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Comment Re:The problem is false negative (Score 1) 383

Notice that most of these weren't fingerprint scanners or retinal scanners-- they were stuff like gait monitors, or even more bizarre stuff, like listening to your heartbeat. So, if you twist your ankle--or even buy a new pair of shoes-- you're out of luck.

Other clothing changes could affect gait. As could anything else you are carrying both in pockets or in your hands.

Taking pseudoephedrine for a cold? Ooops, your heartrate is different. You're locked out.

Plenty of other things can affect your heart rate, no drugs required.

Comment Re:Review != accept (Score 1) 315

Funny thing about (good) science - It doesn't simply dismiss new ideas simply because they disagree with existing theories.

Nor dogmatically cling to "theories" in the face of evidence that they are at least incomplete.

Oh, but for the first time in human history we have it right?

Such an assumption does, unfortunatly, happen fairly frequently. Typically with at least one logical fallacy involved. Hence you end up with poor, junk even actual pseudo-science passed of as being good "science".

Comment Re:Corp IT that can't seem to follow. (Score 1) 138

As a sysadmin, running the current version -1 is the safe bet for most businesses. The problem is that few businesses have an upgrade path, policy or methodology so you end up being current version -2 or -3 because no-one is willing to sign off on an upgrade.
Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything.


Possibly also the managment does not want to spend the money on testing to ensure that any disruption is minimised. Especially when one "upgrade" can require all sorts of consequential changes. Be they upgrading something else or changing obscure settings to maintain the status quo.

So they refuse to allow upgrades until eventually the manufacturer forces the issue (and sometimes not even then). As for running out of date versions of Java (or anything else) it's always due to one legacy application that relies on that version and that version only. Its always a critical application that was written by some rock star developer a few years ago and since that developer left a few years ago no-one know how it works or how to upgrade it to function with a more current version of Java.

They may not even be an inhouse developer. Though if they are an external vendor you might be left to guess that that is the most likely possibility. Or they no longer "support" your version, but their latest version requires you to make a major migration, but is very different from the current version anyway.

Comment Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score 1) 138

From my experience so far, IE11 with default settings renders far more like Firefox/Safari than any prior version of IE. A lot of the brokenness probably comes down to web apps detecting IE, then serving content designed for old, broken IE. When new, standards-compliant IE becomes more widespread, people can just remove the code for supporting bad old IE altogether.

Or they could fix the broken version detection code, so that it only does that with actually "broken" versions of IE.

Comment Re:Good riddance (Score 1) 790

Don't want your ISP looking at your emails? Encrypt your emails.

Probably best avoid using their webmail option.

Don't have the ability to understand how to encrypt your emails and want someone to manage it for you because technology is all so hard but you still want to use it? Suck it up and learn, or pay someone to do it for you and stop whining about your own ignorance.

Of course with the latter option you may find out that you have gained little or no security...
There's also the problem that you can't do much about emails people send to you.

Comment Re: Hamas are Terrorists (Score 1) 402

That Israel has been manipulating public opinion through its control of the media is obvious at this stage.

Zionist propaganda has probably been influencing the media for at least a century. It, no doubt, played it's part in the creation of Israel in 1948.

Look how far from the discussion is the fact that this whole conflict started with an escalation over the murdered teenagers. Murders that, to this day, have not been investigated.

There dosn't appear to be any obvious connection between these murders and Gaza either.

Comment Re:Sources? (Score 1) 402

What do most Americans know about the background to the Israel Palestinian conflict, which has been going for 67 years?

That's as long as it could have gone on for. Considering Israel didn't exist prior to 1948. Though Zionist terrorist groups appear to have been active since the 1920's

Comment Re:Define 'replicate' (Score 1) 172

To replicate an experiment, you take the description of the conditions, tasks, environment, fixed independent and dependent variables, analytical method and results provided by the original experimenter in the (peer-reviewed) paper they published. If you can show the same results, with the same statistical significance, then it's reasonable to assume that the experiment shows a valid scientific phenomenon.
If you can't then one of the two experiments got it wrong and more work is needed.


Actually it would be at least one of the two "got it wrong".

Comment Re:"Social science can be just as valuable" (Score 1) 172

I once read a study that claimed that porn makes people have a callous attitude towards women. To 'prove' this, they asked college students how long rapists should be sent to prison. Then, they showed those students some porn videos. Afterwards, they asked the same question, and some of them supported reduced sentences for rapists. The arbitrary, subjective conclusion they came to in the face of the subjective data they gathered using biased methods was that porn makes people callous towards women.

Did they have a control group who were shown other videos for the same length of time? Were there any cases of the subjects increasing thei sentence length on the second round of questioning? Was it clear to everyone exactly what the definition of "rape" being used was?

Comment Re:Wrong premice (Score 1) 172

For example, try extrapolating behavior from 2 billion young men to older women. You can have huge sample sizes and yet still have sample bias simply because you've excluded an important category (such as the people you actually wanted to study).

Even if you try hard for a "representative sample" you can still have a problem where you lack a "box" to "tick" for something which turns out to be important.

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