Disposing of a lot of paper isn't hard at all, companies do it constantly without anyone noticing or caring.
Unless the company is under investigation, in which case a whole lot of people notice and care. And it's very often possible to find the people whose job it is and, with appropriate pressure, get them to admit what documents they were assigned to destroy.
Look, of course if the election is corrupt enough, it doesn't matter. The USSR held paper-ballot "elections" for seventy years in which the Communist candidates always got some randomly chosen but large percentage of the vote; everyone knew that had nothing to do with reality, but it wasn't like there was anything anyone could do about it. But if you have a country with a reasonably honest election system, the kind of petty vote-rigging that can throw a close election is a lot harder to get away with when there's a physical record. Preferably a large, bulky record that will take time to destroy, and real effort to tamper with in other ways.
I don't know anything about Honduran politics and don't claim to. But in the US, our preferred method of dealing with questionable elections is the recount. With paper ballots, this make sense, and you can bet the process will be closely watched; if there is serious ballot tampering going on, there's a good chance that someone will talk. With electronic results, what you basically get is, "We ran the query and it gave us the same count as last time -- imagine that!"
You may not have noticed this, but paper ballots are... made of paper. And lots of ballots take up lots of space. They're heavy. They have to be disposed of. This takes time. People notice. There are witnesses. The amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of a fully computerized election is so much less than the amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of an election that uses paper ballots that the two aren't really comparable.
Of course paper ballots are no guarantee of an honest election. Nor is there any guarantee that locking your door will keep your house from being broken into. But an all-electronic election is like leaving your front door hanging wide open and putting a sign in your yard that says, "Come take stuff."
I would definitely want to know if this was part of the training for any medical professional that tended to me so that I could leave and find someone else.
Why? Would you refuse to have CPR from someone who had trained on dummies because, you know, dummies aren't people? What is it about the idea of having virtual-world computer training as part of a complete medical curriculum that bothers people so much?
Amazing. Did you even read the summary, to say nothing of the article? No one, no one, is talking about replacing hands-on training with Second Life. It's a preparation. A supplement. A place to play with scenarios that you can't easily replicate with actors, and to give colleagues from widely separated geographical locations a way to work together at least to some degree.
Me, I'm a veteran military medic and civilian EMT with ten years of experience in emergency medicine, so I hope, almost-doctor, that you'll take a little advice from an old soldier. The more you train, the better you will do when you face the real thing. Now, it is entirely true that no training of any kind will ever replace the real thing. Doing CPR on a dummy isn't like doing it on a real person at three in the morning in a rainy alley. Reading a cardiac monitor trace in a classroom isn't the same as doing it under pressure in an ER with people screaming at you. Putting an IV needle in your classmates is a hell of a lot easier than hunting for a vein in someone who's nearly bled out, where you only get one shot and if you don't get the patient's fluid volume up in five minutes he'll die. But you have to practice these skills, over and over again, to the point where your hands and eyes know what to do even when your brain forgets.
If you haven't learned this lesson yet, believe me, in residency you will.
And personally, I would have loved to have this kind of simulation around when I was training. It would have been very helpful in helping people get their heads around the intricacies of emergency medicine operations. Not so much the actual hands-on procedures (although there's some interesting simulation work going on in that area too) but navigating the controlled chaos of an emergency scene or busy ER. Would it have been a substitute for live training, or for the experience of the real thing? Of course not. But it would have been a fine place to start. The more training you do, and the more different kinds of training you do, the better you will handle it when someone's life is literally in your hands.
It's hard to imagine Cold War tensions getting much higher than they actually did. If we'd continued the "space race" (treated the race as a marathon rather than a sprint, so to speak) we'd simply have substituted one form of competition with the Soviets for another -- and you know, seeing who could build the most space stations and Lunar colonies would have been a much better form of competition than seeing who could blow each other up the most times over.
We could have built half the military-industrial complex we did, still had more than enough for MAD, and put the money into NASA. The USSR would almost surely still have collapsed, and today we'd have an American solar system instead of a bunch of missiles and silos that we're not sure what to do with.
Anyone who describes selling used anything this way is clearly so out of touch with reality that their opinion on the subject isn't worth listening to.
