What needs to happen is that the ballot (Yes, the piece of paper is the ballot, not a receipt, and the memory in the computer is just a fast way of adding it up.) has predefined blank areas on it.
The computer prints OCRable text on there indicating the person voted for.
We don't need damn 'check boxes' or whatever. It is trivially possible to print text that human beings and computers can both read, especially when the selection is so limited and the positioning exactly controlled.
At least, it's possible after we line up all the people trying to sell us blatantly hackable electronic voting systems and have them executed for treason.
You hand them an unprinted ballot, they walk into the booth and stick it in the printer.
Of course, you don't want the place that holds the ballot in the booth either. That needs to be in the center of the room where people can't tamper with it. Likewise, put the shredder there so you can watch people shred their ballots.
But all this discussions focuses on an fundimental falsehood: That it is hard to think of a secure way to do this.
It is not. It is not the least bit hard to come up with an hard-to-tamper system.
Why didn't we start with one? TRAITORS built a system that could be tampered with. It really is that simple.
It's also true that many modern drugs are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer than those too.
Well, yes. Doing nothing is always 'safer' than doing something, if you are willing to exclude the problems you already have from the odds. If these problems are 'tiredness', or whatever herbal suppliments are claiming to heal today, than doing nothing is safer than doing something. (Which, incidentally, is probably what modern medicine would tell you.)
Any given suppliment has its supplier standing behind it. Modern drugs have companies like Merck standing behind them - buyer beware!
The 'supplier' of a drug is only important if you are worried about inpure drugs. It is not the least bit important in the modern world. The important thing now are the trust in people saying it is safe and useful for the medical condition is prescribed for.
Real drugs? Well, there's the drug company/inventor, usually the same people. Don't trust them, they'd sell sugar pills to cure cancer if they thought they could get away with it. There's the FDA. Somewhat trust them, although they've been fooled before. There are doctors. Trust them about 95% of the way.
Alternative medicines? Well, there's 'common knowledge'. Don't trust that at all. (Bloodletting ring a bell?) There's the FDA. Trust them that it will be safe, but they don't test effectiveness for herbal remedies. There's the practicioner, who is not required to know anything about how the human body functions. Don't trust them.
See? I don't trust drug companies, but I mostly trust the FDA to keep them in line, I trust doctors to be working for their patients instead of the drug companies, and I trust the scientific process that medicine follows to correct errors made. Granted, it sucks if the error was made on me, but it sucks if I get rear-ended while driving a Pinto, too, but the fact that problem exists does not stop me from driving my Pontiac Sunbird because a similiar problem might show up.
OTOH, if I were to ever try an alternative medication, I would be sure to do my research, because, frankly, the people selling them are not doctors. Say what you want about the drug companies, but their medications rarely contain out-and-out poisons. And doctors try hard to not prescribe a medication that conflicts with other drugs I am taking, which non-doctors cannot possibly manage, because they don't even know the way a certain thing effects the body. (Sometimes they don't know because there is no explanation, aka, homeopathy.)
Of course, there's no chance that what was identified as the "correct medication", simply wasn't correct, since the medical system is infallible.
I don't know where you got that from. I was simply pointing out that the placebo effect works on the wrong medication as much as it works on sugar pills. (Which is the reason that doctors test using double-blind.)
Ergo, if the real medicine does not work, and a fake does, there are two choices: The patient believes in the fake and not the real, or the real medicine actually caused problems.
My mom gets no effect from standard injections of novocaine. (I can't recall if it's that her nerve is in a weird place, or some chemical thing.) When she was young, the dentist refused to believe this: if she didn't get numb from "real" medicine, than the pain must not be "real". That put her off going to the dentist for several decades. (Her current dentist uses a different compound or a different technique that works.)
Like I said...a lot of pain is imaginary. You can have X amount of pain in some circumstances, and it 'hurts', you can have X*10 amount of pain in other circumstances and not notice, and you can have X/10 amount of pain in yet others and be screaming in agony. Pain is almost completely in people's head, and there are people who 'actually feel' completely psychosomatic pain, it doesn't matter how much much their nerve is dead, they can feel the dentist.
I am very very glad that you are not my physician. Indeed, you've pretty much put into one sentence the reason why more and more people are turning to various alternative and complementary modalities.
I want a doctor who's interest is in "curing" me, not just in causing a known biological effect in my body.
I didn't say the point of doctors or medicine wans't to cure you, I said the point of medicineS wasn't to cure you. Perhaps 'medications' would have been clearer there.
Because, you see, it's flatly impossble to say 'This medication cures X in patient Y' without actually testing it on patient Y who has Y. As, at that point, it's rather too later to start figuring out the exact effect the medication has, doctors do something else instead:
They figure out what causes what ailments. And not just the obvious cause..yes, something may have a viral cause, but why exactly is it messing up the liver, for example.
Then they figure out how to undo or counteract these effects. Sometimes this is easy, aka, they solve a problem by merely killing bacteria. Sometimes this is amazingly complicated, where they cause an effect by causing something in your body to do something, which in turn causes something else, which in turn does something else, and that solves your problem.
And now that they have an effect they want to cause, what do they do? They aren't magicians, they can't cause things to happen in your body. Well, this is where medication comes in. They know that certain substances, in certain, well-defined amounts, will cause certain changes, and they give the substances that cause the changes they wish to happen. (And, of course, sometimes causing effects they do not want to happen.)
