... so none of your courses covered the relevance of sample size in a statistical generalization? You know, maybe you could survey more than one person here...
In my experience, wikipedia works best for dispassionate topics. No one really cares whether William Jennings Bryan should've won the 1896 election, which means that you're not going to see a lot of motivated pro-Bryan or pro-McKinley trolls taking potshots at the article. Controversial topics, on the other hand, are a very different thing altogether.
Seeing an "objective" article that you can edit is just too irresistable for some people... to do otherwise is almost to admit that their opinions aren't objective.
spawn telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com expect "Press Return to continue:" send "\n" send "bdr\n" # replace with your own 3-letter city code expect "Press Return to continue" send_user "\n" exit
A space flight is not like a medical cure. You cannot fake it; space flight couldn't have been caused by a mysterious "third factor"; space flight cannot be caused by experimentor bias. Space flight couldn't be created by the Clever Hans effect. So long as you can show you really were in space and back again in one piece, there's no way you could've gotten there through accident, intentional deceipt, spurious correlation or statistical anomaly. If you've been to space there are no possible competing explanations that need to be ruled out, but with medical science this is never true.
So, waiting for peer review on this would indeed be prudent.
For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
Ha, ha! If this were true, you'd expect more games to be actually fun to play, or big-budget movies to be worth watching.
The problem with the consumer electronics industry, as in these other industries, is that they are trying to get you to BUY the damn thing. They don't care about what you do after that point, because most of the time the consumer isn't going to really know at the moment of deciding to buy, either.
So, instead they try to pump up or rachet down various specs in an attempt to try to fool the customer into thinking that these will translate into a better usage experience. Get some quick short-run profits and try not to worry about what's going to happen to the brand in the long term. Happy sailing!
A discount to one group or a fine to one group are mathematically identical. The only difference is marketing. For instance, some places used to charge a small fee for using a credit card. They learned they could get better sales, however, if they merely re-labelled it a "cash discount." Mathematically the two are the same thing, and that's probably what's going on here as well.
You're assuming that the people have some idea what their Senator is actually doing. The people know quite well that, as the campaign ads explained so well, the one they voted against in the last election was actually an agent of Osama bin Laden himself, but most people in this country cannot name their current US Senator.
This isn't a "big government" problem. There are no people saying that "there ought to be a law.... banning P2P programs, robbing the Walt Disney Company of needed influence over market pricing." No, this bill is driven by lobbyists, perhaps the only species of man worse than a politician, and it will pass because the people don't know and don't care that they don't know. Democracy will always fail so long as this is the case.
But P2P of ENTERTAINMENT is a "national security crime"?!?
You're making a common mistake: imputing human characteristics such as shame on lawmakers. It's called "anthropomorphism." Don't feel bad, some people even make this mistake for lobbyists.
Seriously though, they've been using this excuse ever since it became an excuse. Just look at what else they're trying to do this week:
Citing national security concerns, some Republican members of Congress are trying to limit the personal financial information that top federal officials must disclose.
Tucked within the House's 497-page version of the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act" is a provision to repeal the requirement that senior-level officials report their personal financial assets valued at more than $2.5 million. It also would end the practice of disclosing the dates of stock transactions.
The proposal to limit financial disclosures initially covered only top-level intelligence officials. It was recently expanded to include all executive branch officials, according to a draft version of the bill.
I, for one, feel safer already. There is a certain safety, that is, in watching the slow erosion of your system of government and knowing there isn't much you can do about it. There is, indeed, a sense of safety in helplessness.
They have that stuff in Germany, too
on
A New Elena Story
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there
It's that way in Germany, too. I know that in Hamburg, some of the major bomb shelters were so incredibly massive that they simply never tore them down. They put nightclubs in there now. You can see them pretty easily, they're these huge masses of concrete... one of the most touching things, besides the bombed-out cathedrals left unrestored, and the occasional Kennedyplatze or Eisenhowerstrasse you run into...
We don't really have a parallel here. This is one of the reasons that I believe that when Americans and Europeans think about war, they actually conceptualize very different things.
Slow down, there. You're talking about spending, not taxation. And as the past few years have shown, there is no relationship between these two variables.
