"You're taking these approximations and claiming they're more valid than the ballots in the box--it doesn't work that way."
It does when there are no "ballots in the box" to double check the count (as is the case with diebold). If the Administration do not want to be accused of cheating then they should use a ballot that can be verified after the fact. This is NOT how the objections (in my opinion reasonable) have been handled, the Administration prefer to use exacly the same strategy as you do to deter critics.
Regardless of the truth, the Administration have brought the accusations apon themselves by thier arrogant behaviour and can think of no other course of action than to "shoot the messenger".
I could contine to pull your post apart line by line but life is too short and I have no intention of visiting the US.
It's on every diebold machine, just fish it out of the bit-bucket.
Insightfull, WTF? Your whole argument about statistics is based on the administration's official straw men (ie: exit polls were taken only in the morning, sampling is not as reliable as the official total). There were at least three sets of numbers, Rove's predictions, Diebold's count and the Exit poll stat's. Two of them were a very close match but they were not the two sets everyone (except Rove) had expected, the explaination is Rove101, stats101 has it's money on the exit polls.
"The majority of Americans don't like extremists--and they HATE poor losers. Throwing those accusations without any sort of reliable evidence makes you look like both."
Off course if I point out your statistician has no clothes I am a loser extremist and it is every American's patriotic duty to hate me. ( The "hate" bit may one day become the definition of "irony" ).
"Not only that, but such accusations are dangerous."
In other words, allowing people to voice concerns when they have no "evidence" is dangerous, therefore it's better to shun them than to answer their concerns. Modern doublethink: Provided you don't live in a cave with suicidal nutcases, it's ok to start a war without sane reasoning.
"Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality."
Yes I did notice the story was dropped very quickly. I watched a documentry about Rove the other day (on the Australian TV station SBS). Early in the day of the election, exit polls were not lining up with Rove's "tally room" predictions and everyone was looking glum. At the end of the day the "real tallies" came into line with Rove's predictions and there were smiles all round.
This was explained as a result of a last minute drive to get republicans to the booths. It was also pointed out that Rove's "tally room" was hooked directly to the "real tally room" so thier numbers were simply ahead of the exit polls. Even if I could swallow that, the FINAL exit polls in question were ALL wrong and ALL against Bush. Statistically this is like all the air in the room suddenly accumulating in one corner, yes it is POSSIBLE but Rove somehow predicted the event and was waiting in the correct corner when it happened.
It is not a lack of skilled statiticians in the US media that is a problem, it is the strange lack of interest & indignation by the US public. I am hoping for some intrepid reporter to catch Rice giving the others a blow job, maybe then you guys will impeach the lot of 'em.
Disclaimer: Don't take this post as US bashing, my country also re-elected a pack of smirking liars. It's like a re-run of the 1950's, everyone is checking for terrorist under the bed.
I think any red-blooded slashdotter would agree the prestige of patent office clerks has declined dramatically since Eienstien quit.
I didn't mean to imply that today's truck drivers and the clerk's of 100yrs ago are interchangeable in the social pecking order. Had Albert concentrated on his job and followed the career path laid out before him, he would have been financialy comfortable for the rest of his life. It's also quite possible the beauracracy and politics of a "career" would have made him miserable.
My point was that both people were in an occupation that was clearly a "waste" of their abilities but in no way does that imply a wasted life.
"And FYI, Einstein was a straight "A" student..."
I have not seen any original documents but I have read two biographies on the man. His problem was with authority not comprehension. Later in life he quipped: "To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself".
"not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation"
You call yourself a genius and yet you can't recognise the simplicity and elegance in Turing's Universal computing machine. A genius is distinguished by their ability to see what is right under everyones noses, spacetime, evolution, gravity, ect. As another poster pointed out art, music and litrature all have geniuses who can communicate deep concepts across cultures and time. A "genius" of cheap DVD technology cannot even hope to be seen alongside that kind of brilliance.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants".
Yes, we can all stand on the shoulders of giants. However very few who do become giants themselves. I do agree however that circumstance and hard work play a big part in who becomes a giant. Interesting sentiments from Newton considering how he treated Libnitz and others.
Almost all people who are not brain dead have flashes of inspiration now and again regardless of IQ level. As you point out, there are artistic geniuses that have changed the way we think about the world, inventing the paper clip was clever but by no means revolutionary.
If you go back to the GP you will see that they were questioning the wisdom of making intelligent people into lawyers who then go on to run the country as politicians. I was pointing out that genius lawyers do not have incentive to follow the KISS principle (ie: misdirected "genius").
"A genius in my opinion is nothing more than the top 1-2% of the world at associative skill."
No, as Albert pointed out: "Genius is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration", being in the top 2% on an IQ test may help but it is ceratinly not a realistic way to classify great minds.
"Now yours immature need to innapropriately narrow the term genius." "You should really have stated...."
Wow, sorry I excluded you from my idea of what a genuis is. I am not going to change it but you are free to make up your own broader definition to fullfil your need to be seen as a genius.
"You do yourself credit for conducting yourself with a measure of civility in this discussion. I respect a person who responds to missunderstanding with reasonable discourse."
"I have yet to meet a genius who knows what KISS means"
I belive genius is an overused category. I am 46 and I don't think I have met anyone who would qualify as a genius. As far as I can see there are only ever a handfull of geniuses alive at any one time. These people are considered great minds specifically because they have revolutionised our thinking by simplifying existing explanations, eg: Maxwell, Einstien, Newton, Turing. All the great scientific minds I can think off belived that the Universe must be governed by simple and elegant rules.
Lawyers on the other hand have a financial interest to strive for complex and contradictory rules, as do many of the other "geniuses" running the planet.
Smart people, simple jobs.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Your Uncle is in good company. Einstien was working as a patent clerk because he couldn't find a University that would take him. Getting a formal education and a "good job" has a lot more to do with persistence than IQ. Also there are many differing opinions as to what a "good job" actually is. If your Uncle enjoyed his 40yrs of driving he is not only smart but wise too.
"It's people like you and Russell Crowe that give the land down under a bad name."
Yeah, telephone abuse is a real problem over here in the land of convicts.
"be a good boy...at least *trying* to find a modern grass eating reptile"
When I was a boy I had a "Blue tounge" lizard that ate egg & lettuce sandwiches, does that count? Cows and Caterpillers both eat grass, I doubt there digestive organs are the same or even similar.
You missed the point of TFA, it is not about what animals ate grass, it is about the discovery that grass existed alongside dinosaurs.
"God! I've got to be missing something... What modern reptile eats grass?"
Yes, you are missing something. Dinosaurs were not reptiles, many belive their closest living relatives are birds. Also they didn't get the "ate grass" evidence from digestive organs, it was found in fossilised dino turds. Why not read TFA next time?
"If we hired smart security people, overall we'd be more secure."
Less frustrating for the public maybe but I don't know about more secure. Magicians will tell you that smart people are quite often the easiest people to fool (they use predictable assumptions more often than normal people). The Forrest Gump approach of "keep your eye on the ball" is a good way to train average people provided someone smart identifies all the balls.
The gaurd at a metal detector is a perfect example, the (simplified) instructions are: "if the machine goes beep don't let them in". If the gaurd breaks that rule they will be sacked and could possibly be charged with a criminal offence. Think of security gaurds as a firewall, they work best when the software is simple and dependable.
This sort of scheme will never work (shame). When advertisers sell advertising to thier customers they have things called "cost per lead" and demographics. These schemes have high cost per lead (bad) and the demographic is "people who can't afford PC's" (also bad).
To put it another way: I can get the attention of 100,000 geeks (most having a disposable income) by purchasing a banner ad at the top of the/. front page. I don't know how much that would cost but I am betting it would be several orders of magnitute cheaper than buying 100,000 pc's.
"The Herald seems to think that allowing workers to dress comfortably is a *bad* thing. How strange."
