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The ad is simply brilliant. I never thought I'd see Microsoft looking out for my best interests.

Poe's Law

Engineers are on the application side of things....they use the existing tools (equations) to build other things. They don't need to know exactly how the tools work as long as they can be trusted to work.

This presumption is probably what has created the Salem Effect, whereby it's been observed that a lot of engineers are creationists.

An understanding of pure science will tend to inform and contextualize such beliefs, while a focus on mere "operative" technology seems to encourage engineering types to either oversimplify or overgeneralize complex ideas, and to pontificate way above their weight class on subjects to which they cannot speak with authority.

This also seems to underly a lot of very, very smart engineers (who should no better) claiming that such-and-such a problem in neurology, evolutionary genetics, or philosophy of the mind is simply a problem of applied $ENGINEERS_DISCIPLINE. (For this, see Ray Kurzweil, an engineer who specializes in pattern recognition, and now sells books about how human consciousness is nothing more than pattern recognition.)

What a complete Gish Gallop. Here are some quick answers:

Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software? Actually, some will. But, where there is too little benefit, some business rightfully won't .

What happened to that money they saved? Maybe it was: (1) reinvested (2) paid out as dividends (3) passed on to their customers via a reduced selling price.

Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems? Without a cost-benefit analysis for the system in question, the answer is: not necessarily.

Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? (1) Moon rockets. (2) Nukes. (3) Solid gold toilet seats. (4) Led Zeppelin's music rights.

Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded! WTF? Who does both?

Now the crux: who are you trying to drum up business for?

What did you expect, coherent reasoning from people engaged in moral panic?

Probably read Joseph Smith's book on marketing and rube finding.

Not insane, just mindful of the consequences.

Political repression is worse than any other country in the world. People often spy on each other for the slightest signs of disloyalty, and the government not only punishes offenders, but also punishes three generations of their families in order to purge their tainted blood.

Basically, if you screw up, they take you, your family, your relatives, etc.

Yes, they're saying they don't read your personal e-mails. They're also saying they do read your e-mails they deem not personal (as per Wired article linked in one of comments in that thread), allow, not deny, themselves the right to read your e-mails in their privacy policy and they do collect a lot of information on you from other sources.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Straw_man

And Microsoft isn't doing the same?

I'm all for informing people on what information they give to companies, and how those companies will use it. But at least don't be hypocritical about it.
Also, a huge part of the world doesn't care, as is obvious by their Facebook and Twitter activity.

They're not doing the same. Half the +5 posts on this story are invoking the Fallacy of Grey to defend Google's anti-privacy record.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3515705&cid=43077953

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

Microsoft doesn't do personalized ads based on email contents.

No, but online ad personalization isn't the main problem people are complaining about. The main problem people are complaining about is that companies collect vast amounts of personal data, and Microsoft certainly does that. In fact, Microsoft routinely collects even more information about even operations on your computer that appear to be completely local.

See http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Straw_man

Microsoft doesn't do personalized ads based on email contents.

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-compares-outlookcom-to-gmail-and-yahoo-mail-releases-new-video

Thanks for engaging in the Fallacy of Grey to deflect criticism of your favorite company, Mr. Google Shilll.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

Thanks for the pointer to Eric S Raymond. I only knew of his from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I had no idea he was a right wing nut, global warming and HIV denier, Bush jr supporter, islamophobic war-monger, homophobic, racist troll.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Him and Stallman, what a pair! By comparison Torvalds looks quite tame and reasonable.

The Pastafarian holiday International Talk Like a Pirate day: 19 September, to not do so would be religious discrimination.

So what is your excuse for ignorance if not youth?

Development of flagella has been gone over again and again, it is basic evolution re-using existing structures and processes to build cellular structures:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flagellum

And further, abiogenesis, what you seem to call OOL, has nothing to do with evolution and natural selection.

And then some lame appeal to philosophers, not biologists or scientists, making arguments from ignorance. For a reasonable refutation of the first work of dreck, see what an actual biologist has to say about it:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false

Please. You're not going anywhere.

