Unless your hypothesis is as consistent or more consistent with our observations of reality as other hypotheses, and at least as simple it's not particularly useful.
[Sigh] Of course, that would be true if I were hypothesizing, however I was not, and nor was the GP. He was supposedly deducing that life must have evolved here, given that we are here today. I agree that it's very likely that life did evolve here, but it's certainly not so bloody self-evident that it has probability 1. And if he were hypothesizing, then being so ridiculously dogmatic about one's position wouldn't exactly make for good science, IMHO.
Highly unlikely and completely irrelevant even if it did happen. It doesn't really matter if the "protein jackpot" evolved here from lose amino acid bases or came here from an extraterrestrial source. Their abundancy is still a necessary condition of our existence.
Of course having amino acids in abundance is a necessary condition of our existence. However, you originally stated something quite different:
we must (as a condition of our existence) live on a planet on which life did evolve.
That's just plain wrong. Just because there are humans here, it doesn't immediately follow that life evolved here. It's a good bet, sure, but you were taking it to be a logical truth, which it aint. That's why it it's very relevant, because the possibility life evolved somewhere else, and arrived here, denies it the status of logical truth.
And it is certainly not a sufficient condition. Anyone with half a brain knows that just because amino acids were able to come into existence in no way means that intelligent life, much less us in particular, would also come into existence on the same planet.
Granted, and I should have spelled it out more carefully:
We see that human life exists here. That this life could be traced back through it's evolutionary ancestry to a few amino acids forming in a rock pool, on this planet, under god knows what conditions, would be sufficient to explain our observation. It wouldn't be necessary though, as there are other ways we could have arrived at the state we observe today. That's the distinction I was talking about.
we must (as a condition of our existence) live on a planet on which life did evolve.
Or maybe life evolved somewhere else and arrived here sometime before now. You want to consider that? Or does that just complicate things to much for you, and you'd rather not make pesky distinctions like that between necessary and sufficient?
Theoretically speaking, a flowing fluid will try to create a cross sectional shape than minimizes drag. I think of this as the glacier following the principle of least action.
But a system with friction isn't conservative, so the principle doesn't apply does it? (Or am I being a moron?) Interesting thought anyway.
Could be they are overlooked. New Zealand is know as the land of the totaly middle class. Sort of a giant or maybe not so giant suburb where eveyone does okay and everyone lives in peace and harmony.
Sort of. We still have poverty and race relations problems here, but it's a lot less punishing place to live on a low income, welfare or whatever, and murders still make the evening news. It's no utopia, but it's a pretty relaxed place to live.
From what I hear it is next to impossible to emingrate to New Zealand but I guess they go not consider that a human rights issue. But that is just what I have heard.
It is a lengthy process, but probably not as hard to get into as you think. Certainly if you have enough money there will be no problem with you buying a ridiculously large area of our land;)
You might have heard bad things about the immigration process because this Algerian fellow tried to immigrate here a year or two (?) ago, and having been labelled a terrorist by american intelligence has been detained since he landed. He's had alot of legal battles just to get our intelligence agency to tell what the evidence they supposedly have consists of. Not knowing makes it pretty hard to refute. However he may well be a terrorist for all I know, it just doesn't seem likely given the lack of apparent evidence.
Hate to be picky, but muons are actually considered pretty long lived. They have a half life of over 2 microseconds. That sounds short, but it's a lot longer than a free neutron (for example), and it means they're really useful for probing materials.
Are you trolling? Free neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes
and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).
Yes but Moore's law equates to a 10 fold increase in performance over 5 years, so that's not at all surprising. (Cue lots of replies informing me that, strictly, Moore was referring to processor complexity not performance....)
If gnoppix is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu already has a liveCD, then what the hell is gnoppix doing? Is gnoppix now just Ubuntu renamed? Seems like gnoppix just got displaced right?
If gnoppix is based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is based on Debian, then who the hell is working on releasing sarge?;)
If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way.
I'm not staunchly for or against here, but there's a big flaw in this argument.
What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?
Let's be realistic, if you have no intention of buying it because you don't really want it, then sure, pirating it isn't really costing anyone else anything, but, I'd wager people generally pirate stuff they DO want, stuff they potentially would buy, if pirating it wasn't an option.
such as the theory of quantum mechanics?
i bet some time in the future many people will be laughing over what we thought about quantum mechanics, when they realize how wrong we were and find a way to simplify it.
Yeah, but the people that laugh will probably be morons like yourself that don't understand science at all.
