Give me a break. Since when is good science disseminated by press release?

I remember when Fleischmann and Pons pulled a similar stunt. That turned out to be bunk too.

What do we want? Evidence driven change
When do we want it? After peer review.

Admittedly, the R code was probably horrible, but I inherited some of it, so I can't take all the blame. On the other hand, I'm really good at squeezing good performance out of C++.

This reminds me of the big hullabaloo Paul Graham made about how superior Lisp is because he was able to make more quickly adapt web back-ends for some website he'd done. I think attribution of this success to the language is misplaced -- his implenentation was more adaptable simply because he was a superior programmer, and Lisp probably only helped a little bit.

Ah, now it becomes clear. I'm sorry your parents are not properly looking after you and letting you loose on the internet without adult supervision. When you grow up hopefully you'll become mature enough to realize that your parents can't be responsible for you for your entire life and that at some point you have to grow up and take responsibility for yourself.

Indeed even by the time you reach ten you'll probably be able figure out the massive logical hole in your argument that parents should be responsible for their kids for life which is simply that even your parents had parents. Hence, if we accept your argument the first humans to evolve would be responsible for the entire human race and everyone else can just sit back and relax and never have to worry about taking responsibility for anything ever again.

Given your logical reasoning skills I'd also suggest that you stop trying to tell people what they really believe or think, unless it is something like "wow, this person is nuts": you'll probably come across as telepathic if you tell them they are thinking that.

I imagine Beats/Apple isn't too happy with Bose's shenanigans regarding telling NFL players they can't wear their Beats headphones until 90 minutes after the end of the game.

Of course the players do it anyway, and Beats apparently pays the fines for them... but still.

Incidentally, the NFL isn't doing very well with regards to their endorsement deals - first Microsoft, and now Bose.

The problem is you have a conflict of endorsements.

The NFL is being paid directly by Microsoft and Bose to promote their stuff - Microsoft and Bose can put "Official NFL Product" on those things.

The problem is, the teams and players don't really see much of that money because it goes straight into the league. Sure, they may get a few bucks in the way of stadium improvements and such, but you can bet most of that money isn't going into their paycheques.

So the players and teams often have their OWN endorsement deals. This money goes directly to the team and the players themselves. Sure some goes back to the NFL in terms of league fees and whatnot, but it's extra income for the team and player.

So what's a player to do? Be forced to wear Bose which nets them ZERO dollars in the end? Or wear their Beats which nets them millions in extra dollars in their pocket?

It's obvious why the players are defying the rule. And in fact, you have to admit, it's getting a LOT of marketing for Beats as well - I mean, they're being fined, in public, for wearing Beats. With photos. In the news. Now what is better marketing - the player wearing it on the field or a news conference, or having it plastered all over the news with closeups of the offense with news they're being fined for wearing Beats headphones (and barely a Bose mention!).

It's actually kind of brilliant marketing - Bose gets made out to be the bad guy, and Beats gets plastered all over the news section, so much so that the $10,000 fine is well worth it - marketing expense.

List of NFL Finable Offenses, with fines.

Heck, one wonders if they're going to get a bunch of stickers to stick over their Bose headphones with the iconic "b". I mean, it doesn't get more interesting than that - they wear Bose headphones, but they're sporting the "b" that clearly indicates Beats.

Do you hear nothing? No, you hear a background roar of muffly rumblings.

Actually, a small (but not insignificant" amount of sound comes from around the ear as well - bone conduction can transfer the lower bass notes to the ear directly (it's why you can't have perfect silence except by being in an anechoic chamber). Of course, your ears when wearing ear defenders does crank up its gain - people in anechoic chambers do report hearing blood rushing through their veins in the ears, their heartbeats, etc. All noise conducted through the body.

It can get pretty freaky.

I shamefully admit clicking on it at least 10 times and cursing at my browser before realising.

The middle button on my mouse has acted up before, so I was clicking it and nothing was happening. I kept thinking it was the mouse so I clicked it harder, softer, and every which way. Then on a lark, I clicked a link elsewhere and a new tab opened sup, to which I noticed the link wasn't bringing up the destination in the status bar and figured that was the reason why it wasn't middle-clicking.

