And how do you think they have been able to make multiple arrests in the Silk Road case? Hmmm...?

Gee, I mean, of course, Ross Ulbricht had pretty much zero SecOps, babbling this way and that on different forums, but it's still very suspicious he and other Silk Road operators and ''customers'' got arrested so fast.

Companies that do this clearly don't care about productivity, because cost is only one part of the equation. No one who understands anything about business ever does anything because it costs less. They do things because the output per dollar spent is higher. If they are focused on cost, or do something imbecilic like think of their business in terms of "costs centres" and "profit centres" (hint: if it's necessary for your business it's a profit centre, since you can't generate a profit without it... if it isn't necessary for your business you shouldn't be doing it) they they aren't any good at running a business.

There can be reasons for putting people into one big room, and high-walled cubicals can be arranged to produce barely-sufficient privacy to get decent productivity at significantly lower cost, but none of these depend on cost. They depend on output per dollar.

I'll second that one. My first Android phone was really bad. It was slow, buggy, full of crapware, and a pain to use.

I "switched" to a Samsung Galaxy Note, and never looked back. The user experience was simply great, almost as good as an iPhone, but much cheaper and with none of the iTunes crap.

I am now using a Nexus 5 and a Nexus 7, and I absolutely love them both. My next smartphone will be either the next generation of Nexus, or the next Samsung.

Yeah, I mean, take a look at NASA, it always had such a proud and distinguished record...

Oh, wait...

Seriously though: whether in Russia or in the USA, such an important agency, in charge of a large budget, is bound to generate fraud and shady dealings. At least, the Russian government is doing something about it.

Use the Firefox plug-ins Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Self-destructing Cookies, and Better Privacy and everything will be pretty much wiped out.

See above: enable "Do Not Track" in the Firefox Options/Privacy tab and you are (hopefully) in the clear.

Nah, just business as usual.

For pure evil, you have to go to Wall Street.

Some people within the United States may disagree with you. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot.

The Hycopter uses its frame to store energy in the form of hydrogen instead of air

This makes it sound like there are all kinds of quadcopters out there that are using air to store energy. This is news to me, although given the low density of compressed-air storage I'd be pretty surprised if it's true.

Anyone have any idea why anyone would say this, as opposed to "instead of batteries"?

When's the last time it was every six months?

Hint: It was probably sometime back when the release was two CDs, and not 6 CDs and 2 double-sided DVDs.

Also, hearing "We are receiving higher than usual call volume..." every single time you call anywhere for any reason. Nothing says "We are lying incompetents" more clearly.

It has been ringing continuously since 1840, and will probably continue for a long time.

Read all about it here: http://www.atlasobscura.com/pl...

I was writing Fortran/C multi-language applications twenty years ago, so yeah, despite a few issues this is easily possible. There was some weirdness, as I recall, because Fortran implicitly pushed the size of arrays onto the stack, so you had to do some fiddling to accommodate them. There were a few other minor issues, but what the GP said is essentially correct: Fortran is link-compatible with C. C++ mangles names, so unless functions are declared with C linkage (extern "C") all bets are off.

Pretty much any language can be interfaced with any other using tools like swig (dunno if anyone still uses that--it's been almost 10 years since I wrote any multi-language code, thankfully).

That sounds more like a conclusion than an assumption.

But the question isn't "Who won?" It is: "On the basis of this result what can we say about who will win next time?"

I don't know what kind of measures they used, and there are a couple of links in this discussion to papers pointing out how problematic p-values are, but it is perfectly possible for the weaker competitor to win any given competition. All it requires is that the width of the performance distributions be large enough to give significant overlap between the players.

People who don't understand statistics are baffled by this. They see individual instances, but statistics is about distributions. We can, by measuring instances, make judgements about the distributions they are drawn from, and knowing about the distributions we can make predictions about future instances.

In the present case, it appears that the observed distribution of performance was such that it wasn't possible to distinguish clearly between the case where the computer is slightly better than the humans but the humans got lucky, and the case where the humans are definitely better than the computer.

If their plan is to get more third parties to go along with their DRM, then they haven't really learned a thing yet.