[LIsp] is the only language I know of where you can use its macro facility (reader macros, to be specific) to fully implement another language with arbitrary complex syntax. In other words, a program written in any textual language can be a Common Lisp program if you insert a corresponding CL reader macro definition at the beginning of the code.
I routinely take a few weeks to reply to mails if I cannot reply quickly and they require some work to be done. Naturally, some of those I wanted to respond to get lost in the infinitely extending inbox.
Despite my poor replying record, I still spend an average of >10 hours per week dealing with email. And I am not a maintainer of any (public) open source project; I simply participate.
I favour the Linus Torvalds method of inbox flow-control: if it's important, send the maintainer the same mail again after a week or so. Try again a week later. If your email covers multiple issues, try spliting up as the maintainer my have time to deal with one of them. If you're not getting an answer, there are lots of practical reasons which are easy to imagine... Especially if it's a project where the maintainer might get a lot of email, or where the maintainer might have very little time to work on it.
If you do resend an email, mark it clearly so the maintainer knows they can delete the earlier one without reading it; there's a fair chance it's been sitting in their inbox for a long time, making them feel guilty, and when they read your mail they are probably dealing with a batch of mail on related subjects.
Ideally, well run projects have a mailing list and other interested participants where things can be refined without the maintainer being a bottleneck. Small projects don't get that far though.
That's interesting and good to know your anecdote; thank you.
I have some ideas on why it may never have worked.
Offering someone money to incorporate your changes is akin to offering short-term paid work. This is because they will have to do some work - and because when they accept the money, they are duty bound to do what you've asked.
Most people do not work as freelancers, and cannot take new short-term jobs easily. They also do not know how to respond to money offers as a freelancer would.
Remember, most non-commercial open source is written by people in their spare time, so they aren't expecting to be offered money and aren't used to it.
Just like other unsolicited job offers, they're quite likely to be working for someone else full-time, or busy with other things. They may have to say no even if they like your offer, or they might simply not be interested.
They may think you require more of their time then you do, and they may not be sure if it would cause problems with their employer to accept money for work from someone else at the same time.
As with all unsolicited offers of work, if you want to be successful that's more likely if you offer enough money to offset the inconveniences and problems of taking you up on it, including imaginary problems.
For some who already does not have time to maintain a project they care about, that means offering more than the commercial rate for the amount of work you think is involved.
I'm curious, what sort of amounts have you offered? I have offered money too, but it has always been "feel-good" amounts to express gratitude afterwards, and did not require anything to be done; it was never enough to pay seriously for work.
Feeling like you don't have the illness doesn't get rid of an illness.
1. It does if the illness is that you are in pain, and the pain goes away. 2. It does if the illness is that you are depressed, and you become happier. 3. It does if the illness is you are always tired, and you have more energy.
I won't say any of the treatments we're talking about consistently cure these things. But it is false to say these changes never occur in response, or to say that they occur to the same extent without treatment.
So? all this has been studies over and over again, never with any effectivness.
By all means, dispute that conclusion, but by looking at the research or doing your own, not ignoring it and repeating the same unchecked statements.
Specifically, it is false that (1) there are no controlled, double-blinded studies, and it is false that (2) such studies never show a significant effect.
Please be careful with your contradictions. There are controlled clinical studies - which you refer to yourself two sentences later.
There is evidence of a beneficial effect from some treatments - which you also refer to. Pain reduction is a clinically beneficial effect. So is 'feeling better'.
If it doesn't matter where you put the needles, but you still need the needles for the effect, then the practitioners are mistaken about what is important, but you still need the needles.
(Note that acupuncture studies don't all conclude that needle location doesn't matter, though some do; each study typically tests one specific set of treatment locations, and acupuncture is notoriously hard to perform controlled studies on because the purportedly most effective treatments are excluded by the requirements of controlled studies).
As you say, some of them elicit a powerful placebo response. "Powerful" or "doesn't work" - choose one.
If you require a treatment to be understood fully by its practitioner and are not interested in powerful placebo effects for yourself, that's fine for you, but it's an error to say they do no good for anyone.
(You will also rule out a lot of conventional healthcare by that).
Personally I'll take the placebo if it fixes my problem and be glad of it. If the problem is pain, or insomnia, or indigestion, all of which are realistic targets for that sort of treatment, that's good done.
Pragmatism wins over principle when the end-goal of medicine is to alleviate suffering.
There is a mistake often propagated that if something is apparently placebo-equivalent, then you could have the same benefit by simply thinking yourself better without doing anything.
I think many people's reaction against treatments with a weak evidence base is their scam-filter. If the practitioner's explanation isn't scientifically convincing or they are clearly not right about something, they must be a scam and people should be protected from scams - and people do fall for scams, often.
But the fact is, lots of people use them and lots of those people experience a benefit which goes deeper than "the patient feels happier because they think they had a treatment".
