I work with a couple of very good statisticians. What they do is a mystery to me, but one thing I can say for sure - a good programmer or DBA will find work much more easily than a good statistician. In large part because PHBs have no clue why they need someone with more than two semesters of probability in almost every application.

Another problem with students going into statistics in the US is that virtually all of the instructors don't speak very good English. To this day I want to say things like "probabirity", "rotatation about the ashes", and the one that confused everyone in the class - "ashama" (eventually translated to axiom).

We who? I doubt anyone thinks that.

Otherwise I generally agree with what you way - median life expectancy of those who reach adulthood would be a far more useful statistic here.

Submitter might have thought that was a joke, but Amazon already has applied for a patent on that.

Nonsense. The typical Java project is a big steaming mess of factory classes, wired beans, annotations, aspects, xml, and all the other workarounds that are needed to give the same functionality that's built into dynamically typed languages. And you still get logs overflowing with run time exceptions.

Of course a US citizen must file with the IRS. I meant you can't collect taxes from citizens of other countries who are working in their own country.

It's a credit against tax due not a deduction from income. Big difference.

Apparently submitter knows a lot more than the Air Force does when it comes to booster rockets.