Most europeans think all religons should be entirely from the state and politics.
And yet, unlike the US, many European countries have established churches. Kind of ironic that in Europe, there is more substantive separation of religion from the secular authority, while in the US there is more formal separation of the two.
Last time I looked evolution was a totally random process.
When was the last time you looked.
Mutations occur randomly that create changes to individuals in a population.
Mutations in nature do not, generally, occur randomly, but through mechanistic, causal processes (some are random or involve random elements); they are generally unpredictable, and at the level of most mathematical/simulation models must be treated as random (perhaps with some biases) because the processes involved in producing mutations occur at a vastly lower scale than the effects that are interesting in the model, but that doesn't make them actually random.
Those changes that don't allow the individual to live better in the environment and pass on the mutation TEND to die out. Those that give an individual an advantage that can be passed on TENDS to enter the general population and spread.
Again, these tendencies are not, generally, biases in really random processes, they are results of mechanistic processes that may be difficult to predict on an individual level and. Even in simulations and models, these processes are often modelled explicitly rather than randomly (although some of the inputs that affect them are often random because the processes that control them are outside of the scope of model, and a random function with a suitable distribution is more economical for the model than actually going out and modelling the underlying process explicitly.)
There's no directing "force" or intelligence its all due to random occurrences.
The absence of a directing intelligence does not mean that the process is random. It is inaccurte to say there is no directing force: there are a complex set of directing environmental forces.
GP didn't sayhe was. GP said that he was a person who committed great evil that does not appear to have been motivated by "nutjob religious ideas".
The claim is not "some people who happened to be theists also did bad things", but rather that "people did bad things in the name of their religious belief". If you want to counter that, you need to show how someone's lack of belief caused them to do bad things.
Actually, no. If by "counter" you mean "refute", than showing that would not counter it. If by "counter", you mean "demonstrate the invalidity of the use of that fact to suggest that religion is uniquely bad", showing, as GP did, that people have done equally bad things without religious motivation would be enough. Of course, showing that people did bad things in the service of expressly anti-theistic belief systems like Communism, as GP also did, would fit exactly what you are requesting anyway, and so your complaint seems ill-placed even if it was valid.
Only problem with this argument is that California is not particularly different from other states in terms of software needs and the vast majority of state workers could accomplish their tasks on a Linux or Mac OS X platform.
The only problem with this argument is that it simply asserts assumptions without any support.
In addition, improvement through random events, driven by survival of the fittest, provides no explanation for how DNA first formed.
Yeah, that's a subject of a different field. So what?
Based on the evidence, a "scientifically minded" person must conclude that the current "scientific" explanation is lacking.
Er, no. A theory has a designed scope. While a theory that was similarly resilient that explained more would be better, a theory is not "lacking" that explains things within its scope and has nothing to say about things outside of it.
BTW, comparing Wikipedia with random mutations has three drawbacks. First, very few edits are "random".
Very few mutations are truly random, either, they may be unpredictable by outside observers, but they are produced by processes like viral action, etc., that are mechanistic even if practically impossible to predict (some may be produced by radioactive decay and be "random", and some may be distant results of such random processes even if they don't immediately produce them, but then, arguably, so could just about any human action be.)
Second, a bad edit can be corrected without killing the article.
But the "bad" version of the article is less likely to be the focus of future of variations. So it has lower reproductive fitness.
Third, "good" additions and corrections are made by people who are both intelligent and informed.
Biases in the production of mutations do not rule out evolution.
From what I understand, evolution is a scientific hypothesis and the Theory of Natural Selection supports it.
You understand incorrectly. Evolution is observed fact. Darwin's theory and subsequent evolutionary theory posit explanations of why it occurs, and how specifically it has manifested in the past. Their are hypotheses in the field of evolution, but that the diversity of life on Earth emerged by evolution is a component of theory that is not mere hypothesis.
If this is true Wikipedia is dead for long: it never keeps a large, visible "pool" of "genes" (different version of the same article) that the "nature" (viewing public) can "select", and the "nature" simply is too busy to "select" them anyway.
Yeah, it does. "View History". And the "nature" involved is mostly the active core of editors; the "viewing public" that provides occasional edits but doesn't track articles is more a source of mutations than the selection mechanism.
"Wisdom of Crowds" systems produce good results because there is a feedback loop, and elections don't have that feedback.
