You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover...
Sooo...I guess he must think that the US military would normally keep an Apache helicopter on-station orbiting the area for hours to take gun-camera footage of the entire aftermath including the eventual transport of injured civilian children long after the initial events took place?
Does anyone think they just keep an infinite supply of multi-million dollar attack helicopters and their crews in the air just to record a cleanup operation and casualty transport? Does anyone think they would have had an Apache outside the kids' hospital room windows to record the medical treatment too?
I mean, after all, it's not like those Apache helicopters had anything better to do, and they should have known some/. poster in the future would insist they keep valuable & limited military assets engaged in effectively making a documentary instead of...oh, I don't know...supporting US troops under attack elsewhere, maybe.
Strat
Dude, you missed the point. Apache helicopters or trigger-happy marines are totally not needed in order to report that the Glorious Army of America has saved yet another child - a photo camera and a short press release cleared by the division G2 or G5 office would have been totally sufficient -- if there would have been anything to report, that is...
But, the basic facts remain - the Apache took out a unit that had fired on American troops.
So where's the evidence that the journalists - or even the people accompanying them - have fired on American troops? (Video evidence, preferably. DoD officials have been known to invent "facts".)
BTW - both kids were taken to hospital and treated. I never did hear how badly they were hurt, or how well they are doing now - funny that the media doesn't cover stuff like that, huh? Stories about rescued children recovering in a US military hospital aren't very sensational.
You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover and that they would publicise the murder of children by American troops. Hint: War propaganda does not work the way you think.
As soon as it can be proven that a car can drive better than a person when the person is trying their best to drive safely, cars will be favoured, since we know people sometimes deliberately drive wrecklessly.
The problem is not with the people who actually try to drive wrecklessly -- it is with the rest of them, the ones who drive recklessly....
I don't think that this can be empirically substantiated. Germany's Red Army Faction, for instance, contained no engineers at all that I know of. Nevertheless they succeeded in numerous highly technically sophisticated attacks
They may not have had formally trained engineers among themselves, but on the other hand, several of their members received paramilitary training from their WP overlords, in order to make them better useful idiots.
Huh? Do you have references for that? I've never heard of any WP involvement; the RAF got most of their weapons expertise from the Palestinian PFLP and PLO...
Anyway, that is irrelevant to GP's point: He states that non-engineers are too stupid to learn how to build a bomb. I provided counter-examples which quite obviously disprove that. For this issue, it is a moot point to question who they learned it from...
It could not have anything to do with population density, could it?
No. Look up the population density of Sweden and Finland (hint:lower), and look up their carbon emissions per capita. If anything, the causality runs the other way: underpriced petrol encourages low-density suburban sprawl.
Maybe a little mechanical or chemical aptitude is the reason. A bomber with an engineering degree might have the skills necessary to build a bomb and not blow themselves up in the process, whereas a non-engineer bomber might either fail to build a bomb or wind up blowing themselves to kingdom come.
Just look at Faisal Shazad, the guy from Connecticut who tried to blow up Times Square. He tried to build his bomb with a toy clock and M80 firecrackers. He had a business degree.
I don't think that this can be empirically substantiated. Germany's Red Army Faction, for instance, contained no engineers at all that I know of. Nevertheless they succeeded in numerous highly technically sophisticated attacks.
Also, the study that came to the conclusion that engineers are unusually prone to be terrorists was done during 2005-2007. This has biased the sample towards middle-eastern terrorists, where humanities and social studies are far less desirable degrees than engineering degrees due to the socio-economic background of these countries. I don't think they would get the same results if they would look at the European ETA, IRA or RAF (which have been dormant recently).
Unlike most of Europe where citizens 18-20 have to go into the army or other duty for two years
I call bullshit. Please enumerate this list that encompasses "most of Europe" that has such a requirement.
Not most, but about half, not all citizens, but only men, not for two years but only 6 to 12 months. However, the list includes: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Greece, Denmark and Serbia
Fans... in a 486? Don't think so - most of the 486s (and a substantial number of early pentiums) I saw were passively cooled. I think the first HS+Fan combo I saw was on a P120 back in the day.
The early original 486s (50/66/75MHz) ran passively without any problems, but the later i486DX4:100 and AMD 5x86:133 models needed the fans if I remember correctly (especially if you overclocked them, as everyone did)...
