Tell that to SCO. For the past six years their business has been based on ruining IT for the rest of us. For a second opinion ask a patent troll. Even though it might be a bad idea it is certainly a good business for some of them.
You were probably jesting. But whether you were or not, the radius of a nucleus is over four orders of magnitude smaller than the radius of an atom. Unfortunately, the real problem is that the only things we can construct on that scale are spheres (nuclei) and the only tools we have are also spheres (other nuclei) and the only technique we have is banging them together and watching what comes out (a bunch of short lived stuff (probably spheroidal) and... you guessed it, spheres). We can already make gold using these crude tools but it is probably at least a billion more times expensive than simply mining existing gold from the ground.
I think it is extremely unlikely we will ever be able to manipulate nuclei like this robot can manipulate atoms. On the other hand, it is much more cool/useful to be able to manipulate atoms and molecules. For example the novel
The Diamond Age postulates a future where almost all things humans use are manufactured with nanotechnology on the atomic (not nuclear) scale.
The Sierra Club wants regulators to move the site closer to Interstate 15, the busy freeway connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas, to avoid what it says will be a virtual death sentence for the tortoises. Estimates of the population have varied, but government scientists say at least 25 would need to be captured and moved.
I realize I'm not supposed to follow the links but ISTM the article directly contradicts TopSpin's claim. Moving the solar farm closer to Interstate 15 sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Elsewhere in the article it was claimed that the solar plant would generate billions of dollars and the cost of moving the tortoises could be $25 million. I'll tell you what: I'll move those 25 tortoises for half price -- a mere $500k per tortoise.
But seriously, suggesting an alternate location to put the plant is nothing like "No development of any kind, anywhere, under any circumstances, ever." What's wrong with placing the solar farm where they will do the least amount of environmental harm? Are you worried that placing it near route 15 is going to break up the monotony of the drive?
First, EsbenMoseHansen links to the
Wikipedia article on Neodymium saying the numbers in the article show that we don't have to worry about a scarcity of Neodymium. I work through the numbers from the article and explain that if we want to seriously ramp up production of goods that use Neodymium then the numbers in the article indicate that we will run out of it soon.
Then you come along and claim that the numbers in the article are wrong so we still don't have to worry. The article said:
reserves of neodymium are estimated at about 8 million tonnes
and you claim that "estimated reserves" actually means "known reserves in current mines" and you estimate that the reserves are much much greater than what the Wikipedia article says but you give no evidence that this is so.
When it comes down to believing the Wikipedia versus believing some guy on Slashdot who provides no evidence, I will believe the Wikipedia. But it is kind of funny that first we are told not to worry because of the numbers in the article. Then when I show that the numbers actually give us cause to worry, you tell us not to worry because the numbers in the article are wrong.
If you have any evidence that the estimate of reserves from the Wikipedia is wrong, please post a link to it. Citing the overall abundance doesn't count unless you also give a reasonable estimate of what percentage of the total amount can actually be mined. For example
this article which is the first hit for
Google(reserves of neodymium)
explains the problem with your reasoning:
it is not true that, for example, you can simply sift through a cubic yard of dirt from anywhere and extract lead and twice as much neodymium as lead. Mining is limited to places where natural processes such as the movement of molten material from the earth’s mantle to the surface - such as volcanic action - has brought with it dissolved minerals, concentrated by the fact that they are soluble in the molten magma whereas those elements that are less soluble stay behind or drop out far below the surface where they are inaccessible.
That article also says that even if China doubles its neodymium production by 2014, it will just match their domestic demand so there will be a global shortage. All REE experts I can find on the Web (including
Jack Lifton who claims to be the
leading authority on REEs)
are greatly concerned about a worldwide shortage but I guess I should just ignore their warnings on the say-so of a couple of guys from Slashdot.
I'm open to the idea that it is a giant scam or all the experts I've found are wrong but unless you can provide some solid evidence, I will trust the experts.
Oh come on. The section of the wikipedia article you refer to says that we use 7K tonnes per year and there are 8M tonnes left in the ground. At current consumption rates this means we have a 1,000 year supply. But as
this Routers article linked to from the bottom of the wikipedia page explains, the production of green product such as hybrid cars and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. If production Neodymium products is increased by a factor of 10 then we only have a 100 year supply. An increase by a factor of 20 brings it down to a 50 year supply.
If we converted all existing cars and light trucks to hybrid using the technology in the Prius, it would require 1M tonnes of Neodymium, roughly 12% of what is left in the ground.
