Dump them for the nuisance they are to everyone and enact laws that dictate how rounding is performed to the nearest 5c. While at it, scrap $1 and $2 bills, and use coins for those.
Alternatively the US could do what places like Indonesia has done with virtually worthless small denominations. Shops give you sweets in your change. This would be the measure the powerful boiled sweet lobby would recommend.
Correct, but Randi has nothing to do with this. He hasn't shown anything general - e.g. cold-reading techniques - which hasn't already been shown by others before him, and where he's identified individual fraudsters he's used no more technological or detective skill than isn't employed, say, by an enthusiastic radio amateur. All Randi offers is a marketing machine plus...
Randi has very publicly debunked Uri Geller, Peter Popoff, Sai Baba, Sylvia Brown, John Edward, John of God and various others specifically as well as various other less prominent faith healers, psychics etc. He has also contributed enormously to the skeptical movement by his participation in CSI/CSICOP, the annual Amazing Meeting and so forth. To pretend he's done nothing or that his efforts are meaningless is complete nonsense. Even this documentary features interviews from some of the major speakers from the skeptic movement and they all acknowledge him for his efforts and as a leading figure. Even Carl Sagan when he was alive.
...the nonsense that argument X against person Y is any stronger just because Y cannot or will not disprove X under Z's terms after being offered $1,000,000 by Z.
Sorry but it's not under Z's terms. It's under mutually agreed terms. If I claim I can see pictures inside envelopes then I propose a test along those lines. This other person | has a million dollars riding on the result, so their interest is in ensuring that I cannot cheat but also ensuring the result is transparently obvious so there is no doubt which way it fell. So might require the contents cannot be picked up, held to the light, that a particular grade of paper be used etc. They might also suggest that the test is over 20 envelopes with a particular and obvious criteria for pass or fail. They might also provide me with the actual pictures to place over each envelope to relieve me of the ambiguity caused by drawing what I see. I might also have requirements of my own which can be reasonably accommodated (e.g. skeptics stay 50 meters back because of their negative brainwaves) or the colour of the room or distance that each envelope is space from the next or whatever. Eventually the terms of the test are defined and then mutually agreed upon. Then I perform what I say. Or don't.
You appear to think this is somehow unreasonable.
Please just spend a moment imagining what real science would be like if it were based on 1 and 2.
Who says it's science? It's a challenge with a substantial cash prize for the person who succeeds. The science can come later. Scientists would be falling over themselves to test the successful applicant.
I've said this elsewhere but it all boils down to this. If you claim that magic powers allow you to perform some feat and then someone else can perform the exact same feat without any magic at all, then the burden of proof is on you. If as a further incentive I offer you a million dollars you to perform your feat in a manner which prevents tricks (such as the way I just demonstrated) and you bluster, dodge, evade, make excuses, prevaricate, and otherwise attempt to run away from an easy test then any reasonable person might conclude you're cheating too.
And that's the fact of the matter. Randi and cohorts have more than an adequately exposed the tricks behind all kinds of so called psychic phenomena. Why isn't there a queue stretching down the road to take the million off him by demonstrating such phenomena are real? How is it that all these psychics, faith healers and all the rest who are clearly not shy of publicity or averse to making money cannot find a single half a day in their schedule to pick up the easiest million dollars they'll ever make?
There are organizations such as Oxfam, The Samaritans, Trocaire etc which have religious origins but offer valuable, impartial, non judgemental aid to people regardless of race, creed or colour.
Sadly there are a lot of other organisations which are more interested in lining their own pockets or pushing Jesus and less in the whole helping people part. Scientology seems to specialize in such rackets.
