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1 crash per 100,000 flights

Well then, it should be safe for the next 200,000 flights. Better make your reservations quickly before the odds run out.

...the observations or temperature line up pretty well with projections of climate models

That's called "Texas sharp shooter fallacy" http://www.fallacyfiles.org/te...

.

As far as math I've taken classes up to differential equations so it's not like I'm math illiterate but maybe the math you keep alluding to is something I'm not familiar with.

You're still just dancing around the issues without ever getting specific enough to actually name what it is you think is the problem.

You claim to have studied differential equations, but you don't seem to understand the relevance. In particular, again I repeat: coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled. The Earth's climate is coupled to the output of the Sun. That is, in order to model the Earth's climate, you have to first accurately model the Sun. That's the correct and scientific way to model the climate. Assuming the Sun as constant is decoupling the coupled system. It is unscientific to misuse mathematics, the tools of science. Somehow, I find it hard to believe you actually studied differential equations in any rigorous way, if at all. Doing a web search doesn't count as studying. People who have studied at least up to ODEs don't make the comments you have made when I remind them about coupled systems. Stop lying to yourself and go study more math.

Sorry, are you some bot built to promote Mark Shephard? Otherwise what was the point of that?

Point is "climate change" is a faith based political issue for most people. It's bad ideology, but that's never mattered to ideologues hell bent on coercing other people into your preferred behaviors based on "evidence" that you don't fully understand. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/te... Studying mathematics is hard, being an ideologue is easy.

You're begging the question.

These are classic examples of "straw man" arguments: assert that the people you disagree with said something absurd, and then attack that absurd statement.

Of course, the answer Is to go back to living in a cave like a hunter-gatherer while the Al Gore and the rest of the elites can reign over us on high like the Greek Gods from their Mount Olympus.

People are suggesting a switch to technologies that reduce carbon emissions. Nobody is claiming we need to go back to living in caves like a hunter-gatherer. That's a straw man.

Considering how badly the elites simply want to eradicate roughly 90% us from the Earth,

People are suggesting reducing the rate of population growth. Nobody is suggesting "eradicating 90% of us from the Earth." That's a straw man.

Yes, it's easy to demolish absurd straw-man arguments that nobody makes. It doesn't help the argument.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/strawman.html

Yeah anyone is free to setup there own blog or website and hate all they want nobody can do anything about that.

So when did you quit beating your wife? Because I know you're too dense to figure this one out, here's a link.

I think this is more an example of Two Wrongs Make a Right.

Bandwagon usually refers to a shared belief: fifty million lemmings can't be wrong.

Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress.

To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.

Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners;

Yes, that's the basis for the Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision. It is on questionable logical grounds however: corporations are not citizens, and while the people composing a corporation have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that the corporations themselves do. The belief that an object inherits the properties of the pieces composing it is one of the logical fallacies: this is the fallacy of composition.

(Or see: Logically Fallacious: Fallacy of composition.)

The alternative would be to say that the people themselves have the right to donate to political campaigns, but if they want to do so, they must do so personally, and not from the corporations. This is also perfectly reasonable: corporations are legal entities, not persons, and can be subject to different laws then people.

Here is your fallacy...loaded words which are of course designed to halt discussion. A perfect example of using loaded words is if I hand out a petition to ban water? Not gonna get anywhere, but if I pass out a petition to ban Dihydrogen monoxide I have zero doubt I got get a pile of celebs and SJWs on board to have it banned immediately.

Maybe next time if you don't call people names and actually state your positions logically it would be better...otherwise someone will just label you likewise as an SJW douchebag...see how that works? No further discussion with you is required, you are an SJW and therefor a douchebag and that means nothing you say has any merit..now do you see why using loaded words isn't such a great idea?

Please explain how a fallacy could be true.
It's literally defined as being a false belief or a failure in reasoning.

It's the "fallacy fallacy."

If you conclude that because a line of reasoning contains a fallacy, the statement reasoned about is false, you just fell into the fallacy fallacy..

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...

