Newton was the Frozen-Light Alchemist. He earned his name from his ability to transform light into solid matter (and vice versa).

He answered yes by raising his hand. He then volunteered ONE example. He was not asked to disclose all cases. He did not misrepresent anything. He did not state he only had one lawsuit, or answer any questions as to how many lawsuits he had been involved in. That's not his fault for those questions not being asked.

What the judge said is "All right, let's go to Mr. Hogan". You are trying to say "Mr. Hogan didn't have to say anything because that's not a question, the judge just said 'let's go' and that means nothing!" However, standard voir dire instructions are that when you raise your hand and it is "your turn", you must explain your answer in "narrative form". So the reason he gave an example is not because he volunteered an example without prompting. It was because he was instructed that, when picked by the judge, he must elaborate on his yes/no answer. To repeat that, he was required to explain his answer. The judge did not vocalize that requirement at that time, because it was part of the previous instructions. That's why all of the people who raised their hand were not asked explicitly to elaborate, but they all did when he called their names. Since he was, in fact, instructed to explain, he was required to answer truthfully. Omissions are considered deceit as far as the court is concerned.

It wasn't a question of "5 times as much an SSD" (and of course much more if the SSD is idle or off) it was a question of "too much power and heat to be used in a residential situation." It's foolish to have 1TB of ram in a desktop and then never be able to turn it off without losing everything, but not because the power consumption is so high that you couldn't use residential wiring ;)

This doesn't change much. As mentioned, this is a pretty fundamental assumption. What this assumption gets you is that if you go big enough, all of the differences in mass distribution smooth out and everywhere is just like everywhere else. There will be a "typical" cluster of galaxies that "most" are "pretty close" to. And within such a typical cluster you can talk of a "typical" galaxy, and a "typical" star within that galaxy. But are we a typical planet in a typical solar system in a typical galaxy in a typical local cluster in a typical supercluster? Unknown ;)

What's more important is how common solar systems with terrestrial and gas giant planets are. If there are rocky planets, it's thought that more or less they will turn out the same at the same distance from the sun, (scaled by the sun's intensity of course), and depending on their mass for how well they can hold onto an atmosphere. (And of course that's wishy washy, it's argued whether or not Mars would be earth-like at our distance, if it would still have been too small to hold onto an atmosphere long-term, and if the a large moon is necessary to keep the magnetic field rolling). More or less the distance and primary's luminosity will determine atmospheric temperature, and that will determine the rate of out-gassing, and you'll get all kinds of feedback, and either end up with a Venus, Earth, or Mars depending on how the atmospheric pressure and temperature equilibriums end up balanced. There doesn't appear to be a HUGE amount of variance in elemental abundance between solar systems, except according to their age. (Even that is more of a quick rule of thumb than a hard curve). This of course isn't settled by any means. Then you have things that are less settled. How important is a moon to things? Some say our magnetic field would be gone by now without the tidal forces of the moon keeping the core etc. churning away. Others say that's silly, but it might be a bit weaker by now. Then you have to figure out how much water and such we got from bombardment by comets flung out of orbit by gas giants. How many and how large of gas giants do you need to typically get that effect? Is it even strictly necessary, or just handy? Would we have still ended up Earth-like (with much smaller oceans perhaps?) without Late Heavy Bombardment? Or would we have frozen solid without the greenhouse effect of all that water? Or did most of our water come from within anyway so at most we would just have slightly smaller oceans and slightly lower temperature? If gas giants are needed, we at least have spotted those all over the place. (In fact we've spotted them around stars we thought shouldn't have any!)

None of that is really helped or hindered by the homogeneity of the entire universe. If we can get the telescope resolution to make fair estimates on the likelihood of earth-like planets (for some definition of that term) throughout the Milky Way, then we can maybe look at nearby galaxies and guestimate how likely those stars are to be like our own stars...and from there if we can eventually look far enough we can say "OK well by homogeneity most galaxies are probably pretty close to this, so maybe earth-like planets are around about this common...ish".

SCO wasn't a patent troll by any reasonable definition of the term. This is not because they had a product for sale, but because they didn't sue over patents.

The semi-major axis is usually called the "distance" because it's equal to the averaged mean distance between the planet and the foci (one of which is the sun). Though that depends what you average over. I think if you average over time it's approximately equal if eccentricity is small.

Half-Life: Source used all of the same models and maps, but added the physics engine for rag-doll effects, used shaders for improved water effects, had some limited dynamic lighting improvements (I think?), replaced the pre-rendered 16-bit skybox with dynamic effects, and cleaned up the specular/normal maps for better bump mapping and such. That is, it was a port to a new engine, with almost no changes to the content other than the cleaned-up normal maps and the quick switch-out of the skybox. Black Mesa is not a port, but a remake. They redid all of the maps and most of the models that weren't available already as part of HL2, so it takes full advantage of all the new shaders and lighting stuff, and has much higher resolution textures and models.

One of the worst "bad abstract tricks" is putting your findings as Odds Ratios. What's an Odds Ratio? You probably know that the "probability" of an event is "Event over Total". The probability of rolling a 6 on a standard die is 1/6. The "odds" of an event is "Event to Not Event". The odds of rolling a 6 are not 1:6, they are 1:5 for (or more often said, 5:1 against). So then the odds ratio (OR) of two groups is the ratio of ratios, or the ratio of the odds for one event compared to the odds of another. So a big source of confusion is thinking the odds and probability are the same thing. Clearly they aren't. And clearly the closer they get to even odds, the bigger the difference. The odds of tossing a coin and getting heads are 1:1, but that's a 1:2 probability.

