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...

For every case like this, you can find cases where engineers and/or their employers made really bad choices when left to their own devices. The outcome of the Pinto case, and others like it, should not only be judged by the specific issue, but also by their cumulative effect in encouraging manufacturers to be proactively cautious (though that is hard to measure.)

That's an interesting comment about the phase delay. My impression as I watched the video was that the rocket behavior resembled the pilot-induced oscillations that can occur when a pilot's responses lag too far behind the events.

The article doesn't contain any evidence that the cost of operating in Australia was a significant part of the problem, but it does contain evidence that the management pissed off a significant part of the company's talent.
 

I confine my activities to the antisocial media, such as Slashdot.

I broadly agree, but I would like to offer a couple of additional points. Firstly, there are fact-based disciplines within the humanities. Secondly, STEM (especially the technology and engineering parts) can be (mis)taught in a 'how-to' style that is light on critical thinking and in-depth understanding.

That one word pretty much sums up the trajectory of business and politics today. And neoserf for its plans for us.
 

You had me for a second, but this is not a valid analogy. The valid analogy would require someone to say that their analysis has found the pen that will make you a good writer.