This "study" by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman has been debunked. It is junk science, although it seems to be quite popular, in a self-serving way, among pedophiles. It was not debunked - it was condemned by Spiegel, denounced by Congress - hardly a way to do science. Science by consensus always makes me suspicious and in this case the suspicion is valid.
In July 1999, the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin published our review of fifty-nine studies that had examined psychological correlates of child sexual abuse (CSA) (Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman 1998). We soon achieved an unexpected honor: our paper was unanimously condemned by Congress. In the aftermath, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER has published two commentaries, one denouncing Congress (Berry and Berry 2000), and the other denouncing our study (Hagen 2001). We would like to offer our own thoughts about this astonishing story of politics, pressure, and social hysteria--the antitheses of critical and skeptical thought.
We conducted our research in the spirit of scientific skepticism, an attitude sadly missing in the CSA panic that arose throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning in 1984, sensational cases of satanic ritual abuse in daycare centers proliferated in the U.S., from McMartin in the West, to Fells Acres in the Northeast, to Little Rascals in the South. Staff workers were accused of such things as assaulting four-year-olds with swords and curling irons, forcing them in ritualistic style to consume feces and drink the blood of sacrificed babies, and molesting them in outer space or on ships at sea surrounded by sharks trained to prevent them from escaping. Meanwhile, by the late 1980s, a billion-dollar recovered memory movement had developed, and diagnoses of multiple personality disorder (MPD) mushroomed. All over the country, women were entering therapy with vague complaints such as feeling unhappy without knowing why, then emerging with "recovered memories" of bizarre childhood victimization--such as being sexually assaulted with hardware tools or vegetables--sometimes for many years, even decades, without "remembering." Often, these women were led to believe that this purported victimization had fragmented their personalities into a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand alters.
Yet, over time, skeptics emerged-- social scientists, lawyers, and others who questioned the stories coming from daycare cases and therapists' offices. They provided empirical evidence showing how even bizarre memories can be implanted, how children can be manipulated and coerced into telling preposterous stories, how people can be induced to believe they have thousands of "personalities." Daycare cases ceased; convictions were overturned; some of the more egregious practitioners of MPD therapy were successfully sued for malpractice. But few people were willing to critically examine the core assumptions that led to these hysterical epidemics: that child sexual abuse is distinctively horrible (more horrible than any other traumatic experience or than family pathology), inevitably leaving scars that last throughout life (at least, without therapy). It was time to examine those assumptions.
Freud was the first to formalize a relation between CSA and psychological maladjustment. In his "seduction theory," he claimed that all adult neuroses are traceable to premature sex with an older person. He based this notion on a dozen or so patients, whom he pressured to recall seduction episodes using the same discredited techniques that would later be used in modern recovered memory therapy. He soon abandoned his
I'm against children being hurt and I do think pedophiles should be locked up.
Nice to hear a rational response, but I think you've got one thing wrong. Check out The Human Face of Pedophilia and Wikipedia. Many pedophiles are not child abusers (although some are). It's just a form of sexual orientation, like homosexuality (although it's probably not genetic).
It's just a matter of using the correct terms. I agree with you that those who abuse children should be either locked up or treated, but there are plenty of people who just had the misfortune of being sexually fixated on kids, but are otherwise completely fine and can also control their actions.
Well, being sexually aroused by kids is not sick - if 25% of men can be, it's not sick. Neither is jerking off to something you are sexually aroused. Fantasy != reality. Just like killing people in computer games is ok, so is looking at child porn.
Yours is a typical example of hysterical response to child porn. First of all, asking the children was exactly what was done in all 58 stuides. The researchers asked college students specially designed questions controlling for different factors, eliminating bias, etc., etc. And it turns out that there were very few kids who were fucked up for life. And those few that were usually had a pretty fucked up family, which was responsible for them being fucked up.
