I propose a simple but elegant solution to this conundrum. In case of people with multiple personalities you proceed as follows:

(1) Establish how many personalities can be distinguished within the defendant's mind.

(2) Try to identify the personality who was in charge at the time, and do him/her for pointing the laser.

(3) Prosecute all the other personalities for being accessory and/or accomplice to the act of pointing the laser.

(4) Depending on how tightly the personalities are linked, you may optionally prosecute each of them for conspiracy to commit a crime, or even taking part in a criminal organisation.

(5) Add all sentences together. This is how long the body pointing the laser should go behind bars.

I suspect that the defense of "multiple personalities" will lose its popularity very quickly.

I see a lot of people stating their opinions and arbitrarily deciding that people who use 'swear words' are bad at communicating, have weaknesses, or are lazy, but I've yet to see anything objective.

And I think that you've yet to start looking. And I don't mean on Slashdot.

It will surprise you to know that there is a branch of science dealing with questions like: "what makes people better or worse at being listened to and influencing others?". It's called Psychology, and it's about objective study of the human mind. Including personal effectiveness.

Now something tells me that you aren't about to read (much less absorb) anything about Psychology. So I won't bother you with references to the literature (you may use Google if you want to contend that you do).

So I'll try to couch my argument in terms that may be inside your personal sphere of experience. We'll start with advertising. Advertisements are there to make people buy something. They're worth big money because they *work*. Now ... how many swearwords (directed squarely at the viewer) do you see in advertising? And in sales pitches?

That's right: none at all. Reason: they don't work. People would use them if they did ... but they don't.

The same holds for lawyer's briefs, politician's speeches,

If in addition the plain fact that you won't hear any successful managers, professors, lawyers, salespeople, or politicians swear in their official capacity isn't "objective" enough for you, what is?

I would choose the one that's best at the job at hand. At random, if need be. This would be on principle.

You might be getting there. Now lets focus on what you mean by "best at the job", shall we?

There seems to be some romantic notion floating about of the "irksome in manners but super-competent maverick". Most jobs (apart from code monkey or assembly-line worker or data-entry professional) require some measure of interaction. With colleagues. With management. With clients. With prospects. With the public. Being able to do that without needlessly antagonizing people is part of being good at your job.

The vast majority of people I've met professionally (in academe and business) were both extremely good at their work and quite articulate, if not eloquent. I almost never spotted someone with a clear trade-off.

And I also never spotted anyone who was such a prize (professionally speaking) that we had to put up with him/her being a pain to listen to (there was always someone who could do the job just about as well without the theatrics).

So whoever told you that being good at some job correlates with being a potty-mouth? Less fanciful romantic assumptions on your part, and more real-world experience please.

Not using 'swear words' is simply a way of being eloquent, articulate, and effective at influencing people.

All things considered, using crude language (and especially swearwords) is typically a sign of weakness in people. As in: being unable to get their point across without being vulgar and being frustrated at their own inability to do so. Or simply being too lazy to care.

Suppose you're in charge of hiring engineers and you can get someone who (being equally competent on the engineering side) has the added benefit of polishing their shoes, not looking like some bum from the slums, and being able to convince people to adopt their views (as in collaborating with e.g. customers, prospects, colleagues) and to get their thinking across clearly, effectively, and without needlessly antagonising their audience (as in making presentations to e.g. management, prospects, competitors).

Would you choose someone who comes across as a potty-mouth, a bum, a Neanderthaler or someone more sophisticated?

I suppose it depends. If you want a small corporate cog that you'll never have to worry about reaching management levels himself (and perhaps turning into competition), by all means: go for the one lacking polish (or even the potty-mouth). Your only worry will be to pay said cog market value (for their technical competence only: they have no other qualities) and keep them fully booked.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for someone who might be suitable to represent your company externally (after you verified that their head is screwed on right of course) and who's promotable in due time, go for the one with a few extra qualities. Such as politeness and articulateness. You'll find yourself paying extra for such people. They're scarcer and more in demand because they're more useful.

There is nothing "magical" or even "special" about being able to code.It's usually a very shallow trick based on being able to decompose a problem into smaller (easier) ones, and then putting the solution to the smaller problems together to solve the original problem.

Children would be much better served by teaching them concentration, a systematic approach to problem-solving, a good command of language (natural language) and teaching them how to solve problems that require a focused effort or even a team effort.

And yes, programming can be so much fun that you might succeed in getting children so absorbed in the problem at hand that they actually focus and make an effort. But I see it as a means. not an end.

Teaching children about programming in secondary school is plenty good enough, provided they aren't semi-illiterates (as is so often the case), can actually formulate their thoughts in a way that makes sense (instead of the usual incoherent rambling), and know what it means to make an effort.

Unfortunately, any competent author of a nuisance lawsuit will be prepared to appeal and will (in this case) aim for a jury trial. Meanwhile he would signal being open to an out of court settlement to the tune of half a million plus legal costs.

With that in mind, would you bet against his ability to manoeuver for a jury that will be swayed by rethoric about the ickiness of drinking pee?

