Complete nonsense when you're supposed to be doing a uniform aveage.
Agreed - if a uniform average is *what the device is supposed to compute*, then yes, it's wrong. If a weighted running average is known to produce more accurate results in this type of device, then it's far from being complete nonsense.
Discrepancy between comments & code functionality is certainly annoying when you're reading someone's code, but the comments are usually the part that's wrong in my experience - the comment gets inserted at the top of a block, and the code it comments is then revised to the point that the comment appears to bear absolutely no relation to the functionality of the code block beneath it.
Unless you're familiar with the sensor & device design, you cannot say for certain whether or not "weighted running average" or "simple average" is the correct behavior. All that can be said is that the code does not match the comment, and so ONE or the OTHER is incorrect.
You don't know that. It doesn't compute a simple arithmetic mean for the set of samples, but rather computes a weighted average where the final reading taken is given emphasis.
Whether or not that behavior is "correct" in the sense that it gives an accurate number is impossible to say unless you're a subject matter expert.
All you can say with any certainty is "The comment says it should calculate an average, but it does not calculate an average." It's possible the code is incorrect, and it's also possible that the comment is incorrect, and that when the developer wrote "compute an average," he meant to say "compute the weighted average giving emphasis to more recent values for reasons X, Y, and Z."
its release is most definitely a conspiracy, and not a "conspiracy theory".
No, if the strain is proven to have been created in a lab and doesn't exist in the wild, its release is either an unfortunate accident due to lax attention to biosafety procedures, or a deliberate act of malice on the part of one or more people. Even if it was created in a lab, the overwhelming likelihood is that it was released accidentally.
Cross-contamination of flu samples destined for the yearly flu vaccination stockpiles with deadly flu strains just an accident?
Deadly accidents due to negligence and stupidity are far more common than deadly incidents motivated by malice. Statistically, it's far more likely to be an accident caused by negligence and stupidity than it is to be caused by some unnamed malicious intent. If you cannot prove that intent, or show reasonable evidence that there was criminal intent, you cannot conclude that it was there.
Unintentional cross contamination doesn't happen.
Of course it does. You're talking about viral specimens that are generally 10 to 300 nanometers in size; The reason we have biosafety procedures is to prevent these microscopic particles from being carried outside the lab environment & contaminating things. And just about any security expert on earth can tell you that people, and their inattention to security procedures, are just about the weakest link in securing anything. The controls are only as effective as the people observing them.
D-day was kept quiet, as was the Manhattan project.
What happens if you violate that secrecy: The Germans or the Japanese win; You spend the rest of your life as a traitor in exile, or receive a long all-expenses paid visit at Fort Leavenworth, or the death penalty.
The 9/11 Hijackers managed to keep their plans to themselves.
What happens if you violate that secrecy: The 9/11 Hijackers' plan fails, and they do not become martyrs. They go to jail or are handed back to some country for whom waterboarding looks like a day at the park.
In any case what makes you think that something like this needs large numbers of people? One person could just as easily pull it off, even if only a crackpot scientist ala the anthrax scares.
The problem with this is twofold:
First, if it's one scientist operating alone, they would need a lot of knowledge and skill to release this virus, for very little payoff. He doesn't own Tamiflu, he makes a salary for the company that controls it. If they make an extra hundred million dollars this year, he might get a moderate increase in his bonus, but he sure as hell isn't going to rake in a hundred million dollars. It's possible that someone could just be sheer-crazy enough to want to do it out of malice, but it's unlikely you'll find the combination of "talented & well trained" coexisting with "batshit-crazy sociopath". Not impossible, but we're certainly talking fractions of a single percent of the population.
Second, if it's a cabal, then the scientist(s) in question would have to all be ethically & morally bankrupt (not impossible, but not entirely likely), as well as immune to whatever virus they're releasing into the wild (again not impossible, but not entirely likely). They would also, very likely, not see much in the way of money as a result of doing this. So where's the upside? Where's the motivation?
Your example of NDAs, Sworn Oaths, state secrets, and the like are not in the same league as "treason charges with the death penalty as punishment," and where financial motivation is involved, the people with the skills & knowledge to perform this sort of malicious act are very unlikely to profit greatly from doing it.
