ecoli

Like Potter Stewart on Pornography, I know it when I see it.

While Bush & now Obama have gotten away with the legal wiggle room, there's little doubt in my mind that the wide-scale surveillance and privacy violations of American citizen's by our gov't in the name of security lies against the principles of the constitution and bill of rights as determined by various courts. I am not, however, a lawyer.

Amendment 4, 9 & 14, section 1 have been interpreted as a general right to privacy from State and (due to 9) federal governments.

huda - without telling me what distance metric you're using I can't really answer/ find an answer to your question. It's beyond me why you won't be explicit about it.

Agreed, but look at what the gov't has been doing to promote alternative energy: basically subsidizing inefficient corn-based ethanol production. That and subsidizing traditional oil companies - well I don't really think the gov't is good at this game. Gov't subsidized energy doesn't necessarily mean cheaper energy or economic growth. Yes, but the point of the fallacy is not to break them in the first place. Further subsidies or gov't-fueled growth of the energy sector is not necessarily the best place to keep employees busy is my point.

Sounds like math will be very important, especially for security jobs. If you can pull your grades up, I wouldn't be too concerned. Most employers are more interested that you have a degree than in your transcript.

alpha - you have not yet explained what you are trying to do. A quick google search indicates that a socket error could result from a bad connection to whatever server you're using.

Some ideas: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/a346/ http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/ramen/ramen2.html

Extending the Patriot act, using surveillance drones on citizens, signing the National Defense Authorization Act, spying on citizens using the NSA's data processing center and using private firms to avoid warrants, prosecuting gov't whistleblowers (wikileaks cases), blocking freedom of information requests. More here: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/obamas_dismal_civil_liberties_record/

His continued abuse of the bill of rights/ american privacy citizens to wage a war against terror outweighs any potential benefits, IMO. More of the same, more of the same.

Unforuntately the broken window parable is a fallacy. According to the parable, the gov't could just just pay people to break windows - window fixing industry would boom & float the rest of the economy. However, this ignores opportunity costs to the non-window fixing economy and the fact you're not really creating any net value. Not to say that there's no value in electricity generation, but the fact that there isn't any electricity shortage in this country results in the same idea as just breaking windows or digging ditches and filling them up. The fact that GDP calculation includes gov't expenditures doesn't necessarily mean that the economy will improve as G increases. [math] GDP = C + I + G + (X - M) [/math]

alpha2cen: http://www.statisticalanalysisconsulting.com/how-to-ask-a-statistics-question/ This applies equally well to computational questions as well.

What jobs are you applying for <= important

To add to what DJBruce said, as I understand it, the degrees of freedom is just that: the number of entries in the residuals vector that are 'allowed' to vary: since the residuals, [math] (x_1 - \overline{x} ... x_n - \overline{x}) [/math], must sum to zero, the entire vector is determined fully by the first N-1 entries.

Phi - I just don't think its accurate to frame a tax cut as welfare. But, we've had this discussion before.

BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN UNDER CONDITIONS SIMULATING ENTRAPMENT IN REFRIGERATORS I love this kind of stuff. source: Journal of Pediatrics

Ok, I stand corrected. The poster made it sound like the politician didn't have to disclose the name of the organization that gave them money. But the truth is closer to something like organizations don't have to disclose the identity of members who've donated money.

Think about distance in Euclidean space. What is the distance from a point to itself? Obviously zero, since its the same point. So, if you're looking at a distance matrix, there should be zeros on the diameter. Now the rest depends on what metric you're using, but if you have zeros on the diameter I suspect you're using a distance metric and not a similarity matrix - which is perfectly fine for clustering applications, but it helps to be clear about what you're doing.

does it work if you try to run the code from a regular console?

Work hard and get that GPA up. Find a professor that will let you work in a lab. You'll be ok.

The more common term is, I believe, special interest group. Still, I don't believe that any donation to a political campaign can be kept from public knowledge. for example: http://www.opensecrets.org/

The New Yorker does tend towards a specific voicing as well which sometimes drags, but it has a good blend of non-fiction/ fiction to keep things interesting. The New York event pages are useful to me as well.

The fact that I focused on iphones was a bit facetious.. iphone manufacturing jobs are never coming back to the US. Our factory labor can't work cheaply enough and low level-production engineers aren't educated enough. If anyone thought the goal of tax cuts was to increase hiring in manufacturing, I've got a bridge to sell you. From that perspective, I agree with you, that if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire and the money used to education, investment in science, tech & engineering skills, then we would have been far better off and able to cope with the inevitable fact that manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. Hell, I even support social programs that tide people over to deal with the transition that is Pareto optimality.

I'm thinking about either renewing my subscription to the New Yorker or giving the Economist a try. I'd only really have time for 1 magazine. What do you all read, if any.

what's the definition of a private interest group? Using a lose definition, this could be anything from corporate industry groups to labor unions to my high school chess club.