As the holder of a patent on abusive patenting of processes that are common knowledge, I demand royalties. Now off to send letters to some particular companies who owe me a fortune...
They're going to get this if they pull off an attack, no matter what they hit. So they're free to go ahead and not really worry about that and start looking at other things like symbolism of target and body count.
Terrorist probably could have killed more people if they had simply plowed airplanes into the largest New York apartment complex at night time when everyone was at home.
I'd contend that the population density of WTC offices was alot higher than an apartment building during business hours, so this would be the best choice for body count. The pentagon is one of the largest office buildings in the world, so that has a fairly significant body count too.
Symbolism was what they were really aiming for.
Then why didn't they target the statue of liberty? It's a better symbol of the American values than any of the targets they hit, but would have had a much lower body count.
So this would seem to suggest that they're taking both factors into account and looking for the most effective balance. Body count adds shock value and impact too, so to claim that it's just some side effect the terrorists don't care about seems a bit short sighted.
Oh, and as if you hadn't already demonstrated your complete lack of understanding of statistics, I also wanted to point out this little gem:
Having tutored a PHD though quantitative methods (she had one and was working on the 2nd) I can tell you the required level of Statistical knowledge for a PHD is shit. This PHD program spent about as much time teaching them how to use SPSS as they spent trying build a foundation for understanding and applying statistics.
So based on your sample size of ONE individual in ONE program, it's your conclusion that ALL PhDs require "shit" for statistical knowledge? Is your sample size of one valid BECAUSE YOU CAN TELL, but 17-19 invalid BECAUSE YOU CAN TELL AND STATISTICAL TESTS CANT, and then suddenly at 100 conclusions are valid again? Let me go ahead and inform you that a sample size of one WILL NOT produce a significant result for statistical ability of PhD holders in general, and IS NOT representative of the population of PhD holders in the biological sciences.
What I don't understand is how you can demonstrate an understanding of the limitations of their sample, yet do something obnoxiously stupid like call an entire studies findings worthless because of 17/19 person samples. Based on this post, you should know damn well that it's flat wrong to claim this number of people could never produce a significant result especially without reviewing their methodology. While the statistical ability of PhD holders may not be as advanced as is desirable, I assure you that it's advanced enough to know that you can't dismiss a study as worthless without reviewing their methodology because the sample size is 17 or 19. I did take the time to read the study, the authors were aware of the limitations of their sample based on size and participant pool and interpret their results with this in mind. 17 to 19 may not be a very large sample size, but it's not "tiny" either, tests of significance work fine for samples of this size if used properly, which you seem to think there's no way it could have been despite admitting you didn't read the study.
I don't know what exactly your background is in, but it's definately not in research in the biological sciences. You noticed alot of small sample sizes in neuroscience research, so you would then contend that every study involving a sample smaller than 100 is completely invalid no matter how statistically significant their results actually were, because YOU THINK small N designs can't produce significant results? Are you actually that unfamiliar with how validity and reliability of small N designs are established while somehow able to accurately delineate the limitations of their sample, or were you just pandering to the idiots here who legitimately have no clue?
It's just frustrating that this is supposed to be a site for people who have some appreciation of things like mathematics/statistics that go along with computer science, not to mention the scientific logic the "nerd" is associated with, and this guy comes along and calls the entire study worthless just based on the sample size. This is absolutely asinine because not only can ANY sample size produce statistically significant findings, but because it's obvious that he didn't make any effort at all to determine whether their methodology was designed well enough to allow for a reliable test of results. Even if their methodology was flawed or it turned out no significant results could be found, it's a blatant affront to every single bit of logic and knowledge related to experimental design and statistical methodology.
This kind of thing happens, people with no common sense or experience in the relevant issue talk out their ass all the time. But the worst part of this was that it was modded to +5, and the moderation system is supposed to be here to, among other things, REDUCE THE VISIBILITY OF POSTS THAT ARE A DISGRACE TO SCIENCE. See, what makes this so bad is that his post was modded up because all those people actually thought that shit was INSIGHTFUL because it appeared to be logical only for those just as unfamiliar with statistics as the poster, so went ahead and used up a mod point without any kind of standards of quality whatsoever.
