I can walk into a Honda dealer, buy a Honda and couldn't care less what the Ford dealer across the street thinks.
By the same token, if the Honda dealer doesn't have a privacy policy, and did not agree with you to keep your information private, there's nothing to prevent the Honda dealer from selling your information to the Ford dealer for a mutually agreeable price.
What I find really fascinating is that the radio waves that it sends back are red shifted beyond belief by the time they reach us.
Exsqueeze me? According to the Excite article, Pioneer 10 is travelling at 27,380 miles per hour relative to the sun. According to my calculations, this is about 0.00004 c. Enough to measurably red-shift the transmission, yes, barely. Hardly "red shifted beyond belief."
Then the universe would be even older than the 15-20 billion years it appears to be.
Thus the universe's age is in reality not established AT ALL, not that scientists can agree on that either!
Observation: some scientists think the universe is fifteen billion years old.
Observation: other scientists think the universe is twenty billion years old.
shadrax's conclusion: Scientists can't agree on the age of the universe; therefore the universe might actually be six thousand years old.
I can't help but wonder: when shadrax sees an old man on the street, and can't decide whether the man is closer to seventy or eighty, does shadrax conclude that the man might actually be five?
Scientists use circular logic. For example, a dinosaur bone might be dated to x million years old. So we've disproved the Bible--or have we? How do biologists know what level of carbon dating is how old? Well, the geologist over there says the rock it was found in is x million years old. So ask the geologist how he knows how old the rock is. Well, of course, fossils just that old happen to be found there, so of course the rock is that old!
This would be a valid argument if radiometric dating measured only two isotopes. By using isochron methods, which require three isotopes, the age of materials can be determined radiometrically without the sort of circular reasoning shadrax describes.
Not to mention that shadrax is apparently unaware that carbon dating is only good for dates up to tens of thousands of years (carbon dating is only one type of radiometric dating; others are good for much larger ages). Also, carbon dating has been validated by non-radiometric methods, such as counting tree rings or ice layers.
Scientists insist that cave and rock formations must have been formed over millions of years. They have never considered the possible effect of a single catastrophic event, such as the Flood, in creating rock formations like the Grand Canyon.
Since we can never observe the event, it is impossible to prove that man evolved from apes.
Evolution does not state that man evolved from apes. Instead, it states that man and apes evolved from a common ancestor. It's amazing how many creationists have trouble with this distinction; I wonder how they ever manage to tell their brothers from their fathers.
Now tell me, are you presenting this strawman version of evolution out of ignorance, or are you deliberately lying?
As I understand it, he does it out of courtesy, not out of legality. As others have noted, he doesn't have to have anyone's permission at all to write the parodies he does.
This is what I see as the real problem. The legal profession has a strong self-interest in making the law as burdensome and as complicated as possible.
That's part of the problem, I agree, but I think there's another factor at work too.
Lawyers and legislators like to write laws and other legal documents to be as precise as possible. To that end, they use a specialized jargon (commonly called "legalese") with more precise meanings than ordinary everyday English.
Now, there's nothing wrong with lawyers, or any other profession, using specialized jargon among themselves in order to make their meaning more precise. Nearly every profession has some such jargon. The problem is that people outside the field do not understand the specialized jargon, making things more confusing for them. The problem is exacerbated in law, because an ordinary, intelligent person ought to be able to understand the law without knowing the jargon. Just as a programmer should not use jargon in explaining his work to a non-programmer, legal documents which apply to laypeople ought to be understandable by those same laypeople.
A poster in another thread a while back (sorry, don't have the reference) wrote that laws should be written more intelligibly, and held up as a positive example, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. "
Yes, it's nice that it uses clear language, and is intelligible to the average person without the use of a legal dictionary. It's also incredibly vague, and as a result, literally thousands of court cases every year take place where the court must rule on the interpretation of this sentence.
So the dilemma lawyers face is between writing vague, non-legalese documents, and precise legalese documents which are difficult for the layperson to understand.
No, I don't have an easy solution to this. I just wanted to point out that self-preservation is not the sole reason for use of legalese.
As usual, in any disagreement there tends to be three sides to the story. In this case, it is the American side, the Chinese side, and the truth. I'm Canadian, and have had enough international experience to know that there is more going on here than the US press is letting on.
Your point that neither the American nor the Chinese statements represent the full truth is probably accurate.
