The last two weeks we've been too busy to play video games and, look at what we did. There's been drama, action, romance... I mean honestly you guys, do we need video games to play? Maybe we started to rely on Microsoft and Sony so much that we forgot that all we need to play are the simplest things. Like, like this. [grabs a stick from the ground] We could just play with this. Screw video games, dude! Who needs them?!

So all I have to do is alter my car so that it tells the other cars that I am approaching from behind at 120 mph when I'm really only driving 60 mph and the cars in front of me will automatically swerve out of my way! Awesome!

Your description sounds exactly like the only thing that I've ever been paid to do in my entire career. My job is to fix broken things and make them work. It sounds like that's your job, too. If everything were working perfectly, they wouldn't have needed to hire you in the first place. If fixing the project is beyond your skill, then perhaps moving on to a different employer is a good idea.

A problem with that line of thinking is that if those five values are the whole population of interest then you cannot establish that it is a normal distribution, which is a fundamental prerequisite for even considering the existence of a "standard deviation". Even for samples, normal-curve statistics are designed for large sample sizes (n>30). If your sample size isn't large enough to derive a normal distribution curve, then your RMS values are not measuring from the normal peak, but rather from a meaningless arbitrary value. Robotically plugging a small sample size into a large-sample statistical formula doesn't produce a valid statistical result any more than plugging your body weight into "C x 9/5 + 32 = F" would tell you your body temperature.

The example in the article isn't even an example of a standard deviation. He may have plugged his five values into the RMS formula, but what it produced isn't an actual standard deviation because five values is too small of a sample size.
This article is really a demonstration of why people should stop misusing the term "standard deviation" than it is an argument of why people should stop using standard deviation.

Well, with the automated milking systems used on precision dairy farms the cows do get to choose how they get milked. Not that it has anything to do with the Facebook discussion other than to suggest that Facebook treats its users with less respect than the average dairy cow.

So how would the oblivious tech guy in charge of updating the message know to stop updating the message if the senior executive who knows about the contact and is under the gag order isn't allowed to tell the tech guy to stop updating the message?

Of course Microsoft isn't going to make any profit on Skype if they don't actually use it in any of their products.
Sure it's in Office365, but it's not in Office 2012.
I guess it will be in the not-yet-released XBox One, but it isn't in the currently-available XBox 360.
They didn't give me the option of merging my Skype friends with the Xbox friends, or my Outlook contacts with the Skype contacts, only my MSN contacts (by now I had forgotten I even had any MSN contacts).
Some idealist in the Microsoft management probably thinks that Skype will be some sort of hook that makes people buy products and should therefore be limited to the products that most badly need marketing help. But in reality all they have done is put Skype on track to be obsolete before they even finish integrating it with any of their products. In a few years, Microsoft will have killed Skype like they killed Groove.

I'd sure hate to buy a Google car and then find out that my town is having all of the streets automated by Microsoft. I wouldn't be able to get my car past the driveway!

I completely agree. Not just in school but I've also found it true in business meetings. The only notes worth taking have drawings, charts, annotations, margin notes, circled words, arrows, non-roman characters, etc. If the information is something that is easy to type on a laptop, then chances are that nobody needed it to be written down in the first place.

If you are sending an email to a large corporation, then the public key is useless to you because whomever is receiving your email doesn't have permission to use the company's private key to decrypt the email.

So the university that "really encourages entrepreneurship" has managed to get the entrepreneur free national publicity by threatening (but not actually filing, to date) a lawsuit. I feel like a tool just for having read the article.

This sounds like an overly complicated way for someone to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions and decisions.

Sometimes all of those meetings and paperwork serve a useful purpose when an application is critical. If a one-day build of instagram doesn't work, then the only consequence is that there are fewer grainy photographs of someone's cat. If a one-day build of a power distribution system doesn't work, then an entire city loses electricity.

Hmmm... this line of thought sounds familiar for some reason.

If the government regulates [mortgages], policies for [mortgages] are set by one entity: the [FTC]. However, if the government stays out, each company will set its own policies. If you don't like the [FTC]'s policies, you are stuck with them unless you leave the United States. If you don't like your [mortgage banker]'s policies, you can simply switch to another one. So which model sounds better to you?