The primary reason that game developers (and marketers) should shut up about used games? It's not because it may act as advertising for their future games, although that's a valid economic argument. It's because if you buy something, you own it, and it is yours to do with as you wish. Don't talk about "selling" people games if you're not willing to, you know, sell them. Rent them out, whatever. But when you agree to have your products on store shelves (store, not rental facility) or listed as "for sale" in online catalogs, you are giving up the right to control what people do with the physical media after they buy them. Period. End of story. Game over, man, game over.
Movie studios, music labels, book publishers: you too.
Huh? The main function of a jury in any criminal case is to decide whether or not the defendant broke the law, not whether or not the law is fair. If it were really true that "[t]here is precisely zero point in having a jury if they aren't judging the law," then in cases involving laws that pretty much everyone agrees on -- murder, for example, or armed robbery -- we wouldn't have juries at all. But of course we do, and in fact we regard the integrity and competence of the jury as being most important in precisely those cases where both the crime and the legal penalty for the crime are the most clear-cut and severe.
Can you point out to me where in the Constitution jury nullification is mentioned?
Seriously, AFAIK, jury nullification is something we inherited from English common law, and was never really codified. It's a fine idea, but people who are making it out to be an inviolable right up there with free speech or the bearing of arms are going a bit overboard.
What does "sequence a genome" actually mean. The name "sequence" suggests that it has something to do with the "order" of something. Your post makes it sound like sequencing is something done before the computer gets ahold of the data. Can you explain for us genetics laypersons what the heck "sequencing" is? Tnx.
Very simply: Your DNA is stored in chromosomes. Each chromosome contains DNA in tight bundles with lots of weird secondary and tertiary structure. Suppose that you took all the chromosomes from one of your cells -- i.e., your genome -- unwound the DNA into long threads, and laid those threads out. You'd then have the chemical equivalent of strings of characters, e.g. ACGTGCATT..., one for each chromosome, where each character represents a particular base. (I'm not going to get into the biochemistry, and anyway, there are probably people here who can explain it better than I can -- I'm a bioinformaticist, but mainly a numbers guy.) This ordered set of strings of characters is what's known as "the sequence," and "to sequence" a genome is to obtain that set.
Unfortunately, the actual sequencing process is a hell of a lot more complicated than what I just described, and considerable computational power is required at all stages of the process. But really the number crunching isn't the bottleneck, it's the biochemistry. And that's been improving rapidly, so now we have the ability to do the "wet-lab" work necessary to get an entire human (or any other organism) genome sequence a lot faster than we used to.
The vast majority of genes only have effects when translated into protein
That depends on your definition. If you define a gene as "stretch of DNA that is translated into protein," which until fairly recently was the going definition, then of course your statement is tautologically true (replacing "the vast majority of" with "all.") But if you define it as "a stretch of DNA that does something biologically interesting," then it's no longer at all clear. Given the number of regulatory elements not directly associated with genes, sections of DNA that code for RNAzymes, etc., it may well be that the majority of "genes" are not protein-coding at all. Going back to the Mendelian definition of a gene as a unit of inheritance, this looks more and more likely.
The point is that a lot of people are claiming the MSM is obsolete and blogs are the way of the future -- I think I've seen a good thirty/. posts to that effect in just the last month -- and this study pretty clearly shows that it isn't true.
I was wondering that myself -- obviously if they were self-selecting, the results are worthless. (Or rather, they tell us something interesting, but that something isn't what the article claims.) So I read the journal article, and speaking as a biostatistician, I'm pretty happy with the study design. They did in fact randomize into experimental and control groups, and did a repeated measures design, i.e., all participants were in both swearing and non-swearing groups but the order was randomized, so one subject might be in the swearing group first and then the non-swearing group, while another might be in non-swearing and then swearing. If you happen to be a student or faculty at a school with a library with access to the journal, it's worth reading; it's a nice, almost textbook example of how to report this kind of work.
You're missing the point (of course). People who make under $250k are absolutely going to be paying more taxes. A LOT more taxes. Have fun with that.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? At all? Besides "Barack Hussein Obama is a non-natural-born secret Muslim black Nazi socialist communist DemocRAT, so of course he wants to take my hard-earned money away!", I mean?
The view you hold -- "God set up the rules and conditions so that what he wanted to happen would happen" -- is called deism, and it is emphatically not what people mean when they say "guided by a supreme being." The latter is intelligent design, and it's been a depressingly successful stealth tactic for creationists. Deism is perfectly compatible with a scientific study of life. ID says basically, when you find a hard biological problem, throw up your hands and say "Goddidit."