Obviously there are things we don't understand yet, and our theories are incomplete. But quantum mechanics has proved itself time and time again to be the most elegant solution to the problems faced by physics in the early 20th century, (alongside relativity). It isn't stupid, it's on the same footing as newtonian mechanics; that of good science. How could anyone expect newton to have derived special relativity with the technology available at the time (ie, virtually nothing)? The science begets the technology that begets more science. That's simply the way it has to be. I don't believe that future generations will see QM as stupid. The most amazing advances in understanding took place in the shortest amount of time, and that again was largely due to the state of the technology available at the time, which was a direct result of the scientific endeavours that preceded it.
With greater technology, we may discover that things are simpler than we thought, that would be great, but it wouldn't make QM stupid, and statements like "QM is crazy and counter-intuitive, and will therefore one day be seen as a pile of crap" just show how ignorant you are of the scientific method. In short : where's your theory of micro-physical phenomena that gives 10 or more significant figures of accuracy for practically any experiment we're presently capable of performing?
Even Einstein is saddled with the Cosmological Constant which was added at a whim and later claimed to be his biggest blunder. People are still debating if it was useless or genius.
But ultimately, experiment will (somehow) end the debate. That's what makes it science.
Einstein's biggest blunder was arguing against the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, for really unscientific reasons, like his religious bias.
Junk DNA acts as a protective buffer against genetic damage and harmful mutations. An overwhelming percentage of DNA is irrelevant to the metabolic and developmental processes, so it is unlikely any single, random insult to the nucleotide sequence will affect the organism.
I read something about this in NewScientist a while ago. Blocks of a certain base (guanine?) either side of important regions of DNA, which are more susceptible to damage (by free radicals?), serve to protect the important code, by being damaged first. Anyway, I thought it was really cool because it's basically analogous to bolting blocks of more easily oxidizable metal onto the hull of a ship, to prevent the hull from corroding. (What is this process called, anyone?)
He told me that drinking and going cold turkey were both possible for someone addicted to alchohol, but that the sign of a true alchoholic is that they can't drink in moderation. The idea of drinking only one or two drinks per day is inconceivable to them... and I believe this is true for other addictions as well.
I once heard the reformation expressed as "You don't quit drinking, you quit thinking that you can control your drinking."
(This may just be one of the 12 steps, I don't know.)
what are you smoking ? pakistan is not being pushed around because you guys started supporting it from the very begining. gen pervaz mushraf conducted the coup with the us support. You guys started raising a bloodhound...wait till it comea and bites you in the ass.
a)I'm not american, and
b)past backing of a regime is no guarantee of future support. America backed Sadam in the past, and the Taleban also, and numerous other regimes. It's all well documented.
Kerry hasn't told you one thing that he is going to do. He has proffered nebulous lists, buzzwords, and catchy quotes, but nothing substantial or concrete.
Bush constantly accuses Kerry of his flip-flops, or whatever you want to call them, and cites them as evidence of him being unfit to lead. Let me share an excerpt or two from the transcripts of some public lecture by the late RP Feynman (who should need little introduction here, if he does, just google it ok?):
"The government of the United States was developed under the idea that nobody knew how to make a government, or how to govern. The result is to invent a system to govern when you don't know how. And the way to arrange it is to permit a system, like we have, wherein new ideas can be developed and tried out and thrown away. The writers of the Constitution knew of the value of doubt. In the age that they lived, for instance, science had already developed far enough to show the possibilities and potentialities that are the result of having uncertainty, the value of having the openness of possibility. The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way some day. That openness of possibility is an opportunity. Doubt and discussion are essential to progress. The United States government, in that respect, is new, it's modern, and it is scientific. It is all messed up , too."
So, to wit, as most geeks should be aware, uncertainty is key to progress, and the american constitution rates well, having been written according to these principles. He continues in the next lecture:
"... has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions - that is, penetrating, interested, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions - then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, 'What are you going to do about the farm question?' And he knows right away - bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. 'What are you going to do about the farm problem?' 'Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use - not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them,' etc.,etc., etc.
Now such a man would never get anyhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around."
This is why I consider Kerry better than Bush, he's not so damned sure of everything. The fact that he changes his mind atleast shows that he THINKS. It also illustrates very well the fundamental flaw not only in american politics, but democracy in general.
While I generally agree with you, that statement assumes a situation like the Cold War, where both sides understand and want to avoid the result: complete annihilated by the other (mutually assured destruction). Does Kim Jong-Il care? Would Osama Bin Laden care if he had a nuclear arsenal? You don't start a nuclear bluffing match with a madman who has nothing to lose.
