Are you trolling? Google (probably) treats clicks on Google's own search results page as evidence. Microsoft treats clicks on their competitor's search results page (via IE toolbar spying) as evidence. And you're suggesting that's the same?
Bing treats clicks on any links anywhere as evidence, just as Google's crawler treats links on any page anywhere as evidence. The whole "on their competitor's search results page" is a furphy, and is much the same as how Google's crawler has treated links on their competitor (Yahoo)'s directory as evidence for years -- sounds shocking until you add the "...amongst millions of other sources of evidence". You could actually run an almost identical sting on Google. If you snuck a link to a page for "znahanadakas" onto Yahoo's directory, then yup the Yahoo-pointed site would soon be the top link on Google Search. Should we run a "Google copies Yahoo" headline then? That is almost precisely the equivalent of what Google did to Bing here.
And an official investigation of the same would be just as large a waste of money as the investigation into Google's activities. I'm surprised that you're not talking about the real issue.
Ever thought of going into politics? Your line in saying "I'm surprised your not talking about the real issue, which is..." whenever you're having difficulty and need to change the topic of the argument is highly polished!
It's like a student cheating on his homework by copying the smart kid. It will only work as long as the smart kid sticks around.
Except, it's more like taking a statistical survey across all the schools in the state, and then Willy Watkins from class 7B in Bloggsville School says "some of my data is in your survey -- therefore you're copying my results! He then carefully finds a tiny number of searches where there are very few data points other than his, so his data is prominent. But there aren't enough of those so he invents some fake data -- words like "hiybbprqag" -- creates some links for them in a bogus results page, and pays people to install Bing's toolbar and click on the links so the data of them clicking on that link with a referrer URL including the search term "hiybbprqag" will be sent to Bing. He then complains bitterly that Bing, which has just seen a gazillion reported web requests for that URL and with a referrer URL including "search...q=hiybbprqag", thinks that gee maybe that URL might have something to do with "hiybbprqag". He contacts the media and gives them the headline "Bing copies Willy Watkins!"
Bing treats toolbar-reported clicks-on-links as evidence of relevance, just as every search engine including Google's treats page links themselves as evidence of relevance. With Google being the second most visited site on the planet, of course some of the click data is likely to have ended up being from search results pages. Just as some of Google's link data will have come from Microsoft properties like msn.com. And some will come from Slashdot, and maybe even a tiny trillionth of a percentage will come from my blog. And perhaps if I make up a word, say "znapgipslacaragilgar", and put a link with that in the title on my blog, my blog link will eventually turn up in Google's search results for that term. Would that mean Google shut put a "powered by Will's insignificant blog" button on their homepage, or I that I should get headlines saying they copied me? The proportions may end up being different, but the situation is the same: in search everybody is copying everybody's data. While Google may own their search results page, they do not own the user's click on a link. And it appears to be that -- the user's click on a link -- not the search results page that Bing is using.
If it is entered as evidence, won't that make it more likely that someone takes advantage of the legal system and spreads it around further?
So what if it does. The primary function of a prosecution is to charge and convict an (alleged) perpetrator, not to agonize about whether the evidence will be stolen. Court cases can be held "in camera" to prevent information spread, but the legal system's duty to uphold the law is not negated by the chance of someone (illegally) stealing the evidence if it is handed in.
The press repeating pseudoscience as fact? Say it ain't so!
Ah, but if there's an infinite number of universes there is no science -- every paper that passed peer review failed peer review in many universes other than ours! Why should we give such credulity to the mere chance of being in a universe where this theory was published!:-)
There is a more fundamental problem: there is no "we".
To any given subjective human, the only evidence of the current universe existing is their first-hand experience of it. So for instance, the only evidence for you that this universe "exists" (whereas the universe of Conway's Game of Life, or of that game of Quake you just played, or any other mathematical universe, does not actually "exist") is that you are observing being within it. Quite clearly, at any given split, you do not experience being in the "other" universes. This puts them in the same bucket as that Game of Life, Quake, or whatever -- mathematically they are lovely but to any observer/reasoner they cannot be said to "exist" because you cannot be within them. The thought that somebody else or some other you might be experiencing the other universe is neither here nor there -- even if you'd like to think of an infinite succession of "you" splitting off from yourself at every moment, you cannot experience being those other people or other selves and as such cannot observe evidence of any universe existing except this one. Or to put it another way, for all observers other universes "really existing" is identical to other universes "really not existing".
