Exactly. I'm a Canadian living in Romania for the past five years, and have been following Romanian politics as well as I can (as an "outsider") during this time. Of course, since I also have no long-term stake in the outcome of Romania's political chaos (as I will move home eventually, and could just move home sooner if things get really bad), I like to think that I'm a little more objective (though I'm undoubtedly somewhat influenced by friends and coworkers who do have a vested interest).

Here are some relevant background tidbits for this story:

• - There is currently a political struggle between the prime minister (Ponta) and president (Basescu) regarding the relative powers of the presidency and the parliament. (Not knowing anything about the Romanian constitution's delineation of powers, I honestly don't know who is overstepping what.)
• - The parliament has suspended the president, pending a recall referendum on the 29th.
• - The timing of this plagiarism scandal is very convenient, with regards to the damage it has done to Ponta's credibility, immediately prior to the impeachment. (This is where I am inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that the president's cronies probably had something to do with the plagiarism coming to light now. I'm not saying that the plagiarism didn't happen, as it seems quite certain that it did, but rather that the timing of the revelation is not coincidence.)
• - The prime minister "earned" a PhD while sitting as a cabinet minister in parliament. His PhD supervisor (Adrian Nastase) was the sitting prime minister at the time. I chuckle at the thought of Victor Ponta excusing himself from a state dinner to go write a few pages on his dissertation. I also chuckle at the thought of a cabinet minister and prime minister sitting down to have grad student/supervisor discussions on edits to the dissertation. In my opinion, neither of them were actually directly involved in the writing of the thesis -- it was some party drones paid to throw something together that Ponta could claim as his own, and Nastase could endorse before a "committee" (of professors loyal to the party, or at least loyal to the favours Nastase could bestow). Those party drones recognized that it was purely a symbolic PhD (since Ponta is a politician, not an academic), so they lifted content from other sources.
• - Nastase last month was convicted of using millions in state money to fund his run for the presidency in 2004, and sentenced to 2 years in prison. He supposedly tried to commit suicide to avoid prison, but "missed" (with a gun at point-blank range). This is a whole other bizarre scandal, not directly related to the plagiarism affair, but connected to the current political craziness in Romania.

As the parent alluded to, the root problem is that both sides of this particular farce are backed by people who got their power under the former communist regime. Nastase and Basescu were both well-connected prior to the revolution. Ponta was a child in 1989, and hence has no connections of his own to the old regime, but was trained through his political career by Nastase.

As a foreigner, I mostly shake my head at the current situation, and am not terribly optimistic about either outcome in the upcoming referendum. Politics in Romania truly does seem to be a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. I would like to see things improve, as the country and people are fantastic. I am confident that Romanian politics will eventually get better, but probably not within my time here.

Assuming the blog post was indeed written by the real Steve Mann, a guy who has been doing this wearable computing stuff for a while, I think we can trust that it's true. (And if he didn't write it, I would expect to hear something from him, saying that it's a fake.)

It's also not his first altercation related to his wearable stuff. See, for example, this Slashdot story from 2002.

When asked for comment, I hear one of the lawyers replied "ORA-01337: Message 1337 not found".

It's been a while since I studied optical therapy (before dropping out a PhD program in medical biophysics), but I'm pretty sure I remember that you can use fiber-optics. I think it's relatively "easy" (and not too invasive) to poke the patient with a fine fiber-optic cable (guided by ultrasound, I suppose) that delivers the laser light at the target site. In theory, I suppose they might be able to leave the fiber-optics in the patient for a while to deliver treatment over a few days/weeks (like a sort of "optical catheter").

Now, I only had about four weeks of classes on optical therapy 6 years ago (as part of a course that also covered thermal and radiation therapies), so I'm only barely more qualified to write on the subject than most anonymous internet jackasses. That said, I do have a clear memory of slides from class with patients with fiber-optic cables poking into their heads or other parts of their bodies, so I remember that it can be done.

The 486DX4s ran at 75Mhz (with a 25Mhz bus, since despite the name, they only had a 3x multiplier. The DX4-100 had a 33Mhz FSB.). The first Pentiums were 60 or 66Mhz, with no multiplier (i.e. the CPU and FSB were clocked the same). The 75Mhz Pentiums came a year later and ran on a 50Mhz FSB (at 1.5x), and were cheaper (or at least the same price) compared to the 66Mhz model (since you had a faster CPU, but slower bus), if I recall correctly.

While I distlike the idea of TVs in bedrooms (unless you're a college kid whose only private space is the bedroom), I have to strongly disagree with the idea that a TV with a camera (that can watch you without your knowledge) in a common room is even remotely acceptable. Most of the time that I spend interacting with my child is in the living room, with the TV in plain sight, on standby (unless we're watching Sesame Street). I am strongly opposed to the very idea that someone could be watching or listening to what I'm teaching my children. (For what it's worth, I don't have anything to hide, assuming a secular upbringing loosely based on the "golden rule" isn't outlawed anytime soon, but if it were to be outlawed, I wouldn't want my TV ratting me out.)

