An infinite ceiling? Technically you're correct, but if we go by that definition "A few", "Some", and "A couple" all have infinite ceilings as well.
People generally use the largest common number they can find, dozens, hundreds, thousands etc. Thus the ceiling is somewhere in the realm of 100-200, maybe 300 if we're generous and assume the speaker is someone who won't say hundreds for 299 or less. 99.6%...wow...that's much better.
To break even (same number falsely accused as accused) would require 40,000. Show me someone who will say 40K is 'dozens' of people with a straight face:P.
"My freedom of speech does not entitle me to speak my opinions through a bullhorn at 3AM in a quiet neighborhood."
Yes it does. The laws against Disturbing the Peace then take away that right. Big difference between being given a right then having it taken away, and never being given it at all.
It's not an error. Times Less = 1/x times as much in language, and has done so for 3 centuries
"Jonathan Swift, for instance, used it in 1711, writing "I am resolved to drink ten times less than before." It wasn't till the 20th century that language commentators - not mathematicians - came up with the notion that "three times closer" and "100 times slower" were illogical and confusing."
"In most local school districts teachers are no more permitted to use cell phones in class than students"
Maybe where you live. Where I live the general rule of thumb for schools (and I've been to 3 different districts, learning at 2 and visiting a third) is that teachers can have cells as long as they don't take calls in the middle of class (and can even break that rule in an emergency) and students have the same restriction (but can't break the rule in an emergency, unless they 'go to the bathroom').
"On a scale of "interesting", the most entertaining and engaging teacher cannot compete with all sorts of other "interesting" options."
You've obviously never had a good teacher then. The good teachers (and I've been lucky enough to have quite a few) can engage a class far more than any of the other options for a classroom. I had a math teacher in high school who never one had to tell someone to put away the cell phone or stop chatting (cell phones were against the rules, and fairly common, so I guess that dates me a little) because his lectures were actually interesting and engaging.
Perhaps the best solution is to simply block cell phones, but to me that seems like a lot of work as a result of teachers not even trying to be interesting. Any subject can be made interesting with a good enough teacher (I had 2 history teachers who made the subject fun to learn, and I absolutely hate history).
Kids used to pass notes, now they text. To me, that seems like less distraction overall. The students chatting are distracted, but at least the students in the middle of the line aren't. Texting is harmless to people around you for the most part (you can be annoying about it, but you have to make an effort at it). To me reducing distraction by allowing the kids who don't care to bother other kids who don't care without interfering with the ones that do care seems better than forcing everyone to be equally distracted.
"If there exists another race like earth-based humans, it proves our evolution is completely random because no intelligent, higher being would make us on purpose twice."
Do you trust Congress to make that call? I highly doubt anyone there is knows enough about technology (no offense to any technologically inclined congressmen, if there are any) to differentiate between software and protocol. I've seen many people who just assume that p2p = limewire and thus anything bad about limewire is bad about p2p.
You're probably right about the levels, but Congress is far more likely to just skip to 2 or 3 than to actually think about the incident and realize that nothing more than a 1 is required.
And? There are also p2p clients that don't scan your hard-drive and offer to upload things. And there are FTP servers that do. Software behaving badly != Protocol is evil and should be regulated or banned.
Who was using Limewire at work (at a government job!?) anyways and why aren't they being blamed? We're talking about software that should never have been installed on the machine containing the data, any argument over whether the software behaved properly or not is irrelevant because it should never have been on that machine in the first place!
I wouldn't call it throwing up the white flag so much as removing the possibility without affecting the service. For 90% of computer hardware problems the hard drive is unnecessary, the computer can be fixed without it so long as something is there to boot off of. Why then would you have the unnecessary risk of having customers leave the drive in your possession? It won't do you any good, and it means your techs could abuse their jobs or the customer could complain about you breaking their data. Far better to leave the HD with the customer.
"They have to be disposed of. This takes time. People notice. There are witnesses."
The president won the election, here, take this white confetti with random bits of black on it and spread it around to celebrate!
