The software is free, the developer's time is not.
You're free to use the software however you choose, but if you want the developer to spend his time working to your schedule, then you may have to make it worth his while.
It's the open source ineconomy of scale. A million organisations can use a piece of software, and all want the same new feature added. But if any organisation says "add the feature, Joe" they have to pay full price for the change as if they were the only user, because the feature is given free to all the other 999,999 users rather than sharing the cost. So, of course, nobody does -- while the feature might be worth $1,000 to each of the million organisations it's not worth the $10,000 it would cost to develop to any of them. So it never gets developed.
Slashdot of course being famous for never devolving into deeply threaded arguments amongst small numbers of people...
Most readers will let you ignore a whole branch of a tree, or all posts from a specific user (with a single cilck!), or posts matching other criteria (subject, length, etc).
And most actual readers (people) will never use those settings. Given that discussion behaviour depends on the actions of a forum-full of people, it doesn't matter if "I'm alright Jack", if the others wander off because of all the forking and devolution into one-on-one flamewars (and the market stats are that they have wandered off) you haven't got your discussion.
Google cache?
And when was the last time you said to yourself "I don't think I'll visit the forum today even though it's up; instead I'll work out the Google Cache URL for the forum topic to see what might be there instead"?
One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.
What you describe as a "serious problem" is also its major benefit. In no particular order:
Because the group-reading software is just the browser, you know everyone has got one, they haven't had to set it up separately (no more "I'm using my work computer now... what's the nntp server I need to configure into my news client again?")
The site has control of the interaction and can change it as needed -- for instance introducing post-submission editing of posts, retrospective moderation, private sub-forums, the Slashdot moderation system, tagging, and other features
Usenet readers generally have a bad design decision in them: they represent conversations as trees. This means conversations split at every post, and (especially for controversial topics) turn into a bunch of two-person arguments rather than a single community discussion. Forums do not allow forking of the conversation, and this means it's more likely to remain a community discussion
Forums do not depend on the software at your ISP. For instance, deleting a Usenet post tries to propagate a deletion but there is no guarantee any given ISP will honour the deletion; with a forum it either supports deletion or does not -- it doesn't say "I dunno, it'll be deleted to some people".
... I agreed with the results... It was all pretty obvious, I don't think anyone was unfairly persecuted, ever.
However, this is all still opinion. People have not usually been using objective ways of determining whether a system produces false positive and at what rate, but only opinion-based ways. As someone who may need to examine students, that worries me. We're all aware of confirmation bias, and that if you are presented with code that a similarity-matching algorithm says is unexpectedly similar, shock-horror, you're likely to think "hmm, that's unexpectedly similar". The presumption of innocence is replaced with a mere sanity check of "yeah, they look guilty, stick it to 'em". And so it seems that if we were in charge, we'd design the lottery that never pays out. My goodness, most weeks someone has picked the same numbers as the machine! The likelihood of getting those numbers at random is tiny! They must have cheated! Forget your payout, here's your ticket to jail matey!
There are ways to solve the problem, but I don't think people have been doing them much.
However, as an intentionally child-free taxpayer, I really do hate paying for other people's sprogs.
And many of those sprogs might hate paying for your Medicaid and retirement.
Much as some intentionally-childless moan about "having to support other people's children", technically it is the other way around. By deciding not to have children, you aren't "receiving less from the government", economically you are co-investing less in future taxpayers. From a tax and social policy perspective, in the current system, it is the height of selfishness to decide to be childless and put neither the money nor the child-rearing effort into maintaining society into the future.
This acquisition was never about software. People assumed it was, because software is all they know about Sun. But most of the revenue came from selling hardware
It's not Sun's revenues that are relevant -- if Sun's revenues were good enough it would have been able to stand on its own two feet. Oracle's revenues are all about software and in it's expansion from databases into other middleware, it had bet the house on Java. The words "Our biggest competitor is talking about buying the company that directs the stuff we are totally reliant on [IBM bidding for Sun]" would rightly have been ringing alarm bells in Larry Ellison's ears whether he was on the yacht or not. Oracle needed to buy Sun for the software, because if IBM had got the software Oracle would have faced massive risks to its business. IBM might well have ripped up the JCP, taken Java inside the eclipse foundation (which Oracle is only a reluctant member of), and skewed the whole development of the platform away from Oracle.
Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind?
I don't; I demand it of the concept of deity. The entire point of having a word "deity" is to mean something beyond that which humans can achieve, just as "supernatural" does not mean "natural". And historically "deity" and "god" is entirely linked to beliefs about creation. That's not a question of whether you believe such a thing exists but a straightforward matter of language. As I say, if you wish not to believe in a god that is up to you. But that is no reason to abuse the language so you can pretend that humanity is one.
