So you're telling me there's an exception built into the law for the case in which all employees do have the same belief, right?

Woah, woah, woah, because I won't chip in on some contingency pool in case you want to pay for X, I am barring you access to X?

Look, the only issue here is whose name goes on the bill of purchase. If instead of having the employer buy the insurance you had the employee use the same money from their compensation to buy their own insurance there would be no issue at all. In fact, that is how it works now, with the one difference we've decided that people can't be trusted to buy insurance under their own motivation so the government needs to mandate it. There's any of a hundred different options to do this in such a way that no one except the employee has to sign off on what they buy. If the only resolution you can think of to this dispute is, "force the religious organization to do it whether they like it or not" when the only difference between some of these options is a symbolic one, then it's obvious whom is trying to oppress the beliefs of whom.

Now allowing coverage exceptions is going to mean health insurance will be capriciously allocated as a form of ransom? I think your dystopian view is going a little a far, especially since up until now being able to decide the nature of the offered policy has been the status quo, and I haven't heard of anything like this happening.

Yes, they are. No one wants to review all of your credit card purchases and verify you haven't bought anything untoward. All these organizations want is that when they pay their own accounts there is nothing which discusses, e.g., abortion.

Just let the religious organizations buy a cheaper plan and have them rebate the difference to their employees. If you give me $20 bucks I can buy my own condoms. I'm not exactly sure why a cheap regular purchase is something you would buy 'insurance' for anyway.

These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.

The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.

But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.

I would think a properly functioning NSA would indeed be interested in promulgating more secure standards to American companies as part of preventing corporate espionage and preventing foreign companies from stealing trade secrets, besides generally protecting America's technological infrastructure from attack.

RSA seems to indicate that was their belief:

It's a bit like the government has told you to add a new safety device to the cars you manufacture (not just the government ones). That would seem pretty reasonable to go along with. You wouldn't really expect that the safety devices were actually remote activated bombs.

The value of a dollar can and does fluctuate wildly (consult any market crash) and certainly alters slowly over time. What makes it "stable" is the heavy inertia it enjoys from being tied to so many aspects of a large economy, particularly goods whose value are themselves stable. This makes it stable on average, but your analogy wouldn't work if instead of going into a store and buying an apple you went to the stock market, and it doesn't work if a major part of what the dollar is exchanged for comes under duress, such as the real estate market or the American government.

Bitcoin is fluctuating in value right now precisely because people are betting on its future usefulness as a currency. It's sort of like you are buying stock in the Bitcoin Digital Currency company, but the currency itself is being immediately exchanged for the stock. How is it supposed to have a stable value when the only thing it's good for is making bets on an uncertain future? If I had 10 bit coins right now, I really wouldn't know what to do with them, except for look up what they are selling for and get some dollars in trade.

But the simple progression of the future is going to make its more intrinsic value obvious, and once it's tied to companies like Overstock, the value will start to derive increasingly from the goods you can buy with it.

Hasn't bitcoin been specifically designed to have an investor-centric mining phase before plateauing?

It's not meant to be a 'phrase' in this context, it's part of a parable, an argument structured in a story, and you have to understand the story. The law on the books at the time was that adultery was punished by stoning, and so "fair and by the law" judgment being put into effect would mean the adulterous woman would be pommeled with rocks until she died.

Jesus was not concerned that the wrong sort of person was going to be doing the stoning. His concern was that the woman was being stoned at all. So he reminded her accusers that they were in equal standing with the woman as far as being guilty (in God's sight, if not that of the local officials), and coincidentally made it very difficult for them to carry out their task. (If they threw a stone and the others took it as a serious claim of sinlessness, that person could be in for some unpleasant repercussions themselves.)

What you are meant to take away from it is insight into Christ's character -- forgiveness, providing redemption, showing compassion -- and the associated moral philosophy. The idea that everyone does wrong, that no one can boast about being better than others, that everyone needs God's forgiveness, and as recipients of that forgiveness it is hypocritical if we don't show that same mercy to others.