That is how medicine works. It does not work as, apparently, 'alternative' medicine things it does, where things 'cure' problems. Biochemical effects fix problems, and these effects are created via medications that have been through quite a lot of testing to find out what they do at the lowest level.
Sometimes, 'alternative medicine' does have problems and known solutions. Sadly, such 'problems' are usually near total gibberish, like balancing 'humours' and fixing 'miasms' in homeopathy.
Or, to put it in a way slashdoters will get, figuring out what causes a sympton=science. Figuring out what biochemical effect a drug has=science. Putting them together=engineering.
This post got kinda long, so I will continue elsewhere.
I don't know why you put 'law of infinitesimals' in quotes like that. It is indeed one of the two founding principles of homeopathy.
It and the 'law of similiars' were formulated at the start by the founder, Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. They form the foundation of 'The Organon of Homeopathic Medicine' and 'Theory of Chronic Diseases', the works that introduced homeopathy to the world.
Anyone claiming to be producing homeopathic medication at 1C is flatly ripping people off. They might be idiots who know nothing about homeopathy, they might be scam artists producing extremely inefficient and dangerous(1) medication , or they might be people producing tradionional herbal remedies and calling them homeopathy.
The entire concept of homeopathy requires that you find a substance that causes the same symptons as the problem, and give it to the patient in an extremely diluted form to cause them to cure the disease. If it is not following that concept, it is not homeopathy.
1) Homeopathy claims the way to fix disaeases by causing the problem of the disease, in extemely small amounts, aka, the law of similiars. If someone is not diluting the mixture enough, than it obviously will cause the problems of the disease in normal amounts.
(Please note that my speaking from the POV of homeopathy in this post does not imply I agree with or believe any of it in the slightest.)
Actually, many herbel remedies are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer.
Plants, in general, are safe, and have no effect on people besides being food, but the point of herbal medicines is that they do have an effect on humans.
For example, willow bark is completely safe, it only has one active ingrediate, and we know, basically, what that does on human beings. Of course, the reason we know that is we put it in a medicine and sold it on shelves for 100 years.
OTOH, Hypericum perforatum, aka, St. John's wort, has a few active ingrediates, and we don't know how or why it apparently works, or even if it does. Because it has a bunch of active parts, it can lead to dry mouth, dizziness, diarrhea, nausea, increased sensitivity to sunlight, and fatigue, which sounds exactly like any pill on TV. And it doesn't have a company standing behind it, so buyer beware.
Thing is, sometimes, on an individual case-by-case basis, a placebo can be better than "real" medicine; the Demerol doesn't work but the sugar pill does.
For that person, in that moment, what is "real" medicine?
If that happens, the Demerol is. Why? Because the point of medicines isn't to 'cure' people, it's to cause a known biological effect. If the sugar pill made things better, than that is what happens with no medicine. If the Demoral made things worse, or kept them the same, than that demonstrates that what the Demoral is trying to treat is not true.
Medicine does not magically make people better. If I were to take anti-coagulants, I could get very ill and possibly die, because I don't frickin need them, and the fact that a sugar pill would not have this problem does not make sugar pills 'real medicine' and anti-coagulents not.
If someone gets better from fake medicine, and not from real, that is not the placebo effect, where you are treating real diseases with placebos. If they were real, they would have been treated with the correct medication.
That is, instead, the 'hypercondriac effect', where placebos cure imaginary diseases, combined with the fact that prescribing the wrong medication does not help people.
And as Demerol is for pain relief, well, a lot of pain is imaginary. Or, at least, you decide to notice it, and you decide not to. (Note I am aware that real, unblockable pain does exist.)
Speaking of pain and treatment, this situation actually exists where giving pain killers can make things worse: Headaches are caused by blood vessels in the head being too large or too small. (Erm, and sinuses expanding, of course.) Caffiene, which many painkiller contain, constricts blood vessels, and hence works perfectly if the cause of your headache is that they are too large, aka, a vascular headache. However, if they are too small, it will make them worse, and in some people caffiene actually causes headaches in normal circumstances.
This is why some people swear by aspirin, in addition to other stuff, makes the blood vessels larger in your brain, and some people swear by Excedrin, which does the opposite. Because people have different types of headaches.
My point is just this: if you're trying to answer the question "What will releive symptoms the best in this population?" systematic evidence is very helpful. If you want to answer the question "What will releive this person's symptoms the best", that one person is by defintion anecdotal.
However, the fact that any random thing can relieve any certain person's symptoms does not, in fact, mean there is a 'rubbing toothpaste on forehead' school of medicine.
I have no problem with people drinking holy water, or magical water left to sit under the full moon while stirred every six and half minutes four times widdershins with a thrice-blessed stirring rod, or whatever, if that cures their problems.
I have problems with people selling it as medicine to other people.
Incidentally, Vitamin K works quite well for treating bruises. Arnica could have that in it, and you might want to try just some vitamin pills and an aspirin.
Or, for a homeopathic remedy, you can just learn over a vitamin pill and an aspirin, and inhale deeply a few times.
Who is 'them'? Injesting a few parts per billion of minerals certain does not give people any particular color.
