I was thinking about a comment along these lines.

You've summed it up in the most succinct manner I can imagine.

Again, thank you.

The first year or two in any given country is generally pretty difficult to figure out how US taxes work with them. Once that's done it doesn't become an issue after that. As for US consular services, one gets all the advantages one gets from having another country as backup when something is going wrong. Unrest in a country you are staying in and people need to be evacuated? The US has done that many times for its citizens in the past. It has helped other countries evacuate their citizens as well, but they generally have given priority to US citizens. Have legal trouble in another country? Having access to people from the embassy of the country with the big military helps. US citizens are in many places treated better as a result.

Yes. They don't lose anything by becoming citizens (there are tax issues but they are pretty minor), and being a US citizen has a lot of advantages, like the support of US consulate services. They can then decide which passport to travel on depending on what is most convenient. And they can then donate to American political causes if they want. On the whole the benefits outweigh the costs, and if it really does become an issue they can renounce citizenship later. However, you and they should talk to a lawyer about this first to make sure there aren't any special issues that might come up in your particular case. When in doubt, always go with real legal help not random people on the internet.

This isn't passing itself off as the very sought-after Power Rangers short movie everyone's dying to buy; this is a new work that takes the premise of an old work and does something new, with criticism about the whole "child soldier" angle.

Totally fair use.

With the disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer, this seems like fair use. In the US there are four major prongs to evaluate fair use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use. The first is purpose, which as Wikipedia summarizes is "The first factor is regarding whether the use in question helps fulfill the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public, or whether it aims to only "supersede the objects" of the original for reasons of personal profit. " Since there's no profit here, this does well on the first prong. The second prong isn't very relevant here- it just means that because this is a fictional work, the standard is slightly stricter. The third prong looks at the amount of the original material that has been used. Since only a few names, some colors and certain aspects of costumes were used, the amount used is very small. The fourth factor is whether the material dilutes or competes commercially with the original source material. No one is going to go and not by Power Rangers material or not watch the original because of this. There's clearly no competition or loss of profit to the actual franchise. Overall, seems like a clearcut case of fair use even before we talk about the parody defense.

As a very introverted person who almost borders on agoraphobic I found both of the local maker spaces welcoming and comfortable spaces.

I am also a real nerd/geek sloth who gets excited about things most people do not care one bit about and have no clue about.

The very first time I saw a meeting at one of the local maker spaces, it was almost life changing. For the first time in my life I saw 50 people who were actually like me. I didn't know other people like me even existed.

All I can say is: if you think you might have the slightest interest in a maker space or maker community, go check it out, like the article says, I have found them to be the most welcoming and non judgmental community I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.

So, what is being suggested is that every drone carry with it every person's address that doesn't want a drone above it?

Doesn't that sound a whole lot like a list of addresses the police would love to have? And if you sign up for this list, then somebody who uses a drone for nefarious purposes will respect this address, as opposed to (say) disabling the GPS receiver?

This is a great idea, because we know that you never get unsolicited cell phone calls from Credit Card Services or "Hi, Seniors..."

This is without a doubt the most ridiculous solution to a problem that doesn't exist that I have ever come across.

So, let me state the obvious, just in case someone has missed it: That genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting her back in.

To say that "artificial neural networks are nothing like what the biological brain does" is no more correct than to say "artificial neural networks are just like the brain."

Machine learning neural networks do the same flavor of thing that a real organic brain does, but at a complexity that is -many- orders of magnitude smaller. They also tend to be directed at a single skill, and don't have to cohabit the network with, well, everything.

They're not the same, but they're not totally different, either. Truth is not well served by hyperbole.

Axis webcams permit loading a single jpeg, using one of several tools, none of which include their super fancy "look at the webcam" web app.

For example, using the *nix command "curl" gives you a jpeg of what's currently being watched, presto, no grief, no complications.

What you -do- with the jpeg is very much up to you.

I run multiple cameras looking out of my residence, and stuff them into motion jpeg files on a terabyte disk. I use a cron file to change files on an hourly basis, and with the number of cameras I have, I have on hand about four weeks of video coverage. I'm using an atom processor, and the whole affair was cheap and very easy to maintain.

The problem isn't simple visits. The problem is twofold: no signs of communication and no signs of substantial change to the surrounding environment. We don't see any Dyson spheres or ringworlds or stellar lifting or any attempts at that all of which would be noticeable. If there are civilizations out there they are ignoring massive amounts of resources. Note also that in the scale of a few billion years travel and colonization isn't that big a deal: galaxies are only around 100,000 light years across so even going at 1% of the speed of light and hopping between stars should lead to galactic colonization within a a few hundred million years at the most.

Possible, but seems unlikely. Every species has that level of hysteria? And what about the species born early enough in the universe's history that they didn't have much reason to worry about the Filter?

While this is really neat, it is yet more of the accumulating evidence that there are no substantial barriers to intelligent life arising or even arising in the early universe. This suggests that something is wiping out civilizations, possibly something the civilizations themselves all do. This problem is known as the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter (Strictly speaking the Filter is whatever makes massive, interstellar, civilizations apparently rare, but it looks like most of the Filter really is at or beyond our rough tech level.) The Great Filter could be nuclear war, or epidemics, or biological warfare, or bad nanotech, or possibly something we haven't even thought of that comes completely out of left field. But the evidence for it is growing. This is scary.

That's a question of the level of the burden to establish guilt: the point is that a starting presumption of innocence is a court-specific thing.

The original study can be found at http://agecon.okstate.edu/facu... : Another fun bit in the study:

This appears to follow the general pattern that people will lie to interviewers to seem more smart, educated, or intellectual than they are. They don't mention in the study a correlation between those who said yes to reading a book and then couldn't "remember" it when pressed and those who wanted to ban food containing DNA, but I'd be willing put money on their being a correlation.

A drug test isn't an assumption of guilt in a court of law. The entire guilty until proven innocent is for criminal and civil trials, not for employment. Mandatory drug tests are pragmatically stupid for many reasons in many industries (they are much less likely to catch the hard drugs like cocaine which go out of the system fast than marijuana which lingers, they cost a lot of money), but in the case of Disney where the employees are working on and maintaining rides with many passengers and where people could easily be killed if something goes wrong, drug tests aren't as unreasonable. In general, the real silliness of drug tests is when they are used by things like fast food restaurants or worse when they are used as a condition of welfare (where the evidence is that they cost far far more than they save the state).