Pain is never psychosomatic. Because pain is the experience. Even if it's entirely generated inside your nervous system somewhere, and not the part of your body you think it's in, it is still actual pain.
Of course, doctors still need to figure out where it is, so they can treat it.
Likewise, with this 'wifi allergy' nonsense, doctors need to step in and say 'This cannot be causing your pain. If you are getting pain based on things you cannot sense, and are, in fact, getting pain when you wrongly think those things exist but don't, we need to assume that the pain is in your head, and how can we solve that problem?'.
Of course, some of this is just a stupid scam to get disability and whatnot.
It's not just the scan of the CRT, the power supply itself can make a noise. And, of course, they do have speakers, which can obviously make noises. (Beyond the noises they are supposed to be making.)
In fact, if you actually place people in silent rooms and flip devices on and off, almost all people can hear quite a lot of electrical equipment operating. The high pitched transformers in power supplies, the hum of a ground-mismatched speaker, the whop of an amp coming on, obviously any fans or other mechanical parts, etc. Electrical equipment can be noisy, although, yes, it's getting quieter with the removal of CRTs and higher qualities fluorescent lights.
These sounds just don't actually bother most people, and are mentally backgrounded the same way that AC is backgrounded. But we don't have to stretch to realize that some people, in fact, find them annoying.
Unlike these bogus 'wifi' people, who are 'disabled' by something that has never been demonstrated to be preceptable by human beings.
Its like people never knew how to manage mp3 files before itunes came along. How hard is it to organize the files and folders yourself? I seem to have no problems doing so. Are you keeping 100,000 files in a single folder or what?
And, what's more, there are plenty of tools help you add tags to files missing them, that let you rename MP3 files in a logical way, however you want them too. You specify the filename and path using tags, and the software checks to make sure they're all there and moves them for you. MusicBrainz has one that even can look up labels based on the music in addition to the CDDB, add tags and move them wherever you want.
The real issue I have with iTunes is that I don't use a single fucking player to listen to music. I have XMBC, I have foobar2000, I have a USB-connected MP3 player, I have a SD-card player for my car, I have a mini-SD card in my cell phone. And I occasionally try out others.
I keep all my music on a NAS. For my laptop, I've marked the music I want to take with as 'available offline', and foobar2000 does a refresh on startup...if I'm at home, I get my whole library, if not, I just get the offline stuff.
I guess iTunes is useful for people who are listening to their music in exactly two places: The computer that iTunes is installed on, and an iPod synced to that.
Oh, and the whole 'I don't have time to copy music manually to my mp3 player' just blows my mind. You don't have time...to start a file copy? Really? (I'm assuming that the copy itself takes roughly the same amount of time.)
iTune people seem to be saying they don't have time to select the music, which makes no damn sense to me. So they...have no control over the music they listen to? Or they mean they're okay with letting iTunes pick it, possibly via 'similar artist' or genre or something?
Well, I hate to burst their bubble, but most software mp3 players can do that, and even limit it to a total size, and then send the file to a 'drive', which is what normal mp3 players show up as. That's how I fill up my portable players and SD cards, using foobar2000. That isn't some amazing epic feature of iTunes.
The only feature I've ever heard of that 'syncing' with the iPod has, that other software mp3 players don't, is the ability to copy back the 'number of listens' and 'ratings' if you've set one, which most hardware mp3 players don't bother to care about.
Renting a car is silly. If the credit places can't tell them your age, they really have no business existing. But that's not any sort of legal requirement, anyway.
As for other stuff, that's why I said if you are under 21, you could ask, in addition to 'under 21', to have your birthday on the license. Or, heck, print it on there by default, and only remove it if they ask.
But that should stop being done at 21 unless specifically asked for.
Georgia DL have a sort of static looking back that's actually a bar code. I tried to find a picture but couldn't.
Someone, I don't know who, has taken a sharpie and randomly put in about 50% more of the little dots than should be there. Oops.
I have no idea what the hell that's for, I've never seen anyone try to scan it, and cops read off the number. (OTOH, I don't go to a lot of big bars or nightclubs. It's a small town, the biggest place can probably seat 50 people, and usually seats two dozen.)
Yes, they do. In fact, they need an actual photo of you. So they can confirm that you are the person on the card.
Now, what should happen is that your address shouldn't be on the driver's license at all.
The police should be able to pull that out of the DL database, and no one else has the right to know where you live. That, frankly, is an idiotic holdover from when police did not have databases, and should have gone away mid-nineties. (If someone has a legitimate need to know where you live, for example if went to a bar and skipped on on your tab...that's what small claims court is for.)
Same with age, that should not be on a license, except underaged people should have that clearly marked on their DL. Although it should just be an 'Under 18' or 'Under 21' unless they specifically want their birthday on there. Same with elderly people, who could have 'Over 55' or whatever on their license if they want.
Yeah, because Nixon was the great conservative president. What with his wage and price controls, and abolishing the gold standard. And, of course, they reelected him also.
