But... that's even smaller than the ratio versus the threshold of measurement the fellow in this article claims implied experimenter bias and bad science.

More than falsifiable. The NASA experiment demonstrated that the hypothesis was false: the control experiment got the same results.

We're left with either an experimental error which, if corrected, would move the result into the error band or we're left with a real effect for which we don't yet have a satisfactory explanation.

N-rays started this way but so did relativity: the Michelson Morley experiments and their predecessors found a real effect of light which had a lot of quack theories explaining it until Einstein came along and figured it out.

Correct! And until the 1600's, the universe revolved around the Earth. And while politicians can't repeal the law of gravity, scientists can! Isn't that cool?

Replicating scientific results (or failing to) is a good thing.

Being rude about it, as was apparently the case here, is plain old asshattery.

Don't learn a programming language, learn computer science. You should leave school with a solid background in at least three languages and you should expect to learn a new one every year or two in your career. If you're already learning Java, I recommend C (not C++ or C#) and a scripting language like perl, python or ruby as a minimum complement.

That's the difference between computer scientists and code monkeys. Code monkeys know a language. More or less. Computer scientists know how to write software in the language du juor. Regardless of its details and conventions.

When picking schools, there's a simple test for inferiority: if it is possible for a CS student to get academic credit for taking the CS department's language courses it's not a good school.

Online voting and vote by mail present essentially identical issues for vote selling. And if you have to sign your name on or inside the envelope containing the vote by mail then it presents exactly the same secret ballot issues as online voting as well. That leaves security. I'd guess your vote by mail system uses photocopies on easily procured papers, yes?

Everything of interest to me happens in some other forum. I only see the ACM name attached to something about once a year and I generally abandon the effort to view it at the paywall.

Sticks and stones. I'd rather face honest anger than than a disingenuous veneer of reasonableness. And this isn't the first (or second or third) time in the last couple years GCC has been found to have optimized something into wrong code.

Taxes pay to print cash. They could pay to run the transaction system.

Cards could carry a monthly fee that covers up to some number of transactions.

Transactions consisting solely of splitting or combining cards could be made free while transactions consisting of the purchase of goods or services continue to carry a fee.

There are any number of ways to set up the system where one activity or another carries no fee. When I write a check I pay no fee. The bank makes its money off me other ways.

Maybe. Certainly with today's approach.

So a guy walking around with an artificial leg, a plastic heart valve, dentures and google glass ISN'T a cyborg? What is?

Seriously?

By the parent using the parent's bank card. By the kid splitting a larger card so he can give some amount to his buddy or combining several cards he got from his buddies.

I'm against a cashless society but not because there's any practical obstruction to it working. There isn't.

Shame you don't understand logical fallacies.

"Appeal to consequences" means an argument that something must be false because the consequences would be bad. I made no such argument. I said, "we'd better be damn sure we're right" before undertaking an effort with such negative consequences.

Unproven is not the same as false, nor is disputing unfounded conclusions the same as calling the conclusions untrue. This is one of the central fallacies that the alarmists have been perpetrating: that anyone who says, "hold on, it looks like you should investigate this a little more thoroughly" is a "denier" claiming that the hypotheses are false.

Climate alarmists may yet find sufficient scientific evidence to justify drastic action. I claim only that the ringing of the alarm bells is premature and I even suggest a form of acceptable evidence which, if found, would sustain the yet unproven claims.

Unfortunately science only works when scientists are at liberty to try as hard as they can to demonstrate counter-examples to your theory. The whole "denier" politics discourages folks from asking the questions scientists must ask in order to sustain or refute the hypotheses on the table. Your politics have gotten in the way of actually proving whether you're right.

Not exactly. When someone with good credit pays off his "cash back" card at the end of the month, the bank passes on a portion of the merchant fees. That's the "cash back."

Of course, if you use your card as an unsecured loan for longer than the billing cycle then you pay interest. And if you're late paying you pay late fees. You're a fool to do that in anything but a dire emergency, and your parents, friends and colleagues have warned you about it all your life, but you're free to live your life any way you want to.