To be honest, I would rather have a camera in the bedroom. I don't particularly care about shadowy figures watching me have sex with my wife. (We enjoy it, but we're not especially camera-friendly, and we don't do anything that you couldn't find much more professional "amateurs" doing online.) The values that we instill in our children are personal and way more important than our naked asses.

Who brought up the word "politician" (before you)?

The grandparent (and the referenced French law) talk about people "working in government" (i.e. bureaucrats + politicians, but the bureaucrats far outnumber the politicians).

Was Randall Long elected to his position at the FTC? No? So, he's not a politician. He's a former bureaucrat. Sure, many bureaucracies have generous pension plans, but they tend to be linked to the number of years served. Thus, your "serve a month and get payed for 40" example is completely irrelevant.

I am genuinely curious about how the law in France works, with regards to bureaucrats being able to support themselves after leaving their positions. Do they receive some sort of government compensation during this period? Or is it, as another post suggested, simply the case that the rule serves to keep people in the bureaucracy?

Classic...

Really? As a Canadian living in Romania, I have to strongly disagree. The education system here appears to be heavily based on rote learning (much moreso than I saw in Canada or attending American schools in my childhood). The folks I have hired have had excellent imagination, in spite of, not because of, their education (and have generally been the ones who skipped a lot of classes at university and taught themselves the required material).

That said, I previously worked (in Canada) as a physics researcher in a hospital, and we would regularly "joke" about the MDs not being "real doctors" (in contrast to how most people view PhDs), since their main skill appeared to be rote memorization. (See also Richard Feynman's story about his diagram of cat anatomy when he gave a presentation to some med students.) Of couse, as a sibling post says, most medicine comes down to reproducing what is already known (as it should be).

I now look at doctors the way I look at lawyers. To get in, you don't need to be creative (and in fact, you probably shouldn't be, or should suppress it until you've already proven yourself), you just need to know the existing "case law" very very well. Mostly, your job is to identify stuff that has been seen before (taking into account quite a lot of subtle data) and go directly to the most successful known solution. If you want to be imaginative as a doctor, you can go the MD/PhD route (which, in my opinion, makes you a superstar), I suppose, or run the risk of losing your job by doing something no one else has done before (and hence is not "approved").

Incidentally, this is how "break" is implemented in Scala. There is no break keyword in the language, but it is implemented at the library level by throwing/catching an exception.

Here's the source code:
https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/browser/scala/tags/R_2_9_1_final/src//library/scala/util/control/Breaks.scala#L1

I believe Mitch Hedberg said that to "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" in an interview, he replied, "Celebrating the fifth anniversary of you asking me that question!"

They didn't hang onto the old code. Novell only owned WordPerfect between buying it in June 1994 and selling it to Corel in January 1996. (Technically, they did hold onto some of the WordPerfect libraries, which they integrated into GroupWoes.)

Personally, I find MathWorld pretty good for that purpose. Most articles are pretty encyclopedic in nature -- providing first a simple, general explanation, then diving deeper into the more complicated stuff (where the math gets more advanced by necessity).

Unfortunately, the article on floating-point arithmetic is just a one-liner (likely because it's more computer science than math).

There's a few main issues.

1) Angle.
2) Delay.
3) Controller.

The camera needs to be higher to give a better vantage point.

The camera has to be able to do real-time video. 30ms delay is good. 60ms is okay, 200ms is unacceptable. If you have a GeForce card, use nHancer to raise or lower the Prerender Limit. That's the number of frames that can or do get rendered/stored, to maintain a smooth framerate. Bigger number usually increases delay, making it difficult to play.

The wheel is another area where there's input delay. It takes time to spin it rather than just pressing a button.

It's possible that these people were playing with ~500ms delay. That's quite nasty. It'd take a few hours of playing to get used to it, but it'd still be a big problem compared to no delay.

But maybe that's just me. Maybe you'd stay out of harm's way and watch the poor guy bleed to death because you're suspicious of the Americans. Hell, this'll probably be used by terrorist recruiters. "Oh, you think the Americans are here to save you? Look at this! A family tried to save a wounded man, and they shot down the entire family and the wounded man! They justified it by calling it a battle zone!"

There is zero justification for being pumped full of adrenaline and begging to shoot at a vehicle that picked up a wounded man. They seriously couldn't wait half a second to see if the vehicle actually picked up any bodies or weapons?

Copyright that last forever is the problem here.

Current U.S. copyright for an individual is life plus 70 years and for a corporation 95 years. Since both of those are longer then the U.S. life expectancy, copyright is now infinite. I guess Jack Valenti got his wish.