Geology is not a professional degree, at all. I know the fossil fuel industry wants to make it that, but it’s a science degree. As someone with a BS in geology, who admits he isn’t a geologist (also BS in computer science, that I actually use) Zinke is not a geologist any more than I am. Zinke used his geology degree,…

No, actually it doesn’t. Since Zinke never actually did any professional geological work, calling himself a geologist is like calling yourself a prostitute because you watched a documentary on prostitution one time.  What makes you a geologist is actually going out and doing geological work like surveys or…

The Youtube porn algorithms aren’t as great as you seem to think:

Precisely. What’s more, that name only came up in the Google “newsletter” for New Zealanders because a bunch of New Zealanders accessed the foreign articles naming the suspect. The algorithm is, quite literally, just looking at news searches and articles read by people in New Zealand and saying “hey, this might…

It was carved out of Virginia too, so they’d have a gripe but at this point it’s been well over two centuries: I think they’re over it.

The legal system is also pretty messed up, yes, and I’m well aware of that.  When I said “law enforcement” I didn’t just mean cops.

Nope.  This would be around 2003-2004.  It was also very much about an alien occupation, instead of just some aliens landing/crashing.

The prosecutor offered him 6 months to 7 years in jail...that’s not a terrible mark down from the maximum. If he accepted the deal and faced the full 7 years, with good behavior he could have been out in as little as 2 years, serving the remainder of his sentence on probation. It’s possible that a sympathetic judge…

Whenever someone mentions Toto’s Africa, I think of this: 

More Lupe Fiasco is always a good thing.

The Aaron Swartz case is interesting. I agree with his principles in general and I agree he got screwed. At the same time, he did know what he was doing was illegal even if I agree with him that it was the right thing to do; but, if you want to be an activist and do something illegal, you need to know that jail time…

All of this concern over quantum computers is based on the idea that 1. Shor’s algorithm works and 2. that quantum computing is feasible on a large enough scale to run Shor’s algorithm. I wouldn’t bet against the idea that quantum computing can break modern encryption necessarily, but this is not too dissimilar to…

Well, the idea that most self-driving folks are looking at eventually is that the car won’t even have human controls. Instead, people just ride in the car while it is being piloted by the AI. Something like this:

Except we’re objectively bad at driving. Consider one of the most basic things we do while driving: merging into another lane. In order to do this safely you need to turn your head, look behind and to the left or right of you, away from the direction you are travelling, then merge over. If the person in front of you…

But that’s more an effect of a lack of political will.  You can make effective transit in smaller cities, Seattle now has a pretty robust one, for example, but it takes the will and effort to do so.

Not hard to be better than a dried dog turd.

There was a TV show years ago, like in the early aughts, that was kinda sorta like this.  Basically, aliens invade, and there’s a resistance, but the series focused on a guy who part alien somehow (I think some sort of genetic engineering?) who worked for both the aliens and the resistance.  Giving us a view of both…

Yep!  The only way to make companies pay for security is to make them pay when they fuck it up.

As a Seattleite, let me say this: stay the fuck out of Seattle Apple.  It’s crowded enough as it is.

DC is literally built upon a swamp, of course rats thrive there.