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User: david_thornley

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  1. Do you know how dictionaries come up with words and meanings? They look for how words are being used. If enough people use a word in one sense, dictionaries will change to list that sense as an alternate definition. English is a live language, and there is no authority somewhere that defines exactly what words mean once and for all. That sort of stuff is done only in places like France, and what that will do is split off an archaic government French from the main language.

  2. Re:Religion? Google's Religion is Money on Sex Workers Say Porn On Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Damore apparently actively made a significant number of people uncomfortable. That's disrupting the work environment.

  3. Re:Evidence based medicine on Meet the Interstitium, the Largest Organ We Never Knew We Had (thedailybeast.com) · · Score: 1

    We don't have to pick experimental subjects from acupuncture recipients. If acupuncture has objective effects, it should be possible to take people with various symptoms who are unfamiliar with acupuncture, and train someone how to stick pins in who doesn't know where the points are. Then we tell the experimenter where to stick pins in for each individual person, and nobody is qualified to see if those are acupuncture points or not. Double blind.

    I wasn't hunting for studies one way or another. I went to the Wikipedia article and read up on studies there. Although I think it would be cool if acupuncture worked, I really don't care that much.

  4. And, in that case, his safest move would be to arrange to give himself up to Swedish authorities.

  5. He was on the path of being extradited to Sweden. The US never filed an extradition request. The US didn't swoop in and grab him when he was under house arrest, and there was a good chance he was going to Swedish custody, so they wouldn't have another chance that good.

  6. Re:Have not done that _YET_ on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Sure. That means that you, your wife, and some people you talk to aren't going to buy from Apple again. That's not fatal to Apple. If the attitude spreads, it could be fatal, but that will take a while.

  7. Re:Except rotation speeds have already been explai on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    For the tl;dr crowd, this is a proposal that we discard all of non-quantum physics for roughly the past century, and reformulate everything on the basis of single experiments with the luminiferous aether. For the record, I fail to see why this approach is promising.

  8. Re:Engineering follows the scientific method on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    I think you're changing the definition of "science" past the useful point. Science is a method of study that's centuries old, not millennia, and postdates engineering. It is characterized by predictions. Make some observations, come up with a theory, make predictions from the theory, test them, get new observations, etc. Trial and error by itself does not predict anything. If you've come up with a few bridge designs that work, and what you know is that they work, you're not doing science. If you make crude predictions of the forces and where they go, you're doing science.

    Tons of things are done by trial and error. We normally don't call them science.

  9. Re:this fits with what I consider for dark matter on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Photons don't stay in one place, so they aren't the dark matter we've observed. Neutrinos aren't it, for the same reason.

  10. Re:Dark matter is a kludge on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    We generally can detect stuff at the mass required to do some of what dark matter explains. If there were enough non-luminous planets in the Galaxy to outweigh all the visible matter by a factor of five, we'd notice it.

  11. Re:Dark matter is a kludge on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    The mathematics of Special Relativity were mostly or completely derived by others. Einstein appears to be the first person to look at the math and realize what it was saying. Poincare did good work, but he never by himself arrived at the conclusion that there is no absolute reference frame, absolute space, or absolute time.

  12. Re:Dark matter is a kludge on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    We can't start with the Solar System and use that to research the Universe. It's far too small. General Relativity expresses itself best on a much larger scale. Nor do comets and asteroids provide arguments against it. As far as we can tell, they obey the laws of relativity very nicely. There may be other things we don't understand about them, but it's possible to know more about one thing than another, and the fact that we can't explain everything doesn't mean we're completely ignorant.

  13. Re:Aliens of the gaps. on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    What's wrong with scientists being baffled? It's part of the process. If they never were baffled, it would mean they couldn't figure out anything new.

  14. Re:Engineering is a subset of science - sort of on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    Engineering has worked despite nobody in the world knowing the underlying science. You can make a bridge by trial and error, and that's pretty much how engineering worked for most of its existence.

