Dook had either done or not done something
A semantic anomality sparked by the iPhone: how do you estimate the probability that Duke is to be blamed for blaming iPhone for wireless network break downs.
My confidence with Duke’s networking department has never been very high. The last campus-wide network meltdown was blamed on a squirle getting inside a router or something like that. The timing is particularly bad this time, amidst the worldwide woos and ahhs of the iPhone. Duke initially blamed iPhone for flooding the campus wireless network with illegal requests. But Duke now says Cisco, not iPhone, caused Wi-Fi snafu.
The author of the above piece couldn’t resist citing the following online comments — admittedly from an x-UNC:
I knew all along that the percentile was like 99.99999999999988998 that Dook had either done or not done something.
This was not meant to be a tautology, I believe. S/he must have meant that Duke either did something stupid or failed to do something smart. But the way they were juxpodised sure sounds like the probablistic estimate couldn’t have been anthing other than 1.
On the other hand, though, I also doubt the probabilistic estimate from someone who thinks "p" stands for "percentile".