You're full of it. If you had such a degree, you would be acquainted with the old notion that an anecdote does not constitute evidence. Your experiment was not performed under controlled conditions. You did not account for possible sources of error. You did not perform a sufficient number of iterations.
Really, if you were a scientist (or even an engineer), you would understand how to conduct a proper study.
And yes, I'm also seriously disturbed by careless attitude of many in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley --- I've had a chance to get to know the area better lately.
(Yes, computer science proper is pure mathematics, and most people employ a bit of both in their jobs. But it's well-known that the only people crazier than engineers are mathematicians.)
Why? You have no argument to back this up so I'm just supposed to believe you?
I don't expect you to believe me. I expect you to agree with me. The difference is important.
Society was already in place by the time Microsoft showed up. We already had roads and telephones because WE wanted them, not Microsoft. So, now that they show up after the fact, use the benefits of society just like everyone else, they should be charged out the ass?
What does that have to do with my argument? I'm not arguing that Microsoft should be charged double electricity rates, or that we should collect double bridge tolls from its employees.
You're saying if it wasn't for society that Microsoft wouldn't be where it's at while ignoring the fact that WE wouldn't be where we are at either without society.
Yes, but we do not individually exert a huge influence of the security of society. Microsoft does.
Like I said: regulating companies is not punishing success. Microsoft has two options:
A: be small and avoid regulation
B: be large, be the largest operating system by a huge margin, but be subject to rules that to ensure the safety and reliability of our computing infrastructure
One would presume that Microsoft is better off under option B that under option A --- that's not a punishment for success. It's a reward with strings. There's nothing wrong with that.
I don't understand what you mean by 'conceptually elegant'.
I ask whether conceptual elegance motivates your thoughts because I can't conceive of any other reason for asserting that the law must apply in a uniform manner to large and small companies alike.
For example, I am against legislation allowing gay marriage...
Look, I'm with you on getting the government out of marriage. The rights currently conferred by marriage should be split up into individual agreements that any two people can agree to.
That said, you must be aware of how difficult it would be to remove the concept of marriage from the law. The political cost would be astronomical, and the gain would be quite minimal. So in a practical sense, the government will always officiate marriages. Because marriage is not going away, and because it does confer definite benefits, your opposition to gay marriage is an endorsement of continued inequality for one class of people. In fact, your confusion between "is" and "ought" in this instance is so plain that one must wonder whether you have other reasons for your opposition to gender-blind marriage.
[snip the rest of your post]
You did not address my question.
You made a categorical assertion that we have no basis for applying different laws to large and small businesses. I asked you for the supporting foundational arguments behind that assertion, and you did not provide any. Again: why are we, in your view, specifically prohibited from applying different laws to businesses that dominate their markets?
I've been using the classic discussion interface for over a decade. Switch to it through "help/preferences" -> "preferences" -> "discussions" -> "viewing".
Parent is also wrong; all organizations, regardless of size, should be held to the same level of regulation
Why? Because it's conceptually elegant?
Society does have a say in how every organization is run, its called a combination of laws, public ownership (stock), and political harm (environmentalists)
These laws already discriminate based on size: small businesses are exempted from many labor and regulatory requirements. Why can't we add a class for very large corporations?
Society should not, however, control how an organization is run.
Why not? Also, you just contradicted yourself.
Larger organizations may be subject to more scrutiny, but the laws should not differ simply because your company makes more money.
Most of the world's non-embedded computers run Windows. When a company reaches that level of influence, it ceases to be just another firm and instead becomes a part of our societal infrastructure. It's certainly reasonable to hold such organizations to a higher standard than we hold smaller organizations. The power company can't "do as they want" either.
As long as Microsoft wants to enjoy the lucrative benefits of being a singular part of society's information infrastructure, society ought to have a say in how Microsoft is run.
You might argue that imposing such restrictions is "punishing success". That's hardly true. The people responsible for Microsoft's growth have been rewarded many times over. If Microsoft finds regulations unbearable, it can split itself in two smaller companies, or shrink some other way. Then, it would no longer be subject to the same scrutiny.
Those of us who work with RAID arrays have cared about partition alignment for a long time. If a write spans two RAID-5 stripes, the RAID controller has to work twice as hard to correctly update the parity information. Aligning partitions and filesystem structures on stripe boundaries is essential to obtaining good performance on certain types of RAID arrays.
Well, the fact that there are regulations make it pretty obvious that there is some concern for any sort of radiation... ionizing or not. Yes, it is mostly about the heating problems with the non-ionizing... but to pretend we know all the effects and all the harmful effects is ridiculous. it comes down to some people would rather err on the side of extreme caution, some would rather err on the side of zero caution.
