I don't suppose anyone will even read this reply, but surely yours is an argument of despair? Moreover, isn't it slightly circular? And it certainly doesn't speak well for the health of democracy. If no party other than the two giants has any chance of being elected, what happens to the citizens' power to elect a government that will carry out their wishes?

Speaking as an ignorant and unimportant foreigner, I wonder why - in view of the previous two posts - more of you Americans don't vote for parties other than Republican or Democrat. That way you might get a government that rules in your interest, as citizens.

Just saying.

Exactly. "No plutonium was actually lost, and the IAEA was quick to confirm that its own safeguards, which are there to ensure that no nuclear material is diverted, were applied at all times".

More worrying is the admission that "[a]s it turned out, the Genkai plant’s internal accounting system could not properly deal with such a situation, and the material ended up in the wrong column on a spreadsheet".

Spreadsheets are probably not appropriate for such critical applications. Their deceptive simplicity and ease of use makes it far too easy to enter data wrongly, or fail to understand the hidden logic behind an apparently straightforward array of numbers. See, for example, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2.... There are plenty of other detailed indictments of spreadsheet errors (and how easy it is to make them).

"Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour".
- Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790))

The IRS and corporations have this in common: they want everything to be measured in terms of money, and have no interest in anything that can't be measured in money. Consequently, they mistrust and dislike anything that is exchanged freely: they see it as theft from them, as they are entitled to a cut of every transaction.

Let's barter informally as much as we can, just to spite the bastards.

"Never trust an economist, until you've checked his math".

True indeed. If you can understand his math, of course - otherwise you have to get someone else (whom you trust for good reasons) to do it for you. IMHO there ought to be a profession that entails nothing but checking the correctness of other people's math AND the correctness of their mathematical modelling.

Therein lies the even greater problem with economics. The math may even be entirely correct - but how can we tell if it corresponds 1-for-1 to any phenomena in the real world? ("Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true". - Bertrand Russell). Worse still, an economist may have modelled some aspect of reality in a reasonably accurate way, and got the math right - but the piece of the real world he modelled wasn't big enough to tell us anything meaningful, useful, or complete.

Towards the end of his long and phenomenally productive life, Sir Isaac Newton confessed that, "...to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me". It takes a very great man to say something so modest. Ironically, his words apply in far greater measure to modern economists - none of whom would ever dream of making such an admission.

There's theory, and there is practice. In practice everyone takes their lead from the President. After all, who's going to betray the nation by disobeying the Commander in Chief in a time of war? (And we know it's a time of war because the President tells us so).

It's convenient for the President to be able to blame things he just doesn't want to do on a recalcitrant Congress. I didn't say that Congress always agrees with the President - I said it obeys him. Even if he tells it to block measures he wants the voters to think he favours. That way he can get the PR benefit of trying to do the right thing without the inconvenience of actually doing it.

As for the Supreme Court, it has often demonstrated that law, morality, tradition, and the Constitution mean nothing to it in comparison with the President's wishes.

Yes, I do know how your precious Constitution works on paper. And that's exactly where it stays - on paper.

You just nailed one of the primary mechanisms by which the executive branch controls the judicial branch. If a prosecutor doesn't bring charges, the whole judicial system is rendered irrelevant.

"Because there are three branches".

All of which take their orders from the President. Not necessarily in a blatant, direct, overt way - usually just by doing what they know the President would like. That's how real power works and, trust me, there is only ONE branch that has any of that.

Incidentally, the same applies to the mainstream media.

"If those aren't students, then who the fuck are they?"

People who go to college for the piece of paper - as the parent said. That is hardly a description of a student, who is a person who goes to college for an education.

Yup. This guy has an auto-immune disorder. Pattern baldness is caused by premature death of hair follicles. Treating that would require a way to bring those cells back from the dead or some really nifty tricks with stem cells to replace them.

Not that that's going to stop a deluge of clickbait crap about this over the next few weeks, I'm sure.

We spent an inordinate amount of time and effort explaining (often to people with considerable software experience) why "client" and "server" were the wrong way round.

Likewise: VAX/VMS over DECnet. I still remember vividly the sudden paradigm shift I experienced at the time: one day I was used to "green screen" alphanumeric terminals, the next I suddenly understood the immense power and flexibility of a large bitmapped colour monitor. Previously I had thought that such workstations were only for graphic designers, people using CAD/CAM packages, or poncey pretentious managers who just wanted to have the latest hardware. After the first couple of hours on a training course, I grasped how useful it was to have several terminal windows open simultaneously - optionally on different computers.

As an afterthought, I might point out that no PC I have used since 1985 has offered any fundamental improvement over the VAXstation I had then. Processor frequency, RAM, and hard drive capacity have all increased vastly; but response time and basic capability have hardly improved.

This is so damn stupid. If somebody can unwillingly violate your patent then that means your patent is bullshit pretty much by definition. Well, to a reasonable person anyway, the legal system apparently has other ideas.

to understand how a machine could be made to pass the Turing test (or the woman test) honestly and thoroughly. To do so, it would have to understand arbitrary human statements and questions: not just "why is the sky blue?" (relatively easy) but "why doesn't my wife understand me?" and "is the real rational, as Hegel posited, and if so (or not) why (not)?" Note that the machine could reasonably pretend to know nothing about Hegel, but it would have to react like a normal human being. No obfuscation such as pretending to be foreign, a child, thoroughly ignorant, or befuddled by drugs should be accepted.

Going a little further, it would have to cope with (very) simple jokes such as "I asked my dog which team would win the World Cup"/"What did he say?"/"Nothing. HE'S A DOG".