What you say may sound reasonable and obvious but it is based on the assumption that money is a good motivator for creative behavior which has been scientifically proven to be factually incorrect. Take a look at this TED Talk by Dan Pink for an easily digested explanation: On Motivation.

In a more global context, the fact that monetary rewards stifle creativity could explain many deep, systematic problems in our society. Perhaps it is unwise for us to put people who are strongly motivated by monetary rewards into positions of leadership. Not only is fear the mind-killer, it seems money is a mind-killer as well. If we want creative solutions to our problems then the last thing we need are leaders who are primarily motivated by fear and money.

About 10 or 12 years ago I had a Dell laptop that had Nvidia graphics. I was running Gentoo Linux. I reported some bug with the Nvidia driver. Within hours late Saturday, early Sunday I got a reply from Nvidia with a patch to the MM kernel that fixed the problem. The bug was not in the Nvidia driver but was caused by recent change in the MM kernel. I was very impressed. In this case they were acting like an FOSS shop not a proprietary software shop.

I grant you the closed portions of the Nvidia drivers can be a royal pain in the neck, especially when combined with the closed Flash player. There were times when it was maddening but that was partly driven by an obsession by some Gentoo devs to be overly zealous with purging versions of the Nvidia driver from the portage system. Things have been mostly stable for a good number of years now.

I appreciate the Linux support Nvidia does provide. For example, I've been using VDPAU which does video decoding on the graphics card which let me play blu-rays on a machine with a not so powerful CPU. Also, I've never had to reboot in order to update the Nvidia driver. I do have to rmmod the old driver after I stop X but that's no biggie. YMMVG

I am interested in seeing the Nvidia distro if they release one but I'm not holding my breath.

I recommended a Google search. Is that useless too? I also referred to the sources referenced by the Wikipedia article. Are those useless too? Is the entire Internet useless?

I agree that, as with any encyclopedia, the Wikipedia should not be used as the last word on almost any topic which is why I didn't suggest it as such. It is a good starting place, which makes it far from useless. The information GLMDesigns demands is readily available. It is readily available from sources besides just the Wikipedia. Your comment is wrong. Even if it were right it would be irrelevant since I recommended other on-line sources in addition to the Wikipedia.

Since the overwhelming evidence from a large variety of sources confirms that the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth was a vicious smear campaign that used widely publicized and then discredited claims, the onus is on GLMDesigns to provide proof that those discredited claims are true. Simply repeating the discredited claims does not make them more credible. If GLMDesigns believes that the Internet is useless as a tool for gathering information about this topic then I can understand why they are stuck with their own wildly incorrect personal opinions and are confused about what the truth is.

LMGTFY

If the Wikipedia and all of the articles it references, and common knowledge are all wrong (or part of a giant "left-wing" (ha ha)) conspiracy then the onus is on you to provide facts that prove/show this. The mountains of evidence that are only are simple Google search away are not proof positive but your demand that someone else do this simple Google search for you is ridiculous.

The Republicans have also been blamed for resorting to the politics of hate. The best explanation I've seen has two components:

1) The inclination of some people to turn to authoritarianism when times get rough.

2) The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is making things rough for the working class. Things aren't really bad yet (like in the great depression) but people's prospects are bleak. They are worse off now than they were 10 years ago without much hope in sight.

If this simple analysis is correct then the problem is not Trump. There are always Trumps around. The problem is that economic times (more accurately, prospects) are bad enough that a sizable fraction of the population is turning to a strongman/bully who promises to protect them even if those promises don't make any rational sense.

This has several implications. First, if there is a successful large-scale terrorist attack in the US then this could easily raise the overall level of fear enough to sweep Trump into the White House. Second, if the powers-that-be stay in power and continue their policies of transferring wealth away from the working class then the levels of economic distress and fear will grow, creating even more support for Trump or the next authoritarian strongman/bully who comes along.

The only real solution is to stop waging economic warfare on the working class. Unfortunately, even if Bernie Sanders gets elected, it is going to be nigh on impossible to quickly change the course of the best government that money could buy.

Yes, they are most likely related. Both the twin prime conjecture and these results about the final digits can be derived from the prime k-tuple conjecture. Or so says the fine article. It is not immediately obvious to me why the current result is predicted by the prime k-tuple conjecture but it does sound reasonable.