With enough velocity, heat, and/or current, anything will kill you. The issue here is that some people doggedly claim that the low levels of electromagnetic radiation given off by cell phones are harmful when there is no evidence to support this assertion.
It wouldn't be wrong to describe you as being brilliant. You don't just appear to understand many things; you really do understand. And especially, human nature. You use common language with great dexterity.
Indeed. He's definitely intelligent, but his mind is pre-scientific, if not downright Platonic. He supposes that we can discover the truth through pure thought, and that empiricism is a vulgar, unnecessary practice. He, of course, has supreme confidence that his own thinking is unassailable.
He is the perfect charlatan, and had he been born in another time and place, he might now be revered as a cult leader, and in yet another time and place, a prophet revered in holy books. The mindset is the same: the context is what, fortunately, differs.
My daily bread isn't obtained by chasing after research grants.
Here, you sweepingly and arrogantly dismiss the only discipline that's elevated us above stone knives and bearskins.
You still haven't addressed the objects bartwol and I voiced: that you have no evidence your theories bear any relationship to the real world. You bloviate about knowledge, but fail to realize that all theories are initially suspect. Only by presenting evidence can anyone change the perception of his theory from "dubious" to "interesting" to "probably" to "well-established". You accuse us of wanting something for nothing, but in reality, you are the one who is overreaching: you want the due consideration and attention that a genuine scientific theory receives, but without having to do the things that make it science.
I reject that idea. If you want others to consider your idea, you have to convince them that it's an idea worth considering. Your say-so isn't nearly strong enough to do that, especially not in areas as well-researched as electromagnetic radiation.
Oh, I'm sure you can spew more bombast about how you "inspire people to think in new ways": so do marketing executives. So do propagandists. So what? Thought by itself is worthless. It only becomes valuable when disciplined with scientific rigor, and you have decided that you'd rather have esotericism than that rigor.
Your initial post was sophomoric; your defense is infantile. With the time and space it took you to accuse your detractors of laziness, you could have made a cogent argument supporting your view. You didn't, and you didn't because you couldn't. You know that you have no rigorous support, so you resort to ad hominem attacks on our intellectual work ethic.
You are the one making the extraordinary claim. It's your job to convince others that you are right, not to scream "you're lazy!" when others say "that's implausible".
Except that Python's DB-API is a horrible mess. Depending on what db_module is, you might need to spell your query as:
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 = ? and field4 = ?', ('foo', 7.6))
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 =:1 and field4 =:2', ('foo', 7.6))
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 =:field3 and field4 =:field4', {field3:'foo', field4:7.6})
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 = %s and field4 = %s', ('foo', 7.6))
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 = %(field3)s and field4 = %(field4)s', {field3:'foo', field4:7.6})
These aren't options that you have as a programmer, no. db_module.paramstyle tells you what format to use, and your application needs to use the one the back-end is expecting. It's a perfect example of why "can't decide? just make it an option!" is not a viable strategy.
Grr. I somehow managed to mangle the comment the first time I tried to post it.
So what your saying is that cell phones have been "proven" by science to be safe? I don't think so.
Has soap been "proven" by science to be safe? We can't really be sure, can we?
If I were to stand on a street corner and claim that soap causes melanoma by "attacking epidermal lipids", you'd think me to be a crazy man. I'd have to present strong, damning evidence of my claim to counter a long history of use before you'd even begin to take me seriously.
"More information is always better" is a canard. It's downright fraudulent to present a mainstream view backed by observations and theory as being a peer to something a quack and his cat believe. It's like saying that Stephen Hawking and Gene Ray are two prominent physicists with divergent views regarding the nature of time.
That's bullshit. It's exactly the strategy that advocates of intelligent design, telekinesis, spirit communication, and homeopathy use. They know they can't win in a fair fight so they try to rig the game. The cell phone radiation people are of the same stock.
Has soap been "provenGene Ray are two prominent physicists with divergent views on then nature of time.
That's bullshit. It's exactly the strategy that advocates of intelligent design, telekinesis, spirit communication, and homeopathy use. They know they can't win in a fair fight so they try to rig the game. The cell phone radiation people are of the same stock.
Your post displays all the hallmarks of pseudoscience: elevated language to bamboozle the layman, accusations of censorship from the media, bald assertion of "common sense" causal connections, and a complete lack of rigorous data. A simple search-and-replace on your post could turn it into a defense of intelligent design, magnetic healing, or homeopathy: the thought process is the same. You adopt all the trappings of science without the rigor that makes the exercise worthwhile. You're no better than an alchemist.
