And indeed, as of right now (10:35 PM CST) a Google search for "talk.origins" doesn't show any links at all to the Talk.Origins Archive. In fact, the first link that comes up is to a young-Earth creationist site which claims to offer "intellectually honest responses to the claims of evolutionism's proponents, including--but not limited to--the 'Talk.Origins' newsgroup and the 'Talk.Origins Archive' website."
Conclusions about species competing in crowded niches are left as an exercise to the reader.
It was an 8:0 decision written by Rehnquist, and agreed to by Scalia, Kennedy and O'Connor.
That was in 1988. Different world. You've got pre-Columbine, pre-9/11 thinking. Different world. Everything changed. Columbine was the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Any High School, Ever, and 9/11 was The Worst Thing That Ever Happened Anywhere, Ever. Everything changed. Terrorists. Protect the chldren. Different world. If you're not with us, the terrorists have won.
Patents are a creation for the publics interest and are not in the Constitution so when they work against the public they need to be revised.
Um, actually:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
I agree with you entirely that we need to revise the way and extent to which patents are issued, but the fact is that the issuance and enforcement of patents (along with copyrights) is one of the fundamental purposes of the US government, as defined by the Constitution. (You can of course start an effort to get that section amended; good luck with that.) A better approach is to look at the explanatory clause -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" -- and start ruthlessly revising those sections of IP law which do not work toward that goal.
Step 1: if it's not a physical object, a working model of which can be presented at the time of filing, don't grant a patent. Period. End of story. No software algorithms, no "business methods," no DNA sequences, etc. -- software can go copyright; the other two examples shouldn't get IP protection at all -- and no speculative ideas for something that someone might want to make someday, either.
Step 2: deem any patents which are not being actively exploited to be unenforceable, and the IP represented in them to be public domain. IOW, if you have a patent on something, you have to be either distributing it on the market, or be able to show that you're working toward the goal. Otherwise, everyone else gets a shot too.
Step 3: require patent holders to defend their patents, as is the case with trademarks. If the patent holder could reasonably be expected to be aware of a violation -- as IBM certainly could be expected to be aware of Amazon -- require them to begin legal action within one (1) year or forfeit the claim.
These three steps, if followed, would I think substantially reduce the amount of patent bullshit which is currently doing the exact opposite of "promoting] the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The lawyers whose clients still have a legitimate claim would still have plenty of work. Similar though not identical reform is needed for copyrights and trademarks; Step 1 in the former case is reducing the term of copyright to 20 years or so and keeping it there.
It is a cop's job to deal professionally (which includes not using excessive force) with people who are causing trouble. If they can't do it without going apeshit on the guy, they shouldn't be cops.
A civilian who reacted like this to somebody taunting him, arguing with him, whatever, would be headed to prison for aggravated assault. Cops, because of their position of power, should face even harsher penalties for such behavior.
I will say about this what I said about Rodney King: there is nothing that could have happened before the camera started rolling that could justify what those cops did. I don't care if this guy was Hannibal Lecter; once a suspect is incapacitated, further use of this kind of force is torture, not restraint.
Now there will no doubt be a flood of whining along the lines of, "Oh cops have such a tough job, and they deal with scumbags all day, and you just don't understaaaand!" Whatever. About, oh, fifteen years ago it was my job to render medical care to a group of people who had quite actively been trying to kill me a little while before, and who would have kept trying if they'd had the chance. And I did it, no tasers or billy clubs or attack dogs or waterboarding required. Which is why, whether it's happening halfway around the world at Abu Ghraib or right here at home in America, I have no trouble saying: fuck this shit. The people who do such things to prisoners aren't cops, or soldiers, or any kind of public servant. They're criminals, and because of their abuse of power, should be treated even more harshly than we treat serial killers, pedophiles, and other such scum.
He's not talking about murdering people because of their religious beliefs. He's talking about murdering people because they come to your home, annoy the living shit out of you, won't take no for an answer, and occasionally shout threats at your children (true story.) While murder may be a little harsh for such an offense, I don't think there's anyone who hasn't been bothered by these nutcases who hasn't felt the urge now and then.
Governments do not have rights; people do. Governments have privileges, which may be revoked by the people at any time. Never let them forget this.
