Well first of all, the anti-MS culture in/. hardly makes it the 'clear demographic' for zunes.
Second, as I pointed out if you have never even seen a zune, that means you havn't been in an electronics store recently, which means you probably aren't even in the demographic for DAPs in general.
Third, I can think of plenty of things for which I am in the correct demographic and yet anyone with one. For instance I can't think of anyone offhand who owns a Tivo or a Playstation 3. I choose tractors to illustrate the complete absurdity of the claim that "I don't know anyone with one, therefore they must not be popular".
"The only people that use Ogg Vorbis are open source fanatics"
...or people who care about the quality of their music. Sorry, but ogg provides much better sound quality than mp3s. And of course standard mp3s do not support a vital feature that most people overlook when converting their music to a digital source, gapless playback. Even if you ignore the whole patent thing (and it much more than ogg vorbis is open source, mp3 is a proprietary patented encoding that requires a license to develop codecs for), ogg vorbis is clearly superior.
Well I don't know anyone who owns a John Deer tractor, does that mean all the ones that are sold are being bought by people working for the company?
Sheesh, when will you people learn that your circle of friends and contacts are not at all representative of the population as a whole...
And to be honest if you have never even seen a zune, that must mean you havn't set foot in an electronics store recently (assuming they are distributing them over there in the UK as heavily as they are over here in the colonies), which means you probably wouldn't know too many people that owns one.
I thought that was a well known danger. My father recently got a car with one of those, and it came with a warning to keep the key away from electronics like TVs. Cell phones might be more problematic since people often keep them with their keys, but if they can do it too that probably means its a rare problem (otherwise we would have heard of a lot more people getting into this kind of trouble).
Sorry, but system programming itself is a huge category. Also many embedded applications use C, and believe it or not but many "run of the mill GUI apps" out there are developed in C, regardless of whether or not you personally feel they are too expensive to maintain.
It doesn't need to be planned. For instance if the given text is very close to something dirty, a lot of people will get the same idea and will put in the same text. And if you doubt the power pranksters like this can have, look back at the Google bombing episodes.
The Wikipedia is a bit different as you have to make an effort here. People are not required to write Wikipedia articles to sign up for an email account or post on a message board. If they were, the resulting information would be even less consistent than it currently is.
Well, yeah, every language will eventually fade out. But C is still going on strong, as its still the language of choice for many low level applications. I just searched Monster.com and found over 2500 jobs referencing C (its possible that some of the results are because the term "C" is too generic, but most of the titles indicate that C programming is actually part of the job), while Python gets 419, Ruby gets 168, PHP gets 612, and JavaScript gets 1736. How the hell can C be considered dead if its one of the most popular languages around, and probably still the best available choice for a huge class of applications (just not web applications)?
And in fact even the "dead and buried" Cobol is still alive, with 174 jobs. Now, its not as much as the more popular languages, but its still more than Ruby, which is supposed to be the next big thing.
Anyways, from TFA:
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he says.
Despite what this guy thinks, web programming hasn't "taken over", and never will. Yes, it has a large niche, but there are many systems out there that are not, nor never will be web applications. Unfortunately some people (like this guy, he owns some dumb.com company that no one has ever heard of, how does that make him an expert on the subject) have tunnel vision and think that since they work on web applications, everyone else must as well.
Considering all the other people who asked that question, they really needed to make that clear in their press releases.
So if you want to screw with it, all you have to do is intentionally get exactly one word wrong each time. Yeah, it will often take two tries to get it right, but its not like CAPTCHAs usually work fine on one try anyways... And hey, if you just try for only one word (and leave the other blank), you will end up on average typing the same amount.
The article makes comparisons to SETI@Home, but thats a bit different since that is relying on the computer to do the work, not the actual users. That means its fairly consistent and you really are not impacting users all that much (with the exception of pegging their CPU when they are away from the computer).
"Any teacher worth their salt spends plenty of extra time making sure that their lessons are prepared for the next day (or week) and that they are generally ready for anything the class can throw at them."
