See this article, for example. There are many others that are somewhat critical of Gates's intents. First, think how much he got through tax evasion. It might have been more than $28 billion. Second, it's really easy to be generous with criminally gained money. Gates is a monopolist capitalist pig, so the fact that he gives away some of the money doesn't justify stealing all that in the first place.
I do commend Bill for sharing his wealth, though. But it doesn't mean he gets a cart blanche to do everything he wants and still be free of criticism.
It's hard to do a live interview. People, who do it well on TV and radio are paid big bucks and spend years toning their skills nearly daily. With all my respect for Rob, he doesn't get to practice much.
Rob could have edited the interview, but probably thought (correctly) that we would rather read the raw, unedited text.
It doesn't seem Martin was annoyed. Yes, Rob is an OSS advocate and he feels pretty strongly about Firefox, openness and stuff. Don't jump on him for repeately reminding about the zero cost. Yes, it doesn't sound all that witty or funny. But it's not really a serious mistake that he deserves to be crucified for.
The great thing is that unlike with CDDB and Usenet there is already a thriving community of commercial sites making money off Wikipedia's content by adding a (presumably) better interface and ads. I guess they download the contents quite frequently. There are also many others, who download fresh copies to burn them to CDs, convert to other formats, etc. And, finally, Google will not "own" the content, and its agreement with Wikimedia would probably include a clause that Wikimedia foundation has the right to get the latest copy of the database before the agreement is cancelled.
So the contents of Wikipedia are as safe as they can be. In the worst case, if Google guys are real pricks, they can hold hostage a few days of changes, which is hardly a big deal.
They have developed the system, probably investing some considerable sums into R&D. And since this is not a mass product yet (they sold only about 300 systems), they need crazy markup on everything, including storage. This is not a rip-off, this is simply how the market works.
a) You claim that it disagrees. Care to provide any references to why keeping products in perpetual beta is good? I just can't think of any good reasons, and the only most commonly cited (that by releasing a final a company suddenly opens it to lawsuits from dissatisfied customers) is obviously bogus.
b) Google hasn't been enormously successful by any business standard. Their earnings are rather low, their P/S and P/E ratios are nothing extraordinary, they have no clear growth opportunities, they have strong competition and the entry barriers are ridiculously low. They are too reliant on highly qualified workforce and there are countless other potential problems that they have. The only obvious positives are their 40% position on the market (nothing special, but not bad) and their rather successful IPO (but IIRC, they missed their targets somewhat). So, while Google is clearly a successful company, they aren't anything special. And in any case, I don't see why it follows that every business decision Google makes is the right one. Stop using logical fallacies, please.
Evolution: Rap It Up! (When rapping, follow the rhythm of Salt-N-Pepa's "None of Your Business.")
Chorus If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right! None of your business. If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend, None of my business.
What chu doin' with their lives Leavin' evolution out? Don't chu think that you should make a stand and stop the doubts? Ha!
Darwin, Mayer, Watson, Crick, Mendel(son) 'n old Lamarck, Retro-, transpo-, hepadn-, Makes you want to barf? Right!
Flu is evolution too And you thought you were so safe. AIDS 'n cold sores-scary stuff but Changes we've all met. So. . ..
Now you know just what IT is. Change and Evolution. Same! Don't be suckered into playing Brown vs. Board games.
(Chorus). If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right! None of your business. If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend, None of my business.
The article mentions creationists and their sad efforts to "debunk" this, but a self-evolving virus that could fool experts and engage us in a digital war would wake everyone up to the idea that evolution is real.
All the more reasons for them to "outlaw" evolution.
Yes, it's an oversimplification, but if you look above that statement you would see that I admit that some people might not find MP3s enough (it's where I speak about 90% and 99%). My point was simply that anyone, who argues CDs will continue to sell, simply because iPod has a bad decoder, is full of it.
Neither are any of the people I've met who claim to have psychic power.