And before that, Eisenhower, who was amazingly fiscally conservative...except for that huge interstate highway system he built. And he continued the New Deal, and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which extended benefits to millions more people. So less 'fiscally conservative' and more, you know, not.
Of course, none of those projects shoved the country into debt, because, amazingly, we actually taxed people for them.
And, at that point, the Republicans hadn't started yammering about 'lower all taxes' and 'cut all spending', so it actually wasn't hurting their integrity to vote for those people...
...which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the only integrity that the current bunch of lower-tax fools had was the first election of Reagan, who went around asserting that taxes were too high, and that people should elect him...and he was, in fact, elected.
Wait. That's not really 'integrity' at all, is it? He invents the message of lower taxes, and gets elected on it, and doesn't follow through.
That's not voter integrity, that's being fooled. To 'lose' integrity, they must have started with some, which they didn't really. There was no point where Republicans voters said 'Hey, I'm not voting for my party's nominee because he didn't keep his promises', which then changed with the reelection of Reagan.
On, the plus side, I'm constantly gaining respect for the Libertarians, who are total economic loons but at least they're loons with integrity. I don't want them in charge, but I wouldn't mind seeing them as the opposition party.
Valid point. Visiting any location in a spam email is dangerous. Also, it's extremely unlikely to help.
I was just objecting to the silly idea that spammer somehow have some sort of 'good list' and 'bad list'. Spam is not sent using finite resources off spammer's machines anymore.
Spam is sent using millions 0wned machines handed huge lists of email addresses, and the ability to send email is essentially unlimited.
They don't have any incentive to filter out bad addresses, or give 'extra' attention to 'verified' addresses. Nor do they even have a way to do that...the software on the 0wned machines is very stupid. There is not any sort of feedback loop, where they go 'Oh, look, this guy verified his address. That means he's real!'.
I have email address on the mail server that have never accepted mail. That are typos or truncations of existing email address, or are clearly some sort of dictionary word that somehow ended up as a 'real' address. Again, they have never, in their entire 'existence', accepted a single piece of email.
They get hundreds of attempts a day. Spammers. Do. Not. Care. in any manner if an email address is even 'vaguely' real, because they don't actually care what percentage of their email arrives.
It's sorta like your city is being attacked by bombers, so you stay inside to keep from attracting their attention...except that they're dropping approximately four thousand nuclear bombs per square mile. Yeah, 'hiding' is not really going to help a lot.
It's not important, I'm just a little sick of the 'never unsubscribe' nonsense I keep seeing, that somehow spammers will figure out you're real. Yeah, they really really don't care. Unsubscribe links nowadays are solely so they can lie about their compliance with CANSPAM.
The stock market isn't supposed to be a casino, it's supposed to be for long term investment.
No shit. Like I said somewhere above, I'd be happy if you were only allowed to trade stock every six months.
It's absurd to let people trade stocks in the millisecond range. That is part of a company you just sold.
It's resulted in totally irrational pricing for everything, based on the slightest whim of people, instead of any actual valuation of the company and its profit.
It results in boards paying CEOs based on the stock price and not any sort of profits or losses, which in turns results in CEOs doing anything to bounce the stock price up while they're there, like, oh, cripple the company with layoffs, or do a merger they know is stupid, or all sorts of things.
That's what CEOs are paid to do, so that the board can sell more of their stock, right?
I'm confused as to what you think companies are for. Publicly traded companies are not there to earn profits.
They are there to move the stock price up until everyone catches on the company doesn't actually do anything anymore, because it's been totally gutted by layoffs and management decisions that temporarily increase the stock price at the expense of the company.
At which point, they are purchased by another company, not because that makes any sense for either company, but because it increased the stock price of the purchasing company, and it gives the existing board of the purchased company somewhere to unload their stock.
Oddly enough, those on Slashdot who scream about the 2nd amendment, never took up their guns and killed Congress and the President when they should have. Our country was stolen from under our noses, and the 2nd amendment people were too worried about Obama and his funny name or that he might "take away their guns" to notice that the very purpose for which there even is a 2nd amendment, was pushed out in front of them, and they didn't do shit.
Indeed. If there every was the time for a massive shooting spree through Wall Street, last year was it.
Or, oh, how about the government looking American citizens up without trial or charge and insisting it has the right to do that. The real joke is, now that Obama is acting like he's going to actually create a framework for that, the right is silent.
I will repeat that for all time travellers from 1994: The Democratic President is preparing to create a legal framework to imprison people without charges. And the right seems to like it, and the left is opposed to it. Now head back to 1994 and resume yelling about how Clinton is going to use FEMA quarantine ability to create martial law.
Because, of course, the right's never had a shred of integrity about all the stuff they yell about. A Republican started imprisoning people without charges, and the left doesn't like it, so it must be okay. (As much as I loathe the Libertarians, I have to admit they actually see what's going on.)