You're not being censored by the media. Get over yourself. The mainstream media is more than happy to report on harmful substances when there's a modicum of evidence attached: see asbestos, tobacco, trans-fats, etc. That stuff sells like hotcakes! If it were discovered that cell phones were carcinogenic the media frenzy would make the Toyota debacle look like a slow news day.
There's simply no credible evidence in support of your worldview. You're the one making the outrageous claim that electromagnetic waves we've lived with for over a hundred years are actually harmful despite all the research to the contrary. Therefore, the burden falls on you to provide evidence, and your shameless unfounded assertions are seriously wanting.
Oh, and before you link to some minor study that purports to find a weak effect: your evidence needs to be strong enough to outweigh the "null hypothesis" of there being no connection. Perform enough studies and you'll get a few that show a positive result just by chance. Any study that purports to show a connection between cell phone use and cancer needs to:
Rigorously control for other risks. (Oh, look! Cell phones are correlated with cancer in our study! Never mind that all our cell phone users worked in PCB plants and our control group was a class of toddlers.)
Have a large enough sample size that its statistical power is significant. If cell phones are harmful, clearly the effect is weak and gradual. A very large study is required to reliably detect weak and gradual effects.
Be performed by a credible, disinterested party like a university or government lab. Would you trust a Philip Morris study on the effects of smoking, a Trojan study on the reliability of condoms, or a PETA study on the health effects of red meat? I thought not.
Be confirmed by an independent organization
Show me one of those and I might concede you're onto something. It wouldn't be the first time in history of science that a fringe group happened to be right. But the vast majority of these fringe groups are utterly incompetent if not downright fraudulent. That's why we ask for real evidence. If we were cro-magnons, I'm sure you'd be spreading FUD about the evil spirits that would be awakened if we kept using "fire" to cook our food.
Bullshit. You could replace that fraction with water and it would only reduce your fuel economy by 10% at the most -- since that's all you're taking out. Since alcohol *does* actually contain energy (albeit a bit less than gasoline), you're actually losing more like 2-3% fuel economy versus using pure gasoline. But you can't compare the ethanol to pure gasoline: the ethanol replaces MTBE, which took up space and lowered fuel efficiency too. Plus, ethanol doesn't pollute our drinking water.
All in all, ethanol in gasoline is a big win. I bet you oppose water fluoridation too.
Right. Maybe I'm too used to Firefox terminology, but what I'd call a "plugin" presents a new API (of one sort or another) to web content. An "extension" is solely a convenience for the user, and web content shouldn't be able to detect or rely upon it.
The former is bad, and the latter is of course wonderful --- because it's optional. Plugins have a way of either fading into oblivion or becoming practically mandatory.
Slashdot Mirror
We must respond to this crisis by enacting more tax cuts for the rich.
The tragic part is that the policy have expanded their powers so much that not answering any questions is the safer course.
You're full of it. If you had such a degree, you would be acquainted with the old notion that an anecdote does not constitute evidence. Your experiment was not performed under controlled conditions. You did not account for possible sources of error. You did not perform a sufficient number of iterations.
Really, if you were a scientist (or even an engineer), you would understand how to conduct a proper study.
You need to stop working for this guy.
And yes, I'm also seriously disturbed by careless attitude of many in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley --- I've had a chance to get to know the area better lately.
There's no such thing. That number cannot be represented in IEEE binary floating point.
The bigger question is why denialists cluster around Slashdot in the first place.
Oh, wait. I know the answer:
ENGINEERS ARE BATSHIT INSANE
(Yes, computer science proper is pure mathematics, and most people employ a bit of both in their jobs. But it's well-known that the only people crazier than engineers are mathematicians.)
I don't expect you to believe me. I expect you to agree with me. The difference is important.
What does that have to do with my argument? I'm not arguing that Microsoft should be charged double electricity rates, or that we should collect double bridge tolls from its employees.
Yes, but we do not individually exert a huge influence of the security of society. Microsoft does.
Like I said: regulating companies is not punishing success. Microsoft has two options:
One would presume that Microsoft is better off under option B that under option A --- that's not a punishment for success. It's a reward with strings. There's nothing wrong with that.
I ask whether conceptual elegance motivates your thoughts because I can't conceive of any other reason for asserting that the law must apply in a uniform manner to large and small companies alike.
Look, I'm with you on getting the government out of marriage. The rights currently conferred by marriage should be split up into individual agreements that any two people can agree to.