Yes, it's happened in the past, drug companies have done bad things in the interests of profits. But given the number of drugs on the market, and the relatively few "conspiracy" cases, it seems perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of extraordinary claims when there's a reasonable excuse that doesn't involve a group of twisted, morally bankrupt people deciding to go on a killing spree for the fun of it.
Equivalency between any of those things is not required for that post to be dead accurate about the logical flaw in the typical defence for censorship, capitalist-style.
Problem is, consumer boycotts have been show to be effective in producing a change in a company's policies, and that's exactly what "Don't like their policies and rules, don't buy their products," translates to. You're not forced to buy an iphone/ipod, there are competing phones & music players on the market, some of which I'm told are far more feature-rich and capable than Apple's products.
Couple that with the simple fact that a "consumer boycott" of murder, gay marriage, and Enron-style securities fraud is completely ridiculous and nonsensical is why his post (and your support of it) fails to make sense. If you think that a boycott of Apple's products in an attempt to get them to amend their policies won't produce the desired results, that's one thing. Likening that argument to hot-button political issues is absurd.
Oh, except that the reason Microsoft got in trouble was that it illegally leveraged a monopoly in desktop operating systems to limit competition in the browser space, as well as engaging in other anticompetitive behaviours.
You're spot-on with your analysis that it's just like the Microsoft situation. Well, except that it's not just like that situation at all.
How this post got a +4, Interesting on the heels of this fumbling, childish attempt to draw a parallel, I don't know. I'd like you to supply examples of anybody legitimately using "this form of argument" in any of the debates you provided. Citations are most certainly needed.
I'm stunned at the logical gymnastics required to create equivalency between the legality of gay marriage, murder, and buying an app for your cell phone. Breathtaking.
Your commentary on libertarianism so far seems to be at odds with this claim.
I'm just not glossing over all the things that make it impossible.
No, you're glossing over all of your assumptions about human nature that make it impossible to conceive of any alternative to a nanny state picking up after people.
Right. But what happens when 60% of your society makes a bad choice?
Apparently in your view of the world you punish the 40% of people who made good choices and force them to fix the sins of the 60%? I would suggest that if 60% of society makes a bad choice, they be allowed to make that mistake & bear the consequences of it. If there are private citizens in the 40% who made the right choice who wish to help soften the blow for that majority, they're welcome to.
Or someone makes a bad choice and the stock market crashes and you can't extract those billions of lost dollars back out of the people responsible?
Enforcement of information symmetry (in the form of regulations & penalties for nondisclosure) is something which government would have a legitimate role in enforcing, to prevent fraud, even in a libertarian world. If you choose to participate in the stock market and speculate (gamble), then you should be free to take that risk, and responsible for your own losses. If your loss is due to being defrauded by someone, then you would have legal recourse, and the regulatory system clearly needs to be reviewed if massive fraud is possible within a regulatory framework. If your loss is due to your own negligence or lack of due diligence, then you shouldn't have taken the gamble, and it's not the responsibility of other more responsible people to make up for your losses.
Open Source developers rely upon the infrastructure created by the U.S. government - the Internet.
Prove that the only way the internet could have been created is through ARPA funding. I don't dispute that they are building on the infrastructure that was primarily funded by the government. I do dispute that it's impossible for the internet to have been created *without* government involvement.
I'm just saying getting those things done would be very hard without a lot of cooperation.
I disagree, and I think the open source developers are a prime real-life example of how people don't need to be compelled to cooperate by government mandate.
We'd see a working group for implementing roads. And a working group for implementing electrical infrastructure. Kind of like city government. Then those working groups would start cooperating with geographically related, but distant working groups. Kind of like the state governments. Pretty soon you're right back where we are now.
Right, this is exactly my point - people would come together to solve their common problems without the government compelling them to sit down & cooperate. The government is not needed to force people to work together. And incidentally, a loose-knit association of private citizens coming together to decide on a common way of doing things is not "right back where we are now," no matter how geographically-distributed you wish to make the individuals.
And I have no clue why you'd want to invoke the W3C or other such organizations as somehow being more efficient than our governments now.
