It's hard to point at other countries as an example because its not just the laws, its the culture and history affecting things too. You can point at Japan's gun control laws and say that those laws make the difference, just remember Japan is also frequently voted the most polite nation on the planet as well. Shooting you in the face is rather impolite, so it may not really be the gun laws so much as culture. Causation vs Correlation.
Well, there isn't necessarily less crime overall in these countries, just less gun crime. Look at France, which is often considered one of the rudest nations.
Fewer of them are able to obtain guns is an argument that works for people who have never actually been exposed to that part of the world. Sounds nice and peachy and plausible in rooms full of people with white collared shirts and ties. In reality, on the street (and no, I didn't live on the streets as some hardcore thug or anything, just an average middle class kid hanging out with friends on the lower end of the income scale) its EASY to find guns...there is no shortage of guns...illegal guns...
Which part of the world are you talking about?
easy to aquire guns...and at a fraction of the cost you have to pay for in a gun store. Harder to obtain really is little more than a comfort to those who have never actually been around "low income" areas.
I find it hard to believe they cost a fraction of what you'd pay in a store, unless there's a steady supply of stolen guns and that's what they're selling. Black markets are not known for their cheap goods.
Tell me...what about gun control laws make sense? If you are going to use a gun to murder someone...do you really think you would give a rats ass on how you aquired said gun?
There is less gun violence in countries with tighter restrictions on gun ownership. Do you suppose that's just a coincidence?
Owning a gun doesn't suddenly make you more likely to commit a crime...its not like there is 'essense of crime' built into every gun that oozes into your blood through contact. So...you pretty much have the same number of criminals willing to use a gun to kill.
Except that fewer of them are able to obtain guns.
Look, as a libertarian Democrat, I'm on your side here. You should be able to own and use a gun as long as you aren't harming anyone with it, etc., but this argument is silly.
You might as well argue that locking your front door is pointless, because if someone really wants in, they can still break through the door with an axe or shatter a window. But locking the door increases the cost of getting inside. Some people who would otherwise just open your door and steal your TV will move on to another house instead; some will spend extra time breaking in, making it more likely that they'll be caught in the act. Similarly, gun restrictions increase the cost of using a gun for crime, and if properly implemented, they have very little cost for legitimate gun owners.
But...generally speaking...its the Democrat side of the house that is always so keen on anti gun laws.
Except they aren't "always so keen". It's true that when a restriction on guns is proposed, it's usually a Democrat proposing it - but that rarely happens, and most Democrats have no part in it.
And remember you are talking about Dean...who isn't exactly the normal Democrat...
He isn't typical of Democrats in Congress, but I believe he is typical of a large group of Democratic voters.
as he himself has explained, he is from a rural state that doesn't really have the same gun issues as elsewhere.
Indeed. So it seems you're aware that the Democrats who have proposed anti-gun laws are from places with "gun issues", that is, places where gun violence is a real concern for voters, where restrictions make a lot more sense than they would in rural areas where guns are more likely to be used for hunting or defense than crime.
I find it freaking histarical that the Democrats are so keen on disarming the populace
I find it hysterical that you'd write such a thing. Democrats control the legislature and the governorship in my state, and they have for a while, but guns are still legal. DNC chairman Howard Dean is pro-gun. I see no evidence that "disarming the populace" is a goal of Democrats.
Reading comprehension. You aren't talking about the same thing.
Yes, and I pointed that out in my post. "Reading comprehension" yourself.
The probability of getting HHHHHHHHHH is equal to the probability of getting HHHHHHHHHT, that's what the parent poster was asserting. This is very different from the probability of getting 1 tail and 9 heads, which is what you are talking about.
Indeed.
The point is, if you claim you have the power to influence a coin, flipping ten heads in a row is a pretty convincing way to show it. The convincing part isn't the sequence itself, but the fact that you predicted it.
Let's go back to Jon Luckey's original statement:
Like if someone were to claim the could control the flip of a coin, they either could or not, Right? Lets say someone made that claim, and under controlled conditions with a normal coin was able to produce Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads,Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads. My expectation of Randi would be that he's the kind of guy who would claim that HHHHHHHHHH is just a likely a sequence as any other sequence of 10 flips, ergo its not paranormal. Just my opinion.