We have enough Neodymium in the ground so each person on earth can have 1kg, or one Prius' worth. Are you going to be up for your grandchildren offing their grandparents to get use of their Neodymium?
I find the warnings about running out of Neodymium to be scary, not silly.
Just look at how well the forced conversion to digital TV worked out. They said the reason for the forced conversion was to help bring better OTA TV coverage to rural areas. In my very rural area we had 5 network TV stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and PBS before the forced conversion. Now we have three, only one of which actually switched to digital. The crippled $20 off boxes don't pass through analog signals without degradation so I have to replug the antenna in order to switch channels.
Ah yes, another stellar example of the best government money can buy. Did it not suffice that the telecoms have kept the US in the technological telecommunications toilet compared to the rest of the developed world? Now they've destroyed OTA TV and are planing to destroy POTS and DSL. Yet whenever we try to fight the corporate destruction of our country, our efforts get thwarted by the simple ploy of crying "socialism!".
If we're playing "what if" then what if the person who sent the information secretly had a grudge against the recipient?
This ruling was a travesty because it thwarts Darwin by shielding the numbskulls at the bank from taking responsibility for their bone-headed actions.
The Rocky Mountain Bank should go down in flames for their compounded reckless policies and actions that caused this fiasco. Otherwise all banks will believe they can get away with having zero respect for their customers' data. You've got to catch them in the act or they'll never learn.
It's unclear exactly how the servers have become infected. Sinegubko speculates they belong to careless administrators who allowed their root passwords to be sniffed.
... With about 100 nodes, the network is relatively small, making it unclear exactly what the attackers' intentions are.
If Sinegubko is right and the attack vector was sniffed passwords, then it is likely that those passwords got sniffed by an existing Windows Botnet.
I don't dispute that more than 12,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since 2006, but I think you have reversed cause and effect.
There is no question that the ultimate cause of the drug wars in Mexico is the so-called "War on Drugs" in the United States (pushing up the price thus making it profitable for organized crime). But the most recent cause of the mess in Mexico was the crackdown on drug smuggling in Florida. This made the gangs in Florida transfer their operations to the east coast of Mexico which then caused a ripple effect when the gangs that were already there got displaced and moved westward, etc.
Calderon was responding to the massive violence that was caused by the Florida gangs moving to Mexico, he was not the direct cause of the violence. But I agree with the general point that wars on drugs almost always make the problem worse, not better.
They want their SQL injection attack back. I would imagine that the companies involved had to put forth a huge recruitment effort in order to find people competent enough to create a working site and yet clueless enough to allow SQL injection.
Actually. Technically. The article says the same amount of returns for each... and I bet they sell a lot more windows machines, still...
From TFA:
... we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux.
So technically the article says return rate. Earlier the (very short) FA talked about the number of returns being the same but I believe that the explicit mention of rate clears up any possible ambiguity. A marketing manager might easily use the word number when he meant numbers or rate but his use of return rate seems completely unambiguous.
The Wikipedia says the term "blue sky" dates back to at least 1911 in their article on
Blue Sky Law:
The name that is given to the law indicates the evil at which it is aimed, that is, to use the language of a cited case, "speculative schemes which have no more basis than so many feet of 'blue sky'";
I think this is the common usage, referring to speculative schemes not necessarily securities related. I also think it makes much more sense that this meaning is what inspired the movie title.
Don't assume. If I had meant "fossil fuels" I would have said "fossil fuels". We have all sorts of limited resources that we need to deal with because we live on a finite planet. In fact I believe the current debate over cap and trade is about carbon emissions so the limited resource that is being dealt with is clean air.
The problem with relying on the free market instead of acting intelligently is that you are staking our civilization on a bet that there will be a cosmic coincidence such that fossil fuel resources will dry up slowly enough to give us time to develop alternative power sources before the fossil fuels are effectively all gone. If, for example, all the world's fossil fuels were sitting in a tank ready to be piped out then we would be totally screwed if we relied on the free market to give us enough lead time to develop other energy sources.
Currently most of our resource allocation is decided by corporate officers who are charged with making money for their shareholders in the short term, not decades ahead. If we run up against a problem that takes planning on a longer time scale then we are totally screwed if we "do nothing" and let the free market do its thing.
As I said before, even though there are many problems that the free market is very good at dealing with there are also some problems that the free market makes worse. If you insist on relying on the free market to solve every problem then you are no better than a lemming running to the cliff.