(The "split" versus "collapse" within the box is neither here nor there: that split or collapse still always appears to occur within the physics of the observer's universe, and as such still only 1 universe is ever observed or can ever be observed.)
So if "an infinite number of universes exist" is essentially identical to "actually, no they don't", then that infinite number of universes does rather look like that imaginary teaset in space... The argument that it makes the equations simpler (so you don't have to consider special cases) doesn't pass muster -- it would make the equations much simpler to pretend that God created the universe this instant, all the experiments are just fake memories, and so there's no such thing as physics in the first place, but that tends not to be considered good science!
To answer your own question -- "does collapse only happen when *I* make a measurement? If so, why should I be uniquely privileged?" -- for all values of "you", "you" (the observer/reasoner) must be uniquely privileged because you are the only person that can empirically declare that anything exists at all.
Sorry to segue into philosophy, but when you're talking about matters of what it means to exist, it usually does come back to St Augustine / Descartes. ("Even if I am mistaken, I am" and "I think [observe] theferfore I am". If those other universes are provably unreachable from that declaration of existence then there is no difference from their non-existence.)
If you want privacy then build a Faraday cage. Once you emit any electromagnetic radiation outside the bounds of your property, you have no expectation of privacy whatsoever. If I can see what you're doing from outside of your property, you're not handling your privacy correctly. It's your fault. Stop trying to legislate solutions for a problem that only you can fix.
So those pesky Eastern European communists, who did the equivalent of Google's actions (paying people to listen in on your conversations throughout all the major cities, noting down everything they could overhear), those were fine hey? No need to legislate against things like that?
They said they will destroy it, either they do or they don't, it doesn't matter because they will do what they choose. But why go handing a copy over to every state who asks for it?
Because it is evidence of an (alleged) crime. In the next episode of CSI... "No, no, destroy that DNA right now -- I don't care if the killer will get away with it, we musn't invade anybody's privacy!"
I was walking on the sidewalk by his house, and he shouted out the window that he just farted. I took out a notepad and wrote down that the guy just farted. Then he sued me for invasion of privacy. ---> Guy gets laughed out of court.
Same but then something difficult involving "computers and stuff" ---> Guy can make it stick ??!!??
Organise a paid group of people to walk down the streets of every major city, with explicit instructions (equivalent of computer code) to listen for and write down every private conversation they can overhear, and yes you probably will be sued and no it wouldn't be laughed out of court. And if you are arrested by the police and refuse to hand over the notebooks as evidence for the court, saying a big "up yours, cop, my name's Google and everybody knows I can't do anything wrong no matter what your pissy little laws and courts say" things would not go well for you.
But then this is Slashdot where Google is the equivalent of just one guy who didn't know what he was doing...
Really? A company is under official investigation on three continents for the largest unauthorised capture of private information that has ever happened?
/me stares. If I hire a million men to walk through the streets of every major city on earth recording the conversations of those that they pass by, is that a crime? This is *certainly* an unauthorized capture; but should one take issue it?
It would certainly be newsworthy, which is the topic of conversation here...
Even the streetview wireless thing was really a non-event until it was blown way out of proportion by the Murdoch press.
Really? A company is under official investigation on three continents for the largest unauthorised capture of private information that has ever happened? How exactly do you blow that out of proportion in the press? Regardless of what the outcome will be or whether you label it "evil", by any measure it was most certainly a newsworthy event.
Not to get completely off the subject, but there are many perfectly understandable proofs of why 0.999... = 1. For instance, one of the things that defines what a real number is that it is not exactly the same as a different number. Seems pretty common sense, huh? So what number, exactly, comes between 0.999... and 1? Like you said, those 9s go on forever, so if there is nothing that you can add to the first term to turn it into the second, they must be the same. They are just 2 different ways of expressing the exact same number. You probably don't have a problem with the idea that 1/3 =.333..., so multiply both sides by 3 and what do you get?
There's even a wikipedia page that I'd totally paste in here if Chrome was able to do so.
More to the point, what you are effectively saying with the "..." in 0.999... is Lim[n->infinity] Sum[m - 1.. n] (9 * 10 ^ -m) and the result of that limit equation turns out to be 1.