Of course, if you have an agenda, then such research is harmful and should be replaced by blunt psychological pressure on kids to persuade them they actually have been terribly abused. Sometimes the damage done by the police, school, parents and psychologists is greater than the damage done by the sexual act itself.
As for the contribution, I have never paid a single cent for child porn and I have no intention of doing so. The only way it can influence child porn producers is to discourage them, since it's very hard to profit from child porn.
How about A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. "Meta-analyses [based on 59 studies based on college samples] revealed that students with [child sexual abuse] (CSA) were, on average, slightly less well adjusted than controls. However, this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, FE explained considerably more adjustment variance than CSA, and CSA-adjustment relations generally became nonsignificant when studies controlled for FE."
And could you elaborate on what exactly "validated scientific research" proves that pedophelia (sic) is abhorrent.
Not to mention that P2P child porn downloading is an entirely different issue. So despite damage to kids from child abuse being minor, despite not all sex being abuse and despite porn downloading being mostly unrelated to real sex with kids, having one questionable image on your PC is a crime in the US. If this is not "biblical bible thumping", it's just stupidity of general public, sensationalism of the media and opportunism of the politicians.
Child porn is not bad. Real scientific research (as opposed to some mythical studies about "abhorrence" - sound like something a preacher would say) showed that about 25% of adult men can be sexually aroused by children (Freund & Costell 1970, Hall et al. 1995, Quinsey et al. 1975, references from Wikipedia). It is perfectly normal to jerk off to images of naked kids or kids having sex. No harm, no foul. Just keep in mind the difference between your sexual fantasies and the real world and you'll be fine. Just like with videogames.
Hey, what's wrong with sharing child porn on P2P or downloading it? On a related topic, I kinda like your idea about plugins to automatically scan for child porn...
The terms you list are generally not very indicative of the content, but others are. For example, "pthc", "pretten hardcore", "R@ygold", "pedo" usually work quite well to separate illegal content from innocuous. Not to mention the tags like "Hussyfan" or "Lolitaguy".
Another important consideration is that some P2P clients allow you to see all names of a particular file (Show File Details.../File Name in eMule). This is helpful if you were mislead by a particular user, calling the file differently.
Holy shit! I just found another person who experienced this. Even more, that person has explained me what caused the bug.:) I too had an A4 mouse with the very same problem. I remember playing X-Com: Terror from the Deep during the night with a desk lamp, because I needed to keep track of some stats on paper. I too have found out that placing the hand over the mouse in certain ways sometimes helped it, but could not find the system. I took the mouse back to the store and explained the problem. The tech guys probably thought I was crazy - "Yeah, sure the mechanical mouse stops moving in one direction in the darkness, whatever". They connected it and it worked, but when I just placed both hands over the mouse and showed, all techs present in the store just gasped for air.:) I got a replacement mouse, which I had to return promptly after a few days (only then did someone in the store suggested it might have something with the LEDs inside - he was close). The first one worked like a charm, until it died of old age (one of the buttons broke).
BTW, may be someone can help me with another strange mouse related problem? I've got an old Celeron PC that doesn't have PS/2 or USB, so I am stuck with mechanical Serial mouses. The problem is that the new ones just don't work correctly. I tried a Genius model and a Logitech one (the most popular current models, there isn't much choice in serial mice today in most stores), but the movement is not smooth. It first appeared as if the refresh rate (or whatever it's called) is too low, but I have no idea whether it's even possible to change with serial port mouses. The Genius mice worked ok in the store (not too well, but well enough that the store refused to replace it). I swapped the mouses between that Celeron and an even older Pentium MMX 200 and the new Logitech mouse keeps working shitty on the P200, even though it's slightly better than it was on the Celeron300. At the same time, the old noname serial mouse from the P200 works just fine on the Celeron. I am completely puzzled by this - what can be the culprit - the PC, the setup, the mouse?
Unfortunately Gimli-tossing seems to have already become a part of Middle-Earth mythology. Check out the trailers for The Battle of Middle-Earth RTS - Gimli-tossing is apparently one of Aragorn's special actions...
