Sure MS is a monopoly, but if Apple wants to play the game of what software can run on which hardware, then I don't see why MS shouldn't have the same priviledge.
What part of "MS is a monopoly" don't you understand?
Seriously. They're a monopoly, and they've found guilty, in multiple courts in multiple instances, of abusing that status. (Being a monopoly isn't illegal; using that monopoly to suppress competition that might one day break the monopoly is, and that's what Microsoft does.) I just don't see why people have so much trouble understanding this; it's like asking why, if you and I can walk around on the street, a convicted criminal who's locked up in prison can't do the same.
Now, you may disagree with the anti-monopoly laws. But the law as written clearly makes Microsoft guilty of things that Apple hasn't (and in fact couldn't have) done, and the rules are different for lawbreakers. It's that simple.
Diebold is a company that specializes in designing and manufacturing ATMs, so obviously there are problems with voting machines that ATM technology does not currently address.
This would only be true if Diebold wanted to make voting machines that work properly. They don't.
Actually, stopping when you feel better is a pretty good idea. The bug is gone, and the body will take care of the rest. The more time you expose organisms to antibiotics, the more time they have to adapt to it.
It doesn't work that way. When you're infected, some of the bacteria have more resistance than others -- resistance is a fairly complicated trait; it's not binary. So if you stop "as soon as you feel better," what this means is that you've killed off just enough of the least resistant bacteria so that you don't notice the symptoms of infection any more; there are still plenty of somewhat-more-but-not-completely resistant bacteria in your body, and you've created a massive selective pressure favoring those strains. Whereas if you finish the prescribed course of antibiotics, you're wiping out all but the very most resistant -- and that's likely to be a fairly small number, which your immune system can indeed deal with on its own, now that most of the bacteria overall are out of they way.
I hate to bring up such a politically charged analogy, but this is the best way I can think of to explain it: suppose you're planning to invade a country and eliminate all resistance. You have two courses of action available:
(a) Attack, keep attacking, kill anyone who resists, and even after visible resistance has ceased, keep aggressively patrolling every square foot of the country until well after you're sure that everyone who might oppose your rule is dead.
(b) Attack, kill off the most visible opponents, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people until things quiet down, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people...
Which option do you think is likely to be most effective? Conversely, which one do you think is most likely to produce a hardened and pretty much ineradicable resistance? Hint: (b) is pretty much what people who stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better are doing.
Of course, my analogy should only be interpreted in medical terms. Doesn't have anything to do with anything else that's going on in the world. Uh-uh. Not a bit. No sirree.
a massive super bug some day that will kill you before you can treat it
Except that antibiotic-resistant strains are generally less virulent than the old-fashioned kind. It doesn't mean they can't kill you, of course -- obviously they do kill people, all the time -- but most of their victims are already immunocompromised in some way (the very old, the very young, AIDS patients, chemotherapy patients, etc.) Generating the enzymes necessary for antibiotic resistance, such as penicillinase, represents a pretty significant metabolic load for the cell; every bit of energy it has to spend protecting itself from antibiotics is a bit it doesn't have available to spend on reproduction.
I'm not trying to downplay the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria here, only pointing out that "superbug" is a relative term; just because they're tougher in one way doesn't mean they're tougher in all ways. For bacteria as for every other living thing, fitness is relative to environment.
There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.
"Obvious" if you ignore pretty much all work in molecular genetics at least since Watson and Crick.
Once we arrive at a better understanding of how DNA works, perhaps it will be possible to form mathematical models to determine whether or not the "random mutation" theory is feasible.
You mean, the way bioinformaticists and statistical geneticists do all the time, right now, and have been for years?
Maybe it's only feasible during intermittant radiation events that decimate populations by causing widespread mutations, leaving a few individuals with improvements, who go on to reproduce and build up populations again. Maybe it's not possible at all.
Do you have any data, at all, that would support either one of these hypotheses? Or are you just cut'n'pasting from some ID site somewhere?
So in other words, because HP is dishonest, their customers should be dishonest too? Greeeat. That'll help.
Here's a radical idea: everyone lives up their obligations. HP sold a laptop with a warranty. The warranty (if I read TFA correctly) says nothing about what OS should be running on the machine. They are obligated, ethically and legally, to fix the machine under that warranty.