It's a fashion article. Many women have told me that "looking good" is expensive, time consuming and painful. If you don't belive me, try neglecting to compliment the next woman who spends 2 hours (plus shopping time) getting ready to go out with you.
Seems to me that ANY extreme political ideology devolves into a totalitarian government in practice. Sad thing is, ideologies closer to the middle ground also seem to be headed the same way.
In any human you will find both the desire to rebel against conformity and the desire to conform. A single ideology will never work for all people but that does not stop meglomaniacs trying to force others to conform to their theorectical nirvana (eg: Iraq, Tibet).
Yes, I live in Victoria and have been to many of the places in your link more than once, perhaps I should have said "no active volcanoes". If you really want to be pedantic we do have at least one active volcano in our bit of Antartica, I left it out becuase it is several thousand kilometers from the mainland.
Australia does not have any major fault lines, no volcanoes and has some of the oldest (most stable) bedrock on the planet. The heat in the Granite is not from magma, it is from the low level radioactivity in the rock itself. A big enough chunk of granite will get hot all by itself. Check out the CSIRO, they have been working on this kind of "geothermal" for at least 10yrs. Their numbers say that one site with two deep wells (500m apart) would remain hot enough to replace the largest power plant in NSW for 50yrs. Intrestingly the site they got those numbers from was just a few miles from said power station.
The biggest problem in Oz is that coal is not only sprinkled everwhere so as to convieniently fuel our current power stations, it is also a major export. These two things combine to make the coal industry fat, lazy and influential.
In other words "with us or against us". Pregnancy is a physical state, being a "Capitalist" is a concept. There is a vast difference.
They didn't find any fossils.
on
King Kong Lived?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Gigantopithecus has been (as the article states) studied since the 30's. Reading the summary, I thought somebody had found some new fossils. Seems to me they did not even "find a tooth", the article is actually about estimating the age of an existing fossil.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're taking these approximations and claiming they're more valid than the ballots in the box--it doesn't work that way."
It does when there are no "ballots in the box" to double check the count (as is the case with diebold). If the Administration do not want to be accused of cheating then they should use a ballot that can be verified after the fact. This is NOT how the objections (in my opinion reasonable) have been handled, the Administration prefer to use exacly the same strategy as you do to deter critics.
Regardless of the truth, the Administration have brought the accusations apon themselves by thier arrogant behaviour and can think of no other course of action than to "shoot the messenger".
I could contine to pull your post apart line by line but life is too short and I have no intention of visiting the US.
A "file system" is by definition a database. I think you mean the data is not stored in a relational database.
"I want to see evidence to your claims."
It's on every diebold machine, just fish it out of the bit-bucket.
Insightfull, WTF? Your whole argument about statistics is based on the administration's official straw men (ie: exit polls were taken only in the morning, sampling is not as reliable as the official total). There were at least three sets of numbers, Rove's predictions, Diebold's count and the Exit poll stat's. Two of them were a very close match but they were not the two sets everyone (except Rove) had expected, the explaination is Rove101, stats101 has it's money on the exit polls.
"The majority of Americans don't like extremists--and they HATE poor losers. Throwing those accusations without any sort of reliable evidence makes you look like both."
Off course if I point out your statistician has no clothes I am a loser extremist and it is every American's patriotic duty to hate me. ( The "hate" bit may one day become the definition of "irony" ).
"Not only that, but such accusations are dangerous."
In other words, allowing people to voice concerns when they have no "evidence" is dangerous, therefore it's better to shun them than to answer their concerns. Modern doublethink: Provided you don't live in a cave with suicidal nutcases, it's ok to start a war without sane reasoning.
"Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality."
Yes I did notice the story was dropped very quickly. I watched a documentry about Rove the other day (on the Australian TV station SBS). Early in the day of the election, exit polls were not lining up with Rove's "tally room" predictions and everyone was looking glum. At the end of the day the "real tallies" came into line with Rove's predictions and there were smiles all round.
