Supposing my identity stolen and used for fraudelent activity. If we could trace the identity theft back to ChoicePoint, could they be held liable (in any sense of the word)?
Ordinarily in a case like this a class action would be brought against the company. The "Class Action Fairness Act" will shift class actions from state to federal court. Ostensibly this was done to prevent venue shopping- where you look for the state with the most favorable laws for your class action suit- but it also has the nice property that federal courts rarely agree to hear class action lawsuits, citing differences in state law. The Act effectively puts an end to all class action suits without explicitly banning them.
If you're a victim of identity theft because your Social Security number was compromised by ChoicePoint, you'll have to hire a lawyer yourself, prove that the identity theft was a result of ChoicePoint's negligence, and your case will be heard separately from those filed by any other plantiffs.
I think you should have emphasized that smoking is beneficial only to UC patients. Not for any other disease. The mechanism involves some enzyme in the liver that reduces the inflamation in the colon, only in UC patient.
Camel Special Lights 100s You've come a long way, baby... no more bloody diarrhea!
It seems like nicotine is, possibly in addition to other things, a really interesting antifungal drug.
It's a great insecticide- this is what it's supposed to be for, in nature. You can't spray a nicotine solution on fruits and vegetables but for flowers it's OK. I don't know if it's still used, but florists used to use it all the time.
There was a great story about this that I heard from a professor in college. Some florist (in the sixties I think) was spraying nicotine on his flowers, and the spray bottle leaked a little puddle onto the table and he sat on it. Now one of the weird things about nicotine is that it penetrates the skin very easily, and enters the bloodstream- which is how those patches work. So the nicotine solution soaked into the guy's pants and wetted the skin on his butt, entering his bloodstream. A few minutes later someone called the ambulance because he started overdosing on nicotine, which is not pleasant- the symptoms are fairly obvious, including heavy nausea and vomiting, and a nicotine overdose can easily kill you. So the ambulance arrived, and took him to the emergency room where they injected him with some sort of parasympathetic blocker, and monitored him until he stabilized. A nicotine overdose is life-threatening but surprisingly easy to treat. After he seemed OK, he was discharged and went home. They gave him all his stuff back, including his pants, which he put back on... oh no! Back to the ER.
And just like ulcers can be caused by H.Pylori, I think there are a lot of other problems caused by fungi like Candida which doctors simpy fail to address (claiming that it's part of the natural bacterial flora).
Supposedly ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disorder that happens as a result of our coevolution with helminthic worms that live in the gut. In third world countries it's rare. A recent clinical study found that an experimental treatment with pig worms was successful in alleviating the symptoms. They used pig worms, and not human worms, because they didn't want the worms to stick around too long after the study was over. Don't laugh, you'd swallow worm eggs too if you were weak and anemic from bloody diarrhea. Or you might start smoking if you were desperate and didn't know about the worm thing.
Doctors have their collective heads up their asses as far as Ulcerative Colitis goes
I was prescribed sulfa drugs for UC which did absolutely nothing for years except color my palm yellow- the pills stain your skin when you pour them from the bottle into your hand. Both my parents had ulcerative colitis and it made me miserable when I had it. I used to know where all the bathrooms on campus were and I had to solve the traveling salesman problem each morning on my way to each class as I ran from bathroom to bathroom- that was the only way I could get around. I'd have to stop at all the bathrooms to lose blood at each one. I must have lost a lot of weight, though.
So I started smoking, and not only did I look really cool! (yeah right), there was no more bloody diarrhea. I could sit through a movie without having to go to the bathroom. Although I'd have to leave the damn movie to smoke instead. If the UC ever comes back, I'm using gum or something- I was able to control myself with disgusting stuff like smokeless tobacco- but I learned that I can't trust myself with cigarettes. The dose is easy to unconsciously titrate to just where you like it- which is what makes cigarettes so much more addictive than other forms of tobacco, since nicotine has a complicated dose response curve and produces the greatest reinforcement when you reach the "sweet spot". Smokeless tobacco is more clumsy- I would overshoot all the time and end up with vicious nausea. It was still addictive, but I didn't really become hooked until I switched to cigarettes.
The reliability of these effects varies greatly but justifies the search for more therapeutic applications for this interesting compound."
-"Beneficial Effects of Nicotine" (Jarvik, British Journal of Addiction, 1991)
Not listed here is an obscure type of stroke that occurs with less frequency in smokers.