And how many teachers out there do you think are "worth their salt"? I went to a pretty upscale suburban school (at least for a public school) and even I wouldn't say that all my teachers fell into that category. In fact I had several who were absolutely horrible.
Anyways, that rule (that in order to be good, you have to spend more than the minimal number of hours on the job) applies to virtually every profession out there. I know plenty of software engineers who spend 60-80 hours a week involved with their job (and thats including the endless but necessary task of keeping up with the latest technology) even though they are only "expected" to work 40 hour work weeks. I know of very few who only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
"
Also, the vacation is lengthy, but fairly inflexible. Hope you don't want to take any time off OTHER than what the district says, or you've got some problems. Want to take a month off in March instead? Too bad! It's definitely a trade off."
Oh cry me a river. I can't take the month of March off, hell I don't even get that many vacation days for the entire year. And many employees can't just take off whenever they want, but have to work around their employer's schedules.
"Let me turn it around, and see if I can point out just a little bit of hubris on your part. Why should an experienced software developer get more money than a new one?"
Well, they don't. At least not necessarily. Software engineers (like those in most professions outside of teaching) do not get automatic promotions just because they have x # of years of experience at the company. They get merit based promotions. I know thats a strange concept for those of you who are unfamiliar with any job other than teaching, but its actually pretty common. And thats what people like the gp are complaining about when they complain about how the teacher's unions require schools to effectively pay based on experience only.
"Answer: Because they do it better. Because years of experience mean that they will generally be more efficient at whatever the job is, do it better, with fewer errors, and have more bandwith to deal with more things. They will also have the experience to deal with the stranger situations that pop up, and will generally require less supervision and be more valuable employees. If you somehow think that this doesn't apply to teachers just as much as it applies to anyone else, then you have a very distorted view of teaching."
Actually, thats not always true, especially not with teachers. There the best are often either those that come in from an outside profession, or the young idealistic teachers that generally don't last too long. On the other hand, the experienced teachers often out of touch with the rest of the world, can't connect with the students, and treat their jobs as dead end jobs that are just supporting them until retirement.
No, they were afraid they would be portrayed as condoning jokes about women getting raped, and that would have caused many people (who don't think the Secretary of State getting raped is funny, which believe it or not represents the majority of the public) to cancel their subscriptions or just never subscribe anyways. There are certain things you can't say in today's environment, not because the government won't stand for it but because the public won't stand for it. Just ask Don Imus. He wasn't pulled because of FCC regulations or because CBS thought the Rutgers basketball team would sue them, he was pulled because of pressure brought on by the public.
And btw, the government does not award huge law suits just because someone feels offended by something. Only juries have that power. So even if you buy your argument that they were afraid Condi Rice was going to sue XM radio (which seems very unlikely), it still wouldn't be government censorship.
"But the conclusion of the researchers was that the bullets could not have come from multiple shooters. That conclusion is wrong, because the analysis that preculded other shooters was wrong."
Please RTFA. The new analysis does not prove the bullets came from multiple shooters at all. At best it casts doubt on the current evidence. Its still perfectly possible (not to mention likely) that the conclusion that the bullets all came from Oswald's gun is true.
And if you want to bicker that their conclusion was something stronger than that, here is the actual quote from the article summary that we have disputed: "Researchers... say that the government's 1976 conclusion that the bullets came from only one gun (Oswald's) is wrong." This statement is not an accurate reflection of the article, there is no point in you looking like a dumbass while defending it any longer.
"
And have any of them done so through actual forensic science on the actual bullets? Have any of them had the ability to? Have any of them had the credibility in the field of forensics that the one conducting this study has? No? Then this is news."
Yes, there have been people who have used actual forensic science while trying to dispute the government's claim. And this claim (which doesn't seek to prove anything, despite your claims otherwise) is actually relatively weak.
"
I can "cast doubt" on the moon landings by spouting off the stupid standard conspiracy points, that's a far cry from providing geological evidence that the "moon rocks" and "moon dust" are an exact match for sand and rocks from a beach in Paraguay."