A cop at home, or in civilian clothes walking down the street, has the same rights as anyone else, including the right to privacy. A cop in uniform, on duty, is acting as an arm of the State, and has temporarily surrendered many of the rights of a private citizen, privacy definitely among them.
This doesn't apply just to cops, of course; also to politicians, soldiers, and anyone else acting in a governmental capacity, whether local, state, or federal. We always have the right to know what they are doing in our name, and every time we surrender this right, whether in the name of "privacy" or "national security" or "efficiency" or any other excuse, we surrender a vital piece of our freedom.
I think it's funny that "metrosexuals" are regarded as effeminate. Most of that type are in excellent shape, and the reason they spend so much time on clothes, hair, etc. is to attract women.
Really the "metrosexual" type is a return to form for the male of the species. Until fairly recently in historical terms (say, a century and a half or so) men who could afford to do it were expected to put on a display just as much as women were. The idea that caring about how you look is somehow "unmanly" is almost surely a temporary phenomenon.
Yeah, 'cause you're such a big man, posting as AC.
I'm guessing you were one of those schoolyard bullies who thought that beating the shit out of people on a regular basis was all in good fun, and maybe now that you're grown up (er, relatively speaking) you've realized that your victims didn't see it that way. (And this being Slashdot, there's a good chance that one of your erstwhile victims is reading your post...) If you're like most fatso aging ex-jocks, maybe one of these days you'll get stuck in a dark alley with the skinny little geek who grew up to be a weightlifter, and get the chance to learn exactly how much fun it was.
Both the UK and the US are certainly moving toward being the type of country which used to call itself a "democratic republic," but I don't think that's something we should look forward to.
Republicanism and democracy are overlapping. The US is (theoretically) both a republic and a democracy; the UK is a democracy but not a republic, since the Queen is the head of state. Generally speaking, democracies are better places to live than non-democracies, but the same can't really be said of republics vs. non-republics -- would you rather live in the UK, or Denmark (another non-republican democracy) or in, say, Cuba, which is a republic but emphatically not a democracy?
Democracy is the end; republicanism is one of the more common means.
... and if we just pulled into the space pits and sat there, they could catch up.
Which, given the current pathetic state of our space program, makes me expect we'll see a yellow star on a red flag planted on the Moon long before we see another Stars and Stripes.
The networks existed before Internet. Learn facts. And Internet at large is privately owned - as communication channels concerned. As well as standards used to back it are collective effort - not affiliated with any gov't. (Though it's true that DARPA sponsored protocol is the Internet Protocol)
Strictly speaking, of course, you're correct -- there were plenty of computer networks before anything that could reasonably be called "the internet" started to come into existence in the 1960's. But none of those networks became the internet; ARPAnet did. And more recently, we have perfectly good examples of what commercial networks for general use look like. Compuserve, GEnie, Prodigy, Delphi, AOL -- any of these ring a bell? Closed systems, not extensible by private users, refusing to communicate with each other, insanely expensive... it wasn't until home internet access became widely available that any of them even tried to adapt by increasing access and lowering prices. And now they've almost all died a well-deserved death, with AOL marching steadily toward the grave shared by its forebears.
Computers and algorithms were invented about 150 years ago - when science was still considered mostly private matter and not supported by gov'ts.
Babbage received a mix of private and government funding (the Crown has been funding science on a large scale a lot longer than the US government has -- actually, longer than the US government has been in existence.) And modern electronic computers were almost entirely developed, for the first critical decades of their existence, with government money.
Nice one -- leave out four crucial words and completely change the meaning of what I wrote. I wrote "after the invention of X-rays," by which I meant newer imaging methods such as CT, MRI, and PET. Also, of course, modern genetic diagnostics, which depend almost entirely on research funded by the NIH and similar institutions.
Well, yes. I do not understand how existence of black/dark/light/whatever mater would help anyone. As well as all the theories about Universe origin: in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded. I really do not understand.
