Development is heavily driven by experience. For example, if you cut off a sense during development, that brain real estate gets annexed by adjacent functions. By the same token, I would expect that if you contrived an elaborate experiment in which an infant never saw an object a second time until well after the usual development timeline for understanding the persistence of objects and then raised them normally, they wouldn't have developed the abilities of a typical child their age.

Given their experiences at that time, that's a reasonable inference.

I don't doubt the value of citizen investigation, I just think it's quite apparent that it's better to apply it more deliberately rather than scattershot. It's silly to think you'll find something in a information dump like this that you haven't already caught a whiff of elsewhere.

They also have no expectation of privacy for what they put in the dumpster behind their office, but people generally don't sift through public figures' trash. There's little reason to expect to find anything of interest and this is the FOIA equivalent of a fishing expedition.

Of course FOIA fishing expeditions aren't illegal and you're welcome to sift through her trash. However, I can also exercise my right to tell you that you're sifting through trash.

I can't stand the woman but this whole thing is petty.

I find that explicit reasoning (premises, arguments, conclusions, etc.) constitutes very little of my actual thought process. Much more of it is behavioral conditioned response (mammoths fall of cliff->man that was good eaten') and pattern recognition based inference, both of which are tied into our emotional thinking.

I find that I tend to react to things at a gut level and that reason is what I use to support (or rationalize) these gut decisions and communicate them to others.

I'm one of the few people here who's been hoping for a system like this. I absolutely hate using personal information (name, DOB, SSN, mother's maiden name) as a means of authenticating one's identity. As it stands right now, if you know those, you may as well be the person. It's awful.

That said, this proposal isn't perfect and I believe that it is absolutely vital that instead of trying to stop it because it's not perfect, that instead we try to make it better and make an effort to see that new policy reflects our needs. The main issue with the current proposal is that it still has a single point of failure where if someone gets my phone/smart card/login (and associated PIN/password/etc.), I have my identity stolen. This proposed system is better than the current system in that I should be able to revoke a stolen identity easily under this proposal. However, there are other measures that could be taken to make this framework more secure.

I'd prefer to see a web of trust system based on multiple providers. I pay a phone bill with a given address, phone number, and personal information. I have a bank account with that same information on file. I pay rent with that same information on file. We need to have a way for all of these relationships to be used to say: we all have this guy on file at this address and phone number, and if there's someone else out there who doesn't answer this phone number and mail at this address, then he probably isn't the same guy.

Certain things are by their nature difficult and I don't think it's reasonable to expect these things to be solvable.

a) My expectation is that if there were any really good ways of gathering and storing energy, then lower life-forms would be able to exploit these without having to go through the trouble of evolving into higher lifeforms and then figuring it out. You also have the inherent issue that forms of energy which store well are the most difficult to collect.

b) Weak AI is hard because maintaining large collections of information, without them gathering weeds of misinformation, is hard. Strong AI is harder because of the first problem, and I suspect that by the time you put together a system complex enough to match human intelligence, it'll be every bit as unreliable as a human being.

c) I don't really understand this one. If you think of all the things you need to make and distribute any one thing, you always run out of something before you can scale it up to distributing it to everyone.

What we really need is sustainable infrastructure, everywhere in the world. I don't think that's a problem we're just going to crack open all at once. It's going to be something that we'll struggle towards for a long time, and maybe, just maybe, eventually break that barrier.

That's true. But there's more to it than that. The reason they made these risky loans was that they didn't have any incentive to properly vet the applications and in fact they had an incentive to make as many loans as possible. For each loan they made, they could sell it into a MBS and also receive a piece of the monthly payments to administer the mortgage.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't blame the lenders (or some of the borrowers), but in general, I think you should expect that if someone can make money by doing X, they'll do X. People generally don't leave money lying on the table.

What created these bad dynamics, was that there was a demand for mortgages due to the misvaluation of these MBSs. The top tranches were rated as AAA, which made them very appealing to various fund managers who were required to invest a percentage of their funds in AAA rated securities (which have lower return than other investments).

The reason these things got rated as AAA was the model used to value them was stupid. It essentially boils down to, there hasn't been a very high correlation of defaults in the past, therefore there will not be a high correlation of defaults in the future. That model then of course failed when it couldn't predict something that had not been observed, that there can be a failure mode where the correlation of defaults increases overnight.

So the main two issues are that the people who could have prevented this had no incentive to and current financial theory thinks that it can value a bunch of securities using a combination of the central limit theorem and rainbows. I can suggest a solution for the former problem: structure MBS contracts so that the initial lender has some liability for the difference between the initial loan price and the price at foreclosure auction and institute some sort of reserve requirements to cover this. However, I have no idea what to do about the latter problem. I think that right now, the financial world is trying to put hard numbers on too many things that are by their nature gooey and squishy.

Objects that can only be specified using the Axiom of Choice involve an infinite number of arbitrary choices. This means they have infinite Kolmogorov complexity (i.e. it's impossible to write a finite computer program that outputs a representation of the object).

That doesn't really square well with my (limited) understanding of physics where infinities are always tucked away behind event horizons and every interesting quantity is strictly bounded.

Of course, throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out Lebesgue integrals which you need for modern physics. My answer to that is that maybe the integrals work because they're just an approximation for very fine grained sums. (Discrete math major here. Analysis can suck it!)

Hulu has Yes/No buttons on ads with the question "Is this ad relevant to you?". I don't know if it actually does anything yet though.

Maybe the judge would accept a video essay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ymA_3MrXI&feature=related

I thought it was a graph theory exercise.

No, it doesn't brute force every possible combination. You can perform an operation on a superposition of all possible k-bit strings, but you can't actually get all of the 2^k outcomes of that operation. If you measure the result, you'll get one of the 2^k outcomes at random.

Basically you start from that superposition of k-bit strings, then you apply some operations to that state so that all of the the correct answers are in phase with each other and constructively interfere. Effectively, you can only apply this kind of speed-up if you can exploit the numerical properties of the problem to ensure that this happens.

Yeah... um.... I don't think you should be using 7% for personal finance TVM calculations right now.

http://finance.yahoo.com/bonds/composite_bond_rates