That would only be analogous if these researchers had found one of the bullets to be an exact match to one fired from a gun owned by some mafia hitman.
Blizzard has been producing "more of the same" since Warcraft 2. But the key is each time they make improvements in the interface and each game gets better (with the possible exception of WC3, when they attempted a cross genre element with heros). They don't need to move to a whole new genre to make a good game (and their attempts to do so have failed, see StarCraft Ghost). Complaining that this is yet another real time strategy game is sort of like complaining that Civ 4 is yet another turn based strategy game.
"That was the way I worded it, but the fact is that the statement is true for all logical arguments -- if one step in your argument is untrue, then your conclusion is unsupported."
You said "wrong", not "unsupported". And even "unsupported" doesn't work with real world conclusions. Its perfectly possible for them to still be supported even if one piece of evidence was false. This is because they (unlike conclusions from mathematical proofs or other logical systems) generally involve many pieces of evidence which builds up to a final conclusion. They are usually far from simple modus ponens arguments.
Mathematics and predicate logic are very useful. However, you cannot apply rules from those worlds directly into real world arguments.
"A conclusion is wrong if the argument supporting it is wrong, because one cannot draw a conclusion from false premises."
No, not by any accepted definition of the word 'wrong'. At best you can say the researchers were wrong when they reached that conclusion. It is perfectly possible to get a right answer with faulty reasoning.
"After all, as you say experts have been disagreeing with the official story for a long time, yet none have disproven this particular analysis."
And they still have not disproven this particular analysis. At best they have cast doubt on it. But conspiracy theorists have been casting doubt on it for decades.
"The level of confidence is a crucial part of the conclusion. In this case, a very high degree of confidence eliminated entire lines of investigation. A very low level of confidence, which is what the new tests show (essentially no confidence in any conclusion), is an entirely different matter and an entirely different conclusion."
I think in the case of the JFK assassination, it would be very difficult to argue that any line of investigation, no matter how silly, wasn't looked at by somebody.
"This is indeed a "lone" research team, but it's hard to get more mainstream. In case you missed it: "Tobin was the FBI lab's chief metallurgy expert for more than two decades. He analyzed metal evidence in major cases that included the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.""
I wasn't arguing that there is anything loony with this particular researcher, just that one team's findings isn't enough. It has to be backed up by others. Otherwise we would all be hopping into our cold fusion powered cars to go to work.
And if you think financial firms have tough requirements, try interviewing for a defense contractor or certain government agencies. There you often are required to get security clearances, which go far beyond simple fingerprinting.
First, there never was a "proof", at least not in the way you are thinking. Such proofs only exist in the world of mathematics, and there they are only possible because mathematics is a completely abstract field that does not involve perceptions of the real world (which always have some degree of intrinsic doubt). You cannot mathematically prove that Oswald did or did not do it, because Oswald is not a mathematical construct. Its been said many times before, but it bears repeating because people still for some reason try to do it; NEVER interpret real world arguments as mathematical proofs.
Second, here is the exact quote from the article summary:
"Researchers... say that the government's 1976 conclusion that the bullets came from only one gun (Oswald's) is wrong".
The summary is clearly saying that the conclusion was shown to be false (meaning Oswald didn't do it), not the argument itself. Which of course is not what the article says at all. If you read it differently, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
Third, how the hell is this news anyways? Experts (or rather, people calling themselves experts) have been disagreeing with the lone gunman theory since the day Kennedy was shot. This can only be considered "news" if mainstream scientists can back up the lone research team.
That 130,000 number is total US employees. Cringely's previous estimate supposedly just included Global Services employees, which only represents a fraction of the total workforce. So if we assume half of all US IBM employees work for global services, that still means IBM needs to hire 85,000 new employees before his estimate is even mathematically possible.
This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the South Park episode, "Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow".
Reporter: Tom, I'm currently ten miles outside of Beaverton, unable to get inside the town proper. We do not have any reports of fatalities yet, but we believe that the death toll may be in the hundreds of millions. Beaverton has only a population of about eight thousand, Tom, so this would be quite devastating.
