I guess at the small scale it would probably be cheaper to hire labor for $40/day than to rent a machine? That's weird, though, especially with corn. They definitely aren't making any money unless they have some weird heirloom organic thing going on.

I don't think drug use is stupid, necessarily. I personally would never mess with opioids or cocaine because I suck at managing addiction, but I certainly understand the appeal. And if you can handle it without hurting yourself or anybody else then knock yourself out.

But if you think dropping a manufactured substance into your blood makes you cooler than those that don't, and if you think that people who choose not to engage in drug use are living a less interesting life, and if you think that the only reason a person wouldn't take narcotics is because they are boring or ignorant, you are not quite the free thinking radical you imagine yourself to be. Just a different sort of douchebag, and just as subject to social manipulating as the squares you are looking down upon.

And for the record, sniffing glue, smoking cigarettes and doing methamphetamine *are* really stupid. Cigarettes and inhalants aren't that fun relative to the damage they do and meth can cause permanent anhedonia even in small qualities. There are much safer ways to get high. Cocaine is all right I suppose, as long as you get it relatively pure and don't mind annoying sober people at parties.

The US still has the largest manufacturing industry in the world.

It happens in the US occasionally, too. Ross Perot's presidential campaign in '92 caused both parties to push debt reduction to the front of their economic platforms. Of course that only lasted through the Clinton administration, after which we resumed throwing money around without regard to consequence.

That would be actually reasonably smooth move by Obama if he wishes to temper the wrath of his own party. But it's completely absurd to imagine that it's the petition that would make him change his mind. Still, if you're into such things...

Since you ask? Media Matters for America, which isn't just a 501(c)(4) but a 501(c)(3) and routinely engages in blasting the American right wing.

501(c)(4) organizations are for promoting social causes; donations are nondeductible but operations tax-exempt, aka "if we performed these activities as individuals we wouldn't get taxed again so why should we be taxed as a group?" -- they can engage in cause-oriented political spending. 501(c)(3) are charitable organizations and the donations are tax-deductible and the organization isn't supposed to do partisan political spending at all. Then of course there are 501(c)(5)'s, aka labor unions, a left-wing favorite who are given very broad discretion to engage in very overt political spending to the tune of billions of dollars... but that's its own rabbit hole, and I digress.

Anyway. Media Matters would make an okay 501(c)(4), as they clearly have some idea of a social cause, but they go above and beyond that to get outright all-contributions-deductible 501(c)(3) status while their political enemies were denied any tax exemptions at all.

Parent comment deserves +5, Troll. :)

But don't worry! The US left has already proposed a way to resolve these abuses targeting right-wing political activity! Nancy Pelosi would have us take action to ban these vehicles for right-wing political activity altogether. We can also pretend Citizens United never happened. :P (Whatever else, that lady's got some chutzpah.)

Our desire to influence the politics of the Middle East never had much to do with the USSR. It's always been about oil.

Manual labor wouldn't have an effect on corn and squash. Both of those are mechanized crops. Illegals are used to pick labor intensive crops like berries.

And it's not so much that they would lose subsidies. Subsidies are paid at the market, so it wouldn't make sense to waste the crop. And for the most part you wouldn't have to let a field go fallow anyway, what you would do is set up a crop rotation. But a crop rotation adds complexity and cost. Instead of just growing corn and only having to pay for the equipment to plant and harvest corn, you have to invest in all of the equipment to grow each crop efficiently. Even with government subsidies low-volume farmers aren't making a profit unless they're debt free (extremely rare), and either way efficiency is extremely important when you're selling commodity crops. It's simpler and cheaper to just add fertilizer.

If you look back in time, "family farms" all grew at least a few crops and raised all sorts of livestock. It was its own little ecosystem. But the yields were way, way below what we can get now and the equipment has become much more complicated and expensive. If you're growing several types of crops and raising livestock in the modern era you're going to require huge amounts of both land and capital. Even if you're still technically a family farm it would be a very sophisticated operation dwarfing the farms of 100 years ago in terms of size and complexity. "Family farming" as we understood it in the past is a thing dead and gone.

My understanding was this wouldn't work well for BitCoin, because the raw computing power people are throwing at it with GPUs and ASICs easily dwarfs even significant numbers of zombies, and even WebGL can't help you (too limited an instruction set).

Of course by this point the matter is hearsay... but still, Bitcoin is a tough nut to crack these days.

Oh, I definitely agree that you still need math. I just think there needs to be a clear delineation between CS and SE. If you look at the way, say, mechanical engineering is structured you still take a ton of math and physics. It's just that they also teach you application at the same time. Whereas if you take a pure math program, they're going to teach you math in a more "mathy" way rather than relating it to engineering the way most engineers probably prefer.

Just look at the difference between a textbook that teaches Calculus from a science/engineering perspective and one that teaches it by analysis. It's an entirely different course. But it makes sense to teach mathematicians analysis, because they're thinking about the math in pure symbolic terms and aren't trying to relate it directly to engineering problems.

The problem isn't with the way they teach computer science. It's absolutely correct for them to teach CS in that way. Computation is math, and if you're getting a university-level math degree it should be taught in a rigorous way.

The problem is that there is no clear delineation between CS and software engineering in academia. Most people go through a CS program to become software engineers, and higher level computer science isn't really needed for that. I wish there was an option at more universities for a BS in software engineering, because it would be a much more useful degree for the majority of people that take CS.

"Virtually all electric car advocates agree that when toting up the environmental pros and cons of electric cars, it's only fair to include powerplant emissions."

It's like they say... Only Nixon could go to China. Regardless of the merits of their arguments, these guys ain't Nixon. Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.

It also sounds vulnerable to replay attacks. I can have you touch something that secretly records the signal, then play it back to the actual input device. Seems like a password you're always broadcasting from your skin...

I'm interested in what happens when we assume the best of the cloud for a moment. You have a bunch of resources... and the majority of them are on the other side of a home network connection. What's your strategy here? Set up the game to run like a multiplayer client of the resources that are in the cloud? What constraints does that introduce on the user experience?