And I stand by the biological assertation that altering the injestion of trace elements by 0.1% does not have any demonstratable effect on humans, from the nicest vitamin to the nastiest chemical. Not even something like plutonium, which you shouldn't injest in any amount...but injesting 1001 atoms produces identical effects to 1000 atoms.
To accept homeopathy is to accept the 'law of infinitesimals', the idea that the smaller the dose, the better. If medication does not follow that, it is not homeopathy.
If a 10% extract of arnica cures anything, it is not homeopathy. If it was, a 1% solution would be even better, and a.00001% even better.
Is it? Feel free to test.
Just because homeopathy is gibberish doesn't mean it is gibberish to treat bruises with real amounts of arnica, although I've never heard of it. It might not work, but it is an actual substance, in an actual amount, so could indeed have an effect. It's just a standard herbal remedy.
And it has nothing to do with how you stir it, or how much water you put in it. Just because it labels itself as homeopathy doesn't mean it's following the stupid-ass law of infinitesimals. According to homeopathy, it shouldn't work at all, and the fact it does is a point against homeopathy. (In fact, if you try to buy it online, you will run into 10% solutions everywhere, and some of them call it 'homeopathy' and some don't.)
A 10% solution of something isn't homeopathy any more than a saline solution with a 1% morphine drip is homeopathy. Just because some people go 'Hey, our herbs are diluted, let's call it homeopathic' is about as iffy as calling them 'medicine' in the first place. It's not 'real' homopathy. Real homeopathy dilutes things to make them more powerful.
Homeopathy, has, as its basis, two rules: the "law of similars" and the "law of infinitesimals". The law of similars is a completely goofy way of matching medicine to diseases and people, but that's rather moot as long as the law of infinitesimals exists, which, like I said, requires the assertation that the less medication someone gets, the better it is, which has resulted in several assertations that are in violation of physics, and the ones that aren't still can't be medically active.
While some of them are not divided more than Avogadro, thus, by probability, producing a few molecules of the substance in the water, this is meaningless.
Why?
Because all water has, before it starts, many more molecules of other stuff.
And hence the fact that, statistically, you have 5000 atoms of X, you also got 10,000,000 of all sorts of stuff. Poisons, additives, all sorts of crap.
Including 1,000,000 of the stuff you started with.
You heard that right. My tap water has more, for example, arsenic already in it than homeopathy will ever add to it. More arsenic floats in my nose and enters my bloodstream every day via the muscus membranes there every day than any homeopathic remedy.
Have you ever heard of 'parts per million'? You'd be amazing at the crap that's around in tiny amounts. Adding a few parts per billion does nothing, not even if you stir it with a special spoon in the special direction under the special light, or whatever hocus-pocus homeopathics are using.
And you wouldn't believe the amount of the cup you drink every time you take a sip. Plastic, glass, ceramic, metal, whatever, you're drinking it.
It is, at best, literally equivilent to handing someone a grain of salt and saying 'Put this in a glass of water and you'll get better'. If that would make you better, you'd be better already, because there is more than that much salt in the 'purest' water. (And, of course, many times there is actually no salt handed out at all.)
The argument that 'some still exist' is like refuting the claim that 'you can't blow a candle out a mile away' by the fact that, statistically, you will hit it with a few air particles. Well, yeah...but it gets hit with more than that by itself.
It is not medicine. It is a magic spell. As also evidenced by the fact that only 'believers' can make it.
You don't need to 'prove' homeopathy works to the same level as other placebos. You could, but I don't see anyone running around asserting it doesn't.
Placebos work. Telling someone you are giving them some medicine to make them better can make people better, even if the medicine is fictional, and even if the disease is real. This is medical fact that has been known for decades, it is not disputable. Why it happens is unknown, but it happens.
Ergo, homeopathy, even if it works in an identical way to normal water (Which I say it does.), should logically work as a placebo.
Well, hilariously, you could do the test on me, and if you were to tell me something was a homeopathic treatment, it might not work, as I think homeopathy is a load of crap, but if you tell me it's a real medicine it would work. So in my case, homeopathy doesn't work as well as a 'medical' placebo. OTOH, there are people who it would be exact opposite, and people who placebos work better for if they are given a fake medical name, or the phrase 'free radicals' are in there somewhere, etc...
Please go away until you actually learn to form coherent sentences.
However, this 'And there has to be special circumstances', is exactly the kind of crap psychics got away with for fifty years 100 years ago.
If homeopathy works, it is a medicine. Medicines have demonstratable effects on illnesses and the body. If a homeopathic medicine made from X has an effect on condition Y, it should repeatably have that effect.
And, more to the point, there is no way to do a double-blind test when homeopathy 'doctors' refuse to accept others can do exactly what they are doing and end up with the same 'medicine', so patients can either be given that medicine or given water, and watched.
Or, hell, just make a big batch of it and hand it over to a hospital for the study.
And the reason they act like this is because they know that if that were to happen, it would be demonstrated that giving people pure water and telling them it's a homeopathic remedy produces exactly the same effect as giving them the homeopathic remedy.
Which isn't the least bit surprising, because homeopathic remedies are pure water. But, hey, there are places willing to do the studies, and in fact have done the studies.
And, no, the study in the article doesn't prove anything. A single study with a weird result isn't proof of anything. There have been 'guess which way the coin flip will go' studies where a person got 65% of them right, but that doesn't prove anything, because other studies have been unable to replicate them.
