Oh come on. This post is so clearly wrong and makes me so upset that I just have to reply to it. I could show you a logical proof that refutes it, and based upon my vast experience I know that it surely isn't true. I await your reply so that I may provide a more detailed, point by point explanation that will convince you that my position is the correct one.

You are not even wrong. Measure-theoretic probability has proven itself as an exceptionally accurate model of highly complex, yet fully deterministic, phenomena that cannot be predicted well using other means. Such as the shuffling of a deck of cards, slightly different each time, but similar enough to be able to build a model of its behavior.

You called it "random," not me. I would call it "\underset {A\subset S_n} {sup} |Q^{*k}(A) - U(A)|" and then label it as "random" because that is what most laypeople would recognize as being like "randomness". If you have a different definition of "random" that's fine, but you can't argue against the proof that 7 shuffles is sufficient to reduce the total variation distance to stationarity from about 1.0 to about 0.33. If you disagree, please show your work.

I just bought a brand new car last month with 4 doors, performance, reliability, and reasonably priced. It has all sorts of driver aids like backup and blind spot cameras, hill assist, traction and stability control, and an emergency stop brake assist. But it has the best manual shifter I have ever had in 2 decades of driving, which includes everything from American muscle to a turbo import. There is nothing that says that a new automotive technology must necessarily diminish the fun of driving a stick shift, and I see no sign that manufacturers intend to eliminate a manual transmission as an option except in sofamobiles which you and I wouldn't want to buy anyways.

The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model of shuffling is a textbook example precisely because it is both mathematically tractable and a pretty good model of how a riffle shuffle actually distributes cards. It is so good a model, that I would argue that if your shuffling technique isn't well-approximated by the model, then you aren't doing a riffle shuffle.

And his definition of "random" is not "outright blasphemy." To the contrary, the definition is basically "the greatest difference in probability of any particular subset of the universe of possible distributions between a perfectly uniform distribution (the distribution of an infinite number of shuffles) and the distribution you actually have after a finite number of shuffles." As the Wikipedia article mentions, another alternative would be to use a measure of entropy instead of the statistical distance, but nevertheless statistical distance is a pretty good way to do it.

Cats aren't taking pleasure in tormenting prey, or playing with the mouse, they are tiring out an animal that has teeth and claws and could potentially hurt the cat. In the wild, even if a predator manages to kill the prey, if that prey manages to wound the predator so that the next time it goes on the hunt, it is not so strong or sharp, the predator is in trouble.

Have you ever gone fishing? The best way to catch many kinds of fish is to fight it for a while and tire it out. That's the hunting methodology that cats have evolved to use.

Not exactly. There are rules about how big your expenses can be for things like executive compensation. For example, when a company pays for business lunches for its executives to dine out, it can't reduce income by the entire amount. And a firm can't deduct the entire amount of, say salary ($1,000,000 cap) or stock options (cap on deductible amount on incentive stock options, which is why they also offer "non-quals", i.e., non-qualified stock options).

In general, if the choice is between the firm paying a tax or an executive paying the tax, the firm will generally pay the tax (in the US), since corporate rates are lower than the highest personal income tax rate. But if they can defer taxes altogether, by giving the executive something that will appreciate in value (like equity) but avoids immediate income tax, they will do that.

After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.

I have kids and a cat and yes, mistakes have been made. But a dining room table? I guess it depends on the table. Mine doesn't have a good sealant so if you were to drop oil or food coloring on it it would definitely stain. And while I can live with a hairball stain on the carpet, I wouldn't want to live with a s#*! stain on the table where I eat.

I think you have the ordering wrong. If someone defecated on my dinner table I would never eat off that table again. He might as well have set fire to it. And since the table is worth more than the iPad, I think the first scenario is actually the worst.

It seems like a small thing, but it does highlight how something like theft is easy to judge the seriousness of; namely, stealing a $2 candy bar isn't as bad as stealing a $20 shirt, which isn't as bad as stealing a $20,000 car. But sometimes it can be difficult to judge the damage of vandalism, and the vandal almost always thinks it is a smaller deal than the vandalized. So let's say someone is going to slash somebody's tire. The vandal might think that it is no big deal, like a $50 tire that needs to be replaced. But the vandalized is thinking "I'm going to be late to work to deal with this, so I'm losing pay, and I have to make sure that the tire salesman gives me a good price on an equivalent tire, etc etc"

Having said all that, it certainly seems like calling the police for this particular incident of vandalism is way overkill, but (playing devil's advocate a little), what if the administration is totally technologically ignorant, and think that this kind of situation requires a $300/hour consultant to come in and "clean" the "infected" machine? Stupid people have all types of higher costs, and if you make them incur those costs, they will blame you, not themselves.

Not after he has already been convicted. "Criminal" is the right term for the appeals process that determines if there was unfairness in the trial here.

They could say, "You can have your 'stoning gays act of 1304' or your iCool 7, but you can't have both." They don't do that. If they did, then I'd be the first one to say, "great job apple" but if they take a "stand" that wasn't really going to cost them anything to begin with then I don't see why everybody is getting in line to pat Apple on the back.

They are a company, and care about money first and foremost. I expect that of them so I'm ok with that. But if you want my applause, then do something that hurts, at least a little.

But if a company believes in a goal so much that they are willing to influence on the domestic side, then shouldn't they also care enough about it to be willing to give up on the foreign market? The fact that they don't makes it seem like it's just another publicity stunt. Not that there is anything wrong with a company doing a publicity stunt, but we shouldn't give them any moral *credit* for doing so.

Anybody can push the price of a stock up 1%, you don't have to be a brokerage house. All you have to do is place a buy limit at 1% above the current stock price. But then you would have just spent $101 on a share of stock that you could have bought for $100. That's kind of what happened here - computers that thought the joke was a real product were willing to spend $101 on a stock that everyone else know was still just $100. So the point is that they didn't make money off this, they lost money off this. Which is exactly how it should be.

And as for how broken this system of trading is, a 1% change based on a joke is nothing compared to the 600 point drop in 5 minutes, which was reversed just as quickly as it dropped. Even humans could have fallen for a good April fool's day joke, but it takes computers to mess up a system that much.

FTFY. Most of the people I know who are going to school for "longer and longer" have more leisure time than ever before in the history of humanity. Not all, but most.