I've had sat psychologist administered IQ tests a year apart and had my score differ by 10 points. I've been told that, in fact, this is perfectly normal and well within the accuracy expected of IQ tests by psychologists who take them seriously. I wouldn't worry about IQ scores changing (they may well do that, but it is equally likely measurement error). IQ is a very imperfect measure to begin with. Our ability to measure it, even under the best of conditions, is extremely poor. Take most IQ studies with a grain of salt.

You may want to re-think your position.

The FCC redefined common Carrier to INCLUDE ISP's.

ISP's are defined as "an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet."

I am sure Google and Google mail qualify under that definition, as would Facebook and Twitter.

>Basically, this was the option open to the principal, knock it over to the police.

When your lightsaber is in the shop for repairs, calling the police is the only way to deal with a blaster . . .

hawk, reminding everyone to engage in preventative maintenance

Government: Crap, we got hacked again. How are we supposed to protect our lists of security clearances and employee records? Its so confusing.

IT people of the wold collectively reply: ID10T Errors, you have to solve them first! Then you can protect your data.

So, while they deserve the year ban, the apology is nice. It's a shame we can never know what results a fair competition could have yielded ... and an even bigger shame that the media misreported Baidu as overpowering Google. I suppose the damage is done and the ILSVRC has made the right choice.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the classification problem but why isn't this run like most other classification problems (like Netflix and many other data challenges) where you get ~80% for training and the remaining 20% are held back for the final testing and scoring? Is the tagged data set too small to do this? Seems like wikimedia would contain a wealth of ripe public domain images for this purpose ...

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.

And for some reason, they don't like to tell you the salary up front. I made it a practice to refuse to follow up if I don't know the potential salary. I made the policy after wasting my time in interviews only to discover the companies were run by tight-wads who were offering far below the industry standard (which explained why they were hiring).

You really think a small fraction of executives have IT Skills?

If there is a small fraction then it is so small as to be non-existent. The last executive I met who claimed IT skills kept coming down to the IT department and asking us to answer lists of questions, sometimes it was "Can I get someone to write a C++ program to do XYZ?" where XYZ had nothing to do with the job. Come to find out, he was working on a degree in CS and was having the IT group do his homework.

25 years in the field and I have yet to meet an executive with anything more than the basic windows user skills. The bulk of them consider dual core systems with 2gig of ram and 500g of hard drive space as "Top of the line Desktops"

I remember that memo

"MEMO: Politicians should only be trusted as far as you can comfortably spit out a dead rat."