3) Sanitize ads and pay for cleanup if they deliver malware.
See I'm not willing to even take a chance on the malware delivery. If there is even a remote chance of malware delivery then their ad will remain blocked until the end of time. I don't care if they are willing to pay for cleanup or not.
Because the sad fact is that I was willing to put up with annoying, but I am NOT willing to put up with security risk
You are more generous than I am. I'm not willing to put up with annoying OR with a security risk OR with tracking. If they want to pay me with cold hard cash, then and only then will I consider the limited circumstances under which I'm willing to be watched. Under no circumstances will I countenance a security risk or any irritation from advertisements.
It's much further along than SLS. SpaceX claims they'll launch it next year. SLS isn't even to the point of starting to build something that can be launched.
True but not relevant to my point. Furthermore what are the contingency plans if SpaceX drops the ball or goes out of business? Don't let optimism cloud your judgement.
No, that isn't NASA's job
I'm afraid it is NASA's job. Congress made it NASA's job. While I agree with you that at this point it shouldn't be their job any longer we haven't made the transition yet and until we do NASA remains the only civilian government agency with the expertise to facilitate this activity. NASA seems to recognize this and is transitioning away but it isn't going to happen overnight. Furthermore NOBODY has more expertise in this stuff than NASA and we would be idiots to just chuck all that knowledge out in reckless pursuit of privatization.
Back at you. NASA had three decade to come up with this new launch system and strong incentive to develop it after the Challenger accident. Where is it?
Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember the Challenger accident. I do. It's the event in my generation where everybody knows where they were when they heard about it. There was NO meaningful discussion about coming up with a replacement launch system for the space shuttle back in the mid-1980s. We hadn't figured out at that time that the shuttle was a boondoggle. The shuttle had only been flying for about 5-6 years when Challenger exploded. You are looking at this in retrospect when the mistakes are obvious. Back then the shuttle was still exciting and shiny and new. You didn't start hearing people decry the shuttle as a waste for another 15-20 years.
SpaceX has demonstrated actual experience at developing and flying new launch systems and the Falcon Heavy is close to first launch.
Several other companies have even more demonstrated actual experience than SpaceX and yet none are working on a heavy lift vehicle. Why do you suppose that is? Furthermore SpaceX is a young company that could easily run into financial difficulty. Do you really think it is sane to put all your eggs in the one basket? I don't. I admire SpaceX as much as most folks here but I'm not foolish enough to trust our space program to them alone.
It's not "candy and nuts" to make the obvious observation that NASA could be using that $3 billion per year for deep space
They can't use the $3 billion for deep space because Congress allocates the funds and NASA wouldn't GET $3 billion/year for deep space. It's a purely hypothetical conjecture about something that is not a political possibility. I agree with you that it is the sort of thing NASA should be working on but the sad reality is that more mundane stuff like getting an economically sane launch system takes precedence right now. We have a bunch of short sighted idiots in Washington who are more worried about cutting their tax bills and getting pork for their districts than building a robust space program. I guarantee you that you will hear close to nothing about the space program during this election cycle.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet. Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal. Even if Falcon Heavy becomes a working and reliable products (and we have every reason to believe it will), tying yourself to a single vendor is still not a good idea if you can avoid it.
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
The big problem is the degree of locked-downedness. Ios prides itself on being pretty invincible, to the point of being really hard to jailbreak. OS X is a machine you have full control over.
That is not the important difference between them. Most people that buy a Mac could not care less about having full control and many wouldn't know what to do with it even if they did care. Apple is clearly well aware of this.
You could put an Ios sandbox on a Mac, and maybe they'll do that some day, but going the other way seems unlikely.
If I had to put money on Apple going with one or the other right now, I would bet on iOS being the dominant system. I think the market opportunity for iOS is significantly larger so it makes economic sense. I don't think the integration will be in the form of a sandbox. It will be more nuanced than that. I think the code bases will converge over time and you'll see it basically become a single system with different interfaces for various activities.
How many times has Apple said they wouldn't ever do something and then later done it? Apple says they'd never do something all the time so I wouldn't put much stock in such statements. Jobs was famous for doing that.