Just why would anyone think downloading something that has a copyright on it would be illegal?
Maybe because the copyright lobby has been pushing the "downloading X is illegal" meme for all it's worth (X = music, movies, software,...) without bothering to draw a distinction between the circumstances under which it's legal and the (far larger number of) circumstances where it's perfectly legal.
Can we please stop talking about a bunch of APIs as a "technology?" Ever since Intel started pushing "MMX technology" back in the day, every tiny remix of existing ideas and principles, whether in hardware or software, is marketed as "___ technology." It's absurd.
The computer, taken as a whole, is a technology. The personal (desktop, laptop, handheld) computer is maybe a technology. I'll even go so far as to grant that certain features which make modern computing what it is -- the GUI, say, and always-on networking plus worldwide connectivity -- count as technologies. But one particular implementation of the well-explored idea of languages that are JIT-compiled to bytecode, whether from Microsoft or the F/OSS community or anyone else, is not a technology. It's a reasonably clever use of existing technology, and that's all.
Or maybe I should just give up and call every slight variant of Hello World "GNU/iCyberHello Pro Gold Technology Plus Plus Sharp." You know it's coming.
Where would we have been if we'd kept up the pace from the moon landing?
All over the Solar System, probably. Believe me, the engineers were planning it. (My Dad was one of them, so I have this on pretty good authority.) But once we Beat! The! Commies! To! The! Moon!, the national will disappeared, and with it the money.
So the answer to your first question is pretty much financial. Look at how much we spent on just Apollo, as a percentage of GDP, compared to how much we spend on all of NASA now... and consider that the space budget has been a convenient target for Senators and Representatives who want to be able to tell their constituents that they're reining in wasteful government spending for, well, forty years or so. It's bullshit, of course, since NASA spending has never, even at the most expensive point in the Apollo program, been more than a tiny fraction of what we spend on many other programs with a far lower rate of return. But it's bullshit that plays well to ignorant audiences.
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Yours is the standard argument for why cities should build stadiums for major-league teams. Except it never quite seems to work out that way, at least in cities where I've lived (Denver and Minneapolis) which have recently done so. The team owners extract all kinds of special concessions from the cities to the point where the cities end up with all the costs -- traffic control around the stadiums, existing neighborhoods and businesses wiped out, infrastructure costs for the stadium, and of course the construction costs themselves, which always always always go overbudget -- while the owners end up with the benefits, including not only the ticket sales but also such goodies as sales tax exemptions on goods sold inside the stadium, which means they can charge more and keep all the profits. It looks a hell of a lot like a racket; if you've got solid evidence to the contrary, go for it.
Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
The section of my post that you quote contains the answer to your question. That's what a confounding factor is.
To take a very simple example: if you examine two populations, one consisting of old smokers who frequently die of heart attacks and another consisting of young non-smokers who rarely die of heart attacks, and conclude that smoking increases the risk of death by heart attack, then you're clearly drawing a false conclusion. (Or rather, you may be getting the right answer, but you have no way of knowing if it's right or not.) However, if you adjust for age, sex, race, environmental exposure, diet, exercise, and any other identifiable factors that may contribute to heart problems, and you can show that the smokers still have more fatal heart attacks than the non-smokers, then you have a very powerful argument that smoking makes you more likely to die of a heart attack. If your sample size is sufficiently large, and if you can convince people that you've accounted for all the likely confounders, then you have come as close to "proof" as science can ever come.
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Sing it, brother!
It's a kind of pseudo-intellectual argument which is, unfortunately, very appealing to geeks. Stupid, ignorant people are prone to assuming that correlation always implies causation (even if they don't know to put it in those words) and drawing conclusions that reasonably intelligent, slightly less ignorant people can clearly see are false. So at some point they read a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies on the web, come across "correlation does not imply causation," and think, "Ah hah! That explains what all those stupid people are doing!" At which point it becomes the proverbial hammer for which every problem is a nail.
...
In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established. Everything you think you know about the way the world works is based on a correlation so significant that nobody seriously expects it to turn out the be an artifact. And that's all we've got.
Slashdot Mirror
Disposing of a lot of paper isn't hard at all, companies do it constantly without anyone noticing or caring.
Unless the company is under investigation, in which case a whole lot of people notice and care. And it's very often possible to find the people whose job it is and, with appropriate pressure, get them to admit what documents they were assigned to destroy.
