's never put to use is worthless. That doesn't mean basic research is worthless -- we just don't know the applications yet. But the eventual applications are what ultimately brings value. Understanding for understanding's sake is just an amusement. If that's all you want, you may as well study some high school witchcraft book. If you never try to put it to use, what's the difference?

No, I don't think the US should have 10x the standard of living of a small European country. Why would you expect such a thing? We don't have 10x the resources per capita, and even if we did, there's the question of diminishing returns. Additionally, we're still people, with all the murder and rape and greed that entails. You have these absurdly high expectations, and then get all upset when we can't live up to them.

For what its worth, I think you and I are very alike in our politics. I agree with pretty much all your points, just not the conclusion you draw from them. For all its faults, America is still pretty great. I'm certainly glad I was born here, and all of the immigrants I know are extremely thankful to have been able to come here. It could be better, and we should strive to make it better, but acting like its some horrible place doesn't help. It only leads to people giving up.

Has it occurred to you that maybe you just had unrealistic expectations?

America was and is great. How can you judge a country's greatness, if not by the quality of life it affords to its people? And the average person born in the US has a significantly higher quality of life than at least 80% of the world's population.

The US could certainly be a lot better, but to say it isn't and never was great smacks of knee-jerk cynicism masquerading as wisdom.

Science funding as a percentage of GDP has actually been remarkably consistent at around 2.5% going back several decades. Note that that is total funding. The split between industry and public funding used to be fairly even, but in the last 20 years the balance has shifted sharply towards industry. And industry, of course, prefers to spend on things that will be profitable in the next few years. So we see great advancements in consumer electronics, medicine, etc., but not so much in basic understanding of the universe.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Science is worthless if we don't use it in practical applications. But if we're looking for reasons why less basic research is getting done, this could play a role.

Did it?

The executive branch has the authority to delay implementation of laws in order to make those laws work better. This has been done THOUSANDS of times in the past, and has been upheld by the courts whenever challenged. It is absolutely a routine part of how the American government works.

Republicans are strategically howling about this, just like they did when he appointed "czars" to manage certain departments (a practice started by Nixon). It's just a tactic. A trick, to make the uneducated masses think Obama is doing something bad. You fell for it, because you're gullible.

How would the opponent overguess you? You can delay your strategy switch for as little or as much time as you like, since their best strategy only breaks even.

If they don't know what you're doing, you could rack up more wins by exploiting flaws in their strategy, and rack up even more wins when they "wise up" and try to counter you. I guess the difference between our answers is that I'm treating this as an actual game against another person, whereas you're looking for more a game theoretical optimum.

Now, if your opponent does have perfect knowledge of your strategy, then randomly alternating between the strategies would be the best approach, which is effectively the same as your 1/3 rock, 2/3 paper idea. By the way, I ran some sims in matlab just now, and I'm getting the optimum to be bang on 1/3-2/3, so the math might not be so interesting after all :-(

There are only two degrees of freedom: the probability that we pick paper (assume we pick rock the rest of the time -- picking scissors should never make sense); and the probability that our opponent picks scissors when they have the choice. I'm assuming that our opponent never intentionally chooses rock. That seems fair since our plan involves throwing paper more often than not.

Making a meshgrid of those two probabilities in 1% increments, running 100k games at each point, and then taking the minimum along the axis of our opponent's choice (i.e. assuming they always pick the best strategy), I find a peak at 68% with us having a 16% advantage, which is about 1-in-6. So it looks like your initial guess in the other post was correct.