As devil's advocate I'd argue that "all the information about the document" depends on what you consider to be the document - basically whether you can use the XML file usefully by itself - and "XML file" is definitely something you have, inside a ZIP archive.
There's enough uncertainty that I doubt you could use this fact alone to get a summary judgement to skip the expensive fight if a fight was started.
0. Your assumption about my background is incorrect.
1. "Current genetic and epigenetic theories of cancer-specific drug resistance do not adequately explain" simply means the current theories are wrong and/or incomplete. Nobody claims otherwise; gene expression is very complex.
2. Natural selection does not only mean mutation mechanisms, though it includes them. It also does not mean genetic mechanisms alone. You may wish to read the Wikipedia article.
3. But I agree that evolution is more than just mutation mechanisms, and it's quite likely that acquisition of drug resistance in any cells, not just cancers, involves more than mutation mechanisms.
4. Even if there is heavenly magic involved in addition to molecular error correction, neither implies evolution is goal oriented. What if Her Divine Will is to keep life exciting for all of us by finding it's own new directions all the time? That would be magic with no goal. Error correction is just an unsurprising mechanism detail; you cannot deduce anything deep from that.
I work with video and graphics (programming), and I can say for sure this demo running on Firefox 3.5.2 on my Core Duo 2GHz uses about 1.2 cores and gets less than 25fps at ~1680x1050.
That's with the dots small. (Fancy starfield). When they zoom in together for a moment, it slows down noticably.
It's good for a web browser, but as software rendering goes it's beaten by x86 systems 10-15 years older.
Since the patent cites prior art things which also have that ability, it's clear that the patent is not as simple as "ability to ignore things that are not understood".
Your head hurts because you're imagining a different patent than the actual one.
Those types of change aren't all that radical, even though they're not commonly implemented in compilers at the moment, as far as I know.
You're not describing major algorithm changes, just reorganising data to suit different batching requirements, reorganising loops and so on. Reorganising loops is decades old already.
When you can't tell it's the same person because they are using ghost writers, it looks like science but it isn't.
That's the problem.
If it's lots of different people with the related vested interests, the problem is subtler but still significant. Then it's biased science.
You can't retest all the evidence yourself, and you can't afford to pay other people to do it, so you can't tell what's science and what merely looks like science.
I wish there was more study and awareness of the economic idiocy and need for regulation to resolve it, too.
In the UK, the NHS (national health service) cannot afford to treat everyone with certain life-saving drugs because those drugs are too expensive, so they don't, or do so only for a few people.
The drug companies lobby the NHS to include those drugs, and the NHS refuses because the money is better spent on cheaper treatments for more people. Some newspapers and some people side with the drug companies.
Those drug companies justify high prices due to the cost of research, trials and so on, and the patents enable them to maintain the prices.
To be fair, the cost of research etc. is high, and investing in the next drug is needed.
The stupid, awful paradox though, is that if the NHS enforced a lower price, by having the power to override company patents and threaten to make them generically (but only if the company does not agree to sell them at that price itself), then the companies involved could be guaranteed a higher profit for helping more people, while reducing the cost of treatment and care to the NHS.
[All prices in UK pounds - Slashdot does not handle the £ sign properly.]
It's quite simple: Let X be the cost of R&D to the company. Let HP be the high price per person, say 20,000, that the company chooses currently. Let's say 10,000 people choose to use the drug privately. (Revenue = 200 million). Let's say the company believes that strategy makes it's R&D sustainable for future developments. Let's say the marginal cost of production is HP/200 = 100 - after all they say it's dominated by the cost of R&D. (Production cost = 1 million, leaving 199 million for R&D and profits).
Clearly if the NHS agrees to take 1,000,000 person's worth of the drug while enforcing a far lower price of LP = HP/100 = 299 (very affordable per person), then the company will make exactly the same profit, and that's not counting the benefit of scaling up production.
If the NFS takes 1,000,000 person's worth while enforcing a price of 498 (still very affordable compared with 20,000), the company will make guaranteed at least twice the profit, at the same time as helping 100 times as many people.
(* - It's "at least twice" because it's between two and infinity times the profit, depending on the cost of R&D which is somewhere between zero and 199 million, established earlier).
Now will someone explain to me why helping 100 times as many people, while making more profit and/or doing more research, doing more business, with guaranteed long-term business, getting a better reputation and becoming more well known, and yes the individual reps, executives and shareholders can all reap rewards... Why is this something the drug companies negotiate against??!
Simple greed cannot explain it, because everyone in the company stands to benefit personally in the scenario where drugs are cheaper and given to more people, if done properly.
I believe the scenario we're currently seeing is not a result of "evil" corporations and/or individuals in them, nor a result of rational collective greed, but instead is a result of systemic idiocy...
