Whoa, Apple has formally handed control of Siri to the Ferengi?!

People should check out these guys: http://pachyderm.io/ The power of Hadoop, but you choose whatever programming language you think is best for you.

The NY Times investigation referred to in the Slate article has now been released. I'm guessing Slate pushed them out a bit quicker than they'd hoped.

Lots of interesting things in the article, but they feel there's insufficient evidence to claim a link between the Trump server and Alfa.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html

Not sure why this is news. In ECCV95 (European Conference on Computer Vision) there were two separate papers published on exactly how to do this with to different methods in realtime with what then was high end but non-specialized computer hardware. The fact that somebody chose to do this twenty years later really seems to not be newsworthy.

If they don't have common carrier status and their service is used for a crime then they are an accessory to the crime. Pretty sure they don't want that.

Back in the day, you could set your priority on a Cray XMP to 0.01 so that you got 100x the minutes you were allocated but that your code only ran when the machine was otherwise idle.

When TNG came out in 1987 and they wanted to highlight the low point in Earth's dystopian future/past, the writers of the episode took most villainized non-criminal class of individuals at the time (lawyers) -- had them all executed, and made it a capital crime to be one.

Nowadays, I fear far more for the scientists than the lawyers.

So what's the movie reference? It's obviously a joke story...

As a CS professor, I can't tell you how many times we've lost students with great potential in CS because they had no prior experience but were comparing themselves to inferior students with a year or two of programming experience in high school. If you get the students who have prior experience into a "fast track" class (e.g. that compresses the first year into a single term) then both the "experienced" and "naive" students can actually learn at their own pace. Fortunately, I teach at a small college, and so most times we can identify those students and get them into a better class. And I'm actually in favor of having students with a lot of experience start by skipping a class or two. The sooner students are surrounded by their "peers" in ability/experience, the faster and more reliably they're going to engage.

But to be clear: the issue isn't that people should be actively sorting the students so that only female and non-white students are in the CS1 class. That's a horrible idea, racist, sexist, and all the other "ists" you can come up with. It is likely that the "normal" track will have more non-white and female students in it because that's what the high school demographics say: non-white/non-Asian/female students are less likely to have prior experience. But it's also true that there will be more students from rural schools in the "normal" track, because rural schools are less likely to have computer programming courses.

I know it seems off topic but if you had them run Vidalia (autostart on)+TorBrowser, that'd stop a lot of the crap toolbar/plugin stuff that a "normal" browser would allow and I think it also blocks some classes of dangerous downloads.

There's also the issue of the backbone that's installed. There was a very serious push by McLeod a while ago to get heaps of fiber in the ground, but much of it lay dark once it was installed. McLeod went bankrupt, but having all that fiber in the ground also has to be a consideration.

This is a larger problem than in Ohio. In Montana there are a small number of Amish and various other Anabaptists (all of which consider judicial action "taboo"), and they're also finding themselves square in the crosshairs. The fact is that Anabaptists tend to choose to live in isolated areas (so they will be left alone), yet those isolated areas are the ones that are increasingly being exploited for natural resources.

It's also important to understand some of the other restrictions that aren't obvious. If an "English" farmer has a railroad that is forced on him/her through his/her property, s/he can request a crossing be built so that the normal operations of the farm (like moving cattle) aren't impeded. But to do that requires the farmer carry insurance to indemnify the railroad for damage. Amish also don't believe in insurance. So that means that there are no crossings on their farms. Driving 5 miles out of your way to get to an existing crossing is a far larger problem if you're on horse than it is if you are driving an internal combustion engine.

Rendezvous with Rama is a mostly good book, and is certainly very strong with its science (though are debates he didn't get the Coriolis effects quite right). Unfortunately, there is a very brief page or so in the book that talks about having sex in zero-G that may make some people decide it's inappropriate for that age.
Having said that, it's got a lot less sex in it than the PG-13 films that the 13 year olds are seeing...

The reason there were so many programmers who knew how to juggle is that the compile/build/run cycle in older compilers was slow enough that they needed something short to kill that time. Juggling also had the side benefit of actually getting you off your butt and doing something different, which freed your mind, raised your heart rate and circulation, and often gave you enough distance to figure out what the heck you were doing wrong.