That's happening all too often on this site, and this is an exceptionally egregious example of uninformed posts pandering to the uninformed being rewarded. And then I get modded a troll for standing up and exposing disgraceful use of the moderation system and commiting the instant-mod-down act of pointing out blatant cretinism that made the ignorant feel good about themselves for being able to agree with.
Yes I'm being harsh because the message doesn't get through peoples thick skulls the other way.
How long firefox is running (and how much time of that is actually in use) is also a major factor in its memory leaks. I restarted firefox yesterday morning; right now it's taking up 113MB with 6 windows open (I don't use tabs). It was restarted because it was taking up over 500MB of memory after being left open for about 2 weeks; I don't remember how many windows were open, but I'm sure it was never more than 10 at once. And I just use it for normal html web browsing, with only a couple resource intensive things like java thrown in there from time to time (and I don't browse through lots of large picture files:) ). It's almost like it just never unloads pages from memory even when you browse away from them or close their window, so it just keeps building up without limit. And before you jump all over that claim I'm well aware that's probably not what it's doing, thats just the best interpretation I can think of since I'm not familiar with how firefox manages (if you can call it that) memory.
It might build up like that because I'm "old school" and never use tabs, always new windows when needed, but it's still piss poor memory handling that I hope the developers get better control of. Fortunately I have 1GB of RAM and I rarely run something else that requires enough additional memory to notice a performance hit; but the average person is going to notice a slow down because of memory leaks and that might hurt firefox's ability to gain market share among the non-geeks.
Oh shut up, you have absolutely no understanding of research. A small N design does not invalidate the results. The size of the sample is accounted for in the methods that determine whether results are significant or not. Did you even bother to look at the research methodology or did you just eyeball that number and use your (complete lack of) experience with experiment design to determine that 19 and 17 could never produce a significant result? 19 AND 17 AREN'T EVEN CONSIDERED SMALL SAMPLES IN THIS KIND OF RESEARCH, WHICH YOU WOULD BE AWARE OF IF YOU WEREN'T TOO BUSY USING YOUR MIDDLE SCHOOL UNDERSTANDING OF STATISTICS TO CALL THE RESEARCH OF PHD-HOLDING SCIENTISTS WORTHLESS INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY REVIEWING THEIR METHODOLOGY. ffs, how did this idiot get modded up to +5? Oh right, because most people here are blissfully ignorant of experiment design and statistical significance, and he's saying something that makes sense to the completely uninformed, who just go ahead and presume that makes them right.
Considering I've met people with various levels of HSAN, I'm sure your sensitivity to pain is actually quite high. Sensitivity and tolerance for pain are also different concepts. Unless you have late developing CIPA or a similar HSAN disease, I suspect your sensitivity is normal. However, extensive research has been conducted and shown that perception of pain can be controlled by the higher parts of the brain, and thus can be selectively or conditioned to be ignored to various degrees of success. Now this is also different from pain from massive trauma, which is probably an evolutionary mechanism to let you get out of situations that are severely harming you before you have to deal with the pain.
It's not mind over matter, it's just how the mind works. Guess what controls parts of higher order affective pain response? Some abstract construct people call the "mind"? No, hows about parts of the insular cortex.
You wouldn't even make it to getting people to consent to something like that because no institutional review board would ever approve it. It's considered unethical regardless of their consent, for so many reasons anyone with any experience in a field that researched on humans should be aware of. And furthermore it's alot easier to get permission to conduct a study with deception, as long as its not deception that's going to really harm them.
...plus dozens of other netblocks owned by various departments. It's useful when you want to IP deny as much of the government as you can from your site.
Patent control certainly isn't the only issue. Alot of the newer drugs coming out on the market are alot more specifically targetted, and subsequently have less side effects. Developing drugs that bind to only a specific subtype of receptor rather than the entire class of receptors, for instance, allows the condition to be treated with fewer side effects: just because the efficacy itself isn't improved doesn't mean that a newer drug can't be an improvement.