Not dealing with the limited resources problem == suicide. If you don't want to intelligently deal with survival issues, fine. I have no problem with you taking your own life.
But if you want to continue to deplete our limited resources at an insane rate don't be surprised
if you run into severe conflicts with those of us who would prefer to have our species continue.
Cap and Trade is competition through breaking-your-competitors'-kneecaps.
If you don't like cap and trade, then what would you suggest should replace it?
The problem is that even though unregulated free markets are good in many situations, there are some situations where they make things worse, not better. Situations such as
the Tragedy of the Commons where individuals are sharing a limited resource.
Some argue (correctly, I believe) that the reason free markets fail in these situations is that the cost of depleting the shared resource is not correctly accounted for. IMO the obvious solution is to tax the use of the shared resource in order to give it a realistic cost. But I suspect you would find taxation even more onerous than cap and trade.
So how do you propose we deal with the problem of limited shared resources? We will be facing more and more of these situations as long as we are stuck on this planet and if we simply ignore the problem and give free markets free rein then we will be no better than a bunch of lemmings rushing towards the cliff to their doom.
Opps, sorry, for a moment I forget this was Slashdot.
The fine article quotes Stallman as saying:
This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The entire article (it is only five short paragraphs) makes it clear why what Stallman is saying is not antithetical to GNU in general.
The +5 Insightful moderation indicates that many moderators are also anxious to take a swipe at Stallman without even bothering to read the fine article.
In other words, you've bought the hype. But what those books and TV shows about Enigma don't tell you about [...]
I don't have a TV. I don't think I've read the books you are referring to. My information comes from first hand accounts such as the incredible History of Hut Eight by A. P. Mahon. In this same vein, I found this worked example of Banburismus extremely enlightening.
One thing that struck me when reading this fascinating history was how very very fragile the decryption was. If the Germans didn't use some pretty bone-headed protocols, it is extremely unlikely that the Naval Enigma would have been cracked.
I never claimed that breaking the Enigma was the sole anti-submarine effort in the Atlantic.
While the
Wikipedia says:
A major factor in the success of the British during the second half of 1941, and throughout the rest of the campaign, was the cracking of the Naval Enigma machine cipher.
So I don't see where I had to buy any hype in order to think that the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won by the Germans if they were just a little bit more careful with their encryption protocols.
I think the first hand accounts of how the codes were broken are unassailable, maybe you disagree.
If the Wikipedia is wrong, please update the article to downplay the importance of the code breaking so that I and others do not make the same mistake in the future. Thanks.
Yeah, but their U-Boats kicked butt. If the Germans had been a little bit more careful in what encoded messages they sent, their Naval Enigma probably wouldn't have been broken and Germany would have won the battle of the Atlantic. Britain would have fallen and there would have been no D-Day.
The very first reference to radar "stealth technology" that I'm aware of was in Arnold Sommerfeld's Lectures on Theoretical Physics, IIRC in the volume on Electrodynamics, which was published in Germany in 1948. Sommerfeld briefly explained how layering of certain materials could be used to reduce radar cross sections. He also discussed the technical challenges and trade-offs (weight versus efficacy).
I first became aware of this when I was using the English translation as part of my physics studies in the 1970's so I was somewhat surprised when many years later "stealth technology" was considered something new and novel. I am even more surprised that it is not now common knowledge that Germany was working on stealth technology during WW-II since that technology was described in a German textbook published at the end of WW-II.
When claiming some quantifiable likelihood that there was fraud, the prior on fraud is most definitely relevant. At the same time, the prior is most definitely impossible to know. These two things together make any posterior estimate completely meaningless. *THAT* was my point.
If your statement is true then Bayesian statistics is always completely meaningless without informative priors, yet most of Bayesian analysis is done without informative priors and works quite well thank you very much.
The obvious, but unstated, assumption in the article is that they are using an uninformative prior which gives equal weight to fraud and no fraud. You are free to quibble over their use of this prior. For example if you thought (before seeing their data) there was only one chance in 10,000 chance that there would be fraud then even given their data, you would think that fraud was still not likely. But quibbling over a prior is very different from claiming nothing meaningful can come out of their analysis.
In fact, I think the penultimate sentence from the article is spot on:
The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than.005.
But I would agree with you that some of the wording in the article seems very stilted. I think this has more to do with "dumbing down" the article for popular consumption and less to do with crimes against Bayesian statistics (or whatever it is you're claiming).