Anchor: Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?
Reporter: We're not sure what exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, uh Tom, but we're reporting that there's looting, raping, and yes, even acts of cannibalism.
Anchor: My God, you've, you've actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?
Reporter: No, no, we haven't actually seen it Tom, we're just reporting it.
Isn't journalism so much more fun when you don't have to worry about those damn things called 'facts'?
I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.
Here is what typicalhead-oncollisionslooklike. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.
I've never heard of such a case, and sort of doubt it could happen. If someone was involved in a head on collision in which there was enough force to push them straight through not one but two tempered glass windows, and still have enough kinetic energy to cause lethal damage to someone in the other car, well I don't think anyone would survive that wreck period.
Though that does sound like an interesting episode for the Mythbusters...
While fuel efficiency is one of those places where "your mileage may vary" should be taken literally, the rated fuel economy of the 2001 Jimmy (2WD, 4WD is even worse) is 16 city, 22 highway. If you are getting 22-27 mpg, either you must have an unusually efficient car, your foot has an aversion to the gas pedal, you only drive on perfectly smooth roads (which seems to defeat the point of an SUV to me), or you suck at math.
Also, note that typical sedans can usually get from the mid 20s to the low 30s. No a sedan won't help you compensate for your small penis, but to be honest I don't think your Jimmy will fool that many girls either.
"You believe that Bush/Perot/Dole/Clinton/Gore/Kerry/Bush are the best that the US could produce in the past 4 elections?"
Of course not. But democracies are not about putting in power the people I think are best, or even the people you think are best. If thats what you thought a democracy was, you are seriously deluded. Its about who a plurality of voters can, in the end, come together and support. In a big nation like this, that usually means making compromises and not getting your first pick. Thats life, get used to it.
Well, technically the Prisoner's Dilemma is only between two actors. With 50, its more of a Tragedy of the Commons (there is a key difference between the two from a mathematical perspective, one is not just a scaled up version of the other).
Anyways, the simplest way to handle that is have the smaller states go first, and the largest vote in a final "Super Tuesday" at the very end of the primary season. Of course in order to do that, you need a central power (in this case, national party leaders) to take control over when the primaries are scheduled (which is currently done by state leaders). And the only way to do that is to have the national party leaders punish states that go against them, which is what is happening here.
I'm honestly sick of people complaining there are not enough choices in politics today. If you want one of the parties to take a different stand, there is an easy way to influence them. Vote in their primary. If you want a left wing candidate, vote for Dennis Kucinich. If you want a right wing candidate, vote for Tom Tancredo. If you want a libertarian/federalist candidate, vote for Ron Paul. If you want something else, find a candidate running a platform you like and vote for him. Or hey, take some initiative and run yourself. Just don't be surprised when you or your candidate loses, or doesn't even generate enough support to be seen as a viable candidate. Most people don't share your political beliefs, and in a democracy that means you lose.
Your idea of just flooding the general election with dozens of candidates simply would not work. A system where the winner gets 20% of the vote and 8 losing candidates getting 10% each would result in a president 80% of the public voted against. Thats why virtually every democracy without a strong two party system has some way to filter down everything into two choices, be it by forming coalitions in order to achieve a majority (like in Britain) or by having a runoff (like in France).
And your assertion that both parties are the same is just plain retarded. They disagree on everything from abortion to the war to immigration to taxes to the death penalty. And if you disagree with something both unanimously agree with, that probably means you have a very unpopular opinion. And as I said before, in a democracy, that means you lose. Deal with it.
JavaScript (and by extension AJAX) is nothing but a hack. There are huge cross platform issues, even when you are using an AJAX library, due to the fact that there is no well defined JavaScript specification. And then there is a myriad of other issues that AJAX apps often have, such as accessibility, security, performance (especially when the average "AJAX developer" doesn't realize they are essentially writing an application instead of just a web page, meaning they have to worry about complex things like memory usage).