In a sense they all are. Some of them honestly believe they have the powers, some knowingly decieve people. But in any case if you do your readings/predictions/mind reading/whatever using cold reading or another technique and claim you have genuine psychic power, that's cheating (whether your are cheating yourself too is irrelevant).
But the big difference between them and Randi is that they're not saying "I'll give you a million dollars if you can prove I'm not psychic!", while at the same time running a psychic-proving foundation that seems to pay them a healthy salary.
And your point is? That psychics are unselfish and don't cheat people of money using their quackery? That's demonstratable false.
My point, to say it again, is that Randi's carrot makes him LESS of a good example of a psychic debunker, not a better one.
That's your point, all right, but so far you've done nothing to prove it. May be you should try... Sorry, can't promise you 1 million.:)
(And let's not forget that most of the "psychic" crowd tends to be leftish, pro-homosexual rights types, which means that they may see Randi they same way a homosexual in 1805 would have seen a scientists offering $10,000 to anyone who can prove that they're attracted to men and not women.)
I can't forger it, because I've never learned about anything like this. You claim it is so, but please cite any references, first. And in any case, what is your point? Why does it matter how psychics see Randi?
Nope, it wasn't. I wasn't saying that Mirabilis (or Google) are evil for forcing us to use their beta products. I simply said that it's bad for them as a company to be undecided about what state their product is in. There is no real discernible benefit in calling it beta for years. If it's stable enough, it makes sense (purely from the corporate communications point of view) to say so by calling it "final" or "release". If it's not stable yet, it makes sense to anally probe the developers and force them to make a stable interim release.
This isn't some appeal to morals or pedantry, this is just common business sense.
1. MP3 is a standard too. It plays on all computers, all digital players (except the few old Sony players that noone bought), many cellphones and portable game consoles. And I bet that CD didn't become the standard it is today overnight.
2. I won't trust you, because it was proven time and time again, that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind. 128Kbit MP3s are good enough for more than 90% of the people. And the latest OGG/AAC/WMA/MP3Pro are good enough for 99%.
3. That doesn't work. You are not an authority figure, so there is no reason to repeat after you anything. We can all think for ourselves and it is obvious that you can buy an album digitally just as you can buy a single track. In fact, right now I am playing an album (5 albums, to be more exact) and it is in MP3 format. BTW, I am quite happy that I don't have to change CDs...
4. You can't piss people off with that. We will just pity your stupidity. You can eat your placebos as much as you want, of course, but everyone else knows that there is no way to tell iPod playing MP3s from your super-dooper $3k device playing 48bit DVD-audio or whatever else, as long as the testing is done blind.
Yes, they do FORCE all their customers to be testers. You could not be a Mirabilis customer and not use beta software. Note that I didn't say "force all people", I specifically said "force all customers".
And I can explain why this decision is bad. When you offer a product, no matter, free or paid, you expect to provide the users with some benefit and get something in return. The rules of product design stay the same. If you mar the experience of the customers without a compelling reason, you lose. And offering beta product to everyone is just that.
Google/Mirabilis don't need to release buggy product, they just need to finalise it, fix all critical and major bugs, test it and deploy for the mainstream audience. After that (or in parallel with that) they can work on adding features, improving it otherwise and testing it with willing "power-users". It's the ABC of software engineering, it doesn't take a Ph.D. (of which Google has so many) to figure it out.
He opposes psychics not because he has something against psychic phenomena, but because he doesn't like quacks and cheaters pretending they can do something they can't and lying to people. Of course, I can't be sure, but I think it's entirely possible that Randi is a decent guy and if he observes a genuine paranormal phenomenon that passes scientific testing, he would not immediately try to cover it up.
And as for Randi looking just as bad from the other side, this is complete nonsense. He is not trying to cheat anyone. He just says "If you can do, what you claim you can do, under the test conditions that we both agree are reasonable, I give you 1 million dollars". He is not preventing the psychics and their ilk from passing the test, he just makes sure that all/most known ways to cheat are blocked. It's not his fault that all subjects he tested so far were fake.