Of course, now that a study has gone their way, they'll be even less likely to help with research that will prove homeopathy to be a big bag of crap.
People underestimate 'sheer bloody mindedness'. That alone has kept certain people alive for a decade.
Seriously. How many people knew an old couple where the husband was really sick, and literally holding onto life as long as the wife survived, and when the wife died, that guy pretty much said 'To hell with it' and just...died? It happened to my great-grandparents.
Pretending there is no mental aspect to health is silly, and pretending that homopathic medicine is anything but that is silly.
As for 'prayer'...we still don't have any evidence that prayer works if the patient doesn't know about it, so it's basically the placebo effect, too. (There have actually been studies of this sort done, where churchs prayed for randomly selected individuals from elsewhere, or not, but the results have been inconclusive.)
Both you are wrong. Homepathic medicine is a placebo, and hence it works exactly as much as other placebos. (Which is why it gives inconsistent results in double-blind tests where it's compared to other placebos. It's comparing water to water.)
However, it doesn't just 'appear' to work, it does work for the simple matter that placebos do work.
This is a known medical fact, despite the fact it makes no sense. Placebos work better than doing nothing quite often, ergo, homopathy works better than doing nothing quite often.
Of course, it's idiotic to spend that money when you can just, I dunno, pray or something.
Linux doesn't have autorun. Neither does MacOS X, incidentally. This is because autorun is the most fucking insecure feature that has ever been invented.
So this is how this would have worked on Linux, assuming they bothered to support it:
People would have put the CD in. Presumably, it has some random defect that keeps it from playing straight on a computer CD-ROM, so it would have failed to play.
So users would have browsed to it, and seen something to run. Well, some would. The rest would roll their eyes and pull out their ripper app which can handle bad CDs and just encoded the thing.(1)
They'd click on it and run it.
Now, there are only two ways I can think of installing software that would screw up ripping a CD. Either a preloaded library that sites in front of libc and stops the various access to the device, or a kernel module.
Now, the preloaded library could be installed for the single user with no one the wiser, via a varible in.bashrc. Sadly, most low-level error-correcting CD ripper apps require root access anyway, so that idea would be completely pointless. Preloaded library variables go away when you sudo, that was hammered down a long time ago.(2)
So it would require root access. Unlike Windows, people do not normally run Linux as root. In fact, both Gnome and KDE will complain when you start browsing the filesystem as root, so you'd notice a problem when you went to run the install program from the CD.
So, you'd have to type in the root password, at which point it would install a kernel module, and set that module to load on startup.
Of course, there are ways to secure something like that from happening, but these are not enable under normal Linux.
1) In fact, a lot of people would not even notice any copy protection. There are CD apps for Linux that wouldn't bat an eye...if the CD can be played in a CD player, the apps will follow the same rules and play it. The whole 'corrupt CD as copy protection' is getting rather old, and the fact that companies failed to provide any way in Linux to play them means quite a few Linux apps are smart enough to screw around until they find the music.
2) Heh. It could, as you, let you rip, and then keep track of what files named.mp3 were created while the known ripper process was running and not let you access them, I guess. But making that transparent and foolproof would be extremely hard to do.
I am 90% sure this is why you can find about five Indigo Girls CDs in any library music collection.
Seriously. I've checked five library in Georgia. They have about 50 CDs each. At least four of these, at every library, are Indigo Girls. One had seven! It had two copies of two of them!
Really, this is not a joke or an exaggeration. I don't know if this is some local thing, if there's some crazy Indigo Girl fan running around seeding libraries here, but I suspect it's part of some settlement or another.
Why would it not be well-received after that? I mean, obviously, the prison must have hated it for making them look like compete idiots. Someone showed them a hole, and they didn't bother to fix it, resulting in an escape.
That's park bench thing is an old gag. A painter named Hugh Troy did it in New York back in the 30s sometime, in Central Park of all places.
He actually kept letting himself get arrested, and charged, and taken to court, and then producing the bill of sales, greatly pissing off the judges, who would then invent something to fine him for. When the police started ignoring him, he too had random people leap into action and start moving real park benches around, although not for any purpose.
Meanwhile, other people, intent on securing their place in history, apparently actually started stealing the things, realizing that they would be mistaken for him.
Net result? Troy was banned from Central Park, and they still arrest people who move park benches around.
His most famous prank, however, is the 'a rhinoceros fell through ice into the lake' prank. He punched a hole in the ice over a lake, used a rhinoceros foot wastebasket through Cornell University's campus, and managed to convince people one had fallen in. They actually dredged the bottom of the lake to find it, because that was the water supply and no one wanted to drink rhinoceros.
Why'd they believe that absurd story? Well, a rhinoceros had escaped from a zoo a few days earlier. Or, at least, that's what the newspaper article Troy had planted said...
While the story is lame, I feel compelled to point out two things:
First of all, it didn't say anything about anyone being supersonic.
Second, I went to a school that regularly had flights over it at less than 1000 feet...Southern Polytechnic State University, in Georgia. It right next to Dobbins Air Force base and Lockheed-Martin. Sometimes they couldn't have been more than 300 feet up.
And that's just a reserve base. If you were next to an actual base you'd see a lot more. We saw like one group a week, and this was pre-9/11.
