I've heard it described as a form of 'bastard copperplate'.
Learning cursive messed up my handwriting quite a bit, so I ditched it completely in my third last year of school in favor of legible printing (so that markers would be able to read my exams).
As someone who occasionally visits your country (with a New Zealand passport and valid work visa), I can tell you that all non-US citizens are already subject to this indignity, for no better reasons than you will be. It's unfortunately just the next step (I've never been fingerprinted going into any other country, or any other time at all for that matter).
> The whole issue is that the water you're diluting it with will, by homeopathic principles, have "memories" of other things.
No it won't - according to what homeopaths actually claim if you bother to look, keeping the "memory" of something takes some care and erasing it is actually pretty easy - for instance sunlight will do it.
> Well I've seen myself fly, and I don't see a reason to demonstrate it for you. My flight is impossible to test in an empirical way for reasons I'll never bother to explain, and I take your assertion that I should prove myself as an example of the Establishment trying to Keep Me Down. Why are you so full of Hate for those of us who have The Truth about buoyancy and gravity?
You won't find me full of hate - I just won't be interested without evidence (and yes, I will think you are a crackpot, but I won't bother wasting my time saying so).
The key difference between your flying example and homeopathy is that the only scientific demonstration either way for homeopathy is statistical - and there's too many ways to bias (sometimes accidentally) those results in either direction. That's why studies are coming up with results all the time (on all sorts of things), and other studies then disagree. If someone takes a homeopathic remedy and a chronic skin rash goes away or they can now safely eat foods that used to make them ill, that is all anecdotal and no sort of scientific data point - it's helpful for that person though, even if they weren't part of a double-blind experiment. Someday when I've got a lot more spare time, I'd be curious to see how you set up a double-blind experiment for something where each person gets treated not just on a symptom, but the whole picture.
> None of Randi's arguments stands on its own and you seem to think that makes them bad.
No, what is bad (at least in the contexts that I've seen it) is that for pretty much all the other stuff he does, he's careful and got some pretty solid demonstration as to what is actually going on, and he throws this into the middle without being able to directly demonstrate anything, hence my claim of 'borrowed authority'.
> You've clearly missed basically every creationist tract and every alternative medicine rant against Big Pharma.
I wasn't aware that homeopaths were responsible for creationists tracts. As for rants against Big Pharma, you don't need to have an interest in alternative medicine to see that there are an awful lot of unnecessary drugs pushed to people as a quick fix (no conspiracy required - it's a natural consequence of following the money, it's no better or worse than what is done with big food or big software). I've not seen anyone suggest we should give up all drugs as fraudulent (although it's not the sort of thing I go looking for, and I'm sure there's plenty of people out there saying that who I have missed).
> As he points out, how does one get water with a "clean slate" that doesn't have the "memory" of something else in it?
That's a red herring. If you are prepared to accept the "memory" in the first place, then perhaps the 10:1 dilutions will deal with that - at any stage, there is never going to be _that_ big an impurity. I did a bit of reading about this many years ago, and it's actually internally pretty self consistent.
> If I said that I could fill my lungs full of air and fly, would you laughing at me and pointing out that I was violating a number of basic principles of physics be a weak appeal to the fact that my claim was "counterintuitive" or a relatively damning indictment of my claim in the absence of other evidence?
No, I'd simply ask you to demonstrate it, and let your failure to do so speak for itself. Something like that should be easy to demonstrate if it was true.
> It would require a fundamental rewrite of chemistry and physics.
This is actually my biggest problem with homeopathy. It's worth pointing out however that those fundamental rewrites do sometimes happen - 105 years ago we didn't have relativity or quantum physics (and some of the results of quantum physics are mind-bendingly counter-intuitive, which is why I don't regard counter-intuitivity as being particularly damning). Another example - the relatively recent discovery of prions overturned the "Central dogma of molecular biology".