Extraordinary proof requires extraordinary evidence. Arghh I hate making typos like this which I spot 3 seconds after submitting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
All he does is recreate an event or phenomena and then make an unsubstantiated claim that it was done that way without actually proving it was done that way. (Sorry I want the smoking gun)
Well it's like this. One person demonstrates spoon bending powers which they say were bestowed by space aliens. Another person says "you bend the spoon when people are not looking" and demonstrates exactly the same effect by such means. So who is the burden of proof on? And then this second person offers the first person a million dollars to demonstrate their powers in a way that detects cheating (e.g. putting soot on the ends of the spoon) and the first person blusters, whines, prevaricates and ultimately refuses So who is making the unsubstantiated claim?
The simple fact is that Randi has satisfactorily debunked all manner of so called paranomal feats (spoon bending, cold reading, dowsing, miracle smoke, psychic healing etc.) and in some cases exposed outright fraud such as with Popoff. The burden of proof is squarely in the court of those who accept such things to demonstrate it. Extraordinary proof requires extraordinary evidence. Given that there is a million dollars on the table for a very simple demonstration of their powers you'd think Randi would have a queue going round the block.
True but he does debunk the prominent ones and does extend an offer a million dollars if they wish to demonstrate their powers in a transparent and obvious manner which eliminates winning by cheating or luck.
Randi has debunked numerous frauds, either directly such as Peter Popoff or by revealing how a common con trick is done, e.g. cold reading, spoon bending etc. I can understand his continuing existence serves as a constant nuisance to some people, especially those who prey off the gullible, or those so gullible and weak minded themselves that they leap to the defence of these transparent frauds.
So instead of taking a hit of a few weeks while contractors dig out the space he spends the next seven years driving miniature dump trucks and excavators around to accomplish the same and with no end in sight. I'm wondering what the point is here. Maybe for his next project he can attempt something similar with spoons.
If Microsoft can produce a tablet which works with a nice metro interface when you lug it around but can fall back to a classic mode, e.g. when plugged into a dock then they have a very compelling little device. You get something which is a tablet and a PC all in one without some of the limitations of previous attempts. That's assuming the device can run legacy Windows apps, i.e. we're talking about something powered by an x86 compatible chipset, not ARM.
I think the ARM story is less compelling. If a tablet doesn't support legacy apps then why care if its running Windows at all? There are lots of decent Android tablets to choose from as well as the iPad. Even if MS release tools to recompile apps against ARM, how many vendors are going to bother? Especially if Microsoft forces them to offer their apps through a storefront as seems fairly likely.
Not really equivalent. Pharmacists who refuse treatment based on their religious convictions are not doing their jobs properly. Doctors who refuse unvaccinated kids are thinking of the well being and safety of their other patients.
Parents don't have to submit to anything. They can take their business elsewhere, presumably to a doctor who doesn't mind that their precious angels are disease vectors.
Some of these things were around in nascent form but they've only been refined and popularized quite recently. As for Linux being for "real work", that will come as a surprise to people on other operating systems who I'm sure what they've been using their computer for all this time.
So was L. Ron Hubbard right about "engrams" causing PTSD?
L Ron Hubbard was a pathological liar, fantasist, wife beater, sociopath and all round nutcase. The default assumption about anything he said in the absence of evidence was that it was a self-serving lie. Not sure how you'd even be able to massage PTSD to be the same condition as chronic pain to consider him to be "right". And even if he were "right" (and he isn't) then only in the same fashion as a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
That can be illustrated with a simple example. Drag one window over the top of another. In the non-compositing world the desktop has to work out which windows have been "damaged" by being over painted and then send them paint events. Then the process which owns the window has to wake up to handle the paint event, repaint the damaged region and go back to sleep again. This impairs the desktop and the user experience.
In the compositing world each window is rendered into a surface held on the graphics card.. When one window is dragged over another there is no damage to the contents of the window so all the desktop need do is recompose the screen. It's much faster and utilises the hardware in the machine more efficiently.
Compositing also makes it easy to do things like thumbnail previews, scaling and so forth that are common features in modern desktops. It also allows windowed apps like video players and games which traditionally attempt to bypass the desktop (e.g. by carving a hole in the screen and hitting the hardware directly) to be handled through the compositor too.
