I don't assume that, and I didn't in my post. You're not responding to me. I said, "Causation cannot occur without correlation." Not, "correlation is proof of causation." There's a difference.
If you know all the factors causing an effect, sure you can find a correlation. What exactly is your point? Stating that causation cannot occur without correlation doesn't really add anything, which is why you never see that stated in a statistics book. The only thing stating that helps you do is disprove causation, not prove it. I don't think anyone was arguing over methods of disproving causation. If you can't find a correlation, you probably don't have a causal effect.
If I were to say that there is no correlation between couch color preference and political alignment, yes, "causation cannot occur without correlation" would imply that couch color preference and political alignment have no effect on each. Err, what exactly is your point?
If you were to roll a 1000 sided dice, when you first started rolling, you would get record highs and lows almost all of the time. As time wears on and you keep rolling the dice, record highs and lows will keep appearing, just in lower frequency. You could be a 100 rolls in and get a new record. This doesn't mean that the chance of rolling a high or low number has changed. It doesn't imply any sort of trend.
His point is that declaring a "record" high or low doesn't mean anything. You will get record highs and lows all of the time, especially if the system tends to be variable and chaotic.
The real interesting thing to look at are not these "record" highs or lows. Records are good for headlines, but worthless in terms of science. A record high doesn't mean anything. What IS interesting is to look at trends over time and the variablity in this trend over time.
I'll cut myself off here because I really don't know the data all that well to talk much about the trends or their variablity. Just take away from these posts that seeing "record!" high or low, doesn't mean anything. It is the long term trends that really matter.
The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable.
This is just fear mongering. The world might very well have shifted its weather equilibrium. We might see some drastic weather changes. Populations might be displaced and poor nations might experience famines and other natural disasters. Is the world going to become "uninhabitable"? No.
Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable. Even if we put our entire collective effort into killing every last creature alive, we would fail. Nature is far too resilient and our powers are far too minuscule to do anything more then weed out the least adaptable species in the most fragile environments. Yes, we might have it in our power to kill off all the cute Koalas. We don't have the power to kill off all the cockroaches, rats, rabbits, or begin to even make a dent in most insect populations. We would kill off ourselves long before killing them.
Outside of pseudo religious environmentalism, we worry about global warming for the effects it has on humanity. Global warming can not kludge the Earth into a position where it is no longer habitable for humans. Even in our most primitive hunter and gatherer state, we are too adaptable and able to handle to wide of a range of temperatures and climates. Throw technology into the mix, and the thought of exterminating humans through global warming is laughable.
The real danger of global warming are the economic dangers, especially economic dangers that can translate directly into lost lives. When the climate suddenly shifts over a poor African nation, people die. They can't change their farming techniques quick enough. Environmental problems compound to give deforestation and soil erosion. Natural disasters can kill in the hundreds of thousands when ravaging an area with poor building, poor warning systems, and few resources to pick up the pieces.
First world nations should worry about global warming if for no other then reason then the selfish reason that they are expensive. Katrinas can't make a dent in the population by killing people. They are however very costly to pick up afterwards. They force us to build more weather resistant structures which in turn cost more. Farmers are forced to change what they grow in an potentially expensive proposition. First world nations are not going to starve, but they are going to feel more then an economic prick if the climate changes drastically. Perhaps even more worrisome for first world nations is the economic and political instability that can spread in the poorer nations of the world. The world doesn't need more dictators, suicidal religious fanatics, and other such monstrosities, but the political and economic stability that climate change can bring is a perfect spawning grown for such dangers.
My point? People need to take climate change seriously without frothing at the mouth and declaring humanity doomed. Humanity isn't doomed, but it does have challenges facing it. While failure to meet these challenges might not spell doom, they can spell lost life and server economic consequences. We need to look at climate change with a calm and objective view of the real dangers and risks.
You have your thinking backwards. It is easy to look at stats, see a correlation between two of them and then assume one implies the other. A true skeptic does not assume that a correlation is proof of causation. A true skeptic tries to look deeper then the surface level into the data. They try and look at ways in which a simple correlation might be the result of a much more complex relationship.
A good example of this is "liberals tend to hold more degrees". Someone who lacks skepticism would then make the leap and assume that liberals must be smarter people. A skeptic would look at that and ask if there is another variable at work. In this case, there are countless confounding variables mucking things up.
-The most obvious one is age. Older people tend to more conservative, but older people also grew up in a time when fewer people had degrees.
-Other possible confounding variables are the 'value' of a degree. If 60% of the liberals out there have art degrees and 60% of conservatives have degrees in economics, that would suggest that a liberal is less prepared to make economic judgments in politics. Obviously those are not real statistics, but there very well could be some wild skewing in terms of the "value" of degrees.
-Liberals could be inclined to simply get more degrees. The average conservative might call it a life at one BS of engineering degree and get a job, while the average liberal might get a linguistics, art, and sociology minor to compliment their anthropology major, then go one to make a career in the university pursuing more advanced degrees. This divergence of paths doesn't suggest a difference in intellect. It shows a difference in priority perhaps, but getting done with your degree and deciding that you want to go apply it to real world problems doesn't mean you are stupid.
If you don't like me ripping on the liberal statistics, then I can rip on conservative statistics. Conservatives tend to be on average richer then liberals. Does this mean that a liberal is too stupid to acquire more wealth and that is why they want the government to create more transfers of wealth? No, of course not. It could simply be that liberal minded people are more likely to focus less on acquiring wealth. It could be that historical inequalities of traditionally liberal or conservative groups are wildly skewing the data. The possibilities are close to endless.
My point is that when someone grabs a statistic out of the air and holds it up like it is a piece of evidence, it is time to be skeptical, no matter who is waving it. Correlation does not imply causation. In fact, when you are talking populations, they correlations almost NEVER imply causation. Be skeptical.
If you want a really good and fun book that harmers this point home, pick up Freakanomics. It is a quick, easy, and entertaining read. It has no real theme or agenda. It is 100% political agenda free. It is just a book showing freakish statistical occurrence. It is the sort of book anyone can pick up, read, and enjoy.
