Not at all, I've gone to great lengths not to say it's impossible, but I am emphasising that the scenario you're pushing for involves the probability that a virus of previously unseen sequence is collected by the lab multiplied by the probability that said virus then escapes unmodified from a level three containment facility multiplied by the probability that said escape leaves no traceable footprint to link back to the lab. On the other hand we have the probability that the virus was seeded into Wuhan via the same bat/animal transmission event that has occurred literally tens of thousands of times before - SARS 1 being just one example.

On the other hand we have the the human propensity to look for patterns and causes in events and find them even where none exists,

Plug these data points into even the most cursory of rational (baynsian) analysis and we're going to need a lot more solid evidence on the lab escape side before the probability reaches anything worth considering likely.

Jumping up and down and shouting 'false dichotomy' really doesn't bring anything to the table. Indeed we've already incorporated your 'false dichotomy' into the equation. To emphasise I am not saying a lab escape is impossible, simply that with current priors I see no reason to believe that the probability of it lies with the range of anything that was likely to be the cause.

No one is saying that's not 'possible', but if you consider your priors properly it's obvious that exceptionally strong evidence is required to support the lab escape theory, and that's just not forthcoming. The genome shows no sign of genetic manipulation, there's no other signs of unusual adaption, and there's no convincing epidemiological pattern - in short nothing that shifts the probabilities anywhere near to the degree required to overturn the assumption that what we've seen is *exactly* the same species jumping event we're seen thousands of times in recorded history.

The more mundane explanation, that some peasant within a few hundred miles radius picked up the virus somewhere either from a bat or via some intermediate species infected by a bat from where it made its way to the nearest crowded city where it then seeded a cluster in *exactly the same way that has happened thousands of times before throughout human history* has an overwhelmingly higher probability of being true.

Viruses have been jumping from other species into humans for as long as there has been humans, taking a notch up with agriculture a few millennia ago and again more recently with increased populations encroaching on habitats. It's happened millions of times in the lifespan of our species - many, many thousands of times in recorded history - and will continue to happen.

It is of course theoretically possible that this was a lab escape, but an extraordinary level of proof is required overturn an assumption that this is just another natural transmission event in a very, very, long line of natural transmission events in a area of the world where many such events have occurred before. I see absolutely nothing in the least that indicates that this is anything otherwise - indeed the genetics indicate the reverse. The origin of SARS-1 has still not been tied down to an exact transmission chain, but no-one is suggesting that has a lab origin, indeed the only real difference between SARS-1 and SARS-2 is that the lower transmission efficiency of SARS-1 gave a greater opportunity to trace the animal source. We know, because we've seen it many times now, that a SARS-2 positive individual can carry the virus a great distance and for considerable time before seeding a cluster.

I do however see an awful lot of evidence that points to the irrationalist human tendency to look for a cause and something to blame. The probability that the lab theory of origin is derives from human psychology over the true sequence of events is simply overwhelming to the point of being vanishingly different from 1.0

That's purely your opinion, or rather the opnion the Western media has told you to have because they're covering up their incompetence. Actual evidence?

I really don't see the difference here, the argument that China is being substantially different to the west seems to me a rather odd combination of Special Pleading ('because we wouldn't do that and they would') and Circular Reasoning.

Do I think the Chinese numbers have uncertainties? Sure. Do I think they are dramatically off and China lied substantially? No. And that's because the epidemiology of the virus in China as reported by them largely matches up with the epidemiology in Korea and Taiwan, neither of which have any great love for China.

The plain fact is the West has largely screwed their response up and they're now casting around for scapegoats - and China and the WHO are the obvious ones to call. There's a really rather nasty streak of Orientalism coming to the fore here

here in the UK we've only been counting deaths outside hospitals over the past few days when Journalists raised questions, before that it was swept under the carpet. Similarly numerous other western countries, including the USA

So it's more than a tad hypocritical to make out this is some great Chinese cover-up.