Anyway, the delusion of fighting off the government has always been more a right-wing masturbation fantasy than actual thing that could even try happening. Apparently, all anyone needed to do was have the government be operated by 'the right', and all their objections magically vanish.
It's interesting to imagine what the reaction from the right would have been if the meltdown had been mid-January 2009 instead of when it happened, and Obama had to start the bailout. Which he probably would have done basically the same way, except he might have put in more checks and oversight. (Or not. Someday, I'll have to cure myself of the hope that he's actually a good guy.)
We probably would have had some right-wing loon shoot up Wall Street by now.
I think our entire society (Except stock traders) would be a hell of a lot better off if you were required to own stock for six months.
People might actually start purchasing stock based on actual company performance. They'd start expecting to make money via dividends, aka, company profit, instead of random fluctuations in the price caused by CEO manipulation.
Like the CEO, oh, firing half the workforce to cause an upward stock price bump for two months, so they get their bonuses. Oh, and incidentally cripple the company, but what the fuck do they care, they're out the door to another company.
Stock ownership is company ownership. It is not a fucking bingo game. Although if that existed by itself, that would be fine...the problem is that the idiotic bingo games get play by the board, which starts operating the company for the benefit of the bingo game, instead, of, I dunno, the actual company.
As a lefty, I'll complain when companies put profits ahead of employees, but hell, they've stopped doing even that. At least that system worked somewhat. Make the workers too unhappy, abuse them too much, and you don't make as much money.
Now the people running the company are rewarded solely based on an idiotic bingo game, which bears no relationship to how much money the company makes. And it doesn't matter how much the workers abused, because the actual business of actually producing goods and services is irrelevant to the paycheck of the people at the top.
Until the entire company collapses, at which point they walk out the door with a shitload of money and head to another company, whose board will happily hire them because it will make their stock go up. Which they can sell to poor unsuspecting suckers, and walk away with a lot of money to pour into the next business, building it up as an actual industry, until they can hire a stock-pricing oriented CEO and suck all the cash out of that stock, too.
It is visible light using the technical terms, and it is (not visible) light using the common terms for 'visible' and 'light'.
Although strictly speaking, talking about 'light' that is 'visible' in common terms verges on the silly. You cannot 'see' light by the common usage of 'see' meaning 'received light that bounced off it and hit your eyes'. Light isn't 'visible' in the common meaning, light is the carrier of 'visible'. It's like calling water 'a boat'.
Anyway, back to invisible, invisible means something that you would expect to see but cannot, or can see under certain circumstances, but not this one. It is not the same thing as 'not visible', and it is not the opposite of 'visible'.
For example, the air is not invisible. It is not visible, but it's not 'invisible' in any normal sense of that word.
Whereas someone hiding under your bed is invisible, at least figuratively. You'd expect to see people in the same room as you, when you cannot, they are 'invisible'. Likewise, a piece of paper seen edge-on, or a sliding glass door, can be invisible.
Very very dim light is not 'invisible'. Things in total darkness can be considered invisible to start with, but emitting unpercievable light does not make them moreso.
Except that has nothing to do with people at all. All objects emit black body radiation.
The only thing that's an argument for is to hurtle people into outer space.
If anything, having more people around you means there are more objects to suck up the radiation. (Not that a single x-ray photon is going to be harmful to anyone.)
What the hell other sorts of processes could create photons?
Even pretending there was a way to change energy levels in a non-quantum manner, where the hell would the energy be stored 'while' it was changing? How does that possibly work?
Screw quantum physics, I'll emit in every frequency if I want to! If anyone objects, I'll emit in the zettahertz range and turn them into a cloud of pions, so ha!
But, seriously, while people, and other objects that exist, obviously don't emit black body radiation in in all frequencies (As that would require infinite energy, but, more importantly, piss off Einstein.), they can indeed emit it in the visible light spectrum, as far as I can figure out.
For the purpose of this probability calculation, the knowledge we have "at least one daughter" is equivalent to "randomly select from families with at least one girl". In both cases we start off with the same information on which to base the calculation. I'm interested to know why you see there's a difference.
No, it's not the same thing at all. The possible outcomes are the same, but the odds are not. (Which you should understand because, strictly speaking, M/F and F/M are the same outcome if we're not asked about which is which.)
Incidentally, if the question was phrased something like "a family was chosen at random, and I met just one of the children, who was a girl", you will get the 50% probability you mention, but this cannot be deduced from the original question . "First child I met was a girl" implies "at least one daughter" but the reverse is not true.
Because that was the original question. I quote:
A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.
If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?
In other words, a family was chosen at random, and we are told the gender of one of the children. We did not select a family with at least one daughter. We selected a family entirely randomly, then it turns out they have least one daughter, which of course has no bearing on anything else. We might as well be told one of their children is 5'4" and then asked the gender of the other.
Or, to put it more sanely, like I did earlier...the question is identical to stating that 'either the youngest or oldest is female'. Both of those statements have a 50/50 chance of the other being female, and if they are the only two options the thing as a whole must be 50/50. That's how probability works.
