I'm also not sure a return to the time when the company that runs the physical layer has no reason to upgrade to allow more bandwidth is in our best interest.
'return to'? As far as I can tell, in most places the company running the physical layer already has no incentive to upgrade since he faces no competition. Generally speaking I'm all for a free market, but in cases where the entry costs are so high as to make new entry impractical free market capitalism breaks down, and the government needs to intervene. About the least intrusive way the government can intervene here is to make sure the entry costs to competitors are low, and it seems to be working pretty well everywhere they've tried it.
Genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms are both completely distinct from what they're describing here. In those cases, the metaphor is quite appropriate since we're talking about serially encoding an algorithm, and then letting mutations of the encoded algorithm compete subject to a fitness function. Ad-Aware's "Genoytpe" has nothing to do with genetic programming or evolutionary algorithms, and the analogy makes no sense at all.
correllation is not causation?agggh! Read this: The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style.
Do you think scientists with >10 years training know less about statistics than you? They actively try to exclude other causes, which is what "controls for" means. Any other ideas for root causes that do not include those controlled for? Or were you just trying to be smart with a nice one-liner because it worked so well for others?
It is entirely possible that he *does* know more about statistics than these researchers. As someone has already observed, the statistics behind this research are essentially flawed by having too small a pool size of violent criminals. I could point out a couple of other flaws in the study, including the question of how effective their approach to controlling for aggressivity is, but that seems unnecessary.
More importantly, correlation is not causation! It doesn't matter if you've corrected for a few factors. Even if you corrected for every possible factor, the possibility would remain that both events had some shared cause. There is *never* a time when correlation alone, without other evidence, can serve to establish causation.
There are a lot of people who seem to implicitly trust that someone who calls himself a scientist knows what he's doing. The truth is, the social sciences are mostly filled with people who struggled in their basic statistics courses, and never really learned the stuff. As a math major, I often tutored people in statistics classes, and the people in the social sciences statistics classes never had the sort of grasp of the material needed to do anything useful really. Having never understood statistics, they mostly learn by mimicking their research advisors, who never learned statistics either.
There are some researchers out there doing good work, but they are vastly outnumbered, and your default presumption of competence is totally unwarranted.
I agree that the GP was optimistic in suggesting that it would be hard to find one great scientist -- I immediately thought of Erdos too.
In my defense, I said nothing about mathematicians, and the omission was intentional. Outside a very narrow range of fields like mathematics, where everything you need to know to understand a problem can be precisely defined, real greatness requires mental versatility.
Setting aside geniuses, I would argue more generally that this sort of versatility is often (though not always) found in the most successful people in any field.
The purpose of the essay is primarily to determine the students' ability to write rather than to find anything out about them personally, so it makes sense that sometimes the B.S. essay is the better one.
That said, most teachers are pretty good at detecting B.S., and a student who manages to write a good paper which isn't full of B.S. is going to come across very well too. I'm not saying the system doesn't create a strong incentive to write B.S., but I think you might be missing the point of the essay assignment.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
The very smartest people will not only have good grades and test scores, but will be able to analyse a problem like a writing assignment and be able to respond relevantly and skilfully. It's true that most high school graduates don't have the maturity to approach a problem like an application essay correctly (I certainly didn't), but that doesn't mean it can't be a very effective indicator of ability.
You seem to be operating on the (completely wrongheaded) assumption that the best engineers and scientists are one dimensional learners who focus all their energies in their narrow field, but you would be hard pressed to find a single truly great scientist who fit that mold.
In the U.S. death threats like "I'm gonna kill you" are protected speech. The only time it's not protected is if the person has a gun and is in immediate vicinity of the target, neither of which is true in the case of an email.
There's no absolute right to make threats like that. As long as a reasonable person wouldn't believe the threat, you're fine, but imminence isn't strictly necessary. The distinction you're making here is the one that would be used to rule out assault based on a threat in an email, but the possibility of a threat being criminal remains.