Let's look at a class of drugs in the news lately. COX-2 inhibitors. They're anti-inflammatories just like the over-the-counter stuff. But the OTC stuff binds to COX-1 receptors as well as COX-2 receptors, which makes many people unable to tolerate the side effects. Were the COX-2 inhibitors significantly more effective than OTC NSAIDs? Nope, but they sure were better for the people who couldn't take the side effects of a less specific drug. This same example is also very clear with the development and progression of SSRIs through several generations.
This isn't to say that all new drugs coming out aren't as you described, but in reality those "minor modifications" very often do something important for a good number of people who can't take the existing drug because of side effects.
Pulling satellite images from Google Earth is one billion or some other large amount times easier than ordering recon photos from other sources? Even if you Google for companies selling them? Come on now. It's a bit easier, but certainly not more than one order of magnitude easier.
So you have a suitable sample size of your crashes to determine this? If so, maybe you shouldn't be driving at all.
If you can't estimate how frequently you have been at a closer risk of being in an accident than what is experienced normally, you shouldn't be driving at all. I've never been in an accident in over 7 years of driving, but I know when I've almost been in one, and I can track the frequency of these occurences over the years as grouped by not talking on the phone, holding the phone, or using hands free.
Wow, somebody's excessively paranoid about driving and other drivers.
It only takes one hand to safely maneuver the vehicle in the vast majority of situations. If you have to execute a series of difficult turns, yeah you need 2 hands, but for normal corrections 2 hands are simply not neccessary, as one hand is even sufficient for emergency avoidance.
I don't know where you learned how to construct logical arguments, but 'most bad drivers are talking on cell phones, therefore all drivers who talk on cell phones are bad drivers' is not a good argument. While it's correct to claim that most peoples concentration is impaired by using a cell phone while driving, it's not correct to get all pissy and accuse the good number of people who can safely add a phone conversation to the many things they're already paying attention to of recklessly endangering your life.
Like it or not, some people CAN operate a vehicle safely while talking on the cell phone, and you obviously can't comprehend how this is possible so you need to stop passing judgment on EVERYBODY just because the majority of people are bad drivers when on the phone.
There's plenty of other technologies to avoid collisions being developped that don't require GPS, mainly various types of cameras on the car connected to computers that recognize and determine how to avoid objects in the path of the car. And you shouldn't be walking or riding your bike in the middle of the street without looking to see if a car is coming anyway. If you do dart out in front of a car, future technologies will have better reaction times than human drivers anyway, so you'd be safer.
Unfortunately completely automated driving seems to be a few decades away at best.
While concentration does indeed play a bigger role, you are wrong to to imply that hands free sets cannot make you substantially safer. Consider the driver of a vehicle with manual transmission in relatively dense traffic. Steering and shifting gears requires both hands for doing both at the same time, which is often neccessary. If you're on the phone, you have to put your head into an awkard position which compromises safety. Or, you have to briefly use your steering hand to shift gears while holding the cell in your other hand. Either way, a hands free kit makes drivers who insist on talking on their phone significantly safer, just not AS safe as not being on the phone.
I will admit that this scenario is uncommon compared to normal driving in an automatic, and thus is not reflected in results of studies not specifically looking at it. However, I can testify from experience that a hands free kit makes me alot less likely to crash when talking on the phone when I'm in dense traffic having to frequently shift gears while not moving in a perfectly straight line.
Also, while the person next to you can be looking for hazards, and often does, if you are engaged in a conversation they are frequently looking at you just as you are looking at them, in fact usually moreso since they don't have to watch the road.
Bottom line is the effectiveness of a hands free kit and comparison to other people in the car is entirely dependent on the scenario, and its wrong to take the results of generalized studies and talk like hands free kits are completely useless for increasing safety.
WIth 1000 users and 9% MSN that's only 90 users, which is probably not enough to draw broad conclusions about MSN's user base, but the study as a whole seems to be mostly comparing the 52% Google users to the 48% non-Google users.
Well, since they reported it as a statistically significant finding, I'm sure 90 people is enough to be representative. There's all sorts of statistical methods to determine if the results are significant with any sample size, and in practice 90 is a decent sized sample for making generalizations.