The question you think was asked, and the question the original poster thought he was asking, is not the question that was actually asked, as I was attempting to point out. The original poster thought he'd asked your question, 'If we pick a family with at least one daughter, etc', a question with odds of 1/3, but he did not ask that one.
It's like me flipping a coin twice, and then telling you one of the flips was heads. That doesn't change anything. You think that we're doing a bunch of coin flips in pairs and selecting pairs with at least one head, which, indeed, would alter what the odds of the other are...but that's not what we're doing. We're selecting a pair of flips and randomly stating what one of them was.
Now, it's entirely possible you don't agree with my parsing of the original question, which is understandable, it's not a very good question. I'm not going to debate semantics. If you want to read that it is asking something else, that they deliberately selected a family with a female child, fine.
However, do you agree that the question 'We find a family with two children. We flip a coin to pick one of them, and inform you that one is female. What are the odds the other one is also?' has a 50/50 odds? And the same odds if, on another family, instead of flipping a coin to pick, they tell you the oldest child is female?
Actually, I can make this point much simpler. You agree that if they say 'My eldest is a girl', they have a 50% chance of having another girl. Presumable that would also apply if they said 'My youngest is a girl.', right?
And when they say 'One of my children is a girl', what they are actually saying is 'Either my youngest is a girl or my oldest is a girl.', right?
As either of those possibilities would result in a 50% chance of another girl, the situation as a whole must result in a 50% chance of another girl.
You are correct that "telling us the gender of a child tells us nothing about the other one", but we've not been told which of the children is a girl so this this is not relevant here. All we know is that we have 3 equally likely possibilities - M/F, F/M and F/F.
No. We already know the gender of one child. Either we know that the first, or the second. We don't know which one it is, but we do know we know one of them.
Ergo, we're got two options, equally likely. We're trying to find out, either F/[?] or [?]/F, we don't know which.
And hence we have four options. Either we've got F/[M] or F/[F] if we've learned the first one, or we have [F]/F or [M]/F if we've learned the second one. We don't know which to use, because we don't know which we've learned, but luckily they have the same 50/50 odds.
Just because two of the outcomes result in two daughters don't mean they're the same, anymore than F/M and M/F are the same outcome. Knowing the first child, and the second being female, has just as much odds as knowing the first child and the second being male, and the same with swapping 'first' and 'second'. Four outcomes, not three.
It's only when the original choice of the family, in some way, depended on one of the children being female that the probability changes to 1/3. Like if you go around selecting families with one daughter, which means there's a 2/3 chance the other is a son.
Exactly. I can't tear down an engine and rebuild it, but I at least understand the various systems in a car and how they interact, and I'm usually able to localize problems to the system they are in. (My brother is an auto mechanic, so I've learned a lot.)
In one particularly funny example, I kept having my car stall after driving long distances and stopping at lights, and then refusing to operate unless I braked while holding the gas. Aka, it wouldn't idle in place. If I shifted to neutral or park, however, it would work. If I turned it off for a while, it would work fine, unless I got going fast enough, at which point it would die if I idled again.
My utterly naive guess: The automatic transmission is somehow not switching to first gear from higher gears. Thus, when I went into higher gears, and then tried to go back down, it would get 'stuck' in the higher gear...and you can't idle in second gear.
My brother claims that's just silly, he goes and checks the fuel injection, and all sorts of stuff. Eventually he figured out that it was the transmission, that when the car downshifted, sometimes something went wrong and the engine RPMs didn't change the clutch or something I don't understand, the car was failing to shift (correctly) down into first gear. Some sensor was loose. Just from knowing how transmissions generally worked, I had narrowed the problem down to 'shifting back into first gear', and had figured it out before an auto mechanic. (Who, to be fair, had not seen the problem.)
But, anyway, people don't need to know 90% about the tools they use. But they do need to know that first 10%.
And not just tools. I couldn't tell you what frequencies a TV operates on, but I understand the general concept of EM waves and whatnot. You'd be amazed how many people don't.
The real question is why state investigative agencies don't actually get involved and arrest people for this sort of shit.
Seriously, the slightest bit of undercover work on 90% of the scam businesses out there would uncover actual criminal wrongdoing. Not just 'scams', but out and out criminal acts.
It would be easy arrests, but I guess they're too busy solving the crimes that rich people care about, like jewel robbery.
Oh, speaking of jewel robbery...ever had a stone set? It is has been trivially demonstrated that, if you have a nice diamond, and send it in to get set into a ring, they always give you a crappier diamond back and keep yours.
It's not debatable, it's not 'sometimes'. Every. Single. Damn. Time. Every. Single. Damn. Jeweler.
The FBI could spend a few thousand dollars and arrest almost every single jeweler that exists for felony theft.
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Pain is never psychosomatic. Because pain is the experience. Even if it's entirely generated inside your nervous system somewhere, and not the part of your body you think it's in, it is still actual pain.