See here. That's the school in top middle bordered by the lower half of the 120 loop, 280, and what is inexplicably called '3' instead of '41', and Lockheed right under it to the left, and the air force base is obvious. (Actually, SPSU is only half the top middle, the lower end of that, where 41 and 280 meet, is Life University, assuming it is still in business.)
Saying 'No, the military doesn't do that' is just wrong. And, no, they weren't all landing or taking off...we once watched an apparently circling jet for two hours, although we could only watch it as it flew overhead in the same direction at regular intervals of about eight minutes, so were just guessing it was the same one in a loop. And, yes, it appeared to be less than 1000 feet up.
Of course, this is all the Air Force, not the Navy, and actually the Air Force Reserve, but I can't imagine the rules would be that different.
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What needs to happen is that the ballot (Yes, the piece of paper is the ballot, not a receipt, and the memory in the computer is just a fast way of adding it up.) has predefined blank areas on it.
The computer prints OCRable text on there indicating the person voted for.
We don't need damn 'check boxes' or whatever. It is trivially possible to print text that human beings and computers can both read, especially when the selection is so limited and the positioning exactly controlled.
At least, it's possible after we line up all the people trying to sell us blatantly hackable electronic voting systems and have them executed for treason.
Traitors is exactly the right word for people attempting to corrupt the vote taking and counting process.
You hand them an unprinted ballot, they walk into the booth and stick it in the printer.
Of course, you don't want the place that holds the ballot in the booth either. That needs to be in the center of the room where people can't tamper with it. Likewise, put the shredder there so you can watch people shred their ballots.
But all this discussions focuses on an fundimental falsehood: That it is hard to think of a secure way to do this.
It is not. It is not the least bit hard to come up with an hard-to-tamper system.
Why didn't we start with one? TRAITORS built a system that could be tampered with. It really is that simple.
Well, yes. Doing nothing is always 'safer' than doing something, if you are willing to exclude the problems you already have from the odds. If these problems are 'tiredness', or whatever herbal suppliments are claiming to heal today, than doing nothing is safer than doing something. (Which, incidentally, is probably what modern medicine would tell you.)
Any given suppliment has its supplier standing behind it. Modern drugs have companies like Merck standing behind them - buyer beware!
The 'supplier' of a drug is only important if you are worried about inpure drugs. It is not the least bit important in the modern world. The important thing now are the trust in people saying it is safe and useful for the medical condition is prescribed for.
Real drugs? Well, there's the drug company/inventor, usually the same people. Don't trust them, they'd sell sugar pills to cure cancer if they thought they could get away with it. There's the FDA. Somewhat trust them, although they've been fooled before. There are doctors. Trust them about 95% of the way.
Alternative medicines? Well, there's 'common knowledge'. Don't trust that at all. (Bloodletting ring a bell?) There's the FDA. Trust them that it will be safe, but they don't test effectiveness for herbal remedies. There's the practicioner, who is not required to know anything about how the human body functions. Don't trust them.
See? I don't trust drug companies, but I mostly trust the FDA to keep them in line, I trust doctors to be working for their patients instead of the drug companies, and I trust the scientific process that medicine follows to correct errors made. Granted, it sucks if the error was made on me, but it sucks if I get rear-ended while driving a Pinto, too, but the fact that problem exists does not stop me from driving my Pontiac Sunbird because a similiar problem might show up.
OTOH, if I were to ever try an alternative medication, I would be sure to do my research, because, frankly, the people selling them are not doctors. Say what you want about the drug companies, but their medications rarely contain out-and-out poisons. And doctors try hard to not prescribe a medication that conflicts with other drugs I am taking, which non-doctors cannot possibly manage, because they don't even know the way a certain thing effects the body. (Sometimes they don't know because there is no explanation, aka, homeopathy.)
Of course, there's no chance that what was identified as the "correct medication", simply wasn't correct, since the medical system is infallible.
I don't know where you got that from. I was simply pointing out that the placebo effect works on the wrong medication as much as it works on sugar pills. (Which is the reason that doctors test using double-blind.)
Ergo, if the real medicine does not work, and a fake does, there are two choices: The patient believes in the fake and not the real, or the real medicine actually caused problems.
My mom gets no effect from standard injections of novocaine. (I can't recall if it's that her nerve is in a weird place, or some chemical thing.) When she was young, the dentist refused to believe this: if she didn't get numb from "real" medicine, than the pain must not be "real". That put her off going to the dentist for several decades. (Her current dentist uses a different compound or a different technique that works.)
Like I said...a lot of pain is imaginary. You can have X amount of pain in some circumstances, and it 'hurts', you can have X*10 amount of pain in other circumstances and not notice, and you can have X/10 amount of pain in yet others and be screaming in agony. Pain is almost completely in people's head, and there are people who 'actually feel' completely psychosomatic pain, it doesn't matter how much much their nerve is dead, they can feel the dentist.
I want a doctor who's interest is in "curing" me, not just in causing a known biological effect in my body.
I didn't say the point of doctors or medicine wans't to cure you, I said the point of medicineS wasn't to cure you. Perhaps 'medications' would have been clearer there.
Because, you see, it's flatly impossble to say 'This medication cures X in patient Y' without actually testing it on patient Y who has Y. As, at that point, it's rather too later to start figuring out the exact effect the medication has, doctors do something else instead:
They figure out what causes what ailments. And not just the obvious cause..yes, something may have a viral cause, but why exactly is it messing up the liver, for example.