To sift the wisdom from the noise, there has to be some method of determining which are 'good' inputs and which are 'bad'. With Evolution, the feedback is easy to understand, bad mutations die/fail to breed/whatever, good ones get more food/sex/whatever and are more likely to reproduce.
"Wisdom of Crowds" is a catchy but misleading name for a particular kind of generalized darwinian selection, and I would argue that elections do fall within it and that they do have a very strong feedback mechanism, such that variations in the options offered in subsequent elections are largely based around mild shifts from the successful variants in previous elections.
Sure, it may not produce optimal results in terms of the policy outcomes that many people deem "desirable", but then, biological evolution doesn't tend to produce a natural utopia, either. Each system evolves according to what is rewarded and punished in the environment in which it operates.
What distinguishes systems in which the "Wisdom of Crowds" is praised as useful from elections is not the presence of a feedback mechanism in the latter (as that is present in both), but the close tie between the feedback mechanism and some narrowly-defined, specific, objective utility measure. Its not that that elections don't strongly select for certain features -- they strongly select for the ability to win elections in the particular political system in which they are conduct. Its just that what they select for isn't the kind of thing people are looking for when they are discussing the "Wisdom of Crowds" most of the time.
As the parent mentioned, the "Wisdom of Crowds" put Bush in power.
Actually, a system expressly designed to limit the influence of "crowds" put Bush in power, and only by being far more effective in limiting the influence of "crowds" than it does in its normal operation. Bush wasn't the top vote getter in the popular vote, and to the best evidence, also didn't receive even a plurality of the votes cast (as opposed to counted) in any combination of states holding a majority of the electoral votes.
Who controls the content of Wikipedia articles? Is it a large crowd of seemingly random contributors each imparting their own bits of wisdom? Or is it a small set of contributors providing the base of an article with a few mostly minor revisions submitted by random people passing by? In my experience, it's the latter.
So, there is a factor of external, unpredictable change (with some internal biases) from the random passerby submitting revisions, with a focussed selective mechanism in the core group focussed on the article, and new chance changes focus on the variants most successful under the focussed selective method. Oddly, those are key requirements identified for generalized darwinian selection, which seems to be the mechanism TFA is pointing to to explain the success of Wikipedia.
There's no "crowd" at work here, it's a lot of small groups of vested individuals who have interest in a particular domain and an efficient way of contributing and collaborating in that domain.
Sure there is; the random passerby that interject changes are a "crowd". And while they may not individually be decisive as to the form of an article at any given time (especially one with the kind of particularly active core group you point to), their changes do send the article off in one direction or another as the regulars react to them, and are a key feature of the difference between Wikipedia and, say, a traditional encyclopedia (also, the fact that the activist groups shift over time without central direction as people self-select into or out of the activist core of any particular article is also a feature of the "crowd" nature of Wikipedia.)
Its not really a good idea to impose restrictions on a company for "what they MIGHT do".
Those who have been found to have committed wrongdoing in the past are often subject to future restrictions based on what they might do; this relates to the concept of incapacitation as a tool in a justice system.
I don't see why companies should be less subject to this than individuals.
Perhaps it's only a little ironic that some states keep fighting the Microsoft Monopoly yet force their own (state) employees to use Microsoft products. This is true of California (and probably most states). How much do they really care to bust the monopoly if they can't even wean themselves from the convicted monopolist?
How is this "irony"? Its really very simple, the states who don't see a viable choice for themselves besides the existing monopoly would be most likely, not least, to see the monopoly as harmful and seek legal redress for its harms.
States that find that their needs have viable alternatives (whether they always choose Microsoft or not) are unlikely to see Microsoft as even being a monopolist, much less a harmful one. It would be more fairly described as "ironic" if states accused Microsoft of being a harmful monopoly and sought redress but did not use Microsoft software.
Despite the delusions of Mayor Adrian Fenty and Pretend-Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington D.C. is a city, not a state.
That's why it doesn't have congressional delegates or a Governor.
The rest of the article is similarly well researched and written.
Under the law under which D.C. and the other states brought the antitrust actions at issue in TFA against Microsoft, D.C. is a State. What D.C. is or is not in other contexts is hardly relevant. I suspect your understanding of the rest of the issues involved is about on par with that demonstrated by your comment about D.C.
As far as the postal service is concerned it's a state.