That said, you must be aware of how difficult it would be to remove the concept of marriage from the law. The political cost would be astronomical, and the gain would be quite minimal. So in a practical sense, the government will always officiate marriages. Because marriage is not going away, and because it does confer definite benefits, your opposition to gay marriage is an endorsement of continued inequality for one class of people. In fact, your confusion between "is" and "ought" in this instance is so plain that one must wonder whether you have other reasons for your opposition to gender-blind marriage.
You did not address my question.
You made a categorical assertion that we have no basis for applying different laws to large and small businesses. I asked you for the supporting foundational arguments behind that assertion, and you did not provide any. Again: why are we, in your view, specifically prohibited from applying different laws to businesses that dominate their markets?
Huh? Something changed?
I've been using the classic discussion interface for over a decade. Switch to it through "help/preferences" -> "preferences" -> "discussions" -> "viewing".
Why? Because it's conceptually elegant?
These laws already discriminate based on size: small businesses are exempted from many labor and regulatory requirements. Why can't we add a class for very large corporations?
Why not? Also, you just contradicted yourself.
Why not?
Small objects have a low terminal velocity
The power of your argument is overwhelming. I am compelled to concede.
Most of the world's non-embedded computers run Windows. When a company reaches that level of influence, it ceases to be just another firm and instead becomes a part of our societal infrastructure. It's certainly reasonable to hold such organizations to a higher standard than we hold smaller organizations. The power company can't "do as they want" either.
As long as Microsoft wants to enjoy the lucrative benefits of being a singular part of society's information infrastructure, society ought to have a say in how Microsoft is run.
You might argue that imposing such restrictions is "punishing success". That's hardly true. The people responsible for Microsoft's growth have been rewarded many times over. If Microsoft finds regulations unbearable, it can split itself in two smaller companies, or shrink some other way. Then, it would no longer be subject to the same scrutiny.
But as long as Microsoft
Those of us who work with RAID arrays have cared about partition alignment for a long time. If a write spans two RAID-5 stripes, the RAID controller has to work twice as hard to correctly update the parity information. Aligning partitions and filesystem structures on stripe boundaries is essential to obtaining good performance on certain types of RAID arrays.
With enough velocity, heat, and/or current, anything will kill you. The issue here is that some people doggedly claim that the low levels of electromagnetic radiation given off by cell phones are harmful when there is no evidence to support this assertion.
Indeed. He's definitely intelligent, but his mind is pre-scientific, if not downright Platonic. He supposes that we can discover the truth through pure thought, and that empiricism is a vulgar, unnecessary practice. He, of course, has supreme confidence that his own thinking is unassailable.
He is the perfect charlatan, and had he been born in another time and place, he might now be revered as a cult leader, and in yet another time and place, a prophet revered in holy books. The mindset is the same: the context is what, fortunately, differs.
Then stop aping the language of science.
Here, you sweepingly and arrogantly dismiss the only discipline that's elevated us above stone knives and bearskins.
You still haven't addressed the objects bartwol and I voiced: that you have no evidence your theories bear any relationship to the real world. You bloviate about knowledge, but fail to realize that all theories are initially suspect. Only by presenting evidence can anyone change the perception of his theory from "dubious" to "interesting" to "probably" to "well-established". You accuse us of wanting something for nothing, but in reality, you are the one who is overreaching: you want the due consideration and attention that a genuine scientific theory receives, but without having to do the things that make it science.
I reject that idea. If you want others to consider your idea, you have to convince them that it's an idea worth considering. Your say-so isn't nearly strong enough to do that, especially not in areas as well-researched as electromagnetic radiation.
Oh, I'm sure you can spew more bombast about how you "inspire people to think in new ways": so do marketing executives. So do propagandists. So what? Thought by itself is worthless. It only becomes valuable when disciplined with scientific rigor, and you have decided that you'd rather have esotericism than that rigor.
You want to talk books? Let's talk books.
Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (summary)
Your initial post was sophomoric; your defense is infantile. With the time and space it took you to accuse your detractors of laziness, you could have made a cogent argument supporting your view. You didn't, and you didn't because you couldn't. You know that you have no rigorous support, so you resort to ad hominem attacks on our intellectual work ethic.
You are the one making the extraordinary claim. It's your job to convince others that you are right, not to scream "you're lazy!" when others say "that's implausible".
Except that Python's DB-API is a horrible mess. Depending on what db_module is, you might need to spell your query as:
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 = ? and field4 = ?', ('foo', 7.6))
curs.execute('select field1, field2 from table1 where field3 =
These aren't options that you have as a programmer, no. db_module.paramstyle tells you what format to use, and your application needs to use the one the back-end is expecting. It's a perfect example of why "can't decide? just make it an option!" is not a viable strategy.