Then they figure out how to undo or counteract these effects. Sometimes this is easy, aka, they solve a problem by merely killing bacteria. Sometimes this is amazingly complicated, where they cause an effect by causing something in your body to do something, which in turn causes something else, which in turn does something else, and that solves your problem.
And now that they have an effect they want to cause, what do they do? They aren't magicians, they can't cause things to happen in your body. Well, this is where medication comes in. They know that certain substances, in certain, well-defined amounts, will cause certain changes, and they give the substances that cause the changes they wish to happen. (And, of course, sometimes causing effects they do not want to happen.)
That is how medicine works. It does not work as, apparently, 'alternative' medicine things it does, where things 'cure' problems. Biochemical effects fix problems, and these effects are created via medications that have been through quite a lot of testing to find out what they do at the lowest level.
Sometimes, 'alternative medicine' does have problems and known solutions. Sadly, such 'problems' are usually near total gibberish, like balancing 'humours' and fixing 'miasms' in homeopathy.
Or, to put it in a way slashdoters will get, figuring out what causes a sympton=science. Figuring out what biochemical effect a drug has=science. Putting them together=engineering.
This post got kinda long, so I will continue elsewhere.
It and the 'law of similiars' were formulated at the start by the founder, Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. They form the foundation of 'The Organon of Homeopathic Medicine' and 'Theory of Chronic Diseases', the works that introduced homeopathy to the world.
Anyone claiming to be producing homeopathic medication at 1C is flatly ripping people off. They might be idiots who know nothing about homeopathy, they might be scam artists producing extremely inefficient and dangerous(1) medication , or they might be people producing tradionional herbal remedies and calling them homeopathy.
The entire concept of homeopathy requires that you find a substance that causes the same symptons as the problem, and give it to the patient in an extremely diluted form to cause them to cure the disease. If it is not following that concept, it is not homeopathy.
1) Homeopathy claims the way to fix disaeases by causing the problem of the disease, in extemely small amounts, aka, the law of similiars. If someone is not diluting the mixture enough, than it obviously will cause the problems of the disease in normal amounts.
(Please note that my speaking from the POV of homeopathy in this post does not imply I agree with or believe any of it in the slightest.)
Actually, many herbel remedies are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer.
Plants, in general, are safe, and have no effect on people besides being food, but the point of herbal medicines is that they do have an effect on humans.
For example, willow bark is completely safe, it only has one active ingrediate, and we know, basically, what that does on human beings. Of course, the reason we know that is we put it in a medicine and sold it on shelves for 100 years.
OTOH, Hypericum perforatum, aka, St. John's wort, has a few active ingrediates, and we don't know how or why it apparently works, or even if it does. Because it has a bunch of active parts, it can lead to dry mouth, dizziness, diarrhea, nausea, increased sensitivity to sunlight, and fatigue, which sounds exactly like any pill on TV. And it doesn't have a company standing behind it, so buyer beware.
Thing is, sometimes, on an individual case-by-case basis, a placebo can be better than "real" medicine; the Demerol doesn't work but the sugar pill does.
For that person, in that moment, what is "real" medicine?
If that happens, the Demerol is. Why? Because the point of medicines isn't to 'cure' people, it's to cause a known biological effect. If the sugar pill made things better, than that is what happens with no medicine. If the Demoral made things worse, or kept them the same, than that demonstrates that what the Demoral is trying to treat is not true.
Medicine does not magically make people better. If I were to take anti-coagulants, I could get very ill and possibly die, because I don't frickin need them, and the fact that a sugar pill would not have this problem does not make sugar pills 'real medicine' and anti-coagulents not.
If someone gets better from fake medicine, and not from real, that is not the placebo effect, where you are treating real diseases with placebos. If they were real, they would have been treated with the correct medication.
That is, instead, the 'hypercondriac effect', where placebos cure imaginary diseases, combined with the fact that prescribing the wrong medication does not help people.
And as Demerol is for pain relief, well, a lot of pain is imaginary. Or, at least, you decide to notice it, and you decide not to. (Note I am aware that real, unblockable pain does exist.)
Speaking of pain and treatment, this situation actually exists where giving pain killers can make things worse: Headaches are caused by blood vessels in the head being too large or too small. (Erm, and sinuses expanding, of course.) Caffiene, which many painkiller contain, constricts blood vessels, and hence works perfectly if the cause of your headache is that they are too large, aka, a vascular headache. However, if they are too small, it will make them worse, and in some people caffiene actually causes headaches in normal circumstances.
This is why some people swear by aspirin, in addition to other stuff, makes the blood vessels larger in your brain, and some people swear by Excedrin, which does the opposite. Because people have different types of headaches.
My point is just this: if you're trying to answer the question "What will releive symptoms the best in this population?" systematic evidence is very helpful. If you want to answer the question "What will releive this person's symptoms the best", that one person is by defintion anecdotal.
However, the fact that any random thing can relieve any certain person's symptoms does not, in fact, mean there is a 'rubbing toothpaste on forehead' school of medicine.
I have no problem with people drinking holy water, or magical water left to sit under the full moon while stirred every six and half minutes four times widdershins with a thrice-blessed stirring rod, or whatever, if that cures their problems.
I have problems with people selling it as medicine to other people.
Or, for a homeopathic remedy, you can just learn over a vitamin pill and an aspirin, and inhale deeply a few times.