More relevant to the present discussion, as far as the laws allowing State attorneys-general to sue for antitrust violations are concerned, the District of Columbia is a state (see 15 U.S.C. Sec. 15g).
While true in a general sense, this statement is not true in the context of many important federal laws. In particular, relevant to the issue here, in the context of the Clayton Act which authorizes suits by State attorneys-general to enforce certain provisions of anti-trust law, a "State" is defined (15 U.S.C. Sec. 15g) thus:
The term "State" means a State, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and any other territory or possession of the United States.
So the initial moderation of your post as "off-topic" was quite proper; insofar as it is true at all, it is true only in a sense irrelevant to the present discussion.
It's a "law" based on observation. Yeah, it's probably premature at this point to formalize, but it's a trend I've been seeing in the news lately, like evidence of "recent" animals having existed long before they were "supposed" to have evolved;
Well, first, I wouldn't trust "the news" to accurately report science, since few mainstream journalists understand the first thing about the subject matter, and even when they do, the attempts to appeal to mass audiences mean that most things in the popular media are badly dumbed down and distorted.
But, yeah, empiricism results in gaps that have to be filled in, and a lot of tentative conclusions drawn from the earliest or latest known appearance in the fossil record get contradicted later; given what is known about the processes involved in fossilization and the impossibility of cataloging the entire content of the Earth's crust, this is to be expected.
animals being neighbors, but one was supposed to have become extinct long before the other came about.
This isn't a separate issue, its just restating the a special case of the previous issue in different words, and the same response applies.
Massive anachronism abounds when you compare evolutionary geologic tables to the actual fossils.
What is this even supposed to mean? What is an "evolutionary geologic table"? It seems as if you are trying to use bigger words (if not necessary meaningful ones) to restate, again, the same issue to make it sound like you've pointed to three different issuesrather than repeating the same one three times.
There are enough exceptions to the evolutionist-devised rules to throw into doubt whether the rules have any basis in reality.
What "exceptions"? To what "rules"?
Evolutionism uses the Dan Rather approach to science: "Yeah, maybe the story/theory is fake, but it represents the truth."
No, scientific research into origins uses the scientific approach to science in which hypotheses are generated to explain observations, testable predictions are generated from those hypotheses, they are tested, and if after substantial testing they are not disproved and are the most parsimonious available explanation, they are accepted as theories until such time as they are disproven.
Given enough time, scientists will prove evolution.
Evolution has been directly observed. Its existence is not in serious debate.
Given enough time, sludge evolved to man. Given enough time, scientists will prove evolution.
I, for one, don't put faith in the "given enough time" philosophy. Given enough time, pigs will evolve wings. Given enough time, hell will freeze over. Given enough time, the Easter Bunny will become President. No, some realities are simply impossible. Even after a googol years, two will not exist between zero and one, for instance.
There is only a small few religions that take this stance I disagree with your premise: "According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." This is only slightly less than the 46% reported in a 2006 Gallup poll.[64] Only 14% believe that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process." [wikipedia.org]
The number of Americans that believe something is logically orthogonal to the number of religions that teach it, so the evidence you present (questions of its reliability aside) does nothing to cast doubt upon the position it is offered to rebut.
...the program will still fail to predict it. By definition.
The article (as would be unsurprising even from the professional press, and is less surprising from what seems to be a school newspaper of the school employing the professor getting the grant) seems to be a very uncritical regurgitation of an extraordinarily puffed-up press release that seems to suggest that the professor has gotten a grant to develop something that already exist and presently has the capacities sought by the grant. Sometimes. Maybe. Really, the shifting use of verb tenses gave me a kind of mental whiplash trying to read it.
Also, I think that while this may be useful, the danger of overreliance on a system where quite literally no one using it understands how factors are really being used to generate outcome predictions are immense; if you get something that works well predictively at all, it will likely be prone to fail wildly if any of the many factors it is adapted to based on the historical data used to train it shift. Unfortunately, it is quite likely that the particular sensitivities will be opaque, and thus no one is likely to know when it is likely to fail. This is rather distinct from conventional analysis which, even though it may fail in many circumstances, where it is rigorous analysis and not just guesswork to start with, its assumptions are transparent and its weaknesses and vulnerabilities in application to particular situations can also be evaluated.
Don't be obtuse. You don't design for security as an afterthought.
