You're right: Liberalism in Europe
"In general, liberalism in Europe is a political movement that supports a broad tradition of individual liberties and constitutionally-limited and democratically accountable government. This usually encompasses the belief that government should act to alleviate poverty and other social problems, but not through radical changes to the structure of society."

A "liberal" in Europe wants smaller govt like conservatives do in America, while liberals in America want a bigger govt that has more control and attempts to eliminate poverty by equalizing income like a socialist would, like doubling minimum wage to the same wage most college graduates receive.

Been there ... done MORE than that :) http://www.jpbellphotography.c...

He also didn't say if it is cost effective. It's easy to make the fastest or best or most reliable of anything, problem is making it at a price that people are willing to pay.

Were any of those plants making key inputs for yours? If they were, and it wasn't practical to consolidate that function, then closing them down would have crippled you. Which individual plants make money is one thing, but where there's internal transfer of items between units of the business, the value attached to those items is fairly nominal in practice; it's the overall business that really makes the profit or the loss.

Or maybe they're just incompetent fucks. That could be true too. Hard to say without the full facts, but the fact that bankruptcy hit is strongly indicative.

Take at least one OO language (Java's fussy and bureaucratic, but its a pretty good example of the breed and is likely to be useful after you get your masters), at least one functional language (probably Haskell these days), at least one declarative language (Prolog or SQL), and don't just learn programming languages. You also need to learn about data, about data structures, about algorithms and their analysis, about parsing and compilation, and about concurrency; these are all independent of any programming language.

But computing is well served by not just learning about computing. If you have time, learn about math, stats and logic too, and learn how to communicate your ideas effectively; you'll never get far if you can't communicate with other people well.

Huh. I use it quite a bit when implementing an API. (You hardly need to use public at all inside interfaces.)

I'd guess something like:
        if(target->ThreatRating = ThreatRating::Trrist) { target->Kill(); }

Let that be a lesson to you: Trrist must evaluate to 0, for humanity's sake!

The problem is that it requires a true breakthrough, and there's no way to predict when that will happen. It also doesn't help that we don't really know what intelligence really is; all we've got is lots of things it isn't. I suspect that when someone cracks it, there'll be lots of people going "Is that all?! Anyone could have got that." and they'd be right, except that nobody did and it involves something both trivial and non-obvious. It might also require a lot of parallel processing, which we're still learning how to do well.

As we don't have any handy breakthroughs right now, we should instead study how brains really work and how to make computers do useful things (including stuff like "understanding" speech, "understanding" written natural language, drive cars safely, etc.) Those might or might not make the breakthrough easier, but they'll have other benefits along the way so they're still right to do.

Right. However, if you're not a US Person (i.e. if you don't have US Citizenship or a Permanent Resident Permit), there's no due process for you as well: NSA can access your GMail account without a warrant, because, well, you'd be a foreigner in their eyes, and foreigners are NOT protected by US laws in this area. No FISA court for you, comrade! That's the point: in Russia, they may pretend to follow due process (even if they don't), in the US, they don't even pretend to follow due process if you're no US Person. That's why some States are considering encouraging their citizens to move their personal data out of the US cloud.

Beware that the foreign government can secretly or openly cooperate with your own government to rat you out.

Seen from the outside world, most, if not all, US clouds are accessible to the NSA and other US state agencies. Especially if you're not a US Person, those agencies can request your data without a warrant at all. So what the Russians and Brazilians and soon to follow other nations are doing is this: they don't want you to post your potentially incriminating personal data on NSA-controlled servers when the NSA could use them to blackmail you should you work in an important position in politics, industry etc... They rather want you to post data on servers THEY, on only they, control. What's so wrong about this? If you are about to freely give your personal data to a spying agency anyway, it could as well be your own domestic spying agency, instead of the NSA. At least, that agency would be bound by your local laws w.r.t. the respect of privacy and protection of data of its own citizens, while the NSA is free to do what it wants with data of non US Persons, including selling them on the black market (not that they would do such a thing, of course, but in theory, they could). All this is due to the NSA overstepping its original mission that was code breaking and code development, and embarking on the Orwell program of TIA.

Considering the 2010 Nobel prize in physics was won by a pair who made grapheme by simply cleaving graphite with tape, I'd say you really need to use your head.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Perl 6 in Perl 5, as in Lisp in Lisp?

Would it be really so hard to relocate GitHub (servers, company and all) outside the US to avoid those DMCA take downs? Especially considering that it would also make life for the NSA a little harder too (no NSLs could force GitHub to secretly include backdoors here and there, and keep silent about it). Next question: what country would be most friendly to Open Source yet resisting the insatiable hunger of the copyright trolls?

Is it really wrong to spy on the worldwide communication infrastructure, as long as you can? This ubiquitous spying can only spur the deployment of more encryption, anonymizing protocols and generally hardening the infrastructure. As long as that infrastructure is so easily vulnerable to snooping, why should the NSA, GCHQ and other spying agencies refrain from exploiting it? After all, it's our fault that we keep communicating in the clear, and that we keep trusting commercial companies that provide closed source products that we can't inspect (at least in theory).