In this case "wrong" is applicable because I.D. supporters are attempting to portray I.D. as science, and establish a perception of equivalent validity to big bang/evolutionary theories, but without any support beyond "the accepted scientific theories have some holes" and playing up semantic differences in the definition of "theory". As people have brought up many times in this discussion, ID is not a valid scientific theory (or even hypothesis) because it is inherently untestable, unverifiable, and unable to be disproven.
So if I hire a bunch of people to portray the US constitution as science and to try (badly) to establish a perception of equivalent scientific validity for it, does the US constitution then become "wrong"? If so, it'd be a really cool way to get any law or other non-science thing overturned! "Not science" != "wrong", even if there's a bunch of angry campaigners standing on the sidelines shouting "but we think it's science". Again, whether or not ID is wrong, and whether or not ID is science, "ID is not science" and "ID is wrong" are not the same statement.
Pedant mode: you shouldn't conflate "wrong" with "not science". The US constitution, today's newspaper, "I think therefore I am", my son coming in to tell me he's had a bad dream -- none of these are science (I'm yet to peer review my son's claim to have had a bad dream!) but that alone does not make them wrong. Whether or not ID is "wrong", and whether or not ID is "not science", "not science" is not the same as "wrong".
So according to the article, nearly half Google's patents (282 of 576) were granted in 2010... that's quite a change in attitude towards patents at Google then if they are suddenly getting so many!
Well what is fair? Racial discrimination clearly isn't, and we now have laws to enforce that. (Note that we needed laws to make that happen, which is to say that life in its unguarded state isn't fair).
But you can extend fairness to a ridiculous extreme just as easily. Would you go to a baseball game if the guy at bat could say, "I haven't hit the ball as much as the other team. Pitch slower so that it's fair."
Would you enjoy that? Of course not.
Part of the problem with this world is the "everybody who shows up gets a gold star" mentality. Would you want a brain surgeon operating on you that attended a pass/fail curriculum? Of course not.
That's how life is. Not fair. Some people will be better than you at your job. Some people will be paid more for knowing less (see: Managers).
You can give yourself an ulcer worrying about it, or you can accept it. And if you're unhappy in your current circumstance, then change it. Don't complain about fairness - it's an artificial concept. It doesn't exist in nature. Gazelles don't tell lions that it isn't fair for them to eat them. Wouldn't work. So my advice is, if that's how the system is - then work towards being a lion.
My goodness, I've never seen the Chewbacca defence attempted so brazenly before -- thank you I genuinely enjoyed reading that. Your response to it being succinctly pointed out that actually there is legislation requiring pay and conditions to be fair (and outlawing age discrimination)? To give a longwinded monologue about other things you think are fair or unfair, baseball, gold stars, availability of good surgeons, and even finishing off with hairy beasts! Well done, points for audacity!
This is also rhetoric - it's a very old trick to silence your critics. 1. Challenge your opponents to make predictions on a 10 year timescale. 2a. If they accept, for the next 10 years you say "You can't criticise me yet, wait til the 10 years are up!" 2b. If they don't accept, for the next 10 years you say "Clearly you don't really know what you're talking about or you'd have been happy to accept my 10 year challenge."
And that gives you 10 years where you can bat away any criticism, without needing to produce any evidence, and take the moral high ground while you're at it.
3. After 10 years, make a very slightly revised challenge (for the following 10 years). "Ah, yes but if we include the new Blenkinsop adjustment then yes it would have warmed slightly in the previous 10 years, but that minor fluctuation is nothing to the cooling that will take place in the following 10 years..." 4. Repeat ad infinitum.
And hey presto, you can say whatever you like for as long as you like.
I don't get why goods are so bloody expensive in Australia. I was there for 6 months in 2009... I wanted to buy the Lonely Planet guide to New Zealand, which was the next destination on my travels. A$45 from the main book shop chain in Melbourne, or A$37 from Amazon in the UK (including probably about $20 AIRMAIL shipping). How the hell can goods be over twice the price, and still considerably more expensive than goods shipped on planes from almost the exact opposite side of the planet? I hear stories like this all the time from my Aussie friends.
The main problem is the shopping centres, which push rents up and also try to push local shops out and replace them with large chains. In the UK, the shopping centres have to compete with the high street. In Australia, you'd get sunburnt to a frazzle in 20 minutes if you tried to walk down the high street, so shopping centres rule the roost. Westfield has a near-monopoly, and in any case each major shopping centres are local monopolies.
