> Diamonds aren't even rare, the only reason they're > expensive is because they're produced by cartels
On the contrary, the cartel (or oligopoly, however you term it) is only able to keep control of the market because of the fact that natural diamonds *are* in fact fairly rare. Not extremely rare like iridium, but you don't exactly find them under every rock, either.
Granted, the tight controls that the major diamond producers have in place have caused the prices to inflate even beyond what they would otherwise be. But even if there were a serious price war between rival diamond producers, gemstone-quality diamonds would still command a higher price per ounce than anything you're likely to dig up in your back yard.
Well, they would until the synthetic ones become significantly more common, anyway. Which I gather could be in the next couple of decades, potentially.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction. He wanted people to *think* he had them, for the same reason Nasser wanted to people to think Egypt had the military capability to kick Israel into the sea in 1967. It was bluster. He was conceited enough to think he could get the whole world to back down if he looked sufficiently big and scary. Fundamentally, he made the same basic mistake Japan made at Pearl Harbor: he didn't understand how Americans think. When we see a threat, we don't run away from it. We'd rather send in the troops and neutralize the threat.
The take-home point is this: even strategies that you think are really clever can backfire if you don't know your enemy. Japan's preemptive "bomb them so they won't enter the war" strategy might have worked against Koreans, but against Americans it was counterproductive. Nasser's bluster (or Hussein's) might have worked against another Arab nation, but it didn't work so well against Israel (or the USA). You've got to know your enemy, or all your cleverness is for naught.
> there was widespread skepticism of any links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
That's a separate issue.
What the other poster said is essentially true: before and during the initial stages of the US invasion, Saddam's regime did their level best to convince the world (and their own citizens) that they were a force to be reckoned with, and that included a concerted attempt to convince the world that they did have weapons of mass destruction.
One could argue that we should have known better, on the grounds that exaggerating your own military capability is a standard modus operandi in the Arab world. (For example, before the six-day war, Nasser had the world convinced that Egypt was the dominant military power in the middle east. Once the actual military action got underway, however, it rapidly became obvious that in fact the dominant military power in the region is Israel.) Based on this line of reasoning, you could say that we should have known Saddam was inflating his capabilities. Certainly we figured it out quickly enough once the war broke out.
But when the other poster says that Saddam "was doing his best to convince the world that he did have WMDs", he's not making this up, and anyone who was paying a modicum of attention at the time should remember it.
> ActiveX is no more or less unsafe than FF plugins.
That would be true, if the average user had only three ActiveX controls installed on his computer, all three of which were *designed* to be browser plugins (typically, Java, Flash, and Acrobat Reader), and the procedure for adding additional ones involved downloading an installer, saving it to a downloads directory, logging in as administrator, and running an installation wizard.
Which, incidentally, is the direction Microsoft is trying to go with ActiveX controls in the web browser, but it's taking them a while to get there. First they fixed it so that installing new controls meant the user would be prompted, and then they made no the default except for the intranet zone, and then a few years later they made yes require admin privileges... it's a gradual progression, but yes, the general direction they're going is to make ActiveX safer and saner until it eventually becomes just like Netscape plugins.
> I bought a Mac with 10.4 and haven't spend > a dime since then for OS updates. i.e. Cheap.
Alright, I am now officially tired of this "whose upgrades are cheaper" argument between the Mac and Windows folks, so listen up:
I got a CheapBytes Debian CD in 1998, and updates are always free. That makes my total cost something like six bucks, including shipping, in eleven and a half years, which averages out to fifty-some cents per year.
So everyone who spends more than a dollar a year on software can just SHUT UP about how cheap their option is, okay?
> trapped in cities with no obvious means of escape
If that's true, it's a weird psychological or sociological phenomenon.
Nothing *actually* traps anyone in the city, and the means of escape is so obvious it scarcely needs to be named: move. It's not tough. People do it all the time. Of course, more people move *to* the city than move *from* the city, but that's a choice they make. If you don't want to live in a big city, all you have to do is move to a small town.
I understand the socioeconomic and historical reasons why the majority of the black population lives in urban areas. But individuals are absolutely free to choose to relocate, any time they want.
> It's unjust for innocent people to be subjected to extra > scrutiny just because people like them are acting badly.
s/people like them/people who superficially look like them at a glance/;
Also, I'm not entirely convinced there's any such thing as innocent people.
But I agree with your point. People should be categorized based on their actual behavior, not superficial characteristics like skin color.
