Oh no, someone call the police! Someone is ripping off an idea from an open source project! We must stop this "open" madness!

Yeah, right; it was the atomic bombs that made them allies, and not the massive amount of reconstruction help after the war. Blow them up! That's how you make allies!

Silly Iranians, so mad that we propped up a horribly oppressive regime. ("Maybe a better, simpler solution is to build good relations with those who oppose you?" would have been a good rule back then, too, eh?) Also, "and they never will" is a dumb statement to make. Being "nice" to nations can do wonders. After all, we turned Japan, our mortal enemy in WW2, with no history of democracy, on whom we dropped two atomic weapons, into one of our closest allies in just a few decades.

People love science until it tells them that something they like doing has extremely negative consequences.

Let's ask a similarly stupid question: "Why are we targeting drunk drivers instead of bad drivers?" When you can answer that question, you should be able to form a pretty good answer to the question above.

What does the devil want with my pet flounder? Oh, god, Bessie, I'm sorry, I didn't know it was him!

The article spends its entire space criticising the idea that the test is measuring something useful, and then the quiz link title is "How smart are you?".

The right hand needs to talk to the left hand over at the Post.

Part of the military's job is to be prepared for war. If they never had to actually fight one, that would be fine with me; I'd still cut them a paycheck.

Front row seats? If I had front row tickets to a concert, and they seated me 600 light years away, I'd be pissed. Unless it was a Disaster Area concert. Or Justin Bieber.

Just to make clear: The Air Force does not want to check Kepler 22b. Here's what they want:

AFSPC, through the Space Innovation and Development Center (SIDC), is currently researching the possible use of the ATA to augment the already extensive sensors of the Space Surveillance Network, potentially leveraging the array to help increase space situational awareness. Initial demonstrations show promise for the ATA to track transmitting satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Medium Earth Orbit and, most promising, in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO), which is home to the most costly, highly-utilized, and vital satellites that orbit the earth. A collision and subsequent debris field in GEO could permanently remove the GEO belt from worldwide use.

Before I read that the array was going to be used by the Air Force for non-SETI purposes (something not made apparent by the summary), my thought was: "The planet is 600 light years away. Let's say we detect radio signals from Kepler-22b. That means we know that on a planet 3 quadrillion miles away, some species used radio signals 600 years ago. That's not exactly situational awareness..."

I imagined a conversation about "situational awareness" during the Iraq war going something like this:

General: So, what's the situation?
Advisor: Sir! In the 15th century, the Aztecs defeated Azcapotzalco, sir!
General: Excellent!

Yeah, if it was repeated measures that does threaten the sign test. I can't easily check the paper again on this phone. Regardless, they are arguing from a null result, with a low power test, and they misinterpret the p value.

They also say that

This is a complete misunderstanding of what a p value means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, the chance that "Perl affords more [or less] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger. This is covered in first-year statistics.

They claim that Perl is not significantly better than Randomo, but that's just due to the test they chose. Looking at their figure, Perl programmers outperformed Randomo programmers in 6/6 tasks (that is, their means were greater). Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means, the two tailed p value is about 0.03, and the one-tailed p value (I think we're justified here having having a directional hypothesis...) is about 0.015. Both of these numbers are less than 0.05; we are justified in saying that Perl programmers performed significantly better than Randomo programmers, in spite of what the paper says.

Don't be dense. Someone dying is a necessary condition for murder. Someone having sex is not a necessary condition for pornography (there is, for instance, pornographic animation). "Virtual murder" is not murder, but "virtual pornography" is still pornography. What defines "murder" and what defines "pornography" are totally different: murder is not a depiction of anything, while pornography is.

I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with pornography, I'm just saying it's dumb to say that "child pornography" should be defined by whether a child was abused to create it, since whether something is "pornographic" depends on what is depicted (and the manner of depiction), not how it was made.

Not necessarily by legal definitions. Some jurisdictions have decided that pornography that shows virtual children is prosecutable, and yet does not require the sexual abuse of children. I guess maybe by "appropriate" definition, you meant your own definition, but even though the US Supreme Court decided that virtual child pornography is protected in some cases, that doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be considered) child pornography.