Disposing of a lot of paper isn't hard at all, companies do it constantly without anyone noticing or caring. Stick the ballots in a shredder, a good high quality one, and what comes out can't be considered ballots anymore, just random scraps of paper that could be anything. Take the scraps, put them in storage for a day or two, then toss them. Ta da, no evidence, and only a few witnesses (no more than electronic deletion requires).
E-voting is unsafe because there's no verification, not because it doesn't make paper ballots. If the e-voting machine spit out a paper ballot with your vote on it directly into the box it would still be insecure because you'd have no way to verify that what was on the ballot was what you wanted on the ballot. Paper != Instant safety, or even mild security.
The rational response for intelligent people is to say the story doesn't have enough information to just who is right and who is wrong. Photos would help.
No, the rational response is to recognize that, at the time the police arrived, no crime had been committed and thus the police action was absurd. If the police are able to break up a party because it may be a rave, well then that's thought crime, pure and simple. You're telling me that you're okay with the police going after someone before they'd done anything illegal because they might have been planning to do something illegal? Have you never heard of 1984?
I just took a look at it (watched a few minutes of a show) in a basic (no extensions, no nothing) install of IE. No banner ads. Maybe logged in people don't get them? Or maybe they're being inserted somewhere along the way (virus or your provider).
Prove it's ineffective. Perhaps you simply have an odd body chemistry, or some chemical you're taking (food or medicine wise) is affecting the medicine in unpredictable ways. Entire group of people unaffected? I'm sure there's something they have in common that the company can claim wasn't present in their studies that could be the cause of the lack of healing, or many such things.
There are too many variables to prove conclusively that a medicine doesn't work, thus courts are worthless for stopping them. Just look at how long Homeopathy has lasted with tons of scientific (chemical) data saying it shouldn't do anything, for ever person who says a quack drug doesn't work 10 others will subscribe to the placebo effect and state conclusively that it cured them.
"If the information is wrong, sue the manufacturers."
I say my medicine has a high chance of curing you of a specific problem, you take it, and it doesn't work. Prove I lied.
Medicine is by nature semi-unpredictable. We're dealing with a huge number of variable genes within the patient, many of which we don't understand, combined with a huge number of variable genes within a huge number of bacteria/virus (not sure if viruses qualify as having genes, but they certainly have RNA, which is variable) within the patient, combined with a ton of random chance factors (the pill just happens to land in a much higher PH bit of acid in the stomach than normal and is partially dissolved or something) and a good helping of head scratching about whether you have a certain problem or a different one with similar symptoms. We've made a lot of advances, but the day when we can have all the needed information about how a medicine will affect people without hugely expensive testings is way off in the future, so we need those government bodies to force the testing or we may as well be using an astrological chart to determine what medicine to take.
I'm normally a free market proponent but in the case of medicine there are simply too many variables to expect anyone, much less the average consumer, to know enough about the subject to make an informed decision.
Why not? Sure, there's no absolute frame, but extrapolating our local frame out to distant locations doesn't hurt anyone. It's not really useful to do so (much more useful to discuss now as 'light that has reached us now' but there's no reason to say something hasn't already happened just because its light hasn't reached us yet.
Who modded "a circle is infinite" as insightful? A circle with a finite radius has a finite area, only a circle with infinite radius has infinite area. As the other responses to this say a circle does have some qualities which are infinite, but that doesn't make it infinite (anymore than 1 is infinite because it belongs to the natural numbers which are infinite is a good argument).
"Why, because an experienced pilot would also be aware of when the autopilot if taking the wrong procedure or maneuvers and could correct for faulty sensors or whatever causing it."
Like the Boston crash where the pilot overrode the autopilot which was diving to regain speed lost due to ice buildup, thereby causing a stall and crash?
Airbus planes can be run manually, there's just never any need to. Try reading up on them before you suggest that airbus computers fight the pilot.
"The simple fact is that Airbuses have tended to fall out of the sky too frequently"
In 2008 there were 16 recorded commercial airline crashes. 8 were Boeing, 3 were Airbus, and 5 were other types of planes. In 2007 there were 13 recorded commercial airline crashes. 8 were Boeing, 3 were Airbus, and 2 were other types of planes. In 2006 there were 8 recorded commercial airline crashes. 2 were Boeing, 4 were Airbus, and 2 were other types of planes. In 2005 there were 10 recorded commercial airline crashes. 6 were Boeing, 1 was Airbus, and 3 were other types of planes. In 2004 there were 13 recorded commercial airline crashes. 5 were Boeing, 1 was Airbus, and 7 were other types of planes.