Same as in George Lucas and Kevin Smith. Creativity requires limits and rules, and finding ways to break them. When you have no limits and no rules, you have nowhere to go.
Then again, the Evil Dead series has a well-established history of making fun of itself, so there's really not that much that could go wrong. If it turns out to be an overbudget, CGI-laden travesty.... that could actually be kind of funny.
goon america's law: the first person to use the phrase "basic economics", eg, "this is basic economics", is the one who knows the least about economics.
You're assuming a perfect consumption tax correlated 1:1 with income. No one has ever proposed anything like this. This is what they call attacking a straw man. I take this as a tacit admission that you can't actually think of a good argument against progressive income taxation if you have to resort to that.
You're also assuming that the value of money is a linear function. Again, this assumption is flawed. In terms of raw dollars, is there any difference between giving someone who makes $10,000/year another $1000 and giving someone who makes $100,000/year another $1000? Even in terms of percent: is there no difference between giving someone who makes $10,000/year another $1000 and someone who makes $100,000/year another $10,000? If the value of money was determined by a linear function you would not be able to see any subjective differences between these two cases, either in total or in terms of percent. The difference is, it ought to seem like the person that makes $10,000 would spend the additional $1000 on more food for their kids, but for the other person it would go to buying more luxury toys. Yes, and that's making a moral judgment on what people should and should not have. If you honestly think it's some perverse moral calculus to see a difference between rich people buying more luxury cars and poor people having more food, than that's an interesting definition of morality you have.
As for your second ammendment threat, go hog wild: overthrow the government, I encourage you. If lower taxes would put you over the threshold of affording that Porsche Boxster you've always wanted, I'd like to see it happen.
Step one: for each of the misperceptions, come up with something sort of related that is strictly true. In each of these cases, you just laid out what the Bush administration laid out to mislead people into thinking the misperception.
Most of the world opposed the war in terms of people. But, you can say that a large number of countries supported the war, it is merely an attempt to imply that much of the world supported the war in the general sense. But you had to rely on this very specific wording in order to get that implication. Many countries supported the war, yes, but most of them are tiny countries supporting it in name only and contributing little or nothing. You say that 30 countries "sent troops", but for some reason neglect to mention that very few of these sent more than a handful, and in terms of percentage the number was miniscule. The reason anyone plays any of these rhetorical games is that they want to try to make it look like most of the world supported the war when it did not.
Step two: define the something that is sort of related are true in the "more general sense", whatever that means. In order to support this, you always tried to assert that something more specific is true and simply called it more general.
The example of not "literally" unilateral is not "more generally true". This is a definition you've teased out to have the lowest possible bar of truth. It is not more general.
Further, that Iraq supported some international terrorism at some point is the "more important" general truth is also contradicted by the study itself, which found that most Bush supporters said, that if Iraq did not have "substantial" Al Qaeda support or WMD than the US should not have invaded. The questions that asked this used the very same terms as were used when it was asked whether the respondent thought the two things were true or not.
Why, I might ask, did you use the careful wording of Iraq's support for Zarqawi? Iraq gave "safe refuge" to Zarqawi, but he had always been operating in the north of Iraq, which was always under US/Kurdish control, outside of the control of the Iraqi government. Again, this is the same "fact" that is used for no purpose other than to imply that the Iraqi government supported Zarqawi. There were, in fact, plans to get him before the war started, but they were scrapped because then it couldn't be used to mislead people into the larger war. Again, why did you feel you had to use the careful wording here, if it was the "more general truth"?
Step three: declare, in the absense of evidence, that Kerry voters must not have believed in this more specific truth that you've derived. Again, there is no reason to buy this, since you're just pulling it out of thin air.
Had you actually read the PDF version of the questionnaire itself, you would have seen that many of your assertions are false. Most Kerry supporters thought that Iraq had "limited activities" that could be used to help a WMD program. Most did not think that he did not ever have weapons at all, which you would have known had you read the study. Obviously you did not because you asserted the opposite apparently solely on the basis that it sounded plausible to you.
In short: excellent spin. You should be doing this professionally if you're not already. I hear there are going to be some opportunities opening up at the State Department sometime soon.