Vaccines are not 100% safe, and many people find it difficult to weigh up the chance of mild or severe danger against the benefit.
There are many reports of bad reactions to vaccines, some of them severe.
People don't have trustworthy data to weigh that against benefits and make a smart decision. Lots of anecdotes, which people routinely give too much significance to. Lots of things purporting to be data, but...
I believe the problem is more distrust than ignorance. There are plenty of "facts" to choose from.
We know that published science is infiltrated by some dirty conflicts of interest to say the least. This story is an example. (Btw, my mother suffers from severe symptoms which were probably caused by years of HRT, now stopped; I'm not impressed).
When you have good reason to believe many drug companies don't have your health at the top of their agenda; when you believe they spend as much on marketing as research, and the figures support it, but they don't mention that when justifying their pricing model; when you know they're stuck in an economic paradox which gives drugs to fewer people at high cost despite the potential to make more profit helping more people and they don't talk much about that either...
Let's just say that there are obvious conflicts of interest, and that makes it difficult to trust industry representatives and those affected by their funding. Which includes (unfortunately) published science to some extent, and (unfortunately) the extent is not clear.
Scientifically vaccines make great sense, and they have very clearly helped a lot of people. Half a brain and a small dose of history is enough to see their benefit.
But it's hardly surprising that a lot of people don't trust the industry and government to tell the truth, or colour it to suit an agenda other than people's health.
There are good reasons to believe the industry and government don't tell the whole truth, and sometimes lie outright. ("We have found WMDs", anyone?).
So people latch on to the scare stories, and can't evaluate their relevance or significance because they don't trust the sources...
Some scare stores really happened: "There were reports of GBS affecting some people who had received swine flu immunizations in the 1976 U.S. outbreak of swine flu. Overall, there were about 500 cases of GBSâ"25 of which resulted in death from severe pulmonary complications - which, according to Dr. P. Haber, were probably caused by an immunopathological reaction to the 1976 swine flu vaccine. Other influenza vaccines have not been linked to GBS, though caution is advised for certain individuals, particularly those with a history of GBS." link
GBS is very nasty, and 500 is quite a lot considering that 1976 program was aborted early in response.
How do you evaluate the risk of something like that against the benefits, when you don't trust the industry and government who are telling you it's safe?
And how can you trust the industry and government, with the ample evidence that they are not always trustworthy?
I don't see any solutions; only point out that I think the anti-vaccination movement is driven more by distrust than scientific ignorance. People who don't understand the science can seek out people they trust who do, who are commonplace. Finding people they trust to evaluate risks and benefits is harder.
Oh, one last thing in response to "technically pharma produces said vaccinations so I doubt they would actively try to discourage people from using them". Technically pharma also produces treatments; far more when vaccines are not used. Like Slashdot, pharma is not a single mind but many diverse interests, so one part of pharma may want you to take vaccines while another may benefit when you don't.
2. Even when Doctors don't make direct cash, it is said some of them make indirect benefits such as courses which are disguised nice holidays.
3. Even when Doctors don't benefit personally, medical industry reps do benefit from their products being chosen. Behind the Doctor is a whole industry of pressures and reality distortion fields who's agenda includes their own profit, and does not have your health at the top. Doctors are human and are not immune from pressure and reality distortion fields.
2. You are wrong to say "Natural path, homeopaths, acupuncturist and others of there ilk are a different matter. They charge of treatments that do no damn good." Some of them aren't effective, some of them are. Some patients benefit, some do not. It sounds like you don't.
Even if it's just due to psychology or psychosomatic response, when that does you good, it's good. Some people think if it's psychology you can do it yourself and get the same result. That's not true for everyone.
Personally I side with the "climate change is real, important and humankind affects it" camp. But let me respond for a moment just to your assertions:
1. Sure, increased heat retention. What matters is how much: significant or insignificant.
When I fart it increases the greenhouse effect due to the methane I emit.
But my fart is obviously insignificant.
One can't conclude that billions of tons of CO2 emission causes a significant effect without more detailed analysis, including measurements, modelling and understanding whether those measurement results are caused by the CO2 or something else.
2. Climate is way, way more complex than that. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to changes in the ocean currents, ocean gas exchange with the atmosphere, atmospheric currents, photon energy distribution, atmosphere and ocean chemistry, reflectivity due to biosphere changes, reflectivity due to ocean currents churning material and affecting ocean life, changes in just about everything to some degree. Many of those things have the potential to cause the Earth to lose heat.
One may naively think extra CO2 emission leads to increased heat retention. Heck, it probably does, but that does not constitute science.
So things got cooler for a few days, he reached the conclusion of his thought, and she eventually learned that he was glad he made the decision he did. I'm guessing she was reminded of something she didn't like, but that laid the foundation for their growing closer together.