I swapped my search engine to Bing after the James Damore affair on all my devices and actually I now quite strongly prefer it because..
1. There's far less advertising. It's not uncommon for a Google search result for something sellable to have over half a page of placed ads at the top. There's far less on Bing
2. The image search results are just plain better
3. Bing results for anything political/social are just far less weird
4. And actual search results are at least as good as Google
5. And Microsoft rewards are nice, sure the $30 a year I get back in gift vouches aren't going to change the world, but it's a nice wee bonus.

Now sure Google and Microsoft are both big digital, but Microsoft seem far less evil nowadays.

You know, I remember writing test plans to to test input that were one below, at, and one above, some arbitrary limit when I was a trainee programmer coding up COBOL on mainframes back in the mid 80s.

How on earth does this drivel make it onto Slashdot? This is 30 year old news at least (which makes it straight out of the 17th C in internet years)

Like you can't get a perfectly usable VPS in Russia, Hong Kong, The Netherlands or lots of other places for around €10 a month or less

It could be true that your average Jock is progressively loosing the ability for sustained concentration (did they ever have it, really?) but I see no shortage of talented young coders writing complex code. You can't do that if you can't do sustained concentration.

Maybe we're going to end up with more of an intellectual elite again compared to the masses - which would not be desirable of course, but I don't think we're going to loose that ability from the population, per se

Yes, that's exactly my setup, a pair of identical graphics cards... on a twin PCIe motherboard. It's just really frustrating, I'd love to dump windows but linux seems so far behind on this (and you wouldn't have thought 3+ monitors was that unusual among geeks)

Anyone know if this... or any other debian distro... can support 4 monitors? I run Ubuntu on most of my machines, but my main desktop has a motherboard with dual graphics cards and four (large) monitors. I'm running windows 7 which allows me a nice continuous desktop with all the eye candy, but I'd like to move to a debian based distro (I'm agnostic over what UI I use) but when I tried this 6 months ago with Ubuntu 12.04 and the corresponding Kubuntu/MiNT variants none would support 4 monitors without sever limitations.

Sure you can pay Tata $10,000 - you just end up with poor bug-ridden code thrown together with the minimal amount of rigor to meet whatever specification you sent. Even if your offshore coders speak the same language they don't understand your culture and what you get isn't what you want.

I've been a developer for nearly 30 years, 10 years ago I was getting a little worried about the offshore developers - not anymore, I make quite a nice living charging people European rates to redevelop systems properly they've tried to get done for next to nothing offshore.

Of course there are some success stories, but generally any potential client who thinks off-shoring development is a good idea is not one you want as a client.

Completely true. The French had been spoiling for a fight since 1870 when they lost Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians. Famously there was (is?) a bridge somewhere in Paris with a human representation of all the Departments on and after 1870 these two were shrouded in black as a permanent reminder. It manifested in other ways too - part of the reason the whole Dreyfus affair was such a mess was because the Army was understood to have a sacred duty one day to get the two provinces back, and as such were above criticism for large groups of the population - which failed spectacularly when they fitted Dreyfus up (many of the people who were in the guilty camp knew he wasn't or chose to believe he was because supporting the mystical place of the army was more important than one Jew being incorrectly accused).

While it is true that tensions had been higher between France and Germany a few years earlier and actually were decreasing in 1914 until Ferdinand was shot, the situation was unstable and inevitably was going to blow up sooner or later. To unravel this particular knot you'd need to go back to 1870 and either give France a better leader somehow (and arms, Prussian Krupps artillery did for France in 1870) or better still just assassinate Bismark. Personally I'd do this in 1864 or 5 and head off the Austria-Prussian conflict of 1866. If unification of Germany was delayed for a few years, or even better occurred under Austrian (or Bavarian) and not Prussian leadership then the whole inevitable toxic clockwork of 1870, 1914 and 1945 would have developed along completely different lines.

Actually that's not as certain as you might suppose. Just like there is a habitable zone around stars there's probably a habitable zone around the galaxy where there is the correct concentration of heavy elements to create life sustainable planets and life itself. In fact the evidence suggests that the sun formed somewhat nearer the galactic center than us. So it could be that (a) we're not particularly late to the party at all and (b) we've been flung out into a quiet neighborhood. There could well be an advancing galactic civilization, it's just a few thousand light years center-ward of us and it's not reached the backwaters yet.