The iPhone is rather secure; its rather difficult to accidentally -- or even intentionally -- run any non-standard software on it. What is being designed for as an "afterthought" isn't security, its openness. That happens to change the requirements to maintain security, since "security through 'just say no to everything'" is no longer an option.
Are you claiming that Apple engineers are that lazy and naive?
Why would you say that? They did a good job at making a product that fit the role the business people assigned to the product initially; the role has changed, and as a result the design of the system is changing. Someone might have been naive, but it wasn't the engineers.
Yes, it crossed the state lines. That is a felony.
Its almost certainly a felony in any case. Crossing state lines makes it more likely to also be a federal crime; but the two categories are orthogonal.
Apple sold over 1 billion tracks on iTMS. They were paying at least X cents a song to use 1-click. You do the math. Even if X is only 1 cent that's still a lot of pennies.
X may have been a fraction of a cent. Or the licensing arrangement may not have been based on a linear function of sales. Even if it was, the cost of negotiating the license (as well as teh cost of the license) was a barrier to iTMS competitors. How much was it worth to Apple to keep competitors with as-easy-to-use systems out of the market? Quite a lot, I'd say.
It's about the same as saying "Gee, I'm sure glad we just bought those 10,000 SCO Linux right-to-use licenses for $699 a piece," after watching SCO swirl down the toilet when they lost their case.
The difference is that the Amazon 1-click patent -- which was an actual awarded patent, even if later revoked -- was more of a real barrier to potential competitors than the SCO claims of IP rights in Linux.
Sucks to be Steve Jobs and Apple and realize that you've been licensing 1-click for iTMS for years now when it wasn't even a valid patent...
Why? The licensing costs were probably cheaper than the litigation over Amazon's patent would have been, and they quite possibly wouldn't have been awarded costs even if they had won such a challenge. Meanwhile, the Amazon patent raised cost barriers that kept out iTMS competitors. Given the success iTMS experienced in those circumstances and no doubt in part because of those circumstances, particularly the barrier to competition during its formative years when it was most vulnerable to competition posed by the Amazon 1-click patent, I wouldn't say things "sucked" for Apple.
So how would you like your tea made, according to the method the taster used when blending the tea or according to some completely different method?
I find that many teas are best with hot-but-short-of-boiling water, and a brewing/steeping time of substantially less than the 6 minutes called for by ISO 3103, and that brewing in separate pot vs. directly in a cup doesn't help much, and I've at least never observed substantial effects from using a wide variety of different size cups (never actually used a "bowl" as called for by ISO 3103 as the serving container) and pots than those called for by ISO 3103. So, in general, I think "a completely different method."
Standardization of method for taste tests used to choose which teas to grow, purchase, etc. in bulk is arguably useful to get an apples-to-apples comparison. Its not necessarily the best way to make any particular cup of tea.
ISO 3103 is the English method of making tea, i.e. in a pot with BOILING water.
I wasn't aware that proper English teamaking required that the tea be brewed either in a pot of 310 ml with a mass of 200g or one of 150 ml with a mass of 118g and then be poured into a bowl of 380 ml (if the larger pot was used) or 200 ml (if the smaller pot was used), and that, if milk is used, it must be 5ml (for the large bowl) or 2.5 ml (for the small one).
No, because the purpose of a search engine is to find things relevant to what you are looking for. Anyone who actually goes to a search engine is doing so because they don't want www.fedex.com or www.ups.com.
Um, no. I don't think that's a valid assumption, at all. Someone who goes to a search engine may not know the URL for FedEx or UPS (yes, they have fairly obvious URLs -- that doesn't mean everyone knows them, though it does mean that once they know them they are likely, though by no means certain, to remember them.)
If someone knows they don't want fedex.com or ups.com pages and chooses to share that information with Google, Google accommodates their needs. Google's assumption -- and I'd say its a fair one -- is that queries without express restrictions or exclusions of particular sites express no preference, not the kind of "assumed exclusion" you suggest.
I don't claim that wikipedia doesn't have lots of information. I claim that a generic search will never be usefully answered by a link to wikipedia.
I claim that you are wrong, since I've done "generic searches" of the type you describe, and they have been usefully answered by links to wikipedia.
For a search like "shipping" the top retail shippers aren't necessarily the best or most relevant matches.
Actually, I'd say for a search like "shipping", the top retail shippers are a pretty good operationalization of "most relevant".