You probably forget that Randi is not the only guy testing psychics. And so far there was not a single one, who could pass rigorous testing. And in those few cases when psychics were tested positive, the problems in testing were later pointed out and subsequent testing showed nothing. Randi is simply the best example because he has a huge carrot that he is willing to give to anyone who succeeds, that's why he is always brought up.
Well, besides the obvious impossibility of being more than 100% sure, I'd say that Randi has the reason to be pretty damn confident that all contenders are quacks or cheaters. After all, he is a magician himself and he sees right through all the tricks they are always using.
And being sure of something is not wrong. We are all sure that the Sun will rise tomorrow, that the elevator we enter will not fall, etc. Even if it's not 100%, 99.99999% is generally just as good.
And this is the fault. Randi does not have a set guideline, nor does a disinterested party have control of either the funds or the testing procedures.
No matter what guidelines you set, the next psychic would disagree with them and refuse to be tested unless you change them. So Randi does the only possible thing.
And I don't see why there should be a disinterested party. Objective, yes, but Randi is objective. Disinterested? No way, because that disinterested party might design a bad experiment (because they don't really care), and as a result give 1 million to a fraud and support pseudoscience and quackery.
And all the talks about "catapsi" is bullshit. We know that, Randi knows that. You can argue that being tested temporarily disables your skills, but then everyone has the right to say you are a fraud.
We've got to be tolerant to him. It's a hard job trying to be unbiased when testing for something which, as you are 1000% sure, is impossible.
I don't think we should expect Randi to always pretend he is unprejudiced when listening to yet more boring unrealistic claims that he can usually see through without detailed tests. He clearly has prejudice, but when it comes to testing he apparently DOES everything in a professional manner, even though he EXPECTS the result to be negative.
That's a good illustration of why most objections to new technologies are usually groundless (if you look deep enough) irrational fear of change.
What about MP3s? They can kill the music! We need to ban P2P. What about cellphones? They can cause cancer and disrupt our way of life! We need to block phone calls in movie theatres. What about cloning? It kills babies and can harm our human dignity! We must ban medical research.
And the list goes on and on. In the end, though, everything is inevitably just sorted out somehow, through good old adaptation, accomodation and plain common sense.
I'd say the cause can be best understood through memetics. There is meme warfare going on in the USA on these issues and, as a result, many Americans are infected (convinced).
In France many believe in graphology. In Russia many believe that there was no Antiquity and all the artefacts were made during Renaissance to mislead people. In Africa they believe that condoms cause AIDS and fucking virgins heals it. In other places they believe in other crap. It's all caused by local meme wars that includes articles in the media, pundits speaking, politicians promising something, etc. If you are outside of this maelstrom of stupidity, there is no reason to believe in this shit. If you are in it, the pressure is too high and you need to be really smart and sceptical to survive with your mind intact.
We would simply need to gradually redesign our software that a larger fraction of its processing can be done on parallel unreliable processors. You can have part of the processor working as a traditional CPU (with more error checking), while other areas would be designed to carry out simple parallel tasks. The traditional CPU part would control the execution of the main logic, but it would constantly outsource some jobs to those unreliable part of the processors where they do not speak good English but can do the job cheaper.:)
If not, then here it is: You are a moron. A fucking dimwit, to be more precise.
Flight and travel to the moon never sounded like quakery. They sounded like impossible or improbable dreams. Nobody claimed to be able to fly "while noone is looking and I am interpreting the results".
Rabid (or militant) atheism is the only rational worldview. And you can go stick your psionics beliefs in your ass and go fuck yourself. Stop playing those games, they are rotting your brain.
Well, their machine only works when run by specially trained Princeton scientists. And you also need special skills to interpret the results. Any attempt to repeat the test by the skeptic introduces interference, which messes up the predictions. And there are also hundreds of other explanations for those cases when the machine is wrong.
Seriously people, get a grip.