Yes, pretty much every other US college has a pledge or policy like that (including the one I studied at). It is rarely or never properly enforced and not adhered to by students. (A cheater knows that what he's doing is wrong, pledge or no pledge.) If anything, it hinders punishment of cheaters -- when faced with the harsh decision to suspend/expel the cheater, ruin their lives and lose $10,000s in tuition money, the university usually decides to ignore the issue instead. (Proper solution IMO: F for the course, marked in the transcript as caused by "cheating".)
Is ANYTHING today manufactured someplace where child labor is UNCOMMON?
Anything where consistent quality matters. Microprocessors are made in the US, Western Europe, Israel or Taiwan. Cars and their components are still predominantly made in Europe, Japan, Korea or the US. Passenger planes - US, Europe, Brazil. Etc etc.
I'm sorry, you don't get to call me intellectually lazy when I was asking someone to cite a study. When someone says "studies show..." they might as well be saying nothing.
I'm not sorry. It takes less effort to put "grade inflation" into google than asking someone for citations of common knowledge. Anyone who brags about maybe not having gone to Hogwarts ought to know that.
(No bad feelings. But don't bullshit me, ivy pretensions or not.)
Wrong. Tech schools are just as bad or worse as the rest in terms of grade inflation. MIT and Georgia Tech are above the trend (CalTech is not listed).
Not because I say so, because of the arguments I laid forth in my reply.
I wonder what percentage of administrators, professors and students at other universities also speak of grade inflation. Maybe less, maybe more, but I don't see why Harvard is getting singled out. You say "various studies have demonstrated this to be true." What studies?
Don't be intellectually lazy. If you just google the term, you might find the Wiki page chock full of references -- for the ADHD crowd, here's a page with lots of easy-to-understand charts
The conclusion: Grade inflation is massive, even if you try to adjust for purported quality increases by using SAT results. It happened across all private schools (with the notable exception of Princeton, who put in some radical measures to curb it in 2004) as well as most public schools. Harvard is not exceptional.
No, the UN was conceived as a forum for international diplomacy, to foster international cooperation. Its first act was to pledge each member to continue the war (the second world one) until complete victory had been achieved.
International aid is scope creep.
No it was not, and is not. One of the main goals of the UN stated in the 1945 preamble of the UN charter reads:"Determined... to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, AND FOR THESE ENDS... to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples"
So it is clear that international aid was one of the four main goals from the get-go, together with diplomacy, peacekeeping and a forum for international justice/arbitration.
Don't new TV's basically have "AppleTV" built in? Newer Sony TVs (and I imagine other brands) can stream from computer (DNLA), stream from Internet (including netflix, with Hulu joining next month), can play pictures/movies from USB storage... what else does AppleTV do?
Link with your iTunes account for a seamless movie buying^Wrenting experience. Link with Mac and iTunes for photo album and music album playback. Have a pretty UI. Provide a monoculture with a large enough installed base for snazzy apps to be developed.
Now I don't like the piece of bloat that is iTunes/iTMS and thus won't purchase any product that requires it -- but there are tens of millions of people who do (and tens of millions more who won't even know what iTunes is, but would love an easy-to-use old-people friendly movie rental machine).
(I'd rather reply to this than spend my mod points.)
Yes, long-haul commercial pilots are well paid. The problem is getting one of those jobs. There's a huge over supply of pilots. I'm a pilot myself and I'm very glad I never tried to make a living out of it.
Once you are in the company, your position is based not on skill or ability or how hard you work. It's based entirely on how senior you are. That in turn decides how much you get paid. Typically you start off in the right seat of turbo-prop commuters getting paid almost nothing. In fact, "self-sponsored" positions aren't unheard of. If you manage to stay with one company long enough that you're no longer part of the "last in, first out" cuts, then your job is safe but your salary still isn't that great. It's only when you start edging towards retirement that the pay starts to reflect the amount of training and seat-time you've put in while earning peanuts. If your company goes bankrupt or you switch companies, you may find yourself at the bottom again.
I still find GP's average pay figures of $30k unplausible... The $150k+ that I quoted is the average for BA pilots, short-haul/long-haul, junior and senior. Even a lot of cabin crew earn more than $30k.