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to SCO. For the past six years their business has been based on ruining IT for the rest of us. For a second opinion ask a patent troll. Even though it might be a bad idea it is certainly a good business for some of them.
You were probably jesting. But whether you were or not, the radius of a nucleus is over four orders of magnitude smaller than the radius of an atom. Unfortunately, the real problem is that the only things we can construct on that scale are spheres (nuclei) and the only tools we have are also spheres (other nuclei) and the only technique we have is banging them together and watching what comes out (a bunch of short lived stuff (probably spheroidal) and ... you guessed it, spheres). We can already make gold using these crude tools but it is probably at least a billion more times expensive than simply mining existing gold from the ground.
I think it is extremely unlikely we will ever be able to manipulate nuclei like this robot can manipulate atoms. On the other hand, it is much more cool/useful to be able to manipulate atoms and molecules. For example the novel The Diamond Age postulates a future where almost all things humans use are manufactured with nanotechnology on the atomic (not nuclear) scale.
... that BSD is a closed source license.
Seriously, I suggest you have nothing to do with such idiots on the off chance that it is contagious.
No development of any kind, anywhere, under any circumstances, ever.
and provided this link to an article that says:
The Sierra Club wants regulators to move the site closer to Interstate 15, the busy freeway connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas, to avoid what it says will be a virtual death sentence for the tortoises. Estimates of the population have varied, but government scientists say at least 25 would need to be captured and moved.
I realize I'm not supposed to follow the links but ISTM the article directly contradicts TopSpin's claim. Moving the solar farm closer to Interstate 15 sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Elsewhere in the article it was claimed that the solar plant would generate billions of dollars and the cost of moving the tortoises could be $25 million. I'll tell you what: I'll move those 25 tortoises for half price -- a mere $500k per tortoise.
But seriously, suggesting an alternate location to put the plant is nothing like "No development of any kind, anywhere, under any circumstances, ever." What's wrong with placing the solar farm where they will do the least amount of environmental harm? Are you worried that placing it near route 15 is going to break up the monotony of the drive?
Those are the known reserves in current mines.
Wow.
First, EsbenMoseHansen links to the Wikipedia article on Neodymium saying the numbers in the article show that we don't have to worry about a scarcity of Neodymium. I work through the numbers from the article and explain that if we want to seriously ramp up production of goods that use Neodymium then the numbers in the article indicate that we will run out of it soon.
Then you come along and claim that the numbers in the article are wrong so we still don't have to worry. The article said:
reserves of neodymium are estimated at about 8 million tonnes
and you claim that "estimated reserves" actually means "known reserves in current mines" and you estimate that the reserves are much much greater than what the Wikipedia article says but you give no evidence that this is so.
When it comes down to believing the Wikipedia versus believing some guy on Slashdot who provides no evidence, I will believe the Wikipedia. But it is kind of funny that first we are told not to worry because of the numbers in the article. Then when I show that the numbers actually give us cause to worry, you tell us not to worry because the numbers in the article are wrong.
If you have any evidence that the estimate of reserves from the Wikipedia is wrong, please post a link to it. Citing the overall abundance doesn't count unless you also give a reasonable estimate of what percentage of the total amount can actually be mined. For example this article which is the first hit for Google(reserves of neodymium) explains the problem with your reasoning:
it is not true that, for example, you can simply sift through a cubic yard of dirt from anywhere and extract lead and twice as much neodymium as lead. Mining is limited to places where natural processes such as the movement of molten material from the earth’s mantle to the surface - such as volcanic action - has brought with it dissolved minerals, concentrated by the fact that they are soluble in the molten magma whereas those elements that are less soluble stay behind or drop out far below the surface where they are inaccessible.
That article also says that even if China doubles its neodymium production by 2014, it will just match their domestic demand so there will be a global shortage. All REE experts I can find on the Web (including Jack Lifton who claims to be the leading authority on REEs) are greatly concerned about a worldwide shortage but I guess I should just ignore their warnings on the say-so of a couple of guys from Slashdot.
I'm open to the idea that it is a giant scam or all the experts I've found are wrong but unless you can provide some solid evidence, I will trust the experts.
Oh come on. The section of the wikipedia article you refer to says that we use 7K tonnes per year and there are 8M tonnes left in the ground. At current consumption rates this means we have a 1,000 year supply. But as this Routers article linked to from the bottom of the wikipedia page explains, the production of green product such as hybrid cars and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. If production Neodymium products is increased by a factor of 10 then we only have a 100 year supply. An increase by a factor of 20 brings it down to a 50 year supply.