Arguing that the law is unjust is beside the point. The fact remains that growing (selling, using) marijuana is illegal in the United States.
Oh, I guess that's why they should be in jail.
The same logic would justify rounding up the Jews and throwing them into concentration camps. The law stated that they needed to be marked, rounded up, and destroyed. Obviously throwing a kid in jail for smoking weed is not the same as incerating jews, but the extreme example serves its point.
"The settlement resolves all pending litigation and any other disputes between the two companies. Exluna, a privately-held software company specializing in software development technology for film quality graphics rendering, was charged with the misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement and patent infringement."
This has nothing to do with non-compete clauses. They were accused of various levels of IP infringment. Further, they were not sued out of existance. The case was settled and NVIDIA bought them out.
Non-compete clauses are paper thin. A non-compete clause can delay me from going from working on the catch of an Intel chip to working on the catch of an AMD chip. It can't prevent me from working on some other component of an AMD chip. Non-compete clauses are really only useful in stopping the most blatant corporate espionage. They are forbidden by law from preventing you from practicing your livelihood.
While I can't say with 100% certainty, I am pretty sure that in the case of everyone from Pixar jumping ship to form their company would be totally uncovered by a non-compete clause so long as they didn't bring any ideas from Pixar when they jumped ship. Preventing animators from animating is a pretty clearly interfering with their right to pursue their livelihood.
Guys, what happened is GOOD. Disney just made anyone holding stock in Pixar a millionaire. I once consulted at a company where this has happened. You pull up into the parking lot and no one has a car worth under $40,000. Everyone shows up to work because they want to and like working there, not for the salary. If the company goes down the shitter, they just leave.
IP and equipment didn't make Pixar great. The people made Pixar great. If Disney fucks it up, everyone just ups, leaves, and forms a new company leaving Disney with nothing but a name. Disney shelled out a few billion for the SHOT at using Pixar to do something good. If they blow it, the real 'assets' of Pixar can simply leave and go make another few million each.
I saw good for Pixar. Way to make yourself horrifically rich and still leave a dozen escape hatches to bail from Disney. Those people deserved a big steaming pile of money. I hope they go out and enjoy it.
They persuade people to buy food that doesn't have to be flown from New Zealand to get to their plates.
Dude, I have been the UK. There is a damn good reason why all of your food is shipped in from New Zealand. When talking about the environment you need to be reasonable. Buy an efficient car, trying to use public transportation, cutting down on energy consumption, and recycling? All are reasonable. Having to eat native British food every single day for the rest of your life? Put a gun to my fucking head and paint the wall with my brains. There is environmentalism and then eco-terrorist-genocidal-lunatic. Advocating eating British food on a regular basis without a doubt fits in the later category.
Take reasonable steps to save the environment, but really people, you need to learn to draw the line. There are just some prices that we as a species can not afford to pay.
Um, didn't Marx write a somewhat influential book about Capitalism? In fact, considering that he coined the word "capitalist", and practically invented the subject, I think that a course on Capitalism which didn't spend a serious amount of time on Marx would be somewhat incomplete, regardless of how you felt about the man.
Certainly Marx should be included in any discussion of capitalism. I was not suggesting otherwise. I was suggesting that if you are going to pick 10 books to read for a class, pick at least one that defends that status-quo of whatever the hell it is you are studying.
My girlfriend is a Marxist and left with a 3.85 average. Go back and try re-reading what I wrote. I never once implied that she was conservative nor that she does poorly in school. People with differnt political ideologies CAN date you know.
You can't attack statistics made in a vacuum. You can't criticize the results of an experiment if the method is never explained. I would be more then happy to examine possible flaws in methodology if the original poster would post a link detailing the methodology used.
My point was that the poster threw down a pile of sourceless statistics and implied that they meant something. My point was that they meant nothing because even if the methodology used to attain those statistics was correct, they still only show correlations. All of my examples show how correlations can be misleading.
Further, the burden of proof in statitstics when you have an interesting set of data is not to disprove cause and effect. There are lots interesting correlations in this world. When we find a correlation we are never to assume that it is proof of cause and effect. They are assumed to be nothing more then correlations until someone has presented strong evidence to suggest that they are indeed a cause and effect relationship.
So yes, we can list of statistics, but the statistic that blacks are more likely to be criminals is just as worthless as the statistic that liberals hold more degrees.
I understand the difference between liberal (as in democrat) and liberal as in the true meaning of the word. It is a shame the word has been so utterly mauled by American politics. There is no better word to describe my beliefs then liberal (in the true meaning of the word). Sadly, if you tell someone you are a liberal, they will assume you mean socialist leaning.
If there is any irony to the whole misuse of words, it is that libertarian has been hijacked in the US to mean what liberal used to mean. Libertarians were originally European anarchist-socialist.
America deserves +1 irony mod for swapping the meanings of those words.
My girlfriend is a raging liberal. Reading a dozen Marxist books in a class on capitalism doesn't bother here in the slightest.
Yes, there are the few odd ball crazy right wing schools. I don't want segregation though. I want integration. I want to know that if I decided one day to study sociology while holding moderate libertarian beliefs, I wouldn't have to go to a crazy right wing Jesus camp to get away from reading nothing but Marx. I just find it sad to know that young people are avoiding majors that they find interesting because they are stuck with the option between going to a school for fanatics, or be prepared to be crucified while other students half their intelligence wander past without being touched.
Honestly, could you imagine going to a class on capitalism as a pro-capitalist when it is being taught with nothing but Marx? That is like learning about Jewish beliefs from the Iranian Council of Guardians of the Revolution.
*sigh* Someone went to too many anthropology classes and forgot to hit up their statistics class. Say it with me now!
Correlation does not imply causation!
"Furthermore a study showed that on average the viewers of the John Stewart show (liberal) were better educated and made more money then the viewers of Bill Oreilly."