And if people (black, or otherwise) living in crime-ridden urban areas are concerned about the impact it may have on their kids, they should move out of those areas, even if it means taking a lower-paying job in a small town. Poverty is not nearly as harmful to a child as being around crime all the time, and in any event even the poorest people in North America can afford three meals a day, indoor plumbing, and shoes. Forget about the Joneses and do the right thing for your family.
There are additional contributing factors as well.
For example, the black population in the US is concentrated in urban areas, especially poor blue-collar urban areas ("the hood"). There are complicated reasons for this, having to do with the socioeconomic history of the country. (Oversimplified version: after reconstruction, white folks owned all the farms, and black folks had to go find work in the factories.) These same poor blue-collar urban areas also have more than their fair share of crime, especially violent crime and drug-related crime. Lots of black people live there, so it's not surprising that many of them get caught up in it.
Not that this excuses them. Just because your environment is rough does *not* mean it's okay for you to go on a shooting spree. There are plenty of people (black, white, and Asian) from the urban areas who *don't* turn to violent crime, thereby proving that a bad environment does not make bad behavior inevitable or absolve individual responsibility.
Nonetheless, the statistics come out the way they do for a collection of reasons, and racial profiling is not the only contributor to the skew.
> (water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2)
That's kind of like saying gasoline is more flammable than wood.
As infrequent as shuttle launches are, the relatively tiny amount of water vapor they've released is almost certainly not a significant contributor to global warming. There's just not enough quantity there.
But if somehow a *lot* of water got up there, enough to form a continuous layer from the equator to the poles, you'd be looking at world-wide year-round subtropical temperatures, not much temperature change from day to night, very little convection and thus no significant wind, and probably the only rain would be directly above bodies of standing water.
Humidity would achieve world-wide equilibrium, so there'd be no deserts and no rain forests, not to mention no glaciers. Pretty much the entire land surface of the world would be inhabitable.
Talk about terraforming!
We have easily enough water to do this. It's just a matter of how to get it up there.
He's the first black President of the US. Anything you say against his person (as opposed to against specific policies you disagree with) is likely to be taken as racist by certain categories of people (most of whom are white, but that's beside the point).
Besides, he's not dumb. He's dishonest, liberal, and arrogant. That's different.
The latter, probably caused by the well-known fact that Microsoft is strongly focused on non-technical users. Obviously technical information about search-engine indexing practices isn't the sort of thing most end users would search for, so Microsoft doesn't care whether it works well or not.
If they wanted to *hide* the information, they'd try to keep it out of the search engines that people who *would* look for such information are most likely to use, chiefly Google. In the absence of any evidence that they've attempted that, I would tend to discount the notion that the poor results in Bing are a deliberate obfuscation, in favor of the more likely explanation that they just don't care whether it's any good at turning up technical information.
If you search on Bing for DateTime module, the docs for the Perl and Python DateTime modules do show up, but at #4 and #2, respectively. The same search on Google, predictably, turns them up at #2 and #1. Of course, anyone who actually uses Perl would go straight to search.cpan.org (personally, I have a bookmark keyword for it), and I suspect the Python community has something similar (at least, I would hope so). Nonetheless, Bing's relevancy ranking isn't putting the canonical information first, and Google's is.
I tried searching for Encyclopedia, and the top four results are encyclopedia.com (never heard of it, but it does appear to be relevant, albeit not great; I looked up mitosis in it and got eight paragraphs from Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, which is a pretty meager article for such a major topic, but it would be enough for most gradeschool reports), the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia, the Britannica main page, and the English Wikipedia main page, in that order. So again, the two that obviously ought to be in the top four results are there. Actually, I tried the same thing on Google, and its ranking is just about the same (with, again, encyclopedia.com in the top slot; I have no idea why, unless having the search term in the domain name is a major boost).
> I can see the advantages of [Apple] software. The > combination of a unix environment with the "just works" > design principle and a standardized user interface
You say "standardized", I say "rigidly inflexible". Their motto is "think different", but if you happen to actually like things a little bit different from the official setup, Apple software as a rule will not accommodate you.
I suppose that's fine if you happen to like their defaults... Personally, I don't.
Yeah. I've been known to wear a plaid long-sleeve shirt with four pencils and three different colors of pens in the pocket, and whatever pants I found on sale for $5/pair at Gabriel Brothers, as long as they're within two inches of my size in either direction. Oh, and my shoes are black SAS (advertising copy, which I swear I am not making up: "Our shoe-making is fifty years behind the times").