One party controls every branch of the federal government, and one person is in charge of that party. If the President wants something he can tell Congress to do it, and being that the party of which he is the leader controls both houses he'll damn well get it. This President routinely gets anything he asks for from Congress. He has never vetoed or even talked about vetoing a bill. If he doesn't want something it will never make it to the floor, it's that simple.
I might also add that most TV news commentary is conservative. and every conservative commentator gets a fax every week from the White House telling them what to say and what words to use to define the issues most favorably to the party. This gives him substantial control over what gets promulgated in the media, and public opinion as a result.
So while none of these are Constitutionally-denoted powers, that doesn't mean they aren't there. These powers are purely informal, but that doesn't mean they are any less significant.
FC1 provided floppy-sized images for the sole purpose of doing an http/ftp install, as did most earlier RH releases... they seemed to have stopped doing this with FC2. Too bad. I always liked being able to say I installed a modern OS using only a couple of floppy disks.
The whole Bush campaign for the last two years has been a thinly veiled attempt to get people to think that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were the same person. And, it worked: most Bush voters thought that there was proof they were working together, and also thought that WMD was found in Iraq, and that the war was popular worldwide.
Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.
Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions. (...)
Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, "One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree." Eighty-two percent of Bush supporters perceive the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63%) or that Iraq had a major WMD program (19%). Likewise, 75% say that the Bush administration is saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Equally large majorities of Kerry supporters hear the Bush administration expressing these views--73% say the Bush administration is saying Iraq had WMD (11% a major program) and 74% that Iraq was substantially supporting al Qaeda.
Most surveyed agreed that it was the Bush administration who were origin of these beliefs. It drives me up a wall that these guys were able to win an election in part because they were able to successfully misinform people.
I'm sorry, have you ever listened to the Rush Limbaugh radio show? Have you ever read anything by Ann Coulter? Please tell me with a straight face that they're not out to demonize anyone. And they're on the same Republican National Committee fax list that tells them what to say every week as every other conservative commentator in the country.
The Bush campaign ran 75% negative ads and 25% positive ones. The Kerry campaign ran 25% negative ads and 75% positive ones. Please, tell me how the voters were really turned off by all those negative ads. It's not like there's very strong evidence that the swift boat ads, for instance -- which were totally baseless lies -- took Kerry down a few points in the polls. And the election was won by a few points. Because the voters would have been turned off by that negativity, you see, it would have backfired. So it's a good thing that didn't happen because it wouldn't have worked out so well.
Slashdot Mirror
Greedy corps brought it to the masses, and now it's become an accepted part of the "Internet experience."
You mean the "Windows experience."
... so none of your courses covered the relevance of sample size in a statistical generalization? You know, maybe you could survey more than one person here...
In my experience, wikipedia works best for dispassionate topics. No one really cares whether William Jennings Bryan should've won the 1896 election, which means that you're not going to see a lot of motivated pro-Bryan or pro-McKinley trolls taking potshots at the article. Controversial topics, on the other hand, are a very different thing altogether.
Seeing an "objective" article that you can edit is just too irresistable for some people... to do otherwise is almost to admit that their opinions aren't objective.
Great analogy. The only thing we can conclude from this experiment is that humans don't cause things, generally.
#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com
expect "Press Return to continue:"
send "\n"
send "bdr\n" # replace with your own 3-letter city code
expect "Press Return to continue"
send_user "\n"
exit
But Bush didn't cut funding for stem cells! He merely threw up major obstacles to it! Sheesh!
Poor analogy.
A space flight is not like a medical cure. You cannot fake it; space flight couldn't have been caused by a mysterious "third factor"; space flight cannot be caused by experimentor bias. Space flight couldn't be created by the Clever Hans effect. So long as you can show you really were in space and back again in one piece, there's no way you could've gotten there through accident, intentional deceipt, spurious correlation or statistical anomaly. If you've been to space there are no possible competing explanations that need to be ruled out, but with medical science this is never true.
So, waiting for peer review on this would indeed be prudent.
For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
Ha, ha! If this were true, you'd expect more games to be actually fun to play, or big-budget movies to be worth watching.
The problem with the consumer electronics industry, as in these other industries, is that they are trying to get you to BUY the damn thing. They don't care about what you do after that point, because most of the time the consumer isn't going to really know at the moment of deciding to buy, either.