You missed the point entirely as usual. You can't claim intent of 100% nefarious use in one case without evidence and claim intent of 100% legitimate use in another when there is clear indication of nefarious use.

It is time for you to stop being ignorant. I suggest starting here.

No-one could possibly guess mine. It's Password1.

So simple, no-one could possibly pull that rabbit out of a hat.

There must be one word that tells me you told
me and I no longer have to guess. Since I no longer
have to guess I cannot guess.

I guess I should finish reading this: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/lo...

doesn't pertain to anything about the question I was asking which was what metrics was the OP using to make the determination

Ok, so you harp about your "question". I was not replying to your question. You said "When exactly do you expect Apple to suddenly go into the red?", which aside from being a question, is a statement that the commenter expects Apple to suddenly go into the red now or in the future. (Read this for how it is wrong). Followed by straight statements, undisguised as questions, like "People like to say Apple is declining, but there really isn't any financial indication this is so".

So your post to which I originally replied did not come across as a question at all and was full of statements made in the forms of explicit statements or questions.

In short, no, you cannot pretend you were asking a question.

What does arbitrarily multiplying things by -1 prove exactly?

Already explained. "Proof that unqualified downward slide need not mean financial woes, or any woes in general. "

Then the qualifier to your statement must be 'downward can never apply to all aspects (of Apple)?
First off this could be false and so your statement has a fallacy.

No. Profit and loss are definitely aspects of (slides of) Apple. If downward slide is of profits, it is by definition, an upward slide of losses. Losses could be negative in a particular instance, but unquestionably, slides of profits and losses must be in the opposite directions. Hence all aspects, which include both profit and loss, cannot have a downward slide. QED.

Second, my question never involved all aspects of Apple, but was a simply question of what metrics led the OP to make the statement Apple is on downhill slide.

I replied to your statements that the downward slide must mean financial woes as explained above - e.g. asking when the commenter expects Apple to post losses.

How more wide open can a question be than what metrics are you using to come to the conclusion you have stated?

If you actually just asked a question to the commenter, you would have let the question remain wide open, but you are not correct in retrospective conversion of your own post as a question.

We're not talking about the truth value of [P..Z], just the nature of the equation.

Logic lesson for you:

You have options of [P,R..Z] - you must show that at *least* one of those is a "necessary and sufficient" falsifiable hypothesis statement for AGW or CAGW.

Thus far, you have been unable to defend *anything* between [P,R...Z]. You've made 4 propositions for values of [P,R...Z], and you've been unable to defend the strongest one. You haven't been able to defend any of the weaker ones either.

So, you can argue this two ways:

1) successfully defend *any* of your propositions;
2) insist that even if all of your propositions are indefensible, that somewhere, out there, some unspecified proposition will in fact be defensible, and on that basis we should accept the truth of Q.

Can you guess what logical fallacy #2 is? :)

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ig...

The slippery slope is a fallacy. Maybe it's only considered a fallacy when used as an argument against a leftist pet cause.

Wow, the Washington Post sides with the administration. That clinches the argument for me. This must be the least impact way to cut the FAA budget.

Way to poison the well, kid.

Because it's never existed, never will exist even Adam Smith saw that the government was going to have to be involved to keep the actors honest.

You might profit from a brief study of the semantic version of the slippery slope fallacy.

~Loyal

So,they've managed to patent using statistics? Is anyone actually doing their job in the patent office?

Nah, they have managed to patent a logical fallacy -- ON A COMPUTER -- .

FTFY.

I'm thinking about digging up some old internet arguments and submitting them as prior art.

So,they've managed to patent using statistics? Is anyone actually doing their job in the patent office?

Nah, they have managed to patent a logical fallacy.

So, lets spend nothing on defense [...]

Yup, let's spend zero dollars on defense, just like you quoted timeOday as having recommended.

You can learn more tips for constructing illogical non-arguments here.

the fallacy of the complex question.

I don't think that means what you think it means, if you think my quandary qualifies.

I was actually taught logic, unlike many who make claims to logic. As to complex question, it is explained here.