Obviously you're right, pure MAD only applies to situations such as that during the cold war, and any degree of asymmetry at all ruins it. However, having nuclear weapons is a great bargaining chip, or, more accurately, not having them renders you pretty much irrelevant.
I'd be willing to wager that a whole lot more Al-Q activity goes on in Pakistan than Iraq (Iraq as it stood before the invasion that is, obviously it's seething with hardline islamist nut-jobs now). However, Pakistan has the bomb, and therefore doesn't have to be pushed around, similarly to Nth Korea - no US administration is going to attack them if they can nuke even Japan in retaliation, let alone land one in California.
This has been the big give-away from the start. If Saddam had nukes (or even plenty of chem- or bio- weapons), the neo-cons would never have invaded. Why would you put thousands of troops in a position where they would likely be nuked? If you still don't get it: Iraq was invaded because it DIDN'T have WMD. It was a soft target*, with oil, and invading it no doubt served many other political purposes, but it clearly didn't have WMD, that much was fairly transparent before the invasion began.
* for invasion, evidently occupation is a different story.
Seriously, the moderation system, while imperfect, is designed to display comments according to their humour, usefulness, or degree of truth (as decided by a sample of the total/. population). Posts expressing disgust at RP's modus operandi are, more often than not, modded right up to 4 or 5, while those that seek to defend him are modded right down as trolls or flamebait. Clearly the general feeling amongst the community is that his methods are distasteful and unwanted here. What more is it going to take?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless your hypothesis is as consistent or more consistent with our observations of reality as other hypotheses, and at least as simple it's not particularly useful.
[Sigh] Of course, that would be true if I were hypothesizing, however I was not, and nor was the GP. He was supposedly deducing that life must have evolved here, given that we are here today. I agree that it's very likely that life did evolve here, but it's certainly not so bloody self-evident that it has probability 1. And if he were hypothesizing, then being so ridiculously dogmatic about one's position wouldn't exactly make for good science, IMHO.
Highly unlikely and completely irrelevant even if it did happen. It doesn't really matter if the "protein jackpot" evolved here from lose amino acid bases or came here from an extraterrestrial source. Their abundancy is still a necessary condition of our existence.
Of course having amino acids in abundance is a necessary condition of our existence. However, you originally stated something quite different:
we must (as a condition of our existence) live on a planet on which life did evolve.
That's just plain wrong. Just because there are humans here, it doesn't immediately follow that life evolved here. It's a good bet, sure, but you were taking it to be a logical truth, which it aint. That's why it it's very relevant, because the possibility life evolved somewhere else, and arrived here, denies it the status of logical truth.
And it is certainly not a sufficient condition. Anyone with half a brain knows that just because amino acids were able to come into existence in no way means that intelligent life, much less us in particular, would also come into existence on the same planet.
Granted, and I should have spelled it out more carefully:
We see that human life exists here. That this life could be traced back through it's evolutionary ancestry to a few amino acids forming in a rock pool, on this planet, under god knows what conditions, would be sufficient to explain our observation. It wouldn't be necessary though, as there are other ways we could have arrived at the state we observe today. That's the distinction I was talking about.
we must (as a condition of our existence) live on a planet on which life did evolve.
Or maybe life evolved somewhere else and arrived here sometime before now. You want to consider that? Or does that just complicate things to much for you, and you'd rather not make pesky distinctions like that between necessary and sufficient?
Theoretically speaking, a flowing fluid will try to create a cross sectional shape than minimizes drag. I think of this as the glacier following the principle of least action.
But a system with friction isn't conservative, so the principle doesn't apply does it? (Or am I being a moron?) Interesting thought anyway.
Could be they are overlooked. New Zealand is know as the land of the totaly middle class. Sort of a giant or maybe not so giant suburb where eveyone does okay and everyone lives in peace and harmony.
;)
Sort of. We still have poverty and race relations problems here, but it's a lot less punishing place to live on a low income, welfare or whatever, and murders still make the evening news. It's no utopia, but it's a pretty relaxed place to live.
From what I hear it is next to impossible to emingrate to New Zealand but I guess they go not consider that a human rights issue. But that is just what I have heard.
