I'm no expert on this stuff, but I've found there's tons of choice in the price:quality spectrum.

I like the low end of the brands that actually care about quality. SVSound, Axiom, Ascend, etc - they all make great speakers in the 200-300 USD/pair range. Tack on a barebones 150-300 USD receiver and you can have a decent setup for under 400 dollars.

The nice thing is a lot of these brands are internet direct with a lot of reviews/discussion online.

I work in preventing fraud, and I completely agree with your point. In any kind of maliciousness detection, there will be patterns you can find that will immediately stop a large % of the bad guys. But the bad guys won't retire, they will run to another corner, and you will have to chase them.

That isn't to say it's not worth trying to stop them. Quite the opposite: the more you chase them around, the more robust your system becomes, and the harder it will be for casual bad guys to attack your system.

"Outside of Korea I imagine people for the most part watch this stuff because itâ(TM)s awe-inspiring to see someone playing who has literally dedicated a huge chunk of his life to the game and as a result is mind blowing skilled at it."

But there must be more to it than that. How many people watch World of Warcraft? Or Command & Conquer, or Team Fortress 2? Far fewer than Starcraft.

There is something about Starcraft that makes it more fun to watch. IMO it's one of the rare games with both lots of strategy and action - the perfect "sport". The asymmetry argument is a bit odd, but i agree that does make it more fun to watch.

The article has a histogram that shows how sure the algorithm was of its predictions for both sexes. Males on the left of 0 were misclassified, and vice versa for females.

Now, the only confusing this is if that plot is for the test set of the train set. If it is for the test set then it answers your question. If it is for the train set it tells us a lot less. Pretty sloppy of them to title a graph with both :(

Yeah of course it makes sense in production to use high quality files, but isn't 24/96 already fairly standard? As far as the music we purchase and listen to on our stereos, as you say 16-bit is enough to sound perfect to human ears. I don't see the need to sell 24-bit files to consumers.

But it's Apple; they are experts at creating markets that barely existed before.

I'd guess he would rather expend his energy contributing to society rather than cheating a lottery. It's the difference between creating money and creating wealth. The people who concentrate on the latter tend to be more successful in the long run.

Not to mention that they are the primary source for Kindle books. My mom gave my dad a kindle last year, so he started using Amazon to buy all his e-books instead of getting print books from the local Barnes & Noble.

Yes, Israel WANTS the world to know what happened, and they want the world to know they were involved. This is why Mossad has been gleefully and publicly showing off that Iran's nuclear weapon development has been pushed back years.

It is odd that a mission that was 100% successful (something even Iran won't deny) is being criticized for not being good enough. Maybe some researchers just wanted their names in the newspaper?

That's taking a sledge hammer to a nail. The electronics to receive, process, and decode wireless video would be far more powerful and expensive than the 10 Mhz processor required to display text. The processor in the ipad costs ~20 dollars to put it into perspective.

Leaks happen all the time. Wikileaks has lasted for four years and most people hadn't heard of it until a few months ago. Yeah, this leak was big, but we have no proof the leak wouldn't have happened without Assange. Given that the leaker was showing off to a stranger (and hence basically turned himself in) lends evidence that it *would* have happened without Assange. Either way, we're working with a sample size of 1 here.

Yeah, Assange is the only person in the World that can do that :/

Also, why do you even need a single person in that role? Surely there must be a way for people to leak documents to the entire internet anonymously?

I agree with GP, Assange has too much power in his role, and his politics and methods are at odds with what people assume his mission is. Many people believe wikileaks' mission is about openness and disclosure, but sometimes it feels like the opposite.

This is what happens when the leader of a country also controls the largest media conglomerate of that country. Control the media, and you control the people. Control the people, and you *keep* control of the media.

100 billion dollars of the cost had nothing to do with the response. That's a pretty devastating cost - more than ~1600 dollars per domestic passenger in 2001. Even if we spread that cost over 10 years, we are talking about 150 dollars added to every single plane ticket sold in the USA.

The fact is, 9/11 didn't devastate the airline industry because the Government stepped in and protected the airlines from lawsuits they surely would have lost. It seems reasonable for the US Government to do what it can to prevent further tail-end terrorist attacks. Sometimes, their actions are unreasonable, though.