It's not hard to come up with problems best solved by scripting.

I'm a teacher. Suppose I want to produce a letter for each student who is currently averaging below C. I want to include their names and current averages in the letter, and perhaps some text that depends on annotations in my roster.

It would be tedious and silly to do this by hand.

Now, as it happens, I'm not a word processor user, so I don't know whether Word can do what I need here. But in any case, this is an obvious use for scripting in a word processor.

Er. Ah. Oh, never mind.

No, that's not the underlying reason.

The various fallacies you mention (slippery slop, post hoc, etc.) are informal fallacies, that is, fallacies of informal reasoning. The fact that they are fallacies of inductive, not deductive, logic has not escaped logicians at all. They are nonetheless fallacies (though because they are informal, whether a fallacy has actually occurred is a bit more of a judgment call).

Honestly, the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning (the latter you mention as using "absolute formulas") is well-understood.

Finally! A technology where the benefits clearly outweigh any dangers!

Sure, that seems fair enough.

I reckon you'd be happy to do the same during your workday?

I'm not defending the police officer's claim, mind you. Merely casting doubt on the wisdom of treating police officers as if they were convicts.

It's a goddamned shame that this bigoted post is ranked insightful.

I'm not a Tea Party supporter. On the contrary, I dislike the movement quite a bit, and especially dislike their political leaders.

But to call a teapartier fascist, or to accuse the party of being dominated by -- not preferred by, but dominated by -- racists, etc., is shameful. Let's treat our political opponents with basic respect. Let's try to encourage frank but respectful discourse.

Indeed, this is one reason I dislike the right wing: they are loathe to treat their opponents with basic decency and respect. But the proper response is emphatically not to emulate them.

I know it's a desperate and silly thought, but wouldn't it be nice to return to disagreements over ideas rather than caricatures?

And you're an asshole who refuses to take a man at his word and instead accuses him of racism because of his self-declared political views.

Why not treat others with respect? Whether you agree with his take on affirmative action or not, there is no need to claim that the man is a racist. Well-meaning, enlightened persons of good will can disagree whether affirmative action is either fair or well-suited for its end. There is no reason to pretend that any such doubt is the sign of a closet racist.

Respect in political disagreements is a good thing.

I don't like the cavalier attitude of the statement either -- after all, this fella lost wages because he drives for a living.

That said, this has nothing at all to do with the principle that, in criminal cases, the prosecutor must prove guilt.

I'm visiting Shenzhen, a large city in the same province as ZengCheng. I hadn't heard anything about the protests (no surprise, since we're not keeping up with the news), so I thought I'd see what a search brought up.

I found a Wall Street Journal article as one of the first Google hits, no problems at all.

I'm often uncertain about the scope of the Great Firewall. I could read any online U.S. newspaper I tried thus far (this trip -- a previous year, the Washington Post was blocked while others were not). I could get to Usenet via Google Groups, Wikipedia, and pretty much every site I tried, except for Youtube (which seems to be redirected to a broken alternative) and Facebook (though Myspace is accessible). I can see why the great bulk of people are not terribly bothered by the firewall. I don't think they hit it all too often, unless they're exceptionally interested in politics.

In any case, I'm not saying the article is wrong, but I haven't seen the mentioned effects.

What a remarkably stupid opening.

Whether this is a good thing or not is certainly worth debate (and you provide some actual argument later in your post), but these silly examples of the genetic fallacy come off as nothing more than bigoted ignorance.

Antics ?

Yes, that rascal! He's a nincompoop, he is.

(Yeah, I'm sure that you didn't mean to such a frivolous term to describe the murder of thousands, but still... )

Right. Which makes the situation remarkably similar to many of the resurrections described here.

Holmes was dead, but even back then, death could be overcome by popular demand.

Honestly, I was genuinely touched when I read the story of Holmes's death --- despite the fact that it was in a collection of stories and obviously not the last one. I felt more than a bit duped when he returned, even though, as far as returns go, it was well-written, entertaining and reasonably believable in-story.

Er, if we're going that far back, what about Sherlock Holmes? He died a perfectly noble death in a battle against Moriarty, but it didn't take.

Gotta say, I felt kinda cheated when I first read the death and comeback of Holmes.

In fact, the blurb has it wrong.

18% of Americans said that the sun revolves around the earth, rather than the earth revolves around the sun. The question sounds badly worded to me (the earth orbits the sun -- I wouldn't say it "revolves around" the sun), but more importantly: the wrong answer was not that the earth is the center of the universe.

It's a wrong answer, but it doesn't bother me nearly so much as the notion that the earth is the center of the universe.

The problem is that you're not used to certain kinds of philosophical jargon.

The author is asking: Given that there are no aliens and that nothing which exists could have been (counterfactually) an alien, what would make the sentence "There could have been Aliens" true?

It's abstruse philosophy about the problems of what could make a sentence that "X is possible" true, given that X is in fact false, as I understand it. (Perhaps my move from "there could have been..." to "...is possible" is not an equivalence on this view, so read with a grain of salt. I'm not familiar with this theory.)