While Mr. Luckey is, of course, entitled to hold whatever opinion he likes, no matter how foolish, this one is ridiculous. HHHHHHHHHH may be just as likely a sequence as any other, but flipping HHHHHHHHHH after promising to do just that is not as likely an outcome as any other. 1023 times out of 1024, a person with no magic abilities will flip something other than what he promised. Randi would have to be insane to dismiss that result, and I've seen no evidence that he is (although the million dollar challenge would probably have to be more rigorous, to avoid paying off one out of every 1024 fraudsters who applies for it).
Let's take the coin out of the scenario. Suppose you have a spinner wheel evenly divided into 1000 spaces. You say "I have the power to influence this wheel. I'm going to spin it and it will land on 69." You spin it and sure enough, it lands on 69. The chance of landing on 69 randomly is the same as the chance of landing on any other number, but that doesn't mean the experiment was useless: there's a 99.9% chance that you've just demonstrated paranormal powers (or very precise motor control). Do it twice in a row and the probability is 99.9999%.
Rise of the Triad did the same thing for various holidays. This loading screen appeared on Christmas, and on that day the game music was also replaced with a version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
It wouldn't be legal for somebody to release diffs (or say an ed script such that it contains none of the unmodified code) for the linux kernel under a GPL-incompatible license
Is that so? I think it would be legal. A derivative work isn't just something that couldn't have been made without the original, it has to incorporate some part of the original.
Then, just for fun, they added these tubes in the middle room. Each tube was an invisible teleporter (obvious if you were looking for it) that would make you appear at the top of another room -- so basically, each room had a tube that lead downwards to each of the other rooms.
This is in contrast to the Quake engine, where instead of a series of tubes, it'd be more like a big truck that you just dump something on.
There's a difference between assigning blame and looking for causes. Some of us Americans seem obsessed with finding one, and only one, person at fault for any misfortune, but that's not how the world works.
If you're walking down a dark alley and you get mugged, of course it's the mugger's fault - but it is really a good idea to go walking down dark alleys? If you were the victim, would you say "Gosh, I had no idea it might be unsafe to walk there" and then go on to walk down the same alley the next day? I hope you'd be smarter than that. Obviously the fact that you were careless doesn't excuse the mugger, but it's stupid to be so careless and you may have a hard time finding sympathy.
Same goes for a woman in revealing clothing in a seedy part of town: ideally you should be free to go wherever you want without fear of attack, but we live in the real world, and the fact is that certain actions will put you at more risk than others. Anyone who chooses to put themselves at risk is partially responsible for the consequences.
And the same goes for people who walk around flashing their expensive gagdets. Sad but true.
One poster said that the two papers quoted in the article (for their time statistics) were tabloids. Any Britons confirm or deny this?
"Tabloid" doesn't have quite the same connotation in the UK as it does in the US. They may be less serious than most larger format ("broadsheet") newspapers, but they aren't to be dismissed out of hand like the National Enquirer.
One example off the top of my head is in the demo.. right after you get off the little planet ("That was fucked up..."), there's a room with monsters crawling on the wall opposite you ("No, *this* is fucked up!"). The portal on your floor leads out onto the wall. It's around 19:05 in this video.
Prey: spirit walking, gravity manipulation, Native American protagonist, "living" level design. Portal: at-will portal creation, portals don't have to share horizontal/vertical orientation, "futuristic" level design.
What do you mean "share horizontal/vertical orientation"? There are rooms in Prey where a portal takes you onto a wall in the same room, or drops you through a ceiling in another room, etc., meaning your orientation shifts as you walk through it.
Thats not how Randi's FAQ portrays it. The example given is "Spoon bends or not", not "You have 10 tries to bend the spoon"
The number of challenges in that example is 1. With a challenge like bending a spoon with your mind, that's probably fine - you can't do that by accident. For dowsing and remote viewing, however, you need to distinguish a lucky guess from a successful demonstration of paranormal powers.
No, you are still showing a lack of grasp on how probability works. The chance of HHHHHHHHHH is exactly the same as HHHHHHHHHT. This should be obvious because the chance of the 9 heads in both series is the same (identical), so if the 10th flip if 50% one way 50% the other, so the chances of either are still the same.
