The sleazy tactics of trying to exclude GPL by crafty licensing backfired on them in a enormous way. Had they loosened the grip a little they may have still been a player.
IBM used to have a lot of animosity expressed toward them because of their doing a lot of things similar to what MS is doing now, although I don't think the company was anywhere near as hypocritcal as MS has been. Now, IBM has learned the benefits of cooperating with the user community a whole lot better than they did before, and as a result, has a much more positive standing, and is still making money hand-over-fist, and with considerably more respect from customers and others than they had in the past. Not saying they're perfect, but they've learned to be better than they were, and it shows.
Where was Microsoft's concern for backward compatibility before now? At least one version of Office made files that once you loaded ones from an earlier version in and saved them, even if you changed nothing, the file could no longer be read by a prior edition.
One thing about Word Perfect was, all of their file formats were downward compatible as long as you didn't use a feature implemented in a later version. If you did, and you tried to open the document in an earlier version of WP, the functionality provided by that feature would simply be ignored and the document would still load and you could still use it. I think it would even retain the unusable codes so that if you then loaded the document after having used it in a lower version of WP, you got the functionality the earlier version couldn't use, back exactly as it was.
Why does Microsoft suddenly have this concern about backward compatibility of other formats when it never had it for its own? Sounds like the hypocritical comments of a company that is scared to death of people being able to break the chains of vendor lock-in.
I thought that Blu Ray == Sony... I was under the impression that Sony was the makers and backers of Blu Ray. If that is the case then how in the hell can Sony charge Sony (and not call it a "wash" on thier bottom line)??
Consider the following:
Sony may not own all of the patents or technology involved and may have to pay royalties;
The drives do cost something, wholesale, in and of themselves even if Sony is manufacturing them. First development is more expensive because they're not ramped-up to huge production level quantities (which drives down the incremental cost of each additional unit)
Blu-ray is brand-new, bleeding-edge technology, which means it's more expensive than ordinary off-the shelf commodity hardware because the development costs have not been amortized yet and have to be split up across the number of units they can expect to manufacture over the amortization period. If it can be presumed that they have perhaps 2 years before others start to make these and the profits then drop, and they can make 2 million Blu-Ray drives in two years, then the cost of developing the drives has to be divided over (and adds to the cost of those) 2 million units. If they can be sure they can sell 20 million Blu-Ray drives, then, obviously the per-unit development cost added onto the price of the drive is only 10% as much as for 2 million;
Legally or contractually it could be that they can't sell them to themselves (wholesale) for less than they sell to competitors; that may be a violation of antitrust law as an uncompetitive practice, or it may violate "most favored nation" clauses in contracts where a company agrees that no one will get a better rate on what they are selling.
A company may have to use accounting of costs for particular development as a department's budget (and the authority of the department manager) may be related to the profit level of that department or its relationship to the bottom line of the company; thus a particular department has to show some level of income and is not allowed to run at a loss even though the "money" changing hands is merely accounting entries.
American companies complain about how much it costs to find trained programming staff, but they refuse to hire less qualified - and thus cheaper - people and train them, because (1) they'd have to pay them more as they became more valuable and (2) some of them will move on to other places after the company has spent money training them. So the companies won't put money into training, and will only hire people with experience.
This has created a catch-22; those who don't have the experience can't get into the business and you can't get experience because they don't want to spend the money to train.
This also means that all employers are chasing the same (small) pool of labor, which drives up the cost of labor.
This, then, gives them an excellent excuse to claim they can't get people and thus have to hire people from overseas at much cheaper rates. (The claim they are paying these people the same as they would regular Americans is bunk.)
All the companies over the past 25 years that I've been in this business have been consistently "eating the seed corn" and as usual they are finding they never have any harvest, and thus have to spend more on imports instead of growing their own.
The comments about the deprecation of language are not new and I remember at least one other book on the subject within the last 5 years or so.
The (mis)use of language to conceal or to change what one is saying in order to make something less unpleasant, more palatable, or to out-and-out decieve is something that has been going on since Caesar was watching gladiators in the Colliseum. Let's consider some fairly recent examples.