Need I continue? The simple fact is that, of planes that fall out of the sky, far more are Boeing manufactured than Airbus. The only year more Airbuses crashed was 06.
Name one case where that has come up. Just one. I, for one, have never even heard of a case of a plane getting pushed past its limits in order to avoid a crash.
"I don't want my driving automated because I enjoy the act of driving. Giving a computer the job would make every drive I take seem sterile and boring."
Well that's you. Driving is already stale and boring for me, so having the option to read or something on the way would be an improvement. The main reason we don't have auto-driving yet is that it's still in development, controlling a vehicle on a 2-D plane (no pun intended) in a crowded environment is a lot harder for a computer than a 3-D uncrowded environment.
"But, at the time, the people programming the autopilots judged total loss of rudder to be too improbable to worry about. Oops. "
So you're saying that we should program in all almost never seen conditions into the computer? Alright, you get started on alien laserbeams destroying the sensor grid, I'll work on giant squids.
Seriously though, how many times has a modern plane lost complete rudder control? Not exactly a common situation, and that's precisely why even the most computer controlled plane (outside of UAVs) have pilots, to handle things we can't plan for.
"If it gets bad data from one or more of those sensors it's going to base it's control on that bad data."
Did you even try to read the article on the states? If the computer gets bad data, or any indication that the data it's getting that seems good might be bad, it steps back and gives the pilots more control specifically to avoid this situation.
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An infinite ceiling? Technically you're correct, but if we go by that definition "A few", "Some", and "A couple" all have infinite ceilings as well.
People generally use the largest common number they can find, dozens, hundreds, thousands etc. Thus the ceiling is somewhere in the realm of 100-200, maybe 300 if we're generous and assume the speaker is someone who won't say hundreds for 299 or less. 99.6%...wow...that's much better.
To break even (same number falsely accused as accused) would require 40,000. Show me someone who will say 40K is 'dozens' of people with a straight face :P.
"My freedom of speech does not entitle me to speak my opinions through a bullhorn at 3AM in a quiet neighborhood."
Yes it does. The laws against Disturbing the Peace then take away that right. Big difference between being given a right then having it taken away, and never being given it at all.
It's not an error. Times Less = 1/x times as much in language, and has done so for 3 centuries
"Jonathan Swift, for instance, used it in 1711, writing "I am resolved to drink ten times less than before." It wasn't till the 20th century that language commentators - not mathematicians - came up with the notion that "three times closer" and "100 times slower" were illogical and confusing."
from http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/10/21/do_the_math/
Just because it sounds like it can be misinterpreted doesn't mean it's wrong. "5 times less" in english is the same as 1/5 in mathematics.
"In most local school districts teachers are no more permitted to use cell phones in class than students"
Maybe where you live. Where I live the general rule of thumb for schools (and I've been to 3 different districts, learning at 2 and visiting a third) is that teachers can have cells as long as they don't take calls in the middle of class (and can even break that rule in an emergency) and students have the same restriction (but can't break the rule in an emergency, unless they 'go to the bathroom').
"On a scale of "interesting", the most entertaining and engaging teacher cannot compete with all sorts of other "interesting" options."
You've obviously never had a good teacher then. The good teachers (and I've been lucky enough to have quite a few) can engage a class far more than any of the other options for a classroom. I had a math teacher in high school who never one had to tell someone to put away the cell phone or stop chatting (cell phones were against the rules, and fairly common, so I guess that dates me a little) because his lectures were actually interesting and engaging.
Perhaps the best solution is to simply block cell phones, but to me that seems like a lot of work as a result of teachers not even trying to be interesting. Any subject can be made interesting with a good enough teacher (I had 2 history teachers who made the subject fun to learn, and I absolutely hate history).