It fails their own stated goals of making a just world â"â" "climate justice" â"â"when a shack in Kenya that's supposed to store medicines and have a bed for the sick, has to choose between either keeping the fridge on, or the fan and lights, because the solar panel they have can't do both. And that's "climate justice" ????

No, that's a slippery slope leading to an imaginary dilemma, in service of your balance fallacy.

That's actually a rather strange scenario for you to create, since solar power is bringing energy to areas of Kenya traditional power doesn't or won't go.

Is it a reference to this? Are they having problems with their equipment? If so, it is rather obnoxious of you to call their hospital a "shack".

Or, is the scenario made-up, but still plausible? So where in Kenya are diesel generators illegal?

Basically, what I'm asking is, is there some reason for us to not believe you are completely full of shit?

It fails their own stated goals of making a just world â"â" "climate justice" â"â"when a shack in Kenya that's supposed to store medicines and have a bed for the sick, has to choose between either keeping the fridge on, or the fan and lights, because the solar panel they have can't do both. And that's "climate justice" ????

No, that's a slippery slope leading to an imaginary dilemma, in service of your balance fallacy.

That's actually a rather strange scenario for you to create, since solar power is bringing energy to areas of Kenya traditional power doesn't or won't go.

Is it a reference to this? Are they having problems with their equipment? If so, it is rather obnoxious of you to call their hospital a "shack".

Or, is the scenario made-up, but still plausible? So where in Kenya are diesel generators illegal?

Basically, what I'm asking is, is there some reason for us to not believe you are completely full of shit?

in a Libertarian-run country all the other things would not be equal

Ok, then - name the libertarian-run country either past or present you want to use for comparison. Otherwise, any example I provide you will answer with "well, they aren't libertarians" a.k.a. No True Scotsman.

The years leading up to 1929 wasn't a libertarian paradise like you claim

1929 was hardly the first time people fell victim to bank runs: They were a common feature of the banking panics that occurred approximately every 15 years up until then. The first US banking crisis (complete with bank runs) was in 1796, so unless Washington administration had introduced some sort of heavy-handed regulation that caused bank runs, it's safe to say that there was a cause other than federal regulation.

There can still be runs on banks, and they will still run out of reserves before every depositor is paid.

The key difference is that with deposit insurance, the depositors didn't lose their life savings.

And since we haven't discovered how the neuron depends on quantum mechanics to work (like how we've discovered how chloroplasts do just this past year), we need more physics too.

By the time we invent AI that actually works, it won't be artificial anymore.

Neurons and quantum mechanics? Bullshit... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness

That's just doing the same thing at a finer level of resolution. Why stop at individual studies or papers when we can push it to 11 and say individual sentences within a paper are scientific or unscientific? You can assume that, unless we are discussing the very smallest, most fundamental statement, that by branding something 'scientific' or 'philosophical' I mean 'essentially' or 'predominantly' scientific or philosophical. To worry over anything else, as you are now, is wasteful and neurotic.

...and no, the N-ray study was scientific, because it involved the detailed critique of evidence. Both Blondlot's presentation to Wood and Wood's disproof of Blondlot proceeded in a completely empirical manner. Your statement about fairies was no more scientific than Aristotle's arguments about gravity, because fairy theory has generated no testable hypotheses, much like Carl Sagan's garage dragon, and it is grounded in folklore rather than a maximum-parsimony explanation of the evidence, which was exactly the reason in which alchemy is distinguished from chemistry (i.e. Occam's razor does not approve.) If you replaced "fairies" with "God", you'll get something equally flawed.

So basically, you're saying this:

"There are professionals who are not 100% perfect; therefore, there are no professionals."

Which is pretty silly, really.

That's right! Everyone knows that holding bananas is the real evolutionary use of hands!

Modern cars run so completely clean compared to their ancestors that, if anything, deaths from car exhaust are probably at their historical low.

And you've been modded insightful for simply declaring a study wrong on personal incredulity.