Look, of course if the election is corrupt enough, it doesn't matter. The USSR held paper-ballot "elections" for seventy years in which the Communist candidates always got some randomly chosen but large percentage of the vote; everyone knew that had nothing to do with reality, but it wasn't like there was anything anyone could do about it. But if you have a country with a reasonably honest election system, the kind of petty vote-rigging that can throw a close election is a lot harder to get away with when there's a physical record. Preferably a large, bulky record that will take time to destroy, and real effort to tamper with in other ways.
I don't know anything about Honduran politics and don't claim to. But in the US, our preferred method of dealing with questionable elections is the recount. With paper ballots, this make sense, and you can bet the process will be closely watched; if there is serious ballot tampering going on, there's a good chance that someone will talk. With electronic results, what you basically get is, "We ran the query and it gave us the same count as last time -- imagine that!"
You may not have noticed this, but paper ballots are ... made of paper. And lots of ballots take up lots of space. They're heavy. They have to be disposed of. This takes time. People notice. There are witnesses. The amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of a fully computerized election is so much less than the amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of an election that uses paper ballots that the two aren't really comparable.
Of course paper ballots are no guarantee of an honest election. Nor is there any guarantee that locking your door will keep your house from being broken into. But an all-electronic election is like leaving your front door hanging wide open and putting a sign in your yard that says, "Come take stuff."
I would definitely want to know if this was part of the training for any medical professional that tended to me so that I could leave and find someone else.
Why? Would you refuse to have CPR from someone who had trained on dummies because, you know, dummies aren't people? What is it about the idea of having virtual-world computer training as part of a complete medical curriculum that bothers people so much?
Amazing. Did you even read the summary, to say nothing of the article? No one, no one, is talking about replacing hands-on training with Second Life. It's a preparation. A supplement. A place to play with scenarios that you can't easily replicate with actors, and to give colleagues from widely separated geographical locations a way to work together at least to some degree.
Me, I'm a veteran military medic and civilian EMT with ten years of experience in emergency medicine, so I hope, almost-doctor, that you'll take a little advice from an old soldier. The more you train, the better you will do when you face the real thing. Now, it is entirely true that no training of any kind will ever replace the real thing. Doing CPR on a dummy isn't like doing it on a real person at three in the morning in a rainy alley. Reading a cardiac monitor trace in a classroom isn't the same as doing it under pressure in an ER with people screaming at you. Putting an IV needle in your classmates is a hell of a lot easier than hunting for a vein in someone who's nearly bled out, where you only get one shot and if you don't get the patient's fluid volume up in five minutes he'll die. But you have to practice these skills, over and over again, to the point where your hands and eyes know what to do even when your brain forgets.
If you haven't learned this lesson yet, believe me, in residency you will.
And personally, I would have loved to have this kind of simulation around when I was training. It would have been very helpful in helping people get their heads around the intricacies of emergency medicine operations. Not so much the actual hands-on procedures (although there's some interesting simulation work going on in that area too) but navigating the controlled chaos of an emergency scene or busy ER. Would it have been a substitute for live training, or for the experience of the real thing? Of course not. But it would have been a fine place to start. The more training you do, and the more different kinds of training you do, the better you will handle it when someone's life is literally in your hands.
It's hard to imagine Cold War tensions getting much higher than they actually did. If we'd continued the "space race" (treated the race as a marathon rather than a sprint, so to speak) we'd simply have substituted one form of competition with the Soviets for another -- and you know, seeing who could build the most space stations and Lunar colonies would have been a much better form of competition than seeing who could blow each other up the most times over.
We could have built half the military-industrial complex we did, still had more than enough for MAD, and put the money into NASA. The USSR would almost surely still have collapsed, and today we'd have an American solar system instead of a bunch of missiles and silos that we're not sure what to do with.
Anyone who describes selling used anything this way is clearly so out of touch with reality that their opinion on the subject isn't worth listening to.
The primary reason that game developers (and marketers) should shut up about used games? It's not because it may act as advertising for their future games, although that's a valid economic argument. It's because if you buy something, you own it, and it is yours to do with as you wish. Don't talk about "selling" people games if you're not willing to, you know, sell them. Rent them out, whatever. But when you agree to have your products on store shelves (store, not rental facility) or listed as "for sale" in online catalogs, you are giving up the right to control what people do with the physical media after they buy them. Period. End of story. Game over, man, game over.
Movie studios, music labels, book publishers: you too.