Certainly it was his fault. What was he thinking relying on Windows to hold something that was mission critical to him. Just kidding. Sort of.

Seriously, the important question is not whether the speaker was partial responsible for the debacle, the question is whether people want an OS that behaves that way or if they want an OS that is easier to use.

I've been working with computers for over 40 years (can't believe it has been that long). I'm most comfortable when I feel like I'm in control of the machine and not the other way around. That's why I mostly use Linux. I admit, Linux is not for everyone. The opposite extreme from Linux is Apple's iOS. I bought a used iPad and I'm fine with it too. I like to drive but I don't mind if someone else drives as long as they are competent at it and don't make me want to jump out of the car or hold on for dear life.

I now have three Windows 8.1 machines that I have been using to test Linux distros and Linux UEFI booting. Windows really is the worst of both worlds. It grabs control of the car and then immediately drives it into the ditch. If Windows creates an NPE (negative play experience) when it is used on small, underpowered laptops with a hard drive then it should not come pre-installed on those machines. Blaming someone who uses the pre-installed OS on a computer they bought is kind of silly. If the OS is going to take the driver's seat then it needs to do it with such ease and competence that I don't have to worry about it just like I don't have to worry about the hardware (most of the time).

On Linux I don't have to wrestle for control because it is easy for me to take control. I don't have to wrestle for control with iOS (on my iPad) because I can easily do what I want to do and let the OS do the driving. With Windows I often want to wrestle for control (don't do that update now dammit!) but I always lose.

As someone already mentioned, the problem is that the "winner take all" electorial system that is baked into the US Constitution automatically creates a two-party system whether you want one or not. Trying to outlawing politics parties will not solve the problem. You need to change the Constitution to make the electorial system more fair than "winner take all".

A simple introduction to these ideas is available in a few short videos at Politics in the Animal Kingdom. We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. The difficulty is that whoever is in power has little motivation to drastically change the system that put them in power.

The US Constitution was the prototype. Many of the Countries that followed us learned from our mistakes.

Your estimate is off by six months. The forced upgrade was announced today. I just got this email:

***sigh***. Amazon was very convenient. It is not going to be convenient to ditch them, I live in a very rural area. If you don't count Walmart there are not a lot of shopping options in the area. Despite the inconvenience, the encryption announcement followed by the forced upgrade (with no explanation of why the upgrade is needed) leaves me no choice.

On the plus side, I will probably save a lot of money.

You're right. I should not ASSume. OTOH I was responding to a post that had already made that assumption and also assumed Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. Perhaps I should not have corrected one assumption without correcting the other one.

This seems extremely far-fetched to me. It seems extremely unlikely there would be so much cooperation and even if there were, such a move would tear apart the Republican party (cue a quote from the Lord of the Rings movies about sharing power). The Democrats would have a similar problem if Sanders has the majority of pledged delegates but the superdelegates give the nod to Clinton.

Perhaps one of the reasons I ASSumed Trump would win the Republican nomination was that I had recently read: The rise of American authoritarianism. If they are correct then Trump should easily win the nomination barring unforeseen disasters (although I'm in the camp that sees a Trump presidency as a disaster). This article is the only thing I've read about Trump that makes sense to me. I think most commentators don't understand the situation. TL;DR: Trump appeals to the burgeoning authoritarian wing of the Republican party; fear is the mind-killer.

That article gave me hope that a Trump victory in the general election is not a given, even if he runs against an establishment candidate like Clinton.

If the indictment comes out before the Democratic convention then it would be very bad for Trump. It is only good for Trump if it comes out after the convention and if Clinton is the Democratic nominee.

If ABP does screen ads (and the screening is effective) then they are providing a useful service and it is fine (in my book) for them to charge money for it. Some Internet advertisers are a step up (or maybe a step down) from spammers. It is an nasty field. If you are a legitimate Internet advertiser then ISTM you should want to get approval of your ads by Adblock Pro and you should be happy to pay for that approval.