Customers also have an obligation in such situations: when they call tech support, they are obligated (ethically if not legally) to tell the truth. When you call tech support, you're admitting that you have a problem you can't solve yourself; odds are pretty good that you don't know what information is relevant to solving the problem, and so you should answer all the questions they ask you. Of course, you should also be able to answer the questions, without having to worry that you'll lose support as a result...
It's absurd to blame the customer in a case like this. She was doing what she was supposed to do; HP wasn't. This sounds like massive lawsuit material, and I hope she gets enough money from them to buy a brand-new laptop (from someone other than HP, probably) every day for the rest of her life.
She calls it mysogyny because someone posts "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob" on a couple of blogs? Is she new to the internet or something? Name a blog out there that hasn't had even worse repeatedly posted on them. Even directed toward specific individuals? Liberals, conservatives, religious people, atheists, people of different ethnicities and sizes and colors and shapes and views and backgrounds and opinions have things like that said to them online all the time. [snip] Seriously, does nobody think guys like Dvorak and Malda and many others haven't had to put up with this stuff? I'm sure it happens all the time.
If someone told a black writer, "fuck off you boring nigger... i hope someone lynches you," would you say that wasn't racist? If someone told a Jewish writer, "fuck off you boring kike... i hope someone throws you in an oven," would you say that wasn't anti-Semitic?
Personal threats directed solely at the individual happen all the time, yes. But threats directed both at the individual and at an entire group (sex, race, religion, whatever) to which the individual belongs are something that most people regard as Crossing The Line, and with good reason; historically, it's been easier to deal with the one-offs. Does Dvorak get called a "Russki?" Does Malda get called a "Wop?" (Just guessing on that last one.) The fact that clearly misogynist threats like the ones aimed at Sierra get a "no big deal" response from so many people says to me that there are a lot of guys out there on the net -- now, in 2007 -- who have an attitude toward women that's about on the level of the KKK's attitude toward black people.
Also, starting your post with a line like "I know I'm going to get modded to hell for my posts in this thread..." is a stupid rhetorical trick. If you've got something to say, just say it; don't try to impress us with how tough and brave and anti-establishment you are.
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to make patents only valid while the holder is actively exploiting them
Bingo!
Let's be clear about this, for the benefit of the libertarians: patents (and other forms of protected IP, i.e. trademarks and copyrights) are government interference in the market. They are a form of government-granted monopoly which interfere with the normal operations of a free-market economy. As a matter of principle as well as practicality, this should only happen when the benefits clearly and greatly outweigh the costs -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution defines the purpose of IP law. Granting government protection to unused patents clearly does nothing toward this end.
Well, there are sound historical reasons for protecting anonymity; sometimes anonymous free speech is the only free speech, because if people know who you are, Bad Things will happen. Much of the writing and discussion that led up to the American Revolution was done under pseudonyms, sometimes obvious, sometimes not; otherwise the result would have been a whole bunch of hangings and no USA. Whether that would have been a desirable outcome or not depends on your perspective, I suppose.;)
Obviously this isn't one of those cases. These law students are idiots, and law firms that make hiring decisions based on their flamefests aren't any better.
[shrug] I'm one of the few people on/. who doesn't use a pseudonym, and my name isn't an especially common one; anyone who wants to find out what I think can do so with a couple of minutes of Googling. I've noticed that since I started using my real name online in most places, my own online writing has become more civilized; the reason I'm not especially concerned about losing a potential future job over something I said online is because I try not to say stupid things online, and anyone who'd refuse to hire me based on polite, reasonable expressions of opinion isn't someone I'd want to work for anyway. But this is a self-imposed condition, and if I were a whistleblower or a revolutionary, of course I'd try to remain anonymous, and be damned glad that there are ways to do so.
If I didn't make it clear above, I am in no way comparing these idiot law students to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Just saying that the same conditions which allow anonymous communication of genuine importance will inevitably be exploited by morons; it's a price we should be willing to pay.
The FAA keeps what is by far the world's busiest civil air transportation system running with a remarkably good safety record. Every time you go to the airport, get on your plane, fly to your destination, get off your plane, and nothing else happens, you have the FAA to thank for it.
I would hazard to say less French might have died if they had decided to fight from the beginning and not just after the occupation in a clandestine manner.
Can we please lay this stupid myth to rest?