You don't have to understand, and I don't have to understand, as long as someone, at some point down the line, somewhere, understands; we'll all benefit regardless. Linear algebra and numerical analysis? Mildly entertaining but utterly abstract branches of mathematics... until computers came along. Bernoulli's law? Great for explaining how birds fly, but not terribly practical until the invention of the internal combustion engine and this little thing called "the airplane." Quantum physics? Neat but useless stuff for the first fifty years or so... Look, astrophysics doesn't exist in isolation; it's simply the study of how the universe works on the grand scale, and a great deal of our understanding of how the universe works at our scale stems quite directly from it.
P.S. What was first - nuclear reactor or nuclear bomb? Bombs were first - and sponsored by government.
No, Fermi's reactor came first. And IIRC, the Manhattan Project had to build several reactors (and thus lay the foundation for the nuclear power industry) in order to accomplish their primary mission.
In any case, this may not be an opinion with which you have much sympathy, but I'm inclined to say that on the whole, the existence of the Bomb is a good thing. Yes, it's a terrible weapon, the worst weapon ever made, in fact. But it is also the thing which kept the US and the USSR from fighting WW3 on a scale that would have dwarfed WW1 and WW2 combined, and which continues to hold the dreams of would-be Caesars and Napoleons and Hitlers in check. No one will ever try to conquer the world ag
Attention, parent poster and everyone who agrees with him: please immediately cease enjoying benefits of government-funded science. That means logging off/., getting rid of your computer -- in fact, not owning any personal electrical devices whatsoever -- refusing any medical diagnostic procedure developed after the invention of X-rays, and generally living life ca. 1900.
For those who say, "that's technology, not science!" I will note that the examples I gave were based largely on previously abstract, largely government-funded scientific research whose applications were not immediately obvious, but which have since transformed the way we live. If you don't understand the research, that's fine; you don't have to in order to take advantage of it. But just because you don't give a shit about the way things work doesn't mean that you get to stand in the way of people who do, and whose work will benefit you and your children's lives, no matter how little you deserve it.
Congratulations, you've shown that you can copy links to poorly written Wikipedia articles to justify your semi-coherent arguments in discussions you clearly don't understand. We could probably train any reasonably smart monkey to do the same.
All they seem to have is a weak correlation between the number of this gene and intelligence (which is arguable - I know some really dumb people) and as we've all learnt many times "Correlation does not imply causation."
If you RTFA (I know, I know, this is/. and that's against the rules or something) you'll see that the researchers are not claiming anything except "we found this gene, humans have a lot more copies of it than monkeys, and we think that might be important." Anything else is reporter's and/or story submitter's hype.
But there are a couple of other notes I'd like to make in response to your post, which are really responses to lots of posts of this nature. First, this is not a weak correlation; 212 vs. 37 vs. 1 is a significant difference in almost any context, and yes, we've all known some really dumb people, but unless those people are severely retarded, they're still a hell of a lot smarter than the smartest chimp or monkey. Second, I really wish people would stop invoking "correlation does not imply causation" as a mantra. Yes, it's true, but it's also true that correlation implies correlation -- by which I mean that if there is a statistically significant correlation between two variables, then it is entirely reasonable to assume that there exists some connection between them, and to use this assumption as, at the very least, a basis for further investigation.
I think people are so used to misinterpretations of correlation (almost never by scientists, BTW) that they forget that it is still a powerful and useful tool. Actually, this is true of statistics in general. Yes, it's very easy to lie with statistics; it is somewhat harder, but entirely possible and fairly common, to use them to discover great truths.
You don't get it. There's a big difference between your soundcard and his HD-DVDs...
The soundcard was a big improvement over the sound chip built into computers. The studios want people to pay a premium for these new discs that look only a hair better than regular DVDs.
I think you missed the point of the post you're responding to. The point, as I read it, was pretty much what you're saying: people don't want to pay big money for marginal improvements. Like he said, technology peaks; it happened with audio a few years back, and now we're seeing that it may also have happened with video, in the form of DVD's.
Probably the reason for the peak, in this case, is screen size. If someone were playing a DVD vs. a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc on a movie theater screen, you'd be able to tell the difference pretty fast. But as long as people are watching movies on TV's that can fit comfortably inside their houses (or, increasingly, on their computer screens) there is simply no way that any improvement over the current state of the DVD art is going to make a noticeable difference for the average viewer.