In any case, if you go back and read my original post, I pointed out that some do indeed treat science as a religion by elevating man's achievements as deity. In your case, that is quite literally true by your own declaration. So not only are your rantings and railings against god and religion off-topic, but so too is this whole debate about whether you are "right" to elevate man as deity, so I'll leave it there. Feel free to have the last word if you wish to reply.
You conflate these two concepts when they are not the same thing. One explanation for a person thinking they experienced X is that they did in fact experience X. Another is that they were deluded.
No, in fact I said that having to conflate them is the problem. We have to ascribe the state of delusion to them on no evidence, but we also have to assume their memory of the event was perfect even though we are claiming they were deluded (if their recollection was flawed, then perhaps they didn't even experience it). So we find ourselves picking and choosing what to believe as accurate or inaccurate, based on the researchers' own preconceived model, and these picks and choices end up being the main driver of the conclusions. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- anything that doesn't fit the model is ruled out of the evidence, while anything that confirms the model is ruled in. So whatever theory we pick we can only ever confirm it. That makes it non-science (unfalsifiable). It's the scientific equivalent of mathematicians drawing up proofs about the empty set. "All elements are odd!" "No, all elements are even!" "No, all elements are little green frogs!."
What metric are you using to determine this? Human beings could exterminate all life on this planet if we wanted to. We can launch rockets into space. We can make fire. We can build methods of locomotion unseen in the natural world. We exterminated the scourge of small pox. We have effectively tripled our lifespan. We have built machines that burn with the power of the stars. Our computers rival those found in nature as does the beauty of our art forms. Our achievements make the Gods of the ancient world seem petty and pathetic.
Actually no -- we've vastly increased the number of people who reach that lifespan (no longer do most people pop their clogs from disease and malnutrition in their twenties and thirties), but the eldest members of society have been living to approximately the same age since Roman times. Strictly speaking, the biggest factor has been stopping dumping our faeces into our drinking water so fewer of us die from cholera and dysentery.
We can launch small rockets into very nearby space by bankrupting ourselves. We're as yet unable to fling stars into space, and with no likelihood of being able to do so. We could exterminate all life on the planet, but we can create neither new planets nor entirely new forms of life (though we can tweak the ones that are already here in tiny ways with genetic engineering). We do not in fact build machines "that burn with the power of the stars", but machines that burn with less than one billionth of the power of a single star because that is all we can handle and in any case we can't access the material to do more. That is somewhat less than the creation of the universe itself -- "the [alleged] achievements of the gods of the ancient world", to use your own comparison. We just big-note ourselves as if we were doing something much more grandiose than that, just as you have in your post above.
When you are trying to compare humanity to deity you are comparing the concept of scratching around to find out if a Higgs boson exists to the concept of saying "let there be bosons" and they are.
but damn are we marvellous by any of the standards we have devised
So we give ourselves an A by lowering the pass mark. Big deal. Earthworms are pretty good by their own standards too.
What are we to idolise if not that which is good in humankind?
You belie your need to worship and idolise something. If you choose not to believe in a god that is up to you. But when people try to ascribe humanity as "god", they inevitably have to lessen their definition of "god". And that smacks of desperation and mere egotism.
"If there is precisely zero evidence for heaven, why do people believe it exists?" - This is a legitimate scientific question that isn't satisfyingly answered at present.
Unfortunately not. "There is precisely zero evidence" because we rule out the self-reports as "evidence". But then we want to treat the self-reports as "evidence" when investigating the cause of this assumed delusion. We end up in the precarious position of assuming the evidence we wish to study is incorrect. That almost always leads to bad science. "Look, I've repeatedly made people think there's a light shining at them by pushing them over backwards so they look up at the Sun! It's clearly just because so many dying people fall on their backs!" or any other hooey explanation will suffice. Because the evidence is incorrect there are no limits as to how we can mistreat it -- it can't be made invalid because it was never valid in the first place.
From a philosophical perspective it's also problematic in two ways. First because logically the self-reports we are ruling incorrect are the only kind of evidence we could possibly get of something non-physical. Second, because assuming your subjects are wrong without being able to prove they are wrong is problematic -- so this kind of psychology study is one of the few where it does start to be necessary to "prove God does not exist" rather than just fail to prove he does. "80% of my subjects keep reporting bumping into trees! Research the cause of this clear delusion, because I choose not to believe in forests!"
Science works, that's how we figured out how to make computers, and refrigerators, and so on.
