I see you have little experience with decisionmaking in corporate America.

First half of this rambling, incoherent response:

Conclusion: Good because Jews.. uh, I mean "rich evil 1%ers! I used the politically correct code word!" have it coming for some reason and treating people equally under the law is racist.

Second half of this rambling, incoherent response:
People should be treated Equally!* Look at all the repression of some people just because of who they are! We need to get whitey** because SOCIAL JUSTICE!!

* Not really, what he's really saying is subtle racism that's common amongst white-elites who "know what's best" for the underprivileged: Assuming black people are literally too stupid to follow the same rules as everyone else.

** Hey Asians guess what: You're now white so it's impossible to discriminate against you! Congratulations in your new status within our new race-based groupthink hierarchy!

Mad-lib time:
s/rich/black/g from the first half, and all of the sudden discriminating against blacks is now good... The only difference is that the author started out with preconceived bigotries (rich = inherently evil, black = always innocent and oppressed) and applied twisted logic to come to the conclusion he wanted. The only difference between the author and most Klan members is that they apply the same illogic to a different set of bigotries.

We are all dumber for having read this post.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

As a coda to my post, consider this howler:

World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling

An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." ... The reprint will cost Penguin 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,500) ...

This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.

It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.

There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.

This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.

Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.

Jon Postel

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.

There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.

The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.

Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?

I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.

Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.

For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.

I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concerned, that's a matter for the layout engine, if it ends up being done at all. On the input side, it's just semantically wrong. All you get for it is a slight improvement of the visual tidiness on the printed page, at the cost (sometimes) of creating ambiguity in the reader's mind about whether the punctuation mark belongs to the quoted material, or not. Only a crazy person advocates at the same time for the Oxford comma (which averts ambiguity) and for end-quotation punctuation folding (which introduces ambiguity). Aesthetics or semantics? Make up your damn mind! (For myself, I use the Oxford comma as necessary and I make a point of being able to identify those cases.)

I'm sure most people sense that the argument in favour of standard usage as "just another style" mainly comes from people who wish to avoid effort and mastery rather than double down in the honourable spirit of Jon Postel.

I'm a member of Google's Android security team, and I want to correct this. The only component in which Google doesn't fix bugs is the old Webview implementation. I'm not going to try to explain or defend that decision, just note that at this point we think it's more productive to get apps to stop using it to display untrusted content on pre-4.4 Android. Outside of that, Google does provide fixes to all significant issues that are reported to us, and we provide those fixes to device manufacturers, at no cost and with security bulletins explaining the nature and severity of the issues. Further there are partnership policies in place that require manufacturers to release updates for severe issues. The nature and scope of those requirements aren't what I wish they were, but Google's ability to dictate to Android OEMs is limited (which isn't a bad thing, though arguably it is in this case).

The first portion of this sentence is indisputably true. The claim that Android usually has remote exploitable security issues, not so much. Local exploits are pretty common, as they are on every platform, frankly. Securing against local exploits is a hard problem, though I think we're making significant progress. We're finding that SELinux is making many vulnerabilities non-functional on 5.0 and above (granted that it will be a couple of years before 5.0+ represents the majority of Android devices). Functional remote root exploits, however, aren't actually that common, even on pre-5.0 devices. Also, such high-severity vulnerabilities generally *do* motivate manufacturers to deploy fixes (again, pre-4.4 Webview being the notable exception).

Also, I'll point out that thanks to the Android Verify Apps tool, which is active on several hundred million devices, Google has very good insight into exactly what (known) vulnerabilities exist on real-world devices, and even quite a bit about how often exploits are used (though that data is more squishy and speculative). This data even covers a lot of devices that don't use Google Play, since the Verify Apps opt-in is offered to all devices, not just those that use Play.

I can't provide details, but the high-level summary is that the Android ecosystem is actually surprisingly safe. Given the size and complexity of modern mobile operating systems in general and Android in particular, I would expect the situation to be bad, but it's not.

