Astronomers refer to lots of things in their solid state as "ice", and almost always refer to what you would call "ice" as "water ice". And it makes plenty of sense.
Occam's Razor is only a heuristic; it can't make any demands.
What is selected as the null hypothesis is fairly arbitrary (determined by how the question is stated). If inconclusive results meant the null hypothesis was validated, then the same inconclusive results would also validate an entirely different null hypothesis.
Occam's Razor really addresses avoiding assumptions and complexity. There's no guarantee that the null hypothesis, solely by virtue of being the null hypothesis, is the conclusion with the least assumptions. The Razor does suggest (though not demand) that in the face of inconclusive results, conclusions with fewer assumptions are more likely to be true.
Among a sufficiently large group of people with varied predictions, one of them is virtually guaranteed to be right by virtue of statistics. This makes his next prediction no more or less valuable.
For Reclaim, at least, your data doesn't go through their servers. It's a bookmarklet that causes JavaScript to be executed. The JavaScript file can be downloaded and reviewed, and you could even change the bookmarklet to run your local, reviewed copy instead of the one from their server. It doesn't appear to communicate with anyone but facebook.com.
I have the Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta from Ubuntu 10.04. Browsing Incognito appears to still change a number of files on disk, though I haven't investigated what is changed or stored. Finding the zoom problem is straightforward, though:
Per-site zoom levels are stored in a Preferences file (.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences for me) in a "per_host_zoom_levels" section. It appears that the key is the domain name and the value is the zoom level. These seem to be saved when Chrome exits and, at least in my version, are set and accessed from both regular and Incognito mode.
So, anyone who can read this file knows on what domains you have set non-default zoom levels, regardless of whether you accessed the site in Incognito mode.
Right, and you're equivocating on time scale. Facts in textbooks don't need to be accurate for two thousand years. At best, they only need to be accurate for the lifespan of the reader.
This gets tricky, because a lot of the background radiation you're exposed to (less cosmic, more solar) behaves the same way -- concentrated at the skin. Solar UV radiation, for example. So comparing the relative amounts of those sources vs. the scanner is still relevant.
By my very rough estimates, concentration at the skin vs. over the whole body is a two order of magnitude difference at worst.
Remote wipe is super easy on a laptop. Use full-disk encryption and don't leave your laptop powered on. If they can't guess your passphrase, it's equivalent to what happens when an iPhone is remote-wiped -- with the exception that you could be convinced to give them your passphrase eventually.
If fuel continues to rise in price, and nullifies Jeavon's paradox, but the growth in air travel from 1996 to present continues, then the savings of the 70% will be used up within 10 years.
Game over. Thanks for playing.
The mistake you make here is documented on Wikipedia, for crying out loud.
From Wikipedia: "The Jevons Paradox has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may actually increase fuel use. Nevertheless, increased efficiency can improve material living standards. Environmental economists have also pointed out that fuel use will unambiguously decline if increased efficiency is paired with a green tax that keeps cost of use the same. As the Jevons Paradox applies only to technological improvements that increase fuel efficiency, policies that impose conservation standards and increase costs do not display the Jevons Paradox."
He didn't say it was a law. (It's not, it's a rule of thumb.)
I'm no aircraft engineer, but for cars, internal frictions are only significant at low speeds. At a respectable speed, all of your power is going to counteracting drag.
I don't actually claim that cell phones cause brain cancer, only that your claim that there's no proposed mechanism of action turns out to be untrue. (I remember this mostly because I used to say that there's no proposed mechanism of action, so I thought this paper was particularly interesting.) I also claimed that your invoking of 1/r^2 wasn't quite appropriate.
Now, invoking occupational exposure is quite appropriate. Usually when you're working on RF equipment, it's powered off or you keep a good distance. But a good distance is measured in feet; cell phone to brain is inches. That's, roughly, a 1/r^2 difference of thousands. So exposure to a half-watt phone is like exposure to a half-kilowatt transmitter. A half-kilowatt transmitter is weak; some people are regularly exposed to much higher-power transmitters.
This is already true, without the X-ray imagers. In fact, a scan from the imager only gives you radiation equivalent to a few minutes in an airplane -- the flight itself does a much better job.
The areas covered by that legislation has better-than-average foreclosure rates now -- as in, fewer foreclosures. Not to mention that the legislation did not actually require banks to lend money to people without the ability to pay it back.
Two thousand years ago predates science, including physics and biology. If you're talking about the nonscientific discipline of natural philosophy, that's another matter.
You're also playing at equivocation. Your "point" invites comparison between what is widely-accepted now to what is widely-accepted in the past, suggesting that what is widely-accepted now may not be widely-accepted in the future. However, textbook authors -- as well as anyone else -- have no knowledge of what will be widely-accepted in the future. They can only choose between what is widely-accepted now and what is widely-rejected now. The former is more correct more frequently than the latter (given an appropriate definition of "widely-accepted", e.g., among experts).