Stupid people watch Oreilly because they are stupid, not because he is the bastion of conservatives. He is a stupid douche. The average vaguely intelligent person, conservative or otherwise tends to avoid Orielly like the plague. I am a libertarian and I can't stand the guy. The only thing entertaining about him is his aggressive interview style. Beyond that, he has absolutely nothing to offer. If I happen to stop on Fox news and see him speak, I generally can't go more then five minutes without turning it off.
I love the Daily show and I am a libertarian. John Stewart is a comedian. If you learn political ideology from the Daily Show, you are an idiot.
Statistically speaking people with collage educations are more likely to be liberals. Oddly enough the people with passports tend to overwhelmingly liberals.
Statistically speaking, criminals are more likely to be democrats. Statistically speaking, blacks are more likely to be criminals. Statistically speaking, actors are more likely to be liberals. If you take away from those stats being a democrat or black will make you into a criminal, or that being a liberal helps you act better, you are need to go back to school and take a basic stats course.
Say it with me again, "Correlation does not imply causation! "
The explanations as to why the average liberal tends to hold more degrees is close to endless.
-Liberals could have more degrees but they could be more inclined to be intellectually less valuable in terms of political and economic understanding, like art, film, and literature.
-If you count a community college degrees as being equal to a major universities degree you are skewing the data based upon who is more likely to get a community college degree.
-People tend to become more conservative as they get older. In the past, fewer people had degrees. This means that more degree holding people are younger people, who tend to be more liberal in ideology.
-Conservatives could be more likely to not go to college or drop out early in favor of perusing entrepreneurial opportunities.
My point?
Correlation does not imply causation! (if only Slashdot allowed the flashy blinking tag...)
Academia is very biased. Bias is not necessarily a bad thing. It is hard to study a topic for years and not end of taking a stand on it. The issue is when your bias prevents you from teaching people who have a different bias. In 95% of the schools out there, it is completely and utterly impossible to go through the sociology program as a fiscal and/or moral conservative. At best, you will get poor grades, constantly have to defend your every breath, and receive little to no supporting reading material to back up your views. At worst you will be failed multiple times.
My girlfriend is a sociologist. The worst case of abuse I have seen was when she took a class called "Capitalism and the Environment". Every single book and handout that she had was without exception Marxist. How in the hell you can justify teaching a class with the word 'capitalism' in it without reading a single pro-capitalist thinker is utterly beyond me. Not even addressing the opposition is the absolutely most dishonest form of teaching that you can do.
The worst part about this is that it insulates an entire field of thinking from any sort of opposition thinking. A brain dead liberal can make it through the sociology program that my girlfriend made it through. Hell, my girlfriends best friend is sweet, but dumber then a sack full of bricks and made it through with a B. A conservative or libertarian on the other hand would have to fight every single step of the way. Teachers teach nothing but a single side and challenge conservative students every step of the way. I am sure the few conservatives that make it through are as tough as nails, but you shouldn't need an iron will and lead skin to make it through a sociology program.
I am not sure that UCLA's methods are right or effective, but I am glad that they at least acknowledge a problem. A liberal kid should be able to learn economics. A conservative kid should be able to learn sociobiology. Certainly they should be challenged, but they shouldn't have to fight tooth and nail while others float past by simply nodding their heads in agreement with the subjective opinions of their teachers. Liberals have interest in economics and conservative have interest in sociology. It is a travesty that these programs at some school intentionally try and convert or fail the few brave souls willing to cross the lines.
I always find it strange when people accuse academia of unfair bias. When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? (Hint: It's not that they were brainwashed and indoctrinated...)
It probably tells you that they exist in a system that is heavily dependent upon government funding. It probably tells you that they live in a world that is seniority based instead of merit based. They are likely unionized and depend upon strong union laws make them very hard to fire even when they are well past their prime or the institution the worked for has achieved a higher standard and wants to hire better staff.
The best and the brightest are not liberal. Academia tend to liberal. Now, within academia you certainly have some very bright people. You also have some amazingly smart engineers, businessmen, scientist, and economist that are ardently right wing. Arguing that all the smart people are liberals is amazing ignorant.
No, it isn't for morons. It is for people who don't steal and (far more importantly) people who don't have time to waste looking for a bit torrent link that works and is offering something of quality.
The other Friday I missed Battlestar Galactica. Sure, I could have done what I used to do was the fuck around with BT to get it. Instead though, I just threw them 2 bucks, which for a guy with a job is nothing, and got a good quality version without any hassle.
Hell, the reason why I will pay for a TV show is the same reason why I will pay for a videogame. First, I don't want to be a douche and not give the people who made it their due. Second, it is just a hell of a lot easier to simply buy what you want then to screw around trying to download it.
At this point, the only thing I am waiting for now is for all TV programming to be offered free, any time, but with commercials. It is down right archaic that I need to be in front of the television at a certain time to watch a show. I should be able to watch it whenever I damn well please with commercials. Just disable the fastforward function while viewing commercials and you have something as good as normal TV.
Fuck Jack Thompson. I am pretty damn sure that this game will strictly enforce 18+. Let the idiot try and bring this before a court and get violently smacked down.
Personally, I love the spat of video game laws that stupid state legislators have tried to pass. Each and every single one without exception has been struck down, and struck down hard. Each time one of these stupid laws are struck down, it just strengthens freedom of speech laws.
Nothing brings a smile to my face like politicians ramming their head violently against the first amendment and looking shocked and confused when it doesn't budge. I welcome this game the legislation that congressmen will attempt to bring about to stop it. It just makes it easier to see which representatives will grow the strength to stand up for the first amendment, and which are pathetic sniveling slime that refuse to take a stand that doesn't instantly sound good in a sound byte. It makes picking who I vote for all the easier.
