qrendel

Just take comfort in knowing that female attractiveness usually drops off a cliff far earlier than male attractiveness does. The same girl writing that essay will one day be 40+ and begging for any of those "genetic superiors" to give her five seconds, while the same male "uggo" with a stable income and decent hygiene will be able to take his pick of a bunch of nicer women who didn't view the whole of humanity through the lens of the beautiful people master race.

> I wonder, for instance, how much sooner we'd have discovered the Juniper backdoor --- possibly the most catastrophic backdoor in the history of the Internet --- if a larger collection of experts was somehow allowed to review the cache.

So you're claiming that he should be prosecuted and convicted for the leaks, but simultaneously that he should have allowed more people to have access to the leaks? This position doesn't seem very consistent.

I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s?

A few years ago there was something about military personnel being stationed with unloaded rifles in airports as part of the War on Terror(TM). I now imagine that was to desensitize us to this future - everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time.

The U.S. really has become a police state.

That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead they chose the path of petty legalism by assuming since the syllabus didn't agree with their's 100%, the only way to guarantee I knew the material was to make to pay to retake the entire sequence.

I failed to mention I'd also already spent three years as a physics major and had already taken classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics - so being told to retake the intro physics sequence was quite silly indeed.

Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exceptions to these, and personal requests to professors to get out of them were completely ignored. The prereqs were enforced by the computerized registration system - good luck getting past them without a waiver.

As one anecdote, they once told me I needed to retake intro physics. On the pretest given on the first day of class, I came within one problem of a perfect score. Didn't make a lick of difference - their syllabus differed from the last university in the most minor of ways, and despite the fact that the class never actually covered even 50% of the stuff it claimed to on the syllabus, I was made to retake the entire sequence anyway.

I read a lot and don't have a ton of money. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept, and if I'm concerned about the author, I'd honestly rather donate to them directly than see it siphoned off by whatever deal they may have had with the publisher.

When I said "cheap," I meant in price. I'm averse to low-quality books, and would rather pay a few dollars more or hold out longer for a copy with clean pages and little wear. Especially highlighting is usually an immediate deal-breaker. Finding a fairly nice copy typically isn't a problem, though - low-price hardcover is often a more difficult request to meet.

My personal experience, from having been an e-book aficionado who eventually went back to almost entirely paper (cheap used hardcover when I can find it):

Ebook advantages:

- Cheap, no commitment, try before you buy

- Easy to transport, take 30+ books on vacation with no increase in weight

Dead-tree advantages:

- Higher retention of material (various cues for memory related to the physicality and layout of the book versus an indistinguisable smorgasbord of ebook pages)

- Greater tendency to actually read, since they sit around your house/living room taunting you, rather than being forgotten in some obscure folder of your device

You (along with the immediate parent) actually do have a good point here. If any pollsters ask, I'd probably say I support Johnson for this reason, though overall I'd personally prefer Green policies over Libertarian ones. There's something to be said for Greens/Libs banding together just to help wedge third parties into the process at all. This kind of strategizing is still pretty unfortunate though, and only makes sense for the polling/debate process, not necessarily the electoral one.

Not to mention the CPD would almost certainly change the debate qualifiers immediately to still keep Johnson out, same as the DNC did with Lawrence Lessig.

This is already the first election in which millenials and gen-Xers (terrible name, btw) outnumber them as far as eligible voters. The problem is eligibility isn't enough - old people vote far, far more reliably than young people, so the (often idiotic) preferences of their demographic still win out.

Automatic national voter registration when turning 18 would be a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure it would convince people to actually go to the polls. In certain states just registering to vote in the first place can be a real hassle, and having to do it every time you move punishes the more mobile generations.

If what matters to you is actual electoral support, there's no reason to be voting third party anyway. Both Stein and Johnson got less than 1% of the vote in 2012, and even combined only about 1.2%. The most successful third-party/independent Presidential candidate in decades was Ross Perot in 1992, and even winning just under 19% of the popular vote he failed to win any of the electoral college. It's a self-serving double standard to tell people to pass up the major party candidates but then vote based on electoral support for the third parties, ignoring how well their ideological and policy positions actually align with your own.

Regarding size, the official memberships from 2014 were ~411,000 (Libs) vs ~248,000 (Greens). You could look at that as either the Libertarians being 66% larger, or them being practically the same as far as order of magnitude and portion of the total electorate. Johnson/Weld are more experienced candidates than Stein, but on the other hand, Ron and Rand Paul never came as close to winning a nomination as Sanders did, either (him being about 98% in line with Stein's positions - I remember his local campaign staff even defecting to her around the time of the DNC endorsement).

Regarding policies, Greens and Libertarians are also 99% in alignment on this particular issue (war on drugs), as well as some others. I know people have their preferences, just pointing out that there are multiple similarly-sized third parties of yet complete opposite ideological natures that would still be optionable for those wanting to vote on this kind of thing. It's even easier to not support this kind of behavior by the DEA.

Green Party is also an option if you want to protest vote. A problem, for some, with supporting libertarian candidates is that they (voters) may not be as fond of the low-hanging fruit policies most likely to get implemented (e.g. defunding many agencies, removing environmental protections) as the moonshot policies they also promote (e.g. ending the war on drugs and reducing the military-industrial-natsec complex). Even though neither 3rd party will ever win, the votes do send a message about which way policy adjustments should be made, so it's still worth some thought about what message you really want to send.

In general, it allows a better approximation of the solution function for far less hidden neurons. Sure, you could get arbitrarily close using a single hidden layer, but that hidden layer might need to be unfathomably large. Same idea for network topology in multilayer nets - a network could eventually learn to set a lot of the weights to zero, but training is a lot faster and more effective if you know a good problem-specific topology to start with. Deep nets make problems more tractable. Recurrence is the real game-changer, since then you've moved from non-linear function approximators up to Turing completeness (at least over the set of all possible RNNs).