However, the rest of your post is filled by pure speculation on your part. It seems there are at least four sides to this story: the American one, the Chinese one, mks113's unsupported speculations, and the truth. (And no, I don't pretend to have the truth.)
The American plane was flying in an area that the Americans claim is International airspace. The Chinese claim that it was Chinese airspace.
Even the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. admits that the incident took place in international airspace, according to this report.
Rusty writes that in today's society, capital is valued more than life. He implies that the alternative, to be preferred, is to value life over capital.
But the situtation is a quantitative one, not qualitative. It is not life over capital vs. capital over life, but rather the relative value placed on each.
What would happen if we valued life as an absolute, over any amount of wealth or profit motive? Sounds great at first, until you consider that we would have no cars (they cause tens of thousands of deaths every year). How many of us would be noble enough to agree to live the rest of our lives in utter poverty to save the life of a single stranger?
The question is where we strike the balance. Might our society be tilted too much towards capital and too far from life? Perhaps. But it's a question of what level we strike the balance at, and not an either/or question as Rusty suggests.
i come to slashdot to check out tech geeks talking to tech geeks and look what i see! why the heck would you flame the guy for talking like a scientist here?!
Re-read my comment. I'm not flaming the guy for talking like a scientist. I'm flaming the guy for flaming someone else for not talking like a scientist.
you're right about multiple definitions, of course.
And yet you miss my point. Although my example was of two different people using a word to mean two different things, even a single person can use a word to mean different things in different contexts.
so shall we discuss what forking and multithreading or hacking a shell means, also? cause goodness knows that forks and threads and shells mean different things to the layperson and we wouldn't want to confuse them here on/.
"Forking" may mean a computer process to a tech geek most of the time, but that doesn't mean that same tech geek can't also use the term to mean executing a chess move where a single piece attacks two opposing pieces at once, or doing that thing Emeril does to get juice out of a lemon without getting any lemon seeds.
My problem is not with dstone using the technical meaning of "experiment," it's with dstone flaming someone else for using the common meaning of "experiment."
It would interesting, except to be an "experiment", you'd have to get an art class to follow the Scientific Method, including formulating a hypothesis, falsifiability, etc.
Well, yes, if you refuse to accept any other definition of "experiment" besides the one scientists use.
You're probably one of those people who say "a tomato isn't a vegetable, it's actually a fruit," aren't you? Well, I have news for you. To the biologist it's a fruit, but to the chef it's a vegetable. The biologist and the chef don't mean exactly the same thing when they say "fruit," just as the scientist and the layperson don't mean exactly the same thing when they say "experiment." This is how English works. Deal.
I'm just barely old enough to remember "equal time" laws. The idea was that if a TV or radio broadcast station presented an editorial supporting one viewpoint, it had to provide "equal time" to the opposing view.
These laws were eventually struck down as unconstitutional. Part of the reason, IIRC, was that it required stations to subsidize speech that they didn't agree with.
But more importantly (to my mind), the other reason they were struck down was that they were based on the false notion that there are only two viewpoints on any issue, and that presentation of two viewpoints covered the entire spectrum of the issue.
Sunstein's idea to require linking to opposing viewpoints is just Equal Time redux, and it would be just as unconstitutional. Viewpoints that do not fit into the traditional (and overly simplistic) left-right dichotomy would be even more marginalized than they are currently.
Writer Camille Paglia espouses an unusual brand of feminism which tends to upset conservatives and traditional "liberal" feminists equally. Where would her voice fit in this system?
Pro-life and pro-choice extremists both claim there can be no compromise on the issue of abortion, despite the fact that the vast, but largely silent majority of Americans seem to want a compromise, allowing abortions early in a pregnancy, but not partial-birth abortions. But how likely is it that anyone would be exposed to the moderate view under Sunstein's system?
And when there are more than two opposing viewpoints, who decides which ones qualify to be linked to? If it were up to the website owner himself, what keeps him from linking to the worst, weakest presentation of an opposing viewpoint, and how does that help anyone? Or, to take a worst-case scenario, what prevents him from deliberately putting up a bad presentation of an opposing viewpoint, presenting it as a site independent from his own, and linking to that? Literal biblical creationists are notorious for presenting strawman versions of evolutionary theory to shoot down, either failing to understand or deliberately misrepresenting what evoluationary theory actually predicts.
