Not only that, but we don't directly perceive red, green, and blue. What we actually perceive DIRECTLY is a dark indigo ("blue", or short-wave photopigment), green ("green", or medium-wave photpigment), and yellow-green ("red", or long-wave photopigment). These correspond to about 420nM, 534nM, and 564nM respectively, with peak overall response at about 555nM. All the rest of the gamut are tricks your brain figures out. Which is why things like language, training, etc., etc., can affect our perception of "color".

So you don't see red ever, or very much blue. You construct what you think those are from indigo, green, and yellow-green.

And we're not even going to go into mutants with more or fewer photopigments. Or mantis shrimp, which have somewhere around 12-16 different photopigments. Proof that they are aliens.

I have found tarsnap to be great for fire-and-forget. Low impact, low cost, and great availability. Just the basics, no candy. Restores (I tested) are easy. UNIX (and alike) systems only, but that's not a problem for me. :-) Although you might be able to make it work under windows using cygwin (or whatever the latest equivalent of that is; you can see how long it's been since I cared about doze).

If it's good enough for IP (RFC 1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...), it's good enough for me.

Karma's a bitch.

Just hope Trump and Pence get it now.

In fact, there are a number of rational reasons *not* to make a change. I am a research professor, and time is my field, including chronobiology. I see that someone has already mentioned the heart attacks thing. But there are a number of other effects. Similar to the heart attacks, there is a spike in automobile accidents during time changes. More generally, and probably of more impact, every single person experiences increased stress, and reduced time and quality of sleep due to the change. So it's not only those unlucky enough to be in an accident or have a heart attack that are harmed, it is every single person. (In fact, the increase in heart attacks is almost certainly in large part due to the increased stress, and the increase in accidents is probably due to the sleep disruption).

So, yes, do away with the change. And businesses should not change their operating hours unless they have a direct link to sunrise/sunset. If you're working in an office, there is no need to ever change. If you're working at a park, there probably are good reasons to change. :-)

Let's make something carried almost universally now by travellers be suspect as a weapon!!!!! The cops would NEVER overreact to that!

"Please step out of your car. I see a weapon mounted on your dashboard."
"What? That's just my cellphone!"
*BLAM*

You said:

Nationalisation without compensation is just a nice way of saying theft by the government. It makes no sense, since the stockholders did nothing wrong and the German government did nothing to deserve free shares in a company. I also highly doubt that German law allows for such a thing. Also, its "wagen", nog "wagon". They don't make railway equipment.

My reply:

Sorry about the misspelling. If you want to engage in a pedantry dick size war, be prepared to be crushed. (E.g., you're obviously not American. In American English, railway equipment is a "car", not "wagon". A "wagon" is a children's toy, a landscaping, farming, and construction tool, or a police van.)

Making the victim of a crime whole is not theft, it's a remedy to theft. Since the victim here is the public at large (not just the buyers of the cars), in order to make the victim whole, the German government stands in their stead. The shareholders are owners of a criminal organization, and thus responsible for the actions of that organization.

You said:

Yes, let's punish people for crimes committed by others, of which they were not even aware until last week. Very fair and reasonable... I would propose to only prosecute those who were actually involved instead of people who are already punished heavily for something in which they had no part.

My reply:

These people SHOULD have known. It was their JOB. If they didn't know, it is because they intentionally did not, which is as culpaple as the action in a corporate governance situation.

You said:

Retrofitting at VW's cost actually makes sense and I would support that. A buyback would be disproportionate, however.

My reply:

Let me clarify by "buyback" it would be at the depreciated value of the car, not the original price. The owners should be made whole (which may in some circumanstances require slightly more than depreciated value, but still not original value), but not more than whole. The goal is to get the polluters off the street.

You said:

[In response to my holding the German government responsible]
But only in the same way the Peruvian government and your neighbour's dog did. They were not aware of it and they have done nothing to support it.

My reply:

By allowing the corporation to exist as a legal entity they sanction its adherence to certain levels of performance, including that of not being a criminal organization. By failing in this duty, the German government also becomes culpable.

You said:

This is even more absurd. Neither the German government, nor German people who have saved up some money have had anything to do with this.