If you look at what the Industry thinks its losses from piracy are, its plausible. Of course, it does bring up the problem that the drug trade fuels cost estimates for piracy, since they've gotta have alot of analysts smoking crack to come up with the piracy losses they claim.
Huge difference there. Hacking directly infringes on anothers persons rights; the drug war attempts to legislate control over what people do with their own bodies. If drugs were legalized, doing things like slipping a girl roofies would still be illegal. Drugs hurt others only to the extent that other freedoms, such as speech, can.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You really, really don't understand how different the minds of exceptionally intelligent people work. I'm not talking about the "gifted" people way down there in the 125-140 IQ range, and the article isn't either. First of all people in the 99.9th percentile and better (145+) typically have a range of other mental problems, most famously in the social skills area. Coming up with good ideas for projects and entertaining yourself have very very little to do with intelligence. I have an IQ of 151, and thanks to the public education system, even in the gifted program, I lost all will to learn anything outside of the few topics that are extremely interesting to me, none of which I had any exposure to academically until college since even the gifted programs are aimed to the lowest common denominator, which is the 125-135 people, who aren't too bright. I don't get straight As. The problem in college is, topics that don't interest us still require learning of simple facts, which we are not necessarily motivated to exert the effort to learn. Being a genius does not imply being a good student, and vice versa.
It wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't true that police treat anybody with a home chemistry lab as drug chemists. Seriously, try explaining to them why you have flasks, beakers, condensers, magnetic stirrers, etc. They just arrest you and let you rot while their "probable cause" arrest is slowly refuted by overwhelming evidence you were actually not breaking the law. And god forbid you have a digital scale, that'll get you a slam into the pavement every time.
Slashdot Mirror
As the holder of a patent on abusive patenting of processes that are common knowledge, I demand royalties. Now off to send letters to some particular companies who owe me a fortune...
Terrorist are after coverage and impact.
They're going to get this if they pull off an attack, no matter what they hit. So they're free to go ahead and not really worry about that and start looking at other things like symbolism of target and body count.
Terrorist probably could have killed more people if they had simply plowed airplanes into the largest New York apartment complex at night time when everyone was at home.
I'd contend that the population density of WTC offices was alot higher than an apartment building during business hours, so this would be the best choice for body count. The pentagon is one of the largest office buildings in the world, so that has a fairly significant body count too.
Symbolism was what they were really aiming for.
Then why didn't they target the statue of liberty? It's a better symbol of the American values than any of the targets they hit, but would have had a much lower body count.
So this would seem to suggest that they're taking both factors into account and looking for the most effective balance. Body count adds shock value and impact too, so to claim that it's just some side effect the terrorists don't care about seems a bit short sighted.
Oh, and as if you hadn't already demonstrated your complete lack of understanding of statistics, I also wanted to point out this little gem:
Having tutored a PHD though quantitative methods (she had one and was working on the 2nd) I can tell you the required level of Statistical knowledge for a PHD is shit. This PHD program spent about as much time teaching them how to use SPSS as they spent trying build a foundation for understanding and applying statistics.
So based on your sample size of ONE individual in ONE program, it's your conclusion that ALL PhDs require "shit" for statistical knowledge? Is your sample size of one valid BECAUSE YOU CAN TELL, but 17-19 invalid BECAUSE YOU CAN TELL AND STATISTICAL TESTS CANT, and then suddenly at 100 conclusions are valid again? Let me go ahead and inform you that a sample size of one WILL NOT produce a significant result for statistical ability of PhD holders in general, and IS NOT representative of the population of PhD holders in the biological sciences.
What I don't understand is how you can demonstrate an understanding of the limitations of their sample, yet do something obnoxiously stupid like call an entire studies findings worthless because of 17/19 person samples. Based on this post, you should know damn well that it's flat wrong to claim this number of people could never produce a significant result especially without reviewing their methodology. While the statistical ability of PhD holders may not be as advanced as is desirable, I assure you that it's advanced enough to know that you can't dismiss a study as worthless without reviewing their methodology because the sample size is 17 or 19. I did take the time to read the study, the authors were aware of the limitations of their sample based on size and participant pool and interpret their results with this in mind. 17 to 19 may not be a very large sample size, but it's not "tiny" either, tests of significance work fine for samples of this size if used properly, which you seem to think there's no way it could have been despite admitting you didn't read the study.