When someone says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," they are typically inviting a bit of similar reflection.

Jeff Bezos circling above in an Apache attack helicopter.

I think actually implementing this has more direct pay-off for Amazon than you're thinking. How many people are content to communicate by letter now that we have texting, email, and phone calls? Who is willing to use a 56k internet after living with broadband? The fact is that, while getting things in a few days is almost always reasonable, having 30 min deliveries available makes it feel unreasonable. No one is going to want to order things any other way if this becomes prevalent. Amazon is just taking their '2 day shipping' policy (which has been working out well for them) to the next level. Second, it greatly encourages impulse buying. It is that much more satisfying knowing you will receive something immediately. Third, it allows Amazon to compete more fully against brick-and-mortar stores. Up-till-now places like Walmart have been somewhat safe because they offer the ability to have purchased items in your hands immediately. Now the wait time is one less advantage for them. Fourth, and this plays off of the third, it opens up new opportunities for Amazon as a mediator between companies and customers. This is clearly of interest to them as they have already made amazon.com a place where you can buy goods from other companies (not just amazon wearhouses) and second hand from individuals (like ebay). Soon they will be able to realistically include listings for local restuarants, as their drone fleets pick up and deliver food items. Heck, they will probably work something out so that Walmart will pay them to deliver *their* goods directly to customers. In fact, you and I will be able to request drone pick up to deliver our mail and packages, either directly or by taking them to the Amazon shipping center to be ferried to other cities. Amazon isn't just cutting out the middleman of UPS and Fedex and USPS, they are positioning themselves to, at some indefinite point in the future, completely replace them.

The summary is somewhat misleading. Per the linked law:

His intent is irrelevant due to his prior felony conviction. That is what has him in trouble. I imagine the 'intent' clause is mostly for people found with actual drugs or weapons stored in the compartment, in which case their intent is obvious.

Being explicit is precisely what makes programming laborious and tedious. It is entirely true that without such tediousness, you do not enjoy a full range of functionality. But the vast majority of the time you do not need a full range of functionality.

Speaking as someone in a scientific major, Wolfram|Alpha has shortly become the go to resource for everyone looking to do quick, more-than-arithmetical calculation. It does a fantastic job of anticipating what you need and providing the appropriate options. If I need a differential equation integrated or the root to some expression I *can* ask for it explicitly, but usually I just type in the expression and everything I need will be generated by Wolfram automatically. For involved projects I do setup my problems in Python, but 99% of the time Wolfram|Alpha does just what I need for a hundredth of the effort. The fact my peers are using it the same way is notable because, while before Wolfram I might use Python or Maple or Mathematica, most everyone else would do these things by hand -- learning to use the available tools was something they considered too intimidating or not worth the effort.

If Stephen Wolfram can do something vaguely like Wolfram|Alpha with more ability to customize and automate what is happening, it's going to transform academics, maybe even down to the high school level. Imagine being able to easily develop a science fair project which requires solving some complicated ODEs, without having to take 3 years of college math first.

Even well into adulthood, people are still confused by, e.g., the difference between "the early 1700s" and "the early 17th century" (which is actually the 1600s). Turns out, whether you like it or not, the first place value of 10^2, 10^3, 10^4, etc. you count through is always the 0th one. It's only in the very specific circumstance of counting the 10^1 place and when all the other 10^x place values are zero that the 0 gets skipped. Why not be consistent?

Besides being more consistent, I also think it is more intuitive (barring the fact that we are culturally inducted into thinking that it isn't). If you were counting *backwards,* say, starting with ten cookies and removing one cookie off a plate each time, it would be perfectly intuitive to you that you should count down to zero cookies, taking the very last cookie off the plate. The zero cookie limit is enforced by physical reality, while the one cookie limit is enforced by your arbitrary decision to interrupt your process of removing cookies and leave one cookie on the plate. Likewise, in the reverse process, you should also start your counting at an empty plate.