Being shot by whom? Uruk-hai didn't use bows in that battle, at least not on screen. As for moving fast, running down the stair would be just as fast for an elf, not to mention the fact that there was precisely zero need for Legolas to urgently go downstairs, seeing how a few hundred other elfs were already there at that very moment.
Regardless of which way you look at it, it was stupid.
Then I thought about it, and I realized that the shield bit would be perfect for an elf that is well balanced and in the middle of battle, and with a need to get from one floor the next. It's not what you thought, that's what PJ told in an interview, almost word for word. It was a stupid idea, really. Perhaps, not as stupid as Gimli jumping on spears, but still quite stupid.
She became addicted to gambling and alchohol and died rather young. Wikipedia says (though it's not a definitive source) that she died of cancer, which, IIRC, is not usually caused by alcohol or gambling.
I just wanted to check the film, but found out that I lost the CD2 in the harddrive crash. I will redownload it (ed2k://|file|911 the road to tyranny infowars com vcd disk2.mpg|72994512|3649197641369f63b05196f69e0dfc8 8|/) because I believe that's the part where the quote was used. If you reply with your e-mail (or just enable e-mail display in your post settings), I'll write you when I get it. It would indeed be very intersting to know Alex' reaction.
advertisement: a public promotion of some product or service. Trailers are advertisements. Not all advertisements are loathed, some are useful and people actually seek them out. And while I enjoy watching some trailers, please do not think they are the end in themselves. Movies are. I (like most people) use the trailers to decide whether I want to see a movie or not. Thus trailers are advertisements for movies. And while I may seek out these ads, expecting me to pay for them is simply insane. I will download large versions. If Apple closes that too, I will download trailers from film websites. If they won't have the trailers (only the links to Apple.com), I will not see them and probably watch less movies. Is that what studios want? If not, they better rethink their partnerships with Apple...
I was watching "911: the road to tyranny" and really decided to doublecheck one quote that he attributed to some US official (the newspaper or a webpage was on screen and the quote was highlighted). It was some CIA guy, who said that to end terrorism we (they) would need to abandon our freedoms. Alex Jones used the quote to rant about evil CIA people and evil conspiracies. I looked up the quoted text on Google and found the whole interview. Needless to say, the CIA guy actually continued his sentence by saying something like "but abandoning our freedoms is a big no-no because they are what makes America great and so we will never do that and it's better to realise that life is an inherently risky thing and blah-blah-blah". That was the moment I stopped watching the movie, because I was being brainwashed and I didn't like that. Alex Jones is not a reliable source. I would go as far as to call him a liar. That doesn't mean everything he says is a lie, but then neither is everything Dubya says...
I should have said "the 10 day return policy as the reason for selling on eBay was made up by the guy". The whole story about 10+9 days only appears in his letters to the scammer. In his original post he says something along the lines "It was bought for some project. Suffice to say it fell through".
If only it was that simple... But in real world, Soviet Union collapsed because of many systemic reasons. SDI was probably somewhere in the second or third hundred, when ranked by importance.
Then MS needs to invent new tactics. I have a suggestion. A hitman contract can cost as little as 10-100 grands. Using just one billion (out of about 50 that MS has in cash) dollars Microsoft can assassinate about 10-100 thousand Linux developers, promoters and users. That would deal a devastating blow to the OSS community. Of course, that might raise some uncomfortable questions and I don't think courts will turn a blind eye on that (at least not all of them), but Microsoft is probably slippery enough to get out of that unharmed.
There is no credible evidence that large amounts of money were used in USSR to counter SDI. There is, however, evidence that large amounts of money were sucked (and stil lare, after 20 years) from American taxpayers.
As for misleading Soviets, this was a dangerous business. Once this nearly led to the full scale nuclear exchange, other times it led to USA being left in the dust (such as when they pretended to be building a network of tunnels between launch sites, to which Russians answered with a cheap solution of using their extensive railroad system for the same purpose).