I'm afraid you're the one who doesn't understand. What you just said is true: any two sequences are equally likely. If someone claims that he can flip HHHHHHHHHT on cue, that's just as impressive as flipping HHHHHHHHHH on cue.
But that's not what I'm talking about. What I said is flipping 10 heads in a row is less likely than flipping 9 heads out of 10.
There's only one sequence of 10 flips that has 10 heads in it: HHHHHHHHHH
But there are 10 sequences that have nine heads: THHHHHHHHH HTHHHHHHHH HHTHHHHHHH HHHTHHHHHH HHHHTHHHHH... broken up for the lameness filter... HHHHHTHHHH HHHHHHTHHH HHHHHHHTHH HHHHHHHHTH HHHHHHHHHT
Therefore, flipping nine heads in ten tries is 10x as likely as flipping all ten heads. You can test this yourself with the following perl program:
What that means is if someone comes into your office, says "I have the power to flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads 5 times", and then he does just that, there's a whopping 1 in 4 chance that he just got lucky. OTOH, if he says he can flip 10 heads in a row, and he does it, there's only a 1 in 1000 chance that it was luck.
Of course, if you don't want to just give your million bucks to the thousandth guy who comes in making that claim, you'd be wise to devise a better test.
Some of the examples given seem spurious to me. If a dowser claims they can detect X underground, why does the preliminary test have to be detecting X under a teacup. That implies the ability works in a particular sort of way, that the dowser has a connection to X. But what if alleged ability really workded and it stemmed from detecting distortions in some sort of field charateristic of the earth. The preliminary test would exclude that possibility, ergo Randi is insisting preliminary tests that test something other than the claim.
And in that case, the alleged dowser could say "my powers only work for water in the earth," and he could work with Randi to come up with a better demonstration. Randi doesn't just invent tests out of thin air with no input from the applicant.
It all smacks of Randi trying to avoid actual tests, not because he would lose, but because they would be a pain in the ass to administer. That may be human nature, but you can't claim its scientific.
Sure I can: being scientific doesn't mean performing every possible test. Researchers rule out all kinds of experiments due to ethical concerns. Randi is under no obligation to humor applicants whose demonstrations would put them at risk; I suppose he could even be held liable if they harm themselves, even if that is unlikely.
So if they hypothetically only had a success rate of (pull number from air) 85%, they wouldn't be worth hiring just on the fair odds that their assay would be helpful?
I think you oversimplify how the world works. At some fee that level of accuracy would be worthwhile. The world is not binary.
You're reading something into my posts that isn't there. I agree that an 85% success rate would be impressive and convincing. One test, however, is not, which is why the agreed terms include a number of challenges.
Dude, go back to school. There are 2 to the tenth power possible sequences of 10 coin flips. Think of it as a 10 bit binary number. if the coin is truly 50%/50% then every sequence of 10 tosses has the exact same probablity: 1 out of 1024. That includes the all heads 10 coin sequence.
You're right, I was thinking of the total head count instead of the possible sequences, but the point stands: ten out of ten heads is less likely than any other outcome (except ten tails).
If you flip the coin ten times, it's less likely that all ten will be heads than that nine will, which is less likely than eight, and so on (down to five). This is because there's only one sequence of 10 heads, but there are 10 sequences of 9 heads, 10*9 sequences of 8 heads, etc.
Aren't Randi's contracts very yodaish? "Do or Do not, there is no try". Thats what his FAQ says (without using Yoda as a adjective) If the feat Randi contracted for was to be 10 controlled flips, a reasonable person would expect Randi to pay then an there. No 'OK! one more time!'.
Exactly, and if the challenge were met, I would expect him to pay too. That's the whole point of drawing up an agreement beforehand. Are you claiming that someone has met the challenge and Randi has still refused to pay, breaking the agreement?
Basicallly your worldview is unscientific, with 'experiments' biased by the observer, spinning the results.
Ridiculous. If you want an example of results biased by the observer, look at the CIA's remote viewing experiments.
It is really quite irrelevant whether *I* have paranormal powers.
Of course. That was the indefinite "you".
These challenges prove nothing (much like the "hack this box" challenges)
Not true. A successful attempt would, by definition, prove that paranormal powers exist. The fact that no one has been successful doesn't prove that they don't exist, but it does suggest that such powers are unlikely to exist.
and Brian Josephson has already recorded cases that make Randi's bias and unwilling to entertain the possibility.