(If somebody threatens you, then it's entirely appropriate to threaten them back. It's how our adversarial legal system works.)
IANAL, but I am a law student, but threatening to kill someone is not generally an appropriate response to a threat of litigation, and could be criminal if he had reason to take you seriously. Also, the situation the gp describes doesn't really constitute a threat to litigate anyway, Jane's is just asking him to stop because it doesn't like what he's doing. It's a pretty safe bet that if Jane's had any legal grounds at all it would have made an explicit threat, and the letter is all bluster, which can safely be ignored.
Even with gaps in the coverage, blocking most of the radio waves should be enough to massively diminish the reception outside the room. Given the already limited range of most wifi transmitters, a few gaps in the paint for windows shouldn't be enough to allow any practical use of the wifi signal from outside.
Now, if you're putting the paint up for security reasons the windows might constitute a real risk, but trying to restrict the range of your wifi transmissions is probably not the best approach to security anyway.
Hydro power requires particular geographic features, so we probably won't be building many more of those, but nuclear power plants can be built everywhere, and the only reason we're not building them is because people are irrationally scared. Just because we're being stupid right now doesn't mean that we're required to remain stupid for the rest of time.
If it was evolution, yes, but one could simply "spread the seeds."
Exactly. Spread the seeds for the weak strain, and then kill off the strong strain so that the seeds can grow without competition, and before long the strong strain will have been completely eliminated!
You don't seem to understand the percentages, and how the big picture works.
And you don't seem to understand how the internet works. Sure, only a small number of customers have the desire and ability to get by the DRM, but they then share the decrypted files, and anyone with an internet connection and the ability to use a p2p program can get them. Downloading and viewing video via torrent or similar means is already ubiquitous with college students, and as bandwidth increases, and the population gets more comfortable thinking of a computer as a replacement for a TV, it's only going to get worse for the content producers. Companies can buy all the laws they like, from a practical point of view DRM is unworkable, and laws against file sharing are unenforceable.
Well, the thing is, our intuition is often, but not always right. Scientific reasoning is the only means I know of to distinguish the cases when our intuition is right form the cases where it's wrong. I would say that ideas unverified by scientific reasoning are really only opinion, not knowledge. You can't learn anything conclusively without sound reasoning and observation, and while intuition is immensely valuable for guiding reason, treating what your intuition or common sense tells you as knowledge is sure to lead to errors, and errors cost. I would go so far as to say that this particular type of laziness, trusting intuition without verification, is responsible for an awful lot of the suffering in the world, and shouldn't be taken lightly.
So, no, you can't *learn* anything except through the scientific method.
Many stellar objects have been predicted based on various theories that go beyond relativity, such as the cosmic strings described in the summary; the theory of relativity allows for, but doesn't require their existence. It could be that we live in a universe where large gravitational waves are possible, but don't happen naturally, in which case, the detector won't find them. If we don't find gravitational waves below a certain magnitude though, it will raise some perplexing questions as to why the stellar objects we expect to be out there making waves aren't there.
There's a difference between your theory being refined and eventually superseded and it being "wrong". Quite possibly, the world will one day look back on Einstein the way we look back on Newton: the father of a previous revolution in physics, superseded by an even deeper understanding but as valid as ever.
Or, I suppose, not.
Right. The fact that the theory of relativity isn't the ultimate theory of the universe doesn't make it 'wrong'. Any physical theory has a domain over which it is valid, and we are quite confident that relativity is a valid theory over the domain it describes. Proving Einstein wrong doesn't mean finding cases that his theory doesn't handle - we already have plenty of those - it means finding cases that it handles, but handles wrong, and it would be very surprising if any of those turned up.
As far as I remember from my course on general relativity, gravitational waves follow from a linearization of Einstein's field equations. Thus, if they failed to find them, it wouldn't falsify the theory as a whole but only the linear approach to the field equations.