Actually, no. Science is how we figured out that evaporation has a cooling effect; the development of a refrigerator was a matter of invention and engineering. (James Harrison, who made the first practical refrigerator was an engineer but not strictly speaking a scientist). It is one of the rhetorical cheats of these discussions that "anything positive" gets retrospectively attributed as being science -- the rhetorical argument going: "everything good" is attributed as "science" (by widening my definition of science -- eg, to just personally testing if something works), thus "science" is everything good; I'm going to label whatever you say as "non-science" (by re-narrowing my definition of science -- eg, to require full peer-reviewed publication), thus whatever you say is not "everything good" and must be wrong-headed and vile.
The grandparent post's claim that "science is a religion" is to an extent true -- in that non-scientists often treat it as such. There is a popular belief without evidence that "eventually science will solve every problem". There is a popular belief counter to the evidence that "everything science says is True" when that is emphatically not the case (eg, JJ Thomson rightfully remains a hero of science even though his plum pudding model was wrong). There is an unrealistic idolisation of humanity on the grounds of our "great scientific achievements", when we're still pretty much as feeble, week, and transient as we ever were, just with a few more gadgets around the place, and more of us surviving to our (still very brief) hundred-odd years of life.
On the other hand, this could be exceptionally nasty in third world nations, especially in places where condoms aren't available or expensive.
You might want to revisit the statistics. Up to 1 in 6 Americans has herpes. Meanwhile, chlamydia infection rates have doubled in the last 10 years. Young people (15-24) make up half of all new STI infections each year. This is not some third world problem.
It won't be popular to say this on Slashdot, but it also turns out that your grandparents' solution (waiting until marriage) is very effective indeed: from the medical article "About 4 percent of those with one lifetime sex partner were found to have herpes, compared with about 27 percent of those who reported having 10 or more partners."
Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting)
That generally just means their political bent matches yours, so you don't notice it as much as in the papers you disagree with. In 1992, the Scott Trust (The Guardian's owner) explicitly declared "remaining faithful to liberal tradition" as part of its central objective for The Guardian. So it's not just "largely true"; it's part of the mission.
While US newspapers make a big palaver about their news reporting being politically neutral and objective, UK newspapers do not -- in the UK there is much greater recognition that the choice of what news to report is itself affected by the editor's political beliefs (what they consider important), so there can be no such thing as a politically neutral paper even if the articles are written in dry matter-of-fact language. Rather than trying to pretend to be above all that, the UK papers are instead fairly open about their editorial biases, and it's well known which ones lean towards which readerships -- for example the famous Yes Minister quote. Similarly, where I used to work we often found ourselves commenting in the tea room "The Independent is leading with a story on global warming. It must be Thursday." In short, the UK papers care about editorial independence but not neutrality.
The exception, of course, is the BBC, which has a legislative requirement to portray a "balanced" view on any political matter.
China has worked out how to be protectionist without being provably protectionist to the WTO. So, rather than offer an (illegal) export subsidy to it's manufacturers, it lowers its currency by regulation to give the same mathematical effect without allowing retaliation from other WTO countries. Rather than applying illegal tax or tariff penalties on foreign corporation, it uses clandestine hacking attempts, trumped up charges tried in closed courts (eg, Rio Tinto), and creates an environment where anybody could be arrested at any time at the government's whim, to make life uncomfortable for foreign corporations on its shores, while cosseting its own companies that have close ties to the government.
And, sadly, Obama, Brown, and other western leaders just play along, making comments like "we mustn't go down the seductive but damaging path of protectionism", not realising that their largest trading partner has already run gleefully down the path of protectionism and the west has just been too blind to notice.
Good news the UK government is getting involved in another large IT project... So we can assure ourself of two things, first off this will be hugely overbudget, and secondly it will never remotely do what they had originally intended. How is that NHS system coming? That nationwide police database? That system to monitor people entering and leaving the country?...
The UK government has a bad track record of IT. They do stuff by committee and hire tons of "consultants" who only seem to exist to get themselves more consultant work. Instead of just written an ironclad contract and giving the work to a third party they instead give it out to dozens of third parties with a big government organisation in the middle and then wonder why it won't fit together at the end.
The sad truth is that nobody ever asks IT guys who to complete IT projects. Can you imagine if nobody asked doctors how to cure sick people? Or asked the military how to win a war? Sigh, now I'm pressed. I need a drink.
You might want to rethink your examples. "Medical error" is one of the leading causes of death (far more than breast cancer or road accidents -- in the US equivalent to a major plane crash every second day); meanwhile the military's last two wars haven't been pinnacles of success either.
People "expect" IT projects to be straightforward -- it's just 1s and 0s, right? -- but neglect that when you introduce new IT you are changing effectively changing the work practices of everybody in the organisation. And for the NHS that is a bloomin' big organisation (the world's second largest employer). The expectation of "but surely it's easy, right?" is both the cause of bad IT, and also the cause of its bad reputation -- that somehow it should do better than other fields just because you naively think it is a simpler domain.