> First is the obvious and offensive contempt the alternative medicine proponents / creationists / moon landing conspiracy theorists / etc. have for good science. They're essentially telling ignorant third parties, "Don't listen to the experts. They're frauds!" There are a lot of experts here who don't take kindly to being called frauds.
You see, this is exactly what I was talking about with the style of argument (it can be an interesting exercise to listen to the tone of an argument as well as the content).
First you conflate several different groups (kind of like Randi does too):
- alternative medicine. There's a huge range of types of alternative medicine, some of which has been found in studies to have some effect, so each type really needs to be looked at separately. - creationists. If you believe the world is the way it is because some sort of god set it up like that, there's nothing wrong with that, it's internally self-consistent, but it's also not science and doesn't belong in a science curriculum. - moon landing conspiracy theorists. It's relatively easy to demonstrate that they are wrong (just point a laser at the mirrors that were left on the moon and have a sensitive enough detector for the reflection).
Then you say "They're essentially telling ignorant third parties, "Don't listen to the experts. They're frauds!". The boot seems rather to be on the other foot with that - I've seen lots of the anti-homeopathy people pointing the finger of fraud, but I've never seen a proponent do that (maybe I've seen different discussions than you have). Doing something that does not fit inside a nice neat scientific box isn't any sort of attack in and of itself - is the scientific establishment so weak that it's going to collapse like a house of cards just because a few people want to use something that can't be scientifically explained? I don't think so.
All homeopaths do is offer a service. Some people try it - it does some people some good so they keep using it, others find it has no useful effect. Perhaps there are cases where people don't get some other sort of medical attention they need, but everyone is making health decisions all the time based on their own perceptions, and homeopathy is hardly unique there, and from what I've seen, people tend to try alternative medicine _after_ the normal medical attention has failed repeatedly. It's also worth noting that a lot of people get medical attention they don't need (for instance there's pressure on doctors to prescribe something, even if no medication is going to be useful, such as for a virus), so if homeopathic and other alternative medicine can keep some people off unnecessary medication, that's a bonus.
His arguments are basically repeating what homeopaths say - that stuff about more dilute is stronger etc., then ridiculing it for: - being counterintuitive (well, lots of the world including most of the really interesting bits of physics falls into that category), - not fitting with our current understanding of physics (he's got something of a point there - it would be nice to be offered a plausible mechanism that could then be tested directly, however if something works, we don't always know exactly _why_ it works), - not passing his double-blind test.
His only real contribution here is the double-blind test. Unfortunately you can't really disprove a correlation with such a test (and to be honest I've not looked into how you can possibly set up controls when testing something that is supposed to he 'holistic') - the best you can do is put some sort of bounds on how much of a correlation there is (or isn't).
> I suppose it's not uncommon for there to be a vehement disagreement between anecdotes and data. I know which side I come down on.
It's the vehemence that I find the most interesting part of this (also why I don't usually bother with this, evolution debates or Gnome vs. KDE). Looking at some of the comments, it's almost as if some people are personally threatened by the idea of homeopathy - there's quite a bit of name calling rather than argument (garbage, quack, moron, fraud...). Of course, this _is_ slashdot.
No, it's not getting uppity about 'talking about something outside his field' as such (after all, it's outside everyone's field except homeopaths, and they are going to be biased!), it's more that he is _extremely_ solid on the sleight of hand stuff (he can say exactly what is going on, and can demonstrate it), and borrows that air of expertise to make it look as if he knows just as much about other subjects - it's kind of a sleight of hand in itself. It's kind of like Linus Torvalds opinions on the GPL2 vs. GPL3 being given a lot of weight - yes, his opinion is as valid as anyone else's, and he's got a lot invested in it, but I've seen a lot of people swayed because of who his other achievements rather than his arguments.
As for homeopathy itself, there seem to be two groups of people involved in the debate - those who can't see any possible way it could work according to physics as we understand it currently, and those who use it and find it effective. Both sides are very passionate about it, which is why I've learned to stay out of that debate - mine was meant to be more of a side comment.