With respect to Blackberry's work here, it actually sounds really good to me. They're doing a lot of good things, some of which we are also working on. I don't think any of the mobile OSes in current use are very resistant to targeted threats. What Blackberry is doing with this tablet is trying to tackle that problem: how do you secure high-value data which may be the specific target of a skilled attacker on a commodity, open platform device? It's a really tough problem. They're doing it by creating a locked-down sub-platform within the platform, allowing only whitelisted apps, preventing data leakage between those and apps in the open portion of the platform. That's a sensible approach. If they can really achieve protection against targeted attacks, the higher price point isn't unreasonable at all. People with high-value data on their devices will pay for security. Most people won't, but there's nothing wrong with focusing on a high-value niche. It's good business, and a strategy that's consistent with the reputation of the Blackberry brand.

Google, of course, isn't targeting the niche, but trying to provide reasonably good security to the mass market. My opinion is that we're largely succeeding, but must keep pushing hard to stay (mostly) ahead of the threats.

(Disclaimer: Please don't take this as any sort of official Google statement. I'm not a Google spokesperson, and I'm taking something of a risk by being this forthright about Android security work in public. Not a huge risk, because my management is supportive of transparency -- as long as I don't cross any lines. I obviously haven't gone and cleared all of this with PR and it's possible that something I've said is inaccurate, or inconsistent with the company's official position. If there are any such issues, the fault is entirely mine.)

No chamber needed. A typical hospital oxygen mask with a good flow of pure N2 into will do fine.

If you don't want to include euphoria, just use straight N2 or He. The feeling of suffocation is triggered by CO2 buildup, not O2 deficiency, so a person able to freely respire a low CO2 gas mixture without any O2 feels nothing at all, positive or negative, but simply falls asleep. No needles, no poisons, no discomfort... they just fall asleep and then die. Technically they suffocate, but with no feeling of suffocation.

You don't need any sort of special chamber for this. Just a typical hospital oxygen mask and a cylinder of compressed inert gas. It doesn't even matter if the person being executed gets a little bit of ambient O2, as long as the percentage of O2 in the breathing mixture is down around 2% or lower. You probably need to strap the person down so they don't try to remove the mask, but if you play it right they'll never realize when their death has begun... start with a continuous flow of air into from a compressed cylinder into the mask, then without changing pressure or temperature or otherwise notifying the person that the time has arrived, switch it over to the inert gas.

A big chunk of it is written down in the constitutions.

I'm not dissing what these guys are doing; it's good to demonstrate the increasing capabilities of self-driving cars. But I don't think it's very accurate to call this the "most ambitious" test, because long-distance driving, especially on highways like the US interstate system, is about the easiest form of driving there is to automate. I'm much more impressed with the ability of Google's self-driving cars to negotiate crowded city streets safely.

One more point. If your criticism of NHST is more nuanced and informed than I'm assuming, please excuse me. There certainly are significant problems with the way it's generally done, including widespread misinterpretation of the meaning of p values, overemphasis on particular thresholds, and much more.

However, what came before NHST wasn't better statistical analysis of scientific data. Current methods do often leave statisticians shaking their heads, but it is still a significant improvement over the non-statistical methods of much scientific work of the past.

(I should also note that I'm not a statistician. My education is in mathematics, and I've invested a fair amount of time into furthering my statistical knowledge, but I'm not an expert.)

The problem is that if you understand what a null hypothesis is, and why the first step in demonstrating that results are potentially meaningful requires demonstrating that it can be rejected, then there's nothing to explain. And if you don't understand those things you need more education on the topic than I can provide in a slashdot post.

I wasn't being dismissive, I told you precisely (if concisely) what you need to do to understand why this change in scientific methodology was important and valuable. If you care about the issue, I suggest that you do the work to learn the material. If you don't care to do that, the best thing I can do is to point out the lack so others who also lack the requisite background are less likely to accept your misunderstanding as a fact.

Really, I'm not being elitist or dismissive. I'm completely certain that you're capable of understanding the material -- and it's not material that I would expect everyone to know. But it is sufficiently subtle and complex that I'd be doing you a disservice if I tried to explain it in a few paragraphs of non-mathematical exposition, particularly since your earlier comment about disproving chance demonstrates that you've already gotten such an explanation, and it wasn't sufficient.

You need to learn some statistics.

And that change was a huge leap forward. It didn't get us to perfection, but the shift indicated a significant (yet still insufficient) increase in statistical literacy in the sciences.