Of course, doctors still need to figure out where it is, so they can treat it.
Likewise, with this 'wifi allergy' nonsense, doctors need to step in and say 'This cannot be causing your pain. If you are getting pain based on things you cannot sense, and are, in fact, getting pain when you wrongly think those things exist but don't, we need to assume that the pain is in your head, and how can we solve that problem?'.
Of course, some of this is just a stupid scam to get disability and whatnot.
It's not just the scan of the CRT, the power supply itself can make a noise. And, of course, they do have speakers, which can obviously make noises. (Beyond the noises they are supposed to be making.)
In fact, if you actually place people in silent rooms and flip devices on and off, almost all people can hear quite a lot of electrical equipment operating. The high pitched transformers in power supplies, the hum of a ground-mismatched speaker, the whop of an amp coming on, obviously any fans or other mechanical parts, etc. Electrical equipment can be noisy, although, yes, it's getting quieter with the removal of CRTs and higher qualities fluorescent lights.
These sounds just don't actually bother most people, and are mentally backgrounded the same way that AC is backgrounded. But we don't have to stretch to realize that some people, in fact, find them annoying.
Unlike these bogus 'wifi' people, who are 'disabled' by something that has never been demonstrated to be preceptable by human beings.
Its like people never knew how to manage mp3 files before itunes came along. How hard is it to organize the files and folders yourself? I seem to have no problems doing so. Are you keeping 100,000 files in a single folder or what?
And, what's more, there are plenty of tools help you add tags to files missing them, that let you rename MP3 files in a logical way, however you want them too. You specify the filename and path using tags, and the software checks to make sure they're all there and moves them for you. MusicBrainz has one that even can look up labels based on the music in addition to the CDDB, add tags and move them wherever you want.
The real issue I have with iTunes is that I don't use a single fucking player to listen to music. I have XMBC, I have foobar2000, I have a USB-connected MP3 player, I have a SD-card player for my car, I have a mini-SD card in my cell phone. And I occasionally try out others.
I keep all my music on a NAS. For my laptop, I've marked the music I want to take with as 'available offline', and foobar2000 does a refresh on startup...if I'm at home, I get my whole library, if not, I just get the offline stuff.
I guess iTunes is useful for people who are listening to their music in exactly two places: The computer that iTunes is installed on, and an iPod synced to that.
Oh, and the whole 'I don't have time to copy music manually to my mp3 player' just blows my mind. You don't have time...to start a file copy? Really? (I'm assuming that the copy itself takes roughly the same amount of time.)
iTune people seem to be saying they don't have time to select the music, which makes no damn sense to me. So they...have no control over the music they listen to? Or they mean they're okay with letting iTunes pick it, possibly via 'similar artist' or genre or something?
Well, I hate to burst their bubble, but most software mp3 players can do that, and even limit it to a total size, and then send the file to a 'drive', which is what normal mp3 players show up as. That's how I fill up my portable players and SD cards, using foobar2000. That isn't some amazing epic feature of iTunes.
The only feature I've ever heard of that 'syncing' with the iPod has, that other software mp3 players don't, is the ability to copy back the 'number of listens' and 'ratings' if you've set one, which most hardware mp3 players don't bother to care about.
And if you don't have that optin set, it runs in the background...and...um...does nothing.
Renting a car is silly. If the credit places can't tell them your age, they really have no business existing. But that's not any sort of legal requirement, anyway.
As for other stuff, that's why I said if you are under 21, you could ask, in addition to 'under 21', to have your birthday on the license. Or, heck, print it on there by default, and only remove it if they ask.
But that should stop being done at 21 unless specifically asked for.
Georgia DL have a sort of static looking back that's actually a bar code. I tried to find a picture but couldn't.
Someone, I don't know who, has taken a sharpie and randomly put in about 50% more of the little dots than should be there. Oops.
I have no idea what the hell that's for, I've never seen anyone try to scan it, and cops read off the number. (OTOH, I don't go to a lot of big bars or nightclubs. It's a small town, the biggest place can probably seat 50 people, and usually seats two dozen.)
hair color...weight
Yes, they do. In fact, they need an actual photo of you. So they can confirm that you are the person on the card.
Now, what should happen is that your address shouldn't be on the driver's license at all.
The police should be able to pull that out of the DL database, and no one else has the right to know where you live. That, frankly, is an idiotic holdover from when police did not have databases, and should have gone away mid-nineties. (If someone has a legitimate need to know where you live, for example if went to a bar and skipped on on your tab...that's what small claims court is for.)
Same with age, that should not be on a license, except underaged people should have that clearly marked on their DL. Although it should just be an 'Under 18' or 'Under 21' unless they specifically want their birthday on there. Same with elderly people, who could have 'Over 55' or whatever on their license if they want.
'Lost' their integrity?
Yeah, because Nixon was the great conservative president. What with his wage and price controls, and abolishing the gold standard. And, of course, they reelected him also.