Scientist A was trying to do X when he claimed to have discovered Y. Dozens of other scientists confirmed the existence of Y in their own laboratories. However, Y doesn't exist. How could so many scientists be wrong? They deceived themselves into thinking they were seeing something when in fact they were not. They saw what they wanted to see with their instruments, not what was actually there (or, in this case, what was not there).
Blondlot and N-rays story is repeating again and again. Someone, please, hit those Princeton morons with a clue stick.
5 parts in 10000 is nothing. The probability theory guarantees that there are many experiements where such results are randomly produced. It's the same as with stock market. Many people use various insane trading schemes. Some of these randomly get rich. Those that consistently get rich claim that their schemes work, which is, of course, bogus.
Technical analysis is the same. 250 people go to a seminar, half of them decide to get an account, buy books and software and start trading on FOREX or commodity markets. After a year 64 of them are still in the black. After two years 30 of them have profits for two years. After six years there probably will still be 2 guys, with BMWs, Rolexes and stuff. Wait one more year - one of them will lose anything, but the lucky one will decide to give seminars on technical analysis or write 100$ books on trading.
Those guys in Princeton are idiots. They are wasting their time and university's money. Their claims are ridiculous and they deserve to be fired and sent to work in the trash sorting plant. That way we can put their skills in finding valuable stuff in random shit to good use.
Randi always agrees on the procedure, test conditions and interpretation beforehand. And so far there haven't been complaints that he is cheating.
And I am sure he doesn't feel that he needs to cheat (e.g. put pressure on the contenders, set too harsh conditions, etc.), because he is confident that if he simply sets up a honest double-blind test accounting for all possibilities to cheat (and he's a magician, he knows his shit), then noone will pass the test, because there are no genuine paranormal phenomena.
to the general public, beta connotes an offering from a large computer company/ gateway portal that is just unsupported
That's not true. There are just two big examples of moronic developers who don't have the courage to call things properly. It's Google and Mirabilis. Other companies usually use it properly. E.g. I am typing this from Opera 8 Beta. I expect the final version 8 to be released in a few months. Meanwhile the beta is not available from the main page (only from snapshots server and opera newsgroups).
It's not that the language is changing, is that there are two illiterate bullies, who don't know what beta is.
Slashdot Mirror
See this article, for example. There are many others that are somewhat critical of Gates's intents. First, think how much he got through tax evasion. It might have been more than $28 billion. Second, it's really easy to be generous with criminally gained money. Gates is a monopolist capitalist pig, so the fact that he gives away some of the money doesn't justify stealing all that in the first place.
I do commend Bill for sharing his wealth, though. But it doesn't mean he gets a cart blanche to do everything he wants and still be free of criticism.
It's hard to do a live interview. People, who do it well on TV and radio are paid big bucks and spend years toning their skills nearly daily. With all my respect for Rob, he doesn't get to practice much.
Rob could have edited the interview, but probably thought (correctly) that we would rather read the raw, unedited text.
It doesn't seem Martin was annoyed. Yes, Rob is an OSS advocate and he feels pretty strongly about Firefox, openness and stuff. Don't jump on him for repeately reminding about the zero cost. Yes, it doesn't sound all that witty or funny. But it's not really a serious mistake that he deserves to be crucified for.
The great thing is that unlike with CDDB and Usenet there is already a thriving community of commercial sites making money off Wikipedia's content by adding a (presumably) better interface and ads. I guess they download the contents quite frequently. There are also many others, who download fresh copies to burn them to CDs, convert to other formats, etc. And, finally, Google will not "own" the content, and its agreement with Wikimedia would probably include a clause that Wikimedia foundation has the right to get the latest copy of the database before the agreement is cancelled.
So the contents of Wikipedia are as safe as they can be. In the worst case, if Google guys are real pricks, they can hold hostage a few days of changes, which is hardly a big deal.