I'm afraid the grandparent post has nailed it: it's cheaper to waste a few million gallons of perfectly good drinking water than to risk a lawsuit.

People are wary because they don't see tangible incentive right now. Their attitude will change when they do.

First when they understand they can prevent their children from getting genes that e.g. code for nasty hereditary disease like cystic fibrosis.

Then more people will get on board if they believe they can get genes that reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease, caries, code for better eyesight, a stronger immune system etc.

After that I think we'll see offers for genes that code for needing less sleep, of even a cheery and sunny disposition.

And as to what people "want": that's irrelevant. To paraphrase Steve Jobs: don't ask people what they want ... they're clueless about that ... someone with good taste will have to design something ... and people will recognise it as something they wanted all along and buy it.

@Anonymous Coward

An revealing comment from someone who even posts anonymously on Slashdot.

First off, you might know that there was a big flap over the NSA hoovering people's personal communications (content plus metadata), and people generally weren't quite satisfied by the argument that if they had nothing to hide they had no reason to object against having their lives laid bare.

And here *you* are, posting anonymously, suggesting that if an academic has nothing to "hide", his entire email exchange is fair game for people abusing the courts to turn what should be a scientific debate into a politically motivated witch-hunt. Something you top off by turning the issue on its head and suggesting bad faith on part of someone unwilling to turn over his entire email database.

Actions of this kind are known as "fishing expeditions' and uniformly considered unreasonable and objectionable as they are aimed only at discovering something (anything really no matter how unrelated to the issue under debate), that conspiracy-theorists might be able to use to villify the defending party.

For your information, proper scientific debates are held on basis of examination of evidence and reasoning, for which scientific publications together with the underlying data are a necessary and sufficient basis. The way this works is: if someone can't (or won't) produce the underlying data, his articles and conclusions suffer a reduction in credibility and hence lose weight in the debate. Besides which, other data sources than his are brought to bear with which to test his conclusions. And both mechanisms have been in action in this case.

Examination of email correspondence is not relevant for scientific debate, and is the exclusive domain of witch-hunts and lynch mobs.

Rethorical questions such as yours (especially when posted anonymously) are used by conspiracy theorists and people who wish to use the instruments of harassment to intimidate scientists that voice politically inconvenient conclusions.

There was a legal challenge to the ACA already, and it was defeated in court. In other words: your views on the constitutionality of the ACA aren't shared by the current Supreme Court, and therefore they are pretty much irrelevant. Get over it.

Until there is solid evidence of malversation, rants of the calibre of "Gee ... those numbers are big ... so can they be true" cannot be taken seriously.

Oh, and have you filed your demand to see Obama's birth certificate yet? Be sure to demand that he proves he's got a pulse too. And demand that he be doused with Holy Water too ... just in case, eh?

Everyone, including the author of the article (which you apparently didn't read) agrees that correlation doesn't imply causation.

However, we do know that religion is transmitted through contact. Both social contact and personal contact. See e.g. [Alderman, Derek H. 2012. "Cultural Change and Diffusion: Geographical Patterns, Social Processes, and Contact Zones." 21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook (Vol. 1), SAGE Publications (edited by Joseph Stoltman), pp. 123-134.]

This is born out by the empirical data that people who're born in Muslim society tend to take Islam as their religion, whereas people who're born in devoutly Christian, Judaic, Shinto, or Animistic society tend to adopt those. In particular, the hypotheses of "Divine intervention" and "Very Personal Contact With God" aren't needed to model this kind of data. Social proximity (for which spatial proximity is a proxy) does the job adequately and is by far the simpler hypothesis.

Hence it's very reasonable to hypothesize that as social interaction patterns tend to shift to the Internet, transmission of religious beliefs follows suit. This hypothesis is not contradicted by, and dovetails nicely with, the survey data the article refers to.

Another data-point that fits this theory are examples of young or otherwise easily influenced people embracing fundamentalist Islam because of the websites they hang out on. Which incidentally is one of the reasons why organisations like the NSA and GCHQ are so interested in the Internet.

So all in all, the article is somewhere in-between an-interesting-idea-presented-in-a-blog post (it doesn't do any literature review, it doesn't place the question or the data within a recognised theoretical framework (even though suitable and persuasive frameworks such as the one sketched by Alderman exist), it doesn't present the data or the estimation results) and competent research.

But the one thing it's *not* is "Pseudo Science", simply because it (wisely) doesn't make any pretense at being scientific. Note the difference please.

I think they will. And it may well turn out to be a very cheap option compared to the alternatives.

When you think of it, paying 6 million pounds to postpone the conversion of a few million XP boxes (which the UK government isn't yet ready to do) for a year or risk even greater vulnerability than XP has now, isn't expensive.

Of course considerations like these are usually lost on Open Source advocates whose mental horizon is limited to the idea of installing Open Source operating systems on PC's without ever considering what those machines are supposed to do. I.e. what applications they must run and who the people are that must use them (and their training and learning ability ... or the lack of it).