And I stand by the biological assertation that altering the injestion of trace elements by 0.1% does not have any demonstratable effect on humans, from the nicest vitamin to the nastiest chemical. Not even something like plutonium, which you shouldn't injest in any amount...but injesting 1001 atoms produces identical effects to 1000 atoms.
If a 10% extract of arnica cures anything, it is not homeopathy. If it was, a 1% solution would be even better, and a .00001% even better.
Is it? Feel free to test.
Just because homeopathy is gibberish doesn't mean it is gibberish to treat bruises with real amounts of arnica, although I've never heard of it. It might not work, but it is an actual substance, in an actual amount, so could indeed have an effect. It's just a standard herbal remedy.
And it has nothing to do with how you stir it, or how much water you put in it. Just because it labels itself as homeopathy doesn't mean it's following the stupid-ass law of infinitesimals. According to homeopathy, it shouldn't work at all, and the fact it does is a point against homeopathy. (In fact, if you try to buy it online, you will run into 10% solutions everywhere, and some of them call it 'homeopathy' and some don't.)
A 10% solution of something isn't homeopathy any more than a saline solution with a 1% morphine drip is homeopathy. Just because some people go 'Hey, our herbs are diluted, let's call it homeopathic' is about as iffy as calling them 'medicine' in the first place. It's not 'real' homopathy. Real homeopathy dilutes things to make them more powerful.
Homeopathy, has, as its basis, two rules: the "law of similars" and the "law of infinitesimals". The law of similars is a completely goofy way of matching medicine to diseases and people, but that's rather moot as long as the law of infinitesimals exists, which, like I said, requires the assertation that the less medication someone gets, the better it is, which has resulted in several assertations that are in violation of physics, and the ones that aren't still can't be medically active.
Why?
Because all water has, before it starts, many more molecules of other stuff.
And hence the fact that, statistically, you have 5000 atoms of X, you also got 10,000,000 of all sorts of stuff. Poisons, additives, all sorts of crap.
Including 1,000,000 of the stuff you started with.
You heard that right. My tap water has more, for example, arsenic already in it than homeopathy will ever add to it. More arsenic floats in my nose and enters my bloodstream every day via the muscus membranes there every day than any homeopathic remedy.
Have you ever heard of 'parts per million'? You'd be amazing at the crap that's around in tiny amounts. Adding a few parts per billion does nothing, not even if you stir it with a special spoon in the special direction under the special light, or whatever hocus-pocus homeopathics are using.
And you wouldn't believe the amount of the cup you drink every time you take a sip. Plastic, glass, ceramic, metal, whatever, you're drinking it.
It is, at best, literally equivilent to handing someone a grain of salt and saying 'Put this in a glass of water and you'll get better'. If that would make you better, you'd be better already, because there is more than that much salt in the 'purest' water. (And, of course, many times there is actually no salt handed out at all.)
The argument that 'some still exist' is like refuting the claim that 'you can't blow a candle out a mile away' by the fact that, statistically, you will hit it with a few air particles. Well, yeah...but it gets hit with more than that by itself.
It is not medicine. It is a magic spell. As also evidenced by the fact that only 'believers' can make it.
Prayer has commitment. You have to do all the god-believing and tithing.
You don't need to 'prove' homeopathy works to the same level as other placebos. You could, but I don't see anyone running around asserting it doesn't.
Placebos work. Telling someone you are giving them some medicine to make them better can make people better, even if the medicine is fictional, and even if the disease is real. This is medical fact that has been known for decades, it is not disputable. Why it happens is unknown, but it happens.
Ergo, homeopathy, even if it works in an identical way to normal water (Which I say it does.), should logically work as a placebo.
Well, hilariously, you could do the test on me, and if you were to tell me something was a homeopathic treatment, it might not work, as I think homeopathy is a load of crap, but if you tell me it's a real medicine it would work. So in my case, homeopathy doesn't work as well as a 'medical' placebo. OTOH, there are people who it would be exact opposite, and people who placebos work better for if they are given a fake medical name, or the phrase 'free radicals' are in there somewhere, etc...
However, this 'And there has to be special circumstances', is exactly the kind of crap psychics got away with for fifty years 100 years ago.
If homeopathy works, it is a medicine. Medicines have demonstratable effects on illnesses and the body. If a homeopathic medicine made from X has an effect on condition Y, it should repeatably have that effect.
And, more to the point, there is no way to do a double-blind test when homeopathy 'doctors' refuse to accept others can do exactly what they are doing and end up with the same 'medicine', so patients can either be given that medicine or given water, and watched.
Or, hell, just make a big batch of it and hand it over to a hospital for the study.
And the reason they act like this is because they know that if that were to happen, it would be demonstrated that giving people pure water and telling them it's a homeopathic remedy produces exactly the same effect as giving them the homeopathic remedy.
Which isn't the least bit surprising, because homeopathic remedies are pure water. But, hey, there are places willing to do the studies, and in fact have done the studies.
And, no, the study in the article doesn't prove anything. A single study with a weird result isn't proof of anything. There have been 'guess which way the coin flip will go' studies where a person got 65% of them right, but that doesn't prove anything, because other studies have been unable to replicate them.
Of course, now that a study has gone their way, they'll be even less likely to help with research that will prove homeopathy to be a big bag of crap.