Guys, this article is clearly bullshit. I say this in the most NOT +1 funny way, if making someone type a couple sentences in English without a spelling or grammar mistake is the level you hold people to, you will NEVER get people in your group. People in WoW and EQ2 talk like fucking retarded AOL children. If you were to dump me onto a WoW server and I had no knowledge of MMORPGs, I would ask you why there are so many people who have English as a second language on the server. Hell, the foreign speakers some times have better English because they realize that capital letters and periods are okay to use. I thnk caps n perids r godd
The absolutely retarded way that people speak in the MMORPGs today is one of the reasons why I now play EvE. Playing on EvE is night and day compared to WoW and EQ2. Not only is the game far less shallow, but it is simply mind numbing to listen on a chat of 600+ people and have only a very small fraction of them banging away on the keyboard like fucking AOL illiterate pre-pubescent kids. The other night on EvE chat people were talking about good history books. The night before there was an interesting political discussion. Seeing 600 people in a chat room with only a minimal number of them pretending that they have sever brain damage is simply mind blowing.
I think what clinched me into buying EvE was when some idiot started slamming away at the keyboard with his face in all caps using AOL speak. He was promptly made fun of for typing luck a fucktard and then utterly ignored. I promptly logged out and signed up for a permanent account.
If N. Korea started to attack first, we would not fight a conventional warfare. They would be stopped frozen in their tracks once a few nuclear bombs wipe out all major cities. Fuck politics, this is war at this point. This stratagy would be the ONLY effective one against N. Korea. After the fact, then everyone would move the troops in to take out the rouge remaining forces.
That is the point. North Korea wont initiate a war because it would go nuclear. The US wont initiate a war because it would involve the destruction of much of South Korea and a hunk of Japan. Claiming in your earlier post that there is going to be a war is silly. Neither side is going to fight. North Korea doesn't gain anything out of attacking South Korea and could never win such a fight. The US won't attack North Korea because North Korea would retaliate by destroying much of South Korea with chemical and nuclear weapons.
The two simply won't fight. There is no war coming to North Korea.
That, and the fact it we don't want to be fighting wars on two different fronts. Chances are, we will deal with N. Korea with military means once we are sure Europe can take on Iran. It's WWIII, I'm bloddy serious.
That is so utterly wrong I can't even begin to put words to it. The US will never ever deal with North Korea militarily unless North Korea attacks another nation.
People forget that the capital of South Korea is in artillery range of North Korea. North Korea has a massive amount of chemical and biological weapons at its disposal. In any attack, North Korea would intentionally inflict massive civilian casualties on South Korea has it dumped chemical and conventional rounds into heavily populated zones with artillery and missiles. Further, you can pretty much rest assure that if North Korea will fire on Tokyo with chemical weapons and nukes.
There will be no war with North Korea. Every nation in the region would step in to stop it, South Korea, Japan, and China included. When I say "stop it" I don't just mean "apply diplomatic pressure". I mean they would physically stop it with force of arms if they had to. Of course, that isn't going to be a problem because no president or congress would ever be so insane as to destroy the world economy by drowning some of the largest economies in Asia (Japan and South Korea) in a chemical cloud and receiving sanctions from all the others (China and everyone else).
The idea that the US would ever invade North Korea is utterly inane. The only thing North Korea could ever do to provoke a response from the US would be to nuke the US. I imagine at that point our response wouldn't be invasion, it would be glassing.
Gee, because maybe by the time there is a pressing need -- say, a giant extinction-causing asteroid six months away from ramming into Earth at 25,000mph -- there won't be time to develop a whole recolonization program from scratch. And if you discount developing colonization programs, you're also killing off propulsion research that might be beneficial in developing a rocket that could deflect said asteroid. This is just one of several examples I could make.
Under absolutely no circumstance will Mars ever be more hospitable to Earth, even after a life destroying asteroid. If we really are worried about being wiped out by an asteroid, I suggest that at one millionth of the price of going to Mars, we build a sea colony or an underground colony right here on Earth. We could be something many times more secure and safe then throwing a few humans in a vacuum. We can build these colonies right here on earth without having to life billions of tons of material out of a gravity well.
There are plenty of reasons why we should be doing this "RIGHT NOW" as you put it, but the best reason of all is because we can. What you propose is like a patient with early-detected cancer refusing to take treatment for the cancer because "it's not life threatening right now so why bother with the expense and discomfort?"
If you want to use analogies, the correct analogy would be sending in a perfectly healthy child for chemotherapy before having detected any systems or signs of cancer. Further, as I have already shown, space is easily the worst solution to life destroying events. A fucked up Earth beats a normal day on Mars or the Moon any and every day of the week.
Here is my question. WTF is this in YRO? Whose rights were violated or even in question? This broke into a system and destroyed data illegally. IBM had to come in and figure out how much damage he did and repair it. Is 20,000 a lot? It might be on the high end, but you need to remember that not only did they need to undo the damage, but they had to make sure there was no other damage done. I don't know about you, but if a disgruntle ex-employee broke into my system and did damage, I would want the entire system checked from top to bottom to make sure he did nothing else.
So this man clearly violated the law and he got a sentence. Was the sentence appropriate? Hell yes! He got sentenced for just 3 months in a 'white collar resort' plus fines. 3 months for breaking into a computer system and forcing a company to pay to have their entire system checked over is a fair punishment. The company in question will never be sure that they caught all the damage or that he didn't slip a backdoor in. If anything, I think they went light on him.
The only rights violated were the rights of the company in question. The ass hole who broke into the system got exactly what he deserved. A slap on the wrist jail sentance in a white collar resort, a fine, and has effectively made it such that he will never get a job in IT again. Good riddance.
While it is true that the Earth is going to end at some point, that ISN'T a reason to go the moon right now. Right now, to get to the moon and do anything is massively expensive. The cost associated with actual colonization is mind blowing. Why do it RIGHT NOW, when there is no pressing need? Why not let technology further improve and refine before spending the many billions or trillions of dollars it will take to do something of substance on the moon?
Going to the moon now would be like building a 100 story sky scrapper in 1880. We probably had the technology back then to brute force our way around the problem of supporting such a massive structure. We could have mustered the man power to build it. It just would have consumed a noticeable portion of the GDP for minimal benefit. We didn't build such a structure though; we waited 50 years and got the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was cheaper, safer, and more effective at what it did then the solution we could have kludged together 50 years earlier. Going to the moon now instead of waiting 50 years is no different.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't assume that, and I didn't in my post. You're not responding to me. I said, "Causation cannot occur without correlation." Not, "correlation is proof of causation." There's a difference.
