It's a licensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary. For British English that's considered the authoritative dictionary, so an academic might consider it worth paying. I don't think there is any free online access to OED definitions.
But a $50 app that has malware in it is adding insult to injury. They'll presumably be thrown out of the app store program, and face being sued by the end users. Big expensive mistake that.
I never said "everybody's out to get me". I pointed out the modding abuse. And evidence of the modding abuse is in the mods themselves. Modding "offtopic" does not mean "I disagree", and modding "insightful" does not mean "I disagree". Yet that is exactly how they were used here.
You denying it in this way just makes you look party to it. You just didn't have the mod points this time.
In the case of offensive speech there's certainly a case to be made that it works one way.
Actually, no, history of the western world shows it's often been the other way. It used to be that people were put to death for causing offence in western countries. Blasphemy, insulting royalty and such like.
If movement can happen in both directions, then it's not a slippery slope.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it implies one end is lower than the other and gravity only works one way. i.e A move in a certain direction will inevitably result in a move all the way to the extreme of that direction. Actually that is very rarely the case.
If a person is claiming that this is one of those few cases where this will happen, they need strong evidence to show why. Simply saying it's a slippery slope doesn't mean it is one. And that's why it's a fallacious argument.
And predictably, you too are hit by abusive modding. Their case is that weak that they believe they can only maintain it by modding down things they don't want to hear, however true.
A bunch of fandroids misusing a term on Slashdot does not redefine the meaning of the term. It is a fundamental element of the term "patent troll" that it describes an individual or company that does not and does not intend to produce products featuring the patent.
Note the modding abuse. Giving the correct definition of a patent troll gets modded "off topic". The person misusing the term "insightful". How low slashdot has stooped.
I can't see anything in the article you link to that says that putting 3% trees in with coal means the EU count the entire thing as green.
3% green for sure. That's what it is.
There is an accusation in there that they bulk out the weight of the trees with water, but there is no citation. Probably just a distortion of the fact that freshly cut wood has more water naturally than dried wood.
He predicted every state-level election, correct? Maybe 80 representatives, 33 senators or whatever?
He should have predicted at least one of them incorrectly. There is just no way he isn't undercalibrated. His predictions were *massively* correct, closer to 99% than 95% (100:1 vs 20:1).
You haven't noticed that 43 of his predictions were 99%-100% calls. Only 7 had any significantly uncertainty in them. It's way too early to tell if his calibration is off. It'll need more elections for that.
So in other words, you're not going to give the Obama campaign any credit for that last month, when they frantically did a superb job after his fairly-dismal showing in the first debate? They didn't need to do any of that door-knocking, or campaignin' in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is that it? Heh.
The post first debate campaigning improved Obamas chances from 56% to 91%. So it was well worth doing. (Well, strictly speaking: their campaigning and everything else that happened in that month.)
Romney was never the most likely candidate to win, at any point of the campaign. That's not the same thing as saying he didn't have a chance. Even the day before, he still had a 9% chance of winning.
Romney WOULD have won and Nate Silver would have been WRONG. Trust me.
Given that I've been following Nate Silver off and on since early on in the 2008 campaign, I won't trust you any more than I'd trust a TV pundit. Which coincidentally is where you seem to have got your opinions from.
At every stage throughout the campaign, there was always a percentage chance of either candidate winning. The closest Romney got at any stage was a 41% chance of winning, back at the beginning of June.
By the end of the race Romney's chance of winning was down to 9.1%.
That's the reason Democrats kept on campaigning, because at no stage was Romney's chance of winning zero. His chance could have been pushed down to 5% or allowed to increase to 15%. So they kept working.
You mention Hurricane Sandy. It had little or no effect (contrary to the opinions of pundits.) Obamas chance of winning was already trending upwards since Oct 12th, and the slope of that didn't change all the way to the election.
The thing is that polls and elections are different circumstances. When you vote, you need to travel and you can do it in secret. It also counts so maybe you change sides when push comes to shove.
But you know to what extent the polls are biased in these ways by looking at previous election polls and results. And that's exactly what Nate Silver does.
I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable.
It is knowable, and that's exactly why Nate Silvers forecasts are so much more accurate than anyone else's. He does the donkey work to minimise these systematic errors.
It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."