The French did fight, and fought hard; France suffered more battlefield deaths during WW2 than the US did. They surrendered because they were beaten, by an army -- the Wehrmacht -- that was unquestionably the best in the world at that time; quite possibly, allowing for technological changes over time, the best in history. And had London or Moscow or, yes, Washington DC had the misfortune to be as close to Berlin as Paris is, they would have suffered the same fate. There was simply no one in the world who could beat the Germans on the battlefield at that point; it took the surviving Allies years of catch-up, protected by the Channel, the Atlantic, and the simple size of Russia, to match them.
No one ever accuses the Poles and the Czechs of cowardice for falling to the Blitzkrieg, or the British for Dunkirk, or the Russians for being driven back across a piece of their country far larger than France in its entirety, or the Americans for waiting two years while Hitler ran wild. And anyone who believes that cowardice is part of the French national character should go count the graves at Verdun.
It's actually funny that Slashdot pretends to be deeply concerned about the freedom of speech violation of the week, yet its members see no problem with aggressively modding down politically incorrect or otherwise "wrong" opinions, using the tools provided by the site itself.
Getting modded down does not fine you, imprison you, or break down your door in the middle of the night and drag you off to be shot. Hell, it doesn't even remove your comment; anyone who browses at -1 can see everything anyone posts, from reasonable but unpopular comments to goatse and GNAA trolls. It is absurd to equate a voluntary system of peer moderation with government restrictions on speech which are backed up by the armed force of the State.
Open access journals have the same peer review and editing standards as traditional "closed" journals do. PLoS Biology, say, is a hell of a long way from Wikipedia. In fact, speaking as a grad student who reads a whole lot of journal articles published in a variety of formats, I'd say the editing standards are often higher for journals from the better open-access publishers (PLoS and BMC come to mind) than they are for paper journals.
None of the activities you mention are speech. Posting nasty messages about someone online clearly is speech. Don't tell me you can't see the difference.
IIRC, there was a big splash last year about Walmart selling Linux PC's. So it was reasonable to hope for a little while that, although they are undeniably mighty and evil, that they might be fighting the equally mighty and evil Microsoft, thus (however unintentionally) serving the forces of good. Kind of a Stalin vs. Hitler thing. Now it seems the nonagression pact is back in force.
Corporations have the right to censor people. And we have the right to tell other people about it, and if we choose, "vote with our money" based on what those corporations do. Ain't free speech grand?
As a practical matter, I don't want any big entity telling me what not to say. I don't want the government doing it, or Google doing it, or a church doing it, or even Slashdot doing it. And in cases of censorship by anyone, it is always appropriate to fight back. If it's the government, you fight back on the basis of legal rights; if it's a private entity, you do it in other ways. But the one thing you should never do is sit back and say, "Go ahead, muzzle me, it's okay."
I went and edited the "Wikimedia Bank Account" entry to say "The Wikimedia Foundation has a jillion gazillion dollars." That should take care of the problem.
Of course correlation doesn't prove causation. And this is obviously useful knowledge, since so many people do misuse correlation to imply causation, especially when they're trying to make a political point.
What bugs me is the way "correlation is not causation" gets pulled out as a response to every type of statistical inference, even when it's irrelevant. Like I said, it's become a mantra: "I don't agree with or understand the results, so I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and say 'nah nah nah nah, correlation is not causation, I can't hear you' over and over again until it goes away!" Here, for example, it's clearly irrelevant, since meteorologists are just making predictions.
Also, well-controlled studies, in which correlation does strongly indicate causation because other factors (to the degree to which they're known, of course) are balanced between the groups under comparison, are often greeted by the "co. != ca." crowd in the same way. This ties into another/. phenomenon of which I'm less than fond: "Oh, those stupid ___ scientists with their crazy ideas! Why, anyone who's ever taken a freshman course in ___ knows..." In other words, the phenomenon of people who were introduced, in the simplest possible way, to some field of study, long ago, who think they know enough to make pronouncements about what actual practicioners in the field are doing. And the truth of the matter is, especially in the sciences, they hardly ever do.
"Correlation is not causation" is an important bit of folk wisdom. But it is not the be-all and end-all of how to interpret statistics, not even close; nor is it a valid excuse for dismissing all statistical reasoning out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
/me salutes
Sure MS is a monopoly, but if Apple wants to play the game of what software can run on which hardware, then I don't see why MS shouldn't have the same priviledge.
What part of "MS is a monopoly" don't you understand?
