That's a good point. More than once, early research and nutritional advice on "fats" has been shaded by later research which distinguishes between kinds of fats. The heart dangers of "fat" turned out to be for saturated fats. Then we decided that trans fats, which are unsaturated, are even worse. Then we decided that conjugated linoleic acid, is good, and that's a trans fat.
I suspect that fats are the one nutrient where the "organic" movement got it right. Foods naturally high in fat are probably better than foods manipulated to increase their fat content. Free range beef is not only leaner than feedlot beef, it has more of the omega 3 fatty acids that we associate with fish; fats that seem to have heart, blood pressure and possibly cognitive benefits. Fats are as different from each other as a poodle from a pit bull.
So the research, while important, isn't enough to make any kind of dietary adjustments that haven't been warranted by prior research. It seems almost certain that if it can be replicated, it will not be replicated with all kinds of fats.
Additionally, I see a flaw in the methodology -- as reported of course. We can't trust the media to get it right. The researcher was performed on rats who were rewarded by food for performing tasks. Unless the researchers controlled for the greater satiety value of fat, you'd expect the fat fed rats to perform less well. You could get the same results by testing rats who had just eaten versus ones that had been fasting for a short time.
Yes, the police have considerable abilities to track citizens. This is a GOOD thing. What's bad is the failure of our laws and Constitution to keep up with a world in which surveillance has become cheap. It's a lot like the breakdown of the old copyright bargain, which depended on copying books being hard to do. Surveillance was expensive in the eighteenth century, and therefore all that was practically necessary is to draw a line around peoples' houses and keep the state out of there. Since that was the place the an hostile state is most interested in, that made casual surveillance a lot less desirable unless there was something likely to result in establishing probable cause.
Think about a cell phone in an eighteenth century context. You now have a lot of your private conversations via a device you carry around with you, not necessarily on private property owned by you or the person you are talking to.
Developments like that make it attractive and practical to intrude on privacy just to satisfy idle curiosity. I've been in situations where as an IT administrator I had private information about celebrities; it would have been really easy if I cared about the people I see in the magazines at the checkout counter to poke around in their private lives.
There are legitimate reasons for government to conduct surveillance of private citizens, but what is really needed is enhanced oversight and accountability, written into the basic law of the land. Surveillance plans and actions should be reviewed, and if nothing like probable cause is found they should be disclosed to the subject.
The kind of "fairness" where private citizens put the a big red bullseye on cops they don't like isn't a cure, it's spreading the disease. Before it was cops indulging their private interests, after it's everyone. What's more, it is collective punishment. Responsible cops who follow the rules -- or maybe have never even engaged in surveillance -- become targets of anyone who happens to feel hostile towards them, either as individuals or members of the police force.
It's not a fine. It's statutory *damages*. It's not supposed to be punitive; it's supposed to make it possible for damage to the wronged party to be made good in cases where there has clearly been damage but the exact amount of damage is impractical to calculate. The very same approach is needed in cases where companies mishandle data which results in identity theft against their customers. Clearly their bad security harmed their customers, but how much?
Now if you can show that the statutory damages are ridiculous, and are *intended* to punish, then you've got a point.
He deserves a pat on the back for looking into the complaints.
But despite this, he still doesn't get it. He still thinks this is about his convenience vs. a small number of hobbyists. He essentially dismisses the legality issue as quibbling over technicalities, without understanding the reasons for the law.
The law isn't written for the convenience of ham radio operators. It's written for the good of society. Ham radio operators are just the members of the public who *understand* that radio spectrum is a limited resource. They're the only members of the public who ever deal with the rules that protect the public's interest in using spectrum fairly and efficiently in a direct way. Every time they make a connection, they've supposed to dial down to the least power that gets the job done. Most other people rely on *others* to adhere to the rules for them (e.g. radio station licensees, makers of consumer electronics).
So here we have a device that breaks the rules, and speaking as member of the general public with no knowledge of the issue he thinks the things the device can do at the price are wonderful. *But he's failed to make the connection* between the low cost, the breaking of the law, and the cost to everyone else. If everybody could ignore the rules about spectrum when it suited them, there'd be lots of things we could have cheaper but society's use of the radio spectrum would be crippled.
You either accept that anybody can do whatever they damn well please with spectrum, or you make rules and insist they apply to everyone. If the public benefit of keeping these devices cheaper than they would be under the law outweighs society's interest in fair and efficient spectrum use, then prove it. Then the law can be changed. But the assumption seems to be that people should be allowed to break a law passed for the public good because it is convenient for him. Anarchism is a possible philosophical position, of course, but people who advocate it when it benefits them can't complain when the same philosophy costs them.
isn't factual knowledge. Although that could be better, it won't ever be adequate in a world of expanding scientific knowledge. What is really deficient is the ability to reason and draw inferences from scientific facts when encountered.
I'd identify two key areas of reasoning as deficient: numerical reasoning and reasoning about causation.