It is a lengthy process, but probably not as hard to get into as you think. Certainly if you have enough money there will be no problem with you buying a ridiculously large area of our land
You might have heard bad things about the immigration process because this Algerian fellow tried to immigrate here a year or two (?) ago, and having been labelled a terrorist by american intelligence has been detained since he landed. He's had alot of legal battles just to get our intelligence agency to tell what the evidence they supposedly have consists of. Not knowing makes it pretty hard to refute. However he may well be a terrorist for all I know, it just doesn't seem likely given the lack of apparent evidence.
Hate to be picky, but muons are actually considered pretty long lived. They have a half life of over 2 microseconds. That sounds short, but it's a lot longer than a free neutron (for example), and it means they're really useful for probing materials.
Are you trolling? Free neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes
If you sold used cars like software is sold, you would be in prison.
If you sold real estate like software is sold, you would be in prison.
And if you, as a private individual, conducted yourself in the manner of a large corporation, you would be considered a pyschopath.
and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).
Yes but Moore's law equates to a 10 fold increase in performance over 5 years, so that's not at all surprising. (Cue lots of replies informing me that, strictly, Moore was referring to processor complexity not performance....)
If gnoppix is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu already has a liveCD, then what the hell is gnoppix doing? Is gnoppix now just Ubuntu renamed? Seems like gnoppix just got displaced right?
;)
If gnoppix is based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is based on Debian, then who the hell is working on releasing sarge?
Iodine tablets? WTF?
Just in case a nuclear holocaust occurs before you manage to find water...
I guess that ANYONE can write ANYTHING and still get it published!
And there's your new job, post-programming : hacking up tech-BS for some newspaper.
(the "d" is silent)
;)
And I suspect the Italian car is eclectic, not electic.
...(imagine a message that someone managed to build a classical 5-bit computer!).
If classical 5-bit computers didn't previously exist except for simulations on pen and paper we'd probably all be pretty impressed.
If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way.
I'm not staunchly for or against here, but there's a big flaw in this argument.
What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?
Let's be realistic, if you have no intention of buying it because you don't really want it, then sure, pirating it isn't really costing anyone else anything, but, I'd wager people generally pirate stuff they DO want, stuff they potentially would buy, if pirating it wasn't an option.
such as the theory of quantum mechanics? i bet some time in the future many people will be laughing over what we thought about quantum mechanics, when they realize how wrong we were and find a way to simplify it.
Yeah, but the people that laugh will probably be morons like yourself that don't understand science at all.
Obviously there are things we don't understand yet, and our theories are incomplete. But quantum mechanics has proved itself time and time again to be the most elegant solution to the problems faced by physics in the early 20th century, (alongside relativity). It isn't stupid, it's on the same footing as newtonian mechanics; that of good science. How could anyone expect newton to have derived special relativity with the technology available at the time (ie, virtually nothing)? The science begets the technology that begets more science. That's simply the way it has to be. I don't believe that future generations will see QM as stupid. The most amazing advances in understanding took place in the shortest amount of time, and that again was largely due to the state of the technology available at the time, which was a direct result of the scientific endeavours that preceded it.
With greater technology, we may discover that things are simpler than we thought, that would be great, but it wouldn't make QM stupid, and statements like "QM is crazy and counter-intuitive, and will therefore one day be seen as a pile of crap" just show how ignorant you are of the scientific method. In short : where's your theory of micro-physical phenomena that gives 10 or more significant figures of accuracy for practically any experiment we're presently capable of performing?
Even Einstein is saddled with the Cosmological Constant which was added at a whim and later claimed to be his biggest blunder. People are still debating if it was useless or genius.
But ultimately, experiment will (somehow) end the debate. That's what makes it science.
Einstein's biggest blunder was arguing against the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, for really unscientific reasons, like his religious bias.
A death march project is defined as one whose "project parameters" exceed the norm by at least 50 percent.
/. ? That was silly. ;)
You realize there's an ad on that page that claims windows is 14% cheaper in terms of TCO than linux? And you linked to it on
Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time ...
Not to mention doing his father's payroll calculations at the age of 3.
Junk DNA acts as a protective buffer against genetic damage and harmful mutations. An overwhelming percentage of DNA is irrelevant to the metabolic and developmental processes, so it is unlikely any single, random insult to the nucleotide sequence will affect the organism.
I read something about this in NewScientist a while ago. Blocks of a certain base (guanine?) either side of important regions of DNA, which are more susceptible to damage (by free radicals?), serve to protect the important code, by being damaged first. Anyway, I thought it was really cool because it's basically analogous to bolting blocks of more easily oxidizable metal onto the hull of a ship, to prevent the hull from corroding. (What is this process called, anyone?)