I really enjoyed his debunking of Uri Geller (which I think is how he started down the debunking track), and 'psychic' stuff, and he can certainly be entertaining, but his argument about homeopathy is a re-tread of "it doesn't fit our intuition, we don't have a mechanism, therefore it's wrong", with the addition of "because of this, let's equate it with the paranormal".
I don't want to get into the arguments for or against homeopathy on here (I find that sort of argument on here a waste of time as no-one ever changes their mind that way), but I always get slightly irritated when I see someone who is an expert in a particular area using that as leverage to comment about a different area, hence my original comment.
There might well be some good arguments against homeopathy, but those of James Randi does not count among them. He's an ex-magician who knows enough about sleight of had to successfully debunk things like Uri Geller's spoon bending 'psychic power', but then makes the mistake of assuming his expertise is wider than it actually is - there's way more rhetoric than reason in what he says about homeopathy.
"... all Microsoft based operating systems except Windows 2003."
So a box running Windows 95 or DOS is at risk then?
I'm not sure which is more irritating - that the summary uses the above phrase that is not in the article, or that they article doesn't explicitly say which OS/browser versions are affected (and you'd have to go digging around to find whether you are using "XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control, part of Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0".
I suppose the most irritating thing for a Windows user is that this is yet another security hole.
> To hazard a guess, if you laid the periodic table in a straight line you would probably see an approximately logarithmic amount of each element, up to iron and beyond; it'll be a little complicated since some elements are more likely to decay back to lighter elements faster than others, but that's the gist.
In some ways the argument is bit irrelevant, as it is comparing apples and oranges - Wiki and Britannica are compiled in different ways and both have their uses, data in both of them is likely to be _mostly_ accurate, and I wouldn't particularly trust either of them as any more than a starting point (I prefer primary sources where possible).
One valid point that Britannica made is that Nature should release the data (minus of course the names of the anonymous reviewers). or at least the full text of excerpts that were compared and where they were taken from - then anyone that wanted to could judge for themselves how biased Nature's claims are, and whether Britannica's counter-claims have any substance. Otherwise the whole thing is reduced to a 'they said' 'we said' kind of slanging match.
There is a scary risk though that the FBI would either be just as clueless, or (more likely) take a 'seize computers now, ask questions later' approach, either of which would be really bad for CentOS.
> Find areas that are as isolated as possible to avoid annoying people
No, absolutely not!
Isolated areas would be the last remaining bits of wilderness... is that what we really want to intrude on for this? Some of those areas are quite fragile.
Put them around population centres as much as possible, make people _see_ that there is a cost (other than the economic one) to the electricity they use.
I for one would be happy to live in a city with the skyline dotted by windmills, as that would be a visual sign that at least some of the electricity I'm using is coming from a sustainable source. No NIMBY here, at least not when it comes to windmills.
I think the real problem is bills having to be accepted or rejected in their entirety.
The way the New Zealand government legislation works, bills can be debated and clause by clause, with many votes in the process. This neatly solves the rider problem - any rider could be thrown out while the original bill goes through.
Of course it sometimes means that parliament spends days debating a bill - which I think is not a bad thing.
Well, no-one except the person I'm replying to will read this, so I'll keep it short:
> If someone feels that strongly why rank any below them at all?
Well, my support for ranking based systems is largely based on the fact that it becomes worth voting for a minority candidate.
For instance, it's quite possible to (say) really support Nader, but still strongly want Kerry ahead of Bush, and the voting system should allow you to express that. IRV lests you do this very well, and I think (without checking to hard) that Condorcet is pretty good for that too. FPP is lousy, in that it pretty much forces you to either vote for someone you may not want or cast an ineffective vote.
> I'm a strong believer in political parties. But they must remain independent of Federal law.
Not a bad idea, except it doesn't work that well.
It used to be something like that in New Zealand where I live, but we still had a two-party system (although not as badly as the US has). You don't need laws for that... just inertia and a poor voting system (FPP).