So, instead they try to pump up or rachet down various specs in an attempt to try to fool the customer into thinking that these will translate into a better usage experience. Get some quick short-run profits and try not to worry about what's going to happen to the brand in the long term. Happy sailing!
The full quote is, "four legs good, two legs bad"
Some animals are more equal than others.
This is an exciting new feature. You can just remove the files you don't want by dragging the mouse over them and clicking to delete! No OS involved.
He would just have to spend a few hours mucking around in the configuration files
you misspelled "forty-two".
A discount to one group or a fine to one group are mathematically identical. The only difference is marketing. For instance, some places used to charge a small fee for using a credit card. They learned they could get better sales, however, if they merely re-labelled it a "cash discount." Mathematically the two are the same thing, and that's probably what's going on here as well.
You're assuming that the people have some idea what their Senator is actually doing. The people know quite well that, as the campaign ads explained so well, the one they voted against in the last election was actually an agent of Osama bin Laden himself, but most people in this country cannot name their current US Senator.
This isn't a "big government" problem. There are no people saying that "there ought to be a law.... banning P2P programs, robbing the Walt Disney Company of needed influence over market pricing." No, this bill is driven by lobbyists, perhaps the only species of man worse than a politician, and it will pass because the people don't know and don't care that they don't know. Democracy will always fail so long as this is the case.
You're making a common mistake: imputing human characteristics such as shame on lawmakers. It's called "anthropomorphism." Don't feel bad, some people even make this mistake for lobbyists.
Seriously though, they've been using this excuse ever since it became an excuse. Just look at what else they're trying to do this week:
link
I, for one, feel safer already. There is a certain safety, that is, in watching the slow erosion of your system of government and knowing there isn't much you can do about it. There is, indeed, a sense of safety in helplessness.
Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there
It's that way in Germany, too. I know that in Hamburg, some of the major bomb shelters were so incredibly massive that they simply never tore them down. They put nightclubs in there now. You can see them pretty easily, they're these huge masses of concrete... one of the most touching things, besides the bombed-out cathedrals left unrestored, and the occasional Kennedyplatze or Eisenhowerstrasse you run into...
We don't really have a parallel here. This is one of the reasons that I believe that when Americans and Europeans think about war, they actually conceptualize very different things.
Slow down, there. You're talking about spending, not taxation. And as the past few years have shown, there is no relationship between these two variables.
Whoah, slow down there, cowboy. Since when does Congress do more than one thing a week?
Same as in George Lucas and Kevin Smith. Creativity requires limits and rules, and finding ways to break them. When you have no limits and no rules, you have nowhere to go.
Then again, the Evil Dead series has a well-established history of making fun of itself, so there's really not that much that could go wrong. If it turns out to be an overbudget, CGI-laden travesty.... that could actually be kind of funny.
goon america's law: the first person to use the phrase "basic economics", eg, "this is basic economics", is the one who knows the least about economics.
You're assuming a perfect consumption tax correlated 1:1 with income. No one has ever proposed anything like this. This is what they call attacking a straw man. I take this as a tacit admission that you can't actually think of a good argument against progressive income taxation if you have to resort to that.
You're also assuming that the value of money is a linear function. Again, this assumption is flawed. In terms of raw dollars, is there any difference between giving someone who makes $10,000/year another $1000 and giving someone who makes $100,000/year another $1000? Even in terms of percent: is there no difference between giving someone who makes $10,000/year another $1000 and someone who makes $100,000/year another $10,000? If the value of money was determined by a linear function you would not be able to see any subjective differences between these two cases, either in total or in terms of percent. The difference is, it ought to seem like the person that makes $10,000 would spend the additional $1000 on more food for their kids, but for the other person it would go to buying more luxury toys. Yes, and that's making a moral judgment on what people should and should not have. If you honestly think it's some perverse moral calculus to see a difference between rich people buying more luxury cars and poor people having more food, than that's an interesting definition of morality you have.
As for your second ammendment threat, go hog wild: overthrow the government, I encourage you. If lower taxes would put you over the threshold of affording that Porsche Boxster you've always wanted, I'd like to see it happen.
Step one: for each of the misperceptions, come up with something sort of related that is strictly true. In each of these cases, you just laid out what the Bush administration laid out to mislead people into thinking the misperception.
