The problem with that is you'll end up in a situation where people unwilling to participate in the actual killing of someone will get excluded from the juries. Worse, you may end up with juries with people actually looking forward to getting to pull the trigger and get that head shot. Worse yet, because of this skew in jury composition, you'll probably get more convictions, even when the defendant didn't commit the crime.

Can you recommend some ways to do this?

Except there's a solid causal mechanism in play here. Whales are known to have particularly sensitive sound-receiving organs that also also known to be sensitive to extremely loud sounds like explosions and sonar. And it just so happens that someone was using a highly focused sonar in the time and space these whales turned up dead.

By your logic, a guy going into an auditorium and shooting a bunch of bullets isn't necessarily the cause of all the people found dead there with bullet-holes in them. There's just not a cause and effect relationship... sure, it's a plausible explanation, but that's far from being 'cause and effect'.

Even if democracies are somewhat common for many countries, if people in a country overthrow a dictatorship and establish a democracy, is it not a revolution?

I'm not sure that simply because some other group has a thing that another group getting something like that can't still be revolutionary.

For the military logistics planners, this will certainly dramatically change how they do their work and what they're capable of doing.

One of the coolest examples of machine learning was the TD-Gammon program done by Tesauro at IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon). What makes it remarkable is that while Tesauro wasn't a particularly good Backgammon player, he managed to develop this program that "learned" how to be a great Backgammon player - in fact, it learned strategies that no human players had ever tried before, "TD-Gammon's exclusive training through self-play (rather than tutelage) enabled it to explore strategies that humans previously hadn't considered or had ruled out erroneously. Its success with unorthodox strategies had a significant impact on the backgammon community." So here we have an example of a program exceeding the capabilities of not only its programmer, but most "expert" players as well.

"Good composition" for the most part can be described by a set of rules that could be explicitly programmed, or even better, that a computer could most certainly "learn". It wouldn't take much from there to put the robot in a location with its own camera and let it find its own point of view and composition to paint from.

At that point, would you allow for the robot to be called the artist? Especially if it's able to learn as it goes and "improve"?

When dealing with most visual art, you're restricted to viewing the end product. If I go to the Louvre or the MOMA, I can look at the finished products but cannot see the process by which they were created. These paintings, for the most part, are "art", based solely on their end-state; and the fact that they are in a museum of art.

So what happens when you have a painting made by a machine put up in a gallery next to a painting done by a human being, and you can't tell which is which? A "Turing Test" of sorts. What if you hook the viewers up to an FMRI and see that both paintings generate an equivalent emotional response in the viewer?

If the machine-made painting is "not art" because it was made by a machine, what does that mean for human-made painting? Is it no longer art because it was indistinguishable from something that we've determined is non-art?

At that point, what is the definition of "art"? And the criteria for determining what is and is not art?

Do you remember that guy who had paint forced up his rectum as an enema, and then he stood over a canvas as is sprayed back out? This was considered art (by the artistic community). If that meets the standard for "art" then I'm willing to give a robot (and its creators and programmers) the benefit of the doubt.

I have an Acer AO756, which has nearly identical specs as the C7, except it came with Windows 7 and not Chrome (and was therefore more expensive). However it was easy to just install whatever Linux on it I want.

Does the C7 not allow you to do that? Just wipe the drive (or install a different one) and put whatever you want?

The statement I heard on the news was that they did not allow government have backdoor access to their servers.

But that doesn't say anything about the traffic heading to and from those servers. Think about the name "PRISM" and how it refracts a single ray of light into several. If the network traffic coming into their servers were "refracted" to multiple destinations (say, the originally intended server as well as a government collection site), then technically, the government is not using a backdoor to access the server.

O'Reilley publishing offers $4.95 "ebook upgrade" for any of their physical books you have. And those ebooks are offered in a variety of non-DRM formats.

They probably don't have a lot of the books you read, but it's good to see at least one publisher with a reasonable model.

So we need a TSA to monitor the TSA?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I've tried Fedora a few times but always end up back with either Ubuntu or Mint.

Those things you mention are frustrating but what stopped me cold the last time was the installer. I've been installing Linux off and on for 15 years and even I was left wondering "what the heck is going on here?". I hope they fix that. I can't take the distro seriously when an advanced user can't even feel safe/certain about the install process.

The problem I've seen is analogous to building skyscrapers and garden sheds. Some projects, like skyscrapers, have be complely designed in advance and built to be a skyscraper. You don't build a 2-story building then decide it works pretty well and then add another floor, and so on, until you have a skyscraper.

At the other end, you want a shed to protect your tools from the weather. While you could design a shed and the process to build it the way you would a skyscraper, but that's a lot of expense and it's going to take a long time. Instead, if you wanted, you could throw up some supports and put up a roof. This gazebo works well and protects your stuff from the rain. It's pretty easy to add walls, and so on.

Agile is useful for certain kinds of projects and the "classic" way is good for other kinds of projects. The real problem is that people try to use the same methodology for every project.

The last times I tried using Google Drive, if you downloaded more than one file, it would make a zip file with the files where the dates were all reset to Jan-1-1980. Does it still do that?

That's a deal-killer to me and makes the service unusable. DropBox doesn't do that - so I know it's not technically impossible to so something so difficult as preserve a file's modify-time.

If they were banned hopefully I could get a prescription for the soap.

You could probably still get something like a chlorhexidine - it's antiseptic and antibiotic. One brand name is hibiclens. Vets use it a lot with animals with wounds and someone once told me it was also used as a surgical hand scrub.

College is valuable (potentially) in only 3 ways

There's a 4th... that you actually do learn useful skills. I've taken classes in computer modeling & simulation, operations research, data mining, and machine learning. I use quite a bit of this all the time at work and I find it's been helpful to have been given a solid foundation in the subjects - this makes it much easier to explore and learn more on my own.

But, I've been taking these classes for fun and out of interest - I already have a masters degree, so the possibility of an additional degree doesn't help me much.