Kids used to pass notes, now they text. To me, that seems like less distraction overall. The students chatting are distracted, but at least the students in the middle of the line aren't. Texting is harmless to people around you for the most part (you can be annoying about it, but you have to make an effort at it). To me reducing distraction by allowing the kids who don't care to bother other kids who don't care without interfering with the ones that do care seems better than forcing everyone to be equally distracted.
"Given that I haven't heard about any of their executives rampaging through the streets leaving trails of bodies"
That's because they deleted the book on it.
"In that case he would be campaigning to have the law changed to make such actions illegal"
Isn't that what he's doing?
"asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future"
Not all campaigns to change the law involve congress anymore.
"If there exists another race like earth-based humans, it proves our evolution is completely random because no intelligent, higher being would make us on purpose twice."
Unless we're the test or control group :P.
Do you trust Congress to make that call? I highly doubt anyone there is knows enough about technology (no offense to any technologically inclined congressmen, if there are any) to differentiate between software and protocol. I've seen many people who just assume that p2p = limewire and thus anything bad about limewire is bad about p2p.
You're probably right about the levels, but Congress is far more likely to just skip to 2 or 3 than to actually think about the incident and realize that nothing more than a 1 is required.
And? There are also p2p clients that don't scan your hard-drive and offer to upload things. And there are FTP servers that do. Software behaving badly != Protocol is evil and should be regulated or banned.
Who was using Limewire at work (at a government job!?) anyways and why aren't they being blamed? We're talking about software that should never have been installed on the machine containing the data, any argument over whether the software behaved properly or not is irrelevant because it should never have been on that machine in the first place!
I wouldn't call it throwing up the white flag so much as removing the possibility without affecting the service. For 90% of computer hardware problems the hard drive is unnecessary, the computer can be fixed without it so long as something is there to boot off of. Why then would you have the unnecessary risk of having customers leave the drive in your possession? It won't do you any good, and it means your techs could abuse their jobs or the customer could complain about you breaking their data. Far better to leave the HD with the customer.
"They have to be disposed of. This takes time. People notice. There are witnesses."
The president won the election, here, take this white confetti with random bits of black on it and spread it around to celebrate!
Disposing of a lot of paper isn't hard at all, companies do it constantly without anyone noticing or caring. Stick the ballots in a shredder, a good high quality one, and what comes out can't be considered ballots anymore, just random scraps of paper that could be anything. Take the scraps, put them in storage for a day or two, then toss them. Ta da, no evidence, and only a few witnesses (no more than electronic deletion requires).
E-voting is unsafe because there's no verification, not because it doesn't make paper ballots. If the e-voting machine spit out a paper ballot with your vote on it directly into the box it would still be insecure because you'd have no way to verify that what was on the ballot was what you wanted on the ballot. Paper != Instant safety, or even mild security.
The rational response for intelligent people is to say the story doesn't have enough information to just who is right and who is wrong. Photos would help.
No, the rational response is to recognize that, at the time the police arrived, no crime had been committed and thus the police action was absurd. If the police are able to break up a party because it may be a rave, well then that's thought crime, pure and simple. You're telling me that you're okay with the police going after someone before they'd done anything illegal because they might have been planning to do something illegal? Have you never heard of 1984?
I just took a look at it (watched a few minutes of a show) in a basic (no extensions, no nothing) install of IE. No banner ads. Maybe logged in people don't get them? Or maybe they're being inserted somewhere along the way (virus or your provider).
"If someone sells an ineffective product,"
Prove it's ineffective. Perhaps you simply have an odd body chemistry, or some chemical you're taking (food or medicine wise) is affecting the medicine in unpredictable ways. Entire group of people unaffected? I'm sure there's something they have in common that the company can claim wasn't present in their studies that could be the cause of the lack of healing, or many such things.
There are too many variables to prove conclusively that a medicine doesn't work, thus courts are worthless for stopping them. Just look at how long Homeopathy has lasted with tons of scientific (chemical) data saying it shouldn't do anything, for ever person who says a quack drug doesn't work 10 others will subscribe to the placebo effect and state conclusively that it cured them.
"If the information is wrong, sue the manufacturers."
I say my medicine has a high chance of curing you of a specific problem, you take it, and it doesn't work. Prove I lied.