I started smoking out of sheer desperation with ulcerative colitis about ten years ago. The ulcerative colitis went away, but then I was left with a disgusting two pack per day habit for two years that probably did more damage to my health. I should have tried chewing that gross nicotine gum instead. (Crohn's disease OTOH has a high incidence among smokers so it isn't exactly a total win.)
You know you won a fight on Slashdot when you don't get a response, just a new freak. My new freak writes just like the parent AC, e.g. very few question marks in his posts. You should do what I do, keep a grudge and wait a while before adding a foe. You give away details about yourself when you add foes too quickly. And what's wrong with question marks anyway? Aren't they teaching proper punctuation to you libertarian geeks down there in Alabama?:)
You are calling other people idiots when you strongly support a ponzi scheme. That is all social security is.
Ponzi schemes are generally known for being unstable and crashing because people stop entering into them after a while. This has not been the case with Social Security. It has been stable and working well for the past 60 years.
As long as more people keep coming in to the scam, it will work.
Reducing the poverty rate among the elderly from 50% to 10% is pretty impressive for a scam. Obviously it's pretty safe to assume that more people will continue to be born, so even you agree that it will work!
We are reaching the point where less people are coming in to pay than are expecting to get paid.
BFD, it's not that much less. Start redeeming the bonds in the trust fund, which Reagan and Greenspan set up in 1983 for this exact purpose and to which a portion of your payroll taxes have been flowing in preparation for the baby boom. Unless, of course, the fund has been exhausted because Bush defaulted on us, in order to finance making his tax cuts permanent.
Much larger federal budget shortfalls exist today, but nobody seems to care about them. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", remember? This phase-out is about ideology, not accounting. If it were about accounting, we'd be talking about the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which over the next 75 years faces shortfalls more than twice as large as the projected Social Security shortfalls. But the president has declared it completely off limits. Welfare for pharmaceutical companies is a sacred cow.
You pay into the system for decades and the money is not yours. The government can change the rules of who gets the money. They could change it so you have to be 80 years old before you can collect and you only get $15 per month.
Yes, that's exactly why the majority of Americans (check his polls lately?) disapprove of what the president is doing. We've been paying into the system all this time and now it's being phased out on us. These crappy private accounts are a booby prize to get us to play along. And they are really crappy as "private accounts" go- you absorb all risk, and if your stocks make money the government takes all your profits- up to 3% over inflation. You get to pay those commission fees at every turn. And you can't even pass them on to your children when you die.
If it is such a great system, then why are all your senators and congressmen exempt from the program.
You are too stupid to live in a free society. At least you recognize this since you are doing everything possible to free yourself from any personal responsibility.
Oh here the true colors come out... I bet this is where you checked the "Post Anonymously" box. You can't even take "personal responsibility" for your own damn posts.
Yes, I think you're right; t is not truly random because the H series was used in its construction, which means it isn't random anymore. Although it's a fine random sequence for other purposes. Randomness is a subtle property.
I can't wait for Bush to phase out Social Security.
You idiots will be penniless in your old age and cursing his name after you've juggled your little stocks around in your crippled private accounts and maybe raised the huge sum of money you need to buy a crappy annuity of $300 a month as required of you by law. Let's hope the year you retire doesn't happen to be during a bear market, or you won't be able to afford that nice $300 annuity and you'll be fucked for the rest of your life. Meanwhile the nation will be sinking under an $8.7 trillion shortfall from the Bush Medicare prescription drug benefit while the projected Social Security shortfall would have been less than half that- and dwarfed by the budget deficits we have right now- if we were to do nothing to fix Social Security (short of a Bush-style phase-out).
Not everyone is going to pay for a download either. What happens when my hard drive crashes? You mean I have to make backups all the time? No thanks. If music stops coming on CDs or any other self contained physical media I'll stop buying it.
A friend of mine gave me an item he found in some sort of old chemistry set from the fifties (they made good stuff back then- now it's all baking soda and vinegar). It was a little metal tube, with a lens at one end, and a phosphorescent screen with uranium or radium at the other end.
You went into the dark with this thing, and after 30 minutes you could look through the lens and see the individual sparkles (i.e. the future). You could even take the lens off and see the soft glow of the future. I wish I hadn't lost it.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
Say they have a random sequence r_1, r_2, r_3... which has subsequences {s_1}, {s_2}, {s_3}, {s_4} (mapping to portions of the r sequence) that are determined to be predictive of human-world events H_1, H_2, H_3...
