> why is one place saddled with search engine results that are negative and another not?

Because one place is famous for bad thing happening there and another is not. Searching for Jane Q. Celebrity will turn up her personal site first, as she's famous by herself, but searching for brutally murdered John Smith will turn up news reports, not his facebook page.

Your definition of "relevance" is strange. If most people looking for "Nuremberg" or "Bhopal" are interested in trials and chemical plant disaster, filling top page with tourist spots would be irrelevant.

Great post, except top result for "camping alfaques" is "Alfaques Camping - Apartamentos - Camping www.alfaques.com/" both on Google and Bing and they are just ticked off by image search feature showing unpleasant pictures.

But why get constrained by boring reality, when you can rant instead?

> why not call them 'burglars'?

Better yet, call them "terrorists" and the public will immediately see how bad and wrong they are.

After all, nomenclature, not what someone actually did, is what really matters.

You don't need "all the new syntax" to start using C++11, many of most useful additions are already in all major compilers and have been there since the times when C++11 was known as C++0x and C++ TR1. Current GCC is missing only a few features.

... because they're pretending that the many tens of thousands of lines of code in the OS and libraries don't count ...
... because they're pretending that the many tens of thousands of lines of HDL code in the processor don't count ...

True demoscener builds his own CPU out of transistors and resistors. Some suggest that using logic gates ICs is acceptable, but they're wimps.

Almost kilobyte? Yep, not very impressive considering what people build in 1 kB of Javascript.

Not to mention all the cool things people stuff in 512 byte intros for demo parties.

Isn't testing all those people "I'll have to look into that"?

And religious fanatics spending money to put religious and anti-atheistic messages on buses and billboards are perfectly okay.

Because you're blind and deaf, probably.

I don't know, probably not less than same amongst christians. Some christians are pretty vicious. Some are barely hiding their schadenfreude behind "Ha! That's God's punishment for you" when disasters strike - instead of, you know, helping victims as Christ would do. Sure, you could argue that those who don't follow these tenets vehemently are not true christians, but then you could also argue there were only thirteen true christians at all, or may be even just one.

PS: Oh, and by the way, the word is "a-the-ist", from negative prefix "a-" and "theos". I'm not sure what an "athiest" is, probably superlative form of "athy" - as in athy, athier, athiest, but it is a sure sign of illiteracy.

Just don't forget to win small prises in many different lotteries, or else you'll get people suspicious with all the jackpots you grab.

Someone should get all the results of all the lotteries, do some statistics and find them psychics who get ahead with unfair advantage.

AFAIK, the test conditions are negotiated, which means that dowser thought he can find running water in those conditions.

And if dowsers indeed just follow the landscape clues - there is no need to research deeper, those clues are already in all survival guides. Teaching dowsing then would be no more useful than teaching to cross roads as "flip a coin, if it's tails and no cars are close - run across" instead of teaching to look at traffic lights.

The only useful form of dowsing would find water regardless of landscape and artificial/natural streams.

P.S.: Oh, and how repeatable/successful was that "seemed to work"? Did you always hit a spring or was it "close enough, let's try again"?

Then grab your rod and go get that megabuck, incidentally giving credibility to dowsing and a new question for biologists to solve. Words are cheap.

Oh, and if you missed that, the dowser mention that started this thread is of "(unable to) detect running water 15 feet below " variety.

fraud n. Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.

So, whether someone preaching is fraudulent depends on does he/she believe it and does he/she gain anything from it.

Go dive in a thesaurus for "Show me the evidence"

What. You start talking about "strawman" while building a strawman to knock down. Did "pseudoskeptics" bite you or something?

It's not "negation of claim", it's "negative claim", or claim of absence that is hard/impossible to prove.

For example:

Easily proven, I can come over to your house and knock you on the head.

Now to prove that I _don't_ exist you'd have to visit every single person on the Earth and ensure that he is not me -and you still won't get definite proof, because some people are hiding or missing. Most importanly, I'm actually right behind your shoulder all this time and quickly walk when you turn around.

Of course there are negative claims that are easy to prove, like "there are no million dollar bills in my pocket", but those have a) small enough search space, and b) specific test for positives.

Claims of some specific property in _some_ humans are not provable as negatives in general case just due to sheer number of humans on this planet, but easily provable as positives - just show at least one human with that property. That's what Randi does, looks for positive proof.

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

The word you're looking for is "arbitrary" or somewhere near that in thesaurus.

Impartial is "treating everyone the same way, unbiased". As long as same rules and metrics apply to all sites, it is impartial. If ratio for your site is (say) 1:20 and you get ranked down, but return to previous rating after working on your content to make it 1:16, it is impartial. If the search engine devs promptly change the ratio to 1:15, and then when you go to 1:10 they drop it to 1:9, they might be not impartial and biased against you - if it's causation, not correlation, of course.

I don't quite follow the first part of your post.

Link farms are ranked down by search engines using some arbitrary impartial metrics - number of outgoing/incoming links, their relations etc. etc. etc., spreadingsantorum.com is ranked up as relevant using some different arbitrary impartial metrics - number of mentions, incoming links, user clicks, etc etc etc. What does "created and maintained by humans" have to do with that?

It will stop being impartial only if/when they decide to add 'if (query == "santorum") results.match("spreadingsantorum.com").rating -= /* or += just to be evil */ 9e9' to their algorithm.