They have developed the system, probably investing some considerable sums into R&D. And since this is not a mass product yet (they sold only about 300 systems), they need crazy markup on everything, including storage. This is not a rip-off, this is simply how the market works.
a) You claim that it disagrees. Care to provide any references to why keeping products in perpetual beta is good? I just can't think of any good reasons, and the only most commonly cited (that by releasing a final a company suddenly opens it to lawsuits from dissatisfied customers) is obviously bogus.
b) Google hasn't been enormously successful by any business standard. Their earnings are rather low, their P/S and P/E ratios are nothing extraordinary, they have no clear growth opportunities, they have strong competition and the entry barriers are ridiculously low. They are too reliant on highly qualified workforce and there are countless other potential problems that they have. The only obvious positives are their 40% position on the market (nothing special, but not bad) and their rather successful IPO (but IIRC, they missed their targets somewhat). So, while Google is clearly a successful company, they aren't anything special. And in any case, I don't see why it follows that every business decision Google makes is the right one. Stop using logical fallacies, please.
I am flattered, thanks! :) Sadly, I don't have a blog or diary, and the website is rudimentary, but perhaps, I should start one.
Baby raper? Was it anything like this:
.
Evolution: Rap It Up!
(When rapping, follow the rhythm of
Salt-N-Pepa's "None of Your Business.")
Chorus
If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right!
None of your business.
If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend,
None of my business.
What chu doin' with their lives
Leavin' evolution out?
Don't chu think that you should make a stand
and stop the doubts? Ha!
Darwin, Mayer, Watson, Crick,
Mendel(son) 'n old Lamarck,
Retro-, transpo-, hepadn-,
Makes you want to barf? Right!
Flu is evolution too
And you thought you were so safe.
AIDS 'n cold sores-scary stuff but
Changes we've all met. So. . .
Now you know just what IT is.
Change and Evolution. Same!
Don't be suckered into playing
Brown vs. Board games.
(Chorus).
If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right!
None of your business.
If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend,
None of my business.
Go for it.
Source
The article mentions creationists and their sad efforts to "debunk" this, but a self-evolving virus that could fool experts and engage us in a digital war would wake everyone up to the idea that evolution is real.
All the more reasons for them to "outlaw" evolution.
Yes, it's an oversimplification, but if you look above that statement you would see that I admit that some people might not find MP3s enough (it's where I speak about 90% and 99%). My point was simply that anyone, who argues CDs will continue to sell, simply because iPod has a bad decoder, is full of it.
Neither are any of the people I've met who claim to have psychic power.
:)
In a sense they all are. Some of them honestly believe they have the powers, some knowingly decieve people. But in any case if you do your readings/predictions/mind reading/whatever using cold reading or another technique and claim you have genuine psychic power, that's cheating (whether your are cheating yourself too is irrelevant).
But the big difference between them and Randi is that they're not saying "I'll give you a million dollars if you can prove I'm not psychic!", while at the same time running a psychic-proving foundation that seems to pay them a healthy salary.
And your point is? That psychics are unselfish and don't cheat people of money using their quackery? That's demonstratable false.
My point, to say it again, is that Randi's carrot makes him LESS of a good example of a psychic debunker, not a better one.
That's your point, all right, but so far you've done nothing to prove it. May be you should try... Sorry, can't promise you 1 million.
(And let's not forget that most of the "psychic" crowd tends to be leftish, pro-homosexual rights types, which means that they may see Randi they same way a homosexual in 1805 would have seen a scientists offering $10,000 to anyone who can prove that they're attracted to men and not women.)
I can't forger it, because I've never learned about anything like this. You claim it is so, but please cite any references, first. And in any case, what is your point? Why does it matter how psychics see Randi?
Nope, it wasn't. I wasn't saying that Mirabilis (or Google) are evil for forcing us to use their beta products. I simply said that it's bad for them as a company to be undecided about what state their product is in. There is no real discernible benefit in calling it beta for years. If it's stable enough, it makes sense (purely from the corporate communications point of view) to say so by calling it "final" or "release". If it's not stable yet, it makes sense to anally probe the developers and force them to make a stable interim release.
This isn't some appeal to morals or pedantry, this is just common business sense.