Now, if the search was "economy shipping" or "rapid shipping", that might not be the case. And, surprisingly enough, FedEx and UPS aren't the top results for either of those. Vague, generic searches may get results that are most relevant in a kind of least-common denominator sense. But then, what do you expect? Mind-reading that knows your personal, unexpressed interests and inserts them as search terms?
What's more is wikipedia should almost never be a match for a search that doesn't explicitly include phrases like "what is" or "definition" or "encyclopedia".
Why? One of the things people are most likely to be interested in when searching for a term is information about whatever that term is, and one of the most popular on-line sources for such information is often Wikipedia. The fact that you don't personally like Wikipedia doesn't make it irrelevant to the average Google user. If you expressly don't want Wikipedia results, they're easy to exclude.
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And yet, unlike the US, many European countries have established churches. Kind of ironic that in Europe, there is more substantive separation of religion from the secular authority, while in the US there is more formal separation of the two.
GP didn't sayhe was. GP said that he was a person who committed great evil that does not appear to have been motivated by "nutjob religious ideas".
Actually, no. If by "counter" you mean "refute", than showing that would not counter it. If by "counter", you mean "demonstrate the invalidity of the use of that fact to suggest that religion is uniquely bad", showing, as GP did, that people have done equally bad things without religious motivation would be enough. Of course, showing that people did bad things in the service of expressly anti-theistic belief systems like Communism, as GP also did, would fit exactly what you are requesting anyway, and so your complaint seems ill-placed even if it was valid.
The only problem with this argument is that it simply asserts assumptions without any support.
Yeah, that's a subject of a different field. So what?
Er, no. A theory has a designed scope. While a theory that was similarly resilient that explained more would be better, a theory is not "lacking" that explains things within its scope and has nothing to say about things outside of it.
Very few mutations are truly random, either, they may be unpredictable by outside observers, but they are produced by processes like viral action, etc., that are mechanistic even if practically impossible to predict (some may be produced by radioactive decay and be "random", and some may be distant results of such random processes even if they don't immediately produce them, but then, arguably, so could just about any human action be.)
But the "bad" version of the article is less likely to be the focus of future of variations. So it has lower reproductive fitness.
Biases in the production of mutations do not rule out evolution.
You understand incorrectly. Evolution is observed fact. Darwin's theory and subsequent evolutionary theory posit explanations of why it occurs, and how specifically it has manifested in the past. Their are hypotheses in the field of evolution, but that the diversity of life on Earth emerged by evolution is a component of theory that is not mere hypothesis.
Yeah, it does. "View History". And the "nature" involved is mostly the active core of editors; the "viewing public" that provides occasional edits but doesn't track articles is more a source of mutations than the selection mechanism.
"Wisdom of Crowds" is a catchy but misleading name for a particular kind of generalized darwinian selection, and I would argue that elections do fall within it and that they do have a very strong feedback mechanism, such that variations in the options offered in subsequent elections are largely based around mild shifts from the successful variants in previous elections.
Sure, it may not produce optimal results in terms of the policy outcomes that many people deem "desirable", but then, biological evolution doesn't tend to produce a natural utopia, either. Each system evolves according to what is rewarded and punished in the environment in which it operates.
What distinguishes systems in which the "Wisdom of Crowds" is praised as useful from elections is not the presence of a feedback mechanism in the latter (as that is present in both), but the close tie between the feedback mechanism and some narrowly-defined, specific, objective utility measure. Its not that that elections don't strongly select for certain features -- they strongly select for the ability to win elections in the particular political system in which they are conduct. Its just that what they select for isn't the kind of thing people are looking for when they are discussing the "Wisdom of Crowds" most of the time.
Actually, a system expressly designed to limit the influence of "crowds" put Bush in power, and only by being far more effective in limiting the influence of "crowds" than it does in its normal operation. Bush wasn't the top vote getter in the popular vote, and to the best evidence, also didn't receive even a plurality of the votes cast (as opposed to counted) in any combination of states holding a majority of the electoral votes.
So, there is a factor of external, unpredictable change (with some internal biases) from the random passerby submitting revisions, with a focussed selective mechanism in the core group focussed on the article, and new chance changes focus on the variants most successful under the focussed selective method. Oddly, those are key requirements identified for generalized darwinian selection, which seems to be the mechanism TFA is pointing to to explain the success of Wikipedia.
