Comment Re:Evolutionary Theory (Score 1) 347
Nice username you have for commenting on this story.
Nice username you have for commenting on this story.
Personally, I have never encountered an ATM in this country which charges for "access". Some charge for cash withdrawls, but I've not seen any charge for using the machine at all, e.g. checking your balance. And, personally, I could find a free ATM a hell of a lot quicker than I could find my cheque book
Of course, I accept my experience is not universal, etc etc.
LaLa
Interesting... isn't this almost exactly what mp3.com got sued for? "Knowing" you've bought a CD and giving you access to online audio of the same tracks?
The CDC estimates 22M [cdc.gov] cases among Americans through mid-October... that means the poll averages should be closer to 10, not 2-5, and *certainly* not "none at all." Most people who picked the "None" option are either willfully ignorant or woefully uninformed.
Well for starters, great stat, shame about the fact slashdot isn't exclusively visited by Americans, rendering it pretty well useless. I'm in the UK. Is our population running at the same infection levels as the US? Who knows! Not me, not from that CDC report, not without researching a bunch of other sources.
Second, from your own link:
These initial case counts, and subsequent ongoing laboratory-confirmed reports of hospitalizations and deaths, are thought to represent a significant undercount of the actual number of 2009 H1N1 flu cases in the United States....
...[our data was] then corrected for factors that may result in under-reporting using a multiplier
In other words, they expect the number of people who have had H1N1 to be more than the number of people who have been officially diagnosed with H1N1, and have inflated their numbers accordingly so as to estimate the former. The slashdot poll clearly asks for the latter: so you would expect the poll average to be lower than the average as calculated from the report. (Even before you inflated their numbers further still by assuming a 36% rise in cases over the last month, rounding 9.7% up to an even 10, and picking 100 as the number of people that people "know" - I "know" 100 people, sure, but not all well enough and/or people I see often enough to have specifically confirmed any medical diagnoses they have had recently.)
So, no, actually I don't believe most people who picked the "None" option are not willfully ignorant or woefully uninformed. More likely they answered honestly.
Could a Eurozone country change their currency without consultation?
(Not trying to make a point exactly - genuine curiosity)
As a European it's pretty easy to pass 10 countries without trying much.
True. I'm about the least well-travelled I know, I pretty much never go on holiday let alone "go travelling" per se. So I expected to be picking "one to three", but when I totalled up in my head I was surprised to realise I'm up to seven! As you say, without even trying.
In Britain we do things rather differently.
This is absolute nonsense. I know many people who are Capricorns (born in December-January) and who are over-achievers.
Yes, because of course when scientists talk about statistical trends observed within 52 million cases, the fact that you know "many" people who defy the trend of course sufficient basis to dismiss the trend as statistically nonexistent and "absolute nonsense". Congratulations of your robust grasp of the relationship between large data sets, statistical significance and confidence, and the anecdotal relevance of a couple of your mates' star signs.
Immortality is achieved through cloning of new bodies and transferring your conciousness and memories to the new body when needed. Memories can be stored at any time, allowing you to have a constant backup. That way body death isn't that big of a deal, and most people go through the transfer process a few times a decade.
A simliar concept underpins the Takeshi Kovacs universe by Richard Morgan, another new school Brit SF author. Check it out, you might like it.
I haven't read any Commonwealth saga so I can't directly compare - I did read Mindstar Rising and it's not entirely dissimilar to that - action/thriller/detective crossover elements with a hard mercenary (anti)hero, although Morgan is further in the future and more spectacularly violent.
"Little else matters than to write good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer