> do want to necessitate giving some experimental medicine to 10,000 people before assessing whether it's a good idea or not?

Yes. Before giving it to a million people, we should run statistical calculations on the first 10,000 to better asses safety and efficacy.

Oh, you meant as opposed to a trial with 200 people. But that's a false dichotomy. You run run stats on the first 200 to see whether
or not it's likely safe, then run stats on 10,000 to confirm it. Which is to say, you'd wait until you managed a smaller P before announcing a conclusion. In the meantime, with a P of 0.05, you'd label it as a tentative conclusion, a likely theory.

It sounds like you have a clue about statistics. Do you know of a good forum to ask a fairly involved statistics question? I have a set of measured variables A-E which all tend to indicate the likelihood of X. The relationships are a bit complex and unknown, though, so I need help with how I should analyze the historical data in order to come up with parameters to use in the future for making "predictions" of X based on known values of A-E.

Thirteen hours ago you said it means "without god". That's what you said. You said that meaning has been the same for thousands of years. Now, you seem to have changed your mind. Time flies.

No. The phone I'm typing this on is not like the Slashdot server cluster. That's client-server, like most internet activity.

Slashdot.org and CNET.com are peers. Note they don't communicate, there's no peer-to-peer communication.

Sure some elements of the infrastructure involve peer communication.

> The Greek word transliterated as atheos means "without a god"

without God, lacking God. As opposed to "fighting against God". Which is precisely what I had said.

See also "immoral" versus amoral.
immoral: opposite to moral
amoral: without reference to morality.

In English, privative a is most often cognate to "un", through German.
Had the greek come to us via the normal route, we'd write the same word as "un-theist".
  athiest == untheist == ungod != antigod

"Atheist" groups used the word to describe what is in fact _against_ God, not merely _lacking_ God.
Antitheist would be a far more accurate word for those groups.

> That said, could you please explain why the Atheist League should be called the Antichrist league,
> as opposed to the Anti-Kali, Anti-Mohammedan, or Anti-Pastafarian league?
> Sure, there are tons of different sects that profess the divinity of Christ - Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Mormons, members of the Unification Church, etc...

Because they LIKE the whole Pastafarian thing, they are PRO-pastafarian. :)

Seriously, though, you're right, anti-theist is more technically accurate, and I considered using that word.
However, on a practical level, the organizations I'm talking about spend their time being anti-Christian. You don't see "atheist" vs Hindu court cases in the news all the time. Recognizing that fact, antichrist is accurate for practical purposes and using the familiar term brings another level of frankness to the discussion. Whereas misusing the word "atheist" disguises their agenda, the word "antichrist" is the opposite - it puts their agenda it bold letters. So "antitheist" for technical accuracy, "atheist" for disguise, and "antichrist" to say it loud and proud.

> As soon as that line is crossed, I become, indeed, an anti-theist.

I appreciate your frankness. It's far more useful and interesting to have a conversation with someone who is clear about their beliefs and acknowledges them than someone who tries to wear a mask. So often we see, for example, people vehemently denying that they are socialists while they're quoting Trotsky.

> d. "This man has to die because he is an asshole" is a valid argument, "This man has to die because my Holy Book says the penalty for what he's done is death" is not.

How does this logic work for you:

The ancient wisdom says murder is a bad idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The same ancient wisdom says cheating on your wife is a bad idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The ancient wisdom says to reserve one day for rest and for family is a good idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The same ancient wisdom says treating your parents with respect is a good idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The same ancient wisdom says stealing is a bad idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The same ancient wisdom says perjury is a bad idea. The truth of that has become apparent.
The same ancient wisdom says envy is a bad idea. Given the above, this one just might be true as well.

Whether or not that's CORRECT, it's certainly a more LOGICAL argument than "he's an asshole, so he should die", to use your example.

You listed off a bunch of different religions and denominations who have slightly different viewpoints around the central theme of a certain phenomenon. I have no doubt that each of them has come to some mistaken conclusions. Some of them have completely missed the point (Falwell?). It is interesting, though, that around the world they all put this phenomenon they call "God" or "Allah" at the center.