I can then construct a modified sequence (call it "t", i.e. t_1, t_2, t_3...) where all the sequences have been removed (or have been exchanged by chunks of the r sequence that are way further down). The t sequence is a perfectly random sequence, just like r, and it predicts none of the events in the H series. Therefore, even if a random sequence exists with these properties, other random sequences exist that will not work, and the statement any stream of random numbers will work is false. QED.
There are at least 1,000 cookey professors who managed to get tenure at universities running cookey experiments. There is a very good chance that one out of every 100 of them oberves that their experiment makes a prediction that has only a 1% chance of being coincidence.
But after the second experiment, about one out of every 10000 (of those 1000 professors) will still be getting the results he's looking for.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
No, this is incorrect. There exists an infinite variety of streams of random numbers, and not all of them have the same properties, nor are they of the same quality, nor would all random number sources normally be expected to react to outside events (like someone coming to the lab and "concentrating") in the same way. Random numbers can be gotten from a radioactive source (which might be one of thousands of different isotopes), rolling dice, unstable electronic circuits, dripping faucets, the weather, etc. All can map cleanly to a given range and can usually pass all tests used to determine whether or not a sequence is truly random. The pseudorandom numbers that are commonly used in computing (for example) are generated by linear congruential methods and they fail these tests; k-tuples of these numbers form a lattice structure when you plot them in k-dimensional space. If any stream of truly random numbers will work, then any of these sources can be used to predict the future!
Now granted, this is all solidly in the realm of nonsense, so this discussion is already a bit esoteric. But if you seriously think that these guys are right and that outside events are reflected in their random number streams, then the question arises, is there a connection between these human-world events and the random number generator they're using, or is the connection between those events and the random numbers themselves- just by virtue of their randomness?
I say it's between outside events and the particular generator being used, because that (although wildly implausible) is the weaker of these two claims- which are both whoppers. If the prediction comes from the numbers themselves, then the claim being made here is a much, much stronger claim- that any random process is somehow connected to major events in the human world. Now that's the sort of magic I stopped believing in by the time I was 4. (I don't buy the weaker claim either, but I have to acknowledge that it has an infinitely greater chance of being true than the stronger claim.)
The only question is if they actually have the data to back it up (some graphs would be nice).
I would like detailed instructions on how to construct a stream of random numbers with behaviors that correlate to outside events as they describe, so that I can repeat their experiments myself and see if I can reproduce the same effect. Tabletop reproduction isn't always possible in science (e.g. historical sciences like archaeology, paleontology, cosmology- remember that, you creationists) but in this case reproduction of results should be easy. (If this were real.) At the very least I want to know how to generate a stream of random numbers that reproduces this effect, how to recognize a prediction when it arrives in the stream, and how to assign a P-value for associations between random stream events and real world events. Unless we move past the sort of ex post facto "predictions" of past events, there is nothing new here. It looks like a repetition of work already done by Nostradamus.
I found a site with some hot stock tips. These are actually generated by radioactive decay- the server is interfaced to a Geiger counter. (A little applet is audibly clicking away in another browser window right now.) Those are the best random numbers in the universe because they are truly random and can be used to construct a portfolio that typically outperforms funds constructed from random numbers generated by the linear congruential method. Pseudorandom numbers are for the rubes like you and me. The insiders have the benefit of processes involving quantum mechanical randomness to guide their investment decisions.
GOOG will crash on Monday! You heard it here first.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
I just want to say that the 5, Informative that I see on the grandparent now was a 2, Informative when I started typing my reply a few minutes ago.
I'm off now to generate some more random numbers, kill a princess, sink a submarine, knock down a skyscraper, and bomb Serbia. 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1.
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
ie. A security professional who takes their job seriously, earning the money for which they are paid , slowing YOU down because you were too dumb to remember the right passphrase. Yeah, what an assh0le.
I was speaking hypothetically- I've always recited the passphrase correctly and I'm not aware of anyone who hasn't. My point was a human could escalate a missing pronoun into an incident, but only if they were being extremely unreasonable. But a computer will always be completely unreasonable in this regard unless significant work is done to give it the intelligence possessed by an ordinary security guard.