And before that, Eisenhower, who was amazingly fiscally conservative...except for that huge interstate highway system he built. And he continued the New Deal, and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which extended benefits to millions more people. So less 'fiscally conservative' and more, you know, not.
Of course, none of those projects shoved the country into debt, because, amazingly, we actually taxed people for them.
And, at that point, the Republicans hadn't started yammering about 'lower all taxes' and 'cut all spending', so it actually wasn't hurting their integrity to vote for those people...
Wait. That's not really 'integrity' at all, is it? He invents the message of lower taxes, and gets elected on it, and doesn't follow through.
That's not voter integrity, that's being fooled. To 'lose' integrity, they must have started with some, which they didn't really. There was no point where Republicans voters said 'Hey, I'm not voting for my party's nominee because he didn't keep his promises', which then changed with the reelection of Reagan.
On, the plus side, I'm constantly gaining respect for the Libertarians, who are total economic loons but at least they're loons with integrity. I don't want them in charge, but I wouldn't mind seeing them as the opposition party.
Valid point. Visiting any location in a spam email is dangerous. Also, it's extremely unlikely to help.
I was just objecting to the silly idea that spammer somehow have some sort of 'good list' and 'bad list'. Spam is not sent using finite resources off spammer's machines anymore.
Spam is sent using millions 0wned machines handed huge lists of email addresses, and the ability to send email is essentially unlimited.
They don't have any incentive to filter out bad addresses, or give 'extra' attention to 'verified' addresses. Nor do they even have a way to do that...the software on the 0wned machines is very stupid. There is not any sort of feedback loop, where they go 'Oh, look, this guy verified his address. That means he's real!'.
I have email address on the mail server that have never accepted mail. That are typos or truncations of existing email address, or are clearly some sort of dictionary word that somehow ended up as a 'real' address. Again, they have never, in their entire 'existence', accepted a single piece of email.
They get hundreds of attempts a day. Spammers. Do. Not. Care. in any manner if an email address is even 'vaguely' real, because they don't actually care what percentage of their email arrives.
It's sorta like your city is being attacked by bombers, so you stay inside to keep from attracting their attention...except that they're dropping approximately four thousand nuclear bombs per square mile. Yeah, 'hiding' is not really going to help a lot.
It's not important, I'm just a little sick of the 'never unsubscribe' nonsense I keep seeing, that somehow spammers will figure out you're real. Yeah, they really really don't care. Unsubscribe links nowadays are solely so they can lie about their compliance with CANSPAM.
The stock market isn't supposed to be a casino, it's supposed to be for long term investment.
No shit. Like I said somewhere above, I'd be happy if you were only allowed to trade stock every six months.
It's absurd to let people trade stocks in the millisecond range. That is part of a company you just sold.
It's resulted in totally irrational pricing for everything, based on the slightest whim of people, instead of any actual valuation of the company and its profit.
It results in boards paying CEOs based on the stock price and not any sort of profits or losses, which in turns results in CEOs doing anything to bounce the stock price up while they're there, like, oh, cripple the company with layoffs, or do a merger they know is stupid, or all sorts of things.
How is that a boneheaded move?
It temporarily increased the stock price, didn't?
That's what CEOs are paid to do, so that the board can sell more of their stock, right?
I'm confused as to what you think companies are for. Publicly traded companies are not there to earn profits.
They are there to move the stock price up until everyone catches on the company doesn't actually do anything anymore, because it's been totally gutted by layoffs and management decisions that temporarily increase the stock price at the expense of the company.
At which point, they are purchased by another company, not because that makes any sense for either company, but because it increased the stock price of the purchasing company, and it gives the existing board of the purchased company somewhere to unload their stock.
Oddly enough, those on Slashdot who scream about the 2nd amendment, never took up their guns and killed Congress and the President when they should have. Our country was stolen from under our noses, and the 2nd amendment people were too worried about Obama and his funny name or that he might "take away their guns" to notice that the very purpose for which there even is a 2nd amendment, was pushed out in front of them, and they didn't do shit.
Indeed. If there every was the time for a massive shooting spree through Wall Street, last year was it.
Or, oh, how about the government looking American citizens up without trial or charge and insisting it has the right to do that. The real joke is, now that Obama is acting like he's going to actually create a framework for that, the right is silent.
I will repeat that for all time travellers from 1994: The Democratic President is preparing to create a legal framework to imprison people without charges. And the right seems to like it, and the left is opposed to it. Now head back to 1994 and resume yelling about how Clinton is going to use FEMA quarantine ability to create martial law.
Because, of course, the right's never had a shred of integrity about all the stuff they yell about. A Republican started imprisoning people without charges, and the left doesn't like it, so it must be okay. (As much as I loathe the Libertarians, I have to admit they actually see what's going on.)
Anyway, the delusion of fighting off the government has always been more a right-wing masturbation fantasy than actual thing that could even try happening. Apparently, all anyone needed to do was have the government be operated by 'the right', and all their objections magically vanish.
