The main problem is if they're competing with some legitimate business that is forced to pay its workers minimum wage, they'll lose against the prison workforce every time, unless they are also forced to pay the prisoners an equal wage. Though, one potential solution I could see is to contract the workforce out to a private company, require that minimum wages be paid, and have the state garnish these wages to pay for the prison. Problem with this is what private company in their right mind would pay the same wages for prisoner labor when they can get non-criminals to work for them for the same amount, typically? I'd personally favor workforce rehabilitation for non-violent criminals, but the economics of it make it a difficult thing to deal with.

Perl does not have Test::whatever. CPAN has it. And there's nothing preventing anyone from implementing test frameworks in JS. In fact there are already a number of them out there, jsUnit to name an example off the top of my head.

More likely a response to the fact that something like 50-60% of college students are buying Macs for school instead of PCs. Question will be whether or not students are buying the Mac because of the iPod credit or whether it's more some other reason, and whether the free XBox will be enough to reverse that trend.

I think you've been inhaling a bit too much PHP. Just because Javascript is dynamically typed (and it's not alone in this respect, many interpreted languages are), doesn't mean the types are irrelevant. Sure, Javascript will coerce types sometimes, but it's pretty logical about it once you understand how it works. The only real complaint I have is overloading + for string concatenation as well as addition.

What you're asking for is an object that will coerce its inputs, which you can do, you just need to follow good programming practices--mainly, never allow public access to an object's members. If you use getter/setter functions, you can explicitly coerce your types once in the object and then everywhere you use it you no longer have to worry about it. It's standard OO best-practices. http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-getters-and-setters/ is a good place to start to explore that in JS.

Programming languages have never had "reads the programmers mind" as a feature.

*fires up Chrome's JS console*

> var obj = {one: 1, two: 2}
undefined
> obj.one + obj.two
3
> var obj = {one: "1", two: "2"}
undefined
> obj.one + obj.two
"12"
> parseInt(obj.one) + parseInt(obj.two)
3

Nope, seems to work right to me.

There isn't one in most Object Oriented languages either; I'm curious what about your design would need copies of objects anyway. I've run across very few instances where I thought they were useful. Lucky for you, someone already solved that for JS: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/deep-copying-of-objects-and-arrays/

Why would the US want to claim he's dead if they weren't sure of it? It seems like it'd be a pretty huge, demoralizing slap in the face if a video of him alive and debunking his supposed death surfaced after the fact.

Are you sure you're always communicating with people that live in countries with privacy laws that are just as secure? Unless you're really good about keeping your contacts secure as well, all it means is that they have to issue more subpoenas.

The only way anyone would've hit this bug is if they were trying to make their account default to HTTPS while the bug was active. If you'd already set to HTTPS by default, that would still have worked. So, if it exposed anyone to arrest, it would be because they continued past the bug to do risky things anyway.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/microsoft_https_hotmail_syria/ if you want a source.

Exactly.

If you really want to tackle this problem, ask the people with the stories what "proof" they have that ghosts are haunting the place, and then formulate an experiment that can test for that proof. Or, if it's transient phenomena, do the detective work to come up with any alternate hypotheses. Them saying that "it must be a ghost" really just means that they lack knowledge that would allow them to explain it any other way. You will definitely not be able to "disprove" it in any other meaningful way.

Might want to take a look at this guy's video breakdowns to get an idea of how to approach this: http://captaindisillusion.com/

Sorry, exactly the same as a real virus to scanning software.

Then he's pretty stupid for wanting that. This'll look exactly the same as a real virus, and it will be easy to clean off, but it won't propagate or do nasty things like a real virus. For a computers 101 class, anything more than something like this is just asking for trouble.

Defense seems like it'd be easy to solve, just add a metric that counts number of times a player gains possession of the ball from the other team or otherwise interferes with a pass or goal.

Replication of results is not what happens in a peer review. It's because results weren't replicated that this is happening now. I would assume that most scientists are assumed to be honest about their data and conclusions because their reputation and ability to provide for themselves typically rests on them producing good science. Because in an ideal world, no one will fund a quack and his research.

The problem is that there are other markets that will eat up quack ideas and provide for the quacks that produce them even if they spout ridiculous but comforting lies. I very much doubt that recanting this study will affect Wakefield's ability to make money in any way, unfortunately, unless there is also some legal action in the fallout.