Pangloss

I agree with what you're saying. In answer to your question, I think the problem is not only a political (or ideological) one, but also a problem of comprehension and prediction. Even setting aside the ideological issues it may not have been possible to predict this outcome. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before, at least not on this kind of scale (and scale does impact analysis). So there's an academic problem here as well as a political one.

Rofl, thanks BA, that's even funnier.

Somebody sent me an even sillier one today which they claimed ran in the St. Petersburg Times' business section (I've no idea if that's true): Of course if you multiply 40 million times 1 million you get 40 trillion, which begs the question of whether the writer even realized this.

It does seem to me sometimes that the right side of the American political spectrum trends toward the less intellectual side of political humor, and often carries a patina of word-of-mouth and spread-by-email baseness. I'm reminded of comedian Jeff Foxworthy. A sign of the times, perhaps, I don't know. That might be a bit unfair -- I don't mean to suggest that all conservatives are idiots. I'm moving this into a thread because I want to keep the political jokes sticky to just the jokes themselves. Thanks.

Cool. I hope you get some replies on this -- it's interesting. Regarding your last question, do you mean mathematically comparing the compressed image with the original? I'm no expert, but I believe the "standard" technique is to "align" the images with a predetermined corresponding point (e.g. the first pixel in the upper left corner), and then measure the difference between the two pixels in each corresponding location (easy, since they're presumably the same size and number of pixels). You can actually store those values in a third file, called a "difference image", which serves as a kind of map of what your changes did (potentially useful for things like device calibration). You might check into wavelet transforms, which supposedly offer advantages over Fourier transforms. There are good articles on Discrete wavelet transform and Complex wavelet transform in the Wikipedia. These approaches are I believe used in rapid image recognition software, such as automated car-driving programs and facial recognition. If you have access to the IEEE or ACM portals there are a bunch of papers in there -- I believe both institutions also have publications dedicated to image processing. Some more search terms you can try: image differencing, Hutchison metric, and watermark removal. There are also some similarities between this and the process of Normal Mapping, which is used in 3d modeling, which may or may not be useful to you. Good luck!

A $50 Lesson I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do? ' She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.' Her parents beamed. 'Wow...what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.' She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ' Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50? ' I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.' Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

The idea of using science as a guide to moral choice is very compelling. But when special interest groups take up that banner and run with it I tend to get a little wary. Often they'll take a study and run with it as fact, demonizing any who disagree. Later some other study will come out and we'll learn that things were not as they seemed. The history of male infant circumcision might be an interesting topic to analyze in this context as a useful example, since it's less emotionally charged than other subjects. Society has gone back and forth on this one so many times since the 1960s that I've lost count. Last I'd heard it was "out", but I read an article recently about how it's back "in" again due to a study confirming decreased risk of HIV. Problem was, I advised a friend not to circumsize his boys a few years back because the science debunked any benefits as myths. And the things is, every article I emailed him is probably still available. It's not as if they're attached to RSS feeds connecting that old information to this new study (wouldn't that be useful?). There is some risk in having a society take a moral position and then change its mind later. Not only do we all look like hypocrits, causing some to stop listening, but we also caused something to happen that may have consequnces down the road.

Epic fail, then?

You can see the computer and the shared folders but get an error, so it sounds like you don't have the permissions set to allow access. You need to get properties on the shared folder and set it to allow at least read access.

It's "The Name of the Rose". It's very witty and a fun, intelligent mystery. There is a bit of semioticism in there, but mainly his focus here is on the advances and pitfalls of scholasticism (a much more interesting topic, IMO). If you want semiotics, see his "Foucault's Pendulum" (which is a bit of a descent into Dan Brown territory, though admittedly much brainier). I also enjoyed the Sean Connery film quite a bit (mainly because of Arnoud's lovely moodiness - he also directed Enemy at the Gates and Seven Years in Tibet).

The amusing thing there would be if many ordinary citizens also selected to have their news presented with biased spin. Perhaps not directly, but by choosing an AI bot from a specific source.

I'm not sure why you keep saying that, since from what I've been reading the memos themselves and quite a bit of information they contained was new. As I understand it we didn't know that KSM had been waterboarded 183 times, for example. What have you read to the contrary? Please pass it along. It also seems that the Obama administration hasn't released enough information, at least not yet. One of the things Cheney is complaining about is that the documents released don't show what was gained by these techniques -- what information was learned. Now of course he's playing politics too, but he's also right -- we can't assess whether or not these techniques worked unless we know what information was gained and whether or not it was verified to be accurate. And he's not entirely off base in suggesting that the Obama administration may be playing political games here. This release has a certain taint of Emanuel politics. If we're going to release information about Bush administration interrogation techniques, then we should release all of it.

I do get your point, but an AI bot can't acquire information that isn't available to be had. In this case it simply would not have answered the underlying question of where the guns are coming from. It would have only told us that the two percentages being lofted by either side were incorrect. But hey, that would still a great step forward. And given the way the news business is going these days, we may all have to start using intelligent agents some day. Otherwise we'll be getting our news from extremist blog sites or some such. Blah.