Sounds positive to me. A few days coolness, in exchange for that lovely feeling that you know you're partner will talk to you about their thoughts and let you in on their dreams and meanderings, even things they're not sure if you'll like. Then you have something to really talk about.
If I were in a position like that woman's I'd much rather hear what he was thinking than just hear the "conclusion".
Quite likely. Offers like "we can give you and your friend £50 if you introduce your friend to us" are getting more common. This sort of data mining lets them profitably offer you £100 each, if your friend is a probable churner. Which is a net profit for the phone company (if it attracts customers), and net profit for some of the people involved.
It's true that anonymised data can sometimes be traced to real people. And if not real individuals, then real groups of people with whom you may be later associated - that still affects your credit rating (and therefore the cost of living), and other personal reputation metrics.
But unless that's fundamental to all possible forms of anonymisation, it's an argument that the anonymisation should be better and held to higher standards, not an argument against collecting data at all.
It's allowed according to the license to make a profit; there's no legal question about that. The author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, makes it clear there is no problem making money from GPL'd software, including when you build on other people's GPL'd software. That's fine.
But in this case it contradicts the author's stated wishes, so it is at least rude and up for discussion of it's morality. The author has a few good points, such as "cost of distribution" being a spurious claim because it's so low, when clearly the seller's motivation includes making enough money so that their porting work is paid work, not volunteer work.
It's important - for ethical reasons not legal ones (and in the bigger scheme of things, sustainability reasons) - to behave not only according to legalistic requirements of licenses, but to mesh with community expectations and wishes too.
It's not possible to encode everything into legalistic form as a license.
Here's an analogy; the common part is it has a legalistic component (the license) and an expressed wish component:
If you knew of a large project which used the BSD license, would you have no moral concern at all about relicensing the whole project to GPLv3 (or some other copyleft license) and building a new developer community around your GPLv3 fork, even though you know it would greatly upset the (non-legalistic) desires of the people who worked on the original project?
Isn't it better to respect the non-legalistic wishes of people who put a lot of work in, too? Things like participating on their terms, if they are reasonable, keeping with the same license that's already been used, avoiding forks where people, and so on?
This has actually come up a few times, and near consensus seems to be that it's better to work with existing communities according to their norms when possible.
I think in this XPilot example, it's very clear that the sellers could reduce the price to zero, but choose not to and the only reason can be because they want to be paid for all their time spent porting and polishing it. Imho, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for hard work, but it's clearly at odds with (at least part) of the original XPilot community.
That begs questions about whether it is ethical (we know it's legal), when the sellers could have chosen to write a different game instead and recouped their costs that way.
It looks like the sellers may be benefitting from XPilot's reputation (and from this controversy) while potentially not respecting the (non-legal) wishes of the community who made that reputation possible in the first place. That's legal, but for many projects it would be considered at least rude.
I think my "print" looks like the first cursive sample GIF but without the slanting and all the connecting lines removed. TBH, the sample doesn't look like crap too me, it looks quite natural except for the heavy slant, which makes it more difficult to read legible. I don't slant when writing cursive - probably a result of being left-handed, but also because I think it impairs legibility. And I also vary the letter shapes more than "official" cursive.
I suspect I don't draw a line (pun intended;-) between print and cursive when writing, just write whatever way seems appropriate for the sitation, so there's a continuum between the two for me. Sometimes I join some of the letters and not others. Perhaps I'm writing ligatures instinctively:-)
My print probably isn't good enough for engineering drafts, unless I write carefully and slowly. Even though I write primarily in print nowadays, because that's what people find easier to read - including me (I never did find it easy to read other people's handwriting).
I mentioned computer/typed font only because I've occasionally seen attempts to write that way, and it really doesn't work or look good.
I'm glad you were able to get over unhelpful habits and find something that works for you.
Slashdot Mirror
[LIsp] is the only language I know of where you can use its macro facility (reader macros, to be specific) to fully implement another language with arbitrary complex syntax. In other words, a program written in any textual language can be a Common Lisp program if you insert a corresponding CL reader macro definition at the beginning of the code.
Perl can do it too.
I routinely take a few weeks to reply to mails if I cannot reply quickly and they require some work to be done. Naturally, some of those I wanted to respond to get lost in the infinitely extending inbox.
Despite my poor replying record, I still spend an average of >10 hours per week dealing with email. And I am not a maintainer of any (public) open source project; I simply participate.
I favour the Linus Torvalds method of inbox flow-control: if it's important, send the maintainer the same mail again after a week or so. Try again a week later. If your email covers multiple issues, try spliting up as the maintainer my have time to deal with one of them. If you're not getting an answer, there are lots of practical reasons which are easy to imagine... Especially if it's a project where the maintainer might get a lot of email, or where the maintainer might have very little time to work on it.
