It's stupid if you're benchmarking relative efficiency -- it's not an efficient implementation (and you'll have no trouble finding explanations for why the Python and Java code they wrote, while simpler, is not efficient).

Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.

The people who actually DO AI worry publicly about it.

People in the field are painfully aware of:

* The limitations of existing systems
* The difficulty of extrapolating from existing systems to general-purpose AI - things that look like easy extensions often aren't.

I did AI academically and industrially in the 1980's; at the time we were all painfully aware of the overpromising and underdelivery in the field.

Just say that fine revenue above police administrative costs goes somewhere else, so the people issuing the tickets don't directly benefit.

Since these are local/state offenses, the obvious place would be the state general fund.

There's potential for abuse, of course - states might have to specify maximum admin costs.

I bet the enthusiasm for local speed traps would drop way off under such a system. Sounds win/win to me.

The same universe as what? My argument doesn't rest on some idea of the way things used to be. What are you smoking that makes you think name-dropping NCLB or RTTT is a convincing argument? What does the current affordability of college have to do with whether standardized testing at the K-12 level helps charter schools? (For the record, I think an awful lot, and maybe a majority, of college degrees are currently overpriced, and students are suckers for taking out big loans to pay for them.)

Charters are judged -- even more harshly -- based on results of these standardized tests. The fact that there's a mechanism to set up charter schools when the public schools suck has nothing to do with the fact that governments have long tried to, and still do, push private schools into the margin. Government's efforts to do so make a mockery of the AC's claim that this social-media snooping debacle was caused by "the philosophy that the free market will be the best solution in every walk of life".

Why in the world do you think that standardized testing is good for, or inherent to, charter schools? Standardized testing long predates charter schools. Standardized testing -- and standardized curricula, which is what Common Core is really pushing -- are in many ways an antithesis to charter schools. Charter schools are successful to the extent that they can distinguish themselves from what their (public or private) competitors offer. If all schools have the same material and the same tests, and those mandated bits cover as much of the school year as Common Core says they must, then charter schools will have precious little to distinguish themselves with. Besides, charter schools are at best a hybrid between private and public education. They're good in that they generally let parents choose a school for their children, but bad in that they are much more accountable to the existing public-school bureaucracy rather than to parents.

The primary way that government has (very intentionally) pushed private schools to the sideline is by using fairly uniform taxes, usually in the form of property taxes, to pay for the public schools. Anyone who wants to send a child to a private school has, until the very recent phenomenon of school-choice vouchers, had to pay twice: Once for public schools, and once for the private school they choose for the child.

There are special needs kids who can't just click through a test on a computer screen -- blind children are an obvious example, and anyone with dyslexia needs special accommodations for the test to accurately measure skills beyond reading comprehension. Anything more complicated than a multiple-choice question -- for example, being able to get partial credit for showing work in a math or science problem, or any essay question -- tends to be very hard to grade by computer. Setting up computer-focused course materials takes extra work, and if that doesn't amortize over enough classes, it is wasted effort. How often does the course material need to be reworked, do to changes in the available hardware and software platforms? Does the computerized curriculum mean that schools in the inner city, rich suburbs, and rural areas all need to have their students follow the same curriculum, or is there any room to tailor to local needs and abilities?

There certainly is a lot of budget that is wasted or abused in public schools, and bureaucracy and teacher's unions contribute much to that, but good solutions are not always as simple as they seem from the outside. If they were, we'd see more success stories of how a plucky reformer (with backing from the right school board members or whomever else) was able to turn a failing school around and deliver improved results for notably less money.

What part of one level of government coercing another level of government to adopt new educational standards, and then both of them together working to select a contractor to do these extra things (that even the government realizes it's too incompetent to run on its own), all while pushing private schools to the sideline, reminds you of a free market?

Number 7 on the list of oldest registered domain names.

BBN is apparently owned by Raytheon.

Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a /24 block, I think.

When did microsoft.com get created?

My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.

Write-only code is possible in any language. Some languages make it easier than others.

YouTube hasn't been tied to flash for a couple of months, with HTML5 the default video play mechanism since late January. Not all browsers will pick that up, apparently, since I've recently had Flash crash in Firefox during a YouTube playback.

There are plenty of sites still tied to Flash, and that includes internal corporate sites. Those will be even harder to dig out, and Chrome is about the only means of Linux users to access Flash these days (at least in a vaguely secure fashion, since Flash for Linux hasn't been supported by Adobe in some time).

The Chrome dev team has been trying to eliminate cruft from the code base for a while now, as is visible if you spend some time in the bug tracker. This may be a case where they got overzealous in trying to not have legacy code remain when they implemented a new feature. But given the number of distros running 3.17 or later, it should have been obvious that backports would be required for many (most?) distros, and that backporting is often seen as more work that distro devs would rather avoid so they can concentrate on standard code-bases.

I see both sides of this: Google wants the most secure environment possible, and Debian has a development freeze for good reason. It's easy to overlook a flag like TSYNC if it's not being mandated by something major when the review is done, which may be the case here. But Debian may have to fold on this because they're not a big enough slice of the user pie to force Google to back down.

Presumably, you're running RHEL/CentOS 6. If so, that's cool if it works for you--the stability is probably greater than just about any other major distro--but I think the expectation is that most who run Linux for their notebooks/workstations will run something newer and more flexible, and run something like that in a VM. But there's always the reality that RHEL/CentOS 6 isn't going to run the latest software in many cases (unless you go with non-standard repos), and here's a case where a browser has become one of those cases.

It's probably also surprising that you run a six-year-old notebook in a corporate environment. Even the fiscally conservative companies tend to upgrade notebooks at least every four years, even if they are Fortune-100 companies.

That's a lousy analogy. A better analogy in this case would be that someone offended by apartheid took an axe to the bus, and after being arrested, ranted about the white people's plot to breed black people into Morlocks. Does that help clarify why Lumsdaine is such a counter-productive "activist"? His attempt was doomed to fail -- it would not stop either the military-industrial complex, or even the particular program he went after, but would put off practically everyone who disagreed with him and some of those who did agree with him.

Unless a state passes a right-to-work law (California has not), "closed shops" are allowed under Federal law and typically required by union contracts. A "closed shop" agreement means that employees must be union members at the time of hire, or must join the union within a certain period. To conform with the First Amendment, employees who do not wish to pay for the union's "extra" activities (beyond collective negotiation for their bargaining unit that the employee belongs to) can opt out of full union membership and pay a reduced rate for the union's representation. The reduction is almost never a big reduction, which might surprise people who know how much unions spend on political activity. Also, people who do opt out can no longer vote on what the union should negotiate for, and unions like to make them social outcasts, so there are strong incentives to not opt out.