The fact is that it makes a ton of economic sense to have iOS and OS X converge into a single operating system. Right now we aren't at a place where that makes sense yet (see Microsoft) but I can't really see Apple keeping two operating systems indefinitely. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all trying to some degree to converge their software to a single platform. It's a difficult thing to do so progress has been slow but there has been progress all the same. I don't really care what Tim Cook says on the matter because I think it will happen sooner or later.
There are better things to be spending space research money on that yet another orbiting can.
A reasonable argument. Although I would argue that AMONG the most important things we need to study most are human physiology and the only way to really do that is to put people into space. A space station is a comparatively cost effective way of doing that though I will grant that it isn't cheap. There really are a few big important categories of stuff we need to study in no particular order
1) Life support systems including radiation protection 2) Low cost launch systems (escape gravity wells) 3) Propulsion systems (transit) 4) Self sustaining ecosystems 5) Self sustaining industrial systems (includes mining and large scale fabrication) 6) Terraforming and directed genetics (adapting to new worlds and/or microgravity) 7) Power and battery systems (esp fusion) 8) Artificial gravity systems 9) Medicine and physiology 10) Self sustaining economies
Space stations can help us with several of these. Unfortunately they are silly expensive until we address #2 though we seem to be making some progress there. I think it will take centuries before space travel becomes routine just like it took centuries for us to develop the technology to travel efficiently around the Earth.
Even our most advance ion engines still consist of chucking stuff backwards to go forwards. There must be a better way.
Maybe or maybe not. Physics is kind of a harsh mistress that way. Like you I'm hopeful we'll come up with something brilliant but hope doesn't equal success. Sadly even hope + hard work + a big investment doesn't guarantee anything. But if we don't look we certainly won't find anything so best to keep trying!
And many of the state governments in the US routinely execute people (some innocent) plus the federal government kills innocent people all the time with drone and missile strikes while trying to assassinate people they deem terrorists. You really want to compare the human rights and execution record of the US with Saudi Arabia? It won't be pretty on either side of the ledger.
When asked about it, the State Department calls it unfortunate, not batshit crazy evil.
Because of practical Realpolitik reasons. Not as if the US government has its hands clean. If it was politically expedient for them to call out Saudi Arabia I'm sure they would even if that made them (more) hypcritical.
Another circumstance where the court of public opinion rules political correctness to be a greater virtue than the first amendment.
I think you don't understand how the first amendment works. Allow me to clarify: 1) The first amendment protects you from the government, not from private citizens or companies in most cases so long as they don't violate the law in response to your speech. 2) The first amendment does not protect you against all possible consequences of saying something stupid or offensive. 3) People have as much right to say they don't like what you say as you have to say it. You have the right to be offensive but it might cost you your job if you exercise that right. You have a right to remain silent too but that seems to be exercised less often. 4) This was a private citizen exercising his right to free speech (however stupid it might be) and others exercising theirs. All peacefully. That's how it's supposed to work.
China alone can't maintain air superiority against the USA.
Not today but there is no reason to believe that will have to remain the case forever. However any likely direct military conflict between the US and China would take place on or close to Chinese territory where China has advantages besides their fighters that even the US military would struggle to deal with.
But after releasing it to the public, every half-civilized country will be able to make their own stealth fighters. And who has more airplanes: the USA, or the rest of the world? With the cat out of the box, USA will be facing competent opposition in any major conflict involving aerial forces, which will slow down their advance of power, giving China a chance in the race..
You think building a competent stealth fighter is merely a matter of pasting a bit of (allegedly) radar absorbing material on a jet? There's a WEE bit more to it than that. Frankly this argument is nonsense and requires far more technical competence and economic strength than much of the world possesses. Nobody is going to be competing with the US in a straight up fight any time soon and most of them couldn't even if we gave them F22s to fight us with.
China, not being nearly as expansionist as the USA has far less to lose...
China less expansionist? HAHAHAHAHA... China is exerting power all over the place these days and is pretty rapidly building up their military. They are working towards an aircraft carrier and have been for some time. They are claiming large segments of the South China Sea, exerting soft power all over Africa, etc. The only reason China isn't projecting military power more is because they haven't developed the capability yet. But they will. China is no different than any other major world power. They can and will be
Personally I think there are better things to spend a few trillion on down here on earth.
No there aren't. Really, there aren't. I hear your argument a lot and as economic arguments go it doesn't even withstand superficial scrutiny. The return on investment for money invested in space exploration even in the most conservative evaluations is strongly positive. I challenge you to find ANY public spending "down here on earth" with that kind of economic and technological return to society that a space program demonstrably has.
But an orbiting station is not an end in itself - it needs a purpose other than just being the worlds most expensive funfair ride , and until we come up with a better space motor than chemical rockets humans ain't going anywhere further than the moon anytime soon.
No an orbiting station isn't (or shouldn't be) an end. You are correct about that. It should be a means to something greater but don't be short sighted about what "something greater" means. But remember that the goal isn't a crash program to get us to Mars next week. It's longer term than that. We didn't build the Hoover Dam to keep a few thousand guys busy for a few weeks. We built it to enable decades and trillions of dollars of economic activity that wouldn't have taken place otherwise. The value of a space station is really in what is learned and developed by doing one. What technologies do we develop and commercialize? What science do we discover? What do we learn about human physiology and living in zero-g for extended periods? What launch vehicles do we come up with? Etc. Sure, some of what we do seems pretty mundane on the surface and you can make an argument that we could be doing it better in some ways but unless you are willing to ramp up funding we aren't likely to do it much faster.
That's because the vendors are concerned the updates could break the device
No they aren't. They don't do updates because they get no money for the updates. If there was money to be made in maintaining these devices then you can be sure they would do it. Additionally if they make changes to certain devices they have to get them recertified which is a huge and expensive proposition.
No, it is an argument against the position that we have a tight intellectual grip on the process of what goes on in the human body.
I don't think you'll find too many doctors who seriously think we don't have a lot to learn. But even if we did suffer from that misconception that would not be a good reason to treat homeopathy as anything except the snake oil that it is.
Though by that measure, it may become an argument in favor of homeopathy, for noncritical cases: homeopathy has no known (or conceivable, by the standards of the model we are using) side effects, and it appears to work as well as a "good" placebo.
A sugar pill works well as a placebo too and doesn't carry the snake oil baggage that homeopathy does. Just because some foolish people believe in homeopathy does not justify using giving it credibility as a treatment for anything. Homeopathy is an economic fraud as well as a medical one.
So if you were to take two groups of people with cold/flu with viral and/or mild bacterial infections, it seems quite possible that those given homeopathic treatment (placebo) would fare better than those taking antibiotics
I'm sure you could find plenty of cases where no treatment is better than inappropriate treatment. That is not a credible argument to start promoting homeopathy as a treatment for anything.
Yes, substantial resources. But frankly even if it were just a penny I would have a problem with it just on principle.
That's a basic shell script to run a bunch of DNS resolutions and then add the addresses into an existing Firewall drop policy.
It won't be anywhere near that simple. I'm an accountant (among other things) so let me fill you in on where the costs will land. There will be administrative costs to this. There will be documentation and reports. There will be management reviews. It takes time for the network administrators to deal with. The lists will have to be updated and maintained. There will likely be legal costs to help insure compliance. Individually each of these things aren't a huge deal but they add up to a non-trivial amount of money. You are probably looking at many hundreds of man-hours when all is said and done. While we are probably not talking millions of dollars here, I could easily see the cost of compliance getting into the tens of thousands for a large ISP. That's money the ISP has to spend that brings no benefit to them at all.
If you are expending "significant" resources on such a task, you are doing it wrong. Seriously wrong.
You're ignoring all sorts of costs to the business that are very real and substantially larger than zero. There is a lot more to this than simply updating a few shell scripts. If you think it's really that simple then you are doing it wrong.
And as a result they have ZERO biological effect on the patient. Without an active ingredient there cannot be any chemical activity from the administration of a treatment.
They can have an effect, it even has a name, it's called the "placebo effect".
Placebos are BY DEFINITION ineffectual. There is a reason that researchers call it the placebo response instead of placebo effect because people like you conflate the fact that the placebo response is real even though the placebo has no chemical effect itself. "Placebo effect" != placebos having an effect. If the placebo itself had an effect then it is not a placebo. Any curative effect has nothing to do with the contents of the placebo.
Gambling is a government monopoly by law in the province.