Whether Mr. Randi himself is willing to believe in paranormal powers is irrelevant. He isn't the only person behind this challenge, and in any case there's no evidence that his personal beliefs have interfered with any attempts to complete the challenge or caused him to cover up successful results.
Meh. RPC-1 firmware is easily found, man. And so are DVD-R's for authoring.
RPC-1 firmware won't help you make an exact copy, it'll only help you play an encrypted disc without the key or correct region setting. You still can't play such a copy in a set-top DVD player.
DVD-R for Authoring media is expensive. You'd also need a DVD-R for Authoring drive to write to it (which is expensive), because they use different laser wavelengths. And then you'll need to hack the drive to let you write to the key area, if that's even possible. It doesn't make sense to do all that when you can just decrypt the disc in the first place.
Not true, if you have a revision 1 DVD drive. These allowed raw access to the disk. I could put a DVD in my PowerBook, go to Disk Utility, create the image and then mount it and play it back with any normal software; something I did often when travelling so that I could watch an entire film without flattening the battery.
You're talking about playing the copy. Sure, you can take an encrypted disc, sans key, and break the encryption to play it. But I'm talking about making an exact copy of an encrypted disc: you can't do that because the key area is unwritable.
Meanwhile, CSS is only a concern when you're transcoding; 1-1 copies can ignore it safely as well.
This is a common misconception.
You can't make a 1:1 copy of a CSS-encrypted DVD using consumer equipment and media. You can copy the encrypted video data, but you can't copy the key, and the encrypted video is worthless without it. (The key area is unwritable on regular DVD-R/RW discs. Even with DVD-R for Authoring, where the CSS key area is physically writable, the burners are designed to write null data there. This is why CSS encrypted movies are sent to manufacturing as digital tapes, not DVD-R discs.)
You can make 1:1 copies if you own a DVD manufacturing facility, but other than that, the only way to copy an encrypted DVD is to decrypt it first.
Randi does not keep an open mind, Randi is not interested in proof, he does not say "maybe, but we need more evidence." He, as you put it, "does not believe it is possible."
That doesn't undermine his offer, though. If you can prove that you have paranormal powers, you win a million bucks; one man's disbelief isn't going to get in the way of objective evidence, especially since James Randi isn't running the show all by himself. If you can't prove it, you don't win the million bucks. Whether Randi says "It has not been proved that you have magic powers" in his rejection letter instead of "You don't have magic powers" is pretty irrelevant.
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Well, there isn't necessarily less crime overall in these countries, just less gun crime. Look at France, which is often considered one of the rudest nations.
Which part of the world are you talking about?
I find it hard to believe they cost a fraction of what you'd pay in a store, unless there's a steady supply of stolen guns and that's what they're selling. Black markets are not known for their cheap goods.
Futurama is already coming back.
People like me who don't carry cash.
There is less gun violence in countries with tighter restrictions on gun ownership. Do you suppose that's just a coincidence?
Except that fewer of them are able to obtain guns.
Look, as a libertarian Democrat, I'm on your side here. You should be able to own and use a gun as long as you aren't harming anyone with it, etc., but this argument is silly.
You might as well argue that locking your front door is pointless, because if someone really wants in, they can still break through the door with an axe or shatter a window. But locking the door increases the cost of getting inside. Some people who would otherwise just open your door and steal your TV will move on to another house instead; some will spend extra time breaking in, making it more likely that they'll be caught in the act. Similarly, gun restrictions increase the cost of using a gun for crime, and if properly implemented, they have very little cost for legitimate gun owners.
Except they aren't "always so keen". It's true that when a restriction on guns is proposed, it's usually a Democrat proposing it - but that rarely happens, and most Democrats have no part in it.
He isn't typical of Democrats in Congress, but I believe he is typical of a large group of Democratic voters.
Indeed. So it seems you're aware that the Democrats who have proposed anti-gun laws are from places with "gun issues", that is, places where gun violence is a real concern for voters, where restrictions make a lot more sense than they would in rural areas where guns are more likely to be used for hunting or defense than crime.