If you know all the factors causing an effect, sure you can find a correlation. What exactly is your point? Stating that causation cannot occur without correlation doesn't really add anything, which is why you never see that stated in a statistics book. The only thing stating that helps you do is disprove causation, not prove it. I don't think anyone was arguing over methods of disproving causation. If you can't find a correlation, you probably don't have a causal effect.
If I were to say that there is no correlation between couch color preference and political alignment, yes, "causation cannot occur without correlation" would imply that couch color preference and political alignment have no effect on each. Err, what exactly is your point?
If you were to roll a 1000 sided dice, when you first started rolling, you would get record highs and lows almost all of the time. As time wears on and you keep rolling the dice, record highs and lows will keep appearing, just in lower frequency. You could be a 100 rolls in and get a new record. This doesn't mean that the chance of rolling a high or low number has changed. It doesn't imply any sort of trend.
His point is that declaring a "record" high or low doesn't mean anything. You will get record highs and lows all of the time, especially if the system tends to be variable and chaotic.
The real interesting thing to look at are not these "record" highs or lows. Records are good for headlines, but worthless in terms of science. A record high doesn't mean anything. What IS interesting is to look at trends over time and the variablity in this trend over time.
I'll cut myself off here because I really don't know the data all that well to talk much about the trends or their variablity. Just take away from these posts that seeing "record!" high or low, doesn't mean anything. It is the long term trends that really matter.
The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable.
This is just fear mongering. The world might very well have shifted its weather equilibrium. We might see some drastic weather changes. Populations might be displaced and poor nations might experience famines and other natural disasters. Is the world going to become "uninhabitable"? No.
Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable. Even if we put our entire collective effort into killing every last creature alive, we would fail. Nature is far too resilient and our powers are far too minuscule to do anything more then weed out the least adaptable species in the most fragile environments. Yes, we might have it in our power to kill off all the cute Koalas. We don't have the power to kill off all the cockroaches, rats, rabbits, or begin to even make a dent in most insect populations. We would kill off ourselves long before killing them.
Outside of pseudo religious environmentalism, we worry about global warming for the effects it has on humanity. Global warming can not kludge the Earth into a position where it is no longer habitable for humans. Even in our most primitive hunter and gatherer state, we are too adaptable and able to handle to wide of a range of temperatures and climates. Throw technology into the mix, and the thought of exterminating humans through global warming is laughable.
The real danger of global warming are the economic dangers, especially economic dangers that can translate directly into lost lives. When the climate suddenly shifts over a poor African nation, people die. They can't change their farming techniques quick enough. Environmental problems compound to give deforestation and soil erosion. Natural disasters can kill in the hundreds of thousands when ravaging an area with poor building, poor warning systems, and few resources to pick up the pieces.
First world nations should worry about global warming if for no other then reason then the selfish reason that they are expensive. Katrinas can't make a dent in the population by killing people. They are however very costly to pick up afterwards. They force us to build more weather resistant structures which in turn cost more. Farmers are forced to change what they grow in an potentially expensive proposition. First world nations are not going to starve, but they are going to feel more then an economic prick if the climate changes drastically. Perhaps even more worrisome for first world nations is the economic and political instability that can spread in the poorer nations of the world. The world doesn't need more dictators, suicidal religious fanatics, and other such monstrosities, but the political and economic stability that climate change can bring is a perfect spawning grown for such dangers.
My point? People need to take climate change seriously without frothing at the mouth and declaring humanity doomed. Humanity isn't doomed, but it does have challenges facing it. While failure to meet these challenges might not spell doom, they can spell lost life and server economic consequences. We need to look at climate change with a calm and objective view of the real dangers and risks.
You have your thinking backwards. It is easy to look at stats, see a correlation between two of them and then assume one implies the other. A true skeptic does not assume that a correlation is proof of causation. A true skeptic tries to look deeper then the surface level into the data. They try and look at ways in which a simple correlation might be the result of a much more complex relationship.
A good example of this is "liberals tend to hold more degrees". Someone who lacks skepticism would then make the leap and assume that liberals must be smarter people. A skeptic would look at that and ask if there is another variable at work. In this case, there are countless confounding variables mucking things up.
-The most obvious one is age. Older people tend to more conservative, but older people also grew up in a time when fewer people had degrees.
-Other possible confounding variables are the 'value' of a degree. If 60% of the liberals out there have art degrees and 60% of conservatives have degrees in economics, that would suggest that a liberal is less prepared to make economic judgments in politics. Obviously those are not real statistics, but there very well could be some wild skewing in terms of the "value" of degrees.
-Liberals could be inclined to simply get more degrees. The average conservative might call it a life at one BS of engineering degree and get a job, while the average liberal might get a linguistics, art, and sociology minor to compliment their anthropology major, then go one to make a career in the university pursuing more advanced degrees. This divergence of paths doesn't suggest a difference in intellect. It shows a difference in priority perhaps, but getting done with your degree and deciding that you want to go apply it to real world problems doesn't mean you are stupid.
If you don't like me ripping on the liberal statistics, then I can rip on conservative statistics. Conservatives tend to be on average richer then liberals. Does this mean that a liberal is too stupid to acquire more wealth and that is why they want the government to create more transfers of wealth? No, of course not. It could simply be that liberal minded people are more likely to focus less on acquiring wealth. It could be that historical inequalities of traditionally liberal or conservative groups are wildly skewing the data. The possibilities are close to endless.
My point is that when someone grabs a statistic out of the air and holds it up like it is a piece of evidence, it is time to be skeptical, no matter who is waving it. Correlation does not imply causation. In fact, when you are talking populations, they correlations almost NEVER imply causation. Be skeptical.
If you want a really good and fun book that harmers this point home, pick up Freakanomics. It is a quick, easy, and entertaining read. It has no real theme or agenda. It is 100% political agenda free. It is just a book showing freakish statistical occurrence. It is the sort of book anyone can pick up, read, and enjoy.
