DigitalTurk's comments

We didn't see massive uprisings in Nazi Germany also, and there were some Jewish individuals collaborated with the Nazi regime. Your argument couldn't be less convincing.

For a moment I thought I was reading a Xinhua article.

Well, 'nearby pretty girl' would not describer herself as such, but would have a plausible looking profile picture. :) Also the distances are a bit bigger than the bar you're sitting in (up to a few kilometers).

It's a problem because of spam.

On WeChat it happens that if you send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl', you get a link to some dodgy website back.

And before you call people who would send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl' naive. WeChat is in fact used a lot for hooking up with strangers.

Actually, it's quite frustrating. It means that for many (geeky, 'international') apps that I'm interested in there's no rating available.

My question wasn't whether neurons have agency. It was whether people have agency.

Also, I intended 'limited agency' to be read as 'zero or very little agency'.

That's a question, not an argument.

Here's another question: "How can a human being, which consists of many neurons, each of which has limited agency over the aggregate actions of that entity, be remotely capable of demonstrating moral agency?"

Incidentally, I noticed that you substituted 'human-like moral agency' for 'moral agency' in the OP. I never said states have human-like moral agency (nor am I making a claim to the contrary per se).

You state your opinion as facts, but forget to give an argument. The least you could do is provide a reference.

Prima facie, I don't find your view plausible at all.

Great customer service??

I don't have experience with other mobile phone companies in the US, but T-Mobile's customer support line is unlike anything I had ever experienced in Europe. It made my experiences with China Unicom not seem all that bad—and that's saying something!.

I have experienced the following things:

- I would be on the phone for ten or twenty minutes before I could speak to an operator;

- The voice recognition software utterly failed for me (granted, I'm not a native English speaker but I have few to no problems with Siri);

- I would be connected to different departments several times, in circles;

- I would have to enter my mobile phone number over and over again;

- The operators were entirely clueless about SIM cards for iPads and about their inability to accept foreign credit cards.

It's very much reminiscent of calling a national phone company for support in Europe in the 80s.

Also, I've been in T-Mobile shops where they didn't know the term 'SIM card'. They would literally ask me if it was one of those cards you put into an iPhone, and then tell me I could only buy those online (indeed, they're not free!).

They're also very, very expensive by European standards. Again, my previous horrible experience with China telcos made a lot more sense after being a T-Mobile customer. I now realize they just copy the US a little to eagerly!

Edit: Here's an example. When you would call to top up your SIM card they would enumerate all the plans you could get starting from the most absurdly expensive plans that you wouldn't otherwise realize existed. A reasonably priced plan would only come in as the 7th option and it would take a minute or more before they'd tell you what button to press. It was a very painful process to top up my SIM card and I imagine that if I lived in the US longtime I'd ultimately give in and just get a monthly plan that I didn't really want.

Interestingly, in the Netherlands they often call them Flemish fries. Flanders being the Dutch-language region in Belgium.

If you called them that in Belgium I bet you would cause a riot. ;-)

I don't remember McDonald's fries tasting better in the US than in Europe, but then I don't go to McDonald's all that often. (I do grant that there are subtle differences between McDonald's restaurants in different regions.)

There's actually a second type of American fries that I think is somewhat better than the ones at McDonald's. They're called Cajun fries [1]. They're made in an oven and are a bit spicy. You can get them at cheap fast food places like Checkers or fancier hamburger places like Five Guys.

[1] http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/cajun-oven-fr...!

> McDonald's french fries are great. At their best, they are everything a french fry should be: salty, crisp, light, and not greasy.

Funny. I tend to think of super thin fries as an American thing. Fries from McDonald's, in particular, taste like cardboard to me.

Then again, I'm Belgian.

"Americans have an anti-nationalist, universalist ideology"

Come on. You're just trolling.

Spying on foreign corporations, if I were to guess.

Do they do this at Heathrow? I only transferred there once but I had to go through security again.

The Heathrow airport is quite a mess, actually.

Oh, I hate when website follow your approach.

To start, it doesn't work if you use VPNs. Second, it doesn't update when you travel.

Here's one example. Even though I'm logged into Google and used Google Maps' 'pinpoint my location' feature, Google Reader is currently emailing me my daily schedule (a feature I enabled recently) in the afternoon. That's also despite my appointments being annotated with timezone information.

I call this bad engineering.

Speaking as European (non-UK), I do find this bizarre because it makes the UK look weak. It loses face.

You would expect the UK to have enough going for it that it can stand up to the USA, yet here they seem to be so scared of some diplomatic conflict with the US that they preemptively ban someone who is not at all a criminal (under UK/EU law). It's not something you would expect a proud nation to do.

Having lived in Amsterdam I would strongly deny this. Restaurants in NL are below Western European standards. And a quasi-monopoly by one particular supermarket chain means it's a hassle to find quality ingredients for home cooked meals too. For instance, if I recall correctly, Albert Hein ham has about 60% meat in it and it looks really pale.

Very nice work!

It seems like this is only fast on large files, though, because the text needs to be copied from the main RAM memory to the GPU, which introduces latency. I wonder what latency would be like if this algorithm was instead run on the kind of unified memory architecture that you see in e.g. the PS2 and XBox One.

Also, I don't quite follow why they're compiling the finite automata on the GPU. To me their explanation that they didn't want to copy the automaton node per node sort of sounds like there's a lot of room for optimization here. E.g. maybe the regular expressions could be compiled to OpenCL code.

Then again, they did also find that pattern matching is a memory bound problem so maybe emitting native code is pointless. Anyone know if there are regular expression engines that compile emit native x86 code?

they already have cellphones, you know :)