Sure there is; the random passerby that interject changes are a "crowd". And while they may not individually be decisive as to the form of an article at any given time (especially one with the kind of particularly active core group you point to), their changes do send the article off in one direction or another as the regulars react to them, and are a key feature of the difference between Wikipedia and, say, a traditional encyclopedia (also, the fact that the activist groups shift over time without central direction as people self-select into or out of the activist core of any particular article is also a feature of the "crowd" nature of Wikipedia.)
On the contrary, the first Daily Show DVD set (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Indecision 2004 was released in 2005.
Those who have been found to have committed wrongdoing in the past are often subject to future restrictions based on what they might do; this relates to the concept of incapacitation as a tool in a justice system.
I don't see why companies should be less subject to this than individuals.
How is this "irony"? Its really very simple, the states who don't see a viable choice for themselves besides the existing monopoly would be most likely, not least, to see the monopoly as harmful and seek legal redress for its harms.
States that find that their needs have viable alternatives (whether they always choose Microsoft or not) are unlikely to see Microsoft as even being a monopolist, much less a harmful one. It would be more fairly described as "ironic" if states accused Microsoft of being a harmful monopoly and sought redress but did not use Microsoft software.
Under the law under which D.C. and the other states brought the antitrust actions at issue in TFA against Microsoft, D.C. is a State. What D.C. is or is not in other contexts is hardly relevant. I suspect your understanding of the rest of the issues involved is about on par with that demonstrated by your comment about D.C.
More relevant to the present discussion, as far as the laws allowing State attorneys-general to sue for antitrust violations are concerned, the District of Columbia is a state (see 15 U.S.C. Sec. 15g).
While true in a general sense, this statement is not true in the context of many important federal laws. In particular, relevant to the issue here, in the context of the Clayton Act which authorizes suits by State attorneys-general to enforce certain provisions of anti-trust law, a "State" is defined (15 U.S.C. Sec. 15g) thus:
So the initial moderation of your post as "off-topic" was quite proper; insofar as it is true at all, it is true only in a sense irrelevant to the present discussion.
Well, first, I wouldn't trust "the news" to accurately report science, since few mainstream journalists understand the first thing about the subject matter, and even when they do, the attempts to appeal to mass audiences mean that most things in the popular media are badly dumbed down and distorted.
But, yeah, empiricism results in gaps that have to be filled in, and a lot of tentative conclusions drawn from the earliest or latest known appearance in the fossil record get contradicted later; given what is known about the processes involved in fossilization and the impossibility of cataloging the entire content of the Earth's crust, this is to be expected.
This isn't a separate issue, its just restating the a special case of the previous issue in different words, and the same response applies.
What is this even supposed to mean? What is an "evolutionary geologic table"? It seems as if you are trying to use bigger words (if not necessary meaningful ones) to restate, again, the same issue to make it sound like you've pointed to three different issuesrather than repeating the same one three times.
What "exceptions"? To what "rules"?
No, scientific research into origins uses the scientific approach to science in which hypotheses are generated to explain observations, testable predictions are generated from those hypotheses, they are tested, and if after substantial testing they are not disproved and are the most parsimonious available explanation, they are accepted as theories until such time as they are disproven.
Evolution has been directly observed. Its existence is not in serious debate.
Given enough time, sludge evolved to man. Given enough time, scientists will prove evolution.
I, for one, don't put faith in the "given enough time" philosophy. Given enough time, pigs will evolve wings. Given enough time, hell will freeze over. Given enough time, the Easter Bunny will become President. No, some realities are simply impossible. Even after a googol years, two will not exist between zero and one, for instance.
The number of Americans that believe something is logically orthogonal to the number of religions that teach it, so the evidence you present (questions of its reliability aside) does nothing to cast doubt upon the position it is offered to rebut.
...the program will still fail to predict it. By definition.
The article (as would be unsurprising even from the professional press, and is less surprising from what seems to be a school newspaper of the school employing the professor getting the grant) seems to be a very uncritical regurgitation of an extraordinarily puffed-up press release that seems to suggest that the professor has gotten a grant to develop something that already exist and presently has the capacities sought by the grant. Sometimes. Maybe. Really, the shifting use of verb tenses gave me a kind of mental whiplash trying to read it.
