Of course ! The simpler a sentence is, and the smaller a vocabulary you use, the more easy it is to understand.

So if the assignment is: "Write a sentence that is as easy to understand as possible", then something like "I am a boy" should score top grades. It's among the simplest sentences you can write, and it uses only words that tend to be taught in the first couple weeks of english-class.

If you're trying to set a grade for how much english a person has learnt after several years of schooling, then not so much. Then they should actually demonstrate that they understand and can use both a larger vocabulary, and more grammar and syntax. (on a high level, you'd also want to get idioms and nuances right)

That I've experienced to. It's a *really* stupid way to grade someones language-skills, but it's an easy way to do it, just count the mistakes, so it's basically about caring more about ease of grading than whether grades are meaningful or not.

"My name is Eivind. I am a boy. I come from Norway. Norway is in Europe. Norway is cold." should *never* score higher than:

"I'm called Eivind and come from Norway, it's a coldish place over in Europe, thoug not as cold as some folks assume."

Yeah, the latter has more mistakes. But despite this it demonstrates far higher skills in english. Failing slightly at constructing a complicated sentence should be preferable to constructing a entry-level sentence perfectly.

That's not surprising. First, at 30 kcal/day, even if burn-rate was *entirely* contant, it'd take 100 days to drop a single pound. Even in a lab, controlling the diet of a person to within 1% margin over more than 3 months is close-to-impossible.

Secondly, your metabolism ain't *that* stable, nor is your level of physical activity. You burn 50-100 kcals a day just by fidgeting, it's hardly possible to accurately measure precicely how much people fidget over months.

A lot of other factors ranging from daylight-hours to temperature to how many days you where at work over those 3 months also influence your energy burn-rate.

They are. They had 75% of the smartphone-market. Now they've got like 3% of the smartphone market.

Since that's a pretty big market, 3% is still plenty of devices sold, but it's hardly possible to have a steeper decline in marketshare than they've had.

I never claimed everyone will react the same way to the same stimuli, certainly we're different. Two people may both smoke, but only one of them gets cancer. Two might both overeat sugar, but only one gets diabetes.

The post I responded to said "why would you assume faster is better?"

I'd assume that the capability of going faster, is better because in the real world, that's how it is. Even if you have a higher speed-limit and can go faster, it's not worth it to do so all the time, and I explicitly said this in my answer: *sometimes* going faster is better.

Certainly, in principle that's entirely true. In practice though, our bodies have evolved to try *really* hard to extract as much energy as possible from the food we digest. To our detriment today, eating 500 kcals/day too much wouldn't matter if the body would just take "what it needs" and poop the rest.

There's no indication that consuming more calories will cause your body to digest significantly fewer of them. But it is true, like you write, that on very low calorie diets, your metabolism and thus energy-consumption will tend to fall. So you might eat 1000 kcal less, but your metabolism slows by 300 kcal, so your weight-loss is slower than expected.

Because sometimes faster -is- better. A fairly significant fraction of travel is done to get from A to B. Sure if the time between is more comfortable, then it's less of a chore, but nevertheless, a shorter travel-trip is a plus.

Not a plus big enough to override ALL other concerns, the concorde for example is extinct because it was too expensive for the benefit it offered. But for most people at current energy-prices, paying the extra it costs to have your car go 70mph rather than 40mph is worth it. Yes it may spend atleast twice the fuel to do so, but spending $3 in fuel to have 1-5 people each save an hour, is worth it to many, much of the time.

Not just that, they make up figures with *3* significant digits. 95.4 million ? Give me a break ! They're talking about something where anything between 0 and 90% of all vehicles sold is a reasonable guess, and they claim to know the answer to within 0.1% ?

Sure. My point was that the NSA would probably prefer that *nobody* can crack this, rather than that *everyone* can crack this. But certainly, if they could have their dream-situation where *they* can crack it, but nobody else on the planet can, then that'd be just swell.

There's swimvests on planes too -- please look up for me a few examples of situations where those have saved lives ?

Known-plaintext is helpful in cracking certain weak ciphers. One of the criteria for a cipher being strong, is that it *not* be vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. As far as we know, aes-256 is strong.

Furthermore, cracking the files won't help the NSA. The info in them is likely already well-known to the NSA. It's however unknown to the public. Thus the NSA isn't as much concerned with cracking the encryption, as it is with -avoiding- that anyone else cracks it. (or learns of the key)

There's no need for that last step -- you already have a political system that ensures people are forced to vote for the "lesser of two evils" rather than their actual preference -- and those two evils are really more or less equivalent, I mean there's differences, but not in these things.

True. But mortality is equal to frequency of accidents, multiplied with death-risk in an accident. Even if death-risk is higher, you can still be a lot safer if the frequency of accidents is much lower.

These capsules run inside a sealed (airtight!) solid-steel pipe. That alone eliminates a pretty large fraction of all accidents, it's not as if you'll ever get a pedestrian on the track or crash in an intersection in one of these.

They switched because they where paid to do so, because it looks good in marketing. They're in the position to control the webserver for millions of domains, thus Microsoft bribes them to use IIS.