No resources are freed for any future generations of database contaminants to breed on by filtering. And, the notion of evolution would also require changes to the contaminants, which don't really happen. So by all means, filter. It will leave harder-to-detect contaminants there, but they won't become more numerous.

Turn the picture around and re-scan, that way you effectively have the light coming from different angles by each scan. No need to modify the scanner.

Netflix calculates the score shown on the leaderboard from a set of rating predictions submitted by a team. The team does not, and will not, know the correct answers. For testing their algorithms, the teams use another dataset. The two datasets, part of the package made available to the competitors, are known as "qualifying" and "probe".

In the Finnish language version of Excel, all the function names (to be used in spreadsheet formulas) are in Finnish. It's horrible! To search for help or examples from Internet one has to use a table to translate the function names.

That is funny, in Finnish medical drug law there's pretty much an opposite clause: When a patient is buying a prescribed drug, brand A, the drug store must offer a cheaper substitute drug, brand B, if such exists.

Perhaps a better version of your analogy would be this:

A metal pole is used to transfer information from one end to the other. A guy on one end is shaking the bar, and pushing and pulling it. This is detected by the guy in the other end. Life goes past smoothly, and this technique of information transfer is perfected. Then, suddenly, some smart asshole comes in and shows these guys that they can also twist the pole, essentially giving a new channel on which to transfer information.

For simulation, Monte Carlo and such statistical sampling this would be perfect. There is already random error - sampling error - so adding a lesser source of error - computational error - while reducing the first would make sense if the computations can be sped up.

Try CCleaner. Some of my friends recommended it. One of them noticed a speedup after running it.