One common and pernicious numerical fallacy is the base rate fallacy. Suppose you have a drug screening test that has a 5% false positive rate. How certain are you that somebody who fails the test uses drugs? Most people would say 95%; the truth is you don't have enough information without knowing the base rate of drug use in the population being tested and to a lesser degree the false positive rate. Ignoring the false negative rate as negligible, suppose only 1/100 of the population uses drugs. After testing 100 people, you'd expect to get one genuine positive and five false positives, which means you're only 16% sure, not 95%. If on the other hand 50% of the population uses drugs, then you get 50 genuine positives and five false positives, so you are 91% sure.
That shows an important fact about evidence: it must be evaluated in context. Screening tests have their place, but only in a more comprehensive program of evidence gathering. Any single datum is a strand in a web of evidence.
Another group of numerical fallacies is projecting trends from inadequate data or badly chosen baselines, e.g. projecting stock market trends from daily data or citing economic figures from a point in time chosen to carry a certain political message.
Which leads us to causation.
One of the most popular things to do on this site when a science story comes up is to complain that "correlation is not causation", and that is an important point. It's just incomplete unless the poster specifies his criteria of establishing causation. I sometimes feel like there's supposedly some Big Book of Scientific Truth which is being alluded to.
This gets back to the "web of evidence" metaphor. The philosophical truth is that correlation is *all* we have to go on. We have to weigh an individual correlation against all the correlations we have ever observed. For that we need something to represent the most parsimonious explanation for all the past observation, taking into account that probability and methodology ensure that those data are inconsistent.
When we want to establish causation, we need to use a theory. We assume the opposite of the hypothesis (the null hypothesis) and show that accepting the null hypothesis would require us to throw out the theory, and that means throwing out the vast majority of observations we've ever made.
That's why creationism is so pernicious. Without the theories of evolution and natural selection, scientific reasoning about biology is crippled. The creationist hypothesis wasn't concocted to provide the most parsimonious explanation of observed correlations, it is was conceived to patch the difference between observations in some conception of what The Big Book of Scientific Truth ought to contain. Since it is not parsimonious, it is *lenient*. That makes creationism unsuited to testing hypotheses. That is the job of a theory, to break hypotheses. Creationism can't, because the ground rules it assumes allows preconceived ideas to override data. Furthermore, the contest between theory and hypothesis has to be fair: if the theory can break a hypothesis, a hypothesis, supported by data, can revise a theory. The ground rules of creationism don't allow for the creation hypothesis to be modified.
It'd be nice if people could, let's say, give the correct definition of what a "molecule" is. But even if they could, it wouldn't make much difference if they still can't draw valid inferences about chemistry.
In this case the Illinois legislature. I haven't read the bill, but it's common practice in laws or contracts to provide definitions of terms that are likely to be misinterpreted.
After you've been convicted of a crime, you can certainly have civil rights taken away as a punishment.
But there's something else people might not realize: civil rights under our system can be regulated if there is a compelling public interest in doing so and the regulation is narrowly tailored to serve that interest. My freedom of speech does not entitle me to speak my opinions through a bullhorn at 3AM in a quiet neighborhood. I am required to find other means of expressing opinions. A law against talking at 3AM would be too broad; a law against talking so loud that people inside their houses are unable to ignore it is narrow; it doesn't prevent me from communicating other ways or at other times.
Telling a sex offender he can't communicate with his friends ever again would be unconstitutionally broad. Telling him he can't use social networking sites to do so is a more narrow restriction, what's more there is a rational justification for it. A social networking site provides access to many, many more potential victims than tradtional ways of making and having friends. Not only is there a "law of averages" effect, it's an ideal laboratory in which to hone a script for convincing a victim to put himself at danger. You can be rejected hundreds or even thousands of times, but if you try something different at or near the point of failure, eventually you'll have a diabolically effective approach.
It's not so much forgiveness, I think, as resignation.
For the public, worrying about computer security is like worrying about an invisible, odorless poison gas that appears in completely random places. If they knew where the gas would strike, they'd fear those places. If the gas had an odor, they'd learn to fear it. If they knew who was responsible for creating the gas, they'd demand that outfit be shut down.
But if there's nothing they can do to protect themselves, they'll just ignore it and hope for the best.
That's what computer security is like for most people. They don't understand it, and they have good reason to suspect that the people who run the companies they deal with don't understand it. If a company gets hit with an embarrassing breach, they might reasonably conclude that its claim to have learned its lesson is just as credible as a different company's claim it hasn't been hit because it already knows better.
If you want to fix this, there are two ways, neither of them popular. The first is ore regulation of record keeping practices. The second is to establish liability of companies when information it is holding is misused.
How can anybody get to the point of setting HR policy in a company like that without knowing about FRCA? Didn't they read the fine print when they purchased the credit reports?
What this tells you about these companies is that when it comes to their employees, they are stupid and sloppy.
You've obviously never tried supporting the deployment of a software application.