The military's reference to a lost nuclear weapon as a broken arrow
Referring to casualties of war due to your own side shooting your people as friendly fire
The Reagan Administration wanted to define 'ketchup' as a vegetable in an attempt to reduce how much is spent on school lunches
Their attempt to refer to a tax increase as revenue enhancement
Bill Clinton claiming that a woman performing felatio on him was not having sex with her
The statement by the proposed head of the CIA that he would not politicize intelligence gathering, then after he's approved he sends a memo out to CIA staff ordering them not to make pronouncements that are different from White House policy.
Lots of times people use words to obscure the truth. Nothing new here and hasn't been new in 2500 years. As my tagline below indicates.
"In mine learned opinion, as another whose name be William, methinks yon Master Gibson needeth to learn how to sling words into proper sentences in order that those who readeth his words may learn to understand what he intendeth to say, yea verily! Either that, or he needeth to change the brand of crack he smoketh."
- Attributed to Shakespeare, so don't sue me.
IP, though, is the industry standard protocol. These days, everybody knows how to use TCP/IP. That means anyone also deploying DECnet has to license both protocols. The good news is that the DECnet fees are a bit less than those for TCP/IP.
I'm lost here. Unless they mean you have to pay for a license on DEC hardware to use some program to send packets via IP (which seems odd since there are several implementations of IP which are open source as part of several operating systems), I don't understand why someone would have to pay a licensing fee for a public domain protocol, or why TCP/IP would be more expensive than DECNET.
Microsoft Venus was to provide a cheap operating system
Using "Microsoft" and "cheap operating system" in the same sentence is an oxymoron, it's a facially invalid statement. Like using "Verizon" or "SBC" and "cheap phone service"; or using "military" and "intelligence."
Microsoft's cost structures are too high, and they can't afford to provide anything "cheap" unless you also add "shoddy" as in the case of Windows XP Crippled Edition or whatever the name of the version they are selling in Asia is called.
Microsoft's idea of "cheap" is on the order of 10% less than their overpriced rates, if they even offer that much of a discount. So instead of $149 for a copy of an operating system they might consider charging $135, not like the $15 or less for which someone can buy a (fully functional) copy of Linux.
Microsoft has every right to charge all the traffic will bear, but let's not try to give a huge company the low cost and nimbleness of a small one. They can't do it, any more than an elephant can tiptoe.
I can remember back 20, 25 years ago when I was learning programming back in college, and some of the brightest programmers I knew, including some of the people teaching programming, routinely made spelling errors.
I always thought of myself as a little bit strange because I was one of the few programmers I knew of who konsistently speld werds korrectlee.:)
Just buy a cheap firewall appliance, FFS. There are plenty for under $100, and they will do you better than all the old Linux-ridden 486s in the world.
Well, let's see. Using an old 486 which you already have on hand costs you zero, as does any copy of Linux or the specialized firewall downloadables. These are programmable machines that you can add or drop functionality as you need or want.
This is the point of the open-source revolution; you can use older, existing, (now) inexpensive and essentially fully depreciated and otherwise valueless equipment with no-cost software to take on tasks that would otherwise require new hardware or expensive proprietary hardware. And you can reprogram these devices to add functionality, the only option you have with a device you can't change is to throw it away.
Note that the only cost involved is the people time to set up and install the equipment, which you have to spend anyway whether you buy a hardware device or use a surplus PC. (However, the hardware device is a better choice if you have stupid people running your network.)
So, let's see, a non-programmable $100 firewall appliance is better than a programmable $0 Linux-based PC. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. NOT.
If someone is stupid enough to use Hotmail in view of other, better services (Yahoo gives 1GB of free space; Hotmail offers 25MB with an upgrade after 30 days to 250 meg) then they're too stupid for me to deal with and I don't need to be sending mail to anyone there anyway, so it doesn't matter!