I don't think I claimed they were necessarily more efficient, I claimed that these sorts of organizations are examples of groups of people working together on common formats, interchange, and standards without having to be forced by the government to do so. That was in response to your claim that no government involvement would lead to Balkanization of everything because we'd have no government-mandated common infrastructure.
Responsibility to yourself and no one else. Which I would call selfishness.
You are wrong. Libertarians believe that people should be responsible for their own actions - meaning, if you hurt somebody else, you take responsibility for that, and to the extent possible, you fix the damage you've caused. You are most certainly responsible to others - the "ideal" of libertarianism is that responsible people make responsible choices and don't hurt one another. No sane person would claim that people don't occasionally make bad & mistaken choices, and no sane libertarian would claim that anybody should be immune from responsibility for those bad / mistaken choices.
A libertarian would counter that that person who goes hungry or homeless in their own age should have been more responsible.
Wrong again. Libertarianism and private charity are not an either-or proposition. Libertarianism posits that it is not the government's responsibility to force charitable giving to people who have been irresponsible. Libertarians would never claim that voluntary charity from one person to another (or one person to a private charity) is somehow intolerable. You should really understand libertarian values before you start criticizing them.
My point was that in a libertarian world advertising wouldn't work, because in a libertarian world there is no good way to do anything in mass because there is no common infrastructure.
False dichotomy. Open Source developers are not mandated to adhere to open standards by any government regulation or standard. They do so because there is a benefit to everybody to follow certain standards for formatting and interchange. You are claiming that without the government to mandate standards for a common infrastructure, people would not be able to do so, and there are plenty of real-world examples to show that people understand the value of common standards without being forced to adhere to them by a government agency.
For someone who has so much to say about libertarianism, you don't seem to understand it very well.
Not as vague as you might think. If your gross income is $2000 a month from all sources, how will you make a $1500 mortgage payment and meet all your other obligations? Simple math will tell you that $1000 + 1500 > $2000. If your cash flow after purchasing the house is net-negative, you cannot afford the house. If you're *betting* that home price increases will allow you to refinance out of your high-rate ARM before the teaser rate expires, you probably cannot afford the house.
It doesn't matter what the "future value" of the house will be if you cannot pay the bills at today's price, or if you're *relying* on future price gains to reduce your mortgage payment by allowing you to refinance to a better fixed rate. Lax lending policies & home-buyer's appetite for risk led people to gamble that those prices would keep going up. They lost the bet, and a sound financial advisor would have told them not to place the bet in the first place.
Because the house the owner is leasing costs money. You must have the money to first own the house before you can lease it to others. Somewhere in that chain of custody, the person who owns the house must have the sum of money available to own the house - for the vast majority of people, this means a loan. For a lucky few, it means they already have enough money to own the house free and clear.
This system is, I think, known as "owner financing" - the current owner of the property agrees to finance the purchase, and in return, the buyer pays them a monthly payment (instead of a bank); if the buyer defaults, ownership of the house would revert back to the original owner.
Problem with this is, you still need somebody in the mix who has a vast sum of money - bank or owner - to provide the financing for the new buyer, or the new buyer will end up paying exorbitant monthly fees to cover the interest & risk on the loan the owner must take out to provide financing.
I'd amend your initial sentence to read: "There's no reason everyone couldn't own a home they can afford." This is the problem - some predatory banks extended too much easy credit to people knowing they didn't have the means to repay, and some unscrupulous people took that credit knowing they didn't have the means to repay. Not everybody is a crook on either side, but both sets of people are guilty of ignoring the simple reality that they were spending (or enabling people to spend) beyond their means.
If you buy a house you can't afford based on the assumption that "home prices will always rise, so I can just refinance once I have equity!" are taking a gamble, not making an investment.
Big difference. "You" (as in your average person, and the more than average persons, in fact most people outside of the ones employed in a tight area around the manufacturer) cannot change the OS on your fridge/dishwasher/whattamajig, so it's a bit of a moot point.
Not so big a difference as you claim. Most people don't care one whit whether or not "you" (as in your average person) can change the OS on their computer. It's a bit of a moot point.