I don't know what exactly your background is in, but it's definately not in research in the biological sciences. You noticed alot of small sample sizes in neuroscience research, so you would then contend that every study involving a sample smaller than 100 is completely invalid no matter how statistically significant their results actually were, because YOU THINK small N designs can't produce significant results? Are you actually that unfamiliar with how validity and reliability of small N designs are established while somehow able to accurately delineate the limitations of their sample, or were you just pandering to the idiots here who legitimately have no clue?
It's just frustrating that this is supposed to be a site for people who have some appreciation of things like mathematics/statistics that go along with computer science, not to mention the scientific logic the "nerd" is associated with, and this guy comes along and calls the entire study worthless just based on the sample size. This is absolutely asinine because not only can ANY sample size produce statistically significant findings, but because it's obvious that he didn't make any effort at all to determine whether their methodology was designed well enough to allow for a reliable test of results. Even if their methodology was flawed or it turned out no significant results could be found, it's a blatant affront to every single bit of logic and knowledge related to experimental design and statistical methodology.
This kind of thing happens, people with no common sense or experience in the relevant issue talk out their ass all the time. But the worst part of this was that it was modded to +5, and the moderation system is supposed to be here to, among other things, REDUCE THE VISIBILITY OF POSTS THAT ARE A DISGRACE TO SCIENCE. See, what makes this so bad is that his post was modded up because all those people actually thought that shit was INSIGHTFUL because it appeared to be logical only for those just as unfamiliar with statistics as the poster, so went ahead and used up a mod point without any kind of standards of quality whatsoever.
That's happening all too often on this site, and this is an exceptionally egregious example of uninformed posts pandering to the uninformed being rewarded. And then I get modded a troll for standing up and exposing disgraceful use of the moderation system and commiting the instant-mod-down act of pointing out blatant cretinism that made the ignorant feel good about themselves for being able to agree with.
Yes I'm being harsh because the message doesn't get through peoples thick skulls the other way.
How long firefox is running (and how much time of that is actually in use) is also a major factor in its memory leaks. I restarted firefox yesterday morning; right now it's taking up 113MB with 6 windows open (I don't use tabs). It was restarted because it was taking up over 500MB of memory after being left open for about 2 weeks; I don't remember how many windows were open, but I'm sure it was never more than 10 at once. And I just use it for normal html web browsing, with only a couple resource intensive things like java thrown in there from time to time (and I don't browse through lots of large picture files :) ). It's almost like it just never unloads pages from memory even when you browse away from them or close their window, so it just keeps building up without limit. And before you jump all over that claim I'm well aware that's probably not what it's doing, thats just the best interpretation I can think of since I'm not familiar with how firefox manages (if you can call it that) memory.
It might build up like that because I'm "old school" and never use tabs, always new windows when needed, but it's still piss poor memory handling that I hope the developers get better control of. Fortunately I have 1GB of RAM and I rarely run something else that requires enough additional memory to notice a performance hit; but the average person is going to notice a slow down because of memory leaks and that might hurt firefox's ability to gain market share among the non-geeks.
Oh shut up, you have absolutely no understanding of research. A small N design does not invalidate the results. The size of the sample is accounted for in the methods that determine whether results are significant or not. Did you even bother to look at the research methodology or did you just eyeball that number and use your (complete lack of) experience with experiment design to determine that 19 and 17 could never produce a significant result? 19 AND 17 AREN'T EVEN CONSIDERED SMALL SAMPLES IN THIS KIND OF RESEARCH, WHICH YOU WOULD BE AWARE OF IF YOU WEREN'T TOO BUSY USING YOUR MIDDLE SCHOOL UNDERSTANDING OF STATISTICS TO CALL THE RESEARCH OF PHD-HOLDING SCIENTISTS WORTHLESS INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY REVIEWING THEIR METHODOLOGY. ffs, how did this idiot get modded up to +5? Oh right, because most people here are blissfully ignorant of experiment design and statistical significance, and he's saying something that makes sense to the completely uninformed, who just go ahead and presume that makes them right.