Perhaps places should start 550ing (SMTP Permanent rejection message) all mail from @HOTMAIL.COM with the message "Your site imposes a proprietary standard or marks incoming mail as spam. We reject this characterization, and thus we reject all mail from your domain. Please contact your site's administrator to have them correct this situation regarding 'Sender ID', or use a mail service other than Hotmail."
Perhaps this would discourage them from trying to impose a proprietary non-standard method upon others. If they're going to mischaracterize mail sent to them, others can simply refuse to accept mail from them.
I wanted to send you a message within/. but there does not appear to be any way to do so.
I am interested in the idea of the Jewish calendar; it might be something interesting to implement. Is there a way to either calculate the days of that calendar (as Zeller's Congruence does for the Gregorian Calendar) or is there a correspondence between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars?
My first thought. . . Wouldn't this be fun to launch on a model rocket?
Hey! I like that idea! That's a perfect use for this sort of thing. Doing filming of dangerous or potentially dangerous short term events where there is the possibility of losing the equipment. At $30 it's a lot less money than even $125 for a cheap digital video camera, and if the event damages the camera it's a lot less money.
A camcorder that records onto a digital card is disposable...how? Does it just die after 20 minutes? Who needs a camcorder like that?
It means that the memory card in the camera is good for 20 minutes before it is full. I had a video camera that, with a 512mb compact flash, would be good for about two hours at low resolution and about 75 minutes at VHS resolution. Then you need to either use another memory card (where the card is removable) or that's the amount of material you can put on it.
I just purchased a video camera from Target for $97.00, does video, stills, records voice and plays MP3s. Discounted from $125. It can hold a certain amount of material in the 14mb internal memory, or you can put an SD card in it for more time (or space).
Basically the initial price for the camera is way too high. Hell, the $12.95 for a DVD is probably about what they should charge, period. So when people don't buy these in droves, that's when they'll say people aren't interested, instead of realizing they are charging too much. But CVS Drug Stores have a long history of overcharging customers back when they were People's Drug in Washington DC. There's a saying about what CVS really stands for, "Customers Victimized Severely."
This is a red herring of absolutely no relevance
on
GPL Hard to Enforce?
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· Score: 1
I'm not even a lawyer and I know that the point the author is making is completely bogus. While there may be a few exceptions for some underdeveloped countries, the fact remains that almost every country, and certainly every industrialized country in the world - including the United States - is a signatory to the Berne Union copyright convention, which provides that copyright notices and other formalities are not required. This has been the law in the U.S. since March 1, 1989. Because of the former requirement (partially required from 1978-1989, and mandatory before 1978) in the U.S. that a copyright notice be included, most organizations do put copyright notices on their materials.
Now, a government can impose certain formalities on works coming from authors domiciled in that country, but for works from other countries they can't impose a notice formality. The Netherlands can impose requirements with respect to authors who are citizens or nationals of Holland, but any local laws would have no effect upon the protections granted by the treaty because the treaty completely eliminates any formalities upon works from other signatory countries.
If they are going to charge a recycling fee, then when a person has a computer they no longer need, every place that collected the fee should pay to the person turning in an old computer, the current fee being collected.
When they collect a recycling deposit on soft drink bottles, you can return that bottle to any place that sells that brand and get a refund of the deposit. Since the fee is collected on computers when sold, any place that sells computers should then be able to pay the person who returns a used computer the fee collected. If they are only required to accept returns up to the number of computers they sell, it should cost the merchant nothing, and they can sell the computers to actual recyclers to get the small cost of accepting returns (most stores have some amount of space they can use for storing recycled computers pending disposition).
How I thought of it was, you went into a library and gave them an amount equal to twice the retail price of whatever book you wanted to borrow. If you brought it back by the due date, you got all your money back; if you brought it back late they deducted the fine. If you brought it back damaged they deducted it from the deposit.
The book would include the receipt for the deposit, and whoever brought the book back got the refund. As the article noted, you substitute anonymous cash for identity, and you have your choice.
If they don't collect the information, they can't release it, accidentally or otherwise. That bears repeating. Whatever information they do not collect, they can't leak to others.
