Why is this on Ask Slashdot? The question does not contain *any* indication that SyFy actually considers this, so at the moment it's just one person's speculation, nothing more. And anyway, (almost?) nobody here has the data or experience to make a qualified answer to the question in the post title.

Ask Slashdot should IMHO be limited to questions where our collective *experience* can actually help.

Wrong. The new version number will be larger than the previous one, obviously, by 5e-8. And even if you read the number as 3.integer, the new integer has one more digit than the old one. Why do you think it should be lower?

By the way, TeX version numbers are converging to pi, and Metafont version numbers are converging to e. This is intentional. Rumor has it that this should show how TeX and Metafont converge to perfection.

I wish people would stop using the words "bigram" and "trigram" incorrectly. The "-gram" suffix comes from a Greek word for "a written character", the same root is in the word "grapheme". Hence bigram == a two-character substring, and trigram == a three-character substring. And these words are actually being used in the correct sense as well. Two-word and three-word substrings should IMHO be called "bilexes" and "trilexes", or something similar. But a good first step is to stop calling them bigrams and trigrams.

Re your signature: because "am" stands for "ante meridiam", which means "before noon". So technically both "12am" and "12pm" are wrong, it is correct to use "midnight" and "noon" for those times.

Or use 24-hour clocks as we do, there the next hour is always (previous_hour + 1) modulo 24, which is much more pleasing to a programmer looking for patterns ;)

There, and now you have to look for a better sig :)

Seriously. The premise is false, the consequence can be anything we want and still our claim will be true.

There is no subject so important that *everyone* has to be forced to pass the "101 course" in it. If anything, most posters in this thread have a way too narrow definition of "everyone".

And even if we limit ourselves to "first world countries", the premise does not make much sense. Sure, the world would be a nicer place if everyone was able, say, to critically think for themselves -- but there's no way to make this happen, so why bother discussing such a hypothesis?

Another misuse of statistics: Many people expect that FBI uses the DNA database in the following way:
1. get DNA sample from the crime scene
2. match DNA sample against all samples in the database
3. if you got a match, you got the killer.

This is not how it works. Say the real odds of a false positive are ten million to one. In a country of say 300 million people this still gives an expected 30 people who match the sample from the scene. Is each of them the criminal? Clearly not.

How it really works? Imagine that you already identified several suspects. If you take DNA samples of these few people and one of them matches the DNA from the hair from the scene, you can still conclude that given your knowledge, with a very high probability the person in question was present at the crime scene.

In other words, using DNA tests is perfectly reasonable as long as you know what you are doing, even if the probability of a false positive is several orders of magnitude larger than one to a billion.

At least have the courtesy to:

1. 1. read the post you are replying to
2. 2. sign your post

when calling bullshit. I never claimed that the Slovak version is true and different from everyone else's. I said it is more or less equal to the BBC version. What *still* obviously does not match the news in either country is the Slashdot article.

I'm Slovak. The version presented in our press goes as follows. Planting and then detecting the explosives was a part of a dog training security exercise of the Slovak police. The exercise was a disaster. Out of the 8 items planted in the travellers' luggage only 7 were found successfully. These are probably the "seven stopped by airport security" from the summary. The seven do NOT include the guy in Dublin. That is the unlucky guy that got the eighth piece. His luggage passed all security checks and he unknowingly brought the piece of explosives with him into Dublin, where he was then detained by the Irish police. This more or less matches the BBC version linked from the summary, only the summary is wrong. Please update it.

Most of all, the article is just plain wrong, especially in the last sentence "Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code." From what I've heard, Facebook does use PHP, but their PHP code is not interpreted, it is compiled using a custom compiler. And if you RTFA, it clearly states that Facebook developers implemented numerous optimizations that are not available in the default PHP distribution. There's no evidence that would support the "conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code" in Facebook's case.

Yeah, but if you keep the current naming scheme, you get to call the incompetent bank employees "vankers" :)

Mod parent up. And see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/endemic

Yeah, funny, but this precisely illustrates the difference between "random" and "arbitrary" in science. "Arbitrary" means I don't care what you pick, "random" means I care that nobody should be able to predict what you'll pick. And that is clearly not the case if you pick 5 all the time.

I gave Lua a shot, several years ago. Was disappointed, quite a lot. Did not feel right to me at all. In fact, I soon found myself fighting it on many occasions. At that point in time, read() was *silently* failing for binary data. Took me quite some time to figure out that this is causing the unexpected behavior I observed. During the process, I read some reference and found nothing. Only some googling after I knew what was going on got me to a page that, among other things, addressed this issue with a laconic "binary read() is expected to work in Lua 5". That was enough to push me over the edge, I left Lua and never looked back, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision. Which only goes to show that there is no silver bullet, no "universally great first programming language", I guess.