As everyone should know by now, real life is not like CSI. Forensic science isn't the science of discovering who committed crimes, it's the science of making up the most believable science fiction to convince people not to commit crimes, and making up the most plausible BS to bamboozle juries in court. Claims by forensic scientists are generally judged by highly idealised lab situations that bear little relation to real crime scenes. And the scary thing is that when papers are published judging the efficacy of such methods, the papers repeatedly use circular reasoning where correlations between positives from technique X are correlated with event Y even though X was used as evidence in court when determining whether or not Y took place, so they'd appear correlated even if X and Y were competely unrelated. Forensic science ranks up there with cold fusion for pseudo-science. Actually, I think I have more faith in cold fusion.
I know it's vaporware, you know it's vaporware, but who else does? Does the military? Are they doing this in the full knowledge that it does nothing more than siphon money to a friend in research? Or maybe the military doesn't know but the researcher is deliberately lying to the military. Or maybe everyone at some level knows that the whole thing is a scam but government officials, who won't look at the details, will just rubber stamp it. Either way, I'd love to know how these things work because I have a lot of bullshit ideas I'd like to sell to gullible victims.
You can't fool us. You say all this because like every other parent on the planet you're looking for any excuse to tell us how much better your kid is than everyone else's.
Waimea is pretty distinctive and I have no problem recognising it. I can't imagine confusing it with the Grand Canyon.
I suspect an algorithm like SIFT could also easily distinguish between them, if enough of both canyons was pre-processed.
According to that site, the 3j symbol can be written as a terminating generalized hypergeometric series 2F3 of unit argument. Amazing! I had no clue! I can see that this publication is going to be a great boon for people everywhere.
(Especially for people who like looking at the angular momentum of colliding subatomic particles in their spare time.)
> These folks aren't blinded by minute details and generally see the big picture.
Tell me. How exactly does having the "big picture" allow you to see one flaw in a million little details? By definition of "big picture", the details are missing from it.
I've seen a couple of mentions on/. and reddit that there is a new iPhone and I went to the Apple web site to confirm this. Hype makes me think of people running around breathless telling me I just gotta buy it if I want my life to be complete. I don't recall anyone doing this to me. So clearly I'm missing out. So where do I find this hype thing that everyone is talking about? And while you're at it, when I feel like more, where do I find the overhype thing that I've seen a few people talk about?
> There are thousands of copies of portions (5,700 at least) of the New Testament going back to as early as AD 125.
All derived from the same few (magic and fantasy filled) documents, so providing no more evidence than a single copy, and poor evidence at that. Your point? Should I count the number of copies of Aristotle before deciding whether to accept a syllogism?
Josephus on Jesus. It's hardly good evidence. Tacitus is merely reporting the origin myth of a cult in the Empire. The same goes for all of these writers: where reliable they just confirm that Christians existed, and those Christians had origin myths for their cult, just like any other.
It is so well known that these writings about Jesus are suspect that an attempt to bring them up can only be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive.
I shouldn't have left that unfinished. The evidence we have for Jesus are a number of gospels of doubtful reliability because they are (1) written by people with a clear religious agenda and (2) are full of references to magical events. There are also a handful of brief mentions, mostly in passing, in other literature.
> a debate about whether or not some chap called Jesus existed is a waste of time.
Well that depends on whether or not you think historical truth is a waste of time. If truth doesn't interest you, then sure, you shouldn't bother debating such issues.
> you can find dozens of such people in every city in the world.
I don't see the relevance. 'Jesus' isn't just a generic slot to be filled. The claim is that there was a specific person who performed certain specific deeds and was crucified at a certain time, under certain orders, at a certain place. Just saying there are lots of people in any city who claim to be God is hardly relevant. Either someone fitting the given description lived, or they didn't.
> it's pretty well established that Jesus was a real, historical figure.