In the early 90s, I worked for an organization trying to develop a software supported distributed collaboration system -- the kind of thing that's dirt simple these days. We had maybe sixty or seventy people in the group, distributed all over the country, usually one per location. And those locations weren't Chicago and New York, they were more often places like Flagstaff and Tuskegee. The solution: have a guy fly out on the plane to install the software and train the user. CGI was brand new at the time. If we'd been doing it five years later, it would have been way cheaper and easier, although somewhat more crude looking.
In the late 90s and early 00s, I was involved in developing a successful vertical market app. Although profitable, the 80/20 rule applied in spades. Most of the customers we lost money on. The reason: the support costs of installing and maintaining the database. You can't let customers lose their data, period. Basically there was a minimum sized profitable customer, but we needed (for political reasons) to support the entire range of customer sizes. If we'd been doing it five years later, we could have packaged it as a web application for the little guys but we didn't have the web GIS capabilities in 1999.
The whole netbook/laptop dividing line is arbitrary. It's a marketing distinction rather than a technological or ergonomic one. Each represents a different "value proposition".
So you can't say something like "If you don't need super portability, you might as well get a more powerful machine," as if super portability and computational power were opposed to each other. One could make a very computationally potent machine and give it a 7" screen, and there will be some very small number of users who would find that's just the thing they need. I suppose blind users would probably like to dispense with the display all together.
What Intel would like is for you to buy their more more expensive processors. If they can force trade-offs on you, then you'll buy the more expensive processor to get the larger screen. If you don't have much money, they'll take that too for one of their cheap processors. In fact, they'd be delighted if the entire system is cheaper, so that a larger fraction of the cost is their processor. They'll sell more volume, and then you'll buy *another* processor when you have money to get a decent screen.
I went through this for *years* with Detroit auto makers. They made car size part of their market segmentation; small cars were for buyers they couldn't up-sell to a larger car. For years I'd go to buy American, but I wanted a *small* car, and their small cars were their *cheap* cars. They didn't even bother to design the passenger compartment to be comfortable for somebody my height. It was like they just scaled down the car as if only tiny, poor people bought small cars. After I sold my old Pinto and bought my first small Japanese sedan, I couldn't believe the difference it made, just getting in and out of the darn car every day. Over the years US small cars got better, but they were always positioned as entry level cars. They never made a small car I *wished* I could have, like the BMW 3 series.
That said, they made a lot of easy money over all those years selling huge, technologically primitive SUVs on the theory that "more is more", so perhaps it was a sound business decision. I'm not sure, however, that this is a good lesson for the computer industry to follow, where a generation of technology is so much shorter. The "More is More" philosophy doesn't look so successful for Detroit now.
What I'd really like is a mobile form factor where the screen isn't hinged to the computer, and I could choose my own monitor. Notebooks are ergonomically lousy. I actually use mine in a stand with a separate keyboard.
Ford got 5.9 Billion, and they expect to lose money this year. They're going to retool their factories. The Telsa loan is in some ways less risky, since we're not betting on the survival of an industry that is, on it's own, dying in this country: building ICE automobiles.
Everybody in the auto industry is in bad shape. The idea of the loan program isn't just to stem the cash bleeding until the next economic upturn, but to reclaim technological leadership. The 465 million is supposed to result in something that has eluded us for years: a practical, competitively priced electric vehicle. That may not be the answer to all our prayers, but it will give us us some answers about personal transportation in a post petroleum world before the lack of answers becomes a national crisis. That's well worth the opportunity cost on the 465 million dollar loan.
Well, I don't think we can talk on such vague terms as "destroy North Korea".
Could we cripple North Korea's economy, military and government if we don't give a damn how we do it or who gets hurt? Sure. We could nuke them, and what we could do with conventional weapons isn't far behind.
Could we easily defeat it's 1.2 million man army? Depends on the nature of the engagement. In any kind of "capture the flag" scenario where our objective is to capture or better yet destroy any particular thing, probably. The total size of the army doesn't matter, what matters is how many troops you can put where they are needed and how quickly. This is precisely the kind of low tech, brute force army we've built our military to defeat in any kind of engagement where the objectives are to capture and hold or destroy places.
Can we easily pacify the country with our military? No way, especially after tactics have been developed in Iraq that target our weaknesses at that kind of mission. Can we solve the agricultural and economic problems of North Korea with our military? Uh, uh. Can we defend South Korea against a determined ground attack? Yes, but it could get costly if North Korea gets outside help, and those big subterranean gun emplacements just over the DMZ can easily hit Seoul. My buddy who was a fire control officer on a AC-130 gunship claims they could get most of them before they even got a shot off, and under the right conditions he's probably correct, but I don't doubt there are a lot of "depends ons" in that scenario.
The reason murder and arrest are in different moral categories is that with the exception of those guys in Guantanamo arrest is a reversible state. Death is not.
The cop is concerned about whether it was issued by the proper authorities, has the right form, specifies exactly what needs to do etc. It's not normally his job to evaluate whether the legal principles used in justifying the warrant are properly construed. That is supposed to be sorted out later by habeas corpus and due process.