If you do resend an email, mark it clearly so the maintainer knows they can delete the earlier one without reading it; there's a fair chance it's been sitting in their inbox for a long time, making them feel guilty, and when they read your mail they are probably dealing with a batch of mail on related subjects.
Ideally, well run projects have a mailing list and other interested participants where things can be refined without the maintainer being a bottleneck. Small projects don't get that far though.
That's interesting and good to know your anecdote; thank you.
I have some ideas on why it may never have worked.
Offering someone money to incorporate your changes is akin to offering short-term paid work. This is because they will have to do some work - and because when they accept the money, they are duty bound to do what you've asked.
Most people do not work as freelancers, and cannot take new short-term jobs easily. They also do not know how to respond to money offers as a freelancer would.
Remember, most non-commercial open source is written by people in their spare time, so they aren't expecting to be offered money and aren't used to it.
Just like other unsolicited job offers, they're quite likely to be working for someone else full-time, or busy with other things. They may have to say no even if they like your offer, or they might simply not be interested.
They may think you require more of their time then you do, and they may not be sure if it would cause problems with their employer to accept money for work from someone else at the same time.
As with all unsolicited offers of work, if you want to be successful that's more likely if you offer enough money to offset the inconveniences and problems of taking you up on it, including imaginary problems.
For some who already does not have time to maintain a project they care about, that means offering more than the commercial rate for the amount of work you think is involved.
I'm curious, what sort of amounts have you offered? I have offered money too, but it has always been "feel-good" amounts to express gratitude afterwards, and did not require anything to be done; it was never enough to pay seriously for work.
Feeling like you don't have the illness doesn't get rid of an illness.
1. It does if the illness is that you are in pain, and the pain goes away.
2. It does if the illness is that you are depressed, and you become happier.
3. It does if the illness is you are always tired, and you have more energy.
I won't say any of the treatments we're talking about consistently cure these things. But it is false to say these changes never occur in response, or to say that they occur to the same extent without treatment.
So? all this has been studies over and over again, never with any effectivness.
Repeating false statements over and over again does not make them true. E.g. random counterexample Acupuncture for low back pain is cost-effective and works, according to medical researchers.
Digging deeper on that one reveals that sham acupuncture works just as well for low back pain. Still, either is better than none.
More interesting (imho) is a German study of 'laser acupuncture' (which frankly I am skeptical of), because that can be double-blinded far more effectively: The German researchers concluded, "that laser acupuncture can supply a valuable advantage for children with headache, with active laser therapies being clearly more effective than placebo laser treatment."
By all means, dispute that conclusion, but by looking at the research or doing your own, not ignoring it and repeating the same unchecked statements.
Specifically, it is false that (1) there are no controlled, double-blinded studies, and it is false that (2) such studies never show a significant effect.
Please be careful with your contradictions. There are controlled clinical studies - which you refer to yourself two sentences later.
There is evidence of a beneficial effect from some treatments - which you also refer to. Pain reduction is a clinically beneficial effect. So is 'feeling better'.
If it doesn't matter where you put the needles, but you still need the needles for the effect, then the practitioners are mistaken about what is important, but you still need the needles.
(Note that acupuncture studies don't all conclude that needle location doesn't matter, though some do; each study typically tests one specific set of treatment locations, and acupuncture is notoriously hard to perform controlled studies on because the purportedly most effective treatments are excluded by the requirements of controlled studies).
As you say, some of them elicit a powerful placebo response. "Powerful" or "doesn't work" - choose one.
If you require a treatment to be understood fully by its practitioner and are not interested in powerful placebo effects for yourself, that's fine for you, but it's an error to say they do no good for anyone.
(You will also rule out a lot of conventional healthcare by that).
Personally I'll take the placebo if it fixes my problem and be glad of it. If the problem is pain, or insomnia, or indigestion, all of which are realistic targets for that sort of treatment, that's good done.
Pragmatism wins over principle when the end-goal of medicine is to alleviate suffering.
There is a mistake often propagated that if something is apparently placebo-equivalent, then you could have the same benefit by simply thinking yourself better without doing anything.
I think many people's reaction against treatments with a weak evidence base is their scam-filter. If the practitioner's explanation isn't scientifically convincing or they are clearly not right about something, they must be a scam and people should be protected from scams - and people do fall for scams, often.
But the fact is, lots of people use them and lots of those people experience a benefit which goes deeper than "the patient feels happier because they think they had a treatment".
It's arguable; you might win.
As devil's advocate I'd argue that "all the information about the document" depends on what you consider to be the document - basically whether you can use the XML file usefully by itself - and "XML file" is definitely something you have, inside a ZIP archive.
There's enough uncertainty that I doubt you could use this fact alone to get a summary judgement to skip the expensive fight if a fight was started.
