If you actually go through PJ's posts, she is generally very careful to insist that religious stereotyping be eschewed. Other Groklaw members and ACs have indeed debated whether Mormonism had any role, but the general consensus has been to argue that attitude down.
It isn't censorship; it was market issues. If you had just stuck to your embarassingly badly informed opinions, you would still be receiving a paycheck. Instead, because a simple gadfly with remarkable research skills kept blowing holes in the silly theories being floated by SCOG, you resorted to private detectives, invasion of privacy, illegal acquisition of private information (telephone records), possibly breaking and entry, and irrelevant, possibly libelous assertions in a public forum.
The MARKET - remember you WERE writing for a rag with "Linux" in the name - found it held a great distaste for your bias and your tactics. The MARKET explained to your publishers that what you would cost them monetarily could not possibly be recovered by click-throughs to your articles. Then too, losing an unpaid editorial staff might well require acquiring actual PAID talent, quickly. Besides, after that last article it was obvious that you might have a substance abuse problem, or worse, a condition that might affect the bottomline in their health insurance costs.
No, it was never about freedom of speech - you are never guaranteed an audience - just money vs. truth.
Ah, but since the lighted area which is receiving light from both the remote light source and the light saber is receiving more light, the area "shadowed" the saber is in an virtual shadow.;-)
It's the politicians who make the spending decisions you should blame, and more generally, the voters who elect those politicians...
You have that right. I have talked with people who literally seem to think "all the money we have shot into space" is somehow really in orbit out there. Arguing that "all that money" was really spent right here on the ground and that we are all benefiting from the knowledge it paid for often falls on deaf ears.
Research this some. You may be forced to conclude that the decision actually saved tens of thousands of American lives and literally millions of Japanese. I once tried researching the possibility of writing and SF novel predicated on Truman deciding not to use atomic weapons. I concluded that it could never be published. Too grim and no one wanted to read about the Soviets as the single surviving super power.
The article isn't about spreadsheets vs. pencil and paper; it's about improperly constructed spreadsheets and abysmally poor management of them. The plan may be perfectly good, but structural errors (such as a row inserted by somebody who "knows" it needs to be included, but doesn't know that the simple "fix" alters a critical cell address for a formula, and thus doesn't fix the formula) can have an indeterminately large effect throughout a model, since everything dependent upon that value will be in error. So, perhaps pencil and paper is more error prone, but a spreadsheet is more efficient at propagating it.
Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered
Once more we see the "theory not fact" song and dance, and once more there is no indication that the poster even knows enough about what he is repeating to provide a logical argument in it's support. Evolution is indeed a fact. The "theory" is in regards to the consequences of "descent with modification," a phrase actually used by Darwin, unlike "evolution" which is a word that was applied to Darwin's work by Spencer in the later 19th C.
The empirical facts that Darwin argued from are that "descent with modification" is the norm of reproduction (your children are not your clones) and that selection can effectively create a specialized subset of your descendants whose genetics differs from yours profoundly:
The Great Dane and the Dachshund, the miniature horse and the Percheron are no longer physically capable of cross breeding without human intervention; domesticated potatoes and tomatoes are edible while their wild relatives can be deadly; only with the development of DNA analysis were we able to be confident about the wild parental stock that maize is descended from).
The theory is that these two empirical facts of nature can produce a new species. Since descent takes place with modification as a norm, it is pretty much a mathematical certainty over time, even without the action of selection to consider, that drift alone will cause the extinction or gradual alteration of a parent species into a new one. When selection acts, whether it is a farmer breeding or climatic changes, the selection filters the descendants, Again, this is a fact that cannot be avoided. When a species takes up a great enough geographic range then local or regional conditions can (must actually - but you can think that through on your own) effect reproductive success selectively.
Now, just for clarification, just which aspect of the "theory" do you regard as theoretical: The two empirical facts, or is it the self-evident outcome?
How will we know if those Excel calcluations work the way they say they work?
Actually, you cane use Google to look for "spreadsheet reliability" and discover that Excel actually doesn't work all that well. I've repeated a few little experiments after doing this and verified that infact, Excel WILL under some circumstances yield a negative variance, which is nonsense. If MBH98 used Excel, then what MM identified may be only the tip of the iceberg.
To be fair to MS, most spreadsheets have similar problems to those found in Excel.