This debate has been making headlines here for a few weeks now and the thing I find most ironic is that no one has bothered to suggest that just maybe the GST should be simply abolished - everyone seems to accept the idea that the government sticking its hand in your pocket every time you make a purchase as some kind of natural law. This baffles me: the left should naturally be against it because it disproportionately taxes the poor and the right should be against it because it's a tax that is administered non-voluntarily buy businesses without recompense.
I forgot who said it first, but there's an old satirical comment about the difference between political theory and political reality -- it goes something like "Political theory is that the left should hate the GST because it's regressive and the right should hate it because it enlarges the state. Political reality is that the left loves the GST because it enlarges the state, and the right loves the GST because it's regressive."
The problem Gerry Harvey and co have is not that their goods are 10% more expensive then the equivalent goods online, the problem Harvey and co have is that their goods are 50% more expensive then the equivalent online.
Except when was the last time you actually paid the sticker price in a Harvey Norman, Retravision, etc? There is pretty much a cultural expectation in Australia that electrical and whitegoods shops will knock another 15% off the price if you just mutter something like "hmm, what price can you give me if I buy it today"? I have almost always found that you're actually better off looking up an on-line price, then popping into your nearest shop and mentioning it to the salesperson. They will then pop over to their computer, work out what the minimum they are actually allowed to sell it to you for is, and it's usually within about $10-15 bucks of the online price but you don't have to wait or pay for delivery because they can help you take it to your car right now.
The problem is that the statement "there are ghosts" is not falsifiable. There isn't an experiment you can perform that will prove they don't exist. Maybe the experiment scared them away, or they just didn't turn up etc.
The statement "there are no ghosts" is falsifiable. It can be proved wrong by demonstrating the existence of the ghost.
Technically not quite true. Follow it through - how do you demonstrate the existence of the ghost? You have to demonstrate that the supposed "ghost" could not have had a mundane (physical) explanation, and bugger we're back to proving a negative again. "There are no ghosts" is not practically falsifiable because any falsification itself cannot be falsified (and thus can never be accepted).
This sort of issue is always going to devolve to a philosophical argument. The reason being that strict materialsim ("the only things that exist are material and repeatable") is not only a claim of a negative, but intentionally rules out any evidence that might falsify it. "If it is material and repeatable it can be accepted as evidence and supports our hypothesis that everything is material. But if it is not material and repeatable it will be thrown out as evidence and thus there still is no evidence against our hypothesis that everything is material and repeatable."
Normally this doesn't matter. Science doesn't actually need everything in the universe to be repeatable and material, but just cares that some things are so that we can go and find them with experiments. But when you then want to apply science to things that are claimed to be non-material, that's where you start hitting issues around fundamental philosophical assumptions about the nature of existence.
I don't see how playing into your families delusions helps them or you? Why not hunt for the Easter Bunny with them, or Santa... or setup a trap for the tooth fairy.
Slightly funny anecdote, but childrens' belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy is entirely scientific. Every time, they conduct a falsifiable experiment (put out a cookie / tooth that might not be consumed / taken) and every time they come back with a positive result. They even do peer review, asking their fellow peers (children) what their results were (what they got from Santa), and even validate the experiment with respected and more experienced experimenters of the past (their parents, who swear blind that the results are genuine). They are only thwarted because there really is a grand world-wide ongoing conspiracy to interfere with their experiments and falsify their results.
What was he thinking? Threatening to sue? Did he really say he "owned" the documents?
Oh dear, I have a nasty feeling this will come back to bite him if the US prosecutes. "Responsible whistleblower", "acting in the public interest", "public right to know", all those usual defences for publishing classified information tend go get a teensy bit undermined if you've been caught saying that really your motivation in publishing this classified information is personal financial gain.
A pity, because personally I thought the take-home message from this whole saga so far was that it seemed actually governments could operate much more openly without the world crashing to its knees after all -- the much-feared releases, as published in The Guardian etc, had been very interesting and informative but had been received by the world at large in a very calm and reasonable manner, without disastrous consequences after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you trolling? Google (probably) treats clicks on Google's own search results page as evidence. Microsoft treats clicks on their competitor's search results page (via IE toolbar spying) as evidence. And you're suggesting that's the same?
