Cap'n Refsmmat

We do use a CAPTCHA -- we use reCAPTCHA. I strongly suspect that spammers pay people a few cents to bust each CAPTCHA for them. They haven't been very effective for years. New users are also required to have a valid email address, are not permitted to have signatures, can't post status updates or connect their accounts to Facebook and Twitter, and have a rate limit on sending PMs. All of these measures were reactions to techniques used by spammers. One popular spam technique was to register an account, set its signature or "About Me" to spam, and then never post, thus never bringing the account to our attention. We've put a lot of time into nuking spam and trying to prevent it. To give you a sense of scale, there are currently 9,103 members in the database marked as spammers, and I've probably deleted the accounts of just as many. What version of IE are you using? You can use up to IE 8 on Windows XP, which should be compatible with IPB. IE 6 accounts for 0.1% of our audience, and is no longer compatible with IPB. IE 7 is 0.7% of our audience. IE in total is only 15%, as it's swamped by Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

According to the Daily Mail, they are doing this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337973/Ricin-mailing-suspect-caught-Big-Brothers-eye-mail--track-too.html

It's not clear to me that safeguards mean anything if violations are top-secret and unlikely to ever be discovered. David Simon also bases his argument on the premises that (a) terrorism is big and scary and we should undertake these massive projects to stop it, and (b) this kind of surveillance is an effective method to stop it. I disagree with (a) -- deer have killed more Americans than terrorists -- and (b) certainly can't be established while the results are secret.

I certainly could, if I so desired, by using robots.txt. But this is a discussion forum for the general public, and you can be pseudonymous if you so desire. (Google can't crawl to find your IP address or location.) Of course, Google's mass accumulation of low-level details grants them the power to discover many much more interesting things about each Internet user. That's why proposals like Do Not Track have been pushed. So yes, I am worried by private surveillance as much as I am by public surveillance. Google's "Don't be evil" motto is not a legal oversight instrument. I suspect the only answer is that postal mail was invented long before we had the expectation that the federal government could detect and stop any terrorist attack before it occurs. Now, if the FBI and NSA miss a plot -- even one which is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small and unsuccessful -- they're blasted by Americans for "intelligence failures." The only way for a bureaucrat to cover his ass is to put everything under surveillance, and today "everything" means "everything electronic," because the postal mail no longer matters.

Now The Guardian and the Washington Post report on PRISM, which lets the NSA collect data, including emails, search histories, chat logs, and video calls: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html In theory, analysts are only supposed to trawl for data involving foreign nationals, by carefully selecting search terms which should turn up foreigners more often than not. But not much happens if they miss their targets. No FISA warrants are required.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu (allegedly) The point of privacy is not to hide things. It's about power. A government with limitless surveillance abilities has the ability to make numerous decisions about you without your knowledge, and because the surveillance is secret, there is nothing you can do. The potential for abuse is enormous.

What makes me sad is that we could save far more lives for far less money by using massive cell-phone surveillance to mail tickets to people who text and drive.

The Washington Post's front-page article this morning says: What I'd like to know is what else is being collected. ...oh, and why can't the NSA get the CIA to assassinate these guys that keep calling my cell phone about cruises that I've won?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order This has been suspected for a long time, but never proved. The Supreme Court had previously ruled against plaintiffs who argued they had been subject to warrantless wiretapping on the grounds that they could not prove any such wiretapping exists; hopefully, this will change that. What also disturbs me is that the request was made by the FBI but the data is to be delivered to the NSA. Does the FBI believe there is some legitimate law enforcement purpose in collecting this much data? What else do they think they can collect?

What format do you keep the notes in on your laptop?

This paper is a classic: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf

You would probably enjoy the book The Curve of Binding Energy, in which a former nuclear weapons designer explains just how easy it would be to steal some nuclear material and make your own nuke. Sure, it might not be a very good bomb, but you don't need sophistication. You need a very large bang.

I believe I wrote most of them, based on earlier rules written by fafalone and with plenty of input from our moderators.

How do you know it's suspicious if you don't know what bombmaking involves?

If you do not run the server yourself, you will need to ask your web host to install LaTeX and dvipng for you. A simpler way may be to use MathJax, which requires installing nothing but a few changes to your site's templates: http://www.mathjax.org/

Both. Advertisers can pick either method, and then Google picks the ad expected to result in the most revenue for us. Or something.

We can, hypothetically, ban certain ads from SFN by adjusting some settings with the ad network. I believe dave has access to the account, but he is very busy these days and doesn't have much time to tinker with SFN.

This is CKEditor, actually, just with a different look. I suggest you use your browser's zoom features rather than just increasing the font size on your posts -- it'll help you read everyone's posts.

If this is homework, we're not just going to do it for you. Have you tried to solve it? Where did you get stuck?

Your ideas sound reasonable. My personal statement involved my reasons for choosing the field, my research experience, and other things I've done which relate to the field. Remember they'd prefer to hear about things you've done over you talking about how much you love the field. Seemed to work for me.

˙pǝʇןıʇ ʇno ǝɯoɔ sbuıɥʇ puɐ ʞɔɐɥʍ ɟo ʇno sʇǝb buıɹds ǝןpɹıb ǝɥʇ sǝɯıʇǝɯos ؛ɹoʇıuoɯ ɹnoʎ ǝʇɐɹqıןɐɔǝɹ oʇ pǝǝu ʎɐɯ noʎ

I deny everything.

All I get is random segments of my messages parroted back. I'm not sure I see it "acquiring language". It certainly can't beat MegaHAL.

Have you looked at the instructions on GitHub?

You probably want to ask the authors of that software. Do you have Linux?