What does work much better now in New Zealand is yet another voting sytem we use... MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) where you have two votes - you vote for a local candidate, and you vote for a party - and the parties get seats in proportion to their vote. A very good system, which means we have lots of smaller parties, although a 5% threshold makes it pretty tough for small parties to survive sometimes.
The 'Technical Evaluation of Voting Methods' is flawed and misleading as it picks many critera that Condorcet happens to meet (in fact many of their criteria are variations of condorcet), so of course Condorcet come off best.
There are other criteria that IRV happens to meet that Condorcet doesn't, for instance, in IRV, a candidate's later choices can never affect the earlier choice, so you never hurt your favorite candidate by your ranking of the others below them.
There is a theorem Called "Arrow's Theorem" that proves that the following criteria can't all be satisfied: The Majority Criterion The Condorcet Criterion The Monotonicity Criterion The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion (Condorcet fails this one)
There is good (and much less biased) article at: http://ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/dsv/diss/node4.htm l (remove the space before the l in html - Slashdot put it there)
An interesting part of that is that it talks about 'Tendency to Encourage Manipulation' - the amount of information needed about the voter profile required to cast a strategic vote. Runoff methods fare very well here. First Past the Post (FPP) is of course the worst.
In my opinion, both IRV and Condorcet rank way above the FPP method usually used, and I'd support either one of them as giving a good result in most real circumstances (unlike FPP). The main improvement that both of these offer is that you don't need to 'vote for the lesser evil'. I will admit that I am much more familar with Single Transferrable Vote (of which IRV is a special case), and it is the only alternative to FPP on the table at the local level in New Zealand.
However, voting systems seems to be a little like religion... anyone that doesn't support your particular alternative to FPP is regarded as a heretic, and of course many people (usually those with some sort of vested interest) favour FPP. The www.electionmethods.org website would be much more useful without its bias, that seems to indicate (wrongly) that one method is perfect and the other methods aren't nearly as good.
>... which we don't have to deal with here in the US
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (effectively a landmine ban)... it's easier to make the stuff if you don't have to deal with the consequences on your own soil.
The second radio series was quite different than the books, and was better in my opinion (perhaps because I heard it before I read the books).
The end of the second radio series had Arthur taking off in the Heart of Gold after discovering Zaphod's part in the destruction of Earth, leaving Ford and Zaphod stranded with the ruler of the universe, and Trillian had disappeared near the end of the first series (forcibly married to the Algolian Chapter of the Galactic Rotary Club, from memory).
The end of the second book had Arthur and Ford still stranded on prehistoric Earth (where they had been at the end of the first radio series).
I'm hoping that the third radio series will continue from where the second radio series left off, and not just follow the books.
I don't hold much hope for the movie... the TV series was pretty awful.
> In the Open Source world portability is achieved with GNU autoconf, not by compiling all code to run on a mythical platform which is then emulated on whatever host it happens to be running on today.
Um, which platform do you use - it wouldn't be Linux x86 which pretty much all gnu software has already been ported to would it? Autoconf is good at getting things mostly right, but there are still various tweaks to get something running on a platform it hasn't been built for before (I know... I've spent days over such porting).
All the Java I've written seems to run fine without modification under MacOSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris...
If autoconf is the route to native portability, I think I'll stick with the current JVM model and get some work done, thanks you.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard it described as a form of 'bastard copperplate'.
Learning cursive messed up my handwriting quite a bit, so I ditched it completely in my third last year of school in favor of legible printing (so that markers would be able to read my exams).
As someone who occasionally visits your country (with a New Zealand passport and valid work visa), I can tell you that all non-US citizens are already subject to this indignity, for no better reasons than you will be. It's unfortunately just the next step (I've never been fingerprinted going into any other country, or any other time at all for that matter).
I'm not a good driver, and I don't drive (probably not good because I never practiced enough though).
I mostly agree with your argument though - _nearly_ everyone thinks they are a good driver.
The problem isn't necessarily that speed causes accidents - it's also that hight speed greatly increases the level of damage.