Do you also listen to the latest pop music and watch Friends? I am sorry to disappoint you, but following the herd ain't about being human, it's about being a sheep.
And if your uncle is so retarded as to think worse of you because you use metric, I pity you and your family.
We need to do whatever we can to wake people up, it's too vital to "not" do it. "Whatever we can" won't do. We can't rely on sensationalism and misinformation to convey the message, regardless of how true and important the message is. Alex Jones is a nutcase. No sane person would believe anything Jones says. Yes, may be half of what he claims is true, but we have no way to know which half it is.
Yes, it may even be that Bush himself ordered the WTC attack. But if someone attempts to prove it by creatively selecting quotes, using false information and ignoring evidence he doesn't like, the whole "proof" falls down.
It's very nice for you to be able to admit your error, but the truth is - the 10 day return policy was made up by the guy (if we are to believe him) for the scammer. So you were right. If I remember it correctly (having read it on MeFi a few days ago, since Slashdot is lagging as usually), he said it was bought for a "project that fell through". A little bit fishy, yeah, and certainly doesn't explain why he doesn't have money for a express shipping.
This is a great post. People, take notice! I knew about Linux for about 7 years, I used it on several occasions, I knew about Knoppix for about a year, I regularly read Slashdot, but I continued to use Win2k happily (not really happily, but enough to stick to it). This post made me really click through and download Knoppix to try it on my own machine.
Somehow, the concept of multiplying odds by result values is something average people just can't comprehend because emotions get in the way of cold logic...
Bzzt! Wrong.
They can't comprehend it for a totally different reason - most of them being retarded and illiterate morons. Seriously, I would estimate that just a few percent of American adults understand what a weighted average is. I don't have a direct evidence for that, but consider that according to National Science Foundation only 9% of 2,000 people surveyed in the USA could define a molecule, according to VDI Nachrichten, a representative survey showed that 25% of Germans do not know that Earth revolves around the Sun, and in several developed countries surveyed (sorry, forgot the source) about 70-90% of people do not know what a star actually is.
ID cards are flawed because you can't secure a system that large.
I have a solution! You just need a monitoring system. Security people will monitor the passport issuing personnel, recording and checking everything they do. This will surely prevent any frauds!!
The problem is that teaching is still not an industry, it's more like a medieval guild. Toyota can produce millions of cars all over the world, while maintaining consistently high quality, offering immense customisation options and providing quality working conditions. Intel can reduce prices 5-10% annually, while increasing performance 50-100% at the same time. Not to mention cool bunny suits for the workers.:) But teaching is still done the old fashioned way. The productivity revolution is long overdue and when it happens it WILL involve computers. There is no way around it, we can't teach 6+ billion people without using computers extensively. There is one way to teach math which is THE BEST. Ok, may be there are also some "subways" to teach gifted, retarded, blacks, whites, poor, rich, etc., but overall there is one GOOD way to teach math and hundreds of bad ones. But the educational system being what it is, there is no incentive to propagate the best practices across the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
It was not debunked - it was condemned by Spiegel, denounced by Congress - hardly a way to do science. Science by consensus always makes me suspicious and in this case the suspicion is valid.
Rind, Bauserman and Tromovitch have responded to their critics (or, shall I say "accusers") several times. Here is a link to one of such articles, The Condemned Meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism (via FindArticles):
I'm against children being hurt and I do think pedophiles should be locked up.
Nice to hear a rational response, but I think you've got one thing wrong. Check out The Human Face of Pedophilia and Wikipedia. Many pedophiles are not child abusers (although some are). It's just a form of sexual orientation, like homosexuality (although it's probably not genetic).
It's just a matter of using the correct terms. I agree with you that those who abuse children should be either locked up or treated, but there are plenty of people who just had the misfortune of being sexually fixated on kids, but are otherwise completely fine and can also control their actions.
