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360251 submission

Submission + - Wikipedia wins defamation case

Submitted by Raul654 on Friday November 02, 2007 @01:02PM

Raul654 writes: Yesterday, a french judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for defamation. The judge found that "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature". According to the inquirer: "Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros ($100,000) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website."

360215 journal

Journal Journal: The Best Obsolete Technologies

Journal by Billosaur on Friday November 02, 2007 @12:43PM

Given the nature of the world today, where it seems a technology, application, or piece of equipment is rendered obsolete 15 minutes after it becomes available, Wired has gone back and looked at some of the best obsolete technologies. What's interesting about the list is that despite many of the items having been superseded by more modern technologies, several of them (like the Sundial or the Slide Rule) could sti

2535893 comment

Comment Grain of Salt (Score 1) 311

by Y2 on Thursday October 12, 2006 @06:25PM (#16415035) Attached to: Changes in Earth's Orbit Linked to Extinctions

Let me first say that I've read TFA but not the original paper. The following criticism is based on a presentation I attended long ago on another proposed mechanism to explain periodic extinctions.

When you look for a periodicity in a bunch of data, you might do a fourier transform and look for peaks. (The other work did that.) Essentially you're doing a large number of correlations. If you try 100 corelations, you should not be surprised to see one that's significant at the 99% level, just by chance!

On the other hand, if the periodicity they found matched known astronomical phenomena (as opposed to the other work I looked at), the probability of a chance result is much reduced.

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