Excuse it? No, but they would do it anyway if it was feasible.

People blithely unaware they're acting much the same as those who opposed civil rights laws in the first place.

Yes, except for the fact that they aren't lynching niggers.

I can see where you're coming from, but I read it as comparing the early universe to molasses, not the effect of the Higgs field as such. Soupy and homogeneous (mostly).

He's saying that the global average temperature has gone up and down in the past, without industrial levels of CO2 production, so that the correlation between temperature change and CO2 emissions is low.

And it is a valid point, so far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. Bayesian statistics are more informative than mere frequentist correlations.

Obviously, you don't get it. Global warming means that the average global temperature is rising. But consider, if the temperatures remain exactly the same over land, and the temperatures over the poles rise, then that is enough to bring up the average global temperature.

And for the purposes of this discussion, it is a law of physics that the coolest parts of an object will warm up most quickly.

So the proof of global warming is that the average global temperature is rising. A measurable and verifiable fact.

And that is having consequences on our weather. That is a separate issue, which does not constitute proof or evidence of any kind. It is a consequence.

Maybe I'm confusing my history, but I thought Java was basically pre-Linux. Let alone pre-Linux-goes-big-on-the-server-market.

So it makes sense that somebody would want to make an environment that abstracts the machine away and works reliably on every machine. That was the whole point of POSIX, though it didn't go far enough to satisfy everybody. And it makes sense that savvy consumers would want that too, for a variety of reasons: Large market for developers, easy deployment, sunk cost fallacy, less vendor lock-in, etc.

Sports contribute in the same way movies, music, games, and comedy do. They provide entertainment.

Statistically, five meters really isn't much different from ten meters, or twenty meters, or even thirty meters. It's only when you get to about 80 meters or so that we see a statistically-significant deviation from the standard probability distributions.

And you know this because you have the distribution of thicknesses and computed the standard deviation. Right?

Otherwise, you just pulled 80m out of your ass. That must have hurt.

Yes, there's a demand. But the economy of music has apparently reached its saturation point. That is, demand is no longer growing faster than attrition. It will take long-term demographic shifts for growth. There is no room for new players and current players are scaling back their operations to the "essentials" for the business.

Pandora will be fine. Spotify will be fine. But they won't grow or make anybody rich anymore.

International law 101:

It is a sovereign's privilege to not obey other sovereign's laws. That, in effect, is what makes a sovereign a sovereign. If the other sovereign's object, they have to stop the offender.

In this case, that means stopping the intrusions through security or force. Good luck with that.

Correlation + proposed mechanism = scientific theory.

Did you know that a gallon of gasoline is capable of replacing 55 hours of manual labor?

How do you think America managed to make its economic productivity boom? By expanding its constraint horizon with oil.

That's all well and good, but I have a serious problem with people who waste gasoline on things like cars. 55 hours of toil or 20 miles.

There is no physical reason why intelligent life could not expand through space very fast on cosmological timescales, if it wanted to.

Except, you know, the speed of light. And the limits of biology and ecology. And the fact that space is three dimensional on the scales we're talking about (which means that they intelligent species would have to populate at a rate proportional to the distance from the home world cubed in order to meaningfully "populate" the new worlds.

That's nice and all, but... use Bayes theorem. If you get statistically significant results, let us know.

That is, the summary statistics are incomplete for the kind of inference you want to draw.

In particular, the summary statistics you give tell us that having the genetic marker makes a smoker twice as likely to experience psychosis as a smoker who does not have the marker. It does not tell us how much more or less likely psychosis is compared to a non-smoker.

Critical thinking failure.

Like Ayn Rand, right?