Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.

Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show how ludicrous the law was. (In actual fact it turned out that it was an error on the part of the reporter who wrote the story, that in fact Google had evaluated the situation correctly and acted correctly, but hadn't been able to fully explain the decision because the explanation would have violated privacy rights of people mentioned on the page in question.)

The summary quotes the article's own summary, but the headline and intro cause it to be misleading.

The article doesn't claim that "correct horse battery staple" is wrong, as in a bad way to choose a high-entropy password. It is a good way to choose a high-entropy password. The article argues (quite accurately) instead that users should not be choosing passwords at all because they will choose weak ones, even if you give them a fairly good heuristic (like the one from XKCD), or try to help them estimate the strength of their passwords, etc. Instead it suggests that we really should try to get rid of passwords entirely, and where that isn't possible we should encourage people to use truly random, non-memorable passwords and put them in password managers, essentially reducing all of their passwords to one: the password that opens their password manager.

The point is that it will be manipulated to throw out some heirlooms along with the dirt.

In this case they're heirlooms that someone doesn't like and wants gone, but they're also objects of value to the rest. No, the analogy doesn't work all that well, but it's your (lousy) analogy.

Obviously. Ignoring the tithing issue (since that really isn't relevant to getting married), I have reciprocal obligations to my community and family. My brother-in-law is getting married next week, and he and his husband-to-be have asked me to be their photographer (I'm not a pro, but I don't suck). I've helped out in various ways with many other weddings, and I end up giving several wedding gifts every year. It seems to average about one a month, actually... I just looked in my financial software and I've averaged just under $1,000 per year in wedding gifts over the past several years.

I have no doubt that I have already put more into others' weddings than I got out of my own (financially speaking), and I'll give far more yet, but that's not only okay, it's fantastic, because I received when I was young and poor and needed help to set up a new house and I'm giving now that I'm old and established and have disposable income to gift.

Thanks for sharing.

TL;DR: TL;DR

They were kind enough to put that "Read below to see what Bennett has to say" phrase before the fold, so at least I knew what I was getting into when I clicked the link in my RSS feed. I'm glad they're finally putting a warning label on his posts, since I'm tired of being ambushed by the "Bennett bait-and-switch", when we discover that there's an article where there's supposed to be a summary.

The appeal of Slashdot is its comments. Let Slashdot do what it does best: provide a quick summary, leave room for people to express their own thoughts, and provide a link to the article for people interested in reading more. Hosting the entirety of Bennett's post here subverts the comments by sucking all of the air out of the room and ensuring that whatever issue he's discussing will be ignored in favor of complaining about his post being here, as should be evident from every long-form Bennett post in the last few months.

If his goal is to communicate to us, then he really needs to consider his audience and rethink the methods he's employing. Maybe try speaking to us in the format we come here for?

So very true (to both of your posts).

Anyway, the gist of my original post was to simply point out reasons why we needed to conduct properly controlled experiments. As you're getting at, and as I very much so agree, theory doesn't always work out in practice how we expect, hence why it's important to put our theories to the test. Unfortunately, I overstated some ideas in my attempt to convey my point.

Which is all to say, thank you for taking the time to question me on my overstatements, since that's exactly the sort of correction I welcome.

She wasn't the only one :-)

Oh, I have no answers to those questions, since this isn't my field, just something I've read about. It seems that your thesis has also been supported by the fact that one of the nurses for the original patient has now been confirmed to have contracted Ebola as well.

Sure. That's possible. It's just highly unusual, and unlikely. Unlikely things do happen, though. Time will tell.

There are lots of correlated variables here, so it's difficult to pick out useful information.

The comment thread on the article includes lots of discussion about the impossibility of a wedding that is both cheap and large, but lots of people pointing out that weddings with lots of church and/or community support can be both cheap and large. But church and/or community support are also correlated with other elements of a very stable social structure.