There are of course exceptions. If the cop knew that a judge was abusing his warrant authority for personal reasons, e.g. issuing arrest warrants on his ex-wife, then he'd probably be obliged to those warrants. If he had reason to believe that a suspect would not be given his constitutional due process rights, he'd have a moral duty not to use the warrant. But in general, the cop's duty is to mind his own business.
Sweden has a reasonably bloody history, although geography has been a limiting factor in their imperial ambitions. Ironically as we are discussingthe topic of big weapons, during its imperial hey-day Sweden had a mania for heavily armed ships of the line. Sometimes too heavily armed (Q: How to you sink a Swedish ship? A: Put it in the water.).
They have a racism problem with dark skinned immigrants, although one has to consider that Sweden is a welfare state. I wonder if Sweden's relative lack of ethnic diversity explains their openness to paying for state welfare programs.
About 40% of Muslims in Sweden have witnessed at least verbal abuse against Muslims, although to be fair the same figure in the US approaches 75%, so having a race and religious bigotry problem is a relative thing.
Their wrestling is less silly than ours, and we've never had two Sumo yokozuna at the same time.
Our national ethnic costumes aren't as colorful.
While some have called us an "empire", our territory is less than 10 million square kilometers. At the peak of the Mongol empire they controlled 33 million square kilometers, and they built it with horses and hand tools (swords).
Their version of barbecue features vegetables.
I don't think anybody will be mistaking us for Mongols any time soon.
If you've ever bothered to look into the engineering of these suckers, belt-and-suspenders doesn't even begin to describe the multiple levels of failsafe involved. It's nearly impossible to make one explode. You might get some alarming hissing, but they're supposed to fail that way. Hissing is what is supposed to happen after the bad thing that the half dozen safety features on the cell are supposed to prevent fail. The cells are are safety-vented like a pressure cooker, and the plastic jacket puffs up alarmingly but keeps things relatively tidy.
Of course, sometimes your number just comes up on the Big Stochastic Roulette Wheel In the Sky.
I can think of two possible ways this could indicate negligence on Apple's part. The first is if the design of the device defeated some of the safety measures. If the battery is supposed to outgas as it fails, and suddenly your case blocks the outgassing, you're going to get a bang. Another way would be in its choice of suppliers. There have been reports of unsafe li-ion battery cells and packs coming out of or sold within China. If I recall, that was implicated in a rare battery related cell phone death a year or two ago.
The thing is, if it were me, my top priority would be getting my hands on the unit to find out what happened, whether it was my fault, and Act of God, or a fraudulent prank. I'd give the man his money back and then some, Move heaven and Earth, only give me the damn carcass so I can find out what the real story was.
I think the whole reason they've prospered is not competing with the big boxes.
The big box formula is about economies of scale. Big stores = low prices = high volume.
They also mean a longer drive.
I bet it's one of those business models that happen by accident. You have a store that caters to a small but widespread group. So your store stocks things that they can't get easily. It can't be big, because there aren't enough of them. Then people come in to buy other things like TV aerials and whatnot. So why not sell them other things that go with the TV? There's a lot more people who buy TV cables and stuff than capacitors and soldering irons.
Probably the most important thing Radio Shack sells is batteries. You need a bunch of batteries, and maybe some of them are odd. Probably the drug store's got them, but if they don't you're out of luck and the people won't know what you're talking about. The big box electronic chain almost certainly has them, but that's ten miles away and there's a radio shack in the shopping plaza two miles away. That's exactly the same reason that sends the geek there to get a roll of solder.
Even if the Radio Shack is in a mall anchored by a big box electronic store, even if that store puts the batteries right up by the registers, it's still faster to dash into Radio Shack, and if the price is a bit higher, it's still cheap enough.
Then when you're there, you see this r/c toy and you remember little Timmy's birthday is coming up. Or you ask the friendly salesman a question about that phone you spotted on the way in. These guys may not have MIT Course 6 degrees when it comes to technical knowledge, but they're nearly always friendly and eager to be informative within the limits of their ability.
And so a successful business model is born. It's the same thing that keeps local hardware stores stocking an impressive assortment of nuts and bolts. I can go to Lowes or Home Depot and they'll have a larger selection, but the local store almost certainly has what I need and the small scale and attentive service gets me out the door fast with my $2 of purchases fast, and that matters when I'm in the middle of a project. And often I'll also have $20 of things I purchased because they caught my eye.
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That's a good point. More than once, early research and nutritional advice on "fats" has been shaded by later research which distinguishes between kinds of fats. The heart dangers of "fat" turned out to be for saturated fats. Then we decided that trans fats, which are unsaturated, are even worse. Then we decided that conjugated linoleic acid, is good, and that's a trans fat.
I suspect that fats are the one nutrient where the "organic" movement got it right. Foods naturally high in fat are probably better than foods manipulated to increase their fat content. Free range beef is not only leaner than feedlot beef, it has more of the omega 3 fatty acids that we associate with fish; fats that seem to have heart, blood pressure and possibly cognitive benefits. Fats are as different from each other as a poodle from a pit bull.