Hobbyists care. Sufficiently knowledgeable computer-literate people who don't like Windows care. The people for whom a computer is a big black box that plays their music, sends their email, and has a web browser - they don't care, as long as the music, email, and web keep on running.
Total cost of "20 staff plus a big office" plus all the hardware & software to support their research is going to run you far more than "maybe a million."
Rough numbers based on the numbers that HR shares with us at my company is that it'd be more like a 5-10 million dollar cost for that group of 20 people. Still perhaps a blip in MSFT's or AAPL's overall budget, but not an insignificant one when every group is being asked to justify its existence due to shrinking margins.
Most likely because a surprisingly large number of people equate their computer with what it does for them - the application is important to them, not the OS.
Really? Care to provide the name of the medical text or peer-reviewed medical journal that you pulled those from?
Because - not that I'm calling you ignorant, you understand - it really looks to me like those are pulled verbatim from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on "Transmission (medicine)". Furthermore, it looks as if the first paragraph on wikipedia is all you really bothered to read to educate yourself on this topic.
I provided a definition from the CDC of airborne transmission, so hopefully you can understand that. Droplet contact is generally held to be short distance direct transmission (generally over less than 1 meter - "I sneeze, you get wet"), or indirect transmission if the droplets land on a surface that you then come in contact with. Droplets also tend not to be of a size suitable for aerosolation, and so settle to a surface rapidly after they are expelled. Droplet contact IS a method in which influenza may spread, but it is not the ONLY method by which it may spread.
Pro tip: When you're in a hole, best thing to do is stop digging.
Airborne transmission occurs by
dissemination of either airborne droplet nuclei or small particles in the respirable
size range containing infectious agents that remain infective over time and
distance.
Frankly, I'm inclined to believe that when the CDC says that there is "some evidence" of airborne transmission, they actually know what the term means, and are using it in accordance with their own definition.
Really? I could have sworn I meant absurdness, which is a synonym for absurdity, you pedantic twat. Next time I need to know what word I'm thinking of though, I'll be sure to ask you.
Perhaps you should find out what an airborne virus is before commenting.
Please, then, define what exactly the transmission method is for influenza? Is the medical term a "snot virus"? a "lung-butter virus"? When the virus is transmitted through an airborne aerosol (as influenza is), it is entirely appropriate to call that method of transmission "airborne."
But please, feel free to point out examples of viruses which are airborne and which are not introduced into the body via a liquid or fine particulate aerosol. I'm sure with your advanced knowledge of virology and medicine, you'll have no trouble providing an example of such an airborne virus that just floats around "naked" in the air, waiting for unsuspecting prey.
The CDC has stated that they believe this virus is being trasmitted from person to person the same way other influenza viruses spread - airborne aerosols created when infected people cough & sneeze.
It may seem to have a relatively low mortality rate, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the virus is airborne.
Slashdot Mirror
And what if the marketing pamphlets reflect the results of rigorous testing?
Throwing in the word "marketing" does not guarantee an automatic conviction of crimes against IT.
Agreed - if a uniform average is *what the device is supposed to compute*, then yes, it's wrong. If a weighted running average is known to produce more accurate results in this type of device, then it's far from being complete nonsense.
Discrepancy between comments & code functionality is certainly annoying when you're reading someone's code, but the comments are usually the part that's wrong in my experience - the comment gets inserted at the top of a block, and the code it comments is then revised to the point that the comment appears to bear absolutely no relation to the functionality of the code block beneath it.
Unless you're familiar with the sensor & device design, you cannot say for certain whether or not "weighted running average" or "simple average" is the correct behavior. All that can be said is that the code does not match the comment, and so ONE or the OTHER is incorrect.
I think his point was - you have no "right to openness" recognized under the law. You do, however, have the recognized right to a fair trial.
You don't know that. It doesn't compute a simple arithmetic mean for the set of samples, but rather computes a weighted average where the final reading taken is given emphasis.
Whether or not that behavior is "correct" in the sense that it gives an accurate number is impossible to say unless you're a subject matter expert.