And passphrases are harder to remember than passwords with letters and numbers. I can easily imagine typing
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
or was it
"A rose by any other name would be as sweet" "A rose by any other name would smell sweet" "A rose called any other name would smell as sweet" "A rose by any other name could smell as sweet" "A rose by any other name might still smell pretty good"
When we set the alarm off at our building we have to call the security company and recite the passphrase. The employee at the other end is usually forgiving of slight alterations in the sentence that don't change its meaning. (Unless you happen to call when a power-hungry security type assh0le is at the desk, of course.)
Try doing that with a computer. I suppose you could construct a fuzzy scoring system where articles and small words don't contribute as much to the score as "rose", "smell", "name", and "sweet", but then you start to shrink the search space when you make concessions for the easily-forgotten words in a sentence.
For connecting to the VPN at [name of big company here] we have these little RSA SecureID things. You type your 4 digit PIN into it and it generates a numeric password that is good for the next ten seconds. The cards are armored to prevent attacks (the secret RSA key is somewhere inside) and I'm sure if you cracked it open you'd find countermeasures inside. Good thing, too, since an unsuccessful attack was made on the card by my dog last week. She chewed through the case, but her little teeth were stopped by the heavy armor on this little thing.
I suppose if the card were to find its way into the wrong hands, one could make a brute force attack on the PIN. But it would probably be easy to detect since a brute forcer will enter one of 9999 incorrect passwords that are easily distinguishable from 9999990000 other incorrect passwords.
Spray paint can be removed once the copyright expires, 70 years after the artist dies. Nitric acid would make the copyright permanent.
We have Sonny Bono to thank for the 70 years- it used to be 50 before the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, brought to you by Disney.
Just think, that tree that he skiied into will have 70 more rings by the time his copyrights expire! (I happen to think that's a very Insightful way of putting it, although strangely enough I always get modded down for saying it. Sonny's fans use their mod points to protect his legacy.)
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Supposing my identity stolen and used for fraudelent activity. If we could trace the identity theft back to ChoicePoint, could they be held liable (in any sense of the word)?
Ordinarily in a case like this a class action would be brought against the company. The "Class Action Fairness Act" will shift class actions from state to federal court. Ostensibly this was done to prevent venue shopping- where you look for the state with the most favorable laws for your class action suit- but it also has the nice property that federal courts rarely agree to hear class action lawsuits, citing differences in state law. The Act effectively puts an end to all class action suits without explicitly banning them.
If you're a victim of identity theft because your Social Security number was compromised by ChoicePoint, you'll have to hire a lawyer yourself, prove that the identity theft was a result of ChoicePoint's negligence, and your case will be heard separately from those filed by any other plantiffs.
I think you should have emphasized that smoking is beneficial only to UC patients. Not for any other disease. The mechanism involves some enzyme in the liver that reduces the inflamation in the colon, only in UC patient.
Camel Special Lights 100s
You've come a long way, baby... no more bloody diarrhea!
No, no, that's "colitas", which the Eagles' road manager translated for them as meaning "little buds".
I'd rather have colitas than colitis!
It seems like nicotine is, possibly in addition to other things, a really interesting antifungal drug.
It's a great insecticide- this is what it's supposed to be for, in nature. You can't spray a nicotine solution on fruits and vegetables but for flowers it's OK. I don't know if it's still used, but florists used to use it all the time.
There was a great story about this that I heard from a professor in college. Some florist (in the sixties I think) was spraying nicotine on his flowers, and the spray bottle leaked a little puddle onto the table and he sat on it. Now one of the weird things about nicotine is that it penetrates the skin very easily, and enters the bloodstream- which is how those patches work. So the nicotine solution soaked into the guy's pants and wetted the skin on his butt, entering his bloodstream. A few minutes later someone called the ambulance because he started overdosing on nicotine, which is not pleasant- the symptoms are fairly obvious, including heavy nausea and vomiting, and a nicotine overdose can easily kill you. So the ambulance arrived, and took him to the emergency room where they injected him with some sort of parasympathetic blocker, and monitored him until he stabilized. A nicotine overdose is life-threatening but surprisingly easy to treat. After he seemed OK, he was discharged and went home. They gave him all his stuff back, including his pants, which he put back on... oh no! Back to the ER.
And just like ulcers can be caused by H.Pylori, I think there are a lot of other problems caused by fungi like Candida which doctors simpy fail to address (claiming that it's part of the natural bacterial flora).