1. MP3 is a standard too. It plays on all computers, all digital players (except the few old Sony players that noone bought), many cellphones and portable game consoles. And I bet that CD didn't become the standard it is today overnight.
2. I won't trust you, because it was proven time and time again, that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind. 128Kbit MP3s are good enough for more than 90% of the people. And the latest OGG/AAC/WMA/MP3Pro are good enough for 99%.
3. That doesn't work. You are not an authority figure, so there is no reason to repeat after you anything. We can all think for ourselves and it is obvious that you can buy an album digitally just as you can buy a single track. In fact, right now I am playing an album (5 albums, to be more exact) and it is in MP3 format. BTW, I am quite happy that I don't have to change CDs...
4. You can't piss people off with that. We will just pity your stupidity. You can eat your placebos as much as you want, of course, but everyone else knows that there is no way to tell iPod playing MP3s from your super-dooper $3k device playing 48bit DVD-audio or whatever else, as long as the testing is done blind.
Yes, they do FORCE all their customers to be testers. You could not be a Mirabilis customer and not use beta software. Note that I didn't say "force all people", I specifically said "force all customers".
And I can explain why this decision is bad. When you offer a product, no matter, free or paid, you expect to provide the users with some benefit and get something in return. The rules of product design stay the same. If you mar the experience of the customers without a compelling reason, you lose. And offering beta product to everyone is just that.
Google/Mirabilis don't need to release buggy product, they just need to finalise it, fix all critical and major bugs, test it and deploy for the mainstream audience. After that (or in parallel with that) they can work on adding features, improving it otherwise and testing it with willing "power-users". It's the ABC of software engineering, it doesn't take a Ph.D. (of which Google has so many) to figure it out.
He opposes psychics not because he has something against psychic phenomena, but because he doesn't like quacks and cheaters pretending they can do something they can't and lying to people. Of course, I can't be sure, but I think it's entirely possible that Randi is a decent guy and if he observes a genuine paranormal phenomenon that passes scientific testing, he would not immediately try to cover it up.
And as for Randi looking just as bad from the other side, this is complete nonsense. He is not trying to cheat anyone. He just says "If you can do, what you claim you can do, under the test conditions that we both agree are reasonable, I give you 1 million dollars". He is not preventing the psychics and their ilk from passing the test, he just makes sure that all/most known ways to cheat are blocked. It's not his fault that all subjects he tested so far were fake.
You probably forget that Randi is not the only guy testing psychics. And so far there was not a single one, who could pass rigorous testing. And in those few cases when psychics were tested positive, the problems in testing were later pointed out and subsequent testing showed nothing. Randi is simply the best example because he has a huge carrot that he is willing to give to anyone who succeeds, that's why he is always brought up.
Well, besides the obvious impossibility of being more than 100% sure, I'd say that Randi has the reason to be pretty damn confident that all contenders are quacks or cheaters. After all, he is a magician himself and he sees right through all the tricks they are always using.
And being sure of something is not wrong. We are all sure that the Sun will rise tomorrow, that the elevator we enter will not fall, etc. Even if it's not 100%, 99.99999% is generally just as good.
And this is the fault. Randi does not have a set guideline, nor does a disinterested party have control of either the funds or the testing procedures.
No matter what guidelines you set, the next psychic would disagree with them and refuse to be tested unless you change them. So Randi does the only possible thing.
And I don't see why there should be a disinterested party. Objective, yes, but Randi is objective. Disinterested? No way, because that disinterested party might design a bad experiment (because they don't really care), and as a result give 1 million to a fraud and support pseudoscience and quackery.
And all the talks about "catapsi" is bullshit. We know that, Randi knows that. You can argue that being tested temporarily disables your skills, but then everyone has the right to say you are a fraud.
We've got to be tolerant to him. It's a hard job trying to be unbiased when testing for something which, as you are 1000% sure, is impossible.
I don't think we should expect Randi to always pretend he is unprejudiced when listening to yet more boring unrealistic claims that he can usually see through without detailed tests. He clearly has prejudice, but when it comes to testing he apparently DOES everything in a professional manner, even though he EXPECTS the result to be negative.