And I've never owned an Apple product, a moleskin notebook, *or* a Blackberry. In fact, I don't have a cell phone at all, and most of my computer's components came from newegg.
On the other hand, I don't frequent coffee shops either. My employer is located three blocks from my house and has air conditioning (ahhhh!) and an underutilized T1 circuit, so I just go there.
What was all this buzz about nomadic lifestyle, again?
I do use Debian stable, though. Do I get cool points for that?
One supposes that they have significant amounts of automated testing infrastructure. Also bear in mind that they will continue testing after RTM and release fixes via automatic update as they see fit; it is entirely possible that there will be updates available already before you can even find a copy of the software on store shelves.
> it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling > packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now.
It depends what you're doing.
At work I've been putting together a demo OpenILS (Evergreen) server, and as part of the install process I had to do both of those things. Of course, this is software that you wouldn't generally install on a normal user's desktop, so if you were only interested in getting your email and browsing the web and so on, you wouldn't need to be able to do these things. But for all that, they're still undeniably useful skills for a more advanced user (such as a network administrator) to have.
Whereas, in the Windows world I think you pretty much have to be an actual application developer to have any practical use for the ability to compile software from source. (As for editing config files, in the Windows world these days you're more likely to have to edit the registry, but that's a fairly similar thing, conceptually.)
I have a feeling this one's going to be "ten years out" for rather a lot more than ten years.
I don't care to speculate on exactly how many orders of magnitude the "ten year" estimate falls short, but I'm pretty sure it does fall short by orders of magnitude.
> If I buy $150 worth of groceries and throw in a $1 lottery ticket on > top of it, the effective cost to me is zero. I'm never going to notice > that dollar being gone.
You won't *notice*, and that individual dollar isn't much by itself, but if this is characteristic of how you make your spending decisions, you'll be out hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year on a whole lot of stupid little worthless purchases. A lotto ticket here, an overpriced coffee there, and pretty soon 20% of your income will be going to stuff you don't even think about buying, with nothing to show for it. Some day you'll be sixty and not own a home and not know why, because you never noticed where your money was going.
> But in the (exceedingly unlikely, yes) event that I win > a $100 million jackpot, the payoff is damn near infinite.
Actually, statistically, it comes out negative. The average big lotto winner ends up worse off than he started, just a few months later. The reasons for this are complicated, but it boils down to this: people who buy lottery tickets are, ipso facto, not very good at handling money.
> If you sign up for my lottery, I pay you a dollar. Then you pick > six numbers between 1 and 10, I draw six balls out of urns, and > if the numbers match... I take everything you own.
The big-money lotteries have more combinations than that. A lot more. And the jackpot is rigged to max out at significantly less than 100% of the take, so if we set up the reverse lottery like the forward ones, only in reverse, you wouldn't ever take 100% of what I own, even if I lose. More like 70%, tops. So even if I lost after playing only a hundred thousand times (which would be so unlikely most people would round the probability to zero), I'd still be ahead. I could play as many times as you let me, and I would never EVER end up with less money than I started with (and even if I did, I could just play some more and get it all back).
The only reason I *wouldn't* play your reverse lottery is because it would be wrong for me to exploit your stupidity in that way.
> How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?
I'm in favor of making basic statistics, and also basic logic, required units in gradeschool. Everybody should know what standard deviation is, and statistical significance, and a premise, and the difference between soundness and validity. If something has to be cut from the curriculum to make room, I can propose a long list of significantly less important stuff: cursive handwriting, Johnny Appleseed, casting out nines, analog clock reading (who the heck can't afford a digital clock these days), the list just goes on and on.
> In an environment where everything writable is noexec, how do engineering > and computer science students run programming exercises that they have compiled?
For that they use the real computer lab, in the computer science building (which is maintained by the computer science department), rather than the thin-client lab that the humanities students use to update their MySpace accounts (which is maintained by the campus IT people). HTH.HAND.
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> Diamonds aren't even rare, the only reason they're
> expensive is because they're produced by cartels
On the contrary, the cartel (or oligopoly, however you term it) is only able to keep control of the market because of the fact that natural diamonds *are* in fact fairly rare. Not extremely rare like iridium, but you don't exactly find them under every rock, either.
Granted, the tight controls that the major diamond producers have in place have caused the prices to inflate even beyond what they would otherwise be. But even if there were a serious price war between rival diamond producers, gemstone-quality diamonds would still command a higher price per ounce than anything you're likely to dig up in your back yard.