I find it hysterical that you'd write such a thing. Democrats control the legislature and the governorship in my state, and they have for a while, but guns are still legal. DNC chairman Howard Dean is pro-gun. I see no evidence that "disarming the populace" is a goal of Democrats.
Won't work. I had a checking account and associated Visa debit card before I turned 18.
Also, your scheme presumes Dad actually reads his itemized credit card bill and will become suspicious about a $1 charge.
Yes, and I pointed that out in my post. "Reading comprehension" yourself.
Indeed.
The point is, if you claim you have the power to influence a coin, flipping ten heads in a row is a pretty convincing way to show it. The convincing part isn't the sequence itself, but the fact that you predicted it.
Let's go back to Jon Luckey's original statement:
While Mr. Luckey is, of course, entitled to hold whatever opinion he likes, no matter how foolish, this one is ridiculous. HHHHHHHHHH may be just as likely a sequence as any other, but flipping HHHHHHHHHH after promising to do just that is not as likely an outcome as any other. 1023 times out of 1024, a person with no magic abilities will flip something other than what he promised. Randi would have to be insane to dismiss that result, and I've seen no evidence that he is (although the million dollar challenge would probably have to be more rigorous, to avoid paying off one out of every 1024 fraudsters who applies for it).
Let's take the coin out of the scenario. Suppose you have a spinner wheel evenly divided into 1000 spaces. You say "I have the power to influence this wheel. I'm going to spin it and it will land on 69." You spin it and sure enough, it lands on 69. The chance of landing on 69 randomly is the same as the chance of landing on any other number, but that doesn't mean the experiment was useless: there's a 99.9% chance that you've just demonstrated paranormal powers (or very precise motor control). Do it twice in a row and the probability is 99.9999%.
Rise of the Triad did the same thing for various holidays. This loading screen appeared on Christmas, and on that day the game music was also replaced with a version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
Is that so? I think it would be legal. A derivative work isn't just something that couldn't have been made without the original, it has to incorporate some part of the original.
This is in contrast to the Quake engine, where instead of a series of tubes, it'd be more like a big truck that you just dump something on.
There's a difference between assigning blame and looking for causes. Some of us Americans seem obsessed with finding one, and only one, person at fault for any misfortune, but that's not how the world works.
If you're walking down a dark alley and you get mugged, of course it's the mugger's fault - but it is really a good idea to go walking down dark alleys? If you were the victim, would you say "Gosh, I had no idea it might be unsafe to walk there" and then go on to walk down the same alley the next day? I hope you'd be smarter than that. Obviously the fact that you were careless doesn't excuse the mugger, but it's stupid to be so careless and you may have a hard time finding sympathy.
Same goes for a woman in revealing clothing in a seedy part of town: ideally you should be free to go wherever you want without fear of attack, but we live in the real world, and the fact is that certain actions will put you at more risk than others. Anyone who chooses to put themselves at risk is partially responsible for the consequences.
And the same goes for people who walk around flashing their expensive gagdets. Sad but true.
"Tabloid" doesn't have quite the same connotation in the UK as it does in the US. They may be less serious than most larger format ("broadsheet") newspapers, but they aren't to be dismissed out of hand like the National Enquirer.
One example off the top of my head is in the demo.. right after you get off the little planet ("That was fucked up..."), there's a room with monsters crawling on the wall opposite you ("No, *this* is fucked up!"). The portal on your floor leads out onto the wall. It's around 19:05 in this video.
It's kinda been done as a mod for Prey.
What do you mean "share horizontal/vertical orientation"? There are rooms in Prey where a portal takes you onto a wall in the same room, or drops you through a ceiling in another room, etc., meaning your orientation shifts as you walk through it.
With the right mods, players can "do" portals to levels in Prey too.
The number of challenges in that example is 1. With a challenge like bending a spoon with your mind, that's probably fine - you can't do that by accident. For dowsing and remote viewing, however, you need to distinguish a lucky guess from a successful demonstration of paranormal powers.
I'm afraid you're the one who doesn't understand. What you just said is true: any two sequences are equally likely. If someone claims that he can flip HHHHHHHHHT on cue, that's just as impressive as flipping HHHHHHHHHH on cue.
But that's not what I'm talking about. What I said is flipping 10 heads in a row is less likely than flipping 9 heads out of 10.