The addendum to this is actually where textbooks fail. When what is widely-accepted changes (due to research), they must change the textbook.
I don't think 1/r^2 applies here quite like you think it does. It applies to large-area transmitters: RF from a radio antenna, a WiFi AP, or a cell tower is unlikely to cause harm (at least, at a reasonable distance from them) because many people are close to them (and thus subjected to enormously more energy).
Here, you're talking about the effect of a cell phone on the person holding it -- the phone-to-brain distance r is small. (It's a valid point that some people carry RF transmitters around almost constantly, though a lot of those use different frequencies.)
There is actually a paper on the medical basis for thinking that cell phone radiation could cause brain cancer. It's published in a legitimate medical journal. It has nothing to do with ionizing radiation (since cell phones aren't) and freely admits that there's no evidence suggesting that the proposed mechanism actually functions or that cell phones actually cause cancer.
Are you talking about brain cancer from the plastics and dyes in a cell phone? (Lead paint doesn't cause cancer.) I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.
Regardless, it's easy to differentiate between them -- that's why people came up with the clever idea of control groups.
One figure is what fraction of users use this particular client (LimeWire). The other figure is what fraction of bandwidth a particular protocol takes up, They're completely different measures.
You can't sue the Gnutella network, but you can sue the people who made LimeWire, which is by far the most popular Gnutella client.
The lawyers may not understand the distinction between Gnutella and LimeWire, but I guarantee you someone on their side hired someone else to explain it.
You can't shut down Gnutella effectively, and I'm sure they know this. They can, however, shut down the most popular client and make people think twice about writing a Gnutella client or using the Gnutella network.
The comas, which I used, were appropriate. Check with your English teacher.
There's another "m" in "commas". While technically this sentence is legitimate English, indicating that you used commas adds nothing to the statement, "The commas were appropriate." You probably meant, "The commas that I used were appropriate." To be really pedantic, all commas are the same. It's not really meaningful to refer to an appropriate or inappropriate comma. A good sentence would be, "I used commas appropriately."
It's a moot point. You did not use commas appropriately.
Not interested.
Yes, it's quite clear that your approach to discourse follows the stereotype suggested by your stance on the subject and your sig.
Slashdot Mirror
Not knowing how to operate a radar gun and not being currently certified in the proper operation of a radar gun are totally different.
Astronomers refer to lots of things in their solid state as "ice", and almost always refer to what you would call "ice" as "water ice". And it makes plenty of sense.
Occam's Razor is only a heuristic; it can't make any demands.
What is selected as the null hypothesis is fairly arbitrary (determined by how the question is stated). If inconclusive results meant the null hypothesis was validated, then the same inconclusive results would also validate an entirely different null hypothesis.
Occam's Razor really addresses avoiding assumptions and complexity. There's no guarantee that the null hypothesis, solely by virtue of being the null hypothesis, is the conclusion with the least assumptions. The Razor does suggest (though not demand) that in the face of inconclusive results, conclusions with fewer assumptions are more likely to be true.
Among a sufficiently large group of people with varied predictions, one of them is virtually guaranteed to be right by virtue of statistics. This makes his next prediction no more or less valuable.
Up there getting "Flamebait" mods for equating this to government silencing dissenters (using the tried-and-true slippery slope fallacy).
For Reclaim, at least, your data doesn't go through their servers. It's a bookmarklet that causes JavaScript to be executed. The JavaScript file can be downloaded and reviewed, and you could even change the bookmarklet to run your local, reviewed copy instead of the one from their server. It doesn't appear to communicate with anyone but facebook.com.
I have the Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta from Ubuntu 10.04. Browsing Incognito appears to still change a number of files on disk, though I haven't investigated what is changed or stored. Finding the zoom problem is straightforward, though:
Per-site zoom levels are stored in a Preferences file (.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences for me) in a "per_host_zoom_levels" section. It appears that the key is the domain name and the value is the zoom level. These seem to be saved when Chrome exits and, at least in my version, are set and accessed from both regular and Incognito mode.
So, anyone who can read this file knows on what domains you have set non-default zoom levels, regardless of whether you accessed the site in Incognito mode.
Right, and you're equivocating on time scale. Facts in textbooks don't need to be accurate for two thousand years. At best, they only need to be accurate for the lifespan of the reader.
This gets tricky, because a lot of the background radiation you're exposed to (less cosmic, more solar) behaves the same way -- concentrated at the skin. Solar UV radiation, for example. So comparing the relative amounts of those sources vs. the scanner is still relevant.
By my very rough estimates, concentration at the skin vs. over the whole body is a two order of magnitude difference at worst.
Remote wipe is super easy on a laptop. Use full-disk encryption and don't leave your laptop powered on. If they can't guess your passphrase, it's equivalent to what happens when an iPhone is remote-wiped -- with the exception that you could be convinced to give them your passphrase eventually.
If fuel continues to rise in price, and nullifies Jeavon's paradox, but the growth in air travel from 1996 to present continues, then the savings of the 70% will be used up within 10 years.