Well, being sexually aroused by kids is not sick - if 25% of men can be, it's not sick. Neither is jerking off to something you are sexually aroused. Fantasy != reality. Just like killing people in computer games is ok, so is looking at child porn.
Yours is a typical example of hysterical response to child porn. First of all, asking the children was exactly what was done in all 58 stuides. The researchers asked college students specially designed questions controlling for different factors, eliminating bias, etc., etc. And it turns out that there were very few kids who were fucked up for life. And those few that were usually had a pretty fucked up family, which was responsible for them being fucked up.
Of course, if you have an agenda, then such research is harmful and should be replaced by blunt psychological pressure on kids to persuade them they actually have been terribly abused. Sometimes the damage done by the police, school, parents and psychologists is greater than the damage done by the sexual act itself.
As for the contribution, I have never paid a single cent for child porn and I have no intention of doing so. The only way it can influence child porn producers is to discourage them, since it's very hard to profit from child porn.
How about A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. "Meta-analyses [based on 59 studies based on college samples] revealed that students with [child sexual abuse] (CSA) were, on average, slightly less well adjusted than controls. However, this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, FE explained considerably more adjustment variance than CSA, and CSA-adjustment relations generally became nonsignificant when studies controlled for FE."
And could you elaborate on what exactly "validated scientific research" proves that pedophelia (sic) is abhorrent.
Not to mention that P2P child porn downloading is an entirely different issue. So despite damage to kids from child abuse being minor, despite not all sex being abuse and despite porn downloading being mostly unrelated to real sex with kids, having one questionable image on your PC is a crime in the US. If this is not "biblical bible thumping", it's just stupidity of general public, sensationalism of the media and opportunism of the politicians.
Child porn is not bad. Real scientific research (as opposed to some mythical studies about "abhorrence" - sound like something a preacher would say) showed that about 25% of adult men can be sexually aroused by children (Freund & Costell 1970, Hall et al. 1995, Quinsey et al. 1975, references from Wikipedia). It is perfectly normal to jerk off to images of naked kids or kids having sex. No harm, no foul. Just keep in mind the difference between your sexual fantasies and the real world and you'll be fine. Just like with videogames.
Hey, what's wrong with sharing child porn on P2P or downloading it? On a related topic, I kinda like your idea about plugins to automatically scan for child porn...
The terms you list are generally not very indicative of the content, but others are. For example, "pthc", "pretten hardcore", "R@ygold", "pedo" usually work quite well to separate illegal content from innocuous. Not to mention the tags like "Hussyfan" or "Lolitaguy".
Another important consideration is that some P2P clients allow you to see all names of a particular file (Show File Details.../File Name in eMule). This is helpful if you were mislead by a particular user, calling the file differently.
Holy shit! I just found another person who experienced this. Even more, that person has explained me what caused the bug. :) I too had an A4 mouse with the very same problem. I remember playing X-Com: Terror from the Deep during the night with a desk lamp, because I needed to keep track of some stats on paper. I too have found out that placing the hand over the mouse in certain ways sometimes helped it, but could not find the system. I took the mouse back to the store and explained the problem. The tech guys probably thought I was crazy - "Yeah, sure the mechanical mouse stops moving in one direction in the darkness, whatever". They connected it and it worked, but when I just placed both hands over the mouse and showed, all techs present in the store just gasped for air. :) I got a replacement mouse, which I had to return promptly after a few days (only then did someone in the store suggested it might have something with the LEDs inside - he was close). The first one worked like a charm, until it died of old age (one of the buttons broke).
BTW, may be someone can help me with another strange mouse related problem? I've got an old Celeron PC that doesn't have PS/2 or USB, so I am stuck with mechanical Serial mouses. The problem is that the new ones just don't work correctly. I tried a Genius model and a Logitech one (the most popular current models, there isn't much choice in serial mice today in most stores), but the movement is not smooth. It first appeared as if the refresh rate (or whatever it's called) is too low, but I have no idea whether it's even possible to change with serial port mouses. The Genius mice worked ok in the store (not too well, but well enough that the store refused to replace it). I swapped the mouses between that Celeron and an even older Pentium MMX 200 and the new Logitech mouse keeps working shitty on the P200, even though it's slightly better than it was on the Celeron300. At the same time, the old noname serial mouse from the P200 works just fine on the Celeron. I am completely puzzled by this - what can be the culprit - the PC, the setup, the mouse?