That's not an adequate justification for forcing ISPs to expend substantial resources defending that monopoly. The ISPs are a neutral party here and dragging them into the issue is unfair.
There was an article on Ars yesterday that a single course of antibiotics can disrupt the flora in the gut for a whole year.
That's not a credible argument in favor of homeopathy. Yes it is a problem but homeopathy is in no way, shape or form a solution to that particular problem.
Which raises the question.......what moron doctors are out there prescribing this stuff??
Who says they are morons? Water is really cheap and it can be sold for a ridiculous markup. This is nothing more than profiteering off the gullible in 99.99% of cases. There are a few doctors who actually buy into this nonsense but most of them are just trying to get rich.
They don't push for "things better than a placebo". They push for things better than "best possible current treatment".
If it's not better than placebo then it is NOT a treatment. If it is worse than placebo then it is actually harmful. If it is equal in efficacy to placebo then it IS a placebo.
Wrong Placebo is usually more effective than no treatment.
Placebos have NO effect. They cannot have a relevant effect or they would not be a placebo. A placebo is BY DEFINITION an ineffectual treatment. The placebo effect is real but the placebos themselves have no chemical effect.
The most common placebo is antibiotics prescribed for viral infections. Homeopathy is certainly better than that, since at least it is harmless (since there is nothing in it).
Let's say you are a doctor and you prescribe antibiotics for what you believe is actually a viral disease. In many cases they don't actually know for 100% certain that it is viral and cannot because they did not do any test to confirm that thesis. In some percent of the cases the disease will turn out to be bacterial. In most cases the antibiotics will have little to no short term negative consequences for the patient. It's not a placebo because it isn't actually clear that it won't treat the disease and we know for a fact that it has an actual medicinal effect. We know for a fact that homeopathy does not and indeed cannot have a medicinal effect because there is no chemical reaction.
So let's say you prescribe homeopathy instead of antibiotics and the disease progresses and the patient gets very ill or dies. Now you are guilty of malpractice because you prescribed something you knew to be snake oil. You would have been better off either prescribing the antibiotics or even doing nothing. When you get dragged into court the first thing the lawyer is going to do is ask you why you didn't prescribe an actual medicine.
It seems silly to ban homeopathy while overprescription of antibiotics is still rampant.
Those are separate problems and homeopathy is NOT the solution to over prescription of antibiotics. Let's not conflate two issues and give homeopathy credibility when it deserves none.
It's no different than prescribing a placebo, which does have a proven effect
Placebos by definition have no effect. The "placebo effect" doesn't mean placebos themselves have an actual chemical effect. Placebos are designed such that they cannot have a chemical effect that is relevant in treating the condition. Placebos are the measuring stick for whether a treatment actually works.
Selling treatments for cash as if they are actual medicine without proof of efficacy is fraud. Anyone selling homeopathy and representing as a cure for a specific condition is committing a crime.
The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients supported the therapy.
Who cares what the patients "support"? Patients for the most part demonstrably have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to medical treatments. We have highly trained medical professionals and we rely on treatments that can objectively be shown to work better than placebo for a reason.
Demonstrate to me that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo and I'm fine with it. Until that happens it is nothing but snake oil and anyone who supports it is harming people with fake treatments.
It's not just that, it's also that vendors assume that hospitals have competent IT departments and devices will be appropriately firewalled away from the rest of the network.
Vendors of these products know damn well that hospitals routinely lack competent IT departments and they know (or should know) that they will be improperly secured if they are secured at all.
I've worked in a few hospital system. While I'm not an IT guy I'm an engineer and I often serve as a de-facto IT guy for companies. The quality of IT staff in the hospitals I've work with were for the most part deplorable. They tend to be understaffed, underfunded and underpaid and not supported well by management. It should surprise no one that they don't tend to get the best and brightest. While there are some good people, the system sets them up to fail. Quite frankly, hospitals are among the least secure and least well administered companies I've seen when it comes to IT. Their business is extremely complex and very few of the people working in it are IT focused, particularly those in positions of power. Worse a lot of the equipment uses special versions of software that either is not or (usually for regulatory reasons) cannot be updated.
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3) Sanitize ads and pay for cleanup if they deliver malware.
See I'm not willing to even take a chance on the malware delivery. If there is even a remote chance of malware delivery then their ad will remain blocked until the end of time. I don't care if they are willing to pay for cleanup or not.