Game over. Thanks for playing.
The mistake you make here is documented on Wikipedia, for crying out loud.
From Wikipedia:
"The Jevons Paradox has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may actually increase fuel use. Nevertheless, increased efficiency can improve material living standards. Environmental economists have also pointed out that fuel use will unambiguously decline if increased efficiency is paired with a green tax that keeps cost of use the same. As the Jevons Paradox applies only to technological improvements that increase fuel efficiency, policies that impose conservation standards and increase costs do not display the Jevons Paradox."
He didn't say it was a law. (It's not, it's a rule of thumb.)
I'm no aircraft engineer, but for cars, internal frictions are only significant at low speeds. At a respectable speed, all of your power is going to counteracting drag.
I don't actually claim that cell phones cause brain cancer, only that your claim that there's no proposed mechanism of action turns out to be untrue. (I remember this mostly because I used to say that there's no proposed mechanism of action, so I thought this paper was particularly interesting.) I also claimed that your invoking of 1/r^2 wasn't quite appropriate.
Now, invoking occupational exposure is quite appropriate. Usually when you're working on RF equipment, it's powered off or you keep a good distance. But a good distance is measured in feet; cell phone to brain is inches. That's, roughly, a 1/r^2 difference of thousands. So exposure to a half-watt phone is like exposure to a half-kilowatt transmitter. A half-kilowatt transmitter is weak; some people are regularly exposed to much higher-power transmitters.
This is already true, without the X-ray imagers. In fact, a scan from the imager only gives you radiation equivalent to a few minutes in an airplane -- the flight itself does a much better job.
Lovely. Zero to 'racist' is 4.3 seconds. What a lovely rhetorical tool! Almost as good as tossing out "nazi" or "Hitler".
16 minutes, actually. But who's counting? Counting is for Nazis.
The areas covered by that legislation has better-than-average foreclosure rates now -- as in, fewer foreclosures. Not to mention that the legislation did not actually require banks to lend money to people without the ability to pay it back.
Two thousand years ago predates science, including physics and biology. If you're talking about the nonscientific discipline of natural philosophy, that's another matter.
You're also playing at equivocation. Your "point" invites comparison between what is widely-accepted now to what is widely-accepted in the past, suggesting that what is widely-accepted now may not be widely-accepted in the future. However, textbook authors -- as well as anyone else -- have no knowledge of what will be widely-accepted in the future. They can only choose between what is widely-accepted now and what is widely-rejected now. The former is more correct more frequently than the latter (given an appropriate definition of "widely-accepted", e.g., among experts).
The addendum to this is actually where textbooks fail. When what is widely-accepted changes (due to research), they must change the textbook.
No, it really doesn't.
I don't think 1/r^2 applies here quite like you think it does. It applies to large-area transmitters: RF from a radio antenna, a WiFi AP, or a cell tower is unlikely to cause harm (at least, at a reasonable distance from them) because many people are close to them (and thus subjected to enormously more energy).
Here, you're talking about the effect of a cell phone on the person holding it -- the phone-to-brain distance r is small. (It's a valid point that some people carry RF transmitters around almost constantly, though a lot of those use different frequencies.)
There is actually a paper on the medical basis for thinking that cell phone radiation could cause brain cancer. It's published in a legitimate medical journal. It has nothing to do with ionizing radiation (since cell phones aren't) and freely admits that there's no evidence suggesting that the proposed mechanism actually functions or that cell phones actually cause cancer.
No, rejecting the hypothesis is a conclusion. An inconclusive study neither confirms nor rejects the hypothesis.
Are you talking about brain cancer from the plastics and dyes in a cell phone? (Lead paint doesn't cause cancer.) I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.
Regardless, it's easy to differentiate between them -- that's why people came up with the clever idea of control groups.
One figure is what fraction of users use this particular client (LimeWire). The other figure is what fraction of bandwidth a particular protocol takes up, They're completely different measures.
You can't sue the Gnutella network, but you can sue the people who made LimeWire, which is by far the most popular Gnutella client.
The lawyers may not understand the distinction between Gnutella and LimeWire, but I guarantee you someone on their side hired someone else to explain it.
You can't shut down Gnutella effectively, and I'm sure they know this. They can, however, shut down the most popular client and make people think twice about writing a Gnutella client or using the Gnutella network.
Perhaps you should read the text of the post. Or are you advocating a judge-a-book-by-its-cover approach?
The comas, which I used, were appropriate. Check with your English teacher.
There's another "m" in "commas". While technically this sentence is legitimate English, indicating that you used commas adds nothing to the statement, "The commas were appropriate." You probably meant, "The commas that I used were appropriate." To be really pedantic, all commas are the same. It's not really meaningful to refer to an appropriate or inappropriate comma. A good sentence would be, "I used commas appropriately."
It's a moot point. You did not use commas appropriately.
Not interested.
Yes, it's quite clear that your approach to discourse follows the stereotype suggested by your stance on the subject and your sig.