Bing treats clicks on any links anywhere as evidence, just as Google's crawler treats links on any page anywhere as evidence. The whole "on their competitor's search results page" is a furphy, and is much the same as how Google's crawler has treated links on their competitor (Yahoo)'s directory as evidence for years -- sounds shocking until you add the "...amongst millions of other sources of evidence". You could actually run an almost identical sting on Google. If you snuck a link to a page for "znahanadakas" onto Yahoo's directory, then yup the Yahoo-pointed site would soon be the top link on Google Search. Should we run a "Google copies Yahoo" headline then? That is almost precisely the equivalent of what Google did to Bing here.
And an official investigation of the same would be just as large a waste of money as the investigation into Google's activities. I'm surprised that you're not talking about the real issue.
Ever thought of going into politics? Your line in saying "I'm surprised your not talking about the real issue, which is..." whenever you're having difficulty and need to change the topic of the argument is highly polished!
It's like a student cheating on his homework by copying the smart kid. It will only work as long as the smart kid sticks around.
Except, it's more like taking a statistical survey across all the schools in the state, and then Willy Watkins from class 7B in Bloggsville School says "some of my data is in your survey -- therefore you're copying my results! He then carefully finds a tiny number of searches where there are very few data points other than his, so his data is prominent. But there aren't enough of those so he invents some fake data -- words like "hiybbprqag" -- creates some links for them in a bogus results page, and pays people to install Bing's toolbar and click on the links so the data of them clicking on that link with a referrer URL including the search term "hiybbprqag" will be sent to Bing. He then complains bitterly that Bing, which has just seen a gazillion reported web requests for that URL and with a referrer URL including "search...q=hiybbprqag", thinks that gee maybe that URL might have something to do with "hiybbprqag". He contacts the media and gives them the headline "Bing copies Willy Watkins!"
Bing treats toolbar-reported clicks-on-links as evidence of relevance, just as every search engine including Google's treats page links themselves as evidence of relevance. With Google being the second most visited site on the planet, of course some of the click data is likely to have ended up being from search results pages. Just as some of Google's link data will have come from Microsoft properties like msn.com. And some will come from Slashdot, and maybe even a tiny trillionth of a percentage will come from my blog. And perhaps if I make up a word, say "znapgipslacaragilgar", and put a link with that in the title on my blog, my blog link will eventually turn up in Google's search results for that term. Would that mean Google shut put a "powered by Will's insignificant blog" button on their homepage, or I that I should get headlines saying they copied me? The proportions may end up being different, but the situation is the same: in search everybody is copying everybody's data. While Google may own their search results page, they do not own the user's click on a link. And it appears to be that -- the user's click on a link -- not the search results page that Bing is using.
If it is entered as evidence, won't that make it more likely that someone takes advantage of the legal system and spreads it around further?
So what if it does. The primary function of a prosecution is to charge and convict an (alleged) perpetrator, not to agonize about whether the evidence will be stolen. Court cases can be held "in camera" to prevent information spread, but the legal system's duty to uphold the law is not negated by the chance of someone (illegally) stealing the evidence if it is handed in.
The press repeating pseudoscience as fact? Say it ain't so!
Ah, but if there's an infinite number of universes there is no science -- every paper that passed peer review failed peer review in many universes other than ours! Why should we give such credulity to the mere chance of being in a universe where this theory was published! :-)
There is a more fundamental problem: there is no "we".
To any given subjective human, the only evidence of the current universe existing is their first-hand experience of it. So for instance, the only evidence for you that this universe "exists" (whereas the universe of Conway's Game of Life, or of that game of Quake you just played, or any other mathematical universe, does not actually "exist") is that you are observing being within it. Quite clearly, at any given split, you do not experience being in the "other" universes. This puts them in the same bucket as that Game of Life, Quake, or whatever -- mathematically they are lovely but to any observer/reasoner they cannot be said to "exist" because you cannot be within them. The thought that somebody else or some other you might be experiencing the other universe is neither here nor there -- even if you'd like to think of an infinite succession of "you" splitting off from yourself at every moment, you cannot experience being those other people or other selves and as such cannot observe evidence of any universe existing except this one. Or to put it another way, for all observers other universes "really existing" is identical to other universes "really not existing".
(The "split" versus "collapse" within the box is neither here nor there: that split or collapse still always appears to occur within the physics of the observer's universe, and as such still only 1 universe is ever observed or can ever be observed.)
