"people would just memorize the two letter words."

And we'd be okay with that - you memorize the definitions and use them in a sentence then they are part of your vocabulary. But there's a lot more to that than just remembering which 2 letter combinations scrabble considers to be "words".

It's turtles all the way down.

On the Government is stupid enough to base your rates on "profit" which can be gamed to be zero or less.

No, this is revenue. The top line number. And it's a lot harder to game.

Ambient noise is (almost) always present. Even a "silent" room, as such for the experiment, was subject to pencil noises, breathing, HVAC air, mechanical vibrations, (and clocks, computer fans, fluor. ballast hum, etc. as appropriate).

Now ambient as in "people talking in a coffee house" is a whole different matter.

The vote was 4:1 in favor of the rule. He was not required to continue to play, and could have resigned in protest. Not that it actually mattered much - he was vying for last anyway - but we needed to set some ground rules for future games.

Sometimes rule changes are necessary for balance. Previously, this group may or may not have also altered the CAH rules to state that blank cards may not be played as "Two midgets shitting in a bucket."* I say may have because I'm pretty certain it was discussed, but it was too late and I was too drunk to really recall whether the proposal was made official.

*not because it was offensive, but because it was too like to get chosen as the winning combination. And it had been "played" four times that night already.

Defined on the spot. If you don't know what the word means, or how to use it properly, it doesn't count. It means you have to play what you know, not just a memorized list.

I'll just leave this here:

http://www.studentpulse.com/ar...

Yeah, we've got a programmer in our group that we played with one night. After his second questionable 2 letter word we added a rule (democratically voted on and adopted) that you must be able to define your word and use it properly in a sentence if anyone asks.

If you own an american muscle car, the only way you'll know your engine is powerful enough for your manly image is if they add engine sounds to the cabin. They *have* to have a link to the ECS of they won't know how much manliness to tell you you're creating with your throttle.

"But this buffer will cause semi-auto pistols to stove-pipe when the action doesn't cycle correctly."

(1) if you're recycle time is long enough, recovery from the force of recoil is not an issue - only rotational pitch and yaw compensation for the moment due to non-coicindent CGs during firing.

(2) If you're developing a 9 DOF reaction system to account for rapid firing, you can develop an alternative cycling mechanism. It's just another milestone in the project.

A dedicated, full time, paid set of software (and, presumably) hardware professionals with tens (or hundreds) of millions in revenue/funding with no fear of prosecution have managed to create effective software which uses exactly the same features that are available to the OS and app developers to collect data and phone home on the sly, while avoiding detection by people who are - mostly - entirely ignorant of the underlying system.

This is funded by the same people who can press a button and put a thousand pounds of high explosives, literally, through the front door of a building a thousand miles away in under 120 minutes, or 500lbs from 300 miles away in under 10 minutes.

It would be a story if they couldn't. (actually, it wouldn't - we'd call them typical incompetent government contractors).

That's not too hard, actually, from an engineering perspective. It adds expense and complexity, certainly, but it's just a design parameter. Alter the mount to react with uniform stiffness centered around and aligned with the barrel and bolt reaction mass center and you'll reduce your problem to a simple 2DOF force couple system.

I would guess that state of the art drone weapon systems are every bit as accurate as the most accomplished human snipers.

Just because the PR people say words does not make them the most accurate depiction of events occurring. More than likely they are determining if the act meets the tests required by law and if there is reasonable likelihood that a criminal case can be successfully prosecuted. Court cases are expensive - both in money and resources; having the prosecution review a case for potential applicability is SOP.

You know, they should implement some kind of a search engine on their HR database so that they can look up past interviewees to prevent multiple recruitment gaffs like this. Now, I know that not everyone can write a custom search engine in house, but I hear that both Microsoft and Yahoo have up-and-coming search engine technology they might be able to license and implement that would let them mine their existing data.

Again, it's not the phone that's the problem, it's the person. Now it does make espionage easier - no doubt - but there are many, many other less obtrusive (to use) devices for that purpose.

Now the sibling post about malware on the phone which surreptitiously records audio (and/or video...though if you're not supposed to have it, it's doubtful you'll take it out in a secure area) could have implications. But, again, you're looking for a needle in a haystack if you hoping that some distributed malware will happen to active for someone with clearance, and you'll be hard pressed to automatically sift through millions of hours of muffled conversation a day to find that one bit of monetizable information and put it into a context which can actually be sold.