This isn't exactly right. The equations describing gravitational waves do result from a simplifying approximation of Eintstein's equations, but it's the sort of simplifying approximation that really has to be quite accurate in many circumstances. If they don't find gravitational waves of a certain magnitude then either Einstein was wrong or, more likely, the sorts of astronomical phenomena that could create the waves don't exist.
The problem with ID proponents here is that they tend to modify the theory to fit the new evidence while not bothering to make sure what they're left with is a self consistent theory. Their goal is always to win the argument, and they don't care if the theory they come up with actually makes sense.
That's not the real problem with ID though. The real problem with ID is that, as a theory, it has about as much support as the idea that rain is caused by tiny invisible unicorns peeing. The "tiny unicorn" explanation for rain may be a theory, but if I have to explain to you why it's a bad theory our education system is in real trouble.
Self limiting protocols are useful only for small scale solutions when it is reasonably possible to validate the results (are you going to be able to review the votes of 1,000 plus voters in a useful timescale)
This idea seems to come out of nowhere and with no justification other than that the most naive possible method of scaling one particular protocol up doesn't work well. There is no fundamental reason that a well designed self enforcing protocol can't scale very well. As a simple example, let voters gather in groups of 100 or so and tally their votes. Then send someone to report the votes to a larger group (this can happen multiple times to allow for exponential scaling), and make sure the report is publicized (in a local newspaper or on a website designed for the purpose) so that voters can confirm the numbers were reported right. By spreading the work over many people no one person has to do an excessive amount of work, regardless of the number of voters.
Anonymity is a little trickier to do efficiently, but here's the first idea that comes to mind. Gather your 100 voters in a room with a vote count visible to everyone, and give each voter a private terminal. In a random order ask each voter to make a choice, then to confirm the updated count. Each voter will know his own vote was counted correctly. If 100 voters doesn't seem like enough to ensure anonymity you can use a larger group.
Obviously there are all sorts of flaws with the plans above, but with proper time to work through the details a workable plan of some sort exists. Just because you don't know a solution to a problem doesn't mean that someone actually willing to think can't come up with one.
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I don't have to think I understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch to think this is a questionable move. I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch himself thought this was a bit of a gamble. The reality is that right now Rupert Murdoch is between a rock and a hard place. He initially went with the free ad-based model because it was clear that subscription models were only working in special cases. Apparently the free approach is failing, and he's resorting to a subscription model as plan B.
Some types of media just aren't going to survive the changes the internet is bringing, and newspapers may be one of them. I don't think I know better than Rupert Murdoch. I think he knows that his industry is in trouble too. It will be interesting to see if he finds a way to convert his resources into something workable in the future.
Survival is a terrible metric of intelligence. By that standard, lions and tigers and bears are the most intelligent species on the planet.
Many species of lions and tigers are near extinction, and bear populations are well down in most inhabited areas where bears used to live, so by that standard they aren't intelligent at all. Survival rates for large predators just aren't very good in the modern world.
Now you might have pointed out that rats, raccoons, pigeons, and cockroaches are pretty intelligent by the survival metric.
He's right. If the RIAA or MPAA wants to sell you a license to make use of their product in certain specific well described ways, and you pay for the use of said product according to those terms, there's no problem.
However, this is irrelevant. Plenty of DRM free music is available (in a CD if in no other form), and only an idiot would buy DRMed music if an alternative existed. Furthermore, there is no theoretical way to make make effective DRM that isn't tied exclusively to proprietary hardware.
Piracy is widely socially accepted, primarily harmful to large distributors rather than to artists, and excessively costly if not outright impossible to prevent.
The question of whether DRM is moral is totally moot, media is easily and freely available, DRM doesn't work, and does a good job of alienating the few suporters the RIAA has. The RIAA is going to have to get their heads out of their asses, abandon DRM, and find a business model that works, or they're going to find themselves customerless and bankrupt.
Even worse, the colony does not even SOLVE the problem! If you let the bacteria grow enough, you have a pretty high probability of getting a solution. But no guarantee, because it's all probabilistic.