Abusing a monopoly (anti-competitive behaviour) is illegal.
When a company has a monopoly, they get some extra rules to play by. Microsoft has not been following these.
> The whole issue is that the water you're diluting it with will, by homeopathic principles, have "memories" of other things.
No it won't - according to what homeopaths actually claim if you bother to look, keeping the "memory" of something takes some care and erasing it is actually pretty easy - for instance sunlight will do it.
> Well I've seen myself fly, and I don't see a reason to demonstrate it for you. My flight is impossible to test in an empirical way for reasons I'll never bother to explain, and I take your assertion that I should prove myself as an example of the Establishment trying to Keep Me Down. Why are you so full of Hate for those of us who have The Truth about buoyancy and gravity?
You won't find me full of hate - I just won't be interested without evidence (and yes, I will think you are a crackpot, but I won't bother wasting my time saying so).
The key difference between your flying example and homeopathy is that the only scientific demonstration either way for homeopathy is statistical - and there's too many ways to bias (sometimes accidentally) those results in either direction. That's why studies are coming up with results all the time (on all sorts of things), and other studies then disagree. If someone takes a homeopathic remedy and a chronic skin rash goes away or they can now safely eat foods that used to make them ill, that is all anecdotal and no sort of scientific data point - it's helpful for that person though, even if they weren't part of a double-blind experiment. Someday when I've got a lot more spare time, I'd be curious to see how you set up a double-blind experiment for something where each person gets treated not just on a symptom, but the whole picture.
> None of Randi's arguments stands on its own and you seem to think that makes them bad.
No, what is bad (at least in the contexts that I've seen it) is that for pretty much all the other stuff he does, he's careful and got some pretty solid demonstration as to what is actually going on, and he throws this into the middle without being able to directly demonstrate anything, hence my claim of 'borrowed authority'.
> You've clearly missed basically every creationist tract and every alternative medicine rant against Big Pharma.
I wasn't aware that homeopaths were responsible for creationists tracts. As for rants against Big Pharma, you don't need to have an interest in alternative medicine to see that there are an awful lot of unnecessary drugs pushed to people as a quick fix (no conspiracy required - it's a natural consequence of following the money, it's no better or worse than what is done with big food or big software). I've not seen anyone suggest we should give up all drugs as fraudulent (although it's not the sort of thing I go looking for, and I'm sure there's plenty of people out there saying that who I have missed).
> As he points out, how does one get water with a "clean slate" that doesn't have the "memory" of something else in it?
That's a red herring. If you are prepared to accept the "memory" in the first place, then perhaps the 10:1 dilutions will deal with that - at any stage, there is never going to be _that_ big an impurity. I did a bit of reading about this many years ago, and it's actually internally pretty self consistent.
> If I said that I could fill my lungs full of air and fly, would you laughing at me and pointing out that I was violating a number of basic principles of physics be a weak appeal to the fact that my claim was "counterintuitive" or a relatively damning indictment of my claim in the absence of other evidence?
No, I'd simply ask you to demonstrate it, and let your failure to do so speak for itself. Something like that should be easy to demonstrate if it was true.
> It would require a fundamental rewrite of chemistry and physics.
This is actually my biggest problem with homeopathy. It's worth pointing out however that those fundamental rewrites do sometimes happen - 105 years ago we didn't have relativity or quantum physics (and some of the results of quantum physics are mind-bendingly counter-intuitive, which is why I don't regard counter-intuitivity as being particularly damning). Another example - the relatively recent discovery of prions overturned the "Central dogma of molecular biology".
> First is the obvious and offensive contempt the alternative medicine proponents / creationists / moon landing conspiracy theorists / etc. have for good science. They're essentially telling ignorant third parties, "Don't listen to the experts. They're frauds!" There are a lot of experts here who don't take kindly to being called frauds.
You see, this is exactly what I was talking about with the style of argument (it can be an interesting exercise to listen to the tone of an argument as well as the content).