If we converted all existing cars and light trucks to hybrid using the technology in the Prius, it would require 1M tonnes of Neodymium, roughly 12% of what is left in the ground. We have enough Neodymium in the ground so each person on earth can have 1kg, or one Prius' worth. Are you going to be up for your grandchildren offing their grandparents to get use of their Neodymium? I find the warnings about running out of Neodymium to be scary, not silly.
Does it run on Emacs?
Just look at how well the forced conversion to digital TV worked out. They said the reason for the forced conversion was to help bring better OTA TV coverage to rural areas. In my very rural area we had 5 network TV stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and PBS before the forced conversion. Now we have three, only one of which actually switched to digital. The crippled $20 off boxes don't pass through analog signals without degradation so I have to replug the antenna in order to switch channels.
Ah yes, another stellar example of the best government money can buy. Did it not suffice that the telecoms have kept the US in the technological telecommunications toilet compared to the rest of the developed world? Now they've destroyed OTA TV and are planing to destroy POTS and DSL. Yet whenever we try to fight the corporate destruction of our country, our efforts get thwarted by the simple ploy of crying "socialism!".
What exactly is the non-obvious part of the patent in this?
Let me be the first to welcome you to the United States of America. You can pick up your common sense on the way out. Enjoy your stay.
If we're playing "what if" then what if the person who sent the information secretly had a grudge against the recipient?
This ruling was a travesty because it thwarts Darwin by shielding the numbskulls at the bank from taking responsibility for their bone-headed actions.
The Rocky Mountain Bank should go down in flames for their compounded reckless policies and actions that caused this fiasco. Otherwise all banks will believe they can get away with having zero respect for their customers' data. You've got to catch them in the act or they'll never learn.
It's unclear exactly how the servers have become infected. Sinegubko speculates they belong to careless administrators who allowed their root passwords to be sniffed.
If Sinegubko is right and the attack vector was sniffed passwords, then it is likely that those passwords got sniffed by an existing Windows Botnet.
What are you talking about? Britain doesn't even have a constitution.
No problemo. They can take ours. We're sure not using it.
I don't dispute that more than 12,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since 2006, but I think you have reversed cause and effect.
There is no question that the ultimate cause of the drug wars in Mexico is the so-called "War on Drugs" in the United States (pushing up the price thus making it profitable for organized crime). But the most recent cause of the mess in Mexico was the crackdown on drug smuggling in Florida. This made the gangs in Florida transfer their operations to the east coast of Mexico which then caused a ripple effect when the gangs that were already there got displaced and moved westward, etc.
Calderon was responding to the massive violence that was caused by the Florida gangs moving to Mexico, he was not the direct cause of the violence. But I agree with the general point that wars on drugs almost always make the problem worse, not better.
They want their SQL injection attack back. I would imagine that the companies involved had to put forth a huge recruitment effort in order to find people competent enough to create a working site and yet clueless enough to allow SQL injection.
From TFA:
So technically the article says return rate. Earlier the (very short) FA talked about the number of returns being the same but I believe that the explicit mention of rate clears up any possible ambiguity. A marketing manager might easily use the word number when he meant numbers or rate but his use of return rate seems completely unambiguous.
After all, if she does this, you can pretty much guarantee she'll sue her employer the moment she gets passed over for a promotion ...
Although SCO might hit chapter 7 any day now, it looks like she might fit in there perfectly. And if SCO goes casters-up, maybe the RIAA is hiring.
I think this is the common usage, referring to speculative schemes not necessarily securities related. I also think it makes much more sense that this meaning is what inspired the movie title.
Don't assume. If I had meant "fossil fuels" I would have said "fossil fuels". We have all sorts of limited resources that we need to deal with because we live on a finite planet. In fact I believe the current debate over cap and trade is about carbon emissions so the limited resource that is being dealt with is clean air.
But if you want to talk about letting the free market automagically deal with our limited fossil fuel resources, I suggest you take a look at Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by David MacKay. MacKay is a well respected physicist and mathematician. If you think he is a lightweight, take a look at his earlier book: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.