No, it was really, really dumb. Not only can systematic errors be minimised, but margin of error is not going to go in the same direction on all polls.
Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win.
And they're right. Not only for the reason you state, but also because outside of Slashdot and fanatical gun and piracy sites, there isn't a lot of support for libertarianism.
Yes, I know what moral relativism is. The question is how does it, or should it, relate to law.
things like thou shalt not murder, etc., predate current religious texts.
Careful use of the word "current" there. In fact laws against murder date from time immemorial. We don't know for sure how or where they came about.
But even with murder, the edge cases are relative. Assisted suicide, killing in war, abortion, the death penalty. Some people will class these as murder, and some will think they are moral actions. And depending where in the world you are they variously legal or illegal.
Those morals can be based on religion, a belief that we're all instilled with the same core moral beliefs (in which case democracy works just fine), evolutionary arguments (it's not a survival advantage for a social animal to murder, for example), or anything else.
They could be. But by far the biggest class of moral absolutists are the religious who think the absolute is contained in their choice of religious text.
You base laws on what the society generally believes (democracy) rather than on the imagined rules of a mythical character.
If the majority of people don't think it should be illegal to say "God's an arsehole" then it shouldn't be illegal, despite what people think the bible or the koran says.
Hopefully, given yesterday's votes, recreational use of cannabis will become legal in two states. Because the majority of people in those states think it should be. That's moral relativism applied to lawmaking.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a licensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary. For British English that's considered the authoritative dictionary, so an academic might consider it worth paying. I don't think there is any free online access to OED definitions.
But a $50 app that has malware in it is adding insult to injury. They'll presumably be thrown out of the app store program, and face being sued by the end users. Big expensive mistake that.
US patents are 20 years (or in some circumstances 17 years.) Anything to do with FAT is well out of patent protection.
Possibly something in FAT32 might be protected. But I suspect not.
I mean, just look at him or listen to him
... or smell him.
That sort of attitude may have worked in a "one trick" company like Apple
Call it "one trick" it seems like a negative.
Call it "focus", it seems like a positive.
I never said "everybody's out to get me". I pointed out the modding abuse. And evidence of the modding abuse is in the mods themselves.
Modding "offtopic" does not mean "I disagree", and modding "insightful" does not mean "I disagree". Yet that is exactly how they were used here.
You denying it in this way just makes you look party to it. You just didn't have the mod points this time.
Oh, lets be clear. Loons like you will see slippery slopes everywhere. That doesn't mean they're actually there.
In the case of offensive speech there's certainly a case to be made that it works one way.
Actually, no, history of the western world shows it's often been the other way. It used to be that people were put to death for causing offence in western countries. Blasphemy, insulting royalty and such like.
If movement can happen in both directions, then it's not a slippery slope.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it implies one end is lower than the other and gravity only works one way. i.e A move in a certain direction will inevitably result in a move all the way to the extreme of that direction. Actually that is very rarely the case.
If a person is claiming that this is one of those few cases where this will happen, they need strong evidence to show why. Simply saying it's a slippery slope doesn't mean it is one. And that's why it's a fallacious argument.
And predictably, you too are hit by abusive modding. Their case is that weak that they believe they can only maintain it by modding down things they don't want to hear, however true.
A bunch of fandroids misusing a term on Slashdot does not redefine the meaning of the term. It is a fundamental element of the term "patent troll" that it describes an individual or company that does not and does not intend to produce products featuring the patent.
Note the modding abuse. Giving the correct definition of a patent troll gets modded "off topic". The person misusing the term "insightful". How low slashdot has stooped.
Judging by your warped view of things, I bet you voted for Obama.
Judging by your grumpiness I bet you voted Romney.
A patent troll is a person or company that holds patents but doesn't create products. That being the case your comment makes no sense.
I can't see anything in the article you link to that says that putting 3% trees in with coal means the EU count the entire thing as green.
3% green for sure. That's what it is.
There is an accusation in there that they bulk out the weight of the trees with water, but there is no citation. Probably just a distortion of the fact that freshly cut wood has more water naturally than dried wood.
Just remember that EU recognizes burning freshly cut TREES as Biofuel.
As they should. That's exactly what it is.
Obama didn't win by any large margin against McCain/Palin.