Also, I think that while this may be useful, the danger of overreliance on a system where quite literally no one using it understands how factors are really being used to generate outcome predictions are immense; if you get something that works well predictively at all, it will likely be prone to fail wildly if any of the many factors it is adapted to based on the historical data used to train it shift. Unfortunately, it is quite likely that the particular sensitivities will be opaque, and thus no one is likely to know when it is likely to fail. This is rather distinct from conventional analysis which, even though it may fail in many circumstances, where it is rigorous analysis and not just guesswork to start with, its assumptions are transparent and its weaknesses and vulnerabilities in application to particular situations can also be evaluated.
The iPhone is rather secure; its rather difficult to accidentally -- or even intentionally -- run any non-standard software on it. What is being designed for as an "afterthought" isn't security, its openness. That happens to change the requirements to maintain security, since "security through 'just say no to everything'" is no longer an option.
Why would you say that? They did a good job at making a product that fit the role the business people assigned to the product initially; the role has changed, and as a result the design of the system is changing. Someone might have been naive, but it wasn't the engineers.
Its almost certainly a felony in any case. Crossing state lines makes it more likely to also be a federal crime; but the two categories are orthogonal.
X may have been a fraction of a cent. Or the licensing arrangement may not have been based on a linear function of sales. Even if it was, the cost of negotiating the license (as well as teh cost of the license) was a barrier to iTMS competitors. How much was it worth to Apple to keep competitors with as-easy-to-use systems out of the market? Quite a lot, I'd say.
The difference is that the Amazon 1-click patent -- which was an actual awarded patent, even if later revoked -- was more of a real barrier to potential competitors than the SCO claims of IP rights in Linux.
Why? The licensing costs were probably cheaper than the litigation over Amazon's patent would have been, and they quite possibly wouldn't have been awarded costs even if they had won such a challenge. Meanwhile, the Amazon patent raised cost barriers that kept out iTMS competitors. Given the success iTMS experienced in those circumstances and no doubt in part because of those circumstances, particularly the barrier to competition during its formative years when it was most vulnerable to competition posed by the Amazon 1-click patent, I wouldn't say things "sucked" for Apple.
I find that many teas are best with hot-but-short-of-boiling water, and a brewing/steeping time of substantially less than the 6 minutes called for by ISO 3103, and that brewing in separate pot vs. directly in a cup doesn't help much, and I've at least never observed substantial effects from using a wide variety of different size cups (never actually used a "bowl" as called for by ISO 3103 as the serving container) and pots than those called for by ISO 3103. So, in general, I think "a completely different method."
Standardization of method for taste tests used to choose which teas to grow, purchase, etc. in bulk is arguably useful to get an apples-to-apples comparison. Its not necessarily the best way to make any particular cup of tea.
I wasn't aware that proper English teamaking required that the tea be brewed either in a pot of 310 ml with a mass of 200g or one of 150 ml with a mass of 118g and then be poured into a bowl of 380 ml (if the larger pot was used) or 200 ml (if the smaller pot was used), and that, if milk is used, it must be 5ml (for the large bowl) or 2.5 ml (for the small one).
Um, no. I don't think that's a valid assumption, at all. Someone who goes to a search engine may not know the URL for FedEx or UPS (yes, they have fairly obvious URLs -- that doesn't mean everyone knows them, though it does mean that once they know them they are likely, though by no means certain, to remember them.)
If someone knows they don't want fedex.com or ups.com pages and chooses to share that information with Google, Google accommodates their needs. Google's assumption -- and I'd say its a fair one -- is that queries without express restrictions or exclusions of particular sites express no preference, not the kind of "assumed exclusion" you suggest.
I claim that you are wrong, since I've done "generic searches" of the type you describe, and they have been usefully answered by links to wikipedia.
Actually, I'd say for a search like "shipping", the top retail shippers are a pretty good operationalization of "most relevant".
Now, if the search was "economy shipping" or "rapid shipping", that might not be the case. And, surprisingly enough, FedEx and UPS aren't the top results for either of those. Vague, generic searches may get results that are most relevant in a kind of least-common denominator sense. But then, what do you expect? Mind-reading that knows your personal, unexpressed interests and inserts them as search terms?
Why? One of the things people are most likely to be interested in when searching for a term is information about whatever that term is, and one of the most popular on-line sources for such information is often Wikipedia. The fact that you don't personally like Wikipedia doesn't make it irrelevant to the average Google user. If you expressly don't want Wikipedia results, they're easy to exclude.