So if "an infinite number of universes exist" is essentially identical to "actually, no they don't", then that infinite number of universes does rather look like that imaginary teaset in space... The argument that it makes the equations simpler (so you don't have to consider special cases) doesn't pass muster -- it would make the equations much simpler to pretend that God created the universe this instant, all the experiments are just fake memories, and so there's no such thing as physics in the first place, but that tends not to be considered good science!
To answer your own question -- "does collapse only happen when *I* make a measurement? If so, why should I be uniquely privileged?" -- for all values of "you", "you" (the observer/reasoner) must be uniquely privileged because you are the only person that can empirically declare that anything exists at all.
Sorry to segue into philosophy, but when you're talking about matters of what it means to exist, it usually does come back to St Augustine / Descartes. ("Even if I am mistaken, I am" and "I think [observe] theferfore I am". If those other universes are provably unreachable from that declaration of existence then there is no difference from their non-existence.)
If you want privacy then build a Faraday cage. Once you emit any electromagnetic radiation outside the bounds of your property, you have no expectation of privacy whatsoever. If I can see what you're doing from outside of your property, you're not handling your privacy correctly. It's your fault. Stop trying to legislate solutions for a problem that only you can fix.
So those pesky Eastern European communists, who did the equivalent of Google's actions (paying people to listen in on your conversations throughout all the major cities, noting down everything they could overhear), those were fine hey? No need to legislate against things like that?
Ok, Google has it...
They said they will destroy it, either they do or they don't, it doesn't matter because they will do what they choose. But why go handing a copy over to every state who asks for it?
Because it is evidence of an (alleged) crime. In the next episode of CSI ... "No, no, destroy that DNA right now -- I don't care if the killer will get away with it, we musn't invade anybody's privacy!"
I was walking on the sidewalk by his house, and he shouted out the window that he just farted. I took out a notepad and wrote down that the guy just farted. Then he sued me for invasion of privacy.
---> Guy gets laughed out of court.
Same but then something difficult involving "computers and stuff"
---> Guy can make it stick ??!!??
Organise a paid group of people to walk down the streets of every major city, with explicit instructions (equivalent of computer code) to listen for and write down every private conversation they can overhear, and yes you probably will be sued and no it wouldn't be laughed out of court. And if you are arrested by the police and refuse to hand over the notebooks as evidence for the court, saying a big "up yours, cop, my name's Google and everybody knows I can't do anything wrong no matter what your pissy little laws and courts say" things would not go well for you.
But then this is Slashdot where Google is the equivalent of just one guy who didn't know what he was doing...
Really? A company is under official investigation on three continents for the largest unauthorised capture of private information that has ever happened?
/me stares.
If I hire a million men to walk through the streets of every major city on earth recording the conversations of those that they pass by, is that a crime? This is *certainly* an unauthorized capture; but should one take issue it?
It would certainly be newsworthy, which is the topic of conversation here...
Even the streetview wireless thing was really a non-event until it was blown way out of proportion by the Murdoch press.
Really? A company is under official investigation on three continents for the largest unauthorised capture of private information that has ever happened? How exactly do you blow that out of proportion in the press? Regardless of what the outcome will be or whether you label it "evil", by any measure it was most certainly a newsworthy event.
Also, yaaahooo, my first first-post!!!
Ah, if someone paid me a dollar for every time I got a first post... I'd be an executive!
Not to get completely off the subject, but there are many perfectly understandable proofs of why 0.999... = 1. For instance, one of the things that defines what a real number is that it is not exactly the same as a different number. Seems pretty common sense, huh? So what number, exactly, comes between 0.999... and 1? Like you said, those 9s go on forever, so if there is nothing that you can add to the first term to turn it into the second, they must be the same. They are just 2 different ways of expressing the exact same number. You probably don't have a problem with the idea that 1/3 = .333..., so multiply both sides by 3 and what do you get?
There's even a wikipedia page that I'd totally paste in here if Chrome was able to do so.
More to the point, what you are effectively saying with the "..." in 0.999... is .. n] (9 * 10 ^ -m)
Lim[n->infinity] Sum[m - 1
and the result of that limit equation turns out to be 1.
