That's a (deliberate, I frequently think) misunderstanding of the liberal position. The reason that there's a lot of talk about outcomes is because it is the single clearest and simplest metric we have about success. If a group is represented at 5% in a field where we suppose that equal opportunities should lead to something more like 50%, the conclusion is that the initial assumption of equal opportunities is wrong. Measuring opportunity is incredibly hard, consists of hundreds, if not thousands of factors, is impacted by the cultural biases of the investigator, and some impacts to opportunity are so embedded in the culture that they are quite literally invisible to the investigator. As a result, outcome is frequently used as a proxy for opportunity.

Is it right to make it a 100% proxy? No. But it is a valid starting point to look into opportunities.

Which sometimes is a good thing. See for example the "local" Alabama Chief Justice who just gave the finger to gay people because he doesn't like what he's being told to do. Sometimes, the big stick of the uninvolved far away helps to knock sense in the locals. Sometimes, the locals do know best. But blanket statements like "local government is much more often best" is trivially proven to be wrong.

Your generalization would be true if I was just one of a handful of students who worked up to general engineering principles from rudimentary physics knowledge. However, I can point to hundreds of my peers at MIT who did the same thing, many of whom likely have a much deeper understanding than I do. Given my exposure to the curriculum at CalTech and Stanford, I feel rather confident in stating that engineering students at those schools weren't just given equations and told to memorize them. Instead, they slogged through a series of derivations of those principles and had to build up their own understanding of the meaning behind those derivations. I'm sure that others can chime in about their experiences at other top-tier institutions, such as Berkeley, CMU, and the Ivies.

As an aside, undergraduate research assistantships are becoming more commonplace at some institutions. I agree that most undergraduates will probably not come out publishing papers in prestigious journals or conferences. However, that does not mean that they don't enhance their knowledge and understanding of various concepts.

In short, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of engineers out there with educational experiences that either partly or fully mirror my own. Consequently, you really need to be cautious when you make sweeping generalizations like engineers only spend their time memorizing formulas without reflecting on how those formulas came to be.

There are plenty of incorrect assertions and generalizations made in this post. It honestly reads like a dogmatic diatribe.

As EE/CS undergraduate students, my classmates and I learned the fundamental physics behind various phenomena, not just the high-level equations. That is, we learned why, for example, transistors function they way that they do and why we can rely on simplified equations to characterize their behavior. Most of what we were taught is still covered in the MIT undergraduate curriculum (see courses 6.002, 6.012, 8.012, 8.04, and 8.044).

As EE/CS graduate students, my lab partners and I were responsible for furthering the state of the art. During these years, we had to understand why, for example, our experimental results diverged from our model predictions and how to revise those models accordingly. In some cases, we invalided long-standing, widely taught models and proposed new ones. If we didn't understand the fundamental physics behind these models, we wouldn't have made the contributions that we did. We also wouldn't have had our work published in Science, Nature, and PNAS.

I don't even need to lengthily address your comment that engineers aren't smart. There are plenty of people on Slashdot that can thoroughly invalidate that claim.

You make the mistake of listening to articles about scientific research instead of actually reading the research. Additionally, you make the mistake of thinking that one study == Truth. Especially in biology and medecine, with hugely complicated machines and enormous difficulty setting up good controls, a single study is almost meaningless.

Wait for studies to confirm others, wait for things to percolate through the scientific community, then start paying attention to it.

Oh - is that why all the posts about "SJWs are ruining Slashdot and the world" regularly sit at +5?

The main application for piping your phone through your car audio is that phone calls are clearer, and you get access to your audio books, music, or online newspapers that have an audio stream. In other words, making sure that your car system isn't obsolete 3 years after you buy it requires a tethering mechanism. And bluetooth is the simplest one out there.

Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.

There are a few of them that grew up exactly like that. They show little difference with the rest of the politicians. Why? Because if they got to their position, anyone can, and those who don't become part of the 1% are clearly just lazy moochers.

Being poor in the US is either a temporary embarrassment or proof of being a bad person. It's quite amazing how alive Calvinism is in the US.

Great! That means that Al-Qaeda is not about Islam and instead is just about some base for some people, right? The fact that they constantly talk about Islam, Mohammed, and infidels is just a coincidence.

It's called an election. Not my fault that you can't convince enough people to vote for people who'll rewrite the Constitution.

No. If you want Truth, Philosophy is down the hall. Science is about collecting data, creating models of the world around us, and testing the models for usefulness and accuracy.

There is literally nothing for me to buy right now. Why can't this 10% off be in the form of a code that we can use any time we wish?

Isn't that pretty much what Sony are saying they will give. A code you get to apply to a shopping cart once?

I suppose the the "for a limited time" could be a problem, depending on how reasonable it is. If it was something like 6 months then it probably isn't too bad. In that time frame there would probably be something you would buy anyway. At that point it probably comes down to whether the code recipient us capable of delaying gratification. If there's plenty of time to use the code and you choose to use it to buy things you wouldn't have otherwise then that'd be your choice (no doubt one Sony would be happy with). Personally I'll aim to hang on to it until there's something I want. If it turns out there's a game I want, a TV series I want and a movie or two I'd like to see then the 10% could be quite a saving. Then again I've already got more games queued up than I have time to play.

"well, distributions backport security fixes, so 5.3.3 is secure on distro XYZ".

Are you aware of any analysis as to the extent that is actually true, ie for distro X or Y which patches really have been backported and which are skipped?

I had a quick poke about the W3Tech site and couldn't really see much of their methodology, especially in terms of how they identify PHP usage and what version is being used. I'd have though that if you looked at their PHP page there should be a not insignificant number where they can reasonably guess it's using PHP (due to file extensions in URLs perhaps) but not be able to identify the version being used.

I wonder how much your "% of installs that are secure" statistic could be inaccurate due to most (I'd hope) sites that care even slightly about security suppressing the Apache header PHP version information. Are they just missing from the W3Tech stats? It's possible that a significant number of the "secure" PHP installs could be invisible to your calculations because the sort of people who keep their software up to date are the same people who follow fairly basic server set up recommendations.

I suppose there are also questions as to what "insecure" means in practice. For bulk hosting sites running unknown third party code everything is critical but for a lot of sites running their own code whether they are actually "insecure" depends not only on what PHP does but also what their code does. Eg for the most recent PHP 5.4 release there is a fix for a fairly nasty looking bug in unserialize(), but (as I understand it) a site admin with a defined codebase might quite legitimately determine that they never use unserialize() on user generated data and not be in any rush to update if they have other things to be doing. PHP version 5.4.35 might be "insecure" for the purposes of your stats but may not be in practice someone's server if they know they don't use unserialize() in an exploitable fashion (or mcrypt).

None of the above should be interpreted as criticism of your analysis, just food for thought. I find what you have done very interesting and expect that even if there are 'hidden' secure servers, the number of insecure ones would still be alarmingly high.

How is GMail necessary to the growth of the middle class? There's 1.3 billion people who can pick from any other email provider. Compared to creating an OS from scratch, creating and running an email service is trivial.

The bigger concern is that you may not be able to reach any users of the very popular (and state-supported) Chinese services. If you can't do business with people in China through Gmail (and corporate GMail is a significant portion of GMail), you will switch to a provider who does. Or Google figures out a workaround.

In other words, it's a real concern, but not one I would lose a tremendous amount of sleep over. I'd much rather worry about Chinese hackers absconding with my data than about the Great Firewall blocking my GMail.