If the test is 90% accurate and then has 10% false positives, then one out of ten people who fail the test is actually free of Alzheimer's. But if only 5% of the general population actually develop Alzheimer's, then even if you fail the test, you are still most probably (67%) in the clear. Granted, it's a reason for concern, because your odds of being in the clear dropped from 95% to 67%, but it's certainly not as big an update of your odds as you might have expected from a 90% accurate test that you just failed. (Right? Or did I screw up the math?)

Something doesn't add up. If he used anonymizers even for email, why did he attach his *real name* to the Bitcoin project? Vanity? Or what?

How many times do we get to "discover" that bears actually do shit in the woods?

(This is years after we've seen clear pictures of Martian flood plains, with obvious river channels. This is years after we've detected signals for hydrogen under the Martian surface. This is years after models of solar system history basically make the conclusion inescapable that early on, Mars would have had to have liquid water. And I could go on.)

Maybe I'm just more cynical, but isn't this an incredibly convenient and free advertisement about the morality, kindness and social responsibility of a giant corporation? I'm not saying that the "ideologues" were told to manufacture a controversy for the sake of publicity. But if they did it spontaneously, it's pretty clear that Apple was eager to shut them down loudly enough to make the news. There isn't a better image-building exercise than one which pits the altruistic benevolence of a company against the money-grubbing greed of some shareholding scrooges. We love to see them being told off, and feel like this makes Apple our ally. Well, however this episode ultimately came about, I must clap and declare it "well played" on Apple's part.

You're right, but recall that the article had a much longer list of pseudoscientific bullshit that sells at Whole Foods. Homeopathy is just one really obvious instance. Credulity in that stuff is at the core of their business model. The thing is, they also have lots of stuff that I like to buy, but I don't appreciate the deeply cynical nature of their marketing strategy. When you absolutely know that your products do not do what they claim to do, and you sell them anyway because you count on your customers being too dumb to figure it out, that is just really disrespectful.

It's like they're inviting pirates to come aboard and have a little look around. And it would be pretty cool to camp out on a Chinese drone cargo ship as you cross the Pacific. Will this herald the rise of intercontinental hobos?

I don't have a ton of insight about this, but the way I thought of it, QNX is efficient in spite of all the message passing among the microkernel and the modules. The architecture was done that way for robustness, not for efficiency. That they achieved such efficiency is a testament to their coding skills, not the architecture.

I think this sort of view is naive and wildly optimistic. You picture the Earth as some sort of self-correcting organism that will extinguish us if we mess it up. It won't. You comically underestimate our resilience. No matter what the Earth does, we humans will figure out how to cling to life, and when push comes to shove, we don't give a fuck what we destroy. We will strip every cubic centimeter of soil, water, fish and fowl when it suits us, and still, we will find a way to survive on the barren rock. We can drop several thousand nuclear bombs, make the planet an ashen hell, and bounce back far faster than all the other creatures that our bombs destroyed. (Studies were done in the cold war...) The reason why our environment seems powerful relative to us is because we're relatively comfortable now, so we don't feel a strong urge/need to get up and destroy it. You have never seen a humanity whose survival is threatened. Let's hope nobody ever will, because that would be an ugly thing. You think we'll shuffle off and Earth will forget about us in time. In reality, I suspect that of all the species that are visible with the naked eye, we will be among the last to go extinct. If the Earth is a steaming radioactive death ball, we will build cities under the sea. (A much friendlier place to live than Mars.) When the seas boil off, we will move into temperature-regulated caverns underground. Think about it this way: Of all the millions of terrestrial species, which has the highest chance of actually being able to have a self-sustaining colony on Mars? Yeah, the answer is humans. That's how fucking tough we are. We can survive even on an otherwise lifeless rock. Anyone who thinks that a difference of 6C poses an existential danger to humanity is silly. Even a rise of 20C would sill leave Earth by far the most human-habitable place in the solar system. Our existence is not in danger. It's everything that lives alongside humanity that's facing the real danger.

Yeah, which is why the director of the movie made the good guys all wear barely-modified 3rd Reich uniforms, and kept rubbing our faces in the fact that we were rooting for Nazis. This made Starship Troopers the most reflective and emotionally complex space-war movie I know of. This is what can happen when you leave a Hollywood blockbuster in the hands of a Dutch arthouse movie director: He'll mess with paradigms. And to be fair, Heinlein's story was absolutely asking for it. I'm just so impressed that he had the balls to actually do it, and that nobody stopped him!

It appears that no source of power is clean enough for the Germans, except brown coal (the shittiest, dirtiest, world-destroying-est source of electricity of all time). In order to make up for the closure of non-polluting nuclear powerplants, they built brown coal burning plants, and yet they still felt all smug about it - as their carbon footprint went from bad to terrible. And now this. Germans!!!! (fist shaking)

You already have the most expensive electricity in Europe, and since your Atomaussteig, you also have some of the dirtiest electricity in (Western) Europe (in emissions per MW). You're not good at this game!

I really think you're wrong. QNX, for example, is an amazing, fast operating system. Microkernels make certain things difficult, but for all of those difficulties there are technical solutions. That HURD can't implement these is not the fault of the microkernel architecture.

Exactly. No more federal money for abstinence-only sex education when independent research shows that it fails in every one of its goals and leads to an increase in teen pregnancy and abortions. And since nothing in "creationist science" is reproducible, let's finally put that behind us as well. Oh and don't forget about DARE, which is completely secretive and provably worthless when independently evaluated, yet isn't defunded. Yes, I think I can get along with these new pro-science Republicans!

I think you nailed it. 30 years ago HP didn't have a computer line for home users. IBM did, but they don't now. Apple did then, and they still do now. Their claim is really quite defensible. The guy should have said "Of all the companies that were making consumer computers in 1984, we're the only one left that's still doing it." But I think it's not a stretch to interpret his sentence in just this way.

As far as I'm concerned, Winamp is still the best music player on Windows. With the Moon Glade skin, mine lives as an always-on-top bar at the top-center of my screen and expands into a playlist when I hover over it. The plugin system decodes every music file I know of and - this is huge for me - it can apply VST filters to the audio output. This is important to me because I play my music through Bose 901 (v6) speakers, which are designed to require a custom Bose equalizer to sound decent. Because I'm running audio into my receiver digitally, I can't use this analog equalizer, so I rely on a chain of VST plugins to mimic (and actually improve on) its functionality. I don't know of another media player that can use VST plugins for sound shaping. Then again, I haven't been looking, because I'm pretty satisfied with Winamp. If anyone knows other media players with VST functionality I would appreciate the info.

When someone states two factual sentences next to each other, it is not always right to interpret the second sentence as giving the causal explanation of the first. That's not a question of scientific method or intellectual skepticism (though it's related). It's a question of competent reading.