A secondary issue for X11 is that it hasn't the slightest clue what compositing is. It stills thinks in terms of 2D boxes and damage so all that stuff is delegated out to an extensions which manage surfaces and damage and turns it into the compositing equivalent. This is all a bottleneck which causes its own context switches which is why many dists are keen to move to Wayland which would be designed from the ground up to support compositing. Backends for QT and GTK are well advanced so it's only a matter of time really.
A not-exhaustive list of UI advancements which have happened in the last 10 years:
Compositing. Not just for the eyecandy but for the huge performance boost it gives on computers which have the hardware to support it.
Emphasis on task centric design, i.e. only showing buttons, menus relevant to the task in hand, decluttering the user interface.
De-emphasis on spatial design
Docks instead of taskbars, being able to pin / unpin apps
Drag to edges to maximize / tile windows
Exposé - mission control, active screen corners
Ribbons
Apple Spaces, Mozilla Tab Groups - ad hoc grouping of content
Gadgets, Dashboard, Konfabulator, Tiles etc. which use fragments of CSS, XML/HTML, JS to provide extra desktop functionality like clocks, weather etc
Unified front ends for social networks, instant messaging, calendaring
Time Machine / Shadow copy
Cloud based storage
Appearance of other input devices such as touch screens
Gestures, especially on touchpad / screens such as swiping, pinch to zoom etc.
Wayland
Obviously GNOME 3 takes its influence from some of these things more than others (e.g. there is a lot of Expose about it) and doubtless has its eye on supporting others in due course (touch, Wayland). But it's clear that a lot has happened in the last 10 years that GNOME 2 really wasn't built to support.
At present I see GNOME 3 as solid but imperfect. It's only at its 2nd iteration compared to the 17 that GNOME 2 during its life. There are annoyances about it to be sure but nothing I see as insurmountable or justification for sticking with GNOME 2.
Er no. Mint utilised the extensibility of GNOME 3 to make it resemble something some users want. And in the process demonstrated that GNOME 3 has a very powerful framework and all this whining is misguided and wrong.
You don't have to jump through any hoops. Just install Mint and MGSE will give you the experience you want over a modern compositing interface.. And yes they had to rebuild. I just pointed out some reasons why and it has resulted in something which is clean modern, and vastly more extensible than GNOME 2.
It was broke and it did need fixing. GNOME 2 was far more heavily dependent on X11 (not good when dists want to dump it), was largely ignorant of things like compositing and was stuck in time from a user experience perspective. GNOME 3 is modern compositing engine which is far more extensible than GNOME 2, less attached to X11 and is also very usable to boot. The very fact that you can make it resemble GNOME 2 should amply demonstrate the fact that people are whining about nothing.
I didn't say the fallback mode. I said you can extend GNOME 3. There are extensions which alter the existing behaviour to more closely resemble GNOME 2 for those who miss particular functionality. That's pretty much what Mint is doing with its version of GNOME 3 - adding extensions.
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Alternatively the US could do what places like Indonesia has done with virtually worthless small denominations. Shops give you sweets in your change. This would be the measure the powerful boiled sweet lobby would recommend.
Correct, but Randi has nothing to do with this. He hasn't shown anything general - e.g. cold-reading techniques - which hasn't already been shown by others before him, and where he's identified individual fraudsters he's used no more technological or detective skill than isn't employed, say, by an enthusiastic radio amateur. All Randi offers is a marketing machine plus...
Randi has very publicly debunked Uri Geller, Peter Popoff, Sai Baba, Sylvia Brown, John Edward, John of God and various others specifically as well as various other less prominent faith healers, psychics etc. He has also contributed enormously to the skeptical movement by his participation in CSI/CSICOP, the annual Amazing Meeting and so forth. To pretend he's done nothing or that his efforts are meaningless is complete nonsense. Even this documentary features interviews from some of the major speakers from the skeptic movement and they all acknowledge him for his efforts and as a leading figure. Even Carl Sagan when he was alive.