So the research, while important, isn't enough to make any kind of dietary adjustments that haven't been warranted by prior research. It seems almost certain that if it can be replicated, it will not be replicated with all kinds of fats.
Additionally, I see a flaw in the methodology -- as reported of course. We can't trust the media to get it right. The researcher was performed on rats who were rewarded by food for performing tasks. Unless the researchers controlled for the greater satiety value of fat, you'd expect the fat fed rats to perform less well. You could get the same results by testing rats who had just eaten versus ones that had been fasting for a short time.
You're mixing some things up here though.
Yes, the police have considerable abilities to track citizens. This is a GOOD thing. What's bad is the failure of our laws and Constitution to keep up with a world in which surveillance has become cheap. It's a lot like the breakdown of the old copyright bargain, which depended on copying books being hard to do. Surveillance was expensive in the eighteenth century, and therefore all that was practically necessary is to draw a line around peoples' houses and keep the state out of there. Since that was the place the an hostile state is most interested in, that made casual surveillance a lot less desirable unless there was something likely to result in establishing probable cause.
Think about a cell phone in an eighteenth century context. You now have a lot of your private conversations via a device you carry around with you, not necessarily on private property owned by you or the person you are talking to.
Developments like that make it attractive and practical to intrude on privacy just to satisfy idle curiosity. I've been in situations where as an IT administrator I had private information about celebrities; it would have been really easy if I cared about the people I see in the magazines at the checkout counter to poke around in their private lives.
There are legitimate reasons for government to conduct surveillance of private citizens, but what is really needed is enhanced oversight and accountability, written into the basic law of the land. Surveillance plans and actions should be reviewed, and if nothing like probable cause is found they should be disclosed to the subject.
The kind of "fairness" where private citizens put the a big red bullseye on cops they don't like isn't a cure, it's spreading the disease. Before it was cops indulging their private interests, after it's everyone. What's more, it is collective punishment. Responsible cops who follow the rules -- or maybe have never even engaged in surveillance -- become targets of anyone who happens to feel hostile towards them, either as individuals or members of the police force.
It's not a fine. It's statutory *damages*. It's not supposed to be punitive; it's supposed to make it possible for damage to the wronged party to be made good in cases where there has clearly been damage but the exact amount of damage is impractical to calculate. The very same approach is needed in cases where companies mishandle data which results in identity theft against their customers. Clearly their bad security harmed their customers, but how much?
Now if you can show that the statutory damages are ridiculous, and are *intended* to punish, then you've got a point.
He deserves a pat on the back for looking into the complaints.
But despite this, he still doesn't get it. He still thinks this is about his convenience vs. a small number of hobbyists. He essentially dismisses the legality issue as quibbling over technicalities, without understanding the reasons for the law.
The law isn't written for the convenience of ham radio operators. It's written for the good of society. Ham radio operators are just the members of the public who *understand* that radio spectrum is a limited resource. They're the only members of the public who ever deal with the rules that protect the public's interest in using spectrum fairly and efficiently in a direct way. Every time they make a connection, they've supposed to dial down to the least power that gets the job done. Most other people rely on *others* to adhere to the rules for them (e.g. radio station licensees, makers of consumer electronics).
So here we have a device that breaks the rules, and speaking as member of the general public with no knowledge of the issue he thinks the things the device can do at the price are wonderful. *But he's failed to make the connection* between the low cost, the breaking of the law, and the cost to everyone else. If everybody could ignore the rules about spectrum when it suited them, there'd be lots of things we could have cheaper but society's use of the radio spectrum would be crippled.
You either accept that anybody can do whatever they damn well please with spectrum, or you make rules and insist they apply to everyone. If the public benefit of keeping these devices cheaper than they would be under the law outweighs society's interest in fair and efficient spectrum use, then prove it. Then the law can be changed. But the assumption seems to be that people should be allowed to break a law passed for the public good because it is convenient for him. Anarchism is a possible philosophical position, of course, but people who advocate it when it benefits them can't complain when the same philosophy costs them.
isn't factual knowledge. Although that could be better, it won't ever be adequate in a world of expanding scientific knowledge. What is really deficient is the ability to reason and draw inferences from scientific facts when encountered.
I'd identify two key areas of reasoning as deficient: numerical reasoning and reasoning about causation.
One common and pernicious numerical fallacy is the base rate fallacy. Suppose you have a drug screening test that has a 5% false positive rate. How certain are you that somebody who fails the test uses drugs? Most people would say 95%; the truth is you don't have enough information without knowing the base rate of drug use in the population being tested and to a lesser degree the false positive rate. Ignoring the false negative rate as negligible, suppose only 1/100 of the population uses drugs. After testing 100 people, you'd expect to get one genuine positive and five false positives, which means you're only 16% sure, not 95%. If on the other hand 50% of the population uses drugs, then you get 50 genuine positives and five false positives, so you are 91% sure.