Yeah, who cares about the jobs lost? Those jobs are shit jobs. I mean, who wants to preserve a job that is retyping something that someone else wrote? Screw that. Free people up. Let them actually think about things.
It is the last part that is an issue. Where pencil and paper, and where telephones are concerned, the person at the other end in the UK still has some leeway to use their own common sense. For example, there are many tax issues to which the solution is "write a letter explaining the situation to your local tax office" (or phone them up and talk to someone). Where web forms are concerned, the fixed Java code at the other end doesn't really care a toss about any letters you write. You might moan about "inflexible bureaucrats", but automatic processing is even less flexible than that. Welcome to the world of "computer says no".
There is also always an overestimation of the amount of money saved. Not only because governments are bad at estimates (though they are) but because the government is the only employer that gets about a third of whatever it pays straight back in tax (more if you count the flow-on effects that they also tax everyone you buy anything from, so get a fair whack of your "after tax" income too).
Presumably it will also raise web development testing costs in the short term, as organisations feel less happy to test "just on the big three" but might not be any happier to assume that browsers all produce the same output than they are today? The long-term outlook might be more standards compliant pages, but the short term outlook might well be "Panic!"
Actually the subtler issue here has nothing to do with statistics, they are implying peer-review does not work.
"Peer review" is another of the things that has been over-sold to the public. A science research group spends six months and a hundred thousand dollars conducting a research study using highly specialised equipement. They submit a paper to an academic conference or a small journal. It gets put out to review by three people who each spend about four hours reading it and reviewing it, and who usually do not have access to the equipment or the original data that was used in the study. Do you really think we're likely to catch every mistake at review? We certainly can't check the stats (except for the most egregious errors) because we don't have the full data tables they analyzed.
Scientists actually accept that inevitably some incorrect results will be published. More often in the smaller conferences than in the most prestigious journals, but even the journals have to publish a retraction every now and then. We also accept that most studies are never repeated, and so the "objective repeatable experiment" is rarely really tested for being either objective or repeatable. However, science has long had the "many eyes" effect at work. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists reading papers and using them in our own experiments. If some theorised effect out there is wrong, usually we'll find out eventually.
Contrary to the parent poster's claim, the article does not focus on correlation vs causation. It focuses on people getting the correlation wrong in the first place. It lists several common mistakes scientists make when writing up research studies. (Not all scientists are very good at stats). These include:
If you run enough studies you are almost certain to find a difference that appears statistically significant at the p<0.05 level through chance alone. (It is incredibly unlikely that you will win the lottery; but across the whole pool of tickets someone wins it most weeks.) That makes studies that bulk analyze large amounts of data against many different factors, actively hunting for something that is significantly different, erroneous.
"p < 0.05" does not mean there is a 95% chance of your result being "true"; it just means that someone else rolling dice has a 5% chance of achieving the same result through chance alone.
Tests are often combined in ways that are mathematically inconsistent
Finding a statistical effect does not mean it is a strong effect
You cannot simply compare effect sizes between two studies because the results of their control groups may differ ("effect size analysis" is usually wrong)
Failing to find a significant effect does not mean there is no effect ("we found there was no significant effect on..." is misleading because "no satistical significance" is "no information" [your study didn't tell anybody anything] not "no effect" -- to prove "no effect" you need a different statistical test)
And lots of others. It then suggests Bayesian reasoning as an alternative to traditional statistical tests.
Most post-PhD scientists are aware of the common mistakes, but being aware that we make mistakes doesn't necessarily stop us from making them. If you chose a random set of conference proceedings, it is almost certain you will find at least one paper (and I suspect usually a dozen or more) that have statistical mistakes in them.
The paper is not entirely unreasonable. However, there are at least some holes in it.
It lumps good and bad security advice together. The economic benefit of following bad security advice (e.g., buying antivirus software) is zero or negative, so of course anybody would be rational to ignore such advice. That doesn't mean it should be lumped together with *good* security advice.
I'm sorry but it does. It's the "market for lemons" effect. The user cannot tell good advice from bad until after they've invested attention and effort into it (thoroughly reading, understanding, and evaluating something is, economically, effort) -- so rationally when they first see it they have to treat it all as suspect advice.
Why do authors often give names to chapters in their books, if they never intend on having chapters published individually?
Authors don't usually release "Best of..." albums and tours (like Pink Floyd's "Pulse") in with the best chapters from all their books are gathered together in a different order.
Why would MS even care?
In fact if Novell fails, along with what recently happened with MySQL and Open Solaris, MS can brag about how proprietary software is the way to go.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if MS bought Novell for precisely that reason. They might even push WINE and Mono so that SUSE can be seen as "the cheap (connotation of rubbishy) system that you play with before buying Windows licenses when you want to do things for real." Turn your competitors into loss-leaders (as Oracle seems intent on doing with MySQL).