For example, my wedding was both large (> 600 people attended our reception) and cheap (< $3000). How is that possible? We're Mormon, so the actual marriage ceremony was at the LDS temple, which is free, and allows limited attendance. Then we had a wedding breakfast for the ~50 people who attended the ceremony, but the breakfast was at the church (free) and the food was cooked and served by members of our congregation (ingredients cost: low; labor: free). The reception was at the church (free); the bridesmaids paid for their own dresses, best man rented his tux, etc.; the flowers were a wedding gift from a cousin with a flower shop; the table centerpieces and other decorations were handmade by friends and relatives, so we only paid for the materials (cheap); the cake was made by my aunt, who had a wedding business on the side, and cost us $200 for a large, beautiful and tasty cake; my aunt also provided backdrops and other decorations; and some other relatives who are professional photographers did the photos. I don't recall who did the music, but it was all free, using the church's sound equipment. Our biggest expense was the hors d'oeuvres which were actually made by my wife's sisters, so we paid only for the ingredients.

The common thread throughout that list is heavy support from friends, family and community. But I suspect that deep family and church/community support are strongly correlated with long-lasting marriages for lots of reasons which have nothing to do with the wedding day, which to me suggests that those are far more relevant and that wedding cost and attendance are mere proxies for those variables. Also related is the fact that if a lot of people attend, you also get a lot of gifts. So big/cheap weddings are financially beneficial to the couple (mine sure was; spontaneous cash gifts alone -- from the "money tree" -- were more than 2X what we spent, plus all of the gifts of housewares, etc.), while small/expensive weddings are a net drain on their finances.

Similarly, long-term dating tends to be more uncommon among those who get married very young, because it takes time to date someone for 2-3 years, and it's well-known that marriages of the very young are riskier.

Elopement is another one: Those who elope are generally people who decide to get married on the spur of the moment. Such impulsiveness doesn't bode well for future decisions if your goal is long-term stability.

It would be interesting to see a study on this done well, with lots of effort put into teasing apart the correlated variables. This one doesn't actually tell us much.

No, they don't. Most innovations come from people who think farther than the mass. There is an enormous difference between that and what you said.

I'm not advocating throwing him in jail. I'm advocating testing his device. Really testing it, not the arms-length black box testing that has been done so far.

Oh, I certainly agree that it's not necessary that Rossi understands his magic box for it to be real. Just that it's highly, highly unlikely that he managed to build something useful with no conception of how it does what it does. And it's certainly not necessary for us to fully understand it before putting it to use... but I think, again, that it's highly improbable that we would be able to build them without understanding something about how they accomplish what they accomplish.

Of course it does. It's not necessary to have the theory fully elaborated and to calculate the interactions to the nth degree, but you have to have some basis for believing that putting objects together in such-and-such a way will produce such-and-such a result, and why. That's theory.

No, but you do need to understand that different liquids condense at different temperatures... or need to use a design created by someone who does.

No, but you do need to understand that lodestones always point north, and that you can induce similar behavior in a piece of metal. That then gives you the idea of suspending one so it can rotate freely and point directions. Yes, you're doing so without most of the theory as to why lodestones behave the way they do, but you still have a theory of operation of your compass, which is based on the observed behaviors of lodestones plus the notion that configuring one in a particular way would allow it to rotate and act as a pointer.

The key is that there is some theory (which need not be modern physics, or even mathematical in nature) that motivates the engineer to believe that building this thing in this way will accomplish that. In some very rare circumstances (the compass may be such a circumstance, actually), you could notice that materials you found randomly assembled or randomly assembled yourself do something interesting, but that's definitely the exception. Generally, you build a machine because you have ideas about how its parts will collaborate to produce the hoped-for result. That's theory preceding implementation.

All of your examples support my argument. It's not necessary that the theory be fully detailed, but the structure of the processes are generally understood.

In the example of the dynamo and the motor, much of the behavior of electric currents was already understood, and quantified, as was the fact that a current moving through a wire produces a magnetic field and vice versa. From that point it was an engineering effort (a brilliant one, including the observation that the effects could be usefully scaled up) to construct the useful devices. Faraday knew before he built them how he expected them to work, and why.

The steam engine definitely supports my argument. It was designed as a way to harness the power of expanding steam which was already very well understood, even if the Ideal Gas Law and other supporting theories related to thermodynamics, expansion coefficients, etc. were not. Regardless of all that wasn't known, the designers of steam engines (in their various stages) could explain quite clearly how and why they worked, all the way back to Hero's aeopile.

Rossi's inability to offer an explanation of the E-Cat makes me highly, highly skeptical that it works. Oh, he says words which he calls an explanation, but they fly in the face of already-understood theory, and he offers no explanations about why already-understood theory is wrong.