First you conflate several different groups (kind of like Randi does too):
- alternative medicine. There's a huge range of types of alternative medicine, some of which has been found in studies to have some effect, so each type really needs to be looked at separately.
- creationists. If you believe the world is the way it is because some sort of god set it up like that, there's nothing wrong with that, it's internally self-consistent, but it's also not science and doesn't belong in a science curriculum.
- moon landing conspiracy theorists. It's relatively easy to demonstrate that they are wrong (just point a laser at the mirrors that were left on the moon and have a sensitive enough detector for the reflection).
Then you say "They're essentially telling ignorant third parties, "Don't listen to the experts. They're frauds!". The boot seems rather to be on the other foot with that - I've seen lots of the anti-homeopathy people pointing the finger of fraud, but I've never seen a proponent do that (maybe I've seen different discussions than you have). Doing something that does not fit inside a nice neat scientific box isn't any sort of attack in and of itself - is the scientific establishment so weak that it's going to collapse like a house of cards just because a few people want to use something that can't be scientifically explained? I don't think so.
All homeopaths do is offer a service. Some people try it - it does some people some good so they keep using it, others find it has no useful effect. Perhaps there are cases where people don't get some other sort of medical attention they need, but everyone is making health decisions all the time based on their own perceptions, and homeopathy is hardly unique there, and from what I've seen, people tend to try alternative medicine _after_ the normal medical attention has failed repeatedly. It's also worth noting that a lot of people get medical attention they don't need (for instance there's pressure on doctors to prescribe something, even if no medication is going to be useful, such as for a virus), so if homeopathic and other alternative medicine can keep some people off unnecessary medication, that's a bonus.
His arguments are basically repeating what homeopaths say - that stuff about more dilute is stronger etc., then ridiculing it for:
...). Of course, this _is_ slashdot.
- being counterintuitive (well, lots of the world including most of the really interesting bits of physics falls into that category),
- not fitting with our current understanding of physics (he's got something of a point there - it would be nice to be offered a plausible mechanism that could then be tested directly, however if something works, we don't always know exactly _why_ it works),
- not passing his double-blind test.
His only real contribution here is the double-blind test. Unfortunately you can't really disprove a correlation with such a test (and to be honest I've not looked into how you can possibly set up controls when testing something that is supposed to he 'holistic') - the best you can do is put some sort of bounds on how much of a correlation there is (or isn't).
> I suppose it's not uncommon for there to be a vehement disagreement between anecdotes and data. I know which side I come down on.
It's the vehemence that I find the most interesting part of this (also why I don't usually bother with this, evolution debates or Gnome vs. KDE). Looking at some of the comments, it's almost as if some people are personally threatened by the idea of homeopathy - there's quite a bit of name calling rather than argument (garbage, quack, moron, fraud
No, it's not getting uppity about 'talking about something outside his field' as such (after all, it's outside everyone's field except homeopaths, and they are going to be biased!), it's more that he is _extremely_ solid on the sleight of hand stuff (he can say exactly what is going on, and can demonstrate it), and borrows that air of expertise to make it look as if he knows just as much about other subjects - it's kind of a sleight of hand in itself. It's kind of like Linus Torvalds opinions on the GPL2 vs. GPL3 being given a lot of weight - yes, his opinion is as valid as anyone else's, and he's got a lot invested in it, but I've seen a lot of people swayed because of who his other achievements rather than his arguments.
As for homeopathy itself, there seem to be two groups of people involved in the debate - those who can't see any possible way it could work according to physics as we understand it currently, and those who use it and find it effective. Both sides are very passionate about it, which is why I've learned to stay out of that debate - mine was meant to be more of a side comment.
I really enjoyed his debunking of Uri Geller (which I think is how he started down the debunking track), and 'psychic' stuff, and he can certainly be entertaining, but his argument about homeopathy is a re-tread of "it doesn't fit our intuition, we don't have a mechanism, therefore it's wrong", with the addition of "because of this, let's equate it with the paranormal".