Schneier's point can only be applied for cases in which the cost of a false positive is non-negligible compared to the benefit of a correct classification. E.g., if your test to identify a person infected with a lethal disease identifies all infected with a 100% success rate, but misidentifies 1% non-infected, and the treatment has a 2% chance of being lethal itself, this is a very bad test because you do not want to kill off 2% of the healthy population to treat a handful of sick people. If, however, the treatment is entirely innocuous, then you might consider the test to be a great one because it lets you cure everyone who is infected while not unduly burdening the larger healthy population. Or consider that you might have a very expensive secondary test which yields almost no false positives. If the first test is fast and cheap, then together you have an almost ideal system.

The federal government is largely chasing specters already -- how often do the TSA actually catch a terrorist? I doubt they mind too much about false-positives unless that number is totally extreme. Likely, they are interested in correlating this to other data. So, being flagged by itself is not a huge deal, although it might earn you a 'random screening'. But being flagged by facial recognition as someone on a watchlist, and being on a flight to Washington D.C., and having had someone in your hometown recently lookup terms related to assassination at a public library, and having a facebook profile with language indicating emotional stress could all wind up tied together by the government's surveillance program.

A good facial recognition system would be at least as useful as saying someone is 'wanted' on the evening news. But, as usual, the major question is whether we are going to tolerate the increasing formation of a big brother style government in order to reap these meager profits. (And, also as usual, the answer is probably yes.)

There are more news stories printed each day than any individual person could ever reasonably be aware of. Some sort of filter is needed, and, honestly, 'things my friends consider important', i.e., FB links, is a fairly good way to discriminate. If news is interesting/significant to people you share commonality with, it's likely to be interesting/significant to you. (Hence, Slashdot, where all of us nerds aggregate around 'News for nerds'.)

I find most aggregation services fairly bad at this. I actually think twitter is one of the best ways to keep up with politics. By adding people who are actively involved in the news cycle I get to see the actual discussion behind the stories. I understand what aspects of the story are considered most significant, how passionate people feel about it, how people on the right and left are interpreting it. The human reactions are often more important to knowing how the stories relate to practical politics (e.g., is it something the president is going to have to reverse coarse on, apologize for, or will it simply be forgotten by the next morning with the status quo maintained).

Besides that I use Slashdot, some science magazines, and one or two blogs to keep up on what is happening in the world.

Methodology is supposed to override objective in science. It doesn't matter whether my hypothesis is that the world is round or flat, in the former case it should be upheld and the latter case it should be invalidated, but in either case science should produce the correct result. What "lends credibility to crackpots" is if scientists are specifically avoiding doing science because of how they feel the results will be cited, because frankly at that point the crackpots are right, there *is* a conspiracy against their views.

Everyone knows CAPTCHA's are supposed to discriminate between humans and robots based on their cognitive capabilities, but I always assumed it was the humans they were trying to keep out. *punches random keys in attempt to match what looks like the last will and testament of a deranged chicken with tourettes*

The funny thing about definitions is we often don't understand what they are describing until later on, and when we finally do we may wind with a definition which lies in contrast to our initial intuition. A good example would be "temperature." You may start out only with an idea that somethings feel warm or cold. Then you discover that you can use a thermometer to be quantitative about it, so now temperature is defined by the expansion of a particular liquid at normal pressure. But that doesn't make sense below the freezing point and above the boiling point (even in the liquid phase it is not *quite* linear). Eventually, you have temperature formulated very precisely in form of the derivative of entropy with respect to energy. But this is rather counterintuitive and now you can have things like "infinite temperature" and "negative temperature" which would have made no sense at all when your definition of temperature had only to do with how warm you felt by the fire.

So while we would intuitively like for only humans to have free will, as that's our only day-to-day experience of it, I don't count it all that unlikely that we may eventually give free will a quantitative definition (which could easily be coupled with the author's Question 3 and Question 4) in which case some things might possess it in very small quantities.