I'd thought it was inscrutable mathematical voodoo, so never bothered reading further, but it amounts to determining the value of a particular piece of evidence by taking into account both false positives and false negatives. Simple but powerful.
One [...] is formidable. Two is formidabler. Or three? Mega-formidable. And after mega, it goes to mondo, then super, hyper, beaucoup d', crazy, stupid...
It gets exponentially prefixy.
-- Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "season 8", issue #2 (Joss Whedon)
[Alison Bechdel's strip] popularized what is now known as the Bechdel Test, also named the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel's Law. Bechdel credits Liz Wallace for the test. The test appears in a 1985 strip entitled The Rule in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
- It has to have at least two women in it, who
- talk to each other about,
- something besides a man.
You would be amazed, once you start watching for it, how very very rare this kind of scene is in movies, violent and non-.
That's the term for a Wi-Fi access point that appears to be a legitimate one offered on the premises, but actually has been set up by a hacker to eavesdrop on wireless communications among Internet surfers.
Entertaining as always. Since it's just speech, download the .flv and extract the audio for your listening pleasure with:
mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile output.mp3 videofile.flv
Overpaid everybody, bribes, millions in scenes that didn't make final cut...
Not that a free-as-in-beer license is really of much interest in this age of mass infringement, but still.
You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number--not an infinity--on a blank index card.
Interesting, accessible journey through some of the mathematics of really big numbers, from "9999..."-repeating through to curious constructs you never learned the names of in school. See also MeFi.
Answer: not much. The only surprising thing is that they predicted a huge response.