Supposedly ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disorder that happens as a result of our coevolution with helminthic worms that live in the gut. In third world countries it's rare. A recent clinical study found that an experimental treatment with pig worms was successful in alleviating the symptoms. They used pig worms, and not human worms, because they didn't want the worms to stick around too long after the study was over. Don't laugh, you'd swallow worm eggs too if you were weak and anemic from bloody diarrhea. Or you might start smoking if you were desperate and didn't know about the worm thing.
Doctors have their collective heads up their asses as far as Ulcerative Colitis goes
I was prescribed sulfa drugs for UC which did absolutely nothing for years except color my palm yellow- the pills stain your skin when you pour them from the bottle into your hand. Both my parents had ulcerative colitis and it made me miserable when I had it. I used to know where all the bathrooms on campus were and I had to solve the traveling salesman problem each morning on my way to each class as I ran from bathroom to bathroom- that was the only way I could get around. I'd have to stop at all the bathrooms to lose blood at each one. I must have lost a lot of weight, though.
So I started smoking, and not only did I look really cool! (yeah right), there was no more bloody diarrhea. I could sit through a movie without having to go to the bathroom. Although I'd have to leave the damn movie to smoke instead. If the UC ever comes back, I'm using gum or something- I was able to control myself with disgusting stuff like smokeless tobacco- but I learned that I can't trust myself with cigarettes. The dose is easy to unconsciously titrate to just where you like it- which is what makes cigarettes so much more addictive than other forms of tobacco, since nicotine has a complicated dose response curve and produces the greatest reinforcement when you reach the "sweet spot". Smokeless tobacco is more clumsy- I would overshoot all the time and end up with vicious nausea. It was still addictive, but I didn't really become hooked until I switched to cigarettes.
-"Beneficial Effects of Nicotine" (Jarvik, British Journal of Addiction, 1991)
Not listed here is an obscure type of stroke that occurs with less frequency in smokers.
I started smoking out of sheer desperation with ulcerative colitis about ten years ago. The ulcerative colitis went away, but then I was left with a disgusting two pack per day habit for two years that probably did more damage to my health. I should have tried chewing that gross nicotine gum instead. (Crohn's disease OTOH has a high incidence among smokers so it isn't exactly a total win.)
You know you won a fight on Slashdot when you don't get a response, just a new freak. My new freak writes just like the parent AC, e.g. very few question marks in his posts. :)
You should do what I do, keep a grudge and wait a while before adding a foe. You give away details about yourself when you add foes too quickly.
And what's wrong with question marks anyway? Aren't they teaching proper punctuation to you libertarian geeks down there in Alabama?
Getting way OT here, but whatever...
You are calling other people idiots when you strongly support a ponzi scheme. That is all social security is.
Ponzi schemes are generally known for being unstable and crashing because people stop entering into them after a while. This has not been the case with Social Security. It has been stable and working well for the past 60 years.
As long as more people keep coming in to the scam, it will work.
Reducing the poverty rate among the elderly from 50% to 10% is pretty impressive for a scam. Obviously it's pretty safe to assume that more people will continue to be born, so even you agree that it will work!
We are reaching the point where less people are coming in to pay than are expecting to get paid.
BFD, it's not that much less. Start redeeming the bonds in the trust fund, which Reagan and Greenspan set up in 1983 for this exact purpose and to which a portion of your payroll taxes have been flowing in preparation for the baby boom. Unless, of course, the fund has been exhausted because Bush defaulted on us, in order to finance making his tax cuts permanent.
Much larger federal budget shortfalls exist today, but nobody seems to care about them. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", remember? This phase-out is about ideology, not accounting. If it were about accounting, we'd be talking about the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which over the next 75 years faces shortfalls more than twice as large as the projected Social Security shortfalls. But the president has declared it completely off limits. Welfare for pharmaceutical companies is a sacred cow.
You pay into the system for decades and the money is not yours. The government can change the rules of who gets the money. They could change it so you have to be 80 years old before you can collect and you only get $15 per month.
Yes, that's exactly why the majority of Americans (check his polls lately?) disapprove of what the president is doing. We've been paying into the system all this time and now it's being phased out on us. These crappy private accounts are a booby prize to get us to play along. And they are really crappy as "private accounts" go- you absorb all risk, and if your stocks make money the government takes all your profits- up to 3% over inflation. You get to pay those commission fees at every turn. And you can't even pass them on to your children when you die.
If it is such a great system, then why are all your senators and congressmen exempt from the program.
Oh geez, not this hoax again. Stop filling your head with propaganda.