If you don't store information you can't be subpoenaed for it. And you can't compromise information you don't keep. People can't perform identity theft or harm your customers by stealing information from you if you don't keep the information in the first place. And the government can't turn you into an informant collecting information for them if you have no information to collect.
How is it controversial to treat customers with respect by not recording information not absolutely necessary to provide service to them? When I go into Office Depot, I can buy supplies, pay cash and leave. They don't ask me my address, my religion or my political opinions; all they care about is that my money is the right color, as it should be. Other business should consider doing the same thing: If you don't need the information in order to provide the product or service, don't ask for it. If you don't need to retain the information once the product or service is provided, don't keep it.
I have run my businesses that way for years; it saves a lot of paperwork hassles. Too many businesses see additional information collected from customers as a business asset they can sell. Which turns it into more data that can be prostituted into use for other purposes, not all of them good. Correction, most of them definitely bad.
The term 'social engineering' has a well established definition of tricking or conning someone into giving out information you normally would not get from them, usually for nefarious purposes.
"In the field of computer security, social engineering is the practice of obtaining confidential information by manipulation of legitimate users." (Social engineering (computer security))
"In the field of political science, social engineering is a mainly pejorative term used to describe the intended effects of authoritarian systems of government. " (Social engineering (political science))
Hi I'm from the police, mind if I come and fix up your house security, it'll take a while and will be quite dusty and noisy so if you can just give me your keys and go out for a few hours...
Joe Pesci, as "The Wet Burglar" in the movie "Home Alone" would go to people's houses in a police officer's uniform to check the kind of security people had, wanting to make sure they were protected against The Wet Burglar, who was robbing houses. And, of course, people would show him what kind of security they had, which meant, of course, they could skip the houses that had alarms, and especially target houses where people were going on vacation for a few days or longer...
"Well established"? Your assertion doesn't make it so. I would like to see some peer-reviewed research published in a mainstream at least modestly reputable publication showing these results, please. And not just a correlation, but a causation must be shown, since you claim a direct causational relationship.
This presumes the medical journals will accept the articles. Despite opinions to the contrary, not all professionally done research reports will be accepted, if it's contrary to what the particular journal or its organization will accept. One example is that despite research showing fluoride is poisonous, or might not really be effective for preventing tooth decay, and might actually be harmful, the American Dental Association has a flat ban on publishing any articles on the subject; any such articles appear in other journals. Thus according to my understanding the ADA - which gets generous contributions from toothpaste makers - will not allow any research, no matter how well founded, on whether fluoride really does provide anti-cavity protection, even though apparently there's been peer-reviewed research in other smaller journals going back 50 years or more that shows this to be the case.
It kind of worries me when I read things like this because I see people speaking about things that I personally would believe to be crazy, and then years later it eventually does leak out to the mainstream press and the professional journals.
There is also the problem of types of research that cannot be double-blind produced. I believe one example was the use of DMSO, an industrial solvent, for use on the skin for certain types of joint problems, something similar to the way Absorbine Jr. is used. (By the way, Absorbine Jr. was originally proven to be effective because it was used as a veterinary liniment. A lot of discoveries about what is good for people have been made in the veterinary context, but isn't readily noticed by researchers studying humans.) DMSO can't be double-blind tested because apparently it is absorbed almost immediately and the user experiences a taste something like garlic. This makes using a placebo not possible. As a result it's impossible to do double-blind tests on whether DMSO is an effective topical muscle pain reliever. Which means FDA approval to advertise it as such can never and will never be granted. So basically, it's sold advertised "not for human use" even though people do use it - and get relief from it, apparently - even though it cannot be "proven" that the results are not placebo.
Please post links or references, or else I will have to ask that you be ignored as a complete kook.
For years, if not decades, Dr. Semmelweis was dismissed as a kook by the medical community for making the ridiculous claim that doctors could spread disease by coming in contact with patients after being in contact with corpses, and that doctors needed to wash their hands after doing autopsies. He was dismissed as a kook. Just because an idea is new or different does not necessarily make it invalid. Yes, whenever possible claims need to be proven, but whether the proof can be made public is yet another issue. Whether you believe me or not is not my problem, I don't care. I'm just saying that expensive technical developments can be patented and money collected from them, adjustments to diet and/or lifestyle that conceivably can be effective cannot.