Seriously. They're a monopoly, and they've found guilty, in multiple courts in multiple instances, of abusing that status. (Being a monopoly isn't illegal; using that monopoly to suppress competition that might one day break the monopoly is, and that's what Microsoft does.) I just don't see why people have so much trouble understanding this; it's like asking why, if you and I can walk around on the street, a convicted criminal who's locked up in prison can't do the same.
Now, you may disagree with the anti-monopoly laws. But the law as written clearly makes Microsoft guilty of things that Apple hasn't (and in fact couldn't have) done, and the rules are different for lawbreakers. It's that simple.
Can we say, "slippery slope" fallacy?
Can we say, sometimes slippery slopes are very real? GP's scenario seems not only reasonable but almost inevitable.
Diebold is a company that specializes in designing and manufacturing ATMs, so obviously there are problems with voting machines that ATM technology does not currently address.
This would only be true if Diebold wanted to make voting machines that work properly. They don't.
Actually, stopping when you feel better is a pretty good idea. The bug is gone, and the body will take care of the rest. The more time you expose organisms to antibiotics, the more time they have to adapt to it.
...
It doesn't work that way. When you're infected, some of the bacteria have more resistance than others -- resistance is a fairly complicated trait; it's not binary. So if you stop "as soon as you feel better," what this means is that you've killed off just enough of the least resistant bacteria so that you don't notice the symptoms of infection any more; there are still plenty of somewhat-more-but-not-completely resistant bacteria in your body, and you've created a massive selective pressure favoring those strains. Whereas if you finish the prescribed course of antibiotics, you're wiping out all but the very most resistant -- and that's likely to be a fairly small number, which your immune system can indeed deal with on its own, now that most of the bacteria overall are out of they way.
I hate to bring up such a politically charged analogy, but this is the best way I can think of to explain it: suppose you're planning to invade a country and eliminate all resistance. You have two courses of action available:
(a) Attack, keep attacking, kill anyone who resists, and even after visible resistance has ceased, keep aggressively patrolling every square foot of the country until well after you're sure that everyone who might oppose your rule is dead.
(b) Attack, kill off the most visible opponents, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people until things quiet down, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people
Which option do you think is likely to be most effective? Conversely, which one do you think is most likely to produce a hardened and pretty much ineradicable resistance? Hint: (b) is pretty much what people who stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better are doing.
Of course, my analogy should only be interpreted in medical terms. Doesn't have anything to do with anything else that's going on in the world. Uh-uh. Not a bit. No sirree.
a massive super bug some day that will kill you before you can treat it
Except that antibiotic-resistant strains are generally less virulent than the old-fashioned kind. It doesn't mean they can't kill you, of course -- obviously they do kill people, all the time -- but most of their victims are already immunocompromised in some way (the very old, the very young, AIDS patients, chemotherapy patients, etc.) Generating the enzymes necessary for antibiotic resistance, such as penicillinase, represents a pretty significant metabolic load for the cell; every bit of energy it has to spend protecting itself from antibiotics is a bit it doesn't have available to spend on reproduction.
I'm not trying to downplay the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria here, only pointing out that "superbug" is a relative term; just because they're tougher in one way doesn't mean they're tougher in all ways. For bacteria as for every other living thing, fitness is relative to environment.
There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.
"Obvious" if you ignore pretty much all work in molecular genetics at least since Watson and Crick.
Once we arrive at a better understanding of how DNA works, perhaps it will be possible to form mathematical models to determine whether or not the "random mutation" theory is feasible.
You mean, the way bioinformaticists and statistical geneticists do all the time, right now, and have been for years?
Maybe it's only feasible during intermittant radiation events that decimate populations by causing widespread mutations, leaving a few individuals with improvements, who go on to reproduce and build up populations again. Maybe it's not possible at all.
Do you have any data, at all, that would support either one of these hypotheses? Or are you just cut'n'pasting from some ID site somewhere?
So in other words, because HP is dishonest, their customers should be dishonest too? Greeeat. That'll help.
...
Here's a radical idea: everyone lives up their obligations. HP sold a laptop with a warranty. The warranty (if I read TFA correctly) says nothing about what OS should be running on the machine. They are obligated, ethically and legally, to fix the machine under that warranty.