An example of the odds ratio in action: You ask 1000 men if they smoke, and you get 300 who say "yes" (made up statistics). That's odds of 300 to 700, or 3:7. You ask 1000 women if they smoke, and 250 say "yes". That's odds of 250:750, or 1:3. The odds ratio is then (3:7) : (1:3) or 9:7, or 1.2857...:1 So in the abstract you will see that this study has found that males have an OR of 1.29 when compared with women. And they'll just sit back and let the journalists call that "almost 30% more likely!" When it's not. That's how much higher the odds are, and odds are not probability! And of course you can't forget about confidence intervals. It's actually even worse than that. An increasing number of medical papers will take the OR of 20:1 and go straight to "20 fold more likely to blank!" when the probability ratio is 3.5:1 not 20:1.

Part of the problem is not enough statistics courses for scientists. I had to take 2 as part of my degree, and they never covered odds ratios, or odds at all actually. Only probabilities, which are more useful to reason about usually. This is further compounded by people using odds and probability interchangeably. I see on things like scratch and wins and store give aways "Odds of winning 1 in 3", which is a probability.

What good is apathy if nobody knows just how strongly you don't care?

To add actual numbers: In the USA the suicide rate is 11.8 per 100,000 people per year, compared to China's overall 22.2. However, this is for all people. In Foxconn's worst year, they had 14 suicides, or 1.5 suicides per 100,000 employees. Making it extremely low compared to the national average for either China or the USA. Or about 2 per 100,000 if you restrict the death and employee counts to their worst (in terms of suicide) factory complex. As you said, this is about equal to the roughly 2 per 100,000 retail employees murdered per year for assorted reasons. At any rate, to get a fair comparison you would have to look at workplace suicide rates for factory employees in the USA, not just at the grand total. And as far as I know, there aren't really many such statistics available.

I'd imagine that some people have their home address in their phone for GPS purposes. Or, the trojan could have been monitoring movements via GPS, and whoever was running it could have been reversing that into probable addresses. Or it could be cross referenced. If they use their wifi at home, the trojan could get an IP address. Many online stores will connect your IP address to your zip code and/or your address, and sell that data point to geomapping services. Even stores that do not sell online, but have a "find a store near me" will sell the same data. It's not always very accurate as people tend to put fake zip codes in when it doesn't matter. But still. It's important to remember that many (or most?) of these rows do not have address or zipcode information. AntiSec redacted those columns before releasing it so we actually don't even know they were present at all, and if they were, what percentage of rows had these data.

Write original material?

The reference here was probably to Elastica getting sued by Wire over 5 notes. So, 5 notes, regardless of tempo or key change, leaves about 40,000 unique "song parts". And of course, a large portion of them sound terrible, so there are maybe a few thousand possible parts of songs, and each song will be made of many of them. Since there are a lot more than a few thousand songs, by Wire's logic, there are no unique songs left in the world. Of course, that was settled out of court, so it's not actually the law at all ;) Except perhaps it is precedent (not in the legal sense) of having to defend against insanely absurd lawsuits from jealous bands all over the world. And that's enough.

Stupidest is a perfectly cromulent word. Normally I'd be on your side, but it's a lost battle, just as "begging the question", "octopuses" etc. are lost now. (Specifically, most dictionaries list "stupider,stupidest" as the comparative and superlative forms of stupid, including spellcheck dictionaries). It may be painful to witness, but language evolves...oops, I mean, language is (un)intelligently designed.

There was a Canadian show I watched one episode of called "Continuum", the "good" guy (well, girl) is a "Protector" in the "CPA" (I forget if it's "civilian" or "corporate" protection). In other words, she's a secret police officer. No uniform, license to kill. The "government" is the Corporate Congress. After bringing about additional market collapses they bought out the world governments and dissolved them. The CPA doesn't arrest people directly, they implant "trackers" which work not by actually being a GPS tracker, but by inducing more and more pain until the "perp" turns themselves in at the CPA station for sentencing and removal of the excruciator (hungry rats are sooooooooo 20th century). (The pilot has her smashing somebody's face in for vandalism then implanting the excruciator). Her suit/implants record everything she sees and hears and transmits it to HQ for filing. So, bringing it back to the second post in this thread, one of her buddies calls the government Big Brother, and she says the exact same thing "It can't be because otherwise you'd be dead". All while her implants are filming and recording, and transmitting back to HQ for processing and filing.

Anyway, the whole show is so heavily "1984 but the government is the good guy" I couldn't believe it. But they make sure the "bad guys" (pro-democracy rebels) are equally unsympathetic by having them kill as many innocent people as possible 24/7 for no reason. (PS the bad guys are a government trained death squad used to put down protests, but for some reason maybe explained in episodes I didn't watch, they rebelled.)

People are currently scraping forums looking for authors complaining about the site and bragging about getting it taken down. Their works are being compiled into a single torrent for easy piracy ;) The idea is to get all of these beyond-retarded inbreeds tilling at TPB so that they won't bother burning down any more libraries.