What about the 50 billion other "models" for human perception that psychologists pulled out of their asses to get their doctorates? Every little model has its own supporting evidence, and none of the proponents of these various models are interested in trying to explain anyone else's observations. (It's not like they're claiming to be scientists or anything, so why should they try and explain as many observations as possible?) Why is this model more valid than any other one?
Psychologists don't get that a real scientific model will attempt to explain all observations with the least number of terms possible. The sheer number of different perceptual models floating around after decades of study is the absolute antithesis of how science should work.
Damn... sounds like a big name. Maybe I'll look into him. Oh wait, maybe I won't. His music comes on a shiny disc that violates Red Book audio standards and is fraudulently marketed as a Compact Disc. Who knows if it'll play in my Mac? Why would I want Windows Media Audio encodes of his stuff? I might as well listen to it through a tin can. Why can't I decide what digital format I want it in? Oh well. Fuck Anthony Hamilton, and fuck the RIAA. Neither will be seeing a dime from me.
I liked VIII the best for the opposite reason. I thought that it had excellent character development and a fantastic musical score, and the symphonic collection for it was a dream come true. I also loved the cut sequences. There was something about the characters' style that I just really found aesthetic, even if it isn't the most realistic compared to today's stuff.
Of course, saying "wuh-wuh-wuh" would invariably lead to everyone in the room completing it with "Wuh wuh wuh what do you want? Why do you keep touching me?" as per the Warcraft II rap.
Agreed. "Log on to our website" is utterly ridiculous. So that radio station's already given me an account on their server? Great! You don't log on to websites. You log on to workstations and networks. You visit websites. And "http://" is at the point where it's now implied. Just give us the "www.something.com," and that's all anyone needs.
And can we please enact a law prohibiting people from the deep South from saying "www"? Hearing someone say, "Dubya dubya dubya" makes my fucking ears bleed.
Is anyone else tired of the word "cyber" being applied to anything dealing with computers? "Head of Cybersecurity" sounds like a title that some 13 year-old hax0r would call himself after finally learning how to share his family's broadband internet connection among machines. I find it difficult to take an office seriously if it designates head of "cyber" anything. It's the year 2003, people. Let's just start calling it "the internet."
Nanotechnology is one of the most overblown trends of sci-fi. Heat transfer rates correlate with surface area, and nanobots have extremely little surface area, so they're very vulnerable to heat. It's conceivable that light from the sun could simply incinerate them. Also, their small size makes electromagnetic shielding highly impractical, they could be destroyed by a small burst of static electricity, which is not a very uncommon event in Earth's atmosphere.
The thing is that the film and the show were two entirely different animals. I liked everything about the show better, the characters, the acting, the plot, the writing, et cetera. Also, the show set a mythology of its own into place, introduced new characters and generally made me much more interested in the world of Buffy (or the "Buffy-verse") than the movie ever could have. I think that the show has a great springboard for another movie now. I, like probably most Buffy fans, really don't even care about the movie or have just forgotten about it. The show is simply better. And I'd really like to see a movie to make up for season 7, which was disappointing and seemed very rushed and filled with plot devices.
Unfortunately, the premise behind the show was unbelievably absurd. Sheridan just sat there and watched the plague cloud thing float down to Earth. Why didn't he just order someone to detonate nukes in the middle of the clouds? And since when can a biological organism withstand a trip through the extreme temperatures of Earth's atmosphere?
It's an analogy. The original poster was claiming that the orders of magnitude of difference between the chances of needing the insurance and winning the lottery didn't significantly differentiate the two, so why not take it to a logical extension and just introduce an absurd scenario where the odds of winning are infinitesimally small instead of just ridiculously small? The bottom line is that getting insurance is a responsible way to spend your money. Constantly playing the lottery in serious hopes of winning is not, and it is simply stupid to do so. Thus, the lottery taxes people stupid enough to play it all the time.
You're allowed to do it once weekly. That means that you can do it about 4000 times, maximum, if you do it in 80 years. Here's a check for a gazillion dollars. It's post-dating until the year 50,000. Have fun.
Yes, physical media is definitely going away. Researchers are looking into using storage media that only exist in metaphysical planes of existence to store data. Rather than clicking a mouse, the user meditates intensely and mutters a small prayer to Hardus Discus, the god of data storage. They've already found that delusional maniacs can hold up to ten times as much data as a standard hard drive platter.
Why must return be a factor? Would you consider it reasonable to bet on every person on the face of the planet rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice at the same time so long as the payoff was appropriately large?
Microsoft already limits access to msn.com and Hotmail to a handful of browsers. And they have every right to do so, as they own the servers and bandwidth. What's your point?