The problem with relying on the free market instead of acting intelligently is that you are staking our civilization on a bet that there will be a cosmic coincidence such that fossil fuel resources will dry up slowly enough to give us time to develop alternative power sources before the fossil fuels are effectively all gone. If, for example, all the world's fossil fuels were sitting in a tank ready to be piped out then we would be totally screwed if we relied on the free market to give us enough lead time to develop other energy sources.
Currently most of our resource allocation is decided by corporate officers who are charged with making money for their shareholders in the short term, not decades ahead. If we run up against a problem that takes planning on a longer time scale then we are totally screwed if we "do nothing" and let the free market do its thing.
As I said before, even though there are many problems that the free market is very good at dealing with there are also some problems that the free market makes worse. If you insist on relying on the free market to solve every problem then you are no better than a lemming running to the cliff.
Not dealing with the limited resources problem == suicide. If you don't want to intelligently deal with survival issues, fine. I have no problem with you taking your own life. But if you want to continue to deplete our limited resources at an insane rate don't be surprised if you run into severe conflicts with those of us who would prefer to have our species continue.
If you don't like cap and trade, then what would you suggest should replace it?
The problem is that even though unregulated free markets are good in many situations, there are some situations where they make things worse, not better. Situations such as the Tragedy of the Commons where individuals are sharing a limited resource. Some argue (correctly, I believe) that the reason free markets fail in these situations is that the cost of depleting the shared resource is not correctly accounted for. IMO the obvious solution is to tax the use of the shared resource in order to give it a realistic cost. But I suspect you would find taxation even more onerous than cap and trade.
So how do you propose we deal with the problem of limited shared resources? We will be facing more and more of these situations as long as we are stuck on this planet and if we simply ignore the problem and give free markets free rein then we will be no better than a bunch of lemmings rushing towards the cliff to their doom.
The fine article quotes Stallman as saying:
The entire article (it is only five short paragraphs) makes it clear why what Stallman is saying is not antithetical to GNU in general.
The +5 Insightful moderation indicates that many moderators are also anxious to take a swipe at Stallman without even bothering to read the fine article.
I don't have a TV. I don't think I've read the books you are referring to. My information comes from first hand accounts such as the incredible History of Hut Eight by A. P. Mahon. In this same vein, I found this worked example of Banburismus extremely enlightening. One thing that struck me when reading this fascinating history was how very very fragile the decryption was. If the Germans didn't use some pretty bone-headed protocols, it is extremely unlikely that the Naval Enigma would have been cracked.
I never claimed that breaking the Enigma was the sole anti-submarine effort in the Atlantic. While the Wikipedia says:
So I don't see where I had to buy any hype in order to think that the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won by the Germans if they were just a little bit more careful with their encryption protocols. I think the first hand accounts of how the codes were broken are unassailable, maybe you disagree. If the Wikipedia is wrong, please update the article to downplay the importance of the code breaking so that I and others do not make the same mistake in the future. Thanks.
Yeah, but their U-Boats kicked butt. If the Germans had been a little bit more careful in what encoded messages they sent, their Naval Enigma probably wouldn't have been broken and Germany would have won the battle of the Atlantic. Britain would have fallen and there would have been no D-Day.
The very first reference to radar "stealth technology" that I'm aware of was in Arnold Sommerfeld's Lectures on Theoretical Physics, IIRC in the volume on Electrodynamics, which was published in Germany in 1948. Sommerfeld briefly explained how layering of certain materials could be used to reduce radar cross sections. He also discussed the technical challenges and trade-offs (weight versus efficacy).
I first became aware of this when I was using the English translation as part of my physics studies in the 1970's so I was somewhat surprised when many years later "stealth technology" was considered something new and novel. I am even more surprised that it is not now common knowledge that Germany was working on stealth technology during WW-II since that technology was described in a German textbook published at the end of WW-II.
If your statement is true then Bayesian statistics is always completely meaningless without informative priors, yet most of Bayesian analysis is done without informative priors and works quite well thank you very much.
The obvious, but unstated, assumption in the article is that they are using an uninformative prior which gives equal weight to fraud and no fraud. You are free to quibble over their use of this prior. For example if you thought (before seeing their data) there was only one chance in 10,000 chance that there would be fraud then even given their data, you would think that fraud was still not likely. But quibbling over a prior is very different from claiming nothing meaningful can come out of their analysis.
In fact, I think the penultimate sentence from the article is spot on:
But I would agree with you that some of the wording in the article seems very stilted. I think this has more to do with "dumbing down" the article for popular consumption and less to do with crimes against Bayesian statistics (or whatever it is you're claiming).