Unfortunately Gimli-tossing seems to have already become a part of Middle-Earth mythology. Check out the trailers for The Battle of Middle-Earth RTS - Gimli-tossing is apparently one of Aragorn's special actions...
Being shot by whom? Uruk-hai didn't use bows in that battle, at least not on screen. As for moving fast, running down the stair would be just as fast for an elf, not to mention the fact that there was precisely zero need for Legolas to urgently go downstairs, seeing how a few hundred other elfs were already there at that very moment.
Regardless of which way you look at it, it was stupid.
Then I thought about it, and I realized that the shield bit would be perfect for an elf that is well balanced and in the middle of battle, and with a need to get from one floor the next.
It's not what you thought, that's what PJ told in an interview, almost word for word. It was a stupid idea, really. Perhaps, not as stupid as Gimli jumping on spears, but still quite stupid.
She became addicted to gambling and alchohol and died rather young.
Wikipedia says (though it's not a definitive source) that she died of cancer, which, IIRC, is not usually caused by alcohol or gambling.
I just wanted to check the film, but found out that I lost the CD2 in the harddrive crash. I will redownload it (ed2k://|file|911 the road to tyranny infowars com vcd disk2.mpg|72994512|3649197641369f63b05196f69e0dfc8 8|/) because I believe that's the part where the quote was used. If you reply with your e-mail (or just enable e-mail display in your post settings), I'll write you when I get it. It would indeed be very intersting to know Alex' reaction.
advertisement: a public promotion of some product or service. Trailers are advertisements. Not all advertisements are loathed, some are useful and people actually seek them out. And while I enjoy watching some trailers, please do not think they are the end in themselves. Movies are. I (like most people) use the trailers to decide whether I want to see a movie or not. Thus trailers are advertisements for movies. And while I may seek out these ads, expecting me to pay for them is simply insane. I will download large versions. If Apple closes that too, I will download trailers from film websites. If they won't have the trailers (only the links to Apple.com), I will not see them and probably watch less movies. Is that what studios want? If not, they better rethink their partnerships with Apple...
I was watching "911: the road to tyranny" and really decided to doublecheck one quote that he attributed to some US official (the newspaper or a webpage was on screen and the quote was highlighted). It was some CIA guy, who said that to end terrorism we (they) would need to abandon our freedoms. Alex Jones used the quote to rant about evil CIA people and evil conspiracies. I looked up the quoted text on Google and found the whole interview. Needless to say, the CIA guy actually continued his sentence by saying something like "but abandoning our freedoms is a big no-no because they are what makes America great and so we will never do that and it's better to realise that life is an inherently risky thing and blah-blah-blah". That was the moment I stopped watching the movie, because I was being brainwashed and I didn't like that. Alex Jones is not a reliable source. I would go as far as to call him a liar. That doesn't mean everything he says is a lie, but then neither is everything Dubya says...
I should have said "the 10 day return policy as the reason for selling on eBay was made up by the guy". The whole story about 10+9 days only appears in his letters to the scammer. In his original post he says something along the lines "It was bought for some project. Suffice to say it fell through".
If only it was that simple... But in real world, Soviet Union collapsed because of many systemic reasons. SDI was probably somewhere in the second or third hundred, when ranked by importance.
Then MS needs to invent new tactics. I have a suggestion. A hitman contract can cost as little as 10-100 grands. Using just one billion (out of about 50 that MS has in cash) dollars Microsoft can assassinate about 10-100 thousand Linux developers, promoters and users. That would deal a devastating blow to the OSS community. Of course, that might raise some uncomfortable questions and I don't think courts will turn a blind eye on that (at least not all of them), but Microsoft is probably slippery enough to get out of that unharmed.