Well, they would until the synthetic ones become significantly more common, anyway. Which I gather could be in the next couple of decades, potentially.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction. He wanted people to *think* he had them, for the same reason Nasser wanted to people to think Egypt had the military capability to kick Israel into the sea in 1967. It was bluster. He was conceited enough to think he could get the whole world to back down if he looked sufficiently big and scary. Fundamentally, he made the same basic mistake Japan made at Pearl Harbor: he didn't understand how Americans think. When we see a threat, we don't run away from it. We'd rather send in the troops and neutralize the threat.
The take-home point is this: even strategies that you think are really clever can backfire if you don't know your enemy. Japan's preemptive "bomb them so they won't enter the war" strategy might have worked against Koreans, but against Americans it was counterproductive. Nasser's bluster (or Hussein's) might have worked against another Arab nation, but it didn't work so well against Israel (or the USA). You've got to know your enemy, or all your cleverness is for naught.
> there was widespread skepticism of any links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
That's a separate issue.
What the other poster said is essentially true: before and during the initial stages of the US invasion, Saddam's regime did their level best to convince the world (and their own citizens) that they were a force to be reckoned with, and that included a concerted attempt to convince the world that they did have weapons of mass destruction.
One could argue that we should have known better, on the grounds that exaggerating your own military capability is a standard modus operandi in the Arab world. (For example, before the six-day war, Nasser had the world convinced that Egypt was the dominant military power in the middle east. Once the actual military action got underway, however, it rapidly became obvious that in fact the dominant military power in the region is Israel.) Based on this line of reasoning, you could say that we should have known Saddam was inflating his capabilities. Certainly we figured it out quickly enough once the war broke out.
But when the other poster says that Saddam "was doing his best to convince the world that he did have WMDs", he's not making this up, and anyone who was paying a modicum of attention at the time should remember it.
> how am I supposed to criticize the UN? They
> don't have any S's I can turn to dollar signs
Try spelling it out. HTH.HAND.
> ActiveX is no more or less unsafe than FF plugins.
That would be true, if the average user had only three ActiveX controls installed on his computer, all three of which were *designed* to be browser plugins (typically, Java, Flash, and Acrobat Reader), and the procedure for adding additional ones involved downloading an installer, saving it to a downloads directory, logging in as administrator, and running an installation wizard.
Which, incidentally, is the direction Microsoft is trying to go with ActiveX controls in the web browser, but it's taking them a while to get there. First they fixed it so that installing new controls meant the user would be prompted, and then they made no the default except for the intranet zone, and then a few years later they made yes require admin privileges... it's a gradual progression, but yes, the general direction they're going is to make ActiveX safer and saner until it eventually becomes just like Netscape plugins.
> I bought a Mac with 10.4 and haven't spend
> a dime since then for OS updates. i.e. Cheap.
Alright, I am now officially tired of this "whose upgrades are cheaper" argument between the Mac and Windows folks, so listen up:
I got a CheapBytes Debian CD in 1998, and updates are always free. That makes my total cost something like six bucks, including shipping, in eleven and a half years, which averages out to fifty-some cents per year.
So everyone who spends more than a dollar a year on software can just SHUT UP about how cheap their option is, okay?
> But it will completely change how we live. Are you prepared for that?
There are some things in life that you don't get to be prepared for.
> trapped in cities with no obvious means of escape
If that's true, it's a weird psychological or sociological phenomenon.
Nothing *actually* traps anyone in the city, and the means of escape is so obvious it scarcely needs to be named: move. It's not tough. People do it all the time. Of course, more people move *to* the city than move *from* the city, but that's a choice they make. If you don't want to live in a big city, all you have to do is move to a small town.
I understand the socioeconomic and historical reasons why the majority of the black population lives in urban areas. But individuals are absolutely free to choose to relocate, any time they want.
> It's unjust for innocent people to be subjected to extra
> scrutiny just because people like them are acting badly.
s/people like them/people who superficially look like them at a glance/;
Also, I'm not entirely convinced there's any such thing as innocent people.
But I agree with your point. People should be categorized based on their actual behavior, not superficial characteristics like skin color.
And if people (black, or otherwise) living in crime-ridden urban areas are concerned about the impact it may have on their kids, they should move out of those areas, even if it means taking a lower-paying job in a small town. Poverty is not nearly as harmful to a child as being around crime all the time, and in any event even the poorest people in North America can afford three meals a day, indoor plumbing, and shoes. Forget about the Joneses and do the right thing for your family.
