law

I tested it with Cyanogenmod's stock browser customized with an iPhone user-agent, and it also works fine. It seems like Google is trying to coerce "eligible users" into using the Google Play app, but won't prevent others from accessing the site.

This is very likely the Enron corpus that was used: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./enron/

> What happens when say a company like Comcast owns a stake in a company like Netflix and conspire to extort a competitor like Hulu (asking for exorbitant amounts of cash for speed).

Comcast actually owns part of Hulu, but its a purely economic ownership interest (See https://www.fcc.gov/transaction/comcast-nbcu for more information)

One of the best purchases that I have ever made is the Kinesis Advantage keyboard.[1] In fairness, I was tempted to return it shortly after purchasing, but opted to give it one full week of use before making my decision. It took a couple days to become comfortable using it, and now I can't think of myself using another keyboard. It's designed for optimal physical placement of ctrl, alt, delete, backspace, and spacebar, among other keys.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000LVJ9W8

For how long do you keep the information?

> It's important to understand that when FSF talks about "freedom" they explicitly mean keeping the users free - not the developers. As a developer, I'm personally biased towards being free to other developers, and I think GPL (v2 and esp. v3) are very much pro-user at the cost of being anti-developer.

I don't think that's what the FSF means when they talk about freedom. Freedom is about keeping everyone free--developers and users alike. Copyleft licenses ensure that all derivative works be subject to the same licensing terms as the original work. It's a way to protect the self-perpetuating nature of free software that more permissive licenses fail to achieve.

Would you mind expanding upon why you presumably prefer GPLv2 over v3? Additionally, if you prefer the MIT/BSD licensing model, why not choose Apache v2?

> FeedSnap's goal is simple: to provide a reliable, capable, and actively maintained FeedBurner replacement for your beloved RSS feed.

In keeping with that goal, is there any chance that you will open source the work you've done under a GPLv3 license? Perhaps the largest problem is that every service claims to be "reliable, capable, and actively maintained" until it isn't.

You can estimate the likelihood that a particular sentence is spam by calculating the log sum of n-gram probabilities of sub-sequences in a sentence. These probabilities are obtained from a sufficiently general training set, such as Google's n-gram viewer[1]. You can estimate the probability of a particular sequence of words by summing the log probabilities of each n-gram within that sequence. Using a trigram language model (n = 3), you could estimate the likelihood as follows:

Sentence = "This sentence is semantically and syntactically valid."

P(Sentence) = log(p(START,START,This)) + log(p(START,This,sentence)) + log(p(This,sentence,is)) + log(p(sentence,is,semantically)) + log(p(is,semantically,and)) + log(p(semantically,and,syntactically)) + log(p(and,syntactically,valid)) + log(p(syntactically,valid,.)) + log(p(valid,.,STOP)) + log(p(.,STOP,STOP))

where START and STOP are special symbols that aid in determining the proximity of a word to the beginning and end of a sentence.

If your training set fails to sufficiently generalize, you could use Bayesian inference to estimate the likelihood that the sentence is spam. Under this framework, you'd be calculating the posterior probability of the sentence being spam given the observed sequence of n-grams, which combines (i) the inherent likelihood that any sequence of words is spam and (ii) the compatibility of an observed sequence with (i), which is proportional to the impact it has on (i).

[1] http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....

It depends on the context. When combined with other subjective pronouns to form the subject of a verb, "I" is correct (as in "You and I are commenting on this topic"). However, when combined with other objective pronouns to form the object of a verb/preposition, you should use "me" (as in "Others are commenting on this topic along with you and me").[1]

[1] http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/i-or-me

Why not GPLv3?

So does GPLv3.

This article is absolute trash. The 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data hosted on Google's servers, and ECPA and CALEA are essentially meaningless here. The truth is that Facebook and Google can give away (or even sell) your data to the government, and they have your consent to do so.

Reading the terms of service and privacy policy of each site you visit daily is a good exercise. Nearly all will contain some ambiguous catch-all provision that they can use your data to "improve [their] services." Then, if they're sued, the question is whether they have the resources to hire a law firm that can convince a court that selling data to the FBI/CIA/etc. improves their services. They do.

Right, I'm not arguing that. My point is that it's considerably more difficult for them to go this route; they need to convince a judge to affix his signature (and his credibility) to a warrant by demonstrating the existence of probable cause.

Not without a warrant, which is presumably useless against good encryption. Moreover, the dominant view is that a judge can't compel you to disclose the encryption key unless the authorities have already seen what was encrypted.

They can, and they do. It's not a violation of the Fourth Amendment if a private company hands over (or sells) data to the government.

It's a wonderfully designed site; I love how the splash page draws your eyes to where they belong, without being overly obtrusive. One criticism: on http://redstamp.ca/development/, you may want to change the menu that changes position as you scroll. Maybe keep it fixed to the top of the screen as you scroll down, but when you scroll up, it should stay in position until it hits the bottom of the screen, and then begin to move up once it's out of the viewable area. When you're at the top of the page, it can move back to its home. That's just a suggestion on top of what's already very nice work.

That's not the problem. The problem is that the e-mails, by their very nature, are opt-out rather than opt-in. One reason people seem to complain is because they have to waste time logging into the site, finding the e-mail opt-out section, and disabling whatever "service" is responsible for the torrent of spam. And that only works until the site's next "user experience" update.

