Now if only you would apply that argument to cars.

As a Canadian I would be happy with that arrangement :)

Excuse me while I adorn my tinfoil hat.. I don't think this has any anything to do with ISIS, that's just a smokescreen. This is all about power and increasing the reach of the surveillance state, hence all of the deception.

No doubt this will turn into the F-35 of IT security: badly designed, poorly implemented, over budget, behind schedule, and ultimately ineffective.

As long as they teach the Pastafarian creation story.

I got an offer from Apple. The hiring process was relatively painless: telephone interview, coding assignment, and six (not overly difficult) on site interviews.

Who do you think work for? The CIA?

It basically amounts to torture. Should we allow torture behind bars just to satisfy our desire for revenge?

Agreed. I suffer from a mental illness, and I would like to tell Google to go fuck themselves, but in all likelihood they've already mined my Gmail account and inferred my diagnosis.

Intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge to solve difficult problems - at least that's my definition.

That said, there are many methods in the literature that are heuristic in nature and for which there are no obvious theoretical justifications.

I would say you can define most of machine learning as statistical function approximation. I would also add that the theoretical justifications are indeed important and most good texts find some way to justify the computational methods described.

It's always possible to reciprocate in other ways. Life becomes very bleak when every exchange is viewed as some kind of financial transaction. Part of the art of being poor is graciously accepting people's generosity without requesting it in the first place. If your friends feel badly about accepting your offer of a meal then, in my opinion, I would say their perspective is skewed.

I think the rich don't want to be around the poor because of their preconceived notions about the poor. I am poor because I have a disability that destroyed my career and makes it nearly impossible to hold a job. While I sometimes stress about money, I am largely happy because I don't measure my self-worth by how many possessions I have or by the amount of money I have in my bank account. Positive relationships are more important. Doing something you love is more important. If the rich have trouble forming positive relationships or doing what they love because of how much money they have, then my suggestion would be to give it away.

If the rich feel that being wealthy is too stressful, maybe they should try being poor instead.