Because the sad fact is that I was willing to put up with annoying, but I am NOT willing to put up with security risk
You are more generous than I am. I'm not willing to put up with annoying OR with a security risk OR with tracking. If they want to pay me with cold hard cash, then and only then will I consider the limited circumstances under which I'm willing to be watched. Under no circumstances will I countenance a security risk or any irritation from advertisements.
It's much further along than SLS. SpaceX claims they'll launch it next year. SLS isn't even to the point of starting to build something that can be launched.
True but not relevant to my point. Furthermore what are the contingency plans if SpaceX drops the ball or goes out of business? Don't let optimism cloud your judgement.
No, that isn't NASA's job
I'm afraid it is NASA's job. Congress made it NASA's job. While I agree with you that at this point it shouldn't be their job any longer we haven't made the transition yet and until we do NASA remains the only civilian government agency with the expertise to facilitate this activity. NASA seems to recognize this and is transitioning away but it isn't going to happen overnight. Furthermore NOBODY has more expertise in this stuff than NASA and we would be idiots to just chuck all that knowledge out in reckless pursuit of privatization.
Back at you. NASA had three decade to come up with this new launch system and strong incentive to develop it after the Challenger accident. Where is it?
Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember the Challenger accident. I do. It's the event in my generation where everybody knows where they were when they heard about it. There was NO meaningful discussion about coming up with a replacement launch system for the space shuttle back in the mid-1980s. We hadn't figured out at that time that the shuttle was a boondoggle. The shuttle had only been flying for about 5-6 years when Challenger exploded. You are looking at this in retrospect when the mistakes are obvious. Back then the shuttle was still exciting and shiny and new. You didn't start hearing people decry the shuttle as a waste for another 15-20 years.
SpaceX has demonstrated actual experience at developing and flying new launch systems and the Falcon Heavy is close to first launch.
Several other companies have even more demonstrated actual experience than SpaceX and yet none are working on a heavy lift vehicle. Why do you suppose that is? Furthermore SpaceX is a young company that could easily run into financial difficulty. Do you really think it is sane to put all your eggs in the one basket? I don't. I admire SpaceX as much as most folks here but I'm not foolish enough to trust our space program to them alone.
It's not "candy and nuts" to make the obvious observation that NASA could be using that $3 billion per year for deep space
They can't use the $3 billion for deep space because Congress allocates the funds and NASA wouldn't GET $3 billion/year for deep space. It's a purely hypothetical conjecture about something that is not a political possibility. I agree with you that it is the sort of thing NASA should be working on but the sad reality is that more mundane stuff like getting an economically sane launch system takes precedence right now. We have a bunch of short sighted idiots in Washington who are more worried about cutting their tax bills and getting pork for their districts than building a robust space program. I guarantee you that you will hear close to nothing about the space program during this election cycle.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet. Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal. Even if Falcon Heavy becomes a working and reliable products (and we have every reason to believe it will), tying yourself to a single vendor is still not a good idea if you can avoid it.
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
The big problem is the degree of locked-downedness. Ios prides itself on being pretty invincible, to the point of being really hard to jailbreak. OS X is a machine you have full control over.
That is not the important difference between them. Most people that buy a Mac could not care less about having full control and many wouldn't know what to do with it even if they did care. Apple is clearly well aware of this.
You could put an Ios sandbox on a Mac, and maybe they'll do that some day, but going the other way seems unlikely.
If I had to put money on Apple going with one or the other right now, I would bet on iOS being the dominant system. I think the market opportunity for iOS is significantly larger so it makes economic sense. I don't think the integration will be in the form of a sandbox. It will be more nuanced than that. I think the code bases will converge over time and you'll see it basically become a single system with different interfaces for various activities.
How many times has Apple said they wouldn't ever do something and then later done it? Apple says they'd never do something all the time so I wouldn't put much stock in such statements. Jobs was famous for doing that.
The fact is that it makes a ton of economic sense to have iOS and OS X converge into a single operating system. Right now we aren't at a place where that makes sense yet (see Microsoft) but I can't really see Apple keeping two operating systems indefinitely. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all trying to some degree to converge their software to a single platform. It's a difficult thing to do so progress has been slow but there has been progress all the same. I don't really care what Tim Cook says on the matter because I think it will happen sooner or later.