..is to not have a backspace ruin everything you just did just because you didn't have the focus you thought you had (Chrome!)

The big problem is the javascript "rich" editors that mess with browser state saving.

Backspace is a non-issue a lot of the time if you're using standard HTML widgets - every browser I've used from IE, Firefox and I think even Chrome save the state so if you accidentally backspace, you can hit Forward and boom, everything is restored. It's useful if you want to multi-quote Slashdot, for example.

But, rich editors break this functionality. I don't know why. Though, most rich editors work enough that backspace won't leave the page (or they use a javascript alert to keep you from blindly doing it), which is good for accidental purposes, but you lose it all when you return.

Quite annoying, really. Especially since the browsers even return text field contents if you close and re-open the tab (using Ctrl-Shift-T to reopen last closed tab, or reopening a tab from the history). Except well, rich editors. They always blank themselves...

And, can you talk to people who have Skype with them?

Or are you thinking everyone you know is going to start using some open source product to talk to you because you say so?

If they're not compatible with Skype, then they're not replacements for it.

Open Source isn't always the solution, especially when they're not compatible with the things they're supposed to replace.

R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.

That being said, R is also very slow. For one project, I used R and ended up having to use a supercomputer (I only needed a few hundred Opertons out of the 4096 available) to get all the work done in time. For a followup project, I rewrote it in C++ and reran all the same stuff in the same period on a Core 2 Duo. R is really that slow.

But then, R is an interpreted language, so that's not a surprise. And I was able to rewrite my code in C++ because we didn't need any special libraries; if we had, I wouldn't have had the expertise to reimplement it. R is really convenient to use for many things, and it's also faster than Matlab for everything I've tried in both. Matlab is a dog, and the Mac version crashes at the drop of a hat too. I can't believe people pay money for that crap, except that it's pushed on universities, so people get used to it.

MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.

Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.

Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.

Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.

Personal and business reasons are actually opposite. These people are being fired.

I expect that you can convince them that LFTR is safer than our current reactors but that is not the same as convincing them that it is safe enough to build. If you want to do that they best way to do it would be to sell them cheaper electricity. They are unlikely to be able to sensibly judge the risk but at least this way they see that they are benefiting from having a plant nearby.

However there is still the issue of nuclear waste. Both LFTR and fusion still generate it but the advantage of fusion is that it is a one-generation problem not a 10-100,000 year issue. The lighter nuclei activated by neutron radiation from fusion reactors have far shorter half lives than the heavy nuclear fragments left by thorium fission. LFTR might reduce the volume but not to zero and it will be with us for a VERY long time.

Even setting the balance of government powers vs individual rights aside, the problem is that there's no such encryption. If it has a backdoor, it's vulnerable. For example, if it has an extra "NSA key" that can be used to decrypt it, then that key will be leaked eventually (Snowden is a living proof of that0, and at that point all existing data is vulnerable.

What he is asking is to compromise security below any acceptable standard for the sake of his convenience. The only correct answer here is, "fuck off". There's no balance to discuss.

Can you quote that right? Because all I see in the 4th Amendment is that they're not allowed to arrest or search unless it is reasonable; it doesn't say anything about being granted a right to search things successfully.

So far as I can see, 4A is not relevant to this discussion at all. It does not grant people the right to be completely secure from any search (as it specifically excludes reasonable ones), nor does it grant the government the right to force people to make said search easier.

They say that, but I don't believe it. The FairTax still needs to be computed, since some transactions are subject to it, and others aren't. The "prebate" system is begging to be gamed.

It seems to me that they're comparing an existing system which has decades of accumulated cruft to a brand new one which will accumulate equal amounts of cruft. I'm all for sweeping out the existing system just to reset the cruft counter to zero, but there's nothing special about the FairTax that achieves that. Nor does it particularly explain how they're going to deal with the unfairnesses that come from removing deductions that people counted on to make long-term purchasing decisions. That's a problem any new simplified tax code would have to deal with, but the FairTax doesn't even make for a clear way to phase things out because of the shift from income to consumption as a basis.

Mostly, though, I think it's disingenuous of them to claim benefits that could apply equally well to any new tax code, and to claim that the cost will be zero when that's clearly not the case.