after an 18-month battle with cancer, which he had tried to treat with a homeopathic diet before finally agreeing to undergo surgery and hand over temporary control of Apple to someone else."
I guess you were just too lazy to look things up and still wanted to disagree.
I don't like his personality, nor the cult of Mac that has built up around it. But I do hope he'll recover soon, and perhaps finally realises that homeopathy does not work.
Seriously, for someone so intelligent and rich, how could he possibly even consider homeopathy could cure his cancer? All it has done is delay proper treatment, and likely allowed further damages to occur.
First, if you think that ignoring presence of sexual needs, and how to properly defuse or redirect the tension stemming from it, is "professionalism", you are amazingly naive.
Second, you are also incredibly naive if you think that the world "generally" don't need negotiation skills. Modern society (i.e. post-cave men) runs on diplomacy and negotiation. Only the childish would think that pointing out mistakes only serves to satisfy some sort of personal gratification. As another poster pointed out, clarification is very useful and productive.
And often in life there are situations where "right" and "wrong" are not so clear, especially seen from different points of view. And that is where negotiations are important. People who don't see any need for negotiations are probably either narcissists who think they are always right, or someone so meek and uncertain that they think they are always wrong.
Third, in one post you try to portray yourself as subjective and clear thinking, and won't make judgments based on unrelated information. And yet, in the next post, you became so prickly with nomadic's post on what seems like a rather valid rebuttal to one of your points. For someone who supposedly doesn't care about pointing out right or wrong, you seem to take offence at such a reasonable argument, and that seems to show that despite what you claim, your arguments do seem to be colored by your personal biases.
Last, "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is homophobic because it bars anyone who is openly homosexual from serving in the military. So soldier A (heterosexual male) can talk to other soldiers about his wife and kids or his girlfriend, but soldier B (homosexual male) is unable to do so because if he does, he can be expelled. And you don't think this is homophobic?
... a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today.
Bullshit. That's not what's claimed, and the DNA structure is still essentially the same, except that phosphorus has been replaced by arsenic. And it has been theorized, just not found until now.
but at least they have now removed the stupid sentence which said:
this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology.
It's like they were practicing writing script for some crappy sci-fi B movie.
"...her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today."
Not really, the structure is still most the same, except phosphorus is very likely swapped out for arsenic. They don't have a direct proof that phosphorus is used in DNA yet, but it's very likely. It has been a theoretical possibiltiy, and now they very likely have found the example.
"...this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology."
Err.... no, it changes some concepts, but a lot of what we know about biology is still the same. Eating arsenic is still going to kill people.
I am not disputing the importance of this finding, but as NASA scientist said, it expands what we know about biology, rather than "change(s) everything we know".
Why not just link to NASA? http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html
Even NY Times has a better write up: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html?src=mv&pagewanted=all
Not to mention that a whole bunch of stuff happens between transcription (DNA -> RNA) and translation (RNA -> protein).
The ends have to be capped and modified, in eukaryotes the transcript is only a precursor and has to be spliced into the mature sequence, then the whole thing is exported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm.
Plus there's a whole bunch of stuff happening that we don't really know about, like pseudouridylation and methylation of specific sites.
Not to mention, there's always the good old mutation that occurs. We only know about mutations that get passed on, but these are blood cells (made by bone marrow), not germline cells.
Very open-minded and knowledge-seeking.
Don't need to. I told some statistician friends about this, and we all had a good laugh at people's common misconception about statistics.
In return, they told me some stories about people applying standard deviation on experiments with N=3.
Apparently many people like you think statistics is easy.
Round 4.
1) Read up on Poisson process.
2) A piece of glass gets broken once only. They are not counting how many policies are invoked, but how many times (or how many pieces of broken glass) policies are invoked.
Besides, the point of the example was to show that your extrapolation of expected value from the average probability is total bunk. Without knowing what the distribution is, you can't assert anything like that.
Face it, you know you are wrong and you are just grasping at straws.
Average death rate per 1000 per year for US is 8.2 (from the Wikipedia), and so by your logic, average life expectancy is ~122 years.
You are just bad at understanding statistics.
And assuming 8% accident rate is constant through out the device's life time is plain stupid and totally non-intuitive.
[Sigh...] Fortunately, I didn't have to learn maths in the US schools, so I have no idea what is GCSE.
Let me point out one (of many) glaring error in your assumption: you are assuming the accident rate is constant for every year of the device's lifetime.
But let's use your "logic", then it will actually mean that every device will have an accident within 11 years.
"There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity." - David St. Hubbins, "Spinal Tap"