That certainly isn't the case. The evidence for a historical Jesus is very scant, far less than the amount of evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar and Alexander say, and the majority proponents of the existence of a historical Jesus who are described as Biblical scholars are, by and large, religious believers seeking to justify their faith. While we still need to take seriously and reply to the arguments of religious believers, the number of scholars who claim the historicity of Jesus has been swelled by the number of religious believers in their ranks. The term "pretty well established" is a a claim based on counting such numbers.
> enforced freedom of speech is a boolean, not a scalar
Only if you choose to define it that way. I could just decide that heat is a boolean and that there's nothing between hot and cold. In fact, anyone can make up anything they want. What matters is whether or not the definitions are useful. By saying that freedom is speech is a boolean you lose the ability to discriminate between the degrees of freedom you have in various countries. You can no longer compare Britain, the US, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, say. They all score False and the conversation ends. You can choose to cripple yourself this way, but I certainly won't.
This is a very simplistic view. Just as with the US constitution, the fact that it's not written down doesn't mean that we don't have the right. In Britain the law isn't just determined by those bills that pass through parliament. It is also defined by precedents set by judges in earlier cases. The right of Britons to freedom of speech has been upheld time and again by British courts going back centuries. A judge can't simply overturn that. There is some wiggle room over when those rights can be suspended. In the US, the litmus test for whether or not free speech can be suspended is whether or not there is a "clear and present danger". But that test isn't codified in the Constitution, it arose because of a legal precedent set in a court case. So the situation in the US and UK are pretty similar in this regard.
> How on earth did that transform to 'most of the article' when you decided to point it out?
An ad can be as long as you like, and mention the product hardly at all, but still be an ad. Hell, some ads don't even mention the product at all. Whether or not X is an ad for Y is not determined by how much of X contains references to Y. What matters is how the entire text (or video or image) of X is crafted around manipulating you to purchase Y.
Slashdot Mirror
And on the rocks
As everyone should know by now, real life is not like CSI. Forensic science isn't the science of discovering who committed crimes, it's the science of making up the most believable science fiction to convince people not to commit crimes, and making up the most plausible BS to bamboozle juries in court. Claims by forensic scientists are generally judged by highly idealised lab situations that bear little relation to real crime scenes. And the scary thing is that when papers are published judging the efficacy of such methods, the papers repeatedly use circular reasoning where correlations between positives from technique X are correlated with event Y even though X was used as evidence in court when determining whether or not Y took place, so they'd appear correlated even if X and Y were competely unrelated. Forensic science ranks up there with cold fusion for pseudo-science. Actually, I think I have more faith in cold fusion.
I know it's vaporware, you know it's vaporware, but who else does? Does the military? Are they doing this in the full knowledge that it does nothing more than siphon money to a friend in research? Or maybe the military doesn't know but the researcher is deliberately lying to the military. Or maybe everyone at some level knows that the whole thing is a scam but government officials, who won't look at the details, will just rubber stamp it. Either way, I'd love to know how these things work because I have a lot of bullshit ideas I'd like to sell to gullible victims.
What can I say? Without MacOS X I don't think there'd be any OS I could tolerate using. Thank you!
If I knew I'd be stuck in the same job for 20 to 30 years I'd just jump off the nearest cliff now.
You can't fool us. You say all this because like every other parent on the planet you're looking for any excuse to tell us how much better your kid is than everyone else's.
What are you people talking about? Have you actually tried refueling in the San Francisco Bay Area?
No, but the Star Trek movie title that comes 23 lines later in that soliloquy was ripped off from Marlowe.
Waimea is pretty distinctive and I have no problem recognising it. I can't imagine confusing it with the Grand Canyon. I suspect an algorithm like SIFT could also easily distinguish between them, if enough of both canyons was pre-processed.
Enneaphilia
(Especially for people who like looking at the angular momentum of colliding subatomic particles in their spare time.)
Does the technology that you already have point a gun at you and say "Fuck you asshole?" before shooting you? That's the difference.