These days, vigilance is lax and "democracy" seems to be more valued than liberty anyway. The religious right and the politically correct left both seem to have an intense desire to dictate how we live our lives and the current state seems to be a "compromise" where both extremes get to do their worst.
The chief differences between the GUIs of Windows, Mac and Linux are just habit. Thanks to MS long dominance, most users are familiar with the "Windows" way. Of course that was in large part borrowed from OS/2 when Win95 came out, and seriously mangled when XP was released. Users accepted it because they had programs they used and the Win* GUI is what the programs worked demanded, unlike many Linux programs that will work in most GUIs as long as the right libraries are in the path.
What "keeps Linux from dominating the desktop" is simply user reluctance to learn something new. However, let MS continue trying to force developers to pay through the nose to develope in Windows, make the application programs stunningly expensive to users like Adobe Photoshop, S-Plus, or Oracle is, and keep up the development of Linux, KDE, GNOME, Enlightment, and the other GUIs and managers and watch. While no single GUI may dominate, cost will lead to the broad adoption of Linux and one or more of the compatible GUIs. Even if the apps rmain costly, the developers can work at less expense. They should be able to develop at less cost, provide a less expensive product and still have a good margin. Cost is what is driving linux uptake now and that is what will drive it for the foreseeable future.
Since you already have an odometer in the vehicle what advantage would the GPS provide for tracking mileage? It should simple enough to add an electronic readout if it needed. And then, why tax by mile at gas stations? If the state wants to have high mileage drivers pay by the mile the eastern "turnpike" system would work just fine. If they want to tax gas guzzlers, well they already do that. I have to agree with the tin foil bucnh on this; there's no good "tax" reason for a gps in the car, but plenty of law enforcement types would like to be able to simply query a data base to get a list of vehicles in the vicinity of a crime scene.
I need to correct a bit there. The probability is actually about 0.368 that a 1:1000000 event will occur in a million trials. I plead sleeplessness and/or lazyness. I see some other watchful souls have already noted that I stepped in the bucket. Thanks,
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
The article may very well be about pseudo-science. However trying to counter it with pseudo-reasoning and confusing distinct, well-defined statistical properties doesn't advance the cause of science. In fact it looks not only bad but desperate.
My professor in statisitics would probably have pitched an eraser at you for suggesting what amounts to an oxymoronic "high probability of the improbable." If the probability is 1:1,000,000, then in one million experiments there is a finite probability (1:1,000,000) that you may see the event once, and a lesser finite probability you would see it more than once. If something improbable turns up "significantly" as you phrase it then you check to see if the dice are honest.
In fact, the mean value of a normally distributed series of random numbers should trend toward a constant value. In the case of runs of 0s and 1s, it should trend toward 0.5 and approximate it more closely as the experiment runs.
The variance should tend to increase as less probable values fill the wings of the bell curve. The longer the series of random values the more nearly normal that trend should be and the greater the potential variance may be, since with a longer experiment you can actually acquire less probable runs that simply could not occur earlier. For instance you need to toss a coin a minimum of 20 times to have even the possibility of achieving 1:1,000,000 odds (1:1048576, actually 2^20). You would need to toss a good many more times than that before you could legitmately begin to worry of a 1:1,000,000 occurence did not show up.
That's how Los Vegas makes a living. The rubes always hope that the improbable will kiss them on the neck. In fact nothing you say actually contradicts the quote you are trying to criticize. They are discussing the mean results while you are talking about the variance.
The simplest explanation for their "correlation" is simply coincidence of highly improbable runs temporarily skewed the data. Remember that the experiment has been running for years so some really improbable runs are possible. They need a lot more disasters before they can actually test an argument based on a statistical improbability.
By the way, this means that most or all of petrified wood comes from a catastrophe, not from the "normal" course of events.
No, it doesn't. There's a broad gulph between catastrophic and rapidly occuring events. Landslides for instance are quite fast enough to bury trees and preserve then. So are volcanic eruptions. As are floods and tsunamis. Some of those events may be considered "catastrophes" on a human scale, but they are ALL perfectly normal geological processes. Some, such as floods are more or less annual events.
Update. SiC (Silicon carbide) doea occur in nature - in Nickel-Iron meteorites. It's mineral name is Moissanite (if I got the spelling correct) and it is extremely rare. In any case, it still won't serve as naturally occuring material for fossilization.