Flash has the same problem. I can't tell you how many times I haven't been able to view a site because I don't have Adobe's update. And JavaScript is even worse, there you don't even have well defined versions that the app needs. There its just "This script will run on IE 6.0, Firefox 1.5, and maybe some versions of Opera".
Slashdot Mirror
Well first of all, the anti-MS culture in /. hardly makes it the 'clear demographic' for zunes.
Second, as I pointed out if you have never even seen a zune, that means you havn't been in an electronics store recently, which means you probably aren't even in the demographic for DAPs in general.
Third, I can think of plenty of things for which I am in the correct demographic and yet anyone with one. For instance I can't think of anyone offhand who owns a Tivo or a Playstation 3. I choose tractors to illustrate the complete absurdity of the claim that "I don't know anyone with one, therefore they must not be popular".
"The only people that use Ogg Vorbis are open source fanatics"
Well I don't know anyone who owns a John Deer tractor, does that mean all the ones that are sold are being bought by people working for the company?
Sheesh, when will you people learn that your circle of friends and contacts are not at all representative of the population as a whole...
And to be honest if you have never even seen a zune, that must mean you havn't set foot in an electronics store recently (assuming they are distributing them over there in the UK as heavily as they are over here in the colonies), which means you probably wouldn't know too many people that owns one.
I thought that was a well known danger. My father recently got a car with one of those, and it came with a warning to keep the key away from electronics like TVs. Cell phones might be more problematic since people often keep them with their keys, but if they can do it too that probably means its a rare problem (otherwise we would have heard of a lot more people getting into this kind of trouble).
Sorry, but system programming itself is a huge category. Also many embedded applications use C, and believe it or not but many "run of the mill GUI apps" out there are developed in C, regardless of whether or not you personally feel they are too expensive to maintain.
It doesn't need to be planned. For instance if the given text is very close to something dirty, a lot of people will get the same idea and will put in the same text. And if you doubt the power pranksters like this can have, look back at the Google bombing episodes.
The Wikipedia is a bit different as you have to make an effort here. People are not required to write Wikipedia articles to sign up for an email account or post on a message board. If they were, the resulting information would be even less consistent than it currently is.
Well, yeah, every language will eventually fade out. But C is still going on strong, as its still the language of choice for many low level applications. I just searched Monster.com and found over 2500 jobs referencing C (its possible that some of the results are because the term "C" is too generic, but most of the titles indicate that C programming is actually part of the job), while Python gets 419, Ruby gets 168, PHP gets 612, and JavaScript gets 1736. How the hell can C be considered dead if its one of the most popular languages around, and probably still the best available choice for a huge class of applications (just not web applications)?
And in fact even the "dead and buried" Cobol is still alive, with 174 jobs. Now, its not as much as the more popular languages, but its still more than Ruby, which is supposed to be the next big thing.
Anyways, from TFA:
Despite what this guy thinks, web programming hasn't "taken over", and never will. Yes, it has a large niche, but there are many systems out there that are not, nor never will be web applications. Unfortunately some people (like this guy, he owns some dumb .com company that no one has ever heard of, how does that make him an expert on the subject) have tunnel vision and think that since they work on web applications, everyone else must as well.
Considering all the other people who asked that question, they really needed to make that clear in their press releases.
So if you want to screw with it, all you have to do is intentionally get exactly one word wrong each time. Yeah, it will often take two tries to get it right, but its not like CAPTCHAs usually work fine on one try anyways... And hey, if you just try for only one word (and leave the other blank), you will end up on average typing the same amount.
The article makes comparisons to SETI@Home, but thats a bit different since that is relying on the computer to do the work, not the actual users. That means its fairly consistent and you really are not impacting users all that much (with the exception of pegging their CPU when they are away from the computer).
"Any teacher worth their salt spends plenty of extra time making sure that their lessons are prepared for the next day (or week) and that they are generally ready for anything the class can throw at them."