At least when a web site or other information source presents only one side of the story, most people are smart enough to realize it's biased. But I worry that when two viewpoints are represented (because they're required by law to be represented) people will then conclude that all viewpoints are represented.
Of the Republican and Democratic parties, which group believes in greater government intervention in your life?
Looks pretty much like a toss-up to me.
If you have been conditioned by the less informed, you would believe that these are both the same parties.
If you have been conditioned by the less informed, you judge political parties by their words rather than their actions. Yes, Republicans pay greater lip service to smaller government and personal freedom than Democrats. Any evidence of this from their actions is lacking, however.
Which of the two parties has the philosophy of "Small Government"? If you think small government consists of just fewer government employees, then you're fooling yourself. Small Government is not just a policy, it is a philosophy.
Name ONE SINGLE government program that W. proposed to cut during his campaign. You can't, because he didn't.
Why do you think Libertarians, who believe that government's only role is to maintain our roads build a military, typically vote Republican?
A blatant lie. Harry Browne reported that of the people he talked to who were supporting him in this election, about 1/3 traditionally voted Republican, 1/3 traditionally voted Democrat, and 1/3 considered themselves independents or didn't usually vote.
Unlike the author of this story, I broker my argument on logic, rather than ignorance and flailing emotionalism.
Perhaps so, but the flaw in your argument lies in judging Republicans by their words rather than their actions.
E2 may look like an encyclopedia, (and taste like one) but it isn't one.
Fair enough. I suppose I was initially misled by a) the fact that it does look much like an encyclopedia, and b) all the posts to this story (some of them upmoderated!) talking about what a wonderful place E2 is for finding information.
Now, should I be concerned that other people may make the same mistake I initially did, in assuming that E2 is at least intended to be an accurate source of information?
Then perhaps you could explain the point to me, as I'm completely missing it here.
The point of E2 is that it's collaborative. It's not supposed to be a definitive reference work.
OK, if it's not a definitive reference work, then what the hell is it supposed to be? "It's collaborative" is hardly good enough (to my mind). Why a collaborative work that looks like an encyclopedia, then, rather than a collaborative novel or a collaborative symphony? Or is the nature of the work irrelevant? Perhaps "it's collaborative, it's a community, it doesn't have to be accurate" is sufficient for you, but that sort of thinking is completely alien to me.
Still not good enough? You can always try "the internet" I guess.
Please tell me this is a troll and you're not really that naive. If I thought the internet were the only source of information, or that "everything is on the internet" I would be out of a job in about two minutes.
I understand that mistakes can be corrected on E2, but you've entirely missed my point.
When I'm evaluating a new information source--particularly one with very broad subject coverage, such as E2--I'll look for information on subjects I know a lot about, so I can evaluate whether they're accurate or not. I can hardly evaluate the accuracy of a source by looking up things I know little about!
If I find that the source is accurate on areas I'm knowledgeable in, I can trust it to be pretty accurate in other areas as well. If it has errors that I can find, it probably has errors in other areas as well, and I won't trust its information in those areas I know little about.
Finding that E2 does have errors on subjects I'm knowledgeable about, I conclude that it probably has errors in other areas as well. Fixing the errors I have found would not make E2 any more trustworthy in those areas where I cannot recognize errors.
To look at it another way, if I'm interested in learning more about object-oriented programming (a subject I know very little about), I want a source that is error-free, or very nearly so, now. That its errors will be corrected next week when an expert comes along and recognizes the errors does me little good.
The simple fact about everything2 is that while it is an interesting place, and a fascinating community, the ecology of any online community ultimately destroys it as a source of reliable information.
I'll second that.
I had come across references to E2 from time to time before, but never actually visited. So when I saw this article on/. I decided to check it out.
I decided to look up "chess," a topic near and dear to my heart. Skimming the article, I noted a glaring error: the 50-move rule was wrong. The author of the article stated that either player could claim a draw if 50 moves had passed without any captures. In fact, the rule is that 50 moves must pass with neither a capture nor a pawn move taking place. Also missing is the caveat that "50 moves" in fact means 50 moves by each player, something that is not intuitively obvious to someone just learning about the game.
