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Journal Journal: Verbiage: Correlation does not connote causation 5

I just read a comment: "Correlation does not connote causation." A search found the more common adage uses "imply" instead of "connote". Though, they are somewhat synonymous.

Anyway, that seems wrong. I mean, the whole point is that it does indeed imply causation. That's why we need to remind people that it does not equal causation.

Comment Don't remind people (Score 1) 106

No idea on the men-vs-women thing.

But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.

If we want people to just accept that things are shitty and must always remain shitty, then it's probably best to not encourage people to think about the topic at all. Shhhh! Don't bring it up, and pretend that the idea of a convenient media library, where users have the choice to use whatever player software that they want on whatever device that they want, simply doesn't exist at all.

Comment Cool, I guess (Score 1) 70

This reminds me of how in the 1980s, things like FPUs and MMUs were separate chips. Do you want an 80387 with your 80386? Do you want a 68851 with your 68020? But then the newer CPUs just came with that stuff.

Even if 90% of the machines sold over the next few years never use it (think of how many 80386 chips were running MS-DOS as a "fast 8086" and never went into protected mode), it's nice that on the software side you'll eventually be able to expect it. In 1988 you couldn't assume floating point was fast for everyone, but by 1998 you could.

Comment Re:gross EU government (Score 3, Insightful) 20

Google is free to completely ignore these bullshit requirements and stop doing business in Europe.

For whatever reason, they have chosen to keep transacting with Europeans. Perhaps they chose poorly, and should have instead consulted Slashdot posters about whether or not making tons of money is worth the outrageous indignity.

Comment Re:Ya don't say (Score 1) 40

Doesn't adding the disclaimer truly fix the problem, though? Apparently nontechnical users didn't understand what incognito does, so a sufficiently-well-written disclaimer ought to be able to fully correct the misunderstanding.

On the techie side, we all know that a browser setting isn't going to somehow magically keep other peoples' computers from remembering users' requests, but non-techies didn't understand that magic isn't a thing, so Google's understandably under some pressure to better-document the incognito feature.

Comment All the same problems as DRM (Score 1) 67

Imagine the [unlikely?] case where someone wants to implement FACstamp on their own computer. Can they?

They'd end up facing a similar problem as DRM standards: whoever backs it can't allow any independent implementations, because that would undermine the purpose: preventing people from signing the "wrong" data.

So this FACstamp idea requires proprietary software for every step of the process, with a key obfuscated or hidden inside a TPM chip or something like that. Wanna write something that is interoperable with it? You can't.

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