With that many tries she should have been able to choose random answers and still pass the test with a 60% a long time ago

Nope, not if she chooses randomly for each question, each time she writes the test. Assume that for each of the 100 questions, there are four possible answers, only one of which is correct. So, you have a 25% chance of getting each question correct and a 75% chance of getting each question wrong, each time a random test-taker writes the exam.

The odds of passing a test are: the sum from c=60 to 100 of getting c questions correct.

The chances of getting c questions correct is (100 choose c) * (1/4)^c * (3/4)^(100-c).

Summing up from c=60 to 100, you are left with a probability of 0.1326834674 * 10^(-12) of passing the test, if you take it truly at random each time you write it. Basically, if you wrote the test truly at random, you would expect to have to take the test 7,536,733,998,027 times before passing. So, really, she did quite well ;)

And it assumes that an outing at the park -- or even hours spent playing a video game -- can be just as valuable a teaching resource as Hooked on Phonics.

That's veree well sed. I jest don't think it had the meening the awthor intended.

[O]ne question remains: will there be enough spectrum to support all this wireless communication?

Duh. All nerds know that holographic telepresence will utilize a rapidly fluctuating portion of the subspace band!

(Not to mention, they're pretty good at hiding the fact they didn't RTFA!)

Of course it never repeats - we kind of knew that already.

You're absolutely right: pi is irrational, and as such, there won't be any repeats. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a pattern. For example, 0.12112111211112111112... is irrational, but there's a clear pattern that you could extend to an infinite number of digits. Does such a pattern exist once you get to a certain number of digits in pi? We don't know.

I know. Thanks, FiendFreed!

Doctors recommended growth hormone therapy early in Brooke's life, but the treatment produced no results. Howard Greenberg recalled the follow-up visit to the endocrinologist. "We took her back in six months, and the doctor looked at us and said, 'Why didn't you give Brooke the growth hormones?' And I said, 'We gave Brooke the growth hormones. We gave her everything you told us to do.' And Brooke didn't put on a pound, an ounce; she didn't grow an inch."

So clearly an HGH deficiency isn't the (only) issue, it's that her HGH receptors don't respond to the hormone. But, to the best of my knowledge, that wouldn't account for a lack of mental development. This sounds like a combination of many factors coming together.

I'll have to take a look to see if there's anything written from a medical perspective (e.g., a journal paper) on this case. It could be interesting to hear what the doctors have to say, as opposed to what ABC News reports the poor mother has to say (projecting her wishes onto her daughter: thinking she's a rebellious teenager when really she's just an infant).

I found God - the Lord gives me the ability to mingle with society as the techie I am without the fear of what people will think or how they will react...

I find rum gives me the same ability :)

Umm, encryption of...what, exactly?

Are we talking about the flash drive being encrypted? Are we talking about the iPhone finally supporting PGP?

One possibility would be to create a family "treasure chest" of sorts. Well in advance of the holiday season, ask everyone in the family to contribute something (according to a theme). Then, you collect all the submissions and put them (along with your letter) on each USB drive.

As a concrete example of a theme, one year an aunt of mine asked everyone in the family to contribute their favourite recipe. Then, she typed all of them up and sent everyone a collected-effort recipe book. It was such a simple thing, but everyone in the family loved it.

You could do this with any number of themes: recipes, old photographs, favourite stories from the past, etc. Then, put your Christmas letter along with this treasure chest on the USB drives.

Pictures of your family for Christmas, home movies, etc, each encrypted with a different key you send to your recipients on each day in December [...]

I would use password-based cryptography, instead of sending them actual cryptographic keys by e-mail. Not only is it easier for the recipients, but you could choose fairly weak, Christmas-themed passwords (e.g., "snowflake," "cookie," "Santa," etc.). That way, the "peekers" in the family could try to guess the passwords in advance!

And I agree whole-heartily with the GP: make the USB drives into some sort of ornament. You could even use coloured pipe cleaners and those goofy stick-on eyes to make the USB keys look like reindeer. That way, the drives don't go to waste.

Why would the TNG cast make Nemesis?

So that someone would make a fan site about the movie?

That episode was by far one of the best Star Trek episodes (in my opinion, up there with "In the Pale Moonlight" from DS9). To tie your comment into the movie review, Memory Alpha says that Rick Berman hated the entire premise of Darmok. If Memory Alpha is accurate, all I can do is shake my head...

Like many Slashdot users, I run both NoScript and AdBlock Plus.

Had NoScript asked me if I wanted to whitelist adds on their site (in my AdBlock preferences) to support NoScript development, I would have happily clicked "Yes."

As it is, I've left the NoScript whitelist intact in my AdBlock preferences, because I do want to support their development (NoScript leaves a comment in the AdBlock preferences indicating that this whitelist can be disabled easily). That said, I would have been much happier had my permission been asked!

The fill-in tax forms had a lot of behind-the-scenes scripting (javascript, I assume) and only worked with the Adobe browser plugin.

I can second this: I've encountered fill-in forms that just didn't play nicely with Preview.app.

Another issue is that the full-screen presentation mode in Acrobat works much more nicely for, e.g., giving PDF presentations compiled in LaTeX. It works with clickers for advancing slides.

Let's hope the game's storyline will at least be somewhat compelling this time.

If they want my money, how about making the game fun -- that seems like a good goal. FF4-FF7 were incredibly fun, but they seriously lost their way with later games. FF8 was an exercise in redundancy (draw, draw, draw...). FF10 had a painful level dynamic (having to bring every character into every fight, in order to actually level up your party). FF12 lost me the moment I realized that if I opened the wrong treasure chest at the beginning of the game, I'd be screwed out of something much later in the game.

Focus on pure fun, the way FF5 did (the job system was great); or, tell an amazing story in a fashion that is enjoyable to play, as FF7 did. If they can't fix this horrifically paced, guidebook-requiring style of game that FF has become, I'll spend my money on a different game.