yeah, but first off pedagogy isn't the same as praxis. also, (western) math has moved from its Euclidean geometric roots to much more efficient and powerful representations. that is to say, i'm not convinced that low-level memory management is actually a fundamental skill.

anyway, people can and do learn these things if and when necessary; what's happening is that there are so many other things to do now (this is called progress) that people don't have to do them. further, the people who actually do these things are benefitting from modern approaches. even demo writers using decades-old hardware are making graphics which would have been considered jaw-droppingly impossible at the time.

yeah, no hand-holding... but back when "made it work" often amounted to implementing some half-assed version of curses for your ASCII sort-of-GUI, or blitting 320x200 raster gfx to the buffer, or other such bullshit. the most amazing part of it was that everyone around the world was repeating the same fucking work which, sure, some of us enjoyed that work and some of us got paid a lot for it, but anyone who thought that would actually last was just delusional.

sure, there are downsides to the progress we've made; i almost retched when someone proposed a cross-platform "solution" for finding the IP address within an interpreted language by installing a JSON library and querying an API. however, on the whole it's a lot better now; i can go from the sketches, brainstorming, math, and algorithms to an actual result within a few hours instead of a few weeks (or, more likely, never).

It could use a few commas, but it's not terrible. "Sitting an exam" is standard Australian English, I presume. In Europe, it's commonly called "writing an exam" (they started moving from written answers to psychometry much more recently). Maybe "sitting an exam" doesn't make literal sense, but neither does "taking an exam" really; I mean, where are you taking it?

no, no, no. you're still thinking of solving the technical problem of delivering signal. this is mostly old news. sure there are a few improvements here and there, but it's far more important to solve the new problem of extracting maximal profit through market segmentation.

according to a deterministic theory, or one where 300ms is a hard upper bound.

in other words, it's a dumbass assumption.

yes, precisely. i'm wondering why "random engineer thinks this is screwy" is the extent of the analysis here. why the fuck aren't people doing more? isn't this why we have ludicrously large lawyer awards for class-action cases?

uh, since ransom malware generally isn't targeted, that doesn't make a lot of sense. the line you're referencing is that once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the dane.

malware is more of a "stumbling into a pit full of spikes" thing than a "village being raided by vikings" thing.

since they just throttle the connection into tiers so as to maximize profit, isn't it at least possible that the higher tiers also have lower latency or higher prioritization (among the ISP's users, not necessarily of youtube)?

seems like these gentlemen could teach 4chan a thing or two about dealing with the likes of Anita Sarkeesian.

ah, you're just confusing randomization as a means of controlling nuisance factors, with the formal significance level of the result about the factor of interest. you are confused; these are different concepts. to wit, randomization certainly does not involve testing "all the independent variables". trying to randomize this way is a waste of time at best, and would probably fuck up your experiment.

it is worth recalling, at times like this, that the last person to speak to me with such a combination of ignorance and certitude was found dead three days later from profuse rectal bleeding.

maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but why would you test to "ensure that"? the randomization guarantees it (assuming that it is done correctly, of course); poking around after-the-fact can only undo the blind, which is why good experiments take some measures to make it difficult.

and why is it "guaranteed to happen 5% of the time"? is that independent of sample size and distribution of the factor? quite remarkable indeed!

you sound quite confused about certain things.

i am a statistician and i've worked closely with a sociologist (one of the few who uses math correctly, if a bit pedantically). you are correct, it is not intrinsically impossible to do sociology correctly. however, the mathematical literacy standards for the field are woefully lacking even in the ivy league.

this song by Tom Lehrer holds true today, just replace "sigma and chi-square" by "social network analysis".

yes, you are correct: social psychology done rigorously becomes economics. as for the rest, however...

yes, i am.

true randomization allows you to control for everything (intuitively: since it's randomized, there is no way for you to introduce bias), at the cost of increased variance. however, you can make up for increased variance by increasing the sample size, which is what they did here. i forget the exact numbers, but they sent out hundreds of letters.

far from what you assert, randomization is fundamental to experimental control, and randomness is quite easily generated in a controlled manner. here's a general hint for you and everyone else: don't say things like "randomness cannot be controlled because then it wouldn't be 'true' randomness". it just makes you seem like an idiot.

Dammit, I meant the letters were written anonymously and then labeled with names later. I guess "pseudonymous" would have been a better word. Oh well.