All you can say with any certainty is "The comment says it should calculate an average, but it does not calculate an average." It's possible the code is incorrect, and it's also possible that the comment is incorrect, and that when the developer wrote "compute an average," he meant to say "compute the weighted average giving emphasis to more recent values for reasons X, Y, and Z."
No, if the strain is proven to have been created in a lab and doesn't exist in the wild, its release is either an unfortunate accident due to lax attention to biosafety procedures, or a deliberate act of malice on the part of one or more people. Even if it was created in a lab, the overwhelming likelihood is that it was released accidentally.
Deadly accidents due to negligence and stupidity are far more common than deadly incidents motivated by malice. Statistically, it's far more likely to be an accident caused by negligence and stupidity than it is to be caused by some unnamed malicious intent. If you cannot prove that intent, or show reasonable evidence that there was criminal intent, you cannot conclude that it was there.
Of course it does. You're talking about viral specimens that are generally 10 to 300 nanometers in size; The reason we have biosafety procedures is to prevent these microscopic particles from being carried outside the lab environment & contaminating things. And just about any security expert on earth can tell you that people, and their inattention to security procedures, are just about the weakest link in securing anything. The controls are only as effective as the people observing them.
What happens if you violate that secrecy: The Germans or the Japanese win; You spend the rest of your life as a traitor in exile, or receive a long all-expenses paid visit at Fort Leavenworth, or the death penalty.
What happens if you violate that secrecy: The 9/11 Hijackers' plan fails, and they do not become martyrs. They go to jail or are handed back to some country for whom waterboarding looks like a day at the park.
The problem with this is twofold:
First, if it's one scientist operating alone, they would need a lot of knowledge and skill to release this virus, for very little payoff. He doesn't own Tamiflu, he makes a salary for the company that controls it. If they make an extra hundred million dollars this year, he might get a moderate increase in his bonus, but he sure as hell isn't going to rake in a hundred million dollars. It's possible that someone could just be sheer-crazy enough to want to do it out of malice, but it's unlikely you'll find the combination of "talented & well trained" coexisting with "batshit-crazy sociopath". Not impossible, but we're certainly talking fractions of a single percent of the population.
Second, if it's a cabal, then the scientist(s) in question would have to all be ethically & morally bankrupt (not impossible, but not entirely likely), as well as immune to whatever virus they're releasing into the wild (again not impossible, but not entirely likely). They would also, very likely, not see much in the way of money as a result of doing this. So where's the upside? Where's the motivation?
Your example of NDAs, Sworn Oaths, state secrets, and the like are not in the same league as "treason charges with the death penalty as punishment," and where financial motivation is involved, the people with the skills & knowledge to perform this sort of malicious act are very unlikely to profit greatly from doing it.
Yes, it's happened in the past, drug companies have done bad things in the interests of profits. But given the number of drugs on the market, and the relatively few "conspiracy" cases, it seems perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of extraordinary claims when there's a reasonable excuse that doesn't involve a group of twisted, morally bankrupt people deciding to go on a killing spree for the fun of it.
Problem is, consumer boycotts have been show to be effective in producing a change in a company's policies, and that's exactly what "Don't like their policies and rules, don't buy their products," translates to. You're not forced to buy an iphone/ipod, there are competing phones & music players on the market, some of which I'm told are far more feature-rich and capable than Apple's products.
Couple that with the simple fact that a "consumer boycott" of murder, gay marriage, and Enron-style securities fraud is completely ridiculous and nonsensical is why his post (and your support of it) fails to make sense. If you think that a boycott of Apple's products in an attempt to get them to amend their policies won't produce the desired results, that's one thing. Likening that argument to hot-button political issues is absurd.
You're exactly right.
Oh, except that the reason Microsoft got in trouble was that it illegally leveraged a monopoly in desktop operating systems to limit competition in the browser space, as well as engaging in other anticompetitive behaviours.
You're spot-on with your analysis that it's just like the Microsoft situation. Well, except that it's not just like that situation at all.
How this post got a +4, Interesting on the heels of this fumbling, childish attempt to draw a parallel, I don't know. I'd like you to supply examples of anybody legitimately using "this form of argument" in any of the debates you provided. Citations are most certainly needed.
