Last line was ugly. I meant to say:

Congratulations! You are a gentleman. Join our exclusive club! We party on Saturdays, and only get intimate with people we really like!

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense, you cannot use statistical inference in something like this, because the world is too small, and the factors too many. When you say "regardless of other factors" you have no idea how bad that sounds. "Other factors" considered by the survey, maybe, not in the real world. A single unkown factor, like intelligence of the father, or what the parents like to do on weekends, or relationships between jobs, can completely skew this thing one way or the other.
Also, the theory makes sense only to the extent of primates. Human beings maintain social status in a variety of ways, so the child reaching age 5 does not really mean much on its own. And yes we do have instincts to care for our offspring's welfare even when they are adults. I think it's more about people getting bored with each other, whether or not they have kids. Other studies have shown this too. The magic number is 4 years.

You didn't miss out on much. There are some great people who go clubbing to dance..etc with their friends. Very few 'nice' girls go to clubs to get picked up. They don't have to, and they don't want to. I've been approached by women in clubs, every half decent guy has.. and those women were always garbage. Or on a rebound. That sounds mean, but I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. And I live in DC so we party a lot.

Congratulations, you are a decent human being who actually has feelings. Please collect your badge at the door, or pick up a free t-shirt from the table near the exit.

Hello! Are you a mean person? You must be the mean person everybody's mother told them about when they were little. I'm going to scribble down in my slashdot diary, that slashdot devs have provided me with, that you are a mean person; so that I don't forget.

Yeah, and with the judge ruling like he did against the prosecution (as opposed to for the truth) those tubes are bound to get clogged, and the sewage is going to spill everywhere. Just you wait. We have not seen the end of this yet. There will be smelly days to come.

Nay, but duckest thou, the swine before which thy olde joke was cast has freakin' Haskell.

Or maybe I'll just see a 3D sailboat.

Hang on there a sec. The minute you see that sailboat you could be violating Fair Use policies of the people who designed the tax law to look like a 3D Sailboat from a certain angle. Sure, you didn't get the memo, but you are a culprit, and you deserve civil court, and the loss of your reputation, and your money, and your time.

But you are right, he might be stretching it.

Come again?

Wow. Now I know what these 'evolving' spam strategies are like. Pleased to meet you, you adaptive scum.

Well said - and the dice all seem to fall into configurations that are just as probable as any other configurations when you coarse-grain, but which are actually little 'miracles' when you look at them in detail. To be specific, the probability of the entropy changes that occur when 'God' plays dice are far beyond the possible. So Einstein was right, God isn't really playing dice, he *knows* where the dice is going.

As a further note, reducing entropy to a previously determined state is called erasure (of the information carried by the system). The heavens are doing some weird stuff with us, that's for sure!

Have a great night.

Now you're talking.

Welcome to the new world, where you and the machine are almost one. There is no way the prosecution can prove your intent, because everything you do to the machine can be replicated by intelligent software. The government has to both have complete disregard for your machine's privacy and your own privacy, possibly even your own mind, to give a meaningful verdict, hence my reference to Big Brother. The GP was right that the laws are therefore draconian and very stupid, in a free society.

In the case of physical harm, I understand that you have waived your privacy rights and the government can do what they want. But to have a file on your computer being possible grounds for your freedom and privacy to be confiscated.. that's just silly.

You are right about being nice. I just added the karma bit to motivate you in case you didn't think that way. I like Playing God on the internet, when I'm bored ;)

It would be funny if the GP was the insightful one and you were the arrogant nitpicker who doesn't get it, eh?

He is saying that your having a tool like nmap is possibly dangerous, because something like distribution of said tool (which is downright horrible of course, way to go UK) can get you in trouble. In the digital world, as you well know, free distribution can occur with a copy and paste command. So he is saying that by having the tool, you are a copy and paste command away from being in trouble with Big Brother, and he may be right. Also note that if you have malware or a badly configured filesharing program, you don't even need to copy paste to be a criminal.

Be nice. It's good karma.

The UN is there to give the illusion of universal order and support the notion of peaceful co-existence between all nations on the planet. Just because it's badly organized and involves stupid people doesn't mean it has a noble goal. I wouldn't want us to leave it.. as long as we are not expending too many resources on its projects.

This idea is so mind-numbingly silly for anyone who has been through a serious CS major that it blows my mind.

Have you never done an operating systems course? Have you never had to mess with the internals of an OS and write modules for it? Have you never had a proper hands-on security course where you need to have uniformity across machines for the various teams involved? People can argue that virtualization solves this, because you can run vmware on any laptop, for instance. But for some things you need to have direct access to hardware, particularly hardware that you can mess with.

Plus, you need a place to eat. Where would your mess hall be? A friggin cafeteria? Pffft.

Or at everyone's mercy ;)

Things like OpenBSD are the best for security not only because they are designed specifically with it in mind, but because the people working on it are of a limited, genuine species. With that said, it is probably better to be at 'everyone's mercy' than to be at the mercy of corporations who only want your money. It doesn't matter that the people inside them may want your admiration and recognition. It matters very little, at least. The corporations are who you deal with in the end. :(

Look, we don't hate you for what you write - it may well be true. It just has nothing to do with this story, OK? It really is offtopic. In fact I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and disagree with some twisted facts too) but I think the moderators are right modding you down to hell, and maybe banning your IP range. You are annoying people. Annoyed people don't listen. Find a forum to discuss this in a sane way and people might listen.