Do we have reason to believe that this group is actually capable of or prepared to carry out the attacks that they're threatening? If theaters around the country showed the movie, can these terrorists bomb them all?

Or did all these companies simply buckle to a random threat without anything behind it? Because, yeah, I guess if someone calls in a bomb threat to the local high school, you might have to go evacuate the school while the police check it out, but you should have some plan for keeping the kids from calling in new threats every day and shutting the school down permanently.

When people talk about getting a "Liberal Arts education", they're usually talking about getting an education that is supposed to be 'well rounded', giving exposure to subjects like philosophy, literature, art, and even various branches of math and science.

So you ask, "Do you mean sculpture, writing, philosophy, music, or whatever?"

And I answer, "Yes."

I think you're missing the point that grcumb was making, which I think was a good one. I don't believe he was arguing anything like, "If you want to optimize your chances of success, drop out of school and don't get a diploma." He was responding directly to the quote, "most of the jobs with a liberal arts degree involve asking 'Do you want fries with that?'"

I think what he was saying is something more like, "You have no ground to be so glib about other people's lives."

People who work in service industry jobs deserve some measure of dignity. People who never got a degree can still go on to do amazing things. There are people who have no connection to "STEM" fields who have made huge contributions to your life without developing software. And finally, liberal arts degrees do actually have a use.

There are no guarantees that you will be successful in any case, and there's always a vanishingly small slice of the human population that makes it to the top of their field. But who said that was the point?

If you want to make movies for example, you could pursue that. Maybe you'll be a complete failure. Maybe you'll make something great that's a commercial failure. Maybe you'll make an absolute piece of crap movie that's a commercial success. There's a very small chance that you'll ever be rich and famous as a result.

If you want to make software, you could pursue that. Maybe you'll be a complete failure. Maybe you'll make something great that's a commercial failure. Maybe you'll make an absolute piece of crap application that's a commercial success. There's a very small chance that you'll ever be rich and famous as a result. And so what? Pursue what you want to pursue. If you just want to make money and live a comfortable life, then do some research and figure out whatever career provides that, and be prepared if demand for that job dries up, because that can happen to any job.

But in any case, there's really no reason to be a glib, condescending asshole about other people's lives. There are a lot of good, hard working people out there who are making good use of their liberal arts educations. Some may even have a job that involves asking the question, "Do you want fries with that?" If you're ready to condemn them all as 'losers' because they don't write software for a living, then you're an asshole.

ISDN, so technically not a modem....

Now that Sony has cancelled the premier, if I want to see this movie I'll have to find a pirated copy.

Yes, I think it's very interesting when you look at Figure 4 here. They almost look like they could be an artist's interpretation of the things they're supposed to be, or a similarity that a person might pick up on subconsciously. The ones that look like static may just be the AI "being stupid", but I think the comparison to human optical illusions is an interesting one. We see faces because we have a bias to see them. Faces are very important to participating in social activities, since they give many cues to another person's emotions and intentions. It's a whole form of communication. A lot of other sensory biases and reactions are related to things like finding food, avoiding predators, and understanding potentially dangerous obstacles (e.g. if I step here, am I going to fall down?).

So if these are optical illusions for computers, what are the computer's biases based on? The computer isn't trying to find food or avoid predators, so what is it "trying to do" when it "sees"?

Even if national borders were to become meaningless, I'm not sure that jurisdiction stops being relevant. Which law enforcement agency will pursue the crime, and which court will it be tried in?

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

This sounds suspiciously like, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." I'm not on board with that idea.

Just so I've said it, my comment wasn't intended to be in favor of law enforcement being able to search anything without a warrant, or without proper procedure. I'm just pointing out that the issue, as it's stated in the summary, is a legal argument about whether data lies in a particular jurisdiction. I meant to point out that, with the ephemeral quality of data and the ease with which it can move through countries-- even unintentionally, it might not be the best policy to make it as simple as "data is under the jurisdiction of wherever the physical hardware is that happens to hold it at the moment."

However, it might need to be that rule, because I'm not sure there's a workable alternative. All data is automatically under the jurisdiction of the location where it was created? Under the jurisdiction of the creator's primary place of residence? Under the jurisdiction of the primary location where it is most often accessed? I'm not sure I see how any of those policies would be enforceable.

Whichever jurisdiction it is decided to be under, law enforcement should be required to follow the laws of that jurisdiction.

The general tendency to cover the ground with concrete is more than half of the problem of LA, they receive more than enough rainfall every year to cover 100% of their needs but more than 99% of it runs off because that's what they designed the city to do. It's not just wetlands, it's all the lands.

There is no part of California which is not earthquake country. Some places have longer periods than others.

Minivans are what happens when you take a car and stretch it into another vehicle. CUVs are what happens when you purpose-build a vehicle to do a job.

Minivans get crap mileage and have crap handling.

That's overstating the case a bit. I'm seeing grapes go in all over Northern California at a time when we can't afford the existing water consumption, let alone additional. Precious few of these vines are dry farmed.

That assumes your car has those, lots of cars don't. The W126 Mercedes was the first car on which they became standard... in the long-wheelbase editions, which means my 1982 doesn't have them. But lots of newer cars don't have them either, like most cars of the 1990s.

Not really. The seat mounts can't handle the load, and the original mounts aren't in the right place. The racing harness is designed to keep you in place in a car with proper crash protection around you. In the 1960s race cars still had wacky little half-seats, around then they started to become part of the crash protection and that's when race cars got harnesses.

A 5-point system without a cage is usually mounted to the seat, and usually reduces the safety of the vehicle as a result. You can get a cute little half-cage or even a roll bar with a proper place to mount the straps, so you don't need a full cage, but you need to add something.