The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.
This preference is based on the assumption that the extra information conveyed in the HTML part of the email is worthless, which may not be the case.
I can see from the downvotes that some HN users are excessively passionate about their plain text emails, but many people do prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide.
This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.
I don't think that is a very good argument in these modern times, with the relatively huge storage and bandwidth availability. The extra size of such formatting markup is negligible.
Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake.
In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus).
You'd be wasting your time as there is no feedback as to whether your attempts have worked to frustrate their targeting, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that someone picks up on your efforts and casually flags you to make your life more difficult - extra searches at borders, no fly list, and so on.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They may have stopped attacks but not revealed any information about this publicly, or engaged in misdirection as to their role using parallel construction.
Hidden services can't be located in that manner unless the owner has badly misconfigured the service so it's reachable by IP address. A typical configuration would have the service listening on 127.0.0.1 or a private (RFC 1918) network address only, and have Tor connect to that.
Headline should be modified to indicate that the study was carried out in the USA. It's not generally applicable to the world population, or necessarily to all high-income countries.
The problem with 'intelligent design' is that it's such an infantile way of trying to understand the world. Stating "God did it", rather than using one's brain to figure out the mechanisms of how the world works, is just lazy, regressive thinking that doesn't advance our knowledge and understanding in any way whatsoever.
How do you know it doesn't work? From all we've been told (very little, mostly through leaks) there isn't enough information to make that judgement.
The key issue isn't the potential benefit of mass surveillance in dealing with crimes or potential crimes, but rather its risk to individual privacy and the danger of enabling authoritarian governance.
The author starts from an assumption that the Bible is true and cherry-picks evidence in an attempt to support that, choosing the interpretation (or misinterpretation) that best fits into his pre-existing biases.
Not convincing unless one has already been indoctrinated into the belief that everything is 'God-given', rather than being more open-minded and inquisitive about the nature of the world.
> Your beliefs are wrong, as we have been shown that this mass surveillance has failed to prevent even one terrorist attack since its inception.
We don't actually know this. Mass surveillance may have led to 'extrajudicial' methods of thwarting terrorist attacks, i.e. death squads or drone killings. Or when cases of terrorist plots have been taken to trial, its use could have been masked by parallel construction of evidence.
This level of underhandedness seems to be increasing in recent times. For example, there is a terrorist conspiracy trial currently ongoing in the UK that is being held almost entirely in secret - the public and media are not permitted to know the evidence or the sources of evidence against the suspects. In fact up until recently even the existence of the trial and the identities of the suspects were under a gag order, for reasons unknown[1].
To some extent I agree with you that there are benefits to mass surveillance, and that on the whole it is (probably) not currently being widely abused.
However, this is not predictive of the future.
By setting up such a pervasive surveillance machine, this massively enables abuses by future governments that may not be quite as benign towards its citizens.
Just consider how 'useful' this mass data mining of private communications would have been for the East German Stasi, or during McCarthyism in the USA, or many other examples of overly authoritarian governance.
The danger is that a system set up to protect state security, ostensibly with the best of intentions, can be subverted later on as a tool of governmental abuse.
I also have this problem, but on a Windows laptop with 2GB. However, Firefox has recently been crashing several times per day, which sorted out the long-running memory problem but rather inconveniences usage.
It's a shame because I really do prefer it to the other browsers, for a variety of reasons.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.