High end Anyjobs make a lot of money. You're forgetting the 99.99% of all the others that make crap. You're statement is a bit like saying McDonalds employee's make crap tons of money because their exec's are some of the highest payed in the restaurant field
Huh? GP started talking about pilots, not me. Of course, the McJobs of the airline industry -- loaders, screeners etc -- don't make a lot of money either. But then, we weren't talking about McJobs, but dream jobs.
Airline pilot? You start @ $15,000/yr to average $30,000/yr. There was a plane crash where everyone had died. it happened somewhat recently of your typical airline and someone found out that the pilot and 1st officer were the poorest people on the plane. People on welfare made more then they had.
[citation needed]. Long-haul commercial pilot are some of the best-paid jobs around in the transportation sector (around 80k-120k pounds on average at Virgin and BA, that's $150k+), especially given the additional perks and the massive amount of days off. Even short haul pilots at cheapo airlines earn 50k pounds in the UK.
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.
The difference: compared to helium, even oil is a renewable resource. Oil can be made reasonably cheaply (maybe $200/bbl) from air, water and sunshine, as any rapeseed or olive farmer could demonstrate. Copper is not "used up", it's merely dug up in one place and buried somewhere else in form of cables. Helium is different: once the cheap stuff from rock fissures is gone, it can never be retrieved again. Then you can only create it by super-expensive fusion processes, which makes it 4, 5 or even 10 orders of magnitude more expensive...
The PC isn't dead yet despite the pronouncement of iPad fanboys. Days may be numbered for PC gaming though.
Not dead yet either... Starcraft II already sold 2 million times. (So will Diablo 3, in all likelyhood.) I guess given the appeal of cheap "just works" consoles, the high-piracy PC market will not be a desirable market for the major producers of simple mass market games anymore (jump'n'runs, arcade, sports, GTA-style sandbox games), but there is still a big category of games where console inputs are unsatisfactory (RTS, complex RPGs, WoW style MMORPG, city/empire-building games). And even a $500m niche out of the $20bn gaming industry is nothing to sneeze at...
Yes, because there was no violence before guns.....*rolls eyes*
People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.
Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.
That may be true, but such crime is both less deadly and much easier to police and prosecute. Where guns are not available cheaply and abundantly for civilians, the force monopoly of the police can be maintained more effectively: In the UK, it is rarely (if ever) necessary for SWAT teams to use automatic weapons and paramilitary tactics for arrests. Most policemen do not even need a gun, and even the London CO19 firearms backup teams usually just use pistols and tasers, and only get handed MP5s or rifles in very exceptional cases. Now compare that to the gear of a typical LAPD or NYPD SWAT team...
What do we call the "He's right, therefore I like him" effect? If you've been right in the past, you're more likely to be right in the future. It's not exactly a bias to give them the benefit of a doubt in such cases.
If you mean what I think you mean, that simply Bayesian updating, a quite rational inference technique.
It works the other way too. I hate Rush Limbaugh. I also don't believe anything he says. That's not a bias, I don't disbelieve him because I hate him. I both hate and disbelieve him because he is frequently and verifiable untruthful.
That's very rational -- but it turns irrational when you apply it to third parties and think like this: Rush Limbaugh dislikes Kim Jong Il, I hate Rush, therefore I'm positively predisposed to Kim. This kind of thinking can lead to real problems - since the enemy of my enemy is not always my friends...
"Unfortunately, the details are really sparse. Wikipedia notes that it holds the Austrian patent AM 7738/2003, but navigating the Austrian patent website didn't work very well (um... language barrier...). The only source cited by Wikipedia is a speech from a few years ago, which mentions in passing that a woman's church the town had patented it."
Any Austrian patent experts here that can verify this claim? I call BS.
IANAPE, but I took the time to navigate through the database search. The Austrian patent office issues not just patents, but also design patterns and trademarks -- this one probably is the latter. However, I actually didn't find the above patent number in any of the categories...
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover...
Sooo...I guess he must think that the US military would normally keep an Apache helicopter on-station orbiting the area for hours to take gun-camera footage of the entire aftermath including the eventual transport of injured civilian children long after the initial events took place?
