Except that the NSA's hackery has been much in the news recently, so mentioning that there's no reason to suspect them in particular (which is what the article basically did) might well be worthwhile. It's basically answering a question that was sure to come up.

Hmm, yes I am, but so is Prof. Liberman, some of whose criticisms I linked earlier, so the bad science part is not just domestic.

Really? I think the BBC is great when it comes to general news. Sure, they're not perfect, but they are, IMO, well above average. I probably should have made it more clear in my post that I'm only criticising their science coverage, which, for whatever strange reason, has been remarkably and noticably subpar for the last decade or so.

But this was a science story, so I'm waiting to hear from other sources before I start to jump for joy. Assuming they didn't flub this story, it's very cool news!

For "non just science stories", yeah, The Beeb is great. One of my go-to sources in general. Which makes the state of their science reporting even sadder.

That was only a sampling. You obviously didn't read them, or you would have seen links to many more. Also, Goldacre has bigger and more important fights on his hand. As for Liberman and others from Language Log, they basically gave up in frustration several years ago, and now only call out the Beeb when it reports on their field, Linguistics. Seriously, though, if you are familiar with a field or topic of science, go see for yourself how well the Beeb does when it covers that field. I'm pretty confident you'll be appalled.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Well, trivial in the sense that it doesn't require particularly sophisticated technology. Just huge, gigantic piles of not-sophisticated technology. The deployment, provisioning, and maintenance of that huge pile of technology is non-trivial. The code itself is relatively trivial, though. But code is only a tiny portion of what's required.

Exactly. And this is even more so when you consider ongoing costs. Google uses cheap, throwaway servers in mind-boggling quantity. Building gigantic clusters of Watson-style machines is going to be an entirely different proposition. Between the up-front costs and the on-going maintenance costs, IBM would need some serious motivation to even think about trying this. Frankly, it doesn't seem like it fits their current business model at all.

I might be able to see IBM trying to license Watson-like technologies to Google, MS, Yahoo, and/or Ask. I can't see them suddenly switching direction to the degree that would be required for them to try to compete directly.

A trick that relies on the compiler recognizing its own code, which, as the code is edited over the years, would require truly amazing AI. Thompson had it fairly easy, because he was dealing with a relatively simple and fairly static compiler, and could use simple pattern matching to identify the places to insert his trojan. GCC, on the other hand, has undergone some major rewrites over the years.

Of course, if you really want to be sure, you can load the compiler source into something completely different. I once built GCC using a C interpreter, and then used the interpreted version to compile the compiler again, and got identical binaries, so I'm pretty confident that GCC has no such trojans lurking. But you're welcome to try the same trick yourself.

If you'd like to ask my brother that question, feel free. He's a foot taller than me, and can probably lift me with one hand, so I'm not going to ask him that. (Oh, and I think the fact that he's married and has kids might help answer the question about whether he has a girlfriend--the answer is clearly, no.) :)

Then why even post numbers if the numbers are completely meaningless? We all know that some parents are clueless about such things. I said so in my original post. But what's the point of saying that 10% of the purchasers have a kid in tow if that doesn't actually provide any information about how many parents are buying the game for their kids? (And it doesn't.) It's a useless number that serves no purpose except to try to convince us that we have hard data that we actually don't.

Does the same logic apply if you're renting a video? Buying a book? Grocery shopping? And anyway, who's got time for separate "on sly" trips to the video game store? Being a parent with a full-time job doesn't leave you a whole lot of "me" time, and what you do get is usually after the kids are in bed--and the video stores are closed.

And who says he's not buying them a game at the same time?

If your kid doesn't know that some books, videos and games are for adults, and not for kids, you're not raising them right.

The fact that someone bought the game while accompanied by a child does not mean they're buying it for the child. My brother often takes his kids to the game store, and and may buy game for himself or for his kids. Or, frequently, both.

That said, yes, there probably a lot of people too clueless to realize that the one game that is probably the most famous of all games in the world for not being for kids isn't for kids. But trying to estimate the number of people in that category by counting the number of people who happen to buy it while having a child in tow is just as clueless, in quite another way.

No, they just don't like to expose them in the main GUI. Heck, they're even getting better in some respects. In Gnome2, you had to dig around in the general gnome settings to turn on sloppy focus, which could be fairly painful. In Gnome3, you just have to go to the tweak tool.

But yeah, if they get rid of middle-paste entirely, I'll be switching either back to fvwm or to something else entirely, like XFCE or Enlightenment.

If you want to maximize your chances of passing on your genes, then yes, you most certainly do. "Be fruitful and multiply", he said, but he certainly didn't give us the most efficient tools for doing so.

That's only part of their point. They're also supposed to protect US/UK secrets against spying. You may notice that these goals are somewhat at odds, which is why such organizations tend to be a little schizophrenic.