To be fair, current computation is also essentially probabilistic. Solid state electronics like those based on transistors depend on statistical thermodynamic effects for their operation - it just turns out that the probability of a random fluctuation that causes unpredictable behaviour is small enough to be essentially zero - in principle with enough bacteria you could achieve similar levels of confidence.
The scale issue is a real one though, if your base unit is a bacterium instead of an electron you have a awful lot less units to work with a a given size. Still in principle for problems that can be parallelized, having millions of 'processors' might be enough to make up for the size of the units you're working with.
XP runs like a champ (at least in terms of speed) if you keep it clean and the hardware manufacturers manage to write proper drivers...
This is just it; it takes significant expertise to make a year old windows machine run smoothly. People claim that windows is easier to use than Linux, but when I was running XP I needed a lot more knowledge and a lot more effort to keep it working right. I have known so many people who own a perfectly good machine one or two years old, and it's basically unusable because they haven't done proper maintenance. For the average user windows is just a bad choice.
The funny thing is, with proper driver support a well configured XP system without too much bloat installed will in fact run faster than most Linux distros. I know I'm sort of preaching to the choir here, but the idea that you need to be an expert to use Linux seems common even around here, so I felt the point deserved expanding upon.
Perfect security doesn't exist (at least I've never encountered it), so the goal with security is to minimize the chance of a harmful breach. From that point of view, the small company may actually be a better choice even if the security is abysmal or non existant. For all practical purposes a cottage with the key under the doormat is more secure than the mansion next door with a fancy security system - both can be robbed, but no one's going to bother to rob the cottage unless they have something in particular against the owner.
The security at your partner company is truly awful, but if they're low enough profile they'll probably never suffer a breach. Obviously I can't speak to your specific case, but for a small enough company security is a waste of money - security only makes sense if the chance of a breach times the cost of a breach is greater than the cost of the security.
Big companies may generally have much better security, but I doubt their security is enough better to make up for the extra exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also not sure a return to the time when the company that runs the physical layer has no reason to upgrade to allow more bandwidth is in our best interest.
'return to'? As far as I can tell, in most places the company running the physical layer already has no incentive to upgrade since he faces no competition. Generally speaking I'm all for a free market, but in cases where the entry costs are so high as to make new entry impractical free market capitalism breaks down, and the government needs to intervene. About the least intrusive way the government can intervene here is to make sure the entry costs to competitors are low, and it seems to be working pretty well everywhere they've tried it.
Genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms are both completely distinct from what they're describing here. In those cases, the metaphor is quite appropriate since we're talking about serially encoding an algorithm, and then letting mutations of the encoded algorithm compete subject to a fitness function. Ad-Aware's "Genoytpe" has nothing to do with genetic programming or evolutionary algorithms, and the analogy makes no sense at all.
correllation is not causation? agggh! Read this: The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style. Do you think scientists with >10 years training know less about statistics than you? They actively try to exclude other causes, which is what "controls for" means. Any other ideas for root causes that do not include those controlled for? Or were you just trying to be smart with a nice one-liner because it worked so well for others?
It is entirely possible that he *does* know more about statistics than these researchers. As someone has already observed, the statistics behind this research are essentially flawed by having too small a pool size of violent criminals. I could point out a couple of other flaws in the study, including the question of how effective their approach to controlling for aggressivity is, but that seems unnecessary.
More importantly, correlation is not causation! It doesn't matter if you've corrected for a few factors. Even if you corrected for every possible factor, the possibility would remain that both events had some shared cause. There is *never* a time when correlation alone, without other evidence, can serve to establish causation.
There are a lot of people who seem to implicitly trust that someone who calls himself a scientist knows what he's doing. The truth is, the social sciences are mostly filled with people who struggled in their basic statistics courses, and never really learned the stuff. As a math major, I often tutored people in statistics classes, and the people in the social sciences statistics classes never had the sort of grasp of the material needed to do anything useful really. Having never understood statistics, they mostly learn by mimicking their research advisors, who never learned statistics either.