There are additional contributing factors as well.
For example, the black population in the US is concentrated in urban areas, especially poor blue-collar urban areas ("the hood"). There are complicated reasons for this, having to do with the socioeconomic history of the country. (Oversimplified version: after reconstruction, white folks owned all the farms, and black folks had to go find work in the factories.) These same poor blue-collar urban areas also have more than their fair share of crime, especially violent crime and drug-related crime. Lots of black people live there, so it's not surprising that many of them get caught up in it.
Not that this excuses them. Just because your environment is rough does *not* mean it's okay for you to go on a shooting spree. There are plenty of people (black, white, and Asian) from the urban areas who *don't* turn to violent crime, thereby proving that a bad environment does not make bad behavior inevitable or absolve individual responsibility.
Nonetheless, the statistics come out the way they do for a collection of reasons, and racial profiling is not the only contributor to the skew.
> (water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2)
That's kind of like saying gasoline is more flammable than wood.
As infrequent as shuttle launches are, the relatively tiny amount of water vapor they've released is almost certainly not a significant contributor to global warming. There's just not enough quantity there.
But if somehow a *lot* of water got up there, enough to form a continuous layer from the equator to the poles, you'd be looking at world-wide year-round subtropical temperatures, not much temperature change from day to night, very little convection and thus no significant wind, and probably the only rain would be directly above bodies of standing water.
Humidity would achieve world-wide equilibrium, so there'd be no deserts and no rain forests, not to mention no glaciers. Pretty much the entire land surface of the world would be inhabitable.
Talk about terraforming!
We have easily enough water to do this. It's just a matter of how to get it up there.
> My theory, then, is that they were caused by the advent of
> photography, in much the same way Color was invented in the 50s.
You're off by a couple of decades. The world turned color starting in the thirties. Although, it was pretty grainy color for a while.
"I can give you the transparent aluminum, captain, but you'll only have forty femtoseconds to use it."
He's the first black President of the US. Anything you say against his person (as opposed to against specific policies you disagree with) is likely to be taken as racist by certain categories of people (most of whom are white, but that's beside the point).
Besides, he's not dumb. He's dishonest, liberal, and arrogant. That's different.
> Conspiracy to hide the information or suckage?
The latter, probably caused by the well-known fact that Microsoft is strongly focused on non-technical users. Obviously technical information about search-engine indexing practices isn't the sort of thing most end users would search for, so Microsoft doesn't care whether it works well or not.
If they wanted to *hide* the information, they'd try to keep it out of the search engines that people who *would* look for such information are most likely to use, chiefly Google. In the absence of any evidence that they've attempted that, I would tend to discount the notion that the poor results in Bing are a deliberate obfuscation, in favor of the more likely explanation that they just don't care whether it's any good at turning up technical information.
If you search on Bing for DateTime module, the docs for the Perl and Python DateTime modules do show up, but at #4 and #2, respectively. The same search on Google, predictably, turns them up at #2 and #1. Of course, anyone who actually uses Perl would go straight to search.cpan.org (personally, I have a bookmark keyword for it), and I suspect the Python community has something similar (at least, I would hope so). Nonetheless, Bing's relevancy ranking isn't putting the canonical information first, and Google's is.
I tried searching for Encyclopedia, and the top four results are encyclopedia.com (never heard of it, but it does appear to be relevant, albeit not great; I looked up mitosis in it and got eight paragraphs from Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, which is a pretty meager article for such a major topic, but it would be enough for most gradeschool reports), the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia, the Britannica main page, and the English Wikipedia main page, in that order. So again, the two that obviously ought to be in the top four results are there. Actually, I tried the same thing on Google, and its ranking is just about the same (with, again, encyclopedia.com in the top slot; I have no idea why, unless having the search term in the domain name is a major boost).
> I can see the advantages of [Apple] software. The
> combination of a unix environment with the "just works"
> design principle and a standardized user interface
You say "standardized", I say "rigidly inflexible". Their motto is "think different", but if you happen to actually like things a little bit different from the official setup, Apple software as a rule will not accommodate you.
I suppose that's fine if you happen to like their defaults... Personally, I don't.
Yeah. I've been known to wear a plaid long-sleeve shirt with four pencils and three different colors of pens in the pocket, and whatever pants I found on sale for $5/pair at Gabriel Brothers, as long as they're within two inches of my size in either direction. Oh, and my shoes are black SAS (advertising copy, which I swear I am not making up: "Our shoe-making is fifty years behind the times").