This has already been tried out in the UK and Australia successfully.

Bandwagon Fallacy

It's been tried. The "successfully" part is highly debatable.

Most animals who can physically hunt and digest humans do not have any opposition to hunting humans, endangered or not.

Most animals also don't have a problem with rape. Your point is?

On the other hand if you're referring to hunting your own species, we have a problem. While many animal and other species are known to actively practice cannibalism, humans rarely do in cases other then those borne out of extreme competition for food sources.

Oh, right, an appeal to nature. Ugh. Is that the best you can do?

No, but in spite of that, we still don't produce the majority of our food organically.

Yes, well, while we all wish that natural was always better, unfortunately, that nice simply idea died out with the Iron Age. Organic is nothing more than an appeal to nature. Even if, by some miracle, every single thing advocated in organic agriculture were true, it would still be bullshit. If you can't understand that, go back to your high school and demand a refund.

The inefficient and environmentally destructive method of farming involving pesticides

You mean the ones Bt crops cut back on?

and energy intensive fertilizers is the one involving GMO.

You mean the fertilizers that soil needs less of when you use the no till methods facilitated by herbicide tolerant GE crops?

We produce GMO crops to try to deal with the drawbacks of so-called "green revolution" agriculture, which is a fairly imaginative euphemism for "monocultural farming".

You mean the Green Revolution that saved a billion lives? The one that introduced techniques that raised the productivity so much that we would have to log pretty much every forest on the planet if we had pre-Green Revolution yields? Boy, sure is nice to live in those cozy post industrial nations. Sure, the Green Revolution had problems, and monoculture is not desirable, but it isn't nearly as black and white as you make it out to be. You completely neglect the issues of spare or share, and I doubt you'd be criticizing it if you were one of the billions who would be dead without it (and in the unlikely event you are, then that's pretty hypocritical).

The crops which are most commonly GMO (like corn and soy) are typically grown (in a "big agribusiness" context) continuously, meaning without crop rotation or even permitting the crops to lie fallow.

You're joking right? You honestly believe that so-called industrial farmers don't know what crop rotation is, that they'd rather spread fertilizer (the cost of which comes right out of their bottom line) than use crop rotation?

Attempts to grow monocultures for machine cultivation led to Monsanto's production of glyphosphate-resistant crops (aka "Roundup-resistant" — and Monsanto is still the world's largest producer of glyphosphate)

So?

which in turn has produced "superweeds"

The proper term is resistant weed. It has happened before, and without developing a long term rotation plan of crops resistant to multiple different herbicides to counteract individual resistances that immerge in weed populations, it will happen again. Weeds rotations have evolved dormancy in their seeds to take advantage of the rotation. Guess crop rotation is bad too , huh? The existance of selection pressure is only news to the clueless, which I suspect is why the emotional term 'superweed' is used.

which are not only resistant to roundup, but also bigger and stronger in general.

That's a new one on me. got a citation?

The pests are being driven to rapid evolution through the methods of agriculture which benefit (in the short term) from genetic manipulation.

That statement has been true since long before biotechnology was on the scene. I was going to say welcome to the 1930s but now that I think about it that problem is even older. Irish potato famine anyone? Ironically, those problems are caused by lack of genetic diversity, the same thing that transgenics, by definition, inserts.

Labor costs don't seem to be rising at all when it comes to crops, since we're still shitting on Mexico through both direct political intervention and through prohibition, which causes

I think the source of the expression is with subject and object reversed. It is the question that begs to be asked. This is not exactly the same as "raises the question", as it is much stronger.

