FTFA:

Awesome. I'm glad our government is striving to protect our liberties. Seriously, between the ability to declare even American citizens terrorists because of what they've said (not necessarily what they've done), the ability to try anyone classified as a terrorist outside a civilian court, and now the "needed" capability to decrypt encrypted messages over the internet...what's to stop whoever is in the White House from 'disappearing' outspoken people they disagree with, without breaking the law?

I'm an American, and I value my freedom over a false sense of security. If you aren't comfortable with that, perhaps America isn't for you.

Actually, if you look at the other post I mentioned, you'd see that I acknowledge that our (yes, I am an American) government is a democratic republic. While that's all well and good, participating in the democratic process (there, happy?), and then being actively involved with the legislators who have been appointed to represent us, is still very important for the proper functioning of our government.

What I was suggesting was starting a civil discussion on how these new tools of empowerment/tools of entertainment could be used to further inform/involve our digital public as a whole. Whether the President was correct in naming different electronic boxes w.r.t their uses, what he's saying about our treatment of media and information is still pertinent, and deserves some deliberation.

The Dodds, Kennedys, Bushes and Clintons of the world would disagree. It's just less thinly veiled than one might expect, _at the moment_.

A man who has two watches will pay attention to the one that doesn't misinform him time and again, should the two prove to report very differently. Just saying.

I do think distributed reporting and a flood of information (we already have this, IMHO), is a good thing too. But the reporters who are most accurate or are most trusted will likely have quite a significant following, although perhaps not quite as significant as the guy screaming about the end of the world as we know it on his blog. If it has cute pictures of cats.

Mm, very interesting point. As an honest discussion-starting question, what are ways these new technologies could be used to promote democracy and involvement? As another post in this story says (and I totally agree), one of the biggest problems in our current form of government is a lack of involvement in and lack of importance placed on our democracy.

The ability to spread information so quickly and so ubiquitously could definitely be a useful tool for this, methinks.

Personally, I think most of our population fails to recognize the magnitude of importance our right to vote and our basic form of government play into the rights and infrastructure we enjoy. We have indeed checked out, and we'll soon pay the price for it. Democracy's (even a democratic republic's, mind you) proper function hinges on the involvement of the people as a majority. That doesn't happen in the United States anymore.

Perhaps if his administration had the transparency he promised on the campaign trail, it would be easy to get the information people are seeking from credible, reliable sources.

Whether the President and his administration like it, this form of information sharing is very likely here to stay. Perhaps the best reaction would be to embrace it and use it as a positive differentiator from other administrations.

I know I shouldn't self-reply, but...FreeMat also has the 64-bit functionalities under discussion.

I do quite a bit of intense numerical analysis and I rarely get to the point where I need 64-bit operations. I've encountered it before, but only in special cases (very stiff ODE's, for example). Personally, I use FreeMat (an open-source MATLAB clone - its environment is much more like MATLAB's than octave, far as I'm concerned). FreeMat's 64-bit build handles extremely large datasets as well, and that's exactly what drove me to use its 64-bit build as well.

I mean come on, 86 F? Oh NO! Not 12 degrees cooler than body temperature! I've worked on plant floors where the ambient temperature for my 16 hour day was >110 on average, and in some spots >125.

Do I make more money than them? Yes. Do I have more freedom than they likely do? Yes. Is my job less menial? Likely. But 86f? Please.

The energy applied to the target by a bullet is less than or roughly equal to the energy applied to the gun, flesh, other springy elements in between the bullet and hand or shoulder of the shooter.

FTFY. It's a small textual change, but has huge implications in terms of terminal ballistics. What you can easily absorb as the shooter is pretty significantly different than what you can absorb as impact on your flesh from the bullet side. Believe me, you can kill someone with the blunt force trauma that dissipating the energy from a bullet instantaneously would induce.