Well, yes, you are wrong. First there really is no time limit on mineralization processes or decay for that matter. The state the wood was in when it was buried, the climate, and ground water chemistry all affect the rate and outcome. Also, there is more than one form of "petrified" wood. Many pieces are really casts of wood fragments and retain only the external form.
Typical replacement minerals are agate and opal, minerals that can be transported and deposited by cold water. However, there are areas where you can look at carbonized tree trunks that are about 10 million years old. You can put a match to a piece and it will burn, rather poorly and malodorously. The logs have visible microfaults through them that are marked by thin veins of quartz. I have also been to one location where it is possible to peel leaves out of water-deposited volcanic ash, leaves that are still completely intact and organic. They were deposited 30 million years ago or so during the Sierran uplift. They aren't petrified at all.
The biggest problem with the story though is that I have never, ever heard of silicone carbide as a mineral of fossilization. As far as I can find, it's a synthetic mineral (not listed in Dana's or Mason Berry), so the "results" can't possibly exactly duplicate petrified wood - in any form. Also, the process described is a high temperature process that is unlike any environment that wood has been known to petrify in.
It's a technical comparison between the Solaris and Linux kernels.
irony-on And the unsubtle implications concerning the changes in 2.6 respecting the SCO-IBM fracas are legitimate technical observations. irony-off
The article read like troll-bait to me. A serious journalist could have simply asked developers what the technical differences are and how they are affected by the intended platforms. A serious programmer could have answered his own questions. What class does that leave article's author in - bridge dweller?
If you are going to debate in a science discussion isn't it common to quote yer source?
Yep. Not only is it customary, it's essential. Otherwise it's either a simple conversation or a pointless argument. Arguing about a scientific finding based on a journalist's article is simply a waste of time. It means absolutely nothing, content free verbiage.
The argument that the Andean Condor, being a type of vulture, isn't a bird of prey is moot: "Andean Condors may kill some living prey."
Just for grins, what other kind of prey could be killed? While considering this please also explain whether that "may" indicates uncertainty of knowledge stands for "sometimes," as in "sometimes Bald Eagles eat carrion."
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If you actually go through PJ's posts, she is generally very careful to insist that religious stereotyping be eschewed. Other Groklaw members and ACs have indeed debated whether Mormonism had any role, but the general consensus has been to argue that attitude down.
It isn't censorship; it was market issues. If you had just stuck to your embarassingly badly informed opinions, you would still be receiving a paycheck. Instead, because a simple gadfly with remarkable research skills kept blowing holes in the silly theories being floated by SCOG, you resorted to private detectives, invasion of privacy, illegal acquisition of private information (telephone records), possibly breaking and entry, and irrelevant, possibly libelous assertions in a public forum.
The MARKET - remember you WERE writing for a rag with "Linux" in the name - found it held a great distaste for your bias and your tactics. The MARKET explained to your publishers that what you would cost them monetarily could not possibly be recovered by click-throughs to your articles. Then too, losing an unpaid editorial staff might well require acquiring actual PAID talent, quickly. Besides, after that last article it was obvious that you might have a substance abuse problem, or worse, a condition that might affect the bottomline in their health insurance costs.
No, it was never about freedom of speech - you are never guaranteed an audience - just money vs. truth.
I'm sure that the SEC and IBM among others would probably spot it there. Besides, it will tweak O'Gara and she certainly has asked for it.
Several northern states were allowed to keep slaves for many years after the war ended.
Just which states were these?
Ah, but since the lighted area which is receiving light from both the remote light source and the light saber is receiving more light, the area "shadowed" the saber is in an virtual shadow. ;-)
It's the politicians who make the spending decisions you should blame, and more generally, the voters who elect those politicians...
You have that right. I have talked with people who literally seem to think "all the money we have shot into space" is somehow really in orbit out there. Arguing that "all that money" was really spent right here on the ground and that we are all benefiting from the knowledge it paid for often falls on deaf ears.
Research this some. You may be forced to conclude that the decision actually saved tens of thousands of American lives and literally millions of Japanese. I once tried researching the possibility of writing and SF novel predicated on Truman deciding not to use atomic weapons. I concluded that it could never be published. Too grim and no one wanted to read about the Soviets as the single surviving super power.
