are they pursuing the only thing sure to work, which is drilling at a tactically chosen spot of the same oil field to relieve or nullify the pressure at the leak?

Or are they really going through all options sequentially, with the least costly and fastest solutions first.

My thoughts exactly. I skimmed through the article but didn't find a clear answer (also, the formulas in there just seem to pop up from nowhere, but I'm no physicist and hope the guys from nature do get it...)

I am in (combinatorial) scientific computing and high performance computing, and use *NIX environments almost exclusively (ranging from proprietary Unix to different kinds of Linux flavours).
This goes for universities as well as businesses (ranging from software consultancy to companies like Shell). This choice is due to performance as well as productivity. These statements come from my own experiences.

Besides, if you want your students to learn something new, it makes sense to pick something else than Windows.

They shot down a nuclear cruise missle. I saw it live on my tv yesterday on this show called '24'.

This is why slashdot rocks :)

How does being bigger than Microsoft entail that Google was 'that big'? To my knowledge, Google was barely at 15% market share and not getting any bigger, *in China*. Fifteen is way smaller than basically anywhere. Leaving then, especially after the hacking, is a sound *business* move; as your quoted comment also argues.

And, again, leaving after knowingly entering a censored market does not give Google any higher moral ground than e.g. Microsoft, or even Cisco, as far as I'm concerned.

They weren't forced to beat their child, and made the conscious choice of starting to beat their child. Because everyone else was doing so and making money with it. While yelling "do no evil", of all things. Also, Google would have never withdrawn if it had managed to take a large enough market share there. They weren't that big, had to comply with a nagging government and had to put up with a hacker's attack in the back. Not worthwhile, so withdrawn. Just business; not morals.

Mod parent up. Math is more than calculus. At its very base it's result-driven logical thinking combined with wanting to prove correctness of everything you do, within equally well-defined premises. Precisely what a programmer needs. And head on with the discrete math and combinatorics; graph algorithms will impact the computing world more and more.

Sister Miriam, is that you?

Thanks :)

Ah, I see. Comment withdrawn then, and let's hope it doesn't get further than the first year of university. I also hope papers like that don't get any grade until it's properly rewritten.

While I definitely agree there is a problem with people not caring about proper writing (this is also the case with my native language, Dutch); I would say that "Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz'..." is a definite exaggeration. Never have I encountered such an article. I've seen some really badly written articles while still being reviewed (they didn't get accepted), and even those did not contain abbreviations such as 'cuz'.

Those two things is what statistics is based in the first place as well. Evidence etcetera comes second. If you can't blow logical counterarguments away you're probably wrong and you're indeed lacking in understanding.

A police chief who wants to use the law to shut up those who criticize him. If this doesn't ring "police-state" alarm bells then I don't know what will. This chief should go.

Build-in a kill switch for when your spyware hits the wrong machines.