Obama won the popular vote by 7.2 points. (52.9% vs 45.7%)
And he won by 365 electoral college votes to 173.
That is most certainly a large margin.
Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday.
Karl Rove is that you?
The republicans are playing the 'crazy card' for a reason.
Because you are representative of their average IQ?
He predicted every state-level election, correct? Maybe 80 representatives, 33 senators or whatever?
He should have predicted at least one of them incorrectly. There is just no way he isn't undercalibrated. His predictions were *massively* correct, closer to 99% than 95% (100:1 vs 20:1).
You haven't noticed that 43 of his predictions were 99%-100% calls. Only 7 had any significantly uncertainty in them. It's way too early to tell if his calibration is off. It'll need more elections for that.
As has been mention Silver is not a celebrity because his model was the best or even remarkable.
He called 49/50 states correctly in 2008.
In 2012 he got every state right.
For sure that's both the best and remarkable. No one else has come close.
So in other words, you're not going to give the Obama campaign any credit for that last month, when they frantically did a superb job after his fairly-dismal showing in the first debate? They didn't need to do any of that door-knocking, or campaignin' in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is that it? Heh.
The post first debate campaigning improved Obamas chances from 56% to 91%. So it was well worth doing. (Well, strictly speaking: their campaigning and everything else that happened in that month.)
Romney was never the most likely candidate to win, at any point of the campaign. That's not the same thing as saying he didn't have a chance. Even the day before, he still had a 9% chance of winning.
Romney WOULD have won and Nate Silver would have been WRONG. Trust me.
Given that I've been following Nate Silver off and on since early on in the 2008 campaign, I won't trust you any more than I'd trust a TV pundit. Which coincidentally is where you seem to have got your opinions from.
At every stage throughout the campaign, there was always a percentage chance of either candidate winning. The closest Romney got at any stage was a 41% chance of winning, back at the beginning of June.
By the end of the race Romney's chance of winning was down to 9.1%.
That's the reason Democrats kept on campaigning, because at no stage was Romney's chance of winning zero. His chance could have been pushed down to 5% or allowed to increase to 15%. So they kept working.
You mention Hurricane Sandy. It had little or no effect (contrary to the opinions of pundits.) Obamas chance of winning was already trending upwards since Oct 12th, and the slope of that didn't change all the way to the election.
The thing is that polls and elections are different circumstances. When you vote, you need to travel and you can do it in secret. It also counts so maybe you change sides when push comes to shove.
But you know to what extent the polls are biased in these ways by looking at previous election polls and results. And that's exactly what Nate Silver does.
but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play
Sure we do. Nate Silver has looked at this effect a number of times. If it exists at all, it's tiny.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/bradley%20effect
I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable.
It is knowable, and that's exactly why Nate Silvers forecasts are so much more accurate than anyone else's. He does the donkey work to minimise these systematic errors.
It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."
No, it was really, really dumb. Not only can systematic errors be minimised, but margin of error is not going to go in the same direction on all polls.
Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win.
And they're right. Not only for the reason you state, but also because outside of Slashdot and fanatical gun and piracy sites, there isn't a lot of support for libertarianism.
Yes, I know what moral relativism is. The question is how does it, or should it, relate to law.
things like thou shalt not murder, etc., predate current religious texts.
Careful use of the word "current" there. In fact laws against murder date from time immemorial. We don't know for sure how or where they came about.
But even with murder, the edge cases are relative. Assisted suicide, killing in war, abortion, the death penalty. Some people will class these as murder, and some will think they are moral actions. And depending where in the world you are they variously legal or illegal.
Those morals can be based on religion, a belief that we're all instilled with the same core moral beliefs (in which case democracy works just fine), evolutionary arguments (it's not a survival advantage for a social animal to murder, for example), or anything else.
They could be. But by far the biggest class of moral absolutists are the religious who think the absolute is contained in their choice of religious text.
You base laws on what the society generally believes (democracy) rather than on the imagined rules of a mythical character.
If the majority of people don't think it should be illegal to say "God's an arsehole" then it shouldn't be illegal, despite what people think the bible or the koran says.
Hopefully, given yesterday's votes, recreational use of cannabis will become legal in two states. Because the majority of people in those states think it should be. That's moral relativism applied to lawmaking.