This is not consistent with historical meaning. Please see either or both of the following links, which go into substantial detail:

• http://www.fallacyfiles.org/begquest.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begs_the_question

You know what else they don't label? Naturally mutated varieties, plant sports, food produced with hybrid seed, wide crossed varieties (member the Lenape potato?), embryo rescue, chemical mutagenesis, radiation mutagenesis, somatic variation, plants produced with tissue culture, grafted plants, polyploid plants, crops treated with colchicine, ect. Pretty inconsistent to think that inserting a single very well known and well studied protein (even one like the cry protein that people have been eating for decades) should be labeled, meanwhile give all the other things that cause a lot more genetic change a free pass. Allergies are caused by just a few proteins out of the tens of thousands you eat every day...saying that genetic engineering is any more likely to spontaneously produce one than other crop improvement techniques (with a well understood protein anyway, particularly one already in the food supply) is just magical thinking. And if allergies are you concern, I notice no one is protesting the hundreds of new proteins and compounds in biodiverse foods. Fun fact: more people have died from starfruit than GM crops (granted, not from allergic reactions, but people have had reactions to relative newcomers to mas production like kiwi). Of course, it is no coincidence that only one of these things is well known by the public (although when hybrid seed first became big, people said the same thing about it, hell, there people who were against grafting...both things are now ubiquitous in grain/vegetable and fruit production respectively). And because there is not a shred of evidence to suggest the GM food is in any way different than non-GM food, it is no different than mandatory labeling for Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, ect. dietary laws. Of course, you could say that there is no proof that they're not causing allergies, but you could say the same thing about everything else I listed, or pretty much anything, including invisible pink unicorns.

And yes, the term frankenfoods is just an overly emotional appeal, just like calling resistant weeds 'superweeds'' or calling cross pollination 'genetic contamination.'. Fearmongering. Anyone who knows anything about crop domestication knows everything we eat is already 'frankenfoods.' Of course, that's natural, so it's totally different. By the way, the Rainbow papaya isn't labeled either. It was produced by the University of Hawaii. So, what was that about evil corporations again? Here's an idea. Maybe if people want a specific thing labeled, they should stop lying about it. Of course, telling lies to scare people into buying fancy overpriced organic food is somehow morally superior to making people do 15 seconds of looking it up

uh....I'm sorry that you lack basic logic skills.

Logical Fallacy on Sony's part. Post hoc ergo propter hoc . Or as many on /. like to say "Correlation is not causation".

I wouldn't call it that extensive.

Lustig puts forth claims, backed indirectly by a number of studies. Aragon, correctly, points out what could be potential holes in the analysis. However, at this point, everyone engages in the Fallacy Fallacy. What Aragon does not produce is a counter-example. He produces some studies and "analyzes" them. He does not, however, constructively provide any proof that the statement is false.

Lustig suggests that they take the discussion from blogs to journals, which Aragon spins as "elitism" with "journal clubs". Far from elitism, asking for a study to substantiate his counter-claims is pretty much equivocable to what Aragon asks for in the first place. Of course, a journal would also demand enough information to reproduce the study, so it's a step up from a blog post as well.

While Aragon makes some compelling suggestions about how Lustig could be wrong, it's a far cry from extensively debunking. In the end, Aragon isn't doing much more than being the worst kind of armchair scientist--the kind that doesn't execute and publish experiments. Lustig, however, does.

It's an ethically interesting question. If the solution is as simple as building multi-story meat growing labs to save space, what happens if it is found out that eating this stuff gives you some kind of nano-enhanced synthetic cancer or something?

This is a textbook red herring argument, the appeal to fear.

You could say this sort of thing about nearly everything. What if sneezing might cause you to have a embolism that can kill you? What if farm-grown organic vegetables might contain deadly parasites? What if God might get angry at you for not eating what he has commanded you to eat and so he smites you down?

Of course we should make sure that any new food source is as safe as we can reasonably make it, that's a given. Let's debate on real, known, present issues rather than introducing horror scenarios just to try to sway opinion through fear-mongering.

S1: !A => !M
S2: A
S3: M

Asserted: S1 + S2 => S3
S4: M => A (from S1)
S2: A
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/afthecon.html

Eh? What exactly is harder in Windows than it is on Ubuntu?

Opening a document someone sent you and editing it in OpenOffice. I opened it in Word 2007, but what's this ribbon thing?