I probably wouldn't phrase it that way, but I agree -- expose everything. Put it all out there. Let's have that debate. Dick Cheney is screaming from the rooftops about how bad it is that the memos are out there. But now he can make his case, and those who disagree can make theirs, and we'll see what we see. I think when we look back on the first decade of the 21st century in American politics, it's going to show that it was an amazingly educational period.

We get tourists too, CaptainPanic. I don't think many of ours are gun-runners either.

Oh my god, that's hilarious. Obviously a play on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which normally looks like this: I'll have to show your version to my game design students (they just learned about Maslow's version last week). Thanks Padren.

Well unfortunately as we saw over in this other thread, sometimes information is lacking in detail. A knowledge AI bot could have more quickly come to the same conclusion as FactCheck and our investigative thread, but it wouldn't have gotten to the bottom of anything. (Those darned power brokers, always falsifying reality!)

As far as I know ALL European nations control the number of people they allow to immigrate into their country. And as for illegal guns in Europe, the IRA never seemed to have any trouble getting AK-47s from Africa and Asia.

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN19326905 Apparently Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in the first month after his capture. There are 31 days in March, so that's, what, over six times per day? Gee. The Bush administration insisted that he gave up important information. So, what, we're supposed to believe that he enjoyed 182 waterboardings, and then just suddenly decided to spill all the important beans after the disastrous 183rd time? What, did his mask slip or something? Pfft. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop here, where we learn about how he also identified the true Kennedy and Lincoln assassins, Nicole Simpson's "real killer", the location of the Roswell UFO, and the secret to faster-than-light travel.

I think you're right that conservatives have abandoned the Republican party in droves, but what's with this pejorative "branding" term? I asked all of my conservative friends during the 2004 election cycle (when I decided not to vote for Bush again), and to the last person they insisted that they weren't "Republicans", and that they would vote for a Democrat if they could only find one conservative enough. I know droves of liberals who say exactly the same thing in reverse. This should come as no surprise. I believe that if you pin most people down they refuse to actually call themselves Democrat or Republican, and even go so far as to insist that they've voted for people from the "other party". I think people do this out of embarrassment because they know that both parties have a long history of misbehavior. It may sound hypocritical, and it's definitely a recognition of their internal predisposition, but it doesn't mean that they're united behind the party. It just means they don't have anybody else to vote for. So no, conservatives aren't Republicans any more than liberals are Democrats. Not unless they want to call themselves that. And most people just don't do that. Not in my experience, anyway. You've posted one or two individual examples of incidents. Nothing to indicate comprehensive control. If you use it to draw an objective conclusion then I have to call you on a straw man. The fact that Sean Hannity hitched his star to the movement doesn't say anything about who's in charge of it. The fact that a libertarian got shouted down is even more of a straw man. Libertarians are frequently the subject of conservative ire and frustration. They don't need prompting from Glenn Beck for that. I agree. And there are also conservatives who aren't libertarians who are concerned about the amount of money that's being spent and will have to be paid back some day. Just as you and I are concerned about it. They aren't hypocrites either. Not even if they voted for Bush. Not even if they voted for Bush twice.

That's an interesting opinion, but I don't see any evidence for it. Here's another opinion: People argue that the tea parties are "Republican" when they're really just conservative. And another opinion: Some liberals cast the tea parties as "Republican" because it instantly demonizes the purpose of the event without having to address the very real concerns being raised (appeal to ridicule). Republicans are "johnny-come-lately" when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Conservatives aren't. They're just as angry about Republican irresponsibility as you are, Bascule. Wanna give them control over the next election? Keep calling them Republicans. That should do the trick.

This sounds vaguely familiar. If memory serves, user accounts are associated with a unique user ID. So if you delete a user from the system their profile essentially becomes orphaned -- even if you create a user account with the same name the system treats it as a new user. This is by design. Just move the files over from the old profile to the new one. No big deal. (Mod Note: I'm moving this folder to Computer Help.)

I love ice cream. I have a secret concern regarding roses, and believe them to be an unrecognized danger to society. But I'm willing to tolerate the presence or roses, and I have no problem with other people growing them. I can't prove that they're a danger, so I have to live with this. This morning I woke up and discovered that everyone on the planet has suddenly decided to change the definition of "eating ice cream" to include "growing roses". Now whenever I tell people that I like ice cream they think I also grow roses. I find this incredibly frustrating. But that still doesn't change the fact that I love ice cream. My love for ice cream is undiluted. The fact that I am now associated with something I consider a danger to society is really my problem. I solve this terrible dilemma but simply telling people that I do not grow roses. Nobody gets to define society's norms all by themselves. Not conservatives. Not the gay and lesbian community. Not rose growers. Society won't tolerate it. Best not to stress too much over this.

Thanks for the thread. As far as I know it's just another type of "dark" speculation in an early stage of academic development, this one coming primarily from a NASA astrophysicist at Goddard, based on data gathered from the microwave anisotropy probe. There's an article about it at National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow.html There's also some more generalized information on "dark flow" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow But aside from the probe's further refining of the precise time/location of the particle horizon, I don't know that anything can really be definitively stated at this point. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps someone with more expertise here can give us some further insight.