Arguing that the law is unjust is beside the point. The fact remains that growing (selling, using) marijuana is illegal in the United States.
Oh, I guess that's why they should be in jail.
The same logic would justify rounding up the Jews and throwing them into concentration camps. The law stated that they needed to be marked, rounded up, and destroyed. Obviously throwing a kid in jail for smoking weed is not the same as incerating jews, but the extreme example serves its point.
Oh Goodwin, your wisedom is everlasting.
"The settlement resolves all pending litigation and any other disputes between the two companies. Exluna, a privately-held software company specializing in software development technology for film quality graphics rendering, was charged with the misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement and patent infringement."
This has nothing to do with non-compete clauses. They were accused of various levels of IP infringment. Further, they were not sued out of existance. The case was settled and NVIDIA bought them out.
Non-compete clauses are paper thin. A non-compete clause can delay me from going from working on the catch of an Intel chip to working on the catch of an AMD chip. It can't prevent me from working on some other component of an AMD chip. Non-compete clauses are really only useful in stopping the most blatant corporate espionage. They are forbidden by law from preventing you from practicing your livelihood.
While I can't say with 100% certainty, I am pretty sure that in the case of everyone from Pixar jumping ship to form their company would be totally uncovered by a non-compete clause so long as they didn't bring any ideas from Pixar when they jumped ship. Preventing animators from animating is a pretty clearly interfering with their right to pursue their livelihood.
Guys, what happened is GOOD. Disney just made anyone holding stock in Pixar a millionaire. I once consulted at a company where this has happened. You pull up into the parking lot and no one has a car worth under $40,000. Everyone shows up to work because they want to and like working there, not for the salary. If the company goes down the shitter, they just leave.
IP and equipment didn't make Pixar great. The people made Pixar great. If Disney fucks it up, everyone just ups, leaves, and forms a new company leaving Disney with nothing but a name. Disney shelled out a few billion for the SHOT at using Pixar to do something good. If they blow it, the real 'assets' of Pixar can simply leave and go make another few million each.
I saw good for Pixar. Way to make yourself horrifically rich and still leave a dozen escape hatches to bail from Disney. Those people deserved a big steaming pile of money. I hope they go out and enjoy it.
They persuade people to buy food that doesn't have to be flown from New Zealand to get to their plates.
Dude, I have been the UK. There is a damn good reason why all of your food is shipped in from New Zealand. When talking about the environment you need to be reasonable. Buy an efficient car, trying to use public transportation, cutting down on energy consumption, and recycling? All are reasonable. Having to eat native British food every single day for the rest of your life? Put a gun to my fucking head and paint the wall with my brains. There is environmentalism and then eco-terrorist-genocidal-lunatic. Advocating eating British food on a regular basis without a doubt fits in the later category.
Take reasonable steps to save the environment, but really people, you need to learn to draw the line. There are just some prices that we as a species can not afford to pay.
Um, didn't Marx write a somewhat influential book about Capitalism? In fact, considering that he coined the word "capitalist", and practically invented the subject, I think that a course on Capitalism which didn't spend a serious amount of time on Marx would be somewhat incomplete, regardless of how you felt about the man.
Certainly Marx should be included in any discussion of capitalism. I was not suggesting otherwise. I was suggesting that if you are going to pick 10 books to read for a class, pick at least one that defends that status-quo of whatever the hell it is you are studying.
My girlfriend is a Marxist and left with a 3.85 average. Go back and try re-reading what I wrote. I never once implied that she was conservative nor that she does poorly in school. People with differnt political ideologies CAN date you know.
You can't attack statistics made in a vacuum. You can't criticize the results of an experiment if the method is never explained. I would be more then happy to examine possible flaws in methodology if the original poster would post a link detailing the methodology used.
My point was that the poster threw down a pile of sourceless statistics and implied that they meant something. My point was that they meant nothing because even if the methodology used to attain those statistics was correct, they still only show correlations. All of my examples show how correlations can be misleading.
Further, the burden of proof in statitstics when you have an interesting set of data is not to disprove cause and effect. There are lots interesting correlations in this world. When we find a correlation we are never to assume that it is proof of cause and effect. They are assumed to be nothing more then correlations until someone has presented strong evidence to suggest that they are indeed a cause and effect relationship.
So yes, we can list of statistics, but the statistic that blacks are more likely to be criminals is just as worthless as the statistic that liberals hold more degrees.
I understand the difference between liberal (as in democrat) and liberal as in the true meaning of the word. It is a shame the word has been so utterly mauled by American politics. There is no better word to describe my beliefs then liberal (in the true meaning of the word). Sadly, if you tell someone you are a liberal, they will assume you mean socialist leaning.
If there is any irony to the whole misuse of words, it is that libertarian has been hijacked in the US to mean what liberal used to mean. Libertarians were originally European anarchist-socialist.
America deserves +1 irony mod for swapping the meanings of those words.
My girlfriend is a raging liberal. Reading a dozen Marxist books in a class on capitalism doesn't bother here in the slightest.
Yes, there are the few odd ball crazy right wing schools. I don't want segregation though. I want integration. I want to know that if I decided one day to study sociology while holding moderate libertarian beliefs, I wouldn't have to go to a crazy right wing Jesus camp to get away from reading nothing but Marx. I just find it sad to know that young people are avoiding majors that they find interesting because they are stuck with the option between going to a school for fanatics, or be prepared to be crucified while other students half their intelligence wander past without being touched.
Honestly, could you imagine going to a class on capitalism as a pro-capitalist when it is being taught with nothing but Marx? That is like learning about Jewish beliefs from the Iranian Council of Guardians of the Revolution.
*sigh*
Someone went to too many anthropology classes and forgot to hit up their statistics class. Say it with me now!
Correlation does not imply causation!
"Furthermore a study showed that on average the viewers of the John Stewart show (liberal) were better educated and made more money then the viewers of Bill Oreilly."
