I'm not even sure this is tinfoil -- this just sounds like a plain and reasonable explanation.

Exactly. This isn't pro-privacy. This is merely giving the CCP a monopoly on invasive use of personal data.

Not only does he distill and taste heavy water (he indeed confirms that it is sweeter):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc

But he also purchases some heavy oxygen water (_quite_ a bit more expensive!) and tastes that as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH46r9Fvla4

I should also note that I'm not doing an OCR based method -- I'm using a "fingerprinting" perceptual hashing method that instead looks at the entire picture of the card (similar to how Google's "Find Similar Images" function works)

Thanks!

Yeah, it could possibly be sped up a bit, but right now I'm doing a linear search for the nearest Hamming distance in a data set of about 25k cards (all of the MtG cards printed) -- if I were to optimize the Hamming search with a tree of sorts (similar to the algorithms used for spell-checker algorithms) I could possibly speed it up, but no need to prematurely optimize things at this point.

Maybe 0.1 seconds, on average? Not quite fast enough for 30 fps, but close enough that the lag isn't really noticeable to the user.

Currently I'm using OpenCV and a lot of glue code to scan real-time video and recognize cards for MtG. The database is easily extendable for Pokemon, Yugioh, L5R, and other card games.

I wrote it in Python on the PC, and recently ported it over to native Android. So far it works really well, and you can see a screenshot of it in action right here:
http://imgur.com/gallery/v44gIbB

Like others, I'm trying to put my kids through college, and am not quite willing to open-source my months of work just yet. However, I'm not looking to scalp anyone, and my rates are very reasonable. Feel free to PM me if you would like me to license this library to you -- it would be a fairly turn-key solution for you.

When I was your age I was in a similar boat. I went to the Hillsdale Science Camp for two or three summers -- I loved it, and can speak very highly for it. Definitely worth checking out!

Parody.

"higher binding energy" -- meaning that it's harder to pull them apart. Imagine you've got two pits, and you're moving bricks from one to the other. The deeper pit has higher binding energy -- it's tougher to pull the brick out of the pit, and place it into the shallower pit -- lower binding energy. The GP post is asking how this could result in a net gain of energy, when you've had to expend more work pulling bricks out of deep holes and placing them into shallow holes?

I don't know enough about chemistry to comment further, but that's my layman's understanding.

According to the allegations, he did not combine two open-source programs into a super-bot. They claim that the current version of his bot (Rybka) is a copy of Fruit, and an earlier version of his software was a copy of Crafty.

As you said, he closed-sourced them and claimed them as his own without giving attribution -- thereby breaking the software licenses of at least one of them (Fruit), which is GPL.

I know you're speaking in jest, but it's a bit more chilling to consider how many of them (such as the 9/11 suicide hijackers) had college degrees -- they were no flunkies.

I think that's absolutely brilliant. :-D You can just imagine the complaint comments in the Torrent... "This says version 1.2.3.2, but it's only the old 1.2.3.1!!!!11"

It didn't sound like it, no. You can find more info on the LU beta website.

It ended this past Sunday evening -- sorry, you just missed out!