The reply to this is not to say, "well, then, just open it in OpenOffice." Because you have to INSTALL OpenOffice on Windows. On Ubuntu, it comes preinstalled. When Word 2007 looks exactly like OpenOffice, and works exactly the same way as well, then you can ask your question again.

How about people who have used Evolution for years? Nothing, not even Outlook, will look exactly the same and work identically.

You've obviously not dealt with people for whom moving a icon from one place on the desktop to another results in complaints that "my Ubuntu is broken," usually followed by, "I can't do my work until it's fixed."

To argue "Windows is better because I'm used to it and so are most people" is a Bandwagon Fallacy. Look it up.

Just fwiw, you've just made as your argument one of the most classical and basic fallacies -- an appeal to authority.

Since not all arguments from expert opinion are fallacious, some authorities on logic have taken to labelling this fallacy as "appeal to inappropriate or irrelevant or questionable authority", rather than the traditional name "appeal to authority". For the same reason, I use the name "appeal to misleading authority" to distinguish fallacious from non-fallacious arguments from authority.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html

Just because you appeal to an authority doesn't make it a fallacy.

This is the error of attacking the character or motives of a person who has stated an idea, rather than the idea itself.

Note that I do continue to attack your ideas. Furthermore, here's an explanation:

In reality, ad hominem is unrelated to sarcasm or personal abuse. Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument.

Those "personal attacks" (to the extent that they were -- "don't be a dick" has never been a personal attack) were not attempts to undermine your argument -- I could do that well enough on my own.

However, you have been guilty of exactly this, haven't you? It seems every single claim I make, you counter with "Where's your degree that proves you have a right to say that?" You did it right here:

You're no expert in LOGIC, not in CSC/CIS/MIS, nor in English (per your 'grammar/spellcheck/writing style' forensics & critiques attempts, minus provable expertise in any of them yourself or degrees or licenses in them either), nor in Psychology (per your libel directed my way on that account also).

Show us degrees that show you are in those? I'll take it back... until then? LMAO!

In other words, "I'm not going to listen to anything you say unless you have a degree." How elitist and naive -- but it's also a perfect example of argumentum ad-hominem. Instead of addressing my argument, you attack my credentials, in an attempt to undermine my argument.

Another source, with its own citations:

Many people seem to think that any personal criticism, attack, or insult counts as an ad hominem fallacy...

People like you, apparently.

Each subfallacy listed on that page is explicit that it applies when such arguments are used as evidence against the position -- which again, I have not done, though you have.

Ad-hominem is described as the introduction of a red herring, which you commit often, which is described like this:

This is the most general fallacy of irrelevance. Any argument in which the premisses are logically unrelated to the conclusion commits this fallacy.

But I gave no conclusion about your arguments.

Finally, I'm not surprised you've forgotten:

when I brought up the fact that looking for faulty coding practices or risky compiler instructions like sscanf are easy to find... You were reduced to using ad hominem name calling

So you're implying that at this point, I had no argument, and all I did was ad-hom? Let's find out:

Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source, a process which leads to a more secure system -- wouldn't you rather have a vulnerability found and fixed, or even found and marked "unpatched" on Securina, than found and exploited (hidden) elsewhere?

Now, I'm not saying this in itself is an airtight argument, but it's also one that addresses your claim that merely having the source available naturally leads to a less secure system.

Revealing specific techniques for searching through source code, versus analyzing binary, are irrelevant. I never once claimed that vulnerabilities are harder to find in open source. My claim was that the fact that vulnerabilities are easy to find in open source makes it more secure in the long run.

Of course, that wasn't the post where I supposedly ad-hom'd you. Let's look at that one:

if I have the

This is the error of attacking the character or motives of a person who has stated an idea, rather than the idea itself.

Note that I do continue to attack your ideas. Furthermore, here's an explanation:

In reality, ad hominem is unrelated to sarcasm or personal abuse. Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument.

Those "personal attacks" (to the extent that they were -- "don't be a dick" has never been a personal attack) were not attempts to undermine your argument -- I could do that well enough on my own.