Seriously. How many people knew an old couple where the husband was really sick, and literally holding onto life as long as the wife survived, and when the wife died, that guy pretty much said 'To hell with it' and just...died? It happened to my great-grandparents.
Pretending there is no mental aspect to health is silly, and pretending that homopathic medicine is anything but that is silly.
As for 'prayer'...we still don't have any evidence that prayer works if the patient doesn't know about it, so it's basically the placebo effect, too. (There have actually been studies of this sort done, where churchs prayed for randomly selected individuals from elsewhere, or not, but the results have been inconclusive.)
However, it doesn't just 'appear' to work, it does work for the simple matter that placebos do work.
This is a known medical fact, despite the fact it makes no sense. Placebos work better than doing nothing quite often, ergo, homopathy works better than doing nothing quite often.
Of course, it's idiotic to spend that money when you can just, I dunno, pray or something.
If not, it's not autorun, it's just natural selection in action to weed out the stupid people who think that could possibly be a good idea.
Which most sane people do not let it do.
Close, but no cigar. You have to browse to it in Explorer. The thumbnail creator will do all the work for you.
So this is how this would have worked on Linux, assuming they bothered to support it:
People would have put the CD in. Presumably, it has some random defect that keeps it from playing straight on a computer CD-ROM, so it would have failed to play.
So users would have browsed to it, and seen something to run. Well, some would. The rest would roll their eyes and pull out their ripper app which can handle bad CDs and just encoded the thing.(1)
They'd click on it and run it.
Now, there are only two ways I can think of installing software that would screw up ripping a CD. Either a preloaded library that sites in front of libc and stops the various access to the device, or a kernel module.
Now, the preloaded library could be installed for the single user with no one the wiser, via a varible in .bashrc. Sadly, most low-level error-correcting CD ripper apps require root access anyway, so that idea would be completely pointless. Preloaded library variables go away when you sudo, that was hammered down a long time ago.(2)
So it would require root access. Unlike Windows, people do not normally run Linux as root. In fact, both Gnome and KDE will complain when you start browsing the filesystem as root, so you'd notice a problem when you went to run the install program from the CD.
So, you'd have to type in the root password, at which point it would install a kernel module, and set that module to load on startup.
Of course, there are ways to secure something like that from happening, but these are not enable under normal Linux.
1) In fact, a lot of people would not even notice any copy protection. There are CD apps for Linux that wouldn't bat an eye...if the CD can be played in a CD player, the apps will follow the same rules and play it. The whole 'corrupt CD as copy protection' is getting rather old, and the fact that companies failed to provide any way in Linux to play them means quite a few Linux apps are smart enough to screw around until they find the music.
2) Heh. It could, as you, let you rip, and then keep track of what files named .mp3 were created while the known ripper process was running and not let you access them, I guess. But making that transparent and foolproof would be extremely hard to do.
This is Georgia. I know exactly two gay men and exactly no lesbians.
Seriously. I've checked five library in Georgia. They have about 50 CDs each. At least four of these, at every library, are Indigo Girls. One had seven! It had two copies of two of them!
Really, this is not a joke or an exaggeration. I don't know if this is some local thing, if there's some crazy Indigo Girl fan running around seeding libraries here, but I suspect it's part of some settlement or another.
But why would anyone else have a problem with it?
He actually kept letting himself get arrested, and charged, and taken to court, and then producing the bill of sales, greatly pissing off the judges, who would then invent something to fine him for. When the police started ignoring him, he too had random people leap into action and start moving real park benches around, although not for any purpose.
Meanwhile, other people, intent on securing their place in history, apparently actually started stealing the things, realizing that they would be mistaken for him.
Net result? Troy was banned from Central Park, and they still arrest people who move park benches around.
His most famous prank, however, is the 'a rhinoceros fell through ice into the lake' prank. He punched a hole in the ice over a lake, used a rhinoceros foot wastebasket through Cornell University's campus, and managed to convince people one had fallen in. They actually dredged the bottom of the lake to find it, because that was the water supply and no one wanted to drink rhinoceros.
Why'd they believe that absurd story? Well, a rhinoceros had escaped from a zoo a few days earlier. Or, at least, that's what the newspaper article Troy had planted said...
First of all, it didn't say anything about anyone being supersonic.
Second, I went to a school that regularly had flights over it at less than 1000 feet...Southern Polytechnic State University, in Georgia. It right next to Dobbins Air Force base and Lockheed-Martin. Sometimes they couldn't have been more than 300 feet up.
And that's just a reserve base. If you were next to an actual base you'd see a lot more. We saw like one group a week, and this was pre-9/11.
See here. That's the school in top middle bordered by the lower half of the 120 loop, 280, and what is inexplicably called '3' instead of '41', and Lockheed right under it to the left, and the air force base is obvious. (Actually, SPSU is only half the top middle, the lower end of that, where 41 and 280 meet, is Life University, assuming it is still in business.)
Saying 'No, the military doesn't do that' is just wrong. And, no, they weren't all landing or taking off...we once watched an apparently circling jet for two hours, although we could only watch it as it flew overhead in the same direction at regular intervals of about eight minutes, so were just guessing it was the same one in a loop. And, yes, it appeared to be less than 1000 feet up.
Of course, this is all the Air Force, not the Navy, and actually the Air Force Reserve, but I can't imagine the rules would be that different.