0. Your assumption about my background is incorrect.
1. "Current genetic and epigenetic theories of cancer-specific drug resistance do not adequately explain" simply means the current theories are wrong and/or incomplete. Nobody claims otherwise; gene expression is very complex.
2. Natural selection does not only mean mutation mechanisms, though it includes them. It also does not mean genetic mechanisms alone. You may wish to read the Wikipedia article.
3. But I agree that evolution is more than just mutation mechanisms, and it's quite likely that acquisition of drug resistance in any cells, not just cancers, involves more than mutation mechanisms.
4. Even if there is heavenly magic involved in addition to molecular error correction, neither implies evolution is goal oriented. What if Her Divine Will is to keep life exciting for all of us by finding it's own new directions all the time? That would be magic with no goal. Error correction is just an unsurprising mechanism detail; you cannot deduce anything deep from that.
I work with video and graphics (programming), and I can say for sure this demo running on Firefox 3.5.2 on my Core Duo 2GHz uses about 1.2 cores and gets less than 25fps at ~1680x1050.
That's with the dots small. (Fancy starfield). When they zoom in together for a moment, it slows down noticably.
It's good for a web browser, but as software rendering goes it's beaten by x86 systems 10-15 years older.
That particular page doesn't do anything that can't be done with a slow CPU, though.
Probably it's because Firefox uses Cairo, and Cairo's software renderer is said to be quite slow.
On the other hand, the XML file inside an ODF file is itself a document stored in a single XML file.
Since the patent cites prior art things which also have that ability, it's clear that the patent is not as simple as "ability to ignore things that are not understood".
Your head hurts because you're imagining a different patent than the actual one.
Those types of change aren't all that radical, even though they're not commonly implemented in compilers at the moment, as far as I know.
You're not describing major algorithm changes, just reorganising data to suit different batching requirements, reorganising loops and so on.
Reorganising loops is decades old already.
Epigenetics is interesting and clearly important, but it does not undermine natural selection; it supports it.
Natural selection is the propagation of beneficial traits - that includes traits arising from epigenetic causes.
You may have forgotten that Darwin's theory was written before anyone knew about DNA or genetics.
In the theory of natural selection, it would be peculiar if epigenetic phenomena didn't exist.
It would also be peculiar if there was no error correcting mechanism: Error correcting genes are a good survival trait.
Finally, nothing which you have mentioned proves anything about evolution having a goal. Certainly, genetic error correction proves no such thing.
A microchip's physics is far less complicated than biological organic chemistry.
Let's put it this way: you can realistically simulate a microchip. Simulating a cell is still too hard.
You can reverse engineer a microchip by taking it apart chemically and analysing the layers. Try doing that with a cell.
You can make a new chip from raw materials. Cell: that's a long way off.
When you can't tell it's the same person because they are using ghost writers, it looks like science but it isn't.
That's the problem.
If it's lots of different people with the related vested interests, the problem is subtler but still significant. Then it's biased science.
You can't retest all the evidence yourself, and you can't afford to pay other people to do it, so you can't tell what's science and what merely looks like science.
I wish there was more study and awareness of the economic idiocy and need for regulation to resolve it, too.
In the UK, the NHS (national health service) cannot afford to treat everyone with certain life-saving drugs because those drugs are too expensive, so they don't, or do so only for a few people.
The drug companies lobby the NHS to include those drugs, and the NHS refuses because the money is better spent on cheaper treatments for more people. Some newspapers and some people side with the drug companies.
Those drug companies justify high prices due to the cost of research, trials and so on, and the patents enable them to maintain the prices.
To be fair, the cost of research etc. is high, and investing in the next drug is needed.
The stupid, awful paradox though, is that if the NHS enforced a lower price, by having the power to override company patents and threaten to make them generically (but only if the company does not agree to sell them at that price itself), then the companies involved could be guaranteed a higher profit for helping more people, while reducing the cost of treatment and care to the NHS.
[All prices in UK pounds - Slashdot does not handle the £ sign properly.]
It's quite simple: Let X be the cost of R&D to the company. Let HP be the high price per person, say 20,000, that the company chooses currently. Let's say 10,000 people choose to use the drug privately. (Revenue = 200 million). Let's say the company believes that strategy makes it's R&D sustainable for future developments. Let's say the marginal cost of production is HP/200 = 100 - after all they say it's dominated by the cost of R&D. (Production cost = 1 million, leaving 199 million for R&D and profits).
Clearly if the NHS agrees to take 1,000,000 person's worth of the drug while enforcing a far lower price of LP = HP/100 = 299 (very affordable per person), then the company will make exactly the same profit, and that's not counting the benefit of scaling up production.
If the NFS takes 1,000,000 person's worth while enforcing a price of 498 (still very affordable compared with 20,000), the company will make guaranteed at least twice the profit, at the same time as helping 100 times as many people.
