Companies have been paying the post office to shove stuff in my mailbox for years. That actually causes physical annoyance, as I have to shovel it into the recycle bin and then toss it. Then there are those crazy people who hand out free samples on the street. I don't have to take it, but I still have to see them.

Whoever tagged this "first world problems" was dead on.

Then turn off automatic downloads. You can't hit a switch that says "download everything!" and then call it "jammed down your throat" when your phone does what you told it to and downloads the free song someone gave you.

I saw the fuss on Facebook and went to check. No U2 song. It was listed as something I could download if I wanted to. Whoopty doo.

A consensus is a bunch of people who share an opinion. You can have a consensus of scientists, but not a scientific consensus. Crichton was right (about that): science is about consistent, reproducible results, not opinions or consensuses. Politics often involves consensus.

Climate science doesn't care how many people, scientists or not, vote for a particular hypothesis. Climate politics do, and that's what's involved when we try to decide what to do. Unfortunately, people confuse the two.

A consensus is a bunch of people who share an opinion. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.

Why would the cops say the woman attacked the man if they only got there in time to see the man attacking the woman?

Have to agree with the other guy who replied to you - when I took it, pure CS was sort of an applied math degree with a bit of engineeringish stuff like operating systems theory and digital design mixed in. From what I hear, it's now hard to find that, and most CS programs have turned into software engineering, at best.

Maybe women just don't want to slam energy drinks and sit in front of a screen in a cubicle seventy hours a week. I've always suspected they were smarter than men.

So women stopped studying computer science because they didn't have to anymore? That certainly sounds like a crime against humanity.

Kindle's have bookmarks. They're easy to use and work very well. I use them exactly as you've just described.

That's not the suspicious part. This is:

"But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story."

So they measured a whole bunch of things. What would you like to bet they didn't correct for multiple comparisons?

Of course a program can do things that it is not explicitly programmed to do, at least in the sense you're implicitly using "explicitly programmed to do." Any learning algorithm, from simple regression on up, changes it's output based on the training data it's presented with.

If you want to use that phrase in the most general way possible, then your brain can't do anything it's not explicitly (by genetics) programmed to do either.

Nobody knows how to program "general intelligence." Virtually everybody has given up on the idea of doing so and has turned to the idea that you don't have to.

You'll have to wait a few years until they integrate radar and track the bullet's flight. The first one might miss, but the one behind that will hit exactly. By then they'll have dropped the pretense of a human pulling the trigger too.

I recognize your username I think I've been able to answer one of your questions before. They're interesting, and you've got a great way of asking for clarification if you don't like the answer you get. Reminds me of the nineties on Slashdot. ;)

You're being pedantic (yes, in your other post too). NASA is a US government agency. Individual researchers in that agency are US government employees. As far as I can tell, this study was funded by internal NASA funds.

Somebody convinced someone in a responsible position within NASA, with the power to allocate funds and probably assign personnel, that this was something worth looking into. Normal people understand that when you say "NASA did this" or "IBM did this" or "Microsoft did this" that you don't mean that every individual associated with one of those entities was involved, but that someone was, and that there was some kind of institutional involvement. Funding certainly qualifies.

I imagine they'll get around to that, provided everything goes well, but they'd probably like to do some more ground testing before they invest millions putting up a satellite.

Your "major reason" is BS you made up. Have you heard of relativity?

If you're going to use P = F*v then the v has to come from the thruster, not from however you got the train up to mach 10 in the first place. Congrats though, you managed to dazzle the mods with some "math."