This was explained as a result of a last minute drive to get republicans to the booths. It was also pointed out that Rove's "tally room" was hooked directly to the "real tally room" so thier numbers were simply ahead of the exit polls. Even if I could swallow that, the FINAL exit polls in question were ALL wrong and ALL against Bush. Statistically this is like all the air in the room suddenly accumulating in one corner, yes it is POSSIBLE but Rove somehow predicted the event and was waiting in the correct corner when it happened.
It is not a lack of skilled statiticians in the US media that is a problem, it is the strange lack of interest & indignation by the US public. I am hoping for some intrepid reporter to catch Rice giving the others a blow job, maybe then you guys will impeach the lot of 'em.
Disclaimer: Don't take this post as US bashing, my country also re-elected a pack of smirking liars. It's like a re-run of the 1950's, everyone is checking for terrorist under the bed.
So prove to me you are part of "reality" and not just a figment of my imagination (perception).
"...And all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be." - Pink Floyd
Would you trust a roomfull of Kasparov's to run the planet?
I think any red-blooded slashdotter would agree the prestige of patent office clerks has declined dramatically since Eienstien quit.
I didn't mean to imply that today's truck drivers and the clerk's of 100yrs ago are interchangeable in the social pecking order. Had Albert concentrated on his job and followed the career path laid out before him, he would have been financialy comfortable for the rest of his life. It's also quite possible the beauracracy and politics of a "career" would have made him miserable.
My point was that both people were in an occupation that was clearly a "waste" of their abilities but in no way does that imply a wasted life.
"And FYI, Einstein was a straight "A" student..."
I have not seen any original documents but I have read two biographies on the man. His problem was with authority not comprehension. Later in life he quipped: "To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself".
"not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation"
You call yourself a genius and yet you can't recognise the simplicity and elegance in Turing's Universal computing machine. A genius is distinguished by their ability to see what is right under everyones noses, spacetime, evolution, gravity, ect. As another poster pointed out art, music and litrature all have geniuses who can communicate deep concepts across cultures and time. A "genius" of cheap DVD technology cannot even hope to be seen alongside that kind of brilliance.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants".
Yes, we can all stand on the shoulders of giants. However very few who do become giants themselves. I do agree however that circumstance and hard work play a big part in who becomes a giant. Interesting sentiments from Newton considering how he treated Libnitz and others.
Almost all people who are not brain dead have flashes of inspiration now and again regardless of IQ level. As you point out, there are artistic geniuses that have changed the way we think about the world, inventing the paper clip was clever but by no means revolutionary.
If you go back to the GP you will see that they were questioning the wisdom of making intelligent people into lawyers who then go on to run the country as politicians. I was pointing out that genius lawyers do not have incentive to follow the KISS principle (ie: misdirected "genius").
"A genius in my opinion is nothing more than the top 1-2% of the world at associative skill."
No, as Albert pointed out: "Genius is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration", being in the top 2% on an IQ test may help but it is ceratinly not a realistic way to classify great minds.
"Now yours immature need to innapropriately narrow the term genius."
"You should really have stated...."
Wow, sorry I excluded you from my idea of what a genuis is. I am not going to change it but you are free to make up your own broader definition to fullfil your need to be seen as a genius.
"You do yourself credit for conducting yourself with a measure of civility in this discussion. I respect a person who responds to missunderstanding with reasonable discourse."
ditto.
"I have yet to meet a genius who knows what KISS means"
I belive genius is an overused category. I am 46 and I don't think I have met anyone who would qualify as a genius. As far as I can see there are only ever a handfull of geniuses alive at any one time. These people are considered great minds specifically because they have revolutionised our thinking by simplifying existing explanations, eg: Maxwell, Einstien, Newton, Turing. All the great scientific minds I can think off belived that the Universe must be governed by simple and elegant rules.
Lawyers on the other hand have a financial interest to strive for complex and contradictory rules, as do many of the other "geniuses" running the planet.
Your Uncle is in good company. Einstien was working as a patent clerk because he couldn't find a University that would take him. Getting a formal education and a "good job" has a lot more to do with persistence than IQ. Also there are many differing opinions as to what a "good job" actually is. If your Uncle enjoyed his 40yrs of driving he is not only smart but wise too.