And how many teachers out there do you think are "worth their salt"? I went to a pretty upscale suburban school (at least for a public school) and even I wouldn't say that all my teachers fell into that category. In fact I had several who were absolutely horrible.
Anyways, that rule (that in order to be good, you have to spend more than the minimal number of hours on the job) applies to virtually every profession out there. I know plenty of software engineers who spend 60-80 hours a week involved with their job (and thats including the endless but necessary task of keeping up with the latest technology) even though they are only "expected" to work 40 hour work weeks. I know of very few who only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
" Also, the vacation is lengthy, but fairly inflexible. Hope you don't want to take any time off OTHER than what the district says, or you've got some problems. Want to take a month off in March instead? Too bad! It's definitely a trade off."
Oh cry me a river. I can't take the month of March off, hell I don't even get that many vacation days for the entire year. And many employees can't just take off whenever they want, but have to work around their employer's schedules.
"Let me turn it around, and see if I can point out just a little bit of hubris on your part. Why should an experienced software developer get more money than a new one?"
Well, they don't. At least not necessarily. Software engineers (like those in most professions outside of teaching) do not get automatic promotions just because they have x # of years of experience at the company. They get merit based promotions. I know thats a strange concept for those of you who are unfamiliar with any job other than teaching, but its actually pretty common. And thats what people like the gp are complaining about when they complain about how the teacher's unions require schools to effectively pay based on experience only.
"Answer: Because they do it better. Because years of experience mean that they will generally be more efficient at whatever the job is, do it better, with fewer errors, and have more bandwith to deal with more things. They will also have the experience to deal with the stranger situations that pop up, and will generally require less supervision and be more valuable employees. If you somehow think that this doesn't apply to teachers just as much as it applies to anyone else, then you have a very distorted view of teaching."
Actually, thats not always true, especially not with teachers. There the best are often either those that come in from an outside profession, or the young idealistic teachers that generally don't last too long. On the other hand, the experienced teachers often out of touch with the rest of the world, can't connect with the students, and treat their jobs as dead end jobs that are just supporting them until retirement.
No, they were afraid they would be portrayed as condoning jokes about women getting raped, and that would have caused many people (who don't think the Secretary of State getting raped is funny, which believe it or not represents the majority of the public) to cancel their subscriptions or just never subscribe anyways. There are certain things you can't say in today's environment, not because the government won't stand for it but because the public won't stand for it. Just ask Don Imus. He wasn't pulled because of FCC regulations or because CBS thought the Rutgers basketball team would sue them, he was pulled because of pressure brought on by the public.
And btw, the government does not award huge law suits just because someone feels offended by something. Only juries have that power. So even if you buy your argument that they were afraid Condi Rice was going to sue XM radio (which seems very unlikely), it still wouldn't be government censorship.
"But the conclusion of the researchers was that the bullets could not have come from multiple shooters. That conclusion is wrong, because the analysis that preculded other shooters was wrong."
Please RTFA. The new analysis does not prove the bullets came from multiple shooters at all. At best it casts doubt on the current evidence. Its still perfectly possible (not to mention likely) that the conclusion that the bullets all came from Oswald's gun is true.
And if you want to bicker that their conclusion was something stronger than that, here is the actual quote from the article summary that we have disputed: "Researchers... say that the government's 1976 conclusion that the bullets came from only one gun (Oswald's) is wrong." This statement is not an accurate reflection of the article, there is no point in you looking like a dumbass while defending it any longer.
" And have any of them done so through actual forensic science on the actual bullets? Have any of them had the ability to? Have any of them had the credibility in the field of forensics that the one conducting this study has? No? Then this is news."
Yes, there have been people who have used actual forensic science while trying to dispute the government's claim. And this claim (which doesn't seek to prove anything, despite your claims otherwise) is actually relatively weak.
" I can "cast doubt" on the moon landings by spouting off the stupid standard conspiracy points, that's a far cry from providing geological evidence that the "moon rocks" and "moon dust" are an exact match for sand and rocks from a beach in Paraguay."
That would only be analogous if these researchers had found one of the bullets to be an exact match to one fired from a gun owned by some mafia hitman.