Your 'everyone else are insects' attitude fits the US-citizen stereotype perfectly
You're reading a lot more into my post than what's actually there. I don't deny that Brazil is an important market, nor that their kicking Google out would do some harm to Google's business. What I do deny is that their importance as a market is equal to Google's importance as a search engine. And this would be the case regardless of whether Google were based in the US, Brazil, Germany, India, or Outer Qwghlm; Google's importance has nothing to do with their country of origin, and everything to do with the fact that they are far and away the best search engine in existence, and likely to remain so for some time to come.
I agree, why is everyone against software patents except when the judgement is against Microsoft?
Because anything, at all, that hurts Microsoft is good for the rest of the industry. Period.
Look, I despise software patents; I think they're one of the worst hindrances to technological progress ever devised in modern times.* But one of the main reasons these bullshit patents are so prevalent is because the 900 lb. gorillas of the industry always have thousands of them, and aren't shy about using them to threaten competitors. If the largest and strongest of those gorillas (the 1000 lb. gorilla, let's say, which is currently Microsoft) can be forced on occasion to, um, slim down a little, that makes things just the teeniest bit easier for the rest of us. And it brings us closer to a truly competitive marketplace in which, just maybe, we'll see the conditions for the growth of a significant lobby, made up of companies that have suffered from the absurdity of the current patent laws, to try to do away with the stupid things entirely.
*Qualifier added because software patents, as onerous as they are, don't compare to, say, burning people at the stake. It's important to keep things in perspective.
The fact that he gets glowing articles for wearing a suit is a true case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It's the WSJ, what do you expect? That a newspaper of the PHB's, by the PHB's, and for the PHB's should see a former iconoclast going corporate as a praiseworthy sign of maturity isn't exactly a surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the Google Groups archive of the talk.origins newsgroup, which is a different animal (an ancestral form, one might say) from the Talk.Origins Archive web site. It was the site that was delisted.
And indeed, as of right now (10:35 PM CST) a Google search for "talk.origins" doesn't show any links at all to the Talk.Origins Archive. In fact, the first link that comes up is to a young-Earth creationist site which claims to offer "intellectually honest responses to the claims of evolutionism's proponents, including--but not limited to--the 'Talk.Origins' newsgroup and the 'Talk.Origins Archive' website."
Conclusions about species competing in crowded niches are left as an exercise to the reader.
It was an 8:0 decision written by Rehnquist, and agreed to by Scalia, Kennedy and O'Connor.
That was in 1988. Different world. You've got pre-Columbine, pre-9/11 thinking. Different world. Everything changed. Columbine was the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Any High School, Ever, and 9/11 was The Worst Thing That Ever Happened Anywhere, Ever. Everything changed. Terrorists. Protect the chldren. Different world. If you're not with us, the terrorists have won.
There. Hope that clears things up for you.
Patents are a creation for the publics interest and are not in the Constitution so when they work against the public they need to be revised.
Um, actually:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
I agree with you entirely that we need to revise the way and extent to which patents are issued, but the fact is that the issuance and enforcement of patents (along with copyrights) is one of the fundamental purposes of the US government, as defined by the Constitution. (You can of course start an effort to get that section amended; good luck with that.) A better approach is to look at the explanatory clause -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" -- and start ruthlessly revising those sections of IP law which do not work toward that goal.
Step 1: if it's not a physical object, a working model of which can be presented at the time of filing, don't grant a patent. Period. End of story. No software algorithms, no "business methods," no DNA sequences, etc. -- software can go copyright; the other two examples shouldn't get IP protection at all -- and no speculative ideas for something that someone might want to make someday, either.
Step 2: deem any patents which are not being actively exploited to be unenforceable, and the IP represented in them to be public domain. IOW, if you have a patent on something, you have to be either distributing it on the market, or be able to show that you're working toward the goal. Otherwise, everyone else gets a shot too.
Step 3: require patent holders to defend their patents, as is the case with trademarks. If the patent holder could reasonably be expected to be aware of a violation -- as IBM certainly could be expected to be aware of Amazon -- require them to begin legal action within one (1) year or forfeit the claim.