Huh? The main function of a jury in any criminal case is to decide whether or not the defendant broke the law, not whether or not the law is fair. If it were really true that "[t]here is precisely zero point in having a jury if they aren't judging the law," then in cases involving laws that pretty much everyone agrees on -- murder, for example, or armed robbery -- we wouldn't have juries at all. But of course we do, and in fact we regard the integrity and competence of the jury as being most important in precisely those cases where both the crime and the legal penalty for the crime are the most clear-cut and severe.
This "Citizens Rule Book" you seem so enamored of is not something that any sane person would take as a guide to US law.
Can you point out to me where in the Constitution jury nullification is mentioned?
Seriously, AFAIK, jury nullification is something we inherited from English common law, and was never really codified. It's a fine idea, but people who are making it out to be an inviolable right up there with free speech or the bearing of arms are going a bit overboard.
What does "sequence a genome" actually mean. The name "sequence" suggests that it has something to do with the "order" of something. Your post makes it sound like sequencing is something done before the computer gets ahold of the data. Can you explain for us genetics laypersons what the heck "sequencing" is? Tnx.
Very simply: Your DNA is stored in chromosomes. Each chromosome contains DNA in tight bundles with lots of weird secondary and tertiary structure. Suppose that you took all the chromosomes from one of your cells -- i.e., your genome -- unwound the DNA into long threads, and laid those threads out. You'd then have the chemical equivalent of strings of characters, e.g. ACGTGCATT ..., one for each chromosome, where each character represents a particular base. (I'm not going to get into the biochemistry, and anyway, there are probably people here who can explain it better than I can -- I'm a bioinformaticist, but mainly a numbers guy.) This ordered set of strings of characters is what's known as "the sequence," and "to sequence" a genome is to obtain that set.
Unfortunately, the actual sequencing process is a hell of a lot more complicated than what I just described, and considerable computational power is required at all stages of the process. But really the number crunching isn't the bottleneck, it's the biochemistry. And that's been improving rapidly, so now we have the ability to do the "wet-lab" work necessary to get an entire human (or any other organism) genome sequence a lot faster than we used to.
The vast majority of genes only have effects when translated into protein
That depends on your definition. If you define a gene as "stretch of DNA that is translated into protein," which until fairly recently was the going definition, then of course your statement is tautologically true (replacing "the vast majority of" with "all.") But if you define it as "a stretch of DNA that does something biologically interesting," then it's no longer at all clear. Given the number of regulatory elements not directly associated with genes, sections of DNA that code for RNAzymes, etc., it may well be that the majority of "genes" are not protein-coding at all. Going back to the Mendelian definition of a gene as a unit of inheritance, this looks more and more likely.
The point is that a lot of people are claiming the MSM is obsolete and blogs are the way of the future -- I think I've seen a good thirty /. posts to that effect in just the last month -- and this study pretty clearly shows that it isn't true.
So in other words, you're counting pretty much any economic policy you don't like as a tax. Right.
Tell you what, why don't you come up with a definition of "tax" that isn't so broad as to be meaningless, and then we'll talk.
I was wondering that myself -- obviously if they were self-selecting, the results are worthless. (Or rather, they tell us something interesting, but that something isn't what the article claims.) So I read the journal article, and speaking as a biostatistician, I'm pretty happy with the study design. They did in fact randomize into experimental and control groups, and did a repeated measures design, i.e., all participants were in both swearing and non-swearing groups but the order was randomized, so one subject might be in the swearing group first and then the non-swearing group, while another might be in non-swearing and then swearing. If you happen to be a student or faculty at a school with a library with access to the journal, it's worth reading; it's a nice, almost textbook example of how to report this kind of work.
You're missing the point (of course). People who make under $250k are absolutely going to be paying more taxes. A LOT more taxes. Have fun with that.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? At all? Besides "Barack Hussein Obama is a non-natural-born secret Muslim black Nazi socialist communist DemocRAT, so of course he wants to take my hard-earned money away!", I mean?
here in the US we acknowledge that actions committed in other countries fall under the laws of that country
LOL!
Oh, wait, you were serious, weren't you?
BWAHAHAHA!
The view you hold -- "God set up the rules and conditions so that what he wanted to happen would happen" -- is called deism, and it is emphatically not what people mean when they say "guided by a supreme being." The latter is intelligent design, and it's been a depressingly successful stealth tactic for creationists. Deism is perfectly compatible with a scientific study of life. ID says basically, when you find a hard biological problem, throw up your hands and say "Goddidit."