It's interesting to imagine what the reaction from the right would have been if the meltdown had been mid-January 2009 instead of when it happened, and Obama had to start the bailout. Which he probably would have done basically the same way, except he might have put in more checks and oversight. (Or not. Someday, I'll have to cure myself of the hope that he's actually a good guy.)
We probably would have had some right-wing loon shoot up Wall Street by now.
What you do is have the bailouts...and make the top 1% pay for them.
You broke it, you buy it.
No, it doesn't.
I think our entire society (Except stock traders) would be a hell of a lot better off if you were required to own stock for six months.
People might actually start purchasing stock based on actual company performance. They'd start expecting to make money via dividends, aka, company profit, instead of random fluctuations in the price caused by CEO manipulation.
Like the CEO, oh, firing half the workforce to cause an upward stock price bump for two months, so they get their bonuses. Oh, and incidentally cripple the company, but what the fuck do they care, they're out the door to another company.
Stock ownership is company ownership. It is not a fucking bingo game. Although if that existed by itself, that would be fine...the problem is that the idiotic bingo games get play by the board, which starts operating the company for the benefit of the bingo game, instead, of, I dunno, the actual company.
As a lefty, I'll complain when companies put profits ahead of employees, but hell, they've stopped doing even that. At least that system worked somewhat. Make the workers too unhappy, abuse them too much, and you don't make as much money.
Now the people running the company are rewarded solely based on an idiotic bingo game, which bears no relationship to how much money the company makes. And it doesn't matter how much the workers abused, because the actual business of actually producing goods and services is irrelevant to the paycheck of the people at the top.
Until the entire company collapses, at which point they walk out the door with a shitload of money and head to another company, whose board will happily hire them because it will make their stock go up. Which they can sell to poor unsuspecting suckers, and walk away with a lot of money to pour into the next business, building it up as an actual industry, until they can hire a stock-pricing oriented CEO and suck all the cash out of that stock, too.
It is not 'invisible light'.
It is visible light using the technical terms, and it is (not visible) light using the common terms for 'visible' and 'light'.
Although strictly speaking, talking about 'light' that is 'visible' in common terms verges on the silly. You cannot 'see' light by the common usage of 'see' meaning 'received light that bounced off it and hit your eyes'. Light isn't 'visible' in the common meaning, light is the carrier of 'visible'. It's like calling water 'a boat'.
Anyway, back to invisible, invisible means something that you would expect to see but cannot, or can see under certain circumstances, but not this one. It is not the same thing as 'not visible', and it is not the opposite of 'visible'.
For example, the air is not invisible. It is not visible, but it's not 'invisible' in any normal sense of that word.
Whereas someone hiding under your bed is invisible, at least figuratively. You'd expect to see people in the same room as you, when you cannot, they are 'invisible'. Likewise, a piece of paper seen edge-on, or a sliding glass door, can be invisible.
Very very dim light is not 'invisible'. Things in total darkness can be considered invisible to start with, but emitting unpercievable light does not make them moreso.
Except that has nothing to do with people at all. All objects emit black body radiation.
The only thing that's an argument for is to hurtle people into outer space.
If anything, having more people around you means there are more objects to suck up the radiation. (Not that a single x-ray photon is going to be harmful to anyone.)
What the hell other sorts of processes could create photons?
Even pretending there was a way to change energy levels in a non-quantum manner, where the hell would the energy be stored 'while' it was changing? How does that possibly work?
I know of no other way to create a photon.
Screw quantum physics, I'll emit in every frequency if I want to! If anyone objects, I'll emit in the zettahertz range and turn them into a cloud of pions, so ha!
But, seriously, while people, and other objects that exist, obviously don't emit black body radiation in in all frequencies (As that would require infinite energy, but, more importantly, piss off Einstein.), they can indeed emit it in the visible light spectrum, as far as I can figure out.
For the purpose of this probability calculation, the knowledge we have "at least one daughter" is equivalent to "randomly select from families with at least one girl". In both cases we start off with the same information on which to base the calculation. I'm interested to know why you see there's a difference.
No, it's not the same thing at all. The possible outcomes are the same, but the odds are not. (Which you should understand because, strictly speaking, M/F and F/M are the same outcome if we're not asked about which is which.)
Incidentally, if the question was phrased something like "a family was chosen at random, and I met just one of the children, who was a girl", you will get the 50% probability you mention, but this cannot be deduced from the original question . "First child I met was a girl" implies "at least one daughter" but the reverse is not true.
Because that was the original question. I quote:
A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.
If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?
In other words, a family was chosen at random, and we are told the gender of one of the children. We did not select a family with at least one daughter. We selected a family entirely randomly, then it turns out they have least one daughter, which of course has no bearing on anything else. We might as well be told one of their children is 5'4" and then asked the gender of the other.
Or, to put it more sanely, like I did earlier...the question is identical to stating that 'either the youngest or oldest is female'. Both of those statements have a 50/50 chance of the other being female, and if they are the only two options the thing as a whole must be 50/50. That's how probability works.