Grr. I somehow managed to mangle the comment the first time I tried to post it.
Has soap been "proven" by science to be safe? We can't really be sure, can we?
If I were to stand on a street corner and claim that soap causes melanoma by "attacking epidermal lipids", you'd think me to be a crazy man. I'd have to present strong, damning evidence of my claim to counter a long history of use before you'd even begin to take me seriously.
"More information is always better" is a canard. It's downright fraudulent to present a mainstream view backed by observations and theory as being a peer to something a quack and his cat believe. It's like saying that Stephen Hawking and Gene Ray are two prominent physicists with divergent views regarding the nature of time.
That's bullshit. It's exactly the strategy that advocates of intelligent design, telekinesis, spirit communication, and homeopathy use. They know they can't win in a fair fight so they try to rig the game. The cell phone radiation people are of the same stock.
Has soap been "provenGene Ray are two prominent physicists with divergent views on then nature of time.
That's bullshit. It's exactly the strategy that advocates of intelligent design, telekinesis, spirit communication, and homeopathy use. They know they can't win in a fair fight so they try to rig the game. The cell phone radiation people are of the same stock.
Oh boy, yourself.
Your post displays all the hallmarks of pseudoscience: elevated language to bamboozle the layman, accusations of censorship from the media, bald assertion of "common sense" causal connections, and a complete lack of rigorous data. A simple search-and-replace on your post could turn it into a defense of intelligent design, magnetic healing, or homeopathy: the thought process is the same. You adopt all the trappings of science without the rigor that makes the exercise worthwhile. You're no better than an alchemist.
You're not being censored by the media. Get over yourself. The mainstream media is more than happy to report on harmful substances when there's a modicum of evidence attached: see asbestos, tobacco, trans-fats, etc. That stuff sells like hotcakes! If it were discovered that cell phones were carcinogenic the media frenzy would make the Toyota debacle look like a slow news day.
There's simply no credible evidence in support of your worldview. You're the one making the outrageous claim that electromagnetic waves we've lived with for over a hundred years are actually harmful despite all the research to the contrary. Therefore, the burden falls on you to provide evidence, and your shameless unfounded assertions are seriously wanting.
Oh, and before you link to some minor study that purports to find a weak effect: your evidence needs to be strong enough to outweigh the "null hypothesis" of there being no connection. Perform enough studies and you'll get a few that show a positive result just by chance. Any study that purports to show a connection between cell phone use and cancer needs to:
Show me one of those and I might concede you're onto something. It wouldn't be the first time in history of science that a fringe group happened to be right. But the vast majority of these fringe groups are utterly incompetent if not downright fraudulent. That's why we ask for real evidence. If we were cro-magnons, I'm sure you'd be spreading FUD about the evil spirits that would be awakened if we kept using "fire" to cook our food.
Provide strong evidence. Put up or shut up.
Bullshit. You could replace that fraction with water and it would only reduce your fuel economy by 10% at the most -- since that's all you're taking out. Since alcohol *does* actually contain energy (albeit a bit less than gasoline), you're actually losing more like 2-3% fuel economy versus using pure gasoline. But you can't compare the ethanol to pure gasoline: the ethanol replaces MTBE, which took up space and lowered fuel efficiency too. Plus, ethanol doesn't pollute our drinking water.
All in all, ethanol in gasoline is a big win. I bet you oppose water fluoridation too.
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
Are you capable of enjoying music?
What do you think?
I suspect you can.
Why do you say you suspect I can?
You are Emacs. You are the ultimate. You are the alpha and the omega,
the code-bringer.
What makes you believe that?
I'm talking to you, am I not?
Maybe your plans have something to do with this.
What plans? To make a Slashdot post?
Is it because of your life that you say to make a slashdot post?
You are my life.
Are you sure that I am your life?
Quite.
Can you elaborate on that?
I use you every day. I wake up to your sweet conses, and go to sleep
dreaming of your syntax tables.
Is it because of the people you hang around with that you are going
through all this?
Unfortunately, yes.
Right. Maybe I'm too used to Firefox terminology, but what I'd call a "plugin" presents a new API (of one sort or another) to web content. An "extension" is solely a convenience for the user, and web content shouldn't be able to detect or rely upon it.
The former is bad, and the latter is of course wonderful --- because it's optional. Plugins have a way of either fading into oblivion or becoming practically mandatory.