Call me liberal, but I don't think we should be teaching our kids improper definitions for "exponential" *or* myths that O(n^2) algorithms like bubble sort are bad.

Quick: which is going to be faster to sort a list of 4 items, bubble sort or randomized partition merge sort? What's that you say? Proper algorithm selection requires more than knee-jerk application of platitudes? Exactly.

Yes, but Christmas shopping implies that someone else is going to make that purchase for you, and iPad Minis are vastly overpriced.

If you were my relative, this is the tablet I'd get you. It's far cheaper than the iPad Mini. Its screen is almost one inch bigger than the iPad Mini. And its battery lasts a hell of a lot longer too.

That's probably why the author of the article talked about the base iPad Mini 3, not the iPad Mini 2.

And yes, from Apple's own comparison page, there doesn't seem to be any difference between the iPad Mini 2 and the iPad Mini 3. But to be fair to Nokia, its specs are superior to the iPad Mini 2 and 3.

And also, the Android tablets are the ones that initially embraced the 7 inch to 8 inch sizes, so one could say that Apple is the one that cloned those tablets from Asus, Samsung, HTC, and LG. But then again, a specs side-by-side comparison of Nokia's new tablet wouldn't look as good against the newer Android tablets made other manufacturers. Not to mention, the word "iPad" still has the most mind share, where it comes to people talking about tablets in general.

Smug sense of superiority. Are you an American by any chance?

Yes N. Korea is poor, but do not underestimate your enemies. Look at what they've actually done instead of making fun blindly.

Training people in C and Linux and Windows exploits is not all that hard or expensive compared to, say, building your own nuclear warheads and ICBMs. Former can be done for a few million bucks. The latter costs billions and the engineering is orders of magnitude harder than teaching coding.

In case you didn't know, the Norks managed to build their own nukes and also put a satellite in orbit using their own rocket recently.

NAT and double NAT. With those 1024 IPs, they can get millions of computers online if they wanted to.

May be, but targeting Facebook first may just be a matter of strategy.

Facebook resells a lot of the information it gathers from its users, a lot more than Google does. I'm not saying that Google is less evil than Facebook, but if they're doing the same thing as Facebook, Google is lot better at keeping this kind of private information to itself.

Exactly. Blacks with 100 IQ do about as well as whites with 100 IQ. I've known a black colleague whose IQ I'd estimate to be around 120. He was definitely one of the better workers at the company.

Now the elephant in the room is, do all the races have exactly the same IQ distribution amongst their population? Test results say no. Need citation? Just look up anything, SAT, GRE, MCAT, police dept entrance exams, fireman exams, military exams, straight IQ tests, anything. The body of evidence is overwhelming.

There were enough tells in the first movie that I decided to skip both prequel sequels. My only regret concerns the movie not made.

The problem when you have a strong emotional investment in something is that one's instinct is to give it one more chance. By the time you've watched two bad movies, you're almost pot-committed to watch the third.

It takes a special will to abandon a franchise without falling into the emotional mulligan trap, and so there's ultimately little incentive for Jackson to not do what he did.

I'm slowly learning. My loyalty function has now evolved to where it's almost vertiginous.

I do not think you know what Occam's razor is. It does not mean you need conclusive evidence to believe in something. It means the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, other things being equal.

In order to say CIA hacked Sony, you would have to invent all sorts of motives and cover-up to explain it. The simpler explanation is that N. Korea did it, because the circumstances and evidence so far all point to it.

The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea [...]

Um... I hate to be the non-technical person that points this out, but...

The evidence that implicates NK on the previous attacks - is it the same evidence used to assign blame in the current attack?

Is this citing the conclusions based on the same evidence/situation from previous attacks to give legitimacy to the evidence in the current attack?

What a scam! Claim something on flimsy evidence, then cite those claims to give legitimacy to the flimsy evidence!

I wonder... can I do this sort of thing in the scientific literature? Hmmmm...

I would have turned myself in too.

Nobody likes being woken up at 5 AM by a bunch of police thugs breaking down their door, manhandling them, and confiscating all their computers for evidence.

The same way it's currently done now, with both bribes and sponsorship money.

In any case, I agree with you. If video game studios want their own competitions, they should just organize their own leagues.

You can look back at the 1950 olympic games and see people running and jumping and doing other things that we still do today.

Now imagine that video games were included, and you look back at the 1980 olympic games. Overweight geeks with mullets and bowl cuts competing intensely over.... Pong and Breakout.

50 years from now, watching old footage of overweight geeks with lip piercings competing in Counter Strike and Call of Duty will seem just as lame and outdated.

... you are an idiot.

You're going to see the cops as being bad and wrong and evil even as they save your life.

Its mind numbing that you don't understand why that turned out the way it did.

And for reference, normal health people don't die from a chokehold thats released as soon as the person loses conscious, fat ass had a heart attack due to his own health issues.

That is what the Economist had to say about patents... in 1851. The idea that inventors (both people toiling in their garage and Big Pharm companies spending billions on medical R&D) should be encouraged to invest their effort into research and share the results by allowing them to profit from them, is a valid one. But patents are, and have been for over a century, a particularly poor way to ensure reward for inventors without stifling innovation. And remember that patents were not even invented with the purpose of ensuring a profit for inventors; the purpose was to encourage inventors to share so that society as a whole might benefit. The inventor's profit was a means rather than an end.