"It's people like you and Russell Crowe that give the land down under a bad name."
Yeah, telephone abuse is a real problem over here in the land of convicts.
"be a good boy...at least *trying* to find a modern grass eating reptile"
When I was a boy I had a "Blue tounge" lizard that ate egg & lettuce sandwiches, does that count? Cows and Caterpillers both eat grass, I doubt there digestive organs are the same or even similar.
You missed the point of TFA, it is not about what animals ate grass, it is about the discovery that grass existed alongside dinosaurs.
"Are all aussies so arrogant and volatile?"
Nah, me and Rus just like to pick fights...
"God! I've got to be missing something... What modern reptile eats grass?"
Yes, you are missing something. Dinosaurs were not reptiles, many belive their closest living relatives are birds. Also they didn't get the "ate grass" evidence from digestive organs, it was found in fossilised dino turds. Why not read TFA next time?
"If we hired smart security people, overall we'd be more secure."
Less frustrating for the public maybe but I don't know about more secure. Magicians will tell you that smart people are quite often the easiest people to fool (they use predictable assumptions more often than normal people). The Forrest Gump approach of "keep your eye on the ball" is a good way to train average people provided someone smart identifies all the balls.
The gaurd at a metal detector is a perfect example, the (simplified) instructions are: "if the machine goes beep don't let them in". If the gaurd breaks that rule they will be sacked and could possibly be charged with a criminal offence. Think of security gaurds as a firewall, they work best when the software is simple and dependable.
This sort of scheme will never work (shame). When advertisers sell advertising to thier customers they have things called "cost per lead" and demographics. These schemes have high cost per lead (bad) and the demographic is "people who can't afford PC's" (also bad).
/. front page. I don't know how much that would cost but I am betting it would be several orders of magnitute cheaper than buying 100,000 pc's.
To put it another way: I can get the attention of 100,000 geeks (most having a disposable income) by purchasing a banner ad at the top of the
"...say to government agencies..."
OMG, now I need a tin-foil hat for both heads!
"The Herald seems to think that allowing workers to dress comfortably is a *bad* thing. How strange."
It's a fashion article. Many women have told me that "looking good" is expensive, time consuming and painful. If you don't belive me, try neglecting to compliment the next woman who spends 2 hours (plus shopping time) getting ready to go out with you.
Seems to me that ANY extreme political ideology devolves into a totalitarian government in practice. Sad thing is, ideologies closer to the middle ground also seem to be headed the same way.
In any human you will find both the desire to rebel against conformity and the desire to conform. A single ideology will never work for all people but that does not stop meglomaniacs trying to force others to conform to their theorectical nirvana (eg: Iraq, Tibet).
Yes, I live in Victoria and have been to many of the places in your link more than once, perhaps I should have said "no active volcanoes". If you really want to be pedantic we do have at least one active volcano in our bit of Antartica, I left it out becuase it is several thousand kilometers from the mainland.
Australia does not have any major fault lines, no volcanoes and has some of the oldest (most stable) bedrock on the planet. The heat in the Granite is not from magma, it is from the low level radioactivity in the rock itself. A big enough chunk of granite will get hot all by itself. Check out the CSIRO, they have been working on this kind of "geothermal" for at least 10yrs. Their numbers say that one site with two deep wells (500m apart) would remain hot enough to replace the largest power plant in NSW for 50yrs. Intrestingly the site they got those numbers from was just a few miles from said power station.
The biggest problem in Oz is that coal is not only sprinkled everwhere so as to convieniently fuel our current power stations, it is also a major export. These two things combine to make the coal industry fat, lazy and influential.
Now that's funny!
"Either you are or you aren't."
In other words "with us or against us". Pregnancy is a physical state, being a "Capitalist" is a concept. There is a vast difference.
Gigantopithecus has been (as the article states) studied since the 30's. Reading the summary, I thought somebody had found some new fossils. Seems to me they did not even "find a tooth", the article is actually about estimating the age of an existing fossil.