In general, a citizen and only make an arrest if they witness a felony being committed. Also the same sort of idea with drawing a gun. A good way I heard it put is "If you pull a weapon on someone, one of you committed a felony so you'd better be sure ti was them."

Police have a more relaxed standard. They can arrest based on the suspicion of a crime, and can arrest for misdemeanors. Also they have wider latitude as to when they can draw a weapon.

Stuff like this is why universities have police forces. I work on a campus and we have both security (we call them police aides) and police. The security guards are cheaper, yet we have police offers too. There are good reasons, and the university has clear guidelines for who does what. The security guys more or less just lock buildings and call in problems. The police actually deal with the problems.

There's a big difference between "settled" and "set in stone".

"Settled" science can be challenged, but you just can't waltz into a field and say, "I have this data which proves that decades (or even centuries) of research are entirely wrong." You have to start with narrow claims and then gradually broaden them. You attack scientific consensus by patiently tugging at loose ends until the whole fabric of consensus starts to unravel.

Science is, in fact, open to the possibility of perpetual motion or intelligent deign. It just doesn't make it as quick or easy as some people might like to make such ideas a new scientific consensus. The value of scientific consensus largely lies in that it must be hard-won.

So to answer the summary's question, of course science can be "settled", but settled science can always be overturned. A "settled" hypothesis is merely one so well-supported that the burden of proof lies with its would-be rebutters.

If the answer is "Well his life is in danger because he has lots of money in Bitcoins that can be stolen!" well, then there's another flaw in Bitcoins, or at least in keeping Bitcoins on your own hardware, which is what BTCheads have been advocating since the Mt. Gox 'asploded.

This isn't an issue for a normal rich people, because they don't keep their money in something like paper currency that can be easily stolen. It is in banks. So you break in to their house and kill them... well you don't get any of their money. The bank doesn't say "Oh hey you killed the guy, so by RPG loot rules you get his money!" If that's a concern with Bitcoin because it is like keeping lots of cash on hand, well that's another disadvantage now isn't it?

I'm not saying you *should* like music, questioning your personal experience with music, or challenging your position on the value of music.

What I'm interested is in whether the ability to like music or not is "baked in", either by genetics or early childhood experience. I think there's a good chance it could be, given the close relationship of music to language and what we think we know about neural plasticity and learning language. But that's just a hunch. Maybe it's a wrong hunch.

Who knows? Maybe if we figured out how to switch on music appreciation we might be a step toward enabling older people to learn to become fluent in foreign languages, something which is clearly practical.

Let's discard the people who can't recognize tunes or recognize emotions in music -- although they are interesting in themselves. Can the people who don't like music be trained to like music? In other words do they lack associated life experiences with music?

Another question is whether a better understanding would lead to enjoyment. We tend *not* to like music we haven't been exposed to (e.g. foreign music or young people's music).

Personally, I like to listen to music when I'm building something; this also correlates to what works for me when listening to lectures. I seldom need to look at notes, but I have to take them otherwise my mind wanders. I can even doodle, it doesn't matter. Somehow having my hands occupied seems to help my mind track external stimuli better.

In some ways a small sample size is advantageous in disproving the null hypothesis. It's cheaper and more practical to run a small study, especially in a case like this with a controversial substance that is perceived as risky and is hard to obtain.

The disadvantage of a small sample size is that you might not achieve a statistically significant result at the standard 5% confidence level in situation you'd achieve a significant result with a larger sample size. But if you *do* achieve a statistically significant result with a smallish sample size, it's just as real as a statistically significant result with a larger sample size. That's the whole point of having a significance test.

On the flip side, large sample sizes are problematic in that you risk obtaining a statistically significant result that has very little *practical* significance. It's not cost effective to orchestrate a large study that may uncover a real, but tiny difference between your treatment and control group.

So you usually want to have in-between sample size. But if for practical reasons you can only have a small sample size, then it's still worth trying, because a positive result is a positive result, barring experimenter error.

Well, maybe a bad dashboard doesn't mean the whole car is horrible, but it can certainly change the way you feel about a car. Even a single bad *detail* can ruin the experience for you.

I remember back around 1969, my mom bought a Buick Skylark: forest green, with a black vinyl roof. Very chic for the era. In most respects it was a pretty good car for 1969, especially with the optional 8 cylinder engine that put out 230 HP. Nobody balked at 12 MPG fuel economy back then. It was even rather good looking -- maybe not in the same league as a classic Mustang, but brawny and compact for 1969. Check out the Sports Coupe on this page. That's it, fourth from the top. Mom's car.

This car had one fatal flaw: the climate control UI. That was an impressive "space age" affair in which the settings were made on a thumb wheel and displayed on a bar graph. The graph even turned red when you went from AC to heat. Here it is on ebay. Look closely at the worm gear mechanism used to operate the bar readout. This was a fatal flaw that turned what would have been a very nice car into a lemon.

Unlike the basic lever and cable arrangement in less expensive cars, with this you have no tactile feedback. You can't feel whether you've set the control to AC or heat, much less how much heat you've called for. Check out the worm gear mechanism in the photos. That meant you had to rotate the knob maybe three times to go from max AC to max heat. Since only part of the knob protruded from the faceplate you could maybe rotate it 60 degrees with one swipe of your thumb. So when you wanted to change the temperature, you had to take your eyes off the road to see the bar graph, then often frob the control wheel with your thumb five or six times to get the setting you wanted.