No, they do not. They were found to be an illegal monopoly as a direct result of this kind of anti-competitive behavior. Illegal monopolies don't have the same rights to their products as legitimate corporations.
"Companies who are selling clients" automatically excludes Gaim. Even if this was not the case, where do you think all the money for the license is going to come from? Are you implying that Microsoft are just going to give a license to the Gaim folks out of the goodness of their own hearts? What about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior makes you think that they'd do something without the possibility for profit, like giving away licenses?
No, it doesn't. The only thing that matters statistically is the ratio between the payoff and the probability of getting that payoff, or in other words, the expected return. I believe that the expected return for the lottery is close to the ratio for insurance. A bet with a 1% chance of winning and a 1:200 payoff is just as good as a bet with a 10% chance of winning and a 1:20 payoff. The expected return is the same.
So why is it that people who bet on horse races don't always bet on the underdog? Because he's not likely to win. The bottom line is that a minuscule fraction of those who play the lottery regularly win, while just about everyone who has insurance will end up needing it at some point.
I suggest you are the one to take the statistics class.
I'm not the one who can't recognize the difference between the statistical probabilities of winning the lottery and getting into a car accident. The latter will occur far more frequently than the former, so the two are not even remotely comparable. The bottom line is that with insurance, you bet on much better odds.
Why does everyone think that 'winning the lottery' only means hitting the 10 million Euro jackpot? You could win EUR100.000, 10.000 or 1.000 which is still nice... and the odds look decidedly better for that. Perhaps these odds are close to the odds of me needing auto insurance, and the prizes are a lot closer to typical insurance payouts.
When most people mention the lottery, they infer the big, million-dollar jackpots.
The only real difference, as another poster pointed out, is that one might need insurance. By law, or because (for example) you would not be able to afford the hospital bills if you had an accident. Lotteries on the other hand are always voluntary, you don't have to play.
Ah, so the orders of magnitude that separate the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery don't count as a "difference"? This is getting very good.
Yes... for many things, the odds of needing insurance are a lot higher than those of winning even a small prize in the lottery... surprise: that's why the premiums are higher than the cost of a lottery ticket.
Irrelevant. Please explain how playing the lottery and buying insurance are both equally wise decisions given the vast gulf between the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery.
Please explain how playing the lottery and buying insurance are both equally wise decisions given the vast gulf between the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery.
You never played the lottery? Let me ask you another question.
No, I don't. Once in a blue moon, I may buy a ticket just for fun, but playing the lottery regularly is utterly foolish.
Do you have any kind of insurance?
Personally, I do not. My family, however, does, under which I am covered.
But surely you know that, like a lottery, insurance works because on average people pay more money into it than they receive from it. Lotteries and insurance are both gambles... except that in a lottery, you bet on good fortune. With insurance, you bet against bad fortune. In both cases, the expectancy value is less than 1, but in both cases you'll be damn glad you subscribed when your number's up.
The sheer magnitude of difference between the odds of winning the lottery and the odds of needing insurance is so incredibly enormous that I can't help but wonder if you're joking. You're basically suggesting that all forms of gambling are equal just because they're forms of gambling and ignoring probabilities for each one. Are your odds of throwing a 6 on a six-sided die the same as those of throwing a 6 on an eight-sided one? Tell me, would you bet on everyone on Earth throwing snake eyes with two six-sided dice? There's nothing physically that prevents it from happening, and according to you, it'd be perfectly reasonable to regularly play a lottery that hinged on this event actually happening.
I know I know, it's just a joke. Well, I just had to get this off my chest
Please take a statistics class. Your local community college probably offers one.
Illinois State University. According to legend, ISU has had more Playboy Playmates go through its doors than any other university in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the 50 billion other "models" for human perception that psychologists pulled out of their asses to get their doctorates? Every little model has its own supporting evidence, and none of the proponents of these various models are interested in trying to explain anyone else's observations. (It's not like they're claiming to be scientists or anything, so why should they try and explain as many observations as possible?) Why is this model more valid than any other one?
Psychologists don't get that a real scientific model will attempt to explain all observations with the least number of terms possible. The sheer number of different perceptual models floating around after decades of study is the absolute antithesis of how science should work.
Yeah, but us OS X people will probably get that stuff before you do. :)
I take it you did that math on a Pentium 4?
Yeah, the Iraqi people had the right to bear arms and overthrew Saddam very quickly. Oh, wait ...
When has force of arms ever led to the respect of minority rights legislatively in the United States?