There are better things to be spending space research money on that yet another orbiting can.
A reasonable argument. Although I would argue that AMONG the most important things we need to study most are human physiology and the only way to really do that is to put people into space. A space station is a comparatively cost effective way of doing that though I will grant that it isn't cheap. There really are a few big important categories of stuff we need to study in no particular order
1) Life support systems including radiation protection
2) Low cost launch systems (escape gravity wells)
3) Propulsion systems (transit)
4) Self sustaining ecosystems
5) Self sustaining industrial systems (includes mining and large scale fabrication)
6) Terraforming and directed genetics (adapting to new worlds and/or microgravity)
7) Power and battery systems (esp fusion)
8) Artificial gravity systems
9) Medicine and physiology
10) Self sustaining economies
Space stations can help us with several of these. Unfortunately they are silly expensive until we address #2 though we seem to be making some progress there. I think it will take centuries before space travel becomes routine just like it took centuries for us to develop the technology to travel efficiently around the Earth.
Even our most advance ion engines still consist of chucking stuff backwards to go forwards. There must be a better way.
Maybe or maybe not. Physics is kind of a harsh mistress that way. Like you I'm hopeful we'll come up with something brilliant but hope doesn't equal success. Sadly even hope + hard work + a big investment doesn't guarantee anything. But if we don't look we certainly won't find anything so best to keep trying!
Saudi Arabia beheads people almost every month.
And many of the state governments in the US routinely execute people (some innocent) plus the federal government kills innocent people all the time with drone and missile strikes while trying to assassinate people they deem terrorists. You really want to compare the human rights and execution record of the US with Saudi Arabia? It won't be pretty on either side of the ledger.
When asked about it, the State Department calls it unfortunate, not batshit crazy evil.
Because of practical Realpolitik reasons. Not as if the US government has its hands clean. If it was politically expedient for them to call out Saudi Arabia I'm sure they would even if that made them (more) hypcritical.
Another circumstance where the court of public opinion rules political correctness to be a greater virtue than the first amendment.
I think you don't understand how the first amendment works. Allow me to clarify:
1) The first amendment protects you from the government, not from private citizens or companies in most cases so long as they don't violate the law in response to your speech.
2) The first amendment does not protect you against all possible consequences of saying something stupid or offensive.
3) People have as much right to say they don't like what you say as you have to say it. You have the right to be offensive but it might cost you your job if you exercise that right. You have a right to remain silent too but that seems to be exercised less often.
4) This was a private citizen exercising his right to free speech (however stupid it might be) and others exercising theirs. All peacefully. That's how it's supposed to work.
China alone can't maintain air superiority against the USA.
Not today but there is no reason to believe that will have to remain the case forever. However any likely direct military conflict between the US and China would take place on or close to Chinese territory where China has advantages besides their fighters that even the US military would struggle to deal with.
But after releasing it to the public, every half-civilized country will be able to make their own stealth fighters. And who has more airplanes: the USA, or the rest of the world? With the cat out of the box, USA will be facing competent opposition in any major conflict involving aerial forces, which will slow down their advance of power, giving China a chance in the race..
You think building a competent stealth fighter is merely a matter of pasting a bit of (allegedly) radar absorbing material on a jet? There's a WEE bit more to it than that. Frankly this argument is nonsense and requires far more technical competence and economic strength than much of the world possesses. Nobody is going to be competing with the US in a straight up fight any time soon and most of them couldn't even if we gave them F22s to fight us with.
China, not being nearly as expansionist as the USA has far less to lose...
China less expansionist? HAHAHAHAHA... China is exerting power all over the place these days and is pretty rapidly building up their military. They are working towards an aircraft carrier and have been for some time. They are claiming large segments of the South China Sea, exerting soft power all over Africa, etc. The only reason China isn't projecting military power more is because they haven't developed the capability yet. But they will. China is no different than any other major world power. They can and will be
Personally I think there are better things to spend a few trillion on down here on earth.
No there aren't. Really, there aren't. I hear your argument a lot and as economic arguments go it doesn't even withstand superficial scrutiny. The return on investment for money invested in space exploration even in the most conservative evaluations is strongly positive. I challenge you to find ANY public spending "down here on earth" with that kind of economic and technological return to society that a space program demonstrably has.
