Presumably data exist about historical exchange rates, so it ought to be able to correlate that data to produce a correct result. At the least, it shouldn't pretend to have an accurate answer when it's just fudging matters. In this case, Alpha has produced a result that's worse than useless for any serious purpose since it is apparently reasonable, yet completely wrong.

In any case, this is *exactly* the sort of basic processing Alpha needs to be able to do right to be useful. If Alpha can't do this sort of thing reliably, I have trouble coming up with a scenario where I would trust it to do anything I can't do faster and more easily myself.

I guess I just haven't heard anything that makes Google wave sound like a backhoe to me. It sounds to me as if IRC is a shovel, and Google Wave is a shovel with a nice moulded grip. Useful, I'm sure, but hardly newsworthy.

Well, if Google wave does *nothing* that IRC couldn't, then the first question that comes to mind for me is "why is slashdot wasting my time with all these articles about redundant technology?" The GP isn't saying there's anything wrong with Google Wave, he's just wondering what all the fuss is about. I'm sort of wondering about that myself.

I think you have a good point here on the whole. However, it's worth noting that the fundamental difference here is that, in the Civil Rights case, the constitution, which all states presumably treat as the highest authority, was on the side of Civil Rights. Basically, by agreeing to the constitution, states and citizens gave up certain rights to self determination. The constitution says nothing relevant to this issue.

So, you generally make enough extra food to feed an animal, and would just throw it out if you didn't have a dog? You're right. Your dog has no real impact on the environment. I might, however, suggest that you could significantly reduce your environmental impact by not serving yourself more food than you want to eat. Of course then you'd need to start buying dog food, or intentionally setting aside food for the dog.

Just because you can conceal the dog's environmental impact with a much larger personal wastefulness doesn't mean it has no impact.

Some info here

Basically, different companies own and operate the physical cables, and they charge for use. To provide their own clients with access to other parts of the internet in principle they would have to buy bandwidth from their competitors, but rather than do this, the network owners often make agreements to pass on data for each other free of charge.

Unfortunately, in negligence cases the courts often look to the industry standard to decide what sort of precautions a company ought to take. Given that the industry standard is basically no security at all this might be a tough case. Also, to establish negligence you'd have to show some actual harm done - not just the potential for harm. "Unfit for purpose" might still get you out of the contract though.

You make an interesting point about our common culture. We certainly have the option of singing folk songs - in fact I'd argue that most folk songs are nicer than pop music, and I'd rather hear more of them.

When you think about it, the whole reason our common culture is copyrighted is because we've allowed the copyright holders to redefine our common culture via advertising. If we really like the pop music more, then we ought to be paying them for the favour of generating/advertising all these songs.

Put another way, lots of music/recordings are in the public domain, and if you want to play those in your store, you can. If instead you value the convenience of playing whatever's on the radio, or you just like new music more than anything freely available, it's unclear to me why you shouldn't pay a premium for it.

The reason you don't know of Linux programs that let you lock down the desktop is that no such program is needed. A default Linux install will allow you to control access to files and programs on a user by user, or user group basis without the need for extra software. It will take a little bit more expertise than using some program with a gui on windows might, but it also allows much greater control of precisely what user can do.

I think that you're overstating the issue a little here. Listening in on a cell phone conversation generally requires intent and effort. If I have a conversation in a room, the fact that you can overhear me by standing outside with your ear to the door doesn't mean I can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It is neither unreasonable nor ignorant to assume that your conversation is only heard by yourself, the other party, and the cell phone carrier.

It is also reasonable to assume that as far as your cell phone carrier is concerned you have whatever privacy is guaranteed you by your contract and any applicable statutes. I don't know the details on this front, but I'm willing to bet that your cell phone carrier isn't allowed to listen in on your conversations or share them with 3rd parties except in very unusual circumstances.

'return to'? As far as I can tell, in most places the company running the physical layer already has no incentive to upgrade since he faces no competition. Generally speaking I'm all for a free market, but in cases where the entry costs are so high as to make new entry impractical free market capitalism breaks down, and the government needs to intervene. About the least intrusive way the government can intervene here is to make sure the entry costs to competitors are low, and it seems to be working pretty well everywhere they've tried it.

Genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms are both completely distinct from what they're describing here. In those cases, the metaphor is quite appropriate since we're talking about serially encoding an algorithm, and then letting mutations of the encoded algorithm compete subject to a fitness function. Ad-Aware's "Genoytpe" has nothing to do with genetic programming or evolutionary algorithms, and the analogy makes no sense at all.

It is entirely possible that he *does* know more about statistics than these researchers. As someone has already observed, the statistics behind this research are essentially flawed by having too small a pool size of violent criminals. I could point out a couple of other flaws in the study, including the question of how effective their approach to controlling for aggressivity is, but that seems unnecessary.

More importantly, correlation is not causation! It doesn't matter if you've corrected for a few factors. Even if you corrected for every possible factor, the possibility would remain that both events had some shared cause. There is *never* a time when correlation alone, without other evidence, can serve to establish causation.

There are a lot of people who seem to implicitly trust that someone who calls himself a scientist knows what he's doing. The truth is, the social sciences are mostly filled with people who struggled in their basic statistics courses, and never really learned the stuff. As a math major, I often tutored people in statistics classes, and the people in the social sciences statistics classes never had the sort of grasp of the material needed to do anything useful really. Having never understood statistics, they mostly learn by mimicking their research advisors, who never learned statistics either.

There are some researchers out there doing good work, but they are vastly outnumbered, and your default presumption of competence is totally unwarranted.

In my defense, I said nothing about mathematicians, and the omission was intentional. Outside a very narrow range of fields like mathematics, where everything you need to know to understand a problem can be precisely defined, real greatness requires mental versatility.

Setting aside geniuses, I would argue more generally that this sort of versatility is often (though not always) found in the most successful people in any field.

The purpose of the essay is primarily to determine the students' ability to write rather than to find anything out about them personally, so it makes sense that sometimes the B.S. essay is the better one.

That said, most teachers are pretty good at detecting B.S., and a student who manages to write a good paper which isn't full of B.S. is going to come across very well too. I'm not saying the system doesn't create a strong incentive to write B.S., but I think you might be missing the point of the essay assignment.