Let's not forget that for decades the standard medical opinion was that stomach ulcers required bland diet and other changes, then it was discovered that diet didn't do a damn thing one way or another, they found out ulcers are caused by viruses. Just because an idea is different or disagrees with what people expect does not immediately make it invalid.
Have you ever tried to changed your internal pH to be alkaline balance? I'm sure you haven't cause you would be dead. The body can only exist in a narrow range of pH to functional properly.
One of the ways that this occurs is with regular consumption of yellow apple cider vinegar. For some reason the acids in it metabolize to an alkaline form.
And your statement is not true because there are lots of people that are alkaline rather than acidic. One example being those people who find vinegar and other acids to be sweet rather than bitter are alkaline PH. And they exist, and are not dead.
It is well established that if one has a alkaline PH-balance it is impossible for cancers to form. Why this is necessary when simple nutrition and proper readjustment of PH will prevent cancer in the first place I am not sure, other than I suppose having people be healthy in the first place doesn't make money for pharmaceutical and medical technology developers, while high-tech developments of Rube Goldberg-type devices do.
1. Demand he give you a letter of recomendation as soon as you get back to work in view of your good record in having worked there, or you will walk out the door immediately instead of at the end of your notice period. And be willing to do so if he won't; then you will know one way or the other.
2. Inform him - after you get your recommendation or he refuses - that if he attempts to withhold any salary of yours that is due, you will file a complaint with the state labor commission and you will sue if you need to. In most states, withholding a paycheck can be a crime, and in fact some states allow for court costs and attorney's fees plus triple damages, on the same as if someone fails to cover a bad check.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing about Word Perfect was, all of their file formats were downward compatible as long as you didn't use a feature implemented in a later version. If you did, and you tried to open the document in an earlier version of WP, the functionality provided by that feature would simply be ignored and the document would still load and you could still use it. I think it would even retain the unusable codes so that if you then loaded the document after having used it in a lower version of WP, you got the functionality the earlier version couldn't use, back exactly as it was.
Why does Microsoft suddenly have this concern about backward compatibility of other formats when it never had it for its own? Sounds like the hypocritical comments of a company that is scared to death of people being able to break the chains of vendor lock-in.
This has created a catch-22; those who don't have the experience can't get into the business and you can't get experience because they don't want to spend the money to train.
This also means that all employers are chasing the same (small) pool of labor, which drives up the cost of labor.
This, then, gives them an excellent excuse to claim they can't get people and thus have to hire people from overseas at much cheaper rates. (The claim they are paying these people the same as they would regular Americans is bunk.)
All the companies over the past 25 years that I've been in this business have been consistently "eating the seed corn" and as usual they are finding they never have any harvest, and thus have to spend more on imports instead of growing their own.
The (mis)use of language to conceal or to change what one is saying in order to make something less unpleasant, more palatable, or to out-and-out decieve is something that has been going on since Caesar was watching gladiators in the Colliseum. Let's consider some fairly recent examples.
- The military's reference to a lost nuclear weapon as a broken arrow
- Referring to casualties of war due to your own side shooting your people as friendly fire
- The Reagan Administration wanted to define 'ketchup' as a vegetable in an attempt to reduce how much is spent on school lunches
- Their attempt to refer to a tax increase as revenue enhancement
- Bill Clinton claiming that a woman performing felatio on him was not having sex with her
- The statement by the proposed head of the CIA that he would not politicize intelligence gathering, then after he's approved he sends a memo out to CIA staff ordering them not to make pronouncements that are different from White House policy.
Lots of times people use words to obscure the truth. Nothing new here and hasn't been new in 2500 years. As my tagline below indicates."In mine learned opinion, as another whose name be William, methinks yon Master Gibson needeth to learn how to sling words into proper sentences in order that those who readeth his words may learn to understand what he intendeth to say, yea verily! Either that, or he needeth to change the brand of crack he smoketh."