But an orbiting station is not an end in itself - it needs a purpose other than just being the worlds most expensive funfair ride , and until we come up with a better space motor than chemical rockets humans ain't going anywhere further than the moon anytime soon.
No an orbiting station isn't (or shouldn't be) an end. You are correct about that. It should be a means to something greater but don't be short sighted about what "something greater" means. But remember that the goal isn't a crash program to get us to Mars next week. It's longer term than that. We didn't build the Hoover Dam to keep a few thousand guys busy for a few weeks. We built it to enable decades and trillions of dollars of economic activity that wouldn't have taken place otherwise. The value of a space station is really in what is learned and developed by doing one. What technologies do we develop and commercialize? What science do we discover? What do we learn about human physiology and living in zero-g for extended periods? What launch vehicles do we come up with? Etc. Sure, some of what we do seems pretty mundane on the surface and you can make an argument that we could be doing it better in some ways but unless you are willing to ramp up funding we aren't likely to do it much faster.
That's because the vendors are concerned the updates could break the device
No they aren't. They don't do updates because they get no money for the updates. If there was money to be made in maintaining these devices then you can be sure they would do it. Additionally if they make changes to certain devices they have to get them recertified which is a huge and expensive proposition.
Just follow the dollars and it all makes sense.
No, it is an argument against the position that we have a tight intellectual grip on the process of what goes on in the human body.
I don't think you'll find too many doctors who seriously think we don't have a lot to learn. But even if we did suffer from that misconception that would not be a good reason to treat homeopathy as anything except the snake oil that it is.
Though by that measure, it may become an argument in favor of homeopathy, for noncritical cases: homeopathy has no known (or conceivable, by the standards of the model we are using) side effects, and it appears to work as well as a "good" placebo.
A sugar pill works well as a placebo too and doesn't carry the snake oil baggage that homeopathy does. Just because some foolish people believe in homeopathy does not justify using giving it credibility as a treatment for anything. Homeopathy is an economic fraud as well as a medical one.
So if you were to take two groups of people with cold/flu with viral and/or mild bacterial infections, it seems quite possible that those given homeopathic treatment (placebo) would fare better than those taking antibiotics
I'm sure you could find plenty of cases where no treatment is better than inappropriate treatment. That is not a credible argument to start promoting homeopathy as a treatment for anything.
Substantial resources? Seriously?
Yes, substantial resources. But frankly even if it were just a penny I would have a problem with it just on principle.
That's a basic shell script to run a bunch of DNS resolutions and then add the addresses into an existing Firewall drop policy.
It won't be anywhere near that simple. I'm an accountant (among other things) so let me fill you in on where the costs will land. There will be administrative costs to this. There will be documentation and reports. There will be management reviews. It takes time for the network administrators to deal with. The lists will have to be updated and maintained. There will likely be legal costs to help insure compliance. Individually each of these things aren't a huge deal but they add up to a non-trivial amount of money. You are probably looking at many hundreds of man-hours when all is said and done. While we are probably not talking millions of dollars here, I could easily see the cost of compliance getting into the tens of thousands for a large ISP. That's money the ISP has to spend that brings no benefit to them at all.
If you are expending "significant" resources on such a task, you are doing it wrong. Seriously wrong.
You're ignoring all sorts of costs to the business that are very real and substantially larger than zero. There is a lot more to this than simply updating a few shell scripts. If you think it's really that simple then you are doing it wrong.
Placebos have no active ingredient.
And as a result they have ZERO biological effect on the patient. Without an active ingredient there cannot be any chemical activity from the administration of a treatment.
They can have an effect, it even has a name, it's called the "placebo effect".
Placebos are BY DEFINITION ineffectual. There is a reason that researchers call it the placebo response instead of placebo effect because people like you conflate the fact that the placebo response is real even though the placebo has no chemical effect itself. "Placebo effect" != placebos having an effect. If the placebo itself had an effect then it is not a placebo. Any curative effect has nothing to do with the contents of the placebo.
Gambling is a government monopoly by law in the province.