Because you can only sue people that actually did damage.
Welcome to the United States, you must be new here; that statement just isn't true.
Considering I've met people with various levels of HSAN, I'm sure your sensitivity to pain is actually quite high. Sensitivity and tolerance for pain are also different concepts. Unless you have late developing CIPA or a similar HSAN disease, I suspect your sensitivity is normal. However, extensive research has been conducted and shown that perception of pain can be controlled by the higher parts of the brain, and thus can be selectively or conditioned to be ignored to various degrees of success. Now this is also different from pain from massive trauma, which is probably an evolutionary mechanism to let you get out of situations that are severely harming you before you have to deal with the pain.
It's not mind over matter, it's just how the mind works. Guess what controls parts of higher order affective pain response? Some abstract construct people call the "mind"? No, hows about parts of the insular cortex.
I hope this was modded funny because alcohol dehydrates you, but I suspect it was just because of the beer reference.
You wouldn't even make it to getting people to consent to something like that because no institutional review board would ever approve it. It's considered unethical regardless of their consent, for so many reasons anyone with any experience in a field that researched on humans should be aware of. And furthermore it's alot easier to get permission to conduct a study with deception, as long as its not deception that's going to really harm them.
156.33.0.0 - 156.33.255.255 -> senate
...
...plus dozens of other netblocks owned by various departments. It's useful when you want to IP deny as much of the government as you can from your site.
143.228.0.0 - 143.228.255.255 -> house
207.132.0.0 - 207.133.255.255 ->DOD
198.81.128.0 - 198.81.191.255 ->CIA
149.101.0.0 - 149.101.255.255 ->DOJ
Patent control certainly isn't the only issue. Alot of the newer drugs coming out on the market are alot more specifically targetted, and subsequently have less side effects. Developing drugs that bind to only a specific subtype of receptor rather than the entire class of receptors, for instance, allows the condition to be treated with fewer side effects: just because the efficacy itself isn't improved doesn't mean that a newer drug can't be an improvement.
Let's look at a class of drugs in the news lately. COX-2 inhibitors. They're anti-inflammatories just like the over-the-counter stuff. But the OTC stuff binds to COX-1 receptors as well as COX-2 receptors, which makes many people unable to tolerate the side effects. Were the COX-2 inhibitors significantly more effective than OTC NSAIDs? Nope, but they sure were better for the people who couldn't take the side effects of a less specific drug. This same example is also very clear with the development and progression of SSRIs through several generations.
This isn't to say that all new drugs coming out aren't as you described, but in reality those "minor modifications" very often do something important for a good number of people who can't take the existing drug because of side effects.
While the mine is indeed very impressive, it's only one of MANY man-made objects visible from space.
These people seem to be saying that it's alpha quality being published as beta, that means major known issues and significant incompleteness.
Pulling satellite images from Google Earth is one billion or some other large amount times easier than ordering recon photos from other sources? Even if you Google for companies selling them? Come on now. It's a bit easier, but certainly not more than one order of magnitude easier.
So you have a suitable sample size of your crashes to determine this? If so, maybe you shouldn't be driving at all.
If you can't estimate how frequently you have been at a closer risk of being in an accident than what is experienced normally, you shouldn't be driving at all. I've never been in an accident in over 7 years of driving, but I know when I've almost been in one, and I can track the frequency of these occurences over the years as grouped by not talking on the phone, holding the phone, or using hands free.
Wow, somebody's excessively paranoid about driving and other drivers.
It only takes one hand to safely maneuver the vehicle in the vast majority of situations. If you have to execute a series of difficult turns, yeah you need 2 hands, but for normal corrections 2 hands are simply not neccessary, as one hand is even sufficient for emergency avoidance.
I don't know where you learned how to construct logical arguments, but 'most bad drivers are talking on cell phones, therefore all drivers who talk on cell phones are bad drivers' is not a good argument. While it's correct to claim that most peoples concentration is impaired by using a cell phone while driving, it's not correct to get all pissy and accuse the good number of people who can safely add a phone conversation to the many things they're already paying attention to of recklessly endangering your life.
