My pension plan and retirement investments rely on the world being made an inhospitable place for the next 20 human generations. I'll be dead, so I say f* them.

Are adults forgetting how to read?

-> Listen to this story?

It sounds like a fine, down-to-earth attitude on paper to distinguish in a non-judgmental way between the characters, differences and idiosyncrasies of different cultures. "Group them into statistically observed behavioural patterns"? How neutral, scientific, indisputable. Until one re-reads your original message, where the Southern cultures are deemed "less advanced". This sounds so 19th century, I wouldn't be surprised to hear you champion the truths of phrenology next.

The example of the point in the article is himself.

The actually not so wide margin by which Macron won last time was made of reluctant left-leaning voters who chose what they saw as the lesser of two evils. But the "anything but Le Pen" front has been eroding at a fast pace, and those voters might just decide to stay home next time. That's another consequence of the french runoff system: a large part of constituents will have to vote against one candidate rather than for the other in the final round. And an ever growing part of them are getting tired and starting to think it's not worth the hassle to feel screwed over every time, especially since the "traditional right" is pilfering more and more ideas from the extreme right to incorporate in their discourse and their platform, so that in a right vs extreme-right second round the line may not be so clear. Finally, another attitude leading to the same result is people still persuaded that Le Pen would be a disaster, but think in the end it would knock some sense into Le Pen voters to actually experience the disaster for themselves.

Bottom line, there's nothing you should count on as granted for the next election in France.

My experience is better. Also been trying Wine/CrossOver for about one month on an Intel Mac. I am pretty impressed, my success rate is 6/7 so far, to be fair no 3D games, but at least one fairly recent one. Sure, it's a little bit clunky, and one of the programs required some minor fiddling around and forum digging to get working.

Remember when people here were talking about the "global warming hiatus" That was so 2013...

Oh, we already know the next line of defense: "I guess it is happening, it harmful, but it's too late to do anything about it now. Sorry!"

The whole movie has a deliberate, half faux-retro, half totally incongruous sci-fi aesthetic (yes, that was the case even for the 80s). You can love it or hate it, but if you don't realize it's deliberate and that no one back then was seriously envisioning that computers would remotely look like in the movie, ever, then you're off by a large margin in your criticism. It is possible that this point can be lost to some modern viewers. When I saw it back then when it first came out (I am a big fan), this weird and provocative aesthetic choice was actually one of the most charming aspects of the movie, and I believe this is still the case (though I admit I haven't seen it again recently)

Sprouting ammunition developed by the DoD (Department of Death) was an important plot device in Tim Schafer's renowned adventure game Grim Fandango (1998) . It is rather strange how reality takes after fiction, I wonder if there are Grim Fandango fans at the DoD.

Anyone citing seriously the Seralini et al. study immediately loses all credibility in my eyes.

That article was retracted chiefly because many professional statisticians (I am one) pointed out that this study was, from the point of view of basic statistical methodology, a complete joke. In no significant way did this study establish any correlation between GMO and rat tumors (which is not to say it can't exist. Just that the data collected from this particular study does not prove anything).

It is laughable how the piece you link to suggests a big conspiration because the paper was retracted despite its original publication undergoing a "rigorous peer review". The fact of the matter is, peer review can fail big time (given the number of submitted scientific papers, that is hardly a surprise), and journals should definitely retract papers when it turns out after publication that they are a methodological disgrace.

Expose questionable scientific behavior practices, undisclosed conflicts of interests, biased studies, question established truths -- I am all in favor of it. But using bogus (and in this case sensationalist) studies to do so is self-contradictory. Bad science should be countered by good science, not by wishful thinking and vague conspiration theories.

I know this comment comes way too late for anybody to read it... Anyway, I still feel it relevant to point out given the context that in France, legislation making browsing a "terrorist website" a felony (punishable by 2 years prison and/or 30,000EUR fine) already exists (as from the last June 4).

It is telling (on the levels to which Europe is de facto politically sinking), that France, with a "socialist" government, is actually already ahead of Newt Gingrich.

Is it possible that last time you checked was a long time ago? Deep neural networks are again all the rage now (i.e. huge teams working with them at Facebook and Google) because

1. (1) They have resulted in a significant performance improvement over previously state-of-the-art algorithms in many application tasks,
2. (2) Although they are computation-heavy, they are amenable to massive parallelization (modern computational power is probably the main reason why they have improved singificantly with respect to ANNs of the 80-90s, given that the main architecture itself has not changed a lot, except possibly for the "convolution" trick which effectively introduces hard-coded localization and spatial invariance).

Check the wikipedia page for "convolutional neural networks" as well as other /. entries: http://slashdot.org/tag/deeple... , and from yesterday http://tech.slashdot.org/story... .

I hold a faculty position in statistics (that's for the AC above who called me a "passer-by sitting at home in their boxers munching on Hot Pockets", so I guess I have to pull credentials, though in his defense my post sounded more dismissive than what I'd wanted).

Yes, the p-value threshold of 0.05 is considered "standard" in many applied sciences, in particular medicine. It is convenient for many of reasons that were outlined by other posters (cost, number or persons required for an experiment, ethics). It does not mean that it is intellectually satisfactory. The joke among statisticians is that this value was introduced about 100 years ago by the R.A. Fisher (one of the founding fathers of statistics) who once wrote something akin to "if we decide on a value of alpha such that the probability of falsely claiming a discovery when the null hypothesis holds seems reasonably low, say for instance, alpha=5%...", and this has somehow been engraved as gospel ever since.

The truth is, this threshold value of 5% is now considered very lax by modern statisticians, essentially because of the very large numbers of published papers reporting significant values as compared to Fisher's times. The posts of penguinoid and ras above explained it very professionally, one can also refer to "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (Note: this was published in PLOS medicine, hardly an obscure journal)

In conclusion, my post was certainly not a defense of soda pop (there is already sufficient evidence that it is extremely damaging for your health for very clearly identified reasons), but a reminder that the specific results of this study (the effect on telomeres), though certainly not to be dismissed, should not be considered as established truth at this point, but rather pointing in a direction which should be investigated further for confirmation. That, by the way, is the actual meaning of "being skeptical", unfortunately this tends to be conflated with "being in obtuse denial" nowadays.