There are some researchers out there doing good work, but they are vastly outnumbered, and your default presumption of competence is totally unwarranted.
I agree that the GP was optimistic in suggesting that it would be hard to find one great scientist -- I immediately thought of Erdos too.
In my defense, I said nothing about mathematicians, and the omission was intentional. Outside a very narrow range of fields like mathematics, where everything you need to know to understand a problem can be precisely defined, real greatness requires mental versatility.
Setting aside geniuses, I would argue more generally that this sort of versatility is often (though not always) found in the most successful people in any field.
The purpose of the essay is primarily to determine the students' ability to write rather than to find anything out about them personally, so it makes sense that sometimes the B.S. essay is the better one.
That said, most teachers are pretty good at detecting B.S., and a student who manages to write a good paper which isn't full of B.S. is going to come across very well too. I'm not saying the system doesn't create a strong incentive to write B.S., but I think you might be missing the point of the essay assignment.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
The very smartest people will not only have good grades and test scores, but will be able to analyse a problem like a writing assignment and be able to respond relevantly and skilfully. It's true that most high school graduates don't have the maturity to approach a problem like an application essay correctly (I certainly didn't), but that doesn't mean it can't be a very effective indicator of ability.
You seem to be operating on the (completely wrongheaded) assumption that the best engineers and scientists are one dimensional learners who focus all their energies in their narrow field, but you would be hard pressed to find a single truly great scientist who fit that mold.
In the U.S. death threats like "I'm gonna kill you" are protected speech. The only time it's not protected is if the person has a gun and is in immediate vicinity of the target, neither of which is true in the case of an email.
There's no absolute right to make threats like that. As long as a reasonable person wouldn't believe the threat, you're fine, but imminence isn't strictly necessary. The distinction you're making here is the one that would be used to rule out assault based on a threat in an email, but the possibility of a threat being criminal remains.
(If somebody threatens you, then it's entirely appropriate to threaten them back. It's how our adversarial legal system works.)
IANAL, but I am a law student, but threatening to kill someone is not generally an appropriate response to a threat of litigation, and could be criminal if he had reason to take you seriously. Also, the situation the gp describes doesn't really constitute a threat to litigate anyway, Jane's is just asking him to stop because it doesn't like what he's doing. It's a pretty safe bet that if Jane's had any legal grounds at all it would have made an explicit threat, and the letter is all bluster, which can safely be ignored.
Even with gaps in the coverage, blocking most of the radio waves should be enough to massively diminish the reception outside the room. Given the already limited range of most wifi transmitters, a few gaps in the paint for windows shouldn't be enough to allow any practical use of the wifi signal from outside.
Now, if you're putting the paint up for security reasons the windows might constitute a real risk, but trying to restrict the range of your wifi transmissions is probably not the best approach to security anyway.
Hydro power requires particular geographic features, so we probably won't be building many more of those, but nuclear power plants can be built everywhere, and the only reason we're not building them is because people are irrationally scared. Just because we're being stupid right now doesn't mean that we're required to remain stupid for the rest of time.
If it was evolution, yes, but one could simply "spread the seeds."
Exactly. Spread the seeds for the weak strain, and then kill off the strong strain so that the seeds can grow without competition, and before long the strong strain will have been completely eliminated!
You don't seem to understand the percentages, and how the big picture works.
And you don't seem to understand how the internet works. Sure, only a small number of customers have the desire and ability to get by the DRM, but they then share the decrypted files, and anyone with an internet connection and the ability to use a p2p program can get them. Downloading and viewing video via torrent or similar means is already ubiquitous with college students, and as bandwidth increases, and the population gets more comfortable thinking of a computer as a replacement for a TV, it's only going to get worse for the content producers. Companies can buy all the laws they like, from a practical point of view DRM is unworkable, and laws against file sharing are unenforceable.
