I agree, it gets you 98% there, but an eyeball isn't a pinhole either.

If you want to make high resolution true holograms, you'll need to square the pixel density (intuitively, each pixel has to contain an entire high resolution image which would correspond to the hologram as seen though a pinhole placed on this pixel).

Bring on the 1M PPI displays.

Put them in the dome:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/movie_theater_layout

Actually if *anything* remains it might be the concept of "want", having goals is pretty central to the definition of intelligence.

Deniable encryption

This type of law is just made up by a bunch of lobbyist and self interested politicians who were shrewder than their competitors and managed to get elected. Why show so much reverence for it?

Many plants (I'm thinking of passiflore for instance) will not flower unless they are stressed. Why reproduce sexually when you just grow? Because your life might be threatened and forming flower / fruit / seed maybe your only chance to spread your genes.

Seriously why is this even worth fighting for? It'll be broken within a month and an unofficial patch will be available for open source browsers.

Bitcoin was built to evade controls. Sure you can regulate that transactions above a certain amount must be reported, but good luck enforcing it. Transactions can be split into thousand of components at no cost, be dispatched through mixers to thousands of wallets. If the government become savvy enough to track such movements, then anonymous internet banking with chaumian cash can be implemented on top of bitcoin.

So if regulation gives the government the temporary illusion that it's controlling bitcoin, then by all means start regulating. The alternative is government trying to kill bitcoin, which it might be able to pull off at this stage by targeting the exchanges.

Ah then I'm surprised you're not mentioning the horrible record of Woodrow Wilson, probably the worst president of the US ever. One time member of the KKK, when he became the dean at Princeton he *re*segregated the school.

Also, in the pursuit of democracy, he encouraged the Russian revolution which eventually led to the rise of the Soviets, he pushed for the harsh conditions of the Versailles treaty which became fertile ground for Nazism. Also he created the Federal Reserve, the first permanent income tax, instituted a draft.

Pretty evil guy.

What are the odds of a sociopath like him being elected president? Quite good, because being a sociopath *helps you* win elections. In fact it gives you a tremendous advantage. Given how competitive elections are, it would be astonishing if presidents weren't sociopaths.

http://imgur.com/iDdNnNk

nope...

Republicans understand that destroying due process and giving all power to the executive branch is a higher cause than party rivalries. It's so moving to see bipartisan agreement on this.

First of, the economy isn't a machine, it's organic, and this engineering approach generally fails. Companies react to regulation, and regulation itself is the result of government, another organic entity. When this type of laws are enacted, the first thing that happens is that concentrated business interest will make sure they actually benefit from the regulation. It can take many forms. Maybe some corporations will be grandfathered in and therefore manage to keep at bay competitors who can't reach a competitive size, maybe the law will have exemptions that only politically connected firms can obtain. It's misguided to push for a law without taking into account the way it will be distorted by the political process. Contrast this to the viral - hence organic - approach the GPL took.

Second, too big to fail is about the systemic risk that some financial firms exhibited. Walmart is big, Google is big, but they're not too big to fail in the sense that their failure wouldn't particularly cause havoc. If Walmart fails, many different sellers can buy the stores and keep supplying them with goods. In the case of financial companies, the argument went as follow: if a bank fails, many other financial companies may be in trouble if they hold financial instruments whose collateral ultimately is guaranteed by that bank. Unfortunately, it can take a long time to sort out who is really it, and during that time, it becomes very risky to lend to anyone, for fear that they might be exposed to the failing institution. This in turns cause more financial companies to fail in a domino effect. That's the theory at least. I don't know if I buy it, but at any rate, it makes the case that the banks were too heavily interconnected to fail, not too big. Columbia professor Rama Cont has suggested that the solution to this problem is to emphasize clearing houses to bring in transparency in who holds what.

That's not how one should measure the value of letters. Here's a more serious approach:

1) Get a large sample of games by running a scrabble playing program against itself.
2) Assume each letter has a latent fair-point value, model the score differential as as a function of the difference of the sum of the fair-point value of the letters received by each side.
3) Fit fair point values with MCMC