Stupid people watch Oreilly because they are stupid, not because he is the bastion of conservatives. He is a stupid douche. The average vaguely intelligent person, conservative or otherwise tends to avoid Orielly like the plague. I am a libertarian and I can't stand the guy. The only thing entertaining about him is his aggressive interview style. Beyond that, he has absolutely nothing to offer. If I happen to stop on Fox news and see him speak, I generally can't go more then five minutes without turning it off.
I love the Daily show and I am a libertarian. John Stewart is a comedian. If you learn political ideology from the Daily Show, you are an idiot.
Statistically speaking people with collage educations are more likely to be liberals. Oddly enough the people with passports tend to overwhelmingly liberals.
Statistically speaking, criminals are more likely to be democrats. Statistically speaking, blacks are more likely to be criminals. Statistically speaking, actors are more likely to be liberals. If you take away from those stats being a democrat or black will make you into a criminal, or that being a liberal helps you act better, you are need to go back to school and take a basic stats course.
Say it with me again, " Correlation does not imply causation! "
The explanations as to why the average liberal tends to hold more degrees is close to endless.
-Liberals could have more degrees but they could be more inclined to be intellectually less valuable in terms of political and economic understanding, like art, film, and literature.
-If you count a community college degrees as being equal to a major universities degree you are skewing the data based upon who is more likely to get a community college degree.
-People tend to become more conservative as they get older. In the past, fewer people had degrees. This means that more degree holding people are younger people, who tend to be more liberal in ideology.
-Conservatives could be more likely to not go to college or drop out early in favor of perusing entrepreneurial opportunities.
My point?
Correlation does not imply causation!
(if only Slashdot allowed the flashy blinking tag...)
Academia is very biased. Bias is not necessarily a bad thing. It is hard to study a topic for years and not end of taking a stand on it. The issue is when your bias prevents you from teaching people who have a different bias. In 95% of the schools out there, it is completely and utterly impossible to go through the sociology program as a fiscal and/or moral conservative. At best, you will get poor grades, constantly have to defend your every breath, and receive little to no supporting reading material to back up your views. At worst you will be failed multiple times.
My girlfriend is a sociologist. The worst case of abuse I have seen was when she took a class called "Capitalism and the Environment". Every single book and handout that she had was without exception Marxist. How in the hell you can justify teaching a class with the word 'capitalism' in it without reading a single pro-capitalist thinker is utterly beyond me. Not even addressing the opposition is the absolutely most dishonest form of teaching that you can do.
The worst part about this is that it insulates an entire field of thinking from any sort of opposition thinking. A brain dead liberal can make it through the sociology program that my girlfriend made it through. Hell, my girlfriends best friend is sweet, but dumber then a sack full of bricks and made it through with a B. A conservative or libertarian on the other hand would have to fight every single step of the way. Teachers teach nothing but a single side and challenge conservative students every step of the way. I am sure the few conservatives that make it through are as tough as nails, but you shouldn't need an iron will and lead skin to make it through a sociology program.
I am not sure that UCLA's methods are right or effective, but I am glad that they at least acknowledge a problem. A liberal kid should be able to learn economics. A conservative kid should be able to learn sociobiology. Certainly they should be challenged, but they shouldn't have to fight tooth and nail while others float past by simply nodding their heads in agreement with the subjective opinions of their teachers. Liberals have interest in economics and conservative have interest in sociology. It is a travesty that these programs at some school intentionally try and convert or fail the few brave souls willing to cross the lines.
I always find it strange when people accuse academia of unfair bias. When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? (Hint: It's not that they were brainwashed and indoctrinated...)
It probably tells you that they exist in a system that is heavily dependent upon government funding. It probably tells you that they live in a world that is seniority based instead of merit based. They are likely unionized and depend upon strong union laws make them very hard to fire even when they are well past their prime or the institution the worked for has achieved a higher standard and wants to hire better staff.
The best and the brightest are not liberal. Academia tend to liberal. Now, within academia you certainly have some very bright people. You also have some amazingly smart engineers, businessmen, scientist, and economist that are ardently right wing. Arguing that all the smart people are liberals is amazing ignorant.
No, it isn't for morons. It is for people who don't steal and (far more importantly) people who don't have time to waste looking for a bit torrent link that works and is offering something of quality.
The other Friday I missed Battlestar Galactica. Sure, I could have done what I used to do was the fuck around with BT to get it. Instead though, I just threw them 2 bucks, which for a guy with a job is nothing, and got a good quality version without any hassle.
Hell, the reason why I will pay for a TV show is the same reason why I will pay for a videogame. First, I don't want to be a douche and not give the people who made it their due. Second, it is just a hell of a lot easier to simply buy what you want then to screw around trying to download it.
At this point, the only thing I am waiting for now is for all TV programming to be offered free, any time, but with commercials. It is down right archaic that I need to be in front of the television at a certain time to watch a show. I should be able to watch it whenever I damn well please with commercials. Just disable the fastforward function while viewing commercials and you have something as good as normal TV.
Fuck Jack Thompson. I am pretty damn sure that this game will strictly enforce 18+. Let the idiot try and bring this before a court and get violently smacked down.
Personally, I love the spat of video game laws that stupid state legislators have tried to pass. Each and every single one without exception has been struck down, and struck down hard. Each time one of these stupid laws are struck down, it just strengthens freedom of speech laws.
Nothing brings a smile to my face like politicians ramming their head violently against the first amendment and looking shocked and confused when it doesn't budge. I welcome this game the legislation that congressmen will attempt to bring about to stop it. It just makes it easier to see which representatives will grow the strength to stand up for the first amendment, and which are pathetic sniveling slime that refuse to take a stand that doesn't instantly sound good in a sound byte. It makes picking who I vote for all the easier.
Fuck'em.