In this case "wrong" is applicable because I.D. supporters are attempting to portray I.D. as science, and establish a perception of equivalent validity to big bang/evolutionary theories, but without any support beyond "the accepted scientific theories have some holes" and playing up semantic differences in the definition of "theory". As people have brought up many times in this discussion, ID is not a valid scientific theory (or even hypothesis) because it is inherently untestable, unverifiable, and unable to be disproven.
So if I hire a bunch of people to portray the US constitution as science and to try (badly) to establish a perception of equivalent scientific validity for it, does the US constitution then become "wrong"? If so, it'd be a really cool way to get any law or other non-science thing overturned! "Not science" != "wrong", even if there's a bunch of angry campaigners standing on the sidelines shouting "but we think it's science". Again, whether or not ID is wrong, and whether or not ID is science, "ID is not science" and "ID is wrong" are not the same statement.
ID is just wrong because A) it isn't science.
Pedant mode: you shouldn't conflate "wrong" with "not science". The US constitution, today's newspaper, "I think therefore I am", my son coming in to tell me he's had a bad dream -- none of these are science (I'm yet to peer review my son's claim to have had a bad dream!) but that alone does not make them wrong. Whether or not ID is "wrong", and whether or not ID is "not science", "not science" is not the same as "wrong".
So according to the article, nearly half Google's patents (282 of 576) were granted in 2010... that's quite a change in attitude towards patents at Google then if they are suddenly getting so many!
Well what is fair? Racial discrimination clearly isn't, and we now have laws to enforce that. (Note that we needed laws to make that happen, which is to say that life in its unguarded state isn't fair).
But you can extend fairness to a ridiculous extreme just as easily. Would you go to a baseball game if the guy at bat could say, "I haven't hit the ball as much as the other team. Pitch slower so that it's fair."
Would you enjoy that? Of course not.
Part of the problem with this world is the "everybody who shows up gets a gold star" mentality. Would you want a brain surgeon operating on you that attended a pass/fail curriculum? Of course not.
That's how life is. Not fair. Some people will be better than you at your job. Some people will be paid more for knowing less (see: Managers).
You can give yourself an ulcer worrying about it, or you can accept it. And if you're unhappy in your current circumstance, then change it. Don't complain about fairness - it's an artificial concept. It doesn't exist in nature. Gazelles don't tell lions that it isn't fair for them to eat them. Wouldn't work. So my advice is, if that's how the system is - then work towards being a lion.
My goodness, I've never seen the Chewbacca defence attempted so brazenly before -- thank you I genuinely enjoyed reading that. Your response to it being succinctly pointed out that actually there is legislation requiring pay and conditions to be fair (and outlawing age discrimination)? To give a longwinded monologue about other things you think are fair or unfair, baseball, gold stars, availability of good surgeons, and even finishing off with hairy beasts! Well done, points for audacity!
Don't concentrate on what other people have. Life isn't fair. Nobody said it would be.
Various laws disagree with that. Part of living in a civilised society is that we (including employers) do have a responsibility to act fairly.
All I've seen of late is rhetoric on both sides.
This is also rhetoric - it's a very old trick to silence your critics.
1. Challenge your opponents to make predictions on a 10 year timescale.
2a. If they accept, for the next 10 years you say "You can't criticise me yet, wait til the 10 years are up!"
2b. If they don't accept, for the next 10 years you say "Clearly you don't really know what you're talking about or you'd have been happy to accept my 10 year challenge."
And that gives you 10 years where you can bat away any criticism, without needing to produce any evidence, and take the moral high ground while you're at it.
3. After 10 years, make a very slightly revised challenge (for the following 10 years). "Ah, yes but if we include the new Blenkinsop adjustment then yes it would have warmed slightly in the previous 10 years, but that minor fluctuation is nothing to the cooling that will take place in the following 10 years..."
4. Repeat ad infinitum.
And hey presto, you can say whatever you like for as long as you like.
I don't get why goods are so bloody expensive in Australia. I was there for 6 months in 2009... I wanted to buy the Lonely Planet guide to New Zealand, which was the next destination on my travels. A$45 from the main book shop chain in Melbourne, or A$37 from Amazon in the UK (including probably about $20 AIRMAIL shipping). How the hell can goods be over twice the price, and still considerably more expensive than goods shipped on planes from almost the exact opposite side of the planet? I hear stories like this all the time from my Aussie friends.