However, I'll tackle your claim: yes, the very expensive, CA-emissions-compliant car in your driveway is a very clean car. However, it is not representative of what you will find in the major, growing cities of the world, and before you say "but the major cities of the world are like California", you'd best check your ethnocentrism at the door; a lot of developing countries, you'll find vehicles that are outside their warranty period and definitely not as emissions-compliant. Japan, for example, makes it incredibly difficult to hang on to an older car, mostly to drive their economy. The older cars get shipped off to the other asian countries, where they're not nearly as well maintained.

Further, the problem is that people and goods who used to get around by more efficient, lower-pollution means - bicycles, walking, etc. - are now getting around by cars, and probably they're by themselves in that car. The infrastructure can't handle it, so aside from their being many more tailpipes, they're all attached to cars sitting in jammed traffic. Pollution goes up from both. It doesn't matter how low-pollution a car is if it wouldn't have been there in the first place, and is now causing more pollution by virtue of contributing to congestion.

The smartest cities are forcing people out of their cars and trucks; Paris, for example, banned large trucks from the core of the city - and bike cargo delivery has taken off as a result. London has a congestion charge now, and it's been nothing but Win, with the money going towards public transit.

BTW, as to the Communist states under Stalin and Mao - they also explicitly rejected neo-Darwinian evolution and embraced (and enforced) Lysenkoism instead. The resulting crop failures when reality failed to match up to "worker's science" killed a huge fraction - possibly the majority - of the millions who died under those regimes.

Ironically, the people under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would have been better off if their leaders had accepted neo-Darwinian evolution.

Wow, Argument from incredulity on teh interwebs.

I've written rails apps that supported a very large newspaper's site, which got well over 15 MILLION pageviews per month. Never once did my apps stumble or crash.

Like anything else, you have to know what you're doing, boychik. Now go read pp 14-16 of the Pragmatic Programmer and learn a little.

A bit off topic, but on the point of evidence showing that Jesus was a historical person... There is reason to believe he is a historical person, even if there is a lot of evidence to discount the stories about him.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_historical_existence_of_Jesus_Christ

Link

These wingnuts are just looking for a reason to convince themselves that they are relevant to the darkside in an attempt to cut funding even more for NASA and other programs.

They will likely never be re-elected.

There are 4:

"If it could be shown that mutations do not occur."
"If it could be shown that, although mutations do occur, they are not passed down through the generations."
"If it could be shown that, although mutations are passed down, no mutation could produce the sort of phenotypic changes that drive natural selection."
"If it could be shown that selection or environmental pressures do not favor the reproductive success of better adapted individuals."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Disproving_evolution

I was under the impression that the manufacturing processes to make the power plant / batteries for *POPULAR BRAND OF HYBRID VEHICLE* released the equivalent quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere as would be saved by the reduced CO2 released by the hybrid drive over it's serviceable life.

That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.

There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.

The net being a loss to society, as the process for making the batteries released toxic elements not used in making regular combustion engine cars.

Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedly debunked in peer-reviewed literature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.

... subtle satire is indistinguishable real world politics.

There is actually a law similar to this [1], and the modern GOP is comprised of a good chunk of various extremists (authoritarian, fundamentalist, libertarian) and their corporate enablers.

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

That's why I included the bit about fluoridation, to try to make it clear it was in fact satire.

Also, Poe's Law.

So Apple may be parodying an IP troll? That would explain a lot, actually.

Poe's Law. Distinguishing sarcasm from genuine fanboi-ism is potentially beyond AI-hard.

Nuremburg Defense

I'd go for Patriot Bible University

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Patriot_Bible_University

Their staffing costs are low, with them employing about as many people as the average hotdog stand, and they make it very easy to obtain qualifications that'll sometimes not be laughed at. Come to think of it, just slip the hotdog guy a ten and ask him to write "BA in Jesus Studies" on a napkin. Take that to a real university and see if they'll accept you on a masters program. Probably not, but it'll have been cheaper than Patriot Bible, and you'll get a hotdog while you're buying your worthless qualification.

Its Zuckerberg's handle is "moot."