Blizzard has been producing "more of the same" since Warcraft 2. But the key is each time they make improvements in the interface and each game gets better (with the possible exception of WC3, when they attempted a cross genre element with heros). They don't need to move to a whole new genre to make a good game (and their attempts to do so have failed, see StarCraft Ghost). Complaining that this is yet another real time strategy game is sort of like complaining that Civ 4 is yet another turn based strategy game.
"That was the way I worded it, but the fact is that the statement is true for all logical arguments -- if one step in your argument is untrue, then your conclusion is unsupported."
You said "wrong", not "unsupported". And even "unsupported" doesn't work with real world conclusions. Its perfectly possible for them to still be supported even if one piece of evidence was false. This is because they (unlike conclusions from mathematical proofs or other logical systems) generally involve many pieces of evidence which builds up to a final conclusion. They are usually far from simple modus ponens arguments.
Mathematics and predicate logic are very useful. However, you cannot apply rules from those worlds directly into real world arguments.
"A conclusion is wrong if the argument supporting it is wrong, because one cannot draw a conclusion from false premises."
No, not by any accepted definition of the word 'wrong'. At best you can say the researchers were wrong when they reached that conclusion. It is perfectly possible to get a right answer with faulty reasoning.
"After all, as you say experts have been disagreeing with the official story for a long time, yet none have disproven this particular analysis."
And they still have not disproven this particular analysis. At best they have cast doubt on it. But conspiracy theorists have been casting doubt on it for decades.
"The level of confidence is a crucial part of the conclusion. In this case, a very high degree of confidence eliminated entire lines of investigation. A very low level of confidence, which is what the new tests show (essentially no confidence in any conclusion), is an entirely different matter and an entirely different conclusion."
I think in the case of the JFK assassination, it would be very difficult to argue that any line of investigation, no matter how silly, wasn't looked at by somebody.
"This is indeed a "lone" research team, but it's hard to get more mainstream. In case you missed it: "Tobin was the FBI lab's chief metallurgy expert for more than two decades. He analyzed metal evidence in major cases that included the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.""
I wasn't arguing that there is anything loony with this particular researcher, just that one team's findings isn't enough. It has to be backed up by others. Otherwise we would all be hopping into our cold fusion powered cars to go to work.
And if you think financial firms have tough requirements, try interviewing for a defense contractor or certain government agencies. There you often are required to get security clearances, which go far beyond simple fingerprinting.
First, there never was a "proof", at least not in the way you are thinking. Such proofs only exist in the world of mathematics, and there they are only possible because mathematics is a completely abstract field that does not involve perceptions of the real world (which always have some degree of intrinsic doubt). You cannot mathematically prove that Oswald did or did not do it, because Oswald is not a mathematical construct. Its been said many times before, but it bears repeating because people still for some reason try to do it; NEVER interpret real world arguments as mathematical proofs.
Second, here is the exact quote from the article summary:
The summary is clearly saying that the conclusion was shown to be false (meaning Oswald didn't do it), not the argument itself. Which of course is not what the article says at all. If you read it differently, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
Third, how the hell is this news anyways? Experts (or rather, people calling themselves experts) have been disagreeing with the lone gunman theory since the day Kennedy was shot. This can only be considered "news" if mainstream scientists can back up the lone research team.
That 130,000 number is total US employees. Cringely's previous estimate supposedly just included Global Services employees, which only represents a fraction of the total workforce. So if we assume half of all US IBM employees work for global services, that still means IBM needs to hire 85,000 new employees before his estimate is even mathematically possible.
This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the South Park episode, "Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow".
Reporter: Tom, I'm currently ten miles outside of Beaverton, unable to get inside the town proper. We do not have any reports of fatalities yet, but we believe that the death toll may be in the hundreds of millions. Beaverton has only a population of about eight thousand, Tom, so this would be quite devastating.Anchor: Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?
Reporter: We're not sure what exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, uh Tom, but we're reporting that there's looting, raping, and yes, even acts of cannibalism.