Guys, this article is clearly bullshit. I say this in the most NOT +1 funny way, if making someone type a couple sentences in English without a spelling or grammar mistake is the level you hold people to, you will NEVER get people in your group. People in WoW and EQ2 talk like fucking retarded AOL children. If you were to dump me onto a WoW server and I had no knowledge of MMORPGs, I would ask you why there are so many people who have English as a second language on the server. Hell, the foreign speakers some times have better English because they realize that capital letters and periods are okay to use. I thnk caps n perids r godd
The absolutely retarded way that people speak in the MMORPGs today is one of the reasons why I now play EvE. Playing on EvE is night and day compared to WoW and EQ2. Not only is the game far less shallow, but it is simply mind numbing to listen on a chat of 600+ people and have only a very small fraction of them banging away on the keyboard like fucking AOL illiterate pre-pubescent kids. The other night on EvE chat people were talking about good history books. The night before there was an interesting political discussion. Seeing 600 people in a chat room with only a minimal number of them pretending that they have sever brain damage is simply mind blowing.
I think what clinched me into buying EvE was when some idiot started slamming away at the keyboard with his face in all caps using AOL speak. He was promptly made fun of for typing luck a fucktard and then utterly ignored. I promptly logged out and signed up for a permanent account.
If N. Korea started to attack first, we would not fight a conventional warfare. They would be stopped frozen in their tracks once a few nuclear bombs wipe out all major cities. Fuck politics, this is war at this point. This stratagy would be the ONLY effective one against N. Korea. After the fact, then everyone would move the troops in to take out the rouge remaining forces.
That is the point. North Korea wont initiate a war because it would go nuclear. The US wont initiate a war because it would involve the destruction of much of South Korea and a hunk of Japan. Claiming in your earlier post that there is going to be a war is silly. Neither side is going to fight. North Korea doesn't gain anything out of attacking South Korea and could never win such a fight. The US won't attack North Korea because North Korea would retaliate by destroying much of South Korea with chemical and nuclear weapons.
The two simply won't fight. There is no war coming to North Korea.
That, and the fact it we don't want to be fighting wars on two different fronts. Chances are, we will deal with N. Korea with military means once we are sure Europe can take on Iran. It's WWIII, I'm bloddy serious.
That is so utterly wrong I can't even begin to put words to it. The US will never ever deal with North Korea militarily unless North Korea attacks another nation.
People forget that the capital of South Korea is in artillery range of North Korea. North Korea has a massive amount of chemical and biological weapons at its disposal. In any attack, North Korea would intentionally inflict massive civilian casualties on South Korea has it dumped chemical and conventional rounds into heavily populated zones with artillery and missiles. Further, you can pretty much rest assure that if North Korea will fire on Tokyo with chemical weapons and nukes.
There will be no war with North Korea. Every nation in the region would step in to stop it, South Korea, Japan, and China included. When I say "stop it" I don't just mean "apply diplomatic pressure". I mean they would physically stop it with force of arms if they had to. Of course, that isn't going to be a problem because no president or congress would ever be so insane as to destroy the world economy by drowning some of the largest economies in Asia (Japan and South Korea) in a chemical cloud and receiving sanctions from all the others (China and everyone else).
The idea that the US would ever invade North Korea is utterly inane. The only thing North Korea could ever do to provoke a response from the US would be to nuke the US. I imagine at that point our response wouldn't be invasion, it would be glassing.
Gee, because maybe by the time there is a pressing need -- say, a giant extinction-causing asteroid six months away from ramming into Earth at 25,000mph -- there won't be time to develop a whole recolonization program from scratch. And if you discount developing colonization programs, you're also killing off propulsion research that might be beneficial in developing a rocket that could deflect said asteroid. This is just one of several examples I could make.
Under absolutely no circumstance will Mars ever be more hospitable to Earth, even after a life destroying asteroid. If we really are worried about being wiped out by an asteroid, I suggest that at one millionth of the price of going to Mars, we build a sea colony or an underground colony right here on Earth. We could be something many times more secure and safe then throwing a few humans in a vacuum. We can build these colonies right here on earth without having to life billions of tons of material out of a gravity well.
There are plenty of reasons why we should be doing this "RIGHT NOW" as you put it, but the best reason of all is because we can. What you propose is like a patient with early-detected cancer refusing to take treatment for the cancer because "it's not life threatening right now so why bother with the expense and discomfort?"
If you want to use analogies, the correct analogy would be sending in a perfectly healthy child for chemotherapy before having detected any systems or signs of cancer. Further, as I have already shown, space is easily the worst solution to life destroying events. A fucked up Earth beats a normal day on Mars or the Moon any and every day of the week.
Here is my question. WTF is this in YRO? Whose rights were violated or even in question? This broke into a system and destroyed data illegally. IBM had to come in and figure out how much damage he did and repair it. Is 20,000 a lot? It might be on the high end, but you need to remember that not only did they need to undo the damage, but they had to make sure there was no other damage done. I don't know about you, but if a disgruntle ex-employee broke into my system and did damage, I would want the entire system checked from top to bottom to make sure he did nothing else.
So this man clearly violated the law and he got a sentence. Was the sentence appropriate? Hell yes! He got sentenced for just 3 months in a 'white collar resort' plus fines. 3 months for breaking into a computer system and forcing a company to pay to have their entire system checked over is a fair punishment. The company in question will never be sure that they caught all the damage or that he didn't slip a backdoor in. If anything, I think they went light on him.
The only rights violated were the rights of the company in question. The ass hole who broke into the system got exactly what he deserved. A slap on the wrist jail sentance in a white collar resort, a fine, and has effectively made it such that he will never get a job in IT again. Good riddance.
While it is true that the Earth is going to end at some point, that ISN'T a reason to go the moon right now. Right now, to get to the moon and do anything is massively expensive. The cost associated with actual colonization is mind blowing. Why do it RIGHT NOW, when there is no pressing need? Why not let technology further improve and refine before spending the many billions or trillions of dollars it will take to do something of substance on the moon?
Going to the moon now would be like building a 100 story sky scrapper in 1880. We probably had the technology back then to brute force our way around the problem of supporting such a massive structure. We could have mustered the man power to build it. It just would have consumed a noticeable portion of the GDP for minimal benefit. We didn't build such a structure though; we waited 50 years and got the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was cheaper, safer, and more effective at what it did then the solution we could have kludged together 50 years earlier. Going to the moon now instead of waiting 50 years is no different.