I'd like to see this feature rolled out in every country. There are very few countries that aren't busy censoring something; Whether it's the copywrongers or some anti-terror legislation, or the latest "Save the children" law, Google receives piles of censorship demands weekly from every government. We can't just say "Shame on China!" when everyone else is doing variations on the same theme.

I really need to get some time to work on it some more, but that was exactly the idea I had a few years ago when I set up github repositories to track the US Code and Utah Code.

Of course, the only data I had easy access to was the codified law, some time after it was passed and went into effect, so my repos only track changes at that point. But, yes, what would be perfect is a distributed version control system that tracks the changes. Each legislator, each committee, each house would have its own fork, as would special interest groups, etc., even individual citizens with ideas about how to improve the law. Everyone could hack on their copies, push and pull changes, etc., all tracked by version history, and with official versions merging changes at point of adoption.

Imagine being able to run "annotate" on the law to find out where each bit of it came from! Of course, true sources would still often be obscured.

My next step, BTW (should I ever get time to hack on it), is to build a web UI that allows easy navigation of the code. I need to switch to pulling the XML version of the US Code from Cornell, then create some XSLT filters to hide some of the extraneous stuff and convert the links into a functional form and some stylesheets to present the code nicely, and finally create a web interface that allows the changes to be navigated and summarized.

+1.

If there were a concern about partisans being able to break in and alter the version being distributed, that would be legitimate -- but GPG signatures would address it. Outside of that... it has always been possible for people to create fake versions of documents and try to pass them off as the real thing, and yet this doesn't appear to have been an issue for pending legislation in the past.

The late, great Bill Hicks said it best: I'm so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We're like the bullies of the world, you know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep herder's feet: "Pick it up."
"I don't wanna pick it up mister, you'll shoot me."
"Pick up the gun."
"Mister, I don't want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, mister."
"Pick up the gun."

Boom, boom.

"You all saw him. He had a gun."

Good suggestions. Certainly better than spending another decade obsessing over zero G health issues while sitting in the ISS going no where.

I'm pretty sure the zero G biology issues have been inflated as concerns largely to justify the ISS since its one of the few things its good for.

Heh.

It can be funny how often the people who make up bogus grammatical rules and try to enforce them will often unknowingly violate the pseudo-rules that they're trying to foist on the rest of us. I'd guess that very few people who object to using "gift" as a verb will use "gifted" as an adjective without giving it a thought. I wonder how they'd explain that use of an "-ed" suffix on a word that they've insisted is a noun?

One of my favorite rules about actual English grammar is "Any noun can be verbed." ;-)

(Though actually, there are a few nouns that are difficult to verb, mostly nouns that have no action or relation as part of their meaning. E.g., you have to make up a pretty good shaggy-dog story to set up a valid use of "England" or "America" as a verb. Or do you? I just know someone's going to reply with a totally natural, normal-sounding example ...)

What you're missing is the implied assumption that all of the options will fail most of the time, and that all options are initialized with maximum scores. The goal is to find the design that best motivates the user to take some action (e.g. click a link), and the assumption is that most of the time the user will not take that action. By starting all of the choices at a high value, they will all gradually converge downward to their true effectiveness rate, at which point the most effective will be chosen nearly all of the time. During the convergence process, the "leader" may change, but if the current leader isn't the true best, as it gets driven towards it's true rate, it will eventually dip under one of the others.

If, by chance, a more effective option has a really bad run early on and gets pushed below the true effectiveness rate of another option, it would never recover -- which is why the author includes an occasional randomly-selected choice. If there is a large difference between the effectiveness of the options this is really unlikely to happen, but in the rare event it happens the randomization will eventually fix it. The author also covers a method of handling the case where the audience preferences drift over time, by including the ability to "forget" old input via simple exponential decay.

The only really bad thing about this approach is that it assumes you don't have a lot of repeat visitors. If you do, they'll be annoyed by seeing different versions, apparently at random (from their perspective).

Heh; it's the old "less" vs. "fewer" silliness again.

Consult any math book (that's written in English ;-). The term "less" supplanted "fewer" several centuries back, and "fewer" is only an informal synonym. The term "less (than)" is used in all technical speech for comparing any two real numbers. Similarly, "greater (than)" is used rather than "more (than)" .

You're not only fighting a losing battle; you're fighting one that was lost long before anyone living now was born. Any you're wasting our time commenting on a (semi-)technical "news for nerds" forum on such off-topic nonsense. In a technical setting, "less" is always correct.

Actually, this was alway a bit of bogus peevery. The language historians have documented the interchangable use of "less" and "fewer" going back as far as our language was called "English". And nobody has the legal authority to decree a standard for such things in the common (non-technical) speech, so you actually lost before English even existed. ;-)

If you actually want to go to Mars and beyond you need to fix that to:

Let's see NASA funnel money and contracts to help SpaceX build a reusable Falcon Heavy, long duration crew modules to attach to Dragon, etc.

NASA, Lockheed and Boeing, in their current form, simply aren't going to succeed in bending metal, building new launchers or probably designing anything usable. I think its open to debate if they have the fire in their belly necessary to do anything hard. As long as they get paid even when they fail, like on Ares I, why would they.

The NASA model also fails because of constant political interference by Congress. If engineering and design decisions are predicted on job creation instead of what is right they will continue to fail (i.e. requiring the use of Shuttle SRB's to placate Hatch in Utah where they are made). If the goals being set by Congress and the President are also continue to completey changed every four years they will also continue to fail.

SpaceX has to succeed eventually or they go under. SpaceX benefits greatly from government contracts but Musk designed SpaceX to diversify their revenue base so they aren't totally at the mercy of the bizarre and clueless whims of Congress and Presidents.

The only real option here is to ignore the law, as many of us here do now. The United States, and much of the western world, has become so enamored with short-term profit gain, that they're sacrificing the technological progress of all of humanity. The only rational course of action is to ignore them until another group or organization either through economic, political, or military means, remediates the problem.

Yes, I am suggesting that copyright law could eventually become an issue which countries go to war over. No, I don't think it's that crazy: Governments are already engaging in mass electronic attacks of their enemies. It's only a matter of time before things get physical. UEFI could be perceived as a threat to national security: It's giving one corporation carte blanche access to hardware owned by other governments. Redmond, WA may soon be ringed with missiles and armed guards to keep out other governments when they find out their hardware has been taken over by a foreign power. This is just how the world seems to be evolving... there's too much at stake now.