A friend of mine had to have surgery. His is only a semicolon now.

For us who aren't familiar with this visa system, whom did Palmer do a service by calling attention to the situation?

Breaking one of the rules of grammar, say, by using while the way the Slashdot summary does, might be the means by which one conveys precisely that innuendo. If the speaker overall cares very little about the rules, I'm afraid no one would perceive their intentions as that subtle signal would be drowned in the flood of noise.

Mess up how the Internet is supposed to work? I'm not sure I follow you. Why would there be drawbacks if specifically universities and labs paid more as opposed to if everyone else paid more? What if prices do go up? Lot's of things cost me more than I would like them to. Can you make all prices go down, please? Except when I sell something. I'm afraid I'm not convinced by your argument.

Oh! Well, if that's the case, I'm convinced!

Let's just peacefully explore the issue. I'm still trying to find my own stance here, entertaining opinions without necessarily embracing them, putting forward an argument to see what will be said against it.

Firstly, I don't think it would ever go that far. If no one is using a phone at all, then certainly there is money to be made from providing a service that is at least usable. At least as much I'd say we can expect from the invisible hand. Secondly, some would argue that regardless of whether I die or not, it is immoral to force anyone (a telecommunications provider) to offer services it doesn't want to offer. Taking it further, what if we, the people, felt we needed communications services and forced you to provide them? If the invisible hand hadn't already compelled you to provide it, would you be fine with the visible hand "compelling" you?

Hey, are you trying to discredit me as someone who has taken an economics class or someone who has taken too few of them?

I'm gonna be a bit contrarian here, in part because it's an interesting issue to explore. Allow them to collude, I say! If you and I decide to start offering a service and also decide to be all colluding about it, what right does others have to prevent us? If they don't accept our offer, they can just say "no" and go on without it.

No one has any obligation to offer you any service at a price you find reasonable. No one has any obligation to offer you any service at all, even. If you don't find the price reasonable, walk on by. I do that with Ferraris every day.

If someone wants to offer a service wherein they alter the messages sent, let them! They might be a disgrace in the eyes of people like you and med who want a clean and tidy communications channel, but there is no wrongdoing in offering a service we don't want.

Why don't we just choose the provider that gives us the best offer - for example the one that let's us use audio-over-the-internet, maybe at a higher prize?

Let providers be free to make whatever offers they want and let others be free to accept or decline.

Aghnnn! I'm not at all at ease with having the number of digits written out signify the uncertainty. That's just not very elegant. By that method, you can only express certain ranges (for example "1.45 to 1.55", but neither "1.44 to 1.54" nor "-5 to 17") and it's even dependent on what base you write in! Rather, give uncertainty as a separate number.

Even more sophisticated would be to specify a probability distribution over possible values, but in the above discussion I assume that one wished to express the uncertainty as a range with sharp boundaries.

In case anyone wonders, I do myself practise the "significant digits" method when the social context calls for it and I want to please people (so that they give me money, for example), but whenever I can, I follow my heart and do what's right.

Yay! I have no idea what "bitchfest" mean, though. That's totally like Greek to me. ;-)

I'm afraid I don't follow you. The M-W definition is consistent with what I had in mind. Maybe I should explain what I meant, in case it was misunder stood.

Pro primo, let us establish that we agree on the following usage: "Our company has set no standard regarding what file format to write text documents in, but everyone has gravitated toward LaTeX, so it is the de facto standard." Pro secundo, I interpret my sentence about the CMS analogously, like so: "The CMS was never intended to be a style guide, but everyone is using it as such anyway." Of course, it was intended to be a style guide all along, hence my picking on the formulation in the book review. If the CMS is the dominating style guide, you could say that it is the "de facto standard when it comes to style guides", though not an actual, official standard.

I could also be all wrong; that wouldn't be unprecedented.

- We have this "travelling salesman" problem.

- I see. Oh, I know! Let's call it "sales representative" instead.

You see, it's not actually a style guide, only de facto so.

Thank you. I realise I shall need the article itself as well to be sure I understand what some of the numbers in the database mean.

Why not just report likelihoods instead and let the reader multiply it with any prior they want? In many cases, the prior won't make much of a difference anyway, I suppose.

Sure, do away with empirical Bayes. Anyway, I don't think "When using Bayesian methods, you run the risk of using non-Bayesian methods." is an argument for not using Bayesian methods.

Regardless of what practical obstacles there might be for using Bayesian inference, using something else would be wrong, leading to results that make you take the wrong actions!