Gabe Newell is ex-Microsoft. Of the consoles, he's always going to have a preference for the one that (a) is most similar to the other platform they target (PC), and (b) is produced by his old buddies.
IIRC, however, Valve have said they are reconsidering their position on this -- possibly because PS3 sales have climbed since the PS3 Slim came out. In any case, however, I would not expect to see Steam on PS3 (Sony might not like a competing distribution channel to Playstation Store), but perhaps the future games they write will come to PS3.
many people use Internet Explorer simply because they are unaware of alternatives.
Correction: many people use Internet Explorer simply because they don't care about alternatives. Seriously, to you it might be a big deal whether you're using Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 or Chrome's latest beta... for most people out there it's just the logo you click to get through to Facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
The software is free, the developer's time is not. You're free to use the software however you choose, but if you want the developer to spend his time working to your schedule, then you may have to make it worth his while.
It's the open source ineconomy of scale. A million organisations can use a piece of software, and all want the same new feature added. But if any organisation says "add the feature, Joe" they have to pay full price for the change as if they were the only user, because the feature is given free to all the other 999,999 users rather than sharing the cost. So, of course, nobody does -- while the feature might be worth $1,000 to each of the million organisations it's not worth the $10,000 it would cost to develop to any of them. So it never gets developed.
What are the my web proxy settings again?
Almost never entered by individual users.
/. is displayed a tree.
Slashdot of course being famous for never devolving into deeply threaded arguments amongst small numbers of people...
Most readers will let you ignore a whole branch of a tree, or all posts from a specific user (with a single cilck!), or posts matching other criteria (subject, length, etc).
And most actual readers (people) will never use those settings. Given that discussion behaviour depends on the actions of a forum-full of people, it doesn't matter if "I'm alright Jack", if the others wander off because of all the forking and devolution into one-on-one flamewars (and the market stats are that they have wandered off) you haven't got your discussion.
Google cache?
And when was the last time you said to yourself "I don't think I'll visit the forum today even though it's up; instead I'll work out the Google Cache URL for the forum topic to see what might be there instead"?
One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.
What you describe as a "serious problem" is also its major benefit. In no particular order:
... I agreed with the results ... It was all pretty obvious, I don't think anyone was unfairly persecuted, ever.
However, this is all still opinion. People have not usually been using objective ways of determining whether a system produces false positive and at what rate, but only opinion-based ways. As someone who may need to examine students, that worries me. We're all aware of confirmation bias, and that if you are presented with code that a similarity-matching algorithm says is unexpectedly similar, shock-horror, you're likely to think "hmm, that's unexpectedly similar". The presumption of innocence is replaced with a mere sanity check of "yeah, they look guilty, stick it to 'em". And so it seems that if we were in charge, we'd design the lottery that never pays out. My goodness, most weeks someone has picked the same numbers as the machine! The likelihood of getting those numbers at random is tiny! They must have cheated! Forget your payout, here's your ticket to jail matey!
There are ways to solve the problem, but I don't think people have been doing them much.
However, as an intentionally child-free taxpayer, I really do hate paying for other people's sprogs.
And many of those sprogs might hate paying for your Medicaid and retirement.
Much as some intentionally-childless moan about "having to support other people's children", technically it is the other way around. By deciding not to have children, you aren't "receiving less from the government", economically you are co-investing less in future taxpayers. From a tax and social policy perspective, in the current system, it is the height of selfishness to decide to be childless and put neither the money nor the child-rearing effort into maintaining society into the future.
This acquisition was never about software. People assumed it was, because software is all they know about Sun. But most of the revenue came from selling hardware
It's not Sun's revenues that are relevant -- if Sun's revenues were good enough it would have been able to stand on its own two feet. Oracle's revenues are all about software and in it's expansion from databases into other middleware, it had bet the house on Java. The words "Our biggest competitor is talking about buying the company that directs the stuff we are totally reliant on [IBM bidding for Sun]" would rightly have been ringing alarm bells in Larry Ellison's ears whether he was on the yacht or not. Oracle needed to buy Sun for the software, because if IBM had got the software Oracle would have faced massive risks to its business. IBM might well have ripped up the JCP, taken Java inside the eclipse foundation (which Oracle is only a reluctant member of), and skewed the whole development of the platform away from Oracle.
Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind?
I don't; I demand it of the concept of deity. The entire point of having a word "deity" is to mean something beyond that which humans can achieve, just as "supernatural" does not mean "natural". And historically "deity" and "god" is entirely linked to beliefs about creation. That's not a question of whether you believe such a thing exists but a straightforward matter of language. As I say, if you wish not to believe in a god that is up to you. But that is no reason to abuse the language so you can pretend that humanity is one.