These three steps, if followed, would I think substantially reduce the amount of patent bullshit which is currently doing the exact opposite of "promoting] the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The lawyers whose clients still have a legitimate claim would still have plenty of work. Similar though not identical reform is needed for copyrights and trademarks; Step 1 in the former case is reducing the term of copyright to 20 years or so and keeping it there.
It is a cop's job to deal professionally (which includes not using excessive force) with people who are causing trouble. If they can't do it without going apeshit on the guy, they shouldn't be cops.
A civilian who reacted like this to somebody taunting him, arguing with him, whatever, would be headed to prison for aggravated assault. Cops, because of their position of power, should face even harsher penalties for such behavior.
I will say about this what I said about Rodney King: there is nothing that could have happened before the camera started rolling that could justify what those cops did. I don't care if this guy was Hannibal Lecter; once a suspect is incapacitated, further use of this kind of force is torture, not restraint.
Now there will no doubt be a flood of whining along the lines of, "Oh cops have such a tough job, and they deal with scumbags all day, and you just don't understaaaand!" Whatever. About, oh, fifteen years ago it was my job to render medical care to a group of people who had quite actively been trying to kill me a little while before, and who would have kept trying if they'd had the chance. And I did it, no tasers or billy clubs or attack dogs or waterboarding required. Which is why, whether it's happening halfway around the world at Abu Ghraib or right here at home in America, I have no trouble saying: fuck this shit. The people who do such things to prisoners aren't cops, or soldiers, or any kind of public servant. They're criminals, and because of their abuse of power, should be treated even more harshly than we treat serial killers, pedophiles, and other such scum.
... what's Hebrew for "Skynet"?
He's not talking about murdering people because of their religious beliefs. He's talking about murdering people because they come to your home, annoy the living shit out of you, won't take no for an answer, and occasionally shout threats at your children (true story.) While murder may be a little harsh for such an offense, I don't think there's anyone who hasn't been bothered by these nutcases who hasn't felt the urge now and then.
Governments do not have rights; people do. Governments have privileges, which may be revoked by the people at any time. Never let them forget this.
A cop at home, or in civilian clothes walking down the street, has the same rights as anyone else, including the right to privacy. A cop in uniform, on duty, is acting as an arm of the State, and has temporarily surrendered many of the rights of a private citizen, privacy definitely among them.
This doesn't apply just to cops, of course; also to politicians, soldiers, and anyone else acting in a governmental capacity, whether local, state, or federal. We always have the right to know what they are doing in our name, and every time we surrender this right, whether in the name of "privacy" or "national security" or "efficiency" or any other excuse, we surrender a vital piece of our freedom.
This is probably true of just about any form of regular exercise.
I think it's funny that "metrosexuals" are regarded as effeminate. Most of that type are in excellent shape, and the reason they spend so much time on clothes, hair, etc. is to attract women.
Really the "metrosexual" type is a return to form for the male of the species. Until fairly recently in historical terms (say, a century and a half or so) men who could afford to do it were expected to put on a display just as much as women were. The idea that caring about how you look is somehow "unmanly" is almost surely a temporary phenomenon.
The further pussification of america.
...) If you're like most fatso aging ex-jocks, maybe one of these days you'll get stuck in a dark alley with the skinny little geek who grew up to be a weightlifter, and get the chance to learn exactly how much fun it was.
Yeah, 'cause you're such a big man, posting as AC.
I'm guessing you were one of those schoolyard bullies who thought that beating the shit out of people on a regular basis was all in good fun, and maybe now that you're grown up (er, relatively speaking) you've realized that your victims didn't see it that way. (And this being Slashdot, there's a good chance that one of your erstwhile victims is reading your post
Both the UK and the US are certainly moving toward being the type of country which used to call itself a "democratic republic," but I don't think that's something we should look forward to.
Did you even read the links you posted to?
Republicanism and democracy are overlapping. The US is (theoretically) both a republic and a democracy; the UK is a democracy but not a republic, since the Queen is the head of state. Generally speaking, democracies are better places to live than non-democracies, but the same can't really be said of republics vs. non-republics -- would you rather live in the UK, or Denmark (another non-republican democracy) or in, say, Cuba, which is a republic but emphatically not a democracy?
Democracy is the end; republicanism is one of the more common means.