I'm stunned at the logical gymnastics required to create equivalency between the legality of gay marriage, murder, and buying an app for your cell phone. Breathtaking.
Your commentary on libertarianism so far seems to be at odds with this claim.
No, you're glossing over all of your assumptions about human nature that make it impossible to conceive of any alternative to a nanny state picking up after people.
Apparently in your view of the world you punish the 40% of people who made good choices and force them to fix the sins of the 60%? I would suggest that if 60% of society makes a bad choice, they be allowed to make that mistake & bear the consequences of it. If there are private citizens in the 40% who made the right choice who wish to help soften the blow for that majority, they're welcome to.
Enforcement of information symmetry (in the form of regulations & penalties for nondisclosure) is something which government would have a legitimate role in enforcing, to prevent fraud, even in a libertarian world. If you choose to participate in the stock market and speculate (gamble), then you should be free to take that risk, and responsible for your own losses. If your loss is due to being defrauded by someone, then you would have legal recourse, and the regulatory system clearly needs to be reviewed if massive fraud is possible within a regulatory framework. If your loss is due to your own negligence or lack of due diligence, then you shouldn't have taken the gamble, and it's not the responsibility of other more responsible people to make up for your losses.
Prove that the only way the internet could have been created is through ARPA funding. I don't dispute that they are building on the infrastructure that was primarily funded by the government. I do dispute that it's impossible for the internet to have been created *without* government involvement.
I disagree, and I think the open source developers are a prime real-life example of how people don't need to be compelled to cooperate by government mandate.
Right, this is exactly my point - people would come together to solve their common problems without the government compelling them to sit down & cooperate. The government is not needed to force people to work together. And incidentally, a loose-knit association of private citizens coming together to decide on a common way of doing things is not "right back where we are now," no matter how geographically-distributed you wish to make the individuals.
I don't think I claimed they were necessarily more efficient, I claimed that these sorts of organizations are examples of groups of people working together on common formats, interchange, and standards without having to be forced by the government to do so. That was in response to your claim that no government involvement would lead to Balkanization of everything because we'd have no government-mandated common infrastructure.
You are wrong. Libertarians believe that people should be responsible for their own actions - meaning, if you hurt somebody else, you take responsibility for that, and to the extent possible, you fix the damage you've caused. You are most certainly responsible to others - the "ideal" of libertarianism is that responsible people make responsible choices and don't hurt one another. No sane person would claim that people don't occasionally make bad & mistaken choices, and no sane libertarian would claim that anybody should be immune from responsibility for those bad / mistaken choices.
Wrong again. Libertarianism and private charity are not an either-or proposition. Libertarianism posits that it is not the government's responsibility to force charitable giving to people who have been irresponsible. Libertarians would never claim that voluntary charity from one person to another (or one person to a private charity) is somehow intolerable. You should really understand libertarian values before you start criticizing them.
False dichotomy. Open Source developers are not mandated to adhere to open standards by any government regulation or standard. They do so because there is a benefit to everybody to follow certain standards for formatting and interchange. You are claiming that without the government to mandate standards for a common infrastructure, people would not be able to do so, and there are plenty of real-world examples to show that people understand the value of common standards without being forced to adhere to them by a government agency.
For someone who has so much to say about libertarianism, you don't seem to understand it very well.
Not as vague as you might think. If your gross income is $2000 a month from all sources, how will you make a $1500 mortgage payment and meet all your other obligations? Simple math will tell you that $1000 + 1500 > $2000. If your cash flow after purchasing the house is net-negative, you cannot afford the house. If you're *betting* that home price increases will allow you to refinance out of your high-rate ARM before the teaser rate expires, you probably cannot afford the house.
It doesn't matter what the "future value" of the house will be if you cannot pay the bills at today's price, or if you're *relying* on future price gains to reduce your mortgage payment by allowing you to refinance to a better fixed rate. Lax lending policies & home-buyer's appetite for risk led people to gamble that those prices would keep going up. They lost the bet, and a sound financial advisor would have told them not to place the bet in the first place.
