Fact: Putting the word "fact" before your sentence does not absolve you of the need to back it up with actual evidence.

The pool of people who are knowledgeable about the practices, challenges, and daily business realities of the telecommunications industry (or any industry for that matter) is a small one indeed; good luck finding someone in that pool with the experience necessary to lead an agency the size of the FCC who hasn't worked for the industry at one time in his or her life.

That's a matter of perspective. I've been there numerous times and have found that the Canadian side has the best views but the American side is less of a tourist trap. The Canadians have done a piss poor job of keeping development in check, in fact, there's a school of thought saying that the Horseshoe Falls are perpetually mist covered (historically they weren't) because of changes in the local wind currents brought about by development on the Canadian side.

Besides, the coolest thing there is the Cave of the Winds, and that's in good ole USA. No trip would be complete without seeing both sides, but there are plenty of people (myself included, obviously) that think the American side is at least the equal of the Canadian side.

I think it's a rich person who has nothing better to do with his money.

Niagara Falls is in Ontario. You're not making it to Quebec unless you swim across Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence River, and downriver for 50 miles or so. If you can do that learning French should be easy.....

Yeah, it's like three or four whole mouse clicks to make it happen....

C'Mon people, Microsoft does enough shit wrong, we don't need to make crap up.

???

The giveaway was probably when the blue screen was replaced with CIA's logo and the text "All your base are belong to us."

Ask Siemens. They designed the equipment the Iranians are using and wrote most of the control software to operate in a Windows environment. Not that it would have mattered, once you've got an agency with the resources of CIA or Mossad after you it's only a matter of time before they find a way in. Linux is not proof against malware delivered via HUMINT assets.

Dude, it's the Government. That $5 wrench cost at least $25,000.

Where I live they haven't bothered to make any provision for back up power to the repeaters on their coax plant. Power goes out? Kiss your phone service goodbye, even if you've got the battery in your modem. They finally did upgrade us to DOCSIS 3, about eight months ago, so now our peak hour speeds have gone from atrocious to tolerable FWIW.

They're not. The GP obviously doesn't realize that Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable quite some time ago.

I made no contention that HPV wasn't contagious. Read the words I actually wrote. What I said was that in a society that respects individual liberty, merely meeting the medical definition of contagious is insufficient to compel a citizen's behavior. It must meet a higher standard which lacking a better phrase I described as "involuntarily contagious." That is, I'll catch it as a stranger just by being near you in ordinary situations.

HPV does not meet that standard. HEP A/B and HIV don't meet that standard. Measles does.

As for deadly, cancer is deadly. HPV leads to increase -risk- of cancer. Not a certainty. Maybe I'm picking nits and the comparison to tobacco is more apt. From my point of view, that doesn't matter: regardless of whether its deadly, HPV doesn't meet a sufficient standard of contagion to merit compulsory behavior.

Now, I had all my vaccination when I was a child and I'm glad of it. But respecting individual liberty means allowing people to do stupid things. Because they have the right.

Patterns (plural) is creativity. The more novel patterns you can envision without falling off the edge into schizophrenia, the more creative you are. Quantity and quality, not time.

Intelligence is about puzzles. The faster you can find the one correct solution to each progressively challenging puzzle, the smarter you are. Time, not quantity or quality.

This is where researchers often get in to trouble. The language is slippery - the concept of a "pattern" can have a lot of different meanings. You have to intuit the relationships between the elements of a puzzle to solve it, the pattern which connects the pieces, right?

But that's very different from intuiting the many useful ways pieces of something that isn't a puzzle could be put together. Seeing the many patterns which connect them and, even more importantly, intuiting the missing pieces which complete far more.

Which yields this interesting observation about AI's: the problem isn't making computers smart. They already are. The problem is getting them to evince the slightest bit of creativity.

The wisdom of taking the vaccine is not at issue here. That's obvious and well documented. Your right to compel my behavior is at issue. Unless it poses an imminent threat to your well being, you don't have one.

If we have to have sex to facilitate contagion, if that's the only way to get it, there can be no imminent threat.