Does anyone think they just keep an infinite supply of multi-million dollar attack helicopters and their crews in the air just to record a cleanup operation and casualty transport? Does anyone think they would have had an Apache outside the kids' hospital room windows to record the medical treatment too?
I mean, after all, it's not like those Apache helicopters had anything better to do, and they should have known some /. poster in the future would insist they keep valuable & limited military assets engaged in effectively making a documentary instead of...oh, I don't know...supporting US troops under attack elsewhere, maybe.
Strat
Dude, you missed the point. Apache helicopters or trigger-happy marines are totally not needed in order to report that the Glorious Army of America has saved yet another child - a photo camera and a short press release cleared by the division G2 or G5 office would have been totally sufficient -- if there would have been anything to report, that is...
But, the basic facts remain - the Apache took out a unit that had fired on American troops.
So where's the evidence that the journalists - or even the people accompanying them - have fired on American troops? (Video evidence, preferably. DoD officials have been known to invent "facts".)
BTW - both kids were taken to hospital and treated. I never did hear how badly they were hurt, or how well they are doing now - funny that the media doesn't cover stuff like that, huh? Stories about rescued children recovering in a US military hospital aren't very sensational.
You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover and that they would publicise the murder of children by American troops. Hint: War propaganda does not work the way you think.
As soon as it can be proven that a car can drive better than a person when the person is trying their best to drive safely, cars will be favoured, since we know people sometimes deliberately drive wrecklessly.
The problem is not with the people who actually try to drive wrecklessly -- it is with the rest of them, the ones who drive recklessly....
I don't think that this can be empirically substantiated. Germany's Red Army Faction, for instance, contained no engineers at all that I know of. Nevertheless they succeeded in numerous highly technically sophisticated attacks
They may not have had formally trained engineers among themselves, but on the other hand, several of their members received paramilitary training from their WP overlords, in order to make them better useful idiots.
Huh? Do you have references for that? I've never heard of any WP involvement; the RAF got most of their weapons expertise from the Palestinian PFLP and PLO...
Anyway, that is irrelevant to GP's point: He states that non-engineers are too stupid to learn how to build a bomb. I provided counter-examples which quite obviously disprove that. For this issue, it is a moot point to question who they learned it from...
It could not have anything to do with population density, could it?
No. Look up the population density of Sweden and Finland (hint:lower), and look up their carbon emissions per capita. If anything, the causality runs the other way: underpriced petrol encourages low-density suburban sprawl.
Maybe a little mechanical or chemical aptitude is the reason. A bomber with an engineering degree might have the skills necessary to build a bomb and not blow themselves up in the process, whereas a non-engineer bomber might either fail to build a bomb or wind up blowing themselves to kingdom come.
Just look at Faisal Shazad, the guy from Connecticut who tried to blow up Times Square. He tried to build his bomb with a toy clock and M80 firecrackers. He had a business degree.
I don't think that this can be empirically substantiated. Germany's Red Army Faction, for instance, contained no engineers at all that I know of. Nevertheless they succeeded in numerous highly technically sophisticated attacks.
Also, the study that came to the conclusion that engineers are unusually prone to be terrorists was done during 2005-2007. This has biased the sample towards middle-eastern terrorists, where humanities and social studies are far less desirable degrees than engineering degrees due to the socio-economic background of these countries. I don't think they would get the same results if they would look at the European ETA, IRA or RAF (which have been dormant recently).
Unlike most of Europe where citizens 18-20 have to go into the army or other duty for two years
I call bullshit. Please enumerate this list that encompasses "most of Europe" that has such a requirement.
Not most, but about half, not all citizens, but only men, not for two years but only 6 to 12 months. However, the list includes: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Greece, Denmark and Serbia
Fans... in a 486? Don't think so - most of the 486s (and a substantial number of early pentiums) I saw were passively cooled. I think the first HS+Fan combo I saw was on a P120 back in the day.
The early original 486s (50/66/75MHz) ran passively without any problems, but the later i486DX4:100 and AMD 5x86:133 models needed the fans if I remember correctly (especially if you overclocked them, as everyone did)...