In any case, if you go back and read my original post, I pointed out that some do indeed treat science as a religion by elevating man's achievements as deity. In your case, that is quite literally true by your own declaration. So not only are your rantings and railings against god and religion off-topic, but so too is this whole debate about whether you are "right" to elevate man as deity, so I'll leave it there. Feel free to have the last word if you wish to reply.
You conflate these two concepts when they are not the same thing. One explanation for a person thinking they experienced X is that they did in fact experience X. Another is that they were deluded.
No, in fact I said that having to conflate them is the problem. We have to ascribe the state of delusion to them on no evidence, but we also have to assume their memory of the event was perfect even though we are claiming they were deluded (if their recollection was flawed, then perhaps they didn't even experience it). So we find ourselves picking and choosing what to believe as accurate or inaccurate, based on the researchers' own preconceived model, and these picks and choices end up being the main driver of the conclusions. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- anything that doesn't fit the model is ruled out of the evidence, while anything that confirms the model is ruled in. So whatever theory we pick we can only ever confirm it. That makes it non-science (unfalsifiable). It's the scientific equivalent of mathematicians drawing up proofs about the empty set. "All elements are odd!" "No, all elements are even!" "No, all elements are little green frogs!."
What metric are you using to determine this? Human beings could exterminate all life on this planet if we wanted to. We can launch rockets into space. We can make fire. We can build methods of locomotion unseen in the natural world. We exterminated the scourge of small pox. We have effectively tripled our lifespan. We have built machines that burn with the power of the stars. Our computers rival those found in nature as does the beauty of our art forms. Our achievements make the Gods of the ancient world seem petty and pathetic.
Actually no -- we've vastly increased the number of people who reach that lifespan (no longer do most people pop their clogs from disease and malnutrition in their twenties and thirties), but the eldest members of society have been living to approximately the same age since Roman times. Strictly speaking, the biggest factor has been stopping dumping our faeces into our drinking water so fewer of us die from cholera and dysentery.
We can launch small rockets into very nearby space by bankrupting ourselves. We're as yet unable to fling stars into space, and with no likelihood of being able to do so. We could exterminate all life on the planet, but we can create neither new planets nor entirely new forms of life (though we can tweak the ones that are already here in tiny ways with genetic engineering). We do not in fact build machines "that burn with the power of the stars", but machines that burn with less than one billionth of the power of a single star because that is all we can handle and in any case we can't access the material to do more. That is somewhat less than the creation of the universe itself -- "the [alleged] achievements of the gods of the ancient world", to use your own comparison. We just big-note ourselves as if we were doing something much more grandiose than that, just as you have in your post above.
When you are trying to compare humanity to deity you are comparing the concept of scratching around to find out if a Higgs boson exists to the concept of saying "let there be bosons" and they are.
but damn are we marvellous by any of the standards we have devised
So we give ourselves an A by lowering the pass mark. Big deal. Earthworms are pretty good by their own standards too.
What are we to idolise if not that which is good in humankind?
You belie your need to worship and idolise something. If you choose not to believe in a god that is up to you. But when people try to ascribe humanity as "god", they inevitably have to lessen their definition of "god". And that smacks of desperation and mere egotism.
"If there is precisely zero evidence for heaven, why do people believe it exists?" - This is a legitimate scientific question that isn't satisfyingly answered at present.
Unfortunately not. "There is precisely zero evidence" because we rule out the self-reports as "evidence". But then we want to treat the self-reports as "evidence" when investigating the cause of this assumed delusion. We end up in the precarious position of assuming the evidence we wish to study is incorrect. That almost always leads to bad science. "Look, I've repeatedly made people think there's a light shining at them by pushing them over backwards so they look up at the Sun! It's clearly just because so many dying people fall on their backs!" or any other hooey explanation will suffice. Because the evidence is incorrect there are no limits as to how we can mistreat it -- it can't be made invalid because it was never valid in the first place.
From a philosophical perspective it's also problematic in two ways. First because logically the self-reports we are ruling incorrect are the only kind of evidence we could possibly get of something non-physical. Second, because assuming your subjects are wrong without being able to prove they are wrong is problematic -- so this kind of psychology study is one of the few where it does start to be necessary to "prove God does not exist" rather than just fail to prove he does. "80% of my subjects keep reporting bumping into trees! Research the cause of this clear delusion, because I choose not to believe in forests!"
Science works, that's how we figured out how to make computers, and refrigerators, and so on.