There's only one sequence of 10 flips that has 10 heads in it:
HHHHHHHHHH
But there are 10 sequences that have nine heads:
THHHHHHHHH
HTHHHHHHHH
HHTHHHHHHH
HHHTHHHHHH
HHHHTHHHHH
HHHHHTHHHH
HHHHHHTHHH
HHHHHHHTHH
HHHHHHHHTH
HHHHHHHHHT
Therefore, flipping nine heads in ten tries is 10x as likely as flipping all ten heads. You can test this yourself with the following perl program:What that means is if someone comes into your office, says "I have the power to flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads 5 times", and then he does just that, there's a whopping 1 in 4 chance that he just got lucky. OTOH, if he says he can flip 10 heads in a row, and he does it, there's only a 1 in 1000 chance that it was luck.
Of course, if you don't want to just give your million bucks to the thousandth guy who comes in making that claim, you'd be wise to devise a better test.
And in that case, the alleged dowser could say "my powers only work for water in the earth," and he could work with Randi to come up with a better demonstration. Randi doesn't just invent tests out of thin air with no input from the applicant.
Sure I can: being scientific doesn't mean performing every possible test. Researchers rule out all kinds of experiments due to ethical concerns. Randi is under no obligation to humor applicants whose demonstrations would put them at risk; I suppose he could even be held liable if they harm themselves, even if that is unlikely.
You're reading something into my posts that isn't there. I agree that an 85% success rate would be impressive and convincing. One test, however, is not, which is why the agreed terms include a number of challenges.
You're right, I was thinking of the total head count instead of the possible sequences, but the point stands: ten out of ten heads is less likely than any other outcome (except ten tails).
If you flip the coin ten times, it's less likely that all ten will be heads than that nine will, which is less likely than eight, and so on (down to five). This is because there's only one sequence of 10 heads, but there are 10 sequences of 9 heads, 10*9 sequences of 8 heads, etc.
Exactly, and if the challenge were met, I would expect him to pay too. That's the whole point of drawing up an agreement beforehand. Are you claiming that someone has met the challenge and Randi has still refused to pay, breaking the agreement?
Ridiculous. If you want an example of results biased by the observer, look at the CIA's remote viewing experiments.
Of course. That was the indefinite "you".
Not true. A successful attempt would, by definition, prove that paranormal powers exist. The fact that no one has been successful doesn't prove that they don't exist, but it does suggest that such powers are unlikely to exist.
Whether Mr. Randi himself is willing to believe in paranormal powers is irrelevant. He isn't the only person behind this challenge, and in any case there's no evidence that his personal beliefs have interfered with any attempts to complete the challenge or caused him to cover up successful results.
RPC-1 firmware won't help you make an exact copy, it'll only help you play an encrypted disc without the key or correct region setting. You still can't play such a copy in a set-top DVD player.
DVD-R for Authoring media is expensive. You'd also need a DVD-R for Authoring drive to write to it (which is expensive), because they use different laser wavelengths. And then you'll need to hack the drive to let you write to the key area, if that's even possible. It doesn't make sense to do all that when you can just decrypt the disc in the first place.
You're talking about playing the copy. Sure, you can take an encrypted disc, sans key, and break the encryption to play it. But I'm talking about making an exact copy of an encrypted disc: you can't do that because the key area is unwritable.
This is a common misconception.
You can't make a 1:1 copy of a CSS-encrypted DVD using consumer equipment and media. You can copy the encrypted video data, but you can't copy the key, and the encrypted video is worthless without it. (The key area is unwritable on regular DVD-R/RW discs. Even with DVD-R for Authoring, where the CSS key area is physically writable, the burners are designed to write null data there. This is why CSS encrypted movies are sent to manufacturing as digital tapes, not DVD-R discs.)
You can make 1:1 copies if you own a DVD manufacturing facility, but other than that, the only way to copy an encrypted DVD is to decrypt it first.
Nice work! I lost count after 11,111,108. :(
That doesn't undermine his offer, though. If you can prove that you have paranormal powers, you win a million bucks; one man's disbelief isn't going to get in the way of objective evidence, especially since James Randi isn't running the show all by himself. If you can't prove it, you don't win the million bucks. Whether Randi says "It has not been proved that you have magic powers" in his rejection letter instead of "You don't have magic powers" is pretty irrelevant.