The main problem is the shopping centres, which push rents up and also try to push local shops out and replace them with large chains. In the UK, the shopping centres have to compete with the high street. In Australia, you'd get sunburnt to a frazzle in 20 minutes if you tried to walk down the high street, so shopping centres rule the roost. Westfield has a near-monopoly, and in any case each major shopping centres are local monopolies.
This debate has been making headlines here for a few weeks now and the thing I find most ironic is that no one has bothered to suggest that just maybe the GST should be simply abolished - everyone seems to accept the idea that the government sticking its hand in your pocket every time you make a purchase as some kind of natural law. This baffles me: the left should naturally be against it because it disproportionately taxes the poor and the right should be against it because it's a tax that is administered non-voluntarily buy businesses without recompense.
I forgot who said it first, but there's an old satirical comment about the difference between political theory and political reality -- it goes something like "Political theory is that the left should hate the GST because it's regressive and the right should hate it because it enlarges the state. Political reality is that the left loves the GST because it enlarges the state, and the right loves the GST because it's regressive."
The problem Gerry Harvey and co have is not that their goods are 10% more expensive then the equivalent goods online, the problem Harvey and co have is that their goods are 50% more expensive then the equivalent online.
Except when was the last time you actually paid the sticker price in a Harvey Norman, Retravision, etc? There is pretty much a cultural expectation in Australia that electrical and whitegoods shops will knock another 15% off the price if you just mutter something like "hmm, what price can you give me if I buy it today"? I have almost always found that you're actually better off looking up an on-line price, then popping into your nearest shop and mentioning it to the salesperson. They will then pop over to their computer, work out what the minimum they are actually allowed to sell it to you for is, and it's usually within about $10-15 bucks of the online price but you don't have to wait or pay for delivery because they can help you take it to your car right now.
The problem is that the statement "there are ghosts" is not falsifiable. There isn't an experiment you can perform that will prove they don't exist. Maybe the experiment scared them away, or they just didn't turn up etc.
The statement "there are no ghosts" is falsifiable. It can be proved wrong by demonstrating the existence of the ghost.
Technically not quite true. Follow it through - how do you demonstrate the existence of the ghost? You have to demonstrate that the supposed "ghost" could not have had a mundane (physical) explanation, and bugger we're back to proving a negative again. "There are no ghosts" is not practically falsifiable because any falsification itself cannot be falsified (and thus can never be accepted).
This sort of issue is always going to devolve to a philosophical argument. The reason being that strict materialsim ("the only things that exist are material and repeatable") is not only a claim of a negative, but intentionally rules out any evidence that might falsify it. "If it is material and repeatable it can be accepted as evidence and supports our hypothesis that everything is material. But if it is not material and repeatable it will be thrown out as evidence and thus there still is no evidence against our hypothesis that everything is material and repeatable."
Normally this doesn't matter. Science doesn't actually need everything in the universe to be repeatable and material, but just cares that some things are so that we can go and find them with experiments. But when you then want to apply science to things that are claimed to be non-material, that's where you start hitting issues around fundamental philosophical assumptions about the nature of existence.
Parent++.
I don't see how playing into your families delusions helps them or you? Why not hunt for the Easter Bunny with them, or Santa... or setup a trap for the tooth fairy.
Slightly funny anecdote, but childrens' belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy is entirely scientific. Every time, they conduct a falsifiable experiment (put out a cookie / tooth that might not be consumed / taken) and every time they come back with a positive result. They even do peer review, asking their fellow peers (children) what their results were (what they got from Santa), and even validate the experiment with respected and more experienced experimenters of the past (their parents, who swear blind that the results are genuine). They are only thwarted because there really is a grand world-wide ongoing conspiracy to interfere with their experiments and falsify their results.
What was he thinking? Threatening to sue? Did he really say he "owned" the documents?
Oh dear, I have a nasty feeling this will come back to bite him if the US prosecutes. "Responsible whistleblower", "acting in the public interest", "public right to know", all those usual defences for publishing classified information tend go get a teensy bit undermined if you've been caught saying that really your motivation in publishing this classified information is personal financial gain.
A pity, because personally I thought the take-home message from this whole saga so far was that it seemed actually governments could operate much more openly without the world crashing to its knees after all -- the much-feared releases, as published in The Guardian etc, had been very interesting and informative but had been received by the world at large in a very calm and reasonable manner, without disastrous consequences after all.