Maybe this has something to do with it:

The American Association for Justice, formerly and more accurately known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, gave 96 percent of all its contributions so far this year to Democrats. A fluke? They gave Democrats 96 percent in 2012, 97 percent in 2010, and 95 percent in 2008. The Washington Examiner’s 2011 investigative reporting showed that, of political contributions given in 2010 by the employees and partners at the top 110 plaintiff’s firms in the United States, 97 percent went to Democrats.

Democrats’ reliance on this legal gravy train was highlighted two years ago when Sherry Sylvester of Texans for Lawsuit Reform wrote an article claiming that 80 percent of all contributions to the state Democratic Party over the previous decade came from trial lawyers. The bean counters at Politifact weighed in to declare that she was mostly right, but that the real fraction was closer to 75 percent. Read that again: Three-quarters of the Texas Democratic Party’s cash came from trial lawyers.

It is because he has not seen it in the news yet.

The IRS employees responsisble for the "lost" emails and Tea Party persecution are praying to heaven that Hillary Clinton wins in 2016. If a Republican takes office there will be an independent council, grand jury indictment, a trial, likely conviction and jail time. Also Republican political appointess to the IRS who would make damn sure that the IRS stopped stonewalling and that every shred of evidence would be turned over to congress.

If Hillary wins and the culprits recieve no punishment that would be license for the IRS to engage in open and rampant corruption. Once the IRS knows that it can engage in criminally corrupt conduct without reprecussions then the floodgates will be wide open to unrestrained corruption, discrimiation and repression in the IRS and any othe federal agency. I though those Republicans crazys stockpiling ammunition and AR-15s, screaming "The gooberment's gonna get us" were, well, crazy. And I still do. It's just that reality is changing to conform to their delusions.

"But the Republicans will be doing it for partisan motives!" scream the Democrats. Why should I give a shit about that, so long as justice is served?

The sounds similar to the Napoleon Dynamite Problem, the problem encountered in the Netflix Prize challenge of predicting user ratings for some particular films. For most films knowledge of an individuals preferences for some films were good predictors for their preferences of other films. Yet preferences for some particular films were hard to predict, notably the eponymous Napoleon Dynamite.

Neural network identification and automated prediction of individual film ratings are both classification tasks. Example sets for both of these problems contain particular difficult-to-classify examples. So perhaps this phenomena of "adversarial examples" described in the Szegedy et. al. article is more generally a property of datasets and classification, not an artifact of implementing classification using neural networks.

quoth ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein

Note that the guy in charge of all the nuclear missiles in the United States invokes a security-though-obscurity argument to justify obsolete systems.

So how could the IRS fund their Microsoft Custom Support? By seizing tax refunds.

Quoth Wales:

'Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"

It is noteworthy that Wales is not arguing for excluding pseudoscience from Wikipedia on the basis of Wikipedia's own guidelines. According to Wikipedia itself, status as pseudoscience is not a criterion for exclusion from Wikipedia. Rather,the criterion for acceptance is NPOV. Wikipedia's guidelines permit dishonest, fictitious and untruthful content so long as it is NPOV.

Because the rules of Wikipedia would allow the inclusion pseudoscience this is a "gotcha" for Wales, revealing a fundamental limit in Wikipedia: With NPOV, the contents of Wikipedia can never be more veridical than is the social consensus. A purportedly objective guideline which immediately reduces to subjective value judgments, NPOV is a ruse; What constitutes "Significant views," or "reliable sources on a topic" is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Wales would have it in this case, whatever he says they are.

Wikipedia was an unexpected success because the popular expectation, a priori, was that if you just let anyone edit an encyclopedia then predominantly non-experts would contribute falsehoods. A posteriori, after Wikipedia had actually worked, the reasoning about why it had was that it was unexpectedly accurate because, well, experts are really not so good at getting stuff right anyway, and maybe spontaneous social organization really does work better than structured regulation and those dead Austrian economists and their crazy Libertarian fan club might actually have been right about something.