I mean ... I had always understood that SCADA vulnerabilities were caused by amateurish system design (connecting SCADA systems to the Internet using cheapo consumer-grade routers, without precautions like stealth, VPN's, whitelist callbacks, etc.) and shoddy system management (factory default passwords, obvious passwords, dictionary passwords, no passwords).

And now this! In some cases the actual software seems to have security holes too. Shocking, shocking, shocking!

ATM's don't need a browser, so in those cases your comment is irrelevant.

For other kinds boxes, just remove the browser and tell people to surf using their tablet or the shared machine down the hall.

Those whose work absolutely requires them to use a browser you can provide with more modern boxes.

Still way cheaper than replacing every single XP box.

Because, as will be understood by anyone but the most naive hobbyist, the cost of switching applications for a few million boxes is enormous.

Counter to what some people seem to think, running XP isn't an end in itself. In the real world you run XP in order to run certain applications, right? Applications that typically won't run on Linux (closed-source Windows-only stuff) and may not even run on Windows-7.

Besides upgrading would be really expensive. Ripping out several million boxes, reformatting they disks, installing Linux, dealing with a substantial percentage of cases where the hardware breaks when you unplug them or on which the more recent kernels won't run is very expensive. So expensive in fact that the license cost for a Windows copy will be completely dwarfed by the cost of handling the hardware and installing Linux.

By the time you're done installing the OS you'll find your troubles are only beginning. You'll find that your old applications (that you built into your business) won't function anymore. You might be able to write one single application for ATM's that runs on Linux or or a more recent version of Windows but you won't have time to test that thoroughly (enough) and you'll replicate that application millions of time. Good luck! For ordinary office machines you'll be facing a big bill in reinstalling all the old packages and even more (training !) if you decide to upgrade the applications too. And then you can watch your office performance sag as everyone starts learning their way around the new apps.

Chances are you'll lose a lot more money handling, migrating, training, and pushing updates to all those millions of boxes than dealing with any security problems that may start to arise in the next two years.

That, in a nutshell, is why it makes financial sense to just isolate the, shortly very vulnerable, XP boxes behind firewalls than to upgrade them.

In fact I think you might even be able to insure yourself against cost of problems when you continue using XP at a rate that's much lower than the cost of migrating.

Take any issue at all. Take a random sample of of possible outcomes. It's statistically unavoidable that some of them will more or less hit home.

Even better, take Paul the Octopus (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... ), who correctly predicted the outcome of several soccer matches and was offered a job by a UK bookmaker for his performance.

I fear it makes as much sense to credit Paul for deep psychic insights into soccer as Mrs. Palin for an astute grasp of international politics. Perhaps I'd rather take my chances on Paul.

If Whole Foods (often) are a waste of money, they aren't actively dangerous (well, except to your wallet).

Laugh if you will, at people's gullibility, and then read up on the Radithor patent medicine (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).

Of course it's well known that the food industry isn't worried about health effects of what it sells. They're happy to simply put in whatever ingredients make a product sell. Just look at all the stuff that contains sugar (often disguised as "corn syrup" to avoid having to print the word "sugar" on the label).

And "naturally risen" meat isn't all bull either (pardon the pun). It's because standard commercial beef is quite likely to contain antibiotics (see e.g. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/... ). The reason is of course that feeding animals antibiotics raises production, so it's cost-effective.

It's also grossly irresponsible and really should be banned on the spot. Why? Serving up diluted amounts of antibiotics ensures (through natural selection) that those bacteria that survive the initial onslaught are immune to those same antibiotics. And where do those bacteria and residual antibiotics end up? Well ... in animal poop and from there in surface waters, sewers and oceans. And via the slaughterhouse (if they're a teensy bit careless about separating out intestines in the thousands of carcasses they process each day) in your steak.

Given that those dirty little critters actually exchange pieces of DNA, it's easy to see how whole families of bacteria that live in sewers, surface waters and seas can gain resistance to antibiotics. Which is why we're now facing a crisis with perfectly ordinary bacteria being hard to treat when they cause an infection (just Google for MRSA). Or being even being impossible to treat, so that people with a weak immune system (elderly, post-surgery patients) die from infections that had stopped being a threat when antibiotics were discovered some 70 years ago.

Of course the industry resists. They're not responsible for public health or MRSA, they're responsible for their own bottom line (see e.g. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... ). Which is why the FDA is embarking on a campaign of voluntary reductions.

Reading labels (if you can be bothered) gives you a lot of information you need to make sensible choices in what you eat. That's why we have food labeling regulations (which incidentally are severely criticised by some libertarians as "undue interference with the markets").

Even then there's little defence against people who seek solace in bogus science. But it's better to light a candle ... etc. One very interesting site I have found that debunks various "power" food additives is this one ( http://www.ergo-log.com/ ). They genuinely impressed me by truthfully and insightfully reporting on scientific publications concerning food supplements. They know their stuff, both from a (bio)chemical point of view and from a statistical (and experimental design) point of view. Not a light read, but Recommended.