That shows an important fact about evidence: it must be evaluated in context. Screening tests have their place, but only in a more comprehensive program of evidence gathering. Any single datum is a strand in a web of evidence.
Another group of numerical fallacies is projecting trends from inadequate data or badly chosen baselines, e.g. projecting stock market trends from daily data or citing economic figures from a point in time chosen to carry a certain political message.
Which leads us to causation.
One of the most popular things to do on this site when a science story comes up is to complain that "correlation is not causation", and that is an important point. It's just incomplete unless the poster specifies his criteria of establishing causation. I sometimes feel like there's supposedly some Big Book of Scientific Truth which is being alluded to.
This gets back to the "web of evidence" metaphor. The philosophical truth is that correlation is *all* we have to go on. We have to weigh an individual correlation against all the correlations we have ever observed. For that we need something to represent the most parsimonious explanation for all the past observation, taking into account that probability and methodology ensure that those data are inconsistent.
When we want to establish causation, we need to use a theory. We assume the opposite of the hypothesis (the null hypothesis) and show that accepting the null hypothesis would require us to throw out the theory, and that means throwing out the vast majority of observations we've ever made.
That's why creationism is so pernicious. Without the theories of evolution and natural selection, scientific reasoning about biology is crippled. The creationist hypothesis wasn't concocted to provide the most parsimonious explanation of observed correlations, it is was conceived to patch the difference between observations in some conception of what The Big Book of Scientific Truth ought to contain. Since it is not parsimonious, it is *lenient*. That makes creationism unsuited to testing hypotheses. That is the job of a theory, to break hypotheses. Creationism can't, because the ground rules it assumes allows preconceived ideas to override data. Furthermore, the contest between theory and hypothesis has to be fair: if the theory can break a hypothesis, a hypothesis, supported by data, can revise a theory. The ground rules of creationism don't allow for the creation hypothesis to be modified.
It'd be nice if people could, let's say, give the correct definition of what a "molecule" is. But even if they could, it wouldn't make much difference if they still can't draw valid inferences about chemistry.
E.g.,: "What do you get when you deduct England fro Britain?"
or "The primary component of beer other than water is:
(a) Malt
(b) Rice
(c) Piss
(d) all of the above
"
I agree with you, provided we define "sex offender" as people who were arrested for peeing in the woods.
The definition we use is what makes a measure like this rational or irrational.
Because you can't punish people forever.
Nor can you predict who will re-offend and who will not.
Obviously if you knew who was going to re-offend, you'd keep them in the clink.
In this case the Illinois legislature. I haven't read the bill, but it's common practice in laws or contracts to provide definitions of terms that are likely to be misinterpreted.
I doubt it.
After you've been convicted of a crime, you can certainly have civil rights taken away as a punishment.
But there's something else people might not realize: civil rights under our system can be regulated if there is a compelling public interest in doing so and the regulation is narrowly tailored to serve that interest. My freedom of speech does not entitle me to speak my opinions through a bullhorn at 3AM in a quiet neighborhood. I am required to find other means of expressing opinions. A law against talking at 3AM would be too broad; a law against talking so loud that people inside their houses are unable to ignore it is narrow; it doesn't prevent me from communicating other ways or at other times.
Telling a sex offender he can't communicate with his friends ever again would be unconstitutionally broad. Telling him he can't use social networking sites to do so is a more narrow restriction, what's more there is a rational justification for it. A social networking site provides access to many, many more potential victims than tradtional ways of making and having friends. Not only is there a "law of averages" effect, it's an ideal laboratory in which to hone a script for convincing a victim to put himself at danger. You can be rejected hundreds or even thousands of times, but if you try something different at or near the point of failure, eventually you'll have a diabolically effective approach.
It's not so much forgiveness, I think, as resignation.
For the public, worrying about computer security is like worrying about an invisible, odorless poison gas that appears in completely random places. If they knew where the gas would strike, they'd fear those places. If the gas had an odor, they'd learn to fear it. If they knew who was responsible for creating the gas, they'd demand that outfit be shut down.
But if there's nothing they can do to protect themselves, they'll just ignore it and hope for the best.
That's what computer security is like for most people. They don't understand it, and they have good reason to suspect that the people who run the companies they deal with don't understand it. If a company gets hit with an embarrassing breach, they might reasonably conclude that its claim to have learned its lesson is just as credible as a different company's claim it hasn't been hit because it already knows better.
If you want to fix this, there are two ways, neither of them popular. The first is ore regulation of record keeping practices. The second is to establish liability of companies when information it is holding is misused.
Also dumb because it violates federal law.
How can anybody get to the point of setting HR policy in a company like that without knowing about FRCA? Didn't they read the fine print when they purchased the credit reports?
What this tells you about these companies is that when it comes to their employees, they are stupid and sloppy.
No, it wasn't buying more shit. It was *leveraging* more shit.