Though perhaps the secret to Wikipedia's success is not really that open encyclopedias are unexpectedly accurate, but rather that accuracy is not, as had been assumed, paramount. Rather, it is the appearance of accuracy which is essential for success. NPOV is a codification of a strategy for creating the popular appearance of accuracy without achieving genuine accuracy. Wikipedia is winning the encyclopedia contest by gaming the system. It matched the same flawed criterion function for accuracy as used by its customers, the test of asking: "is this what respectable people believe?" So now Wales has the problem that, according to the very rules of Wikipedia which have been the recipe for its success, it must permit pseudoscientific content which is popularly believed. This explains why Wales can shoot that down only outside of Wikipedia's own guidelines.

For every assassination bounty hosted they should also host a corresponding anti-assassination bounty. The assassin would be paid the net pro-assassination value, that is, the difference between the two bounties, and the bounty hosting site would keep the remainder. For opposing interests of equal magnitude in a bidding war this would be hugely profitable for the bounty hosting site and also result in nobody actually getting assassinated. It would also be more equitable because it represents the opinions of both pro-assassination and anti-assassination sides, not just the pro-assassination side.

Though seriously, the entire subject is revolting. Almost every American, love Obama or hate Obama, love Bush or hate Bush, agrees that they do not want their President to be assassinated. Despite disagreements in American politics, there are essential fundamental core values which unite us all, and that we do not assassinate our leaders is one of them.

. . .and from the MakerPlane website:
"MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as...3D printers."

According to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the United States and Iceland are, respectively, the 10th and 23rd freest countries.

The top 10 positions are:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Australia
4.New Zealand
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Chile
8. Mauritius
9. Denmark
10. United States.

In addition to current rankings the index also reports trends. For example, economic freedom in the United States has declined since 2009, according to the graph on this page. In comparison, freedom in Chile is high and continues to climb, which makes it a popular destination for American expatriates such as "Simon Black" over at his Sovereign Man website.

The term for this is "shoot, shovel and shut up."

It could be reasonably argued that government officials hava a legitimate need for both publicly-facing published email addresses and private, unpublished email addresses for inter-governmental communication. Presumably the former would be handled by their staffs for public communication and the latter used for professional communications between government officials.

If that were the issue, there would be no scandal here, merely a difference of opinion between what is good practice. What makes this a scandal is not that the email addresses themselves were secret, but that 1). The practice of maintaining secret email accounts was itself secret 2.) With one single exception the agencies exempted the contents of the secret email accounts from FOI searches. 3) In violation of its own policy agencies sought to charge the AP fee, and quite a hight one.

So this looks like a widespread attempt by government officials to avoid transparency and accountability, not a pragmatic attempt to manage their inboxes efficiently.

Crowdsourcing did not fail because what occurred was not crowdsourcing.

There is a distinction between, on the one hand, the emergent behavior which spontaneously arises from ungoverned social interaction and, on the other hand, the management practice of dividing and framing a problem such that it can be solved by large, loosely-affiliated groups of anonymous individuals working in parallel. The latter is crowdsourcing. The former, in the case of attempts to identify Boston Marathon suspects in online fora such as reddit, is a vigilante mob.

At least that interpretation is consistent with the conventional usage of the term "crowdsourcing" up to this point. Consider well-known examples such as the Mechanical Turk, the search for the wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane and prediction markets such as Iowa Electonic Markets. In all case the role of any individual in the crowd is predefined and constrained in advance by design. Constraints can include the dimension of response and the information to be evaluated.

Open source advocate Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming has entered the Nature-Nurture debate, stating here:

And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist
bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard
deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And
it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower
still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental
retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about
85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards
the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather
than nurturance effects.

For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal,
this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of
well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will
attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have
been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had
their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual
scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print
it.

Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away.

So it looks like communities which choose to harm the environment by banning plastic bags might be killing themselves off with bacterial infections.

Environmentalism is self-correcting.