Maybe, but did you get a perfect score on your SAT? He did.

The idea that SAT score says anything about intelligence is the dumbest thing said here all day.

SAT measures knowledge in a few specific areas, not intelligence. And it's subject to rampant gaming (did you think all those Kaplan SAT prep courses magically make you 100 points smarter?).

I award you no points. May god have mercy on your soul.

In order for the public at large to have faith in fact checking results Facebook needs to: * Employ fact checkers in proportionate numbers for liberal, independents and conservatives

That's exactly the wrong way to do it.

Facts are not beholden to political views. Facts are knowledge which satisfy a given evidentiary threshold. If you can show sufficient evidence then it's a fact. Often a citation to a reputable (read: non-partisan) source is enough.

What you need are non-partisan fact checkers. People who value facts and evidence above politics or supporting their own beliefs. Despite the marked decline lately, such people do still exist.

You need to find these fair-minded, not-beholden-to-ideology types and have them do fact checks. Sure, sometimes they'll disagree. There will be close or questionable calls. But most of the time, they'll do a far better job than other folks.

Your "solution" just leads to wikipedia-style cage matches. Different political groups will fight for control and one will eventually win. Then they'll magically rig the "proportionate numbers" to show themselves with the most support and choose spineless token puppets to represent the other parties. The cure is worse than the disease.

Problem with a new social network is that all your friends and family are on the old social network.

Correction: The problem with an old social network is that all my family are on it.

I can always make new friends. Ditching family is an incredible value proposition. Where do I sign up?

Issuing taxes and fees to the local population for a local service is a local as local can get, and the federal government has no right to interfere.

Well someone clearly never went to law school.

There are plenty of issues where Federal interests trump local interests under the Constitution. Many under the commerce clause, but other clauses as well. For example, Federal regulations can preempt local regulations where interstate commerce is impacted. That's why California's exception to set their own air quality standards is, well, an exception.

The problem with armchair lawyers is they focus on one small piece of vague language, like the 10th amendment. It doesn't work that way. You have to consider the entire document holistically. Some parts conflict with other parts. There are two centuries of rules about how to resolve those conflicts.

You wouldn't take coding advice from someone who took an intro to javascript course. Why do certain segments of the population believe that complicated legal issues can be resolved with a grade school American history primer?

Your post is mostly spot-on. Just a couple things:

The Bay-Dole Act explicitly grants them the legal right to do this and it is a HUGE part of the business of research universities these days.

Indeed. And the very reason for Bayh-Dole? People complained that freely available university research wasn't being commercialized. No company wanted to invest in technology that its competitors could use freely. Whether that's accurate or not, that's how the bill was sold to Congress.

Because of that bit of law, research universities are really patent machines that churn out technology transfer businesses.

That's the story universities sell. The statistics say that very few do meaningful technology transfer that makes any money. Something like a half dozen universities account for all the licensing revenue. UC, Stanford, U Florida, maybe Michigan, and a few others. U Florida is only on the list because of Gatorade. Other schools do tech transfer at a net loss. Though they keep selling it as a revenue generator.

It turns out technology transfer is hard. Most universities don't do it very well, even when you take revenue out of the equation. By far the most common way successful technology transfer happens is when the student / faculty researcher actually goes to work for the company commercializing the research. Otherwise, tech transfer almost never happens well, apart from a few world-changing inventions like CRISPR.

You're solving the wrong problem. The issue isn't that policy makers don't understand the technology. The issue is that they don't care how the technology works.

To use the iphone example - the FBI has very smart technical analysts. They are fully aware of how hard it is to break strong encryption. That's why they want Apple to make phones that are easy for them to access. Not because they misunderstand encryption. Because they value their ability to access suspect's data more than the public's ability to protect their information.

IOW it's a clash of values. One side values privacy above crime fighting, the other doesn't. No amount of technical knowledge will resolve the problem.

They don't care about the costs... at all. They do care about controlling access to information. ... They should only have access to government approved messages.

Complete fail. PACER does absolutely nothing of the sort.

This service is built for lawyers, who can easily afford the charges (not because of personal wealth, but because the charges are passed on to clients). Moreover, information services retrieve the information in bulk and make it available to their users. PacerPro takes PACER data and makes it all available for a flat monthly fee, starting at $30 per person per month.

Not to mention that the information on PACER is gobbledygook to most people. Without some understanding of the law, the docs won't make sense. Or worse, people will think they know what it says and completely misinterpret the result.

So the 10 cents per page doesn't restrict information in the slightest. The info is only relevant to legal professionals, and there are plenty of ways for them to get it. And anything can be freely shared once retrieved.

As a control of information, PACER is a complete fail. That's not what it was designed for, and not what it does. Look for your boogeymen elsewhere.

If they fail to convince the Supreme Court to grant a hearing, it's all over and Oracle wins and software as an industry basically ends, swallowed by lawyers.... If the ruling by the blithering idiots in the Court of Appeals is allowed to stand...

Not really. Jurisdiction is confusing even to lawyers.

The court system is divided into circuits. There are 11 numbered circuits and DC. Each circuit covers a limited geographic area. 9th Circuit is California and the west. 2nd circuit is NY and half of New England. Etc.

The Federal Circuit has no geographic area. They are an appeal court that handles patent and maritime cases. They almost never get a copyright case. How they got this one, I don't recall. There must have been some extraordinary circumstances.

In any case, the Fed Circuit's rulings are only binding on the whole country where they have original jurisdiction: patents and maritime law. In other areas such as copyright, their rulings are not binding on anyone. Other circuits follow their own laws. CA federal courts follow 9th circuit rulings. NY courts follow 2nd circuit. Etc.