Well, the thing is, our intuition is often, but not always right. Scientific reasoning is the only means I know of to distinguish the cases when our intuition is right form the cases where it's wrong. I would say that ideas unverified by scientific reasoning are really only opinion, not knowledge. You can't learn anything conclusively without sound reasoning and observation, and while intuition is immensely valuable for guiding reason, treating what your intuition or common sense tells you as knowledge is sure to lead to errors, and errors cost. I would go so far as to say that this particular type of laziness, trusting intuition without verification, is responsible for an awful lot of the suffering in the world, and shouldn't be taken lightly.
So, no, you can't *learn* anything except through the scientific method.
Many stellar objects have been predicted based on various theories that go beyond relativity, such as the cosmic strings described in the summary; the theory of relativity allows for, but doesn't require their existence. It could be that we live in a universe where large gravitational waves are possible, but don't happen naturally, in which case, the detector won't find them. If we don't find gravitational waves below a certain magnitude though, it will raise some perplexing questions as to why the stellar objects we expect to be out there making waves aren't there.
There's a difference between your theory being refined and eventually superseded and it being "wrong". Quite possibly, the world will one day look back on Einstein the way we look back on Newton: the father of a previous revolution in physics, superseded by an even deeper understanding but as valid as ever.
Or, I suppose, not.
Right. The fact that the theory of relativity isn't the ultimate theory of the universe doesn't make it 'wrong'. Any physical theory has a domain over which it is valid, and we are quite confident that relativity is a valid theory over the domain it describes. Proving Einstein wrong doesn't mean finding cases that his theory doesn't handle - we already have plenty of those - it means finding cases that it handles, but handles wrong, and it would be very surprising if any of those turned up.
As far as I remember from my course on general relativity, gravitational waves follow from a linearization of Einstein's field equations. Thus, if they failed to find them, it wouldn't falsify the theory as a whole but only the linear approach to the field equations.
This isn't exactly right. The equations describing gravitational waves do result from a simplifying approximation of Eintstein's equations, but it's the sort of simplifying approximation that really has to be quite accurate in many circumstances. If they don't find gravitational waves of a certain magnitude then either Einstein was wrong or, more likely, the sorts of astronomical phenomena that could create the waves don't exist.
The problem with ID proponents here is that they tend to modify the theory to fit the new evidence while not bothering to make sure what they're left with is a self consistent theory. Their goal is always to win the argument, and they don't care if the theory they come up with actually makes sense.
That's not the real problem with ID though. The real problem with ID is that, as a theory, it has about as much support as the idea that rain is caused by tiny invisible unicorns peeing. The "tiny unicorn" explanation for rain may be a theory, but if I have to explain to you why it's a bad theory our education system is in real trouble.
Self limiting protocols are useful only for small scale solutions when it is reasonably possible to validate the results (are you going to be able to review the votes of 1,000 plus voters in a useful timescale)
This idea seems to come out of nowhere and with no justification other than that the most naive possible method of scaling one particular protocol up doesn't work well. There is no fundamental reason that a well designed self enforcing protocol can't scale very well. As a simple example, let voters gather in groups of 100 or so and tally their votes. Then send someone to report the votes to a larger group (this can happen multiple times to allow for exponential scaling), and make sure the report is publicized (in a local newspaper or on a website designed for the purpose) so that voters can confirm the numbers were reported right. By spreading the work over many people no one person has to do an excessive amount of work, regardless of the number of voters.
Anonymity is a little trickier to do efficiently, but here's the first idea that comes to mind. Gather your 100 voters in a room with a vote count visible to everyone, and give each voter a private terminal. In a random order ask each voter to make a choice, then to confirm the updated count. Each voter will know his own vote was counted correctly. If 100 voters doesn't seem like enough to ensure anonymity you can use a larger group.
Obviously there are all sorts of flaws with the plans above, but with proper time to work through the details a workable plan of some sort exists. Just because you don't know a solution to a problem doesn't mean that someone actually willing to think can't come up with one.
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I don't have to think I understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch to think this is a questionable move. I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch himself thought this was a bit of a gamble. The reality is that right now Rupert Murdoch is between a rock and a hard place. He initially went with the free ad-based model because it was clear that subscription models were only working in special cases. Apparently the free approach is failing, and he's resorting to a subscription model as plan B.