(* - It's "at least twice" because it's between two and infinity times the profit, depending on the cost of R&D which is somewhere between zero and 199 million, established earlier).
Now will someone explain to me why helping 100 times as many people, while making more profit and/or doing more research, doing more business, with guaranteed long-term business, getting a better reputation and becoming more well known, and yes the individual reps, executives and shareholders can all reap rewards... Why is this something the drug companies negotiate against??!
Simple greed cannot explain it, because everyone in the company stands to benefit personally in the scenario where drugs are cheaper and given to more people, if done properly.
I believe the scenario we're currently seeing is not a result of "evil" corporations and/or individuals in them, nor a result of rational collective greed, but instead is a result of systemic idiocy...
Vaccines are not 100% safe, and many people find it difficult to weigh up the chance of mild or severe danger against the benefit.
There are many reports of bad reactions to vaccines, some of them severe.
People don't have trustworthy data to weigh that against benefits and make a smart decision. Lots of anecdotes, which people routinely give too much significance to. Lots of things purporting to be data, but...
I believe the problem is more distrust than ignorance. There are plenty of "facts" to choose from.
We know that published science is infiltrated by some dirty conflicts of interest to say the least. This story is an example. (Btw, my mother suffers from severe symptoms which were probably caused by years of HRT, now stopped; I'm not impressed).
When you have good reason to believe many drug companies don't have your health at the top of their agenda; when you believe they spend as much on marketing as research, and the figures support it, but they don't mention that when justifying their pricing model; when you know they're stuck in an economic paradox which gives drugs to fewer people at high cost despite the potential to make more profit helping more people and they don't talk much about that either...
Let's just say that there are obvious conflicts of interest, and that makes it difficult to trust industry representatives and those affected by their funding. Which includes (unfortunately) published science to some extent, and (unfortunately) the extent is not clear.
Scientifically vaccines make great sense, and they have very clearly helped a lot of people. Half a brain and a small dose of history is enough to see their benefit.
But it's hardly surprising that a lot of people don't trust the industry and government to tell the truth, or colour it to suit an agenda other than people's health.
There are good reasons to believe the industry and government don't tell the whole truth, and sometimes lie outright. ("We have found WMDs", anyone?).
So people latch on to the scare stories, and can't evaluate their relevance or significance because they don't trust the sources...
Some scare stores really happened: "There were reports of GBS affecting some people who had received swine flu immunizations in the 1976 U.S. outbreak of swine flu. Overall, there were about 500 cases of GBSâ"25 of which resulted in death from severe pulmonary complications - which, according to Dr. P. Haber, were probably caused by an immunopathological reaction to the 1976 swine flu vaccine. Other influenza vaccines have not been linked to GBS, though caution is advised for certain individuals, particularly those with a history of GBS." link
GBS is very nasty, and 500 is quite a lot considering that 1976 program was aborted early in response.
How do you evaluate the risk of something like that against the benefits, when you don't trust the industry and government who are telling you it's safe?
And how can you trust the industry and government, with the ample evidence that they are not always trustworthy?
I don't see any solutions; only point out that I think the anti-vaccination movement is driven more by distrust than scientific ignorance. People who don't understand the science can seek out people they trust who do, who are commonplace. Finding people they trust to evaluate risks and benefits is harder.
Oh, one last thing in response to "technically pharma produces said vaccinations so I doubt they would actively try to discourage people from using them". Technically pharma also produces treatments; far more when vaccines are not used. Like Slashdot, pharma is not a single mind but many diverse interests, so one part of pharma may want you to take vaccines while another may benefit when you don't.
1. Some Doctors make extra cash by prescribing particular treatments.
Crackdown on Doctors Who Take Kickbacks [New York Times]
2. Even when Doctors don't make direct cash, it is said some of them make indirect benefits such as courses which are disguised nice holidays.
3. Even when Doctors don't benefit personally, medical industry reps do benefit from their products being chosen. Behind the Doctor is a whole industry of pressures and reality distortion fields who's agenda includes their own profit, and does not have your health at the top. Doctors are human and are not immune from pressure and reality distortion fields.
2. You are wrong to say "Natural path, homeopaths, acupuncturist and others of there ilk are a different matter. They charge of treatments that do no damn good."
Some of them aren't effective, some of them are. Some patients benefit, some do not. It sounds like you don't.
Even if it's just due to psychology or psychosomatic response, when that does you good, it's good.
Some people think if it's psychology you can do it yourself and get the same result.
That's not true for everyone.
Personally I side with the "climate change is real, important and humankind affects it" camp.
But let me respond for a moment just to your assertions:
1. Sure, increased heat retention. What matters is how much: significant or insignificant.
When I fart it increases the greenhouse effect due to the methane I emit.
But my fart is obviously insignificant.
One can't conclude that billions of tons of CO2 emission causes a significant effect without more detailed analysis, including measurements, modelling and understanding whether those measurement results are caused by the CO2 or something else.
