Oh you 'tire', do you? Well thank you, King Lear, for that bit of input. When you're done playing with yourself as you think about Ayn Rand, maybe you can get back to the real world? You actually tried to apply social Darwinism to a museum...how's that "let's monetize everything, including our history" thing going for ya?

Also: did you miss the whole "distribution of wealth" bit? Let me break it down for you: top %5 of wealth-holders possess roughly 60% of all wealth in the country. This is 2004 figures, so with the economic unpleasantness it's probably shifted a few points, so may be closer to 65% now. (top 10% hold 70+% of all wealth). So, your solution is that private citizens (and here, that would be the 90%-95% of the people NOT in the top bracket) would compete with the top 5-10%'s purchasing ability (specifically their disposable wealth) to subsidize museums and other public institutions to preserve our history. Do you have an analytical problem or an arithmetic problem?

It is a less-than-perfect world. :)
aka complex systems have unforeseen negative interactions.

I don't have to do either. I believe the FCC should not be censoring the airwaves, because their mandate is to ensure, for example, that radio stations do not interfere with each other. But does it arguably fall into their purview - yes it does. Also - the FCC should obviously not have 'free reign' over content of communication. Should it have authority over the structure of communication - again, yes.
To use Comcast's example: it is properly prohibiting violations of net neutrality as per it's "communication" statute. If it decided to get involved with censoring chat messages on Comcast's network, that would be regulating "content", which I believe to be wrong. Could they make a case for it though - yes. And again, properly so.

Basically, I would like their authority over providing regulated structure formalized - ensuring that communication can be fairly competitive, etc.. But they need to get out of the censorship business.

FCC - Federal Communications Commission

I take your point - what passes for content on the Intertubes can hardly be defined as "communication", nevertheless, which part of the "communication" confused you?

Besides the obvious (wasting time, too much info being shared with future employers), their privacy and data policies have gotten worse and worse. Once you sign up with them, they own everything you do. Or at least so they believe. From his writing, this researches was quite open and tried to be as forthcoming as possible. If they had concerns over anonymity, I suspect he would have been happy to discuss the exact data-scrubbing procedure to make sure it's on the level. But instead, these turds reach for the lawyers.

So it's fine for search engines to cache this data. It's fine for marketing firms to use it to pester even more people. But the moment the researchers get in on it - oh noes, gotta stop that shit from happening.

With any spare time, I'd sit down, recreate the damn dataset and post it to every torrent site in the world. Let's Streisand these jerks!

Anata no seikan wa omoshiroi to omoimasu, soshite nyuusureta o koudoku shitai. :)

+5 Painfully True

I'm not sure whether this will go to offtopic or flaimbait, but 'weaning' usually involves breasts. Your suggestion does not merely put one in mind of the old anecdote of trying to milk a bull, but also presents a rather disturbing, though not entirely inaccurate picture of Washington. Perhaps Moore was right when he did a segment on US politicians needing a pimp...

If you are being so very logical and intellectual about the whole thing, we would, in principle, need to discuss the definition of 'despotism'. That said, your claimed example of an instance where a disparity in warmaking capability does not lead to despotism is the US vs. Native American Indians.

The wars between the US and Native Americans actually predate the US. As per wikipedia article on the issue, the wars lasted between 1775ish all the way to 1918 (admittedly, in 1918, it was a very small engagement). Figure about 125 years of war. More precisely, an almost unbroken string of defeats for the Indians, the associated forced relocation, disease, famine, depopulation, destruction of culture, etc.. Women got the right to vote in 1920 (19th Amendment). Native Americans, to whom this land effectively "belongs", what with them being here first and all, were generously granted voting rights in 1924 by the Indian Citizenship Act.

You may point out the obvious - that 'merely' 6 years after the last military engagement Indians achieved legal parity with their conquerors, and hence the arrangement was not "despotic". If you are capable of making this claim with a straight face...well, I certainly can not.

RTFA. I know that's a sin, but seriously, do. You'll discover you are wrong.

The microcontroller loads the program as written in ascii on an SD card. It also can write the initial data onto the tape. After that, the computation is, indeed, performed by the "machine". Hence the optical reader for the characters on the tape.

And we are free to consider you the asshole that you are.

Love "teh freedom" :)

So you're in the community? Ok. You have a Fields medal? Clay prize? Critical breakthrough? New field of study? No? In that case, you need to STFU about what he should and should not do. And that papers are coauthored doesn't mean one guy's not doing all the work and the other gets his name on it just because. Tell me that doesn't happen :)

And you do. Enlighten us, oh great one.

And after that you can go back to playing with your transformers

Not "alleged" behavior. Yau's behavior is well documented, to the point of being published. There's no "alleged".

There's only his reaction to the mathematical community's lack of response to Yau's publication of what amounts to intellectual plagiarism.