Because the house the owner is leasing costs money. You must have the money to first own the house before you can lease it to others. Somewhere in that chain of custody, the person who owns the house must have the sum of money available to own the house - for the vast majority of people, this means a loan. For a lucky few, it means they already have enough money to own the house free and clear.
Would that be before, or after, the Baby Boom?
This system is, I think, known as "owner financing" - the current owner of the property agrees to finance the purchase, and in return, the buyer pays them a monthly payment (instead of a bank); if the buyer defaults, ownership of the house would revert back to the original owner.
Problem with this is, you still need somebody in the mix who has a vast sum of money - bank or owner - to provide the financing for the new buyer, or the new buyer will end up paying exorbitant monthly fees to cover the interest & risk on the loan the owner must take out to provide financing.
I'd amend your initial sentence to read: "There's no reason everyone couldn't own a home they can afford." This is the problem - some predatory banks extended too much easy credit to people knowing they didn't have the means to repay, and some unscrupulous people took that credit knowing they didn't have the means to repay. Not everybody is a crook on either side, but both sets of people are guilty of ignoring the simple reality that they were spending (or enabling people to spend) beyond their means.
If you buy a house you can't afford based on the assumption that "home prices will always rise, so I can just refinance once I have equity!" are taking a gamble, not making an investment.
And unfortunately for your point, everything in your post is also not statistically valid.
Not so big a difference as you claim. Most people don't care one whit whether or not "you" (as in your average person) can change the OS on their computer. It's a bit of a moot point.
Hobbyists care. Sufficiently knowledgeable computer-literate people who don't like Windows care. The people for whom a computer is a big black box that plays their music, sends their email, and has a web browser - they don't care, as long as the music, email, and web keep on running.
Total cost of "20 staff plus a big office" plus all the hardware & software to support their research is going to run you far more than "maybe a million."
Rough numbers based on the numbers that HR shares with us at my company is that it'd be more like a 5-10 million dollar cost for that group of 20 people. Still perhaps a blip in MSFT's or AAPL's overall budget, but not an insignificant one when every group is being asked to justify its existence due to shrinking margins.
Most likely because a surprisingly large number of people equate their computer with what it does for them - the application is important to them, not the OS.
Really? Care to provide the name of the medical text or peer-reviewed medical journal that you pulled those from?
Because - not that I'm calling you ignorant, you understand - it really looks to me like those are pulled verbatim from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on "Transmission (medicine)". Furthermore, it looks as if the first paragraph on wikipedia is all you really bothered to read to educate yourself on this topic.
I provided a definition from the CDC of airborne transmission, so hopefully you can understand that. Droplet contact is generally held to be short distance direct transmission (generally over less than 1 meter - "I sneeze, you get wet"), or indirect transmission if the droplets land on a surface that you then come in contact with. Droplets also tend not to be of a size suitable for aerosolation, and so settle to a surface rapidly after they are expelled. Droplet contact IS a method in which influenza may spread, but it is not the ONLY method by which it may spread.
Pro tip: When you're in a hole, best thing to do is stop digging.
Frankly, I'm inclined to believe that when the CDC says that there is "some evidence" of airborne transmission, they actually know what the term means, and are using it in accordance with their own definition.
Really? I could have sworn I meant absurdness, which is a synonym for absurdity, you pedantic twat. Next time I need to know what word I'm thinking of though, I'll be sure to ask you.
Please, then, define what exactly the transmission method is for influenza? Is the medical term a "snot virus"? a "lung-butter virus"? When the virus is transmitted through an airborne aerosol (as influenza is), it is entirely appropriate to call that method of transmission "airborne."
But please, feel free to point out examples of viruses which are airborne and which are not introduced into the body via a liquid or fine particulate aerosol. I'm sure with your advanced knowledge of virology and medicine, you'll have no trouble providing an example of such an airborne virus that just floats around "naked" in the air, waiting for unsuspecting prey.
Understandable. I was underwhelmed by the available choices as well.
The absurdness of this response is mind-boggling.
Really.
The CDC has stated that they believe this virus is being trasmitted from person to person the same way other influenza viruses spread - airborne aerosols created when infected people cough & sneeze.
It may seem to have a relatively low mortality rate, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the virus is airborne.