Probably not. The purpose of the system is to make people more money. Whether the results are statistically valid isn't the point.
Record company executives are not going to pay for a system which doesn't work. The most convincing way to show them that it works is to prove it statistically. Therefore the reasonable assumption is that this company will have done just that. This system is not being marketed to the public, it's being marketed to executives who are certainly more statistically aware than the general public (just look at how they use statistics to lie). They are not going to accept bogus methodolgy.
I'm running about two dozen apps I skinned myself in the same style, so if spybot is all that skinnable, I'm about to make it number 25.
Can you list those apps? I'm curious as to what sort of stuff you run that is all skinnable. Certainly Winamp is the only app I use regularly that is skinnable.
I have yet to see a good media player that use native widgets, the native widgets aren't made for such button-filled interfaces as media players tend to be.
Oh, come on. There is nothing particularly tricky about a media player interface. Winamp 3 (the player I'm using at the moment) has only 12 buttons and one slider on the main window, and three of those buttons are just for toggling the other windows. I'm using Firefox and it has 6 buttons and two text fields on the main toolbar, a Personal Toolbar with 10 buttons for bookmarks, and a search toolbar with 3 buttons, a textfield, and a checkbox, and yet it seems quite usable with native widgets (or at least widgets that emulate native feel). Excel has over 50 toolbar items, which it manages quite happily with native widgets. Windows Media Player managed with native widgets until someone at Microsoft decided they needed to emulate all the other player's funky interfaces to get market share (it still does manage perfectly well with the "classic" theme.
So blame on, but I still think that Winamps skinning is part of what makes it the best music player around.
Winamp skinning is probably part of what made it the most popular music player around (going by the number of custom skins available, even if I have never seen anyone use them). As far as "best" goes, that mostly subjective and I certainly don't think it's unusually good.
Any rule of UI design should be broken if there's a solution that benefits the user more than the one that follows the traditional guidelines.
This is true, but you're putting the cart before the horse. Most UI designers don't seem to follow the guidelines closely enough to even think about breaking them to benefit the user. At this point it's more important to be talking about using the guidelines than to be talking about when to break them, right?
you don't need the marketing blitz (which she didn't get)
I don't know where you live, but where I live she certainly did get a massive marketing blitz. The most noticeable I remember, in fact. TV, billboards, advertising on buses, the full works.
In the field of machine learning, it's considered a major no-no to quote performance figures based on your training data.
I picked up on that too, but then I realised that it's a single, throwaway line in an article in the Guardian. It's not pitched at a statistics aware audience so they haven't bothered to tell us how the algorithm was actually evaluated. For all we know they did use N-way cross-validation. These are not stupid people so there is a good chance they did.
This report would have been rejected immediately from any academic journal of any significance. It's a fucking joke.
What academic journal would ever publish an article written for a newspaper? What's your point here?
If you read the article, try to discover what is actually fact. Notice how no uninvolved people were interviewed - we only have the statements of the pair and a court official. Each of these people will, of course, spin the event their way. The majority of that article is little better than editorializing - filling in with opinion where facts are lacking.
True, but we can still form theories about what went on. For example, which seems more likely to you:
1. These guys did liken the lawyers bypassing the line as "kings" compared to the "peasants" who had to stand in line (as the pair contend),
or 2. In fact they were just randomly calling other people standing in line "peasants" (as the courts spokesman claims)?
"They were making general comments to the people on line, referring to them as 'peasants,' and they were causing a disturbance."
Apparently they were refering to the people in line as 'the peasants' in comparison to the lawyers who got to skip the line 'the nobility'. Unless there were particularly stupid people in the line that day, I'd say it's unlikely that anyone there felt they were personally being insulted. It looks like a case of the Nassau courts spokesman trying to spin the incident into something more serious than it was.
however the original post is not a proof by contradiction because its really not a mathematically sound construction at all. it is, however, amusing.:)
It's only amusing if you enjoy seeing that sort of bastardized and incorrect mathematical reasoning.
Simply state, validly, that evolution seems to fit with the facts as science is best capable of recording it, and that there are some failures which we cannot explain yet but which alternative theories, including creationism might possibly explain.
But why do you want to single out evolution for this treatment? There is plenty of other science with as many failures and alternative theories. The big bang theory, a lot of quantum mechanics, for example. The obvious answer is dogma. To push for this sort of disclaimer on evolution alone under the pretext that it's the right thing to do scientifically is to be dishonest about your motives, IMHO.
Cell phones use microwaves and microwaves are non-ionizing radiation, and *NOBODY* in over 50 years of trying has managed to devise a reprodicable experiment that demonstrates any harmful effect of non-ionizing radiation (well unless you get enough microwaves to cook you).
Actually there is plenty of evidence, though nothing conclusive, that non-ionizing radiation may have non-thermal effects on biological systems. Do some research and you'll see.
Whoopy we have a few more unrepeated experiments that show some minor effects. I would lay odds that when they are repeated the results turn out to be statistical flukes, and show no effect.
Paraphrased from the article:
"A study in Sweden has shown that acoustic neuromas are twice as common in mobile phone users, and were also four times as common on the side of the head where the phone was held".
Does that really sound likely to be a "statistical fluke" to you? Does a condition requiring surgery to prevent deafness really sound like a "minor effect" to you?