The article isn't about spreadsheets vs. pencil and paper; it's about improperly constructed spreadsheets and abysmally poor management of them. The plan may be perfectly good, but structural errors (such as a row inserted by somebody who "knows" it needs to be included, but doesn't know that the simple "fix" alters a critical cell address for a formula, and thus doesn't fix the formula) can have an indeterminately large effect throughout a model, since everything dependent upon that value will be in error. So, perhaps pencil and paper is more error prone, but a spreadsheet is more efficient at propagating it.
Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered
Once more we see the "theory not fact" song and dance, and once more there is no indication that the poster even knows enough about what he is repeating to provide a logical argument in it's support. Evolution is indeed a fact. The "theory" is in regards to the consequences of "descent with modification," a phrase actually used by Darwin, unlike "evolution" which is a word that was applied to Darwin's work by Spencer in the later 19th C.
The empirical facts that Darwin argued from are that "descent with modification" is the norm of reproduction (your children are not your clones) and that selection can effectively create a specialized subset of your descendants whose genetics differs from yours profoundly:
The Great Dane and the Dachshund, the miniature horse and the Percheron are no longer physically capable of cross breeding without human intervention; domesticated potatoes and tomatoes are edible while their wild relatives can be deadly; only with the development of DNA analysis were we able to be confident about the wild parental stock that maize is descended from).
The theory is that these two empirical facts of nature can produce a new species. Since descent takes place with modification as a norm, it is pretty much a mathematical certainty over time, even without the action of selection to consider, that drift alone will cause the extinction or gradual alteration of a parent species into a new one. When selection acts, whether it is a farmer breeding or climatic changes, the selection filters the descendants, Again, this is a fact that cannot be avoided. When a species takes up a great enough geographic range then local or regional conditions can (must actually - but you can think that through on your own) effect reproductive success selectively.
Now, just for clarification, just which aspect of the "theory" do you regard as theoretical: The two empirical facts, or is it the self-evident outcome?
N/T
How will we know if those Excel calcluations work the way they say they work?
Actually, you cane use Google to look for "spreadsheet reliability" and discover that Excel actually doesn't work all that well. I've repeated a few little experiments after doing this and verified that infact, Excel WILL under some circumstances yield a negative variance, which is nonsense. If MBH98 used Excel, then what MM identified may be only the tip of the iceberg.
To be fair to MS, most spreadsheets have similar problems to those found in Excel.
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
These days, vigilance is lax and "democracy" seems to be more valued than liberty anyway. The religious right and the politically correct left both seem to have an intense desire to dictate how we live our lives and the current state seems to be a "compromise" where both extremes get to do their worst.
The chief differences between the GUIs of Windows, Mac and Linux are just habit. Thanks to MS long dominance, most users are familiar with the "Windows" way. Of course that was in large part borrowed from OS/2 when Win95 came out, and seriously mangled when XP was released. Users accepted it because they had programs they used and the Win* GUI is what the programs worked demanded, unlike many Linux programs that will work in most GUIs as long as the right libraries are in the path.
What "keeps Linux from dominating the desktop" is simply user reluctance to learn something new. However, let MS continue trying to force developers to pay through the nose to develope in Windows, make the application programs stunningly expensive to users like Adobe Photoshop, S-Plus, or Oracle is, and keep up the development of Linux, KDE, GNOME, Enlightment, and the other GUIs and managers and watch. While no single GUI may dominate, cost will lead to the broad adoption of Linux and one or more of the compatible GUIs. Even if the apps rmain costly, the developers can work at less expense. They should be able to develop at less cost, provide a less expensive product and still have a good margin. Cost is what is driving linux uptake now and that is what will drive it for the foreseeable future.
... who goes there?
Heh
Obviously you never wasted any time in a modern literature class that covered existentialist authors, did you now?
Since you already have an odometer in the vehicle what advantage would the GPS provide for tracking mileage? It should simple enough to add an electronic readout if it needed. And then, why tax by mile at gas stations? If the state wants to have high mileage drivers pay by the mile the eastern "turnpike" system would work just fine. If they want to tax gas guzzlers, well they already do that. I have to agree with the tin foil bucnh on this; there's no good "tax" reason for a gps in the car, but plenty of law enforcement types would like to be able to simply query a data base to get a list of vehicles in the vicinity of a crime scene.
I need to correct a bit there. The probability is actually about 0.368 that a 1:1000000 event will occur in a million trials. I plead sleeplessness and/or lazyness. I see some other watchful souls have already noted that I stepped in the bucket. Thanks,
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
The article may very well be about pseudo-science. However trying to counter it with pseudo-reasoning and confusing distinct, well-defined statistical properties doesn't advance the cause of science. In fact it looks not only bad but desperate.