You are too stupid to live in a free society. At least you recognize this since you are doing everything possible to free yourself from any personal responsibility.
Oh here the true colors come out... I bet this is where you checked the "Post Anonymously" box. You can't even take "personal responsibility" for your own damn posts.
Yes, I think you're right; t is not truly random because the H series was used in its construction, which means it isn't random anymore. Although it's a fine random sequence for other purposes. Randomness is a subtle property.
Do you have any information that hasn't been filtered through and possibly altered by right wing think tanks?
I can't wait for Bush to phase out Social Security.
You idiots will be penniless in your old age and cursing his name after you've juggled your little stocks around in your crippled private accounts and maybe raised the huge sum of money you need to buy a crappy annuity of $300 a month as required of you by law. Let's hope the year you retire doesn't happen to be during a bear market, or you won't be able to afford that nice $300 annuity and you'll be fucked for the rest of your life. Meanwhile the nation will be sinking under an $8.7 trillion shortfall from the Bush Medicare prescription drug benefit while the projected Social Security shortfall would have been less than half that- and dwarfed by the budget deficits we have right now- if we were to do nothing to fix Social Security (short of a Bush-style phase-out).
Not everyone is confused by downloading.
Not everyone is going to pay for a download either. What happens when my hard drive crashes? You mean I have to make backups all the time? No thanks. If music stops coming on CDs or any other self contained physical media I'll stop buying it.
A friend of mine gave me an item he found in some sort of old chemistry set from the fifties (they made good stuff back then- now it's all baking soda and vinegar). It was a little metal tube, with a lens at one end, and a phosphorescent screen with uranium or radium at the other end.
You went into the dark with this thing, and after 30 minutes you could look through the lens and see the individual sparkles (i.e. the future). You could even take the lens off and see the soft glow of the future. I wish I hadn't lost it.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
Say they have a random sequence r_1, r_2, r_3... which has subsequences {s_1}, {s_2}, {s_3}, {s_4} (mapping to portions of the r sequence) that are determined to be predictive of human-world events H_1, H_2, H_3...
I can then construct a modified sequence (call it "t", i.e. t_1, t_2, t_3...) where all the sequences have been removed (or have been exchanged by chunks of the r sequence that are way further down). The t sequence is a perfectly random sequence, just like r, and it predicts none of the events in the H series. Therefore, even if a random sequence exists with these properties, other random sequences exist that will not work, and the statement any stream of random numbers will work is false. QED.
I'd like to see how many "special" sequences they had which were NOT followed by an event they deemed special.
Probably lots. Their numbers are apparently downloadable, but you can always derive ex post facto "predictions" from random crap.
There are at least 1,000 cookey professors who managed to get tenure at universities running cookey experiments. There is a very good chance that one out of every 100 of them oberves that their experiment makes a prediction that has only a 1% chance of being coincidence.
But after the second experiment, about one out of every 10000 (of those 1000 professors) will still be getting the results he's looking for.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
No, this is incorrect. There exists an infinite variety of streams of random numbers, and not all of them have the same properties, nor are they of the same quality, nor would all random number sources normally be expected to react to outside events (like someone coming to the lab and "concentrating") in the same way. Random numbers can be gotten from a radioactive source (which might be one of thousands of different isotopes), rolling dice, unstable electronic circuits, dripping faucets, the weather, etc. All can map cleanly to a given range and can usually pass all tests used to determine whether or not a sequence is truly random. The pseudorandom numbers that are commonly used in computing (for example) are generated by linear congruential methods and they fail these tests; k-tuples of these numbers form a lattice structure when you plot them in k-dimensional space. If any stream of truly random numbers will work, then any of these sources can be used to predict the future!
Now granted, this is all solidly in the realm of nonsense, so this discussion is already a bit esoteric. But if you seriously think that these guys are right and that outside events are reflected in their random number streams, then the question arises, is there a connection between these human-world events and the random number generator they're using, or is the connection between those events and the random numbers themselves- just by virtue of their randomness?
I say it's between outside events and the particular generator being used, because that (although wildly implausible) is the weaker of these two claims- which are both whoppers. If the prediction comes from the numbers themselves, then the claim being made here is a much, much stronger claim- that any random process is somehow connected to major events in the human world. Now that's the sort of magic I stopped believing in by the time I was 4. (I don't buy the weaker claim either, but I have to acknowledge that it has an infinitely greater chance of being true than the stronger claim.)