...the nonsense that argument X against person Y is any stronger just because Y cannot or will not disprove X under Z's terms after being offered $1,000,000 by Z.
Sorry but it's not under Z's terms. It's under mutually agreed terms. If I claim I can see pictures inside envelopes then I propose a test along those lines. This other person | has a million dollars riding on the result, so their interest is in ensuring that I cannot cheat but also ensuring the result is transparently obvious so there is no doubt which way it fell. So might require the contents cannot be picked up, held to the light, that a particular grade of paper be used etc. They might also suggest that the test is over 20 envelopes with a particular and obvious criteria for pass or fail. They might also provide me with the actual pictures to place over each envelope to relieve me of the ambiguity caused by drawing what I see. I might also have requirements of my own which can be reasonably accommodated (e.g. skeptics stay 50 meters back because of their negative brainwaves) or the colour of the room or distance that each envelope is space from the next or whatever. Eventually the terms of the test are defined and then mutually agreed upon. Then I perform what I say. Or don't.
You appear to think this is somehow unreasonable.
Please just spend a moment imagining what real science would be like if it were based on 1 and 2.
Who says it's science? It's a challenge with a substantial cash prize for the person who succeeds. The science can come later. Scientists would be falling over themselves to test the successful applicant.
And that's the fact of the matter. Randi and cohorts have more than an adequately exposed the tricks behind all kinds of so called psychic phenomena. Why isn't there a queue stretching down the road to take the million off him by demonstrating such phenomena are real? How is it that all these psychics, faith healers and all the rest who are clearly not shy of publicity or averse to making money cannot find a single half a day in their schedule to pick up the easiest million dollars they'll ever make?
Sadly there are a lot of other organisations which are more interested in lining their own pockets or pushing Jesus and less in the whole helping people part. Scientology seems to specialize in such rackets.
Extraordinary proof requires extraordinary evidence. Arghh I hate making typos like this which I spot 3 seconds after submitting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
All he does is recreate an event or phenomena and then make an unsubstantiated claim that it was done that way without actually proving it was done that way. (Sorry I want the smoking gun)
Well it's like this. One person demonstrates spoon bending powers which they say were bestowed by space aliens. Another person says "you bend the spoon when people are not looking" and demonstrates exactly the same effect by such means. So who is the burden of proof on? And then this second person offers the first person a million dollars to demonstrate their powers in a way that detects cheating (e.g. putting soot on the ends of the spoon) and the first person blusters, whines, prevaricates and ultimately refuses So who is making the unsubstantiated claim?
The simple fact is that Randi has satisfactorily debunked all manner of so called paranomal feats (spoon bending, cold reading, dowsing, miracle smoke, psychic healing etc.) and in some cases exposed outright fraud such as with Popoff. The burden of proof is squarely in the court of those who accept such things to demonstrate it. Extraordinary proof requires extraordinary evidence. Given that there is a million dollars on the table for a very simple demonstration of their powers you'd think Randi would have a queue going round the block.
Yes and seven years of your life to enjoy it in.
True but he does debunk the prominent ones and does extend an offer a million dollars if they wish to demonstrate their powers in a transparent and obvious manner which eliminates winning by cheating or luck.
Randi has debunked numerous frauds, either directly such as Peter Popoff or by revealing how a common con trick is done, e.g. cold reading, spoon bending etc. I can understand his continuing existence serves as a constant nuisance to some people, especially those who prey off the gullible, or those so gullible and weak minded themselves that they leap to the defence of these transparent frauds.
Don't you mean into his parent's basement?
Maybe he removed the dirt from his basement by putting it in their basement.
So instead of taking a hit of a few weeks while contractors dig out the space he spends the next seven years driving miniature dump trucks and excavators around to accomplish the same and with no end in sight. I'm wondering what the point is here. Maybe for his next project he can attempt something similar with spoons.