Some types of media just aren't going to survive the changes the internet is bringing, and newspapers may be one of them. I don't think I know better than Rupert Murdoch. I think he knows that his industry is in trouble too. It will be interesting to see if he finds a way to convert his resources into something workable in the future.
Survival is a terrible metric of intelligence. By that standard, lions and tigers and bears are the most intelligent species on the planet.
Many species of lions and tigers are near extinction, and bear populations are well down in most inhabited areas where bears used to live, so by that standard they aren't intelligent at all. Survival rates for large predators just aren't very good in the modern world.
Now you might have pointed out that rats, raccoons, pigeons, and cockroaches are pretty intelligent by the survival metric.
He's right. If the RIAA or MPAA wants to sell you a license to make use of their product in certain specific well described ways, and you pay for the use of said product according to those terms, there's no problem.
However, this is irrelevant. Plenty of DRM free music is available (in a CD if in no other form), and only an idiot would buy DRMed music if an alternative existed. Furthermore, there is no theoretical way to make make effective DRM that isn't tied exclusively to proprietary hardware. Piracy is widely socially accepted, primarily harmful to large distributors rather than to artists, and excessively costly if not outright impossible to prevent.
The question of whether DRM is moral is totally moot, media is easily and freely available, DRM doesn't work, and does a good job of alienating the few suporters the RIAA has. The RIAA is going to have to get their heads out of their asses, abandon DRM, and find a business model that works, or they're going to find themselves customerless and bankrupt.
Dunno - I think I'd prefer Paula Abdul as an overlord to a Dalek. Ditzy and scatter-brained, but at least with some compassion.
Daleks aren't robots, they're mutants! Please hand in your geek card and go rewatch Dr. Who.
Even worse, the colony does not even SOLVE the problem! If you let the bacteria grow enough, you have a pretty high probability of getting a solution. But no guarantee, because it's all probabilistic.
To be fair, current computation is also essentially probabilistic. Solid state electronics like those based on transistors depend on statistical thermodynamic effects for their operation - it just turns out that the probability of a random fluctuation that causes unpredictable behaviour is small enough to be essentially zero - in principle with enough bacteria you could achieve similar levels of confidence.
The scale issue is a real one though, if your base unit is a bacterium instead of an electron you have a awful lot less units to work with a a given size. Still in principle for problems that can be parallelized, having millions of 'processors' might be enough to make up for the size of the units you're working with.
XP runs like a champ (at least in terms of speed) if you keep it clean and the hardware manufacturers manage to write proper drivers...
This is just it; it takes significant expertise to make a year old windows machine run smoothly. People claim that windows is easier to use than Linux, but when I was running XP I needed a lot more knowledge and a lot more effort to keep it working right. I have known so many people who own a perfectly good machine one or two years old, and it's basically unusable because they haven't done proper maintenance. For the average user windows is just a bad choice.
The funny thing is, with proper driver support a well configured XP system without too much bloat installed will in fact run faster than most Linux distros. I know I'm sort of preaching to the choir here, but the idea that you need to be an expert to use Linux seems common even around here, so I felt the point deserved expanding upon.
Perfect security doesn't exist (at least I've never encountered it), so the goal with security is to minimize the chance of a harmful breach. From that point of view, the small company may actually be a better choice even if the security is abysmal or non existant. For all practical purposes a cottage with the key under the doormat is more secure than the mansion next door with a fancy security system - both can be robbed, but no one's going to bother to rob the cottage unless they have something in particular against the owner.
The security at your partner company is truly awful, but if they're low enough profile they'll probably never suffer a breach. Obviously I can't speak to your specific case, but for a small enough company security is a waste of money - security only makes sense if the chance of a breach times the cost of a breach is greater than the cost of the security.
Big companies may generally have much better security, but I doubt their security is enough better to make up for the extra exposure.