My professor in statisitics would probably have pitched an eraser at you for suggesting what amounts to an oxymoronic "high probability of the improbable." If the probability is 1:1,000,000, then in one million experiments there is a finite probability (1:1,000,000) that you may see the event once, and a lesser finite probability you would see it more than once. If something improbable turns up "significantly" as you phrase it then you check to see if the dice are honest.
In fact, the mean value of a normally distributed series of random numbers should trend toward a constant value. In the case of runs of 0s and 1s, it should trend toward 0.5 and approximate it more closely as the experiment runs.
The variance should tend to increase as less probable values fill the wings of the bell curve. The longer the series of random values the more nearly normal that trend should be and the greater the potential variance may be, since with a longer experiment you can actually acquire less probable runs that simply could not occur earlier. For instance you need to toss a coin a minimum of 20 times to have even the possibility of achieving 1:1,000,000 odds (1:1048576, actually 2^20). You would need to toss a good many more times than that before you could legitmately begin to worry of a 1:1,000,000 occurence did not show up.
That's how Los Vegas makes a living. The rubes always hope that the improbable will kiss them on the neck. In fact nothing you say actually contradicts the quote you are trying to criticize. They are discussing the mean results while you are talking about the variance.
The simplest explanation for their "correlation" is simply coincidence of highly improbable runs temporarily skewed the data. Remember that the experiment has been running for years so some really improbable runs are possible. They need a lot more disasters before they can actually test an argument based on a statistical improbability.
By the way, this means that most or all of petrified wood comes from a catastrophe, not from the "normal" course of events.
No, it doesn't. There's a broad gulph between catastrophic and rapidly occuring events. Landslides for instance are quite fast enough to bury trees and preserve then. So are volcanic eruptions. As are floods and tsunamis. Some of those events may be considered "catastrophes" on a human scale, but they are ALL perfectly normal geological processes. Some, such as floods are more or less annual events.
Update. SiC (Silicon carbide) doea occur in nature - in Nickel-Iron meteorites. It's mineral name is Moissanite (if I got the spelling correct) and it is extremely rare. In any case, it still won't serve as naturally occuring material for fossilization.
Well, yes, you are wrong. First there really is no time limit on mineralization processes or decay for that matter. The state the wood was in when it was buried, the climate, and ground water chemistry all affect the rate and outcome. Also, there is more than one form of "petrified" wood. Many pieces are really casts of wood fragments and retain only the external form.
Typical replacement minerals are agate and opal, minerals that can be transported and deposited by cold water. However, there are areas where you can look at carbonized tree trunks that are about 10 million years old. You can put a match to a piece and it will burn, rather poorly and malodorously. The logs have visible microfaults through them that are marked by thin veins of quartz. I have also been to one location where it is possible to peel leaves out of water-deposited volcanic ash, leaves that are still completely intact and organic. They were deposited 30 million years ago or so during the Sierran uplift. They aren't petrified at all.
The biggest problem with the story though is that I have never, ever heard of silicone carbide as a mineral of fossilization. As far as I can find, it's a synthetic mineral (not listed in Dana's or Mason Berry), so the "results" can't possibly exactly duplicate petrified wood - in any form. Also, the process described is a high temperature process that is unlike any environment that wood has been known to petrify in.
It's a technical comparison between the Solaris and Linux kernels.
irony-on And the unsubtle implications concerning the changes in 2.6 respecting the SCO-IBM fracas are legitimate technical observations. irony-off
The article read like troll-bait to me. A serious journalist could have simply asked developers what the technical differences are and how they are affected by the intended platforms. A serious programmer could have answered his own questions. What class does that leave article's author in - bridge dweller?
If you are going to debate in a science discussion isn't it common to quote yer source?
Yep. Not only is it customary, it's essential. Otherwise it's either a simple conversation or a pointless argument. Arguing about a scientific finding based on a journalist's article is simply a waste of time. It means absolutely nothing, content free verbiage.
Nah. It's a great novel.
The argument that the Andean Condor, being a type of vulture, isn't a bird of prey is moot: "Andean Condors may kill some living prey."
Just for grins, what other kind of prey could be killed? While considering this please also explain whether that "may" indicates uncertainty of knowledge stands for "sometimes," as in "sometimes Bald Eagles eat carrion."