I stand by my original post.

I did not take issue with the floating point irregularities. In fact, I also believe that the issues he experienced were not due to the FDIV problem he believed to be the cause. I probably would have used the fact that the last release of QuickBasic was in about 1989, before the widespread inclusion of FPUs in PCs, and that QuickBasic would almost certainly use software emulation for floating point arithmetic. It therefore would not have triggered a bug with the FDIV instruction.

What I did take issue with was your notion that he would have run on the AMD chip and seen a less accurate result. As I said, the bug he was talking about was the FDIV bug.

The idea that the QuickBasic would trigger an overheating-related bug on a 2006 Opteron is even more laughable than the OP's original troll post. :p

You are mistaken. The floating point bug was in Intel processors, not AMD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Exactly, and in this case the best we have isn't good enough, therefore administering untested treatments remains unethical.

If the doctors themselves are not adequately informed about a patient, how could a patient ever give informed consent?

A book? Fantastic. Can you instead please link to the scientific research papers?

Yes, and no...

No, because a the fact relational databases are based off a first-order logic model doesn't mean that a RDBMS 'does' anything that another system couldn't do.

Also, don't forget that no current RDBMS completely implements the relational database model as originally defined.

A hierarchy IS a relationship. In a hierarchical databases, child segments and parent segments were the main kind of relationship used.

All relational databases did was allow the relationships to be more freely defined.

Further to that, a key / value pair is also a relationship, in that the key symbolically represents the data. That's why it is correct to call them NoSQL databases: They forgo the complexity of a general query language. In doing so, they also lose the ability to inherently store anything except the most basic relationship: the key / value lookup.

You are incorrect. Evidence can have varying levels of quality. You get weak evidence, you get strong evidence, and you can also get extraordinary evidence.

If any hypothesis is well-supported by established theory, it is only necessary for there to be mediocre evidence for it. In the absence of any reasonable alternative, it can then be accepted as correct, because it is backed not only by that weak evidence but also by all the strong evidence that supports the established theory.

If a hypothesis contradicts established theory, the evidence for it must be particularly strong. Accepted theory is based on the BALANCE of evidence being in favour of one hypothesis over another.

There is always at least some evidence to support a crackpot claim, otherwise that claim would never have been made. To simply abandon a theory because another theory has some evidence to support it is pure folly. The only reasonable action is to compare the sum of evidence for competing theories.

(Upon re-examining your post, it seems possible that you are mistakenly taking the phrase 'extraordinary evidence' to mean 'evidence of something extraordinary', it isn't clear. If so, you have completely misunderstood the grandparent post.)

Chechnyian nationalists, maybe...?

You were funnier when you where doing Dr Bob the chiropractor.

That's not all! Windows 95 was released without a spreadsheet application or presentation package installed! Clearly, the "business age" hadn't started yet, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!

Obviously, having TCP/IP support enabled by default for all your network devices is a fundamental part of Internet access. How else could people in 1995 utilize the cable-provider broadband connections in their home?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Protocol

(For those of you who are a bit slower, my point is that the reason the web browser or many other applications designed for the Internet were not installed in Windows by default, is that Microsoft was still hoping they were products they could sell to you.

TCP was not enabled on LAN interfaces by default because IPX was the most common LAN protocol at the time. Of course, any modems you installed DID have PPP enabled to tunnel the TCP/IP traffic over to your ISP)

Don't you even read the links you post? 'Copyleft' is a subset of 'Copyright'. Copyleft works because of copyright.

If he won't, I might...

"A small number of customers have reported lower-than-expected battery life on iOS 5 devices," Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison said in a statement to All Things Digital. "We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life, and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks."

That is very different to "saying they've found software issues causing a problem". That's more like saying "Look, we have found a couple of tweaks to slightly lower the usage of some apps, but that's all we can do. People are just going to have to get real with their battery life expectations."

Once again, Sir, I disagreed with the original post you replied to. Clearly, Afganistan was not the 'last major colonialist war' as it was quickly followed by a trillion-dollar Iraqi war.

you said:

[quote]How does going into a war mean a period of peace?[quote]

That is what I disagree with. The [i]pax romana[/i] was won by agressive expansionism, and wars to pacify the provinces. That placed it in a state where peace could largely be enjoyed throughout the empire.

It could therfore be argued that the war in Afganistan could mark the start of a [i]pax americana[/i].

Of course, the peace was kept through propaganda and social engineering, but that's a story for another time.

What do you call the last war before a long period of peace? That's right, it's called a 'war'.

I disagree with the GP post tho. I also disagree with yours.