Actually, no. Science is how we figured out that evaporation has a cooling effect; the development of a refrigerator was a matter of invention and engineering. (James Harrison, who made the first practical refrigerator was an engineer but not strictly speaking a scientist). It is one of the rhetorical cheats of these discussions that "anything positive" gets retrospectively attributed as being science -- the rhetorical argument going: "everything good" is attributed as "science" (by widening my definition of science -- eg, to just personally testing if something works), thus "science" is everything good; I'm going to label whatever you say as "non-science" (by re-narrowing my definition of science -- eg, to require full peer-reviewed publication), thus whatever you say is not "everything good" and must be wrong-headed and vile.
The grandparent post's claim that "science is a religion" is to an extent true -- in that non-scientists often treat it as such. There is a popular belief without evidence that "eventually science will solve every problem". There is a popular belief counter to the evidence that "everything science says is True" when that is emphatically not the case (eg, JJ Thomson rightfully remains a hero of science even though his plum pudding model was wrong). There is an unrealistic idolisation of humanity on the grounds of our "great scientific achievements", when we're still pretty much as feeble, week, and transient as we ever were, just with a few more gadgets around the place, and more of us surviving to our (still very brief) hundred-odd years of life.
On the other hand, this could be exceptionally nasty in third world nations, especially in places where condoms aren't available or expensive.
You might want to revisit the statistics. Up to 1 in 6 Americans has herpes. Meanwhile, chlamydia infection rates have doubled in the last 10 years. Young people (15-24) make up half of all new STI infections each year. This is not some third world problem.
It won't be popular to say this on Slashdot, but it also turns out that your grandparents' solution (waiting until marriage) is very effective indeed: from the medical article "About 4 percent of those with one lifetime sex partner were found to have herpes, compared with about 27 percent of those who reported having 10 or more partners."
Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting)
That generally just means their political bent matches yours, so you don't notice it as much as in the papers you disagree with. In 1992, the Scott Trust (The Guardian's owner) explicitly declared "remaining faithful to liberal tradition" as part of its central objective for The Guardian. So it's not just "largely true"; it's part of the mission.
While US newspapers make a big palaver about their news reporting being politically neutral and objective, UK newspapers do not -- in the UK there is much greater recognition that the choice of what news to report is itself affected by the editor's political beliefs (what they consider important), so there can be no such thing as a politically neutral paper even if the articles are written in dry matter-of-fact language. Rather than trying to pretend to be above all that, the UK papers are instead fairly open about their editorial biases, and it's well known which ones lean towards which readerships -- for example the famous Yes Minister quote. Similarly, where I used to work we often found ourselves commenting in the tea room "The Independent is leading with a story on global warming. It must be Thursday." In short, the UK papers care about editorial independence but not neutrality.
The exception, of course, is the BBC, which has a legislative requirement to portray a "balanced" view on any political matter.
China has worked out how to be protectionist without being provably protectionist to the WTO. So, rather than offer an (illegal) export subsidy to it's manufacturers, it lowers its currency by regulation to give the same mathematical effect without allowing retaliation from other WTO countries. Rather than applying illegal tax or tariff penalties on foreign corporation, it uses clandestine hacking attempts, trumped up charges tried in closed courts (eg, Rio Tinto), and creates an environment where anybody could be arrested at any time at the government's whim, to make life uncomfortable for foreign corporations on its shores, while cosseting its own companies that have close ties to the government.
And, sadly, Obama, Brown, and other western leaders just play along, making comments like "we mustn't go down the seductive but damaging path of protectionism", not realising that their largest trading partner has already run gleefully down the path of protectionism and the west has just been too blind to notice.
Good news the UK government is getting involved in another large IT project... So we can assure ourself of two things, first off this will be hugely overbudget, and secondly it will never remotely do what they had originally intended. How is that NHS system coming? That nationwide police database? That system to monitor people entering and leaving the country? ...
The UK government has a bad track record of IT. They do stuff by committee and hire tons of "consultants" who only seem to exist to get themselves more consultant work. Instead of just written an ironclad contract and giving the work to a third party they instead give it out to dozens of third parties with a big government organisation in the middle and then wonder why it won't fit together at the end.
The sad truth is that nobody ever asks IT guys who to complete IT projects. Can you imagine if nobody asked doctors how to cure sick people? Or asked the military how to win a war? Sigh, now I'm pressed. I need a drink.
You might want to rethink your examples. "Medical error" is one of the leading causes of death (far more than breast cancer or road accidents -- in the US equivalent to a major plane crash every second day); meanwhile the military's last two wars haven't been pinnacles of success either.
