You mean like they did with the first PC OS (Behind the original mac OS) that they copied, then improved on to basically take over the world? It seems like the system worked for them...

FTFY. HAND. ;)

Is it me, or lately MS looks like a fireman with a watering can, running around trying to put out fires everywhere?

I mean, Zune (iPod), Bing (Google), this (Spottify)... Lagging behind the competition a little, are we?

Did you even care to finish reading his sentence? Is there something wrong with your English language parser?

It's the stupidity, economist! ;)

Just a little nitpicking. Noise randomness doesn't mean that you'll get a good estimation of the signal by averaging.

The mean estimator works all right (it's the MVU, IIRC) when you're getting zero-mean noise, or noise whose PDF is symmetrically distributed around its expected value (in this case, you could correct the bias by extracting the mean of the noise).

But I just flunked an exam on this very topic, so to hell with me :D

Minuses: a socialist government and Jante Law [wikipedia.org] ingrained in the Norwegian psyche.

Well, that might be your minuses, but you just added 2 of my pluses to the list ;)

Well, if you choose to ignore the concept of "burden of proof", yes, it is.

"There is no god" is a reply to "There is/are a/some god/s". The former does not make sense without stating the latter first.

I believe there is no god on the same grounds as I believe there are no orange polar bears. In order to prove that there actually are, you just need to provide a single instance of them. Until that moment, the default position is believing that there are no such animals.

A belief which, consequently, can be changed by showing me a single polar bear, so no, it's not one of the religious kind.

Ethics can try to tell you whether or not creating such a bomb is a good idea.

FTFY. I'll never, ever, ever, let religion (be it through the words of an either long dead or alive-and-kicking prophet or some thousand-year-old book) dent my moral choices.

This has been discussed a gazillion times before.

Come back to us again when hosts can not only block whole advertising companies' domains, but also things like 'http://slashdot.org/ads/*', and thanks for playing.

Well... How... brave? of the French, the people whose public health service subsidizes homeopathy, to try and take down an organization that targets vulnerable people for commercial gain...

You know, the courts may not be working any more, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done.

If the leg has a CPU in it, are you still human?

Maybe. Maybe not. I'll be back.

I guess they didn't... They just generated "popularity"... and that seemed enough to get taken over... But I'm actually a little drunk, so feel free to disagree.