What?
I think the ARM story is less compelling. If a tablet doesn't support legacy apps then why care if its running Windows at all? There are lots of decent Android tablets to choose from as well as the iPad. Even if MS release tools to recompile apps against ARM, how many vendors are going to bother? Especially if Microsoft forces them to offer their apps through a storefront as seems fairly likely.
The link you should be look at (past all the anti-vaxxer dribble) is this one - http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/.
Not really equivalent. Pharmacists who refuse treatment based on their religious convictions are not doing their jobs properly. Doctors who refuse unvaccinated kids are thinking of the well being and safety of their other patients.
Parents don't have to submit to anything. They can take their business elsewhere, presumably to a doctor who doesn't mind that their precious angels are disease vectors.
Some of these things were around in nascent form but they've only been refined and popularized quite recently. As for Linux being for "real work", that will come as a surprise to people on other operating systems who I'm sure what they've been using their computer for all this time.
So was L. Ron Hubbard right about "engrams" causing PTSD?
L Ron Hubbard was a pathological liar, fantasist, wife beater, sociopath and all round nutcase. The default assumption about anything he said in the absence of evidence was that it was a self-serving lie. Not sure how you'd even be able to massage PTSD to be the same condition as chronic pain to consider him to be "right". And even if he were "right" (and he isn't) then only in the same fashion as a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
In the compositing world each window is rendered into a surface held on the graphics card.. When one window is dragged over another there is no damage to the contents of the window so all the desktop need do is recompose the screen. It's much faster and utilises the hardware in the machine more efficiently.
Compositing also makes it easy to do things like thumbnail previews, scaling and so forth that are common features in modern desktops. It also allows windowed apps like video players and games which traditionally attempt to bypass the desktop (e.g. by carving a hole in the screen and hitting the hardware directly) to be handled through the compositor too.
A secondary issue for X11 is that it hasn't the slightest clue what compositing is. It stills thinks in terms of 2D boxes and damage so all that stuff is delegated out to an extensions which manage surfaces and damage and turns it into the compositing equivalent. This is all a bottleneck which causes its own context switches which is why many dists are keen to move to Wayland which would be designed from the ground up to support compositing. Backends for QT and GTK are well advanced so it's only a matter of time really.
Obviously GNOME 3 takes its influence from some of these things more than others (e.g. there is a lot of Expose about it) and doubtless has its eye on supporting others in due course (touch, Wayland). But it's clear that a lot has happened in the last 10 years that GNOME 2 really wasn't built to support.
At present I see GNOME 3 as solid but imperfect. It's only at its 2nd iteration compared to the 17 that GNOME 2 during its life. There are annoyances about it to be sure but nothing I see as insurmountable or justification for sticking with GNOME 2.
Er no. Mint utilised the extensibility of GNOME 3 to make it resemble something some users want. And in the process demonstrated that GNOME 3 has a very powerful framework and all this whining is misguided and wrong.
Yes. Or stick with what you have and quit whining.
You don't have to jump through any hoops. Just install Mint and MGSE will give you the experience you want over a modern compositing interface.. And yes they had to rebuild. I just pointed out some reasons why and it has resulted in something which is clean modern, and vastly more extensible than GNOME 2.
It was broke and it did need fixing. GNOME 2 was far more heavily dependent on X11 (not good when dists want to dump it), was largely ignorant of things like compositing and was stuck in time from a user experience perspective. GNOME 3 is modern compositing engine which is far more extensible than GNOME 2, less attached to X11 and is also very usable to boot. The very fact that you can make it resemble GNOME 2 should amply demonstrate the fact that people are whining about nothing.
I didn't say the fallback mode. I said you can extend GNOME 3. There are extensions which alter the existing behaviour to more closely resemble GNOME 2 for those who miss particular functionality. That's pretty much what Mint is doing with its version of GNOME 3 - adding extensions.