We should be paying more for water! And food! And especially especially gasoline! It's ABSURD that gas is subsidized, although I understand that stable prices are important.

Ironically, Seattle is big in this outlaw-being-poor trend precisely because so many people in the PNW are nice and tolerant to poor people!
Seattle is facing this argument because it's a good place to find large vocal groups on both sides of the issue. Really, the leaders on the forefront of this trend are smaller cities with wealthy white populations e.g. Ft. Lauderdale, where it's now illegal to share food on the sidewalk, it's basically against the law to not sleep under a roof there. http://homelesshatelaws.blogsp...

I want to be the founder of Moriah.

This is obviously not true.

For chipping away at this pernicious BS. Thanks to everyone who yet again steps up to slowly and patiently demonstrate that, yes, AGW is real, yes, vaccines are fine.

It has been clear skies for over a week. At this time of year, this is, I think, totally without precedent. I've only been here for 5 years but it feels completely unnatural. Even when I first moved here it rained basically without ceasing from November until almost June. There's been comparatively almost no rain this winter. The climate is fucked!

and liked the new star trek movies

Laughed the whole time. Best satire of American Jingoism and Hollywood ridiculousness in years and years. I love that movie.

We can do a tremendous variety of things with our hands. Witness my typing for an example of the incredibly sophisticated and dextrous manipulation of my physical environment that I can effect with training and practice (especially considering how crappy the keyboard on my laptop is). I think that having a large terminal bundle of neurons is great, but you have to be able to do a lot of different things with it in order to learn to be a good learner.

One thing I have spent some time pondering: creatures that have stepped up to higher cognitive plateaus live in more 3-dimensional environments. For instance, horses and cows basically live on surfaces that we can hike, whereas our ancestors lived in forest canopies. Dolphins live in several different levels of aquatic environments. Birds get full overhead space, but they are hampered by weight considerations.

FUCK YOU!

I am not much of a programmer (I'm learning math), but if they put code in GPG to give themselves keys, and nobody else in the world would fix it, I'd learn C and do it myself.
1000X FUCK OFF

This is a pretty positive thread, but I just want to speak on this one real quick. My brother is autistic, like he talks, graduated high school, but is a ward of the state and kind-of far from functional. At school I've heard CS students saying stuff like "No I wouldn't build a red-brick calculator in Minecraft, I'm not autistic." This kind of talk makes me really upset. I'm not even exactly sure why, but I don't like it. I guess, I watched pretty closely as my brother struggled and struggled through life, to still end up in a very marginalized position. I think this had as much to do with poverty and my parent's religious practices as his condition. But I got really upset about this the other day, and I want to encourage you all to be really nice, and refrain from making fun of people with behavioral difficulties. I'm not pointing my finger at anyone specifically as much as just feeling that this is somewht of a problem in the tech community, and we can be nicer. This might be somewhat off-topic.

I used to have thoughts like this, but it's not a good idea to build malicious intent into a system. If the phone pushed out a message about it's GPS location before it died, it might be handy. There would be some serious privacy concerns about such a mechanism.

Actually Haskell would make this otherwise almost impossible plan easy with the "Either a or b" datatype! Thanks functional programming for making AI easy!

This is all very northern-hemisphere-centric reasoning. Some day South Africa will be running the show, and you can bet that the moon will revolve clockwise.

The human race would probably be better off if a lot fewer people stared at computers all day. But CS would be better off with more females, if for no other reason than equal opportunity (although I think there are other reasons, it's a touchy subject). Overall, we could use a lot fewer people doing a better job of using computers to accomplish things.