People "expect" IT projects to be straightforward -- it's just 1s and 0s, right? -- but neglect that when you introduce new IT you are changing effectively changing the work practices of everybody in the organisation. And for the NHS that is a bloomin' big organisation (the world's second largest employer). The expectation of "but surely it's easy, right?" is both the cause of bad IT, and also the cause of its bad reputation -- that somehow it should do better than other fields just because you naively think it is a simpler domain.
Yeah, who cares about the jobs lost? Those jobs are shit jobs. I mean, who wants to preserve a job that is retyping something that someone else wrote? Screw that. Free people up. Let them actually think about things.
It is the last part that is an issue. Where pencil and paper, and where telephones are concerned, the person at the other end in the UK still has some leeway to use their own common sense. For example, there are many tax issues to which the solution is "write a letter explaining the situation to your local tax office" (or phone them up and talk to someone). Where web forms are concerned, the fixed Java code at the other end doesn't really care a toss about any letters you write. You might moan about "inflexible bureaucrats", but automatic processing is even less flexible than that. Welcome to the world of "computer says no".
There is also always an overestimation of the amount of money saved. Not only because governments are bad at estimates (though they are) but because the government is the only employer that gets about a third of whatever it pays straight back in tax (more if you count the flow-on effects that they also tax everyone you buy anything from, so get a fair whack of your "after tax" income too).
Presumably it will also raise web development testing costs in the short term, as organisations feel less happy to test "just on the big three" but might not be any happier to assume that browsers all produce the same output than they are today? The long-term outlook might be more standards compliant pages, but the short term outlook might well be "Panic!"
Actually the subtler issue here has nothing to do with statistics, they are implying peer-review does not work.
"Peer review" is another of the things that has been over-sold to the public. A science research group spends six months and a hundred thousand dollars conducting a research study using highly specialised equipement. They submit a paper to an academic conference or a small journal. It gets put out to review by three people who each spend about four hours reading it and reviewing it, and who usually do not have access to the equipment or the original data that was used in the study. Do you really think we're likely to catch every mistake at review? We certainly can't check the stats (except for the most egregious errors) because we don't have the full data tables they analyzed.
Scientists actually accept that inevitably some incorrect results will be published. More often in the smaller conferences than in the most prestigious journals, but even the journals have to publish a retraction every now and then. We also accept that most studies are never repeated, and so the "objective repeatable experiment" is rarely really tested for being either objective or repeatable. However, science has long had the "many eyes" effect at work. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists reading papers and using them in our own experiments. If some theorised effect out there is wrong, usually we'll find out eventually.
And lots of others. It then suggests Bayesian reasoning as an alternative to traditional statistical tests.
Most post-PhD scientists are aware of the common mistakes, but being aware that we make mistakes doesn't necessarily stop us from making them. If you chose a random set of conference proceedings, it is almost certain you will find at least one paper (and I suspect usually a dozen or more) that have statistical mistakes in them.
The paper is not entirely unreasonable. However, there are at least some holes in it. It lumps good and bad security advice together. The economic benefit of following bad security advice (e.g., buying antivirus software) is zero or negative, so of course anybody would be rational to ignore such advice. That doesn't mean it should be lumped together with *good* security advice.
I'm sorry but it does. It's the "market for lemons" effect. The user cannot tell good advice from bad until after they've invested attention and effort into it (thoroughly reading, understanding, and evaluating something is, economically, effort) -- so rationally when they first see it they have to treat it all as suspect advice.
...there was an 'i' in 'team'.
Why do authors often give names to chapters in their books, if they never intend on having chapters published individually?
Authors don't usually release "Best of..." albums and tours (like Pink Floyd's "Pulse") in with the best chapters from all their books are gathered together in a different order.
Why would MS even care? In fact if Novell fails, along with what recently happened with MySQL and Open Solaris, MS can brag about how proprietary software is the way to go.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if MS bought Novell for precisely that reason. They might even push WINE and Mono so that SUSE can be seen as "the cheap (connotation of rubbishy) system that you play with before buying Windows licenses when you want to do things for real." Turn your competitors into loss-leaders (as Oracle seems intent on doing with MySQL).
Why is valve ignoring ps3?
Gabe Newell is ex-Microsoft. Of the consoles, he's always going to have a preference for the one that (a) is most similar to the other platform they target (PC), and (b) is produced by his old buddies.
IIRC, however, Valve have said they are reconsidering their position on this -- possibly because PS3 sales have climbed since the PS3 Slim came out. In any case, however, I would not expect to see Steam on PS3 (Sony might not like a competing distribution channel to Playstation Store), but perhaps the future games they write will come to PS3.
many people use Internet Explorer simply because they are unaware of alternatives.
Correction: many people use Internet Explorer simply because they don't care about alternatives. Seriously, to you it might be a big deal whether you're using Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 or Chrome's latest beta... for most people out there it's just the logo you click to get through to Facebook.