However, you have been guilty of exactly this, haven't you? It seems every single claim I make, you counter with "Where's your degree that proves you have a right to say that?" You did it right here:

You're no expert in LOGIC, not in CSC/CIS/MIS, nor in English (per your 'grammar/spellcheck/writing style' forensics & critiques attempts, minus provable expertise in any of them yourself or degrees or licenses in them either), nor in Psychology (per your libel directed my way on that account also).

Show us degrees that show you are in those? I'll take it back... until then? LMAO!

In other words, "I'm not going to listen to anything you say unless you have a degree." How elitist and naive -- but it's also a perfect example of argumentum ad-hominem. Instead of addressing my argument, you attack my credentials, in an attempt to undermine my argument.

Another source, with its own citations:

Many people seem to think that any personal criticism, attack, or insult counts as an ad hominem fallacy...

People like you, apparently.

Each subfallacy listed on that page is explicit that it applies when such arguments are used as evidence against the position -- which again, I have not done, though you have.

Ad-hominem is described as the introduction of a red herring, which you commit often, which is described like this:

This is the most general fallacy of irrelevance. Any argument in which the premisses are logically unrelated to the conclusion commits this fallacy.

But I gave no conclusion about your arguments.

Finally, I'm not surprised you've forgotten:

when I brought up the fact that looking for faulty coding practices or risky compiler instructions like sscanf are easy to find... You were reduced to using ad hominem name calling

So you're implying that at this point, I had no argument, and all I did was ad-hom? Let's find out:

Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source, a process which leads to a more secure system -- wouldn't you rather have a vulnerability found and fixed, or even found and marked "unpatched" on Securina, than found and exploited (hidden) elsewhere?

Now, I'm not saying this in itself is an airtight argument, but it's also one that addresses your claim that merely having the source available naturally leads to a less secure system.

Revealing specific techniques for searching through source code, versus analyzing binary, are irrelevant. I never once claimed that vulnerabilities are harder to find in open source. My claim was that the fact that vulnerabilities are easy to find in open source makes it more secure in the long run.

Of course, that wasn't the post where I supposedly ad-hom'd you. Let's look at that one:

if I have the

attaching importance to what he has to say about this gadget is an example of an "Appeal to Misleading Authority."

Citing fallacies is an example of failing at life

Linus wrote a kernel not a GUI.

I was going for "funny". Since you want to take the argument seriously though, because Linus is indeed an expert but in an unrelated field like you say attaching importance to what he has to say about this gadget is an example of an "Appeal to Misleading Authority."

Oh, and I think you meant "ease of use".

Touchy ... I mean touché. On second thought touchy is probably right.

Other than that, great post!

Gee, thanks ;-)

Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s.

Yeah, once the industrial age had got started in earnest.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

You and all your fanatical friends are failures. Will that putrid hypocrite Gore refund you the price of your five copies of A Convenient Lie?

"Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

That was exactly my point. If everyone who acts in their own self interests is blameless, then you pretty much can't "blame" anybody for anything.

"Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

Not quite - the hit rate is 70 percent, which means that 70 percent of the messages that are spam will never reach your inbox, and the other 30 percent will. The number you're after is the false alarm rate, 0.3%, which tells you that only 3 out of every 1000 non-spam messages will be incorrectly flagged as spam.

My initial reaction to these numbers was to wonder what percentage of e-mail is spam. The article says it's a whoppingly high 90.4%, which I think makes the false-alarm rate more than acceptable, as (by my calculations) only one out of every 229 e-mails flagged as spam will be a real e-mail. In contrast, if, say, only 1% of e-mails were spam (in which case we probably wouldn't need a spam detector at all, but still), 3 out of every 10 e-mails flagged as spam would actually be real e-mails.

Of course, this is just a long-winded way of noting that hit rates and false alarm rates aren't terribly useful without taking the base rate into account.

Yeah, and the GP is pointing out that it is a weak analogy.

For example the sig could have been: "Atheism is a belief system to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby." But I think most people would see that as an absurd analogy.