I remember my Mom cursing that car every time she wanted to change the temperature. It was one small detail that ruined what would otherwise have been a terrific car. This is the first car I remember in detail, and it taught me an important lesson about user interfaces: impressive controls and displays don't necessarily make a UI convenient or pleasant to use.

Well, there isn't enough demand to put a hobby electronics shop in every mall and on every major highway. In fact it's a mystery to me how Radio Shack got as big as it is, other than it predated big box consumer electronics store.

What you need to support a bricks and mortar store network like this is an answer to these two questions:

(1) Why will people go to the store?

(2) What will they end up buying when they get there?

Have you noticed how bookstores tend to have coffee bars in them now? It's because you're thinking about going to Starbucks for coffee, so why not go to the one in Barnes and Nobles and do a little browsing while you're there? Granted, you may go there specifically for books some time, but having a coffee bar gets you in the door enough more times that you end up spending more money there annually than you would otherwise.

If you're going to buy a phone, why go to Radio Shack instead of your carrier's store? If you're going to buy a radio or a set of speakers, why go to Radio Shack instead of a big box electronics retailer? About the only reason I can think of to go to Radio Shack is if I needed an odd sized battery, which is not such a bad draw but it wouldn't draw me in more than once or twice a year.

Sure, if Radio Shack had a great parts counter it might get people like you or me to go there, and we might walk out with a headset or a cell phone. But there aren't enough people like you or me to put a Radio Shack in every mall and along most major highways. If they could just get enough people in the doors, they could sell them all kinds of electronics-y stuff, but there's nothing that will bring lots of people in the door. Every time I go to Radio Shack, it seems like the number of customers is something like 1.2x the number of staff. That's no way to make money.

Although the ties to other countries, the shared work, etc. also describes scholarly research and peer review -- the very things you need to put faith in some kind of cryptographic scheme.

If you have a problem that you don't know who to trust, a proprietary black box is no solution. Then you're trusting both the box and the person selling it to you.

Well tested, familiar conventional crypto algorithms are very, very hard to break. With correctly generated keys of sufficient length, they are practically unbreakable for longer than most secrets need to be kept.

But that doesn't mean *systems* built around those algorithms are unbreakable. It's all that stuff around the strong cryptographic algorithms that introduces weakness.

So claims of "unbreakable" algorithms or system components don't get me excited. If you want to make me sit up and take notice, claim that your invention makes secure cryptographic systems *simpler*.

Well,I think you're onto something, although it's certainly not the case that anti-vaccination ideology is confined to "uneducated redneck hicks". It is rampant among educated, middle class people too who *do* have the tools to evaluate claims. They just don't have the inclination to use those tools. I know because I have a niece who is an anti-vaccine crusader; she's always posting links to anti-vaccine screeds on Facebook, only to get knocked down by all her science geek aunties and uncles. She is not an ignorant, uneducated moron. She is an intelligent, accomplished and educated suburban mom who just happens to be off her rocker about this one thing.

The problem, I think, is that anti-vaccine hysteria actually arises out a healthy impulse: distrust of authority. We've raised a generation on tales of the Tuskeegee experiment, of bungled CIA actions in Iran, of government leaders' deceptions about the course of the Vietnam war. But the line between healthy distrust and paranoia is often fuzzy. In attempting to raise a generation of healthy skeptics, we've also made paranoia respectable.

This explains the counter-intuitive result in the study. Convincing people to distrust anti-vaccine information doesn't make them trust their doctors or public health authorities. It makes them distrust everyone. And some of the mud probably still sticks. Here's where knowing what the anti-vaccine crowd is saying helps. They've moved well beyond the autism thing; their message has two prongs: "vaccines aren't as effective as claimed" and "vaccines put children at risk for a wide spectrum of harms".

Finally there's another misunderstood aspect about who these people are. They've been raised to admire crusaders like Dr. King who stood up against authority figures, and they've been taught to emulate them. We've raised them to be firm and determined in their convictions, even the face of ridicule and condemnation. But that attitude of Emersonian self-reliance has a dark side: it's very hard to change your mind once you've donned your crusader surcoat and drawn your greatsword.

So the idea that these people are anti-vaccine crusaders *because* they're contemptible is wrong. These people are attempting to do something heroic. In other circumstances they *would* be heroic. The problem with self-righteousness is that it feels *exactly the same* as righteousness.

C# is also an open standard. It is an ECMA/ISO standard (as is the Common Language Infrastructure that underlies the CLR). Java is still Oracle's thing and they get snarky with companies that implement it in ways they don't like (like their BS with Google).

I have a french press, but I prefer a small moka pot -- aka a stovetop "espresso" pot. While it doesn't use enough pressure to qualify as true "espresso", with a little experimentation you can do a very nice extraction with one. They're also available in single serving and even backpack versions.

It follows that blind people have never tasted proper coffee.

You know, you touch on something that bugged me when I watched the Iron Man movies. Where is the reaction mass for Iron Man's flight coming from? Even a lightweight, unlimited power source wouldn't solve the problem of reaction mass. The Iron Man suit obviously uses some kind of reactionless drive -- not inconceivable, given that it also has "repulsor" technology which has no plausible physical explanation and violates classical physics.

The arc reactor idea actually is interesting to think about. Suppose you had an unlimited energy source with negligible weight. Could you build something like a rocket belt? I think you could, say by driving a turbine or some more exotic method of accelerating air. Technically it wouldn't be a "rocket" belt, but it would fit the bill. Even you'd still be limited in how small you could make the thruster due to the hazards the high velocity of the exhaust would present to the user and the surroundings.