Oops. That should have been "... under which it's illegal and ...", of course.
Just why would anyone think downloading something that has a copyright on it would be illegal?
Maybe because the copyright lobby has been pushing the "downloading X is illegal" meme for all it's worth (X = music, movies, software, ...) without bothering to draw a distinction between the circumstances under which it's legal and the (far larger number of) circumstances where it's perfectly legal.
a subset of Microsoft .NET technology
Can we please stop talking about a bunch of APIs as a "technology?" Ever since Intel started pushing "MMX technology" back in the day, every tiny remix of existing ideas and principles, whether in hardware or software, is marketed as "___ technology." It's absurd.
The computer, taken as a whole, is a technology. The personal (desktop, laptop, handheld) computer is maybe a technology. I'll even go so far as to grant that certain features which make modern computing what it is -- the GUI, say, and always-on networking plus worldwide connectivity -- count as technologies. But one particular implementation of the well-explored idea of languages that are JIT-compiled to bytecode, whether from Microsoft or the F/OSS community or anyone else, is not a technology. It's a reasonably clever use of existing technology, and that's all.
Or maybe I should just give up and call every slight variant of Hello World "GNU/iCyberHello Pro Gold Technology Plus Plus Sharp." You know it's coming.
Before you critizise, please learn to spell.
I think I'm going to leave that line sitting there by itself for a while, in all its lonely glory.
Where would we have been if we'd kept up the pace from the moon landing?
All over the Solar System, probably. Believe me, the engineers were planning it. (My Dad was one of them, so I have this on pretty good authority.) But once we Beat! The! Commies! To! The! Moon!, the national will disappeared, and with it the money.
So the answer to your first question is pretty much financial. Look at how much we spent on just Apollo, as a percentage of GDP, compared to how much we spend on all of NASA now ... and consider that the space budget has been a convenient target for Senators and Representatives who want to be able to tell their constituents that they're reining in wasteful government spending for, well, forty years or so. It's bullshit, of course, since NASA spending has never, even at the most expensive point in the Apollo program, been more than a tiny fraction of what we spend on many other programs with a far lower rate of return. But it's bullshit that plays well to ignorant audiences.
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Yours is the standard argument for why cities should build stadiums for major-league teams. Except it never quite seems to work out that way, at least in cities where I've lived (Denver and Minneapolis) which have recently done so. The team owners extract all kinds of special concessions from the cities to the point where the cities end up with all the costs -- traffic control around the stadiums, existing neighborhoods and businesses wiped out, infrastructure costs for the stadium, and of course the construction costs themselves, which always always always go overbudget -- while the owners end up with the benefits, including not only the ticket sales but also such goodies as sales tax exemptions on goods sold inside the stadium, which means they can charge more and keep all the profits. It looks a hell of a lot like a racket; if you've got solid evidence to the contrary, go for it.
Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
The section of my post that you quote contains the answer to your question. That's what a confounding factor is.
To take a very simple example: if you examine two populations, one consisting of old smokers who frequently die of heart attacks and another consisting of young non-smokers who rarely die of heart attacks, and conclude that smoking increases the risk of death by heart attack, then you're clearly drawing a false conclusion. (Or rather, you may be getting the right answer, but you have no way of knowing if it's right or not.) However, if you adjust for age, sex, race, environmental exposure, diet, exercise, and any other identifiable factors that may contribute to heart problems, and you can show that the smokers still have more fatal heart attacks than the non-smokers, then you have a very powerful argument that smoking makes you more likely to die of a heart attack. If your sample size is sufficiently large, and if you can convince people that you've accounted for all the likely confounders, then you have come as close to "proof" as science can ever come.
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Sing it, brother!
It's a kind of pseudo-intellectual argument which is, unfortunately, very appealing to geeks. Stupid, ignorant people are prone to assuming that correlation always implies causation (even if they don't know to put it in those words) and drawing conclusions that reasonably intelligent, slightly less ignorant people can clearly see are false. So at some point they read a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies on the web, come across "correlation does not imply causation," and think, "Ah hah! That explains what all those stupid people are doing!" At which point it becomes the proverbial hammer for which every problem is a nail.
...
In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established. Everything you think you know about the way the world works is based on a correlation so significant that nobody seriously expects it to turn out the be an artifact. And that's all we've got.