That's not an adequate justification for forcing ISPs to expend substantial resources defending that monopoly. The ISPs are a neutral party here and dragging them into the issue is unfair.
There was an article on Ars yesterday that a single course of antibiotics can disrupt the flora in the gut for a whole year.
That's not a credible argument in favor of homeopathy. Yes it is a problem but homeopathy is in no way, shape or form a solution to that particular problem.
Which raises the question.......what moron doctors are out there prescribing this stuff??
Who says they are morons? Water is really cheap and it can be sold for a ridiculous markup. This is nothing more than profiteering off the gullible in 99.99% of cases. There are a few doctors who actually buy into this nonsense but most of them are just trying to get rich.
They don't push for "things better than a placebo". They push for things better than "best possible current treatment".
If it's not better than placebo then it is NOT a treatment. If it is worse than placebo then it is actually harmful. If it is equal in efficacy to placebo then it IS a placebo.
Wrong Placebo is usually more effective than no treatment.
Placebos have NO effect. They cannot have a relevant effect or they would not be a placebo. A placebo is BY DEFINITION an ineffectual treatment. The placebo effect is real but the placebos themselves have no chemical effect.
Neither can I. I have one particularly annoying friend who is always trying to suggest bullshit "remedies" that have no basis in science or fact.
You know what they call alternative medicine that is proven to work? Medicine!
The most common placebo is antibiotics prescribed for viral infections. Homeopathy is certainly better than that, since at least it is harmless (since there is nothing in it).
Let's say you are a doctor and you prescribe antibiotics for what you believe is actually a viral disease. In many cases they don't actually know for 100% certain that it is viral and cannot because they did not do any test to confirm that thesis. In some percent of the cases the disease will turn out to be bacterial. In most cases the antibiotics will have little to no short term negative consequences for the patient. It's not a placebo because it isn't actually clear that it won't treat the disease and we know for a fact that it has an actual medicinal effect. We know for a fact that homeopathy does not and indeed cannot have a medicinal effect because there is no chemical reaction.
So let's say you prescribe homeopathy instead of antibiotics and the disease progresses and the patient gets very ill or dies. Now you are guilty of malpractice because you prescribed something you knew to be snake oil. You would have been better off either prescribing the antibiotics or even doing nothing. When you get dragged into court the first thing the lawyer is going to do is ask you why you didn't prescribe an actual medicine.
It seems silly to ban homeopathy while overprescription of antibiotics is still rampant.
Those are separate problems and homeopathy is NOT the solution to over prescription of antibiotics. Let's not conflate two issues and give homeopathy credibility when it deserves none.
It's no different than prescribing a placebo, which does have a proven effect
Placebos by definition have no effect. The "placebo effect" doesn't mean placebos themselves have an actual chemical effect. Placebos are designed such that they cannot have a chemical effect that is relevant in treating the condition. Placebos are the measuring stick for whether a treatment actually works.
Selling treatments for cash as if they are actual medicine without proof of efficacy is fraud. Anyone selling homeopathy and representing as a cure for a specific condition is committing a crime.
The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients supported the therapy.
Who cares what the patients "support"? Patients for the most part demonstrably have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to medical treatments. We have highly trained medical professionals and we rely on treatments that can objectively be shown to work better than placebo for a reason.
Demonstrate to me that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo and I'm fine with it. Until that happens it is nothing but snake oil and anyone who supports it is harming people with fake treatments.
It's not just that, it's also that vendors assume that hospitals have competent IT departments and devices will be appropriately firewalled away from the rest of the network.
Vendors of these products know damn well that hospitals routinely lack competent IT departments and they know (or should know) that they will be improperly secured if they are secured at all.
I've worked in a few hospital system. While I'm not an IT guy I'm an engineer and I often serve as a de-facto IT guy for companies. The quality of IT staff in the hospitals I've work with were for the most part deplorable. They tend to be understaffed, underfunded and underpaid and not supported well by management. It should surprise no one that they don't tend to get the best and brightest. While there are some good people, the system sets them up to fail. Quite frankly, hospitals are among the least secure and least well administered companies I've seen when it comes to IT. Their business is extremely complex and very few of the people working in it are IT focused, particularly those in positions of power. Worse a lot of the equipment uses special versions of software that either is not or (usually for regulatory reasons) cannot be updated.