If you want to see some of the most corrupt businesses alive today, look no further than utilities. This is nothing more than a front, primarily to stop the debate about Government intrusion but also to squeeze more money from the middle class.

What utilities are you referring to? My sewers, water, electricity, and gas all keep flowing, and at reasonable rates. I certainly would not want them transformed into Comcast-esque money-grubbers. Privatization in the absence of competition is the worst of both worlds, and that's what broadband to my home currently is.

With respect to government intrusion, assuming you buy the line that it's any different from, or even separate from, corporate intrusion (which I don't, since companies simply sell it to the govt) - the US Mail has the strongest legal guarantees of privacy, as far as I can tell, with phone being next. It seems to be in decreasing order of when invented, rather than public/private. At least with a utility there's a possibility of meaningful privacy regulations, if the public ever decides to start wanting them.

Nations don't fall because of (un) diplomatic gestures. They fall because they are conquered, or go bankrupt. The Soviet Union fell because of its bad economy. However, the USSR did not increase military spending in response to the US buildup. There was never any reason to think they did, other that it was a nice story.

The USSR's 9-year Afghanistan misadventure, on the other hand, was extremely costly (look at the above graph from '79 to '89). US support for the Mujahideen surely increased that pain. But the American president who started backing them was, in fact, Jimmy Carter.

Reagan vilifying the Soviet Union is totally irrelevant to Obama and the NSA. People everywhere love smack talk about faraway enemies, it always plays well. A better Reagan analogy would be the Iran-Contra scandal.

Now as to Obama, he did order Gitmo shut down. What happened? Congress rebelled, even Democrats, spinning up fear of Magneto-like supervillians too dastardly to contain in American prisons. Congress passed a law making it illegal to bring Gitmo prisoners to the US even for medical treatment, so now we spend millions flying medical equipment down there to rot.

I suppose a more forceful President might be able to prevail on the Congress more often, Teddy Roosevelt-style, and do something about the NSA, if they had some reason to do so, which they don't. It's hardly ever a voting issue. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was used by both Democratic and Republican administrations to trample the Constitution for decades and voters never cared, because they were so scared of Communism they supported the purge. Now the roles are filled by a new cast of characters, but little has changed.

But that's why I don't understand how it makes sense to argue about whether the observations are about "the Higgs boson," or something "else." If the Higgs boson was previously a prediction, as were these others, and new observations are consistent with several of them but don't rule out all but one, what is the basis for saying one was the real one and the others were impostors?

I have a 512 one and the slow CPU is a bigger issue for me. It is too slow to comfortably run a web browser. It is also too slow to use as an X server using ssh tunneling. Opening up the X display to accept unencrypted connections from remote hosts, it is kind of OK (no videos, obviously).

I am sure it's great for lots of things, but if I were buying something to plug a screen and keyboard into, I would go the route of a used Core 2 duo laptop next time. YMMV.

Oh, darn, you beat me to it.

But I just wanted to add that fMRI lacks the resolution to measure individual neurons, so I don't know how it could possibly be used to rule out neuron-level parallelism. It is like recording people's height in whole feet and concluding there are only 6 different heights of people.

I think the opposite. First, Watson is not really GOFAI because it uses so much machine learning to populate its knowledge base. But second, I don't think any conceptual breakthrough is coming, or needed, in AI. Deep Learning is a great example of this - it achieves super-human levels of performance on some recognition tasks (such as street signs) despite being almost devoid of any conceptual progress compared to, say, 1970. (At least, no conceptual breakthrough). The fact that it outperforms an entire generation of advances in statistical machine learning (which supposedly obsoleted conventional AI by being vastly more rigorous) is stunning.

The basic reason there cannot be a conceptual breakthrough is because intelligence is not anything in particular. It is just a level of proficiency in a bunch of various areas, and the integration between them. Just a bunch of different hacks.

Since the editor did not say "slashdotted," I don't see your point.

Lots of people beyond slashdot are interested in Blizzard games.

I don't think "upside" for the employees is particularly what they had in mind. (Actually, it can't be, because employees don't have the data to populate this sort of model - only the employer does).

Harm to employees also doesn't require them to do anything wrong, if by that you mean "incorrect." If the algorithm notices that you're a caregiver for your aging mother, and you have 3 kids in high school, and your wife has a state-issued licensed for her job, you're certainly not going anywhere no matter what... so why give you a raise, ever?

Sadly I think granular security controls have been rejected by the market. You spend a while downloading and installing an app and it almost always requests access to more or less everything, or it won't run. You can "fix" this by cutting yourself off from most of the most popular apps. But the fact that it's so commonplace among popular apps implies that companies want to spy more than people want privacy, so privacy-protecting options are unlikely to become available and well-supported anytime soon.

craiglist and ebay don't allow firearms listings either. You can argue that's bad, fine. But centering the discussion around Cody Wilson in particular, as if this were some arbitrary decision that just affects him, is just feeding into his self-promotion. On the contrary, it would be odd if Stripe's pre-existing policy against participating in the arms trade were somehow deemed to be inapplicable merely on the basis of how a gun is manufactured.

So it is only "American's killed in wars" that counts?

Nope, not at all!

Still waiting for those numbers... be sure to include civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan when you try to argue that the military has "increased its killing" under Obama - I don't believe he can match 5% of his predecessor.

See, that's why I asked for numbers.

Keep in mind, the amount of cable-news time that can be devoted to something has no relation to how big an event it actually is.

UUggh, I'm getting sucked into political bickering on ./ again.

But I would really like to hear one person such as yourself explain, by the numbers, how this is not a time of relative peace and prosperity? Especially, say, as compared to 10 years ago. I see tens of thousands fewer dying in American wars, and a booming stock market. It's like Clinton all over again, except without a salacious sex scandal.

What is it you are thinking of when you say it? (With numbers please).

Keep in mind this is a Wall Street Journal editorial article, so pronouncements to the effect that "Silicon Valley is Republican now" should be taken with a big grain of salt.