You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free

Anecdotal fallacy.

The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines. This is the way it was before the 1960s.

Appeal to tradition.

I've seen many Republicans like you, providing no evidence to support their positions, just spouting lame garbage. Often people like you will even sound sensible on the surface, but then ten seconds of critical thought later, your arguments are exposed for the lies and hypocrisy they truly are.

I pity you, for seeing the world through such a distorted view must make your life incredibly miserable.

Many thanks!

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html

While the above post may be "Interesting" to some, it is a blatant example of a Tu Quoque Fallacy. Ignoring that the GP did not seek to praise the US government for its actions, the US government's involvement in any software production is not relevant.

I believe you are Affirming the Consequent.

In a list like this the writer upgrades the commas in the names to semicolons. You do respect the comma and use them in their more important role as list separators. It's not pretty, but it's right. It's not easy being an English Major.

I call shenanigans. Yeah, I have a writing degree too, and what you're saying contradicts Strunk and White, and just about every other style guide I've ever read. And it contradicts every English textbook I've ever read. I can't find a decent copy of The Elements of Style online -- the only versions I can find are the original written by William Strunk, before E. B. White jumped in and expanded the book. However, I found plenty of other grammar-related sites online that agree with me:

• Wikipedia (yes, I know, but bear with me): Use a semicolon between items in a series containing internal punctuation: "There are several Waffle Houses in Atlanta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Gainesville, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama."
• From Grammar Monster's English Grammar Lessons: "Items in lists are usually separated with commas (as in the first example below). However, if the list items themselves contain commas, then semicolons can be used as separators."
  Interestingly enough, this article does discuss "promoting" commas to semicolons, but indicates clearly that the commas being promoted are the ones in between the list items and not the ones inside the list items themselves.
• Grammar Girl's blog: "I don't want to confuse you, but there is one situation where you use semicolons with coordinating conjunctions, and that's when you are writing a list of items and commas just don't do the job of separating them all. Here's an example: 'This week's book winners are Herbie in Milligan College, Tennessee; Matt in Irvine, California; and Jan in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.' Those are the real winners in this week's special Scott Sigler book giveaway, and they've each won a copy of his novel Earthcore, but the list also provides a great example of using semicolons in a list. Because each item in the list requires a comma to separate the city from the state, you have to use a semicolon to separate the items themselves."
• How to use the semicolon properly: "When you have a series of three or more items that normally would be separated by commas except that each individual item already has a comma in it, you use the semicolon between items."
• The University Writing Center at UCF: "Semicolons also separate elements of a list, if those elements contain internal commas. Semicolons replace commas in a list if using commas would make the list more ambiguous."
• And finally, this terse guide from LEO at St. Cloud State University.

So since you're hiding behind Anonymous Coward, either (a) you're not really an English Major, or (b) you are one, but apparently lack the conviction of certitude in your answer to sign your "name" to it. And that list I gave above isn't even comprehensive, it's just what I managed to find after a few minutes of searching with Google. I will, however, point out that at least two of the citations I gave are from respected educational institutions.

You, on the other hand, indirectly claim to be an authority when it's not at all clear whether you're truly an expert or not.

Your logical fallacy? Laziness, I guess. Or general failure to read the article.....

Er, no, you missed the GP's point. He referred to argumentum ad ignorantiam , one of the classic logical fallacies: Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence (or feasibility).

In this case, it applies because the test has a one-sided bias... If someone accepted the challenge and succeeded, it would of course prove the viability of recovering a wiped drive. IF, however (as has happened), no one succeeds at the challenge... That doesn't prove the task as impossible.

That's a logical fallacy: affirmation of the consequent. He could get flamed for many reasons, so we can't conclusively say that his posts are flamebait because they drew flames.

But we can say that it is very VERY likely ...

I appreciate your comment, it doesn't contain any of those obnoxious well-reasoned "intellectual arguments" but resorts directly to ad-hominem and poisoning-the-well.

I, for one, am convinced you are right because you say others are dumb. Brilliant.