Yes, a survey with sample size n=1 is hardly scientific, and I can't draw any formal conclusions just from that about the overall accuracy of E2. I'm also not saying that traditional information sources are 100% accurate--as a librarian, I'm certainly aware that even sources such as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica contains errors, albeit rarely. But my n=1 survey is enough to convince me not to treat E2 as a reliable information source, and I won't be going back.
Slashdot Mirror
By the same token, if the Honda dealer doesn't have a privacy policy, and did not agree with you to keep your information private, there's nothing to prevent the Honda dealer from selling your information to the Ford dealer for a mutually agreeable price.
If this were the case, a filtered internet connection should be cheaper than an unfiltered one.
Explain to me how, once we're not allowing our tax dollars to allow viewing of "bad" parts of the internet, we end up paying more?
Exsqueeze me? According to the Excite article, Pioneer 10 is travelling at 27,380 miles per hour relative to the sun. According to my calculations, this is about 0.00004 c. Enough to measurably red-shift the transmission, yes, barely. Hardly "red shifted beyond belief."
Yet a closer examination reveals that "science" is little more than a separate religion itself.
Is evolution just another religion?
Evolution cannot be observed.
Observed instances of speciation
What if light slowed down away from the earth?
Then the universe would be even older than the 15-20 billion years it appears to be.
Thus the universe's age is in reality not established AT ALL, not that scientists can agree on that either!
Observation: some scientists think the universe is fifteen billion years old.
Observation: other scientists think the universe is twenty billion years old.
shadrax's conclusion: Scientists can't agree on the age of the universe; therefore the universe might actually be six thousand years old.
I can't help but wonder: when shadrax sees an old man on the street, and can't decide whether the man is closer to seventy or eighty, does shadrax conclude that the man might actually be five?
Scientists use circular logic. For example, a dinosaur bone might be dated to x million years old. So we've disproved the Bible--or have we? How do biologists know what level of carbon dating is how old? Well, the geologist over there says the rock it was found in is x million years old. So ask the geologist how he knows how old the rock is. Well, of course, fossils just that old happen to be found there, so of course the rock is that old!
This would be a valid argument if radiometric dating measured only two isotopes. By using isochron methods, which require three isotopes, the age of materials can be determined radiometrically without the sort of circular reasoning shadrax describes.
Not to mention that shadrax is apparently unaware that carbon dating is only good for dates up to tens of thousands of years (carbon dating is only one type of radiometric dating; others are good for much larger ages). Also, carbon dating has been validated by non-radiometric methods, such as counting tree rings or ice layers.
Scientists insist that cave and rock formations must have been formed over millions of years. They have never considered the possible effect of a single catastrophic event, such as the Flood, in creating rock formations like the Grand Canyon.
Problems with a Global Flood: Producing the Geological Record
Who said anything about atheism? There are many Christians who accept evolution. Acceptance of evolution != atheism.
Evolution does not state that man evolved from apes. Instead, it states that man and apes evolved from a common ancestor. It's amazing how many creationists have trouble with this distinction; I wonder how they ever manage to tell their brothers from their fathers.
Now tell me, are you presenting this strawman version of evolution out of ignorance, or are you deliberately lying?
Absolutely not.
Is it OK for me to spy on my neighbor, just so I feel safer? Absolutely. :)
As I understand it, he does it out of courtesy, not out of legality. As others have noted, he doesn't have to have anyone's permission at all to write the parodies he does.
That's part of the problem, I agree, but I think there's another factor at work too.
Lawyers and legislators like to write laws and other legal documents to be as precise as possible. To that end, they use a specialized jargon (commonly called "legalese") with more precise meanings than ordinary everyday English.
Now, there's nothing wrong with lawyers, or any other profession, using specialized jargon among themselves in order to make their meaning more precise. Nearly every profession has some such jargon. The problem is that people outside the field do not understand the specialized jargon, making things more confusing for them. The problem is exacerbated in law, because an ordinary, intelligent person ought to be able to understand the law without knowing the jargon. Just as a programmer should not use jargon in explaining his work to a non-programmer, legal documents which apply to laypeople ought to be understandable by those same laypeople.
A poster in another thread a while back (sorry, don't have the reference) wrote that laws should be written more intelligibly, and held up as a positive example, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. "
Yes, it's nice that it uses clear language, and is intelligible to the average person without the use of a legal dictionary. It's also incredibly vague, and as a result, literally thousands of court cases every year take place where the court must rule on the interpretation of this sentence.