If people like you ran the world, we'd still be fighting off sabertooth tigers with flint-tipped spears.
... and if we just pulled into the space pits and sat there, they could catch up.
Which, given the current pathetic state of our space program, makes me expect we'll see a yellow star on a red flag planted on the Moon long before we see another Stars and Stripes.
The networks existed before Internet. Learn facts. And Internet at large is privately owned - as communication channels concerned. As well as standards used to back it are collective effort - not affiliated with any gov't. (Though it's true that DARPA sponsored protocol is the Internet Protocol)
... it wasn't until home internet access became widely available that any of them even tried to adapt by increasing access and lowering prices. And now they've almost all died a well-deserved death, with AOL marching steadily toward the grave shared by its forebears.
... until computers came along. Bernoulli's law? Great for explaining how birds fly, but not terribly practical until the invention of the internal combustion engine and this little thing called "the airplane." Quantum physics? Neat but useless stuff for the first fifty years or so ... Look, astrophysics doesn't exist in isolation; it's simply the study of how the universe works on the grand scale, and a great deal of our understanding of how the universe works at our scale stems quite directly from it.
Strictly speaking, of course, you're correct -- there were plenty of computer networks before anything that could reasonably be called "the internet" started to come into existence in the 1960's. But none of those networks became the internet; ARPAnet did. And more recently, we have perfectly good examples of what commercial networks for general use look like. Compuserve, GEnie, Prodigy, Delphi, AOL -- any of these ring a bell? Closed systems, not extensible by private users, refusing to communicate with each other, insanely expensive
Computers and algorithms were invented about 150 years ago - when science was still considered mostly private matter and not supported by gov'ts.
Babbage received a mix of private and government funding (the Crown has been funding science on a large scale a lot longer than the US government has -- actually, longer than the US government has been in existence.) And modern electronic computers were almost entirely developed, for the first critical decades of their existence, with government money.
> X-rays
X-rays? Check your facts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray - before posting.
Nice one -- leave out four crucial words and completely change the meaning of what I wrote. I wrote "after the invention of X-rays," by which I meant newer imaging methods such as CT, MRI, and PET. Also, of course, modern genetic diagnostics, which depend almost entirely on research funded by the NIH and similar institutions.
Well, yes. I do not understand how existence of black/dark/light/whatever mater would help anyone. As well as all the theories about Universe origin: in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded. I really do not understand.
You don't have to understand, and I don't have to understand, as long as someone, at some point down the line, somewhere, understands; we'll all benefit regardless. Linear algebra and numerical analysis? Mildly entertaining but utterly abstract branches of mathematics
P.S. What was first - nuclear reactor or nuclear bomb? Bombs were first - and sponsored by government.
No, Fermi's reactor came first. And IIRC, the Manhattan Project had to build several reactors (and thus lay the foundation for the nuclear power industry) in order to accomplish their primary mission.
In any case, this may not be an opinion with which you have much sympathy, but I'm inclined to say that on the whole, the existence of the Bomb is a good thing. Yes, it's a terrible weapon, the worst weapon ever made, in fact. But it is also the thing which kept the US and the USSR from fighting WW3 on a scale that would have dwarfed WW1 and WW2 combined, and which continues to hold the dreams of would-be Caesars and Napoleons and Hitlers in check. No one will ever try to conquer the world ag
Attention, parent poster and everyone who agrees with him: please immediately cease enjoying benefits of government-funded science. That means logging off /., getting rid of your computer -- in fact, not owning any personal electrical devices whatsoever -- refusing any medical diagnostic procedure developed after the invention of X-rays, and generally living life ca. 1900.
For those who say, "that's technology, not science!" I will note that the examples I gave were based largely on previously abstract, largely government-funded scientific research whose applications were not immediately obvious, but which have since transformed the way we live. If you don't understand the research, that's fine; you don't have to in order to take advantage of it. But just because you don't give a shit about the way things work doesn't mean that you get to stand in the way of people who do, and whose work will benefit you and your children's lives, no matter how little you deserve it.
Congratulations, you've shown that you can copy links to poorly written Wikipedia articles to justify your semi-coherent arguments in discussions you clearly don't understand. We could probably train any reasonably smart monkey to do the same.