I had to make room for a more imminent releases like Duke Nukem Forever, The Arrival of Godot and Jesus, The Second Coming.
> These folks aren't blinded by minute details and generally see the big picture. Tell me. How exactly does having the "big picture" allow you to see one flaw in a million little details? By definition of "big picture", the details are missing from it.
...you didn't want a bun in the oven.
I've seen a couple of mentions on /. and reddit that there is a new iPhone and I went to the Apple web site to confirm this. Hype makes me think of people running around breathless telling me I just gotta buy it if I want my life to be complete. I don't recall anyone doing this to me. So clearly I'm missing out. So where do I find this hype thing that everyone is talking about? And while you're at it, when I feel like more, where do I find the overhype thing that I've seen a few people talk about?
All derived from the same few (magic and fantasy filled) documents, so providing no more evidence than a single copy, and poor evidence at that. Your point? Should I count the number of copies of Aristotle before deciding whether to accept a syllogism?
Josephus on Jesus. It's hardly good evidence. Tacitus is merely reporting the origin myth of a cult in the Empire. The same goes for all of these writers: where reliable they just confirm that Christians existed, and those Christians had origin myths for their cult, just like any other.
It is so well known that these writings about Jesus are suspect that an attempt to bring them up can only be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive.
> a debate about whether or not some chap called Jesus existed is a waste of time.
Well that depends on whether or not you think historical truth is a waste of time. If truth doesn't interest you, then sure, you shouldn't bother debating such issues.
> you can find dozens of such people in every city in the world.
I don't see the relevance. 'Jesus' isn't just a generic slot to be filled. The claim is that there was a specific person who performed certain specific deeds and was crucified at a certain time, under certain orders, at a certain place. Just saying there are lots of people in any city who claim to be God is hardly relevant. Either someone fitting the given description lived, or they didn't.
> if you have to ask, you'll never know.
Well it's nice to find something we agree on.
That certainly isn't the case. The evidence for a historical Jesus is very scant, far less than the amount of evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar and Alexander say, and the majority proponents of the existence of a historical Jesus who are described as Biblical scholars are, by and large, religious believers seeking to justify their faith. While we still need to take seriously and reply to the arguments of religious believers, the number of scholars who claim the historicity of Jesus has been swelled by the number of religious believers in their ranks. The term "pretty well established" is a a claim based on counting such numbers.
Only if you choose to define it that way. I could just decide that heat is a boolean and that there's nothing between hot and cold. In fact, anyone can make up anything they want. What matters is whether or not the definitions are useful. By saying that freedom is speech is a boolean you lose the ability to discriminate between the degrees of freedom you have in various countries. You can no longer compare Britain, the US, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, say. They all score False and the conversation ends. You can choose to cripple yourself this way, but I certainly won't.
This is a very simplistic view. Just as with the US constitution, the fact that it's not written down doesn't mean that we don't have the right. In Britain the law isn't just determined by those bills that pass through parliament. It is also defined by precedents set by judges in earlier cases. The right of Britons to freedom of speech has been upheld time and again by British courts going back centuries. A judge can't simply overturn that. There is some wiggle room over when those rights can be suspended. In the US, the litmus test for whether or not free speech can be suspended is whether or not there is a "clear and present danger". But that test isn't codified in the Constitution, it arose because of a legal precedent set in a court case. So the situation in the US and UK are pretty similar in this regard.
Well yeah, we'd all like stuff to be free. Why should science be treated so specially in this regard?
> How on earth did that transform to 'most of the article' when you decided to point it out? An ad can be as long as you like, and mention the product hardly at all, but still be an ad. Hell, some ads don't even mention the product at all. Whether or not X is an ad for Y is not determined by how much of X contains references to Y. What matters is how the entire text (or video or image) of X is crafted around manipulating you to purchase Y.
Where does Oceanic 815 fit into all this?