So the dilemma lawyers face is between writing vague, non-legalese documents, and precise legalese documents which are difficult for the layperson to understand.
No, I don't have an easy solution to this. I just wanted to point out that self-preservation is not the sole reason for use of legalese.
Case in point: when I was 6, I thought Hop on Pop was mildly amusing. Today, I can't read it without completely cracking up at least once.
No, even China's ambassador admits the collision took place in international airspace.
Your point that neither the American nor the Chinese statements represent the full truth is probably accurate.
However, the rest of your post is filled by pure speculation on your part. It seems there are at least four sides to this story: the American one, the Chinese one, mks113's unsupported speculations, and the truth. (And no, I don't pretend to have the truth.)
The American plane was flying in an area that the Americans claim is International airspace. The Chinese claim that it was Chinese airspace.
Even the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. admits that the incident took place in international airspace, according to this report.
But the situtation is a quantitative one, not qualitative. It is not life over capital vs. capital over life, but rather the relative value placed on each.
What would happen if we valued life as an absolute, over any amount of wealth or profit motive? Sounds great at first, until you consider that we would have no cars (they cause tens of thousands of deaths every year). How many of us would be noble enough to agree to live the rest of our lives in utter poverty to save the life of a single stranger?
The question is where we strike the balance. Might our society be tilted too much towards capital and too far from life? Perhaps. But it's a question of what level we strike the balance at, and not an either/or question as Rusty suggests.
Re-read my comment. I'm not flaming the guy for talking like a scientist. I'm flaming the guy for flaming someone else for not talking like a scientist.
you're right about multiple definitions, of course.
And yet you miss my point. Although my example was of two different people using a word to mean two different things, even a single person can use a word to mean different things in different contexts.
so shall we discuss what forking and multithreading or hacking a shell means, also? cause goodness knows that forks and threads and shells mean different things to the layperson and we wouldn't want to confuse them here on /.
"Forking" may mean a computer process to a tech geek most of the time, but that doesn't mean that same tech geek can't also use the term to mean executing a chess move where a single piece attacks two opposing pieces at once, or doing that thing Emeril does to get juice out of a lemon without getting any lemon seeds.
My problem is not with dstone using the technical meaning of "experiment," it's with dstone flaming someone else for using the common meaning of "experiment."
Well, yes, if you refuse to accept any other definition of "experiment" besides the one scientists use.
You're probably one of those people who say "a tomato isn't a vegetable, it's actually a fruit," aren't you? Well, I have news for you. To the biologist it's a fruit, but to the chef it's a vegetable. The biologist and the chef don't mean exactly the same thing when they say "fruit," just as the scientist and the layperson don't mean exactly the same thing when they say "experiment." This is how English works. Deal.
He corrected it after I posted, dear. Changes to .sigs are retroactive.
Does he present citations to opposing views?
These laws were eventually struck down as unconstitutional. Part of the reason, IIRC, was that it required stations to subsidize speech that they didn't agree with.
But more importantly (to my mind), the other reason they were struck down was that they were based on the false notion that there are only two viewpoints on any issue, and that presentation of two viewpoints covered the entire spectrum of the issue.
Sunstein's idea to require linking to opposing viewpoints is just Equal Time redux, and it would be just as unconstitutional. Viewpoints that do not fit into the traditional (and overly simplistic) left-right dichotomy would be even more marginalized than they are currently.
Writer Camille Paglia espouses an unusual brand of feminism which tends to upset conservatives and traditional "liberal" feminists equally. Where would her voice fit in this system?
Pro-life and pro-choice extremists both claim there can be no compromise on the issue of abortion, despite the fact that the vast, but largely silent majority of Americans seem to want a compromise, allowing abortions early in a pregnancy, but not partial-birth abortions. But how likely is it that anyone would be exposed to the moderate view under Sunstein's system?
And when there are more than two opposing viewpoints, who decides which ones qualify to be linked to? If it were up to the website owner himself, what keeps him from linking to the worst, weakest presentation of an opposing viewpoint, and how does that help anyone? Or, to take a worst-case scenario, what prevents him from deliberately putting up a bad presentation of an opposing viewpoint, presenting it as a site independent from his own, and linking to that? Literal biblical creationists are notorious for presenting strawman versions of evolutionary theory to shoot down, either failing to understand or deliberately misrepresenting what evoluationary theory actually predicts.