All they seem to have is a weak correlation between the number of this gene and intelligence (which is arguable - I know some really dumb people) and as we've all learnt many times "Correlation does not imply causation."
/. and that's against the rules or something) you'll see that the researchers are not claiming anything except "we found this gene, humans have a lot more copies of it than monkeys, and we think that might be important." Anything else is reporter's and/or story submitter's hype.
If you RTFA (I know, I know, this is
But there are a couple of other notes I'd like to make in response to your post, which are really responses to lots of posts of this nature. First, this is not a weak correlation; 212 vs. 37 vs. 1 is a significant difference in almost any context, and yes, we've all known some really dumb people, but unless those people are severely retarded, they're still a hell of a lot smarter than the smartest chimp or monkey. Second, I really wish people would stop invoking "correlation does not imply causation" as a mantra. Yes, it's true, but it's also true that correlation implies correlation -- by which I mean that if there is a statistically significant correlation between two variables, then it is entirely reasonable to assume that there exists some connection between them, and to use this assumption as, at the very least, a basis for further investigation.
I think people are so used to misinterpretations of correlation (almost never by scientists, BTW) that they forget that it is still a powerful and useful tool. Actually, this is true of statistics in general. Yes, it's very easy to lie with statistics; it is somewhat harder, but entirely possible and fairly common, to use them to discover great truths.
You don't get it. There's a big difference between your soundcard and his HD-DVDs...
The soundcard was a big improvement over the sound chip built into computers. The studios want people to pay a premium for these new discs that look only a hair better than regular DVDs.
I think you missed the point of the post you're responding to. The point, as I read it, was pretty much what you're saying: people don't want to pay big money for marginal improvements. Like he said, technology peaks; it happened with audio a few years back, and now we're seeing that it may also have happened with video, in the form of DVD's.
Probably the reason for the peak, in this case, is screen size. If someone were playing a DVD vs. a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc on a movie theater screen, you'd be able to tell the difference pretty fast. But as long as people are watching movies on TV's that can fit comfortably inside their houses (or, increasingly, on their computer screens) there is simply no way that any improvement over the current state of the DVD art is going to make a noticeable difference for the average viewer.
Your 'everyone else are insects' attitude fits the US-citizen stereotype perfectly
You're reading a lot more into my post than what's actually there. I don't deny that Brazil is an important market, nor that their kicking Google out would do some harm to Google's business. What I do deny is that their importance as a market is equal to Google's importance as a search engine. And this would be the case regardless of whether Google were based in the US, Brazil, Germany, India, or Outer Qwghlm; Google's importance has nothing to do with their country of origin, and everything to do with the fact that they are far and away the best search engine in existence, and likely to remain so for some time to come.
... they'll be hurting Brazil a lot more than they'll be hurting Google.
I agree, why is everyone against software patents except when the judgement is against Microsoft?
Because anything, at all, that hurts Microsoft is good for the rest of the industry. Period.
Look, I despise software patents; I think they're one of the worst hindrances to technological progress ever devised in modern times.* But one of the main reasons these bullshit patents are so prevalent is because the 900 lb. gorillas of the industry always have thousands of them, and aren't shy about using them to threaten competitors. If the largest and strongest of those gorillas (the 1000 lb. gorilla, let's say, which is currently Microsoft) can be forced on occasion to, um, slim down a little, that makes things just the teeniest bit easier for the rest of us. And it brings us closer to a truly competitive marketplace in which, just maybe, we'll see the conditions for the growth of a significant lobby, made up of companies that have suffered from the absurdity of the current patent laws, to try to do away with the stupid things entirely.
*Qualifier added because software patents, as onerous as they are, don't compare to, say, burning people at the stake. It's important to keep things in perspective.
The fact that he gets glowing articles for wearing a suit is a true case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It's the WSJ, what do you expect? That a newspaper of the PHB's, by the PHB's, and for the PHB's should see a former iconoclast going corporate as a praiseworthy sign of maturity isn't exactly a surprise.
Alan Turing. Lesson: if you're gay, your government will use you to win the biggest war in history, then hound you to suicide.
John Nash: Lesson: really, really, really crazy people win Nobel prizes.
Evariste Galois. Lesson: live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.