You've obviously never tried supporting the deployment of a software application.
In the early 90s, I worked for an organization trying to develop a software supported distributed collaboration system -- the kind of thing that's dirt simple these days. We had maybe sixty or seventy people in the group, distributed all over the country, usually one per location. And those locations weren't Chicago and New York, they were more often places like Flagstaff and Tuskegee. The solution: have a guy fly out on the plane to install the software and train the user. CGI was brand new at the time. If we'd been doing it five years later, it would have been way cheaper and easier, although somewhat more crude looking.
In the late 90s and early 00s, I was involved in developing a successful vertical market app. Although profitable, the 80/20 rule applied in spades. Most of the customers we lost money on. The reason: the support costs of installing and maintaining the database. You can't let customers lose their data, period. Basically there was a minimum sized profitable customer, but we needed (for political reasons) to support the entire range of customer sizes. If we'd been doing it five years later, we could have packaged it as a web application for the little guys but we didn't have the web GIS capabilities in 1999.
The whole netbook/laptop dividing line is arbitrary. It's a marketing distinction rather than a technological or ergonomic one. Each represents a different "value proposition".
So you can't say something like "If you don't need super portability, you might as well get a more powerful machine," as if super portability and computational power were opposed to each other. One could make a very computationally potent machine and give it a 7" screen, and there will be some very small number of users who would find that's just the thing they need. I suppose blind users would probably like to dispense with the display all together.
What Intel would like is for you to buy their more more expensive processors. If they can force trade-offs on you, then you'll buy the more expensive processor to get the larger screen. If you don't have much money, they'll take that too for one of their cheap processors. In fact, they'd be delighted if the entire system is cheaper, so that a larger fraction of the cost is their processor. They'll sell more volume, and then you'll buy *another* processor when you have money to get a decent screen.
I went through this for *years* with Detroit auto makers. They made car size part of their market segmentation; small cars were for buyers they couldn't up-sell to a larger car. For years I'd go to buy American, but I wanted a *small* car, and their small cars were their *cheap* cars. They didn't even bother to design the passenger compartment to be comfortable for somebody my height. It was like they just scaled down the car as if only tiny, poor people bought small cars. After I sold my old Pinto and bought my first small Japanese sedan, I couldn't believe the difference it made, just getting in and out of the darn car every day. Over the years US small cars got better, but they were always positioned as entry level cars. They never made a small car I *wished* I could have, like the BMW 3 series.
That said, they made a lot of easy money over all those years selling huge, technologically primitive SUVs on the theory that "more is more", so perhaps it was a sound business decision. I'm not sure, however, that this is a good lesson for the computer industry to follow, where a generation of technology is so much shorter. The "More is More" philosophy doesn't look so successful for Detroit now.
What I'd really like is a mobile form factor where the screen isn't hinged to the computer, and I could choose my own monitor. Notebooks are ergonomically lousy. I actually use mine in a stand with a separate keyboard.
By applying.
Ford got 5.9 Billion, and they expect to lose money this year. They're going to retool their factories. The Telsa loan is in some ways less risky, since we're not betting on the survival of an industry that is, on it's own, dying in this country: building ICE automobiles.
Everybody in the auto industry is in bad shape. The idea of the loan program isn't just to stem the cash bleeding until the next economic upturn, but to reclaim technological leadership. The 465 million is supposed to result in something that has eluded us for years: a practical, competitively priced electric vehicle. That may not be the answer to all our prayers, but it will give us us some answers about personal transportation in a post petroleum world before the lack of answers becomes a national crisis. That's well worth the opportunity cost on the 465 million dollar loan.
Well, I don't think we can talk on such vague terms as "destroy North Korea".
Could we cripple North Korea's economy, military and government if we don't give a damn how we do it or who gets hurt? Sure. We could nuke them, and what we could do with conventional weapons isn't far behind.
Could we easily defeat it's 1.2 million man army? Depends on the nature of the engagement. In any kind of "capture the flag" scenario where our objective is to capture or better yet destroy any particular thing, probably. The total size of the army doesn't matter, what matters is how many troops you can put where they are needed and how quickly. This is precisely the kind of low tech, brute force army we've built our military to defeat in any kind of engagement where the objectives are to capture and hold or destroy places.
Can we easily pacify the country with our military? No way, especially after tactics have been developed in Iraq that target our weaknesses at that kind of mission. Can we solve the agricultural and economic problems of North Korea with our military? Uh, uh. Can we defend South Korea against a determined ground attack? Yes, but it could get costly if North Korea gets outside help, and those big subterranean gun emplacements just over the DMZ can easily hit Seoul. My buddy who was a fire control officer on a AC-130 gunship claims they could get most of them before they even got a shot off, and under the right conditions he's probably correct, but I don't doubt there are a lot of "depends ons" in that scenario.
"Daisy Cutter".
The imagery is rather bow-wow-chicka-bow: our device will penetrate deep down to the secret chamber where the goods are kept.
