One major advantage of R is that it's the standard teaching package for undergraduate statistics. That means that stats department (or math department, if the school is too small to have a separate stats dept) will have people who can show you how to do stuff. That is, support is available, locally, for free. Also, there are teaching texts that start simple and build up to as complicated as you want. A saved R script is a reasonable way to automate the report preparation process. You can collect data in Excel, dump it to tab-delimited text, read it into R and generate a pile of pretty graphs over and over again every month. But writing the script requires a fair amount of study, and being able to talk to someone who uses it a lot will make you much happier.

Well, for a wifi-only ipad, it finds nothing. Has anyone confirmed this? It sounds dubious on the face of it -- why would a device with limited storage generate an infinitely-growing log file with no clear purpose? Is there some setting in Location Services that requests this log?

Ted Chang has a wonderful story about this, called "Dividing by Zero". If we find that ZFC is inconsistent, it will greatly bother a few mathematicians, and nobody else will care.

Thus speaks someone who has never worked with data. Data isn't just a number. You really have to know just what question the number is an answer to, how and where it was collected -- and when, and what got done to the number along the way. There have been some public data repositories, but it's hard to write this stuff all down, and analyzing data without knowing where it comes from has lead to some pretty screwy conclusions. This kind of forced public access isn't completely wrongheaded, but there's a lot wrong with it.

Also, think about it yourself. What does the network do? What measures can you make that describe whether it's working well? If someone were trying to improve the network, how often would they want to see those measures? Management usually doesn't know enough to know what to ask. You're the expert, figure out what they should be looking at.

Yes, this is a good example. I think, in **my** dialect, these two meanings of "downhill" have different grammatical structure: the first meaning, of a bad situation, is always said as "went downhill", or "going downhill". The second, of getting easier, is stated as "is downhill". So really, two different verbs, hopefully made more clear by context. This is why translators get paid.