I don't think I saw The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (available at http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Inform... ) on the list. The Boston Globe's review is 100% correct: it's a visual Strunk and White.

Except patent trolls are not even close to the first groups of people to notice this "bug." Many "white hat hackers" came first; there are many law review articles published concerning the flaws in the patent system. It's not like Congress didn't know about it. They, like always, decided to punt. This is their wake-up call.

To lobby a software company? That makes no sense. If anything, that hacker would be lobbying Congress...and frankly, that's his or her prerogative. I don't care what they do. It's not dirty money just because you say it is; it's legally-acquired money that a subset of the population feels was obtained illegitimately. I don't like what has happened with the patent system any more than you do, but I'm choosing my battles. I'm disdainful toward patent trolls; I'm thankful for them, because they effectively give me work (invalidating their patents)

> If the banks found a loophole in mortgage regulations that allowed them to take the houses of people who were paying, should we admire them for finding a bug, or vilify them for taking people's houses?

You're ignoring the probability that banks would find such a a loophole. The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis was an indirect example, but allocating the majority of blame to the banks is not appropriate. They acted rationally assuming perfect information (an assumption that's usually necessary in the economic models they used in evaluating creditworthiness), so if anything, they deserve criticism for failing to appreciate the significance of, and potential for, imperfect information. But that issue isn't really relevant here.

It might be a fundamental difference in our opinions, but I'm inclined to believe that the purpose of the law is to avoid situations requiring "social justice." These companies are playing by the rules, but it's the rules that are flawed. So I prefer to spend my time focused on the root cause of our outrage.

Because socially punishing the NPEs takes the focus away from the real problem: punishing Congress for its failure to reform the laws causing a hemorrhage of lawsuits. The NPEs are effectively doing Congress' job by finding these loopholes; they're analogous to black-hat hackers who exploit a flaw in software that the developer fails to fix in a timely manner. In that example, this community historically hasn't vilified that hacker to the extent they vilify patent trolls. That's why I reacted strongly to your post.

> He's not saying they must conform with these ambiguous rules. But if they don't, it's fair to be contemptuous of them. There is nothing at all unusual about this, there are lots of actions that won't get you in jail but will get you punished in various social manners.

I disagree, though. They're following the law as written, which the vast majority of people and organizations do daily. The distinction is that by doing so, they've found a "bug" in the system, and that's something that deserves admiration rather than contempt. Here's the analogy: someone spots a bug in a program, and they're exploiting that bug in a way that's harming other users. Who deserves those users contempt more: (1) the hacker who found & exploits the bug; or (2) or the quiescent software developer who fails to timely patch that bug? I think it's (2), which is why I'm reluctant to socially punish NPEs. They're publicizing flaws in patent legislation to the detriment to many innocents. Consider this akin to "crowdsourcing" Congress, subject to a cost function (namely, the magnitude of harm suffered by the innocents). It's Congress' continued inaction that deserves the magnitude of our contempt; socially vilifying the 'hacker' is just a band-aid solution.

I agree with your suggestion on the webcams. Another approach is to use machine learning to generate the high-definition image from the mutual information contained in the multiple images by using probabilistic estimators. As an example, [1] has empirically shown decent results using MAP estimators.

[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130...

> Organizations that follow the letter of the law but ignore the principles behind them should inspire our strongest contempt.

And who establishes these principles? To suggest that an organization must additionally follow some ambiguous set of principles putatively inspiring an established law is the pinnacle of arrogance. How can a country function if its members (citizens and organizations alike) cannot look to the letter of the law to decide whether their conduct conforms therewith?

If you don't like the fact that some companies are legally engaging in contemptuous behavior, then change the law. That's the whole point of Congress--to legislate. Suggesting that laws additionally be subject to motivating principles comports with judicial supremacy, which is to say it's the courts (rather than our elected officials) who decide what the law is. That's not how this country is supposed to work.

Prior art is usually resolved by the patent office (or the patent trial and appeal board). It's only after they rule against you that you can take it to the federal circuit.

Additionally, if the entities receiving the shares happen to be C corporations (which I believe can have 501(c)(3) status), they can deduct the lesser of: (i) 70% of dividends received on the stock; or (ii) 70% of the corporation's taxable income. As such, the implied tax rate on any dividends received from the shares would only be 11.88% (30% * 39.6%), assuming the corporation is in the 35% ordinary income bracket. This is important for 501(c)(3)'s, too, because there are plenty of exceptions to the general notion of "tax exemption" associated with that code section (See, e.g., 26 USC §§ 507-09, 511-15, and 527).

EDIT: of course, this only applies if the company issues a dividend

I use Python in production for text pre-processing and other ETL-related processes, which is part of a larger reinforcement learning approach. Additionally, I use Python to prototype the core ML algorithms, which I sometimes re-implement in C++. However, for many of those algorithms, numpy actually performs identically to BLAS in C++.

I've never tried Scala, but I suppose I should give it a chance. I'm a fan of Lisp, and the two languages seem to have a lot in common. Scala's expressive type system seems like it has the potential to be both a blessing and a curse, but admittedly, I know next to nothing about the language.