Posted on 12/09/2014 6:40:15 PM PST by Kartographer
Ha! My first thought exactly!
"Will Mr. Hari Seldon please proceed to the white courtesy phones? Foundation calling."
They're only as good as the programmer and operator combined. Crap programs won't do a good operator any good, and a crap operator can screw up the best of programs. I fall under the operator category, not programmer. Most days I'm pretty good, but there are some days where I have to just check the ID-10-T box and be done with it.
“Armstrong did get charged with a crime and jailed.”
He refused to hand over his records and programs. He was charged falsely as a justification to jail him. Those charges were dropped.
He has written extensively about it on his blog, showing copies of court records, correspondence, etc.
He refused to give in. I admire him for that.
A Judge in his Courtroom is as close as a human can get to be God on the Earth.
You know what is funny thing about FR? Post something from Wiki to prove you are right and you get scorned, post something from Wiki to prove the OP is wrong and you have Trupmted all. Odd how that works. ;-)
I never use Wiki as the PRIMARY source.
The joy of Wiki is they list the origins of a quote at the bottom of the page - that’s where you go to find the paydirt.
I started my article on the 2011 UK Riots based on my initial Wiki search, and follow my nose from there.
Apparently you’re not particularly familiar with the capabilities of “1980s computers”.
“You know what is funny thing about FR? Post something from Wiki to prove you are right and you get scorned, post something from Wiki to prove the OP is wrong and you have Trupmted all. Odd how that works. ;-)”
I like Wiki. It has short-comings, but every source does.
In this case, factually, he was charged. I added more to the story without criticizing Wiki.
Oh I certainly am. One capability they did not have was scanning with optical character recognition. So, how exactly do you suppose he was able to get “thousands of years” of ancient records (if any even existed that would meet the description, which is doubtful) into a database?
Did he hire an army of data entry techs that were fluent in latin? Use some friggin’ common sense.
I claim no expertise of any kind where computers are concerned, or cell phones. I’m surprised I do as well as I do, and that’s due to prayer...lol
Kondratieff Waves:
Sir William Herschel found a correlation between sunspot activity and the price of grain, and he didn’t have any computers at all.
So what? Did he claim to use a computer model to do it? Based on thousands of years of data that probably doesn’t actually exist, and if it does, certainly not in a form easily accessible to a computer model?
It the answer is no, then I don’t see how the comparison is relevant. My issue is not with people who might find some connection in a dataset, it’s with people claiming to have a dataset that is improbable, if not impossible to have existed at the time.
I worked on coding some stock market analysis software a few years ago, and there is still only about 15-20 years of stock prices, at best, available for most companies in the public databases. If you want to get more historical data than that, just for one single set of very common economic data, you would have to go to the library, pull the records yourself, and manually key them into a database. Or pay someone else to do that, or pay someone who has done that already for access to their proprietary data.
Now that is post-internet age, after we have been digitizing records like that for some time already. In the 80s, that was not going on, so it would probably have all had to be done manually. From what records? Even where you might find some historic data from before the 20th century, it would be spotty, of dubious accuracy, and inconsistent from time to time and place to place. The idea that you are going to have any consistent dataset to build a model on with that long a time period is just laughable.
“Have you heard of this little thing called the Roman Empire? It was going strong two thousand years ago.”
Yep, I’ve heard of it. The thing is while we know a lot about the Roman Empire, I don’t think our knowledge amounts to “economic, political and financial data.”
Whatever spreadsheets the Romans used, I doubt the data can be imported into Excel. :-)
That’s why I posted the references for the wiki article in post #38.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3235572/posts?page=38#38
My argument is with Mac Slavo’s writing; the way he wrote it was different than what happened.
The statement below by Slavo sounds like the cops just went and carted him off.
Slavo said
” He had not be charged with any crime. He was never given a trial. They simply arrested him,seized his life’s work,and threw away the key.”
Reference #6 says otherwise:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/18/business/republic-new-york-pleads-guilty-to-securities-fraud.html
He WAS charged with fraud, he DID go to court -where he refused to hand over his stuff- ( otherwise how could he be held in contempt in the first place?) THEN was put in jail for the contempt, and DID plead guilty to the fraud.
Slavo does that - it drives traffic to the blog.
That’s how it is with the prepper blogs: follow the money.
Kartographer wrote:
“A Judge in his Courtroom is as close as a human can get to be God on the Earth.”
That accounts for why the guy got stuck in jail for not turning over his stuff .
One party to the argument thinks he’s a god, and the other party is stubborn and won’t hand over his research.
Old Sarge wrote:
“Slavo does that - it drives traffic to the blog.
That’s how it is with the prepper blogs: follow the money.”
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
OldSarge, you nailed it; Mac leaves stuff out to make the story ‘juicy’ & get people to go to his site.
Dno't even get me started about Captain Chemtrail...
LOL that was a good chuckle to start the day.
Some ancient alien theorists believe the Roman Empire fell because of a latent computer virus that infected all their hard drives at once, on the eve of the first barbarian invasion. Aliens? You decide.
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