That's a good illustration of why most objections to new technologies are usually groundless (if you look deep enough) irrational fear of change.
What about MP3s? They can kill the music! We need to ban P2P.
What about cellphones? They can cause cancer and disrupt our way of life! We need to block phone calls in movie theatres.
What about cloning? It kills babies and can harm our human dignity! We must ban medical research.
And the list goes on and on. In the end, though, everything is inevitably just sorted out somehow, through good old adaptation, accomodation and plain common sense.
I'd say the cause can be best understood through memetics. There is meme warfare going on in the USA on these issues and, as a result, many Americans are infected (convinced).
In France many believe in graphology. In Russia many believe that there was no Antiquity and all the artefacts were made during Renaissance to mislead people. In Africa they believe that condoms cause AIDS and fucking virgins heals it. In other places they believe in other crap. It's all caused by local meme wars that includes articles in the media, pundits speaking, politicians promising something, etc. If you are outside of this maelstrom of stupidity, there is no reason to believe in this shit. If you are in it, the pressure is too high and you need to be really smart and sceptical to survive with your mind intact.
We would simply need to gradually redesign our software that a larger fraction of its processing can be done on parallel unreliable processors. You can have part of the processor working as a traditional CPU (with more error checking), while other areas would be designed to carry out simple parallel tasks. The traditional CPU part would control the execution of the main logic, but it would constantly outsource some jobs to those unreliable part of the processors where they do not speak good English but can do the job cheaper. :)
Perhaps you've heard of the scientific method?
Perhaps you've heard that you are a moron?
If not, then here it is: You are a moron. A fucking dimwit, to be more precise.
Flight and travel to the moon never sounded like quakery. They sounded like impossible or improbable dreams. Nobody claimed to be able to fly "while noone is looking and I am interpreting the results".
Rabid (or militant) atheism is the only rational worldview. And you can go stick your psionics beliefs in your ass and go fuck yourself. Stop playing those games, they are rotting your brain.
Seriously people, get a grip. Blondlot and N-rays story is repeating again and again. Someone, please, hit those Princeton morons with a clue stick.
5 parts in 10000 is nothing. The probability theory guarantees that there are many experiements where such results are randomly produced. It's the same as with stock market. Many people use various insane trading schemes. Some of these randomly get rich. Those that consistently get rich claim that their schemes work, which is, of course, bogus.
Technical analysis is the same. 250 people go to a seminar, half of them decide to get an account, buy books and software and start trading on FOREX or commodity markets. After a year 64 of them are still in the black. After two years 30 of them have profits for two years. After six years there probably will still be 2 guys, with BMWs, Rolexes and stuff. Wait one more year - one of them will lose anything, but the lucky one will decide to give seminars on technical analysis or write 100$ books on trading.
Those guys in Princeton are idiots. They are wasting their time and university's money. Their claims are ridiculous and they deserve to be fired and sent to work in the trash sorting plant. That way we can put their skills in finding valuable stuff in random shit to good use.
Randi always agrees on the procedure, test conditions and interpretation beforehand. And so far there haven't been complaints that he is cheating.
And I am sure he doesn't feel that he needs to cheat (e.g. put pressure on the contenders, set too harsh conditions, etc.), because he is confident that if he simply sets up a honest double-blind test accounting for all possibilities to cheat (and he's a magician, he knows his shit), then noone will pass the test, because there are no genuine paranormal phenomena.
to the general public, beta connotes an offering from a large computer company/ gateway portal that is just unsupported
That's not true. There are just two big examples of moronic developers who don't have the courage to call things properly. It's Google and Mirabilis. Other companies usually use it properly. E.g. I am typing this from Opera 8 Beta. I expect the final version 8 to be released in a few months. Meanwhile the beta is not available from the main page (only from snapshots server and opera newsgroups).
It's not that the language is changing, is that there are two illiterate bullies, who don't know what beta is.