Damn ... sounds like a big name. Maybe I'll look into him. Oh wait, maybe I won't. His music comes on a shiny disc that violates Red Book audio standards and is fraudulently marketed as a Compact Disc. Who knows if it'll play in my Mac? Why would I want Windows Media Audio encodes of his stuff? I might as well listen to it through a tin can. Why can't I decide what digital format I want it in? Oh well. Fuck Anthony Hamilton, and fuck the RIAA. Neither will be seeing a dime from me.
I liked VIII the best for the opposite reason. I thought that it had excellent character development and a fantastic musical score, and the symphonic collection for it was a dream come true. I also loved the cut sequences. There was something about the characters' style that I just really found aesthetic, even if it isn't the most realistic compared to today's stuff.
Of course, saying "wuh-wuh-wuh" would invariably lead to everyone in the room completing it with "Wuh wuh wuh what do you want? Why do you keep touching me?" as per the Warcraft II rap.
Agreed. "Log on to our website" is utterly ridiculous. So that radio station's already given me an account on their server? Great! You don't log on to websites. You log on to workstations and networks. You visit websites. And "http://" is at the point where it's now implied. Just give us the "www.something.com," and that's all anyone needs.
And can we please enact a law prohibiting people from the deep South from saying "www"? Hearing someone say, "Dubya dubya dubya" makes my fucking ears bleed.
Is anyone else tired of the word "cyber" being applied to anything dealing with computers? "Head of Cybersecurity" sounds like a title that some 13 year-old hax0r would call himself after finally learning how to share his family's broadband internet connection among machines. I find it difficult to take an office seriously if it designates head of "cyber" anything. It's the year 2003, people. Let's just start calling it "the internet."
The RIAA: Making the world a safer place, one hapless victim who can't afford a good lawyer at a time.
SCO have filed a lawsuit against the RIAA, claiming that the RIAA are infringing on SCO's copyrights over filing absurd lawsuits.
Nanotechnology is one of the most overblown trends of sci-fi. Heat transfer rates correlate with surface area, and nanobots have extremely little surface area, so they're very vulnerable to heat. It's conceivable that light from the sun could simply incinerate them. Also, their small size makes electromagnetic shielding highly impractical, they could be destroyed by a small burst of static electricity, which is not a very uncommon event in Earth's atmosphere.
The thing is that the film and the show were two entirely different animals. I liked everything about the show better, the characters, the acting, the plot, the writing, et cetera. Also, the show set a mythology of its own into place, introduced new characters and generally made me much more interested in the world of Buffy (or the "Buffy-verse") than the movie ever could have. I think that the show has a great springboard for another movie now. I, like probably most Buffy fans, really don't even care about the movie or have just forgotten about it. The show is simply better. And I'd really like to see a movie to make up for season 7, which was disappointing and seemed very rushed and filled with plot devices.
Unfortunately, the premise behind the show was unbelievably absurd. Sheridan just sat there and watched the plague cloud thing float down to Earth. Why didn't he just order someone to detonate nukes in the middle of the clouds? And since when can a biological organism withstand a trip through the extreme temperatures of Earth's atmosphere?
It's an analogy. The original poster was claiming that the orders of magnitude of difference between the chances of needing the insurance and winning the lottery didn't significantly differentiate the two, so why not take it to a logical extension and just introduce an absurd scenario where the odds of winning are infinitesimally small instead of just ridiculously small? The bottom line is that getting insurance is a responsible way to spend your money. Constantly playing the lottery in serious hopes of winning is not, and it is simply stupid to do so. Thus, the lottery taxes people stupid enough to play it all the time.
You're allowed to do it once weekly. That means that you can do it about 4000 times, maximum, if you do it in 80 years. Here's a check for a gazillion dollars. It's post-dating until the year 50,000. Have fun.
Yes, physical media is definitely going away. Researchers are looking into using storage media that only exist in metaphysical planes of existence to store data. Rather than clicking a mouse, the user meditates intensely and mutters a small prayer to Hardus Discus, the god of data storage. They've already found that delusional maniacs can hold up to ten times as much data as a standard hard drive platter.
Why must return be a factor? Would you consider it reasonable to bet on every person on the face of the planet rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice at the same time so long as the payoff was appropriately large?
"Companies who are selling clients" automatically excludes Gaim. Even if this was not the case, where do you think all the money for the license is going to come from? Are you implying that Microsoft are just going to give a license to the Gaim folks out of the goodness of their own hearts? What about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior makes you think that they'd do something without the possibility for profit, like giving away licenses?
Illinois State University. According to legend, ISU has had more Playboy Playmates go through its doors than any other university in the United States.