It's not, there are people with no friends or pairs. But I've looked at some data samples from facebook, I'd be shocked if the giant component didn't contain more than 98% of non-singleton notes. I'd be very surprised if the largest "Non-giant component" has more than 10 people.

You can have the system estimate the optimal amount of weighing, by observing the inherent volatility in the data.

Actually, most statistical analysis of cop behavior show that cops still harass minorities more than you'd statistically expect from their greater chance to commit crime:

"In the period for which we have data, 1 in 7.9 whites stopped were arrested, compared with approximately 1 in 8.8 Hispanics and 1 in 9.5 blacks. These data are consistent with our general conclusion that the police are disproportionately stopping minorities; the stops of whites are more “efcient” and are more likely to lead to arrests"

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/frisk9.pdf

This isn't about finding potheads...

The algorithm would be dynamic though, so crimes being reported somewhere else would shift police. Could be useful for a short period of time though, provided that you have a giant data gathering apparatus.

"I always thought that this was a result which was known through graph theory of what happens when you get a large number of nodes each with an arbitrary number of unique connections between them, that it would always tend towards the case that you got an average of no more than six degrees of separation for a sufficiently large network."

Not really, no. It's about scale-free networks (Networks that have preferential attachment, IE, people with tons of friends are more likely to get new friends than people with no friends. Their degree distribution, IE, the number of friends, is power-law distributed as opposed to exponential distributions, which come from friendship being totally random). You can model social networks fairly well as scale-free networks empirically. Roughly speaking, the average distance between two random notes is proportional to the log of the log of the number of nodes.

Right. Probably the best way to do it is to randomly draw a couple thousand UID's and run Dijkstra. Then you can do all sorts of neat stuff like geodesic distributions.

The idea is that you provide meta-data along the way (I know this person through school, this person is a good friend, etc).

"I personally think this is bad news bears all around. The infrastructure is already spread thin - at least judging by my internet speeds and costs. Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth."

Comcast is a monopoly in most places, and monopolies tend to purposely restrict supply in order to justify raising prices. A giant influx of customers that would force it to pile money onto building more infrastructure would be a good thing.

http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/ is a good article with numbers that shows how Telcos are purposely raising prices and restricting access even as their own costs go way down.

"Let's not argue about giving everyone a car based on cost, because it's pathetic when compared to things that already exist. The right to a home, the right to a job, the right to medical care and the right to a family ... those are the ones that are expensive.

And you know what ? We're simply not able to pay for them. Seriously, if you raised taxes to 100%, and *somehow* this didn't affect the economy, we wouldn't be able to pay for what we currently have. So it's going to disappear"

Numerically, that isn't true. In the Netherlands for example, everyone has access to cheap and high quality medical care, generous family support and free pre-school, access to massive job-retraining programs that have kept unemployment below 4% even in recessions, as well as access to generous crime-free public housing projects. And they do it all with efficient government and slightly higher taxes, while maintaining a smaller debt burden as a percent of GDP and faster GDP growth over the last 20 years. More on topic, they also have faster and cheaper internet!

Conservatives spend so much time fighting the ghosts of hippies from the 70's that they fail look around and realize that other countries have largely solved the public policy problems facing this country and have done so in ways that made their countries stronger. But unfortunately, a lot of the political establishment is more interested in acting tough and serious than they are in actually solving problems.

"True freedom of speech really doesn't exist anywhere in the world today"

You can use whatever words you want, but the point of public policy is to broadly improve living standards for society at large. There could be some disagreement as to the proper degree of reliance on market forces to get there, but I don't have any patience for anti-social douchebags who claim that the material welfare of the population at large isn't as important as preserving their warped definition of liberty.

A conservative is somebody who stays up at night because somewhere, some poor person might be getting something they don't deserve.

Eh. Every country that has better broadband than us does it via extensive government intervention. Our internet is more expensive and slower, by a considerable margin, than most other countries in the OECD, even when you just look at dense cities. The best internet in the country is in Utah, where government has just rolled out their own fiber. Markets are great, but they don't really work with utilities. Monopolies, network externalities, economies of scale, etc.

" If internet access is a right, food is a right, a car is a right, a home is a right, a job is a right and so on."

The horrors!

Seriously, rights don't exist in and of themselves. They're just things that society has decided are important and should exist for everyone. In the revolutionary era, freedom of speech was all that we could afford to give to everyone. But as society has gotten richer, they've decided to expand the universe of things that everyone is supposed to have (FDR's "freedom from want", to give an example). This is a good thing! Now, it's possible that this particular way of trying to improve the living standards of the poor is going to have unintended consequences, but that's the argument you need to make.

That aside, Comcast is a monopoly in most of it's markets, and the capital costs are too high for that to realistically change. Regulators are necessary to keep them from purposely restricting investment and access and reaping monopoly profits.

Cite?