Try getting a job at the NSA. You'll be security-screened up the wozoo, and then face 10 years in the slammer if you leak. Ask Manning.

There's also a lot of security - no USB drives, no internet (they'll have 2 computers, one of which can only access a LAN where the confidential information is kept), audits, lots of rules, etc. Manning used a CD burner. I'm betting that's going to be a bit harder to do now.

Obvious troll is obvious. Why is this upvoted?

Saying "imperially found to be lower quality" is just bullshit. If you have some study where they have a higher rate of failure, you can always link it. (Their fucking laptop chargers are a joke - I've been through a few and if they don't brick themselves the cord wears out and can't be replaced). But "quality" is way to vague, and just invites a troll war.

Some Apple stuff is OK. Dell and Sony are rarely much cheaper. Asus and Levano may offer better value products, but it's hard to say.

The big problem with Apple is the lack of variety. They don't offer value products, like a 14" laptop (these seem to be the best value) or non-workstation desktops.

I could waste my time justifying the cost of a MBA (the display, speakers, aluminium casing, large touchpad). It used to be streets ahead of the competition, but now there's some competing ultralight laptops with better displays.

Or the Mac Pro is about to go EOL, so there's no point changing it.

It's how the plea bargaining system is.

The US has decided that the 6th Amendment was a bad idea. That jury trials just aren't worth it. The only way to strip criminals of their rights is by "rewarding" them, by dropping some of the charges. And since dropping reasonable charges will be too soft on criminals, you have to keep increasing sentencing guidelines.

In China, you can go to 4-year college, or 2-year vocational school. 2-year vocational school is where the shit students go, like community college in the US.

Unlike the US, there's a massive stigma at not going to a good school.

This is for a few reasons:

1) The Chinese culture is much more pro-education than the US culture. "Good" kids are ones with good "gaokao" (high school final exam) results, not quarterbacks. I'm not saying that *all* Chinese really value education. Most just pretend to value education, and only care about the attainment of good marks. Sport start in China are not seen as heros, unless they are literally gold medal material.

If you want to deny that US parents are meatheads who just want their boy to play football, you'll probably agre that US parents value a "well rounded" kid over a kid with top marks. That's not the case in China.

2) In the old communist / socialist system, a college degree was a ticket for an "iron rice bowl" job - a cushy government job that you couldn't lose, which guaranteed a pension and lots of perks. There are now *far* more degree holders than government jobs, so it's no longer a meal ticket. But parents still believe in the caste system which communism created, in which a degree was the only way out.

3) Factory work was very low pay. It's gone up, because demand is outstripping supply. But Chinese still think "metal-working degree = peasant going to work in a shit factory".

Obviously, real degrees are still good. But they aren't *as* good as older Chinese think they are.

Phone minutes are practically a commodity. None of the carriers have any real advantage, and there's no way they can really cut costs. The only way for them to make more money is by screwing customers. If you unlock your phone, it can help you avoid getting screwed.

If it weren't for "screw the customer" penalties, they'd all have a simple transparent plan. And you could figure out which phone was the cheapest, so you'd shop for a good deal (driving down profits).

Also, there's IP issues. China is pretty keen on their home-grown CPUs. Their MIPS-based processors (with x86 emulation) are 10 years behind what Intel can do, but they are keen to catch up.

Yes I know China's not a monolithic entity, and the Chinese government rarely does more than turn a blind eye on the theft of foreign IP, but still ...

I play dwarf fortress. I find it's the opposite. My GPU is fine, and no CPU in the next 10 years will be fast enough. :/

My point is, *he* wouldn't be communicating. The AI (which he is a physical part of) would be. He isn't the mind, he's simply part of the brain. A mind is the sum of its components and its state. Simply being part of a mind doesn't mean you can understand everything the mind does. Your individual neurons don't understand much, but putting them all together and you create a mind.

The real problem is, can a stupid AI trick a human into thinking it's smart? Obviously it can - people often think ELIZA is much smarter than it really is. But we are imagining some ideal Turing Test, in which the tester can't be fooled by cheap tricks (diversions like "why do you ask that question?", or cute anthropomorphic things - "Don't you love kittens?"). But the Turning Test itself was intended to be a thought experiment. Turing predicted that cheap tricks could be used to fool most people. His original point was that any system capable of acting like a mind is itself a mind.

Webcams are often pretty poor quality. The main factor in cameras is the sensor size (not MP, but physical size - a big sensor captures more light). But a good sensor is more expensive, and heavy. And it's not fun trying to figure out webcam specs, as they are often simply not well publicised.

The first step - get good lighting. A bad camera with good lighting is better than a good camera with bad lighting. Unless you have something as powerful as a high-end DSLR, you simply need good lighting.

If you have good lighting, you can shoot at a lower ISO, which means less noise. You can shoot at a higher speed, which means a faster refresh (unless there's a bottleneck somewhere else - probably USB speed) and less blur. You can get a higher depth of field, even up close, so you don't have to focus. There's a reason why professional photographers, working with the best cameras money can buy, spend so much time setting up lots of lighting - most cameras are simply not at their best in low light.

> I also read commentaries of it, explaining the context. Which is, as any sane person should know, essential to understand the meaning.

The problem with religious texts is, not every reader is sane. And not every reader wants to know the context. It's the word of God, so why should context matter? You just have to twist his words till they mean what you know they *should* mean. It's an exercise in double-think.

The Koran is more internally consistent, having a single author and single editor, and is read in its original language. The Bible tends to be all over the place. Different authors, different translations. It's a mess.

But with both texts, different readings are still possible, if you have your own agenda.

By design, Postgresql is simply not as good a key-value store as MySQL / MariaDB. Innodb stores the data along with the primary index (technically cluster index), so it's fast to look up data by the primary key. Postgres is a better database, though.

How is the Chinese Room thing valid?

The argument is - you write a program which can pass a Turing test, in Chinese. You can, in theory, execute that program by hand. But the program isn't a "mind", because you don't speak Chinese.

It's rubbish. The guy in the "Chinese Room" isn't the "mind", he's part of the brain. Your neurons aren't a mind. The CPU isn't a mind. But a CPU executing a Turing-test-beating AI program is a mind. A mind is not a piece of hardware, it's an abstract way to describe hardware and software.

tl;dr: Novels have lots of filler (for arguably good reasons).