The question you think was asked, and the question the original poster thought he was asking, is not the question that was actually asked, as I was attempting to point out. The original poster thought he'd asked your question, 'If we pick a family with at least one daughter, etc', a question with odds of 1/3, but he did not ask that one.
It's like me flipping a coin twice, and then telling you one of the flips was heads. That doesn't change anything. You think that we're doing a bunch of coin flips in pairs and selecting pairs with at least one head, which, indeed, would alter what the odds of the other are...but that's not what we're doing. We're selecting a pair of flips and randomly stating what one of them was.
Now, it's entirely possible you don't agree with my parsing of the original question, which is understandable, it's not a very good question. I'm not going to debate semantics. If you want to read that it is asking something else, that they deliberately selected a family with a female child, fine.
However, do you agree that the question 'We find a family with two children. We flip a coin to pick one of them, and inform you that one is female. What are the odds the other one is also?' has a 50/50 odds? And the same odds if, on another family, instead of flipping a coin to pick, they tell you the oldest child is female?
Actually, I can make this point much simpler. You agree that if they say 'My eldest is a girl', they have a 50% chance of having another girl. Presumable that would also apply if they said 'My youngest is a girl.', right?
And when they say 'One of my children is a girl', what they are actually saying is 'Either my youngest is a girl or my oldest is a girl.', right?
As either of those possibilities would result in a 50% chance of another girl, the situation as a whole must result in a 50% chance of another girl.
You are correct that "telling us the gender of a child tells us nothing about the other one", but we've not been told which of the children is a girl so this this is not relevant here. All we know is that we have 3 equally likely possibilities - M/F, F/M and F/F.
No. We already know the gender of one child. Either we know that the first, or the second. We don't know which one it is, but we do know we know one of them.
Ergo, we're got two options, equally likely. We're trying to find out, either F/[?] or [?]/F, we don't know which.
And hence we have four options. Either we've got F/[M] or F/[F] if we've learned the first one, or we have [F]/F or [M]/F if we've learned the second one. We don't know which to use, because we don't know which we've learned, but luckily they have the same 50/50 odds.
Just because two of the outcomes result in two daughters don't mean they're the same, anymore than F/M and M/F are the same outcome. Knowing the first child, and the second being female, has just as much odds as knowing the first child and the second being male, and the same with swapping 'first' and 'second'. Four outcomes, not three.
It's only when the original choice of the family, in some way, depended on one of the children being female that the probability changes to 1/3. Like if you go around selecting families with one daughter, which means there's a 2/3 chance the other is a son.
Exactly. I can't tear down an engine and rebuild it, but I at least understand the various systems in a car and how they interact, and I'm usually able to localize problems to the system they are in. (My brother is an auto mechanic, so I've learned a lot.)
In one particularly funny example, I kept having my car stall after driving long distances and stopping at lights, and then refusing to operate unless I braked while holding the gas. Aka, it wouldn't idle in place. If I shifted to neutral or park, however, it would work. If I turned it off for a while, it would work fine, unless I got going fast enough, at which point it would die if I idled again.
My utterly naive guess: The automatic transmission is somehow not switching to first gear from higher gears. Thus, when I went into higher gears, and then tried to go back down, it would get 'stuck' in the higher gear...and you can't idle in second gear.
My brother claims that's just silly, he goes and checks the fuel injection, and all sorts of stuff. Eventually he figured out that it was the transmission, that when the car downshifted, sometimes something went wrong and the engine RPMs didn't change the clutch or something I don't understand, the car was failing to shift (correctly) down into first gear. Some sensor was loose. Just from knowing how transmissions generally worked, I had narrowed the problem down to 'shifting back into first gear', and had figured it out before an auto mechanic. (Who, to be fair, had not seen the problem.)
But, anyway, people don't need to know 90% about the tools they use. But they do need to know that first 10%.
And not just tools. I couldn't tell you what frequencies a TV operates on, but I understand the general concept of EM waves and whatnot. You'd be amazed how many people don't.
You know, something like that should be at a library.
A lot of electronic hardware fails early in its life. Although 3 week is rather long for this, usually it's a day or two.
The real question is why state investigative agencies don't actually get involved and arrest people for this sort of shit.
Seriously, the slightest bit of undercover work on 90% of the scam businesses out there would uncover actual criminal wrongdoing. Not just 'scams', but out and out criminal acts.
It would be easy arrests, but I guess they're too busy solving the crimes that rich people care about, like jewel robbery.
Oh, speaking of jewel robbery...ever had a stone set? It is has been trivially demonstrated that, if you have a nice diamond, and send it in to get set into a ring, they always give you a crappier diamond back and keep yours.
It's not debatable, it's not 'sometimes'. Every. Single. Damn. Time. Every. Single. Damn. Jeweler.
The FBI could spend a few thousand dollars and arrest almost every single jeweler that exists for felony theft.