Dear British,

Please forgive the (sic) my spell check is AE.

Best Regards,
cmsjr

"one of which (the '906) was successfully used in litigation against Microsoft Corp for a $565 million judgement." (sic)

This isn't clear from the article, but other sources indicate that the judgment in question was overturned on appeal, and the case then settled out of court, presumably, for a lesser, but still staggering amount of money.

I don't disagree with any of the arguments you have made, but I think you underestimate the importance of both "idiots" and sound-bites. Policy comes from politicians, not scientists. In a representative democracy, politicians are (loosely) accountable to the electorate, consisting largely of "idiots", who, particularly on complex issues, tend to base their views on sound-bites. If the scientific community, and those who support it, neglect to generate compelling sound-bites and to dispel un-scientific ones, then policies for a given issue will tend to be driven by the rhetorical value of the sound-bites surrounding the issue.

While coding style is certainly important, the most clearly written, nicely commented, richly documented source possible can't tell you if the code does what it's intended to. Formal coding standards may help mitigate the difficulty of debugging and modifying a program, but I think can you get a lot more bang for your buck by implementing a solid testing framework. If I had to pick between coding behind someone with great style, or someone with great unit tests, I'd take the latter.

I am so impressed with Google's approach on this that I am immediately adopting it. From now on, anything personally advantageous that I don't do, well obviously, that was for the good of the geecosystem.

Pardon me now, I have to go read some Ayn Rand.

You just had to add your own spin/2, didn't you.

Purpose is an abstraction of the need to survive. If you want something smart,

1. Start with something simple, mutable, and capable of self reproduction (like a virus or p2p software)
2. Threaten it constantly and ruthlessly
3. Lather, rinse, repeat (billions of times)
4. Hide

I can see your point on it being a labeling issue. When I read "High Multitasker" I envision someone working the help desk, playing an FPS and being active on chat. (and maybe posting some opinionated response on some website)

Stanford scientists have again proven, that anomalous results can, in fact, be generated by choosing unrepresentative models for a behavior or phenomena under study. A particular key for reaching such results in this study was to replace the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks with performing a single task involving multiple inputs and success criteria.