Yet the linked-to article says "If Wallace is telling the truth, the FTC aggressively prosecuted a company based on bogus evidence."

The only way I can see the evidence being bogus is if Wallace exploited a position of trust granted to him by the target company, and not even necessarily then. Whatever the truth is, the report is not self-consistent. Apparently, rational analysis and critical thinking are not employed at CNN - but we suspected that, anyway.

I am not aware of any study that shows that arbitrarily complex tasks (a distributed operating system, an AI project such as Watson, an airplane fly-by-wire system...) can be completed solely by a sufficient number of bottom-of-the-barrel programmers. I don't recall any such claim in The Mythical Man-Month, but it has been a while since I read it - perhaps you could cite the chapter that references such a study, so I can look it up in my copy?

There's no point in trying to assign a ratio to it, because the worst developers have zero or negative productivity, on account of the damage that they do to projects by checking in inordinately complicated code that fails mysteriously, or simply by messing up everyone else's schedule by failing to deliver their part. This is not a hypothetical argument; I have several specific people from my personal experience of corporate development in mind (all in the past, fortunately.)

You would have to poll all of them to establish that.

Thank you for your highly informative comment about Goldman Sachs indemnifying its employees for legal fees.

It seems that Goldman Sachs may be hoist by its own petard here, if the intent behind this provision was, at least in part, to enable 'aggressive' behavior by its officers and employees (i.e. to flirt with arguably illegal behavior).

Perhaps this is getting off-topic, but the Greek government hired Goldman Sachs precisely because it wanted to adopt 'sharp practices' in hiding its growing economic crisis.

You are not the only person here to make a case against the conviction on the basis of the meaning of 'stealing', but such arguments don't get anywhere, as the law contains precise definition of what the word is intended to mean in this case (if it actually says 'stealing', which I doubt.) A more pertinent question might be how a matter that should fall under civil / contract law has been turned into a criminal offense.

On the other hand, your characterization of Goldman Sachs' behavior is spot-on.

The good software is not theirs, it is Bitdefender's, and it does not have a zero marginal cost unless they steal it. That would not be unknown, of course, but this company may be too large, and have big enough aspirations, for that not to be an option.

I also tend to agree with those who suspect they are selling to customers who don't like to be reminded that using keygens is risky.

No, the testing organizations here are competent. It is the "let's have the intern do an antivirus review" articles in publications having no particular reputation in security matters that should be treated with suspicion.

At least they should have their studies replicated.

The comment that several of the failed replications were "broadly similar" but failed to reach statistical significance leads me to wonder if there has been any data cherry-picking in some of the original studies.

Indeed. There is a widespread fallacy, in business as well as education, that any number you can assign to something is inherently meaningful, and conversely, if you cannot assign an 'objective' quantity to something, it must not be important. I suspect that business schools have done a lot to spread this fallacy (including into education), though I don't have the numbers to prove it...

I have to disagree with the statement that content doesn't matter. Without considering the content, you cannot judge whether the student is displaying reasoning and making cogent arguments, or merely faking it. <curmudgeon> it seems to me that the number of people I deal with who cannot tell the difference is increasing - a coincidence? Perhaps not. Murdoch has made a political movement out of exploiting such people.</curmudgeon>

If you say you cannot do a fair test if content is considered, that is not an argument for dumbing it down to pointlessness; it is an argument for doing it a different way or not doing it at all. In reality, you can set meaningful essay questions, that test a student's critical analysis and reasoning skills, within the context of the humanities and sciences.
 

That would actually be an educationally-useful exercise - much more so than the exam itself.

The title is clickbait, if ever I saw it.

AI is not ready to do this task properly, but, at least in the US, human grading has sometimes been dumbed-down to the point where you would not even need current 'AI' to do as well, as prof. Perelman of MIT has demonstrated - e.g: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opi...