Like it or not, some people CAN operate a vehicle safely while talking on the cell phone, and you obviously can't comprehend how this is possible so you need to stop passing judgment on EVERYBODY just because the majority of people are bad drivers when on the phone.
There's plenty of other technologies to avoid collisions being developped that don't require GPS, mainly various types of cameras on the car connected to computers that recognize and determine how to avoid objects in the path of the car. And you shouldn't be walking or riding your bike in the middle of the street without looking to see if a car is coming anyway. If you do dart out in front of a car, future technologies will have better reaction times than human drivers anyway, so you'd be safer.
Unfortunately completely automated driving seems to be a few decades away at best.
While concentration does indeed play a bigger role, you are wrong to to imply that hands free sets cannot make you substantially safer. Consider the driver of a vehicle with manual transmission in relatively dense traffic. Steering and shifting gears requires both hands for doing both at the same time, which is often neccessary. If you're on the phone, you have to put your head into an awkard position which compromises safety. Or, you have to briefly use your steering hand to shift gears while holding the cell in your other hand. Either way, a hands free kit makes drivers who insist on talking on their phone significantly safer, just not AS safe as not being on the phone.
I will admit that this scenario is uncommon compared to normal driving in an automatic, and thus is not reflected in results of studies not specifically looking at it. However, I can testify from experience that a hands free kit makes me alot less likely to crash when talking on the phone when I'm in dense traffic having to frequently shift gears while not moving in a perfectly straight line.
Also, while the person next to you can be looking for hazards, and often does, if you are engaged in a conversation they are frequently looking at you just as you are looking at them, in fact usually moreso since they don't have to watch the road.
Bottom line is the effectiveness of a hands free kit and comparison to other people in the car is entirely dependent on the scenario, and its wrong to take the results of generalized studies and talk like hands free kits are completely useless for increasing safety.
WIth 1000 users and 9% MSN that's only 90 users, which is probably not enough to draw broad conclusions about MSN's user base, but the study as a whole seems to be mostly comparing the 52% Google users to the 48% non-Google users.
Well, since they reported it as a statistically significant finding, I'm sure 90 people is enough to be representative. There's all sorts of statistical methods to determine if the results are significant with any sample size, and in practice 90 is a decent sized sample for making generalizations.
If you look at what the Industry thinks its losses from piracy are, its plausible. Of course, it does bring up the problem that the drug trade fuels cost estimates for piracy, since they've gotta have alot of analysts smoking crack to come up with the piracy losses they claim.
Huge difference there. Hacking directly infringes on anothers persons rights; the drug war attempts to legislate control over what people do with their own bodies. If drugs were legalized, doing things like slipping a girl roofies would still be illegal. Drugs hurt others only to the extent that other freedoms, such as speech, can.
You really, really don't understand how different the minds of exceptionally intelligent people work. I'm not talking about the "gifted" people way down there in the 125-140 IQ range, and the article isn't either. First of all people in the 99.9th percentile and better (145+) typically have a range of other mental problems, most famously in the social skills area. Coming up with good ideas for projects and entertaining yourself have very very little to do with intelligence. I have an IQ of 151, and thanks to the public education system, even in the gifted program, I lost all will to learn anything outside of the few topics that are extremely interesting to me, none of which I had any exposure to academically until college since even the gifted programs are aimed to the lowest common denominator, which is the 125-135 people, who aren't too bright. I don't get straight As. The problem in college is, topics that don't interest us still require learning of simple facts, which we are not necessarily motivated to exert the effort to learn.
Being a genius does not imply being a good student, and vice versa.
It wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't true that police treat anybody with a home chemistry lab as drug chemists. Seriously, try explaining to them why you have flasks, beakers, condensers, magnetic stirrers, etc. They just arrest you and let you rot while their "probable cause" arrest is slowly refuted by overwhelming evidence you were actually not breaking the law. And god forbid you have a digital scale, that'll get you a slam into the pavement every time.