The only question is if they actually have the data to back it up (some graphs would be nice).
I would like detailed instructions on how to construct a stream of random numbers with behaviors that correlate to outside events as they describe, so that I can repeat their experiments myself and see if I can reproduce the same effect. Tabletop reproduction isn't always possible in science (e.g. historical sciences like archaeology, paleontology, cosmology- remember that, you creationists) but in this case reproduction of results should be easy. (If this were real.)
At the very least I want to know how to generate a stream of random numbers that reproduces this effect, how to recognize a prediction when it arrives in the stream, and how to assign a P-value for associations between random stream events and real world events. Unless we move past the sort of ex post facto "predictions" of past events, there is nothing new here. It looks like a repetition of work already done by Nostradamus.
I found a site with some hot stock tips. These are actually generated by radioactive decay- the server is interfaced to a Geiger counter. (A little applet is audibly clicking away in another browser window right now.) Those are the best random numbers in the universe because they are truly random and can be used to construct a portfolio that typically outperforms funds constructed from random numbers generated by the linear congruential method. Pseudorandom numbers are for the rubes like you and me. The insiders have the benefit of processes involving quantum mechanical randomness to guide their investment decisions.
GOOG will crash on Monday! You heard it here first.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
I just want to say that the 5, Informative that I see on the grandparent now was a 2, Informative when I started typing my reply a few minutes ago.
I'm off now to generate some more random numbers, kill a princess, sink a submarine, knock down a skyscraper, and bomb Serbia. 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1.
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
Sonny Bono has fans? A legacy? Did he leave a 70s style pube stuck to Cher's thigh or something?
He must have had fans! How did he get into the Senate?
As to his legacy- say what you want about his musical career, but as a Senator, he has certainly left a legacy in copyright law.
ie. A security professional who takes their job seriously, earning the money for which they are paid , slowing YOU down because you were too dumb to remember the right passphrase. Yeah, what an assh0le.
I was speaking hypothetically- I've always recited the passphrase correctly and I'm not aware of anyone who hasn't. My point was a human could escalate a missing pronoun into an incident, but only if they were being extremely unreasonable. But a computer will always be completely unreasonable in this regard unless significant work is done to give it the intelligence possessed by an ordinary security guard.
Not my fault you went into security.
And passphrases are harder to remember than passwords with letters and numbers. I can easily imagine typing
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
or was it
"A rose by any other name would be as sweet"
"A rose by any other name would smell sweet"
"A rose called any other name would smell as sweet"
"A rose by any other name could smell as sweet"
"A rose by any other name might still smell pretty good"
When we set the alarm off at our building we have to call the security company and recite the passphrase. The employee at the other end is usually forgiving of slight alterations in the sentence that don't change its meaning. (Unless you happen to call when a power-hungry security type assh0le is at the desk, of course.)
Try doing that with a computer. I suppose you could construct a fuzzy scoring system where articles and small words don't contribute as much to the score as "rose", "smell", "name", and "sweet", but then you start to shrink the search space when you make concessions for the easily-forgotten words in a sentence.
For connecting to the VPN at [name of big company here] we have these little RSA SecureID things. You type your 4 digit PIN into it and it generates a numeric password that is good for the next ten seconds. The cards are armored to prevent attacks (the secret RSA key is somewhere inside) and I'm sure if you cracked it open you'd find countermeasures inside. Good thing, too, since an unsuccessful attack was made on the card by my dog last week. She chewed through the case, but her little teeth were stopped by the heavy armor on this little thing.
I suppose if the card were to find its way into the wrong hands, one could make a brute force attack on the PIN. But it would probably be easy to detect since a brute forcer will enter one of 9999 incorrect passwords that are easily distinguishable from 9999990000 other incorrect passwords.
Spray paint can be removed once the copyright expires, 70 years after the artist dies. Nitric acid would make the copyright permanent.
We have Sonny Bono to thank for the 70 years- it used to be 50 before the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, brought to you by Disney.
Just think, that tree that he skiied into will have 70 more rings by the time his copyrights expire!
(I happen to think that's a very Insightful way of putting it, although strangely enough I always get modded down for saying it. Sonny's fans use their mod points to protect his legacy.)
I wonder what that art would look like getting shot up w/ paintballs?
I think having a big fat copyright symbol sprayed onto it would be a more fitting recognition of the artist's work.