Customers also have an obligation in such situations: when they call tech support, they are obligated (ethically if not legally) to tell the truth. When you call tech support, you're admitting that you have a problem you can't solve yourself; odds are pretty good that you don't know what information is relevant to solving the problem, and so you should answer all the questions they ask you. Of course, you should also be able to answer the questions, without having to worry that you'll lose support as a result
It's absurd to blame the customer in a case like this. She was doing what she was supposed to do; HP wasn't. This sounds like massive lawsuit material, and I hope she gets enough money from them to buy a brand-new laptop (from someone other than HP, probably) every day for the rest of her life.
She calls it mysogyny because someone posts "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob" on a couple of blogs? Is she new to the internet or something? Name a blog out there that hasn't had even worse repeatedly posted on them. Even directed toward specific individuals? Liberals, conservatives, religious people, atheists, people of different ethnicities and sizes and colors and shapes and views and backgrounds and opinions have things like that said to them online all the time. [snip] Seriously, does nobody think guys like Dvorak and Malda and many others haven't had to put up with this stuff? I'm sure it happens all the time.
..." is a stupid rhetorical trick. If you've got something to say, just say it; don't try to impress us with how tough and brave and anti-establishment you are.
If someone told a black writer, "fuck off you boring nigger... i hope someone lynches you," would you say that wasn't racist? If someone told a Jewish writer, "fuck off you boring kike... i hope someone throws you in an oven," would you say that wasn't anti-Semitic?
Personal threats directed solely at the individual happen all the time, yes. But threats directed both at the individual and at an entire group (sex, race, religion, whatever) to which the individual belongs are something that most people regard as Crossing The Line, and with good reason; historically, it's been easier to deal with the one-offs. Does Dvorak get called a "Russki?" Does Malda get called a "Wop?" (Just guessing on that last one.) The fact that clearly misogynist threats like the ones aimed at Sierra get a "no big deal" response from so many people says to me that there are a lot of guys out there on the net -- now, in 2007 -- who have an attitude toward women that's about on the level of the KKK's attitude toward black people.
Also, starting your post with a line like "I know I'm going to get modded to hell for my posts in this thread
There's no irony if you consider the fact that, apparently, people love Big Brother.
As long as creationists keep saying stupid things, why shouldn't we keep pointing and laughing?
"State troopers" are state police. They don't serve any militia function.
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to make patents only valid while the holder is actively exploiting them
Bingo!
Let's be clear about this, for the benefit of the libertarians: patents (and other forms of protected IP, i.e. trademarks and copyrights) are government interference in the market. They are a form of government-granted monopoly which interfere with the normal operations of a free-market economy. As a matter of principle as well as practicality, this should only happen when the benefits clearly and greatly outweigh the costs -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution defines the purpose of IP law. Granting government protection to unused patents clearly does nothing toward this end.
Well, there are sound historical reasons for protecting anonymity; sometimes anonymous free speech is the only free speech, because if people know who you are, Bad Things will happen. Much of the writing and discussion that led up to the American Revolution was done under pseudonyms, sometimes obvious, sometimes not; otherwise the result would have been a whole bunch of hangings and no USA. Whether that would have been a desirable outcome or not depends on your perspective, I suppose. ;)
/. who doesn't use a pseudonym, and my name isn't an especially common one; anyone who wants to find out what I think can do so with a couple of minutes of Googling. I've noticed that since I started using my real name online in most places, my own online writing has become more civilized; the reason I'm not especially concerned about losing a potential future job over something I said online is because I try not to say stupid things online, and anyone who'd refuse to hire me based on polite, reasonable expressions of opinion isn't someone I'd want to work for anyway. But this is a self-imposed condition, and if I were a whistleblower or a revolutionary, of course I'd try to remain anonymous, and be damned glad that there are ways to do so.
Obviously this isn't one of those cases. These law students are idiots, and law firms that make hiring decisions based on their flamefests aren't any better.
[shrug] I'm one of the few people on
If I didn't make it clear above, I am in no way comparing these idiot law students to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Just saying that the same conditions which allow anonymous communication of genuine importance will inevitably be exploited by morons; it's a price we should be willing to pay.
To be perfectly honest ... um, let me think about this ... no.
The FAA keeps what is by far the world's busiest civil air transportation system running with a remarkably good safety record. Every time you go to the airport, get on your plane, fly to your destination, get off your plane, and nothing else happens, you have the FAA to thank for it.
I would hazard to say less French might have died if they had decided to fight from the beginning and not just after the occupation in a clandestine manner.
Can we please lay this stupid myth to rest?
