The probability of someone with a PhD in meteorology (or something similar) knowing what they are doing with a storm is quite a bit higher than some random guy who thinks storms are neat.

Are there amateurs who know a lot about what they are doing and their hobby is contributing in some way to society / our knowledge base? I'm sure there are, but very few compared to the "random yokel who wants to video tape the storm because he watched Twister last weekend"

Yup. Clearly if money is the prime goal one wants to spend 4 years in a tough undergrad program becfore moving on to a 6 year (on average) graduate program and probably a post-doc or 2, vs. getting a degree in marketing and having your company pay for your MBA and rolling in 6 figures.

So your friend is a complete douchebag?

At least 3 mod points will be wasted on this post.

Dumbasses.

For the same reason that if you build me a house, I can't pull out halfway through construction and leave you out $50,000?

This is called "almost surely" or "almost never" in probability theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely

While the probability of getting an infinite number on 1's is 0, it's still in the sample space, therefore can still happen (in fact, with an infinte number of coin tosses, any particular sequence has a probability of zero of occurring)

Set up an OpenVPN system at home and remotely connect to it, giving you high quality (AES) over-the-air encryption, even on an open and unencrypted system.

I second this. I used Texmacs in undergrad and grad school - it's pretty good for taking notes, although if I'm going to sit down and type something up, i'll go with plain old LaTeX

ah, i was commenting more about equating SSL with PKC than the overall meaning of your comment.

SSL = secure sockets layer

the ability to asymmetrically encrypt data = public key cryptography (See RSA, El Gamal, NTRU, etc)

Moses story takes place after the Noah story. It's really not a 'stunning bit of logic'.

Exactly.

Turing completeness. You can emulate those if you wish, although it won't necessarily be pretty.

I worked for them in college.