Medicine is by nature semi-unpredictable. We're dealing with a huge number of variable genes within the patient, many of which we don't understand, combined with a huge number of variable genes within a huge number of bacteria/virus (not sure if viruses qualify as having genes, but they certainly have RNA, which is variable) within the patient, combined with a ton of random chance factors (the pill just happens to land in a much higher PH bit of acid in the stomach than normal and is partially dissolved or something) and a good helping of head scratching about whether you have a certain problem or a different one with similar symptoms. We've made a lot of advances, but the day when we can have all the needed information about how a medicine will affect people without hugely expensive testings is way off in the future, so we need those government bodies to force the testing or we may as well be using an astrological chart to determine what medicine to take.
I'm normally a free market proponent but in the case of medicine there are simply too many variables to expect anyone, much less the average consumer, to know enough about the subject to make an informed decision.
Why not? Sure, there's no absolute frame, but extrapolating our local frame out to distant locations doesn't hurt anyone. It's not really useful to do so (much more useful to discuss now as 'light that has reached us now' but there's no reason to say something hasn't already happened just because its light hasn't reached us yet.
Who modded "a circle is infinite" as insightful? A circle with a finite radius has a finite area, only a circle with infinite radius has infinite area. As the other responses to this say a circle does have some qualities which are infinite, but that doesn't make it infinite (anymore than 1 is infinite because it belongs to the natural numbers which are infinite is a good argument).
"but not allowing the pilot to ever fully override the autopilot is a huge mistake"
Which is precisely why Airbus planes allow the pilot to override the autopilot.
Learn about the system before you decry it for lacking something.
"Why, because an experienced pilot would also be aware of when the autopilot if taking the wrong procedure or maneuvers and could correct for faulty sensors or whatever causing it."
Like the Boston crash where the pilot overrode the autopilot which was diving to regain speed lost due to ice buildup, thereby causing a stall and crash?
Airbus planes can be run manually, there's just never any need to. Try reading up on them before you suggest that airbus computers fight the pilot.
"The simple fact is that Airbuses have tended to fall out of the sky too frequently"
In 2008 there were 16 recorded commercial airline crashes. 8 were Boeing, 3 were Airbus, and 5 were other types of planes.
In 2007 there were 13 recorded commercial airline crashes. 8 were Boeing, 3 were Airbus, and 2 were other types of planes.
In 2006 there were 8 recorded commercial airline crashes. 2 were Boeing, 4 were Airbus, and 2 were other types of planes.
In 2005 there were 10 recorded commercial airline crashes. 6 were Boeing, 1 was Airbus, and 3 were other types of planes.
In 2004 there were 13 recorded commercial airline crashes. 5 were Boeing, 1 was Airbus, and 7 were other types of planes.
Need I continue? The simple fact is that, of planes that fall out of the sky, far more are Boeing manufactured than Airbus. The only year more Airbuses crashed was 06.
Name one case where that has come up. Just one. I, for one, have never even heard of a case of a plane getting pushed past its limits in order to avoid a crash.
"I don't want my driving automated because I enjoy the act of driving. Giving a computer the job would make every drive I take seem sterile and boring."
Well that's you. Driving is already stale and boring for me, so having the option to read or something on the way would be an improvement. The main reason we don't have auto-driving yet is that it's still in development, controlling a vehicle on a 2-D plane (no pun intended) in a crowded environment is a lot harder for a computer than a 3-D uncrowded environment.
"But, at the time, the people programming the autopilots judged total loss of rudder to be too improbable to worry about. Oops. "
So you're saying that we should program in all almost never seen conditions into the computer? Alright, you get started on alien laserbeams destroying the sensor grid, I'll work on giant squids.
Seriously though, how many times has a modern plane lost complete rudder control? Not exactly a common situation, and that's precisely why even the most computer controlled plane (outside of UAVs) have pilots, to handle things we can't plan for.
"If it gets bad data from one or more of those sensors it's going to base it's control on that bad data."
Did you even try to read the article on the states? If the computer gets bad data, or any indication that the data it's getting that seems good might be bad, it steps back and gives the pilots more control specifically to avoid this situation.