They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.

We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.

So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.

Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.

Whether you use this, a regular Arduino or whatever, you still need transistors, op-amps, resistors and so on to build the stuf it interfaces with. I think the possibilities you gain with an easy to program microcontroller actually makes regular electronics more powerful and more fun to play with as a result.

"Our goal was to analyse Tor source code and determine any vulnerabilities in the system. We set up an internal Tor network to analyze..." http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/nsa-research-report-on-the-tor-encryption-program/501/

One slide mentioned this. It said that the node exploitation route was improbable due to technical and legal difficulties.

I've heard a number of people I trust comment on how the Moto X just feels really good in the hand and how the screen and size is just right. So the phone is certainly not bad at all, and most of us don't actually buy the high-end phones any more than we buy the high-end cars or bikes. A really good mid-range phone is exactly what I want; I'm already making calf-eyes toward the coming Sony Z1 Mini.

What's hurting Motorola for me, personally, is that it's simply not on sale in most of the world, and seems unlikely to ever be. It's not just about being able to get it where I live, but having a phone designed from the start to be usable in all major regions of the world as I travel.

So, make the benchmark software resemble the composite behaviour of common classes of apps. OGL benchmarks effectively act as the "typical" 3D game and so on.

At which point cheating becomes pointless, as any tweaking in favour of performance on those benchmarks immediately hit you as worse batterly life and high temps for all users running any similar kinds of apps, including your reviewers.

Yes, they should have submitted it to a similar number of similarly ranked closed-access journals and seen if there's any difference due to the open access policies specifically. As it stands it's sort of interesting, but doesn't tell us squat about open access.

Well, I think gunfire on the capitol. grounds *is* a legitimate news story that Americans need to know about. However it's far too early to have an opinion on the events. What bugs me isn't that the event is *covered*, it's that in lieu of facts news outlets spread speculation. There's very little factual information as of yet to report upon.

Whereas you can say condescending things about the intelligence of public employees without suffering the discomfort of ironic self-awareness. Smells like freedom to me.

Wow, if people read the criminal indictment there's one, possibly even two murder-for-hires in the wings linked to (allegedly posted by / conversation with) this guy.

-Matt

Good points all. Just a small addendum/correction: replace

"Ken Burns style"

With

"although not Ken Burns style, as that has been overused lately, and makes it harder to appreciate the image"

True, but calling a dictionary a vector space doesn't make it so. For example how "close" are the definitions of "happiness" and "joy"? In a dictionary, the only concept of "closeness" is the lexical ordering of the word itself, and in that sense "happiness" and "joy" are quite far apart (as far apart as words beginning h-a are from words beginning with j-o are in the dictionary). But in some kind of adjacency matrix which show how often these words appear in some relation to other words, they might be quite close in vector-space; "guilt" and "shame" might likewise be closer to each other than either is from "happiness", and each of the four words ("happiness", "joy", "guilt", "shame") would be closer to any other of those words than they would be to "crankshaft"; probably close to "crankshaft" (a noun) than they'd be to "chewy" (an adjective).

Anyhow, if you'd read the paper, at least as far as the abstract, you'd see that this is about *generating* likely dictionary entries for unknown words using analysis of some corpus of texts.

The on-site computer (a CP 818) REDACTED and demodulated the signal, then scanned the plaintext transmissions for key words. The system would alarm on . recognition of high-interest text, and the operators would react with special processing and forwarding routines.

So it DECRYPTED and demodulated the signal you say? :-\

(1st para, p.18 / 373).