Haha, I was typing "make excuses to procrastinate" and didn't delete enough words when revising the post.

When I want to go somewhere and it's too much trouble, I make procrastinate until it's too late to make it to whatever appointment I was going for, and that way I don't even have the bother of traveling anywhere at all.

Wrong again.
You can't make any predictions about a single lottery draw. You can make reasonable predictions about 100 lottery draws, better ones about 1,000 lottery draws. You can make extremely accurate predictions, within a fraction of a percent, about 1,000,000,000 lottery draws.

Oh yea, and also... They would not need foreknowledge of the desired value as the ratios they use are sound. They would only need confidence in the random distribution of holes in the target.

I don't think they'd need to game it that much. They'd need a random dispersion of a large number of holes on that square to achieve the result, and I don't think that getting close to that ideal would be difficult given a large number of discharges at the target using fine shot shells. The law of large numbers would be in their favour.

Do you have a citation to that medical paper and a robust dissection of it? It'd be great to know from where all this nonsense started.

Predicting local perturbations from data is very hard. Identifying long term trends is, by comparison, easy.

Yep. Not sure what GP was on about, but I'd trust a Google Car over a teen driver any day of the week.

I'd trust a 16 year old on a cellphone over a self driving car and roads that look like a battlefield here in Massachusetts.

Have another look. Self-driving car tech is a lot more advanced than people realize.

For many years, Gnome was the most popular desktop environment. Many of the people who got into Linux on the desktop moved into a Gnome environment. It provided a familiar UI with standard metaphors. While the Linux desktop has moved on for better or worse, the fact remains that it was Gnome that provided the soft landing for many when they jumped ship.

Pay some respect to those who went before and the work they did.

It knows what it's done.

The open source movement owes much to the Gnome foundation. Yes, they have alienated their core support base, and perhaps this situation is a result of those cows coming home to roost. Nonetheless, a gutted or even dead Gnome foundation hurts the whole community, if only because it highlights the fragility of open source focused organizations as going concerns.

(Yes, yes I know it's supposed to be chickens.)

I cannot reply to that without Godwining the thread.

Boiling down free speech to nothing more than a constitutional guarantee is to denude it of all meaning.

Free speech is a principle which society bakes into its core values as expressed by the unwritten social contract. It manifests itself in legislation because that is where it needs to be formally documented. However, it is a mistake to think that the written law is the beginning and end of the values that we uphold.

Actually, the thinking that the law as written is the sum total of all values is one of the main problems of today. Because the black letter of the law is taken as the only gospel, then finding loopholes and ways to manipulate the wording to your advantage is just fine. I think a short look around the state of the world today will reveal that that is not fine.

They hate us for our freedom. Underhanded manipulation of their local political system for our own agenda has nothing to do with it.