Actually they data is in Europe the judge is trying to say since they have access to it from the US they need to turn it over. The data is under the control of a division incorporated in Europe.

If the parent company, located in the US, can just access the data any time they want and (presumably) do whatever the heck they want with it, then it's a bit of a stretch to say that the data is "under the control" of anyone else under anyone else's laws.

Basically, if a multinational corporation doesn't structure itself such that it actually respects borders and separate jurisdictions in its day-to-day operations, I see no reason why stuff like this shouldn't happen.

It'd be a whole other story if there were internal firewalls. You know, something like "well, according to Corporate Directive 1444.18.c, the only way we can transfer this account data to the US is either at the request of the user or under an EU court order; yeah, too bad, take it up with Legal".

But what would be the point? As far as I can tell, USPTO policy is ultimately set by campaign contributors.

Right. NASA also still has way too many "centers". Ames (except for the big wind tunnel) and Glenn (except for the test facilities at Sandusky) ought to go.

As someone who's worked on 30-year-old acoustic ray tracing software models, the fact that they're attempting to get a patent make me want to puke.

Fortunately, we can count on the vigilant patriots at the USPTO to view the patent with skepticism, and bring a combination of deep domain knowledge and Rottweiler-like tenacity to look for prior art.

Quake audio consists mostly of footsteps and bangs. This might be fun for, say, GTA IV/V, where the NPCs have conversations to which you can listen if you're close enough.

OK, found it. The mention of razor stubble is there. The "[decrying] the evils of razor stubble and testosterone as more evidence of the evil that is man" is completely absent.

Agreed. The U.S. federal government is so incredibly goofed up right now that the practical impact of this appointment will be approximately nil.

Google isn't detecting potholes? Back in 1985, we had that on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The LIDAR on top of the vehicle was generating a ground profile. This was for off-road driving, where that's essential. I'd assumed Google was doing that; they have a Velodyne laser scanner that provides enough information.

In traffic, sometimes you can't see a pothole because it's obscured by a vehicle ahead, but if the vehicle ahead doesn't change speed, direction, or attitude, it's probably safe to proceed over the ground it just covered. On high speed roads, you can't see distant potholes clearly because the angle is unfavorable, but if the road ahead looks like the near road, and the near road profiles OK with the LIDAR, the far road is probably good. That's what the Stanford team used to out-drive their LIDAR range. (We didn't do that and were limited to 17MPH).

Fixed road components should be handleable. People, bicycles, and animals are tough.

It's nice to have this analysis. But am I the only wondering to what other use they could have put those DNA Points???

Oh thank goodness! I assume then that you can point me at something to read which answers my question?

This may come across as a troll, but I promise it's not. I'm looking for a genuine discussion on something.

From the small amount of reading I've done, it seems that the Koran is pretty clear: Islam requires non-Muslims to convert or pay tax or be killed:

http://infidelsarecool.com/200...

http://www.vexen.co.uk/religio...

So it seems to me like all fully observant Muslims are required to engage in, or at least approve of, this behavior.

If that's true, then:

(1) Why do so many Muslims renounce such violence? Is it that they can't stomach what appears to be this straight-forward interpretation of the Koran?

(2) If there is some alternative, justifiable interpretation of the Koran, why aren't governments fighting that propaganda war? Does the fact that they're not doing so indicate that no such justifiable interpretation exist?

This is my news printer. Each morning I turn it on, and it prints a paper tape with the Reuters news summaries.

This is 1926 technology. The machine talks to a standard serial port at 45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.

Cards, vibrators, air conditioners, vibrators, antibiotics, vibrators, dishwashers, vibrators, ...

This is fascinating. It's not the classic "people don't have social lives in the real world because they are on line too much" argument. The authors argue that following people who are "different" from you is bad for you. They write:

"Compared to face-to-face interactions, online networks allow users to silently observe the opinions and behaviors of an immensely wider share of their fellow citizens. The psychological literature has shown that most people tend to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are âoenormalâ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias leads to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, or a 'false consensus' (Gamba, 2013)."

"The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt afterwards; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. The effects found by the authors were not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression, thus suggesting the existence of a direct link between SNSs' use and subjective well-being."

This is a new result, and needs confirmation. Are homogeneous societies happier ones? Should that be replicated on line? Should efforts be made in Facebook to keep people from having "different" friends?

That's not actually what happened, or what he claimed.

No, that is pretty much exactly what happened, unless you caught the one video where he made a relevant point rather than the dozen or so that I saw where he missed the point completely.

Part of the problem here, and it's also evident in the comment thread here, is that a lot of science-minded geeks don't understand the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.

You can understand an atom pretty much perfectly. You can understand a star at the level at which you can observe it, because you can treat it statistically. You can't really understand a war in the same way. There are so many aspect and so many levels that you can't really capture the whole thing at the level at which you can observe it.

The things that the humanities study are so inherently complex (because they deal with the human experience) that there is never going to be an exact theory which applies all the time. Instead, you come up with models (sometimes called "narratives") which try to capture generally what's going on at one level. If a historian is studying a war, they might focus on the general trends and forces in one theatre, and in doing so gloss over details which may contrast with that. Or they might focus on what happened in one town, and in doing so simplify some of the wider context.

That is what Anita Sarkeesian is doing with the video game landscape. In doing so, of course she is going to gloss over details, because there is no other way to understand the landscape as a whole. Chipping away at a few points doesn't invalidate the argument. Just because North America had a cold winter doesn't mean that the global trend is towards warming. Just because killing civilians is penalised in one particular game doesn't mean that there isn't a general theme of abused women being used as decoration in video games.

Does that actually describe him, or is that your own delusion?

It's an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's only a slight exaggeration. What actually describes him is that he is a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And yes, I've seen way too many Thunderf00t videos for my own good.

I don't know if you've ever been in an undergraduate-level critical thinking class, but the field is very, very different from what most people think. You know how you go into topology thinking it's going to be all Klein bottles and toruses, and what you actually find is weeks of open and closed sets and metric spaces? Well, critical thinking mostly isn't about logical fallacies. It's mostly about how to understand an argument. It's all about the Principle of Charity, diagramming arguments, and so on.