For example, Underwriters Laboratory does not give away their services for free. If you want your product certified then you have to pay for it. This is not a scam. They are providing a useful service. ISTM Adblock pro is doing something similar. If you want them to make sure your ads meet their guidelines then you need to pay them for this service. To some extent they are taking on the liability for bad ads (or even malware). In the long term this will be a very positive thing for legitimate Internet advertisers.

I fully agree with you that school should be about broadening minds. I think that a statistics class like the one discussed in the fine article (which uses a real-world hands-on approach) would broaden minds much better than a class in algebra or calculus. I honestly think the world would be a much better place if more people had even a vague understanding of Bayesian probability and statistics. This really is much more important and relevant than algebra or calculus. It is not about job training, it is about perceiving and understanding the world around us.

The fine article also discusses the underlying problem: math is often taught by people who don't understand or enjoy math. Teaching statistics poorly will be no better than teaching algebra or calculus poorly. Although the worst of the problem IMO is the teaching at the elementary school and middle school levels. When I was in 6th grade I was taught that the set of no apples was distinguishable from the set of no pears.

There is also a problem with the teaching of calculus in college by math professors and grad students who are not interested in calculus. It seemed to me that if you didn't learn calculus in high school then you were screwed (at least at the university I attended). Years later when I was a grad student, some of the physics grad students ended up being TAs for the intro calculus course. The grades of the students shot way up. I think the reason was that calculus is extremely relevant to all physics grad students but is not of much interest to most math grad students.

I was basically repeating/interpreting what the fine article said:

I believe interstellar dispersion of electromagnetic waves is caused by interactions with ionized interstellar medium. A quick Google(interstellar dispersion) brought up this page which gives a formula that relates the integral of electron density along the path of the signal to the dispersion of the signal. On that page they assume they know the density of interstellar medium inside our galaxy and use the dispersion of signals from pulsars to estimate their distance. In the FRB experiment they did it the other way around and used the known distance (using the red-shift of the source galaxy) and the dispersion to estimate the integral of the density. Integral measurements such as this usually give much more accurate results than point measurements.

If the interstellar medium were entirely made up of ionized hydrogen then knowing the electron density would give you the total density since there would be one proton for every electron. You need to add corrections because only about 70% of the interstellar medium is hydrogen so you need to estimate the number of neutrons. You also need to make a small correction since the interstellar medium is not 100% ionized.

The reason why the dispersion is related to the electron density is given, for example, in J. D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics where the dielectric "constant" (and hence the speed of light) is shown to be a function of the frequency. The electromagnetic wave causes the electrons to wiggle (just a little), the higher the frequency, the less wiggling so the higher frequencies are slowed down less than the lower frequencies. You can think of it like having an eccentricity in a front tire of your car that makes the steering wheel vibrate. When you go fast enough so the frequency of the oscillations is much greater then the resonant frequencies of the components then the amount of vibration you experience goes down because the direction reverses before things can move very far. In the interstellar medium each electron slows down the wave just a little and the total amount of slowing down is proportional to the number of electrons encountered.

Usually, the "closeness" of the electrons is not considered, instead the integrated electron density is used. But it is possible to calculate how close the electrons have to be to a line between the source and the receiver using what is called the 3-point function. The cross section of the volume that contributes to a fixed percentage of the signal will be roughly elliptical with the source and the receiver at each focus of the ellipse. Given the vast intergalactic distances involved, it will probably be extremely wide near the middle by any earthly standards but this width is independent of the calculation of the dispersion. I'd imagine the width would scale as sqrt(d * c * t) where d is the distance between the source and the receiver, c is the speed of light, and t is roughly the duration of the signal (more accurately, the inverse of the bandwidth). The reason the closeness (the width of the 3-point function) doesn't matter is because the more spread out the 3-point function is, the weaker it is. All that matters is what you get when you sum it all up.

Correct.

Incorrect. It doesn't even make sense that finding one more galaxy would somehow account for half the normal mass of the Universe. Finding the originating galaxy was part of the solution but it helped because it gave them the distance to the FRB source. They already knew the dispersion (different frequencies arriving at different times) of the FRB. The dispersion tells you how much non-dark matter the signal passed near during its trip here. By also knowing the distance to the source, they were able to calculate the average density of the non-dark matter along the line of travel. This average density was then be used to estimate the amount of non-dark matter in the Universe.