Anchor: My God, you've, you've actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?
Reporter: No, no, we haven't actually seen it Tom, we're just reporting it.
Isn't journalism so much more fun when you don't have to worry about those damn things called 'facts'?
I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.
Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.
I've never heard of such a case, and sort of doubt it could happen. If someone was involved in a head on collision in which there was enough force to push them straight through not one but two tempered glass windows, and still have enough kinetic energy to cause lethal damage to someone in the other car, well I don't think anyone would survive that wreck period.
Though that does sound like an interesting episode for the Mythbusters...
While fuel efficiency is one of those places where "your mileage may vary" should be taken literally, the rated fuel economy of the 2001 Jimmy (2WD, 4WD is even worse) is 16 city, 22 highway. If you are getting 22-27 mpg, either you must have an unusually efficient car, your foot has an aversion to the gas pedal, you only drive on perfectly smooth roads (which seems to defeat the point of an SUV to me), or you suck at math.
Also, note that typical sedans can usually get from the mid 20s to the low 30s. No a sedan won't help you compensate for your small penis, but to be honest I don't think your Jimmy will fool that many girls either.
"You believe that Bush/Perot/Dole/Clinton/Gore/Kerry/Bush are the best that the US could produce in the past 4 elections?"
Of course not. But democracies are not about putting in power the people I think are best, or even the people you think are best. If thats what you thought a democracy was, you are seriously deluded. Its about who a plurality of voters can, in the end, come together and support. In a big nation like this, that usually means making compromises and not getting your first pick. Thats life, get used to it.
Well, technically the Prisoner's Dilemma is only between two actors. With 50, its more of a Tragedy of the Commons (there is a key difference between the two from a mathematical perspective, one is not just a scaled up version of the other).
Anyways, the simplest way to handle that is have the smaller states go first, and the largest vote in a final "Super Tuesday" at the very end of the primary season. Of course in order to do that, you need a central power (in this case, national party leaders) to take control over when the primaries are scheduled (which is currently done by state leaders). And the only way to do that is to have the national party leaders punish states that go against them, which is what is happening here.
I'm honestly sick of people complaining there are not enough choices in politics today. If you want one of the parties to take a different stand, there is an easy way to influence them. Vote in their primary. If you want a left wing candidate, vote for Dennis Kucinich. If you want a right wing candidate, vote for Tom Tancredo. If you want a libertarian/federalist candidate, vote for Ron Paul. If you want something else, find a candidate running a platform you like and vote for him. Or hey, take some initiative and run yourself. Just don't be surprised when you or your candidate loses, or doesn't even generate enough support to be seen as a viable candidate. Most people don't share your political beliefs, and in a democracy that means you lose.
Your idea of just flooding the general election with dozens of candidates simply would not work. A system where the winner gets 20% of the vote and 8 losing candidates getting 10% each would result in a president 80% of the public voted against. Thats why virtually every democracy without a strong two party system has some way to filter down everything into two choices, be it by forming coalitions in order to achieve a majority (like in Britain) or by having a runoff (like in France).
And your assertion that both parties are the same is just plain retarded. They disagree on everything from abortion to the war to immigration to taxes to the death penalty. And if you disagree with something both unanimously agree with, that probably means you have a very unpopular opinion. And as I said before, in a democracy, that means you lose. Deal with it.
JavaScript (and by extension AJAX) is nothing but a hack. There are huge cross platform issues, even when you are using an AJAX library, due to the fact that there is no well defined JavaScript specification. And then there is a myriad of other issues that AJAX apps often have, such as accessibility, security, performance (especially when the average "AJAX developer" doesn't realize they are essentially writing an application instead of just a web page, meaning they have to worry about complex things like memory usage).
Flash has the same problem. I can't tell you how many times I haven't been able to view a site because I don't have Adobe's update. And JavaScript is even worse, there you don't even have well defined versions that the app needs. There its just "This script will run on IE 6.0, Firefox 1.5, and maybe some versions of Opera".