At best, other circuits may look at a Fed Circuit copyright ruling as advisory. But the law in their own circuit determines the copyright rules they follow.

This is why you often hear of Supreme Court cases as circuit splits. When e.g. the 9th circuit and the 2nd circuit make different rules, sometimes the Supreme Court steps in to unify them with one rule for the whole country. Otherwise the circuits operate independently and you get fragmented rules. This is considered a feature not a bug,

tl;dr version - Fed Circuit rules on copyright mean jack squat. No other US court is required to follow them.

What does knowing a language mean?

I am proficient in a couple, that I can write off the top of my head with little or no reference material. Python, javascript, and C.

Several more languages I used heavily in the past, but not in a long time. I would need to check syntax and library references as I write, but could put together something passable without difficulty. C++, Java, Perl, PHP, bash, Pascal.

Other languages I used for a couple months on a one-off project. ML, Snobol, Fortran, COBOL, basic.

Then there languages I played around with a bit, but never did anything substantial with. LISP, Ada, C#, Eiffel, Objective C, Smalltalk, D, Ruby. I know something about them - but not much.

And there are languages I've heard of. Maybe even seen a program or two in, but never studied or tried to write in myself. Swift, Rust, visual basic, Algol, Go, brainfuck, Erlang, TCL, Haskell. I know of these languages.

So what should my answer be? Which of these languages do I "know"?

the future is the next billion users and more mobile and cloud, reorganizing the company to allow that transition to happen more smoothly is a smart forward looking move.

Correction: 10 years ago that would have been a smart, forward looking move. Now it's just yielding to the plainly obvious.

You don't get credit for saying the tide is coming in when you wait until your ankles are wet.

That's true. Streets (roads with driveways) benefit the property owner like you said, and so streets should be financed with a street frontage fee. Then the property owner can decide how much street he/she wants to pay for. Non-street roads benefit the traveler and therefore should be billed to the traveler.

Missing the point entirely. You don't benefit from the street frontage. You benefit from the entire road network. Do all your groceries and domestic goods spring forth fully formed from your front lawn? Hmm, wonder how they got to the stores you visit. You buy online, you say? Has UPS perfected their hoverjet delivery service yet? Didn't think so.

The value is the network. Not your curbside.

False. In fact, the poor love pay per use, because it gets them out of paying taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes. Except maybe you.

Are you joking? One survey of unknown methodology proves absolutely nothing. Besides which, all the survey data in the world is irrelevant to my point. "Poor people love it" and "it burdens poor people" aren't remotely the same thing. Poor people vote against their economic self interest all the time. Whether they like something has nothing to do with whether it's a fair and equitable system.

Likewise comparing tolls to sales tax is asinine. Sales tax is the most regressive tax there is, since poor people have to spend a much greater proportion of their income. Saying tolls aren't as bad as sales tax is like saying losing a limb isn't as bad as decapitation.

Not to mention citing a paper by two urban planners in a policy journal is laughable. Economists do these analyses rigorously. If it were a serious study it'd be published in a peer-reviewed economics journal.

Please, don't waste my time with your nonsense.

This is why we need to switch from taxes to user fees. For example, instead of mostly paying for roads with sales and other general fund taxes, pay for them 100% from gas taxes and other user fees. So if you don't want to give the government your money, don't drive, or at least don't drive a gasoline powered vehicle. Legally avoiding the gas tax is much simpler than avoiding the sales tax!

Worst. Idea. Ever. Roads are the very definition of a public good. Everyone benefits from better roads, whether they drive on them or not. They bring goods to your store, food to your market, customers to your business. Unless you live on an Amish compound and churn all your own butter, you need roads to get through your day - even if you don't own a car.

Live closer to the office? Your office just relocated 10 miles over, too bad for you. And when many people work in a central location downtown, few can afford those neighborhoods anyway.

Pay per use is horribly inefficient. You burden the poor and those with the greatest distances to travel. You penalize commuter cars who have next to no impact on road wear and tear, while semis chew up the pavement with orders of magnitude more damage. You waste more resources collecting the small fees than you spend on the roads themselves. Pay roads are just an awful system. I've lived enough places with both to see the difference.

Worst. Idea. EVER.

Thus, human beings matter a great deal more than rocks in the only context that matters, our own.

Typical arrogant thinking from squishy water bags. You have neither the strength and constancy of granite, nor the adaptable and accommodating nature of limestone. Puny carbon sludge.

Rock Lives Matter!

One metric that I find appealing is, what language requires the least amount of lines of code. Bugs are often related to lines of code, also, if you're maintaining code, the fewer lines to look at the better.

One just need to look at perl one-liner contests to know that this is way wrong.

Indeed - but perhaps not for the reason you think. It's not just number of lines of code - it's number of semantic units the programmer has to digest.

Perl achieves brevity by cramming lots of arcane symbols on one line. That's terse but also very dense, making it harder to comprehend. Each symbol adds another semantic element to unravel: @$%#$%[%#^$#]=$_;

OTOH Python achieves brevity in ways that aid comprehension. Syntactic symbols are kept to a minimum, and expressive names are encouraged and used throughout the standard library.

Lines of code is usually meant as a rough proxy for semantic complexity. More lines = more things to digest. This may be true within one language, but across different languages it breaks down.

The real measure is semantic units (operators, variable names, control flow, etc) to digest. For instance x += y and x = x + y may be functionally equivalent, but the first one is easier to digest. There are 3 semantic units rather than 5. Semantic complexity can be better approximated by looking at the parse tree for any given code. The number of nodes in the tree tells a lot more about complexity than lines of code.