The golden rule of all science is that it most be independantly repetable. Unless you can satisfy this it is just junk science. You would have thought if there was any effects someone would have found them by now with thousands of experiments over 50 years.
The correlations that these studies are claiming should be verifiable in other populations, true, however you have not presented any evidence that these studies have been discredited. Until someone can produce that evidence you have to accept that the correlations may be real. To do otherwise is foolish.
This has nothing to do with kids or brian tumors, but rather science. You have focused on the specifics of this case, which are irrelevant. The point was this scientist neeeds to have real evidence, of which there is currently little or none, before making potentially damaging claims like this.
This scientist has reviewed the studies in question (whereas you, I am certain, have not), and concluded that there is more evidence than there was 5 years ago. Because there is the potential for a great deal of harm, this report has been issued pointing out that there are possible risks. That is all reasonable and responsible. You seem to think that the potential for harm shouldn't be a factor in the decision to make a statement like this, that is a very dangerous attitude.
You assume that fewer people will smoke under prohibition. Obviously, if you look at the history of alcohol and drug prohibition, that is not a reasonable assumption.
Prohibition of a substance when the majority of the users don't see any harm is one thing. Prohibition when there is clear harm is another. In my country tabacco advertising was made illegal several years ago. There has been a resulting drop in the number of smokers. It is not at all unreasonable to conclude that a prohibition on smoking would result in a further drop in the number of smokers.
This study is applicable to children. The results may or may not be applicable to adults.
No. The studies (if you'd really read TFA you'd know there were four) are not just applicable to children. However the recommendation in the report summarising the research is that children may be at particular risk and should therefore not use mobiles.
It's called Gentoo. Install with Anaconda, type emerge mythtv. You now have MythTv, wasn't that hard? Use genkernel to compile your kernel if you're lazy, and now you have the drivers for your mpeg card and all that fun stuff.
Having just setup a media PC with Gentoo and MythTV I can tell you it ain't that easy. emerge mythtv will get MythTV install for you, but it won't get it set up. There is still plenty to do: get the drivers for your capture card sorted out, get the audio settings right, get the program guide data working properly, get the TV out on the video card working.
A lot of 4 and 5 modded comments on this story, and not one of them discussing who will actually win. Is it really necessary to have so many highly modderated comments saying "yes, the porn industry is very influential"?
So who will win? Will it be the larger producers who favour Blu-ray or the smaller ones who favour HD-DVD? I'd say that size matters and Blu-ray will win.
No. That's why I mentioned "everyone's system". A program which is stable on some of the systems it runs on is not a stable program. Doubly so for something as critical as a kernel.
What you meant to say is "it's not stable for me". I'm having no problems with it.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
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Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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Ok, I see. You meant multitasking as in a person doing more than one thing at a time, not multitasking in the technical sense of the capabilities of the OS.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
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Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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You weren't doing the sort of seamless multitasking I can do now in Photoshop
Care to elaborate on what you mean by that? The Amigas didn't have memory protection, but the multitasking was as real and seemless as OS X, Linux on XP.
that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented
I don't think that's right. I think it was that total transistor counts would double each 18 months. Transister density has certainly not doubled every year, or even every 18 months. More like every 30 months.
Downloading isn't the issue. The problem is, if you are PROVIDING illegal content on a p2p network, where is the checkbox that says "Allow downloads only from people who would never have bought it anyway?"
Yes, but we were specifically talking about downloading, not sharing.
Old parts are all very well for you, but as far as sweeping generalisations go we're better off looking at what it would cost to get equivalent functionality from scratch. That's where the quiet components come in. If you're not actually replicating what a Tivo does it's not a very valid comparison is it? I mean most people have already got a VCR and that does approximately what a Tivo does, so you might as well say "existing VCR: $0, sticking it to Tivo, priceless". It'd make as much sense.
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1. These guys did liken the lawyers bypassing the line as "kings" compared to the "peasants" who had to stand in line (as the pair contend),
or 2. In fact they were just randomly calling other people standing in line "peasants" (as the courts spokesman claims)?
"A study in Sweden has shown that acoustic neuromas are twice as common in mobile phone users, and were also four times as common on the side of the head where the phone was held".
Does that really sound likely to be a "statistical fluke" to you? Does a condition requiring surgery to prevent deafness really sound like a "minor effect" to you? The correlations that these studies are claiming should be verifiable in other populations, true, however you have not presented any evidence that these studies have been discredited. Until someone can produce that evidence you have to accept that the correlations may be real. To do otherwise is foolish.
So who will win? Will it be the larger producers who favour Blu-ray or the smaller ones who favour HD-DVD? I'd say that size matters and Blu-ray will win.
Ok, I see. You meant multitasking as in a person doing more than one thing at a time, not multitasking in the technical sense of the capabilities of the OS.
True (I use mythttv myself). But then you're putting together 2 PCs...
Old parts are all very well for you, but as far as sweeping generalisations go we're better off looking at what it would cost to get equivalent functionality from scratch. That's where the quiet components come in. If you're not actually replicating what a Tivo does it's not a very valid comparison is it? I mean most people have already got a VCR and that does approximately what a Tivo does, so you might as well say "existing VCR: $0, sticking it to Tivo, priceless". It'd make as much sense.