He told me that drinking and going cold turkey were both possible for someone addicted to alchohol, but that the sign of a true alchoholic is that they can't drink in moderation. The idea of drinking only one or two drinks per day is inconceivable to them... and I believe this is true for other addictions as well.
I once heard the reformation expressed as "You don't quit drinking, you quit thinking that you can control your drinking."
(This may just be one of the 12 steps, I don't know.)
When I was a kid I did kid things...throwing rocks...pellet fights
:P
Frankly, kids like you should be locked up inside infront of a computer
No-one's ever lost an eye playing FPSs. Collapsed dead from exhaustion with blood running from their nose, yes. But lost an eye, no.
what are you smoking ? pakistan is not being pushed around because you guys started supporting it from the very begining. gen pervaz mushraf conducted the coup with the us support. You guys started raising a bloodhound...wait till it comea and bites you in the ass.
a)I'm not american, and
b)past backing of a regime is no guarantee of future support. America backed Sadam in the past, and the Taleban also, and numerous other regimes. It's all well documented.
Kerry hasn't told you one thing that he is going to do. He has proffered nebulous lists, buzzwords, and catchy quotes, but nothing substantial or concrete.
Bush constantly accuses Kerry of his flip-flops, or whatever you want to call them, and cites them as evidence of him being unfit to lead. Let me share an excerpt or two from the transcripts of some public lecture by the late RP Feynman (who should need little introduction here, if he does, just google it ok?):
"The government of the United States was developed under the idea that nobody knew how to make a government, or how to govern. The result is to invent a system to govern when you don't know how. And the way to arrange it is to permit a system, like we have, wherein new ideas can be developed and tried out and thrown away. The writers of the Constitution knew of the value of doubt. In the age that they lived, for instance, science had already developed far enough to show the possibilities and potentialities that are the result of having uncertainty, the value of having the openness of possibility. The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way some day. That openness of possibility is an opportunity. Doubt and discussion are essential to progress. The United States government, in that respect, is new, it's modern, and it is scientific. It is all messed up , too."
So, to wit, as most geeks should be aware, uncertainty is key to progress, and the american constitution rates well, having been written according to these principles. He continues in the next lecture:
"... has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions - that is, penetrating, interested, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions - then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, 'What are you going to do about the farm question?' And he knows right away - bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. 'What are you going to do about the farm problem?' 'Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use - not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them,' etc.,etc., etc.
Now such a man would never get anyhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around."
This is why I consider Kerry better than Bush, he's not so damned sure of everything. The fact that he changes his mind atleast shows that he THINKS. It also illustrates very well the fundamental flaw not only in american politics, but democracy in general.
While I generally agree with you, that statement assumes a situation like the Cold War, where both sides understand and want to avoid the result: complete annihilated by the other (mutually assured destruction). Does Kim Jong-Il care? Would Osama Bin Laden care if he had a nuclear arsenal? You don't start a nuclear bluffing match with a madman who has nothing to lose.
Obviously you're right, pure MAD only applies to situations such as that during the cold war, and any degree of asymmetry at all ruins it. However, having nuclear weapons is a great bargaining chip, or, more accurately, not having them renders you pretty much irrelevant.
I'd be willing to wager that a whole lot more Al-Q activity goes on in Pakistan than Iraq (Iraq as it stood before the invasion that is, obviously it's seething with hardline islamist nut-jobs now). However, Pakistan has the bomb, and therefore doesn't have to be pushed around, similarly to Nth Korea - no US administration is going to attack them if they can nuke even Japan in retaliation, let alone land one in California.
This has been the big give-away from the start. If Saddam had nukes (or even plenty of chem- or bio- weapons), the neo-cons would never have invaded. Why would you put thousands of troops in a position where they would likely be nuked? If you still don't get it: Iraq was invaded because it DIDN'T have WMD. It was a soft target*, with oil, and invading it no doubt served many other political purposes, but it clearly didn't have WMD, that much was fairly transparent before the invasion began.
* for invasion, evidently occupation is a different story.
Seriously, the moderation system, while imperfect, is designed to display comments according to their humour, usefulness, or degree of truth (as decided by a sample of the total /. population). Posts expressing disgust at RP's modus operandi are, more often than not, modded right up to 4 or 5, while those that seek to defend him are modded right down as trolls or flamebait. Clearly the general feeling amongst the community is that his methods are distasteful and unwanted here. What more is it going to take?