We could certainly do with a lot less people going around saying Math is hard. That's defeatist thinking. Math is easy!

I've had dozens of college profs and the ones which stood out were the ones who were good listeners as well and perceptive of what students struggle over. Generally I found when I thought a course was 'hard' I knew 80% or more of the material or concepts, but I was struggling over one or two things which blocked conceptual understanding of things further on.

Subbing, as a TA once in a programming class I was perplexed how people couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of a Variable (think of it as a name on a bucket, into which I add or remove apples, yet they were still stumped).

Things do tend to be more 'hard' when the student spends more time listening to their nay-saying peers than their instructors. When you actually believe Math, Chemistry or Physics is 'hard' your belief is your own largest obstacle to learning.

Stick figures? Well that's a relief. Now we don't need to worry about lectures from Sexual Harassment Panda.

If you can't think of ways by which you could derive indicators of the nationality of a sender, and maybe a recipient, of a piece of email you aren't really trying.

I seem to recall that the revealed procedure for accidently accessing information from an American is that they have to file a report which is the basis for tracking incidents. I doubt that they have breached the Constitution since it is bigger than you probably think, and includes this entire section called Article II. You only arrest people if there is reasonable suspicion they have committed a crime for which there is no mitigating circumstance. You haven't proved that to be the case.

It seems pretty clear that they don't think "they can get away with anything," otherwise they wouldn't bother going to the courts, and ignore the FISA courts orders.

Thanks for clearing that up.

What are you talking about? From that article they made a few comments about how they wish to move away from Google's Android. And actually here's the exact quote that sentiment was extrapolated from:

That's a quote from some Chinese Ministry, not even a group of Chinese developers. I hear that more like "Chinese are reluctantly still installing Google's Android on most of their phones. Google's Android use still rising sharply in China with no end in sight." Can you point me to the Chinese repo for the forked source to android? Surely if it's widely distributed it must also make the source available?

'Gleefully gone their own way'? Yeah, tell you what, fork Android for China and let's compare the two code bases for support and worldwide use one year later. I suspect the glee will be entirely one-sided and it's not going to be China's Android.

I don't know. You tell me. I don't know what the orbital period for this planet is or the distance it orbits at. Orbital speeds are pretty fast though. Google tells me that the earth moves about 107,000 km/hr around the sun. If their instruments are sensitive enough, they might see the difference. I would also guess there is a possible gravitational redshift and lensing depending on the mass of the star and the orbital distance.

In other words, it's about 1.6 Kessel Runs? But how fast is that?

The memo specifically called out Office365 and Azure, which is the foundation of their plans to extract an annual tithe from all the copies of Office in the world.

They've been seeing this day come for over a decade, and it's been their number one concern. How do they keep selling something that isn't improving as much as its price tag might suggest? Office 2010 had only one real competitor, Office 2007, which in turn had only Office 2003 to beat. Since Microsoft has turned the corner on code quality, their latest products are so well written that the users have stopped clamoring for a not-broken version. They aren't putting out an Office 2013 because even their thickest users no longer see any value in upgrading.

The thing Microsoft believes users really want these days is multiple-device integration and someone else to manage their systems. Users want their documents at home, at school, on the road, at the office, and on their phone (specifically on their iPhones and Androids, screw you Windows phone.) And they don't want to back up their stuff any more, they'll pay someone else to back up their stuff. This move lets them give away Office for free, because they get to collect the rent on your files forever.

Oh, and did we tell you what happens if you stop paying? Nahh...

FTA

To isolate the light contribution of the planet, Evans and his colleagues waited for the planet to move behind the star during its orbit, so that its light would be blocked, and looked for changes in light colour.

A spectrograph on board the Hubble monitored light coming from the source, in wavelengths ranging from yellow to ultraviolet. During the eclipse, the amount of observed blue light decreased, whereas other colours remained unaffected. This indicated that the light reflected by the planet's atmosphere, blocked by the star in the eclipse, is blue.

So, they are observing the change in light when the planet moves farther away (behind its star) and seeing less blue, thereby conjecturing the planet is blue. But wouldn't the planet's light also redshift as it moves away and blueshift as it moves toward us? How much of the color change is accounted for by doppler?

You're missing the bigger picture. Typing error rates only matter on actual letter-at-a-time typewriters (regardless of any correction technology.) Once word processors arrived, though, the error rate ceased to have any meaning. If you can maintain 80 WPM while making 10 errors that you went back and corrected, you are twice as productive as someone who can type 40 WPM with no errors.

Typing teachers harped on error rates long after the point where they made sense. We have to remember they were "typing" teachers, and they were just passing on the way they learned.

"important" should not be a matter of opinion, but of objective profit measurement.

But what if you have something that is making good money now, but another division that could be making an amazing amount of money if managed differently?

If you just base things on objective profit measurements, you'll never undertake the risky projects that can also have order of magnitudes better reward.

Except it turned out not to be the case when the Soviets were bugging the U.S. Embassy's typewriters. CBS News had learned about the original typewriter bugging from a leaker, and in their reporting sought out an expert to explain how the bugs worked. The expert guessed that it was an audio bug. But this technique was refuted in the NSA paper "Learning from the Enemy", on page 18:

Elsewhere in the paper, the NSA explains the bug was hidden in a metal bar, and magnetically detected the ball moving mechanism.

Thanks, AC, for the link. Very interesting story!

In an ironic twist, I present this paragraph from page 23 of the report:

"Eight months after the GUNMAN discovery, the story broke in the press. By highlighting the damage, press coverage helped to focus the attention of the U.S. government on improving the security of its information."

Perhaps Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning can present this in their trials.

Me holding up dripping keyboard: "Were you drinking coffee around this thing?"

Secretary: "No."

Were this an ideal world, her nose would have grown out about 2 inches.