I'm late to this party, but: http://honorcode.stanford.edu/
Yes, pretty much every other US college has a pledge or policy like that (including the one I studied at). It is rarely or never properly enforced and not adhered to by students. (A cheater knows that what he's doing is wrong, pledge or no pledge.) If anything, it hinders punishment of cheaters -- when faced with the harsh decision to suspend/expel the cheater, ruin their lives and lose $10,000s in tuition money, the university usually decides to ignore the issue instead. (Proper solution IMO: F for the course, marked in the transcript as caused by "cheating".)
Is ANYTHING today manufactured someplace where child labor is UNCOMMON?
Anything where consistent quality matters. Microprocessors are made in the US, Western Europe, Israel or Taiwan. Cars and their components are still predominantly made in Europe, Japan, Korea or the US. Passenger planes - US, Europe, Brazil. Etc etc.
I'm sorry, you don't get to call me intellectually lazy when I was asking someone to cite a study. When someone says "studies show..." they might as well be saying nothing.
I'm not sorry. It takes less effort to put "grade inflation" into google than asking someone for citations of common knowledge. Anyone who brags about maybe not having gone to Hogwarts ought to know that.
(No bad feelings. But don't bullshit me, ivy pretensions or not.)
Wrong. Tech schools are just as bad or worse as the rest in terms of grade inflation. MIT and Georgia Tech are above the trend (CalTech is not listed).
Not because I say so, because of the arguments I laid forth in my reply.
I wonder what percentage of administrators, professors and students at other universities also speak of grade inflation. Maybe less, maybe more, but I don't see why Harvard is getting singled out. You say "various studies have demonstrated this to be true." What studies?
Don't be intellectually lazy. If you just google the term, you might find the Wiki page chock full of references -- for the ADHD crowd, here's a page with lots of easy-to-understand charts
The conclusion: Grade inflation is massive, even if you try to adjust for purported quality increases by using SAT results. It happened across all private schools (with the notable exception of Princeton, who put in some radical measures to curb it in 2004) as well as most public schools. Harvard is not exceptional.
No, the UN was conceived as a forum for international diplomacy, to foster international cooperation. Its first act was to pledge each member to continue the war (the second world one) until complete victory had been achieved.
International aid is scope creep.
No it was not, and is not. One of the main goals of the UN stated in the 1945 preamble of the UN charter reads :"Determined ... to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, AND FOR THESE ENDS ... to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples"
So it is clear that international aid was one of the four main goals from the get-go, together with diplomacy, peacekeeping and a forum for international justice/arbitration.
Don't new TV's basically have "AppleTV" built in? Newer Sony TVs (and I imagine other brands) can stream from computer (DNLA), stream from Internet (including netflix, with Hulu joining next month), can play pictures/movies from USB storage... what else does AppleTV do?
Link with your iTunes account for a seamless movie buying^Wrenting experience. Link with Mac and iTunes for photo album and music album playback. Have a pretty UI. Provide a monoculture with a large enough installed base for snazzy apps to be developed.
Now I don't like the piece of bloat that is iTunes/iTMS and thus won't purchase any product that requires it -- but there are tens of millions of people who do (and tens of millions more who won't even know what iTunes is, but would love an easy-to-use old-people friendly movie rental machine).
(I'd rather reply to this than spend my mod points.)
Yes, long-haul commercial pilots are well paid. The problem is getting one of those jobs. There's a huge over supply of pilots. I'm a pilot myself and I'm very glad I never tried to make a living out of it.
Once you are in the company, your position is based not on skill or ability or how hard you work. It's based entirely on how senior you are. That in turn decides how much you get paid. Typically you start off in the right seat of turbo-prop commuters getting paid almost nothing. In fact, "self-sponsored" positions aren't unheard of. If you manage to stay with one company long enough that you're no longer part of the "last in, first out" cuts, then your job is safe but your salary still isn't that great. It's only when you start edging towards retirement that the pay starts to reflect the amount of training and seat-time you've put in while earning peanuts. If your company goes bankrupt or you switch companies, you may find yourself at the bottom again.
I still find GP's average pay figures of $30k unplausible... The $150k+ that I quoted is the average for BA pilots, short-haul/long-haul, junior and senior. Even a lot of cabin crew earn more than $30k.