I know 4chan is not my personal army and all that, but it seems to me that accusing moot of being a Zuckerberg is a bit below the belt. I hereby call for vengeance :-) Hell, 4chan has probably produced far more of social value than Facebook.

This smiley brought to you by "occasionally having a reputation for joking is not enough to overcome Poe's law"

I'm discovering that Poe's Law is applicable to faux stupidity as sarcasm, too. Or, frankly, any form of humorous or sarcastic parody.

However, "troll" is perfect valid substitute for "too stupid to post to slashdot". Sorry, Jane, I know you're just a victim of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to climate change but given your history of being a crank, it's just not worth anyone's time to argue with your insanity any more.

You can put a thousand compromised devices on a network I've setup. Not a one of them will go undetected once activated.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect There is only 1 law of network security: there is no such thing.

Speaking as a professional SQL Developer with OVER TWENTY YEARS of experience, an RDBMS is not the answer to every problem. Sometimes NoSQL makes sense.

For example, if I'm dumping some random user data that will never be formatted/standardized/normalized—that can be different domains for every user—NoSQL might be the right choice.

Maybe I want to store a user's favorite object (puppy, car, toy, steak 'doneness') and I don't want to have a child-table-from-hell lookup table. NoSQL is a great option.

On the other hand, if I want to do some sort of row lookback, then it is far easier in a relational DB. For example, if I want to find the salary average and of all of people in the same department as the most recent new hire or the average working 'lifespan' (how long before the person quits, gets fired or dies) of every department vs. their salary range*, then it is pretty easy.

Now get off my lawn.

* Yes, real-world examples.

I'm not saying it can't be true just because a paranoid crackpot believes it, but check all the cited sources, and don't trust any statements that aren't backed up with verifiable evidence.

... style over substance.

Actually, Chicago is way down the list in murder and homicide numbers, and posting only a third of the number 1.

But then again, I don't expect facts to make any difference to your closed, bigoted little mind.

(Or have I fallen for Poe's Law?)

I believe that is whats known as "parody".

But can you ever really be sure?

Why don't you ever try to quote your arguments, or paraphrase the gist of them? Why do you just place cryptic links full of wordspam agreeing with your world-veiw? Here's a link to a concept I think you're using here. Argumentum ad tl:dr basically means you're burying your opponent in reams of text that could meaningfully be expressed in a few sentences.

An easy summary of what your link has to say is this:"I am a gay man, and therefore I speak for all gays; however, those gosh darn gay activists on the news DON'T speak for all gays, so have I proclaimed by the power vested in me by my suspicion of the evil government. When gay activism was repealing laws that criminalized homosexuality, I supported it, but now that they're trying to make NEW gosh darned laws making gay marriage legal, I don't support it because it goes against the beliefs of all these conservative Christians who have been so nice to me. In fact, "no major religious conservative has called for legal measures against homosexuals.", they're just "acting defensively, in working to overturn gay rights legislation that attacked their most deeply held beliefs.""

And my reply to that argument is: "Riiiiiight... Totally only defensively, and your deeply held religious beliefs TOTALLY have more importance than my life and my freedom

You're an engineer, not a scientist. See the Salem Hypothesis.

Do the obvious: beat them at their own game! A superior vision, with an educated, thoughtful and gentle guiding hand, will surely win out.

Indeed, Last Thursdayism is the only true religion. All others are false creations created by our most mischievous of Gods to sort out the unworthy among us! You must cast away all memories from before the beginning of the Universe (Last Thursday) and join the one true religion!

I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?

Wow. It's really impressive seeing someone literally invoking Last_Thursdayism in defense of "merely circumstantial evidence" argument. Usually it's the atheist side that invokes Last Thursdayism to point out how unbelievably stupid it is to dismiss an entire planet of evidence as "merely" circumstantial.

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Poe's law states that you can't really tell the difference between someone being serious and a troll.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

The thing about satire is that if you are too close to what you are satirizing, you may run afoul of Poe's Law.

What you did was true to the Nathan Poe's original version of his law.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

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BMO