I misread it as "California Student Arrested for Console Humping", so my reaction was "This is probably in Orange County, not San Francisco."
The reason murder and arrest are in different moral categories is that with the exception of those guys in Guantanamo arrest is a reversible state. Death is not.
The cop is concerned about whether it was issued by the proper authorities, has the right form, specifies exactly what needs to do etc. It's not normally his job to evaluate whether the legal principles used in justifying the warrant are properly construed. That is supposed to be sorted out later by habeas corpus and due process.
There are of course exceptions. If the cop knew that a judge was abusing his warrant authority for personal reasons, e.g. issuing arrest warrants on his ex-wife, then he'd probably be obliged to those warrants. If he had reason to believe that a suspect would not be given his constitutional due process rights, he'd have a moral duty not to use the warrant. But in general, the cop's duty is to mind his own business.
Sweden has a reasonably bloody history, although geography has been a limiting factor in their imperial ambitions. Ironically as we are discussingthe topic of big weapons, during its imperial hey-day Sweden had a mania for heavily armed ships of the line. Sometimes too heavily armed (Q: How to you sink a Swedish ship? A: Put it in the water.).
They have a racism problem with dark skinned immigrants, although one has to consider that Sweden is a welfare state. I wonder if Sweden's relative lack of ethnic diversity explains their openness to paying for state welfare programs.
About 40% of Muslims in Sweden have witnessed at least verbal abuse against Muslims, although to be fair the same figure in the US approaches 75%, so having a race and religious bigotry problem is a relative thing.
Their wrestling is less silly than ours, and we've never had two Sumo yokozuna at the same time.
Our national ethnic costumes aren't as colorful.
While some have called us an "empire", our territory is less than 10 million square kilometers. At the peak of the Mongol empire they controlled 33 million square kilometers, and they built it with horses and hand tools (swords).
Their version of barbecue features vegetables.
I don't think anybody will be mistaking us for Mongols any time soon.
Well, sorta.
If you've ever bothered to look into the engineering of these suckers, belt-and-suspenders doesn't even begin to describe the multiple levels of failsafe involved. It's nearly impossible to make one explode. You might get some alarming hissing, but they're supposed to fail that way. Hissing is what is supposed to happen after the bad thing that the half dozen safety features on the cell are supposed to prevent fail. The cells are are safety-vented like a pressure cooker, and the plastic jacket puffs up alarmingly but keeps things relatively tidy.
Of course, sometimes your number just comes up on the Big Stochastic Roulette Wheel In the Sky.
I can think of two possible ways this could indicate negligence on Apple's part. The first is if the design of the device defeated some of the safety measures. If the battery is supposed to outgas as it fails, and suddenly your case blocks the outgassing, you're going to get a bang. Another way would be in its choice of suppliers. There have been reports of unsafe li-ion battery cells and packs coming out of or sold within China. If I recall, that was implicated in a rare battery related cell phone death a year or two ago.
The thing is, if it were me, my top priority would be getting my hands on the unit to find out what happened, whether it was my fault, and Act of God, or a fraudulent prank. I'd give the man his money back and then some, Move heaven and Earth, only give me the damn carcass so I can find out what the real story was.
That's design; not service.
The only way to make money with a device you sell for under $500 is the customers almost never call.
I think the whole reason they've prospered is not competing with the big boxes.
The big box formula is about economies of scale. Big stores = low prices = high volume.
They also mean a longer drive.
I bet it's one of those business models that happen by accident. You have a store that caters to a small but widespread group. So your store stocks things that they can't get easily. It can't be big, because there aren't enough of them. Then people come in to buy other things like TV aerials and whatnot. So why not sell them other things that go with the TV? There's a lot more people who buy TV cables and stuff than capacitors and soldering irons.
Probably the most important thing Radio Shack sells is batteries. You need a bunch of batteries, and maybe some of them are odd. Probably the drug store's got them, but if they don't you're out of luck and the people won't know what you're talking about. The big box electronic chain almost certainly has them, but that's ten miles away and there's a radio shack in the shopping plaza two miles away. That's exactly the same reason that sends the geek there to get a roll of solder.
Even if the Radio Shack is in a mall anchored by a big box electronic store, even if that store puts the batteries right up by the registers, it's still faster to dash into Radio Shack, and if the price is a bit higher, it's still cheap enough.
Then when you're there, you see this r/c toy and you remember little Timmy's birthday is coming up. Or you ask the friendly salesman a question about that phone you spotted on the way in. These guys may not have MIT Course 6 degrees when it comes to technical knowledge, but they're nearly always friendly and eager to be informative within the limits of their ability.
And so a successful business model is born. It's the same thing that keeps local hardware stores stocking an impressive assortment of nuts and bolts. I can go to Lowes or Home Depot and they'll have a larger selection, but the local store almost certainly has what I need and the small scale and attentive service gets me out the door fast with my $2 of purchases fast, and that matters when I'm in the middle of a project. And often I'll also have $20 of things I purchased because they caught my eye.