  15. Re:Except rotation speeds have already been explai on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    You could say the same thing about quarks and leptons. They're things scientists made up to explain things. Apparently, we can never see a quark in isolation.

    "God did it" is crap science, in that it closes off investigation. "We don't currently know how it works" is scientific, and invites further investigation. So far, no reformulation of equations explains what black matter explains. Physicists have tried all sorts of theories, and dark matter is clearly the most promising.

  16. Re:Science vs Religion on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    People made observations that are inconsistent with what we understood at the time. These observations are things like galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, etc. Then physicists tried making up theories to explain what was going on. Dark Matter was such a theory, and it's been a successful one. It explains many more observations with a relatively simply hypothesis than competing theories, and so it's become accepted. Someone could certainly come along with another theory that works better, but at this point it seems unlikely. Dark matter is therefore generally scientifically accepted. I"m not nearly as familiar with dark energy.

    Broken theories can still be useful. People keep using Newtonian dynamics and Newtonian gravity models, despite the fact that we know they're wrong. Newtonian dynamics is the basis of Special Relativity. If you add principles like "Light speed in vacuum is invariant across reference frames", and apply Newtonian dynamics, you come out with Special Relativity.

  17. Re:Blatant racism modded up?!? on Galaxy Without Any Dark Matter Baffles Astronomers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    A lot of Republicans care. Ever heard of the Southern Strategy? It was explicitly a plan to get racists to vote Republican.

  18. Re:Customers vs Product... on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    If you define the "product" as what makes money, Facebook's website isn't the product. They offer that for free, so they can attract people and get them to give up information, which they sell. Its much more accurate, in this sense, to say the users are the product.

  19. Re:FYI: retail markup, packaging, shipping on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Most of my free apps don't try to sell me anything, and a lot of them don't have a better paid version. I'm not completely sure how the developers get paid, but that's not my problem.

  20. Re:Not to be a grammar nazi here.... on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    You know what? There were other phones where you could degrade performance by holding it wrong. The antenna design was dumb, but it usually worked pretty well. How bad it was seemed to vary from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4, and people seemed to pay attention to the worst cases.

    I could cause some small degradation by licking my finger and putting it on the junction. The phone still worked for me. Presumably, if I'd been far from a tower, that would have caused problems.

    Apple then gave a free phone case to every iPhone 4 owner that wanted one. This included cases that just covered the edge, and full cases (which I got). That solved the problem, without additional expense to the customers.

  21. The privacy policy does not necessarily describe what Apple does. I wouldn't trust a CEO, but he points out that Apple has other, better, ways of getting money out of us.

  22. Re:Do you even read bro? on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Is Google evil for selling targeted ads? They're going to serve ads, and with the targeting the ads are slightly more likely to be interesting. If Google is evil for other reasons, then that doesn't mean Apple is evil.

  23. Apple thinks long-term. They want happy customers so they can keep selling them stuff, since Apple makes most of their money selling stuff. Cook thinks that monetizing customer data would make customers unhappy, so it would reduce profits.

    That's, in my opinion, a good plausibility argument, and shows that it's quite likely that Apple isn't selling your data. I have no way of proving to you what Apple's doing, but I haven't seen evidence that they're selling customer data in the same sense Facebook does, and they don't exploit it in the way Google does. Fortunately, I'm not really interested in convincing you of anything.

  24. Re:Have not done that _YET_ on Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    This stuff is by no means fatal. It'll cut into revenues, but Apple has plenty of time to respond and shape up. If quality control suffers for too long, they're in trouble, but that hasn't happened yet.

  25. No. Just no.

    I'm the customer. Apple doesn't make any significant amount of money by limiting the accessories I can buy. As far as I've been able to tell, they don't restrict who can sell in the App Store. They will refuse individual apps that violate their policies, and they at least used to be inconsistent on that, but that's something different.

    The money Apple gets off the App Store is really not that important for their profits. It';s a revenue stream most companies would kill for, but Apple takes in much more money by selling things. Nor am I being sold to the app developers. They're out there and I'm here, and I go through their stuff and decide what to buy.