High end Anyjobs make a lot of money. You're forgetting the 99.99% of all the others that make crap. You're statement is a bit like saying McDonalds employee's make crap tons of money because their exec's are some of the highest payed in the restaurant field
Huh? GP started talking about pilots, not me. Of course, the McJobs of the airline industry -- loaders, screeners etc -- don't make a lot of money either. But then, we weren't talking about McJobs, but dream jobs.
Airline pilot? You start @ $15,000/yr to average $30,000/yr. There was a plane crash where everyone had died. it happened somewhat recently of your typical airline and someone found out that the pilot and 1st officer were the poorest people on the plane. People on welfare made more then they had.
[citation needed]. Long-haul commercial pilot are some of the best-paid jobs around in the transportation sector (around 80k-120k pounds on average at Virgin and BA, that's $150k+), especially given the additional perks and the massive amount of days off. Even short haul pilots at cheapo airlines earn 50k pounds in the UK.
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.
The difference: compared to helium, even oil is a renewable resource. Oil can be made reasonably cheaply (maybe $200/bbl) from air, water and sunshine, as any rapeseed or olive farmer could demonstrate. Copper is not "used up", it's merely dug up in one place and buried somewhere else in form of cables. Helium is different: once the cheap stuff from rock fissures is gone, it can never be retrieved again. Then you can only create it by super-expensive fusion processes, which makes it 4, 5 or even 10 orders of magnitude more expensive...
The PC isn't dead yet despite the pronouncement of iPad fanboys. Days may be numbered for PC gaming though.
Not dead yet either... Starcraft II already sold 2 million times. (So will Diablo 3, in all likelyhood.) I guess given the appeal of cheap "just works" consoles, the high-piracy PC market will not be a desirable market for the major producers of simple mass market games anymore (jump'n'runs, arcade, sports, GTA-style sandbox games), but there is still a big category of games where console inputs are unsatisfactory (RTS, complex RPGs, WoW style MMORPG, city/empire-building games). And even a $500m niche out of the $20bn gaming industry is nothing to sneeze at...
Yes, because there was no violence before guns.....*rolls eyes*
People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.
Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.
That may be true, but such crime is both less deadly and much easier to police and prosecute. Where guns are not available cheaply and abundantly for civilians, the force monopoly of the police can be maintained more effectively: In the UK, it is rarely (if ever) necessary for SWAT teams to use automatic weapons and paramilitary tactics for arrests. Most policemen do not even need a gun, and even the London CO19 firearms backup teams usually just use pistols and tasers, and only get handed MP5s or rifles in very exceptional cases. Now compare that to the gear of a typical LAPD or NYPD SWAT team...
What do we call the "He's right, therefore I like him" effect? If you've been right in the past, you're more likely to be right in the future. It's not exactly a bias to give them the benefit of a doubt in such cases.
If you mean what I think you mean, that simply Bayesian updating, a quite rational inference technique.
It works the other way too. I hate Rush Limbaugh. I also don't believe anything he says. That's not a bias, I don't disbelieve him because I hate him. I both hate and disbelieve him because he is frequently and verifiable untruthful.
That's very rational -- but it turns irrational when you apply it to third parties and think like this: Rush Limbaugh dislikes Kim Jong Il, I hate Rush, therefore I'm positively predisposed to Kim. This kind of thinking can lead to real problems - since the enemy of my enemy is not always my friends...
We need to invent a pithy expression for this sort of "I like him therefore he is right" reasoning. How about "volo hoc ergo propter hoc"?
It's not just rhetorical, it's a cognitive bias. And there's already a name for it and plenty of research on it: see "Halo Effect".
And the rest of the article goes on to say:
"Unfortunately, the details are really sparse. Wikipedia notes that it holds the Austrian patent AM 7738/2003, but navigating the Austrian patent website didn't work very well (um... language barrier...). The only source cited by Wikipedia is a speech from a few years ago, which mentions in passing that a woman's church the town had patented it."
Any Austrian patent experts here that can verify this claim? I call BS.
IANAPE, but I took the time to navigate through the database search. The Austrian patent office issues not just patents, but also design patterns and trademarks -- this one probably is the latter. However, I actually didn't find the above patent number in any of the categories...
the iphone lasts %20 to %50 longer. thats only cause the battery is twice as big.
Yes, that's what I said.