Much of what they say sounds like it's describing the same phenomenon I've directly experienced on more than one occasion. It reminds me of what might happen if you went around asking kindergartners to explain the common cold - what causes a cold, what the effects are, and the mechanism around the those effects. They'd come up with many entertaining explanations I'm sure. I bet many of them would include anthropomorphized "bugs". Most of them have experienced a cold, but they don't understand it. I suspect that the world's religions are full of people trying in vain to explain something many of them have experienced, but don't understand. They anthropomorphize what they don't understand in the same way that office workers do their computer, speaking, and thinking, as if the computer "wants" something because they have no understanding of the internal workings.

> Why should I change who I am just so I'm "acceptable" or "normal" to other people. I like me.

Do you still poop your diaper? If not, you've made changes, switched to something more effective than what you had been doing.

> > Understand the people you're working with, what they need, and provide that.

> Worrying about what people think ... then you are still going through puberty and all the pubescent insecurity that entails.

I've said things like that before. Every so often, I have to remind myself of the following:

If your customers think you suck, you do indeed suck. You may have provided them with a wonderful solution to problem X, but since you didn't listen and ask questions you didn't know their problem was Y. For the problem at hand, your solution sucks, and your poor communication caused it.

If you don't "worry about what people think" when it comes to your boss, you'll not know she thinks it's critically important that your application is very easy to use because the old farts in the C suite will be the primary users. Lack of communication = suck, for the purpose at hand.

If the people report to you think you suck, they'll leave, after having no interest in getting your projects done and probably bad mouthing you (accurately). Again, the results suck because you're only interested in what you think.

Being interested in what other people think, need, and want is the first requirement for a successful project. Not paying due attention to what other people think makes you an arrogant asshole.

I've never had someone "with different background and views" get upset when I've asked them how they're doing, or complimented them, or asked them for suggestions or ...

If you converse rather than proselytize I don't think you'll run into too many problems.

Ps - it's funny how the word "atheist" has been co-opted. The prefix "a" means "not applicable", or "not concerned with". Someone who is actually a-theitical is someone who is not interested in theology. The word has become most often used as a disguise by people who are very much interested, who are anti-God. If they described were honest enough to use accurate wording for their cause, the Atheist League would be called the Antichrist League. I wonder why they aren't honest, why they lie by labeling themselves as people not interested in the topic.

Grandpa was incorrect. If you wish to purchase pussy, $20 bills are the preferred form of payment. Though, I did notice some backpage ads listing 290 roses / hour.

Google's numbers based on 100,000 drives showed that specific model numbers are reliable or not, while brand name doesn't matter as much.
All manufacturers make bad models and good models.

The Google report based on many thousands of drives showed that while some MODEL NUMBERS had much higher failure, various brand names had similar failure rates. Western Digital will make two drives at the same time, one model that's very reliable while the one next to it is crap. Same with every other manufacturer.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

If you insist on buying based on the brand name, HGST models have been very good in our datacenter.

I understand and respect that. It sounds like we may have some things in common where you mentioned "I'm a nerd ... redesign the firmware".

You do have a powerful testimony and I hope that, through whatever medium you choose, you continue to express that. Those of us who have been around long enough to have an appreciation of what this country is supposed to be can appreciate the reminder, and today's teenagers remember only the Bush and Obama years, so your words may introduce them to ideas that they've never thought about.

Every time I've asked to observe a user, the request baffles them. They've never had a developer do that before. I've never seen a developer other than myself just observe the user, keeping one's own mouth shut.

Users do the most surprising things, so watching them really is instructive.

When I made my post, to which you replied, I spent perhaps 40 seconds on it. I suspect you spent a similar amount of time on yours and Taco Cowboy maybe twice as long on his. That's about how long one spends on a Slashdot post - a minute or two. When one is writing an article that is expected will be read by thousands or millions of people, one generally spends an hour or two, as opposed to a minute or two.

As a case in point, I've made posts here regarding the 2nd amendment / gun control. I'll take a minute or two to post some relevant numbers, or at least the approximations I can remember. I'm currently writing a piece on the same topic, mentioning the same numbers, but I'm spending several hours to actually get the numbers write, to be sure I introduce my main point in the first paragraph and support it in the following paragraphs, then reinforce it in the closing paragraph, etc.

The post we're discussing has no paragraphs, or if one sentence per paragraph if you choose to look at it that way.
I suspect that if Taco Cowboy were so inclined, he (she?) could organize it more effectively. In fact, I've read essentially te same post by Taco Cowboy before, but it was more effectively written the last time.

Again, this isn't a criticism of what was written, just an acknowledgement that what was written was a Slashdot post, not an article.