Rebecca wrote:
> Twisted One wrote:
>>Besides, how can you possibly claim that? The newsgroup has a
>>potential audience in the hundreds of millions. You have no way of
>>knowing for sure how many of those people may or may not have read
>>that post without "getting it".
>
> I polled them.
You should know that Internet polls are inherently unreliable and
unscientific. That is to say, they prove absolutely nothing. Nada. Zip.
Zero. Zilch. Responders are self-selecting -- there's bias source #1.
Anyone might lie. There's source #2. Unless a lot of hashing and strong
crypto is used, errors will creep in from network unreliability,
Microsoft software, and other sources. This won't produce a systematic
bias, but it will make any results approximate, this destroying any
usefulness for making absolute claims rather than "approximately half of
our respondents chose Pepto-Bismol over the other leading brand" or
whatever. So "Everybody except <name> believes X" and the like are right
out. Also, without good crypto, anyone can stuff the ballot box, alter
someone else's vote, or otherwise corrupt the process, which is bias
source #3. There are probably more bias sources I'm missing, too. :)
--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 19:28:33 CDT