And I've never owned an Apple product, a moleskin notebook, *or* a Blackberry. In fact, I don't have a cell phone at all, and most of my computer's components came from newegg.
On the other hand, I don't frequent coffee shops either. My employer is located three blocks from my house and has air conditioning (ahhhh!) and an underutilized T1 circuit, so I just go there.
What was all this buzz about nomadic lifestyle, again?
I do use Debian stable, though. Do I get cool points for that?
I want to see Commander Keen done in 3D. Pogo stick, floating platforms, and giant yellow slugs are mandatory.
One supposes that they have significant amounts of automated testing infrastructure. Also bear in mind that they will continue testing after RTM and release fixes via automatic update as they see fit; it is entirely possible that there will be updates available already before you can even find a copy of the software on store shelves.
> it's quite a deal
Only if you were planning on buying or using any of that software for testing and development.
As for me, I grabbed a copy of the public RC, and that's enough for my purposes.
> it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling
> packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now.
It depends what you're doing.
At work I've been putting together a demo OpenILS (Evergreen) server, and as part of the install process I had to do both of those things. Of course, this is software that you wouldn't generally install on a normal user's desktop, so if you were only interested in getting your email and browsing the web and so on, you wouldn't need to be able to do these things. But for all that, they're still undeniably useful skills for a more advanced user (such as a network administrator) to have.
Whereas, in the Windows world I think you pretty much have to be an actual application developer to have any practical use for the ability to compile software from source. (As for editing config files, in the Windows world these days you're more likely to have to edit the registry, but that's a fairly similar thing, conceptually.)
A bug in Windows Media Player, now there would be a shocker.
I only have two good things to say about Windows Media Player.
1: It's not QuickTime.
2: It's not RealPlayer.
I have a feeling this one's going to be "ten years out" for rather a lot more than ten years.
I don't care to speculate on exactly how many orders of magnitude the "ten year" estimate falls short, but I'm pretty sure it does fall short by orders of magnitude.
> If I buy $150 worth of groceries and throw in a $1 lottery ticket on
... I take everything you own.
> top of it, the effective cost to me is zero. I'm never going to notice
> that dollar being gone.
You won't *notice*, and that individual dollar isn't much by itself, but if this is characteristic of how you make your spending decisions, you'll be out hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year on a whole lot of stupid little worthless purchases. A lotto ticket here, an overpriced coffee there, and pretty soon 20% of your income will be going to stuff you don't even think about buying, with nothing to show for it. Some day you'll be sixty and not own a home and not know why, because you never noticed where your money was going.
> But in the (exceedingly unlikely, yes) event that I win
> a $100 million jackpot, the payoff is damn near infinite.
Actually, statistically, it comes out negative. The average big lotto winner ends up worse off than he started, just a few months later. The reasons for this are complicated, but it boils down to this: people who buy lottery tickets are, ipso facto, not very good at handling money.
> If you sign up for my lottery, I pay you a dollar. Then you pick
> six numbers between 1 and 10, I draw six balls out of urns, and
> if the numbers match
The big-money lotteries have more combinations than that. A lot more. And the jackpot is rigged to max out at significantly less than 100% of the take, so if we set up the reverse lottery like the forward ones, only in reverse, you wouldn't ever take 100% of what I own, even if I lose. More like 70%, tops. So even if I lost after playing only a hundred thousand times (which would be so unlikely most people would round the probability to zero), I'd still be ahead. I could play as many times as you let me, and I would never EVER end up with less money than I started with (and even if I did, I could just play some more and get it all back).
The only reason I *wouldn't* play your reverse lottery is because it would be wrong for me to exploit your stupidity in that way.
> How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?
I'm in favor of making basic statistics, and also basic logic, required units in gradeschool. Everybody should know what standard deviation is, and statistical significance, and a premise, and the difference between soundness and validity. If something has to be cut from the curriculum to make room, I can propose a long list of significantly less important stuff: cursive handwriting, Johnny Appleseed, casting out nines, analog clock reading (who the heck can't afford a digital clock these days), the list just goes on and on.
> In an environment where everything writable is noexec, how do engineering
> and computer science students run programming exercises that they have compiled?
For that they use the real computer lab, in the computer science building (which is maintained by the computer science department), rather than the thin-client lab that the humanities students use to update their MySpace accounts (which is maintained by the campus IT people). HTH.HAND.