I don't want to get into the arguments for or against homeopathy on here (I find that sort of argument on here a waste of time as no-one ever changes their mind that way), but I always get slightly irritated when I see someone who is an expert in a particular area using that as leverage to comment about a different area, hence my original comment.
There might well be some good arguments against homeopathy, but those of James Randi does not count among them. He's an ex-magician who knows enough about sleight of had to successfully debunk things like Uri Geller's spoon bending 'psychic power', but then makes the mistake of assuming his expertise is wider than it actually is - there's way more rhetoric than reason in what he says about homeopathy.
Ears are supposed to be self cleaning if left alone, but for some people that is not the case.
- One method is to go to a doctor, and the nurse will clean your ears out with hot soapy water.
- A better method is to find a hearing clinic that has a special machine that vacuums the wax out.
- There's also earwax dissolving drops, but I don't think they are really recommended.
The problem with trying to do anything to mechanically clean them is that you _will_ push some of the wax further in.
"... all Microsoft based operating systems except Windows 2003."
So a box running Windows 95 or DOS is at risk then?
I'm not sure which is more irritating - that the summary uses the above phrase that is not in the article, or that they article doesn't explicitly say which OS/browser versions are affected (and you'd have to go digging around to find whether you are using "XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control, part of Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0".
I suppose the most irritating thing for a Windows user is that this is yet another security hole.
> To hazard a guess, if you laid the periodic table in a straight line you would probably see an approximately logarithmic amount of each element, up to iron and beyond; it'll be a little complicated since some elements are more likely to decay back to lighter elements faster than others, but that's the gist.
Not quite right:
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/abund.htm
Some elements (Oxygen, Carbon, Neon) seem to form more easily than Lithium, Beryllium etc.
In some ways the argument is bit irrelevant, as it is comparing apples and oranges - Wiki and Britannica are compiled in different ways and both have their uses, data in both of them is likely to be _mostly_ accurate, and I wouldn't particularly trust either of them as any more than a starting point (I prefer primary sources where possible).
One valid point that Britannica made is that Nature should release the data (minus of course the names of the anonymous reviewers). or at least the full text of excerpts that were compared and where they were taken from - then anyone that wanted to could judge for themselves how biased Nature's claims are, and whether Britannica's counter-claims have any substance. Otherwise the whole thing is reduced to a 'they said' 'we said' kind of slanging match.
Well, I was tempted to say something like that in my post, but I don't live in the USA, so you might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment.
Is MS really that evil that they are breaking laws all over the world illegally using their defacto monopoly?
Yes. In many places (including the USA), a monopoly has extra rules it must follow to avoid abusing it's position.
... to just let him call the FBI.
There is a scary risk though that the FBI would either be just as clueless, or (more likely) take a 'seize computers now, ask questions later' approach, either of which would be really bad for CentOS.
I dunno. When is the last time single cell bacteria sent people to the moon or blew up an atomic bomb? Or posted on slashdot for that matter...
I imagine that not posting on Slashdot might be an evolutionary advantage.
> Find areas that are as isolated as possible to avoid annoying people
... is that what we really want to intrude on for this? Some of those areas are quite fragile.
No, absolutely not!
Isolated areas would be the last remaining bits of wilderness
Put them around population centres as much as possible, make people _see_ that there is a cost (other than the economic one) to the electricity they use.
I for one would be happy to live in a city with the skyline dotted by windmills, as that would be a visual sign that at least some of the electricity I'm using is coming from a sustainable source. No NIMBY here, at least not when it comes to windmills.
I think the real problem is bills having to be accepted or rejected in their entirety.
The way the New Zealand government legislation works, bills can be debated and clause by clause, with many votes in the process. This neatly solves the rider problem - any rider could be thrown out while the original bill goes through.
Of course it sometimes means that parliament spends days debating a bill - which I think is not a bad thing.
Well, no-one except the person I'm replying to will read this, so I'll keep it short:
... just inertia and a poor voting system (FPP).
... MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) where you have two votes - you vote for a local candidate, and you vote for a party - and the parties get seats in proportion to their vote. A very good system, which means we have lots of smaller parties, although a 5% threshold makes it pretty tough for small parties to survive sometimes.
> If someone feels that strongly why rank any below them at all?
Well, my support for ranking based systems is largely based on the fact that it becomes worth voting for a minority candidate.
For instance, it's quite possible to (say) really support Nader, but still strongly want Kerry ahead of Bush, and the voting system should allow you to express that. IRV lests you do this very well, and I think (without checking to hard) that Condorcet is pretty good for that too. FPP is lousy, in that it pretty much forces you to either vote for someone you may not want or cast an ineffective vote.
> I'm a strong believer in political parties. But they must remain independent of Federal law.
Not a bad idea, except it doesn't work that well.
It used to be something like that in New Zealand where I live, but we still had a two-party system (although not as badly as the US has). You don't need laws for that
What does work much better now in New Zealand is yet another voting sytem we use
The 'Technical Evaluation of Voting Methods' is flawed and misleading as it picks many critera that Condorcet happens to meet (in fact many of their criteria are variations of condorcet), so of course Condorcet come off best.
m l (remove the space before the l in html - Slashdot put it there)
... anyone that doesn't support your particular alternative to FPP is regarded as a heretic, and of course many people (usually those with some sort of vested interest) favour FPP. The www.electionmethods.org website would be much more useful without its bias, that seems to indicate (wrongly) that one method is perfect and the other methods aren't nearly as good.
There are other criteria that IRV happens to meet that Condorcet doesn't, for instance, in IRV, a candidate's later choices can never affect the earlier choice, so you never hurt your favorite candidate by your ranking of the others below them.
There is a theorem Called "Arrow's Theorem" that proves that the following criteria can't all be satisfied:
The Majority Criterion
The Condorcet Criterion
The Monotonicity Criterion
The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion (Condorcet fails this one)
There is good (and much less biased) article at: http://ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/dsv/diss/node4.ht
An interesting part of that is that it talks about 'Tendency to Encourage Manipulation' - the amount of information needed about the voter profile required to cast a strategic vote. Runoff methods fare very well here. First Past the Post (FPP) is of course the worst.
In my opinion, both IRV and Condorcet rank way above the FPP method usually used, and I'd support either one of them as giving a good result in most real circumstances (unlike FPP). The main improvement that both of these offer is that you don't need to 'vote for the lesser evil'. I will admit that I am much more familar with Single Transferrable Vote (of which IRV is a special case), and it is the only alternative to FPP on the table at the local level in New Zealand.
However, voting systems seems to be a little like religion
> ... which we don't have to deal with here in the US
... it's easier to make the stuff if you don't have to deal with the consequences on your own soil.
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (effectively a landmine ban)
The second radio series was quite different than the books, and was better in my opinion (perhaps because I heard it before I read the books).
... the TV series was pretty awful.
The end of the second radio series had Arthur taking off in the Heart of Gold after discovering Zaphod's part in the destruction of Earth, leaving Ford and Zaphod stranded with the ruler of the universe, and Trillian had disappeared near the end of the first series (forcibly married to the Algolian Chapter of the Galactic Rotary Club, from memory).
The end of the second book had Arthur and Ford still stranded on prehistoric Earth (where they had been at the end of the first radio series).
I'm hoping that the third radio series will continue from where the second radio series left off, and not just follow the books.
I don't hold much hope for the movie
> In the Open Source world portability is achieved with GNU autoconf, not by compiling all code to run on a mythical platform which is then emulated on whatever host it happens to be running on today.
... I've spent days over such porting).
...
Um, which platform do you use - it wouldn't be Linux x86 which pretty much all gnu software has already been ported to would it? Autoconf is good at getting things mostly right, but there are still various tweaks to get something running on a platform it hasn't been built for before (I know
All the Java I've written seems to run fine without modification under MacOSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris
If autoconf is the route to native portability, I think I'll stick with the current JVM model and get some work done, thanks you.