At least when a web site or other information source presents only one side of the story, most people are smart enough to realize it's biased. But I worry that when two viewpoints are represented (because they're required by law to be represented) people will then conclude that all viewpoints are represented.
Looks pretty much like a toss-up to me.
If you have been conditioned by the less informed, you would believe that these are both the same parties.
If you have been conditioned by the less informed, you judge political parties by their words rather than their actions. Yes, Republicans pay greater lip service to smaller government and personal freedom than Democrats. Any evidence of this from their actions is lacking, however.
Which of the two parties has the philosophy of "Small Government"? If you think small government consists of just fewer government employees, then you're fooling yourself. Small Government is not just a policy, it is a philosophy.
Name ONE SINGLE government program that W. proposed to cut during his campaign. You can't, because he didn't.
Why do you think Libertarians, who believe that government's only role is to maintain our roads build a military, typically vote Republican?
A blatant lie. Harry Browne reported that of the people he talked to who were supporting him in this election, about 1/3 traditionally voted Republican, 1/3 traditionally voted Democrat, and 1/3 considered themselves independents or didn't usually vote.
Unlike the author of this story, I broker my argument on logic, rather than ignorance and flailing emotionalism.
Perhaps so, but the flaw in your argument lies in judging Republicans by their words rather than their actions.
I wasn't aware that "deities" was a word blocked by some filters.
Fair enough. I suppose I was initially misled by a) the fact that it does look much like an encyclopedia, and b) all the posts to this story (some of them upmoderated!) talking about what a wonderful place E2 is for finding information.
Now, should I be concerned that other people may make the same mistake I initially did, in assuming that E2 is at least intended to be an accurate source of information?
Then perhaps you could explain the point to me, as I'm completely missing it here.
The point of E2 is that it's collaborative. It's not supposed to be a definitive reference work.
OK, if it's not a definitive reference work, then what the hell is it supposed to be? "It's collaborative" is hardly good enough (to my mind). Why a collaborative work that looks like an encyclopedia, then, rather than a collaborative novel or a collaborative symphony? Or is the nature of the work irrelevant? Perhaps "it's collaborative, it's a community, it doesn't have to be accurate" is sufficient for you, but that sort of thinking is completely alien to me.
Still not good enough? You can always try "the internet" I guess.
Please tell me this is a troll and you're not really that naive. If I thought the internet were the only source of information, or that "everything is on the internet" I would be out of a job in about two minutes.
When I'm evaluating a new information source--particularly one with very broad subject coverage, such as E2--I'll look for information on subjects I know a lot about, so I can evaluate whether they're accurate or not. I can hardly evaluate the accuracy of a source by looking up things I know little about!
If I find that the source is accurate on areas I'm knowledgeable in, I can trust it to be pretty accurate in other areas as well. If it has errors that I can find, it probably has errors in other areas as well, and I won't trust its information in those areas I know little about.
Finding that E2 does have errors on subjects I'm knowledgeable about, I conclude that it probably has errors in other areas as well. Fixing the errors I have found would not make E2 any more trustworthy in those areas where I cannot recognize errors.
To look at it another way, if I'm interested in learning more about object-oriented programming (a subject I know very little about), I want a source that is error-free, or very nearly so, now. That its errors will be corrected next week when an expert comes along and recognizes the errors does me little good.
I'll second that.
I had come across references to E2 from time to time before, but never actually visited. So when I saw this article on /. I decided to check it out.
I decided to look up "chess," a topic near and dear to my heart. Skimming the article, I noted a glaring error: the 50-move rule was wrong. The author of the article stated that either player could claim a draw if 50 moves had passed without any captures. In fact, the rule is that 50 moves must pass with neither a capture nor a pawn move taking place. Also missing is the caveat that "50 moves" in fact means 50 moves by each player, something that is not intuitively obvious to someone just learning about the game.
Yes, a survey with sample size n=1 is hardly scientific, and I can't draw any formal conclusions just from that about the overall accuracy of E2. I'm also not saying that traditional information sources are 100% accurate--as a librarian, I'm certainly aware that even sources such as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica contains errors, albeit rarely. But my n=1 survey is enough to convince me not to treat E2 as a reliable information source, and I won't be going back.
Please show me where I said that.