My reply:

The government IS the people, remember civics 101? Oh wait, that's right, you're not American, so this may not be automatic for you. But it is the underlying myth for all modern representative democracies, which you likely are a citizen of, since your level of English proficiency would seem to be native; so you should be aware of this, especially if you are expounding upon the nature of culpability, macroeconomics, and so on.

That it should be the wealthy that pay is because a) they're the ones that have money; b) there is a strong argument to be made that they also are transitively culpable; c) it probably wouldn't come to this; and d) from a utilitarian standpoint it minimizes the harm caused, as the utility of a Euro to the wealthy is considerably lower than the utility of a Euro to the poor.

You said:

f anything, it would make more sense for the American government to pay, since it is their idiotic emission standards that are extremely strict with regards to a modest pollutant while being very lax in other, worse pollutants just because that happened to disadvantage foreign manufacturers are what led to all this in the first place

My reply:

Wrong again. Those are the rules of the marketplace, whether they are reasonable or not. If you want to play in a marketplace, you observe its rules. If you don't want to play by those rules, you don't enter the market.

Your assertions about the utility and purpose of the regulations are exactly that: assertions. Back them up, and you might have an argument. In fact, nitrogenous emissions from diesel engines is a major problem. They are the primary component of smog; you know, that brown stuff that surrounds major cities and highways? And causes many respiratory problems, even for healthy adults? What are the other pollutants that are being ignored? Provide some evidence.

In summary: You obviously missed the very first line of my post, which said IMHO. You're allowed to have an HO also, but you're not allowed to use your HO as an argument against mine. If you feel my HO is wrong, you need to provide evidence that it is wrong, not merely assertions of your HO. If you simply want to assert your own HO, be my guest, but in your own post, not mine, Anonymous Coward.

IMHO, all of the following:

* Repeal of the DMCA
* Nationalization of Volkswagon without compensation to stockholders
* Jail for 10 or more years and massive fines for the C level officers, and all management between the C suite and the implementors of the device
* Jail for 1 or more years for implementors of the device
* Retrofits or buybacks of all affected vehicles without charge (the nationalization makes this somewhat possible. The German government, which implicitly permitted the fraud, will have to cover any excess if necessary, through a wealth tax surcharge).

Nationalization ensures that the innocent workers aren't penalized. The implementors bear some responsibility, but not as much as those who ordered the implementation or should have known about it, hence the difference in penalties. By owning stock in the corporation you are implicit in any of its actions, thus the erasing of all equity.

Yes, exactly. the R squared (variance explained) is tiny. So, yeah, the effect is there, but it's unimportant (and, as you point out, skewed by outliers). There's no assessment of normality of the data (it pretty clearly isn't), which also affects the validity of the results. And, finally, when you have a very large sample size, getting a "significant" result is very easy (20,000 data points is a very large sample size, for statistical purposes). Honestly, with 20,000 data points, I could "prove" pretty much any theory I chose about that data.

Many confounding explanations for the small correlation are ignored that might also have eliminated the observed correlation.

FWIW, I have a PhD, I do this stuff for a living. I got a "significant" result for one of my theories that had an R-squared of 7%. While I of course reported the significance, I also pointed out that it was of no real consequence, and probably due to sample size rather than a real relationship. Especially with the problems of Popper-style hypothesis testing, one should be very careful about what one reports as "real" connections.

I'll second this one. I'm a doctoral student, and have been using it to handle my research. A nice, simple firefox-based interface. It'll snarf references right off pages from search engines. You can attach things, including links to or copies of pdfs to those references, summaries, etc. You can apply keyword tags to citations, and you can organize the citations into a nice directory tree.

To get them out, there's a sweet interface available for open office. I think it's also available for Word, but I use M$ as little as possible.

The only real downsides are copying between computers and citation formats.

Copying is actually easier than it is with the other reference managers I've tried (yeah, I'm talking about you, refworks (bleaargh!) and end note (urrrp!)). You may have to do it more than you would with others, but it's easy to do when you need to. You can export some or all your references to a file, sneakernet the file to the new computer, import it into zotero, and you're done.

There are a lot of citation formats currently available, they just don't happen to be the ones I need. However, there's one close, and the system is designed to be extensible; it's not *that* hard to add your own styles. As soon as I get a round tuit I'll be adding styles for the journals I'll be submitting to, and contribute those back to the project.

Like I said, really sweet, and free.