Most of the world opposed the war in terms of people. But, you can say that a large number of countries supported the war, it is merely an attempt to imply that much of the world supported the war in the general sense. But you had to rely on this very specific wording in order to get that implication. Many countries supported the war, yes, but most of them are tiny countries supporting it in name only and contributing little or nothing. You say that 30 countries "sent troops", but for some reason neglect to mention that very few of these sent more than a handful, and in terms of percentage the number was miniscule. The reason anyone plays any of these rhetorical games is that they want to try to make it look like most of the world supported the war when it did not.
Step two: define the something that is sort of related are true in the "more general sense", whatever that means. In order to support this, you always tried to assert that something more specific is true and simply called it more general.
The example of not "literally" unilateral is not "more generally true". This is a definition you've teased out to have the lowest possible bar of truth. It is not more general.
Further, that Iraq supported some international terrorism at some point is the "more important" general truth is also contradicted by the study itself, which found that most Bush supporters said, that if Iraq did not have "substantial" Al Qaeda support or WMD than the US should not have invaded. The questions that asked this used the very same terms as were used when it was asked whether the respondent thought the two things were true or not.
Why, I might ask, did you use the careful wording of Iraq's support for Zarqawi? Iraq gave "safe refuge" to Zarqawi, but he had always been operating in the north of Iraq, which was always under US/Kurdish control, outside of the control of the Iraqi government. Again, this is the same "fact" that is used for no purpose other than to imply that the Iraqi government supported Zarqawi. There were, in fact, plans to get him before the war started, but they were scrapped because then it couldn't be used to mislead people into the larger war. Again, why did you feel you had to use the careful wording here, if it was the "more general truth"?
Step three: declare, in the absense of evidence, that Kerry voters must not have believed in this more specific truth that you've derived. Again, there is no reason to buy this, since you're just pulling it out of thin air.
Had you actually read the PDF version of the questionnaire itself, you would have seen that many of your assertions are false. Most Kerry supporters thought that Iraq had "limited activities" that could be used to help a WMD program. Most did not think that he did not ever have weapons at all, which you would have known had you read the study. Obviously you did not because you asserted the opposite apparently solely on the basis that it sounded plausible to you.
In short: excellent spin. You should be doing this professionally if you're not already. I hear there are going to be some opportunities opening up at the State Department sometime soon.
One party controls every branch of the federal government, and one person is in charge of that party. If the President wants something he can tell Congress to do it, and being that the party of which he is the leader controls both houses he'll damn well get it. This President routinely gets anything he asks for from Congress. He has never vetoed or even talked about vetoing a bill. If he doesn't want something it will never make it to the floor, it's that simple.
I might also add that most TV news commentary is conservative. and every conservative commentator gets a fax every week from the White House telling them what to say and what words to use to define the issues most favorably to the party. This gives him substantial control over what gets promulgated in the media, and public opinion as a result.
So while none of these are Constitutionally-denoted powers, that doesn't mean they aren't there. These powers are purely informal, but that doesn't mean they are any less significant.
FC1 provided floppy-sized images for the sole purpose of doing an http/ftp install, as did most earlier RH releases... they seemed to have stopped doing this with FC2. Too bad. I always liked being able to say I installed a modern OS using only a couple of floppy disks.
link
Most surveyed agreed that it was the Bush administration who were origin of these beliefs. It drives me up a wall that these guys were able to win an election in part because they were able to successfully misinform people.
I'm sorry, have you ever listened to the Rush Limbaugh radio show? Have you ever read anything by Ann Coulter? Please tell me with a straight face that they're not out to demonize anyone. And they're on the same Republican National Committee fax list that tells them what to say every week as every other conservative commentator in the country.
The Bush campaign ran 75% negative ads and 25% positive ones. The Kerry campaign ran 25% negative ads and 75% positive ones. Please, tell me how the voters were really turned off by all those negative ads. It's not like there's very strong evidence that the swift boat ads, for instance -- which were totally baseless lies -- took Kerry down a few points in the polls. And the election was won by a few points. Because the voters would have been turned off by that negativity, you see, it would have backfired. So it's a good thing that didn't happen because it wouldn't have worked out so well.