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Comment door knobs (Score 1) 502

Yesterday I bought a package of two doorknobs with the connecting rod, but I only attached one of them to my door where a knob had broken. Is the doorknob manufacturer going to sue me now?

Last Thursday I bought a happy meal at MacDonalds, but I didn't eat all the fries. Am I going to be sued?

Some of the students in a course I taught last semester didn't attend all the lectures. Can I sue them?

If Lufthansa really wants to penalize people for not using the second half of a connecting ticket they should charge an extra couple €100 up front, to be refunded upon successful completion of the full itinerary.

Comment Other pledges (Score 1) 294

They've also promised to stop beating their wives, to stop sending classified government secrets to alien bases on the moons of Jupiter, to stop playing rugby while wearing white gloves and frilly dresses, to stop pulling out workers' fingernails as punishment for not clearing their desks before leaving for the day, and many other practices that they have never done and have no intention of ever doing.

Comment Statistical Artefact (Score 4, Interesting) 298

People (and even Google) are taking the wrong lesson from this.

The sample used in this study was managers *at Google*. This is a biased sample, in that almost all of them will have high technical competence. So the statistical power of the study in determining how technical competence affects management performance will be low. In some other setting, where managers have much wider variability in technical competence, that factor would very likely show up much higher on the list.

(Analogy: if you conducted a study of how wealth affects cancer survival rates and only admitted millionaires to the study, you might get a very different result than if you also included people with very little money. The classic example of this effect in the statistics literature is a study of wages as a function of height, whose result changes if the sample includes only circus midgets.)

Comment Re:the facts of the case (Score 1) 381

... not complying with an officer of the law is a crime (get out of the car, get down on the ground, put your hands on your head, ...)

Take off your clothes, give me a blow job, sign this piece of paper, stick your finger up your ...

(Hint: the order has to be *lawful*, which in this case, it arguably was not.)

Comment Kindness to Strangers (Score 1) 340

Next they'll send plainclothes policemen to people's doors to ask for a glass of water, or to see if there's an unsecured spigot on the outside of the house. And if they find this sort of freely available water, they'll give them a stern talking-to. Because it(*) all starts with kindness to strangers!

(*) "It" being civilization: the biblical command to be kind to strangers, and the custom in the middle east to give water to travelers, date to prehistory are are literally the basis of our civilization.

Comment Re:How much?!?! (Score 1) 416

... the force required increases as a square of the speed

The force required scales as the cube of the speed. When you go twice as fast the air has to move twice as fast to get out of the way, and square that for kinetic energy, but you also have to move twice as much air, giving a factor of eight. (On the other hand you only have to do the pushing for half as long, so the *total* work, which is the integral of the force, goes as the square of the speed.)

Comment Re:Mulsim... (Score 1) 1002

If we lifted the sanctions on Palestine [...] it would take 15 years tops for them to start caring more about cars and TVs than God and Jews.

That's what Israel tried first. Until the 1st intifada, people in the West Bank and Gaza had largely unimpeded access to jobs across the Green Line, in Israel, and their salaries from such jobs constituted an enormous fraction of the economy of those territories.

It's not like Israel wants to impede the flow of goods across the border, even today. Gaza today, unoccupied, is powered by electricity from electric power plants in Israel. But when aluminum is used to make missiles that get shot across the border, preventing aluminum from getting across the border seems pretty tempting. Regardless of the measure's effectiveness.

Has anyone heard from the IRA since the Irish GDP shot up?

(a) I live in Ireland; (b) yes; (c) you're confusing Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland; and (d) correlation, even if it were true in this case which it is not, does not imply causality.

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