The French did fight, and fought hard; France suffered more battlefield deaths during WW2 than the US did. They surrendered because they were beaten, by an army -- the Wehrmacht -- that was unquestionably the best in the world at that time; quite possibly, allowing for technological changes over time, the best in history. And had London or Moscow or, yes, Washington DC had the misfortune to be as close to Berlin as Paris is, they would have suffered the same fate. There was simply no one in the world who could beat the Germans on the battlefield at that point; it took the surviving Allies years of catch-up, protected by the Channel, the Atlantic, and the simple size of Russia, to match them.
No one ever accuses the Poles and the Czechs of cowardice for falling to the Blitzkrieg, or the British for Dunkirk, or the Russians for being driven back across a piece of their country far larger than France in its entirety, or the Americans for waiting two years while Hitler ran wild. And anyone who believes that cowardice is part of the French national character should go count the graves at Verdun.
It's actually funny that Slashdot pretends to be deeply concerned about the freedom of speech violation of the week, yet its members see no problem with aggressively modding down politically incorrect or otherwise "wrong" opinions, using the tools provided by the site itself.
Getting modded down does not fine you, imprison you, or break down your door in the middle of the night and drag you off to be shot. Hell, it doesn't even remove your comment; anyone who browses at -1 can see everything anyone posts, from reasonable but unpopular comments to goatse and GNAA trolls. It is absurd to equate a voluntary system of peer moderation with government restrictions on speech which are backed up by the armed force of the State.
Open access journals have the same peer review and editing standards as traditional "closed" journals do. PLoS Biology, say, is a hell of a long way from Wikipedia. In fact, speaking as a grad student who reads a whole lot of journal articles published in a variety of formats, I'd say the editing standards are often higher for journals from the better open-access publishers (PLoS and BMC come to mind) than they are for paper journals.
Making it a standard practice would reduce the number of RIAA lawsuits dramatically, I suspect.
None of the activities you mention are speech. Posting nasty messages about someone online clearly is speech. Don't tell me you can't see the difference.
IIRC, there was a big splash last year about Walmart selling Linux PC's. So it was reasonable to hope for a little while that, although they are undeniably mighty and evil, that they might be fighting the equally mighty and evil Microsoft, thus (however unintentionally) serving the forces of good. Kind of a Stalin vs. Hitler thing. Now it seems the nonagression pact is back in force.
Corporations have the right to censor people. And we have the right to tell other people about it, and if we choose, "vote with our money" based on what those corporations do. Ain't free speech grand?
As a practical matter, I don't want any big entity telling me what not to say. I don't want the government doing it, or Google doing it, or a church doing it, or even Slashdot doing it. And in cases of censorship by anyone, it is always appropriate to fight back. If it's the government, you fight back on the basis of legal rights; if it's a private entity, you do it in other ways. But the one thing you should never do is sit back and say, "Go ahead, muzzle me, it's okay."
I went and edited the "Wikimedia Bank Account" entry to say "The Wikimedia Foundation has a jillion gazillion dollars." That should take care of the problem.
Of course correlation doesn't prove causation. And this is obviously useful knowledge, since so many people do misuse correlation to imply causation, especially when they're trying to make a political point.
/. phenomenon of which I'm less than fond: "Oh, those stupid ___ scientists with their crazy ideas! Why, anyone who's ever taken a freshman course in ___ knows ..." In other words, the phenomenon of people who were introduced, in the simplest possible way, to some field of study, long ago, who think they know enough to make pronouncements about what actual practicioners in the field are doing. And the truth of the matter is, especially in the sciences, they hardly ever do.
What bugs me is the way "correlation is not causation" gets pulled out as a response to every type of statistical inference, even when it's irrelevant. Like I said, it's become a mantra: "I don't agree with or understand the results, so I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and say 'nah nah nah nah, correlation is not causation, I can't hear you' over and over again until it goes away!" Here, for example, it's clearly irrelevant, since meteorologists are just making predictions.
Also, well-controlled studies, in which correlation does strongly indicate causation because other factors (to the degree to which they're known, of course) are balanced between the groups under comparison, are often greeted by the "co. != ca." crowd in the same way. This ties into another
"Correlation is not causation" is an important bit of folk wisdom. But it is not the be-all and end-all of how to interpret statistics, not even close; nor is it a valid excuse for dismissing all statistical reasoning out of hand.