- Attributed to Shakespeare, so don't sue me.
Microsoft's cost structures are too high, and they can't afford to provide anything "cheap" unless you also add "shoddy" as in the case of Windows XP Crippled Edition or whatever the name of the version they are selling in Asia is called.
Microsoft's idea of "cheap" is on the order of 10% less than their overpriced rates, if they even offer that much of a discount. So instead of $149 for a copy of an operating system they might consider charging $135, not like the $15 or less for which someone can buy a (fully functional) copy of Linux.
Microsoft has every right to charge all the traffic will bear, but let's not try to give a huge company the low cost and nimbleness of a small one. They can't do it, any more than an elephant can tiptoe.
I always thought of myself as a little bit strange because I was one of the few programmers I knew of who konsistently speld werds korrectlee. :)
Paul Robinson
Well, let's see. Using an old 486 which you already have on hand costs you zero, as does any copy of Linux or the specialized firewall downloadables. These are programmable machines that you can add or drop functionality as you need or want.
This is the point of the open-source revolution; you can use older, existing, (now) inexpensive and essentially fully depreciated and otherwise valueless equipment with no-cost software to take on tasks that would otherwise require new hardware or expensive proprietary hardware. And you can reprogram these devices to add functionality, the only option you have with a device you can't change is to throw it away.
Note that the only cost involved is the people time to set up and install the equipment, which you have to spend anyway whether you buy a hardware device or use a surplus PC. (However, the hardware device is a better choice if you have stupid people running your network.)
So, let's see, a non-programmable $100 firewall appliance is better than a programmable $0 Linux-based PC. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. NOT.
Perhaps places should start 550ing (SMTP Permanent rejection message) all mail from @HOTMAIL.COM with the message "Your site imposes a proprietary standard or marks incoming mail as spam. We reject this characterization, and thus we reject all mail from your domain. Please contact your site's administrator to have them correct this situation regarding 'Sender ID', or use a mail service other than Hotmail."
Perhaps this would discourage them from trying to impose a proprietary non-standard method upon others. If they're going to mischaracterize mail sent to them, others can simply refuse to accept mail from them.
I am interested in the idea of the Jewish calendar; it might be something interesting to implement. Is there a way to either calculate the days of that calendar (as Zeller's Congruence does for the Gregorian Calendar) or is there a correspondence between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars?
My first thought. . . Wouldn't this be fun to launch on a model rocket? Hey! I like that idea! That's a perfect use for this sort of thing. Doing filming of dangerous or potentially dangerous short term events where there is the possibility of losing the equipment. At $30 it's a lot less money than even $125 for a cheap digital video camera, and if the event damages the camera it's a lot less money.
I just purchased a video camera from Target for $97.00, does video, stills, records voice and plays MP3s. Discounted from $125. It can hold a certain amount of material in the 14mb internal memory, or you can put an SD card in it for more time (or space).
Basically the initial price for the camera is way too high. Hell, the $12.95 for a DVD is probably about what they should charge, period. So when people don't buy these in droves, that's when they'll say people aren't interested, instead of realizing they are charging too much. But CVS Drug Stores have a long history of overcharging customers back when they were People's Drug in Washington DC. There's a saying about what CVS really stands for, "Customers Victimized Severely."
Now, a government can impose certain formalities on works coming from authors domiciled in that country, but for works from other countries they can't impose a notice formality. The Netherlands can impose requirements with respect to authors who are citizens or nationals of Holland, but any local laws would have no effect upon the protections granted by the treaty because the treaty completely eliminates any formalities upon works from other signatory countries.
When they collect a recycling deposit on soft drink bottles, you can return that bottle to any place that sells that brand and get a refund of the deposit. Since the fee is collected on computers when sold, any place that sells computers should then be able to pay the person who returns a used computer the fee collected. If they are only required to accept returns up to the number of computers they sell, it should cost the merchant nothing, and they can sell the computers to actual recyclers to get the small cost of accepting returns (most stores have some amount of space they can use for storing recycled computers pending disposition).