What do you people think?
There is no credible evidence that large amounts of money were used in USSR to counter SDI. There is, however, evidence that large amounts of money were sucked (and stil lare, after 20 years) from American taxpayers.
As for misleading Soviets, this was a dangerous business. Once this nearly led to the full scale nuclear exchange, other times it led to USA being left in the dust (such as when they pretended to be building a network of tunnels between launch sites, to which Russians answered with a cheap solution of using their extensive railroad system for the same purpose).
Star Wars was never a great idea.
Do you also listen to the latest pop music and watch Friends? I am sorry to disappoint you, but following the herd ain't about being human, it's about being a sheep.
And if your uncle is so retarded as to think worse of you because you use metric, I pity you and your family.
We need to do whatever we can to wake people up, it's too vital to "not" do it.
"Whatever we can" won't do. We can't rely on sensationalism and misinformation to convey the message, regardless of how true and important the message is. Alex Jones is a nutcase. No sane person would believe anything Jones says. Yes, may be half of what he claims is true, but we have no way to know which half it is.
Yes, it may even be that Bush himself ordered the WTC attack. But if someone attempts to prove it by creatively selecting quotes, using false information and ignoring evidence he doesn't like, the whole "proof" falls down.
It's very nice for you to be able to admit your error, but the truth is - the 10 day return policy was made up by the guy (if we are to believe him) for the scammer. So you were right. If I remember it correctly (having read it on MeFi a few days ago, since Slashdot is lagging as usually), he said it was bought for a "project that fell through". A little bit fishy, yeah, and certainly doesn't explain why he doesn't have money for a express shipping.
This is a great post. People, take notice! I knew about Linux for about 7 years, I used it on several occasions, I knew about Knoppix for about a year, I regularly read Slashdot, but I continued to use Win2k happily (not really happily, but enough to stick to it). This post made me really click through and download Knoppix to try it on my own machine.
Somehow, the concept of multiplying odds by result values is something average people just can't comprehend because emotions get in the way of cold logic...
Bzzt! Wrong.
They can't comprehend it for a totally different reason - most of them being retarded and illiterate morons. Seriously, I would estimate that just a few percent of American adults understand what a weighted average is. I don't have a direct evidence for that, but consider that according to National Science Foundation only 9% of 2,000 people surveyed in the USA could define a molecule, according to VDI Nachrichten, a representative survey showed that 25% of Germans do not know that Earth revolves around the Sun, and in several developed countries surveyed (sorry, forgot the source) about 70-90% of people do not know what a star actually is.
You, my friend, would benefit much from reading an Ignobel prize winning Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. One of the findings was (simply put and doesn't necessarily apply to all fields) that people generally believe others know as much as they do about a given subject. Thus your ability to calculate probabilities disturbs your judgement about other people...
ID cards are flawed because you can't secure a system that large.
I have a solution! You just need a monitoring system. Security people will monitor the passport issuing personnel, recording and checking everything they do. This will surely prevent any frauds!!
The problem is that teaching is still not an industry, it's more like a medieval guild. Toyota can produce millions of cars all over the world, while maintaining consistently high quality, offering immense customisation options and providing quality working conditions. Intel can reduce prices 5-10% annually, while increasing performance 50-100% at the same time. Not to mention cool bunny suits for the workers. :) But teaching is still done the old fashioned way. The productivity revolution is long overdue and when it happens it WILL involve computers. There is no way around it, we can't teach 6+ billion people without using computers extensively. There is one way to teach math which is THE BEST. Ok, may be there are also some "subways" to teach gifted, retarded, blacks, whites, poor, rich, etc., but overall there is one GOOD way to teach math and hundreds of bad ones. But the educational system being what it is, there is no incentive to propagate the best practices across the industry.