The original research (2008) studied the records of people "engaged in political violence."

So the point is that active (in some sense) terrorists are more often engineers. It isn't a random selection of all people who are part of terrorist organizations, only those who actually participate in actions, who do things. I could suggest reasons other than political philosophy for that.

That shouldn't be true. For example, part of compliance with things like PCI (Payment Card Industry) level N certification is how your systems are set up to block *internal* users from accessing information.

Just like any security system, people find it easier to leave internal access wide open, and that creates a massive security hole, because security means protecting from all unauthorized access, and unauthorized doesn't just mean "outside the organization."

There will always be internal users with more access and more sensitive access, but a well-designed system sharply constrains that access, logs activities, and in cases like the admin unblocking himself, makes it visible to the user. It doesn't sound as if Google's systems are well-designed in this way.

The Feds prosecute Lori Drew, under the theory that breaking TOS is criminal, but they see no way to prosecute school administrators for photographing young people in the privacy of their homes. How much sense does that make?

I agree completely: this is exactly the sort of experiment that helps all kinds of simulations be more accurate, and makes predictions that may not be testable more likely to be correct.

This kind of thing is also why I always distrust the stories (evolutionary psychologists are the worst offenders) given by scientists instead of experiments: "It's logical that people who helped each other would be more successful, so they reproduced more often...." But logical is often disproved by experiment, so if it hasn't been tested, it's a guess.

They've successfully converted this from, "Is there an issue with touching a part of the iPhone that we should have caught during development," to "Is the iPhone better or worse than other smart phones when held in a death grip?"

When Steve Jobs gets to define the question, the answer will never be seriously negative for Apple.

Yes, it's disinformation. Of about the same order as saying, "We have 3000 people working on the clean-up," when in fact they have 2998. That would be stupid to do, because if someone discovered the real number, they'd claim BP was "inflating" things, but it would be pretty trivial. If they had photoshopped in 8 screens when they only had 2, I'd say that was "doctoring" the image. Putting a fake display on screens that really exist may just have shown what it looked like 15 minutes before the photo was taken.

So a reasonable business model for the pay-wall might be to roughly recoup the costs of distribution, i.e., run the site. I'll bet if they priced it based on that, the cost of an online subscription would be a lot lower, and they'd get a lot more eyeballs to use to sell the advertising.

Perhaps, although climate change science suffers the same problem.

While it's perfectly valid for ecologists to weigh in on what effect climate change will have on species in various environments, it's unfortunate that the ecologists get lumped into the "all scientists" who agree on the climate trends and the source of the problem, when in fact there are just a very few climate scientists who study those areas.

This problem occurs on both sides, of course: everyone feels a right to an opinion.

I don't think your analogy is very good, for two reasons. First, the relationship between DNA and protein folding has been under investigation longer, and second, it can be studied under controlled circumstances.

A better analogy would be paleoanthropology. The science is fairly young, and not very amenable to experimentation. From time to time, someone is able to do something like check DNA from a frozen specimen.

But there doesn't seem to be thesame kind of horrified reaction, with cries of "skeptic" or "denier," when someone proposes an alternative theory in this field.

As a couple of comments have said, the Chief has every right to go after anyone committing libel or pretending to be an official.

But from the article:

Assuming the comments in the first paragraph are accurately paraphrased, the Chief certainly seems to be using the threat of legal action to quiet people who are making negative comments.

Reading between the lines (the whole purpose of /. :-), the whole thing seems more directed at his own department: he keeps mentioning department employees, and the article has a couple of mentions of regulations about posting on social networking sites. That would explain why he wants to learn identities, then possibly file charges.

The Austin PD must be a really happy organization!

It's a decent article, but I don't see any surprises there.

Rational people and, by extension, rational IT departments choose software based on the overall value for cost. The features are the obvious value, of course. Individuals may think of ease of installation as a feature, while an IT department sees it as a cost.

I would also argue that the comparison is distorted because commercial products undergo selection: a commercial product that fails to provide a certain minimum value goes away. FOSS, on the other hand, can stay around forever. If commercial apps were compared only to those FOSS apps that were installed at least as often as a low-selling commercial app, the differences might be so great.