The book would include the receipt for the deposit, and whoever brought the book back got the refund. As the article noted, you substitute anonymous cash for identity, and you have your choice.
If they don't collect the information, they can't release it, accidentally or otherwise. That bears repeating. Whatever information they do not collect, they can't leak to others.
How is it controversial to treat customers with respect by not recording information not absolutely necessary to provide service to them? When I go into Office Depot, I can buy supplies, pay cash and leave. They don't ask me my address, my religion or my political opinions; all they care about is that my money is the right color, as it should be. Other business should consider doing the same thing: If you don't need the information in order to provide the product or service, don't ask for it. If you don't need to retain the information once the product or service is provided, don't keep it.
I have run my businesses that way for years; it saves a lot of paperwork hassles. Too many businesses see additional information collected from customers as a business asset they can sell. Which turns it into more data that can be prostituted into use for other purposes, not all of them good. Correction, most of them definitely bad.
Joe Pesci, as "The Wet Burglar" in the movie "Home Alone" would go to people's houses in a police officer's uniform to check the kind of security people had, wanting to make sure they were protected against The Wet Burglar, who was robbing houses. And, of course, people would show him what kind of security they had, which meant, of course, they could skip the houses that had alarms, and especially target houses where people were going on vacation for a few days or longer...
It kind of worries me when I read things like this because I see people speaking about things that I personally would believe to be crazy, and then years later it eventually does leak out to the mainstream press and the professional journals.
There is also the problem of types of research that cannot be double-blind produced. I believe one example was the use of DMSO, an industrial solvent, for use on the skin for certain types of joint problems, something similar to the way Absorbine Jr. is used. (By the way, Absorbine Jr. was originally proven to be effective because it was used as a veterinary liniment. A lot of discoveries about what is good for people have been made in the veterinary context, but isn't readily noticed by researchers studying humans.) DMSO can't be double-blind tested because apparently it is absorbed almost immediately and the user experiences a taste something like garlic. This makes using a placebo not possible. As a result it's impossible to do double-blind tests on whether DMSO is an effective topical muscle pain reliever. Which means FDA approval to advertise it as such can never and will never be granted. So basically, it's sold advertised "not for human use" even though people do use it - and get relief from it, apparently - even though it cannot be "proven" that the results are not placebo.
For years, if not decades, Dr. Semmelweis was dismissed as a kook by the medical community for making the ridiculous claim that doctors could spread disease by coming in contact with patients after being in contact with corpses, and that doctors needed to wash their hands after doing autopsies. He was dismissed as a kook. Just because an idea is new or different does not necessarily make it invalid. Yes, whenever possible claims need to be proven, but whether the proof can be made public is yet another issue. Whether you believe me or not is not my problem, I don't care. I'm just saying that expensive technical developments can be patented and money collected from them, adjustments to diet and/or lifestyle that conceivably can be effective cannot.Let's not forget that for decades the standard medical opinion was that stomach ulcers required bland diet and other changes, then it was discovered that diet didn't do a damn thing one way or another, they found out ulcers are caused by viruses. Just because an idea is different or disagrees with what people expect does not immediately make it invalid.
And your statement is not true because there are lots of people that are alkaline rather than acidic. One example being those people who find vinegar and other acids to be sweet rather than bitter are alkaline PH. And they exist, and are not dead.
It is well established that if one has a alkaline PH-balance it is impossible for cancers to form. Why this is necessary when simple nutrition and proper readjustment of PH will prevent cancer in the first place I am not sure, other than I suppose having people be healthy in the first place doesn't make money for pharmaceutical and medical technology developers, while high-tech developments of Rube Goldberg-type devices do.
2. Inform him - after you get your recommendation or he refuses - that if he attempts to withhold any salary of yours that is due, you will file a complaint with the state labor commission and you will sue if you need to. In most states, withholding a paycheck can be a crime, and in fact some states allow for court costs and attorney's fees plus triple damages, on the same as if someone fails to cover a bad check.