2. Climate is way, way more complex than that. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to changes in the ocean currents, ocean gas exchange with the atmosphere, atmospheric currents, photon energy distribution, atmosphere and ocean chemistry, reflectivity due to biosphere changes, reflectivity due to ocean currents churning material and affecting ocean life, changes in just about everything to some degree. Many of those things have the potential to cause the Earth to lose heat.
One may naively think extra CO2 emission leads to increased heat retention. Heck, it probably does, but that does not constitute science.
It's not nice to get a slap like that, but it will improve the sex life if it's honest and you're actually compatible.
Consider it a starting point - "oh, I thought you were enjoying that.... let's try something else next time... tell me how you'd really like it..."
So things got cooler for a few days, he reached the conclusion of his thought, and she eventually learned that he was glad he made the decision he did. I'm guessing she was reminded of something she didn't like, but that laid the foundation for their growing closer together.
Sounds positive to me. A few days coolness, in exchange for that lovely feeling that you know you're partner will talk to you about their thoughts and let you in on their dreams and meanderings, even things they're not sure if you'll like. Then you have something to really talk about.
If I were in a position like that woman's I'd much rather hear what he was thinking than just hear the "conclusion".
But then again I'm not him or her.
Quite likely. Offers like "we can give you and your friend £50 if you introduce your friend to us" are getting more common. This sort of data mining lets them profitably offer you £100 each, if your friend is a probable churner. Which is a net profit for the phone company (if it attracts customers), and net profit for some of the people involved.
It's true that anonymised data can sometimes be traced to real people. And if not real individuals, then real groups of people with whom you may be later associated - that still affects your credit rating (and therefore the cost of living), and other personal reputation metrics.
But unless that's fundamental to all possible forms of anonymisation, it's an argument that the anonymisation should be better and held to higher standards, not an argument against collecting data at all.
It's allowed according to the license to make a profit; there's no legal question about that.
The author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, makes it clear there is no problem making money from GPL'd software, including when you build on other people's GPL'd software. That's fine.
But in this case it contradicts the author's stated wishes, so it is at least rude and up for discussion of it's morality. The author has a few good points, such as "cost of distribution" being a spurious claim because it's so low, when clearly the seller's motivation includes making enough money so that their porting work is paid work, not volunteer work.
It's important - for ethical reasons not legal ones (and in the bigger scheme of things, sustainability reasons) - to behave not only according to legalistic requirements of licenses, but to mesh with community expectations and wishes too.
It's not possible to encode everything into legalistic form as a license.
Here's an analogy; the common part is it has a legalistic component (the license) and an expressed wish component:
If you knew of a large project which used the BSD license, would you have no moral concern at all about relicensing the whole project to GPLv3 (or some other copyleft license) and building a new developer community around your GPLv3 fork, even though you know it would greatly upset the (non-legalistic) desires of the people who worked on the original project?
Isn't it better to respect the non-legalistic wishes of people who put a lot of work in, too? Things like participating on their terms, if they are reasonable, keeping with the same license that's already been used, avoiding forks where people, and so on?
This has actually come up a few times, and near consensus seems to be that it's better to work with existing communities according to their norms when possible.
I think in this XPilot example, it's very clear that the sellers could reduce the price to zero, but choose not to and the only reason can be because they want to be paid for all their time spent porting and polishing it. Imho, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for hard work, but it's clearly at odds with (at least part) of the original XPilot community.
That begs questions about whether it is ethical (we know it's legal), when the sellers could have chosen to write a different game instead and recouped their costs that way.
It looks like the sellers may be benefitting from XPilot's reputation (and from this controversy) while potentially not respecting the (non-legal) wishes of the community who made that reputation possible in the first place. That's legal, but for many projects it would be considered at least rude.
Fair enough.
I think my "print" looks like the first cursive sample GIF but without the slanting and all the connecting lines removed. TBH, the sample doesn't look like crap too me, it looks quite natural except for the heavy slant, which makes it more difficult to read legible. I don't slant when writing cursive - probably a result of being left-handed, but also because I think it impairs legibility. And I also vary the letter shapes more than "official" cursive.
I suspect I don't draw a line (pun intended ;-) between print and cursive when writing, just write whatever way seems appropriate for the sitation, so there's a continuum between the two for me. Sometimes I join some of the letters and not others. Perhaps I'm writing ligatures instinctively :-)
My print probably isn't good enough for engineering drafts, unless I write carefully and slowly. Even though I write primarily in print nowadays, because that's what people find easier to read - including me (I never did find it easy to read other people's handwriting).
I mentioned computer/typed font only because I've occasionally seen attempts to write that way, and it really doesn't work or look good.
I'm glad you were able to get over unhelpful habits and find something that works for you.